Rituals for the Dead: Religion and Community in the Medieval University of Paris

By William J. Courtenay

In his fascinating new book, based on the Conway Lectures he delivered at Notre Dame in 2016, William Courtenay examines aspects of the religious life of one medieval institution, the University of Paris, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In place of the traditional account of teaching programs and curriculum, however, the focus here is on religious observances and the important role that prayers for the dead played in the daily life of masters and students.

Courtenay examines the university as a consortium of sub-units in which the academic and religious life of its members took place, and in which prayers for the dead were a major element. Throughout the book, Courtenay highlights reverence for the dead, which preserved their memory and was believed to reduce the time in purgatory for deceased colleagues and for founders of and donors to colleges. The book also explores the advantages for poor scholars of belonging to a confraternal institution that provided benefits to all members regardless of social background, the areas in which women contributed to the university community, including the founding of colleges, and the growth of Marian piety, seeking her blessing as patron of scholarship and as protector of scholars. Courtenay looks at attempts to offset the inequality between the status of masters and students, rich and poor, and college founders and fellows, in observances concerned with death as well as rewards and punishments in the afterlife.

Rituals for the Dead is the first book-length study of religious life and remembrances for the dead at the medieval University of Paris. Scholars of medieval history will be an eager audience for this title.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Dec 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9780268104962

William J. Courtenay

William J. Courtenay is the Charles Homer Haskins Professor Emeritus of Medieval History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Book preview

RITUALS FOR THE DEAD

The Conway Lectures in Medieval Studies 2016

The Medieval Institute gratefully acknowledges the generosity of Robert M. Conway and his support for the lecture series and publications resulting from it.

PREVIOUS TITLES PUBLISHED IN THIS SERIES:

Paul Strohm

Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer and Shakespeare (2005)

Ulrich Horst, O.P.

The Dominicans and the Pope: Papal Teaching Authority in the Medieval and Early Modern Thomist Tradition (2006)

Rosamond McKitterick

Perceptions of the Past in the Early Middle Ages (2006)

Jonathan Riley-Smith

Templars and Hospitallers as Professed Religious in the Holy Land (2009)

A. C. Spearing

Medieval Autographies: The I of the Text (2012)

Barbara Newman

Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred (2013)

John Marenbon

Abelard in Four Dimensions: A Twelfth-Century Philosopher in His Context and Ours (2013)

Sylvia Huot

Outsiders: The Humanity and Inhumanity of Giants in Medieval French Prose Romance (2016)

RITUALS FOR

THE DEAD

Religion and Community in

the Medieval University of Paris

WILLIAM J. COURTENAY

————————————————————

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

undpress.nd.edu

Copyright © 2019 by the University of Notre Dame

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Courtenay, William J., author.

Title: Rituals for the Dead : Religion and Community in the Medieval University of Paris / William J. Courtenay.

Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, [2018] | Series: The Conway lectures in medieval studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2018043811 (print) | LCCN 2018044730 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268104955 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268104962 (epub) | ISBN 9780268104931 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 026810493X (hardback : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Université de Paris—History—To 1500. | Christian life—France—Paris—History—To 1500

Classification: LCC LM2165 (ebook) | LCC LM2165 . C68 2018 (print) | DDC 378.44/361—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043811

∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992

(Permanence of Paper).

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface

Introduction:

The University of Paris and Its Communities

CHAPTER 1

Death in Paris

The University’s Dead

By Whom the Bells Toll

CHAPTER 2

Allocating Spiritual Rewards:

The Power of the Mass for the Souls of the Dead

Virtus Missae and Its Development

The Money Economy and the Afterlife

CHAPTER 3

Candles for Our Lady:

The Arts Faculty Nations as Confraternities

Candles in the Ceremonies of the Nations

The Churches of the Nations

Nations as Confraternities

CHAPTER 4

Gaudy Night: Colleges and Prayers for the Dead

Halls and Colleges

Medieval Colleges and Memorials for the Dead

Medieval Colleges and Islamic Madrasas

CHAPTER 5

A Hidden Presence: Women and the University of Paris

Women and Higher Education in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries

University Wives

Women in Trades Connected to the University

Women as Founders of Colleges

CHAPTER 6

The Growth of Marian Devotion

Dedications to the Virgin before 1200

The Image of the Virgin on Individual Seals

Marian Devotion as Evidenced in College Statutes

Marian Iconography on Magisterial Seals

CHAPTER 7

Balancing Inequality

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index of Persons

Index of Places and Subjects

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURE 1. Map of Paris Churches and Cemeteries, 1250

FIGURE 2. Great Seal of the University of Paris

FIGURE 3. Seal of William Alexander, canon at Notre-Dame

FIGURE 4. Map of Left Bank of Paris, 1300

FIGURE 5. Map of Left Bank of Paris, 1400

FIGURE 6. Illumination in Collège de l’Ave Maria Statutes, Paris, AnF, MM 406, fol. 6r

FIGURE 7. Illumination in Collège de l’Ave Maria Statutes, Paris, AnF, MM 406, fol. 8r

FIGURE 8. Illumination in Collège de l’Ave Maria Statutes, Paris, AnF, MM 406, fol. 10r

FIGURE 9. Illumination in Collège de l’Ave Maria Statutes, Paris, AnF, MM 406, fol. 7v

FIGURE 10. Great Seal of the University of Paris

FIGURE 11. Seal of the French nation

FIGURE 12. Seal of the Norman nation

FIGURE 13. Seal of the Picard nation

FIGURE 14. Seal of the English-German nation

FIGURE 15. Seal of the faculty of arts

FIGURE 16. Seal of the faculty of decrees

FIGURE 17. Seal of the faculty of theology

FIGURE 18. Seal of the faculty of medicine

FIGURE 19. Counterseal of the Norman nation

FIGURE 20. Counterseal of the faculty of decrees

FIGURE 21. Counterseal of the faculty of medicine

FIGURE 22. Rose Window in North Transept, Chartres Cathedral

FIGURE 23. Rose Window in North Transept, Laon Cathedral

FIGURE 24. Belle Verrière, South Choir, Chartres Cathedral

FIGURE 25. Philosophia, illumination in Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. lat. 1253, f. 3r

FIGURE 26. Great Seal of the University of Paris

FIGURE 27. Counterseal of the University of Paris

FIGURE 28. Counterseal of the University of Paris, close-up

FIGURE 29. Seal of the College of Navarre

FIGURE 30. Seal of Artaud, prior of the College of Cluny

FIGURE 31. Seal of Walter of Gamaches

FIGURE 32. Seal of the College of Dormans

FIGURE 33. Seal of Peter of Poitiers

FIGURE 34. Seal of Simon of Kaine

FIGURE 35. Counterseal of the faculty of decrees

FIGURE 36. Seal of John of Blanot

FIGURE 37. Seal of Henry of Teubuef, canon of Saint-Marcel

FIGURE 38. Seal of Henry of Teubuef, canon of Notre-Dame

FIGURE 39. Seal of Adenulf of Anagni, canon of Notre-Dame

FIGURE 40. Seal of Baldwin of Aumale

FIGURE 41. Seal of William Alexander

FIGURE 42. Seal of James of Thérines

FIGURE 43. Seal of Gerard of Bologna

PREFACE

Much of the material in the early chapters of this book was first presented as the Frederick Artz Lecture at Oberlin College in September 2000 at the invitation of Marcia Colish. This material was again given as a lecture at the University of Leuven in November 2009 and at the Mid-America Medieval Association (MAMA) conference at Conception Abbey, Missouri, in February 2010. On each of those occasions I benefited from questions and comments from those in attendance. The invitation to give the Conway Lectures at the Medieval Institute, University of Notre Dame, allowed me the opportunity to revisit and expand the topic for publication. In the course of research the mixture of topics encountered took me into parts of medieval Paris that are no longer visible today but can be mentally reconstructed from documentary and archaeological evidence.

A number of people have aided me in the process of rethinking and expanding the topic of this book or offered encouragement that led me to do so. I am indebted to Richard Cross, whose comment on Duns Scotus’s quodlibetal question on the dedication of masses led me to explore that topic more thoroughly; to Margot Fassler, who pointed me in the direction of work on chants and liturgy in twelfth- to fourteenth-century Paris and whose The Virgin of Chartres was not only an inspiration, but provided an image crucial to an argument in two chapters; to Rachel Fulton-Brown, whose suggestions as a reader for Speculum of my article on the seals of Parisian masters led me to expand my research on Marian piety, which has in turn informed several parts of this book; to Thierry Kouamé, whose willingness to answer questions on Parisian colleges was always useful; to Thomas Sullivan, whose knowledge of the religious convents and colleges in Paris was of considerable help; and to Caroline Bourlet, who as director for the project on the Livres des tailles under Philippe le Bel provided access to the database and responded generously to my questions.

For the images of seals in the book, both those I was permitted to photograph and those provided to me, I am grateful for the courtesy and assistance across many years of staff members at the Archives nationales, especially M. Ghislain Brunel, directeur des publics; M. Clément Blanc, conservateur de la section des sceaux; and M. Jean-François Moufflet, conservateur du patrimoine, département du Moyen Âge et de l’Ancien Régime. I am also grateful to Mme Jacqueline Artier, conservateur du département des Manuscrits et livres anciens de la Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, for permission to consult and photograph the seal fragments from that collection, one of which is included here; to Dr. Christoph Mackert, head of the Handschriftenabteilung at the Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, for providing the image of Philosophia in Ms 1253; to Henri de Feraudy, for allowing me to use his photograph of the image of the Virgin in the Belle Verrière window at Chartres; and to Jean-Luc Chassel, for images of seals connected to Parisian colleges. I am indebted to Alicia Iverson and the Cartography Lab of the University of Wisconsin, through the support of its present director, Tanya Buckingham, for the three maps of Paris providing the locations of places and institutions discussed in the book.

Several links to websites with additional visual images are provided in the notes, but there are no guarantees that these links will remain active. Finally, I wish to thank those at the University of Notre Dame Press for their help in preparing the work for publication, particularly Stephen Little, Wendy McMillen, Susan Berger, and Sheila Berg.

The lectures and the resulting book are dedicated to the memory of Astrik L. Gabriel, former director of the Medieval Institute at Notre Dame. The history of medieval universities, particularly the University of Paris, was Abbot Gabriel’s principal area of research, and he built a major collection of sources and secondary literature on the history of universities, which is now housed in the library of the Medieval Institute and in the Special Collections and Rare Books section of Hesburgh Library. I first met Canon Gabriel, later Abbot Gabriel, during my graduate studies when he spent a year at Harvard as the first Chauncy Stillman Professor of Roman Catholic Studies. He had a lifelong interest in the daily life of the University of Paris, the nations in the faculty of arts for which he edited the Receptors’ Book of the English-German nation, the colleges, on which he wrote several articles as well as a book on Ave Maria College, and his unfinished project to publish the statutes of all the colleges at Paris, now being carried forward to completion. The research library Gabriel assembled as director as well as his papers and the source materials he left to Notre Dame constitute perhaps the best collection of material on the history of medieval universities anywhere in the world.

Introduction

The University of Paris and Its Communities

In his Pour un autre Moyen Âge Jacques Le Goff brought together a number of his articles that approached medieval society from a different, less common perspective, as the title suggests.¹ Similarly, in the following chapters, none previously published, features of the medieval University of Paris rarely encountered in the secondary literature are explored, indeed reconfigured. Much of the literature on medieval universities, from Heinrich Denifle through the contributions of Hastings Rashdall, Lynn Thorndike, Gaines Post, and Pearl Kibre, concentrated on questions of origins and early development, constitutional structure, curriculum and studies, and the role of colleges.² Universities were places of intellectual endeavor as well as professional training for careers in the church, in medicine, or in law. Other historians emphasized student daily life, the frequenting of taverns, gambling, acts of violence, and student pleas for money and the suspicious responses of parents and patrons. And more recently there has been an emphasis on the regional and social background of students and the careers of graduates.³ But although it has long been acknowledged that students and masters were clerics and that most of them had careers in the church, the religious side of university life in Paris has received almost no attention.⁴ Thus, in what follows, those standard themes and descriptions, while true in their own way, have been set aside or at least balanced with a different perspective on the university that explores the religious elements in the daily life of Parisian scholars.

Before addressing that, a different way of looking at or reconfiguring the University of Paris needs to be considered. We tend to think of a university community as one entity. One is studying at, teaching at, or is part of a specific university, which in this book is the medieval University of Paris. From one perspective it is legitimate to speak about a university or a university community as a whole. The enjoyment of scholarly privileges and protections was only available for those who were recognized as members of the university. Put another way, those privileges were institutional privileges and applied to the individual only because he belonged to the university as a corporation of masters and students (magistri et scolares Parisienses). To be a student at the university, to have what was called scolaritas, meant that one was acknowledged as a student by the master under whom one studied, who in turn belonged to the guild of masters.

From another and more accurate perspective, however, the university was a fictional entity, having standing in law as a corporate personality with rights and privileges, but it was in fact a consortium, a collection of different groupings that were the basis of self-identity and social interaction. One thought of oneself as belonging to a faculty (i.e., one of the four scholarly disciplines, of philosophy or the liberal arts, theology, decrees or canon law, and medicine), and, within the faculty of arts, as belonging to a nation. Of those two, the faculty and the nation, the nation was the principal unit of affiliation for secular clerics within the university. All secular masters of theology or medicine, and many in law, had earlier studied and reigned (i.e., taught) in the faculty of arts and belonged to one of its nations. The oaths taken by those being licensed in arts required obedience to the rector and the proctor of the nation regardless of their future state, even promotion to bachelor or master in a higher faculty.⁵ And students in theology and medicine often continued to teach in the faculty of arts to support themselves while studying in a higher faculty. When they incepted in the higher faculty as masters of theology, canon law, or medicine, their social network often remained the one formed at the level of the nation, both those who, like themselves, had gone on to higher studies, and their former colleagues who remained active in the nation. There is very little evidence that masters in a higher faculty regularly associated with each other apart from meetings to conduct the business of the faculty, although they may well have done so, but there is considerable evidence that masters in a nation met almost weekly to eat and drink in different taverns at the expense of the nation, which included students in a higher faculty who were still teaching in arts. Nations also on occasion celebrated the achievement of a former master when he incepted as a doctor in a higher faculty and presumably had maintained his association with his former colleagues.⁶

It is usually said that the faculty of arts at Paris was divided into four nations. A more accurate description would be to say that the faculty of arts was itself a corporate persona made up of four largely autonomous units, the nations.⁷ A master was a member of the faculty of arts only because he was, first and foremost, a member of a nation. The nation was the unit of self-identification and association, just as, in a weaker sense, departments are in American colleges and universities. Modern academic departments, however, are based on a recognized scholarly discipline, while the basis for self-identification in the nations at a medieval university was regional, based on place of origin. Although a student in arts did not have a choice of which nation he would join or be affiliated with when he came to Paris to study, we can assume most were comfortable in the company of fellow Landsmänner, to use the German term, ones whose vernacular language or Latin accent, topographical attachments and associations, and even liturgical practices were familiar. This attachment to a local region, or terroir, subdivided nations into subgroups. This is easy to comprehend in the case of the English nation, which contained masters and students from Scotland, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Germany, and Eastern Europe, but it was even the case for the other nations. The French nation divided itself into five provinces: the diocese of Paris and the ecclesiastical provinces of Sens, Reims, Tours, and Bourges. Within the Picard nation the closest associations were often diocesan, dominated by Beauvais and Amiens in the south and Arras, Tournai, and Cambrai in the north. The same was true for the Norman nation and the important topographical difference between upper and lower Normandy. From the standpoint of religious practices, those from these local regions usually had an attachment to a particular saint, St. Martin for those from the province of Tours and St. Remy for those from the region of Reims, St. Firmin for those from the diocese of Amiens, St. Piat for those from the diocese of Tournai, and St. Romain for those from Rouen.⁸

One’s nation, and even its subgroupings, determined the group of masters under whom one studied, the teachers whose lectures one attended for instruction in logic and natural and moral philosophy, and the master under whom one would be sponsored for the baccalaureate (determination), licensing, and inception as a master of arts.⁹ It probably also influenced where and with whom one sought accommodations while a resident in Paris. And in terms of a postuniversity career back home, personal ties formed at the university could prove very useful in helping one obtain a benefice or find a patron. There were, of course, masters and students who belonged to a religious order, whether mendicant, monastic, or canonical. But the vast majority of those at the University of Paris, and all of those in the faculty of arts, were secular clerics, tonsured at least at the lowest level of holy orders, and it is with them that the following chapters are concerned.

From the standpoint of the frequency of association, again it is the nation that mattered. Meetings of the university as a whole (general assemblies) might occur two or three times a year for a matter that concerned the entire group of masters. Faculties met more frequently, in the case of the faculty of arts at least four times each year to elect a rector and as needed to address an issue that concerned masters in all four nations. Meetings of a nation in the faculty of arts, however, met several times a month to conduct its business and several times a week for religious services. There was occasional tension between faculties and between nations, most visible perhaps at the election of a rector. One’s primary association, allegiance, and self-identification within the faculty of arts, therefore, was to the small group of fifteen to forty masters, depending on the size of the nation, with whom one associated on a regular basis professionally and socially. Similarly, self-identification for a student was with the group of students studying under and sometimes living in rooms rented or owned by the master under whom one was studying. To a large degree, therefore, the University of Paris and even the faculty of arts were legal fictions, collective personalities that existed in documented privileges, statutes, and regulations but not as social groups with whom one associated on a regular basis.

A second reconfiguration of the university community at Paris is to look not at the written products of the classroom and disputations from which the intellectual history of that university is constructed, and not even at what masters and students thought they were doing or what was most important to them, even if one were able to determine that. Rather, the approach of this book is to look at how those in the nations and colleges at Paris spent their time. Much of that time was devoted to academic study, lecturing or attending lectures, disputing or attending disputations, and, for some, preparing written versions of lectures and disputations for circulation and preservation. And that may have been how many if not most of them understood why they were at a university and what they thought were their most important activities beyond social interaction and, of course, eating and sleeping. But a surprising amount of time was spent in religious activities, and much of that was concerned with rituals for the dead, which has received very little attention in the scholarly literature on the University of Paris or any other university. That religious dimension of university life, which, if the statutes were observed, took up between 20 and 30 percent of their time, and for one college 50 percent of each day.

If the statutes were observed is crucial. University statutes as well as those of faculties, nations, and colleges speak of required religious services and activities, revealing the intentions and expectations of legislating masters and founders of colleges regarding the daily life in a nation or college. If the records of the English-German nation in the faculty of arts in the fourteenth century is any guide, religious services were regularly held and the quality of the services was important to the nation. An occasional absence by a master, if he had sufficient reason, was excusable, but nonattendance was not an option in an institution whose spiritual health and well-being depended on its religious devotion. About the regularity of student attendance we know nothing. How those religious practices were experienced by masters and students, what it meant to them personally, is essentially unknowable. Similarly, college statutes reflect what founders thought the daily life of college members should be like and the religious obligations they required to be observed in order to retain a fellowship, but not what college members thought was most important or how they reacted to or experienced those religious activities. Students’ letters rarely discuss such matters, which in any case are formulaic and at best tell us what students wanted a parent or patron to believe, not necessarily what was true.¹⁰ How religion affected the life of university scholars at Paris emotionally in