Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages

By Caroline Walker Bynum

From the Introduction, by Caroline Walker Bynum: The opportunity to rethink and republish several of my early articles in combination with a new essay on the thirteenth century has led me to consider the continuity-both of argument and of approach-that underlies them. In one sense, their interrelationship is obvious. The first two address a question that was more in the forefront of scholarship a dozen years ago than it is today: the question of differences among religious orders.    These two essays set out a method of reading texts for imagery and borrowings as well as for spiritual teaching in order to determine whether individuals who live in different institutional settings hold differing assumptions about the significance of their lives.    The essays apply the method to the broader question of differences between regular canons and monks and the narrower question of differences between one kind of monk--the Cistercians--and other religious groups, monastic and nonmonastic, of the twelfth century.    The third essay draws on some of the themes of the first two, particularly the discussion of canonical and Cistercian conceptions of the individual brother as example, to suggest  an interpretation of twelfth-century religious life as concerned with the nature of groups as well as with affective expression.    The fourth essay, again on Cistercian monks, elaborates themes of the first three. Its subsidiary goals are to provide further evidence on distinctively Cistercian attitudes and to elaborate the Cistercian ambivalence about vocation that I delineate in the essay on conceptions of community. It also raises questions that have now become popular in nonacademic as well as academic circles: what significance should we give to the increase of feminine imagery in twelfth-century religious writing by males? Can we learn anything about distinctively male or female spiritualities from this feminization of language?   The fifth essay differs from the others in turning to the thirteenth century rather than the twelfth, to women rather than men, to detailed analysis of many themes in a few thinkers rather than one theme in many writers; it is nonetheless based on the conclusions of the earlier studies. The sense of monastic vocation and of the priesthood, of the authority of God and self, and of the significance of gender that I find in the three great mystics of late thirteenth-century Helfta can be understood only against the background of the growing twelfth- and thirteenth-century concern for evangelism and for an approachable God, which are the basic themes of the first four essays.   Such connections between the essays will be clear to anyone who reads them. There are, however, deeper methodological and interpretive continuities among them that I wish to underline here.   For these studies constitute a plea for an approach to medieval spirituality that is not now--and perhaps has never been--dominant in medieval scholarship. They also provide an interpretation of the religious life of the high Middle Ages that runs against the grain of recent emphases on the emergence of "lay spirituality." I therefore propose to give, as introduction, both a discussion of recent approaches to medieval piety and a short sketch of the religious history of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, emphasizing those themes that are the context for my specific investigations.   I do not want to be misunderstood. In providing here a discussion of approaches to and trends in medieval religion I am not claiming that the studies that follow constitute a general history nor that my method should replace that of social, institutional, and intellectual historians.    A handful of Cistercians does not typify the twelfth century, nor three nuns the thirteenth. Religious imagery, on which I concentrate, does not tell us how people lived. But because these essays approach texts in a way others have not done, focus on imagery others have not found important, an

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520907539

Caroline Walker Bynum

Caroline Walker Bynum is Western Medieval History, Professor Emerita, School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Book preview

Publications of the

Center for Medieval

and Renaissance Studies,

UCLA

ï. Jeffrey Burton Russell: Dissent and Reform in the Early Middle Ages

2. C. D. O’Malley: Leonardo’s Legacy: An International Symposium

3. Richard H. Rouse: Guide to Serial Bibliographies in Medieval Studies

4. Speros Vryonis, Jr.: The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century

5. Stanley Chodorow: Christian Political Theory and Church Politics in the Mid-Twelfth Century

6. Joseph J. Duggan: The Song of Roland: Formulaic Style and Poetic Craft

7. Ernest A. Moody: Studies in Medieval Philosophy, Science, and Logic: Collected Papers, 1933-1969

8. Marc Bloch: Slavery and Serfdom in the Middle Ages

9. Michael J. B. Allen: Marsilio Ficino, The Philebus Commentary, A Critical Edition and Translation

10. Richard C. Dales: Marius, On the Elements, A’Critical Edition and Translation

11. Duane J. Osheim: An Italian Lordship: The Bishopric of Lucca in the Late Middle Ages

12. Robert Somerville: Pope Alexander III and the Council of Tours (1163)

13. Lynn White, Jr.: Medieval Religion and Technology: Collected Essays

14. Michael J. B. Allen: Marsilio Ficino and the Phaedran Charioteer: Introduction, Texts, Translations

15. Barnabas B. Hughes, O.F.M.: Jordanus de Nemore, De numeris datis: A Critical Edition and Translation

16. Caroline Walker Bynum: Jesus As Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages

Jesus as Mother

In the twelfth century, a new awareness of differing social statuses or roles, each with

religious significance, was reflected in literary and artistic images. In this illustration

of the virtues and vices, the miniaturist has altered the conventional motif of a

procession of monks toward the crown of life into a depiction of roles with their

characteristic temptations: the lay woman and the knight, tempted by ornament and

fornication; the cleric, tempted by luxury, including wealth, food and a friend (arnica

clerici); the nun, seduced by the gifts of priests, the pomp of the world, and the wealth

of relatives; the monk, wooed by property and money; the recluse, longing for his

bed; and the hermit, distracted by thoughts of his garden.

Jesus as Mother

Studies in the Spirituality

of the High Middle Ages

Caroline Walker Bynum

University

of California

Press

Berkeley

Los Angeles

London

The illustration facing title page is the

Ladder of Virtues, from Hortus Deliciarum

(destroyed manuscript formerly in Strasbourg),

fol. 215v. Photograph by E. G. C. Menzies,

Princeton, N.J.; pl. IX of a hand-colored

copy of C. M. Engelhardt, Herrad von Landsperg …

(Stuttgart/Tübingen, 1818), in possession

of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York;

reproduced from R. Green et al.,

Herrad of Hohenbourg, Hortus Deliciarum

(London/Leiden, 1979), Pl. 124.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 1982 by

The Regents of the University of California

First Paperback Printing 1984

ISBN 0-520-05222-6

Printed in the United States of America

123456789

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Bynum, Caroline Walker.

Jesus as mother.

Includes indexes.

i. Spiritual life—Middle Ages, 600-1500— Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Monastic and religious life—Middle Ages, 600-1500—Addresses, essays, lectures. 3. God—Motherhood—History of doctrines—Middle Ages, 600-1500—Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Title.

BV4490.B96 255 81-13137

AACR2

FOR

Guenther Roth

AND

Judith Van Herik

Contents

Contents

Preface

Abbreviations

Introduction

Approaches to the History of Spirituality

The Religious Revival of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries and the Clericalization of the Church

I. The Spirituality of Regular Canons in the Twelfth Century

The State of the Question

The Canonical Concern with Edification Verbo et Exemplo

Canonical and Monastic Views of Conduct

Canonical and Monastic Views of Silence and Speech

Canonical and Monastic Use of Sources

The Canonical Focus: Revival or New Concern?

II. The Cistercian Conception of Community

Examples of Cistercian Treatment of Community

Cistercian Ideas Compared to Those of Regular Canons

The Basic Conception of Monastic Vocation in Cistercians and Other Monks

The Benedictine Rule as Source

Affective Subtlety

III. Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?

Discovery of the Individual or Discovery of Self?

Awareness of Groups

The Sense of Model

Groups Reformed by Models

Conclusions

IV. Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother: Some Themes in Twelfth-Century Cistercian Writing

Examples of Maternal Imagery

Biblical and Patristic Background

The Theme of Mother Jesus as a Reflection of Affective Spirituality

The Feminization of Religious Language and Its Social Context

The Basic Characteristics of Cistercian Usage

Maternal Imagery and the Cistercian Concept of Authority

Maternal Imagery and True and False Dependence

Conclusion

V. Women Mystics in the Thirteenth Century: The Case of the Nuns of Helfta

The State of the Question

Gertrude of Helfta: Images of God

Gertrude’s Role and Sense of Self

Mechtild of Hackeborn: Images of God

Mechtild of Hackebom: Role and Sense of Self

Mechtild of Magdeburg: Images of God

Mechtild of Magdeburg: Role and Sense of Self

Conclusions: Women Mystics and the Clericalization of the Church

Epilogue

Appendix: Monastic and Canonical Treatises of Practical Spiritual Advice

General Index

Index of Secondary Authors

Preface

AUTHORS OF collections of essays often comment at the outset that nothing has been changed in their older work except obvious errors, either because resetting the originals was prohibitively expensive or because the author found it impossible or unnecessary to rethink the earlier formulations. My situation is different. For, in going back to work done during the 1970s, I found much that could be reformulated or clarified, much that needed to be put in a broader context—and the University of California Press has made it possible for me to do so. Thus, although the first four essays published here bear the titles of earlier articles and continue to address the historical problems and the historiography that gave rise to their namesakes, each has been substantially rewritten. I have revised these studies, not in order to link them artificially into an overview of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (which they were never intended to be), but in an effort to make each a better and more broadly based case for the interpretation presented in the original article. I have also emphasized—in the introduction, in the revised essays, and in the new study that concludes the book—the methodological and substantive concerns that give unity to the work I have done over the past seven years. I am grateful to the publishers of Medievalia et Humanística, the Harvard Theological Review, and the Journal of Ecclesiastical History for per-

PREFACE

mission to publish new versions of earlier articles in a context that makes their interrelationship clearer and allows them to serve as background to a new study of thirteenth-century nuns.

I would also like to express my gratitude to the students in my seminar at the Harvard Divinity School (spring, 1976), who helped me to articulate my approach to religious imagery; to the members of the University of Washington Faculty Seminar on Religion (fall, 1978), who contributed to my understanding of religious authority; to the American Council of Learned Societies for a grant for fall and winter of 1978-79; to Emily L. D. Baker, Andrea Fahlenkamp, Sheryl Feldman, Margery A. Kepner, and Fred Paxton, who helped with the typing and copy editing; to my editor, Karen Reeds, for her perceptive suggestions; and to numerous friends and colleagues who read portions of these essays and gave advice. I have thanked below in the notes those who helped with individual articles, but I should mention here several mentors without whose encouragement and sometimes harsh criticism the whole collection would never have taken shape: Robert Benson, John Benton, Peter Brown, Giles Constable, C. Warren Hollister, Brian Stock, and Charles T. Wood. The book is dedicated, with deep appreciation and affection, to my fellow scholars in the field of religion, Guenther Roth and Judith Van Herik, whose values and insights have frequently provided the context within which I ask questions.

Seattle, Washington September, 1980

Abbreviations

xiii

xiv

Introduction

Have women and priests pray for me.

— A SUFFERING SOUL

TO MECHTILD OF MAGDEBURG

THE OPPORTUNITY to rethink and republish several of my early articles in combination with a new essay on the thirteenth century has led me to consider the continuity—both of argument and of approach—that underlies them. In one sense, their interrelationship is obvious. The first two address a question that was more in the forefront of scholarship a dozen years ago than it is today: the question of differences among religious orders. These two essays set out a method of reading texts for imagery and borrowings as well as for spiritual teaching in order to determine whether individuals who live in different institutional settings hold differing assumptions about the significance of their lives. The essays apply the method to the broader question of differences between regular canons and monks and the narrower question of differences between one kind of monk—the Cistercians—and other religious groups, monastic and nonmonastic, of the twelfth century. The third essay draws on some of the themes of the first two, particularly the discussion of canonical and Cistercian conceptions of the individual brother as example, to suggest an interpretation of twelfth-century religious life as concerned with the nature of groups as well as with affective expression. The fourth essay, again on Cistercian monks, elaborates themes of the first three. Its subsidiary goals are to provide further evidence on distinctively Cistercian attitudes and to elaborate the Cistercian ambivalence about vocation that I delineate in the essay on conceptions of community. It also raises questions that have now become popular in nonacademic as well as academic circles: what significance should we give to the increase of feminine imagery in twelfth-century religious writing by males? Can we learn anything about distinctively male or female spiritualities from this feminization of language? The fifth essay differs from the others in turning to the thirteenth century rather than the twelfth, to women rather than men, to detailed analysis of many themes in a few thinkers rather than one theme in many writers; it is nonetheless based on the conclusions of the earlier studies. The sense of monastic vocation and of the priesthood, of the authority of God and self, and of the significance of gender that I find in the three great mystics of late- thirteenth-century Helfta can be understood only against the background of the growing twelfth- and thirteenth-century concern for evangelism and for an approachable God, which are the basic themes of the first four essays.

Such connections between the essays will be clear to anyone who reads them. There are, however,’ deeper methodological and interpretive continuities among them that I wish to underline here. For these studies constitute a plea for an approach to medieval spirituality that is not now—and perhaps has never been—dominant in medieval scholarship. They also provide an interpretation of the religious life of the high Middle Ages that runs against the grain of recent emphases on the emergence of lay spirituality. I therefore propose to give, as introduction, both a discussion of recent approaches to medieval piety and a short sketch of the religious history of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, emphasizing those themes that are the context for my specific investigations. I do not want to be misunderstood. In providing here a discussion of approaches to and trends in medieval religion I am not claiming that the studies that follow constitute a general history nor that my method should replace that of social, institutional, and intellectual historians. A handful of Cistercians does not typify the twelfth century, nor three nuns the thirteenth. Religious imagery, on which I concentrate, does not tell us how people lived. But because these essays approach texts in a way others have not done, focus on imagery others have not found important, and insist, as others have not insisted, on comparing groups to other groups (e.g., comparing what is peculiarly male to what is female as well as vice versa), I want to call attention to my approach to and my interpretation of the high Middle Ages in the hope of encouraging others to ask similar questions.

Approaches to

the History of Spirituality

Spirituality, as Andre Vauchez has pointed out, is not a medieval word at all.1 It was coined in the nineteenth century to designate a field of study that might also be called ascetic or mystical theology. Thirty or forty years ago, books on the history of medieval spirituality were surveys of various theories of the stages of the souls ascent to contemplation or union. Recently the history of spirituality has come to mean something quite different: the study of how basic religious attitudes and values are conditioned by the society within which they occur. This new definition brings spirituality very close to what the school of French historians known as annalistes call mentalité; the history of spirituality becomes almost a branch of social history, deeply influenced by the work of structural-functionalist anthropologists and of phenomenologists of religion.

The new history of spirituality has increasingly been dominated by an interest in popular religion. This interest has involved, first, a determination to study those phenomena that might reveal the religious aspirations of the illiterate and, second, an interpretation of the period from 1100 to 1517 as the emergence of lay spirituality—that is, the increasing diffusion outward into society from the monastery of religious practices and values and a new willingness to define roles in the world as having religious significance. Reviving certain emphases of German scholarship in the first decades of this century, scholars are now also deeply interested in the class background of those who peopled the religious movements of the high Middle Ages.

In addition to the emphasis on social context, current work on Christianity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries shows other common emphases. Continuing the interpretation of the French scholar, Andre Wilmart,2 recent studies stress the new psychological subtlety and interiority of twelfth-century religion and tend to see the affective spirituality of the Cistercians and later the Franciscans as the dominant note in the religious writing of the period. Insofar as the spirituality of women has been treated—and it has been surprisingly neglected when we consider that the most important work on twelfth and thirteenth-century religion in the past fifty years has been Grundmann’s study of the beguines3 —it has been treated as an aspect of this new affective emphasis. Furthermore, in direct and intended contrast to earlier histories of spirituality, the new scholarship avoids the question of the particular characteristics of religious orders (e.g., Franciscans as opposed to Dominicans, Cistercians in contrast to old-style Benedictines), attempting instead to set out those features that characterize many groups, including the heterodox. Following the lead of Grundmann and M. D. Chenu,4 recent work, while showing a keen interest in heresy, nonetheless sees dissident groups as basically reformist. It sees the most pressing issues of the period as matters not of doctrine but of practice or what we might call lifestyle, particularly the question of what true poverty is and of how evangelism (which comes increasingly to mean preaching) is to be carried out.

Much current work on medieval religion has thus abandoned the sources that were so carefully studied by scholars half a century ago—mystical treatises, sermons, biblical commentaries, works of advice for novices, collections of visions, saints’ lives— and turned instead to prosopographical work or to analysis of artifacts with which the laity had contact, documents the laity executed (mostly wills and charters), and rituals the laity attended. Use of these materials presents enormous methodological problems, however, if—having established what lay people did or which groups they joined—we then try to ascertain the religious meaning of these facts. For example, lay people frequently behave as they do because they have been told to do so by priests; priests are themselves, in the absence of hereditary succession, recruited from lay society; if lay people do not write, the question of what a lay attitude is becomes exceedingly difficult to establish in any way other than by arbitrary definition.5 The new history of spirituality is therefore in a curious situation. It has abandoned detailed study of most of the material medieval people themselves produced on the subject of religion in favor of far more intractable sources. It has done this partly from the admirable desire to correct the concentration of earlier scholarship on mainline groups (i.e., those who succeeded in recruiting members and presenting their visions of the Christian life to others) but partly, I suspect, from boredom and frustration with the interminable discussions of the souls approach to God, which is the major subject of medieval religious writing.6

We cannot, however, afford to abandon what will always be the bulk of our information on medieval religion. Nor can we afford to abandon questions of how one group contrasts with another—whether these groups be differentiated by gender (men and women) or status (cleric and layperson) or vocation (Franciscan and Cistercian)—simply because these issues have often been raised polemically by members of the groups in question. We urgently need a middle ground between the older history of doctrine or mystical theology, which has exhaustively catalogued medieval theories of purgation and contemplation, and the newer stress on the changing social context of religious movements. In addition to new kinds of material, we need new ways of reading the material we have had all along, new ways of determining how the differences between people are reflected in their discussions of topics that tradition and convention required them to treat in ostensibly similar manners. If we are ever to know what gave significance to life for even some of the medieval population, which aspects of reality they were rejecting and which they were affirming when they renounced the world, where they felt themselves able to make choices, and what they felt to be the important differences in the roles open to them or imposed upon them, we must find ways of answering these questions from the works they actually wrote.

In the essays that follow, I have tried to find new ways of using this conventional material by concentrating on the images in which religious people presented their theories of the souls journey. Imagery has, of course, often been studied by medievalists, most commonly with a view to determining its sources in earlier writings or using it to test medieval theories of language but sometimes with the idea that it may supplement other information about medieval life. (For example, a metaphor in which a king or a plow figures just might include a detail about medieval kings or plows that we would otherwise not know.) None of these approaches is very helpful in determining basic religious attitudes, and the attempt to argue from the details of metaphors to social reality can be positively misleading if one assumes that people construct images from what they actually perceive without realizing that images may just as frequently reflect what people wish they perceived. But if we trace the networks of images built up by medieval authors and locate those networks in the psyches and social experiences of those who create or use them, we find that they reveal to us what the writers cared about most deeply themselves and what they felt it necessary to present or justify to others.

In each of my studies I have attempted to penetrate to the basic concerns of authors by analyzing very carefully a few images or phrases. For example, in the first two essays, a study of the verbs love, teach, serve, re-form, or be a form (pattern) for becomes a way of detecting which activities a certain kind of religious person feels most obligated to perform as part of his vocation; in the fourth article, a study of the metaphorical uses of mother, nurse, womb, breast, and feed leads into an exploration of concepts of leadership; in the fifth study, analysis of the full range of images used by three women to talk about their own authority and God’s becomes a way of establishing what the women felt entitled to do and why. These essays are thus sometimes a kind of psycho-historical interpretation, sometimes a structural interpretation, without being linked closely to any current body of psychological or structuralist theory. I have simply assumed that the emotional significance of a word or image (even very common words) cannot be inferred from its modern meaning but must be established by a careful study of the other images and phrases among which it occurs in a text. I have also assumed that the more images or phrases depart in certain ways from traditions to which they otherwise belong or link aspects of reality not obviously linked by common sense, logic, or previous usage, the more they convey the needs, the anxieties, and the sources of repose in the hearts of men and women. I have then tried to place these needs, anxieties, and solutions in the context of the interpersonal experiences that formed personalities and the kinds of communities within which people lived.7 For example, in the third essay, I show that mechanical metaphors of putting on garments, constructing buildings, or stamping out patterns appear in twelfth-century literature alongside organic images of burgeoning or flowering; that these metaphors express intense concern for conforming personal behavior and community life to prescribed patterns; and that such patterns are seen as the precondition for the flowering of souls toward God. Thus the affectivity or psychological subtlety so emphasized in recent interpretations of the twelfth-century is rooted in a new concern with external behavior, and the new concern with externals is in turn rooted in a proliferation of religious and social groups. In the fourth and fifth essays, I suggest that images taken from friendship, marriage, and family grow more common and more complex in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, supplementing but not replacing older images of ruler and follower, and that these images reflect a need, felt especially by males, for a view of authority that balances discipline with love. In the fifth study, I argue that images of food and drink, of brimming fountains and streams of blood, which are used with special intensity by thirteenth-century women, express desire for direct, almost physical contact with Christ in the eucharist and for power to handle this Christ as only the priest is authorized to do.

However partial the picture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries presented by the five topics treated here, these studies suggest that broadening the history of spirituality from a history of mystical theology to a history of religious attitudes need not involve abandoning the spiritual treatises, saints’ lives, and collections of visions that medieval people produced’in such relative abundance. In addition to study of rules and institutions, crowd movements and persecutions, social conditions, and the diffusion of texts, careful reading of spiritual treatises can reveal to us shifts in sensibility and values. For such treatises take us into the complexities of a few hearts, and in these complexities we find reflected, if we read with sensitivity, the ways in which larger groups of people were burdened or healed, oppressed or encouraged, by the structures of the church and by society.

who produce them is deeply indebted to Clifford Geertz’s influential article: Religion as a Cultural System, in Michael Banton, ed., Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, Association of Social Anthropologists Monographs 3 (London, 1966), pp. 1-42.

The Religious Revival of

the Twelfth and Thirteenth

Centuries and the

Clericalization of the Church

The essays that follow have been written in the context of the recent history of spirituality and assume many of its most persuasive and original insights. But they differ from that history, not only in turning back to the kind of source material treated by the old-style history of doctrine but also in seeing at the heart of twelfth- and thirteenth-century developments the problem of authority. In the post-Gregorian church the roles of clergy and laity were more carefully distinguished than they had been before. Although the separation did in the long run prepare the way for a positive valuation of the secular qua secular, the short-run effect was increased prominence and power to the clergy. Each of my studies finds at the core of high medieval spirituality not only the growth of affective response and the rise of the laity but also deep desire for and fear of the clergy’s right to rule and to serve. Because each essay in certain ways assumes this latter trend and none describes it directly, it seems wise to conclude my introduction with a brief sketch of the clericalization of the church.

The first five hundred years of Christianity had established that a male clergy, whose authority was based on office, would serve as the fundamental channel of God’s message and God’s grace to the laity—that is, all men (including monks) who were not clergy and all women. But despite the continuing importance of ecclesiastical office, the early Middle Ages have frequently been seen as the period of monastic spirituality, both in the sense that monks were the vicarious worshippers for all of society and in the sense that the monastic role was held up to all as the Christian ideal. To ordinary people in the ninth and tenth centuries contact with the clergy was often limited to baptism, burial, and paying tithes; bishops were far more visible for their control of large feudal properties than for their pastoral care; Rome was important not as an administrative center but as the residence of St. Peter, whose relics were charged with special power. Salvation, for oneself and one’s relatives, came by making gifts to monks and nuns who said the prayers that assured a right relationship to God. More immediate needs, like the fertility of one’s fields or one’s cow or one’s beehive, might as often be taken care of by wise women and men or white magic as by the blessing of priests or holy water. The most significant locations of holiness and supernatural power were the relics of saints. It was the Gregorian Reform movement of the mid-eleventh century that created a church headed by the clergy and began the process of locating supernatural power most centrally in the eucharist, which the priest controlled. Moreover, the great religious revival of the same period— usually known as the "search for the vita apostolica’"—created so many new nonmonastic or quasi-monastic models for a specialized religious life that male monasticism never recovered from the challenge.8

Beginning with an attack on simony and clerical marriage, Gregorian reformers hoped to impose generally on the clergy what was in the mid-eleventh century called the apostolic or full common life (i.e., renunciation of private property) and to extricate the church from the control of feudal rulers by renouncing feudal relationships. Because, as G. Tellenbach has pointed out,9 to a medieval person freedom meant freedom to as well as freedom from, the reformers increasingly saw the extrication of church property and personnel from the control of secular rulers as a precondition for the church’s exercise of its leadership role. Their work began the century and a half of development that made the church the most advanced bureaucracy in Europe.

The post-Gregorian church is a break from the early Middle Ages in several senses. The reformers’ successful campaign for clerical celibacy and their emphasis on the freedom of episcopal elections (which fairly rapidly became papal appointments) created a clergy that was set apart much more radically than before from ordinary Christians and was also welded into a hierarchy In the course of the twelfth century canon law was elaborated, the sacraments were defined, the penitential system and theory that functioned in the later Middle Ages were established, and higher education was brought firmly under the control of the church with the result that advanced theological training became by definition the preserve of the clergy and denied to women. The Gregorian reformers thus began a process that sharply expanded the clergy’s service of and control over the laity. Clerical status—an amorphous concept in the early twelfth century when clericus often meant simply ordained or literate—was increasingly defined as the right to preach and practice the cura animarum; the role of the priest in consecrating the eucharist was more and more held in awe. Oh revered dignity of priests, in whose hands the Son of God is incarnated as in the Virgin’s womb… reads an often cited twelfth-century text.10 11 And the following lines have been attributed to the wandering preacher Norbert of Xanten, who founded an order of clerics:

Priest, you are not you, because you are God.

You are not yours, because you are Christ’s servant and minister.

You are not of yourself because you are nothing.

What therefore are you, oh priest? Nothing and all things…11

As clerical direction of the laity increased, however, the clergy was removed further and further from the lifestyle of the laity and from certain kinds of contact with women and family. Although twelfth-century theologians argued that marriage is a sacrament, these same theologians held the clergy to be purer once they renounced it. Moreover, the reformers, in their distinction between the bishops sacramental authority and the property that was the economic base for his administration, and in their attacks on sacerdotal kingship, initiated that awareness of a sharp line between sacred and secular, spiritual and material, that is such a striking feature of more modern western Christianity. From the world of the early Middle Ages, in which the supernatural may break into everyday life at any moment and anything may be a sign or sacrament of the holy, we move in the twelfth century into a world in which what we today call the material or secular is increasingly seen as having its own laws and operations, as other than the spiritual and perhaps even corrupting to it. To ninthcentury theologians, for example, the problem in dealing with the eucharist was really the problem of explaining how it could be of special import when in fact any object or event might suddenly reveal God; by the thirteenth century the problem was to explain how bread and wine, which looked like bread and wine, could be anything else.

But the later eleventh century saw other changes in Christianity as fundamental as the new Gregorian sense of the spiritual, the clergy, and the church as separate from and dominant over the secular world. The years between 1050 and 1216 saw a proliferation of new types of specialized religious vocations, all of which departed from the old model of the monk, withdrawn from the world by renunciation of family and marriage and private property but part of a wealthy collectivity that offered to God an elaborate and splendid cycle of public prayer. Some of these new groups withdrew to barren and threatening wilderness, receiving only uncleared areas free of feudal ties and living a poverty that meant hard manual labor, near starvation, and great personal isolation. Other groups—and this was increasingly true as the period wore on—interpreted the apostolic life not simply as personal poverty and hardship but also as preaching the gospel in imitation of Christs disciples; they formed wandering bands that went from place to place whipping up religious fervor, often to the considerable discontent of local religious authorities. Although it has become standard in the scholarship to say that all these groups, including some who followed the dualist Cathars, represented shades of reform concern more than doctrinal aberration,12 it is clear that some of these individuals were not merely clerics (like Norbert of Xanten) who wanted to provide for the growing urban population, or lay people (like some of the Patarenes) who wanted a purer clergy, or even lay people (like Francis of Assisi and Peter Valdes) who simply tried to follow Christ literally and spread the sense of joy they found in so doing. Some were indeed attacking the authority of the clergy so greatly expanded by the Gregorian reform. In any case, throughout the new types of religious life created in the twelfth century ran a tension, present also in the Gregorian ideology, between withdrawal from and service of the world. But with the founding of the friars in the early thirteenth century a new religious role was created, whose core was a combination of evangelical preaching and radical renunciation of material support. The old monastic goal of personal salvation through withdrawal and salvation of society through prayer was eclipsed; the male talent of Europe flocked to the friars. Monasteries, of course, continued to play an important role in intellectual and economic as well as religious life. But the major philosophical, theological, and spiritual leaders of Europe in the thirteenth century were Franciscans and Dominicans. Thus, by the mid-thirteenth century not only had the clerical hierarchy expanded its responsibility for