History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person

By Columbia University Press

In this groundbreaking collection, twenty-one prominent medievalists discuss continuity and change in ideas of personhood and community and argue for the viability of the comic mode in the study and recovery of history. These scholars approach their sources not from a particular ideological viewpoint but with an understanding that all topics, questions, and explanations are viable. They draw on a variety of sources in Latin, Arabic, French, German, Middle English, and more, and employ a range of theories and methodologies, always keeping in mind that environments are inseparable from the making of the people who inhabit them and that these people are in part constituted by and understood in terms of their communities.

Essays feature close readings of both familiar and lesser known materials, offering provocative interpretations of John of Rupescissa's alchemy; the relationship between the living and the saintly dead in Bernard of Clairvaux's sermons; the nomenclature of heresy in the early eleventh century; the apocalyptic visions of Robert of Uzès; Machiavelli's De principatibus; the role of "demotic religiosity" in economic development; and the visions of Elizabeth of Schönau. Contributors write as historians of religion, art, literature, culture, and society, approaching their subjects through the particular and the singular rather than through the thematic and the theoretical. Playing with the wild possibilities of the historical fragments at their disposal, the scholars in this collection advance a new and exciting approach to writing medieval history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: May 22, 2007
• ISBN: 9780231508476

Book preview

HISTORY IN THE COMIC MODE

HISTORY IN THE COMIC MODE

MEDIEVAL COMMUNITIES AND THE MATTER OF PERSON

EDITED BY

Rachel Fulton

Bruce W. Holsinger

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York   Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2007 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-50847-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

History in the comic mode : medieval communities and the matter of person / edited by

Rachel Fulton and Bruce W. Holsinger.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-10: 0-231-13368-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-231-13368-5 (cloth) / 978-0-231-50847-6 (e-book)

1. Middle Ages. 2. Civilization, Medieval. 3. Individuality—Europe—History—To 1500. 4. Identity (Psychology)—Europe—History—To 1500. 5. Community life—Europe—History—To 1500. 6. Europe—Religious life and customs. 7. Religion and sociology—Europe—History—To 1500. 8. Body, Human—Social aspects—Europe—History—To 1500. 9. Soul—Social aspects—Europe—History—To 1500. 10. Europe—Social conditions—To 1492. I. Fulton, Rachel. II. Holsinger, Bruce W.

CB353.H575 2007

940.1—dc22

2006102676

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

For our teacher

Caroline Walker Bynum

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person

Bruce Holsinger and Rachel Fulton

PART I. SAINTS, VISIONARIES, AND THE MAKING OF HOLY PERSONS

1. Forgetting Hathumoda: The Afterlife of the First Abbess of Gandersheim

Frederick S. Paxton

2. If one member glories…: Community Between the Living and the Saintly Dead in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons for the Feast of All Saints

Anna Harrison

3. The Pope’s Shrunken Head: The Apocalyptic Visions of Robert of Uzès

Raymond Clemens

4. Thomas of Cantimpré and Female Sanctity

John Coakley

5. The Changing Fortunes of Angela of Foligno, Daughter, Mother, and Wife

Catherine M. Mooney

6. A Particular Light of Understanding: Margaret of Cortona, the Franciscans, and a Cortonese Cleric

Mary Harvey Doyno

PART II. COMMUNITY, CULTUS, AND SOCIETY

7. Fragments of Devotion: Charters and Canons in Aquitaine, 876–1050

Anna Trumbore Jones

8. Naming Names: The Nomenclature of Heresy in the Early Eleventh Century

Thomas Head

9. Economic Development and Demotic Religiosity

Richard Landes

10. Back-Biting and Self-Promotion: The Work of Merchants of the Cairo Geniza

Jessica Goldberg

11. John of Salisbury and the Civic Utility of Religion

Mark Silk

PART III. COGNITION, COMPOSITION, AND CONTAGION

12. Understanding Contagion: e Contaminating Effect of Another’s Sin

Susan R. Kramer

13. Calvin’s Smile

John Jeffries Martin

14. Why All the Fuss About the Mind? A Medievalist’s Perspective on Cognitive Theory

Anne L. Clark

15. Aspects of Blood Piety in a Late-Medieval English Manuscript: London, British Library MS Additional 37049

Marlene Villalobos Hennessy

16. Machiavelli, Trauma, and the Scandal of The Prince: An Essay in Speculative History

Alison K. Frazier

PART IV. THE MATTER OF PERSON

17. Low Country Ascetics and Oriental Luxury: Jacques de Vitry, Marie of Oignies, and the Treasures of Oignies

Sharon Farmer

18. Crystalline Wombs and Pregnant Hearts: The Exuberant Bodies of the Katharinenthal Visitation Group

Jacqueline E. Jung

19. Gluttony and the Anthropology of Pain in Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio

Manuele Gragnolati

20. Human Heaven: John of Rupescissa’s Alchemy at the End of the World

Leah DeVun

21. Magic, Bodies, University Masters, and the Invention of the Late Medieval Witch

Steven P. Marrone

Afterword: History in the Comic Mode

Rachel Fulton and Bruce Holsinger

Notes

Contributors

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

WE WOULD first like to thank our twenty-one contributors for the speed, efficiency, and care with which they wrote, rethought, and revised their essays for this volume. A project this large and complex requires enormous amounts of coordination, and we are deeply grateful to our colleagues for their promptness in meeting our deadlines, their thoughtfulness in responding to our many queries, and their collaborative spirit in helping us put together this book over a period of nearly three years. Steven Justice and Richard Kieckhefer considered our original proposal with great insight and rigor; their many suggestions and criticisms of both the proposal and, with a third anonymous reader, the full manuscript helped us reorganize the book and articulate its purposes much more clearly than we thought we could when we originally conceived it. Wendy Lochner at Columbia University Press has been a model of editorial wisdom during this process; we greatly appreciate her sensitivity to our own design for this book, as well as her foresight in insisting on the volume’s ultimate usefulness to others. The editors would also like to thank one another: Bruce thanks Rachel for her editorial brilliance, empathy, and moving vision of this book’s founding and final purpose; Rachel is grateful to Bruce for his critical perceptiveness, collegiality, and generosity, both intellectual and editorial, which made working together on this volume a genuine pleasure. The dedication of the volume reflects our greatest debt, to the teacher who showed us all the importance of community to the matter of person.

INTRODUCTION: MEDIEVAL COMMUNITIES AND THE MATTER OF PERSON

Bruce Holsinger and Rachel Fulton

SOME OF the most enduring questions inspiring the modern study of medieval European cultures have concerned the relationship between person and community. How did medieval people relate to their communities, and what shaped or determined the nature of this relationship at certain moments and in particular places? To what extent can the self in the Middle Ages be understood as an autonomous individual or subject independent of the pressures of community, institution, and locality—as a modern subject, as some might characterize this species of individualism? Conversely, did the pressures of collectivity and commonality in medieval culture most often disallow the emergence of such individualizing forms of self-consciousness? What exactly was an individual or a self in the Western Middle Ages—and what, for that matter, was a community? Where does the self end and the community begin?

It seems that each generation of medievalists has asked these questions on its own terms, and the sheer variety of the answers proposed over the last century and a half would suggest that future generations will continue to pose them. A thumbnail sketch of the relevant historiography and criticism would conventionally begin with Burckhardt and his notorious image of those corporate medieval selves whose unveiling would reveal the triumphant individualism of the Renaissance: In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness—that which was turned within as that which was turned without—lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category.¹

Many of the most influential medievalists of the twentieth century felt themselves compelled to respond, whether directly or not, to Burckhardt’s infantilizing vision of medieval collectivity (and its promotion of what one of our contributors, John Jeffries Martin, has elsewhere called the myths of Renaissance individualism).² Thus Marc Bloch, in the first volume of Feudal Society, identified as a mark of the intellectual renaissance of the second feudal age the rehabilitation of the individual, the growth of a more introspective habit of mind, and the emergence of a form of self-consciousness unknown to men and women of earlier centuries.³ Likewise, R. W. Southern’s The Making of the Middle Ages attributed an impulse towards individual expression and the emergence of the individual from his communal background to a massive cultural transition from epic to romance discernible in numerous forms of cultural expression and social formation.⁴ The 1970s saw an explosive interest in the nature of individual identity in the Middle Ages (and particularly during the so-called twelfth-century renaissance), as historians and literary critics turned to ethical philosophy, contemplative literature, spiritual autobiography, manuals of religious instruction, vernacular romance, and other medieval writings in a large-scale effort to understand the character of premodern individualism over and against the communal background, in Southern’s words, from which it emerged.⁵

Yet there has never been a clear consensus, let alone unanimity, among scholars of the Middle Ages regarding the relative historical weight to be granted the individual as opposed to the collectivity as the primary organizing category for medieval selfhood. A fascinating counterpoint to this whole discussion, in fact, comes from Jacob Burckhardt’s own generation, indeed from the very European intellectual milieu that gave us Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. Here, mirabile dictu, is John Stuart Mill, writing in the third chapter of On Liberty (1859), Of Individuality, as One of the Elements of Well-Being, about what he saw as a steady decline in individualism from the premodern era to his nineteenth-century present:

In ancient history, in the Middle Ages, and in a diminishing degree through the long transition from feudality to the present time, the individual was a power in himself; and if he had either great talents or a high social position, he was a considerable power. At present individuals are lost in the crowd. In politics it is almost a triviality to say that public opinion now rules the world. The only power deserving the name is that of masses, and of governments while they make themselves the organ of the tendencies and instincts of the masses.⁶

While Burckhardt envisioned the Renaissance as a cultural awakening from the communal darkness of the Middle Ages, Mill—writing just one year earlier—saw the same epoch as the hallmark of a fall from the heights of a powerful individualism shared by the classical and medieval eras. Imagine if this had become the rallying cry for twentieth-century medievalists invested in the character of premodern individualism rather than a neglected riposte to Burkhardt’s equally sweeping portrait of medieval commonality! Hamlet’s soliloquies might then be understood as a sign of the diminution rather than the triumph of the individual, and medieval studies might not have needed to spend so much time over the last century defending its historical subjects against Burckhardt’s charges of a stifling collectivity. For if we take seriously Mill’s confidence in the individual coherence of the ancient and medieval subject (and why should we take Mill’s historicism any less seriously than Burckhardt’s?), the individual in the Middle Ages would appear unassimilable to his or her modern counterpart. The medieval individual for Mill is just that: a medieval individual, not the progenitor of the modern, post Enlightenment subject.

Neither Burckhardt’s nor Mill’s trajectory, of course, is particularly subtle, and we are not suggesting that either should be taken as a model for how to write the history of person and community. At the same time, the comic apposition of these two conflicting nineteenth-century timelines of Western individualism has much to teach us about our own habits of periodization as they bear on the relationship between individual identity and communal affiliation: habits that may cause us to cherry-pick the aspects of individualism we cherish as modern while neglecting the considerable pressures against individual identity that suffuse the premodern cultures we study. We might recall, for example, the often heated debates in the study of the history of sexuality during the 1980s and early 1990s over the relationship between acts and identities. When John Boswell published in 1980 what he saw as a history of gay people in the Middle Ages, the book was blurbed enthusiastically by Michel Foucault, whose own aphoristic pronouncement in The History of Sexuality to the effect that The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species would seem to have rendered such a history incoherent.⁷ Yet the false opposition of essentialism and constructivism has yielded in recent years to a more nuanced understanding of the historical dynamic among sexuality, individual identity, and social constructs. Central to this rethinking of the acts/identities divide (by, for example, Carolyn Dinshaw and Judith Bennett) has been a recognition of the role of communities in the shaping of the sexual person, and an unapologetic emphasis on the provisional commonalities forged between the historian and her historical subjects.⁸

Yet it was also in 1980, at the end of a banner decade for the medieval individual, that Caroline Walker Bynum published an essay in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History that dissented from the long-standing conventional wisdom against Burckhardt’s view of the post-medieval origins of individualism (the revolt of the medievalists, as Wallace Ferguson had called it in a book cited by Bynum).⁹ The question Bynum asked here gave the essay its deliberately provocative title: Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual? Bynum’s answer was a polite but firm no, a response reflecting her skepticism regarding the spate of recent scholarship finding in the twelfth-century renaissance what often seemed to be taken as the origins of the modern individual. Rather, she suggested, the new forms of selfhood and self-consciousness discernible in the twelfth century should be seen in light of the burgeoning throughout Europe of new forms of communities during this period, the growth of new ways of thinking about group affiliation, spiritual models, and forms of exemplification.¹⁰ As she put it in this influential essay, "If the religious writing, the religious practice, and the religious orders of the twelfth century are characterized by a new concern for the ‘inner man,’ it is because of a new concern for the group, for types and examples, for the ‘outer man.’"¹¹

Bynum’s challenge to what she saw as a reductive emphasis on individualism at the expense of community has not gone unanswered, either in history or in other medievalist disciplines. David Wallace’s Chaucerian Polity, to take a relatively recent example from literary studies, examines the associational forms of late medieval polity in an effort to better understand some of the same forms and models of groupification that were at issue in the twelfth century: Medieval people, in short, experienced themselves as political subjects through the making and maintenance of associational forms. It may be that a coming to consciousness through such forms proves to be of more compelling interest … than an individualism that would define itself by setting itself against every such ‘general category.’¹² It is this setting against that of course most distinguishes what the Western tradition understands as the modern, post-Enlightenment individual from its premodern counterpart.

What Bynum and Wallace both are suggesting is that, while certain types of individualism, subjectivity, self-consciousness, and so on are undeniably perceptible in medieval culture, just as crucial to our understanding of these types must be the processes, institutions, associations, and roles that enable their emergence. Neither scholar advocates a return to Burckhardt, as if such a return were desirable or even possible; rather, what they are asking us to do is to recognize and, in some way, perhaps even embrace the collective and worldly constraints on individualism inherent to medieval social formations.

In this spirit, the essays collected here seek to sidestep the pitfalls of individualism by taking up the category of person, and in particular what we are calling the matter of person in relation to community: the forms of mediation, materiality, incarnation, representation, and transcendence that go into the making of the medieval human being in all its individual and collective complexity. To put it another way, while our contributors take it as a settled question that identity, individuality, subjectivity, self-consciousness, and so on were categories not unknown to medieval people, they suspend judgment on the usefulness of these terms for a more general comprehension of the period in favor of particularist inquiries into the mutually clarifying categories of person and community. The sorts of questions we wish to pose here, then, are not so much, to take an example we have already discussed, Did the twelfth century discover the individual?, but rather, How and why did certain persons (Elisabeth of Schönau, Robert of Uzès) emerge as remarkable or celebrated individuals in the historical record, and why were others (here, most strikingly, Hathumoda of Gandersheim) virtually forgotten, or at least historically effaced in a way their institutional contemporaries were not? What must happen in order for a person to become an individual, and how is this transformation (if indeed it is one) a function of the scant sources that allow us to perceive it? What are the boundaries of person at particular moments, and how are these boundaries imagined and negotiated in particular circumstances?

Individualism and individual identity, our contributors argue, represent only one way of looking at personhood: there are others, many of them not inevitably bound up in fractious questions about subjectivity, modernity, and so on. As we remark in our own contribution to this volume, to write a history of person and community in the comic mode is to write with the conviction that the truth that we seek about these categories is unavoidably human, that is, shaped at once by our potential as a species and by the stories that we live and tell, more prosaically, by our bodies, minds, and spirits in interaction with the material, cognitive, social, and spiritual environments in which we dwell. These environments are inseparable from the making of the persons that inhabit them, persons who are in part constituted by and understood in terms of the communities that grant them their existence, their identities, and, in some cases, their very survival in and as the historical record.

Of course, community, like person or individual, is by no means a self-evident or transparent category, whether for modern historians of culture or for medieval cultures themselves. As Miri Rubin has put it, Community is neither obvious nor natural, its boundaries are loose, and people in the present, as in the past, will use the term to describe and to construct worlds, to persuade, to include and to exclude.¹³ The term can be so vague in its usage as to be rendered nearly meaningless, and it is not unusual these days to see it employed in formulations of convenience that seem quite bizarre, if not alarming (the nuclear weapons community, for example). As we understand it here, the term community signals less a discrete or fixed form of human relationship than a multivalent collectivity of persons, whether the imagined community of the (pre-national) medieval Church or the brethren of a single rural abbey. Community encompasses much more than collective action or pure volunteerism, in Katherine French’s phrase, and yet communities themselves can possess world-making capacities that are often astonishing in their creativity and endurance.¹⁴ Sometimes, in fact, as Susan Kramer demonstrates in her contribution to this volume, medieval communities may become spiritually threatening for even their most trusted members, spreading the contagion of sin through the social body like a disease through a village. Communities may also serve as focal points for persons devoted to specific objects or texts, as exemplified by the many textual communities (to take Brian Stock’s influential phrase) organized around specific understandings of the written word shared by particular medieval groups.¹⁵ If, as Bynum has suggested, we human beings are ourselves shapes with stories, always changing but also always carrying traces of what we were before (see the afterword to this volume), these stories of person will in turn be shaped by the communities most invested in preserving and interpreting the traces they leave behind.

This volume, then, presents a pointillist history of person and community in the Middle Ages. All of us are writing primarily as historians of religion, art, literature, culture, or society, and our approach is through the particular and the singular rather than through the thematic or theoretical as such. And yet, such is the nature of the particular stories that we would tell about community and person that certain overarching narratives and themes necessarily emerge in these pages. Taken together, our fragments—about Elisabeth of Schönau’s visionary experience or Dante’s understanding of pain or devotional images of Christ’s Five Wounds or Thomas of Cantimpré’s ideas about female sanctity—themselves begin to tell a story of continuity and change in the development of medieval ideas about person, about the place of person in community, and about the role of the community in supporting and constraining such continuity and change.

The twenty-one essays that follow are organized according to four broad themes. The six collected in part I, Saints, Visionaries, and the Making of Holy Persons, engage most directly with the nature of the medieval relationship between individual and community, though here the individuals in question are by any measure remarkable for their distinctiveness from their surrounding communities. We open with the story of a woman who, by every standard of her day, should have become a saint but did not—though not, it should be noted, for lack of effort on her biographer’s part. What, Fred Paxton asks in his examination of Hathumoda of Gandersheim’s story, does it take to transform a person into a saint other than the loving memory of a biographer? Significantly, it is precisely failures such as these that make clear the importance not only of fact but also of fortune in the recognition and prestige that communities grant to the individuals who have lived and died in their midst. More generally, what did it mean to belong to the community of saints, that is, to the community of Christians? This is the question Anna Harrison takes up by way of a reading of Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons for the Feast of All Saints. Bernard’s answer, in short: suffering, not because the saints themselves were special in their suffering, but rather because they suffered by virtue of being human persons; sinfulness, because the saints themselves were sinners, worse even than most other Christians; and desire to enjoy the society and glory of the community of the saints as an exemplary model of transcendence. Yet the worldly religious communities of Western Europe, Ray Clemens demonstrates, could also engage in internal critiques of their own and others’ practices, often aided by the kind of densely metaphorical language found in the highly idiosyncratic writings of Robert of Uzès. Like Bernard of Clairvaux, Robert was a reformer, a thirteenth-century Dominican whose visionary energies were directed largely at addressing the failings of the contemporary papacy. In the cases of both these writers, however, the language of sanctity is inseparable from the language of community, and community in turn is unthinkable without the transformative metamorphosis of the human person into the saint.

Intentionally or not on the part of their formulators, such relationships almost inevitably raise problems of priority, whether, as with Robert, of cultivating the institution at the expense of the failed individual, or, as with Thomas of Cantimpré, the subject of John Coakley’s chapter, of acknowledging the powers peculiar to the sanctity of women without suggesting that they might overlap in any way with the activities specific to priests. The tense relationships between women, their spiritual mentors, biographers, and public (i.e., clerical and lay communities) are the subject of the final three essays in part I. Coakley reads the hagiographical works of Thomas of Cantimpré for what they can tell us about the potentialities and limits that Thomas would credit to and place on the example of spiritually active women. Catherine Mooney reads the changing picture of the persona of Angela of Foligno as daughter, mother, and wife through the tellings and retellings of Angela’s story from the fragments assembled in her Liber through its various medieval, early modern, and modern manuscripts, editions, and translations. Ironically, whereas Hathumoda has been almost completely forgotten by historians and Angela has become something of a cause célèbre, we in fact know more (or, at least, would seem to) about Hathumoda than we can ever know about Angela, including her name. In contrast, as Mary Harvey Doyno shows, we know almost too much about Margaret, who was (and is) the patron saint of the town of Cortona, despite the fact that she was neither an abbess, like Hathumoda, nor an ascetic, like Marie of Oignies, nor even, like Angela, a wife. Rather, Margaret of Cortona, the unmarried mother of an illegitimate son, had lived for nine years as a nobleman’s concubine, coming to Cortona only after her lover’s death had left her without support and protection. Doyno concentrates on Margaret’s efforts first to affiliate herself with the Franciscan community of Cortona and then to distance herself therefrom by moving to a new residence under the spiritual direction of the secular clergy of San Basilio high atop a hill of the city. At stake was not only Margaret’s status as a spiritual leader of her community, but also the question of Margaret’s transition from her former life of sin. Margaret, it seems, was both too pretty and too outspoken in her devotions to make it easy for the Franciscans to accept her as one of their own.

Part II of our volume, "Community, Cultus, and Society, opens with similar scenes of outspoken devotion, bound up in this case with complex claims for personal identity. As Anna Trumbore Jones shows, individuals and families made great efforts to ensure the relative spiritual status of the religious communities to which they made their bequests: if even the holiest of persons, like Hathumoda, could quickly be forgotten by the communities that they had served, how were donors to such communities to ensure that they themselves were not forgotten in the prayers of these communities, not to mention that the prayers would have the intended effect (the salvation of the donors’ souls)? Perhaps monks did not always provide the best insurance; canons, or so many of the donors in tenth-century Aquitaine seem to have assumed, might do the work just as well. The intimacy here between the performative reality of personal names and the lived reality of communal change can also be discerned in medieval understandings and practices of heresy. Thomas Head suggests that the naming of heretical sects by the Church, far from a simple practice of identification, became a powerfully ideological instrument for bishops and other ecclesiastical officials. Naming names in this way buttressed the Church’s own institutional self-confidence while affording its bureaucrats a particularly blunt way of consigning its perceived enemies to a past that was securely closed off from the present. There simply are no Manichees in Châlons," Wazo of Liège confidently avowed.

But what if the very model of society on which such communal foundations were built was at stake? Richard Landes argues that just such a rupture in thinking and, therefore, in economic as well as political and intellectual activity occurred over the course of the eleventh century. Commoners and vowed religious alike began to read the promises of the Scriptures to their communities and to themselves from a demotic rather than a hierarchical perspective, a reading that both made possible and was stimulated by the enthusiasm surrounding the Peace of God. Jessica Goldberg’s article enables us to see a moment in this economic transformation from outside the boundaries of Europe, in the patterns of gossip and back-biting about their rivals and fellows in the letters of the Jewish merchant-community of Fustat, commercial sister-city of Cairo. Like reputations for sanctity and attention to duty among ninth-and tenth-century monks, nuns, canons, and canonesses, so reputations for effort, knowledge, honor, and dignity among the eleventh-century merchants depended as much upon the report of the community as upon the individual persons involved, arguably because it was only in this way that the prayers and other services of the religious, like the services of the merchants to each other and to their business, could be assessed. Whether such desire had a civic, as opposed to a strictly spiritual, utility is the question that Mark Silk takes up in his reading of John of Salisbury’s Policraticus. Of particular interest to Silk here is John’s attempt to distinguish between the utility of the cultus exterior for maintaining the integrity of the community as a whole and that of the cultus interior for maintaining the integrity of the soul.

The third part of this volume, Cognition, Composition, and Contagion, begins by taking up a particularly alarming threat to the integrity of the community: sin, and the twelfth-century conviction that sin might spread from person to person throughout a community like an infectious disease. Susan Kramer demonstrates how this metaphor of contamination is best understood in the context of medieval medical theory, whereby the health of the physical person, and so likewise the health of the community, could be conceptualized as a problem of balance between a body’s humors and the elemental or social environment. This balance could be disrupted by an intemperate will as well as by an improper mixing of the physical elements, a view that posits the human person as always and everywhere a kind of existential threat to the community. In a very different vein, John Martin shows how Calvin’s rejection of the identity of the saints with their bodily relics may be best understood in the context of Andreas Vesalius’s emphasis on the composite structure of the body. Fragments were no longer enough: individual bodies, like individual texts, were to be viewed with respect to their structure as well as in context; wholeness was to be sought for not in the shared experience of those who suffer but rather in the shared faith of those who can apprehend the reality of God through the study of God’s Word.

Anne Clark takes up the question of balance from a slightly different perspective. Drawing on the Benedictine nun Elisabeth of Schönau’s account of her visions, Clark argues that current theorizing about embodiedness and cognition as applied to questions of the formation and transmission of religious experience fails to account for the full complexity of religious belief and practice. Marlene Hennessy shows how the Carthusian use of such frightening images as bleeding trees and the name of Jesus become bloody flesh enabled the very mnemonic fixation of devotion to the Incarnation that certain current cognitive theories of religiosity (such as those examined by Clark) would associate primarily with ritual; texts become visions in a Carthusian miscellany just as the bodies of the faithful may become texts inscribed by the practices of their devotion. Alison Frazier would challenge us to recognize body as instrumental in effecting not only changes in the way in which persons view their relationship to the physical world, but also in the way in which we theorize about community and society, by asking us to read Niccolò Macchiavelli’s On Principalities through the lens of his torture as a prisoner of the Medici. However much such traumatic experiences would encourage us to try, we cannot imagine ourselves as fully human without our bodies. The question is whether we are our bodies only in their wholeness (and healthiness) or also in their parts.

The book’s fourth and final part, The Matter of Person, takes up the issue of materiality and its bearing on the making of particular kinds or styles of person: the ascetic, the virgin, the sinner, the martyr, the witch. Sharon Farmer pushes the question of the knowability of the past from the visionary to the material by examining the context of the gemstones used by the goldsmith Hugh of Oignies to ornament the reliquaries containing bodily fragments of his community’s heroine, Marie. As Farmer argues, these stones point not only to the purity and incorruptibility of the resurrected body Marie’s asceticism was intended to achieve, but also eastward, to the sources of the gemstones in India. If sin, as Susan Kramer argues in her chapter, might spread like a disease, so the gemstones of paradise—the bodies of the saints, the jewels of the East—offered promise of a cure, not only for the individual person, but also for the Christian community as a whole. Such healing had, of course, already at least once in human history been realized, or so the crystalline wombs of Mary and Elizabeth in the thirteenth-century sculpture from the Dominican convent of Katharinenthal discussed by Jacqueline Jung suggest. Here once again visibility and materiality converge in an image of the body made transparent to the effects of the soul.

Dante Alighieri is, of course, one of the great masters of such imagery, as Manuele Gragnolati demonstrates in his reading of the personalized relationship in the Divine Comedy among gluttony, embodiment, and the purgatorial experience and interpretation of both physical and spiritual pain. Medical theory, material metaphors for spiritual transformations, experiences of visions, and hopes for the incorruptibility of the body at the end of time come together in Leah DeVun’s reading of John of Rupescissa’s theories of the quintessence and the postapocalyptic millennium in which the community of martyrs at the last battle would rise again to reign corporeally with Christ for one thousand years, until the advent of Gog near the end of the world. Finally, Steven Marrone takes up the problem of how practices hitherto taken as real only in texts (the night-flights and sabbaths of witches) came to be argued for—and prosecuted—as real in fact on the basis of an elite (i.e., university-educated) insistence on the privileging of the material in explanations of material and spiritual change. If witches or ritual magicians thought of themselves as cavorting with demons, was it not then likely that they actually did so, and in the body, as would ultimately be required for effective action, not merely in the mind?

The final chapter in the volume, History in the Comic Mode, takes up some of these questions from the perspective of the authors themselves, as a manifesto and tribute to the way in which communities of scholars come together under the influence of a particular teacher—in our case, Caroline Walker Bynum. Ironically, as much as we, as modern scholars, would celebrate the matter of person in the lives of the medieval people whom we have made the subjects of our professional study, so contemporary conventions of intellectual formation would encourage us to efface the effects of particular individuals—as opposed to books or theories—on our own thinking. This we have refused to do. If we, the contributors to this volume, have had the courage to write in defense of the medieval past in the way that we have, it is, for all of us, in large part thanks to the example of our teacher. Here in this final section, we, the editors of this book, attempt to explain why.

PART I

   SAINTS, VISIONARIES, AND   

THE MAKING OF HOLY PERSONS

1

FORGETTING HATHUMODA

THE AFTERLIFE OF THE FIRST ABBESS OF GANDERSHEIM

Frederick S. Paxton

HATHUMODA, FIRST abbess of Gandersheim, could have had a glorious afterlife. Agius, a monk-priest of the nearby abbey of Corvey—her confidant and perhaps a blood relative—was with her when she died.¹ Afterward, so he tells us, Agius consoled her bereaved sisters at Gandersheim, speaking movingly of Hathumoda’s long and painful passing and the significance of her life and death. Over the next two years he transformed those conversations into a consolatory dialogue in verse. At the same time, so that they, who could no longer hold her or gaze at her in the flesh, might at least possess a kind of image of her in life and think to have her in her acts and deeds, he composed a prose narrative that has been called one of the most beautiful saints’ lives of the Middle Ages.²

Hathumoda died and was buried at Brunshausen, a family foundation of Benedictine monks associated with the monastery of Fulda, where she and her community lived while a cloister and church were being constructed for them nearby at Gandersheim.³The bones of her father, Count Liudolf of Saxony, rested there too. Her remains might have been included in the ceremonial translation of relics from Brunshausen to Gandersheim for the consecration of the abbey church in 881, if only secondarily to the church’s major relics.⁴ But even a separate translatio would have bathed her in some of the light of sanctity associated with such events at that time and place.⁵ Moreover, for the next thirty-eight years, Hathumoda’s younger sisters, Gerberga and Christina, along with their mother, Oda, tended her grave in the great church. Thus, within a few years of Hathumoda’s death, Agius had provided a literary record of her sanctity and a liturgical community of aristocratic women, established and led by her own family, had dedicated themselves to her memory.⁶

And that is not all, for both Hathumoda’s family and her institution had brilliant futures before them. When her oldest brother, Brun, died in 880, nobly fighting the Danes, their brother Otto succeeded to the title of duke of Saxony. Otto’s son Henry became king of the East Franks in 919, the year his aunt Christina died at Gandersheim. Henry’s son, Otto the Great, was crowned emperor in 962, a title that passed to both his son Otto II and his grandson Otto III. Henry’s wife, Mathilda, who died in 969, was recognized as a saint almost immediately after her death; and Otto’s wife, Adelheid (d. 999), was canonized in the eleventh century.⁷ Moreover, as a Familienkloster of the Ottonian house and its Liudolfing ancestors, Gandersheim became one of the central institutions of the German empire. In the second half of the tenth century, its school produced the famous poet, dramatist, and historian Hrotsvit, the most accomplished writer of the age; and its abbesses minted coins, held court, supplied troops to the emperor, and had a vote in the imperial diet.⁸ Hathumoda’s successors at Gandersheim and her royal relatives had good reasons to invest in her memory, and in the memory of her sanctity.⁹

In spite of all this, though, Hathumoda did not become a saint.¹⁰ She had no feast day. No prayers to her survive. Her name appears in no liturgical calendars or litanies; no altar was ever dedicated to her; and no miracles are associated with her tomb. Most of what we know of her comes from Agius, and we would not know even that if Andreas Lang, abbot of St. Michael’s on the Mountain in Bamberg (1483–1502), had not copied the Vita and Dialogus from an earlier manuscript, which is now lost. No others survive.¹¹ The preservation of the second most important source on her, a poem on the origins of Gandersheim by Hrotsvit, is just as fortuitous. In 1531 another monk, Heinrich Bodo, borrowed a manuscript from Gandersheim that looked, in his words, as if it had been gathering dust for over six centuries.¹²After copying Hrotsvit’s On the Origins of Gandersheim Abbey, Bodo apparently never returned the manuscript, and it too disappeared.¹³

Hrotsvit must have read Agius. Nevertheless, Hathumoda plays only a minor role in her story of Gandersheim’s beginnings and the poet gives no indication that she, or anyone else, regarded her as a saint.¹⁴ Furthermore, while the Gandersheim necrology preserved Hathumoda’s memory until the suppression of the house in 1810, and her name appears here and there in sources from a few nearby foundations, she seems to have been otherwise forgotten.¹⁵ Before the death of Henry I, her name was added to the Confraternity Book of St. Gall, along with those of the rest of her family. Less than a century later, it had disappeared from the memorials of the Ottonians.¹⁶ The accession of Hathumoda’s nephew to the German throne and her grandnephew Otto’s coronation as emperor, along with the fame of Corvey and Gandersheim (not to mention the products of their scriptoria), could have catapulted her into the ranks of medieval Christian saints. In spite of Agius’s best efforts, though, and even among her father’s descendants and her own spiritual kin, there apparently became little room for, or any point in, promoting the memory of the first abbess of Gandersheim.

What happened? Why did Hathumoda’s familial and spiritual descendants all but forget her? Why did the combined effect of Agius’ claims for her sanctity and the stunning careers of her family and foundation fail to guarantee that she would live on, if not as one’s of God’s chosen, dispensing his power to comfort the living and the dead, then at least as an important figure in Ottonian family history? My answers to these questions will be provisional, given the nature of the evidence, but thanks to the antiquarian interests of a couple of early modern monks, it is possible to track Hathumoda’s afterlife, in the memories of her descendants, for more than a century after her death. Memory and sanctity are fluid. Because they are artifacts of imagination as much as of social life, they are peculiarly open to reinterpretation and reconstruction, especially at times of crisis or of familial, institutional, and social change. As such they can be crafted and recrafted to fit the changing needs of those who do the remembering. In Hathumoda’s case, the key to how she was represented and remembered, and why, ultimately, she was virtually forgotten, appears to lie in the complex interplay between her two families—spiritual and sanguineal—as their fortunes rose and fell over the course of the tenth century.

From its inception Gandersheim was part of a web of interests that grew and thickened over time. It owed its existence to the Liudolfings, of course, and the family expected that debt to be paid. But, as a religious institution, it was also drawn into the orbit of local monastic familiae, like the monks of Corvey and of Fulda, who both had long-standing ties to the Liudolfings. Then there were the bishops of Hildesheim, in whose diocese Gandersheim lay. Moreover, as the family of the founders grew and changed, so did its relationship to the house. For the male descendants of Liudolf not only acquired more and more power, they also acquired wives, who brought new kin into the family and produced new bloodlines. They also established new Familienklöster, putting pressure on older foundations to keep up with the times, and presenting new candidates for sanctity. Still, things could have gone either way. Agius’s claims for Hathumoda could have been used to support any number of these competing interests, and sometimes they were. But somehow they did not survive the process. We will return to all of these issues, but for the moment let’s look more closely at what Agius had to say about the sanctity of the first abbess of Gandersheim.

Even as a child, according to Agius, Hathumoda had refused the wealth and comfort due someone from a family as illustrious as her own. At six, she took the veil at Herford, a Benedictine convent that may have been presided over by her maternal grandmother, Adala, and was closely affiliated with Corvey.¹⁷ At the age of twelve, Hathumoda’s parents made her the spiritual mother of a community she would lead for the next twenty-two years. As abbess, Hathumoda made her rule strict. No one ate with relatives or guests, or even spoke to them without permission. They could not go out (as many cloistered women did) to visit family or the convent’s properties. They slept together, prayed together at the canonical hours, and left together to do whatever work had to be done. They were not allowed to have servants or private cells outside the cloister. They were so separated from men that not even priests entered their cloister unless illness required it.¹⁸

Just as St. Benedict had counseled, Abbess Hathumoda sought to be loved rather than feared, teaching by example rather than through discipline and compulsion.¹⁹ Just like St. Martin of Tours, she was never angry or upset, and never laughed indecorously or too much.²⁰ She was also a diligent student and teacher of scripture, whose caution, good sense, and intellect were almost second to none. In the months before her death, many of the girls and women were sick. At that point in his narrative, Agius protests that he cannot describe with how much care she stood by them, with how much solicitude she hurried from one bed to another, and what wonderful and diverse things she tried to alleviate their bodily suffering; it was, he says, as if this holy woman, loved by God, sensed that her own time on earth was short.²¹

The other women may have sensed it too. Several of the older ones dreamed of the church bell falling, others that the reliquary of saints Anastasius and Innocent had collapsed and disintegrated.²² Hathumoda herself dreamed that she and her sisters were bound to the spokes of an enormous millwheel. Although she was thrown onto the riverbank instead of into the water rushing beneath it, she awoke trembling all over. Another time it seemed that she was taken up into the air and could see all the buildings of the monastery with their roofs off .²³ The sight of a large cleft in the earth inside the church troubled her, but she was calmed when a voice told her that it was to be her future home. She then heard a multitude chanting a psalm, and when they came to the verse This is my rest for ever and ever, here I will live, because I chose it, she awoke, with the words still in her mouth.²⁴

Hathumoda eventually fell ill herself. But even then she kept looking after the others, until finally, collapsing into bed, she experienced another dream vision. She saw a large field of flowers, which she took to be the youngest of her virgins. While she was admiring their beauty, a fire broke out, threatening to consume them. She called out to St. Martin for aid. Without delay the saint appeared, stilling the flames and saving the girls. Later, as Agius specifically attests, Martin visited her while she was awake. No one else could see him, but they watched her eyes follow the saint’s movements around the room.²⁵

As the fevers came and went, Hathumoda had more and more visions, difficult for those present to understand, but clearly of future events, even of Judgment Day. Many were joyous, but not all, and sometimes she trembled with fear and wondered whether even the saints could help her. As the end drew near, she commended herself into Agius’ hands, and to all the saints whose relics rested in his monastery. She also prophesied (rightly, as he would later learn) that Agius’ brothers at Corvey would be upset with him for being away so long that day.²⁶ The bishop of Hildesheim performed the last rites. The dying woman held a crucifix to her lips while doing her best to murmur a few words of the psalms being chanted around her. During the penultimate verse of psalm 40, thou hast received me because of my innocence, and established me in thy presence for ever, she breathed her last.²⁷

Agius reports with wonder that, when Hathumoda’s body was placed in the room where it was to be washed and prepared for burial, her eyes opened and her lips moved as if to speak to the attendants. During the public funeral, Hathumoda’s mother, Oda, kept her composure, but she wept bitterly when alone. But there was no reason to weep, wrote Agius, since Hathumoda lived on, in spirit, in her holy life, in her irrepressible conversation, in her exceptional habits, and in her perfect example. Nor ought the women to worry about the length and difficulty of her death, for that only purged whatever stain of sin might have been upon her, so that now she could be counted among the 144,000 elect before the throne of God.²⁸

So the Life. In the Dialogue, Agius addresses the grief of Hathumoda’s sisters at Gandersheim at more length and intensifies his claims for Hathumoda’s sanctity. His consolations, in fact, depend on them.²⁹ At the very outset of the poem, he refers to her as sancta abbatissa.³⁰ When the women complain that she died too young, Agius argues first that everyone, even the saints, must die, cataloguing a long list of biblical figures, male and female, from both the Old and New Testaments, as examples. Then he asserts that, rather than dying prematurely, Hathumoda was at the perfect age. Just like Christ, she had completed her thirty-third year of life—the age that everyone will be in paradise.³¹ The women respond that they still cannot overcome their sense of loss and abandonment. Do not worry, writes Agius, Hathumoda’s mother, Oda, is still alive, and her sister is married to the king, so they have earthly support.³² Most importantly, though, Hathumoda has joined God in heaven, from where she will watch over them.³³ This finally convinces the women to end their grieving. They turn to Hathumoda for help, praying, You have already rejoiced over the conquered enemy with the Lord.… Aid us, dear one, through your worthy merits, and then bid Agius adieu.³⁴ In his closing response, Agius promises first to pray for them and then urges them to pray for all of the family’s dead, in particular Liudolf, the father of them all. Agius tells them of a dream Liudolf had before he died, attesting the good Hathumoda’s merits had brought him.³⁵After asking the women to pray for himself, too, Agius narrates a final dream vision, in which Hathumoda came to him and authorized the transfer of her rule to her sister Gerberga.³⁶The poem ends with an exhortation to Gerberga to model herself in every way after Hathumoda, and to the rest to accept Gerberga as their new abbess.³⁷

Agius was explicit about why he wrote these two texts. The Life was meant to create a memorable representation of Hathumoda in words, so that the sisters at Gandersheim would not feel that they had lost her completely, and the Dialogue was to console them in their