Cornell University Press Medieval Studies Sampler 2018

This sampler contains short excerpts from the following forthcoming

books from Cornell University Press. Full details about each book are available on our website, cornellpress.cornell.edu.

Michael D. Barbezat, Burning Bodies: Communities, Eschatology, and the Punishment of Heresy in the Middle Ages, available December 2018

Tamar M. Boyadjian, The City Lament: Jerusalem across the Medieval Mediterranean, available December 2018 Carissa M. Harris, Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain, available December 2018 Walter Pohl, The A vars: A Steppe Empire in Central Europe, 567-822, available December 2018

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Emma Maggie Solberg, Virgin Whore, available December 2018 John Howe, Before the Gregorian Reform: The Latin Church at the Turn of the First Millennium, available in paperback January 2019

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Burning Bodies

Communities, Eschatology, and the Punishment of Heresy in the Middle Ages

Michael D. Barbezat

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction: Burning Bodies and Medieval Human Communal Identity Chapter 1. Our God is Like a Consuming Fire: Burning Bodies and Christian Community Chapter 2. Fields and Bodies: Toleration and Threat in a Shared Space Chapter 3. The Beginning at Orleans in 1022: Heretics and Hellfire Chapter 4. Likeness in Difference: Three Burnings in the Twelfth-Century Rhineland Chapter 5. Like Rejoices in Like: Recognition and Differentiation in Descriptions of Heresy Chapter 6. Heresy, Sex, and Reading in the Late Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Centuries Chapter 7. Leaping from the Flames: Love, Redemption, and Holy War in the Albigensian Crusade Conclusion: The Uses of Exclusion and Fear for a Community of Love

Introduction: Burning Bodies and Medieval Human Communal Identity The thirteenth-century Cistercian monk Caesarius of Heisterbach, in a chapter of his Dialogue on Miracles, wrote what became a famous account of an earlier immolation of a group of heretics at Cologne in 1163. In this dialogue between a mature monk and a young monk, or novice, the older monk tells a series of stories designed to illustrate for the novice the dangers posed by demons and their temptations. Heretics, the monk explains, are Christians overthrown by these deceptions who have become knowing or unknowing servants of the Devil, like demons themselves. The monk recounts that under the authority of the archbishop of Cologne a group of heretics, led by a man named Arnold, were arrested whose exact beliefs are left unexplained. These people were then examined and convicted as heretics by “learned men,” and following their conviction, the secular authorities condemned them to death. After learning of their conviction and their sentence, the novice asks for a description of their deaths, and the monk replies with a short and striking account of judicial murder: They were taken outside the town, and were together put into the fire near the Jewish cemetery. After the flames had taken hold of them, in the sight and hearing of a great crowd, Arnold placed his hand on the heads of his dying disciples, and exhorted them: “Stand fast in your faith, for this day you shall be with Laurence,” and yet they were very far from the faith of Laurence. There was a maiden among them, beautiful though a heretic, and she was drawn from the fire by the compassion of some who promised that they would provide her with a husband, or if it seemed better, would place her in a nunnery. She consented to this in words, but when the heretics were now dead, she said to those who had charge of her: “Tell me, where does that seducer lie?” and when they pointed out to her where Master Arnold lay, she slipped from their hands, veiled her face with her robe, and threw herself upon the body of the dead man, and with him went down to burn forever in hell.1 Accounts like this one from Caesarius often perplex modern readers by their paradoxical combination of heartlessness and pity. How could people, who considered themselves good and righteous, end up burning human beings alive?

How did they and their defenders, or “spinners of facts,” describe and explain this atrocity? These questions occurred to me as I first read descriptions of medieval executions for heresy, and they proved remarkably persistent, demanding some kind of response. Burning Bodies replies to these questions by focusing upon medieval accounts of the burning alive of Christian heretics from the eleventh to the early thirteenth century. In it, I analyse these descriptions of executions from the point of view of the executioners and their supporters, asking what the act of killing this type of criminal meant to them. As explained

by these authors, the most threatening and traumatic image of exclusion from human community was deeply connected to the most fundamental and hopeful promises on which they thought their society was built. In other words, the justification of horrific atrocity mirrors in reverse the noblest of aspirations.

Burning alive, to these authors, formed a part of a collection of ideas about salvation, Christian community, and the role of love. Descriptions of burning supposed heretics alive were profoundly related to ideas of a redemptive Christian community based upon a divine, unifying love, and medieval understandings of what these burnings could have meant to contemporaries cannot be fully appreciated outside of this discourse of communal love. For them, human communities were bodies on fire. Medieval theologians and academics often described the corporate identity of the Christian world as a body joined together by the love of God. This love was like a fire, melting individuals together into one whole. Those who did not spiritually burn with God’s love were destined to burn literally in the fires of Hell or Purgatory, and the fires of execution were often described as an earthly extension of these fires. In this scheme, there were two burning bodies that defined human collective identity and destiny, and those who did not burn one way must burn in another. Medieval authors recurrently saw the development of burning alive as the customary punishment for persistent heresy through their ideas regarding the larger significations of fire. In the form of the exclusionary fires of Hell and judicial execution, the purifying fire of post-mortem purgation, and the unifying fire of God’s love, medieval authors described processes of social inclusion and exclusion through the imagery of burning bodies.

In the accounts of burnings that they authored, medieval writers often depicted heresy and orthodoxy as co-constitutive, portraying heretics as the inverse of what they regarded mainstream Christianity to be. In the course of disavowing the heretical as everything the orthodox were not, these authors defined “Christian society by what it cast out to the margins,” and in so doing they said a great deal about how they imagined themselves. 2 In this fashion, descriptions of executions, and the accounts of events that lead to them, provided opportunities for particularly focused discourses on medieval ideas of religiously based community. In these sources, authors conjured up the presence of the heretic, put it to work and then abjured it away.3 The idea of the heretic conjured by these authors did important work, work on which developing concepts of orthodoxy depended. In their thinking with heretics, medieval writers portrayed exclusion that allowed integration, likeness that generated difference, and they explored the recurrent and unstable negotiations between such binaries in which they found themselves in different fires.4 In what follows, I offer a history of the ideas that orthodox authors of medieval historical and theological texts associated with the executions of

heretics from the earliest instances of burning alive as a punishment for heresy in the medieval West in the eleventh century until the advent of the internal crusades of the thirteenth. Out of necessity, I place what are often short accounts of executions in context, considering them alongside other sources. These other sources are either closely related to the actual events or describe the fundamental assumptions through which a medieval reader would have understood these often terse accounts of judicial murders.

My inquiry remains bound by the chains–sometimes explicitly golden–of orthodox polemic. By remaining in these confines, it leaves much essential work to be performed by other studies regarding heresy and its persecution in medieval worlds. Within orthodox polemic, the very real people who died in the events the sources describe were turned into instruments of the discourse that justified their murder. Any reality beneath such deliberate shaping is difficult, and sometimes impossible, to recover, but the deliberate shaping itself has a logic and a history that can be better understood. It was an essential component of what medieval persecutors thought they were doing, and modern attempts to understand their thought sincerely must grapple with it. In many ways, the attitudes and the arguments analysed below are astonishingly ugly, but their foulness can only be completely appreciated in connection with a set of apparently noble, beautiful, and seductive promises. Without looking at the beauty we cannot grasp the ugliness.

Questions and Issues in the modern Study of Medieval Heresy In part, my focus in Burning Bodies upon the point of view inhabited by orthodox polemic arises in reaction to developments in the recent historiography of medieval heresy. These developments have problematized the relationship between orthodox polemic and what one might call objective reality. In their analyses of medieval heresy, medievalists have recently found themselves divided into two camps, regarding the reality of the high medieval heresies described by traditional historiography. One group maintains a more “traditional” view, according to which organised heresies were, from the twelfth-century onward, an historical reality. The other side argues that, up until the mid thirteenth century, organised and systematic Christian heresies primarily existed as ideas in the minds of educated churchmen. The conversation between the two groups is often openly antagonistic and personal. 5 In the context of this debate, scholars are often grouped together by the general tenor of their conclusions while continuing to disagree with one another on many details. 6 In general, the traditionalists still adhere to familiar or conventional accounts of medieval heresy in which persecutors responded to phenomena that existed independently in their world. In the broadest outlines, many of these scholars would agree that heretical dissent, particularly Catharism, first appeared in Western Europe during

the twelfth century in the Rhineland, perhaps as an importation from the East, and then grew more prominent, especially in Italy and southern France, before the Albigensian Crusade.

In contrast to the conventional accounts of medieval heretical movements, the opposing side follows what Alessia Trivellone has termed a “new type of approach” which takes the attitudes of churchmen regarding heresy as its privileged object of study.7 Scholars who have taken this focus have found that many so-called medieval heresies were intellectual inventions of the elite, and that these inventions were further elaborated and solidified by modern historians, particularly in the nineteenth century. For those who follow this approach, medieval heresy in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries was primarily an idea, or set of ideas, that existed in the minds of those with power. As James Given summarises, “In many cases those whom the rulers of society persecuted were phantoms of their own imagining rather than the real enemies of Christendom.”8 The questioning of the difference between what medieval intellectuals constructed in their minds regarding heresy and what so-called heretics actually believed parallels, to some extent, the historiography of witchcraft. Once, historians read accounts of witches’ Sabbaths, consistently uniform across a long stretch of time and space, as an indication that something like them had to have actually happened and that historical authors described, often in garbled ways, this underlying reality. 9 This assumption came under withering assault in the second half of the twentieth century. Norman Cohn, in particular, turned the earlier assumption on its head. There was continuity, he argued, but it was in the learned tradition constituted by the literary descriptions of supposed events like the witches’ Sabbath. Outside of this literary tradition, the witch cult never actually existed. Cohn illustrated that the sex-filled nocturnal meetings ascribed to witches, heretics, early Christians, and similar groups formed a long-running trope in Western civilization. He tracked accounts of the supposed night-time meetings of various conspiratorial sects from the ancient world up to the witches’ Sabbaths of the early modern period. These meetings often featured sexual promiscuity, incest, demon worship, infanticide, cannibalism, and black magic.

Cohn termed this trope “the nocturnal ritual fantasy.”10 The nocturnal ritual fantasy impacts the history of heresy as many of the sources that establish it in the geology of witchcraft are also important sources for medieval heretical sects, because medieval heretics were often reputed to perform the same acts at their meetings.

In English-language scholarship on medieval heresy, the move towards a fundamental reappraisal of the truth behind sources’ claims regarding heretics began with the work of R. I. Moore. Moore’s thesis in The Formation of a Persecuting Society argued that persecution itself in the Middle Ages did not arise and intensify

as potential targets became more plentiful; rather, persecution was the result of the rise of central powers that could use the identification and exclusion of deviants as a way of justifying and expanding their authority.11 The motivators of this process were the literate clerici, a newly emergent educated elite, who shared a way of viewing the world derived from their training at the schools.

These learned men staffed the budding bureaucracies of centralising powers, both secular and ecclesiastical, and advanced their interests and imposed their conceptions on their surroundings.12 While Moore’s work initially focused upon the transformation of a culture, its analysis of that transformation, in the words of Carol Lansing, “stands the problem of heresy on its head: heresy becomes the result of the need to persecute.”13 In sharp contrast to the view of medieval persecution as an example of primitive delusion or sectarian backwardness, for Moore, persecution is an historical aspect of Western progress, if a regrettable one, and it arises from the self-interested rationalisation of the world.

Scholars influenced by Moore, particularly Mark Gregory Pegg and Uwe Brunn, have taken his arguments further and indeed have influenced him to embrace some of the more radical possibilities that were implicit in his earlier work. Pegg, based upon his research on early inquisitions around Toulouse and on the Albigensian Crusade, has argued that Catharism, the most famous medieval heresy, never existed in the Middle Ages.14 The Cathar heresy, as it is often presented, is an invention of nineteenth-century historians.15 Moore, for the twelfth century at least, now follows Pegg’s argument.16 This is not to say that medieval religious dissent did not exist, but that it did not take the form in which it is often presented. For Pegg, before the early thirteenth century, no one would have described themselves as a heretic or argued a suite of theological ideas consistent with the dualism ascribed to the Cathars by learned polemic.

There was no shadow church confronted in the Albigensian Crusade, or hidden hierarchy linking heretical cells across medieval Europe. The persecutors of heresy only sometimes believed that there was, and they used different names, often drawn from antiquity, to describe it, repeating the tropes of a tradition rather than drawing from immediate observation. Modern scholarship often only amplifies this dynamic in the sources by laying the scholarly construct of the Cathar over the suite of heretical tropes found in the medieval sources, for example substituting “Cathar” where the original text has a more generic word such as “heretic,” “good men,” or “Manichean.”17 Uwe Brunn, in the words of Moore, delivered the coup de grâce to the traditional account of the emergence of the Cathar heresy in the twelfth-century Rhineland. 18 Brunn built upon a recent French-language turn towards questioning the historical reality of the Cathars that began with Monique Zerner’s Inventer l’hérésie?19 He concludes that the term Cathar appeared in the twelfthcentury Rhineland as a learned construct projected onto diverse dissident groups,

particularly by Eckbert of Schönau. 20 This construct had a limited medieval circulation and is one of many ways authorities described dissent through the use of familiar tropes. Eckbert, a Benedictine monk, drew upon literary concepts and historical figures he encountered in his clerical education to create his Cathars, including the works of Augustine, Manicheaism, and the decrees of early Church councils from which he took the term Cathar. 21 Brunn’s work seriously challenges modern scholarly accounts that seek to link Eckbert’s Cathars with other dissident groups elsewhere and apply his Cathar theology to them. The arguments of Brunn and Pegg suggest that in the study of heresy there are two historiographical veils or integumenta that must be recognised. One arises from the filters used and assumptions held by the medieval authors of the sources.

The other takes shape in modern scholarship regarding heresy, often building upon select assumptions and generalisations present in some sources and projecting them onto others.

The scholars in the traditionalist camp largely concede that many elements of the sources, especially those from the twelfth century, must be read sceptically, but they maintain that this scepticism should not extend to the very reality of heresy itself. Accounts of medieval heresy written by orthodox intellectuals, they maintain, reflect a past reality that had actual heretics in it. In their arguments, a strong concern arises that the new approach to heresy goes too far, becoming a solvent to everything it touches. For John Arnold, “to make ‘heresy’ only the product of orthodox power is to impute to that power an overwhelming hegemony that is in danger of making the people subjected to it disappear.”22 Peter Biller, likewise, argues that the new approach to heresy threatens to render the actual lives and actual sufferings of real people non-existent, a past reality cast aside in a scholarly quest to disbelieve the source.23 To scholars like Biller, “there is a difficulty in seeing” medieval heretics, but “there is something to see.”24 In the debate, there is an important difference in the sources used by the two sides. Those who do not believe that medieval heretics existed as described specialize and largely focus upon twelfth-century and early thirteenth-century sources, and the traditionalists, in contrast, focus upon sources from the mid to late thirteenth century onward. As scholars who have positioned themselves in opposition to Pegg and Moore passionately argue, there is significant evidence from the mid thirteenth century that heresy existed beyond the minds of orthodox intellectuals. 25 In response, opposing scholars do not deny the existence of this evidence, but instead disagree with the traditionalists about its significance, arguing that the existence of dualist heretics in the thirteenth century does not, by itself, prove their presence in the twelfth century. Moore, for example, agrees that thirteenth-century dualists do seem to exist beyond the minds of orthodox intellectuals, but he maintains that those who study these later

dualists must now locate their origin outside the twelfth century.26 Jean-Louis Biget has long argued for a similar process, although with differing dates, in which an initial evangelical dissent became anticlericalism, and then dualist heresy, shaped in large part by a dialectic between dissent and the pre-conceived schemas through which the elite characterised and rejected that dissent.27 Julien Théry-Astruc suggests that actual dualists may have resulted from a century or so of intellectuals’ well-publicised combat with phantoms in a Foucauldian pattern of “perverse implantation.”28 Moore himself points to the rise of modern witchcraft groups as an example of this kind of implantation in action.29 The scholarly controversy regarding medieval heresy centres upon the usefulness and analytical limits of the scepticism we should have towards our medieval sources, but it also involves, and perhaps reveals, deeper principles held by the scholars involved. Tied to this conversation, in difficult and often nebulous ways, are individual scholar’s convictions regarding the role of power and the extent of the role played by institutions and bureaucracies in shaping the world and the identities of the individuals in it with that power.30 It seems to me that the heresies described by the sources I examine are largely intellectual constructions that existed in the minds of the churchmen who described them. The deaths they narrate were often real, if not the particular details imputed to these deaths, but the sources as we have them are primarily written to narrate something else. While I believe that the “new type of approach” to twelfth-century heresy is the right one, I acknowledge that the fear expressed by scholars like Peter Biller is extremely perceptive. The kind of erasure Biller finds implicit within the new approach was in actuality exactly what Orthodox polemic against heresy often was trying to do. In this polemic, the real suffering of real victims was transformed into a justification for victimisation.

Turning heretics into signs to be read by orthodox exegetes, signs that endlessly proclaimed the rightfulness of the actions undertaken by orthodox intellectuals who enjoyed the privilege to read them, was the goal behind the presentation of heretics upon the pyres of the eleventh to early thirteenth centuries. 31 The reduction of the persecuted into sign is an essential window onto the persecutors’ ethics and modes of interpreting their world.

The careful presentation of condemned heretics by hostile, orthodox authors aimed to defuse and to negate any supposed nobility in the choice to die for one’s beliefs, while rendering what those beliefs were murky and often impossible to disentangle from hostile polemic. Unlike the confessional struggles of early modern Europe, for the eleventh to early twelfth centuries, we have sources written largely from one perspective. 32 In this period, the real circumstances that may have led to the deaths of those condemned as heretics are often impossible to recover. A modern reader should wonder what convictions could have led the condemned to persevere and endure one of the

most horrific punishments ever inflicted by human beings upon each other.

While the uncovering of these beliefs, despite the difficulties posed by the sources, is a worthy goal, my analysis is primarily aimed at a better understanding of how orthodox portrayals of the burning of heretics attempt to forestall an audience from even asking such a question. Early accounts of heresy and its punishments are carefully designed to discourage such interest and, paradoxically perhaps, to convert any inherent likeness between the heretic on the pyre and the supposed nobility of martyrdom into the service of those powerful enough to make martyrs.

I have approached the sources in the way that I have in order to better understand the complex of ideas that justified the persecutors’ point of view. To realise this goal, I have taken seriously many of their claims that I do not regard as historical fact. To me, tales of demonic inspiration, orgiastic nocturnal rituals, and ceremonial cannibalism are obviously fallacious, but these shocking practices served as part of a unified complex of ideas for the medieval authors who attributed them to religious dissidents. For this reason, I have maintained their pairing with these dissidents’ supposed theological positions, analysing them together as parts of one whole. Even if the integument of medieval authors’ topoi of the heretic could be penetrated to reveal the lived reality of religious dissent, these topoi themselves would remain important artefacts of the past that should not be discarded. Authors in the past often believed in these phantoms and they put them to work, and, so employed, these spectres did things. In particular, they served as a boundary marker for Christian community while also acting–or being made to act–as continuous participants in the creation of the community they came to demarcate.33 In performing this function, the presence of actual heretics was not as important as their virtual presence within texts put into the service of orthodox self-definition and a developing understanding of the world tied to it.34 Actors in the past carried these phantoms inside them and in this way one can say that what never existed was an integral part of what did. In understanding this complex of ideas, we can better see how and why particular heresies were created and how these creations served their creators. To orthodox authors, one of the key aspects of this service was a closer integration with their God in a community formed by love. In their arguments, it was this love that led to persecution, and this love was like a raging fire.

One final introductory point needs to be made about the exceptional and unusual nature of the subject matter of this study. While burning at the stake endures in the popular imagination as a major facet of the Middle Ages, it was actually a very unusual event. Burning alive was, compared to other methods of execution, rare in the medieval period, and burning alive for heresy even more so. Medieval secular authorities executed people regularly for many crimes, but they executed individuals for the crime of heresy only in extraordinary

circumstances. The death penalty for theft, murder, or other crimes was relatively common in comparison with modern statistics. In fact, in the fourteenth century, where better records are available, the number of criminals executed per year in a large city could be roughly equivalent to the number of executions in the entire modern United States.35 The vast majority of these executions were hangings.36 Decapitation was less common, as it required a significantly skilled executioner, but it was still more frequently employed than immolation.37 Depending upon the region, burning alive was used as a punishment for different types of crimes and for different types of criminals. In France and in parts of Germany, custom forbade hanging women and they were sometimes burned, buried alive, or drowned instead.38 Burning alive was not a unique type of punishment reserved for heretics alone, but during the time period of this study it did become the customary punishment for unrepentant heretics before it became the official legal punishment in many jurisdictions. 39 Even in the thirteenth century and after, when burning alive was the official punishment for unrepentant heretics, it was rarely employed. For example, in the register of the famous fourteenthcentury inquisitor Bernard Gui, out of 633 sentences only 41, or six and a half percent, called for burning the condemned alive.40 The extraordinary symbolic power and larger cultural significance of burnings for heresy granted them a significance that far exceeded their frequency.

Such executions were extraordinary, resulting from unusual circumstances, and their abnormality drew contemporaries’ attention. As Paul Friedland has observed, medieval executions rarely attracted detailed written descriptions, especially in comparison to the attention lavished upon the details of judicial spectacles after the sixteenth century.41 Burnings for heresy are an exception to this tendency, an exception that mirrors, to some extent, the modern preoccupation with this form of punishment as emblematic of the medieval period as a whole. The unusual nature of the burnings for heresy examined in this book constitutes a large part of their value as historical sources. These executions represented an extraordinary exception to the everyday world of judicial violence. To contemporaries, they meant something; they set people to talking and writers to writing.

In the individual chapters that follow, I explore the meanings contemporary authors found in these unusual events. These chapters are divided into two main sections. The first part sets the stage for the second by interrogating the foundational concepts that medieval authors used to understand and discuss executions for heresy. These authors expressed, explored, and elaborated upon these concepts through imagery derived from scripture and its interpretations.

This imagery is important in and of itself, because it served as a tool through which medieval authors developed and debated their responses to heretics and the heresies they believed that they encountered. In other words, these images

and metaphors were not simply used to explain and to rationalise the choices made by medieval authorities, they played a role in the making of these choices.

The second part examines the sources for specific burnings and their context.

Each chapter focuses upon one event or closely-related group of events in a roughly chronological order. These chapters are not an exhaustive survey of all burnings in medieval Europe; rather, they question what meanings the authors of the sources for select events found in the act of killing heretics.

This book ends with the Albigensian Crusade for a number of reasons. More formalised processes against heresy, or inquisitions into heretical depravity, followed in the wake of that crusade. These practices saw an increased legal complexity and standardisation of procedure. For this later period, other studies have examined both the punishment meted out to heretics and the portrayals of the heretic in the sources. In contrast, the episodes selected here reveal the earlier, customary punishment of heresy and the presentation(s) of the heretic in relation to that punishment in a much messier period. These chapters illuminate some aspects of a process of becoming in which a set of central legal and symbolic assumptions was established that inform this later, and more studied, time.

Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum, 5.19, ed. Joseph Strange (Cologne: J. M. Heberle, 1851), 1:298-99; H. Von E. Scott and C. C. Swinton Bland, trans., The Dialogue on Miracles (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1929), 1:342.

2 The quote is drawn from the discussion of the legend of Saladin and the three rings in Dominique Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam (1000-1150), trans. Graham Robert Edwards (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 360.

3 My phrasing is influenced by that of Steven F. Kruger, “The Spectral Jew,” New Medieval Literatures 2 (1998), 21. On the relationship of his notions of spectrally and conjuration to medieval “categories of otherness” beyond Judaism, see The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 20.

4 Much like “thinking with demons” has served as a fruitful approach to the intellectual history of witchcraft in Europe, “thinking with heretics” allows scholars to approach the world of ideas and ideologies in which the medieval persecutors of heretics operated. See Stuart Clark, Thinking With Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); R. I. Moore, review of Heresy and Heretics in the Thirteenth Century: The Textual Representations, by Lucy J. Sackville, H-France Review 12 (2012), 44. See discussion below.

5 See Antonio Sennis,ed., Cathars in Question (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2016). This edited collection represents the current state of the debate. Some of the essays in this collection illustrate an unfortunate tendency in the current scholarly conversation to employ ad hominem arguments in the context of heated debate and prolonged disagreement.

1

Different scholars give the opposing sides different names in different contexts. They are sometimes described as “traditionalists” and “sceptics.” R. I. Moore, “Principles at Stake: The Debate of April 2013 in Retrospect,” in Cathars in Question, 258. Earlier, Lucy J. Sackville described the debate through a division between “functional” and “radical” skepticism: Heresy and Heretics in the Thirteenth Century: The Textual Representations (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2011), 5.

7 Alessia Trivellone, L’hérétique imaginé: hétérodoxie et iconographie dans l’Occident medieval, de l’époque carolingienne à l’inquisition (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 21-22.

8 James Given, “Chasing Phantoms: Philip IV and the Fantastic,” in Heresy and the Persecuting Society in the middle Ages, 271. See also Given’s review of Brunn’s Des contestataires aux “Cathares” in which he concludes that Brunn’s book provides much ammunition to those who argue that Catharism was “a mere spectre that haunted the minds of those troubled by the phenomenon of religious dissidence.” James Given, review of Des contestataires aux “Cathares” Discours de réforme et propagande antihérétique dans les pays du Rhin et de la Meuse avant l’Inquisition, by Uwe Brunn, Speculum 83 (2008), 963.

9 Perhaps the most influential example of such assumptions lies in the work of Margaret Alice Murray, especially her: The Witch Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921). For the influence of Murray’s thesis that the so-called cult was the survival of a pre-Christian religion, see Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

10 Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom, rev. ed. (London: Pimlico, 1993), 72-73. It was originally published as Europe’s Inner Demons: An Inquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt (London: Sussex University Press, 1975).

Cohn was far from the first to question Murray’s thesis, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 514-16.

11 R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society (Malden: Blackwell, 1987).

12 A process explored in more depth in R. I. Moore, The First European Revolution, c. 970-1215 (Malden: Blackwell, 2003).

13 Carol Lansing, Epilogue to The Albigensian Crusades by Joseph R. Strayer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 179. Lansing questions whether Moore’s argument can completely apply to Catharism because it is a different religion from Catholicism. As I will argue below, some scholarship has addressed this concern by doubting the existence of Catharism as another religion.

14 Mark Gregory Pegg, The Corruption of Angels: The Great Inquisition of 1245-1246 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

15 Pegg, “The Paradigm of Catharism; or, the Historians’ Illusion,” in Cathars in Question, 21.

16 R. I. Moore regards the identity of those called Cathars in medieval, or more often modern, scholarship as a serious problem; see Moore, The War on Heresy (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 6, n.

17 Mark Gregory Pegg, “Heresy, Good Men, and Nomenclature,” in Heresy and the Persecuting Society in the Middle Ages: Essays on the Work of R. I. Moore, ed. Michael Frassetto (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 238.

18 Moore, “The Debate of April 2013,” in Cathars in Question, 262.

6

Monique Zerner, ed. Inventer l’hérésie? Discours polémiques et pouvoirs avant l’inquisition (Nice: Centre d’Études Médiévales, 1998).

20 Uwe Brunn, Des contestataires aux “Cathares” Discours de réforme et propagande antihérétique dans les pays du Rhin et de la Meuse avant l’Inquisition (Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 2006).

21 See the discussion in chapter four for more information on Eckbert’s presentation of the Cathars. These are the “Sermones contra Catharos” also called the Liber contra hereses. PL 185:11-102. The first sermon, or section, of the work is translated in Moore, Birth of Popular Heresy, 88-94.

22 John H. Arnold, “The Cathar Middle Ages as a Methodological and Historical Problem,” in Cathars in Question, 76.

23 Biller and Brushi use these words to describe the essential epistemology at work in Lerner’s Heresy of the Free Spirit; see Caterina Bruschi and Peter Biller, “Texts and the Repression of Heresy: Introduction,” in Texts and the Repression of Medieval Heresy, ed.

Caterina Brushi and Peter Biller (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2003), 16-17.

24 Peter Biller, “Through a Glass Darkly: Seeing Medieval Heresy,” in The Medieval World, ed.

Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson (London: Routledge, 2001), 324.

25 Arnold, “The Cathar Middle Ages as a Methodological and Historiographical Problem,” in Cathars in Question, 68.

26 Moore, “Principles at Stake,” 272.

27 Jean-Louis Biget, Hérésie et inquisition dans le Midi de la France (Paris: Picard, 2007), 107-115.

28 Julien Théry–Astruc, “The Heretical Dissidence of the ‘Good Men’ in the Albigeois (12761329): Localism and Resistance to Roman Clericalism,” in Cathars in Question, 81.

29 Moore, “Principles at Stake,” 271, n. 31.

30 For example, Christine Caldwell Ames suggests that the success of Moore’s thesis in his Formation of a Persecuting Society has counteracted his original goal of denaturalising persecution, rendering persecution again into an inevitability as “what institutions do.”

She suggests that scholars take the sincerity of persecutors’ religious convictions, and the importance of these convictions to their identities, into consideration. See Christine Caldwell Ames, Righteous Persecution: Inquisition, Dominicans, and Christianity in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 18-19.

31 I see the use of the heretic as an object to be interpreted as very similar to that of the “hermeneutic Jew” as the “living letters of the law,” see Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 2. Cohen takes the phrasing “living letters” from Bernard of Clairvaux, “Letter 363,” in Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. Leclercq (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1958), 8:311-17.

32 For the kinds of justice that can be done with later sources to the convictions of those who chose to die for their religious views, see Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

33 For influential explorations of this dynamic, see Kai T. Erikson, Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (London: John Wiley and Sons, 1966); Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 3-8.

34 Similar points, regarding the representation of Jews in medieval Christian literature and iconography are argued by Sara Lipton and David Nirenberg: Lipton, Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), 7; 19

Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The History of a Way of Thinking (New York: Head of Zeus, 2013), 12.

35 For example, Jacques Chiffoleau estimated that, even though death sentences were a low percentage of the overall punishments inflicted by authorities, around 15 to 30 individuals were condemned to death every year in the region of Avignon at the beginning of the fourteenth century: Les justices du pape: délinquance et criminalité dans la region d’Avignon au quatorzième siècle (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1984), 235. In fourteenth-century Paris, Bronislaw Geremek recorded 73 death sentences issued at the Châtelet alone in the years 1389-92, an average of about 18 a year. For the entirety of Paris and the surrounding region, similar sentences at seigniorial courts would have increased that number; see Bronislaw Geremek, Les marginaux parisiens aux XIVe et XVe siècles, trans. Daniel Beauvois (Paris: Flammarion, 1976), 62. For comparison, since the reintroduction of the death penalty in the United States in 1976 until 2015, there have been an average of about 36 executions per year (with the actual numbers in any given year varying dramatically); see “Executions by Year,” Death Penalty Information Center, accessed July 12, 2016, http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions-year.

36 On different modes of execution and their frequency, see Julius R. Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 98-99.

37 Although from a later period a good account of the skill involved in public decapitation, as well as the length of time required for the acquisition of that skill, can be found in Joel F. Harrington, The Faithful Executioner: Life, Honor, and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century (New york: Picador, 2013).

38 On the prohibition of hanging women, see J. Gessler, “Mulier suspensa: à délit égal peine différente?” Revue Belge de philology et d’histoire 18 (1939), 974-88.

39 Julien Havet, in his foundational study of punishment for heresy, argued that burning heretics alive became basically a customary punishment before it became a point of fixed, written law: Julien Havet, “L’hérésie et le bras seculier au Moyen-Age jusqu’au treizième siècle,” Bibliothèque de l’Ecloe de Chartes 41 (1880), 517.

40 James B. Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 69.

41 Paul Friedland, Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment in France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 120-24.

The City Lament

Jerusalem across the Medieval Mediterranean Tamar M. Boydjian

Contents: List of Illustrations Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Note on Translation and Transliteration Introduction. A Wasteland Translated Chapter 1. Lamenting Jerusalem Chapter 2. The Lost City: Ibn al-Abīwardī, Ibn al-Athīr, and the Lament for Jerusalem Chapter 3. Papal Lamentations: The First Crusade and the Victorious Mourning for Jerusalem Chapter 4. Jerusalem’s Prince Levon: Lamentation and the Rise of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia Chapter 5. Forgotten Lamentation: Richard I and the Heavenly Journey to Jerusalem Conclusion Bibliography Index

Introduction: A Wasteland Translated What is that sound high in the air Murmur of maternal lamentation Who are those hooded hordes swarming Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth Ringed by the flat horizon only What is the city over the mountains Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air Falling towers Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London Unreal T.S. Eliot, from The Waste Land1 The “murmur of maternal lamentations,” the lament for the “city over the mountains,” the “falling towers” of places that once were: that carry memories of a cultural past now transformed.

That which once was and may never be again –Jerusalem, the wasteland.

Eliot’s poem The Waste Land embarks on the journey that loosely follows the medieval legend of the Holy Grail and its wounded guardian, the Fisher King – whose impotence and illness metaphorically reflect the infertility and suffering of his own kingdom which has turned into a barren wasteland. 2 The poem’s theme of life and death are symbolically channeled through the contrast between desolated space and that of the city, which both function as wastelands to those who attempt to inhabit them. And when the poem speaks of the “nightingale / Filled all the desert with inviolable voice / And still she cried and still the world pursues” (100-103), it references Philomēlē –the raped “princess of Athens” who becomes transformed through suffering into the nightingale; and whose violation becomes the “inviolable voice” that laments the physical and metaphorical death of land and cities.3 Eliot’s The Waste Land incorporates in its narrative many elements similar to the ritual of laments, specifically city laments –lamentations composed and devoted to the loss and destruction of a particular city (or space). The wasteland, comparable to ruined and barren cities after war and destruction, stands as a symbolic emblem for infertile lands, thirsty for a vivacious water of healing, for the renewal that can arrive through translating that space in literature, in lamentation.4 The afflicted land is connected to an overlord –here, the Fisher King –whose curse of impotence can only be lifted through the appearance of

the knight expected to decipher those symbols presented to him. But the knight fails. And the “no-thing” of the wasteland becomes filled with memory and desire, inscribed through textual, ritualistic, and cultural references in the poem –both from traditions of the “east” and “west.” Life and meaning are engraved upon the dead sculpture of the city, chiseled through words and poetic sorrow.

But, a poem that is to engage in lamentation cannot construct itself only upon ancient myth (that tradition must also reinvent that same myth).

This book will explore how various ethno-religious cultures across the medieval Mediterranean world lament the loss of the city of Jerusalem, and in what ways these lamentations informed by re-inscribing models of ancient city laments. This book argues that as a result of the contested nature of the city during the battles more commonly (and problematically) referred to as the Crusades, medieval laments over Jerusalem are produced across a number of literary traditions –Armenian, Arabo-Islamic, and Latin West –which posit their own contemporary social and political circumstances within an established exemplum of the city lament. This book will demonstrate how these lamentations are modeled specifically on Jewish conceptions of lamenting Jerusalem in the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible, as well as through the poetic traditions respective to each individual ethno-religious culture. In producing these city laments, each culture furthers their political objectives of reconquering the city by envisaging their own Jerusalem, through a textually surrogate geography of the city, also informed by the theological and spiritual tradition of the significance of Jerusalem for that particular faith. The form and content of these lamentations also informs us of how different cultures imagined Jerusalem. Since these laments appear during moments where the city is contested, they further allow each tradition to have their own Jerusalem live anew –through the very paradoxical discussion of its loss and destruction in lamentation.

Reading Mediterranean City Laments in the time of Crusade City laments date back to the ancient Mediterranean world. Dirges formulated over the fall of cities place the voice of lamentation in a city’s tutelary goddess – the same goddess who upon abandoning the city and its population, brings upon the fall and destruction of that city. Some of the most well recognized city lamentations come from ancient Mesopotamia –one of which is a Sumerian “Lament for Ur” composed as a result of the fall of the city-state Ur to the ancient pre-Iranic Elamites, around the period 2000 BCE.5 The Akkadian epic poem Gilgameš also includes references to the lamenting people of Uruk in Tablet VIII, who together with Gilgameš wail over the death of Enkidu –a wild man created by the protecting gods to stop Gilgameš from oppressing the people of the city.6 The ancient Greek epic the Illiad, could even be considered a tale whose overarching frame-narrative circles around the destruction of Troy, a city that

has been abandoned by its gods. Homer’s Odyssey is also in many ways a reflective lamentation of Troy, as Odysseus journeys to return home to his “fallen” city. In Book VIII, Odysseus is described as melting into tears after the bard, Demodocus, sings of the “death and slaughter [that bore] down on Troy” and how “Troy was fated to perish.” 7 Further examples from the ancient world include: Euripides’s tragedy Trojan Women; the Roman epic poem by Lucan, Pharsalia (also known as Bellum Civile); Aelius Aristeides’s oration delivered in Rhodes after a devastating earthquake that raged the city in 142 CE; and Aeschylus’s tragedy The Persians. These are of course only a handful of examples of many city lamentations that appear across different ethno-religious cultures in the ancient Mediterranean world. 8 The focus of this study, however, is those city laments composed over the loss of Jerusalem in the medieval Mediterranean world. The extant examples discussed in this book pivot around two focal points in the history of the city during the period that most scholars refer to as the First Crusade –the capture of Jerusalem by the Franks in 1099 CE, and the Third Crusade or Kings’ Crusade –initiated as a reaction to the capture of the city of Jerusalem by Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn in 1187 CE. These Crusades advanced conflict and contact between various ethnoreligious groups across the medieval Mediterranean. These wars also produced a number of laments over the loss of cities and principalities that became spaces of contestations between the invading Western powers, various Muslim groups of the region as well as Jews, Greeks, and Armenians who were already living there. Isaac bar Shalom’s “There Is No One Like You among the Dumb,” records in 1147 AD the destruction of a Jewish community during the Second Crusade who refused the crusaders’ demands of converting to Christianity.9 The sack of Constantinople by the Franks in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade also produces an elaborate and rhetorical lament by Niketas Choniates, a Byzantine Greek government official and historian who was present during the fall of the city.10 Niketas’s brother, Michael Choniates –the archbishop of Athens in the last quarter of the twelfth century –composes a city lament in the same year on the conquest of Athens by the Franks.11An interesting city lamentation also appears shortly after the invasion of Hungary by the Tatars of Batu Khan. A monk in service of King Béla IV composes a lament in 1242 for the destruction of Hungary. In his Planctus destructionis regni Hungariae per Tartaros, he builds upon common theme of ancient Mesopotamian city laments, such as attributing the fall of Hungary to the sins of the inhabiting population.12 A limited number of surviving lamentations over Jerusalem exist from this period, and center around these two moments in early crusading history where the status of Jerusalem changed hands between Islamic and European powers.

Though Byzantine Jerusalem was conquered and ruled by Islamic powers since the early seventh century, early Latin chronicles of Pope Urban II’s famous call

to crusade present the city as a lamented space for the Christian believer, imagining a future Latin Christian Jerusalem. The resulting conquest of the city in 1099 CE by the crusading powers produced a lamentation over the city by the Arabic poet Ibn al-Athīr, who calls for Islamic unity in recapturing Jerusalem.

And in the anticipation of the Kings’ Crusade after the loss of the city to Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn in 1187 CE, the Armenian High Patriarch Grigor Tłay writes his lamentation over the capture of Jerusalem. However, the inability of the Kings’ Crusade to secure Jerusalem into Latin Christian hands also resulted in narratives of lament, such as that of Richard the Lionheart, or Richard I of England, upon his departure of the city in the anonymous chronicle the Itinerarium Peregrinorum.

The medieval Mediterranean world was consumed with wars over territories, principalities, and cities. Mediterranean cities changed hands between rulers, cultures, and sometimes even within the same ethno-religious group, despite the representation of the Crusades historically by a majority of Western scholars, as battles purely between Islam and Christianity. The term “crusade” generally conjures up the image of devout medieval Christian knights marching on Jerusalem to fight for their faith against a forcefully unified Islamic unit. The historical reality was of course far more complex and diverse than this. In fact, Arabo-Islamic scholars attribute the success of the capture of Jerusalem in 1099 CE by the European Franks to the very disunity of the Islamic world. European participants and authors of the period also did not generally refer to these events as Crusades. The term did not exist in Europe until the thirteenth century and in the English language limited as a borrowing from the French.13 These wars were often referred to by the Latin terms bellum dei (war of god), negotium dei (business of god), passagium (passage), iter (journey), and peregrinatio (pilgrimage).14 What these terms reveal to us is that the focus of “crusading” was the journey, a movement to the salvation of the believer, a pilgrimage armed by the faith of its soldiers. However, “crusading” was not universal throughout Western Europe.

The idea encompasses geographic and ethnic diversity among the many groups of pilgrims who undertook the journey. “Crusading” presents itself through theological contradictions as the simultaneous embodiment of secular and religious activity, the political through ritualistic movement.

This range of medieval “crusading activity” came to be simplified through rigid definitions of what constituted a “crusade” –all of which moves us further away from the cultural and linguistic interconnectivities of the period. The term “crusade” –from the French croisade or literally the “one bearing the cross,” has come to represent an understanding of religiously motivated campaigns of Western Europeans conducted roughly between the late eleventh to the fourteenth century, motivated by religious, political, and economic reasons. 15 The application of the term “crusade” or “crusading history and literature” also represents a limited scope in that it confines our understanding of the wars over

Jerusalem (in the late eleventh to late twelfth centuries) to Western Europe and the views of a European, Latin Christian Occident towards and in conflict with an Islamic Orient. These types of partial, hierarchical, and preferential approaches have contributed to the understanding of this period traditionally as solely antagonistic: occident versus orient, Christian versus Muslim, European versus non-European. The Crusades were presented by a large number of scholars as battles purely between “Islam” and “Christianity” –an approach oftentimes reflective of the current political climate and used as symbols for national identities.

This strictly dualistic approach is one, which views cultures and their textual narratives in continual conflict, rather than exploring these ethno-religious interactions as collaborative and interdependent in also their contact. Many of the texts from this period have also generally been read against one another in the past, rather than as literary works informed from some of the same cultural, geographic, and linguistic realities. My study challenges these types of limited and anachronistic approaches to the period, by considering sources in their original languages as analogous creations that contribute to a larger study of the genre of lament in the medieval Mediterranean world. Rather than framing its analyses within the context of individually defined hegemonic and national discourses (i.e.

French, Latin Christendom, Islamic Empire, etc.), this book will consider lamentations composed over the loss of the city of Jerusalem within the larger trajectory of the city lament tradition, and the imagination of Jerusalem across the medieval Mediterranean world.

In their watershed study, Horden and Purcell paradoxically argue for the unity of the Mediterranean precisely in its inherent fragmentation —principalities and polities that were ethno-religiously diverse but integrated culturally and politically. 16 The process of acculturation and exchange operates within antagonistic but also collaborative enterprises in this period and it is this very framework which allows us to look at individual representations of Jerusalem, each of which amalgamate to a larger understanding of the recursive image of the city across the medieval Mediterranean world. Using the Mediterranean as a framework for analysis rather than “crusade” encourages readings that move beyond European realities, which recognize reciprocal exchanges and commonalities across cultures in the period, and acknowledge the significance of the impact of Mediterranean networks on literary cultures that have only been considered within national frameworks in the past. 17 My study also builds on recent scholarship in the field of medieval literature and Mediterranean studies, which attempt to bridge the gaps between confined readings of the Crusades and their relationship to the “eastern” world.18 The scale and scope of this book attempts to shift those discourses in a field, which primarily center their discussions on representations of Jerusalem in crusading

narratives between “east” and “west.” Most of these works contextualize their arguments as reactions to larger Orientalist discourses of nineteenth century that focused solely on a Western European frame for discussing the battles over Jerusalem (and in the area of the Levant in the late eleventh to twelfth century).

By focusing on lyrical and poetic lamentations over Jerusalem across the Mediterranean, I pluralize medieval European narratives and reframe antagonistic readings of the past to ones that enable textual and cultural dialogue between literary traditions that are oftentimes treated in insular and isolated fashions. This study is also interested in exposing Armenian and Arabic poetry to those who would otherwise not have the ability to access these sources because of linguistic or archival restrictions.

In its exploration into the ways in which the genre of lament works transculturally, this book reflects upon a particular historical moment where the contested nature of the city of Jerusalem becomes the object of lamentation. The goal here is not to purely trace a genealogy of the genre of the city lament, but rather to investigate what happens to the rhetoric of lament when the object of lamentation is the city. The center of my book is Jerusalem: how the city is represented, how cultures mourn the loss of the city, and how lamenting Jerusalem becomes a mirror for perceiving political and religious authority. Most scholarship on city laments tends to draw linguistic or cultural boundaries in their discussions of the genre. Lamentations over cities as part of larger historiographical works are oftentimes also not considered. Throughout this book, I read city laments as part of the larger literary history of each individual tradition. At the same time, this book moves beyond the realm of individual and nationalized literatures by considering the ways in which these compositions reframe an already established exemplum of lamenting the loss of Jerusalem in the Hebrew Bible. By aligning these different traditions alongside one another (Arabo-Islamic, Latin Christendom, and Armenian), this book hopes to expand upon the our understandings of the ways in which various ethno-religious cultures across the medieval Mediterranean lamented cities, specifically Jerusalem.

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land. Norton Critical Editions, ed. Michael North (2001). All subsequent references and line numbers are from this edition.

2 The figure of the Fisher King appears for the first time in Chrétien de Troyes’s 12th century unfinished romance, Perceval le Gallois, though originally believed to be of borrowed from Celtic tradition as part of the motif of a barren land whose cure must be lifted by a hero.

In the legend, Perceval’s silence in inquiring the nature of the Holy Grail and the bleeding sword during a feast at the disabled Fisher King’s castle, subsequently results in Fisher King’s wound to remain unhealed, and Perceval to embark on the quest for the grail. The legend develops through the Middle Ages in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, Marie de France’s Lanval, Robert de Boron’s Joseph d’Arimanthie, Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, and 1

others. Though the significance of the grail is not specified in Chrétien’s Perceval, the “graal” [Old French for “cup” or “vessel”] has later come to be interpreted in continuations of the text by other authors as the chalice used by Jesus during the Last Supper. Note also that the Grail legend in its archetypal pattern does not belong solely to the European or Christian tradition, but rather develops from Celtic, Greek, and Persian origins such as the Cup of Jamshīd, which we find in the Persian epic poem Shāhnāmeh among other places.

3 Φιλοµήλη (Philomēlē) is a figure in Greek mythology who is transformed into a nightingale after being raped and mutilated by her sister’s husband Tereus. In his notes to “The Waste Land,” Eliot refers to the “The Story of Tereus and Philomela” as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book VI. See page 22 for Eliot’s note.

4 Eliot’s notes to his “The Waste Land” open with the following: “Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss L. Weston’s book on the Grail Legend: From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge).” In her study, Weston traces the roots of Arthurian legends from pagan to Christian rituals, and attempts to connect the Grail legend to pagan infertility rituals.

5 Four other Sumerian city lamentations also survive from the same period: the Lament for Sumer and Ur; the Lament for Nippur; Lament for Eridu; and the Lament for Uruk.

These are preserved in ancient Babylonian copies. For a detailed outline and discussion of the structural and thematic characteristics of Mesopotamian city-laments see Paul Wayne Ferris, Jr. The Genre of the Communal Lament in the Bible and the Ancient Near East (Georgia: Scholars Press, 1992) 17-62; S. Langdon, Sumerian and Babylonian Psalms (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1909) and Babylonian Liturgies (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1913); H. Zimmern, Babylonische hymnen und gebete, zweite auswähle (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs, 1911).

6 At the end of the epic when a violent storm arrives in Tablet XI, and the tutelary goddess Ištar and the other gods depart, the inhabitants engage in lamentation over Uruk, along with Gilgameš who “sat down and wept, / down his cheek his tears were coursing.” See The Epic of Gilgamesh, trans. Andrew George (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 62-69; 99 (XI, 309-310). This translation includes the Old Babylonian Tablets, which have been used to construct the “Standard Version” of the epic, as well as the translation of fragments later discovered from archeological digs dating to 2000 BC 7 Homer’s Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (London: Penguin books, 1996), VIII, 573-630.

Homer differentiates two ancient Indo-European terms for lament, according to the manner of performance and relationship to the deceased. A lament performed by a female member of kin or close friend, and spontaneous in nature is γόος (góos); see for example, Illiad 18.51. Θρηνωδία (threnodia) is the Greek term for a song of mourning composed for the dead by those who are not members of kin or are hired mourners. The word comes from the combination of Θρηνως (threnos) “to wail”, and ωδή (oide) an “ode.” The major source for discussing the lament tradition in ancient Greek and Roman society is the work of Margaret Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in the Greek Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), esp. 102-128; see also Richard A. Hughes, Lament, Death, and Destiny: Studies in Biblical Literature 68 (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2004), 11-26.

8 For an extensive study of city laments in the ancient world see Ed. Ann Suter, Lament: Studies in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond (Oxford University Press, 2008); and eds.

Mary R. Bachvarova, Dorota Dutsch, and Ann Suter, The Fall of Cities in the Mediterranean:

Commemoration in Literature, Folk-Song, and Liturgy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

9 William Morrow, “The Revival of Lament in Medieval Piyyuṭîm,” Lamentations in Ancient and Contemporary Contexts, 139-150; includes original Hebrew text with English translation by Morrow, 146-150. See also: William Morrow, Protest against God: The Eclipse of a Biblical Tradition (Hebrew Bible Monographs 4; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2006); Jakob J. Petuchowski, Theology and Poetry: Studies in the Medieval Piyyut (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).

10 Ed. Immanual B. Bonn, Nicetae Choniatae Historia (Bonn, 1835), 763-767.

11 S. Lambros, Μιχαήλ ’Ακοµινάτου τοΰ Χωνιάτου τά σωζόµενα II (Athens, 1879-80); repr.

Groningen, 1968.

12 The poem has been preserved in a single fourteenth century manuscript at the Royal State Archives in Breslau. Ed. Juhász Lászlo, “Planctus destructionis regni Hungariae per Tartaros” in ed. Imre Szentpétery, Scriptores Rerum Hungaricarum II (Budapest: Academia Litter. Hungarica, 1937), 589-98. Two historiographic works lamenting the loss of Hungary to the Mongols also appear around this time. The first is included in the Gesta Hungarorum, the oldest extant account of the history of the Hungarians by the anonymous notary of King Béla; and the Carmen Miserabile super Destructione Regni Hungariae per Tartaro by the Italian prelate Roger of Torre Maggiore or Master Roger (Scriptores Rerum Hungaricarum II, 543-88).

13 James A. Brundage, “Cruce Signari’: The Rite for Taking the Cross in England,” Traditio 22 (1966): 289-310; Kenneth Pennington, “The Rite for Taking the Cross in the Twelfth Century,” Traditio 30 (1974): 429-435; Michael Markowski, “Crucesignatus: Its Origins and Early Usage,” Journal of Medieval History 10 (1984): 157-165.

14 For example, see Jonathan Riley Smith, What Were the Crusades? (San Francisco: Ignatus Press, 2009), 1-8; Christopher Tyerman, The Invention of the Crusades (University of Toronto Press, 1998), 49-55; among others.

15 Whether Jerusalem was the central goal of the crusades is a point of contestation among Crusading historians until today. The German historian Carl Edrmann, noted particularly for his study of the origins of the Crusading movement in Western Europe, argues in his Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens (Stuttgart, 1955) that Jerusalem was a secondary goal, a lure to appeal to all aspects of medieval society –the layman and the religious man alike –as part of a growing “papal militism” prior to the First Crusade, which according to Erdmann established an ideology which supported the crusading movement towards the orient. Most scholars either agree or argue against Erdmann’s claim. See H.E.J. Cowdrey, “Pope Urban II’s Preaching of the First Crusade,” History 55 (1970): 177-188; E.O. Blake, “The Formation of the ‘Crusade Idea’,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 21 (1970): 11-31.

16 Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: The Study of Mediterranean History (Malden: Blackwell, 2000). See also Eds. Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita, A Companion to Mediterranean History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014); Eds. Adnan A. Husain and K.E. Fleming, A Faithful Sea: The Religious Cultures of the Mediterranean, 1200-1700 (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2007); Stephen O’Shea, Sea of Faith: Islam and Christianity in the Medieval Mediterranean World (Walker Books, 2006); Brian A. Catlos, Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c.1050-1614 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); among others.

For more on the framework of the Mediterranean for the medieval scholar, see Sharon Kinoshita, “Medieval Mediterranean Literature,” PMLA 124, no. 2 (Mar., 2009): 602. See also her work on the Mediterranean and French romances: Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).

18 Western crusading historians such as Riley-Smith, Norman Housley, Christopher Tyerman, Thomas Madden, and Helen Nicholson have produced a large body of new scholarship, which interrogates the question of crusading and its relationship with the East. Recent scholarship in the field which advances intercultural studies in the Mediterranean world include: Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100-1450 (NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); Suzanne Yeager, Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Lee Manion, Narrating the Crusades: Loss and Recovery in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); eds. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Karla Mallette, A Sea of Languages: Rethinking the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013). See also Mallette’s work on the literary traditions of the medieval Mediterranean: The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250: A Literary History (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); and European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) 17

Obscene Pedagogies

Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain

Carissa M. Harris

Contents

Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Teaching Sex: The Pedagogy of Obscenity 1. “Felawe Masculinity”: Teaching Rape Culture in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales 2. “With a cunt”: Obscene Misogyny and Masculine Pedagogical Community in the Middle Scots Flyting 3. Pastourelle Encounters: Rape, Consent, and Sexual Negotiation 4. Pedagogies of Pleasure: Peer Education in Medieval Women’s Songs 5. Songs of Wantonness: Voicing Desire in Two Lyric Anthologies Conclusion: “Grab ‘em by the pussy”: Obscene Pedagogies, Past and Present

Appendix to Chapter 4: Songs of Lusty Maidens Appendix to Chapter 5: Songs of Wantonness

Notes Bibliography Index

Introduction Teaching Sex: The Pedagogy of Obscenity In The Castle of Perseverance (c. 1425), a morality play featuring personifications of the seven deadly sins, characters repeatedly use obscenities like “cunte” and “serdyn” as tools for sexual education. Gluttony teaches his friend Mankind how to indulge his bodily appetites with a step-by-step script: He orders him to enjoy “mete and drynkys goode” (1149) and rich spices, then urges, “And thanne mayst thou bultyn in thy boure, / And serdyn gay gerlys” [then you must copulate in your bedroom, / And fuck pretty girls] (1159-60).1 Gluttony’s use of “bultyn” takes a verb normally applied to the sifting of grain and transforms it into a descriptive sexual term indicating repetitive back-and-forth bodily movement.2 The explicit verb “serdyn” means “to fuck” in Old and Middle English, and John Florio lists “sard” alongside “fucke” and “swive” in his 1598 Italian-English dictionary.3 In mobilizing the shock value of “bultyn” and “serdyn” and instructing his friend to turn word into action, Gluttony uses obscenity to teach Mankind about masculine sexuality.

Gluttony’s lewd lecture is significant for two reasons. First, it demonstrates how medieval religious writers harnessed obscenity’s powers for didactic purposes to teach individuals about sex and sin. Mankind points to the educational dimensions of his friend’s speech when he replies, “Soth and sad it is, thy sawe” [your words are true and wise] (1162), drawing upon the valences of “sawe” as “a teaching, doctrine” and “a rule, law, commandment.”4 Gluttony instructs Mankind regarding not only whom (“gay gerlys”) but also where (“in thy boure”) and how (“bultyn[g]”) he will copulate. Gluttony’s use of the verb form “mayst” reinforces his statement’s pedagogical thrust, as it can connote obligation, meaning “should” or “must.”5 His instructions are successful, as Mankind tells Gluttony’s sister Lechery, “To bed thou muste me brynge” (1207).

She responds with a lesson of her own when she orders, “In my cunte thou schalt crepe” (1190). She links genital obscenity with the didactic verb “schalt”—which “express[es] an order, a commandment, direction”—to issue instructions regarding her “cunte,” illustrating obscenity’s efficacy for articulating female desire.6 Gluttony’s speech teaches his fellow man how to copulate, as he breaks down the sexual script into discrete steps: pampering the body, retreating to the bedroom with pretty girls, then vigorously “bultyn[g]” and “serdyn[g].” This scene stages same-sex peer pedagogy with effective results, as one man’s bawdy, instructive words result in another’s deeds.

Obscenity is a useful teaching tool because of its inherent transgression and capacity to agitate, and Gluttony is only one of many speakers to deploy its pedagogical potency in late medieval England and Scotland. Mary Caputi states that “we recognize the obscene in its predetermined violation of established norms, its eagerness to proclaim from beyond the acceptable.”7 Obscenity sheds light on cultural taboos and anxieties, as it “challenges the accepted limits of culture, not always with a view toward redefining these limits but toward revisiting their reasons for being, and toward underscoring their ultimate tenuousness.”8 Obscenity defies assumptions and sensibilities; it horrifies, scandalizes, entices, offends; and it incites laughter. Through its insistence on violating the rules of polite expression, it reaches listeners with its galvanizing power and shocks them into reconsidering how they think about gender, sex, and power.

With its transgression of taboos governing bawdy talk, obscenity provokes two main axes of response: the irresistible pull of arousal and titillation and the revulsive push of shame and disgust. The former response is due to medieval culture’s frequent conflation of sexual words and deeds. It is reflected in Linda Williams’s emphasis on “pornography’s solicitation of the bodies of its viewers” and Jeffrey Henderson’s claim that obscenity can “excite amusement or pleasure.”9 The latter response, in contrast, entails recoil, revolt, loathing, nausea, horror. Obscenity operates similarly to the abject theorized by Julia Kristeva, which “simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject,” operating as “a vortex of summons and rejection.”10 We are simultaneously drawn in and repulsed by the obscene; we cannot stay put. In many cases, as in Gluttony’s speech teaching Mankind “how to serd” and asserting the centrality of “serdyn[g] gay gerlys” to Mankind’s performance of masculinity, speakers mobilize obscenity’s powers of compulsory response to educate audiences about sexuality.

Some men deploy obscenity when teaching their peers how to dominate and dehumanize women, while others use it to challenge dominant narratives about masculinity and to propose alternatives, a practice that scholars and activists have identified as one of the key sites of rape prevention more generally.11 Obscenity enables women to voice their dissatisfaction with the sexual status quo, to instruct their partners about pleasure, and to teach each other strategies for negotiation. It is this capacity of obscenity to educate and change minds that I investigate throughout Obscene Pedagogies, in order to understand its meanings in the later Middle Ages and to uncover its present-day implications. Starting with an examination of obscenity’s role in authorizing masculine aggression and fostering misogyny before turning to explore its potential for facilitating sexual negotiation and encouraging empathy for rape survivors, Obscene Pedagogies

investigates how medieval lyric voices mobilize the obscene to teach their peers about violence, power, and desire.

“Histories that are still”: Feminist Frameworks Feminists have long argued that the personal is political. I follow Judith M. Bennett, Sara Ahmed, Carolyn Dinshaw, and others in suggesting that the personal and political are also historical.12 Individual experiences of gendered embodiment do not simply have larger political causes and import, but are also shaped by a long history of ideologies so entrenched that they have calcified and come to be viewed as “natural.” Obscene Pedagogies seeks to uncover a usable past in the literature of premodern England and Scotland that can help us understand current cultural discourses and lived realities with greater perspicacity. I am a mixed-race woman of color. My body, and the meanings it carries in this world, is an ineluctable condition of my existence as a human and as a scholar. I approach these texts as an embodied subject, and I incorporate both contemporary material and occasional personal anecdote into my scholarly analysis. I use a black feminist framework even though many of these texts are not explicitly about race, because it enables us to approach these texts in generative ways.13 I ground Obscene Pedagogies in several key features of black feminist thought articulated by Patricia Hill Collins, most notably an awareness of the long legacy of struggle against sexual violence, connections to lived experience, and the merging of intellectual work and activism.14 A black feminist framework is aware of how different inequalities intersect—in the case of peasant women in the pastourelle, or unmarried urban working women in singlewomen’s songs, or tapsters in clerk-and-serving-maid-ballads—to produce violence that falls more heavily on some bodies than others. The medieval attitudes outlined in this book have shaped my life in profound and indelible ways, and I am committed to probing the roots of those attitudes by using “words as tools” to “hammer away at the past,” to use Ahmed’s evocative phrasing.15 I use an intersectional framework, which Kimberlé Crenshaw names as “account[ing] for multiple grounds of identity when considering how the social world is constructed” and which Brittney Cooper calls “an account of power,” to examine the violence inflicted upon women disadvantaged by gender, class, age, profession, and unmarried status, including “wenches,” brewhouse workers, milkmaids, and penniless peasant girls.16 I was always aware of race-based sexual violence’s insistent presence in my family history, and I bring that keen awareness of violence’s manifold forms to my analysis here. My great-great-great grandfather was a plantation owner in Hearne, Texas. My great-great-great grandmother was his kitchen slave. We do

not know her name. He raped her, and she gave birth to my great-great grandmother Kate.

When I was a child, my great-grandmother Rose told me stories about our foremothers. “Just call me G.G. Rose,” she always said. “Great-Grandma makes me sound like an old lady.” She told me about her grandmother Julia Fields Key, born to ex-slaves in east Texas five years after Emancipation. Julia gave birth to her oldest daughter Mary as an eighteen-year-old singlewoman in 1888. Mary was far lighter-skinned than Julia’s next two daughters with her husband, and she carried her mother’s last name, Fields, rather than any father’s. “The white man got her,” G.G. Rose would say matter-of-factly about Julia. Even as a child, I knew what she meant. On the 1900 federal census, Mary Jane Fields is twelve years old. Under “father’s birthplace,” the census-taker writes, “don’t know.”17 The record appears to give oblique confirmation of this family lore of interracial rape, histories of violation embedded within its dispassionate official language.

My foremothers’ bodies were marked for violence because they were black women who lived in Texas during slavery and its aftermath. I seek to honor their experiences of by probing the violence that came before and after them and fitting it into larger context, by dissecting the ideologies that made it possible, and by honoring their survival. I analyze these medieval texts with an acute awareness of how the histories of various inequalities, including race and class, contribute directly to women’s contemporary experiences of violence. Ahmed writes, “so much violence does not become visible or knowable or tangible. We have to fight to bring that violence to attention.” She insists upon the necessity of recognizing “histories that are still.”18 Black feminist activism has historically focused its energies on fighting violence against women made vulnerable by intersecting structural inequalities.19 It sees speaking against sexual violence as imperative for social change; it emphasizes recognizing past injustices and putting the present into historical context; and it stresses the importance of survival, of resilience, of moving forward. I apply this framework, this project of probing histories of violence and paying special attention to intersecting inequalities, to my study of medieval obscene poetry about bodies and desires, focusing on different kinds of intersectionality throughout the book. I view these common experiences of violence as the basis for trans-historical feminist coalition-building, as I show how shared harms and inequalities have the capacity to create affective connections across time among marginalized individuals.20 I link my discussion of medieval texts with my own experience, bringing personal histories into conversation with literary and cultural ones, in line with Collins’s assertion that “knowledge for knowledge’s sake is not enough,” as black feminist scholarship “must both be tied to Black women’s lived experiences and aim to better those experiences in some fashion.”21 I have written this book

inhabiting a black woman’s body which moves through the world, which walks city blocks and sits on crowded buses. I cannot help but see the larger issues I write about—power, inequality, oppression, misogyny—at work in my everyday experiences, just as I cannot help but notice how the quotidian violations of inhabiting this body have structural causes and political import.22 Lewd words yelled from moving cars. Men’s hands brushing deliberately and repeatedly against my ass on a downtown street, grasping me around the rib cage just under my right breast as I sit at a bar, the brazenness of the violation shocking me into speechlessness even though I have tried to condition myself to expect it at any time. A man in a Philadelphia Eagles cap saying, “Holy shit, them titties bounce!” as he passes me on a busy street. Bodies much larger than mine who block my path until the last possible moment, just to show me that they can, before stepping out of the way and letting me pass.23 I know that the things I write about from the past are not over. I know that with my body. And while fifteenthcentury lyrics about fictional British women may not seem directly tied to the lived experience of a twenty-first-century woman of color, I am convinced that, by understanding how gender intersected with class, youth, and single status to render certain bodies inordinately vulnerable to violence, we can better understand how power operates and comprehend the urgent necessity of social change. I cannot read medieval pastourelles without thinking of my own experiences riding public transportation or walking down the street, nor can I read Middle English proverbs commanding young women to save their “cunte[s]” for marriage without recalling the evangelical vogue for adolescent virginity pledges at the turn of the twenty-first century.

I have chosen to embrace the immediacy generated by obscenity’s potent charge across time, noting as Dinshaw does that “the present is ineluctably linked to other times, people, situations, worlds,” while at the same time acknowledging the significant differences between then and now.24 The resonances between past and present cannot be denied, Suzanne M. Edwards demonstrates in her reading of rape survivor Emma Sulkowicz’s yearlong mattress-carrying campaign at Columbia University in 2014-15 as part of a long history of viewing survival as “a shared experience of suffering,” and as Nicole Nolan Sidhu explores in her discussion of the relationship between medieval obscenity and modern pornography.25 These cross-temporal resonances have important implications for scholars and activists who seek a more sexually ethical future.

We are not accustomed to seeing the Middle Ages as intimately familiar, particularly when it comes to sexual violence, as the term “medieval” is frequently mobilized to signify especially egregious violence or inequality. In pieces such as the Slate article entitled “North Carolina Fails to Fix its Horrifying, Medieval Rape Law,” decrying a law that prevents individuals from revoking

consent to sexual contact once it has begun, “medieval” functions as shorthand for backwards, other. We are not like that. We are not that bad.26 We are more like that than we want to admit, and our impulse to demarcate present from past, to posit ourselves as “progressive,” as not-that, has profound implications, as it elides the continuities of violence and inequality over time and prevents us from seeing the full scope of the issue.27 By arguing for the absolute alterity of the past and refusing to name sexual violence both past and present, we remain blind to the profound resonances between sexual cultures across time.

And by refusing to call violence both past and present by its name, as Ahmed contends, “that violence is both concealed and reproduced.”28 We see this willful occlusion of histories of violence in newspaper headlines naming Sally Hemings as Thomas Jefferson’s “enslaved mistress,” the fact that she was fourteen years old when her forty-four-year-old owner began raping her camouflaged under the guise of illicit interracial romance.29 We see it when male comedians defend jokes about violence against women as “free speech,” and when literary critics characterize medieval rape poems as “amorous encounter[s]” and “lover’s dialogues.”30 We do not want to believe that the world is as violent as it is, that awful, inexplicable things can happen to you even when you are not “asking for it” because we live in a deeply unequal world. Ahmed writes, “Feminist ideas are what we come up with to make sense of what persists.”31 Obscene Pedagogies is devoted to making sense of what persists, of recognizing how the past’s violence lives on in the present.

At the same time that we need to trace the deep roots of violence and misogyny stretching back to the Middle Ages, I do not want to flatten the differences between then and now. I am aware that my search for a usable past in these texts can be a dangerous endeavor, because it risks collapsing the differences not only between past and present but also between fiction and reality. I do not intend to suggest that the medieval and modern map seamlessly onto each other, nor do I mean to elide the particularities of each, preferring instead to follow Dinshaw in using Donna Haraway’s notion of “partial connection (not a full identification)” to argue for linkages without collapsing differences.32 And there are indeed differences, as the centuries between the Middle Ages and now have witnessed significant changes in the recognition of sexual violence in its many forms: Estelle B. Freedman shows how U.S. activists in the generations after the Civil War successfully raised the age of consent, brought increased awareness to the sexual abuse of boys, and named marital rape as a problem, while Jody Raphael traces a recent growing awareness of the problem of acquaintance rape.33 Susan Brownmiller’s influential book, Against our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, showed how rape is a widespread, trans-historical structural phenomenon keeping all women in fear of harm and argued that sexual

violence is not a runaway expression of desire but is rather spurred by an urge to dominate and disempower.34 By seeing this violence as systemic terrorism rather than individual trauma, scholars began to analyze the problem of “rape culture,” teasing out the erroneous, widely-held attitudes that allow sexual violence to continue by blaming victims and failing to hold perpetrators accountable, including seven key components of “rape myths”—“she asked for it,” “it wasn’t really rape,” “he didn’t mean to,” “she wanted it,” “she lied,” “rape is a trivial event,” and “rape is a deviant event”—and the frequent erasure of cisgender male and transgender victim-survivors from discussions of sexual violence.35 Conversations about consent have shifted from No means no to Yes means yes, and institutions ranging from colleges and universities to the state of California have adopted affirmative consent policies, which define consent as “the communication of an affirmative, conscious and freely-made decision by each party to engage in agreed upon forms of sexual contact” and predicate it upon “the presence of yes” rather than “the absence of no.”36 I am heartened by these changes, but they are not enough, as I show in my linking of rape culture in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to a rape trial involving professional athletes in Wales, and in my analysis of the implications of Donald Trump’s famous injunction to “Grab ‘em by the pussy.”

As part of providing “an account of power” in these texts, I focus on recovering forgotten lyrics in women’s voices and bringing them into the scholarly conversation. Since many of the texts I discuss have been overlooked by critics, I provide glossed editions in two appendices so that others can read and write about them. The voices from these pastourelles and “songs of lusty maidens” were sung by living women in alehouses, at village festivals, and among friends, and they have much to tell us about widespread cultural attitudes regarding violence, consent, desire, and pleasure. Noting how marginalized perspectives have been excluded from critical conversations and subsequently forgotten, Alice Walker writes, “it is our duty…to collect them again…if necessary, bone by bone.”37 While Walker is speaking specifically about AfricanAmerican writers, her sentiments apply to my project of gathering neglected voices from the past and placing them in dialogue with each other as well as with the present. I want to listen to the fictive voice of the rape survivor. I want to hear the tapster, the milkmaid, the servant girl far from home.

Reading the significance of long-ago fictional texts alongside contemporary realities is further complicated by the fact that many texts voiced by women were composed and copied by men. Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner argues that medieval woman’s song is encoded with “double voicing,” as these lyric voices are simultaneously “locate[d]…in the daily work and life cycle of real women who sing about and along with their experience” and “a literary convention written

by men.”38 These voices sometimes speak in service of patriarchal interests or embody misogynist stereotypes of feminine duplicity and sexual voracity, like the woman who reminisces regretfully about her days as “a wanton wench / Of twelve yere of age.”39 E. Jane Burns names this “resistant doubled discourse” as “bodytalk” and argues it is “something that we as feminist readers can choose to hear,” as “female voices, fashioned by a male author to represent misogynist fantasies of female corporeality, can also be heard to rewrite the tales in which they appear.”40 We hear this resistance when women’s literary voices articulate protest against social stigma and vociferously challenge men who assault, mistreat, betray, or harass them.41 “Spekyng Rybawdy”: Obscenity in Late Medieval Britain Due to centuries of scholarly embarrassment, study of medieval obscenity is only in its incipient stages despite the prevalence of obscene words and imagery in medieval culture, and its pedagogical dimensions have gone largely unaddressed.42 Michael Camille explores how visual artwork like dragons wearing pink penis-hats, naked men exposing their gaping anuses, and nuns selecting plump penises from phallus-laden trees was often relegated to the margins—of manuscript pages, cathedral facades, and choir-stalls—where liminality imbued them with a special kind of power even as it reinforced their taboo status.43 Art historians note the survival of eight sexually explicit metal badges recovered from the banks of London’s River Thames, including a fourteenth-century bronze vulva pendant whose labia are inscribed with the words “con por amours” [a pun on “as for love/cunt for love”]; a large phallus inside an ornate tasseled purse, giving new meaning to the contemporary slang expression “bag of dicks”; and three ships filled with crews of phalluses.44 They suggest that these badges functioned apotropaically “to dispel evil, protect the wearer, bring good luck, and avert misfortune” much like the prominent phallus carvings meant to ward off the “evil eye” popular in Roman Britain.45 In her exploration of obscene gender comedy, a popular discourse which deployed bawdy humor to dramatize domestic power struggles, Sidhu draws links between past and present, arguing that “medieval thinkers, artists, and writers reveal a sense of taboo relating to sexual activity and lower body parts that is remarkably similar to that of the modern West.”46 Sidhu investigates the political implications of obscene gender comedy and explores how obscenity’s mixing with laughter enabled “alternative ways of looking at the established order,” whereas I examine obscenity’s pedagogical currency in fabliaux, erotic songs, alewife poems, pastourelles, and insult battles, showing how it both authorizes and challenges sexual violence.47 I use obscenity to name “a word or expression that designates explicitly, possibly even with vulgarity, sex or a sexual part of the body, in a way that some

at least are likely to find offensive.”48 The Oxford English Dictionary notes obscenity’s etymological links to filth (caenum), ill-omen, and perversity (scaevus) and defines it as “offensively indecent, lewdness,” emphasizing its ties to illicit sexuality.49 I focus on sexual obscenity rather than scatological or religious obscenity, although these categories sometimes overlap with one another.50 Religious authors repeatedly underscore the distinction between licit and illicit sexual language, attesting to the existence of rules governing bawdy talk. Saint Paul repeatedly forbids “turpitudo,” “scurrilitas,” and “turpem sermonem” [offensive, coarse, indecent, and foul speech], sins which medieval translators render in English as “filthe,” “harlatrye,” and “foule wordis.”51 In Handlyng Synne (c. 130317), Robert Mannyng exhorts his readers to “speketh no fylthe oute of skore, / That noun outher synne tharfore” [speak no filth out of limits, / So that no other person sins as a result].52 This prohibition invokes mutually understood rules for speaking of sex—“skore” means “a limit, boundary”—and cites obscenity’s power as social and pedagogical: this forbidden “fylthe” teaches “outher[s]” how to sin.53 Mannyng and his fellow religious authorities repeatedly prohibit verbal obscenity, known as turpiloquium [filthy speech] in Latin pastoral discourse and “spekyng rybawdy” in Middle English.54 Understood as a sin of the tongue and the genitals, an act of both gluttony and lechery, “spekyng rybawdy” was believed to be part of the behavioral script leading to intercourse as well as its moral equivalent: sexual words both lead to and substitute for sexual deeds.

In addition to its status as moral transgression, “spekyng rybawdy” was understood as a matter of “curtesie,” inflected by social status and gender. In the Canterbury Tales, the Chaucer-narrator cautions readers about the bawdy content in the Miller’s and Reeve’s tales by warning, “The Millere is a cherl; ye knowe wel this / So was the Reve eek and othere mo, / And harlotrie they tolden bothe two” (I.3182-4).55 He characterizes their speech as “harlotrie” and “cherles termes” (I.3917), drawing upon “cherl”’s double valence denoting both status and decorum, as it means “any person not belonging to the nobility or clergy” as well as “a person lacking in refinement, learning, or morals.”56 “Harlotrie,” derived from “harlot” [a vagabond, beggar], means both “ribald talk, obscenity, a dirty story” and “sexual immorality,” blurring the distinction between sexual words and deeds and linking both to the speaker/doer’s social status.57 Some of the rules governing obscenity are articulated clearly in medieval texts.

Commenting on the relationship between gender, language, and taboo, the author of one late fourteenth-century anatomical treatise names the scrotum as “the balloc coddis” and says, “[by] wommen it is ycallid a purs for curtesie.”58 He adds, “men callen [the penis] a ters but for curtesie wymmen callen it a yerde.”59 Men use the explicit terms “ters” and “balloc coddis” for their own genitalia, whereas women are expected to use the multiply-signifying “purs” and

“yerde,” which also meant “pouch” and “pole,” out of “curtesie.”60 This expectation portrays genital naming as governed by the rules of gendered etiquette. This rule also reflects the link between language and signification governing the lexicon’s politeness spectrum: words with a single, solely sexual meaning—“ters,” “pintel,” “cunte,” “serd,” “swyve,” and “fuck”—are more explicit, and therefore more transgressive, than their multiply-signifying synonyms.

While some medieval texts include sexually explicit vocabulary, others feature obscene metaphor or wordplay, as we see in riddles which describe everyday objects in suggestive corporeal language and lyrics featuring erotic wordplay meant to titillate and teach, such as forester songs centered on the suggestive metaphors of arrows and spears and a marketplace dialogue about the bawdy possibilities of sausage-selling.61 Gaunt claims that “sexual metaphor…can indeed be as obscene as overt obscene language.”62 He argues that this “kind of semantic indirection…may be more interesting, perhaps more titillating than outright obscenity,” since “obscene metaphors sometimes seem to enable more outrageously detailed descriptions of sex than the use of explicit sexual language.”63 Obscene metaphor is deployed for erotic and misogynist purposes in texts like the pair of balades copied by John Shirley which describe men’s pursuit of intercourse in detailed metaphorical terms as fishing and plowing, and John Lydgate’s My fayr lady so fressh of hewe, which uses the vocabulary of hunting, hawking, and heraldry to describe his former lover’s vulva.64 I use “obscene” to designate both explicit terms like “ters” and “swyve” and texts centered on richly suggestive sexual metaphor. In my chapters on pastourelles and “songs of wantonness,” I analyze bawdy such as My ladye hathe forsaken me, I have ben a foster, and Let be wanton your busynes alongside songs which are not necessarily obscene but nonetheless center on sexuality, desire, and embodiment.

Except for those moments when they deploy obscenity deliberately for instructive purposes, religious authors name genitalia with vague, multivalent terms specific to neither sex such as “privity,” “thing,” “shap,” and “membres,” with the occasional qualifiers “privy,” “shameful,” “shamefast,” or “secree.”

They do not use descriptors like “lang,” “best,” or “smale” that accompany these terms in obscene verse. Similarly, they designate intercourse using verbs— “take,” “lay by,” “dele with,” “go to,” “know,” “do,” “meddle with,” “have at do with,” and “use”—that have a wide range of non-sexual meanings, and whose bawdy significance is secondary or tertiary. These decorous ways of naming sex are often periphrastic, requiring an additional preposition (“by,” “with,” or “together”) plus a gendered pronoun. The more words required to name sexual activity, the greater the distance between the reader’s mind and its physical reality, causing these constructions to serve as a linguistic prophylactic. Language

functions as a clother and concealer, as it renders a term polite by obscuring its bodily significance.

Middle English obscenities appear in texts from a variety of genres: gynecological treatises, proverbs, comic texts, erotic lyrics, and morality plays.

Medical texts are the most straightforward, featuring terms like “yerd,” “ters,” “pintyl,” and “cunte.”65 The Liber Uricrisiarum’s translator (c. 1425) names the clitoris in Latin as “tentigo” before stating, “lewed [lay] folk call [it] the kykyre in the cont.”66 He portrays links obscenity and vernacularity by claiming that the most straightforward terms are the ones used by uneducated lay-folk. The verb “fuck” makes its enigmatic first appearance in the form of a man’s name, “Roger Fuckebythenavele,” in a 1310 Chester court roll.67 Richard Coates argues that a 1373 Bristol charter referring to a field known as “Fockynggrove” constitutes another early sexual usage of the term, suggesting that the location was known as a site for copulation.68 “Fuck” next appears in macaronic verses in two late fifteenth-century schoolbooks, where both times it is copied with the synonymous “swyve.”69 Writers of antifeminist satires, fabliaux, didactic lyrics, and erotic songs use a range of genital obscenities—“cok” and “pilcok” for the penis, “tikeltaylles” [lascivious vulvas] and “fikel flaptaills” [fickle floppy-vulvas] for women—to vilify female desire, mourn lost virility, and teach detailed scripts for sexual conduct.70 Obscenities were used to amuse and entertain readers, as in one riddle which designates “a pintel of 21 year” as “the best thing in all the land.”71 Speakers deploy obscenity to emphasize their own sexual desirability, as in one lyric whose male speaker boasts that his “tente of xv ynche” [fifteen-inch rod] goes “by-tuynne my lady thyes” [between my lady’s thighs] (21, 26).72 Obscenity could humiliate men for failure to maintain marital dominance, claiming that wives “use wele the lecheres craft / With rubyng of ther toute [ass]” when their spouses are away; it disparaged women, as in a carol claiming they are “of ther ars evyn ryght brytyll” [completely fickle with their vulvas]; and it critiqued clerical misconduct, as in one macaronic carol which concludes, “Thus the fryer lyke a prety man…Ofte rokkyd the Nunnys Quoniam [vulva]” (39, 40).73 Sidhu argues that medieval obscenity differs from contemporary obscenity in the way that it functioned to uphold the established order as well as to challenge it.

We see this multivalence when women exclaim, “Now ye speke of a tarse!” and “Here is a pyntell of a fayre lengthe!” to their friends in A Talk of Ten Wives on Their Husbands’ Ware (c. 1453-1500), an “alewife poem” whose obscenity reinforces misogynous stereotypes of women as inherently foul-mouthed and transgressive at the same time that it illuminates the positive possibilities of women gathering for a frank discussion of pleasures.74 One way we can understand which Middle English words were viewed as taboo is seeing what terms are altered, encoded, or replaced in manuscripts, using

codicology to shed light on how medieval scribes and readers understood the obscene.75 The obscenity that scribes most frequently censor is “swyve.” In numerous fifteenth-century manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, copyists replace it with more decorous alternatives like “pleyed,” “served,” “dight,” and “dide.”76 In other cases, readers have scraped the offending word from the page with knives. Some obscenities were written in code, which both confirms their taboo status and restricts their legibility to an educated male audience. In his notebook filled with misogynist proverbs, Latin grammatical exercises, and didactic verses on masculine comportment, one university student copied a macaronic anticlerical poem accusing the Carmelite friars of preying on local wives: they “gxddbov xxkxzt pg imfk” [fuck the wivys of Heli (Ely)] and “txxkxzv nfookt xxzxkt” [swivyt mennis wyvis], he writes.77 He copies these phrases—and only these—in code, using a popular scholastic system of alphabetic encryption. This use of code to conceal obscenity while still enjoying its transgressive pleasures illuminates obscenity’s role as both tantalizing and forbidden. These strategic acts of substitution and encoding illustrate which words were considered to be obscene, and they show how scribes responded to taboo speech.

I focus on obscenity in fourteenth- through late sixteenth-century England and Scotland, reading across periodization boundaries and national borders in order to explore the full breadth of a cultural tradition rich in obscenity, misogyny, and bawdy linguistic innovation. In the generations after the Black Death in 1348-50, women’s increased geographical mobility, prominence in the workforce, and earning power was paralleled by a rise in virulent misogyny. We see the literary effects of these historical shifts, as obscenity functioned to assert female desire using the language of the marketplace as well as to authorize violence against young, poor, and working singlewomen. 78 Many of these late medieval textual trends continued into the sixteenth century, as evidenced by the ongoing popularity of genres like the alewife poem.79 Manuscript culture’s survival in the age of print enabled obscene texts to be circulated far from the printer’s censoring eye, and medieval lyrics continued to be copied in sixteenthcentury manuscript anthologies and printed in song collections.80 I read Scottish and English poetry together, since these centuries witnessed both constant Anglo-Scots border warfare and active literary exchange between the two countries.81

1

The Castle of Perseverance, ed. David N. Klausner (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2010).

MED s.v. “bulten” (v.), 1-2. It has similar double connotations in Old French: OFED s.v. “buleter” (v.): “bolt, sieve; (fig.) to engage in sexual intercourse.”

3 OED s.v. “sard” (v.); MED s.v. “serden” (v.); John Florio, A Worlde of Wordes, or Most copious, and exact dictionarie in Italian and English (London: Arnold Hatfield for Edward Blount, 1598), 137, s.v. “fottere”; Melissa Mohr, Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 88-89 and 145-56.

4 MED s.v. “sau” (n.[2]), 4.

5 MED s.v. “mouen” (v.[3]), 7c.

6 MED s.v. “shulen” (v.[1]), 4a.

7 Mary Caputi, Voluptuous Yearnings: Toward a Feminist Theory of the Obscene (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993), 7.

8 Caputi, Voluptuous Yearnings, 6.

9 Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible,” expanded edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), xiii; Jeffrey Henderson, The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 7; also Drucilla Cornell, “Pornography’s Temptation,” in Feminism and Pornography, ed. Drucilla Cornell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 551-68. For more on the range of potential reactions to explicit medieval visual representations of sexuality, see Sarah Salih, “Erotica,” in A Cultural History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: In the Middle Ages, ed. Ruth Evans (New York: Berg, 2011), 181-212.

10 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 5, 1; William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

11 Nicola Henry and Anastasia Powell, “Framing Sexual Violence Prevention,” in Preventing Sexual Violence: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Overcoming a Rape Culture, eds. Nicola Henry and Anastasia Powell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 1-21, at 7.

12 Judith M. Bennett argues for “the feminist potential of this particular sort of women’s history [that is] focused on feminist issues, aware of the distant past, attentive to continuities, and alert to the workings of patriarchal power,” declaring that “women’s history, especially when viewed across many centuries, can…stimulate feminist outrage and revolutionary fervor.” While my focus is on literature in addition to history, my aims are similar to hers. Judith M. Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 5, also 153-55. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 1-39.

13 I use Patricia Hill Collins’s definition of “black feminist thought”: “Black feminist thought works on behalf of Black women, but does so in conjunction with other similar social justice projects.” Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009), xi. For other examples of black feminist frameworks applied to premodern and ancient texts, see Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), esp. 254-68, and “‘These bastard signs of fair’: Literary Whiteness in 2

Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” in Post-Colonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (New York: Routledge, 1998), 64-83; Nyasha Junior, An Introduction to Womanist Biblical Interpretation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015).

14 Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 24-48.

15 Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 33.

16 Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall, “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 4 (2013): 785-810; Brittney Cooper, “Intersectionality,” in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, eds. Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 385-406, at 386; Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241-99, at 1245.Valerie Smith discusses how an intersectional framework can be useful for analyzing texts that are not necessarily centered on black women in Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings (New York: Routledge, 1998), xiii-xxiii.

17 1900 United States Federal Census, Enumeration District 0024, Sheet Number and Letter 12B, Household ID 261, Reference Number 62, GSU Film Number 1241630, Image Number 00132.

18 Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 262.

19 On the centrality of sexual violence to black women’s lives from the Middle Passage onward, see Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage Books, 2010); Sowande’ M. Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea: Sex, Sickness, and the Middle Passage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), esp. 82-90; Estelle B. Freedman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), esp. 73-88 and 104-124. Freedman explores how black woman activists like Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, Anna Julia Cooper, and Pauline Hopkins addressed black women’s sexual vulnerability in Redefining Rape, 113-19; McGuire examines Rosa Parks’ involvement in anti-rape activism in At the Dark End of the Street, 11-47; also Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 29-37.

20 Crenshaw declares that “we [must] first recognize the organized identity groups in which we find ourselves in are in fact coalitions, or at least potential coalitions waiting to be formed” and suggests that shared experiences of violence are one starting point for coalition-building (“Mapping the Margins,” 1299); similarly, Cathy J. Cohen “envision[s] a politics where one’s relation to power, and not some homogenized identity, is privileged in determining one’s political comrades,” as she outlines “a politics where the nonnormative and marginal position…is the basis for progressive transformative coalition work.” “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3 (1997):437-65, at 438; also Collins, “On Violence, Intersectionality and Transversal Politics,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 40:9 (2017): 1460-73.

Dinshaw explores the possibilities of trans-historical queer coalition building and argues that “the medieval…becomes itself a resource for subject and community formation and materially engaged coalition building” around shared interests in Getting Medieval: Sexualities

and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 21; also 181-82. I am grateful to Suzanne Edwards for suggesting the usefulness of feminist coalition building to my analysis.

21 Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 35; also Charlotte Pierce-Baker, Surviving the Silence: Black Women’s Stories of Rape (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), which powerfully combines academic scholarship with the author’s personal trauma narrative. Ahmed notes how the “embodied experience of power provides the basis of knowledge” (Living a Feminist Life, 10), and Dinshaw effectively brings medieval scholarship into conversation with own experience throughout How Soon is Now? 32-33, 101-3, 123-27, 129-31, and 151-52.

22 Renee Heberle, “The Personal is Political,” in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, ed.

Disch and Hawkesworth, 593-609; Collins, Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 46-76; Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984), 110-13.

23 These are all things that happened to me while I was writing this book in 2014-17, in some cases as I was walking to or from the coffee shop to write.

24 Dinshaw, How Soon is Now?, 36.

25 Suzanne M. Edwards, The Afterlives of Rape in Medieval English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 137-42; Nicole Nolan Sidhu, Indecent Exposure: Gender, Politics, and Obscene Comedy in Middle English Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 233-36.

26 Mark Joseph Stern, “North Carolina Fails to Fix its Horrifying, Medieval Rape Law,” Slate, June 29, 2017, http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2017/06/29/north_carolina_fails_to_outlaw_rape _after_woman_revokes_consent.html. On the function of the medieval in contemporary culture as simultaneously “a period that produces our modernity, and as a period quite separate and different from our own” see Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 183-206.

27 Dinshaw, How Soon is Now?, 20.

28 Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 72.

29 Krissah Thompson, “For Decades They Hid Jefferson’s Mistress. Now Monticello is Making Room for Sally Hemings,” Washington Post, Feb 19, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/for-decades-they-hid-jeffersonsmistress-now-monticello-is-making-room-for-sally-hemings/2017/02/18/d410d660-f22211e6-8d72-263470bf0401_story.html?tid=sm_tw&utm_term=.071ee03b88fd. After public outcry, “Jefferson’s Mistress” was updated to “Jefferson’s Relationship with Her,” although the original headline is still visible in the URL. See also Michael Cottman, “Historians Uncover Slave Quarters of Jefferson’s Enslaved Mistress Sally Hemings at Monticello,” NBC News, July 3, 2017, http://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/thomasjefferson-s-enslaved-mistress-sally-hemings-living-quarters-found-n771261; this title was later revised as “Historians Uncover Slave Quarters of Sally Hemings at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.” For more on Sally Hemings and slavery’s oft-elided legacy of rape, see Mia Bay, “Love, Sex, Slavery, and Sally Hemings,” and Catherine Clinton, “Breaking the Silence: Sexual Hypocrisies from Thomas Jefferson to Strom Thurmond,”

both in Beyond Slavery: Overcoming its Religious and Sexual Legacies, ed. Bernadette J. Brooten (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 191-212 and 213-28.

30 For a critique of the “free speech” argument applied to rape jokes, see Lindy West, Shrill (New York: Hachette Books, 2016), 165-212. For these characterizations of pastourelles, see DIMEV entries for 6851 and 2142.

31 Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 12.

32 Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 14, 21; Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, ed. Sandra Harding (New York: Routledge, 2004), 81-101, esp. 90.

33 Freedman, Redefining Rape, 125-46, 168-90, and 226-28. On the history of marital rape, see Rebecca M. Ryan, “The Sex Right: A Legal History of the Marital Rape Exemption,” Law and Social Inquiry 20, no. 4 (1995): 941-1001; Jill Elaine Hasday, “Contest and Consent: A Legal History of Marital Rape,” California Law Review 88, no. 5 (2000): 1373-505. On acquaintance rape, see Jody Raphael, Rape Is Rape: How Denial, Distortion, and Victim-Blaming are Fueling a Hidden Acquaintance Rape Crisis (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2013); Freedman, Redefining Rape, 283-85.

34 Susan Brownmiller, Against our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York: Fawcett Books, 1975). For a discussion of how Brownmiller’s book shaped feminist approaches to rape, see Ann J. Cahill, Rethinking Rape (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 15-49.

35 Diana L. Payne, Kimberly A. Lonsway, and Louise F. Fitzgerald, “Rape Myth Acceptance: Exploration of its Structure and its Measurement Using the Illinois Rape Myth Acceptance Scale,” Journal of Research in Personality 33, no. 1 (1999): 27-68, esp. 37; Kate Harding, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture – And What We Can Do About It (Boston: Di Capo, 2015), 22-25.

36 Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World without Rape, eds. Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2008). This quotation is from the affirmative consent policy adopted by Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas: “Equal Opportunity and Non-Discrimination Policies,” http://washburn.edu/statements-disclosures/equalopportunity/Regulation%20and%20Procedure%20Final%20formatted%20BOR%20App roved_2015.pdf, page 3.

37 Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt, 1983), 92.

38 Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, “Fictions of the Female Voice: The Woman Troubadours,” in Medieval Woman’s Song: Cross-Cultural Approaches, eds. Anne L. Klinck and Ann Marie Rasmussen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 127-51, at 133.

39 I discuss these lines from And I war a maydyn in Chapter 4.

40 E. Jane Burns, Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 4-7.

41 Anne L. Klinck notes that “repeatedly the woman’s view [in medieval woman’s song] is associated with protest against the assumptions and arrangements of men.” An Anthology of Ancient and Medieval Woman’s Song (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 1-16, at 12.

In addition to the monographs cited below, see the edited collections Medieval Obscenities, ed. Nicola McDonald (York: York Medieval Press, 2006) and Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages, ed. Jan Ziolkowski (Leiden: Brill, 1998).

43 Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London: Reaktion, 1992); also Paul Hardwick, English Medieval Misericords: The Margins of Meaning (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011), esp. 85-109. Camille examines how obscene images were censored in manuscripts especially during the late fifteenth century, as when readers erased depictions of copulating couples from copies of Aristotle’s De generatione and Posterior Analytics, in “Obscenity Under Erasure: Censorship in Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts,” in Obscenity, ed. Ziolkowski, 139-54, at 151.

44 A. M. Koldeweij, “Lifting the Veil on Pilgrim Badges,” in Pilgrimage Explored, ed. J. Stopford (York: York Medieval Press, 1999), 161-88; Malcolm Jones, “Sex, Popular Beliefs, and Culture,” in A Cultural History of Sexuality, ed. Evans, 139-64, at 142. I am grateful to Joseph Derosier for discussing the significance of “con por amours” with me.

45 Koldeweij, “A Barefaced Roman de la Rose (Paris, B.N., ms. fr., 25526) and Some Late Medieval Mass-Produced Badges of a Sexual Nature,” in Flanders in a European Perspective: Manuscript Illumination around 1400 in Flanders and Abroad, eds. Maurits Smeyers and Bert Cardon (Leuven: Peeters, 1995), 499-516, at 506. For Roman examples, such as the stillvisible phalluses carved into Hadrian’s Wall at the Chesters Bridge Abutment and set in the courtyard paving of the Chesters Fort headquarters building in the late second century C.E., see J. S. Johnson, Chesters Roman Fort Northumberland (London: English Heritage, 1990), 23-24, 28-30; Catherine Johns, Sex or Symbol? Erotic Images of Greece and Rome (London: Routledge, 1999).

46 Sidhu, Indecent Exposure, 15.

47 Ibid., 229.

48 Simon Gaunt, “Obscene Hermeneutics in Troubadour Lyric,” in Medieval Obscenities, ed.

McDonald, 85-104, at 85. John J. Honigmann defines it as ““the expression, representation, or display…in certain contexts or situations, of something that is culturally regarded as shocking or repugnant” in “A Cultural Theory of Obscenity,” Journal of Criminal Psychopathology 5 (1944): 715-33, at 716. Henderson defines it as “verbal reference to areas of human activity or parts of the human body that are protected by certain taboos agreed upon by prevailing social custom and subject to emotional aversion or inhibition,” The Maculate Muse, 2.

49 OED s.v. “obscene” (adj.), 1; s.v. “obscenity” (n.), 1.

50 Caputi outlines these categories of sexual, scatological, and eschatological obscenity in Voluptuous Yearnings, 5. For a thoughtful discussion of obscenity’s various definitions in antiquity and the Middle Ages, see Leslie Dunton-Downer, “Poetic Language and the Obscene,” in Obscenity, ed. Ziolkowski, 19-37.

51 Ephesians 5:3-4 and Colossians 3:8; John Wyclif, The Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments, with the Apocryphal Books, ed. Josiah Forshall and Frederic Madden, 4 vols.

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1850), 4:415 and 434.

52 Robert Mannyng, Robert of Brunne’s ‘Handlyng Synne,’ ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, 2 vols., EETS o.s. 119 & 123 (London: EETS, 1901, 1903), 1:126, lines 3679-80.

42

MED s.v. “scor” (n.), (d).

MED s.v. “ribaudi” (n.), (b): “obscenity, scurrility, bawdry; coarse speech; an obscene story”; DMLBS s.v. “turpiloquium” (n.): “foul or offensive speech.”

55 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd. ed., ed. Larry D. Benson et al (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

56 MED s.v. “cherl” (n.), 1(a), 2(a).

57 MED s.v. “harlotrie” (n.), 1 and 2; s.v. “harlot” (n.), 1(a).

58 R. N. Mory, “A Medieval English Anatomy: MS Wellcome 564” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1977), 168.

59 Ibid., 166.

60 MED s.v. “purs” (n.), 1 and 4; s.v. “yerd” (n.[2]), 1-2 and 5; s.v. “courtesie” (n.), 2(a).

61 For these riddles, see Medieval English Lyrics and Carols, ed. Duncan, 286-87; for more on British traditions of obscene riddling stretching back to the Exeter Book riddles, see Louise O. Vasvari, “Fowl Play in my Lady’s Chamber: Fowl Play in my Lady’s Chamber: Textual Harassment of a Middle English Pornithological Riddle and Visual Pun,” in Obscenity, ed. Ziolkowski, 108-35.

62 Gaunt, “Obscene Hermeneutics,” 95.

63 Ibid, 94-95.

64 It is no right all other lustes to lese (DIMEV 2739) and Of alle the crafftes oute blessed be the ploughe (DIMEV 4138), in Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards, “‘Chaucer’s Chronicle,’ John Shirley, and the Canon of Chaucer’s Shorter Poems,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 20 (1998): 201-18, at 217-18; John Lydgate, My fayr lady so fressh of hewe (DIMEV 3594), A Selection of the Minor Poems of Dan John Lydgate, ed. James Orchard Halliwell (London: C. Richards for the Percy Society, 1840), 199-205. Other lyrics centered on obscene metaphor include I have a newe gardyn (orcharding and grafting), At the northe ende of selver whyte (jousting), It was a mayde of brenten ars (milling), Ther was a fryer of ordur gray (singing the liturgy), and We bern aboute no cattes skynnes (peddling); all in Duncan, Medieval English Lyrics and Carols.

65 For “yerd,” see Mory, “Anatomy,” 155, 164, 165, and elsewhere; The Knowing of Woman’s Kind in Childing, ed. Alexandra Barratt (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), 47, 76; Liber Uricrisiarum, ed. Joanne Jasin (PhD diss, Tulane University, 1983), 75, 159, 292, and elsewhere. For “ters,” see Mory, “Anatomy,” 166, 167, and elsewhere. For “pintyl,” see Jasin, Liber Uricrisiarum, 48, 49; Barratt, Knowing, 46. For “cunte,” see Jasin, Liber Uricrisiarum, 293; Barratt, Childing, 48.

66 Jasin, Liber Uricrisiarum, 293; MED s.v. “kekir” (n.), (a); DMLBS s.v. “tentigo” (n.), 1c.

67 This unusual surname was recently discovered by Paul Booth: “An Early FourteenthCentury Use of the F-Word in Cheshire, 1310-11,” Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire 164 (2015): 99-102.

68 Richard Coates, “Fockynggroue in Bristol,” Notes and Queries 54, no. 4 (2007): 373-76.

69 “Fuck” and “swyve” are copied in verses alongside one another in BL MS Harley 3362 (c.

1475), which I discuss below, and in NLW MS Peniarth 356B (1460s-80s), fol. 149v, a school notebook owned by Thomas Pennant, who began to copy the manuscript in his grammar school days and later became abbot of Basingwerk Abbey, a Cistercian foundation in North Wales. For an early sixteenth century occurrence of “fuck,” see 53 54

Edward Wilson, “A ‘Damned F…in Abbot’ in 1528: The Earliest English Example of a Four-Letter Word,” Notes and Queries 40, no. 1 (1993): 29-34.

70 I have a gentil cok (c. 1425), Medieval English Lyrics and Carols, ed. Thomas G. Duncan (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), 177-78; Elde makith me geld (DIMEV 1183), in The Texts of BL MS Harley 913, ‘The Kildare Manuscript,’ ed. Thorlac Turville-Petre (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 2015), 74-76; John Lydgate, Prohemy of a Mariage Betwixt an Olde Man and a Yonge Wife (c. 1440-60), in The Trials and Joys of Marriage, ed. Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2002), 103-9, line 109; The Tale of Beryn, in The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions, ed. John M. Bowers (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992), 55-196, line 1283.

71 CUL MS Dd.5.75, fol. 63r.

72 May no man slepe in youre halle (c. 1425), in Duncan, Medieval English Lyrics and Carols, 286; DIMEV 3453.

73 Sir Corneus, in Ten Bourdes, ed. Melissa M. Furrow (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2013), 118-29, lines 119-20; Stel is gud, I sey no odur (DIMEV 5034), in Greene, Early English Carols, 236, line 14; Ther was a frier of order gray (c. 1500, DIMEV 5593), in Duncan, Medieval English Lyrics and Carols, 304-5.

74 Sidhu, Indecent Exposure, 26-29; A Talk of Ten Wives on Their Husbands’ Ware (DIMEV 3073), in Salisbury, The Trials and Joys of Marriage, lines 58 and 105.

75 Daniel Wakelin examines scribes’ choices to correct as they copy, and Fiona Somerset notes how a copyist or reader may alter a text “to remove something offensive to himself,” “whether from affront, disgust, or some other more personal motive.” Daniel Wakelin, Scribal Correction and Literary Craft: English Manuscripts 1375-1510 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 70; Fiona Somerset, “Censorship” in The Production of Books in England 1350-1500, eds. Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 239-58, esp. 257, 255.

76 BL MS Harley 7333 (c. 1425-75), a manuscript of the Canterbury Tales produced by Augustinian canons at St. Mary de Pratis Abbey in Leicester, the monastic scribes have substituted more decorous terms for “swyve.”

77 Flen flyys and freris (DIMEV 1324), in BL MS Harley 3362 (c. 1450-75), fol. 24r. The first four lines only are copied onto a damaged folio in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 196, fol. 196v. The poem is printed, with some errors and omissions, in Reliquiae Antiquae: Scraps from Ancient Manuscripts, ed. James Orchard Halliwell and Thomas Wright, 2 vols.

(London: William Pickering, 1841-3), 1:91-92. This passage is discussed briefly by Coates, “Fockynggroue in Bristol,” 374; Mohr, Holy Shit, 151-53; and Jesse Sheidlower, The F-Word, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 83.

78 I explore these historical changes and their literary implications in Chapter 4. In his index of misogynist literature until 1568, Francis Lee Utley notes that 250 of 400 pieces come from 1500-1568, as literary antifeminism gathered steam over the course of the fifteenth century before reaching its zenith at the turn of the sixteenth. Francis Lee Utley, The Crooked Rib: An Analytical Index to the Argument about Women to the Argument about Women in English and Scots Literature to the End of the Year 1568 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1944; rpt. New York: Octagon Books, 1970), 64.

This genre first appears in the latter half of the fifteenth century with A Talk of Ten Wives on Their Husbands’ Ware (1453-1500), and it continues into the late seventeenth century with the broadside ballad The Gossips Meeting, Or The merry Market-Women of Taunton (London: for F. Coles, T. Vere, J. Wright, and J. Clarke, 1674).

80 The three pastourelles copied into the Welles Anthology (1522-35) likely date from the late fifteenth century, and at least one of the lyrics in Bodleian MS Ashmole 176 (c. 1525-50), Come over the borne bessye, first appears in the fifteenth century. Joshua Eckhardt discusses how early modern manuscript culture facilitated the circulation of obscene lyrics in Manuscript Verse Collectors and the Politics of Anti-Courtly Love Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

81 Priscilla Bawcutt explores the circulation of Scottish texts in England in “Crossing the Border: Scottish Poetry and English Readers in the Sixteenth Century,” in The Rose and the Thistle: Essays on the Culture of Late Medieval and Renaissance Scotland, eds. Sally Mapstone and Juliette Wood (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1998), 59-70; Louise O. Fradenburg examines Chaucer’s reception in Scotland in “The Scottish Chaucer,” in Writing after Chaucer: Essential Readings in Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century, ed. Daniel J. Pinti (New York: Garland, 1998), 167-76; also Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards, “Bodleian MS Arch. Selden.B.24 and the ‘Scotticization’ of Middle English Verse,” in Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 1400-1602, eds. Barbara Kline and Thomas Prendergast (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 166-85. Antony J. Hasler discusses fifteenth- and sixteenth-century English and Scottish court poetry together in Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland: Allegories of Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), and Susan E. Phillips analyzes William Dunbar’s Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo alongside Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale and Wife of Bath’s Prologue in Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 119-46.

79

The Avars A Steppe Empire in Europe, 567–822

Walter Pohl Translated by William Sayers

Contents List of Maps Timeline Preface 1.

APPROACHING THE AVARS 1.1.

Marginal Europeans?

1.2 Sources and Prejudices 1.3 Steppe Research and its Methodological Problems 2. THE AVAR MIGRATION 2.1. Constantinople 558 2.2. The Empire and the Steppe Peoples 2.3 Fugitives from the East 2.4 Avars or Pseudo-Avars?

2.5 The Advance of the Avars 2.6 Byzantium and the Turks 2.7 The Discovery of Europe 2.8 Decisive Years 2.9 568: A Turning Point 3. THE NEW POWER, 567–90 3.1 The First Attack on Sirmium 3.2 Between Peace and War 3.3 Baian’s Alliance with Byzantium 3.4 The Conquest of Sirmium 3.5 583/84: Avar Raids and Symbolic Politics 3.6 585/86: Slavic Raids and the Bookolabras Affair 3.7 587: The War in Thrace 3.8 The Carpathian Basin in the Later Sixth Century: The Archaeological Evidence 3.9 Cultures around Keszthely 4. AVARS AND SLAVS 4.1 Slavs Before the Avars: Perceptions and Origins 4.2 The Saint and the Barbarians 4.3 Slavic Campaigns and Memories of Avars on the Greek Peninsula 4.4 The Obor and his Slavs 4.5 Avar Rule and Slavic Expansion 4.6 Becoming Slavs

5. THE BALKAN WARS OF MAURICE, 591–602 5.1 Maurice’s Campaign and the Date of the Wars 5.2 The Avars on the Offensive 5.3 593: Attacks on the Slavs North of the Danube 5.4 594: The Limits of the Slavic War 5.5 595: The Illyrian War 5.6 The Avars’ Western Policy and the Slavs 5.7 598: Only the Plague Can Stop the Avars 5.8 599: The Khagan under Pressure 5.9 600–602: The End of Imperial Politics on the Danube 6. LIFE AND ORGANIZATION IN THE AVAR EMPIRE 6.1. Nomads, Warriors, Steppe Peoples 6.2 “Their Life is War” 6.3 The Early Avar Khaganate 6.4 The Avars and Byzantium 6.5 Avar Gold: Prestige, Gifts, Representation 6.6 Logades and Warriors 6.7 Forms of Production and Distribution 6.8 Exchanges and their Limits 6.9 Religion and Ritual 6.10 The Development of Identities in the Avar Empire 7. THE SEVENTH CENTURY 7.1 Consolidation and New Offensives 7.2 The Surprise Attack on the Emperor 7.3 626: The Siege of Constantinople 7.4 Samo 7.5 Croat Migrations?

7.6 Alciocus and Kuvrat 7.7 Kuver and Asparukh 7.8 Continuity and Cultural Change 8. THE CENTURY OF THE GRIFFIN 8.1 Ways of Life in Archaeological Evidence 8.2 The Hierarchy of the Late Avar State 8.3 Limes Certus: The Avars and the West 8.4 The Collapse of Avar Power 8.5 Why Did the Avars Disappear?

8.6 Conclusion

Appendix: Amount of Subsidies Paid by Byzantium to the Avars Sources Abbreviations Bibliography Index

1. APPROACHING THE AVARS The first chapter of this book addresses the question why and how we can write a history of the Avars. Why are the Avars significant for European history, and why have they remained a marginal concern in its study? At a point where Eurocentric history is being criticized as seeing the world from a hegemonic, but rather particular historiographic perspective, it seems promising to turn to a neglected Eurasian element in the European past: the steppe peoples. The history of contemporary perceptions, and of scholarly study of this alternative form of life in pre-modern Europe, is interesting in itself, and exposes the deep ambiguity of European attitudes to its both threatening and fascinating eastern neighbors.

1.1 Marginal Europeans?

Few of the peoples who determined the fate of Europe during the transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages have remained so poorly known as the Avars.

For almost a quarter-millennium, from 558 to 796, they ruled vast stretches of Central and Eastern Europe from their power base on the Middle Danube. At the height of its power the Avar khaganate put the Byzantines and the Franks on the defensive, maintained relations with peoples as distant as the Persian Sassanians and the Turks of Central Asia, and put a decisive stamp on Slavic expansion between the Baltic and the Ægean. After the fall of the Avar empire, the court of Charlemagne was astonished at the treasures that had been amassed in the “ring” of the khagans between the Danube and the Tisza.

Nevertheless the Avars have remained alien to European history. Attila’s Huns, who maintained their rule for only a few decades, are much more present in the consciousness of posterity. The Song of the Nibelungs (Das Nibelungenlied) and frescoes in the Vatican tell of Attila, and European school children learn his name. The khagan Baian, who established the Avars as a great power, is hardly mentioned in reference works. This may also be due to the fact that he and his successors gave his western neighbors, Franks and Lombards, little cause for complaint. While the Huns and the Magyars made their way from the Carpathian Basin across half of western Europe, the Avars directed their attacks almost exclusively against Byzantium.

The Avars themselves have remained mute for us. Whereas the rulers of the Bulgars and the Turks in this same era had lengthy inscriptions chiseled in stone, we know of only a few brief runic texts from the Avar domain. As a consequence, the history of the Avars was written by their enemies. For contemporary observers the opponent was almost anonymous. Baian is the only Avar ruler whose name has been transmitted; all the others are designated in the sources by their title, khagan.

A handful of other exotic titles, such as iugurrus, kapkhan, canizauci, and a scant dozen names are all that has been preserved. Does this anonymity reflect a

conscious program or does it express the chroniclers’ sense of Avar foreignness?

For them this “ugly nation of hairy barbarians” appeared faithless, brutal, greedy, and unpredictable.1 At the same time the Byzantines were not reluctant to adopt the military accomplishments of the “barbarians” such as the stirrup, which Avar horsemen from the steppe were the first to introduce into Europe. The armies of the Christian empire and the “ugly” Central Asian horsemen had more in common than could be accounted for by the ideology of the times. The modern historical sciences have long fed on the prejudices of their informants. A “deadly storm tide” that drew “prosperous states and peoples into the maelstrom of a common annihilation” is how the Avars are viewed by one of their most distinguished modern historians.2 That the Avar military campaigns often spread death and destruction across the provinces of the Byzantine Empire cannot be denied. The army of the khagans resembled a highly specialized war machine,3 which only war itself could keep running. Yet what appeared to the enemy as blind rage was a carefully managed economy of force, a skillful alternation of threats, attacks, and negotiations that sustained the outpouring of riches from the empire. The khaganate made it possible for warriors to acquire in regulated fashion the prestige and goods through which they expressed their status and power. For the empire in turn, war and peace, inside and outside, became rather calculable. The highly militarized late Roman state and the barbarian rulers competed for the distribution of the wealth still produced by the Mediterranean economy. In the west the post-Roman kingdoms of the Goths, Franks, and Lombards successfully mastered the apparatus of the state. The Avars did not aim for similar integration. When they made the attempt, like the later Bulgars and Hungarians, of founding a Christian state on the Roman model, it was too late to give their empire a durable foundation. The Christian khaganate, which the last Avars tried to establish east of Lake Neusiedl, was a belated caricature of the lost opportunity of integration in Christian Europe.

This failure was clearly the outcome of a centuries-long process and not its precondition, as a cliché-driven historiography of these ‘nomads’ might easily lead us to believe. It was not because of the Avars’ savagery and foreignness that they remained ‘barbarians’ and as such disappeared again from history. The conditions for this failure at the same time led to the ‘making of Europe’ as we know it, and thus are a part of the early history of the West. Medievalists should therefore not assume that a Frank, a Roman, or a Byzantine in the sixth, seventh or eighth century was ‘one of us’ and that an Avar on the other hand was a foreigner. For a long time, the ‘Germanic’ peoples were seen as the direct ancestors of the Germans and thus as subjects of history, while the eastern barbarians were a matter for ethnography. An ethnocentric world view could establish the superiority of the Christian West (or even worse, the Nordic race) by drawing on prejudices that were already well known to Antiquity. For his war of conquest against the godless Avars

Charlemagne was able to draw on a whole register of conventional resentment.4 In the modern age similar propaganda has accompanied the colonial subjugation of “savages” overseas. From the nineteenth century on, nationalism sought its justification to no little extent in a misconceived view of the peoples of the early Middle Ages.

Our painfully slow emergence from nationalism and ethnocentricity gives research on the ‘barbarians’ a new relevance. After a century that reached the pinnacle of civilization but also the pinnacle of barbarity (in its pejorative sense), we need to account for the origins of our culture’s double face anew. The way in which ‘the Other’ was fixed in prejudice and eventually repressed in the course of a ‘process of civilization’ has become an issue. The nomad, the non-sedentary is discovered as the quintessential ‘other.’ For instance, a post-modern “treatise on nomadology” set out to explore ways to a “nomadic thinking” that would transcend the dualistic logic of the West.5 Ethnology, once a discipline that reaffirmed the superiority of occidental culture, is now expected to provide information on alternative forms of life and material for the critique of civilization.

Cultural transfers, acculturation, and the formation of identities become preferred areas of interdisciplinary research.

As long as such an interest does not fall back into the cliché of the ‘noble savage,’ which from the time of Tacitus was the obverse of the barbarian stereotype, early Medieval Studies will have to take it serious. An impressive array of research over the last decades has revealed the diversity of life styles in early medieval Europe and their complementarity. Even in the east-central European domain of the Avars a whole series of cultural patterns abutted one another. Where written sources are silent, archaeology is eloquent; some sixty thousand Avar graves have been excavated so far.6 The possibilities and limitations of historical interpretation of such finds are certainly not uncontested and the dialogue between archaeology and historical research suffers from occasional misunderstandings. Yet results to date have clarified a great deal. Ethnic diversity and flexibility, cultural exchange, often over great distances, wide-ranging political activity, and regional differentiation emerge with increasing clarity from current investigations into the empires of the steppe.7 Early medieval peoples consisted of diverse groups that had found a common political frame and soon felt that they belonged; this simple model is quite useful to understand ethnicity on the steppe.8 The unusually rapid course of such ethnic processes in steppe environments permits new perspectives on the dynamics in the formation of ethnic identities.

Writing a history of the Avars presents two very different challenges. On the one hand it must address the many questions of detail that have arisen from recent advances in our understanding. Given the paucity of historical information, nuances in the interpretation of the sources may lead to a significantly different overall picture. An overview of the basic sources and of discussions among

specialists is therefore necessary. The present work consciously runs the risk of interdisciplinarity and from the medievalist’s side seeks a dialogue with the numerous disciplines involved: archaeology and ancient history, ethnology, Classical, Byzantine, Slavic and Oriental studies, in addition to an array of other philologies, whose research findings will enrich our knowledge of the Avars. Since the author has not mastered the methodology of all these disciplines, he must often limit himself to reporting their results, and assess them from a historian’s perspective. Nevertheless, in the case of the Avars such a synopsis is all the more necessary. It is to be hoped that the overview thus obtained may compensate for deficiencies in matters of detail. If this history of the Avars can serve as a tool for a diversity of future investigations that go far beyond its own possibilities, it will have attained its goal. Several new aspects and questions which are here raised will hopefully be of use.

On the other hand, it is not enough to recount the many ramifications of specialist studies and, to that end, advance a collection of material plus respective historical critique. The objective of this book, whatever the difficulties, is a view of the whole. If the confrontation between barbarian and imperial policies, the encounters between various patterns of culture and social organization are described here, it is in order to contribute toward an understanding of a process from which, ultimately, the European Middle Ages would emerge. Perhaps a neglected part of the picture of European history can thereby be made more evident. The present history of the Avars is also directed to those readers for whom the fate of this—and other—early peoples has hitherto been less than familiar and who, like the author, are prepared to accept the challenge of this alterity.

1.2 Sources and Prejudices Historical accounts of the Avars come from their neighbors, who were often also their enemies, peoples who by virtue of religion and culture felt superior to them. This does not invalidate such sources. Partisan historical representations are seldom completely pulled from thin air. A millennium of classical ethnography had turned prejudice, as topos, into a method.9 The cultivated Byzantine and his often somewhat less cultivated contemporary in the West long saw the “Scythians,” as they were still occasionally called, through the eyes of Herodotus, Strabo and Justin. Synesius of Cyrene stated in about the year 400, when new peoples were crossing the borders of the empire almost yearly: “There are no new barbarians; the old Scythians are always thinking up new names to deceive the Romans.”10 The view he expressed remained a reference point until the Carolingian era and beyond.

The Huns were often called Scythians, and the Avars and Bulgars, in their turn, Huns. The Hungarians were variously named Scythians, Huns, Avars, or Turks.

Goths and after them occasionally even Slavs were identified as Getae. Most of

them were linked with the apocalyptic peoples Gog and Magog of the Bible, who were still entered on maps of the High Middle Ages.11 In the first centuries A.D., most authors distinguished crudely between “Scythians,” armed horsemen who came from the steppe, and “Germans,” who lived in the West. In late antiquity, the Goths were consistently counted among the eastern “Scythians.” Judgments were often schematic, as made by Procopius when he alluded to the “Hunnic” life style of the Slavs. The passage is nevertheless a good example of how the use of the topos still permitted the communication of reliable information.12 A manual on warfare written about 600, called the Strategicon of Maurice, divides the barbarians into four groups according to their ways of life and war: the Persians; the “blond peoples,” among whom the Franks and Lombards (the collective term German was not used any more at the time); the “Scythians,” i.e., the Avars and Turks and the other Hunnic peoples; and the Slavs and Antes.13 For military purposes this was evidently adequate.

In the sixth or seventh century it was not difficult to acquire information about the barbarians. Even the distant Turks, soon after their first embassy, maintained a colony counting more than a hundred residents in Constantinople.14 Byzantine diplomats regularly gathered information on all the peoples who could be of interest to imperial diplomacy. In war-time it was often of decisive importance to be up-to-date on the political structure, modes of warfare, or internal tensions among the barbarians. This was the case not only for the imperial court but to a degree also for the residents of every province that had to reckon with barbarian incursions. The way in which clerics of Thessalonica describe the various attacks on their city in the Miracula Demetrii shows a relatively sound knowledge of the enemy.

Even the sober accounts of well-informed contemporaries are stamped with often unstated value judgments. To a cultivated Byzantine (and to a pious cleric in the West) nomadic life must have appeared coarse, brutal, and uncivilized. A summary of the barbarian topoi in Ammianus Marcellinus (fourth century) offers, inter alia, the following characteristics typical of barbarians: savagery, lack of restraint, rage, excessive courage, arrogance, cunning, boldness, inconstancy, greed.15 Even the names, coincidentally or not, were eloquent: Avari could be understood in Latin as “the greedy,” Bulgares as “the vulgar,” and the name of the Slavs apparently gave reason to replace the ancient servus with the modern word “slave.” With such a negative perspective it made no difference that barbarian society was occasionally described for culture-critical purposes as a positive antithesis to the writer’s own world, as Tacitus in his Germania or Salvian of Marseille illustrate. Even though the Avars found no Tacitus of their own, there are individual examples of this attitude. The ecclesiastical historian John of Ephesus describes how the Avar conquerors in 582 generously gave food to the half-starved inhabitants of Sirmium: “People also speak of the compassion shown by the

barbarians to the inhabitants, on seeing the pitiable condition to which they were reduced by famine, and which well deserves the admiration of Christians, whose conduct too frequently it condemns; because they do not show kindness to their fellow-servants, nor pity those of their own flesh.”16 Something similar happened later in the midst of war when the khagan gave the opposing Roman army some wagonloads of food, so that they might celebrate Easter in proper fashion.17 That the simple life among the “Scythians” could offer an attractive alternative to many disaffected Greeks is illustrated in Priscus’s account of a Greek merchant he met at the court of Attila who had advanced to the status of Hun warrior.18 To the harsh criticism of the Roman-turned-barbarian who wished to “enjoy undisturbed the fruits of his bravery” the author opposes an apology for the Roman world.

The Romans’ sense of superiority over the ‘savages’ could not be shaken by such traces of noble innocence in the portrait of the barbarians. The atrocities that were ascribed to ‘Scythians’ of all kinds served as illustrations of the fact that a life with human dignity was impossible outside the Roman-Christian ecumene. For many, this perception rose to the intensity of a blind hate, as exhibited in the tirades of Theodore Syncellus after the siege of Constantinople in 626. He viewed the khagan as the “pernicious offspring of the eternally evil spirit; he has shown himself to be the devil’s son, not by the necessity of nature, but by his own decision, and all devilish turpitude is incarnated in him. Like an anti-god who strives for dominance over land and sea, he stretches his mouth up toward heaven and with his tongue reaches down to earth in order to annihilate the people of God like abandoned eggs.”19 Such depictions most of all served as a moralistic summons to desist from sin, because of which God has sent such punishments. The notion that barbarian incursions befell Christianity as divine retribution had become selfevident for contemporaries. The Frankish author of the seventh-century Chronicle of Fredegar put this thought in the mouth of Samo, King of the Wends, when he is vilified as a “heathen dog” by a Frankish ambassador: “Then if you are God's servants, and we his hounds, and since you persist in offending Him, we are within our rights to tear you to pieces!”20 Christian Byzantine state ideology could only regard the existence of pagan, hostile barbarian kingdoms on its borders as a passing trial or punishment in the context of the divine plan of salvation. Baptism and subjugation by the emperor remained the ultimate objectives of Byzantine (and later also Frankish) policy.

Being savage, faithless, cruel, and perfidious was the very modality of the existence of Avars and other ‘Huns,’ quite independent of how they might comport themselves. It is to the credit of many Byzantine authors that these ascriptions, with which they are lavish, do not fully obscure the reality behind the accounts.

The course of the battles between the Byzantines and the Avars, as they are depicted in Menander, Theophylact Simocatta and others, reveals that neither side had much for which to condemn the other. Yet one has the impression that

senseless cruelties rather belonged in the repertory of the Christian empire. The rare forays into enemy territory were regularly exploited for the massacre of sleeping non-combatants.21 A captive Persian emissary, during the siege of 626, was sent back to the khagan demonstratively mutilated, with the severed head of another fastened around his neck.22 Only exceptionally did the khagan have his prisoners massacred.23 Breaches of treaties occurred on both sides. The Byzantines were the first to detain Avar envoys.24 But clearly the khagan did not balk at swearing false oaths of various kinds and violating diplomatic rules.25 The Strategicon of Maurice draws from this the usual conclusions: “They are very superstitious, treacherous, foul, faithless, possessed by an insatiate desire for riches. They scorn their oath, do not observe agreements, and are not satisfied by gifts. Even before they accept the gift, they are making plans for treachery and betrayal of their agreements.”26 The same manual repeatedly counsels Roman commanders to miss no opportunity to deceive the opponent and take him by surprise.27 The policies of both the empire and the barbarians operated with similar methods, and the inhabitants of the Roman provinces had good reason to fear imperial forces almost as much as the barbarians.28 The pax Romana was no less an expansive program than the hegemonial aspirations of the khagan. When Menander has the Emperor Justin say to Avar emissaries: “A war would do the Romans more good than a peace,”29 this was no mere bluff. Byzantine armies initiated hostilities just as often as did the Avars.

When boundaries threatened to become blurred in this way, language had to establish clear distinctions. The rhetoric provided a basis for dealing with the barbarians.

Rigorous criticism of the texts is therefore necessary. Even though the sources for the history of the Avars should not be summarily dismissed as “literary constructs” or “opaque barriers,” text and context have to be considered critically, especially since many of them were written down at some temporal distance from events and were often transmitted in much later manuscripts.30 Sources have all too often been exploited as mere mines of information in research on the Avars; the validity of isolated pieces of information has been accepted or rejected on the basis of sometimes quite arduous reconstructions of the events. Despite all the distortions, the contemporary accounts of the barbarians represent the traces of a tempestuous encounter of cultures, a dialogue that had consequences for both sides.

We owe a substantial part of the information on the European Avars to Byzantine authors. The newcomers from the East arrived in the 550s in one of the most productive periods of Byzantine historiography. Few periods of Roman history are so well documented as the reign of Justinian. Procopius’ eight-volume history of Justinian’s wars goes up to 552, and gives a rather detailed if sometimes

polemical description of the Empire and its barbarians prior to the arrival of the Avars.31 Agathias, who wrote during the reign of Justin II, picked up the thread of his work and continued it to the year 559.32 But of the Avars he mentions only their hair style. Menander Protector successively wrote a history of the years 558 to 582, our primary source for the first Avar wars. Unfortunately the work itself is lost. But its numerous accounts of embassies, based on excellent sources of information, were fortunately still judged so instructive in the tenth century that many were incorporated in the Excerpta de legationibus.33 The last of the literarily versed and historically interested jurists who has left us a work of early Byzantine history is Theophylact Simocatta. Under the emperor Heraclius he continued the work of Menander and described the reign of Maurice (582–602).34 This Egyptian, who was long judged by classical philologists a “paragon of the grotesque” because of his luxuriant rhetoric, is our chief witness for Avar history.35 It may well be that in this mimetic homage to classical models he no longer reaches the level of his predecessors. Moreover, he seems to have misunderstood and arbitrarily arranged some of his at times excellent sources. Nonetheless, the extensive descriptions offer on the whole a valuable picture of the battles and thus also of the policies of the khaganate.

The experiences of Byzantine generals in the Avar and Slav wars under Maurice informed a source of a different kind: a manual on warfare that was compiled around 600 by an anonymous author, known as the Strategicon of Maurice.36 Whoever the author was, it is a handbook based on praxis that illustrates how pragmatic and flexible the Byzantines could be in their relations with their opponents and how seriously they took the conduct of psychological warfare.

Not only the military but also the church was challenged by the barbarian incursions. One of the most interesting but also most debated sources for the early Avar period is the Ecclesiastical History of John of Ephesus, preserved in a Syrian compilation from the time of the Crusades, the work of Michael the Syrian. A monophysite bishop, John spent the last years of his life around 580 cloistered near Constantinople, where, well on in years, he still incorporated a considerable amount of current information.37 He wrote under the fresh impression of the first great Avar-Slav invasion of 584 on the basis of indirect information, so he reflects perceptions in Constantinople rather than actual events. Some material about the Avars is also found in the Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius Scholasticus, probably composed in 593 in Syria.38 First-hand information assembled with hagiographic intentions is found in the Miracula Sancti Demetrii, a collection of accounts of the miraculous interventions of the patron saint in the manifold crises that befell his city, Thessalonica. The first part, written during the reign of Heraclius, recounts among other things the first great Avar-Slav siege of the city. Further attacks are described in a continuation compiled toward the end of the seventh century.39 The supernatural actions of

Demetrius are swiftly woven into a surprisingly sober account, rich in detail and for the most part quite plausible—after all, the audience of the text, the citizens of Thessalonica, had also witnessed the sieges.40 Similar intentions to reinforce the cohesion of the community during difficult times guided the composition of Theodore Syncellus’s sermon on the liberation of Constantinople from the hardships of the Avar siege in the year 626. Composed on the heels of these events, it expostulates on the moral, salvific and eschatological dimension of the rescue of the imperial city by the Mother of God.41 The same events are treated in two further contemporary sources: one a poem composed for the occasion by George of Pisidia, which, despite all its rhetorical effects, offers some valuable pieces of information.42 The other is the less high-blown, unfortunately incomplete but still relatively extensive account of the Easter Chronicle (Chronicon paschale).43 After 626 the Avars more or less disappear from the field of vision of Byzantine historiography. The seventh and eighth centuries are, to a degree, the dark ages of the writing of history in Byzantium.44 After Theophylact Simocatta the chronicle tradition breaks off. It is not until the late eighth century that we again find a historical work on a grander scale. The patriarch Nicephorus, in his Breviarium, gives some relevant information about the Avars and Bulgars.45 More extensive is the Chronography of Theophanes the Confessor, composed soon after 810 by a wellconnected monk. The years between 285 and 813 are dealt with in annalistic fashion, with, however, some chronological uncertainties. For the period of the Avar wars the chronicler draws mostly on the work of Theophylact; for the seventh century, he relies on the same set of information as Nicephorus.46 Finally, a considerable enrichment to our knowledge of the Avars is offered by two later works. In the tenth century the learned emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus compiled the celebrated treatise De administrando imperio in the framework of a vast encyclopedic undertaking. Particularly for the history of the western Balkans and for the early Croats and Serbs this work offers unique material, albeit often with a tendency toward the legendary.47 The Suda Lexicon, compiled at the close of the tenth century, also contains some otherwise unknown passages about the Avars, among which some fragments from Menander.48 In the Latin West less notice was initially taken of the Avars. Very sketchy statements are found in some contemporary chronicles, as for example in Victor of Tunnuna, John of Biclaro, and Isidore of Seville. The lost work of Secundus of Trento, who died in 612, is only known from extensive excerpts found in Paul the Deacon’s Lombard History.49 His contemporary Pope Gregory the Great was above all interested in the ecclesiastical disputes of the time. But his letters do provide valuable clues for understanding the displacements of the Slavs and Avars in the direction of the Adriatic.50 The khaganate plays a similarly peripheral role in the work of Gregory of Tours.51 The Chronicle of Fredegar in the mid-seventh century

provides patchy, but valuable information on events east of the Frankish frontier.52 The principal source for relations between the Avars and the West from the beginning is the Lombard history which Paul the Deacon, connected both to Lombard and Carolingian courts, committed to vellum toward the end of the eighth century. Since his origins were in Friuli, he also had family traditions about experiences with the Avars.53 The conflicts between the Franks and the Avars on the one hand and the Bavarians and the Slavs on the other up to the year 610, the Lombard-Avar entente, and the two raids on Friuli are for the most part known only from his record.

When Paul composed his history of the Lombards, the Avars were again on Charlemagne’s political agenda for the Franks. The Royal Frankish Annals and a series of other annalistic works register precisely, if often scantily, the various stages of the conflict with the eastern neighbor.54 The collapse of the khaganate for the first time revealed, as if on an operating table, its inner structure to Frankish observers. Now, since everyone seemed to be driving his own foreign policy, the various dignitaries with their oriental titles could be recorded in the annals, albeit not without some phonetic difficulty.

The heroes of the wars against the Avars were celebrated before the Carolingian public. A poem on the victory of King Pippin over the Avars in 796 and an obituary of Erich of Friuli by Paulinus of Aquileia have been preserved.55 An episcopal synod that was held in enemy territory in 796 expressed concern for the conversion of the subjugated, and this was also a topic in the correspondence between Alcuin and Arn, the archbishop of Salzburg.56 Even a letter from Charlemagne to his wife Fastrada about the Avar war of 791 has been preserved.57 Charlemagne’s biographer Einhard, in his summary, identifies the subjugation of the Avars as the emperor’s greatest military accomplishment.58 Lastly, the Carolingian efforts to organize the newly conquered eastern territories conserved, well into the ninth century, traces of the vanishing Avar elite.59 1.3 Steppe Research and its Methodological Problems “L’histoire des Avares reste à écrire.” With this statement Denis Sinor (1963) outlined an undertaking that, despite intensive research, remained unrealized at the time.60 In 1988 Omeljan Pritsak characterized the Avars as “stepchildren in historical studies.”61 Admittedly, there have been several efforts at a historical synthesis. Arnulf Kollautz, in collaboration with Hisayuki Miyakawa, portrayed the “History and Culture of a Nomadic People from the Age of Migrations” (as the title might read in translation), departing from a straightforward identification of the Rouran of Central Asia with the European Avars.62 Rich in material, this work threw into relief a fundamental problem of research on the Avars: the patchy evidence and the wide range of regional particularities hardly allows a coherent narrative. The “histoire des Avares” is often obscured by the focus on detail.

In more coherent fashion, Alexander Avenarius attempted to delineate the fate of “the Avars in Europe.”63 The work was written under the difficult conditions of repression after the “Prague Spring” of 1968 and could not deal equitably with the current state of research in all areas. In point of fact, for few other questions of the European Middle Ages is the historian more obliged to turn to the help offered by a number of more or less exotic disciplines. The historian of the Avars should not only gain a mastery over the Latin and Greek sources with all their nuances but must in addition deal in critical fashion with Iranian, Armenian, Syrian, Arabic and Chinese texts, should be at home with Slavic, Hungarian, Turkic and Mongolic linguistics and onomastics, be competent to interpret with caution the published and, to the greatest degree possible, unpublished findings of archaeologists, master the approaches and models of social anthropology, and, lastly, offer new insights into old problems discussed by colleagues in his own field.

It is no coincidence that one of the classics of steppe research is entitled Osteuropäische und ostasiatische Streifzüge [Rambles in Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia]. It was not least the unsystematic and often excursive form of the work that enabled the author, Josef Marquart, at the turn of the twentieth century, to draw connecting lines between disciplines that may still be fruitfully pursued today. It was precisely these interdisciplinary ramblers who provided the decisive stimulus for the exploration of the nomadic peoples. In the second half of the nineteenth century the German Wilhelm Radloff made his way through the “Wild East” in the service of the Russian tzar. He collected an immense body of ethnographical and linguistic data, excavated caves from the Ice Age and kurgans or mounds from the Iron Age, undertook metallurgical investigations, and published his material in the form of a memoir “From Siberia.” Long before “interdisciplinary” became a vogue word in the humanities, frontier-crossers such as Radloff and Marquart laid the foundations for research into the medieval steppes, combining archaeology and ethnography, linguistics and history.64 In the constricted circumstances of the redrawn national boundaries of eastern Europe after 1918, this panoramic view could hardly be sustained. Rigid nationalistic thinking, which drew from Germanic, Slavic or Hunnic antiquity justifications for chauvinistic politics, did not hinder serious research, but ensnarled it in a vicious circle of fierce discussions about wrongly formulated questions. Were the Slavs the slaves of the Avars or the Avars merely the rulers of an alliance of Slavic tribes? Are the Romanians direct descendants of the Daco-Romans or the late results of a reversal of ethnic processes in the mountain regions between the Hungarians and the Slavs? How Carantanian are the Carinthians and the Slovenes, how Slavic the Serbs and Croats? A protracted dispute arose over eighth-century graves in Slovakia as to whether the long-departed were Avars or Slavs, AvaroSlavs or proto-Great-Moravians, until scholars settled on the neutral term “Avarperiod” (awarenzeitlich). Just how explosive historical research into remote periods

could be when fed into political disputes was evidenced in the stir that arose in Romania over a history of Transylvania that was published in Hungary in 1986.65 The multifaceted historical contexts for research into the early Middle Ages in central and eastern Europe must be taken into account.66 After 1989 the search for national origins gained a new and often tragic topicality.

The multiple, changeable identities of the steppe peoples could in fact have undermined the retrospective disputes over nationality. We know from inscriptions in Old Turkic, and from Chinese and Byzantine chronicles how rapidly the “peoples” of the horsemen and their followers took shape and then fell apart again.

Sources attest that the Goths qualified as Scythians and that Gothic was spoken at the court of Attila the Hun. The “Hun” and “Avar” names that have come down to us are of extremely varied provenance. Germanic warriors, and even the rebellious sixth-century youth of Constantinople, assumed ‘Hunnic’ dress; the Byzantines, Avar weaponry; the Slavs, Avar and German titles.67 The efforts of highly qualified historians to identify peoples with the same name but widely separated locations in time and space as “one and the same” has therefore led to many dead ends.68 Migrations, which continuously moved new groups of nomad warriors from one end of the Eurasian steppe zone to the other, are a fascinating object of study. Yet “the” Avars, (“Proto”)-Bulgars or Magyars are not to be found in some fanciful ‘original homeland’ somewhere between Manchuria and the Ural, even if we find similar ethnonyms there.

Soon after the apocalypse of nationalism in Nazi Germany 1933–45, the biological definition of ethnicity began to be abandoned in early medieval studies; a subjective sense of belonging came to be seen as the decisive feature of ethnic identity. Reinhard Wenskus maintained that early medieval peoples were not at of common origin but rather held together by common myths and norms.69 Concepts of ethnicity and identity have been further developed since. One problem with the post-1945 approaches was that in many cases, the early medieval sense of belonging is hard to trace in the sources. It is more productive to conceptualize ethnic identities as the results of a process of communication and interaction in which self-identification of individuals with a group, of the group as such by its representatives and in rituals, and the perceptions of the group by outsiders all play a part.70 In any case, ethnic identities cannot be assumed as fixed categories; rather, ethnic processes are a part of the historical development under investigation.

While archaeologists excavate hundreds of new Avar graves annually between the Moravian and Serbian Morava rivers, the historian is not favored with such an increase in source material. Nevertheless, work on the written evidence has made significant progress. The Hungarian Byzantinist Samuel Szádeczky-Kardoss presented a compilation of the sources for the history of the Avars with a short description of contents in 1972.71 A lexicon of the early medieval names and their occurrences from eastern Europe, the Glossar zur frühmittelalterlichen Geschichte

Osteuropas, was unfortunately discontinued after the first fascicule, but at least the lemma “Avars” has been published.72 Over the years, decisive improvements were made in the editing and publication of important sources. Most of the essential authors for the history of the Avars are now available in new critical editions and/or translations (see Ch. 1.2). In many cases the new editions proved a stimulus to numerous new studies.73 The archaeological legacy of the Avar period is richer than for almost all other early medieval peoples and cultures, a fact that makes its exploration of particular methodological interest. Some time ago, Falko Daim presented a reliable summary of the present state of research in English.74 It is not easy to keep track of all the new finds, since they come from almost a dozen countries, are studied in many different languages, and remain for the most part unpublished, while the body of available data is immense. The historian can barely call a dozen Avars by name, while the archaeologist “knows” not the name but many typical and individual characteristics of thousands of individuals of the Avar period. According to recent assessments more than two thousand Avar-period sites and approximately sixty thousand graves have been identified so far. Yet relatively few cemeteries have been fully excavated and published. Even though this flood of evidence occasionally lures the excavator into making hasty historical judgments, the historian, on the other hand, cannot simply ignore this mass of contemporary evidence.

For the non-specialist who studies the excavation reports it may seem that the Avars come alive for us only in death. Relatively few settlements from the Avar period have been excavated so far.

The Avar cult of the dead, on the other hand, has left striking traces. Prominent warriors were often buried in richly decorated costume and with magnificent weapons, sometimes with their horses. Their wives bore equally rich jewelry and decorations. A particularly rich example is a grave discovered in a sandpit in Kunbábony in 1971 and initially ascribed to a khagan.75 The extensive burial ground of Zamárdi in southwestern Hungary, excavated in the 1990s, with its thousands of graves, produced much new information on the first period of Avar rule and its impressive cultural diversity.76 The symbolic significance of grave goods as markers of status, their style, provenance and distribution, the technologies used, the burial rites and organization of the cemeteries, the information on food and tools, the traces of illness and wounds, and much, much more make it possible to draw a host of conclusions. A strength of the school of Gyula László and István Bóna in Hungary was great attention paid to social and economic questions.77 “The finds, however, will give no answers without a prior question from the researcher,”78 and these questions are connected to the inquirer’s historical understanding and interests. Many methodological questions are being debated: to what extent can an archaeologically based relative chronology provide a basis for

historical datings? What is the relationship between archaeological culture, and the ethnic and political entity? Can archaeological finds be interpreted ethnically at all?79 These and similar questions call for further discussion in collaboration among the disciplines. It is, however, clear that each discipline must first begin with its own methodology to try to draw tenable conclusions, before results from neighboring disciplines are called on in support. A “mixed argumentation” can lead to circular reasoning and results. The same is true for the collaboration between history and onomastics.

John of Ephesus, Historiae Ecclesiasticae pars tertia 6.45, ed. Ernest W. Brooks, CSCO 106, Scriptores Syri 55 (Louvain, 1964), 260; John of Ephesus, The Third Part of the Ecclesiastical History of John, Bishop of Ephesus, trans. Robert Payne-Smith (Oxford, 1860), XLV. 2 Arnulf Kollautz, “Die Awaren: Die Schichtung in einer Nomadenherrschaft,” Saeculum 5 (1954): 129.

3 On this concept, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrenie (Paris, 1980); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1987), also at http://projectlamar.com/media/A-Thousand-Plateaus.pdf.

4 Josef Deér, “Karl der Große und der Untergang des Awarenreiches,” in Karl der Große: Lebenswerk und Nachleben, vol. 1, Persönlichkeit und Geschichte, ed. Helmut Beumann (Düsseldorf, 1967), 719–91.

5 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1–25, 351–423.

6 Falko Daim, “The Avars: Steppe People of Central Europe,” Archaeology 37 (1984): 33–39, and Falko Daim, “Avars and Avar Archaeology: An Introduction,” in Regna and Gentes: The Relationship between Late Antique and Early Medieval Peoples and Kingdoms in the Transformation of the Roman World, ed. Hans-Werner Goetz, Jörg Jarnut and Walter Pohl, The Transformation of the Roman World 13 (Leiden, 2003), 463–570. A monograph about Avar archaeology by Csanád Bálint is in preparation.

7 Jürgen Bemmann and Michael Schmauder, eds., The Complexity of Interaction along the Eurasian Steppe Zone in the First Millennium CE (Bonn, 2015); Michael Maas and Nicola Di Cosmo, eds., Eurasian Empires in Late Antiquity (forthcoming).

8 Fundamental studies are Reinhard Wenskus, Stammesbildung und Verfassung: Das Werden der frühmittelalterlichen Gentes, 2nd ed. (Graz, 1977), and Herwig Wolfram, Die Goten: Von den Anfängen bis zur Mitte des sechsten Jahrhunderts; Versuch einer historischen Ethnographie, 5th ed.

(Munich, 2009); engl. trans. Thomas J. Dunlap, History of the Goths (Berkeley, 1988); more recently, Walter Pohl, “Ethnicity, Theory and Tradition: a Response,” in On Barbarian Identity—Critical Approaches to Ethnogenesis Theory, ed. Andrew Gillett (Turnhout, 2002), 221– 40; Pohl, “Archaeology of Identity: Introduction,” in Archaeology of Identity—Archäologie der Identität, ed. Walter Pohl and Mathias Mehofer, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 17 (Vienna, 2010), 9–24.

9 On Roman ethnography, see Klaus E. Müller, Geschichte der antiken Ethnographie und ethnologischen Theoriebildung, vol. 2 (Wiesbaden, 1980), and Michael Maas, The Conqueror’s Gift: Ethnography, Identity and Roman Imperial Power at the End of Antiquity, forthcoming. Assuming an end of the classical ethnographic tradition in the seventh century: Anthony Kaldellis, Ethnography after Antiquity: Foreign Lands and Peoples in Byzantine Literature; Empire and after (Philadelphia, 2013).

1

Synesius of Cyrene, Oratio de regno ad Arcadium imperatorem 11, ed. and trans. Augustine Fitzgerald, The Essays and Hymns of Synesius of Cyrene, 2 vols (London, 1930), 1:27. Agathias, on the other hand, is of the opinion that new peoples might very well appear and then disappear; Agathiae Myrinaei Historiarum libri V, ed. Rudolf Keydell, CFHB 2 (Berlin, 1967); Agathias, The Histories 5.11.4, trans. Joseph D. Frendo, CFHB 2B (Berlin, 1975), 146 (cited after Frendo’s edition). Similarly, Orosius, Seven Books of History Against the Pagans 7.32.11, trans. A.T. Fear, Translated Texts for Historians 54 (Liverpool, 2010), 380.

11 A fine example is the so-called Cotton Tiberius mappa mundi, on which they appear as neighbors of the “Turci griphorum” between the Sea of Azov (the ancient Maeotis) and the Caspian Sea; see David Hill, An Atlas of Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto, 1981), 2–3. See also Walter Pohl, “The Role of Steppe Peoples in Eastern and Central Europe in the First Millennium A.D.,” in Origins of Central Europe, ed. Przemysław Urbanczyk (Warsaw, 1997), 65–78.

12 Procopius, Bella 7.14, ed. and trans. Henry B. Dewing, Procopius: in seven volumes, vol. 4, History of the wars, books VI (continued) and VII, Loeb Classical Library 173 (London, 1914), 272–73. See also the partial edition and translation History of the Wars, Secret History, and Buildings, ed. and trans. Averil Cameron (New York, 1967).

13 Strategicon 11.2–4, ed. George T. Dennis and Ernst Gamillscheg, CFHB 17 (Vienna, 1981), 360–89; Maurice’s Strategikon: Handbook of Byzantine Military Strategy, trans. George T. Dennis (Philadelphia, 1984), henceforth abbreviated as Strategicon.

14 Menander frag. 19.1, ed. and trans. Roger C. Blockley, The History of Menander the Guardsman (Liverpool, 1985), 170.

15 Ursula-Barbara Dittrich, Die Beziehungen Roms zu den Sarmaten und Quaden im 4. Jahrhundert n.

Chr. nach der Darstellung des Ammianus Marcellinus (Bonn, 1984); Yves Albert Dauge, Le barbare: recherches sur la conception romaine de la barbarie et de la civilisation (Brussels, 1981); Müller, Geschichte der antiken Ethnographie, 427–29; François Hartog, Le miroir d’Hérodote (Paris, 1991).

16 John of Ephesus, 5.32, 256 (cf. Ch. 3.4).

17 Cf. Ch. 5.7.

18 Priscus frag. 11.2, ed. and trans. Roger C. Blockley, The Fragmentary Classicising Historians of the Later Roman Empire, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 1983), 266–73.

19 Theodore Syncellus, Homilia de Obsidione Avarica Constantinopolis, ed. Leo Sternbach, Analecta Avarica (Cracow, 1900), 4–5; French translation: Traduction et commentaire de l’homélie écrite probablement par Théodore le Syncelle sur le siège de Constantinople en 626, ed. Ferenc Makk, Acta Universitatis de Attila József Nominatae, Acta Antiqua et Archaeologica 19 (Szeged, 1975), 13–14. English translation by Roger Pearse (Ipswich, 2007): http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/theodore_syncellus_01_homily.htm.

20 Fredegar, Chronicae 4.68, ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH SS rer. Merov. 2 (Hanover, 1888), 154– 55; unless otherwise noted, the page numbers cited refer to the English translation by Wallace-Hadrill: The Fourth Book of the Chronicles of Fredegar, trans. John Michael WallaceHadrill (London, 1960), 56–58.

21 Theophylacti Simocattae Historiae 6.9.12–13, ed. Karl de Boor (Leipzig, 1887), 238 and 8.3.12, 288; cf. Ch. 5.3 and 5.8; The History of Theophylact Simocatta: An English Translation with Introduction and Notes, trans. Michael and Mary Whitby (Oxford, 1986), 173 and 213. Unless otherwise noted, the English translation is cited throughout this book. Walter Pohl, “Perceptions of Barbarian Violence,” in Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices, ed.

Harold A. Drake (Aldershot, 2006), 15–26.

22 Cf. Ch. 7.3; Chronicon paschale, ed. Ludwig Dindorf, CSHB, 2 vols (Bonn, 1832), 1:723, 5–15; 10

Chronicon Paschale 284–628 AD, a. 626, trans. Michael and Mary Whitby, Translated texts for Historians 7 (Liverpool, 1989), 177. Unless otherwise noted, the page numbers cited refer to the English translation by Whitby and Whitby.

23 Theophanes Confessor, Chronographia 6092, ed. Karl de Boor (Leipzig, 1883), 280, trans.

Cyril Mango and Roger Scott, The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern History AD 284–813 (Oxford, 1997), 404. However, this information is not found in Theophylact. Theophanes also ascribes the massacre to the obduracy of the emperor, who did not want to pay the ransom money; cf. Ch. 5.7. After the conquest of Cividale, the men capable of bearing arms were presumably all killed by the Avars; Paul the Deacon, Historia Langobardorum 4.37, ed. Georg Waitz, MGH SS rer. Germ. 48 (Hanover, 1878), 163. Cf. Ch. 7.1.

24 Menander, frag. 5.4 Blockley, 52.

25 Menander, frag. 25.1 Blockley, 220; Theophanes, Chronographia 6110, 433–34; cf. Ch. 3.4 and 7.2.

26 Strategicon 11.2, 361–62.

27 Strategicon 4.2, 195; 9.2, 307.

28 Cf. Ch. 2.1.

29 Menander, frag. 12.6 Blockley, 140.

30 On sources as literary constructs, see Walter A. Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550–800): Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon (Princeton, 1988); but see Walter Pohl, “History in Fragments: Montecassino’s Politics of Memory,” Early Medieval Europe 10, no. 3 (2001): 343–74.

31 Survey of the Byzantine sources of the time in Gyula Moravcsik, Byzantinoturcica, 2nd ed., 2 vols (Berlin, 1958), 1:302–04; Herbert Hunger, Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner, 2 vols, Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft 12.5 (Munich, 1978), Vol. 1, especially 1:292–93; Johannes Karayannopoulos and Günter Weiss, Quellenkunde zur Geschichte von Byzanz (324–1453), 2 vols, Schriften zur Geistesgeschichte des östlichen Europa 14 (Wiesbaden, 1982), Vol. 2; Warren Treadgold, The Early Byzantine Historians (New York, 2010). See also Averil Cameron, Procopius and the Sixth Century (Berkeley, 1985).

32 Agathias, 5.11.4, 146.

33 Menander, ed. and trans. Blockley; Treadgold, The Early Byzantine Historians, 293–99.

34 The History of Theophylact Simocatta, trans.Whitby and Whitby; see Michael Whitby, The Emperor Maurice and his Historian: Theophylact Simocatta on Persian and Balkan Warfare (Oxford, 1988). German translation: Theophylaktos Simokates, Geschichte, trans. Peter Schreiner (Stuttgart, 1985). According to Schreiner, the author’s name was Simokates, with one ‘t’.

On the chronological problems of the text, see Ch. 5.1.

35 “Ausbund an Fratzenhaftigkeit”: The quotation is from Ulrich von Wilamowitz (1905), cited in Schreiner’s “Einleitung,” 15; see also his own balanced judgment on the author (ibid. 8–10), and Michael Whitby, The Emperor Maurice and his Historian: Theophylact Simocatta on Persian and Balkan Warfare (Oxford, 1988).

36 New edition 1981 by Dennis and Gamillscheg. Its information on the Avars and Slavs is extensively reviewed in John Earl Wiita, “The Ethnika in Byzantine Military Treatises,” PhD diss., University of Florida, 1977.

37 Translations of Michael the Syrian are in The Third Part of the Ecclesiastical History of John, Bishop of Ephesus, trans. R. Payne-Smith (Oxford, 1890); Chronique de Michel le Syrien: patriarche jacobite d’Antioche (1166–1199), trans. Jean Baptiste Chabot (Paris, 1899–1910; repr. Brussels, 1963); in Chronica minora, trans. [Latin] Ernest W. Brooks (Paris, 1903–05). See, further,

Ernest Honigmann, “L’histoire ecclésiastique de Jean d’Éphèse,” Byzantion 14 (1939): 623– 24; Dorothea Weltecke, Die “Beschreibung der Zeiten” von Mōr Michael dem Großen (1126–1199): Eine Studie zu ihrem historischen und historiographiegeschichtlichen Kontext, CSCO 594, Subsidia 110 (Louvain, 2003).

38 The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius Scholasticus, trans. Michael Whitby, Translated Texts for Historians 33 (Liverpool, 2000). Pauline Allen, Evagrius Scholasticus, the Church Historian (Louvain, 1981).

39 Paul Lemerle published a Greek-French edition of the Miracula Demetrii, with a second volume of extensive commentary: Les plus anciens recueils des miracles de Saint Démétrius et la pénétration des Slaves dans les Balkans, 2 vols (Paris, 1979–81).

40 Johannes Koder, “Byzanz, die Griechen und die Romaiosynē —eine ‘Ethnogenese’ der Römer?” in Typen der Ethnogenese unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Bayern, vol. 1, ed. Herwig Wolfram and Walter Pohl, DsÖAW 201 (Vienna, 1990), 103–12; Johannes Koder, “Anmerkungen zu den Miracula Sancti Demetrii,” in Byzantium: Tribute to Andreas N. Stratos, ed. Nia A. Stratos (Athens, 1986), 2:523–25. Koder calls attention to the mixed character of the Miracula, with a hagiographical purpose and a chronicle-like description, which expertly employs the terminology of the imperial administration.

41 Theodore Syncellus, Homilia de Obsidione Avarica Constantinopolis, trans. Pearse, http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/theodore_syncellus_01_homily.htm.

42 George of Pisidia (Georgios Pisides); for an edition in Greek and Italian, see Bellum Avaricum, ed. and trans. Agostino Pertusi, Giorgio Piside, Poemi, vol. 1, Panegirici epici, Studia Patristica et Byzantina 7 (Ettal, 1959), 176–200. On George’s historical poems, see Mary Whitby, “Defender of the Cross: George of Pisidia on the Emperor Heraclius and his deputies,” in The Propaganda of Power: The Role of Panegyric in Late Antiquity (Leiden, 1998), 247–76.

43 Chronicon Paschale a. 626, 168–81; Treadgold, The Early Byzantine Historians, 340–49. For the year 626 and relevant sources, see Ch. 7.3.

44 Leslie Brubaker and John Haldon, eds., Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era (ca. 680–850): The Sources: An Annotated Survey (Aldershot, 2001); Hunger, Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner, 1:334–39 (Theophanes); Karayannopoulos and Weiss, Quellenkunde zur Geschichte von Byzanz (324–1453), 2:338–39.

45 Nicephorus, Saint Patriarch of Constantinople, Short History, ed. and trans. Cyril Mango (Washington, 1990). See also Cyril Mango, “The Brevarium of the Patriarch Nikephoros,” in Stratos, Byzantium: Tribute, 2:539–52, who characterizes the work as more a “rhetorical exercise than a work of history”; more appreciative view in Karayannopoulos and Weiss, Quellenkunde zur Geschichte von Byzanz, 2:33–34.

46 Theophanes Confessor, Chronographia; there are two recent English translations: trans.

Mango and Scott (used here), and The Chronicle of Theophanes: An English Translation of Anni Mundi 6095–6305 (A.D. 602–813), ed. Harry Turtledove (Philadelphia, 1982).

47 Greek-English edition: De administrando imperio: Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, Emperor of the East, 905–959, ed. Gyula Moravcsik and Romilly James Heald Jenkins, 2nd ed., 2 vols (Budapest, 1963); Romilly James Heald Jenkins, ed., Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, De administrando imperio, vol. 2, Commentary (London, 1963), commentary by Francis Dvornik et al.

48 Moravcsik, Byzantinoturcica, 2:312–15.

49 Walter Pohl, “Paulus Diaconus und die ‘Historia Langobardorum’: Text und Tradition,” in Historiographie im frühen Mittelalter, ed. Anton Scharer and Georg Scheibelreiter, VIÖG 32

(Vienna, 1994), 375–405.

Gregory the Great, Registrum epistolarum, ed. Dag Norberg, 2 vols, Corpus Christianorum: Series Latina 140–140a (Turnholt, 1982). See Carole Ellen Straw, Gregory the Great (Aldershot, 1996); Robert A. Markus, Gregory the Great and his World (Cambridge, 1997).

51 Gregory of Tours, Decem libri historiarum, ed. Bruno Krusch and Wilhelm Levison, MGH SS rer. Merov. 1, 1 (1937; repr., Hanover, 1965); Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks, trans. Lewis Thorpe (1974; repr. London, 1986). See Ian N. Wood, Gregory of Tours (Bangor, 1994); Martin Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours: History and Society in the Sixth Century (Cambridge, 2001); Helmut Reimitz, History, Frankish Identity and the Framing of Western Ethnicity, 550–850 (Cambridge, 2015), 25–124.

52 The Fourth Book of the Chronicles of Fredegar, ed. and trans. Wallace-Hadrill; see Roger Collins, Fredegar (Aldershot, 1996); Reimitz, History, Frankish Identity, 166–239.

53 Walter Pohl, “Paul the Deacon—Between Sacci and Marsuppia,” in Ego Trouble: Authors and their Identities in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Richard Corradini et al., Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 15 (Vienna, 2010), 111–24; Goffart, Narrators of Barbarian History, 329–431, for a sceptical view of his value as a source.

54 For an English translation of selected annals, see Carolingian Chronicles: Royal Frankish Annals, and Nithard’s Histories, trans. Bernhard Walter Scholz, with Barbara Rogers (Ann Arbor, 1970). See Rosamond McKitterick, History and Memory in the Carolingian World (Cambridge, 2004).

55 Carmen de Pippini regis victoria Avarica, ed. Ernst Dümmler, MHG Poetae 1 (Berlin, 1881), 116–17; Paulinus of Aquileia, Versus de Herico duce, ed. Ernst Dümmler, MHG Poetae 1 (Berlin, 1881), 131–33.

56 Conventus episcoporum ad ripas Danuvii, ed. Albert Werminghoff, MGH LL, Concilia 2,1 (Berlin, 1906), 172–76; cf. Helmut Reimitz, “Grenzen und Grenzüberschreitungen im karolingischen Mitteleuropa,” in Grenze und Differenz im frühen Mittelalter, ed. Walter Pohl and Helmut Reimitz, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 1 (Vienna, 2000), 105–66, at 156–58; Maximilian Diesenberger and Herwig Wolfram,“Arn und Alkuin: Zwei Freunde und ihre Schriften,” in Erzbischof Arn von Salzburg, ed. Meta Niederkorn-Bruck and Anton Scharer, VIÖG 40 (Vienna, 2004), 81–106.

57 Charlemagne, Epistula 20, ed. Ernst Dümmler et al., MGH Epp. Karolini Aevi 2 (Berlin, 1895), 528–29.

58 Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni 13, ed. Oswald Holder-Egger, MGH SS rer. Germ. 25 (Berlin, 1911), 15; The Life of Charlemagne, in Charlemagne’s Courtier: The Complete Einhard, ed. and trans.

Paul Edward Dutton (Peterborough, 1998), 24.

59 Herwig Wolfram, Grenzen und Räume: Geschichte Österreichs vor seiner Entstehung, Österreichische Geschichte 1 (Vienna, 1995), 211–74.

60 Denis Sinor, Introduction à l’étude de l’Eurasie centrale (Wiesbaden, 1963), 265.

61 Omeljan Pritsak, “The Slavs and the Avars,” in Gli slavi occidentali e meridionali nell’alto medioevo, SSCI 30, 2 vols (Spoleto, 1983), 1:353.

62 Arnulf Kollautz and Hisayuki Miyakawa, Geschichte und Kultur eines völkerwanderungszeitlichen Nomadenvolkes: Die Jou-Jan der Mongolei und die Awaren in Mitteleuropa, 2 vols (Klagenfurt, 1970), henceforth abbreviated as Kollautz and Miyakawa. On the problem of the identification with the Rouran, see Ch. 2.3–4.

63 Alexander Avenarius, Die Awaren in Europa (Amsterdam, 1974); other histories of the Avars

by Slavic scholars: Jovan Kovačević, Avarski Kaganat (Belgrad, 1977) (in Serbian); Wojciech Szymánsky and Elzbieta Dabrowska, Awarzy—Węgrzy (Warsaw, 1979) (in Polish).

50

Josef Marquart, Osteuropäische und ostasiatische Streifzüge (Leipzig, 1903); Wilhelm Radloff, Aus Sibirien, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1884). See also Ádám Bollók, “Excavating Early Medieval Material Culture and Writing History in late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Hungarian Archaeology,” Hungarian Historical Review 5, no.2 (2016): 277–304.

65 Béla Köpeczi, ed., Erdély Története három kötetben (History of Transylvania in Three Volumes) (Budapest, 1986); see László Péter, ed., Historians and the History of Transylvania (New York, 1992).

66 See, for instance, Florin Curta, “From Kossinna to Bromlej: Ethnogenesis in Slavic Archaeology,” in On Barbarian Identity: Critical Approaches to Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Andrew Gillett, Studies in the Early Middle Ages 4 (Turnhout, 2002), 201–18.

67 On Hunnic dress, see Procopius, Anecdota 7.11–14, ed. and trans. Henry B. Dewing, Procopius: in Seven Volumes, vol. 6, The Anecdota or Secret History, Loeb Classical Library 290 (1935; repr. London, 1969), 80–81 and Walter Pohl, “Telling the Difference: Signs of Ethnic Identity,” in Strategies of Distinction: The Construction of Ethnic Communities, 300–800, ed.

Walter Pohl and Helmut Reimitz, The Transformation of the Roman World 2 (Leiden, 1998), 48 68 As in Kollautz and Miyakawa’s identification of the Avars and Rouran; explicitly stated by Károly Czeglédy, “From East to West: The Age of Nomadic Migrations in Eurasia,” Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 3 (1983): 26: “Indeed, it is a breathtaking task to try to pry out of the written remains evidence pertaining to one and the same people, one and the same tribal union”; cf. Ch. 2.2–4.

69 Wenskus, Stammesbildung und Verfassung. Further comment in Wolfram, Die Goten, 40–41; Wolfram, Goths, 28–29; Walter Pohl, “Tradition, Ethnogenese und literarische Gestaltung: eine Zwischenbilanz,” in Ethnogenese und Überlieferung: Angewandte Methoden der Frühmittelalterforschung, ed. Karl Brunner and Brigitte Merta, VIÖG 31 (Vienna, 1994), 9–26; Pohl, “Ethnicity, Theory and Tradition,” with an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of Wenskus’s model. For a fierce and, to my mind, unfair criticism of Wenskus, see Alexander C. Murray, “Reinhard Wenskus on Ethnogenesis, Ethnicity, and the Origin of the Franks,” in On Barbarian Identity—Critical Approaches to Ethnogenesis Theory, ed. Andrew Gillett (Turnhout, 2002), 39–68. Approaches similar to Wenskus were used in studies of early medieval eastern Europe by František Graus, “Die Entwicklung Mitteleuropas im 8.

Jahrhundert und die Vorbedingungen der Staatenentwicklung in diesem Gebiet,” in I problemi dell‘occidente nel secolo VIII, SSCI 20 (Spoleto, 1973), 1:451–54; Manfred Hellmann, “Grundlagen slawischer Verfassungsgeschichte des frühen Mittelalters,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, N. F., 2 (1954): 387–404; and Wolfgang Fritze, “Zur Bedeutung der Awaren für die slawische Ausdehnungsbewegung im frühen Mittelalter,” in Studien zur Völkerwanderungszeit im östlichen Mitteleuropa, ed. Gerhard Mildenberger (Marburg, 1980), 498–545.

70 Walter Pohl, “Introduction: Strategies of Identification: A Methodological Profile,” in Strategies of Identification: Ethnicity and Religion in Early Medieval Europe, ed. Walter Pohl and Gerda Heydemann (Turnhout, 2013), 1–64.

71 Samuel Szádeczky-Kardoss, Ein Versuch zur Sammlung und chronologischen Anordnung der griechischen Quellen der Awarengeschichte, Acta Universitatis de Attila József Nominatae, Acta Antiqua et Archaeologica 16, Opuscula Byzantina 1 (Szeged, 1972).

72 Christian Lübke and Andrzej Wędzki, eds., Glossar zur frühmittelalterlichen Geschichte im östlichen Europa: Enzyklopädie zur Geschichte des östlichen Europa, 6.–13. Jahrhundert, Heft A: AalborgAwdańce (Greifswald, 1998).

64

See, for instance, numerous studies by Evangelos Chrysos, as well as Andreas N. Stratos, Byzantium in the Seventh Century, 3 vols (Amsterdam, 1968–71), and John Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century (Cambridge, 1990).

74 Daim, “Avars and Avar Archaeology.”

75 Elvira H. Tóth and Attila Horváth, Kunbábony: Das Grab eines Awarenkhagans (Kecskémet, 1992).

76 Edit Bárdos and Éva Garam, Das awarenzeitliche Gräberfeld in Zamárdi-Rétiföldek. 2 vols.

(Budapest, 2009 and 2014).

77 The fundamental studies were Gyula László, Études archéologiques sur l’histoire de la société des Avars, Archaeologica Hungarica 24 (Budapest, 1954), and Ilona Kovrig, Das awarenzeitliche Gräberfeld von Alattyán, Archaeologica Hungarica 40 (Budapest, 1963). Many of László’s methods would not stand up to present-day criticism; their lasting value lies the questions they stimulated. See, also, the numerous publications of the late István Bóna, as well as, inter alia, those of C. Bálint, E. Garam, A. Kiss, A. Sós, R. Müller, P. Tomka and T. Vida.

78 Falko Daim, “Gedanken zum Ethnosbegriff,” Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 112 (1982): 69.

79 See, for instance, Sebastian Brather, Ethnische Interpretationen in der frühgeschichtlichen Archäologie: Geschichte, Grundlagen und Alternativen, RGA Erg. Bd. 42 (Berlin, 2004); Volker Bierbrauer, Ethnos und Mobilität im 5. Jahrhundert aus archäologischer Sicht: Vom Kaukasus bis Niederösterreich.

Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, phil.-hist. Kl., N.F., 131 (Munich, 2008); Pohl, “Archaeology of Identity: Introduction”; Florin Curta, “Medieval Archaeology and Ethnicity: Where Are We?,” History Compass 9 (2011): 7: 537–48.

73

Virgin Whore

Emma Maggie Solberg

Contents Acknowledgments Abbreviations Used in the Notes Introduction Chapter 1. The Many Fathers of Jesus Christ Chapter 2. Testing the Chastity of the Divine Adulteress Chapter 3. The Second Eve Chapter 4. Imitations of the Virgin Chapter 5. Promiscuous Mercy Chapter 6. The Whore of Babylon Bibliography Index

Introduction When did the Virgin Mary become so chaste and so fragile?1 At the turn of the twenty-first century, the Brooklyn Museum of Art exhibited the BritishNigerian artist Chris Ofili’s painting of a black Madonna ornamented (or “splattered,” as the Daily News had it) with elephant feces and cutouts of female genitalia clipped from pornographic magazines.2 Ofili’s painting so offended Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a devout Catholic, that he attempted to defund and evict the Brooklyn Museum of Art.3 Giuliani accused Ofili of having “attacked,” “desecrated,” and—most tellingly— “defiled” the Madonna.4 The verb defile (which descends from the Latin fullāre, meaning to trample, and from the Old English fúl, meaning foul or dirty) suggests the acts of polluting, besmirching, breaking, violating, and deflowering—especially when used in reference to a virgin, or, as in this case, the Virgin.5 To Giuliani’s mind, it seems, Ofili’s painting registered as a sexual assault. Ofili touched the Virgin’s image with pitch, and so she was defiled. Taking this notion further, Giuliani also accused the Brooklyn Museum of having “desecrate[d] the most personal and deeply held views of the people in society,” as if faith too were a kind of fragile innocence—once lost, and lost forever.6 According to Giuliani, Ofili and the Brooklyn Museum had deflowered the until-then unblemished purity of the Virgin and so too the innocence of the faithful.7 And yet despite this rhetoric of never-before, Ofili was hardly the first to deflower the Virgin, even within recent memory. In 1948, the Italian director Roberto Rossellini released Il miracolo, a film starring Anna Magnani (La Lupa, “the she-wolf”) as a delusional and destitute innocent whose rape, pregnancy, and persecution mirror the narrative of the virgin birth. When Il miracolo premiered in the United States, the Catholic Legion of Decency picketed cinemas (signs read “This Film is an Insult to Every Decent Woman and her Mother”), lobbying for censorship.8 The Reverend Patrick J. Masterson of the Legion complained that the film had “defamed” the Virgin.9 “Satan alone,” Cardinal Spellman agreed, “would dare make such perversion.”10 Again, in 1998, when the British artist Tania Kovats’s “Virgin in a Condom” toured Australia and New Zealand, concerned citizens protested that the encased statuette “libeled” Mary, an offense for which it was protested, attacked, and, in one case, kidnapped.11 And in 2012, when Pussy Riot sang an obscene song to the Madonna (the chorus: “Shit, shit, the Lord’s shit!”) from the pulpit of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, they were arrested and condemned for the crime of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.”12

In each case, Mary’s champions claimed that the touch of filth (whether feces, obscenity, contraception, or pornography) had defiled the chastity of the Virgin.

Even the opposition agreed with that interpretation—at least with its terms if not with its values. Across a spectrum of media outlets, Ofili’s supporters lauded the artist as an iconoclastic genius whose “new way of seeing old subjects” boldly broke with history and defied tradition.13 Secular progressives can also see faith as a kind of innocence—like a child’s belief in Santa Claus, or like maidenhead— and modernity as its necessary loss. The modern adult, according to this way of thinking, must put aside childish things: virginity, faith, and Mary. In this sense, detractors and defenders alike understood the artist and the museum as the vanguards of the future and Mary and Giuliani as the bulwarks of the past. Like their opponents, Ofili’s allies assumed the Madonna’s innocence and fragility, thereby reducing her to the vulnerabilities of her epithet. Once torn, the hymen does not grow back.14 Transferring the qualities of virginity to the Virgin, activists on both sides of the controversy concurred that Ofili had broken the membrane of innocence protecting Mary, Christianity, and tradition from the disenchantment of the present—a violation seen by some as progressive and others destructive, by some as valiant and others villainous.15 And yet despite this consensus between enemies, the Virgin’s vulnerability is hardly fragile, but rather uncannily resilient. History teaches us that although Mary is often deflowered, she remains eternally untouched, always newly ready for the next inevitable attack. Contrary to the pull of empiricist and fundamentalist habits of modern thought, Mary’s purity functions in accordance with the laws of magic and metaphor. Unlike a hymen, the construct of her virginity cannot be destroyed. The Virgin Mother, paradoxically, is both innocent and experienced. Her miraculous impenetrability, although so often proven, seems strangely easy to forget. There are those who register every ultimately impotent attack against her integrity as an unprecedented shock and irreparable loss. Not, however, the avant-garde provocateurs—like Ofili, Rossellini, Kovats, and Pussy Riot—who launched those attacks. Their memories are longer.

Ofili, who was raised Catholic, defended his work not on the grounds of freedom of expression but rather religious tradition, describing his painting as “merely a hip hop version” of the sacred and yet also “sexually charged” representations of the Madonna at which he had gazed as an altar boy during Mass and as a student of art history in the National Gallery.16 Likewise, Rossellini (also raised Catholic)—and, for that matter, the Vatican—interpreted Il miracolo not as a blasphemous parody, but rather as an updated Miracle of the Virgin, a devotional meditation on God’s scandalously promiscuous mercy.17 Likewise, Tania Kovats (also raised Catholic) defended “Virgin in a Condom” as the culmination of her lifelong contemplation of the history of Mariology.18 Likewise, Pussy Riot represented their political protest not as an attack against but

rather as a prayer of supplication to the Virgin. “Mother of God,” they begged, “Put Putin away!”19 Although these artists were taken for iconoclasts, they all identified themselves as iconographers.

These provocateurs did not offend against tradition by being too modern, but rather offended against modernity by being too medieval.20 Strangely, what looks like avant-garde iconoclasm also strikingly resembles the devotional practices of the late medieval cult of the Madonna. Ofili’s canvas radiates gold and ultramarine, the deluxe blue made from imported cobalt or lapis lazuli reserved for the late medieval robes of the Virgin.21 Like medieval craftsmen, Ofili layers translucent pigments over a wash of gold to create a shimmering effect. And just as medieval artists punched geometric patterns into burnished gilt to create stippled crystalline refractions circling the heads of saints, Ofili layers various golden textures (swirls of paint, drips of glitter, and raised sequin-like dots) to make Mary’s resplendent halo. And yet despite all this radiance, Ofili’s critics emphasized and exaggerated his use of black and brown.

The polemic written about the painting—reacting against the blackness of Ofili’s Madonna as much as against his use of elephant dung—gave the impression that the canvas oozed fecal darkness.

Ofili challenged the ideal of the lily-white and hygienically immaculate Virgin.

And yet Mary was not always and is not always so vanilla. From the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries, European artists habitually represented the Virgin as black—a tradition that continues in the contemporary cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe.22 In fact, many of medieval England’s most visited shrines of Our Lady—including Our Lady of Willesden, Our Lady of Crome, and Our Lady of Muswell—housed statues of Mary that were said to be black.23 Neither was the Virgin always so inimical to excrement. According to the fourteenth-century Prickynge of Love (a Middle English translation of the Stimulus amoris), the Madonna handled the filth of human sin as a mother handles the feces of her infant: with love and patience.24 Mankind may “stynke foule,” but Mary “farist with us as a modir with hir owne childe that kisseth hym with her mowthe & with hir handis makith clene his taylende”—she deals with us as a mother with her own child who kisses him with her mouth and with her hands makes clean his tail-end.25 To medieval theologians, Mary’s earthiness proved (in the words of the twelfthcentury Benedictine Odo of Tournai) that “God created all things good,” including “viscera and excrement.”26 But to the early modern reformers, her earthiness stank. Roger Hutchinson, Archbishop Cramner’s chaplain, compared the rankness of Mary’s flesh (and her womb) to the “stinking scents” of “carrion and filthy jakes,” jakes being an early-modern term for toilet.27 Since then, the Virgin may have been cleaned up and bleached white in the Anglo-American imagination, but Ofili’s Madonna remains old-fashioned.

Even the pornographic clippings of buttocks framing labia that surround Ofili’s Madonna resonate with the theology and iconography of late medieval Mariology. From a distance, these heart-shaped cutouts resemble the choirs of naked, chubby putti that attend upon the Virgin. As the art critic Jerry Saltz wrote, “It’s only when you get close to the painting that these flickering cherubs turn rude.” Ofili’s use of genitals in his representation of the Mother of God struck Saltz—and many others—as “irredeemable.”28 Yet as Lady Reason explains in the fourteenth-century Roman de la Rose, God made the noble genitals (les nobles choses) with his own hands in paradise; they are neither shameful, sinful, nor unpleasant.29 Proving this point, the Son of God deigned to descend into Mary’s reproductive system, live there for nine months like a monk in a cell, and enter the world through the vaginal gates of her body.30 According to one interpretive tradition, he endured this awful ordeal just as he endured his ignominious Crucifixion.31 Yet according to the intepretation that held sway over Christendom from the twelfth through the early sixteenth century, Jesus relished this fleshly intimacy with his bride and mother, prizing it (as one fourteenthcentury devotional lyric had it) “above all that ever was His.”32 It is no wonder, then, that vaginal imagery—split figs and pomegranates, red roses and dripping honeycombs, passageways and aqueducts—ornaments so many late medieval representations of the Virgin.33 Medievalists have called this phenomenon by many names: “genital theology,” “theological gynecology,” “gynotheology.”34 Iconographers depicted Mary’s body as a hortus conclusus deliciarum, an intimately enclosed garden of delights, the Trinity’s playpen.35 Vermillion, vulva-shaped mandorla encased the medieval Virgin, as they do Our Lady of Guadalupe today.36 More explicit still are the strange (or rather, strange to us) metallic souvenir badges recently excavated from medieval pilgrimage sites that depict the Virgin as an ambulant, crowned vulva worshipped by walking phalluses with tiny, wagging tails.37 In this context, Ofili’s Holy Virgin Mary seems less like a break with the past and more like a continuation of old, if half forgotten, traditions.

The controversy surrounding Ofili’s representation of the Madonna— and Rossellini’s, Kovat’s, and Pussy Riot’s—confused the categories of old and new, making and breaking, iconography and iconoclasm. In perhaps the most illuminating example of these apparent contradictions, one Dennis Heiner—a retired English teacher from Murray Hill and devout Catholic—desecrated an image of the Virgin in order to protest the desecration of the image of the Virgin.

Deeply offended by Ofili’s Holy Virgin Mary, Heiner resolved to rescue the Madonna from her shame before Christmas (in other words, before her due date).38 In early December, he smuggled a bottle of white paint into the Brooklyn Museum and faked a heart attack in order to draw the guard away from his post, at which moment—“with an amazing burst of speed,” as a museum

spokesperson reported—he darted behind the plexiglass shield protecting the painting and smeared white all over the canvas.39 Heiner’s wife later explained to reporters that her husband had been “trying to clean the painting.”40 Her phrasing suggests that Heiner did not consider the image itself (or rather herself) to be the problem, but rather some pollution besmirching its surface—some smear that could be wiped off. Yet,f surprisingly, Heiner did not target the most flagrant pornographic cutouts located in the margins of the frame, nor any of the three most conspicuous lumps of dung. Instead, he reached for the very focal center—the face of the Virgin.

This is not to say that Heiner could have had no reason to attack Mary’s face: Ofili has drawn her lips as red labia, layered a palimpsest of clippings of buttocks underneath her cartoonish features, and fixed a tiny ball of dung dotted with two pinpricks of white paint on the pupil of her left eye. Yet these are subtleties, not easy to spot. In his haste, Heiner probably registered only the quickest of impressions: an abstract African face with strange, staring eyes. In a grainy blackand-white photograph captured by one of the museum’s security cameras, Heiner (who wore a suit and tie for the occasion) is seen with his right hand reaching above his head, having just smeared the first stroke of white across Mary’s eyes—hiding her from us, her from herself, and us from her. An inoffensive image of the Virgin, it seems, is blank.

The iconoclasts of the Protestant Reformation certainly thought so.

Sixteenth-century reformers accused the medieval Catholic Church of having turned the chaste, silent, and obedient Mary of the Gospels into a whorish idol— specifically the Whore of Babylon prophesied by the Book of Revelations.41 Iconoclasts made it their mission to rehabilitate this fallen woman. They stripped her of her prayers and powers, burned her statues to ash, and whitewashed her image from the walls of churches.42 Their chastisement of the Virgin checked the Catholic Church, which effectively capitulated to Protestant critique by reigning in and regulating the excesses of the late medieval cult of the Madonna.43 Strange things had flourished in the autumn of the Middle Ages (to borrow Johan Huizinga’s lovely phrase), after Christianity’s conquest of Europe but just before its Reformation—things that shocked and disturbed those in the future who looked backwards: monstrous obscenities in the margins of manuscripts and cathedrals; corrupt bureaucracies binding sinners on earth to the dead in purgatory and saints in heaven; rampant heterodoxies mingling piety and paganism.44 Perhaps strangest of all was the fifteenth century’s unprecedented and unmatched devotion to the Virgin, who was hailed as the Queen of Heaven, Mother of Mercy, Empress of Hell, Savioress of Mankind, and Recreatrix of the Universe.45 Reformers had their own name for this devotion: “Mariolatry,” the idolatrous elevation of an upstart fertility goddess over the one true God of the Bible.46

The protestations of Catholic apologists notwithstanding, this accusation was not unfounded.47 During the late Middle Ages, the Church tolerated the eccentricities of Mariology with remarkable leniency. In fact, those positioned to police were as guilty as anyone else. Adoration of the Madonna cut across all three estates. Popes, princes, and peasants all preferred to offer their prayers through the merciful Mediatrix rather than directly to God.48 Minstrels in taverns, troubadours in castles, and scholastics in their ivory towers venerated Mary’s genitals and breasts as devotedly as they did Christ’s wounds—if not more.49 Whereas early modern reformers worshipped a highly jealous deity who reigned over the universe alone, the unreformed Christians of the late Middle Ages believed that the besotted Trinity could not bear to cross their beloved bride and mother, the fourth member of the heavenly “Quaternity” and, in many ways, omnium potentissima—the most powerful of all.50 Medieval theologians, mystics, and artists preached that Mary had seduced God with her sexual charisma, bewitched his better judgment, and remade both the Word and the entire universe in her irresistibly attractive human image.51 Under her reign, they promised, the strict old rules no longer applied. If God refused to listen, Mary would answer. If he said no, she would say yes. If he condemned, she would forgive. To reformers, this sounded like blasphemy, idolatry, paganism, and devil-worship.52 But before the Reformation, Mary’s triumph over the Trinity was taken, by and large, as extraordinarily good news.

But not by all. A certain strain of Christianity (upright, fastidious, prim) has never had any patience for this nonsense—not now, and not then. Neither Jerome, Thomas Aquinas, nor Jean Gerson could stomach the embarrassing exaggerations and excesses of the medieval cult of the Virgin. (I echo the language of their rather condescendingly tolerant irritation: Mary inspires “excess,” “exaggeration,” “eccentricity,” “levity,” “deviancy,” and “indiscretion,” never heresy.53) Even at its very zenith in the High and late Middle Ages, the Queen of Heaven provoked both enthusiasm and embarrassment, sometimes from the same person. While Bernard of Clairvaux lavished unprecedentedly heady lyricism upon Mary’s breasts, he also felt the need to sharply chastise those who, as he saw it, let their love of the Madonna carry them beyond the bounds of reason and decorum.54 And yet despite his resistance, Mary conquered Bernard in the end. Long after his death, a legend arose alleging that Bernard had begged Mary to nurse him like the Infant Christ.55 Late medieval images of this scene tend to depict this grave doctor in a state of helpless ecstasy on his knees before the Virgin, who squirts a stream of milk into his eager mouth.

So much for restraint. Before the Reformation, protestations against Mary’s ever-expanding power tended to flounder. When staunchly Christocentric Dominicans called upon the Vatican to discipline the Franciscans whose

Mariology transgressed the limits of orthodoxy, the Pope refused to act.56 When Lollardish townspeople complained that their neighbors idolized rather than venerated images of the Virgin, the Inquisition brought in the accusers, and not the accused, for questioning.57 Heretics burned at the stake for refusing to recant their imputations against, amongst other things, the cult of Mary. Until the Reformation, her power proved hard to check.

Nowhere more so than in England, “the dower of the Virgin,” as England was called, the site of perhaps the most visited Marian pilgrimage destination in late medieval Europe, the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in East Anglia, “England’s Nazareth.”58 As Gail McMurray Gibson writes, “The Marian fervor that we associate today with Italy or Spain…was in the Middle Ages of English renown.”59 It was theologians working in the British Isles (most notably Anselm of Canterbury, Eadmer of Canterbury, Aelred of Rievaulx, Duns Scotus, and William of Ware) who constructed and defended the new theory of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin, one of the most controversial theological innovation of the late Middle Ages.60 Englishmen’s infatuation with the Madonna provoked Peter of Celle to wonder from his cloister in France whether the soggy British climate had not addled their wits: Insula enim est circumfusa aqua, unde hujus elementi propria qualitate ejus incolae non immerito afficiuntur, et nimia mobilitate in tenuissimas et subtiles phantasies frequenter transferuntur, somnia sua visionibus comparantes, ne dicam praefrentes. Et quae culpa naturae, si talis est nature terrae?

England is an island surrounded by water, hence her inhabitants are understandably affected by the property of this element and are often led to odd and unfounded fancies, comparing their dreams with visions. And how can they be blamed for this, if this is the nature of their country?61 Here, Peter describes England as a feminine landmass, governed by sluggish water and drossy earth rather than by the masculine elements of air and fire.

Suffering from disordered humors, the island’s humid brain (cerebrum…humidius) takes phantasms (phantasmata) rising from its womb (fumositate stomachi) for truth.

Hence, Peter argues, England’s light-headed, light-hearted mania for Mary—its Anglica levitas.

This Madonna mania expressed itself in outpourings of artistry.62 Appropriately, gifts given to Mary tended to imitate the gifts of Mary herself.

When she seduced God with her beauty and incarnated Jesus in her flesh, it was believed, the Virgin had redeemed humanity’s capacity for invention.63 Whereas the sweaty labors of Adam and Eve perpetuated the curse of original sin, Mary’s flawless masterpiece saved mankind. In accomplishing this sacred work, she used only the most human tools: her uterus and breastmilk—her body, in short.64 Honoring her methods, makers felt it right to celebrate Mary with the handmade fruits of their crafts, however humble, carnal, undignified, or even scandalous.

Medieval Miracles of the Virgin emphasize Mary’s love of artists, from cloistered composers of heavenly music to itinerant acrobats juggling in the streets.65 In an infinite regress on the walls of Winchester Cathedral’s Lady Chapel, a painter has painted an image of Mary saving a painter painting an image of Mary.66 Troubadours sang songs about the Virgin favoring troubadours who sang songs about the Virgin.67 In the enchanting story of Le jongleur de Notre Dame, an illiterate jongleur (meaning a minstrel, juggler, and/or jester) better pleases the Virgin by performing joyful tricks and acrobatic tumbles bare-naked than an abbey of monks in full regalia with their solemn liturgy.68 Demonstrating her preference, a statue of Mary bends down from her pedestal to wipe the sweat from his brow, much to the astonishment of the learned brethren who had gathered to mock his foolish antics. The Virgin, apparently, deeply respected a good show—and a good laugh.

Her interest in comedy might even be called professional. In the divina commedia of medieval Catholicism, Mary plays the part of the trickster, outfoxing both Satan and God the Father at every turn.69 According to an ancient exegetical tradition, Jesus and Mary performed the comedy of the virgin birth in order to distract the devil from the stealth operation of the Harrowing of Hell.70 In medieval adaptations of this farce, Mary takes on the fabliau role of the crafty adulteress and Joseph the grouchy old cuckold duped by her wit.71 For these reasons, jugglers, jesters, buffoons, and players of all stripes laid special claim to Mary’s favor. As Carol Symes has demonstrated, the jongleurs of Arras—the pioneers of medieval vernacular drama—made this claim official.72 According to their origin myth, the Virgin had appeared to their founding fathers, like Gabriel to the shepherds, and bestowed upon them (“you who live by jest and acting”) a contract of eternal partnership.73 But, then, Mary has always been funny. We all know that mothers have a special ability to embarrass their children. As the Theotokos, the mother of God (and God’s only mother amongst the three desert monotheisms), Mary has been making Christianity look silly since the very beginning.74 In the Gospels, anonymous hecklers in the crowd mock Christ with innuendos about the suspicious circumstances of his birth.75 Exacerbating this problem, Mary follows the Messiah around, reminding everyone that the Son of God also had an alltoo-human parent. First, she spoils twelve-year-old Jesus’s precocious domination of the doctors in the Temple by scolding him in front of everyone for having run away from his parents.76 Christ retorts, “How is it that ye sought me? Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?” (Luke 2:49). But his mother’s business continues to intrude. In the early days of his ministry, Jesus finds his sermon to the multitudes rudely interrupted.77 Your mother is outside, he is informed, and wants to speak with you. Expressing what we might call wishful thinking, Jesus replies that he has no mother. Yet, frustratingly, there she

stands, demanding his (and our) attention. Again, at the Wedding at Cana, Mary pesters Jesus to turn water into wine; “Woman,” he snaps, “what have I to do with thee?” (John 2:4).78 Far too much, it seems. These comical moments from the Life of Christ inspired what is perhaps Monty Python’s most celebrated joke: “He’s not the Messiah,” the Virgin Mandy protests, “He’s a very naughty boy!”79 By means of the Incarnation, Mary both humanized and humiliated God, pulling him down from heaven to earth—much to his, and mankind’s, benefit and delight. Her late medieval devotees compared this transformative seduction to the metamorphoses wrought by the goddess Venus.80 Love turned Jupiter into a swan, and Jehovah into a helpless infant. “The Virgin made God finite, mortal, poor, temporal, palpable, sentient, visible,” the fifteenth-century Franciscan “Apostle of Italy” Saint Bernardino of Siena wrote.81 Imitating and commemorating this ravishing and hilarious metamorphosis, late medieval communities cyclically reincarnated the sacred mysteries of Christianity as theater, that most Incarnational of art-forms.82 Marking the affinity between theater and the body of Christ, the citizens of York and Coventry performed their cycle of biblical pageantry on Corpus Christi Day, and those of Lincoln on the Feast of Saint Anne, Mary’s mother—because Saint Anne’s flesh is Mary’s flesh, which is also the flesh of Jesus.83 Dramatizing this matrilineal genealogy, Dublin’s guild of bakers produced the pageantry of Saint Anne (who leavened the dough of Jesus’s flesh) and the butchers the Virgin (who butchered the bloody sacrifice of the Lamb of God).84 At these theatrical festivals, actors embodied the text of scripture just as Mary had clothed the Word in her body.85 Extant play-scripts, therefore, describe the Incarnation in meta-theatrical terms, calling Mary’s skin and bones a “gyse” (as in “disguise”) worn by Jesus on the world stage.86 Gazing down at Mary from paradise just before the moment of the Annunciation, Jesus says, “I have so grett hast to be man thore / In that mekest and purest virgyne,” and put on the “weed” (or costume) of her body.87 Julian of Norwich described the Incarnation as “a mervelous medlur” of the Holy Spirit and the flesh of the Virgin.88 Mirroring this hypostatic union, sacred drama muddled divinity and humanity, tragedy and comedy, sacred and profane—or, in Auerbach’s terms, the high style of the sermo sublimis and the low of the sermo humilis.89 The register of medieval play-scripts ranges freely between the loftiest Latin and the homeliest vernacular, mingling the sounds of scholastic disputation and liturgical music with those of dirty jokes and violent children’s games.90 Records of performance indicate that while these productions moved some spectators to weep penitent tears, it inspired others to carouse, brawl, and flirt.91 While Margery Kempe sobbed at the sight of Christ’s Passion, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath attended “pleyes of myracles,” she tells us, to play, to see, and to be seen by lusty folk.92 The savants of the Renaissance and Enlightenment found this characteristically Gothic jumble of registers, styles, and affects

“grotesque”—sí goffe e sí ree, e tanto malfatte (“so rude and vile, so misshapen”).93 Until the twentieth century, in fact, medieval drama struck almost all of its readers (including Milton, Voltaire, and Lord Byron) as “undignified,” “indelicate,” “vulgar,” and “very profane.”94 Even before the Reformation, there were those who decried the blasphemy of sacred drama. The late medieval anti-theatrical diatribe “A tretise of miraclis pleyinge” makes the case that play and games should have no place in Christendom.95 Theater, the text insists, impudently “bourdith” (jokes) with God like an equal when it should “drede to offend” like an underling.96 Drama, it continues, mocks, scorns, and “bobs” (meaning to strike in a game of blindman’s bluff) Christ, “as did the Jewis” during his Passion.97 “Myraclis pleyinge,” the treatise concludes, “is of the lustis of the fleyssh and myrthe of the body” (is of the lust of the flesh and mirth of the body) and therefore incompatible with the solemnity and spirituality of Christianity.98 Speaking as God, the treatise chastises theater for these offenses, warning, “Pley not with me.”99 And yet, as the play-scripts of early English drama emphasize, God chose the Virgin, a mere mortal, to be his consort and “pleynge fere,” meaning playmate.100 When in early English pageantry Saint Joseph protests to Mary that God could not have fathered her unborn child because God would never “jape so” (meaning “joke,” “play,” or “have sexual intercourse”) with any human woman, he is proven wrong.101 According to medieval Mariological doctrine, God did play with Mary, and their merriment redeemed the fallen universe. Drama’s defenders protested that theater, like the Mother of Mercy, had a special power to save what seemed lost past all hope of recovery.102 One particularly illustrative Miracle of the Virgin tells the tale of a sinner named Markiken or “Little Mary,” the devil’s own paramour, who was miraculously converted back to the faith by watching a play about the infinite mercy of the Madonna.103 The parable concludes with a moral: “A play often tymes were better than a sermant to some folke.”104 In other words, theater, a type of the Virgin, dotes on mankind, its loving bride and mother, irresistible and indulgent, leaving the paternal Church militant to dispense discipline and punishment. Obeying this logic, the founders, leaders, and practitioners of medieval theatrics venerated Mary as the patroness, muse, and diva of their craft.105 Often, pageantry dedicated to the glorification of the Virgin—like the Parisian Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages or Lincoln’s festival of Saint Anne—expressed this devotion with luxury craftsmanship, dazzling special effects, and lyrical encomiums to the Madonna’s supremacy.106 While no playtexts from Lincoln survive, city records yield vivid images: Mary wearing a “cremysyng gowne of veluet” (crimson gown of velvet), a walking Tree of Jesse performed by a parade of kings dressed in silks, and a mysterious golden head projecting beams of light from its gigantic mouth.107 This type of veneration of

the Virgin is laudatory, spectacular, and gorgeous—if also (as its naysayers have complained) idolatrous, antinomian, and aggressively, even blasphemously, erotic.108 But by contrast, the shock value of another medieval mode of veneration of the Virgin registers on a higher order of magnitude.109

Studies of the Madonna are many, too many too name here; but, among this multitude, I relied most extensively upon the following: Hilda Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion; with a new chapter covering Vatican II and beyond by Thomas A. Thompson, (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 1963, 1965/2009); Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” trans.

Arthur Goldhammer, Poetics Today 6.1/2 (1985); Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Knopf, 1976); Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); and Elina Gertsman, Worlds Within: Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2015).

2 For more on this painting, see Carol Becker, “Brooklyn Museum: Messing with the Sacred” in Chris Ofili (NY: Skira Rizzoli, 2009), 78–121; Alicia Ritson, “Between Heaven and Hell: The Holy Virgin Mary at the Brooklyn Museum,” in Chris Ofili: Night and Day), ed.

Massimiliano Gioni (New York: Skira Rizzoli Publications, 2014), 164; Jennifer Glancy, Corporal Knowledge: Early Christian Bodies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 134–6.

3 Floyd Abrams, Speaking Freely: Trials of the First Amendment (NY: Penguin, 2006), 188–230.

4 Rudolph W. Guiliani, Leadership (New York: Hyperion, 2002), 225–6.

5 OED, s.v. “defile.”

6 Abrams, Speaking Freely, 195.

7 This book depends on the foundational work that established medieval and early modern virginity studies around the turn of the last century: Karen Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Marina Leslie, eds., Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999); Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl, eds., Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999); Kathleen Coyne Kelly, Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 2000); Sarah Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2001); Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Saints' Lives and Women's Literary Culture, 1150-1300: Virginity and its Authorizations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Kathryn Schwarz, “The Wrong Question: Thinking through Virginity,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13.2 (2002), 1–34; Anke Bernau, Ruth Evans, and Sarah Salih, Medieval Virginities (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003); Ruth Evans, “Virginities,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing, eds. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 21–39.

8 Gregory D. Black, The Catholic Crusade Against the Movies, 1940-1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 66–102; William Bruce Johnson, Miracles and Sacrilege: Roberto Rossellini, the Church, and Film Censorship in Hollywood (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 259. See also Laura Wittern-Keller and Raymond J. Habersku, The Miracle Case: Film Censorship and the Supreme Court (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008).

9 Johnson, Miracles and Sacrilege, 271.

10 Wittern-Keller and Habersku, Miracle Case, 138.

1

Reid Mortensen, “Art, Expression, and the Offended Believer,” in Law and Religion, ed.

Rex J. Ahdar (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000), 181–93; Bernadette Courtney, “An Artist Shrouded in Mystery,” Dominion, Apr. 04, 1998, available on ProQuest; “Campaigners Seek Legal Advice on Virgin Statue,” Dominion, Mar 17, 1998, available on ProQuest.

12 Nicholas Denysenko, “An Appeal to Mary: An Analysis of Pussy Riot’s Punk Performance in Moscow,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 81.4 (2013), 1061–92.

13 S. Brent Plate, introduction to Religion, Art, and Visual Culture: A Cross-Cultural Reader, ed. S. Brent Plate (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 2; Becker, “Brooklyn Museum: Messing with the Sacred,” 84.

14 For more on the history and science of the hymen as a sign of virginity, see Giula Sissa, “Maidenhood without Maidenhead: The Female Body in Ancient Greece,” in Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, ed. David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 339–364; Bianca R. van Moorst, Rik H. W. van Lunsen, Dorenda K. E. van Dijken, and Concetta M. Salvatore, “Backgrounds of women applying for hymen reconstruction, the effects of counselling on myths and misunderstandings about virginity, and the results of hymen reconstruction,” European Journal of Contraception & Reproductive Health Care 17.2 (2012), 93–105, esp. 94.

15 For more on disenchantment, Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Routledge Classics, 2001); Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), esp. 80–88, 553; Secularisms, ed. Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

16 Ritson, “Between Heaven and Hell,” 165.

17 Wittern-Keller and Habersku, Miracle Case, 71; Johnson, Miracles and Sacrilege, 244–5, 249.

18 Rebecca Fortnum, Contemporary British Women Artists: In Their Own Words (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 122–3; Jeremy Miller and Philip Hoare, Tania Kovats (Oxford: Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, 2010), 9–10, 70–3.

19 Denysenko, “An Appeal to Mary,” 1069.

20 My thinking here owes a great debt to James Simpson’s illuminating Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), esp. 39– 48.

21 Cennino D’Andrea Cennini, The Craftsman's Handbook “Il Libro dell' Arte,” trans. Daniel V. Thompson Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1933), 36–9; Michel Pastoureau, Blue: The History of a Color (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 50–55.

22 For more on the black Madonna, see Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Black Madonnas: Feminism, Religion, and Politics in Italy (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993); Monique Scheer, “From Majesty to Mystery: Change in the Meanings of Black Madonnas from the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries,” The American Historical Review 107.5 (2002), 1412–440; Malgorzata Oleszkiewicz-Peralba, The Black Madonna in Latin America and Europe: Tradition and Transformation (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007).

23 Sir Walter Besant, Mediaeval London: Ecclesiastical (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1906), 2.187–8; Ean Begg, The Cult of the Black Virgin, 2nd ed. (London: Arkana, 1996), 165–6.

Not enough work has been done on medieval England’s black Madonnas; see Mary Lee Nolan and Sidney Nolan, Christian Pilgrimage in Modern Western Europe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 204 (Map 6-2); Begg, Cult of the Black Virgin, 164–6. The most widely agreed upon example is Our Lady of Willesden, thanks to an early sixteenth-century Inquisitional record; see Shannon McSheffrey, Gender and Heresy: 11

Women and Men in Lollard Communities, 1420–1530 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 146–7.

24 Harold Kane, ed., The Prickynge of Love, 2 vols. (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik der Universität Salzburg, 1983); Walter Hilton, The Goad of Love, ed. Clare Kirchberger (London: Faber and Faber 1952); Katie L. Walter, “The Child before the Mother: Mary and the Excremental in The Prickynge of Love,” in Words and Matter: The Virgin Mary in Late-Medieval and Early Modern Parish Life, ed. Jonas Carlquist and Virginia Langum (Stockholm: Sällskapet Runica et Mediævalia, 2015), 149–63.

25 Kane, Prickynge of Love, 1.191 (lines 2–4).

26 Lisa Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 52.

27 Roger Hutchinson, The Works of Roger Hutchingson, ed. John Bruce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1842), 148. For more on the ancient association between womb and sewer, see Glancy, Corporal Knowledge, 120–124.

28 Jerry Saltz, Seeing Out Loud: The Voice Art Columns Fall 1998–Winter 2003 (New York: The Figures, 2003), 326.

29 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. André Lanly (Paris: Librarie Honoré Champion, 1975), 2.6913–7154; Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. Frances Hogan (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), 106–109.

30 Nicholas Love, Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Critical Edition Based on Cambridge University Library Additional MSS 6578 and 6686, ed. Michael G. Sargent (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992), 34. See also Gertsman, Worlds Within, 97.

31 Alexandra Cuffel, Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic (Notre Dame, IL: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 61–3; Tertullian, Contre Marcion, ed. René Braum, Sources Chrétiennes 399 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1994), 3.11.6–9. See also Glancy, Corporal Knowledge, 94, 124, 127–8.

32 Rubin, Mother of God, 212.

33 Gary Waller, The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Literature and Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 34–7, 57, 77; Gertsman, Worlds Within, 70–73.

34 Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, 2nd ed.

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 3–5; Gail McMurray Gibson, “Seeing and Performing Late Medieval Childbirth,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29.1 (1999), 7–24; Gary Waller, “The Virgin's ‘Pryvytes’: Walsingham and the Late Medieval Sexualization of the Virgin,” in Walsingham in Literature and Culture from the Middle Ages to Modernity, ed. Dominic Janes and Gary Waller (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 1–20.

35 Donna Spivey Ellington, From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul: Understanding Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2001), 61–2.

36 Waller, Virgin Mary, 36; Gertsman, Worlds Within, 94.

37 Jos Koldeweij, “‘Shameless and Naked Images’: Obscene Badges as Parodies of Popular Devotion,” in Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and the British Isles, ed. Sarah Blick and Rita Tekippe, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 1.509; Albrecht Classen, “Introduction” in Sexuality in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: New Approaches to a Fundamental Cultural-Historical and Literary-Anthropological Theme, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 19–21.

38 Ritson, “Between Heaven and Hell,” 180.

Robert Santiago, Mike Claffey, and Bill Hutchinson, “Virgin Mary Canvas Defaced in Brooklyn,” New York Daily News, Oct. 17, 1999.

40 Ibid.

41 My understanding of this shift depends on the work of Huston Diehl and Frances Dolan.

See Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 158–72; Frances Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 102–18. For more on the Reformation’s broader effects upon the Virgin, see Christine Peters, Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender, and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Helen L. Parish, Monks, Miracles and Magic: Reformation Representations of the Medieval Church (New York: Routledge, 2005); and Beth Kreitzer, Reforming Mary: Changing Images of the Virgin Mary in Lutheran Sermons of the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

42 Waller, Virgin Mary, 12–17; Diehl, Staging Reform, 162–3.

43 Rubin, Mother of God, 400–12; Ellington, From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul, 142–3; Peters, Patterns of Piety, 217.

44 Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), ix–x.

45 Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 81–102, 315–332; Waller, Virgin Mary, 32; Sara Ritchey, Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Christianity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 13–15.

46 OED, s.v. “Mariolatry”; Dolan, Whores of Babylon, 103.

47 For a representative back-and-forth on this question, see Waller, Virgin Mary, 33–4 and Rachel Fulton Brown’s response in The Medieval Review (2012), 12.02.29. Fulton Brown admits that “Waller is right,” although she finds his reasoning (atheist instead of orthodox, psychoanalytic instead of theological) wrong.

48 Hilda Graef, Mary, 169–71; Eadmer, Liber de excellentia Virginis Mariae, in PL vol. 159, ed.

J.-P. Migne (Paris: Imprimerie Catholique, 1854), 570B. 49 For a polemical early modern take on this comparison, see William Crashaw, The Iesuites Gospel (London, 1610), 29–34, available on EEBO. 50 Mary Clayton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 114; Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 254–73.

51 Graef, Mary, 249; Rubin, Mother of God, 299; Ritchey, Holy Matter, 13–15; Bernardino of Siena, Bernardino of Siena, De superadmirabili gratia et gloria Matris Dei in S. Bernardino Senesis Opera Omnia, vol. 2 (Florence: Quaracchi, 1950), 376.

52 John Foxe, The Second Volume of the Ecclesiastical History Containing the Acts and Monuments (London: John Daye, 1570), 1774–7, available on EEBO. 53 For two examples of this language, one medieval and one modern, see Jean Gerson, “Sermo de nativitate Domini,” in Opera Omnia, vol. 3, ed. L. Ellies du Pin (Antwerp: Sumptibus Societatis, 1706), 947; and Graef, Mary, xv.

54 Bernard of Clairvaux, “Epistola 174: Ad Canonicos Lugdunensis, de conceptione S. Mariae,” in PL vol. 182, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris: Imprimerie Catholique, 1859), 332D–333A; Bernard of Clairvaux, The Letters of Bernard of Clairvaux, trans. Bruno Scott James (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1998), 292.

55 James France, “The Heritage of Saint Bernard in Medieval Art,” in A Companion to Bernard of Clairvaux, ed. Brian Patrick McGuire (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 329–35.

56 Sarah Jane Boss, Empress and Handmaid: On Nature and Gender in the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Cassell, 2000), 123–155; Nancy Mayberry, “The Controversy over the 39

Immaculate Conception in Medieval and Renaissance Art, Literature, and Society,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 21.2 (1991), 208–9.

57 McSheffrey, Gender and Heresy, 146–7; Karma Lochrie, Heterosyncracies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 54–5; John F. Davis, “The Trials of Thomas Bylney and the English Reformation,” The Historical Journal 24.4 (1981), 779, 781.

58 Of the many studies of the Virgin Mary in late medieval England, I owe the most to the groundbreaking work of Gail McMurray Gibson, from her dissertation, “The Images of Doubt and Belief: Visual Symbolism in the Middle English Plays of Joseph's Troubles About Mary” (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia, 1975), to her forthcoming Medieval Drama in Afterlife, and above all to The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989)—and of Theresa Coletti, especially “A Feminist Approach to The Corpus Christi Cycles,” in Approaches to Teaching Medieval English Drama, ed. Richard K. Emmerson (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1990), 78–89, and “Purity and Danger: The Paradox of Mary’s Body and En-gendering of the Infancy Narrative in the English Mystery Cycles,” in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 65–95. See also Gary Waller, The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Literature and Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Walsingham and the English Imagination (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011). For more on the phrase “dower of the Virgin,” see Edmund Waterton, Pietas Mariana Britannica: A History of English Devotion to the Most Blessed Virgin Marye Mother of God (London: St. Joseph’s Catholic Library, 1879), 11–17; Dillian Gordon, “The Wilton Diptych: An Introduction,” in The Regal Image of Richard II and the Wilton Diptych, ed. Dillian Gordon, Lisa Monnas, and Caroline Elam (Coventry: Harvey Miller, 1997), 24–6.

59 Gibson, Theater of Devotion, 138–9.

60 Mayberry, “Controversy over the Immaculate Conception,” 208–9; for a more lurid account, see Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages (New York: MacMillan, 1922), 3.596–611.

61 Peter of Celle, Epistola 171, in PL vol. 202, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris: Imprimerie Catholique, 1855), 614A-B; Graef, Mary, 196–7.

62 Georgiana Donavin, Scribit Mater: Mary and the Language Arts in the Literature of Medieval England (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 3; Gertsman, Worlds Within, 42–6, 133–5. See also Henry Adams, “The Dynamo and the Virgin” in The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Modern Library, 1931), 384–5.

63 Ritchey, Holy Matter, 14–15, 89–90.

64 For more on gender, embodiment, and medieval Christianity, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) and Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Urzone Publishers, 1991); Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard's Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), and God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Dyan Elliott, Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), Proving Woman: Female Mysticism and Inquisitional Practice in Late Medieval Europe (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2004), and The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200-1500 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

65 For more on English Miracles of the Virgin, see Beverly Boyd, The Middle English Miracles of the Virgin (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library Press, 1964); R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom, eds., William of Malmesbury: The Miracles of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Rochester: Boydell, 2015); Adrienne Williams-Boyarin, ed., Miracles of the Virgin in Middle English (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2015) and Miracles of the Virgin in Medieval England: Law and Jewishness in Marian Legends (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010). For more on Miracles of the Virgin beyond England, see Claire Waters, Translating “Clergie”: Status, Education, and Salvation in Thirteenth-Century Vernacular Texts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 164–208; Gautier de Coinci, Les miracles de Nostre Dame, ed. Frédéric Koenig, 4 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1955–70); ); Kathy M. Krause and Alison Stones, eds., Gautier de Coinci: Miracles, Music, and Manuscripts (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006).

66 M. R. James and E. W. Tristram, “The Wall Paintings in Eton College Chapel and in the Lady Chapel of Winchester Cathedral,” The Volume of the Walpole Society 17 (1928–9), 21–2.

See also Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-making in Medieval Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 239; Gertsman, Worlds Within, 122, 133–5.

67 Alfonso X, Songs of Holy Mary of Alfonso X, the Wise: A Translation of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, trans. Kathleen Kulp-Hill (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000), 2, 442.

68 Jan M. Ziolkowski, “Juggling the Middle Ages: The Reception of Our Lady's Tumbler and Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame,” Studies in Medievalism 15 (2006), 158–9; Gautier de Coinci, Of the Tumbler of Our Lady & Other Miracles, trans. Alice Kemp-Welch (London: Chatto and Windus, 1908); Alfonso X, Songs of Holy Mary, 13–14.

69 Williams-Boyarin, Miracles of the Virgin, 10, 90–1, 103. For more on this kind of comic trickery in the Judeo-Christian tradition, see Melissa Jackson, Comedy and Feminist Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible: A Subversive Collaboration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

70 Nicholas Constas, Proclus of Constantinople and the Cult of the Virgin in Late Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 301–2; Gustaf Aulen, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement (London: S.P.C.K., 1953), 63–71; John Parker, The Aesthetics of Antichrist (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 169–78.

71 It has been widely acknowledged for quite some time that these texts represent the Virgin in a fabliau “frame,” “context,” or “paradigm.” See, for example, Joseph L. Baird and Lorrayne Y. Baird, “Fabliau Form and the Hegge Joseph's Return,” The Chaucer Review 8.2 (1973), 159–69; Gibson, “Images of Doubt and Belief,” 3, 131–2, 256; Coletti, “Purity and Danger,” 65, 72; Emma Lipton, Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval English Literature (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 104, 119–22. Scholars have often argued that the text “inverts,” “resolves,” “rebukes,” and “conquers” its fabliau predilections—a self-fulfilling interpretation, as the critic becomes the agent of that inversion and resolution. By contrast, I have taken Theresa Coletti’s advice to “give comedy its due”; “Purity and Danger,” 65.

72 Carol Symes, A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 80–92. See also OED, s.v. “jongleur,” “juggler,” and “jangler”; MED, s.v. “janglere.”

73 Symes, Common Stage, 90.

74 My understanding of Mary in early Christianity owes an enormous debt to the pioneering work of Jane Schaberg, especially The Illegitimacy of Jesus: A Feminist Theological Interpretation of the Infancy Narratives, 2nd ed. (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2006). For more on Mary

as Theotokos, see Susan Wessel, Cyril of Alexandria and the Nestorian Controversy: The Making of a Saint and of a Heretic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 76–81.

75 John 8:41 and Mark 6:3; Schaberg, Illegitimacy of Jesus, 138–45. For an introduction to Mary in the New Testament, see Raymond E. Brown, Karl P. Donfried, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, and John Reumann, eds., Mary in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978) and Beverly Roberts Gaventa, Mary: Glimpses of the Mother of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999).

76 For the episode of the Finding in the Temple, see Luke 2:41–52. This and all subsequent quotations from the Bible in English, unless otherwise noted, are taken from the DouayRheims, available on The Bible in English Database.

77 Mark 3:31–5; Brown et al., Mary in the New Testament, 167–70.

78 This translation is taken from the King James Bible, available on The Bible in English Database. See also Ernst Haenchen, John 1: A Commentary on the Gospel of John, Chapters 1–6, Hermeneia, trans. Robert W. Funk (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 172–3.

79 See Terry Jones et al., Monty Python’s Life of Brian, The Criterion Collection 61 (New York: Janus Films, 1999). See also Max Ernst’s “The Blessed Virgin Chastising the Child Jesus Before Three Witnesses,” in Anthony Julius, Transgressions: The Offences of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 159–60; Leo Steinberg, “Max Ernst’s Blasphemy,” New York Review of Books, Sept. 22, 2005.

80 Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde 3.12–21. This and all subsequent quotations from Chaucer derive from Larry Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). See also Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Filostrato, trans. Robert P. Roberts and Anna Bruni Benson (New York: Garland, 1986), 172–3 (3.76); Camille, Gothic Idol, 220–41.

81 Graef, Mary, 249; Bernardino of Siena, De superadmirabili gratia et gloria Matris Dei, 2.376.

82 For an introduction to the study of early English drama, see Janette Dillon, The Cambridge Introduction to Early English Theater (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Early English Theater, 2nd ed.

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). For more on the association between theater and the Incarnation, see Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), esp. 59– 60; Gertsman, Worlds Within, 94–6.

83 For more on the festival of Corpus Christi, see Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings (London: Routledge, 1996); Clifford Davidson, Festivals and Plays in Late Medieval Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 49–79. For an important caveat, see Alexandra Johnston, “What If No Texts Survived?

External Evidence for Early Drama,” in Marianne G. Briscoe and John C. Coldewey, eds., Contexts for Early English Drama (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 11–12.

84 Frederick W. Fairholt, ed., The Civic Garland: A Collection of Songs from London Pageants, Early English Poetry, Ballads, and Popular Literature of the Middle Ages vol. 19 (London: Percy Society, 1846), xxxiii. For more on this sacrificial imagery, see Merrall Llewelyn Price, “Remembering the Jews: Theatrical Violence in the N-Town Marian Plays,” Comparative Drama 41.4 (2007–8), 454; Gertsman, Worlds Within, 50–3, 70–1, 75–6; Cleo McNelly Kearns, The Virgin Mary, Monotheism and Sacrifice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

85 Gail McMurray Gibson, “Writing Before the Eye: The N-Town ‘Woman Taken in Adultery’ and the Medieval Ministry Play,” Comparative Drama 27.4 (1993), 401; Gibson, Theater of Devotion, 156–66; Gertsman, Worlds Within, 56.

Douglas Sugano, ed., The N-Town Plays, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007), 12.31. Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent references to the N-Town plays refer to Sugano’s edition. Other scholarly editions include K.S. Block, ed., Ludus Coventriæ: or, The plaie called Corpus Christi, EETS (London: Oxford University Press, 1922); Peter Meredith and Stanley J. Kahrl, eds., The N-Town Plays: A Facsimile of British Library MS Cotton Vespasian D VIII, Leeds Texts and Monographs: Medieval Drama Facsimiles IV (Leeds: University of Leeds, 1977); Stephen Spector, ed., The N-Town Play: Cotton MS Vespasian D. 8, 2 vols., EETS (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Peter Meredith, ed., The Mary Play from the N. Town Manuscript (London: Longman, 1987). In this book, I have not made use of Meredith’s Mary Play; I agree with Gibson’s take on this edition; Theater of Devotion, 212.

87 N-Town 11.78, 11.201–2; MED, s.v. “wede” 2; OED, s.v. “weed” 2. See also Beckwith, Christ’s Body, 61; Gertsman, Worlds Within, 94.

88 Julian of Norwich, The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 2.2079.

89 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 151.

90 For representative carnivalesque readings of medieval drama, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 15; Kristina Simeonova, “The Aesthetic Function of the Carnivalesque in Medieval Drama,” in Bakhtin, Carnival and Other Subjects, ed. David Shepherd (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993), 70–9.

91 Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, eds., REED: York (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 1.47–8, 2.732; Margaret Rogerson, “Audience Responses and the York Corpus Christi Play,” in Staging Scripture: Biblical Drama, 1350–1600, ed. Peter Happé and Wim Hüsken (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 360–83.

92 Chaucer, Wife of Bath’s Prologue, 551–9. This and all subsequent quotations from Margery Kempe derive from Lynne Staley, ed., The Book of Margery Kempe (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1996), 1.1.1613–25, 1.2.3302–13. See also Jesse Njus, “Margery Kempe and the Spectatorship of Medieval Drama,” Fifteenth-Century Studies 38 (2013), 135.

93 Liana De Girolami, ed., Giorgio Vasari's Prefaces: Art and Theory (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2012), 144, 159; Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori da Cimabue insino a' tempi nostril, vol. 1 (Torino: Einaudi, 1986), 100; Edmund Burke, A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful, 2nd ed. (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1759), 2.4.109.

94 Margaret Kean, ed., John Milton's Paradise Lost: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 2005), 28; M. de Voltaire, An Essay upon the Civil Wars of France, Extracted from Curious Manuscripts (London: Samuel Jallasson, 1727), 103; George Gordon Byron, Cain, A Mystery (London: H. Gray, 1822), v. See also James Wright, Historia Histrionica (London: G. Croom, 1699), 17–18; Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry, from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century, 3 vols. (London, 1778), 2.373–4.

95 “A tretise of miraclis pleyinge” in Anne Hudson, ed., Selections from Wycliffite Writings, Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching 38 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 97–104.

96 Ibid., 97 (line 28).

97 Ibid., 99 (lines 92–3).

98 Ibid., 99 (lines 73–4).

99 Ibid., 98 (lines 44–5).

100 N-Town 12.315; MED, s.v. “fere.”

86

N-Town 12.43–6; MED, s.v. “japen.”

As Sarah Kay writes, Mary “specializes in lost lives and lost souls”; Courtly Contradictions: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 184.

103 Margaret M. Raftery, ed., Mary of Nemmegen (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1991); Therese Decker and Martin W. Walsh, eds., Mariken van Nieumeghen: A Bilingual Edition (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1994).

104 Raftery, Mary of Nemmegen, 34.

105 Waller, Virgin Mary, 55, 67–8.

106 For more on the Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages, see Gaston Bruno Paulin Paris, Ulysse Robert, and François Bonnardot, eds., Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages (Paris: Firmin Didot Et Cie, 1876) and Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox, eds., Parisian Confraternity Drama of the Fourteenth Century: The Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages (Turnhout, Brepols: 2008). For more on Lincoln, see Alan H. Nelson, The Medieval English Stage: Corpus Christi Pageants and Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 100– 118; James Stokes, ed., REED: Lincolnshire, 2 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 2.409, 413–6.

107 Stokes, REED: Lincolnshire, 1.143, 2.417; Kenneth M. Cameron and Stanley J. Kahrl, “Staging the N-Town Cycle,” Theatre Notebook 21 (1967), 130; Alan H. Nelson, The Medieval English Stage: Corpus Christi Pageants and Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 105, 110–11.

108 For representative critiques along these lines, see Graef, Mary, 250; Huizinga, Autumn of the Middle Ages, 182; R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 248.

109 For more on this sense of shock, see Evans, “Virginities,” 21–2.

101 102

JOHN HOWE

BEFORE THE GREGORIAN REFORM THE LATIN CHURCH AT THE TURN OF THE FIRST MILLENNIUM

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments xi Abbreviations xiii

Introduction: A Pre-Gregorian Reform?

1

1. “Wolves Devouring the Lambs of Christ”

13

2. “Enter Confidently into the War of the Lord God”

50

3. “A White Mantle of Churches”

86

4. “To Rouse Devotion in a Carnal People”

112

5. “Following in the Footsteps of the Saints”

147

6. “When My Soul Longs for the Divine Vision”

172

7. “Learning Is Part of Holiness”

204

8. “The Body Is Not a Single Part”

230

9. “One Shepherd Presides over All Generally”

267

Epilogue: A Pope Captured, A Church Triumphant

297

Selected Bibliography

315

Index 343

vii

INTRODUCTION A PRE-GREGORIAN REFORM?

In 865, while Vikings were pillaging the monastery of Saint-Benoît-surLoire at Fleury, its monks took refuge in Orléans and its vicinity. When they finally straggled back it was no happy homecoming. According to Fleury’s chronicler Adrevaldus (d. 878), “after the monastery had been destroyed by a great raging fire, there was nothing good left, no temples suitable for divine worship, no hearths for various uses, no granaries, no provisions, absolutely nothing that was either decorative or useful; bare masonry walls shocked those gazing at them, a spectacle of horror rather than of dignity or glory.”1 The monks crowded into a small dormitory, part of which they walled off as a chapel for their treasured relics of St. Benedict,2 and they remained there until the Vikings briefly drove them away again in 879.3 Fleury had lost more than monastic amenities. When the monks “occupied again that holy place,” they had “divided minds” and “did not hold the property of the monastery in common, but parceled it out among themselves as they were able or as seemed good to them.” Much later a local count, perhaps supported by the French king, called in St. Odo of Cluny (d. 944) to reorganize Fleury, but its monks responded by arming themselves with swords and spears, manning the walls, and holding off the reformers for several days until Odo rode in by himself on a donkey and managed to make peace. Subsequent negotiations remained tense.4 1. Adrevaldus, Miracula Benedicti I xxxv, ed. Eugène de Certain, in Les Miracles de Saint Benoît (Paris: Mme Ve Jules Renouard, 1858), 1–83, esp. 76. For context, see Thomas Head, Hagiography and the Cult of the Saints: The Diocese of Orléans, 800–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 52–55.

2. On the relics of Benedict at Fleury, see Walter Goffart, “Le Mans, St. Scholastica, and the Literary Tradition of the Translation of Benedict,” Revue bénédictine 77 (1967): 107–41, esp. 108–31; Head, Hagiography and the Cult of the Saints, 135–43.

3. Adrevaldus, Miracula Benedicti I xxxv, Certain, 76.

4. John of Salerno, Vita Odonis Abbatis III viii–ix, ed. ASOSB 7:179–81, trans. Gerard Sitwell, St. Odo of Cluny: Being the Life of St. Odo of Cluny by John of Salerno and the Life of St. Gerald of Aurillac by St. Odo (London: Sheed & Ward, 1958), 79–81. John Nightingale, “Oswald, Fleury, and Continental Reform,” in

1

2 INTRODUCTION A century later this dysfunctional community had become one of the most distinguished monasteries in Europe. A Fleury customary composed in the early eleventh century claims that this “head of the monasteries of France” had three hundred monks.5 Its impressive properties6 were protected by legal privileges that included a charter from Pope Gregory V (996–99) making its abbot “preeminent throughout France [primus inter abates Galliae]”.7 From its library some six hundred to eight hundred medieval manuscripts still survive today, most from the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries.8 A historian writing in the 1040s described the community as a “torrent of the liberal arts and a gymnasium of the school of the Lord,” mixed metaphors he explicates in a chapter devoted to its early eleventh-century scholars.9 Its church was intended to be “an example to all France.”10 Its customs and school influenced monks in England, Spain, northern France, the Low Countries, and Germany.11 St. Oswald of Worcester: Life and Influence, ed. Nicholas Brooks and Catherine Cubitt (London: Leicester University Press, 1996), 34–39, cautions that the most negative depictions of the Fleury community were written by its Cluniac competitors.

5. Thierry of Amorbach, Libellus de Consuetudinibus et Statutis Monasterii Floriacensis I prol., ed. Anselme Davril and Lin Donnat, Consuetudinum Saeculi X/XI/XII Monumenta Non-cluniacensia, Corp CM 7(3) (Siegburg, Ger.: Schmitt, 1984), 7–9, ed. and trans. Davril and Donnat, in L’abbaye de Fleury en l’an Mil, IRHT Sources d’histoire médiévale 32 (Paris: CNRS, 2004), 170–73.

6. Elizabeth Dachowski, First among Abbots: The Career of Abbo of Fleury (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 85–86 and 148.

7. Head, Hagiography, 236–40, 255–57; Dachowski, First among Abbots, 166–69 and 178–86. The quotation is from Gregory V’s letter to Abbot Abbo of Fleury (13 November 996), ed. Harald Zimmermann, Papsturkunden 896–1046 (Vienna: Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1984–89), 2:655–57.

8. Fleury’s library is analyzed by Marco Mostert in The Political Theology of Abbo of Fleury: A Study of the Ideas about Society and Law of the Tenth-Century Monastic Reform Movement (Hilversum, Neth.: Verloren, 1987), 32–34; The Library of Fleury: A Provisional List of Manuscripts (Hilversum: Verloren, 1989); and “La bibliothèque de Fleury-sur-Loire,” in Religion et culture autour de l’an Mil: Royaume capétien et Lotharingie: Actes du Colloque Hugues Capet 987–1987. La France de l’an Mil, Auxerre, 26 et 27 juin 1987—Metz, 11 et 12 septembre 1987, ed. Dominique Iogna-Prat and Jean-Charles Picard (Paris: Picard, 1990), 119–23.

9. Andrew of Fleury, Vita Gauzlini I ii, ed. Robert-Henri Bautier and Monique Labory, André de Fleury Vie de Gauzlin, Abbé de Fleury, Sources d’histoire medieval publiées par l’IRHT 2 (Paris: CNRS, 1969), 32–39.

On this chapter, see Dachowski, First among Abbots, 220–23.

10. The phrase from the Vita Gauzlini I xliv, Bautier and Labory, 80–91, refers specifically to the great tower constructed by Abbot Gauzlinus (1004–30). On the larger context, see Éliane Vergnolle, Saint-Benoîtsur-Loire et la sculpture du XIe siècle (Paris: Picard, 1985), 275–76, and “Les débuts de l’art roman dans le royaume franc (ca. 980–ca. 1020),” CCM 43 (2000): 183–84.

11. For an overview see Donnat, “Recherches sur l’influence de Fleury au Xe siècle,” in Études ligériennes d’histoire et d’archéologie médiévales: Mémoires et exposés présentés à la Semaine d’études médiévales de Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire du 3 au 10 juillet 1969, ed. René Louise (Auxerre: Société des fouilles archéologiques et des monuments historiques de l’Yonne, 1975), 165–74; and his “Les coutumes monastiques autour de l’an Mil,” in Iogna-Prat and Picard, Religion et culture autour de l’an Mil, 17–24. Regional studies of Fleury’s influence include Louis Gougaud, “Les relations de l’Abbaye de Fleury-sur-Loire avec le Bretagne armoricaine et les îles britanniques (Xe et XIe siècles),” Mémoires de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Bretagne 4 (1923): 2–30; Bautier and Labory, “Fleury et la Catalogne au début du XIe siècle,” in André de Fleury, Vie de

A PRE-GREGORIAN REFORM?

3

Fleury’s spectacular revival, although aided by its relics of St. Benedict, was by no means unique. The destruction the Latin West experienced turned out to have been creative destruction. Aristocrats and churchmen rebuilt the churches lost to barbarian raids and civil disorders and then built new ones, competing against each other so that church building, like castle building, acquired its own momentum.12 Patrons strove to improve ecclesiastical furnishings, liturgy, and spirituality. Schools were built to staff the new churches. The result was that by the mid-eleventh century a wealthy, unified, better-organized, better-educated, more spiritually sensitive Latin Church was assuming a leading place in the broader Christian world.

This story has not been adequately told. One obstacle is that Church historians have focused more on the late eleventh- and early twelfthcentury Gregorian Reform, offering a narrative that emphasizes the investiture controversy between popes and emperors and culminates in the “papal monarchy” of the High Middle Ages.13 Although historians recognize earlier reforms, especially the revival often somewhat simplistically associated with the monastery of Cluny, they normally separate the anticipatory movements from the main event. Augustine Fliche, who popularized the term “Gregorian Reform,” surveyed its earlier roots in La Réforme grégorienne but privileged the story of a movement developing in the Rhineland in the early to mid-eleventh century, brought to Rome during the pontificate of Leo IX (1049–54), and ascendant by the start of the twelfth.14 Although strong continuities between tenth- and eleventhcentury reform movements and the Gregorian Reform might seem to undercut this perspective,15 Gerd Tellenbach, in a synthesis first expounded Gauzlin, 169–85; Nightingale, “Oswald, Fleury and Continental Reform,” 23–45; and Mostert, “Relations between Fleury and England,” in England and the Continent in the Tenth Century: Studies in Honour of Wilhelm Levison (1876–1947), ed. David Rollason, Conrad Leyser, and Hannah Williams (Turnhout, Belg.: Brepols, 2010), 185–208.

12. John Howe, “The Nobility’s Reform of the Medieval Church,” AHR 93 (1988): 317–39.

13. Surveys of the literature can be found in Uta-Renate Blumenthal, The Investiture Controversy: Church and Monarchy from the Ninth to the Twelfth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988); Maureen C. Miller, “The Crisis in the Investiture Crisis Narrative,” History Compass 7, no. 6 (2009): 1570–80, doi:10.1111/j.1478–0542.2009.00645.x; and Michel Sot, “La réforme grégorienne: Une introduction,” Revue d’histoire de l’Ėglise de France 96 (2010): 5–10.

14. Augustin Fliche, Études sur la polémique religieuse à l’époque de Grégoire VII: Les prégrégoriens (Paris: Société française d’imprimerie et de librairie, 1916), and, more influentially, in La réforme grégorienne, vol. 1, La formation des idées grégoriennes (Paris: Université Catholique, 1924), vi, viii, 6, 17, 39–148.

15. See, for example, William Ziezulewicz, “The School of Chartres and Reform Influences before the Pontificate of Leo IX,” CHR 77 (1991): 383–402; Howe, “Gaudium et Spes: Ecclesiastical Reformers at the Start of a ‘New Age,’ ” in Reforming the Church before Modernity: Patterns, Problems, and Approaches, ed. Christopher M. Bellitto and Louis I. Hamilton (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 21–35; and Greta Austin, Shaping Church Law around the Year 1000: The “Decretum” of Burchard of Worms (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), esp. 60–67, 103–4, 123–26.

4 INTRODUCTION in 1936, dismissed earlier “monastic reforms” as otherworldly coenobitic projects quite different from mid eleventh-century papal reforms dedicated to making the world more Christian.16 His division still holds the field today, albeit with more and more qualifications. For Andrė Vauchez, for example, the Gregorian Reform is a movement “toward a spirituality of action” in which the popes took the lead after the mid-eleventh century; yet he recognizes that nonpapal reformers had anticipated the drive for the Christianization of the world and that the papal reform cannot be treated exclusively in political institutional terms since it reflects a spirituality that struggled against evil, within and outside the Church.17 Dominique Iogna-Prat, whose studies have greatly illuminated monastic spirituality, still starts a new era with the advent of the papal reform party in the 1040s, even while claiming that “the Gregorian Reform was largely prepared by the monastic movement of the first half of the eleventh century.”18 On the other hand, some English-speaking scholars, following the lead of Karl Leyser, have actually sharpened the distinction between the Gregorian Reform and earlier ecclesiastical movements by championing a “Gregorian Revolution” or a mid-eleventh-century “formation of a persecuting society.”19 True, researchers interested in millenarianism have recently been attempting to shift discussion back toward the year 1000, attributing ecclesiastical growth and development first to a hidden millennial excitement and then to the reaction to its failure, but the resulting debates, while documenting increasing eschatological interest, have not justified a focus on any single year.20 Now in the twenty-first century 16. Gerd Tellenbach, The Church in Western Europe from the Tenth to the Early Twelfth Century, trans. Timothy Reuter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), defended the theoretical structure he had already set up in Libertas: Kirche und Weltordnung im Zeitalter des Investiturstreites (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1936), trans.

R. F. Bennett, Church, State, and Christian Society at the Time of the Investiture Contest (Oxford: Blackwell, 1940).

17. André Vauchez, The Spirituality of the Medieval West: From the Eighth to the Twelfth Century, trans.

Colette Friedlander (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1993), 66–68.

18. Dominique Iogna-Prat, La Maison Dieu: Une histoire monumentale de l’Église au Moyen Âge (v.

800–v. 1200) (Paris: Ėditions du Seuil, 2006), esp. 360.

19. Karl Leyser, Communications and Power in Medieval Europe: The Gregorian Revolution and Beyond, ed. Timothy Reuter (London: Hambledon, 1994); Robert I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe 950–1250 (New York: Blackwell, 1987); Moore, The First European Revolution, c. 970–1215 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).

20. The historiography of the “terrors of the year 1000” is surveyed in Edward Peters, “Mutations, Ad­ justments, Terrors, Historians, and the Year 1000,” in The Year 1000: Religious and Social Response to the Turning of the First Millennium, ed. Michael Frassetto (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 9–28; and Levi Roach, “Emperor Otto III and the End of Time,” TRHS, 6th ser., 23 (2013): 75–102, esp. 76–77. For broader millennial context, see Richard Landes, Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) and the website for the Center for Millennial Studies, http://www.mille.org.

A PRE-GREGORIAN REFORM?

5

scholars are beginning to recognize that systematic ecclesiastical reform began even earlier.21 The tenth- and early eleventh-century Latin Church, or more concisely the millennial Church, needs to be studied so that we can comprehend not only ecclesiastical history but also the broader history of Western civilization. The narrative linking ecclesiastical revival to the Gregorian Reform has become increasingly problematic because it no longer synchronizes with the rest of Western history. In the twentieth century, scholars such as Marc Bloch, Georges Duby, and André Vauchez had assumed that ecclesiastical revival had occurred in tandem with an economic, social, and cultural revival of the West, which they dated to the late eleventh century, part of a “spectacular leap forward in all fields.”22 Yet today’s scholars now situate the start of the rise of the West well before the mid-eleventh century, even well before the turn of the millennium. Many now see the mid-tenth century as the launching pad for the High Middle Ages, citing the revival of long-distance trade, the growth of cities, the birth of the village, the rise of technology, the “feudal mutation” or “feudal revolution,” and the spread of Frankish culture. Others place the new movement even earlier, back during Charlemagne’s era, and see it hitting full stride in the tenth after overcoming some post-Carolingian challenges. But whatever the exact chronology of the start of the great medieval revival, a consensus now exists that it was well under way back in the tenth century.23 21. Timothy Reuter, preface and introduction to, NCMH, vol. 3, 900–1024, ed. Reuter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), xv–xvii and 1–24, utilizes the concept of a “long tenth century” to integrate much of the period covered here and treat ecclesiastical topics in a forward-looking fashion. Michel Parisse, who spent his career investigating the Lorraine and Saxony, describes a relatively seamless tenth- and ­eleventh-century monastic reform, most recently in Religieux et religieuses en Empire du Xe au XIIe siècle (Paris: Picard, 2011), esp. 28–31 and 85–86. A new interest in bishops, expressed by the academic society Episcopus founded in 2004, treats bishops as an element of continuity in tenth-, eleventh-, and twelfthcentury Europe. This perspective is exemplified in Miller, The Formation of a Medieval Church: Ecclesiastical Change in Verona, 950–1150 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); John Ott and Anna Trumbore Jones, eds., The Bishop Reformed: Studies of Episcopal Power and Culture in the Central Middle Ages (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), esp. 4; and Francesca Tinti, Sustaining Belief: The Church of Worcester from c. 870 to c.

1100 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), esp. 225.

22. The quotation is from Vauchez, Spirituality of the Medieval West, 75. On this historiographical assumption, see Heinrich Fichtenau, Living in the Tenth Century: Mentalities and Social Orders, ed. and trans.

Patrick J. Geary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), esp. 435–38; and Thomas F. X. Noble, introduction to European Transformations: The Long Twelfth Century, ed. Noble and John Van Engen (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 1–16, esp. 4.

23. Howe, “Re-Forging the ‘Age of Iron’: Part 1: The Tenth Century as the End of the Ancient World?,” History Compass 8, no. 8 (2010): 866–87, doi:10.1111/j.1478–0542.2010.00707.x, and “Re-Forging the ‘Age of Iron’: Part 2: The Tenth Century in a New Age?,” History Compass 8, no. 9 (2010): 1000–1022, doi:10.1111/ j.1478–0542.2010.00708.x.

6 INTRODUCTION This present book attempts to reinsert the history of the Church into the story of the rise of West. It presents ecclesiastical reform as a central part of the post-Carolingian, postinvasion revival. The Church embodied and defined a rising Europe. The Gregorian Reform that centralized and developed ecclesiastical structures in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries still remains the proximate background for what has been called the “Renaissance of the twelfth century” and the “Reformation of the twelfth century.”24 Yet those achievements rested on earlier ones. This book studies the Christendom that the mid-eleventh-century Latin reformers inherited. Its goal is to present the millennial Church in its appropriate context, the resurgence of the Latin West, and to understand its ecclesiastical developments as bases for later reform programs rather than as dead ends. In addition, by going beyond traditional political and institutional perspectives, this book seeks to better align Church history with the current fascination with material culture and social history.25 One challenge, however, relates to the reform paradigm itself. Ecclesiastical changes in the central Middle Ages are usually discussed in terms of reform. What exactly does this mean? Is reform a modern analytical construct anachronistically applied by today’s scholars to a past context? Or is it a medieval concept animating and shaping the changes it describes?

If medieval, does it designate ideological ideals or objective realities?

And should discussion of reform be limited to concepts explicitly articulated by medieval people themselves or can it be expanded to include a broader implicit range of reform dynamics revealed by their actions? This last dilemma is very familiar to medieval historians who have discovered that important medieval intellectual structures often tend to “go without saying,” evoking little debate or definition until some malcontent or heretic begins to raise difficulties. Modern scholars, undeterred by these and other epistemological problems, still often speak indiscriminately about reform.26 That they will continue to do so is suggested by the 220 special 24. Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927), supplemented by Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable, eds., Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), a fifty-year retrospective volume; Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); R. N. Swanson, The Twelfth-Century Renaissance (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999).

25. Van Engen, “The Future of Medieval Church History,” Church History 71 (2002): 492–522, esp. 495– 97; Austin, “Bishops and Religious Law, 900–1050,” in Ott and Jones, Bishop Reformed, 40–57, esp. 41.

26. Julia Barrow, “Ideas and Applications of Reform,” in Early Medieval Christianities, c. 600–c. 1100, ed. Noble and Smith, The Cambridge History of Christianity 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 345–62.

A PRE-GREGORIAN REFORM?

7

sessions and round tables that the International Medieval Congress at Leeds in 2015 devoted to its theme of Reform and Renewal.

The most systematic attempt to define and categorize concepts of reform was made by Gerhart B. Ladner, whose Idea of Reform recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary.27 Appearing on the eve of the Second Vatican Council, this book identified reform as a basic Christian dynamic, one given a unique shape in Latin Christianity by Augustine, whose preoccupations with the creation of man in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:26–27; 5:6; and 9:6) and with the salvation offered by Jesus Christ had led him to conclude that human beings could never return to a restored paradisial state, as many Greek fathers had envisioned; rather, because God had become man, it was now impossible to get back to the garden—reform would have to be progress toward a better state (reformatio ad melius). In retrospect Adam’s sin would turn out to have been a “happy fault [felix culpa].”

Augustine imagined Christian life moving forward, not backward. The “city of God” would be a pilgrim city, unable to be completely perfected in earthly institutions or even on earth, undergoing a never-ending process of reform as it moves toward its fulfillment of the divine plan. Reform would mean corrections based upon an authoritative past. But Ladner emphasized that reform movements in the medieval Latin Church, in contrast to later Protestant attempts at reformation guided by “Scripture alone [sola scriptura],” referenced multiple authorities including the Bible, the fathers and tradition, and even Constantinian, canonical, and Carolingian legislation. Although Ladner’s work launched a small school of reform studies,28 inherent in his explications of reform was a tension between the dispassionate technical analysis of a former MGH scholar and the theological vision of a Jewish convert to Catholicism who had come to believe that “the idea of reform . . . was to remain the ­self-perpetuating core, the inner life spring of Christian tradition through greater and lesser times.”29 While historians can argue, as did R. W. Collingwood, that the essence of history is the history of thought, Ladner’s conception of reform as animating thought may be close enough to the Logos to make nontheistic historians hesitate.

27. Gerhart B. Ladner, The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959). Note also Ladner, “Terms and Ideas of Renewal,” in Benson and Constable, Renaissance and Renewal, 1–33.

28. On the influence of The Idea of Reform, see Christopher M. Bellitto and David Zachariah Flanagin, eds., Reassessing Reform: A Historical Investigation into Church Renewal (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2012); and Lester L. Field Jr., Gerhard Ladner and the Idea of Reform: A Modern Historian’s Quest for Ancient and Medieval Truth (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2015), esp. 353–416.

29. Ladner, Idea of Reform, 423.

8 INTRODUCTION Here a disclaimer is in order: Ladner was my dissertation director at UCLA, and this book owes much, consciously and unconsciously, to his vision of a European ecclesiastical community haltingly and fitfully attempting to reform itself. I employ reform language, although I tend to use “revival” and “renewal” to describe the recovery of existing institutions, and “restoration” to describe the re-creation of institutions lacking direct continuity with their prototypes. “Reform” here designates attempts at reshaping existing ecclesiastical structures in order to make them better conform to ancient norms, attempts that could never fully succeed in an imperfect world and that tended to reveal in their limited successes the tensions between tradition and innovation that are inherent in any attempt at reformation for the better.

From this perspective, reform offers a dynamic narrative. Even the most conservative medieval reformers were innovative, despite themselves, because in order to establish some usable past as a benchmark, they had to resolve the conflicts in their sources and prioritize ancient norms in the light of their own knowledge and concerns. Other reformers deliberately embraced “a certain measure of revolt.”30 The result is that it is less a question of “reform” than of “reforms,” and today’s scholars increasingly emphasize diversity and local features.31 Monastic reform remains a central interest, though now it is a question of many reforms, multiple reformers, and irregular initiatives that often depended upon the fates of particular patrons.32 The story line is less about organized linear progress than about minimally coordinated advances and retreats. Reformation provides a framework inclusive enough to link together the changes that millennial churchmen made in the material, institutional, and intellectual culture of the medieval Church, changes that would help shape the civilization of the Latin West.

My use of reform terminology to describe the development of the millennial Church may draw fire from scholars who question whether an allegedly chaotic “Age of Iron” could actually manifest reform. Ladner himself wrote that “before the Hildebrandian age, reform had . . . been primarily individual or personal, and monastic. There was no full realization that the 30. Van Engen, “The Twelfth Century: Reading, Reason, and Revolt in a World of Custom,” in Noble and Van Engen, European Transformations, 17–44, esp. 24.

31. Howe, Church Reform and Social Change in Eleventh-Century Central Italy: Dominic of Sora and His Patrons (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), esp. 162; William North, Jay Rubenstein, and John D. Cotts, “The Experience of Reform: Three Perspectives,” Haskins Society Journal 10 (2001): 111–61, esp. 111–12.

32. Joachim Wollasch, “Monasticism: The First Wave of Reform,” in NCMH, 3:163–85, surveys recent trends.

A PRE-GREGORIAN REFORM?

9

Church as a whole might be in need of reform.”33 In Christopher Belitto’s Renewing Christianity: A History of Church Reform from Day One to Vatican II, a book directly inspired by Ladner’s work, one reads, after a discussion of the Carolingian Renaissance, “The next important chapter in the history of reform begins about 1050 with a series of reform minded popes.”34 This present book argues, to the contrary, that ecclesiastical structures were significantly reformed back in the tenth and early eleventh centuries. In part this conflict stems from the fact that scholars in Ladner’s tradition have usually studied ecclesiastical reforms through written documents. Reform back to the Bible? Back to the norms of the apostolic Church? Back to the canon laws of Late Antiquity and of the Carolingians? Back to ancient monastic rules? Back to customaries documenting monastic best practices? In the relatively unreflective millennial Church, however, actions were often more important than words. A dynamic of reform is manifest in material culture, ecclesiastical structures, liturgy, education, and spirituality, not just in literary discourses on reform. As will be seen below, the gritty character of this reform is evident in the earliest reappearances in the post-Carolingian world of the word reformare, where it refers to real estate, not theology, to the literal “re-forming” of ecclesiastical patrimonies disrupted during the invasions and civil wars of the late ninth and early tenth centuries. It was possible to re-form property and buildings, customs and costumes. Reforms in the material and customary realms, although sometimes humble, were the necessary prerequisites for the loftier theoretical developments of the Gregorian Reform. Ladner himself might have been open to this extension of his concept inasmuch as he had defined reform, without regard to media, as the “free, intentional and ever perfectible, multiple, prolonged and ever repeated efforts by man to re-assert and augment values pre-existent in the spiritual-material compound of the world.”35 Other objections will come from a very different direction, from scholars who have concluded that traditional reform terminology now carries so much baggage that it ought to be dropped. It has been argued that monastic-reform master narratives produced in the mid-twentieth century by scholars such as Ernst Sackur and Kassius Hallinger may cause scholars to overlook the varying situations of individual ecclesiastical institutions. If the major narrative becomes reformed vs. unreformed, 33. Ladner, “Reformatio,” in Ecumenical Dialogue at Harvard: The Roman Catholic-Protestant Colloquium, ed. Samuel H. Miller and G. Ernest Wright (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1964), 172–90, esp. 172.

34. Bellitto, Renewing Christianity: A History of Church Reform from Day One to Vatican II (New York: Paulist Press, 2001), 35 and 47.

35. Ladner, Idea of Reform, 35.

10 INTRODUCTION then debates tend to center more on abstract models such as monasticism and hierarchy and less on concrete institutional realities involving patrons operating in unique social and political situations. Traditional reform narratives emphasize charismatic leaders, overlooking the successors who often did the heavy lifting required to turn ideals into institutional realities. These and other objections were made recently in Steven Vanderputten’s Monastic Reform as Process: Realities and Representations in Medieval Flanders, 900–1100, which attempts to test the historiography of monastic reform by examining seven Flemish monasteries. He concludes that reform terminology is a “black hole” into which all sorts of historical reality get sucked.36 Yet his straw men have been attacked before: current research views institutional reform not as a single flashpoint event but as a halting and sporadic process; scholars do recognize the need to contextualize reforms in terms of different generational cohorts and goals; they know to approach with caution the alleged “crisis of monasticism.”37 Vanderputten’s concerns relate more to specific misuses of reform paradigms than to the actual paradigms themselves, whose validity his attacks on individual scholarly malpractices cannot logically falsify.

• This book is addressed not only to professional medievalists but also to general readers interested in medieval and Church history, and therefore it attempts to explain basic concepts, often, I hope, in fresh ways. The initial chapters are more narrative, the later ones more topical, but all seek to highlight changes in the Church in an age of transition. I use thick description to portray a world in which introspective analysis was rare. This story necessarily discusses ideals because the Church postulated the existence of and oriented itself toward a more perfect world. Skeptics might object that the aspirations of a few literate clerks would not have been representative of all Latin Christians, most of them illiterate, some perhaps still living in the “pagan Middle Ages.”38 But the “greater tradition”—articulated by reforming churchmen, backed by powerful patrons, and embodied in 36. Steven Vanderputten, Monastic Reform as Process: Realities and Representations in Medieval Flanders, 900–1100 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), esp. 186–89. Along these same lines, see Christopher A. Jones, “Aelfric and the Limits of ‘Benedictine Reform,’ ” in A Companion to Aelfric, ed. Hugh Magennis and Mary Swan (Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 2009), 67–108, esp. 70–72, 82–88.

37. Van Engen, “The Crisis of Monasticism Reconsidered: Benedictine Monasticism in the Years 1050– 1150,” Speculum 81 (1986): 269–304; Constable, Reformation of the Twelfth Century, 4; Wollasch, “Monasticism,” 163–85.

38. Van Engen, “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,” AHR 91 (1986): 519–52, esp. 519–22, 538; Ludo Milis, ed., The Pagan Middle Ages, trans. Tanis Guest (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1998).

A PRE-GREGORIAN REFORM?

11

a host of costly institutions and popular practices—is a legitimate subject of inquiry, perhaps more historically consequential than the medieval world’s myriad local folk and minority traditions.

Is it possible to write a unified text about a regional world? The aftermath of the collapse of Carolingian central government has been described as encellulement, the division of the Latin world into townships and castellanies like the discrete cells enclosing the enamels on a cloisonné vase. And if this was the Frankish heartland, then what about the surrounding Celts, Scandinavians, Slavs, Hungarians, and other peoples? And what about the Mediterranean world, where Latin, Greek, and Eastern Christians, incestuously connected by their “corrupting sea,” sometimes seem to have had more in common among themselves than with their brethren north of the Alps?39 Yet certain themes help unify this diversity: reforms involved the ideals of Rome and Christendom, Carolingian civilization and its legacy, and an ecclesiastical internationalism promoted by an increasingly interrelated community of literary professionals. Reforms manifested a common tension between practice and theory that was being generated as a world based upon custom and ritual was transforming itself into a world privileging written law and true doctrine.

It is impossible to describe each piece of the elaborate mosaic that constitutes the pre-Gregorian Church. My research over the years has centered on France and Italy, though bordering regions in England and the Lorraine have always been in the background. Examples from other places are drawn more heavily from the secondary literature. It can be objected that such a perspective tends to favor Latin Europe’s core over its peripheries. Scholars who specialize in Spain, maritime Italy, the Celtic World, Eastern Europe, or Scandinavia will have no problem identifying other possible approaches, but, given the aim of this book and the types of historical sources that survive, a focus on central Francia is hard to avoid. The Latin Church was a hierarchical organization run by literate clergymen whose status in peripheral areas was based in large part on their ability to promote institutional core values. Yet although I can justify the Frankish heartland’s presence on center stage, I try not to let the actors on the frontiers fade into the scenery.

The study of the tenth- and early eleventh-century Church is easier now that the surviving historical evidence has become more accessible.

Despite the tenth century’s famous obscurity, much can be discovered.

Monastic chronicles and histories are not as numerous as today’s historians would wish, but idiosyncratic voices, oddly local and universal, are 39. The phrase echoes Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), esp. 32–34, 522–23, 541, and 637–41.

12 INTRODUCTION provided by chroniclers such as Rodulfus Glaber, Adémar of Chabannes, Flodoard and Richer of Rheims, Thietmar of Merseburg, and others. Tens of thousands of charters survive, not randomly distributed but in clusters such as those from Catalonia and from the monasteries of Cluny and Monte Cassino. Less traditional sources are now entering the public domain: early collections of canon laws that reveal legal minds at work long before Gratian, compendiums of texts produced by schoolmasters and their pupils, practical liturgical manuals, and hagiographies that are now exploited as sources for cultural history as well as for information about their heroes.40 Architecture and art offer vital perspectives on a largely oral culture.41 Although medieval archeology is a relatively new discipline, it has much to teach.

• It may be helpful to conclude this introduction by signaling some conventions this book adopts. One is to speak of the “millennial Church,” While the “millennial Church” is a simpler label than “the tenth- and early eleventh-century Church,” it risks evoking eschatological resonances.

Nevertheless, its benefits may outweigh its deficits, especially now that “millennial” has become a term chronologically neutral enough to designate one group of this book’s potential readers, the “millennials” who are members of the 1980–2000 generational cohort. I also employ the names of contemporary national and geographical entities such as “Germany” or “Italy” or “Poland,” which are potentially misleading when applied to their very different medieval analogues, but I use them when they are the best communicative signs available and attach warning flags when they are particularly problematic. Personal names are presented in English whenever there is a widely accepted English form; when there is none, the Latin name is the default option. Exceptions include instances where aesthetic dissonance or long use encourage alternative forms: hence “Rodulfus Glaber” instead of “Bald Ralph” or “Sainte Foy” instead of “St. Faith.” Names of places and churches still existing today, or that did exist well into the modern period, are presented in their current vernacular form unless they have a generally accepted English name. If a medieval place has no continuity into the modern era, its name appears in Latin.

40. For the sources available, see Reuter, “Introduction: Reading the Tenth Century,” in NCMH, 3: 1–24; Noble, “The Interests of Historians in the Tenth Century,” in Rollason et al., England and the Continent, 495–513.

41. Michael Camille, “Art History in the Past and Future of Medieval Studies,” in The Past and Future of Medieval Studies, ed. Van Engen (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 362–82, esp. 366 and 371.