Christianity and Culture

in the Middle Ages

essays to honor

JOHN VAN ENGEN

Edited by

D av i d C . M e n g e l a n d L i s a Wo l v e r t o n
Christianity and Culture in the Middle Ages
 Christianity and Culture
in the Middle Ages
essays to honor

JOHN VAN ENGEN

Edited by

D av i d C . M e n g e l a n d L i s a Wo l v e r t o n

university of notre dame press

notre dame, indiana

 Copyright © 2015 by the University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Christianity and culture in the Middle Ages : essays to honor John Van Engen /
edited by David C. Mengel and Lisa Wolverton.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-268-03533-4 ( hardcover : alk. paper) —
ISBN 0-268-03533-4 ( hardcover : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-0-268-08686-2 (e-book)
1. Christianity and culture —Europe — History — Middle Ages, 600 –1500.
2. Europe — Church history — 600 –1500. I. Van Engen, John H.
II. Mengel, David Charles. III. Wolverton, Lisa.
BR115.C8C44434 2015
274'.03— dc23

2014039308

∞ The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence

and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines
for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources
 Contents

List of Figures and Maps ix

Preface xi

C h r i s t i a n i z at i o n

One The Christianization of Medieval Marriage 3

Ruth Mazo Karras

Two The Christianization of Bohemia: 25

Revising the Narratives
Lisa Wolverton

Three The Cathar Middle Ages as an 58

Historiographical Problem
R.I. Moore

Four Authentic, True, and Right: Inquisition and 87

the Study of Medieval Popular Religion
Christine Caldwell Ames

Tw e l f t h - C e n t u r y C u l t u r e

Five Reconsidering Reform: A Roman Example 123

Maureen C. Miller
 vi / Contents

Six Otto of Freising’s Tyrants: Church Advocates 141

and Noble Lordship in the Long Twelfth Century
Jonathan R. Lyon

Seven Testimonial Letters in the Late Twelfth-Century 168

Collections of Thomas Becket’s Miracles
Rachel Koopmans

Eight The Counterfactual Twelfth Century 202

Dyan Elliott

Nine The Cross in Medieval Monastic Life 236

Giles Constable

Jews and Christian Society

Ten A Death in Wisdom’s Court: Poetry and 253

Martyrdom in Thirteenth-Century Castile
Susan Einbinder
Appendix: Cantiga 348; Time’s Impartial Decree 272

Eleven Anti-Judaism in the Christina Psalter 280

William Chester Jordan

Twelve Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space 294

David C. Mengel

L a t e M e d i e va l R e l i g i o u s L i f e

Thirteen In Praise of Faithful Women: Count Robert of 331

Flanders’s Defense of Beguines against the
Clementine Decree Cum de quibusdam mulieribus
(ca. 1318–1320)
Walter Simons
Appendix: Count Robert’s Petition 353
to Pope John XXII
 Contents \ vii

Fourteen The Effect of Papal Provisions to Oxford and

Paris Scholars on the Pastorate and Care of Souls
William J. Courtenay 358

Fifteen Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered 387

James D. Mixson

Sixteen John Příbram and His Vernacular Treatises: 419

Equipping the Laity in Battle against Hussite
Radicals
Marcela K. Perett

Seventeen Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt: The Arrival of 436

Antichrist in Fifteenth-Century Italy
Daniel Hobbins

Appendix: A Medieval Antichrist Story 468

Eighteen Martin Luther: The Reformed Augustinian Beggar 474

Roy Hammerling

Publications of John Van Engen 501

Contributors 507
Index 512
 Figures and Maps

Figures for chapters 5 and 11 are reproduced in the gallery following pp. 250.

Figure 5.1. Rome, San Clemente, lower basilica, dado of the Miracle at
Cherson fresco, ca. 1090 –1100. Image courtesy of the Istituto Superi-
ore per la Conservazione ed il Restauro, Archivio Fotografico Docu-
mentazione Restauri, Roma.
Figure 5.2. Rome, San Clemente, lower basilica, Life of Saint Alexius
fresco, ca. 1090 –1100. Image courtesy of the Istituto Superiore per
la Conservazione ed il Restauro, Archivio Fotografico Documen-
tazione Restauri, Roma.
Figure 5.3. Rome, San Clemente, lower basilica, Miracle of Saint Cle-
ment’s Tomb at Cherson fresco, ca. 1090 –1100. Image courtesy of the
Istituto Superiore per la Conservazione ed il Restauro, Archivio Fo-
tografico Documentazione Restauri, Roma.
Figure 5.4. Rome, San Clemente, lower basilica, Mass of Saint Clement
fresco, ca. 1090 –1100. Image courtesy of the Istituto Superiore per
la Conservazione ed il Restauro, Archivio Fotografico Documen-
tazione Restauri, Roma.
Figure 5.5. Rome, San Clemente, lower basilica, Translation of Saint
Clement’s Relics fresco, ca. 1090 –1100. Image courtesy of the Istituto
Superiore per la Conservazione ed il Restauro, Archivio Fotogra-
fico Documentazione Restauri, Roma.
Figure 11.1. Psalm 26, The Lord is my light / Dominus illuminatio mea,
from the Christina Psalter. Used by permission of Det Kongelige Bib-
liotek, Denmark.

ix
 x / Figures and Maps

Figure 11.2. Psalm 52, The fool said in his heart: There is no God /
Dixit insipiens in corde suo non est deus, from the Christina Psalter. Used
by permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark.
Figure 11.3. Psalm 68, Save me, O God / Salvum me fac deus, from the
Christina Psalter. Used by permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek,
Denmark.
Figure 11.4. Psalm 80, Sing out your joy / Exultate deo adiutori nostro,
from the Christina Psalter. Used by permission of Det Kongelige
Bibliotek, Denmark.
Figure 11.5. Psalm 87, O Lord, the God of my salvation / Domine, Deus
salutis, from the Christina Psalter. Used by permission of Det Kon-
gelige Bibliotek, Denmark.
Figure 11.6. Psalm 109, The Lord said to my Lord / Dixit dominus
domino meo, from the Christina Psalter. Used by permission of Det
Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark.
Figure 11.7. Annunciation and Visitation, from the Christina Psalter.
Used by permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark.
Figure 11.8. Jews plotting Jesus’s arrest and execution, from the Christina
Psalter. Used by permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark.
Figure 11.9. Women at the tomb and Noli me tangere, from the Christina
Psalter. Used by permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark.
Figure 11.10. Jesus Before Caiaphas, in the Salvin Hours. Image © Brit-
ish Library Board, Add. 48985.
Figure 18.1. Jost Amman, Luther the Monk and Professor, late sixteenth
century. Used by permission of Germanisches Nationalmuseum,
Nürnberg, photo: Monika Runge. 475

Map 12.1. Nuremberg during the reign of Charles IV 307

Map 12.2. Prague during the reign of Charles IV 309
Map 12.3. Nuremberg, detail of Jewish quarter 314
Map 17.1. Hermitages of medieval Tuscany 450
 Preface

The life and thought of Robert of Liège defied the historical molds
crafted by the historians who had already convinced us that his lifetime
(ca. 1075–1129) had been—in one way or another— a time of profound
and lasting change. The Walloon-speaking Benedictine oblate was a con-
temporary of Anselm, of Bernard of Clairvaux, of Peter Abelard, and of
Hugh of Saint-Victor, and indeed the most prolific author of them all.
Yet his writings did not exemplify the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, the
Gregorian Reform, the Commercial Revolution, the Second Age of Feu-
dalism, or the Origins of European Dissent; on the contrary, as a cham-
pion of the Black Monks against the reforming Cistercians and the enter-
prising canons regular, Robert seemed to belong among those unhappy
reactionaries against whom modern scholars like to pit the progressive
heroes of their historical narratives. But that was not quite right either,
because this creative and controversial theologian, scriptural commenta-
tor, and reformer could not easily be slotted into the role of conservative
foil to the protagonists of the schools, or even a straightforward propo-
nent of Jean Leclercq’s monastic theology. This was the problem— the
opportunity, really—facing John Van Engen as a graduate student in the
1970s, and much the way he formulated the situation in his first book,
Rupert of Deutz (1983). ( You may ask John why he called him Rupert
rather than Robert; he will be happy to explain.)
With Rupert and a prizewinning monograph, John Van Engen made
an extraordinary start upon a conventional (if already increasingly rare)
career path, that of the medieval historian who is both university scholar
and teacher. On the strength of Rupert of Deutz, Van Engen earned tenure
at the University of Notre Dame, where he had been teaching since 1977.
Then, in 1986, he published major review articles in both Speculum and

xi
 xii / Preface

The American Historical Review; in the same year, he became director of

the Medieval Institute at Notre Dame and the number of doctoral stu-
dents working with him began steadily to increase. But already he was
in the process of taking a significant scholarly turn: in 1985, in Leuven
with his family, he delved into the writings of late-medieval reformers and
innovators Geert Grote and the Modern Devout. Rather than build di-
rectly upon his twelfth-century research, or even branch out modestly, he
jumped to a different place and time to read quite different material,
much of it in Middle Dutch. If a relatively neglected Rupert of Deutz had
challenged the historiographical categories of the best-studied century of
the Middle Ages, Van Engen’s new subjects belonged to movements and a
time that neither medieval nor Reformation scholars quite owned; such
late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century figures had appeared mostly in the
epilogues or prefaces of their respective studies. An early result was a 1988
volume of translated writings related to the Modern Devout. Twenty years
later, long after that stay in Leuven, he added his second monumental and
prizewinning monograph, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life.
Yet these two volumes and the two centuries of their subjects by no
means encapsulate the range of Van Engen’s scholarly enquiries or con-
tributions. Instead, his years directing the Medieval Institute witnessed a
proliferation of articles and edited collections on an impressive range of
subjects — listed, together with his books, near the end of this volume.
From the christening of late antique Romans to the fifteenth-century
church, Van Engen turned his careful eye and practiced pen to individu-
als both iconic and forgotten: Hildegard of Bingen, William of Saint-
Thierry, Gratian, Dominic, John Nider, and Marguerite Porete, on
the one hand; Theophilus Presbyter, Ralph of Flaix, Gerlach Peters,
Friar Matthew Grabow, and Alijt Bake, on the other. Time and again,
colleagues in the United States and abroad called on Van Engen to con-
tribute to conferences and other collective scholarly endeavors, and he
rose to the occasion whether the subject was the future of medieval
studies, the exercise of power, medieval women’s voices, Jews and Chris-
tians, canon law, or the Carolingians. And all the while, his graduate stu-
dents produced dissertations—and many now books—on an equally wide
range of times, places, and subjects. From Jean Gerson to the miracle
collections of Thomas Becket’s cult, from Hussites to the beatific vision,
 Preface \ xiii

from priests on military campaigns to Dominican inquisitors, from Cath-

erine of Siena to German noble families, from the intellectual life of
Italian nuns to politics in twelfth-century Bohemia, from late-medieval
Prague to the Lord’s Prayer.
A painstaking reader and editor of texts, Van Engen has long ex-
horted his students to read “against the grain”— even when, sitting
around a seminar table, the most urgent challenge seems simply to pro-
duce a credible sight translation of whatever bit of canon law or Hilde-
gardian vision falls to each one’s turn. The goal was never arcane or
antiquarian, but rather profoundly humane: to bring again to life the
long silent, to rewrap flesh around the flat words — whether scratched
on parchment or preserved in one of the scores of printed volumes lin-
ing the Medieval Institute’s shelves. Read carefully and follow the text
where it leads. Ask the simple and profound questions — the ones that
elude easy answers, the ones that speak to the lived lives of canonical
and noncanonical figures, women and men, Christians and Jews.
This volume seeks to honor John Van Engen’s teaching career by
mirroring topics and approaches that have characterized his scholarship.
Two essays include editions, as do many of Van Engen’s own publica-
tions; some bring to light individuals and single texts, others genres and
categories of people more broadly; several offer critical reviews of his-
toriography, a leitmotif of Van Engen’s curriculum vitae represented
with particular force by the 1986 American Historical Review article, “The
Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,” which some au-
thors here directly engage. Each essay connects with Van Engen’s own
career in one or more ways, and by design. Contributors were invited to
tie into one of three strands that interweave Van Engen’s scholarship: the
Christianization problematic; twelfth-century culture; and late-medieval
religious life. Those provided the framework for the sections into which
we have sorted this volume’s essays. Admittedly the question of “Jews and
Christian Society” is a less prominent theme in Van Engen’s extensive
work—the dedicated topic of only an article or two plus a conference and
a coedited book — but in this case we have followed the texts where they
led, just as we have been taught.
As the editors of this volume, we are glad to join our friends and emi-
nent colleagues in honoring John Van Engen for the academic service
 xiv / Preface

that he has contributed to our shared discipline. He himself has edited

five such volumes of essays, and a significant portion of his own research
has appeared in North American and especially European volumes such
as this. It seems fitting that we — John’s peers and former students, all
his friends — offer these essays and this volume with deep respect and
gratitude for his long-standing and profound contribution to our collec-
tive exploration of medieval experience. We hope — indeed, we know—
that he is not yet finished editing, synthesizing, explicating, and revivify-
ing the Middle Ages. And so we offer it too as an encouragement for
him to continue for many years to come.

Note

The editors would like to thank Emily Rosenfeld Mengel for editing and format-
ting this volume; Jonathan Lyon, Roberta Baranowski, and the late Olivia Remie
Constable for helping to organize the 2012 conference to honor John Van Engen’s
thirty-five years of teaching at the University of Notre Dame; and all of the par-
ticipants in that conference and the contributors to this volume.
 One

Th e C h r i s t i a n i z a t i o n
o f M e d i e va l M a r r i a g e

ruth mazo karras

John Van Engen’s 1986 article, “The Christian Middle Ages as an His-
toriographical Problem,” was the first piece of John’s work that I ever
read and one that I have taught many times.1 There, he addressed the way
scholarship had turned away from the idea that the Middle Ages were (for
better or worse) dominated by the Church and Roman Christian belief,
and toward a view that Christianity was only an elite veneer over a sub-
stratum of popular belief that remained pre- or non-Christian. Over the
more than a quarter century since his account, the field has shifted toward
what might be seen as a middle position—yes, Christianity did dominate
the medieval Western world, but yes, many intellectual developments
connected with “the Church” were restricted to the elite. These polar-
ized views can be reconciled within a framework that now tends to speak
of “Christianities,” recognizing not only the local variation across both
space and time ( Van Engen identified attention to this variation as one of
the important post–World War II developments), but also that individual
believers could and did interpret Christianity for themselves. To name
but a few of the most influential scholars, Caroline Bynum demonstrated
that both lay and religious women constructed their own understandings

3
 4 / Ruth Mazo Karras

of the Eucharist and thus of the somatic relation of humans to God; a

number of scholars, including Dyan Elliott, have shown that the lines
between orthodoxy and heresy, or indeed between sanctity and heresy,
could be quite indistinct; Eamon Duffy has argued for a conception of
“traditional religion” that represented a deep and shared commitment
among late medieval clergy and laity, neither dictated by the former nor
ignored by the latter; and Van Engen, among others, has demonstrated
the variety of ways of living a Christian life neither within established
orders nor in rejection of them.2
Recent historiography, then, has followed the path Van Engen set in
1986 in recognizing that Christianity was central to medieval Europe as
a shared language and set of assumptions, “routine” rather than “out-
landish,” in which “specifically Christian teachings and practices shaped
the cultural milieu of medieval folk both high and low,” although it has
also recognized that this shared cultural language encompassed many
different modes of life.3 However, while acknowledging its cultural per-
vasiveness, we need to beware of assuming Christianity directly and de-
liberately shaped everything that went on within medieval societies. In-
deed, it may be precisely because of its cultural pervasiveness that this
assumption is dangerous. Christianity in the Middle Ages was what femi-
nist scholars, taking a term from linguistics, have called an “unmarked
category,” that is, the default—like whiteness or heterosexuality in con-
temporary North America and like masculinity in most societies. Most
white people do not notice most of the time that they are white and do
not carry out the activities of daily life with whiteness in mind. Straight
people don’t seek out a straight bar or a straight bookstore, nor do they
look for a wedding planner who specializes in straight weddings, because
that is not something they need to think about. Similarly, not everything
that Christians do in a predominantly Christian society is necessarily un-
derstood by the subject who performs it as a Christian behavior or per-
formance. Even those behaviors and performances that seem to us today
to be explicitly Christian were not deliberately Christian.
One of these contested institutions was marriage. The title of this
chapter invites the question of what it might mean to Christianize mar-
riage. Philip L. Reynolds interprets Christianization as referring not to
“the actual married life of Christians . . . but rather the manner in which
 The Christianization of Medieval Marriage \ 5

men of the Church understood and regulated marriage.”4 Here I attempt

to move a bit beyond that circle, at least for the later Middle Ages.5 The
orally presented version of this essay claimed to address the question of
when marriage became Christian, but that question may be answered in
a great many different ways depending on one’s understanding of Chris-
tianization. If one interprets it as Reynolds does, “the process by which
marriage became differentiated from its non-Christian origins and envi-
ronment under the influence of Christianity itself,” we see that it was an
ongoing process and one that was not complete in the Middle Ages.6
This chapter instead proposes to examine marriage, which was both an
organizing principle of medieval political and social institutions and a
governing metaphor of medieval religious culture, as a way of thinking
about the question Van Engen posed in 1986 when he noted that it was
not only a matter of “whether medieval culture was essentially Chris-
tian” but also of “what that might mean.”7 Van Engen focused on the
rituals and practices by which a common structure of Christianity was
expressed, particularly baptism and death rituals, but he noted that the
process was rather different with marriage: “The result, typically, was an
overlay of Christian and other notions of marriage, but to imagine wholly
separate and distinct conceptions of marriage competing over centur-
ies is an exaggeration.”8 In other words, we must think of the Christiani-
zation process not as a continuum across which the institution of mar-
riage moved during the Middle Ages, with pagan marriage at one end
and Christian at the other, but rather as an ongoing interweaving of as-
pects of marriage shaped by Christian beliefs and aspects that were not
inherently Christian but existed within a Christian context.
There are a variety of ways in which marriage, or any other prac-
tice, can be Christian (or mutatis mutandis, pagan, Jewish, or Muslim):
because it takes place within a predominantly Christian society, because
the rules governing it are controlled by the church(es), because the society
understands it as something done at God’s command, because the ritual
invokes God or scripture, or because the individuals involved see it as a
religious act. This last, of course, is by far the hardest to get at. The sec-
ond (church control) is what people often think of when they think of
Christianization; the words of the ritual are perhaps the most measurable,
but the degree to which marriage is generally understood as being for
 6 / Ruth Mazo Karras

spiritual rather than temporal purposes is an important key to under-

standing how “Christian” it is.
Marriage in most societies has been a vehicle for the production of
offspring to whom property could be transferred, whether or not the
union was approved or sanctioned by a deity or a religious apparatus. In
many cultures, any acknowledged offspring of the father may inherit his
property; Christian societies, however, drew on both Roman and Jewish
traditions in limiting inheritance rights to those born in formal marriage.
In ancient Rome—the legal system on which law of the medieval church
drew extensively, as did that of many kingdoms—matrimony was an in-
stitution into which a man entered in order to beget legitimate children.
Roman-law marriage was a legal, contractual relationship, and it contin-
ued to be understood this way under Christian canon law. But Roman
matrimonium was limited to unions between Roman citizens. Unions be-
tween slaves or freed persons, or between a free person and a slave, or
even of elites who were not Roman citizens, were defined as outside the
institution. Like Roman religion, then, marriage was intimately tied to the
Roman civitas.
Although some writing about marriage in pagan Rome referred to
divine law, it did not require a religious ceremony. The confarreatio cere-
mony did involve a sacrifice to Jupiter, but by the time of Augustus it had
lapsed and was used only by a few patricians. Certainly the expectation
that women would marry could be considered a part of Roman civic reli-
gion, and the phrase “Where you are Gaius, I am Gaia,” used in connec-
tion with Roman marriages, was associated by some sources with reli-
gious ritual. There were also a variety of “small religious rites” which
were known mainly by antiquarians.9 In general, however, when we speak
of “pagan Roman marriage,” we mean marriage among pagan Romans,
rather than marriage blessed specifically by pagan deities except (among
upper-class marriages) through the taking of omens. The handing over
of the bride and the dotal witnesses were more important than divine
sanction, although still not legally required; what made a marriage legal
was consent.
Romans who became Christian tended to include an element of ex-
plicitly Christian ceremony to their marriages, seeking a nuptial bless-
 The Christianization of Medieval Marriage \ 7

ing based on God’s blessing of Adam and Eve.10 Initially this may have
been a Christian gloss on an institution that in other ways—the betrothal,
the marital assigns, the transfer of a woman from her father’s family to her
husband’s—remained much the same as in pagan times. Roman marriage
was monogamous, at least serially: only one union at a time could produce
children who were capable of inheriting. Christianity brought changes in
the kind of sexual behavior demanded of men within marriage— women
were expected to be faithful to one man in both systems—but the process
of marriage formation, like many other aspects of late antique Christian
society, drew heavily on local law and custom, and in much of the Chris-
tian West that law and custom were Roman.11 The biggest change Chris-
tianity brought to Roman marriage, the idea of indissolubility, was quite
slow to be accepted, although it was part of a package of Christian ideas
about marriage that, as we shall see, the church promoted.
The idea of the nuptial blessing may have come in part from the
Jewish tradition. Whether marriage in the Second Temple period should
be called Jewish in the modern sense or Judaean — that is, when the
Greek iudaios or Latin iudeus came to be religious labels as opposed to
ethnonyms—is arguable.12 Certainly the culture of the region of Judaea
and its diasporic communities had distinctive customs. The community
that shared these customs also shared a belief in a deity and the scriptural
law he granted, but the extent to which there was divine involvement
in their early marriage customs — whether a benediction was used at
weddings and whether people understood themselves to be fulfilling a
spiritual obligation as well as a familial one—is not clear. A strong pro-
marriage religious stance appeared in Palestinian rabbinic literature,
which emerged after the destruction of the Second Temple — God de-
crees everyone’s marriage partner before birth, it is a religious obligation
to arrange marriages for one’s children, the betrothal is called qiddushin
or “sanctification”— but this may have been influenced extensively by
Greek and Latin writings, including Stoic defenses of marriage. Babylon-
ian sources (the other rabbinic tradition) put more emphasis on marriage
for the prevention of sin than on the commandment of procreation.13
The rules for marriage involved witnesses and a ketubah, or contract, not
performance in a particular holy place or by a religious authority. The
 8 / Ruth Mazo Karras

Hebrew Bible prescribes no particular ceremonies, and surviving docu-

ments from the Jewish community at Elephantine from the fifth century
BCE are concerned purely with economic arrangements.
Blessings to be said on the occasion of a marriage appear in the Tal-
mud; they are probably not an innovation of that time, but Michael Sat-
low argues that they were an attempt to “Judaize” marriage, in the sense
of giving it more religious content than it had had in the Second Temple
period.14 However, the blessings said at the marriage feast, like the Chris-
tian benediction of marriage, did not create the marriage. A marriage
was Jewish or Christian because it belonged to that community, rather
than because of the theology or practice involved: it was the parties who
engaged in it and the legal rules they followed, rather than the ceremo-
nial aspects, that made it Jewish or Christian. Indeed, prior to 388 CE, if
Jews and Christians married each other, even though such marriages
were forbidden by both communities, they were valid under civil law.15
By the central Middle Ages in Jewish communities, the combined cere-
mony of betrothal (qiddushin/erusin) and marriage (nisuin) was often per-
formed at the synagogue.16 It certainly was distinctively Jewish and was
considered as fulfilling religious precepts; the line between what be-
longed to communal custom and what had to do with belief may be
even harder to draw here than for Christianity.
For Christianity, certainly, the inclusion of a blessing in the mar-
riage ceremony — whether it followed a Jewish pattern or was grafted
onto a Roman one— was more than just a minor addition to an existing
institution. In the eyes of Christian thinkers, marriage became no longer
only an institution for the legitimation of reproduction or the creation
of family alliances, but also the only way of permitting sexual activity and
a way of creating a shared life of devotion. Ironically, it may have been the
late antique emphasis on Christian asceticism and sexual renunciation
that created the need for a Christian theology of marriage.17 Where re-
nunciation was the ideal, there was a risk that those who could not or
did not live up to it might despair of being good Christians, so it was
necessary to reassure the married that there was an alternate Christian
mode of life that allowed for sexual activity. The extent to which this
idea of Christian marriage was internalized is uncertain, but within the
Christian empire there was certainly the option of taking marriage seri-
 The Christianization of Medieval Marriage \ 9

ously as a Christian institution. Although Tertullian and other thinkers

claimed that virgins were the true brides of Christ, Augustine of Hippo
came to expound the position that married people were not to be disre-
garded as Christians.18
Augustine’s treatise On the Good of Marriage (401) was in one sense a
reaction to his own work and that of others on virginity. Around ten
years before, Jerome had written his highly influential Against Jovinian,
in which he refuted the work (now lost) in which Jovinian had suggested
that marriage could be as virtuous as virginity. Augustine too wrote in
praise of virginity (and, later, of chaste widowhood), but he felt the need
also to defend marriage as not just a lesser evil— a remedy against forni-
cation or adultery—but as a positive good in itself. This was a relatively
early work of Augustine’s, shortly after the completion of his Confessions.
It also arose from a pastoral impulse to explain to ordinary Christians
that they could lead a Christian life without rejecting the society in which
they lived it. Between 419 and 421 he wrote another treatise on the sub-
ject, “On Marriage and Concupiscence,” which emerged in a somewhat
different theological context, his controversy against the Pelagians. Au-
gustine wrote for a married layman, Count Valerius; he was not as open
as he had been earlier about the possibility of sex being a good thing
within its proper marital context.19 However, even though continence was
a greater good than marriage, marriage was still good for three reasons:
procreation and mutual fidelity, which were natural goods, and the sacra-
mental bond created by the “law of piety,” which did not disappear even
in case of adultery or divorce.20
It was the third good, the sacramentum, that was particular to Chris-
tianity; yet, for Augustine, it was not incompatible with Roman forms
of marriage. A Christian bond could very easily coexist with the desire
to link families and pass property to heirs. The events of Augustine’s
own life, as he told it in his Confessions, undoubtedly shaped his view. His
mother, Monica, had planned a marriage for him with a girl of appro-
priate family, and although Monica was a Christian — as was Augustine
by the time he wrote about it — it is quite clear that this young woman
was selected for him not so that he would have the opportunity to partici-
pate in a Christian institution or sacrament, but so that he could perpetu-
ate the family. When Augustine discussed his concubine in his Confessions,
 10 / Ruth Mazo Karras

he said not that their union was nonsacramental or not divinely sanc-
tioned, but that it was not legitimate. He explained that marriage was a
pact (foederatum) for the sake of offspring, contrasting it with other types
of unions that were for the sake only of lust.21 This is a very Roman view
and does not require Christianity. He did, however, make arguments
that prefigured the high medieval theologians’ and canonists’ theories
about consent making marriage; in other words, the sacrament of mar-
riage did not necessarily require any ritual or performance. He wrote in
On the Good of Marriage that even if two people come together to satisfy
their lust rather than for the purpose of procreation, as long as it is their
intention to remain faithful and not engage in intercourse with anyone
else, “doubtless without absurdity it can indeed be labeled a marriage.”
He went on to suggest that a concubine, “should she maintain sexual
fidelity with [ her partner], and after he takes a wife she gives no thought
to marriage herself and steels herself to refrain utterly from such sexual
intercourse, I should not perhaps readily presume to call her an adul-
terer.” If her goal was not the satisfaction of lust but the procreation of
children, “she is to be ranked higher than many matrons.”22 Dyan Elliott
has suggested that he may be obliquely describing his own concubine
here and suggesting that from her point of view, she participated in a
Christian marriage, even though he did not.
This passage suggests that fidelity creates the sacramental nature of
marriage, even though it can also be considered a separate “good.” Au-
gustine here marks a major change in comparison to Roman marriage:
the expectation of fidelity from the husband as well as the wife. The Jew-
ish tradition had also condemned men’s infidelity, but there was no male
equivalent of the sotah ritual for the detection and punishment of adul-
terous women.23 The same would be true in Christian societies: through-
out the medieval and indeed the early modern and modern periods,
we see adultery by men taken less seriously in practice than adultery by
women. When it is taken seriously, upon close examination most cases
turn out to be men who adulterate other men’s marriages, that is, men
who have sex with married women, not married men who have sex with
women not their wives. Nevertheless, Christianity did innovate in pro-
moting at least a notional equality in the degree of sinfulness that male
and female adulterers incurred (and also male and female premarital for-
 The Christianization of Medieval Marriage \ 11

nicators, although fornication was less sinful than adultery). This was
expressed not only by Augustine but also by Ambrose, who wrote that
only single men and not married men should have concubines, and the
Council of Toledo, which ordered much the same thing.24 Augustine
went further than he had previously in suggesting that mutual fidelity
was good not only in that it prevented both parties from committing
fornication, but also in the bond that it created.
Augustine assumed that the good of marriage most obvious to his
audience would be that of proles, offspring, as in pre-Christian Roman so-
ciety. But one might argue that Christian marriage actually came to run
counter to the goal of begetting offspring because of its emphasis on in-
dissolubility. In ancient, late antique, and early medieval Jewish society it
was entirely permissible for a man to divorce a wife who was barren or, in
some societies, to take an additional wife. Far from encouraging chaste
widowhood, if a man died childless, halakha, or rabbinic law, required that
his nearest male relative (even if already married) marry the widow or
else ritually release her, and the first child born from the marriage would
be accounted the child of the decedent.25 Islam at one time encouraged,
and still permits, men to marry up to four wives and have children with
all of them. Christianity turned against these practices. Without follow-
ing Jack Goody in considering the minimizing of potential heirs a con-
spiracy by the church to accumulate more property, we can note that
Christianity, while condemning contraception, never put so great a value
on marital fertility as to allow the dissolution of a barren marriage, let
alone forbid the formation of one.26
Goody argued that the church discouraged strategies for the cre-
ation of heirs by prohibiting divorce, plural marriage, marriage between
relatives, and adoption. While medievalists agree that he went too far in
attributing a coherent organization and purpose to the church’s regula-
tion of marriage, it is clear that from at least the ninth century on, and
with more success from the twelfth, the church was claiming authority
over the institution. Georges Duby suggested that “two conceptions of
marriage clashed in Latin Christendom about the year 1100. It was the
climax of a conflict resulting in the introduction of customs that have
lasted almost up to our own day.”27 The two conceptions to which he re-
ferred were indissoluble, church-sanctioned marriage on the one hand
 12 / Ruth Mazo Karras

and lay-controlled, dissoluble, dynastic marriage on the other. As Duby

acknowledged, the tension between church and magnates began long be-
fore the twelfth century, although neither group was unanimous or con-
sistent; individual cases often involved one group of lay magnates and
their ecclesiastical allies against another. A number of marriage cases in-
volving the Carolingian royal family, such as the marriages of Lothar II
and those of Judith, daughter of Charles the Bald, for example, involved
men of the church on both sides of the controversy. This has often been
read as an indication that “the church” did not have a consistent marriage
policy at that time, or that lay magnates were successfully preventing the
church from seizing control, but it can equally be read as an indication
that lay magnates knew that whatever they did about their own or their
children’s marriages, they needed to acquire the sanction of the church
for it in some way, even if that meant the approval of their own tame
clergy rather than of Rome. In the sense that there was a broad accept-
ance that the church could govern the terms of marriage — as discussed
above, one of the common meanings of “Christianization”— we may
suggest that marriage was Christian long before the twelfth century, and
the spate of legislation about it from Carolingian councils (and even
Merovingian ones) indicates that the church saw itself as in a position to
legislate about it, even if this legislation tended to be roundly ignored.
Nor did the twelfth century bring an end to controversies over clerical
versus lay control of marriage. In later cases — the most famous, of
course, being that of Henry VIII — lay magnates knew they needed the
backing of the church to do what they wished, but they put considerable
pressure on churchmen to provide that backing.
What did change in the twelfth century were the detailed rules sur-
rounding marriage, which were substantially clarified. Marriage was a
major point of discussion among canon lawyers and theologians in the
first half of the twelfth century, from Ivo of Chartres’s emphasis on the
consent of the two parties rather than their families, to Gratian’s distinc-
tion between matrimonium initiatum and matrimonium ratum, to Peter
Lombard’s treatment in the Sentences, with its definitive enunciation of
the consent theory. Peter Lombard also argued, although he did not
originate the argument, that marriage represented the union of Christ
with the church, expressed through a sacramental physical union: “Since
 The Christianization of Medieval Marriage \ 13

therefore marriage is a sacrament, it is also a sacred sign of a sacred

thing, that is to say, the conjunction of Christ and the Church. . . . As,
therefore, between spouses there is a conjunction according to the con-
sent of souls and according to the mixing of bodies, thus the church is
coupled to Christ by will and by nature.”28 And, as the theology of the
sacrament and the legalities of marriage were elaborated, they could not
be trusted to laypeople. Though Gratian and the Lombard disagreed
on some points, by the third quarter of the twelfth century the decretals
of Alexander III solidified the latter’s position. Alexander’s statement of
the law on marriage formation and indissolubility, as well as the impedi-
ments to marriage, remained normative for the rest of the Middle Ages,
although there was of course disagreement among churchmen on how to
apply it in practice.
The church also “christened” marriage through extensive use of
marital language and imagery in a wide range of contexts, which would
have led the general community to understand marriage as a Christian
institution. Close and indissoluble relationships were described—in ser-
mons, treatises, and biblical commentaries — as marriages: the relation
between a bishop and his church, between Christ and the church, be-
tween the soul and God. The use of marriage as metaphor, of course,
brought with it connotations other than closeness: it implied an unbro-
ken sacramental bond, but also a hierarchical ranking of the two parties.
By putting forward a familiar relationship, marital language gave people
a point of reference for understanding relationships that required a more
complex understanding. David d’Avray has argued that the use of marital
language for the relation between Christ and the church would have ele-
vated marriage in the eyes of laypeople and helped lead them to view it
sacramentally.29 While both processes — the sacramentalizing of mar-
riage and the familiarization of Christian theology — were likely going
on, the use of the everyday to explain the transcendent looms somewhat
larger than the use of the transcendent to elevate the everyday. Marital
language was also frequently used, as Dyan Elliott has shown, for rela-
tions between holy men and holy women. This helped to normalize the
celibate by placing them within the context of an institution in which
most medieval people participated or at least expected to participate. But
the frequent references to spiritual unions that were spiritually, although
 14 / Ruth Mazo Karras

not biologically, fruitful did more than normalize celibacy. It celebrated it

in a way that devalued carnal marriage: everything that carnal marriage
could do, spiritual marriage could do in a higher and more virtuous way.30
Thus, while people may have been led to an understanding of marriage as
Christian through its use as a metaphor for other relationships that were
nothing but Christian, it is not so clear that it changed the terms in which
ordinary people thought about their own marriages—or that, if it did
change them, it did so in the direction of assimilating them to (rather
than emphasizing their contrast with) the more spiritual ones.
Through law, sermons, hagiography, and other means, then, the me-
dieval church laid claim to marriage. Marriage was promoted as the uni-
versal state for those who had not vowed a religious celibacy. There re-
mained, of course, those who did not or could not marry, but the church
claimed fairly successfully to be able to determine who these were, that
is, which unions should be recognized as marriage and what penalties
should be assigned for those who entered them wrongly. Yet the body
of rules articulated in the twelfth century did not entirely control the
marital behavior of the public over the subsequent centuries. People
were pushed to marry — by their families or their lords — in ways that
could coerce consent. They self-divorced in the absence of a formal way
of breaking up a marriage, often simply by leaving or being left by their
partner, and remarried even though this was forbidden.31 Dowry was not
required in theory to make a legal or sacramentally valid marriage, but it
continued to be required in practice.32
Medieval Christian sources give us a coherent theory of marriage
put forward by celibates, but we have little about marriage written by the
married, except for married couples who agreed to live chastely (and
even then, it is rarely in their own words). We have plenty of people who
rejected marriage for Christian reasons, but no way of knowing how
many people entered it for Christian reasons. Indeed, one of the few im-
portant twelfth-century writers on marriage to be married herself —
Heloise — considered it more honorable to be called “friend” (amica,
often translated as “mistress”) rather than “wife,” and claimed that she
would rather be Abelard’s whore (meretrix) than the wife and imperial
consort (imperatrix) of a Roman emperor. She said that “the name of wife
may have the advantages of sanctity and safety, but to me the sweeter
 The Christianization of Medieval Marriage \ 15

name will always be lover [amica] or, if your dignity can bear it, concu-
bine [concubina] or whore [scorta].”33
Heloise rejected marriage in favor of an unconstrained love, while
others rejected it for a love of God alone, but none of the rejecters
stressed the Christian aspects of the marriage they rejected. There is, in
fact, remarkably little evidence until the time of the Reformation that in-
dividuals had a Christian purpose in their marriage; thereafter, we get for-
mer monks or nuns who chose to marry, or women who chose to marry
priests. And even then—except for the rare woman such as Katharina
Zell, who wrote about her decision to marry a priest and claimed that she
did it deliberately for the good of the church— we do not know whether
the choice to marry was a statement about belief or simply due to the fact
that this new mode of Christian life required a spouse, for support in the
case of a woman, for household management in the case of a man.
During the Middle Ages, the closest we can get in terms of evidence
of laypeople having Christian beliefs in mind when they chose to marry
is often a grudging acceptance that marriage is something under the ju-
risdiction of the church. We can see this in the later Middle Ages with
regard to the role of publicity in marriage. Christian culture inherited
the idea that publicity was essential to a marriage from the Romans: there
was nothing fundamentally Christian about it. In Roman law the funda-
mental difference between a wife and a concubine was the presence of
maritalis affectio, marital affection or intent, but publicity was an impor-
tant part of the latter: wishing and intending to be married involved hold-
ing oneself out publicly as married.34
The church also pushed publicity consistently, in part because the
enforcement of indissoluble monogamy required the clear identification
of unions as marriages. The church also related requirements for the
payment of dotal transfers, which were not new, to publicity. The re-
quirement of dowry or reverse dowry in order to validate the marriage
might seem to be contrary to the principles of Christian marriage, which
stressed personal consent rather than the familial consent demonstrated
by a financial contribution. But the importance of dos was evidentiary. It
was part of the publicity surrounding a union. In the later Middle Ages,
where a dowry could be shown to have been negotiated, a woman would
have a much easier time making a plausible case that the relationship was
 16 / Ruth Mazo Karras

a marriage. The most famous example is the mid-fifteenth-century story

of Giovanni della Casa and Lusanna of Florence, described in Gene
Brucker’s microhistory. In a complicated legal case, Giovanni won his
claim that the two were not married; a private marriage ceremony had
been held, which was all that the law technically required, but because it
was not public and there was no dowry and no notarial record, Lusanna’s
evidence was weak and she lost her case on appeal.35
But Christian adoption of the Roman idea of publicity in marriage
did not fundamentally change the idea; it was a practical rather than a
theological requirement. Pope Leo I, in 458 to 459, wrote in a much-
repeated letter that a wife had to be “legitimately endowed [dotata], and is
seen to be made honest by public nuptials.” Carolingian councils drew
on Leo’s dictum and required publicity in order to identify and avoid im-
pediments to marriages. Yet Pope Nicholas I in 866 made clear that the
rituals that normally constituted marital publicity — a betrothal agree-
ment, a transfer of property via a document, an exchange of rings, a
ceremony with a nuptial benediction — were not possible for everyone:
“These are the laws of marriage, these, in addition to other things that
do not come to mind, are the solemn pacts of nuptials; however, we do
not consider it a sin if all these things do not happen in a marriage agree-
ment . . . especially because such great lack of means oppresses some
people, that they have no assistance in preparing these things.”36 By the
later Middle Ages the system that had developed for ensuring the public-
ity of marriage and therefore the absence of impediments such as previ-
ous marriage was the proclamation of banns at the parish church for
three Sundays before the marriage, which in one sense Christianized the
publicity requirement by involving the church in guaranteeing it. Yet
clandestine marriages, while illicit, remained valid.
A clandestine marriage was one in which the banns were not called
properly and the union therefore not properly publicized. My own re-
search on Paris, that of Carole Avignon on northwestern France, and that
of Shannon McSheffrey on London indicates that those unions labeled
as “clandestine” were not necessarily those in which a couple entered
into marriage vows in secret— although such marriages certainly existed.
Theologians and canonists from the twelfth century onward listed a va-
 The Christianization of Medieval Marriage \ 17

riety of criteria of clandestinity. Hostiensis had one of the most detailed

and widely followed typologies: first, those conducted without a blessing
in facie ecclesiae; second, those conducted without witnesses and dowry;
third, those conducted without episcopal license in cases that required it;
and fourth, those without banns.37 In the fourteenth-century encyclope-
dia Omne Bonum, for example, the image for “clandestinum matrimo-
nium” depicts a marriage being solemnized by a friar.38 In London, Mc-
Sheffrey argues, there were a number of “extra-ecclesiastical” marriages
formed in the homes of relatives or employers; however, the term “clan-
destine” tended to be used not for these, but rather for marriages sol-
emnized at church but with some error in the procedure, such as lack
of banns.39 In Paris there were many unions where the parties did not
bother to enter into present-tense vows at all, essentially making future
promises which constituted a betrothal and then living together as mar-
ried, in addition to marriages in which the ceremony was conducted at a
place other than the parish church or by someone other than the appro-
priate parish priest.40
To the extent that people were exchanging vows in the homes of
their parents or employers, or even in fields or in stables, rather than at
the church door, we might suggest that the church was not that impor-
tant to them in their marriages and that there was nothing particularly
Christian about them; the vow, “I take you as my wife/husband,” which
was a legal contract, was not explicitly Christian. Some people, however,
did choose to have their marriages celebrated in church, but not their
own parish church, which was where canon law required the banns to be
called, or even in their own church without banns. For example, “Jean
David and Thomassine la Bouchiere now his wife, cited, made amends
for espousals in a certain chapel in Villette-aux-Asnes in the diocese of
Meaux, although they were parishioners of the Villetaneuse.”41 They
could also make use of an exempt jurisdiction (generally monasteries not
subject to the local bishop): as one of many examples, in Paris in 1492,
“Jean Leguyot . . . and Pierrette his wife made amends for having sol-
emnized matrimony at St.-Germain-en-Laye on St. Laurence’s day.”42
People could also be liable to a fine for attending a ceremony in an inap-
propriate church.43 One man claimed that he had solemnized marriage in
 18 / Ruth Mazo Karras

an exempt jurisdiction out of fear of his parents (strangely, not hers, al-
though women’s families were in general more concerned about whom
their daughters married than were men’s families).44
To the extent that couples were choosing to get married at church,
even if it was the wrong church, and having a priest celebrate a nuptial
mass for them, even when it was a priest who was not authorized to do so,
we may conclude that these aspects were important to them, socially if
not spiritually. There may have been various reasons for them to go to an
exempt jurisdiction, including cheaper rates, a shorter delay without the
banns, or indeed the avoidance of publicity about impediments, but they
were still accepting, if not the church’s control over marriage, at least the
idea that the church should be connected with marriage: if they were re-
jecting the church’s authority entirely they could have omitted solemniza-
tion, as many couples did, or performed a ceremony, with or without a
priest, in a loco profano (that is, somewhere other than a church).45
These late fifteenth-century cases bear on several of the possible
meanings of “Christian marriage.” If we assume that people were being
married in a church, but clandestinely, because they did not grasp the dif-
ference and thought that the marriage was licit, then it is difficult to
claim that they understood the union as being Christian. If the only for-
mal and legal marriage available to the vast majority of people living in
western Europe was a church-sanctioned one, we cannot assume that
their entering into a Christian form of marriage was a result of their own
beliefs. If, however, they were consciously violating the church’s rules by
not marrying in their own parish, perhaps because there was some im-
pediment that they did not want the banns to reveal or because they did
not want to wait, then they did have a choice. They could just live to-
gether and hold themselves out as married (which some people certainly
did). They could exchange vows in front of witnesses but not at a church
(which a great many people certainly did), vows prescribed by the church
but without explicitly Christian wording. Or they could have a nuptial
mass celebrated at a church other than their parish church. The choice
of the latter would seem to indicate that they had internalized a view
of marriage as Christian in the sense of being connected with a church.
Possibly they chose vows in a church because it was spiritually meaning-
 The Christianization of Medieval Marriage \ 19

ful to them, possibly because the community would accord higher stand-
ing to the union.
When I presented this paper orally I made the not entirely facetious
suggestion that marriage did not become Christian until non-Christian
marriage became an option. Civil marriage was established in France in
1792, England in 1836, and the German states at various times in the
nineteenth century, followed by Bismarckian legislation in 1875.46 Once
it is the registration with the civil authorities that makes a marriage of-
ficial, Christian marriage is no longer an unmarked category, but one
that a couple has to make an effort to enter, although there may be social
pressure to do so. If only those people who actively choose a Christian
ceremony have one, and there is no penalty for not doing so, we may
argue that for those people marriage is more thoroughly Christianized
than in a situation such as the Middle Ages, when all marriage in western
Europe was religious and therefore participation in it was a sign of the
church’s control and not of personal commitment to Christianity.
In the Middle Ages marriage was a social and economic act. The
church had to keep after people constantly to follow the canon law rules,
and property exchanges that were not legally required were neverthe-
less, among the upper and middling classes, socially critical. The think-
ing about marriage as primarily sacramental rather than social seems, as
far as we can tell, to have been limited to the celibate. People were not
marrying to imitate Christ and his church—not most of them, anyway—
they were doing it to create households and rear offspring, neither a
uniquely Christian goal. The roots of church-controlled marriage are
in the Middle Ages, but older and more universal traditions about the
purpose of marriage also continued, and modern theorists of Christian
marriage rely much more on how medieval churchmen thought than
how medieval couples actually formed their unions. Nevertheless, as the
church successfully exerted control over the making of marriage, its mo-
nopoly may have meant that many individuals, and certainly the commu-
nity as a whole, understood it as a Christian ritual.
Marriage nevertheless remained different from other life course
sacraments. Baptism took place on the occasion of birth, but it did not
cause someone to be born (although adult baptism was, in the early
 20 / Ruth Mazo Karras

church and in some evangelical churches still, spoken of in terms of re-

birth). Extreme unction was to take place on the occasion of death, but
it did not cause death. Marriage, however, caused marriage; that is, the
vows were performative and created a permanent and recognized union.
Preachers throughout the Middle Ages ensured that the baptism and ex-
treme unction, as well as confirmation, penance, and the Eucharist,
were understood as the obligations of all Christians. Like holy orders,
however, marriage was not for everyone. Unlike holy orders, there were
many purposes for it other than religious ones. It is important not to
equate “marriage” with “the formation of a union,” because there re-
mained an unknown number of couples who could not or did not marry.
But to guarantee the passing of wealth to the next generation, ensure
economic support for the female partner and her children, and in many
cases to guarantee social acceptability, marriage was needed, and its sacra-
mentality was likely not the main point for many people. As Van Engen
so forcefully argued, that does not mean that the Christian aspect was
merely a meaningless superstructure. Rather, what we see is several dif-
ferent meanings of Christianization. Christian law was the law of the
majority community, and from a legal and administrative view, marriage
was under the jurisdiction of the church. Participating in Christian rit-
ual around marriage was a matter of community, and people chose to do
it even when they were in violation of the church’s law. Marriage was
certainly Christianized by the end of the Middle Ages in these two re-
spects. But we need to be careful about assuming that because it was
Christian in terms of who made the rules and what set of customs joined
the community together, it therefore brought with it the implications of
individual faith and participation in a sacrament. People choose Chris-
tian marriage today because it is meaningful to them; in the Middle Ages,
it was the default.

Notes

1. John Van Engen, “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical

Problem,” American Historical Review 91 ( June 1986): 519– 52.
2. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Signifi-
cance of Food to Medieval Women ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987);
 The Christianization of Medieval Marriage \ 21

Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the
Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Nancy Caciola,
Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2003); Richard Kieckhefer, “The Holy and the Unholy: Saint-
hood, Witchcraft, and Magic in Late Medieval Europe,” Journal of Medieval and
Renaissance Studies 24 (1994): 355– 85; Peter Dinzelbacher, Heilige oder Hexen?
Schicksale auffälliger Frauen (Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut, 2001); Eamon
Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400 –1580 ( New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); John Van Engen, Brothers and Sisters of the
Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Late Middle Ages ( Phila-
delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
3. Van Engen, “Christian Middle Ages,” 536 – 37. Of course, not every-
one in medieval Europe was Christian, but even Muslims and Jews living within
Christian-dominated territories shared to some extent in this language and
assumptions.
4. Philip Lyndon Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church: The Chris-
tianization of Marriage during the Patristic and Early Medieval Periods ( Leiden:
Brill, 1994), xiii.
5. This chapter develops some ideas I presented in Unmarriages: Women,
Men, and Sexual Unions in the Middle Ages ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
vania Press, 2012), although it does not duplicate any part of that book.
6. Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church, xii; he does not argue that it
was incomplete.
7. Van Engen, “Christian Middle Ages,” 522.
8. Ibid., 543.
9. Susan Treggiari, Roman Marriage: Iusti Coniuges from the Time of Cicero
to the Time of Ulpian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 161; see also 8– 9, 23, 27,
161– 70.
10. See Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church, 362– 85, on the bene-
diction.
11. Kyle Harper, in From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sex-
ual Morality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), discusses in detail
the way Christianity changed the double standard.
12. On the development of a Jewish identity and the meaning of iudaios,
see Shaye H. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncer-
tainties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). This argument has been
misapplied in a nonacademic context by some Christians who use it to deny that
Jesus was “Jewish,” but some scholars use it to argue that the term “Jew” is
anachronistic.
13. Michael L. Satlow, Jewish Marriage in Antiquity ( Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2001), 14, 26 – 27.
14. Satlow, Jewish Marriage, 68, 84, 178– 79.
 22 / Ruth Mazo Karras

15. Hagith Sivan, “Why Not Marry a Jew? Jewish-Christian Marital Fron-
tiers in Late Antiquity,” in Law, Society, and Authority in Late Antiquity, ed. Ralph
W. Mathisen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 208–19.
16. Avraham Grossman, Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Eu-
rope, trans. Jonathan Chipman ( Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2004),
49– 51, 196– 97.
17. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation
in Early Christianity ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), is the classic
work on late antique asceticism.
18. For Tertullian, see Dyan Elliott, The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Meta-
phor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200 – 1500 ( Philadelphia: Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 14 – 29.
19. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, 2d ed. (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 2000), 392– 93.
20. Augustine, “De nuptiis et concupiscentiis” 1:19, in Corpus scriptorium ec-
clesiasticorum latinorum 42, ed. Carl Verba and Joseph Zycha ( Vienna: F. Temp-
sky, 1902), 231.
21. Augustine, Confessions, 4.2.2, ed. James J. O’Donnell, 3 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1992), 1:33. I develop this further in Unmarriages, 28– 31.
22. Augustine, De bono coniugali, 5, ed. and trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford: Clar-
endon Press, 2001), 11–13.
23. This ritual involved an ordeal of drinking “bitter waters.” There is lit-
tle evidence of its being practiced in the Second Temple period, and it was abol-
ished shortly thereafter; nevertheless, it is discussed extensively in the Talmud
and medieval Jewish scholars were certainly aware of it.
24. Both cited in Augustine, Confessions, 2:384.
25. On levirate marriage, see Satlow, Jewish Marriage, 186 – 89; and Gross-
man, Pious and Rebellious, 90 –101.
26. Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
27. Georges Duby, The Knight, the Lady and the Priest: The Making of Modern
Marriage in Medieval France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 19.
28. Peter Lombard, Sententiae in IV libris distinctae, bk. 4, dist. 26, chap. 6,
ed. Ignatius Brady, 3d ed. (Grottaferrata: College of St. Bonaventure, 1981),
2:419– 22.
29. David d’Avray, Medieval Marriage: Symbolism and Society (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 2005).
30. On marital imagery, see Elliott, Bride of Christ; D’Avray, Medieval Mar-
riage; Dyan Elliott, Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Megan McLaughlin, Sex, Gender,
and Episcopal Authority in an Age of Reform, 1000 – 1122 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 51– 91; and E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The
 The Christianization of Medieval Marriage \ 23

Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity ( Philadelphia: University of Penn-

sylvania Press, 1990), esp. 123– 50.
31. Sara McDougall, Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Cham-
pagne ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), provides a survey
on this topic.
32. On dowry, see Susan Mosher Stuard, “Brideprice, Dowry, and Other
Marital Assigns,” in The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Eu-
rope, ed. Judith Bennett and Ruth M. Karras (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013); Diane Owen Hughes, “From Brideprice to Dowry in Mediterranean Eu-
rope,” Journal of Family History 3 (1978): 262– 96; and many chapters in Philip L.
Reynolds and John Witte Jr., To Have and to Hold: Marrying and its Documen-
tation in Western Christendom, 400 – 1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007).
33. Abelard and Heloise, The Letters and Other Writings, trans. William
Levitan ( Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007), 55.
34. On “affectio maritalis,” see Judith Evans-Grubbs, “Marrying and its
Documentation in Later Roman Law,” in Reynolds and Witte, To Have and to
Hold, 51; and John T. Noonan, “Marital Affection in the Canonists,” Studia Gra-
tiana 12 (1967): 481– 509.
35. Gene Brucker, Giovanni and Lusanna: Love and Marriage in Renaissance
Florence ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); and Thomas Kuehn,
“Reading Microhistory: The Example of Giovanni and Lusanna,” Journal of Mod-
ern History 61 (1989): 512– 34.
36. Nicholas I, Epistolae, 99, ed. Ernst Perels, Monumenta Germaniae His-
torica, Epistolae 6 ( Berlin: Weidmann, 1925), 570.
37. Carole Avignon, “L’Eglise et les infractions du lien matrimonial: Mari-
ages clandestins et clandestinité. Théories, pratiques et discours, France du nord-
ouest du XIIe siècle au m ilieu du XVIe siècle,” Ph.D. dissertation, Université de
Paris-Est, 2008, 94 – 95 on Hostiensis, 95–102 on other theologians. Avignon’s
work provides great detail not only on legal practice on clandestine marriage in
northwestern France, but also on the theological and canon law background.
38. Lucy Freeman Sandler, Omne bonum: A Fourteenth-Century Encyclopedia
of Universal Knowledge: British Library MSS Royal 6 E VI– 6 E VII, 2 vols. ( Lon-
don: H. Miller Publishers, 1996), 2:108– 9. The text for “clandestinum despon-
sacio” relied on Hostiensis.
39. Shannon McSheffrey, Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval
London ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 27– 32.
40. Karras, Unmarriages, 179– 86.
41. Paris, Archives nationales, Z/1o/19, fol. 83r, 1488.
42. Ibid., Z/1o/19, fol. 257v.
43. Ibid., Z/1o/18, fol. 12v.
44. Ibid., Z/1o/18, fol. 41v.
 24 / Ruth Mazo Karras

45. Ibid., Z/1o/18, fol. 78r, 82r, 96v, the latter with a priest. These were
“affidationes” rather than solemnization.
46. On France, see Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary
France ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), esp. 47– 92; on England,
Rebecca Probert, Marriage Law and Practice in the Long Eighteenth Century: A Re-
assessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 337– 38. See Probert,
2– 6, for the argument (contra Lawrence Stone) that the 1753 Marriage Act did
not constitute a major change from previous procedure, as the Church of England
had jurisdiction before as well as after that act.
 Tw o

Th e C h r i s t i a n i z a t i o n o f B o h e m i a
Revising the Narratives

l i s a wo l v e rt o n

“Christianization”: the term is widely used, and still widely contested.1

On the face of it, it evokes the abandonment, rejection, or simple decay
of one set of religious and cultural beliefs and practices and the adoption
of another, as well as the consequent transformation of a whole society.
In contrast with a word such as “conversion,” it suggests the gradual na-
ture of this change and stresses the process as much as the product. How-
ever, “Christianization” leaves opaque matters of agency: does it signify
a process willingly engaged in or one imposed by others? While reli-
gious historians such as John Van Engen are inclined toward the former,
I would argue that in the overarching narrative of early medieval his-
tory there exists an unmarked tendency toward the latter in accounts of
how various “peripheral” regions, beyond the formerly Roman “core” of
Christian Europe, became part of medieval Christendom.2 Moreover, in
northern and east-central Europe, the period usually identified as crucial
to Christianization—circa 1000, plus or minus a century—overlaps with
either the expansion of the Frankish/East Frankish/German Empire or
the coalescence of independent states in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe
that survive to the modern day.3 Because of this overlap, Christianization

25
 26 / Lisa Wolverton

is chiefly treated, either outright or implicitly, as a political development

rather than a religious or cultural one. The specific form such a func-
tionalist approach takes in scholarship about the adoption of Christian-
ity in Bohemia is my subject here.
I take my cue—fittingly, I think—from Van Engen’s influential essay
in the 1986 American Historical Review, “The Christian Middle Ages as an
Historiographical Problem.” In it he states that “Christianization re-
quired, in cultural terms, the putting in place of the means to structure
Christian profession and practice, that is, the rituals and institutions deans
and priests supervised.”4 Institutions, then, matter— and matter more, as
Van Engen says, than the official baptism of a ruler or other elites. But
institutions are inherently impersonal, and their study can become an
end it itself; the unmarked tendency is to assume that the study of insti-
tutions such as monasteries, bishoprics, or parishes elucidates, even stands
in for, the beliefs and practices these institutions were to encourage and
support — and indeed does so sufficiently that little direct consideration
of the latter is needed. Moreover, institutional control of resources and
imbrication in structures of political power enable the subtle infiltration
of functionalist assumptions. Van Engen talks of parishes, but the schol-
arship on central Europe in the early Middle Ages, especially in the Ot-
tonian orbit, focuses on bishoprics — missionary bishoprics, colonizing
bishoprics, national bishoprics, and especially archbishoprics. The pres-
ence of a bishop was unquestionably among the requirements for, or
markers of, Christianization, for within the well-established hierarchy
of the Roman church, the bishop oversaw and provided the basic frame-
work for exactly the structures of ritual and practice Van Engen describes.
Yet here again there is a tendency to float back up, into that world of
kings and courtiers, ideology and political machinations, and away from
belief and practice among everyday people on the ground. To some ex-
tent, these approaches have been rationalized by the sources, implicitly
or explicitly: circa 1000 we often know very little of what the common
folk felt and did, and non-Christian peoples and those on Latin Europe’s
periphery had little recourse to writing in order to testify to the Chris-
tianization process as it unfolded among them.5 Yet, in this, Bohemia
constitutes an exception — if one rarely noted in the scholarship: it is
comparatively well served for written sources of local provenance, from
 The Christianization of Bohemia \ 27

a series of tenth-century vitae of Saint Václav ( Wenceslas) to the twelfth-

century chronicles by Cosmas of Prague and his continuators.6
My aim here is to offer a reappraisal of Christianity’s institutional
development in Bohemia, not only by rejecting the kinds of political ar-
guments that currently dominate its study, but also by shifting our un-
derstanding of the relationship between politics and the Christianization
process in general.7 I intend first to revise the narrative for the establish-
ment of the bishopric of Prague, removing it from the world of Ottonian
political scheming and situating it instead within an indigenous process
of institution building and Christian practice on the ground in Bohemia.
This will allow us to then trace a different set of contours for the adop-
tion of Christian practices throughout Bohemia over three centuries
and to consider the role of local political elites, including ( but not re-
stricted to) the Přemyslid dukes of Bohemia, as patrons and facilita-
tors of this process. Finally we must acknowledge that Bohemia’s expo-
sure to Christianity — via travelers and immigrants, including priests, all
anonymous to us — came from east as well as west, and thus that a bilin-
gual liturgical Christianity was practiced at least through the end of the
eleventh century. In considering the bishopric of Prague, the role of the
dukes, and the place of the Slavonic liturgy, I propose to revise the three
dominant narratives of Christianization in Bohemia: that of Ottonian
missionary influence, that of autochthonous Přemyslid “state formation,”
and that of a clash between two monolithic Christianities, Western Roman
Catholic and Eastern Orthodox (in its Slavonic form). In each case, this
will rest on a fresh appraisal of the evidence, considered from a ground-
level view.

A Bishop to Meet Local Needs

The foundation of the see of Prague presents a conundrum: no contem-

porary text relates how it came about. Without question, it was subordi-
nated from the outset to the archbishopric of Mainz. But while hagio-
graphic and historical sources document and reliably date the reigns of
Bohemia’s second and third bishops, little evidence survives to indicate
when the first bishop of Prague was appointed or the bishopric itself
 28 / Lisa Wolverton

first constituted. We know only that it occurred sometime before

982.8 Writing in the early twelfth century, Cosmas, dean of the cathe-
dral church in Prague, offered one version of the see’s founding, which
I would like to discuss at some length. Cosmas cannot be treated as au-
thoritative, not least because he composed his account roughly 150 years
after the fact on the basis of sources, written or oral, that cannot be firmly
reconstructed. Moreover, by comparison with other evidence, Cosmas’s
dating is generally regarded as incorrect. Without Cosmas we have noth-
ing; with Cosmas we have some problems.
But let me first suggest that the absence of references to the bish-
opric’s establishment in any imperial source, narrative or documentary, is
not merely an impediment but instead potentially revealing. Bohemia’s
incorporation within the archdiocese of Mainz and the see’s likely foun-
dation during the reign of Emperor Otto II have led to a wide range
of speculative arguments about how and when this must have occurred
within the realm of Ottonian episcopal politics.9 In treatments of the sub-
ject in scholarship on medieval Germany, Prague is often listed alongside
Havelberg, Meissen, or Poznań — in other words, among the “mission-
ary” bishoprics established on Ottonian initiative.10 Czech historians
likewise posit an Ottonian context for the see’s foundation, for instance,
presuming complicated negotiations between the bishops of Regensburg
and Mainz regarding claims to Bohemia, even though the only evidence
for Regensburg’s missionary rights over Bohemia is a brief remark in the
mid-twelfth-century vita of Saint Wolfgang.11 Precisely because tenth-
century German chronicles make frequent mention of episcopal appoint-
ments, conflicts over bishops’ rights and resources, and high-profile efforts
by the rulers to establish new sees, as at Magdeburg or Bamberg, their
complete silence about Prague to me argues for minimal initiative or
agency on the part of the Ottonians.
Cosmas, given his exclusive focus on local Czech affairs and his criti-
cism of German rulers’ meddling in Bohemian political life, not surpris-
ingly eschews any wider imperial framework.12 In his telling, the see’s
founding was a local effort approved directly by the pope, whose letter
on the subject Cosmas reproduces. The letter itself, from a pope named
John13 to Boleslav II, provides the chronicle’s first reference to the bish-
opric; Cosmas makes no previous mention of a plan, but the letter refers
 The Christianization of Bohemia \ 29

to a request from the duke. The letter was delivered to Bohemia by Bole-
slav’s own sister, Mlada, who had gone to Rome to pray; “After some
time,” Cosmas says, the pope, “wanting to help the new church,” made her
an abbess and “gave her the rule of St. Benedict.”14 John’s letter thus reads:

[Mlada] brought entreaties, sweet to our heart, on your [Boleslav’s]

behalf: that, with our approval, it might be permitted for there to be a
bishopric in your principality to the praise and glory of the church of
God. We received it gladly and gave thanks to God, who always en-
larges his church everywhere and extols it in all countries. Whence,
by apostolic authority . . . we approve and highly praise, and indeed
put in writing, that there be an episcopal see at the church of Saints
Vitus and Václav, martyrs, [in Prague] and also that a community of
nuns be established at the church of St. George the martyr under the
rule of St. Benedict and in obedience to [Mlada]. Not according to
the rite or sect of the people of Bulgaria or Russia, nor in the Slavic
language, but rather following apostolic laws and decrees, at the will
of the whole church you should choose someone more preferable for
this work: a cleric well educated in Latin letters.15

According to Cosmas, the duke then did as the letter instructed: he sent
messengers to a man he knew named Thietmar, described as erudite, a
priest, a monk, and a Saxon, who had previously spent time in Prague
“for the sake of prayer” and was fluent in Slavic. Then, “Boleslav con-
vened the clergy, leaders, and people of the land and, through his own
entreaties and admonitions, he brought it about that everyone by com-
mon assent elected Thietmar as their bishop. On the next day, as pleased
the duke, everyone chose Thietmar as bishop by favorable acclamation.”
Only after this election, portrayed as a communal event, was Thietmar
sent to Emperor Otto I, Cosmas says, for ordination: “The emperor, as a
lover of divine law, with the counsel of the dukes and princes but espe-
cially the bishops, and taking thought for the salvation and newness of
these Christian people, ordered the archbishop of Mainz, who presided
at court then, to ordain him bishop.” With this final clause, “who pre-
sided at court then,” Cosmas seems to construe as an accident the institu-
tional arrangement whereby Prague became suffragan to Mainz.
 30 / Lisa Wolverton

Note here all the language about the “newness” of the faith in Bo-
hemia, not referring to it as a mission field (i.e., as the object of outsiders’
proselytizing efforts at conversion), but as a region in which Christianity
was still growing and needed support. And indeed, Cosmas immediately
describes how Bishop Thietmar went about consecrating churches,
“built by the faithful in many places to the praise of God,” and perform-
ing baptisms, thus furthering the process of making “the gentile populace
faithful to Christ.”16 But could the bishopric have been founded this way?
There are difficulties in the dating, suggesting that Cosmas has some of
the facts wrong.17 And while it seems plausible that the unnamed arch-
bishop of Mainz happened to be in residence at the emperor’s court,
surely it is less likely that either Otto or his bishops made such a critical
institutional decision so casually. Or is it? If the Czech entourage indeed
appeared unannounced, might the emperor not make an expedient deci-
sion? Might it not have seemed a boon for the emperor to be offered,
without any effort on his part, rights of confirmation over this new see?
The procedure Cosmas describes for Thietmar’s election was the
norm in Bohemia throughout the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries:
bishops were chosen jointly by the duke of Bohemia and popular accla-
mation and then sent to the emperor for confirmation and investiture, as
well as consecration by the archbishop of Mainz.18 While this certainly
suggests that Cosmas was projecting backward the practices of his own
day, it nonetheless remains the case that never in these centuries were
bishops chosen by the emperor, nor was any bishop-elect sent from Bo-
hemia ever rejected. ( The single exception, the third bishop of Prague,
Thieddag, was appointed by Otto III at the request of Boleslav, who “as-
serted that no cleric worthy of episcopal office was to be had in all of
Bohemia at that time.”)19 At no time, so far as we know, was this norm
ever questioned by either party; the bishopric of Prague, in other words,
was always understood to have a different relationship with the em-
peror than other sees, even those likewise subordinate to the archdi-
ocese of Mainz. One might logically conclude that this exceptional situ-
ation originated with the see’s founding. Note too that neither at the
time of foundation nor at any later date did the emperor possess any
lands or rights in Bohemia with which to endow or invest the bishop of
Prague.20 I would suggest, then, that the context for the establishment of
 The Christianization of Bohemia \ 31

the see of Prague was not the Empire but Bohemia — and its founder
was not Otto but Boleslav.
To some extent, we must conclude from the absence of contempo-
rary evidence that we simply cannot know how the Prague see came to be
established. I would nevertheless argue that Cosmas’s account contains
elements of plausibility when viewed from a Bohemian perspective. It is
striking, if overlooked by all non-Czech scholars of the subject, that
Cosmas explicitly links the see’s foundation with the establishment of the
first Benedictine monastery in Bohemia: Saint George, situated within
Prague Castle, directly behind the church of Saint Vitus (later the cathe-
dral). The archive of Saint George seems the likely source of the letter
from Pope John; Cosmas also mentions “a privilege of the church of
St. George” that he declines to cite and is unfortunately now lost, but
that apparently described twenty churches built and endowed by Bole-
slav II.21 Indeed, Cosmas consistently credits Boleslav with Christian
piety, though less for his personal qualities than his patronage of the
church. In addition to the usual platitudes about defending widows and
orphans, he calls him a “supporter of clergy and pilgrims” and, above all,
“an exceptional builder of God’s churches.”22 Hagiographical sources
likewise emphasize church building among the chief Christian acts of
patronage practiced by dukes, going back to the first Christian duke of
Bohemia, Bořivoj I, in the late ninth century.23 Among Saint Václav’s many
demonstrations of piety was his decision to build an exceptionally large
church within Prague Castle (where two other churches, those dedicated
to Saint Mary and Saint George, already stood).
Here, in these small churches, are the institutions John Van Engen
emphasizes, the crucial structures for Christian ritual practice and the
work of priests. Dotting the landscape, their proliferation must have
gone hand in hand with, and indeed facilitated, Christianity’s growth in
Bohemia. Yet, canonically, churches can only be consecrated by bishops.
Cosmas claims that Václav’s church, dedicated to Saint Vitus, stood un-
consecrated at his death, and thus his fratricidal successor, Duke Bole-
slav I, had to offer many inducements to Bishop Michael of Regensburg
to come consecrate it.24 Since Michael governed the church of Regens-
burg from 942 to 972, unless Cosmas is mistaken in the bishop’s name,
Václav’s church must have stood unconsecrated for more than a decade
 32 / Lisa Wolverton

and perhaps much longer (for Boleslav I ruled until 967). Crescente fide in-
dicates, however, and Cosmas repeats, that the remains of Saint Václav
were translated from the site of his martyrdom to Saint Vitus a mere three
years after his death,25 perhaps indicating that the Christian community
made liturgical or other religious use even of unconsecrated churches.
Nevertheless, Boleslav II probably realized that, for all his new buildings
and any future ones, it would do well to have a bishop available locally
to consecrate them. One imagines a kind of snowball effect: at a cer-
tain point, the example of consecration made meeting in unconsecrated
places untenable. Whether influenced by exemplars abroad or increas-
ingly aware of canon law, those pressing for conformity to external norms
must still have been, in the early part of the Christianization process,
faithful Christians within Bohemia. Only later, in the mid-twelfth century,
do we begin to find papal legates imposing norms from outside (e.g., about
clerical celibacy or abbatial elections).26
With a bishop in place, priests could be ordained as well. Christian
practice in Bohemia initially required the cultivation of foreign priests.
As one of the Václav legends testifies, “many priests from . . . Bavaria
and Swabia flocked to him with relics and books” and received in return
rich rewards.27 Half a century later Boleslav II may have established a
bishopric precisely in order to relieve the Czechs’ dependence on priests
from elsewhere, although it would be some time before a suitable epis-
copal candidate emerged from among the locals. All the earliest bish-
ops of Prague were of German origin, but for Saint Adalbert (born Voj-
těch), who was sent to Magdeburg for education.28 Here again, while
the Czechs’ Christianization critically depended upon such contacts with
neighboring regions where Christian institutions were more fully de-
veloped, the commitment to Christianity within Bohemia, whether to
support outsiders financially or send natives abroad for training, was
instrumental.
Establishing a bishopric seems also to have facilitated the provision
of permanent maintenance for this growing network of churches and
priests. Cosmas notes that Bishop Thietmar instituted a tithe consisting
of “two stacks of the harvest” (where a stack, he says, “holds fifty hand-
fuls”).29 Later, around the turn of the eleventh century, Ekkehard, the
fourth bishop of Prague, reformed this tithe: “Each person — whether
 The Christianization of Bohemia \ 33

powerful, rich, or poor, whether he possessed arable land from his bene-
fice or his allod — would pay the bishop two measures of five palms and
two fingers, one of wheat and the other of oats.”30 It is unclear whether
this represents a change in the amount owed, the grain rendered, or the
categories of land tenure obliged to pay.31 Nonetheless, the Christian
community could now be imagined to include the “powerful, rich, [and]
poor,” both freeholder and tenant. Does “each person” mean that all in-
habitants of Bohemia could now be expected to support the Christian
church, whatever their own beliefs and practices? Rendering the tithe out
of obligation scarcely indicates a deep commitment to Christianity— but
nevertheless, it was crucial to the support and further development of its
institutions, which in turn promoted and provided regular support for
those who had, even partially, made such commitments. And by Cos-
mas’s account, the institution of a tithe — supporting the church materi-
ally from across all sectors of society, rather than ducal or other elite pa-
tronage alone—occurred only after the establishment of a bishopric and
explicitly, even exclusively, on the bishops’ own initiative.
Christianity was, by definition, a foreign import to Bohemia. Its the-
ology and its rituals developed in the late Roman Empire and continued
to evolve over succeeding centuries as new peoples embraced its mes-
sage. This necessarily meant that its norms were initially established out-
side Bohemia. But how these were embraced by new adherents — how
and how much they were integrated into, and eventually replaced, na-
tive practices — everywhere depended upon local context. Ideas and ob-
jects could be brought by any Christian passing through Prague, lay or
cleric, merchant or pilgrim, and surely were. The Bohemians’ contacts
with Christians reached back at least to Charlemagne’s day, and already in
845 the Annals of Fulda report that “fourteen among the leaders [duces] of
the Bohemians, together with their men, accepted the Christian religion”
and were baptized at the imperial court in Regensburg.32 On many occa-
sions Frankish armies entered or passed through Bohemia, with the lo-
cals sometimes allies, sometimes enemies. And there is no question that
by the mid-tenth century, Prague was a major long-distance trading cen-
ter (see below). We have little record, of course, of most of these travelers
and thus can only guess at the nature of their conversations and influence
on the locals. Some among them must have been conscious missionaries,
 34 / Lisa Wolverton

though no evidence in the sources suggests that any secular or ecclesiasti-

cal leaders mounted a concerted missionary effort aimed specifically at
Bohemia.33 The local veneration of Saint Václav, himself not a missionary
but a pious exemplary duke whose murder was interpreted as martyrdom,
surely made the largest contribution to the development of the new faith
in Bohemia.34 It was his cult, most likely, that brought Thietmar to Prague
“for the sake of prayer” well before his appointment as bishop; indeed, by
the later tenth century, Václav’s cult was sufficiently well known outside
the Empire for a new vita to have been commissioned by Otto II, based
on Latin texts of Bohemian provenance.35 Eventually, then, the flow of
individuals and influences into and out from Bohemia — nearly all of it
beyond the reach of extant sources—influenced Christianity’s evolution
and adoption there. But local institutions—churches, bishops, tithes—
grounded the faith in daily observance, in the everyday lives of the local
population, whether believers or mere observers. And, by all accounts,
from their inception and in the months and years and decades that fol-
lowed, these institutions were the work of locals.36

The Dukes’ Resources

In the foregoing discussion of the institutions that supported Christian

practice, successive dukes of Bohemia have loomed large; we have ob-
served them building churches, patronizing priests, providing a personal
example of Christian piety, and arranging for the establishment of a
bishopric, thus taking a leadership role in establishing this new religion
in their lands. But in shifting the focus of the narrative of Bohemia’s
Christianization from outside influences to local initiatives, we must
avoid yet another form of political functionalism whereby a narrative of
internal political consolidation —“state formation”— subsumes, or even
substitutes for, one about the incorporation of Christian belief and prac-
tices into everyday life.37 Having displaced the excessive emphasis on the
agency of emperors and missionaries, we must not unwittingly cast
dukes in that same role — at least not without careful consideration. Un-
fortunately, it is a commonplace among the Czech scholarship, as well
 The Christianization of Bohemia \ 35

as within the broadly functionalist treatments of the Christianization of

northern and eastern Europe, to presume that rulers supported and
promoted, even introduced, Christianity chiefly for political reasons,
whether to aid in the consolidation of their authority over rivals, to en-
hance their stature with foreign rulers, or to impose greater control over
the populace.38 It is further argued that both the adoption of Christianity
and the dukes’ support for it worked to foster the formation of a “state”
in territories such as Bohemia.39 Yet, while Czech scholars routinely as-
sert that the church formed the backbone of the duke’s administration,
that the “Bohemian state” could not have existed without it, and that for
this reason dukes supported Christian institutions, these contentions in-
variably rest on flimsy, even nonexistent, evidence.40 They emerge instead
from flawed understandings of religious leadership, the structure of politi-
cal power, and the nature of patronage. Implicitly— and wrongly—these
scholars tend to equate institutions per se with administration, failing
to recognize that the earliest Christian bishops or churches were only “in-
stitutional” in the Van Engen– inspired sense, that is, insofar as they sup-
ported “Christian profession and practice.” If we take a more skeptical
view of the intersection of politics and Christian practice, rejecting tele-
ological assumptions about the dukes’ ostensibly “statist” or supposedly
political goals, we come to a better appreciation of what it meant for the
Czech populace to embrace Christianity over many decades.
The statist argument about the politics of Christianization in Bo-
hemia tacitly rests on two core pieces of evidence: the impression that
most of the earliest churches were located within fortifications, and a cru-
cial passage of Cosmas’s chronicle that describes the legislation of Chris-
tian mores. Nearly all the oldest churches, whether they survive intact
or as ruins, have been found within the walls of, or are described in texts
in association with, fortified centers, especially those connected with the
Přemyslids. Indeed, scholarly convention has long held that kostel, the
Czech word for “church”— that is, the physical building rather than
the institution or community of believers in abstract—derived from the
Latin castellum. It is tempting, therefore, to elide assumptions about the
function of fortresses with presumptions about the churches within them,
for if one believes Přemyslid rule consisted in the domination of the
 36 / Lisa Wolverton

countryside from such fortifications, then the church too appears to be an

instrument of domination. Meanwhile, the Cosmas passage includes pro-
visions such as this:

Concerning those who are accused of homicides, the archpriest will

write down their names for the comes of that burg and the comes will
summon them. And if they are rebels [and refuse], he will put them
in prison until they perform a fitting penance or, if they deny it, until
they are examined by hot iron or blessed water to determine whether
they are blameworthy. Regarding fratricides, parricides, killers of
priests, and those caught in capital crimes of this sort, the archpriest
shall consign them to the comes or the duke, or he will eject them
from the realm shackled by the hands and around the stomach, so
that they might wander the earth as fugitives and wanderers in the
likeness of Cain.41

Here Cosmas provides clear indication that the Christian archpriest per-
formed a record-keeping service in the enforcement of the legal prohibi-
tion of murder, that he worked hand in hand with the duke’s secular rep-
resentative, the comes, and that he himself could consign parricides and
other malefactors to exile. All seem to constitute evidence that clergy
worked on the duke’s behalf to enforce his coercive authority within
Bohemia. However, framed within a somewhat broader context, these
“facts” about the place of churches and clergy in the duke’s realm should
be interpreted rather differently.
To understand this passage in the Chronica Boemorum we need to
look at its context, both the entirety of the preexisting text of legal stric-
tures, often called “the Břetislav decrees,” and the narrative frame in
which Cosmas has embedded it and outside of which it does not survive
independently. The core text of the decrees lays out penalties for the vi-
olation of a number of Christian mores; in the outer frame, Cosmas
ascribes these to Duke Břetislav, working together with Bishop Severus
of Prague, as they beseech Saint Adalbert to allow the translation of his
relics from Gniezno to Prague— an event Cosmas dates to the year 1039.
As he tells it, the duke demanded that his assembled army swear to up-
hold the promise and commitments of baptism and thus to “cease alto-
 The Christianization of Bohemia \ 37

gether from depraved works.”42 He then promulgated regulations con-

cerning marriage, divorce, promiscuous women, and abortion; homicide,
including of priests and close kin; taverns, “the root of all evil”; Sunday
markets and work; and burial of the dead.43 Here then we observe crucial
steps in the long process of Christianization: after the planting of
churches, the provision of priests and necessities for ritual practice —
and fully a century after Václav’s martyrdom— came the deeper, more
difficult change in social mores. Indeed, Cosmas himself casts the de-
crees as Christianizing, that is, as a turning point when the community
moved beyond, and indeed affirmed, Christian baptism by embracing a
fuller commitment to Christian teachings through the renunciation of
older practices that ought to be understood as “depraved.” For example,
pre-Christian Czech custom patently allowed divorce and possibly po-
lygamy,44 whereas Christianity demanded the restriction of sexual activity
to the lifelong union of one man and one woman, with exceptions only
in cases of severe abuse. The decrees deploy derisive language to mark
the transition to Christian mores, for instance, by accusing the Czechs
of treating their marriages as “brothels” and calling sexually active single
women “harlots.” Beyond such rhetoric, they also prescribe harsh penal-
ties for deviance from the new norms. Married men or women of any
rank who abandon a spouse or separate are to be expelled from the realm,
with no ability to return. Replacing this penalty with a monetary fee
or reduction to “servitude” is expressly forbidden, “lest the taint of one
small sheep spread through all of Christ’s sheepfold.”45 The aim, patently,
was the acceptance of new, Christian norms across society and their
communal safeguarding.
To be sure, we here observe the duke committing his authority, his
power to administer the law and apply coercive force in punishment, to
compel adherence to Christian teaching. Where a monetary penalty is
prescribed, payment is rendered to the duke’s fisc — if also shared with
the clergy. For instance, “If someone should be discovered in any servile
work, either on Sundays or on feast days, the accused shall be brought
publicly to the church and the archpriest shall take away both the work
itself and the draught animal found in the work. The offender will also
pay three hundred coins into the duke’s treasury. Likewise, those who
bury their dead in fields or forests: those so accused shall pay a cow to
 38 / Lisa Wolverton

the archdeacon and three hundred coins to the duke’s treasury. Then
they should bury the dead anew in a cemetery of the faithful.”46 But the
penalties here are clearly intended as disincentives, rather than as sources
of enrichment for the fisc or church. In the process of compelling adher-
ence to Christian teaching on marriage, the duke explicitly refused any
income and indeed bore a double loss in exiling the offending subject al-
together. Regarding taverns, the prohibited goods (i.e., the alcohol), were
to be poured on the ground rather than assigned to any authority, “lest
anyone be sullied by the accursed drink.”47 In both cases, then, weighing
the potential effect of bad examples, the benefit to the Christian commu-
nity came before profit. Moreover, rather than monopolize the income,
where financial penalties are prescribed, the duke effectively created a fi-
nancial endowment for the Christian church, one that would grow in in-
verse relation to the very success of the clergy’s efforts to change mores.
Again the intended outcome was to strengthen the church more than
materially, for, in handing a cow over to the archdeacon prior to reburial,
the wrongdoers thereby acknowledged the authority of both Christian
doctrine and the Christian clergy. Thus the decrees worked to strengthen
the clergy’s position in society as well as Christian teachings about as-
pects of everyday life. As Cosmas would have it: whereas Saint Adalbert
ostensibly fled Bohemia in frustration at his flock’s failure to translate
Christian belief into Christian practice, almost half a century later, the
duke stood behind a determined commitment to change.
There is nothing particularly administrative in this, nor necessarily
“statist”; it supports the clergy in matters doctrinal and social but not
in the least political. What, then, about the homicide provisions quoted
above? And the evidence regarding the archpriest working together with
the duke’s comes to punish killers? We surely ought not to imagine that
customary pre-Christian practices among the Czechs failed to prohibit
the unjustified killing of others among them; few societies do. How, then,
do these homicide provisions constitute Christianization? And why in-
volve the archpriest in their implementation? Notably, the decrees make
the murder of priests comparable to fratricides or parricides. But the an-
swer to these questions seems to lie in prescribing the ordeal to reveal
the guilt or innocence of the accused: “they are examined by hot iron or
blessed water to determine whether they are blameworthy.” That ordeal
 The Christianization of Bohemia \ 39

was regarded as a Christian practice, albeit one grounded more in cus-

tom than in theology, is reflected in the reference here to “blessed water.”
The decrees also call for ordeal, referred to as “a judgment of God,” in
determining whether abuse justifies the separation of a married couple.48
Thus Christian clergy are implicated in the exercise of justice, their ritu-
als made part of customary procedures, at the same time as some of their
teachings are enshrined in law.49 It must be said, then, that in addition to
promoting the adherence to Christian mores among the population —
and indeed, making Christian doctrine normative for all, regardless of
personal belief — the ducal decrees seem intended to strengthen the
clergy’s authority among the populace. The duke’s authority, his right
and ability to punish wrongdoers, to collect fines, even to make law,
is presumed and effectively backs the authority accorded the clergy. In
other words, the presumption that Christianity — even the archpriest
himself — helped to construct Přemyslid power has it exactly backward,
for the duke did not involve the archpriest in homicide prosecution in
order to enhance his own power, but rather to strengthen the archpriest’s
social and religious authority.
Let us turn now to the physical and textual evidence for the “statist”
assumption that Bohemia’s earliest churches were located chiefly within
fortresses and that this attests to the administrative and political utility
of ecclesiastical patronage. The survival of physical remains is invariably
uneven, dependent upon the original building materials, the fate of the
site over centuries, and patterns of modern excavation; plain logic there-
fore argues against taking the apparent correlation between castle and
church as causal. From the textual evidence, we have reason to expect
that more churches existed than those excavated or still standing within
the remains of fortifications. Most importantly, Cosmas reports of Bole-
slav II, “As we read in the privilege of the church of St. George, that
faithful man built twenty churches for the Christian religion and gener-
ously endowed them with all the necessities that pertained to ecclesiasti-
cal uses.”50 The number of churches indicated here seems to outstrip the
potential number of castles in Bohemia to house them, especially if one
assumes — as seems sound — that Saint George was only granted a por-
tion of all existing churches, that many known fortress churches could
not be described as “new” at this time, and that these twenty churches
 40 / Lisa Wolverton

were unlikely to be situated at too great a distance from the women’s

monastery itself. And this is the evidence of but one (now lost) privilege,
one moment in one man’s patronage of one monastery. Moreover, Cos-
mas’s remark stresses not only the duke’s construction of churches, but
also his care in providing them with resources. Even without knowing
whether the phrase “generously endowed” indicates a financial endow-
ment or the vessels, vestments, books, and other items necessary to rit-
ual practice, the implication is still that Boleslav acted to benefit both
the local churches and the convent. Nothing in Cosmas’s remark sug-
gests that either the construction or endowment of these churches bene-
fited Boleslav’s governance of Bohemia.
Given the scanty evidence, it is nearly impossible to determine the
degree to which the Přemyslids dominated the provision of Christian-
ity’s necessities — a crucial issue if one imagines that the promotion of
the new faith was intended to extend and consolidate the duke’s rule in
the tenth century, itself a process otherwise wholly obscure. The extant
written sources are deeply biased toward the Přemyslids, for the earliest
evidence comes from the vitae of a Přemyslid saint, Václav, which not
surprisingly show him moving between fortresses and worshiping in
churches within the central Bohemian heartland of Přemyslid lordship.
However, the only other elite non-Přemyslids we know of during the
tenth century, the family of Saint Adalbert — usually in the historiogra-
phy called the Slavníkids and cast as rivals of the Přemyslids, albeit with-
out much evidence — were also Christian. The vitae of Adalbert, com-
posed outside Bohemia, tell of his father sending him to Magdeburg for
a Christian education, as well as of the family’s massacre by Duke Bole-
slav II’s men while gathered in their castle’s church for mass.51 Indeed,
according to Cosmas, not only Adalbert’s relatives but “all the burg’s
warriors” perished that day, suggesting more widespread adherence to
Christianity among the elite.52 If we do not let the convergence here
of fortress and church distract us, we notice instead the integration of
Christianity—not merely its buildings, but also its rituals and calendar —
into the political activities of the native elite, non-Přemyslid as well as
Přemyslid.
In general, I would argue, we need to rethink the meaning of the old
equivalencies — of fortress and church, Přemyslid and Christian, Chris-
 The Christianization of Bohemia \ 41

tianization and political advantage—by broadening our examination to

understand better the social and economic functions of fortresses, whether
as political strongholds of elite families or proto-urban centers of con-
centrated population, and thus the rationale for and consequences of
siting churches within them. Take, for instance, Libice, the Slavníkid
fortress in which Adalbert’s family and their followers were slaughtered:
Cosmas calls it the “metropolis” of the saint’s father, Slavník, and de-
scribes Slavník’s “principality” as comprising a broad swath of south-
eastern Bohemia.53 Although Cosmas’s language does not clarify whether
Slavník governed as a designate of the Přemyslid duke or independently,
Libice was unquestionably no ordinary Bohemian castle. Rather, it stood
as the heart—the capital, essentially—of the territorial holdings of a man
of extensive wealth and political authority (the very assets that enabled
him to send a son to Magdeburg for a formal ecclesiastical education).
Since Slavník himself espoused Christianity, for a church to stand in Li-
bice was both logical and of manifold significance. The same held for
Prague, from the mid-tenth century the preeminent Přemyslid strong-
hold. Throughout the Middle Ages, Christian holidays, most especially
Saint Václav’s feast, brought the community of Czechs of all ranks to-
gether in Prague Castle for worship and, among the elite, to treat the af-
fairs of the realm.54 At least three churches were located within Prague
Castle itself in the tenth century: Saint Michael, the smallest and old-
est; Saint Vitus, the larger church built by Saint Václav, where later his
relics lay and which became the cathedral; and Saint George, the site of
the women’s monastery. However, the many rotunda-style churches —
Bohemia’s oldest form for ecclesiastical architecture in stone55— which
still stand in the modern metropolitan area of Prague on both sides of the
Vltava, dating to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, suggest that Chris-
tian worship was by no means limited to the castle itself. The prominence
of Václav’s church, feast, and idealized patronage of Bohemia—which the
Přemyslids unquestionably exploited56— should not lead us to conflate the
adaptation of certain aspects of Christian practice to ideological or practi-
cal political ends with the independent evolution of Christian belief across
Bohemian society. The more deeply embedded Christianity became in
people’s lives at all social levels, the greater the role Christian churches,
rituals, holidays, and teachings played in their collective activities. At both
 42 / Lisa Wolverton

Prague and Libice, elites were as much responding to as influencing the

tendency of people to congregate centrally for all manner of political,
economic, and cultural reasons.
Indeed, across the land and in these same castles, a wide variety of
economic developments must have been occurring, intersecting in cru-
cial ways we can scarcely trace, with the emergence of political elites and
the adoption of the new faith. Prague in particular was a thriving com-
mercial center by the mid-tenth century. A Jewish traveler from Muslim
Iberia, Ibrahim ibn Ya’qub, noted the variety of long-distance trade goods
passing through there and declared, “Their country is the best of all those
of the Northern peoples, and the richest in provender.”57 Although we
cannot know who built or paid for them, the many churches in Prague’s
environs served the people flocking to profit from these economic op-
portunities. Other early churches appear in those burgs — Mělnik and
Litoměřice on the Elbe, Plzeň on the road to Regensburg— where people
clustered in proximity to trade routes. Libice too might have been such
a burg, on the route to Moravia, before it faded in consequence. It like-
wise stands to reason that in the most populous and wealthiest settle-
ments would stand the finest churches, those more likely to be built of
stone and thus to last, even in ruins, for archeologists to discover cen-
turies later. Only in Prague Castle do we know for certain that ducal pa-
tronage financed the construction of such churches, but we cannot know
the degree to which the dukes did so in response to community needs,
toward their own political ends, or some combination thereof. Duke
Spitihněv committed, circa 1060, to constructing a new cathedral on the
foundations of Václav’s old church, which, Cosmas says, was “no longer
large and capacious enough for all the people flocking together” on the
saint’s feast.58 Here again, he was not alone in sponsoring such projects:
Cosmas also describes one of Spitihněv’s magnates, Mstiš, building and
endowing a church in the suburbs of the burg entrusted to him, whose
dedication both duke and bishop attended.59 Elites, including the Pře-
myslid dukes — far and away the wealthiest men in Bohemia, as all the
available evidence attests — were in the best financial position to pro-
vide, in the words of the lost charter from Saint George, “all the neces-
sities that pertained to ecclesiastical uses.” That they did so potentially
had political consequences and possibly but not necessarily a political
 The Christianization of Bohemia \ 43

impetus, but certainly always rested on their ready and preeminent ac-
cess to economic resources.
Stripping away functionalist assumptions, then, we can elicit a
compelling, alternative narrative about Bohemia’s adoption of Chris-
tianity from Cosmas, who reveals crucial turning points and stages in a
generations-long process. At every stage, the duke played a conspicuous
role, but one that accorded naturally with the changing needs of the Czech
community rather than a teleology of state formation. The first steps, as
mentioned earlier, included building churches and supporting priests,
establishing a bishop and a monastery, and later, legislating stricter ad-
herence to Christian doctrine in everyday life. Without question, whether
on account of or merely in tandem with these measures, the number of
Christians continued to grow: by the mid-eleventh century a larger ca-
thedral was required. So too was a second bishopric, established by Duke
Vratislav (1061–1092) to meet the needs of his subjects in Moravia. Cos-
mas patently disapproved of this decision, and Vratislav’s own brother,
Bishop Jaromír/Gebhard of Prague (1068–1090) fought it bitterly be-
cause establishing a new see at Olomouc in Moravia meant halving the
diocese of Prague, but to no avail.60 About this same time, the bishop
appointed a cathedral provost, a German named Mark, who reformed
the education, daily life, and prebends of the clergy serving the see of
Prague. “Previously,” Cosmas says, “the men there were without a rule,
canons in name only, uncultured, unlearned, serving in choir in layman’s
dress”— a reminder that the mere existence of native Christian clergy
and institutions did not guarantee the highest standards, or even the
basic norms, we associate with Christianity broadly.61 Finally, in 1092,
again on the feast of Saint Václav:

[ Duke Břetislav II] expelled all the magicians, prophets, and sooth-
sayers from the midst of his realm. He also eradicated and consumed
with fire the meadows and trees which the base commoners wor-
shipped in many places. So also the superstitious practices which the
villagers, still half-pagan, observed on the third or fourth day of Pen-
tecost, offering libations over springs, offering sacrifices, and mak-
ing offerings to demons; the burials they made in forests and fields;
the plays they performed according to the pagan rite at crossroads
 44 / Lisa Wolverton

and crossroad temples as if for the suppression of spirits; and the

profane jests, which they performed over the dead, rousing useless
ghosts, wearing masks on their faces, and reveling. The good duke
exterminated these abominations and other sacrileges, so they might
no longer persist among the people of God.62

Old habits died hard, particularly, it seems, when it came to death rit-
uals. For the first century or more, Christians in Bohemia not only lived
side by side with non-Christians—even as their numbers dwindled—but
themselves maintained some of their old ways.63 Yet decade by decade
the Christian community grew, and these last vestiges of the old ways
either disappeared or were assimilated and tolerated as local customs,
even as, through the work of both native reformers and the influence of
outsiders, the community simultaneously strove toward prevailing Chris-
tian, so to speak, best practices. After this time, of course, ecclesiastical
institutions continued to develop, and the religious beliefs and practices
of the Christian community never ceased evolving, but in the first two
centuries of Christianity in Bohemia, the Přemyslid dukes — as Cosmas
tells it — had helped assure it was firmly planted.64

A Slavonic-Latin Hybrid

John Van Engen’s approach to understanding medieval Christianity has

never hinged on institutions as conventionally defined; more important
always were the teachings promulgated within and supported by them,
as well as the enactment of belief in ritual practice and daily life. Yet, in
narratives of Christianization and elsewhere, institutions often over-
shadow the ritual activities that occurred within them and in which the
wider community surely participated.65 In part, that is a consequence of
sources, material or textual, that compel an emphasis on externals —
churches, grave sites, decorative forms, writings produced or copied, laws
proclaimed— and give no access to internal thoughts and feelings. Thus,
for Bohemia, aside from ample evidence of an abiding local reverence
for Saint Václav, we can only assume that the doctrinal teachings offered
by priests and espoused by Bohemian Christians accorded with those
 The Christianization of Bohemia \ 45

typical of Roman Christianity elsewhere in the earlier Middle Ages, and

that these were enshrined and reinforced by ritual and social practices
likewise similar. Still, scholars have long acknowledged that everywhere
in Christendom local permutations existed and even flourished, so long
as they neither came to the attention of Rome nor tested the limits of
received doctrine. Bohemia’s peculiarity was the coexistence, for at least
two centuries, of two separate ritual languages and textual cultures, one
Latin, the other Slavonic. This circumstance is normally omitted or
minimized in narratives of the Christianization of East Central Europe
framed as the region’s eventual incorporation into Western Christendom.
At the same time, scholars of the broader Slavic world, stretching from
the Elbe to the Balkans and east to Kiev and beyond, have tended to
construct narratives that presume contending monolithic Christianities,
Orthodox versus Catholic, East versus West, or, more particularly but
nevertheless the same, Methodius and his Moravian disciples using Old
Church Slavonic versus the German episcopacy, Bavarian missionaries,
and Latinate clergy.66 To be sure, both views have their representatives
in the sources. On the one hand, recall from above that the papal letter
authorizing the Prague see’s foundation stated, “Not according to the
rite or sect of the people of Bulgaria or Russia, nor in the Slavic lan-
guage, but rather following apostolic laws and decrees, at the will of the
whole church you should choose someone more preferable for this work:
a cleric well educated in Latin letters.”67 We might read this as evidence
of a view— whether Cosmas’s or the pope’s — that opposing Christiani-
ties indeed existed, were identifiable by their ritual languages, and stood
as readily available options from which the Czechs might or were re-
quired to choose. Alternately, presuming it a genuine papal document,
we might ascribe such a view merely to the Roman clergy, inclined to im-
pose assumptions on a region little known to them. On the other hand,
Cosmas, himself a native Czech and, as dean of Prague cathedral, indis-
putably well informed, omits any mention of Slavonic practice at all.
His silence, beyond this letter, is absolute — and almost certainly delib-
erate. Other evidence suggests a situation more fluid on the ground, one
the historiography ought better to reflect.
To appreciate the place of Slavonic practice in Christian Bohemia,
Cosmas cannot be our guide. But almost immediately after his death in
 46 / Lisa Wolverton

1125, the failings of his chronicle on this score were perceived by con-
temporaries and an effort was made to rectify them. A monk or monks
at the Bohemian monastery of Sázava, to the southeast of Prague, noted
the omission of this community and of Slavonic practice while copying
Cosmas’s chronicle. The copyist thus inserted what appears to be a pre-
existing text, describing Sázava’s foundation by a hermit named Prokop,
trained in Slavonic letters, and the vicissitudes of his community as sub-
sequent monks and dukes sought to suppress or promote the Slavonic
tradition.68 The story it tells — the one it implicitly faulted Cosmas for
omitting — lionizes Sázava’s holy founder and first abbot Prokop, demo-
nizes internal factions who, perhaps opportunistically, criticized Slavo-
nic practice, and demonstrates how Bohemia’s dukes were called upon
to resolve these disputes.
It begins with Prokop, whose holy reputation spread such that fol-
lowers swarmed to him, keen to reject the world.69 He then built a church
and gathered his followers together to live “according to the example”
of Benedict.70 Duke Oldřich (1012–1037) and his court supported these
efforts, investing Prokop as abbot, and the duke’s son Břetislav I later
endowed the monastery with property.71 However, after the deaths of
Prokop and of Břetislav, internal dissention led some to conspire at Duke
Spitihněv’s court until their “lies” reached the duke’s ears; they claimed
that “through the Slavonic letters, openly wrong and altogether perverse
men were a heretical and hypocritical sect,” and they called upon the duke
to establish Latin monks there instead.72 The other party, the Slavonic
monks, fled into exile, while a German abbot was appointed at Sázava.
But when Duke Spitihněv, dying young, was succeeded by his brother,
Vratislav, the exiled monks were recalled. Still, after a succession of holy
abbots, there continued to be dissenters within the monastery (portrayed
by the anonymous author as dissolute). Nonetheless, Duke Vratislav ( later
king) held the abbot of Sázava in such great esteem that “he seemed su-
perior in dignity to nearly all Bohemian abbots.”73 Indeed, Vratislav even
allowed Abbot Božetěch to crown him on feast days, in place of Bishop
Cosmas of Prague, who, the author tells us, was incensed.74 The abbot’s
enemies within and outside the monastery, having waited until Vratislav’s
death, took their complaints to Břetislav II, who expelled the abbot and
his Slavonic brethren. The author thus laments, “The books of their lan-
 The Christianization of Bohemia \ 47

guage, altogether effaced and ruined, will never again be read aloud in
that place.”75 A second interpolation, inserted elsewhere in Cosmas’s text
by an author with a different Latin style and different allegiances, rec-
ords that it was in 1097 that Duke Břetislav and Bishop Cosmas together
appointed the provost of Břevnov, Diethard, as abbot of Sázava; the abbot
then bought and copied many books, presumably in Latin, since “he
found none but Slavonic in that place.”76 This passage concludes by not-
ing that Abbot Diethard reigned at Sázava for thirty-seven years, nine
months, and eleven days — indicating 1135 as a date post quem for these
insertions. The author of the first text plainly favored the Slavonic party,
suggesting that while the community’s adherence to a Slavonic liturgy
and the books that sustained it failed to survive into the twelfth cen-
tury, some reverence for Slavonic practice persisted at Sázava as late as
1135, when the text was inserted into Cosmas’s chronicle. ( Thirteenth-
century efforts to win Prokop’s canonization likely hint at still longer
memorialization.)77
The evidence from and about Sázava supplements the small corpus
of extant texts of Bohemian origin in Old Church Slavonic (OCS), reach-
ing back to the early to mid-tenth century.78 The so-called First OCS
Life seems to have been written very soon after Václav’s death, perhaps
as early as 940; it represents a distinct version and different spiritual em-
phases than the corpus of Latin legends, all of which it seems to predate.
Although we can scarcely determine the relationship of literary Slavonic
to the Czech vernacular spoken at this time, there is no question that these
writings partake— and even played a seminal role—in a self-consciously
textual tradition.79 Slavonic was written in a distinctive script, Glagolitic,
said to have been devised by Methodius’s brother Constantine/Cyril,
which then evolved into early Cyrillic, the script of the surviving manu-
scripts.80 The link between literacy and Latin that prevailed everywhere
else in medieval continental Europe was, in Bohemia, not exclusive. More-
over, since even the script was not Latinate (unlike for Old English),
there must have been some means to provide a separate education in it,
as well as the resources to acquire and copy books. The Sázava text de-
scribes Prokop as a Bohemian “thoroughly trained in the Slavonic let-
ters at one time invented by the most holy Bishop Cyril and instituted
canonically.”81 And throughout its account of the community’s troubles,
 48 / Lisa Wolverton

it explicitly stresses books and makes no mention of ritual, doctrine, or

even learning generally; litteras and libros are the key words it repeats.
Thus, while a textual tradition unquestionably existed, the degree to which
a distinct liturgical tradition, with different norms of ritual practice and
doctrinal emphases, also existed cannot be determined. This Sázava text
and the survival of a second OCS life of Václav, dating perhaps to the early
eleventh century, indicates that Slavonic influences persisted long after
Methodius’s death and the earliest stages of Christianization in Bohemia.
Both also demonstrate that the Slavonic and Latin literary traditions flour-
ished side by side in Bohemia, for the anonymous Second OCS Life is
patently derived from Gumpold’s Latin vita.82 How many more texts, in-
cluding translations of the Bible and liturgical books, were among those
copied, preserved, composed, and ultimately burned at Sázava, we can-
not know. Whatever the scope or quality of the Slavonic tradition, there is
no question that—Cosmas’s silence notwithstanding—not one but two
forms of literate Christianity existed for two centuries in Bohemia.
Unfortunately, given Cosmas’s omissions, we cannot determine the
relationship between the Slavonic and Latin traditions outside the vicis-
situdes of the community at Sázava.83 Were the churches built by Bole-
slav II devoted to the Latin liturgy, a Slavonic tradition, or both? Those
clergy who immigrated to Bohemia from German-speaking lands surely,
at least initially, performed Latinate rituals. Although scholars routinely—
and quite logically — presume that Slavonic clergy also immigrated and
thus came to preach and officiate at Christian services in Bohemia, we
cannot really determine how many did so, where they came from, what
kind of training they received and where, what books they brought with
them or found in Bohemia, and how they were welcomed. Did some
German-born clergy themselves acclimate to Slavonic practice? Even
if we assume that bishops of Prague, as Pope John demanded, adhered
chiefly to Latin — and there is no reason necessarily to assume so —
we cannot know whether, to what degree, or under what circumstances
they tolerated the ecclesiastical use of Slavonic. Sázava’s very existence
suggests at least tacit episcopal sanction. Moreover, few other monaster-
ies existed in Bohemia at the time of its foundation: the women’s con-
vent of Saint George in Prague Castle; the Benedictine house at Břevnov
 The Christianization of Bohemia \ 49

outside Prague; and another at Ostrov, further down the Vltava from
Prague. Given their scarcity and late emergence, monasteries as institu-
tions seem not to have played a significant role in Christianity’s early
development in Bohemia.84 Nonetheless, that one of the first — and, for
a long time, only — four monastic communities was a Slavonic preserve
suggests contemporary acknowledgment of the significance of Slavonic
practice to worship among early Czech Christians. It is only through the
distorted lens of hindsight that Sázava appears as a marginalized, iso-
lated outpost of Slavonic.
By the later eleventh century the use of Slavonic alongside Latin
came to be either a source of tension or exploitable as such, and the dukes
felt the pressure most acutely. All the dukes involved in Sázava’s travails,
one way or another, were also actively involved in ecclesiastical affairs, and
the anonymous author from Sázava tells of local protagonists seeking
their intervention as leaders committed to the faith. For their part, as Bo-
hemia’s dukes and bishops moved more freely and frequently in Christian
circles outside Bohemia, they may have become increasingly conscious that
local, bilingual practice deviated from the norm elsewhere. In the midst of
the long-running dispute between Duke Vratislav and his brother, Bishop
Jaromír/Gebhard of Prague, over the newly established see in Moravia—
which intersected directly with the Investiture Contest raging in the
Empire85—Vratislav specifically asked for papal permission to encour-
age the Slavonic liturgy. In the letter copied into Gregory VII’s Register,
the reformist pope refused.86 He argued, in keeping with long-standing
doctrine, that vernacular practice might lead to error or “cheapen” scrip-
ture. While Vratislav’s original request does not survive, Gregory’s re-
sponse suggests that the duke framed it in terms of pressures upon him
from others: “We forbid that it should be done as is unwisely requested
by your people, and we command you for the honour of Almighty God
to resist this vain temerity with all your powers.”87 Such arguments were
in the air in Bohemia too, for heresy is exactly what one faction of monks
had alleged earlier at Spitihněv’s court. But so too was an alternative,
the basis for Vratislav’s request that Gregory casually labeled “vain te-
merity.” The efforts of Vratislav’s son, Břetislav II — he who cast out the
soothsayers — to eradicate Slavonic practice may have been intended to
 50 / Lisa Wolverton

follow through on official ecclesiastical proscriptions like Gregory’s, not

only changing the composition of the community at Sázava, as Spitihněv
had, but burning the books as well.
The Sázava text does more than rectify the omissions in the Chron-
ica Boemorum: it presents a wholly different perspective on Bohemia’s
ecclesiastical history. Cosmas’s text is colored throughout by his own
views of the character of the dukes whose deeds he chronicles, judged in
part — if only tacitly — by their patronage of the see of Prague, whereas
the anonymous author of the Sázava text inversely valorizes these same
rulers, based on their attitude toward the Slavonic monks there. This sug-
gests that today’s historians ought not to be seeking out a single hege-
monic narrative of Christianization, but looking instead at the variety of
ways and reasons that medieval authors shaped narratives of Christiani-
zation for themselves, whether as part of saints’ lives or chronicles.88 And,
in looking beyond individual texts, we ought to avoid imposing mono-
causal, singular narratives of our own. This essay does not aim to replace
any one of the currently prevalent narratives about the Christianization
of Bohemia with another, drawn from Cosmas or some other source.
Rather, I hope to have displaced some old answers, provided plausible al-
ternatives, and above all raised the kinds of questions that can lead to a
fuller understanding of early Christian practice as it shaped the lives of
medieval Czechs. It seems that for centuries Bohemian Christianity on
the ground was, exceptionally, multilingual and perhaps multi-liturgical;
unexceptionally, it coexisted with pre-Christian beliefs and customs to
varying and evolving degrees. Chiefly it was local, interwoven well or
awkwardly with the everyday lives of people in very specific places and
times. And the rulers who governed these localities — whose influence
ought itself be a subject for nuanced consideration — embraced, sup-
ported, influenced, mediated, enforced, appropriated, or simply partici-
pated in Christian practice for many, probably changing, reasons and to-
ward various ends, only some of them political. While broader models
of the Christianizing process have their place, as do comparative per-
spectives, these ought to grow out from the particularities of local, lived
experience. Only in this way can we, as scholars, fulfill one of the in-
junctions John Van Engen leveled at historians in his best-known essay:
“take religion seriously.”89
 The Christianization of Bohemia \ 51

Notes

1. The literature is vast and cannot be adequately summarized here. For a

useful critique, especially of archeological approaches, see William G. Kilbride,
“Why I Feel Cheated by the Term ‘Christianization’,” Archeological Review from
Cambridge 17 (2000): 1–17.
2. The equivalence between adoption of Christianity and inclusion in a
wider European whole, characterized by a cluster of shared political, social, eco-
nomic, and cultural characteristics, is more often assumed than analyzed. An ex-
ception is Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural
Change, 900 –1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). In scholarship
on the “core” of Europe in the early Middle Ages, these simplistic older narratives
have already been displaced; cf. Jonathan Couser, “Inventing Paganism in Eighth-
Century Bavaria,” Early Medieval Europe 18 (2010): 26– 42, esp. 27.
3. For recent treatments of this process in Scandinavia, see Anders Win-
roth, The Conversion of Scandinavia: Vikings, Merchants, and Missionaries in the Re-
making of Northern Europe ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); and Saeb-
jørg Walaker Nordeide, The Viking Age as a Period of Religious Transformation: The
Christianization of Norway from AD 560 –1150/1200 ( Turnhout: Brepols, 2011).
4. John Van Engen, “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical
Problem,” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 541.
5. For an insightful analysis of the difficulties inherent in trying to remedy
this evidentiary gap with the results of archeological research, see Simon Burnell
and Edward James, “The Archeology of Conversion on the Continent in the
Sixth and Seventh Centuries: Some Observations and Comparisons with Anglo-
Saxon England,” in St. Augustine and the Conversion of England, ed. Richard
Gameson ( Thrupp, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishers, 1999), 83–106.
6. Most are now available in English translation. See Marvin Kantor, The
Origins of Christianity in Bohemia: Sources and Commentary ( Evanston: North-
western University Press, 1990); also Cosmas of Prague, The Chronicle of the
Czechs, trans. and intro. Lisa Wolverton ( Washington, DC: Catholic University
of America Press, 2009) [ hereafter CC ]. For comparison, Lars Boje Mortensen
provides a useful table of the earliest writings produced in Hungary, Denmark,
and Norway, all nearly a century later than in Bohemia: “Sanctified Beginnings
and Mythopoietic Movements: The First Wave of Writing on the Past in Nor-
way, Denmark, and Hungary, c. 1000 –1230,” in The Making of Christian Myths
in the Periphery of Latin Christendom (c. 1000 – 1300), ed. Lars Boje Mortensen
(Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006), 253.
7. For an overview of the arguments offered by recent Czech scholarship,
see Petr Sommer, Dušan Treštík, and Josef Žemlička, “Bohemia and Moravia,” in
Christianization and the Rise of Christian Monarchy: Scandinavia, Central Europe
and Rus’ c. 900 –1200, ed. Nora Berend (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
 52 / Lisa Wolverton

2007), 214 – 62. This essay is severely flawed by both the presumptions of its in-
terpretive framework and the tendency to present as the facts of early Bohemian
society and Christianization conclusions wholly unsubstantiated by the extant
sources. My essay here cannot begin to address these inaccuracies, which appear
not just occasionally but often sustain the discussion for pages. I hope instead to
outline a new approach, starting from scratch and grounded in the sources, how-
ever limited, and to address the assumptions that shape the narrative of Chris-
tianization per se (rather than those that yield or inflect the individual “factoids”
on which Sommer, Treštík, and Žemlička’s analysis purports to rest).
8. The “obscurity” and difficulty dating the see’s foundation is well known.
See Timothy Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages, 800 –1056 (London: Long-
man, 1991), 164; he suggests “perhaps” 973 or 976, both dates conventionally of-
fered in the scholarship.
9. See, for instance, David Kalhous, Anatomy of a Duchy: The Political and
Ecclesiastical Structures of Early Přemyslid Bohemia ( Leiden: Brill, 2012), 146 – 56;
he provides a summary and bibliography of previous interpretations as well as
offering his own. Note also that this provides the framework for Ian Wood’s
analysis of the Václav legends, The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evangelisation of
Europe, 400 –1500 ( New York: Longman, 2001), 187– 206.
10. Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages, 164 – 65 (e.g., “a bishopric
was set up at Prague”; “some of the new bishoprics were clearly intended to
cover a specific ethnic grouping: Prague for the Bohemians, Oldenbourg for
Wagrians . . . , Meissen for the Misni.”)
11. Othloni Vita sancti Wolfgangi, ed. G. H. Pertz, Monumenta Germaniae
Historica, Scriptores 4 ( Hanover: Impensis Bibliopolii Hahniani, 1842), 538.
Note that Othlo reports that Bishop Wolfgang was compensated by Emperor
Otto for the loss of the Bohemian part of his diocese after Otto had given his ap-
proval for the establishment of a bishopric there.
12. For an introduction to Cosmas and his chronicle, see CC, 3–17; also
Lisa Wolverton, Cosmas of Prague: Narrative, Classicism, Politics ( Washington,
DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015).
13. Scholarly consensus presumes this to be John XIII (965– 972), since
his reign dates overlap with Cosmas’s indirect dating of the events to 967. How-
ever, since the letter itself is undated, it could refer to John XIV (983– 984) or
John XV (985– 996), or, less likely, to John XII (937– 964). Boleslav II was duke
of Bohemia from 967 to 999.
14. CC, 71.
15. Ibid., 72– 73.
16. Ibid., 73.
17. Cosmas does not provide any date for the see’s foundation, perhaps de-
liberately, to subtly hide his own ignorance. But he dates Thietmar’s death “after
not many days” to January 2, 969. But then, following the vitae, he links the begin-
 The Christianization of Bohemia \ 53

ning of Adalbert’s episcopacy to Otto II’s return from the battle of Crotone, thus
982, and has Adalbert consecrated by Archbishop Willigis of Mainz (975–1011).
These obvious inconsistencies created a space for the speculative construction of
the standard scholarly narrative of political negotiation over the see’s founding.
18. Lisa Wolverton, Hastening Toward Prague: Power and Society in the
Medieval Czech Lands ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001),
137– 41.
19. CC, 84.
20. Wolverton, Hastening, 229– 31; see also 118– 23 regarding ecclesiastical
resources overall.
21. CC, 71.
22. Ibid.
23. See “Life and Martyrdom of Saint Wenceslas (Crescente fide),” in Kan-
tor, Origins, 145; and “Life and Martyrdom of Saint Wenceslas and His Grand-
mother, Saint Ludmila (Legenda Christiani),” in Kantor, Origins, 171.
24. CC, 66 – 67. Here is some hint at a Regensburg connection, although
Cosmas avoids suggesting any institutional relationship and instead emphasizes
Michael’s personal friendship with Václav. Scholars, however, make a great deal
of the relics of Saint Vitus, the patron saint of the influential Saxon monastery
of Corvey, most especially to mount arguments for a political rationale for Vá-
clav’s murder (i.e., in opposition to his supposedly pro-Saxon policies). They
also take the fact that the date Cosmas gives for Michael’s consecration of the
church of Saint Vitus, September 22, is in fact the feast day of Saint Emmeram,
to whom the most prominent monastery in Regensburg was dedicated; this os-
tensibly testifies to the “conflict” between Regensburg and Saxony over Bo-
hemia as a missionary diocese. See, for instance, Henry Mayr-Harting, “Was
the Identity of the Prague Church in the Tenth Century Imposed from With-
out or Developed from Within?” in his Religion and Society in the Medieval West,
600 – 1200 ( Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), 271– 77. This “contest” between
Saxony and Bavaria is a variation on the assumption of Bohemia as a contested
mission field between Bavarian and Slavonic clergy (see below).
25. Crescente fide, in Kantor, Origins, 151; CC, 68.
26. Wolverton, Hastening, 125– 26.
27. Crescente fide, in Kantor, Origins, 148.
28. After Vojtěch/Adalbert, the first native-born bishop was Severus
(1030 –1067), and thereafter the bishops of Prague were just as often Czech as
German.
29. CC, 104.
30. Ibid.

Bolina, “Příspěvek k interpretaci Kosmových desátkových údajů,” Český časopis

31. On the debates over the nature of the early tithe in Bohemia, see Pavel

historický 103 (2005): 828– 60.

 54 / Lisa Wolverton

32. Annales Fuldenses, ed. G. H. Pertz and Friedrich Kurze, Monumenta

Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum 7 ( Hanover: Hahnsche
Buchhandlung, 1878), 35.
33. Burnell and James likewise endorse a model of “Christianisation by os-
mosis” as an alternative to emphasizing “purposeful expeditionary missions.”
“Archaeology of Conversion,” 92.
34. See Wolverton, Hastening, 149– 56.
35. Gumpold of Mantua, Passio sancti Venceslavi martyris, ed. F. J. Zoubek,
Fontes Rerum Bohemicarum ( Prague, 1873), 1:146 – 66. On this text, see Wood,
Missionary Life, 195– 97.
36. Thus tenth-century Bohemia looks much like eighth-century Bavaria,
as described by Couser, including the duke’s efforts to “organize Christian reli-
gious life there” by means of bishops. Couser, “Inventing Paganism,” 33.
37. Cf., for instance, Jonathan Shepard’s discussion of Christianity in early
Poland: while on the one hand he notes, “Polish Christianity, one must stress, was
sui generis, and ideally it should be compared closely with that of the Czechs”; on
the other he declares, “taking advantage of a remoter geographical location, trade
routes, and political ties with the already-Christian Czechs, a Slav potentate [in
Poland] gained dominance over many surrounding populations, using the Chris-
tian religion not only as an agent of dominion, but also to fend off the Christian
Goliath [i.e., the German Empire] to his west.” Jonathan Shepard, “Slav Chris-
tianities, 800 –1100,” in Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 3, Early Medieval
Christianities, c. 600 –c. 1100, ed. Thomas F. X. Noble and Julia M. H. Smith, with
Roberta Baranowski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
38. Cf. Winroth, Conversion of Scandinavia, 138– 60.
39. For instance, David Kalhous states, “The role of church organisation
was indisputable in the processes that led to the strengthening of the central
power.” Anatomy, 143; similarly, 156 – 57.
40. E.g., Sommer, Treštík, and Žemlička, “Bohemia and Moravia,”
245– 46.
41. CC, 116.
42. Ibid., 115.
43. Ibid., 115–17.
44. Cosmas says of Duke Oldřich, upon meeting the beautiful Božena,
“Sending for her immediately, he took her as his, although he did not dissolve his
old marriage. At that time . . . it was permitted to have two or three wives. Nor
was it a sin for a man to abduct the wife of another, or for a wife to marry an-
other’s husband” (CC, 92). He uses similar language in describing the earliest in-
habitants of Bohemia and conditions at the time of Adalbert’s episcopacy (CC, 37
and 79, respectively). However, all these passages show heavy literary influences
and may be taken as descriptions of actual social practices only with caution.
45. CC, 115.
 The Christianization of Bohemia \ 55

46. Ibid., 117.

47. Ibid., 117.
48. CC, 116: “let a judgment of God be held between them and let the one
who is found guilty pay the penalty.” On ordeal, see Robert Bartlett, Trial by Fire
and Water: The Medieval Judicial Ordeal (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), esp.
4 –12, on its Frankish origins and coalescence in the age of Charlemagne.
49. On a similar development in eighth-century Bavaria, see Couser, “In-
venting Paganism,” 29– 30.
50. CC, 71.
51. Ibid., 80 – 81; Cosmas is following the lives by both John Canaparius
and Bruno of Querfurt, who report this event similarly: S. Adalberti pragensis epis-
copi et martyris, ed. Jadwiga Karwasi ska, Monumenta Poloniae Historica, N. S.,
vol. 4, fasc. 1– 2 ( Warsaw, 1962–1969).
52. Ibid., 80.
53. Ibid., 77. Cosmas here apparently supplies information of his own, not
found in the vitae.
54. Wolverton, Hastening, 155– 61.
55. For a brief overview in English, see Veronika Gervers-Molnár, “Origins
of Romanesque Rotundas in East-Central Europe,” in Rapports du IIIe Congrès in-
ternational d’archéologie slave, vol. 1 (Brno: Veda, 1980), 307–12. The fullest treat-
ment is Anežka Merhautová-Livorová, Einfache mitteleuropäische Rundkirchen (Ihr

see Anežka Merhautová and Dušan Třeštík, Romanské umění v Čechách a na

Ursprung, Zweck und ihre Bedeutung) (Prague: Academia, 1970). For illustrations,

Moravě (Prague: Odeon, 1984), esp. 46, 54, 80 – 81, 85, 114 –15.
56. Wolverton, Hastening, 165– 85.
57. Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe ( New York: W. W.
Norton, 1982), 145.
58. CC, 135.
59. Ibid., 138– 39.
60. See Lisa Wolverton, “Manipulating Historical Memory in Late
Eleventh- and Early Twelfth-Century Prague,” Haskins Society Journal 23 (2011;
appeared 2014): 71– 86.
61. CC, 145– 46.
62. Ibid., 184.
63. Such a long evolution and coexistence, as manifested in archeological
remains, was also the norm elsewhere. Cf. Nordeide, Viking Age, on Norway; or,
for an exceptionally thorough, localized analysis, Sam Turner, Making a Chris-
tian Landscape: The Countryside in Early Medieval Cornwall, Devon and Wessex ( Ex-
eter: University of Exeter Press, 2006).
64. Note that there exists a body of literature, mostly devoted to pre-
Christian Slavic beliefs generally, that substitutes assumptions derived from an-
thropological models for either textual or archeological evidence. For a recent
 56 / Lisa Wolverton

example of this tendency, which likewise imposes assumptions about Christian-

ity’s supposed political usefulness, see Przemysław Urbańczyk, “The Politics of
Conversion in North Central Europe,” in The Cross Goes North: Processes of Con-
version in Northern Europe, AD 300 – 1300, ed. Martin Carver ( New York: Mac-
millan, 2003), 15– 27.
65. Cf. Kilbride, “Why I Feel Cheated,” 4.
66. In the Czech scholarship, this manifests in an emphasis on the Great
Moravian Empire and most especially on assumptions about its role as a precursor
and model for subsequent Bohemian political and ecclesiastical developments—
although the evidence for connections, much less continuity, between the Mora-
via of Svatopluk and Methodius and later Přemyslid Bohemia is very slim. See
Sommer, Treštík, and Žemlička, “Bohemia and Moravia,” esp. 221– 25, 227– 28,
and 251.
67. CC, 73.
68. These are published as appendices in Bretholz’s Latin edition of Cosmas
(hereafter CB): Cosmas of Prague, Cosmae pragensis chronica boemorum, ed. Bertold
Bretholz, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum,
N. S. 2 (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1923), 242– 51, 255– 56. Both the
interpolations and the continuation have been published as Mnich Sázavský, Fontes
Rerum Bohemicarum, 2 vols., ed. Josef Emler (Prague: Nakladatelství Musea Král-
ovství českého, 1874), 2:407– 60. See also Wolverton, Hastening, 134 – 35.
69. CB, 242– 44.
70. Ibid., 244: “iuxta exemplar almifici patris Benedicti.”
71. Ibid., 244 – 45.
72. Ibid., 247: “scilicet dicentes per Sclavonicas litteras heresis secta
ypochrisisque esse aperte irretitos ac omnino perversos.”
73. Ibid., 250.
74. Note that this Bishop Cosmas (r. 1091–1098) is not the same as the
chronicler of the same name.
75. CB, 251: “libri lingue eorum deleti omnino et disperditi nequaquam
ulterius in eodem loco recitabuntur.”
76. CB, 255. This passage appears in book 3, immediately after Cosmas in-
troduces the date, 1097 (CB, 165). The entirety of the first interpolation, how-
ever, was inserted at the end of book 1, just after the notation dating Jaromír’s
murder to 1038, and before Cosmas’s closing flourish (CB, 79).
77. See Michael Goodich, “Vision, Dream and Canonization Policy under
Pope Innocent III,” in Pope Innocent and his World, ed. J. C. Moore (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 1999), 160 – 62.
78. Translated into English and described in the introduction by Marvin
Kantor, in Kantor, Origins.
79. Although most of these various texts survive only in later manuscripts
of non-Bohemian provenance, scholars generally agree that they originated in
 The Christianization of Bohemia \ 57

Bohemia. Regarding the First OCS Life, see Marvin Kantor, Medieval Slavic Lives
of Saints and Princes (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), 11–14, 18.
On the others, see Kantor, Origins, 25– 30; he also provides a review of the schol-
arship (30 – 46). The relationship and dating of these and the Latin vitae remains
a subject of much discussion, even dispute, and the conclusions offered by Kan-
tor, most especially regarding the Latin lives, are by no means definitive. Indeed,
many aspects of and assumptions about Slavonic practice in Bohemia remain

kých Čechách 10. století,” Českoslovenký časopis historický 14 (1966): 473– 95.
contentious. Cf. František Graus, “Slovanská liturgie a písemnictví v přemyslov-

80. For an introduction, see Alexander Shenker, The Dawn of Slavic: An In-
troduction to Slavic Philology ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
81. CB, 242: “Sclavonicis litteris a sanctissimo Quirillo episcopo quondam
inventis et statutis canonice admodum imbutus.”
82. Kantor, Origins, 19.
83. No evidence supports the assumption that Bohemian society, even in
ecclesiastical circles, was riven between pro- and anti-Slavonic camps, much less
that these corresponded to anti- or pro-German sentiments; thus Cosmas’s omis-
sions should not be taken either as documenting them or as the “triumph of the
Latinists.” Such views are common in the Czech (especially older) scholarship,
and are also reflected in A. P. Vlasto’s overview of early Christianity in Bohemia,
The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom: An Introduction to the Medieval History of the
Slavs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 107– 9; for the quote, 107.
84. Cf. Burnell and James, “Archaeology of Conversion,” on the compara-
tively different role monasteries played in the Christianization process in Anglo-
Saxon England versus Alemannia and Bavaria (103).
85. Wolverton, “Manipulating Historical Memory.”
86. H. E. J. Cowdrey, The Register of Pope Gregory VII, 1073– 1085: An En-
glish Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 336 (Letter 7.11, Janu-
ary 2, 1080): “Now because your highness has asked that we would agree to di-
vine service being performed among you in the Slavonic tongue, you should
know that we can in no way favour this petition of yours.”
87. Ibid.
88. Cf. Couser, “Inventing Paganism.”
89. Van Engen, “Christian Middle Ages,” 544.
 Three

Th e C a t h a r M i d d l e A g e s a s
an Historiographical Problem

r. i. moore

If there is one thing that “everybody knows” about medieval Europe it is

that the Cathars were the followers of a twelfth- and thirteenth-century
heresy widely supported in the part of France now generally called the
Languedoc, the target of the Albigensian crusade (1209–1229) and of the
inquisitors brought in afterward to hunt down its fugitive survivors. From
vacations and research trips, from films and novels—including much bet-
ter novels than The Da Vinci Code—as well as for the small minority of the
reading public that has taken university courses in medieval history, the
pays cathare is familiar as a land of ruined castles once the home of splen-
did courts presided over by jovial lords and gracious ladies and beguiled
by the lyrics of the troubadours. The idyll was destroyed when grim and
merciless fanatics from the north brought the castles and their lords to
ruin and burned the Cathars they had sheltered on the pyres of Lavaur,
Minerve, and Montségur, from whose ashes was spirited away a treasure
that may have been anything from a large quantity of gold and precious
stones to the texts of the gnostic scriptures or the Holy Grail itself.1
Among the many obstacles placed in the way of this account by
fun-hating historians, the simplest — though one of the most recently

58
 The Cathar Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem \ 59

articulated — is that nobody in the thirteenth-century pays cathare, ac-

cused or accuser, actually used the word Cathar.2 It does not occur in the
large body of letters and sermons denouncing heresy in the region from
the middle of the twelfth century, in the records of the region’s inquisi-
tions, or indeed in any medieval source directly from it. The heretics —
and let me immediately scotch one persistent misrepresentation of the
revisionist tendency with which I associate myself by saying, firmly and
unequivocally, that there were heretics, people who knowingly rejected
the authority and some teachings of the church, in the region at least by
the 1160s.3 They were known to their followers by the ubiquitous hon-
orifics boni homines and bone femine.4 To the earliest Dominican inquisi-
tors, who pursued them so tenaciously and interrogated them so closely
and carefully, they were simply heretici, as distinct from the Waldenses
who were also active in the region. Bernard of Clairvaux denounced Albi
as a nest of heresy in 1145, and in the run-up to and during the crusade
the term most widely used by outsiders to describe its targets was Albi-
genses.5 After the middle of the thirteenth century Albigenses was gen-
eralized by Capetian bureaucrats to describe what they considered the
heresy par excellence of the conquered territories, and it remained the
preferred designation until very recently.6 Charles Schmidt’s Histoire
des sectes des Cathares ou Albigeois (1849)7 established “Cathar” as a name
for the heresy, which he identified as a dualist religion of Balkan origin
and distinguished definitively from Waldensianism, with which, since the
fourteenth century, it had often been confused. Nevertheless, “Cathars”
and “Catharism” were rare in mainstream scholarly discourse until after
World War II, especially in France. Antoine Dondaine, O.P., on whose
discovery and edition of key texts immediately before and during the
war the modern study of “Catharism” is founded, published what he be-
lieved to be “les actes du concile albigeois de St. Félix de Caraman” in
1946, but in 1949 and 1950 wrote of “La hiérarchie cathare en Italie.”8
Arno Borst’s Die Katharer (1953) was the first scholarly history since
Schmidt’s to use the word in its title.9 In France the Cathars broke free
from the confines of regionalism, exoticism, and secret societies to join
the national scene and the “séries de grande diffusion” with the appear-
ance in the series Que sais-je? of Fernand Niel’s Albigeois et Cathares in
1955. Its opening words expressed concisely, and precisely, the most
 60 / R. I. Moore

important implication of the change: “L’hérésie albigeoise, qui se dé-

veloppa dans le midi de la France aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles, n’est que
la manifestation locale d’une mouvement beaucoup plus important, le
catharisme.”10 The Cathars were at last cemented into the national legend
in 1959 by Zoé Oldenbourg’s Le Bûcher de Montségur,11 in Gallimard’s
prestigious collection Trente journées qui ont fait la France, whose
envisaged authors included not only numerous academicians and in-
stituteurs, but also two prime ministers of the Fourth Republic and a fu-
ture president of France.12 As Jean-Louis Biget comments, the battle of
Muret (September 12, 1213) might have been a better choice.13 Anglo-
phone historians were commonly writing of “Cathars” and “Catharism”
by the 1970s but did not feature them in book titles until a deluge in the
late 1990s.14
The recency of the usage is worth stressing, not only because it may
come as a surprise to anybody now approaching the subject for the first
time, but also because some of the academic response to the criticism of
it in recent years, which Mark Gregory Pegg has led with invigorating
forensic élan, has itself become an intriguing, if minor, historiographi-
cal phenomenon.15 However, the new terminology registered not a new
interpretation of the nature and history of the main heresy of the region
between the Rhône and the Garonne, but the canonization and vulgari-
zation (in the French sense) of an old one. Schmidt’s conclusions that it
was Balkan in origin, dualist in theology, and part of a wider European
heretical movement had been widely accepted and regularly repeated.16
To the extent that the vogue for calling it “Catharism” that grew up after
World War II had a scholarly basis, it reflected what appeared to be the
confirmation of his view, in dramatically clarified and systematized form,
by three texts discovered and edited by Dondaine: the “Acts of the Coun-
cil of St-Félix-de-Caraman”; the De heresi catharorum in Lombardia (as
Dondaine called it), a fragment which he had found in a late thirteenth-
century manuscript but dated, with some ingenuity, before 1214;17 and
a tractatus de hereticis from 1270 by a Dominican inquisitor, Anselm of
Alessandria. If Dondaine’s intricately argued and closely interdependent
provenances and datings were correct — and they stood unquestioned
for many years — these texts added to the known documentation a lively
and circumstantial description of the transmission of Catharism from
 The Cathar Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem \ 61

France (whither it had been carried from Constantinople by returning

crusaders) to Lombardy in (it would appear) the 1160s. Its subsequent dif-
fusion under the influence of contacts with the Byzantine world produced
confusion and serial schism among the heretics in Lombardy, but a power-
ful, monolithic, and doctrinally radical Cathar church in the Languedoc.
Adopted and elaborated by Borst and unreservedly endorsed by Grund-
mann,18 Dondaine’s account reigned unchallenged for a generation —
except, as it happens, by that generation’s most formidable scholar of
heresy in the region, Yves Dossat19— to underpin the acclamation and
celebration of “Catharism” in late twentieth-century historiography.
In a recent reassessment of the “war on heresy” between about 1000
and 1250 I concluded that this narrative, and with it “the Cathars” and
“the Cathar church,” which have figured so prominently in accounts of
heresy and its repression in the Europe of the high Middle Ages, were
largely mythical, a unifying construct imposed by the literate elite on
a multitude of local cults and enthusiasms both real and imagined.20
An academic invention of the mid-twelfth century, the term Cathari was
brought into fairly regular use by Innocent III as a synonym for “Pata-
rene.” Patarene had been coined in the 1050s to describe the followers of
Ariald of Cucciago, Landolf Cotta, and Anselm of Baggio (from 1061
Pope Alexander II) in their campaign against the archbishop and clergy
of Milan, whom they denounced as simoniac and Nicolaitan heretics.
The movement quickly spread to other cities in Tuscany and Lombardy,
financed in part by Archdeacon Hildebrand. As his and Anselm’s involve-
ment makes vividly clear, it was intimately associated with what we now
regard as the first phases of “Gregorian” or “papal” reform, whose ur-
gent objective and key strategy was to delegitimize bishops and clergy of
the old order by public denunciation and to secure their replacement, if
necessary through popular action incited and led by charismatic preach-
ers. So “Patarene” became a common description in Italy of those who
opposed episcopal authority in their cities. By the middle of the twelfth
century, as the new order rejected charisma in favor of reliance on the
authority of the institutions that it had now largely captured, “Patarene”
had come unequivocally to imply heresy. No particular theological error
is specifically associated with the term, but it seems reasonable, to put it
mildly, to suspect an association with denial of the sacraments of unworthy
 62 / R. I. Moore

or improperly consecrated priests: the medieval Donatist, bearer of the

heresy that dare not speak its name, posed a far greater danger to the
church than the medieval Manichee ever did. Hence the inclusion of
the Patarenes among the heresies proscribed by the Council of Verona
in 1184 which, in its decree Ad abolendam, demanded of the Italian bish-
ops regular and exhaustive inquisition for heresy in their dioceses, di-
rected not only at the heretics themselves, but also at their patrons and
supporters and at clergy and lay officials who failed to prosecute them.
Cathars also appeared on this list, along with Humiliati, Waldenses,
Passagini, Josephini, and Arnoldists.21 They had been equated with Pa-
tarini by Lateran III (as they were not in Ad abolendam, which lists the
two as separate heresies) in 1179: “In Gascony and the regions of Albi
and Toulouse and in other places the loathsome heresy of those whom
some call the Cathars, others the Patarenes, others the Publicani, and
others by different names, has grown so strong that they no longer prac-
tice their wickedness in secret, as others do, but proclaim their error
publicly and draw the simple and weak to join them.”22
Despite their explicit differentiation in Ad abolendam, it has been
taken as read from these two decrees and their many reiterations that
Cathars and Patarenes were one and the same heresy,23 already well en-
trenched by this date — many have thought much earlier — both in the
lands of the Count of Toulouse and in the cities of northern and central
Italy. It has invariably been taken to be a dualist heresy, though how and
when it became so, and with what variations of doctrine and affiliation
within it, are questions around which the enormous literatures — the
singular seems hardly adequate to their volume and variety — devoted to
them from the middle of the thirteenth century until the present day
have been largely constructed. On this basis their history was investi-
gated and recorded by Dominican inquisitors from the middle decades
of the thirteenth century. One of the earliest and much the most influ-
ential of these accounts, written in 1250 by the Piacenzan Raniero Sac-
coni, asserts that there were sixteen Cathar churches in Italy and the
Balkans, each with its bishop and his adjuncts; those in Italy included ex-
iles from the recently conquered Languedoc. According to Raniero, they
shared a common body of ritual and conduct, and all believed in two prin-
ciples, though they differed among themselves as to whether the evil was
 The Cathar Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem \ 63

uncreated or the fallen creature of the good, as well as on various, less

fundamental points.
Raniero’s account has been, directly and indirectly, the starting point
of almost all subsequent discussion of heresy in Italy and southern France
in the two centuries before he wrote. My reexamination of the sources
for the growth of heresy and heresy accusations up to his time, however,
concluded that he was probably wrong on some important points. I found
no persuasive evidence of the presence of avowedly dualist heresy any-
where in Latin Europe, or of the so-called Cathar churches, with their
organized hierarchies, more than a few decades before Raniero wrote.
The suggestion that theological dualism was of little or no importance
until well after the Albigensian crusade is in harmony with the excellent
French and Italian work of the last quarter century on which it largely
rests.24 Nor could I see any justification for assuming that those who were
identified as Cathars in Italy were followers of the same heresy as the vic-
tims of the Albigensian crusade and the persecution that accompanied
and followed it in the lands between the Rhône and Garonne rivers. The
Waldensian message seems to have reached Lombardy by the 1180s; the
Poor Men of Lyons and the Poor Lombards had tried, and failed, to re-
solve their differences over the legacy of Valdès by 1218.25 But while a
lively and persuasive picture can be painted, as Caterina Bruschi has
done extremely well,26 of social and commercial connections among dis-
senters of various origins and tendencies stretching back to the years be-
fore the crusade and greatly intensified under the pressure of persecu-
tion after it, there is no convincing evidence of doctrinal identity, still
less of organizational affiliations, between the people who were called
Cathars by the Dominican inquisitors in Italy from the 1230s and the
men and women of the midi whom their brethren of Toulouse and Car-
cassonne knew at the same time simply as “heretici”— and not, let it be
emphasized, by the name of any heresiarch or sect, ancient or modern.
Compelling as the reasoning and conclusions of The War on Heresy
may be, it is just possible that every detail of them may not be immedi-
ately and unanimously embraced by the academic community. Neverthe-
less, I propose here to avail myself of the brief limbo between publication
and the appearance of scholarly reviews to consider without further de-
fense or more reiteration than I can avoid a question that immediately
 64 / R. I. Moore

arises from them: if the “Cathars” of the Languedoc and most of what
goes with them are a myth, why has that myth been so fervently and so
tenaciously embraced? The short and obvious answer, valid until only a
generation or so ago, is that it was a beneficiary of what John Van Engen
called “the common presupposition that medieval culture was essen-
tially ‘Christian’ or ‘Catholic.’ ”27 Whether to be “vilified as so much
superstition or revered as so much authoritative tradition,” the story
of the dissemination, discovery, and eradication of a widespread, well-
organized, and theologically radical counter-church, comparable in scale
and intellectual menace with the great heresies of antiquity, suited the
church’s humanist, Protestant, and Enlightened critics quite as well as it
did the church itself. On the other hand, when thanks to Schmidt the
“Cathars” had once again been clearly distinguished from the Walden-
sians, with whom they had been intermittently confused from Bernard
Gui onward, and firmly identified once again as theological dualists,
there was nobody to embrace them— unlike the Waldensians or other
apostolic or anticlerical movements — as spiritual forebears, or, until the
emergence of self-conscious Occitanism in the nineteenth century,28 as
historical antecessors. Nobody had any pressing reason to scrutinize the
details of their supposed teachings or the historical foundations of the
supposition until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ astonishing fe-
cundity in fantasy of every kind brought them a bizarre assortment of
celebrants, from the proudly regionalist to the deeply sinister and the
merely dotty. The attendant notoriety served to marginalize them even
further from the standpoint of serious scholarship of every stamp until
Van Engen’s “dramatic shift downward in recent historiography”29 of
the 1950s and 1960s, of which, in their different ways, Étienne Delaru-
elle and Norman Cohn were influential pioneers.30
That shift was anticipated by what turned out to be a fatal attack on
the notion that popular heresy in the medieval West was an importation
from the Byzantine world, launched in 1944 by Raffaello Morghen and
sustained by his student Raoul Manselli. Morghen argued that the bod-
ily austerities and anticlerical sentiments attributed to those accused in
the early eleventh century’s handful of heresy cases, which included the
first execution of heretics since antiquity, the burning at Orléans in 1022,
 The Cathar Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem \ 65

did not amount to a coherent or consistent expression of theological du-

alism and could be explained, without the need to invoke external stimu-
lus, as manifestations of spiritual awakening within the Latin tradition.31
The subsequent debate on “the origins of medieval heresy” resulted by
the mid-1970s in as complete a victory for the revisionists as scholarly
debate ever does, for even the minority who continued to suspect an ele-
ment of Bogomil influence in the early eleventh- or early twelfth-century
West conceded that before 1143— a date to whose significance we will
return — it was neither causal nor formative and could be confidently
detected in no identifiable heretic or group of heretics.32 From the pres-
ent perspective, the significance of that debate lies not so much in the
details of the argument, now for the most part of little more than anti-
quarian interest, as in the fact that at one time or another for a quarter of a
century it engaged an extraordinary array of scholars, of both the Latin
and Greek traditions and of almost every conceivable theological and
methodological persuasion. Morghen himself, a student of Ernesto Buon-
aiuti, wrote from the modernist perspective, as Van Engen explains,33 but
it is well beyond the competence of the present writer to trace in the de-
bate that Morghen launched the pervasive echoes of that controversy
and its reverberations in the Catholic world in the decades immediately
before and after Vatican II, still less in the contributions of more or less
sympathetic observers and fellow travelers from Orthodox, Anglican,
and Protestant points of view. Engaging as it did an almost equally com-
prehensive array of social (or, in the terminology of the age, materialist)
perspectives, including those of the East German Marxists34 and, since
the Bogomils were central to the issue, their Bulgarian counterparts,35 the
origins debate could still serve as an admirable introduction to the wider
historiographical issues of those years. It figured prominently at the Inter-
national Historical Congress of 1955 in Rome, where Delaruelle, Grund-
mann, and Morghen presented substantial contributions.36 All three did
so again at the 1962 conference at Royaumont, whose proceedings, edited
by Jacques Le Goff, were published (appropriately enough) in 1968 as
Hérésies et sociétés dans l’Europe préindustrielle.37 From the patristic legacy
( Henri-Irénée Marrou) to heretical messianism in the eighteenth cen-
tury (Gershom Scholem), its lists of contents and remarkably eminent
 66 / R. I. Moore

contributors and discussants offer a strikingly eclectic view of the field

at the time and a palette of approaches that anticipated much of the
agenda of the following decades.
Hérésies et sociétés marked the reception of heresy among the laity
into the mainstream historical agenda and the point from which its his-
toriography can be subsumed into that which Van Engen analyzed so
comprehensively in 1986. It is enough to mention the Waldensians, pov-
erty and prophecy in thirteenth-century Italy, the Free Spirit, the Lollards
or the Hussites, or indeed the Templars or the witch craze, to register the
progress made during the 1970s and 1980s and how fully it reflected the
critical and creative insights and techniques of modern historical scholar-
ship. In effect, to put it in the broadest terms, the insights of Grundmann
and his followers were combined with those of the Annales School. Al-
most all this work presumed that even individuals or movements con-
demned as heretical could be located on an apostolically inspired spectrum
of Christian enthusiasm and were to be interpreted in their social context,
though with varying emphases as to the relative priority of “religious” and
“social” motivation. Indeed, an implicit truce between the clerically and
anticlerically inclined, embodied in a tacit understanding that the inde-
pendence and autonomy of those categories themselves were not at issue,
might be considered emblematic of a broader reconciliation between the
traditions and exponents of secular and church history that accompanied
the progress celebrated in Van Engen’s famous paper, and of which his ap-
pointment at Notre Dame was a notable example.
At least in retrospect, however, there is one striking exception. The
“Cathars of the Languedoc” and those who worked on them are con-
spicuous in Hérésies et sociétés by their absence. Even in Philippe Wolff ’s
communication ( barely more than a page) on “Villes et campagnes dans
l’hérésie cathare,” and in a survey by Christine Thouzellier (a student of
Augustin Fliche who had taken over Dondaine’s project when his order
withdrew him from the field of heresy to direct the Leonine edition of
Aquinas)38 of “Tradition et résurgence dans l’hérésie médiévale,” they
get only passing mentions.39 Thouzellier offered an olive branch to the
revisionists by conceding that in Christian history, heresy had regularly
arisen from the impulse to reform and might even, “considering itself
orthodox, hope to triumph in the name of evangelical truth.”40 That was
 The Cathar Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem \ 67

true of some of the heresies of the eleventh century, but others, she
maintained, betrayed dualistic traces of the Bogomil proselytism that in
the twelfth century transformed resurgent apostolic heresy “in effect
into an affiliation which owed its patronage to the East.” Thouzellier’s
formulation marked another step in the emergence of a consensus that,
in retrospect, can be seen to have been gathering for some years, notably
in Manselli’s L’eresia del male (1963) and, despite his unqualified endorse-
ment of Borst’s unquestioning acceptance at face value of the assertions
of the texts, by Grundmann, in his report to the Rome Congress and the
second edition of Religiöse Bewegungen (1961).41 Most of those who con-
tinued to insist on the lurking Bogomil presence conceded that it con-
tributed little or nothing to the apostolic enthusiasm of the early eleventh
century or the wandering preachers of the early twelfth.42 It was now ac-
cepted on all sides that heresy up to the 1140s was either the product or
(in Grundmann’s 1961 formulation) the beneficiary of the evangelical re-
vival of the eleventh century, with its strong populist overtones, and that
that movement was itself closely intertwined with tensions arising from
commercialization and urban growth, as Cinzio Violante (a student of
Morghen’s, also present at Royaumont) had shown in a major study of the
Milanese Pataria.43 This quickly became the standard account of the first
century or so of popular heresy in the Middle Ages. Christopher Brooke
brought it safely to England through the fog of erudition that had cut the
continent off for so long, and Jeffrey Burton Russell to North America; in
the second edition (1992) of his influential synthesis, Malcolm Lambert
substituted Gregorian Reform for Bogomil as the starting point of the Popu-
lar Movements in which medieval heresy was manifested.44
Equally, however, it was accepted on all sides that everything changed
after 1143, the most commonly accepted date for the letter in which Eber-
win of Steinfeld told Bernard of Clairvaux about two groups of heretics
discovered in Cologne, of which, he said, one had bishops, a division be-
tween perfecti and credentes, a ritual closely resembling the consolamentum,
and the memory of predecessors who had lingered in the Balkans since
antiquity. In short, an organized sect of eastern origin—Cathars!—clearly
distinguished by Eberwin from “the other lot, who deny our Pope but at
least do not claim to have another one of their own.”45 Whatever differ-
ences of opinion there might have been as to how recently the people
 68 / R. I. Moore

described by Eberwin had reached the West, in which particular reports

of heresy in the following decades they appeared, or whether they dif-
fered among themselves on particular points of doctrine, nobody doubted
that from this point on “Cathars” were present in western Europe and
that reports of people who expressed “dualist” opinions or values, or had
practices that could be likened to the consolamentum, were to be taken as
referring to them. This applied particularly to the lands of the Count of
Toulouse, identified by the Council of Tours in 116346 as the source of the
heresy whose leaders brazenly defied the regional hierarchy at a meeting
at Lombers, near Albi, in 1165 and were exposed and humbled, though
without lasting effect, by a papal mission to Toulouse in 1178.47 In this
way, it quickly became accepted that eastern dualism was of little or no
account in western heresy before the middle of the twelfth century, but
of crucial and formative importance thereafter. As late as 2008 I myself,
though always close to the skeptical end of the spectrum of opinion, had
only begun tentatively to abandon it, remarking that “until recently no-
body has questioned either the authenticity or the accuracy of Eberwin’s
account, though it now seems that we must at least be prepared not to
take it simply at face value.”48
In short, the old story stuck, modified, but in its essentials un-
changed by the origins debate and the scholarly and historiographical
developments from which it had arisen. It was, if anything, reinforced
by the rapprochement between historiography sacred and profane at
Royaumont. Heresy moved into the mainstream as a subject of study in
its own right and was taken increasingly seriously as a manifestation of
popular religious sentiment and solidarity, and therefore not only a symp-
tom of social change but also an active element in it, notably for example
in some brilliant passages of Georges Duby’s Les trois ordres (1978) and
in a resurgence of interest in the Peace of God movement.49 But, as Van
Engen’s analysis makes clear, the sources of the “downward shift” in the
attention of Catholic historians that brought them to Royaumont had
lain in “a conviction that the heart of medieval religious life lay in the
‘piety’ of the ‘people’ ” on the one hand, and in the impacts of urbaniza-
tion and the socio-pathology of crowds on the other. Those were the
dominant themes of Hérésies et sociétés and the main issues that engaged
 The Cathar Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem \ 69

the attention of general historians in the decades that followed. The

Cathars of the Languedoc were not obviously central to either.
Activity in the region itself, however, gained in scholarly credibility
in these years.50 It had notoriously been dominated by variously moti-
vated amateur enthusiasts, recently under the aegis of Déodat Roché’s
Société du Souvenir et des Études Cathares, whose quarterly Cahiers
d’Études Cathares, launched in 1948, published material of mixed quality
and sometimes esoteric orientation. Tension between the more politi-
cally and the more intellectually inclined was always present in these
circles, and in 1981 the latter, led by René Nelli, established the Centre
Nationale d’Études Cathares at Carcassonne ( later known as the Centre
René Nelli). With support from the département de l’Aude, it became a
focus of much activity, including the increasingly useful journal Heresis
(1982– 2008) under the capable scholarly direction successively of Anne
Brenon and Pilar Jiménez-Sanchez. Associated with it was Jean Duver-
noy, who from the 1960s published a stream of texts and translations of
archival and other Cathar-related material. From the other side, Delaru-
elle, at the Institut Catholique de Toulouse, had in 1965 initiated in re-
sponse to the excesses of the Cahiers d’Études Cathares an annual confer-
ence, bringing in a wide range of scholars from outside the region. The
conference still provides a forum for systematic scholarly exploration of
the religious history of the midi, published in Cahiers de Fanjeaux, pre-
dominantly but not narrowly or exclusively Catholic in approach and out-
look.51 One of its stalwarts was Yves Dossat, also of the Institut Catho-
lique de Toulouse, whose analysis of the early years of the Dominican
inquisition, published in 1959, remains fundamental.52
Interest in the relations between heresy east and west had been some-
what muted since the origins debate had subsided, and especially since
Henri-Charles Puech, the great scholar of Manicheism and coeditor of
the fundamental text on the Bulgarian Bogomils, Cosmas the Priest’s
treatise against the Bogomils,53 had firmly quashed the attempts of the
Byzantinists Runciman and Obolensky, as well as of Dondaine, to de-
scribe the appearance of heresy in the eleventh-century West as an im-
portation of dualism from the Byzantine world.54 In the third session at
Fanjeaux, Dossat reignited it and raised what has become a pivotal issue
 70 / R. I. Moore

in current discussion of the nature of Catharism and the reality of “the

Cathar church” by questioning the authenticity of the document that
Dondaine had defended as a contemporary account of a council (of which
there is no trace in any other source) convened by the heretics at Saint-
Félix-de-Caraman in 1167.55 According to Dondaine, the text recorded
how, under the guidance of an emissary from Constantinople, Cathar
bishops were appointed to dioceses with the same boundaries as the
Catholic ones and the “absolute” form of dualism was adopted through-
out the region. The document purports to be a copy made in 1232 for a
“bishop” of the heretics, but it survives only as published, in 1660, by
the antiquarian Guillaume Besse, who said he had a transcription of it
from a canon of Toulouse who had since died. Showing that the docu-
ment was riddled with inconsistencies and anomalies both of form and
content, Dossat concluded, in brief, that Besse had made it up, as he had
others, to embellish his history of the ruling house of Narbonne. Dossat
himself minimized the importance of this conclusion, on the ground
that the so-called charter in any case added nothing of importance to the
documents that Dondaine had discovered and published subsequently,
the De heresi catharorum in Lombardia and the treatise of Anselm of Ales-
sandria. Apart from the implications for the chronology and organiza-
tion of heresy in the region, of which those texts have nothing of sub-
stance to say, however, it was subsequently pointed out that Dondaine
had used the supposedly vindicated charter to support his acceptance
and interpretation of them, including his attribution of an early date,
around 1200, to the De heresi catharorum. His reasoning, in other words,
was circular in critical respects, and the mighty structure of his Cathar
church stands or falls on the soundness of its foundations.56
Among the consequences of Dossat’s intervention was a response
from the English Byzantinist Bernard Hamilton. His characteristically
learned and subtle reexamination of the document (accompanied by a
fresh edition and translation), concluding that “Besse published extracts
from a genuine document drawn up for Peter Isarn, Cathar bishop of
Carcassonne, on 14th August 1223,”57 was the first of what has become a
long and influential series of contributions, including translations and
editions of key texts, which consistently reflect how, as he put it a quar-
ter of a century later, Hamilton “become more convinced that western
 The Cathar Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem \ 71

Catharism was a branch of Balkan and Byzantine dualism.”58 Hamilton

is particularly interested in religious ideas and their transmission, and
the main tenor of his work has been to identify resemblances between
the thought and practice of dualist heretics, or those whom he identifies
as such, in east and west, and to suggest, with an extraordinary breadth
and minuteness of learning and remarkable ingenuity, ways in which
they might have arisen from actual contacts between the two. He has
shown great ingenuity also in finding reasons for accepting as trustwor-
thy texts which others have dismissed as spurious or misleading, includ-
ing not only the “acta” of Saint-Félix but, in the same paper, a letter of
1223 in which the papal legate Conrad of Porto informed the bishops of
the province of Sens that the Balkan heretics had their own antipope,
from whom the Albigensians were taking advice.59 The texts which
Hamilton adduces for the nature and extent of eastern influence in the
West (with the exception of the treatise of Hugh Eteriano) necessarily
postdate the Albigensian crusade — as they must, for there are none ear-
lier. The issue in respect of his conclusions, as of the wider debate, is how
properly texts that predate the crusade can be glossed in the light of those
that postdate it, and how reliably such evidence can be used as a guide to
the situation in the region before 1209. Thus, he interpreted the appear-
ance in inquisition records of names that occur in the Saint-Félix docu-
ment as confirming its authenticity, and with it the existence as early as
116760 of a network of “Cathar” bishops and bishoprics in the region. A
more skeptical reader might think that, while that supports acceptance
of the document as authentically of the 1220s, it says nothing of its
claim to be, or to incorporate, a contemporary record of something that
happened in the 1160s. Hamilton’s student Claire Taylor, the doughtiest
current champion of the traditional view, has used the same techniques in
combination with great skill in the conventional sources and techniques
of regional history to chart what she holds to be the implantation and
diffusion of Catharism in the Agenais and Quercy.61
All this meant that, for the rest of the twentieth century, enlivened
and in many ways greatly improved activity in the field of popular
heresy appeared to confirm, and considerably to elaborate, the familiar
story of “the Cathars” and the diffusion of their influence from an epi-
center in and around Toulouse. What was overlooked in the bliss of that
 72 / R. I. Moore

dawn was that, proceeding as it did from the rapprochement of the 1960s
between the new religious historiography inspired by Grundmann and
Delaruelle on the one hand and the agenda and methods of the Annales
School on the other, it was almost entirely based on the reinterpreta-
tion of a received body of texts, mostly garnered from the great printed
collections of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and not on the
fresh scrutiny of their provenance and transmission that true quellenkri-
tik would have demanded. Thus, although my own selection and that of
Wakefield and Evans62 were made quite independently and in mutual ig-
norance, they are to all intents and purposes identical — and identical
also with those discussed by Malcolm Lambert in the first edition of Me-
dieval Heresy (1977), which he was writing while these collections were in
preparation. The same might be said of almost everything else that had
been written on the subject, stretching back through Borst and Guiraud
to Henry Charles Lea, and beyond. Morghen had shown that these texts
could and should be read in wider spiritual, intellectual, and social con-
texts than they had been before, and with different presuppositions, but
the very richness of the agenda he generated distracted attention from
still more fundamental questions about how and why they had come into
existence and remained at our disposal.
There were exceptions. Manselli produced a series of studies and
editions, though his texts and conclusions have not always survived re-
newed scrutiny.63 Arsenio Frugoni, yet another student of Morghen, pro-
duced in 1954 a study of Arnold of Brescia that proceeded by a scrupu-
lous examination, in chronological order, of each of the sources for
Arnold’s life and influence.64 It was not widely read however, until it was
translated into French in 1993, nor was its significance generally appre-
ciated: it was taken merely as rescuing Arnold from a political interpre-
tation that made him a forerunner of the Risorgimento to place him in
the spiritual one described by Grundmann and Morghen, rather than as
posing questions that ought to have been asked in every case about when
and why the sources had been written and preserved.65 Similarly, the les-
sons of Robert Lerner’s brilliant demolition of the fabled “Heresy of
the Free Spirit” (1972) were not rigorously applied to the materials of the
earlier period either by Lerner himself or by others.66 In 1975 Robert-
 The Cathar Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem \ 73

Henri Bautier — not a historian of religion or the church, but a distin-

guished expert on the study of documents and on the early history of
the Capetian monarchy — published his conclusions about the burning
at Orléans in 1022.67 Bautier’s close analysis of each text in the chrono-
logical order of their production, locating each author and actor precisely
in every relevant context, transformed the first people to be burned as
heretics in the medieval West from a coterie of obscure intellectuals
dabbling on the fringes of mysticism and magic into the highly placed
victims of a ruthlessly organized show trial. These were true pointers
toward the final dismantling of the Cathar legend, but their lessons were
slow to be learned. Many of those who worked on the social, political, and
institutional history of the lands between the Rhône and the Garonne in
the decades on either side of the Albigensian crusade, especially, perhaps,
from outside the region, had no obvious reason to question whether the
assertions of colleagues working on heresy were based on the same rigor-
ous criticism of the sources that they routinely applied to their own.68 So
it continued to be taken for granted that “the Cathar church,” or at least
“the dualist heresy,” as denounced in Cistercian polemics and papal let-
ters and confirmed by Dominican inquisitors, and described by their stu-
dents, represented the most formidable expression, socially and politically
as well as theologically, of religious dissidence around 1200, and as such
supplied both the main rationale for the crusade itself and the substance
of resistance to it. Even those who saw the extirpation of heresy in the re-
gion as the excuse rather than the reason for the assault assumed that the
heresy itself was as the attackers and their successors described it. Pegg’s
2008 account was the first to reject those time-hallowed premises.69
In fact, however, similar doubts had been gathering for some time
and from several directions, as a growing number of scholars whose at-
tention was initially directed to the Cathars by other concerns found the
received account at odds with their own expertise and methodologies.
By the early 1980s, Monique Zerner’s questioning of the ancient equa-
tion of “bougre” and “Bulgar” as synonyms of dualist heresy, Guy Lobri-
chon’s discovery of an eleventh-century text of what had long been re-
garded as a vivid description of Balkan dualism at work in the Périgord
in the 1160s, Dominique Iogna-Prat’s curiosity about how Peter the
 74 / R. I. Moore

Venerable’s polemic against Peter of Bruys fitted into a longer and broader
tradition of Cluniac invective, and Jacques Chiffoleau’s observation of
the role of heresy accusations in the reconfiguration of the management
of ecclesiastical property in the later medieval Rhône valley, were rein-
forcing each other’s suspicions that denunciations could not simply be
taken at face value as straightforward descriptions and “confirmed the
urgency of considering the sources in the logic of their production.”70
This was the nucleus of the seminar convened by Zerner in Nice between
1993 and 1996. Its systematic review of the ways in which the discourse
of heresy had evolved and been deployed since patristic times was pub-
lished in 1998 as Inventer l’hérésie? Among the most significant of its con-
clusions was the uncovering of the pivotal role of the Cistercian order in
the progressive demonization of the “Cathar” heresy, of the region be-
tween Rhône and Garonne as its center, and of the region’s lords as its
patrons and protectors.71 Integral to that process was the collection and
construction of a dossier of texts among which several — going back as
far as the only surviving account of the synod at Arras in 1024 and 1025,
for example, in a Cistercian manuscript of the late twelfth century72—
were foundation stones of the accepted narrative of what we had naively
known as “the birth of popular heresy.” The demolition of the “Council
of Saint-Felix-de-Caraman” by members of the same group, discussed
above, and with it the foundations of Dondaine’s account of the “Cathar
church” in the Languedoc, followed in 2001.73 That of its prehistory in
the appearance of “Cathars” in the Rhineland as described by the hith-
erto unassailable Eberwin of Steinfeld followed in 2006, when Zerner’s
student Uwe Brunn demonstrated that they were in effect a by-product of
conflicts within the Premonstratensian order in which Eberwin himself
was deeply implicated.74 That is only one conclusion of a massive, closely
documented and argued, though (it must be said) not unfailingly lucid
study of heresy and heresy accusations in the archdiocese of Cologne
between 1100 and 1233 whose implications, not just for the Rhineland but
for Europe as a whole, will take some time to absorb, but which leaves
nothing undisturbed.
Inventer l’hérésie? served emphatic notice that it was no longer the
case that, as Peter Biller has put it, “the elite medievalists of France —
 The Cathar Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem \ 75

and Paris — have left the study of Languedocian heresy and inquisition
to non-French historians (Americans, English, and Germans) and to
French amateurs, such as Jean Duvernoy, a jurist and autodidact historian,
and Michel Roquebert, a former schoolteacher.”75 The news, however,
was slow to reach some of the Americans, English, and Germans in ques-
tion, for Biller was reviewing, in 2010, Jörg Feuchter’s important analysis
of the consular elites of Montauban, Ketzer, Konsuln und Büßer. In this
work Feuchter brilliantly combined the list of penances imposed in 1236
by the inquisitor Pier Seilan on the heretics—heretici and Valdenses— of
Montauban with charter-based reconstruction of the elite families from
which the former came, to illuminate not only their dealings with Seilan
but also structures of power in Montauban since its foundation in 1145.
Yet in doing so Feuchter accepted the traditional account of Catharism, as
described by Borst and Duvernoy, most obviously in describing the heretici
themselves as Vollkommenen (“parfaits”), that emblematic term of the old,
old story for which there is no reputable authority in the sources.76
Some of the doubts that gave rise to Inventer l’hérésie? had been ex-
pressed before and some of its insights anticipated by others. Its principal
conclusions in respect of “the Cathars” were independently reinforced
from an entirely different direction when a historian of comparative re-
ligion with a strong background in anthropology, Mark Gregory Pegg,
showed vividly how Bernart de Caux and Jean de Saint-Pierre, conduct-
ing the most extensive of all medieval inquisitions into heresy at Toulouse
in 1245 and 1246, interpreted the values, customary behaviors and body
language, and hesitant reminiscences of a peasant society, constrained by
long-term ecological pressure and brutally disrupted by conquest and
persecution, by fitting them to the stereotypes that, as outsiders to the
region, they had been trained to expect.77 That major elements of that
training came not simply from their order and vocation, but also from
the foundational cultural and intellectual developments of the age, be-
comes ever more clear. The growing centrality of evil and its agents to
the scholastic theology and pastoral preoccupations of the thirteenth cen-
tury has long been a truism, but its roots in the twelfth and beyond are
now increasingly prominent in discussion of heresy and its persecution.
Iogna-Prat saw the dialectic evolving in the schools of Paris to construct a
 76 / R. I. Moore

flexible and comprehensive model of evil at work as molding Peter the

Venerable’s definition of the boundaries of Christendom;78 Brunn that it
inspired Eckbert of Schönau’s invention of the Cathars;79 Biget how it
informed the nightmares of the Cistercian demonizers.80 Pilar Jiménez-
Sanchez traces the specter of dualism from commentaries as early as the
ninth century to shape perceptions of the “Catharisms” which for her
provided a series of models of dissidence for twelfth-century Europe.81
Hilbert Chiu is supplying a new genealogy for the “Catharism” of the
thirteenth-century inquisitors in the formation, from the middle of the
twelfth century, of an academic model of dualist heresy which, by its
end, the well-formed clerk could hardly help mistaking for reality.82
David d’Avray, Peter Biller, and Biller’s student Lucy Sackville are point-
ing to ways in which perceptions and understandings of “Catharism”
(irrespective of their relationship to mundane reality) fed into the wider
formation of scholastic thought.83 In the last generation, increasingly
sterile argument about the reality of witches and how intellectuals could
believe in them gave way to a sophisticated understanding of how such
beliefs related and contributed to the formation of ideas in many other
fields.84 The signs that this one is turning its attention to “thinking with
Cathars” are greatly to be welcomed.
Inventer l’hérésie? has reset the historiographical clock in respect of
the study of heresy in the high Middle Ages, and nothing connected with
the subject that fails to take full account of its conclusions and those of
its successors and descendants can now expect to be taken seriously. It
may be seen as one of the ways, if a spectacular one, in which, as Van
Engen observed, a great variety of approaches, each shaped by its own
circumstances, has been brought to bear on his central question, whether
medieval culture was essentially “Christian” and what that might mean.
The question itself he saw as having emerged in the middle decades of the
twentieth century because historians were no longer ready to leave it to
theologians, church historians, and members of religious orders.85 That
immediately implies a departure from classification by ideas and a fascina-
tion with similarity over time to focus on temporal succession and change
over time, and on different ways not only of reading evidence, but of test-
ing and validating it. By such means do historians change the world.
 The Cathar Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem \ 77

Notes

1. On the legend and its uses, Jean-Claude Biget, “Mythographie du ca-

tharisme (1870 –1960),” Cahiers de Fanjeaux: Historiographie du catharisme 14 (1979):
271– 342; Charles-Olivier Carbonell, “Le catharisme à travers les mass-media,”
in ibid.: 361– 80; Malcolm Barber, The Cathars: Dualist Heretics in the Languedoc in
the High Middle Ages (London: Pearson, 2000), 203– 25; Andrew Roach, “Occita-
nia Past and Present: Southern Consciousness in Medieval and Modern French
Politics,” History Workshop Journal 43 (1997): 1– 22; and Philippe Martel, Les
cathares et l’histoire. Le drame cathare devant ses historiens (1820 –1922) ( Toulouse:
Privat, 2002).
2. See, by Mark Gregory Pegg, “On Cathars, Albigenses and the Good
Men of the Languedoc,” Journal of Medieval History 27 (2001): 181– 95; The Cor-
ruption of Angels: The Great Inquisition of 1245–1246 ( Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2001), 15–19; “ ‘Catharism’ and the Study of Medieval Heresy,” in
New Medieval Literatures 6, ed. D. Lawton, R. Copeland, and M. Scase (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004), 249– 69; and “Heresy, Good Men and Nomen-
clature,” in Heresy and the Persecuting Society in the Middle Ages: Essays on the Work
of R.I. Moore, ed. Michael Frassetto ( Leiden: Brill, 2006), 227– 39.
3. Episcopal authority was overtly repudiated by boni homines, clearly fig-
ures who commanded local respect, at Lombers, near Albi, in 1165; Pier Mau-
rand and others were convicted by papal legates at Toulouse in 1178 of denying
the real presence in the mass. Theological dualism is another matter, but it is
reasonable to suppose some continuity (though not necessarily uniformity) of
heresy in the region thereafter: R. I. Moore, The War on Heresy (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 188– 203.
4. Julien Théry, “L’hérésie des bons hommes. Comment nommer la dissi-
dence non vaudoise ni béguine en Languedoc ( XIIe – début du XIVe siècle),”
Heresis 36 – 37 (2002): 75–117.
5. Daniel Power, “Who Went on the Albigensian Crusade?,” English His-
torical Review 534 (2013): 1047– 85, at 1070 – 75, showing on the basis of charter
evidence that the term was used much more widely, and earlier, than had previ-
ously been thought. On the demonization of the region in general, see Jean-Louis
Biget, “Les albigeois: remarques sur une dénomination,” in Inventer l’hérésie?, ed.
Monique Zerner ( Nice: Z’éditions, 1998), 219– 55; revised in Jean-Louis Biget,
Hérésie et inquisition dans le midi de la France (Paris: Picard, 2007), 142– 69. This
volume is now by far the best, and indispensable, introduction to its subject; an
English translation is badly needed.
6. Christine Thouzellier, Hérésie et Hérétiques. Vaudois, Cathares, Patarins,
Albigeois, Storia e Letteratura, Raccolta di Studi e Testi 116 ( Rome: Edizioni di
Storia e Letteratura, 1969), 223– 62. For Pierre Belperron, La croisade contre les
 78 / R. I. Moore

Albigeois et l’union du Languedoc à la France ( Paris: Plon, 1942; repr. Perrin, 1967),
89 ff (“L’albigéisme fut constitué par deux hérésies distinctes, l’hérésie cathare et
l’hérésie vaudoise . . .”). Cf. Pilar Jiménez Sánchez, Les catharismes. Modèles dissi-
dents du christianisme médiéval (xiie.–xiiie. siècles) ( Rennes: Presses universitaires
de Rennes, 2008), 21– 48.
7. Charles Schmidt, Histoire et doctrine des sectes des Cathares ou Albigeois,
2 vols. ( Paris: Cherbuliez, 1849); see Yves Dossat, “Un initiateur: Charles
Schmidt,” Cahiers de Fanjeaux: Historiographie du catharisme 14 (1979): 163– 84;
and Bernard Hamilton, “The Legacy of Charles Schmidt to the Study of Chris-
tian Dualism,” Journal of Medieval History 24 (1998): 191– 214.
8. See Antoine Dondaine, “Les actes du concile albigeois de St. Félix de
Caraman,” Miscellanea Giovanni Mercati V, Studi e Testi 125 ( Vatican City: Bib-
lioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1946), 324 – 55; “L’hiérarchie cathare en Italie, I, Le
‘De heresi catharorum’ ”; II, Le tractatus de hereticis d’Anselme d’Alexandrie OP;
III, Catalogue de La hiérarchie cathare en Italie, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum
XIX (1949): 280 – 312; XX (1950): 234 – 324, all reprinted in Antoine Dondaine,
Les hérésies et l’inquisition, xiie.–xiiie. siècles (Aldershot: Variorum, 1990). On
Dondaine and his work, see Yves Dossat, “La découverte des textes cathares: Le
père Antoine Dondaine,” Cahiers de Fanjeaux: Historiographie du catharisme 14
(1979): 343– 59; and, importantly, the unpublished observations of Jacques Chif-
foleau summarized in L’histoire du Catharisme en discussion: Le ‘concile’ de St. Félix
(1167), ed. Monique Zerner ( Nice: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique,
2001), 49– 56.
9. Arno Borst, Die Katharer (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1953), trans.
as Les Cathares ( Paris: Payot, 1974). Hans Söderberg, La réligion des Cathares:
Étude sur le gnosticisme de la basse antiquité et du moyen âge ( Uppsala: Almqvist &
Wiksells, 1949), was a study in religious ideas rather than a historical account.
10. Fernand Niel, Albigeois et Cathares ( Paris: PUF, 1955), 5.
11. Zoé Oldenbourg, Le bucher de Montségur. 16 Mars 1244 ( Paris: Galli-
mard, 1959), trans. Peter Green as The Massacre at Montségur: A History of the Al-
bigensian Crusade ( London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961). Note the unusual
promptness of the translation. Weidenfeld and Nicolson were recently estab-
lished, fashionable, and both ambitious and successful in publishing scholarly
history for a general readership.
12. Edgar Faure, La disgrâce de Turgot ( Paris: Gallimard, 1961); and Edgar
Faure, La banqueroute de Law ( Paris: Gallimard, 1977). Le coup d’état du 2 Décem-
bre was initially advertised to be by Pierre Mendès-France and later by François
Mitterand, but eventually appeared as Le sacre de Napoléon by José Cabanis
( Paris: Gallimard, 1970).
13. Biget, “Mythographie du catharisme,” 323.
14. Michael Costen, The Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade ( Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1997); Malcolm Lambert, The Cathars (Oxford:
 The Cathar Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem \ 79

Blackwell, 1998); Malcolm Barber, The Cathars: Dualist Heretics in the Languedoc
in the High Middle Ages ( New York: Longman, 2000); and René Weis, The Yellow
Cross: The Story of the Last Cathars 1290 –1329 ( London: Penguin, 2000). Andrew
Roach’s Oxford D. Phil. dissertation (1989) was The Relationship of the Italian and
Southern French Cathars, 1170 –1320.
15. For instance, Peter Biller ( Pegg’s most distinguished critic), “Cathars
and the Material World,” in God’s Bounty? The Churches and the Natural World, ed.
Peter Clarke and Tony Claydon (Suffolk: Ecclesiastical History Society/Boydell
Press, 2010), 91– 92; and in response, Mark Gregory Pegg, “Albigenses in the An-
tipodes: An Australian and the Cathars,” Journal of Religious History 55 (2011):
577– 600. See also Biller’s review of Pegg’s The Corruption of Angels in Speculum
78 (2003): 1365– 70; and, on a closely related debate raising the same methodo-
logical and historiographical issues, Peter Biller, “Goodbye to Waldensianism?,”
Past & Present 192 (2006): 3– 33. Through a mishap, probably my fault, my own
review of The Corruption of Angels was never published; it may now be found at
http://www.rimoore.net/PeggCorruption.html. I concluded, in contrast to Biller,
that “This analysis deserves to kill stone-dead the myths and stereotypes of
‘Catharism’, ‘radical dualism’ and all the rest, ‘imported from the Balkans’, which
have sustained the master-narrative of crusade and inquisition in the Languedoc
at least since the ground for the conquest of the County of Toulouse began to be
laid by the mission sent there by Alexander III in 1178, at the behest of Henry II
and Louis VII,” and that “by cutting himself free of this sterile discourse Pegg
has brought a far more interesting agenda to the fore.”
16. Including, notably, Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition of
the Middle Ages ( New York: Harper, 1887); Jean Guiraud, Histoire de l’Inquisition
au Moyen Âge, 2 vols. ( Paris: Picard, 1935– 38); and Steven Runciman, The Medi-
eval Manichee: A Study of Christian Dualist Heresy (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1955).
17. Dondaine, “Hiérarchie cathare” I, 287– 90.
18. Herbert Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages, trans.
Steven Rowan ( Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 213–19.
19. Yves Dossat, “Remarques sur un prétendu évêque cathare du Val d’Aran
en 1167,” Bulletin philologique et historique ( jusqu’à 1715), années 1955 et 1956
(1957): 339– 47; and “A propos du concile cathare de Saint-Félix: les Milingues,”
Cahiers de Fanjeaux: Cathares en Languedoc 3 (1968): 201–14.
20. Moore, War on Heresy.
21. Corpus Iuris Canonici, 2 vols., ed. Emil Albert Friedberg, 1:780 – 82.
22. Norman P. Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols. ( Washing-
ton, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 1:224.
23. Crucially, e.g., to the argument of Bernard Hamilton in Bernard Hamil-
ton, Janet Hamilton, and Sarah Hamilton, Hugh Eteriano: Contra Patarenos (Lei-
den: Brill, 2004), 8ff.
 80 / R. I. Moore

24. Especially Gabriele Zanella, Itinerarie ereticali. Patari e catari tra Rimini e
Verona, Studi storici 153 (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 1986);
and the work of Monique Zerner and her associates, L’histoire du Catharisme en
discussion, 131– 34.
25. Euan Cameron, Waldenses Rejections of Holy Church in Medieval Europe
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 35– 60.
26. Caterina Bruschi, The Wandering Heretics of the Languedoc (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009).
27. John Van Engen, “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical
Problem,” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 519– 52, at 519.
28. In addition to the works cited in note 1 above, see Robert Gildea, The
Past in French History ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 208–13.
29. Van Engen, “Christian Middle Ages,” 535– 36; 523– 25. Van Engen
rightly distinguished the approaches of these scholars and others concerned with
religious movements as such from that of Grundmann, whose interest effectively
stopped at the point at which the individual search for apostolic perfection gave
way to the formation of groups and communities. (My own case is exactly the re-
verse.) However, though Grundmann’s Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter had
appeared in 1935 ( Berlin: Emil Ebering Verlag, 1935), it was not widely known
outside Germany until the second edition (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1961).
30. Norman Cohn presented a stirring account of the impact of charis-
matic preaching on the “Disoriented Poor” created by urbanization from the
twelfth century onwards: see The Pursuit of the Millennium, 3d ed. (London: Pala-
din, 1970). In Europe’s Inner Demons: An Enquiry into the Great Witch Hunt (Lon-
don: Chatto, 1975), Cohn broke what had been generally accepted as a direct link
between the “Cathar” heresy and the witch beliefs of the later Middle Ages and
exposed for the first time a tradition of demonization of heretics and other mar-
ginal groups with its origins in late antiquity. Both still deserve not only to be re-
membered but also to be read, which may be done with much enjoyment. The
demolition in Europe’s Inner Demons of the views of Margaret Murray and her
followers on the “witch cult” is a classic and exhilarating demonstration of how
nonsense in academic garb should be dealt with.
31. Raffaello Morghen, “Osservazioni critiche su alcune questione fonda-
mentali riguardanti le origini e le carraterri delle eresie medievali,” Archivio della
R. Deputazione Romana della Storia Patria 67 (1944): 97–151, reprinted in Raffaello
Morghen, Medioevo Cristiano ( Bari: Laterza, 1951), and followed by a series of
papers culminating in “Problèmes sur les origines de l’hérésie médiévale,” Revue
historique 336 (1966): 1–16; Raoul Manselli, L’eresia del male ( Naples: Morano,
1963). Manselli’s main interests lay in Franciscan spirituality and its deviations,
but the list of his papers includes comment on almost every text relating to
twelfth-century popular heresy (see note 62 below). On Morghen and his in-
fluence, see G. Cracco, “Eresiologia in Italia tra otto e novecento,” in Eretici ed
 The Cathar Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem \ 81

eresie medievali nella storiografia contemporanea, Bollettino della Società Valdesi 174,
ed. G. Merlo ( Turin: Torrepellice, 1994), 15– 38, at 31 ff.; on the influence on
him of the Modernist controversy, see Heinrich Fichtenau, Heretics and Scholars
in the High Middle Ages 1000 – 1200, trans. Denise A. Kaiser ( University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press 1998), 119– 20.
32. Dondaine defended his position, in more categorical terms than for-
merly, in “L’origine de l’hérésie médiévale,” Revista di storia dell chiesa in Italia 5
(1951): 47– 78. For full references and a survey of subsequent discussion, see Jef-
frey Burton Russell, “Some Interpretations of the Origins of Medieval Heresy,”
Medieval Studies 25 (1963): 25– 53; R. I. Moore, “The Origins of Medieval
Heresy,” History 55 (1970): 21– 361 (the first and somewhat naive published
paper on this subject by an Ulsterman raised as a Unitarian); R. I. Moore, “Af-
terthoughts on The Origins of European Dissent,” in Heresy and the Persecuting So-
ciety, ed. Frassetto, 291– 326, at 295– 306.
33. Van Engen, “Christian Middle Ages,” 527– 28.
34. Werner Maleczek, “Le ricerce eresiologiche in area germanica,” in
Eretici ed eresie medievali, ed. Merlo, 64 – 93.
35. Led by Dimitre Anguelov, Le bogomilisme en Bulgarie ( Toulouse: Privat,
1972).
36. “Movimento religiosi popolari ed eresie del Medioevo,” Relazioni del X
Congresso internazionale di scienze storiche Roma 4– 11 sett. 1955, vol. 3, Storia del
Medioevo ( Florence: Sansoni, 1955), 309– 402.
37. Jacques Le Goff, ed. Hérésies et sociétés dans l’Europe préindustrielle,
11e.– 18e. siècles ( Paris: Mouton, 1968), including at 407– 67 a comprehensive
“Bibliographie des études récentes (après 1900) sur les hérésies médiévales” by
Grundmann.
38. Dossat, introduction to Dondaine, Les hérésies et l’Inquisition, ix– x.
39. Le Goff, Hérésies et sociétés, 203– 4, 103–16.
40. Ibid., 106.
41. See notes 19 and 34 above.
42. A stimulating exception, regrettably achieved by ignoring all the critical
discussion referred to in these paragraphs and the work on which it drew, is Jean-
Pierre Poly and Eric Bournazel, The Feudal Transformation ( New York: Holmes
and Meier, 1991), originally La mutation féodale (Paris: PUF, 1980), 272– 308.
43. Cinzio Violante, La pataria milaneses e la reforma ecclesiastica. I Le pre-
messe, (1045– 57) ( Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 1955).
44. C. N. L. Brooke, “Heresy and Religious Sentiment, 1000 –1250,” Bul-
letin of the Institute of Historical Research 41 (1968); Jeffrey Burton Russell, Dissent
and Reform in the Early Middle Ages ( Berkeley: University of California Press,
1965); and Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from Bogomil to
Hus (London: Edward Arnold, 1977); 2d ed., Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements
from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
 82 / R. I. Moore

45. Jacques-Paul Migne, ed., Patrologia Latina 182, col. 680. The dating
depends on whether Eberwin wrote before or after Bernard’s mission to the
Languedoc in 1145. Like every other accepted view about this letter, it has been
overturned by Uwe Brunn, Des contestataires aux ‘Cathares’. Discours de réforme et
de propagande antihérétique dans les pays du Rhin et de la Meuse avant l’inquisition
( Paris: Études augustiniennes, 2006), 139– 50.
46. William of Newburgh, Historia rerum Anglicarum, in Chronicles of the
Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I, Rolls Series 82, 4 vols., ed. R. Howlett
( London, 1884 – 89), 2:136.
47. Moore, War on Heresy, 182– 203.
48. R. I. Moore, “The War against Heresy in Medieval Europe,” Historical
Research 81 (2008): 189– 210, at 203. In the original version of the lecture (2004),
however, still ignorant of the work of Uwe Brunn, I had remarked that “[the first
half of ] this comment is intended as a red rag to Guy Lobrichon,” in deference to
Lobrichon’s critical alertness in respect of Cistercian texts (see note 71 below).
49. Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, trans. Arthur
Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), for instance, at 31ff.,
130 ff., and 175– 77; Thomas Head and Richard Landes, eds., The Peace of God:
Social Violence and Religious Response around the Year 1000 ( Ithaca: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1992); Dominique Barthélemy, L’an mil et la paix de Dieu. La France
chrétienne et féodale 980 –1060 ( Paris: Armand Colin, 1999).
50. Well described by Roach, “Occitania Past and Present.”
51. Delaruelle had also sketched a comprehensive program of inquiry in
“Le Catharisme en Languedoc vers 1200: une enquête,” Annales du Midi 72
(1960): 149– 67.
52. Yves Dossat, Les crises de l’Inquisition toulousaine au xiiie. siècle, 1233–1273
( Bordeaux: Imprimerie Bière, 1959).
53. Henri-Charles Puech and André Vaillant, Le traité contre les Bogomiles de
Cosmas le prètre ( Paris: Institut d’études slaves, 1945).
54. Henri-Charles Puech, “Catharisme médiévale et bogomilisme,” Accade-
mia Nazionale dei Lincei. . . . Atti di convegne xii, Oriente ed Occidente nel Medieo Evo
( Rome, 1956), 55– 84, 154 – 57; cf. Steven Runciman, The Medieval Manichee. A
Study of Christian Dualist Heresy, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1955), 115– 70; Dmitri Obolensky, The Bogomils (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1948), 285– 89.
55. Dossat, “A propos du concile cathare de Saint-Félix.”
56. Jean-Louis Biget, in Zerner, L’histoire du Catharisme en discussion,
117– 21; cf. Dondaine, “Les actes,” 339– 41; “Hiérarchie cathare” I, 291–92. The
ambiguity of the word church helps further to confuse these often somewhat ar-
cane discussions. Dondaine had been scrupulous to insist that “Catharism is
often spoken of as a religion, as a spiritual body hierarchically organized; it has
even been discussed whether there was a Cathar pope, a supreme head of the
 The Cathar Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem \ 83

sect. This is a grave historical error. There were dualist sects, as much in the East as
in Lombardy, which had no more in common than a more or less related doctrinal
legacy” (“Hiérarchie cathare” I, 292– 93: Dondaine’s emphases, my translation).
However, he also held that they shared history and ritual as well as theology, and
for the most part accepted each other’s sacraments, and so constituted a church
despite their divisions.
57. Bernard Hamilton, “The Cathar Council of St. Félix reconsidered,”
Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 48 (1978): 23– 53, reprinted in Bernard Hamil-
ton, Monastic Reform, Catharism and the Crusades (Aldershot: Variorum, 1979). The
argument of this paper was first stated in an appendix Hamilton wrote for my The
Origins of European Dissent (London: Allen Lane, 1977). It was replaced in the sec-
ond edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985) by a summary of Bautier’s paper on the
burning at Orléans in 1022 (see note 66 below) because it had been published else-
where in full, not because I had yet come to disagree with it. Although (as he also
has commented) our positions on this matter have steadily diverged, I owe a very
great deal to Hamilton’s writing and conversation over almost half a century.
58. Bernard Hamilton, “Bogomil Influences on Western Heresy,” in Heresy
and the Persecuting Society, ed. Frassetto, 93–114, 93. Other major contributions
include Bernard Hamilton, “Wisdom from the East,” in Heresy and Literacy,
1050 –1530, ed. Peter Biller and Anne Hudson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1994), 61– 82; Bernard Hamilton, “The Legacy of Charles Schmidt,”
191– 214; Janet Hamilton and Bernard Hamilton, Christian Dualist Heresies in the
Byzantine World, c. 650 –c. 1405 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998);
and B. Hamilton, J. Hamilton, and S. Hamilton, Hugh Eteriano. Bernard Hamil-
ton is now preparing an edition and translation of the sermons of Eckbert of
Schönau, which will be of great significance, fundamentally though he and I dis-
agree as to why.
59. B. Hamilton, “Cathar Council of St. Félix,” 44.
60. Dossat had pointed to the date 1167 as one of the many contradictions
in the document, and Hamilton actually preferred a date between 1174 and 1177
for the meeting (“Cathar Council of St. Félix,” 34 – 35, 50), but those who rely
on his authority for its authenticity almost always give the more familiar though
doubly discredited one.
61. See, by Claire Taylor, Heresy in Medieval France: Dualism in Aquitaine
and the Agenais 1000 –1249 ( Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society, 2005); “Au-
thority and the Cathar Heresy in the Northern Languedoc,” in Heresy and the
Persecuting Society, ed. Frassetto, 139– 94; and Heresy, Crusade and Inquisition in
Medieval Quercy ( Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2011).
62. R. I. Moore, The Birth of Popular Heresy ( London: Edward Arnold,
1975); Walter L. Wakefield and Austin P. Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages
( New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). The same is true of similar col-
lections in other languages, such as James Fearns, Ketzer und Ketzerbekämpfung
 84 / R. I. Moore

im Hochmittelalter (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1968). Fearns, a stu-

dent of Christopher Brooke, had produced a modern edition of Peter the Ven-
erable’s attack on Peter of Bruys: James Fearns, Contra Petrobrusianos hereticos.
Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio mediaevalis ( Turnholt: Brepols, 1968).
63. See Raoul Manselli, Studi sulle eresie del secolo XII (Rome: Istituto storico
italiano per il Medio Evo, 1953); “Il monaco Enrico e la sua eresia,” Bulletino del-
l’Istituto storico Italiano per il medio evo 65 (1953): 1– 63; and “Eckberto di Schönau
e l’eresia catara,” Arte e Storia: Studi in onore di Leonello Vincenti ( Turin: Gi-
appichelli, 1965), 311– 38. On his work on the “debate” between Henry of Lau-
sanne and William the Monk, see Monique Zerner, ed., Guillaume monachi: Con-
tre Henri schismatique et hérétique, Sources chrétiennes 541 (Paris: Cerf, 2011).
64. Arsenio Frugoni, Arnaldo da Brescia nell fonti del secolo XII, Studi storici
8– 9 (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 1954), trans. Alain Boureau
as Arnaud de Brescia dans les sources du xiie. siècle (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1993).
65. Except by Beryl Smalley, rightly portrayed by Van Engen (“Christian
Middle Ages,” 521, 526) as one of the outstanding talents of her generation, who
in a very generous review of The Origins of European Dissent (English Historical Re-
view 93 [1978]: 853– 56), remarked mildly that I had missed the importance of
Frugoni and the traces of Neoplatonism in the reports of the Orléans trial—thus
pinpointing with characteristic acuteness exactly where the old story would begin
to unravel. When we met a short time afterward she chided me for having been
insufficiently critical in my own review of Lambert; I had not been uncritical.
66. Robert E. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages
( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). Lerner, a student of Joseph
Strayer, knew Grundmann in the 1960s and was profoundly influenced by him;
see his memoir and introduction to Religious Movements, ix– xxv. It seems fair to
comment that the training of Strayer was also reflected in a critical acumen still
rarely deployed in the history of religion. I was not myself directly influenced by
Lerner’s work at that time, but was greatly encouraged to find in it endorsement
of the principles that I was applying (much less skillfully) to what became The
Origins of European Dissent.
67. R. H. Bautier, “L’hérésie d’Orléans et le mouvement intellectuel au
début du XIe. Siècle. Documents et hypothèses,” Actes du 95e. Congrès national
des sociétés savantes, Reims, 1970, Section Philologique et historique jusqu’à 1610
( Paris: Bibliotheque nationale, 1975), 63– 88.
68. A point especially pertinent to the work of John H. Mundy, as in “Une
famille Cathare: les Maurand,” Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilizations 29
(1974): 1211– 23; The Repression of Catharism at Toulouse: the Royal Diploma of
1279, Studies and Texts 74 ( Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies,
1985); and Society and Government at Toulouse in the Age of the Cathars, Studies and
Texts 129 ( Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1997).
 The Cathar Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem \ 85

69. Mark Gregory Pegg, A Most Holy War ( New York: Oxford University
Press, 2008).
70. Zerner, Inventer l’hérésie?, 7– 8. Cf. Monique Zerner, “Du court mo-
ment où on appela les hérétiques des bougres et quelques déductions,” Cahiers de
Civilization Médiévales 32 (1989): 305– 24; Guy Lobrichon, “The Chiaroscuro of
Heresy,” in Peace of God, ed. Head and Landes, 80 –103; Dominique Iogna-Prat,
Ordonner et exclure: Cluny et la société chrétienne face à l’hérésie, au judaisme et à l’Is-
lam ( Paris: Aubier, 1998), trans. Graham Robert Edwards as Order and Exclusion:
Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam (1000 –1150) ( Ithaca: Cor-
nell University Press, 1998); and Jacques Chiffoleau, La comptabilité de l’au-delà:
les hommes, la mort et la religion dans la région d’Avignon à la fin du Moyen Age, vers
1320 –vers 1480 ( Rome: École française de Rome, 1980).
71. Jean-Louis Biget, “Les albigeois.” On the directly related issue of Cis-
tercian acquisition and exploitation of property in the region and the disputes to
which it gave rise—directly comparable with Chiffoleau’s conclusions for a later
period— see also Constance H. Berman, Medieval Agriculture, the Southern French
Countryside and the Early Cistercians: A Study of Forty-Three Monasteries, Transac-
tions of the American Philosophical Society 76 ( Philadelphia: American Philo-
sophical Society, 1986), 5; Constance H. Berman, The Cistercian Evolution. The In-
vention of a Religious Order in Twelfth-Century Europe (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2000), passim; and Elaine Graham-Leigh, The Southern
French Nobility and the Albigensian Crusade ( Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005), es-
pecially ch. 4. Demonization was not, however, the work of Cistercians alone: see
Alessia Trivellone, L’hérétique imaginé. Héterodoxie et iconographie dans l’occident
médiévale de l’époque carolingienne à l’inquisition, Collection d’études médiévales de
Nice 10 ( Turnholt: Brepols, 2009); and Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The
Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bibles moraliseés ( Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1999), 105–10 and passim.
72. Guy Lobrichon, “Arras, ou le vrai procès d’une fausse accusation,” in
Inventer l’hérésie?, 65– 85. The extent to which the traditional account of the
growth of heresy between ca. 1170 and ca. 1240 depends on Cistercian sources
has been generally under-recognized. But see also Yves M.-J. Congar, “Henri de
Marcy, abbé de Clairvaux, cardinal-évêque d’Albano et légat pontifical,” Analecta
Anselmiana 43 (1959): 1– 90; Beverley Mayne Kienzle, Cistercians, Heresy and
Crusade in Occitania, 1145–1229 ( Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2001); and
L. J. Sackville, Heresy and Heretics in the Thirteenth Century: The Textual Represen-
tations ( Woodbridge: York University Press, 2011), 53– 60.
73. Zerner, L’histoire du catharisme en discussion.
74. Brunn, Des contestataires aux ‘Cathares’.
75. Peter Biller, review of Ketzer, Konsuln und Büßer: Die städtischen Eliten
von Montauban vor dem Inquisitor Petrus Cellani (1236/1241), by Jörg Feuchter,
 86 / R. I. Moore

H-Soz-u-Kult, April 4, 2010, http://www.hnet.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30164.

It should be added that the importance of the Zerner group’s work was not widely
appreciated before it was published, even within the region: Mark Pegg, who was
active there during the 1990s and reaching very similar conclusions, did not hear
of it until after the publication of his own The Corruption of Angels ( personal
communication).
76. Cf. Sackville, Heresy and Heretics, 201– 2. Feuchter appears not to have
had access to Inventer l’hérésie? and L’histoire du catharisme en discussion, neither of
which is mentioned in his discussion of the historiography of Catharism (Ketzer,
Konsuln und Büßer, 20 – 25).
77. Pegg, Corruption of Angels, 92–103.
78. Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion, 120 – 47.
79. Brunn, Des contestataires aux ‘Cathares’, Part 2, especially at 285– 321.
80. Biget, Hérésie et inquisition, 15–16.
81. Pilar Jiménez-Sanchez, Les catharismes: Modèles dissidents du christianisme
médiéval xiie.–xiiie. siècles (Rennes: Presses universitaire de Rennes, 2008), 75– 89.
82. Hilbert Chiu, The intellectual origins of medieval dualism, M. Litt. thesis,
University of Sydney, 2009; publication of a revised and expanded version is
forthcoming.
83. David d’Avray, Medieval Marriage: Symbolism and Society (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 2005), 65– 72; Biller, “Cathars and the Material World”;
and Sackville, Heresy and Heretics, notably in chapter 2, seem to me to point in
this direction — though it is beyond my competence to develop.
84. Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern
Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers:
Witchcraft, Sex and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
85. Van Engen, “Christian Middle Ages,” 522.
 Fo u r

A u t h e n t i c , Tr u e , a n d R i g h t
Inquisition and the Study of Medieval Popular Religion

c h r i s t i n e c a l dw e l l a m e s

I must beg John Van Engen’s forgiveness. My thoughts here are inspired—
as those of so many of his students and peers have long been—by a piece
that he may be weary of revisiting, so enduring have been its reverbera-
tions in our field: “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical
Problem,” published in The American Historical Review in 1986. There,
Van Engen surveyed radical developments in the study of the European
Middle Ages: most simply, “the emergence of medieval religious life as a
field of historical inquiry”; more strikingly, the revision of the former
“Age of Faith” into a world barely touched by Christianity at many social
levels and marked rather by persistent folklore, popular beliefs, magic,
or “paganism.” As Van Engen summarized, “the study of medieval re-
ligious life has . . . come full circle. Practices that earlier generations of
Protestants and enlightened liberals dismissed as so much superstition,
and many Catholics quietly downplayed or entirely overlooked, have
been taken up enthusiastically— with a heavy debt to anthropologists and
folklorists— as the authentic (and non-Christian) religion of the people.”1
However, rejecting the idea of a “wholly distinct religious culture” of the
people, “not somehow amalgamated into Christian practice,” Van Engen

87
 88 / Christine Caldwell Ames

recommended instead recognizing the shared religious territory of “elite”

and “popular,” the practical means by which Christianity had penetrated
medieval life at all levels and stages, and, finally, “the reality of Chris-
tianization as crucial to the formation and flowering of medieval reli-
gious culture.”2
For a student of my particular field — the history of heresy inquisi-
tions in medieval Europe —Van Engen’s piece has some special reso-
nances, echoing from that very sense of “authentic” religion. The schol-
arship to which the article partly responded, that of “popular religion,”
has long been complexly and strangely bound to inquisition. The first
and most obvious sign of their binding, and a crucial component of the
overarching problem Van Engen addressed, is that “popular religion”
was greatly indebted for its discovery, both in the Middle Ages and by
modern historians, to the work of inquisitors.3 As Van Engen noted, given
the dominance of clerical elites in furnishing our premodern sources,
popular religion’s diverse manifestations were to be found especially in
the cracks and interstices of learned texts, including episcopal visitations,
penitentials and confession manuals, synodal statutes, exempla collections,
sermones ad status, and canonization proceedings.4 And, as Pierre Boglioni
averred in a survey of sources for uncovering “popular religion,” inquisi-
torial texts seemed particularly to allow access to “le monde intérieur”
and to provide source material for elusive, invisible popular beliefs and
activities.5 To name the most famous instances, Jean-Claude Schmitt’s
The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children since the Thirteenth Cen-
tury used a single exemplum from Dominican Étienne de Bourbon’s Trac-
tatus de materiis praedicabilibus (ca. 1260) — resulting from this inquisi-
tor’s tour of the Dombes circa 1235— as a prompt for deep analysis of
the cult of the dog-saint Guinefort. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s study
of the “ecology” and “archeology” of Montaillou was based upon the
register of Bishop Jacques Fournier, who conducted heresy inquisitions
in Pamiers with the sometime assistance of Dominican friars Gaillard
de Pomiès, Jean de Beaune, Jean Duprat, and Bernard Gui. The work of
early modernist Carlo Ginzburg on the benandanti and on the creative
miller Menocchio used the trial transcripts of Giulio d’Assisi and Felice da
Montefalco, successive Franciscan inquisitors of Aquileia and Concordia.6
 Authentic, True, and Right \ 89

Conventional judgments of inquisitorial sources as purely instru-

mental usually permitted the quick jettisoning of their clerical-elite pro-
ducers from the discussions of “popular religion” they enabled. As Re-
nato Rosaldo commented of Montaillou, Ladurie’s “liberat[ion]” of “the
document from the historical context that produced it” meant that after
the introduction, Jacques Fournier “does not again make a significant
appearance in the rest of the book.”7 Dominick LaCapra similarly ob-
served of Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms that the author’s “empa-
thy with the oppressed induces a piecemeal, evanescent perception of the
oppressors, whose own problems, anxieties, and motivations remain cov-
ered by a veil of silence.”8 After Schmitt’s initial section on “The inquisi-
tor,” Étienne de Bourbon exits The Holy Greyhound. Inquisitors were other
than the “people,” and the sources they produced were reflective chiefly
of someone else’s piety and religious mentality.
Recent scholars of heresy have disputed with great energy the con-
tention that the inquisitorial confrontation and its documentation allow
access to an individual’s “interior world” or to collective religious be-
liefs and practices. This is so not only because of the mediating obstruc-
tions of that confrontation — language, translation, interrogation for-
mulae, memory — but also because of the ecclesiastical essentializing of
heresy, the unreflecting imposition of rigid categories upon diverse ac-
tions and thoughts.9 The larger intellectual process of constructing heresy
trickled down to the immediate confrontations between inquisitor and
deponent that were mined so enthusiastically for “popular religion.”
Yet both recent skepticism about how religion can be reassembled
from inquisitorial sources and scholars’ ejection of inquisitors from those
sources take us to a second and more substantive link between medi-
eval heresy inquisitions and scholarship on popular religion. While the
popular-religion scholarship so dominant in the 1970s and 1980s often
offered implicit critiques of heresy inquisitions, it nevertheless continued
a long genealogy of religious discernment concerning beliefs and prac-
tices of “the people” to which medieval inquisitions themselves belonged.
Natalie Zemon Davis has remarked upon “the historian’s propensity to
sort religious behavior into approved and disapproved categories.”10 In
this propensity, the modern historian differs little from the medieval
 90 / Christine Caldwell Ames

inquisitor. Scholars of popular religion tacitly assumed a familiar au-

thority to discern and to define good and bad, true and false religion, de-
veloping their own judgments about and criteria for “authentic” religion.
As Davis and André Vauchez both observed, popular religion could
perpetuate older discerning dichotomies of authentic/inauthentic Chris-
tianity by excising as “folkloric,” “superstitious,” “magical,” or “pre-
Christian” certain beliefs from “real” religion, or, in Robert Scribner’s
words, by imposing “a derogatory value judgment, seeing ‘popular reli-
gion’ as an inferior and distorted version of a ‘higher’ or ‘superior’ form
of religion.”11 But these judgments could also be reversed, with a natural-
ized popular religion juxtaposed to an inferior, elite Christianity. Indeed,
the “real,” proper religion often proposed by scholarship on popular reli-
gion was precisely the opposite of inquisitors’ own. It was authentic not
just because it was what people believed and did when freed from watch-
ing eyes and was the default to which they returned no matter how much
instruction or compulsion countered it; it also satisfied modern criteria—
which we will explore below—for what religion was and did.
With their complementary implication that Christianity did not
satisfy those criteria, these scholarly constructions were important for
our understanding not just of how Europe became Christian, but also
of Christianity itself as a historical phenomenon. So to think about the
future of medieval Christianity as a field, as Van Engen’s article still com-
pels us to do, we might consider the seeming inevitability of making re-
ligious judgments when excavating common beliefs and practices, recog-
nizing that criteria can shift and even upend over time. In what follows I
will re-view, with the lens of an inquisition historian, some of the schol-
arship that Van Engen surveyed, arguing that from Christianity’s origins
there have existed categories and criteria for its authentic and inauthentic
forms, and by extension those of authentic and inauthentic religion.
“Popular religion” has long been a tool for creating those categories, and
historians have followed inquisitors in creating them. What particularly
shows the tenacity of this process is that even the modern historiography
that reversed premodern churchmen’s judgments about popular religion
nevertheless still judged, categorized, and sorted. How do historians of
Christianity stop doing that, or do we even need to?
 Authentic, True, and Right \ 91

Defining Popular Religion

If in 1955 Étienne Delaruelle could remark of popular piety in the elev-

enth century that “aucun ouvrage n’a étudié cette question dans son en-
semble,” he would have been well satisfied twenty years later.12 By the
mid-1970s, few topics in medieval and early modern religious history
were as seductive as “popular religion” and its concomitants, “popular
belief,” “popular piety,” and “folk religion.” The period witnessed an ex-
plosion not only of studies but also of a hyperaware concern over how
to treat, and what constituted and delimited, this putatively new field. In
1973, for example, the editors of Revue d’histoire de la spiritualité noted
that “le sujet [of ‘les spiritualités populaires’] est ‘dans l’air’ ” and issued
a questionnaire seeking to refine topical and methodological problems.13
M.-H. Vicaire’s introduction to the eleventh Cahiers de Fanjeaux col-
lection ( published 1976) broached “un thème presque trop neuf . . . son
étude n’a encore suffisamment fixé ni sa méthode, ni sa problématique,
ni même son langage, sans parler de ses sources propres.”14 Jean-Claude
Schmitt, in a critique of Delaruelle appearing in Annales the same year,
observed that “les travaux sur la ‘religion populaire’ se sont multipliés
ces dernières années.”15 In Anglophone scholarship, meetings of Brit-
ain’s Ecclesiastical History Society in the early 1970s studied “Popular
Belief and Practice,” while in the United States, the Davis Center research
seminar at Princeton chose as its theme in 1973 “the history of popular
religion, a new and promising field of enquiry.”16
Who were the “people”: all medieval Christians — the populus
Christianus— or only the “lowest,” as defined by social and economic
class, literacy, and education? Did the rural peasant belong to “the peo-
ple,” but not the urban merchant? What of the wealthy layman and the
impoverished parish curé ? One might ask other questions: Did a catego-
rization as “popular” depend upon the nature of beliefs and action them-
selves, or rather upon the status of who held or did them? Were criteria
for an identification as “popular” the original form or instead the even-
tual character of such beliefs; their degree of prescription or of spon-
taneity; who promoted them or for whom they were intended? To gen-
eralize, in answer to such questions a rather uneven consensus formed of
 92 / Christine Caldwell Ames

the constitution, source base, and methods of this “new and promising
field.” The “popular religion” emerging in this work ranged widely from
devotion soundly bound to the Latin church’s orthodox theology (saints,
the Virgin Mary, prayers and masses, miracles) to paraliturgical, marginal,
or “superstitious” forms of that devotion (charms, incantations, use of
consecrated hosts) and to religious manifestations of “folklore” (seasonal
feasts, rites of passage) that tended to fuse in scholarship with— although
they were not necessarily identical to—pre-Christian “pagan survivals.”17
While some scholars flirted with the idea that “popular religion” con-
noted beliefs and practices common to all Christians in the premodern
West, its usual definition was the domain of lower economic, social, and
educational classes: anticlerical, antiwritten, antielite, antidoctrinal.18
Although the use of inquisitorial sources (and the taxonomic ques-
tions above) weighed down the study of popular religion with heavy
methodological problems, some scholars emphasized rather the thrills of
innovation and departure. James Obelkevich, for example, used the words
“new,” “novel,” and “newer” repeatedly in his introduction to an essay col-
lection resulting from the Davis seminar—its work, he claimed, exploded
the narrow, desiccated channels of “ecclesiastical history” by making the
invisible visible, the unheard heard, the marginal central.19 Yet the sudden
birth of “popular religion” in the 1970s was a bit phantasmatic. The topic
had emerged both amid and from a remarkable confluence of strands with
longer tenure: an interest in folklore that slurred into the “religious as-
pects of folk culture”; attention to lay Catholic experience that would also
be reflected in the Second Vatican Council; and the importation into me-
dieval religious history of anthropology, sociology, and psychology, all of
which had long attended to religion.20 Changing demographics in the
American academy, and perhaps the British and European as well, also
contributed, as a less homogenous body of academics drifted toward the
“margins” and away from the elite for topics.21
Something else that made that “novel” scholarship not so novel was
its place within a long tradition — which I will sketch only cursorily — of
religious discernment, of turning ethical, theological, pastoral, and tax-
onomic eyes upon popular religion. That tradition included the very in-
quisitors who so prominently furnished sources for the study of popular
religion. Even though popular-religion scholarship tended to remove
 Authentic, True, and Right \ 93

these inquisitorial predecessors from studies based on their records, it

nevertheless maintained some of their premises about distinguishing
authentic from inauthentic religion.22 But while that tradition began
with learned Christians who conceptualized particular practices as er-
rant, its most recent representatives found learned Christianity liable to
that same charge.

Popular Religion as Religion

As is well known, the condemnation and excision of particular beliefs as

“vulgar” or “superstitious” was deeply interwoven, both rhetorically and
substantively, with early Christianity’s formation of unity and identity.
In Arnaldo Momigliano’s words, late-antique Christians “set up their
palisade between religion and superstition to coincide with the frontier
between Christianity and Paganism.”23 Peter Brown famously chafed
against the modern “two-tiered model” in which scholars presented
“popular religion . . . as in some ways a diminution, a misconception or a
contamination of ‘unpopular religion’ . . . best intelligible in terms of a
failure to be something else.” Yet as Brown remarked, that diminution
was indebted to late-antique Christians themselves, who refashioned and
recategorized Christian piety in the terms of the Roman urban elite: “the
upper class culture of Europe would always measure itself against the
wilderness of a rusticitas which it had itself played no small part in creat-
ing.”24 Rusticitas, superstitio, and traditional Roman religion gradually co-
alesced in the condemnatory thinking of Christian elites in late antiquity
and was not identical to the heresy that in earliest Christianity was usu-
ally doctrinally sophisticated and abstruse. Those elites then set the stage
both for later “popular religion” and for more immediate repression, as
their recategorization introduced and enabled attempts to eradicate “su-
perstitious” elements from elite Christianity.
We need not rehearse how various elements — legal theory, papal
monarchism, religious dissent, heresiology, pastoral reform— combined
to create the office of inquisitio hereticae pravitatis in the high-medieval
Roman church. But it is worth revisiting how inquisition perpetuated the
late-antique legacy of treating, and perhaps creating, putatively erroneous
 94 / Christine Caldwell Ames

popular belief as an authenticating foil. As specialists in medieval heresy

have instructed us, antiheretical writers in the high Middle Ages specifi-
cally cited early Christian rhetoric and terminology about heresy, using
it to organize and to attack scattered nonconformity and dissent. More
generally, polemicists and inquisitors adopted late antiquity’s construc-
tion of Christianity itself as default religion. In medieval western Eu-
rope’s atmosphere of Christian hegemony, however, attention to popular
belief was part of broad and ambitious ecclesiastical efforts at spiritual
discipline.
Although rusticitas was not the chief target of medieval heresy in-
quisitors, Étienne de Bourbon’s thirteenth-century encounter with the
“holy greyhound” demonstrates how inquisition’s attention to popular
religion lacquered its double task of discernment and correction with a
pastoral gloss. In Étienne’s Tractatus, the Guinefort exemplum appeared
in the book De fortitudine, under the subhead “De superstitione.” Étienne
recounted there his discovery, through several confessions, that village
women brought their ill children to Saint Guinefort, whom the inquisi-
tor learned was a greyhound once slain unjustly by its master, who mis-
takenly believed the dog had killed his son. “Certain rustic people, . . . se-
duced by the devil and deluded in that way many times, so that by this he
might lead people into error,” honored the dog as a martyr. The cult’s
key ritual, leaving the sick infant, a supposed changeling, overnight at
Guinefort’s shrine to be exchanged for the genuine child, horrified Éti-
enne, who attempted to destroy the cult by instruction, interdict, and
razing the shrine. To Étienne, Guinefort worship was not heresy, but one
of the “superstitions contumelious to God, . . . attribut[ing] divine hon-
ors to demons or to any other created thing, as idolatry does.” It was a di-
abolical trick whereby the devil attacked the “populus Christianus, drag-
ging behind him with the tail of deceitful seduction innumerable souls of
the foolish, whose number is infinite.”25 We see here the crediting of “rus-
tic” error to devilish sabotage, the salvific value of instruction, and, inci-
dentally, of investigating such belief. In the original legend of the slain
greyhound that Étienne recorded, its master’s grievously tardy queries
exculpated the dog only after the summary injustice of its death (“inqui-
rentes . . . veritatem autem facti agnoscentes, et dolentes de hoc quod sic
injuste canem occiderant”). But Étienne’s own sober “inquiry” into the
 Authentic, True, and Right \ 95

truth was able beneficially to deflect that “deceitful seduction” from the
populus Christianus.
Through its appearance in an exemplum for preaching, Étienne’s in-
quisitorial lesson — popular superstition was a diabolical trick on the
foolish, and “seeking [it] out” had pastoral use—could be repeatedly and
more widely taught. While Étienne’s pastoral aims in naming and eradi-
cating “superstition” inherited late-antique constructions of rusticity, it
also reflected contemporary constructions of heresy by fellow inquisitors
and ecclesiastics: identifications of behavior and beliefs that undergirded
high-medieval pastoral reform and heresy inquisitions. If various strate-
gies against the practices of the “people” buttressed ecclesiastical power,
they did so by firmly placing such practices within Roman Christianity’s
theological and legal frameworks, rather than expelling them as wholly
other.26 Superstition, heresy, and unusual practices and beliefs were all
targeted by a broad complex of spiritual discipline (including confession
and penance as well as inquisition) that paid increasingly close attention
to the internal and external constitutions of the populus Christianus. For a
medieval inquisitor such as Étienne, attending to the “popular” was inex-
tricable from the salvific demand to be intolerant.
While that attention to popular religion, and the accompanying
process of discerning authentic from inauthentic religion, continued, its
relationship with inquisition and toleration would radically alter. By the
eighteenth century, for instance, even fewer people than in the Middle
Ages agreed that intolerance and persecution were Christian values. The
role of heresy inquisitions in Enlightenment arguments for religious tol-
eration, as bloody proof of the evils of forced conformity, is well known.27
Some Enlightenment critics of religion, including Voltaire, posited that
“the people’s” superstitions harmfully kept alive Christianity’s intolerant
institutions.28 But David Hume’s Natural History of Religion (1757) — an
early appearance of the term “popular religion” in English— saw the re-
lationship between popular religion and toleration differently, despite
sharing a low opinion of most people’s religious impulses. The Natural
History argued against the theory of degradation, that is, that humans’
original theism had deteriorated into polytheism. Hume’s progressive re-
ligious history contended rather that polytheism refined itself over time
into theism. But it was not so simple, as most “people,” everywhere and
 96 / Christine Caldwell Ames

in all eras, were superstitious, instinctive, and nondogmatic, naturally re-

sistant to a rational theism. Hume used the phrase “popular religion” re-
peatedly, generally equating it with polytheism and with “vulgar” beliefs
and practices.29 Hume prefigured later scholarly assumptions about popu-
lar religion by arguing that religion’s origin was found in “anxious con-
cern,” “the incessant hopes and fears, which actuate the human mind,”
and a lack of control over the “unknown causes” of life’s vagaries.30 The
Natural History also anticipated later analytical conventions in the study
of religion by observing the commonalities of universal religious experi-
ence; by proposing a progressive model of human development; and by
comparing “our present experience concerning the principles and opin-
ions of barbarous nations” to the European past, which featured idolatry
or “polytheism, the primitive religion of uninstructed mankind.”31 But
Hume’s European present was not immune: “the vulgar, in nations,
which have embraced the doctrine of theism, still build it upon irrational
and superstitious opinions,” demonstrating the “flux and reflux” by which
“ignorant and uninstructed” persons, encountering the tidy theism that
had slowly emerged from polytheism, dragged it back down into idola-
try.32 Even “at this day, and in Europe . . . the vulgar” would cheaply ex-
plain God’s existence by accidents and fortune, “so inveterate are the
people’s prejudices” toward “superstition.”33
So far, medieval heresy inquisitors might be nodding in agreement.
So too might many Christian ecclesiastics of late antiquity. But Hume’s
Natural History departed from them and again anticipated later studies
by associating that unsophisticated, polytheistic popular religion with
toleration. The superstitious instincts of the “vulgar” had at least one
value: “The tolerating spirit of idolaters, both in ancient and modern
times, is . . . obvious,” while “the intolerance of almost all religions,
which have maintained the unity of god, is as remarkable.”34 While the
former “naturally admits the gods of other sects and nations to a share of
divinity,” competing theistic sects, each persuaded of its own correct no-
tions of the “unity of god” and worship, “fall naturally into animosity.”35
( This was then a historical as well as a conceptual argument.) If Hume
congratulated his contemporary English and Dutch Protestantism for
“embrac[ing] the principles of toleration,” he conceded that only the
“steady resolution of the civil magistrate” obstructed the repressive in-
 Authentic, True, and Right \ 97

stincts of “priests and bigots.”36 If inquisitors such as Étienne de Bourbon

held up the practices of the populus Christianus against their conception of
right religion and found them culpably amiss, in Hume’s discussion of
“popular religion” those inquisitors were now on the other side. To
Hume, the best examples of theism’s repressive impulses were “the inqui-
sition and persecutions of Rome and Madrid,” both of which were, of
course, still active when Hume wrote. These superseded even “the human
sacrifices of . . . barbarous nations” by joining their “effusion of blood” to
inquisitors’ hatred of “virtue, knowledge [and] love of liberty,” ultimately
destroying not just the body of the condemned heretic, but also society it-
self. Thus, while “idolatry” had its disadvantages, intolerant monotheism
exceeded them in its “pernicious” effect on “political society.”37
Did Hume know that the “inquisitions of Rome and Madrid,” and
the medieval inquisitions whose offspring they were, had preceded him
in turning an eye to “irrational and superstitious opinions”? Regardless,
Hume departed from how previous Christian observers had judged the
moral value of and the religious lessons taught by “vulgar” beliefs and
practices. To borrow Étienne de Bourbon’s language, to Hume “diaboli-
cal seduction” had fallen upon those ready to rend social and political
communities, to spill blood and to persecute, for their one god. A
messier and more diffuse popular religion, less committed to unity, con-
formity, and doctrine, was better suited to human cohesion and happi-
ness than was intolerant monotheism.
It is striking how often we hear echoes of Hume in the popular-
religion scholarship of the twentieth century. This is so in part because
of other trends that developed in Hume’s wake, particularly, as John Van
Engen noted, the influence of the nineteenth-century disciplines of com-
parative religion and folklore upon the study of medieval religion. We
might add specifically that the progressive theories of development em-
braced by nineteenth-century anthropologists of religion such as E. B.
Tylor, William Robertson Smith, and James George Frazer foreshadowed
later scholars’ structural links between non-European peoples and pre-
modern Europeans.38 Late twentieth-century scholarship on popular reli-
gion maintained firm faith in the “survivals” of folkloric and primitive
practices and beliefs and that the core of religion was a response to the
uncertainty of life. James Obelkevech listed as one contributor to the
 98 / Christine Caldwell Ames

field’s novelty “the influence of the social sciences, ranging from classic
sociology (including Marx) down to contemporary anthropology.” 39 For
example, in the Davis seminar collection, Robert Muchembled argued
that witches of the Cambrésis were “expiatory victims chosen by their
fellow villagers to satisfy a confused, ritualistic need for sacrifice”; “the
witch hunters . . . engaged in a ritualistic purging of their own fears . . .
demanded scapegoats.” Muchembled depended here on a model of ac-
culturation, which was also used by Jean-Claude Schmitt in a study of
the medieval custom of young men’s festive dance with a wooden horse.
Schmitt would also explicitly “situate” The Holy Greyhound “within a sci-
entific anthropological perspective.”40 In a supposition impugned by
Leonard Boyle as an example of how anthropology’s allure led scholars
astray, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie insisted that fertility cults must have
existed in Montaillou, if “unspoken” and even unrecognized by the vil-
lagers’ consciousness.41
Anthropology’s influences, ubiquitous in the scholarship of the 1970s
and 1980s, are well known. But I would like to emphasize how, despite
the importation of new methods and vocabulary, the field of popular re-
ligion perpetuated traditional kinds of religious judgments and distinc-
tions between good and bad, authentic and inauthentic religion. That
perpetuation was also, in a sense, indebted to anthropology, even as it
inherited the habits of medieval inquisitors. Two things had particularly
enabled the extension of anthropology’s methods, language, and prem-
ises to premodern European Christianity and the excavation of its own
“primitive” forms. First was the contention that premodern Europe was
the civilizational equivalent of modern nondeveloped, nonliterate, non-
industrialized cultures, which we glimpse as early as Hume.42 Second was
a premise of structural unity and similarity among religions that leveled
Christianity as an object of analysis. The anthropologist E. E. Evans-
Pritchard observed that for many of his predecessors, “primitive reli-
gion was with regard to its validity no different from any other religious
faith . . . they sought, and found, in primitive religions a weapon which
could . . . be used with deadly effect against Christianity.”43 That leveling
had broader applications beyond the history of the Middle Ages. But in
medieval studies, anthropology’s leveling of Christianity — supported
by its structural commonalities with some “primitive” religions — would
 Authentic, True, and Right \ 99

have extra bite amid the often-confessional legacies of “church history”

and the “Age of Faith,” stripping away any exceptionalism that Chris-
tian scholars had attached to their subject. This was the important con-
verse of the historiographical development from which Van Engen’s piece
sprang: if medieval religious life now joined politics, warfare, and eco-
nomics as fit topics of investigation for scholars who were not theolo-
gians or monks, it did so in large part because Christianity had been
brought down to earth.44
This meant, then, that by the twentieth century, two things could be
combustibly brought together: one, a long history of defining and judg-
ing “religion” by persons examining popular beliefs and practices; and
two, Christianity identified as merely one of many religions to be dis-
mantled and analyzed. When this marriage took place, Christianity lost.
If previously Christianity itself had provided and constituted the criteria
for a true religion for the late-antique polemicist or the medieval heresy
inquisitor, now other criteria deriving from anthropologists, sociolo-
gists, and scientists of religion were in play, against which Christianity
might fall short. This leveling inclusion of Christianity within the cate-
gory of an analyzable religion was accompanied by the stronger infusion
into its history of universalist norms about what “religion” is and does.
These included helping persons confront uncertainty and lack of con-
trol; naturalizing or diminishing economic forces; and cohering and
glorifying society.45 While functionalism especially was not new, it was
crucial in the scholarly elevation of popular religion over “elite” Chris-
tianity amid competing definitions of real religion.
Let’s look more closely at the criteria undergirding those defini-
tions. Most important was the situation of “popular religion” within
prehistory. Religious anthropologist (and Anglican priest) E. O. James,
in an article discussing the influence of folklore on the study of religion,
repeatedly divorced folklore, particularly in its orality, from tempo-
rality: “from time before memory things have been ordained in this
manner,” “through the ages,” “from time immemorial,” “from age to age,”
“a heritage extending back beyond the confines of history and written
records.”46 Although Schmitt wished to establish precisely the social, po-
litical, and cultural contexts in which the Guinefort cult, as Étienne en-
countered it, arose in the high Middle Ages, he also argued that the cult
 100 / Christine Caldwell Ames

“involves ritual practices of very ancient provenance, whose ‘origins’

cannot really be traced.”47 Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou repeatedly evoked
the “very ancient”: “the emergence of pre-existing folklore elements,
pre-Christian, non-Christian or anti-Christian . . . traditional rural natu-
ralism”; “the collective unconscious which was always, though often
silently, concerned with ancient rural beliefs”; a village sexual ethics
“deriv[ing] directly from an ancient source of popular peasant wisdom.”48
For Ginzburg, as for James, timelessness was inextricable from oral tradi-
tion, which reached back irretrievably into the past, “transmi[tted] from
generation to generation.”49 Particularly through orality, an undefined
“paganism” or religious folklore was thus naturalized as the religious sys-
tem: “It is this [oral] tradition, deeply rooted in the European country-
side, that explains the tenacious persistence of a peasant religion intoler-
ant of dogma and ritual, tied to the cycles of nature, and fundamentally
pre-Christian.”50 This timelessness of lost origins was inevitably linked to
the functional; for John Shinners, “what worked, worked — as it had in
the past.”51
“What worked” in this paradigm—what seemed to be real religion—
was the concrete and the emotionally, psychologically, satisfying.52 If
nineteenth-century scientists of religion tended to explain “survivals”
by models of uneven cultural development, now, in a return to Hume,
survival was explained functionally by the transhistorical demands of
human needs. Timelessness, orality, and the immediate, material quality
that was credited to popular religion all promoted the gratification of
desires and assuaging of fears that were posited as the sociological and
psychological origin— and as the core purpose—of “religion.” As André
Vauchez observed, scholars of medieval popular religion commonly de-
fined it as a collection of folkloric survivals that responded “à un certain
nombre de besoins fondamentaux de l’individu et du groupe.”53 To John
Shinners, popular religion was “starkly functional . . . religion was a way
of coping with the world; medieval people grabbed for whatever tools,
natural or supernatural, that seemed to work best under the circum-
stances.” Shinners described the Guinefort cult discussed by Schmitt
specifically in these terms: “When lives and times are hard, people —
medieval and modern alike — turn for relief to what they think will best
work, leaving theologians and historians to sort out the finer points about
 Authentic, True, and Right \ 101

what is orthodox and what is not.”54 Popular religion’s apt functionalism

gave it a humanist superiority over a more cerebral and formal elite
faith; it “addressed feelings of genuine need, so it came from the heart,
was emotionally focused, and intensely human.”55 The emotional imme-
diacy of this natural faith was consequently “free from the academically
narrow categories placed on something as encompassing, amorphous,
and mysterious as religious belief. . . . [O]rdinary Christians . . . had a
better grasp of religion’s fluid boundaries than thinkers who restrained
pious impulses by academic or doctrinal fetters.”56
The absence of such restraints and fetters was important. The nat-
ural religion that emerged as popular belief was capacious, nondog-
matic, and tolerant. To Robert Scribner, “because it is less structured
and more fluid, popular devotion is a kind of liminal area where beliefs
are volatile and susceptible to new suggestions and influences.” As Hume
would agree, that fluidity and susceptibility was of humanist benefit, less
likely to, in Hume’s words, “provoke men’s spleen and indignation.”57
The organic impulses of this satisfying and timeless faith were absent
doctrine; hence it was incompatible with compulsion, which the “in-
tensely human” never required for a successful inculcation among resis-
tants. As Dominick LaCapra noted, Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms
identified religious tolerance and endorsement of nondogmatic reli-
gion as key elements of oral peasant culture. In another echo of Hume,
Ginzburg located the miller Menocchio’s “statements in favor of religious
tolerance” within the “obscure, almost unfathomable, layer of remote
peasant traditions.” Again, this naturalized religion was “free of dogmatic
requirements . . . [and] didn’t call for confessional restrictions.”58 To
Ginzburg, that tolerant peasant religion was “intolerant,” properly, of
only two things: “dogma and ritual.”59
Several scholars have challenged or softened the more boldly drawn
lines of these depictions of premodern religious life.60 For example,
can we assume that the complex Guinefort ritual — which, as Étienne
de Bourbon tells us with seeming truth, often led to dead infants — was
what “worked best” when confronting a child’s illness? But the point
here is that as scholarship on popular religion continued a venerable tra-
dition of, to recall Natalie Zemon Davis’s words, “sort[ing] religious be-
havior into approved and disapproved categories,” it likewise embedded
 102 / Christine Caldwell Ames

assumptions about what religion is and what authenticates and com-

mends it. The “historian’s propensity” to validate and to reject, to form
criteria for religion’s definition and authenticity, was shared with, and
partly inherited from, inquisitors.61
But in modern scholarship on popular religion, traditional attention
to the practices and beliefs of “the people” joined constructions of reli-
gion that were reflective of post-Enlightenment humanism.62 “Approved”
religion would now be unrecognizable both to the early Christian elites
who recategorized traditional Roman religion as superstition and to the
medieval inquisitors who sought to excise “diabolical deception” through
repression. Real religion was now that very rusticitas, which both fit and in
turn helped to shape scholarly criteria for authentic religion. But to ap-
preciate best the consequences for how we understand inquisition specifi-
cally and Christianity generally, we need to examine briefly what was “dis-
approved.”

Medieval Christianity as Religion

If in scholarship timelessness, naturalism, orality, and an ability to fulfill

human needs were interpenetrating and validating aspects of “popular re-
ligion,” they were countered by Christianity’s opposite failures. First was
time. “The pattern of daily life as molded by Christianity” was unnatural,
arrhythmic, dissonant. To Le Roy Ladurie, “the time of the humble peo-
ple [was] only partially annexed by the Church.” This was obviously a
matter of the calendar, of time in a daily and yearly sense, with Christian
rituals, feast days, and liturgical seasons sitting with effort upon natural
cycles.63 But the problem of time was also more serious: unlike the time-
lessness of an oral culture that reached back irretrievably into the past,
Christianity was bound in time. It had entered history and had joined
human experience at a certain point—rather than being organic, psycho-
logically and sociologically determined, constant, “before memory”—and,
consequently, Christianity would struggle to succeed. It had an origin and
recorded beginnings, while the natural religion neatly expressive of hu-
manity was contemporary with, and inseparable from, the human expe-
 Authentic, True, and Right \ 103

rience. The intimation, obviously redolent of psychology, was that human

sensibilities and sentiments were hardwired and unchanging over time.
Together with its temporality, Christianity’s arid, abstract quality
rendered it unable to satisfy human needs—that is, to serve as emotional,
social, and psychological balm for individuals and communities. This
also ensured its failure among (most) people. This, for example, pro-
vided a key argument in Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic,
which analyzed both late-medieval Catholicism and early modern An-
glicanism as grappling differently with the enervating pull on doctrinal
Christianity by the centrifugal forces of fear and anxiety.64 Schmitt went
further. His analysis of a popular wooden-horse dance argued that Chris-
tianity not only did not cohere and aggrandize the community, as Emile
Durkheim famously posited as the purpose and genius of religion, but
actually rended it by disrupting its folkloric unity.65 Christianity’s in-
ability to fulfill what religion “did,” or the purposes for which religion
had originated among humans, therefore explained the broad persistence
of pre-Christian religion. To Ludo Milis, the latter’s survival was “neces-
sary to Christianity, to fill the gaps in its own concepts and ideas.”66
In this scholarship, Christianity’s written character was a disadvan-
tage. Writing of course played a key role in scholarly depictions of elite
and popular cultural conflict, as a central component of social and eco-
nomic class, of a clerical/lay divide, and generally of cultural difference
between those with power and without it. We also glimpsed above the
issues of writing, mediation, and authority at hand in the inquisitorial
sources mined for information. But the written was also incompatible
with the timeless in a way the oral was not. Just as scholarship on popular
religion linked timelessness and orality, Christianity’s temporality was in-
separable from writing: as in, for example, those recorded beginnings.
And as the written fixes, dates, and stakes out historical origins, it also lim-
its and doctrinally restricts, creating those “doctrinal fetters,” mentioned
above, that restricted people’s “pious impulses.” Hume had also antici-
pated this in contrasting the tolerance of “vulgar” religion, with its orally
circulating and competing traditions, with scriptural religions more likely
to spawn violence and repression. The written enabled orthodoxy, and
its consequent repression, in a way the oral did not, making repression
 104 / Christine Caldwell Ames

inherent in rather than an accretion of Christianity.67 Combined with its

inevitable “gaps” in addressing core human needs, Christianity’s “spe-
cific doctrine”— which since late antiquity had shaped orthodoxy and
heterodoxy in tandem — generated the persecution that was alien to
and unnecessary in popular religion. Those familiar with scholarship on
popular religion know that standard explanations for Christianity’s im-
probable success in premodern Europe are syncretism and accultura-
tion. The church occasionally accommodated, or appropriated, popular
practices and beliefs, attempting tactically, as Ginzburg and Schmitt
thought, to “reassert control over the masses.”68 In this view— however
paradoxically — popular religion was a tool to ensure the success of the
very religious system whose otherwise inevitable failure that tool’s tena-
cious existence proved.69
But what the ecclesiastical sources to which scholars appealed showed,
most dramatically and clearly, as a means to that success was not accul-
turation, but rather repressive force. Heresy inquisitions such as those of
Étienne de Bourbon were the darkest extent of the bicultural opposition,
painfully imbalanced in power, between “clerical culture and folk culture.”
Inquisition sought the excision of popular elements, obviated through
the arm of force Christianity’s necessary failure, and targeted popular
culture as an “object of repression.”70 Inquisition’s own attention to the
“folk” had preceded that of scholarship on popular religion, and its own
sources had been a foundation of those studies. But inquisition was also,
in that work, itself an argument to be raised against elite Christianity
and in favor of the fluid, tolerant natural faith that the church had tried
at best to coopt and at worst to extinguish.71
Most significant then for students of medieval heresy inquisitions
is how deeply in these depictions Christianity — particularly in its writ-
ten and doctrinal character, ostensibly neither functional nor “from the
heart”— structurally intertwines with compulsion and coercion. The
theme of “mis-fit” often present in popular-religion scholarship implic-
itly posited repressive hegemony as endemic to a Christianity that pre-
sumably meshed poorly with everyone, not just low social classes or the
illiterate. Van Engen noted in “Christian Middle Ages” the troubled mat-
ter of “the extent of the ‘Christianization’ of medieval society, that is,
the degree to which specifically Christian teachings and practices shaped
 Authentic, True, and Right \ 105

the cultural milieu of medieval folk both high and low.”72 The question
the historian of inquisition might ask, after reading about Christianity’s
difficulties and shortcomings, was not how medieval people became bet-
ter Christians through instruction, preaching, confession, and so on, but
rather how anyone became Christian at all. Even learned clerics had
their own “human needs.” Why would they embrace a faith that could
not satisfy those needs without borrowing from traditions outside of it?
If Christianity was so unsuited to medieval Europeans, only various
hegemonic social, political, and economic forces can explain Christian-
ity’s dominating presence in medieval Europe.
At the same time, positing a stark conflict between a popular religion
and an elite church culture that repressed it could also mean underesti-
mating the pervasiveness, reach, and power of ecclesiastical repression in
premodern Europe. Ginzburg described the “permanent confrontation
between different cultures” as the “essence” of anthropology, and belief
in that permanent confrontation was crucial in imagining and describing
premodern popular religion. In the sources mined by scholars of popular
religion, inquisition’s literally and figuratively dialogic character — the
personal encounter between inquisitor and deponent — well supported
an anthropological “two cultures” model.73 However, this meant sharp-
ening cultural differences between clerical inquisitor and lay witness;
as Van Engen observed, those “two distinct cultures” were not so distinct
in background, interests, or religious sympathies and habits.74 Anthro-
pology’s influence upon popular-religion scholarship surely encouraged
the deepening of cultural and devotional divides between clerical and lay
Christians, of various social and economic classes, in medieval Europe.
In retreating from an exaggerated cultural divide and looking differently
at ecclesiastical persecution, we might ask how scholarship on popular re-
ligion that posited a protolayer of natural faith would respond to recent
arguments about constructions of heresy. When Van Engen wrote, R. I.
Moore’s paradigm of the persecuting society, with its ramifications for
our understanding of ecclesiastical conceptualizations of heresy and of
the encounter between inquisitors and laypeople, was not yet entrenched
in medieval studies. In dominant scholarly interpretations today, medi-
eval heterodoxy was the result of clerics’ categorizations and construc-
tions, rather than a reality continued from human origins, as it was to
 106 / Christine Caldwell Ames

many scholars of popular religion. Power was gained and increased by

churchmen who fashioned and refashioned stereotypes in order to ex-
cise outsiders, rather than in play through the clash of two truly distinct
religious faiths.
Arguments about heresy, its construction, and its essentialized char-
acter in the high Middle Ages themselves show the influence of anthro-
pology, particularly through the contention that categorizing heresy and
the resulting repression pursued purity by creating marginalized out-
groups.75 Those arguments are also unquestionably premised upon the
significance of culture and class. But they also encourage us to view the
disciplinary aims of churchmen and inquisitors as more ambitious and
wide-ranging. Inquisitions and other forms of spiritual discipline were
not tools wielded only against popular beliefs branded heretical or super-
stitious, or against folk culture. The “two cultures” model rested on the
idea that one culture was the repressor and the other the repressed. But
we might instead focus on the exhaustiveness, the totality, of spiritual dis-
cipline and repression throughout later-medieval religious culture. Heresy
inquisitions were directed against clerics, too; more broadly, ecclesiastics
at all levels were subject to discipline in both the immediate and the more
theoretical sense. Inquisition was one component of an ambitious com-
plex of spiritual discipline that did not discriminate socially against the
bodies and souls it sought to subjugate.
The definitions and constructions that marked the scholarship on
popular religion to which John Van Engen responded had other implica-
tions for Christianity as a historical phenomenon. There, medieval Chris-
tianity could be many things— an institution, an elite social class, a hege-
monic cultural force—but its ability to be a “religion,” as many scholars
now understood that term, was diminished. But in a sense, when that
scholarship cut medieval Christianity in two, it gave its “elite” version too
much credit. As Obelkevich said of the Davis seminar papers, “Religion
appears . . . less often in its doctrinal or ecclesiastical purity than with the
impurities and accretions of particular social contexts.”76 We can appreci-
ate his attempt to distinguish the study of popular religion from that of
high theology and acknowledge the need still to do so in 1973. But Obel-
kevich, like much of this scholarship, wrongly implied that “non-popular”
Christianity as a historical entity was not variegated and impure, not a
 Authentic, True, and Right \ 107

composite, and not influenced by social contexts. In scholarly contrasts

of popular dynamism to elite purity, Christianity became less organic,
vulnerable, and evolving: as if only literate intellectuals had antiseptically
birthed and nurtured it from its antique origins in the Greek east; as if
doctrinal orthodoxy was uncreated, hermetic, and exhaustive; as if Chris-
tianity’s character and content were immune to historical circumstance;
as if the normative beliefs and practices that gradually and controversially
developed over the faith’s first (and non-hegemonic) centuries did so di-
vorced from “human needs.” A pure, unitary, and self-evident Christianity
is an image that Étienne de Bourbon would have warmly endorsed.77 But
it never existed. To capture the diversity and breadth of medieval reli-
gious life, we cannot diminish the roles of contingency and construction
in the most “elite” Christianity and in Christian orthodoxy, or forget how
Christianity, from its origins and at all levels, was a congeries of differ-
ence, conflict, creativity, the oral and the written, the rending of bonds as
well as sealing them, making life harder as well as making it easier.

Conclusion

Of the two religions that emerged from scholarship on premodern popu-

lar religion, one of them matched expected norms for an essentialized re-
ligion resident in the human experience and was therefore viewed as
healthily self-perpetuating. One did not and was not, and so tactically
created the persecution that, in turn, justified its condemnation as unnatu-
ral, irreligious, and antihumanist.78 Visible was a contrapuntal clash not
just between two cultures, but also between the pervasive Christianity
that had ostensibly comprised the “Age of Faith” and the now-discovered
natural religion so dissimilar to it. It was between authentic religion and
what appeared not to be a religion at all. This clash was the same as that
of Étienne de Bourbon, but the tables had turned; now the inauthentic
religion was the one that failed to unite communities, to smooth hard-
ships, and to help persons assuage fear and anxiety. It was the religion
that was restrictive rather than inclusive.
This long genealogy of finding and observing “popular religion”
(under its various names) consistently did so in pursuit of a truer religion
 108 / Christine Caldwell Ames

and consistently claimed to discern this religion authoritatively. However,

over that time, there was inconsistency and tension in what these ob-
servers saw as the purpose of investigating popular beliefs and practices.
For some the value was pastoral and disciplinary. For example, we might
add to inquisitors such as Étienne de Bourbon some representatives dis-
cussed by Van Engen: the early twentieth-century development in Ger-
many of religiöse Volkskunde, indebted to the “practical, pastoral concern”
of a Lutheran clergy seeking better to tend its flock, and the Catholic
religious sociology of Étienne Delaruelle and Gabriel Le Bras.79 But for
others it was humanist and ethical. For Hume, for nineteenth-century
“scientists of religions,” and for anthropologists of religion, the benefits
of attending to the religion of the people fell not to those who possessed
it — that is, by correcting or by educating them — but rather to those
both inside and outside the tradition. Of course, those with a pastoral
interest were often Christian clerics, and those with a more broadly hu-
manist interest were generally not. But if Christian scholars believed that
the souls of the populus Christianus could be saved through investigating
such practices and beliefs, their colleagues who did not share explicitly
pastoral or confessional aims nevertheless presented their own analyses
as having moral value. Attending to the “people” could beneficially in-
crease comparative understanding among world religions, could loosen a
stifling Christian hegemony, and could further the humanist value of re-
thinking religion’s very purposes and utilities. It is not difficult to see in
the scholarship so prominent in the 1970s and 1980s the ethical interest
in proving genuine religion to be, simply, religion that was tolerant.80
If we have so far emphasized some shared premises between medi-
eval inquisitors and modern scholars, we must note a crucial difference.
Even if we want to argue that “the historian’s propensity to sort religious
behavior into approved and disapproved categories” continues a pattern
from the inquisitorial enterprise, this is not to equate the two. There is a
stark difference between writing about something and persecuting it. No
matter how implicitly or explicitly critical scholars might be about a
“non-popular” Christianity that seemed to violate their criteria for au-
thentic religion, unlike medieval inquisitors they were not empowered to
exterminate it. And I am not arguing that Christianity in its medieval Latin
 Authentic, True, and Right \ 109

form was indeed successful at doing all of the things that now seemed to
define religion — cohering communities, easing anxieties, and so on — a
matter that John Van Engen’s article is a powerful starting point for con-
sidering. My point in evoking this long history, in which the beliefs and
practices of the “people” were a landscape against which to work out and
to assert authoritative definitions of religion, is to consider its ramifica-
tions for our understandings of medieval inquisition and Christianity
more generally, and to ask whether that process is escapable. Again, the
fundamental questions raised by Van Engen’s article— what was the con-
tent and character of medieval Christianity, how have the broad strokes
of its depictions changed with scholarly shifts, and what suppositions
must we hold to access it?— are perennial, even as “popular religion” has
become less fashionable in medieval studies.81 Those questions, and the
depictions of Christianity, religion, and medieval persecution offered by
scholarship on popular religion, are perhaps especially pertinent for in-
quisition historians. This is so precisely because since the high Middle
Ages inquisition has been a powerful gauge of religious (in)authenticity,
and because inquisition historians are sensitive to our disconcerting re-
semblances and debts to the inquisitors we study and whose sources
we use.82 It is also because we are regularly confronted in our research by
the encompassing place medieval Christianity made, among all kinds of
Christians, for repression, pain, and discipline.
One key question prompted by “popular religion” for students of
inquisition, and for medievalists, then is: In writing the history of Chris-
tianity, including the history of heresy inquisitions, how do we break from
a schema of discernment and authority about “right” religion — that
“propensity to sort religious behavior into approved and disapproved
categories”— that is indebted, in part, to inquisitors themselves? The
scholarship considered above reminds us how difficult it is to construct
and to delimit religion and Christianity as historical subjects and to
define Christian orthodoxy as an interpretive category. Whether we per-
ceive a popular religion that we excise from Christianity (or vice versa),
affirm a singular Christianity, or embrace Vauchez’s “plusieurs variétés
de christianisme,” we still inherit a legacy of discernment in which both
“religion” and “Christianity” are self-reflective.83 We know what medieval
 110 / Christine Caldwell Ames

inquisitors were trying to do with their discernments and categorizations;

what we are trying to do can be less clear. It will always be the task of me-
dievalists to ask ourselves whose souls we are trying to save in our studies.
But what I think John Van Engen has done, both in that article and be-
yond it, is to shed that propensity and to encourage us to shed it, too.

Notes

1. John Van Engen, “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical

Problem,” American Historical Review 91 (1986), 519– 52 (quotations 522, 529).
2. Ibid., 530, 552.
3. Ibid., 530 – 31.
4. Pierre Boglioni, “Pour l’étude de la religion populaire au moyen age: le
problème des sources,” in Foi populaire foi savante. Actes du Ve Colloque du Centre
d’études d’histoire des religions populaires tenu au Collège dominicain de théologie (Ot-
tawa) ( Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1976), 93–148. Schmitt: “Stephen of Bour-
bon’s exemplum gives us a totally unprecedented opportunity to attend to both a
legend and a folk rite. This was an almost unheard-of piece of luck.” Jean-
Claude Schmitt, The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children since the Thir-
teenth Century, trans. Martin Thom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1983), 171. Van Engen, “Christian Middle Ages,” 530 – 31.
5. Boglioni, “Pour l’étude,” 136 – 37.
6. Jean-Claude Schmitt, Le saint lévrier: Guinefort, guérisseur d’enfants
depuis le XIIIe siècle ( Paris: Flammarion, 1979), translated into English as The
Holy Greyhound (see note 4 above). Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, vil-
lage occitan de 1294 à 1324 ( Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1975; rev. ed., 1982); trans-
lated into English as Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, trans. Barbara Bray
( New York: Scolar Press, 1978). Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft
and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John Tedeschi
and Anne Tedeschi ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); and
Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century
Miller, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1980).
7. Renato Rosaldo, “From the Door of His Tent: The Fieldworker and
the Inquisitor,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed.
James Clifford and George E. Marcus ( Berkeley: University of California Press,
1986), 81.
8. Dominick LaCapra, “The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a
Twentieth-Century Historian,” in History and Criticism ( Ithaca: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1985), 61– 62.
 Authentic, True, and Right \ 111

9. R. I. Moore, The War on Heresy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012);

Mark Gregory Pegg, The Corruption of Angels: The Great Inquisition of 1245–1246
( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Mark Gregory Pegg, A Most
Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008); Monique Zerner, ed. Inventer l’hérésie?: Discours polé-
miques et pouvoirs avant l’inquisition ( Nice: Université de Nice Sophia-Antopolis,
1998). For countering arguments, see Peter Biller, “Goodbye to Waldensian-
ism?,” Past and Present 192 (2006): 3– 33; L. J. Sackville, Heresy and Heretics in the
Thirteenth Century: The Textual Representations ( Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer,
2011); and Claire Taylor, Heresy, Crusade and Inquisition in Medieval Quercy ( York:
York Medieval Press, 2011).
10. Natalie Zemon Davis, “Some Tasks and Themes in the Study of Popu-
lar Religion,” in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion,
ed. Charles Trinkaus and Heiko Obermann ( Leiden: Brill, 1974), 311. Her con-
cern was rather in evoking relational meanings in acts and beliefs.
11. Davis, “Tasks and Themes,” 307; André Vauchez, “Conclusion,” in La
Réligion populaire en Languedoc du XIIIe siècle à la moitié du XIVe siècle, Cahiers de
Fanjeaux 11 ( Toulouse: Privat, 1976), 435; R. W. Scribner, “Ritual and Popular
Religion in Catholic Germany at the Time of the Reformation,” Journal of Eccle-
siastical History 35, no. 1 (1984): 48.
12. Étienne Delaruelle, “La pietà popolare nel secolo XI,” in Relazioni del
Xo congresso internazionale di scienze storiche, t. 3 ( Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1955),
309n1.
13. N. A., “Une enquête sur les ‘spiritualités populaires,’ ” Revue d’histoire
de la spiritualité 49 (1973), 493.
14. M.-H. Vicaire, “Introduction,” in La Réligion populaire en Languedoc
du XIIIe siècle à la moitié du XIVe siècle, Cahiers de Fanjeaux 11 ( Toulouse: Pri-
vat, 1976), 7.
15. Jean-Claude Schmitt, “ ‘Religion Populaire’ et Culture Folklorique,”
Annales: ESC 31 (1976): 941.
16. G. J. Cuming and Derek Baker, eds., Popular Belief and Practice: Papers
Read at the Ninth Summer Meeting and the Tenth Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical
History Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); James Obelke-
vich, ed., Religion and the People 800 – 1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1979).
17. The 1970s produced numerous introductory, synthetic articles at-
tempting to define and to delimit the field. See Pietro Boglioni, “Élements d’un
Bilan,” in Les religions populaires: Colloque international, 1970, ed. Benoît Lacroix
and Pietro Boglioni (Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1972), 53– 63;
Michel Mollat, “Les formes populaires de la piété au moyen age. Introduction
au colloque sur la piété populaire,” in La piété populaire au Moyen Âge. Actes du 99e
congrès national des Sociétés Savantes, Besançon 1974. Section de philologie et d’histoire
 112 / Christine Caldwell Ames

jusqu’à 1610, t. 1 (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1977), 7– 25; André Vauchez, “La
piété populaire au moyen âge: État des travaux et position des problèmes,” in La
piété populaire au Moyen Âge, 27– 42; Raoul Manselli, La religione popolare nel medio-
evo (Sec. VI–XII) ( Turin: G. Giappichelli, 1974), 1–10; Raoul Manselli, La religion
populaire au moyen âge: Problèmes de méthode et d’histoire. Conférence Albert-le-Grand
1973 ( Montréal: Institut d’Études Médiévales, 1975), 11– 41; Vicaire, “Intro-
duction,” and Vauchez, “Conclusion,” in La Réligion populaire en Languedoc, 7–11,
429– 444; Davis, “Tasks and Themes,” 307– 36; Leonard E. Boyle, “Popular Piety
in the Middle Ages: What Is Popular?” Florilegium 4 (1982): 184 – 93; Schmitt,
“‘Religion populaire’ et Culture Folklorique” and “Une enquête sur les ‘spiritual-
ités populaires.’” For a concise summary of the field’s diversity— and the interest-
ing observation that little work on popular religion has appeared in Germany—
see Scribner, “Ritual and Popular Religion,” 47– 48. Davis later took stock of the
concept’s evolution throughout the 1970s: Natalie Zemon Davis, “From ‘Popular
Religion’ to Religious Cultures,” in Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research, ed.
Steven Ozment (Saint Louis: Center for Reformation Research, 1982), 321– 41.
18. John Shinners, “Introduction,” in Medieval Popular Religion 1000 –1500:
A Reader ( Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1997), xvi; Boyle, “Popular
Piety in the Middle Ages.” Robert Scribner: “Popular belief may, in general, be
regarded as the belief held by the mass of the people, by contrast to that held by
the religious elite who make up the clerical hierarchy of the Church, the ‘pro-
fessional men of religion’. But this distinction should not be too rigidly drawn.”
Robert Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German
Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 95.
19. For example, Obelkevich: “The authors have broken with the related
discipline of ecclesiastical history and have abandoned its confines and conven-
tions.” Obelkevich, “Introduction,” 3. Schmitt criticized Delaruelle, and the “popu-
lar religion” scholarship following in Delaruelle’s more conservative train, for
failing to recognize that folkloric culture undergirded the daily, religious life of
the “masses,” and for limiting his conception of folklore to the medieval West.
Schmitt, “Religion populaire et culture folklorique,” 944 – 45. Incisive source-
methodological critiques of scholars dwelling in “popular belief ” have come from
LaCapra, “Cosmos of a Twentieth-Century Historian,” 45– 69; Leonard E. Boyle,
“Montaillou Revisited: Mentalité and Methodology,” in Pathways to Medieval Peas-
ants, ed. J. Ambrose Raftis ( Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies,
1981), 119– 40; Rosaldo, “Door of His Tent,” 77– 97; and Anne Jacobson Schutte,
“Carlo Ginzburg,” Journal of Modern History 48, no. 2 (1976): 296– 315.
20. E. O. James, “The Influence of Folklore on the History of Religion,”
Numen 9, no. 1 (1962): 1–16; Julio Caro Baroja, “Del folklore religioso europeo
como disciplina histórica,” Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares 21 (1965):
370 – 79; Don Yoder, “Toward a Definition of Folk Religion” and “Introductory
Bibliography on Folk Religion,” Western Folklore 33, no. 1 (1974): 2– 34. On the
 Authentic, True, and Right \ 113

influence of the lay interests of Delaruelle and Gabriel Le Bras, see André
Vauchez, “Étienne Delaruelle Historien,” in Étienne Delaruelle, La piété populaire
au Moyen Age ( Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1980), 5–19; M.-H. Vicaire, “Liminaire.
L’apport Étienne Delaruelle aux études de spiritualité populaire médiévale,” in
La religion populaire en Languedoc, 23– 36; Peter Biller, “Popular Religion in the
Middle Ages,” in Companion to Historiography, ed. Michael Bentley ( London:
Routledge, 1997), 224 – 26, 236. As Gábor Klaniczay observes, many scholars in-
vestigating popular religion were inspired by the popular-culture analysis of So-
viet literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Gábor Klaniczay, The Uses of Supernatural
Power: The Transformation of Popular Religion in Medieval and Early-Modern Europe
( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 2– 3, 10 – 27. Bakhtin’s most in-
fluential book was first published in English in 1965: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais
and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965).
21. Paul Freedman and Gabrielle Spiegel, “Medievalisms Old and New:
The Rediscovery of Alterity in North American Medieval Studies,” American
Historical Review 103, no. 3 (1998): 677– 704; John Van Engen, “Practice Beyond
the Confines of the Medieval Parish,” in Educating People of Faith: Exploring the
History of Jewish and Christian Communities, ed. John Van Engen (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2004), 151.
22. A methodological problem to remain unaddressed here is the degree of
disconnect between medieval ecclesiastics’ definition of “superstition” and this
term’s deployment by modern scholars of popular religion. See Michael D. Bailey,
Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013); and Schmitt, Holy Greyhound, 14 – 24.
23. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Popular Religious Beliefs and the Late Roman
Historians,” in Cuming and Baker, Popular Belief and Practice, 11. On paganism
as a “category of difference” created by early Christians and the difficulties this
has provided for subsequent scholars, see James Palmer, “Defining Paganism in
the Carolingian World,” Early Medieval Europe 15, no. 4 (2007): 402– 25.
24. Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Chris-
tianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 17– 22, 124.
25. “de supersticione vani cultus divinacionum, incantacionum, sortilegio-
rum, ludificacionum demonum diversarum, per que dyabolus impugnat popu-
lum christianum, trahens post se cum cauda fallacis seductionis innumerabiles
[animas] stultorum, quorum infinitus est numerus.” Étienne de Bourbon, Anec-
dotes historiques légendes et apologues tirés du recueil inédit d’Étienne de Bourbon, Do-
minicain du XIIIe siècle, ed. A. Lecoy de la Marche ( Paris: Librairie Renouard,
1877), 314. The Guinefort exemplum is found on pages 325– 28.
26. Biller argues that “popular heresy” has often been wrongly conflated
with “popular religion,” observing the misleading weight of our inquisitorial
sources on knowledge of “heretical laity.” Biller, “Popular Religion in the Middle
Ages,” 235– 40.
 114 / Christine Caldwell Ames

27. Voltaire’s Traité sur la tolérance (1763), which included a brief imagined
dialogue with a Dominican inquisitor, was typical, asking “si Jésus-Christ a
établi des lois sanguinaires, s’il a ordonné l’intolérance, s’il fit bâtir les cachots
de l’Inquisition, s’il institua les bourreaux des auto-da-fé.” Voltaire, Traité sur la
tolérance à l’occasion de la mort de Jean Calas, available at http://athena.unige.ch
/athena/voltaire/voltaire_traite_tolerance.html. A handy overview of Enlight-
enment views on religious liberty and toleration is found in Simone Zurbuchen,
“Religion and Society,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philoso-
phy, 2 vols., ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), 2:779– 813.
28. Voltaire, Traité sur la tolérance; see especially chapters 10 (“Du danger
des fausses légendes et de la persécution”) and 20 (“S’il est utile d’entretenir le
peuple dans la superstition”). Verbuchen, “Religion and Society,” 793.
29. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, in Principal Writings on
Religion, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 151,
165– 66, 176, 178– 80, 182, 184.
30. Ibid., 139– 40, 176.
31. Ibid., 135, 138. “Our [Christian] ancestors in Europe” believed in
elves, fairies, and goblins, as polytheism “still prevails among the greatest part of
uninstructed mankind” among “the savage tribes of America, Africa, and Asia”
(143– 44).
32. Ibid., 158– 60.
33. Ibid., 153, 180.
34. Ibid., 161– 62.
35. Ibid., 160 – 61.
36. Ibid., 162.
37. Ibid., 162– 63.
38. Van Engen, “Christian Middle Ages,” 529. Scholars such as Tylor,
Smith, and Frazer built important foundations for later scholarship on premod-
ern popular religion with their progressive, linear models of religious develop-
ment. These models posited that identical stages of evolution proceeded in a
staggered fashion; what the “primitive” did now gestured dependably toward the
European past. These progressive models defined the “savage” as unwritten, un-
doctrinal, visceral, and responding to the mysteries of life, whether this appeared
in the long-ago European past, in the non-European present, or was even, in
some cases, barely covered in the European present by a thin drape of ethical,
scriptural, learned faith. This evolutionary progressivism was influenced not just
by Darwin, but also by geologist Charles Lyell (1797–1875). To Smith, the
“record of religious thought of mankind . . . resembles the geological record of
the history of the earth’s crust, the new and the old are preserved . . . layer on
layer.” William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, 2d ed.
 Authentic, True, and Right \ 115

( Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1894), 24. J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough:
A Study in Comparative Religion, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1890) (the first of
three exponentially longer editions). This “science” of religions could lean heavily
on the discipline of folklore, as in Frazer’s work, although folklorists originally ig-
nored religious practice as not pertinent to their field. Wolfgang Brückner, “Popu-
lar Piety in Central Europe,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 5 (1968): 159.
39. Obelkevich, “Introduction,” 3– 4; see also Biller, “Popular Religion in
the Middle Ages,” 227– 28.
40. Robert Muchembled, “The Witches of the Cambrésis: The Accultura-
tion of the Rural World in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Religion and
the People 800 –1700, 222, 273. Jean-Claude Schmitt, “‘Jeunes’ et danse de chevaux
de bois: le folklore méridional dans la littérature des ‘exempla’ ( XIIIe – XIVe
siècles),” in La Religion populaire en Languedoc, 152; Schmitt, Holy Greyhound,
7– 8. The intersection of magic and popular belief in premodern Europe was a
natural and powerful channel for anthropology’s influence: most obviously,
Keith Thomas and his student Alan MacFarlane both depended upon Evans-
Pritchard’s study of witchcraft among the Azande for their own analyses of early
modern English magic and witchcraft. On Evans-Pritchard’s attractions for Euro-
pean historians, see Carlo Ginzburg, “The Inquisitor as Anthropologist,” in Clues,
Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 157– 58; and Rosaldo, “Door of His
Tent.” See also Jean-Pierre Dedieu, “The Archives of the Holy Office of Toledo
as a Source for Historical Anthropology,” in The Inquisition in Early Modern Eu-
rope: Studies on Sources and Methods, ed. Gustav Henningsen and John Tedeschi
(DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), 158– 89; and William H.
Beik, “Searching for Popular Culture in Early Modern France,” Journal of Modern
History 49 (1977): 266– 81 (which defines the popular as “the bulk of the nonelite
population” counter to “the ruling elite”).
41. Boyle, “Montaillou Revisited,” 139– 40.
42. “The peasant like the primitive is a plain unsophisticated practical
person full of common sense but very much aware of the mystery and rhythm
of life, often living under precarious conditions of climate and environment
over which he has little if any control.” James, “Influence of Folklore,” 3. The
first sentence of Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic established this
equation: “In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries England was still a pre-
industrial society, and many of its essential features closely resembled those
of the ‘under-developed areas’ of today.” Thomas, Religion and the Decline of
Magic, 3.
43. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1965), 14 –15.
44. Van Engen, “Christian Middle Ages,” 522.
 116 / Christine Caldwell Ames

45. For a classic instance of religious functionalism, see Bronislaw Malinow-

ski, Magic, Science, and Religion and Other Essays ( Boston: Beacon, 1948), which
departed from the evolutionary progressivism of nineteenth-century “scientists”
of religion.
46. James, “Influence of Folklore,” 3– 4, 6, 10, 14 –16. Le Roy Ladurie,
Montaillou, 277.
47. Schmitt, Holy Greyhound, 73 (“how ancient and how enduring these
practices were”), 159.
48. Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, 140, 151, 297, 322. Boyle is bitingly criti-
cal: “Montaillou Revisited,” 139– 40.
49. Ginzburg, Cheese and the Worms, 33, 58, 117.
50. Ibid., 112.
51. On the shepherd Pierre Maury’s sense of fate: “In him as in others it is
simply a very old peasant idea quite natural in societies where there is no growth
and where people literally have no choice.” Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, 133.
52. Cf. Étienne Delaruelle, “Dévotion populaire et hérésie au moyen age,”
in Hérésies et Sociétés dans l’Europe pré-industrielle, 11e– 18e siècles, ed. Jacques Le
Goff ( Paris: Mouton, 1968), 150.
53. André Vauchez, “Conclusion,” in La Religion populaire en Languedoc,
431– 33.
54. Shinners, “Introduction,” xvi, 460.
55. Ibid., xvii.
56. Ibid., xvii.
57. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk, 95. From Hume: “Another cause,
which rendered the ancient religion much looser than the modern, is, that the
former were traditional and the latter are scriptural; and the tradition in the for-
mer was complex, contradictory, and, on many occasions, doubtful; so that it
could not possibly be reduced to any standard or canon, or afford any determi-
nate articles of faith. . . . The less importunate and assuming any species of su-
perstition appears, the less will it provoke men’s spleen and indignation.” Hume,
Natural History of Religion, 172– 73.
58. “A different religious concept, rooted in the Gospels, free of dogmatic
requirements, and reduced to a core of practical precepts.” Ginzburg, Cheese and
the Worms, xxiii, 9. “This was an explicit recognition of the equivalence of all
faiths, in the name of a simplified religion, free of dogmatic or confessional con-
siderations” (51). On universalism, see 49.
59. Ginzburg, Cheese and the Worms, 112.
60. See note 17 above.
61. See note 10 above.
62. Jonathan Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Critical Terms
for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1998), 269.
 Authentic, True, and Right \ 117

63. James, “Influence of Folklore,” 12–13. Le Roy Ladurie: Christian feast-

days “often involved some folkloric or even pagan elements”; Le Roy Ladurie,
Montaillou, 308, 347. Cf. Van Engen, “Christian Middle Ages,” 543– 44.
64. Seventeenth-century English divine Herbert Thorndike observed of
his contemporaries that “People weary of their Christianity because it easeth
them not of the little discontentments of their estate in this world which they
meet with.” Herbert Thorndike, An Epilogue to the Tragedy of the Church of En-
gland ( London, 1659), 3:290, quoted in Keith Thomas, “An Anthropology of
Religion and Magic, II,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 6, no. 1 (1975): 101.
65. Schmitt, “ ‘Jeunes’ et danse de chevaux de bois,” 152.
66. Ludo J. R. Milis, ed., The Pagan Middle Ages, trans. Tanis Guest ( Wood-
bridge: Boydell, 1998), 10. One cannot pass by church historian and Jesuit Nor-
man Tanner’s remark that upon seeing Milis’s brief book, “my first reaction was
to feel that if this is all the paganism that can be found in the Middle Ages, there
cannot have been so very much of it.” Norman Tanner, The Ages of Faith: Popu-
lar Religion in Late Medieval England and Western Europe ( London: I. B. Tauris,
2009), 193. See too, coming from a perspective very different from Milis’s, Boyle,
“Popular Piety,” 189. Cf. Delaruelle: “Il est pourtant un domaine où la dévotion
populaire recouvre l’hérésie et où l’on voit celle-ci se maintenir sous ce masque:
c’est le domaine de la superstition, témoin du paganisme antique qu’elle entre-
tient. . . . le mot d’hérésie n’a-t-il pas été employé par les hommes du Moyen
Age pur définir cette fidelité aux traditions ancestrales, mais l’on sait que cer-
tains des vieux cultes antérieurs au christianisme ont survécu à l’évangelisation
et restèrent vivaces jusqu’à la fin du Moyen Age. Ils entretiennent tout un
monde de sentiments, de pensées, de comportements moraux, profondément
étrangers à la foi catholique.” Delaruelle, “Dévotion populaire et hérésie au
moyen age,” 151.
67. Schmitt, Holy Greyhound, 1, 7, 177. For nuanced discussions of the
place of literacy and the written in heretical movements that engaged different
social levels, see Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and
Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries ( Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1983); and Peter Biller and Anne Hudson, eds., Heresy and
Literacy, 1000 –1530 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
68. Schutte, “Carlo Ginzburg,” 307. A good example of this is Ginzburg,
Cheese and the Worms, 126; see also Schmitt, Holy Greyhound, 7; and Schmitt,
“ ‘Religion Populaire’ et Culture Folklorique,” 948. Peter Biller incisively re-
marked that Schmitt’s opposition of “ruling ideology (Christianity)” to “folkloric
culture,” and the former’s tactical récuperation of the latter, served to broaden
Friedrich Engels’s arguments about medieval sociopolitical dissent. Rather than
seeing opposition in scattered and irregular heresies, Schmitt located it in a folk-
loric culture “ubiquitous in time and place,” thus broadening and universalizing
conflict between rulers and ruled. Biller, “Popular Religion,” 229. For a milder
 118 / Christine Caldwell Ames

and more positive view of Christianity’s “adaptation” of folk elements, see

James, “Influence of Folklore.”
69. Van Engen, “Christian Middle Ages,” 548. Ginzburg (Cheese and the
Worms, xv) was skeptical of a too-reductive monodirectional model of accultura-
tion. So was Manselli; Manselli, La religion populaire au moyen âge, 19.
70. Schmitt, “ ‘Religion Populaire’ et Culture Folklorique,” 948– 50; and
Schmitt, “ ‘Jeunes’ et danse de chevaux de bois,” 127– 28.
71. Crucially, Le Roy Ladurie aligned “Cathar and peasant values” to-
gether against “Catholic and urban” ones. Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, 68.
72. Van Engen, “Christian Middle Ages,” 537.
73. Schutte links Ginzburg’s fondness for a conflict model of “two cul-
tures” to his anticlericalism. Schutte, “Carlo Ginzburg,” 304 – 8.
74. Van Engen, “Christian Middle Ages,” 529, 531– 32, 550.
75. Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger was an obvious influence upon R. I.
Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western
Europe 950 –1250, 2d ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).
76. Obelkevich, “Introduction,” 4.
77. Since late antiquity, after all, a prevailing definition of Latin-Christian
orthodoxy — self-consciously formulated within anti-heretical polemic — had
been “what is believed everywhere, always, by all” [id teneamus quod ubique,
quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est]. Vincent of Lérins, The Common-
itorium of Vincent of Lérins, ed. Reginald Stewart Moxon (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1915), 10.
78. Ginzburg, “Inquisitor as Anthropologist,” 159. Vauchez, “Conclu-
sion,” 441.
79. Theologian and minister Paul Drews (1858–1912) first used the phrase
religiöse Volkskunde in 1901. Brückner, “Popular Piety in Central Europe,” 161;
Don Yoder, “Toward a Definition of Folk Religion,” Western Folklore 33, no. 1
(1974): 2– 5; Scribner, “Ritual and Popular Religion,” 47. Vauchez, “Étienne De-
laruelle Historien,” 5–19; Vicaire, “Liminaire. L’apport Étienne Delaruelle,”
23– 36; Biller, “Popular Religion,” 224 – 26, 236. Scribner posited that the ex-
tremes to which National Socialism took the nationalist character of folklore
helped explain why religiöse Volkskunde never developed into vibrant German
scholarship on popular religion: Scribner, “Ritual and Popular Religion,” 47. On
the other hand, Joshua Trachtenberg’s analysis in 1939 of Jewish “folk religion”
made the fascinating, keen, and even poignant argument that “The Jews were an
integral part of medieval Europe and their culture reflected, as in a measure it in-
fluenced, all the forces operative in the general culture of the period. This was
especially so in Germany — and nowhere more notably than in the folk beliefs
that constitute the commonest denominator between peoples.” Joshua Trachten-
berg, Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion ( New York: Behrman’s
Jewish Book House, 1939), xxx. Trachtenberg’s definition of “folk religion” was
 Authentic, True, and Right \ 119

practice that “expressed the common attitude of the people, as against the official
attitude of the Synagogue, to the universe” (xxviii).
80. And thus a religion more accordant with secularism. See Talal Asad,
Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2003); and Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern
Concept ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).
81. As Van Engen has argued in another piece, numerous studies showing
the “success” of Christian instruction at the local/parish level have helped return
the pendulum. Van Engen, “Practice Beyond the Confines of the Medieval
Parish,” 151– 52. As early as 1982, Davis argued that “historians . . . are becoming
increasingly unwilling to adopt [‘magic,’ ‘superstitious,’ and ‘pagan’] as terms for
interpreting religious practise.” Davis, “From ‘Popular Religion’ to Religious
Cultures,” 324. A recent work emphasizes shared culture: Elite and Popular Reli-
gion: Papers Read at the 2004 Summer Meeting and the 2005 Winter Meeting of the
Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory ( Woodbridge:
Boydell and Brewer, 2006).
82. Ginzburg, “Inquisitor as Anthropologist,” 156 – 64; John H. Arnold,
“The Historian as Inquisitor: The Ethics of Interrogating Subaltern Voice,” Re-
thinking History 2, no. 3 (1998): 379– 86.
83. “Il y ait eu plusieurs variétés de christianisme, adaptées à des types dif-
férents de mentalité . . . il a pu y avoir dans le passé des façons différentes d’être
chrétien.” Vauchez, “Conclusion,” 435. Vauchez, unsurprisingly, avoided an “im-
position” model, arguing for scholars’ confusion of “origin” and nature: many
beliefs and practices are not “popular” in origin, but are certainly “popularized.”
Vauchez, “Conclusion,” 433– 34.
 Five

Reconsidering Reform
A Roman Example

maureen c. miller

Historians have been discontented with “reform” as a category of analysis

for some time now.1 Yet the term seems as irreplaceable as it is problem-
atic. While early modernists and Carolingianists have endeavored to de-
velop more nuanced narratives, historians of the eleventh- and twelfth-
century movements, often reductively called “Gregorian” after Pope
Gregory VII (1073–1085), have been slower to seek alternatives. In 1987
Karl Morrison lamented the “immobilization of interpretive discourse”
on this “central theme in European history,”2 but little movement has
occurred since. Fortunately, visual sources and approaches offer oppor-
tunities to clarify the problems we confront in using the term and to posit
solutions.
From the 1970s to the present, art historians have drawn upon the
research of historians to try to connect the ideas of “reformers” to the
art and architecture of Rome and northern Italy in the late eleventh and
twelfth centuries.3 This has been a fruitful endeavor, but one that throws
into high relief the insufficiencies of the historical approaches that the
art historians are drawing upon. The interpretive movement to define an
“art of reform” highlights the pitfalls of what I will here call “dichotomy

123
 124 / Maureen C. Miller

creep.” This problem derives from the prominence of the investiture con-
test in historical studies of reform in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
Reform and the investiture contest, of course, were not unrelated. But
the dichotomies perceived in the investiture conflict—by contemporary
historical actors and by historians—have crept into historical discussions
of reform across the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This is not helpful in
capturing the complex and varied demands for ecclesiastical renewal that
were advocated across the period. There were two allegiances only from
1076 on, and more clearly from 1080 with the election of Wibert of
Ravenna as Pope Clement III: only then is it possible to discern support-
ers of the emperor and an imperial pope, on the one hand, and, on the
other, supporters of Pope Gregory VII and his immediate successors.
This dichotomy, although real, was not necessarily widespread: many in
western Europe avoided taking sides or did so for motives not necessar-
ily related to the issues noised about by polemicists.4 The most common
way the dichotomy that emerged from the schism, and the polemical lit-
erature it generated, has crept into ecclesiastical histories of the period
is the tendency to speak of a reform party or reformers and to identify it
or them with popes such as Leo IX and Gregory VII and their visible
supporters. This implicitly defines anyone else, particularly anyone ques-
tioning or opposing some of their ideas and goals, as unreformed or
against reform. Further, the members of the reform “party” are usually
assumed to share a set of ideas that was the party’s “program,” which
often consists in an ill-defined set of changes advocated by different in-
dividuals over the eleventh century.5 The art historical movement to de-
fine an “art of reform” reveals how untenable and unproductive this di-
chotomy creep among historians is.
The solution to dichotomy creep, I argue, is to abandon entirely the
categories of papal/imperial, reform /unreformed when considering ec-
clesiastical change and ideas about reform in the eleventh century. The
model of two “parties” is bankrupt; a fractious family model is much
more accurate and useful. Such a conceptualization is warranted for a
number of reasons. First, from its origins Christianity used familial lan-
guage to describe relationships among believers, as when Gregory VII
addressed Henry IV as his son.6 Even those excommunicated during
the great battles of eleventh-century reform still believed themselves to
 Reconsidering Reform \ 125

be Christians and, therefore, part of the family. Second, demands for

moral and institutional renewal in the eleventh century focused on social
practices — with whom priests lived, whether money was given in ex-
change for appointments — thought by believers to threaten purity and
spiritual efficacy. A conceptual language drawn from modern politics ef-
faces the complex ramifications of the ecclesiastical changes sought,
which were about more than temporal power. Finally, the complexity of
relationships within families—their capacity to change over time as well
as in different situations, their potential for emotional intensity — is bet-
ter suited to religious relationships than the more programmatic and
calculating categories of politics. Approaching the church in the elev-
enth and twelfth centuries as a fractious family is, at the very least, an in-
teresting model to explore and perhaps a means to produce more nu-
anced appraisal of ecclesiastical change in these crucial centuries.
Visual culture, moreover, can contribute to our understanding of this
particular fractious family. The eleventh-century frescoes of the lower
basilica of San Clemente in Rome offer a particularly clear example, one I
will use to set out— and critique—the key arguments of the effort to
define an “art of reform.” I will then analyze the San Clemente frescoes in
order to reconstruct the lay views on reform that shape their rendering.
These views combined support for some ideas associated with the papal
“party” with opposition to other actions of the same “reformers.” They
venerated the papacy but rejected the stricter separation of the clergy
and laity associated with Gregory VII and his specific policy of elimi-
nating “quasi-lay” clerical orders within the Roman church. Indeed, the
frescoes used images and stories about families to comment on debates
within the late eleventh-century Christian family.

The “Art of Reform” at San Clemente

Mentioned by Saint Jerome in the late fourth century, the ancient titulus
of San Clemente was restored and rebuilt several times.7 The church
still in use today, usually called the “upper basilica,” was built between
1100 and 1118, and its surviving apse mosaics date from this period.8 Ear-
lier phases of the site’s history were unearthed from the mid-nineteenth
 126 / Maureen C. Miller

century,9 and the images under discussion here survive in a space usually
called the “lower basilica.” This excavated space, beneath the floor of the
present basilica, contains the remains of the early Christian church that
preceded it. This church was renovated in the Carolingian era and again
in the late eleventh century,10 just before it was abandoned and filled in
with rubble to form the foundation of the surviving early twelfth-century
basilica. Four large murals survive from the eleventh-century renovation,
one depicting scenes from the Life of Saint Alexius and three others dedi-
cated to Saint Clement: the Miracle of Saint Clement’s Tomb at Cherson, the
Translation of Clement’s Relics, and, in the nave of the church, the Mass
of Saint Clement. The church’s ties with major figures in late eleventh-
century Rome are well documented. Shortly after his arrival in Rome in
1049, Pope Leo IX appointed a member of his entourage, Hugh Can-
didus, as cardinal priest of San Clemente. This entourage also included
Hildebrand, who as Pope Gregory VII removed Hugh Candidus in 1076
( later excommunicating him) and appointed Rainerius as cardinal priest
of San Clemente.11 In 1099 in the basilica of San Clemente this Rainerius
was elected pope and took the name of Pascal ( II).12
Art historians have posited two main connections to reform, and both
have been argued for the San Clemente frescoes. The first is classicizing
elements evoking the early Christian church that many reformers sought
to restore. In support of such a program at San Clemente, Hélène Tou-
bert pointed to the clipeus portrait of Clement — that is, a bust image of
the saint enclosed in a roundel — in the lower portion of the Miracle at
Cherson panel, the decorative bands with acanthus leaves and other mo-
tifs inspired by ancient mosaics, and the dedicatory plate mimicking an
antique lapidary inscription (figure 5.1; see gallery for ch. 5 figures).13
The second connection to reform hinges on the depiction of particular
saints whose cults were favored by prominent advocates of reform. At
San Clemente, the panel dedicated to the life of Saint Alexius supports
this connection, for Pope Leo IX composed a poem in honor of this lay
ascetic, and Peter Damian wrote a sermon on his virtues.14 Alexius, the
son of a Roman senator, fled an arranged marriage in order to live in
chaste poverty and wandered as a beggar in Syria. The panel depicts first
his return to Rome, where he is unrecognized by his father (on horse-
back), and then his death and recognition by his family — aided by the
 Reconsidering Reform \ 127

pope, who discovers the rotulus in his hand that identifies him and tells
the story of his life of penance (figure 5.2).
This second connection, the visualization of models of sanctity, an
important strain of which was the veneration of past popes, has gained
more assent than the connection between classicizing stylistic elements
and reform. Francesco Gandolfo and Peter Cornelius Claussen, for ex-
ample, have both argued that such antique elements were part of a con-
tinuing Roman artistic lexicon, and Claussen has published several com-
pelling sculptural examples from the early eleventh century (at San
Giovanni a Porta Latina and San Gregorio Nazianzeno). Indeed, Gan-
dolfo goes further, dating the antique revival to the late tenth century
and linking it to the Ottonian renovatio imperii.15
But there were other problems with the easy ascription of these fres-
coes to the reform “party” that reveal the consequences of dichotomy
creep. The most widely accepted dating of the San Clemente frescoes,
based on the construction of the walls they were painted upon and on
stylistic factors, places them circa 1090 to 1100.16 Those who see an “art
of reform” in them suggest an association with Rainerius, whom Greg-
ory VII appointed as cardinal priest of the church in 1078 after excom-
municating Hugh Candidus. But did Cardinal Rainerius preside over the
church while the frescoes were being painted? Gregory VII was chased
from the city in 1084, dying in Salerno in 1085, and although his succes-
sor Desiderius/ Victor III was elected in 1086 in the deaconry of Santa
Lucia, he immediately had to beat a hasty retreat from the city. Victor III
spent the rest of his pontificate at Monte Cassino, save for a few days in
1087, when a Norman army briefly liberated Saint Peter’s for him to be
consecrated, and then again for a few more days when summoned by
Matilda of Tuscany as her troops occupied the Leonine city and Traste-
vere. The imperial pope Clement III ( Wibert of Ravenna), however,
recaptured Saint Peter’s — when Matilda’s forces took to fighting the
Normans — and held most of the city until his death on September 8,
1100, forcing Urban II, for his very brief stays in Rome, to shelter with
the Pierleoni. Given Rudolf Hüls’s reconstruction of the presence of
pro-imperial cardinals in the city, it seems highly unlikely that Rainerius
was at San Clemente in the period in which the frescoes were probably
painted.17 The fact that three of the four panels were dedicated to Clement
 128 / Maureen C. Miller

and that the imperial pope controlling the city had taken Clement as
his papal name — both points underscored in the work of Cristiana
Filippini — seems telling in this political context.18 Recently, Serena Ro-
mano has reasserted the connection with Rainerius by suggesting the
frescoes date to 1078 to 1084.19 The effort to connect Rainerius with the
frescoes foregrounds some of the assumptions undergirding the art his-
torical argument for an “art of reform.” A clerical patron is assumed to
contribute the ideology of the decorative program and, because of an
association with Gregory VII, is also assumed to advocate the “reform
party’s program”— even if, as in the case of Rainerius, we have no evi-
dence of his views in the 1090s. The presumption that the reformers
comprised Gregory’s circle underpinned the arguments of art historians
positing an “art of reform.” Thus, when Filippini called attention to the
difficulties with assuming Rainerius presided over San Clemente in the
1090s, a hypothesis of “Ghibelline Art” visualizing the perspectives of
imperial supporters emerged.
This hypothesis foundered immediately because works associated
with supporters of Clement III and supporters of Gregory VII or Victor
III or Urban II look much alike stylistically. Interestingly, our colleagues
in art history are now roughly at the same place as some historians. Ian
Stuart Robinson, for example, has pointed out that both the supporters
of Clement III and those of Gregory VII wanted to revive a golden age:
for one side it was the age of Charlemagne and Otto I, for the other it
was the era of Constantine the Great, Pope Sylvester I, and Pope Gre-
gory the Great.20 Classicizing features in art can be found to support
either appeal to the past. William Tronzo, in reconsidering Toubert’s ar-
gument about the antique decorative motifs in the San Clemente fres-
coes, pointed out that only some of them are specifically early Christian,
whereas others are quoting imperial monuments of the first to third
centuries.21 Robinson has also shown that the supporters of both Clem-
ent III and Gregory VII endorsed reform: Sigebert of Gembloux and
Wido of Ferrara, for example, likewise opposed simony and clerical un-
chastity, even though they condemned Gregory’s attempts to persuade
the laity to boycott the masses of married priests and to compel obedi-
ence to Rome using military force. Some objected to Gregory’s methods,
not his aims.22 The concept of a reform party that assumes support for
 Reconsidering Reform \ 129

reform came only from close associates and vocal advocates of popes
such as Leo IX and Gregory VII is simply untenable. If there was an “art
of reform” in Rome, it was not the creation of a “party.”

Laypeople and Reform

Stepping back from these disputes, we discover instead that these visual
sources can help us understand the complexity of peoples’ views and
their experiences of the struggles over reform in the eleventh century.
What gets sidelined in attempts to discover an art of reform in the San
Clemente frescoes is that we actually know who the patrons of these
paintings were: Beno de Rapiza and Maria Macellaria, a married couple,
who appear not only in the Mass of St Clement panel, but also with their
two children in the dado of the Miracle fresco. The emphasis on Rainer-
ius as the artistic patron behind the frescoes was primarily motivated by
the need to find a link with the reform party and its program. But it also
reveals an assumption that laypeople just provided the financing, not the
ideas, which somehow had to be supplied by a cleric. Why not read the
frescoes as the expression of these patrons’ ideas?
When we do, a series of emphases and interests emerge, the most
important of which is the prominence of laypeople and their families. At
the center of the Miracle panel is a mother and child. According to the
acta of Saint Clement, he was martyred for his missionary efforts in the
Crimea by being thrown in the Sea of Azov, bound to an anchor. Angels
created an undersea tomb for the saint that was miraculously revealed by
the ebbing tide annually on his feast day. According to the legend, on one
of these occasions, a child was caught in the tomb by the returning tide,
only to be discovered the following year miraculously alive and well in
the tomb. This is the scene depicted at San Clemente (figure 5.3). Not
only is the reunion of mother and child at the very center of the image
and directly above the clipeus portrait of Saint Clement, but the mother
and child are depicted twice—once as the mother bends to scoop her son
into her arms and again as she turns to greet the ecclesiastical procession
arriving to celebrate the saint’s feast. We’ll return to this procession and
its clergy below.
 130 / Maureen C. Miller

The story from the acta depicted in the Mass of Saint Clement also fo-
cuses on laypeople (figure 5.4). It tells the story of the devout believer
Theodora and her non-Christian husband, Sisinnius. The husband be-
comes suspicious of his wife’s absences, follows her to the Christian
meeting place, and is struck blind and deaf for having profaned sacred
space. You see him on the right in this debilitated state, having to be led
by a servant out of the church.23 On the other side of Clement we see the
donors of the murals, Beno de Rapiza and Maria Macellaria, offering
candles; an inscription below this central scene records their patronage,
and Beno’s name is inscribed on the fresco near the hem of his garment.24
Gerhard Wolf has noted the didactic opposition set up between the good
behavior of layman Beno and the censured behavior of Sisinnius.25 Yet I
would also underscore the visual prominence of the virtuous wife
Theodora: closest to the altar, she is emphasized by the gesturing figure
next to her and dressed in the same yellow/gold color as the altar cloth,
Clement’s dalmatic, and Maria Macellaria’s gown (although greater cor-
respondence is signaled between the latter and Clement through a pat-
terning to indicate silk).
The Alexius panel also tells a story about lay virtue. Rather than ful-
filling the worldly expectations of his elite Roman family, Alexius spurns
an arranged marriage and becomes a wandering ascetic. Returning
home, unrecognized by his natal family, he continues his ascetic life by
working in their household as their humblest servant. This model of lay
piety differs from the one depicted in the Mass. Interestingly, it privi-
leges visually not Alexius’s wandering in Syria, but his return home to be
with his kin. Notice the visual prominence and role of the clergy in
these panels. At the very center of the panel (figure 5.2), between two
images of Alexius (one alive, one deceased), are the pope and his clerical
entourage discovering the identifying rotulus. They are depicted again
in the final scene as they officiate at the bier of the dead saint while his
family mourns their long-lost son. The pope and his clergy reveal to the
family the saint in their midst but also identify him as their kinsman —
not only so they can properly mourn and inter him, but also so they can
take his example to heart and benefit from his virtue.
The clergy are also visually and narratively prominent in the other
frescoes. They dominate the scene of the Translation of Clement’s Relics
 Reconsidering Reform \ 131

(figure 5.5). Although peripherally placed in the Miracle panel, they rec-
ognize and legitimate the miracle: the bishop leading the procession
gives the viewer the open-handed gesture used to draw the viewer’s at-
tention to the miraculous. In the Mass of Saint Clement (figure 5.4), they
present the patrons Beno and Maria to the saint as he celebrates the
Mass at the altar. The inscriptions on the book lying open on the altar —
“The Lord be with you” ( Dominus vobiscum) legible on one page,
and on the other, “May the peace of the Lord be with you always” ( Pax
Domini sit semper vobiscum)— identify the liturgical moment as that of
the Eucharistic prayer. The posture of the saintly celebrant, his arms
outstretched in the orans position, underscores the priest’s role as alter
Christus.26 Here the clergy again make the holy manifest to the laity — in
the Eucharist actually confecting the saving body and blood of Christ to
help bring them to redemption. The clergy, in sum, are accorded very
important and necessary roles in these frescoes, but they are positioned
in service to the laity, facilitating in particular the devotion and salvation
of parents and their children.
This seems to me highly significant in light of efforts at reform over
the eleventh century and of the real and violent divisions in Rome and
the broader church in the 1090s over the role of the laity. A papal saint
is celebrated in the Clement frescoes and an important role for the
clergy acknowledged. But lay piety and devotion are central to these de-
pictions of the early church, and lay figures are interspersed with clerics.
This mixing is particularly pointed in the Mass scene, since the architec-
tural frame of the scene resembles contemporary images of Ecclesia from
Exultet rolls. The Monte Cassino Exultet from the very beginning of
the twelfth century illustrates a common representation of the Church:
the personification of Ecclesia takes the place of the celebrant while men
and women participate in their architecturally distinct compartments.
The equation of the celebrant (priest/pope in Clement’s Mass) with the
Church would seem to reflect a tendency in many reformers to replace
the more capacious Carolingian notion of Ecclesia as clergy and people
with a more restricted sense of Church as priestly hierarchy. An eleventh-
century roll now in the Vatican shows the iconography becoming domi-
nant over the period in which the clergy and the laity are rigorously sepa-
rated.27 In the Mass of Saint Clement, however, the artist(s) and patrons
 132 / Maureen C. Miller

invoke conventions that would appear to reflect well-known reform

themes and then resist or complicate them in the details of the composi-
tion. The architectural frame of “Church” is used, and the clergy and
people are generally separated, but the laypeople do not stay on their side
of the church, and women are visually prominent here as models of piety.
Another detail of the Mass fresco also shows resistance to efforts, as-
sociated with Gregory VII, to more sharply delineate the clergy from the
laity. The two clean-shaven and tonsured figures just behind the donors,
escorting them to the altar, are subdeacons: both wear tunicles rather
than diaconal dalmatics and have maniples draped over their arms. These
short, scarf-like ornaments were worn by the major clerical orders of
priests, deacons, and subdeacons, but were particularly associated with
the ordination rite of subdeacons, who received the maniple upon pass-
ing from the lower orders of the minor clergy to the major orders serv-
ing at the altar.28 The two figures behind the subdeacons, however, are
more mysterious: they are tonsured but bearded. Given the hierarchies
of status inscribed in these panels, both in the size of figures and in their
arrangement, it seems reasonable to conclude that these figures are below
the rank of subdeacon.29 But their beards, and the hooked crosiers they
hold, do not accord with the depictions of clerics in any of the canonical
minor orders of porters, acolytes, lectors, or exorcists. The Roman church,
however, also had numerous offices held by persons who were tonsured
but not ordained. Among these were mansionarii and virgarii, what we
might call sacristans, who maintained the church building, especially its
lighting, guarded its treasure, and rang bells, but also had liturgical roles
(holding candles, sprinkling holy water, preparing chrism). I suggest that
the back two figures are virgarii because they are bearing crosiers, and
virga means “staff ” or “shepherd’s crook.”30 Pope Gregory VII and oth-
ers in his circle saw these semi-clerical or quasi-lay Roman church offices
as an abuse needing to be reformed, for they blurred the line between the
clerical and lay estates. Bonizo of Sutri referred to these officials as a pes-
sima consuetudine of the Roman church that Gregory VII had tried to ex-
tirpate cum magna difficultate.31 Yet one can imagine reasons laypeople
such as Beno and Maria may have valued them: they were likely more
available and accessible to the laity than those training for the priest-
hood. Their presence at the Mass of Saint Clement is further evidence that
 Reconsidering Reform \ 133

its lay patrons accepted some, but not all, of the ideas advocated by Greg-
ory VII and his circle. They accorded great prominence to the papacy
and very important roles to the clergy in these frescoes, but they also vi-
sually challenged an ideal of the clergy as a separate and higher caste.
Laypeople too are models of virtue, clerics and laypeople act together,
and pious laypersons who serve the church’s daily needs are valorized.
The proper relation between the clerical hierarchy and laypeople —
particularly lay elites who built, endowed, and patronized churches —
was at the heart of the investiture struggle. Kings such as Henry IV be-
lieved they had a right to choose the bishops whose churches they had
richly endowed. They also, along with many of their subjects, believed
kings had a sacred status and a special, divinely sanctioned role in caring
for God’s people. Gregory VII, of course, challenged both beliefs, fa-
mously asserting not only that there is “nothing in this world more pre-
eminent than priests” but also that “a greater power is granted to an ex-
orcist when he is constituted a spiritual emperor to drive out demons
than may be bestowed upon anyone of the laity on account of secular
domination.”32 To Gregory, the king was a layman, just as the unordained
virgarii who tended Roman churches were laypeople. Beno and Maria’s
frescoes offer us precious evidence of some lay views on the subject. They
do not accord with simplistic dichotomies: they celebrate papal and other
saints favored by associates of Leo IX and Gregory VII and show devo-
tion to the Eucharist and to the clergy, but reject a vision of the church
that equates it with the clergy alone. This visual advocacy for the role of
the laity in the church may have been fostered by supporters of Clem-
ent III in the 1090s and may be one reason the recently restored and re-
frescoed basilica was leveled just after 1100. But the frescoes also include
many elements that accord with the ideas and texts circulated among as-
sociates of Gregory VII.33
Such a mix of ideas makes sense if we conceive of these struggles as
a fractious family disagreement rather than as a conflict between clearly
defined parties. Beno’s and Maria’s ideas about reform, as articulated in
the frescoes they commissioned, do not neatly match up with either the
imperial/unreformed “party” constructed in historical discourse or the
papal/reform “party” and its “program.” Thinking of Christian commu-
nities as more familial than political may help us as historians to recognize
 134 / Maureen C. Miller

and give historical weight to complex views and their potential to de-
velop, strengthen, or weaken over time. Why do we need to give diverse
and changeable ideas about reform historical weight? Because neither a
“papal program” nor an “imperial party” won at Worms in 1122. The
results of the reform movements and the investiture conflict were more
varied and gradual than the results of a contest between parties. They
emerged over generations and were as much products of compromise
and accommodation as of ideological struggle. Framing our understand-
ing of reform as a contest between two coherent, opposing ideological
and political groups does not help us capture the ongoing interaction,
debate, and compromise that produced the church of the twelfth cen-
tury. Imagining reform conflicts played out among individuals who be-
lieved they were supposed to love one another, break bread with one an-
other, and care about one another’s salvation just might. The goals of
experimenting with such a conceptualization would be to understand
the varied ideas in play and the combinations in which they were held;
to isolate more clearly the events and positions that caused real war and
schism; and to construct a compelling narrative of how the schism was
healed and the church transformed.

Notes

1. Gerhart B. Ladner, “Terms and Ideas of Renewal,” and Giles Con-

stable, “Renewal and Reform in Religious Life: Concepts and Realities,” in Ren-
aissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Robert L. Benson, Giles Con-
stable, and Carol D. Lanham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982;
repr. Toronto: University of Toronto Press/Medieval Academy of America,
1991), 1– 33, 37– 67; I. S. Robinson, “Reform and the Church, 1073–1122,” in
The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 4, c. 1024–c.1198, Part I, ed. David Lus-
combe and Jonathan Riley-Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 268– 334; Julia Barrow, “Ideas and Applications of Reform,” in The Cam-
bridge History of Christianity, vol. 3, Early Medieval Christianities, c. 600 –c. 1100,
ed. Thomas F. X. Noble and Julia M. H. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2008), 345– 62.
2. Karl F. Morrison, review of Brigitte Szabó-Bechstein, Libertas ecclesiae:
Ein Schlüsselbegriff des Investiturstreits und seine Vorgeschichte, 4.– 11.Jahrhundert,
Speculum 62 (1987): 999.
 Reconsidering Reform \ 135

3. Ernst Kitzinger initiated the discussion with his essay “The Gregorian
Reform and the Visual Arts: A Problem of Method,” Transactions of the Royal His-
torical Society, 5th series, 22 (1972): 87–102. The most significant rejoinders have
been Hélène Toubert, Un art dirigé: réforme grégorienne et iconographie ( Paris:
Cerf, 1990), a volume collecting essays that Toubert published from 1969 to 1987,
and an Italian version, Un’Arte orientata: Riforma gregoriana e iconografia, trans. Lu-
cinia Speciale ( Milan: Jaca, 2001), that added some essays from the early 1990s;
Christine Verzár Bornstein, Portals and Politics in the Early Italian City-State: The
Sculpture of Nicholaus in Context ( Parma: Istituto di Storia dell’Art Università di
Parma, 1988); Gerhard Wolf, “Nichtzyklische narrative Bilder im italienischen
Kirchenraum des Mittelalters: Überlegungen zu Zeit- und Bildstruktur der
Fresken in der Unterkirche von S. Clemente (Rom) aus dem späten 11. Jahrhun-
dert,” in Hagiographie und Kunst: Der Heiligenkult in Schrift, Bild und Architektur,
ed. Gottfried Kerscher (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1993), 319– 39; Valentino Pace,
“Riforma della chiesa e visualizzazione della santità nella pittura romana: i casi
di Sant’Alessio e di Santa Cecilia,” in Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 46 – 47
(1993–1994): 541– 48; Nino M. Zchomelidse, Santa Maria Immacolata in Ceri:
Pittura sacra al tempo della Riforma Gregoriana / Sakrale Malerei im Zeitalter der
Gregorianischen Reform ( Rome: Archivio Guido Izzi, 1996); Anat Tcherikover,
“Reflections of the Investiture Controversy at Nonantola and Modena,” Zeitschrift
für Kunstgeschichte 60 (1997): 150 – 65; Kristin Noreen, “Lay Patronage and the
Creation of Papal Sanctity during the Gregorian Reform: The Case of Sant’Ur-
bano alla Caffarella, Rome,” Gesta 40 (2001): 39– 59; Serena Romano and Julie
Enckell Julliard, eds., Roma e la Riforma gregoriana: Tradizioni e innovazioni artis-
tiche (XI–XII secolo) (Rome: Viella, 2007); Massimo Mussini, “Pievi e vita canon-
icale nei territory matildici. Architettura e riforma gregoriana nelle campagne,”
in Matilde e il Tesoro dei Canossa tra castelli, monastery e città, ed. Arturo Calzona
(Cinisello Balsamo, Milan: Silvana, 2008), 27– 53; Dorothy F. Glass, The Sculp-
ture of Reform in North Italy, ca. 1095–1130: History and Patronage of Romanesque
Façades (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010).
4. Many also seem either not to have known about key events in this strug-
gle or to have heard only garbled versions: Hanna Vollrath, “Sutri 1046— Canossa
1077—Rome 1111: Problems of Communication and the Perception of Neigh-
bors,” in European Transformations: The Long Twelfth Century, ed. Thomas F. X.
Noble and John Van Engen ( Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
2012), 132– 70.
5. The reform /unreformed dichotomy was most influentially established
in Augustin Fliche, La Réforme grégorienne, 3 vols., Spicilegium sacrum Lova-
niensis, Études et documents 6, 9, 16 ( Louvain: Spicilegium sacrum Lovanien-
sis, and Paris: E. Champion, 1924 –1937); and it continues to form general ac-
counts: Colin Morris, The Papal Monarchy: The Western Church from 1050 – 1250
 136 / Maureen C. Miller

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), especially 79–133; Giulia Barone, “La riforma
gregoriana,” in Storia dell’Italia religiosa 1: L’antichità e il medioevo, ed. André
Vauchez (Rome: Laterza, 1993), 243– 70; Sylvain Gouguenheim, Réforme grégori-
enne: De la lutte pour le sacré à la secularization du monde (Paris: Temps Présent,
2010), 103, 123, 125— where the Dictatus papae is called “un programme,” “une
plateforme d’action,” and Pope Urban II’s supporters are “le camp réformateur”
and Henry IV’s the “parti laïc.”
6. Megan McLaughlin has insightfully explored the uses of such lan-
guage in this period in Sex, Gender, and Episcopal Authority in an Age of Reform,
1000 –1122 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
7. A wonderful introduction to the church is Leonard E. Boyle, O.P., A
Short Guide to St. Clement’s, Rome ( Rome: Collegio San Clemente, 1960; repr.
1989). Jerome’s reference to the ecclesia of San Clemente is in his De viris illus-
tribus, ch. 15, in Patrologia Latina 23, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, 633.
8. Joan Barclay Lloyd, The Medieval Church and Canonry of S. Clemente in
Rome, San Clemente Miscellany III ( Rome: San Clemente, 1989), 118–121; see
also Sible de Blaauw’s important review of this volume in The Journal of the Soci-
ety of Architectural Historians 51, no. 4 (1992): 454 – 57. The consecration date of
this church has been much debated. Lloyd thinks that “it must have been conse-
crated by 1119” because Pope Gelasius II (1118–1119) granted an indulgence to
those who visited the church. Her source for the indulgence is a fifteenth-century
description of an inscription: Lloyd, Medieval Church, 121, 67– 70. Boyle de-
scribes the tortured history of scholarly opinions on this point, concluding that
the earliest sure record of the church’s dedication or consecration was Boniface
VIII’s 1295 indulgence: Leonard E. Boyle O.P., “The Date of Consecration of
the Basilica of San Clemente,” in Art & Archaeology, San Clemente Miscellany II,
ed. Luke Dempsy, O.P. (Rome: San Clemente, 1978), 1–12.
9. First by the intrepid prior of the Irish Dominicans then resident at the
church, Father Joseph Mullooly, and in the past century through the work of Ed-
uardo Junyent, Federico Guidobaldi, and Joan Barclay Lloyd: on the earliest ex-
cavations at San Clemente, see John Osborne, Early Mediaeval Wall-Paintings in
the Lower Church of San Clemente ( New York: Garland, 1984), 8–10, 46; Eduardo
Junyent, Il Titolo di San Clemente in Roma (Rome: Pontificio istituto di archeolo-
gia cristiana, 1932); Federico Guidobaldi, San Clemente, 2 vols., San Clemente
Miscellany IV ( Rome: San Clemente, 1992); an overview with an English sum-
mary is Federico Guidobaldi, “Il Complesso Archeologico di San Clemente,” in
Art & Archaeology, 215– 303; Lloyd, Medieval Church.
10. Some scholars still see this late eleventh-century renovation as necessi-
tated by the violence and destruction attending Robert Guiscard’s rescue of Pope
Gregory VII in May of 1084 from the Castel Sant’Angelo, where the pontiff had
been stranded since Henry IV’s capture of the city the previous year. Archeologi-
cal work at San Clemente, however, has revealed no evidence of a fire at the
 Reconsidering Reform \ 137

church, and the idea that the Norman forces “sacked” the city has been called
into question on textual grounds as well: Lloyd, The Medieval Church, 55– 57, 117;
Louis I. Hamilton, “Memory, Symbol, Arson: Was Rome ‘Sacked’ in 1084?”
Speculum 78 (2003): 378– 99.
11. Uta-Renate Blumenthal, The Investiture Controversy: Church and Mon-
archy from the Ninth to the Twelfth Century ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
vania Press, 1988), 70 – 71; Lloyd, Medieval Church, 54.
12. The association of San Clemente with reform, however, goes beyond
individuals. Joan Barclay Lloyd has demonstrated that a canonry to house the
clergy was built at San Clemente in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries;
it incorporated some monastic architectural elements but is most comparable to
other structures built specifically for secular clerics sharing a communal life.
Lloyd, Medieval Church, 59, 181– 86, 195– 201.
13. Hélène Toubert, “La Renovatio gregoriana a Roma e Montecassino,” in
Un’Arte orientata, 163– 68.
14. Pace, “Riforma della Chiesa,” 543– 44.
15. Francesco Gandolfo, “La pittura romana tra XI e XII secolo e l’An-
tico,” in Roma, centro ideale della cultura dell’Antico nei secoli XV e XVI: da Martino
V al Sacco di Roma 1417–1527, ed. Silvia Danesi Squarzini ( Milan: Electa, 1989),
21– 32.
16. John Osborne, “Proclamations of Power and Presence: The Setting
and Function of Two Eleventh-Century Murals in the Lower Church of San
Clemente, Rome,” Mediaeval Studies 59 (1997): 162– 65.
17. After his ordination as cardinal priest of San Clement, we have notice of
Rainerius in Terracina (March 12, 1088, with Urban II), and in Spain and Gaul as
a legate (1089, 1090). He was in Rome at Santa Maria Nuova with Urban II on
February 6, 1094, in Salerno in September 1098, and at St Peter’s March 24,
1099. Only on August 13, 1099, does he appear at San Clemente. Rudolf Hüls,
Kardinäle, Klerus und Kirchen Roms 1049–1130 ( Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1977),
160 – 61.
18. Cristiana Filippini, “La leggenda di sant’Alessio nella chiesa di S. Clem-
ente a Roma: genesi e funzione di una narrazione pittorica al momento della Ri-
forma gregoriana,” in Roma e la Riforma gregoriana, 298– 99.
19. Serena Romano, La Pittura medievale a Roma, corpus volume 4: Riforma e
tradizione 1050 –1198 ( Milan: Jaca, 2006), 129– 30. The author invokes both sty-
listic factors and “fatti storici attestati in rapporto alla basilica e ai suoi person-
aggi chiave” at the opening of her discussion of the frescoes’ date, but mentions
only events related to Rainerius in explaining the proposed date range circa
1078 to 1084 and highlights the clerical knowledge she sees as necessary to ac-
count for liturgical details in the frescoes. Her stylistic analysis is much more
general and not linked directly to these dates.
20. Robinson, “Reform and the Church,” 281– 86.
 138 / Maureen C. Miller

21. William Tronzo, “On the Role of Antiquity in Medieval Art: Frames
and Framing Devices,” in Ideologie e pratiche del reimpiego nell’alto medioevo, 16– 21
aprile 1998, Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo 46
(Spoleto: CISAM, 1999), 1085–1111, especially 1097– 99.
22. Robinson, “Reform and the Church,” 276 – 82.
23. Depicted below is the sequel: Clement, out of compassion for Theo-
dora, goes to the couple’s home afterward and restores Sisinnius’s sight and
hearing. The husband, however, is enraged to find Clement in his home and or-
ders the holy man tied up and dragged away. The servants are miraculously led
to mistake a column lying about for Clement, and you see them here tying up
the column and trying to remove it. The inscriptions, famous for being one of
the earliest examples of vernacular Italian, record Sisinnius’s exhortations:
“Pull, you sons of whores! Heave away, Gosmai and Albertel! You, Cavoncelle,
get behind with a lever!” ( Fili dele pute, traite. Gosmai, Albertel, traite. Falite
dereto colo palo, Carvoncelle.). A Latin inscription records Clement’s words:
“Because of the hardness of your hearts you have merited to pull building ma-
terials away instead of me” (duritiam cordis vestris saxa traere meruistis). Tou-
bert, “La Renovatio,” 152– 53; Boyle, Short Guide, 56 – 58; Eileen Kane, “The
Painted Decoration of the Church of San Clemente,” in Art & Architecture,
86 – 88; Patrick Geary, “ ‘Pull You Sons of Whores!’: Linguistic Register and
Reform in the Legend of Saint Clement,” in Promoting the Saints, ed. Ottó
Gecser ( Budapest: CEU, 2010), 41– 49.
24. “EGO BENO DE RAPIZA CU( M) MARIA UXOR [sic] MEA P( RO)
AMORE D( E)I ET BEATI CLEMENTI(S) P( IN)G( E)R( E) F( ECI)” ( I,
Beno de Rapiza, with my wife Maria, caused this to be painted for the love of
God and of blessed Clement). The donors and their two children are depicted
below the Miracle at Cherson mural with another inscription. Osborne, “Procla-
mations,” 158– 59, 162– 63n29. The inscription near Beno’s hem is visible in Josef
Wilpert’s plate of this fresco. Wilpert used photographic enlargements made
from negatives shot shortly after the frescoes were excavated and then had an
artist, Carlo Tabanelli, apply gouache colors or gold and silver tints in front of
the originals. In the late 1970s, Per Jonas Nordhagen conducted a minute com-
parison of several of Wilpert’s plates with originals recently restored or newly
accessible, concluding that the plates are “highly accurate and convey a truer
picture of the refinements of the original than any black and white photogra-
phy.” Nordhagen also gave Wilpert’s plates “high marks . . . for their precision
both in the delineating of the subject matter and in the rendering of colours.”
Given the deterioration of many of these works of art since their excavation and
Wilpert’s attention to evidence of restorations and alterations, the plates in his
Die römischen Mosaiken und Malereien der kirchlichen Bauten vom IV.–XIII. Jahr-
hundert, 4 vols. ( Freiburg: Herder, 1916 –1917), provide important documenta-
tion. Per Jonas Nordhagen, “Working with Wilpert: The Illustrations in Die
 Reconsidering Reform \ 139

römischen Mosaiken und Malereien and Their Source Value,” Acta ad Archaeologiam
et Artivm Historiam Pertinentia, Series Altera in 8o 5 (1985): 247– 57.
25. Wolf, “Nichtzyklische narrative Bilder,” 325.
26. “D(OMI)N(U)S VOBISCUM / PAX D(OMI)NI SIT SE(M)P(ER)
VOBI(S) CUM.” Joseph A. Jungmann, S.J., The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins
and Development (Missarum Sollemnia), trans. Francis A. Brunner, 2 vols. ( New
York: Benziger Brothers, 1951), 2:85, 311–14; Toubert, “La Renovatio,” 153; Wolf,
“Nichtzyklische narrative Bilder,” 322– 25; John Osborne, “Framing Sacred
Space: Eleventh-Century Mural Painting in the Churches of Rome,” Analecta ro-
mana instituti Danici 30 (2004): 145.
27. Hélène Toubert, “La rappresentazioni dell’Ecclesia nell’arte del X– XII
secolo,” in Un’Arte orientata, 49– 50.
28. These figures have been misidentified as priests ( Toubert) and deacons
( Wolf ). Neither wears the characteristic attire of the priestly order (chasuble,
stole) or the diaconate (dalmatic), an identifying visual language that the artists of
these panels use with other figures. In addition to the correct liturgical garb of
the subdiaconate (tunicles and maniples), one of the figures is holding a thurible
and incense vessel. Thurifers, when they are identified in the Ordines romani, are
either acolytes or subdeacons. Toubert, “La Renovatio,” 153; Wolf, “Nichtzyklis-
che narrative Bilder,” 322; Roger E. Reynolds, “Image and Text: The Liturgy of
Clerical Ordination in Early Medieval Art,” Clerics in the Early Middle Ages: Hier-
archy and Image (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 1999), 8: figures 14 –17; Michel
Andrieu, Les Ordines Romani au haut moyen age, 5 vols., Spicilegium sacrum lo-
vaniense, Etudes et documents, fasc. 11, 23– 24, 28– 29 ( Louvain: Spicilegium
sacrum lovaniense, 1931–1961), 5 (Ordo L): 228 (XXV.109), 305 (XXXII.9).
29. In the Translation of Clement’s Relics, for example, the pope, flanked by
the priests Cyril and Methodius, heads a crowd of other clerics trailing off be-
hind to the left; from the other side, the order reads pope/celebrant, deacon, and
then the acolytes bearing the bier and candles. Both in the Miracle at Clement’s
Tomb and the Saint Alexius scenes, the pope or bishop is at the head of a mass of
clerics. Rank order among the various grades of clergy is underscored in the
Roman pontifical of the twelfth century: “ordinent se lectores, ostiarii, acoliti, et
subdiaconi et stent in ordine suo, secundum eos gradus ubi ascenditur ad altare.”
Michel Andrieu, Le pontifical romain au moyen age, 5 vols. ( Vatican City: Bib-
lioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1938– 41), 1:223.
30. Roger E. Reynolds, “Clerics in the Early Middle Ages: Hierarchies and
Functions,” Clerics in the Early Middle Ages, 1:7–13; Tommaso di Carpegna Fal-
conieri, Il clero di Roma nel medioevo: Istituzioni e politica cittadina (secoli VIII–XIII)
( Rome: Viella, 2002), 138– 40.
31. The control these officials exerted over sacred objects, combined with
their lack of celibacy, was what earned the mansionarii and virgarii reformist ire.
Bonizo also describes them as “cives romani uxorati seu concubinari, barba rasi
 140 / Maureen C. Miller

et mitrati”; I have no explanation for why they are represented as bearded here.
Carpegna Falconieri, Clero di Roma, 144 – 45.
32. The Register of Pope Gregory VII 1073–1085, trans. H. E. J. Cowdrey (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 391 [8:21].
33. Bonizo of Sutri’s Libellus de sacramentis (ca. 1089), for example, attributed
the canon of the Mass to Pope Clement I and reconstructed a Clementine mass,
and the fresco in San Clemente, particularly the book open on the altar quoting
passages from the canon, seems to quote this work. Toubert, “La Renovatio,” 154.
 Six

O t t o o f F r e i s i n g ’ s Ty r a n t s
Church Advocates and Noble Lordship in
the Long Twelfth Century

j o n a t h a n r . lyo n

During the years between 1050 and 1215, the intellectual elite in west-
ern Europe did not debate the nature of tyranny with the same intensity
as ancient Greek philosophers had — or late medieval and early modern
legal theorists soon would. John of Salisbury discusses tyrants at length
in his Policraticus, but as modern scholars have noted, he was exceptional
in this regard; another century would pass before Thomas Aquinas ad-
dressed the subject of tyranny in detail.1 Despite twelfth-century authors’
disinterest in this topic, some medieval historians have nevertheless been
drawn in recent years to the language of tyranny in the sources from the
period. For these scholars, the indiscriminate employment of this kind
of language in chronicles and other narrative works is evidence for the
endemic problem of violent lordship during the central Middle Ages.
Abbot Suger of Saint Denis’s The Deeds of Louis the Fat is often cited in
this context, because Suger frequently uses the words “tyrant” and “tyr-
anny” in his complaints about capricious lords.2 Indeed, at times Suger
seems to use the term “tyranny” as a synonym for what historians
today call “lordship.”3 Other twelfth-century authors writing in the

141
 142 / Jonathan R. Lyon

Anglo-French sphere were equally unreflective in their use of this lan-

guage.4 Thus, as Thomas Bisson suggests in his 2009 book The Crisis of
the Twelfth Century, “tyranny” was a generic concept for twelfth-century
church writers: “There was nothing technical in the use of this emotive
term, which often corresponded to circumlocutions for violent or coer-
cive power of equal rhetorical force.”5
The aim of this paper is to complicate these arguments about the re-
lationship between tyranny and lordship by examining the works of one
of the most famous twelfth-century authors from the German kingdom,
Bishop Otto of Freising. As I will argue here, Otto does not use the lan-
guage of tyranny indiscriminately. On the contrary, when employing it
to discuss noble lordship during his own lifetime, he reserves its usage for
the Wittelsbachs, the Bavarian noble lineage that controlled the position
of church advocate (Latin: advocatus; German: Vogt) for his bishopric and
was thus responsible for exercising judicial authority over his church’s
lands. A close reading of Otto’s other uses of the language of tyranny in
his works— when combined with a consideration of how other contem-
porary German chroniclers also employed this language— suggests that
he was one of numerous German authors who drew an explicit connec-
tion between tyranny and church advocacy. Otto’s complaints about the
Wittelsbach lineage thus provide important evidence for an understud-
ied facet of local lordship and power dynamics in the medieval German
kingdom— and highlight some key differences between Anglo-French
and German authors’ uses of the language of tyranny.
Otto of Freising (d. 1158) is best known to medieval historians for
his authorship of two narrative works of history: the Chronica, spanning
the years from Adam’s creation to 1146 AD, and the Gesta Friderici, an ac-
count of the early years of Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa’s life and
reign. Especially for the middle decades of the twelfth century, Otto is
an invaluable source on the German kingdom and the empire. No other
German chronicler covers the 1140s and early 1150s in such depth, and
Otto provides important details about German politics thanks to his
strong ties to the imperial court. As a member of the Babenberg line-
age of Austrian margraves and dukes, a half-brother of King Conrad III
(1138–1152), and a paternal uncle of Emperor Frederick I (1152–1190),
he belonged to the uppermost echelons of the German aristocracy. Fur-
 Otto of Freising’s Tyrants \ 143

ther enhancing the value of Otto’s historical works was his educational
background; he was one of the few German churchmen to spend time in
Paris in the 1120s, and he became a monk and abbot at the early Cister-
cian foundation of Morimond in the 1130s.6 Otto thus moved in some of
the most elite intellectual circles of his day. This combination of political
and religious connections made him a multifaceted — and frequently
contradictory — figure whose complex background can make it difficult
to understand fully his historical works.7
Frequently overlooked (especially in the Anglophone world) amid
all of these biographical details is his career as bishop of the small dio-
cese of Freising in the duchy of Bavaria. Between 1138 and his death in
1158, he spent much of his time in this bishopric performing the roles
of prelate and ecclesiastical lord. As a result, managing local diocesan
issues — not writing chronicles or participating in imperial politics —
frequently occupied his days.8 While the surviving sources permit only
occasional glimpses of this aspect of Otto’s career, his activities as bishop
of Freising are essential to understanding not just his historical works,
but also what those works can tell us about the twelfth-century German
kingdom. Some of the ways in which Otto’s local interests affected his
writings are evident in a striking passage that appears in book VI of his
Chronica, where he briefly departs from the chronological structure of
his narrative while describing the 955 Battle of Lechfeld. It is here that
he uses the language of tyranny to attack some of the Wittelsbachs, the
lineage who controlled the church advocacy for Freising and exercised
significant influence within his bishopric.9
According to Otto, the Hungarians had been almost completely an-
nihilated at the famous battle because the Bavarian count of Scheyern had
secretly conspired against them and led them to their deaths.10 Rather
than praising the count for his role in the victory of the German king,
Otto I, however, Otto of Freising emphasizes the price the count and
his family paid for his treachery. First, the Hungarians killed him as a
traitor. Then King Otto I confiscated some of his lands ( presumably be-
cause of his original decision to side with the king’s enemies), and cer-
tain bishops placed the count’s remaining properties under anathema.
At this point, the chronicler digresses and looks forward two centuries
to his own day, to the count of Scheyern’s descendants:
 144 / Jonathan R. Lyon

Because many tyrants [tyranni] have arisen thus far from this source
[i.e., the count], Count-palatine Otto [ I of Wittelsbach]— an heir
by no means dissimilar from his perfidious and wicked father and
one who exceeds all his predecessors in sinfulness — does not cease
to persecute the Church of God up to the present day. For, amazing
to say and by what divine judgment I do not know, almost all of that
man’s [i.e., the count’s] descendants have been given over to a repro-
bate mind. And so none of them— or very few— of either sex, of
whatever profession or rank, may be found but those who either rage
in open tyranny [tyrannide] or who, utterly infatuated with and un-
worthy of every honor both ecclesiastical and secular, devote them-
selves to thefts and robberies and lead a miserable life begging.11

Among historians who have studied the works of Otto of Freising

and the history of twelfth-century Bavaria, this is a well-known passage
because the rhetoric is unusually sharp for the chronicler.12 Indeed, these
sentences are missing from many later manuscripts of the Chronica, par-
ticularly those written after several members of the Wittelsbach lineage
became influential figures at Barbarossa’s court.13 To contextualize the
language of tyranny that Otto employs in this passage, it is therefore
necessary to pay close attention to some of the local concerns that shaped
his writing — though neither his Chronica nor Gesta Friderici has tradi-
tionally been viewed as a work of local history.
Because Otto of Freising had close ties to the Staufen dynasty and
was himself a member of the upper aristocracy, he was not an unbiased
observer of German politics. Moreover, as a Cistercian monk, he had
strong opinions about how secular rulers and lords ought to act. In both
of his chronicles, therefore, he praised those who conformed to his politi-
cal views and his high standards of behavior and criticized those who did
not. Some of the most frequent targets of the bishop’s wrath were the
German noblemen of his own day. Thus, the various lords who laid claim
to the title of duke of Bavaria during his twenty-year episcopate, includ-
ing two of his own brothers, were often blamed for their failure to bring
peace to the duchy. Early in the Chronica, for example, Otto inserts into
the middle of his account of ancient history a lament about the duchy’s
difficulties in the 1140s: “A clamor is heard in all lands, but especially in
 Otto of Freising’s Tyrants \ 145

our province, which the nobleman Welf [ VI] recently invaded in a hos-
tile manner, laying waste to the fields and plundering the goods of God’s
churches. . . . Indeed, because there is a dispute over the duchy between
him and Duke Henry [ Jasomirgott] of Bavaria, both of whom are ex-
emplary youths of impetuous courage, what can be expected from ei-
ther of them . . . other than the ruin of the poor and the devastation of
churches?”14
Elsewhere, Otto mockingly dismisses the claims of one of the Stau-
fens’ territorial rivals, the Zähringens, to ducal authority in the south of
the duchy of Swabia: “Berthold [II of Zähringen (d. 1111)], then bearing
the empty name of duke, left it to his descendants as if it were hereditary.
For all of them, up to the present day, are called dukes but hold no duchy,
sharing in the name only without the substance — unless there is some-
one who says the county between the Jura Mountains and the Great Saint
Bernhard Pass is a duchy. . . .”15
Thus, Otto of Freising’s Wittelsbach neighbors were not the only
German nobles whom the bishop criticized sharply in the Chronica and
Gesta. The attack on the Wittelsbach lineage in book VI of the Chronica
is nevertheless unique when viewed alongside Otto’s other complaints
about contemporary lords, because none of these other German nobles
is ever labeled a tyrant in his works. Nor are any of their actions ever de-
scribed as tyrannous. As I will argue here, his choice of words directed
against the Wittelsbachs is therefore significant. Indeed, the distinctive-
ness of Otto’s complaints about the lineage becomes even clearer when
his other uses of the language of tyranny are considered.
In general, Otto of Freising employs tyrannus, tyrannis, and related
terms infrequently in both his Chronica and his later Gesta Friderici. The
majority of his references to tyrants and tyranny appear in the early
books of the Chronica, when he is recounting the history of the ancient
world and early medieval Europe. Thus, tyrants include various rulers
of ancient Sicily and the Roman Empire as well as Attila the Hun and
the Gothic king Theoderic. For the Carolingian and Ottonian periods,
he singles out the Breton ruler Nominoë, the Beneventan duke Adalgis,
Duke Arnulf of Bavaria, and King Berengar II of Italy for their tyran-
nous actions.16 In many of these cases, Otto is simply copying the lan-
guage of his sources, most notably Orosius, Rufinus’s Latin translation
 146 / Jonathan R. Lyon

of Eusebius, Regino of Prüm, and Frutolf of Michelsberg.17 When dis-

cussing the reign of Emperor Constantine (d. 337), for example, Otto
borrows from Rufinus’s Latin translation of Eusebius and labels Con-
stantine’s rival, Maxentius, a tyrant: “And so the pious emperor Con-
stantine, already protector of the Christian faith, prepared to wage war
against that most wicked tyrant [ Maxentius].”18 Otto then calls Maxen-
tius a tyrant in two subsequent sentences while discussing the Battle of
the Milvian Bridge.
Because most of these references to tyrants are taken from other
sources, it is difficult to draw any clear conclusions from the early books
of the Chronica about Otto’s own understanding of tyranny. In book VII
of the Chronica and in his Gesta Friderici, both of which concern his own
lifetime, Otto is not as dependent on other sources in constructing his
narratives. There, he most frequently uses the terms “tyrant” and “tyr-
anny” when discussing the political situation in Italy. King Roger II of
Sicily in particular is accused of tyrannical behavior on numerous occa-
sions.19 And Otto, who is often critical of the independent-minded cit-
ies of northern and central Italy in his works, also attacks them for pre-
ferring to be governed by tyrants than by their rightful Frankish and
German overlords. He puts into the mouth of Emperor Frederick I, in a
speech to the Romans, the complaint that it was not Charlemagne and
Emperor Otto I but “Desiderius and Berengar, your tyrants [tyranni
tui], in whom you gloried, on whom you relied as if on princes.”20
What patterns, if any, can be discerned in Otto’s employment of the
language of tyranny? In many cases, he conforms quite closely to tradi-
tional usage. Isidore of Seville writes succinctly of the difference between
kings and tyrants “that the king is moderate and temperate, but the tyrant
cruel [crudelis].”21 This straightforward definition is mirrored in various
passages in the Chronica and Gesta, where Otto draws clear connections
between tyranny and cruelty.22 He is most explicit in this linkage when he
describes King Roger II of Sicily’s actions as “works of cruelty [crude-
litatis opera]” similar to those “of the ancient tyrants [tyrannorum] of
Sicily.”23 Thus, in some places, Otto of Freising relies on a conventional
understanding of tyrants and tyranny when crafting his narrative.
However, cruelty was not the only attribute that prompted Otto to
employ the language of tyranny when describing various rulers in his
 Otto of Freising’s Tyrants \ 147

works. He also labels as tyrants those who, in his opinion, exercised their
power and authority illegitimately. Attila the Hun, Odoacer, and Theo-
deric were not simply cruel; they had also seized possession of territories
that rightly belonged to the Roman Empire. Otto makes this point ex-
plicitly in his extended discussion of Theoderic’s victory over Odoacer
and Theoderic’s seizure of Rome. Here, in one of the only places in the
early books of the Chronica where he diverges from his sources and adds
his own comments, he writes, “See the state wretchedly destroyed. See
that people [i.e., the Romans], who by their wisdom and strength were
formerly lords of the world, weakened to such a great extent that —
downtrodden by a barbarian tyranny [tyrannide] and delivered up to a
harsh domination — they cannot be freed except by a barbarian. They
submissively and gladly receive a tyrant [tyrannum] in order to escape
the domination of another tyrant [tyranni].”24 Similarly, Otto follows his
source Frutolf of Michelsberg in labeling King Berengar II of Italy a
tyrant in order — at least in part — to justify the Ottonian king (and fu-
ture emperor) Otto I’s invasion of northern Italy and seizure of territo-
ries south of the Alps.25
Another pattern discernible in Otto of Freising’s usage of tyrannical
language also deserves mention. Unlike Isidore of Seville— and many of
the ancient sources Otto uses for the opening books of the Chronica—he
does not limit his definition of the tyrant solely to kings and emperors.
He follows Regino of Prüm in describing Duke Adalgis of Benevento
as a tyrant, partly because Adalgis refused to acknowledge Carolingian
authority over this Italian duchy.26 Later, Duke Arnulf of Bavaria is la-
beled a tyrant as a result of his virtual independence from Ottonian
royal authority; he controlled the selection of bishops in Bavaria dur-
ing the early tenth century and was frequently opposed by those bishops
who favored stronger royal control over the Bavarian church.27 Thus,
lords below the level of king and emperor who exercised too much inde-
pendent authority from the rightful rulers of the German kingdom and
empire could also be tyrants.
Through this broader sense of tyranny, it is possible to see similari-
ties between Otto and two of his most famous contemporaries, Suger
(d. 1151) and John of Salisbury (d. 1180). In his Deeds of Louis the Fat, the
abbot of Saint Denis does not hesitate to employ the language of tyrants
 148 / Jonathan R. Lyon

and tyranny when describing various counts and lesser lords who were
devastating the region around Paris and refusing to accept Louis VI’s
royal authority.28 John of Salisbury is likewise quick to label as a tyrant
anyone who acts in opposition to the law. In the Policraticus he notes,
for example, “And of course not only kings practise tyranny; many pri-
vate men are tyrants, in so far as the powers which they possess promote
prohibited goals.”29 And, most significantly, he also argues, “For tyranny
is an abuse of the power conceded to man by God. . . . It is therefore evi-
dent that tyranny exists not among princes alone, but that everyone is a
tyrant who abuses any power over those subject to him which has been
conceded from above.”30
Otto of Freising’s decision to label the Wittelsbachs, the descendants
of the treacherous Bavarian count of Scheyern, as tyrants fits within this
broader twelfth-century milieu of authors claiming that non-kings could
also be called tyrants. However, the Wittelsbach counts-palatine do not
conform neatly to any of the other, broader patterns visible in Otto’s
references to tyrants. Most significantly, the only other Frank or Ger-
man whose actions are labeled tyrannical in either of his works is Duke
Arnulf of Bavaria. Arnulf, however, is only identified this way in a chap-
ter heading, “Concerning the Tyranny [tyrannide] of Duke Arnulf of
the Bavarians.”31 In the body of the Chronica and the Gesta, every other
king, emperor, and lord who is called a tyrant lived prior to or outside of
the Carolingian/Ottonian/Salian/Staufen empire—or refused to accept
the authority of its rulers. The Wittelsbachs, living in the heartland of the
German kingdom in the duchy of Bavaria, are anomalous from this per-
spective. They also differ from many of Otto of Freising’s other tyrants,
past and present, in that they were the legitimate possessors of their title to
the county-palatine of Bavaria.32 Count-palatine Otto I had not usurped
this position, and Conrad III — the king when Otto of Freising wrote
his invective in book VI of the Chronica—recognized his and his heirs’
authority as holders of the title.33 Otto of Freising thus singles out the
members of the Wittelsbach lineage for a distinctive type of criticism
when he calls them tyrants.
The key to unlocking Otto’s choice of words is the unique relation-
ship that the bishop had with the members of the Wittelsbach lineage.
Count-palatine Otto I of Bavaria and his son Count-palatine Otto II
 Otto of Freising’s Tyrants \ 149

were more than just his neighbors in western Bavaria. They were also the
advocates for the episcopal church of Freising during his lifetime. In la-
beling his church’s advocates as tyrants, Otto of Freising was therefore
making a specific kind of accusation, one that finds echoes in several mo-
nastic chronicles written in the late eleventh- and twelfth-century Ger-
man kingdom. The authors of these works also tended to reserve the lan-
guage of tyranny for their complaints about the behavior of their own
advocates, and these sources therefore can help better contextualize Otto
of Freising’s attack on the Wittelsbachs in book VI of the Chronica. Be-
fore turning to these sources, however, it is necessary to consider briefly
the history of the Freising bishops’ relationships with their advocates.
Church advocates first begin to appear in the extant sources in west-
ern Europe during the Carolingian period.34 The advocates of the late
eighth and ninth centuries were tasked with representing bishops, abbots,
and abbesses at secular courts— and with serving as legal agents and advi-
sors to these ecclesiastics. The office of advocatus was thus closely tied to
the canon law tradition that churchmen should not attend courts presided
over by laymen. The driving force behind the creation of church advo-
cacies seems not to have been churchmen, however, but rather the Caro-
lingian rulers, who promoted them as part of their broader efforts at
ecclesiastical reform. Kings and emperors granted to monasteries and
bishoprics the right to choose their own advocates from among the local
lay community, and these laymen appear in the Carolingian sources ar-
guing cases before missi dominici and pressing claims concerning prop-
erty disputes at local courts. Although the extant evidence on individual
advocates is meager, there are a few sources that suggest some of these
advocates may have had real legal expertise, making them vital figures
for the churches they represented.35
The church advocates of the Carolingian period seem not to have
played a prominent role in acting as judges for their religious communi-
ties on ecclesiastical lands that were immune from royal jurisdiction.36 If
this is the case, then Carolingian advocates differed fundamentally from
their successors in later centuries. Tracing the development of church ad-
vocacy through the tenth century, especially the decades immediately fol-
lowing the collapse of Carolingian authority in the East Frankish king-
dom, is virtually impossible because of the lack of surviving evidence.
 150 / Jonathan R. Lyon

However, when advocates begin to appear more regularly in the German

sources again during the eleventh century, their roles as the secular lords
tasked with maintaining order on church lands have clearly expanded.37
Bishoprics and monasteries, which frequently received immunities from
kings and emperors guaranteeing that their lands were exempt from
royal authority, needed laymen to inflict corporal punishment on people
who committed violent crimes on their estates. Increasingly, this seems
to have become one of the chief functions of a church advocate. Thus,
Timothy Reuter goes so far as to label the advocate of the central Middle
Ages “the private count” of the bishop, abbot, or abbess whose lands lay
outside royal jurisdiction.38
Much of what we know about church advocates in this early period
survives in the unusually rich sources from the bishopric of Freising,
where there had been advocates since the early ninth century and per-
haps even earlier. Thanks especially to the diocese’s extant collections of
tradition notices—brief, summary records of the gifts of property to the
religious community — many of these advocates are quite well docu-
mented.39 The first about whom we know anything was named Lantfrid
and appears in sources from the early 800s.40 In the 860s and early 870s,
the advocate was named Karthario and can frequently be seen fulfilling
one of the most commonplace roles of the church advocate, namely act-
ing as a guarantor whenever property moved into or out of the church’s
possession. For example, a tradition notice recording an exchange of
moveable properties between Bishop Anno of Freising (855– 875) and
the abbot of Tegernsee states, “And so the praiseworthy bishop, with his
legitimate advocate by the name of Karthario, gave to the same noble
abbot one female serf and her two children. . . . On the other side, in
compensation for this female serf, the noble abbot, together with his ad-
vocate Cundbald, gave to the same bishop one male serf, who is called
Wolfram, two cows and a liturgical robe.”41 A century later, the advocate
Poppo is named in almost one hundred Freising tradition notices during
the prelacy of Bishop Abraham (957– 972). In the overwhelming major-
ity of these cases, Poppo can be seen playing the same role as Karthario.
Anytime the bishop was involved in a property donation or exchange,
the property was given “into the hands of the bishop and his advocate,
Poppo.”42 Again in the mid-eleventh century, we see in the same posi-
 Otto of Freising’s Tyrants \ 151

tion another Freising advocate, named Otto, this one an early ancestor
of the later Wittelsbach counts-palatine. For example, a property ex-
change was made “into the hands of Bishop Nitker and his advocate
Otto” sometime between 1047 and 1053.43
Thus, for more than three hundred years before Bishop Otto of
Freising wrote his invective against the Wittelsbachs, there had been a
tradition of local nobles performing the duties of the Freising church ad-
vocate. Even Count-palatine Otto I of Wittelsbach, who seems to have
come into possession of the advocacy for Freising at some point in or
shortly before 1130, is named in a small number of tradition notices play-
ing the typical role of the advocate.44 In 1135, for example, three years be-
fore the other Otto became bishop, a Freising tradition notice records a
property exchange that occurred “with the common counsel of clerics and
laymen and with the consent of the lord Otto, the church’s advocate.”45
During the early years of Bishop Otto’s prelacy, the count-palatine contin-
ued to occasionally carry out his normal duties. Sometime between 1141
and 1147, he is named as confirming a property donation that two nobles
made to the church.46 And during the same period, he and his son Otto II
witnessed a property exchange involving the cathedral chapter.47
Other sources, however, indicate that Bishop Otto was also begin-
ning to come into conflict with his Wittelsbach advocate during the early
1140s. Otto suggests in the harsh passage of book VI of his Chronica that
members of the Wittelsbach lineage had behaved tyrannically toward
Freising for generations prior to the advocacy of Count-palatine Otto I.
It is therefore unsurprising that the bishop would try to limit the family’s
influence within his diocese. Some historians have also suggested a more
specific reason why the 1140s became a flashpoint in the history of
bishop-advocate relations in Freising. For them, the key to the conflict is
the extended vacancy in the see of Freising between the death of Bishop
Henry of Freising in late 1137 and Otto’s consecration sometime in the
autumn of 1138. Count-palatine Otto I of Wittelsbach seems to have
used this period to assert greater control over the church’s rights and
properties. Specifically, he succeeded in drawing many ministerials —
unfree knights and tenants and their families — away from the church of
Freising in order to bring them into his own household. In the process,
he severely weakened the church’s economic base.48
 152 / Jonathan R. Lyon

During the earliest years of Bishop Otto’s episcopacy, he focused

significant energy on reasserting his church’s rights. On May 3, 1140,
less than two years after his consecration, he used his close connections to
his half-brother King Conrad III to obtain a new royal privilege for his
church. The charter includes the statement, “And so we decree by our
royal authority that the ministerials of the same church [Freising] should
remain in that liberty, in which royal ministerials and those of other
churches [remain], and in the aforesaid diocese no one may mint coinage
except the bishop.”49 The following year, Otto received a new papal privi-
lege that included the wording, “Furthermore, since the advocates are ap-
pointed for the purpose of the defense of the church, we forbid to the ad-
vocates of that church in every way, lest they presume to inflict any harm
on the same place or the things pertaining to it, or presume to demand
anything from them except their right.”50 The most explicit evidence for
the growing dispute between the two Ottos over the rights of the advo-
cate appears in a second royal privilege, this one dated to 1142. In part, it
states, “Therefore, let the diligence of every present and future person
know that Count-palatine Otto [I] of Wittelsbach, following our [King
Conrad III’s] suggestion, denied wholly the judicial authority, which he
seemed to have over the ministerials of the church of Freising.”51
When these royal and papal privileges are viewed alongside Otto
of Freising’s complaints about the Wittelsbachs in his own chronicles, it
becomes clear that the two Ottos were deeply divided over the role of
the advocate within the diocese. The count-palatine seems to have been
using the office of advocate to expand his own lordship into regions tra-
ditionally controlled by the church of Freising. The bishop, in contrast,
was doing everything he could to limit the rights of the church advocate.
Since modern scholars typically date Otto of Freising’s invective against
the Wittelsbachs in book VI of the Chronica to circa 1143, the passage
can plausibly be read as an expression of the bishop’s frustration in this
key period when he was seeking both royal and papal support in the
conflict with the count-palatine.52 Here, and only here, in his two chron-
icles does he use the language of tyranny to complain about the behavior
of someone with whom he was in direct conflict.
Under King Conrad III, the bishop gradually won the upper hand—
at least partially — thanks to his own kin connections to the ruler and the
 Otto of Freising’s Tyrants \ 153

somewhat weaker ties between the king and the Wittelsbachs.53 This is
suggested in one Freising tradition notice from the year 1147, in which
an agreement drawn up at the royal court between Bishop Otto and an
abbess identifies a minor noble as the bishop’s advocate.54 Otto of Freis-
ing’s gains in this conflict during the 1140s may also explain why Count-
palatine Otto I’s son Otto II resorted to threats and violence in an at-
tempt to regain his lineage’s position in the diocese. On November 21,
1150, Pope Eugene III wrote to the archbishop of Salzburg,

We have heard the serious grievance on behalf of our venerable

brother Bishop Otto of Freising against Otto [II], the son of Count-
Palatine Otto [ I of Bavaria], who assailed him with harsh insults
while he was celebrating Mass and — disregarding the reverence of
God — disgracefully laid hands on him. Prudent and wise men can-
not ignore the fact that he must be punished with as serious and
as severe a censure as possible. Therefore, lest such a great offence
against the church of God remain unpunished, . . . we charge to your
fraternity through the present letters that you sternly admonish the
aforesaid Otto [ II] that he make suitable amends to our aforesaid
brother on account of such a great offence. But if he refuses to yield
to your admonitions, you will declare the same Otto excommuni-
cated, and you will preserve the sentence of excommunication and
make certain it is observed steadfastly until he gives suitable satisfac-
tion to God and the church on account of such a great offence.55

This letter is one of the best pieces of extant evidence for just how
protracted and bitter the conflict between Otto of Freising and members
of the Wittelsbach lineage had become. If Otto of Freising is to be be-
lieved, Otto II’s actions ultimately failed; he was threatened with excom-
munication and, according to the Gesta Friderici, the king soon “outlawed
Count-Palatine Otto [ I] on account of his sons’ crimes. [ The king] laid
siege to his nearby castle called Kelheim . . . and, at this place, forced him
to give one of his sons as a hostage.”56
The dynamic between the bishop and the Wittelsbach lineage shifted
with the death of Conrad III in 1152 and Frederick Barbarossa’s sub-
sequent election as king. Count-palatine Otto I and especially his son
 154 / Jonathan R. Lyon

Otto II became regular visitors to Barbarossa’s court and effectively cul-

tivated Königsnähe (a close connection to the king). As early as 1163, five
years after Bishop Otto’s death, Count-palatine Otto II of Wittelsbach
was acting as advocate of Freising.57 He also emerged as one of the em-
peror’s most trusted agents south of the Alps, and his loyal support of
Frederick earned him a substantial reward in 1180: the duchy of Bavaria,
which the Wittelsbachs would possess until 1918. As noted previously,
the Wittelsbachs’ growing influence during the 1150s is likely the reason
why the harsh passage in book VI is missing from many later manuscript
copies of the Chronica.58 According to some scholars, the turning of the
tide against the bishop of Freising may also be an important clue toward
unraveling Otto’s motivations for writing his second work, the Gesta Frid-
erici. In the mid-1150s, he may have been looking to regain the advantage
in his long-standing dispute with the Wittelsbachs by writing a flattering
account of Frederick Barbarossa’s early reign, one that would win him
Königsnähe and give him more influence at the imperial court.59 Read from
this angle, the Gesta was intended to impact local politics in western Bava-
ria rather than make a grand statement about imperial history.
Viewed from the wider perspective of the history of the bishops of
Freising and their advocates, we can see that Otto of Freising’s accusa-
tions of tyrannical behavior against the Wittelsbachs came at a crucial
moment. In the early 1140s, as he was struggling to regain properties
and rights lost to the advocates in earlier years, he expressed his frustra-
tion in the Chronica by using the language of tyranny in a way he does
nowhere else in his works. For Otto, who tends to be much more tradi-
tional in his employment of the language of tyranny in both of his nar-
rative works, this is an especially striking piece of evidence for his criti-
cal attitude toward his church’s advocates. His reluctance to label other
contemporaries within the German kingdom as tyrants suggests that
this was a particularly harsh criticism for him to level against his Wit-
telsbach advocates, and not one that he leveled lightly. There was a clear
basis for this usage, however, because other, contemporary German mo-
nastic chroniclers also employed the language of tyranny in their com-
plaints about their own advocates.
The conflict between Otto of Freising and the members of the
Wittelsbach lineage was not unique. During the late eleventh and early
 Otto of Freising’s Tyrants \ 155

twelfth centuries, many bishops and abbots clashed with their advocates.
On the one hand, churchmen needed secular advocates on their estates
because they could not wield the sword of secular authority themselves
and bloody their own hands executing violent criminals. On the other
hand, once these secular advocates had gained access to ecclesiastical es-
tates and ecclesiastical sources of income, they frequently looked to take
advantage of their positions. Rather than limiting themselves to their
judicial roles, many of these nobles exploited their advocatial authority
and transformed it into an instrument of personal lordship.60 In the his-
toriography of the German kingdom, this transformation of church ad-
vocacy maps neatly onto the narrative of the decline of royal authority
in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Because the later Salian
rulers and their successors did not have the ability to exert their author-
ity effectively on the ground everywhere in the kingdom, monasteries
and other churches had no other defenders beyond members of the
local nobility. However, these local lords had little if any reason to fear
royal intervention if they chose to exploit their positions as advocates.
Churches could certainly bring their complaints against their advocates
to the imperial court — and many did — but the kings and emperors
were rarely in the position to bring swift justice to bad advocates.61
There is a large body of eleventh- and twelfth-century source mate-
rial, most of it written inside monastic communities, that supports this
general picture of German nobles using their advocatial authority to ad-
vance their own interests and those of their families. The language of
these texts is invaluable when trying to understand why Otto of Freising
labeled his own Wittelsbach advocates as tyrants. Here, I will focus on
two monastic chronicles that offer especially rich evidence — and strik-
ing parallels with Otto’s Chronica.
The Casus monasterii Petrishusensis is a history of the monastery
of Petershausen in Constance, in the duchy of Swabia near the present
Swiss-German border. Written by a monk of the community in the mid-
twelfth century, in the decades after the monastery had come under the
influence of the Hirsau reform movement, the text begins with the earli-
est days of the community in the late tenth century. Because the monks
of this house had developed close ties to the church reformers of the
eleventh century and to the Swabian nobles opposed to King Henry IV
 156 / Jonathan R. Lyon

(1056 –1106) during the Investiture Controversy, the author is especially

critical of this Salian ruler and his supporters. In the history’s entry for
the year 1075, the author begins, “King Henry [ IV] was living tyranni-
cally [tyrannice] in every way and feared neither God nor men.”62 Later,
when complaining about Henry IV granting the patriarchate of
Aquileia to one of the king’s relatives and closest allies, the monastic au-
thor complains, “He [the patriarch] exercised tyranny [tyrannidem]
against the members of the catholic faith.”63
The language of tyranny appears on only two other occasions in this
work, which fills more than fifty pages in the printed edition. Once,
when the author is describing the background to the Second Crusade, he
refers to the tyrannus Zengi’s capture of Edessa.64 The second occurrence
comes when he is discussing the actions of one of the monastery’s advo-
cates, specifically a count, Henry, who was another supporter of King
Henry IV in the tumultuous years around 1100: “Henry . . . , advocate of
the Holy Mountain [i.e., Petershausen], assembled a multitude of his
men and came and exercised tyranny [tyrannidem] in the monastery of
Saint George [i.e., Petershausen]. For these rash men forcefully seized
the brothers’ food supplies, tested their swords in the brothers’ animals,
and committed many disgraceful acts.”65 Thus, like his contemporary
Bishop Otto of Freising, the monk writing the Casus monasterii Petr-
ishusensis uses the language of tyranny sparingly — but does not hesitate
to use it, in the context of local history, for the behavior of one of his
own church community’s advocates.
A similar situation is evident in the text known today as the Chronicon
Laureshamense, a twelfth-century chronicle of the monastery of Lorsch.
This monastic house, an eighth-century foundation, is located to the
east of the Rhine River near Worms and is well known for its important
Carolingian-era annals. The Chronicon, which was written by a monk of
the community who had access to a wide range of earlier charters and
narrative sources for Lorsch, covers the years 764 to 1167; a second au-
thor then continued it to the year 1179. The first author uses the lan-
guage of tyranny on only three occasions in his portion of the text,
which is almost one hundred pages in the printed edition. In the earliest
section of the chronicle, concerning the Carolingian period, he refers to
“the tyranny of the Lombards” when describing the Italian campaigns of
 Otto of Freising’s Tyrants \ 157

Charlemagne’s father, Pippin.66 Later, he quotes in full a letter written by

the monastic community and addressed to emperor and pope, in which
the monks complain about a property dispute that has led their oppo-
nents to act like “tyrants.”67 When discussing the eleventh- and twelfth-
century history of his monastery in his own words, he reserves this
language of tyranny for only one person, namely the community’s ad-
vocate, Berthold. According to the chronicler, Abbot Anselm (d. 1102)
helped to rebuild the church at Lorsch after a fire and to recover many
of its most valuable possessions. But these were not the only reasons he
deserved to be praised:

Not content with these things, he [Anselm] also began to support

and defend his church’s household manfully against its oppressors,
especially against the tyranny [tyrannidem] of the advocate Ber-
thold, who was the sinful root of those sorts of exactions that flour-
ish even up until now. The same Berthold perceived that the abbot
was superior not only militarily but also in righteousness and indus-
triousness. Because he was not able to lay hold of him by force, he
endeavored to lay hold of him by deceit. Therefore, at a fortunate
moment, he was able to approach the abbot, who was unaware and
unprepared, in the church of the blessed Mary at the priory at
Michlinstat, and to seize the surprised abbot deceitfully. With the
consent of his relative Count Egeno, he imprisoned him in the cas-
tle of Vehingen.68

The abbot was soon released, but the story calls attention to the kind of
behavior that so many monastic communities found objectionable in
their advocates.
Various other monastic authors writing in the late eleventh and
twelfth centuries offer similar descriptions of the tyrannical actions
of their advocates.69 We could, for example, mention Abbot Rupert of
Deutz. Though not born in the German-speaking regions of the em-
pire, he seems to have shared with the abbots of other German mon-
asteries a disdain for advocates. In his De Incendio, he avoids identifying
his community’s enemies by name and does not explicitly refer to his
church’s advocate as a tyrant. Nevertheless, modern interpretations of
 158 / Jonathan R. Lyon

this complicated text generally agree that his advocate was one the tar-
gets of the harsh language of tyranny he employs in some passages. Spe-
cifically, his multiple references to the tyrannical behavior of the Old
Testament ruler Nimrod, who was the first great warrior and the founder
of several cities, may well be a veiled critique of his advocate’s efforts to
build new fortifications near the monastery of Deutz.70
Although there are other monastic sources that also deserve care-
ful analysis for the study of church advocacy, the Casus monasterii Petris-
husensis and Chronicon Laureshamense, in combination with Bishop Otto
of Freising’s Chronica, suffice here to highlight the general trend. The
authors of these works tended to use the language of tyranny infre-
quently but to employ it consistently when complaining about their own
church’s advocates. This pattern may suggest that monastic authors of
the period perceived their community’s relationship with its advocates
in distinctive terms that set this relationship apart from the commu-
nity’s interactions with other local lords. When that relationship soured,
special language was necessary to call attention to the inappropriate be-
havior of advocates.
How did ecclesiastical writers expect the relationship between church
and advocate to function? Detailed, theoretical discussions of the nature
of church advocacy are rare in the sources from the German kingdom of
the central Middle Ages. In many cases, all that we know about the ad-
vocates of any given monastery or bishopric are their names and — as
suggested by some of the sources cited above — the worst offenses they
committed against their church communities. Nevertheless, there are a
few sources that make it possible to develop a clearer picture of the
proper relationship between an advocate and a religious house, at least
from the perspective of the community’s members. Church chroniclers
frequently expressed very clear expectations about the behavior of their
community’s advocates. As a result, when an advocate abused his author-
ity, he was considered to be much worse than simply a capricious lord
run amok. To appreciate the reasons for this special status of the advo-
cate, let us briefly consider the chronicles written by the monks Ortlieb
and Berthold from the Swabian monastery of Zwiefalten and the Gesta
of Archbishop Albero of Trier.
 Otto of Freising’s Tyrants \ 159

Ortlieb’s chronicle, written in the years between 1135 and 1139, sur-
vives in a twelfth-century manuscript and is a rich, detailed source for the
earliest years of the monastic community at Zwiefalten.71 The work in-
cludes a lengthy description of the events that transpired after the death
of the monastery’s first advocate in the opening decades of the 1100s:

Count Kuno of happy memory, so long as he lived, administered

[administravit] the advocacy of this place by his own proprietary
right. Until the day of his death, he took care to defend the monas-
tery in the manner of a pious father. After he died, his brother Count
Leopold did not have the strength to bear the burden of this kind of
care, because he suffered from the pain of gout. For this reason, by
his counsel and with his consent, the whole community of brothers
elected Duke Welf [ V] of Bavaria as advocate . . . on the condition
that the [monastery’s] liberty, acquired through privilege, remain in-
violate. Namely, he [ Welf ] should know that he only has this charge
so long as he is willing to benefit this place. If, however, he should
be injurious, the community has the free power to elect another
advocate.72

the monks of Zwiefalten to have complete control over their monas-

Ortlieb’s careful choice of words makes it clear that he considered

tery’s advocacy because they were in possession of a papal privilege that

granted them the right to choose their own advocate.73 Moreover, the
monks also claimed the right to remove an advocate if he failed to exer-
cise his advocatial authority appropriately. These aspects of monastic
advocacy come into even better focus in the chronicle of Berthold of
Zwiefalten.
Berthold wrote his chronicle during the same period that Ortlieb
was writing his, namely the later 1130s, and the two authors discuss many
of the same events. Berthold also expands on many issues covered only
briefly in Ortlieb’s chronicle, and as a result, his chronicle offers many
important additions to Ortlieb’s. According to Berthold, the monks even-
tually grew to dislike the behavior of Welf V’s nephew and successor as
advocate, Duke Henry the Proud of Bavaria (d. 1139). As a result,
 160 / Jonathan R. Lyon

[ Henry’s] brother Welf [ VI] was elected by the common consent

and counsel of the brothers and was substituted for him as [our]
fourth advocate. But first, on the relics of the saints, in the presence
of the whole community, he confirmed by oath through three of his
ministerials that, should he ever be repudiated by us for a just reason,
he would not retain this dignity beyond seven days against our will;
in addition, [ he confirmed] that he would preserve as inviolate our
charter of privilege to the extent that it pertained to him; and in ad-
dition, [ he confirmed] that none of his knights would be placed at
the head of our household unless elected by us in accordance with
our petition. If one of his knights, having been placed at the head of
our household, should exercise tyranny [tyrannidem] and lay waste
to our properties against our will, or for whatever reason be justly re-
pudiated by the community, he should step down and remove him-
self from such an office [praefectura] before the end of seven days.74

Ortlieb’s use of the verb administrare and Berthold’s use of the term
praefectura, combined with the long description of Welf VI’s oath, indi-
cate that both chroniclers saw advocacy as an office and the advocate as a
sworn officer of the monastic community.75 As a result, the nobles who
held the position of advocate were expected to conform to a certain set of
standards. If they chose instead to exploit their position at the expense of
the monastic community, they were not simply being bad lords. They
were breaking their sworn oath to the monks.
Confirmation for this view of the significance of the oath sworn
by a church advocate can be found in the Gesta Alberonis. Written by a
churchman named Balderich, this biographical work concerning Arch-
bishop Albero of Trier (1131–1152) is a rich source for the relationship
between nobles and ecclesiastical communities in the far west of the Ger-
man kingdom. In the author’s account of a conflict between the arch-
bishop and his advocate, Count-palatine Herman of the Rhine, Albero
gives a stirring speech to his troops on the eve of battle with the count-
palatine’s forces:

Then, holding the archiepiscopal cross in his hands, he began to

make an exhortatory oration to the ranks of his soldiers in such a
 Otto of Freising’s Tyrants \ 161

manner: “Oh you friends of the blessed Peter! Oh defenders of the

Holy Church, who today for God and for justice have set your mor-
tal bodies against the enemy’s sword. Now may the blessed Peter
come to you in spirit, for you are his knights today. Believe that he
with a great heavenly host protects you today by their invisible
shields. Be certain of victory. Behold this sign of the cross, this sign,
I say, terrible for the adversaries of Jesus Christ. This is the cross
upon which Herman, Count Palatine, swore fidelity to me on that
day when I made him an advocate of our Church, on that day when
I conferred on him those powers and that authority by which he now
attacks me. I told him then that in this cross is a piece of the Lord’s
cross, upon which He, whose sacrosanct image shines here, tri-
umphed over the enemy of the human race; and I pointed out that
the relics of many other venerable saints were contained in this
cross. Indeed, that same Count Palatine, holding his hands upon this
holy image, swore to me with these words: ‘I give to you, lord arch-
bishop, this Lord, He who was crucified for us, as my guarantor, and
I swear to you by His virtue that I shall never do anything against
you, and that I shall assist you faithfully in all your interests with all
my military forces and with all my strength.’ Let everyone know that
this guarantor, namely Lord Christ, I shall now bring before the
count in this his sacred image. I shall thrust it before his eyes; I shall
show this witness of his oath to him.”76

Balderich’s point here is clear. By going to war with Albero, the count-
palatine was violating the oath he had sworn to the archbishop as advo-
cate and was therefore abusing the authority that the archbishop had
conferred upon him.
The Zwiefalten chronicles and the archbishop’s Gesta help to ex-
plain better why advocacy and tyranny were sometimes connected in
works written by German churchmen in the twelfth century. Advocates
who exploited their positions for personal gain were not just abusing
their power or using illegitimate force; they were also violating the unique
bond that connected them to a prelate and a church community. A mon-
astery or diocesan church’s relationship with its advocate was one of the
most important relationships that a religious community could have
 162 / Jonathan R. Lyon

with any secular lord. As a result, bad advocates were viewed as much
worse than any other bad, local lords who might threaten the commu-
nity or attack its lands. This is why religious writers employed the espe-
cially sharp rhetoric of tyranny when these nobles turned against them.
As this article has shown, Otto of Freising’s employment of the terms
tyrannus and tyrannis—in both his Chronica and his later Gesta Friderici—
does not support the assertion that twelfth-century authors used these
terms indiscriminately to complain about capricious lords. Nor do the us-
ages of the language of tyranny by many other German monastic chroni-
clers of the period. Instead, these authors consciously chose to single out
their advocates as tyrants and their advocates’ behavior as tyrannical. This
language of tyranny thus held a special meaning for these churchmen; it
was especially inflammatory language reserved for criticizing those secu-
lar lords who were supposed to be the strongest protectors and defenders
of a church’s rights and properties. Otto of Freising’s works— and their
milieu—therefore offer a cautionary note for those scholars who wish to
see tyranny as a loose term during the long twelfth century. Some me-
dieval authors, including most notably Suger, may have used tyranny as a
generic synonym for lordship, but others clearly did not. Moreover, since
Otto was educated in Paris and spent several years at the Cistercian
monastery in Morimond, it is impossible to dismiss him and his works as
simply a German exception to an Anglo-French rule; he must have under-
stood at least some of the ways the language of tyranny was being used
west of the Rhine.
That Otto of Freising chose to label the Wittelsbachs as tyrants
therefore calls attention to the special significance of church advocacy
for the exercise of noble lordship in the German kingdom. For Otto and
other German authors to identify this institution, in particular, as the
principal source of tyranny in their lifetimes suggests that modern schol-
ars have not yet fully appreciated the role of church advocacy in this so-
ciety. More work on this understudied institution is essential if historians
hope to understand why even a prominent member of the pan-European
aristocratic and intellectual elite such as Otto could find his local church
advocate to be such a thorn in his side. The tyrannical behavior of Otto’s
Wittelsbach advocates is thus an important reminder that churchmen
living in different parts of Latin Christendom could have very differ-
 Otto of Freising’s Tyrants \ 163

ent experiences with the Renaissance, Reformation, and Crisis of the

Twelfth Century.77

Notes

1. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, ed. and trans. Cary J. Nederman (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). See also C. Stephen Jaeger, “John of
Salisbury, a Philosopher of the Long Eleventh Century,” in European Transforma-
tions: The Long Twelfth Century, ed. Thomas F. X. Noble and John Van Engen
( Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 514 –15; and Charles
Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cleveland: Meridian
Books, 1968), 359– 60.
2. Suger, Vie de Louis VI le Gros, ed. and trans. Henri Waquet ( Paris:
Champion, 1929), 26, 128– 30, 174 – 76, and 232.
3. John Van Engen, “Sacred Sanctions for Lordship,” in Cultures of Power:
Lordship, Status, and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. Thomas N. Bisson
( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 223– 24.
4. See, for example, Gregory A. Smith, “Sine rege, sine principe: Peter the
Venerable on Violence in Twelfth-Century Burgundy,” Speculum 77 (2002): 25;
and Edmund King, “The Anarchy of King Stephen’s Reign,” Transactions of the
Royal Historical Society, 5th series, vol. 34 (1984): 135.
5. Thomas N. Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship,
and the Origins of European Government ( Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2009), 281 and, more generally, 278– 87, where he describes “tyranny” as being
synonymous with “bad lordship” and “tyrant” as synonymous with “public
enemy,” among other terms.
6. For Otto’s biography, see Hans Werner Goetz, Das Geschichtsbild
Ottos von Freising: Ein Beitrag zur historischen Vorstellungswelt und zur Geschichte
des 12. Jahrhunderts (Cologne: Böhlau, 1984), 22– 49; and Cornelia Kirchner-
Feyerabend, Otto von Freising als Diözesan- und Reichsbischof ( Frankfurt am Main:
Peter Lang, 1990).
7. Karl F. Morrison, “Otto of Freising’s Quest for the Hermeneutic Cir-
cle,” Speculum 55 (1980): 207– 8.
8. This can be seen most clearly in Alois Weissthanner, “Regesten des Frei-
singer Bischofs Otto I. (1138–1158),” Analecta sacri ordinis Cisterciensis 14 (1958):
151– 222.
9. For more on the office of church advocate, see below.
10. For this story, see Christof Paulus, Das Pfalzgrafenamt in Bayern im
Frühen und Hohen Mittelalter (Munich: Kommission für bayerische Landes-
geschichte, 2007), 196– 97; and for the battle more generally, Charles R. Bowlus,
 164 / Jonathan R. Lyon

The Battle of Lechfeld and its Aftermath, August 955: The End of the Age of Migrations
in the Latin West (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011).
11. Otto of Freising, Chronica sive Historia de Duabus Civitatibus, ed. Adolf
Hofmeister, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Germani-
carum 45( Hanover: Hahn, 1912), VI.20, 283– 84. See also ibid., VII.25, 350.
12. See, for example, Paulus, Pfalzgrafenamt in Bayern, 197; Doris Hagen,
Herrschaftsbildung zwischen Königtum und Adel: Die Bischöfe von Freising in salischer
und frühstaufischer Zeit ( Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1995), 172– 73; and Odilo En-
gels, “Friedrich Barbarossa im Urteil seiner Zeitgenossen,” in Stauferstudien:
Beiträge zur Geschichte der Staufer im 12. Jahrhundert, ed. Erich Meuthen and
Stefan Weinfurter (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1988), 226 – 27.
13. Otto of Freising, Chronica, xx– xxiii.
14. Ibid., “Prologue,” book II, 68. See also Otto of Freising and Rahewin,
Gesta Friderici I. Imperatoris, ed. Georg Waitz and Bernhard von Simson, in
Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum 46
( Hanover: Hahn, 1912), I.30, 47– 48.
15. Otto of Freising and Rahewin, Gesta Friderici, I.9, 25– 26 (emphasis
mine).
16. See, for example, Otto of Freising, Chronica, II.19, 90; IV.1, 184; IV.9,
195; IV.25, 216; V.1, 229; VI.2, 263; VI.4, 266; VI.19, 280; and VI.21, 284.
Duke Arnulf of Bavaria is described as exercising tyranny only in a chapter
heading, not in the body of the text (see note 31 below). The reign of Antichrist
is similarly described as a tyranny only in the chapter headings: Chronica, 35.
17. For more on this point, see Goetz, Geschichtsbild Ottos von Freising, 55– 59.
18. Otto of Freising, Chronica, IV.1, 184.
19. Ibid., VII.20, 338 and VII.23, 346 – 47; and Otto of Freising and Ra-
hewin, Gesta Friderici, II.49, 157.
20. Otto of Freising and Rahewin, Gesta Friderici, II.30, 137. See also ibid.,
II.25, 130. In the Gesta, he also cites a papal letter that describes the “tyranny”
exercised by the infidels in the Holy Land: I.36, 56. For a similar usage of the
language of tyranny, see below.
21. Isidore of Seville, Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi Etymologiarum sive Originum
Libri XX, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford: Clarendon, 1911), I.xxxi. See also, II.xxix.7
and IX.iii.19– 20.
22. See, for example, Otto of Freising, Chronica, II.19, 90 and IV.9, 195.
23. Ibid., VII.23, 346 – 47.
24. Ibid., V.1, 229.
25. Ibid., VI.19, 280 and VI.21, 284 – 85.
26. Ibid., VI.4, 266; and Regino of Prüm, Chronicon, ed. Friedrich Kurze,
Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum 50 ( Hano-
ver: Hahn, 1890), 104. See also Rosamond McKitterick, The Frankish Kingdoms
under the Carolingians 751– 987 ( London: Longman, 1983), 69.
 Otto of Freising’s Tyrants \ 165

27. Ludwig Holzfurtner, Gloriosus Dux: Studien zu Herzog Arnulf von Bay-
ern (907– 937) ( Munich: C. H. Beck, 2003), 73– 81.
28. See note 2 above.
29. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, VIII.17, 191.
30. Ibid., VIII.18, 202. See also Van Engen, “Sacred Sanctions for Lord-
ship,” 224 – 25.
31. Otto of Freising, Chronica, 29. The chapter headings are present in all
of the earliest manuscripts of the Chronica, and they more than likely were writ-
ten by Otto. See Otto of Freising, Chronica, cvii.
32. For this title, see Paulus, Das Pfalzgrafenamt in Bayern.
33. Ibid., 282– 302.
34. I base this very general overview of Carolingian advocates on Charles
West, “The Significance of the Carolingian Advocate,” Early Medieval Europe 17
(2009): 186 – 206.
35. Warren Brown, Unjust Seizure: Conflict, Interest, and Authority in an
Early Medieval Society ( Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 75– 78.
36. West, “Significance of the Carolingian Advocate,” 203.
37. Timothy Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages, c. 800 –1056 ( Lon-
don: Longman, 1991), 219.
38. Ibid.
39. The classic study of these texts remains Oswald Redlich, “Ueber bai-
rische Traditionsbücher und Traditionen,” Mitteilungen des Instituts für österre-
ichische Geschichtsforschung 5 (1884): 1– 82. See also Peter Johanek, “Zur recht-
lichen Funktion von Traditionsnotiz, Traditionsbuch und früher Siegelurkunde,”
in Recht und Schrift im Mittelalter, ed. Peter Classen, Vorträge und Forschungen
23 (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1977), 131–162; and John B. Freed,
“German Source Collections: The Archdiocese of Salzburg as a Case Study,” in
Medieval Women and the Sources of Medieval History, ed. Joel T. Rosenthal (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1990), 80 –121.
40. Brown, Unjust Seizure, 77.
41. Theodor Bitterauf, ed., Die Traditionen des Hochstifts Freising, 2 vols., in
Quellen und Erörterungen zur bayerischen Geschichte, neue Folge 5 (Aalen: Scientia
Verlag, 1967): 1:684, no. 867. See also ibid., 1:676, no. 853.
42. For this example, ibid., 2:83, no. 1157.
43. Ibid., 2:308, no. 1054. For this Otto, see Kirchner-Feyerabend, Otto
von Freising, 93.
44. There is no consensus in the scholarship regarding the year when
Otto became advocate. Compare Kirchner-Feyerabend, Otto von Freising, 93,
and Stefan Weinfurter, “Der Aufstieg der frühen Wittelsbacher,” in Gelebte
Ordnung—Gedachte Ordnung: Ausgewählte Beiträge zu König, Kirche und Reich, ed.
Helmuth Klager, Hubertus Seibert, and Werner Bomm (Stuttgart: Thorbecke,
2005), 142– 43.
 166 / Jonathan R. Lyon

45. Bitterauf, Traditionen des Hochstifts Freising, 2:531, no. 1742.

46. Ibid., 2:541– 42, no. 1763.
47. Ibid., 2:542– 43, no. 1764. Besides the aforementioned examples, Count-
palatine Otto I is only identified as advocate in ibid., 2:361, no. 1528, and 2:363,
no. 1532b.
48. Hagen, Herrschaftsbildung zwischen Königtum und Adel, 147– 48; Kirchner-
Feyerabend, Otto von Freising, 39– 46; and Weinfurter, “Aufstieg,” 146.
49. Die Urkunden Konrads III. und seines Sohnes Heinrich, ed. Friedrich Haus-
mann, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Die Urkunden der deutschen Könige
und Kaiser 9 ( Vienna: Hermann Böhlaus Nachf., 1969), 77– 78, no. 46.
50. Codex Diplomaticus Austriaco-Frisingensis, ed. J. Zahn, Fontes Rerum
Austriacarum 2:31 ( Vienna, 1870), 99, no. 101.
51. Urkunden Konrads III., 145– 49, no. 83.
52. Otto of Freising, Chronica, xii; and Hagen, Herrschaftsbildung zwischen
Königtum und Adel, 172– 73.
53. Stefan Weinfurter, “Die kirchliche Ordnung in der Kirchenprovinz
Salzburg und im Bistum Augsburg 1046–1215,” in Handbuch der bayerischen Kirch-
engeschichte, 3 vols., ed. Walter Brandmüller (St. Ottilien: EOS Verlag, 1998),
1:279– 83.
54. Bitterauf, Traditionen des Hochstifts Freising, 2:367, no. 1537.
55. Die Tegernseer Briefsammlung des 12. Jahrhunderts, ed. Helmut Plechl,
Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Die Briefe der deutschen Kaiserzeit 8
( Hanover: Hahn, 2002), 122– 23, no. 92.
56. Otto of Freising and Rahewin, Gesta Friderici, I.69, 97– 98.
57. Bitterauf, Traditionen des Hochstifts Freising, 2:388, no. 1557e.
58. See above and the strikingly different version of this passage preserved
in one later manuscript of the text: Chronica, VI.20, 282– 83.
59. Engels, “Friedrich Barbarossa im Urteil seiner Zeitgenossen,” 226 – 27.
60. Bisson, Crisis of the Twelfth Century; Susan Wood, The Proprietary Church
in the Medieval West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 328– 38; and Gerd
Tellenbach, The Church in Western Europe from the Tenth to the Early Twelfth Century,
trans. Timothy Reuter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 298– 300.
61. Benjamin Arnold, Princes and Territories in Medieval Germany (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 83– 85.
62. Casus monasterii petrishusensis, ed. Heinrich Friedrich Otto Abel and
Ludwig Weiland, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores 20 ( Hanover,
1868), II.28, 645.
63. Ibid., III.29, 656.
64. Ibid., V.27, 674.
65. Ibid., III.30, 656.
66. Chronicon Laureshamense, ed. Karl August Friedrich Pertz, Monumenta
Germaniae Historica, Scriptores 21 ( Hanover, 1869), 343.
 Otto of Freising’s Tyrants \ 167

67. Ibid., 433– 34.

68. Ibid., 429.
69. See, for example, Die Annalen des Klosters Einsiedeln, ed. Conradin von
Planta, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum 78
(Hanover: Hahn, 2007); and Henry of Tegernsee, Passio sancti Quirini, in Johann
Weissensteiner, “Tegernsee, die Bayern und Österreich: Studien zu Tegernseer
Geschichtsquellen und der bayerischen Stammessage: Mit einer Edition der Pas-
sio secunda s. Quirini,” Archiv für österreichische Geschichte 133 (1983): 247– 87.
70. See the edition of this text in Herbert Grundmann, “Der Brand von
Deutz 1128 in der Darstellung Abt Ruperts von Deutz: Interpretation und Text-
Ausgabe,” Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 22 (1966): 452– 54; and
Grundmann’s own comments on pages 409–18 and 424 – 28. See also John Van
Engen, Rupert of Deutz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 253– 61.
71. Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Cod. hist. quart. 156.
72. Die Zwiefalter Chroniken Ortliebs und Bertholds, ed. and trans. Luitpold
Wallach, Erich König, and Karl Otto Müller (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Ver-
lag, 1978), 68.
73. The right to elect the advocate appears in many monastic foundation
charters issued by the popes of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries.
74. Zwiefalter Chroniken, 236.
75. For oaths of office more generally in this period, see Bisson, Crisis of
the Twelfth Century, 358– 64.
76. A Warrior Bishop of the Twelfth Century: The Deeds of Albero of Trier, by
Balderich, trans. Brian A. Pavlac ( Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Stud-
ies, 2008), 67– 68.
77. For these terms, see John Van Engen, “The Twelfth Century: Reading,
Reason, and Revolt in a World of Custom,” in European Transformations, 17– 20.
 Seven

Te s t i m o n i a l L e t t e r s i n t h e
L at e Tw e l f t h - C e n t u ry C o l l e c t i o n s
o f Th o m a s B e c k e t ’ s M i r a c l e s

rachel koopmans

In an article on the preservation patterns of early medieval letters, Mary

Garrison has pointed out the extraordinary differences between the letters
we know from medieval letter collections, which usually concern politics,
theology, the monastic life, and other interests of the religious elite, and
those few letters recovered from “the garbage dump”—letters written on
wood, slate, and other materials found in archeological contexts. Such
“garbage dump” letters provide examples of “entire categories of written
communication [that] either do not survive or else are barely attested,”
such as ephemeral business notes and other pragmatic correspondence.1
In this essay, I examine a rare cache of pragmatic correspondence pre-
served in a highly unusual context: two miracle collections for Thomas
Becket composed at Christ Church, Canterbury, in the 1170s, which be-
tween them contain the texts of forty-two letters ( listed and numbered
in table 7.1).2 The Becket miracle collections are no garbage dumps, but,
importantly, they are also not letter collections. The unusual nature of
this source and the special conditions of the early Becket cult favored the

168
 Testimonial Letters in the Becket Miracle Collections \ 169

preservation of a category of written communication that most medieval

letter collectors saved in small numbers or disregarded entirely: the testi-
monial letter—that is, letters of introduction, recommendation, or refer-
ence written by a person of high standing for someone of lower status.3
None of the originals of the forty-two letters found in the Becket
miracle collections survive, and only two are known from other sources.4
The letters saved in the miracle collections are valuable for a number of
different studies, perhaps most obviously for their relationship to the
Becket correspondence,5 but my interest here is in what they reveal about
the use of the testimonial letter itself in the late twelfth century. The writ-
ers of the forty-two letters, all male, and nearly all hailing from England
or north-central France, include the occasional monk, canon, priest, or
layman, but are mostly religious men in a position of leadership—priors,
abbots, and bishops.6 These men describe an impressive variety of heal-
ings, recoveries, and other miraculous incidents in their letters. Strikingly,
though, these miracles almost all happened to other people, not to the
writers themselves.7 In more than half of the letters, the man or woman
who had actually experienced the miracle is named as the letter’s bearer
(marked in bold in table 7.1) and would have carried the testimonial let-
ter to Canterbury himself or herself.8
The reasons why the Becket collectors decided to save a large num-
ber of such letters are the subject of the first part of this essay. These
collectors clearly saw and read far more miracle testimonials than are
now found in their compositions. They made direct copies of some of
them in part because the letters could speak to their own concern with
truth and authoritative testimony, but also simply because they became
exhausted by the scale of their collections and, toward the end, found it
easier to copy in letters than to compose their own accounts of a miracle.
About half of the letters preserved in the collections concern miracles
experienced by monks, clerks, and other religious men of middling or low
status. I focus on this set of letters in the second part of the essay, argu-
ing that they are best seen as a part of a widespread and firmly established
use of testimonial letters among the religious in the late twelfth century.
Though testimonials about miracles were written only in special (miracu-
lous!) circumstances, it seems very likely that a significant portion of a
prominent religious man’s time would have been swallowed up by writing
 170 / Rachel Koopmans

testimonial letters for his underlings and responding to those sent to

him. One of the very last letters sent to Thomas Becket, in fact, was
from a bishop urging Becket to listen favorably to the petition of a clerk,
and contemporary letter collections preserve other scattered examples of
testimonials requesting clemency or favor for the bearer, recommending
the bearer’s services, supporting the bearer’s position in a dispute, and so
on.9 The miracle testimonials for religious men preserved in the Becket
collections, then, appear to be a subset of a much larger discourse.
The rest of the letters preserved in the Becket collections, a little over
one-half the total, concern the miracles of lay men and women. Testimo-
nials for lay bearers for any purpose are quite difficult to find in contem-
porary letter collections. In the third section of the essay, I will argue
that these intriguing letters appear to reflect a new development and ex-
pansion of the use of testimonials in the late twelfth century. Most of
these lay testimonials were, again, written by religious men, but usually
by bishops, deans, or priests rather than abbots or priors. A majority of
them were composed in response to outgoing inquiries from Canter-
bury or on a bishop’s or abbot’s own initiative, but some were clearly
written at the request of the lay bearer himself or herself. These re-
quested testimonials function much like those written for religious bear-
ers, and I will discuss these particularly interesting letters at some length.
At the close of the essay, I will turn to the smallest set of letters found in
the collections, those written by laymen for laymen. There are only three
such letters preserved in the collections (nos. 2, 35, and 39), and they were
probably the least common type of testimonial letter seen by the miracle
collectors as well. Notably, these letters lack the warm greetings and amic-
itia rhetoric one finds in the testimonials written by religious men. These
three letters read rather more like certificates than letters, and they, es-
pecially, point to a world in which the use of testimonials was moving
out of the preserve of the religious.
John Van Engen has argued that letters were “the primary expression
of written culture in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.”10 The exchange
of letters, Van Engen writes, created a sense of belonging, conveyed news,
and bound together men trained in the schools as nothing else could, but
it even did more than this: the words and forms of expression in these let-
ters also “creat[ed] the reality upon which people based their lives and
 Testimonial Letters in the Becket Miracle Collections \ 171

upon which events turned.”11 Van Engen is speaking here primarily about
relationships between well-placed schoolmen and the events of high poli-
tics and intellectual movements. But when one considers the function of
the testimonial letter in this period, it becomes clear that what Van Engen
has described went well down the social scale. Bearers of testimonial let-
ters were usually middling- or low-status individuals, which is part of the
reason the texts of these letters rarely survive. Such letters carried little
intellectual cachet, then or now. But for their bearers, both religious and
lay, these letters were precious documents, crucial for the success of their
personal petitions. How those letters were written and received by their
superiors very much created the reality on which they based their lives.
When we envision what scholars have termed “friendship circles,” the
networks created by the exchange of letters between the elites,12 it is im-
portant to realize that testimonial letters were riding piggyback on the en-
tire system, with clerks, monks, and canons— and an increasing number
of lay men and women too—hoping to capitalize on the connections and
status of their betters by means of such letters.

The Preservation of Letters in

the Christ Church Miracle Collections

Letters concerning miracles are found sprinkled here and there in twelfth-
century letter collections and occasionally in miracle collections as well,
but no letter or miracle collection of the period contains anything like
the dozens of miracle testimonials found in the two Becket collections.13
Benedict of Peterborough, a monk of Christ Church who wrote his col-
lection of Becket’s miracles circa 1171 to 1173, included the texts of ten
letters in his collection. He was later to become prior of Christ Church
(1175–1177) and abbot of Peterborough (1177–1193). William of Can-
terbury, also a monk of Christ Church and the author of a lengthy vita
of Becket, compiled his collection of Becket’s miracles between circa
1172 to 1177. He copied in thirty-six letters.14 Four of William’s letters
are repeats of letters found in Benedict’s collection (marked with an R in
table 7.1), resulting in the total of forty-two letters between the two col-
lections. This is many times more letters than one finds in all other high
 172 / Rachel Koopmans

medieval English miracle collections combined, most of which include

no direct copies of letters whatsoever.
One reason the Becket collectors included so many letters in their
texts is simply that they were seeing a lot of them, certainly more than
most miracle collectors of the era. During the dispute between Henry II
and Thomas Becket, many hundreds of letters were sent between many
different individuals over considerable distances, very frequently over
the Channel. The same contacts and networks consolidated in the 1160s
could be — and were — used to exchange news about Becket’s last days,
the fate of Becket’s enemies, Becket’s miracles, the question of canoni-
zation, Becket’s relics, and so on, in the 1170s. The letters Benedict and
William copied into their collections from John of Salisbury, Peter of
Celle, and John of Canterbury were all continuations of conversations
via letter that had started long before Becket’s death.15 One revealing
passage about the flow of letters after Becket’s death is found in Peter of
Celle’s letter (no. 9), in which he speaks of how a “letter of miracles” had
“come to us from England” (ab Anglia carta miraculorum sancti Thome
ad nos deuenerat), and how he, in turn, had passed the letter on to the
monks of Mont Dieu, located a few miles away from Peter’s own mon-
astery. The circulation of this “letter of miracles”— now lost, and evi-
dently not written by a Christ Church monk—points to the ready-made,
cross-Channel audience for Becket’s cult, an audience habituated to re-
ceiving and sending news by letter.
Both Benedict and William refer to letters about Becket’s miracles
that they had received and read but did not include in their texts, and
there is little doubt that what these men preserved represents just a sub-
set of letters sent to Canterbury in the years they were actively creating
their collections.16 Still, it is important to note that in the overall context
of the collections, direct copies of letters appear rarely. Under 4 percent
of the chapters of Benedict’s collection include letters, and a little over
10 percent of William’s. Most of the letters, moreover, are found late in
the collections — in the last books or in additions composed after the
main body of the collection was complete (the line between nos. 35 and
36 in table 7.1 marks the division between William’s sixth book and a
later addition he made to the collection circa 1176 –1177).17 Often let-
ters appear at the beginning or close of the collector’s own, quite distinct
 Testimonial Letters in the Becket Miracle Collections \ 173

account of the miracle, accounts that can be much longer than the let-
ters themselves (see especially nos. 2, 5, 10, and 17). Benedict and Wil-
liam clearly did not envision themselves as letter collectors. They were
writing narrative compositions meant to be akin to saints’ lives, and they
were uncomfortable including direct copies of letters without some intro-
duction or mediation by their own authorial voice.18 In one chapter, Bene-
dict took this mediation to such an extent that he silently cut off the salu-
tation of a letter and lightly revised the text to hide its origins in a letter
(see no. 9). We know what Benedict did only because William later hap-
pened to copy the same letter in full in his collection, so giving us the
name of the writer (Augustine, a monk of Reading).19 There are strong in-
dications that William, too, cut off salutations and silently copied lengthy
passages from the texts of letters.20 We should, in fact, think of the forty-
two letters identifiable in the Becket collections as the known letters—both
collectors certainly drew on more letters than these.21 Especially when the
collectors include a story of a miracle in a religious house with no indica-
tion of how the story came to Canterbury, we should wonder whether the
collector was silently lifting text from a letter.22
The fact that Benedict decided to copy only nine letters directly (the
tenth, as noted above, he disguised), whereas William copied in more
than three times as many, signals some marked differences between the
two men’s use of letters and intentions for their collections. Benedict
started his collection first. He was working from around 1171 to 1173, in
the period when Becket’s cult was taking root, and he aimed to create a
collection of miracles that could convince any doubters. For him, direct
copies of letters were primarily intended to reinforce the authority of his
collection and to illustrate what he termed his “examination of the truth.”23
No less than five of the ten letters Benedict included in his collection
(nos. 1, 3, 4, 7, and 9) were replies to requests or letters of inquiry sent
out from Canterbury for more information, and a sixth, from the bur-
gesses of Bedford (no. 2), was solicited by Hugh Puiset, the bishop of
Durham, who would later write a testimonial of his own about a similar
miracle (no. 24). None of these outgoing letters of inquiry has survived,
unfortunately, though Benedict clearly sent out more than just the ones
that resulted in these responses. Benedict concludes a very lengthy chap-
ter, for instance, by writing, “We secretly wrote about these things to the
 174 / Rachel Koopmans

priest, and he brought forward testimony to the truth, writing back that
the boy was definitely dead and resurrected from the dead.”24 In this case,
Benedict did not include a copy of the priest’s letter in the chapter (it is
very possible, though, that he lifted passages from it). Benedict’s point in
discussing these outgoing letters of inquiry and making direct copies of
some of the letters written in response was to prove how seriously he was
taking his task. Two of the unsolicited letters he included in his collec-
tion were written by William Turbe, the bishop of Norwich (no. 5), and
by Silvester of Lisieux, a member of Thomas Becket’s former household
(no. 6). Letters from these men added weight and authority to his col-
lection. Only two of the known letters in Benedict’s collection were
unsolicited and written by men without high religious standing. One
of these — by Augustine, the monk of Reading — was the letter Bene-
dict rewrote to disguise its origins (no. 8), and the other, by the dean
of Gloucester, appears as supplementary testimony at the close of Bene-
dict’s own very lengthy account of the miracle (no. 10), a chapter that ap-
pears in a short addition Benedict made to his collection circa 1173.
William, who started his collection as Benedict was finishing his,
sometimes included letters as supplementary testimony in the same way
that Benedict did (see especially nos. 10 and 17). However, William never
speaks of sending out letters of inquiry to check up on rumors or confirm
people’s healings, and it is likely that he never bothered to do so.25 By the
time William was writing the bulk of his miracle collection, around 1173
to 1177, the cult had found its footing. There was no one left to convince,
not even Becket’s most hardened enemies, and pilgrims were pouring
into Canterbury. William aimed to create a miracle collection that would
be a great “feast” for the reader.26 He created the longest miracle collec-
tion to survive from the period, nearly 425 chapters long—truly a sump-
tuous banquet of stories. We know from the repeated letters that Wil-
liam inherited some notes and letters from Benedict at the beginning of
his project, and since he worked when the cult was more mature and over
a longer time frame, he must have seen considerably more letters arrive
at Canterbury. William, moreover, already had experience working with
letters. By 1174 he had completed a major vita of Becket in which he
drew very extensively on letters from the dispute, often quoting from
them in part or in full.27 Nevertheless, in the first five books of his collec-
 Testimonial Letters in the Becket Miracle Collections \ 175

tion, William utilized direct copies of letters sparingly. Not counting the
prefatory letter affixed to the collection (not written until ca. 1175), in
these first five books there are just nine direct copies of letters, and four
of these are letters Benedict had already integrated into his collection. As
he wrote these books, William must have been drawing on considerably
more letters than these nine. At one point, for instance, he apologized
for including direct copies of letters from the abbot of Shrewsbury and a
monk of Reading by writing, “Let it be said without my labor [absque la-
bore meo] what benevolence the churches of Shrewsbury and Reading
have found in the martyr,”28 implying very strongly that he was putting in
the labor to rework other letters.
At the beginning of his sixth book, William wrote a more extensive
apology. He warns the reader that he is about to insert miracles “written
by other hands.” His own hand is like a horse weary of its burden, and
“that which knows not how to rest knows not how to last.”29 He then
copies in seven letters, the texts following one after another with no
input or introduction (nos. 18– 24). Five more copies of letters appear in
the next twenty chapters (nos. 25– 29), and five more appear later on in
the sixth book (nos. 30 – 32 and 34 – 35). In an addition William made to
his collection around 1176 or 1177, there is another remarkable run of
seven copied letters (nos. 36 – 42). In all, William included twenty-five
direct copies of letters in his collection’s sixth book and the later addi-
tion. These include kinds of letters that one suspects William would
have reworked very considerably, had he not been tired out and trying
to rest his “horse.” He copied in two letters that testify to a writer’s truth-
fulness, rather than a miracle (nos. 20 – 21); three letters that were not
addressed to anyone at Canterbury (see nos. 26, 27, and 34); letters so
long they had to be broken up into separate chapters (nos. 23 and 41);
and two letters relating to a conversation about miracles at a council
(nos. 30 – 31). Letters from ordinary priests, monks, and laymen are sand-
wiched together with letters from abbots and bishops; letters about dif-
ferent kinds of miracles appear willy-nilly together.
To all appearances, what William was doing in these latter parts of his
collection was working through piles of letters that had accumulated on
his desk. Instead of reworking and rewriting all of these letters, as he
might well have done before, he now simply copied many of them directly
 176 / Rachel Koopmans

into his collection. While one cannot treat these letters as a representative
sample of the letters arriving at Canterbury about Becket’s miracles, they
seem closer to such a sample than those found in the earlier parts of
William’s collection or in Benedict’s text. They are certainly more varied
and include unusual letters that we are fortunate to have preserved at all. If
we take William’s complaints about his weariness seriously— and there
seems no reason not to— we chiefly have William’s exhaustion to thank
for the unique and extensive cache of letters found in his collection.

Testimonials for Religious Men

Turning now from the collectors to the letters themselves, it is impor-

tant to note that neither Benedict nor William categorized or sorted the
letters in any discernable way. The forty-two letters appear very much
in an ad hoc manner in the two collections and are quite varied in terms
of style, length, rhetoric, subject, and so on. One constant, though, is
that most of the letters concern a single individual’s miracle. To under-
stand how these letters functioned as testimonials, it is helpful to group
them into and analyze them in two major categories: those written for a
religious man (no known letter for a religious woman, unfortunately, is
preserved in the collections),30 and those written for a lay man or woman.
The letters for religious men, the subject of this section, are noticeably
more homogeneous in tone and intent than those written for the laity.
This is in part because many of them were written by the religious
man’s immediate superior — by his own abbot, prior, or religious com-
munity as a whole, people who knew the religious man well. There are
thirteen letters from immediate religious superiors preserved in the
Becket collections, seven of which name the brother who experienced
the miracle as the letter’s bearer.31 These in-house testimonials make up
the most coherent block of letters preserved in the collections (some 30
percent of the letters overall).
The letter written by Adam, the abbot of Shrewsbury, concerning a
monk of his house, Richard (no. 13), is a good example of such an in-
house testimonial. Adam warmly addresses the letter “to our lord and
friend, by the grace of God, the venerable prior Odo, and the holy con-
vent of that place . . . greetings in the fullness of devoted affection.” Adam
 Testimonial Letters in the Becket Miracle Collections \ 177

then enthuses about Becket’s miracles in general and one in particular

that “gladdened our hearts” and that “we can make known to you with
certainty.” “And so behold,” he writes, “the bearer of the present letters,
our beloved son Richard, the precentor of our church: [it is] he himself, I
say, in whom the martyr marvelously worked this thing, and we have sent
him to you that he might make faith in our words through his living voice,
and give thanks for the benefits the martyr performed for him.” Adam
then describes in considerable detail how Richard had been given up for
dead but recovered his health by means of Becket relics recently acquired
by Shrewsbury. He concludes in the same warm vein in which he began
the letter: “may your holiness, most beloved, fare well forever.”32
Abbot Adam seems to have had previous contact with Odo (prior at
Christ Church from 1167 or 1168 to 1175), but the precentor Richard, to
all appearances, did not. Without his abbot’s letter, Richard might have
had to deal with awkward questions about his identity and remarkable
miracle story when he arrived at Canterbury. Nearly all of the testimoni-
als preserved in the miracle collections were written by men and about
people who lived at a considerable distance from Canterbury. Half of
the letters were written by men who lived on the Continental side of the
Channel, and nearly all of the English writers lived at least one hundred
miles away from Canterbury. Shrewsbury itself was over two hundred
miles away from Canterbury. If Shrewsbury had been closer to Canter-
bury, Adam might simply have accompanied Richard on his thanksgiving
pilgrimage, making the composition of a testimonial letter unnecessary.
It is also notable that Richard had nearly died before Becket revived him.
Many of the testimonials preserved in the miracle collections concern
near-death experiences or recoveries from serious, long-lasting illnesses
such as leprosy or epilepsy.33 People who recovered from less serious prob-
lems probably were not seen as needing testimonials in the same way.
With his abbot’s letter, Richard could be confident of a warm wel-
come at Canterbury. A considerate abbot or prior would likely have regu-
larly written letters to aid subordinates setting off on errands or pilgrim-
ages to destinations where they were unknown. In Anselm of Canterbury’s
letter collection, for instance, there is a set of five letters Anselm wrote on
behalf of a group of monks from Bec who were heading to Saint Neot’s,
in England, to found a new monastic community. Anselm urges the
 178 / Rachel Koopmans

recipients to guide and protect his monks; three of his letters conclude
with the exact same line: “I commend to your paternal charity and chari-
table paternity our brothers and yours whom we are sending to England
so that, whenever necessary, they may be sustained by your help and
guided by your counsel.”34 Many religious men on the road probably car-
ried analogous types of letters, for many different purposes. In 1169, in
the midst of the Becket dispute, Henry II had mandated that no cleric,
canon, monk, or lay brother was to travel overseas without a letter of per-
mission from the king (“nisi habeat litteras domini regis de passagio
suo”).35 No letters of permission resulting from the 1169 decree have sur-
vived, but the very fact such an order was given is suggestive of how com-
monplace the composition and use of letters would have been.36 One tes-
timonial preserved in the Becket collections functioned quite explicitly as
a travel permit. Written by Abbot Ralph of Cluny, the letter describes
the miraculous healing of the bearer, Daniel, a monk of Cluny, and ex-
pressly grants him permission to travel in England (“in Angliam licentia
nostra peregre proficiscitur”) so that Daniel might fulfill his vows and
give praise to the martyr (no. 27). Abbot Ralph addressed the letter “to
all the priors, dear sons, to whom these letters might come,” and clearly
expected Daniel to travel to Canterbury by way of Cluniac priories.
Such testimonials explained the bearer’s pilgrimage and were in-
tended to evoke hospitality, good wishes, and trust in the bearer’s story.
Some testimonials preserved in the Becket collections go still further and
request the reader to give gifts of relics or alms to the bearer. Abbot Eu-
stace of Saint Peter’s, for instance, asks the Christ Church monks to pro-
vide relics to the bearers of his letter—“whatever kind and however much
as would please you”— so that they could take them home and “a memo-
rial might be made among us” for celebrations of the martyr’s feast day
(no. 37).37 In a letter written by Prior Stephen of Taunton, addressed to
“all the faithful” (no. 26), the prior explains how “this John, our brother,
the bearer of the present letter,” had recovered from leprosy at Becket’s
tomb (no. 26). “Hear [ John’s] petition,” the prior urges the reader, since
“he greatly desires to alleviate the poverty of those ill people among whom
he dwelt for a long time by his labor and your alms. To all those who, in
the sight of divine piety, contribute something of their resources to him,
we grant fraternity with our congregation.”38
 Testimonial Letters in the Becket Miracle Collections \ 179

Very similar letters requesting alms for a traveler can be found in

contemporary letter collections. One interesting example was written by
Raymond, the master of the Hospitallers in Jerusalem, who composed a
letter for an unnamed bearer who had received “serious, painful wounds
for Christ” fighting in a battle in the Holy Land in 1177. Like Prior Ste-
phen, Master Raymond addressed his letter to “all the Christian faith-
ful,” and he asked the reader “to consider [the bearer’s] needs, so that by
your generous alms and his work and our prayers, he may complete his
journey to the community of martyrs.”39 The late twelfth-century letter
collection of Gilbert Foliot, bishop of London and Becket’s chief reli-
gious opponent, is a gold mine for letters like these.40 Gilbert wrote let-
ters on behalf of “brothers Adam, G. and G.,” who were appealing for
funds for Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital, on behalf of an unnamed bearer
appealing for funds for Saint Leonard’s Hospital in Northampton, on
behalf of bearers appealing for funds for the building of Prittlewell pri-
ory, and many others.41
As the letters in Gilbert’s collection demonstrate, a religious man
could seek testimonials from people besides his immediate religious su-
perior, and a number of the testimonials preserved in the Becket collec-
tions were written on behalf of religious men with whom the writer had
an acquaintance but no formal oversight (see, e.g., nos. 41 and 42). The
most interesting and revealing examples of such letters preserved in the
Becket collections are numbers 19 through 21, a set of three intercon-
nected letters found at the beginning of William’s sixth book. The first
letter, carried to Canterbury by Gerald, a clerk of Liége, was written by
Reginald d’Etampes, who introduces himself as the former prior of Ber-
mondsey (no. 19).42 Reginald explains how he had come to know Gerald
when the clerk was raging mad in a poorhouse near Provins, in northern
France, which was where Reginald himself was living at the time. Reginald
took pity on Gerald, procured the water of Becket for him, and super-
vised his cure. At the letter’s close, Reginald discusses the seal he had
put on the letter, telling the readers at Canterbury that since they were
not likely to recognize it, they should check with the brothers of Ber-
mondsey to confirm his truthfulness.
So far this is a fairly standard-sounding testimonial, but what comes
next in William’s collection is surprising. There are two letters testifying
 180 / Rachel Koopmans

to Reginald’s veracity, testimonials Reginald had sought for himself. It ap-

pears that Reginald first went to the Cistercian abbey of Jouy, about five
miles away from Provins, and persuaded the abbot there, Peter, to write a
letter confirming that Reginald would never assert anything that was un-
true (no. 20). Abbot Peter of Jouy seems to have written his letter on the
same parchment that contained Reginald’s letter and, at Reginald’s re-
quest, added his seal to the parchment too. Reginald then went to the
small Cluniac priory of Reuil, some thirty miles north, and asked the
prior there, Haymo, to write a letter and add his seal to the same parch-
ment. Prior Haymo did so, assuring the readers at Canterbury that Regi-
nald was well known to him—he and Reginald had converted to the mo-
nastic life together— and that Reginald’s word could be trusted (no. 21).
Reginald then seems to have been satisfied that these two testimonials
would make the Christ Church readers accept his word. The healed Ger-
ald was dispatched to Canterbury carrying a parchment that actually con-
tained more information about Reginald than about his own miracle.
Reginald’s quest for more letters and more seals is suggestive of just
how entrenched testimonial letters were in this culture and how impor-
tant they could be in establishing someone’s credibility. As a former prior,
possibly living in disgrace (we do not know why he left Bermondsey),
Reginald felt he needed buttressing testimony from his friends. Friend-
ship rhetoric often permeates the testimonial letters found in the Becket
miracle collections. Abbot Peter of Pontigny, for instance, confidently
appeals to connections between his monastery and Christ Church in the
preamble of his letter about his monk Pontius (no. 38): “Made happy
not long ago by great and delightful joy, we thought it worthy to sum-
mon you to be a participant in our happiness, so that you might share in
our joy, we who once shared tribulations and pains” ( Becket spent much
of his exile in Pontigny).43 The more the writer and the recipient of a
testimonial were on friendly terms, the more the bearer was likely to be
well received and have favors granted to him. Bernard of Clairvaux’s let-
ter collection contains many examples of letters written in the hope that
a well-placed friend could help a deserving individual, including one for
the young John of Salisbury addressed to Archbishop Theobald of Can-
terbury. “I am sending to your Highness John, the bearer of this letter,”
Bernard writes. “He is a friend of mine and of my friends, and I beg that
 Testimonial Letters in the Becket Miracle Collections \ 181

he may benefit from the friendship for which I count on you.”44 This let-
ter worked: John of Salisbury became part of Theobald’s household and
in that capacity would write many testimonial letters for underlings
himself. His letters, too, were often infused with friendship rhetoric.45
The relationship between the writer and the recipient of a testimo-
nial was so important that a potential letter writer might decide that an-
other religious man, someone with closer ties to the intended recipient of
the letter, would be a better writer than himself. A case in point is the let-
ter carried to Canterbury by Osbern, the miraculously healed servant of
Roger son of Ain, a canon of Lisieux (no. 6). Canon Roger, surely, could
have written a letter for his servant to carry to Canterbury, but instead it
was written by another canon of Lisieux, Silvester. Silvester had been a
member of Thomas Becket’s household, and he could address his letter
“to the beloved brothers and friends in Christ, the prior and sacrist and
the rest of the brothers” of Christ Church. With these kinds of connec-
tions, Silvester was clearly a much better writer in these circumstances
than Roger would have been.46 The extent to which people would go to
gain testimonials for their favorites is suggested by a fascinating letter
sent by Anselm of Canterbury to Queen Matilda. Anselm wrote Matilda
to reject a request for a testimonial. “The bearer of this letter brought
me your seal with a letter from you,” he writes. “This indicated to me
that you wish his disgrace to be driven from him by the testimony of my
letter . . . [such] that through my intercession he might regain from my
lord the King what he had lost on the King’s order.” Anselm tells the
queen that he cannot supply such a letter. He knows nothing about the
matter, “nor is it for me to intercede for someone whose life and charac-
ter I know nothing about.”47 Anselm’s scruples were probably unusual.
When John of Canterbury, then the bishop of Poitiers, was asked by a
delegation of religious men to write a letter to the Christ Church monks
concerning the miracle of a hanged man he did not know (see no. 17),
he did so without apology. Moreover, he even urged the Christ Church
monks, whom he knew well, to grant the letter bearers some relics of
Thomas Becket.48
By the late twelfth century, the traffic in testimonial letters appears
to have been intense, with religious men writing for their subordi-
nates, protégés, and acquaintances, and sometimes also for their friends’
 182 / Rachel Koopmans

subordinates, protégés, and acquaintances. We have no firm evidence

about how the miracle testimonials would have been treated at Canterbury,
but it seems highly likely that they would have been read aloud, quite pos-
sibly before the bearer himself would have told his own story. This is the
impression given by Abbot Peter of Pontigny’s letter (no. 38), which con-
cludes, “If the account of these events is too shortly described in this letter,
the present bearer [Pontius], in whom these things were done, will tell
them at more length in his living voice.”49 Such subordination of the living
voice to the written authority of a superior’s letter is also clear in Abbot
Adam of Shrewsbury’s letter on behalf of his precentor Richard. “We have
sent him to you,” Adam tells Prior Odo, “that he might make faith in our
words through his living voice.” Richard could not have become a pre-
centor without having considerable facility with his voice, and he—not
Adam—was the one who had actually fallen sick and recovered his health
through Becket’s merits. In this situation, though, Richard’s speech serves
as a mere supplement to his abbot’s written authority. That was the whole
point of the testimonial—to carry along a superior voice, one with more
authoritative power than one’s own. When the bearer of a testimonial was
a lay man or woman rather than a religious man, the authoritative gap be-
tween writer and subject became even more stark. This gulf in status is un-
derlined by the fact that the lay bearers, unlike the religious, would not or-
dinarily have been able to read the testimonials they carried.

Testimonials for Lay Men and Women

More than half of the letters preserved in Benedict’s and William’s col-
lections concern the miracle of a lay man or woman, most of them written
by bishops, deans, and ordinary priests. Nine of these letters explicitly
identify the lay man or woman who experienced the miracle as the letter’s
bearer.50 Two things in particular distinguish the testimonials written
for lay individuals from those written for the religious. First, the connec-
tions between the writers and the people who experienced the miracles
are markedly less personal and more unequal. The writers and bearers of
these testimonials often had no acquaintance with each other whatsoever
before the miracle occurred. Even the few letters written by priests, men
closest in social status to the lay bearers, often make it clear that the priest
 Testimonial Letters in the Becket Miracle Collections \ 183

had been in a highly controlling position in the course of a miracle (see

nos. 14 and 33). Second, the writers’ own interests in writing the letters—
whether to boast about a wonderful local miracle, to aid the Christ Church
monks in investigating a rumor, or to renew or establish friendly connec-
tions and conversation with the religious at Canterbury—often dominate
these texts. These letters, in other words, were often written more for the
purposes of the writers and recipients than their bearers, even though the
letters were about miracles the bearers had personally experienced.
These differences are especially marked in the three letters about
lay miracles that were written in response to inquiries from Canterbury
(nos. 3, 4, and 8). One of them concerns a layman named Humphrey, a
leper from the region of Chesterton who had recovered at Canterbury
but failed to tell the Christ Church monks about it. When the monks
heard rumors about this miracle, they requested a letter confirming that it
did indeed happen. Saffrid, the dean of Chesterton, located Humphrey
and wrote a letter about his miracle (no. 3), a letter he made Humphrey
carry back to Canterbury: “I send him back to you,” the dean writes grimly,
“so that he might supply the saint what he did not do.” Humphrey appears
to have had very little say in the matter. Given the tone of Saffrid’s letter,
Humphrey may well gotten tongue-lashings for his negligence both at
home and on his arrival at Canterbury. In another case, when Albinus,
the abbot of Darley, received a letter from Christ Church asking about a
miracle that occurred in a layman’s house involving an ampulla of the
Becket water, he too took it upon himself to investigate the miracle (no. 4).
“Having been requested for the truth, we therefore bring forth testimony
to the truth; we know that our testimony is true,” Abbot Albinus writes,
with the stress on truth telling that is a feature of many of the letters
about lay miracles. “I and Henry and William and Osbern, priests, and
Nicholas and Odo, deacons, and the aforementioned woman Aileva and
her son Nicholas, saw and testify to these things.” Here again, the lay
men and women involved in the miracle seem to have felt little impetus
themselves to get word to Canterbury about the miracle.
Inquiries prompted the letters from Saffrid and Albinus; in other
cases, religious men investigated lay miracles entirely on their own ini-
tiative. For example, Hugh Puiset, the bishop of Durham, wrote a long
letter addressed to the archbishop of Canterbury concerning a certain
 184 / Rachel Koopmans

“most simple” (a phrase often meaning mentally disabled) young man

named Roger (no. 24). Roger had been punished for a crime by being
blinded and castrated, but later, Hugh writes, he could see again. Bishop
Hugh had heard about young Roger’s restored vision late on the day
of the miracle and had clearly never met him before. Indeed, it is hard
to imagine any other situation in which a bishop would seek out and
talk with a mentally disabled young man convicted of a crime. He did
because Roger’s recovery reminded him of Eilward of Westoning’s fa-
mous miracle of restored vision, a story “we heard had been done by
[ Becket] once in Bedford and we now know to have been repeated after-
wards in our city, namely, Durham. . . . [ W]e know and testify this to
have happened in Durham, and by our writing we have taken care to
transmit it to the notice of posterity.”51
The letter by Richard Peche, the bishop of Coventry, about a dea-
con who had been wounded and castrated by a jealous lover (no. 25), is
very similar in tone. Peche, who had clearly had no contact with this
lowly deacon before he was attacked and miraculously healed, rejoices
that Becket “had visited the diocese of Coventry with a great miracle
[magno miraculo].” He was so enthusiastic about the deacon’s healing
that he included poems celebrating the miracle at the end of his letter
and sealed it three times.52 Letters from much less exalted writers, such
as the one written by a prior and priest about a parishioner named Odo
(no. 16), often have the same air of local pride. The prior and priest con-
clude their letter about the wayward parishioner (who had slept with a
prostitute and had been miraculously punished for breaking a vow) with
the plea: “We seek, holy fathers, that this thing happening among us be
added [ascribi] to the rest of the miracles of the precious martyr.”
These letters tell us a lot about the pains religious men were willing
to take to investigate lay miracles and why they thought it was important
that the news be known at Canterbury. They tell us nothing about how
the lay bearers viewed these letters and the lengthy trips they required.
The “most simple” Roger from Durham is not named as the bearer of the
bishop’s letter, though he certainly went to Canterbury; Hugh Puiset may
well have entrusted the letter, and Roger himself, to some other traveler.53
Richard Peche, though, specifically names the castrated deacon as the
letter bearer, and he seems to have compelled the jealous lover to make
 Testimonial Letters in the Becket Miracle Collections \ 185

the trip to Canterbury too: he had confessed to the attack, Peche tells
the archbishop, “just as it will be confessed in your presence.”54 In another
case, an entire delegation seems to have been making its way up to Can-
terbury with Girald, a man who had survived a hanging on the gallows
near Perigueux (see no. 17). The hanged Girald, the castrated Thomas,
the vengeful lover, the simple Roger, the lecherous Odo, the former leper
Humphrey— were they pleased, or bemused, or unhappy to have at-
tracted so much attention from these religious men?
While these must remain open questions, there are three examples
preserved in the collections in which the lay bearers had more personal
investment in the letters they carried, more along the lines of what one
sees with the religious bearers. One of these was written by Henry, the
bishop of Bayeux, and is addressed “to all the clerks in the bishopric of
Bayeux” (no. 34). Bishop Henry describes how William, a layman from
Rouen, had been cured of leprosy in the course of a stay at Becket’s tomb
at Canterbury. William still had remnants of the disease visible on his
body, but, the bishop tells the reader, “you should not turn him away,”
for he was truly cured. It seems likely that William of Rouen had peti-
tioned the bishop for this testimonial. Bishop Henry’s letter had obvious
value for William wherever he went in the bishopric of Bayeux. He must
have kept the letter on his person and showed it to the Christ Church
monks on a return visit to Canterbury, where it had the added value of au-
thenticating his miracle story. Perhaps it was not unusual for a recovered
leper to acquire some such letter (see also no. 26, the letter from Prior
Stephen, discussed above, which requests alms for John, a former leper).
The letter concerning the laywoman and former leper Mabel of
Dudley (no. 15) was also brought to Canterbury by Mabel herself, who
had already made a pilgrimage there. In the second book of his collec-
tion, William wrote a single sentence about Mabel of Dudley’s cure from
leprosy.55 In the fourth book of his collection, written perhaps a year or
so later, William repeats the same sentence ( he must have looked back
to find it) and then copies in a letter from Humbald, the prior of Much
Wenlock, a Cluniac monastery in the West Midlands located about thirty
miles west of Dudley.56 In the letter, Humbald describes how Mabel
had been cured at Canterbury “without doubt, we believe, by the blessed
Thomas.” He assures the Christ Church monks that no less than eight of
 186 / Rachel Koopmans

the brothers of Much Wenlock “knew for certain” that Mabel had been a
leper and that he himself was writing “so that, with all scruples of hesita-
tion buried, this might be noted down with the rest of the great deeds of
the saint [caeteris hoc ipsum annotetis magnaliis].” The prior adds that
one of the brothers of Much Wenlock, Osbert, a man of good reputation
who knew Mabel well and had supported her with a stipend, was going to
“write at more length to you” about Mabel’s illness and cure.57
Reading between the lines, Mabel must have traveled to Canterbury,
recovered, and been disappointed by how her story was received — with
skepticism and “scruples,” as Prior Humbald’s letter suggests. On her re-
turn to Dudley, she must have complained about her treatment to some-
one at Much Wenlock, Osbert being the most likely candidate. She cared
so much about the matter that she was willing to make a second trip to
Canterbury—over one hundred and fifty miles away—to get Prior Hum-
bald’s letter into the hands of the Christ Church monks. It is possible that
she also carried a letter from Osbert, but if she did, William did not copy
it into his collection. There’s a hint of sullenness about William’s treat-
ment of Prior Humbald’s letter. He simply inserts it, making no comment
himself about Mabel’s cure aside from the repetition of the sentence he
had written earlier, a silence perhaps suggestive that he was not pleased
with Mabel’s determination to make him take her story seriously.58
Mabel brought letters to Canterbury after a skeptical reception, and
it could be that William of Rouen, too, returned to Canterbury with the
letter from Bishop Henry of Bayeux in part to prove to the Christ Church
monks that he was indeed cured. One of the most interesting letters
preserved in the collections, written by the bishop of Norwich, William
Turbe, about a young woman named Cecilia, was definitely requested to
circumvent a skeptical reception (no. 5). “The bearer of this letter, Ce-
cilia, daughter of one of our men, was held by the sickness of cancer for
a long time,” writes Turbe in a letter addressed to the prior and convent
of Christ Church. He then briefly describes Cecilia’s miracle and con-
cludes, “We send her to you, along with our written testimonial [cum
scripti nostri testimonio], to the glory of such a miracle.” Neither Bene-
dict nor William thought the bishop’s letter described Cecilia’s miracle
at sufficient length, which is fortunate, since it is in their accounts that
the circumstances of the letter’s composition are explained. Cecilia’s fa-
 Testimonial Letters in the Becket Miracle Collections \ 187

ther, Jordan of Plumstock, “went into the presence of his lord the bishop
of Norwich, indicating the course of the event and asking for testimonial
letters [petensque litteras testimonia], lest, coming to Canterbury and
telling about the miracle, he might be thought to speak beyond good
opinion and faith, without authority.”59 In addition to speaking with Jor-
dan and his daughter Cecilia, the bishop called in “the priest and others
who had been present to witness the event, as well as two matrons of good
reputation, who examined the vestiges of the cancer.” Eventually, by
means of “careful examination,” the bishop “removed all doubt” about the
matter. This sounds very much like the investigations undertaken by
Bishops Hugh Puiset and Richard Peche, but done, in this case, at Jor-
dan’s request rather than on the bishop’s own initiative. Moreover, it could
well be that Jordan, like Mabel of Dudley, came to Canterbury carrying
more than one letter. Parallel passages in Benedict’s and William’s de-
scriptions of Cecilia’s miracle strongly suggest that they were both si-
lently copying from yet another letter, possibly written by a priest, God-
win, who was involved in the miracle.
Both Jordan and Mabel had established connections with religious
men before they needed a letter, and both worked those connections to
gain letters in much the same way a clerk or canon might. From the sam-
pling of letters preserved in the Becket collections, it appears that deter-
mined lay men and women could gain testimonials for themselves in the
late twelfth century, but it also appears to have been a more fraught
process. If a lay man or woman did not have established connections with
a religious figure, moreover, obtaining such a letter might have been quite
difficult: it does not yet seem to have been a widely established practice for
laymen to write such letters. Only a few types of testimonials issued by
laymen for laymen are known from late twelfth-century England. Though
none of the actual texts survive, we know that diplomatic couriers or en-
voys needed royal letters to ensure safe passage across the Channel, a
system that Nicholas Vincent terms “an early form of passport con-
trol.”60 Moneylender’s bonds were, in Michael Clanchy’s words, “by far
the commonest form of certificates” in this period: the earliest surviving
examples of these date to circa 1166.61 In the Becket miracle collections,
there are just three letters composed by laymen. One was written by the
burgesses of Bedford at Bishop Hugh Puiset’s request about the miracle
 188 / Rachel Koopmans

of Eilward of Westoning, the most famous miracle of Becket’s early cult

(no. 2); the second was written by Roger of Berkeley about a madman
(no. 35); and the last by William, the castellan of Saint-Omer, about a
hanged man who survived his punishment (no. 39). All three of these let-
ters are short and entirely lack the fraternizing tone common in the letters
written by religious men. The letter from Roger of Berkeley reads, in full:

To the convent of Canterbury and all the sons of the church, greetings
from Roger of Berkeley. Let it be known to your amiability that the
present bearer was so vexed by a demon that, spurning human com-
pany for the habits of beasts, he frequented the dens of wild animals.
When discovered by certain of the faithful, he was taken to a chapel
of St Thomas. By his merits, it is believed, he was brought back to
sanity. The dean and the chaplain of this church and their parish-
ioners with me bring forward testimony to this thing. Farewell.62

This is a stripped-down authentication document. The letter from

the castellan of Saint-Omer is slightly longer, but it, too, has an entirely
businesslike tone. “Let it be known to your sanctity,” he writes, “as much
by the presence of the bearer as the presence of this letter that my stew-
ard and certain of my servants captured a thief near Fauquembergues,
and he was condemned to death for the crime by my steward and bur-
gesses.” The castellan then describes how the thief, who is never named,
was hanged, but, due to invocations to Saint Thomas, was later found
alive by his steward. “Lest this miracle of God be hidden from you,” the
castellan writes, “we bring forward this testimony with the impression
of our seal. Farewell.”63
Neither Roger of Berkeley nor William the castellan seems to have
had previous acquaintance with bearers of their letters or been an eye-
witness to these miracles. Like the religious men writing for the laity,
they too wrote as local authorities, men who had looked into the matter
and whose word could be trusted. Many questions remain unanswered.
Why the dean and chaplain mentioned in Roger of Berkeley’s letter did
not write letters themselves is an interesting conundrum. Did they, per-
haps, accompany the recovered madman to Canterbury, and so acquire
the letter from Roger of Berkeley to bolster the authority of their story?
 Testimonial Letters in the Becket Miracle Collections \ 189

In the castellan’s description of the miracle of the hanged man, the stew-
ard seems to have taken a leading role: it was he who captured the thief,
hung him, and found him alive again. Could it be that the steward sought
a letter about the event from his castellan, and that the steward, too, in-
tended to accompany the thief to Canterbury? In any case, the fact that
the hanged man carried a letter from a castellan rather than a local abbot
or prior is notable and gestures to a future in which more and more
workaday texts would be written by laymen.

———

Most testimonials had ephemeral value. Written for very specific and
often quite personal purposes, they were of little use once an errand was
completed. These were texts destined for the rubbish bin, however much
they were sought after, carried on long journeys, and protected from
weather, thieves, and mischief. But though we have lost nearly all of these
texts, our sense of letter writing in the high medieval period is incom-
plete without them. Giles Constable has noted that the messengers who
delivered the letters of the medieval elite should be thought of as “much
more than delivery boy[s],” since the bearers of letters were often called
upon to articulate their superior’s cause or to convey messages too sen-
sitive to entrust to text.64 This is an important corrective, but the Becket
miracle testimonials take us one step further. They show us that people
of low status often carried letters about themselves, letters concerning
their own needs, petitions, status, and stories, letters testifying to their
good faith and seeking favor from the recipient of the letter. In the late
twelfth century, traveling clerks, monks, and canons were the people
most likely to have such testimonials. Yet a fair number of lay travelers,
even then, appear to have been carrying letters about themselves. In the
late twelfth century, there were scripts in some pilgrims’ “scrips,” the
pouches pilgrims carried at their belts. The snubbed Mabel of Dudley,
the anxious father of Cecilia, and maybe, too, the steward of Saint-Omer
who found a hanged man alive, seem to have been as dogged in their pur-
suit of letters as any clerk or monk. They would probably be pleased to
know that their testimonials were preserved, but whether these letters
brought all the results their bearers hoped for is something that the bare
texts, for all their miracle of preservation, cannot tell us.
Table 7.1 Letters in the Christ Church Miracle Collections for Thomas Becket
( BP=Benedict of Peterborough; WC=William of Canterbury)

Chp(s)
No. in Coll(s) Sender Addressee Subject of miracle (in bold if named as the bearer)

1 BP 2.52 Robert of Cricklade, [ Removed: originally The writer, Robert of Cricklade ( healed after a visit to
prior of St Frideswide’s, Oxford addressed to “brother Canterbury). [ Text of letter also known from late 14th-century
(occ. 1140x1174) Benedict”] Icelandic saga, which drew on Robert’s otherwise lost vita et
miracula for Becket.]
2 BP 4.2 and Burgesses of Bedford Convent of Canterbury Eilward of Westoning ( pauper healed of blinding and castration
WC 1.17 and all the faithful in Bedford). [ Letter written in response to inquiry from Hugh of
Puiset, bishop of Durham, see also no. 24.]
3 BP 4.4 Saffrid, dean of Chesterton Convent of the church Humphrey, from diocese of Coventry ( healed of leprosy at
of Canterbury Canterbury).
4 BP 4.11 Albinus, abbot of Darley Odo, prior of Canterbury Water turned into blood at Stafford (30 miles east of Darley) at
(occ. 1151x1176) (ca.1168– July 1175) the home of Reinard, and another case of water turning into blood.
5 BP 4.65 and William Turbe, bishop of Prior and convent of Cecilia, daughter of Jordan of Plumstock in diocese of Norwich
WC 1.49 Norwich (1146 –1174) Canterbury (resurrected from death by cancer). [ Letter requested of the bishop
by Jordan, Cecilia’s father.]
6 BP 4.84 Silvester, treasurer of the Prior, sacrist, and brothers Osbern, servant of canon of Lisieux, Roger son of Ain (healed of
church of Lisieux of Canterbury hernia at Lisieux after vow of pilgrimage).
7 BP 4.85 A., prior of Corbie, and convent Odo, prior of Canterbury John, young man of Valenciennes (caught for theft in Corbie and
healed there after judicial blinding).
8 BP 4.86 and Augustine, monk of Reading Odo, prior of Canterbury Geoffrey of Wallingford, a monk of Reading ( healed at the brink of
WC 2.12 death in Reading). [ Benedict cuts the salutation, William does not.]
9 BP 4.87 Peter of Celle (d. 1183), Prior of Canterbury; Geoffrey, monk of Mont-Dieu ( healed of dropsy by touching to his
then abbot of Saint-Rémi, greetings at the letter’s body a carta miraculorum that had come from England via Saint-
Reims close to the convent and Rémi). [A longer version of this letter is also in Peter of Celle’s
master John of Salisbury letter collection.]
 Chp(s)
No. in Coll(s) Sender Addressee Subject of miracle (in bold if named as the bearer)

10 BP 6.1, and Geoffrey, dean of Gloucester Prior of Holy Trinity of William of Gloucester (workman buried at Churchdown, a town
WC 3.1 Canterbury and all the five miles west of Gloucester, while building an aqueduct for
convent archbishop Roger of York).

11 WC 1.1 Convent of the church of Henry, king of the English, William of Canterbury, with accounts of his visions impelling him
Christ, Canterbury duke of Normandy and to write a collection.
Aquitaine, count of Anjou
12 WC 1.10 Richard, abbot of Sulby [ Removed, but said by Vision of an unnamed brother of Sulby concerning the celebration
in Welford, occ. 1155x1174 William to be composed of Thomas as a martyr.
by the abbot’s “own hand.”]
[R] WC 1.16 see above, no. 2 ( Bedford) [ Repeat, Eilward of Westoning]
[R] WC 1.49 see above, no. 5 ( Norwich) [ Repeat, Cecilia of Plumstock]
[R] WC 2.12 see above, no. 8 ( Reading) [ Repeat, Geoffrey, monk of Reading]
13 WC 2.13 Adam, abbot of Shrewsbury Odo, prior of Canterbury, Richard, monk and precentor of Shrewsbury (restored by relic
(occ. 1168x1175), and brothers and the holy convent water in Shrewsbury when on the brink of death).
14 WC 2.37 Paganus, chaplain of Louin Eustace, monk of Canterbury Wimarga of Louin (cured of blindness in Louin using Paganus’s
relics).
[R] WC 3.1 see above, no. 10 (Gloucester) [ Repeat, William of Gloucester]
15 WC 4.23 Humbald, prior of Much Odo, prior, and all the Mabel of Dudley (cured of leprosy at Canterbury). [ Mabel’s cure
Wenlock (1168x1175), and all convent also described in WC 2.22.]
the convent
16 WC 4.25 Brother Fulk, prior of St Prior and convent of the Odo “of our parish” ( layman struck with leprosy after sex with a
Leonard of Beaumont-sur-Oise, church of Canterbury prostitute; struck a second time after broke vow not to eat meat
and Hugh of Praeres, priest until he arrived at Becket’s tomb).
 Chp(s)
No. in Coll(s) Sender Addressee Subject of miracle (in bold if named as the bearer)

17 WC 5.2 John of Canterbury, or “aux Odo, prior Girald of La Tour Blanche (hung on the gallows near Perigueux but
Bellesmains,” bishop of Poitiers survived).
1162–1181 (see also no. 29)
18 WC 6.2 Clerks of church of Exeter Prior Odo and brothers of Bartholomew, bishop of Exeter (1161–1184), and his household
the church of Canterbury (all recovering from illnesses, including story of vision of William,
nephew of archbishop Theobald).
19 WC 6.3 Reginald of Etampes, former Prior of Holy Trinity of Gerard, clerk of Liége (healed of dangerous illness under watchful
prior of Bermondsey (occ. 1166); Canterbury eye and by water provided by Reginald of Etampes near Provins).
residing near Provins
20 WC 6.4 Peter, abbot of Jouy Prior of Holy Trinity of Character of Reginald of Etampes (see no. 19 above). The abbey of
Canterbury Jouy was located about 5 miles northwest of Provins.
21 WC 6.5 Haymo, prior of Reuil, Prior of Holy Trinity of Character of Reginald of Etampes (see no. 19 above). The cell of
in diocese of Meaux Canterbury Reuil was located about 30 miles north of Provins.
22 WC 6.6 Pons, bishop of Clermont Prior and convent Daughter of John Sistercius, a wealthy burger of Le Puy-en-Velay
(1170 –1189), former abbot of (cured of a fistula on her hand).
Clairvaux [see also nos. 28 and 31]
23 WC 6.7, Anselm, monk of Reading, Jeremy, monk of Christ Three stories of Reading monks: 1) Anselm’s own horse rescued;
6.8 and 6.9. possibly subprior Anselm occ. Church Canterbury 2) Elias, leper monk from Reading [also told in BP 4.72];
1185x1186 3) Richard, monk, saved from dangerous illness.
24 WC 6.10 Hugh Puiset, bishop of Durham Richard, archbishop (1174 – Roger, a “most simple” young man ( blinded and castrated in
(1153–1195) 1184), prior and convent Durham for theft).
25 WC 6.14 – Richard Peche, bishop of Richard, archbishop of Thomas, deacon of bishropic of Coventry (wounded and castrated
6.16 Coventry (1161–1182) Canterbury by jealous lover while setting up altar to Thomas).
26 WC 6.17 Stephen, prior of Taunton, To all the faithful in Christ to John, brother of Taunton (cured of leprosy at Canterbury).
occ. 1158–1189x91 whom these letters may come
27 WC 6.21 Ralph of Sully, abbot of To all the priors, dear sons, to Daniel, monk of Cluny and abbot’s notary (cured of quinsy when
Cluny (1173–1176) whom these letters may come near death).
 Chp(s)
No. in Coll(s) Sender Addressee Subject of miracle (in bold if named as the bearer)

28 WC 6.23 Pons, bishop of Clermont Archbishop and chapter of A young woman of the diocese of Clermont (cured of muteness at
[see also nos. 22 and 31] Canterbury Meyssac, in Limousin, about 80 miles southwest of Clermont).
29 WC 6.26 John of Canterbury, bishop Odo the prior and the Candles miraculously relit during a procession when John returns
of Poitiers [see also no. 17] convent home to Poitiers with relics from Canterbury.
30 WC 6.57 John of Salisbury (d. 1180), Odo, prior, William, Stories told at council at Bourges, one by Pons, bishop of Clermont
“least of priests of Christ,” subprior, and all the brothers about leper John Scot; another told by canons of Saint-Aoustrille
then at Bourges in Bourges about their servant, Bucecius.
31 WC 6.58 Pons, bishop of Clermont Prior and convent of John Scot, from Clermont ( healed of leprosy at Canterbury), see
[see also nos. 22 and 28] Canterbury no. 30 above.
32 WC 6.59 P[ayne], abbot of Sawtry, Prior and convent of the Alfwin, lay brother of Sawtry (cured of a rupture), and Richard,
occ. 1164x1179 church of Christ cellarer of Sawtry (cured of illness).
33 WC 6.67 A., minister of “Stocatoniensis Brothers of the church of Unnamed poor woman who became ill and vowed a calf to the
ecclesiae” Canterbury martyr; calf sent to Canterbury.
34 WC 6.84 Henry de Beaumont, bishop To all the clerks in the William of Rouen (a leper cured after visit to Canterbury).
of Bayeux (1165–1205) bishopric of Bayeux
35 WC 6.86 Roger of Berkeley ( perhaps the Convent of Canterbury and Unnamed madman (cured in a local chapel of St Thomas).
grandson of Roger of Berkeley all the sons of the church
of the Conquest)
 Chp(s)
No. in Coll(s) Sender Addressee Subject of miracle (in bold if named as the bearer)

36 WC 6.123 Convent of Osney Convent of Canterbury William, canon of Osney (cured of epilepsy after a visit to
Canterbury).
37 WC 6.124 Eustace, abbot of St Peter Benedict, prior (1175–1177), Robert, brother of the house (cured of paralysis).
“de Clincurce” and the convent
38 WC 6.125 Peter, abbot of Pontigny Benedict, prior and the Pontius, monk of Pontigny (revived when seemingly dead).
(1174?–1180) convent
39 WC 6.126 William, castellan of Saint-Omer Prior and chapter of the Unnamed thief ( hung on gallows at Fauquembergues, about 12
church of Canterbury miles southwest of Saint-Omer).
40 WC 6.127 Abbot of La Sie-en-Brignon Benedict, prior, and all the Unnamed worker ( blinded when reached into a glass vessel
or Brignon-la-sie religious serving under him containing bones and black earth that he found while digging).
41 WC 6.128– A[ lard], abbot of Trois-Fontaines Benedict, prior, and the Seffrid, monk of Himmerod (Cistercian), whose self-castration was
6.134 Abbey (ca.1173–1181) and convent healed, and stories of eight other miracles taking place at a Becket
[ Milo], the abbot of Haute- chapel near Himmerod with relics brought from Canterbury by
Fontaines Ludwig of Deudesfeld and his wife.
42 WC 6.135 Master A. of Asti Richard, archbishop of Surleo (struck in the head while bell-ringing two miles away from
Canterbury Asti).
 Testimonial Letters in the Becket Miracle Collections \ 195

Notes
1. See Mary Garrison, “ ‘Send More Socks’: On Mentality and the Pres-
ervation Context of Medieval Letters,” in New Approaches to Medieval Communi-
cation, ed. Marco Mostert ( Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 69– 99, at 69– 71.
2. BP on the listing in table 7.1 stands for Benedict of Peterborough,
Miracula S. Thomae, ed. J. C. Robertson, in Materials for the History of Thomas
Becket, Rolls Series, vol. 2 ( London, 1876), 21– 281; WC stands for William of
Canterbury, Miracula S. Thomae, ed. J. C. Robertson, in Materials for the History of
Thomas Becket, Rolls Series, vol. 1 (London, 1875), 1–137. I have listed the letters
in the order they appear in the collections and by book and chapter number. For
some of the letters found in William’s first and second books, I have followed my
renumbering of chapters as listed and explained in my book Wonderful to Relate:
Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England (Philadelphia: Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 271n1 and appendix 3. By Robertson’s num-
bering, WC 1.16 is 2.2; 1.49 is 2.35; 2.12 is 2.50; 2.13 is 2.51; and 2.37 is 2.75.
I have attempted to identify the writers and their locations as far as possible,
but I have not yet been able to identify which town is meant by “Stocatoniensis”
(no. 33), nor which monastery is meant by Saint Peter “de Clincurce” (no. 37). I
have not included a charter from Henry II found in William’s collection in the
listing because I do not think that it was part of William’s original text (see Wil-
liam, Miracula 6.98, 494 – 95; and my Wonderful to Relate, 155).
3. This category of letter is not mentioned in most surveys of high me-
dieval letter writing. I have chosen to dub them “testimonial” letters because this
reflects terms used by the miracle collectors themselves: see especially how the
collectors introduce nos. 5, 14, and 17. The best overview of letter writing in
the medieval period remains Giles Constable, Letters and Letter-Collections, Ty-
pologie des Sources du Moyen Age Occidental 17 ( Turnhout: Brepols, 1976); see
also the recent review of eleventh- and twelfth-century letter collections in Samu
Niskanen, The Letter Collections of Anselm of Canterbury, Instrumenta Patristica et
Mediaevalia 61 ( Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 41– 71. There has been surprisingly
little study of letter bearers: for one recent contribution, see John R. C. Martyn,
Pope Gregory’s Letter-Bearers: A Study of the Men and Women who Carried Letters for
Pope Gregory the Great ( Newcastle-on-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012).
4. These are Robert Cricklade’s autobiographical letter (no. 1), found as
part of a late fourteenth-century Icelandic saga that drew on Robert’s (lost) mira-
cle collection (see Eiríkr Magnússon, ed. and trans., Thómas Saga Erkibyskups: A
Life of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Icelandic, 2 vols., Rolls Series 65 [London, 1883],
2:93–101); and the letter from Peter Celle (no. 9). A longer version of Peter’s let-
ter was preserved in his letter collection (see note 6 below).
5. See Anne Duggan’s recent edition of 329 letters sent to and from
Becket, The Correspondence of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury 1162–1170,
2 vols., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Duggan’s edition halts with
 196 / Rachel Koopmans

Becket’s death. Post-martyrdom letters concerning Becket have not been edited
or examined as a body, though Alan of Tewkesbury included many such letters
in the fifth and final book of his famed collection of the Becket correspondence.
For an excellent study drawing principally on post-martyrdom letters, see Anne
Duggan’s 1998 article “Diplomacy, Status, and Conscience: Henry II’s Penance
for Becket’s Murder,” reprinted in Thomas Becket: Friends, Networks, Texts and
Cult (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 2007), chapter 7. I am very grateful for
Anne Duggan’s comments on an earlier version of this article.
6. Despite the eminence of some of the letter writers, these texts are hardly
ever mentioned in the historical literature. Ronald Finucane commented on the
existence and importance of these texts, but only very briefly, in his Miracles and
Pilgrims ( New York: Macmillan, 1977), 159– 60. The letters from Peter of Celle
and John of Salisbury (nos. 9 and 30) are edited in the Oxford Medieval Texts edi-
tions: see Julian Haseldine, ed. and trans., The Letters of Peter of Celle (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2001), no. 142, 522– 25 (Haseldine misdates this letter to Bene-
dict’s rather than Odo’s priorate); and W. J. Millor, S.J., and C. N. L. Brooke, eds.,
The Letters of John of Salisbury, vol. 2, The Later Letters (1163–1180) (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 1977), no. 323, 794 – 99. The most thoroughgoing study of
any of the letters concerns no. 41, a very long narrative with accounts of multiple
miracles occurring near Himmerod: see S. K. Langenbahn,“Die wiederentdeck-
ten Himmeroder Miracula S. Thomae Cantuariensis (1175). Zugänge zur früh-
esten narrativen Quelle zur Geschichte von St. Thomas/Eifel,” Kurtrierisches
Jahrbuch 41 (2001): 121– 64.
7. Compare the “sender” and “subject” columns of table 7.1. Just three
of the forty-two letters are autobiographical: no. 1, a letter written by Robert
Cricklade about his own healing (a text requested by Benedict); the first part of
no. 23, in which Anselm, a monk of Reading, recounts a miracle involving his
horse; and no. 29, a letter in which the bishop of Poitiers describes how candles
lit up in the presence of a Becket relic he had acquired from Canterbury.
8. Other letters that were probably carried to Canterbury by people
closely involved in the miracle (though a bearer is not explicitly named) are no. 2,
no. 18, nos. 20 and 21 (which seem to have been copied on the same parchment
as no. 19), and nos. 24, 32, 33, 36, and 41.
9. The letter, from Bishop Arnulf of Lisieux, was written on behalf of
“Master Everard, the bearer of this letter.” See Frank Barlow, ed., Letters of Arnulf
of Lisieux, Camden Third Series 61 ( London: Royal Historical Society, 1939),
no. 57, 102– 3; also edited (from the same manuscript used by Barlow) and trans-
lated in Duggan, Correspondence of Thomas Becket, vol. 2, no. 321, 1336– 37. Both
scholars suggest that Master “Errardus” (Barlow’s reading of the manuscript) or
“Evrardus” (Duggan’s reading) was Edward Grim. If so, one of Becket’s last ac-
tions may have been to read this testimonial, and Grim’s brave defense of Becket
might have been motivated by Becket’s response to his petition.
 Testimonial Letters in the Becket Miracle Collections \ 197

10. John Van Engen, “Letters, Schools and Written Culture in the Elev-
enth and Twelfth Centuries,” in Dialektik und Rhetorik im früheren und hohen
Mittelalter, ed. Johannes Fried, Schriften des Historischen Kollegs Kolloquien
27 ( München: Oldenbourg, 1997), 97–132, at 118.
11. Van Engen, “Letters, Schools, and Written Culture,” 128. This article
should be read in conjunction with Van Engen’s equally absorbing and important
essay on Hildegard of Bingen’s letter collection, “Letters and the Public Persona
of Hildegard,” in Hildegard von Bingen in ihrem historischen Umfeld, ed. Alfred
Haverkamp, Internationaler wissenschaftlicher Kongreß zum 900jährigen Ju-
biläum, 13.–19. September 1998, Bingen am Rhein ( Mainz: Trierer Historische
Forschungen, 2000), 375– 418. I am most grateful to John Van Engen for his
help and long-standing interest in my work on the Becket miracle collections.
12. On such networks, see the work of John McLoughlin, “Amicitia in Prac-
tice: John of Salisbury (c.1120 –1180) and his Circle,” in England in the Twelfth Cen-
tury: Proceedings of the 1988 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Daniel Williams ( Wood-
bridge: Boydell, 1990), 165– 81; Julian Haseldine, “Understanding the Language of
amicitia: The Friendship Circle of Peter of Celle (c.1115–1183),” Journal of Medi-
eval History 20 (1994): 237– 60; and Walter Ysebaert, “Medieval Letter-Collections
as a Mirror of Circles of Friendship? The Example of Stephen of Tournai,
1128–1203,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 83, no. 2 (2005): 285– 300.
13. For three contemporary English examples, see the letter written by
Osbert of Clare in Liber Eliensis, ed. E. O. Blake, Camden Third Series 92 (Lon-
don: Royal Historical Society, 1962), bk. 3, ch. 43, 281– 83 (this text was also in-
cluded in Osbert’s letter collection; see E. W. Williamson, ed., The Letters of Os-
bert of Clare, Prior of Westminster [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929], no. 33,
116–19); a letter written by a brother Christian at Pershore Abbey, in Worcester-
shire, about a local miracle attributed to William Thomas of Monmouth, in The
Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich, ed. and trans. Augustus Jessopp and
Montague Rhodes James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896), bk. vii,
ch. 18, 283– 89; and a letter from the dean and rector of Chilwell about a miracle
of Gilbert of Sempringham in The Book of St. Gilbert, ed. Raymonde Foreville
and Gillian Keir (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 319– 23.
14. For the careers of these collectors and this dating of their collections,
see Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate, 139– 58.
15. See the numerous letters to and from these men edited by Duggan,
Correspondence of Thomas Becket.
16. See, for example, Benedict, Miracula 3.40, 4.52, 4.64, and 4.66; William,
Miracula 5.2 and 6.115. Letters about miracles continued to arrive at Canterbury
after William finished his collection, as we know by the chance preservation of a
letter from John of Salisbury about a miracle in Chartres. The letter is found
in abbreviated copies of Benedict of Peterborough’s miracle collection in two
fifteenth-century manuscripts: see Raymonde Foreville, “Une lettre inédite de
 198 / Rachel Koopmans

Jean de Salisbury, évêque de Chartres,” Revue d’histoire de l’Église de France 22

(1936): 179– 85; and Letters of John of Salisbury, vol. 2, no. 325, 803– 7. These edi-
tors take the text from Vatican MS lat. 1221; it also appears in Cambridge, Cor-
pus Christi College MS 464, at ff. 89v– 91v.
17. On this later addition and its dating, see Koopmans, Wonderful to Re-
late, 154 – 55.
18. Notably, both Benedict and William cut the salutations of the first let-
ters they included in their collections (see nos. 1 and 12). They wrote their own
introductions instead, seemingly as a means of more smoothly integrating the
other man’s words into their texts.
19. Compare Benedict, Miracula 4.86, and William, Miracula 2.12 (2.50 by
Robertson’s numbering).
20. See William, Miracula 1.49 (2.35 in Robertson’s edition) and 2.2 (Rob-
ertson, 2.40), and my discussion of these chapters in Wonderful to Relate, 149.
21. Scholars working on miracle collections more generally should be sen-
sitive to the possibility of letter texts standing behind chapters ostensibly in the
author’s own voice. A striking example of how such a letter could get absorbed
into a collection is found in Eadmer of Canterbury’s early twelfth-century mira-
cle collection for Saint Dunstan, in which Eadmer discusses a miracle that oc-
curred at Sapperton ( probably a manor near Glastonbury). Eadmer never indi-
cates that the news of this miracle come in by letter, but luckily, a fair copy of the
letter, with its salutation removed, was bound into British Library Arundel MS
16, a text of Osbern of Canterbury’s earlier miracle collection. See Eadmer of
Canterbury, Lives and Miracles of Saints Oda, Dunstan, and Oswald, ed. and trans.
Andrew J. Turner and Bernard J. Muir (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006), lxxii– lxxiii
and 206– 7. In the prologue to his vita of Dunstan, Eadmer notes that he had sent
out requests for information about Dunstan (ibid., lxxii): it is possible that the
Sapperton letter came to Canterbury as a result.
22. An example in William’s collection is the account of the miracle of a
certain servant of the monks of Boxgrove, Miracula 4.24, 339.
23. See Benedict, Miracula 1.9, 40, and the discussion of Benedict’s col-
lecting methods in Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate, 159– 80.
24. Benedict, Miracula 4.64, 233.
25. The letter from Richard, abbot of Welford (no. 12), looks suspiciously
as if it had been requested by the Christ Church monks in the same manner as
Robert Cricklade’s account was (no. 1), but the placement of this text at the very
beginning of William’s collection suggests that if it was the result of a request,
the request had been made by Benedict, not William.
26. This is how the collection is described in the prefatory letter (no. 11):
see William, Miracula 1.1, 139: “epulas quas habet recumbentibus exhibet.” For
further discussion of William’s aims as a miracle collector, see Koopmans, Won-
derful to Relate, 153– 58 and 181– 84.
 Testimonial Letters in the Becket Miracle Collections \ 199

27. On William’s use of letters in his vita, see Anne Duggan, Thomas Becket:
A Textual History of His Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 182– 87
and table 2, 272– 73. Duggan notes that William was a careful copyist: “Wher-
ever William inserted complete letters into his narrative, he treated the texts with
great respect” (185).
28. William, Miracula 2.12 ( Robertson 2.50), 210 –11.
29. William, Miracula 6.2, 407.
30. It is possible that letters from abbesses are behind some chapters. In his
account of a miracle of a nun named Lecarda, for example, Benedict includes a di-
alogue between Lecarda and her sisters that may have been derived from a letter
(see Benedict, Miracula 4.10, 188– 89). On nuns’ letter writing in this period, see
Alison I. Beach, “Voices from a Distant Land: Fragments of a Twelfth-Century
Nuns’ Letter Collection,” Speculum 77 (2002): 34 – 54; and, on women’s letter writ-
ing more generally, see Joan M. Ferrante, “‘Licet longinquis regionibus corpore
separati’: Letters as a link in and to the Middle Ages,” Speculum 76 (2001): 877– 95.
31. For these in-house religious letters (in bold if the bearer is named), see
nos. 6, 8, 11, 12, 13, 18, 23, 26, 27, 32, 36, 37, and 38. No. 6 concerns a servant
of a religious house who was likely a layman, and no. 32 is principally about the
miracle of a lay brother, but I believe these letters are best read in the category
of letters concerning the religious.
32. William, Miracula 2.13 ( Robertson 2.51), 211–13. For two letters writ-
ten very much along the same lines, see nos. 35 and 37.
33. Letters preserved in the Becket collections about less serious illnesses—
such as, for example, the letter by Pons, the bishop of Clermont, about the cure
of a mute woman (no. 28) — were not generally written as testimonials to be
carried by bearers. Pons wrote this letter about the mute woman because “emer-
gency business” prevented him from coming on pilgrimage and telling the Christ
Church monks the story himself.
34. Anselm addressed the five letters to people he hoped would help the
monks in their mission: the archbishop of Canterbury, the bishop of Rochester,
the abbot of Bury St. Edmunds, the prior of Christ Church, Canterbury, and
the noble couple who had requested the new foundation. For English transla-
tions of these letters, see The Letters of Saint Anselm of Canterbury, vol. 1, trans.
Walter Frölich ( Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1990), nos. 90, 91, 92, 93,
and 94, pp. 232– 38.
35. For these decrees, see M. D. Knowles, Anne J. Duggan, and C. N. L.
Brooke, “Henry II’s Supplement to the Constitutions of Clarendon,” English
Historical Review 87 (1972): 757– 71.
36. The prefatory letter heading William’s collection that was directed to
Henry II (no. 11) is very much in this vein: the letter, written by the convent,
names William as the bearer of the letter and provides the king with a descrip-
tion of the miraculous visions that led William to write the collection.
 200 / Rachel Koopmans

37. William, Miracula 6.124, 512. See also no. 17, another letter containing
an explicit request for relics for the bearers.
38. William, Miracula 6.17, 429.
39. For the English translation of this letter, see Letters from the East: Cru-
saders, Pilgrims and Settlers in the 12th–13th Centuries, trans. Malcolm Barber and
Keith Bate ( Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), no. 38, 72– 73. The letter is edited in R.
Röhricht, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Kreuzzüge, vol. 2 (Berlin, 1878), 127– 28n45.
40. This collection, dated to the late 1170s, is edited as The Letters and Char-
ters of Gilbert Foliot, ed. Z. N. Brooke, Dom Adrian Morey, and C. N. L. Brooke
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). The collection has been termed
“a clerk’s compilation out of diverse, ill-ordered materials,” which includes “an as-
sortment of the content of the bishop’s files and pigeon-holes”: see Dom Adrian
Morey and C. N. L. Brooke, Gilbert Foliot and his Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1965), 28.
41. See Letters and Charters, nos. 413, 424, and 428. For more letters for
bearers seeking funds for a particular cause, see also nos. 352, 386, 390, 418, and
419, and for a similar letter from a slightly earlier time period from Archbishop
Theobald, see Avrom Saltman, Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury ( London:
Athlone, 1956), no. 82, 305– 306. On these letters, see also Nicholas Vincent,
“Some Pardoners’ Tales: The Earliest English Indulgences,” Transactions of the
Royal Historical Society 12 (2002): 23– 58.
42. In Heads of Religious Houses: England & Wales, I. 940 – 1216, ed. David
Knowles, C. N. L. Brooke, and Vera C. M. London, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2001), 266, this Reginald ( presumably) is noted as
“occ. 1166” as prior of Bermondsey.
43. See also the very similar rhetoric in the opening of the letter from the
clerks of Exeter, no. 18.
44. Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. J. LeClercq and H. Rochais ( Rome: Edi-
tiones Cistercienses, 1979), no. 389. I am grateful to John Van Engen for this
reference.
45. For three examples, see The Letters of John of Salisbury: The Early Letters
(1153–1161), ed. W. J. Millor, S.J., and H. E. Butler; rev. C. N. L. Brooke ( Lon-
don: Clarendon, 1955), no. 50 (a letter on behalf of the bearers — canons of
Merton — seeking to regain property); no. 51 (a letter on behalf of William, the
bearer, who is struggling with an unnamed adversary); no. 52 (on behalf of un-
named bearer who wished to join a stricter order), etc.
46. On Silvester, see Duggan, Correspondence, vol. 1, no. 122, 582– 85, and
vol 2., 1131n15.
47. Walter Fröhlich, trans., The Letters of Saint Anselm of Canterbury, 3
vols. ( Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1994), 3:172– 73, no. 406.
48. It appears that religious men traveling from Perigueux with the hanged
man asked John for the letter.
 Testimonial Letters in the Becket Miracle Collections \ 201

49. William, Miracula 6.124, 512.

50. For letters written by religious men about miracles experienced by lay
men or women (in bold if bearer is named), see nos. 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, 14, 15, 16,
17, 22, 24, 28, 30, 31, 33, 34, 40, and 41 (nos. 30 and 41 discuss lay and religious
miracles).
51. William, Miracula 6.10, 420. Hugh Puiset had earlier involved himself
in the miracle of Eilward of Westoning. Letter no. 2 was written at his request,
as we know from Benedict’s account of Eilward’s miracle: see Benedict, Miracula
4.2, 180 – 81.
52. William, Miracula 3.1, 256.
53. In William’s account of Roger’s miracle, it is clear Roger had come to
Canterbury: see William, Miracula 6.11, 422– 23.
54. William, Miracula 6.14, 427– 28.
55. William, Miracula 2.22 ( Robertson 2.60), 221.
56. William, Miracula 4.23, 338.
57. William, Miracula 4.23, 338– 39.
58. William’s handling of Mabel’s letter can be contrasted with his more
enthusiastic reception of an epileptic canon of Oseney on a return trip to Can-
terbury. William wrote a lengthy introductory chapter, Miracula 6.122, 508– 9,
about the canon’s illness before copying a letter from his convent (no. 36), which
confirmed that the canon had not been ill since he had come back from pilgrim-
age to Canterbury.
59. Benedict, Miracula 4.65, 236 – 37, and William, Miracula 1.49 ( Robert-
son 2.35), 192. Both men seem to have been silently copying from yet another
letter for this account. The second half of the sentence cited above (“ne Cantu-
ariam veniens et rem narraturus supra opinionem et fidem, citra auctoritatem,
loqui putaretur”) is only found in William’s account — it is not clear whether
this was in the original letter or whether William added it himself.
60. Nicholas Vincent, “The Court of Henry II,” in Henry II: New Interpre-
tations, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill and Nicholas Vincent ( Woodbridge: Boy-
dell, 2007), 278– 334, at 306.
61. Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307,
2d ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 89.
62. William, Miracula 6.86, 480 – 81.
63. William, Miracula 6.126, 515.
64. Constable, Letters and Letter Collections, 53. See also Constable’s very
interesting article “Dictators and Diplomats in the Eleventh and Twelfth Cen-
turies: Medieval Epistolography and the Birth of Modern Bureaucracy,” Dumb-
arton Oaks Papers 46, Homo Byzantinus: Papers in Honor of Alexander Kazhdan
(1992): 37– 46.
 Eight

Th e C o u n t e r f a c t u a l
Tw e l f t h C e n t u r y

d ya n e l l i o t t

In the twelfth century, Latin Christendom began to dream out loud.

People started to see and converse with others long dead. Theologians
attempted to approximate the perspective of God, who could search the
conscience and judge lives unlived. Gods and heroes awoke from the
slumber of their mythical past to be provided with a new agenda. Deities
were invented with impunity. Vernacular literature arose and shook off
the bondage of the credible, opting for magical scenarios driven by wish
fulfillment. Autobiography provided a new medium for self-revelation,
exposing the distance between the external world and internal desire.
This engagement with what I am calling counterfactual reality was a
hallmark of twelfth-century thought that permeated the period’s new
genres at both conscious and unconscious levels. It was an altogether new
way of looking at the world—one that provided a creative recasting of re-
ality that pursued roads not taken, explored unexploited possibilities, ful-
filled unrealized potential, and accessed fantastical or supernatural realms.1
The counterfactual could be engaged in both fiction and philosophical
speculation, neither of which made claims on external reality. But it also
could be revealed unconsciously in the kinds of alternative realities pre-

202
 The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 203

sented in dreams or visions. Although such states were commonly associ-

ated with a heightened truth quotient, they nevertheless resisted the kind
of verification available to the miracle, which was apprehended by many.
Not only were dreams and visions private, they were also apprehended in-
dependently from external (or what Augustine referred to as corporeal)
vision. Instead, they proceeded from spiritual vision: an internalized fac-
ulty utilizing images that were captured by corporeal vision and subse-
quently stored in the imagination.2 This means that while a vision of pur-
gatory was, in a certain sense, real, even ultrareal, to its recipient, it was
destined to remain a personal reality that could be (and often was) dis-
missed as imaginary or counterfactual to others.3
Although the counterfactual cuts across discourses and assumes many
forms, I propose to examine four manifestations that are closely related to
genre. They were all generated in northern France, a locus of creative
ferment where the counterfactual loomed especially large. In the mem-
oirs of Guibert of Nogent, the counterfactual manifests itself as a kind
of rambunctious textual unconscious that distorts or reinterprets exter-
nal reality, often projecting deeply held attractions and antipathies into
an alternative reality apprehended by spiritual vision. Concealed ten-
sions and conflicts also reveal themselves in the way in which the text is
constructed — whether through inclusions, exclusions, or strange coin-
cidences. In the period’s novel applications of reason, the counterfactual
can manifest itself in terms of speculation about received truths; hence
Peter Abelard provides hypothetical motivations for Adam and Eve with a
view to their possible exculpation in the outer world. In the lais of Marie
de France, the counterfactual tends to manifest itself through magical
realms buttressed by wish fulfillment. Finally, the writings of Alan of Lille
demonstrate how in both orthodox and heterodox cosmological dis-
course, the counterfactual can wear the camouflage of allegory, which
provides a resourceful disguise in which to explore potentially suspect
philosophical and theological principles. This is a period, however, in
which imaginative invention shades off into philosophical speculation,
so these categories are by no means stable. Marie de France deploys ro-
mance to explore Eucharistic theology even as Alan of Lille uses literary
devices such as myth and allegory as philosophical tools. All of these
genres, however, demonstrate a propensity to imagine things differently
 204 / Dyan Elliott

than they presented themselves in mundane reality, an exercise that

often leads to hidden insights and deeper truths.
Because the counterfactual generally seeks an accommodation of the
strange within the ambit of the familiar, it qualifies as uncanny in a psy-
choanalytic sense. It has the capacity to defamiliarize mundane reality.4
There has been a surge of recent scholarly interest in the many elements
deemed uncanny in this period: visions of the dead; revenants stalking
the living; bizarre creatures with quasi-human attributes. I hope to ex-
tend the conventional perimeters of the uncanny beyond its preter- and
supernatural ambiance to accommodate the counterfactual.5 This orien-
tation counterpoints a number of traditional historiographical emphases
of twelfth-century scholarship. Thus in contrast to the autonomous indi-
vidual, a focus on the counterfactual reveals divisiveness, altered states of
consciousness, and revealing projections of the self and others. It empha-
sizes a scholasticism that quixotically attempts to Christianize Plato, and
applications of reason exposing new vistas of uncertainty. The counter-
factual also lends insight into intellectually or doctrinally troubled wa-
ters, pointing to the way that uncomfortable or dangerous truths can best
be conveyed in fiction.

Guibert of Nogent:
Subconscious Counterfactuality and
the Name of the Father

The memoirs of Guibert of Nogent (ca. 1115) constitute the first work
of autobiography since Augustine’s Confessions. As such, they have rightly
been taken as representative of the kind of self-reflection associated with
the twelfth century and the discovery of the individual.6 Traditionally,
Guibert’s memoirs have proved a veritable treasure trove to scholars en-
listing psychoanalysis, peeling back the text to reveal the individual be-
neath the one on display. Guibert himself has fared rather poorly in this
context, generally emerging as an unhappy neurotic with a mother fixa-
tion.7 Recently Jay Rubenstein has eschewed the psychoanalytic ap-
proach, with its dependence on the unconscious, instead representing the
memoirs as structured around a deliberate psychological theory of mind
 The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 205

that Guibert elaborated from the work of Anselm of Bec.8 An analysis of

the counterfactual straddles both approaches, highlighting instances of
deliberate and innovative representations of identity as well as uncon-
scious forces that work toward its destabilization. Guibert’s treatment of
his parents follows a distinct, but telling, pattern in this respect. For
while the portrait of the mother enlists counterfactual embellishments in
a very deliberate manner, his grip on his portrayal of his father is un-
steady and contradictory. Much of the material appears as if it were inad-
equately processed, arising unbidden from the unconscious. The result is
a devolution into counterfactual mayhem.
The first part of Guibert’s memoirs is largely a tribute to his beloved
mother. His devotion is highlighted by his attempts to present her coun-
terfactually as unsullied and virginal. Her fictive purity is helped by the
fact that her marriage remained unconsummated for a number of years
due to enchantment. Eventually, however, the spell was broken, as the ex-
istence of Guibert and his reluctantly acknowledged siblings attests.9 Yet
Guibert, an ardent student of Augustine, was clearly prepared to credit
the counterfactual world of inner intention over external actuality. Au-
gustine had reassured ascetically-minded wives that God would credit
their chaste intentions if they mentally withheld themselves from the sex
act while paying the conjugal debt.10 Following this line of reasoning,
Guibert did his utmost to align his mother’s apparent aversion to sex with
an uninterrupted purity. Hence we read that “she cherished her widow-
hood as if, unable to bear them, she had always loathed a wife’s bedtime
duties.”11 Guibert also emphasizes her refusal to remarry after her hus-
band’s death, despite her youth, choosing to live an ascetic life within her
home. Just in case the reader missed the point, Guibert relates how he
heard “a devil-possessed dependent of hers . . . shouting out these words:
‘The priests have placed a cross in her loins.’ Nothing could have been
truer,” Guibert remarks.12
The mother is represented as complicit with her doting son’s convic-
tion of her purity. Eventually she left her home for a hermitage attached
to a monastery, where she modeled her behavior on a senior and virginal
nun.13 Just prior to her death, however, his mother successfully argued
for the right to receive the same veiling as a consecrated virgin — a rite
that religious authorities as renowned as Anselm of Bec had told her was
 206 / Dyan Elliott

forbidden to widows. This final privilege was nevertheless granted, par-

tially as a result of a series of visionary interventions engineered by the
Virgin Mary, to whom she was especially devoted.14 The superiority of
the psychic virginity available to Guibert’s mother becomes especially
apparent when she sees the older nun, her erstwhile mentor, in purga-
tory “carried off by two coal-black spirits, her form a mere shadow.”15
The mother’s exceptional purity was also an anchor for Guibert’s
vocation. Destined for the church from infancy, Guibert nevertheless ex-
perienced a bout of adolescent rebellion: “As the life of this world began
to stir my itching heart with fleshly longings . . . my mind repeatedly fell
to remembering and dwelling on what and how great I might have been
in the world, in which my imaginings often travelled beyond truth.” It is
noteworthy that Guibert’s precocious commitment to chastity required
that his “fleshly longings” be elaborated as lives unlived. He thus pres-
ents an interesting foil for his mother, whose parallel commitment is
conveyed through her son’s efforts to erase the life that was lived. Fortu-
nately, his mother was apprised of Guibert’s inner turbulence through
dreams and called him back from the brink of counterfactual disaster.
Guibert confessed to her, and the problem was resolved “since . . . my
will was one with hers.”16 This image of concord, frequently ascribed to
lovers in romance, underlines the fact that Guibert’s beloved mother was
indeed his beloved. Since Guibert is modeling his work after Augustine’s
Confessions, it is not surprising that his mother achieves a similar promi-
nence to Augustine’s mother. Yet, as Nancy Partner has noted, Guibert’s
mother remains nameless throughout the narrative, bringing her into
tacit alignment with Augustine’s nameless but much beloved mistress.17
Such intense feelings for a mother who suffered the trials of a trou-
bled marriage must naturally take their toll on Guibert’s attitude toward
the father he never knew. Guibert’s alleged profession of joy at his fa-
ther’s premature death has a distinctly oedipal resonance, which is hardly
dispelled by the feeble rationale that, had his father lived, he would doubt-
less have interfered with his son’s monastic vocation.18 Nevertheless, the
father is quite often evoked to offset his wife’s piety. This is especially
true in the most detailed discussion of the father, which occurs in Gui-
bert’s relation of the mother’s vision of purgatory. Of course, since Gui-
bert never knew his father, it is to be expected that he would rely on the
 The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 207

testimony of others. But it can also be no coincidence that, of the many

things he might have related, he chose to dwell on an incident that showed
his father to such poor advantage. Throughout Guibert’s retelling of his
mother’s vision, moreover, the point of view switches seamlessly back and
forth between what she said she saw and what Guibert says it meant,
merging their consciousness so that his will was, indeed, “one with hers.”
Guibert begins by recounting how, one night as she was beginning
to fall asleep, “her soul seemed to leave her body without her losing her
senses.” After escaping the clutches of some predatory specters, who at-
tempted to drag her into a pit, she “suddenly . . . saw that my father was
there, appearing as he did when he was young. When she looked hard at
him and piteously asked of him whether he was called Evrard (for that
had been his name), he denied that he was.” The denial functions as a si-
multaneous rejection of the relationship with mother, and, hence, son
alike. Alternatively, it could be read as the mother’s unconscious recogni-
tion that her image of the father (and hence her son’s) was distorted, per-
haps beyond recognition. Whatever the case may be, Guibert himself is
at pains to claim the reluctant revenant for his father, rationalizing why
the spirits of the deceased no longer answered to their former names.19
One of the identifying traits of the specter, moreover, is the proximity of
the figure of a wailing child, which Guibert identifies as the illegitimate
child that Evrard begot during the time that he and his wife were inca-
pable of sexual congress as the result of witchcraft.20
As the episode suggests, the period’s “birth of purgatory” provided
an eerie forum in which spectral projections of the self had the opportu-
nity to converse with spectral projections of others, usually deceased.21
Such apparitions are counterfactual on multiple levels. Their very ap-
pearance in their former bodies was, in itself, a fiction.22 Medieval au-
thorities further recognized that there were physiological reasons that
could cause one to imagine the appearance of a ghost, or, as Dickens’s
Ebenezer Scrooge said to the ghost of Jacob Marley, “There’s more of
gravy than of grave about you.”23 The subjectivity of the experience is
also a factor: even if a specter appeared while an individual was awake, its
apprehension was exclusive to the person to whom it appeared. From this
perspective, it is worth stressing that Guibert’s father is many times re-
moved from reality for reader and author alike: he is a ghost from a third
 208 / Dyan Elliott

party’s vision, further occluded by the medium of a dream. Because

Guibert only learned of the dream many years after its occurrence, it is
further obscured by the passage of time.24 The fact that the father’s ap-
parition denied, perhaps even lied about, his identity seems to render this
specter even more counterfactual than the “average” specter — which
generally returns to seek prayers or issue warnings and, hence, depends
upon being recognized.
Whatever the reality quotient of such encounters, they invariably
lead to a reordering of earthly hierarchies. The mere fact of being
granted such a vision establishes the mother’s spiritual superiority over
most Christians. But this advantage is multiplied through interactions
with various spirits. Hence Guibert’s mother established an ascendancy
over her former mentor —“a woman who clearly was always mortifying
her body with crosses on the outside, but, it was said was not enough on
her guard against a hunger for spiritual glory.”25 Hence her purported
holiness was exposed as simulated and counterfactual. The gender hier-
archy in marriage is likewise inverted insofar as her ghostly husband ac-
knowledges the benefits of her prayers, alms, and masses.26 Not only was
the adulterous husband now the spiritual client of the wife he had humili-
ated, but she had the further satisfaction of seeing him punished by the
inescapable presence of his illegitimate child’s specter, endowed with
preternatural powers of wailing and tacitly presented as an appropriate
punishment for his betrayal. Nor was her visionary reach limited to the
dead. In the same vision, she also saw a specter of Guibert’s brother, who
Guibert is quick to inform us was still alive and would only die many
years later. As a result, the brother’s appearance in purgatory is doubly
counterfactual.27
The first time the reader learns the father’s name is in the course of
this same vision in which he denies his name. It is also the last time he en-
ters the narrative. Well before this incident, however, the name Evrard is
a source of contestation and rivalry. The first person named Evrard that
Guibert mentions is the pious count of Breteuil, who essentially gave up
his name in order to pursue the vita apostolica in anonymity. One day he
encountered an overdressed fop whose appearance was so outlandish that
Evrard could not help but ask who he was. “The other man raised his
eyebrows with a sidelong look in a bold fashion. . . . ‘I am,’ he said,
 The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 209

‘though I must ask you not to mention it to anyone, Evrard of Breteuil,

formerly count, who, as you know, was once a rich man in France, but,
going into exile, I am now voluntarily doing penance for my sins.’” The
authentic Evrard “star[ed] in disbelief at the impudence of so incredible
a rascal, and scorn[ed] all further talk with his own shadow.” Ultimately,
the count accepted responsibility for his impersonator, recognizing that
he himself had “furnished the occasion for deception.” Evrard joined a
stable religious order expressly to “‘deprive anyone of the temptation to
impersonate us.’”28
One wonders if the pious count was being overscrupulous. Were
there really others waiting in the wings to steal his identity? But the very
fact that Guibert includes this anecdote suggests the degree to which
counterfactual identities, whether by error or theft, were a locus of con-
cern. Evrard of Breteuil was a genuine holy person who was being cyni-
cally impersonated by an impious rogue. Nor is this concern with fraud
restricted to Guibert’s autobiography. His treatise On the Relics of Saints
expresses a similar dismay over the various scams being perpetrated with
the bodies and identities of the dead. There were two different sites
claiming the head of John the Baptist; two different communities that
translated the relics of Saint Fermin of Amiens. Far from being a martyr,
Saint Pyro is alleged to have died from a drunken fall into a well. Guibert
regarded the situation as dire, reasoning, “Whoever venerates something
he does not know is never free from grave danger, even if that something
is actually holy; on the contrary it normally leads to sacrilege.”29
What’s in a name? With respect to Guibert and his attitude to his
father, the answer may well be “everything.” If the episode concerning
Evrard of Breteuil and his double is construed as an extension of Gui-
bert’s own doubts over his father’s identity — a reading implicit in the
purgatorial specter’s denial — two other Evrards appear who are equally
suggestive. Each betrays his respective lord, even as Guibert’s father be-
trayed his mother. The penultimate Evrard was not only implicated in
the scandalous communal revolt against the bishop of Laon, but was ad-
ditionally a two-faced traitor, guilty of betraying his master. The final
Evrard was the leader of a heretical sect at Soissons, thereby committing
the ultimate act of treachery by betraying God.30 Both were executed,
thus receiving, like Guibert’s father in purgatory, the punishment they
 210 / Dyan Elliott

deserved. Whether by voluntary decision or involuntary lapse, Guibert

constructs a chain out of the different evocations of Evrard’s name,
forging its links from uncertainty, subterfuge, and treachery. The father
may be long since dead, but the son contrives a verbal monument that
keeps the infamy of his name alive.

Peter Abelard:
The Intentional Counterfactuality of a Master

It is hard to imagine personalities more diametrically opposed than Gui-

bert, the self-effacing and insecure monk, and his slightly younger con-
temporary, Peter Abelard, the bombastic and self-assured scholar. And
yet there was considerable common ground. Not only did they produce
the only autobiographies of the period, both also became preoccupied
with questions of interiority and conscience.31 Although Guibert was a
transitional figure and Abelard on the vanguard of the new learning, both
engaged in what John Van Engen has identified as new reading practices,
directing their attention to the minor prophets.32 I would add to this list
of parallels a mutual indebtedness to counterfactual constructions.33 But
while Guibert’s explorations into the realm of the counterfactual were
often oblique and sometimes unconscious, Abelard wielded the counter-
factual with the precision of a master.
Abelard first burst upon the intellectual scene with a formula for
dismissing the existential claims of Universals, a problem inherited from
the ancients.34 Rooted in Plato’s realm of Ideas or Forms, the term itself
refers to the elements or qualities that characterize and unite a distinct
genus or species. The Realists believed that Universals preexisted the
objects they informed in a separate realm. Nominalists denied their ex-
istence, arguing that Universals were simply words or names (nomina)
that society has agreed to apply to a given group of individuals or ob-
jects. William of Champeaux, one of Abelard’s teachers and an extreme
Realist, staked his reputation on the claim that Universals were things
and that a particular concurrence of the same things is the material
essence present in all individuals or objects of a given species or genus.
This implied that humanity had a material essence that somehow ex-
 The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 211

isted independently of any given human. Abelard countered by denying

that Universals had any ontological reality independent of the things in
which they inhered — a view which ultimately prevailed. Less dismissive
than his ultra-Nominalist teacher Roscelinus, however, Abelard did ac-
knowledge that these words were invested with meaning — a position
akin to our understanding of concepts and, hence, frequently referred to
as conceptualism.35
In essence it was a struggle over the nature of reality. The Realists’
claim for a privileged, independent, and formative realm of Universals
posited different levels of authenticity to the detriment of the temporal
world, imparting a counterfactual aspect to the quotidian. As such, the
belief in Universals had a distinctly uncanny resonance. Abelard fought
back by demoting Universals to a counterfactual status, thereby uphold-
ing the reality quotient of the everyday.
But there were other counterfactual realities that Abelard actively
fostered, such as the possibility of Christians before Christ. In Abelard’s
first ambitious theological opus, Theologia ‘Summi boni’ (ca. 1119–1120) he
argues that Plato’s World Soul anticipated the doctrine of the Trinity.36
This insight was not unique to Abelard but shared by a number of
other scholars — particularly those aligned with the Platonic school of
Chartres.37 Theologia Christiana— a work that was begun after the con-
demnation of his Theologia ‘Summi boni’ at Soissons (1121) — goes con-
siderably further.38 Here Abelard argues that certain pagan philosophers
not only knew about the Trinity, but were even possessed of a saving
faith. Such individuals were “Gentiles perhaps by nation, but not by
faith. . . . For how is it that we would relegate them all to infidelity and
damnation — to whom . . . God himself revealed the mysteries of the
faith and the profound mystery of the Trinity.”39 Such thinking was su-
premely counterfactual. And yet Abelard was ultimately forced to ac-
knowledge the fallacy at the heart of his vision: his theological optimism
was checked by his own conviction that there was no salvation without
direct knowledge of Christ.40
Abelard’s propensity to think counterfactually was especially in evi-
dence in the groundbreaking method of his work Sic et Non (ca. 1120),
the basic structure of which was to argue both sides of any given posi-
tion. Some of these questions on the nature of God were quite abstruse
 212 / Dyan Elliott

and would have had little or no impact on human history if answered

either way. Question 25, however, returns to the question of whether
“philosophers also might have believed in the Trinity or the word.” Un-
fortunately, Abelard cannot garner the kind of support from Christian au-
thorities that would assure salvation to his beloved philosophers. Though
leading with Paul’s potentially ecumenical remarks that the invisible things
of God were clearly revealed and understood from the beginning of the
world, this is immediately followed by patristic authors condemning
Gentile philosophers.41
And yet a different position emerges if the predicament of pagan
philosophers is read through the lens of related problems. In particular,
when the question of whether someone can be saved without baptism is
engaged, the chorus of denials is interrupted by the example of Trajan.
According to legend, the emperor, known for his justice, was freed from
the pains of hell by the prayers of Gregory the Great.42 It is true that
Abelard goes on to cite the careful equivocation of Gregory’s biogra-
pher that this did not mean that Trajan was actually admitted into
heaven, just that he was spared the pains of the flame. Even so, such ef-
forts on behalf of the virtuous pagan would gain in momentum until
Dante was emboldened to put Trajan in paradise.43
Perhaps the most daring of Abelard’s counterfactual moves arose in
the course of the inward-looking speculation initiated in his later work
Ethics (1139). We have already seen how an emphasis on intention helped
Guibert’s mother cultivate a counterfactual virginity that even received
ecclesiastical ratification. Abelard made a parallel strategy available to
all of Latin Christendom through his redefinition of sin. According to
Abelard’s formulation, sin was assessed in terms of contempt for God—
a measure that only God “who searches our hearts and loins and sees in
our darkness” (Psalm 7:10) could wield with any precision.44 Such a defi-
nition furthered his case for his philosophers since “ignorance of God or
unbelief in him . . . can happen to many people without fault.”45 Abelard
also notes that Christ chose to preach in certain cities, but withheld him-
self from others, asking, “Who will impute this to their fault?” 46
The deeply personal nature of sin as defined by Ethics allows Abe-
lard to place the counterfactual in the foreground of Christian life and
sustain this position by casuistic demonstrations of the depth of divine
 The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 213

judgment. “For if a monk and a layman alike come to consent to forni-

cation, and if the mind of the layman is also so incited that if he were a
monk he would not hold back in reverence for God from that baseness,
he earns the same punishment as the monk. . . . God considers only
the mind in rewarding good or evil, not the results of deeds.”47 In other
words, their relation to external reality is entirely eclipsed by the truth
revealed in the counterfactual recesses of conscience, only apparent to
God. “Works in fact . . . are all indifferent in themselves and should be
called good or bad only on account of the intention of the agent.”48
This line of argument is pursued still further in a recently discovered
series of quaestiones (ca. 1140) attributed to Abelard in which he explores
the respective degrees of sin of Adam and Eve. He begins by recapping
the traditional cases against each: on the one hand, Adam was more cul-
pable, as he knew more and was supposed to look after Eve; on the other
hand, Eve was more guilty because Adam only ate the apple out of sym-
pathy, at least according to Augustine. Moreover, Paul says explicitly that
Eve, not Adam, was seduced (1 Timothy 2:14). But Abelard rejects these
judgments, claiming it is impossible to know who manifested more con-
tempt for God. He proceeds to demonstrate this point through a provoca-
tive exploration of the hypothetical doings of straw men and counter-
factual readings of biblical figures.49 The example of the monk and the
layman is resurrected, only to be supplemented with the hypothetical in-
stance of a man who fornicates with a single woman, but might have slept
with her anyway had she been married. But he follows this by evoking
Augustine’s comment that although John the Baptist was not tortured, he
was nevertheless prepared for such torments and hence deserved the
same reward as Peter. Likewise, Abraham, the fruitfully multiplying pa-
triarch par excellence, was as deserving of merit for his counterfactual
virginity as was John the Baptist. The example of Lucretia is further ad-
duced from the pagan past as evidence that no one can be forcibly de-
prived of her virginity, which is a state of mind.50
Although reiterating that only God can know whether Adam or Eve
was the worse sinner, Abelard maintains that their sin is no worse for its
deleterious effects on humanity because the extent of their contempt
for God remains static. The situation is parallel to someone who lands
a sucker punch that results in a disastrous outbreak of violence. Yet,
 214 / Dyan Elliott

however many may have been killed, the instigator is still less culpable
than would be an adulterer, whose sin was more deliberate. Alterna-
tively, if a deed results in a greater good, this is no guarantee that the
deed itself was good. Still, as Boethius says, to wish evil is evil; to do evil
is worse. And Abelard acknowledges the necessity of punishing certain
deeds as deterrent. Thus a priest is compelled to assign penance to a lov-
ing mother who rolls over in her sleep and inadvertently smothers her
baby, as a caution to others.51
The respective culpability of Adam or Eve is unknowable. Even so,
Abelard does what he can to lift the presumption of guilt from Eve,
hence leveling the playing field. Abelard admits that he cannot under-
stand why Augustine would assign more blame to Eve. But he reflects on
how Augustine once invited a certain correspondent to correct his writ-
ings, as he did theirs, and, as far as Abelard is concerned, the offer still
pertains. Paul’s claim that only Eve was deceived is recast as a reference
to her gullibility over the devil’s promise of immortality, which Adam
recognized as a lie. He ate the fruit in solidarity with his wife, confident
that he could easily propitiate God over so trifling an offense.52
Abelard’s simulation of Adam’s reasoning that his offense was nuga-
tory casts doubt on his judgment, edging his degree of fallibility closer
to Eve’s. It is a subtle move. Eventually Abelard will progress from an
Eve who is not necessarily more culpable to one who may not have
sinned at all, asking: would it be disobedience if Eve had forgotten the
lord’s sanction against eating the apple?53 If, in fact, she did suffer a lapse
in memory, her sin would be comparable to that of a man who bedded
the wife of another, mistaking her for his own. If the husband really was
hoping to sleep with the maid, however, he would still be an adulterer in
God’s eyes, even if the wife surreptitiously took her place. By the same
token, if Eve was forgetful of God’s injunction and simply desired some
fruit, her culpability would decline precipitously. Furthermore, if she
was generally inclined to put the divine will before her own, “not only
did she not sin, but it could be turned to merit and she would be re-
warded more than if she had not desired [the apple].”54
In short, in the counterfactual realm of God’s justice, where intention
and action were frequently at odds, Abelard imagines a world in which
 The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 215

Adam and Eve’s degree of personal responsibility was not only greatly di-
minished, but where Eve may even have earned a degree of masticatory
merit. It is a world in which practically anything could happen — where
even the veil of female shame could be lifted altogether.

Marie de France and the Counterfactual Eucharist

The appearance of vernacular romance gives rise to two different types of

fictional fabrications: those that might have existed but did not, and those
that not only did not exist but could never have existed. This latter group
would require an entirely different order for its viability—the realm of
magic. The genius of Marie de France is exemplified by her ability to
unite effortlessly social realism with the realm of fantasy, allowing a given
protagonist to enter a counterfactual reality by the mechanism of a wish.
Thus the impoverished but worthy knight Lanval, undervalued in Ar-
thur’s court and close to despair, receives timely financial and romantic
relief from a fairy lover visible only to him.55 The selfless grief of Eliduc’s
long-suffering wife over the death of her husband’s lover is rewarded by a
magic powerful enough to restore her rival to life.56
In the lai Yonec this pattern receives, if not its most elaborate treat-
ment, at least its most quirky. A beautiful malmariée, locked in her room
by an elderly husband, muses, “I have often heard tell that in this country
one used to encounter adventures which relieved those afflicted by care:
knights discovered maidens to their liking, noble and fair, and ladies
found handsome and courtly lovers, worthy and valiant men. There was
no fear of reproach and they alone could see them. If this can be and ever
was, if it ever did happen to anyone, may almighty God grant my wish.”57
Immediately a large hawk flies into her chamber and is transformed into
a handsome knight. The hawk-knight claims to have been deeply in love
with the lady for years, but had to await her summons. In other words,
her wish-cum-prayer, like a spell, must be expressed before it could be
fulfilled.
The lady is prepared to grant the knight her love, provided that he
can prove that he is a Christian. By way of response, the knight not only
 216 / Dyan Elliott

professes his faith, but offers an extremely unusual surety in support of

his word: “If you do not believe this of me, send for your chaplain. Tell
him that an illness has come upon you and that you want to hear the
service that God has established in this world for the redemption of sin-
ners, I shall assume your appearance, receive the body of Christ, and re-
cite all my credo for you.”
Approving the idea, she sends for her attendant (the elderly sister of
her ancient husband) who, after some resistance, summons the priest.
“[He] came as quickly as possible, bringing the corpus domini. The knight
received it and drank the wine from the chalice.”58
Yonec should be assessed in the context of the tales of metamorphosis
that were rife in this period. Werewolves were particularly in vogue— so
much so that Caroline Bynum has suggested that a “werewolf Renais-
sance of the twelfth century” might be added to the period’s accolades.59
Marie herself wrote a werewolf story in which a disloyal wife hides the
clothing necessary for her were-husband to resume his human form. De-
spite a prolonged sojourn in a wolf ’s body, however, the man’s inner self
remained unaltered. Thus, when pursued as prey by hunters, he was pre-
served through a very human form of supplication: “He ran up to him
[the king] and begged for mercy. He took hold of his stirrup and kissed
his foot and his leg.”60 Gerald of Wales likewise depicts a remarkably hu-
mane werewolf seeking last rites for his lupine companion. The wolf
moved the reluctant priest to compliance by pulling the animal skin away
from the body of the ailing animal to reveal a woman underneath.61 As
Bynum has suggested, such tales provide a reassuring continuity of iden-
tity, “stressing the werewolf as a rational soul trapped in an animal body,”
while at the same time testing the boundaries between species.62
Such metamorphoses are unsolicited and undesired. The were-
wolves described by Gerald were victims of a strange curse, imposed by a
(saintly?) abbot, which compelled the natives of Ossory to take turns be-
coming wolves for seven-year stints.63 Yonec stands in stark contrast to this
pattern. The hawk-knight is not trapped in an alien form but apparently
able to assume any shape at will. While transformation into his beloved is
certainly idiosyncratic, it nevertheless resonates on a number of levels.
From a romance perspective, it could be construed as the apex of the ten-
 The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 217

dency for the hero and heroine to resemble one another, while revers-
ing the general representation of woman as reflection of man.64 The ease
with which the knight can assume and abandon bodies is also reminiscent
of the shape-shifting capacity of demons— an aspect of the uncanny that
was beginning to exert considerable fascination among contemporary
writers.65 The parallel with demons is both evoked and allayed by his offer
to take communion, since any demon would be routed definitively by a
consecrated host.66 On the most obvious, but perhaps most subtle, level, it
is a tacit reminder that the tale began with the lady alone in her room fan-
tasizing about a lover—as might any woman in Marie’s audience. It is pos-
sible that there never was anyone else in the room and that the knight was
a fantasy who morphed into a delusion because of illness.
However this transformation is understood, it is a strange coincidence
that both Marie and Gerald place metamorphosis and the Eucharist,
specifically in conjunction with the last rites, within the same frame. Each
metamorphosis—human to werewolf; hawk-knight to lady—is juxta-
posed with the still more baffling change from bread to bleeding body at
the heart of the Eucharistic mystery. Gerald is certainly sensitive to possi-
ble parallels. He begins by deploying what Bynum has with justice re-
ferred to as the “rather dubious analogy” between Christ as divinity be-
coming human and man becoming wolf, as prequel to a series of bizarre
metamorphoses. Some of these are culled from Augustine’s City of God;
others— such as the magical red pigs that revert to normal if they cross
water—Gerald claims to have witnessed firsthand. But significantly, he
concludes with the change of bread into the body of Christ— a subject
which he “judges is more safely passed over.”67
Gerald was showing uncharacteristic restraint in not pursuing the
analogy between a human in a wolf ’s body and the true presence of Christ
in the consecrated host. Although the last major Eucharistic controversy
had occurred in late eleventh century, the theology of the Eucharist re-
mained an intellectual minefield.68 Guibert of Nogent’s speculation on
the three bodies of Christ in the sacrament only won him humiliation and
heartache.69 Among Abelard’s condemned doctrines was the view that the
accidents of bread and wine somehow persist in the substance of the air
after the consecration and the alleged change of substance.70
 218 / Dyan Elliott

Marie may have been discreetly engaging these same issues. She had
the advantage over Guibert and Abelard, however, since she was nei-
ther constrained by the literal nor writing theology. Indeed, the magical
world of the lais, where the natural was indistinguishable from the su-
pernatural, was arguably the perfect medium for a treatment of the Eu-
charist. The discussion was fast moving beyond the grasp of reason in
theological circles. Over the latter half of the twelfth century, any sym-
bolist understanding was rejected in favor of an increased emphasis on
the real presence of Christ in the sacrament, despite the continued ap-
pearance of bread and wine. This was the epitome of what could be de-
scribed as the counterfactuality of the sacred. Indeed, the trajectory of
Eucharistic theology was a steady progression toward the complete sepa-
ration of external and internal reality — a separation that finds a parallel
emphasis in the ethical musings of Abelard. The knight’s transforma-
tion into the lady, in which the essence of his identity is obscured by his
lover’s outer form, mirrors the mystery at the heart of the mass.
Nor is this entirely out of keeping with the knight’s overall persona,
which is fraught with Christological parallels. Within the context of
Marie’s magical world, he represents the lady’s personal savior. Not only
does he ultimately die for her sake, but he is also cruelly put to death by
a husband characterized as implacably evil. Thus his miserable wife
laments, “He will never die. When he should have been baptized, he was
plunged into the river of Hell.”71 Of course, the fact that the knight’s
salvific activity is performed in the service of adultery would render this
a very strange theology indeed. But Marie was not writing theology.
She was, however, attempting a statement about the holiness of uncon-
strained human love. As such, she would have been in sympathy with
her older contemporary Heloise and her defiant proclamation to Abe-
lard that “the name of wife may seem more sacred or more binding,
but sweeter for me will always be the word friend or, if you will permit
me, that of concubine or whore.”72 Of course, it is possible to read
Marie’s Eucharistic experimentation cynically, perhaps as an expression
of doubt in the nascent doctrine of transubstantiation, or even satire.73
This strikes me as misguided, however. If Gerald could find Christ in a
werewolf, Marie could even more plausibly find Christ in a self-sacrificing
knight.74
 The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 219

Alan of Lille, Platonic Allegory,

and Denuded Heresy

The twelfth century’s interest in counterfactuality was especially mani-

fest in its deep investment in narratio fabulosa or fabula—the imaginative
deployment of allegory, myth, and quasi-fictional narrative as vessels for
moral and philosophical principals.75 Such fictive constructions were fre-
quently strategic, allowing for the kind of speculation that would have
been otherwise condemned.76 Very often these narratives were displayed
against a Platonic backdrop— an indebtedness that could cut both ways.
In the symbolist school of Chartres we find what M.-D. Chenu charac-
terizes as “the optimistic Platonism of the Timaeus,” which was, in itself,
a fabula detailing the creation of the world through the triune creative
forces that theologians associated with the Trinity.77
There was, however, a darker side to a Platonic framework that
sometimes presented problems for Christian appropriation. The fact
that creation tended to be seen as a series of emanations effected through
intermediaries rather than the direct work of a supreme being was a defi-
nite challenge. Worse still was the exaltation of the spiritual over the ma-
terial in a manner far exceeding the comparatively restrained dualism of
orthodoxy.78 Rather than regarding the material world as the creation of
a beneficent deity, this strand of Platonism perceived the world as a by-
product of the inevitable devolution of spirit into matter. The stimulus
of the fifth-century Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite and his Carolin-
gian disciple, John Scotus Eriugena, attest to the continued appeal of
this philosophy in the twelfth century, sometimes inspiring or at least
underwriting distinctly unorthodox positions.79 Honorius Augustodu-
nensis, who came under the influence of Eriugena late in life, is a case in
point. His Clavis physicae, written sometime in the 1120s, describes pre-
lapsarian humanity as a spiritual body infused with reason in the image
of God.80 The material body and its division into the sexes were ramifi-
cations of the fall.81 Spiritual elements would eventually triumph over
the material, however, returning to God.
In contrast to Honorius, Alan of Lille, a Platonizer to the bone, was
generally careful to enlist the appropriate integumentum, or allegorical
covering, for speculation, frequently invoking the persona of Nature in
 220 / Dyan Elliott

this context.82 In The Plaint of Nature, the protagonist “acting by an es-

tablished covenant as the deputy of God” was responsible for bringing
the “material body into real existence from the mixed substance of pri-
mordial matter.”83 Things went awry, however, when Nature voluntarily
turned away from her task in order to sojourn in the “delightful palace of
the ethereal region,” much to humanity’s detriment.84 She delegated the
job to Venus, who proved still more dilatory. “Desiring to live the soft life
of barren ease rather than be harassed by fruitful labour . . . she began to
wanton with childish indiscretion.”85 Stimulated by their delinquent fore-
woman, humans quickly degenerated into deviant same-sex relations and
a whole host of other vices. Anticlaudianus opens with a chastened Na-
ture, very much aware of her limitations: “I find no living thing that is
perfect in every way and could not bring many complaints against us.” 86
She wishes to atone for these past lapses by making a perfect man and
calls a heavenly council of the Virtues with that purpose in mind. The
members of the council are cognizant of their inability to animate their
creation, however. Thus Prudence, equipped with a chariot fashioned
by the Seven Liberal Arts and drawn by the equine team of the Five
Senses, is sent to heaven for a soul.
From an interpretative standpoint, these are flexible narratives. Alan
acknowledges as much in the prose prologue of Anticlaudianus, claiming
that the poem can be read literally (as a kind of adventure), morally, or al-
legorically.87 If not for this wide counterfactual margin, there would have
been a number of junctures at which aspects of Alan’s Platonism might
have rankled. For instance, both works ascribe the creation of the human
body to Nature—not God himself. In Anticlaudianus, moreover, a preex-
isting soul is infused into the body — a supposition that parallels the be-
liefs of contemporary dualists. The Plaint further depicts Nature (a kind
of personified emanation) as a flawed delegate who is ultimately respon-
sible for the human race’s decline. Yet the potential volatility of this ma-
terial is dispelled by the genre of vision poetry, steeped in allegory. Alan
was certainly apprised of how essential allegory could be to stay on the
right side of orthodoxy. Nor was he prepared to share this exploratory
vehicle with any group he deemed heretical. Nowhere was this more ap-
parent than in his polemical work On the Catholic Faith against the Heretics
 The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 221

of His Time, in which he stripped a competing ideology of its Platonic

integumentum.88
The prologue of this work constitutes an extended critique on hereti-
cal methodology and the intellectual confusion that ensues. Contempo-
rary heretics present a particular challenge to the faith because, unlike the
heretics of old, with their cogent arguments, their modern counterparts
are “given to new philosophical speculations” eclectically borrowed from
the past, acting as “mirrors of the modes of thinking [of others].” Hence,
“bound by no reason human or divine, they fashion monstrous things ac-
cording to their will and desire.” The result is a theological hodgepodge.
“The new heretics . . . depict ancient dogma drawn from different here-
sies as one general heresy— as if creating one idol from different idols;
one monster from many; a common poison from many different noxious
herbs.” As a result, Alan is “forced, with clear reasons, to render an ac-
count of a reasonable faith [disertis rationibus de fide rationabili reddere
rationem].” Moreover, because he is basically confronting borrowed (and
hence ancient) doctrines, the situation does not call for innovation, “but
rather [to be] opposed by authentic reasons [rationibus obviandum au-
thenticis]” derived from the church fathers.89
The “new philosophical speculations,” “mirrors of modes of think-
ing,” and the “fashion[ing] of monstrous things,” almost certainly pertain
to the sectarians’ appropriation of classical thought and the development
of their own allegories and mythologies. This is further implied by the
constant reiteration of ratio and its derivatives as antidote. Yet Alan seems
content temporarily to withhold this remedy, instead developing precisely
the kind of classical medley he seems to despise. He begins by commend-
ing the famed heroes of yore for their expeditious elimination of mon-
sters, comparing them with the church fathers countering the ‘monstrous
things’ of heretical fashioning: “Hercules slew Antaeus, Theseus the
Minotaur, Jason the fire-breathing bull, Meleager the enormous boar,
Coroebus the Stygian monster, Perseus the sea-monster, even so we read
that the noble princes of Holy Church with spiritual weapons overcame
the monsters of various heresies.” So far so good: the puissance of the
church fathers had prevailed over heretical monstrosity. Unfortunately,
this good luck did not hold. For while pagan Antaeus was prepared to
 222 / Dyan Elliott

stand by while the Hydra unfurled its other heads, “among moderns there
are not those who are able to resist new heresies.” As a result Alan is
forced to step into the breach, “least among the sons of Jesse . . . to kill
Goliath with his own sword.”90
This brief counterfactual reverie — itself a hybrid of pagan, Chris-
tian, and Jewish lore — was just a preamble: the body of the treatise is
eminently reasonable, consisting of a scholastic description and refuta-
tion of the competing faith. It begins by detailing how certain heretics
posited the existence of two warring principles of light and dark, associ-
ated with good and evil respectively. The principle of light, which is
God, was the creator of all things spiritual such as souls and angels. The
dark principle, Lucifer, created all temporal and material things, includ-
ing the earth. It is therefore Lucifer, not Christ, who is the prince of the
world. This philosophy is corroborated by Paul’s description of the
struggle between the flesh and the spirit.91
Initially, Alan presents the two deities as equals, ventriloquizing here-
tical arguments against a single and omnipotent creator as follows: “If
God made visible things, either He could make them incorruptible or not.
If He could not, He was weak; if He could do so and refused, He was
malevolent.”92 In this reckoning, matter is physically and morally invested
with such gravity that good and evil are represented as equal, obscuring
the Platonic roots of this doctrine in which the spiritual ultimately pre-
vails over the material.93 At a later juncture, however, Alan introduces the
contentions of “certain of the aforesaid heretics” who claim that human
souls are really apostate angels “infused into human bodies by God’s per-
mission, to the end that they may be able to do penance therein.” In fact,
they argue, there were no angels left in heaven, but all fell with Lucifer.94
It is in these claims that the Platonic inevitability of the fall of spirit into
matter, as well as its ultimate return, can be best discerned. The lengths
to which Alan goes to refute these claims are proportionate with his
concern. Thus he proceeds to prove “that there is a soul in the human
body, not demons”;95 “that demons will not be saved”;96 “that some an-
gelic spirits remained in heaven”;97 and “that not all angels fell from
heaven.”98 In short, Alan is determined to refute what he perceived as
the baleful pattern of descent of spirit into matter and its return. His in-
 The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 223

sistence on the eternal materiality of humankind is in keeping with this

program: he not only adamantly contradicts the view that Christ was
simply a disincarnate shadow of human nature, but also underlines his
natural birth,99 the reality of his flesh,100 and that he was sustained by
food and drink.101 Our glorified but material bodies were destined to rise
again, as had Christ’s.102
The treatise will eventually develop a spirited apology for the sacra-
ments, including a comprehensive defense of penance and transubstanti-
ation, that anticipates Lateran IV.103 I have focused on the section treating
the cosmological assumptions of the sect and its implications because this
is precisely the area in which the need for allegory, and the softening ef-
fect that its counterfactual narration provides, is most acutely felt. Alan’s
disquisition on the heresy is, however, relentlessly literal and hence very
much at odds with the mythologizing character of his opening chapter.
Yet the sources indicate that twelfth-century dualists shared the inclina-
tion for allegory and counterfactual mythologies evident among Alan and
his peers. Dualism had traditionally eschewed the literal in favor of mythi-
cal expression. This was certainly true of the Platonizing gnostics of the
early church. The Vision of Isaiah, an ancient work depicting the prophet’s
ascension into heaven with an angelic mentor, which continued to circu-
late in the twelfth century, bears witness to this shared predilection. Like-
wise, The Secret Supper, a Bogomil work circulating in the West by the last
decade of the twelfth century, details a counterfactual conversation be-
tween John the Evangelist and Christ at the Last Supper and provides a
grand recasting of Genesis.104 In fact, the dualist investment in mythical
structures was sufficiently deep that some scholars have observed that the
heretics’ chief strategy was “to substitute myth for history.”105
Alan was clearly not prepared to share myth and allegory, the pre-
ferred medium of twelfth-century intellectuals, with thinkers he deemed
dangerous. From this perspective, the mythology he enlists in the open-
ing chapter could be construed as a cryptic statement of orthodoxy’s pre-
rogative. The competing belief system that Alan presents is, by contrast,
trapped in the literal: stripped of all metaphor, allegory, or hypothesizing.
Indeed, elsewhere, Alan is prepared to experiment with the appropriation
and realignment of heretical myth. Hence, his sermon for Palm Sunday
 224 / Dyan Elliott

describes a heavenly city in which an army of angels was expelled for ris-
ing up against their lord: “The demons moreover seeing themselves
excluded from the celestial castle in the lower world contrived a horrible
castle through which they could insult the superior castle. . . . The Devil
therefore through depraved suggestion secured his castle in the first
woman, through which the entire human race was compelled to be
members of his family.”106
In short, Alan was not turning “Goliath’s sword” against the hereti-
cal giant, as he alleged in the prologue, so much as forging a different
sword of their beliefs—in crude metal with no ornamentation. Without
any imagery to hide behind, the dualists were denuded so as to be barely
recognizable as Platonic, even as their doctrine emerged as painfully sim-
plistic and unmistakably heretical. Eventually the mythological content
would be restored to them by their orthodox foes. It is probably no coin-
cidence, however, that this only occurred after orthodoxy’s fascination
with Plato had receded, as had competition for counterfactual forms or
the possibility of confusion between orthodox and heterodox Platon-
isms. Aristotelianism was now the favored method of the day. Heterodox
mythology was not readmitted under the sophisticated counterfactual
auspices that Alan and his cohort had enjoyed, however, but presented in
a much more literal fashion, as absurd as it was baffling. An anonymous
anti-heretical manifesto, probably from the early thirteenth century,
avers, “In their secret meetings their elders recount that the wicked god
first fashioned his creatures and at the beginning of his act of creation,
made four beings, two male and two female, a lion and a bee-eater, an
eagle and a spirit. The good God took from him the spirit and the eagle
and with them He produced the things which he made.” Bee-eater may
refer to a Provençal bird that eats bees. But what it or any of the other
animals may signify is a mystery.107 There were other methods for mak-
ing dualist doctrine seem risible. Moneta of Cremona’s Summa against the
Cathars (ca. 1241) tends to separate the doctrine from the mythologizing,
sometimes with ludicrous results. “They say that the sun, the moon, and
the stars are demons, adding that the sun and moon commit adultery once
each month because one reads in astronomical works of the conjunction
of sun and moon. They also say that the moisture from that conjunction
 The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 225

is sprinkled through the air and on earth, because they lose clarity.”108And
this strategy has, of course, sustained the orthodox representation of the
heretics as simplistic, even crude, thinkers.

———

The twelfth-century deployment of the counterfactual was in every way

a match for the spirit of exuberant creativity that both characterized the
age and gestured toward things to come. Although autobiography never
caught on as a genre, Guibert’s quasi-hagiographic depiction of his
mother and her visions were the wave of the future, anticipating the rise
of female mystics and their ministry in purgatory. Romance and the
world of magic would continue to flourish. Abelard’s emphasis on inten-
tionality would revolutionize the penitential system, while his casuistic
methodology would become standard fare in the universities. Alan’s heirs
would abandon allegory, but would continue to pummel their heretical
opponents with the latest theological methodologies.
Yet something important was lost. Abelard’s method, read in con-
junction with his opposition to Universals, augured a shift in which rea-
son would win out over poetry, even as Aristotle came to replace Plato.
This substitution resonated far beyond the nascent universities. For an
Aristotelian perspective had little room for pagan Christians, whimsical
explorations of the Eucharist, or mythical approaches to theology. It
also had little tolerance for phenomena that were impervious to expla-
nation or classification. The solution was to consign such anomalies to
the realm of the demonic — the new and ever-expanding repository for
the uncanny. And in no time at all demons managed to colonize magic,
romance, theology, visionary culture, and heresy — creating some of the
most powerful, and frightening, counterfactual realities Latin Christen-
dom had ever seen.

Notes

1. I would like to thank Barbara Newman and Ruth Karras for their help-
ful comments. I am also indebted to Mary Favret for alerting me to a special
issue dedicated to the question of counterfactual realities. See Catherine Gal-
lagher’s introductory forum, Representations 98 (2007): 51– 52.
 226 / Dyan Elliott

2. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim 12.25, in Corpus Scrip-

torum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 28/1, ed. Joseph Zycha ( Leipzig: G. Frey-
tag, 1894), 417–18.
3. For a nuanced discussion of this question, see Barbara Newman’s
“What Did It Mean to Say ‘I Saw’? The Clash between Theory and Practice in
Medieval Visionary Culture,” Speculum 80 (2005): 1– 43.
4. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Com-
plete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey ( London: Hogarth
Press, 1955), 17:217– 56.
5. There has already been considerable work on aspects of the uncanny
in this period. See, for example, Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans.
Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Jean-
Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval So-
ciety, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1998); Nancy Caciola, “Wraiths, Revenants, and Ritual in Medieval Culture,”
Past and Present 152 (1996): 3– 45; C. S. Watkins, History and the Supernatural in
Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Caroline
Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity ( New York: Zone Books, 2001); and
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On
Difficult Middles ( New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
6. See Colin Morris’s classic statement of this premise in the Discovery of
the Individual, 1050 – 1200 ( New York: Harper and Row, 1972). See also John F.
Benton, “Consciousness of Self, and Perceptions of Individuality,” in Renaissance
and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 263– 95, esp. 284 – 86 on the
difficulty of applying twentieth-century terms signifying individuation of per-
sons to this period. For an alternative emphasis away from individuality and on
self-definition through allegiance to groups, see Caroline Walker Bynum’s “Did
the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?,” in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the
Spirituality of the High Middle Ages ( Berkeley: University of California Press,
1982), 82–109.
7. See, for example, John F. Benton’s introduction to his translation of
Guibert’s life in Self and Society in Medieval France ( Toronto: University of To-
ronto Press, 1984); Nancy Partner, “The Family Romance of Guibert of Nogent:
His Story/Her Story,” in Medieval Mothering, ed. John Carmi Parsons and Bon-
nie Wheeler ( New York: Garland, 1996), 359– 79; cf. Mary Martin McLaughlin,
“Survivors and Surrogates: Children and Parents from the North to the Thir-
teenth Century,” in History of Childhood, ed. Lloyd DeMause ( New York: Psycho-
history Press, 1974), 105–12, 122– 29.
8. Jay Rubenstein, Guibert of Nogent: Portrait of a Medieval Mind ( New
York: Routledge, 2002), 63 ff. See Nancy Partner’s very eloquent defense of the
use of psychoanalysis on medieval subjects in “The Hidden Self: Psychoanalysis
 The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 227

and the Textual Unconscious,” in Writing Medieval History, ed. Nancy Partner
( London: Arnold, 2005), 42– 64.
9. Guibert does his best to minimize them, however, in spite of the fact
that his older brother actually was in the monastery with him at Nogent: Autobi-
ographie 2.4, ed. Edmond-René Labande ( Paris: Belles Lettres, 1981), 242; Ben-
ton, trans., Self and Society, 133. Rubenstein notes the possibility of something
missing in the manuscript, however: Guibert of Nogent, 62. There was also an-
other brother — a knight who ended up in hell for falsely swearing and taking
the lord’s name in vain (1.7, 1.18, p. 42; 152; trans., 50 – 51, 95).
10. See particularly Ep. 262, To Ecdicia c. 2, in Corpus Scriptorum Eccle-
siasticorum Latinorum 57, ed. A. Goldbacher ( Leipzig: G. Freytag, 1911), 623.
On the importance of interiority, and the increased emphasis on conscience, in
religious life during this period, see Giles Constable, The Reformation of the
Twelfth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 261 ff.
11. Autobiographie 1.18, p. 146; trans., 92.
12. Ibid., 1.13, 14, pp. 94 – 96, 98; trans., 71– 72, 73.
13. She is described as an old woman “in a nun’s habit” (in sanctimonali
habitu) in ibid., 1.14, p. 102; trans., 75). Although this seems like a circumspect
way of describing her vocation, perhaps even indicating doubt over her purity,
the word sanctimonialis was reserved for virginal choir nuns. See Dyan Elliott,
The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious
Women, 200 –1500 ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 94.
14. See Guibert’s argument against the veiling of widows and her resist-
ance: Autobiographie 2.4, pp. 244 – 46; trans., 133– 34; Elliott, Bride of Christ,
121– 25. Guibert was also devoted to Mary. His first work was Liber de laude
Sanctae Mariae, Patrologia Latina 156:537– 77. See Rubenstein’s analysis in Gui-
bert of Nogent, 21– 26. Rubenstein further argues that as Guibert was preparing
to leave home, he gradually drew closer to Mary, who became something of a
mother surrogate (69– 70).
15. Autobiographie 1.18, pp. 152– 54; trans., 95. On the overweening pride
of virgins, see Augustine, De sancta virginitate 38.39, Patrologia Latina 40: 418.
The two women had agreed that whoever died first would report back to the
other. This was a common trope in pious exempla. Guibert of Nogent describes
a parallel agreement between two holy virgins in his De pignoribus sanctorum,
which has a happier outcome: 1.2, Patrologia Latina 156: 620; Joseph McAlhany
and Jay Rubenstein, trans., On the Relics of Saints, in “Monodies” and “On the Relics
of Saints ( New York: Penguin, 2011), 204.
16. Autobiographie 1.16, p. 122; trans., 83.
17. Cf. Partner, “Guibert and his Mother,” 360.
18. Autobiographie 1.24, p. 24; trans., 44.
19. Ibid., 1.18, pp. 148– 50; trans., 93– 94. See Jean-Claude Schmitt’s
analysis of this dream in Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 47– 51.
 228 / Dyan Elliott

20. Autobiographie 1.18, p. 150; trans., 94. As penance for her husband’s sins,
she adopted an orphan who kept her awake with its wailing— a vicarious suffering
that she believed benefited her husband: ibid., 1.18, pp. 154 – 58; trans., 96– 97.
21. See Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory, part 2. There is also the rise of many
different kinds of interaction between the living and the dead — a number of
which have popular nontheological roots: Caciola, “Wraiths, Revenants, and
Ritual”; Schmitt, Ghosts, 59– 62.
22. Twelfth-century theologians attempted to come to terms with the me-
chanics of such appearances. Honorius Augustodensis (ca. 1100), for example, ar-
gued that the dead inhabited bodies made out of air that imitated the ones they
had inhabited in life; see Dyan Elliott, “Rubber Soul: Theology, Hagiography,
and the Spirit World in the High Middle Ages,” in From Beasts to Souls: Gender
and Embodiment in Medieval Europe, ed. E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCracken
( Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 96. Thomas Aquinas
would have the final word on this, denying the existence of spiritual matter:
Summa Theologica 1a q. 75 art. 5.
23. According to Macrobius, an insomnium was caused by a bodily distur-
bance: Commentarii in Ciceronis Somnium Scipionis 1.3 (Quelingburg: G. Bassius,
1848), 24 – 25.
24. Guibert is very clear that his mother’s visions were contained by the
dream state. Moreover, Rubenstein notes that even in Guibert’s waking visions,
when he allegedly saw demons or even the devil, the words used were frequently
imagines or species, implying a lesser degree of reality: Guibert of Nogent, 68– 69.
25. Autobiographie 1.18, pp. 152– 54; trans., 95.
26. Ibid., 1.18, p. 152; trans., 95.
27. Ibid., 1.18, p. 154; trans., 95.
28. Ibid., 1.9, p. 56; trans., 55. There is also a supernatural instance of im-
personation when the devil masquerades as Saint James, prompting a penitent
fornicator to castrate himself and take his own life: ibid., 3.19, pp. 142– 46; trans.,
219– 20. Cf. the instance in the contemporaneous work of Goscelin in which the
devil masquerades as a priest and talks a hermit into murdering his ward, whom
he had impregnated: Liber confortatorius, bk. 4, ed. H. C. Talbot, Studia Anselmi-
ana, fasc. 37, Analecta Monastica, 3d ser. ( Rome: Herder, 1955), 104 – 5; W. R.
Barnes and Rebecca Hayword, trans., in Writing the Wilton Women: Goscelin’s Leg-
end of Edith and Liber confortatorius, ed. Stephanie Hollis ( Turnhout: Brepols,
2004), 190 – 92.
29. Guibert of Nogent, De pignoribus sanctorum 1.3,1, PL 156: 624, 625,
614; trans., 210 –11; 211– 212; 196.
30. Autobiographie 3. 11, 17, pp. 370, 328– 34; trans., 188, 212–14. Evrard
did not act alone, but shared the responsibility with his brother, Clement. The
names of the two fraternal heretics, Evrard and Clement, are uncomfortably
close to the name of Guibert’s father, Evrard of Clermont.
 The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 229

31. For possible parallels, see Rubenstein, Guibert of Nogent, 75, 77– 78,
80 – 82. On Abelard’s life, see Michael Clanchy, Peter Abelard: A Medieval Life
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1997).
32. John Van Engen, “The Twelfth Century: Reading, Reason, and Revolt
in a World of Custom,” in European Transformations: The Long Twelfth Century,
ed. Thomas F. X. Noble and John Van Engen ( Notre Dame, IN: University of
Notre Dame Press, 2012), 33. Also see C. Stephen Jaeger, The Envy of Angels:
Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950 – 1200 ( Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 226 – 29; and Rubenstein, Guibert of
Nogent, 74.
33. Jaeger, Envy of Angels, 226 – 29; Rubenstein, Guibert of Nogent, 74.
34. For background into this controversy and Abelard’s intervention, see
Martin M. Tweedale, Abailard on Universals (Amsterdam: North-Holland Pub-
lishing, 1976), 89–132. For Abelard’s position, see John Marebon, The Philosophy
of Peter Abelard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 174 – 201. See
also Yukio Iwakuma, “Influence,” in A Cambridge Companion to Abelard, ed. Jef-
frey E. Brower and Kevin Guilfoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 306 –12; and John Marebon, “Life, Milieu, and Intellectual Contexts,” in
ibid., 27– 34.
35. His position could also be construed as undermining the commonality
of humankind in favor of a theory that insisted on the uniqueness of the individ-
ual. At one point he argues the inadequacy of the Universal since “There do not
seem to be any things to which universal nouns are applied, since all things sub-
sist distinctly in themselves and do not agree.” Logica Ingredientibus, as cited by
Tweedale, Abailard on Universals, 162.
36. Theologia ‘Summi boni’ 1.36 – 38, ed. E. M. Buytaert and C. J. Mews,
Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaeualis 13 ( Turnhout: Brepols, 1987),
98– 99; cf. Theologia Christiana 1.98, ed. E. M. Buytaert, Corpus Christianorum
Continuatio Mediaeualis 12 ( Turnhout: Brepols, 1969), 112–13; Theologia ‘Schol-
arium’ 1.158, ed. E. M. Buytaert and C. J. Mews, Corpus Christianorum Con-
tinuatio Mediaeualis 13 ( Turnhout: Brepols, 1987), 383.
37. M.-D. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on
New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, ed. and trans. Jerome Taylor and
Lester K. Little (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 69– 70; Peter
Dronke, Fabula: Explorations into the Uses of Myth in Medieval Platonism, Mittel-
lateinische Studien und Texte 9 (Leiden: Brill, 1974), 55– 63. For the historiogra-
phy of the school, see John Marenbon, “Philosophy and Theology,” in European
Transformations, ed. Noble and Van Engen, 412–14.
38. Abelard’s final Theologia ‘Scholarium’ also builds on the previous two
works. See the concordance in the editions of Theologia ‘Summi boni’; Theologia
‘Scholarium,’ ed. E. M. Buytaert and C. J. Mews, Corpus Christianorum Contin-
uatio Mediaeualis 13 ( Turnhout: Brepols, 1987), 75– 81.
 230 / Dyan Elliott

39. Theologia Christiana 2.15, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medi-

aeualis 12, 139; cf. Sic et Non q. 25, ed. Blanche B. Boyer and Richard McKeon
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 167– 69.
40. John Marebon, “Peter Abelard’s Theory of the Virtues and Its Con-
text,” in Knowledge, Discipline, and Power in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of
David Luscombe, ed. Joseph Canning et al. ( Leiden: Brill, 2011), 237– 38. Ac-
cording to an anonymous student’s record, the question of whether individuals
could be saved before Christ was also addressed by Alan of Lille, who resolves it
in the negative. Although the question is allegedly “Whether those who were
before or under the law would be able to be saved without faith in Jesus Christ,”
it is limited to a treatment of Old Testament figures, in “Deux questions sur la
foi inspirées d’Alain de Lille,” ed. Raynaud de Lage, Archives d’histoire doctrinale
et littéraire du moyen âge 14 (1943– 45): 323– 26.
41. Sic et Non, q. 25, pp. 167– 69.
42. Ibid., q. 106, pp. 348– 49. Abelard goes on to cite the careful equivoca-
tion of the biographer that this did not mean that Trajan was actually admitted
into heaven. Cf. the quaestio that addresses whether a person who loved God per-
fectly could be saved without baptism: q. 10, in Charles Burnett and David Lus-
combe, eds., “A New Student for Peter Abelard: The Marginalia in British Li-
brary MS Cotton Faustina A. X.,” in Itinéraires de la raison: Etudes de philosophie
médiévale offertes à Maria Cândida Pacheco, ed. J. F. Meirinhos (Louvain-la-Neuve:
Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Études Médiévales, 2005), 178.
43. God allowed Trajan to return to the flesh briefly so he could be con-
verted: Paradiso 20, 106 –17, in The Divine Comedy, trans. Allen Mandelbaum
( New York: Knopf, 1995), 475. As Barbara Newman pointed out to me, Lang-
land goes still further claiming that Trajan was saved not by prayers from Gre-
gory but for his own goodness.
44. See Jaeger’s discussion of Abelard’s privileging of the inner over the
outer man and how this philosophy could help to exculpate an individual, such
as himself, who had inspired so much scandal, in Envy of Angels, 244 – 45.
45. Ethics, ed. and trans. David Luscombe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971),
64 – 65.
46. Ibid., 66 – 67.
47. Ibid., 44 – 45.
48. Ibid., 45.
49. Burnett and Luscombe, “New Student for Peter Abelard,” 169.
50. Ibid., 169– 70.
51. Ibid., 170 – 71.
52. Ibid., 172.
53. This is on a continuum with other arguments he made on behalf of the
first mother. See Mary McLaughlin, “Peter Abelard and the Dignity of Women:
Twelfth Century ‘Feminism’ in Theory and Practice,” in Pierre Abélard; Pierre le
 The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 231

Vénérable: Les courants philosophiques, littéraires et artistiques en Occident au milieu

du XIIe siècle, Abbaye de Cluny 2 au 9 juillet 1972 ( Paris: Editions du Centre na-
tional de la recherche scientifique, 1975), 287– 333.
54. Burnett and Luscombe, “New Student for Peter Abelard,” q. 6,
pp. 173– 74. It seems to me that something more is needed to turn Eve’s snack
into a meritorious act. Our account of this quaestio is, after all, based on the
notes a student took during one of Abelard’s lectures. It seems likely that the
student could not write fast enough and missed a turn in the argument.
55. Marie de France, Lanval, ll. 5–152, in Lais, ed. Alfred Ewert ( London:
Bristol Classical Press, 1995), 58– 61; Glyn S. Burgess and Keith Busby, trans.,
in The Lais of Marie de France, 2d ed. ( London: Penguin, 1999), 73– 75.
56. Eliduc, ll. 1006 – 66, in Lais, 152– 54; trans., 124 – 25.
57. Yonec, ll. 91–104, in Lais, 84; trans., 87.
58. Yonec, ll. 145– 90, in Lais, 85– 86; trans., 88.
59. Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, 94.
60. Bisclavret ll. 145– 48, in Lais, 52; trans., 70.
61. Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica dist. 2, c. 19, ed. James F. Di-
mock, in Giraldi Cambrensis opera (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer,
1867), 5:102.
62. Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, 95. For a reading of werewolves as
indicators of ethnicity, see Cohen, Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity, 86 – 87. As
David Shyovitz has argued, Talmudic scholars in the Rhineland were struggling
with the same issue, again using the werewolf to think with.
63. Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica dist. 2, c. 19, p. 102.
64. See Joan Ferrante, Woman as Image in Medieval Literature: From the
Twelfth Century to Dante ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 73– 74.
65. See particularly Walter Map’s De nugis curialium: Courtiers’ Trifles dist.
2.12–15, 29; 4.6, 11, ed. M. R. James, rev. ed. C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B.
Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 156 – 64, 204 – 6, 315– 40, 351– 64; and book
3 of Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia: Recreation for an Emperor, ed. and trans.
S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns (Oxford: Clarendon, 2002), especially 61– 62, 64,
66, 85– 86, and 93; 674 – 78, 680 – 83, 684 – 88, 717– 30, and 743– 46.
66. Also note that the lady made her initial appeal to God, not that this is
necessarily a warrant against demonic trickery, however. Even so, Michelle
Sweeney argues that the magic in question is “sanctified by God,” despite its
adulterous tenor: Magic in Medieval Romance from Chrétien de Troyes to Geoffrey
Chaucer ( Dublin: Four Courts, 2000), 92.
67. Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica dist. 2, c. 19, pp. 106 – 7. See
Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, 16 –17.
68. The last great Eucharistic controversy was between Berengar of Tours
and Lanfranc. See Gary Macy, Theologies of the Eucharist in the Early Scholastic
Period: A Study of the Salvific Function of the Sacrament according to the Theologians,
 232 / Dyan Elliott

c. 1080 –c. 1220 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 35– 43; and Miri Rubin, Corpus
Christi: The Eucharist in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), 17– 20.
69. Guibert’s main treatment of the Eucharist occurs in the course of the
second book of his De pignoribus sanctorum, Patrologia Latina 156:629– 50; trans.,
219– 48. See Rubenstein, Guibert of Nogent, 132– 72; Macy, Theologies, 80 – 82.
70. Macy, Theologies, 114 –15. This is according to William of St. Thierry.
The claim is not present in any of Abelard’s works, however, and may have been
circulated in the course of his teaching.
71. Yonec, ll. 86 – 90, in Lais, 84; trans., 87.
72. Heloise, ep. 2, in Héloïse–Abélard: Correspondance, Lettres I–VI, ed.
François d’Amboise ( Paris: Editions Hermann, 2007), 104; Betty Radice, trans.,
The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, rev. ed. M. T. Clanchy ( Middlesex: Penguin
Books, 2003), 51. Barbara Newman also compares Marie de France with
Heloise with respect to the speculation that she, too, was an abbess and that
both women may have had much in common with the first wife’s retreat to the
cloister in Eliduc: “Liminalities: Literate Women in the Long Twelfth Century,”
in European Transformations, ed. Van Engen and Noble, 371– 72.
73. Steven Justice argues that the many exempla concerning Eucharistic
miracles were to risk provoking doubt in order to spark a more reflective faith:
“Eucharistic Miracle and Eucharistic Doubt,” Journal of Medieval and Early Mod-
ern Studies 42 (2012): 307– 32. See also Sabine Flanagan, Doubt in an Age of Faith:
Uncertainty in the Long Twelfth Century ( Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 71– 73. The
fact that both Gerald and Marie were writing in a Plantagenet ambiance begs
the question of whether their two idiosyncratic approaches to the Eucharist
were in some way related. Although it may well be that Marie wrote as early as
the 1160s, unfortunately, the terminus ante quem for both works is the death of
Henry II in 1189. So it is impossible to say with any certainty if and how one
may have influenced the other. But given that Marie is, after all, from France,
the site of heated Eucharistic discussions, it is not difficult to construct an imagi-
native ( possibly counterfactual) narrative in which Gerald heard or read some of
Marie’s lais, perhaps Bisclavret and Yonec, and this started him thinking about Eu-
charistic werewolves.
74. According to Burgess and Busby, although the lais must have been
written by the 1180s, they could have been written as early as the 1160s since
they show no influence of Chrétien de Troyes: Burgess and Busby, introduction,
in Lais, 14. For the chronology of the different recensions of Gerald’s Topograhia
Hibernica, see Robert Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 1146– 1223 (Oxford: Clarendon,
1982), app. 1, 213.
75. These are the terms used by Brian Stock, in Myth and Science in the
Twelfth Century: A Study of Bernard Silvester ( Princeton: Princeton University
 The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 233

Press, 1972), and Peter Dronke, in Fabula, respectively. For an overview of

twelfth-century approaches to myth, see Stock, Myth and Science, 31– 62.
76. Heinrich Fichtenau, Heretics and Scholars in the High Middle Ages,
1000 –1200, trans. Denise A. Kaiser (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univer-
sity Press, 1998), 185. This tendency is illuminated in Barbara Newman’s God and
the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), which delineates how authors use personae such as
Sapientia or the Goddess Natura in order to explore the female aspect of God.
77. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society, 36.
78. See ibid., 52– 56.
79. Ibid., 80 – 88.
80. Clavis physicae, c. 103, ed. Paolo Lucentini ( Rome: Edizione di storia e
letteratura, 1974), 75. Cf. ibid., cc. 106, 272, pp. 76 – 77, 219– 20.
81. Ibid., c. 70, p. 49. Guibert makes a similar formulation symbolically
versus literally: Rubenstein, Guibert of Nogent, 44.
82. The persona is first introduced into medieval literature by Bernard Sil-
verstris. See Newman, God and the Goddesses, 51– 66; George D. Economou, The
Goddess Natura in Medieval Literature ( Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 2002), 58– 72; and Stock, Myth and Science, 63 ff. On integumentum,
see Stock, Myth and Science, 48. Despite Alan’s undoubted mastery of this
medium, Chenu still notes that Alan is one of the best witnesses to the tensions
between Platonism and orthodoxy: Nature, Man, and Society, 96.
83. Alan of Lille, De planctu Naturae 6, ed. N. M. Häring, Studi Medievali
ser. 3, 19, 2 (1978): 825; James J. Sheridan, trans., The Plaint of Nature ( Toronto:
Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980), 117.
84. Ibid., 8, p. 841; trans., 146.
85. Ibid., 10, p. 849; trans., 163. Venus is also very much at fault in Alan’s
off-color poem on whether it is preferable to marry a virgin or matron. ( The an-
swer is predictable.) It bears much in common with The Plaint to the extent that
many manuscripts treated it as the ending of the poem. See Nikolus M.
Häring’s edition, “The Poem Vix nodosum, by Alan of Lille,” Medioevo 3 (1978):
165– 85. A prose translation of the poem by J. J. Sheridan is included on 167– 70.
86. Alan of Lille, Anticlaudianus, ed. R. Bossut ( Paris: Librairie philoso-
phique J. Vrin, 1955), 1: ll. 216 –17; James J. Sheridan, trans., Anticlaudianus or
the Good and Perfect Man ( Toronto: Pontifical Institute, 1973), 54.
87. Ibid., prose prologue, 56; trans., 40 – 41.
88. De fide catholica contra haereticos sui temporibus, praesertim Albigenses, Pa-
trologia Latina 210: 305– 430. Book 1 of the treatise (cols. 307– 78) is devoted to
contemporary dualists. Parts of this book have been translated in Heresies of the
High Middle Ages, ed. and trans. Walter L. Wakefield and Austin P. Evans ( New
York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 215–17. I have purposefully avoided
 234 / Dyan Elliott

using the terms Cathar or Albigensian because Alan does not use them. The term
Cathar is first used by Eckbert of Schönau in his Sermones tredecim contra haereti-
cos (ca. 1164), Patrologia Latina 195:11–102. See Uwe Brunn, Des Contestataires
aux ‘Cathares’ ( Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 2006), 218–19, 238. The
use of the term Albigensian only definitively became associated with the heresy
in 1209, after the so-called Albigensian Crusade. See Jean-Louis Biget, “ ‘Les Al-
bigeois’: Remarques sur une denomination,” in Inventer l’hérésie? Discours polé-
mique et pouvoirs avant l’Inquisition, ed. Monique Zerner ( Nice: Centre d’Études
Médiévale, 1998), 219– 55. This is not to say that I am siding with Mark Pegg et
al. that the dualist heresy was largely the imposition of polemical writers and
later inquisitors. R. I. Moore’s War on Heresy: Faith and Power in Medieval Europe
( London: Profile Books, 2012) also shares this position. See, however, Peter
Biller’s very penetrating discussion of the sources, the problems they present,
and on the general reliability of the early inquisitors regarding the basic beliefs
of the heretics: “Through a Glass Darkly: Seeing Medieval Heresy,” in The Me-
dieval World, ed. Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson ( London: Routledge, 2001),
308– 26. It has traditionally been assumed that Alan had firsthand knowledge of
these heretics because he joined the Cistercians late in life, is reputed to have
taught at Montpellier, and addressed the treatise to Count William VIII of
Montpellier. See Jean Longère’s introductory volume to Alan’s Liber poeniten-
tiales ( Lille: Librairie Giard, 1965), 1:217– 21. Recently this view has come
under attack: see Moore’s War on Heresy, 219– 20.
89. Prologue, De fide catholica, Patrologia Latina 210:307– 8.
90. Ibid., 1.1, col. 307; trans., 215.
91. Ibid., 1.2, col. 307; trans., 215–16.
92. Ibid., 1.3, col. 309.
93. It is this tendency that leads Fichtenau to differentiate the heretics
from Platonists: Heretics and Scholars, 175, 178.
94. De fide catholica, 1.9, Patrologia Latina 210:316; trans., 217.
95. Ibid., 1.10, cols. 316–17. This also required an in-depth explanation of
what led to this belief in the first place: ibid., 1.11, col. 317.
96. Ibid., 1.12, cols. 317–18.
97. Ibid.,1.13, cols. 318.
98. Ibid.,1.14, col. 318.
99. Ibid., 1.19– 20, cols. 321– 23.
100. Ibid., 1.21, col. 323.
101. Ibid., 1.22, col. 323.
102. Ibid., 1.24, cols. 324 – 25.
103. Ibid., 1.47 ff.; 1.57 ff., col. 352 ff.; 359 ff. Alan’s later manual for confes-
sors will draw on some of these discussions. See Liber poenitentialis 4.4, 2:164 – 65
and 164n.
 The Counterfactual Twelfth Century \ 235

104. Edina Bozóky, ed., Le livre secret des cathares: Interrogatio Iohannis ( Paris:
Beauchesne, 1980).
105. Verbeke, “Philosophy and History,” as cited by Fichtenau, Heretics and
Scholars, 155.
106. “In Dominica Palmarum,” in Alain de Lille: Texts inédits, ed. Marie-
Thérèse d’Alverny (Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 1965), 247. See Ficht-
enau, Heretics and Scholars, 163, 167. Fichtenau also notes the puzzling omission
of humanity’s fall, original sin, and redemption through Christ: ibid., 188.
107. Antoine Dondaine, ed., Manifestatio haeresis Albigensium et Lugdunen-
sium, app. 1, in “Durand de Huesca et la polémique anti-cathare,” Archivum
Fratrum Praedicatorum 29 (1959): 268; Wakefield and Evans, trans., Heresies,
231– 32; see also 718n11.
108. Moneta of Cremona, Adversus Catharos et Valdenses libri quinque 2.1,
ed. T. A. Ricchini ( Rome: Palladis, 1743; repr. Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg, 1964),
110; Wakefield and Evans, trans., Heresies, 318.
 Nine

Th e C r o s s i n M e d i e va l
Monastic Life

giles constable

Christian life in the Middle Ages was frequently compared to the cross.
Jesus said that “He that taketh not up his cross and followeth me is not
worthy of me” (Matthew 10:35) and that “If any man will come after me,
let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” ( Matthew
16:24). Saint Ephraim in the fourth century wrote that “He subjected all
peoples to the infirmity of the cross. Extend your arms to the cross in
order that the arm of the crucified Lord may be extended to you.”1 Saint
John Chrysostom described solitude as a rest from the cross of life.2 Mar-
tin of Tours, while he was still a layman, told the emperor Julian that he
would fight without arms “in the name of the lord Jesus, by the sign of
the cross.”3 Christians should look at Christ on the cross, according to
Rabanus Maurus, as if he were dying at that moment and should medi-
tate in their hearts on the image and on the suprascription “since God
is also man.”4 And Odo of Cluny, in his Occupatio, said that all faithful
Christians must bind their limbs to the cross.5 The sign of the cross —
both visible and invisible, physical and symbolic— was ubiquitous in me-
dieval society, both as a blessing and as a precaution against danger.

236
 The Cross in Medieval Monastic Life \ 237

These ideas and practices developed as time went on. Many exam-
ples can be cited from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Henry of
Marcy stressed that not only the lowest and middle ranks of people “but
also the highest should attach the cross to themselves, indeed they should
glory in attaching themselves to the cross.”6 The crosses born by carnal,
animal, and spiritual men, in whose hearts Christ hangs daily, were de-
scribed in an anonymous text from the circle of Bernard of Clairvaux.7
And Thomas of Citeaux, in his commentary on the Song of Songs, dis-
tinguished between those who bore the sign of Christ (that is, the cross)
on their bodies, in their hearts —“by remembering, understanding, and
loving God,” he said — and on their foreheads —“by glorifying the pas-
sion of Christ and the victory of the cross.” The first was a sign of human
infirmity, the second of divinity, and the third of preaching both the pas-
sion and the humanity of Christ.8 Precisely what Thomas meant here is
uncertain, but his words emphasize the inner and outer functions of the
cross. There is by implication a spiritual hierarchy of types and degrees
of attachment to the cross.
What was true of all Christians applied even more to those who were
dedicated to the religious life, the monks, nuns, hermits, and canons. The
highest rank of Christians in the three sources cited above was probably
monks. The anonymous author of the treatise On the professions of monks,
which was written at Bec in the first half of the twelfth century, argued
that the monk was he “who is attached to the cross, has no power of his
own, and cannot move according to his own will.”9
The cross was the physical sign of commitment to monastic life. Pa-
chomius, who is considered the founder of cenobitic monasticism, wanted
the cowls of his monks to be marked with a purple cross,10 and the head-
dress of Coptic monks is still marked with a cross. Bede said that monks
should bear the cross on their foreheads, like all Christians, and the like-
ness of the crown of thorns in the form of their tonsure.11 In the twelfth
century, Heloise wrote to Abelard that nuns should have the sign of the
cross woven in white on the dark veils over their heads in order to show
that they belonged particularly to Christ “by the integrity of their bod-
ies” and that this mark “should strike fear into the hearts of any of the
faithful and make it more abhorrent to them to burn with desire for these
 238 / Giles Constable

women.”12 Arnulf of Lisieux, in a letter written about 1159, said that a

monk should express obedience to his superior by voice and in writing
“with an oath also physically intervening [and] with the added impression
of the saving cross.”13 This suggests that the cross was a mark of confirma-
tion, like the cross put at the beginning of a document or in place of a sig-
nature. It distinguished the monk or nun as a bearer of the cross and
sealed his or her obligation to renounce the world.
There are countless references—many more than can be mentioned
here—in the Lives of medieval holy men and women, most of whom
were professed religious, to taking, following, bearing, and meditating on
the cross and to crucifying themselves to the world. Their sufferings, in-
cluding poverty, nudity, and solitude, as well as physical mortifications,
were often compared to the cross, and their lives were called crucifixions.
Peter Damiani described himself as “the uttermost servant of the cross
of Christ” in the salutation to one of his letters.14 “We carry the cross on
our forehead,” he said in his sermon “On the invention of the cross,” “but
we hide the same cross much more salubriously in our heart.”15 For Ber-
nard of Clairvaux, in his sixth sermon on Lent, “All the things that the
world loves—the pleasure of the flesh, honors, riches, the vain praises of
men— are a cross for me.”16 And Aelred of Rievaulx called his monks “not
only adorers of the cross of Christ but also professors and even lovers of
the same cross. . . . Our order,” he said, “is the cross of Christ.”17
Bernard and Aelred were Cistercians, but the same view was held by
black monks, regular canons, and religious women. For the author of the
treatise On preserving the unity of the church, which was written at Hirsau
in the late eleventh century, the cross of the Lord was not only that on
which He was crucified, but also that which is fitted to the virtues of all
the disciplines in the course of life: “Whence not only the whole life and
institution of a monk but also every Christian action is described in the
sign of the cross.”18 In the Stimulus of love, which has been attributed to
Anselm, Bernard, and Eckbert of Schönau, the breadth of the cross was
compared to love, its length to eternity, its height to omnipotence, and
its depth to wisdom: “Attach my hands to it, and my feet, and place on
Your servant the entire form of Your passion.”19 And for Peter of Celle,
“The whole form of the claustral discipline emanated from the cross. . . .
The cloistered person who is truly cloistered should crucify himself en-
 The Cross in Medieval Monastic Life \ 239

tirely with his vices and desires,” stripped, suffering, and attached to the
wood, so that only his tongue can move in prayer.20 Elsewhere Peter de-
scribed the soul as “co-suffering in the passions of Christ, co-crucified,
and co-dying with Him.”21
Stephen of Muret, the founder of the Grandmontines, was said to
have carried the cross of Christ on his mind and body.22 Canons were de-
scribed by Anselm of Havelberg, who was himself a canon, as “bound to
the cross of obedience.”23 And Godwin of Salisbury wrote, in his Medita-
tions addressed to a recluse named Rainild, that to carry the cross is to
offer one’s own body, which contains the form of the cross.24 Nuns like-
wise should embrace “the length, width, height, and depth of the charity”
of the cross, according to Wolbero of Saint-Pantaleon in Cologne in his
commentary on the Song of Songs,25 and the delight of the anchoresses in
the Ancrene Riwle was “to be painfully and ignominiously suspended with
Jesus on His cross.”26
Among the most elaborate discussions of the crucifixion of monks
is found in the Dialogue of miracles by Caesarius of Heisterbach, who dis-
tinguished between the long cross of the monastic order, as he called
it, referring presumably to its long duration as well, perhaps, as its size,
and the short or brief cross of pilgrimage. When Bernard of Clairvaux
preached the crusade, Caesarius said, “He signed some [for pilgrimage]
and received others into the order. He who was touched and inwardly
instructed by the unction of the Holy Spirit received the cross not, how-
ever, of the overseas expedition but of the order, judging it more salu-
tary to impress a long cross on his mind than to sew a narrow band tem-
porarily on his clothing.”
Caesarius went on to stress the superiority of the cross of the order
to the cross of pilgrimage.27 Elsewhere, in the section “On the crucifix-
ion of monks [religiosi]” he distinguished inner crucifixion by compas-
sion to outer crucifixion by mortification of the flesh: “Those who are of
Christ, who can say with the Apostle that ‘We are crucified with Christ’
(Gal. 2:20), have crucified their flesh, that is, they have attached it to the
cross, fighting against the vices of works and the concupiscences of de-
sires.” The right hand of a monk is attached to the cross by the nail of
obedience, the left hand by the nail of patience, and the feet by the nail
of humility.28 Caesarius gave an account of two visions of a priest who
 240 / Giles Constable

was angry with his abbot. In one he saw the congregation of his abbey as
the body of Christ and the strictness of the rule as the cross. In the
other he saw Christ on the cross “not in painting, not in sculpture, but
in a body of flesh,” whose obedience the prior should follow.29
Monks who were tempted to become pilgrims or crusaders were
sometimes prevented from leaving their monasteries by visions of the
cross forbidding them to depart. James of Vitry said in one of his ser-
mons that Christ stayed on the cross in order to show that monks should
stay on the cross of religious life.30 Count William II of Nevers became
a lay brother at La Chartreuse rather than a crusader, changing his belt
into rope and silk into wood, according to his biographer: “Bearing the
cross of the Lord every day and following Him constantly [ he was] a
true pilgrim of the world and did not cease to progress from virtue to
virtue before he deserved to see the God of gods in Syon.”31 Christ gave
a golden cross to Christina of Markyate in a vision and instructed her to
hold it firmly upright and to remember that He Himself bore the cross
and that all who wished to go to Jerusalem must carry the cross.32 The
abbot of Mortemer warned a knight who had taken the cross of crusad-
ing that he should crucify himself for Christ as a monk rather than bear
the cross on his clothing,33 and Hildegard of Bingen told Abbess Hazz-
icha of Krauftal and two companions who were “marked with the sign
of Christ by which you go to the heavenly Jerusalem” not to go on an
earthly pilgrimage.34 Ralph Niger, in his treatise On military matters and
the triple way of pilgrimage to Jerusalem, written in 1187 and 1188, said
that clerics and religious (deuotati) and “those who by their profession
constantly bear the cross of the Lord on their bodies” should not also
carry the cross of pilgrimage or fight the Saracens.35
In some cases the monk’s experience of the cross was a physical real-
ity. Gerard of Saint Albinus at Angers carried a lead cross.36 Gilbert of
Merton secretly wore an iron chain around his loins, which was com-
pared by his biographer to “the cross of Christ on his body,” and Ray-
mond of Piacenza, who died in 1200, went around with a cross on his
shoulder.37 Some holy men and women prayed with their arms extended,
in the form of a cross, or lay on the ground with their arms and legs ex-
tended, and a few bore or imposed on their bodies the marks or stigmata
of the crucifixion. Savonarola was said to have had the image of the cross
 The Cross in Medieval Monastic Life \ 241

and the name Jesus imprinted on his chest during prayer.38 The Premon-
stratensian canon Philip of Harvengt identified the location of the abbey
of Prémontré with a cross because it was in a valley of which the four
branches, going east and west and north and south, stretched out “in the
manner of a cross.” God made the place in the likeness of a cross, Philip
said, in order that the inhabitants would conform to the crucifixion.39
Many of the references to monastic cross bearing were symbolic and
metaphorical, however, and applied to particular aspects of the lives of
professed religious. In the remainder of this paper I shall look at the im-
portance of the cross in monastic profession, costume, prayer, and death.
It was customary from the earliest times to place a cross in the hand
of a new monk or nun and to mark him or her with the sign of the
cross.40 When Saint Anthusa withdrew from the world, according to her
Acts, which date probably from the end of the fifth century, the bishop of
Tarsus gave her a cross which she still had when she died twenty-three
years later.41 Denis the Pseudo-Areopagite said, in his Ecclesiastical Hierar-
chy, that after a new monk ratified his commitments, “The priest marks
him with the sign of the cross and cuts his hair, invoking the three per-
sons of the divine beatitude.”42 In the west Syrian rite the sign was on the
shoulder, but its position may have varied from region to region or even
from monastery to monastery.43 The precise significance of this cross is
also uncertain. It may have been not only a blessing and a mark of the
new monk’s or nun’s devotion to Christ, but also a sign of divine protec-
tion and of an orientation towards Jerusalem, with which the cross was
associated in early Christian and medieval spirituality. It may also have
been connected with the ancient concept of entry to monasticism as a
second baptism, which opened the way to a new life.
The symbolism of the cross permeated monastic life and customs.
The habit was said to be modeled on the cross.44 William of Gellone put
on the apostolic dress “in the form of the cross [instar crucis],” and, ac-
cording to the eleventh-century Canterbury pontifical, the cowl that was
placed over the head of a novice had “the form of the most holy and ven-
erated cross.”45 The canons of Barnwell arranged their clothing “in the
form of a cross” when they sat or bowed, except at meals or in the lava-
tory.46 The author of the treatise On preserving the unity of the church said
that the monastic cowl “had the appearance of the cross through its four
 242 / Giles Constable

extended parts so that this four-part union by every part restrains and
leads to heaven him who is crucified to the world.”47 He continued with
the passage cited above saying that the entire life of a monk and every
Christian act was described in the cross.48 The costume of the mendi-
cants was likewise compared to the cross. Thomas of Celano said, in his
First Life of Francis of Assisi, that Francis designed for himself “a tunic that
bore a likeness to the cross” in order to ward off temptation and to cru-
cify his flesh by its roughness.49 Both monks and friars could be, and
often were, said literally to carry the cross.
The liturgical life of monks and nuns was also filled with the image
of the cross. Some ascetics, including Saint Gall and Dominic Lorica-
tus, prayed with their arms extended in the form of a cross.50 The monks
of Cluny were especially celebrated for their devotion to the cross, and
their liturgical ceremonies in honor of the cross exercised a wide in-
fluence outside Cluny itself.51 Peter the Venerable’s statute that the de-
votional crosses presented to dying monks should be made of wood
rather than metal was inspired by his desire that they resemble the true
cross.52 The passionate devotion to the cross of Peter’s mother Rain-
gard, who became a nun at Marcigny toward the end of her life, was de-
scribed in his letter written to his brothers after her death.53
Abbots and priests in monasteries often wore a pectoral cross, and
from the sixth century on, abbots in Gallic and Spanish monasteries car-
ried crosses, probably as marks of jurisdiction and pastoral care.54 Many
individual monks and nuns kept crosses and crucifixes in their cells and
prayed before them. The seventh-century Nestorian ascetic Dādisho’
adored and embraced the cross in his cell,55 and Saint William of Vercelli,
the founder of Montevergine, who died in 1142, prayed at night before a
cross in his cell.56 The use of crosses in monastic churches, refectories,
and chapter houses spread especially in the ninth century.57 Monks and
nuns participated in and to some degree inspired the growing devotion
to the crucifix that marked the spirituality of the eleventh and twelfth
centuries.58 The cross figured prominently in the private visions and re-
ligious experiences of monks and nuns. Odo of Saint-Martin at Autun
was seen raised up, embracing a cross halfway up a wall; Richard of Saint-
Vanne, after praying before the cross and looking at it with tears, heard
a voice saying, “You have blessed Me on earth, and I bless you”; and Ru-
 The Cross in Medieval Monastic Life \ 243

pert of Deutz embraced an image of Christ on the cross above an altar

in the church of Saint Laurence at Liège.59
“I adore your cross, O Lord,” Damiani said in one of his prayers, “I
adore your life-giving death”; in his sermon “On the exaltation of the
holy cross,” he stressed almost every aspect of the cult of the cross and
urged monks to meditate on the position of the crucified body.60 “I often
see with the most immediate perception of my mind,” he wrote, “Christ
fixed with nails, hanging on the cross, and I eagerly receive the dripping
blood in my mouth placed below.”61 Rupert of Deutz, in his dispute with
the Jewish convert Herman, said that Christians who outwardly contem-
plated the image of Christ’s death on the cross were inwardly incited to
love Him.62 And Gerhoh of Reichersberg wrote in his commentary on
the Psalms that “When you see with your eyes the life-giving image of the
poor and destitute Man hanging on the cross, realize inside in your heart
that you see the Lord face to face.”63 Meditations of this type prepared the
way for a sense of identification with Christ and of bearing His cross.
Saint William Firmat, who died in about 1090, “crucifying the world to
himself and himself to the world, and recalling in frequent meditation
what and how greatly the Lord suffered for him on the cross, took his
cross when he was about to visit the holy places of Jerusalem and began
to follow in the footsteps of the Lord.”64 This shows that the two crosses
of monastic life and of pilgrimage were not always incompatible.
This devotion showed itself especially at the time of death.65 Abbot
Attala of Bobbio, who died in 627, had a cross brought to him when he
was dying and addressed it in emotional terms: “Greetings, nourishing
cross, you who carry the price of the world and, bearing the eternal ban-
ners, bring medicine to our wounds; it is you who by His forbidden
blood, in order to save the human race, descended from heaven into this
vale of tears, you the second Adam who progressing in the path of the
first Adam removed the ancient stain by a new washing.”66 The dying
Saint Benedict is shown with his arms extended in the form of a cross in
an illustration in MS Vat. lat. 1202, f. 80, which dates from about 1070.67
Robert of Arbrissel, when he was on his deathbed, called for the wood
of the holy cross,68 and Robert of Betun, who was prior of Llanthony
before he became bishop of Hereford, addressed a long soliloquy to the
cross when he was dying at the Council of Rheims in 1148.69
 244 / Giles Constable

The cross played an important part in the elaborate ceremonies sur-

rounding the death of a monk at Cluny, described in the customary by
Bernard of Cluny.70 The dying monk was first marked with the sign of the
cross on his eyes, ears, lips, nose, hands, feet, and inquina, meaning his
groin or genitals. He then kissed and adored a cross, and a cross was put
on his face, presumably to enable him to kiss it more easily. After death,
his body was laid on the ground on ashes sprinkled in the form of the
cross and, finally, a cross was attached to the structure holding his bier.
The cross thus played a central role in the lives of medieval monks
and nuns from the time of their profession until their final hours. They
were surrounded by images of the cross and constantly reminded of its
power and significance. They had a deep personal relationship with the
cross, and there was almost no distinction between contemplating the
sufferings of Christ on the cross and participating in them. The cross
marked not only their outer lives, including their physical appearance
and costume and their behavior in church and in the monastery, but also,
and more significantly, their inner lives and sufferings, of which every as-
pect reflected the significance of the cross.

Notes

1. Louis Leloir, Saint Ephrem: Commentaire de l’évangile concordant. Version

arménienne, Corpus scriptorum christianorum orientalium, 137, 145: Scriptores
armeniani 1– 2 ( Louvain: E. Peeters, 1953– 54), II, 213 (xx, 23, commenting on
Luke 23.39), who went on to say that he who did not extend his hand to the
cross could not move his hand to Christ’s table.
2. Chrysostom, Expositio in psalmum 9.2, in Patrologia graeca, LV, 123.
3. Sulpicius Severus, Vita Martini, 4.5, ed. Jacques Fontaine, Sulpice Sévère.
Vie de saint Martin, Sources chrétiennes 133– 35 ( Paris: Cerf, 1967– 69), I, 260.
See Olivier Guillot, Saint Martin de Tours. Apôtre des pauvres (336– 397) (Paris: Fa-
yard, 2008), 87– 88.
4. Rabanus Maurus, Opusculum de passione Domini, in Patrologia Latina
[ hereafter PL] CXII, 1425B.
5. Odo of Cluny, Occupatio, VI, 163, ed. Anton Swoboda ( Leipzig: Teub-
ner, 1900), 123.
6. Henry of Marcy, Tractatus de peregrinante civitate Dei, 13, in PL, CCIV,
357A.
 The Cross in Medieval Monastic Life \ 245

7. H.-M. Rochais, Enquête sur les sermons divers et les sentences de saint Ber-
nard, Analecta sacri ordinis Cisterciensis 18.3– 4 (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses,
1962), 90.
8. Thomas of Cîteaux, In cantica canticorum, 12, in PL, CCVI, 810BC.
9. Anonymous of Bec, Tractatus de professionibus monachorum, ed. Giles
Constable, Three Treatises from Bec on the Nature of Monastic Life, Medieval Acad-
emy Books 109 ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 58.
10. Matias Augé, “L’abito monastico dalle origini alla regola di S. Bene-
detto,” Claretianum 16 (1976): 56 – 57; Claude Peifer, Monastic Spirituality ( New
York: Sheed and Ward, 1966), 184.
11. Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People V, 21, ed. Bertram Colgrave
and R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 548.
12. The Letters of Heloise and Abelard, trans. and ed. Mary McLaughlin and
Bonnie Wheeler ( New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 181, Ep. 8. Cf. David
Luscombe, ed., The Letter Collection of Peter Abelard and Heloise (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2013), 483, Ep. 8.103.
13. Frank Barlow, ed., The Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux, Camden Third Se-
ries 61 ( London: Royal Historical Society, 1939), 26, Ep. 19.
14. Peter Damiani, Ep. 50 (= Opusc. 15), in Die Briefe des Petrus Damiani, ed.
Kurt Reindel, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Die Briefe der deutschen Kais-
erzeit 4 ( Munich: Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 1983– 93), II, 79. Abbot
Pontius of Cluny called himself “crucis Christi . . . seruus” in the heading of the
letter published by Pietro Zerbi, “Ancora interno a Ponzio e allo ‘scisma’ cluni-
acense. La ‘svolta’ del 1124 – 25,” in Società, Istituzioni, Spiritualità. Studi in onore
di Cinzio Violante, Collectanea 1 (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto me-
dioevo, 1994), II, 1084.
15. Peter Damiani, Serm. 18, in PL, CXLIV, 610B. On Damiani and the
cross, see Valentino Vailati, “La devozione all’umanità di Cristo nelle opere di San
Pier Damiani,” Divus Thomas 46 (1943): 85; and Giovanni Tabacco, “Privilegium
amoris. Aspetti della spiritualità romualdina,” II Saggiatore 4 (1954): 324 – 43.
16. Bernard of Clairvaux, In quadragesima sermo 6, 3, in S. Bernardi opera, ed.
J. Leclercq and H.-M. Rochais (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957– 77), V, 379.
17. Aelred of Rievaulx, Serm. 9, in PL, CXCV, 263C-D.
18. De unitate ecclesiae conservanda, II, 42, in Monumenta Germaniae His-
torica, Libelli de lite imperatorum et pontificum 2 ( Hanover: Hahn, 1891–
1897), 278. On De unitate, see Zelina Zafarana, “Richerche sui ‘Liber de unitate
ecclesiae conservanda,’ ” Studi medievali 7, no. 2 (1966): 626 – 29; and I. S. Robin-
son, Authority and Resistance in the Investiture Contest ( Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1978), 94 – 95.
19. Ekbert of Schönau (attr.), Stimulus amoris, in PL, CLVIII (among the
works of Anselm), 758D– 9A. See André Wilmart, “La tradition des prières de
saint Anselme. Tables et notes,” Revue bénédictine 36 (1924): 59.
 246 / Giles Constable

20. Peter of Celle, De disciplina claustrali, 6, in PL, CCII, 1108D, 1110BC.

See Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale, Théologie 41, 42, 59 ( Paris: Aubier,
1959– 64), I, 55.
21. Peter of Celle, Mosaici tabernaculi mystica et moralis expositio, 1, in PL,
CCII, 1053BC.
22. Stephen of Lecey, Vita Stephani Muretensis, 31, in Corpus Christiano-
rum: Continuatio mediaeualis [ hereafter CC:CM] VIII, 120; Gerard Itier, Conclu-
sio vitae Stephani Muretensis, 2, in ibid., 321– 22.
23. Anselm of Havelberg, Epistola apologetica pro ordine canonicorum regular-
ium, in PL, CLXXXVIII, 1125C.
24. Godwin of Salisbury, Meditationes, in MS Oxford, Bodleian Library,
Digby 96, f. 11r.
25. Wolbero of St. Pantaleon, Commentaria super Canticum Canticorum,
praef., in PL, CXCV, 1016CD.
26. James Morton, ed. and trans., Ancrene Riwle, Camden Society 57 (Lon-
don: Camden Society, 1853), 355. On this work, which is now commonly called
the Ancrene Wisse, see the references in Giles Constable, The Reformation of the
Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 66, n. 95.
27. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum, I, 6, ed. Joseph
Strange (Cologne: J. M. Heberle, 1851), I, 12–13. On the cross of crusading, see
Giles Constable, Crusaders and Crusading in the Twelfth Century ( London: Ash-
gate, 2008), 45– 91.
28. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum, VIII, 19, ed. Strange,
II, 97.
29. Ibid., IV, 18, ed. Strange, I, 189– 91.
30. Thomas F. Crane, The Exempla or Illustrative Stories from the “Sermones
Vulgares” of Jacques de Vitry, Publications of the Folk-Lore Society 26 ( London:
David Nutt, 1890), 127– 28, no. 305. In his Vita of Mary of Oignies, James said
that she “crucem tollebat”: Acta Sanctorum, 23 June, IV, 641F. Saint Romuald
told a self-willed hermit who recognized no superior that “If you carry the cross
of Christ, it is added that you should not leave the obedience of Christ”: Peter
Damiani, Vita beati Romualdi, 24, ed. Giovanni Tabacco, Fonti per la storia d’I-
talia 94 ( Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 1957), 51.
31. Decima Douie and David Farmer, eds., Magna vita sancti Hugonis, IV,
12(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), II, 57.
32. Charles H. Talbot, ed. and trans., The Life of Christina of Markyate (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 106, cap. 41.
33. J. Bouvet, “Le récit de la fondation de Mortemer,” Collectanea ordinis
Cisterciensium reformatorum 22 (1960): 152.
34. Peter Dronke, Women Writers in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1984), 258.
 The Cross in Medieval Monastic Life \ 247

35. Radulfus Niger, De re militari et triplici via peregrinationis Ierosolimitanae

(1187/88), III, 90, ed. Ludwig Schmugge, Beiträge zur Geschichte und Quel-
lenkunde des Mittelalters 6 ( Berlin: de Gruyter, 1977), 196; cf. IV, 10 (204) on
the two crosses of pilgrimage and “the higher life.”
36. On Gerard, see Jean-Hervé Foulon, “Solitude et pauvreté volontaire
chez les ermites du Val de Loire,” in Liber Largitorius. Etudes d’histoire médiévale
offertes à Pierre Toubert par ses élèves, Sciences historiques et philologiques, V.
Hautes études médiévales et modernes 84 (Geneva: Ecole pratique des hautes
études, 2003), 399– 401, 412. According to the Miracula Girardi sancti Albini An-
degavensis, in Acta Sanctorum, 4 Nov., II.l, 506D, Gerard carried the cross volun-
tarily (sponte), like Christ, thus outdoing Simon, who carried it as a duty.
37. Marvin L. Colker, “Latin Texts Concerning Gilbert, Founder of Merton
Priory,” Studia monastica 12 (1970): 269, cap. 8; Kenneth Baxter Wolf, The Poverty
of Riches: St. Francis Reconsidered (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 73, 76.
38. Donald Weinstein, Savonarola: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet
( New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 86; cf. 281, where he later denied this.
39. Philip of Harvengt, De continentia clericorum, 126, in PL, CCIII,
857D– 8A.
40. See the references in Giles Constable, “The Ceremonies and Symbol-
ism of Entering Religious Life and Taking the Monastic Habit, from the Fourth
to the Twelfth Century,” in Segni e riti nella chiesa altomedievale occidentale. Spoleto,
11–17 aprile 1985, Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medio-
evo 33 (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, 1987), reprinted in
Giles Constable, Culture and Spirituality in Medieval Europe, Variorum Collected
Studies 541 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996), Art. VII, 796n74 and 817.
41. Franz J. Dölger, “Das Kreuz bei der Mönchsweihe,” Antike und Chris-
tentum 5 (1936): 291– 92.
42. René Roques, “Eléments pour une théologie de l’état monastique selon
Denys l’Aréopagite,” in Théologie de la vie monastique, Théologie 49 (Paris: Aubier,
1961), 284 – 85; Pierre Raffin, Les rituels orientaux de la profession monastique, Spiri-
tualité orientale 4 (Bellefontaine: Abbaye de Bellefontaine, 1969), 22– 24.
43. Raffin, Rituels, 106 and n. 177.
44. See, in addition to the works cited in note 10, Benedictus van Haeften,
S. Benedictus illustratus sive disquisitionum monasticarum libri XII (Antwerp, 1644),
480 – 83 ( V, 3,5), citing among others Honorius Augustodunensis on the cross
shape of the cowl and tunic; Constable, “Ceremonies,” 817, citing Ps-Anselm,
De similitudinibus, and Hamelin of St. Albans.
45. William of Gellone, Vita, II, 23, in Acta Sanctorum, 28 May, VI, 817A;
Montague Rhodes James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library
of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1912), 325. See Constable, “Ceremonies,” 813.
 248 / Giles Constable

46. John Willis Clark, ed., The Observances in Use at the Augustinian Priory
of S. Giles and S. Andrew at Barnwell, Cambridgeshire (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1897), 86.
47. De unitate ecclesiae conservanda, II, 42, 277.
48. See note 18 above.
49. Thomas of Celano, First Life of Francis of Assisi, IX (22), in St. Francis of
Assisi: Writings and Early Biographies, 3d ed., ed. Marion A. Habig (Chicago:
Franciscan Herald Press, 1973), 247.
50. Walafrid Strabo, Vita Galli, I, 11, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica,
Scriptores rerum merovingicarum 4, 292– 93; Peter Damiani, Vita sancti Rodul-
phi et sancti Dominici Loricati, 10, in PL, CXLIV, 1018B–19B; cf. Damiani, Ep. 50
(= Opusc. 15), ed. Reindel, II, 109, where he referred to hermits with their arms
extended in prayer “and other exercises of holy fervor.” See Albert Dresdner,
Kultur- und Sittengeschichte der italienischen Geistlichkeit im 10. und 11. Jahrhundert
( Breslau: W. Koebner, 1890), 297; Willy Rordorf, “The Gestures during Prayer
According to Tertullian, De oratione 11– 30, and Origen, Perì Euchês 31– 2,”
Liturgy O.C.S.O. 29, no. 1 (1995): 87– 99.
51. See especially the sermon of Abbot Odilo, De sancta cruce, in PL, CXLII,
1031– 36, and among secondary works, Glauco Maria Cantarella, I monaci di Cluny
( Turin: Einaudi, 1993), 164 – 65; Barbara Rosenwein, “Cluny’s Immunities in the
Tenth and Eleventh Centuries: Images and Narratives,” in Die Cluniazenser in
ihrem politisch-sozialen Umfeld, ed. Giles Constable, Gert Melville, and Jörg Ober-
ste, Vita regularis 7 (Münster: LIT-Verlag, 1998), 155– 56; Dominique Iogna-
Prat, Ordonner et exclure. Cluny et la société chrétienne face à l’hérésie, au judaïsme et à
l’islam, 1000 –1150 (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), 186– 91; Dominique Iogna-Prat,
Etudes clunisiennes (Paris: A & J Picard, 2002), 84 – 87.
52. Statuta Petri Venerabilis abbatis Cluniacensis IX (1146/7), 62, in Consue-
tudines benedictinae variae (Saec. X I–Saec. XIV), ed. Giles Constable, Corpus
consuetudinum monasticarum 6 (Siegburg: Schmitt, 1975), 93– 94; cf. Stat.
75, in ibid., 104, and the relevant notes with references to the cult of the cross
at Cluny.
53. Giles Constable, ed., The Letters of Peter the Venerable, Harvard Histori-
cal Studies 78 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), I, 169, Ep. 53.
54. In the Ordo Casinensis (Ordo regularis), II, 18, some of the priests, dea-
cons, and subdeacons had gold crosses: Initia consuetudinis benedictinae. Consue-
tudines saeculi octavi et noni, ed. Kassius Hallinger, Corpus consuetudinum mo-
nasticarum 1 (Siegburg: Schmitt, 1963), 119. This work probably dates from
about 817/21 and reflects the usage of the Aniane reforms: Pius Engelbert, “Die
Herkunft des ‘Ordo Regularis,’ ” Revue bénédictine 77 (1967): 264 – 97. See Fran-
çois Chamard, “Les abbés au Moyen Age,” Revue des questions historiques 38 (1885):
103– 8; Pierre Salmon, Etude sur les insignes du pontife dans le rit romain. Histoire et
liturgie ( Rome: Officium Libri Catholici, 1955), 25.
 The Cross in Medieval Monastic Life \ 249

55. The cross on the front and back of a bishop’s pallium was a sign of his
redemption, according to Rabanus Maurus, De institutione clericorum libri tres, I,
23, ed. Detlev Zimpel, Freiburger Beiträge zur mittelalterlichen Geschichte 7
(Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996), 315. See Erik Petersen, “La croce e la
pregiera verso l’Oriente,” Ephemerides liturgicae 59 (1945): 55– 56; B. Capelle, “Aux
origines de la culte de la croix,” Les questions liturgiques et paroissiales 27 (1946): 162.
56. Johannes a Nusco, Vita sancti Guillelmi, II, 14, in Acta Sanctorum, 25
June, VII, 102CD.
57. See the late eighth-century Memoriale qualiter, II, 6 (chapter house),
V, 11 and 14, (2) II, 10 (refectory), and (2) II, 6 (church), in Initia cons. ben., ed.
Hallinger, 254, 257, 270, and 274; see 224 – 25 on authorship and date.
58. See among others Ursmer Berlière, L’ascèse bénédictine des origines à la fin
du XIIe siècle, Collection Pax in-8° 1 (Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 1927), 238– 39;
Edouard Dumoutet, Le Christ selon la chair et la vie liturgique au Moyen-Age (Paris:
Gabriel Beauchesne et ses fils, 1932), 18– 27; Romuald Bauerreiss, “Vom Ur-
sprung des Benediktuskreuzes,” Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des
Benediktiner-ordens und seiner Zweige 56 (1938): 275– 80; Matthäus Bernards,
Speculum virginum. Geistigkeit und Seelenleben der Frau im Hochmittelalter,
Forschungen zur Volkskunde 36– 38 (Cologne: Böhlau, 1958), 181– 82; Johannes
Fried, “Endzeiterwartung um die Jahrtausendwende,” Deutsches Archiv 45 (1989):
449– 61; and Foulon, “Solitude,” 408–15.
59. Vita of Hugh of Anzy-le-Duc, II, 11, in Acta Sanctorum, 20 Apr., II, 764;
Hugh of Flavigny, Chronicon, II, 2, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scrip-
tores 8, 369 (=PL, CLIV, 200C); Rupert of Deutz, Super Matheum, 12, in CC:CM,
XXIX, 382– 83. See John Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1983), 51, 350 – 51.
60. Peter Damiani, Carmina et preces, 27, in PL, CXLV, 928A, and Sermo
47, in PL, CXLIV, 763B– 5C. See André Wilmart, “Les prières de saint Pierre
Damien pour l’adoration de la Croix” (1929), reprinted in André Wilmart, Au-
teurs spirituels et textes dévots du Moyen Age latin ( Paris: Brepols, 1932), 138– 46.
61. Peter Damiani, Ep. 72 (=Opusc. 19.5), ed. Reindel (cited note 14 above),
II, 343. See Tabacco, “Privilegium,” 334.
62. Hermannus quondam Judaeus, Opusculum de conversione sua, 4, ed.
Gerlinde Niemeyer, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Quellen zur Geistes-
geschichte des Mittelalters 4 ( Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1963),
79– 80. See Rupert of Deutz, De sancta trinitate et operibus eius, XXI, 9, in
CC:CM, XXII, 1163.
63. Gerhoh of Reichersberg, Commentarium in Psalmis, IV, 40.14, in PL,
CXCIII, 1486BC. See, on this passage, Karl Morrison, “I am you”: The Her-
meneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art ( Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1988), 197– 98, saying that the soul participated “with the
God-in-man in the picture.”
 250 / Giles Constable

64. Stephen of Redon, Vita sancti Guillelmi Firmati, 1, in E.-A. Pigeon, Vies
des saints du diocèse de Coutances et Avranches (Avranches: Impr. de A. Perrin, 1898),
II, 402.
65. See Louis Gougaud, “La mort du moine,” in Anciennes coutumes claus-
trales, Moines et monastères 8 ( Ligugé: Abbaye Saint-Martin de Ligugé, 1930),
69– 95, esp. 76 – 77 on cross.
66. Jonas of Bobbio, Vita Attalae, III, 10, in Acta Sanctorum, 10 March,
II.2, 44.
67. Emile Bertaux, L’art dans Italie méridionale ( Paris: Ecole française de
Rome, 1903; repr. 1968), pl. VIII (opposite I, 206).
68. Andrew of Fontevrault, Vita altera Roberti de Arbrissello, VII, 38, in PL,
CLXII, 1076B. Baldric of Bourgueil, Vita Roberti, II, 11, in ibid., 1043C, said
that Robert subjected himself to many crosses.
69. William of Wyecombe, Vita Roberti Betun episcopi Herefordensis, II, 25,
in Anglia sacra, ed. Henry Wharton ( London, 1691), II, 316 –17.
70. Bernard of Cluny, Ordo Cluniacensis, I, 24, in Vetus disciplina monastica,
ed. Marquard Herrgott (Paris: Osmont, 1726), 190 – 99; cf. Ulrich of Cluny, Con-
suetudines Cluniacenses, III, 28– 29, in PL, CXLIX, 770C– 5D. See Frederick Pax-
ton, A Medieval Latin Death Ritual: The Monastic Customaries of Bernard and Ulrich
of Cluny, The Chalice of Repose Project: Studies on Music-Thanatology 1 (Mis-
soula, MT: Saint Dunstan’s Press, 1993), 71– 97; Frederick Paxton, “Death by
Customary at Eleventh-Century Cluny,” in From Dead of Night to End of Day: The
Medieval Customs of Cluny, ed. Susan Boynton and Isabelle Cochelin, Disciplina
monastica 3 ( Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 297– 318.
 Te n

A D e a t h i n Wi s d o m ’ s C o u r t
Poetry and Martyrdom in Thirteenth-Century Castile

susan einbinder

In the summer of 1279, a weakened Christian army surrounded the port

city of Algeciras in the last Muslim kingdom on Iberian soil. Had the
Christian siege prevailed, Granada might have fallen two centuries and
more before 1492. But the Christian victory so sought by King Alfonso X
of Castile was not to be. Plagued by hunger, sickness, and desertion, what
remained of the Castilian fleet at Algeciras was decimated that summer,
and as the defeat at Algeciras reverberated throughout the royal court,
there were other casualties as well. The following essay explores the fall of
one of the higher-ranking figures associated with the failure of the siege,
a Jewish financier and courtier known in Christian sources as Don Zag de
la Maleha and to his fellow Jews as Yitzhaq (Isaac) ben Zadoq.
Don Zag may have been as surprised as anyone by his sudden down-
fall. He was a powerful tax farmer, someone who provided the king with
large sums of cash in exchange for the right to collect outstanding taxes.
His final commission in this role, which authorized him to pursue royal
taxes long in arrears, was specifically intended for the relief of the Chris-
tian army in the south. With an escort and the monies he had success-
fully collected, Don Zag left for Seville to meet with the king’s second

253
 254 / Susan Einbinder

son, Sancho, stationed at the front. Sancho, however, had his own plans
for Don Zag’s delivery, which he forwarded to his mother in Aragon,
where she had fled to her brother the year before. Using the siege monies
to cover her journey and debts in Aragon, Queen Violante returned to
Castile in July. Starved of funds, the siege collapsed.
Bedridden and possibly deranged by sickness, humiliated by the
flight of his wife and the defeat of his army, Alfonso X arrested the three
Jewish tax farmers whom he held responsible for this disaster.1 One con-
verted to save himself, while another was dragged to his death. In Sep-
tember 1280, despite Sancho’s efforts to intervene, Don Zag was hanged
outside the Franciscan monastery that was Sancho’s residence in Seville.
Tersely, the royal chronicles describe the financial scandal, the military
embarrassment, and the Jewish courtier’s end, suggesting the family
tensions that sealed Don Zag’s fate.
Two poetic sources treat this incident also, a Hebrew lament and a
Romance cantiga. The Hebrew lament is by Todros Abulafia, a poet as-
sociated with Alfonso X’s court and under Don Zag’s patronage.2 The
cantiga, in Gallego-Portuguese, is one of the Cantigas de Santa Maria at-
tributed to Alfonso X. Highly stylized works, both poems have been ex-
tensively mined as historical resources but rarely with attention to the
ways in which they mediate history through literary tropes. Drawing on
forms of dramatic narrative, social critique, and religious polemic, both of
these works view contemporary events through a blend of personal and
conventional motifs. This essay focuses on the ways in which polemics
and politics are linked to images of familial leadership and loyalty, explic-
itly or implicitly contrasted with those of a rival faith. Where the He-
brew poem stresses good governance and order, by implication absent in
the Christian court, the cantiga emphasizes loyalty and service, explicitly
betrayed by the Jews. Todros’s poem contrasts Don Zag’s ideal family
with the king’s failure to rule his household; Alfonso contrasts his loyalty
to Mary with his Jewish servants’ disloyalty to him. The interest of both
compositions in this theme is illuminated by reading them in the context
of contemporary events. Resituating these texts in the thick of court poli-
tics permits their historical context to enrich them as poetry, even as the
poems themselves enrich the historical context that has been tradition-
ally read without them. While my primary concern is with the Hebrew
 A Death in Wisdom’s Court \ 255

lament and its treatment of Don Zag, the cantiga offers a meaningful
counterpoint to the Hebrew poem’s concerns. Let me begin with the
lament before turning to the cantiga, then juxtapose the poems to con-
clude with some thoughts on the ways in which, read in counterpoint,
these two compositions reflect similar assumptions about kinship, poli-
tics, and faith.
A unique figure in many ways, Todros Abulafia recorded events and
encounters throughout his tumultuous life. Born circa 1247 in Toledo,
he reached Don Zag de la Maleha and the Alfonsine court around 1270,
when he was in his early twenties, and his verse testifies to the zest for
pleasure and privilege he indulged under his patronage.3 Although the
lament discussed below depicts its speaker as an eyewitness, Todros may
or may not have been present for Don Zag’s execution. The siege of Al-
geciras collapsed in the summer of 1279; Don Zag was hanged in Sep-
tember 1280. Four months later, in January 1281, Alfonso X ordered a
surprise Sabbath raid on Toledo synagogues; Todros and other local Jews
were incarcerated for several months while the Jewish community strug-
gled to raise their exorbitant ransom. The poetic lament may date to the
summer of the execution or to the following year. We know that Todros
was strongly affected by his time in prison, which he documented in a
number of poems and letters, some of the latter beseeching an important
relative, the rabbi Todros ben Joseph, to intercede on his behalf. Upon
their ransom, the prisoners rejoined a shaken community in the throes of
public penance, renouncing luxury clothing, festivities, and liaisons with
Muslim or Christian concubines who doubled as domestic servants. Ac-
cording to their rabbis, the community’s travails were God’s punishment
for these sins.4
Domestic politics, family virtue, and loyalty preoccupied the Cas-
tilian king also. Throughout the 1270s and 1280s, these concerns were
tested through a series of intrigues and crises, illnesses and deaths, all of
which unfolded against the backdrop of larger political concerns. By the
mid-1270s things were not going well for Alfonso X. He was badly in
need of money and had resorted to new and heavy taxation. Since taxes
were not always paid, that meant increasing reliance on tax farmers such
as Don Zag or his father, or the rival clans of the Barcilonai or Ibn Sho-
shan brothers. At the same time, Alfonso X’s nobles relentlessly sued for
 256 / Susan Einbinder

privileges, battering his vision of a uniform law for the land — ultimately
codified in the Siete Partidas but not promulgated until years after Al-
fonso X’s death. The war in the south was expensive, and the king’s armies
suffered repeated humiliations in Granada. In 1275, following an exorbi-
tant journey to Beaucaire to meet with the pope, the disappointed king
laid to rest his imperial ambitions. Falling ill on his return, he stopped in
Montpellier, where news reached him of a Moroccan invasion and the
death of his eldest son and heir, Fernando de la Cerda. His beloved
daughter Leonor died a few months later, as did a favored nephew.5 The
king took these losses hard. In 1277, possibly suffering from mental de-
terioration, he ordered the execution of his brother Fadrique and Fad-
rique’s ally and perhaps lover.6
The king was not a healthy man, and throughout this period he ex-
perienced worsening bouts of illness: fevers, jaundice, edema, facial ul-
cerations, and a frightening episode of swelling that nearly forced his eye
from its socket. Contemptuously, Sancho referred to lesions or ulcera-
tions of his father’s face that gave him the appearance of a “leper.” 7
Whatever the diagnosis, it affected his behavior and his marriage as well.8
His queen, Violante, was the daughter of James I (the Conqueror) of
Aragon and sister to his successor, Pedro III. (One of her brothers, an-
other Sancho, was the powerful archbishop of Toledo and was killed in
1275, the year Alfonso lost two children and a nephew.)9 Married in 1246
at the age of ten or twelve, the queen gave birth to eleven children and
served as a valued negotiator for her husband, who trusted her repeatedly
with prickly nobles, councils, and courts. Nonetheless, in January 1278
she fled to Aragon, taking with her her widowed daughter-in-law Blanche
(the daughter of King Louis IX of France) and two small grandsons in
line for the throne.10 At the 1278 Cortes in Segovia, the king disregarded
his grandsons’ claim by granting significant authority to his second son,
Sancho, powers that some scholars have equated with co-rule. It was a
newly emboldened Sancho, then, who persuaded his parents to recon-
cile.11 To do so, he needed to cover Violante’s debts in Aragon and fi-
nance the return journey: he found a way to do so with Don Zag’s arrival
in Seville.12 Queen Violante returned to her husband in July 1279. She is
missing in the sources until 1282, when she appears at an assembly in
Valladolid. By then, the Castilian fleet had been destroyed at Algeciras,
 A Death in Wisdom’s Court \ 257

Don Zag was dead, and in defiance of his father, Sancho had proclaimed
himself king.
Against this backdrop, we can turn to our poems.
Todros’s lament for Don Zag has received no real attention since
the work of Yitzhaq Baer in the early decades of the twentieth century.13
While the poem—“Time’s Impartial Decree” (‫ — )זמן בגזרה שווה‬draws on
multiple genre conventions, it is primarily indebted to the Hebrew la-
ment genre, which itself owes much to Arabic models. Traditionally, the
lament, a poetic eulogy, consists of idealized encomia that occasionally
embed historical details; the text moves through a sequence of thematic
segments embellishing an idealized portrait of its subject with topoi of
communal grief. Baer, of course, was interested in history, which he iden-
tified with the small gems of realia embedded among conventional ex-
pressions of grief. Nonetheless, Todros’s lament is more than a brace for
pointillist details of fact. Indeed this final homage to his patron proves a
complex blend of traditional and innovative elements. The poem’s artful
weave of embellishment and fact is strikingly evident in its extended de-
scription of Don Zag’s execution. Not only does the victim politely re-
quest permission to pray before the executioner hoods and hangs him,
but following a penitential confession, he addresses his mother, sisters,
and wife, his children, his eldest son, and finally his supporters, all de-
picted as witnesses to his death.
For the historian Baer, this depiction of Don Zag’s family could be
read literally as the insertion of “documentary” detail into a poetic eulogy.
In fact, the family tableau embedded in the lament may itself be a literary
invention; as already noted, we do not know if Todros was even present at
his patron’s execution. Moreover, like other elements of the poetic narra-
tive, such as the use of idealized portraiture and biblical “backstories,” the
lament’s polemical treatment of the family constitutes a social and reli-
gious polemic as much as a commemorative strategy. From this literary
perspective, the intrusion of the private family into public verse is note-
worthy. Carefully, Todros portrays the Jewish courtier as an impeccable
family man, squelching any doubts that personal moral failings might
have contributed to his end. The lament praises a patriarchal hierarchy
that has publicly unraveled in the royal household and extends its social
critique to the religious beliefs of the king. Whether Todros composed
 258 / Susan Einbinder

his elegy before or after his own arrest, he was a member of the royal
court and would also have known of the queen’s flight and return, as well
as Sancho’s hunger for the throne. His idealized portrait of Don Zag’s
family contrasts sharply with the fissures in the royal family, where the
king’s failure to rule his household or maintain its loyalty hums loudly be-
neath Todros’s text.14
The work of a mature poet, Todros’s lament for Don Zag was writ-
ten when the poet was in his thirties. The composition, consisting of
sixty-four verses, is notably free of the martyrological conventions that
had matured among Jewish poets in nearby France and Germany.15 In-
stead, Todros’s lament draws on Iberian Hebrew conventions inherited
from the age of Muslim rule. His Hebrew verses are a latticework of
biblical citations that weaves a subtle backdrop to the surface meaning
of the text. Each verse contains four subunits: the first three subunits
share a rhyme, which changes from verse to verse, while the fourth is a
biblical excerpt ending with the word qodesh, or “holy”: aaaQ/ bbbQ/
cccQ, and so on. Atypically for Iberian Hebrew composition, the meter
is neither quantitative (Arabic) nor regular. Also atypically, the biblical
citations favor cultic passages, drawing from Exodus, Leviticus, Num-
bers, Ezekiel, and Daniel to forge a net of allusions to Don Zag’s sanc-
tity, piety, and exemplary death.
The content of “Time’s Impartial Decree” is also idiosyncratic in
several ways. The poem makes no mention of Alfonso X. Rather, its in-
troductory verses rail against “Time,” or Fate, who levels righteous and
wicked alike. This is a common trope in medieval Hebrew poetry from
Spain and not in itself surprising. Here, the generic condemnation of
Time gives way to a dramatic interlude whose main character is the vic-
tim himself. The figure of Don Zag appeals to the executioner and his
henchmen, who stand waiting with the hangman’s rope:

.‫ וככלות נפץ יד עם קודש‬/ “.‫ עד כי אכלה שיחי‬/ ‫ מעט תפשוני חי‬/ ‫ ”אנא אחי‬:‫אמר‬
———
He said, “Please, my brothers! Detain me alive for a bit, so I may fin-
ish my prayer.” And when he finished, the power of the holy people
was shattered [with him]. [53– 54]
 A Death in Wisdom’s Court \ 259

After reciting his final confession, Don Zag tells the executioners to
proceed:

“.‫ שאו ידיכם קודש‬/ ‫ ”השלימו הפעולה‬/ ‫ פניהם חלה‬,‫ לדבר‬/ ‫ויהי כאשר כלה‬
———
When he finished speaking, he implored them: “Finish the deed.
Lift up the holy offering in your hands.” [59– 60]

Reassuring the anguished onlookers, the victim offers advice and

consolation to his mother, his sisters, and his wife, his daughters and
sons, his eldest son David, and his supporters. Snugly interwoven into
the portrait of a grief-stricken family are the threads of a larger critique,
one that assumes that the moral condition of communities and that of
their leaders are inextricably linked.
Mother and son receive the lion’s share of the poem’s attention, and
I will limit my analysis here to their treatment, which finds an echoing
voice in Alfonso’s allusions to the Holy Mother and her loyal servants
and Son. Don Zag first consoles his mother for his untimely death by
reassuring her that his soul has gained eternal life:16

“Take comfort, take comfort, my mother! For God’s house is my

abode. He commanded me to sanctify His Name, and I have pro-
vided the holy crown.
“Why are you weeping for the death of a body and corpse?
My soul sees the processions of my God, my King, into the Holy
Sanctuary!
“Even if I have found an untimely death at the hands of tor-
mentors, the angels have brought me up as an offering to my Lord:
this is holy.
“I have merited eternity by virtue of plaiting the royal crown,
the golden plate, the holy diadem.
“My soul has become the companion of angel and cherub and
fiery winged creatures, and God is there saying to me, this is a holy
place.
“[. . .] to [turn over] the body to the executioner, while the soul
returns to the inner sanctum to serve in the holy place
 260 / Susan Einbinder

“with the pious ones, who established their righteousness

within their households, [which] they leave [ behind] in the holy
chambers.” [85– 99]

The recipient of this outpouring, Don Zag’s mother, was an impor-

tant widow as well; her husband, Don Çuleyma (Solomon ben Isaac), had
been a formidable presence in the courts of Ferdinand III and the young
Alfonso X.17 She most likely had an impressive pedigree of her own. To-
dros reminds us of Don Zag’s proud lineage, twice alluding to passages
in Ezekiel that legislate privileges of the Levitical descendants of Zadoq,
whose name is shared by the victim ( Isaac ben Zadoq). In fact, this pas-
sage refers repeatedly to the priests or Levites, their investiture and privi-
leges. Thus Todros recalls the days of Don Zag’s glory, which in other
poems he had invoked in descriptions of luxury cruises, wine and women,
sumptuous apparel, and tokens of royal affection. Now the poet empha-
sizes divinely sanctioned privilege and priestly merit, underlining Don
Zag’s pedigree and election as they testify to his piety.
Don Zag’s words to his mother also summon two images of idealized
femininity. In the second line, “tzofiah halikhot” ([my soul] sees the pro-
cessions [or ways]) echoes Proverbs 31 with its praise of the good wife and
mother: “A good wife who can find? She is more precious than rubies . . .
/ she looks out for the ways [tzofiah halikhot] of her household” (Proverbs
31:7, 27). The verse’s conclusion, from Psalm 68, describes the defeat of
God’s enemies and a procession to the Temple led by singers and musi-
cians amid women with their drums. One group of commentaries to this
passage insisted that the young women—almot—represented eternal life
(‘al mot). Another exegetical reading of the same verse invoked Miriam
and her women at the Red Sea, whose praise of God preceded even the
angels’.18 Both traditions, which would have been familiar to any Jew with
Todros’s education, echo in Don Zag’s exhortation, affirming traditional
images of female piety.19 Don Zag’s final words to his mother envision the
(feminine) Soul, the royal Shulamith, returning to her Maker in the celes-
tial court (94 – 95), perhaps an ironic nod to Violante’s homecoming.
Todros’s representation of his patron’s household as a model of piety
and virtue, perhaps especially female virtue, was relevant. Historians of
Jewish life in Christian Spain refer ubiquitously to the wave of communal
 A Death in Wisdom’s Court \ 261

repentance that followed Don Zag’s execution and the arrest and ransom
of Toledo’s leading Jews.20 Two contemporary sermons document its
force. The preacher was Todros’s relative, Todros ben Joseph, the elderly
rabbi and courtier to whom the poet had appealed from prison.21 Rabbi
Todros, who escaped arrest, was active on behalf of the prisoners and ex-
horted his community to turn its back on the immoral pleasures that had
triggered God’s ire. His sermons criticize Jewish communal failings: the
swearing and dishonest business practices; Sabbath loitering in public
places and men ogling women in holiday finery, or worse, engaging in
sexual liaisons with gentile servants.22 Saperstein has argued that the be-
haviors singled out by Rabbi Todros targeted not a decadent courtier class
but an entire religious community.23 As metaphor and social barometer,
however, the family pointed upward and down: decadence at the lower
levels of society imperiled the purest of their leaders, but moral decay at
the top also threatened those below. Women featured critically in this de-
bate, both in terms of their own moral laxity and insofar as they were vic-
tims of the infidelities of their husbands, brothers, and sons. Echoing
these concerns, Todros’s poem testifies to how much the sermon captured
(rather than created) this communal debate.24
Cantiga 348 has been dated to the second half of 1281 and may have
been known to Todros. Like the Hebrew lament, this cantiga has been
beloved by historians. It appears near the end of the Cantigas de Santa
Maria, a compilation of more than four hundred lyrics in praise of the
Virgin, composed by Alfonso X or under his supervision. Alfonso does
not mention Don Zag or the fiasco at Algeciras; rather, the king, who has
exhausted his fortune in battle, turns to Mary for help. He has two dreams
in which Mary directs him to treasure. The first dream proves fruitless;
the second yields riches. The double dream sequence and the cameo roles
of royal officials who impede the treasure’s discovery are the king’s ideal-
ized recapitulation of a frustrating year of defeats and perceived betrayal.
The ransom that freed Todros and his fellow Jews from prison is the
poem’s second “treasure”: the poem tells us that it has been hidden by the
Jews, “[Mary’s] enemies, whom She hates worse than the Moors” (seus
emigos, a que quer peor ca mouros).25
On the surface, Cantiga 348 does not acknowledge family tensions,
but rather describes the king’s costly wars of crusade in the south.26 The
 262 / Susan Einbinder

king, the song tells us, had exhausted his wealth in his efforts to conquer
Andalusia, to honor the Christian faith and vanquish that of the Moors.
He had raised a large army but lacked funds to support it, and his nights
were plagued by worry. One night the Holy Virgin came to him in a
dream and assured him that her Son had answered his prayer with a hid-
den treasure. However, when the king awoke and sought the treasure,
“non achou y nemigalla”—“he found nothing there.” A year later, the
Virgin reappeared with clues to a real treasure, belonging to her detested
enemies, the Jews, and the king offers thanks to the “Mother and Daugh-
ter of God.” This cantiga is a zajal, an Andalusian Muslim genre charac-
terized by its rhyme scheme and refrain:

Ben parte Santa Maria sas graças e seus tesouros

aos que serven seu Fillo ben e ela contra mouros
———
Holy Mary generously shares her blessings and her treasures with
those who serve Her and Her son well against the Moors

The refrain rhymes the king’s two obsessions, tesouros and mouros,
one of which he needs to get rid of the other. The Iberian zajal from
which the poem is derived is a strophic lyric form with roots in Andalu-
sian song. In each four-line stanza, the first three verses rhyme independ-
ently; the fourth verse anticipates the refrain rhyme (i.e., where the re-
frain is AA, the arrangement is bbba + AA, ccca + AA, ddda + AA, and so
on). The odd-numbered stanzas end in “mouros” and the even-numbered
stanzas “tesouros,” alternating the two overt sources of royal anxiety. As
these concerns threaten to destabilize the poetic narrative, the recurring
refrain offers reassurance to the listeners, concluding always with a cou-
plet in which the echoing invocations of Mary and her treasures override
the stanzas’ preoccupations.
Cantiga 348 refers three times to royal counselors who encouraged
the king’s trust in Don Zag and thus contributed to his betrayal—“those
who guard his possessions” in stanza 3, and the counselor and “certain
others” of stanzas 6 and 7. All are linked to Alfonso X’s first, misleading
dream, suggesting his fear of defection within the court. Likewise, two
lines rhyming “mouros” (5, 9) actually refer to the Jews, who are worse
 A Death in Wisdom’s Court \ 263

than “mouros.” Nowhere does the king explicitly mention his family, but
his Beloved Mary is described in language that emphasizes her identity
within the Holy Family: she grants the king’s prayers in the name of her
Son and is praised with her Son in the final stanza’s “madr’ e filla.” Unlike
Alfonso’s wife, Mary intercedes with her Son to Alfonso’s benefit, and she
bestows wealth upon him rather than taking it. This cantiga also belongs
to the Puerta de Santa Maria group, which is noted for its focus on Al-
fonso, his family, and events at the court.27
Whether or not Todros ever heard this cantiga, the Holy Mother’s
presence was pervasive in his world. 28 Even Castilian Jews could not
escape her in the court or market, communal bakeries or baths — or in
exchanges with their servants, some more intimate than others, but
ubiquitous in their presence at home. A polemical riposte to the Virgin’s
iconographic power may even undergird Todros’s unusual focus on Don
Zag’s mother: she, too, witnesses the death of an innocent son, who ac-
cepts his “sacrifice” by evoking a cult that Christianity claimed to have su-
perseded. At the same time, Don Zag exemplifies patriarchal authority—
a rebuke to feminized sanctity and a model of the family values conducive
to private and public health.
This emphasis is abundantly evident in Don Zag’s final words of
family advice, which are addressed to David, his eldest son. The only per-
son actually named in Todros’s poem, David’s importance as heir under-
lines the lament’s patriarchal concerns. In contrast, the biblical allusions
that repeatedly summon images of warring and troubled kings might
easily have led Todros’s contemporaries to think of Alfonso X— a failed
patriarch and king in service to a false god. Don Zag says:

“David, prepare yourself in fear of the One Who Dwells on High.

May God be with you; may He send you aid from the Holy Sanc-
tuary!
“Hasten forth your trained men. May your pathways be set to
observe your King’s Law. Then you shall sanctify them and be holy.
“Worship the Awesome God, and do not stray to idolatry, my
son. For you are meant to rule: holiness befits your house.
“Break your appetite, and feast your thoughts on the God of
your fathers, attending to the duties of the Holy Sanctuary.
 264 / Susan Einbinder

“Know that all is vanity, and that joy ends in mourning. Happy
is he who leaves the world with his heart on the holy covenant.
“The soul is imprisoned in mire and dirt. Death is her freedom,
a jubilee and holy.” [107–18]

Once again, Todros has Don Zag invoke the moral platitudes of a
nonlyric genre, here the ethical will. Some of his language taps Psalms
and Proverbs, such as Proverbs 4 and its speaker’s admonitions to his son.
Some passages allude to politics, evoking the wars of kings or of kinsmen
held hostage. Thus, “Hasten forth your trained men” comes from Gene-
sis 14 and Abram’s summons to his kinsmen to free his captive nephew,
Lot. “May he send you aid from the Holy Sanctuary” quotes Psalm 20, a
plea to save the king (and patriarchy?). “Then you shall sanctify them and
be holy” cites Exodus 30, in the context of a ransom or tithe imposed on
the Israelites and perhaps echoing the ransom that freed Todros and his
cohorts from prison. Still other phrases allude to Aaron’s priestly descen-
dants, whose responsibilities and privileges were embodied in Don Zag.
Again, behind the surface screen of ethical pieties, a parallel, shadow nar-
rative moves in which innocent men are held hostage, communal finances
are requisitioned for sacred purposes, and an heir marshals an extended
family in support.
In 1280, when Todros composed his commemorative lament, David
was the Zadoq family heir. By designating and advising that heir before
his death, Don Zag fulfilled his final responsibilities as head of house-
hold. As a historical figure, David ben Zadoq seems not to have fulfilled
the poetic vision of his succession: the historical sources do not mention
him or the Zadoq family for years to come, while the powerful Bar-
cilonai and Ibn Shoshan clans dominate royal finances. Todros himself
emerges as a formidable tax farmer in the reign of Sancho IV.
The contrast with the royal family did not have to be explicit for
Todros to underline its presentation of an ideal patriarch and ruler.29 He
concludes this passage with allusions to the book of Daniel, a rich re-
source for messianic prophecies as well as bad news about kings. The
passage draws on Daniel 11, and no wonder: that biblical chapter pre-
dicts a war between north and south in which the south is under siege;
the southern kingdom’s resistance against northern advances; peripheral
 A Death in Wisdom’s Court \ 265

threats from the north and east; and the northern king’s final advance to
pitch his “palatial tents” between sea and mountain, where alone and
unaided, he shall meet his end.
Even beleaguered and ill, the king would probably have resisted such
a prophecy of his inevitable defeat. If he regretted the loss of his tax
farmer, or his family’s disaffection, Cantiga 348 does not say so; nor does it
explicitly mention his wife or his son. By the fall of 1281, when it was sup-
posedly written, Alfonso X was threatening to disinherit his son Sancho.
In April, Sancho summoned the Cortes to Valladolid, where in the pres-
ence of his mother and uncle, he assumed royal power. At that point Al-
fonso X did disinherit him. By then, as the prophet Daniel had predicted,
the king was alone and unaided; even an appeal to his old enemy, Abu
Yusuf in Morocco—to whom he offered his crown in payment—failed to
restore his kingdom. He died two years later with Sancho on the throne.30
Cantiga 348 reflects Alfonso X’s preoccupation with a loyal servant and
son, an inverted counterpoint to Todros’s focus on fathers and rulers.
In sum, Todros’s lament for his former patron is a social and religious
polemic, enlisting an idealized representation of a patriarchal leader in an
implicit appeal for moral correction in Jewish homes and Christian court.
The lament is formally idiosyncratic, absorbing and adapting the conven-
tions of metaphysical poetry, the ethical will, and poetic eulogy; it is surely
not pure martyrology. Its core analogy between hearth and kingdom re-
lies explicitly on images of family as barometers of social order and politi-
cal health.31 The patriarchal ideal also challenges the Marianism that
dominated Alfonsine Castile. Both in its idealized depiction of Don Zag’s
mother and its emphasis on patriarchal privilege, Todros’s poem critiques
Christian reverence for Mary as Intercessor, policy maker, and antagonist
of the Jews. So, too, Cantiga 348 testifies to Alfonso X’s preoccupation
with questions of governance and loyalty that are dramatized in the song’s
counselors and Jews, Mother and Son. Why does Mary mislead the king
and make him wait for a second dream and treasure? Well, why does To-
dros open his lament condemning Fate, and then conclude by asserting
God’s unfailing providence? Eerily, both poems embed a lingering discor-
dance, tracing parallel fault lines in the landscape of faith.
Indeed, and fittingly, a kindred blend of faith and doubt character-
izes both of these poems and perhaps the men who wrote them. One was
 266 / Susan Einbinder

a Jew and one was a Christian; one served the victim and one he served;
one admired him and one ordered his death. Nonetheless, they view that
death across the same chasm of incommensurability, which they resolved
as a story of politics, family, and faith. In Wisdom’s court in Castile, two
of the three had proved fickle—but later centuries would fare far worse.

———

Full translations of the Hebrew and Gallico-Portuguese texts follow in

the appendix to this essay.

Notes

1. The classic biography of Alfonso X remains Antonio Ballesteros Beretta,

Alfonso X el Sabio (Barcelona: El Abir, 1984). Ballesteros notes the October 9, 1276,
dispensation that sold access to tax records back to 1261 to three Jewish tax farm-
ers, Don Zag, Abraham Ibn Shoshan, and Yerno the son-in-law of Don Meir,
plus a Christian partner, Roy Ferrandez de Sant Ragund. However, he also notes
that a second document, dated October 2, 1276, names only Don Zag (807). I
have also relied on the extensive studies of Joseph O’Callaghan, in particular,
“The Cortes and Royal Taxation during the Reign of Alfonso X of Castile,” Tra-
ditio 27 (1971): 379– 98; “Paths to Ruin: The Economic and Financial Policies of
Alfonso the Learned,” in The Worlds of Alfonso the Learned and James the Conqueror,
ed. Robert I. Burns ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 41– 67; The
Learned King: The Reign of Alfonso X of Castile (Philadelphia: University of Penn-
sylvania Press, 1993); “Kings and Lords in Conflict in Late Thirteenth-Century
Castile and Aragon,” in Iberia and the Mediterranean World of the Middle Ages II,
ed. Paul Edward Chevedden, Donald Joseph Kagay, and Paul G. Padilla (Leiden:
Brill, 1996), 117– 35; Alfonso X and the Cantigas de Santa Maria: A Poetic Biography
( Leiden: Brill, 1998); Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain ( Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); and The Gibraltar Crusade: Castile and
the Battle for the Strait (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). See
also Robert MacDonald, “Law and Politics: Alfonso X’s Program of Political Re-
form,” in The Worlds of Alfonso the Learned and James the Conqueror, ed. Robert
Burns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 150 – 202; and Teofilo Ruiz,
From Heaven to Earth: the Reordering of Castilian Society 1150 –1350 ( Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2004).
2. I rely on the two diwan editions for the text, one of which is actually a
facsimile edition of the only extant copy of the poem. That copy is preserved in
Moses Gaster, ed., Sefer Gan haMeshalim vehaĤiddot le-haSar Todros haLevi ibn
Abu’l’afia, according to the transcription of Shaul Yosef of Hong Kong [ Hebrew]
 A Death in Wisdom’s Court \ 267

(London: E. Goldston, 1926), no. 361. The “modern” critical edition of Todros’s
diwan also contains the text: David Yellin, ed., Gan haMeshalim vehaĤiddot: Osef
Shirei Todros ben Yehudah Abu-l’afia, Part I ( Jerusalem: n.p., 1932), no. 405,
134 – 39, notes in the back, 92– 96.
3. For biographical information, see Haim Schirmann, HaShirah Ha’Iv-
rit BiSefarad UveProvans ( Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik; and Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1960)
4:413–18; and Haim Schirmann and Ezra Fleischer, eds., HaShirah Ha’Ivrit Bi-
Sefarad HaNotzrit uveDrom Tzarefat ( Jerusalem: Magnes/Hebrew University,
1997), 366 – 425.
4. Todros resurfaces several years after this incident in the court of San-
cho IV, where, like his former patron, he farms taxes. After Sancho’s death in
1295, Todros fled to Alfonso’s despised brother, Enrique, in whose service he re-
mained until his death. See MacDonald, “Law and Politics,” 188.
5. O’Callaghan, Learned King, 233– 36.
6. O’Callaghan, Learned King, 241.
7. A 1948 forensic autopsy of Alfonso’s mummified corpse, which inspired
a 1992 essay in Speculum, concluded that the king suffered from a brain tumor; a
recent biography wavered between sinus problems, chronic granuloma, or “can-
cer of the maxillary sinus” with “inverted papilloma.” Juan Delgado Roig, “Exa-
men Médico Legal de unos Restos Históricos: Los cadáveres de Alfonso X el
Sabio y de Doña Beatriz de Suabia,” Archivo hispalense 9 (1948): 135– 53. See also
Richard Kinkade, “Alfonso X, Cantiga 235, and the Events of 1269–1278,” Specu-
lum 67, no. 2 (1992): 284 – 323. The newer diagnosis options appear in H. Sal-
vador Martínez, Alfonso X, the Learned: A Biography, trans. Odile Cisneros ( Lei-
den: Brill, 2010), 288. Chastened by some excellent recent articles on the dangers
of retrospective diagnosis, I will leave this stuff alone. See Jon Arrizabalaga,
“Problematizing Retrospective Diagnosis in the History of Disease,” Asclepio 54,
no. 1 (2002): 51– 70; and Pier Mitchell, “Retrospective Diagnosis and the Use of
Historical Texts for Investigating Disease in the Past,” International Journal of Pa-
leopathology 1 (2011): 81– 88.
8. The state of medical knowledge in Castile was weak, in marked contrast
to neighboring Aragon, where the importation of Galen via Arabic into Latin
would soon transform the practice of medicine. Surprisingly, given both his poor
health and Toledo’s role in the translation of scientific works, medicine was not
high on the king’s list of interests. The Toledan school, in Garcia Ballester’s
words, remained “a scientific market rather than a place of medical study.” See
Luis Garcia Ballester, “Medical Science in Thirteenth-Century Castile: Prob-
lems and Prospects,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 61 (1987): 183– 202, here
195n57. The author notes, “Everything seems to indicate that Toledo was the
place where medical works were translated, but that the work of translation was
not followed up by one of copying and elaboration. European scientists came and
went. Christian Toledo was a scientific market rather than a place of medical
 268 / Susan Einbinder

study.” See also, by the same author, La Búsqueda de la salud: Sanadores y enfermos
en la España medievale (Barcelona: Ediciones Peninsula, 2001). It may be that Al-
fonso’s faith in other kinds of healing deterred investment in medical science; the
Cantigas de Santa Maria refer repeatedly to scenes of confounded physicians
whose futile efforts are trumped by the Blessed Mary. The relatively low priority
granted to medical research in Castile is also reflected in the king’s reliance on
Jewish physicians, such as the Ibn Waqar brothers, or Abraham al-faquim, or one
Zizaq, all men who would have been supplanted by university physicians if there
had been universities with medical faculties from which to draw them. Todros
wrote poems to all of these men, too, confirming that they held positions of privi-
lege at the court. Some of them were also bankers who farmed taxes for the king,
and it is worth asking whether Don Zag himself had any medical training. One
verse does suggest some such skills: ‫ קטרת הסמים קודש‬/ ‫אבקת רוכל‬-‫ מכל‬/ ‫( וישכל‬79– 80).
Nonetheless, nothing else in the sources indicates any medical role for Don Zag.
9. O’Callaghan, Learned King, 235– 36; MacDonald, “Law and Politics,”
162. James I’s son Sancho became archbishop in 1268.
10. On his deathbed, the young Fernando had entrusted them to a noble from
the powerful Lara clan, angering the rival Haros, who in turn counseled Alfonso X’s
second son Sancho to head for the frontier, where successes on the battlefield en-
thused his supporters. The king was impressed, too, subordinating the succession
claim of his grandson to his second son’s. MacDonald, “Law and Politics,” 192.
11. Ballesteros, Alfonso X el Sabio, 790; O’Callaghan, Learned King, 246.
12. It is worth noting that the royal chronicles do not blame the Jewish
courtier but, with circumlocution, describe how the king was troubled to learn
that upon Don Zag’s arrival in Seville, the money was “taken” by Don Sancho.
How reluctant or willing Don Zag was to comply with Sancho’s order we do not
know: “Et el rey, que cuydaua que les enbiaría acorro del auer que recabdaua en
Castilla e en León don Çag de la Malea et los que andauan con él, et sopo cómmo
[este auer avía tomado] el infant don Sancho [e lo] auié dado a la reya donna Vi-
olante, pesól ende mucho ca non touo de qué enbiar pagas a los que estauan en la
hueste de Algezira nin a los que estauan en la flota en la guarda de la mar . . . ”
Crónica de Alfonso X: Según el MS II/2777 de la Biblioteca del Palacio Real (Madrid),
ed., transcr., and notes by Manuel González Jiménez (Murcia: Real Academia Al-
fonso X el Sabio, 1998), cap. LXXII, pp. 200 – 201.
13. Yitzhaq Baer, History of the Jews in Christian Spain ( Philadelphia: Jewish
Publication Society, 1971), vol. 1, ch. 3, 111– 37; and Yitzhaq Baer, “Todros b.
Judah haLevi and His Time” [in Hebrew] Tsiyyon 2, no. 1 (1937): 19– 55. Later
historians relied on Baer without returning to the poem. See, e.g., B. Chapira,
“Contribution á l’étude du Divan de Todros Ben Iehouda Halévi Aboulafia,”
Revue des Etudes Juives n.s. 6, no. 106 (1941– 45): 1– 31; and Judit Targarona
Boras, “Todros ben Yehuda ha-Leví Abulafia, un poeta hebreo en la corte de Al-
fonso X el Sabio,” Helmantica 36, no. 110 (1985): 195– 210. O’Callaghan, Ray,
 A Death in Wisdom’s Court \ 269

MacDonald, etc., all cite Baer. Todros’s diwan was published for the first time
only eighty years ago and owes its existence to a single manuscript hastily copied
in the nineteenth century by a businessman and lover of Hebrew poetry, Shaul
Abdullah Yosef of Hong Kong. After Shaul Yosef ’s death — an avid marksman,
he shot himself in the arm and died of gangrene in his fifties — his sons turned
over his papers to the Hebrew scholar Moses Gaster. Stunned by the contents,
Gaster in 1925 published a facsimile edition of Shaul Yosef ’s copy; a decade
later, David Yellin’s critical edition followed. See Gaster’s introduction to Yellin,
Gan haMeshalim vehaĤiddot.
14. Violante’s absence did not leave the king to dine alone. Beatriz, his ille-
gitimate daughter, who had for years been the consort of King Afonso III of
Portugal, was now with him. Upon his ascension to the throne in 1279, her son
Dinis had expelled her to Castile, where she became “Alfonso X’s greatest single
source of consolation and moral support” in the wake of Violante’s defection.
See MacDonald, “Law and Politics,” 160.
15. See Susan L. Einbinder, Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom
from Medieval France ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
16. The opening verse puns cleverly on Isaiah 50:1 (“Take comfort, take
comfort, my people” [‫)]נחמי נחמי עמי‬, which the poet alters by one letter to read
‫“( נחמי נחמי אמי‬Take comfort, take comfort, my mother”). As Aviva Doron has
observed, the poem offers testimony to belief among nonphilosophical Jews in
the soul’s immortality: Aviva Doron, Meshorer behatzar hamelekh ( Tel Aviv: Dvir,
1989), 178– 81. For a contemporary affirmation of the same belief, see Ibn Sahula’s
Meshal haQadmoni, where in book 1 the Hart responds to the Lion’s query about
the nature of the soul with a long disquisition based on Aristotelian philosophy.
Unlike the vegetative or animal forms of the soul, the Hart explains, “when death
takes her form,” the intellectual or reasoning soul “to her dwelling-place . . . turns
again / Aloft, to Him who gave her, to remain / For ever there . . .” Translation by
Raphael Loewe, in Isaac Ibn Sahula, Meshal haQadmoni: Fables from the Distant Past,
ed. and trans. Raphael Loewe (Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civiliza-
tion, 2002), 1:98–100. The interlacing series of fables that constitutes book 1 of
Ibn Sahula’s remarkable work, which were also produced in an Alfonsine milieu,
are widely believed to represent conditions in Alfonso X’s court in the early 1270s;
Loewe suggests that the Hart may be intended to represent Don Zag or his father
and the Fox and the rebellious animals various nobles in the court (lxxxviii– xc).
17. Roth argues that the father, who died in 1273, outlived the son, and
that the Isaac ben Zadoq mourned in the poem is not Don Zag de la Maleha.
One of his arguments is that the king’s decision to impound Don Culeyma’s
property in Seville after his death made no sense if the son were still living. The
arguments do not strike me as convincing, and they are not cited by any study to
appear since the publication of Roth’s essay. Todros’s lament, which lists every cate-
gory of kinship relevant to Don Zag’s household, makes no mention of the father
 270 / Susan Einbinder

(to whom, in a variety of other poems, he paid homage). I consider this additional
evidence that the father was not alive. Ballesteros is more persuasive on this point
and the chronology: see Ballesteros, Alfonso X el Sabio, 810. See also Joseph O’Cal-
laghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 173. For invocations of the biblical family of Zadoq,
see also, e.g., lines 35– 36, 51– 52, 61– 62, 105–106, which cite Ezekiel 44 and 48.
18. ’‫ ילקות שמעוני תורה פר‬,‫ ויקרא רבה פר’ יא ד”ה ט רבי ברכיה‬,‫שמות רבה פר’ כד ד”ה אז‬
.and many more —‫בשלח רמז רמא ד”ה תניא ר’ מאיר‬
19. As students of this poetry know, the expected literacy level for the
(male) audience to this poem would have been reasonably high. Raphael Loewe
remarks, in his introduction to his recent translation of the Meshal haQadmoni,
by Todros’s contemporary Isaac Ibn Sahula, that an “adequate” Jewish education
would have included “at its base, familiarity with substantial portions of the He-
brew Bible and with the legendary embellishment of biblical history in
midrashic exegesis,” while “at least some” of his reading audience would have fa-
miliarity with rabbinic law and “Western patterns of thought . . . in Arabic or
Hebrew translation . . . [of ] such works as Sa’adyah’s Beliefs and Opinions and
Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed.” Isaac Ibn Sahula, Meshal haQadmoni, lxvi.
See also Ephraim Kanarfogel, Jewish Education and Society in the High Middle Ages
( Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992).
20. See, e.g., Baer, or any other credible history of medieval Jewish experi-
ence in Christian Spain.
21. For more on Rabbi Todros, see Baer, “Todros b. Judah haLevi,” 29– 30,
36; and Marc Saperstein, “The Preaching of Repentance and the Reforms of
Toledo of 1281,” in Models of Holiness in Medieval Sermons: Proceedings of the Interna-
tional Symposium, Kalamazoo, 4– 7 May 1995, ed. Beverly Mayne Kienzle (Louvain la
Neuve: Fédération internationale des Instituts d’études médiévales, 1996), 157– 74.
22. Saperstein, “The Preaching of Repentance,” 166 ( his translation).
23. Ibid., 173.
24. The widespread distribution of this social critique suggests it was not
the elderly rabbi who discovered it. Moreover, had the sermon “created” the de-
bate, the lament would have to postdate it, which, while possible, seems unlikely.
The particular critiques found in Rabbi Todros’s sermon were already featuring
in other didactic and homiletic diatribes.
25. English translation in Kathleen Kulp-Hill, trans., Songs of Holy Mary of
Alfonso X, the Wise: A Translation of the Cantigas de Santa Maria ( Tempe: Arizona
Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000), 423– 24. The Gallico-
Portuguese text may be found online at http://pt.wikisource.org/wiki/Cantigas_
de_Santa_Maria/CCCXLVIII. The literature on the Cantigas de Santa Maria is
abundant. This study has made use of the following: Albert Bagby Jr., “The Fig-
ure of the Jew in the Cantigas of Alfonso X,” in Studies on the Cantigas de Santa
Maria: Art, Music and Poetry, ed. Israel J. Katz and Jon E. Keller ( Madison, WI:
 A Death in Wisdom’s Court \ 271

Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1987), 235– 46; Dwayne Carpenter,

“The Portrayal of the Jew in Alfonso the Learned’s Cantigas de Santa Maria,” in
Iberia and Beyond: Hispanic Jews between Cultures, ed. Bernard Dov Cooperman
( Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 15– 42; and Angus MacKay, with
Vikki Hatton, “Anti-Semitism in the Cantigas de Santa Maria,” Bulletin of His-
panic Studies 60 (1983): 189– 98, reprinted in Angus MacKay, Society, Economy and
Religion in Late Medieval Castile ( London: Variorum, 1987).
26. Gallico-Portuguese text from http://pt.wikisource.org/wiki/Canti-
gas_de_Santa_Maria/CCCXLVIII.
27. Joseph Snow, “A Chapter in Alfonso X’s Personal Narrative: The
Puerto de Santa Maria Poems in the Cantigas de Santa Maria,” La Corónica 8,
no. 1 (1979): 10 – 21; Manuel Gonzales Jimenez, “La frontera de Granada en las
Cantigas de Santa Maria,” in IV Estudios de Frontera: Historia, Tradiciones y leyendas
en la frontera: Homenaje a Don Enrique Toral y Peñaranda ( Jaén, Spain: Diputación
Provincial de Jaén, 2002), 229– 45, esp. 242– 43; Anthony John Lappin, “The
Thaumaturgy of Regal Piety: Alfonso X and the Cantigas de Santa Maria,” Jour-
nal of Hispanic Research 4 (1995– 96): 39– 59.
28. John Keller, “The Threefold Impact of the Cantigas de Santa Maria:
Visual, Verbal, and Musical,” in Studies on the Cantigas de Santa Maria: Art, Music,
and Poetry, ed. Israel Katz and John Keller (Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Me-
dieval Studies, 1987), 7– 35.
29. Nor is it explicit or isomorphic in Ibn Sahula’s tale of the Lion, the
Hart, and the Fox, cited above. For all of these authors —Todros Abulafia, Al-
fonso X, Isaac Ibn Sahula, and presumably their contemporaries—it was both ac-
ceptable and aesthetically, politically, and didactically meaningful to embed real
historical figures and their conflicts in dramatic narratives that did not necessarily
unfold as they did in “real life.” Nonetheless, the allegorical or imaginative repre-
sentation is not distinct from its historical counterpart so much as it attempts to
distill its moral essence and capture it in hyperbolic form.
30. O’Callaghan, Gibraltar Crusade, 81– 83.
31. Whether this was a peculiarly Castilian concern I doubt, but a later
Castilian continuation of this theme has been very much on my mind, and that
is the Hebrew translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics produced by the late
fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century Jewish courtier-physician, Meir Alguades.
A rare fifteenth-century copy of this work at the Jewish Theological Seminary
includes a fragment of the Economics (Politics). The Hebrew text begins, not
with the words of Aristotle, but with a discourse on the place of highborn
women, whose domain should be restricted to the domestic and who should
never leave home without their husbands’ permission, fearing always the inher-
ent sinfulness of women: NY MS JTS 2315, fol. 127a (Arabic numbering 130a):
‫האשה החשובה ראוי להשתרר בכל הדברים שהם פנימה ולעיין בכל הדברים כפי הדתות הכתובים לא‬
.‫תעזוב לה חנם שום אדם בלי מרשות]?[ בעלה מפחדת תמיד ביותר מהדברים הנאמרים מחטאת הנשים‬
 272 / Susan Einbinder

Appendix

Cantiga 348
Alfonso X el sabio

Translation by Kathleen Kulp-Hill in Songs of Holy Mary of Alfonso X, the

Wise ( Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Stud-
ies, 2000), 423– 24.
How Holy Mary revealed a great treasure of gold and silver to a
king who wrote songs for Her.
Holy Mary generously shares Her blessings and Her treasures with those
who serve Her and Her Son well against Moors.
Concerning this, I shall tell a miracle which happened in Spain
which Holy Mary, the gentle and compassionate One, performed for a
king who led a great army to honor the faith of Christ and destroy that
of the Moors.
That king had expended great treasures that he possessed in order
to conquer the land called Andalusia, but he trusted so firmly in the
Holy Virgin Mary that he never gave thought to diminishing his wealth.
Whereby it happened once that he had raised a large army, and
those who guarded his possessions were not prompt in coming to his
aid, nor could they find much money in his coffers with which he could
long sustain the war against the Moors.
While he was worrying about this, in his sleep one night he saw the
Glorious Virgin and went up to Her, weeping and asking Her to please
have mercy on him so that he might have wealth.
She told him: “Your prayer is already granted by my Son. There-
fore, have no concern for your lack of funds, but be of good heart, for I
shall give you a very great treasure which lies hidden under the earth
which people much worse than Moors put there.”
When She had told him this, She went away. The king was very
pleased by that dream and called in one of his advisors and told him what
he had dreamed. After he had told him, he went to where he thought to
find those treasures.
Although trustworthy men had previously told him that that treas-
ure lay there without doubt, he found nothing there and said with great
 Appendix: Cantiga 348; Time’s Impartial Decree \ 273

disappointment: “May Holy Mary preserve me, because I have not

enough left to do great harm to the Moors.”
So God willed that on that occasion the king should find nothing.
However, after a whole year had passed, he led an attack on Granada,
and on his way to join his army he passed by that way again, and the Vir-
gin showed him in another place great treasures
Of silver, gold, rich and precious stones, much cloth of silk, beauti-
fully worked tapestries, and other very noble objects of gilded silver
which belonged to the Jews, Her enemies, whom She hates worse than
the Moors.
When the king found all this, he was exceedingly happy and fer-
vently blessed the Virgin who is Mother and Daughter of God. At once
he sent this wealth as a gift to Seville to serve Her and God with this and
other treasures.

———

‫ ( זמן בגזרה שווה‬Time’s Impartial Decree)

Todros Abulafia

Text in David Yellin, ed., Gan haMeshalim vehaĤiddot: Osef Shirei Todros
ben Yehudah Abu-l’afia, Part I ( Jerusalem: n.p., 1932), no. 405, 134 – 39;
notes, pp. 92– 96.

1– 2
Time’s impartial decree has closed the door of hope. It has waved away
all that is good and twisted sacred and profane.
3– 4
Time, like a foe, stood and uprooted a cypress of immeasurable splendor.
Time destroyed the precious one. Time’s enmity has wrought havoc with
everything in the Holy Sanctuary.
5– 6
Time scattered the high princes, leaving one alive, one a sin-offering,
and one a whole sacrifice to the Lord of holiness.
7– 8
The world was filled with violence. Privilege became a burden, and
Time passed through, trampling the golden bud, the crown of holiness.
 274 / Susan Einbinder

9–10
Arrogantly, the destroyer arose and brought the heavenly pillars down
to earth; he overthrew the holy foundations.
11–12
One was roasted on the fire, another was dragged in the open, and one
who was guiltless was hanged — he was scented with holy salt [ like the
sanctuary incense].
13–14
Time! Aren’t you ashamed — how you arose to destroy the world, leav-
ing the holy seed like a heap of stones, a stump!
15–16
You have made an end and destruction to the holy one who repaired the
breach. You will never make another one so holy as long as the world exists.
17–18
This is your way with sin and transgression, to dim the eyes of the
sighted, and annihilate the righteous with the wicked, to make desolate
the sinner and saint.
19– 20
You listen to lies and return evil for good. How can you account this
holy one a guilt offering?
21– 22
You exterminate root and branch; you race to exchange evil for good.
Such is your law, to order a sin offering in the holy sanctuary!
23– 24
Do you love wickedness? Or have you not learned to distinguish be-
tween night and day, and what is holy?
25– 26
You established no ransom for the elite hostage. How could the apostate
be released instead of atoning for the holy one?
27– 28
You blind yourself to any light and designate the holy ones for destruc-
tion. You entrap every holy thing that is dedicated to God!
29– 30
Daily you sweep everything away in wrath, unfired and fired clay alike.
Does fearing God bring no advantage over those who leave God’s
covenant?
 Appendix: Cantiga 348; Time’s Impartial Decree \ 275

31– 32
You have made low what was mighty, and brought down what was ex-
alted. The exile of Jerusalem, the holy city, has been renewed.
33– 34
For the evil that was decreed, let pearl-like tears fall in weeping from the
eyes of the kind and the cruel.
35– 36
Honor amplified its mourning, and Poetry broke his lyre when the light
of the world vanished, and when he came to the holy place.
37– 38
Privilege wept in bitterness of spirit, and came to offer eulogy in the
holy tent of meeting.
39– 40
When the foundation that ascended to the holy sanctuary fell, Torah
and Greatness heard a sickly voice [?].
41– 42
The heart of the Virtues was broken, their grace crushed; fire blazed in
them on the day of the Holy Sanctuary’s destruction.
43– 44
Mourning for the death of their noble one, who came from their dear
land, who appeared from the mount of their Glory, who went forth
from the ten thousands of holy ones.
45– 46
He did not merit death because of any corruption of soul. It was God’s
decision to make a holy offering.
47– 48
He earned eternity. He merited the Kingdom instantly. Happy is he
who so dedicates his house to holiness.
49– 50
Sanctifying God’s Name and his law, he took the hangman’s rope as his
inheritance. The day of his death is a day of atonement before God, a
holy convocation.
51– 52
The attackers conspired. They came prepared for the binding with
ropes, exalting the holy portion.
 276 / Susan Einbinder

53– 54
He said, “Please, my brothers! Detain me alive for a bit, so I may finish
my prayer.” And with his conclusion came the shattering of the holy
people’s strength.
55– 56
Broken-spirited, he cried out loudly and bitterly: “May my death atone
in place of the offering, in place of the holy [offering].
57– 58
To You, God, I pour out my prayer. I commit my soul to Your hand. Is it
too much to ask that it live on holy land?”
59– 60
When he finished speaking, he implored them: “Finish the deed. Lift up
the holy offering in your hands.”
61– 62
He who sees the pious man’s end puts mud and clay on his head, and
thus he said to the victim:
63– 64
“If the body dies, will we still exist?” “I shall not die but shall live. See,
my soul will endure and be holy.”
65– 66
“Woe is me, for I am doomed to death, I have lingered to my [own] evil
by living to see the holy one uncovered !” 1
67– 68
He rebuked him2 : “Fool! Do not weep for my death, for this is my day
of rest, a Sabbath of Sabbaths, a holy convocation.”
69– 70
The inner sanctuary and hall have been destroyed, along with this right-
eous man, the foundation of the world, who vanquished all with the
weight of his holiness.
71– 72
“I have abandoned the world’s vanity, and gained the heavenly kingdom.
I have been anointed on high with the holy anointing oil.”
73– 74
In life and death, he was surely righteous. On heaven and earth, he was
sanctified among the priestly descendants of Tzadok, in the place of
righteousness, on the holy mountain.
 Appendix: Cantiga 348; Time’s Impartial Decree \ 277

75– 76
He did not return from it defeated or crushed, and his light did not van-
ish. The work of the Holy Sanctuary was perfected in him.
77– 78
All pleasant deeds and all pious attributes that belong to the Holy Sanc-
tuary were gathered together in him.
79– 80
In righteousness and justice, he sustained patronage and nobility. He
was more knowledgeable than anyone else in making medicines and
scented drugs for the Holy Sanctuary.3
81– 82
He inherited many graces, and added several good attributes to the an-
cestors’ legacy. Their seed and his were intermingled.
83– 84
As he grew, his beauty increased, and his life4 was bounded by God’s
house [of study and worship]. His voice was heard when he came to the
Holy Sanctuary.
85– 86
“Take comfort, take comfort, my mother! For God’s house is my abode. He
commanded me to sanctify His name, and I have provided the holy crown.”
87– 88
“Why are you weeping for the death of a body and corpse? My soul sees
the processions of my God, my King, into the Holy Sanctuary!
89– 90
“Even if I have found an untimely death in the hands of tormentors, the
angels have brought me up as an offering to my Lord: this is holy.
91– 92
“I have merited eternity by virtue of plaiting the royal crown, the golden
plate, the holy diadem.
93– 94
“My soul has become the companion of angel and cherub and fiery
winged creatures, and God is there saying to me: this is a holy place.
95– 96
“. . . to [turn over] the body to the executioner, while the soul5 returns to
the inner sanctum to serve in the holy place
 278 / Susan Einbinder

97– 98
“With the pious ones, who established their righteousness within their
households, [which] they leave [ behind] in the holy chambers.
99–100
“My sisters, I have not died. Say this to my wife: my life was profane, but
this very day it has returned to a state of holiness.6
101– 2
“I have been sanctified in a state of purity, without contact with the
women of my family. My glorious house [ body?] was established on the
holy mount.
103– 4
“Return, my sons and daughters! Give thanks to Him who dwells in
heaven for the day my sins were forgiven. Bow down to God in holy array.
105– 6
“Seek out the Father of orphans, who will always have mercy on you [ by
virtue of ] the holy land’s offering.
107– 8
“David, prepare yourself in fear of the One Who Dwells on High. May
God be with you; may He send you aid from the Holy Sanctuary!
109–10
“Hasten forth your trained men. May your pathways be set to observe
your King’s Law. Then you shall sanctify them and be holy.
111–12
“Worship the Awesome God, and do not stray to idolatry, my son. For
you are meant to rule:7 Holiness befits your house.
113–14
“Break your appetite, and feast your thoughts on the God of your fa-
thers, attending to the duties of the Holy Sanctuary.
115–16
“Know that all is vanity, and that joy ends in mourning. Happy is he
who leaves the world with his heart on the holy covenant.
117–18
“The soul is imprisoned in mire and dirt. Death is her freedom for her,
a jubilee and holy.
119– 20
“And you, O band of brothers, who are set in my heart where their
names are engraved, like the engraving of a holy signet,
 Appendix: Cantiga 348; Time’s Impartial Decree \ 279

121– 22
“Be informed and know that God’s divine messengers have pitched the
palatial tent of your dear one who has been struck down by the glorious
Mountain.”8
123– 24
Let God say “enough” to sorrows, and let there be light for all the chil-
dren of Israel. Let a redeemer come for Zion and let Jerusalem be holy.
125– 26
Let Him bring in your rejected ones from the east and north and south.
Let the dead rise for the End of Days when he is released in the holy
jubilee.

Notes

1. Lit., “when they removed his covering” ( perhaps hood). The outburst
belongs to the speaker or witness who is overwrought at the sight of Don Zag’s
unhooding prior to being hanged.
2. I.e., “He” (Don Zag) rebuked “him” (the speaker of the preceding lines).
3. In the context of the Sanctuary, the reference must be to the com-
pounded incense that accompanied the sacrifices. The medieval sense of the
words is, however, medical, and may suggest that Don Zag was also a physician.
There is no record of his having practiced medicine, but it would not be uncom-
mon for a Jew of his rank and closeness to the court to have medical training.
4. Literally, “his way was bounded,” i.e., his life was guided by the prin-
ciples of Jewish faith and practice.
5. Literally, “Shulamith.”
6. Following Yellin’s reading.
7. Brody emends to read: you are intended for purity.
8. Yellin’s punctuation yields different phrasing: the one who has been
struck down by divine messengers, [they] have pitched, etc.
 Eleven

A n t i - Ju d a i s m i n
the Christina Psalter

william chester jordan

This paper is offered as a speculative inquiry into the nature of a codex, a

psalter associated with the French royal family in the thirteenth century,
and its association with the development of anti-Jewish representations in
the same period. A few points about the general characteristics of the me-
dieval Catholic psalter are worth mentioning at the outset.1 Many such
codices provided far more than the texts of the one hundred fifty poems
and songs of the Book of Psalms. Visually, many also included variable
calendar-lists of universal and local saints as well as ornate illustrations.
The variations in the calendars help scholars to localize the codices in ei-
ther or both of two ways. The feast days of the particular local saints in-
cluded in the earliest hand(s) may tell researchers where a manuscript was
produced or at least the region for whose use it was intended. Subsequent
additions to the lists can also suggest how the manuscripts traveled, as
scribes over decades or centuries incorporated different and locally popu-
lar saints’ days into the calendars. The illuminations directly accompany-
ing the psalms, which were placed in the margins of the text or in en-
larged initials at the opening of all or some psalms, served to illustrate and
comment on the poems themselves. But there were often prefatory se-

280
 Anti-Judaism in the Christina Psalter \ 281

quences of pictures that were unrelated to the psalms per se. Some of
these prefatory sequences were extremely elaborate full-page scenes,
such as the seventy-eight-picture sequence in the famous mid-thirteenth-
century Psalter of Saint Louis, of Parisian origin and royal patronage, on
which several scholars, including myself, have worked.2
The most sumptuous of the psalters, those using gold in the illustra-
tions, were extraordinarily expensive and, because of the use of so much
precious metal, exceptionally heavy. The Psalter of Saint Louis, a small
codex now covered in velvet and measuring only six by eight inches and
three inches thick, weighs about three pounds (1.36 kilograms).3 An ordi-
nary book of similar size and with a similar covering, judging from a few
comparisons I have made, would weigh about half a pound (0.23 kilo-
grams) less. Put another way, enough gold went into the manuscript to
mint at least fifty gold écus, the prestige coins Louis IX began to strike in
the 1260s.4 Before the Hundred Years War, an écu was worth twenty
shillings tournois.5 Fifty écus were the equivalent of one thousand shillings
or fifty pounds (livres) tournois, quite a tidy sum. Some viscounts com-
manded this amount or thereabouts as their yearly income.6
Much more could be said about psalters. Scholars who work on
ceremonial and sacramental books differentiate between biblical and li-
turgical psalters and their different manners of organization. They dis-
tinguish between the format and content of the books in western and
eastern Christianity. They note exceptional examples, such as glossed
psalters, and epitomes with only a selection of psalms. They have con-
structed elaborate taxonomies that both make distinctions among vari-
ous kinds of ceremonial, liturgical, and study books and show how these
kinds of texts overlap. And so on. Most of this sort of analysis is not ger-
mane to my project.
Issues of patronage are relevant, however. Personages in the royal
court circle in Paris in the thirteenth century commissioned a great many
illustrated books, including psalters but not restricted to this genre.7
One need only think of the wonderful examples of the moralized Bibles
studied in 2000 by John Lowden.8 The Christina Psalter, the artifact at
the heart of the present study, is one such book, commissioned from
within the royal circle; unlike the Psalter of Saint Louis and the moralized
Bibles, however, it has received scant attention. The best work on the
 282 / William Chester Jordan

book is that published in 2006 by Marina Vidas, adjunct professor of art

history at the University of Copenhagen. The subject was suggested to
her by the wide-ranging art historian Jonathan Alexander of the Insti-
tute of Fine Arts of New York University.9 But Vidas’s book is a largely
formal study of genre, production, ownership, and the like. It hardly ex-
tends beyond such matters. In particular, there is a surprisingly short
section on the psalter’s anti-Judaism which I think begs for greater elabo-
ration.10 This is what I will attempt to do—go beyond formal considera-
tions to the substantive matter of the psalter’s anti-Jewish motif — after
summarizing the main findings of Vidas’s study.
In its present condition the Christina Psalter has three folios that
serve as flyleaves and were added during a modern rebinding. The first
two of these are empty, but folio 3 verso contains informative tables in a
late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century hand—indications of scriptural
readings, dominical letters to aid in dating, and other dating aids.11 The
calendar begins on folio 4 and extends to folio 9 verso. Three hands are
identifiable, one—the earliest—French, and two others, Norwegian, ac-
cording to Vidas, although she does not indicate the criteria by which she
made these identifications. A relative few feast days, which are graded by
color coding, appear in the calendar along with further dating aids useful
for calculating movable feasts. Vidas suggests that the small number of
feasts implies private ownership. A religious community would need to
know the dates of far more feast days. She also notes that many of the
feasts are typical of psalters of French and particularly Parisian prove-
nance, although several that one might expect to be included are not to
be found. The redaction of the calendar, based on the entries from the
earliest (French) hand, points to the late 1220s or early 1230s, with addi-
tions made in subsequent years by Scandinavian hands. The calendar is
illustrated with scenes of hawking, heraldry, and the zodiac.12 Folio 10,
which follows the calendar, is an elaborate table that provides the means
to help, in Vidas’s words, “determine the position of the moon within the
zodiac on each day” of a particular year. This in turn would permit the
calculator to assess the day as one fortunate, unfortunate, or indifferent
for particular activities, such as bloodletting.13
The prefatory cycle of pictures comes next, folios 10 verso to 21.
I will return to this after describing the remainder of the manuscript.
 Anti-Judaism in the Christina Psalter \ 283

The psalms themselves commence after the prefatory cycle at folio 22

verso and continue until folio 154 in the order found in the Bible, al-
though there is one run that is now lost, Psalms 58 to 63. A second
French hand, contemporary with the French hand of the calendar, is re-
sponsible for writing the text of the psalms.14 Historiated initials allow
the reader to disengage clusters of psalms appropriate to particular weeks
and Sundays of reading. One should note in particular the abundance of
gold in these and, as I will show later, in other parts of the psalter. As
Vidas writes, “A considerable amount of gold was expended in the illumi-
nation of the Psalter. Besides using this precious material in hundreds
of the manuscript’s initials and in the backgrounds of the twenty-four
medallions of the Calendar as well as in the thirty-two miniatures of the
prefatory cycle, nearly every page has one or more gold anthropomor-
phic or zoomorphic line fillers, close to 280 in total.”15
The psalm pages considered here are:

Psalm 26, The Lord is my light / Dominus illuminatio mea (figure 11.1;
see gallery for ch. 11 figures)
Psalm 52, The fool said in his heart: There is no God / Dixit insipiens in
corde suo non est deus (figure 11.2)
Psalm 68, Save me, O God / Salvum me fac deus (figure 11.3)
Psalm 80, Sing out your joy to God our helper / Exultate deo adiutori nostro
(figure 11.4)
Psalm 87, O Lord, the God of my salvation / Domine, Deus salutis (fig-
ure 11.5)
Psalm 109, The Lord said to my Lord / Dixit dominus domino meo (fig-
ure 11.6)

After the more than two hundred fifty pages of the psalms and their
historiated initials, one finds texts of ten canticles, seven drawn from the
Old Testament and three from the New, all appropriate for liturgical
practice. Next come the hymn known as the Te Deum and the Athanasian
Creed. All together — canticles, hymn, and creed — occupy folios 154
verso to folio 166.16 Many psalters commissioned for lay folk, Vidas notes,
have similar song-hymn-creed sections.17 The same can be said of the
section of litanies (folios 169 to 172): Kyrie eleyson, Christe eleyson, Christe
 284 / William Chester Jordan

audi nos, and further invocations of God (the Trinity), the Virgin Mary,
and the celestial hierarchy for mercy. The saints then invoked, how-
ever, point to some connection between the original patron of the manu-
script and the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés of Paris, but what this
connection signifies is at present uncertain. Saints added to the litany
in the thirteenth century but after 1255 included the new crop of men-
dicant saints ( Francis, Anthony, Dominic, Clare) and a few others, the
most important among them, in terms of where the manuscript mi-
grated, being Olaf.18
The manuscript comes to an end with two sections. The first (folio
172 to 172 verso) consists of two fairly conventional collects, Deus cui
proprium and Omnipotens sempiterne, conventional in the sense of show-
ing up in numerous psalters written for lay patrons.19 The second con-
sists of the Mass of the Blessed Virgin for Pregnant Women and Those
in Labor. It occurs on folios 172 verso and continues through folio 174
verso. This is an addition of the fourteenth or fifteenth century and is
uncommon in psalters, though not in missals.20
So much for the description of the Christina Psalter. But why does
one call the manuscript the Christina Psalter? Or, put another way, who
was Christina? The scholarly consensus is that the psalter came to be as-
sociated with a particular Christina, namely, the princess of Norway who
was the daughter of King Haakon IV. Haakon, born in 1204, ruled Nor-
way from 1217 to 1263. His daughter Christina lived from 1234 to 1262
and according to scholarly consensus was the recipient of the psalter,
which explains its presence today in Scandinavia. If so, the book was a
gift directly from the French royal court or from an initial French recipi-
ent who regifted it to Christina. Christina’s connection to the French
royal family was strong: at about age twenty-four she wed Philip of Cas-
tile and León, Blanche of Castile’s nephew. At the time the psalter was
commissioned, this Blanche was the wife or the recent widow of Louis
the Lion, who was king of France from 1223 until his death from disease
in 1226 in the concluding phase of the Albigensian Crusade. Queen
Blanche was also regent for her young son Louis IX, the future Saint
Louis, in the first decade or so of his reign. This thorny question of
whether or not the Christina Psalter, originally bestowed on someone
else, was regifted as a wedding present for Christina need not detain us.
 Anti-Judaism in the Christina Psalter \ 285

It is enough to know that the weight of the evidence points to a Parisian,

indeed French royal origin of the manuscript before its subsequent mi-
gration directly or in stages to Scandinavia.21
At this point we need to return to the prefatory cycle of full-page
pictures, from folio 10 verso to folio 21, twenty-four scenes in all. I have
already noted that such prefatory cycles exist in many psalters and often
have nothing obvious to do with the psalms. The pictures usually repre-
sent, in chronological order, sequences from the Old Testament or New
Testament, the latter in the case of the Christina Psalter, where the pic-
tures illustrate the life of Christ from infancy to resurrection.22 Figure
11.7, for example, reproduces the opening picture, the upper scene
being the Annunciation to the Virgin, the lower the Visitation. One
should again note the abundance of gold that is characteristic of all
these pictures. The sequence of pictures, however, is incomplete, with
folios probably lost in rebinding.23 This is important to remark because
the four missing scenes, I will argue, would almost certainly have further
developed an iconographically distinct and culturally aggressive anti-
Jewish subtheme already hinted at in the sequence.
This subtheme is represented by a scene of Jews plotting ( Vidas’s
term) Jesus’s arrest and execution (figure 11.8). The scene, perhaps more
properly, alludes to the debate that culminated in the plotting and oc-
curs in the upper station of folio 18 verso; the lower station is devoted to
the arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. The textual inspirations from
the Gospels for these two scenes are multiple: Matthew 26:3– 5 and
47– 56; Mark 14:1– 2 and 43– 49; and Luke 22:2 and 47– 53. True, John’s
Gospel is more lavish and informative than any of these, but he narrates
the scenes in such a way that the events occur in chapter 11 at verses
47– 54, while the arrest takes place in chapter 18 at verses 1–12. So, the
artist’s inspiration, given the textual juxtaposition of the scenes in the
three synoptic Gospels (references to which were melded together in a
number of Gospel harmonies), is probably one or more of the passages
from them, in particular Mark, as I shall argue later.24 Nonetheless, I do
not deny that he may also have had John’s more extensive descriptions
in the back of his mind, as did other authors who otherwise explicitly
quoted or invoked a synoptic gospel when they wrote of Jews, although
I shall not pursue that possibility here.25
 286 / William Chester Jordan

As to the upper scene, on the left are two men, one in front of the
other, the more foregrounded wearing a conical hat (a marker for a Jew),
the other with a round-top hat.26 They look at the central figure while
gesturing in a way that bespeaks an energetic discussion. On the right two
other men appear, again one foregrounded but apparently with a round-
top hat and largely obscuring the other, who wears a conical hat. The
figure behind also gestures, making him part of the agitated discussion.
But the other, who is dressed rather sumptuously, strokes his beard in
thought. The central figure, depicted with a conical hat, looks somewhat
to his right (the viewer’s left), as if listening to the discussants on that side.
At the same time he holds a body-length empty scroll with one hand and
points at it with the other (his right hand). This may be an indicator of his
dominant role among the speakers, a point suggested by his centrality or,
at least, his highly significant participation in the conversation.27 It is not
unreasonable to suppose that in a setting of Jews hostile to Jesus, the
emptiness of the scroll signifies the vanity of this seditious speech.
This scene may be rather simple, but it was assuredly not common at
the time it was painted. In fact, there are very few such scenes in the en-
tire corpus of medieval Christian art before the production of the
Christina Psalter, making this picture peculiar, as Vidas noted, if not
unique in its time, in its anti-Jewish imagery.28 One similar scene in the
so-called Toledo–New York Bible, a moralized Bible, has the scroll inscribed
with the single word Caiphas,29 alluding to the scriptural narrative, “Then
were gathered together the chief priests and ancients of the people into
the court of the high priest who was called Caiphas” ( Matthew 26:3).
Other Gospels call the ancients or elders scribes ( Mark 14:1 and Luke
22:2) or Pharisees ( John 11:47), but the only plotter mentioned by name
in any is Caiaphas (using the conventional spelling). One other psalter
that has the scroll also has a discussant holding a book, probably symbol-
izing the presence of the scribes.30 All these manuscripts originated in
and around the French royal court and under its patronage.
In the lower scene of folio 18 verso of the Christina Psalter Judas
kisses Jesus in betrayal. Peter in the foreground and on the viewer’s left
cuts off the ear of the High Priest’s servant. Behind this scene stands
a slightly obscured soldier with a poleax. Another soldier with a poleax
 Anti-Judaism in the Christina Psalter \ 287

takes Jesus, the central figure, by the hands in arresting him. And on the
viewer’s far right, one of those in the crowd who has come to watch the
drama and seems to have a cudgel and a hand on the soldier’s pole bears
a stereotypical sign of the hated Jew, a distorted face.31 All of this more
or less conforms (saving only the stereotypical pictorial traits) to the
various scriptural narratives. I quote Mark 14:43– 48,

And while he was yet speaking, cometh Judas Iscariot, one of the
twelve: and with him a great multitude with swords and staves, from
the chief priests and the scribes and the ancients. And he that be-
trayed him, had given them a sign, saying: Whomsoever I shall kiss,
that is he; lay hold on him, and lead him away carefully. And when he
was come, immediately going up to him, he saith: Hail, Rabbi; and
he kissed him. But they laid hands on him, and held him. And one of
them that stood by, drawing a sword, struck a servant of the chief
priest, and cut off his ear. And Jesus answering, said to them: Are you
come out as to a robber, with swords and staves to apprehend me?

The next folio in the present constitution of the Christina Psalter has
two scenes as well (figure 11.9). The first, in the upper station, is that of
the three women at the open tomb on Easter morning, which is precisely
appropriate only to Mark’s Gospel, chapter 16, verse 1, which mentions
the women by name—Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and
Salome. The other Gospels refer to two women by name (Matthew 28:1),
or to an indefinite number (Luke 23:55 and 24:1), or solely to Mary Mag-
dalene ( John 20:1). (I shall return to the possible relevance of the artist’s
or exegete’s choice of the Gospel of Mark as his source momentarily.)
The second scene on the page, in the lower station, is the Noli me tangere,
where Mary Magdalene sees the risen Christ, who forbids her to touch
him ( John 20:17). Originally, however, there were several other scenes
intervening between those of the plotters and the arrest, on the one
hand, and those of the Easter events on the other. Vidas has surmised on
tenuous evidence that the present psalter lacks the Roman soldiers’ flag-
ellation of Jesus, the crucifixion, the deposition from the cross, and the
anointing of the dead body which might have been present originally.32
 288 / William Chester Jordan

If these scenes were depicted, then the psalter would revert to a rather
conventional sequencing.
My question is whether Vidas’s conjecture coheres with a mentality
that introduced such an unusual scene as that of the Jews debating Jesus’s
fate into the sequence. Indeed, the other manuscripts in which similar
scenes appear and to which Vidas compares the depiction in the Christina
Psalter have their origin in the contemporary French royal court, whose
obsession with the place of the Jews in society I have spent my entire aca-
demic life exploring. (My first graduate seminar paper was on the tribu-
lations of the Jews of Normandy in 1247, that is to say, on the eve of
Louis IX’s first crusade.) If we assume that the evangelist Mark’s narra-
tive line was dominant in the conception of the sequence that starts with
the scene of the Jews debating Jesus’s fate, which I intimated above (even
though the other gospels are more common picture sources), then there
are a number of encounters between the arrest and the Easter story
which could have been the subject of illustration and, more to the point,
would have continued to emphasize the guilty centrality of Jews to the
drama. Besides the crucifixion, which Vidas herself suggests and to
which I shall return, Mark tells the story of Jesus’s appearance before the
High Priest, who rends his garments at the Nazarene’s declaration of his
messiahship, a scene that includes Jews spitting on him and beating him,
following the High Priest’s action (Mark 14:55– 65). The evangelist also
describes the Jewish leaders taking counsel together the next morning, a
kind of reenactment of their original debate, and deciding to send Jesus
to Pilate (Mark 15:1). The appearance before Pilate prompts Mark to de-
scribe the Jewish crowd’s cries to release the seditious Barabbas and re-
peatedly to crucify Jesus (Mark 15:6–15). This, too, would have provided
a splendid opportunity to render the Jews’ guilt.
Mark also describes the mocking of Jesus and his crowning with
thorns while in Pilate’s custody (15:17–19). Modern interpreters read
this text literally, namely, as evidence of the responsibility of Roman
soldiers. But by the thirteenth century the crowning with thorns, as I
have recently shown, had been thoroughly Judaized in Christian exege-
sis.33 Mark’s narration of the crucifixion (15:22– 37), with the Jewish by-
standers’ scorning of Jesus, the offer of vinegar by the sponge bearer, also
 Anti-Judaism in the Christina Psalter \ 289

imagined as a Jew in medieval Christian exegesis, and of course the titu-

lus, THE KING OF THE JEWS, were all susceptible to the most nega-
tive visual treatment of Jews, as the late Ruth Mellinkoff showed com-
prehensively.34 One example (figure 11.10) is the scene of Jesus being
brought before Caiaphas from the late thirteenth-century Salvin Hours.35
In other words, I am suggesting that the four missing leaves included the
crucifixion as well as three other scenes that were susceptible to strong
anti-Jewish interpretations.
The peculiar thing is that there are remarkably few examples of
these various scenes in the corpus of medieval Christian art before the
time of the Christina Psalter, but not after. Indeed, by 1270, the approxi-
mate date of the production of the Salvin Hours, they had already begun
to proliferate, and the scene of Jesus before Caiaphas in particular even
shares the motif of the empty scroll. More research would have to be
done on this, and I have largely depended on the work of Vidas for con-
firmation. But my own survey of scenes, such as those collected by Ruth
Mellinkoff, makes me think that Vidas is right: such scenes were very
uncommon before the Christina Psalter but common not long afterward.
Of course, to argue from this one scene and imagine that other scenes
from the Christina Psalter, now lost, stimulated a trend among later artists
is a real leap. And yet, we have been repeatedly told that the influence of
the French royal court and its artistic productions — manuscript illu-
minations, and architecture, too, for that matter — was profound in the
thirteenth century.36 It would not be entirely surprising if the Christina
Psalter, especially its putative anti-Jewish scenes, had a similar influence
before the book migrated to Scandinavia.
To repeat, this is speculation. It is not proof that I am right and that
the now missing scenes even had a peculiarly anti-Jewish slant. But nei-
ther is there any evidence or reason to believe that the exegete and/or
artist who planned and executed the lost scenes retreated from their very
creative interjection of the debate scene — retreated immediately from
this to a much more conventional iconography thereafter. If so, why did
he or they introduce the scene in the first place? The Christina Psalter
deserves more study, and it deserves to be considered not merely in for-
mal terms, but in depth as an artifact of the culture — political, social,
 290 / William Chester Jordan

and religious — of the French royal court. The anti-Judaism of that

court was one of its principal features. The reign of Louis VIII
(1223–1226) opened with its only major piece of legislation, an établisse-
ment or statute directed at the Jews of France, in which the king com-
manded that existing debts owed them could no longer generate
interest charges. Even the contractual obligations of borrowers to pay
interest were annulled. He also abolished the long-standing practice of
letting Jews register their debts in offices maintained by the crown. So
draconian was the legislation that Jews tried to flee the royal domain and
take shelter under other lords whose policies they regarded as more tol-
erable. But the king forbade flight and put enormous pressure on neigh-
boring lords to return Jews who dared to flee. On top of everything else,
the king ordered a captio or seizure of Jewish wealth, which is to say, the
repayment of the principal of debts owed to the Jewish lenders not to the
lenders themselves, but to the royal treasury.37
The brief reign of Louis VIII was stern. In the early years of his
son’s reign, 1226 down to, say, 1234, which constitute the temporal
upper limit for the production of the Christina Psalter, policies toward
the Jews culminated. The years 1227 and 1228 saw another captio carried
out against those Jews who had managed to generate some new wealth
since 1223. Thousands of debts were paid over to the royal treasury as a
systematic campaign was launched to suppress usurious moneylending.
What was usury? In the famous Ordinance of Melun of 1230 all interest
charges— any interest charges whatsoever— were declared to be usury.
Jews who lent money were thenceforth reduced to being pawnbrokers
who could draw income only from the sale of pledges that remained un-
redeemed. This measure, if effectively enforced— and ultimately it was
effectively enforced— would have impoverished the Jews of royal France,
who drew their livelihood almost exclusively from moneylending. The
Ordinance of Melun also stigmatized as traitors to the crown— as rebels,
to use its word — all those who refused to enforce or who violated its
provisions.38
The Christina Psalter, in other words, was conceived and executed at
a time when the monarchy established its identity as irrevocably hostile
to what it regarded as the excesses of Jews and when it articulated and
began to enforce policies designed to bring them, as future directives
 Anti-Judaism in the Christina Psalter \ 291

would demonstrate, to the ultimate goal of conversion. Taking these

facts into consideration, scholars would be wise to search for the Christina
Psalter’s single loose leaves with the missing illustrations, perhaps in some
Scandinavian repository or repositories.39 They may very well represent
one of the initial iconographic consequences of this heightened religious,
ideological, and social antipathy to the Jews, much as the exactly contem-
porary moralized Bibles, in Sara Lipton’s words, “constitute an unprece-
dented visual polemic against the Jews.”40 If my suspicion is correct, we
would only have to emend her choice of words from “unprecedented” to
“almost unprecedented” in acknowledgment of the contribution of the
lost images of the Christina Psalter to this visual polemic.

Notes

1. For a brief introduction to the nature of the medieval psalter, from

which my general remarks are drawn, see Eric Palazzo, A History of Liturgical
Books from the Beginning to the Thirteenth Century, trans. Madeleine Beaumont
(Collegeville, MN: Order of St. Benedict, 1998), 129– 34.
2. Harvey Stahl’s Picturing Kingship: History and Painting in the Psalter of
Saint Louis ( University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), is the
most comprehensive study and guide to the literature (to about the year 2000).
See also Gerald Guest, “The People Demand a King: Visualizing Monarchy in
the Psalter of Louis IX,” Studies in Iconography 23 (2002): 1– 27; Gerald Guest,
“Structuring Old Testament History in the Psalter of Louis IX, in Tributes to Lucy
Freeman Sandler: Studies in Manuscript Illumination, ed. Kathryn Smith and Carol
Krinsky ( London: Harvey Miller, 2007), 51– 61; and William Chester Jordan,
“The ‘People’ in the Psalter of Saint Louis and the Leadership of Moses,” in Me-
dieval Paradigms: Essays in Honor of Jeremy Duquesnay Adams, ed. Stephanie Hayes-
Healy, 2 vols. ( New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 1:13– 28.
3. Stahl, Picturing Kingship, 3.
4. On the weight of the écu, 4 grams, see Per Enghag, Encyclopedia of the
Elements: Technical Data, History Processing, Applications ( Weinheim, Germany:
Wiley, 2004), 107. D. J. Henstra, “The Evolution of the Money Standard in Me-
dieval Frisia: A Treatise on the History of Systems of Money of Account in the
Former Frisia c. 1500 – c.1500,” Ph.D. dissertation, Rijksuniversiteit Gronigen,
2000, 114, opts for 4.5 grams, and I have used this so as not to exaggerate. On
Louis’s introduction of the écu, see William Chester Jordan, Louis IX and the
Challenge of the Crusade: A Study in Rulership ( Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1979), 210 –13.
 292 / William Chester Jordan

5. Peter Spufford, Handbook of Medieval Exchange ( London: Royal His-

torical Society / Boydell and Brewer, 1986), 189.
6. Joseph Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair ( Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1980), 56.
7. Robert Branner, Manuscript Painting in Paris during the Reign of Saint
Louis: A Study of Styles ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).
8. John Lowden, The Making of the Bibles moralisees, 2 vols. ( University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000).
9. Marina Vidas, The Christina Psalter: A Study of the Images and Texts in a
French Early Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Manuscript ( Njalsgade, DK: Mu-
seum Tusculanum Press/University of Copenhagen, 2006). For the inspiration
of Jonathan Alexander, see 7.
10. Ibid., 89– 90.
11. Ibid., 15.
12. Ibid., 16 –19.
13. Ibid., 19– 20.
14. Ibid., 21– 22.
15. Ibid., 99.
16. Ibid., 22– 23.
17. Ibid., 22.
18. Ibid., 23– 24.
19. Ibid., 25.
20. Ibid., 25.
21. Ibid., 49– 53.
22. Ibid., 20 – 21.
23. Ibid., 21.
24. Influenced by the case of the moralized Bibles, Vidas implies that
Matthew’s Gospel is the likeliest inspiration: Christina Psalter, 73. Her citations to
English-language biblical passages derive from the Authorized Version. I have pre-
ferred to quote the Vulgate in the American version of the Douay-Rheims transla-
tion. On the use of Gospel harmonies in learned circles, see Beryl Smalley, The
Gospels in the Schools c. 1100 –c. 1280 (London: Hambledon Press, 1985), 30 – 33.
25. For an example of this sort of double usage, in this case of the Gospel
of Matthew directly and the Gospel of John more allusively, see Barbara New-
man, “The Passion of the Jews of Prague: The Pogrom of 1389 and the Lessons
of a Medieval Parody,” Church History 81, no. 1 (2012): 12.
26. On headgear, including the conical hat as a Jewish marker, see Ruth
Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Mid-
dle Ages, 2 vols. ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 1:59– 94.
27. Cf. Michael Curschmann, “Levels of Meaning and Degrees of Viewer
Participation: Inscribed Imagery in Twelfth-Century Manuscripts,” in Qu’est-ce
que nommer? L’image légendée entre monde monastique et pensée scolastique, ed.
 Anti-Judaism in the Christina Psalter \ 293

Christian Heck ( Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 89– 99. Curschmann draws on

William Noel’s work in The Utrecht Psalter in Medieval Art: Picturing the Psalms of
David, ed. K. V. D. Horst et al. (’t Goy, Netherlands: HES, 1996), 159– 64.
28. Vidas, Christina Psalter, 74.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. On physical distortions and deformities, including facial, see Mellin-
koff, Outcasts, 1:122– 35.
32. Vidas, Christina Psalter, 28.
33. William Chester Jordan, “Judaizing the Passion: The Case of the
Crown of Thorns in the Middle Ages,” in New Perspectives on Jewish-Christian Re-
lations, ed. Elisheva Carlebach and Jacob Schacter (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 51– 63.
34. See the illustrations in Mellinkoff, Outcasts, vol. 2. Mellinkoff (Outcasts,
1:328) drew on my work on Stephaton, the sponge bearer at the crucifixion, in
discussing the Judaization of the tormentors of Christ.
35. Mellinkoff, Outcasts, vol. 2, plate VI.6.
36. Claudine Billot, “Les Saintes-Chapelles ( XIIe – XVIe siècles): Ap-
proche comparée de fondations dynastiques,” Revue d’histoire de l’église de France
73 (1987): 229– 48; Robert Branner, St. Louis and the Court Style in Gothic Architec-
ture ( London: A. Zwemmer, 1965); Robert Branner, Manuscript Painting in Paris
during the Reign of Saint Louis: A Study of Styles (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1977).
37. William Chester Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews from Philip
Augustus to the Last Capetians ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1989), 93–104.
38. Jordan, French Monarchy and the Jews, 129– 35.
39. I have launched a modest effort to search for the missing leaves of the
Christina Psalter. My strategy is to try to identify already cataloged single leaves
in library collections in Scandinavia, leaves whose provenance has hitherto been
unknown — an obvious method; see, for example, the Finnish database from
the National Library in Helsinki, brought to my attention by Tommi Lankila, a
graduate student in the Department of History at Princeton University, http://
fragmenta.kansalliskirjasto.fi/community-list. See also the Norwegian database
Bergen University Library [ Norway]–Medieval Parchment Fragments http://
gandalf.aksis.uib.no/mpf/. I also intend to look systematically through Scandi-
navian sale and auction catalogs of the last century or so. There is no certainty,
of course, that these leaves can be identified. Such single leaves may very well
have become (transient) devotional objects, as John Van Engen suggested to me
in conversation.
40. Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism
in the Bible moralisée ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 1.
 Tw e l v e

E m p e r o r C h a r l e s I V, J e w s ,
and Urban Space

d av i d c . m e n g e l

The 1346 election of Charles IV as King of the Romans accelerated

Prague’s rise to late medieval prominence. Already in 1344 it had become
an archbishopric, a lofty status progressively embodied by the new Gothic
cathedral rising, stone by stone, within the walls of Prague Castle. That
castle, and the city that had grown up in its shadow, was the center of
Charles’s power as King of Bohemia. His royal and imperial ambitions
can be traced in Prague’s transformation during his reign (1346 –1378).
In 1348 Charles IV established there a university, Central Europe’s first.
In the same year, he ordered the first of two new circuits of walls to
greatly extend the city’s urban area and embarked on an extended build-
ing program. Despite what might have seemed unfortunate timing—1348
is a year remembered especially for the devastating effects of the Black
Death in many European cities—Prague grew and prospered throughout
Charles IV’s reign.1 We might even call it a golden age, one all the more
impressive for its defiance of the crisis often associated with the same
century elsewhere in Europe.2 During these years Prague’s sparsely popu-
lated suburbs developed into the booming New Town, and the imperial
style of its art and architecture helped to inspire the Beautiful Style.3 To-

294
 Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 295

gether the city’s diverse population of Czechs and Germans, of Chris-

tians and Jews, flourished under Charles IV as at no other time.
Of the stories told about medieval Prague, this attractive tale of an
all-too-brief golden age disrupted by the political tumult and urban de-
struction of the Hussite era has enjoyed a recent resurgence. This is a
tourist-friendly story, explaining as much as a guide needs to remem-
ber about the major landmarks of the built (and rebuilt) medieval envi-
ronment of a lovely and walkable city: Charles Bridge, Charles Univer-
sity, New Town with its expansive Charles and Wenceslas squares, and
the Gothic (and partly neo-Gothic) cathedral of Saint Vitus. Golden-age
Prague furthermore offers an appealing contribution to a refashioned,
post-1989 Czech identity, as does the gilded memory of the emperor who
orchestrated it. In a recent Czech Television poll to identify the greatest-
ever Czech, Charles IV topped not only the principled but tragic Jan Hus,
but also all other historical Czechs—even hockey players.4
Among scholars, art historians in particular have turned enthusias-
tically to the same sites that attract tourists. Their interest and research
have inspired a number of treasure-rich exhibitions in Prague and even
New York City. The resulting volumes and additional research by grow-
ing ranks of international scholars have given welcome attention to the
significance of physical space in Prague: the design and orientation of
its cathedral and other sacred buildings, the location and composition of
decorative arts, and the political and religious meaning of the art and ar-
chitecture.5 This work reminds us that the physical space of a built envi-
ronment is well worth scholarly attention, both to describe its significance
for those who lived within it and also — as some authors have further
argued — because at least some medieval patrons themselves paid care-
ful attention to the organization of urban and architectural space. Paul
Crossley and others, for example, have attributed to Charles IV himself
a direct, intentional role in shaping the politically significant space of
Prague’s new cathedral and that of the expanding city itself.6 The locations
of saints’ tombs within the cathedral of Saint Vitus participate in a “sacred
topography” that reflect Charles IV’s “politics of presentation.”7 Similarly,
the sites selected by the emperor for the many new churches within New
Town point to carefully designed “axes of meaning” converging on the
square that now bears Charles’s own name.8 Such arguments are open to
 296 / David C. Mengel

criticism, especially for overestimating the medieval monarch’s personal

and sustained engagement with the fine details of art and architecture
that so fascinate academic art historians. They have also contributed to
what Milena Bartlová rightly characterizes as “a cult of personality of
Charles IV,” traceable to the exhibitions and publications that marked the
six hundredth anniversary of the emperor’s 1378 death.9 Yet, whereas the
scholarship of 1978 addressed nearly every possible facet of Charles IV’s
life and reign,10 the art historians in the vanguard of twenty-first-century
international scholarship have focused especially on the emperor’s roles in
transforming Prague’s shape and appearance. The result can be a glow-
ing, if at times still hazy, image of an idealized, highly educated medieval
monarch and connoisseur of the arts whose careful stewardship ushered
in Prague’s golden age.
A parallel strain of scholarship, one also nurtured by the publications
of 1978, paints Charles IV much differently. Rather than looking ad-
miringly at the cultural achievements of Charles IV’s reign, especially in
Prague, this research looks critically at the suffering of Jews in areas under
Charles IV’s authority, especially in German cities. Numerous Czech and
German historians have addressed the question of Charles IV’s relation-
ship with Jews, as have historical surveys of Jews or anti-Judaism in Eu-
rope.11 A commonplace of the literature compares the experience of Jews
within the kingdom of Bohemia, where Charles ruled as king, with that of
Jews elsewhere within the empire. (Charles had been elected the empire’s
ruler in 1346, but his reign remained contested until 1349.) Bohemian
Jews in general faced less violence than those in the rest of the empire
during the middle years of the fourteenth century. Historians have sought
to explain this difference by emphasizing the limitations of Charles IV’s
financial resources and his political power outside Bohemia, particu-
larly in the early years of his reign. Not a few have gone beyond explana-
tion to venture into uncomfortable territory for the medieval historian:
namely, the moral evaluation of past actions. Implicit are often hypotheti-
cal or counterfactual questions: How would Charles IV have treated Jews
throughout the empire, had his power been equal to that he enjoyed in
the Bohemian crown lands? Would the peace and privilege of the Bo-
hemian Jews have been shared uniformly by Jewish communities across
the entire empire?
 Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 297

In these accounts, Prague’s flourishing Jewish community serves pri-

marily as a foil to the Jewish communities in other cities of the empire,
notable primarily for what they did not experience. Historians similarly
contrast the community’s situation during these decades with that of
later Jews massacred in Prague in 1389, during the reign of Charles’s suc-
cessor, Wenceslas IV. In that year accusations of host desecration led to
mob violence on Easter day— also the last day of Passover in 1389—that
left hundreds of Jews dead.12 Prague Jews experienced no such violence
during Charles IV’s reign. Yet, despite this relative peace and prosperity,
historians of art, literature, and material culture have uncovered remark-
ably little material to study from Prague Jews during this period. The
signature thinkers, texts, manuscripts, and synagogues of Prague’s me-
dieval Jewish community date primarily to the thirteenth or fifteenth
centuries. The third quarter of the fourteenth is particularly blank. The
devastation of 1389 must be at least partly to blame for this lack of
sources, but it has left a noticeable gap in the recent exhibitions and cata-
logs dedicated to Charles IV’s Prague.13
In this essay, I intend to contribute to both scholarly conversations
through a close look at two of Charles IV’s most favored cities: Prague and
Nuremberg. A better understanding of their different circumstances, es-
pecially in the first years of Charles’s imperial rule, can inform a more ro-
bust answer to questions about the character of Charles IV’s relationship
with Jews. To achieve this, I will focus—as Crossley and others have done
so powerfully in Prague — on physical space: namely, on Charles IV’s
active role in reshaping urban space. At the end of Charles IV’s life, both
Prague and Nuremberg could thank the emperor for expansive new mar-
ketplaces: today’s Charles Square and Wenceslas Square in Prague, and
the Hauptmarkt with its Frauenkirche in Nuremberg. Creation of these
spaces brought suffering to the Jews of one city and new privileges to
those of the other.

Jews in Prague and Nuremberg

A comparison of Prague and Nuremberg is particularly apt for this period.

The medieval empire never had a single capital city, and even Charles IV’s
 298 / David C. Mengel

impressive plans to remake Prague were not intended to alter that. In-
stead, as Peter Moraw argued, Charles IV cultivated an axis of powerful
cities from Frankfurt to Wrocław (Breslau), with Nuremberg and Prague
as its two most important points.14 Charles’s own itinerary confirms this
powerfully.15 The charters he issued from Nuremberg document more
than fifty separate visits in twenty-six distinct years. Only Prague hosted
the ruler more frequently.16 As in Prague, the emperor worked to boost
Nuremberg into the ranks of the empire’s greatest cities. For example,
Charles made sure that his son and heir, Wenceslas, was born and chris-
tened in Nuremberg in 1361. By then his Golden Bull of 1356 had al-
ready stipulated that each future emperor should hold his first Reichstag
at Nuremberg, after being elected at Frankfurt and crowned at Aachen.17
No two cities benefited more from Charles IV’s long reign than Nurem-
berg and Prague.
Yet while the Jews of Prague flourished during these years, Jews
in Nuremberg were massacred. At first glance, the disparity seems
inexplicable — particularly because Charles IV took direct interest in
the fates of both communities. For Jews in fourteenth-century Prague,
Charles IV’s actions seem to have been almost entirely beneficial. To
start, they enjoyed the legal protection guaranteed by King Přemysl Ot-
tokar II a century earlier to all the Jews of Bohemia. In 1356 Charles IV
confirmed Ottokar’s Statuta Judaeorum, which identified Jews in Prague
and the Bohemian crown lands as servi camere nostre, indicating at once
Jews’ protected and subservient status, in the same words used by German
rulers since Frederick II in 1236 to express Judenregal, the royal rights
over Jews.18 In the fourteenth century, two Prague synagogues served a
population of perhaps 750 Jews, according to the most recent estimate;
they lived predominately in the northwestern part of the city’s Old Town,
the most densely settled of three legally distinct Prague cities (Old Town,
Lesser Town [ Malá Strana], and Hradčany).19 Careful study indicates a
modest expansion during Charles IV’s reign of this Jewish quarter (vicus
Judaeorum) — which was neither a legally distinct town nor a closed-off
ghetto at the time.20 Evidently this Old Town Jewish community flour-
ished. Furthermore, in 1348 Charles specifically invited Jews to partici-
pate in his ambitious plans to expand Prague by establishing a fourth dis-
 Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 299

tinct Prague city, New Town: he extended to Jews the same tax incentives
on offer to any Christian who would move into the lightly populated
area and build a stone house. He further promised his special protection
to Jews who answered the appeal, in recognition of their “vulnerability.”
All Jews except those already living in Old Town were eligible — for
Charles IV did not want to damage Old Town to benefit New Town.21
Under Charles IV, Jews living in their traditional community within
Prague’s Old Town enjoyed privileged protection, while other Jews
were offered financial incentives to help populate New Town. Prague’s
Jews could have hardly asked more from their ruler and protector.
Three hundred kilometers away, the experience of Jews in Nurem-
berg was entirely different. Although they too should have enjoyed the
emperor’s protection as servi camere regie, they instead seem to have been
treated as expendable tools for Charles IV’s political ambitions. The em-
peror’s relationship with Nuremberg was admittedly shaky— at best—in
the first years of his contested reign as King of the Romans. As support-
ers of his Wittelsbach rival, Ludwig of Bavaria, the Nurembergers did
not even admit the elected Charles into their gates until October 1347,
after Ludwig’s death. Seven months later, the so-called Artisans’ Revolt
brought to power a new Nuremberg town council that supported the
Wittelsbachs’ next champion, Günther von Schwarzburg.22 Charles only
reentered the city in September 1349, after Günther’s death and Charles’s
own belated coronation at Aachen the previous summer. The emperor’s
entry marked the end of the urban revolt as Charles reinstated the previ-
ous town council. Nuremberg’s Jews suffered financially during the re-
volt, but matters quickly worsened afterward. Included among a flurry of
privileges Charles granted to Nuremberg during that visit was an Octo-
ber 2 charter absolving the council from any responsibility for violence
against the town’s Jews, “unser camerknecht,”23 that the “common folk”
might perpetrate.24
Given this advance permission, it should come as no surprise that
Nuremberg’s Jews did indeed become the targets of mass violence two
months later, only days after a series of still more chilling imperial char-
ters instructed the Nuremberg town council and citizens precisely how
to dispose of the town’s Jewish houses after their inhabitants were gone.25
 300 / David C. Mengel

A brief entry in the family chronicle of a Nuremberger named Ulman

Stromer — likely an eyewitness to the massacre — recorded simply that
the town’s Jews had been “burned” on December 5, the eve of Saint
Nicholas Day in 1349.26 The Nuremberg Memorbuch records the names
of 562 Jews who died then. Most of their houses were destroyed, their
synagogue burned.27 The Jewish cemetery was also pillaged and some of
its gravestones repurposed as building materials — including, most poi-
gnantly, as steps in a staircase of the renovated church of Saint Lorenz.28
No members of Nuremberg’s Jewish community remained in the city, a
situation that the emperor seemed to envision as permanent. The next
October, he fully legitimized the plundering of all Jews’ property and
other wealth in the city.29 Evidently this was the plan from the start: in
advance of the massacre, his so-called Market Charter (Markturkunde)
had ordered that a new church dedicated to the Virgin Mary be built on
the site of the synagogue.30 And so it was: construction began within three
years, the choir was consecrated in 1355, and in 1358, less than a decade
after the Saint Nicholas Eve massacre of Jews, the completed Gothic
Frauenkirche permanently replaced Nuremberg’s synagogue.31 Presum-
ably the few Jews who by then had returned to Nuremberg lamented the
old synagogue’s demise,32 even as they recited the names of those who
survived the fiery violence only in the spare language of the community’s
Memorbuch:

May God remember the souls of those killed and burned in

Nuremberg:
Joseph, son of Jechiel haKohen, his wife Chandlin and his
daughter;
Yechiel haKohen, his wife Jutta and his three children;
Isaac, son of Baruch haKohen, his wife Jachnet, his son the
young Baruch, his mother-in-law the elderly Hanna, his daughter
Minna, her young son Koplin, and her [other] six children;
Jacob, son of Baruch haKohen, his wife Tube, his young son
Michel, his unmarried daughter Dolce and his [other] four children;
Yechiel, son of Yekutiel haKohen, his wife Miriam and his eight
children;
Dolce, daughter of Yekutiel haKohen, and her six children. . . .33
 Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 301

Historians, Charles IV, and Jews

The well-documented, premeditated massacre of Nuremberg Jews in

1349 is breathtaking, even to modern readers with general knowledge of
the range of persecutions, discriminations, and libels to which medieval
European Jews were at times subjected. So the fate of Nuremberg’s Jews
under Charles IV seems to call not only for explanation, but also for
moral condemnation; some historians in recent decades have indeed of-
fered the latter. Before turning to their judgments, however, we need
some further context for the experience of Jews in these two cities. Mid-
fourteenth-century Prague and Nuremberg make an instructive compari-
son, but they belonged to a larger environment that should inform our
evaluation.
First, we should note that persecution of and violence against urban
Jews was neither unusual nor isolated in fourteenth-century central Eu-
rope.34 Nor were such acts limited to the waves of anti-Jewish violence in
the years 1348 through 1350—despite a common tendency in the schol-
arship to overestimate the Black Death’s causal force, even in the face of
the awkward chronology of plague and persecution in many cities.35
( Nuremberg itself seems to have escaped the epidemic in these years, for
instance.)36 Instead, the experience of Nuremberg’s Jews in 1349 fits into
a wider and longer pattern of medieval persecutions and expulsions of
Jews in central Europe.37 Violent attacks on Jews occurred in dozens of
cities not only between 1348 and 1350, but also especially in the previous
several decades. During the so-called Good Werner (1287/1288), Rint-
fleisch (1298), and Armleder (1336 –1338) persecutions, and in other
local and regional outbreaks of violence, mobs killed and burned Jews in
numerous cities in this region.38 A contemporary Toledo rabbi character-
ized the regnum Teutonicum as the “land of persecution,” a judgment sup-
ported by maps that plot the incidences of violence in the region.39
Nuremberg’s Jews had suffered especially in the 1298 persecutions,
during which its Memorbuch was begun by Isaac of Meiningen.40 Isaac
died in the violence along with more than six hundred other Jews; they
had fled to Nuremberg Castle, but the imperial officials there proved
unable to hold off the mob.41 In the kingdom of Bohemia, too, there
were episodes of anti-Jewish violence during the same decades, if not as
 302 / David C. Mengel

many as in the more western parts of the empire.42 So although the tacit,
advance permission that Charles IV gave Nuremberg’s citizens in 1349
to expel or kill its Jews remains shocking, the anti-Jewish violence itself
fits into a larger pattern that predated Charles’s reign and extended far
beyond Nuremberg.
Secondly, Charles IV’s offer of amnesty to Nuremberg citizens also
belongs to a larger pattern. As violence against Jews erupted in town after
town at the beginning of his reign, Charles IV quickly issued pardons for
the perpetrators. Repeatedly Charles assigned the possessions of the mur-
dered or exiled Jews to city authorities or even to individual supporters—
as had some of his imperial predecessors in similar situations before.43
The emperor regularly abdicated, in other words, his duty as ruler to
protect the Jews of the empire. Even worse, Nuremberg was not the only
city that received advance permission from Charles IV to confiscate the
property of Jews, should they be killed or exiled. Similar letters went to
the city of Frankfurt and to Archbishop Baldwin of Trier, assigning Jew-
ish property in Frankfurt and Alsace, respectively, to their recipients —
in the event that Jews in those places might happen to be killed.44 So al-
though the situation of Nuremberg’s Jews in 1349 is particularly well
documented, it was not unique or perhaps even exceptional.45
Where does this leave the broader question of Charles IV and Jews—
and specifically the question as informed by a comparison of Nuremberg
and Prague? Most historians have been inclined to attribute the Nurem-
berg massacre to the emperor’s relative powerlessness. Some earlier com-
mentators even portrayed Charles as a praiseworthy protector of Jews
unable to hold back the crush of anti-Jewish mobs of common folk, per-
haps panicked by the arrival of plague and wandering flagellants.46 Others
further characterized the violence as a medieval manifestation of social
or class conflict,47 an explanation that seems more plausible for the Rint-
fleisch and Armleder persecutions than for this one. Closer study of the
midcentury events now allows us to rule out this explanation for the per-
secutions of 1348 to 1350. The chronology is often wrong for plague-
crazed mobs—plague followed violence in some places rather than pre-
ceding it— and official instigation and complicity are too clearly recorded
in surviving documents: the emperor and leading city officials in Nurem-
berg and elsewhere both anticipated and excused the violence.48 At the
 Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 303

same time, scholars have continued to argue that Charles IV’s political
power in the empire was extremely limited, especially but not only while
his imperial rule remained contested. Charles, according to this per-
spective, only gave what he had no power to withhold; in other words, he
could not have protected the empire’s Jews in any case.
Exacerbating this weakness was the financial precariousness of
Charles IV’s situation in the early years of his imperial reign, which
serves to explain why the emperor resorted to the dispersal of Jewish
property. Paying soldiers and buying allies left Charles IV seriously in
debt as he struggled after his 1346 election to consolidate his power in
the empire. He owed great sums, for example, to Archbishop Baldwin of
Trier, his great-uncle, who had supported Charles’s claims in imperial
politics and over the family’s Luxemburg lands. Transferring to Baldwin
his rights over Jews in Alsace offered a way to reduce that debt.49 An even
more tempting resource was the emperor’s expectation of annual pay-
ments from Jews, not to mention the right to levy additional taxes; this
was the most lucrative aspect of the Judenregal. Future income from such
taxes could be exchanged for much-needed cash or political support. Un-
fortunately, previous emperors had progressively allocated elements of
the Judenregal to city governments and regional lords.50 That left the rela-
tive responsibilities and privileges of various authorities in relation to a
city’s Jews “anything but clear” in cities such as Nuremberg, especially
during times of conflict and transition; nevertheless, the emperor did re-
tain the strongest claim on the right to tax Jews.51
Historians’ efforts to disentangle the evidence for the financial mo-
tives and effects of Charles IV’s acts have also suffered a lack of clarity. It
is tempting to jump right to the conclusion that the emperor pawned or
gave away Jewish property in Nuremberg that was not yet vacant. But to
understand the steps that led to this inflammatory end, a more detailed
summary of the financial aspects of Charles IV’s orders is necessary. The
emperor’s continuing claim to the right to tax the empire’s Jews led him
to declare invalid the revolutionary city council’s reported levy of 13,000
gold gulden on Nuremberg’s Jews during the Artisans’ Revolt. Charles
then rewarded the Burgraves of Nuremberg52— his loyal supporters
and likely already his creditors—by granting them whatever the revolu-
tionary council had extorted from the city’s Jews.53 It was up to them to
 304 / David C. Mengel

reclaim the money from the town councilors who, for the moment, re-
mained in firm control of Nuremberg. For the same reason, Charles IV’s
own future receipt of annual Jewish payments from Nuremberg remained
in doubt, even as his need for ready money had not abated. Mortgaging
that future income—evidently expected to be 2,200 pounds per year from
Nuremberg’s Jews at this time54—required finding a lender willing to ac-
cept significant risk. The same Burgraves of Nuremberg, together with
the bishop of Bamberg, did precisely that in June by providing the em-
peror money he desperately needed to put down the rebellion. In ex-
change, the bishop of Bamberg was to receive 1,100 pounds of the Jewish
tax each year for the next six years;55 the Burgraves of Nuremberg were
likewise to receive 1,100 pounds annually until the debt to them had been
entirely paid.56 Given the reports of anti-Jewish persecutions and expul-
sions emanating from dozens of other towns over the previous seven
months,57 these creditors may have insisted upon additional guarantees
that the promised payments would indeed be forthcoming from the Jews.
We know that Charles IV offered them precisely such a pledge— a pledge
that explains his reassignment of occupied Jewish property: should the
Jews be expelled from Nuremberg before repayment of this debt, he
stipulated, the bishop of Bamberg and the Burgraves of Nuremberg
were to divide equally the houses and moveable goods belonging to the
town’s Jews.58 Strapped for money, Charles IV borrowed against what-
ever elements of the Judenregal he could monetize. He mortgaged the
annual taxes owed him by Nuremberg’s Jews — payments he had never
before received— and further secured the loan with the promise of Jew-
ish property — located in a city that did not yet recognize his authority.
Charles proceeded to promise some of the same Jewish property to oth-
ers, including the three best Jewish houses of his choice to the Wittels-
bach heir, Ludwig of Brandenburg, in exchange for his acknowledgment
of Charles IV’s imperial rule. This grant would obtain only if the Jews
living there happened to be killed.59
Such detailed scrutiny of the context of Charles IV’s actions has
helped historians to explain them. Like previous emperors, including his
rival Ludwig of Bavaria, he granted to others the rights over Jews asso-
ciated with the Judenregal in part because he was not currently profiting
from them. Such rights were more theoretical than real; his true finan-
 Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 305

cial stake in the Jews in much of the empire was minimal. He mortgaged
tax income that was theoretically owed to him by Jews, but which he had
not actually been receiving; he transferred to favored supporters Jewish
houses — including ones that had not yet been vacated — but in a city
where a hostile revolutionary council denied his authority. These meas-
ures promised to benefit those to whom Charles owed money, those
whom he wanted to reward, or those with whom he hoped to curry
favor — all without costing him much, or anything.60 Those promises is-
sued while his imperial title remained contested were furthermore of
dubious value to their recipients, coming from a ruler with limited power
to enforce them. The emperor’s financial exigency and his limited power
in imperial cities such as Nuremberg also provide a simple and appeal-
ing explanation for the better situation of Jews within the crown lands
of Bohemia: where Charles IV had the power to protect Jews, he tended
to do so. His royal authority in Prague allowed him to treat Jews as he
chose, whereas his weak and contested imperial authority in Nuremberg
in 1349, together with his dire financial situation, compelled him to
abandon the Jews to their own fates. As medieval rulers went, some his-
torians have argued, Charles IV was therefore no worse an enemy to
Jews than most others.61
One article — a small contribution to a mountain of literature ap-
pearing in 1978— aggressively challenged this tendency to exonerate
Charles IV. It was a study of the Artisans’ Revolt in Nuremberg of 1348
to 1349 by Wolfgang von Stromer, descended from the same Stromer
whose fourteenth-century family chronicle recorded the burning of
Nuremberg Jews. Stromer’s careful account added still further explanation
of the political and financial situation that limited the scope of Charles
IV’s power, but nevertheless offered scathing moral judgment against the
emperor, expressed in distinctively twentieth-century terms: “As Protector
[of Jews], his failure to uphold his duty would already render him guilty.
But through the phrases cited above [that is, the language granting
amnesty in advance for violence against Jews], Charles IV demonstrated
himself to have been the desk worker with ultimate responsibility for the
Final Solution [die Endlösung] in Alsace, Frankfurt and Nuremberg.”62
To Stromer, Charles IV’s meager efforts to protect Jews in his
crown lands and his isolated punishment of a few egregious instances of
 306 / David C. Mengel

anti-Jewish violence by no means mitigate his guilt. It seems “grotesque,”

he concluded, to exonerate Charles IV from complicity (Mitschuld ) in the
Nuremberg pogrom.63 Subsequent historians have echoed the moral con-
demnation of Stromer, if not usually so directly in the language of Holo-
caust.64 The measured judgment of František Graus admitted that, from
the perspective of realpolitik, one might acknowledge Charles IV’s limited
power to protect Jews within the empire. Nevertheless, in the Nuremberg
case in particular, Graus too considered undeniable Charles IV’s com-
plicity as well as his abject failure to fulfill the role that he and other me-
dieval rulers claimed for themselves: protector of Jews.65 Other historians
have expressed a combination of moral condemnation and bewilderment
at Charles’s “inexplicable” acts.66

Urban Space

Already we have seen that the larger context of late medieval anti-Jewish
violence in the region, Charles IV’s political weakness in the empire at the
contested start of his reign, and his related financial need can together
help us to explain—if certainly not to excuse— why Charles IV provided
advance, tacit permission for the Nurembergers to expel or even murder
the Jews in their city. But those factors seem to me insufficient to explain
the relative peace enjoyed by the Jews of Prague. Their experience is
more difficult to explain than that of the Nurembergers— at least until
we pay closer attention to the different physical environments of the two
Jewish communities. As with all city dwellers, the lives of Jews in these
medieval towns cannot be separated from the characteristics of the space
they occupied. Urban space, as art historians and others continue to re-
mind us, at once reflected and shaped both the experience and meaning of
medieval urban life. That insight provides the foundation of my argument
here: namely, that independent developments in the early fourteenth cen-
tury affected the physical place of the Jews in each town in ways that con-
tributed significantly to their fates. To understand how this happened, we
must next look more closely at the urban space of both cities.
The town of Nuremberg grew from two eleventh-century settle-
ments on either side of the Pegnitz River. The older developed around
 Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 307

Map 12.1. Nuremberg during the reign of Charles IV

Nuremberg Castle; the second, on the other side of the river, spread out
from a royal palace and the church of Saint Jakob.67 (See map 12.1.)68 By
the middle of the thirteenth century, Nuremberg consisted of two walled
areas: north of the Pegnitz lay St. Sebald Town, so called after the church
of the same name; south was St. Lorenz ( New) Town, a planned, oval-
shaped town established around the middle of the twelfth century.69 At
about the same time, a significant number of Jews fleeing violence during
the Second Crusade were resettled in Nuremberg, where they may have
joined Jews already living there.70 Where exactly they settled remains in
question. Historians have generally assumed that in the twelfth century
Jews occupied the same space they did in the fourteenth century —
namely, the swampy land between St. Sebald Town and the Pegnitz
River. Convenient as this area was to both towns, its waterlogged ground
would have required houses there to be built on expensive wooden pil-
ings.71 This assumption fits well with the broader claim that medieval
 308 / David C. Mengel

Jews tended to occupy the least desirable, most marginal parts of cities,
reflecting a social gradient of center to periphery embodied in medieval
urban space. But that general point has been challenged, not least be-
cause so many urban Jewish settlements in medieval central Europe were
centrally located. Jewish settlements grew in tandem with the high-
medieval cities themselves, and the space each community occupied
within a city reflected the moment of Jews’ arrival as much as any other
factor.72 For Nuremberg, furthermore, recent archaeology has failed to
discover any settlement at all in the high-medieval area just north of the
Pegnitz; instead, boardwalks seem to have led people over uninhabited
swampland between St. Sebald Town and the bridge over the Pegnitz. If
Jews lived nearby in the twelfth century, it was likely just to the northeast
on the site of the later fruit market. Another area of Jewish settlement
south of the river in St. Lorenz Town seems to be indicated by a mikwe, a
Jewish ritual bath, which archaeologists judge to date from the twelfth or
thirteenth century.73
The location of later medieval Jewish settlement in Nuremberg is
much clearer: archaeological and textual evidence concurs that a concen-
tration of Nuremberg’s Jews did inhabit the southern edge of St. Sebald
Town after the building of a new wall around it in the middle of the thir-
teenth century and continued to occupy the same area until 1349. The
ground level seems to have been raised during this wall-building process,
making it far more habitable than before—if still possibly more flood-
prone than other parts of the city.74 Jews and at least some Christians both
lived in this area, where in 1296 a synagogue was built not far from the
chapel of Saint Maurice.75 The synagogue was damaged in the 1298 Rint-
fleisch persecution but repaired again afterward.76 This urban space oc-
cupied by Nuremberg’s Jewish community was at once central and mar-
ginal. Just inside the new walls, it was distant from the city’s two original
centers of gravity, the castle and the church of Saint Jakob. Yet its proxim-
ity to the bridge that linked the two towns made it ideally located for con-
ducting trade. Indeed, the stalls and arcades built along the Jewish houses
evidently threatened to choke urban traffic in the early fourteenth cen-
tury, for which reason at least some of them were likely demolished.77
Prague’s late medieval Jews occupied a remarkably similar urban
space. (See map 12.2.)78 Like Nuremberg, Prague had grown up on both
 Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 309

Map 12.2. Prague during the reign of Charles IV

sides of a river. Hilltop castles on either bank of the Vltava loomed over
the early medieval settlements: Prague Castle with its suburban popu-
lation on the western side and Vyšehrad on the eastern side. A single
bridge linked the two sides of the river. In the twelfth and thirteenth cen-
turies, settlement clustered especially in the bend of the river around a
marketplace that has become today’s Old Town Square.79 By the time of
Charles IV’s coronation as King of Bohemia in 1347, Prague comprised
three legally distinct towns: Hradčany and Lesser Town on the west-
ern side of the river and Old Town (or Greater Town) on the eastern. A
phrase from the early twelfth-century chronicle of Cosmas of Prague
suggests that Jews were then living on both sides of the river, although
 310 / David C. Mengel

their earliest settlement locations in Prague remain— as in Nuremberg—

a matter of some speculation. Some probably lived within Lesser Town
and others on land that later became part of New Town. Archaeological
research has further uncovered evidence of a Jewish cemetery in the latter
place.80 By the later thirteenth century, however, Jews were concentrated
especially in the area north of Old Town Square. Two synagogues existed
there by the early fourteenth century.
But this Jewish quarter was by no means a distinct ghetto. Jewish
and Christian houses were legally distinct — residents of houses that
were legally Jewish owed no parish tithes — but one could find both on
the same street and in some cases the same block. The status of an indi-
vidual house could and sometimes did change from Christian to Jewish,
or Jewish to Christian, but only with the king’s permission. Notice also
the interspersed churches and synagogues: the Church of the Holy Spirit,
belonging to the hospital order of the Crosiers with the Red Heart, occu-
pied space between the Old Synagogue and the Old-New Synagogue.
The entire area, moreover, was divided among three Old Town par-
ishes; in 1380 the parish priests of Saint Nicholas, Saint Valentine, and
Holy Cross the Greater (which the Crosiers administered) all grumbled
that the Jewish houses within their parishes represented lost tithes.81 Al-
though gates were added before 1389 in several places to protect some
of the predominantly Jewish blocks, they seem not to have been in-
stalled before Charles IV’s death in 1378.82 As in Nuremberg, the Jews
in Prague occupied an urban area near the river that was also home to
Christian residents; on the edge of Old Town, it was still convenient
both to Prague’s main marketplace and to its only bridge. Its low eleva-
tion did make the area especially prone to flooding; in fact, the first in-
controvertible documentary evidence for a Jewish population there comes
from an account of a 1273 flood that inundated the entire Jewish quar-
ter (“per totum vicum Judaeorum”).83 The presence in the same area of
Hampays, an officially sanctioned brothel, underscored the location’s
marginality and limited desirability.84
From around the middle of the thirteenth century, Jews in Nurem-
berg and Prague lived in areas with remarkably similar characteristics.
But that changed profoundly in the fourteenth century as both cities
flourished and grew. In Prague, Charles IV’s ambitious plans shifted the
 Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 311

urban center to the south and east. His vision for New Town included
numerous new religious houses as well as two new, carefully laid out
public marketplaces that dwarfed those of both Old Town and Lesser
Town: the horse market (now Wenceslas Square) and the cattle market
(now Charles Square).85 The cattle market became the ceremonial cen-
ter of a new annual feast day arranged by the emperor as a public display
of the great collection of relics he had collected from across Europe.86
In reshaping the urban space of Prague, Charles IV proved determined,
even ruthless. Wherever existing buildings or property owners stood in
the way of his vision, they had to give way. He had the Romanesque
basilica of Saint Vitus demolished to make way for its Gothic successor.
Since New Town needed new parish churches, Charles arranged for two
new ones to be built on property that had belonged to a local monastic
community.87 The emperor required the Old Town artisans practicing
the noisiest, hottest, and smelliest crafts to move to the less densely popu-
lated New Town.88
Later he ordered that the walls between the two towns be torn
down, so that Old Town and New Town would combine as a single
Greater Town of Prague. That command had further spatial implica-
tions to which Charles IV responded decisively. For example, he confis-
cated Prague’s most notorious brothel, called Venice, which the urban
unification had shifted from Old Town’s southern margin to the center of
Prague’s Greater Town. The emperor reassigned the vacated brothel to a
charismatic priest for an experimental religious community of priests and
reformed prostitutes. When that priest attracted controversy and then
died, Charles IV quickly expelled the community and reassigned the
property to the Cistercians for a college— an uncontestably respectable
purpose for its newly central location.89 By then the emperor had al-
ready established another college, Charles College, for twelve arts mas-
ters at the university he had founded in 1348. He generously provided
the college a large Old Town house — namely, the house of Lazarus the
Jew. Charles IV seems to have confiscated the house from Lazarus or his
heirs despite the fact that Lazarus had previously enjoyed his particular
favor, itself presumably the result of the emperor’s financial relationship
with Lazarus’s family.90 The house of Lazarus, the first home of Charles
College, was located near the edge of the Jewish quarter closest to Old
 312 / David C. Mengel

Town Square. Fortunately for the Jewish community, this house was the
exception in Prague. The emperor’s plans for the city included an ex-
panded and remade urban area, but for the most part they left the Jewish
quarter alone. The city’s physical topography and built environment
together dictated the direction in which the city should expand: Prague’s
new walls on both sides of the river followed the terrain to bring the an-
cient hilltop castle of Vyšehrad into the urban fortification system. To the
good fortune of the city’s Jews, most of their houses happened not to
stand in the way.
The fourteenth-century expansion of Nuremberg, on the other hand,
left the Jewish quarter on some of the most desirable, most central prop-
erty in the city. A new city wall built in the 1320s crossed the river to sur-
round both St. Sebald Town and St. Lorenz Town. By this time, multiple
bridges spanned the narrow Pegnitz to connect the northern and south-
ern parts of Nuremberg, now unified physically as well as legally. What
the new urban conglomeration lacked was a centrally located marketplace
of adequate size, as would have been painfully clear to the city’s powerful
merchant families. One such family included the brothers Ulrich and
Conrad Stromer, both uncles of Ulman Stromer, whose family chronicle
briefly mentioned the 1349 massacre of Nuremberg Jews. The Stromers
enjoyed considerable wealth and power within Nuremberg, despite its
political vicissitudes: Ulrich served on the revolutionary town council of
1348 to 1349 that had supported Charles IV’s Wittelsbach opponent; his
brother Conrad was a member of the pro-Charles IV council that the
emperor reinstated in 1349.91 Their connections extended far beyond the
city itself. Like some of Nuremberg’s other leading merchant families,
the Stromers had intermarried with Prague’s leading families and even in-
cluded members who served at Charles IV’s own court. Together they
have been described as a “lobby” at the court for Nuremberg’s trade and
financial interests.92 Despite his association with the revolutionary coun-
cil, Ulrich in particular cultivated the favor of Charles IV. Ulrich deliv-
ered to Rome Nuremberg’s gifts for Charles IV’s imperial coronation in
1355, for example.93 It was also Ulrich who traveled to Prague to obtain
from Charles IV the notorious Market Charter of November 1349—the
document that expressed Charles IV’s grand plans for the urban space oc-
cupied by Nuremberg’s Jews.94
 Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 313

The words of the Market Charter, rarely quoted at length, express

clearly the emperor’s ambition for his second city in language grounded in
Ulrich’s intimate (and self-interested) knowledge of its urban topography.

We Charles, by God’s grace King of the Romans, for all time im-
prover of the empire, and King of Bohemia, profess and proclaim
publicly in this letter to all who see it or hear it read, that we have
considered such a defect, which is communal and has existed in the
city of Nuremberg: namely, that in this city there is no large square
[grozzer platz] on which people can gather together to buy and sell
things and otherwise profit. For this reason, when we considered that
it is for the profit and good of us, the empire, the city and the citizens
themselves, we have allowed and also with this letter do allow the
council members and the citizens of Nuremberg themselves to tear
down all the Jewish houses in Nuremberg that lie between the houses
of Franz Haller and Fritz Behaim, plus the synagogue and the four
Jewish houses that are in the middle between the two streets and
across from the house of Ulrich Stromer; from them they shall make
two squares that shall endure permanently and belong to the city in
common. And furthermore, no house shall ever again be built upon
that space, with the exception that in place of the synagogue, one
should build a church in honor of Saint Mary, our Lady, which will
lie on the larger square in the place where the citizens think best.95

In a further pair of charters issued three days later, Charles IV rewarded

Ulrich “for his loyalty to us and for the sake of the service he has done
for us and for the empire and may still do in the future.” The reward?
The house of the Jew Isaac of Scheßlitz, located in the same block as his
own house, one that was not slated for demolition by the Market Char-
ter. Within the year, Ulrich received another neighboring Jewish house
as well; a few other leading merchants of Nuremberg benefited simi-
larly.96 Unlike earlier charters, the Market Charter was not conditional
on the death or exile of the Jews who inhabited the houses it targeted
for destruction. And rather than transfer Jewish property to other indi-
viduals to enjoy as they pleased — like the separate charters that bene-
fited Ulrich and others—the Market Charter ordered the destruction of
 314 / David C. Mengel

Map 12.3. Nuremberg, detail of Jewish quarter

Jewish houses and the conversion of the underlying land into public
space. (See map 12.3.)97 This grant also explicitly superseded earlier
gifts, which led to some legal complications; remember that the bishop
of Bamberg and the Burgraves of Nuremberg had shortly before been
promised all the town’s Jewish houses as surety for receipt of the next
several years’ worth of Jewish taxes to the emperor. Nevertheless, a deal
was soon reached.98
We cannot know, of course, whether the idea for a new pair of adja-
cent market squares in the middle of Nuremberg originated with Ulrich
Stromer and his fellow citizens or the emperor himself. But Charles IV’s
support for the creation of a great public space in Nuremberg certainly
parallels his contemporary plans for the great horse and cattle markets in
Prague’s New Town. Furthermore, his strong and continued interest in
the building of a church in honor of the Virgin suggests that this stipula-
tion at least originated with him. He was present at the dedication of the
choir and the church itself in 1355 and 1358, and he endowed the church
with a considerable treasure of holy relics.99 Commercial, political, and
 Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 315

religious interests motivated Charles IV to order the creation of public

marketplaces in the centers of both Prague and Nuremberg. In Nurem-
berg, the most central site for such a market, the site favored by Charles
and the leading Nuremberg citizens whom the new emperor was eager
to please, happened to be occupied by the city’s Jewish community.
Writing about the violence against Jews in Strasbourg in 1349, a
chronicler in that city attributed the murder of Jews not to religious ani-
mosity or concerns about the Black Death, but instead to their Christian
neighbors’ greed for their property and money: their wealth, he said, was
the “poison that killed the Jews.”100 In Nuremberg, Ulrich and others did
indeed covet the houses of their Jewish neighbors. That contributed to
Jews’ insecure situation in the city. Historians have emphasized an addi-
tional factor leading to the Nuremberg massacre: namely, the inherent
legal vulnerability of medieval Jews, which Charles IV, himself still feel-
ing vulnerable in his imperial and financial situation, exploited. But I sug-
gest that the Nuremberg Jews suffered, while those of Prague did not, be-
cause of the location of their houses and synagogue within Nuremberg’s
late medieval walls. The space that they occupied itself proved poison-
ous.101 Prague’s new walls, on the other hand, extended in the opposite di-
rection and simply reinforced the marginal and relatively undesirable lo-
cation of Prague’s Jewish neighborhood— a low-lying, flood-prone urban
area also notorious for prostitution and gambling.102
Perhaps the emperor’s solicitude for Jews in Prague was not, after all,
demonstrably greater than elsewhere. Remember that Charles IV confis-
cated the house of Lazarus the Jew for his new college. More damning
still, a formulary from Charles’s chancery includes an undated document
granting an unnamed person one thousand gold florins—to be taken
from the property, goods, and furniture of Prague Jews “in the event they
should be killed or flee the city of Prague,” an ominous echo of the char-
ters the emperor issued to several German cities.103 But in Prague the em-
peror’s urban plans faced a very different problem than in Nuremberg.
His challenge there was too much open space within the new walls, not
too little. So the priority was attracting Jews (and everyone else) to New
Town, not expelling them from Old Town. It was geography that saved
Prague’s Jews from the fate of those in Nuremberg.
 316 / David C. Mengel

Judging the Emperor

A close reading of the Market Charter and greater attention to the built
environments of Prague and Nuremberg allow us better to explain the
differing fates of the Jews in the two cities. But it seems that the burden
of proof has shifted: now the point is less to explain why Nuremberg
Jews suffered than to explain why Prague Jews did not. Perhaps the
broader question of Charles IV’s general relationship with and policies
toward Jews — the subject of numerous articles and book chapters —
was never the most useful one, or at least not the one most likely to lead
to a compelling explanation. Political, financial, and other factors — es-
pecially factors related to urban planning — prove to be more salient.
Yet by attempting to explain the past more richly, to me more con-
vincingly, I seem to have invited an even harsher moral judgment on
Emperor Charles IV than that of Wolfgang von Stromer. The names
recorded in Nuremberg’s Memorbuch bring back to mind what modern
maps of medieval cities can easily obscure.

Gutlin, daughter of Nehemiah haKohen, and her young son;

Simson, son of Baruch haKohen, his wife Deiha, his son-in-law
David and his wife Lilia, daughter of Simson haKohen, his son
Yechiel haKohen and his wife Jutta.
Joel, son of Kalonymos haKohen, his wife Gutlin, his daughters
Juttlin, Merlin, Leah and his three grandsons, as well as his grandsons
Suslin and Joel, sons of Chakim, and his servant Bona, daughter of
Jacob of Wöhrd, his daughter the young Dolce with her daughters
Hannah, Miriam, and Hizlin, and her sons Lasan and Michel. . . .104

Remaking the urban space of Nuremberg contributed to the violent

massacre of at least 562 individual Jews — people whose names we still
know, husbands and wives, daughters and sons, grandchildren. Some his-
torians have felt compelled to defend Charles as a well-intentioned ruler,
albeit one of limited power — a ruler whose idealized image fits nicely
into a glossy exhibition catalog of golden-age Prague. Others have in-
stead condemned him, after more or less careful historical analysis, for
actions that contravene the moral standards of his age or our own, the
 Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 317

latter rightly shaped by the modern experience of Holocaust. My own

goal here has been neither to defend nor condemn, but to understand
and explain.105 Patron of arts, builder of Prague’s tourist-friendly cathe-
dral and numerous other churches, founder of a university, Charles IV
was also at times ruthless, even inhumane, in his commitment to re-
designing his cities. Nuremberg’s proud Frauenkirche looks out not only
over the city’s expansive main marketplace, but also over the ghosts of
massacred Jews. That the Jews of Prague did not suffer the same fate
owes little or nothing to the scruples of an enlightened medieval mon-
arch. Giving closer attention to urban space has shown that. Still, I hold
back from offering judgment, hoping instead to have painted richer and
more compelling—but also more complicated—pictures of Charles IV,
of the Jews of his two most favored cities, and of an undeniably remark-
able age for the city of Prague — if not an age of unalloyed gold. But
what real era of any living city ever was?

Notes

1. On the considerable confusion surrounding Bohemia’s experience of

the Black Death and later plague outbreaks, see my article, “A Plague on Bo-
hemia? Mapping the Black Death,” Past & Present 211, no. 1 (May 1, 2011): 3– 34.
2. Prague in the later fourteenth century meets the general criteria that
Peter Hall lays out for the golden age of a great city, although Hall himself does
not include in his massive survey any examples between the years 100 ( Rome)
and 1400 ( Florence). Peter Geoffrey Hall, Cities in Civilization ( New York: Pan-
theon Books, 1998).
3. Jiří Fajt, “Charles IV: Toward a New Imperial Style,” in Prague: The
Crown of Bohemia 1347– 1437, ed. Barbara Drake Boehm and Jiří Fajt ( New
York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005), 16.
4. Česká televize conducted this poll in 2005, in which Tomáš Garrigue
Masaryk and Václav Havel gained the second and third most votes. Hus ap-
peared in seventh place: “Největší Čech všech dob? Karel IV.!,” Česká televise,
March 19, 2005, http://www.ceskatelevize.cz/specialy/nejvetsicech/oprojektu_
napsalidetail?id=133. It would be unwise to take this poll too seriously, as Czech
voters evidently did not. Before fictional characters were disallowed, it seems
that the leading vote recipient was the fictitious Jára Cimrman — a genius of art
and science who somehow never got credit for his astonishing works: Ladka M.
Bauerova, “Czechs’ Hero? The People’s Choice Is a Joke,” New York Times,
 318 / David C. Mengel

March 26, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/25/world/europe/25iht-hero

.html?_r=1&.
5. Boehm and Fajt, eds., Prague: The Crown of Bohemia 1347– 1437; Jiří
Fajt and Barbara Drake Boehm, eds., Karel IV., císař z boží milosti: kultura a umění
za vlády posledních Lucemburků 1347– 1437 ( Prague: Správa Pražského hradu,
2006); Klára Benešovská, ed., The Story of Prague Castle ( Prague: Prague Castle
Administration, 2003); Jiří Fajt, ed., Magister Theodoricus: Court Painter to Em-
peror Charles IV ( Prague: National Gallery Prague, 1998); Jiří Fajt, ed., Court
Chapels of the High and Late Middle Ages and Their Artistic Decoration ( Praze:
Národní galerie v Praze, 2003).
6. Paul Crossley, “The Politics of Presentation: The Architecture of
Charles IV of Bohemia,” in Courts and Regions in Medieval Europe, ed. Sarah Rees
Jones, Richard Marks, and A. J. Minnis ( York: York Medieval Press, 2000),
99–172; Paul Crossley and Zoë Opačić, “Prague as a New Capital,” in Prague:
The Crown of Bohemia 1347–1437, ed. Boehm and Fajt, 59– 73.
7. Crossley, “The Politics of Presentation,” 164.
8. Crossley and Opačić, “Prague as a New Capital,” 64, building on the
foundational work of Vilém Lorenc, Nové Město pražské ( Prague: SNTL-
Nakladatelství Technické Literatury, 1973).

runy české: sborník k šedesátým narozeninám Prof. PhDr. Lenky Bobkové, CSc, ed.
9. Milena Bartlová, “Karel IV a výtvarné umění,” in Ve znamení zemí Ko-

Luděk Březina, Jana Konvičná, and Jan Zdichynec ( Prague: Casablanca, 2006),
349; see also Eva Schlotheuber, “Der Ausbau Prags zur Residenzstadt und die
Herrschaftskonzeption Karls IV.,” in Prag und die grossen Kulturzentren Europas
in der Zeit der Luxemburger (1310 –1437), ed. Markéta Jarosová, Jiří Kuthan, and
Stefan Scholz, Opera facultatis Theologiae catholicae Universitatis Carolinae
Pragensis, Historia et historia artium 8 ( Prague: Togga, 2008), 601–17. Among
the most significant works on the subject to appear in 1978 was the volume that
accompanied exhibitions in Nuremberg and Cologne: Ferdinand Seibt, ed.,
Kaiser Karl IV: Staatsmann und Mäzen ( Munich: Süddeutscher Verlag, 1978).
10. On the literature of 1978, see Peter Moraw, “Kaiser Karl IV. 1378–1978:
Ertrag und Konsequenzen eines Gedenkjahres,” in Politik, Gesellschaft, Geschichts-
schreibung: Giessener Festgabe für František Graus zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Herbert
Ludat and Rainer Christoph Schwinges (Cologne: Böhlau, 1982), 224 – 318.
11. Among the most recent is a passing, firmly critical reference in David
Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition ( New York: Norton, 2013), 201.
12. Barbara Newman, “The Passion of the Jews of Prague: The Pogrom
of 1389 and the Lessons of a Medieval Parody,” Church History 81 (2012): 1– 26.
13. One partial exception proves the point by including very little material
from Charles IV’s own reign, despite the focus of the pair of New York and
Prague exhibitions that the English and Czech versions of the article accompa-
nied: Vivian B. Mann, “The Artistic Culture of Prague Jewry,” in Prague: The
 Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 319

Crown of Bohemia 1347–1437, ed. Boehm and Fajt, 83– 89; Mann, “Židé a panov-
nický dvůr,” in Karel IV., císař z boží milosti, ed. Fajt and Boehm, 276 – 89. See also
Otto Muneles, “Die hebräische literatur auf dem Boden der ČSSR,” Judaica
Bohemiae 5 (1969): 110 –14.
14. Peter Moraw, “Zur Mittelpunktsfunktion Prags in Zeitalter Karls IV.,”
in Europa Slavica–Europa Orientalis: Festschrift für Herbert Ludat zum 70. Geburt-
stag, ed. Klaus-Detlev Grothusen and Klaus Zernack ( Berlin: Duncker & Hum-
blot, 1980), 448– 60; František Graus, “Prag als Mitte Böhmens 1346 –1421,” in
Zentralität als Problem der mittelalterlichen Stadtgeschichtsforschung, ed. Emil Mey-
nen (Cologne: Bohlau, 1979), 22– 35; Karl Bosl, “Nürnberg– Böhmen–Prag,”
Böhmen und seine Nachbarn: Gesellschaft, Politik und Kultur in Mitteleuropa ( Mu-
nich: Oldenbourg, 1976), 176 – 87; Günther Bräutigam, “Nürnberg als Kaiser-
stadt,” in Kaiser Karl IV: Staatsmann und Mäzen, ed. Seibt, 339– 43.
15. The maps of Charles IV’s itinerary in Heinz Stoob’s study of Charles
IV graphically illustrate the importance of this axis: Kaiser Karl IV. und seine Zeit
(Graz: Verlag Styria, 1990), maps 1– 4. This is especially true for the years
1355–1368, depicted in map 1.
16. Werner Schultheiß, “Kaiser Karl IV. und die Reichsstadt Nürnberg:
Streiflichter und funde zur Territorialpolitik in Ostfranken,” Mitteilungen des
Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 52 (1963): 43.
17. Wolfgang D. Fritz, ed., Die goldene Bulle Kaiser Karls IV. vom Jahre 1356,
Fontes iuris Germanici antiqui in usum scholarum ex Monumentis Germaniae
Historicis separatim editi ( Weimar: Böhlau, 1972), 87, chap. 29.
18. Jaromír Čelakovský, ed., Privilegia civitatum Pragensium, Codex juris
municipalis regni Bohemiae 1 ( Prague: Grégr, 1886), 5– 9, no. 3; 99, no. 63.
Peter Hilsch, “Die Juden in Böhmen und Mähren im Mittelalter,” in Die Juden
in den Böhmischen Ländern, ed. Ferdinand Seibt ( Munich: Oldenbourg, 1983),
22– 26. On the significance of the oft-discussed “camerae nostre servi,” see David
Abulafia, “The King and the Jews — the Jews in the Ruler’s Service,” in The Jews
of Europe in the Middle Ages (Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries), ed. Christoph Cluse,
Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 4 ( Turnhout: Bre-
pols, 2004), 45– 46; cf. Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 191– 93, 201, who translates
servi as “slaves.”
19. Alexandr Putík’s estimate of 750 Jews significantly revises the conven-
tional estimate of 4,000, which seems to have been based solely on the contem-
porary report that 3,000 Jews died in the 1389 pogrom: “On the Topography
and Demography of the Prague Jewish Town,” Judaica Bohemiae 30 – 31 ( May

Böhmischen Ländern, ed. Seibt, 106, 117; Tomáš Pěkný, Historie Židů v Čechách a
1996): 44 – 45. Cf. Wilfried Brosche, “Das Ghetto von Prag,” in Die Juden in den

na Moravě, 2d ed. ( Prague: Sefer, 2001), 387n2; 637.

20. Putík, “On the Topography and Demography of the Prague Jewish
Town,” 7– 46, esp. maps 6 and 7.
 320 / David C. Mengel

21. Čelakovský, ed., Privilegia civitatum Pragensium, 79– 85, nos. 49– 50;
Lorenc, Nové Město pražské, 97–104. This part of Prague was already home to a
large Jewish cemetery and at least a small number of Jewish inhabitants, but
their numbers seem not to have increased significantly after the foundation of
New Town. See Pěkný, Historie židů, 393, for a summary of more recent archae-
ological investigations of this area.
22. For this revolt, see especially Wolfgang von Stromer, “Die Metropole
im Aufstand gegen König Karl IV. Nürnberg zwischen Wittelsbach und Lux-
emburg, Juni 1348–September 1349,” Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der
Stadt Nürnberg 65 (1978): 55– 90.
23. On the problem of translating Kammerknecht, a medieval German
form of “servi camere regie,” into modern English in the traditional way as “serfs
of the royal chamber,” see Abulafia, “The King and the Jews,” 43– 46.
24. Regesta Imperii VIII, no. 1173, in Regesta Imperii Online, http://www
.regesta-imperii.de/regesten /8-0-0-karl-iv/nr/1349-10-02_4_0_8_0_0_1350_
1173.html; Arndt Müller, Geschichte der Juden in Nürnberg 1146–1945, Beiträge zur
Geschichte und Kultur der Stadt Nürnberg 12 ( Nürnberg: Stadtbibliothek Nürn-
berg, 1968), 32; Stromer, “Metropole im Aufstand,” 64 – 65; Werner Schultheiss,
“Der Handwerkeraufstand von 1348/49,” in Nürnberg, ed. Pfeiffer, 74.
25. Margarete Kühn, ed., Dokumente zur Geschichte des Deutschen Reiches und
seiner Verfassung: 1349, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Constitutiones et acta
publica imperatorum et regum 9 (Hannover: Hahn, 1983), 481– 82, nos. 616–18.
26. “Anno domini 1349 di juden hi waren gesessen zu mittelst auf dem platz,
gingen hewser auf und ab, und do unser frawen kapellen stet gin auch ain gass auf
und ab und hinter unser frawen kirchen; und hetten auch hewser am Zotenperg.
di juden vurden verprant an sant Niclos abent anno alz vor geschriben stet.” Karl
Hege, ed., “Ulman Stromer’s ‘Püchel von meim geslechet und von abentewr,’” in
Die Chroniken der deutschen Städte vom 14. bis ins 16. Jahrhundert (Leipzig: Hirzel,
1862), 1:25.
27. Isaac ben Samuel of Meiningen, Das Martyrologium des Nürnberger
Memorbuches: Im Auftrage der Historischen Commission für Geschichte der Juden in
Deutschland, ed. Siegmund Salfeld (Berlin: L. Simion, 1898), 61– 65, 219– 30;
Rainer Barzen, “Das Nürnberger Memorbuch. Eine Einführung,” in Corpus der
Quellen zur Geschichte der Juden im spätmittelalterlichen Reich, ed. Alfred Haverkamp
and Jörg R. Müller ( Trier: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur
Mainz, 2011), http://www.medieval-ashkenaz.org/NM01/einleitung.html. This
web-based project’s edition of the Memorbuch currently includes the entries up
to 1347.
28. Müller, Geschichte der Juden in Nürnberg, 35; Günter Heinz Seidl, “Die
Denkmäler des mittelalterlichen Jüdischen Friedhofs in Nürnberg,” Mitteilungen
des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 70 (1983): 43– 51; Karl Kohn, “Die
Lage des Nürnberger Judenfriedhofs om Mittelalter,” Mitteilungen des Vereins für
 Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 321

Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 70 (1983): 13– 27. A photograph of the repurposed
gravestones appears in Herbert Lehnert et al., Juden in Nürnberg: Geschichte der
Jüdischen Mitbürger vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart ( Nurnberg: Tümmels,
1993), 7.
29. Müller, Geschichte der Juden in Nürnberg, 34; Regesta Imperii VIII, no.
1335, in Regesta Imperii Online, http://www.regesta-imperii.de/id/1350-10-12_
1_0_8_0_0_1524_1335.
30. Kühn, Dokumente zur Geschichte, 481, no. 616.
31. Klaus Winands and Hasso Breuer, “Aachen–Nürnberg–Prag. Eine Mis-
zelle zur Architekturrezeption unter Karl IV.,” in Architektur und Kunst im Abend-
land: Festschrift zur Vollendung des 65. Lebensjahres von Günter Urban, ed. Michael
Jansen and Klaus Winands (Rome: Herder, 1992), 168– 70; Paul Crossley, “Our
Lady in Nuremberg, All Saints Chapel in Prague, and the High Choir of Prague
Cathedral,” in Prague and Bohemia: Medieval Art, Architecture, and Cultural Exchange
in Central Europe, ed. Zoë Opači (Leeds, UK: Maney, 2009), 64 – 80.
32. One Jew was admitted to the city as early as February 1350— in ex-
change for an exorbitant fee. Müller, Geschichte der Juden in Nürnberg, 38.
33. Isaac ben Samuel of Meiningen, Das Martyrologium des Nürnberger
Memorbuches, ed. Salfeld, 219– 20. I am grateful to Katja Vehlow, who corrected
my translation of the edition’s German translation by comparing it to the He-
brew. I have omitted the honorific titles —“Rabbi” or “R.” for the adult males
and “Lady” for adult females — to avoid misperceptions. Barzen, “Nürnberger
Memorbuch.”
34. Nor, of course, was it a daily experience, as Robert Chazan points out:
“These episodes of significant anti-Jewish violence should not, however, give
rise to a pervasive sense of medieval European Jews living their lives under the
threat of daily danger to life and limb. These periods of wide-ranging anti-Jewish
violence represent the exception rather than the rule for medieval Jews. In be-
tween these explosions of violence, Jews could and did live normal lives. Only in
this way can we understand the ongoing Jewish decisions to remain in western
Christendom and the capacity to foster a burgeoning Jewish population and a
rich Jewish culture in medieval Europe.” Reassessing Jewish Life in Medieval Eu-
rope ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 182.
35. Alfred Haverkamp, “Die Judenverfolgungen zur Zeit des Schwarzen
Todes im Gesellschaftsgefüge deutscher Städte,” 1981, reprinted in Verfassung,
Kultur, Lebensform: Beiträge Zur Italienischen, Deutschen und jüdischen Geschichte
im europäischen Mittelalter, dem Autor zur Vollendung des 60. Lebensjahres, ed. Fried-
helm Burgard, Alfred Heit, and Michael Matheus (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern,
1997), 232– 36; Christoph Cluse, “Zur Chronologie der Verfolugungen zur Zeit
des ‘Schwarzen Todes’,” in Geschichte der Juden im Mittelalter von der Nordsee bis zu
den Südalpen: Kommentiertes Kartenwerk, vol. 1, Forschungen zur Geschichte der Juden,
ed. Alfred Haverkamp, Abteilung A, Abhandlungen 14 (Hannover: Hahnsche
 322 / David C. Mengel

Buchhandlung, 2002), 223– 42. Cf. Karl Heinz Burmeister, Der Schwarze Tod:
Die Judenverfolgungen anlässlich der Pest von 1348/49 (Göppingen: Jüdisches Mu-
seum, 1999).
36. Müller, Geschichte der Juden in Nürnberg, 31; Mengel, “A Plague on Bo-
hemia?,” 32.
37. Jörg R. Müller divides the high- and late-medieval persecutions and
expulsions of Jews in this region ( between the North Sea and the southern Alps)
into six periods: 1000 –1200; 1201–1250; 1251–1300; 1301–1350; 1351–1450;
and 1451–1520: “Judenverfolgungen und -vertreibungen zwischen Nordsee und
Südalpen im hohen und späten Mittelalter,” in Geschichte der Juden im Mittelalter
von der Nordsee bis zu den Südalpen, ed. Haverkamp, 1:189– 222.
38. Haverkamp, “Judenverfolgungen,” 224 – 26; Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism,
201.
39. R. Judah b. Asher (d. 1349), cited in Jörg R. Müller, “Ereẓ gezerah —
‘Land of Persecution’: Pogroms against the Jews in the Regnum Teutonicum
from c. 1280 to 1350,” in The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages, ed. Cluse, 246.
Müller’s map (252– 53) of anti-Jewish violence in central Europe is based on
maps C.4.3 and C.4.4 in Alfred Haverkamp, ed., Geschichte der Juden im Mittelal-
ter von der Nordsee bis zu den Südalpen, 3 vols. ( Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhand-
lung, 2002).
40. Barzen, “Nürnberger Memorbuch.”
41. Müller, Geschichte der Juden in Nürnberg, 22– 24; Ernst Daniel Gold-
schmidt, “Nürnberg,” in Germania Judaica, vol. 2, Von 1238 bis zur Mitte des 14.
Jahrhunderts, ed. Zvi Avneri, Veröffentlichung des Leo Baeck Instituts ( Tübin-

42. Pěkný, Historie Židů v Čechách a Na Moravě, 30 – 36. The distinction in

gen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1968), 598– 99.

fact seems as much geographic as political: of twenty-four towns in which sig-

nificant Jewish populations lived in the later Middle Ages, Alfred Haverkamp
notes that Jews in only five were spared the 1349 persecutions: Regensburg,
Prague, Vienna, Wiener-Neustadt, and Graz. All were in the eastern parts of
the empire, but only Prague was ruled by the king of Bohemia. Haverkamp,
“The Jewish Quarters in German Towns during the Late Middle Ages,” in In
and Out of the Ghetto: Jewish–Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern
Germany, ed. R. Po-chia Hsia and Hartmut Lehmann ( Washington, DC: Ger-
man Historical Institute, 1995), 17, 19.
43. Burmeister, Schwarze Tod, 16 –17; Stromer, “Metropole im Aufstand,”
82; František Graus, Pest–Geissler–Judenmorde: Das 14. Jahrhundert als Krisenzeit
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987), 234 – 36.
44. Haverkamp, “Judenverfolgungen,” 274 – 75; Alfred Haverkamp, “Stu-
dien zu den Beziehungen zwischen Erzbishof Balduin von Trier und König Karl
IV,” 1978, reprinted in Verfassung, Kultur, Lebensform, ed. Burgard et al., 97;
Stromer, “Metropole im Aufstand,” 82– 83.
 Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 323

45. Graus, Pest–Geissler–Judenmorde, 234.

46. “And, in the times of which we are writing, the Pope Clement VI and
the Emperor Charles IV were both favourable to the Jews, and endeavoured,
but in vain, to prevent their persecution: for when once the bloodhounds of
persecution — Avarice, Ignorance, and Hatred — are let loose, nothing short of
the power of Heaven itself can restrain them.” William Henry Lowe, The Mem-
orbook of Nurnberg Containing the Names of the Jews Martyred in That City in the
Year 5109, 1349 A.D.: From the Unique Manuscript Preserved in the University Li-
brary, Cambridge, and Marked “Add. 1506” ( London: Jewish Chronicle Office,
1881), 29. Lowe’s generous portrayal of the medieval emperor’s intentions may,
however, have been shaped somewhat by his contemporary and even wishful
concerns; in a note on the same page, he thanks “the Emperor and Crown
Prince of Germany” for “doing their best to put a stop to the disgraceful out-
rages, which are being perpetrated against the Jews in Germany.”
47. See, e.g., Georg Caro, Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Juden im Mitte-
lalter und der Neuzeit, vol. 2, Spätere Mittelalter (Leipzig: Gustav Fock, 1920), 217.
48. Haverkamp, “Judenverfolgungen,” 223– 31, 259– 68.
49. Haverkamp, “Studien zu den Beziehungen,” 81– 85, 92– 97.
50. J. Friedrich Battenberg, “Des Kaisers Kammerknechte. Gedanken zur
Rechtlich-sozialen Situation der Juden in Spätmittelalter und früher Neuzeit,”
Historische Zeitschrift 245 (1987): 563– 74.
51. For example, in 1313 Emperor Henry VII had given the city’s imperial
mayor (Schultheiß) responsibility to protect the city’s Jews and the right to admit
new Jewish residents, for a fee, but had not abdicated his own right to tax Jews.
Müller, Geschichte der Juden in Nürnberg, 25– 26.
52. At the time, the Hohenzollern brothers Johan II (d. 1357) and Al-
brecht (d. 1361) exercised this noble office jointly. Günther Schuhmann, “Jo-
hann II.,” in Neue Deutsche Biographie 10 (1974): 504, http://www.deutsche-bi-
ographie.de/pnd134291077.html.
53. Regesta Imperii VIII, no. 967, in Regesta Imperii Online, http://www
.regesta-imperii.de/id/1349-05-28_2_0_8_0_0_1133_967; Müller, Geschichte der
Juden in Nürnberg, 31.
54. Goldschmidt, “Nürnberg,” 601.
55. Of this, he was obliged to remit 100 pounds yearly to Ulrich of Hanau,
presumably another (smaller) creditor. Regesta Imperii VIII, no. 6604, in Re-
gesta Imperii Online, http://www.regesta-imperii.de/id/1349-06-23_1_0_8_0_0_
8076_6604.
56. Müller, Geschichte der Juden in Nürnberg, 32.
57. For a dated list, see Haverkamp, “Judenverfolgungen,” 232– 36.
58. Müller, Geschichte der Juden in Nürnberg, 32. This account by Müller,
based on archival sources, has not been fully integrated into the scholarship. In
part for that reason, accounts of the roles of the bishop of Bamberg and the
 324 / David C. Mengel

Burgraves of Nuremberg in subsequent disputes over the ownership of Jewish

property in Nuremberg have not always been clear: e.g., Stromer, “Metropole
im Aufstand,” 80 – 81n84.
59. “Wann die Juden daselbst um nehst werden geslagen.” Regesta Imperii
VIII, no. 1045, in Regesta Imperii Online, http://www.regesta-imperii.de/id/1349
-06-27_2_0_8_0_0_1216_1045; Müller, Geschichte der Juden in Nürnberg, 32.
60. Graus, Pest–Geissler–Judenmorde, 210; Haverkamp, “Judenverfolgun-
gen,” 280; Hana Karasová, “Židé v době Karla IV.,” in Otec Vlasti 1316–1378, ed.
Jaroslav V. Polc ( Rome: Velehrad – Křes anská Akademie, 1980), 176 – 77; Eva
Doležalová, “Pražská Židovská obec ve středověku a její mezinárodní kontakty,”
in Od knížat ke králům: sborník u příležitosti 60. narozenin Josefa Žemličky, ed. Eva
Doležalová and Robert Šimůnek ( Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 2007),
352; Müller, Geschichte der Juden in Nürnberg, 31.
61. Willehad Paul Eckert, “Die Juden im Zeitalter Karls IV,” in Kaiser Karl
IV: Staatsmann und Mäzen, ed. Seibt, 130, echoing with approval the judgment
of Caro, Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, vol. 2.
62. “Als ihr berufener Schutzherr wäre er schon vor anderen schuldig
durch pflichtwidriges Unterlassen. Durch die zitierten Formulierungen aber er-
weist er sich für die Endlösung im Elsaß, in Frankfurt und Nürnberg als der
hauptverantwortliche Schreibtischtäter.” Stromer, “Metropole im Aufstand,” 83.
63. Ibid.; Michael Toch, Die Juden im mittelalterlichen Reich, Enzyklopädie
Deutscher Geschichte 44 ( München: Oldenbourg, 1998), 118.
64. See, e.g., Burmeister, Schwarze Tod, 22– 24; Ruth Bork, “Zur Politik der
Zentralgewalt gegenüber den Juden im Kampf Ludwigs des Bayern um das
Reichsrecht und Karls IV um die Durchsetzung des Königtums,” in Karl IV:
Politik und Ideologie, ed. Evamaria Engel ( Weimar: Böhlau, 1982), 70 – 73, at 73:
“Karl IV. gab die Juden preis. Er verzichtete auf seine Schutzfunktion um des
erhofften Gewinnes willen und nutzte darüber hinaus die Situation während der
Anfänge seiner Herrschaft aus, um Anhänger zu werben. So spekulierte er auf
Pogrome, begünstigte und förderte sie.”
65. Graus, Pest–Geissler–Judenmorde, 240; see similar comments by Wil-
helm Hanisch, “Die Luxemburger und die Juden,” in Die Juden in den Böhmis-
chen Ländern, ed. Seibt, 27– 28.
66. Müller, “Ereẓ gezerah —‘Land of Persecution’,” 257; see also Burmeis-
ter, Schwarze Tod, 17; Toch, Die Juden im mittelalterlichen Reich, 63; and Jeffrey F.
Hamburger, introduction to “Nürnberg —Ein Zentrum Karolinischer Macht
und Kunstpolitik im Reich,” in Kunst als Herrschaftsinstrument. Böhmen und das
Heilige Römische Reich unter den Luxemburgern im Europäischen Kontext, ed. Jiří
Fajt and Andrea Langer ( Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009), 194 – 95.
67. Karl Bosl, “Die Anfänge der Stadt unter den Saliern,” in Nürnberg, ed.
Pfeiffer, 15–16; Fritz Schnelbögl, “Topographische Entwicklung Nürnbergs,” in
Nürnberg, ed. Pfeiffer, 54 – 55; Birgit Friedel, “Spuren Der Frühesten Stadten-
 Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 325

twicklung,” in . . . Nicht eine einzige Stadt, sondern eine ganze Welt . . . Nürnberg:
Archäologie und Kulturgeschichte: 1050 – 2000, 950 Jahre Nürnberg, ed. Birgit Friedel
and Claudia Frieser ( Büchenbach: Verlag Dr. Faustus, 1999), 48– 51.
68. Based on maps in David Nicholas, The Later Medieval City 1300 –1500
( London: Longman, 1997), 420 – 21; Schnelbögl, “Topographische Entwick-
lung Nürnbergs,” 56 – 57; Claudia Frieser and Birgit Friedel, “. . . di Juden hi
waren gesessen zu Mittelst auf dem Platz . . . Die ersten Nürnberger Juden und
ihre Siedlung bis 1296,” in . . . Nicht eine einzige Stadt, sondern eine ganze Welt . . .
Nürnberg, ed. Friedel and Frieser, 57; Seidl, “Denkmäler des mittelalterlichen
Jüdischen Friedhofs in Nürnberg,” abb. 1.
69. Schnelbögl, “Topographische Entwicklung Nürnbergs,” 55– 60; Müller,
Geschichte der Juden in Nürnberg, 14; Frieser and Friedel, “. . . di Juden hi waren
gesessen zu Mittelst auf dem Platz . . . ,” 52– 53.
70. Müller, Geschichte der Juden in Nürnberg, 14 –15.
71. Ibid., 15–16.
72. Haverkamp, “Jewish Quarters in German Towns,” 26 – 27.
73. Frieser and Friedel, “. . . di Juden hi waren gesessen zu Mittelst auf
dem Platz . . . ,” 57– 70.
74. Ibid., 56 – 59.
75. The chapel was moved in 1313 to a location north of St. Sebald: ibid.,
53, 56 – 57; Schnelbögl, “Topographische Entwicklung Nürnbergs,” 58.
76. Frieser and Friedel, “. . . di Juden hi waren gesessen zu Mittelst auf
dem Platz . . . ,” 54.
77. Ibid., 52.
78. Detail of Jewish quarter, ca. 1380s, after Putík, “On the Topography
and Demography of the Prague Jewish Town,” maps 4 – 7.
79. Dobroslav Líbal, “Staré Město v raném středověku,” in Staré Město
Pražské: Architektonický a Urbanistický Vývoj, ed. Dobroslav Líbal and Jan Muk
( Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové Noviny, 1996), 17– 63; Dobroslav Líbal, “Raně
Gotické Staré Město a doba Václava II.,” in Staré Město Pražské, ed. Líbal and
Muk, 65–119.
80. Cosmas, The Chronicle of the Czechs, trans. Lisa Wolverton ( Washing-
ton, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 174; Hana Volavková,
Židovské Město Prazské ( Prague: Sportovní a Turistiché Nakladatelství, 1959),
8– 9; Hana Volavková and Pavel Bělina, The Lost Jewish Town of Prague, trans.

Čechách a na Moravě, 15–16; Milada Vilímková et al., Die Prager Judenstadt

Gita Zbavitelová ( Prague: Litomysl Paseka, 2004), 8; Pěkný, Historie Židů v

( Prague: Aventinum, 1990); Brosche, “Ghetto von Prag,” 87– 88.

81. Putík, “On the Topography and Demography of the Prague Jewish
Town,” 12–16.
82. Ibid., 18– 20. Putík’s map 7 indicates the likely locations of the several
gates.
 326 / David C. Mengel

83. Ibid., 7–11.

84. David C. Mengel, “From Venice to Jerusalem and Beyond: Milíč of
Kroměříž and the Topography of Prostitution in Fourteenth-Century Prague,”
Speculum 79 (2004): 414, 424 – 27.
85. For Charles IV’s plans for New Town, see Lorenc, Nové Město Pražské,
esp. 41– 57.
86. Franz Machilek, “Privatfrömmigkeit und Staatsfrömmigkeit,” in Kaiser
Karl IV: Staatsmann und Mäzen, ed. Seibt, 93.
87. In exchange for their land, the Crosiers with the Red Star were granted
patronage over the two new parishes of Saint Henry and Saint Stephen. Anna
Petitova-Bénoliel, L’Eglise à Prague sous la dynastie des Luxembourg (1310 – 1419).
Middeleeuwse Studies en Bronnen 52 ( Hilversum: Verloren, 1996), 118–19.
88. The emperor seems also to have envisioned New Town as Prague’s new
artisanal center, or at least a center for some of the noisiest, hottest, and smelliest
crafts — not to mention those most at risk of fire. Prague’s malters, dryers (of
malt), brewers, wagon makers, tinsmiths, and other smiths were ordered to move
their operations to New Town within a year of the city’s foundation. At least
some of these occupations were resented or perhaps even prohibited in Old
Town, so this decision allowed artisans such as those “die mit dem hamer smiden
vnd kloppen” to practice their crafts freely in New Town. Čelakovský, ed., Privi-
legia civitatum Pragensium, 75, no. 48.
89. Mengel, “From Venice to Jerusalem and Beyond,” 440.
90. Michal Svatoš, ed., Dějiny univerzity Karlovy 1: 1347/48–1622 ( Prague:
Karolinum, 1995), 42– 43; Putík, “On the Topography and Demography of the
Prague Jewish Town,” 33– 35; Doležalová, “Pražská Židovská obec,” 352.
91. Stromer, “Metropole im Aufstand,” 57– 58.
92. Wolfgang von Stromer, “Der kaiserliche Kaufmann —Wirtschaftspoli-
tik unter Karl IV.,” in Kaiser Karl IV: Staatsmann und Mäzen, ed. Seibt, 64 – 66;
Stromer, “Metropole im Aufstand,” 67. On the Nuremberg merchant families,
see Wolfgang von Stromer, Die Nürnberger Handelsgesellschaft Gruber, Podmer,
Stromer im 15. Jahrhundert, Nürnberger Forschungen 7 ( Nürnberg: Verein für
Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg, 1963).
93. Stromer, “Kaiserliche Kaufmann,” 65.
94. Stromer, “Metropole im Aufstand,” 76 – 77.
95. Kühn, ed., Dokumente zur Geschichte, 481, no. 616: “Wir Karl von gots
gnaden Romischer kung ze allen zeiten merer des Reichs und kung ze Beheim
voriehen und tun kunt offenlich an disem brief allen den, di in sehent oder horent
lesen, daz wir angesehen haben solchen gebrechen, der gemeinlich ist untz her
gewesen in der stat ze Nürnberg, bei namen dar an, daz in der selben stat kein
grozzer platz nicht enist, dar an di leut gemeinlichen an gedienge kaufen und
vorkaufen mügen und andirr iren nutz schaffen. Dar umb wann wir bedacht
haben, daz es uns, dem Reich, der stat und den burg(er)en da selbest nutz und gut
 Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space \ 327

ist, haben wir den ratleuten und den burg(er)en da selbest ze Nuremberg irlaubet
und erlauben auch mit disem brief, daz si alle die Judenhauser zu Nuremberg, di
gelegen sint zwischen Frantzen des Hallers und Fritzzen des Beheims heuser, und
dar zu di Judenschul und di vier Judenheuser, di zu mittelst zwischen den zwein
strazzen un(d) gegen Ulriches des Stromayrs haus gelegen sint, brechen mügen
und sullen und darauz zwene pletzze machen, dy ewiclichen also bleiben und zu
der stat gemeintlich gehoren, und also daz furbaz nymmermer dar uf kein haus sol
gemachet werden, auzgenumen daz man aus der Judenschul sol machen eine
kirchen in sant Marien ere unser frawen und di legen uf den grozzern platz an ain
sulch stat, da ez die burger aller peste dunket.”
96. The language of the first grant suggests that Isaac was no longer alive,
or at least no longer in possession in the house, at the time of the grant: ibid., no.
617–18, pp. 481– 82; Stromer, “Metropole im Aufstand,” 81, esp. note 85; An-
dreas Würfel, Historische Nachrichten von der Juden-Gemeinde welche ehehin in der
Reichsstadt Nürnberg angericht gewesen aber Ao. 1499 ausgeschaffet worden ( Nürn-
berg: Georg Peter Monath, 1755), 130 – 36. According to Kohn’s reconstruction,
Ulrich Stromer received the Jewish houses Kohn lists as C and B; if he also ob-
tained A ( later joined with B), his newly acquired houses would have connected
with his own corner property on the fruit market. “Das Hochmittelalterliche Ju-
denviertel Nürnbergs. Eine Topographische Rekonstruktion,” Mitteilungen des
Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 65 (1978): 89; Müller, Geschichte der Juden
in Nürnberg, 32– 35.
97. Based on map in Seidl, “Denkmäler des mittelalterlichen Jüdischen
Friedhofs in Nürnberg,” abb. 1.
98. The city agreed to pay 1,600 gulden, half to the bishop and half to the
Burgraves, a very small sum in relation to what they had been promised Müller,
Geschichte der Juden in Nürnberg, 33– 34.
99. Günther Bräutigam, “Die bildende Kunst zur Zeit der Luxemberger,”
in Nürnberg, ed. Pfeiffer, 107; Machilek, “Privatfrömmigkeit und Staatsfröm-
migkeit,” 99–100; Gerd Zimmerman, “Die Verehrung der böhmischen Heiligen
im mittelalterlichen Bistum Bamberg,” Bericht des historischen Vereins für die Pflege
der Geschichte des ehemaligen Fürstbistums Bamberg 100 (1964): 226 – 29.
100. “Was man den Juden schuldig was daz wart alles wette unde wurdent
alle pfant un briefe die sie hettent uber schulde wider geben. Daz bar gut daz su
hettent, daz nam der rot, un teiletes under die antwerg noch mar[g]tzal. Daz was
ouch die vergift, die die Juden dote.” Fritsche Closener and Adam Walther Stro-
bel, Strassburgische Chronik (Strasbourg: Literarischer Verein, 1842), 107; see also
Ferdinand Seibt, Karl IV: Ein Kaiser in Europa, 1346–1378 (1978; repr. Munich:
DTV, 1994), 198.
101. In a partial parallel, Ruprecht II of the Palatinate expelled Jews from his
territory in 1390 and assigned the property of Heidelberg Jews to the town’s
young, struggling university; the synagogue became a university chapel dedicated
 328 / David C. Mengel

to the Virgin Mary. Jürgen Miethke, “The University of Heidelberg and the Jews:
Founding and Financing the Needs of a New University,” in Crossing Boundaries at
Medieval Universities, ed. Spencer E Young (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 317– 39.
102. Only at the turn of the twentieth century did that change, when Prague’s
Jewish town was destroyed in a process that was welcomed by many of its Jewish
inhabitants and owed as much to nineteenth-century liberalism and to the model
of Baron Haussmann as to the legacy of medieval anti-Jewish violence. Cathleen
M. Giustino, Tearing Down Prague’s Jewish Town: Ghetto Clearance and the Legacy of
Middle-class Ethnic Politics around 1900 ( Boulder, CO: East Europe Monographs,
2003). Floodwaters continued to threaten this area more than others of Prague
and reached the Old-New Synagogue again as recently as 2002. Pavla Státníková,
Historie povodní v Praze v grafice, malbě a fotografii ze sbírek Muzea hlavního města
Prahy ( Prague: Muzeum hlavního města Prahy, 2001); Peter S. Green, “As
Prague Dries, Flood Wall Stands Tall as a Hero,” New York Times, August 18,
2002, http://www.nytimes.com /2002/08/18/world/as-prague-dries-flood-wall-
stands-tall-as-a-hero.html.
103. “condicione tali, quod quam primum judei dicte civitatis quocunque
casu seu eventu contrario perempti fuerint, aut de ipsa Pragensi civitate fugerint.”
Ferdinand Tadra, ed., Cancellaria Caroli IV = Summa Cancellariae (Prague, 1895),
73– 74, no. 103, http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/002044159; see also Graus,
Pest–Geissler–Judenmorde, 235– 36.
104. See note 34 above.
105. On empathy toward and condemnation of historical subjects, see
Richard Kieckhefer, “Empathy for the Oppressor,” in Studies on Medieval Em-
pathies, ed. Karl F. Morrison and Rudolph M. Bell, Disputatio 25 ( Turnhout:
Brepols, 2013), 317– 36.
 Thirteen

I n P r a i s e o f Fa i t h f u l Wo m e n
Count Robert of Flanders’s Defense of Beguines against
the Clementine Decree Cum de quibusdam mulieribus
(ca. 1318–1320)

wa l t e r s i m o n s

The Council of Vienne’s legislation condemning beghards and beguines in

1312 marked a turning point in the history of the lay religious movement,
after which ecclesiastical authority often regarded these men and women
with deep suspicion. Following the promulgation of the council’s decrees
in 1317, bishops in many parts of northern Europe launched extensive
inquiries against beghards and beguines, leading to stricter regulation of
their way of life and sometimes to suppression of their communities. In-
deed, as John Van Engen has shown in his magisterial Sisters and Brothers of
the Common Life, the Modern Devout who emerged from Geert Groote’s
teachings in the second half of the fourteenth century initially endured
hostile scrutiny and canonical challenges because of the enduring legacy of
the Vienne decrees against lay religious without an approved rule.1
The genesis of the Vienne legislation and its reception among con-
temporaries is actually a more complex, multilayered story than this brief
introduction suggests. I shall return to the ongoing historical debate2 at
greater length in another contribution. Here, I should like to introduce a

331
 332 / Walter Simons

new piece of evidence taken from the archives of the beguinage of Our
Lady of Ter Hooie in Ghent. The beguine community at Ter Hooie sur-
vived those troubled times in no small part because of this document and
preserved it in its archives until the closure of the beguinage seven cen-
turies later, after the death of the last beguines, Hermina Hoogewijs
(2005) and Marcella Van Hoecke (2008).3 It is a petition directed by Rob-
ert of Béthune, count of Flanders from 1305 until 1322, to Pope John
XXII (1316–1334), defending the beguines of Flanders against the coun-
cil’s accusations and requesting that they be allowed to continue their way
of life. At that time, the county of Flanders was home to more than fifty
beguinages housing, most probably, several thousand women. Beguine
way of life may well have been the single most popular form of religious
life for women in these lands.4 Speaking eloquently of the count’s strong
belief in the women’s piety and social value, the document is the only
known record of a secular ruler praising beguines in this time of crisis.

The Council of Vienne

(October 16, 1311 – May 6, 1312)

As the proceedings of the council are largely lost, we are poorly informed
of the ways in which it reached its conclusions and do not even know
with certainty its exact decisions, since Pope Clement V chose to re-
work the decrees into a decretal collection but died before he could do
so, on April 20, 1314. They were revised again by his successor, Pope
John XXII, who published them only in 1317 as the Clementinae.5 The
council’s main concerns lay with the Templars, the recovery of the Holy
Land, and reform of the Church. Fragmentary evidence further suggests
that within the context of the latter goal, the central committee charged
with the redaction of the decrees held “long discussions on the beg-
hards,”6 resulting in the decree Ad nostrum (number 28 of the coun-
cil’s constitutions, later known as Clementinae 5.3.3). In the final version
promulgated by John XXII, this decree condemns “an abominable sect
of wicked men, called beghards, and of faithless women, commonly
called beguines, [that] sprung up in the realm of Germany” and then
goes on to list eight errors on the concept of spiritual perfection allegedly
spread by the sect and expressed in terms partially inspired by the errors
 In Praise of Faithful Women \ 333

theologians had found two years earlier in the work of Marguerite

Porete, condemned as a heretic in Paris on May 31, 1310.7 It ends with an
order for “bishops and inquisitors” of the “dioceses where beghards and
such beguines are living” to investigate “their life, behavior, and opinions
on the articles of faith and the sacraments of the Church, and to impose
due punishment on those found guilty.”8 Jacqueline Brown, writing as
Jacqueline Tarrant, has convincingly argued that the original decree ap-
proved at Vienne, forming the basis of Ad nostrum, referred to beghards
only, and that beguines were added as members of this putative sect dur-
ing the later revision of the decree.9
In a similar change made after the council, a brief resolution at Vienne
to prohibit beguines from living together in convents, while allowing a be-
guine to provide for and lodge a daughter or niece in her private house,10
was expanded into the papal decree Cum de quibusdam mulieribus (number
16 of the council’s constitutions, known as Clementinae 3.11.1). It states:

Certain women, commonly called beguines, who . . . promise obedi-

ence to no one, nor renounce property, nor live in accordance with
an approved rule, can in no way be considered religious although
they wear a certain habit that is called that of beguines. . . . We have
heard from a reliable source that there are some beguines who seem
to be led by a particular insanity, arguing and preaching on the
Holy Trinity and the divine essence, and express opinions contrary
to the Catholic faith on the articles of faith and the sacraments; de-
ceiving simple people, they lead them to various errors while creat-
ing and producing many other causes for danger to the soul under
the cover of holiness. After receiving many ominous reports from
these and other sources about their reputation and justly regard-
ing them suspicious, we with the approval of the sacred council de-
clare their way of life [statum] perpetually prohibited and forever
abolished from the Church of God.

However, at the end of the decree the pope then affirms that,

Of course by what precedes we in no way intend to prohibit that,

if there are any faithful women living virtuously in their dwellings
[ hospitiis], whether they promise chastity or not, who wish to do
 334 / Walter Simons

penance and serve the Lord of hosts in a spirit of humility, they be

allowed to do so in the manner inspired by the Lord.11

Both decrees obviously spelled trouble for beguines, but the meas-
ures thereby put in place against them diverged in severity and contained
some ambiguity, no doubt because they were proposed by different sub-
committees. Ad nostrum was part of a series of conciliar canons (num-
bers 24 – 28) regarding inquisitorial and missionary work among non-
Christians. Having identified beghards (and eventually also beguines) in
Germany as the main proponents of the so-called heresy of the Free
Spirit, the canon prescribed immediate and concerted action to fight
their doctrine. Cum de quibusdam mulieribus, on the other hand, emerged
from discussions about “religious” (monastic) life that found expression
in canons dealing with such diverse subjects as the usus pauper contro-
versy within the Franciscan order, conflicts between secular clergy and
Mendicants regarding their apostolate, and the visitation of nunneries
(canons 2– 4, 10 –11, 13– 20). It decided that beguines did not qualify as
religious and should not make claims to religious status. Clarifying the
original, somewhat cryptic, conciliar decree that forbade beguines from
living in “convents,” it now declared their “way of life” prohibited, thus
in essence reiterating canon 13 of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and
canon 23 of the Second Council of Lyons (1274), which had banned all
religious orders not following a rule previously approved.12 Ad nostrum
pronounced on a matter of orthodoxy; Cum de quibusdam mulieribus
evoked the large body of canon law on religious persons and institutions.
Still, while the two decrees pertained to different issues and appealed
to different sets of rules, they evidently overlapped, if only because be-
guines were targeted as potential heretics in the first and as pseudo-
religious in the second. In addition, Cum de quibusdam mulieribus spoke of
certain beguines who, seemingly led by madness, ventured to preach on
the mysteries of the Trinity and divine essence, committing doctrinal er-
rors. This broadside at beguine spirituality did not refer to the heresy of
the Free Spirit or the statements condemned as heretical in Ad nostrum and
treated the women with disdain rather than anger or horror. Nonetheless,
it raised the issue of doctrinal deviance quite directly. Ambiguity arose
from the qualification that only some beguines were guilty of such folly,
 In Praise of Faithful Women \ 335

and especially from the final clause granting faithful women permission to
lead a humble life of service to God “in the manner inspired by the Lord.”
As mentioned above, the official promulgation of the council decrees
did not occur until November 1, 1317, when Pope John XXII sent the
final text of the Clementinae to the universities. However, in the interven-
ing five-year period, news of the decrees unquestionably filtered through
to various echelons of the Church and perhaps even to the wider commu-
nity. After all, bishops and theologians attending the council must have
left with some knowledge of the decisions made and with summary notes
of those that directly concerned them, including policies on lay religious.
Canon lawyers and secretaries involved in the revisions under Pope
Clement V and in the first year of John XXI’s pontificate were other po-
tential sources of information. And, finally, there had in fact been an oral
promulgation: Pope Clement had his version of the decrees read in con-
sistory at Monteux (near Carpentras) on March 21, 1314, anticipating the
written dissemination aborted by the pope’s death a month later.
If complete and accurate information about the imminent decrees
might be wanting, rumors evidently swirled throughout the Low Coun-
tries, home of a great many beguine communities. In a will written on
June 11, 1316, seventeen months before the official promulgation, Giles
of Repen, chaplain of Saint Maternus in Tongeren (in the imperial di-
ocese of Liège), sympathized with the fears of the local beguines but also
made provisions in case of their suppression. Donating a piece of land to
the beguinage of Saint Catherine’s in Tongeren for the celebration of an-
niversary services for himself and members of his family, he added that,
“should, God forbid, the said beguinage be destroyed by the Roman
Curia, it shall cede the land to the hospital of the Eleven Thousand Vir-
gins that is being built in the beguinage, for use of the poor in that hospi-
tal.”13 Meanwhile beguines of Aalst and Dendermonde complained to
Pope John XXII that unnamed leaseholders on their land, lay and clerical,
were appropriating possessions of the beguinages. The pope ordered in-
quiries into the affair on September 7, 1316, and January 13, 1317.14 It is
probably not a coincidence that both cities were located in Rijksvlaan-
deren, or “Imperial Flanders,” subject to the empire: Ad nostrum had men-
tioned German beguines in particular, and suspicion of heresy fell more
fully on those beguines living in “German” lands.
 336 / Walter Simons

Once Pope John XXII had officially promulgated the Clementinae,

diocesan authorities in Flanders proceeded with their implementation.
On February 25, 1318, the bishop’s standing judge-delegate for the di-
ocese of Tournai ordered the dean of Christianity (decanus Christianitatis,
the bishop’s local representative) of Ghent to publish Cum de quibusdam
mulieribus in his district. He asked the dean to warn beguines against vi-
olating the decree, to seize all property of the beguine communities sup-
pressed in the district, and to hold it for “pious use” by the bishop. All
those who contested the seizures should be excommunicated or forced to
pay a fine of 100 marks of silver.15 We may assume that deans in the other
districts of the diocese received similar notices. No mention, however,
was made of the decree Ad nostrum against the heretical “sect” of beg-
hards and beguines in Germany.
The suppression of beguinages and the confiscation of their collec-
tive property logically followed from Cum de quibusdam mulieribus. The
decree did not prohibit individual women from leading a life of penance,
as the final clause had pointed out, nor did it endanger their individual
property rights. The judge-delegate’s letter clearly states that only the
immovable goods, “intended for collective use of the [beguine] commu-
nity” should be seized. Yet in practice the measure made it impossible for
the women to pursue beguine life in common in the manner to which
they were accustomed. Larger “court” beguinages in Flanders had their
own chapels or churches, hospitals for elderly or sickly women, brew-
eries and other service buildings, “convents” for the training of novices
or for communal housing — most of which were collectively endowed
and had now lost their sources of revenue. Smaller, independent “con-
vents” outside a court structure had far less property, but the little they
did possess (their communal house and land, with or without a chapel;
possibly also a small hospital) was usually held in common and could thus
be confiscated as well. Furthermore, the confiscations undermined an
important principle of beguine life, that of mutual support. Most court
beguinages housed a diverse population of women of varied social status
and wealth; in larger communities, such as the two “beguine courts” of
Ghent dedicated to Saint Elizabeth and Our Lady of Ter Hooie, several
hundred women pooled their resources to support the neediest among
them, effectively forming miniature social-security systems, with the
 In Praise of Faithful Women \ 337

wealthy and able-bodied women paying into common funds that pro-
vided an income to the elderly, the sick, and poor. The funds were in-
vested in land or other real estate. Loss of such properties thus threat-
ened the survival of the internal dole system, forcing the expulsion of the
poorer members of the community.16 As a matter of fact, since destitute,
semi-itinerant beguines were also those more often suspected of heresy,
one wonders if the confiscations did not tear down these support struc-
tures intentionally.
Everybody knew, of course, that the Templars’ assets had just been
seized and were being transferred to the Hospitallers and others. The
smaller mendicant orders, such as the Brothers of the Sack, suppressed
by the Second Council of Lyons in 1274, had been allowed to reside in
their convents until the death of their last friars; their property, too,
now passed into other hands. In Tournai, for instance, the bishop trans-
ferred the local convent of the Brothers of the Sack to the Augustinian
Hermits in 1317 through 1319, at the very moment the beguine assets
were being seized.17 Who could doubt that beguines faced a similar fate?
Rather touchingly, around this time a beguine at Saint Elizabeth’s in
Ghent made a list of all “property donated to the beguinage since the
Second Council of Lyons” in the apparent hope that real estate acquired
before that time would be spared.18
While beguinages lacked a central command or even institutional
ties with one another, which might have facilitated a concerted response
to the Clementine decrees, they were not entirely powerless. Several
communities naturally sought the support of the count of Flanders,
whose ancestors had founded court beguinages in Ghent (Saint Eliza-
beth; perhaps also those of Our Lady of Ter Hooie and the much smaller
beguinage at Saint Aubertus or “Poortakker”), Bruges (Saint Elizabeth
or “Vineyard”), Lille, Douai (Saint Elizabeth or “Champfleury”), Cour-
trai, and Ypres (Saint Christine Ten Brielen). They had also extended
their protection beyond those favorite institutions to the wider move-
ment in their county at a crucial moment, during the formative years of
the 1230s and 1240s.19 Since then, the counts had granted the women tax
privileges, supervised the administration of “their” beguine courts, and
issued internal regulations. Beguines of Ghent, the largest city of Flan-
ders and a major political player, frequently called on the count for special
 338 / Walter Simons

aid, even sometimes against the bishop. In 1284 beguines of Saint Eliza-
beth of Ghent complained to Count Guy that during a recent audit of
their financial records, the count’s bailiff had brought a priest along,
which went against their tradition: “We doubt,” they declared, “that we
have ever opened our books before a priest, which the bishop may now
demand from us”; the count agreed that such was not the custom, and
that the annual audit would henceforth be done solely before his repre-
sentative.20 And in June 1311, four months before the Council of Vienne,
Guy’s son and successor, Count Robert, even appealed to Pope Clement
in a conflict with the bishop of Tournai. The latter had contested the
count’s authority over the beguines and the affairs of the beguinage, but
Count Robert invoked his rights as heir of the beguinage’s founder and
“more than sixty years” of custom. To underscore his full secular juris-
diction over the beguines, Count Robert further reminded the pope that
the women “were lay people, not clergy [persone sint seculares non ec-
clesiastice].”21 Given what the council was about to decide, that last state-
ment may not have been the most fortunate.

The Document

The text of Count Robert’s petition to Pope John XXII on behalf of

beguines of Flanders, asking the pope to exempt them from Cum de qui-
busdam mulieribus, is published below (see apppendix). It was written
on a simple piece of parchment, slightly irregular in form, with a space
left blank for a decorated initial and the dating formula left unfinished.
The scribe, obviously an experienced professional (albeit occasionally
distracted), wrote in an early fourteenth-century cursive hand com-
monly found in the comital, urban, or ecclesiastical administrations of
contemporary Flanders. Several interlinear and marginal corrections
that cannot always be interpreted as misreadings or simple slips of the
pen suggest that it is a draft. Probably the final version was to be copied
on higher quality material, properly dated, and authenticated by the
count’s chancery. That would also explain why at some point the present
document was discarded and passed on to the beguines of Ter Hooie as
a token of the count’s efforts. No copy of it or indeed any reference to
this petition was found in the archives of the Flemish counts or in the
 In Praise of Faithful Women \ 339

Vatican archives.22 Still, that is not unusual, nor must we assume that the
letter was never sent: its content is entirely consistent with the count’s
policies in the matter and with later sources. Indeed, it is difficult to un-
derstand why the draft document would have been handed over to the
beguines if the petition had not in fact been sent. ( Notes on the reverse
date from a much later era and do not tell us anything about its genesis.)
Internal evidence provides few clues for dating. The letter obvi-
ously responds to the recent proclamation of Cum de quibusdam mulieri-
bus, lamenting its effects on beguine communities in Flanders, which
places it after February 25, 1318. As will be explained below, it must pre-
cede Pope John’s letter Cum de mulieribus, which clarified the Clemen-
tine decree Cum de quibusdam mulieribus and was sent to bishops of the
Low Countries on December 31, 1320. To narrow down that window of
time a little further, we need to examine more closely the political con-
text, namely the ongoing conflict between the Flemish count and the
French crown, as well as Pope John XXII’s role in that struggle.
After the great clash between France and Flanders around 1300, lead-
ing to the famous Flemish victory over the French knights at Courtrai
in July 1302, peace did not return to the county for any extended period
of time.23 Both sides were dissatisfied by the Treaty of Pontoise of 1312;
hostilities resumed in 1314 and again in 1315 through 1316. In November
1317, delegates of both parties traveled to Avignon to seek the help of
Pope John XXII, who rendered a nonbinding “advice” on March 8, 1318.
The main issue of discussion at this point consisted of the securities to
be exchanged for observing a future peace treaty. Since 1226, any breach
by the Flemish count of a treaty with the French crown could trigger re-
taliation by the French bishops who governed the dioceses of Flanders
( Thérouanne, Tournai, Arras, and Cambrai, all in the ecclesiastical prov-
ince of Rheims) and might issue an interdict over Flanders. The count
now demanded a similar guarantee from the French king: if he broke his
oath, Pope John XXII should excommunicate him and French barons
should be released from their oaths of fealty to the king. This was a bridge
too far for Pope John, fearful to offend King Philip V, who in turn argued
that the conflict with Flanders kept him from acting upon his desire to
launch a new crusade, as the pope wished. A papal mission led by the Do-
minican Pierre de la Palud and two Franciscans, Étienne de Nérac and
 340 / Walter Simons

William of Ghent, to persuade the Flemish that the king’s oath should
suffice by itself, failed in a climate of mutual distrust and disputes among
the papal envoys during their trip to Flanders (April–May 1318). French
bishops and archbishops placed the usual interdict on Flanders in Septem-
ber 1318. After a second papal mission—led by none other than the Do-
minican Bernard Gui—in October 1318 did not succeed, Pope John XXII
finally demanded that Count Robert accept his terms on pain of excom-
munication and a major papal interdict over Flanders. A third papal envoy
traveled to the Flemish borders to inform the count and his subjects of
the pope’s sentence, proclaimed at Tournai on June 25, 1319; Count Rob-
ert had sixty days to comply. When the city of Ghent refused to march
against France the following month, most probably because of the new
spiritual threat of the papal interdict, Count Robert relented on August 20.
Pope John wrote to Robert on September 11, 1319, to congratulate him on
that decision and express relief that excommunication proved unnecessary.
Weakened by his advanced age—he was now seventy-three—and by dis-
sent within his own family, Count Robert concluded a new peace treaty
with the king on May 6, 1320. The count died on September 17, 1322.
The tone of confidence, perhaps even defiance, pervading Count
Robert’s petition suggests a date prior to Pope John’s formal threat of ex-
communication on June 25, 1319. One doubts that Robert would risk
lecturing the pope on the finer points of conciliar doctrine while being
under such a threat. Put differently, his chances of successfully petition-
ing the pope under these circumstances were slim. Although it is not im-
possible that the count wrote after the apparent reconciliation with the
pope in September 1319 (but before December 31, 1320), the earlier pe-
riod seems more likely: that was the time when Count Robert was fighting
French episcopal action in the county on multiple fronts, while still hop-
ing for Pope John’s “neutral” arbitration in the Franco-Flemish conflict.
If this hypothesis is correct and the letter was written between Feb-
ruary 25, 1318, and June 25, 1319, it may be linked to another measure
taken by the count. On June 12, 1319, he appointed Henry ( Hendrik)
Braem, legum professor, as his special representative to protect the be-
guinage of Saint Elizabeth of Ghent. Recalling that “religious women
who used to be called beguines” had been living at the beguinage under
his protection and that of his ancestors “since the oldest days” (ab an-
 In Praise of Faithful Women \ 341

tiquo), but that the Church had recently prohibited the “way of life” (sta-
tus) of said women and abolished it, he declared that he would not allow
the institution, founded by his predecessors, to be “abandoned under
the pretext of this novelty.” In phrases that replicate the last clauses of
Cum de quibusdam mulieribus, the count extended his protection over all
“faithful women” living at Saint Elizabeth “virtuously in their dwellings,
whether they promised chastity or not, who wish to do penance and
serve the Lord of hosts in a spirit of humility, in the manner inspired by
the Lord.” Henry Braem should make sure no other women live in the
beguinage, and that, “since the outward decency of dress demonstrates
internal moral virtue,” the women wear “clothes that fit their virtuous
and humble way of life.”24 While observing the injunction against be-
guine dress imposed by Cum de quibusdam mulieribus, the count’s instruc-
tions to Henry conformed not only with the “escape clause” contained in
the decree, but also with his petition to Pope John. If the petition and the
charge to Henry were part of the same series of measures taken in de-
fense of beguines, the former might plausibly be dated in the spring of
1319. That would be consistent with the reference in the petition to the
decree’s adverse effect on Flemish beguine communities, whose internal
discipline, the count asserts, it had fatally undermined, indicating that
some time has lapsed since the decree was implemented.
Henry Braem had served on Count Robert’s council since 1309. As a
wealthy member of a prominent Ghent family, he frequently acted as the
count’s liaison with the city. His clerical status and legal training made
him the ideal person to mediate between count, city, and Church. In ad-
dition to his work for the count, he served as legal counsel to the city and
held benefices as a canon of the cathedral of Tournai and collegiate
churches of Saint Omer and Saint Pharailde of Ghent. He knew the be-
guinage of Saint Elizabeth well: his stone dwelling on the Vismarkt in
Ghent was located not far away, and he was probably related to Eliza-
beth ser Braems, the superior of Saint Elizabeth’s from 1269 to 1277;
the ser Braems were among the oldest donors of the beguinage.25
We do not know if Henry was also involved in writing Robert’s peti-
tion. Nothing in the letter suggests expertise in canon or civil law; quite
the opposite, for the petition generally disengages from legal matters
and lacks the legal jargon we would expect from someone with Henry’s
 342 / Walter Simons

profile. While it reflects thorough familiarity with the proper forms of

address and rhetoric in correspondence with the pope, that technical
knowledge was of course widely shared within the count’s chancery and
does not help to identify its author. We may consider Henry Braem,
rather, one of several possible intellectual authors, along with, for in-
stance, Count Robert’s confessor, the Franciscan Giles of Klemskerke,
or the former custos of the Franciscan order in Flanders, Fulco Borluut, a
member of another wealthy Ghent clan with close ties to the count’s
family and active in the care of nuns and beguines from 1291 to 1320.26
Both Henry Braem and Friar Giles of Klemskerke feature as witnesses in
a charter of November 24, 1321, by which Count Robert confirmed the
authority of the main mistress at Ter Hooie to discipline the women liv-
ing at the beguinage according to its “ancient customs, save in all things
the statutes of our holy father the Pope.”27
Authorship by a beguine seems unlikely. The language of the docu-
ment, a somewhat ornamental, affected Latin, could have been used by
any well-educated individual in the fourteenth century, including some
beguines. But its paternalistic, aristocratic, and entirely external per-
spective on the beguine movement, a perspective that bespeaks quite ac-
curately the attitudes of the Flemish comital family and their circle in
this period, is not what one would expect from a beguine author.
The petition, then, directly challenges recent episcopal measures
implementing Cum de quibusdam mulieribus by arguing that they reflect
a “bad” or “superficial understanding” of the decree. The canon con-
demned the way of life of “dangerous beguines” rashly debating subtle
theological problems, with grave consequences for the simple people who
thought them to be holy. But “in my land,” the count affirms, women
who have “since the oldest days” pursued a simple life of holiness are also
commonly called beguines; these never engaged in “the aforesaid silli-
nesses” and have never been “infamous or suspect of the errors of the
aforesaid constitution.” Would the pope not like to bring these “laudable
women” back to that honest, faithful way of life?
And, the petition asks, is the pope quite aware of the disastrous ef-
fects of those incorrect interpretations? By dissolving beguine communi-
ties, the bishop’s implementation of Cum de quibusdam mulieribus has
ruptured the disciplinary fabric that undergirded their observances and
 In Praise of Faithful Women \ 343

“maternal admonitions . . . redolent of virtue.” As a result, the women

have now “releas[ed] the reins of modesty” and are destined for vice, “to
the loss of many girls.” Count Robert dwells at length on the beguine
world, once pious and disciplined, destroyed by the recent actions. He
describes the typical format of beguine communal life in Flemish cities,
where “enclosed courtyards” are “assigned” to them, a reference to the
so-called court beguinages, walled spaces sometimes comprising entire
neighborhoods which could and still can be found in various cities of the
Low Countries, and which the count — possibly correctly — assumes to
be little known at the highest echelons of the Church in Avignon. His
petition emphasizes the point that the women sustain themselves materi-
ally, either through family endowments or by the hard labor of their own
hands, engaging in such “licit feminine crafts” as washing textiles; the
contrast with the “dangerous beguines” known to beg for alms is left im-
plicit. It then turns to their demonstrably orthodox religious practices:
these women hear mass daily, pay their parochial dues, respect the priest-
hood, and on feast days participate in the divine office—indeed a regular
component of liturgical practice among most beguines of Flanders since
the earliest days.28 In a rare passage skirting perilous terrain, the count
highlights beguine engagement with sermons on those feast days, when
they “expound” on the sermons—tracing a fine line between proper ap-
plication of the spoken Word through mutual exhortation (admissible
and admirable) and expounding Scripture itself (an appropriation of
clerical privilege and therefore inadmissible).
The count concludes his apologia beguinarum with a remarkable ex-
ploration of social factors for their success. In an age in which the upper
classes find it increasingly difficult to place their daughters in convents
or marry them within their station, beguinages form an acceptable al-
ternative, the count argues. Not only do they provide young girls with a
suitable education that serves them well, should they eventually marry
or find an opening in a convent, but they also receive within their ranks
candidates from all classes and fortunes who opt not to marry or take
up monastic vows. This is a broad analysis of a complex situation — the
count’s allusion to an excess of women in his county simplifies more com-
plex demographic changes — but not far from the truth: beguine com-
munities indeed provided shelter to a wide range of single women who
 344 / Walter Simons

could not or did not wish to marry.29 The count’s rationale for beguine
life became a topos of beguine lore. A description of life in beguinages
of Ghent presented to agents of the bishop in 1328 borrowed substan-
tial parts from Count Robert’s text to explain why his ancestors, Count-
esses Joan and Margaret, had founded beguinages almost a century ear-
lier, invoking the same social pressures and thus laying the basis for much
received wisdom on beguine history since then.30
The count ends the letter with a request: since the last clauses of
Cum de quibusdam mulieribus appear to leave the door open for women to
pursue these ideals, could the pope provide the women of Flanders with
a special license to do so?
In as much as we admire the clarity and force of Count Robert’s de-
fense, we must also note some glaring omissions. There is no reference
whatsoever to the decree Ad nostrum and the “sect” of beghards and be-
guines it condemned. The absence is understandable: by 1320, no bishop
had attempted to implement Ad nostrum in the Flemish dioceses, and
no investigations against the heresy described therein had been launched.
Obviously Count Robert saw no reason to raise that dangerous subject
here. There are other silences, however. The count sketched a picture of
beguine life crafted upon a particular model for beguine organization: the
enclosed court beguinage, with its rather stable population and large en-
dowment, its chapel or church served by a priest and multiple chaplains
and visited regularly by mendicant confessors. This type of beguinage
formed a large, diverse female microcosm that was well known to the
count and his staff, and, we may assume, relatively easily monitored for or-
thodoxy. This was not the case for the numerous small beguine houses and
convents that sprang up in every city and town of the county, largely with-
out comital support or clerical supervision. These more ephemeral and
loosely organized houses, quite comparable to the German situation, could
only arouse further suspicion; the count silently omitted them. Similarly,
Count Robert did not volunteer the information that his own father,
Count Guy, had ordered his bailiff in 1295 to act against “wanton young
girls” (lassivas juvenculas) who “wear the habit of beguines” but should be
removed from their ranks because of their “suspect talk” (suspecta collo-
quia), sexual activity (lapsu carnis), or “other crimes.”31 Finally, the count
surely failed to describe beguine education accurately: it could offer a
 In Praise of Faithful Women \ 345

great deal more than the moral training and the usual crafts deemed essen-
tial for a young girl’s preparation for marriage or the convent. It usually
included training in music and languages, some Latin, and in a few cases,
quite serious study of Scripture and of course mystical theology.32 Evi-
dently the count did not wish to allude to anything that might raise further
suspicion. Even as the petition thus spoke to real and essential features of
Flemish beguine experience, it also quite deliberately misrepresented it.
For Count Robert, more was at stake than the preservation of his
own good name and that of his family’s religious heritage. The decision
of the bishop of Tournai to dissolve beguinages in his diocese was clearly
understood as an assault on a quintessentially Flemish institution. In the
context of the ongoing struggle with France, the religious quickly be-
came the political or the national. As mentioned above, French royal
policy vis-à-vis Flanders routinely made use of French episcopal jurisdic-
tion over Flemish territory. But shortly after victory at Courtrai, in 1303,
the Flemish demanded the erection of separate Flemish dioceses. There
were sound pastoral reasons for them, they argued: “The largest part
of the county is populated by people who speak the Flemish language,
and they cannot possibly be spiritually guided by bishops who are igno-
rant of that language.” But to put matters more bluntly, as Count Robert’s
younger brother Philip did, the episcopal sees of Thérouanne, Tournai,
Arras, and Cambrai were all “occupied by enemies of the Flemish.”33 Re-
ligion, language, and national politics were symbolically addressed by rit-
ual action in that same year: when the count and the Flemish urban mili-
tia successfully besieged the bishops’ city of Thérouane, bands of their
men ran into the church to remove a statue of Saint Louis, which they
publically beheaded on the market square — this, barely six years after
the French king’s canonization.34 For his part, King Philip IV of France
accused the Flemings of being Joachimites, and French clergy preached
against Flemish “idolatry.”35 The Grandes Chroniques de France relate that
in 1304 “there lived in Flanders a false female prophet with the habit of a
beguine: she feigned to be pious, living among beguines, but made certain
fictional revelations full of lies that deceived the king, the queen, and even
nobles of France, particularly at the time when the king was fighting the
Flemish,” until Charles of Valois, the king’s brother, made her confess her
lies under torture.36 In the middle of the Franco-Flemish negotiations of
 346 / Walter Simons

1318, sermons in Paris suggested that, if the pope excommunicated the

Flemish, the latter could be killed like Saracens. Papal envoy Pierre de la
Palud, who preached a similar sermon in Paris, naturally lost all credibil-
ity before even arriving in Flanders because news of his participation in
such royal propaganda quickly reached the Flemish. The episcopal inter-
dict that followed later in the year incited still more Flemish anger:
when, in compliance with the interdict, the guardian of the Franciscan
convent in Ghent refused to say mass, the count’s bailiff attacked him
with his sword and expelled him from Flanders “as a robber, [who] has
no right to be in the land of the count.”37
One understands therefore Count Robert’s quick dismissal of the
episcopal decisions and his determination to defend beguine orthodoxy
in his county, his land (terra mea), and his fatherland (mea patria). Hav-
ing argued that the women in Flanders had only a name in common
with those other, “dangerous” women and that the bishop’s decree had
instead wreaked havoc on a perfectly Catholic institution, his proposal
to Pope John XXII was both modest and reasonable: why not apply the
last clause in Cum de quibusdam to these women?
Why not indeed, some at Avignon must have thought. Count Rob-
ert’s letter was not the only one to ask the question. Around the same
time, in the first months of 1319,38 Bishop John of Strassburg apparently
also sought clarification from Pope John on the very same issue, and oth-
ers may well have done so, though Count Robert’s letter is the only one
to survive. Pope John XXII responded with a new bull, Cum de mulieri-
bus, sent to the bishops of Tournai, Cambrai, and Paris on December 31,
1320, and distributed to other bishops in the following weeks. In this let-
ter, John agreed that, while certain beguines, particularly in Germany,
were reputed to be guilty of the errors enumerated in the Clementinae,
he received news of women, also called beguines, who lived piously. He
therefore ordered the bishops to carefully investigate such women and,
if they were deemed innocent, to protect their persons and their prop-
erty against mistreatment.39
These inquiries took another three to eight years to complete, de-
pending on the city and diocese. Throughout this period, beguines in
Flanders — and in many other parts of northwestern Europe — shunned
the name “beguine,” as did those who wished them well. In a letter for
 In Praise of Faithful Women \ 347

the beguines of Ghent, of 1321, Count Robert called them “good women
who serve God and whom one used to call beguines”: the beguine way of
life was still not permissible, their habit prohibited. Indeed, it was only
after the bishops’ agents had made the rounds to sanction beguine or-
thodoxy in the various beguinages, in 1328,40 that the women could dress
again in their original, gray habits. The deep attachment of monks and
nuns to their monastic garb as the outward symbol of their propositum is
well known. As a profound marker of their identity, the gray (griise) habit
served a role no less important for beguines, as Cum de quibusdam mu-
lieribus had observed. Shortly after the resumption of beguine life in
Ghent, a member of the community made a dorsal note on Count Rob-
ert’s letter charging Henry Braem with their protection. It said, “This is
[the letter in which] Count Robert asked master Henry Braem to help
maintain us in law, and to help us regain our ‘gray.’ ”41

Notes

I should like to thank the editors of this volume, David C. Mengel and Lisa
Wolverton, as well as an anonymous reviewer for the Press, for their criticism
and wise counsel in writing this essay.

1. John Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio
Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages ( Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2008), especially 84 –118.
2. Jacqueline Tarrant, “The Clementine Decrees on the Beguines: Con-
ciliar and Papal Versions,” Archivum Historiae Pontificae 12 (1974): 300 – 8; Eliza-
beth Makowski, “A Pernicious Sort of Woman”: Quasi-Religious Women and Canon
Lawyers in the Later Middle Ages ( Washington, DC: Catholic University of
America Press, 2005), 3– 50; Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers, 24 – 26, 38– 42;
Sean L. Field, The Beguine, the Angel, and the Inquisitor: The Trials of Marguerite
Porete and Guiard de Cressonessart ( Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press, 2012), 196 – 204; Jörg Voigt, “Das Beginenwesen nach dem Konzil von
Vienne: Die Auswirkungen der Konzilsdekretale Cum de quibusdam (1317) auf
die Beginen in den Diözesen Cambrai, Tournai, Lüttich und Utrecht und die
Umsetzung der Bulle Cum de mulieribus (1320),” in Friedensnobelpreis und his-
torische Grundlagenforschung. Ludwig Quidde und die Erschließung der kurialen
Registerüberlieferung, ed. Michael Matheus ( Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 441– 75,
incorporated with a few changes in Jörg Voigt, Beginen im Spätmittelalter: Frauen-
frömmigkeit in Thüringen und im Reich (Cologne: Böhlau, 2012), 288– 314.
 348 / Walter Simons

3. The archives of the beguinage of Ter Hooie have suffered extensively

from neglect in the past. Several items in the collection attested by local histori-
ans in the late nineteenth century are now missing, and the present classification
is in a state of disarray. I should like to thank canon Ludo Collin, chancellor of
the bishop’s administration of Ghent, for his efforts to save the archives, and for
graciously giving me access to them at the Bishop’s House in Ghent, where the
collection is currently preserved.
4. For some essential data in the medieval history of these beguinages,
see my Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Low Countries, 1200 – 1565
( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).
5. The sources are best discussed in Ewald Müller, Das Konzil von Vienne
1311– 1312. Seine Quellen und seine Geschichte ( Münster in Westfalen: Aschen-
dorffschen Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1934). See also Norman Tanner, ed., Decrees
of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols. ( London: Sheed & Ward, 1990), 1:333– 35,
with edition of the decrees and facing English translation on 336 – 401.
6. Item de Beghardis longus processus, in Munich, Bayerische Staatsbiblio-
thek, Clm 2699, fol. 31a, edited in Müller, Konzil von Vienne, 687, no. 27. Müller
dates this informal version of the council’s decrees to the last session, on May 6,
1312, or shortly afterward, probably before December 31, 1312: ibid., 679– 85.
7. At least six theologians serving in Marguerite’s trial also attended the
Council of Vienne: Field, The Beguine, the Angel, and the Inquisitor, 193– 99; for
the extracts from Marguerite’s work invoked in the trial, see ibid., 128, and the
edition of the trial record in Paul Verdeyen, “Le procès d’inquisition contre
Marguerite Porete et Guiard de Cressonessart (1309–1310),” Revue d’Histoire ec-
clésiastique 81 (1986): 47– 94 (at 51).
8. “[S]ecta quaedam abominabilis quorundam hominum malignorum, qui
Beguardi, et quarundam infidelium mulierum, quae Beguinae vulgariter appel-
lantur, in regno Alemanniae procurante satore malorum operum, damnabiliter
insurrexit. . . . Porro dioecesani et illarum partium inquisitores haereticae pravi-
tatis, in quibus Beguardi et Beguinae huiusmodi commorantur, suum officium
circa eos diligenter exerceant, inquirentes de vita et conversatione ipsorum,
qualiterve sentiant de articulis fidei et ecclesiae sacramentis. In illos vero, quos
culpabiles repererint . . . debitam exerceant ultionem.” Ed. in Tanner, Decrees of
the Ecumenical Councils, 1:383– 84. See also Aemilius Friedberg, ed., Corpus Iuris
Canonici, 2d ed. (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1879–1881), vol. 2, col. 1183– 84.
9. Tarrant, “The Clementine Decrees,” 302, 308, rejecting Müller, Konzil
von Vienne, 410.
10. “Item quod Begine conventum habere non debent, set quevis filiam
neptam in domo sua nutriat et custodiat prout potest.” Ed. in Müller, Konzil von
Vienne, 687, no. 16.
11. “Cum de quibusdam mulieribus, Beguinabus vulgariter nuncupatis (quae,
cum nulli promittant oboedientiam nec propriis renuncient, neque profiteantur ali-
 In Praise of Faithful Women \ 349

quam regulam approbatam, religiosae nequaquam exsistunt, quanquam habitum,

qui Beguinarum dicitur, deferant . . . nobis fide digna relatione insinuatum exsti-
terit, quod earum aliquae, quasi perductae in mentis insaniam, de summa Trinitate
ac divina essentia disputent et praedicent ac circa fidei articulos et ecclesiastica
sacramenta opiniones catholicae fidei contrarias introducant et, multos super his
decipientes simplices, eos in errores diversos inducant aliaque quam plura pericu-
lum animarum parientia sub quodam velamine sanctitatis faciant et committant,
nos tam ex his quam ex aliis, de ipsarum opinione sinistra frequenter auditis, eas
merito suspectas habentes, statum earundem sacro approbante concilio perpetuo
duximus prohibendum et a Dei ecclesia penitus abolendum. . . . Sane per praedicta
prohibere nequaquam intendimus quin, si fuerint fideles aliquae mulieres, quae
promissa continentia vel etiam non promissa, honeste in suis conversantes hospitiis,
poenitentiam agere voluerint et virtutum Domino in humilitatis spiritu deservire,
hoc eisdem liceat, prout Dominus ipsis inspirabit.” Ed. in Tanner, Decrees of the Ec-
umenical Councils, 1:374. See also Friedberg, Corpus Iuris Canonici, vol. 2, col. 1169.
12. Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 1:242 and 326 – 27.
13. “Et si quod absit beghinagium predictum destrueretur per curiam Ro-
manam, tunc volo quod predicta terra simpliciter cedat dicte infirmarie sue hos-
pitali quod in honore Undecim Milium Virginum in dicto conventu [= the be-
guinage] est constructum ad usus pauperum dicti hospitalis.” Tongeren,
Stadsarchief, Archief van het Begijnhof, Oorkonden, no. 47 (original, unpub-
lished). Saint Maternus was a chapel on the grounds of the collegiate chapter of
Our Lady in Tongeren.
14. E. Soens, Cartularium en renteboek van het Begijnhof Ste Katharina op den
Zavel te Aalst (Aalst: Spitaels-Schuermans, 1912), 35– 36; Jan Broeckaert, Cartu-
larium van het begijnhof van Dendermonde voorafgegaan van eene historische schets
dezes gestichts ( Dendermonde: Aug. De Schepper-Philips, 1902), 19, no. XIV.
See also Arnold Fayen, Lettres de Jean XXII (1316–1334), 2 vols. ( Rome: Institut
historique belge de Rome, 1908–1909), 1:71, no. 226.
15. “Mandamus vobis quatenus ipsam constitutionem in omnibus locis vestri
decanatus ubi necesse fuerit publicetis seu publicari faciatis et penas sententiarum
ac pericula quas incurrent non observantes eandem eisdem mulieribus exponatis;
preterea cum destructo collegio bona ad comitatem eiusdem collegii deputata,
saltim mobilia, applicari debeant de iure communi reverendo in Christo patri
domino Tornacensi episcopo in usus pios et debitos per ipsum convertenda,
mandamus vobis quatenus ipsa bona ubicumque poterunt inveniri saysiatis ac ar-
restetis, saysitaque et arrestata detineatis, et faciatis detineri ad opus predictum, in-
hibentes omnibus illis penes quos bona ipsa contigerit inveniri sub pena excom-
municationis et sub pena centum marcarum argenti ne dicta bona distrahant vel
alienent vel distrahi aut alienari faciant aut procurent vel hoc facientibus seu facere
volentibus auxilium prebeant consilium vel favorem. . . . Bona tamen que ad
privatas personas pertinent nolumus nec intendimus saisiri vel arrestari.” Ghent,
 350 / Walter Simons

Archief van het Bisdom, Begijnhof Onze-Lieve-Vrouw Ter Hooie, Charters,

no. 41, contemporary copy certified by the dean (unpublished).
16. Simons, Cities of Ladies, 48– 60, 91–104.
17. Tournai, Archives du Chapitre Cathédrale, Cartulaire D, fol. 189r –190r;
see Walter Simons, Bedelordekloosters in het graafschap Vlaanderen: Topografie en
chronologie van de bedelordenverspreiding voor 1350 (Bruges: Stichting Jan Cobbaut
and Sint-Pietersabdij Steenbrugge, 1987), 110 –11.
18. “Dit [es] tgoet dat die van sente Liisbetten ghecreghen hebben sider dat
de conselie te Lyons was,” from an informal note in an early fourteenth-century
hand on a piece of parchment containing copies of deeds from 1273, 1277, and
1287. Ghent, Stadsarchief, Reeks LXXVIII, Charters Béthune, no. 56. The list is
edited in Jean Béthune, Cartulaire du Béguinage de Sainte-Élisabeth à Gand (Bruges:
Aimé de Zuttere, 1883), 42– 43, no. 56.
19. See Simons, Cities of Ladies, 104 – 9, 267– 68 (nos. 25A– B), 273– 74 (no.
35A), 276– 78 (nos. 40A– C), 282 (no. 58), 285– 86 (no. 63), and 300 (no. 108A),
as well as Walter Simons and Paul Trio, “Begijnen, begarden en tertiarissen in
het middeleeuwse Ieper,” Jaarboek voor middeleeuwse geschiedenis 4 (2001): 118– 67
(at 126 – 29 and 150 – 52). For the important place of beguines in the context of
Countess Joan’s (d. 1244) and Countess Margaret’s (d. 1280) religious policies,
see Theo Luykx, Johanna van Constantinopel, gravin van Vlaanderen en Henegouwen
(Antwerp: Standaard-Boekhandel, 1946), 310 –18, 348– 59, and 412– 20; Erin L.
Jordan, Women, Power, and Religious Patronage in the Middle Ages ( New York: Pal-
grave Macmillan, 2006); and Bernard Delmaire, “Béguines et béguinages en
Flandre et Hainaut au XIIIe siècle,” in Jeanne de Constantinople comtesse de Flandre
et de Hainaut, ed. Nicolas Dessaux (Paris: Somogy, 2009), 107–15.
20. “[Q]uant il [=the bailiff ] i fu ore pour conte oir, il amena prestre avoec
lui et nous nous doutons, sire, se nous aviemes une fois conte fait par devant
prestres, ke li evesques ne nous enpeuist calengier de lors enavant.” Petition at-
tached to the count’s letter of October 10, 1284, in Ghent, Stadsarchief, Reeks
LXXVIII, Charters Béthune, no. 50 (informal contemporary copy), ed. with a
few small errors in Béthune, Cartulaire, 39– 40, no. 50.
21. Ghent, Rijksarchief, Oorkonden van de graven van Vlaanderen, Reeks
de Saint-Genois, no. 1228 ( June 11, 1311), ed. Béthune, Cartulaire, 60 – 62, no.
88 (with an incorrect date).
22. In a most rewarding and agreeable week reviewing the papal registers
and assorted materials for the era in the Vatican archives, I found no trace of the
count’s petition or of any response to it by Pope John. As is well known, many
papal letters, some quite significant, were not registered.
23. For the events set out in the following paragraph, the best guides are
Paul Lehugeur, Histoire de Philippe le Long Roi de France (1316–1322) ( Paris: Ha-
chette, 1897), 1:120 – 65; Herman Vander Linden, “Les relations politiques de la
Flandre avec la France au XIVe siècle,” Compte rendu des Séances de la Commission
 In Praise of Faithful Women \ 351

Royale d’Histoire 62 (1893): 469 – 542; Giovanni Tabacco, La casa di Francia nel-
l’azione politica di papa Giovanni XXII ( Rome: Istituto storico Italiano per il
medio evo, 1953), 108– 28; and Jean Dunbabin, A Hound of God: Pierre de la
Palud and the Fourteenth-Century Church (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
24. “Cum in loco sancte Elizabeth iuxta Gandavum religiose mulieres que
beghine nuncupate fuerant sub nostro ac predecessorum nostrorum regimine
degere consueverint ab antiquo, statusque predictarum beghinarum de novo sit
prohibitus et a Dei ecclesia penitus abolendus, nolentes locum predictum quem
novimus a nostris predecessoribus fuisse fundatum, dimittere desolatum et pre-
textu novitatus huiusmodi . . . , mulieres fideles que promissa continentia vel non
promissa, honeste in suis conversantur hospitiis, penitentiam agere voluerint et vir-
tutum Domino in humilitatis spiritu deservire prout ipsis Dominus inspirabit . . . in
cura, protexione et gardia nostris suscepimus speciali. . . . Et quia per decentiam
habitus extrinseci morum honestas intrinseca demonstratur, volumus quod pre-
dicte mulieres honestati et conversationi humili earumdem congruentia defer-
ant vestimenta.” Ghent, Stadsarchief, Reeks LXXVIII, charters Béthune, no. 94,
ed. Béthune, Cartulaire, 67, no. 94.
25. For Henry Braem’s public functions and family background, see Mau-
rice Vandermaesen, De besluitvorming in het graafschap Vlaanderen tijdens de veer-
tiende eeuw. Bijdrage tot de politieke sociologie van de Raad en van de raadsheren achter de
figuur van Lodewijk II van Nevers (1322–1346), 3 vols. (Brussels: Algemeen Rijks-
archief, 1999), 1:458– 59, and Frans Blockmans, Het Gentsche stadspatriciaat tot om-
streeks 1302 (Antwerp: De Sikkel, 1938), 224n4. For the ser Braems’ involvement
with the beguinage: Ghent, Rijksarchief, Sint-Elisabethsbegijnhof Gent, charters
at dates May 1269 and October 1, 1273; Béthune, Cartulaire, 25, no. 28; 28,
no. 33; and 30 – 32, nos. 37 and 38.
26. See Walter Simons, Stad en apostolaat: De vestiging van de bedelorden in
het graafschap Vlaanderen (ca. 1225– ca. 1350) ( Brussels: Paleis der Academiën,
1987), 234n11; Walter Simons, “Borluut, Fulco,” in Nationaal Biografisch Woor-
denboek ( Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1987), vol. 12, cols. 95– 97. In a short
work of popular history, L. Joos, a priest of the beguinage of Ter Hooie, claimed
that the petition was written by “Count Robert, Friar Fulco Borluut, the prior of
the Dominicans [of Ghent?] and others, with the support of the bishops of Tour-
nai and Cambrai” (my translation), and dated it to January 10, 1320: L. Joos, Be-
gijnhof O.L. Vrouw ter Hooie. Geschiedenis en gids ( Wetteren: Bracke-Van Geert,
1934), 20 – 21. Joos appears to have confused the petition with an unrelated
vidimus by Fulco, of January 8, 1320, now lost but edited in Napoleon De Pauw,
“Note sur le vrai nom du ‘Minorite’ de Gand,” Bulletin de la Commission royale
d’Histoire 81 (1912): 361– 73 (at 372, no. I).
27. “les boines anchienes coustumes du dit lieu sauve en toutes choses les
estatus de no saint pere le pape.” Ghent, Archief van het Bisdom, Begijnhof
Onze-Lieve-Vrouw Ter Hooie, Charters, no. 48, unpublished.
 352 / Walter Simons

28. See Walter Simons, “Beguines, Liturgy, and Music in the Middle Ages:
An Exploration,” in Beghinae in cantu instructae: Musical Patrimony from Flemish
Beguinages (Middle Ages–Late 18th C.), ed. Pieter Mannaerts ( Turnhout: Brepols,
2009), 15– 25.
29. I discuss these factors in Cities of Ladies, 7– 34 and 109–17.
30. Ghent, Stadsarchief, Reeks LXXVIII, Charters Béthune, no. 106, ed.
Béthune, Cartulaire, 73– 76, no. 106 (for Saint Elizabeth Ghent); Ghent, Archief
van het Bisdom, Begijnhof Onze-Lieve-Vrouw Ter Hooie, Charters, no. 52C
(for Ter Hooie, unpublished).
31. Ghent, Archief van het Bisdom, Begijnhof Onze-Lieve-Vrouw Ter
Hooie, Charters, no. 24 (August 11, 1295, unpublished).
32. Simons, Cities of Ladies, 80 – 85. Count Robert’s characterization of be-
guine teaching also found its way into the 1328 report cited above; see note 30
above.
33. J. Kervyn de Lettenhove, Études sur l’histoire du XIIIe siècle. Recherches sur
la part que l’Ordre de Cîteaux et le comte de Flandre prirent à la lutte de Boniface VIII et
de Philippe le Bel (Brussels: M. Hayez, 1853), 91– 93 (at 93). For the context: Walter
Simons, “‘Dieu, li premierz, plus anchiiens et souverains bourgois de tous’. Sur la
place de la religion dans les villes flamandes (XIIIe– XVe siècle),” in Villes de Flan-
dre et d’Italie (XIIIe–XVIe siècle). Les enseignements d’une comparaison, ed. Élisabeth
Crouzet-Pavan and Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin ( Turnhout: Brepols, 2008),
77–103 (at 78– 80).
34. Chronique artésienne (1295–1304) et Chronique tournaisienne (1296–1314),
ed. Franz Funck-Brentano (Paris: Alphonse Picard, 1899), 68.
35. Jean Leclercq, “Un sermon prononcé pendant la guerre de Flandre
sous Philippe le Bel,” Revue du Moyen Age latin 1 (1945): 165– 72.
36. Les Grandes Chroniques de France, ed. Jules Viard, vol. 8 ( Paris: Cham-
pion, 1920), 235– 36.
37. Vander Linden, “Les relations,” 485.
38. I am following here the data in Voigt, Beginen im Spätmittelalter, 238– 46,
who revised the traditional interpretation of the Strassburg dossier generally ac-
cepted since Alexander Patschovsky, “Straßburger Beginenverfolgungen im 14.
Jahrhundert,” Deutsches Archiv 30 (1974): 56 –198 (at 103– 5).
39. Béthune, Cartulaire, 69– 70, no. 98; Voigt, Beginen im Spätmittelalter,
202– 4.
40. See, for instance, the final report on the beguinages of Ghent, Bruges,
Aardenburg, and Damme: Ghent, Stadsarchief, Reeks LXXVIII, Charters
Béthune, no. 107, edited in Béthune, Cartulaire, 76 – 78, no. 107 ( May 14, 1328).
41. “Dit es dat de grave Robberecht begherende an meester Heinric Braem
helpen ons in rechte houden ende helpen omme griisse weder te ghecrijghen.”
Ghent, Stadsarchief, Reeks LXXVIII, charters Béthune, no. 94, reverse.
 Appendix: Count Robert’s Petition to Pope John XXII \ 353

Appendix

Count Robert’s Petition to Pope John XXII

Edition

[ February 25, 1318–December 31, 1320; most probably in the spring

of 1319]

Count Robert of Flanders petitions Pope John XXII to defend beguines of Flan-
ders against the implementation of the Clementine decree Cum de quibusdam
mulieribus.

A. Draft: Ghent, Archief van het Bisdom, Begijnhof Onze-Lieve-

Vrouw Ter Hooie, Charters, no. 43.
Parchment, 28 x 19 cm (20 cm at the bottom). In dorso: Noch een pro-
tectie van Den grave van Vlaendere Robert (18th c.). Copié 20 – 21 Août
1901 N. de Pauw= (1901).

[S]1anctissimo in Christo patri ac domino meo, carissimo domino Jhoanni

digna Dei providencia sacrosancte Romane ac universalis ecclesie summo
pontifici, suus2 devotus filius Robertus, comes Flandrie, cum humili re-
commendacione devotissima pedum oscula3 beatorum. Pater sanctissime,
quum constitutio sacri consilii Viennensis ultimo selebrati statum per-
iculosarum beghinarum temere de4 theologicis subtilitatibus predicare
ac disputare presumentium, in simplicium subvertionem Catolice fidei
contraria sub sanctitatis pallio seminando, consulto perpetuo condemp-
navit, ex cuius constitucionis malo ut creditur intellectu quedam mulieres
ab antiquo honeste et quasi sancte conversacionis, indigene5 terre mee,
communiter apud nos beghine hactenus nuncupate, suum simplicem seu
humilem habitum solitum religiosasque observancias ac maternas cor-
rectiones nullius mali suspicionem sed virtutem ac dissiplinam coram
Deo et hominibus redolentes, totaliter fere cohacte sunt6 relinquere in
plurimarum puellarum dispendium et7 post illius statuti promulgacionem
oportuna castigacione omissa, soluto pudicicie freno abierunt in devia vi-
tiorum8. Cum numquam huiusmodi mee9 patrie mulieres consueverant
 354 / Walter Simons

per diversas regiones ociose discurrere, premissis se erroneis fatuitatibus

ammiscendo, sed per diversas Flandrie villas in propriis domibus aut lo-
catis, vel eisden concessis infra curiarum ad hoc deputatarum clausuras10
pro operis sui11 exigencia et competenti numero simul degentes, de patri-
monialibus bonis aut pro maxima parte pio labore manuum suarum in la-
narum vel pannorum purgatione sive aliis licitis femineis artificiis, audita
prima cotidie missa, sibi tenuem victum querunt, persolventesque fi-
deliter iura parocialia prelatosque seu ecclesiarum rectores cum debita
obediencia reverentur festivos dies in sermone ac divinorum officiorum
celebracione audienciisque precipue exponendo, in tantum quod omnis
iuvencula in ipsarum consortio educata ad quemquam statum religionis
seu matrimonii postea accedens, semper devotior reperitur. Nec in ter-
ris meis sexu habundantibus muliebri probi ac honorati viri filias12 suas
quas iuxta proprias13 facultates nequeunt tradere monasteriis aut matri-
moniis honorifice copulare, starent alicubi aptius collocare14 quam in is-
tarum mulierum securrissima comitiva, ubi cujuslibet fortune mulier no-
bilis ac ignobilis, dives, mediocris ac pauper, honeste decenterque vivendo,
in castitate ac humilitate virtutum Domino felicius famulatur.15
Unde vix opinari possum si sanctitate vestra animadverteret detri-
menta virtutum ac incitamenta viciorum que pullulant ex prefate consti-
tutionis superficiali intellectu ac cotidie magis et magis incipiunt pullu-
lare, quin16 a debita sincera declaratione sepedictas laudabiles17 mulieres
de erroribus prefate constitucionis numquam infamatas vel suspectas, ad
statum suum pristinum humilem et honestum vestra sanctitas benigne
dignum duceret revocare. Verum licet ut innuit ejusdem statuti ultima
clausula statum fidelium mulierum sancte observancie nullatenus pro-
hibitum videatur18, nihilhominus teneritudine consciencie ad papale
vestrum preceptum pavide, sine ipsius speciali licentia statum dimissum
resumere non auderent.
Quocirca19 sanctitati vestre supplico humiliter quatenus20 hujusmodi
nonobstante statuto super premissis, declarare seu ordinare ipsa sanctitas
vestra21 dignetur quod mee Flandrie patrie mulieres superius declarate
tam preterite, presentes, quam future in statu pristino libere possint in
humilitatis spiritu Domino famulari.
Sanctitatem vestram illesam conservet Altissimus ecclesie sue sancte
per tempora longiora. Datum et cetera.
 Appendix: Count Robert’s Petition to Pope John XXII \ 355

Notes

= Baron Napoleon de Pauw (1835–1922), the well-known jurist and local histo-
rian, who lived close to the beguinage. His copy is preserved and kept with the
original document. I was somewhat comforted to note that this erudite scholar
had just as much trouble as I had in reading the document: having left open sev-
eral passages on the first day of his visit, August 20, 1901, he returned the next
day to complete them but was not always successful. I have not indicated his
readings in this edition.

1. Ample space was left open for a decorated or larger initial, not filled in A.
2. suuus A.
3. occula A.
4. Added above the line A.
5. indigere A.
6. Added in the margin for se int, expunctuated A.
7. Added above the line A.
8. vicorum crossed out A.
9. me A.
10. Corrected above the line, from claustras A.
11. Added above the line A.
12. filas A.
13. Originally propreas, with e expunctuated and i added above the line A.
14. collocate A.
15. famulantur A.
16. Added above the line A.
17. laudabliles A.
18. prohibite videantur A.
19. Quapropter, not expunctuated but marked with a symbol referring to a mar-
ginal correction, lower right A.
20. Incorrectly expunctuated A.
21. Added above the line A.

Translation

To the most holy father in Christ and my lord, dearest Lord John, su-
preme pontiff of the holy Roman and universal church by God’s worthy
providence, his devoted son, Robert, count of Flanders, with humble dedi-
cation the most pious kissing of your saintly feet. Most holy father, a con-
stitution of the sacred council recently celebrated in Vienne condemned
 356 / Walter Simons

by a perpetual decision the way of life of dangerous beguines who rashly

presume to preach and dispute about theological subtleties, sowing things
that are contrary to the Catholic faith under the cover of holiness, to the
destruction of simple people. Because of a bad (so it appears) understand-
ing of that constitution, certain women of an honorable and quasi holy
way of life since the oldest days, natives of my land, around here com-
monly called beguines up to this point, have been forced to abandon
almost completely the simple and humble habit they used to wear, as
well as their religious observances and maternal admonitions, redolent
of virtue and discipline before God and humankind rather than suspi-
cion of any evil, to the loss of many girls. And after the promulgation
of that statute, releasing the reins of modesty and letting go of proper
chastity, they vanished on the wayward paths of vice.

Such women of my fatherland never used to run around idly in several re-
gions, engaging in the aforesaid erroneous sillinesses. Instead, in several
cities of Flanders, in houses or sites owned by them or granted to them
within enclosed courtyards assigned for that purpose, living together be-
cause of their work and in a fitting number, they seek a tenuous living for
themselves either from their patrimonial goods or, for the most part, from
the pious labor of their hands in the washing of woolens or linens or from
other licit feminine crafts, having daily heard the first mass. Faithfully pay-
ing parochial dues, they honor the prelates or clerics of their churches
with due obedience, on feast days through a sermon and the celebration of
the divine office, particularly by expounding to those in the audience— so
much so that every young girl educated in their company is always said to
be more devout when later she moves on to some form of religious life or
marriage. In my lands, abounding in the female sex, upright and reputable
men would not agree that their daughters, whom they cannot give over to
monasteries or join in honorable marriages from their own resources, be
placed anywhere more fittingly than in these women’s most steadfast com-
pany, where a woman of whatever fortune, noble or non-noble, rich, mid-
dling or poor, living honorably and decently, serves the Lord more happily
in chastity and humility of virtues.
 Appendix: Count Robert’s Petition to Pope John XXII \ 357

Whence I can scarcely believe that, if your holiness were to consider the
damages to virtue and inducements toward vice that emerge from a su-
perficial understanding of this aforesaid constitution and daily begin to
emerge more and more, your holiness might not kindly see fit to recall
those laudable women, mentioned many times above, never infamous or
suspect of the errors of the aforesaid constitution, to their original, hum-
ble, and honorable way of life, by a due and truthful declaration. Indeed,
although the way of life of faithful women of holy observance by no
means appears to be forbidden, as the last clause of that statute indicates,
nonetheless they are fearful, with tenderness of conscience toward your
papal precept, and do not dare to resume the way of life they abandoned
without its special license.

Therefore, I humbly beg your holiness that, regardless of that statute

on the aforesaid matters, your holiness yourself sees fit to declare or
command that the women of my fatherland Flanders, described above,
whether past, present, or future, may freely serve the Lord in humility
of spirit in their original way of life.

May the Most High preserve your holiness unharmed for his holy church
for a very long time. Dated, etc.
 Fo u r t e e n

Th e E f f e c t o f Pa p a l P r o v i s i o n s
t o O x f o r d a n d Pa r i s S c h o l a r s o n
t h e Pa s t o r a t e a n d C a r e o f S o u l s

w i l l i a m j . c o u rt e n ay

The theme of reform has been an important dimension of the research

contribution of John Van Engen, stimulated in part, no doubt, by his
training with Gerhart Ladner.1 The chapter of the long history of re-
form within the life of the church that I want to examine here concerns
the attempts to improve the educational level and theological training of
the clergy, particularly the parish clergy, in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries. I should state at the outset that I will not be able to answer a
question frequently raised by those interested in this topic: how many
clerics with university training, particularly at the level of Master of Arts
and higher, actually served out their careers as parish clergy. The evi-
dence we have is insufficient, despite the considerable amount of atten-
tion that has been given to this issue, particularly in the second half of
the twentieth century.2 What I can provide is a more detailed picture of
the relation of university education and appointments to parish churches
in fourteenth-century England and France.3

358
 The Effect of Papal Provisions on the Pastorate \ 359

Thirteenth-Century Initiatives

From well before the Fourth Lateran Council through the pontificate of
Boniface VIII, church leaders, primarily popes, put forward three initia-
tives to improve the educational level of the clergy. At the highest level
this meant increasing the appointment of university graduates to the epis-
copate, an area in which the papacy exercised influence through con-
firmation. This was even more the case by the middle of the fourteenth
century, when appointment to a bishopric required papal action or provi-
sion, often after negotiations with monarchs or princes. The second ini-
tiative in the thirteenth century was to encourage bishops, acting directly
or through other church officials with rights of appointment or advow-
son, to provide scholars from their diocese with appointment to bene-
fices, especially parish churches, which in turn would presumably lead to
a better-educated parish clergy. Ultimately more important for the parish
clergy was a third initiative, namely the papal constitutions that permitted
and encouraged bishops to grant a leave of absence to a rector of a parish
church for purposes of study in the schools or at a studium generale, an ef-
fort that culminated in Boniface VIII’s Cum ex eo constitution in 1298.4
The success rate on the first of these initiatives, namely the appoint-
ment of university-trained men as bishops, was considerable in England
but, to the degree biographical evidence permits, seems to have been
lower in France.5 From the perspective of the papacy, the mendicant or-
ders proved to be an excellent source of university-educated talent for
appointment as bishops, since their members were required to have theo-
logical training.
The second initiative, namely encouraging bishops to appoint
university-trained scholars from their diocese to a parish church, was
largely unsuccessful in the thirteenth century. Appointment to a parish
was controlled by many different patrons, some lay, many ecclesiastical,
all of whom were under pressure from vested interests in medieval so-
ciety, from kings down to local noble families, to appoint faithful ser-
vants or those connected to their familia. This is not to say that those with
university education were not appointed. Some bishops, such as Rob-
ert Grosseteste at Lincoln, considered educational training an important
 360 / William J. Courtenay

consideration, perhaps even more important than spirituality. But with-

out a system that could level the playing field over against competing
local interests, the results of papal pressure were slim.
The third initiative, namely allowing dispensations from parish resi-
dency for purposes of study, was the most successful but also the most
controversial. Already in the twelfth century bishops had been allowed to
grant permissions of nonresidency to rectors of parish churches for pur-
poses of study, presumably at a cathedral school.6 The perceived need for
such permissions probably increased in response to the legislative empha-
sis at the Third Lateran Council in 1179 on improving diocesan educa-
tional resources for the training of clergy, especially if beneficed clergy in
towns and villages throughout a diocese were to be included within the
target group.7 Such permissions, however, simultaneously ran up against
an opposing reform goal, namely to limit or eradicate parish absenteeism
by requiring those holding benefices with the care of souls to be in resi-
dence, a policy also mandated at the Third Lateran Council.8 In response
to a question from the archbishop of York as to whether this last canon
was to be applied without exception, Alexander III allowed the continu-
ation of licenses of nonresidence for study and other reasonable causes.9
The parish was not left without the administration of the sacra-
ments and the care of souls. Whether the license for study was granted by
a bishop or a pope, the rector was obliged to appoint a curate, who tem-
porarily served in his stead, while the majority of the income was retained
by the rector for his expenses in the schools or at a university. From a leg-
islative standpoint, the rector was obliged to appoint a qualified curate to
handle the care of souls, or he would be guilty of fraud and could lose his
benefice.10 We should not assume that such curates were uneducated,
since scholars holding a position as rector of a parish church would know
students, ordained or able to be ordained as priests, without the means
to remain at the university and for whom the portion of income for a cu-
rate would be attractive. The episcopal registers for dioceses in England
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries show that ordinations to the
priesthood outnumbered institutions to parish churches, creating a large
pool of available curates. The many clerics seeking parish churches had a
strong interest in drawing attention to negligent benefice holders, includ-
ing those who failed to be ordained within the required time after ap-
 The Effect of Papal Provisions on the Pastorate \ 361

pointment, who held more than one church with cure, or who had been
absent without license. Therefore appointing a curate who lacked the
proper qualifications, which could lead to a charge of fraud and the loss of
the benefice, represented a significant risk for a rector.
Following upon the mandate of the Third Lateran Council to ap-
point a grammar master in every cathedral, and in the face of the grow-
ing threat of heresy, the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 insisted on a
similar appointment of a theologian in every metropolitan cathedral.11 In
1219 Honorius III mandated the implementation of that decree, and in
order to offset the excuse that an insufficiency of trained teachers pre-
vented this, bishops and chapters were instructed to do more to improve
the supply of teachers of theology, allowing those capable of such studies
to use the income from their benefices for up to five years of study.12
But to whom were such licenses granted, and, whatever the legisla-
tive intent, was the implementation of Honorius’s decree concerned
with the preparation of teachers for cathedral schools? Cathedral and
parish clergy resident in a cathedral city would not need such licenses
because they could remain in residence and fulfill their pastoral duties
while engaged in study, unless they were asking to study elsewhere. Simi-
larly, unbeneficed clerics would not need such a license because they
were not yet involved in the care of souls. Licenses for study must there-
fore have been aimed at beneficed clerics in other towns and villages in a
diocese, and the small amount of evidence available suggests that li-
censes were not for the improvement of the teaching staff at cathedrals,
but rather for the improvement of the level of learning among the
clergy involved with the care of souls. The brief length of study permit-
ted by most licenses, usually one year, as well as the junior academic sta-
tus of the recipients, does not correspond well with a goal of preparing
teachers. Looking at the seven rectors in the diocese of Lincoln receiv-
ing licenses for study between 1219 and circa 1232, only one is identified
as studying theology and that for only one year, insufficient to prepare a
teacher.13 Most of the other licenses were also for one year, and the most
generous license, for seven years, was granted in 1223 to a cleric so
young that he needed a tutor in the schools.14
It must be acknowledged, however, that not all licenses granted for
study may have been recorded in episcopal registers, at least not with
 362 / William J. Courtenay

the same degree of thoroughness in every diocese and across time. As

shall be seen in a moment when discussing licenses for study between
1274 and 1298, the number of licenses recorded varies dramatically among
dioceses, and even earlier in the thirteenth century there are periods in
which no licenses for study were recorded. For example, while Walter
Giffard was bishop of Bath and Wells, from 1264 to 1266, no licenses
for study were recorded in his surviving register, despite the fact that
Giffard had studied at Cambridge, became a Master of Arts at Oxford in
1251, and may have remained there for a time for further studies.15 Dur-
ing his time as archbishop of York (1266 –1279), his register records six
licenses for study in 1268, three in 1269, and one in 1270, before and after
which no licenses were recorded.16 If these figures accurately reflect the
number of licenses granted, they present an erratic picture for a large
diocese with a scholarly prelate. A similar erratic pattern shows up in the
register of Giffard’s successor, William Wickwane, archbishop of York
from 1279 to 1285. His register records two licenses for study in 1280,
seven licenses in 1281, another seven licenses in 1282, and no licenses
during the remainder of his pontificate.17
With the growth of universities in the thirteenth century, oppor-
tunities for study by secular clerics expanded far beyond what was pre-
viously available at cathedrals and town schools. Thus, while licenses
for study in the twelfth century were for attendance in the schools, such
licenses by the middle of the thirteenth century were almost entirely for
study at a studium generale, a university.18 Specific universities, such as
Oxford, Cambridge, or Paris, were sometimes mentioned in a license
as recorded in English episcopal registers. And the growth of the facul-
ties of theology at Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge was as important for
the training of secular clerics as it was for the defense of orthodoxy
against heresy.

From Licet canon (1274) to Cum ex eo (1298)

Licet canon, a constitution that Gregory X attached to the decrees of the

Second Council of Lyons in 1274, seemingly restricted the ability of
bishops to grant licenses of absence to those holding benefices that en-
 The Effect of Papal Provisions on the Pastorate \ 363

tailed the care of souls. Of the many requirements for holding a parish
church, such as having attained the age of twenty-five,19 having sufficient
learning and good character, ordination as priest, and personal residency
in the parish, only two mitigations were allowed. Ordination to the priest-
hood could be delayed for up to a year from appointment to a parish
church.20 Secondly, a bishop could dispense someone from the residency
requirement for a period of time for reasonable cause.21 A delay in ordina-
tion was only for a year, and no mention was made of episcopal dispensa-
tion for any further delay. As regards residency, however, no definition
of “reasonable cause” was given, nor of the length of time for which a
dispensation might be granted.
The reiteration in Licet canon of the age and ordination require-
ments for a rector of a parish church was aimed in part at patrons who
wished to endow at an early stage a young family member destined for a
church career.22 Rather than present a qualified candidate for institution
to a parish church in the gift of a noble family that had a son, nephew, or
protégé already tonsured, who was only a few years away from being able
to be ordained a priest, they often preferred their own underage candi-
date and sought to obtain a dispensation from the bishop to postpone
ordination for five or more years.23 In the meantime, the spiritual needs
of the parishioners could be served through a temporary curate. Episco-
pal registers from the late thirteenth century suggest that Licet canon was
to a large extent successful in addressing the abuse of underage rectors,
although not eliminating it entirely.24
Licet canon’s ruling on absenteeism, however, which allowed bishops
to grant leaves for reasonable cause, posed a different set of issues. While
many leaves were for study, often to masters in arts for advanced theologi-
cal training at Oxford or Paris,25 many others were for administrative du-
ties or other forms of service in royal, noble, or episcopal households.
The income derived from possession of a parish church had long been an
attractive source of revenue from which to reward clerics who served
those in positions of political, social, or ecclesiastical power. While Licet
canon sought to end the appointment to parish churches of those who did
not qualify by reason of age and lack of ordination, permitting leaves of
absence for reasonable cause left open the possibility of leaves for service
as much as for study.
 364 / William J. Courtenay

Early in his pontificate Boniface VIII moved to eliminate or reduce

sharply that form of absenteeism. On March 19, 1296, a month after
Clericis laicos, Boniface issued a bull that required the personal residence
of parish clergy, specifically as it applied to those engaged in administra-
tive, diplomatic, or personal service away from the parish.26 To the ex-
tent that such service qualified as reasonable cause under Licet canon, it
had to be approved and licensed by the pope. Although the bull would
have been sent to church officials throughout Europe, it has left very little
trace in ecclesiastical records. If conscientiously observed, it would have
had a devastating effect on royal and ecclesiastical bureaucracies. It ap-
pears, instead, to have been ignored.
In Cum ex eo, promulgated in 1298, Pope Boniface addressed the
other reason for parish absenteeism, namely licenses for study, and out-
lined a different course of action. He made the argument that the insis-
tence on promotion to the priesthood within a year of installation as rec-
tor and the requirement of personal residence in the parish as stipulated
in Licet canon discouraged those interested in pursuing studies from ac-
cepting appointment to a parish church. The church was losing talent for
the parish ministry by too stringent an insistence on residency and ordi-
nation to the priesthood. Boniface was not alone in viewing Licet canon
in that light.27 Despite the fact that both Licet canon and Cum ex eo men-
tioned the requirements for ordination to the priesthood within a year
and residency in the parish, in that order, it was the residency require-
ment that attracted the most attention in the late thirteenth century and
among twentieth-century historians. As Leonard Boyle expressed it in
his foundational article on Cum ex eo, “in legislating ruthlessly against
absenteeism, Licet canon had in fact placed the common good in jeop-
ardy.”28 Under the terms of Licet canon no one could be appointed as a rec-
tor unless he was within a year of meeting the canonical requirement of
age twenty-five, and once installed as rector, he had to remain in resi-
dence and provide the care of souls. According to Boyle, the reformist
attempt to safeguard pastoral care had threatened the long-term goal
of raising the clergy’s educational level. Benedict VIII’s Cum ex eo had
sought to correct this unintended consequence. And because Cum ex eo
assumed the recipient of the dispensation was not yet ordained a subdea-
con, the legislation was aimed at those in their late teens or early twen-
 The Effect of Papal Provisions on the Pastorate \ 365

ties, who would be attracted into to the parish ministry by the promise of
using parish revenues for education. Although some prelates and canon-
ists in the last quarter of the thirteenth century feared that Licet canon
would greatly reduce the level of education among parish priests, a point
of view Boyle adopted, Boyle also argued that Cum ex eo was aimed not at
those who were already parish priests, but rather at those who desired
but could not afford university education and might in this way be
brought into the ranks of parish priests.
Despite contemporary perceptions, Licet canon did not choke off
licenses for study, nor did it limit them to one year.29 Some bishops in
England took a cautious approach to granting licenses of absence in the
wake of Licet canon. For example, Oliver Sutton at Lincoln (1280 –1299)
apparently granted only five licenses for study to rectors in his diocese
between 1290 and 1296, and only one of them was for a period longer
than one year; however, six months after the constitution Cum ex eo
was promulgated, Sutton granted six licenses for study in the autumn of
1298.30 Other bishops in England took a more liberal view of “causa ratio-
nabilis” in Licet canon. For example, Thomas de Cantelupe at Hereford
(1275–1282) granted thirty licenses for study in less than five years, be-
tween September 1275 and January 1280.31 His successor at Hereford,
Richard de Swinfield (1283–1317) continued to grant licenses for study,
albeit at a more controlled pace: thirteen licenses across five years, 1283
to 1287.32 Archbishop of York William Wickwane granted twenty-eight
licenses for study in less than three years (1280 –1282), at least eight
of which were given to those who were already masters.33 Bishop Peter
Quivil at Exeter (1280 –1291) granted thirty-eight licenses across an eight-
year period.34 Whatever Pope Gregory may have intended by “reasonable
cause” in 1274, a substantial number of English bishops interpreted it to
cover university study.
Boyle noted that “some bishops would, no doubt, stretch ‘causa ratio-
nabilis’ to cover licenses of absence for study,” specifically citing the regis-
ters of Wickwane at York and Swinfeld at Hereford.35 But adding the evi-
dence from the registers of Cantelupe at Hereford and Quivil at Exeter
suggests that the problem with Licet canon was not the suppression of li-
censes for study, but that only those rectors who were ordained priests,
or within a year of being eligible for ordination, could be canonically
 366 / William J. Courtenay

granted a license for study. What Cum ex eo changed, as Boyle empha-

sized, was to allow clerics too young to be ordained priests to be installed
as rectors of a parish church, use the income for up to seven years of
study at a studium generale, and delay ordination to the priesthood until
the eighth year. This opened the possession of parish churches and li-
censes for study to those in the age range of seventeen to twenty-four,
precisely the age group appropriate for the final stages of a degree in arts
and the beginning of studies in theology. It could also be of use to those
who needed remedial work in Latin grammar, but to the extent that Cum
ex eo released rectors for study at a studium generale, it assumed candidates
already possessed proficiency in Latin and was aimed at those who were
already studying in or wished to study in the faculty of arts at a univer-
sity. It could also be used for higher studies in the faculties of theology
and canon law.
It has often been assumed, on the basis of Boyle’s analysis, that Cum
ex eo was aimed at those in need of remedial work in Latin and those
beginning their studies in arts. Thus, it comes as a surprise that among
those receiving licenses for study according to the terms of Cum ex eo we
find a number of scholars who were already masters in arts and thus well
beyond the beginning level, both in age and educational achievement.
Cum ex eo licenses to masters in arts were not, however, an occasional
anomaly. For example, Archbishop Greenfield at York granted licenses
for study to masters under the provisions of Cum ex eo in every year of his
pontificate. In some years, such as in 1306 and 1315, they made up the
majority of licensees.36 Similarly, during the short pontificate of Simon
de Montacute at Worcester, masters received Cum ex eo licenses for study
in every year, comprising five of the eight licenses granted in 1334, two
of the six granted in 1335, four of the thirteen granted in 1336, and two
of the six granted in 1337.37 This pattern might well have occurred in
other dioceses, but many registers as edited do not provide academic ti-
tles to those receiving licenses for study. Whatever the intent of Boni-
face’s legislation, as applied in the dioceses of England in the early four-
teenth century the controlling factor was not the age of the rector or his
being at the beginning of studies in grammar or arts, but whether or not
he was a priest. If he was a priest, the license could be granted under the
authority of Licet canon, whether explicitly mentioned as such in the reg-
 The Effect of Papal Provisions on the Pastorate \ 367

ister entry or not. If he was too young to be ordained a priest— as would

be the case for any recent master in arts who was continuing studies in
theology or canon law—the license would be granted under the author-
ity of Cum ex eo, again whether that canon was explicitly mentioned or
not.38 Many permissions to delay ordination to the priesthood, usually
granted as part of a Cum ex eo dispensation for study, were probably not a
result of reluctance to become a priest, although there are examples of
that,39 but of the individual’s young age, that is, below the canonical age
of twenty-four for ordination, that is, being in one’s twenty-fifth year.
Viewed from this perspective, Cum ex eo was not primarily intended
to counter an unfortunate outcome of the reforming constitution, Licet
canon, which purportedly limited the education of priests. Its main pur-
pose, again as Boyle noted, was to allow the use of parish revenues for
study to those who, by reason of age, were not yet eligible to be ordained
as priests. By requiring ordination to the subdiaconate within a year of
institution to a parish church, the recipient of a church and a license to
study was obliged to celibacy and a career as a parish priest or office
within the church.
Allowing the use of parish income in absentia for university study by
priests already serving in a parish was practiced in the thirteenth century
and did not end with Licet canon, at least as implemented at the diocesan
level in England. A limited number of parish priests could be given the
opportunity to study in the arts faculty to improve their Latin grammar,
their skills in argumentation and rhetoric useful in preaching, or more
especially in theology to better understand the Bible and doctrine —
rather like a continuing education program that improves the skills of
those already serving in a profession. Boyle correctly interpreted Cum ex
eo to be targeted at those who were not yet priests, younger men inter-
ested in higher education who, because of the restrictions of Licet canon,
might avoid the parish ministry. We might view this as equivalent to the
Reserve Officer Training Corp program at American universities by
which one’s university education is financed by the government in return
for future military service at the officer level. Since Cum ex eo required
ordination to the subdiaconate within a year of receiving the license and
ordination to the priesthood after the period of study, it was not targeted
at those who had been serving in a parish, since they would already have
 368 / William J. Courtenay

taken holy orders. The principal aim of Cum ex eo was to attract talented
young men to the priesthood and the parish ministry, some or many of
whom might already be studying at a university, by offering the use of
parish income to support their education with the expectation that they
would, after a number of years of study, return to that parish and serve as
rector in residence. So long as those with positions involving the cura an-
imarum could not be absent or appoint a replacement (except in rare
cases), clerics interested in education would view appointment to a parish
church as a barrier to study.
The problem with assessing the effectiveness of Boniface’s initiative
is the limited quantity of information on the educational and clerical ca-
reer pattern of those who received dispensations. Boyle studied dispensa-
tions granted by specific bishops in England across the fourteenth century
and presented a number of specific cases, but for the most part we have no
idea whether they had previous university study or in what faculty they
presumably used their dispensation to study. If we turn, as Boyle did not,
to the biographical registers for Oxford and Cambridge compiled by A. B.
Emden, we are in fact able to gain some impression of where episcopal li-
censes for study, whether Cum ex eo dispensations or ones granted on the
basis of earlier canonical legislation, fitted into the academic and ecclesi-
astical careers of scholars. Outside England—in France, for example— a
similar analysis has not been possible because episcopal registers are all
but nonexistent and because we lack a comparable biographical register
for the medieval University of Paris.40 An additional problem is that, in
most cases, we do not know the initial financial resources of students and
therefore are unable to gauge the role that parish revenues played in al-
lowing their studies— whether it made study possible or simply enhanced
the quality of life at Paris, Oxford, or elsewhere.
While there is nothing in the Cum ex eo constitution that excludes
licenses for study to priests already holding a benefice with care of souls,
the evidence that Donald Logan has assembled for the diocese of Lin-
coln in the first half of the fourteenth century supports Boyle’s interpre-
tation that Cum ex eo was targeted at clerics who were not yet priests.41
The Lincoln registers distinguish between licenses for study granted to
priests already holding a parish church and dispensations Cum ex eo
to non-priests, which, in addition to permission to use parish revenues
 The Effect of Papal Provisions on the Pastorate \ 369

in absentia for a period of university study, allowed a delay in ordination.

Most telling perhaps is the fact that institution to a parish church and
the dispensation based upon Cum ex eo usually occurred within a matter
of months, sometimes on the same day. While a significant number of
these dispensations were granted to clerics to continue at or return to
the university, the vast majority of recipients are not known to have had
any previous university study.
The numbers that have been assembled for the diocese of Lincoln re-
veal a remarkable growth in the use of parish income for university study
in England in the early fourteenth century, an increase paralleled by evi-
dence from the registers of other dioceses. If judged by the use made of
this opportunity, this third initiative was highly successful. It is probably
safe to assume that most of those receiving dispensations or licenses for
study in fact used them for that purpose, although the number known to
have attained the degree of Master of Arts is relatively small. And since all
recipients of these permissions held or had been recently appointed to a
parochial benefice, there would seem to be a close connection between
these educational grants and the eventual care of souls. Logan has looked
at the question from the standpoint of diocesan evidence, combining it
with evidence provided by Emden’s Biographical Register for Oxford. What
does the picture look like from the standpoint of university and papal evi-
dence? What role, if any, did student rectors play in the academic life of a
university? To answer those questions I now turn to a different body of
evidence associated with yet another papal initiative.

The Rotuli : A Fourteenth-Century Papal Initiative

Beyond the three papal initiatives outlined above for the thirteenth cen-
tury, there was a new initiative in the fourteenth century, namely papal
provisions to university scholars.42 This initiative was an innovation by
John XXII that allowed a university, the first one being Paris in 1316, to
petition the pope directly as a collective supplicant on behalf of a list of
teaching masters without benefice income or benefice income sufficient
to meet their perceived needs. In almost all cases, what was being granted
by the pope was an expectation of a parish church or, in a few cases, a
 370 / William J. Courtenay

canonical prebend from a designated collator who held the right of ap-
pointment, such as a bishop, a cathedral or collegiate chapter, or a mon-
astery. When a benefice in their gift became vacant, the papal letter of
provision presumably gave the university candidate an advantage over
other petitioners.
This fourth initiative resembled the second inasmuch as it sought to
place university-trained scholars into church positions within a diocese.
But instead of trying to persuade bishops to do this on their own, it went
directly to collators with a papal mandate that connected an individual
scholar to an individual collator and sometimes a specific church. More-
over, this new initiative was not promulgated as a bull or constitution
that might have brought opposition from kings, prelates, or lay patrons,
but rather was implemented letter by letter without any policy state-
ment. Just as kings, princes, bishops, and others had long submitted to
the pope lists of persons for whom they sought a benefice, John XXII
was allowing an institution, a university, to do likewise.
Thus, while licenses for study under Licet canon allowed some literate
priests to use their parish revenues for a year or more of university train-
ing, and dispensations for study under Cum ex eo allowed that same op-
portunity to rectors who were not yet priests, university petitions, sub-
mitted on rolls (rotuli), provided unbeneficed university masters with a
means of obtaining a parish church or a position in a cathedral and colle-
giate church that might also entail care of souls. Cum ex eo put more rec-
tors into universities; papal provisions facilitated the process of placing
university masters in parish churches and other positions within the
church. Together they contributed to the same, more general goal of in-
creasing the number of beneficed clergy with university educations.
By the 1330s submitting a rotulus of petitions for benefices had be-
come standard practice through which a university, every two or three
years, submitted a list of masters in all faculties and bachelors in the higher
faculties (and, toward the end of the fourteenth century even students in
arts) seeking a special papal grace that granted an expectation of appoint-
ment to a parish church or a canonical prebend or dignity in a cathedral
or collegiate church. The results of these petitions have now been edited
for the University of Paris for the fourteenth century, and although they
give us no direct information on licenses for study, they do provide abun-
 The Effect of Papal Provisions on the Pastorate \ 371

dant information about when in an academic career a scholar received an

expectation or appointment to a parish church, how long it took to trans-
form an expectation into collation or acquisition, and in what discipline or
faculty a recipient of a parish church was studying.43 Moreover, since
many university scholars continued to petition for benefices throughout
their time at the university, we can see approximately when a scholar ob-
tained his first parish appointment and when he exchanged it for one with
a higher income or one located in a region more suitable to his present
and future needs. This new evidence allows us to test some aspects of the
relation of dispensations and licenses to study in the careers of university
scholars and thus the impact that Cum ex eo had upon universities, or at
least their more academically successful members.
Two features of this type of documentation need to be noted. First,
those whose petitions were recorded in the papal Registers of Supplica-
tion were only those whose petitions were granted, either as requested or
as revised in chancery. The recorded results, therefore, do not reflect the
total number of those who petitioned the pope by means of the univer-
sity supplication. Only in one instance, the rotulus of 1335 for the faculty
of arts at Paris, do we have evidence that allows us to know the ratio be-
tween the total number of petitioners and those who were successful, al-
though that ratio may be atypical of a normal rate of return. It was the
first rotulus in the pontificate of Benedict XII, whose attitude toward the
University of Paris was, at best, ambivalent. Since the faculties and na-
tions at the University of Paris listed the petitions in ranked order based
mostly on seniority, we may assume that, except for a few cases in which
the pope and his advisers may have made a distinction in persons, those
receiving a favorable response were probably those at the top of the list.
As we shall see, it was not based on whether or not the petitioner already
held a parish church or other benefice.
Secondly, the papal chancery required that supplicants list all bene-
fices and expectations of benefices already held, including parish churches,
and the corresponding letters of provision repeated that information in
a non obstantibus clause. Failure to list benefices and expectations was con-
sidered fraud and could result in their loss, as well as endangering the pos-
sibility of papal graces in the future. Thus, the results of university rotuli
of supplication provide a reliable picture of parish church possession
 372 / William J. Courtenay

within the career of a university scholar and allow us to compare that

information against the date and terms of a license for study, at least for
the British Isles, where we have episcopal registers that list dispensations
and licenses for study.
Let me begin with one example from Oxford in the first year of
John XXII’s innovation, namely the results of Oxford’s first collective
supplication to the pope in 1317.44 Although all but one of the twenty-
seven regent masters in the faculty of arts whose petitions were ap-
proved received an expectation of a benefice with care of souls,45 none
of them already held a parish church, although they had been studying
and teaching at a university for seven years or more. Their expenses at
Oxford were being paid from personal family sources, a college fellow-
ship, or a patron, supplemented by student fees from their teaching in
arts. Those in the rotulus who already possessed a parish church were
doctors in a higher faculty, namely theology.
Of the twenty-seven regent masters in arts who received an expecta-
tion of a benefice, fifteen are known to have been successful in turning
their expectation into possession of a benefice, and of those all but one
obtained a parish church from the collator named in their letter of provi-
sion.46 The time span between obtaining the letter of expectation47 and
possession of a church was relatively short, on average within four years,
several within a year or two. Some of these petitioners might have fared
well on their own initiative, but a success rate of more than 50 percent
nonetheless shows the effectiveness of papal provisions for Oxford schol-
ars at this time. Moreover, of the fifteen, only six are known to have ob-
tained a degree in a higher faculty or a license for study after 1317. That
suggests that many of them, after obtaining a parish church, moved from
the university into an ecclesiastical career, either as a parish priest or in
some other capacity.
As mentioned, the five regent masters in theology all held parish
churches, with the exception of John of Elham, who held a canonical
prebend in the cathedral chapter at Hereford.48 John Lutterell was a
priest when he was appointed to the parish church of Holme in 1304, but
his only recorded license for study was for one year in 1320, during his
time as chancellor of the university.49 There must have been a series of
earlier and subsequent licenses— all based on Licet canon, since he was a
 The Effect of Papal Provisions on the Pastorate \ 373

priest—to cover the fourteen years of study needed to obtain the doctor-
ate in theology and his continuing residence at Oxford and then at Avi-
gnon. Another of the regent masters in theology was Simon de Mepham,
later archbishop of Canterbury, who was appointed to the parish church
of Turnstall in 1297, but whose only recorded license for study was in
1314 for a year. As with Lutterell, there must have been many unrecorded
licenses for study before 1314, since he remained rector of Turnstall until
he was appointed archbishop.50 Thomas de Corbridge, a clerk and possi-
ble kin of the archbishop of York of the same name, received his first
parish church as an acolyte in 1300 and exchanged it for another parish
church in the diocese of York in 1302, soon after which, now ordained
subdeacon, he received a seven-year license to study (a Cum ex eo dispen-
sation).51 The date of his doctorate in theology, by or before 1317, means
that he must have been Master of Arts in 1302, with many years of pri-
vately funded university study already accomplished and many years of
theological study ahead, for which he would have needed numerous li-
censes of absence, although none are mentioned in the surviving regis-
ters. Similarly, Thomas de Hotot was already a master in arts when he re-
ceived appointment to the parish church of Allington together with a
license to study for two years in 1303.52 Admittedly, these scholars had
had successful university careers, but in no case was their arrival at Ox-
ford a result of a permission to study, under Cum ex eo or otherwise.
A similar picture emerges from the results of an Oxford rotulus in
1343, in the second year of the pontificate of Clement VI.53 Since two of
the recipients mentioned what they had received from an earlier suppli-
cation to Clement, there may well have been a university rotulus submit-
ted in Clement’s first year that, like the Paris rotulus of 1342, was not
recorded in the Registers of Supplication.54 Everyone on the 1343 list re-
ceiving a papal grace was at least a master in arts and had thus been at
Oxford for almost a decade or more. Moreover, only the doctors of the-
ology and civil law (no doctors of canon law appear on the list) held
parish churches, all of which had been obtained after many years of uni-
versity study and the attainment of the degree of Master of Arts.
Turning next to the University of Paris, a slightly different picture
emerges. In the first Parisian rotulus of supplication to the pope in 1316,
regent masters in theology already held parish churches and/or canonical
 374 / William J. Courtenay

prebends in a cathedral or collegiate church at the time of the supplica-

tion.55 Of the twenty regent masters in the faculty of arts who were re-
warded with a papal grace, three already had parish churches, and they
seem to have been teaching for many years and simultaneously involved
in study in a higher faculty. Those three presumably would have had a li-
cense to be absent for reasons of study from the bishop of the diocese in
which their church was located, but because we lack diocesan records on
licenses or dispensations in France, we do not know how their possession
of a parish church is related to study at Paris. The same is true in the uni-
versity rotulus of 1335, where only one regent master in arts out of
thirty-five successful supplicants held a parish church.56
Since the university rotulus of 1335 was submitted at the beginning
of Benedict XII’s pontificate and he awarded graces to less than a quar-
ter of the Parisian supplicants, the question arises whether Benedict,
and perhaps other popes, may have discriminated against scholars who
already possessed a church or some other benefice. Whatever Benedict’s
grounds for selecting some and rejecting others, previous possession of
a benefice does not seem to have been a factor. This becomes evident
thanks to the survival of a record of a subsequent meeting of the Picard
nation in the faculty of arts.57 The fifty-five masters who petitioned the
pope in 1335 and received nothing forced their ten successful colleagues,
none of whom held a parish church when they petitioned, to reimburse
them the fee they paid to have their petition included in the rotulus. As a
result we know the names of those masters who were not rewarded. Only
one of the supplicants in the Picard nation not rewarded by Benedict is
known to have held a parish church at that time, namely Jean Buridan.58
Nineteen others who were similarly passed over, and for whom we have
additional biographical information (since such information was re-
quired to be included in the petition and was repeated in the letter), are
known not to have held a parish church.59 It is possible that one or more
of the thirty-five non-rewarded scholars for whom we do not have biog-
raphical information did hold a parish church, but since only one out of
twenty for whom we do have such information was a rector, excluding
benefice holders does not appear to have been a factor in papal decision
making in response to the university rotulus. It is more likely that Bene-
dict simply chose the first ten on the list and that because nations some-
 The Effect of Papal Provisions on the Pastorate \ 375

times listed those without benefices before those with benefices, Buri-
dan’s name was not among the first ten.60
In contrast to Benedict XII, his successor, Clement VI, was far more
generous to university scholars. As a result of the rotulus submitted on
the occasion of Clement’s coronation in 1342, 236 regent masters in arts
at Paris received an expectation of a benefice, of whom only 28 already
held churches.61 Papal generosity continued, especially under Urban V
and Gregory XI, and there was a gradual easing of the requirements for
eligibility. By the beginning of the pontificate of Clement VII in 1378,
the first pope in the Avignon line during the papal schism, even students
in the faculty of arts were petitioning the pope for benefices.62 In the last
quarter of the fourteenth century a theologian was usually rector of a
parish church by the time he reached the level of bachelor of theology,
and the number of regent masters in arts at Paris who held a parish
church exceeded 25 percent. By the late fourteenth century it also be-
came common for those masters pursuing a teaching career to obtain a
permanent papal leave of absence from their parish responsibilities, with
income, as long as they continued teaching at a university and employed
a qualified substitute for the care of souls.

The Results of Papal Initiatives

Papal support of universities and university study began in the thirteenth

century as a response to the problem of heresy by seeking to ensure a
sufficient number of trained theologians who could combat heresy. By
the end of the thirteenth century it had become a means of improving
the level of learning of the parish clergy, provided that the scholar or
graduate would return to his parish after his studies to care for the souls
of those who, in a sense, had funded his education, and that he would re-
main in the parish ministry.
Licenses and dispensations for study, whether based on Licet canon
or Cum ex eo, were but one tool for meeting that goal. To the extent the
evidence allows conclusions, they seem primarily to have brought nu-
merous students into university faculties of arts, a few of whom attained
the level of master and went on to study theology or canon law.63 Most
 376 / William J. Courtenay

recipients of Cum ex eo dispensations were not deficient in Latin, since

all university study required Latin. However, most probably left before
obtaining a degree, having at least acquired a few years of learning at a
level above that of a grammar school. Licenses for study, on the other
hand, which were usually given out in one- to three-year permissions to
a parish priest, allowed him to continue at or return to the university to
complete his studies in a higher faculty.
While licenses for study pulled rectors of parish churches into uni-
versities, papal provisions to scholars placed university-trained individu-
als in parish churches. How many stayed in their parishes is impossible to
determine, but these two papal initiatives nonetheless worked together
to increase the level of learning within the church at large. Throughout
most of the fourteenth century, the securing of a parish church by a uni-
versity scholar came, for those who were successful, within a few years of
the papal letter of expectation. Certainly, by the time a scholar became a
bachelor of theology, law, or medicine, he would have a benefice, usually
in the form of a parish church.
University supplications for benefice support by way of papal provi-
sions allowed university scholars who otherwise lacked an important pa-
tron to obtain benefices, most of which were parish churches. If, as Guy
Lytle and others have argued, university scholars were losing out at the
opening of the fourteenth century to nonuniversity clients of those who
held the power of collation to parish churches, papal provisions gave uni-
versity scholars a better chance of success and in some cases an advantage.
And since, until the last quarter of the fourteenth century, scholars rarely
obtained a parish church until they were engaged in studies in a higher
faculty, many of those who eventually served out their careers as parish
priests would have had training in scripture, doctrine, and the sacrament
of penance obtained through the study of theology or canon law. On the
other hand, many remained longer in teaching and went on to careers in
law or medicine, or as canons in collegiate and cathedral chapters. If this
latter group did not directly serve the parish ministry, they did maintain a
higher level of learning within the officialdom of the church at large. Per-
haps even more than Cum ex eo, the system of papal provision ensured
that a higher percentage of rectors were university trained.
 The Effect of Papal Provisions on the Pastorate \ 377

As the process of papal provisions to scholars (and to other petition-

ers) became common in the fourteenth century, those receiving such
graces viewed the benefice, particularly the parish church, essentially as
income. Just as parish churches in England in the nineteenth century
were referred to as “church livings,” parish churches in the fourteenth
century were described in terms of fructus (fruits, yield), redditus (reve-
nue owed), and proventus ( provision, living) — that is, income. And the
continual quest for appointment to a new parish appears to be based as
much on the tithe income or value of the church as on proximity to re-
gion of origin or eventual residence.64 Most likely, seeking appointment
to a parish church as a source of income was not new in the fourteenth
century, merely better documented.
The success rate in turning an expectation obtained through papal
provision into actual possession of a parish church varied considerably.
Petitioners often sought collation from the abbot and community of a
monastery, since they held the right of appointment to churches that
had been given into their care. Collation from a bishop or dean of a
cathedral chapter, however, usually required the cooperation of a lay pa-
tron who held the advowson on a vacant parish church. For those schol-
ars better connected with patrons who controlled the presentation or
nomination to a specific church, or who knew those who could influence
the process, the time frame between presenting a letter of expectation to
a collator and being appointed to a church was around two years. For
others it might take five or ten years, and in some cases it might never be
successful. What is difficult if not impossible to know is how many uni-
versity graduates in arts, theology, or canon law eventually served a
parish as rector and, having obtained a dispensation, episcopal or papal,
to have a curate serve his parish church, went on to a different church
career. During his years of study, if the parish was within or near Oxford
or Paris, a rector could teach and fulfill his parish duties without the
need for a substitute. With parishes more distant, which was usually the
case, a curate would need to be appointed, and the scholar-rector might
return to his parish duties only during vacation periods. Perhaps many
scholars eventually served as a rector in residence after their years at a
university, but in what numbers we do not know.
 378 / William J. Courtenay

Unfortunately, sufficient documentation does not exist to gain a de-

tailed view of what licenses for study did for the educational level of cu-
rates at the parish level. Visitation records give us only a partial view, and
not a very positive one. But those records are biased inasmuch as they
identify problems and have no reason to inform us about parishes in
which there was a conscientious and learned rector or vicar. What we can
say is that without the use of parish income for study and teaching, and
without papal letters that helped place scholars in parish churches, there
would have been fewer university graduates in the ranks of parochial
priests and a less learned clergy in the late Middle Ages.

Notes

1. Gerhart B. Ladner, The Idea of Reform (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-

versity Press, 1959); John H. Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz ( Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1983); John Van Engen, Religion in the History of the Medieval
West (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
2. One thinks especially of William A. Pantin’s The English Church in the
Fourteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955; repr. Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1962), and the many articles of
Leonard E. Boyle collected in his Pastoral Care, Clerical Education and Canon Law,
1200 –1400 ( London: Variorum Reprints, 1981).
3. For England, see Guy Fitch Lytle, “Patronage Patterns and Oxford
Colleges, c. 1300 – c.1510,” in The University and Society, ed. Lawrence Stone, 2
vols. ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 1:111– 49; Guy Fitch Lytle,
“Oxford Students and English Society: c. 1300 –1510,” Ph.D. dissertation, Prince-
ton University, 1976; Trevor H. Aston, “Oxford Graduates and the So-Called
Patronage Crisis of the Late Middle Ages,” Past and Present 74 (1977): 3– 40, esp.
31– 32; R. Barrie Dobson, “Oxford Graduates and the So-Called Patronage Cri-
sis of the Late Middle Ages,” in The Church in a Changing Society, Proceedings of
the Commission Internationale d’Histoire Ecclésiastique Comparée ( Uppsala:
CIHEC, 1978), 211–16; Robert N. Swanson, “Universities, Graduates, and Bene-
fices in Later Medieval England,” in Past and Present 106 (1985): 28– 61; Wil-
liam J. Courtenay, Schools and Scholars in Fourteenth-Century England ( Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1987), 138– 40; and especially a study by F. Donald
Logan of dispensations and licenses for study in the diocese of Lincoln in the
first half of the fourteenth century, University Education of the Parochial Clergy in
Medieval England: The Lincoln Diocese, c.1300 to c.1350 ( Toronto: Pontifical Insti-
tute of Mediaeval Studies, 2014).
 The Effect of Papal Provisions on the Pastorate \ 379

4. Liber Sextus 1.6, 34, in Corpus iuris canonici, ed. Emil Friedberg, vol. II,
Decretalium collectiones (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1879; repr. Graz: Akademische Druck-
und Verlagsanstalt, 1959), 964 – 65, subsequently cited as CIC II; Leonard E. Boyle,
“The Constitution ‘Cum ex eo’ of Boniface VIII,” Mediaeval Studies 24 (1962):
263– 302, reprinted in Boyle, Pastoral Care, essay VIII. Boyle gives the Latin text on
271– 72. For other discussions of the meaning and impact of Cum ex eo, see C. J.
Godfrey, “Non-residence of the Parochial Clergy in the 14th Century,” Church
Quarterly Review 162 (1961): 433– 46; Roy M. Haines, “The Education of the Eng-
lish Clergy during the Later Middle Ages: Some Observations on the Operation of
Boniface VIII’s Constitution Cum ex eo (1298),” Canadian Journal of History 4
(1969): 1– 22; Haines, Ecclesia anglicana. Studies in the English Church of the Later
Middle Ages ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 138– 55, 309– 20; and
Roy M. Haines, Calendar of the Register of Simon de Montacute, Bishop of Worcester,
1334–1337 (Kendal, UK: Worcestershire Historical Society, 1996), 324 – 28.
5. On England, see Pantin, English Church, 54 – 58, 111–17. For France,
see Dale R. Streeter, “ ‘In servitio Dei’: The Bishops of France from 1305 to
1352. A Prosopographical Study,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin,
2002. Unlike England, where we have biographical registers for the universities
of Oxford and Cambridge, we do not yet have comparable information for the
University of Paris.
6. The existence of such licenses in the twelfth century is confirmed by
Alexander III’s allowing their continuation, ca. 1180; see X 3.4.4, CIC II,
460 – 61, Relatum est nobis. Nothing is known about those receiving licenses for
study before the thirteenth century, but we do know about the settings in which
instruction might have been given to secular clerics. In addition to whatever
teaching was available at cathedrals, other resources might be town grammar
schools, private masters who taught arts and theology in the towns of north-
central France, or tutorial instruction.
7. The Third Lateran urged the appointment of a grammar master in
every cathedral; see X 5.5.1, CIC II, 768– 69, Quoniam ecclesia Dei: “ne pau-
peribus, qui parentum opibus iuvari non possunt, legendi et proficiendi oportu-
nitas subtrahatur, per unamquamque cathedralem ecclesiam magistro, qui cleri-
cos eiusdem ecclesiae et scholares pauperes gratis doceat, competens aliquod
beneficium praebeatur.” The phrase “clericos eiusdem ecclesiae et scholares
pauperes” suggests that those benefiting from the appointment of a teaching
master would primarily be cathedral clergy and unbeneficed clerics, neither of
whom would need permission to be absent from parish responsibilities.
8. X 3.4.3, CIC II, 460, Quia nonnulli: “Quum igitur ecclesia vel ecclesi-
aticum ministerium committi debuerit, talis ad hoc persona quaeratur, quae
residere in loco et curam eius per se ipsam valeat exercere. Quod si aliter actum
fuerit, et qui receperit quod contra sacros canones acceptit amittat, et qui dederit
largiendi potestate privetur.”
 380 / William J. Courtenay

9. X 3.4.4, CIC II, 460 – 61, Relatum est nobis: those not in residence
should be removed, “nisi forte de licentia suorum praelatorum, vel studio liter-
arum vel pro aliis honestis causis, contigerit eos absesse.”
10. By the early thirteenth century we find the mandate to provide a quali-
fied curate to be part of the standard language of a license for study. For example,
in a license for study to a rector in the diocese of Lincoln, dated 1220, the official
of the archdeacon is mandated “quod provideat ut ipsa ecclesia interim per cap-
pellanum idoneum officietur.” Rotuli Hugonius de Welles, episcopi Lincolniensis, A.D.
MCCIX–MCCXXXV, ed. W. P. W. Philimore et al., 3 vols. (Lincoln: Lincoln
Record Society, 1907–1908), 2:57. Slightly different wording is used in a license
for study in the diocese of York in 1268, The Register of Walter Giffard, Lord Arch-
bishop of York, 1266–1279, Surtees Society 109 (Durham: Andrews, 1904), 44: “in
theologia et jure canonico studere valeas per triennium, proviso quod in memo-
rata ecclesia cura animarum interim nullatenus negligatur.” Although no mention
of a substitute for a rector was made in Licet canon (1274) when allowing bishops,
ad tempus, to grant a dispensation on residency, Cum ex eo repeated the require-
ment to appoint a qualified curate; Liber Sextus 1.6, 34, CIC II, 965: “per bonos et
sufficientes vicarios, ab eis in huiusmodi ecclesiis deputandos, animarum cura dili-
genter exerceatur, et deserviatur laudabiliter in divinis, quibus de ipsarum eccle-
sarum proventibus necessaria congrue ministrentur.” That language was repeated
in fourteenth-century papal letters “de recipiendis fructibus in absentia,” e.g., Acta
Pataviensia I, ed. Josef Lenzenweger ( Wien: Österreichischen Akademie der Wis-
senschaft, 1974), 289: “proviso, quod huiusmodi beneficia debitis interim obse-
quiis non fraudentur et animarum cura in eis, quibus illa imminet, nullatenus neg-
ligatur, sed per bonos et sufficientes vicarios, quibus de beneficiorum ipsorum
proventibus necessaria congrue ministrentur, diligenter exerceatur et deserviatur
inibi laudabiliter in divinis.”
11. Repeating the language of the 1179 statute (see note 7 above), Innocent
III at the Fourth Lateran urged cathedral chapters to appoint grammar masters
in other churches in the diocese, and that metropolitan churches should allocate
a prebend for a theologian able to teach scripture and pastoral care to priests and
others. X 5.5.4, CIC II, 770, Quia nonnullis: “adiicimus, ut non solum in qualibet
cathedrali ecclesia, sed etiam in aliis, quarum sufficere poterunt facultates, consti-
tuatur magister idoneus, a praelato cum capitulo, seu maiori et saniori parte ca-
pituli eligendus, qui clericos ecclesiarum ipsarum [et aliarum] gratis in grammat-
ica facultate ac aliis instruat iuxta posse. Sane metropolis ecclesia theologum
nihilominus habeat, qui sacerdotes et alios in sacra pagina doceat, et in his prae-
sertim informet, quae ad curam animarum spectare noscuntur. . . . Quodsi forte
de duobus ecclesia metropolis gravetur, theologo iuxta modum praedictum ipsa
provideat, grammatico vero in alia ecclesia suae civitatis sive dioecesis, quae
sufficere valeat, faciat provideri.”
 The Effect of Papal Provisions on the Pastorate \ 381

12. X 5.5.5, CIC II, 770 – 71, Super specula: “Volumus et mandamus, ut statu-
tum in concilio generali de magistris theologis per singulis metropoles statuendis,
inviolabiliter observetur . . . ut, quia super hoc propter raritatem magistrorum se
possent forsitan aliqui excusare, ab ecclesiarum praelatis et capitulis ad theologicae
professionis studium aliqui docibiles destinentur. . . . Docentes vero in theologica
facultate, dum in scholis docuerint, et studentes in ipsa integre per annos quinque,
percipiant de licentia sedis apostolicae proventus praebendarum et beneficiorum
suorum.” The assumption has often been made that such licenses for study were
aimed primarily if not exclusively at preparing teachers, interpreting the word do-
cibile to mean “able to teach” rather than “able to be taught.”
13. The individual was William de Wirmele, vicar of Wrangle; see Rotuli
Hugonius de Welles 3:105.
14. Ibid., 2:287: “ita quod dictus Walterus [de Clintone] per septennium
proximo sequens habeat magistrum continue in scolis.” Seven-year licenses for
study were rare before 1298, but they did exist.
15. The Registers of Walter Giffard, Bishop of Bath and Wells, 1265– 1266,
and Henry Bowett, Bishop of Bath and Wells, 1401–1407, ed. T. S. Holmes ( Taunton:
Somerset Record Society, 1899). On Giffard’s career, see A. B. Emden, A Biogra-
phical Register of the University of Oxford to A.D. 1500 (subsequently cited as BRUO),
3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 2:762– 63.
16. Registers of Walter Giffard, 1– 3, 31, 44.
17. The Register of William Wickwane, Lord Archbishop of York, 1279– 1285,
Surtees Society 114 ( Durham: Andrews, 1907), 84 – 85. Wickwane was referred
to as “magister,” but there is no evidence that ties him to any particular univer-
sity. On Wickwane’s career, see BRUO 3:2228.
18. The other phrase that occurs is “literarum studio insistentes.” One does
occasionally encounter a license for study at a cathedral in the thirteenth and four-
teenth centuries. For example, John de Birerwic, rector of Molesworth in the di-
ocese of Lincoln, received a license of nonresidency in 1222 to study for two years
in Lincoln: Rotuli Hugonis de Welles 3:35. And as late as 1310, master John de Fonte,
rector of Kirkeby Oreblouer in the diocese of York, received a license of non-
residency to study for three years at Rouen or elsewhere: The Register of William
Greenfield, Lord Archbishop of York, 1306–1315, ed. William Brown and A. Hamilton
Thompson, part 4, Surtees Society 152 (London: Andrews, 1937), 93, no. 1874.
19. The stipulation of being in one’s twenty-fifth year in order to be rector
of a parish church was based on the assumption that the latter required the care
of souls, which in turn required ordination to the priesthood. Licet canon attrib-
uted that legislation to Alexander III ( X. I.6.7, CIC II, 52: “nec parochialis ec-
clesiae regimen, nisi qui iam vigesimum quintum annum aetatis attigerit”). The
practice of appointing rectors below the age of twenty-five by separating the
office of rector from the care of souls nevertheless continued.
 382 / William J. Courtenay

20. X 1.6.14, CIC II, 954, Licet canon: “et infra annum, a sibi commissi regi-
minis tempore numerandum, se faciat ad sacerdotium promoveri.”
21. Ibid.: “Super residentia vero, ut praemittitur facienda, possit ordinarius
gratiam dispensationis ad tempus facere, prout causa rationabilis id exposcit.”
22. Lists of institutions usually mention the person who held the right of
presentation, which often reveals a family connection.
23. In fact, canon law allowed, by way of dispensation, the appointment of
someone as young as fourteen as rector of a minor church (“parvulis ecclesiae
regimen,” X. I.14.3 CIC II, 126), while X. I.14.5, CIC II, 127, required ordination
as subdeacon “ad regimen parochialis ecclesiae,” although, “dispensative,” some-
one only in minor orders could be appointed. Being rector meant control of the
church and its revenue, even if one could not be ordained a priest by reason of
age and therefore could not undertake the care of souls. Being a priest, on the
other hand, required ordination as priest in or after one’s twenty-fifth year and
did not in itself entail appointment to a parish church as rector or vicar, or in-
deed to any benefice.
24. Licet canon was not received in England without objections from Ed-
ward I, lay patrons, and bishops. Haines, Ecclesia anglicana, 139– 40 summarizes
these objections.
25. For example, although the register of Peter Quivil, Bishop of Exeter,
1280 –1291, as edited, does not give the ordination status of those receiving li-
censes, almost all of those granted were for study in the higher faculties of the-
ology and canon law, which means that the licensees were beyond, at, or close to
the age for ordination to the priesthood. See The Registers of Walter Bronescombe
(A.D. 1257– 1280), and Peter Quivil (A.D. 1280 – 1291), Bishops of Exeter, ed. F. C.
Hingeston-Randolph ( London: George Bell & Sons, 1889).
26. The Register of John de Halton, Bishop of Carlisle, A.D. 1292–1324, ed. W. N.
Thompson, 2 vols. (London: Canterbury and York Society, 1913), 1:94 – 95:
“Traxit hactenus sancta mater ecclesia in pluribus partibus orbis terrarum pro-
funda suspiria, cujus presunt nonnulli regimini qui pastoris nomen solum opti-
nent et commissum sibi gregem dominicum deserentes, per loca dispersi varia
pervagando, tanquam mercenarii, proh dolor! lupis oves exponunt; imperato-
rum, regum, principum, baronum, et aliorum potencium obsequiis insistentes ac
aliis exquisitis coloribus, quos ex causa tacemus ad presens, se frequenter absen-
tant ac spirituali corporale. . . . de fratrum nostrorum consilio irrefragabili con-
stitucione statuimus, tam pastorum quam gregum animabus salubriter providere
cupientes, et omnes patriarche, primates, archiepiscopi, episcopi, abbates, pri-
ores, decani, archidiaconi, plebani, et quivis alii quibus cura iminet animarum,
cujus jus, status, et preeminencie dignitatis seu condicionis existant, ecclesiis
quibus presunt personaliter et continue resideant ad fideliter animo in eisdem
deserviant, prout onera beneficiorum suorum exigant, infra mensem continue
numerandum a die quo presens salubre statutum ad noticiam pervenerit eorun-
 The Effect of Papal Provisions on the Pastorate \ 383

dem. . . . Nec volumus quod a quocunque super residencia in ipsis beneficiis

minime facienda sine licencia sedis apostolice speciali plenam et expressam fa-
ciente de constitucione hujus mencionem valeat cum aliquo dispensari.”
27. Boyle, “Constitution ‘Cum ex eo’,” 268– 71, pointed to the arguments
of Durandus the Elder on the negative effect of Licet canon on the educational
level of the clergy.
28. Ibid., 273.
29. Haines, Calendar of the Register of Simon de Montacute, 324, expressed
surprise that many of the licenses granted by Montacute were granted under the
authority of Licet canon. This is surprising only because historians have misun-
derstood how Licet canon was applied, as will be shown.
30. The Rolls and Register of Bishop Oliver Sutton, 1280 – 1299, ed. Rosalind
M. T. Hill, 8 vols. ( Woodridge, Suffolk: Lincoln Record Society by Boydell Press,
1948–1975), 3:43, 48, 184; 5:162; 6:113, 114, 115, 116, 124. The number of li-
censes granted by Sutton before and after Cum ex eo assumes that all licenses were
recorded, which may not be the case. Sutton held a Master of Arts degree from
Oxford and had intended further study in law and theology before administrative
duties interrupted his academic career. On Sutton’s career, see BRUO 3:1822– 23.
31. Registrum Thome de Cantilupo, Episcopi Herefordensis, A.D. 1275–1282, ed.
R. G. Griffiths, Canterbury and York Society 2 ( London: Canterbury and York
Society, 1907), 8, 29, 41, 45, 101, 120, 125, 134, 135, 136, 151, 156, 157, 176, 188,
189, 190, 194, 209, 212, 235. Cantelupe had a long academic career. He was
Master of Arts at Paris by 1245, studied canon law at Orléans, was licensed in
canon law at Paris and incepted as a Doctor of Decrees (canon law) at Oxford
circa 1255 before returning to Paris to study theology and later incept as a Doc-
tor of Theology at Oxford in 1273. On Cantelupe’s career, see BRUO 1:347– 49.
32. Registrum Ricardi de Swinfield, Episcopi Herefordensis, A.D. MC-
CLXXXIII–MCCCXVII, ed. W. W. Capes ( London: Canterbury and York Soci-
ety, 1909), 545– 46. While no licenses for study were recorded for the 1290s,
which may be a result of failure to include them in the surviving register, Swin-
field granted fifty-four licenses for study between 1300 and 1317. Those num-
bers are less than the total, as is probably true for licenses for study in the Here-
ford diocese before 1298. For example, the list of licenses granted on page 545
lists only one license for 1300, to Thomas de Wenlock, but on page 377 for 1300
there is an entry on dispensations granted to rectors, “secundum formam consti-
tucionis domini Bonifacii, pape octavi,” that mentions four rectors by name,
among them Thomas de Wenlock. Two of the others have the title of master,
almost certainly for this period revealing university study and a degree in arts.
Swinfield was himself a Master of Arts and Doctor of Theology, presumably
from Oxford; see BRUO 3:1833– 34.
33. The Register of William Wickwane, Lord Archbishop of York, 1279–1285, Sur-
tees Society 114 ( Durham: Andrews, 1907), 84 – 85. Wickwane was sometimes
 384 / William J. Courtenay

referred to as “magister,” but nothing is known of his academic career; see

BRUO 3:2228.
34. Registers of Walter Bronescombe (A.D. 1257–1280), and Peter Quivil (A.D.
1280 –1291), 275, 313, 315, 317, 321, 323, 327, 334, 340, 363, 364, 366, 369, 370,
371, 372, 374, 375, 376, 388, 389, 390. Quivil held the title of “magister” by 1262
and published a manual for parochial clergy known as Summula; see BRUO 3:2208.
35. Boyle, “Constitution ‘Cum ex eo’,” 268.
36. Register of William Greenfield, 3, 7, 70, 214; part III (1936), 47– 48, 71,
161; part IV (1938), 5, 6, 8, 16, 45, 56, 64, 93, 116, 136, 202, 227; part V (1938),
266, 278. Many of those receiving licenses for study under Greenfield were
noble, but that may not have been unique to him. Other episcopal registers, as
edited, do not usually mention noble status.
37. Haines, Calendar of the Register of Simon de Montacute, 325– 28.
38. The evidence from the register of Simon de Montacute in most cases
identifies whether a license was granted under the terms of Licet canon or Cum ex
eo. The registers from the bishopric of Lincoln in the fourteenth century, as ana-
lyzed by Logan in University Education of the Parochial Clergy, differentiate between
licenses for study granted to those who were already priests (Licet canon licenses,
even if that constitution was not mentioned) and dispensations for study granted
to those who were not yet priests, for which Cum ex eo was frequently cited.
39. Haines, Ecclesia anglicana, 139 and 146, suggested that ordination to the
priesthood was undesirable for those interested in an administrative career, es-
pecially royal administration.
40. It would be useful to examine papal licenses for study, which could be
culled from the papal registers, but since the vast majority of licenses for study
were issued by bishops and papal licenses usually addressed cases in which epis-
copal licenses had been exhausted or for some reason were not available, they
would not provide information comparable to English episcopal registers.
41. I am grateful to Donald Logan for sharing the fruits of his research
with me before the publication of his study.
42. On university petitions for benefices in England, see E. F. Jacob, “Eng-
lish University Clerks in the Later Middle Ages: The Problem of Maintenance,”
Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 29 (1946): 304 – 25, and “Petitions for
Benefices during the Great Schism,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society,
4th series, 27 (1945): 41– 59, both reprinted in E. F. Jacob, Essays in the Conciliar
Epoch ( Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1953; repr. Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1963), 207– 39; and D. E. R. Watt, “University
Clerks and Rolls of Petitions for Benefices,” Speculum 34 (1959): 213– 29. On the
origin of this initiative and petitions from the University of Paris, see Rotuli
Parisienses: Supplications to the Pope from the University of Paris, ed. William J.
Courtenay, vol. 1, 1316–1349 ( Leiden: Brill, 2002), 1– 25.
 The Effect of Papal Provisions on the Pastorate \ 385

43. William J. Courtenay and Eric D. Goddard, eds., Rotuli Parisienses: Sup-
plications to the Pope from the University of Paris, 3 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2002, 2004,
2013). There is a section in the papal registers of common letters that does con-
cern dispensations for study (“de recipiendis fructibus in absentia”), but such dis-
pensations were not a result of supplications included in a university rotulus and
therefore were not edited in the volumes of the Rotuli Parisienses.
44. William J. Courtenay, “The Earliest Oxford Supplication List for Papal
Provisions,” History of Universities 16 (2000): 1–15.
45. The exception was Peter de Scolaschis (Scolacley), who held a burse in
Merton College by 1313 and received an expectation of a canonical prebend in
the collegiate church at Auckland in the diocese of Durham; see BRUO 3:1656.
46. The exception was Peter of Scolacley; see previous note. In the case of
Ivo of Eglesheyl from Cornwall, who sought a benefice from the bishop of Ex-
eter, he was granted the church of Saint Erme in Corwall by the bishop in June
1319. His appointment was opposed by the patron of that church, however, so
Bishop Stapleton of Exeter appointed him to another church in Cornwall in
1320; see BRUO 1:489.
47. The date of the Oxford rotulus was the date on which John XXII
granted the individual petitions. It usually took several months for letters of
provision to be prepared and to be sent to the recipient and the three executors
named in the provision. John of Lugwardyn, one of the recipients, presented his
letter to the collator, Bishop Orleton of Hereford, in May 1318 and received a
portion of the church of Bromyard in Herefordshire in July 1322, a four-year
waiting period.
48. BRUO 1:633. Although not mentioned by Emden, Elham was already a
priest in September 1316, when he was instituted to the prebend of Moreton
and Whaddon; see Registrum Ricardi de Swinfield, 544, where the name is given
as John de Olham, priest.
49. BRUO 2:1181– 82.
50. BRUO 2:1261.
51. BRUO 1:485.
52. BRUO 2:972. According to Donald Logan, Hotot later received a
three-year license for study in theology or canon law in England in 1320. Since
he was already a regent master of theology in 1317, this license granted him the
right to use his parish income to continue to teach theology or to study in a dif-
ferent faculty at Oxford for three more years. It may have been preceded by a
similar license to cover the period 1317 to 1320.
53. Vatican City, Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Reg. Suppl. 4, f.74r– 75v; Cal-
endar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland: Petitions
to the Pope, vol. 1, A.D. 1342–1419, ed. William H. Bliss (London: Public Records
Office, 1896; repr. Nendeln: Kraus Reprints, 1971), 60 – 62.
 386 / William J. Courtenay

54. The two were John of Swineshead (Swynesheved), MA, and William
de Blebury, MA, who stated, “non obstante quod sit expectans in gratia generali
per vos [i.e., Clement VI] anno consecrationis vestre primo facta.”
55. Rotuli Parisienses 1:31– 37.
56. Rotuli Parisienses 1:65– 78. The individual who possessed a church was
Hugo de Montibus Vinosis in the French nation (Rotuli Parisienses 1:73), a secu-
lar clerk from the diocese of Toul who was rector of the parish church of Xam-
mes in the diocese of Metz and had been teaching as regent master in the faculty
of arts for over seven years. He had been provided with the church by the abbot
of Gorze in response to a provision from Pope John XXII in 1328 (Rotuli
Parisienses 1:44), which means he obtained the church at some point between
1328 and 1335 as a result of papal provision and would have begun his studies at
Paris by or before 1320. He was still teaching at Paris in arts in 1349 and still
rector of Xammes (Rotuli Parisienses 1:338).
57. Charles Vulliez, “Autour d’un rotulus adressé par l’Université de Paris à
Benoît XII (1335),” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Moyen Age 114 (2002/1):
359– 69.
58. Buridan, who was regent master in the faculty of arts by 1327, was ap-
pointed to the church of Illies in the diocese of Arras in early 1330 and exchanged
it between 1342 and 1349 for a nearby church of roughly the same value in the
diocese of Tournai. Rotuli Parisienses 1:52, 54, 89, 128, 424. It appears that during
that entire time he continued his teaching career in arts at Paris.
59. There are three who later held a parish church, but there is no evi-
dence that they already held them in 1335.
60. In the rotulus of the Picard nation in 1349, those without benefice (“Isti
sunt nichil actu habentes”) were listed first, followed by those who had a
benefice but sought another (“Isti sunt secundum statum eorum et sufficientiam
modicum habentes”). Buridan’s name was listed first in this second category. Ro-
tuli Parisienses 1:424.
61. Rotuli Parisienses 1:93–160.
62. Rotuli Parisienses 3:304 – 417, mixed in with more advanced students.
63. Cum ex eo was aimed at educational improvement, not degree attain-
ment or long-term study. Although the faculty of study was not specified in Cum
ex eo, which allowed Boyle to suggest it could be used for study in any faculty,
seven years barely covered the time needed to become a master of arts. The de-
gree in theology was an additional ten to fourteen years of study, depending on
whether one sought only the baccalaureate or the doctorate.
64. The tithe value of churches in fourteenth-century France can be ob-
tained from the volumes of the Pouillés series in Recueil des Historiens de France
( Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1903 sq.).
 Fifteen

G i o va n n i D o m i n i c i ’ s F i r e fl y
Reconsidered

james d. mixson

Around 1392 John of Sanminiato turned away from his life as a soldier
in the service of Florence to profess religious life as a Camaldolese monk.
From the cloister he wrote to his friend Coluccio Salutati, warning the
famed chancellor of the danger that pagan poetry posed to the soul.
Salutati responded that since all truth was from God, the study of the
ancient poets posed no threat. Brother John wrote again, but when he
received no reply he sought to draw out Salutati once more — this time,
cleverly, by turning on Salutati’s protégé, Angelo Corbinelli. The strata-
gem worked. Salutati eventually entered the fray again, this time with a
masterful response that addressed both John of Sanminiato’s earlier un-
answered letter and the more recent one to Corbinelli. The range of ar-
guments was impressive: that secular letters were essential for rulers of
states; that their truths corroborated Christian doctrine; that they were
natural, useful, and important for cultivating a sound moral life, and much
more. The endgame approached checkmate, but John of Sanminiato
had one last move. Around 1405 he sent Salutati’s letter to the Domini-
can friar Giovanni Dominici. A native of Florence and a lector at Santa
Maria Novella, Friar Giovanni was a veteran preacher and reformer, and

387
 388 / James D. Mixson

well positioned to take up the challenge. His response was a treatise he

called the Firefly (Locula Noctis), a work of forty-seven chapters, over four
hundred pages in modern print, in which he first carefully rehearsed
each of Salutati’s arguments and then offered a systematic refutation.
Within months, Salutati had crafted the beginnings of a response. He pi-
ously conceded almost every point Dominici had made. But he could not
resist correcting the friar’s sloppy grammar, and he refuted Dominici’s
claim for the primacy of the intellect in moral matters. He also tried
again to defend the virtues of pagan poetry. Salutati died before complet-
ing the response, however, and another lively moment in a centuries-old
controversy died with him.1 From that day to our own, the towering hu-
manist has often overshadowed the cantankerous friar, and the Ren-
aissance has cast its long shadows over our readings of the Firefly. Only
recently has modern scholarship begun to appreciate more fully both
Dominici and his treatise as worthy of study in their own right. But our
work remains incomplete. The purpose of this essay is to examine the
Firefly more closely, especially for the ways in which it speaks to so much
recent work on the fifteenth-century world that produced it.
Dominici’s career and work are well enough known to historians of
Renaissance Italy.2 A native of Florence, he joined the Dominicans at
Santa Maria Novella as a teenager in the 1370s. He soon came into contact
with Catherine of Siena and her circle, rising to prominence under the
leadership of Raymond of Capua. In 1393 he was appointed vicar-general
over a small network of Observant houses across northeastern and central
Italy, anchored at the Dominican convent of San Giovanni e Paolo in
Venice. There he served as a lector in theology and enjoyed great popular-
ity as a preacher and pastor. He famously turned the daughters of influen-
tial patricians to reformed religious life and founded a new community for
them at Corpus Domini in 1394. His fall from grace came in 1399, how-
ever, after the Council of Ten banned from the city the peaceful proces-
sions of the white-clad penitents known as the Bianchi.3 Dominici, who
had embraced the movement, staged his own procession. For his defiance
of the council, he was arrested and exiled. His opponents then convinced
Boniface IX to revoke Dominici’s powers as Observant vicar-general and
slowly dismantled his efforts at reform across the region. By 1400, years of
 Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered \ 389

his patient work were in shambles. Dominici soon found his way to Flor-
ence, however, where he began to thrive once again. He befriended Salu-
tati and many in his circle. He found a promising protégé in Antonio
Pierozzi, who professed as a Dominican in 1405 and who would later be-
come archbishop of the city. Dominici composed most of his significant
surviving works in Florence as well: a collection of letters, his best ser-
mons, and a series of treatises on spiritual and moral matters, including his
famous Regola del governo di cura familiare.4 Florence was also the catalyst
for a dramatic later career. By the end of his life in 1419 he had risen to the
rank of cardinal, served as papal confessor, and, as a papal ambassador, had
been a central figure in the drama of the Council of Constance.5
In the midst of so much preaching and writing in Florence, Do-
minici paused to compose the Firefly. The treatise has received modest
attention, at least from specialists. Edmund Hundt’s critical edition of
1940 remains foundational, along with B. L. Ulmann’s work on the manu-
scripts.6 More recently, Concetta Greenfield and Claudio Mésoniat have
both authored studies (a book chapter and an extended essay, respec-
tively) that place Dominici’s work within a longer history of humanist
and scholastic poetics.7 In the same context, Anne Reltgen-Tallon has
also sought a better understanding of the conservative nature of the trea-
tise in the context of the Dominican tradition.8 Most, however, have read
Dominici’s ponderous work only in passing. Erica Rummel notes it near
the beginning of her study of the struggle between scholastics and human-
ists, for example; Ronald Witt turns to it toward the end of his account of
the origins of humanism.9 In these studies, and others, references to the
Firefly and summaries of its arguments appear, dutifully but briefly, only to
be set aside in the pursuit of other concerns. Unfortunately these treat-
ments have been scattered and unfocused. Worse, they have tended to
force Dominici and his treatise into now-tired interpretive dichotomies,
leaving behind a series of curiously competing, even contradictory claims.
While an older biography celebrates Dominici as a humanist, for exam-
ple, a more recent essay reflects on the Firefly’s opposition to human-
ism.10 Worse still, even careful scholars have on occasion retreated into
thinly veiled insults. One presents Dominici as a Thomist and scholastic
“extremist.” Another describes the Firefly’s “ham-fisted” argument as the
 390 / James D. Mixson

last installment in “an old and well-worn literary controversy” to

which Dominici “had ultimately very little to add.”11
These appraisals have allowed the Firefly too often to escape our
grasp, and they leave us with an impoverished appreciation of Dominici’s
challenging work. This essay therefore seeks, if the metaphor be allowed,
to catch our enigmatic insect once again and to have a closer look at it,
for a time, in a pleasant scholarly jar. It seeks to understand Dominici as
something other than a crabby, conservative cleric and to read his treatise
as something other than an odd and undistinguished failure. To that end
it first reconsiders the treatise as a product of its original literary and cul-
tural habitat. Freed from artificial binaries between scholastics and hu-
manists, the Firefly emerges here as a literary and pastoral work addressed
to an issue of explosive public and moral concern. As a treatise, the Firefly
is then allowed to shine its fleeting light on our modern scholarly dark-
ness in two ways. First, it appears as a work distinctly populist in tone, its
inspiration the language of simplicity and purity of heart so well known
in other fifteenth-century devotional settings. In the name of simplicity,
Dominici defends the rugged basics of the Christian faith as all the learn-
ing that ordinary folk might need. The treatise also openly attacks the
very scholastic tradition Dominici is said to represent— an element that
generalizations about the work’s “pastoral” stance have missed. Second,
the Firefly reveals that its author’s embrace of simplicity, and his cate-
chetical concerns, were inseparable from his thinking about demons. Driv-
ing Dominici’s attacks on the humanists’ love of pagan poetry and their
elitist docta pietas, his assault on the uselessness of natural philosophy and
all the chattering, arrogant disputations of the university masters was
more than a vague sense of traditionalism. In ways modern scholars have
all but ignored, for Dominici the reading of pagan texts was a profound
moral threat not only to the learned, but to the public as a whole, because
it unleashed on the world the counterfeit spiritual power of the devil.
These considerations will serve — if the metaphor again be allowed —
as holes in a very old scholarly lid. They allow the Firefly to breathe the
fresh historiographical air of the fifteenth century as we have come to
understand it of late — an era of “multiple options,” as John Van Engen
has called it, options that our approaches to the Firefly have long been
unable to capture.
 Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered \ 391

The Firefly as Treatise

Scholars who have characterized the Firefly as a scholastic broadside

against humanism have done so with good enough reason. Dominici
frames his subject as a disputed question: “Whether it is permissible for
faithful Christians to make use of secular learning.” He surveys his op-
ponent Salutati’s position, defines his terms carefully, and proceeds to
his refutation. Dominici also structures that refutation in the manner of
the schools: as a series of major and minor propositions, numbered ar-
guments and counterarguments. Throughout the text we encounter the
full array of standard authorities: Augustine ( his favorite by far); scrip-
ture and other patristic authors, including Jerome; Aquinas, too, along
with Hugh of St. Victor, accented with occasional citations of canon
and civil law. And at the heart of the entire treatise, as many have noted,
is a strong defense of theology as a speculative science (scientia) superior
to the study of secular letters and to the study of poetry in particular.
Yet recent scholarship has opened the way for a reappraisal of these
interpretations. Schoolmen of Dominici’s generation, we now recognize,
thought and wrote in a world very different from that of their more fa-
miliar predecessors. The most fundamental changes centered on outlook
and literary expression. As Daniel Hobbins’s work has shown, school-
men raised in the generation of the Great Schism sought to engage the
world beyond the classroom.12 To that end they shaped the learning of
the traditional schools into new occasional pieces called tracts (tractatus).
Lawyers turned from abstract reflection and strings of citations to offer
consilia, legal briefs that brought the law to bear on particular cases.
Physicians offered practical advice on the treatment of plague and other
diseases. Theologians abandoned the traditional commentary on Lom-
bard’s Sentences in favor of treatises that engaged a full range of issues of
morality, of social conscience, of theology in practice. In all of these
works, the old scholastic forms of question and case broke free of the
classroom. They were now a literary device that allowed an author to
engage in public controversy, to wrestle with all of the arguments over-
heard in the streets. The new work of the treatises, moreover, came to
circulate in unprecedented ways — on a grand scale at Constance and
Basel, and more modestly within local networks of authors and readers
 392 / James D. Mixson

( Wyclif ’s Oxford, the London of Chaucer, Hoccleve and Lydgate, Henry

of Langenstein’s Vienna, Salutati’s Florence).13 For many, and theologians
especially, the concern for outreach and the search for new modes of ex-
pression were in turn expressions of a deeper spiritual concern. As Do-
minici wrote, a generation of theologians had begun to lament how all of
the disputation and the jargon of the schools trumped matters of the
heart; how pride in disputation and the embrace of learning for its own
sake strangled charity, devotion, and common sense. In response— and
the parallels in humanist circles and among vernacular authors have been
noted—theologians began to develop a canon of “classics,” of great au-
thors and great works. They searched their libraries for firm foundations,
a return to the safety and security of what Jean Gerson called the “com-
mon school of theological truth.”14 The books and texts they embraced—
Augustine and Gregory, Bernard, Hugh, and Richard, Thomas and
Bonaventure — were celebrated for their pastoral utility and for their
clarity and simplicity of style.15
In a sense, none of this was new. Medieval friars, after all, had always
moved easily between studium and the world beyond, their preaching
now described as one of the earliest forms of mass communication in the
Western tradition.16 In Dominici’s own Florence, several of his Domini-
can predecessors had become local celebrities as both preachers and
authors — Remigio dei Girolami and Aldobrandino Cavalcanti, for ex-
ample, and the stern Jacopo Passavanti, whose Specchio di vera penitenzia
represented an early example of a vernacular spiritual tract developed
from public preaching.17 But from another perspective, the first decades
of the fifteenth century saw a decisive shift. Observant authors and read-
ers, and the mendicants especially, took the lead in shaping a dynamic
that was different from its predecessors in scale, in method, in impulse
and tone. They called for and embraced what Kaspar Elm called a vigor-
ous Bildungsreform— a thoroughgoing reconfiguration and renewal of
education and moral formation.18 It was led by friars who made them-
selves into compelling opinion makers on matters of morality and educa-
tion. They were energetic authors and popular preachers who focused
intently on practical matters for common folk and emphasized, more
than most, the moral stakes of day-to-day decisions. At the heart of their
 Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered \ 393

project was the same concern for simplicity and common sense that
shaped the work of Gerson and others in the ranks of the secular clergy.
Framed in this context, two points about Dominici and his work
merit emphasis. First, Dominici, like Salutati, Gerson, and so many
others of the era, was a relentlessly public figure. In Venice he was a men-
tor to patrician nuns and the inspiration behind a creative adaptation
of the Bianchi movement; in Florence, a powerful and popular preacher;
at Constance, along with Carlo Malatesta, the representative of Greg-
ory XII, and the one who officially tendered the pope’s resignation. Sec-
ond, Dominici was, in his own way, an active literary figure. He authored
a series of biblical commentaries; a Latin treatise on propertied monks,
one of the earliest of its kind and one of dozens of similar treatises to be
composed and circulated in the coming generation;19 a collection of let-
ters, most to the Dominican nuns of Venice, many of them adorned with
poems; and a range of Italian treatises on charity and on questions of pas-
toral care and education.20 Scholars have caught glimpses of Dominici’s
career in this light—one has offered a passing reference to Dominici as an
intellectual “all-rounder,” for example.21 But we can now articulate such
claims with more nuance and force. If Dominici was never a prolific au-
thor, and never a towering figure like Gerson or Denys the Carthusian,
neither was he quite a traditional scholastic in the mold of Aquinas, or
even of his Florentine Dominican predecessors Passavanti and Caval-
canti. Somewhere in between, like so many of his contemporaries, he was
nevertheless a full participant in the vibrant culture of authors, texts, and
intellectual exchange that was coming to characterize his era.
Turning to the Firefly itself, we can now discern a specimen quite at
home in the cultural climate outlined here. Dominici styled the work
explicitly as a tractatus,22 one self-consciously addressed to a renowned
educator and framed explicitly as a disputed question: “Whether it is per-
missible for faithful Christians to make use of secular learning.” Within
that framework, as in so many similar treatises on matters of social and
religious reform (including Dominici’s own De proprio and his vernacular
Trattato delle dieci questioni), an author crafts a conversation that works
through an issue of pressing contemporary concern — here the moral
and spiritual dimensions of education in Florence around 1400. It was a
 394 / James D. Mixson

conversation, moreover, adorned with at least a modicum of literary

awareness. In its opening passages, Dominici betrays before the towering
humanist Salutati a certain authorial self-consciousness and anxiety.23 He
also frames his title, Locula Noctis, as a pun on Coluccio, and Salutati him-
self eventually responded to the joke with a pun of his own.24 The
Firefly’s structure and method, too, betray its author’s literary sensibili-
ties. In keeping with the treatise as a genre, the work is built around the
rhythms of a disputed question. But that structure, the dialectic of ques-
tion, objection, response, and so on, governs the Firefly only gently. In
fact, the disputed question is here framed as an extended acrostic. The
first letter of the first word of the Firefly’s prologue and forty-seven
chapters reconstructs John 1:5—“Lux in tenebris lucet et tenebre eam
non comprehenderunt”:

Prologue: Lux in tenebris . . .

Chapter 1: Videlicet an fidelibus Christianis licitum sit . . .
Chapter 2: Xianis preterea licet Catholicis illos libros studere . . .
Chapter 3: Iterum arugo quod liceat Christianis secularibus litteris uti . . .
Chapter 4: Nunc arguo quarto sic. . . .

Literary style and authorial awareness, puns, acrostics, thematic invoca-

tions of light and darkness — we are far, it seems, from the measured
anonymity and timeless authority of a figure such as Aquinas, and con-
fronted with a work that is something other than a tired “scholastic” text.
More distant still from inherited scholastic tradition is the language
of the Firefly. Within each of his chapters, Dominici largely avoids the
jargon and technicalities of formal logic, as well as the labored strings of
citations characteristic of late-medieval scholastic discourse. Augustine,
Jerome, and many other standard authorities appear, but most often as
conversants, not as cropped citations invoked to seal an argument. More-
over, Dominici deeply embraces the fervent and eloquent authors of an
older tradition: Peter Damian, Bernard, John of Salisbury, and others, all
of them in extended quotation or paraphrase. For modern readers unac-
customed to Dominici’s method, the Firefly can easily seem a long-winded
and unoriginal compilation, diseased by what has been described as “over-
elaboration, prolixity and interminable sequences of quotations.”25 But
 Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered \ 395

there are alternatives to such a stern reading. That Dominici speaks with
and through a patchwork of authors reflects a habit and sensibility shared
with any number of his contemporaries, who embraced excerpt, para-
phrase, and compilation as a sophisticated literary and scholarly tech-
nique. It is a strategy that seems to echo patterns noted among the circles
of the Modern Devout, the Carthusians, and others. The Firefly is no de-
votional text, to be sure, but in a way that reflects the broader mood, Do-
minici seems to embrace the stirring eloquence of many of his “devout”
texts — a word he used to describe some of them explicitly, Bernard in
particular.26
Any effort to reconsider the Firefly as a treatise must also confront the
matter of its reception. The text survives in three copies: one from Santa
Maria Novella, where Dominici wrote; another that made its way to Salu-
tati; and a third that is merely a tortured copy of the first.27 Is seems un-
surprising, then, to find the Firefly so often dismissed as odd and ineffec-
tive, set to one side as unworthy of Dominici’s otherwise noteworthy
literary output. But here, too, we are in need of more context and nuance.
Scholars have noted the importance of growing international networks—
most visibly the councils and the reforming religious orders—for the
widespread circulation of popular works. But it is important to see that
access to those networks was difficult and rare, the circulation they pro-
vided uneven.28 Most authors thus never gained or even sought it. They
remained content with what has been called “coterie” readership—rela-
tively small circles of professionals and friends who were the first and per-
haps the only readers of a given work.29 In Dominici, we seem to have an
author whose works and their circulation reflect that dynamic: for all of
their variety, his sermons, treatises, letters, and other works, even those in
the vernacular, circulated regionally and locally, and relatively briefly, in
only a handful of manuscripts. That a work like the Firefly, for all of the
labor put into it, survives only in a few manuscripts again suggests an au-
thor content with traditional horizons of circulation. It is a work that Do-
minici himself probably never envisioned reaching much beyond his im-
mediate circles and those of Salutati in Florence. Our Firefly, so it seems,
never wandered far from its home and struggled to reproduce. But a re-
consideration of the text itself reveals a work that was, on its own terms,
far from odd or marginal. On the contrary, as the following will show, it
 396 / James D. Mixson

was a work consistent with Dominici’s thought generally, and one that
found itself at the center of a range of broader concerns.

Tilling the Earth: The Firefly ’s Thomist Populism

The Firefly’s content, more even than its supposedly “scholastic” struc-
ture, has led scholars to dismiss the work as wholly traditional. Here most
have allowed Salutati’s reply to set the tone. In it, the Florentine chancel-
lor had taken up two of the Firefly’s recurring themes. One concerned the
status of poetry as a teacher of truth. A second concerned whether the in-
tellect or the will, understanding or passion, took precedence in moral
matters. Dominici’s stance on both issues was quite clear. While not nec-
essarily evil in itself, he argued, poetry was not a true scientia and was
therefore dangerous to those who did not have a firm understanding of
the tenets of Christianity. For a Dominican friar, the second issue was
equally clear: the will was a wild animal, the intellect its trainer and pastor,
its cage a sound catechetical regime.30 Scholars have rightly located these
themes within a longer history of tensions—between pagan and Chris-
tian learning, between humanist and scholastic poetics, between scholastic
advocates of the intellect against the voluntarism of the humanists. In
light of that longer history, most have found the Firefly’s claims both un-
surprising and uninspiring. Dominici’s arguments are those of Aquinas,
and his pastoral stance is that of countless preachers before him, Floren-
tine Dominicans such as Cavalcanti and Passavanti not least among them.
The Firefly thus finds itself again easily stereotyped as a long-winded and
tortured attempt to make rather obvious points.
A more careful reading, however, reveals a work that draws its inspi-
ration not from the traditions of the schools, but from the spiritual cur-
rents of the early fifteenth century. Specifically, Dominici grounded the
Firefly’s reflections repeatedly in the ideal of simplicitas. It was a spiritual
commonplace, as old as scripture itself, with a rich medieval tradition
reaching from Peter Damian and Bernard to Eckhart and Marguerite.31
But in the early fifteenth century, reformist circles recovered the ideal
anew, in ways that emphasized its biblical and monastic themes. Purity of
heart, right intention, charity, submission to the will of God—these be-
 Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered \ 397

came the leitmotifs of countless devotional works. In that spirit, the Imi-
tation of Christ (most famously among innumerable examples) repeatedly
called its readers to embrace “simplicity of intention and purity of de-
sire.”32 Schoolmen also deployed simplicitas as a literary ideal and as a tool
for social and institutional critique. Gerson attacked the “curiosity” of so
many students and masters, whose style was muddled and obscure and
whose subtle arguments were “contrary to penitence and simple belief.”33
Scholars have universally noted that Dominici’s concern in the Firefly
was pastoral. But contentment with that level of generalization allows us
to neglect the particular ways in which the ideal of simplicitas informs his
major arguments. Contesting the humanist claim that all truth came from
God, for example, he countered with what he called the “study of the sci-
ence of charity” (scientia caritatis) which was founded on scripture alone.
It taught what he called the “grammar of all simple Christians”; the elo-
quence of all orators; the true dialectic; the arithmetic of those who con-
fess, counting both their sins and their blessings; the geometry by which
the faithful reshaped their lives to correspond to the image of God.34 In a
similar spirit, while refuting Salutati’s claim that pagan letters adorned a
life of Christian grace, Dominici recounted the story of Christianity’s
humble, illiterate beginnings. He cited at length Peter Damian, among
others, who had celebrated “Christ’s simplicity” and the “rusticity of the
wise.”35 Against the argument that pagan letters led to a life lived well, Do-
minici again countered with his central theme: Christ did not choose as
his followers those who lived well in the world through learning—neither
senators nor kings, learned grammarians nor those armed with dialectic
nor puffed up with rhetoric. He chose simple commoners and fishermen,
the poor, the unlearned.36
Attentiveness to Dominici’s embrace of simplicity reveals the Firefly
as a work concerned with more than the dangers of pagan poetry, or
even the dangers of pagan learning. At its center is a concern for the
spiritual dangers of intellectual pride in the schools generally. In ways
analogous to similar suspicions among figures such as Gerson and the
leaders of the Devotio Moderna, to say nothing of the humanists them-
selves, Dominici repeatedly denounced the “artificial subtlety” of many
schoolmen’s propositions. He lamented how logic, with its “clever de-
lights,” baited the nets for so many unsuspecting minds. It was through
 398 / James D. Mixson

their “clever assertions” that the “disputations of the depraved” sought

to turn perversity into truth.37 “Simplicity of life,” as Dominici put it,
counted more than argument.38 The Firefly repeatedly ignites its broad-
sides against “exceedingly vain” and dangerous disputations, and against
those who engaged in arguments that were as refined as they were end-
less.39 It is a work, in short, that attacks the very scholastic tradition it sup-
posedly represents.
Dominici’s embrace of simplicity informed more than his fervent at-
tacks on the dangers of pagan learning for scholars and students. The
Firefly is also charged, in a way that scholarship has too often missed,
with a distinctly populist spirit. Its chapters bristle repeatedly with warn-
ings of the dangers that refined university learning posed for ordinary
folk. Dominici denounced all of the bad doctors: their remedies usually
kill you, and most farmers and ordinary folk (rustici nostri) fare better
without them.40 He denounced the vanities and heresy that plagued the
learned study of the stars — all of it reducible to a few simple rules that
could be taught even to children.41 But worst of all were the blowhard
rhetoricians — the streets of Florence were stuffed with them, and most
were badly trained!42
Friar Giovanni’s advocacy of simple folk emerges most clearly, how-
ever, in the proposition he advanced in chapters 32 and 33 of the Firefly:
“That it is better to till the earth than to spend time with pagan books.”43
Here we see the salty populist at his best, reminding pompous philoso-
phers and commoners alike of the holy simplicity of a life of work and the
dangers of an excessive and arrogant learning that undermined solid
grounding in faith and doctrine.44 In particular, Dominici argued, learned
natural philosophers, unlike faithful ploughmen, undermined belief in
miracles. He then illustrated the point with a vivid story: One morning in
Padua, a shade in the shape of a body appeared above the grave of an en-
tombed corpse. As a crowd gathered around, a learned natural philoso-
pher, his students in tow, began to explain it all away. Vapors, drawn from
the grave through the power of the heavens, had simply retained the
body’s original shape.45
A few have noted Dominici’s call to return to “tilling the earth” in
passing, only to dismiss it as a bizarre and clumsy diversion. Erika Rum-
mel has read the story from Padua’s graveyard merely as a “shaggy dog
 Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered \ 399

story,” a vivid anecdote meant to illustrate an otherwise scholastic argu-

ment.46 But to leave the matter there is to miss the broader stakes of
these chapters and the precise nature of both Dominici’s concern and his
response. As Dominici saw it, whatever truth the learned philosopher in
Padua (and others like him) had to offer, his teaching undermined the
faith of simple folk (“dum veres alliciunt simplices, falsis necant per-
mixta”).47 He soon rushed to the defense of the simplices with a string of
stern legal citations from Justinian’s Code, prohibiting the teaching of Ar-
istotle, Virgil, Cicero, and other texts inter Christicolas simplices et ignaros
de Catholica fide.48 Dominici also cited, and creatively allegorized, laws
that protected hospitals, orphanages, and other institutions for the sick
and the poor: “For who (in terms of their faith) are the simple Christian
boys—that is, those who attend schools and who, whether boys or girls,
attend sermons in which mostly poems are recited (which is displeasing,
and which is our current concern!) — except pilgrims, the ill, the or-
phans, the poor, and the imbeciles?”49 Dominici condemned the teaching
of the “profane precepts” of “heretics and pagans” to those who were
spiritually weak.50
Patient reading of these lines reveals more still about Dominici’s
populist stance. In ways that scholars have often failed to emphasize, but
that the Firefly makes unmistakably clear, Dominici engaged the issue be-
fore him as a matter of intensely public concern. The philosopher in
Padua, armed with his pagan learning, had not only dismissed a won-
drous event by reducing it to earthly causes. He had done so in the open,
as a teacher who held a “publicly funded” chair. Dominici thus waged a
“just war,” as he called it explicitly, against public preaching and teaching
that was saturated with pagan poetry and prose.51 “And why am I slan-
dered for this,” he erupted, “since I am trying to protect not private chairs
but public ones, and churches consecrated to Christ?”52 This was no liter-
ary quarrel limited to Salutati’s charmed circles. At stake for Dominici was
the moral life of the community as a whole. He was concerned not only
for the philosophers of Padua and their students, but also for ordinary
parishioners and others, women and men, young and old alike, who as
they gathered round, awed by the learning of the schoolman and his an-
cient authors, lacked the proper intellectual grounding to separate truth
from falsehood.
 400 / James D. Mixson

The public stakes of Dominici’s arguments also make sense of the

legal dimensions of his response. He was the heir of a long tradition, not
limited to the ranks of the Dominicans but especially robust among
them, that from the thirteenth century had come to see all of Western
Christendom as one community, a society of baptized Christians whose
economy of salvation was now governed by the pope and by an ever
more elaborate and refined body of canon law and its precedents. Within
that regime canonists and priests together governed soul and body alike,
in ways that blended the moral and the legal, as well as the roles of pastor
and judge.53 In that spirit, and as an Observant friar himself, Dominici’s
citations of Justinian were an attempt, for the sake of simple folk, to bind
the public teaching and preaching of Christian scholars and students
back to that regime’s orthodox foundations. And there is at least one hint
that the friar put all of the citations into action: in Florence, in 1405, the
grammarian Master Benedetto di Nicolello da Gubbio was accused of
heresy for teaching pagan authors to impressionable students, and one
scholar has raised the possibility that Dominici himself was the inspira-
tion behind the accusations.54
One final set of considerations will help us most fully appreciate Do-
minici’s advocacy of simplicity and the resonance of his populism. The
author and his work must be set more carefully still in their original cul-
tural position, as, in one sense, on the margins of his intellectual and cul-
tural scene. The story of the learned teacher of Padua, for example, was
itself a grudging tribute to the vibrant teaching of so many physicians and
natural philosophers in the Italian educational landscape.55 Their teaching
and popularity had slowly rendered university theology ever more irrele-
vant by Dominici’s day. Other passages from the Firefly help us see Do-
minici from the same angle of vision, as a friar who moved awkwardly and
uneasily in elite, intellectually refined circles. Dominici recalled his en-
counters with two renowned schoolmen. One had used sophisticated di-
alectic to disprove the claims of scripture. The other (a lapsed religious,
no less!) not only denounced the Bible as fables to be read by the fire, but
even sang the praises of geomancy. And both scholars had derided Do-
minici, to his face, as a simpleton.56 The insufferable pride of such men
was only made worse by their popularity. Dominici could hardly hide his
 Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered \ 401

resentment at so many young men who rushed to learn from them. The
students were not only driven by pride and curiosity; they pranced to the
schools with curled hair, dressed in elegant attire!57
To see so many foppish students learning from vain philosophers
was bad enough. But Dominici had also to confront daily what Peter
Howard has called a “public theology of magnificence” in Florence and
beyond. It was a theology that appealed to high and low, one articulated
through polished sermons suffused with rhetorical refinement.58 Many of
its most talented advocates were churchmen who were lovers of the clas-
sics, and their popularity doubtless inspired the Firefly’s vivid attacks on
modern preachers. Dominici denounced these “so-called Christians”
who— when they bothered to preach at all—offered sermons laden with
everything from tragedy and comedy to metaphysics. They lorded it over
crowds of simple folk with citations from “poets, philosophers and other
infidels.”59 The preachers’ cheeks were “puffed out” with worldly wis-
dom, as he put it, their reflections on the gospels interwoven with pagan
texts.60 They attracted great crowds, and many eager for pagan elo-
quence. But none of it inspired any real devotion.61 Worst of all, as Do-
minici well knew, the love of classical chic had powerfully shaped life
among the ranks of the religious themselves. By 1400 in Florence the re-
sults were most famous among the Augustinian Hermits under Luigi
Marsigli at Santo Spirito, where Salutati himself had studied for a time.
But at Santa Maria Novella, too, lectors wrote treatises adorned with ref-
erences to Cicero and Seneca, Virgil and Horace, Alexander and Octa-
vian. Dominican preachers also celebrated the “virtues of the ancient
princes and philosophers.” And we know of one creative friar who, when
it seemed that traditional pious legends and miracle stories no longer ap-
pealed to the crowd, recast a traditional life of Mary as a Virgilian epic.62
Here we are perhaps closer than ever to the original poignancy of
the Firefly for its author, a figure who seemed so badly and so publicly be-
trayed by the preachers of his own order. But we are also in a position to
add another layer of nuance to generalizations about Dominici’s “pas-
toral” concern. In defense of simple folk, and in a public cultural contest
over the moral stakes of education in a Christian society, Dominici’s Fire-
fly launched a sharp counterattack not only against learned philosophers
 402 / James D. Mixson

and their students, but also against the elite sensibility and refined tastes
of the populo grasso who controlled communities such as Santa Maria
Novella and against the friars who catered to them.
The Firefly’s attacks on classical learning have led scholars to dismiss
the work as out of touch with its times, a “bitter rearguard action,” as it
has been called, in a lost cultural war.63 But Dominici’s advocacy of sim-
plicity, his populism, and his cultural critique were from another angle
consistent with both the outreach of his vernacular educational treatises
and what has been called the “civic theology” of his sermons. As an advo-
cate for ordinary folk, Dominici preached peace, charity, and the com-
mon good, as well as “social justice” for the poor. In that same spirit he
denounced the polished and powerful rhetoricians in Florence, every one
of them “a meddler and an embellisher with language” as he put it, who
used their powers of persuasion to deceive the simple, the poor, and the
weak.64 More broadly, his embrace of simplicity, of conversion, and of
law was consistent with the distinct culture of lay penitence that had
taken root among many confraternities and other associations across Do-
minici’s Italy (the Bianchi not least among them).65 It also shared some-
thing of the language and tone we have discerned in other experiments
among his contemporaries, from the Lollards to the Devout to his own
fellow Observant preachers.66 In fact, the connections here are explicit in
the Firefly itself. One passage celebrated, for example, what he called “the
pastoral fruits of certain modern people who live simply, preaching with-
out dialectic”— a reference to any number of penitential groups, to the
Observants or even the New Devout themselves. Another passage cele-
brated what had happened when preachers set aside their pagan texts, or
even openly despised them, and instead preached the gospel purely, in
humility and simplicity of faith: factions turned from feud and blood-
shed to peace and reconciliation; thieves restored ill-gotten gains; the
lustful embraced the chastity they had once hated; citizens submitted
humbly to authority. 67
Against a range of learned masters of logic and persuasion, and
against the docta pietas of so many refined elites, we have in Dominici’s
Firefly a manifesto of what might be called docta simplicitas, an informed
simplicity, a kind of Thomist populism. For all of the learning of the
schoolmen and the humanists, as Dominici saw it, women, rustic farm-
 Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered \ 403

ers, and other ordinary folk showed the way. It was they who knew true
philosophy; they, along with young boys and others not fully formed in
the faith, who needed only to be armed with a rugged understanding of
“simple doctrine,” conditioned by obedience and discipline.68 Straight-
forward training in theological basics for ordinary folk was essential,
both for the sake of the individual soul and as a matter of public and
pastoral security.

Dominici’s Demons

For all of the reconsiderations of the Firefly offered thus far, it remains
difficult to explain why Dominici remained so intensely hostile to the
kind of learning Salutati and so many others — monks and friars among
them—had embraced. Many of his colleagues and contemporaries, after
all, were advocates of more vigorous pastoral theology and yet hardly op-
ponents of pagan philosophy and poetry. We can explore and explain the
nature of the threat Dominici discerned in the classics more clearly and
precisely than we have to date. For this Observant friar, as the Firefly
makes clear, the study of pagan letters exposed not only the minds of the
young, but also the minds of “simple” Christians of all ages, to the power
of demons.69
The evidence for Dominici’s concern with demons is scattered
throughout the Firefly in language that appears so often and so clearly
that its import is unmistakable. Faced with Salutati’s argument that
pagan letters served to corroborate the Christian faith, for example, Do-
minici countered by citing Paul and Augustine, who had denounced not
only the “presumptuous investigation” of the ancients, but the polythe-
ism and the “damnable worship of idols” it had fostered. In his own day,
as he saw it, scholars presumed to “revive idols” and “adore demons”
through their learning.70 Similarly with the study of pagan poetry: for
Dominici the danger of these texts lay not merely in their paganism, still
less in their challenge to scholastic scientia, but in their diabolical origins.
The “wickedness of the ancient serpent” lurked in pagan literature’s
lines. Reading the ancients opened the way to “diabolical fraud” and to
the worship of their “demons, called gods.”71 So too with the study of
 404 / James D. Mixson

natural philosophy: its texts were rooted in deception and pride, and
even to read them, let alone to defend and teach them, was to embrace a
sophistry inspired by the devil.72
The Firefly’s final two chapters, however, reveal most clearly the
depth of Dominici’s concern over the demonic dangers lurking in pagan
texts. Confronted with Salutati’s claim that the study of pagan letters
posed no threat to Christian doctrine, Dominici here crafted his refu-
tation around a discussion of what he called “prodigies, miracles and
dreams.” The thrust of the argument was to highlight the ways in which
the devil and his demons sought to have for themselves the worship
proper to God, and to highlight the ways in which they deployed their
counterfeit spiritual power to deceive the innocent to that end. Astrology,
mathematics, history, poetry—every text and tradition was filled with sto-
ries of the devil’s lies and temptations. The books of the pagans were
“drunk” with the rituals that marked the “cult of demons”73 and with ac-
counts of demonic imitation of divine miracles.74 There emerges here yet
again the strong sense of the public stakes of the danger noted above. The
root of so many evils in the public life of the day, as Dominici saw it, was
to be found in so much celebration of the “trifles of the philosophers.”75 It
was the “ancient enemy” who inspired such “vanities” of the mind, who
toyed with and deceived those miserable souls who put their faith in his
demons. What else had inspired the spiritual pride of so many who fan-
cied themselves prophets and seers? With a citation of the Liber Extra he
condemned all of these figures, and any who so much as spoke with them,
as heretics.76 “If only Christ had so many who would profess him pub-
licly,” Dominici lamented, “as the devil has marching shamefully under
his well-known banners!”77
These passages have been noted almost nowhere, either in recent
scholarship on Dominici and the Firefly, or on demonology and reform.78
But they suggest how unwise it is to continue to dismiss the treatise as
odd, eccentric, or out of touch with its times. The later Middle Ages, as
Dyan Elliott has shown, witnessed the emergence of the disembodied
demon, who demanded and recruited bodily accomplices to do his work.
Learned discourse on those “fallen bodies” and their demonic power, as
Stuart Clark has shown, became central to early modern culture gener-
ally, in ways that ranged from religion and science to history and politics.
 Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered \ 405

And as Franco Mormando and Michael Bailey have shown, Observant

reformers were pivotal figures in crafting that emerging discourse. The
power of demons was central to the sermons of Bernardino and other
Observant Franciscans. In his Formicarius, the Observant Dominican John
Nider, Dominici’s younger contemporary, offered extensive reflections on
witchcraft and demonic power; his work laid the foundation for Heinrich
Kramer’s infamous Malleus Maleficarum. In all of these texts, the power
of devils and demons to deceive, to inspire all manner of magic and su-
perstition, played a central role.79
Dominici was no demonologist in the mold of his fellow Domini-
cans Nider and Kramer, but the Firefly shares the same broad concern.
As Dominici saw it, demons were ensnaring the young — especially im-
pressionable boys who showed promise as preachers — by drawing them
into the study of pagan philosophy. But he also warned explicitly of the
special dangers for the learned, who were more likely to find themselves
“tangled in the nets of Vulcan,” deceived by “miracles, auguries, oracles
and dreams.”80 He then leveled his sharpest denunciation against magi-
cians, who claimed that Moses worked his “signs and portents” by the
power of spells (viribus nominum), that Solomon practiced divination, or
that the apostles cast lots. Just as foolish was the magician’s belief in pre-
dicting fate through all manner of what Dominici dismissed as supersti-
tious “observances,” including casting dice and reading cards.81 However
pious their incantations might sound, for Dominici they were offered up
to a crowd of demons.82
To illustrate his reflections more vividly, Dominici offered a long se-
ries of exempla from his own day, each meant to illustrate precisely how
the devil and demons continued to deceive so many into joining their
ranks. 83 Evil spirits often worked to recruit mature and wise men, but
they were especially eager and willing to pursue women and young boys.
In Pistoia, a boy was visited by the spirit of a charming young girl. She
often spoke to him of future events and joked with him. The boy’s
mother suggested he ask the spirit for gold, and the boy thought he had
received it. But when he opened the box in which he thought he had
stored it, he was met only with a foul stench. Another story came from
Dominici’s Venice, where a fourteen-year-old virgin had been visited by
the spirit of an adolescent boy, adorned in fine clothing. He offered her
 406 / James D. Mixson

fruits and other gifts, as well as gold. But when she went to retrieve the
money, she too found her room filled with a foul stench. Other stories
followed.84 In Florence, a knight and his household had been assailed by
an invisible demon who had thrown stones in their house. Only the de-
vout repetition of the name of Mary had spared the household from the
“nightly terrors” of the demonic “infestation.” Another evil spirit had tor-
mented a Florentine weaver and his wife until they had cleansed them-
selves with a thorough confession. And at Santa Maria Novella itself, a
spirit had often playfully seized a four-year-old boy as he slept between his
parents, placing the child, unharmed, on the chest next to the bed. Folksy
stories about demons might easily fall into the scholarly interstices of our
abiding interest in humanism and education in the later Middle Ages. But
they reflect the Firefly’s engagement in a matter of long-standing, broad,
and pressing concern among fifteenth-century intellectuals, inquisitors,
and pastors: the power of demons to deceive. In fact, Dominici’s textual
authority for each of these many stories was the famous canon Episcopi, a
tenth-century text made widely available through its inclusion in Gratian’s
Decretum. The canon is most often noted for its description of “wicked
women” who believed that they flew through the night with Diana and
who served her as their mistress. As such, it is recognized as the inspira-
tion for what would become the infamous stereotype of the witch, flying
to the devil’s Sabbath. But for Dominici, as for Nider and other contem-
porary demonologists, the canon was concerned primarily with decep-
tion: Christians had allowed themselves to be “seduced by the illusions
and phantasms of demons.”85
The antidote to so much demonic and diabolical deception was, to
recall the spiritual foundations of the Firefly, a well-trained soul grounded
in simplicitas. Dominici contrasted the pride and vanity of so many learned
scholars of pagan poetry and philosophy with the pure hearts of those he
called “true Christians.” Their purity and simplicity, nurtured by the
study of “sacred letters” and guided by a learned pastor, was the only sure
guard against error. He offered an extended account of miracles he had
seen with his own eyes: one man healed of blindness by touch alone, an-
other of fever; a girl’s seizure calmed; even a wounded puppy healed by
the touch of a holy man. For Dominici, the piety and humility of those
involved ensured that these were no illusions “crafted by the art of
 Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered \ 407

demons.”86 Dominici similarly affirmed the power of divinely inspired vi-

sions. In his own day he had known a “simple” eleven-year-old girl (puel-
lam simplicem) who told of visions that had often seized her during mass
on feast days, taking her to paradise, to hell, to purgatory, to limbo.87 She
had also known with certainty of secret matters both present and future,
all of it confirmed by her pious works and ways. Dominici noted her
eventual conversion to religious life and her miraculous abstinence from
food and drink for twenty-three years thereafter.88 The same ideal gov-
erned Dominici’s discussion of divinely inspired dreams. As scripture it-
self taught, through the stories of Daniel, Joseph, and others, dreams
often served as a source of divine revelation. Dominici’s own experience
taught the same lesson. He told of his encounter with a pious man whose
dreams had revealed the torments of purgatory in all of their detail, va-
riety, and horror.89
Few readers of the Firefly seem to have ventured all the way to these
concluding passages. To reach them, it is true, requires something of
a forced march through an often difficult, seemingly unfocused text.
The inattentive reader might thus easily dismiss it all as an Observant
preacher’s pious ramblings. But careful reconsideration of these neg-
lected final chapters allows them to take on a new life. Their seemingly
odd exempla and other disjointed digressions might now be read as a de-
liberately and carefully crafted demonic crescendo. As such, they allow
us to gauge more precisely why a friar would bother to refute Salutati at
such length, and they further establish the explosive and public urgency
of the pedagogical and moral battle Dominici sought to engage.
Moreover, read properly, the Firefly’s reflections on demonic power
put the treatise at the very center of a distinct but closely related set of
early fifteenth-century cultural concerns (equally well known) about
discretion and authenticity. Dominici’s era has been described as one in
which truth was challenged on every side, a time of schisms and divided
loyalties, of spiritual reversals, of ambivalence and ambiguity. Amid the
confusion, the era’s schoolmen sought to discern true from false, au-
thentic from counterfeit, diabolical from sacred; at the heart of their
project was an abiding concern over the deceptions of the devil and his
demons. 90 In a steady flood of works written after 1400 (Gerson’s De er-
roribus circa artem magicam of 1402, for example, and Nicholas Magni of
 408 / James D. Mixson

Jauer’s De superstitionibus of 1405, the same year that Dominici wrote in

Florence) schoolmen sought, as Michael Bailey notes, to “map a topog-
raphy of spiritual and natural power,” and emphasized the need for
proper understanding of earthly, demonic, and divine forces at work in
the world.91 They explored the relationship between God’s power and
the power presumed in the rites and rituals of the church, as well as the
twilight realm between those rites and the power of charms and spells. In
a similar mood, and in the same years, schoolmen deployed ever more
refined regimes of logic and inquest to map and to govern the contested
spiritual ground between demonic and divine. 92 In 1402 (the same year
that saw the publication of the De erroribus circa artem magicam), Gerson
was confronted with the case of the widow Ermine of Reims, whose vi-
sions he cautiously endorsed. In all of these contexts and cases, the faith
of the individual, purity of heart, and intention remained central. For
theorists such as Nider, purity of heart trumped formal rites (even ordi-
nary folk of good faith could perform effective exorcisms, for example),
and the faithful disposition defeated the power of demons. For Gerson
and others it was precisely the purity of heart and devout simplicity of
figures such as Ermine or Joan of Arc that proved the divine merit of
their visions and revelations.93 And yet, as they descended into particu-
lars from case to case, even the most careful theoreticians of discretion
confronted often intractable problems of interpretation. Nider, for ex-
ample, struggled with whether the ringing of church bells or the in-
cantation of spells to protect crops from storms were effective and licit
practices.94
In a structurally similar way, the same tensions over true and false,
genuine and counterfeit inform Dominici’s positions in the Firefly. It is
well established that he allowed access to pagan letters, grudgingly, to
those pure in heart and fully formed in the faith. But few have noted the
complexity lurking behind that concession. Dominici saw not only the
difficulty of delineating the boundaries between divinely and diabolically
inspired readings of the pagans, but also the broader challenge of dis-
cerning between true and counterfeit spiritual power, and between true
and false revelation. Communication from the divine through “prodigies
and miracles,” these final chapters taught, was never false. But as Do-
minici admitted openly, true discernment was a gift rarely granted even
 Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered \ 409

to good folk, and almost never to those who were evil. In between, amid
all of the deceptions and falsehoods unleashed by “necromancy and its
spawn,” it was nearly impossible to know true from false.95 The danger
was equally great in the interpretation of dreams. Dominici acknowl-
edged the long philosophical tradition that had reflected on how the stars
and planets, complexion, and so on could influence dreams and visions.96
But only the divinely inspired pious dream, one approved by “sacred and
divine wisdom,” could serve as a guide. All other teachings and “obser-
vances,” as he called them, were nothing but vanity that opened the door
to demonic influence. He noted as one example the folk tradition that
suggested anyone smeared with the blood of the hoopoe would endure
dreams filled with demons.97 “I can say truly,” Dominici warned, “that
not a few visions of this kind have been revealed in our own day.”98 He
called on Salutati and his readers to renounce so many “harmful noctur-
nal poisons,” to “lay aside the deeds of darkness,” to “put on the armor of
light,” and to “behave properly as in the day.”99

———

Christianity in the later Middle Ages, John Van Engen has argued, was
full of variety and possibility, its challenging diversity shaped by a land-
scape centuries in the making. Its many options were defined and con-
strained by Christendom’s estates and orders, its range of legal and social
structures, customs and rites and traditions. They were lived out across a
spectrum of intensities, from vivid zealotry to plodding indifference. They
were shaped by the force of authority and tradition, yet also charged with
unpredictable energies that inspired sharp reversals. A turn to Giovanni
Dominici, who knew that fifteenth-century world in all of its layered com-
plexity, has offered one fitting way to honor Van Engen’s vision. As an Ob-
servant friar, Dominici embraced and channeled his era’s zeal for reform
and knew reform’s failure. As an ally of the Bianchi and of the women of
Corpus Domini in Venice, he knew intimately the tensions between cleri-
cal leadership and popular piety, and between women and men both lay
and religious. As an author, preacher, and teacher he knew the challenges
of education and moral formation and the fierce competition over the
broad ground he shared with the humanists. The reconsiderations of the
Firefly offered here, too, honor the same vision. It is a treatise that mirrors
 410 / James D. Mixson

all that is best in John Van Engen’s work. In ways that scholars have most
often missed, the Firefly glides gracefully among our aging scholarly
dichotomies — between sacred and secular, scholasticism and human-
ism, magic and miracles, medieval and Renaissance. It flutters across
the boundaries of our sources and settings, from the canon law and
theology of Observant sermons and treatises to the religious and in-
tellectual energies of the Florentine streets. And, like our teacher
and colleague, it thrives in a habitat of so many religious and cultural
possibilities — competing “observances,” as Dominici might have called
them, from the catechetical and legal regimes of the church to the cur-
riculum of the humanists, from the discretion of pastors and the divina-
tions of magicians to the deceptions of demons.

Notes

Previous versions of this paper were delivered at the New College Conference
on Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Sarasota, Florida, and the Patristic Me-
dieval and Renaissance Conference sponsored by the Augustinian Institute at
Villanova. I would like to thank my colleagues at these venues for their insights,
especially Michael Bailey, Daniel Hobbins, and Michael Waddell. Above all, I
am grateful to my colleagues at the University of Alabama for their critiques,
suggestions, and support, especially George McClure, Daniel Riches, and the
faculty and students of our European history workshop.

1. The Firefly has been edited by Edmund Hundt, Iohannis Dominici Lucula
Noctis ( Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1940), whose intro-
duction provides a useful outline of the exchanges that inspired it— see especially
the letters of Salutati to Giovanni da Sanminiato in Francesco Novati, ed. Epis-
tolario di Coluccio Salutati, 4 vols. ( Rome: Forzani E. C. Tipografidel Senato,
1891–1911), 3:539– 43 and 4:169– 205. Hundt’s introduction (at xiv– xvi) also
provides a brief and useful outline of both Salutati’s arguments and Dominici’s
refutations. For the key issues and contexts at stake here, see above all G. Ron-
coni, “Giovanni Dominici e le dispute sulla poesia nel primo umanesimo,” in
Dizionario critico della letteratura Italiana 2 (1973): 11–17; Peter Denley, “Giovanni
Dominici’s Opposition to Humanism,” in Humanism and Religion, ed. Keith Rob-
bins (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 103–14; and Claudio Mésoniat, Poetica theologia:
La “Lucula Noctis” di Giovanni Dominici e le dispute letterarie tra ’300 e ’400 (Rome:
Edizioni di storia letteraria, 1984).
 Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered \ 411

2. The best overviews of Dominici’s life and career are Giorgio Cracco’s
article in Dizionario Biografico Degli Italiani 5: 657– 64 and his essay “Giovanni
Dominici e un nuovo tipo di religiosità,” in Conciliarismo, Stati Nazionali, Inizi
dell’Umanesimo–Atti del convegno storico (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto
Medioevo, 1990), 3– 20, each with further literature.
3. For Dominici in Venice, as founder of Corpus Domini and as an ally of
the Bianchi, see Daniel E. Bornstein, The Bianchi of 1399: Popular Devotion in Late
Medieval Italy ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); and Bartolomea Ric-
coboni, Life and Death in a Venetian Convent: The Chronicle and Necrology of Corpus
Domini, 1395–1436, ed. and trans. Daniel E. Bornstein (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2000).
4. In addition to the bibliography cited in note 1 above, for the Floren-
tine period see Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, “Political Views in the Preaching of
Giovanni Dominici in Renaissance Florence, 1400 –1406,” Renaissance Quarterly
55 (2002): 19– 48, and Renaissance Florence in the Rhetoric of Two Popular Preachers:
Giovanni Dominici (1356–1419) and Bernardino Da Siena (1380 –1444) ( Turnhout:
Brepols, 2001); as well as Daniel R. Lesnick, “Civic Preaching in the Early Ren-
aissance: Dominici’s Florentine Sermons,” in Christianity and the Renaissance:
Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocentro, ed. Timothy Verdon (Syra-
cuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 208– 25.
5. Hermann Heimpel, Die Vener von Gmünd und Strassburg 1162–1447, 3
vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1982), 2:341– 44.
6. B. L. Ullman, “The Dedication Copy of Giovanni Dominici’s Lucula
Noctis: A Landmark in the History of the Renaissance,” Medievalia et Humanis-
tica 1 (1943): 109– 23.
7. In addition to Mésoniat, Poetica theologia, see Concetta Carestia Green-
field, Humanist and Scholastic Poetics, 1250 –1500 ( Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Uni-
versity Press, 1981), especially chapter 8. The Firefly also appears briefly in the
context of poetry in Daniel Hobbins, Authorship and Publicity before Print: Jean
Gerson and the Transformation of Late Medieval Learning ( Philadelphia: Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 94.
8. Anne Reltgen-Tallon, “L’observance dominicaine et son opposition a
l’humanisme: l’exemple de Jean Dominici,” Collection de l’Ecole française de Rome
330 (2004): 43– 62.
9. Erika Rummel, The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and
Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 53– 54; and
Ronald G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from
Lovato to Bruni (Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought ( Leiden: Brill,
2000), 334 – 37.
10. Pino Da Prati, Giovanni Dominici e l’umanesimo ( Naples: Istituto edito-
riale del Mezzogiorno, 1965); Denley, “Opposition.”
 412 / James D. Mixson

11. Cf. Greenfield, Humanist and Scholastic Poetics, 150; Denley, “Opposi-
tion,” 113–14.
12. Hobbins, Authorship, especially chapter 4 and 144 – 46.
13. John Van Engen, “Multiple Options: The World of the Fifteenth-
Century Church,” Church History 77 (2008): 257– 84, especially 275– 78.
14. Hobbins, Authorship, 40 – 45, 49.
15. Ibid., 122– 23.
16. David D’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons: Mass Communication in a
Culture without Print (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
17. M. Michèle Mulchahey, “First the Bow is Bent in Study”: Dominican Edu-
cation Before 1350 ( Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1998), espe-
cially 417–18, and 446– 47. See also Timothy Kircher, The Poet’s Wisdom: The Hu-
manists, the Church and the Formation of Philosophy in the Early Renaissance (Leiden:
Brill, 2006), especially chapter 5.
18. Kaspar Elm, “Die Franziskanerobservanz als Bildungsreform,” in
Lebenslehren und Weltentwürfe im Übergang vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit: Politik—
Bildung—Naturkunde—Theologie, ed. Hartmut Boockmann, Bernd Moeller, and
Karl Stackmann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1989), 201–13.
19. For this debate, see my Poverty’s Proprietors: Ownership and Mortal Sin at
the Origins of the Observant Movement ( Leiden: Brill, 2009), and, for Dominici,
109–11.
20. See note 1 above for editions and literature, especially Il Libro d’amore
di carità, ed. Antonio Ceruti ( Bologna: Romagnoli-dall’ Acqua, 1889); Regola del
governo di cura familiare, ed. P. Bargenelli ( Florence, 1927); Trattato delle dieci
questioni, ed. Arrigo Levasti ( Florence: Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, 1957); and
Lettere spirituali, ed. M.-T. Casella and G. Pozzi, Spicilegium Friburgense 13
( Freibourg: Edizioni Universitarie Friburgo Svizzera, 1969). For discussion of
these works in relation to the Firefly, see Denley, “Opposition.” See also Giusep-
pina Battista, L’educazione dei figli nella Regola di Giovanni Dominici ( Florence:
Pagnini e Martinelli, 2002).
21. Denley, “Opposition,” 106.
22. Locula Noctis, 4: “sed etiam ex parte determinationis tue prout exquiri-
tur huic tractatui Lucula Noctis nomen imponitur.”
23. Ibid., 3: “Me denique etiam mihi ignorantem esse negare non pos-
sum. . . . Hinc timeo in re tali non parum errare. Eos vero qui prefatis dictis
meis opponunt fama non mediocriter celebrat in utroque.”
24. Ibid., 4: “Et quicquid senseris tecum sentire conabor, et quecumque ap-
posueris vel deleveris, id verminis huius parti finali lucem a te qui colluces apposi-
tum reputabo; tuncque in lucem desinens, ‘noctiluca’ poterit nuncupari quod, sine
te exorsum, a ‘luce’ Locula Noctis supra extitit appellatum.” See also Salutati’s re-
sponse, describing the Firefly as “real daylight,” in Hundt’s introduction (xvi).
 Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered \ 413

25. Denley, “Opposition,” 114.

26. E.g., Locula Noctis, 293, 324. For context and further literature see John
Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the
World of the Later Middle Ages ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2008), 269– 81.
27. See the discussion of manuscripts by Hundt in the introduction to the
Locula Noctis, xx– xxiv.
28. Ibid., 213–16, especially 215.
29. Hobbins, Authorship, 187– 89, following Katherine Kerby-Fulton (n. 22).
30. Locula Noctis, 163– 64.
31. In addition to standard dictionary entries (e.g., Dictionnaire de spiritual-
ité, XIV: 892– 914), see also Achim Wesjohann, “Simplicitas als franziskanisches
Ideal und der Prozeß der Institutionalisierung des Minoritenordens,” in Die Bet-
telorden im Aufbau: Beiträge zu Institutionalisierungsprozessen im mittelalterlichen Re-
ligiosentum, ed. Gert Melville and Jörg Oberste (Münster: Lit, 1999), 107– 68, es-
pecially 107–18, with further literature. See also Hobbins, Authorship, 119– 25.
32. Imitation of Christ, 2:4
33. Hobbins, Authorship, 123.
34. Locula Noctis, 199– 200.
35. Ibid., 271: “Christi me simplicitas doceat, vera sapientium rusticitas
ambiguitatis mee vinculum solvat.”
36. Ibid., 297: “Inflat enim sapientia huius mundi et legum ventosa lo-
quacitas. Elegit enim non reges, non senatores, non philosophos sed plebeios,
pauperes, indoctos, piscatores, ineruditos liberalibus disciplinas, non peritos
grammatica, non armatos dyalectica, non rhetorica inflatos.”
37. Ibid., 164 – 65: “In disputatione fidelium cavenda est propositiunum ar-
tificiosa subtilitas, que callidis oblectationibus retia tendit. Ita enim versutis as-
sertionibus pravorum disputatio innodatur, ut recta esse simulent que perversa
persuadent.”
38. Ibid., 368.
39. Ibid., 369.
40. Ibid., 304: “Rustici nostri et etiam ubique a regulis medicorum forenses
paucioribus morbis subduntur quam ceteri.”
41. Ibid., 309: “Si igitur astrologia sic necessaria reputatur ad medicandum
et navigandum, quod iam sub illa non paucis erroribus ortis anime pretioso san-
guine Christi redempte dampnantur, audacter dixerim bonum fore medicis
carere et usu peritis mare secandi. Verumtamen, ut videtur ad liquidum, hec
utilis est sub paucissimis regulis veritatis contenta, que sine periculo etiam a iu-
venculis posset addisci.”
42. Ibid., 311–12, discussing the second of two propositions concerning
modern rhetoricians: “Secunda, quod inreprehensibiliter potest contra modernam
 414 / James D. Mixson

rhetoricam acriter perorari, tum quia incomparabiliter plures sunt mali quam
boni, in quorum buccis omnis splendor obmutescit orandi, tum quia paucissimi
aut fere nulli ad sapientiam volant vel nititur volare . . . necnon quia qui pravi ig-
norantesve arte pollent loquendi, propria commode communi bono preponunt.
Pro horum exemplis non oportet barbaros aut Indiam penetrare, cum hiis malis
simus undique constipati.”
43. Ibid., 252: “Utilius est Christianis terram arare quam gentilium inten-
dere libris.”
44. Ibid., 261: “Fateor itaque eos in pluribus dicere vera, et hoc pessimum.
Utinam in eorum libris nulla esset veritas! Sed dum veris alliciunt simplices falsis
necant permixtis. Non decipitur piscis ab hamo sed ab esca, sub qua mortalis ab-
sconditur hamus. Praecipue vero hanc doctrinam dixerim iunioribus metuen-
dam, qui nondum perfecte sunt in fide fundati.”
45. Ibid., 261.
46. Rummel, Humanist-Scholastic Debate, 53– 54.
47. Locula Noctis, 261.
48. Ibid., 265: “Prohibeo sacra lege, civili favente, Aristotelem, Virgilium,
Ciceronem, pariter et Anneum inter Christicolas simplices et ignaros de Catho-
lica fide taliter edocere.”
49. Ibid.: “Quid enim aliud simplices Christiani pueri (videlicet qui scolas
frequentant et qui vel que predicationes secuntur, quibus maxime poetica nar-
rantur, quod discplicet et quod presens ferit tractatus) quam, quoad fidem per-
fectam, peregrine, egroti, orphani, pauperes, et imbecilles . . . ?”
50. Ibid.: “Prohibeo cum legibus sanctis profana precepta doveri vel disci,
que heretici vel gentiles dederunt.”
51. Ibid., 266: “Iustum bellum igitur contra paganorum dicta non pauca
habemus.”
52. Ibid., 266: “Cur propter hoc laceror, quia non privatas sed publicas
sedes et maxime Christo templa sacrata reclaudo . . . ?”
53. Christine Caldwell Ames, Righteous Persecution: Inquisition, Dominicans,
and Christianity in the Middle Ages ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2009), especially chapter 4 and 141– 81.
54. Robert Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, vol. 1, Teachers,
Pupils and Schools ( Leiden: Brill, 2007), 112–16. Black offers extensive transcrip-
tions from the legal proceedings and raises the possibility that Dominici himself
was the inspiration behind the accusations.
55. As Paul Grendler notes in a discussion on the immortality of the intel-
lective soul, in the Italian schools natural science trumped theology, and “theo-
logical issues could be ignored, because theologians were seldom there in the
next classroom to present them.” Grendler, The Universities of the Italian Renais-
sance ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 282; and also Grend-
 Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered \ 415

ler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning 1300 – 1600 ( Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 117 ff.
56. Locula Noctis, 243– 44; Mésoniat, Poetica theologia, 120 – 21.
57. Locula Noctis, 342: “Igitur nostri iuvenculi calamistrati et compti . . .
solum aliqua curiositate moti, initium litterarum etiam inordinate querentes, ad
illas scolas non sunt admittendi.”
58. Peter Howard, “Preaching Magnificence in Renaissance Florence,”
Renaissance Quarterly 61 (2008): 325– 69.
59. Locula Noctis, 272: “Propter hoc, auctore deo, invehitur contra predi-
cantes simplicibus turbis poetas, philosophos, et reliquos infideles. Hec sola
inter plurimas causas est digna strepitu tube bellum clangentis.”
60. Ibid., 224. See also Mésoniat, Poetica theologia, 119 and note 137, with
further references and literature.
61. Locula Noctis, 271– 72: “Nonne ubique terrarum, prudentissime, felix et
venerande senex, ipse vidisti per eos qui, tumentibus buccis, grandia mundane
sapientie evangeliis mixta trutinant populis neminem hominum (quanquam
catervatim ad eorum audientiam ruant, sola verborum pruridine delectati) ad
devotionem converti.”
62. Kaspar Elm, “Mendikanten und Humanisten im Florenz des Tre- und
Quattrocento. Zum Problem der Legitimierung humanistischer Studien in den
Bettelorden,” in Die Humanisten in ihrer politischen und sozialen Umwelt, ed. Otto
Herding and Robert Stupperich ( Boppard: Boldt, 1976), 51– 85, here 61 and
nn. 45– 49.
63. Denley, “Opposition,” 113.
64. Debby, “Political Views in the Preaching of Giovanni Dominici,” 38.
65. For consideration of the ways in which the “new piety” took root across
Europe, see Marek Derwich and Martial Staub, eds., Die Neue Frömmigkeit in
Europa im Spätmittelalter (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2004), espe-
cially the essay by Daniela Rando, “Le avventure della ‘devotio’ nell’Italia del Tre-
Quattrocento, fra storia e storiografia,” 331– 51. The final section of the essay
(347– 51) discusses confraternities and other “devout” circles, with reference to
the Bianchi at 347.
66. John Van Engen, “Conversion and Conformity in the Early Fifteenth
Century,” in Conversion: Old Worlds and New, ed. Kenneth Mills and Anthony
Grafton ( Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003), 30 – 65.
67. Locula Noctis, 272: “Et ubi humiliter sacra scriptura, illis omissis aut
etiam despectis, predicatur, plurimos desidentes ad concordiam reduci, dirigi
contractus illicitos, male parta restitui, amplecti inimicam hactenus castitatem,
parsimonia corpus domari, et plurima superborum colla obedientie sancte subici
iugo?”
68. Ibid., 381.
 416 / James D. Mixson

69. Ibid., 164: “Antequam in mentibus extiterit fides fundata, non conce-
datur illis ethnicorum scriptura, que aut fidei adversatur in cortice aut nichil ad-
mittit quod ratione naturali non capit, nisi id fuerit demonis procuratum.”
70. Ibid., 174: “Philosophicum autem genus deorum ita est obnoxium reli-
gioni Christiane ut principalis intentio Christi fuerit per suos praedicatores illud
delere. Nempe teste Salomone in libro Sapientie, Paulo id approbante in princi-
pio epistole ad Romanos, Augostino xivo De Trinitate idem demonstrante, a
philosophis deorum pluralitas est orta et ydolorum cultura dampnanda. Itaque
dum praesumptuosa investigatione Deum conati sunt invenire, tandem ad de-
mones terminati, mundum ydolis impleverunt. Et nunc iterum existimatur ex-
pedire revocare phisicos, ydola suscitare, demones adorare.”
71. Ibid., 340 – 41: “In promptum est dicere quare demones, Dii vocitati,
quosdam ex his a casibus preservarunt, quia scilicet errant eorum satellites et
membra, in quibus loquentes deludebant genus humanum.” See also 388: “non
solum pugnant philosophi, a decem alieni preceptis, sed et in ipsis demones in-
fernales inimici.”
72. Ibid., 380: “Evidenter itaque patet eterne salutis horrendum dispen-
dium imminere, non dico defendentibus sed etiam legentibus libros pro veritati-
bus non solum asserentes errores sed insuper colorantibus persuadentibusque
atque sophisticis rationibus probantibus apparenter, Philosophia autem fabulosa
id asserit; persuadere vero moralis conatur, sed naturalis sophistice probat. . . .
Sic, sic tota philosophia, dyabolo instigante reperta, totum hominem dampnat.”
73. Ibid., 413: “Hinc libri gentilium sunt ebrii pulvinaribus, procession-
ibus, coronis, hostiis, placationibus . . . et huiusmodi obsecrationibus infinitis, in
quibus specietenus prevaluit nimium demonum cultus.”
74. Ibid., 414: “Ibi, sicut arguendo summatim fuit peretactum, fulgent nu-
merosa prodigia arte illius producta qui operibus simulatis dei equalitatem invadit.”
75. Ibid., 382: “Opinor plane rei publice et singularibus hominibus pluri-
morum malorum evenire incursus propter veritatem desertam divinam et cele-
bratas philosophorum nugas.”
76. Ibid.: “Nam cum hostis antiquus per vanitates illorum occupaverit
mentes humanas, velut possessor et fortis armatus in atrio suo tutus consistens. . . .
Hec enim miseriarum nostrarum est una non parva, ut qui semel sponte demoni
credit, credere frequenter per deceptiones cogatur.”
77. Ibid., 415.
78. An exception is Mèsoniat, who mentions them briefly: Poetica theologia,
102– 3.
79. Dyan Elliott, Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality and Demonology in the Mid-
dle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), especially chapter
6 and 150 – 56; Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early
Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Franco Mormando, The
Preacher’s Demons: Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance
 Giovanni Dominici’s Firefly Reconsidered \ 417

Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Michael D. Bailey, Battling

Demons. Witchcraft, Heresy and Reform in the Later Middle Ages (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003); and Marina Montesano,“Supra acqua
et supra ad vento”: superstizioni, maleficia e incantamenta nei predicatori francescani os-
servanti: Italia, sec. XV (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 1999).
80. Locula Noctis, 423: “Quid dicam de fatua iniquitate magorum . . . ? Nam
magis sunt per deceptionem, miraculorum, auguriorum, oraculorum, somnio-
rumque philosophiam scientes, a spiritibus malis irretiti rethe Vulcani quam veri
Christiani.”
81. Ibid., 426 – 27: “Item falluntur, casui subdentes ex puntis, manu, clavo
vel quovis alio instrumento, dextra levaque relictis, vel taxillis proiectis, aut nescio
quibus cartulis premissis quibusdam observantiis apertis.” The text here seems
corrupt. The overall point regarding illicit magical “observances,” however, re-
mains clear enough.
82. Ibid., 427, “Dampnatur orationibus impiis, pio sermone verbotenus,
Deo sed realiter demonum catervis relatis.”
83. For these narratives, see ibid., 416 – 21.
84. Ibid., 418–19.
85. For a full citation and discussion of this text, with further literature, see
Bailey, Battling Demons, 33– 34.
86. Locula Noctis, 424: “Plurima vidi et fideli relatu alia cognovi non pauca,
que nulla demonum arte potuerunt facta putari.”
87. Her story recounted in ibid., 427– 28.
88. Ibid.
89. Ibid., 429: “Scio hominem nondum defunctum crebro in somnis vidisse
notorum animas, purgatorii penis detentas, quarum tormenta tam proprie, tam
varie, tamque horrendas describit quod, si ipse fide dingus non foret, inaudita se-
ries fidem vendicat certam.”
90. Dyan Elliott, “Seeing Double: John Gerson, the Discernment of Spir-
its, and Joan of Arc,” American Historical Review 107 (2002), 26 – 54. See also El-
liott’s Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later
Middle Ages ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). For the longer his-
tory, see also Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in
the Middle Ages ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). For the intersection of
reform and demonology with magic and superstition, see Michael Bailey, “The
Disenchantment of Magic: Spells, Charms, and Superstition in Early European
Witchcraft Literature,” American Historical Review 111 (2006): 383– 404; and
Michael Bailey, “A Late Medieval Crisis of Superstition?” Speculum 84 (2009):
631– 61.
91. Bailey, “Crisis,” 645– 46.
92. Elliott, “Seeing Double,” 38– 44, especially 39– 40. See also her book-
length study, Proving Woman.
 418 / James D. Mixson

93. Bailey, “Disenchantment,” 394; and Elliott, “Seeing Double,” 39.

94. Bailey, “Disenchantment,” 394 – 95.
95. Locula Noctis, 428: “Hec enim fortassis est responsionum differentia
collegenda, quia omnes per nigromantiam et eius surculos respondentes, mani-
feste sunt pravi et persepe nuntiant falsa.”
96. Ibid., 429– 31. The passages are built around passages drawn mostly
from Augustine, Gregory, Apuleius, Cicero, and Vincent of Beauvais.
97. Ibid., 431.
98. Ibid.
99. Ibid.
 Sixteen

J o h n P ř í b r a m a n d
H i s Ve r n a c u l a r Tr e a t i s e s
Equipping the Laity in Battle against Hussite Radicals

marcela k. perett

In Bohemia as in England, John Wyclif ’s thought gave rise to a large cor-

pus of writings in the vernacular (as well as in Latin) that ranged from
learned translations of Eucharistic theology to simple propaganda.1 As
attempts to control the spread of Wycliffite heresy intensified in En-
gland in the early fifteenth century, the Hussite reform unfolded in Bo-
hemia and with it a debate regarding the role of Wyclif ’s writings there.2
Whereas scholars have reflected at length about the ways in which the
status of the English vernacular changed as a result of its ( perceived)
link with heresy in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century, the
encounter with Wyclif and its effect on the vernacular in Bohemia re-
main unexplored.3 This short essay examines three vernacular treatises of
John Příbram, a master at the University of Prague and an ardent critic
of Wyclif, who ordinarily wrote in Latin but turned to the vernacular in
a desperate attempt to combat the spread of Wyclif ’s ideas in Bohemia.4
The thorough, methodical nature of his vernacular refutations, as well as
the fact that he included translations of the tractates that he considered

419
 420 / Marcela K. Perett

heretical, suggests that he used the vernacular in order to equip the laity
with the theological ideas and language they needed in order to be able
to recognize heresy and make their own counterarguments against it.
Příbram’s vernacular works, written in quick succession between
1426 and 1430, grew out of his disagreement with Peter Payne (also
called Peter English), a Wycliffite master of arts from Oxford, who had
arrived in Prague in 1414 and quickly established himself in the radical
branch of the reform leadership there.5 Příbram also belonged to the re-
form party but served as a spokesman for the reform’s conservative wing.
The two masters disagreed vehemently about Wyclif, especially the role
that his Eucharistic doctrine ought to play in the Hussite reform. Příb-
ram rejected Wyclif ’s views on the mass as heretical, whereas the English
master promoted them. The disagreement between Payne and Příbram
was emblematic of the ongoing divisions inside the Hussite reform lead-
ership. The question of the role that Wyclif ’s teachings ought to play in
the reform in Bohemia had been discussed numerous times: the uni-
versity (which served, after 1407, as the chief authority on questions of
religion in the reform party) debated the question in different ways, from
official quodlibeta to informal conversations, but no agreement was
reached.6 By the time of Příbram’s foray into the vernacular, the Hussite
leadership in Prague was deeply divided by Wyclif and the role his teach-
ing ought to play in the Czech reform.
The question of Wyclif ’s role in the Hussite reform ceased to be
merely academic after the reform movement splintered into two major
camps following Jan Hus’s death in Constance in July of 1415. ( The
councilmen at Constance called for complete eradication of heresy in Bo-
hemia, but putting Hus to death as a heretic only inspired greater defiance
of the church’s decrees, most notably among the nobility in Bohemia.)7
As a result of this division, some theological ideas (many of them attrib-
utable to Wyclif ) found themselves suddenly in the mainstream of the
more radical Hussite party. By the early 1420s, the radicals had completely
broken with the reform leadership in Prague and founded their own
communities in southern Bohemia. Energized by eschatological hopes
and expectations, some of the apocalyptically minded laity and clerics
abandoned their villages and livelihoods in anticipation of the second
coming of Christ, predicted for February 1420.8 When the appointed
 John Příbram and His Vernacular Treatises \ 421

time came and went and the world did not, in fact, end, the devotees de-
cided to build a commune, called Tabor, where they would live like
Christ’s apostles, in simplicity and devotion. What this ideal looked like
in reality proved very disturbing to the reform leadership in Prague: a re-
jection of all rituals not specifically mandated by the Scriptures and, most
shockingly perhaps, a minimalist mass celebrated outside, using clay or
wooden vessels, by priests dressed in ordinary clothes. This radical re-
jection of tradition was accompanied by a new kind of social and politi-
cal arrangement that resembled a theocracy.9
As the most frequently celebrated Christian ritual, the mass was also
the most obvious reminder of disagreement and disunity among the re-
formers. The shape of the mass proved to be the single most divisive
issue, both between Tabor and Prague and within the Hussite leadership
in Prague. The theological negotiations (discussed in more detail below)
revolved around the minimalism of the ritual life at Tabor, with the ques-
tion of Christ’s presence in the sacrament as the main point of con-
tention. Příbram and many of the reformers in Prague supported the
Roman doctrine of transubstantiation, whereas many Taborite priests
did not. Of the latter group, some defended the doctrine of real presence
in accordance with Wyclif ’s definition (according to which Christ is
present, figuratively and sacramentally, in the bread and wine after con-
secration) while others argued against Christ’s real presence in the sacra-
ment, claiming that it was a mere symbol.10 What one believed about the
sacrament also had practical implications for what, if any, veneration one
offered to the consecrated host: different beliefs translated into different
actions, which further divided the reformers.
Without an agreement regarding the mass, unity among the reform-
ers proved elusive. The early years of the Taborite commune showed just
how divisive the question of real versus figurative presence of Christ in
the sacrament could be. Around 1420, the deniers of real presence, led
by Martin Húska (called Loquis) and Peter Kániš, persuaded some at
Tabor to abandon the doctrine of real presence and reject any kind of
veneration of the sacrament as idolatrous. With time, Loquis and his
followers decided to secede from Tabor and start their own commune
with its own way of celebrating mass. The Taborite leadership, however,
refused to allow it to happen, with fatal consequences: in 1421, at the
 422 / Marcela K. Perett

order of Tabor’s leadership, about fifty followers of Loquis, men, women,

and children, were first expelled and later burned as heretics outside of
Tabor’s walls.11 Their beliefs proved harder to eradicate, however, and it
is likely that all subsequent debates about Eucharistic theology were
tinged with a threat of a similar fragmentation.
The reform leadership in Prague had repeatedly tried to come to
some theological agreement with Tabor, but with little success.12 How-
ever, the demands of war, which had by now engulfed most of Bohemia,
made an agreement between the reform parties vital to the reform’s sur-
vival.13 Foreign crusaders, dispatched by the pope against the heretics in
Bohemia, swarmed the land in 1420, 1422, 1423 to 1424, 1426 to 1427,
and 1431, and, at every occasion, made it crucial that Prague and Tabor
cooperate.14 The leaders in Prague walked a political tightrope: while they
wished to be seen as cooperating with Tabor because they needed its mili-
tary help against crusaders, they also wanted to limit its influence because
they feared losing control of the direction of the reform. These negoti-
ations took the form of synods and occasional public disputations, in which
two delegations of theologians would argue a set of prearranged points in
front of a jury of judges, usually—but not always—university-educated
clerics.15 The purpose was to debate various points of theology and, if
possible, arrive at a formulation that both sides could agree on. They were
held in Prague and at various locations around Bohemia, such as a dispu-
tation in Konopiště in June 1423 and a synod in Klatovy in November
1424, both of which featured heated discussions about liturgical vest-
ments (which Prague masters considered necessary and Tabor rejected) as
well as the usual debates about Eucharistic theology.16 The debates, con-
ducted and recorded in Latin, were well documented, and reports of
them circulated widely among the university masters and other clerics.
These debates were not confined to Latin. Příbram’s remarks sug-
gest that Tabor used the occasion of synods and disputations to dissemi-
nate its teaching in the vernacular, circulating treatises far and wide.17
For example, Příbram reported that after the synod in Klatovy in No-
vember of 1424, the Taborite clergy sent out “many tractates in Latin
and in Czech across the whole land, especially about the nature of the
sacrament [arguing] that the bread remains the same after consecration
as before.”18 However, the fallout of the disputation in Konopiště in 1423
 John Příbram and His Vernacular Treatises \ 423

aggravated Příbram even more. At that meeting, the leaders of the Prague
and Taborite factions exchanged Eucharistic tractates for study and cor-
rection.19 Příbram later complained that the Taborites disseminated their
version of the tractate without making the corrections suggested by the
Prague masters. Příbram lamented that “Taborite priest [ Nicholas] sent
out this tractate, uncorrected, without the changes and insertions rec-
ommended by the jury at the disputation, to villages and towns and dis-
seminated it practically across the whole land.”20 “These tractates,” Příb-
ram added, “corrupted and fomented many a simple heart with error
and heresy.”21
Příbram’s frustration with the ongoing dissemination of heresy boiled
over after a disputation that took place in Prague in October 1429, lead-
ing him to write in the vernacular. In the disputation, Příbram took on
Peter Payne. Ostensibly the disputation addressed John Wyclif ’s theol-
ogy of the Eucharist, but it was really Tabor’s understanding of the mass
that was on trial.22 Peter Payne defended John Wyclif and his teachings
and admitted to compiling summaries of the most salient points of
Wyclif ’s doctrine and distributing them for the purpose of instructing the
priests and laity at Tabor.23 Příbram objected vigorously, arguing that the
articles were heretical and lamenting their toxic influence. A jury com-
posed of eight university masters heard the arguments. The jury called a
truce between the parties until June of the following year and banned
everyone from revealing details about the disputation until then.24 The
ban on publishing details about the disputation was supposed to reassert
the boundaries of theological discussions, which were to take place in
Latin and within the university.
In principle, Příbram agreed with confining the discussion to uni-
versity circles. But in this case, the ban squelched Příbram’s critique of
Wyclif at a moment when Wyclif ’s own works, as well as the treatises
his work inspired, had already been circulating in Latin and in Czech.
By the early 1420s, Payne had begun disseminating summaries and in-
dexes of Wyclif ’s works, which, according to Příbram, Taborite priests
used to compose heretical tractates of their own, in the vernacular.25
Příbram found such activities, undertaken against the earlier prohibi-
tions of councilmen appointed by the city, intolerable and complained
that “heretics composed and disseminated many tractates in Czech and
 424 / Marcela K. Perett

Latin out of a number of theological articles by Wyclif and Payne, which

Payne wrote and circulated in this land a few years ago.”26 It is not sur-
prising, therefore, that Příbram reached the decision to break the ban on
revealing the disputation’s details within weeks of the event.27 Instead of
relying on the university to stop Payne from disseminating translations
of Wyclif, he decided that he would teach the laity to recognize heresy
and shun it. He turned directly to the laity in their language, explaining
the arguments held by both sides to help them recognize heretical
teaching and know how to correct it. He even made them into his col-
laborators in the struggle against heresy, begging them to help him
“work against these errors,” to stop their dissemination.28
By turning to the vernacular, Příbram gave the laity an opportunity
to make up their minds in favor of what he saw as orthodoxy. In a ver-
nacular treatise entitled Confession of the Faithful Czechs (Vyznání věrných
Čechů), he narrated what transpired at the disputation in 1429, who said
what and in what sequence, paying particular attention to the arguments
put forth by Payne and including his own refutations of them. Příbram’s
goal was to show that Payne’s articles on the mass were derived from
Wyclif ’s and were, therefore, heretical.29 Making the connection be-
tween Payne and Wyclif was important. Payne passed his treatises on to
the priests at Tabor, and so, by showing Payne to be heretical, Příbram
would make the point that Taborite understanding of the mass was also
heretical.30
The translated articles of Payne and Příbram’s refutation of them
brought the university-level discourse into the vernacular. Příbram first
listed the heretical articles of Wyclif and then compared them to what
Payne himself had written. This was an impressive feat of translation;
Příbram excerpted from a Latin treatise that Payne had originally put to-
gether for the arbiters of the disputation, entitled Posicio M. Petri Anglici
contra Przibram.31 Příbram arranged Payne’s articles right after Wyclif ’s,
highlighting the similarities between them, all of which had to do with
the nature of the consecrated host. Příbram’s discussion is focused around
two very specific questions in order to counter two very specific sets of er-
rors, both resulting from Wyclif ’s particular understanding of the mass.32
The first question deals with the manner in which Christ is present in the
consecrated elements and the related issue of the kind of union that exists
 John Příbram and His Vernacular Treatises \ 425

between the body of Christ and the bread. The second question has to do
with the location of Christ: is he to be found on the altar or in heaven,
and, if both, how can he be located in more than one place at once?
The two sets of questions grew out of the very particular way in
which Wyclif had challenged the teaching on transubstantiation.33 Ac-
cording to the traditional teaching, at the moment of consecration the
Eucharistic species of bread and wine turn into the body and blood of
Christ. Their appearance, however, remains, because — as Aquinas ex-
plained using Aristotelian categories — the accidents of the bread re-
main, but “they cease to inhere in any substance, since they cannot con-
tinue to be related to the bread, which has substantially changed to
become body.”34 This explanation of how the substance of the bread
changes into the substance of Christ’s body while retaining its original
appearance proved insurmountable to Wyclif. For complicated reasons
that must be omitted here, Wyclif could not accept Aquinas’s teaching of
what happens at consecration, especially the suggestion that one sub-
stance (Christ’s body) completely replaces another ( bread). Instead, he
argued that the material bread (and its substance) remained in the sacra-
ment and were, in fact, simultaneously present with the body of Christ.
The nature of this union was something that Wyclif tried hard to define.
He developed a position that fit somewhere between a substantial kind of
presence and the notion of Christ’s presence as merely symbolic.35
Příbram’s Confession was not only a treatise on theology, however,
but also a primer on how to distinguish orthodox believers from heretics
based on their conduct in church. Do they venerate God in the sacra-
ment? Do they kneel before it? Do they bow down to it? Do they praise
and implore it as the true God? If they do not, if they fail to acknowledge
that God dwells in the sacrament more reliably than anywhere else in the
world, they reveal themselves to hold heretical beliefs about the sacra-
ment. Thus, one’s behavior in the presence of the sacrament served as a
marker of what one believed about it, whether one supported Tabor and
its radical theology of the mass. In this way, Příbram’s questions helped
the faithful determine by simple observation whether their parish had
been contaminated by heresy or not.
Příbram gave the laity access to theology in translation but did not
count on them necessarily to be able to judge its logic. For this reason,
 426 / Marcela K. Perett

more than two thirds of the treatise is dedicated to nontheological kinds

of arguments, which were supposed to endow his argument with addi-
tional, extra-theological weight. In particular, Příbram drew on the au-
thority of prominent church leaders. He ended his report on Wyclif by
stating that “these three articles have been renounced not only by Hus,
but also by masters at the university in Prague, Paris, England and by the
Roman church.”36 He also drew attention to a meeting eleven years back,
in 1408, when “Master Jan Hus and all other Czech masters and doctors
present together at the Black Rose proclaimed: ‘Let all know that we ban,
prohibit, persecute and reject [ Wyclif ’s articles]—in Latin saying repro-
bamus, refutamus et prohibemus — and [order that] no masters, bachelors
and students, of whom there are many here, should hold them or other-
wise believe them publicly or secretly in their heretical or erroneous or
scandalous interpretations. The penalty is being expelled from the corps
of Czech masters.’ ”37 Příbram used the authority of Hus and Hussite
leaders, not just the logic of the theology, to support his position.
Příbram especially exploited the popularity and perceived saintli-
ness of Jan Hus. By 1416, numerous masses celebrated Hus as a holy
martyr and many others included him as a venerated patron of the
Czech-speaking people. Many churches expressed their sympathies by
displaying images of Hus and Jerome of Prague (also martyred at Con-
stance) as saints and by singing masses for them.38 In his treatise, Příb-
ram brought up Hus’s name frequently, alluding to two Latin documents,
which show “to anyone who can read Latin” that Hus never agreed with
Wyclif ’s teaching on the mass. “Master Jan Hus wrote his own letter, in
which he disputed article number one,”39 that is, the belief that “God’s
body is not bodily present in the sacrament.”40 In proving that Hus dis-
puted Wyclif ’s articles two and three, Příbram promised that he had in
his possession a certain letter as evidence that settled the matter. “When
many witnesses testified against master Hus that he held or taught [the
belief ] that material bread remained even after consecration, Master
Hus wrote with his own hand and himself bequeathed to us, as the here
remaining shows, and said several times to each of the witnesses: ‘know
that you are lying [if you say that] I believe that the material bread re-
mains.’ ”41 In the disputation, Příbram produced Hus’s letter and showed
 John Příbram and His Vernacular Treatises \ 427

it around, but in his report of the disputation, a mere description of the

letter had to suffice.42
Příbram was not trying to turn every layman into a theologian, but
rather sought ways, both theological and nontheological, to teach laity to
identify heresy. His next vernacular treatise, entitled the Lives of the Ta-
borite Priests (Život kněží táborských), followed a few months after the Con-
fession, in early 1430, and offered additional ways to spot a heretic. The
Lives of the Taborite Priests is a strange amalgam of theological explana-
tions, polemical attacks, and translated theological excerpts, a combina-
tion that makes sense only if we understand it as Příbram’s attempt to
present as many different ways for recognizing heresy as possible. This
treatise in particular resembles a handbook for distinguishing heresy from
orthodoxy by describing heresy’s distinctive markers, much like a hand-
book for recognizing wild mushrooms that summarizes their identifying
characteristics, allowing one to distinguish the safe from the deadly. The
language of the treatise suggests that Příbram wanted it to be accessible: it
is expressive and avoids complicated formulations; its style is systematic
and clear. The overall argument is straightforward as well: no one in his or
her right mind should join, support, or even admire the commune at
Tabor. It traces the rise of Tabor but interweaves a well-argued polemic
against its leaders. “I intend,” Příbram says, “to describe their lives, how
they based the beginning and the entire course of their lives in great error
and heresy and unheard-of lies, and how they conceived their words and
sermons from the devil, who is a liar and the father of lies.”43
In the first section, Příbram argued that the Taborite priests inter-
preted the Bible too literally and that they used it to justify any action or
belief that suited them. He began with the question of correct exegesis,
explaining that just because something is mentioned in the Bible does
not mean that one ought automatically to follow it. This was a direct at-
tack on what Tabor held most dearly: the conviction that their com-
mune adhered to the Scriptures more closely than the Roman church,
which went to the heart of its identity. The problem was, as Příbram
saw it, that the laity at Tabor was taught “not to believe anything that is
not literally [zjevně] and obviously [zřetedlně] in the Bible,” which is an
error that “[the priests] hold themselves and preach to others.” In order
 428 / Marcela K. Perett

to illustrate (and mock) the flaws in Taborite exegesis, Příbram opened

with Tabor’s most obvious error: the imminent end of the world pre-
dicted for 1420. “First we say, and it is apparent to the whole land, that
those priests of Tabor [twenty-seven of whom are named], after being
possessed by the devil ten years ago, started prophesying, writing and
proclaiming that in the summer of 1420, the Day of Judgment would
certainly come.” When the end of the world did not come, the priests
reinterpreted their original claim, a decision that Příbram ridiculed: “So
the deceitful seducers, in order to comfort the people, came up with a
new lie, saying that a reform of all the Christian church would dawn, that
all sinful and evil ones would perish and only God’s elect would remain in
the world: those would flee to the mountains.” They prophesized that
after the Judgment Day only five cities would be left standing and that
the true faithful would congregate there in order to avoid punishment.
Příbram explained that they based this prophecy on Isaiah 19:18, where
the prophet spoke about five cities, but Příbram pointed out emphatically
that Isaiah did so “according to a different sense [ k jinému rozumu].”
Příbram did not go into greater detail in explaining why Tabor’s exegeti-
cal conclusions were not to be taken seriously, but he made it clear that
it was their method of reading the Scriptures, rather than the Scriptures
themselves, that was at fault.
Příbram argued that Tabor’s erroneous interpretation of the Scrip-
tures corrupted the commune’s ritual and social life, and interpreted ex-
amples of such ritual and social transgressions as evidence of heresy. In
this way, he was able to avoid potentially complicated theological argu-
mentation. Instead he pointed to a number of facts, both actual and in-
vented, about the Taborite commune, employing them as evidence that
something was seriously amiss at Tabor. First, he listed the various ways
in which Tabor defied the church’s ritual prescriptions: they disgraced
and despised the sacrament and the celebration of mass,44 celebrated a
much reduced version of the mass, only saying pater noster and the words
from the reading and calling that a mass.45 He then transitioned to dis-
cuss Tabor’s social perversion. He alleged that the Taborites married
godfathers to godmothers,46 monks to nuns, and even disrespected mari-
tal consent, claiming that “when a maiden promised marriage without
her mother’s or father’s knowledge, [the leaders] broke that marriage
 John Příbram and His Vernacular Treatises \ 429

and married her to another.”47 However, the main symptom of Tabor’s

heresy was, according to Příbram, the commune’s violence. He described
numerous instances of it, drawing an explicit link between ritual error
and perverse actions. He described priests being killed while celebrating
mass at the altar48 and monks being burned like heathens,49 arguing that,
on account of their heresy, the Taborites killed, burned, and extermi-
nated many priests.50 The treatise gave clear examples of the observable
actions that resulted from the heretical theology at Tabor. Příbram de-
scribed them as symptoms of heresy that anyone could recognize with-
out having to make a judgment about theological matters.
But Příbram did not limit himself to describing the symptoms of
heresy. The second section of the treatise featured excerpts from actual
treatises written by contemporary heretics, translated so that the laity
could recognize heresy and its purveyors. Almost all of the excerpts per-
tain to the mass, the question most frequently discussed by Příbram. Ac-
cordingly, the second half of the treatise catalogues various heretics, in-
cluding John Wyclif and other prominent priests at Tabor, and their
views on the mass and the sacrament. By identifying the authors of
heresy, many of them still living, Příbram warned the laity not only
against specific doctrines but also against specific people. Příbram’s deci-
sion to let the heretics speak for themselves via the translated excerpts is
unusual but perfectly suited to his goal. While allowing his opponents to
condemn themselves from their own mouths, it also shows the relation-
ship between Wyclif ’s and Taborite doctrine on the mass, cementing
Příbram’s claim that Wyclif was the source of all this heresy and ritual
perversion, which he had long claimed and which the reform leadership
in Prague had been slow to acknowledge.
Příbram wrote in the vernacular in order to help stay the dissemina-
tion of Wyclif ’s ideas, using a number of different strategies to teach the
laity to recognize heresy. He translated passages from tractates by here-
tics, explained Wyclif ’s doctrines and showed how they related to what
priests at Tabor preached and wrote, circulated explanations of orthodox
doctrine, and highlighted extra-theological evidence, such as ritual and
social corruption, to prove that Tabor’s beliefs were indeed heretical.
Příbram’s three vernacular treatises are a small but telling example of the
ways in which the vernacular was being employed to combat heresy in
 430 / Marcela K. Perett

Bohemia. The vernacular discourse did not parallel the Latin learned dis-
course but rather augmented it, offering information tailored specifically
to the problem at hand and describing symptoms of heresy that the laity
could easily identify even in the absence of proper theological training.
Unlike in England at this time, the vernacular language was not seen as
suspect or tinged with heresy but instead was used as a valid medium for
combatting heretical beliefs. And although efforts were made to limit
learned disputation to learned, Latinate circles, as in the ban on dissemi-
nating Prague’s disputation details in 1429 discussed above, such attempts
proved ineffective and, more importantly, did not undermine the status of
the vernacular discourse as a whole. Quite the opposite. Příbram’s exam-
ple suggests that in Bohemia in the early fifteenth century, Wyclif ’s heresy
and the attempts to combat it elevated the status of the vernacular lan-
guage, making it an acceptable medium for theological discourse not only
to laity, but also to clerics and university masters.

Notes

1. Kantik Ghosh, “Wyclif, Arundel, and the Long Fifteenth Century,” in

After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England, ed, Vincent Gilles-
pie and Kantik Ghosh ( Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 545– 62.
2. See, for example, František Šmahel, “Wyclif ’s Fortunes in Hussite Bo-
hemia,” in The Charles University in the Middle Ages, ed. František Šmahel (Leiden:
Brill, 2007), 467– 89; Vilém Herold, “Zum Prager Philosophischen Wyclifismus,”
in Häresie und Vorzeitige Reformation im Spätmittelalter, ed. František Šmahel and
Elisabeth Müller-Luckner (München: Oldenbourg, 1998), 133– 46; and František
Šmahel, Die Revolution, 3 vols. (Hannover: Hahn, 2002), 2:788– 832. On Lollard-
Hussite exchange more generally, see Michael Van Dussen, From England to Bo-
hemia: Heresy and Communication in the Later Middle Ages ( New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2012).
3. On the links between the English vernacular and heresy, see Margaret
Aston, Faith and Fire: Popular and Unpopular Religion, 1350 –1600 ( London: Ham-
bledon Press, 1993); and Anne Hudson, “Lollardy, the English Heresy?” Studies
in Church History 18 (1982): 261– 83. On the concept of vernacular theology, see
Nicholas Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval Eng-
land: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Con-
stitutions of 1409,” Speculum 70 (1995): 822– 64, especially 823n4. Response in
 John Příbram and His Vernacular Treatises \ 431

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory

Writing in Late Medieval England ( Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press, 2006), appendix A, 397– 401. Watson’s article gave rise to a massive amount
of scholarship, augmenting, reasserting, critiquing, or nuancing his thesis. See, for
example, R. Blumenfeld-Kosinski, D. Robertson, and N. Warren, eds., The Ver-
nacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious Literature ( New York: Palgrave, 2002);
and Gillespie, After Arundel. For a useful bibliography, see Fiona Somerset and
Nicholas Watson, eds., The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity

4. F. M. Bartoš, Literární Činnost M. Jana Rokycana, M. Jana Příbrama, M.

( University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 257.

Petra Payne ( Prague: Nakl. Česke akademie věd a uměni, 1928).

5. Van Dussen, From England to Bohemia, 70 – 75; William Robert Cook,
“Peter Payne: Theologian and Diplomat of the Hussite Revolution,” Ph.D. dis-
sertation, Cornell University, 1971; J. V. Polišenský, ed., Addresses and Essays in
Commemoration of the Life and Works of the English Hussite Peter-Payne-Engliš

Diplomat Husitské Revoluce ( Prague: Kalich, 1956); Bartoš, Literární Činnost.

1456– 1956 ( Prague: Univerzita Karlova, 1957); F. M. Bartoš, M. Petr Payne

6. Howard Kaminsky, “The University of Prague in the Hussite Revolu-

tion: The Role of the Masters,” in Universities in Politics: Case Studies from the Late
Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, ed. John Baldwin and Richard Goldthwaite
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 79–106, 82; Howard Kamin-
sky, A History of the Hussite Revolution ( Berkeley: University of California Press,
1967), 239.
7. After Hus’s death, fifty-eight Hussite barons and nobles issued a joint
statement officially protesting the council’s decision to execute Hus and were, in
turn, excommunicated by the council. Text in František Palacký, Documenta Mag.
Joannis Hus vitam, doctrinam, causam in Constantiensi Concilio actam et controversias

580 – 84; see also Václav Novotný, Hus v Kostnici a česká slechta ( Prague: Nákla-
de religione in Bohemia annis 1403–1418 motas illustrantia (Prague: Tempsky, 1869),

dem Společnosti přátel starožitností českých v Praze, 1915).

8. Howard Kaminsky, “Hussite Radicalism and the Origins of Tabor,
1415–1418,” Medievalia et Humanistica 10 (1956): 102– 30.
9. Howard Kaminsky, “The Religion of Hussite Tabor,” in The Czechoslo-
vak Contribution to World Culture, ed. M. Reichcígl ( The Hague: Mouton, 1964),

Tábora,” Československý Časopis Historický 15 (1967): 103– 20.

210 – 23; Kaminsky, Hussite Revolution, 435– 60; František Hoffman, “K Počátkům

10. On the doctrinal disunity within Tabor’s own ranks, see Kaminsky, Hus-
site Revolution, 460 – 81. For discussion of different theological formulations, see
William R. Cook, “John Wyclif and Hussite Theology, 1415–1436,” Church His-
tory 42 (1973): 335– 49, 341– 42. For a brief summary, see Thomas Fudge, “Hus-
site Theology and the Law of God,” in The Cambridge Companion to Reformation
 432 / Marcela K. Perett

Theology, ed. David Bagchi and David C. Steinmetz (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2004), 22– 27, 24. When speaking about “conservation,” Fudge
undoubtedly means “consecration.”
11. The followers were called “Picardi” ( Pikarts), but their origin is un-
clear. Rudolf Holinka, “Počátky Táborského Pikartství,” Bratislava 6 (1932):
187– 95; F. M. Bartoš, “Konec Táborských Pikartů,” Jihočeský Sborník Historický
41 (1972): 41– 44; Kaminsky, Hussite Revolution, 353– 60 and 430.
12. The disputations and the eventual slide into hostility and noncommu-
nication are well documented in Kaminsky, Hussite Revolution, 460 – 94; Fran-
tišek Šmahel, Die Hussitische Revolution, vol. 2, 1368– 1408, includes a brief dis-
cussion of nationalism implicit in Příbram’s attacks on Peter Payne. See also
F. M. Bartoš, The Hussite Revolution, 1424–1437 ( New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1986).
13. The leadership in Prague wished to unite the reformers with their (rela-
tively moderate) program of reform, which consisted in the Four Articles:
utraquism (communion in both kinds), free preaching, punishment of public sins,
and clerical poverty. Text in Kaminsky, Hussite Revolution, 369. See also Mathilde
Urlirz, “Die Genesis der Vier Prager Artikel,” Sitzungsberichte der Kaiserlichen
Akdemie der Wissenschaften in Wien 175 (1914): 1– 98; F. M. Bartoš, “Do Čtyř
Pražských Artikulí,” Sborník Příspěvků k Dějinám Hlavního Města Prahy 5 (1932):
481– 591.
14. For political and military events, see Frederick Heymann, John Žižka
and the Hussite Revolution ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955); and
Bartoš, Hussite Revolution.
15. For example, the disputation at Konopiště was presided over by lay ar-

Čechách 1418–1440 ( Prague: Univerzita Karlova, 1985), 48– 49.

biters. Kaminsky, Hussite Revolution, 467; Blanka Zilynská, Husitské Synody v

16. For a complete list of Hussite synods and disputations, see Zilynská,
Husitské Synody, 5, 24 ( Klatovy) and 26 – 27 ( Konopiště); Zilynská also describes
each synod and disputation in detail and lists available primary sources. See also
Kaminsky, Hussite Revolution, 500 –16. On university disputations, see Michal
Svatoš, “Kališnická Univerzita (1419–1556),” in Dějiny Univerzity Karlovy, vol. 1,
ed. Michal Svatoš, 1347/48–1622 ( Prague: Karolinum, 1995), 205–17, 207.
17. Little of Tabor’s vernacular writing remains extant, as much of that lit-
erature disappeared with the demise of Tabor. See Amedeo Molnár, “O
Táborském Písemnictví,” Husitský Tábor 2 (1979): 17– 31. What remains are
Peter Payne’s summaries of Wyclif ’s tractates, which, according to Cook, must
have circulated widely. Cook, “John Wyclif,” 340.
18. “latině i česky po zemi lidu rozepsali a zvláště o tělu božiem tatkto jsú
vydali, že v té svátosti po posvěcení chléb chlebem zuostává týmž jako před
posvěcením.” Jaroslav Boubín, ed., Jan z Příbramě, Život Kněží Táborských
( Příbram: Státní Okresní Archiv et al., 2000), 82. Also, see F. M. Bartoš, “Kla-
 John Příbram and His Vernacular Treatises \ 433

tovská Synoda Táborských Kněží z 11. Listopadu 1424,” Jihočeský Sborník His-
torický 8 (1935): 4 –10, which includes the text of the Latin and Czech reports
that had circulated across the realm.
19. Příbram (for the Hussite faction in Prague) and Nicholas of Pelhřimov
(for Tabor); see Zilynská, Husitské Synody, 50 – 51.
20. “A aj, přes to přese všecko týž kněz Mikuláš i s jinými kněžími brzo
potom ten jsú traktát neopravený bez těch přídavkuov s těmito bludnými kusy
svrchu pověděnými po obciech a městech rozepsali a téměř po vší zemi jej
rozsieli.” Boubín, Jan z Příbramě, Život, 79.
21. “A tiem jsú přemnohá srdce sprostná bludy a kacieřstvím naprznili a
nakvasili.” Boubín, Jan z Příbramě, Život, 79.
22. For Taborite understanding of the mass, see Amedeo Molnár and Ro-
molo Cegna, eds., Confessio Taboritarum ( Rome: Istituto Palazzo Borromini,
1983). Taborite eucharistic tractates edited in Jan Sedlák, Táborské Traktáty Eu-
charistické ( Brno: Nákl. Papežské Knihtisk. Benedktinu Rajhradských, 1918).
23. It is not clear whether Payne wrote his registers and summaries in
Latin or in Czech; of the estimated total of 35,000 entries, only several registers

the extant manuscripts, see Cook, “John Wyclif,” 339– 40; Bartoš, Literární Čin-
and one summary survived, and those appear to be in Latin. For details about

nost; Peter Payne’s treatises and polemics from this time period on 101– 3, nos.
9–11, Příbram’s on 73– 74, nos. 12–14. For analysis of the disputation, see Zilyn-
ská, Husitské Synody, 63– 68.
24. Jaroslav Boubín and Alena Míšková, eds., “Spis M. Jana Příbrama
“Vyznání Věrných Čechů,” Folia Historica Bohemica 5 (1983): 239– 83, 247; Zilyn-
ská, Husitské Synody, 67.
25. Boubín and Míšková, “Vyznání Věrných Čechů,” 271; Cook, “John
Wyclif,” 339– 40.
26. Boubín and Míšková, “Vyznání Věrných Čechů,” 273.
27. The vernacular portion edited in Boubín and Míšková, “Vyznání Věr-
ných Čechů,” 262– 83. The Latin treatise, printed in Johannis Cochleus, Historiae
Hussitarum Libri Duodecim ( Mainz: ex officina Francisci Behem, 1549), 503– 47,
is more extensive.
28. Boubín and Míšková, “Vyznání Věrných Čechů,” 273.
29. This stance fits well with Příbram’s overall crusade against Wyclif and
his influence in Bohemia, evident from the long history of their interactions.
Cook, “John Wyclif,” 336 – 44; also in Boubín and Míšková, “Vyznání Věrných
Čechů,” 246, who follow Cook’s interpretation.
30. Boubín and Míšková, “Vyznání Věrných Čechů,” 269, 271; the trans-
mission of Wyclif by Payne discussed in Cook, “John Wyclif,” 338– 40.
31. Cook, “John Wyclif,” 343.
32. Recent literature on Wyclif includes Stephen Lahey, John Wyclif
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Ian Levy, A Companion to John Wyclif
 434 / Marcela K. Perett

( Leiden: Brill, 2006); and Anne Hudson, Studies in the Transmission of Wyclif ’s
Writings ( Burlington: Ashgate, 2008). See also William R. Cook, “John Wyclif
and Hussite Theology, 1415–1436,” Church History 42 (1973), 35– 49.
33. For more detail, see Lahey, John Wyclif, chapter 3 (“Denying Transub-
stantiation”), 102– 33; and J. Patrick Hornbeck, What Is a Lollard? Dissent and Be-
lief in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 70 –101,
where he summarizes Wyclif ’s Confessio. For an English summary of Wyclif ’s De
Eucharistia, see David Aers, Sanctifying Signs: Making Christian Tradition in Late
Medieval England ( Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002),
chapter 3.
34. Lahey, John Wyclif, 107.
35. In Wyclif ’s view, “the union between the bread and body finds its most
appropriate parallel in the doctrine of the incarnation; just as two natures are
there joined in a single person, so also through the words of institution are the
substances of Christ’s body and bread present in the consecrated host.” Horn-
beck, What Is a Lollard?, 75.
36. Boubín and Míšková, “Vyznání Věrných Čechů,” 264.
37. “mistr Jan Hus se všemi jinými mistry i doktory českými všichni [za
jednoho] člověka svoliti sou se a všickni z plné rady U černé ruože [vypově] deli
jsou společně bez odpory [všeliké] a řkouce: Bu všem známo, [že my] tyto ar-
tikule Viklefovy: . . . všem mistruom, bakalářům i studentům, jichž tu stálo
množství, zapovídáme, tupíme, a potupujeme, latině řkouc reprobamus, refuta-
mus et prohibemus, aby jich žádný nedržel ani vedl zjvně ani tejně ve smyslech
jich kacířských nebo bludných nebo pohoršlivých, a to pod pokutou touto, to
jest pod vypověděním z českého zboru.” Boubín and Míšková, “Vyznání Věrných
Čechů,” 263. For details about the 1408 condemnation of Wyclif, see Šmahel,
Hussitische Revolution, 2:814 –16.
38. “In templis dei pro beatis depingunt ( Husa a Jeronyma), in praedica-
tionibus eos sanctos fore astru, in officiis divinis suffragiis honorant, missas ut
pro martiribus canunt.” Palacký, Documenta, 649.
39. Boubín and Míšková, “Vyznání Věrných Čechů,” 265.
40. Ibid., 263.
41. “Item proti druhému a třetímu kusu Viklefu svrchu psanému dovodil
jest mistr Příbram, že když jsou mnozí svědkové svědčili na mistral Husi, že by
on držal nebo učil, že po požehnání chléb hmotný zůstával, napsal jest mistr Hus
svou vlastní rukou a nám zde ostavil, jakž to písmo ještě zde mají, a řka něko-
likrát každému svědku: lžeš; rozuměj: bych to držel, že by tu chléb hmotný zu-
ostav.” Ibid., 265.
42. “aby po mně nic jiného nepřipisovali.” After dealing with the mass, he
continues to describe other articles of belief, such as secular property of priests,
tithing, indulgences, and war. Ibid., 265.
 John Příbram and His Vernacular Treatises \ 435

43. “mieníme tuto jich život od počátku popsati, kterak jsú na bludích ve-
likých a na nevěrách a lžech neslýchaných své počátky i běhy založili, a tak od
ábla, jenž je lhář a otec lži, své běhy, řeči I kázanie počeli.” Příbram, Life of the
Taborite Priests, in Boubín, Jan z Příbramě, Život, 39.
44. “Item o poslední svátosti najvětčí, to je o těle božím, i o jejiem řádu
slavném takto sú zle smyslili.” Ibid., 64.
45. “Najprv že jsú řá veškeren cierkev svaté v slúžení a obětování té drahé
svátosti potupili a opovrhli. A toliko řkúce páteř a slova ze čtenie, tak jsú své mše
slúžili.” Ibid.,, 64.
46. “Item, ze při oddávání kmotrovstvie téměř za nic sú nevážili, ale kmotry
s kmotrami sú oddávány.” Ibid., 59.
47. “Item jiný neřád vedli i ještě vedúm že když dievka bez otcovy a
mateřiny vuole slíbí pravé manželství pacholkum tehdy to pravé a celé manžel-
stvie sú roztrhali a ji jinému a jeho s jinú oddávali.” Ibid., 58– 59.
48. “Item některé jsú u oltářuov stojíce a mši svatú slúžíce mordovali.”
Ibid., 60.
49. “Item že jsú i kněžie zákonné, to je mníšky, zlé i dobré jako pohany pálili,
mordovali i hubili.” Ibid., 61.
50. “Item že z těch nevěr i jiných kněžstva jsú veliké množstvie zmordovali,
spálili i zhubili.” Ibid., 60.
 Seventeen

H e a r s a y, B e l i e f, a n d D o u b t
The Arrival of Antichrist in Fifteenth-Century Italy

daniel hobbins

Textbooks may continue to describe the fourteenth and fifteenth cen-

turies as a period of crisis, but specialists have been searching for a new
paradigm for more than a generation. And yet, what label can do justice to
such a complex period? John Van Engen appreciated its complexity as
clearly as anyone when he argued that the period after 1370 represents a
new and dynamic stage in the development of the medieval Church, a pe-
riod of “multiple options.” He described a confluence of energies break-
ing out across Europe “independently and nearly simultaneously,” visible
in figures such as John Wyclif, Geert Grote, the Prague reformers, Cath-
erine of Siena, Birgitta of Sweden, and Julian of Norwich. Rather than
“pre-reformers,” we should imagine them as lightning rods for latent en-
ergies. In a dizzying tableau, we watch a cast of characters march across
the stage of history: Observant monks purging their own monasteries,
humanists attacking the schools, women inspiring new movements, uni-
versity masters turning from scholastic niceties to the wider world. We
see startling novelties: new saints, new devotions, new media, and ambi-
tious new councils bending the law to their will. Across the face of Europe
we see parish communities developed far beyond their twelfth-century

436
 Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 437

counterparts, laypeople appropriating not merely the practices of pro-

fessional religious but the very Passion of Christ, the Church’s “central
spiritual treasure,” even as churchmen appropriated more of the world.
Above all, we see a range of options, extending even to the most basic of
the Church’s prescribed practices.1 Energy, dynamism, novelty, possi-
bility: we are a long way here from the “autumn” of the Middle Ages.
Anyone who works in this period will at once recognize features of
the landscape that Van Engen has sketched, though, like a skilled cartog-
rapher, he has also balanced granular detail with broad strokes, connect-
ing the particular to the general. Yet, to suggest that a period is one of
multiple options is at the same time to concede, perhaps, that we do not
fully understand it, that its patterns still elude us at some basic level. It is
an honest label that captures something essential about the period, even
as it seems to raise new questions. The problem, at least in part, is not the
limitation of our evidence but its extravagant surplus. Anyone who works
much with manuscripts knows of the abundance of fifteenth-century
copies in comparison with earlier centuries. This abundance extends not
only to copying, but also to new literary production. Major new genres,
such as the plague tract or legal consilium, arose after 1350 and remain to
be untangled. We have yet to comprehend the scale of late medieval de-
votional literature, let alone read it all. Our understanding of the late
medieval university is fragmentary, often limited to stale generalizations.
The late medieval papacy has never been studied with the same diligence
that scholars have shown in their studies of early and high medieval
popes. Is it any wonder that, for all we have learned, our textbooks still
rely on the old narrative of crisis and decline, or that Huizinga’s meta-
phor of an autumnal waning, of a culture past its prime, endures?2
Even in fields that have drawn much attention, such as late medieval
prophecy and apocalypticism, the complexity of the evidence continues
to surprise us. The text that I wish to investigate here illustrates the chal-
lenge. On the one hand, it tells the remarkable story of a wandering her-
mit who apparently wanted people to believe that he was a devil, perhaps
even Antichrist. Sometime around the Council of Constance, he visits a
group of hermits on a mountainside near Lucca and dazzles them with
eloquence and marvels, but also unsettles them with his heresies, and
finally departs, leaving them baffled. “If he and those like him are the
 438 / Daniel Hobbins

members of Antichrist,” the text concludes, “I leave to [those with] deeper

judgment.” The story offers suspense and entertainment—relatively rare
commodities in medieval stories. It presents us today with a new kind
of evidence: not how Antichrist was supposed to appear, as we see in
the foundational texts of Antichrist doctrine such as Pseudo-Methodius
or the Tiburtine Oracle; in illuminated Apocalypses; in surviving mosaics,
stained glass, and tapestries; in the prophecies studied by Robert Ler-
ner; or in the vitae of Antichrist in the early block books, but rather how
one individual went about playing the role of Antichrist.3 We see him
performing strange but homely miracles, uncovering secrets, speaking in
tongues, uttering incantations, terrifying but also amusing those he en-
countered. We can even make out the likeness of a personality, a charis-
matic holy man, but also a charlatan, perhaps a trickster.
On the other hand, for all its entertainment value, the text that tells
us all of this defies easy classification and challenges our powers of inter-
pretation. Its analysis requires not just the technical skills of the medi-
evalist, including close study of the manuscripts, but also the creativity
of the historian to bring it to life. These in fact are skills that John Van
Engen has put on display in his own scholarship: exploring the archives,
reading texts sensitively, identifying larger themes, and refusing to force
the evidence into received historiographical categories. This, or some-
thing like it, is what this text requires and what I shall attempt here.
Entirely unstudied, the text survives in two mid-fifteenth-century
manuscripts and is about four folios long in each one. Its author is anony-
mous. Below, I propose a date for the original composition of around
1425. It stands as a reflection of the world of northern Italy from which
it emerged at that time: rumors of the birth of Antichrist, obsession with
the last times, distrust of popes and spiritual leaders, and a landscape
populated by charismatic figures eager to rescue their followers from the
impending cataclysm. In this way, it conforms to what we know about
this time and place and provides further evidence of a general preoccu-
pation in the early fifteenth century with the arrival of Antichrist.
But the text appears even more valuable for the ways in which it
defies our expectations. To state the challenge in the simplest terms: what
is this text? Medievalists depend heavily on the clearly definable genres in
which medieval texts have reached us. The genre helps us to frame and
 Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 439

grasp a work, to understand not only its literary structure but also its ma-
terial form and audience. So what do we do with a text that belongs to no
recognizable genre? At its core, the present text is a relation passed from
one person to the next until someone put it into writing. Medieval au-
thors, especially clerical authors, typically intended their stories to de-
liver a moral lesson. The author of the present text could have taken this
path: he might have shaped his narrative into a sermon, a prophecy, or an
exemplum. But, as we shall see, he allowed it to remain a story drawn
from someone’s personal experience about an event that seemed to por-
tend the last times. Rather than stripping away precise references to peo-
ple or places, as we find in the exempla literature, he filled his story with
local detail, investing it with “facts” as though anxious to authenticate it.4
Rather than teach a moral, he told a story that seemed to presage the ar-
rival of Antichrist with no real certainty that it did so. Ironically, the his-
torical value of this text lies in this basic uncertainty.
Thus the challenge of this text, its refusal to conform to our expecta-
tions, is really a clue telling us that at least for this author, the traditional
storytelling genres were inadequate. Our classification system for me-
dieval texts, embodied since 1972 in the Typologie des Sources du Moyen Âge
Occidental, while essential for imposing some organization onto the vast
expanses of medieval literature, should not obscure for us its fabulous
complexity far beyond our current taxonomy, particularly for the late
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. A text such as this affords the oppor-
tunity to ponder a more fundamental question: what is the meaning of
anomalous texts, those that do not fit our categories? What can they tell
us that more recognizable texts cannot? The author of our text overcame
all of the prejudices drawing him to the traditional storytelling genres,
presumably because they failed to meet his needs in this particular case.
Whereas the traditional genres insisted upon a clear moral, our author
needed a vehicle for communicating doubt and uncertainty. The arrival
of Antichrist had been predicted for centuries, even since the early days
of Christianity, but rarely was there more speculation over his arrival
than in early fifteenth-century Italy. By its very nature, such speculation
invited hearsay. Hearsay must have generated not only belief, buttressed
by “facts,” but doubt as well. That, essentially, is what this story provides:
a glimpse into a lost world of storytelling about the coming of Antichrist,
 440 / Daniel Hobbins

in which rumor, hearsay, belief, and doubt compete for the upper hand.
Most of this storytelling never found its way into writing. The most sur-
prising thing about our text is the happy fact of its existence, that it passed
from the oral to the written.
The narrative structure of the story is more sophisticated than it first
appears. To communicate this complex mixture of hearsay and belief and
“fact” and doubt, the author arrived at a formula that resembles more than
anything the conventions of a modern ghost story. Of course, the literary
ghost story as we know it is a modern form, forged out of seventeenth-
century English collections of supernatural incidents, commercialized in
the late eighteenth century to meet the demands of a growing reading
public, crystallized into a distinct genre in the nineteenth century, and
remaining popular to the present day.5 In that sense, no medieval text—
including this one—can be called a literary ghost story.6
But the likeness of this tale to a modern ghost story, though not per-
fect, is striking and worth further consideration. Attempting to define
their subject, the editors of a collection of modern ghost stories pro-
posed that a ghost story should include the returning dead among its cast
of characters; that it should feature a “dramatic interaction between the
living and the dead,” usually with the intent to frighten or unsettle the
reader; that it should display “clear literary quality”; and that it should be
fairly short.7 The central character in our story, whose name is Johannes,
does claim to have died and returned from hell, though he is no phantom;
in fact, he resides with a hermit named Francis for an entire week. He
possesses a physical “weight,” taking walks, attending confession (while
insisting that he had nothing to confess), eating meals, and (one is free to
assume) sleeping. He interacts with Francis throughout the tale, and this
interaction leads to some disturbing scenes. But the unsettling nature of
the story arises not from a ghastly or menacing presence, but from Jo-
hannes’s likeness to Antichrist and his shocking miracles. Where a mod-
ern ghost story would introduce a phantom, our text foreshadows the end
of the world. That, I suppose, is what the medieval reader found thrilling
in such a text. The author also has some skill in narration. He sets the
story at a hermitage in the wooded hills outside Lucca. The dialogue oc-
curs as a story within a story, with hair-raising scenes and shocking claims.
The visitor, we are told at first, “called himself Johannes”— as though his
 Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 441

true identity remains uncertain. The story builds to a climax at midnight

on the last day of Johannes’s visit, with the invocation of Lucifer and
Francis frightened out of his mind. The scribe of the later of two manu-
scripts, searching for a title (which the earlier manuscript lacks), landed
upon “Historia terribilis,” or “frightening story.” This is a form of story-
telling, a kind of medieval ghost story that might have satisfied the gen-
eral craving to know what Antichrist would be like, how he might be-
have, what he might do.
Beyond these broad structural similarities between our text and the
ghost story, we could point to similar narrative strategies or tropes of the
genre. Ghost stories frequently insist upon the reality of the event they
describe.8 The present tale vouches for its own authenticity by appealing
to the unimpeachable witness of Francis, who “speaks only rarely but
truly,” while at the same time leaving to the reader to decide what to
make of it all. That too is a time-honored strategy of the ghost story:
“Here are the facts, what do you do with them?”9 A ghost story often
presents itself as a “true relation,” the product of a chain of information
referring back to the experience of someone else in the recent past.10 Me-
dieval storytellers knew this strategy well. Speaking of medieval tales of
ghosts, Jean-Claude Schmitt observed that “the person who wrote down
the tale never claimed to be the direct beneficiary of the apparition.”11 In
the case of our text, the story is reported inside a conversation that is de-
scribed by a third-person narrator, who may or may not have been the
author of the text.
The point here is not to claim that the author of our text was some-
how involved in the “invention” of the literary ghost story or to push
back its history by several centuries. Indeed, it seems unlikely that the
ghost story is really a definable genre for the medieval period (despite the
title of a recent anthology).12 Rather, I propose that the author worked
out for himself a way of telling the story that fit his purpose at that time
and place. What he left us is an anomaly, what we might call a “rumor of
Antichrist” tale that belongs unmistakably to early fifteenth-century Italy
but also anticipates in surprising ways the structure and narrative strate-
gies of our modern ghost stories. These strategies allowed him to tell a
story whose truth claims he could not himself verify and also satisfied the
great appetite for news about the arrival of Antichrist. We see rumor
 442 / Daniel Hobbins

turning into “fact” in the form of an authenticated story. And this story
draws much of its power from its claim to be an authentic narrative of a
mysterious and frightening encounter at a time of crisis in the Church.
Throughout the remainder of this article, I develop this argument
through a consideration of the story’s basic architecture, the layers re-
flecting its movement from speech to writing; through an examination of
the factual details embedded in it, which together give the story a certain
“facticity”; through a consideration of the historical context for this
story, the time and place of its construction; and finally through an analy-
sis of the central characters, Francis and Johannes. A complete descrip-
tion of the manuscripts is given at the end of this chapter, and a critical
edition of the text follows in an appendix. We turn first to the story itself,
a gem of medieval storytelling and, happily, one brief enough to be in-
cluded in its entirety in English translation.

The Story

In the earlier of our two manuscripts, the story begins abruptly and with-
out title, following a Latin verse abbreviation of Innocent III’s De miseria
hominis. It is followed by a fairly popular account of the loss and miracu-
lous rediscovery of the Moralia of Pope Gregory I. The text is written in
the same hand as the rest of the manuscript, in a clear Gothic textualis:

In the mountains of Tuscany, about five miles from the city of Lucca,
there lies a solitary, wooded place called Petraplana, where many her-
mits dwell with great austerity of soul and full of good cheer. Among
them, one named Francis shines forth, especially renowned and slen-
der, and by general consent glittering beyond peer in his many vir-
tues, and completely matchless in his abstinence. So mighty is the
rigor of his abstinence that one can hardly believe it in our times.
For sometimes he abstains for six, seven, or even twelve days, tast-
ing nothing, food or drink. But what is worthy of praise and remem-
brance is this: he asserts that he is neither anxious nor tormented with
any care or vexation on this account. Rather, if he wishes, he can ab-
stain for even longer. And this Francis is now so renowned for his
 Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 443

maturity and bears such simplicity of soul with the wisdom of a ser-
pent,13 that he speaks only rarely but truly.
Accordingly, he was earnestly entreated many times in the city
of Rome by the distinguished and reverend father in Christ, the
noble L., bishop of Mallorca,14 to reveal to him whether he or any
of his hermit companions believed that the Son of Perdition, who
would raise himself above everything that is called or that is wor-
shipped as God, was already born.
He answered that he knew nothing for certain, nor did he be-
lieve that any of the hermits have any certainty on the matter. “Still,”
he said, “it is true that sometimes when we come together and talk
about various things, when the subject comes up — that is, whether
they believe that Antichrist has been born—they all without excep-
tion believe that he has.”
“Look,” the bishop added, “here’s why I’m asking you hermits who
live there rather than others. I once heard a certain reverend religious
of the Order of Preachers, called Master Vincent, who was preaching
at the time in the kingdom of Aragon.15 And he said that when he was
preaching in Lombardy, a certain man clad in white garments—a her-
mit’s habit — came to him. And he declared that he dwelled in the
mountains around Lucca, and insisted with certainty that Antichrist
had already been born into the world. Do you not know this hermit?”
Francis answered: “I have not known him, nor is there anyone
in our mountains who dresses in that way. But as I said we hold this
as a true opinion that he has already been born, though none of us
affirm this with absolute certainty. Nonetheless, it is true that at the
time of the Council of Constance, when I was in my cell in Petra-
plana, a certain man calling himself Johannes came to me unexpect-
edly in a poor and mean habit, carrying neither money, purse, nor
satchel.16 Upon his arrival, he showed rather too much pleasure in
jesting with me.
“And he said: ‘Ah Francis, I’ve long desired to see you!’
“And I made a similar greeting upon his arrival. And when I was
silent, he began to fashion such extraordinary conversation, so high,
holy, and deep, that it transformed us all, filling us with no small
wonder and astonishment.
 444 / Daniel Hobbins

“And after he had resided with us for two days, and we with
him, he feigned such great holiness, and uttered daily such learned
and devout words of holy conversation and high perfection, that
you would scarcely believe someone who reported such things. To
be sure, he never stopped mixing those good, sweet words with the
bitterness of error and many heresies. What next? When we were
all saying confession together in Mass or outside of Mass, acknowl-
edging that we had sinned against God and had offended his saints
and holding ourselves blameworthy, he alone refused to say this.
“And when I reproached him for this, he answered with dignified
yet rash presumption: ‘I cannot lie. And if I say that I’m a sinner or
that I have any fault, I would be lying since I am entirely without sin.’
“Then I replied: ‘How dare you say that you have no sin, when
the blessed evangelist John in his canonical text proclaims, “If we say
that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us”?’17
“ ‘These things,’ he answered, ‘were spoken for you, not for me,
who am free from all sin.’
“And this filled me with no small wonder. For when I heard him
utter these words, as my conscience is witness, it seemed to me that
I had been translated into another dimension, as his lovely and
fluent eloquence lingered in my ears.
“And then, as we were talking together and had both left the
cell through a secluded spot in the mountains, a large herd of cattle
came into our path. Suddenly, he commanded them to stop and to
dare go no further. A strange thing happened next: for at his com-
mand, those animals — wild by nature — stood gentle and motion-
less, so that one might have supposed them to be stones instead of
animals, and one could easily have touched their heads and horns, as
Johannes himself fearlessly bade me do, though I was unwilling and
dared not attempt it.
“And when they had stood so for a while, he said to me: ‘Do you
wish these cattle to depart?’
“ ‘I do wish it,’ I replied.
“Then more wonders: for as soon as he made the sign of the
cross and bid them leave, the cattle, as if loosened from chains, left
in the swiftest haste.
 Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 445

“Afterward, when we turned toward the cell from which we had

wandered some three miles in our conversation, he told me many
things, even (as it seemed) all the inner and hidden secrets of my life.
At this I marveled greatly and beyond measure, not without reason,
and was utterly astonished. And both going and returning he never
failed to sow his words with errors against the faith.
“At last, after we had returned and entered the cell, I implored
him by Him who lives forever and ever and by his most blessed
Mother and by all the saints to tell me in truth who he was.
“ ‘I am a Briton by nationality,’ he said. ‘I once was dead and
damned in hell, but from hell’s fires I took on the soul that gives life
to this body which you see me bear. Soon I shall judge all the world.
And at last I shall save the demons.’
“Hearing this I laughed, supposing it to be idle, empty chatter.
But upon further consideration, I also refuted these errors.
“Then one day, as we were walking together outside the cell, he
gazed directly into the sun’s rays with his eyes so wide open that he
did not close them in the slightest by reason of that gaze nor divert
them to either side, even though the sun, having now banished the
haze, was burning its brightest. His face aglow like fire, he began to
cry out, bellowing three times as if at the top of his lungs: ‘Justice
without mercy!’
“And as he condemned the rulers of God’s Church, naming the
pope and cardinals or other prelates or masters in theology, his face
became enkindled, and as a raving, roaring lion or a ringing trumpet,
he said: ‘O hypocrites! Soon he shall come who will subdue you! Your
destruction is at hand!’ And he uttered many similar words.
“And he spoke in tongues, saying: ‘I am still unknown to the
world. But after I obtain the tongues of all dialects, then shall I be re-
vealed. And I say to you, Francis, within five years you will see me in
Rome in the see of Peter the apostle. For with twelve allies whom I
shall elect, I shall come to Rome humbly, seated upon a donkey. And
then I shall be chosen pope if I have not already been chosen at Con-
stance. And you will see me sitting in the apostolic see of Peter.’
“And I rightly supposed that all of these things and the others
that he recounted above, about the soul taken from the fires of hell
 446 / Daniel Hobbins

and so on, were tricks and jokes. Yet after pondering them, espe-
cially my own secrets, I was and I remain full of wonder and trou-
bled in spirit.
“What shall I tell you next? After he had stayed with us for six
days, late on that sixth day, the two of us were alone in the cell. As
he was eating at table and drinking from the wine in the cup, which
he had mixed with salt, he invoked the virtues of heaven and the
powers of hell one by one, and at their individual names he made
the sign of the cross over the cup, saying: ‘If there is any sin in me,
come and take me to hell.’ He continued doing this until nearly
midnight.
“But after he had invoked many demons by name, at last with a
great cry he invoked Lucifer over the cup without making the sign
of the cross, but saying: ‘If there is any sin in me, come and take me
with you to hell!’
“Suddenly, as he pronounced the words, his face was horribly
transformed into the most extraordinary semblance. At this, I was
more terrified and frightened than I can say, and I dared not look
him in the face or remain with him even for a moment, but left him
at the table, retreated to the church of the hermitage, and waited
there until morning.
“Early the next day, when he said that he wished to depart, I
prepared the table so that he might find strength for the labors to
come. As he was eating and drinking I implored him to tell me the
truth at least upon his departure. And I asked him: ‘Who are you?’
“I had scarcely spoken the words when his face began to alter,
and he grew utterly terrified and speechless, and stopped eating. After
a short pause, he became enraged, and he growled: ‘I am Beelzebub.’
“A moment later he arose from the table and told me many
things in admonition. But since they seem to flatter myself, I have
no care to express them. But at last he said to me: ‘Francis, you hold
to the good life. Persevere in it, and take great care not to depart
from it.’
“And so, bidding farewell, he departed. If he and those like him
are the members and disciples of Antichrist, I leave to [those with]
deeper judgment.”
 Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 447

Construction

The story in its present form must have passed through various stages
that are now difficult to reconstruct. It may help to establish a few basic
facts from the manuscripts themselves. (I have reserved a more complete
description of the manuscripts for the appendix below.) The text survives
in two copies: Melk, Stiftsbibliothek, Hs. 688, copied in 1451 probably at
Melk, and Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm. 2797, copied in
1463 at the Cistercian abbey of Aldersbach, about two hundred kilome-
ters from Melk in Lower Austria. Comparison shows that the Melk copy
appears closer to the original. The Munich copy also contains a titulus
that is absent from Melk: “Sequitur quedam terribilis historia congesta
tempore Concilii Constantiensis de Antichristo et quodam dyabolo in-
carnato vel humanato nomine Beelzebub” (Here follows a certain fright-
ening story, assembled at the time of the Council of Constance, about
Antichrist and a certain devil incarnated or made human, by the name of
Beelzebub). In the absence of other evidence, this titulus provides a pre-
cious clue as to how one fifteenth-century reader perceived the work and
helps us locate the work’s genre.
It is a story, then, but to grasp its movement from speech to writing
we might better think of it as a relation passed from one person to the next
and then written down. These layers are clearly evident in the text itself.
The core narrative is the story of Francis and Johannes, as reported by
Francis speaking to the bishop of Mallorca, Lluís de Prades, some years
later, a conversation that in turn is reported by the anonymous narrator.
We thus have a story reported inside a conversation that is described by a
third-person narrator. The narrator begins with a reverent, almost hagio-
graphical account of the hermit Francis, who at first appears to be the
focal point of the story. The critical moment for the construction of the
story is the assertion that Francis “speaks only rarely but truly” (quod rar-
ius sed veridice verba profert), a statement that vouches for the veracity of
the interview between Francis and the bishop and of Francis’s own account
of his encounter with Johannes. In this way, the narrator has hit upon one
of the tropes of the ghost story: the narrator’s insistence upon the reli-
ability of the source, or what a recent introduction to the genre called “the
pretence of believing.”18 We encounter the formula in childhood: “The
 448 / Daniel Hobbins

story I’m going to tell you now is true . . . ” The narrator’s insistence upon
Francis’s basic honesty portends the strange tale to come.
It is simplest to imagine the narrator who is speaking in the opening
lines and the author as one and the same, though these might have been
two different individuals. The author-narrator seems to have known
Francis very well. He reports Francis’s assertion, presumably firsthand,
that he suffers very little for his abstinence. Perhaps he met him near
Lucca, but it seems more likely that the two met in Rome when Francis
had conversations with the bishop, certainly sometime in the 1420s,
which the author-narrator reproduces. The text says that the bishop
asked Francis “often” ( pluries) if he and his fellow hermits believed that
Antichrist was already born. So these conversations presumably took
place over an extended period of weeks, months, maybe even years. In
any case, it was the bishop who provoked the central narrative from
Francis by describing his own earlier conversation with the Dominican
preacher Vincent Ferrer, and thus it was probably the bishop who
served as the critical channel through which the author-narrator heard
the story. Perhaps the author-narrator was present during these conver-
sations and so heard the story from Francis himself. Perhaps he even
asked Francis to repeat it until he could reconstruct (or even “record”?)
the conversation between Francis and Johannes. Or, possibly, the author-
narrator heard the story from the bishop. However it happened, it seems
clear that at some point, someone took a preexisting oral version of this
story and committed it to writing.

“Facticity”

In the written version as we have it, the author-narrator seems eager to

press the facts of the case. Indeed, the story’s salient feature is what we
might call its “facticity.” He takes care to invest his story with facts and to
situate it in real time and space, to create a factual framework for the telling
of an ominous and incredible story. In other words, the author is at pains
to situate us not in the realm of the timeless imaginary, but rather in the
present (Francis is still alive), in northern Italy, on a mountain just outside
Lucca soon after the Council of Constance. Other facts—surely known to
the protagonists but only implicit in the retelling—are as follows.
 Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 449

First, the existence of various groups of hermits in Tuscany from

the eleventh century is a well-known historical fact, including one clus-
ter in the Garfagnana region on the river Serchio north of Lucca (see
map 17.1).19 Of course, hermitages by their nature are difficult to locate
on a map. Our text puts the hermits on “Petraplana,” a peak that Dante
mentions in Inferno 32 for its great size.20 It appears to be the modern
Pania della Croce, the tallest peak in the Apuan Alps, and just a few miles
from Lucca (as stated correctly in the text).21 Our text might have been
referring to any one of a number of hermitages in this general area.
Second, we can identify two of the individuals in the story, though
unfortunately not Francis and Johannes. The story places their conversa-
tion in the past during the Council of Constance. At one point Jo-
hannes says that he might be chosen pope at Constance. Since Martin
V was chosen pope in November 1417, I suppose that this conversation
between Francis and Johannes — if it really took place — must have oc-
curred sometime before November 1417, probably sometime in 1416 or
early 1417. In the text, the bishop of Mallorca interviews Francis in
Rome sometime after the Council of Constance and refers to the famous
Dominican preacher Vincent Ferrer as “Master Vincent.” The bishop is
designated with the letter L in both manuscripts, and indeed the bishop
of Mallorca at this period was Lluís de Prades, the scion of a powerful
Catalan noble family and camerarius, or chamberlain, to the Avignonese
Pope Benedict XIII (Pedro de Luna), whom he served until 1417.22
Third, the bishop states that he had heard Vincent preaching in
Aragon, where we know he was preaching from late September 1414 to
June 1415.23 We saw that, according to the bishop, Vincent claimed that
when he was preaching in Lombardy a man clothed in a white hermit’s
habit came to him, claiming to be from the mountains around Lucca; and
this hermit insisted that Antichrist had been born. In a letter that Vincent
wrote on July 27, 1412, to Benedict XIII, Vincent tells this exact story, but
he adds several details. He says that when he was preaching in Lombardy
nine years earlier (so 1403), a messenger from the Tuscan hermits had
told him that Antichrist had been born. And this messenger, says Vincent,
told him this so that he could announce it to the world, that the faithful
might prepare for this great contest ahead. In the letter, Vincent says that
if this is true, then Antichrist is now nine years old.24
Map 17.1. Hermitages of medieval Tuscany
 Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 451

Fourth, we know that Lluís de Prades had close contacts with Vin-
cent Ferrer, probably in part because both men supported Pedro de Luna.
Vincent’s support for Benedict XIII is well known (he was the pope’s con-
fessor), but the bishop was also one of the pope’s most faithful followers
(holding the office of chamberlain in the pope’s household). The bishop
also promoted the preaching campaign of Vincent in Mallorca in 1413,
and now we see from our text that the bishop heard him preach in Ara-
gon as well the following year.25 What is more, we also know that the
bishop actively supported hermits in his own diocese.26 Thus, his support
for Vincent Ferrer and his friendship with the devout hermit Francis
seem to fit our limited understanding of his personality.
Fifth, our text says that the bishop and Francis had conversations in
Rome. We know that Lluís de Prades died in Rome in 1429, and there-
fore these conversations might actually have taken place.27 Here then we
have five pieces of evidence to show that where it can be confirmed, our
text conforms to what we know about Lluís de Prades, Vincent Ferrer,
and the Tuscan hermits.
It is possible that the story was never oral at all, and that the author,
whoever it was, used the names of Vincent Ferrer and the bishop of
Mallorca and the hermitage of Petraplana as the factual framework to
add plausibility to a completely fictitious account. While this possibility
cannot be ruled out, it seems unlikely given the inconclusive outcome of
the story. Any reader of the text would have known that Johannes made
empty threats about becoming the pope, and such knowledge must have
diminished the story’s terror. Beyond its endorsement of ascetic spiritu-
ality, the story offers no moral and teaches no lesson. The author him-
self does not know what to make of it. In other words, if the story is
pure invention, why is its lesson so ambiguous?

Context

The facts that we have now established allow us to situate the story
chronologically and geographically. Since Lluís de Prades died in 1429
at Rome, his conversation with Francis must have occurred sometime
between the end of the council in 1418 and 1429. In our story, Francis
 452 / Daniel Hobbins

refers back to the council in such a way as to suggest that the event is
now at least some years in the past. For that reason, I would put their
conversation sometime around 1425, though a date of a few years earlier
or later is entirely possible. The text does seem to refer to the bishop as
though he is still alive. If so, then the actual composition must have
taken place sometime before his death in 1429.
Geographically the story unfolds in a Mediterranean landscape:
we hear of Lucca, Rome, Aragon, Lombardy, and Mallorca. Its central
theme — the appearance of Antichrist — was perennial in medieval cul-
ture, but in this particular form it belongs especially to the northern
Italian landscape of the second and third decades of the fifteenth cen-
tury, a time and place of heightened apocalyptic sensibility, the feverish
and panicked search for Antichrist, and the expectation of the end of
the world.28 The reference to Vincent Ferrer in the story is a deeper
clue than it first appears, for we might even imagine this story as his
stepchild. The preaching campaigns of Vincent seem to have stirred
troubled spirits everywhere, souls already in despair over the lingering
schism. Roberto Rusconi divided Vincent’s preaching career into two
great periods — the first from 1399 to 1409, the second from 1409 to
1419—over the course of which Vincent came to hold a more apocalyp-
tic vision of the end of the world.29 The first, always carried on in contact
with the papal court at Avignon, took him into Provence, then Savoy,
back down to northern Italy, and into Lombardy (perhaps in the shadow
of Petraplana), and possibly also to Rome by way of Padua and Bologna
in 1408 before his return westward.30 Some of this activity involved
preaching against heretics, and the trip to Italy may have been a diplo-
matic effort to resolve the Schism.31 But his preaching in this early pe-
riod, says Rusconi, was measured: Antichrist is present here and now, but
in the sinner. This was a call to moral reform, and any eschatological mes-
sage remained muted.32 The second decade of his preaching saw a grow-
ing preoccupation with Antichrist, verging on obsession, with sermons
performed so as to terrify his listeners into repentance. In the letter to
Benedict XIII from 1412, mentioned above, he warned that “the time of
Antichrist and the end of the world shall come quickly, very quickly, and
exceedingly soon” (tempus Antichristi, et finis mundi erunt cito, et bene
cito, ac valde breviter). He recounts the legend of Saint Dominic, wherein
 Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 453

the Virgin Mary prevailed upon Christ to withhold punishment for a

time so that the two preaching orders might attempt conversion.33
The next generation of Italian preachers inherited Vincent’s apoca-
lyptic zeal. The energy seems to have pulsated outward from the duchy
of Milan. Apparently the healing of the schism did nothing to quench
enthusiasm for preaching on Antichrist. In 1418 Bernardino of Siena
preached in Milan on the Apocalypse. In October, as the newly elected
Martin V was passing through the city, Manfredi da Vercelli led a band
of one thousand Dominican tertiaries ( half of them men, half women),
proclaiming that Antichrist had already been born and that the world
would end in five years. One contemporary compared him to Vincent
Ferrer; clearly, memories of his earlier campaign endured. By March of
1419 he had shown up in Bologna, followed by hundreds of penitents
dressed in the habit of Dominican tertiaries. He must represent for us
an entire generation of Italian preachers, many of whom are now just
names in chronicles.34
This is the world that gave birth to the Historia. It takes an exercise
of imagination to understand just how deeply belief in Antichrist had
penetrated this culture, above all in northern Italy. We might say that this
place at this period was an incubator for every kind of apocalyptic mis-
chief and that, with all of the talk about the arrival of Antichrist, charac-
ters like Johannes were bound to turn up now and then.35
Clearly, then, the text is a product of Italy. And yet it seems to have
been written outside of Lucca and possibly in Rome. The first line of the
text holds a small but important clue: “Est in montibus Tuscie miliaribus
quasi quinque ab urbe lucana. . . .” The author here is projecting a certain
distance from the place of action. To say “in the mountains of Tuscany”
is to imply that one is remote from Tuscany. The narrator might have
been somewhere else in Italy or perhaps outside Italy. Our two manu-
scripts come from Bavaria and Lower Austria. How then might a text
about a story that takes place in Lucca cross the Alps? We are in the
realm of conjecture, but one possibility is that the story was brought to
the Council of Basel, where books and texts were brought and copied,
and where the religious orders from the Empire were heavily represented
and spent a great deal of time copying books.36 What is indisputable is
that the story traveled far from the place of its origin.
 454 / Daniel Hobbins

Decoding the Text

So far I have described a text that came into being out of a world of rumor
and storytelling, situated in a landscape where preachers worked their fol-
lowers into a fever pitch over the coming of Antichrist and the end of the
world. But I have said little so far about the story at the heart of this text.
What can we say, then, about its meaning and historical value? Can we do
more than dismiss it as a frightening but idle tale of Antichrist?
As I read it, the story draws its forward energy from the tension be-
tween certainty and uncertainty, between belief and doubt. It is a striking
feature of this text that nothing is ever known for certain. Take, for in-
stance, the conversation between Francis and the bishop. Asked if the
hermits believe that the Son of Perdition has already been born, Francis
stresses that “he knows nothing for certain, nor does he believe that any of
the hermits have any certain knowledge on the matter.” And yet, he adds,
the hermits all believe unanimously that Antichrist has arrived. We might
imagine the rest of the story as an attempt to resolve this basic tension.
The encounter between Francis and Johannes must bear the weight
of our interpretation. The basic components of the character of Johannes
accord with highly traditional themes. For example, his ambiguous iden-
tity as both harbinger of Antichrist (if not Antichrist himself ) and future
pope reflects a view of history that became almost mainstream in the four-
teenth century, the figure of the papal Antichrist.37 Likewise, in his preoc-
cupation with clerical vice he seems to embody some of the central anxi-
eties of the late medieval Church. Perhaps every reformer incorporated
this theme into his preaching or writing, even defenders of the establish-
ment such as Jean Gerson. It infuses some of the most popular texts of
this period, such as the De ruina ecclesiae of Nicholas de Clamanges. Of
course, this anxiety had much to do with the Schism. According to a com-
mon interpretation of 2 Thessalonians, the Schism heralded Antichrist.38
Authorities such as Pierre d’Ailly treated it as the central eschatological
fact of modern times.39 Visionaries saw it looming in their prophecies,
which prelates heeded, despite the warnings of theologians such as Henry
of Langenstein, d’Ailly, and Gerson.40 Although Johannes never explicitly
mentions the Schism, he is in one sense its product, arising out of the
landscape as a prophet of doom and despair. Was there ever a better time
 Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 455

to do so? After the flight of Pope John XXIII from Constance in March
1415, the institutional Church teetered on the brink of collapse. Before
long it was generally known that a new pope would be elected, and in
fact Johannes implies knowledge of this fact when he says that he might
be elected pope at Constance. We see here the institutional crisis, the
vacancy in the highest office of the Church, as well as the sense of a
Church deeply in need of reform (the other part of his message), pro-
ducing anxiety at some distance from the centers of ecclesiastical power.41
But Johannes is interesting not so much for his rather conventional
criticisms of the Church, but more for his colorful behavior and outra-
geous claims. Throughout the encounter he seems to be collapsing in his
own voice two related but distinct and even contradictory messages, both
of them highly topical and contemporary. This is what makes the story
confusing in some ways, the fact that he communicates not one clear and
consistent message, but two: (1) that by virtue of his miracles, through his
concourse with demons (or demon-possession), and revealed through his
prophecies, he is, if not Antichrist himself, at least a tool of Antichrist;
and (2) the more conventional message, that the contemporary Church is
corrupt and the life of rigorous abstinence, embodied in Francis, is the
path to salvation. It is as if this character, Johannes, having listened to too
many sermons on the last times, has absorbed not merely the persona of
Antichrist as we find him in contemporary texts and images, but also the
contemporary critique of the Church hierarchy found in those same ser-
mons, and has then proceeded to voice in one character both the role
of Antichrist and the message of corruption in the Church.42 His per-
formance gives this text a certain honesty, in that Johannes seems — as
an actor playing the role of Antichrist—genuinely confused about what
Antichrist’s message should be.
On a more literal level, Johannes also seems confused about his own
identity. Francis is confused about Johannes as well, and uncertain how
to react: laugh at him, stand in awe of him, refute him, or run away from
him, each of which he does at points throughout the story. Twice he im-
plores him to reveal himself. After all, who is he? We never learn. Upon
his arrival he is clothed as a disciple of Christ. He insists repeatedly on
his own sinlessness, in a parody of Christ, and he praises Francis for his
austerity. But he also invokes demons and under intense pressure to
 456 / Daniel Hobbins

reveal himself claims to be Beelzebub. Is he a heretic? A demon? Or only

demon-possessed? In this respect, Johannes only seems to be reflecting an
uncertainty within the tradition of works on Antichrist, though by this
period most authorities had come to accept that Antichrist was a human
with demonic attributes.43 At the story’s end, the narrator leaves open
the possibility that Johannes is Antichrist, even though Johannes never
mentions that word, while the scribe who provided the titulus in the
Munich manuscript distinguishes Johannes as “a certain devil incarnate
or made human named Beelzebub.” We might think of Johannes as a
mirror, reflecting all of the ambiguities and contradictions of the West-
ern tradition on Antichrist.
If Johannes is the outsider who threatens disruption to the Church
and points to impending cataclysm, appearing out of the blue and staying
just long enough to disquiet the hermits and cast a shadow over the fu-
ture, we might think of Francis as the moral center around which Jo-
hannes revolves. The narrator begins with a description of Francis’s as-
ceticism, which establishes him as a model of true holiness, as opposed to
the counterfeit holiness of Johannes. In the central narrative he appears
as a spiritual protagonist who resists corruption and flattery. The text
thus depends on Francis for its resolution; the final words, spoken in the
first person, appear to be spoken by Francis. But as with Johannes, there
is no clear template for his behavior. He does not behave quite like a
saint. Sometimes Francis believes Johannes, sometimes he doubts him,
sometimes he is amazed and transported by his eloquence, sometimes he
contradicts him. But he never turns him away or distances himself. He
even seems to befriend him, taking walks with him (despite his heresies
and refusal to confess), preparing his meals, and seeing him off at the
story’s conclusion. Francis commands our respect, but one can imagine
readers wishing for a more resolute rebuttal, for clearer lines, perhaps a
more satisfying resolution at the end, when Johannes is allowed to walk
off into the sunrise. In short, Francis forges his own path through this
encounter, appearing as a real person and no cardboard saint.
Both characters meet in a world out of joint: the see of Peter vacant,
Church leaders declining into vice, rumors of the last times everywhere.
What better opportunity for Antichrist to make his appearance? In fact,
despite their formal opposition, Francis and Johannes share a set of as-
 Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 457

sumptions and values about the proper governing of the Church and
even about the coming of Antichrist. Johannes feeds off the energy of a
Church in crisis, while Francis and his fellow hermits live in a state of
anxious expectation. The coming of Antichrist is a frequent topic of their
conversation. All of this helps to explain why Francis seems predisposed
to wonder at Johannes, to credit his miracles, and to be transformed into
“another dimension” (aliud seculum) at one point. Johannes, who knows
of Francis by reputation before meeting him, also knows how to “attack”
this community, even as he acknowledges the virtue of the ascetic life
against the messenger of Antichrist. In short, both Johannes and Francis
are outsiders to the world of ecclesiastical power politics, and they share
a common outlook. This might help to explain why the text as we have it
seems to disrupt traditional forms and to upset our expectations.

Conclusion

One distinguishing feature of John Van Engen’s scholarship is a sensi-

tivity to genre as a type of historical evidence. Genre offers a way of com-
prehending both the circumstances of composition and the potential
audience of a work. It is a powerful organizing feature of medieval litera-
ture, irresistible for most authors. But authors were still free to choose,
to reject, to select, to adapt, even to work out their own literary strategy.
In the present case, it is as though the author found himself with a story
that needed telling, as a sign of the times and another cloud on the hori-
zon, but for which no familiar genre existed. So he worked out one for
himself, a “rumor of Antichrist” tale that served as a convenient vehicle
for a “true relation” of a mysterious and frightening encounter on a
Tuscan mountainside during the Council of Constance.44 It would seem
that he imagined the text as an alarm to his contemporaries, perhaps to
confirm their anxieties.
Over time, the frenzy over Antichrist cooled somewhat. The evidence
of the manuscripts suggests that the next generation of readers valued the
text in a different way. The copyist of the Munich manuscript actually la-
bels the text “Historia terribilis.” An Antichrist tale was becoming litera-
ture. The compiler of the Melk manuscript similarly imagined his volume
as a collection of interesting and sometimes fabulous narratives, including
 458 / Daniel Hobbins

visions, fables, and a legendary account of the rediscovery of the Moralia,

as well as our text. The work was executed in a careful book hand and
illustrated with decorated initials. Its margins remain empty. This was
a volume intended for reflection, edification, and enjoyment more than
study or devotion. Certainly the story of Johannes had little immediate
relevance anymore. Fear over Antichrist never disappeared from medi-
eval culture, but, by the time of this tale’s copying in 1452, the obses-
sion over Antichrist in Italy that had motivated the central story of our
text must have seemed distant to the monks of Melk Abbey. The compiler
of the manuscript included the text with other stories, not with other
works about Antichrist.45 The monks might have taken comfort from the
fact that Johannes could not have been Antichrist, and the Church had
survived a period of great tribulation and emerged stronger from the re-
forms of Basel. In short, the monks seem to have valued the text more as
an interesting and frightening tale than as a harbinger of doom.
How many more anomalies might there be in the vast manuscript
collections of European libraries? Our current mapping of late medieval
literature describes the broad contours of the landscape, but it is far from
complete. There are still plenty of caves left to explore. We may not find
Antichrist hiding inside any of them, but the search will be rewarding.

Description of Manuscripts

The work in question survives in two copies: Melk, Stiftsbibliothek,

Hs. 688, ff. 257r– 260v; and Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm.
2797, ff. 151r–154r. Both copies can be dated precisely: the Melk manu-
script was copied in 1451, the Munich manuscript in 1463. The material
evidence in the manuscripts has significant bearing on the interpretation
of the text.

Melk, Stiftsbibliothek, Hs. 688

We lack a modern description of Melk 688, which I examined in Novem-

ber 2011.46 The manuscript once formed a single codex with Melk 687;
the two were described as one volume in a catalogue of the Melk collec-
tion produced in 1483, under the shelf mark F 162.47 Both parts of F 162
were copied on paper. The two manuscripts were apparently still bound
 Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 459

together in the nineteenth century, when they were separated and bound
individually. The modern division of F 162 into two manuscripts reflects
an original material division in that codex: the paper is nearly but not ex-
actly the same size in each manuscript. (Hs. 687 measures 22.1 x 14.7 cm,
with a writing block of 15.4 x 9.7 cm; Hs. 688 measures 22.1 x 14.4 cm,
with a writing block of 15.8 x 9.7 cm.) Both were copied in or around
1451 in a clear Gothic textura, but a different scribe copied each part of
the codex. Large and beautifully decorated initials grace the openings of
the four books of the major work in Hs. 688, the Liber quadripertitus Cir-
illi. All of the evidence—the similar size of the paper and writing block
and the similar handwriting— suggests that the two parts of the original
codex belonged to the same copying project.
The contents of the two manuscripts are as follows (my numbering
of items considers the two as one codex):

687
1) ff. 1r–153r, [ Johannes of Marienwerder], Septililium

688
[f. 1r, modern list of contents]
2) ff. 2r– 99r, Liber quadripertitus Cirilli, copied 1451
3) ff. 99v–101r, Abbreviacio ricmica cuiusdam longi sermonis sancti Bern-
hardi Abbatis ad monachos, de strenuitate eorum ad divinum officium.
Incipit: Dum in nocte video in choro conventum . . . Explicit: . . .
Et partem cum ceteris meruit habere. Amen.
4) ff. 101r–105r, Latin verse abbreviation of Innocent III, De miseria
hominis. Incipit: Dic michi quanta putas sit gloria . . . Explicit: . . .
Vir neque femina nec sua semina morte perissent.
5) ff. 105r–108v, “Est in montibus Tuscie . . . ”
6) ff. 108v–109v, De perditione et inventione librorum moralium beatis-
simi Gregorii pape Rome. An excerpt from Vincent of Beauvais, Specu-
lum historiale, bk. 22 c. 26. The same excerpt is found in other manu-
scripts. See, for example, Rodney M. Thomson, Catalogue of the
Manuscripts of Lincoln Cathedral Chapter Library (Cambridge: D. S.
Brewer, 1989), 25.
7) f. 109v, six-line poem. Incipit: Omnibus esto pius secreta pandere
noli . . . Explicit: . . . Non satis est tutum mellitis credere verbis.
 460 / Daniel Hobbins

The contents of F 162 (that is, Hss. 687– 88 considered as a single

unit) offer hints as to how our text (Hs. 688, ff. 105r–108v) might have
been read. The Septililium of Johannes Marienwerder is an account of the
workings of the Lord through the Prussian recluse Dorothea of Montau
(1347–1394), so called because, its author claimed, that word typifies her
seven graces. Johannes wrote the work as a complement to two vitae that
he had already composed for her canonization campaign. As a kind of
meditation on Dorothea’s visions and revelations, the Septililium surely
made for entertaining reading. But for any monk, the text also must have
raised questions about the source and soundness of Dorothea’s revelations.
Through a striking coincidence, we know of one monk at Melk
Abbey who was anxious or perhaps hopeful about these revelations, almost
certainly as a result of reading this very copy of the Septililium. In 1459,
Johannes Schlitpacher, the prior at Melk Abbey, wrote a letter to Vincent,
the aged former prior of the nearby charterhouse at Aggsbach.48 Johannes
had read the Septililium and had three questions for Vincent: (1) Has
Dorothea been canonized? (2) How many books of hers do we have? And
(3) what does Vincent think about her life and deeds, especially as found in
the Septililium? We need not pause to consider Vincent’s favorable reply
(her humility and indeed her anonymity weigh heavily in her favor). The
point for us here is that contemporary readers of this manuscript found in
the Septililium an interesting and entertaining account of the revelations
of a devout but unknown woman, whose holiness was open to question.49
The Septililium survives in only a few copies. Besides our copy from Melk,
a manuscript in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek at Vienna was ap-
parently the copy read by Vincent of Aggsbach.50
The next work, the Liber quadripertitus Cirilli, was a popular collec-
tion of fables (many of them beast fables) wrongly attributed to Cyril of
Alexandria (d. 444) but in fact written in the first half of the fourteenth
century by the Italian Dominican Bonjohannes de Messana, who appar-
ently composed the work for his nephew.51 Though almost entirely neg-
lected today, the work survives in some 150 manuscripts, with transla-
tions into German, Dutch, and Czech.
The Septililium and the Liber formed the core of the original codex,
and the quiring suggests that the five short works following the Liber
quadripertitus Cirilli served only to fill out the final quire. Following the
 Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 461

modern paper insertion on f. 1, Hs. 688 contains nine sexternions or

twelve-folio quires. The Liber quadripertitus Cirilli concludes on the sec-
ond folio recto of the last quire. At the close of the work, the scribe pro-
vided the year in a colophon, “Scriptus anno 1451o” (f. 99r), perhaps to
indicate the close of the volume. But he still had more than ten blank
folios at his disposal, which he then filled with a series of short works:
two verse abbreviations, one of a sermon of Saint Bernard on the divine
office, the other of Pope Innocent III’s De miseria hominis; our text, un-
titled; an account of the loss and miraculous discovery of Gregory’s
Moralia; and six lines of verse advising discretion with one’s friends.
In sum, the compiler(s) of F 162 seem(s) to have imagined it as a col-
lection of interesting or unusual narratives, a volume of monastic enter-
tainment. The volume’s appearance — the decorated initials and careful
book hand—is another clue. No reader wrote notes in the margins. This
was a volume intended for pleasure reading, reflection, edification, and
enjoyment rather than study or devotion.
The volumes shelved next to F 162 provide additional evidence for
how the volume might have been read. F 161 is very similar; it included
the “revelations” of Catherine of Siena (presumably her Dialogue) along
with Pseudo-Methodius, De principio et fine seculorum, which treats the
rise of Antichrist and his defeat, and the end of the world to follow. F 163
was a more varied collection: a life of John Climacus, works of Nicholas
of Cusa, works on mystical theology, Gerson’s tract on Joan of Arc, and
other spiritual works. The location of these volumes at Melk does seem to
reflect a certain way of ordering knowledge. Thus, our text belonged to a
corner of the library that one might have visited for alternatives to aca-
demic theology, for works by or about saints who pushed the boundaries
of orthodoxy, for information about Antichrist, and for good stories.

Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm. 2797

The Munich copy of our text is the less important of the two witnesses,
though the volume as a whole would be worth more study than I can give
it here.52 Clm. 2797 is an octavo paper manuscript, at least part of which
was copied in 1463, including our text.53 At some point it entered the Cis-
tercian abbey of Aldersbach, about two hundred kilometers from Melk
in Lower Bavaria. The scribe Caspar Strengberger copied the section of
 462 / Daniel Hobbins

the manuscript that includes our text (ff. 151r–154r).54 The manuscript
includes a miscellaneous assortment of devotional and spiritual texts:
works attributed to Augustine, Anselm, Benedict, Bernard, and others;
an ars moriendi attributed to Gerson, dated 1463 ( but probably the work
of Nikolaus von Dinkelsbühl);55 an excerpt from the Speculum Ecclesiae
of Honorius Augustodunensis, immediately preceding our text; and a
work De officio missae, immediately following our text.
The critical edition in the appendix shows that this copy of our text
is insignificant as an independent textual witness, with one important ex-
ception. In this manuscript, our text is described in a titulus in the follow-
ing terms: “Sequitur quedam terribilis historia congesta tempore Concilii
Constantiensis de Antichristo et quodam dyabolo incarnato vel humanato
nomine Beelzebub.” In the absence of other evidence, this titulus provides
a precious clue as to how one fifteenth-century reader perceived the work,
as a “frightening story.” The reference to the Council of Constance is criti-
cal, because it places the story’s composition some forty years in the past.
Antichrist may have walked abroad, but if he did so, the world did not
end. Perhaps this basic contradiction might explain why the work had
such a limited circulation.

Notes

My thanks for their advice and suggestions to David C. Mengel, Lisa Wolver-
ton, Christine Glassner, Fiona Somerset, Halle McGuire, Bruce Woll, James
Bartholomew, Laura Ackerman Smoller, and two anonymous readers.

1. John Van Engen, “Multiple Options: The World of the Fifteenth-

Century Church,” Church History 77 (2008): 257– 84, quotations at 261 and 278.
2. For recent challenges, see the references in Van Engen, “Multiple Op-
tions,” 257n2.
3. See, in general, Richard K. Emmerson, Antichrist in the Middle Ages: A
Study of Medieval Apocalypticism, Art, and Literature (Seattle: University of Wash-
ington Press, 1981). On Apocalypses, see Nigel J. Morgan, Illuminating the End
of Time: The Getty Apocalypse Manuscript ( Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum,
2012), 9–13. On prophecies, see Robert E. Lerner, The Powers of Prophecy: The
Cedar of Lebanon Vision from the Mongol Onslaught to the Dawn of the Enlighten-
ment ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
 Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 463

4. On the exempla, see Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages:

The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998), 60, 124, 129.
5. See E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), 5– 7; and Peter Marshall, “Transformations
of the Ghost Story in Post-Reformation England,” in The Ghost Story from the
Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, ed. Helen Conrad O’Briain and Julie Anne
Stevens ( Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010), 17.
6. Cf. Andrew Joynes, ed., Medieval Ghost Stories: An Anthology of Miracles,
Marvels, and Prodigies ( Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2001).
7. Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert, eds., The Oxford Book of English Ghost
Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), xvi. A final criterion applies
narrowly to the regional nature of their book: “a definable Englishness about
the story.” See also R. A. Gilbert, “Ghost Stories,” in The Handbook to Gothic Lit-
erature, ed. Marie Mulvey-Roberts ( New York: NYU Press, 1998), 68– 69.
8. Marshall, “Transformations,” 19, remarks that “the great majority of
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ghost stories purported to be accounts of
real incidents.” Sometimes the authenticity is vouched for even in the title of a
work, as in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Authentic Narrative of the Ghost of a
Hand,” chapter 12 of his House by the Churchyard.
9. Again, consider the opening paragraph of Le Fanu’s “Authentic Narra-
tive,” which carries the trope of “authenticity” further while acknowledging
bafflement: “I’m sure she believed every word she related, for old Sally was vera-
cious. But all this was worth just so much as such talk commonly is. . . . Still it
was not quite for nothing that the house was held to be haunted. Under all this
smoke there smouldered just a little spark of truth — an authenticated mystery,
for the solution of which some of my readers may possibly suggest a theory,
though I confess I can’t.”
10. Marshall, “Transformations,” 19.
11. Schmitt, Ghosts, 8.
12. See note 6 above.
13. Matthew 10:16.
14. Lluís de Prades, bishop of Mallorca, translated from Tortosa on June
20, 1407. He later served as chamberlain for Benedict XIII in exile until 1417.
He died in Rome in 1429. Antonio Ubieto Arteta, Listas episcopales medievales
( Zaragoza: Anubar Ediciones, 1989), 226.
15. Clearly a reference to Vincent Ferrer, who conducted a preaching
campaign in Aragon from late September 1414 to June 1415.
16. Cf. Luke 10:4, where Christ sends forth the disciples: “Carry neither
purse, nor satchel, nor shoes.”
17. 1 John 1:8.
 464 / Daniel Hobbins

18. Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert, The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Sto-
ries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), xi. Cf. on Peter the Venerable’s
belief that his stories about the supernatural were true, Schmitt, Ghosts, 77.
19. Frances Andrews, The Other Friars: Carmelite, Augustinian, Sack and
Pied Friars in the Middle Ages ( Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), 72. The map is
from Benigno van Luijk, Gli eremiti neri nel dugento con particolare riguardo al ter-
ritorio pisano e toscano: Origine, sviluppo ed unione ( Pisa: Il Telegrafo, 1968), 48.
Kaspar Elm also worked on this problem. See his “Italienische Eremitengemein-
schaften des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts: Studien zur Vorgeschichte des Augustiner-
Eremitenordens,” in L’eremitismo in Occidente nei secoli XI e XII (Atti della seconda
Settimana internazionale di studio Mendola, 30 agosto– 6 settembre 1962) (Milan: Vita
e pensiero, 1965), 491– 559.
20. Inferno 32.28– 30: “che se Tambernicchi | vi fosse sù caduto, o Pietra-
pana, | non avria pur da l’orlo fatto cricchi.” Robert Pinsky translates: “Had
Mount Tambernic fallen to strike that ice, | Or Pietrapana, it would not even
then | Creak, even at its edge.” Robert Pinsky, trans., The Inferno of Dante: A New
Verse Translation ( New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 340 – 41.
21. Paget Toynbee, A Dictionary of Proper Names and Notable Matters in the
Works of Dante (Oxford: Clarendon, 1908), 431. See also Douglas W. Freshfield,
“The Alpine Notes of Leonardo da Vinci,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical
Society n.s. 6 (1884): 339; and Boccaccio’s Expositions on Dante’s Comedy, trans.
Michael Papio ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 708n27.
22. Arteta, Listas, 226: installed as bishop of Mallorca June 20, 1407, trans-
lated from Tortosa; dies in Rome in 1429. For a brief overview, see also Antoni
Pladevall, “Prades I d’Arenós, Lluís de,” Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana ( Barcelona:
Enciclopèdia Catalana, 1978), 12:23. On the office held by Lluís de Prades,
see Daniel Williman, “Letters of Etienne Cambarou, Camerarius Apostoli-
cus (1347–1361),” Archivum Historicum Pontificiae 15 (1977): 195– 96.
23. H. Fages, Histoire de Saint Vincent Ferrier ( Louvain: A. Uystpruyst,
1901), 2.64.
24. H. Fages, Notes et documents de l’histoire de Saint Vincent Ferrier
( Louvain: A. Uystpruyst, 1905), 222, quoting from the Epistola Fratris Vincentii
de tempore Antichristi et fine mundi: “Quarto, eadem conclusio ostenditur per
aliam revelationem mihi relatam per quemdam virum devotum (ut mihi videtur)
et sanctum. Nam cum ego predicarem in partibus Lombardie prima vice (modo
jam sunt novem anni completi), venit ad me de Tuscia ille vir, missus (ut dicebat)
a quibusdam sanctissimis eremitis in partibus Tuscie, in maxima vite austeritate
per magna tempora degentibus, annuncians quod eisdem viris expresse revela-
tiones divinitus facte fuerant, quod Antichristus jam erat natus, et quod istud de-
bebat mundo denunciari, ut fideles ad tam terribile prelium se pararent, et quod
propterea dicti sancti Eremite ipsum ad me mittebant, ut hoc mundo denuncia-
rem; sic ergo patet ex hujusmodi revelationibus, si vere sunt, quod jam Antichris-
 Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 465

tus est natus, et habet completos novem annos sue maledicte etatis, et per conse-
quens predicta conclusio vera.” This letter of Vincent was fairly well known: see
Thomas Kaeppeli, Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum Medii Aevi ( Rome: Istituto
Storico Domenicano, 1970 – 93), 4:463– 46, which lists sixteen copies, including
one ( Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm. 903) originating in Regensburg
in Bavaria. My thanks to Laura Ackerman Smoller for drawing my attention to
this list.
25. Juan Rosselló Lliteras, “San Vicente Ferrer: su misión en Mallorca
(1413–1414),” Bolletí de la Societat Arqueològica Luliana 43 (1987): 72– 73; A. San-
tamaria Arándee and M. Barceló Crespí, “Església I administració a Mallorca en
l’época del Cisma d’Occident,” in Jornades sobre el Cisma d’Occident a Catalunya,
les Illes i el País Valencià: Barcelona-Peníscola, 19– 21 d’abril de 1979: ponències i comu-
nicacions (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1986– 88), 1:265. For the text of
the open letter to the cities of Mallorca publicizing the upcoming preaching cam-
paign, see Andres Ferrer de Valdecebro, Historia de la vida maravillosa y admirable
del segundo Pablo, Apóstol de Valencia, San Vicente Ferrer ( Madrid, 1791), 261– 62.
On the relationship between Lluís de Prades and Vincent Ferrer, see also Pere
Xamena and Francesc Riera, Història de l’església a Mallorca ( Mallorca: Editorial
Moll, 1986), 70 – 74.
26. J. N. Hillgarth, “Some Notes on Lullian Hermits in Majorca Saec.
XIII – XVII,” Studia Monastica 6 (1964): 315, 318.
27. Arteta, Listas, 226.
28. For general bibliography on Antichrist in the medieval period, see Mi-
chael A. Ryan, “Antichrist in the Middle Ages: Plus ça change . . .” History Compass
7, no. 6 (2009): 1581– 92.
29. Roberto Rusconi, L’attesa della fine: Crisi della società, profezia ed apoc-
alisse in Italia al tempo del Grande Scisma d’Occidente (1378–1417) ( Rome: Istituto
Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1979), 220.
30. For a critical overview, see Matthieu-Maxime Gorce, Saint Vincent Fer-
rier (1350 –1419) ( Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1924), 72– 76 and the helpful map at the
end of the volume.
31. Rusconi, L’attesa della fine, 221.
32. Ibid., 221– 22.
33. Ibid., 225.
34. Ibid., 237– 42; Daniel Bornstein, The Bianchi of 1399: Popular Devotion
in Late Medieval Italy ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 39– 41.
35. Jean Gerson mentions a similar case around 1401 that served as a cau-
tionary tale. An educated man (litteratus) became convinced that he would be-
come pope, then Antichrist, then perhaps not Antichrist but at least the precur-
sor of Antichrist. He was so carried away by the idea that he wished to kill
himself to avoid bringing such great harm to Christian people. Finally, he came
to his senses and wrote about his experience to warn others. See Jean Gerson,
 466 / Daniel Hobbins

Oeuvres complètes, ed. P. Glorieux (Paris: Desclee, 1960 – 73), 3:38: “De alio simi-
liter litterato per relationem accepi primo persuasum esse sibi quod foret Papa,
deinde quod Antichristus, deinde quod si non Antichristus saltem praecursor An-
tichristi; novissime ut seipsum perimeret instigatus est vehementer, ne videretur
tantum affere nocumentum populo christiano. Tandem miserante Deo ad san-
iorem mentem conversus, ista de se scripsit ad eruditionem et cautelam aliorum.”
36. See, in general, on copying at the councils, Johannes Helmrath, “Kom-
munikation auf den spätmittelalterlichen Konzilien,” in Die Bedeutung der Kom-
munikation für Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, ed. Hans Pohl (Stuttgart: F. Steiner,
1989), 116 – 72. On the heavy representation of the religious orders, see Antony
Black, Council and Commune: The Conciliar Movement and the Fifteenth Century
Heritage ( London: Burns & Oates, 1979), 33 ff.
37. Bernard McGinn, “Angel Pope and Papal Antichrist,” Church History
47 (1978): 155– 73, here 161.
38. Laura Ackerman Smoller, History, Prophecy, and the Stars: The Christian As-
trology of Pierre d’Ailly, 1350–1420 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 4.
39. Ibid., 85–101.
40. Hélène Millet, “Ecoute et usage des prophéties par les prélats pendant
le Grand Schisme d’Occident,” Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome (Moyen-Age,
Temps modernes) 102 (1990): 425– 55, esp. 438; Hélène Millet, Le cardinal Martin
de Zalba (†1403) face aux prophéties du Grand Schisme d’Occident,” in Mélanges
de l’Ecole française de Rome (Moyen-Age, Temps modernes) 98 (1986): 265– 93; André
Vauchez, “Les Théologiens face aux prophéties à l’époque des papes d’Avignon
et du Grand Schisme,” Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome (Moyen-Age, Temps
modernes) 102 (1990): 577– 88.
41. For a recent treatment of the theme of the Great Schism in contemporary
literature, see Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great
Schism, 1378–1417 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006).
42. On illustrations of Antichrist’s life and deeds, see Emmerson, Antichrist,
124 – 45, 279n5; Richard K. Emmerson, The Apocalyptic Imagination in Medieval
Literature ( Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 206n19; and
Robert W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the Ger-
man Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 148– 89. For a facsimile of a
fifteenth-century block book life of Antichrist, see H. Theodor Musper, ed., Der
Antichrist und die Fünfzehn Zeichen, 2 vols. ( Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1970). Rele-
vant scenes for the character of Johannes in the Historia terribilis include f. 5r– v
(Antichrist performs marvels), f. 6r (the adherents of Antichrist are marked with
a sign, and Antichrist sends disciples to announce a new Messiah), and f. 13v (An-
tichrist parodies Pentecost with his followers and speaks in tongues).
43. Bernard McGinn, “Portraying Antichrist in the Middle Ages,” in The
Use and Abuse of Eschatology in the Middle Ages, ed. Werner Verbeke, Daniel Ver-
 Hearsay, Belief, and Doubt \ 467

helst, and Andries Welkenhuysen ( Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1988), 2;

Emmerson, Antichrist, 82, 127. Cf. Gerson, Oeuvres complètes, 7.2.814.
44. An interesting parallel to this text is found in an anecdote related by
Trithemius about one Ferrandus of Cordova, a twenty-year-old scholar who in
the year 1445 confounded all the doctors of Paris with his learning and pro-
found knowledge of many languages. Like Johannes, he was accused by some of
being Antichrist. See further Lynn Thorndike, University Records and Life in the
Middle Ages ( New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 341– 43, who translates the ac-
count found in Jean de Launoy, Regii Navarrae Gymnasii Parisiensis historia ( Paris,
1667), 1:157– 58.
45. For a complete description, see the appendix below.
46. My thanks to Dr. Christine Glassner for her help with this manuscript.
Dr. Glassner is publishing the modern catalogue of the Melk Stiftsbibliothek.
47. Mittelalterliche Bibliothekskataloge Österreichs, vol. 1, ed. Theodor Gottlieb,
Niederösterreich ( Vienna: A. Holzhausen, 1915; repr. Aalen: Scientia, 1974), 221.
48. Earlier letters between the two are discussed in Joachim Stieber, Pope
Eugenius IV, the Council of Basel, and the Secular and Ecclesiastical Authorities in the
Empire: The Conflict over Supreme Authority and Power in the Church (Leiden: Brill,
1978), 338– 40.
49. F. Hipler, “Septililium B. Dorotheae Montoviensis auctore Joanne
Marienwerder,” Analecta Bollandiana 2 (1883): 381– 82; compare the full letter in
Bernhard Pez, Thesaurus anecdotorum novissimus . . . , vol. 6 (Augsburg, 1729), 3:332.
The Septililium is edited in vols. 2– 4 (1883–1885) of the Analecta Bollandiana.
50. Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. 1265. Cf. Hipler, “Septililium,” 382.
51. For orientation, see Ulrike Bodemann, Die Cyrillusfabeln und ihre deutsche
Übersetzung durch Ulrich von Pottenstein: Untersuchungen und Editionsprobe (Munich:
Artemis, 1988), 1– 3. For a list of about 150 Latin manuscripts of the work, see
Kaeppeli, Scriptores, 1:251– 53, supplemented by Bodemann, Cyrillusfabeln, 50 – 53.
52. The summary description of the manuscript in the catalogue does not
list the complete contents: Catalogus codicum latinorum Bibliothecae Regiae Mona-
censis, t. 1 pars 2 ( Munich: Bibliotheca Regia, 1894), 39. I examined this manu-
script in 2007. The current description also relies on a digitized microfilm of
the manuscript.
53. This scribe also copied in 1463 a German translation of De heraldis of
Aeneas Silvius. See Wolfgang Stammler, Christine Stollinger-Loser, Karl Lan-
gosch, Kurt Ruh, and Burghart Wachinger, Die Deutsche Literatur des Mittelal-
ters: Verfasserlexikon ( Berlin: De Gruyter, 1977– 2008), 9:232.
54. He gives his name and the year, 1463, on f. 119v, and his name again
later on f. 155r.
55. See further Rainer Rudolf, Ars moriendi: Von der Kunst des heilsamen
Lebens und Sterbens (Cologne: Böhlau, 1957), 75– 78.
 468 / Daniel Hobbins

Appendix

A Medieval Antichrist Story

Edition

Sigla

M = Melk, Stiftsbibliothek, Hs. 688, ff. 105r–108v

N = Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm. 2797, ff. 151r–154r

Base Text

M, with variants from N in the apparatus.

In the following edition, I have modernized capitalization and punctu-

ation and silently expanded all abbreviations, but I have retained the or-
thography of the manuscript. I have also retained the underlining
found in the Melk manuscript. There, the underlining is in red.

Abbreviations in the Critical Apparatus

add. addidit
corr. correxit
del. delevit
inv. invertit
lin. linea(m)
marg. margine
om. omisit
scr. scripsit
sup. supra
vid. videtur

Est1 in montibus Tuscie, miliaribus quasi quinque ab urbe lucana, locus

heremiticus et silvestris Petraplana vocatus, in quo heremite quamplures
animi austeritate multa et hilari famulantur altissimo. Inter quos fulget
unus Franciscus nomine, vir utique famosus et gracilis, et secundum es-
 Appendix: A Medieval Antichrist Story \ 469

timationem communem singularior virtutibus multis coruscans, singu-

larissimus autem in abstinendo. Tanta inquam abstinencie severitate hic
pollet, ut vix sit fas credi nostris diebus. Nam quandoque sextam, quan-
doque septimam, et quandoque duodecimam diem attigit abstinendo,
nil commestibile, nil omnino potabile degustando. Sed quod laudabili
memoria dignum est, nulla anxietate, nulla penitus molestia asserit se ob
id deprimi vel torqueri. Quinymo si vellet, valeret ulterius ipsam absti-
nenciam dilatare. Est tandem vir iste Franciscus maturitate conspicuus,
et tanta simplicitate animi cum prudencia serpentina dotatus, quod rar-
ius sed veridice verba profert.
Hic, itaque, affectuosissime rogatus est pluries in civitate Romana2
per illustrem virum reverendum in Christo patrem dominum L., epis-
copum Maioricensis, quatenus ei manifestaret an ipse vel alii eius con-
socii heremite quicumque sentirent de filio illo perdicionis, qui se ele-
vaturus est supra omne quod dicitur aut quod3 colitur deus, utrum esset
iam natus.
Respondit se nichil scire decerto, nec credit quempiam de ipsis here-
mitis certitudinem ullam habere.“Bene tamen,” inquit, “est verum, quod
quandoque convenientibus nobis in unum et conferentibus adinvicem
de diversis, dum materia hec in medium tollitur, utrum scilicet credant
antichristum4 natum, omnes unanimiter opinantur quod sic.”
Adyecit idem, dicens, “Ecce causam quare magis a vobis heremum ibi
colentibus quam ab aliis istud peto. Quendam venerabilem religiosum or-
dinis predicatorum, vocatum magistrum Vincencium hactenus in regno
Aragonum predicantem, audivi narrantem quod dum ipse in lumbardia
predicaret, ad se venit quidam in vestibus albis heremitico habitu, asserens
se in lucanis montibus habitare, contestans antichristum procerto iam
natum in mundo. Nostis ne hunc heremitum?”
Respondit ipse Franciscus: “Neque novi, neque in montibus nostris
est aliquis sic indutus, neque qui talia profiteatur. Sed hanc ut dixi tan-
quam veridicam opinionem habemus, quod ille sit natus, quamquam nul-
lus nostri sub asseverationis certitudine hoc affirmet. Est tamen5 verum
quod tempore Constanciensis concilii, cum essem in cella mea in Petra-
plana, homo quidam qui se dicebat Iohannem insperato venit ad me in
habitu quidem despectibili et pauperculo, non portans secum pecuniam,
sacculum, neque peram.
 470 / Daniel Hobbins

“Qui suo adventu nimiam mecum ostendens iocunditatis compla-

cenciam ait, ‘O Francisce, diu est quod desideraveram te videre.’
“Cui vicem reddens, consimile eius adventui demonstravi. Cumque
tacuissem, incepit singularia, alta, sancta, et profunda verba componere,
adeo ut nos omnes in non modicam admirationem et stuporem convert-
eret. Postquam duobus diebus conversatus est sic nobiscum, tantam
sanctitatem fingebat, et tam scientifica, devota, sancte conversationis, et
magne perfectionis verba quotidie proferebat, quod vix crederetur alicui
recitanti. Sane cum illis bonis et dulcibus verbis errorum amaritudines
et6 multas hereses commiscere non cessabat.
“Quid inde? Dum in missa vel extra missam confessionem omnes in
simul diceremus, profitentes nos peccasse in Deum, et sanctos eius of-
fendisse, et culpam in nobis habere, solus ille hoc dicere recusabat. Et cum
super hiis per me reprehenderetur, honeste, audaci temeritate respondit:
‘Ego nolo mentiri. Et si dicerem me peccatorem, vel ullam culpam haben-
tem mentirer, quoniam sum absque omni peccato.’
“Subiunxi: ‘Quomodo dicere audes te nullum peccatum habere, cum
beatus ewangelista Iohannes in canonica sua clamet: “Si dixerimus quo-
niam peccatum non habemus, nosipsos seducimus et veritas in nobis non
est.”’ ‘Hec,’ inquit ille, ‘pro vobis dicta sunt, non pro me, qui sum immu-
nis7 ab omni peccato.’ Et quod vertit me in ammirationem non modicam,
dum enim sua verba promentem audirem, consciencia teste, videbatur
michi quod iam essem translatus in aliud seculum, sic attractiva et effa-
bilis eius facundia meis in auribus resonabat.
“Denique cum colloquentes8 extra cellam ambo pariter exissemus
per moncium devia, obvius nobis affuit9 boum grex satis ingens. Quibus
ille subito imperavit ut starent nec procedere ultra presumerent. Mira-
bile valde, ad huiusmodi enim iussionem animalia illa, indomita per nat-
uram, sic micia et immobilia perstiterunt ut pocius lapides quam ani-
malia iudicarentur, in tantum ut facile quisque posset illorum capita et
cornua manibus contrectare, sicuti Iohannes ille intrepide faciebat me
idem facere invitando, quod minime fui ausus.
“Cumque sic per pausam10 stetissent, ait michi: ‘Vis ut boves isti
discedant?’ ‘Volo,’ aio. Mirum dictu. Mox enim facto signaculo crucis
iussit abire, qui ac si soluti a vinculis extitissent, cursu velocissimo re-
cesserunt.
 Appendix: A Medieval Antichrist Story \ 471

“Hiis factis, dum versus cellam a qua pene miliaribus tribus fueramus
colloquendo pertracti iremus, dixit michi multa, et quasi omnia secreta et
intrinseca vite mee. Quo nimium supra modum admiratus extiti,11 nec
immerito, et totus attonitus in meipso. Nec desinebat12 tam eundo quam
eciam13 redeundo, quin suis in14 verbis errores insereret contra fidem.
“Tandem ex quo cellulam redeuntes fuimus ingressi, adiuravi illum
per viventem in secula seclorum, et beatissimam eius matrem, et omnes
sanctos, ut michi in veritate diceret quis nam esset. ‘Ego,’ inquit ille, ‘sum
natione brito, fui actenus mortuus et in inferno dampnatus, sed ex ig-
nibus infernalibus sumpsi animam que corpus hoc vivificat, quod gestare
me cernis. Sum eciam iudicaturus universum mundum. Et finaliter de-
mones ego salvabo.’
“Hiis auditis subrisi, nenias vanas15 talia iudicans, sed et errores con-
siderans refellebam. Factum est autem una dierum, dum simul extra cel-
lam iremus, prospiciens ille dyametraliter solares radios sic apertissimis
oculis quod nec tantillum propter illum intuitum eos clauderet aut hinc
inde diverteret ex transverso, licet omni fugata caligine limpidissime sol
ferveret, incepit clamare velut mugitibus validissimis succensa illius fa-
cies16 tanquam ignis, ter dicens ‘iusticia sine misericordia.’
“Et cum regentes Dei ecclesiam increparet, nominando papam
aut cardinales vel alios quosvis prelatos seu magistros in theologia, eciam
eius17 facies incendebatur, et quasi rugiens leo rabidus vel tuba clangens,
dicebat: ‘O yppocrite, cito veniet qui pacabit vos. In proximo est solutio
vestra.’ Et multa verba consimilia proferebat, et cum lingwis loquetur di-
versis, aiebat: ‘Ego adhuc non sum notus mundo. Sed postquam habuero
omnium ydiomatum lingwas, tunc manifestabor. Et dico tibi Francisce,
infra quinquennium videbis me Rome in sede Petri apostoli. Nam cum
xii sociis quos michi eligam, super asinum sedens et humiliter veniam
Romam, et ero tunc electus in papam si nunc non fuero electus Constan-
cie, et tu videbis me sedentem in sede apostolica Petri.’ Unde quamvis
hec omnia et alia que superius referebat de assumpta anima ex ignibus in-
ferni et cetera, truffas et ridicula merito reputarem. Nichilominus tamen
consideratus omnibus antedictis, potissime tamen18 secreta mea, non eram
nec sum sine ammiratione et conturbatione animi in meipso.
“Quid dicam vobis? Cum sic nobiscum stetisset sex diebus, sero huius
sexti diei nobis ambobus tantum in cella sistentibus et illo edente super
 472 / Daniel Hobbins

mensa et bibente posito vino in cifo et infra vinum per illum sale com-
mixto, invocabat singillatim virtutes celorum, et potestates inferorum,
singulis nominationibus, signum19 crucis faciens supra cifum et20 dicens:
‘Si peccatum aliquod in me est, venite et me perducite ad infernum.’ Hoc
continuavit ferme usque ad mediam noctem. Postquam vero multos de-
mones invocasset nominatim, novissime clamando invocavit Luciferum
super cifo, non tamen facto tunc signo crucis, sed dicens: ‘Si peccatum
aliquod in me est, veni et duc me tecum ad inferos.’ Subito ad huiusmodi
verborum prolationem sic facies eius horribiliter immutatur21 in speciem
enormissimam. Quod ego plus quam possem dicere perterritus et per-
timescens, eum extunc in faciem non fui ausus respicere, nec secum vel ad
morulam permanere, quinymo illo sic super mensa relicto, intra ecclesiam
dicti heremitorii me receptans, ibidem usque mane permansi.
“Die crastino mane facto cum22 diceret se iam velle proficisci, ap-
ponere mensam curavi, ut refecto corpore validior fieret ad labores.
Quo edente et bibente, adiurans ipsum ut michi diceret veritatem saltem
in recessu, interrogavi: ‘Tu quis es?’ Vix verbum perfeceram incepit facie
alterari, et totus attonitus ac sine loquela cessavit ab esu. Post paululum
furens23 ac fremens respondit: ‘Ego sum beelzebub.’ Tantillo temporis
interiecto, surgens a mensa dixit michi multa verba, monendo. Que scil-
icet verba24 quoniam videntur aliquantulum adulationem michi concer-
nere, non curo exprimere. Sed tandem dixit michi: ‘Francisce, bonam
viam tenes, persevera in illa, et cave sumopere ne discedas ab ea.’ Et sic
valedicens, abscessit.25
“Si hic et consimiles sint membra et discipuli26 antichristi, relinquo
iudicio graviori.” Explicit.

Notes

1. Est] Sequitur quedam terribilis historia congesta tempore Concilii Con-

stantiensis de Antichristo et quodam dyabolo incarnato vel humanato nomine
Beelzebub. Est N
2. Romana] Romanen- Romana scr. sed del. Romanen- ut vid. M
3. quod om. N
4. antichristum] iam add. N
5. tamen in marg. M
6. et om. N
 Appendix: A Medieval Antichrist Story \ 473

7. sum immunis inv. N

8. colloquentes] alloquentes N
9. affuit] fuit N
10. pausam] paussam N
11. extiti] exstiti N
12. desinebat] disinebat N
13. eciam om. N
14. in om. N
15. nenias vanas] venias falsas N
16. facies] faciens scr. sed corr. N
17. eciam eius] inv. sed corr. N
18. tamen om. N
19. signum om. N
20. et om. N
21. immutatur] mutatur N
22. cum] dum N
23. furens] fre- sed del. et furens scr. M
24. scilicet verba sup. lin. scr. M
25. abscessit] discessit sed corr. M
26. et discipuli om. N
 Eighteen

Martin Luther
The Reformed Augustinian Beggar

roy hammerling

Interpreters of Martin Luther’s legacy have often had difficulty recon-

ciling an apparent sharp divide between the early, gaunt, stern Augustin-
ian friar and the older, well-fed, fiery Protestant Reformer. Jost Amman
(1539–1591), a Swiss artist, illustrated the tension visually in his sixteenth-
century image of Luther as an ascetic Augustinian hermit sitting across
a table from a later version of himself as a plump Protestant professor,
as if the two parts of Luther’s life were in fact two completely different
people. (See figure 18.1.)1
This essay suggests that an in-depth look at the continuity between
the younger and older Luther can provide insight into both his life and
theology. Amman’s image illustrates a connection between the two fig-
ures: the lean friar points to the work of the reformer, who in turn ap-
pears to be contemplating what to write, as if he has just taken advice
from his youthful self. Both hold books: the friar sits in front of a me-
dieval manuscript, whether a Bible, a volume by a revered church author,
or one of his own early works; the reformer writes the book before him.
Both have laurel wreaths above their heads, held by cherubs. They are

474
 Martin Luther \ 475

Figure 18.1. Jost Amman, Luther the Monk and Professor, late sixteenth cen-
tury. Used by permission of Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg, photo:
Monika Runge.

honored together by Amman’s vision of the friar informing the reformer.

The older Luther grows out of and is inseparable from the younger
Augustinian.
The focus here will be not only to put the youthful and more mature
Luther at the same table, but also to see them as one person by looking at
an illustrative continuity, the spiritual ideal of the beggar. Luther’s per-
sistent use of the beggar image throughout his life demonstrates that he
always considered himself to be a beggar of one kind or another, either
as an Augustinian or simply as a Christian. During Luther’s days as a
mendicant friar he highlighted first of all the physical side of a religious
beggarly life, symbolized in his habit and outward devotional actions,
and then secondly the spiritual reward of such a piety. However, as Lu-
ther despaired of reliance on such external emphases, he came to under-
score the spiritual implications of being a beggar before a gracious and
 476 / Roy Hammerling

merciful God. Luther ultimately argued that an emphasis upon being

spiritual beggars eliminated the need for physical beggars in society, be
they mendicant friars or actual vagrants, because as Luther saw it, spiri-
tual Christian beggars before God transformed the world to make the
earth a better place, where begging was unnecessary.
Luther’s last written words —“We are all beggars. This is true.”—
reveal how comforting an image the metaphor of a beggar had become
for him over his lifetime. Luther’s early Augustinian spirituality, which
emphasized being a mendicant, profoundly affected his view of his rela-
tionship to God. Luther readily acknowledged his Augustinian beggarly
status before his Lord in his earliest postdoctoral lectures on the Psalms.
However, his Augustinian mendicant life, which he perceived to empha-
size a physically beggarly lifestyle, eventually gave way to a re-formed
understanding of being a spiritual beggar before God. At every stage of
his life Luther employed the metaphor of a beggar in relationship with a
gracious Lord in order to explain how Christians ought to perceive their
connection to the divine. The image, while remaining essentially the
same in content, nonetheless changed in meaning over time, depending
upon Luther’s historical context. There was never any time, however,
when Luther did not find comfort in the beggar image. When his rela-
tionship with God was at last before him in the starkest reality of death,
Luther had nothing left to write but “We are all beggars. This is true.”

Martin Luther’s Augustinian Habits

Heiko Oberman has pointed out that when Luther entered the Augus-
tinian religious life he “did not seek the monastery as a place of medita-
tion and study to exercise a faith he lacked. . . . He was driven by a desire
to find the merciful God.”2 Luther’s ritualized entrance as a hopeful
candidate into an Augustinian convent began with the prior’s question,
“What do you seek?” The proper response was, “A gracious God and your
mercy.”3 The words foreshadow what Luther desired, but was unable to
find. For the young Luther, God was a harsh judge. However, Luther’s
religious habit and prayer life were two aspects of his Augustinian mendi-
cant spirituality that helped him to seek a gracious and merciful Lord.
 Martin Luther \ 477

At his installation ceremony, when Luther became a mendicant

novice, the prior blessed Luther’s Augustinian habit, the symbol of his
new lifestyle, by saying, “Lord Jesus Christ, who deemed it worthy to
take the cloak of mortality, we beseech . . . that you might thus see fit
to bless this form of dress which the holy fathers renouncing the world
sanctified by wearing to symbolize humility and innocence, so that this
your servant Martin, who will use these vestments, might be worthy to
dress himself with you.” The blessing “signified a humility of the heart”
as well as a renunciation of the world, specifically detailed in his vows of
poverty, chastity, and obedience. Luther’s habit reminded him that he
had left behind his earthly life, that is, his family, future career as a lawyer,
and all material means, and had put on Christ, taking on a spiritual life
of outward devotions and prayer dedicated to God, as expressly laid out
in the Rule of Augustine and Augustinian ideals.4
One of the Augustinian order’s deepest commitments as mendicants
was to the ideal of spiritual poverty. Luther’s black habit, like those of
his brothers, was considered to be an outward representation of what
Augustinians for centuries had considered to be a dedication to a life of
being holy beggars. The Augustinian author Jordan of Quedlinburg (ca.
1300 –1370/80), in his important work, The Lives of the Brethren (Liber
Vitasfratrum), explained that “in its modern state the Order is founded
upon begging and reckoned among the mendicants.” Jordan grounded
this identity upon the example of Augustine, whom Jordan argued was
the order’s founder and model of a begging lifestyle. Jordan quoted one
of Augustine’s sermons as evidence of this claim: “Come, therefore, my
brothers, be poor, not only in name but in deed and in love, paying heed
to what he says to us who made himself our ransom on the altar of the
cross.” Augustine, as Jordan (and later Luther)5 understood him, believed
that Matthew 5:3, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” was not simply about
those who pretended or preached poverty, but about those who were real
beggars, who embraced voluntary physical poverty as a way of spiritual
life. Jordan was quick to qualify, however, that he did not advocate ab-
solute poverty like some Franciscans, but rather endorsed common own-
ership of the necessities of a communal life and worship, including books
and clothing. These possessions, said Jordan, were consistent with the
goals of the Order of Saint Augustine because they were grounded in
 478 / Roy Hammerling

biblical models and examples of common property, especially as re-

flected in the early Christian communal ideals of Acts 4, a key biblical
text in Augustine’s Rule. Nevertheless, Jordan clarified, “In all cases,
however, the starkness of poverty should remain intact, compelling [Au-
gustinians] to engage in actual begging, and to this extent their unre-
stricted begging should provide them with a livelihood through public
alms-giving.”6
The Augustinian order, Jordan explained, was a mendicant order, in
which the brothers were physical beggars who thereby attained spiritual
reward. Jordan argued that three types of begging had occurred dur-
ing the course of Christian history. Christ and the apostles solicited
alms as beggars in what Jordan called the first way of evangelical pov-
erty. A second way, or apostolic poverty, was lived out in the common
life of the disciples in Acts (especially chapter 4) and of other biblical
figures, such as the “holy women of the Bible.” Lastly, Jordan stated that
apostolic poverty continued on in the life of Saint Augustine specifically
and in the entire Order of Hermits of Saint Augustine more generally
in Augustinian begging. For Jordan, the Augustinian friars were beggars
who willingly and voluntarily embraced physical poverty and a life of
begging in deepest humility, like those before them, in order to better
love God and attain spiritual fruit.7
Augustinian beggars acquired three “spiritual fruits,” according to
Jordan. First, they “conformed to Christ and the apostles, who lived on
alms,” or that which was precisely hinted at in Luther’s ceremony of put-
ting on the habit. Second, by begging and collecting alms, Jordan noted,
“pride is healed at its root,” because to “beg is an immense humility, for
thus we lower ourselves to ask those who are weaker than we are for the
worthless temporal things which we despise.” Luther would make this
same point in his important lecture on Psalm 101 (see below). And third,
begging was a way “to build up their store of merits.”8 Although he later
abandoned the notion of a store of merits as an inadequate means to un-
derstand God as a merciful and gracious Lord, early in his time as an Au-
gustinian Luther trusted in the physical reality of being a beggar of the
Augustinian order.
All in all, Luther identified various physical or outward aspects of
the religious life with being an Augustinian mendicant beggar, including
 Martin Luther \ 479

especially regularized prayers and his habit. While at first these com-
forted Luther, he eventually came to see these outward expressions of
his Augustinian lifestyle as unbearable burdens. This led him to ques-
tion his physical life as an Augustinian beggar before God and his men-
dicant way of life, so that he began to pursue a more spiritual view of
being a beggar as a Christian before God without vows to an order.
Luther came to describe the outward expressions of his religious life,
especially in prayer, as external façades. Later in his life, reflecting on his
days as an Augustinian, he said, “Formerly, when I was a monk, I, too,
was far saintlier than I am now so far as the external mask is concerned. I
prayed more, kept vigils, practiced abstinence, and tormented my flesh.
In short, my whole life was altogether showy in the eyes of others, al-
though not in my own eyes; for I was intensely crushed and distressed.”9
By “distressed” Luther meant that he had come to feel abandoned and
cast away from God’s presence; Luther despaired both physically and
spiritually because of his own inability to draw closer by means of his
own works to God.10 Luther at times called this despair his Anfechtungen,
his deep inner spiritual struggles or temptations. On one occasion he re-
marked that not recognizing these “spiritual attacks” of crushing des-
peration as coming from God was for him the “worst possible plight.”11
Historically speaking, Luther’s “plight” in part grew out of an Au-
gustinian concern for prayer that had developed many centuries earlier
in the works of Hugh of Saint-Victor (ca. 1096–1141), a Canon Regular,
who wrote a popular commentary on Augustine’s Rule that Luther and
other Augustinians eagerly took to heart. Hugh encouraged religious to
be diligent in praying the divine office and in giving an account of every
“syllable” that they skipped.12 Luther tells of one occasion early on in
151513 when he neglected to pray the hours because he attended the
graduation of some doctoral candidates. A thunderstorm broke out later
that day, and he interpreted the storm as God’s anger directed toward
his neglect. Quickly, Luther went to his knees to make up the skipped
hours as swiftly as possible. Luther in hindsight noted that in this in-
stance he relied upon the goodness of his own outward prayerful efforts
to make himself right with God.14 Luther on another occasion vividly re-
membered his early life by saying, “When I was a monk I was unwilling to
omit any of the prayers, but when I was busy . . . I often accumulated my
 480 / Roy Hammerling

appointed prayers for a whole week, or even two or three weeks.” Lu-
ther noted that he would take off “as long as three days without food
and drink,” until he had caught up with his “prescribed prayers.” Com-
menting on the toll his devotions took on him, he stated, “This made
my head split, and . . . I couldn’t close my eyes for five nights, lay sick to
death, and went out of my senses.” Luther recalled how in these early
years of 1515 to 1517 he came to despair physically in body and spiritu-
ally in his soul.15
Pictures of the young, emaciated Luther, like Ammon’s above, dem-
onstrate how Luther’s relentless focus on outward pious acts as a mendi-
cant beggar drove him to utter exhaustion. When Luther first lectured
on the Psalms (more below), and also the letters of Paul, he slowly came
to consider his own and all outward monastic prayers done out of a sense
of duty, in haste, and without true earnest humility, as nothing more
than petitions flapping in the wind (Flattergebet)16 and empty murmur-
ings (inane murmur).17 Thinking back on his problematic Augustinian
habits and a religious life grounded in reliance upon his own outward
goodness, Luther concluded that the Lord God had abandoned him in
order to reveal his destitute state. God did this in order to drag him, “as
if by force, from that torment of prayers” of his outwardly focused reli-
gious life, pulling him by means of humility, as if from a “prison,” away
from pride in his own deeds and back into a proper relationship with his
merciful and gracious Lord. The reader will note the similarity of this
point to the second fruit of Jordan already mentioned, with the caveat
that here God humbles rather than the action of the friar.18 The eternal
mask was forcibly removed, and Luther the Augustinian was left with
his naked, foolish conceit and his empty reliance on religious trappings
such as prayer and his habit.
The story behind Luther’s habit, however, and his trust in this out-
ward symbol of his Augustinian lifestyle, indicates that Luther’s Augus-
tinian religious life, convictions, and view of himself as a beggar before
God were intimately connected. Since one physical sign of his Augus-
tinian humility was his habit, a look at Luther’s attitude toward his cowl
during his years of struggling despair can help illuminate an important
and oft-unnoticed continuity between the younger and older Luther.
 Martin Luther \ 481

After putting on the habit, the physical sign of his Augustinian men-
dicant lifestyle, Luther was very slow to take off the substantive symbol
of clothing himself in Christ. Luther only abandoned his robes many
years after he had been removed from his order and the good graces of
the Catholic Church—long after many scholars often assume he had al-
ready made a stark break with his Augustinian convictions. Not until Oc-
tober 9, 1524, when his Augustinian habit hung somewhat threadbare on
his body, did Luther finally appear in public without it. Eric Saak calls
this Luther’s “self-defrocking.”19 That day was three years after the day,
January 3, 1521, when the Roman Catholic Church and his own Augus-
tinian order excommunicated him, Luther burned the papal bull against
him, and his vicar-general, Johannes Staupitz, released him from his
vows.20 For Saak, Luther remained true to the Rule of Augustine, his
vows, and his Augustinian ideals until he at last set aside the habit, its
most visible symbol.21 But why did Luther cling to the cowl so long, and
why did he finally abandon it?
Luther, in a May 1524 letter to Wolfgang Capito, just a few months
before he hung up his habit, stated that he was considering giving up his
Augustinian apparel because some, in his estimation, no longer under-
stood its true meaning. Luther wrote, “Indeed, in these years I have given
enough consideration to the weak. Therefore, because they are hardened
day-by-day, everything should be done and said most openly. For I too
should finally start to cast aside even my cowl, which up until now I have
kept on to support the weak and to ridicule the pope.”22 Luther wore his
mendicant clothing long after his reforms had taken hold in Germany in
part because it remained a powerful outward symbol of his religious devo-
tion and connection to the Catholic Church. Unfortunately, some con-
tinued to see habits in general, and Luther’s own cowl in particular, as an
outward good work in and of itself: even as supporters rallied to Luther’s
cause, the “weak” among them clung to the idea that the habit somehow
provided spiritual merit to those who wore it. For Luther, physical reali-
ties such as repetitive daily prayers and habits were incapable of providing
spiritual fruits of merit. If some believed that Luther trusted in his cowl,
then Luther had to abandon it, not because he wanted to—for him it was
a symbol of his dedication to humility and being clothed in Christ—but
 482 / Roy Hammerling

for the sake of preventing misunderstanding. Luther insisted in 1532 that

his religious habit had become an “accursed cowl” only because he as a
young friar and others had seen it as a physical means contributing to his
salvation.23
The Roman curia, in Luther’s view, interpreted his insistence upon
wearing his habit after his excommunication as “ridicule” and a mockery
because they had formally condemned his writings and the man himself.
Still, if a cowl was understood properly, he had no problem wearing one.
As late as 1537, in response to some religious who wished to join the ref-
ormation and retain their habits, he declared it fine with him if people
wanted to continue to wear cowls, so long as they did not put any trust in
them as good works.24 The habit was for Luther a spiritual reality of put-
ting on Christ, a call to humility as a beggar, and a quest for a gracious
and merciful God. As long as that was clear, he wore the habit and re-
mained dedicated to the Augustinian ideal of being a beggar. When he
and others lost sight of this, he abandoned outward shows in favor of
what he believed was true inward spiritual devotion. However, just what
true spiritual devotion as a beggar before God was had been developing
in his mind over these years. To trace just how his intellectual under-
standing of being a beggar before God changed, we turn now to examine
the evolution of his spiritual interpretation of metaphorical beggars. In-
deed, this further discussion will suggest that even though he gave up
the physical cowl, Luther did not give up the ideal of being a spiritual
beggar before Christ.

Martin Luther’s Beggar Story for Augustinians

Luther delivered his first postdoctoral lectures at the recently established

Wittenberg University; he gave his first lectures on the Psalms in 1513
(published in 1515 as the Dictata super Psalterium).25 In them, Luther pro-
vided his Augustinian students with not only theological education but
also spiritual direction. His lectures focused on interpreting scripture
and also, at times, his understanding of what it meant to be an Augustin-
ian friar. The image of a beggar and her lord in particular summed up his
 Martin Luther \ 483

view of what it meant to be a mendicant Augustinian. This lecture laid

the foundations for the broader, more spiritualized understanding of
being a beggar before God that Luther developed later.26
In his lecture on Psalm 101, Luther told of a destitute girl who re-
ceived unwarranted gifts from a gracious and merciful lord: once there
was a prince who took in a beggar girl (mendica puella) “in filth and ver-
min” and dressed her in the finest clothes, jewels, and gold (cf. Ezekiel
16:17).27 Luther noted that if she were a wise beggar, she would not dare
to claim that the objects of her lord’s goodness belonged to her in any
way. If she was foolish, however, and declared that the gifts were in some
manner hers or that she deserved praise because of them, she exposed
her pride, discredited the graciousness of the lord, and falsely repre-
sented her true beggarly station before her master. Should she erro-
neously or deceitfully assert that she inherited the gifts from her family,
she would be a liar. Therefore, the only proper response to the lord’s
mercy was for her to acknowledge her good fortune with heartfelt humil-
ity. In fact, she should desire that others not even notice her, but only her
lord and his graciousness in providing physical and spiritual gifts. If
someone should happen to point out that she had once been poor, she
should readily acknowledge her lowly beggarly estate and the greatness
of her prince’s generosity. Luther concluded, “But if she confuses and
mixes up everything and, forgetting herself, does not maintain the dis-
tinction and difference between herself and the gifts given her, just as
queen Vashti did [in Esther 1:12– 22],28 what will the prince do now?
Why he will either remove her or reject her together with these orna-
ments and cast her out.”29
Luther noted specifically that the prince saved the beggar girl from
her material poverty by means of physical objects, that is, clothing and
gems. Luther’s audience, young Augustinians, would have primarily iden-
tified the poverty of the girl with their physical destitution, resulting from
the voluntary renunciation of their possessions upon entering the order.
Likewise, such sacrifices, as Jordan of Quedlinburg had noted, provided
“spiritual fruit” and lives of dedication to God.30 What Luther proposed
with his illustration was that the true state of his mendicant audience was
one that began in physical destitution and ended in spiritual beggarly
 484 / Roy Hammerling

poverty, or true lives of humility, which praised the gracious and merciful
Lord and claimed no credit whatsoever for their own deeds.31
Luther’s inspiration for his parable may derive from multiple sources.
Most obviously, Luther directly alluded to the book of Esther and the
story of Vashti. However, Vashti was not a beggar redeemed, but a queen,
chosen as a king’s bride, only to be cast out when she refused to obey her
husband and lord. Similarly, a popular folktale retold by Boccaccio,32 Pe-
trarch, and Chaucer 33 notes that a wealthy and seemingly generous lord
married a beggar girl, Griselda, but then harshly demanded unfailing obe-
dience in the form of a series of horrible trials. Eventually, he dismissed
Griselda as his wife, but because of her patient, faithful obedience and re-
fusal to complain at any stage of the testing, he restored her as bride. Her
famous storytellers praise Griselda as a model of patient virtue and for-
bearance.34 While Luther, like many before him, believed that people
should endure hardships with patience and perseverance and not presume
to judge God’s actions, no matter how they might appear to humanity, his
version of the beggar girl story had different emphases.35 Luther stressed
not the righteousness of the beggar, nor certainly the cruelty of the lord,
but her lack of virtue and his boundless generosity.
Most importantly, Luther echoed a remark by the aforementioned
Jordan of Quedlinburg.36 Jordan described how God was like a lord who
granted to a poor vassal goods, not to claim or possess in any way, but to
hold and use for the sake of his lord. Jordan then applied the compari-
son to his Augustinian audience: “God did give us those goods, which
we have from God not on account of our own merits, or so to say, on ac-
count of our beautiful hair, but on account of God’s own goodness and
for God’s service.” Jordan concluded, “The goods which we hold from
God, are not to be considered . . . as our own.”37 Here there is no girl,
and the metaphor is patently feudal. But Jordan’s point and Luther’s are
the same. Both argued that salvation comes not through trust in one’s
own physical or spiritual goodness, but by God’s merciful and gracious
gift of grace alone.38
Following most closely after Jordan’s model,39 Luther presented the
beggar girl as an example to his audience of mendicant friars, illustrating
how they ought to live in relation to God in proper humility and devo-
tion, focused not on their own goodness but on the wealthy generosity of
 Martin Luther \ 485

God as a merciful Lord. Understood properly, explained Luther, the true

benefit of such a gift may only be grasped with a genuine spiritual humil-
ity in the face of such overwhelming and undeserved kindness. Once
Luther came to this conclusion, he began to realize that the emphasis of
the image was primarily upon the kind Lord and only secondarily upon
the beggar. This shift rendered the physical reality of the beggar a moot
point. Whether physically poor or not, all people were spiritually poor
before God, and if this was the case, then perhaps the physical nature of
the beggar was important in light of the goodness of the master. Luther’s
interpretation of the beggar image would ultimately remove the distinc-
tion between those who pursued voluntary poverty, who were poor by
circumstance, and who were poor by nature of their spiritual depravity.
In the end, all were in need of a gracious Lord and merciful master to
rescue them from their spiritual need.

Martin Luther’s Re-Formed Beggar Metaphor

for All Christians

Luther, during his days as an Augustinian, had come to rely on the out-
ward expressions of his religious convictions, such as regular monastic
prayers and his habit. As discussed above, his cowl in particular was a
symbol of the reality of putting on Christ and of being humble before a
gracious Lord who granted Luther mercy despite his own unworthiness,
something he felt most acutely in his times of spiritual distress. As Lu-
ther removed his habit and gave up praying the hours, the beggar image—
with its Augustinian origins — initially seems an unlikely metaphor to
continue as a regular part of Luther’s self-identification or as a model
for others outside religious orders. However, for the rest of his life,
Luther constantly returned to the image. He slowly reshaped the beggar
girl metaphor by altering the starting point, wherein the beggar’s status
is defined, from physical conditions to a direct emphasis upon spiritual
ones. Over time Luther connected the image more frequently to biblical
heroines, especially the Virgin Mary, and heroes, including Christ, in a
way that allowed him to define the image more inclusively, as one that
applied to all Christians.
 486 / Roy Hammerling

The metaphor appeared next — and most famously — in two of his

most important reformation texts, written some years after his Psalm
101 lecture and during the same year Pope Leo X’s bull Exsurge Do-
mine denounced Luther’s writings. In his The Babylonian Captivity of the
Church (1520), discussing the Mass and Lord’s Supper, Luther told the
story of a “very rich lord” who gave a “thousand gulden” to a “beggar . . .
an unworthy and wicked servant.” While it is likely, said Luther, that
such a vagrant might boldly claim the gracious riches as his own “with-
out regard to his unworthiness and the greatness of the bequest,” he
urged his readers, now not Augustinians but all Christians, to acknowl-
edge their own beggarly worthlessness by putting faith in the gracious
promises of their merciful Lord, Christ. Luther in this instance once
again opened by emphasizing the servant’s physical beggarliness, in par-
ticular with reference to the money he received. He then turned to ex-
amine the beggar’s trust in outward confession, prayer, and preparation
for the sacrament, as if such public actions made the beggar worthy of
receiving God’s grace, while their absence — and the servant’s persist-
ence in his own self-righteousness — would cause God to cast him out.
The clear Augustinian resonances of the beggar image still can be heard
here: the physical mercy of the Lord represented in wealth is still pres-
ent. However, the context has shifted from an Augustinian audience in a
university setting to a public document aimed at all Christians. It is they
whom he identifies broadly as spiritual beggars, who dare not trust in
any of their physical goods or outward appearances, in this case even
their own confessions, prayers, and preparation for the sacraments, but
only in a Lord who is mercifully gracious to all in need.40
In another significant work from the same year, On the Freedom of the
Christian (1520), Luther invited a Christian audience to consider once
again the importance of a beggar girl. Luther, however, here called the
protagonist of his metaphor “a poor unfaithful little harlot” (paupercula
impia meretricula), thus emphasizing her spiritual depravity. The lord, in
this text a “rich and divine bridegroom” expressly named “Christ,” gave
to the harlot not fine clothes or jewels, but himself in marriage, “adorn-
ing her with all goodness” and righteousness. The gift of an ennobling
relationship transformed her, the lowliest member of society, into a
 Martin Luther \ 487

princess. The sins of her harlotry and utter poverty of virtue, as well as
indirectly her physical poverty, no longer had any power to destroy her,
said Luther, because as the spouse of a gracious Lord she had all the privi-
leges of her beloved husband, both in her status and wealth. On account
of Christ’s merciful gift of unmerited grace she had become true royalty,
a free lord subject to none. At the same time, her lowly origins remained;
she persisted as a humble servant without any merit of her own, and thus
she was subject to all. Those familiar with Luther’s work will recognize
its central paradox embodied in the poor little harlot: the Christian is
free lord subject to none and simultaneously humble servant subject to
all. For Luther at this time, it did not matter whether his audience was in
religious orders, a great king, a learned reader, or a lay washerwoman; all
who stood before God came as poor harlots in need of grace from a mer-
ciful Lord.41
One year later, in 1521, the same year Luther was excommunicated
by the pope and declared outlaw by the emperor, he returned to the
image of the beggar. This time, in his Commentary on the Magnificat, the
metaphor appeared as part of an analysis of the Blessed Virgin Mary as
a model beggar. Rather than lifting up an abstract ideal of a beggar girl,
or even Jordan of Quedlinburg’s Augustinian exemplar of beggars, Saint
Augustine, as before,42 he pointed to Mary as the perfect model of physi-
cal and spiritual poverty for all Christians.43 Mary’s virtue, said Luther in
his analysis of the Magnificat ( Luke 1:46 – 50), lay in the fact that God
had chosen her not on account of her own merit, but because of God’s
graciousness toward her. Luther stated that Mary herself recognized this
reality: “She glorified . . . only in the gracious regard of God. Hence the
stress lies not on the word ‘low estate,’ but on the word ‘regarded.’ For it is
not her humility but God’s regard that is to be praised. When a prince
takes a poor beggar [einen armen bettler] by the hand, it is not the beggar’s
lowliness but the prince’s gracious goodness that is to be commended.”44
Here he not only implicitly compares Mary to a beggar but also, through
emulation of her example, instructs Christians, as beggars, to regard
God’s mercy above all else.
Luther continued to refer to beggars often, drawing on illustrations
rooted in the lives of scriptural saints. For instance, in his Sermons on the
 488 / Roy Hammerling

Gospel of John (1537), he wrote, “Christ comes along and shows that He
wants to select as His disciples, those who are beggars, ignoramuses, and
fools. It might even be the poor harlot Mary Magdalene, or the murderer
and knave Paul, or the malefactor on the cross. He wants it to be appar-
ent to all that no one acquires God’s mercy because of their own gifts,
such as riches, wisdom, and power.”45 Saints as great as Peter and Paul,
said Luther, were lowly beggars because even they had no merits of their
own to stand upon and instead stood in need of their Lord’s goodness.46
Biblical representations of beggars who led exemplary virtuous lives, and
who might then serve as models for all Christians, were everywhere
for Luther— and all were to be emulated for their spiritual poverty of hu-
mility and trust in a merciful and gracious lord. Besides seeing Christ as
the most merciful Lord, on a number of occasions Luther also specifically
referred to Jesus as a beggar and model of humility for all Christians.47
Luther combined the notion of Christ as gracious Lord and servant
in Sermons on the Gospel of John (on John 1:29). Once there was a lord,
said Luther, the son of a king, who entered the home of a sick male beg-
gar and treated the beggar’s disgusting illness by washing off his filthy
stench. Certainly, the prince could have ordered servants to perform
such a nasty task, but instead this kind lord, in a remarkable act of divine
humility, willingly chose to become the servant of the beggar. Luther
says, “But what is a king or an emperor compared with the Son of God?”
And beyond that, “What is a beggar’s filth and stench compared with the
filth of sin which is ours by nature, stinking a hundred thousand times
worse and looking infinitely more repulsive to God than any foul matter
found in a hospital?” Luther observed that the love of the Son of God for
humanity is of such a marvelous magnitude that the greater the filth and
stench of sins, the more he befriends and serves the beggars and sinners.
God cleanses people, relieving them of all their misery and of their bur-
dens and sins “by placing them upon His own back.” By way of contrast
Luther then abruptly recalled his own religious life, as well as the lives of
others, who trusted in outward masks of righteousness as filthy sores.
Says Luther, “All the holiness of the monks stinks in comparison with
this service of Christ, the fact that the beloved Lamb, the great Man, yes
the Son of the Exalted Majesty, descends from heaven to serve me.”48
 Martin Luther \ 489

In the very years that Luther turned away from the life of an Augus-
tinian friar and began to compose some of his most famous reformation
works, Luther reshaped — re-formed, even — his interpretation of the
beggar metaphor to emphasize the spiritual nature of all Christians as
beggars. Indeed, beggars in religious orders had become a part of the
problem for Luther. The former trust Luther had placed in his out-
wardly mendicant lifestyle — habit and prayers in particular — was now
for him a part of the larger “stinking” and “filthy” problem of society,
which allowed religious beggars and ignored the needs of the truly des-
titute. Christ the servant of beggars had cleansed him and all sinners,
not out of obligation or on account of any goodness in the sick beggars,
but purely out of love.49 Luther concluded that attitudes and actions to-
ward beggars needed reform.

Martin Luther’s Reforms for Mendicants

and Needy Beggars

In the process of rethinking the spiritual significance of beggars, Luther

realized that his reforms would ultimately have to deal directly with the
reality of physical beggars on the streets, including those in religious or-
ders. He drew sharp distinctions between what he called the insincerity
of many religious mendicants, the reality of harsh poverty among the
masses, and faithful Christians who were spiritually impoverished and in
need of God’s grace. When put in the context of his social reforms,
Luther ultimately felt compelled to call for an end to public begging al-
together, especially by mendicant orders, but among others as well.50
For Luther, the only way to bring this about was with specific reforms
that sought the elimination of outward begging altogether and pro-
moted an understanding of being spiritual beggars, who willingly
helped others so begging would become unnecessary.
The first step in the development of Luther’s social ideas on poverty
emerged from the belief that all were beggars, whatever their earthly
means. If all people were spiritual beggars, then the only logical conclu-
sion was that even the greatest kings on earth ought rightly to be called
 490 / Roy Hammerling

spiritual beggars. In fact, kings who recognized their spiritual destitution

were even truer beggars than those who had lived self-righteous lives as
physical beggars on account of religious vows. In his Commentary on the
Sermon on the Mount, specifically discussing Matthew 5:3,51 Luther wrote,
“So be poor or rich physically and externally, as it is granted to you —
God does not care about this — and know that before God, in his heart,
all people must be spiritually poor. That is, they must not set their confi-
dence, comfort, and trust on temporal goods, nor hang their hearts
upon them and make mammon their idol.” Surprisingly, Luther lifts up
as his model King David: “[ He] was an outstanding king, and he really
had his wallet and treasury full of money, his barns full of grain, his land
full of all kinds of goods and provisions. In spite of all this he had to be
a poor beggar spiritually [geistlich ein armer bettler sein], as he sings of
himself : ‘I am poor, and a guest in the land, like all my fathers [ Psalm
39:12].’” Luther encouraged all to look to King David, sitting amid pos-
sessions, a lord over land and people, as an exemplary beggar because “he
does not dare to call himself anything but a guest or a pilgrim, one who
walks around on the street because he has no place to stay. This is truly a
heart that does not tie itself to property and riches; but though it has, it
behaves as a destitute beggar, as St. Paul boasts of Christians: ‘As poor,
yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything
[2 Corinthians 6:10].’ ”52 For Luther, all true beggars are defined spiritu-
ally, regardless of their station in life or abilities.53 Indeed, this view ulti-
mately led Luther to look critically at his world and conclude that phys-
ical poverty must be eliminated as spiritual poverty flourished among
Christians.
Luther and his contemporaries were all too familiar with beggars in
the streets, both those genuinely in desperate need and religious brothers
from monasteries who called themselves beggars while living in various
levels of luxury. Catherina Lis and Hugo Soly have suggested that at least
50 percent, if not 65 percent of sixteenth-century people were barely
surviving from day to day, while as much as “25 percent of the popula-
tion was chronically underfed.” Many of these needed to beg daily and to
live hand to mouth.54 Samuel Torvend has commented, “It is no small
thing that Luther the monk, raised in a peasant household, was conscious
of those who were ‘perched precariously on the edge of poverty.’ ”55 In
 Martin Luther \ 491

begging for alms, noted Luther, mendicants of his day robbed from true,
poor beggars in dire need. Charlatan beggars did the same.56 Referring
to Abraham’s kindness to strangers in Genesis 18, Luther writes, “The
devil, too, has his beggars; but whenever these have nothing, they never-
theless have enough and have it in abundance, as we see in the case of the
monks and the idle vagrants. But the true beggars are those who are beg-
gars because of the promise of the Word. These the world hates and nei-
ther helps nor supports.” Luther explained that Abraham understood the
true nature of strangers and beggars because he had himself endured
great hardships, both physical and spiritual; therefore, out of humble
hospitality he showed kindness to all, even the needy who showed up
unexpectedly at his doorstep, whether poor in body or in spirit.57 On the
other hand, Luther argued that beggars from religious orders who asked
for physical offerings, often in exchange for prayers, deserved nothing.
Those who falsely believed that their acts of physical humility provided
them with spiritual wealth were mistaken; they should therefore be dis-
couraged from promoting this misconception.58
Moreover, Luther felt that Abraham’s kindness toward true beggars
served not as a means to make Abraham worthy of God, but rather as a
way by which God acted through Abraham in the world.59 Luther thus
encouraged social reforms to provide truly needy beggars with physi-
cal necessities, for instance, by establishing common chests ( like one in
Leisnig); in this way, the community might imitate the example of the
disciples in Acts 4, where all things were held in common. The same
Acts 4 passage had guided the Augustinian understanding of poverty,
insofar as it was an organizing and ideological principle in the Rule of
Augustine and influenced Jordan of Quedlinburg’s teaching about Au-
gustinian lives as beggars. Monastic, mendicant, and ecclesiastical prop-
erties, Luther concluded, were to be seized and their incomes used to
provide for the poor, maintain public services, and offer education. In a
good society, said Luther, poor beggars should be cared for; there should
be no need whatsoever for them to beg. In his so-called Long Sermon on
Usury, in 1520, Luther argued, “It ought to be established and decreed,
either by the mandate of [the pope, bishops, kings, princes, and lords] or
in general council that every town and locality should build and furnish
its own churches, towers, and bells, and make provision itself for its own
 492 / Roy Hammerling

poor. Then begging would cease entirely.”60 Having eliminated physical

poverty, Luther hoped that all people would see themselves as spiritual
beggars before God.
Commenting on Deuteronomy 15:4, “There will be no poor among
you,” Luther stated in 1525 that this was a “most beautiful order, but
one that is never kept.” He wondered, “If begging is forbidden to [the
people of Israel in this passage], by what right is it set up among Chris-
tians by law, as though it were something sacred?” Luther concluded,
“Spiritual poverty is to be praised [again, cf. Matthew 5:3],” but unfor-
tunately, “those who boast of outward poverty do not take upon them-
selves wounds, sicknesses, imprisonments, nakedness, or exile, hunger,
thirst, swords, dangers, deaths, sins, the devil, and all other evils by means
of new vows set up for these, just as they have done for poverty [cf.
Matthew 25].”61 In other words, religious beggars took vows of poverty
justifying their own piety before God even as they lived lives of ease,
rather than embracing the reality of true spiritual poverty, which in-
volved harsh lives of facing very real outward and spiritual hardships
in the world. Luther believed those who, like the mendicants, boast of
physical poverty were really “servants of Satan” because they avoided
both true physical and spiritual poverty and instead, through their vows,
enjoyed lives of plenty. Luther concluded, “Constant care should be
taken that, since these evils [ like the need for begging and beggars] are
always in the world, [those who seek mendicant poverty] are always to
be opposed.”62
Luther abandoned his life of outward poverty as an Augustinian
beggar because he and others had misunderstood it as a means of being
justified before God and claiming the lord’s gracious gift as his own. As
he sought to live as a true spiritual beggar, and as he promoted this ideal,
he sought to reform a society in which begging played a major role. In
some ways, Luther pushed the beggar ideal he had learned from the Au-
gustinians toward what he believed was its logical conclusion, namely,
that being truly destitute before God spiritually was more important than
being a beggar physically. He did not so much abandon his Augustinian
ideals, which also had emphasized the spiritual aspects of begging, as
adapt them to apply to all around him. This meant that he and others, in
the monasteries in particular, needed to recognize that their physical
 Martin Luther \ 493

poverty mattered little in comparison with true spiritual poverty, which

also demanded that they needed to suffer the genuine hardships of spiri-
tual begging by sacrificing for the most destitute members of society.
God worked through Christians, argued Luther, in such a way that they
were required to provide for a poor neighbor’s every need. As a result,
in a world where people took their status as spiritual beggars seriously,
there would be no reason for physical begging, either in or outside the
monastery.

Martin Luther’s Final Days—

The Reformed Augustinian Beggar

Even after Luther had turned his beggar ideal into a call for social re-
form, he continued to use the beggar metaphor in his writings. More-
over, the image slowly came to encompass thoughts about mortality.
When Luther faced his own impending death, he did so in a manner
that took comfort in, and hearkened back to, typically Augustinian atti-
tudes concerning ritualized preparation for dying. Shortly before he
breathed his last, Luther repeated three times the words of Psalm 31:5,
the last words of Christ on the cross ( Luke 23:46), “Into your hands,
I commend my spirit,” and then he added, “You have redeemed me,
O Lord, faithful God.” In this Luther followed Jordan of Quedlinburg’s
admonition from the Lives of the Brethren, in a chapter entitled “On the
Brother’s Preparation for Death,” where he instructed Augustinians to
imitate their brother Henry of Friemar (d. 1340), who with his last breath
repeated three times, “Into your hands I commend my spirit.”63 The Au-
gustinian and the reformer in Luther were still inseparable. The per-
sonal addition of the words, “You have redeemed me, O Lord, faithful
God,” likewise suggested a beggar acknowledging indebtedness to his
Lord one last time.
A few days earlier, Luther had left a scrawled note on a piece of
paper that has puzzled scholars ever since. Two similar accounts relate
that Luther was unable to finish his last sermon in Eisleben, so he went
to a local house to rest. Fearing that he was dying, he wrote his last words
in a cryptic note mostly in Latin, but with some key words in German:
 494 / Roy Hammerling

Nobody can understand Virgil in his Bucolics and Georgics unless he

has spent five years as a shepherd or farmer. No one understands
Cicero in his letters unless he has served under an outstanding gov-
ernment for twenty years. No one should believe that he has tasted
the Holy Scriptures sufficiently unless he has spent one hundred
years leading churches with the prophets. That is why: 1. John the
Baptist, 2. Jesus Christ, 3. the Apostles were a prodigious miracle.
Do not profane this divine Aeneid, but bow to it and honor its ves-
tiges. [German:] We are all beggars [ Wir sein pettler]. [Latin:] This
is true [ Hoc est verum].64

Scholarly explanations of this text have ranged from wondering if

Luther’s last written words reflected a dejected man resigned to death or
if he was simply waxing poetic about scripture.65 Oberman has insight-
fully argued that these words must be read in light of Luther’s entire ca-
reer, from friar to reformer. Some authors falsely assume, said Oberman,
that over time the inexperienced friar had overcome his lack of under-
standing of scripture, abandoned his superstitious religious roots, be-
come an expert biblical scholar, and thus emerged as a confident “Refor-
mation Luther.” On the contrary, argued Oberman, facing death, Luther
was still “overwhelmed by the depth and wealth of scripture,” which no
one was able to fathom, especially he himself.66
To Oberman’s observation, however, we must add that Luther’s de-
pendence upon the beggar illustration allows for a more complete analy-
sis of these German and Latin words. On a very basic level it must be
noted that the Latin hints at the primary language of Luther as an Au-
gustinian scholar and the German points to the preferred language of
Luther as a reformer. When Luther declared, “Wir sein pettler,” the
German breaks the rhythm of the Latin in a way that emphasizes the
declaration that all are beggars. The conclusion of the Latin words “Hoc
est verum” rings like an ancient exclamation point adding weight to
the German pronunciation. Two key aspects of Luther’s world are in-
separable in one final statement about life. There is a clear contrast be-
tween the two great classical authors, Virgil and Cicero, and scripture.
Luther’s references to ancient Roman writers acknowledge his early edu-
cation, which focused on studying the classics. The declaration about the
 Martin Luther \ 495

scriptures suggests Luther’s personal lifelong quest, as an Augustinian

and reformer, to grasp what is ultimately beyond human comprehen-
sion. For Luther, great literature can be understood through experience;
scripture, however, is a gift, an incomprehensible treasure, from a gra-
cious God to an undeserving beggar. On his deathbed, therefore, Luther
was able to refer back to two major themes of his life, namely that he was
a spiritual beggar before God and the undeserving recipient of God’s
gracious treasures, such as scripture, which were so tremendous that he
would never fully grasp their meaning, nor the graciousness of the Giver.
Luther’s final puzzling note had been anticipated earlier, in his Ser-
mons on the Gospel of John (14:12, written in 1537), where he wrote:

On earth we are all beggars, as Christ Himself was; but before God
we are bountifully blessed with all good things. In comparison the
world is poor and destitute, nor can it retain its goods without us. I,
on the other hand, have abiding goods in my hour of death; for I
have the Lord Christ Himself, who sits enthroned in heaven above.
But in that hour you all will be obliged to depart naked and bare, and
will not take as much as a shred of clothing with you. And up there
you will be bereft of all property, even though you were a mighty
king on earth and owned all the wealth of the world. Christians will
not leave one bit of their goods behind: for they have none and al-
ready have laid up their treasure in heaven, in and with Christ.67

Luther believed that he had entered the world bare, as a beggar;

that he had joined the Augustinians as a beggar; that he had defined his
life as a reformer as a spiritual beggar; and that, at last, he died a naked
beggar, bountifully blessed by his gracious Lord. In the end, then, it is
not surprising to find the reformed Augustinian beggar summing up his
life and theology with the words “Wir sein pettler. Hoc est verum.”

Notes

This article is dedicated with deepest gratitude and appreciation to John Van
Engen on the joyous occasion of celebrating thirty-five years at the University of
Notre Dame. The author sincerely thanks Lisa Wolverton and David C. Mengel
 496 / Roy Hammerling

for their expert editorial and substantive help in providing clarity to the present
argument. The author also is grateful to Jonathan Lyon and Remie Constable;
Kenneth Christopherson, Ralph Gehrke, and Ralph Quere; his colleagues at
Concordia College, especially the religion department; and Joshua Hammerling
for his editorial insight.

1. Jost Amman’s Martin Luther als Monch und als Professor is dated variously,
1551 or the last part of the sixteenth century. The image may be found at http://
www.all-art.org/DICTIONARY_of_Art/a/amman1.htm.
2. Heiko Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil ( New York:
Image Books, 1989), 127. Scripture references are from the New Revised Stan-
dard Version ( NRSV) unless otherwise noted.
3. Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil, 128.
4. Johannes Staupitz, Constitutiones fratrum Eremitarum sancti Augustini ad
Apostolicorum privilegiorum formam pro reformation Alemanniae, ed. Wolfgang Gün-
ter, in Johann von Staupitz, Sämtliche Schriften. Abhandlungen, Predigten, Zeugnisse,
ed. Lothar Graf zu Dohna and Richard Wetzel, vol. 5, Spätmittelalter und Refor-
mation Neue Reihe 17 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2001), 195f; slightly altered trans. in
Erik Leeland Saak, High Way to Heaven: The Augustinian Platform Between Reform
and Reformation, 1292–1524 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 634f.
5. Cf. Martin Luther, D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe,
121 vols. ( Weimar: Böhlau, 1908– 2009) (hereafter WA [Weimarer Ausgabe]), 3:27f,
trans. in Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, 55 vols. (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Pub-
lishing, 1955–1986) ( hereafter LW ), 10:26 f. Cf. Saak, High Way to Heaven, 672,
which also discusses how Luther lifted up Augustine as a model in his early lec-
ture on Psalm 1.
6. Jordani de Saxonia ( Jordan of Quedlinburg), Liber Vitasfratrum, ed.
Rudolphus Arbesmann and Winfridus Hümpfner ( New York: Cosmopolitan,
1943), 3:IX– X, 350 f, trans. in Jordan of Saxony, The Life of the Brethren, trans.
Gerard Deighan ( Villanova, PA: Augustinian Press, 1993), 324 f.
7. Jordan of Quedlinburg, Liber Vitasfratrum, 3:IX– X, 350 f, trans. in Life
of the Brethren, 324 f.
8. Jordan of Quedlinburg, Liber Vitasfratrum, 3:XII, 363 ff, trans. in Life of
the Brethren, 339 ff.
9. Genesis 29:3 commented upon in WA 43:612 ff, trans. in LW 5:271 ff.
10. Below we will see that Luther’s earliest lectures on the Psalms, espe-
cially Psalm 101, which is central to the focus of this article, make the point
forcefully that Luther the Augustinian believed that God abandoned friars in
their pride in order to call them back to true faith in God. WA 4:131 f, trans. in
LW 11:280 ff.
11. Luther’s Treatise on Good Works (1520) in WA 6:236, trans. in LW 44:62;
WA 43:612 ff, trans. in LW 5:271 ff.
 Martin Luther \ 497

12. WA Tr 1: no. 495, trans. in LW 54:85; WA Tr 2: no. 1253; WA Tr 4: no.

5094; WA Tr 5: nos. 5428, 6077. Cf. Martin Brecht, Martin Luther: His Road to
Reformation 1483– 1521, trans. James L. Schaaf ( Minneapolis, MN: Fortress
Press, 1993), 65 f; and Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther
( New York: Penguin, 1995), 195 f.
13. More on this below, but this will be the same year he finished his im-
portant first lectures on the Psalms in which Luther first developed his story of
the beggar.
14. WA Tr 4: no. 4082.
15. WA Tr 1: 220f, trans. slightly altered in LW 54:85, in the spring of 1533.
16. WA 17:112; WA 41:695; WA 45:681, trans. in LW 24:241. Cf. Brecht,
Road to Reformation, 65 f.
17. Lectures on Genesis 32:12 (1535) in WA 44:82 f, trans. slightly altered
from LW 6:111. Cf. WA 43:284 ff, trans. in LW 4:209 ff; Genesis 24:15 in WA
43:326 ff, trans. in LW 4:267 f; Genesis 29:3 in WA 43:612 ff, trans. in LW 5:271
ff; Genesis 44:18 in WA 44:574 ff, trans. in LW 7:369 ff; WA 4:131 f, trans. in LW
11:280 ff.
18. WA Tr 1: 220 f, trans. slightly altered in LW 54:85.
19. Saak, High Way to Heaven, 630.
20. Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil, 286; Saak, High Way
to Heaven, 640 ff.
21. Saak, High Way to Heaven, 627.
22. WA Br 3:299, trans. in Saak, High Way to Heaven, 660.
23. WA 30, 3:530.
24. Luther’s Commentary on John 2:24 in WA 46:776ff, trans. in LW 22:267ff.
25. Cf. Luther’s Preface to the Complete Edition of Luther’s Latin Writings
1545 in WA 54:179– 87, trans. in LW 34:327– 38; Heiko Oberman, Harvest of
Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism ( New York: Backer
Academic, 2001); Adolar Zumkeller, Theology & History of the Augustinian School
in the Middle Ages ( Villanova, PA: Augustinian Press, 1996), 207 ff; David Gutier-
rez, The Augustinians from the Protestant Reformation to the Peace of Westphalia
1518–1648 ( Villanova, PA: Augustinian Historical Institute, 1979), 19– 66; Saak,
High Way to Heaven, 587– 680; Adolar Zumkeller, Martin Luther und sein Orden
( Rome: Institutum Historicum Ord. Erem. S. Augustini, 1962); Willigis Ecker-
man and Cornelius Petrus Mayer, eds., Studien über Augustinus, den Augustinis-
mus und den Augustinerordern. Festschrift P. Dr. theol. Dr. phil. Adolar Zumkeller
OSA zum 60 Geburtstag ( Würtzburg: Augustinus Verlag, 1975); Thomas F. Mar-
tin, Our Restless Heart: The Augustinian Tradition ( Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books,
2003), 120 ff.
26. Brecht, Road to Reformation, 107 ff; Oberman, Luther: Man Between God
and the Devil, 113 ff.
27. LW 10:ix.
 498 / Roy Hammerling

28. Cf. Queen Vashti in Ezekiel 1– 2; cf. Jordan of Quedlinburg, Liber Vitas-
fratrum, 292, trans. in Life of the Brethren, 278.
29. WA 4:131 f, trans. slightly altered from LW 11:280 ff. In Latin Luther
generally uses the word mendicus for beggar, but at times he also uses pauper; in
German he most often uses Bettler or armer Bettler.
30. Jordan of Quedlinburg, Liber Vitasfratrum, 3:XII, 363 ff, trans. in Life of
the Brethren, 339 ff.
31. WA 4:131 f and LW 11:280 ff.
32. WA Tr 3:349, trans. in LW 54:208; Anthony Lauterbach and Jerome
Well, No. 3479, talk about Luther’s use of Boccaccio; hence, if Luther’s story is
based on the Griselda story, perhaps Boccaccio is the most likely origin, but this
is speculation.
33. I am indebted to Barbara Newman and David Sprunger for their help
with these references. Petrarch, De Patientia Griseldis; Boccaccio, The Decameron,
the final story; Chaucer, “The Clerk’s Tale,” in The Canterbury Tales.
34. Helen Cooper, The Oxford Guide to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 187 ff.
35. For more, see WA 4:131 f and LW 11:280 ff and Luther’s early develop-
ment of the Theology of the Cross in his Lectures on Hebrews (1517–1518), WA
57 and LW 29.
36. Jordan, aka Jordan of Saxony, is not to be confused with the famous
Dominican, Jordan of Saxony, ca. 1190 –1237.
37. Jordan of Quedlinburg, Sermon 436A text and trans., slight alteration,
in Saak, High Way to Heaven, 401; Adolar Zumkeller, Erbsünde, Gnade, Rechtferti-
gung und Verdienst nach der Lehre der Erfurter Augustinertheologen des Spätmitte-
laters, Cassiciacum 34 ( Würtzburg: Augustinus Verlag, 1984): 289, 378. Jordan
also lived in Erfurt, where Luther joined the Augustinian Order.
38. Saak, High Way to Heaven, 410 ff, 642 has an excellent discussion of the
similarity of Luther and Jordan on this point. Jordan uses the phrase gratia gratis
data or a “grace gratuitously given,” an idea akin to Luther’s notion and lan-
guage of infused righteousness in LW 25:28 ff; LW 26:127 ff, 233 ff; LW 27:28 ff;
LW 31:101, 136; LW 32:229 ff; LW 34:167 f, 187 f; LW 44:280; LW 48:366. Luther
does use a similar phrase in WA 9:368 in a collection of sermons, i.e., spiritualia
gratis data. For more, see The Bondage of the Will 1525 WA 18:735 f, trans. in LW
33:218 f; A Sermon on the Three Kinds of Good Life for the Instruction of Consciences
1521 in WA 7:795 ff, trans. in LW 44:241 ff; A Treatise on the New Testament, i.e.,
The Holy Mass in 1520 WA 6:353 ff, trans. in LW 35:109; The Gospel for the Festival
of the Epiphany, Matthew 2:1–12 in 1522 WA 10, 1, trans. in LW 52:252.
39. WA 4:129ff, trans. in LW 11:280ff. Jordan of Quedlinburg, Liber Vitas-
fratrum 3:6, trans. in Lives of the Brethren, 316. Other Augustinian authors can be
pointed to in this regard as well. Cf. Eric L. Saak, High Way to Heaven, 10; Eric Le-
land Saak, “Quilibet Christianus: Saints in Society in the Sermons of Jordan of
 Martin Luther \ 499

Quedlinburg, OESA” in Models of Holiness in Medieval Sermons, ed. Beverly Mayne

Kienzle with Edith Wilks Dolnikowski, Rosemary Drage Hale, Darleen Pryds,
and Anne T. Thayer, Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Études du Moyen
Âge 5 (Louvain-la-Neue: Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Études Médi-
évales, 1996), 317– 38.
40. WA 6: 519 f, trans. in LW 36:46.
41. Cf. WA 7:55 f, trans. in LW 31:352 f.
42. WA 3:27 f, trans. in LW 10:26 f . Cf. Saak, High Way to Heaven, 672,
which also discusses how Luther lifted up Augustine as a model in his early lec-
ture on Psalm 1.
43. Earlier Luther had declared, in his On the Freedom of the Christian, that
the Blessed Mother was in fact the “pre-eminent example” of the Christian life.
Cf. WA 7:66, trans. in LW 31:368.
44. WA 7:561 f, trans. in LW 21:314 f, Luke 1:48 Commentary on the Mag-
nificat written in 1521.
45. WA 46:647 ff, trans. in LW 22:189 ff, Sermons on the Gospel of John 1:45.
46. WA 33:9 ff, trans. in LW 23:11 ff, Luther in his Sermons on the Gospel of
John 6:27.
47. Luther refers to Christ as a beggar in a number of places. E.g., WA
30:637 f, trans. in LW 23:391– 92, or his Sermons on the Gospel of John (8:30). Cf.
WA 46:649 ff, trans. in LW 22:128 f, Sermons on the Gospel of St. John 1:16; WA
3:201– 2; WA 45:690 ff, trans. in LW 24:251, Luther in his Sermon on the Gospel of
John 15:14. For Luther’s clearest statement about Christ the beggar, see WA
45:483 ff, trans. in LW 24:84 ff.
48. WA 46:680 f, trans. in LW 22:166 f.
49. WA 45:492 f, trans. in LW 24:35 f.
50. WA 42:493 ff, trans. in LW 2:330 ff.
51. The reader will remember that this text has been mentioned above in
relation to Jordan of Quedlinburg and Augustine.
52. WA 32:305 ff, trans. slightly altered in LW 21:13 ff.
53. WA 45:532 f, trans. in LW 24:78 f. Cf. Martin, Our Restless Heart, 67.
54. Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, Poverty and Capitalism in Pre-Industrial Eu-
rope (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities, 1979), 53– 96. Cf. Samuel Torvend, Luther
and the Hungry Poor: Gathered Fragments (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008).
55. Torvend, Luther and the Hungry Poor, 20.
56. Ibid., 23.
57. WA 43:2 ff, trans. in LW 3:180 f.
58. Torvend, Luther and the Hungry Poor, 23.
59. WA 43:2 ff, trans. in LW 3:180 f.
60. WA 6:36 – 60, trans. in LW 45:286 f. Cf. an extended discussion of this
in Torvend, Luther and the Hungry Poor, 107.
61. WA14:657 f, trans. in LW 9:147 f.
 500 / Roy Hammerling

62. WA14:657 f, trans. in LW 9:147 f.

63. Jordan of Quedlinburg, Liber Vitasfratrum, 2:13, trans. in Lives of the
Brethren, 172 ff.; Martin Brecht, Martin Luther: The Preservation of the Church,
vol. 3, 1532–1546 ( Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999), 375.
64. WA Tr 5:317 f, no. 5677, trans. in Oberman, Luther: Man Between God
and Devil, 166 and LW 54:476. Another, slightly different version of the note may
be found in WA Tr 5:168, no. 5468, trans. in Walther Von Loewenich, Martin
Luther: The Man and His Work (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1986), 383.
65. Brecht, Preservation of the Church, 375. Eric W. Gritsch, Martin—God’s
Court Jester: Luther in Retrospect ( Ramsey, NJ: Sigler Press, 1990), 87.
66. Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil, 166.
67. WA 45:483 ff, trans. slightly altered in LW 24:84 ff.
 P u b l i c a t i o n s o f J o h n Va n E n g e n

Books

Rupert of Deutz. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

Awarded: John Nicholas Brown Prize, Medieval Academy of America, 1987.
Devotio Moderna: Basic Writings. New York: Paulist Press, 1988.
Religion in the History of the Medieval West. Burlington, VT: Ashgate/ Variorum,
2004.
Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Modern Devotion and the World of the
Later Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
Awarded: The John Gilmary Shea Prize, American Catholic Historical So-
ciety, 2010; The Philip Schaff Prize, American Society of Church History,
2010; Otto Gruendler Prize, International Congress of Medieval Studies,
Kalamazoo, 2010; Haskins Medal, Medieval Academy of America, 2013.
The Writings of Alijt Bake (1413– 55), forthcoming.

Edited C ollec tions

Ed., The Past and Future of Medieval Studies. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1994.
Ed., Learning Institutionalized: Teaching in the Medieval University. Notre Dame,
IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000.
Ed., with Michael A. Signer. Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe. Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001.
Ed., Educating People of Faith: Exploring the History of Jewish and Christian Com-
munities. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2004.
Ed., with Thomas F. X. Noble. European Transformations: The Long Twelfth Cen-
tury. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012.

A rtic les

“Rupert von Deutz und das sogenannte Chronicon sancti Laurentii Leodiensis.”
Deutsches Archiv 35 (1979): 33– 81.

501
 502 / Publications of John Van Engen

“Theophilus Presbyter and Rupert of Deutz: The Manual Arts and Benedictine
Theology in the Early Twelfth Century.” Viator 11 (1980): 147– 63.
“Rupert of Deutz and William of Saint Thierry.” Revue Bénédictine 93 (1983):
327– 36.
“False Decretals,” “Benedictus Levita,” “Donation of Constantine,” and “Right of
Presentation.” In The Dictionary of the Middle Ages, edited by Joseph Strayer,
2.178– 79; 4.124 – 27, 257– 59; 10.117–18. New York: Scribner, 1983– 84.
“Observations on Gratian’s De Consecratione.” In Proceedings of the Sixth Inter-
national Congress of Medieval Canon Law, edited by Stephan Kuttner and
Kenneth Pennington, 309– 20. Monumenta iuris canonici Series C, Sub-
sidia 7. Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1985.
“The ‘Crisis of Cenobitism’ Reconsidered: Benedictine Monasticism in the
Years 1050 –1150.” Speculum 61 (1986): 269– 304.
“The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem.” American Histori-
cal Review 91 (1986): 519– 52.
“Rupert de Deutz.” In Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, 13.1126 – 33. Paris: G. Beau-
chesne et ses fils, 1986.
“Christianity and the University: The Medieval and Reformation Legacies.” In
Making Higher Education Christian, edited by Joel A. Carpenter and Ken-
neth W. Shipps, 19– 37. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1987.
“The Virtues, The Brothers, and the Schools: A Text from the Brothers of the
Common Life.” Revue Bénédictine 98 (1988): 178– 217.
“Images and Ideas: The Achievements of Gerhart B. Ladner, with a Bibliogra-
phy of his Published Works.” Viator 20 (1989): 85–115.
“Faith as a Concept of Order in Medieval Christendom.” In Belief in History, ed-
ited by Thomas Kselman, 19– 67. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1991.
“‘God is no Respecter of Persons’: Sacred Texts and Social Realities.” In Intellec-
tual Life in the Middle Ages: Studies for Margaret Gibson, edited by Leslie Smith
and Benedicta Ward, 243– 64. London: Hambledon Press, 1992.
“A Brabantine Perspective on the Origins of the Modern Devotion: The First
Book of Petrus Impens’ Compendium Decursus Temporum Monasterii Christifere
Bethleemitice Puerpere.” In Serta Devota in memoriam Guillelmi Lourdaux, Pars
Prior: Devotio Windeshemensis, 3– 78. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1992.
“Late Medieval Anticlericalism: The Case of the New Devout.” In Anticlerical-
ism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Peter Dykema and
Heiko Oberman, 19– 52. Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought
51. Leiden: Brill, 1993.
“Anticlericalism among the Lollards.” In ibid., 53– 63.
“An Afterword on Medieval Studies, or the Future of Abelard and Heloise.” In
The Past and Future of Medieval Studies, edited by John Van Engen, 401– 31.
Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994.
 Publications of John Van Engen \ 503

“Obituary: Gerhart Burian Ladner.” Catholic Historical Review 80 (1994): 415–18.

“The Church in the Fifteenth Century.” In Handbook of European History in the
Later Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation, edited by Thomas Brady Jr.,
Heiko Oberman, and James Tracy, 305– 30. Leiden: Brill, 1994.
“Sacred Sanctions for Lordship.” In Cultures of Power: Lordship, Status, and Process
in Twelfth-Century Europe, edited by Thomas N. Bisson, 203– 30. Philadel-
phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.
“Studying Scripture in the Early University.” In Neue Richtungen in der hoch- und
spätmittelalterlichen Exegese, edited by Robert Lerner, 17– 38. Schriften des
Historischen Kollegs, Kolloquien 32. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996.
“Obituary: Gerhart Burian Ladner.” Speculum 71 (1996): 802– 4.
“Christening the Romans.” Traditio 52 (1997): 1– 45.
“Letters, Schools, and Written Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries.”
In Dialektik und Rhetorik im frühen und hohen Mittelalter, edited by Johannes
Fried, 97–132. Schriften des historischen Kollegs, Kolloquien 27. Munich:
Oldenbourg, 1997.
Preface to Carthusian Spirituality: The Writings of Hugh of Balma and Guigo de
Ponte, by Dennis Martin, xv– xx. New York: Paulist Press, 1997.
“From Practical Theology to Divine Law: The Work and Mind of the Medieval
Canonists.” In Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Medieval Canon
Law, edited by Peter Landau and Joers Mueller, 874 – 96. Monumenta iuris
canonici C, Subsidia 10. Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1997.
“Mother and Teacher: Hildegard as Abbess.” In Voice of the Living Light, edited by
Barbara Newman, 30 – 51. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
“Religious Profession: From Liturgy to Law.” Viator 29 (1998): 323– 43.
“Privileging the Devout: A Text from the Brothers at Deventer.” In Roma, mag-
istra mundi. Itineraria culturae medievalis: Mélanges offerts au Père L.E. Boyle à
l’occasion de son 75e anniversaire, edited by Jacqueline Hammesse, 951– 63.
Louvain-la-Neuve: Fédération des Instituts d’Études Médiévales, 1998.
“Dominic and the Brothers: Vitae as Life-forming exempla in the Order of
Preachers.” In Christ among the Medieval Dominicans, edited by Kent Emery,
Jr. and Joseph Wawrykow, 7– 25. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1998.
“Managing the Common Life: The Brothers at Deventer and the Codex of the
Household ( The Hague, MS KB 70 H 75).” In Schriftlichkeit und Leben-
spraxis im Mittelalter, edited by Hagen Keller, Christel Meier, and Thomas
Scharff, 111– 69. Munich: W. Fink, 1999.
“Friar Johannes Nyder on Laypeople Living as Religious in the World.” In Vita
Religiosa im Mittelalter: Festschrift für Kaspar Elm zum 70. Geburtstag, edited
by Franz J. Felten, 583– 615. Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1999.
“The Work of Gerlach Peters (d. 1411), Spiritual Diarist and Letter-Writer, a
Mystic among the Devout.” Ons Geestlijke Erf 73 (1999): 150 – 77.
 504 / Publications of John Van Engen

“Letters and the Public persona of Hildegard of Bingen.” In Hildegard von Bingen
in ihrem historischen Umfeld, edited by Alfred Haverkamp, 375– 418. Mainz:
P. von Zabern, 2000.
“The Sayings of the Fathers: An Inside Look at the New Devout in Deventer.”
In Continuity and Change: The Harvest of Late Medieval and Reformation His-
tory. Essays Presented to Heiko A. Oberman on his 70th Birthday, edited by Rob-
ert J. Bast and Andrew Colin Gow, 279– 302. Leiden: Brill, 2000.
“Appendix: A Working Edition of the Dicta patrum.” In ibid., 303– 20.
“Introduction: Jews and Christians Together in Twelfth-Century Europe.” In
Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe, edited by Michael A. Signer
and John Van Engen, 1– 8. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press, 2001.
“Ralph of Flaix: The Book of Leviticus Interpreted as Christian Community.”
In ibid., 150 – 70.
“The Future of Medieval Church History.” Church History 71 (2002): 492– 523.
“Conversion and Conformity in the Early Fifteenth Century.” In Conversions Old
and New, edited by Anthony Grafton and Kenneth Mills, 30 – 65. Rochester:
University of Rochester Press, 2003.
“Devout Communities and Inquisitorial Orders: The Legal Defense of the New
Devout.” In Reform von unten: Gerhart Zerbolt von Zutphen und die Brüder
vom Gemeinsamen Leben, edited by Nikolaus Staubach, 44 –101. Frankfurt:
P. Lang, 2004.
“Epistolae fratrum: An Edition.” In ibid., 143– 61.
“Formative Religious Practices in Pre-Modern European Life.” In Educating Peo-
ple of Faith: Exploring the History of Jewish and Christian Communities, edited
by John Van Engen, 1– 26. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2004.
“Practice Beyond the Confines of the Medieval Parish.” In ibid., 150 – 77.
“The Voices of Women in Twelfth-Century Europe.” In Voices in Dialogue: Read-
ing Women in the Middle Ages, edited by Linda Olsen and Kathryn Kerby-
Fulton, 199– 212. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005.
“New Devotion in the Low Countries.” Ons geestelijk erf 77 (2003, appeared 2005):
235– 63.
“From Canons to Preachers: A Revolution in Medieval Governance.” In Do-
menico di Caleruega e la nascita dell’ordine dei Frati Predicatori: atti del XLI
Convego storico internazionale, 261– 95. Spoleto: Fondazione Centro italiano
di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 2005.
“Illicit Religion: The Case of Friar Matthew Grabow O.P.” In Law and the Illicit
in Medieval Society, edited by Ruth Mazo Karras, Joel Kaye, and E. Ann Mat-
ter, 103–16. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
“The Writings of Master Geert Grote of Deventer, Deacon (1340 – 84).” Ons
geestelijk erf 78 (2004, appeared 2008): 345– 68.
 Publications of John Van Engen \ 505

“Multiple Options: The World of the Fifteenth-Century Church.” Church His-

tory 77 (2008): 257– 84.
“Conclusion: Christendom c. 1100: On the Cusp of the Twelfth Century: Latin
Christendom and the Kingdoms of the Christened.” In Early Medieval Chris-
tianities, edited by Thomas Noble and Julia Smith, 625– 43. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008.
“Alijt Bake, Four Ways of the Cross.” In Late Medieval Mysticism of the Low Coun-
tries, edited by Rik van Neiuwenhove, Robert Faesen, and Helen Rolfson,
176 – 202. New York: Paulist Press, 2008.
“The Practices of Devotio Moderna.” In Medieval Christianity in Practice, edited by
Miri Rubin, 256 – 62. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.
“Wrestling with the Word: Rupert’s Quest for Exegetical Understanding.” In
Rupert von Deutz—Ein Denker zwischen den Zeiten, edited by Heinz Finger,
Harold Horst, and Rainer Klotz, 185– 99. Libelli rhenani 31. Cologne:
Köln Erzbischöfliche Diözesan- und Dombibliothek, 2009.
“Foreword: Michael Signer.” In Transforming Relations: Essay on Jews and Chris-
tians throughout History in Honor of Michael A. Signer, edited by Franklin T.
Harkins, xi– xix. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010.
“The Sister-books.” In Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition c. 1100 –c.
1500, edited by Alastair Minnis and Rosalynn Voaden, 105– 31. Turnhout:
Brepols, 2010.
“The Twelfth Century: Reading, Reason, and Revolt in a World of Custom.” In
European Transformations: The Long Twelfth Century, edited by Thomas F. X.
Noble and John Van Engen, 17– 44. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 2012.
“Letters, the Lettered Voice, and Public Culture in the Carolingian Era.” In
Scrivere e leggere nell’alto medio evo, 403– 25. Settimana di studi sull’alto
medioevo 59. Spoleto: Fondazione Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medio-
evo, 2012.
“Sabine G. MacCormack,” Speculum 88 (2013): 891– 93.
“Marguerite of Hainaut and the Medieval Low Countries.” In Marguerite Porete
et le “Miroir des simples âmes”: Perspectives historiques, philosophiques et littéraires,
edited by Sean Field, Robert Lerner, and Sylvain Piron, 25– 68. Paris: Vrin,
2013.
“Medieval Monks on Labor and Leisure.” In Faithful Narratives: Historians, Reli-
gion, and the Challenge of Objectivity in History, edited by Nina Caputo and
Andrea Sterk, 47– 62. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014.
“Christening, the Kingdom of the Carolingians, and European Humanity,” in
Rome and Religion in the Medieval World: Studies in Honor of Thomas F.X. Noble,
edited by Valerie L. Garver and Owen M. Phelan, 101– 28. Burlington, VT:
Ashgate, 2014.
 506 / Publications of John Van Engen

“Deventer and Zwolle.” In Regeneration: A Literary History of Europe, 1348–1418,

edited by David Wallace. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. (also at
http://www.english.upenn.edu /~dwallace/europe)
“The Religious Women of Liège at the Turn of the Thirteenth Century: Re-
cluses, Cistercian Nuns, Beguines?” In Medieval Liège at the Crossroads of Eu-
rope: Monastic Society and Culture, 1000 –1300, edited by Tjamke Snijders and
Steven Vanderputten. Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming.
 Contributors

Christine Caldwell Ames is a historian of medieval Europe with particular

interests in heresy and orthodoxy, interreligious relations, and the tax-
onomy of religion. Her articles have appeared in the American Historical
Review, History Compass, Heresis, and Comitatus, and her book Righteous
Persecution: Inquisition, Dominicans, and Christianity in the Middle Ages was
published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2009. She is an as-
sociate professor of history at the University of South Carolina.

Giles Constable is Professor emeritus of History at the Institute for Ad-

vanced Study, Princeton, NJ. He held positions at the University of Iowa
from 1955 to 1957 and at Harvard University from 1958 to 1985. He was
director of Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, from 1977 to 1984. He
has been a visiting professor at several universities and still serves on the
editorial boards of a number of periodicals and book series. He has writ-
ten and edited about twenty books and published over a hundred articles,
mostly in the area of medieval religious and monastic history.

William J. Courtenay, Ph.D. Harvard (1967), Hilldale and Charles

Homer Haskins Professor emeritus of History, University of Wiscon-
sin, is a specialist in medieval intellectual history. He is also a fellow of the
Medieval Academy of America, American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
Royal Historical Society, and the British Academy. His recent books in-
clude Parisian Scholars in the Early Fourteenth Century (Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1999), Rotuli Parisienses, 3 vols. ( Brill, 2002, 2004, 2013), and
Ockham and Ockhamism ( Brill, 2008). He is presently preparing a book
on relations between the University of Paris, the papacy, and the French
monarchy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

507
 508 / Contributors

Susan Einbinder is Professor of Judaic Studies and Comparative Literature

at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. She arrived in Storrs in 2012
after teaching for nineteen years at the Hebrew Union College in Cincin-
nati. She is the author of two books, Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and
Martyrdom from Medieval France (Princeton University Press, 1999) and
No Place of Rest: Jewish Literature, Expulsion and the Memory of Medieval
France (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). She is currently working
on a linked series of studies on medieval Jewish trauma and memory.

Dyan Elliott is Peter B. Ritzma Chair of the Humanities, Department

of History, Northwestern University. Her most recent book is The
Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious
Women, 200 – 1500 ( University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). She is cur-
rently working on the concept of scandal and its impact on the me-
dieval church.

Roy Hammerling is Professor of Religion at Concordia College, Moor-

head, MN. His publications include of A History of Prayer: The First to
the Fifteenth Century ( Brill, 2008) and The Lord’s Prayer in the History of
the Church: The Pearl of Great Price ( Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Besides
writing about Christian spirituality he also enjoys collaborating with his
sons on documentary film projects such as A Message from the East and
My Country, No More.

Daniel Hobbins is Associate Professor of History at the University of

Notre Dame. His book Authorship and Publicity before Print: Jean Gerson
and the Transformation of Late Medieval Learning appeared in 2009 from
the University of Pennsylvania Press. His research interests include au-
thorship, media, and the general cultural background to print. He is cur-
rently working on a history of the authorial colophon from 1100 to 1500.

William Chester Jordan is Dayton-Stockton Professor of History and

Chairman of the History Department at Princeton University. A Fellow
of the Medieval Academy of America, the American Philosophical Soci-
ety, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Professor Jordan is
the author of several books, including The French Monarchy and the Jews
 Contributors \ 509

from Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians ( University of Pennsylvania

Press, 1989) and, most recently, Men at the Center: Redemptive Governance
under Louis IX (Central European Press, 2012). Professor Jordan’s cur-
rent research focuses on French–English relations in the thirteenth and
early fourteenth century.

Ruth Mazo Karras is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota.

She has published numerous books and articles on medieval gender and
sexuality, most recently Unmarriages: Women, Men, and Sexual Unions in
Medieval Europe ( University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). She coedited
the Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe (2013). Her
current research concerns King David as a figure of masculinity across
Jewish and Christian cultures.

Rachel Koopmans is Associate Professor of History at York University in

Toronto. Her book, Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Col-
lecting in High Medieval England, was published by the University of
Pennsylvania Press in 2011. Her research interests focus on hagiogra-
phy, stained glass, and the religious culture of medieval England. She is
currently writing a book on the Thomas Becket “miracle windows” of
Canterbury Cathedral.

Jonathan R. Lyon is Associate Professor of Medieval History at the Uni-

versity of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Notre
Dame in 2005. His fields of specialization include family history and the
history of the medieval Holy Roman Empire. He is the author of Princely
Brothers and Sisters: The Sibling Bond in German Politics, 1100 –1250 (Cor-
nell University Press, 2013).

David C. Mengel, Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences

and Associate Professor of History at Xavier University, has published
articles on urban religious culture, prostitution, and maps of the Black
Death that have appeared in journals such as Speculum and Past and Pres-
ent. He is currently completing a book on religion, space, and power in
Prague during the reign of Charles IV (1346 –1378).
 510 / Contributors

Maureen C. Miller, University of California, Berkeley, is a historian of me-

dieval Europe with a particular interest in Italy. She earned her Ph.D. in
1989 from Harvard University, where she studied with the distinguished
social and economic historian David Herlihy. She has published three
monographs: The Formation of a Medieval Church: Ecclesiastical Change in
Verona, 950 –1150 (1993), The Bishop’s Palace: Architecture and Authority in
Medieval Italy (2000), and Clothing the Clergy: Virtue and Power in Medieval
Europe, c. 800 –1200 (2014), all with Cornell University Press.

James D. Mixson is an Associate Professor of History at the University of

Alabama. He is the author of Poverty’s Proprietors: Ownership and Mortal
Sin at the Origins of the Observant Movement (Brill, 2009). His current
projects include a translation of the seminal essays of Kaspar Elm, a hand-
book on the Observant Movement (coedited with Bert Roest), and a study
of the Franciscan Observant John of Capistrano.

R.I. Moore is Professor emeritus at the University of Newcastle. He has

taught as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago and UC
Berkeley and is a Corresponding Fellow of the Medieval Academy of
America. His books include The Formation of a Persecuting Society ( Uni-
versity of Vermont Press, 2007), The First European Revolution ( Black-
well, 2001) and The War on Heresy ( Belknap, 2012). He is series editor of
the Blackwell History of the World.

Marcela K. Perett is on the faculty at Bard College, Berlin. Her research in-
terests are centered around theological writing in late medieval Bohemia,
asking questions about the consequences of Latin theology becoming ver-
nacularized and about the role it played in the formation of distinct reli-
gious groups, particularly Hussites in Bohemia and Lollards in England.

Walter Simons is Professor of History at Dartmouth College. He studies

religious movements and their social context in the high and late Middle
Ages. His books include Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Me-
dieval Low Countries, 1200 –1565 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001)
and, as editor with Miri Rubin, The Cambridge History of Christianity,
vol. 4, Christianity in Western Europe, c. 1100 –c. 1500 (2009).
 Contributors \ 511

Lisa Wolverton, Professor of History at the University of Oregon, con-

centrates her research on the Czech Lands in the early and central Mid-
dle Ages. Her books include Hastening Toward Prague: Power and Society
in the Medieval Czech Lands ( University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), a
translation of Cosmas of Prague’s Chronicle of the Czechs (Catholic Uni-
versity of America Press, 2009), and Cosmas of Prague: Narrative, Classi-
cism, Politics (Catholic University of America Press, 2015). She is also
the author, with Ian F. McNeely, of Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexan-
dria to the Internet ( W. W. Norton, 2008).
 Index

Abbreviations t and f refer to table and figure, respectively.

Abelard, Peter, xi, 203, 210 –15, 218, Alexander III, pope, 13, 79n15, 360,
229n31, 229n34, 230n42, 379n6, 381n19
230n53, 231n54; and Heloise, Alexius, saint, 126, 130
237. See also Heloise Alfonso X of Castile, 253– 73 (ch. 10,
Abraham (Abram), biblical patriarch, appendix)
213, 264, 491 Algeciras, seige of, 253, 256, 261
Abraham, bishop of Freising, 150 Ambrose of Milan, 11
Ad abolendam, 62 Amman, Jost, 474 – 75, 475f
Adalbert ( Vojtěch), bishop of Prague, Ancrene Riwle, 239
32, 36, 38, 40, 41, 52n17, 54n44 Anno, bishop of Freising, 150
Adalgis of Benevento ( Duke), 145, Anselm, abbot of Lorsch, 157
147 Anselm, monk of Reading, 192t,
Adam, 142, 244; and Eve, 7, 203, 196n7
213–15 Anselm of Alessandria, 60, 70
Adam, abbot of Shrewsbury, 176 – 77, Anselm of Baggio. See Alexander II
182, 191t Anselm of Bec/Canterbury, xi, 177,
Ad nostrum, 332– 36, 344 181, 205, 238, 462
advocate (advocatus), 141– 67 (ch. 6) Anselm of Havelberg, 239
Aelred of Rievaulx, 238 Anthony of Padua, saint, 284
Alan of Lille, 203, 219– 25 anthropology, 75, 87, 92, 97– 99, 105,
Alan of Tewkesbury, 196n5 108
Albero, archbishop of Trier, 158, Anthusa, saint, 241
160 – 61. See also Gesta Alberonis Antichrist, 164n16, 436 – 73 (ch. 17,
Albi, France, 59, 62, 68 appendix)
Albigensian Crusade, 58, 63, 73, Ariald of Cucciago, 61
233n88, 284 Aristotle, 224 – 25, 269n16, 271, 399,
Albigensians (Albigenses), 59, 71, 425
233n88. See also Cathars Armleder persecution, 301– 2
Aldersbach, abbey, 447, 461 Arnoldists, 62
Alexander (the Great), 401 Arnold of Brescia, 72. See also
Alexander II, pope, 61 Arnoldists

512
 Index \ 513

Arnulf of Bavaria, 145, 147– 48 Benedict of Peterborough, 171– 76,

Arnulf of Lisieux, 196n9, 238 182, 187, 190t, 194t
Arthur, king, 215 Beno de Rapiza, 129– 33
Artisans’ Revolt, 299, 303, 305 Berengar II, king of Italy, 145– 47
asceticism, 8, 64, 126, 130, 205, 242, Berengar of Tours, 232n68
451, 457, 474 Bernardino of Siena, 405, 453
Attala, abbot of Bobbio, 243 Bernard of Clairvaux, xi, 59, 67,
Attila the Hun, 145, 147 180, 237– 39, 392, 394 – 96,
Augustine, monk of Reading, 461– 62
173– 74, 190t Bernard of Cluny, 244
Augustine of Hippo, 9, 11, 203– 6, Bernard Silvestris, 233n82
213–14, 217, 391– 92, 394, 403, Bernart de Caux, 75
462, 477– 78, 487; rule of, Berthold II of Zähringen, 145
477– 79, 481, 491 Berthold (of Hohenberg), advocate
Augustinian canons, 190, 192, 194, of Lorsch, 157
248n46 Berthold of Zwiefalten, 148, 159– 60
Augustinian Friars (Augustinian Besse, Guillaume, 70
Hermits), 337, 401, 464n19, Bianchi, 388, 393, 402, 409
476 – 85, 493– 95. See also Birgitta of Sweden, 436
mendicants Black Death ( plague), 294, 301– 2,
Avignon, 339, 343, 346, 375, 452 315, 391, 437
Blanche, daughter of Louis IX of
Babenbergs, 142 France, 256
Babylonian Captivity of the Church, 486 Blanche of Castile, mother of
Bake, Alijt, xii Louis IX of France, 284
Balderich, author of Gesta Alberonis, Boccaccio, 484
160 – 61 Boethius, 214
Baldwin, archbishop of Trier, 302– 3 Bogomils, 65, 67, 69, 223
baptism, 5, 19– 20, 26, 30, 36 – 37, Boleslav I, duke of Bohemia, 32
212, 218, 241 Boleslav II, duke of Bohemia,
Barabbas, 288 28– 32, 40
Barcilonai, 255, 264 Bonaventure, 392
Becket, Thomas, xii, 168– 201 (ch. 7) Boniface VIII, pope, 136n8, 359,
Beelzebub, 446 – 47, 456, 462, 472 364, 368
beghard, 331– 34, 344 Boniface IX, pope, 388
beguines, 331– 57 (ch. 13, appendix) Bonizo of Sutri, 132, 140n33
Benedetto di Nicolello da Gubbio, 400 Bonjohannes de Messana, 460
Benedict VIII, pope, 364 Bořivoj I, duke of Bohemia, 31
Benedict XII, pope, 371, 374 – 75. Borluut, Fulco, 342
See also Fournier, Jacques Božetěch, abbot of Sázava, 46
Benedict XIII, pope, 449, 451– 52 Braem, Henry ( Hendrik), 340 – 42,
Benedictines, xi, 31, 47– 48, 194 347
Benedict of Nursia, 46, 243, 462; Břetislav I, duke of Bohemia, 36, 46;
rule of, 29 decrees, 36 – 38
 514 / Index

Břetislav II, duke of Bohemia, 43, Cistercians, xi, 73– 74, 76, 82n48,
47, 49 143– 44, 162, 180, 234, 238, 311,
Břevnov, Bohemian monastery, 47, 447, 461
48– 49 Clare of Assisi, 284
Brothers of the Sack, 337. See also Clavis physicae, 219
mendicants Clement I, saint and pope, 126,
Buridan, Jean, 374 129– 30, 138n23, 140n33. See also
San Clemente, basilica
Caesarius of Heisterbach, 239 Clement III, pope, 124, 127– 28
Caiphas (Caiaphas), 286, 289 Clement V, pope, 332, 335, 338.
Camaldolese, 387 See also Clementinae
Cantelupe, Thomas de, 365 Clement VI, pope, 323n46, 373, 375
Cantigas de Santa Maria, 254, Clementinae (Clementine decrees),
261– 63, 265, 267n8, 272– 73 331– 57 (ch. 13, appendix)
Capito, Wolfgang, 481 Clericis laicos, 364
Carolingians, xii, 12, 16, 123, 126, Cluny (Cluniac), 74, 178, 180, 185,
131, 145, 147, 148– 49, 156 191– 92, 242, 244, 245n14,
Carthusians, 395. See also La 248n52. See also individuals by
Chartreuse; Denys the name
Carthusian Concordat of Worms, 134
Casus monasterii Petrishusensis, Confessions (Augustine of Hippo),
155– 56, 158. See also 9–10, 204, 206
Petershausen Conrad III, German king, 142, 148,
Cathars, 58– 86 (ch. 3), 118n71, 224, 152– 53
234n88 Conrad of Porto, 71
Catherine of Siena, xii, 388, 461 Constantine (Cyril). See Cyril
Cavalcanti, Aldobrandino, 392– 93, Constantine, Roman emperor, 128,
396 146
Charlemagne, 33, 55n48, 128, 146, Corbinelli, Angelo, 387
157 Corbridge, Thomas de, 373
Charles IV, emperor, 294 – 328 (ch. Cosmas of Prague, 27– 32, 35– 48, 50,
12) 309
Charles of Valois, count, 345 Cosmas the priest, 69
La Chartreuse, 240 Cotta, Landolf, 61
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 392, 484 Council of Basel, 391, 453
Christina, daughter of Haakon IV, Council of Constance, 389, 391, 393,
284 420, 426, 437, 443, 447– 49, 455,
Christina of Markyate, 240 457, 462
Christina Psalter, 280 – 93 (ch. 11) Council of Lyons II (Second Council
Chronica Boemorum. See Cosmas of of Lyons), 337, 362
Prague Council of Saint-Felix, 74
Chronicon Laureshamense, 156, 158. Council of Ten, 388
See also Lorsch Council of Toledo, 11
Cicero, 399, 401, 494 Council of Tours, 68
 Index \ 515

Council of Verona, 62 Dominic, saint, xii, 284, 452

Council of Vienne, 331– 35, 338 Dominicans, 351n26, 388– 89, 393,
Crescente fide, 32 396, 400 – 401, 405, 448– 49,
Crosiers with the Red Heart, 310 453, 460; as inquisitors, xii,
Crosiers with the Red Star, 326n87 59– 60, 62– 63, 69, 73, 88,
Crusade, 339; Albigensian, 58– 59, 114n27; tertiaries, 453. See
63, 71, 73, 233n88, 284; against also mendicants; and individuals
Hussites, 422; in Iberia, 261; by name
of Louis IX, 288; Second, 156, Dominici, Giovanni, 387– 418 (ch. 15)
239, 307 Dominic Loricatus, 242
crusaders, 61, 240, 422 Donatists, 62
Çuleyma (Solomon ben Isaac), 260 Dorothea of Montau, 460
Cum de quibusdam mulieribus, 333– 34, dreams, 202– 3, 206 – 8, 261– 62, 265,
336, 338– 39, 341– 42, 344, 272, 404 – 9
346 – 77 dualism, 59– 60, 62– 64, 67– 71, 73,
Cum ex eo, 359, 364 – 71, 373, 375– 76 76, 219– 20, 223– 24. See also
Cyril (Constantine), saint, 47, Bogomils; Manichees
139n29 Durkheim, Emile, 103
Cyril of Alexandria, saint, 460
Eberwin of Steinfeld, 67– 68, 74
Dādisho’, 242 Eckbert of Schönau, 76, 233n88, 238
d’Ailly, Pierre, 454 Eckhart, 396
Damian, Peter. See Peter Damian Eilward of Westoning, 184, 188,
Daniel, 258, 264 – 65, 407 190t, 191t
Dante, 212, 449 Ekkehard, bishop of Prague, 32
David, biblical king, 490 Eliduc, 215
De Incendio, 157 Enlightenment, 64, 87, 95, 102
Denis the Pseudo-Areopagite. See Ephraim, saint, 236
Dionysus the Pseudo-Areopagite Ermine of Reims, 408
Denys the Carthusian, 393 Eteriano, Hugh, 71
De ruina ecclesiae, 454 Étienne de Bourbon, 88– 89, 94 – 95,
Desiderius, 146 97, 99, 101, 104, 107– 8
Desiderius ( pope). See Victor III Étienne de Nérac, 339– 40
devil, 94 – 95, 97, 102, 205, 214, 224, Eucharist, 4, 20, 131, 133, 203,
390, 403– 8, 427– 28, 437, 447, 215–18, 225, 231n68, 419– 20,
456, 491– 92. See also Beelzebub; 422– 23, 425
Lucifer Eusebius, 146
Devotio Moderna, 397. See also Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 98
Modern Devout Eve. See Adam, and Eve
Diethard, abbot of Sázava, 47 Exsurge Domine, 486
Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite Exultet rolls, 131
( Denis the Pseudo-Areopagite
or Pseudo-Dionysius), 219, 241 Fadrique of Castile, 256
divorce, 9, 11, 14, 37 Felice da Montefalco, 88
 516 / Index

Ferdinand III, king of Castile, 260 Goliath, 222, 224

Fernando de la Cerda, 256 Good Werner persecution, 301
Ferrer, Vincent, 443, 448– 53 Grabow, Matthew, xii
Firefly, 387– 418 (ch. 15) Grandes Chroniques de France, 345
Foliot, Gilbert, bishop of London, Grandmontines (Order of
179 Grandmont), 239
folklore, 87, 92, 97, 99–100 Gratian, xii, 12–13, 406
Formicarius, 405 Greenfield, William, archbishop of
Fournier, Jacques, bishop of Pamiers, York, 366
88– 89. See also Benedict XII Gregorian reform, xi, 61, 67, 123
Franciscans, 80n31, 88, 242, 254, Gregory I, the Great, 128, 212, 392,
334, 339, 342, 346, 477. See also 442, 461
mendicants; Observants Gregory VII, 49– 50, 61, 123– 29,
Francis of Assisi, 242, 284 132– 33
Frederick I, Barbarossa, 142, 144, Gregory X, 362, 365
146, 153– 54 Gregory XI, 375
Frederick II, emperor, 298 Griselda, 484
Free Spirit, heresy of the, 66, 72, 334 Grosseteste, Robert, 359
Frutolf of Michelsberg, 146 – 47 Grote (Groote), Geert, xii, 331, 436
Gui, Bernard, 64, 88, 340
Gaillard de Pomiès, 88 Guibert of Nogent, 203–10, 212,
Gall, saint, 242 217–18, 225
Gandolfo, Francesco, 127 Guinefort, dog-saint, 88, 94, 99–101
Gebhard, bishop of Prague. See Gumpold of Mantua, 48
Jaromír/Gebhard Günther von Schwarzburg, 299
Gerard of Saint Albinus, 240 Guy, count of Flanders, 338, 344
Gerald of Wales, 216 –18
Gerhoh of Reichersberg, 243 Haakon IV, 284
Gerson, Jean, xii, 392– 93, 397, Hazzicha of Krauftal, 240
407– 8, 452, 461– 62, 465n35 Heloise, 14 –15, 232n72, 237
Gesta Alberonis, 158, 160 – 61 Henry, bishop of Freising, 151
Gesta Friderici, 142, 144 – 46, 148, Henry II, king of England, 172, 178,
153– 54, 162 191t, 195n2, 199n36, 232n73
ghosts, 44, 204, 207– 8, 440 – 47 Henry IV, emperor, 124, 133, 155
Giffard, Walter, bishop of Bath and Henry VII, emperor, 323n51
Wells, archbishop of York, 362 Henry VIII, king of England, 12
Gilbert of Merton, 240 Henry de Beaumont, bishop of
Gilbert of Sempringham, 197n13 Bayeux, 185– 86, 193t
Giles of Klemskerke, 342 Henry Jasomirgott, duke of Bavaria,
Giles of Repen, 335 145
Giovanni della Casa, 16 Henry of Friemar, 493
Giulio d’Assisi, 88 Henry of Langenstein, 392, 454
Glagolitic (script), 47 Henry of Lausanne, 84n63
Golden Bull of 1356, 298 Henry of Marcy, 237
 Index \ 517

Henry of Tegernsee, 167n69 Isaac Ibn Sahula, 269n16, 270n19,

Henry the Proud, duke of Bavaria, 271n29
159– 60 Isaac of Meiningen, 301
Herman, count-palatine of the Isaac of Scheßlitz, 313
Rhine, 160 – 61 Isidore of Seville, 146 – 47
Herman, Jewish convert, 243 Ivo of Chartres, 12
hermits, 237, 248n50, 437, 443, Ivo of Eglesheyl, 385n46
448– 49, 451, 454, 456 – 57.
See also Augustinian Friars James I, king of Aragon, 256
Hildebrand. See Gregory VII James of Vitry, 240
Hildegard of Bingen, xii, 197n11, 240 Jaromír, duke of Bohemia, 56n76
homosexuality, 220 Jaromír/Gebhard, bishop of Prague,
Honorius III, 361 43, 49
Honorius Augustodunensis, 219, Jean de Beaune, Dominican friar, 88
247n44, 462 Jean de Saint-Pierre, 75
Horace, 401 Jerome, saint, 9, 125, 391, 394
hospital, 179, 310, 335– 36, 399, 488 Jerome of Prague, 426
Hospitallers, 179, 337 Jesus (Christ), 9, 12–13, 19, 30,
Hostiensis, 17 21n12, 114n27, 131, 161, 179,
Hotot, Thomas de, 373 211–12, 218, 222– 23, 230n40,
Hugh Candidus, 126 – 27 235n106, 236 – 44, 285– 89, 355,
Hugh Eteriano, 71 397, 399, 404, 420 – 25, 437, 453,
Hugh of Saint-Victor, xi, 391– 92, 479 456, 477– 78, 481– 82, 485– 89,
humanism, 64, 101– 2, 108, 389– 92, 493– 95. See also Eucharist
394, 396 – 97, 402, 406, 409–10, Jews, xii-xiii, 5–11, 42, 85n71,
436 118n79, 222, 243, 253– 79 (ch.
Hume, David, 95– 98, 100 –103, 108 10, appendix), 280, 282, 285– 91,
Humiliati, 62 295– 317
Hus, Jan, 295, 420, 426. See also Joachimites, 345
Hussites Joan, countess of Flanders, 344
Húska, Martin ( Loquis), 421 Joan of Arc, 408, 461
Hussites, xii, 66, 295, 419– 35 (ch. 16) John, saint and evangelist, 223;
gospel of, 285– 86, 444,
Ibrahim ibn Ya’qub, 42 487– 88, 495
Innocent III, 61, 380n11, 442, 459, John XIII, pope, 52n13
461 John XXII, pope, 332, 335– 36,
inquisition, 58– 63, 69, 71, 73, 75– 76, 338– 40, 346, 353, 369– 70,
87–119 (ch. 4), 233n88, 333– 34, 372, 385n47, 386n56, 455
406. See also Dominicans, as John Chrysostom, 236
inquisitors John Climacus, 461
investiture, 30, 260; contest over, 49, John of Canterbury, 172, 181
124, 133– 34, 156 John of Elham, 372
Isaac ben Zadoq. See Zag de la John of Salisbury, 141, 147– 48,
Maleha 172, 181, 196n6, 197n16, 394
 518 / Index

John of Sanminiato, 387 Lothar II, emperor, 12

John of Strassburg, bishop, 364 Louis VI (the Fat), king of France,
John Scotus Eriugena, 219 141, 147– 48
John the Baptist, 209, 213, 494 Louis VII, king of France, 79n15
Jordan of Quedlinburg, 477, 483– 84, Louis VIII (the Lion), king of
487, 491, 493 France, 284, 290
Jordan of Saxony, 498n36 Louis IX, king of France, saint,
Joseph, 407 256, 281, 288, 345; Psalter of
Josephini, 62 Saint Louis, 281
Jovinian, 9 Lucifer, 222, 441, 446, 472
Judas, 286 – 87 Lucretia, 213
Judenregal, 298, 303– 4 Ludwig of Bavaria, 299
Judith, daughter of Charles the Bald, Ludwig of Brandenburg, 304
12 Luke, gospel of, 244n1, 285– 86,
Julian, emperor, 236 463n16, 487, 493
Julian of Norwich, 436 Lusanna of Florence, 16
Justinian, Roman emperor, 399– 400 Luther, Martin, 474 – 500 (ch. 18)
Lutheran pastoral concern, 108
Kániš, Peter, 421
Kramer, Heinrich, 405 magic, 43, 73, 87, 90, 103, 202– 3,
215–18, 225, 405, 407– 8, 410
Lanval, 215 Malatesta, Carlo, 393
Lateran III ( Third Lateran Council), Malleus Maleficiarum, 405
62, 360 – 61 Manfredi da Vercelli, 453
Lateran IV ( Fourth Lateran Manichees, 62, 69
Council), 223, 334, 359, 361 Marguerite Porete. See Porete,
Lechfeld, Battle of, 143 Marguerite
Leo I, pope, 16 Maria Macellaria, 129– 33
Leo IX, pope, 124, 126, 129, 133 Marie de France, 203, 215–18
Leo X, pope, 486 Marienwerder, Johannes, 459– 60
Leonor, daughter of Alfonso X of Margaret, countess of Flanders, 344
Castile, 256 Mark, gospel of, 285– 88
lepers, 183, 185– 86, 192t, 193t, 156 marriage, 4 – 24, 37– 38, 126, 130,
Liber Vitasfratrum. See Lives of the 205– 6, 208, 256, 345, 356,
Brethren 428, 486
Licet canon, 362– 65, 367, 370, 372, Marsigli, Luigi, 401
375 Martin V, pope, 449
Lives of the Brethren, 477, 493 Martin of Tours, 236
Lives of the Taborite Priests, 427 Mary, Virgin, 92, 206, 254, 259,
Lluís de Prades, bishop of Mallorca, 261– 63, 265, 272– 73, 284, 401,
447, 449, 451 406, 453, 484 – 85, 487; church
Lollards, 66, 402, 430n2 dedicated to, 31, 157, 300,
Lombard, Peter. See Peter Lombard 313–14. See also Cantigas de
Lorsch, monastery, 156 – 57 Santa Maria
 Index \ 519

Mary Magdalene, 287, 488 Nicholas I, pope, 16

Master of Arts, 358, 362, 369, 373, Nicholas de Clamanges, 454
383n30, 386n63, 420 Nicholas Magni of Jauer, 407– 8
Matilda, queen of England, 181 Nicholas of Cusa, 461
Matilda of Tuscany, 127 Nicolaitan heretics, 61
Matthew, gospel of, 236, 285– 87, Nider, John, 12, 405– 6, 408
463n13, 477, 490, 492, 498n38 Nikolaus von Dinkelsbühl, 462
Maxentius, 146 Nimrod, 158
Melk, monastery, 447, 457– 58, Nitker, bishop of Freising, 151
460 – 61, 468 Nominoë, Breton ruler, 145
mendicants, 242, 284, 334, 337, 344,
359, 392, 476, 478, 489– 91. See Observants, 388, 392, 400, 402– 3,
also Augustinian Friars; Brothers 405, 407–10, 436. See also
of the Sack; Dominicans; Dominicans; Franciscans
Franciscans; Observants Octavian, 401
Menocchio, 88, 101 Odilo, abbot of Cluny, saint, 248n51
Mepham, Simon de, archbishop of Odo, abbot of Cluny, saint, 236
Canterbury, 373 Odo, prior of Christ Church,
Merovingians, 12 Canterbury, 176 – 77, 182,
Methodius, 45, 47– 48. See also 190t –193t
Pseudo-Methodius Odoacer, 147
Michael of Regensburg, bishop, 31 Odo of Saint-Martin, Autun, 242
Milvian Bridge, Battle of the, 146 Olaf, saint, 284
miracles, xii, 92, 126, 129, 131, 168– 94, Old Church Slavonic (OCS), 47– 48.
203, 232n73, 239, 272, 398, 401, See also Slavonic liturgy
404 –10, 438, 440, 455, 457, 494 Oldřich, duke of Bohemia, 46, 54n44
missionaries, 26 – 28, 30, 33– 34, 45, Omne Bonum, 17
129, 334 On the Freedom of the Christian, 486
Mlada ( Maria), 29 ordeal, 22n23, 38– 39
Modern Devotion. See Devotio Ordinance of Melun, 290
Moderna Orléans, burning of heretics at, 64, 73
Modern Devout ( New Devout), xii, Orosius, 145
331, 395, 402 Ortlieb, 158– 60
Moneta of Cremona, 224 Ostrov, Bohemian monastery, 49
Montacute, Simon de, bishop of Otto I, count-palatine of Bavaria,
Worcester, 366 148, 151– 53
Montaillou, 88– 89, 98, 100 Otto I, emperor, 29– 30, 128
Monte Cassino, Italy, 127; Exultet of, Otto II, count-palatine of Bavaria,
131 148, 151– 54
Moses, 405 Otto II, emperor, 28, 30 – 31, 34
Mstiš, 42 Otto III, emperor, 30
Muslims ( Moors, Saracens), 21n3, Ottokar. See Přemysl Ottokar II
42, 240, 253, 255, 258, 261– 62, Ottonians, 26 – 28, 127
272– 73, 346 Otto of Freising, 141– 67 (ch. 6)
 520 / Index

Pachomius, saint, 237 Pippin, emperor, 157

parish, 18, 26, 119n81, 425, 436; Plato, 204, 210 –11, 219– 25
parish church, 16 –18, 311; parish Pontius ( Pons of Melgueil), abbot of
clergy, 91, 310, 358– 86 (ch. 14); Cluny, 245n14
parishioners, 184, 188, 399; Pontius Pilate, 288
parish tithes, 310, 377 Poor Lombards, 63
Pascal II, pope. See Rainerius Poor Men of Lyons, 63
Passagini, 62 Porete, Marguerite, xii, 333
Passavanti, Jacopo, 392– 93, 396 Premonstratensians (Order of
Patarenes ( Pataria), 61– 62, 67 Canons Regular of Prémontré),
Paul, saint, 212–14, 222, 403, 480, 74, 241
488, 490 Přemyslid dynasty, 27, 35, 39– 41, 44
Payne, Peter ( Peter English), 420, Přemysl Ottokar II, king of Bohemia,
423 298
Peace of God, 68 Příbram, John, 419– 35 (ch. 16)
Peche, Richard, bishop of Coventry, Prokop, 46 – 47
184 – 85, 187, 192t Protestantism, 64 – 65, 87, 96, 474
Pedro III, 256 Pseudo-Methodius, 438, 461
Pedro de Luna. See Benedict XIII Puiset, Hugh, bishop of Durham,
Peter, saint, 286, 445, 288 173, 183– 84, 187, 190t, 192t
Peter Abelard. See Abelard Pyro, saint, 209
Peter Damian ( Damiani), 126, 238,
394, 396 – 97 Quivil, Peter, bishop of Exeter, 365
Peter Isarn, 70
Peter Lombard, 12–13, 391 Rabanus Maurus, 236
Peter of Bruys, 74 Rainerius, cardinal priest of San
Peter of Celle, 172, 190t, 238– 39 Clemente, 126
Peter of Jouy, 180, 192t Ralph (Glaber), 178
Peter of Pontigny, 180, 182 Ralph (of Sully), abbot of Cluny, 178,
Peters, Gerlach, xii 192t
Petershausen, 155– 56 Ralph Niger, 240
Peter the Venerable, 73– 74, 76, Ralph of Flaix, xii
83n62, 163n4, 242, 464n18 Raymond, master of Hospitallers,
Pharailde of Ghent, saint, 341 Jerusalem, 179
Philip, brother of Robert of Raymond of Capua, 388
Flanders, 345 Raymond of Piacenza, 240
Philip V, king of France, 339 Regino of Prüm, 146, 147
Philip of Castile and León, 284 Remigio dei Girolami, 392
Philip of Harvengt, 241 renovatio imperii, 127
Pierleoni, 127 Richard of Saint-Vanne, 242
Pierre d’Ailly. See D’Ailly, Pierre Richard of Saint-Victor, 392
Pierre de la Palud, 346 Rintfleisch persecution, 301– 2, 308
Pierozzi, Antonio, 389 Robert of Arbrissel, 243
 Index \ 521

Robert of Betun, 243 Staupitz, Johannes, 481

Robert of Béthune, count of Flanders, Stephen, prior of Taunton
331– 57 (ch. 13, appendix) Stephen of Muret
Robert of Liège. See Rupert of Deutz Strengberger, Caspar, 461
Roger II, king of Sicily, 146 Stromer, Conrad and Ulrich, 312–14
Roscelinus, 211 Stromer, Ulman, 300, 312
Rupert of Deutz ( Robert), xi– xii, Studium generale, 359, 362, 366
157, 243 Suger, abbot of Saint-Denis, 141,
147, 162
Sacconi, Raniero, 62– 63 Sutton, Oliver, 365
Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Benedictine Swinfield, Richard de, 365
abbey, 17, 284 Sylvester I, pope, 128
Salian, 148, 155– 56 synagogue, 8, 255, 297– 98, 300, 308,
Salutati, Coluccio, 387– 89, 392– 97, 310, 313, 315
399, 401, 403– 4, 407, 409
Salvin Hours, 289 Tabor ( Taborites), 421– 25, 427– 29
San Clemente, basilica, 125– 40 Talmud, 8, 231n62
Sancho IV, king of Castile, 254, Templars, 66, 332, 337
256 – 58, 264 – 65 Tertullian, 9
Savonarola, 240 Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury,
Sázava, Benedictine monastery in 180 – 81, 192t
Bohemia, 46 – 50 Theoderic, Gothic king, 145, 147
Schlitpacher, Johannes, prior of Theophilus Presbyter, xii
Melk, 460 Thieddag, bishop of Prague, 30
Seilan, Pier, inquisitor, 75 Thietmar, bishop of Prague, 29– 30,
Seneca, 401 32, 34, 52n17
ser Braems, Elizabeth, 341 Thomas Aquinas, 66, 141, 228n22,
Severus, bishop of Prague, 36, 391– 94, 396, 425. See also
53n28 Thomist
Siete Partidas, 256 Thomas of Celano, 242
Sigebert of Gembloux, 128 Thomas of Citeaux, 237
Sigehard, patriarch of Aquileia, 156 Thomist, 389, 396, 402
Silvester of Lisieux, 174, 181, 190t Tiburtine Oracle, 438
Slavník, 41 tithes, 32– 34, 264, 310, 377
Slavníkids, 40 – 41 Todros Abulafia ( Todros ben Judah
Slavonic liturgy, 27, 45– 50. See also Halevi Abulafia), 254 – 71,
Old Church Slavonic; Prokop; 273– 79
Sázava Todros ben Joseph, 255, 261
Solomon, biblical king, 405 Trajan, Roman emperor, 212
Solomon ben Isaac. See Çuleyma Treaty of Pontoise, 339
Spitihněv II (Spytihněv), duke of troubadours, 58
Bohemia, 42, 46, 49– 50 Turbe, William, bishop of Norwich,
Staufen, 144, 148 174, 186
 522 / Index

Ulrich of Cluny, saint and abbot of Wibert of Ravenna. See Clement III
Zell, 250n70 Wickwane, William, archbishop of
universities: of Cambridge, 362, 368; York, 362, 365
and education of clergy, 358– 86 Wido of Ferrara, 128
(ch. 14); of Oxford, 362– 63, William, castellan of Saint-Omer,
368– 69, 372– 73, 377, 426; of 188
Paris, 362– 63, 368– 71, 373– 75, William II, count of Nevers, 240
377, 426; of Prague, 294 – 95, William VIII, count of Montpellier,
311, 317, 419– 26, 430; of 234n88
Wittenberg, 482 William Firmat, 243
William of Canterbury, 171– 76, 179,
Václav ( Wenceslas), 31– 32, 34, 37, 182, 185– 87, 190t–194t
40 – 41, 44; church of saints William of Champeaux, 210
Vitus and Václav, 29, 32, 41– 42; William of Gellone, 241
feast of, 41, 43; vitae of, 27, 32, William of Ghent, 340
40, 47– 48 William of Rouen, 185– 86
Valdès ( Peter Waldo), 63. See also William of Saint-Thierry, xii, 232n70
Waldenses William of Vercelli, 242
Vashti, biblical queen, 483– 84 William the Monk, 84n63
Vatican II (Second Vatican Council), Wittelsbachs, 142– 45, 148– 49,
65, 92 151– 55, 162, 299, 304, 312
Victor III, pope, 127– 28 Wolbero of Saint-Pantaleon, 239
Vincent, prior of Aggsbach, 460 Wolfgang, bishop of Regensburg,
Violante, queen of Castile, 254, 256, 28
260 Wyclif, John, 292, 419– 21, 423– 26,
Virgil, 399, 401, 494 429– 30, 436
Voltaire, 95
Vratislav, duke/king of Bohemia, 43, Yonec, 215–16
46, 49
Zag de la Maleha ( Yitzhaq or
Waldenses ( Waldensians), 59, 62– 64, Isaac ben Zadoq), 253– 79
66, 75 (ch. 10, appendix)
Welf V, 159 Zähringens, 145
Welf VI, 145, 160 Zell, Katharina, 15
Wenceslas IV, king of Bohemia Zengi, 156
297– 98, 311 Zwiefalten, 158– 59, 161
 “Christianity and Culture in the Middle Ages is a fitting tribute to one of America’s
leading medievalists by his former students and other distinguished colleagues in the
fields that Van Engen has investigated. The essays are wonderfully conceived and well
executed to show the wide-ranging influence Van Engen has had on the interpretation
of medieval Christianity and Judaism from the twelfth-century context of his early
work to the late medieval world of his recent studies. The volume has an unusual unity
and compelling narrative flow for a collection of essays by different authors.”
Paul Freedman • Chester D. Tripp Professor of History, Yale University

“Christianity and Culture in the Middle Ages: Essays to Honor John Van Engen
is a thrilling collection, both wide-ranging and informative. The contributions are
well structured, well argued, and comprehensive in bibliography and source
materials—a welcome volume to celebrate the work of John Van Engen.”
Anthony Lappin • National University of Ireland, Maynooth

“The editors of Christianity and Culture in the Middle Ages: Essays to Honor John
Van Engen have succeeded in producing a very fine volume. Most of the contributions
honor John Van Engen by referring in various ways to his work. A remarkably large
number are well written, original, thoughtful, and trenchant.”
Robert E. Lerner • Peter B. Ritzma Professor in the Humanities, Northwestern University

“Here is a collection as multifaceted as the scholar it honors. John Van Engen came to
prominence as a force for renewal in the study of medieval religious and intellectual
culture. How well he succeeded is written on every page by luminaries of his
generation to rising stars of the future, many his former students. Every medievalist
will find something of value here. Highly recommended.”
James Murray • the Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Contributors Christine Caldwell Ames, Giles Constable, William J. Courtenay,
Susan Einbinder, Dyan Elliott, Roy Hammerling, Daniel Hobbins, William Chester
Jordan, Ruth Mazo Karras, Rachel Koopmans, Jonathan R. Lyon, David C. Mengel,
Maureen C. Miller, James D. Mixson, R. I. Moore, Marcela K. Perett, Walter Simons,
Lisa Wolverton
David C. Mengel is an associate professor of history at Xavier University.
Lisa Wolverton is professor of history at the University of Oregon.

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, IN 46556 undpress.nd.edu
GALLERY
Figure 5.1. Rome, San Clemente, lower basilica, dado of the Miracle at Cherson fresco, ca. 1090–1100. Image courtesy of the Istituto Superiore per la
Conservazione ed il Restauro, Archivio Fotografico Documentazione Restauri, Roma.
Figure 5.2. Rome, San Clemente, lower basilica, Life of Saint Alexius fresco,
ca. 1090–1100. Image courtesy of the Istituto Superiore per la Conservazione
ed il Restauro, Archivio Fotografico Documentazione Restauri, Roma.
Figure 5.3. Rome, San Clemente, lower basilica, Miracle of Saint Clement’s Tomb
at Cherson fresco, ca. 1090–1100. Image courtesy of the Istituto Superiore per la
Conservazione ed il Restauro, Archivio Fotografico Documentazione Restauri,
Roma.
Figure 5.4. Rome, San Clemente, lower basilica, Mass of Saint Clement fresco,
ca. 1090–1100. Image courtesy of the Istituto Superiore per la Conservazione
ed il Restauro, Archivio Fotografico Documentazione Restauri, Roma.
Figure 5.5. Rome, San Clemente, lower basilica, Translation of Saint Clement’s
Relics fresco, ca. 1090–1100. Image courtesy of the Istituto Superiore per la Con-
servazione ed il Restauro, Archivio Fotografico Documentazione Restauri,
Roma.
Figure 11.1. Psalm 26, The Lord is my light / Dominus illuminatio mea, from
the Christina Psalter. Used by permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark.
Figure 11.2. Psalm 52, The fool said in his heart: There is no God / Dixit insip-
iens in corde suo non est deus, from the Christina Psalter. Used by permission of Det
Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark.
Figure 11.3. Psalm 68, Save me, O God / Salvum me fac deus, from the Christina
Psalter. Used by permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark.
Figure 11.4. Psalm 80, Sing out your joy / Exultate deo adiutori nostro, from the
Christina Psalter. Used by permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark.
Figure 11.5. Psalm 87, O Lord, the God of my salvation / Domine, Deus salutis,
from the Christina Psalter. Used by permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek,
Denmark.
Figure 11.6. Psalm 109, The Lord said to my Lord / Dixit dominus domino meo,
from the Christina Psalter. Used by permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek,
Denmark.
Figure 11.7. Annunciation and Visitation, from the Christina Psalter. Used by
permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark.
Figure 11.8. Jews plotting Jesus’s arrest and execution, from the Christina Psalter.
Used by permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark.
Figure 11.9. Women at the tomb and Noli me tangere, from the Christina Psalter.
Used by permission of Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Denmark.
Figure 11.10. Jesus Before Caiaphas, in the Salvin Hours. Image © British Li-
brary Board, Add. 48985.