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THE JUGGLER OF NOTRE DAME
VOLUME 1
The Juggler of Notre Dame and
the Medievalizing of Modernity
Vol. 1: The Middle Ages
Jan M. Ziolkowski
OpenBook
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Jan M. Ziolkowski, The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity. Volume. 1: The Middle Ages.
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2018, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0132
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Contents
Note to the Reader 3
Preface 5
Overture 5
The Story of a Story 6
From Our Lady’s Tumbler to The Jongleur of Notre Dame 9
1. The Medieval Beginnings of Our Lady’s Tumbler 17
The French Poem 17
The Manuscripts 22
Gautier de Coinci and Anonymity 25
Picardy 33
The Identity of the Poet 34
The Bas-de-Page Miniature: Of Marginal Interest 38
The Genre: Long Story Short 54
The Table of Exempla, in Alphabetical Order 57
The Latin Exemplum 59
The Life of the Fathers 63
True Story: Why the Story Succeeded 69
2. Dancing for God 73
The Tumbler 73
Notre Dame versus Saint Mary 75
The Equivocal Status of Jongleurs 79
Trance Dance 90
Jongleurs of God 96
Holy Fools 99
Fact or Fiction? 102
3. Cistercian Monks and Lay Brothers 117
The Order of Citeaux 117
Cistercians and the Virgin 125
Mother’s Milk 131
Mary’s Head-Coverings 133
Cistercian Lay Brothers 140
Conversion Therapy 146
The Language of Silence 149
Gym Clothes 153
Sweat Cloth 158
The Weighing of Souls 162
The Latin-Less Lay Brother and Our Lady 166
4. Reformation Endings: A Temporary Vanishing Act 171
What Makes a Story Popular? 171
Walsingham, England’s Nazareth 177
Madonnas of the World Wars 186
Literary Iconoclasm 192
Marian Apparitions 196
5. A Troupe of Sources and Analogues 203
King David’s Dancing 204
The Widow’s Mites 210
The Virgin’s Miraculous Images and Apparitions 216
The Jongleur of Rocamadour 218
The Holy Candle of Arras 225
The Pious Sweat of Monks and Lay Brothers 232
The Love of Statuesque Beauty 235
The Holy Face of Christ and Virgin Saints 237
Notes 247
Notes to Preface 247
Notes to Chapter 1 249
Notes to Chapter 2
Notes to Chapter 3
Notes to Chapter 4
Notes to Chapter 5
Bibliography
Abbreviations
Referenced Works
List of Illustrations
Index
267
288
305
315
335
335
335
377
387
To Michel Zink
Art and beauty and poetry are a portion of our mediaeval heritage. Our
contribution to the knowledge of those times must be scholarly, first of
all, but scholarship must be arrayed, as far as possible, in a pleasing form.
—E. K. Rand
Mary Garden as Jean the juggler in Jules Massenet’s Le jongleur de Notre Dame.
Photograph by Aimé Dupont, 1909.
Note to the Reader
This volume is the first of a half dozen. Together, the six form The Juggler of Notre Dame
and the Medievalizing of Modernity. The book as a whole probes one medieval story, its
reception in culture from the Franco-Prussian War until today, and the placement of
that reception within medieval revivalism as a larger cultural phenomenon. The study
has been designed to proceed largely in chronological order, but the progression
across the centuries and decades is relieved by thematic chapters that deal with topics
not restricted to any single time period.
This installment, entitled “The Middle Ages,” deals with the story in its medieval
forms, with the nature of chief character as a dancer and lay brother, with the
circumstances relating to the Reformation and Counter-Reformation that explain the
disappearance of the narrative in the early modern period, and with possible sources
and analogues, from the Bible on through saints’ lives. The second in the series, called
“Medieval Meets Medievalism,” examines the reemergence of the narrative after its
edition in 1873, its translation into English, and its recasting as a short story by Anatole
France. Later volumes trace the story of the story down to the present day.
The chapters are followed by endnotes. Rather than being numbered, these notes
are keyed to words and phrases in the text that are presented in a different color.
After the endnotes come the bibliography and illustration credits. In each volume-by-
volume index, the names of most people have lifespans, regnal dates, or at least death
dates. Significant topics and concepts are also indexed.
One comment on the title of the story is in order. In proper French, Notre-Dame
has a hyphen when the phrase refers to a building, institution, or place. Notre Dame,
without the mark, refers to the woman, the mother of Jesus. In my own prose, the title
is given in the form Le jongleur de Notre Dame, but the last two words will be found
hyphenated in quotations and bibliographic citations if the original is so punctuated.
All translations are mine, unless otherwise specified.
Pretace
Overture
If no one can walk backward into
the future, can anyone walk forward
into the past?
Over the last half decade, an unattributed joke in French has made the rounds of the
highways and byways on the internet. In it, two musicians, one Corsican and the other
Breton, chat together in a club for violinists. Both instrumentalists pride themselves
on their talents. The performer from the Mediterranean island brags, “Last week I
played a concerto in the cathedral of Ajaccio, in front of six thousand spectators. You
won't believe me, but I acquitted myself so well on my instrument that I moved the
statue of the Holy Virgin to bawl her eyes out.” The entertainer from Brittany shakes
his head and replies, “As for me, yesterday I played at the cathedral of Brest before an
audience of more than ten thousand people. You won’t believe me, but at one point
I saw Jesus detach himself from the cross and come to me. I stopped playing. In the
dead silence, he said to me, ‘My son, I hope you know the music well.’ Surprised,
I responded, ‘Lord, I know the score. Why do you say that to me?’ He answered,
‘Because last week at the cathedral of Ajaccio, a pompous little Corsican played so
badly that he caused my mother to wail.”
Jests of this sort may circulate hither and yon for a while, then die out for a bit, only
to return from the jocular grave to joyous rebirth and regrowth. Yet few ever prove
themselves ready for the big time. Achieving broad visibility and long durability
nowadays requires the narrative to be infiltrated somehow into a mass-media
blockbuster of one kind or another, such as a chart-topping film or novel. Otherwise
the tale will not make much headway when the tempo of life is frenetic and airtime
is packed.
For all the tenuousness of its current existence, the French joke makes a suggestive
point of departure for the book before you. Its basic elements so typify the Middle
Ages that no one should be startled to find that it was in fact recounted in medieval
© 2018 Jan M. Ziolkowski, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0132.07
6 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
Europe and that in a zigzag it transited across the space-time continuum from then
and there to become today’s worldwide meme.
The story’s humor is verbal. Even so, it presumes nonverbal performances by
artists before Madonnas. The crucial actions, so to speak, take place within cathedrals
consecrated to the Virgin. The punchline assumes that in her maternal capacity, Mary
has special leverage over her son. The dialogue between the two European musicians
takes as an ontological given either that images of the Mother of God and Christ may
become animate or that the real beings for whom they are stand-ins may come as
visitants associated with them. More simply, statues of Mary and Jesus are brought to
life or the heavenly personages depicted in them descend to earth.
With luck, the amusement of the brief account intrigues and predisposes you, dear
reader or listener, enough that you want to learn more about our protagonist, the
juggler of Notre Dame. He too enacts his routine before a Madonna in a church—but
that is only part of the story.
The Story of a Story
In the introduction... I would have
preferred to see a short overview of
the history of the motif.
— Arthur Langfors
This book, six volumes in all, tells the story of a story. In a sense, the prose to come
resembles a megafarm of the sort that sprawls across the Great Plains of North America.
Conceive a mental picture of a vast acreage devoted to monoculture. The plant under
single-crop cultivation is one narrative and its reception. Then again, all the words
that follow offer much more than the story of a single story. Just as musicians learn,
perhaps especially in consorts, from playing and replaying the same piece, and
readers refine themselves and their understanding by reading and rereading, the
enrichment on offer here is enhanced —cultivated—by perusing multiple versions of
the same narrative. To think of a different geography and geology, these chapters
map a planetwide archipelago of translations, adaptations, and performances that
is formed by the evidence for the reception of one medieval tale and its descendants.
Because the tale has been retold in many ways and because it relates to a host of
other tales, the account presented here is not an exercise in pure monomania on my
part. In fact, it leads in enough other zigs and zags to warrant comparison with The
Thousand and One Nights. It takes us into other stories and histories, first contemporary
with the original one and then surrounding it down to the present day. It offers up a
succession of whodunits, although the mystery is not a murder but a miracle. As we
watch the wonder unfolded again and again, we can never be certain what the upshot
Preface 7
will be in the final scene of each episode. Each chapter expands like the bellows of an
accordion to become a different detective novel.
The tale of the story is then, more accurately, the tale of the ebbing and flowing fate
that befell the narrative as it was received by this and that author or artist and audience.
As such, it mirrors the tale of the medieval period as it has been reconstructed by people
who have come afterward. At the same time, its trajectory reflects the overall destiny of
Gothic. The jongleur, our itinerant musician and juggler, flourished, at least relatively,
in two texts from the Middle Ages. The first was a poem in a form of the language now
called French. The second was a preaching exemplum—an edifying story—in Latin.
To judge by all indications, the written expression of the story originated in France in
the first half of the thirteenth century or conceivably a tad earlier. It sprang into being
in roughly the same place and time as the architectural and artistic manner known as
Gothic itself took shape. Both writing specimens date to the final third of the long era
and grand social construct that for the sake of convenience we call the Middle Ages.
Let us say that the period extends roughly from 500 to 1500.
The relatively derisory evidence of textual transmission for both the French poem
and the Latin prose suggests that before disappearing temporarily into the floss of a
cultural cocoon, the tale lived on in these incarnations until the medieval era drew to
a close. Perhaps a more apt choice of words would be chrysalis, since the hardened
body of a butterfly pupa is better suited to the architecture of the great stone churches.
In what has been called the Gothic survival, this construction style too persevered
through the beginning of the sixteenth century, at which juncture it slipped largely
out of both cultural consciousness and architectural practice. The narrative and the
architecture alike succumbed to the wave of anti-Gothicism and antimedievalism that
washed across Europe and its colonies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
along with other reflexes of the Italian Renaissance. During the Reformation, the
anonymous story plunged into obscurity, where it vegetated for a few successive
centuries. It resurfaced or was recovered in the early 1870s. At that moment, it elicited
a romantic gusto that contributed to its being remade time and time again, down
to the present day, in paraphrases, literary reworkings, and operatic refashionings.
Eventually it permeated many levels and genres of mass culture. Both the medieval
text and some of the chief modern adaptations have been rated of the highest grade.
The tale occupies a paradoxical position by being at once nowhere and everywhere,
resembling the titular object in Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.” In this
short story from 1845, a document is plastered over by being hidden in open view.
Our medieval narrative also, after having been a stock item in the storehouse of
cultural literacy throughout much of the twentieth century, has now subsided from
mass culture. For many reasons, a moment came, a switch was flicked. The sway of
the tale had been unassailable, but suddenly language teachers and literary critics
spoke of what in jurisprudence is called undue influence. More devastatingly, the
8 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
narrative dropped precipitously from popular view. In the twenty-first century, it is
no longer reenacted annually on live television at Christmas as it was in the 1950s,
no longer retold constantly on radio programs as it was in the 40s, and no longer
promoted as a regular feature on the opera circuit as it was from 1900 through 1930.
For all that, the juggler of Notre Dame seems still to be widely encountered and
remembered, even if only as a warm and fuzzy memory in the minds of today’s
audiences. Everyone who comes across it appears to regard it as a personal find, the
narrative equivalent of an objet trouvé. It is uncamouflaged. At the same time, it is
a secret weapon.
Examples of its hiding in plain sight are plenty but I will limit myself to two:
Five years before my godmother passed away in 2009, I mentioned to her that I
was studying a medieval story and its reception since the late nineteenth century.
When I told her the kernel of the narrative, she mused a moment before dropping
the title of a poem by W. H. Auden. Until that point—confession time—I had not run
across “The Ballad of Barnaby.” As we will see in due course, the short stanzas by
the great twentieth-century poet tell the same medieval story. A little more recently,
I happened to be asked about my research by the longest-serving flight attendant in
the world, a favorite person of mine on my weekly commuter hop. I prattled about
the narrative for a couple of minutes. At first, she smiled blankly, but within an instant
her mien changed completely. She recognized the tale as one preferred by her son
when she read it to him decades earlier. To this day, he recalls it fondly. In short order,
we pieced together that she had known the story in a children’s book written and
illustrated by Tomie dePaola.
The tale under discussion here is a love story, and this book of mine is a love story
about it. Not all undying love is romantic, with billing and cooing. Even less is it
necessarily erotic or a prologue to sex. All the same, in our hard-core world it is almost
inevitable that even a guiltless juggler should be compelled to enter a seamy space in
culture not too many inches removed from jiggle-booty videos. Before this book is
finished, we will see the medieval narrative as it has been manipulated by filmmakers
of porn—to explain, ancient carvings of the last-mentioned sort often showed a Greek
or Roman god with the ramrod of an erect penis. Wait to learn how a representation
of the juggler could possibly merit comparison with such a figure.
In an interview about the movie of his novella Love Story, Erich Segal demurred
when the reporter compared him with the jongleur. Although the author balked at the
comparison, he went on in short order to reveal that he knew the tale and that telling
it gave him a leg up in negotiations about the film. In fact, the juggler of Notre Dame
served him in virtually the same way as it would have done a preacher in the Middle
Ages. It seems that during the planning for the filming of the smash hit Love Story,
the financers from the studio had decided to save a large sum of money by lopping
Preface 9
from the screenplay what has become one of its most famous moments. In this scene,
the hero ice-skates at Wollman Rink in Central Park. To convince them to keep the
segment, Segal had a half minute to make his pitch while climbing the stairs to their
office. In those thirty seconds, he narrated the tale of the performer from the Middle
Ages. Won over, they agreed to retain the episode. Thus, a pivotal scene in the film
owes its presence to Segal’s invocation of the juggler’s spiritual love.
Not only is this study about a story of love, it is also about a love of story. One
emotion binds the protagonist of the medieval narrative to the Virgin. The affective tie
is hitched by way of a Madonna in a crypt, before whom the lead character expresses
his devotion by performing an acrobatic or juggling routine. This daily grind puts into
action a heart-melting lyricism. His feeling is faith-based, but the humble attachment
to Mary that is described in the narrative emanates from an era when religion was
not as quarantined from the rest of life as many now experience it. The other love
has less to do with the divine than with art itself. This consuming—and creating —
passion ties to the jongleur every poet, illustrator, composer, and other creative soul
who has remodeled the tale in literature, art, music, and other media. The makeover
commences with the two medieval versions, resumes with the rediscovery of the
story in the late nineteenth century, and stretches to the present day. Nor should
researchers be omitted. From 1873 until this very moment, they have been inspirited
by their own gusto for the narrative and more broadly for the Middle Ages. Propelled
by that affection, they have transmitted it to the public, including fresh generations of
artists, who have kept it living through rereading and creative reinterpretation.
From Our Lady’s Tumbler to The Jongleur of Notre Dame
The account of concern to us here has traveled under various aliases. The story is
simplicity incarnate, but it also displays an astonishing plasticity. Most often, it has
borne in English the titles Our Lady’s Tumbler and The Jongleur of Notre Dame. The
two versions are closely related but not fungible. Many renderings of them have
been deceptively simple in the number and nature of their narrative elements. The
narrative can even be pruned at its barest minimum to the interior of a high-ceilinged
Gothic church and a ball, by way of which the cover art to the program of an opera
production summed up the whole narrative (see Fig. Pref.1 below).
Not even a single human being is present. Gothic is familiar to everyone who has
traveled in Europe, the Americas, and many other places around the globe that were
once gripped by European imperialism or tied to its national cultures. The principal
elements of the style instantiate the gist of medieval Christianity: the pointed arch
conjures up a monastery, a cathedral of Notre Dame, or both. By visual metonymy,
the sphere evokes the juggler himself.
10 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
LE
"@ JONGLEUR 0
NOTRE-DAME :
Fig. Pref.1 Christie Grimstad, Le jongleur de Notre Dame, 2009.
Ink pointillism, 28 x 35.6 cm. © Ken Fish. All rights reserved.
Tracing how the tale of the juggler acquired these associations has its own inherent
interest. More broadly, it takes us down a path toward appreciating how the Middle
Ages have been recaptured since the late nineteenth century. The medieval period as
we now know it was retrieved, reinvented, and reconceived by the nineteenth century
as a counterbalance to industrial society. Since then, it has been reinvoked both
architecturally and literarily at times of profound soul-searching, by both individual
artists and whole cultures. Everyone knows that with each passing moment we
venture beyond a new point of no return and that the event horizon lies behind us.
In this sense, Gothic is gone—but that does not mean dead and gone. At least half
of William Faulkner’s adage holds true: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
We may now have reached once again a juncture where the Middle Ages have an
especially heightened relevance or meet needs that other times will not fill.
The architecture of Gothic revivals cannot be ignored. In fact, it represents an
essential aspect of the overall reinvention that the medieval period has undergone
recurrently. In part, the story has thrived owing to the seductiveness of the built spaces
in which the imaginations of the reader have pictured it taking place. Fathoming the
juggler helps us to grasp the reasons for which the construction style predominated
as it did. In turn, comprehension of the buildings assists in coming to terms with
the performer in the literary texts. Gothic architecture and literature are the twin
terminuses of a heavily traveled two-way street. They are not in discord; we are under
Preface 11
no obligation to pit them against each other in a game of rock-paper-scissors. Instead,
they are constantly, ever-evolvingly interactive. In both edifices and texts, Gothic may
be so often seen and so readily recognized that it needs to be defamiliarized for us to
perceive it afresh.
The wretched and yet transcendent jongleur himself stands beyond the
intellectualism of polarities between print and oral, Reformation and medieval,
and modernism and Middle Ages. He speaks to all of us who suffer the trials and
tribulations of at least two anxieties. One makes us fear in the pit of our stomachs
that our chosen occupation is insubstantial; the other fills us with fretfulness that
our execution of it may not be even particularly authoritative or dignified. Relieving
both worries, he shows us that art and physicality, acted out in the right spirit, can
transfuse meaning into life and win accolades even in the afterlife.
The most common English title, Our Lady’s Tumbler, is one translation of a French
title, Del Tumbeor Nostre Dame, by which the medieval narrative was known when it
was first brought back to light. From this story another has been crafted, a nineteenth-
century adaptation called, again from the French, The Jongleur of Notre Dame. It recounts
a miracle of the Virgin Mary. Such wonders were the abundant side shoots and suckers
of medieval literature that sprouted from the much heftier trunk of hagiography, that
is, saints’ lives and legends. Since the late nineteenth century, these two forms of the
tale—Our Lady’s Tumbler and The Jongleur of Notre Dame—have undergone frequent
amalgamation and adaptation. In close association, they have constituted an enduring
component of culture in Western Europe, America, and even farther afield. Whereas
most medieval narratives that have exercised much influence on modern culture have
been familiar, at least patchily, since romanticism or even earlier, Our Lady’s Tumbler
gamered attention only from 1873.
Sometimes coming on the scene late can have upsides and confer advantages.
From that year on, the story and its awesomely variegated progeny have held a place
continuously in literature, as well as eventually in music, dance, radio, television,
cinema, painting, sculpture, and other media. Scrutinizing the family tree of this one
tale illustrates and validates the worth of the arts and humanities. This case study
demonstrates how the world may be constructed creatively through language, art,
music, movement, and other forms of human expression. Even just within the literary
sphere (and that is a big “just’”), the narrative has found expression in a multitude
of genres, which include cheap paperbacks, handwritten and printed pseudo-
manuscripts, miniature books, bibliophilic editions, and children’s books, even
pop-up books.
Until the late twentieth century, the world of learning tended to keep apart many
categories just mentioned, and to ignore or boycott popular and mass culture. Oral
and written, folkloric and literary, low and high, image and text, children’s and adult,
medieval and modern, and many other such either-or dualities were kept in place with
far greater rigidity than has become the custom. Similarly, investigators speak now
2 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
of literary reception rather than tradition. This change corresponds to a shift of focus
from authors and their intentions to readers and their multiplicity of interpretations.
For the breaking down of artificial balkanizations that were created and instituted
long after the Middle Ages, I am thankful. Their evaporation enables us to wend our
way freely across time, genre, and space. Scholarship needs the solidity of disciplines
and fields, but at this point who would write off the attractions and values of building
on them to attain vibrant multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity across areas?
Disciplines and fields must be maintained so that we may acquire the expertise
required for knowledge and wisdom, yet simultaneously, they must be resisted and
transcended, so that culture may be understood holistically, across times, places,
media, levels, and more.
In my wanderings, I have lighted upon beauties in narrative and in lives touched
and sustained by the story that would have escaped me. At the same time, the
contemplation of later reformulations has granted insights into the medieval poem
that would never have occurred to me otherwise. For all the marvels that human
ingenuity has reached through science, we are still unable either to outleap our own
mortality or to journey back or forward in time. Try as we may, we are bogged down
more than knee-deep in the here and now. Yet this story has enabled me to achieve
intimacy with individuals, some accomplished, others unremarkable, most large-
hearted and next to none small-minded or mean-spirited, from across eight centuries
or more. Among the many delights and duties of devotees to the humanities is to role-
play as bounty hunters. First, we tail our prey. After nabbing them, we parade them
in a perp walk before a broader public. Why? Because they are the “wanted, dead or
alive” who can expand our appreciation of culture.
Over the first few decades of the prolific aftermath that the medieval Our Lady’s
Tumbler has engendered since the late nineteenth century, the reception of the narrative
owed to its intrinsic qualities. The historical circumstances when it was received were
marked by particularities that would have predisposed audiences to the significations
they detected in it. In addition, the story’s heft has gained from the serendipity that a
host of major scholars, authors, songsters, performers, and artists gravitated to it and
reshaped it. Tracking the shifting fate of Our Lady’s Tumbler allows insights into not
only the life and afterlife of medieval tales and modern preconceptions of the Middle
Ages but also the very nature of story.
ae
The story I will tell extols humble zeal, which is how many who have fallen under its
spell would like to characterize their own spirit in approaching Our Lady’s Tumbler.
Nurturing a determination to be unshowy seems inherently self-subversive, but such
undermining seems to be an essential element of being human. So, let us aspire to
be modest but also to help wean this tale off life support. Fiction writers might hope
Preface 13
to save it by composing utterly different retellings. I will instead offer a study that
surveys the theme from as many analytical vantage points as my own conceptual and
cultural-historical capacities allow. Our combined efforts may yet help to confirm that
the pen is mightier than the sword.
The length of this study has not resulted from mere writing mania on my part,
but rather from the multiplicity and richness of the issues involved in it. I cannot
claim to have constructed a cathedral of learning, but I can argue that like some of
the finest Gothic places of worship, this edifice of words and images has a complex
structure in which each component predicates another. Great churches are cruciform,
enforcing on worshipers and even on nonbeliever visitors an empathy with Christ
through imitation of the crucifixion as they bring their bodies to the crossing of nave
and transept. Yet the same houses of worship deposit upon the original story of Jesus
many others, both precedents from the Hebrew Bible and successors from saints’ lives
and other subsequent tales, told in stained glass, carvings, paint, and many of the
other media that go into the making of cathedrals. So too you will find here, as you
thumb through this volume, a very deliberate accumulation of what ideally will serve
as purposeful variety. Decide for yourself whether it adds up to more than merely the
sum of the parts.
Our Lady’s Tumbler and The Jongleur of Notre Dame, like their title characters, may
seem uncomplicated and timeless. People who are humble and devout risk being
described as simple, which in turn can be conflated with simpleminded. The jongleur
is no simpleton. For that matter, those who have created art or artisanship about him
are not simplistic either. As for timeless, on each occasion these stories are retold, they
mutate. Like the jumping gymnast of the story, they are whirligigs. Despite qualities
that take them out of time, many changes in fact reflect transformations brought about
constantly by the passage of days, months, and years.
To rephrase what I wrote at the outset, the pages to follow unfold the unauthorized
biography of a tale. Although the destiny of the story may be never-ending, and
although my aspirations may be totalizing, this study of its life can be neither. All
mortals, unlike some of the art they produce, have only a finite measure of vitality at
their disposal. Thus, I must finish, for my own sake as well as yours. As loath as Iam
to pull back from an enterprise that has taught me much and brought me unbroken
joy, the moment has arrived to start the show-and-tell of what I have learned. Like any
biographer who aspires to do his subject justice, I am filled with fervor to delineate a
detailed picture. Even more, I ache to construct one that has all the three-dimensional
immersiveness of an insight gained or even entered from multiple perspectives. The
fancy word for this objective is perspectivism, the practice of viewing and analyzing
a situation or object from different observation posts.
This project, driven by an aim for holism, provides the ingredients for an infinity
of close readings. The big-hearted soul who in the early thirteenth century left us our
14 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
earliest extant manifestation of the narrative was already in the thick of an interchange
between what has been called high and low culture. His poem perched at an interface.
On the one side was the sometimes spicy, unrehearsed entertainment that was made
available to the illiterate common folk. Indeed, the protagonist of his poem was
himself a ruefully unlettered performer. On the other end of the spectrum stood the
esoteric exercises of the educated and privileged elite, especially ecclesiastics such as
monks. The result is a contradiction, a beautiful and learned text about monastic life
that imparts how conventional prayer may be outstripped without Latin, chant, or
liturgy. Alternatively, what prevails is the simplicity of the performer's thoughts and
hopes: wishful thinking comes out on top.
To elucidate, I will follow one-way lines of cause and effect, but the linear causalities
will be braided together into complex bundles. I will toggle between text and context,
with the added nuance that the text itself will change at every step of the way—as
holds true of a human life history, since individuals develop in response to the
environment that evolves around them. For all these reasons and more, digital devices
have functioned for me as tools rather than interlocutors. As a humanist, I have been
driven to converse with human beings—sometimes face to face with the living but
more often via printed page, canvas, film, and other media with the dead or distant.
The days, weeks, months, and years have heaped up like flakes in a heavy snowfall as
I have picked up and put down the work. Each artist or interpreter has furnished me
with another lens, sometimes microscopic, sometimes telescopic, that has amplified
and clarified my vision and insight. I have been fascinated by learning about these
other individuals and their perspectives. If I have been clumsy in interpreting them, I
have at least tried: in our times, anxiety about past or present injuries done to others
seems to encourage talking about things rather than people. Objects have become the
preferred subjects. That is too bad, since in a time of materialism the consideration of
humanity makes a nice counterweight to the preoccupation with materiality. Human
beings win out over stuff and nonsense.
This book grapples with two equal but opposite processes. One is the making
modern of a medieval story; the other is the making medieval of the cultures that
have received it. In what follows, a single miraculous tale supplies the vehicle for
sharing and revelation. At the same time, The Jongleur of Notre Dame relates to what
has happened to the Middle Ages themselves. It makes this one story a synecdoche,
or a rich case in point, for the entire reception of the medieval period in modernity.
The description and analysis that lie ahead tell and show (to transpose the usual
idiom) a tale. They alternate between countless texts and contexts. The versions of
the story and the cultures surrounding them interdigitate inextricably. I would like
to resuscitate the narrative, while also applying it as a fulcrum for understanding
the reception of the medieval era in general.
Preface 15
Accept then a heartfelt invitation to commute back and forth through time and
space, as retailed in words and images. We will get underway by taking a very long
stride into the Middle Ages—or at least into what they have been made by those who
have sought to shuttle between them and their own times, and into what they appear
to be to me. (I am resisting saying that our excursion takes us back, since that carries
unfavorable connotations— medieval is not another word for backward.) Then, after
taking that huge lunge to 1200, we will jump part of the way forward again toward
the somewhat more proximate past of the late nineteenth century. And, from the
1870s onward, we will take baby steps across time until our own day.
As chance would have it, our appreciation of medievalism is much fuller and
perhaps simpler up to our late nineteenth-century starting point of 1870 than afterward.
That year makes a good dividing line for at least France and Germany, which acted
out important roles in the reception of Our Lady’s Tumbler, since the Franco-Prussian
War precipitated major changes in both. Even though Britain did not participate in the
armed conflict, 1870 marked a seismic shift in its culture as well. As has happened ad
nauseam since, the hostilities no sooner drove people apart than they made the world
a smaller and more nodal place. Among other things, movements in art and culture
spread like wildfire internationally, especially across the transatlantic plane.
Strictly speaking, the reception portion of my book commences in 1873. Many
medievalists are well acquainted with the reemergence of the medieval in the Gothic
revival of the nineteenth century. Yet that eruption of revivalism is often understood
to have fizzled out in failure precisely when my timetable starts. In the conventional
scheme, the main renewal of medievalizing entered its twilight by 1880 and was
extinct by 1900. As a result, the timeline of this probe may catch my colleagues in
medieval—or medievalism— studies, ill- or even altogether unprepared. We are not
trained to be aware of second- and third-wave medievalism.
ee
The tale of the performer has been for me a top-notch teacher and guardian angel—or
acrobat. Alongside unnerving and subversive undercurrents that only enrich it, the
story possesses a redemptive goodness that has made lengthy immersion in it nothing
but a charm.
This undertaking has also made me belatedly valorize the fragile durability of
books. I have never considered myself an especial book lover—a bibliophile carries
a gene for collecting that I lack. Rather, I have viewed myself as a craftsman in a
profession that involves an untold array of tools, and printed matter forms a large and
much-valued class among that panoply. Yet conducting the dragnet for this project
has made me a bibliophile in the broadest and perhaps truest sense.
The end result, these six volumes, has ensconced within itself aspects of my own
fondness— for the tale, for medieval cultures, and for people in my life. l owe gratitude
16 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
to all those who have fostered in me the thirst and perhaps even the knack for making
the past come alive as I construe it. The Roman myth of Pygmalion is analogous only
so far, since the object of my enthusiasm is not a narrative that I composed myself,
but I will acknowledge that this story made me fall in love with a product of art.
Whatever resemblance I may have to Pygmalion, however, I hope to bear less of one
to Narcissus. I long to coax mute texts into speaking, not to coerce them into serving
as ventriloquist’s dummies for my own self.
The goodness of our medieval tale froths up in the foam of positive feelings and
memories that the story often elicits from those who have been touched by it. Truth
to tell, I have been delightedly startled again and again by the generosity of those
whom I have consulted when foraging for information and materials. The repeated
kindness of strangers has led me to conclude that the story is innately and infectiously
constructive. The world needs more narratives like it, for a story can be improving, a
tale can be a tonic: a treatment known as bibliotherapy exists, with good cause. To be
less highfalutin, we refer routinely to feel-good stories. This is such a narrative. If any
of its qualities have rubbed off on my project, enough to make this book instill warm
feelings in the cockles of others’ hearts, that outcome gladdens me.
1. The Medieval Beginnings of
Our Lady’s Tumbler
I find that I always get back to the
twelfth century when left to myself.
—Henry Adams
The French Poem
The poem often called Our Lady’s Tumbler, comprising 684 lines in 342 rhyming
couplets, is held by common consensus to be a bright spot of French literature,
among the most beautiful texts from the Middle Ages. Magnum opus though it
may be, the piece poses quintessentially medieval puzzles. The tale it recounts has
also come through to us in a later, no-frills Latin prose version. Rudimentary facts
about interconnections between the poem and prose turn out not to be facts at all but
moot points. When all is said and done, we can do nothing first except read, reason,
and seek out hard evidence. Then we may proceed to formulate, substantiate, and
evaluate hypotheses by trying them out in the proving grounds of public delivery. By
taking precautions and implementing preventive measures against slipperiness, we
can tiptoe around slippery-slope fallacies. Just by itself, the verse in Picard-flavored
medieval French remains, in important regards, unexplored territory. Among the
unknowns are authorship and precise date of composition. Even more mystifying
is the exact relationship between the two actual written texts and any conjectural
unwritten forms. Did an oral narrative stand behind the poem that is our earliest
datum? Did one, either inspired by the poetic version or independent of it, lead to
the later exemplum? At the end of the day, the only two foregone conclusions are the
story itself and the manuscripts that transmit it. Both these diamond-hard certainties
warrant close examination.
Our Lady’s Tumbler has been termed a “stand-alone moralizing piece.” The tale it
tells resembles a specific type of medieval literature known as an exemplum. Exempla,
© 2018 Jan M. Ziolkowski, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0132.01
18 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
to use the plural, were illustrative stories that furnished entertainment in speeches.
By doing so, they particularly enlivened sermons. Generally, they were pithy. While
providing a modicum of mirth, the brief narratives, which like most rhetoric were
protreptic, served as launch pads for edification. Often they impressed salutary or
redemptive ethical lessons. Sometimes they afforded humdrum, concrete explanations;
at other times they illustrated complex, abstract doctrinal issues. These exemplary
tales can be heterogeneous in nature, but many purport to relate an actual event in
the life of a real human being. That is, they are presented as being true. Thus, they can
approximate closely what today we might categorize as anecdotes or, alternatively,
legends. At the very least, they are usually plausible. Whether they actually happened
is almost beside the point.
Preaching became ever more prevalent after 1200. Inside the beehives of Cistercian
monasteries, abbots were expected to utter daily homilies in chapter meetings to the
monks under their oversight. Beyond this routine expectation, the same community
kingpins were also to hold forth in church on festivities, when pontificating was the
order of the day. Those feasts, of course, included the major Marian celebrations. The
white monks, as those of this order were called, spread throughout Europe, into the
Eastern Mediterranean and even beyond. They carried with them their sermons and
exempla in speech and writing, and enriched their stock of such narratives with what
they heard and read during their travels. The store of these little tales swelled. In
the world outside the abbeys, sermonizing proliferated as clerics were reoriented to
devote far greater time and energy to the moral welfare and spiritual life of laypeople.
In the process, the clergy tasked with pulpiteering developed a taste for enlivening
and enlightening their orations with engaging and edifying stories. Eventually
the friars, too, became especially enmeshed in proselytizing among the laity. All
these preachers, monastic, fraternal, and clerical, felt an imperative to grandstand
and to find attention-grabbing tales that lent themselves to moralistic or religious
interpretations—in a word, to preachiness.
Both the theory and praxis of homiletics necessitated familiarity, both broad
and deep, with exempla. Consequently, the requirements of would-be sermonizers
opened up niches for new sorts of reference works. In these books, aspiring orators
who sought out stories suited to specific themes could forage for ones that met their
needs. They rooted around in exempla collections conveniently arranged in clusters
by topic. Alternatively, they consulted systematic “arts of preaching.” Illustrative
stories often turned up in the model speeches that were implanted in or grafted onto
such manuals. The exempla became only more pervasive as this type of rhetoric took
an ever stronger hold on oral and written culture alike. In those two cultures, the
noun “sermon” carried a dual meaning. On the one hand, it referred to a declamation
proclaimed aloud and live to an audience. The delivery could come from memory,
improvisation, a written outline, or a full text. On the other hand, the word could
denote a text copied in a manuscript for reading and consultation.
1. The Medieval Beginnings of Our Lady’s Tumbler 19
Churchgoing listeners, whether monastic or lay, had far fewer reservoirs of
diversion on which to draw than we have today. For them, the exemplum was a
happy innovation that came into its own in the thirteenth century. It remained well
liked throughout the remainder of the Middle Ages. Viewed from a higher altitude,
this literary genre can be lodged within a broader framework. Even outside churches,
the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries saw an explosion of both tales and tale-
telling. To describe the trend toward fiction as a development of “story for story’s sake”
would go too far. After all, many narratives had lessons or at least germs of wisdom
to convey. Yet with or without morals, narrative mushroomed. The formulation
“emancipation of story” may be the snappiest catchphrase that has been concocted
to describe the proliferation of romances and “songs of heroic deeds,” fabliaux and
so-called elegiac comedies, and fables and exempla. Like many others in society,
preachers had to be good storytellers if they wished to compete and succeed.
But let us turn inward from context to text. The poem of Our Lady’s Tumbler
tells a stirring tale of a professional entertainer who specializes in dizzying double
somersaults, light-footed leaps, and other such feats. In our terms this key figure
might be called an acrobat, gymnast, or dancer. All three pursuits involve nonverbal
bodily movements that are intentionally rhythmical, and all three follow patterned
sequences. All three have interdependences between body and emotion, in strong
contrast to the associations of linguistic expression with the mind and reason. Dance
constitutes a symbolic form of communicating and representing. Its connection
with symbolism elevates it. Yet it is also ineluctably physical, with the positives and
negatives that corporeality entails. The hero of the poem is radically new, a role model
who is simultaneously a roll model.
Whatever name we assign to the profession and activities the tumbler transacts in
the story, this simple layman tires of his existence as a secular performer. World-weary,
he feels like a misfit, and he cannot stomach any more years of aimless wandering.
From the medieval Christian perspective that he assumes, all his possessions are ill-
gotten gains. In a sudden and definitive change of heart, and without any forethought,
he repents by giving away his hard-earned money, horse, and clothes. He is game now
to lead life pro bono. The entertainer aspires to cure his newly developed agoraphobia
by yielding to claustrophilia. He joins a monastery as a lay brother, and he plunges in
with a blank slate. The abbey is his spiritual promised land. Yet his notions of tabula
rasa and a clean break prove to be illusory. All too soon, one form of hopelessness gives
way to another. In his new environs, he realizes that he is far from his wheelhouse (or
cartwheelhouse). He has no capability for singing or reading. Shortly, he despairs over
his inefficacy. He cannot fulfill the duties of a regular monk—in fact, he is incapable
even of deciphering the codes of monastic communication and conduct. After one life-
changing transition, he needs another. This time he must invent a new life for himself,
but within the inflexibilities of monasticism.
20 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
Eventually, the jongleur figures out a means for overcoming his life’s ennui. It
dawns upon him that his priorities are all amiss. He needs to put the (cart)wheel
before the horse: by recognizing in a way uniquely his own that the show must go on,
he hybridizes his two ostensibly irreconcilable métiers. The physics of his devotion
has its own space and time. To express himself in the only medium he can devise, the
tumbler takes to slinking off to the crypt when the robed and hooded monks fulfill
the canonical hours above. He leaves it to others to preach to the choir. Instead, in
solitude he develops the custom of stripping down from his habit to his underclothes.
Upon entering the abbey he divested himself figuratively of his property; now he
does a literal divestment. In this array (or disarray), he venerates the Virgin Mary by
enacting his devotions in solitude before an image of Our Lady. His reverence takes
the shape of acrobatics. His physical exploits are intermingled with breast-beating,
sighs, whimpering, and other indicia of penance. The moral of the story would appear
to be “As you weep, so shall you reap.” The sequence culminates in genuflection
before the Madonna. At the end of the whole-body workout (but perhaps especially
the legwork), he collapses, not groveling, but parched and prostrate, lips chapped,
lungs gasping for oxygen, his quadriceps heavy as lead.
The story continues. Fellow monks have noticed the absenteeism of the tumbler,
who supposedly abandoned the wandering without purpose in which he engaged
professionally in the world outside. They remain unconvinced that despite now being
at least nominally a monk of some species, he has not lost his bearings and reverted
to his old ways. In their petty-mindedness, they suspect him of being shiftless. What
does he do while they knuckle down to execute their duties by singing in choir? Could
he be lounging, a laggard or loafer? Acting upon their suspicions, they trail him, ferret
out his alibi, see his unorthodoxy in action, and disapprove. The lay brother believes
that by tumbling, he is worshipping. Their reaction is dismissive: what they observe,
they judge as “not a prayer.” Through them, the abbot is alerted to the unaccustomed
and nonnormative behavior of the unwitting tumbler and spies upon him, at which
moment he witnesses a miraculous visitant. Spoiler alert! The Virgin herself descends
from heaven and, in her role as comforter, fans the tumbler. The scheming of the
brethren has backfired.
A while after this celestial encounter, the overwrought entertainer is summoned
to a meeting in the abbot’s quarters. The lay brother is tied in knots with worry. Has
he transgressed by riffing so radically on the regular worship? Has he committed
not really but metaphorically a faux pas? Will his superior have him ejected from
the abbey? Will he be defrocked for his frocklessness in the crypt? All these anxieties
prove to be ungrounded. Instead of being reprimanded and penalized, he receives a
commendation. In the view of his spiritual father, his dance routine gives evidence
not of shirking but of supererogation: it is a balletic form of going above and beyond,
except it takes place below ground. Relief washes over the tumbler. What happens
1. The Medieval Beginnings of Our Lady’s Tumbler 21
next may seem a kind of physiological non sequitur. Beyond the physical drain
of performing multiple times a day, he has been under insufferable psychological
duress. The sudden turnabout from anxiety to reassurance and relaxation overloads
his constitution, which has become damaged through overwork. He immediately
falls ill and soon expires. In one sense, he has attained the release from life that is
designated technically as quietus. Peace and salvation have been his goals, and now
he has reached them. From another perspective, he has truly worked himself to death.
He has achieved the ultimate in work-life imbalance.
Thanks to another intervention by Mary, angels wrest the tumbler’s soul from
demons who have swooped in to claim it as their own. Despite being the beneficiary
of the Virgin’s leniency, in neither case does he witness the act himself. He cannot
measure up to a saint. He has not died after being martyred nor after living an entire
life of unpolluted virtue, from cradle to grave. At the same time, beyond the shadow of
a doubt, the entertainer who has become a lay brother has won ringing endorsement
from the Mother of God. Although he is rail-thin and worn to the nub by asceticism,
what happens around him are not his own fatigue-induced hallucinations. The
miracles may function to his maximum advantage, but they take place unbeknownst
to him. Rather, they are genuine epiphanies to which others can testify. They are
wonders for which impartial, even skeptical eyewitnesses can vouch.
If we dissect the tale and seek to taxonomize it within present-day categories
of literary genres, we might waver in classifying Our Lady’s Tumbler. The genre
of the poem, if not altogether uncharacterizable, is problematic to characterize—
but fortunately those who write literature have often been much less fussy about
generic exactitude than those who criticize, historicize, and theorize it. We could
sort the poem under the heading of short story, if we regard the account as fiction.
Alternatively, we could class it as minor biography, if we buy that it was meant
to be taken as a record of reality—a moment in history. We could compare it
profitably with the Occitan literary form called vida, which presented in prose a
brief life story of a troubadour. Then again, we could subsume it within one subset
of writings about the saints. Hagiography encompasses writings on the lives and
deaths of saints, their miracles, and the fate of their mortal remains. By this measure
the French text fits squarely within the form—it recounts a miracle tale about the
Mother of God, who is a saint even if the tumbler is not. To go a step further, it tells
a double wonder: In the first instance, the Virgin intervenes to succor physically
a devotee of hers. In the second, she tops her earlier assistance by interceding to
save his eternal soul from hell for heaven. The poem is technically a soteriological
Marian miracle tale, in which the Mother of God performs a wonder to redeem an
individual. As such, it falls within a subgenre of miracles about Mary that is not
attested definitively before the eleventh century.
22 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
To return to familiar territory, the narrative unfolded in Our Lady’s Tumbler is an
exemplum, just as the preamble to the poem declares. As might happen in a sermon, the
tale concentrates our undivided attention upon reversals in stature. The tumbler has
attained worldly success and prosperity, which he abandons. Within the monastery,
he rates himself a total washout. Yet in the end, he manages to reach the ultimate of
un- and otherworldliness. He attains recognition by securing a lifeline twice, both
times courtesy of Mary. Our Lady’s Tumbler conjures up a hefty set of oppositions. It
sets in competition the categories of lay and monastic, literate and illiterate, official
and unofficial, public and private, liturgical and non- or paraliturgical, verbal and
nonverbal, devout and blasphemous, and even aboveground and underground.
Indeed, the list of such antonyms could be extended almost without end. What is
more, the poem raises urgent questions about love, regarded at least nowadays as
quite possibly the most powerful and mysterious aspect of human life, whether
directed toward another person, God, or both.
But we get ahead of ourselves by delving into such subtleties and shades of grey
before dealing with more elementary issues. Prompted by the medieval text, our path
must commence, whether we recognize it as such or not, with words preserved in
ink on parchment. We must toe our way carefully, letter by letter, across and down
painstakingly prepped and smoothed rectangles of cowhide. The manuscripts that
transmit the text help us to hear the words and read the minds of people from the
Middle Ages. A codex has an altogether different shape from a low-caliber revolver,
yet if we seek out a smoking gun in the distant past of the Middle Ages, we need to
start our search for the fumes by looking at the books made of animal skin.
The Manuscripts
Manuscripts can bear a deceptive resemblance to printed volumes, but by their
very nature the first are handwritten (Latin manu “by hand,” scriptus “written’).
Consequently, all such products are unique. No mass-produced items of this sort exist,
any more than do assembly-line medieval cathedrals. No two styles of penmanship
are the same. These objects, each one of a kind, pump the lifeblood of medieval studies,
or at least fill the circulatory system for that vital force. In many respects, they were
the vascular network of the Middle Ages themselves. They constitute the veins and
arteries of the bloodstream through which medieval folk, especially the educated, have
been best able to reach across the centuries and millennia and to communicate with
us—and we with them. For all the skewing that results from their being the output of
literate elites, such codices have always offered a sweet spot for access to the minds
and hearts of many medieval people. By metonymy, they present medievalists an
illusion that the era in which they specialize is remote but not intangible. Parchment
leads to poetry and prose. Poems take us all the way to poets.
1. The Medieval Beginnings of Our Lady’s Tumbler 23
Books made of vellum and its kin embody a massive societal commitment. The
investment came partly in what might now be called “staff time.” Preparing an animal
skin to create a proper writing surface, penning texts upon it by hand with quill and
ink, and binding it into a codex were all labor-intensive processes, often requiring
teams of specialists. This cursory conspectus elides many steps in the production of
even the plainest of plain-vanilla manuscripts. The economic costs of materials were
also real and mounted high. The pelts employed for parchment could have been used
instead for fabricating clothing, buckets, harnesses, or any of the thousand other
functions that leather fulfilled in the Middle Ages, which plastics or synthetic fabrics
might serve today. Although the parchmenting process often renders the hide soft
and smooth, the resultant material is tough. It may be scuffed, scratched, and snipped,
but it can stand a lot.
Where manuscripts now reside holds interest, but far more consequential than the
libraries in which they sit today is where they originated and how they relate to one
another. In total, five codices of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries preserve the
verse work Our Lady’s Tumbler. The original, at least as it has been handed down to us,
is recorded in a form of French marked with many features of the language spoken
and written in Picardy, a territory in the northern part of France. It could be termed
Franco-Picard. The relationship between the literary idiom now customarily called
Old French and the living colloquials or dialects grouped under the name Picard
remains heatedly debated. When the poem was composed, the pecking order of
languages within France was not yet established. Picard has devolved into a regional
tongue or dialect under the overall umbrella of Jangue d’oil, the language employed
in the northern half of the country and other nearby areas, but in the early thirteenth
century, the linguistic and dialectal spectrum looked very different. Whatever label
we attach to what is now a patois, the important thing is that the text is, and had to be,
in the vernacular. It tells of a leading character who is nonclerical, illatinate, illiterate,
and unlearned. Without making a conscious effort, he contests the world that belongs
to his Latin, literate, and learned confreres. Thus, it juxtaposes very deliberately at
least two or three discourses and sets of values.
The text’s prototypes have vanished. We do not have a rough draft that the poet
wrote out himself or that he dictated to a scribe. We lack even the next stage of a
clean and corrected version. But we possess one manuscript closely related to the lost
original. The other four all seem to stand at two or more additional removes from the
hypothetical author’s original, or holograph. The unconfirmed authorial fair copy is
sometimes designated the urtext, a term taken from German. The affiliation of the
handwritten versions has been set down graphically in a genealogical chart that is
known as a stemma (see Fig. 1.1).
24 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
/\
/\,
/\/\
Fig. 1.1 Stemma of Our Lady’s Tumbler. Vector Art by Melissa Tandysh (2014) after Hermann
Wachter, “Der Springer unserer lieben Frau,” Romanische Forschungen 11.1 (1901): 299. Image
courtesy of Melissa Tandysh. All rights reserved.
This kind of diagram is meant to isolate what is styled an archetype. This
primogenitor sires a lineage of descendants, whose relative purity and propriety are
to be spotlighted. Low-quality codices are black sheep (or cows, if the writing surface
is vellum). We could take the metaphor further to call them bastards in the family
tree. The propinquity of copies to the real or hypothetical original is determined
by detecting what are called fallacies. Editors of texts, following the procedures of
stemmatics, hunt down common errors that are shared by different manuscripts. By
doing so, they narrow down how the varying texts preserved in the medieval books
are related to one other.
Textual edition and criticism prioritize the identification of supposed
misapprehensions by those involved in writing out words by hand. To a degree, these
two arts rest on an assumption that manuscripts and the scribes who produce them
are error-prone. Consequently, they are often not enterprises that nurture positive
and charitable thinking about the work of others. Philologists committed to such
pursuits may go to great lengths in tallying errata. Over the centuries, the medieval
copyists who have been put under the microscopes of these scholars have been on
the receiving end of much obloquy for their real or alleged blunders. Helpless to
defend themselves, they have been excoriated over and over again as stupid and
slovenly bunglers. They have been taken to task especially for luckless efforts to
make changes on the fly when they encountered wording that made no sense to them.
Another consideration important for us to recognize is that the processes of editing
and criticizing texts were held in the highest regard in the late nineteenth century,
when nation-states were created and coalesced in Europe. Researchers contributed
to the construction of nationhood by delivering to the public through the educational
system the earliest literary expressions of national identities. First, they identified and
1. The Medieval Beginnings of Our Lady’s Tumbler 25
concurred about texts worthy of being considered foundational. Then they located
and validated the manuscripts most faithful to their originals so that they could
constitute reliable editions.
In the sort of genealogy that a stemma provides, letters from the Greek and Roman
alphabets customarily serve to signify individual manuscripts. Each such designation
is called a siglum. In this case the letter O represents the lost original or archetype,
which transmitted the urtext. The letter a stands for an early exemplar that was made
as a copy of the archetype, although it, too, has not lasted. The alpha and beta, a and
6, that come below the Roman letter are two further exemplars that were copied from
it. Neither of these is extant either; they also are hypothetical. Tangible and legible
reality arrives in the next stage. From each of a and B, two handwritten versions were
copied that survive. In each pair, the text of one shows signs of having been affected
by consultation of one in the other couple. To indicate this crossover, the sigla of these
two are joined by the dashed line that traces an arc between them.
Of the five manuscripts that are not merely hypothetical but indeed exist, one has
been deemed higher-ranking by all editors to date for the text it transmits. Its shelfmark,
a notation that indicates its place in a collection, refers to the Arsenal library. Although
far from infallible, the folios in this codex lack the major errors that are common to all
the other codices that descend from the lost archetype, a. This text is largely without
the omission or inversion of verses, faults in rhyme, mistakes in diction, and so forth
that mar the other exemplars. This five-star copy has been assigned the letter F as
its sighum in the stemma. In recognition of its superiority, it has been accorded a
fork in the family tree all to itself. Alas, the prime quality of the text does not mean
automatically that the manuscript has been passed down to us intact or even in sound
condition. Fourteen folios have been vandalized. Most of the miniatures have been
cut out, with attendant damage to many texts in the codex. What lingers of the art is
the sad equivalent of the chalk on asphalt that outlines where the body of a homicide
victim was found. But by exceedingly good fortune the image accompanying our
tale remains mainly undamaged. The year in which the manuscript was written and
assembled can be inferred from a piece of internal evidence. A perpetual calendar at
the beginning commences with the year 1268. For readily recognizable reasons, we
can conclude that the poem was composed before then—but by how long? To take on
a still more intriguing question, by whom?
Gautier de Coinci and Anonymity
Our Lady’s Tumbler leads off a section in the Arsenal manuscript that mainly comprises
miracles of the Virgin. Not one of the codices gives the faintest indication of authorship:
in all five the poem is anonymous. The poet’s name may have been present in the
archetype but gone missing between it and the earliest codex, or the author may have
kept his identity a deliberate cipher. Anonymity would have been consonant with
medieval Christian values as a fitting assertion of modesty. Such self-suppression
26 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
would have been especially appropriate if the writer had been a monk. Remember
that the central figure of the poem is likewise unnamed. Since the tale is all about
modesty and simplicity, it is apt for both the poet and his protagonist to be nameless.
For application to the Middle Ages, the Shakespearean question “What's in a name?”
could be reformulated with equal relevance as “What's in namelessness?” The
anonymity of the title character befits his humble occupation as well as his personal
humility. For that matter, the anonymity of the poem itself could be construed as an
apt touch of modesty.
Despite the lack of an ascription, many translators and authors who have adapted
the story have credited it unequivocally but wrongly to a specific northern French
poet and musician in the Benedictine order (see Figs. 1.2 and 1.3). Particularly in
France, this Gautier de Coinci has enjoyed favor and name recognition among literati
far beyond the degree to which he has been translated and read. He was born in
the village of Coinci-L’Abbaye, south of Soissons, probably in 1177 or 1178. Notre-
Dame de Soissons was the abbey there, with a church dedicated to Mary. A good-
sized portion of the monastery as it existed in the times of this monk withstood the
hazards of time until the French Revolution (see Fig. 1.4). At that point the complex of
buildings suffered a blindingly rapid demise, from which little now remains (see Fig.
1.5). In Marian relics, the church possessed a slipper of the Virgin that became revered
for the miracles associated with it.
Fig. 1.2 Gautier de Coinci at work. Miniature by Fauvel Master, 1327. The Hague,
Koninklijke Bibliotheek 71 A 24, fol. 49v. Image from Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gautier_de_Coinsi.jpg
1. The Medieval Beginnings of Our Lady’s Tumbler 27
Fig. 1.3 Gautier de Coinci (detail). Miniature, 1260-1270. Brussels, Bibliotheque royale Albert I,
MS 10747, fol. 3r. Image courtesy of Bibliotheque royale Albert I, Brussels. All rights reserved.
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SOISSONS XVIII* siécle. — Vue de l'Abbaye Notre-Dame et de son Eglise, prise du bord de la riviere. — Sadat 64S
Cette abbaye de bénddictines fut fondée par saint Drousin, eveque de Soissons, avec le concours #Ebroin, en 47%? ©
660, L'église que lon yout etait siiuée sur la place Sasnt-Pierre. Sa tour ajourée était un chef-d'@uve dev oLaviilte
legéreté architecturate.
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Fig. 1.4 Postcard depicting Notre-Dame de Soissons in the
eighteenth century (Soissons, France: Nougaréde, 1903).
PrP. 0. — Nougaréde, Svisdfns
28 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
Fig. 1.5 Ruins of Notre-Dame de Soissons. Fig. 1.6 Postcard depicting the Abbey of
Photograph, 1938. Photographer unknown. Saint-Jean-des-Vignes (Paris: Levy Fils et
Cie, early twentieth century).
Fig. 1.7 Postcard depicting the cloisters at the Abbey of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes
(Paris: Neurdein et Cie, early twentieth century)
1. The Medieval Beginnings of Our Lady’s Tumbler 29
ame
ai ep ast
Fig. 1.8 L’Abbaye de Saint-Médard, Soissons. Engraving, date and artist unknown.
Gautier grew up in a region tied particularly closely to the Mother of God. Sometime
after 1143, a Latin author by the name of Hugh Farsit composed a prose collection of
miracle stories, many of them connected with the local Madonna. He was a regular
canon of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes, a monastery of Augustinian canons in Soissons (see
Figs. 1.6 and 1.7), and his book of traditions about Mary from the vicinity records
the miraculous healings she performed in this municipality during the fast-spreading
epidemic of ergotism that swept over northern France in 1128. This outbreak is often
identified by referring to the French victims as ardents “burning people.” The qualifier
alluded to the discomfort that they experienced: the hot and bothered.
At the age of fifteen or sixteen, Gautier himself entered as a novice monk into the
Benedictine house of Saint Médard at Soissons in 1193 (see Fig. 1.8). He remained
there for more than two decades. In 1214, he became prior of Sainte Léocade at Vic-
sur-Aisne, a village within hailing distance of Soissons, and served there nearly twenty
years. In 1233, he was appointed Grand Prior back at Saint-Médard, an office that an
uncle of his had held. If he had been the author of Our Lady’s Tumbler, he would have
30 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
had good cause to be impressed by the chilly crypt of Saint-Médard and to think of
it as the venue for the tumbling of the lead character in the poem (see Fig. 1.9). The
space would have been as striking then as it is today. The poet died in 1236, in the
same monastery where he had begun his monastic calling.
Fig. 1.9 The crypt of the abbey of Saint-Médard, Soissons.
Engraving by Léon Gaucherel, date unknown.
Between 1212 and 1236, Gautier composed two books of verse Marian miracles known
as Miracles of Our Lady. This chronology means that he had two staging grounds for
his poetic creation. Although he wrote the individual segments mostly in Vic-sur-
Aisne, he began and finished them at Saint-Médard in Soissons. His text achieves an
extraordinary range in its language and rhetoric, holds to a careful and goal-oriented
plan, and puts on display a discriminating and satirical perspective on both the
secular and ecclesiastical society of his day. Many of his versified tales touch at least
in passing upon images of the Mother of God. In numerous instances he introduces
Madonnas when they were not mentioned in the Latin sources upon which he draws.
Eleven of his stories go so far as to involve such representations as characters within
their narratives. If Marian miracle tales qualify as a specific literary genre, ones about
statues or paintings of the Virgin form a distinct and multipart subgenre within it.
Time and again, such narratives were associated with sites where relics of Mary were
held, and where pilgrims devoted to her would come.
Gautier’s Miracles of Our Lady were enormously popular, to judge by the total of
114 extant manuscripts. This figure plants his composition squarely in the realm of
bestsellers of the day, although none of the codices dates to his lifetime. A dozen of
these copies contain extensive musical notation. Twenty-nine have the added drawing
power of being beautifully illustrated. Likenesses of Madonnas and of Madonnine
1. The Medieval Beginnings of Our Lady’s Tumbler 31
miracles constitute a salient feature of the codices. The depictions emphasize figures
as they kneel in supplication before images of the Virgin. In the Byzantine world, the
act of genuflection was intrinsic within the veneration of icons. In the West, it became
anachronistic by the thirteenth century. In writing, Gautier verged on describing
himself as a jongleur, or at least as a trouvere or minstrel of his lady, Notre Dame. The
stance the poet takes in his text correlates nicely to the pose in which he is presented
in one manuscript portrait, where he is portrayed as a musician in black Benedictine
monastic garb. While bowing the fiddle-like stringed instrument called the vielle, he
looks down at a big sheet of parchment with two facing folio sides of musical notation
that lies on the bench beside him (see Fig. 1.10). Thus, like the hero of Our Lady’s
Tumbler, he managed to combine in himself strains of minstrelsy and monasticism.
Fig. 1.10 Gautier de Coinci. Miniature, 1260-1270. Brussels, Bibliotheque royale Albert 1, MS
10747, fol. 3r. Image courtesy of Bibliotheque royale Albert I, Brussels. All rights reserved.
32 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
When all is said and done, the fact that Gautier was a highly successful poet from
Picardy who wrote extensively in verse on miracles of the Virgin does not suffice
to ascribe to him the authorship of Our Lady’s Tumbler. For better or worse, we have
become acclimated today to requests that we identify ourselves by our names and
birthdates, commit to memory and reel off numbers that have been affixed to us by
states and businesses, and even surrender to biometric analysis of our fingers, faces,
eyes, or more. Naturally we expect the past to bestow upon us at least some of the
same trivia about its authors.
But here we must reconcile ourselves to the anonymity in which much medieval
literature has been engulfed. Some authors cloaked themselves in this kind of
impersonality by choice, for reasons of Christian humility or owing to differing
conceptions of authorship. The indifference of scribes or the happenstances of sloppy
transmission imposed namelessness upon others. In any case, the identity and
individuality of authors mattered far less, or at least far differently, in the Middle
Ages than now. Many works traveled under aliases. Along with Pseudo-, Anonymous
was the most prolific of medieval authors. She or he composed Beowulf, The Song of
Roland, and Aucassin et Nicolette, to name only three texts from the many that spilled
out from the comucopia of anonymity.
In the same company, the poet of Our Lady’s Tumbler has no name right now. Indeed,
none is likely ever to be accorded that will win general agreement. In medieval times,
stories tended to be treated as in the common domain, whether they surrounded
legendary figures of late antiquity or the early Middle Ages such as Arthur and
Charlemagne, were connected with the heroic wars and haphazard wanderings of
classical myths relating to Troy and Thebes, or celebrated the travails and triumphs of
saints. No conventions of copyright existed, let alone of royalties, and the conception
of plagiarism differed starkly from our own. Both copyright and unacknowledged
borrowing have been under constant renegotiation since the advent of personal
computers. The authors, collectors, scribes, readers, and hearers of medieval literature
appear often to have been untroubled about the fine points of authorial rights.
Many authorless texts from the Middle Ages are subject to a high degree of textual
variance. With each rewriting by a scribe, they have been affected by variations in
dialect, minor changes in lexicon here and there, thoroughgoing expansion and
contraction, and sometimes even more drastic redrafting. This sort of textual mobility,
a hallmark of manuscript culture, is alien to the fixity that has become expected of
printed texts. It has been described with an imported French word, mouvance.
No deduction about the author of Our Lady’s Tumbler is unquestionable or
unimpugnable, beyond the fact that a poet was at work—and a very fine one at that.
Yet when all is said and done, the anonymity need not deal us as expositors a crippling
blow. All is not lost. We can still gain some sense of him, and an even greater one of
the characters in his Our Lady’s Tumbler. The challenge is to exercise caution and not,
in our eagerness to know the writer, to draw any hasty inferences. The unnamed poet
1. The Medieval Beginnings of Our Lady’s Tumbler 33
had his finger on the pulse of monasticism, but he need not have been a monk. He
knew the minstrelsy, but he does not have to have been a minstrel himself. Regardless
of his status, we have a fighting chance of determining the pecking order of human
values in which he participated. In that valuation, the spiritual was privileged over the
material. The ne plus ultra was to attain heaven through a mystical communion with
the divine. But let us get both feet back on the ground, by examining the language and
region with which the poet and poem are associated.
Picardy
Of the five medieval manuscripts, the earliest witness for Our Lady’s Tumbler survives
from the second half of the thirteenth century. As mentioned, the poem has been
described as being in Old French, the tongue spoken in the northern half of modern
France and related regions from the ninth through the fourteenth centuries. Yet
attaching this linguistic tag to the tale may oversimplify and distort the situation.
The study of French in the Middle Ages, like that of most medieval languages, was
established in the nationalistic atmosphere of the late nineteenth century. To serve
the end of buttressing nation-states, the major languages of Europe that existed or
were being willed into existence at that time were read back into the medieval past.
The dialect that became modern French was in fact hardly the most important in
the literary production of twelfth- and even thirteenth-century France, but its later
centrality was retrojected upon it by the philologists who constructed the field of
Romance philology.
The patriarchs of Old French in the glory days of the field lived in a world of
nationalism. Furthermore, their nation under the Third Republic revolved around a
clearly defined and outsized capital city. If Paris was the axle, it was set into a hub,
the greater Parisian region known as Ile-de-France. This conceptualization does not
apply to the Middle Ages, but it was forced upon it by simultaneous anachronism
and anatopism. By the late nineteenth century, dialects existed on the margins of
a standardized official language, French. The concept of Old French assumes the
existence of a similarly standard idiom already during the medieval period.
By the touchstone of today’s population distribution, at the very northern tip of
what is now France, Picardy may look peripheral. The territory is extrametropolitan,
since it lies outside Paris. France has many cities but at the same time the country has
been centralized for centuries now around the capital. The national transportation
systems and governmental reporting structure may be visualized as a set of spokes
radiating from what is now the City of Light and reaching out to the felly of the
French frontiers. Yet this was not the organization of communication and power in the
early thirteenth century, when Our Lady’s Tumbler was written. Localizing the poem
in this northern area and in the Picard dialect likely means that the poet in fact was
born, reared, and lived in that region. Those credentials place him at a long distance
34 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
geographically from daily life where the events of Our Lady’s Tumbler reputedly
occurred. Clairvaux was a monastery in Champagne. Among other things, it was
the abbey of Saint Bernard, from its foundation as daughter house of Citeaux Abbey,
mother house of the Cistercian religious order of monks and nuns, until Bernard’s
death in 1153. The white monks sought to reignite strict observance of the Rule of
Saint Benedict, framed in the day of the founder himself, and to hammer home self-
sufficiency through manual labor, as early Benedictinism had done.
Obviously, the poem cannot have been written after the earliest datable manuscript
in 1268, but the earliest surviving record of a text can come from long after the time
of its writing. In this case, a frequent conjecture suggests that the text was composed
around 1200, or even in the late twelfth century. The most thoroughgoing analysis has
pegged the dating approximately in the late third decade of the thirteenth century.
The linchpin of this chronology rested upon resemblances to the poetry of Gautier de
Coinci, who died in 1236. As to place of origin, the most cogent hypothesis has been
that the poet settled as a white monk in Ponthieu, a feudal county in northern France.
Yet this reasoning, close to being a sophism, capitulates to the fallacious argumentation
that is called the thin edge of the wedge. The premise that the writer was a Cistercian
arises from the glowing praise that he gives to retreat from the world. The supposition
that he belonged to a community in this particular locality has only one toehold: he
singles it out for mention once. Both inferences are tenuous at best.
The Identity of the Poet
In a way, the name of the poet is nearly extraneous. Even if we knew this one detail
in isolation but had no certitudes about social class, educational background, or other
life circumstances, we would be no better positioned for guesswork about how his
biography could inform our interpretation of the work. The style and content of the
poem are tantalizing, since they imply that its writer was as sure-footed a metrist as
his protagonist was an athlete. Although incontestably literate, he does not have all
his facts straight about Clairvaux, however. Still, he was reasonably well acquainted
with monks and monasteries. His ready knowledge of monastic life has long led some
readers to assume that he was likely a brother himself, but the groundwork for this
assumption warrants close and careful appraisal. The delineation that we are given of
the tumbler’s life among the lay brethren may be a touch misleading. No one in his
capacity would have been allowed to rove daylong—or at least during all the eight
canonical hours of prayer— without having set duties. Coenobites were closer to being
battery hens than free-range chickens.
At the same time, the author of Our Lady’s Tumbler also had deep involvement
in the lay world outside the monastery. He comprehended the simultaneous awe
and alienation that the laity felt before the wealth, sophistication, and foreignness of
1. The Medieval Beginnings of Our Lady’s Tumbler 35
abbeys and life inside them. Nothing would have stopped a knowledgeable layman
outside from writing of a lay brother’s experiences within a cloister. The poet tells a
tale that gives no hint of being intended to establish or popularize a shrine, monastic
or otherwise, as a pilgrimage site. Yet the poem could have been meant to disseminate
the fame of the Cistercian order generally. More particularly, it could have served
to highlight the contributions that lay brethren made inside the order, as well as
to uphold the esteem in which they deserved to be held within it. Could the poet
have been privy to the inner workings of both classes of brothers, from having taken
the cloth only after having lived a relatively long life as a laic? The reality is that
uncountable, not fictional medieval monks and friars found their monastic vocation
and donned a habit only after having spent full lives in the world.
An argument framed just about a century ago posited that the poet of Our Lady’s
Tumbler was identical with the one who produced two other anonymous medieval
French poems from the beginning of the thirteenth century, The Knight of the Barrel
and The Hermit and the Jongleur, going so far as to posit Our Lady’s Tumbler to be a
pendant to the latter. The case was built on strong similarities in language, versification
(including rhymes), themes, and motifs. Both tales relate narratives that could be
reckoned as exemplary in a twofold sense. First, they tell of characters who provide
sterling examples to imitate and emulate. Second, they could easily be imagined as
having been or as becoming exempla, those short tales used in sermons for illustrative
purposes. Both stories have as their point of balance the theme of repentance. Although
the penance takes place near religious figures, it does not require in either case a priest
or mea culpa.
The Knight of the Barrel is anything but a barrel of laughs; it is more like the medieval
equivalent of a bucket list. Its outcome demonstrates the principle “Only tears will be
weighed at the Last Judgment.” In this tale, a venerable hermit charges a cruel, impious,
and blasphemous nobleman with filling from a rivulet a keg that he gives him (see Fig.
1.11 below). After the water refuses to enter the under-hydrated container, the knight
sets out a-wandering. At each spring or river he passes, he tries to fill the small vat.
Only at the end of his existence does the nobleman return to the old solitary and shed a
tear for his former life of misdeeds. This one sign of contrition is the defining moment
in what is revealed to be the archetypal sob story. As it turns out, this single globule
of liquid suffices miraculously to leave the little vessel waterlogged. The sole deposit
from his lacrimation is the drop in the bucket that gives the lie to the proverbial turn
of phrase. Just as Our Lady’s Tumbler compels its audience to ponder the nature of true
devotion, so, too, The Knight of the Barrel impels its readers or listeners to contemplate
the purport of penance (see Fig. 1.12 below). In modern figurative use, we describe a
forgetful so-and-so as having a mind like a sieve, since by design this utensil normally
fails to retain all its contents. In the medieval tale, one special barrel performs differently
from usual ones, so that it may serve as a spiritual test.
36 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
Fig. 1.11 The Knight of the Barrel. Miniature, from an unidentified manuscript in the Bibliotheque
nationale de France, Paris. Reproduced in Emile Abry et al., Histoire illustrée de la littérature francaise
(Paris: Henri Didier, 1946), 32.
Fig. 1.12 The Knight of the Barrel. Illustration by Pio Santini, 1946. Published in Jéréme and Jean Tharaud,
Les contes de la Vierge (Paris: Société d’éditions littéraires francaises, 1946), between pp. 140 and 141.
1. The Medieval Beginnings of Our Lady’s Tumbler 37
The second poem, The Hermit and the Jongleur, is extant in two additional versions.
One of these adaptations is by a poet who has been held to be a Cistercian. The story
had a rich afterlife in exempla as well. Thus, its transmission presents loose parallels
to that of Our Lady’s Tumbler.
In the opening three lines, the poet flags as his inspiration the genre known as
Lives of the Fathers (citing its common Latin title overtly)—and the relationship
is unambiguously one of source and influence. The title that this poem cites in the
learned language corresponds nearly verbatim to that of the French Life of the Fathers,
from which Our Lady’s Tumbler likewise claims to have drawn its story.
The tale sketches a hermit who displays such devotion that God sends him his
sustenance by way of an angel. Regrettably, being distinguished by this signal honor
makes the loner grow self-important and insolent. Emboldened, he asks to be told
who will accompany him in paradise. To his displeasure, the spirit relays God’s fiat:
his companion will be a jongleur. In this instance, the performer turns out to be a
fiddler. The ascetic puffs up indignantly that he has expended no inconsiderable
efforts in his religious life; he does not appreciate being made to share his lot in the
afterlife with a base entertainer. The messenger of God replies that by divine grace a
repentant sinner can become rich in good works. The recluse then strikes out to find
his promised companion. After leaving his abode and going to town, he encounters
in the market place a poor but pious jongleur who has no means of earning his keep
except with his stringed instrument and bow. After being upbraided by the skeptical
solitary, the musician furnishes three examples of his virtuous conduct in the past.
When the minstrel learns afterward from the hermit what has been foretold, he passes
out. Upon regaining consciousness, he announces his intention to remain with the
recluse. When the two return to the hermitage, its previous occupant finds himself
locked out for his affront against God. An angel wafts down and signifies that the
offense has been venial, but predicts that after three days the reclusive fellow will be
pardoned. Yet one holdup arises: his companion will enter paradise before him. After
two days and a night of prayer in penance, the fiddle-player becomes debilitated and
dies. On the third day, the man of God also expires. Attendant spirits ferry their souls
to paradise.
The poem of The Hermit and the Jongleur is pious, but for whom was it intended?
Likewise, who wrote it? It belongs to a clump of tales that has been labeled “the
cycle of brotherhood.” The tag describes characters who are related, much as siblings
would be. They share an aspiration to achieve perfection and to determine their
salvation through their demeanor on earth. Yet they issue from disparate social strata
and vocations. In all three cases, those of The Hermit and the Jongleur, The Knight of the
Barrel, and Our Lady’s Tumbler, we the readers are left guessing whether the poet was
a monk or not. Without a doubt, he was conversant with monastic life. For all that, he
was under no contractual obligation to make his composition a versified customary:
he does not have to detail hour by hour the practices of brothers. By the same token,
38 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
in the imaginary landscape of his poem he was not constrained to abide exactly
by the architecture of Cistercian churches. The author could have been a onetime
professional entertainer but now a monk, formerly drilled to satisfy lay audiences but
latterly dedicated to his monastic brethren. He would have known how to address
both insiders, the cliquish cenobites within monasteries, and outsiders, such as
prospective converts who came from professions as marginal as his had been. And
he would have been intimate with the type of protagonist he portrayed in Our Lady’s
Tumbler. The poem, like its hero, has a topsy-turvy quality that enables it to beckon to
both the status quo and its revolutionary opposite.
The Bas-de-Page Miniature: Of Marginal Interest
"CAN 1 JUST LooK AT THE PictURES?"
Fig. 1.13 “Can I just look at the pictures?” © Paul Taylor. All rights reserved.
Medieval literature plays out first and foremost, textually, artistically, musically, and
otherwise, in the manuscripts that transmit the texts. The codices are often the sole
equivalents we possess from the Middle Ages to printed books, audio-recordings,
live performances, musical notation, illustrations, or most of the other media we take
so much for granted nowadays. When those handwritten objects contain artwork, it
should be vetted with the greatest care. In addition to its own inherent value and
importance, it holds importance for its relationship to the text. Literary critics may use
the written word to achieve interpretative liftoff, regarding the art as no more than
an auxiliary element in the interpretative context. Art historians may do the opposite.
To a degree, both are right. The two sets of experts contribute essential perspectives
to an understanding and appreciation of what the codices furnish us. In some cases,
medieval art and written work may be meticulously aligned. Often, but not always,
1. The Medieval Beginnings of Our Lady’s Tumbler 39
the interpretation of the words dictates the pictures that are supplied. In other
instances, the art leads a life of its own—text and image are on the same page literally
but not metaphorically. That is the situation with the miniature accompanying our
poem from the early thirteenth century.
In the case of Our Lady’s Tumbler, the original text has motivated many modern
literary imitations. Do we dare go so far as to call them knockoffs or even rip-offs? Be
that as it may, some of these copies have been inspired directly by the medieval poem,
while many more have been tied to it only unconsciously and indirectly. Alongside
the literature, pictorial representations of the tale have also existed since the Middle
Ages. Still, the precariousness of the early evidence for illustration must be underlined.
Fig. 1.14 The jongleur before the Virgin and Child. An angelic hand delivers a towel from the heavens
while a vielle lies at the Virgin’s feet. Miniature, thirteenth century. Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France,
MS Arsenal 3516, fol. 127r. Image courtesy of Bibliotheque national de France, Paris. All rights reserved.
As we have seen, a fivesome of medieval manuscripts transmits the text of the medieval
French version. Of the five, just one contains a miniature by way of embellishment
(see Fig. 1.14). The persistence of this single illustration hung on a thread in multiple
ways. For a start, more than two dozen other paintings that should precede this
specimen have gone missing by being sliced out of the manuscript at some point in
its mysteriously checkered past, becoming nondigital clip art. It is the lucky survivor.
40 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
If only it could talk, to tell its story as in the Book of Job: “I only am escaped alone
to tell thee.” Another fragility of the artwork owes to its placement on the folio. It
differs from most in its codex, and in fact from those in any whatsoever, by being
unusually misaligned. It sits in what would otherwise have been the unwritten-on
and unornamented void below the left column of text on the folio side, which in
French is termed bas-de-page, designating the lower edge of a side of parchment. In
illuminated manuscripts, embellishments and marginal illustrations often appear in
this area, but only atypically would a miniature in a contained frame be put there in
the border. This placement was avoided for a good practical reason: by being set at
the foot of a page, a piece of this kind is subjected to increased wear and tear from
handling and from trimming. (It has no margin of safety.) By being enclosed, such
a painting stands out from unenclosed marginalia, which are far more commonly
found in this location. The nonstandard placement was probably not prearranged.
Rather, the item may have been an afterthought supplied only after the text had been
written. The inference that this artwork was a late addition is fortified by the stylistic
separateness of the portrayal. The brushwork was done by a different hand than that
involved in all the other extant pictures from this codex.
The artist has been associated with the one who participated in producing a copy
of Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval and its Continuations that may have been created
in Arras. In this town in the northernmost region of France, an extremely famous
miracle connected with two entertainers and involving a statue of the Virgin Mary
was reputed to have taken place. Although the episode is not mentioned in our poem,
it may help to explain why the miniature contains a depiction of the vielle. An artist,
patron, or both would naturally have associated and conflated the tumbler-minstrel
with the renowned pair of local jongleurs, promoted by a municipal confraternity.
If the composition is viewed as a stage setting, the instrument is placed lower stage
left. It lies at the bottom of a line that runs to the semiotically all-important position
of upper stage right, where a supernal forearm extends a fabric toward the bowed
acrobat. Is the fiddle meant to recall the professionals of the other stories?
Within the text of the poem, the seminudity of the tumbler is provocative. In
contrast, the illustrator painted the performer as anything but half-naked —the athlete
is portrayed fully clothed. Indeed, the lithe figure even has his long garment cinched
demurely at the waist and is shod in mid-calf boots. Were these touches the results of
a purposeful prudery, to avoid showing even a lay brother in substantial undress, or
do they demonstrate the irresistible attraction of the other story set at Arras, in which
a minstrel would have been clad in his normal attire when sounding his fiddle?
The process by which this illuminator worked is unascertainable. We cannot
divine whether the medieval artist read or was read the text, had no direct exposure
to it but at least was clued in about the gist of the narrative by being given a short
and sweet summary, or was directed by a scribe or manuscript compiler to depict
1. The Medieval Beginnings of Our Lady’s Tumbler 41
this scene without being told the tale in full. The placement of the miniature—very
nearly at the foot of the page as it has now been trimmed—may have been motivated
by the simple reality that the space was free, or it might equally have been prompted
by the suitability of the position on the folio side to the standing that the performer
would have had in society at the time, reflecting the ignoble societal associations that
acrobats and dancers endured at the time when the illustration was painted. Within
the artwork, the tumbler himself has his head positioned level with his own backside.
He stands curved back upon himself, below the plinth on which the statue of the
Virgin and Child begins. Thus, the representation conveys abasement both literal and
figurative.
In Romanesque statuary, we find jongleurs pictured in privileged places on facades,
portals, and capitals throughout Europe, or at least from Germany and the south. In
the Gothic period, only slightly later, the entertainers seem to have cascaded to lower
orders, and slipped as well to a back seat within the iconographic hierarchy. Their
images are now placed in subservient locations. For instance, they are depicted on
the underside of the folding seats known as misericords, wooden carvings found in
choir stalls, to say nothing of their place in miniatures and marginalia in manuscripts.
Just as a lay convert has baser status than does a choir monk, so too the location of the
image on the folio could be construed as signifying its humbler value.
The English adjective humble derives from the Latin humus, for soil or ground. By
setting the miniature at the farthest point from the top of the page, the artist or the
person overseeing him may have intended to humiliate—put down—the humble
tumbler. Strikingly, the angel, Virgin, and Child are positioned far above him. The
tumbler is located before the statue of Mary and the infant Jesus on the altar, with
his head at the height of his buttocks. This could be called making a rumpus, even
though the last noun owes no etymological debt to the word rump. His head is
cocked downward and groundward, and his line of sight is directed at his own
hindquarters, rather than at the carving above him. Talk about low-profile! If the
lower classes are supposed to aim at an ascent to the upper, what are we to make of
a man who is the opposite of a social climber, with his head not far from the floor?
Matters are made only worse by the fact that the ground is in a crypt, itself the
lowest space within the building.
Humbleness is one of the tumbler’s conspicuous traits. A nineteenth-century
interpreter averred point-blank that the tale had been composed “to debase pride
and exalt humility.” It is much likelier that the protagonist’s physical posture makes
his meekness plain to see than that it conveys a message that we should damn the
acrobat or dancer for ungodliness. The condemnatory alternative meaning can be
found in an exemplum that compares a sinner with a jongleur who ambulates on
his palms with his feet turned heavenward. Whereas human beings should do their
best to keep their heavy-lidded eyes open on the supernal realms, entertainers
42 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
subvert normal human bearing and do the opposite. In their upside-down stance,
performers effectively trample what is heavenly, while fixing their heads and gaze,
along with their hands, on the earthly.
Another perspective is to view this liminal location as sitting outside the official
realm of control over the elite and sacred. Instead, this position at the threshold
sets the illustration within a space reserved for the least hoity-toity, popular or folk
culture. In a sense, the miniature resides in a no-man’s zone. The bas-de-page is
seldom occupied by miniatures, but often by marginal art. It can become a veritable
freak show, depicting drolleries and grotesques such as fools, wild men, monkeys,
monsters, and minstrels. One common form of marginalia that may offer a glimpse
of real-life performances portrays two entertainers who show the bread and butter of
their trade: a musician strums an instrument alongside a male or female acrobat who
performs a somersault, flip, or handstand. These representations are always parked
in the lowest register of the folio sides (see Figs. 1.15, 1.16 and 1.17). In codicological
terms, art in this ribbon of parchment is comparable to carvings in wood or stone, such
as misericords, chimeras, and gargoyles, that lay somewhat outside the controlled
formulation of iconography. Consequently, the imagery is itself marginalized and is
put beneath the text, in value as in position. The placement could bring home visually
and symbolically the story’s revolutionary outlook on lay and monastic relations—to
wit, the jongleur holds a questionable ranking even within the laity but with the help
of Mary’s reaction to his sincere devotion, he turns out to be superior spiritually to
the monks. Then again, such an interpretation could conceivably be overthinking.
The miniature could have been put in the bas-de-page not through premeditation but
through poor planning or mismanagement, which unwittingly saved it from damage
when the other miniatures preceding it were excised.
The image may be easier to appreciate closely in a black-and-white facsimile
made in the early twentieth century, because in the meantime some degradation has
taken place: part of the bas-de-page has been trimmed off (see Fig. 1.18). Occupying
the bottom left quarter of the frame, the miniature shows the tumbler performing
acrobatics by arching backward in a hoop. The depiction could offer the freeze-frame
view of a gymnast in the middle of a backflip. A performer is captured in a similar
circular pose, with his hands clasping his lower legs above the ankles, in a portion of
a sculpted limestone pilaster that is now in The Cloisters (see Fig. 1.19). Then again,
and perhaps likelier, the miniature need not be a split-second of seeming stillness
that has been isolated from lightning-fast motion. It could portray a specific pose the
acrobat has struck. It could show him not midway into a backward flip, but rather
in the gymnastic position known today as a bridge. He is recurved, like the tusk of
a wild boar or an elephant. Frozen in this posture like an (athletic) insect trapped in
amber, he has bent backwards until both his soles and his palms rest upon the ground.
Literally as well as metaphorically, he is no backslider. Instead, he is well grounded,
levelheaded, and down-to-earth.
1. The Medieval Beginnings of Our Lady’s Tumbler 43
Fig. 1.15 Musician and tumbler. Miniature by Petrus de Raimbaucourt, 1323. The Hague, Koninklijke
Bibliotheek, 78 D 40, fol. 108r. Image courtesy of Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague. All rights reserved.
O90 fi eto tit 08. Erervip niamerus filro
reehiOath beseniaaticens G fine rtifanaé:
.€ eer Too wn dient?
a. is s deeet’ c1s, At OF Ut
ners Er ogregabunna fis dae
Fig. 1.16 Musician and tumbler. Miniature, late thirteenth century. Lausanne, Bibliotheque
cantonale et universitaire de Lausanne, U 964, fol. 343v. Image courtesy of the Virtual Manuscript
Library of Switzerland, www.e-codices.unifr.ch, CC BY-NC.
The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
Fig. 1.17 Musicians, dancers, and tumblers. Miniature by Jehan de Grise, 1338-1344. Oxford,
Bodleian Library, MS Bod. 264, fol. 90r. Image courtesy of the Bodleian Library, Oxford. All
rights reserved.
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Fig. 1.18 The jongleur before the Virgin and Child. Miniature, thirteenth century. Paris,
Bibliothéque nationale de France, MS Arsenal 3516, fol. 127r. Monochrome facsimile, published in
Alice Kemp-Welch, trans., Of the Tumbler of Our Lady & Other Miracles (London: Chatto & Windus,
1908), frontispiece.
1. The Medieval Beginnings of Our Lady’s Tumbler 45
Fig. 1.19 Portion of a pilaster with an acrobat, ca. 1150-1170, Lyonnais. Limestone,
30.8 x 21 x 26.7 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In medieval manuscripts, text and image can be foils to each other. They can affirm
in two separate media one and the same message; contrarily, they can set in conflict
a couple of different perspectives. In this case, the kineticism of the acrobat in motion
contrasts with the sedate stability of the text. By the same token, the mobility of the
devotion that the lay brother performs is opposed to the static state of the monks as
they stand rooted to their spots, singing the songs of the liturgical office in the choir
somewhere above him. Yet the tumbler’s movement is not wobbly: his flipping back
and forth is not like the flip-flopping in policy and backpedaling in rhetoric that are
belittled in politics. He is at the midpoint of a happily steep learning curve.
Paradoxically, the tumbler’s half-inverted stance calls to mind the likeness that
Bernard of Clairvaux drew between the monks of his order, on the one hand, and
jongleurs and tumblers on the other. The impressively athletic posture in which the
performer has been caught has a sheer devotional aspect. We cannot forget that, after
all, he bends over backward both literally and figuratively to please none other than
the Virgin. If he is an athlete, he is (however unconventionally and even raffishly)
an athlete of Christ. If he is masculine, his masculinity has no more machismo than
does Jesus when hanging on the cross. At the same time, his pose approaches being
Dantesque or infernal in its unnaturalness. Despite having no permanent deformity,
he has misshapen himself temporarily. One commonplace, built upon Ovid's
Metamorphoses, held that human beings were unique among the creatures of this
world in their posture. They were formed to stand erect so that they could train their
sight easily upon heaven. This natural inclination seems twisted in the stance of the
tumbler, which is against the grain. As a result, he bears a resemblance to one of the
46 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
monstrous races that captivated the imaginations of teratologists in the Middle Ages.
Take, for example, the creatures called Blemmyes, who were believed to lack heads
but instead to possess eyes and mouths in their stomachs (see Fig. 1.20).
‘
HH
Fig. 1.20 Alexander the Great encounters Blemmyes. Miniature, ca. 1445. London, British Library,
Royal 15 E. vi, fol. 21v.
The miniature reflects knowledge on someone’s part of the text it accompanies, but
even so it does not match it in a facile, one-to-one correspondence. The upper right
quarter depicts a likeness of the Virgin. In Western European fashion, she is crowned
in her guise as Queen of Heaven. Yet she is unhaloed. Seemingly seated, she has no
visible throne or chair. She clings to a strapping infant Jesus, who sits on her left
thigh. With nimbus but crownless, Jesus is here God made man rather than the king
of the universe. Both Mary and Jesus lack the frontality of much sculpture from the
twelfth century. Rather, they gaze sideways from us as viewers, toward a figure
1. The Medieval Beginnings of Our Lady’s Tumbler 47
with a nimbus who floats down from a cloudlike projection at the center top of the
miniature. Angelic but wingless, this being holds out and downward in his helping
hands a thick towellike cloth with many rumples. This mega-serviette, probably of
linen, is to be used for either wiping or ventilating the jongleur. Many later artists
envisaged the item as a part of the headcloth, veil, sleeve, or hem of any garment worn
by Mother of God herself (see Fig. 1.21). Here it is incontrovertibly a separate item.
Both the Virgin and Child have their right forearms raised to the other figure. She is
draped in a red mantle, and her right hand is splayed open fully. Jesus holds the ring
finger and pinkie of his right hand curled down against his palm while extending the
thumb, index, and middle finger in blessing. In his left hand, the child clutches an
unidentified object.
Fig. 1.21 The Virgin wipes sweat from the juggler’s brow. Illustration by Henry Morin, 1928.
Published in Anatole France, Abeille / Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame / Les Pains noirs, ed. R. L. Graeme
Ritchie (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1928), 133.
The scene’s construction conforms with other depictions of miraculous Marian
images. The artist takes care to convey that the miracle is enacted not by the statue
itself but by divine potency. The image that the tumbler honors is shown to remain a
representation on the altar as the wonder takes place. But the staging as portrayed in
the bas-de-page departs from these other portrayals in not showing a life-size Virgin
who intervenes. In contrast, the figure emerging from the heavenly stratocumulus at
the top looks to be a divine emissary of another sort, anything but hands-off. In the
world of medieval miracles about Mary, no sky is completely overcast: every cloud,
even the blackest thunderhead, has an angelic silver lining.
The predominant background in the miniature is a dark blue. The color makes good
sense: in medieval art, no one likes better than the Mother of God to come out of the
48 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
blue to mediate salvation. Against the cobalt stands out what could almost be called
a wallpaper of symbolism. These signs strongly resemble the rice symbol in Japanese
typography, modern stylizations of the snowflake, and, most directly relevant, ancient
forms of a textual mark that is still used today (see Fig. 1.22). The asterisk or star goes
back ultimately to Byzantine images in which a so-called star-cross appears on the
forehead or veil of the Virgin, or elsewhere on her person or garments. The token may
well have signified the luminosity of the Madonna. The emblem also resembles one
found in the fresco by Giotto on the vault of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, where
Mary and the infant Jesus are encircled against an azure backdrop, with a gospel writer
at each of the four corners (see Fig. 1.23). The miniaturist could have meant viewers
to envisage the jongleur’s showstopper as taking place outside, against a starlit night
sky. Likelier is that the illuminator had seen vaultings in chapels studded with stars,
fleurs-de-lis, or other similar devices. A representative ceiling close to home would
be the wondrous lower chapel of the Sainte Chapelle on the fle de la Cité in Paris,
where at least as the nineteenth-century renovation has left the adornment overhead,
asterisk management has been thrown to the wind (see Fig. 1.24).
As mentioned, the jongleur is dressed more fully and modestly than the poem
suggests. Does the clothing reflect concern for decorum? Although to all appearances
untonsured, he also lacks the facial hair that was the most distinguishing physical
feature of Cistercian lay brothers. Does the beardlessness typify the well-kempt self-
presentation of entertainers at the time when the painter did his work? Professionally,
the performer as painted here is not a specialist, restricted to the gymnastics he is
caught doing. We can tell that he is a generalist in his entertainment abilities because
a musical instrument is plainly depicted at the bottom right of the miniature. The
unplayed device, a kind of wide-waisted violin, lies on a greenish mat at the foot of
the dado-like altar (see Fig. 1.14). Has it been laid down at the foot of the altar as an
offering, a sacrifice made by the tumbler? Its presence may hint that solo dances like
that of the tumbler normally took place to the accompaniment of instrumental music,
but that this performer could not do his solo routine and play simultaneously (see
Fig. 1.25). In general, dancing has been often inextricable from stringed instruments.
Think of the proverbial saying “If you want to dance, you must pay the fiddler.” Or
consider the etymology of “jig.” Words in English and Romance languages from
which it probably derives signify a kind of lively dance. A similar-sounding noun in
German preserves the sense of violin. A conjectured relationship between the dance
and the instrument has led to speculation, not very convincing, that the English term
“gis” when denoting a live musical performance originated in a form of this name
for a stringed instrument. Then again, the ostentatiously inactive instrument in the
manuscript painting may not signal that dancing and fiddling go together. Rather, it
could indicate exactly the opposite. It may be left aside so as not to mislead the reader
into thinking that the solo tumbling is in any way analogous to lowly instrumental
music, to the collective liturgical song in the choir above or, on a far higher level, to
the heavenly music of the spheres or angels.
1. The Medieval Beginnings of Our Lady’s Tumbler 49
Fig. 1.22 The Japanese komejirushi (“rice symbol”),
so called for its similarity to the kanji for kome
(“rice”) and used in Japanese writing to denote an
important sentence or thought. Unicode U+203B.
Vector art by Melissa Tandysh, 2014. Image courtesy
of Melissa Tandysh. All rights reserved.
Fig. 1.23 Giotto, Vault of Cappella degli
Scrovegni, 1303-1306. Fresco. Padua, Capella
degli Scrovegni. Image from Wikimedia
Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.
org/wiki/File:Giotto_di_Bondone_-_Vault_-
WGA09168.jpg
Fig. 1.24 Ceiling of the Lower Chapel of Sainte-Chapelle, Paris. Photograph by Benh Lieu Song
(2007). Image from Wikimedia Commons, © Benh Lieu Song (2007), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ste_Chapelle_Basse_s.jpg
50 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
ine
fa.
ba
oe
a
pele
iat
ie
tf.
Mo
in
tH
lic
folt
|
bt,
ud
ua,
EE
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Rfvcte 10 Feartuth Gy Ke fidanuchditinuunic
CriciieLe (Ant fetitint Garant: & 2
Fig. 1.25 Fiddler and dancer. Miniature. Graz, Universitatbibliothek Graz, MS 32, fol. 106v. Image
courtesy of Universitatsbibliothek Graz. All rights reserved.
The vielle, a fiddle (and therefore by definition fretless), had four or five gut strings
with a flattish bridge and frontal tuning pegs. It was played with a bow on the arm
or shoulder. Here it occupies a position that can only be called low-key: it can be seen
where the jongleur has laid it on the ground on what could be green tiles or a green
rug beneath the statue of the Virgin and Child. Far less probably, another performer
could have set it down there as an offering. Its function may be to provide visually
what we cannot receive aurally, namely, the musical accompaniment that the painter
took as a given for dance. The tumbler cannot have it in arm as he does his routine. He
may not need it, since he has internalized the rhythmical grace of music. In any case,
the instrument is left there intact as the minstrel performs himself into exhaustion. By
the end, he is a wreck. In contrast, the proto-violin remains, well, fit as a fiddle.
The vielle, a progenitor of the violin, became known in the Renaissance and baroque
periods as a viol. It looks to have been roughly the size of a large modern viola. Later
it also evolved bit by bit into a cranked contrivance more like a hurdy-gurdy, with a
handle to turn. Simultaneously, it became associated with rustic performers in clogs,
peasant dances, and songs in dialect (see Figs. 1.26 and 1.27). The stock-in-trade of
medieval jongleurs in many regions of Europe, this kind of instrument is often shown
in the hands of musicians playing to honor the Virgin. For example, a renowned
manuscript from medieval Germany known as the Manesse Codex contains on one
folio side a rollicking scene. A portrait of the vernacular lyric singer Frauenlob occupies
the center (see Fig. 1.28). Sounding a vielle, the poet is flanked by four entertainers.
1. The Medieval Beginnings of Our Lady’s Tumbler 51
He has above him to one side the emperor and to the other the Virgin herself. The
representation of Frauenlob brings home that in the miniature accompanying Our
Lady’s Tumbler the tumbler has set the musical instrument aside. With his salvation
at stake, he is not going to fiddle around (and there is no second fiddle). At the time,
much dance involving these entertainers may have presupposed instrumental music.
Yet our performer has opted instead to act in silence. He cannot very well fiddle a tune
to accompany a routine that overtaxes every fiber of his whole musculature. His body
is his sole instrument, and he applies it to a ritual dance of his own devising.
Fig. 1.26 Postcard depicting a musician and
his vielle a roue, also known as a hurdy-
gurdy (Le Puy-en-Velay, France: Margerit-
Brémond, early twentieth century).
Fig. 1.28 Frauenlob and his fellow
performers. Miniature, 1300-1340. Heidelberg,
Universitatsbibliothek, Bibliotheca Palatina,
Cod. Pal. Germ. 848, fol. 399r. Image courtesy of
Universitatsbibliothek Heidelberg, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Fig. 1.27 Postcard depicting dancers and
aman with a vielle a roue, also known as a
hurdy-gurdy (L. Ferrand, 1911).
52 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
Since the early twentieth century, artists have not needed to travel to Paris to inspect
the miniature firsthand. Rather, they have had access to it through facsimiles,
photographs, and imitations. The bas-de-page that accompanies the medieval French
poem in one codex has been reproduced repeatedly. For example, it showed up already
as the frontispiece to the 1908 English translation of Our Lady’s Tumbler. Furthermore,
modern book illustrations have been influenced heavily by the original artwork, the
frontispiece reproduction of it just mentioned, and modern illustrations inspired by it
either directly or indirectly. Thus, the jongleur illustrating the story in one medieval
painting has had a robust afterlife.
What does the miniature tell us about the understanding of the narrative, as told in
the text, at the time when this codex was produced? From the outset, we must remind
ourselves that the medieval book may have been made nearly a half century after the
poem itself as we have it was composed. Consequently, ample room existed at that
time for conflation and confusion between tales of an athletic jongleur and a musical
one, since in the Middle Ages the two functions were often fulfilled by one and the
same entertainer. The painter could have incorporated the fiddle simply because of
the presupposition that most performers were multitalented, and that an acrobatic
member of this profession would likely play a stringed instrument as well. Then again,
the illuminator could have caught the drift of the story from the scribe or someone
else, and in a slapdash way blended it with other narratives—for instance, miracles in
which Mary responded to musical rather than gymnastic performances by jongleurs
before Madonnas. In either case, the artist was notably unworried by any controversy
over the presence of musical instruments in church. Even long before stormy debates
over the appropriateness of organs in ecclesiastical settings, proto-viols were not at
all universally welcomed. This presents another interpretation to explain the setting
aside of the vielle: it signifies a renouncement of corporeal music to make way for
spiritual music. The minstrel’s routine has no need of a physical instrument beyond
his own body. When push comes to shove, all that is needed is to act in accordance
with divine law and worship.
An intriguing pair of carvings that may relate to Our Lady’s Tumbler can be found
at Exeter in southwest England. They hover on the south side in the cathedral church
of Saint Peter. One corbel, representing the Virgin carrying the Child in her arms, was
badly damaged at some point, perhaps by iconoclasts (see Fig. 1.29). Opposite it, the
second of these supporting projections depicts a minstrel playing a vielle (see Fig. 1.30).
Above the music-maker, a tumbler either turns a somersault or walks upside down
(see Fig. 1.31). In 1910, the experts who craned their necks to catalogue figural bosses
on the ceilings and brackets on the upper levels of the interior architecture in this
building were tentatively seduced by the notion that these projections might render
in lapidary form the legend of the tumbler. They were apparently under the spell of a
translation that had been published sixteen years earlier. Apart from this one possible
allusion in medieval ecclesiastic art, the narrative in Our Lady’s Tumbler is otherwise
unattested in Britain before the late nineteenth century. If not referential to our story,
1. The Medieval Beginnings of Our Lady’s Tumbler 53
the two carvings at least suggest that the two jongleurs, the one an instrumentalist,
the other a tumbler, perform in homage to the Virgin and Child.
© Arina-Hulbert'’s*estate
Fig. 1.29 Damaged corbel of Exeter
Cathedral. Photograph by Anna Hulbert,
no date. Image courtesy of Anna Hulbert’s
Estate. All rights reserved.
Fig. 1.30 Corbel of Exeter Cathedral.
Photograph by Anna Hulbert, no date. Image
courtesy of Anna Hulbert’s Estate.
All rights reserved.
ves
<2?
© pr ive reity of Exeter
Fig. 1.31 Corbel of Exeter Cathedral, no date. Image courtesy of the
University of Exeter. All rights reserved.
54 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
Beyond the medieval manuscript, the only certain allusion to the story that appears
in ecclesiastical architecture is in a twentieth-century work of art in New York City. In
the church of Saint Thomas, one panel illustrates a performance of Our Lady’s Tumbler
(see Figs. 1.32 and 1.33). The oak carving, like the others in the chancel, was made as an
offering of thanks for the armistice that ended World War I. All these wood sculptures
were carved not too long after the identification, right or wrong, of the corbel at Exeter
as relating to our story. In sum, the oaken figure in Saint Thomas stands as the proof
of concept. It demonstrates the popularity of Our Lady’s Tumbler, not as the follow-up
of an unsundered tradition from the Middle Ages, but as reinvigorated in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Figs. 1.32 and 1.33 Panel from the Church of Saint Thomas, New York City. Photograph by David
M. Daniels, no date. Image courtesy of David M. Daniels. All rights reserved.
The Genre: Long Story Short
Perfectionism in the taxonomy of stories is a modern malady, or at least an affliction of
professional literary critics. In the Middle Ages, authors and scribes apparently lived
undeterred by any such obsession. Thus, they resort often, seemingly indiscriminately,
to words that correlate to our “exemplum,” “legend,” and “miracle,” to cite only a
few. Understandably, they do not apply the plethora of generic terminology that
originated only after the medieval period.
In many respects Our Lady’s Tumbler has ample claim to warrant being called a
miracle, and more particularly a Marian one, like those of Gautier de Coinci. Then
again, the miraculous aspect of the narrative pertains more to its contents than to its
literary form. In any event, the story of the acrobat or dancer is nowhere labeled as a
miracle within the text itself or within the manuscripts. If calling Our Lady’s Tumbler a
miracle gives pause, we have even more reason to hold back from styling it a legend.
1. The Medieval Beginnings of Our Lady’s Tumbler 55
This term, designating the biography of a saint, derives from the Latin legendum est
or “it is to be read.” Such accounts of holy men were regular fare in places and on
occasions where texts in the learned tongue were read aloud ceremonially, especially
on the feast-days of given saints. Reading of this kind happened, for instance, in the
installments that were recited in monastery refectories at mealtimes. One insuperable
impediment prevents us from construing Our Lady’s Tumbler as a saint’s legend: the
jongleur is not a saint or even saintly. Furthermore, the tale lacks the connection with
pilgrimage that is evident in many legends, miracles, and exempla.
For whom then was the poem composed? Was it to be plowed through by
individuals or declaimed in cadenced voices before groups? By whom was it copied?
To return to the question of literary form, what kind of literature was it? In modern
terms, the story satisfies the generic criteria of a pious tale or, to use a modern French
term, a pious récit. Both The Knight of the Barrel and The Hermit and the Jongleur have
been categorized within this genre of short narrative. Stories in this category, which
is associated particularly with the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, can be in prose,
but are more often in verse. They bear a close resemblance to hagiography, and they
draw often on the Life of the Fathers and Marian miracles.
Pious tales are more reverent and less worldly cousins to fabliaux. Contrary
to the tug of instincts some of us may feel, the two forms can overlap or even be
coterminous. Our Lady’s Tumbler is in fact sometimes called a fabliau. If the designation
is understood to mean nothing more than a tale in verse, Our Lady’s Tumbler can be
classed more precisely as a pious fabliau. It must be noted that piety need not be
identical with po-faced; a pious tale may in fact be comic as well as didactic. That said,
the assertion does not carry much conviction that the apparent piety in Our Lady’s
Tumbler is somehow laughable.
Yet another literary type with which the pious tale deserves comparison is
the exemplum, a brief story told to entertain and edify by setting an example or by
exemplifying a moral lesson. Many pious tales are such illustrative stories that have
been expanded and dramatized. Like exempla, they are designed to instruct. Exempla
are meant to be repeated, revised, and remade. In this regard, they live up to their
etymological relationship with the technique of “sampling” in today’s popular music:
a portion of one audio recording is reused, almost like an instrument or component,
in a different piece of music.
The exemplum existed at the intersection of two distinct planes, amusement and
didacticism. These stories throw open windows that allow us to look back upon two
often distinct groups and processes in the Middle Ages—they convey the mentalities
of those whose actions are described as well as of those whose writing framed that
behavior within the discourses and values of Latinate, literate, ecclesiastical culture.
Short narrative was one of the many rhetorical devices that medieval preachers,
above all from the twelfth century on, enlisted to make their sermons more effective.
They may have been especially reliant upon these devices when speaking before
illiterate audiences of lay people. The entertainment of the tale helped to stave off
56 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
yawns of boredom, while the edification worked to win over listeners to the ethical
or theological doctrine being purveyed, particularly by epitomizing the recompense
of good behavior, or punishment of bad. A loose nexus to legend exists, since the
accounts are often based on recent incidents, actual or supposed.
What does Our Lady’s Tumbler claim itself to be? This may turn out to be a trick
question. The poem is identified in its preamble as an examplel, a “little example” or
a “mini-exemplum.” The poet could have meant the noun in a broad-brush or generic
sense, just as an “example.” After all, the word has that as its fundamental definition.
Yet the likelier alternative is that the French refers here deliberately and explicitly
to the specific oratorical and literary genre. While the medieval text is not, strictly
speaking, an exemplum in a sermon, its narrative has that form at its very core.
Like other categories of rhetoric, the exemplum is intended to persuade by its
cogency. In Our Lady’s Tumbler, the narrative applies all the power of learned wordcraft
toward the objective of suasion, but the persuasion ends up subverting the authority
of learnedness itself. The protagonist who prevails does so despite his utter lack of
learning. The prior and choir monks stand for one hegemony within medieval society:
they are the literarily and liturgically literate class. Without any conscious effort, the
tumbler confronts this status quo head-on. In some high-altitude circles, he would
be called counter-hegemonic for his de facto commitment to dismantling hegemonic
power. The irony of ironies is that the story of his quiet and unwitting opposition
comes down to us in writing that is thoroughly salted with learning, liturgy, Latin,
and literature.
The exemplum is an autonomous literary genre. Yet it exists almost intrinsically
to serve the construction of narrative in other genres. At the same time, we may
commit a stark injustice by forcing this type upon the Procrustean bed of present-day
literary-critical or -theoretical categories. To the Cistercians in the first century of their
order, the form would have been anything but an abstraction. Rather, it would have
occupied a space not unlike episodes in the Gospels: it recorded momentous aspects
in the community life through which the monks sought redemption and expressed
their shared values and aspirations, the ties that bind. Exempla offered means for
tellers within the Cistercian order to inform their peers about their worldviews.
The white monks were remarkably prolific in the exemplary genre, but nowhere
more than at Clairvaux. The collections they assembled there were rife with exempla
about the lay brothers known in Latin as conversi. The frequent appearance of such
brethren in short illustrative texts should surprise no one. Presumably this Cistercian
literature served to shape the conduct of the converts as well as to forge a body of
basic beliefs and principles held in common by both the choir monks and them.
Our Lady’s Tumbler is too long and too truly poetic to qualify narrowly as an
exemplum. But sound reason exists to take the poet at his word when he suggests that
the tale at its base originated in this genre. We may require no further evidence beyond
the use of the term examplel to assure ourselves that the poet was well acquainted with
preaching and perhaps even with the formal teaching of it in homiletics. If we do
1. The Medieval Beginnings of Our Lady’s Tumbler 57
need more grist for our mill, we can consider that the poem enfolds within itself a
miniature authorial sermon or homily. We should have no difficulty in appreciating
either how easily the narrative could have grown out of an exemplum, or how readily
it could have been distilled back into one.
The Table of Exempla, in Alphabetical Order
A Jesuit, Dominican, and Cistercian were stranded on a
desert island. They came upon a magic lamp. After they
rubbed it, a genie materialized and offered each of them a
wish. When the Jesuit said that he wished to teach at the
world’s most famous university, he vanished. When the
Dominican announced that he wanted to preach in the
world’s largest church, he disappeared. The Cistercian
said, “I got my wish.”
The heyday of medieval exempla stretched from the late twelfth through the
fifteenth century. During these hundreds of years, the Church obligated preachers
to pronounce more sermons and the laity to attend more of them. The narratives are
sometimes handed down on their own, free-floating; alternatively, these tales may
be incorporated individually or in small groups within other types of writing. In fact,
they pop up in almost every genre written in the later Middle Ages. Finally, they
may be corralled into systematic assemblages, first in learned language and later in
colloquial, nonstandard (vulgar) tongues.
In similar fashion, Our Lady’s Tumbler is documented first in relative seclusion, as
an independent poem in a manuscript codex. Long thereafter, it is attested as one
narrative within a specific type of prose collection. This alternation has held true
in the subsequent fate not only of the medieval tale, narrowly defined, but also of
adaptations made from it. The story has been both transmitted by itself and passed
down in repertories with other short texts. How it transits from one medium to
another, or even if the surviving evidence suffices to allow us to speculate about the
routes of transmission—these questions demand thoughtful consideration.
The same story related in Our Lady’s Tumbler is also preserved as an exemplum in
the schematic Latin prose Table of Exempla, in Alphabetical Order. This reference work
for preachers composing sermons was confected in the second half of the thirteenth
century, about 1277. The compendium comprises more than three hundred illustrative
anecdotes. They are schematized under 151 headings that traverse the Roman alphabet
from the letter A all the way to X. The abecedarian arrangement facilitated the efforts
of pulpiteers on the prowl for materials with which to embellish sermons that they
draft. The headwords were intended to sum up the main themes of the exempla.
Another bonanza to sermonizers was the table of contents, to which the title refers.
Both alphabetization and tables of contents were thirteenth-century refinements in
the organization of exempla collections. Both innovations owed specifically to the
58 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
religious movement known as Franciscanism, since the members of this new order
committed themselves particularly actively to preaching to the laity. These untried
tactics contributed to an explosion of unprecedented formats that changed the look
of manuscripts in the later Middle Ages. Many alterations expanded and enhanced
the investigation and consultation of handwritten books through reference systems,
indexes, and other aids to study and reference.
The anonymous compiler of the Table of Exempla was probably a French Franciscan,
quite possibly of rural origins. The fraternal connection may help to illuminate the
purposes for which the anecdote about the tumbler was woven into the compilation.
The friars minor had ample cause to be hospitable to the notion of religious devotion
embedded in the basic narrative underlying Our Lady’s Tumbler. Their founder
referred to himself as a “jongleur of God,” and was the subject of stories in which he
performed stunts and behaved like jongleurs and jesters.
Equally to the point, the followers of Saint Francis of Assisi made a policy of
pursuing social engagement in large urban settings. This venue required them to
practice preaching, especially in the vernacular languages, that would attract people’s
notice. To this end, they needed the paraphernalia of skills, and tricks of the trade,
of professional entertainers. Able sermonizers could give new meaning to the old
injunction “practice what you preach”: they could help the audience members, even
as they sat and listened, to picture the minstrel performing. Thus, the exemplum could
achieve the slick effect of bringing the tumbler, at least in their listeners’ imaginations,
from outside into the church. In the process, it could lure auditors away from the
antics of real street entertainers in market squares and entice the same individuals into
services, either out of doors on a thoroughfare or within formal ecclesiastical settings.
The assembly could even have been spectators in the full sense. The speaker recounting
the tale from the pulpit or on a piazza could have punctuated a recapitulation with
gestures at reenactment, by feigning somersaults and other movements that would
then taper off at the finish of the story.
Franciscans delivering sermons would have found ready use for the narrative. They
could have retold it to lay listeners to spur them on to the possibility of converting,
becoming friars, and seeking redemption within that religious context. Whatever
their specific objectives in repeating the exemplum, preachers from any order could
have conveyed the gist of the tale about the jongleur to listeners who could and would
never have waded through the text of the French poem.
Whatever the most common medium of transmission was, whether textual or oral,
we cannot know how many in the audiences would have recollected their experience
of the narrative. The hermeneutic gap between what the preacher delivered and what
the listeners recalled could have been imperceptible or unbridgeable. The story could
have gone in one ear and out the other, or it could have made a life-altering impact.
If it figured in many sermons with large congregations, it could have benefited from
the closest equivalent that the Middle Ages had to mass communication. Then again,
it could have been only sparsely used and known.
1. The Medieval Beginnings of Our Lady’s Tumbler 59
The Latin Exemplum
The source, properly so called, of the
poet is still unknown.
The gist of Our Lady’s Tumbler is relayed in an exemplum that is compartmentalized
in the Table of Exempla under the rubric “Joy.” If we set aside the preoccupation of
Our Lady’s Tumbler with penance and devotion, its placement under this heading
is altogether appropriate, since gifted performers were thought to display and to
engender jubilation. They could render joyful their audiences of both human attendees
and heavenly onlookers, such as God, angels, and saints. Such euphoria has been
expressed in life by the faithful whose commitment to dance has been documented
extensively over the past century and a half.
The essentials of the narrative in this Latin version from around 1277 are
summarized telegraphically.
‘.~
fons
ttle fin religiig éturve
ropes ithe peep foros fi 1105 08
igo ai crs ¥
ys ater Sie fae
TEL Hum
oe atacseae
ped fuoliurerd-1B8men fier
fap tolo Dm.
Fig. 1.34 Excerpt from Liber exemplorum secundum ordinem alphabeti, chap. 49, no. 28,
“Gaudium.” London, British Library, MS Additional 18351. Image courtesy of British Library,
London. All rights reserved.
The whole of the closely packed two-sentence original reads in translation as follows:
A certain entertainer, forsaking the world, entered a religious order and, when he saw
his peers singing Psalms, since he did not know his letters, thought how he could praise
God with the others. For that reason, when the others sang their Psalms, he began to
dance and leap for joy, and when asked why he did such things, replied, “I see everyone
serving God in accord with his faculty, and for that reason I wish to celebrate God in
accord with mine, as I know how.”
The relationship between this later, roughly fifty-word exemplum in Latin prose and
the earlier 684-line poem in medieval French verse cannot be established conclusively.
60 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
One sure thing is that this in-a-nutshell version differs radically from the piece of
poetry in more than length alone. The Madonna and Virgin are suppressed in favor
of God. We hear nothing of the crypt, nothing of the venomous monks, nothing of
the abbot, nothing of the miracle, nothing of the jongleur’s death, and nothing of his
soul’s fate.
Nearly a third of the short text comprises the closing utterance of the entertainer.
The exemplum is sheer paradox, being made all of words but all about deeds. Then
again, it embodies the famous principle of writing, “Show, don’t tell.” Its hero is a man
who expresses himself most effectively through private acts. Yet here the physicality
of the earlier tale is shucked to make room for an uncensored statement by the solo
artist, almost like the moral to a fable. He has the last word—and then some. We
know only a little about him. It is as if he entered the monastery —the order is not
even specified—in a fugue state that made him an amnesiac. In our times, names are
essential to being and identity, but, again, as in the vernacular verse, the tumbler and
the poet resemble each other in their anonymity. The protagonist is notable in both
the poem and exemplum for his namelessness. Lacking a name makes him even more
exemplary. For being a nobody, or at least a no-name, he becomes an everyman. Does
he have a specific identity at all, or is he incognito deliberately? Does his virtuousness
support the argument that he is made up—that he must be fictitious because he is too
good to be true?
Fig. 1.35 Postcard depicting Thomas Frederick Crane (left) and David Hoy (right), ca. 1910.
Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Archives. Image from Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
File:Davy_and_TF_Crane_1910.jpg
1. The Medieval Beginnings of Our Lady’s Tumbler 61
No evidence exists that would facilitate illuminating the interconnections between
our two surviving attestations of the narrative. The exemplum is the merest scrap
of a tale. In 1911 an American folklorist asked, “Is this prose story the hitherto
undiscovered original of the French poem?” (see Fig. 1.35). The question is astute. The
Latin in the Table of Exempla could transmit, even word for word, a text as the author
of the French verse read it. Then again, the early twentieth-century researcher could
have gotten it backwards. The prose from the late thirteenth-century compendium
could be a distillation that the anonymous Franciscan made directly from reading the
medieval French piece of poetry, or indirectly from hearing it performed verbatim or
its contents related less punctiliously.
Underlying the folklore scholar’s question is his conjecture that the medieval poet
did not personally invent the fundamentals of the story as we have it. But accepting
that hypothesis does not force the conclusion that the version passed down by the
Franciscan author lay any closer to a notional original. Both the French versifier and
the Latin prose writer could have been indebted to a common written source, without
any intermediary; or another exemplum in the learned language could have predated
the medieval French poem. The short Latin prose version could have inspired both
Our Lady’s Tumbler and the exemplum. Then again, the poet and prose writer alike
could have picked up the tale orally from sermons or some other form of anecdote.
Possible explanations could be constructed in abundance if not ad infinitum, but
potential shreds of proof for any of them are regrettably elusive.
The likelihood is that both the French and the Latin survive, by a mere twist of
fate, from a much larger multitude of lost versions, as the story pulsed back and
forth between oral and written, popular and elite, lay and clerical, short and long,
vernacular and Latinate. Both the poem and the prose are likely to have been under an
obligation somehow to an exemplum that achieved diffusion through the Cistercian
monastic order. Initially, such a tale would have been recounted by itself. A monk
who heard or witnessed a miracle might relate it, others might press the point, and
ultimately the head of an abbey might employ it in speaking with the brethren in the
chapter house. It might be retold for hosts at another monastery. A choir monk could
relate it to a lay brother, or vice versa.
In a later stage, such exempla agglutinated within collections, often produced
for and by the monasteries where many are thought to have originated. The white
monks were great collectors and carriers of edifying and entertaining short narratives,
especially those that bore on miracles relating to the particularities of their monasteries.
During the period from roughly 1140 to roughly 1200, the Cistercians put together the
stories of both monks and lay people, particularly lay brothers. When recapitulating
what they had heard, the compilers presented the tales in succinct and straightforward
Latin, with a minimum of rhetorical flourishes. These assemblers may be imagined as
having relied heavily on oral reports and even on what we might call oral literature.
They were prototypical oral historians.
62 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
The activities of the Cistercian collectors coincided with the emergence of a new
form of transmission for vernacular literacy in what were in those days the two
principal tongues of France: Occitan (the language of Languedoc, including what
was formerly known as Provencal) and what is now called French. The designation
“minstrel manuscript” has been applied to simple codices, with texts invariably in
single columns, written in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. Such handwritten books,
small and portable, could have been carried as manuals in the literal or etymological
sense. The best-known exemplar of all the ones to which this name has been attached
conserves the text of the famous French epic, The Song of Roland. In the past quarter
century, the longstanding assumption has been rejected or at least strongly critiqued
that such objects were produced by dictation from oral poets for their use in rehearsal
or recitation. The extant texts are not actual working copies, and we must take pains
not to project upon them romantic views of minstrels. At the same time, it has not
been misconceived to seek connections between surviving medieval literature and the
contents of oral performances that took place without being recorded or successfully
transmitted.
From the mid-thirteenth century, the early Cistercian exempla collections were
tapped by friars. Both Franciscan and Dominican tabulators of these illustrative stories
resembled the white monks of the order’s first few decades in aiming at narrative
brevity and rhetorical simplicity. Like many mendicants of his day, the anonymous
author of the Table of Exempla drew systematically upon such accounts available
from contemporaneous and earlier friars and Cistercians. The line of descent that
has been laid out has emphasized the roles of first white monks and later fraternal
orders. It demands little imagination to devise a mental image of an abbot relating
the short narrative in the chapter house to choir monks, to motivate them to be kind
to lay brothers. Alternatively, the same teller could recount the tale when recruiting
prospective lay brethren. The story could spur them to act on their impulses by
converting to join the Cistercians.
The likeliest venue for the hypothetical lost exemplum is a Cistercian monastery,
specifically the one at Clairvaux. As with so much else, we cannot be certain.
Interestingly, many exempla associated with this order do seem to have emanated
from that very abbey. As rotten luck would have it, the chief early collection of
Claravallian anecdotes has not weathered the storms of time. Consequently, we can
only speculate about whether our poem, set as it is in Saint Bernard’s institution, ever
formed part of it.
In all periods, the tale has lent itself remarkably to compression and subsequent
re-expansion. Even visually, the whole of the story can be expressed by the most
economical of metonymies. For example, one artist active in the early twenty-first
century called the entire narrative to mind by illustrating an orb caught in the air at
the top of a soaring pointed arch (see Fig. Pref.1). The ball stands in for other objects
being juggled, but not pictured, by a likewise unrepresented juggler. The lancet recalls
1. The Medieval Beginnings of Our Lady's Tumbler 63
a whole Gothic church, presumably a Notre-Dame, or even a cathedral dedicated to
the Virgin, with a Madonna, though Mary too is not shown. In sum, the jongleur is
reduced to the rounded geometry of a sphere; Our Lady, to the pointed one of a lancet.
The Life of the Fathers
More than any other literary genre,
edifying Christian tales have
been subjected over the course of
centuries to successive re-readings.
Many of them go back to the
tradition of the Desert Fathers.
Ah, scholarship—or should I say, ah, pedantry! Brace yourself, dear reader, for
alternation between the titles Lives of the Fathers and Life of the Fathers. The inconsistency
is deliberate and owes nothing to typographical errors. Let me do my best to unravel
the tangled skein, so that we may tease apart the individual strands and make sense
of them. By referring in French to Lives of the Fathers, the poem invokes as an ostensible
source what may appear to be, to switch metaphors, no more than a red herring.
Works in both French and Latin exist that could have been designated in this way in
the thirteenth century, although nowadays the names in both languages are reserved
for incomparably different texts.
The fact that the tale of Our Lady’s Tumbler has turned up in none of them could
lead to three conclusions. One is that the wellspring of the poem bubbled up in a
version of Lives of the Fathers that has failed to survive. Another is that poet’s reference
was calculated to be a false scent. If the citation was meant to be taken under such false
pretenses, one reason could be that the author sought to keep under wraps his actual
inspiration in another source, which either no longer exists or remains unidentified.
The third interpretation could be that the writer of Our Lady’s Tumbler made up the
story out of whole cloth, but succumbed to a characteristically medieval impulse by
alleging that his fabrication had authoritative underpinning, as it was drawn from a
respected work.
A total of at least five French poems of the thirteenth century claim as their origin
a text that may be either Lives of the Fathers in Latin or the related but distinct Life of
the Fathers in French. Only The Hermit and the Jongleur has been tracked conclusively
to an item in any such narrative treasury. In the other four, the citation of Lives of the
Fathers appears to be a literary device to misguide readers. Two of them share with
The Hermit and the Jongleur the feature of being both miracles and pious tales. The same
combination occurs in both the French Life of the Fathers and the Miracles of Gautier
de Coinci. Furthermore, the manuscripts of the French Life of the Fathers overlap
substantially with those that transmit the Marian miracles of Gautier de Coinci.
64 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
Lives of the Fathers designates in the first instance a Latin collection that emerged in
the last quarter of the fourth century and later, presumably based on Greek originals.
The text amasses in ten books brief narratives that are comparable in a coarse way to
the one about the jongleur. Such accounts are known as “spiritually beneficial” or
“useful tales.” They are narratives, but at the same time they could be called spiritual
exercises. More than a thousand such stories were recorded at the latest in the late
fourth century, but some of them may have circulated orally long before then. At
the other extreme of the chronological spectrum, most of the major collections in the
genre had been put together by the beginning of the seventh century. Additional tales
cropped up, singly and in clumps, for centuries afterward.
The genre assembles traditions, running the gamut from completely developed
biographies to much shorter dialogues, sayings, and anecdotes. Many of these materials
relate to individual Christians who from the end of the third century withdrew from
society to devote their lives to spiritual self-improvement and hyperascetic severity in
the solitude of the wilderness. The so-called desert fathers at the heart of the collections
were the earliest such figures from within Christianity. They inhabited the wilds of
what we call the Mideast, especially the region around Thebes in Egypt, Judea, and
Syria. All of them were hermits, in that they dwelled in wastelands. In Greek, the
root of the word for “hermit” means “deserted,” “uninhabited,” or “solitary.” Initially
they were solitaries, but eventually they lived mostly in ordered communities. Lives
of the Fathers, which pertains to the early stages of development, admits stories of
laypeople who do not reside in the sunbaked desert and whose concerns are not
strictly religious but sometimes even inarguably secular.
Lives of the Fathers exercised appreciable influence in the Middle Ages. In the
beginning the work would have been particularly esteemed among monks. The
monastic appreciation began early, since the Rule of Saint Benedict prescribes the
text for collective reading after a sit-down dinner. Among Cistercians, recitation took
place during balanced meals in the refectory as well as at the close of the day when
the brethren huddled in the collation gallery. Lives of the Fathers belonged among the
favored texts for reading aloud, since it affirmed to the monks the achievements and
vicissitudes experienced by some of their earliest and most important role models,
the desert fathers. But the reach of the collection was destined to extend far beyond
the cloister. In time, it was translated into many European vernaculars. In French,
versions of different portions from it were created in both verse and prose between
the late twelfth and fifteenth century.
In the literary history of medieval French, the title Life of the Fathers (differing by
use of an initial singular rather than plural) refers most often to an agglomeration
from the first half of the thirteenth century. This heavyweight piece of poetry
from the Middle Ages enjoyed a lasting success. Its popularity is confirmed by the
existence of more than fifty complete and partial manuscripts, from the thirteenth
into the sixteenth century. The narratives contained in this verse compendium have
1. The Medieval Beginnings of Our Lady’s Tumbler 65
often been subsumed within the genre of pious tale, although some of them bear a
stronger resemblance to fabliaux. Although Life of the Fathers has a similar title and
overlaps very loosely at the beginning with some material found in the Latin Lives of
the Fathers, no part of the whole poem as it has come through in the spoken language
is directly connected with the latter, or with related Latin compositions that deal with
the sanctity of the desert fathers. The three main thrusts of the French text are toward
the ascetic existence of those early fathers, aspects of monasticism, and miracles of the
Virgin Mary.
To get down to further nitty-gritty, the Life of the Fathers in the vernacular
language comprises three collections. The first one has been attributed to a formerly
anonymous author who has now been identified provisionally by majority opinion as
one Ernoul Langny. Although well disposed toward the Cistercians, this individual
is remarkably clear in suggesting that lay existence is in no wise inferior to monastic.
In fact, it establishes that laymen may overshadow monks in their way of life. The
poet is likely to have written near Paris in the 1220s or thereabouts. The second and
third collections were added later to the first one. The additional stories that make up
the second are probably to be dated shortly after the first was completed. They show
signs of having originated in western Picardy. The third is later again. It may have
come from the hand of a Franciscan. Thus, we can see familiar fellow-travelers, with
white monks preparing the way for friars minor, and with a Picard connection.
The forty-two tales in the first assemblage of tales take place mostly in Egypt
in the days of the desert fathers. The prologue to each proffers a truth of Christian
life or dogma, which is exemplified by the narrative. At the other end, an epilogue
teases out the moral. The narratives in the other two collections are more often given
a contemporary thirteenth-century setting, with their concluding commentary being
shorter. Some of them tell miracles of the Virgin, unlike the stories in the first, set in
olden times. For example, we have seen that The Tale of the Barrel, which is loosely
related to Our Lady’s Tumbler, surfaces among these accounts. The lay brothers are
heavily represented among the narratives included within the French Life of the Fathers.
Yet neither the Latin Lives of the Fathers nor the French in any guise manifests any reflex
of the legend that corresponds to the exemplum recounted in Our Lady’s Tumbler. All
the same, the reference in our poem does not necessarily constitute false advertising.
Instead, it may point to a tangential, rather than a straight-line, indebtedness.
In seeking tales comparable to Our Lady’s Tumbler, we could look for other
narratives about professional entertainers. Adhering to this criterion, we find that the
French Life of the Fathers incorporates a tale about a minstrel. The story of the tumbler
might be construed as a narrative that counters it. The forty-two episodes making up
the French text are conventionally known by short titles that were assigned to them
in 1884 by Gaston Paris, a scholar of language and literature who will appear often in
this book. This episode goes by the name “Goliard.” The epithet originally applied to
members of the medieval clergy, particularly students, who composed Latin squibs
66 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
and drinking poems. In other words, goliards belonged to the same social stratum
that included jongleurs. To speak in terms of present-day academic attire, they were
tweedy, but their heavy-twill jackets sometimes had holes through which their
elbows poked, rather than the leather patches that have become metonymous with
“professor.” In this case, the story centers upon a bibulous cleric with a compulsive
gambling problem and the French appellation of Lechefrite or “Grease Pot.” This
malfeasant converts to become a Cistercian monk. His hidden intent is to pocket gold
and silverware from the monastery and make off with it. Yet for twenty years, his
conscience renders him unable and unwilling to carry through on either his initial
intention to commit theft or his later resolution to leave the order.
Although at the outset the goliard only feigns a resolve to be a monk, a miracle
causes him to undergo a conversion that is both authentic and enduring. On one
occasion, after holy orders have been conferred upon him, he decides to forsake the
monastery once he has said Mass. His first objective is to officiate at the altar of the
Virgin, so that Mary may protect him from temptation in the world outside; but the
best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Just when the goliard-turned-priest
elevates the host, the right hand of the infant Jesus, who is pictured in the altarpiece
with his mother, reaches out and grabs it from him. No sooner has the would-be
escapee lamented and prayed to the Virgin than Jesus returns the wafer and wine
to him. After the penitent goes back to bed all sackcloth and ashes, the monk who
assisted him at the altar reveals to his superior what happened. In turn, the abbot visits
the onetime worldly wordsmith. Eventually the reformed monk, no longer a wannabe
runaway, is himself elected to the highest office within the abbey, whereupon he dies
and is granted entry into heaven.
The tales of “Goliard” in the French Life of the Fathers and of the entertainer in Our
Lady’s Tumbler are by no stretch of the imagination one and the same. Yet the overlap
suffices to render it at least plausible that the author of the jongleur poem was not
merely indulging himself in the supremely medieval whimsy of citing a spurious
source with his mention (and perhaps significantly, in the plural form) of Lives of the
Fathers. Both pieces of poetry gloss over inaccuracies about time and place by engaging
in anachronism and, to resort to the corresponding term for a comparable spatial
disjunction, anatopism. To be specific, both texts present tales that are identified as
happening in medieval Cistercian monastic contexts, but as if the characters and
events belonged to the Egyptian desert of the fathers from late antiquity.
To turn to the two poems’ protagonists, both the tumbler and the goliard issue
from marginal groups with reputations that are antithetical to those of monks; both
convert to the Cistercian order, which is treated favorably by the poets; both undergo
crises when performing before altars dedicated to the Virgin; both elicit motions from
within representations of the Virgin that become animated; both become the focus
of communiqués made by a fellow monk to the abbot; and both are admitted to the
celestial realm at the close of the tales. Despite the risk of growing unctuous, it is
1. The Medieval Beginnings of Our Lady’s Tumbler 67
worth mentioning in addition that both are connected pointedly with cooking fat.
In Our Lady’s Tumbler, a strikingly oleaginous simile describes in animal terms the
perspiration of the performer after he completes his routine to honor the Virgin: “Just
as grease comes out on the spit so the sweat comes out of him... from his feet up to his
head.” The image of the meat sizzling on the skewer underlines the carnality of the
gesture that the minstrel makes in devotion to the Virgin. The goliard and eponymous
character “Grease Pot” is related to oily matter through his very name.
Then again, we may misjudge if we make the profession of the protagonist the
benchmark for the degree of proximity between Our Lady’s Tumbler and any of the tales
in the Latin Lives of the Fathers or French Life of the Fathers. The fact that an entertainer
plays the foremost role in both stories may be a distraction. Instead, we should think
about the progression of events in specific narratives that we compare. Evaluation in
this spirit leads to the episode in Life of the Fathers that has been entitled “Miserere.”
The tale is so called because it has at its nucleus the prayer for mercy known by this
name. The Latin imperative miserere or “have pity” is the first word of Psalm 51. For
the major moving parts of this narrative, this story would seem to have a common
source with a miracle in Gautier de Coinci.
In “Miserere,” a simple but goodhearted man makes up his mind to give up all
his possessions and to join a holy hermit, which the solitary allows. The recent arrival
prays repetitiously, using shaky phraseology in the learned language that does not
follow the wording of the biblical verse as it should. Liking the text for its sincerity
and humility, God causes a miraculous glow to gleam whenever the unflashy fellow
worships. Unaware of God’s favor and the miracle, the recluse insists that the
beginner use only the proper Latin. The miracle ceases, the man is distressed, and in
his perturbation, he sickens. One half year later, the ascetic visits, discovers what has
transpired, recognizes the piety of his former companion, and has him return to his
earlier practice and phrasing. At this point the light resumes. The hermit witnesses the
wonder. Duly awestruck, he remains with the man forever after.
Finally, the reference to Lives of the Fathers in Our Lady’s Tumbler could have one more
explanation. The poet may have intended to acknowledge that he was beholden not
so much in content as in spirit. The tale of the tumbler shows a person, saintlike even
if not a saint, who wins divine favor. He achieves this grace not through martyrdom
but through conversion and staunch belief. To be precise, he expresses piety through
humility in the face of public humiliation. Even the profuse sweating could be
construed as referring to a hagiographic motif and implying the tumbler’s saintliness,
by calling to mind the deacon Lawrence. When tortured by being placed upon a red-
hot iron grille, this famous martyr of the third century reportedly responded only by
telling his tormentors, “This side is done, turn me over.” Similarly, the tumbler makes
himself into a human roast, but through the blistering heat of his own exertions rather
through the effects of a torture device. Both men have the last laugh in their ordeals.
At the end of his routines, the tumbler is prone. The position is reminiscent of the
68 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
obeisance that is known technically now by the Greek meooKvvnotc, proskunesis. In
this act of devotion, the worshiper bends down and kneels. In extreme cases, he lies
face down. The Rule of Saint Benedict prescribed a humble posture of penance, with
head and eyes glued to the ground, and body stretched out. Pride is the deadliest sin,
and the self-debasement of humility affords an opportunity for avoiding the fall that
the prideful are known to suffer. Portraits, even self-portraits, may be found in which
monks are shown in such a position before the Virgin and Child (see Fig. 1.36). To take
a remarkable instance, a manuscript of a chronicle contains by way of proem a self-
depiction of its author in this stance. A large framed drawing portrays the historian
(and artist) himself on his knees in deference before the Virgin and Child, shown
enthroned. The picture is the medieval equivalent of a snapshot that catches Christ in
motion as he presses his face against his mother’s, strokes her hair, and clambers up
toward the apple she is holding.
Fig. 1.36 Kneeling monk (Matthew Paris). Miniature by Matthew Paris, 1250-1259.
London, British Library, MS Royal 14 C VII, fol. 6r. Image courtesy of British Library, London.
All rights reserved.
The self-abasement here is true to the word, since etymologically abasement refers
to a lowering. The comportment ascribed by the painter to the worshipful monk is
more characteristic of the heroic asceticism and devotion of the early centuries in the
church. The performer in Our Lady’s Tumbler takes down the humility, or even self-
humiliation, by one additional gradation. To be clad in the attire of a monk is already
humble enough, but he strips down to the even lowlier layer of his underclothing.
In attire as in all else, he becomes the opposite of vainglorious. While not wholly in
the buff, he molts to a very exposed and defenseless state. In any event, the story of
the tumbler’s redemption through humility conveys a message consistent with the
biographies of the desert fathers. The gist is worth chewing over. People, especially
1. The Medieval Beginnings of Our Lady’s Tumbler 69
odious ones, have always been inclined to misconstrue humility for softheadedness.
Often they also commit an error by assuming that simplicity will be the kiss of death.
So much the worse for them, because simplicity can be powerful.
True Story: Why the Story Succeeded
What garnered the story its modest success in the Middle Ages? A fact beyond
speculation is that whatever the relative priority of the Latin, the medieval French,
and any hypothetical versions no longer extant, the piece of poetry in the spoken
language alone accounts ultimately for the impact of the tale from the late nineteenth
into the twenty-first century. Here we are probably very fortunate that the author
opted to express himself within the vernacular literary tradition. At the time when
the poem was composed, most writers working in the learned tongue and its heritage
would have felt obliged to pull out all the rhetorical stops. The results would have
made a verse or prose version in the language of liturgy and learning less attractive
to us.
Yet the mere fact that Our Lady’s Tumbler was set down in French is not the whole
story. From the twelfth century on, the laity was incited ever more strenuously by
the clergy to attend church and hear sermons. On the supply side, the clerics were
bidden to preach publicly far more often than had once been customary. The papal
assembly of 1215 (Fourth Lateran Council) enjoined preachers to indoctrinate lay folk
in virtuous living. As a result, the application of exempla became more entrenched,
with the hard-minded aims of enticing listeners and holding their interest so that they
would not slip away before the preaching had finished. Finally, it bears mentioning
that from early in the second half of the twelfth century, the Cistercians were
exceptionally active in collecting and employing exempla. A case has been made that
they intended their digests of such stories for brethren in their order, as a means of
corroborating collective identity, memory, and values.
Of course, sermons had to vie with other forms of amusement. The types of
entertainment furnished by professionals would have posed acute challenges to
sermonizers. We must not forget that traveling preachers jockeyed with jongleurs
for audiences. At times, sermonizers entered into rivalry with singers, dancers, and
jugglers, as well as with very different performers of public speech-making (construing
the word broadly) such as lawyers and heretics. Yet the two different groups were
not always at each other’s throats. They may have journeyed together in company
sometimes and would have by various avenues been familiar with each other’s
techniques and practices. Because medieval churches were not merely official places
of worship but also de facto social centers, most of these different professions plied
their trades at least some of the time either outside the churches or even inside them.
Under the circumstances, speakers would predictably have resorted to techniques
we would associate today more with stand-up comedy in an open-mike club than
70 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
with church, especially when they were delivering sermons before open-air crowds
in cities.
Entertainment and edification have always intersected. In English literary history,
two anecdotes set in Anglo-Saxon times make the matter perfectly clear. One is a
legend told in the twelfth century by the monk and historian William of Malmesbury
about what allegedly took place four hundred years earlier, in the seventh century,
when the abbot, bishop, and Latin author Aldhelm would attract audiences in
Malmesbury by playing a proselytic pied piper. He would sing Old English lays on
a bridge to listeners whom he would then lead to church. The other is a celebrated
episode related in Bede’s Ecclesiastic History of the English People. In this blow-by-blow
account in Latin, a simple herdsman named Czedmon cares for the animals at what is
now known as Whitby Abbey during the abbacy of Saint Hilda. The herder is illiterate
and therefore, it goes without saying, a layman. One evening, when the brethren
croon to the strumming of a harp after dinner, this poor fellow absents himself out of
the equivalent to stage fright on an amateur night. Like the tumbler, he feels shame at
his inability in a skill possessed by the monks with whom he lives. Subsequently, he
has a dream in which he is asked to sing of creation. Soon thereafter, he inaugurates
Christian song in Old English oral-formulaic verse by performing a short encomium
to God as creator of heaven and earth. On the following morning, he adds to his
earlier composition. The foreman of the farm, after hearing of Ceedmon’s vision and
gift, has him visit the abbess, who first puts his compositional acumen to the test and
then has him take monastic vows.
The animosity toward non-Christian pastimes is typified by the later Anglo-
Saxon Alcuin, who in a Latin letter written in 797 denounces monks for regaling
themselves with narratives about pagan protagonists, rather than Jesus Christ in his
role as Messiah. Referring to one such hero, he asks, “Let God’s words be read at
the episcopal dinner-table. It is right that a reader should be heard, not a harpist,
patristic discourse, not pagan song. What has Hinield to do with Christ?” Yet in both
the legend of Aldhelm and the anecdote of Caedmon, the non-Christian diversion
is something to be set aside or transcended. The legendary Aldhelm seduces his
auditors into leaving behind secular pleasantries. Ceedmon gains notice through the
innovation of directing toward Christian ends the conventions of Old English verse-
making, otherwise to be eschewed or at least forgotten. In fact, the herdsman passes
muster as an old Germanic jongleur of God. He bears comparison with the tumbler in
his dithering about the value of what he can offer in his devotion, as well as in his fix
about participating in collective activity.
In the relationship between the French and the Latin treatments of the tale, the
vernacular verse of Our Lady’s Tumbler is less likely to have been informed by the
prose of the learned language than vice versa. Alternatively, the two works could
have been prompted by other sources, written, oral, or both. No evidence has come to
light thus far to suggest that anyone paid the slightest heed to the story from when the
1. The Medieval Beginnings of Our Lady’s Tumbler 71
Latin prose fell out of fashion in the late fifteenth century. For reasons both linguistic
and cultural, the medieval vernacular form could have ceased earlier to be readily
intelligible. To all intents, the tale of Our Lady’s Tumbler and its Latin equivalent
evanesce for four hundred years, until the late nineteenth century.
In the Middle Ages, people had the desert fathers for inspiration and imitation. In
the twentieth century, avid readers called their utmost favorites “desert island books.”
These were readings that they fantasized they would take with them if marooned as
castaways on an isolated atoll with only the smallest of libraries. The two gravitations,
toward the fathers and islands, are not unrelated. Human beings crave a furlough
from distractedness in direct proportion to their addiction it. We are at once extroverts
and introverts, herd animals and lone wolves. The little story of the tumbler can tell us
about both poles of our shared condition. In fact, medieval monasticism has much to
teach on the same topic, since in a certain sense it constitutes a system of social solitude.
Let us follow in the footsteps of the minstrel made monk, first into the entertainment
world and then into the cloisters of the Middle Ages.
2. Dancing for God
I would only believe in a God that knew how
to dance. [...] Now a God dances in me.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
To make sense of Our Lady’s Tumbler, we must transport ourselves to the Middle Ages.
We have delved into the manuscripts, and we have begun to come to terms with the
texts and the single image that they transmit. For all that, we have not advanced very
far in decoding what the narrative portends. The words are never mere words. They
constitute our best guides to the meanings that individual writers, their communities,
and, even more broadly, their societies hoped to relay across the chasms of time and
space to others—including, now, us. All the same, the verbalism is, at the risk of
appearing flippant, only part of the story. To wrest the richest and deepest significance
from the tale, we will be obligated to go beyond the strictly and solely lexical level.
Through the lexicon and subject matter, we may identify and reconstruct discourses.
In the poem and exemplum, we need to uncouple the conceptual framework of the
entertainer from that of the monk. The two are overlaid, like electrochemical cells in a
battery or conductors in a capacitor, to create the extraordinary electricity that the lay
brother and jongleur in this tale discharges.
The Tumbler
Scribes in the Middle Ages manifested nearly the same indifference to transmitting
exact titles as they did to pinning down exact authorship. The names of medieval texts
were often not authorial, but concocted by scribes or readers. Thus, the manuscripts
of Our Lady’s Tumbler divulge no consensus as to the original title, if one even existed.
To the contrary, they identify the poem in five different ways. Each codex, to judge by
the captions for our poem, tells a different story:
© 2018 Jan M. Ziolkowski, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0132.02
74 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
Of the Tumbler of Our Lady
This Is about the Tumbler of Our Lady
The Tale of the Jongleur
Of a Minstrel Who Became a Monk to Whom Our Lady Showed Grace
Of a Minstrel Who Served Our Lady by His Own Craft.
The common element in all these combinations is a term for a professional entertainer,
whether tumbler, jongleur, or minstrel. But exactly what sort of performer? Even
more to the point, what manner of tale should we have in mind? Finally, what type of
association with the Virgin should we envisage the protagonist having? After all, she
is mentioned in four of the titles. Research is detective work. Let us become gumshoes
ourselves, on a manhunt to understand the character who dies at the end of our story.
In our medieval film noir, the blackness is the ink on folios of parchment.
Various factors would have made advantageous a shift from a tumbler into a
jongleur. The latter is usually lowlier in social status than the troubadour, but the two
nonetheless share resemblances. One is that both could be instrumental musicians,
singers, or both. Another is that both have an interesting connection with passion for
women. The troubadour belongs to the system of courtly love, in which the beloved
and unattainable lady is idolized. The jongleur here, at his most pious, is presented
as a humble but sincere worshiper of the Virgin, who is embodied in a Madonna. He
does everything, and gives his all, for the love of Mary alone. In the titles that four
of the five manuscripts offer, this character is associated with the Mother of God. In
other words, he too is a fool for love, but his inamorata is Mary. He dances attendance
upon her and upon no one else.
The most literal-minded transposition of the prevailing medieval title into present-
day French would be Le tombeur de Notre Dame, word-for-word “The Tumbler of Our
Lady.” The hitch with retaining this wording unmodified in the modern tongue lies in
the element tombeur. While the verb tomber means “to fall,” for more than a century the
derivative noun has come to connote in French not a tumbler, in the sense of acrobat,
dancer, or acrobatic dancer, but rather a lady’s man, ladykiller, womanizer, cad, or
bounder, for whom incautious women may fall, sometimes much to their subsequent
remorse. Although the term is by no means an obscenity, and no one would be
foulmouthed in using it, it carries a charge of moral disapproval and condemnation.
Imagine if every time English speakers employed the word tumble, their thoughts
turned to sexual intercourse, because of the euphemistic “a tumble in the hay.” Under
such circumstances, they might shun the noun tumbler, which is the predicament that
tombeur thrusts upon French-speakers today. The medieval verb is another matter,
since it carried no such associations.
The discomfort about transposing the original term from medieval French into the
modern language can be inferred from a heading in a 1912 volume of French literary
2. Dancing for God 75
history. The caption leading into discussion of the medieval poem reads “Le Tombeur
(Jongleur) de Notre-Dame,” and the following sentence glosses the word in question
as “a tumbler or performer of tumbles.” To bat away objectionable associations of
tombeur that ill befit a spiritual tale, the closest and otherwise most natural modern
rendering of the thirteenth-century French has been unloaded in favor of Le jongleur
de Notre Dame. The present-day title can be and has been rendered into English as
The Jongleur of Notre Dame in the hybrid of the two languages that has been styled
Frenglish. In this case, key noun is a loanword that can mean generally minstrel or
particularly juggler.
The situation in French hastened conflation of the medieval story with its fin-
de-siecle adaptations by the Nobel Prize-winning author Anatole France and the
once supremely successful songwriter Jules Massenet. We need not bid them au
revoir, since we will encounter them again repeatedly. Their short story and opera,
respectively, carry the title Le jongleur de Notre Dame. Thus, in French both sides of the
narrative equation, medieval and medievalized, are known unvaryingly as Le jongleur
de Notre Dame. In contrast, in English, despite occasional contamination across the
divide, the medieval tale tends to be called Our Lady’s Tumbler, whereas the texts by
the above short-story writer and musician are designated by the half-Anglicized title
of Jongleur of Notre Dame. Modern authors have contrived myriad ways of ringing
changes, mostly slight but some radical, upon each of these captions.
Notre Dame versus Saint Mary
At first blush, the other panel in the diptych-like title looks problem-free. No
troubleshooting would appear to be called for. When used as a possessive, the medieval
French Nostre Dame morphed into the modern de Notre Dame. Yet this other phrase too
requires at least a little examination. Notre Dame designates the Virgin in her capacity
as “Our Lady.” Even more often, it serves as shorthand for a religious foundation
dedicated to her, with the cathedral of Paris being by far the best known. The more
relevant matter is what led to the formulation Notre Dame in the first place. Despite its
familiarity, it should not be taken for granted. French is unusual in calling Mary what
it does, in having as many dedications of places, buildings, and institutions to her as
it does, and in vaunting a cathedral named after her that has become emblematic of
both Gothic architecture overall and particularly the city of Paris. Let us take a gander
at all these aspects of the one seemingly simple phrase.
The designation of the Virgin as “Our Lady,” from the Latin domina nostra, has
hardly been universal in the Romance languages. Calling her Saint Mary was, and
perhaps still is, more common (see Fig. 2.1). To take one well-known nautical example,
Christopher Columbus’s largest ship was not christened Nuestra Sefiora, Spanish for
76 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
Our Lady. On the contrary, it was the Santa Maria—Saint Mary if translated into
English. In French, usage has differed markedly—and the divergence from most
other languages began early. Notre Dame may well have become current already in
the eleventh century. To all appearances, the phraseology took strong hold first at
Chartres in the second half of the twelfth century. From there, it seeped by linguistic
drip-drip into other forms of Romance speech, such as Occitan and Catalan, at the
expense of the formulations for “Saint Mary” in these tongues.
Fig. 2.1 Edward Maran, The “Santa Maria,” 1492, 1892. Painting, reproduced on color print from
original The Santa Maria, Nifia and Pinta (Evening of October 11, 1492).
No one knows what bright soul coined the locution Notre Dame. (Nobody filed for
exclusive rights to it.) The turn of phrase may have arisen among the laity rather
than among ecclesiastics, as a means of marking the Virgin apart from other saints,
including virgins, to accord her special credit for her uniqueness. By not being
labeled “saint” she is elevated, not to the point of heading a matriarchy, but still head
and shoulders above all others. The discrimination makes perfect sense, since she
occupies a degree below that of Jesus Christ but above ordinary saints. At the same
time, Mary was the most popular, in the fullest sense of the word, of holy women.
Yet Notre Dame differs interestingly from, for instance, the Italian Madonna, which
could be equated to “my lady” or “milady.” We may not stop to puzzle over why we
say “your Majesty” as opposed to “my Lord,” but the possessive adjectives have been
driven by specific forces. The plural in the French first-person possessive for “Our
Lady” brought home that she belonged to everyone. The form “Our” may well reflect
liturgical practices, in which the members of a church collectively invoke the Mother
2. Dancing for God 77
of God. The noun Dame had the simultaneous effect of coordinating the Virgin with
feudalism. In French, Jesus Christ is Notre Seigneur, or “Our Lord.” By being called
“Our Lady,” Mary is recognized in rank for being what she was, that is, the most
powerful female in Christianity. In medieval society, women were ringed around by
constraints, but the Mother of God knew no limitations: she had to shatter no stained-
glass ceiling. Making her into a lady had the self-contradictory, but understandable
effects of simultaneously ennobling, familiarizing, and humanizing her. As obligatory
within the feudal system, the Virgin would indemnify her devotee as a lady would
shield a vassal against all threats and arm-twisting.
The upswing in the wording Notre Dame took place within a much larger swing,
namely, the cult of Mary. This veneration began to proliferate in the eleventh century,
and in the twelfth century reached in both lay and clerical piety a pinnacle from which
it would not be dislodged for the rest of the Middle Ages. The high point turned
out to be a mesa-like plateau. Devotion to the Virgin must be reckoned among the
most instrumental forces in spiritual life and creative achievement from the twelfth
through the fifteenth centuries. There is no hyperbolizing the number of sculptures,
paintings, stained-glass windows, and other artworks created in honor of Mary, and
no overstating the volume of hymns and stories composed on her behalf. This literary
flowering coincided with the efflorescence of courtly love literature, in which the lady
occupied an exalted place. The two developments would have supported each other,
and would have initiated many-sided interplay.
The Mother of God as elevated through mass devotion was manifold. At first the
Virgin won favor through her relation to Christ. She enabled the Word to become
flesh when she accepted her role in the Incarnation, as the human mother from
whom the Son of God took his humanity. In her own humanness, she was later the
grieving Mary. In this guise, she would become formalized as the Mater Dolorosa, or
“Sorrowful Mother.” Even more particularly, her griefs would be numbered seven. In
this connection, we should not overlook the parallels between the maternal Virgin
as she keens over the deposed Christ, and the Mary who assuages the jongleur after
he collapses before the Madonna. Eventually, the Mother of God won a clean sweep
through her Assumption into heaven, which positioned her first for coronation and
then for being seated on the right side of Jesus as the Virgin and Child in majesty.
On a civic plane, Mary constituted a favored last-line defense for municipalities,
in the first instance Constantinople. She earned this reputation after the siege of the
Byzantine capital by Persians and Avars in 626. A progression becomes clear: she
acquired status as the invincible defender and invulnerable protector of, first, the
city, then the whole Eastern Roman Empire, and ultimately all Christendom. Despite
having a power quotient that bordered on omnipotence, the Mother of God was
not preempted from transitioning to being a merciful mediator. In her maternal
78 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
capacity, she acted as a vigilant lookout for the best interests of humanity. As the
Virgin of Mercy, she went from merely being Mother Confessor to playing an active
role in motivating her son to absolve repentant sinners. Beyond the Marys in all
these capacities burgeoned a multiplicity of other Virgins, including Madonnas that
triggered local affection and devotion while generating miracles. In popular devotion,
such images served as the focal points for personal and affective language that invoked
the Mother of God as intercessor. In exchange for the worship, the Virgin traveled to
and fro between heaven and earth with a facility disallowed to Jesus himself. She was
especially approachable, and uniquely capable of working miracles. All these Marys
traveled with a long train of miracle stories, sermons, popular literature, art works,
and shrines.
In modern French, Notre Dame has come to denote without distinction the Virgin
Mary herself and a cathedral, since almost all such foundations in France are dedicated
to her. After the bombing of Reims in World War I, an author spouted about the
synecdoche with patriotic wholeheartedness:
When we speak indifferently of “the Cathedral” or of “Notre-Dame” we do not confound
the Palace with the Queen; we affirm that the Palace is the Queen’s, and that she is at
home there; we mean to say that the Cathedral is her domain, her sanctuary, that one
cannot separate the one from the other, that to touch the Cathedral is to touch Our Lady,
and to violate the Cathedral is to violate Our Lady.
What rendered Mary exceptional, and why was she worshiped so warm-bloodedly
by so many? The special saving grace of Christianity was that the religion made
monotheism approachable by incorporating a man within its divinity. For all that, in
time the godhead became regarded as aloof and forbidding to the rank and file. At the
top of the social hierarchy, emperors and kings were God’s anointed. In that capacity,
they had a privileged relation to Jesus. In Christian iconography of the East, we find
Christ Pantokrator. In Greek, the epithet means “almighty.” In the corresponding
imagery of the West, we encounter Christ in Majesty, enthroned as ruler of the world.
In contrast to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, the Mother of God
seemed within reach to everyone, no matter how humble. The reforms of the Fourth
Lateran Council in 1215 suggest that by then she was sought after more than ever to
intercede with her offspring. One explanation was that the Church was not equipped
to deliver the level of pastoral care demanded for the swelling numbers of needy
Christians. Filling the gap, the Blessed Virgin could be counted upon to sway Jesus
through her maternal influence. The underlying guideline was the common reality of
life that a solicitous son can be prevailed upon to do anything for his mother. Thus,
Mary assumed an unexcelled place within personal piety from which she shows no
signs of being budged even today.
2. Dancing for God 79
The Equivocal Status of Jongleurs
Not all those who wander are lost.
—J.R. R. Tolkien
It is high time to read beyond the title and to think about the protean character to
whom it refers in its first part. In French as in English, jongleur can now designate
performers of innumerable different complexions. It behooved the practitioners of
this profession to wear many hats. In their versatility, they diverted their audiences,
both lay and ecclesiastical, with displays of verbal, musical, and physical skill. Even
a very approximate taxonomy of these entertainers ramifies into a many-branched
family tree. As artists of the word, they composed, ad-libbed, or rattled off verses and
told tales. To detail these activities in composition and delivery more specifically, a
jongleur could be a singer or composer of love songs, comic narratives, heroic lays, or
other narratives such as histories and saints’ lives. In the fullest sense of the expression,
they would sing for their supper.
What is more, jongleurs were actors. At the humblest level, they mimed and
mummed in dumb shows. Likewise, they tried their hands (truly) as puppeteers.
Then too, they served as buffoons, clowns, fools, and jesters. Beyond acting, they
ventured before their audiences as musicians, singers and instrumentalists alike. In
another direction, they could perform physically as acrobats, contortionists, dancers
and dance masters, fire-eaters, gymnasts, jugglers, ropewalkers, stiltwalkers, and
sword-dancers, -jugglers, and -swallowers. Among other things, they were conjurors
and magicians. To go beyond the purely human, they tamed, trained, and exhibited
animals, such as bears, dogs, and snakes, and they entered the fray as equestrians too.
All told, it may sometimes seem harder to determine what they were not than what
they were. They acted as the archetypal and ultimate crossover artists, prepared to do
whatever would attract medieval thrill-seekers.
The repertoires of such entertainers were not restricted merely to acts of physical
adroitness such as acrobatics, prestidigitation, and juggling. Their stock-in-trade also
had a verbal (and voluble) dimension. Indeed, these performers drew upon all the
sorts of words and music associated with the wandering minstrels and court jesters
who long ago became embedded in modern conceptions of medieval life (see Fig. 2.2).
Although sometimes courtly, such figures were often related to discreditable places
and activities, such as taverns and throwing dice. A jongleur could be a professional
gambler, instrumentalist, or contortionist—or all of the above. Likewise, he could be
a mountebank, an individual who would hop onto a long seat to do his act. The last
designation, originating in the Italian imperative “climb on (the) bench!,” isametonymy
80 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
that tends to imply an inn or alehouse, where the bare minimum of furniture would
have been trestles, tabletops, and benches. We are not talking about fancy marquetry.
In worlds without theaters, the altitude of such seating was often as close as actors
and audiences could get to stages or circus rings. In time, the mountebank became as
we know him today, a nomadic charlatan who stands atop an elevation, maybe even
a plank on two sawhorses, not so much to enact an entertainment routine as to peddle
a nostrum or some other overpriced product of quackery.
Fig. 2.2 Postcard depicting court jesters (L. Vandamme et Cie, 1905).
Guiraut de Calanson, often termed (with only flimsy support) a Gascon troubadour,
frequented the courts of northern Spain. In the first two decades of the thirteenth
century, he composed a dozen poems in Occitan that are extant today. In one of these
compositions, he lays out the talent that a performer worthy of being called a jongleur
should have. In enumerating an ideal repertoire, he touches upon the abilities to
speak and rhyme wittily, be steeped in the Trojan legend, balance apples on the tips
of knives, juggle, jump through hoops, and play multiple musical instruments.
What can the etymology of jongleur tell us? The English is scrounged from the
French, which in its turn is a direct blood relative of the Latin ioculator. By whatever
name, the term denoted then a joker or jokester, usually professional. At its broadest,
the word meant any kind of entertainer. The primary sense of the original noun in the
learned language derived from iocus, meaning “game, play, or jest.” The English word
“joke” comes from the same noun. In the Middle Ages, both the Latin and vernacular
nouns became contaminated by association with a similar-sounding term of Germanic
origin, jangler (babbler, chatterbox, gossip, liar, scandal-monger, calumniator). Yet the
early medieval labor market did not allow many entertainers to specialize in the arts
of speech alone. They learned to move among verbal, musical, and physical skills.
Therefore the Latin noun gave rise in English not only to “joker” but also to “juggler.”
Ioculator was but one item in the sprawling Medieval Latin nomenclature to
indicate this ilk. In the ferocious Darwinian battleground that language can constitute,
2. Dancing for God 81
this noun rode roughshod over its closest predecessors and eventually displaced
them. The results can be cross-checked in many European tongues, including
English. Throughout Europe, the Latin word has progeny that go back to the Middle
Ages. In contradistinction, the root of histrio survives mainly as a later and learned
reintroduction from Greek, whence the adjective histrionic. Likewise, the stem of the
other derivative from the same language, mimus, has become largely restricted to the
ambit of mime-player. Finally, the Latin scurra has persisted solely as embedded in
scurrilous and scurrility. As performers became more professionalized, stark shifts
took place in the old meanings of words. In English, the most common derivative
of the Latin ioculator became not a “joker” in general, but much more narrowly a
“juggler.” In medieval French, it denoted above all entertainers who specialized in song.
Similarly, the jester turned into a clown-like figure, even though the name originally
implied an artist or teller of tales or stories. A gestour was a teller of gestes, or “stories.”
From him descended the jester as we know him. Another Latin noun of the Middle
Ages has been largely omitted so far.
The ioculator had a major competitor in the ministerialis. The two, jongleurs and
minstrels, were sometimes conflated. The medieval Latin ministerialis, better known
now as minstrel, signified literally “of a little minister, servant,” but more commonly
“minor court official.” In turn, the term in the learned language came from the noun
ministerium for “service, office,” itself derived from minister. It signified the hireling
of a lord, either secular or ecclesiastical, or prince. The French for “minstrel” derived
from this Latin. The vernacular word soon referred to a person who had mastered a
craft. The word to describe what a minister does is ministerium “ministry.” Mestier, the
medieval French derivative of that noun, gives us métier.
To slip from conflation to its opposite, a primary distinction has been predicated
between jongleurs and trouveres. Cognates of these two terms exist in the language
of southern France and other neighboring Mediterranean regions. In presentations of
poetics in this other Romance tongue, the two groups are sometimes differentiated by
stressing that the joglar performs, whereas the trobador invents or composes. By this
standard, the two types of professionals were as distinct or indistinct as artisans from
artists. The underlying premise is that the jongleur or joglar is a professional musician
and singer, whereas the trouvere or trobador is a songwriter and lyricist—not quite
gentlemen scholars, but much closer to them than the jongleurs. The last-mentioned
were marginal beings whose social standing and reputation could be deemed equivocal,
at best. They were edgy in every sense of the word: they specialized in brinkmanship,
by operating at the margins. In contrast, trouveres could have achieved exalted status
through their affiliation with noble courts.
The dichotomy can apply as well to Latin. Cognates for trouveres and troubadours
are not used there, but substantially the same line is drawn between functions. Clerics
could concoct texts in Latin or even in vernacular languages, such as medieval French.
Often, they relied upon lay entertainers to deliver them. In this schema, jongleurs
perform orally in the vulgar tongue before lay audiences. All the same, we should not
82 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
suppose that the writers in the Middle Ages who used these words upheld the nuance
regularly. We should be even less disposed to credit that composers and performers
themselves had fixed terminology to describe themselves. The relevance, or even
existence, of such glib sociocultural distinctions between trouveres and jongleurs
has been rightly challenged. The differences in meaning between the two are not
nearly so straightforward and schematic as some would wish us to believe. Take the
courts, for example, where minstrels and jongleurs are often discussed as if they were
transposable. As the associations of their name suggest, minstrel is the diminutive of
the noun minister. A minstrel can be then a minor official attached to a set retinue. To
warrant being named what they were, they may have largely abandoned the rootless
itinerancy that put wandering players into friction with the sedentariness and stability
esteemed within much of medieval society.
Another factor to weigh is a reshuffling that may have occurred over time.
Troubadours who became impoverished may have cascaded many rungs to become
jongleurs, while jongleurs who succeeded may have scaled the social ladder. Whatever
the causes, over time the neat differentiation between troubadours and jongleurs
seems to have become muddied. In 1274, a late troubadour penned a lengthy poem
of supplication to King Alfonso X of Castile. In it, he asked that the inhabitants of
his kingdom maintain bright-line distinctions between the two groups. This poet
approved that the Castilians still discriminated among instrumentalists, imitators,
troubadours, and even more reprehensible performers. In contrast, in Provence at
the time, the troubadours had become déclassé and lost the cachet of their name, the
supremacy that originated in their ability to compose. They were all called jongleurs
without differentiation.
Certain proclivities of jongleurs stand beyond dispute. For a start, these performers
tended to be transients who subsisted and worked on peripheries. With their special
privilege of laissez-aller, they existed at the fringes of princely and ecclesiastical
courts, villages, and everywhere else they circulated. The marginality in which the
entertainers were enveloped because of their profession meant that they were often
considered disreputable—personae non gratae. Yet their rakishness was not an
undiluted negative. For instance, they could venture into places where, and at times
when, others could not. The protagonist of Our Lady’s Tumbler may have benefited
from the carte blanche accorded jongleurs, at least when they appeared as characters
in fiction. He seems to have enjoyed license to roam the monastery at will.
When considering the medieval French poem, we must take note that the hero is
not a street performer in straitened circumstances, however often grinding poverty
and professional failure are assumed to be the case in post-medieval adaptations of the
tale. On the contrary, the tumbler has proven himself to be a successful entrepreneur
in entertainment. Unlike the visionaries who experienced many of the most important
apparitions of Mary in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the dancer betrays no
sign of enduring economic deprivation, political upheaval, or brewing war. What he
2. Dancing for God 83
does let drop is that he lives in a time of high religiosity, particularly when devotion
to the Virgin enters consideration.
Traditionally, jongleurs were expected to be multitalented. Yet no one individual
could be a true jack-of-all-trades, thoroughly competent in all the arts that were
ascribed to this class of entertainers. A little before 1215, Thomas of Chobham
produced a vade mecum of practical theology on penance and confession for priests,
which accrued wide favor. In it, the English-born but Paris-educated ecclesiastic
distinguished among three classes of performers, referring to all of them generically
as histriones. Thinking of ‘histrionic’ gives a clue. The first category in his taxonomy
comprises those who specialize in what we might call physical comedy or burlesque.
Part of their disgrace consists in their habit of disrobing to a level of attire (or should
we Say non-attire?) that common folk found shocking, even horrid. These entertainers
rate the lowest in Thomas’s hierarchy. The second of his groupings encompasses
gossips, while the third comprises singers. The last two have in common that their
tongues wag. He subdivided the vocalists in turn into two clusters, one praiseworthy
and the other not worth a tinker’s damn.
The ethical framework of this manual tags as bad those jongleurs who do not direct
the body to spiritual goals. These lowlifes do not shrink from unabashed buffoonery
in either words or deeds. In effect, they submit the spirit to the flesh. Still worse, they
engage as agents provocateurs to sin. By engaging in obscene movements of the
anatomy, they incite concupiscence in other people. From Genesis 1:27 on, we know
that a person’s frame is made in God’s image. As such, the human body is not to be
deformed. Neglectful of this divine analogue, acrobats writhe their limbs out of shape.
By employing their physique to despicable ends, they have the look of streetwalkers.
If the tumbler were truly like such gymnasts, he would resemble at best a harlot saint
like Mary Magdalene or Thais before conversion. That is, he would earn his living by
selling his body through enactment of base acts. Yet his solution differs, since he does
not so much turn away from his profession by leaving it as redeem it by inventing a
means of making the performance private and transcendent.
As a caste, physical jongleurs deserve their comeuppance. They not only indulge
in frivolity themselves, but even worsen matters by implicating others. Through
their sensuality, they stimulate lustfulness and turpitude among their audience.
But what can be said of good jongleurs? On the positive side, Thomas excepts from
condemnation jongleurs who “sing the lofty deeds of princes and lives of saints, furnish
solace when a person is sick or unsettled, and do not commit the disgraceful acts that
male and female acrobats perform, as well as those who put on shameful shows.”
This laudable type of trouper serves the aims of the Church and elicits wary approval
above all for helping to propagate the cults of saints and pilgrimage. The approved
kind restricts physicality to a sober-minded bearing and to the playing of musical
instruments. To this top-flight echelon in his classificatory system the ecclesiastical
writer grants careful but ungrudging approbation. In concluding his consideration,
84 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
he relates an anecdote about a jongleur. This individual addresses himself to Pope
Alexander III to test the waters about his fate in the afterlife. He wants to find out if he
can win salvation. His holiness asks him if he knows another trade. Despite receiving
a negative answer, the supreme pontiff assures his jumpy inquirer that he can live
without fear so long as he avoids suggestive conduct or obscenity.
In the Romance of Flamenca we again encounter three genera of jongleurs, but the
taxonomy is not at all the same as in Thomas of Chobham. First come those who
sing songs, lyric and narrative; then instrumentalists; and finally, physical performers.
Before entering a monastery, the artist in Our Lady’s Tumbler would have been
completely at home in this third cadre. By the same token, the acrobat in the medieval
French poem belongs to the final one in Thomas’s three ranks of entertainers. His flair,
like theirs, lies in the body. So far as we are given to know, our tumbler is an old hand
solely in acrobatics, including what we would regard as dance. Indeed, we are told
explicitly that he knew only to make his leaps and that he was incapable of anything
else. He is not an odd-job man in the entertainment field.
What accounts for the permafrost distrust and disregard in which performers,
especially of the physical sort, were held? One pat answer would be that Christians in
the Middle Ages were meant to leave the body behind, and not to dwell upon it. The
anxieties of people across the centuries about the human plight of having an immortal
spirit caged within a mortal frame were captured starkly in medieval debates. In
the culture of the Middle Ages, body and soul were often presented as antithetical.
Debate poems abound in which the two are pitted against each other. This makes
sense, considering that the tension between them is a common and perhaps even a
fundamental human dilemma. How do we reconcile two such different pulls upon
us?
In such exchanges, the soul often occupied a position of superiority over the body.
It held the moral high ground. In other cases, the two were equally inculpated. Within
the asceticism and body-denying spirit of medieval Christianity, it was questionable
enough for the entertainer to have a sharpened sensitivity to his own body. How
could the joy of dance qualify as asceticism? Even worse, spectators would have been
inspired too by the tumbler to pay closer heed to their corporeality as human beings.
Yet we must also remember that the acrobat kills himself through the mortification of
his devotion. He makes his physicality the means to an end: his body serves as the
instrument for the expression of his soul in worship. He makes the prison of the spirit
into an escape hatch.
Physicality thrusts the tumbler to the bottom of the scale for jongleurs and minstrels.
It took a long time for the shame of his corporeality to be destigmatized. Generally,
both kinds of artists are portrayed in vernacular literature as being able to sing and
play the fiddle-like vielle or harp, as well as perhaps to tumble and perform acrobatics.
A manuscript of the Old Spanish Canticles of Saint Mary portrays King Alfonso X
the Wise on bended knee before Mary as he calls upon a gaggle of jongleurs, both
2. Dancing for God 85
instrumentalists and dancers, to join him in performing in her honor (see Fig. 2.3).
The fragmentary Old Occitan epic Daurel and Beton depicts a professional jongleur
named Daurel who possesses both skill sets, musical and athletic. Yet he refrains from
imparting his gymnastic arts to his king’s son Beton, and instead gives him a boot
camp in music and song alone. Implied is that the physical stunts would ill besuit the
station of a nobleman. Whatever their menu of professional skills, jongleurs tended to
be regarded with suspicion but not with universal condemnation. A more benevolent
outlook upon them can be detected in a thirteenth-century poem by the troubadour
Cerveri de Girona, which gives utterance to nail-biting about the spiritual salvation
of jongleurs. After initially exhorting them to renounce their wrongful and debasing
profession, the poet comes around to urging them instead to put their gifts at the
disposal of the Virgin Mary.
Me OG 6 oS
> ae
a umele
C6 aco
“
- oe
Teme
3
Fig. 2.3 Musicians before the Virgin and Child, as depicted in the Cantigas de Santa Maria
(Codice Rico). Madrid, Real Biblioteca del Escorial, MS T.1.1., fol. 170v.
The tumbler has in common with the jongleur a mobility that was shared in medieval
times almost uniquely by pilgrims and merchants. They could go it alone, or travel in
troupes. When plural, they swarmed in a kind of proto-circus. For self-protection, they
organized themselves ever more tightly by forming guilds and wearing a distinctive
livery. The clothing remains with us in popular stereotypes of clowns and court jesters.
86 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
Jongleurs could move from the crossroads, central squares, and street corners of
yokel villages to the halls of lordly castles, from the parvises of the saintliest cathedrals
to the interiors of the seamiest brothels and bathhouses, and from everyman’s
pilgrimage route to the choosiest cloisters. The itinerancy of the jongleurs could border
on vagrancy. In a monastic context, steadfastness of place is often designated by the
Latin expression stabilitas loci, by which the Rule of Saint Benedict stipulated staying put
as one of its most sacrosanct principles. The vows of a Benedictine underlined stability
of residence in a single monastery as one of a monk’s paramount duties. Brothers
were supposed to abstract themselves from the world at large. By remaining stably in
place, they would show the constancy that could elide the otherwise immeasurable
space between divinity and humanity. Like the entertainers, the act of wandering
elicited praise in some cases and uneasiness in others. The Latin expression homo
viator, concretizing the conception of man as nomad, captures the article of faith that
the human condition is to range between two worlds. The meandering has logically
as its pendants the notions of pilgrim and pilgrimage. But not all drifters were created
equal. Those brethren who moved about were condemned for their rambling and
roving. Consequently, the monk who was remiss and failed to stay put in one place
risked being degraded as a gyrovague. This term for a monastic defector melded a
Greek root for a round plane figure and a Latin one for wandering. It has never been
thought good to go in circles. The scholar who wheeled about from one venue to
another held the shady status of being a wanderer or vagrant. The pilgrim might be
righteous or not. The minstrel who accompanied the pilgrim also might be upstanding
or not.
When in the world, the jongleur in Our Lady’s Tumbler was a boundary-crosser. No
container could hold him: he stretched limits, pushed the envelope, and expanded
horizons. In contrast to a pious monk, he could epitomize instability. In some ways,
he would have resembled a knight. He strayed about sometimes by himself as a
knight errant would do, sometimes among troupes of peers. Yet his errancy was not
construed as a redemptive quest. He led a vagabond life. He alternately straddled and
transgressed, embodying the concept of liminality by crossing thresholds as he went
from town to town on a hunt for income from performances. The society around him
almost instinctively conflated physical waywardness with moral or spiritual error.
Since to be errant and arrant are closely related not merely in etymology, he was
more like an arrant knave than an errant knight. He incurred suspicion for being a
desperado, a truant, or even a felon.
At the end of the day, the jongleur was regarded as a weak prospect for experiencing
an enduring conversion. He issued from a class seen as being especially prone to
recidivism. When he first entered the monastery, the inveterate rambler would
become by force of circumstances a stay-at-home —or this story’s medieval equivalent,
a stay-in-monastery. In our story, the tumbler remained just as much of a wanderer, as
he shuttled between the ground level or slightly elevated plane of the church where
2. Dancing for God 87
the monks carried out their devotions and the crypt below where he executed his
performances. For all that, the entertainers had their good sides and strong suits. For
instance, they could serve as cultural vectors across geographic boundaries and social
barriers. In this function as intermediaries, they could carry culture from high to low
and vice versa, ecclesiastical to secular and vice versa, region to region, language to
language, and ethnic group to ethnic group. The performers transported stories and
techniques across the lines that ran between such steely oppositions as lay and clerical,
oral and written, Germanic and Romance, and worldly and religious. In a year-round
open season, they lifted material and methods liberally from others, just as others
drew at liberty from them. This unrestricted aspect of jongleur life is evident in the
many dance steps with which the tumbler of Our Lady demonstrated familiarity.
To judge by their names, he was exposed in his earthbound life to a rainbow of
different regional styles in gymnastics. In mobility, the jongleurs bore a likeness to
the wandering scholars who are often lumped together and called goliards. Yet our
tumbler was no free-and-easy student. Whereas the prerequisite for academic status
was Latin, he was unscathed by exposure to the learned tongue. If he had a universal
language, it took the form of nonverbal communication in the use of body movements
and gestures.
Contrary to what many later variants of the story intimate, the protagonist of Our
Lady’s Tumbler in its original medieval French verse reflex flourished in his career
before entering the abbey. Prior to becoming involved in a miracle tale, he was not a
failure but a success story. The geographic diffusion of the balletic steps or acrobatic
moves enumerated in his practice suggests that he interacted with entertainers from
far and wide. His routinized dance shows the cosmopolitanism of his trade as well as
the breadth of his travels and the many ethnicities of his audiences. He was anything
but a one-trick pony. Through whatever channels, he familiarized himself with
movements indigenous to regions all over Western Europe. Relatively nearby, he was
conversant with dance steps or gymnastic moves characteristic of Metz, Lorraine, and
Champagne. Further afield, he alluded to Brittany, Spain, and Rome. The distribution
may even imply that he traveled in person to these places.
Yet since all the steps or moves named are otherwise unknown and unknowable, the
real nature of the drill cannot be reconstructed. Though the play-by-play names names
without inhibition, we have no frame of reference for them. We cannot discern how
one national or regional style of sport or dance differed from another. To complicate
matters further, we must even consider that the complex acrobatic or balletic cycle
corresponds to no performance that a tumbler or dancer ever put on show. At the
remove of many hundred years, we cannot analogize with confidence to any event
in our experience. At one extreme would be calypso or cancan moves in freestyle
dance competitions; at another, calisthenics before floor exercises in gymnastics. In
any case, the supposed routine could be entirely the fancy of the poet, as a way of
almost parodying the overwrought psalmody that goes on in monastic churches.
88 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
Finally, we have no idea how much the dance varies from one performance to the
next. Is it mechanical and even robotic, or it is improvised anew in each instance—
does the jongleur rejig his jig each time he does it? The “vault of Metz” is the first
and last named regional move that he performs. Does he save for last the best leap
or handspring of his imagination? How does his routine relate to the ritualism of the
liturgical offices enacted by the monks above?
Our Lady’s Tumbler has sundry associations with Picardy: its dialect contains
features typical of the region; it has common ground with the miracles of Gautier
de Coinci, who hailed from the heart of the area; it shares motifs with stories from
such places as Arras; and so forth. In view of these factors, it is intriguing that in
later centuries tumblers and jongleurs from Chauny earned special renown. The
Picard town had its own Confraternity of Trumpet-Jongleurs. The guild staged its
own festival and went on the road as well. But just as we may not discover much that
is meaningful about the supposedly local dance moves that the tumbler made, we
are unlikely ever to make great inroads in coming to grips with the particularities of
Picard performers. No matter how fine-toothed the comb with which we check the
ledgers, relevant information may well never emerge: however great the information
explosion may be, not all facts will be at the tips of our fingers.
A stock view in Western Europe held thatjongleurs were damned automatically, for
the very fact of being jongleurs. A systematic exposition of the Christian faith presents
a snatch of dialogue to this effect between its author Honorius Augustodunensis and
one of his students. The pupil asks if these entertainers have any glimmer of hope
for salvation. His master with the catchy Latin name replies with a stiff negative. The
outlook of the churchman meshed with a perspective in which these performers were
social outcasts. Often others of this type are mentioned pejoratively, with disapproving
terms in French that became modern English /echer and ribald.
Although the relationship of the jongleurs with the clergy was fraught, their
standing shot up from the early Middle Ages to the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Subsequently, the entertainers who earned their keep in urban or at least curial
settings attained a noticeably higher socioeconomic status. Though some remained
squalid and marginal, an appreciable number came to have property and wealth. One
of them was the tumbler in the original medieval poem, who was far from a penniless
failure. The modern image of the jester relates to this intensifying fixity of place or,
to be more accurate, milieu. One element in the evolution was the engagement of
entertainers with courts and palaces, of both noblemen and ecclesiastical magnates,
such as bishops. Jongleur and jester are nearly substitutable terms. An entertainer of
this ilk was also attached to a set circle, in this case the entourage of a noble or king.
After him, the professional buffoon arrived. Jongleurs and the Church had abundant
reason to make common cause when they could. On the clerical side, monks and
friars composed legends, increasingly in the vernacular, that they wanted delivered
before the widest audience. Sometimes they would have profited from witnessing
and appropriating the performance techniques of the jongleurs, to make their own
2. Dancing for God 89
preaching more appetizing. On the other side, professionals had every reason to
ingratiate themselves with the clerics who policed many of the common spaces where
the largest publics awaited them.
By describing in loving detail the virtuosity of a resourceful entertainer, the
preacher who resorted to the exemplum of the tumbler would have coopted some
of what his competitors in entertainment had to offer. In effect, the stimulation of
hearing an eloquent exemplum about a high-quality performance could have rivaled
the experience of watching an actual performer in action: score one for the pulpiteer
versus the puppeteer. The equivalence would have held especially strong if the sermon-
giver employed gestures or movements to convey mimetically how the acrobat’s
tumbling might have appeared. Along these lines, a parish priest is reported to have
later called himself a “mime of Christ” in the inscription at his burial place. If true,
this allegation would transmute the mimetic art into being an “imitation of Christ.”
In this case, the jongleur would have mimed the elation of creation upon being saved.
In an added Marian wrinkle, he achieved salvation through the grace of the Virgin.
At the same time, one main thrust of the exemplum is to burnish the reputation of a
professional entertainer who repudiated his profession and converted. By drawing
upon the narrative, a sermonizer would have exalted religious devotion over more
earthly pursuits. When a speaker related the story at the pulpit, he could claim for
his narrative the full weight of institutional authority. Such church-sanctioned use
is what the poet of Our Lady’s Tumbler assumes by referring to the tale as a “little
exemplum.”
Many valuations of jongleurs and their colleagues have come to light from the
medieval period. Ambivalence about them percolates into plain sight in Gautier de
Coinci. The poet of the Virgin takes pains to establish the veracity of the legends
he relates. By doing so, he differentiates his narrative repertoire from the fallacious
and fraudulent miracles retailed by footloose and fancy-free goliards and itinerant
sermonizers. Gautier, nobleman turned Benedictine, monk promoted to abbot, was no
jongleur himself. Nor, the odds would imply vigorously, was the author of Our Lady’s
Tumbler. But both poets, alongside preachers who drew upon the exemplum for their
sermons, had incentive to assert control over the sometimes reviled and sometimes
dreaded members of their guild. They could do so by promulgating a view of what a
proper entertainer—one who merited the approbation of no less than the Mother of
God herself—should be and do.
During the Reformation, all entertainers, both jongleurs generally and jugglers
specifically, fell into even deeper disrepute than in the Middle Ages. Furthermore,
jugglers and their skill became anti-Catholic slurs in England. Priests who officiated
at Mass were likened to entertainers of this sort, as the Mass and transubstantiation
were to their characteristic craft. The theologian John Wycliffe went so far as to smear
such fathers with being “the devil’s jugglers.” In many parts of Europe a story with a
jongleur as protagonist would have stood an even slimmer chance of eliciting favor
during the sixteenth-century reform movement than in most earlier times.
90 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
Trance Dance
So he became a dancer to God.
—T.S. Eliot
Dance and spiritual practice sometimes relate strongly to each other. No one how-to
or do-it-yourself manual can tell everyone how to achieve transcendence through an
altered state. For some, the best means of attaining an out-of-body experience comes
through the body itself, through the ecstatic ritual of dance. The liturgy of Christian
worship may seem excessively verbal and slow-moving, even stalled, but in every
single one of its expressions it involves motions as well as words. We would not go
too far to say that the prayer books of many denominations seek to formulate for
worshipers a coherent message from both a choreography of ritualized steps and a
content based on set texts. Analyzed against this backdrop, the juggler had landed
in a quandary. As an illiterate lay brother, he was not permitted to participate in
the sequence of motions, and he could not understand the foundational texts. The
scriptures and formal ceremonies were unintelligible to him. Although not anti-
intellectual, he was inalterably unintellectual. What was to be done? His achievement
came in dreaming up a silver bullet all his own. His leggy liturgy was a worship
with movements and language of his own creation. A clash and crisis follow, since
his veneration through dance is initially indecipherable to the other monks. We have
competing, mutually uncomprehending, and uninterpretable illiteracies, the one of
texts and the other of dance.
Despite the distinctly detail-oriented description that the poet of Our Lady’s
Tumbler furnishes, we cannot reconstruct the tumbler’s jumps in their entirety. We are
unable to state with assurance how a single move in it would look, or even to establish
for sure whether the act was properly a dance, a gymnastic routine, a fusion of the
two, or something different again. We do know that a multitude of religious systems,
distributed widely across time and space, have allowed for the physical expression of
ritual adoration—for sacred performance. In ancient Greece, the athletic competitions
of the Olympic Games were tied so tightly to religious festivals in honor of Zeus that
they ceased only when the Christian emperor Theodosius banned such pagan cults.
In pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, ballgames constituted symbolic and ritual actions
while they also served the purposes of politics and entertainment. In Buddhism,
monks still dance to offer their bodies to the Buddha.
This is obviously not to say that all dances have been accepted in any religion, and
even less that any type of such rhythmic stepping has been rubber-stamped across
the full religious spectrum. From the Fathers of the Church through the Middle Ages,
Christianity showed itself highly disposed to condemn dancing. Many ecclesiastical
councils and synods, as well as texts concerned with penance, leave the distinct
impression that priests wished to extirpate dance. The taboos held with remarkable
hardiness against any movement remotely resembling it during divine service,
2. Dancing for God 91
especially in sermons and sacred processions. By the same token, dancing elicited
frowns and furrowed brows when it took place in hallowed sites, such as churches,
churchyards, and cemeteries. By both timing and place, the conduct of the lay brother
in Our Lady’s Tumbler was glaringly provocative to orthodox views within Christianity.
In almost every way imaginable, but particularly in this one regard, he challenges
the inelasticity of the dissociation that the Church sought to impose between lay and
clerical culture.
During the same span of a millennium and a half, Christians never stopped gyrating
for long. Despite hostility to the medium, some of the recurrent denunciations themselves
confirm that dancing took place. In fact, even priests engage in ritual dances sometimes.
In special cases, the physical activity could lead to mystical experiences. Through
balletic performance the tumbler could have attained a state of altered consciousness
that is achieved through the manner of movement known as trance dance. This type
of effortful motion facilitates entry into ecstasy. Such a condition of heightened being
is achieved, above all, in religious rituals. A particularly ancient manifestation is the
leaping for which the followers of the Greek god Dionysus were known in Greece. It
was associated with the choral song or chant known as the dithyramb, which to this day
is associated with wildness and irregularity. In dances associated with possession, the
participants may undergo visitations from spirits that take hold of them. Incidentally,
they may do spectacular feats beyond their normal abilities.
The line between religious ritual and entertainment is often porous, especially in
the case of fire-walking (see Fig. 2.4). As captured in an image of Fijian men from the
1960s, this sort of religious ritual features barefooted people who lope unharmed over
white-hot stones or coals. The tumbler’s performance resembles the custom of the
Pacific islanders mainly in his ability to locomote through what a person in a normal
state might have experienced as extreme discomfort. The joys of his movement and his
worship are analgesic in the same way as religious ecstasy protects pyro-peripateticists.
Medieval asceticism and mysticism abound in manifestations of devotion that
originate in self-inflicted suffering. The order of white monks is devoted in large part to
the expression of piety through penance. Their goal is to merit intercession, not merely
for themselves but also for others. Cistercianism included its fair share of devotees
who inflicted penitential pain upon themselves. Alongside exaltation and exultation,
the lay brother would have braved with gritted teeth the pain of penitential prayer
and worship. The tumbler’s self-imposed physical torment, although whipless, faintly
resembles that of radicals in the late medieval movement known as flagellantism who
lashed themselves with scourges or cat-o’-nine-tails (see Fig. 2.5). In turn, the European
flagellants bring to mind the pious in the yearly ‘Ashura’ ritual in Twelver Shi‘ism,
who march through the streets flogging themselves in remembrance of al-Husayn,
the Prophet’s martyred grandson. Loosely similar to both groups, the gymnast puts
himself on a treadmill of self-annihilation through physical expression of devotion.
By continuing despite exhaustion, he kills himself through the enactment of his love
for Mary, working or worshiping himself to death. In the story of Our Lady’s Tumbler,
92 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
the acrobat suffers the reality suggested by the etymology of contrition, which derives
ultimately from a Latin participle for “broken” or “ground down.” He is stomped
down through the stamping of his own feet.
Véritable Extrait de viande inet hed
1 ays em
cre bleu
Pesogy la signature LIEBIG en
sur l’étiquetie et le papier
pois.
qui enveloppe les
bs OK Ne 4— PROCESSION DE FLAGELLANTS A AVIGNON. Sere
VOIR AU VERSO.
Fig. 2.5 Trade card depicting a flagellant procession in Avignon, 1574
(London: Liebig’s Extract of Meat Company, 1903).
2. Dancing for God 93
The late Middle Ages and early modern era witnessed their own distinctive
manifestations of dances in dazes. These phenomena peaked in number and intensity
from the late fourteenth down through the seventeenth century. In these events,
packs of people would go berserk and engage in a frenzied mass hysteria of dancing
in the streets. Such manic episodes hinged upon collective dance that was associated
with music, sometimes allegedly either precipitated or palliated by the playing
of instruments (see Fig. 2.6). The causes of the flare-ups remain disputable. One
explanation that has gained traction lays the blame on poisoning, the culprit being
either toxins from infected foodstuffs or bites from spiders or scorpions. Another line
of reasoning sees the illness as having no real physiological etiology. Instead, the
impulse would be psychogenic or psychosomatic. Supposedly this balletic “monkey
see, monkey do” on a grand scale resulted from shared stress.
In contrast to the group dances of the laity, the tumbler’s performance is the solo
act of an individual. So far as he is aware, his audience has just one member. His
disporting is neither competitive nor spectator sport. Only the Virgin Mary watches
him, through the proxy of the Madonna. He does not join others in ad hoc line dancing,
but instead remains in solitude. What he does by himself is pray, but for his soliloquy
he resorts not to verbose utterances, but to physical maneuvers. He apostrophizes
the Virgin through his steps, without realizing that she sees and esteems what he
accomplishes. Although not lonesome, the tumbler dances alone. The aloneness of his
dance sets it far apart from collective dances, whether in rings or not. If such a thing
as penitential dancing existed, it would be his atonement in this way. His dancing is
also distinctive in not entailing possession by a spirit. On the contrary, it turns upon
Fig. 2.6 Pieter Brueghel the Younger (attributed), The Pilgrimage of the Epileptics to Molenbeek,
late sixteenth to early seventeenth century. Oil on panel, 29.2 x 62.2 cm. Image from Wikimedia
Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dance_at_Molenbeek.jpg
94 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
performance before an image that leads to the appearance of a presence. But the balletic
routine of the individual performer does set the stage for a death that makes him
loosely comparable to the victims of the mass dance frenzies. He dances himself into
oblivion. Before the tumbler dies, his practice results in a loss of self. Whether his state
amounts to mania in any way equivalent to the madness of the maenads or bacchantes
in Greek mythology remains open to debate. Likewise requiring further discussion
is whether the leaping and falling match up with spiritual exaltation and depression.
Is the leaper subject to mood swings in tandem with his physical undulation? One
surety is that late in the game he suffers, both physical and psychological, prostration
as he buckles before the Madonna.
Christianity is the religion that enters the equation in Our Lady’s Tumbler and its
diverse progeny. The tumbler coordinates his personal expression of devotion with
the liturgical song of the monks who chant in the church above the crypt. Similarly,
he aligns dance from the lay realm with monastic ritual. Both the liturgy and the
performance of the tumbler prescribe movements that function as a language of signs.
Even so, we must not assume that the jongleur’s routine could correspond reductively,
step by step, to an utterance or a text. In part, dancers dance to express what cannot
be conveyed verbally, rather than to translate verbal pronouncements into physical
actions. In this case, the tumbler makes into motion the emotion that moves more
learned monks to transact the set words and gestures of worship.
The tumbler shares with the victims of dancing mania a compulsion to dance until
he is emptied of all his cyclonic energy and crumples. Indeed, he could be said fairly
to have danced himself into his grave. The outcome of self-immolation through this
activity reappears in the nineteenth-century French ballet Giselle, or The Wilis, set in
the Rhineland during the Middle Ages (see Fig. 2.7). Its star-crossed title character
dies of a broken heart after catching wind that her lover is betrothed to another. The
Wilis, who summon the peasant girl from her grave, target her beloved for execution,
but her love extricates him from their grasp. In legend, these nightwalkers are the
ghosts of young ladies who, having died before their wedding days, cannot remain
at peace in their tombs. To fulfill the unbridled passion for dance that they could not
sate during their lives, they dance in troupes at midnight. Woe betide the young man
who meets these seductive spirits, since he must dance with them until he drops dead.
To look beyond the motif of death through nonstop dancing, the routine of
the jongleur anticipates approximately the enthusiastic vocalization and bodily
movement that have been incorporated into the worship of various religions. For
example, adherents of the American religious sect known as the Shakers sang and
danced. Similarly, worshipers in some churches in the Southern United States engage
in “praise dance” as a channel for sacred expression. Outside Christianity, the fevered
steps of the tumbler bear comparison with the corkscrewing moves of dervishes. Such
Muslim Sufi mystics wandered from place to place; stood apart from normal people
in their dress, behavior, and language; and expressed their piety through a vigorously
2. Dancing for God 95
athletic mélange of music and motion. Like them, the jongleur loses himself in a
physicality of bodily movements and touch (by Mary), but, alone when he does his
routine, it constitutes at once a private ritual and a one-person festival. More especially,
the apparition of the Virgin herself from heaven relates to the collective delusions
in medieval dancing mania. Are the collapses of the tumbler merely the unintended
outcome of overexertion, or are they the purposeful results of performances designed
to achieve ecstasy through whirling? We would do well to recall the etymology in
Old English of giddy, which referred literally to scatterbrained possession by a God,
and dizzy, which meant “foolish” or “witless.” Older still is the Greek enthusiasm,
from a word meaning “possessed by a god.” Thus, our God-filled character was not a
madcap innovator in doing his vertiginous dance before the Madonna.
=
CISELLE ou les WILIS.
Melodie
Turée du Ballet de Giselle.
MUSIQUE DAD. ADAM.
Pareles de UF L.ESCUDIER.
A MADEMOISELLE DOBREE.
Paris Chez J MEISSOMNIER., 28, Rue Dauphine
Fig. 2.7 Front cover of Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges and Théophile Gautier, Giselle, ou
les Wilis, illus. Célestin Nanteuil (Paris: J. Meissonnier, 1841). Image courtesy of Bibliotheque
nationale de France, Paris. All rights reserved.
96 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
The tale does not advocate the abandonment of conventional worship. Rather, it
reminds us that traditional veneration exists as a conduit for a spirit of reverence,
devotion, love, joy, and hope. All of us must decide for ourselves where soul or mind
begins, and where body stops. Likewise, we must determine, for both ourselves
and the tumbler, what constitutes thought and feeling, reason and faith. Finally, we
should cogitate about song and instrumentation. If music of any sort is set aside, the
performance is a form of acrobatics; if the rhythm and melody are internalized, dance
results. (Break dancing, which is often held to have originated in the mid-1970s, is only
the latest and best-known style of acrobatic dancing, with its spinning headstands,
fancy footwork, tumbling, and pantomime.) Laying down a boundary between the
two can be ticklish, even impossible.
Jongleurs of God
The jongleur captured the
theologians’ attention because he
was an antitype of themselves.
The pleasure principles in whichjongleurs were ensnared brought them inevitably into
tension with Christianity, at least in fits and starts. Were they divine or diabolic forces?
Was their artistry licit or illicit? The position of these performers was ambiguous. Often
it was judged to be very negative, but sometimes more positive. For hundreds of years,
churchmen, almost unanimously, voiced stentorian disapproval of such entertainers.
Yet in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, dissenting murmurs of approval can be
heard at the fringes of the loudly condemnatory chorus. Indeed, Church luminaries
spoke of their own missions in life as resembling those of entertainers. As the jongleur
relates to his earthly patrons, so too does the inspired devotee to his divine ones.
Cistercian monks had a complicated self-image as God’s jesters. The foremost
exponent of Cistercianism, Bernard of Clairvaux, was accused of having in his
misspent youth devised minstrel-like ditties and suave melodies. He referred to
himself, no doubt with a measure of irony, as an “acrobat of God.” In a letter dated
around 1140, the celebrated saint-to-be presented monastic life as a kind of humbling
game that pleases the Almighty even as it elicits stares and sniggers from men.
Continuing, he contrasted the transcendence of spiritual exercise to the deformity
of physical entertainment. The gymnasts are yogis who practice yoga in ashrams;
the others are contortionists who bend themselves into pretzels to divert the public.
In a world where values are upended, monks may appear to the worldly to cavort.
Elsewhere they will seem to angels to enact a wonderful spectacle.
Understandably, Bernard does not himself refer to spectacle here in describing the
behavior of monks. The large-scale, public display that is implied by the concept of the
spectacular is attested first in English in a 1340 psalter by Richard Rolle. Interestingly,
the mystic writes of such showiness specifically when referring to the “hopping
and dancing of tumblers.” The context he evokes is one familiar from present-day
2. Dancing for God 97
reenactments of medieval and Renaissance fairs, in which colorful gatherings of
many people include such performers as jugglers, jesters, and other entertainers often
popularly associated with the Middle Ages.
To return to the passage by Bernard from two centuries earlier, the gist of his point-
by-point description is that professionals, such as actual jongleurs and dancers, turn
themselves wrong side up to provide pleasure to their terrestrial audiences. In contrast,
monastic brothers exemplify humility and serve heaven. They engage in apparent
frolic as sacred play. The Cistercian’s audacious simile is in no way inconsistent with
the vitriolic verdicts against jongleurs and other traveling entertainers pronounced by
him (even in this very snippet), as well as by other monks and clerics. Yet he opens a
pathway to redemption for the professional performers that others who follow him
see reason to maintain. After him, his fellow white monk Caesarius of Heisterbach
speaks of unassuming souls whom he esteems to be “jongleurs of God and of the holy
angels.” He describes folk without airs and graces, who upend worldly values. By
the same token, they make what is reasonable seem nonsensical, and vice versa. To
him, they are like gymnasts who twist themselves to ambulate with their heads down
and their feet aloft. If we let our imaginations run wild, we can make out the gentle
sound of their handfall (let us give footfall a sibling). In characterizing the simple
man, Caesarius treads carefully among the many connotations of simplicity. He does
not correlate the noun and concept completely with simplemindedness or vacuity.
Similarly, he leaves implicit the notions of humility, ordinariness, and inexperience.
Later, Saint Francis of Assisi transcended simile. He counseled his companions to
eschew Latin books when preaching. Instead of putting on any airs of learnedness,
he disguised himself as a beggar or busker, performed the medieval equivalent
of air guitar by miming a jongleur fiddling, and trilled songs in French. This was
one way of saying, “It’s showtime, folks!” All these behaviors had the goal, or at
least the effect, of making the public titter at his expense. By extension from their
founding father, the Franciscans collectively remain famed even today for having
styled themselves provocatively jongleurs or minstrels of the Lord, of Christ, and of
God. These pairings were oxymora that bordered on being blasphemous. Despite his
miming, the Poor Man of Assisi made apparent that he was a God’s troubadour who
juggled with words rather than physical acts (see Fig. 2.8). He took a bold roll of the
dice by equating the words of songs such as lyrics and ballads with the Word of God,
and vernacular entertainment with Latin preaching. In all cases Francis and the friars
minor served as jesters of the divinity, not of the Church. They claimed divine rather
than ecclesiastical sanction for their conduct. The ruler for whom they tumbled was
God; the court, heaven.
The first generation of the saint’s original stalwarts supposedly included Brother
Juniper, who joined the friars in 1210. Known in time as “the jester of the Lord,”
this legendary figure was renowned for simplicity and humility. At the same time,
his radical humbleness caused him to be bracketed as a fool. Through pranks and
practical jokes, hoaxes and hilarity, Brother Juniper defied social norms and sought
to subvert them. In contrast, our tumbler abstracted himself from the conventions of
98 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
the closed society that he entered within the abbey, and charted and piloted a course
uniquely his own, without making the slightest effort to prescribe it to anyone else.
Fig. 2.8 Film poster for Francesco, guillare di Dio, dir. Roberto Rossellini (Minerva Film, 1950).
© Minerva Pictures. All rights reserved.
The example of Francis, building upon that of Bernard of Clairvaux, had a strong
bearing upon the standing of jongleurs, at least in similes and metaphors. The Castilian
poet Gonzalo de Berceo differentiated between two classes of artists in societal rank,
presenting himself as a troubadour when singing to the Virgin, a jongleur when
dealing with Saint Dominic of Silos. Nicolas de Biard was a mendicant preacher
of the late thirteenth century in Paris who assembled two much-esteemed sermon
collections. In one of them he likened confessors to jongleurs, or vice versa.
Francis was not the only jongleur-like solitary who attracted enough champions to
warrant founding a religious congregation in the early thirteenth century. Blessed John
Buoni was another. He lived licentiously as a professional entertainer until suffering
a near-fatal illness at around the age of forty. After that moment of truth, he saw the
light in 1209. He turned into a true troglodyte, a bona fide hermit in an equally real
grotto (see Fig. 2.9). Through his stringent asceticism he attracted hermitic acolytes. In
1217, he formally established a following. His admirers became known as Boniti, after
his cognomen.
2. Dancing for God 99
Jongleurs of God stand not too far from jongleurs of Notre Dame. What is
Our Lady’s tumbler, if not such a minstrel of Mary? Like others of this kind, he
consolidates two qualities that would seem mutually exclusive. Though humble to the
core, he is still so self-assured that he rashly breaches the conformity and obedience
required by monasticism and even by Catholicism. He throws caution to the wind
and improvises an entire liturgy for himself, determined not by readings, chant, and
hallowed movements and objects, but rather by a physical performance that he has
devised from scratch. Contrary to the very basis of monasticism, he serves as his own
drillmaster and taskmaster. Such pluck might seem dim-witted, but the apparent
empty-headedness is holy.
Fig. 2.9 John Buoni. Engraving by Adriaen Collaert after Maerten de Vos, 1585-1586. Published in
Jan Sadeler, Solitudo, sive vitae Patrum Eremicolarum (Antwerp: Jan Sadeler, ca. 1590s).
Holy Fools
We are fools for Christ’s sake, but
you are wise in Christ.
—Paul the Apostle
The distinction between faith and folly can be cut very finely. If truth be told, the
dividing line may be invisible to the naked eye. The fool of God, also known as the
holy fool, is an even more multifaceted and omnipresent conception from medieval
Christianity down to the present day than is the acrobat of God. The two concepts are
interrelated, and the figure of the jongleur has sometimes been superimposed upon
that of the holy fool.
100 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
From one end to the other in both time and space, the Middle Ages were anything
but foolproof. That said, the notion of the fool of God or the fool for Christ became
disseminated far more widely outside than inside Western Europe. The cultural
importance of this type has loomed large, first in the Greek East and later in Russia. One
of the first attested examples of such a character is the sixth-century Symeon of Emesa.
Two other cases, both fools who happen to be nuns, are found in the Lausiac History,
a major compendium of traditions about the desert fathers that enjoyed popularity
through the East. Such figures often make idiots of themselves in public through (un)
intentional absurdism. They engage in seemingly weak-minded behavior from which
a clear-headed person would refrain. They dispose of all their possessions, sometimes
even down to much or all their clothing. They express themselves in babbling or
blustering twaddle that others may find inexplicable, meaningless, or even unhinged.
Yet there is method to the madness. From one perspective, these religious fools may
appear to profane the sacred. From another lookout point, they take to an extreme
what is called in Latin imitatio Christi. That is, they humiliate themselves to imitate the
humility and humiliation of Jesus.
Within Western Europe, Saint Francis of Assisi stands out as the paragon of the holy
fool, just as of the jongleur. His clowning had the collateral effect of illuminating the
degree of his simplicity. The jongleur of God reportedly presented himself likewise
as a slow-minded fool or jester of God. He and the first generations of Franciscans
paralleled the tumbler in rejecting the finery and splendor of the conventional Church
for lowness and abasement. For their stance, they earned regard as what Erasmus
called “fools to the world.”
Beyond the general homogeneity of the protagonist in Our Lady’s Tumbler and of
holy fools, it bears noting that the exemplum resembles accounts of so-called hidden
saints. These secret servants of God are typically retiring in their comportment. They
slave at a humble vocation, their sanctity unrecognized by others. An archetype
would be Saint Joseph, the carpenter. Such holy men are numerous in Byzantine
hagiography. There we encounter individuals whose holiness goes undetected or is
even mistaken for negative qualities, such as derangement. A lesson could be drawn
from all these stories that communities are not always capable of the discernment
required to tell apart a mere jongleur from one of God, or a fool from one of God. For
instance, Daniel of Scetis, an Egyptian monk and abbot, tells the tale of Mark the Fool.
This saint pretends to be demented and passes himself off as a raving lunatic. For
eight years, he plays the role of a Robin Hood among fools by distributing to others
what he begs and steals. It emerges that earlier he had lived fifteen years in a monastic
community, before his eight years as a solitary. On the morning after the facts of his
life have become known to the pope, Mark dies and subsequently his body emanates
the odor of sanctity—a mystical scent of incorruption that was construed as a sign
of saintliness. Another example is a narrative recounted in the vita of Daniel himself.
While visiting a convent, he allegedly witnessed a sister there who to all appearances
was sprawled intoxicated. That night the future saint and his disciple observed how
the same nun would stand in prayer until a passerby appeared, at which point she
2. Dancing for God 101
would sag to the ground. They brought this behavior to the attention of the abbess,
who realized rapidly that the alleged falling-down drunk was a hidden saint. When
the report of the sister’s piety spread, she fled the nunnery. Still other tales in the
genre have principals who are entertainers, apparently leading unseemly lives but in
fact recognized by God as being on the side of the angels.
The type of behavior that these individuals display is attested in Byzantine
hagiography throughout the Middle Ages. A memorable case of such holy and high-
functioning folly from the fourteenth century is Maximos. This man, a soon-to-be saint,
acclaimed from childhood for his devotion to the Virgin, became a monk rather than
enter into a marriage arranged for him by his parents. In Constantinople, he dwelled
for a time in the gateway of the church of Saint Mary of Blachernae in the guise of a
fool for Christ’s sake. Later, on Mount Athos, Maximos earned his colorful cognomen,
the Hut-Burner, as a kind of auto-arsonist. Whenever he moved to anew dwelling for
greater seclusion, he would torch his old hovel.
Likewise worth mentioning are the later Russian descendants of the Byzantine
hidden saints—the holy fools or fools in Christ—who are stock characters in first
Muscovy and later Imperial Russia. In Western Europe, fools of God are far from
unknown in French literature from the early thirteenth century. To cite only two
examples, Life of the Fathers contains a story that goes simply by the short title “Fool,”
and Gautier de Coinci wrote a miracle on the topic.
Distinct from a saint who poses as a fool would be a court jester who has occasion
to display miraculous piety. In 1878, the German author Gottfried Keller composed
a poem based on a purportedly actual event of 1528. Entitled “The Fool of Count
von Zimmern,” the piece describes how an entertainer of this sort was called upon
to assist in the office when the chaplain was shorthanded. At the point when a bell
was to be tolled, none was to be had, and so the joker improvised by shaking with all
his might to jingle his fool’s cap, whereupon a golden glow shone out from the large
lidded flagon that held the host for the Eucharist.
In recent times a figure well worth examining in this conjunction is Dario Fo. His
first major work after receiving the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature was The Holy Jester
Francis. Like the medieval saint, the modern Italian performer immersed himself in folk
culture, popular theater, and oral tradition. Although the laureate wrote extensively,
his texts presumed performance. He was himself styled a holy jester. His theater
entailed mime and pantomime, song and dance, acrobatics, clowning, puppetry, and
above all storytelling. Fo’s main stance was as a latter-day jongleur. Accordingly,
he termed his one-man show “jonglery.” His objective was to demonstrate how
culture belonging to the unempowered masses ha an inherent worth that has been
either arrogated or effaced by the dominant cultures of the Church, aristocracy, and
bourgeoisie. The Italian author’s conception of a subaltern jongleur suits the tale of
the medieval tumbler well. In a way, the paradox of the spiritually inspired fool was
hardwired within Our Lady’s Tumbler. The story is built upon the radical innovation
and challenge that enabled lay brothers to serve within cenobitism. Of the various
trials made in this direction, that of the twelfth-century Cistercians may well have
102 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
been “the most successful and significant.” This experiment allowed the depiction of
a man without education and culture, who lacked institutional or political muscle but
possessed the power of boundless charisma. He was not a fool so much as a simple
man of God, not a jester so much as a jongleur of God.
The tumbler may have been a legend based on an otherwise unattested reality.
Then again, he may have been fabricated as an exemplum to occupy a vacancy that
real-life personages had not filled. In either case, he perpetuated the image of real-life
holy fools who had preceded him. By the same token, he was a proto-Franciscan who
anticipated equally actual jongleurs of God who would succeed him. Like all of them,
he was a beatific ascetic. He blurred the absolute lines that some have sought to draw
between religious and profane, as between monastic and secular.
Fact or Fiction?
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it
is because Fiction is obliged to stick
to possibilities; Truth isn’t.
—Mark Twain
The story of the jongleur poses fundamental and ultimately unanswerable questions,
some of them along the lines of the old chicken-or-egg conundrum. Did the reports
of saintly behavior rest on reality? Did Our Lady’s Tumbler monasticize or monkify a
preexisting motif that storytellers had imagined and transmitted in written or oral
literature? Or did it remodel an actual occurrence that played out within a monastery?
Was it, then, history rather than story? How far did the tale lie from bona fide lived
religion? By a process almost equivalent to convergent evolution, personal and social
circumstances of all types have led in radically different cultures across time and
space to astonishingly similar cases of performers who have dedicated their crafts to
God. These peas in a pod deserve our full attention.
In The City of God, Augustine, bishop of Hippo and later saint, quotes from a lost
treatise On Superstition by Seneca the Younger. In the passage, the Roman philosopher
lambastes a down-at-the-heels mime. Formerly at the top of his profession, the
washed-up thespian, now in his declining years, performs daily on the Capitol in
Rome with the expectation of pleasing the pagan gods. The old man seems to have
subscribed to the belief that in the end, artists and artisans devote their achievements
to the gods. Although the dotard may have been pressured by material needs to
perform, no mention is made of payment by temple keepers or passersby. In effect,
the worn-out entertainer enacts the routine in a spirit of “the show must go on.” Yet
however humble the player, the spectator may be divine, in the person of Jupiter as
worshiped in the sanctuary on the Capitoline Hill.
Such a story as Seneca tells, and Augustine repeats, need not have been altogether
fanciful. Professional actors may have rendered performances in honor of God, the
2. Dancing for God 103
Virgin, and others. Afterward, events may have ensued that came to be credited as
miracles. Both the fragment quoted by Augustine and Our Lady’s Tumbler present
performers who have withdrawn from their practices but who offer their acts in
homage to divinities. Yet would the storyteller with whom Our Lady’s Tumbler
originated have needed the provocation of either a written source or an actual
performance by a jongleur to come up with his idea? To create any of the tales as we
have them, would he have required such a propellant?
Before answering these questions, we should consider one half dozen historically
attested cases from western Christendom. One tells of a humble Spanish friar in the
sixteenth century who was unwittingly seen prancing before a statue of the Virgin
over the refectory door. Another concerns an Italian priest whose methods for drawing
youths into the values of the Church included following and preceding prayer with
presentations of juggling, acrobatics, and magic. The third relates to an incident in
1935 that involved a female American trailblazer of modern dance, Ruth St. Denis.
The fourth pertains to a French ballerina who turned nun. Once she took the habit, her
longing to dance for God put her at odds with the ecclesiastical hierarchy later in the
twentieth century. The fifth is a man who first came to live in a circus while a Jesuit.
After leaving the Catholic religious order, he remained a clown with his troupe. The
final—and most recent, bringing us into the twenty-first century —is an Italian lap- or
pole-dancer. Although no longer gyrating or grinding, her persistence in dancing after
her conversion to religion created hassles for her like those that the ballerina faced.
The Church has demonstrated abiding ambivalence toward dance as an expression
of devotion, not least within the setting of formal monastic institutions. The hierarchy
has sought to devise and decree the proper forms of praise and prayer, and to make its
decisions the pathway to miracles. Not all individuals have complied. Instead, some
have chosen, not always consciously, to find or make rituals of their own. They have
realized that even the mundane may be magical—that ordinary lives turn out to be
filled with miracle whenever the people living them feel grateful for the ordinariness
of their lives. If God moves in mysterious ways, so too do worshipers.
ry
Dancers are the athletes of God.
To begin with our first attested instance, we have a sixteenth-century friar who began
life as a Spanish rustic. An illiterate herdsman born in Aragon in 1540, Paschal Baylon
was devoted to the Eucharist and the Virgin. Out of devotion to the latter, this future
saint taught himself to read so that he could make use of the Little Hours of the
Blessed Virgin Mary, the prayerbook most favored among laypeople. He adopted
habits of going barefoot, fasting, and eating only simple fare. Not content merely with
being ascetic, he wore beneath his shepherd’s cloak an imitation of a friar’s habit. In
1564, at the age of 24, he was at long last granted his heart’s desire and allowed to
enter the reformed Franciscan friary of the Blessed Virgin of Loreto in Valencia, where
104 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
he distinguished himself as a lay brother by his sanctity, especially in love for the poor
and in visions of the Eucharist.
Most mainstream hagiography and all the iconography concerning Paschal focus
on his attachment to the Eucharist. Secondarily, in popular devotion he is widely
associated with cooking, above all in Mexico. In the Mexican state of Chiapas and in
Guatemala he has tertiary associations in folk traditions with death, as a bony “King
of the Graveyard.” Finally, the good friar is known for dancing. Holding special
relevance to Our Lady’s Tumbler is an episode connected with the functions of the
future saint in the communal kitchen and scullery. Despite his complete inexperience
as a cook, the lowly man was put in charge of tending to the refectory. A beautiful
statue of the Virgin stood above a doorway of the room. As refectorian, Paschal made
sure always to deck the altar there with fresh-cut flowers. On feast days, he supplied
candles. While attending to his duties by himself, he would sing quiet songs of praise
to the Mother of God. Once a fellow Franciscan caught him in an unguarded moment
as he gamboled in rhythmic steps of joy, by some accounts a rudimentary gypsy
dance, moving forward and backward, before the statue. The image of Mary allegedly
assumed a real body and blessed the saint. Dancing is also a motif in a tale about a
journey by foot that the friar made as he returned from engaging with heretics on his
return trip from Calvinist France. In at least one telling (see Fig. 2.10), he first prayed
before his staff and thereafter broke into a jubilant jig. The given name Paschal draws
attention to Easter. In contrast, the cognomen Baylon suggests a sense of “one fond of
dancing.” If this is the case, the nickname could have come to him specifically thanks
to his predilection for high-stepping in honor of the Virgin.
Paschal’s cult has developed especially strong connotations with dance in the
Philippines, where in the eighteenth century Spanish Franciscan missionaries in
Obando built a church dedicated to him. Thanks to the interpretation of his second
name as an epithet, the saint became associated with a ritual known as the “Obando
Fertility Rites.” These feast days, which take place on the streets on three consecutive
days in May, feature dancing by men, women, and children in traditional dance
costumes. On each day, an image of the patron saint of the day heads the procession—
in effect, as lead dancer. The first day of the Obando festival, the official feast day of
Paschal, which falls on May 17, is dedicated to Paschal; the next is dedicated in honor
of Saint Clare (whose regular feast day is August 11); and the third is to celebrate Our
Lady of Salambao (see Fig. 2.11). Paschal is called in this conjunction “the dancing
saint.” Some faithful believe that when accompanied by dance, prayer to him will be
granted more readily. For these associations with rhythmic movement, he has been
termed “a second jongleur de Notre-Dame.”
Our second example goes in English by the name of Saint John Bosco. This holy
man grew up fatherless and in poverty in Piedmont, in the north of what is today Italy.
At the age of nine or ten, he had the first in a series of life-determining dreams. He
first saw himself in a field with a knot of poor juvenile delinquents who played and
cursed. Then, when he failed to stop the penniless urchins from misbehaving, a man
2. Dancing for God 105
of noble dress and bearing counseled him to win over the boys from vice to virtue
through gentleness and softheartedness. Toward the end of the vision, a woman
appeared. The guttersnipes turned into a pack of wild animals until she put out her
hand, whereupon they changed into a flock of capering lambs.
LUEGO, LLENO DE GOZO, CANTO Y BAILO
COMO UN ENAJENADO..--
7 COMAN TODOS
LOS MORTALES FRUTA
CON QUE VIVIRAN,
QUE ES DIOS
DEBAJO DE
PAN..2
Fig. 2.10 San Pascual Bailon. Comic illustration, 1961. Published in Vidas ejemplares 7.113
(November 15, 1961).
Fig. 2.11 Statue of Our Lady of Salambao, Obando Church, The Philippines. Photograph by
Ramon Velasquez, 2012. Image from Wikimedia Commons, © Ramon Velasquez (2012), CC
BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Salambaojf.JPG
106 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
John Bosco put into action the oneiric advice that had been offered him. Very literally,
he practiced what he preached (see Figs. 2.12, 2.13 and 2.14). By watching traveling
showmen he learned juggling, acrobatics such as tightrope walking, and magic tricks.
Seizing the initiative, he made himself as teacher into the class clown. He would
punctuate with prayers his activities in sleight of hand and as a physical performer.
In effect, he refined circus stunts into a means of enticing young people to say the
rosary and attend Mass (see Fig. 2.15). Conjuring maneuvers such as ostensibly
changing pebbles into coins became a trademark of his repertoire. In addition, he
made demonstrations of rough-and-ready skills the basis for lessons in basic theology.
For example, he would plait three cords to become a single rope. This uncomplicated
action would bring home the nature of the Trinity.
In the decade that followed, the man who would become a saint left behind life as
a shepherd to take the clerical collar. Eventually, Bosco founded the Society of Saint
Francis de Sales. The Salesians, as the members of this order came to be known, were
divided into three groups, namely, priests, seminarians, and lay brothers. The holy
man, canonized in in 1935, is regarded as the patron of stage magicians. Abracadabra!
On his feast day, Catholic illusionists sometimes show their veneration by offering
displays of conjuring gratis to poor children.
The third instance takes us forward to the mid-1930s. The modern dancer Ruth
St. Denis had long cherished an interest in dance as a spiritual medium. She defined
her performances as “religion-art.” In the wake of a broken marriage and financial
meltdown, she poured herself ever more into integrating her art form and her
spirituality. Toward this end, she founded a Society of Spiritual Arts, tantamount to a
Church of the Divine Dance, which evolved into a performing ensemble.
During the early part of this phase, St. Denis made a specialty of dances on
Christian themes that were performed to the accompaniment of music in churches.
The most important such composition was The Masque of Mary, which premiered in
1934 in Riverside Church in New York. The dancer was introduced in the guise of
the White Madonna (see Fig. 2.16). With thick makeup on her face and equally heavy
paint on her finger- and toenails, and with veils wound around her, she posed on
an altar. At the same time, the Angels of the Heavenly Host danced joyously around
her. When their routine ended, she acted out what was effectively a sacred striptease
by peeling back the layers of milky white to show her true colors: a gown of deep
turquoise. Now as the Blue Madonna, she danced vignettes that illustrated the major
moments in the Virgin’s life (see Figs. 2.17 and 2.18). In writing and speaking about
the goal of the spectacle, St. Denis described the Mother of God as the incarnation
of femininity and creative love, in terms not wholly incompatible with either Henry
Adams, an American thinker of the generation preceding hers, or Sigmund Freud. No
one will be nonplussed to hear that “Madonnas were the passion of her last years.”
2. Dancing for God 107
Ui WS CREAM,
JOHNNY WAS
TOLO TOBE
KINP 7O
PEOPLE. HE
BEGAN RIGHT
AWAY W7¥
4 FPRIENC.-
TH/s BOY
ALWAYS HAD
DAlek BREAD
FOR LUNCH,
LIKE THAT
FOR MY
FRIENDS /
HIS HATS
Fig. 2.12 Teresio Bosco, The Children’s Priest: St. John Bosco, illus. Alarico Gattia
(Turin, Italy: Editrice L.D.C., 1988), 8. All rights reserved.
108 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
Now,
FOR A
BREAK .SOME
OF YOu
REMEMBERED
FROM THE
SERMON,
Fig. 2.13 Teresio Bosco, The Children’s Priest: St. John Bosco, illus. Alarico Gattia
(Turin, Italy: Editrice L.D.C., 1988), 9. All rights reserved.
2. Dancing for God 109
Peorc € LISTEN ANE
ARE (PRESSED.
CY7 SOME
Wah ke AWay
AS EASY
AS WALKING
PERMISSION,
‘LL TAKE A
SHORT WALK e
ON THis y
TIGHTROPE! |
TONY WATCHES
SHENCE. ; z FROW A
TUIEN apete OVSTANEE.
MVPLALEE:,. e,
{ LAZY CLOWN’ J
KR WHILE I BREAK
MY BACK IN
THE FIELDS.
HE‘S PLAYING
GAMES. ILL DO
SOMETHING
ABOUT THIS/
Fig. 2.14 Teresio Bosco, The Children’s Priest: St. John Bosco, illus. Alarico Gattia
(Turin, Italy: Editrice L.D.C., 1988), 10. All rights reserved.
110 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
Aa gem
po Saint
== JOHN BOSCO
and the Childrens Saint
og DOMINIC SAVIO.
by @
Catherine Beebe
Fig. 2.15 Front cover of Catherine Beebe, Saint John Bosco and the Children’s Saint Dominic Savio,
illus. Robb Beebe (London: Vision Books, 1955). All rights reserved.
2. Dancing for God
Fig. 2.16 Ruth St. Denis as the White Madonna in The Masque of Mary (Riverside Church, New
York). Photograph, date unknown.
Fig. 2.17 Ruth St. Denis as the Madonna in The Masque of Mary. Photograph, 1934.
111
112 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
Fig. 2.18 Ruth St. Denis as the Madonna in The Masque of Mary. Photograph, 1934.
One Sunday in 1935, St. Denis caused a stir by celebrating a religious dance before the
altar in another jam-packed Manhattan church, with congregants pressed shoulder
to shoulder. The occasion sparked scorching controversy, all because of pedicure. St.
Denis’s decision to color her toenails led to huffing and puffing against dance very
generally. In support of this physical activity as a form of worship, one writer cited first
scripture and next, foreseeably, Anatole France. The French writer belongs among the
fistful of authors and artists who have done most to make Our Lady’s Tumbler famous
in a modern guise.
For the fourth case, we have a much fuller dossier, thanks largely to the written
reminiscences of the woman herself. As a two-year-old toddler in Paris, Mireille
Negre boarded an elevator. When it departed, her left foot slipped through the metal
framework at the bottom. As the lift ascended, this lower extremity of her body became
lodged between the grille and the top of the entrance. Although fortunately spared
the amputation of her left leg, she still lost two toes. At the age of four she was sent to
begin studying classical dance, in hopes that the training would correct the limp she
had developed. Despite her handicap, she made such progress that once she turned
seven, her father put her forward at the National Opera (Opéra national) of Paris.
The commitment of the Frenchwoman to dance became extraordinary, but so did
her attraction to a devotional life. Negre came from a religious family, but she took
spirituality to an extreme far beyond her kinfolk. At the age of twelve, she had an
epiphany of sorts. As an adolescent, she achieved ever greater success in ballet at the
National Opera. In 1965 she took a retreat in a convent and had the revelation of her
religious calling, but for five years she temporized in indecision between a spiritual
vocation and dance. In 1973, at the age of twenty-eight, she entered the Carmelites of
Limoges on a probationary but extended basis (see Fig. 2.19). The liturgy of this order
lays notable emphasis upon holidays associated with Mary.
2. Dancing for God 113
————
ne
pees Se
PA
Fig. 2.19 Portrait of Mireille Negre. Photograph, 1973. Photographer unknown.
© Argenta Images. All rights reserved.
The almost fanatical Marianism of this religious society has not gone unquestioned. In
the late Middle Ages the Carmelites were sometimes reproached for misrepresenting
their relationship with Mary by disseminating half-truths and out-and-out lies about
her. In one case in point, an antifraternal text from the very end of the fourteenth
century charges that the brethren “make themselves out to be Mary’s men (so they
tell people), / And lie about Our Lady many a long tale... .” The members of these
brotherhoods and sisterhoods encompass friars, nuns, and layfolk. They may have
been well suited to Negre in their capacity as the order of Thérése of Lisieux, because
of the saint’s defining characteristics as well as her special connection with Mary.
Known as “The Little Flower of Jesus,” this holy woman claimed to have experienced
an apparition of the Virgin while still a child. At the age of fifteen she entered a
Carmelite convent, in 1897 she died at the age of twenty-four, and in 1923 she was
canonized. She incarnated naiveté and simplicity that are not worlds apart from
qualities associated with the tumbler or jongleur, in both his medieval and modern
manifestations.
For three of Négre’s ten years at Limoges, she embraced the combined contemplation
and asceticism of the order happily, with Saint Teresa of Avila as her model. In the
process, she was required to abdicate the body, and refraining from dance formed part
of the abdication. The renunciation entailed modifying her ballerina’s posture and
carriage. When caught striking a balletic pose while plying a broom in the refectory,
114 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
she found herself chided by the mother superior. Despite the discouragement from
above, the passion for dance would not leave Negre. Many Bible passages reminded
her of the performing art, and with twinges of nostalgia she would hear during Mass
words from scripture that referred to it: “I will dance for you, Lord, as long as I live.”
When invited to serve as cantor, she replied that she could never do so, because she
was “exasperated at not being able to pray for God by dancing for him.” For Négre,
the leaps of ballet became degrees of rapture that could lead to union with the divine
through love. Despite all the potential for joy, her reminiscences make no attempt to
sweep under the carpet the painful sacrifices she made in forgoing her customary
mode of asserting her identity. She establishes an equivalence between physical and
verbal expression that recalls the tumbler, as indeed does much else in her account.
During the remaining seven years of her decade within the religious society,
Negre endured protracted tribulations marked by nervous breakdowns, bouts of
anorexia, and the development of a triple scoliosis. Eventually, she left the Order of
Carmel for the more complaisant Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary in Vouvant.
Although the religious society to which she switched may have been less rigorous, the
former ballerina’s ambition was unabated. On the contrary, she aspired to broaden
the concept of spiritual self-consecration to Christ so that it would comprehend
the dedication to Him of her body as a dancer. For her, God was the lord of the
dance, and in her view, the art could be devout in consonance with the dictates of
Christianity by entailing ascetic discipline while resulting in joyous ecstasy. In due
course, the Church authorities came around to Negre’s viewpoint. The Carmelites
permitted her to resume dancing. In 1986 she became consecrated as a sister. Since
then she has danced in hallowed places, such as chapels and churches. She has even
performed at Chartres, an archetypal cathedral of the Virgin. Since Vouvant, Neégre
has choreographed the words of the liturgy. This experiment constitutes a fascinating
parallel to the performance of the tumbler in the medieval French poem, who made
his leaps correspond to the progression of the offices being performed in the choir
above him. Just as the tumbler, versed in neither Latin nor monastic sign language,
contrived to express himself through his acrobatics, so too this later Frenchwoman
came to view ballet in linguistic terms.
To what extent has Negre’s self-presentation been shaped by knowledge, filtered
or unfiltered, of the tradition that originated in Our Lady’s Tumbler? She plants a seed
when she presents herself, in her guise as “the protector of dancers,” to being “like
the jongleur on the fagade of Notre-Dame of Paris, who used to represent for me the
struggle of an artist who finds no recognition in the world.” This simile, which points
to sculpture rather than literature, suggests an acquaintance with the story through
secondary or back channels and not even through Anatole France. In fact, it would be a
little hard to swallow that a professional dancer in France would not hear of the tale at
one point or another. But it would be even more cockamamie to contend that a person
would strive to replicate a story so far as to enter a nunnery for a decade—or to leave
2. Dancing for God 115
the same institution and return to a career of dancing. Both the story of the tumbler
and the biography of Negre speak to clashing and yet compatible loves that have fired
many artists, one of which passes under the name of art for art’s sake, while the other
craves transcendence of mere art. Can dance and devotion go together? More to the
point, can organized religion countenance the expression of prayer outside liturgy?
The crux for this ballerina was her creed “I dance for God.”
Our fifth example is Nick Weber, who was interested in both dramatic art and
theology. After becoming a practiced clown, he was ordained as a Jesuit priest. Soon
thereafter, he happened to see a medieval morality play, reconceived and enacted for
a twentieth-century public. The experience became the germ of his idea to retool a
traditional troupe, suited for the greatest show on earth, and to make its performances
the vehicle for conveying Christian messages. Weber’s Royal Lichtenstein Circus
traveled the United States for twenty-two years, from the summer of 1971 through
1993. Eventually the founder returned to the lay state, but in the prolonged intermezzo
he approached becoming at least in aspiration a twentieth-century Saint Francis. By
seeking to demonstrate the credal compatibility of Christian faith with what could be
called sacred comedy, he strove to fulfill in reality what Dario Fo has sometimes acted
out in his performances. Weber’s clowning rested on two convictions. One was that
comedy allows for the boisterous celebration of life. The other was that laughter does
not diminish the expression of worship, but in fact offers an additional avenue for it.
An Italian nun, Sister Anna Nobili, will serve as the sixth and final example of a
real-life individual who has chosen to pray and worship through dance. Like most
of her predecessors, her choice has generated both fascination and unease within the
Catholic Church. Images of her in action have graced mass-circulation newspapers
and magazines. Her tale has been told in on-screen interviews and set forth in a tell-all
memoir with an Italian title meaning J Dance with God: The Sister Who Prays Dancing.
The blurb on the cover of the paperback concludes by referring to her “true and
mysterious acrobatics of the heart and soul.”
Born in 1970, as a young woman Anna Nobili became a dancer who performed
on raised platforms in bars, nightclubs, and discotheques of Milan. Although really a
go-go dancer, she is described often as having been a lap dancer and stripper. In 1998,
at the age of twenty-five, she left the dance floor and went on a three-day visit to Assisi.
During those days, she had an epiphany under the inspiration of Saints Francis and
Chiara. In a subsequent repudiation of the heavy guzzling and no-strings lovemaking
in her former life, Nobili entered the order of Worker-Sisters of the Holy House of
Nazareth. Rather than abandoning her previous calling altogether, she drummed up
permission ten years later to open a school devoted to contemporary sacred dance.
She continues to do so, in an operation called HolyDance.
Nobili now runs the program with clearance from the local prelate in her diocese
of Palestrina, near Rome. The episcopal backing has not prevented her from being
controversial. Although she considers herself a ballerina for God, some find her
116 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
ungodly. As Sister Anna Nobili, her participation in a public event at the Cistercian
monastery of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem, along with other celebrities such as the
pop star Madonna, may have played a contributing role in an imbroglio in May of
2011. The charges related especially to the monks’ handling of finances and liturgy,
as well as their questionable behavior and moral discipline. Undeterred by such
setbacks, Sister Anna has persisted in making many appearances on the small screen,
disseminating her story in a book, and, above all, performing dance. She contends
consistently that she has been driven from the beginning by a desire for love, but that
it took her a long time to find that the truest love was love for God.
ae
What are we left to conclude about the French poem and Latin exemplum from the
Middle Ages? Regardless of which came first, we confront the riddle of whether the
earliest written form of the tale bore any relation to an actual incident in which a
lay brother who had been an entertainer ever performed a devotional dance before
an image of the Virgin Mary. Was the jongleur a mythic, legendary, or real goody
two-shoes? As the saying goes, there are stranger things in reality than can be found
in romances. The only finality is the ben trovato principle: “If it is not true, it is well
conceived.” Even if not necessarily the record of a literal truth, the story still bears
scrutiny. It rings true in a deeper sense. If situating the tumbler among his fellow
medieval entertainers does not explain everything, then we will do well to pay heed
next to his monastic context.
3. Cistercian Monks and Lay Brothers
He who labors as he prays lifts his
heart to God with his hands.
—Bernard of Clairvaux
The Order of Citeaux
Vox clamantis in deserto
Our Lady’s Tumbler manifests vividly both strains and rapprochements that recurred
between laity and clergy within medieval Christianity. It offers a mostly laudatory
close-up of life among the white monks in the twelfth century. Its protagonist stands in
deep awe of Cistercian monasticism. Despite all this, it demonstrates that at least this
once, the layman goes the monks one better in devotion. The amateur prayer outwits
(or outdoes) the unpaid professionals at their own game. The stresses heightened
during the late Middle Ages, before finally scoring their most drastic effects in the
temblor and aftershock known as the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-
Reformation. Our story, from roughly three centuries earlier, has at its hub issues that
anticipate the shock waves to come in the later period. To be specific, it points out
cognitive dissonances between the faith that was professed in Christ and apostolic
life, and the attitudes encoded in daily life within leading religious institutions. Let us
look closely at how the tale of the tumbler fits within Cistercianism.
The medieval French poem that forms the cornerstone of this book tells of a
prosperous minstrel who wearies of his secular lifestyle and its turpitudes. In response,
he redistributes his worldly possessions, such as money, horse, and clothes, and joins
the Cistercian monastery of Clairvaux as a convert. He is not said to enter a novitiate.
The untested brother has the objective of devoting himself to God, or rather to his
more approachable mediator, the Virgin Mary. The initial dilemma, if not tragedy,
for the former performer is that he takes the step of committing to a new walk of life
within a monastery without grasping what it entails. At the time of his conversion, he
does not know that he should be concerned about his preparedness to be a brother,
© 2018 Jan M. Ziolkowski, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0132.03
118 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
nor can he gauge realistically whether he has the wherewithal in cultural literacy and
the psychological temperament for the monastic mode of life. Soon after his induction,
he discovers to his consternation that he is out of his depth. He lacks the savoir faire
and savoir dire to fulfill the services required of a monk.
The value of the entertainer’s donations to the abbey could have been substantial.
In the economy of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, jongleurs were often
remunerated in kind rather than in cash. The objects that the minstrel conveys to the
abbey are interesting, but when all is said and done, what he leaves behind matters
less than what he takes on by embracing the specific brand of monkish life that the
Cistercians represent. He goes from being at least modestly successful in the medieval
entertainment world to being an underachiever and a nonentity as a monk in this
order.
Cistercianism was a new branch of monasticism that had been inaugurated in
France at the very end of the eleventh century, around 1098. Although not a Crusade
movement, it was established in sync with the first of those expeditions. Indeed, it
absorbed many young men of the same sorts who were drawn to the movement
across Latin Christendom to recoup the Holy Land for Christianity. From its
inception, the order was tied closely to the Virgin, and it grew apace with the rise of
Marianism in the twelfth century. It soon diffused throughout Europe. By 1200, the
Cistercians tallied five hundred abbeys for monks and probably, grosso modo, the
same number of convents for nuns. By the end of the thirteenth century, the white
monks, as they were often styled, occupied approximately seven hundred houses.
The explosive enlargement was not without growing pains. Eventually, envy over
their ease in accumulating immense tracts of land and the resources that issued from
them meant that the order incurred plenty of vilification, alongside praise. Even the
monks themselves sometimes gave voice to fretfulness about what would be defined
today as mission creep.
For the site of their seminal “New Monastery,” the founder chose Citeaux, south
of Dijon in France. Cistercianism promoted a radical reformation of Benedictine
monasticism by emphasizing a literal, even fundamentalist interpretation of
the celebrated sixth-century Rule of Saint Benedict of Nursia. The movement was
formulated for frugality, in conscious reaction against the perceived immoderation
of Benedictinism. Its aesthetic, in architecture, manuscript production, and all else,
was deliberately humble. In fact, humility may well have been the most prominent of
the values that the Cistercians professed. All branches of Christian coenobitism have
had their own forms of law and order at their core, but the Cistercians were especially
strict. Sundry dos and don’ts set these brethren apart from their confreres in longer-
established orders. In contradistinction to the major older ones, the white monks
did not acquiesce in child oblation (the practice of giving children to monasteries
or convents), ran no schools, and expected postulants to have been educated before
seeking entry. The last factor is intriguingly relevant to Our Lady’s Tumbler.
3. Cistercian Monks and Lay Brothers 119
7 een) ere oe i a
F 48 LONGPONT. — Ancienne Abbaye de Citeaux, 'Eglise. — ND Phot.
OS as oem ee rn
Fig. 3.1 Postcard depicting l’Abbaye de Citeaux, Saint-Nicolas-les-Citeaux
(early twentieth century).
The original medieval buildings of Citeaux have all but disappeared, beyond rack and
ruin. The place took its name ultimately from the Latin for “cistern,” a holding pen for
runoff precipitation. Calling their venue after a catchment for rainwater acknowledges
nicely its location amid the effluvia of low-lying swamps and swales. Benedictines— or,
to use a name for the order after its tenth-century reform, Cluniacs— were montane:
they tended to inhabit mountainous heights. They liked to be between a rock and a
hard place. Whereas they sought out the highlands, Cistercians gravitated toward the
lowlands (see Fig. 3.1). They were paludal and fluvial. Initially, they took as theirs
the rural marshes and riverbanks, wetlands and boglands, basins and springs of
France. Soon, they fanned out to similar environs elsewhere with high water tables,
inhabiting neither terra firma nor open sea, making fens far and wide their own. The
contrast between the two orders was embedded in an old aphorism that encapsulates
the locations that their respective initiators purportedly favored: “Bernard loved the
valleys, Benedict the hills.” Put differently, the white monks situated their monasteries
with the goal of being siloed and freestanding. As their wasteland, the desert fathers of
late antiquity had had windswept and sand-covered barrenness, especially in Egypt.
For the Cistercians, Citeaux constituted their equivalent: drainage trumped dryness.
Even so, they saw their home as harking back to the glory days of asceticism: one of
their foundational texts from the early 1120s refers to the site in France as a desert.
There they emulated the way of life that they believed the original inhabitants of such
120 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
spaces had practiced in the third and fourth centuries, and aspired, like the earlier
Christian hermits and monks, to simplicity, poverty, and chastity.
Monasticism has at its heart an antinomy that is latent in the very noun monk. In
fact, the etymological meaning of the word flatly contradicts the communal nature of
the organization it customarily assumes. It derives from a Late Greek substantive for
“single” or “solitary,” itself from the earlier “alone.” Ordinarily, however, the people
dwelling in monasteries are anything but alone. On the contrary, as the rank and file
of tightly organized religious communities, they have no choice but to be gregarious.
In performing the liturgy and especially in chant, they act in synchrony as a team.
They should share an esprit de corps. In hardheaded terms, monastic brothers are not
alone at all. Rather, they live shoulder to shoulder. Even referring to them as brethren
indicates that they are bound together in something larger, an elective extended
family. In acknowledgment of this reality, they are known as cenobites, from a Greek
word composed of elements that mean “common” and “life.” They form complex
societies, with a social contract. Within these groups, specific liturgical duties are
shared by individuals who also execute a varied range of specialized functions. They
imprison themselves voluntarily in cells, perpetually in a self-imposed lockdown. Still
more paradoxical than monks generally are the Cistercians particularly. Their order
encompasses both withdrawal and engagement— both the wilderness and the world.
All the paradox accords well with the situation of the tumbler. He barters away
a life in which he is a loosely regulated, venturesome individualist. In place of
such freedom, he takes on the millstone of rule-bound conformity to set hours and
practices. When the swap proves to be untenable for him, he devises or improvises
a fix that fuses individualism with communitarianism. Small wonder that his story
would regain appeal in the modern world, which has displayed inconsistencies as
keen as any ever before about the mutual rights and responsibilities of individuals
and communities.
Cistercian communes were meant to be secluded from the secular world.
Architecturally, they achieved this objective through claustration—that is, they
confined their members within cloisters. To the same end, the abbeys were
situated in unpopulous regions so that the monks could worship God apart from
the distractions and irritants of worldly activity, by conducting a celibate life of
devotion and work. Thanks to their location in wildernesses, the brothers of this
order often turn out to bear at least some sketchy likenesses to solitaries. Despite
their sometimes cohering in communities, they can be antisocial or even (to push
the point) downright misanthropic. After all, the noun “hermit” denoted originally
a person who inhabited a desolate place in isolation. Heremum is Latin for “desert”
or “wasteland,” a place in the middle of nowhere. Yet a fundamental difference
remains between the two classes of religious. Whereas a hermit runs a one-man
operation, a monk does anything but that.
3. Cistercian Monks and Lay Brothers 121
A monastery has a complex ecology. The hermitage stands in opposition to the
abbey, where the foodchain is topped by the official who gives the institution its very
name. The term abbot goes back ultimately to Aramaic. In the New Testament abba is a
form for “father” that Jesus and Paul use in addressing God intimately. Whereas the
nature of eremitic life is solitude, the word for the leader of a monastery presumes the
collectivity of a family. It also presupposes patriarchy and paternalism (the question
posed in the slang expression “Who’s your daddy?” has never required more than a
split second for monks to answer).
Within a Cistercian context, the heads of a handful of the oldest communities, such
as Citeaux and Clairvaux, have additional special status as proto-abbots. That is, they
could be considered “abbots plus” or superfathers (better than superdad). At the top
of the paternalistic pecking order, they figure out how to administer love, including
tough love, toward the end of helping individuals grow and communities cohere.
The chief job requirement might be called prior knowledge, especially in the form
of Menschenkenntnis or (to translate the German) people knowledge. These monastic
managers are owed obedience. In the story of Our Lady’s Tumbler, the monk who
sees the tumbler’s performance finds it both ridiculous and unnerving; he hastens
to deprecate the incongruity that arises when the lay brother unclothes himself to
show submission through dance to the pious solemnity of the Virgin (and presumably
Child). Yet the head of the abbey refrains from joining a rush to judgment about the
unconventional behavior of the erstwhile entertainer. In the end, the abbot models
multiple lessons for the brethren under his charge. The most important may be a
deeply Christian message of tolerance. In his wisdom, the superior of the monastery
takes his time to watch and listen: he is all ears. He conveys that it is not right to
devalue or condemn any form of worship based upon sincerity. Sincere devotion to
God deserves understanding and even praise.
The minstrel in the medieval French poem takes very seriously the final say of his
superior. A little while after the principal of the monastery has sighted the display
of miraculous favor by God’s mother in the crypt, he summons the tumbler to his
office. The abject entertainer, who has bizarrely performed his lack of stature through
a ritual of his own making, expects that he has committed a trespass and that he will
be expelled from the abbey. Instead of making him an outcast, the kindhearted abbot
bids him to recount his life story, from beginning to end. After hearing it, he assures
the minstrel that he will be in good odor in their order—and they in his.
What does this distinction between two communities mean? The tumbler is
designated a convers, a word that could be translated loosely as “convert.” As such, he
held a status not necessarily identical with a full conversion to monastic life. In some
ways, the functions of a laic convert, and the position of the jongleur as such, speak
to the abiding tension between the two views of monasticism, hermitic and cenobitic.
Even more broadly, the lay brother carves out a no-man’s- or no-monk’s-land in two
122 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
tripartite schemas that are often invoked to describe the warp and weft of medieval
society.
One framework comprises the three orders of the faithful, namely clerics, monks,
and laymen. The other threesome comprehends those who pray (meaning clerics and
monks), those who fight (the nobility), and those who work (peasants). Within this
second triad, toil signifies above all agricultural labor in the production of food. The
lay brother fits frictionlessly into none of the above slots. He embodies a radically new
construct, as a layman, usually from the rural poor, who can shed the scarlet letter of
being illiterate and lead a life that virtually guarantees salvation. The jongleur is an
individualist, in leaving society outside as well as in striking out on his own within
the monastery. First, he abandons the world. Then, after getting off to a halting start
as a cenobite, he makes himself into a do-it-yourself recluse.
With the intent of earning redemption or at least of showing penance, the former
entertainer goes off to be at one with God, or rather with the Virgin. He breaks away
from the communal liturgical offices to perform in camera his personal rituals of
penance and devotion. In doing so, he enacts a solitude for which the white monks
were known. Yet he achieves this end in a manner that would almost not have been
permitted within the realities of Cistercian regulations governing both monks and lay
brothers. In effect, he invents his own form of contemplative spirituality. He becomes
a contradiction in terms. A recluse within a cenobitic community, he lives solitarily
within a well-run organization that is structured around communal life. Such a
paradox may have been lauded in eulogies on Clairvaux, but it is dubious that such
nonconformity would have been countenanced in the actual day-to-day business of
the monastery.
Cistercianism could not have survived long, and could not have burgeoned with as
much vim and vigor as it did, without the involvement of “converts” or lay brethren
like the tumbler. The order specialized in first acquiring land that had hitherto been
agriculturally unproductive and then fructifying those same fallow swamps, valleys,
and springs. This was the turf war in which they engaged with the Benedictines and
other religious societies. The monks dammed waterways with weirs to create fish
ponds, channeled running water in millraces and flumes to power mills and presses,
planted crops on new tillage, established vineyards, and herded sheep and made
wool. For their establishments to be self-contained, managing all the temporalities and
carrying out all the many agrarian tasks required a sizable work force. The so-called
converts were the best solution to the chronic problems of being overstretched and
understaffed. By enlisting extra help from such operatives, the full monks could have
many hands available for manual labor without altogether sacrificing the proposition
of uncompromising disengagement from the secular world. That said, the lay monks
never outnumbered the so-called choir monks. The plus side to the care shown in
keeping down their tally is that the order did not lose its founding focuses or values.
3. Cistercian Monks and Lay Brothers 123
A not-so-good drawback is that, if we allow ourselves anachronism by imposing
present-day business administration upon the distant past, the organizational chart
of a typical Cistercian foundation could have been regarded in present-day terms as
top-heavy, with a preponderance of staff in administrative positions. Especially at
times when the monasteries were undermanned, friction between the two groups was
inevitable. To invoke a twentieth-century synecdoche, the tensions between lay and
choir monks would have sometimes resembled the oppositions between blue-collar
and white-collar workers.
The categories of the convert monk and the lay brother were not always
synonymous. At times, the Latin conversus was applied to any adult entrant into
monastic existence. Such a full-grown joiner stood in contradistinction to the child
oblate. In the learned language, the word for a convert implied a phrase that denoted
“to the monastic way of life.” Within Cistercianism, the term evolved to signify a
lay brother, usually of humble peasant stock. The monasteries did not hold to an
open-door policy of accepting all would-be entrants, but they needed strong hands,
sturdy backs, and stout shoulders, and the lay brethren contributed to monastic life
first and foremost through heavy toil. The hardest work took place on the abbatial
estates. These operations usually served agricultural purposes, as may be surmised
from the usual name for such an estate, grange, which derives from a Latin adjective
that relates to (and is cognate with) “grain.” Most often, lay brothers lent a hand
with the grueling drudgery of food production. As farmhands, they provided the
animal husbandry connected with sheep, grew vegetables and herbs, cleared land,
and managed irrigation. In addition, they commonly ran the kitchens, infirmary, and
guest-house. Their living conditions could not hold a candle to those of the full monks.
Yet under the best of circumstances the two monastic sorts coexisted in mutual respect
and interdependence. In a metaphor that drew upon specific personages in the Bible,
the lay brother played the active role of Martha in executing physical labor, while the
choir monk acted out the contemplative one of Mary. At least ideally, both types of
brethren aspired to spiritual redemption, and both had equal claim to salvation.
Choir monks were bound to perform the divine office in choir, to pray and study,
and to do manual work. The first chore required, among other things, knowing by
heart in Latin the hundred-and-fifty Psalms. As much as anything, the occupation of
Psalm-singing marked these monks apart from the rest of society. It positioned them
to be quasi-angelic. In contrast, lay brothers were exempted from liturgical practices
that, nearly without exception, their counterparts in the choir were obliged to fulfill.
Mostly illiterate, perhaps proud possessors of experiential knowledge but almost
invariably intellectual vacuums where formal education entered the picture, these
laymen were not called upon to engage in the so-called divine reading. Lectio divina,
to use the customary Latin phrase, was a practice of unhurried scriptural reading,
contemplation, and prayer that was cultivated by Benedictine monks and others. And
124 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
thus, questions arise about whether the very existence of lay members implies that
the equilibrium between the office and work, or between contemplative study and
corporeal slog, had been lost unrectifiably.
Even under the most auspicious circumstances, lay brothers would generally have
been segregated physically from choir monks in worship as well as in the remainder
of life. The monastery was a house with many rooms, and a large number of the most
prestigious ones lay off limits to the conversi. Within the honeycomb of the monastery,
lay monks had their own separate spaces in the church, the meeting place known as
the chapter room, the dining hall called the refectory, and the dormitory (see Fig. 3.2).
Typically, the domain of the lay brethren was situated in the west range of the cloister.
Inside the church, they were not allowed access to the choir, where the regular monks
performed the office. Instead, they were quarantined in stalls outside and to the rear
of it. The separateness was enforced by a partition, such as a roodscreen. The balance
between the dueling duties of the lay brothers to do manual labor and to participate in
the liturgy was disputed. They were expected to execute only a shortened form of the
office, since often at the set hours for prayer they were far from the monastic churches
and carrying out the tasks that had to be done in the fields. The lay members also
would not have been included in most all-hand meetings in the chapter house, where
abbots delivered homilies: the monasteries were places where preaching was nearly
always directed at the choir monks.
Sacristy Chapterhouse Workroom
Dormitory
Door to
graveyard
Church
.
Cloister
Warming room
Monks’ Refectory
7
“loister
Cloister <i
garden
Choir for
lay brothers ms
: Kitchen
—|
Lay brothers’ Refectory
Fig. 3.2 Floor plan of a typical Cistercian monastery. Vector art by Melissa Tandysh, 2014.
Image courtesy of Melissa Tandysh. All rights reserved.
3. Cistercian Monks and Lay Brothers 125
The reasons why monks of this higher class could have justifiably missed the office are
few, but their lay counterparts had many more sound excuses. Bernard of Clairvaux,
the great Latin preacher of Cistercianism and much else, reportedly uttered a sermon
in praise of one such conversus. A busy farmworker, the poor soul in question failed
to take part in the worship of Mary at the monastery in order to discharge other
obligations on his to-do list, of which some necessitated his presence at a grange that
was far off the beaten path. When lay brethren happened to be present at the main
institution, they were to perform their version of the office silently. In the meantime,
choir monks chanted theirs on the other side of the partition that ran between the two
groups. Lay brothers differed, because they specialized in physical labor as contrasted
with the opus Dei, or “work of God,” that took place in the choir. All the same, they
were not meant to be second-best citizens.
The Cistercians’ empathy for badlands and solitude remained strong across the
centuries, but the breakout success of the order meant that very soon the marches of
Citeaux were not the only place with which these monks were identified. Before long
they became known equally, or even more, for Clairvaux. The “bright valley,” to put
its name into English, was a beacon toward which Christians flocked from throughout
the West. The abbot of the monastery there was Bernard, the most prominent exponent
of Cistercianism. This saint in the making sought to place his foundation under the
tutelary spirit of Mary. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the abbey acquired
massive power from the trifecta of its associations with the white monks, Bernard,
and the Virgin.
Cistercians and the Virgin
y
The theological term yperdulia combines two Greek words meaning “more than’
and “servitude.” It signifies service to the nth degree—super-service, as it were. It
denotes the special veneration, next to the worship due to the Lord, to be paid to
the Virgin in acknowledgment of her unique status as the Mother of God. Such
ministrations to Mary sprang up in the Middle Ages. Among the many groups and
individuals who aspired to render tribute of this kind, the Cistercians stood out for
the intensity of their deference. The Virgin occupied the center of their universe (see
Fig. 3.3). They consecrated themselves to her, and in return she acted as their hidden
advantage. If the search for salvation had been a card game, she would have been
their ace in the hole.
In all their locations, the Cistercians were marked by their aspirations toward
simplicity, asceticism, and holiness, and they strove toward all three goals at least
partly in the name of Mary. We can be confident that the Madonna was the sole
female presence in the otherwise all-male environment of most monasteries. What
126 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
was she doing there? She exemplified monastic virtues, since she practiced asceticism
and study. Like at least some of the monks, she remained a lifelong virgin. As all of
them had taken a vow to be, she was chaste. Mary also specialized in intercession.
This was likewise the remit of monks, especially white ones. In this capacity, she was
the sovereign mediator, the special patron and point person for their whole order.
Christianity is, by its very definition, Christocentric. Yet Jesus can be forbidding and
fearful, even terrorizing, to the skittish. Here the intercessory role of the Virgin enters
the picture or even (since images are at stake) becomes it. (In emergencies, she is
the hotline to call. Better still, she is the switchboard operator.) She can be asked to
approach Christ for any help that is needed. Jesus remains at the top in the hierarchy
of the holy, but the Mother of God comes next, well before saints and incalculably far
before ordinary people on earth.
Fig. 3.3 Jehan Bellegambe, The Virgin Sheltering the Order of Citeaux, 1507. Oil on panel, 91 x 74 cm.
Douai, Musée de la Chartreuse. Image courtesy of Musée de la Chartreuse, Douai.
3. Cistercian Monks and Lay Brothers 127
In this world, self-help or how-to guidance played no role, except in figuring out
how best to beseech Mary for her intercession. She was the genie whose response to
prayer would be “Your wish is my command.” Among the highest and rarest forms
of devotion that faithful followers could promise was to consecrate themselves to the
service of the Virgin. In a way the tumbler manifests this type of observance. Merely
by joining the Cistercian order, he takes upon himself an institution-wide obligation
to practice devotion to the Mother of God. Beyond any official responsibility, he
undertakes a personal commitment by descending into the crypt to perform his
routine in honor of her.
In return for his dedication the tumbler seeks no specific recompense, least of all a
miracle. Although the Virgin wipes or fans his sweat-beaded brow, we are not given
to understand that he has any awareness of the gesture. He apparently has no idea
that she has taken upon herself to be his guardian angel. From what we can judge,
whatever she does is impalpable and immaterial to him. We learn only that others
witness the boon he garners from Mary herself for the attentiveness he has displayed
toward her Madonna. Such care in the fulfillment of obligations toward the Mother
of God is a hallmark of lay brothers as they are portrayed by their advocates in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries. When the soul of the lay brother is wrested from the
devil, thanks to Mary, the performer is already dead. Consequently, he does not know
while still a mortal the premium he has earned. He has not received breast milk from
the Mother of God, as legend would hold that Bernard of Clairvaux did, but he has
been saved. In the process, the very nature of Christian worship has been demystified.
The hocus-pocus of the liturgy has been set aside.
The entertainer’s constancy is distinctive in its specific form of expression, but
parallels the solitary worship of the Virgin by this Doctor of the Church. The saint’s
trueheartedness to the Mother of God is well attested from sermons and prayers,
and his voice, amplified by successors who only heightened the intensity of his
Marianism, became a dominant one in the Mariology of his day. Both before and
after him, Cistercian writers were passionate proponents of Mary. After championing
the Blessed Virgin in his lifetime, Bernard was laid to rest before her altar. In his
own afterlife, he achieved recognition for his dedication to the Mother of God from
Dante, who chose the sainted white monk as his final lodestar in the Divine Comedy.
Eight hundred years after his death, Bernard was memorialized for his inspirational
relationship with the Virgin by being pictured with her on a commemorative stamp
from the Vatican.
Across the various orders, and across time, Christian monks and nuns have viewed
Mary as embodying monastic virtues. Among the qualities in the Mother of God that
Cistercians would have found resonant with their own values, humility and chastity
are salient. Bernard, among others, admired the characteristic of humbleness in her
above (or below) everyone else. Another trait of the Virgin that could have exercised
128 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
special appeal to white monks is her uncommunicativeness. In the Gospels, she is
nearly wordless, and in scenes and sermons of the Passion she is frequently sketched
as expressing an unvoiced grief. Humility, chastity, and silence are all qualities
associated in Cistercianism with lay brothers too.
Without saying so, Our Lady’s Tumbler peels back the overlayer from the self-
contradictions of the entire Western monastic tradition, especially as the Cistercians
adapted and articulated it. It sets the stage for its audience, whether readers or listeners,
to examine many major imponderables of monkish life. To single out four examples,
it explores how much conformity to collective liturgy, as opposed to individual
worship, life ina monastery requires, how individual seclusion relates to group living
and praying, how much asceticism and physical expression of devotion the order
calls for or allows, and how much the imperative to obedience within the priorities of
such religious societies may be upstaged by allegiance to God and his intermediaries.
Among its other distinguishing features, the Cistercian order has been marked
since its very commencement by its fealty to the Virgin. Citeaux arose in a century
that was stamped on all sides by confident dedication to the worship of Mary and
unwavering trust in her. Even in a prevailing climate of fevered Marianism, even
against a backdrop of such generally intense commitment to the Mother of God, the
white monks were second to none. In a letter censorious of their liturgical innovations,
the theologian Peter Abelard (d. 1142) commented upon the custom that these brothers
maintained in consecrating all their churches to the Virgin. In the same spirit, the seals
of most of their abbeys bore her image, first as their mediator with God and later as
their special protector (see Fig. 3.4). These emblems, mostly of wax, featured within
an architectural canopy in Gothic style an image of the Virgin, usually with Child.
Fig. 3.4 Cistercian seal depicting the Virgin surrounded by devotees.
Seal (modern cast from original), ca. 1300-1500. Paris, Archives nationales.
© Genevra Kornbluth, 2011. All rights reserved.
3. Cistercian Monks and Lay Brothers 129
Mary was not decreed a queen by the pope until 1954, but the Middle Ages greeted
her routinely in that capacity—and that reginal reverence held particularly true for
the white monks. An early statute stipulated officially that every Cistercian church
and cloister should be founded in honor of the “Queen of Heaven and Earth.” Not
the faintest doubt exists that by this formulation the Mother of God is meant. The
designation of the Virgin as Queen of Heaven and Earth had been conventional for a
long time already. This status positioned her to operate as a unique conduit between
the two realms. In an extension of this power, relics of her and of physical contact
with her earthly self could also provide petitioners with a pipeline to God and all the
holiness surrounding him on high. Madonnas, as images of her, could fulfill the same
funneling function.
The Virgin, along with these tokens of her, arbitrated between the simplicity of
humble believers in the sublunary realm and the loftiness of God above. She was not
unapproachable and unresponsive in her queenliness. On the contrary, she thrust
herself forward as mediator. In medieval and theological terms, she came not as an
accessory to the crime but as an intercessor for the sinner. The movements involved
in Marian intercession were perceived to take place in both directions. Petitions from
votaries on earth were relayed to Christ in heaven. Rebounding in the opposite course,
expressions of divine grief, joy, and other emotions were transmitted from heaven
through visions or animated images. Those celestial feelings could take palpable
terrestrial form, with tears, milk, blood, and oil being four of the most common
drippings that exuded from the Virgin, especially as represented in Madonnas. In the
Middle Ages, virgin olive oil was not at all the same as today.
Veneration of the Mother of God belonged among the paramount manifestations of
Christian practice. To go further, it reigned supreme in that same class. Consequently,
nothing is strange about the fact that the liturgies of the Cistercians were heavily
Marian. Each of the daily offices features a special reflection on her vocation. Since the
thirteenth century, each day in a monastery of white monks has been capped by the
singing of “Hail, Holy Queen” as the final antiphon. This hymn praises the Virgin in
her guise as Mother of Mercy who intercedes with the Lord. It can be difficult to know
which personage is meant when a Mary is mentioned within a Cistercian context. A
reference to a woman by this name could allude to the historical person, the Jewish
woman who was the mother of Christ; to the patroness of the order, ever to be trusted
to champion the life- and soul-saving of contrite sinners; to the buildings dedicated
to her, especially in this case all Cistercian churches and most cathedrals; or to the
mother Church as an institution.
Since 1109, Cistercian monks have not worn the black vestments of the Benedictine
order from which they branched off. Rather, they dress in ones of natural, unwhitened,
and uncolored wool. The resultant hue is off-white, effectively a beige. For all that, the
brethren have tended to be called white monks. In the Middle Ages, they were also
130 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
known sometimes as gray monks. In either case, they were dyed in the wool for being
undyed. Wherever we place the color of the Cistercians’ unbleached woolen habits
on the chromatic spectrum, the most common explanation for the adoption of this
lightness in preference to black was a specific of Marian symbolism. The color honors
Mary’s purity and spotlessness. A hue unblemished by blackness is what immaculate
conveys etymologically in the original Latin: unstained and ultraclean.
The Cistercians wore clothing as white as a sheet—a modern and not a medieval
one, since bed linens would not have had the incandescence often prized today for
its connotation of cleanness. The whiteness betokened not ghostliness or fear, but
virginal purity. More than once, they explained the color as bespeaking their service
to the bright splendor of the Mother of God. In legend, the change from black to
its opposite resulted directly from an apparition of the Virgin. One August morning,
Mary made herself visible among the monks as they chanted matins. Not stopping at
merely appearing, she went up to the second abbot of Citeaux and later Saint Alberic,
and threw a white cowl over his shoulders (see Fig. 3.5). At this moment, the habits of
all the other monks present also turned the same color. The bright cleanliness of Mary
makes even more vivid her gesture of having a towel supplied to suck up the saline
solution that sluices from the tumbler.
Fig. 3.5 St. Alberic receives the Cistercian habit from the Virgin. Fresco, 1732-1752. Zirc, Zirc
Abbey Church. Image from Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Alberic_receives_habit.jpg
3. Cistercian Monks and Lay Brothers 131
Bernard of Clairvaux, who championed the growing cult of the Virgin, has himself
been described as Mary’s greatest devotee. Since the eight hundredth anniversary of
his death, he has been called the Marian Doctor. By extension, the Cistercians have
been styled collectively as missionaries of Marianism. The saint’s principal work of
Mariology would be four homilies on the verse in Luke “The angel Gabriel was sent.”
These circulated together under the title On the Praises of the Virgin Mother. Other
homilies of his deal with Mary too. Bernard’s famous sermons on the Song of Songs
identify the betrothed in that book of the Bible as the Mother of God. He articulates
his commitment to her in a way analogous to the dynamics of courtly love. He came
honestly by his cloisterly courtliness, since before becoming a monk he had been the
son of a knightly family. By breeding and upbringing, he was destined to be versed in
the culture and ethos of chivalry and chivalric love, with their distinctive ideology and
poetry. Perhaps to buff Bernard’s Marian credentials, he was misassigned authorship
of texts about the Blessed Virgin in the composition of which he had no hand. Thus,
he was often wrongly credited with authorship of a beloved Latin liturgical hymn,
“Hail, Star of the Sea,” which honors her. In a further miscue, he is sometimes still
supposed to have composed the prayer to her known as the Memorare, while in fact it
is apparently from the fifteenth century.
By all accounts, Mary was as favorably disposed toward Bernard as he was toward
her. According to many legends, she had a stand-by-her-man loyalty to the holy man.
Sometimes statues of Our Lady pumped the affection of the Virgin toward him. Take,
for instance, a Madonna in the Benedictine abbey of Affligem, a Belgian municipality.
The image reputedly leaned down to receive the “Hail, Mary” of the saint-to-be as he
prostrated himself at her feet one day in 1146. In return, she said “Greetings, Bernard.”
The legendary episode allegedly prompted him to give the monastery his staff and
chalice. This was far from the strangest case in which the Virgin and a Madonna
bestowed their favor upon a devotee.
Mother’s Milk
The international advocacy group La Leche League, which took its name from the
Spanish word for milk, claims on its website to have been inspired by a statue and
shrine to “Our Lady of Happy Delivery and Plentiful Milk.” But Mary’s association
with such health and bounty stretches back at least to the Middle Ages. The Virgin is
often depicted in medieval images, particularly in paintings, with one breast exposed
to feed the infant Jesus. The pose is known in iconography as the nursing Madonna.
To judge by the reactions of twenty-first-century students, the most bizarre expression
of attachment to the Mother of God may be a story that builds on the motif of nursing.
Called the lactation of Bernard, this exchange between Mary and her preeminent
Cistercian enthusiast takes filial devotion and recognition to the highest and most
heart-to-heart degree. The saint asks to be placed, and is indeed put, on the level of a
son sucking milk from the breasts of the Virgin as mother.
132 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
Fig. 3.6 Master I. A. M. of Zwolle, Saint Bernard Kneeling before the Virgin, ca. 1480-1485.
Engraving, 32 x 24.1 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. Image from Wikimedia
Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:StBernardFS.jpg
The accounts, none of them dating from before Bernard’s death, vary in the
behavior that they identify as preceding the miracle. In some, the saint prays before
a Madonna. This is possible, of course, although he and the early white monks
issued pronouncements against images. Furthermore, no statue exists that can be
demonstrated to have come from a Cistercian abbey before the thirteenth century.
In other versions, the mellifluous doctor sees Mary in a vision. Regardless of what
happens first, the aftermath is the same in all the accounts. The saint-to-be requests
the Virgin to show herself as a mother. In response, she obliges by projecting a jet of
milk from her breast through his open lips (see Fig. 3.6). The jet or droplets endow
him with his wisdom and eloquence. Similar motifs surface repeatedly, not only in
the twelfth century but even earlier and predictably later. They do not always pertain
to Saint Bernard alone. Thus, the Virgin infuses her breast milk into the mouth of her
aficionado Bishop Fulbert of Chartres, who promoted in that city the cult of Mary’s
tunic. He collects in a vase and treasures three drops that cling to his face afterward.
This element in the legend of Fulbert likely became the ultimate inspiration for most
subsequent variations on the theme of Marian lactation. Such stories go back to the
3. Cistercian Monks and Lay Brothers 133
exemplum known as Roman charity, a very real demonstration that the milk of human
kindness exists. In this legendary episode, a woman keeps more than her cards close
to her chest: on the sly, she breastfeeds her father to spare him from a sentence to
death by starvation.
Later, the feature of Mary’s suckling a devotee spreads. In assorted miracle tales,
she comes on scene with her best bedside manner to heal ailing people of one sort or
another miraculously, by inviting them to feed at her breast. For instance, one cleric is
taken by an angel to the other world, where the Virgin gives him her nipple. Another
is saved from a throat tumor after she atomizes his face by spraying it with her breast
milk. In a third case, a worshipper of hers is cured of his writer’s block by lactation.
By the fourteenth century, the notion that the Mother of God formed this most special
union with Bernard in her guise as nursing mother is solidly established among the
traditional stories and iconography of the saint.
Mary’s Head-Coverings
The time has come for full disclosure of veiled references. Likewise, the moment is
upon us for picking up for the first of many times the thread of an argument about
textiles. Bernard was hardly the last Cistercian to do obeisance to the Virgin. To take
just one example, Helinand of Froidmont (d. after 1229), himself a former jongleur or
troubadour, composed sermons for Marian feasts. In his writings, he declared that his
brethren in the Cistercian order “do homage to this great lady and avow everlasting
service to her.” If Venn diagrams had existed in the Middle Ages, the categories of
Cistercian and Marian would often have come close to total eclipse. The white monks
were bound in a privileged rapport with Mary in myriad ways. To rehearse only one
more instance, they are often presented in exempla as receiving special guardianship
from the Virgin. Her intervention in the tale of the tumbler speaks to the willingness
of the white monks to show ordinary monastic authority tempered or even subverted
by her maternal power. The Mother of God was permitted to be the exception to the
Rule.
In art, Cistercian iconography gives graphic form to the notion of the special favor
that the order enjoyed from the Virgin. One type of representation depicts the Mother
of God as Our Lady of Mercy. In this capacity, she provided asylum to her faithful
beneath her mantle. Before and beyond its strictly Cistercian lineage, the portrayal
of “Mary of the Protective Cloak” was due ultimately to Byzantine literature and art.
In the tenth century, Saint Andrew the Blessed witnessed a miraculous apparition
in the Blachernae church in Constantinople. In this episode, the Virgin cloaked the
congregants with her maphorion. A still of her stretching out this veil or robe came to
signify the unfailing tutelage that she extended to her devotees. The sanctuary that
the Mother of God afforded through her intercessions was celebrated in the liturgical
feast of the Veil of Our Lady.
134 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
Depictions of Mary’s protection in Cistercian art give the motif a special torque.
The diminutive figures who take refuge beneath the Virgin’s garment are all white-
hooded monks (see Fig. 3.7). Like a posse of tots clinging to their mother’s shins, they
are medieval mothers’ boys who have not the faintest desire to do whatever would
have been the medieval equivalent of cutting the apron strings. The motif can be
traced back to an episode in the Dialogue on Miracles by the Cistercian monk Caesarius
of Heisterbach, eventually repeated by many others. In this incident, a brother had an
eschatological vision in which he encountered Our Lady in the afterlife. In heaven, he
could not find his fellows. In due course, the visionary queried the Mother of God. In
response, she hiked her cloak to reveal the monks, lay brothers, and nuns of the order
who were protected beneath it.
Fig. 3.7 Master of the Life of the Virgin, The Virgin of Mercy, ca. 1463-1480. Tempera on oak panel,
129.5 x 65.5 cm. Budapest, Szépmiivészeti Muzeum. Image from Wikimedia Commons, https://
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Master_of_the_Life_of_the_Virgin_-_The_Virgin_of_Mercy_-
WGA14594.jpg
3. Cistercian Monks and Lay Brothers 135
In Our Lady’s Tumbler, the Virgin comes to assuage a lay brother whose sole mode
of veneration is his body. In general, the tumbler clings fast to Cistercianism by
making purgation and purification of his anatomy a means of penance. That said,
his choice of bodily self-mortification is atypical. Yet however much outside the
norm the performer’s conduct may fall, for Mary to weigh in and signal her approval
is altogether appropriate. Her cult made a priority of the ways in which the very
humanness of her physique brought salvation, through pregnancy, childbirth, and
nursing. She constituted living proof that the corporeal frame need not be detested
as solely sinful. On the contrary, the body could be a vehicle for the expression of
goodness and virtue.
The fanning or mopping of the tumbler with a textile belonging to the Virgin may
ring a humbler change upon this popular motif. Two exempla, only crudely datable,
constitute cases in point. To the best of our present knowledge, they are preserved
first in the early 1600s in a book produced by a Jesuit. This volume is itself based on
an anonymous collection that was printed first at the end of the fifteenth century,
and compiled materials from earlier assemblages of exempla. In one exemplum, Mary
appears to the dying in their final throes. With her little kerchief or handkerchief, she
dries the sweat of mortality from them. In the other, she ventilates them.
The text of Our Lady’s Tumbler leaves unspecified what the Virgin used to cool
her devotee. She is said, with no further explanation, to be holding a cloth. In the
French text, the textile is called a white towel. Both the etymology and meaning of
the medieval vernacular noun used here are fraught. Touaille could denote a piece of
fabric to be carried in the hand or worn on the head, including what we would call a
napkin, hand towel, handkerchief, kerchief, veil, scarf, or rag. In Romance languages,
the most vigorous living relatives are the Italian for tablecloth and table napkin. As
the last two words suggest, the cloth could be meant for household use as well as for
personal cleanliness. In English usage worldwide, the noun napkin has bifurcated. The
split fossilizes the two potentials within it. It can denote either a sanitary napkin in
feminine hygiene, or a table napkin or serviette. But let us not allow lexical semantics
to distract us from the physical reality of the object in question. In the bas-de-page
with the sole medieval illustration of the tale (see Fig. 1.17), the item in question
looks very much like white terrycloth. No one is throwing in the towel, but it is being
projected downward from a heavenly thunderhead by a haloed figure, perhaps an
angel. The cloth has not come directly from the crowned Madonna and Child nearby,
but instead presumably indirectly through their mediation.
Could the fabric be of her own making? Like many women in premodern literature,
Mary had an up-close-and-personal connection with textile production in her own
life. As a girl, she reputedly dedicated six hours daily to weaving, with a regularity
reminiscent of monasticism. More to the point, what is the material? The stuff could
be a corner of her veil, the velvety sleeve of her dress, or soft goods of some other
sort that would have been on or near her person. A modern viewer not grounded
136 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
in Christian art may be surprised to realize that the Mother of God is customarily
portrayed, particularly in Byzantine and Italian art, wearing a head-covering that
resembles the hijab worn nowadays by some Muslim women as an expression of
modesty. Often blue, brown, red, or purple, the cloth overspreads the head and chest.
While not so extreme as the type of veil called the niqab that covers all the face apart
from the eyes of its Muslim wearer, it can still be so extensive as to function effectively
as a one-way window. The opposite of a blindfold, it wards off the gaze of others
while allowing the wearer to see out.
We may forget that in much medieval art the Virgin typically wore a multipurpose
kerchief. Taken by itself, the last word derives from the French phrase meaning “head
cover.” As the elements of the compound presuppose, such a fabric wraps around the
skull and encircles the face as a scarf. In the kit of textiles and paper goods available
to us today, the covering is largely restricted in its use to fulfilling the tasks that the
original sense of the term conveys. The many purposes to which headgear could be
put are fossilized etymologically in the near oxymoron of “handkerchief.” Parsed
element by element, the noun would mean a head covering kept in hand. This item is
then a cloth of a size, texture, color, and general appearance that could function as a
headscarf or veil. In a pinch, or a sneeze, it could also meet other needs. Along similar
lines, a cowboy’s bandana could serve as sweatband or neck-cloth, facemask or dust
mask, tourniquet, or all-round handkerchief. It was a one-item ragbag. Nowadays,
people will most likely use cloth towels for blotting or wicking away dampness, and
disposable plies for facial hygiene. Whatever we call Mary’s fabric, she uses its edge to
comfort the man who has danced madly in her honor: it is the lunatic fringe.
In Marian iconography, the jumbo-sized veil is known as a maphorion (see Fig.
3.8). This Greek term designates a head-covering in which noblewomen in Greece
customarily enveloped themselves. These ladies were tradition-bound both literally
and figuratively. The Virgin’s textile has been equated at different times also to a
shawl, mantle, and outer robe. Often represented as a long length of cloth, it not only
draped her head but beyond that fell in deep swags down her arms and chest to her
knees or even ankles. One color renders the fabric Virginal: if blue is present, the dye
is cast. In representations of the oversized veil, the garment is decorated at Mary’s
forehead and shoulders with four pellets, positioned to suggest a cross. Later in the
Middle Ages, the points were sometimes made stellar. Such foursomes of dots around
stylized crosses may be discerned in the background of the miniature to illustrate
the miracle in the story of the tumbler. The Mother of God was often associated
with stars, but usually singly or in threes, to represent the threefold nature of her
inviolate virginity. The unstated message of the four-star iconography in all cases
may be that the Nativity led continuously to the Crucifixion, which brought salvation
to humankind.
3. Cistercian Monks and Lay Brothers 137
Fig. 3.8 Virgin and Child enthroned between angels. Mosaic, sixth century. Ravenna,
Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo, north wall. Image from Wikimedia, © José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro (2016),
CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:-Madonna_and_Child_-_Madonna_and.
Child_between_Angels_mosaic_-_Sant'Apollinare_Nuovo_-_Ravenn.jpg
The maphorion serves multiple uses. Veneration of relics was deeply ingrained in
medieval Christianity. After the Virgin’s death, the length of material doubled as
her shroud. As Mary’s body was never found on earth, her grave-clothes became
powerful for the immediacy that they granted to the purity and incorruptibility of
her last corporeal presence before her Assumption into heaven. Such contact relics
enjoyed lofty prestige and occupied a place of special privilege in the cult of Mary,
since they granted the closest possible approach to an otherwise altogether absent
body: they gave it a common thread. By a very easy to use and apply principle of
transference, the fabric embodied her materiality. At the same time, the lack of bodily
remains helped to make the Virgin the most universal among saints. She became
present everywhere, capable of performing miracles anywhere.
However we translate the Greek term, the textile in question was believed to
have been found in the Holy Land at the latest in the fifth century. Initially, it was
transferred, along with Mary’s girdle, to a church in Jerusalem; later, the cloth was
moved to Constantinople, where it belonged to the glitz and glamour of the many
138 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
major Marian relics possessed by the great capital city. The fabric was showcased in
a chapel close by the seacoast that the Byzantine emperor and empress Leo I and his
wife Verina added to the Church of the Blachernae. Together with the icon known as
the Great Panagia, or “All-Holy,” the maphorion perished in a fire that destroyed the
church in 1434, not even two decades before the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The
waistband, ostensibly dropped as a token by the Virgin as she ascended from earth,
survived the conflagration. It was preserved in a church in the Chalkoprateia quarter
of the Byzantine metropolis, near Hagia Sophia.
A tidal wave of Byzantine influence struck Latin Christendom in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries. Roman Catholics were immensely indebted to Eastern Marianism
in things plundered, purchased, and imitated, as well as (to a degree) in practices
emulated and replicated. Byzantium contributed substantially to the fascination with
cloths and clothing connected with the Virgin in the cult of Mary in the medieval
West. During the Crusades, ever more travelers had opportunities to see and hear of
such relics. After the looting of Constantinople in 1204, many such valuables were
carried to the West, or at least the claim was made that they had been taken there.
In ways that warrant much further inquiry, the treasure trove of Marian textiles
was greatly expanded by contact between the crusaders and the Byzantines. But the
Fourth Crusade was not the very beginning. The acquisition of fabrics pertaining to
the Mother of God had begun even earlier.
The Church developed a vested interest in textiles of the Virgin. Mary was
associated with many types of cloth, such as girdles, corsets, sashes, and veils. No
pains were spared in procuring them, through diplomacy, trade, despoliation,
theft, or manufacture. The most famous, the object of a flourishing relic cult, was
undoubtedly the chemise, camisole, or “interior tunic” of the Mother of God at
Chartres. Charlemagne acquired this trophy in the Holy Land. After he brought the
precious item back to France, four armed sentinels guarded it twenty-four hours a day.
The actual garment, by all accounts worn by the Virgin on the night she gave birth
to Christ, was seldom seen directly but was depicted nonstop on locally produced
leaden badges. These little images of the chemise were known by the diminutive
“chemisettes.” The tokens were purchased and taken away by pilgrims to Chartres as
travel trinkets, as proof and reminder of their visits. Another major item, sometimes
identical and often confused with the chemise, was Mary’s veil.
One of these cherished fabrics occasioned a brouhaha at Chartres after a blaze in
1194. When the old cathedral was destroyed in the raging fire, this famous former
possession of the Virgin’s was thought to be lost. Days after the all-clear was sounded,
the prize was found by a rescue team and unearthed from the crypt. Along with a few
monks, it had been interred there beneath rubble. Thanks to Mary, both the treasured
thing and the pious people had been kept safe and sound. The poet of Our Lady’s
Tumbler may have lived near a site with a relic of such a fabric. In that event, the poem
may have helped to promote a cult associated with the cloth. The place need not have
been Chartres, or for that matter anywhere else named in this book.
3. Cistercian Monks and Lay Brothers 139
Mary’s intimate apparel was often the focus of intense devotion from women who
hoped to have a healthy childbirth at the end of uninterrupted pregnancies. Somewhat
contrarily, a spotless towel, symbolizing purity, is also a Marian attribute. At times, the
Mother of God is portrayed cuddling her divine infant in her lap with a linen blanket
or handkerchief. The most influential image of her along these lines is the Virgin
and Child from around 867 in the mosaic apse of Hagia Sophia (see Fig. 3.9). This
representation belongs to the Byzantine genre known by the Greek epithet Theotokos,
or “God-Bearer.” Because of Mary’s immaculateness, an undyed towel made an ideal
symbol for her. Many textiles connected with her were reputedly without seams, in
keeping with the seamlessness of her body. Her very physical structure as a living
human being was a garment in which Jesus had been clothed. As his mother bore him
during her pregnancy, so he wore her as a covering.
Fig. 3.9 Virgin and Child enthroned. Mosaic, ninth century. Istanbul, Hagia Sophia, apse
semidome. Image from Wikimedia Commons, © SBarnes (2007), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hagia_Sophia_Interior_Virgin_2007.JPG
140 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
If the trading in objects relating to Mary was heavy, ideas and stories flowed even
more abundantly. The Virgin was an unica, but she came in almost as many forms
as there were believers. The same observation holds true today as well. Both laymen
and churchmen cherished her, but often very differently. The tumbler’s simple and
unlearned attachment typifies what might have been encountered within a parish
church, or even in the fields among country cousins. His determination to express
his love through a solitary and purely physical ritual of his own making runs counter
to monastic norms and rituals in all ways except frequency. Remarkably, his teeth-
gritting mode of devotion outperforms all that the brethren do in the choir above him.
The uneducated but passionately sincere lay brother smuggles his own peculiarly
efficacious reverence for the Mother of God into the theologically more rarefied
ambience of a Cistercian abbey. Now let us scrutinize the relationship between choir
monks and lay brothers.
Cistercian Lay Brothers
No good deed goes unpunished.
While Cistercians sported white habits, as distinct from the black ones worn by
Benedictines, the two orders differed from each other in much more than the mere tint
of their attire. Rather, they were distinguished by their attitudes toward the elemental
injunction in the Rule of Saint Benedict to pray and work. The twofold imperative
raised a very real challenge that put monks in jeopardy of being neither fish nor fowl
in the fauna of faith. On the one hand, the obligation to prayer could be construed
as service to God; on the other, the injunction to toil could be regarded as furnishing
ministrations to the world. The disharmony between the two activities is self-evident.
Christ, to quote a law unto himself, said clearly, “No one can serve two masters.” As
a category, then, the lay brothers within the Cistercian order rendered perfect service
to neither God nor the world. How imperfectly they fulfilled their duties could be a
cause for sarcasm. The German Benedictine nun Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179) was
only one of many in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries who engaged in wordplay by
positing that Cistercian converts were intrinsically perverts.
By the time Our Lady’s Tumbler was composed, lay brethren were probably no
longer at their high-water mark in numbers. Even so, the poem could have served
not so much to proselytize for fresh-faced recruits to join their ranks as to remind
the choir brothers of better days. In earlier times, newcomers from the laity had
endued the monastic society with a devout simplicity. Later, the white monks may
have worried that the same quality was being eroded by the twinned processes of
clericalization and secular learning. The unlearned piety of lay brothers in the heroic
age of the Cistercians would be preferable any day! At that point, the order was
3. Cistercian Monks and Lay Brothers 141
engaged in a boundary-pushing experiment in social engineering by bringing in laity
to the extent that they did. The monasteries were not classless, but they tried at least
to be egalitarian.
From the abbacy of Alberic around 1120 on, the Cistercian order, as also later the
Carthusians and Grandmontanes, relied extensively upon lay brothers. These members
of the institution furnished a creatively drastic solution to the tension between prayer
and work that had pervaded cenobitic monasticism since its establishment. They took
vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, yet rather than concentrating upon chanting
the hours, they funneled their energies toward manual, and usually agricultural, labor.
In fact, they were strictly forbidden from becoming choir monks. At the same time, lay
brethren were not altogether devoid of monklike obligations. For example, they were
bound to the punishing Cistercian custom of silence, the white noise of the white
monks. Most notably, they followed a simplified version of the office that they could
enact while at work. Under the circumstances, their reputed proclivity to sleepiness is
understandable. Run-down from physical toil and unable to parse the language and
semantic code of the liturgy, they would have had good reason to grow heavy-lidded
and to doze when they were constrained to sit in wordless stillness and attend the
office in the monastery’s chapel.
Fig. 3.10 Cistercian monks and conversi before the Virgin. Miniature. Wroclaw, Biblioteka Uniwersytecka,
MS IF 413, fol. 145r. Image courtesy of Biblioteka Uniwersytecka, Wroclaw. All rights reserved.
142 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
In physical appearance, lay brothers were differentiated from choir monks by a few
distinct features. The main item in their clothing was a cloak or mantle, which in all
likelihood lacked the cowl that betokened monastic status. The tumbler bore such a
garment. In addition, lay brethren had no tonsure, a glabrous patch on the scalp where
the hair was clipped or shorn. This characteristic haircut was a token of belonging for
those men with clerical or monastic status. It signified imitation of the apostles. Much
like a passport today, it entitled its bearers to a specific legal and civic status within
society. Finally, lay members wore facial hair of not more than two fingers in length
(see Fig. 3.10). The last characteristic led often to their being called “bearded brothers.”
Not exactly groomed for success by not being close-shaven, they were clean-cut only
in a metaphorical sense.
As mentioned, lay brothers took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.
Paradoxically, they were described as the equals, in everything except monkhood,
of those who sang beyond the rood screen. The proviso of not possessing this status
meant that the laity had no hope of being admitted to the ranks of the choir monks,
who towered above them in the monastic hierarchy. They were not required, either
before or after entry into monastic life, to be conversant in Latin, song, or the liturgy.
Accordingly, it is altogether consonant with actual practice and reality that the lay
brother in Our Lady’s Tumbler cannot chant, read, or understand Latin. He is excluded
from the sociolect of the full brethren; rather than being simply a different dialect
with its own jargon, the tongue they speak is a distinct language from the vernacular
that he employs. In many respects, he makes himself incommunicado. This illiteracy
means that most, if not all, Latin exempla about lay brothers reflect the viewpoint
of the choir monks, who presumably had many preconceptions about them, not all
complimentary. Thus a distinction between elite and nonelite, choir monks and lay
brothers, was baked into Cistercian monasticism.
Like education and culture, ignorance and stupidity are all too often conflated. Thus
the mostly analphabetic lay brothers were wrongly assumed also to be simpleminded
morons. In the Latin Middle Ages, not knowing Latin, being unlettered, and lacking
formal education were regarded as intimately related and often interchangeable weak
points. In modern European languages, the consequences of the interrelations among
these categories remain enshrined in etymology to the present day. On the one hand,
idiots are conversant only in their own idiom or speech. By their very nature, they
are bereft of access to the schooling available in the learned tongue. On the other,
even the unintelligent deserve acknowledgment for belonging within the Christian
community—despite suffering intellectual deficiencies, the cretin, as its etymology
indicates, is a Christian and not a non-Christian human being or even a beast.
The simplicity of lay brothers could cuttwo ways, leading in one direction to sanctity
and in the other to sheer folly. At times their simultaneous paucity of secular learning
and plenitude of unpretentiousness could call to mind lay heroes of early monasticism,
3. Cistercian Monks and Lay Brothers 143
such as the desert fathers. Simplicity in this sense was a good thing, the opposite
of duplicity and double-dealing not merely etymologically, but also semantically.
A simple person was undivided, whole, and integral—everything but two-sided or
two-faced. At other junctures, the undevious nature of lay brethren elicited snobbery
from Cistercian abbots, and instead of administering care and oversight, they sneered.
The order made its eagerness for recruits, including those who became lay brothers,
a point of pride. Accordingly, the superiors of the monasteries were obliged to be
evenhanded in dealing with new entrants incoming from lower social classes. They
accepted the recruits, warts and all. The obligation went beyond mere administrative
responsibility. In fact, it rose to a matter of spiritual life and death, since on the Day
of Reckoning the monastic head was expected to render account for the monks in his
charge.
What is meant when the protagonist is called a convert, in this case using the French
singular? The term does not imply just that he has converted to monasticism and is
on course to being accepted eventually as a fully developed choir monk. Rather, it
signifies that he has been permitted to join as a lay brother. The innovation of this
special subset among the white monks raises a host of issues. The word’s horizon
was far more spacious than even the spread between the two preceding usages would
suggest. Complicating matters, the Latin equivalent (and original) enveloped its own
partly distinct semantic sweep. Furthermore, the reputation of the “convert” covered
an even more imposing span, from a presupposition of humble holiness through
suspicions of unseemliness.
To oversimplify, let us pose four questions, without seeking to answer them right
now. First, was a conversus, a lay convert in Latin, or convers, to use the corresponding
but not exactly congruent French singular, a second-class citizen within the Cistercian
context? That is to say, was he generally a Latin-less rustic of innately inferior status
who was exploited for physical labor by monks who were his social superiors? Second,
was he typically a bread-convert? That is, did he take up the burdens of his lot within
(or without, as the case may be) the cloister mainly as a precondition to receiving a
daily dole? (By becoming a lay brother, the typical twelfth-century peasant would
have left behind the bottom of the hardscrabble feudal world and the elusiveness
of a regular per diem of food. It is imaginable that the destitute would have been
drawn by the magnetism of board and lodging in return for work, according to the
same terms offered centuries later in workhouses.) Third, was he of markedly higher
social and economic class than his blinkered education and culture might lead us to
believe? In other words, could he have been unliterate, un-Latinate, and therefore
more surely rooted in popular religion than in the Latin-based liturgy and theology,
while possessing enough wealth to have been stung by the price of admission? (The
Cistercians required lay brothers to forswear property.) And, fourth, if the manual
labor of lay brethren in the agrarian work of the granges and fields was sanctified,
144 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
what of other physical expressions of devotion? How much of a thorn in the side
was it, during the salad days of what might be called lay Cistercianism, to winnow
permissible from impermissible physicality in worship? Could Our Lady’s Tumbler
speak to the crosscurrents of a dispute within the order over the very nature of piety?
One feature lay brothers shared with full-fledged (or full-habited) choir monks
was the fervor of their fidelity to Mary (see Fig. 3.11). Their adoration stands to reason,
since in countless miracle stories the Mother of God was touted for her charity toward
unchaste nuns and priests, light-fingered thieves and scoundrels, and other sundry
reprobates. The tales showed her again and again in her guise as Lady of Mercy,
rescuing from eternal fire and brimstone, perhaps especially at their deathbeds,
individuals who had little or even nothing in their favor apart from their allegiance
to her. Even that faithfulness might have been shown to her only fleetingly, perhaps
just lately. Yet in the ultimate crisis of salvation or damnation, the Virgin intervened
to ensure that in the weighing of souls, the balance tipped toward those faithful to her.
This motif appears in Our Lady’s Tumbler, following upon the description of how after
his death, when his body is laid out in the church for last rites and he lies in repose,
the lay brother is treated as a choir brother would be.
Fig. 3.11 The adoration of Mary. Stained glass window, ca. 1280. Wettingen, Kloster Wettingen,
cloister, north walk. Image courtesy of Swiss National Library. All rights reserved.
The largest and most ambitious omnium-gatherum of Cistercian stories is Conrad
of Eberbach’s The Great Beginning of Citeaux. In the 1180s and 1190s, when the great
monastery was evidently a hotbed of creation and exchange for exempla that pertained
3. Cistercian Monks and Lay Brothers 145
to the genesis of the order, its author spent time at Clairvaux. Conrad’s compendium
is notable for arranging its illustrative anecdotes in a logical structure, and for making
their morals easily identifiable to readers. The fourth book offers numerous narratives
that recount the divine favor shown specifically to lay brothers. Miracle tales about
brethren of that sort were ideal for the genre, since the stories graph intersections
between learned and lay, clerical and secular, and literate and illiterate. The centrality
of liturgy in the miracle of Our Lady’s Tumbler suggests that the tale took shape when
the nature of veneration within the cult of Mary was developing and being negotiated,
perhaps in novel directions. Such creative haggling was under way throughout Europe,
but early Cistercian foundations such as Citeaux and Clairvaux saw as much of it as
anywhere. They lived through what was tantamount to a heroic epoch in Marianism.
One anecdote in Conrad’s text tells of a devoted lay brother who was obliged to
tend a flock of sheep and therefore to miss the services for the vigil of the Assumption
of the Virgin. In place of the formal liturgy, he recited the few prayers to Mary known
to him. At least through the mid-twelfth century, converts were expected to know by
heart only the Our Father, Apostles’ Creed, and Psalm 51. These three texts were their
spiritual survival kit. By the time of Our Lady’s Tumbler, circumstances had not altered
radically. “Hail, Mary,” the hymn in the learned tongue based on the angel Gabriel’s
salutation to Mary, might have been added, but throughout their existence, most
lay brothers remained innocent of Latinity. To the tumbler, even the paternoster—
the Lord’s Prayer in Latin—seems the esoteric stuff of higher learning. Lacking the
ancient language does not dishonor a conversus within the monastery or order. In the
exemplum that Conrad relates, Bernard of Clairvaux himself was so impressed by the
fervor of the lay brother who privileged his shepherding over the office that the saint
incorporated the incident into a sermon as a lesson in obedience.
In 1223, Caesarius of Heisterbach completed his Dialogue on Miracles (see Fig.
3.12). In format, the text pairs a tyro who poses questions with a veteran monk who
responds. The situation was well known to the author, who served as novice-master
for some years in the monastery. The fictitious exchange purported to purvey actual
spoken interactions recorded by Caesarius, as rapporteur. As such, the work was well
positioned to draw upon both written and oral sources. The 746 medieval miracle
stories were assembled a half century after the magnificent flowering of Cistercian
exemplum literature began at Clairvaux.
Caesarius’s extended conversation contains scores of tales in which lay brothers
come on the scene. In most, these brethren elicit favor from God. The seventh book
of this major collection is given over to miracles of the Virgin and relates more than
five dozen visions of her. It includes an account of a conversus named Henry, from the
cloister of Himmerod in Germany, who experienced a number of sightings of Mary.
In one, he saw her enter the infirmary and bless invalids as they languished on their
sickbeds. In another, he looked on as she materialized in the separate choir of lay
146 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
monks, where she lingered before the devout but passed by the sluggish or drowsing.
In every case, the visionary, whether a priest or cleric, lay brother, knight, or woman,
is alone in discerning the Mother of God at the time of the apparition. Although the
status of lay brethren varied from period to period, it was never automatically or
intrinsically second-rate. The converts were not so much marginal as medial, going
back and forth between clergy and laity.
Fig. 3.12 Benedict of Nursia (left) and Caesarius von Heisterbach (right). Miniature, early
fourteenth century. Diisseldorf, Universitatsbibliothek Diisseldorf, MS C-27, fol. 2r.
Conversion Therapy
In the Middle Ages the Latin noun conversio designated simultaneously retreat
from the secular world and consecration of a spiritual life to God, within either the
isolation of a hermitage or the community of a monastery. Consequently, it is not
at all preposterous that a man such as the tumbler would be attracted to the notion
of becoming a lay brother. Medieval historical sources and literature bristle with
portrayals of jongleurs who convert, particularly late in life, to become hermits or
monks. In the twelfth century, converts who elected to spend their last-chance final
years among the Cistercians hailed from many slices of society. Rulers, noted laymen
from various professions, and ecclesiastics from priests through abbots to primates—
individuals from all these ranks and callings took on the habit of white monks.
In the Latin Lives of the Fathers, the Egyptian desert father Paphnutius, who had
been a disciple of Saint Anthony, is said to have converted a jongleur who had already
3. Cistercian Monks and Lay Brothers 147
become esteemed for his good deeds. A tradition attested from the early twelfth
century held that such an entertainer built a hermitage dedicated to the patron of his
native town. In turn, the site on a hill known as Publémont became the center of an
abbey in Liege, in what is today Belgium. The late twelfth and thirteenth centuries
provide numerous cases in which a performer saw the light and converted. Quasi-
legendary would be the short life entitled The Monk of Montaudon (see Fig. 3.13). The
man in question enters (no surprise here) a religious foundation at Montaudon. He
subsequently becomes head, first of this otherwise unidentified priory and later of
another near Villafranca in northern Spain, in the province of Navarre. Reportedly, he
composes poetry but gives what he earns to his monasteries. Eventually, the monk is
released from his vocation to join the court of King Alfonso II of Aragon, where he is
appointed lord over the poetic society of Puy-Saint-Mary at Le-Puy-en-Velay. Sadly for
our purposes, Saint-Mary has no relation to the Virgin: no tangible Marian connection
is to be found. In other well-documented instances, poets and other entertainers
converted to monasticism, including Cistercianism. A shining example would be the
famed troubadour and later fanatic in the anti-Cathar Crusade, Folquet of Marseille.
He disavowed his profession, repudiated his poems, torched the texts of them in his
personal possession, and became a Cistercian. Eventually, he was elevated bishop of
Toulouse (see Fig. 3.14). His songs included a dawn song in praise of the Virgin that
Pope Clement IV, himself a former troubadour, certified. Folquet’s conversion was
itself made the stuff of an exemplum.
(Se gt. ys
Fig. 3.13 The Monk of Montaudon. Miniature, Fig. 3.14 Folquet de Marseille. Miniature,
thirteenth century. Paris, Bibliotheque nationale thirteenth century. Paris, Bibliotheque nationale
de France, MS Fr. 854, fol. 135r. Image courtesy de France, MS Fr. 854, fol. 61r. Image courtesy
of Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris. of Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris.
148 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
A robust list can be constructed of other troubadours who became Cistercians. To take
another instance, a man known as Guiot de Provins lived at the turn of the twelfth to
the thirteenth century. While young, he studied in Arles and elsewhere in Provence.
After serving as a court poet and composing love lyrics, he became a white monk
at Clairvaux, but he was not there to stay. He left his life as a trouvere definitively
four months later to enter Cluny. At the beginning of 1206, twelve years after taking
up the habit, he completed the social satire known as Bible Guiot, or “Guiot’s Bible.”
The roll call does not end with Guiot. Far from it! Helinand of Froidmont also put
his career as a minstrel behind him to become a Cistercian at the monastery from
which he takes his name. Jean Renart, the thirteenth-century author of the Old French
romance Guillaume de Dole, may also have finished his days in an abbey. Perhaps the
most pertinent of the many virtuosi among lyricists who converted to Cistercianism
is the thirteenth-century Adam of Lexington, from Melrose in Scotland. To honor the
Virgin, he passed his winter nights in playing the lute and singing before her altar
in the abbey church. The Scot was an antibusker who would hand out provisions to
others rather than solicit alms for himself. To give the gritty (or at least grainy) details,
he would take a seat near the church doors and pore over the psalter with a basket of
bread at the ready to allot to the helpless and needy.
The decorum of conduct within houses of God now differs materially from what
it was in the Middle Ages. The buildings served as places not merely of worship
but also of congregation more broadly. Children were unruly, babies cried, mothers
breastfed. Scuttlebutt would be exchanged, loudly. Mongrels barked and bayed, ran
about nipping at each other, and even urinated on pillars. The churches were at once
communal recreation centers and homeless shelters, providing soup kitchens and
social services, as well as entertainment. Accordingly, in many regions of medieval
Europe, it would not have struck anyone as odd that jongleurs frequented cathedral
closes, churchyards, and even the interiors of cathedrals or larger churches, at least for
certain types of performance.
But what would reactions have been to a jongleur-become-monk who wished
to ply his trade within cloisters or even inside a monastic church? The Cistercian
General Chapter of 1199 passed a statute that in theory issued an all-inclusive call for
the routine expulsion of monks who composed poetry. Given medieval perspectives
on performance, recrimination could have been even stiffer against brethren who
sought to engage post-conversion in gymnastics, instrumental music, or most other
performing arts. Yet the world, even the rule-reverencing monastic one, can be an
inconsistent place. Policies and practices are often at odds, sometimes noisily and
sometimes tacitly. Not ten years after the passage of the statute, a brother of Clairvaux
wrote a statement against versifying by monks that would have been fit for chiseling
into a stone tablet. The only hitch was that the memorable line itself took the form of
a verse in a poem by him.
3. Cistercian Monks and Lay Brothers 149
The Language of Silence
There once was a very strict monastery. Its vow of silence
forbade the brethren ever to utter a syllable—with one
exception. Once every decade, each monk could say two
words. After one brother spent ten years there, the prior
asked him to speak. “Bed hard” was the reply. After the
same stretch of time passed again, the monk said, “Food
bad.” Following ten more years, the head asked again and
heard, “I quit.” The prior responded, “That makes sense.
y
All you ever do is complain.”
Our Lady’s Tumbler grapples in part with themes of reading, lack of success in
interpreting what is read, and misjudgings of signs—in other words, a failure to
communicate. To go further, the poem expresses the limits of semiotics. Monasteries
are loci of written and unwritten, even unspoken bylaws. At the same time, the story
plays out behind a curtain of silence. The Cistercian recruit who is the protagonist
cannot understand Latin or follow sign language —he finds himself at a loss for words
and even for gestures. He chafes at his ignorance and consequent incompetence. Not
being versed in the prestige language, he cannot chant or pray at times of worship.
He goes from jongleur manqué to monk manqué—or the other way around. From his
learning tour of the abbey, he learns at first nothing except that he has no learning
to make him a contributor within the community. His secret escape, as a jester, is to
scrabble his way to gestural expression, true body language.
The medieval liturgy was a kind of schooling. In scholastic settings, repetition is
the mother of learning. The opportunity and opportunism for acquiring competency
by parroting newly acquired pieces of knowledge, or even just repeatedly witnessing
the performance of acts and recitation of words by others, were especially great for
lay brothers. Alas, the entertainer in the poem has a learning disability: he cannot find
a way around his lack of Latinity. With an occluded view and an equally obstructed
understanding of the rituals, he is a thwarted voyeur. Instead of being blocked out, he
wishes to participate fully in them.
To make matters worse, the tumbler cannot decipher even the special system of
hand signs by which his confreres communicate when speaking aloud is taboo. Their
signals are a semaphore that he has not been trained to decode. As it turns out, his
plight is still more annoying. Incapable of talking the talk or even understanding it, he
cannot grasp the mode and protocol of monastic silence either. Playing dumb without
knowing what he is doing, he gets the silent treatment and has no idea what it means.
He does not know when to keep quiet or for how long, and he is not fluent in the lingo
of crying and caterwauling, moaning and mewling. He makes a transition from being
a man of few words to being one of none, but he fails even in that drastic solution. In
150 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
his self-imposed dumbfoundedness, he is devout and well meaning, but bumbling. He
embraces elective mutism to mimic monks, but this only deepens his disheartenment.
Then, vexed by his own inadequacies as a semiotician, he finds himself misread —his
French (or Picard) leave from the offices in the choir is misinterpreted as a dearth of
devotion, when the opposite is true.
A word, or at least a sign, is needed to explain what the language of signs was. The
Rule of Saint Benedict put a mute exclamation point on the importance of quiet, and
Benedict recommended specifically that at table it would be preferable to indicate
the unavailability of an item by using a sign rather than a word. A fixed system of
gestures emerged a little at a time, with the evidence for so-called “signs of speaking”
surfacing soon after the reformed Benedictine monastery of Cluny was founded. By
muffling or muzzling the men within the monastery, the Cluniacs endeavored to
mirror the quiet that prevailed in heaven. From then on, the lexicon of hand signs
grew ever more extensive. Monks learned to give the finger—and then some.
The Cistercian order, which took its cue from Benedictinism, was renowned for the
lengths to which it elevated the monastic injunction against inane speechmaking and
cultivated silence. The directive extended even to lay brothers. The white monks were
to mind their own business and refrain from even whispering in the cloister, refectory
(especially at mealtimes), dormitory, and infirmary. As part of the taciturnity that
they were enjoined to practice, they also developed hand signs, contriving some
specifically for communicating with lay brethren on the grange. The theologians and
administrators of the order paid considerable attention to regulating where, when,
and among whom the signals were to be practiced. Overall, the heavy reliance on sign
language within Cistercianism was regarded with misgiving and maligned by many
of their contemporaries. Visitors from outside the order perceived a potential for
abuse in an excessive reliance on hand signs. Unregulated, the gestures could devolve
into their own brand of volubility. According to non-Cistercian satirists, but also to
regulators from within, the use of hand and finger movements was not restricted
to necessary business but served to facilitate idle exchanges, even chitchatting and
joking. Monks became much less taciturn and even talkative in their silence: at times
it could be hard to get a sign in edgewise.
In the Rule of Saint Benedict, the holy man established a daily cycle of monastic
offices. The rotation, which established the circadian rhythm of the faith, mirrored
a verse in the Psalms that called for lauds to be given seven times by day and once
around midnight in each liturgical day (see Fig. 3.15). These canonical hours of prayer
that make up the divine office are known as lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers,
and compline. The seven were raised to a total of eight by the addition of the night
office, or vigils. Staggered to be celebrated punctually at roughly three-hour intervals,
their fulfillment demanded waking in the deep of night and all but sleepwalking—a
form of institutionally mandated somnambulism.
3. Cistercian Monks and Lay Brothers 151
Midnight
Matins
Compline
Sunset Daybreak
Vespers
e Prime
Fig. 3.15 St. Benedict’s monastic rotation. Vector art by Melissa Tandysh, 2014.
Image courtesy of Melissa Tandysh. All rights reserved.
Cistercianism and similar reform movements can be presented as rejecting Carolingian
monastic traditions. Of their reactions, one ran against what the white monks
perceived as an overgrowth of ritualism in the liturgies of mainstream Benedictine
monasteries. Yet even the supposed restoration of the observance set forth in the
Rule of Saint Benedict to its pristine and primitive form is too much for the erstwhile
minstrel. Despite being streamlined, the cycle outpaces what a community member
unseasoned in Latin, song, and ritual can manage. In lieu of the prescribed routine,
he performs his own offices, a gymnastic improvisation loosely analogous to the later
“Hours of the Virgin” that evolved among the laity.
At first the tumbler is caught in a bind, since he has no abilities in either work or
prayer. He feels that no one will sing his praises, because he lacks the savvy to fulfill
the duties of a choir monk in Latin. Thus, he has no means of expressing his devotion
except by remaining as quiet as a church mouse. Even in this self-abnegation he
proves to be ignorant of the seemly occasions and measures for silence. Consequently,
he finds himself the butt of wisecracks among his peers. Such tensions about on-the-
job training must have arisen often when lay brothers included converts who were ill
equipped for the grind they were expected to perform. Not only converted jongleurs,
but converted clerics and nobles as well would have been unfamiliar with and
mismatched for even the rudiments of agricultural labor.
The hero seems predisposed to guilt. His ne’er-do-well feeling intensifies rather
than wanes after his debut as a monk. He has gone from second-tier and sidelined
152 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
in the world to being a runner-up within the monastery too. As he wrestles with
his shortage of skills suited to abbey life, the entertainer seems on the verge of
succumbing to despair. He hates the thought of being a putterer and (even worse)
a leech, sucking away resources from the community without giving back anything
in return. He would not have been unique: such aimlessness and listlessness, with
an accompanying apprehension of pointlessness, often befell monks. The condition
of soul-crushing weariness and wanness even had a name—the Latin technical term
acedia, itself derived from a Greek noun meaning “lack of care.” Yet it does not denote
what could be a happy state of “being carefree” from having a sinecure so much
as “not caring.” Such numbness was also called the noontide demon or the sin of
sloth. Whatever name we assign, it can become a tiredness of life. It anticipates the
sort of ennui that at times has been deemed characteristic of modern existence. Such
anesthetized lethargy bears no small resemblance to degrees of clinical depression.
This deadened state as diagnosed today also frequently entails in its sufferers a dread
of being good for nothing. The miracle in Our Lady’s Tumbler depicts a man racked by
such deadness, self-doubt, and despair. He overcomes these afflictions triumphantly,
thanks not to medication in the form of antidepressants, but to the godsend of
heavenly intervention in his earthly world. Immortality and mortality crisscross, as
do hope and hopelessness.
Despondency of the sort that the performer endured mustnot have been uncommon
among the Cistercian brethren, both choir monks and lay brothers. Members of
the second group lived and labored in harsh conditions that may not always have
corresponded well with what they had imagined beforehand. One anecdote set in
Clairvaux describes a lay brother at a grange who cried at not being permitted to
participate in the liturgy for the feast of Mary. While he wept, the Virgin appeared in
a vision to tell him that he ought to take part in the devotions with the choir monks.
Thereupon, he heard a choir of angels singing the office. Another story describes a
lay brother who would sigh before the altar, since the number of times he could take
communion was strictly limited. A third exemplum tells of a lay brother who when
asked to explain his melancholy, clarified that he knew he would be denied entry to
paradise for not saying his prayers as he had formerly done while among the laity.
Eventually, this doleful soul drowned himself in the millpond.
Christianity has contained since the earliest days a strain known as apophatic or
negative theology. Designated in Latin as the way of negation or denial, this approach
requires describing God solely by spelling out what may not be said of him. The
tumbler is the ultimate apophatist, since he concludes by abnegating speech about God
altogether. Maintaining the most restrained and rigorous silence, he utters nothing
in either Latin or the vernacular. The poem becomes a quagmire of reading and
interpreting, hogtied reading and interpreting, and misreading and misinterpreting.
The entertainer cannot follow Latin or sign language. He cannot devise a mode of
3. Cistercian Monks and Lay Brothers 153
communication that rises to the level of God, even as mediated through the more
obliging channel of Mary. When he seeks to remedy his insufficiencies by performing,
his colleagues misunderstand his absence from the conventional office for this
purpose. Eventually, the performer casts off his dejection and finds a getaway route
out of the apophatic bind. Instead of constraining himself to privation, he employs the
idiom of dance. He validates in his own unique way that actions speak louder than
words. Instead of paralyzing himself with the fearfulness that comes from expressing
veneration directly to God, he resorts to the Virgin through her Madonna.
Bernard of Clairvaux famously harangued against sculptural art in the cloisters,
but he favored the presence of books there. The gymnast finds his own way to make
of bodily movement a private text. He makes acrobatics his own kind of Bible of the
Poor. Long before choreographers devised a system for recording movements in
dance, the tumbler creates a liturgy through his physical moves. By the same token,
he achieves the wondrous feat of staying in rhythm chronologically with the other
monks while performing his devotions. Although out of sync spatially with his peers
in where he does his worship, he transcends them through the efficacy of his balletic
prayer.
Gym Clothes
One old saw declares, “Clothes make the man.” Another holds, “The habit does not
make the monk.” Does the second saying suggest that a male not in the monastic
uniform may still be a monk, or only that a person who dons it may not make the
grade as one? Let us turn now to the tumbler’s clothing (or scantiness of it). As his
fellow monks in the choir above fulfill their liturgical duties, he peels off his cowl
and other outer garments and enacts an elaborate gymnastic sequence in the crypt
to honor the Mother of God. What exactly was he wearing, when he dressed in next
to nothing? The text and the illumination are at variance. In medieval art, men who
strip down to their most intimate underclothing are depicted as having on a filmy
undergarment that covers their lower body. Not so our performer, when he performs
his strange equivalent of rolling up his sleeves for hard work.
We learn that the entertainer has on nothing but a “little coat” that serves as hardly
more than a shirt. The coatlet that constitutes his undergarb could be pictured as a
short smock or kirtle or, to resort to a shade more familiar term, a short nightshirt.
Perhaps we should go so far as to envisage something along the lines of a romper,
the one-piece outer garment worn by a young child. In all cases, the item would have
had a T-shaped cut with an oval neckline, so that it could enclose parts of the arms,
the whole torso, and a mite below the midriff and upper thighs. Whatever we call it,
the de facto jumpsuit would have concealed enough of his body in a critical situation
to be decent (even though he was not expecting to be seen by anyone terrestrial, just
154 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
celestial, and he was most certainly not out to air any dirty linen). That said, his outfit
would not normally have been sufficiently long to provide seemly covering for the
active movements in which he reportedly engaged.
The nightshirt-like item would shield mainly the trunk and above. For the
nether limbs, men could rely on linen breeches and fabric hose on their shanks. The
Cistercians elicited many sniggers because they refrained from sporting such coverings
except when they served at the altar. The white monks were as distinctive for their
underwear (or lack thereof) as for their outerwear. Remember the metonymy that
gave them one of their principal names. Being whispered about as the brethren who
wore no undergarments was a gossipy equal-and-opposite reaction to the designation
of “white monks.” The practice of not bothering to wear underpants under clothes
is known now in slang as “going commando,” but in the Middle Ages it could have
been called “going Cistercian.”
The Latin author Walter of Map (d. ca. 1210) offers a slurring explanation in the
anecdote-ridden Latin prose of his twelfth-century De nugis curialium (Courtiers’
Trifles). In it, the habit of dispensing with underclothes was allegedly intended to
maintain coolness in the sexual organs, for fear that flashes of heat would stimulate
their possessors to lechery—an alternative etiology for “some like it hot.” Whatever
the real rationale for forgoing the lowest layer of clothing, non-Cistercians rolled into
the aisles in sidesplitting laughter at the hazards of accidental exposure to which
white monks were purportedly prey. Thus, the same Map recounts the scurrilous
anecdote of a hapless member of the order who inadvertently mooned King Henry
II of England. While scrambling from the path of the oncoming royal cavalcade, the
poor unfortunate fell head over heels. With nothing covering his bottom, he went
once more into the breach (but breechless) and exposed his posterior to the monarch.
In these cases of a bottom-up process gone awry, the covering the monks failed to
wear was breeches. They dispensed with unmentionables altogether, opting not to be
encumbered even by a shortened form that extended only so far as the upper thighs.
The tale of the tumbling lay monk in the French poem and Latin exemplum is
not concerned with exhaustively documenting the practices of the order regarding
monastic unmentionables, as engrossing as such an investigation could have been.
Rather, it brings into higher resolution the peculiarities of an individual. To go further,
it concentrates on the minimalism of clothing and not on the absence of underthings.
Thus, the story lacks any clear-cut connection with the Cistercian sartorial convention
against undergarments. That is probably a good thing, because if it had one, we would
have to delve into the issue of the order’s policy on underclothing for lay brothers,
which may well have been different and more lenient than for the choir monks.
The tumbler’s near nakedness as he goes about his business contrasts with the
wealth he waived upon entering the monastery, since the tangibles of a successful
jongleur included without fail a sumptuous wardrobe. Clothing forms part of the
3. Cistercian Monks and Lay Brothers 155
stock in trade for professional entertainers. In their compositions, those who compose
and perform songs and poems, like medieval jongleurs, strike a pose of operating
within a well-developed sartorial economy. At work, they petition, even beg, their
patrons for cloaks. At play, they win and lose such items in gambling.
Yet the wardrobe that jugglers of words earn for their craft stands far apart from the
representations in art of the physical entertainers as they do their routines. Medieval
performers of the physical sort were known for their scandalously insufficient attire.
In practical terms, it made sense for the gymnastic jongleurs to strip in preparation for
their acts. Both gymnast and gymnasium are built upon the Greek adjective gumnos, or
“naked,” by way of a verb meaning “to exercise naked.” The various words reflect the
reality that the backbreaking movements of gymnastics require skintight and scanty
clothing, or even none at all. The medieval legends of Alexander the Great perpetuated
knowledge of the so-called gymnosophists or “naked wise men” of long-ago India,
who among other things eschewed conventional dress to achieve greater purity of
thought (see Fig. 3.16). The tumbler resembled them in keeping little under wraps: he
lives by a principle of unveiled truth. Millennia later, similar claims for the spiritual
and epistemic benefits of shedding clothes continue to be advanced by nudists and
naturists. Anatomized etymologically, the designation gym suit is a contradiction in
terms—an antithesis of the first order. The only suit on view in ancient gymnasia was
the birthday suit.
The jongleur of Our Lady’s Tumbler is atypical to the extreme in the sartorial
sacrifices that he makes unprompted. Upon becoming a monk, he relinquishes
his entire collection of worldly clothes. Whether he wears breeches beneath or not
at the commencement of his acrobatic routine of performing for the Madonna is a
footnote (or a note on some other body part) best left to the imagination, but the light
clothing heightens the physicality of his skills as a dancer-acrobat. At the end of his
self-inflicted ordeal, the physical crumpling of his nearly unclothed person can call to
mind the Passion of Christ or the martyrdom of any number of saints. Having been
stripped down for at least part of the torture that culminated in the cross, Jesus was
shown consistently as dressed in next to nothing for the Crucifixion and Deposition.
The four soldiers who crucified him took his clothes and divided them in four shares
among them, leaving him with only his undergarment (see Fig. 3.17). After he was
taken off the cross, Jesus had on next to nothing when cradled for the last time by
his mother. Thus, being nearly undressed was part of the overall sacrificial offering.
At the same time, it belonged to the deliberate humiliation to which Jesus was
subjected, and which he embraced. The humbling imposed by involuntary nakedness
becomes a routine part of legends of saints, perhaps particularly virgin martyrs. Such
harassments can be depicted with a meticulousness that might strike a viewer today
as verging on pornographic.
156 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
I ure que mae SF ce maaly mae que plue eftont G
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Fig. 3.16 Alexander the Great encounters gymnosophists in India. Miniature by Maitre Francois,
1475-1480. The Hague, Museum Meermanno, MS 10 A 11, fol. 93v. Image courtesy of Museum
Meermanno, The Hague.
3. Cistercian Monks and Lay Brothers 157
Fig. 3.17 The crucifixion of Christ, with soldiers shown casting lots at the foot of the cross.
Miniature by Queen Mary Master, 1310-1320. London, British Library, MS Royal 2 B VIL, fol. 256v.
Image courtesy of the British Library, London.
Outside the context of martyrdom, being in the buff or close to it was viewed
negatively in the Middle Ages. To be seen unclothed by accident was customarily
found ridiculous and comic in medieval culture. The tumbler’s look may verge on
black comedy. For him to be nearly nude in the presence of the Virgin may also raise
gender issues, just as his virtual nakedness near fully clad monastic brothers may
point to a difference in status between entertainers (as a subset of lay brothers) and
monks. Yet the juggler’s gym suit signals on a textile level his true simplicity. In this
sense, his minimal attire outshines even monastic garb; his nakedness is not merely
virtual but even virtuous. In the end, the poet need not have been scoring any special
point, either comic or commendatory. The reality of athletic performance would have
required jongleurs in the world outside the cloister to strip down, which could have
contributed to the poor reputations accorded them by the Mrs. Grundys of their day.
To view the tumbler’s disrobing from an utterly different vantage point, the
medieval commentary tradition, in both exegesis of the Bible and interpretation of
secular writings, emphasized peeling away protective layers of the surface text to
arrive at the hidden meaning of subtexts. Tropes developed to express the hermeneutic
process. Thus, interpreters could winnow to separate wheat from chaff, crack shell to
reach kernel, shuck husks to get at the ear of corn (had Europe had maize), and so
158 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
forth. Two comparisons, ever present in the twelfth century, involved the Latin terms
Wet
signifying “wrapper,
At the same time, the tumbler’s appearance nudges the scene close to the borderline
covering,” or “envelope.”
of the sexuality and even promiscuity that are sometimes detectable in miracles of
the Virgin. Sexual sinners are far from abnormal among those saved by Mary. The
whorish meretrix, “prostitute” in the learned language, could be spared thanks to the
virginal mediatrix, the Latin qualifier of the Virgin in her capacity as mediator between
earthly sinners and heavenly redeemer. As the junction where God and humanity
intersected, the Mother of God was ideally suited to help individual human beings
and her child meet each other halfway. By interceding with her son and being heard
by him, she has access to the heavenly father who can bring a magic solution through
salvation.
As the chant rises, the tumbler’s leaps and skips grow more arduous. He coordinates
his physical devotions with the verbal and musical worship of the monks in the church
above him. In straining to execute his service, he goes so far as to extemporize hitherto
unseen and unattempted new moves for the Virgin. Finally, the heavy-breathing
exertion causes him to collapse, sweat-slicked from head to foot. A simile that likens
the wetness exuding from him to fat oozing from meat on a spit may bring home how
he treats his fleshly self like a dray animal. In this self-inflicted physical mortification,
the tumbler resembles Arnulf, a lay brother from the Cistercian monastery at Villers in
Belgium, whose life was celebrated in the second decade of the thirteenth century by
the monk Goswin of Bossut. According to the macabre minutiae, the masochistically
inclined, devout brother scourged his body with all manner of homemade devices to
cause himself exquisite pain. Another lay brother from the same institution afflicted
his flesh to the point where a witness likened him to one of the desert fathers. In
any case, the entertainer’s sweatiness in Our Lady’s Tumbler is reemphasized in a later
performance, when his perspiration dribbles down into the middle of the crypt. In his
one-man sweatshop, we can picture the paving stones whitened by the salt from the
effusion of sweat and tears. Let us scrape a sample and submit it to a little testing in
the laboratory of language and literary history.
Sweat Cloth
The convert makes a habitual routine of his impromptu ritual. Mystified by his
absence during the canonical hours, one of the brethren shadows the former jongleur
stealthily, spies upon his acrobatic dance, and, finding it comic, induces the leader of
the abbey to join him as an onlooker. The guffaw he intended was not a “laugh with”
of shared joy, but a “laugh at” of jeers, heckling, and tongue-clucking. Yet the last
laugh ends up being on the tattletale. When the dance ends, he and the abbot see the
statue of Mary come to life, descend, and dry the tumbler by fanning him with a cloth.
What are we to make of the sweat that exudes from the lay brother? What did the
damp signify, and how would it have been viewed? Madonnas in crypts have often
3. Cistercian Monks and Lay Brothers 159
served females. Women have put their faith in such images to be magical solutions,
expecting them to act as fertility drugs, take the edge off pain in childbirth, ensure
successful delivery, and fix diseases of the reproductive and sexual organs. Yet let
us not forget that the jongleur is male. His manliness is particularly apparent in his
bedraggled wetness. The aphorism holds that “royals glow, women perspire, and
men sweat.” By this measure the jongleur belongs among the sweatiest of the sweaters.
In medical jargon, he could be diagnosed as hyperhidrotic. Apparently, he has pores
like fire hydrants. The perspiration could further betoken the physicality that makes
so very lowly the tumbler’s type of profession and performance. In this event, the
Virgin’s gesture could be tantamount to a healing touch. It cures the gymnast of the
corporeality that threatens to debar him not merely from monasticism but even more
grievously from salvation.
As we know by now, the Madonna’s treatment for the entertainer’s condition
in Our Lady’s Tumbler is to apply a textile. Whatever functions the object may have
fulfilled earlier, in this scene it is pressed into use for sopping or fanning. A person
communicating in Latin would have called it a sudarium, or “sweat cloth,” which refers
to the liquid that such fabrics mop up. A modern Italian would designate it instead as
a fazzoletto, or “facecloth,” which goes back ultimately to the noun for face, from where
people most often wipe sweat. The associations between sweat cloths and athletics fall
entirely within the realm of the ordinary in today’s world. The religious context for
such pieces of fabric within Christianity may be less familiar. For centuries, wrangles
have raged over a crazy quilt (so to speak) of relics that have been designated at one
time or another by the above-mentioned sudarium. The Gospel of John provides a
major basis for the subsequent interest in such artifacts. The writer makes no mention
of a sweat-soaked textile in the entombment of Jesus. Yet in describing the empty
sepulcher, he refers to both nondescript linens and a cloth of this specific type that
had been upon his head. The original Greek word is soudarion, a borrowing from the
language of the Western Romans.
Various items designated as sweat cloths have been revered as relics of Christ. One
would be the facecloth of Oviedo in northern Spain. At the risk of casting a pall upon
this discussion, burial cloths must be mentioned. They are intimately related to face-
and sweat cloths. Most famously, the shroud of Turin, a much-controverted length of
linen that bears the image of a man and that has been alleged to be the winding cloth
from the burial of none other than Jesus himself (see Fig. 3.18), remains the subject of
debate to the present. So too does the image of Edessa, an imprint allegedly left on a
cloth by the visage of Christ while still living. This likeness of Jesus was in effect the
first icon.
Any discussion of perspiration that involves the Christian savior cannot help
but call to mind the visuality and viscerality of the episode involving Veronica (see
Fig 3.19), whose very name speaks to her function. Perhaps a hybrid form from two
languages, the compound may fuse a Latin adjective for “true” and a Greek noun,
WoMs
scrambled by metathesis during Latinization, for “icon,” “image,” or “likeness.” In
y:
160 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
Fig. 3.18 The Shroud of Turin (original on left, processed negative by Dianelos Georgoudis on
right). Image from Wikimedia Commons, © Dianelos Georgoudis (2014), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Turin_shroud_positive_and_negative_displaying_original_
color_information_708_x_465_pixels_94_KB.jpg
Fig. 3.19 Martin Shongauer, Saint Veronica,
ca. 1480. Engraving. Washington, D.C.,
National Gallery of Art, Rosenwald
Collection. Image courtesy of the National
Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Fig. 3.20 Hans Memling, Saint Veronica,
ca. 1470-1475. Oil on panel, 31.2 x 24.4 cm.
Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art,
Samuel H. Kress Collection. Image courtesy of
the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
3. Cistercian Monks and Lay Brothers 161
legend, a woman of Jerusalem by this name (so the story goes) held a veil, cloth,
or piece of linen to Jesus’s countenance as he carried the cross to his crucifixion on
Calvary (see Fig. 3.20). With it she wiped away sweat, blood, and gore. By being
pressed to Christ’s features, the swatch became a life mask. From his bodily fluids, it
received a miraculous imprint that reproduced his features (see Fig. 3.21). The story
goes that Veronica presented the textile to the Roman emperor Tiberius. To this day, a
piece purporting to be this very item is held in the basilica of Saint Peter in the Vatican.
In iconography, it is sometimes borne by two angels. (In Our Lady’s Tumbler the towel
is gripped in one, perhaps angelic, hand that reaches down with it to swab or fan the
tumbler’s brow.)
In a nod to her truly iconic name, the cloth of Veronica is known today as the
vernicle, a Western Christian equivalent of a depiction of Jesus’s face that had its own
name and story, both connected with the Greek East. The mandylion, as this other
image was called, was supposedly painted by one of Christ’s contemporaries. The
legend held that the portrait by this painter was brought to Edessa at the request of
the monarch there, Abgar the Black. In the tenth century, the object was moved to
Constantinople. It disappeared from the capital city of the Eastern Romans during the
sack that occurred in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade. Its subsequent whereabouts
Fig. 3.21 Martin Shongauer, The Bearing of the Cross with Saint Veronica, ca. 1480.
Engraving, 16.5 x 11.8 cm. Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art. Courtesy of the National
Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
162 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
have been the stuff of much conjecture. It has been associated with various textile
relics owned and displayed later in the West, some of which still exist. The Western
cloth of Veronica vaporized the whole problem of iconicity, since it was not a painting
by an artist but the direct impression that the countenance of the Christian savior left
upon a cloth. In the legend, the textile had been applied to the front of his head as an
act of charity by the woman after whom it was named. Thus, it belonged squarely
among images that were designated by a Greek adjective that means “not handmade”:
the fabric was manufactured, but not the face represented upon it. In this quality it
can be compared with the shroud of Turin.
The material was also designated by the Latin word that later evolved via French
into the English “towel.” In Our Lady’s Tumbler the equivalent noun in the vernacular
describes the textile the Virgin wields. This same word also denotes a holy cloth
inserted in a piece of wood that was purchased by King Louis IX of France in 1247.
This relic was conveyed to the Sainte-Chapelle, the royal “Holy Chapel” located in the
heart of Paris. It may have been identical with the mandylion. The item employed to
comfort the tumbler could have been either a thick and absorbent fabric designed to
sponge away sweat or a thinner strip from a bigger piece of clothing. In either case,
the stuff must not be underappreciated. Thanks largely to contacts with the so-called
cult of the Mother of God in Constantinople, textiles insinuated themselves into the
fabric of life, death, and afterlife in the medieval West. Their cultural resonance at the
time was anything but threadbare.
The Weighing of Souls
No pain, no gain.
After the abbot has seen the monkish acrobat in action, nothing happens for a while
to rupture the ritual. But eventually the leader of the community bids the tumbler to
meet with him. A summons from a person higher in the hierarchy can be overawing,
along the lines of a subpoena — literally an injunction to come “under penalty.” Being
dragged into the boss’s office or into a judge’s chambers is not often a good thing.
The lay brother shows up in a fright for the interview with his superior. He is not
braced for a David-and-Goliath fight of lone laic against “the man.” Instead, he is
scared nearly to death that he is to be drummed out of the cloister. The outcome is
not what he expects. Quite the contrary: he finds himself praised —a monastery is just
the place for his cultlike devotion. Upon realizing that he is not in trouble, he goes
weak in the knees and swoons from what might be diagnosed medically as orthostatic
hypotension. At least in the case of the enervated entertainer, the physiological
effects of breakneck change from grave apprehensiveness to intense relief are dire.
Furthermore, they are compounded by exhaustion from untold days of repeated
performances in the crypt. The result overwhelms his debilitated constitution. The
initial fainting spell is only the first symptom of a more drastic turn for the worse. The
3. Cistercian Monks and Lay Brothers 163
burdens, both physical and spiritual, have overtaxed the brother and take a dreadful
toll. After a swift decline, he dies. His only hope for salvation rests upon the Virgin:
she remains, as she has been all along, his sole exit strategy. When the jongleur’s
soul departs from his body to transit from the vale of tears (at death, human beings
“give up the ghost” — literally, they breathe out their spirit), Mary must release it from
damnation by wresting it from the talons of demons. These agents of Satan thought to
claim the tumbler’s spirit as theirs because of blemishes in the life he had led before
entering the abbey. The performer is saved and ends up on the side of the angels, but
only after a white-knuckle prelude in which punishment seems the likelier outcome.
Salvation could not come in more nip-and-tuck a fashion than this.
Although the sequence of events in which a celestial forearm handed down a towel
from within a cumulus would seem to end with the jongleur on cloud nine, we are
shown only that the mediation of the Virgin induces God or an angelic agent to spare
him from perpetual torment. The hand is related to what is known technically as a
manus Dei or dextera Dei. In Christian art, the motif of the divine (right) hand went back
to late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. A full-length depiction of God as a human
figure would have crossed the red line of the Second Commandment. Instead, the
representation of a hand or hand and forearm symbolized the deity’s intervention in
human affairs. The hand reminds the viewer that in medieval theology, God performs
all miracles.
The aphorism that “death is the great equalizer” has been in circulation since the
mid-nineteenth century at the latest. Such thinking would have been utterly foreign
in the Middle Ages. Existence then was a cliffhanger until the very end. The episode
of Our Lady’s Tumbler calls to mind scenes in art of the act that is called technically by
the Greek compound psychostasis. Meaning “soul-weighing,” this operation is a stock
element in Christian eschatology. When Jesus Christ presides at the Last Judgment,
the Archangel Saint Michael weighs out a soul’s good and bad deeds on the pans
of a scale to determine whether it will be damned or redeemed (see Fig. 3.22). In
this endgame, Satan had anything but a take-no-prisoners outlook: he wanted all the
hostages he could get. In iconography, such scenes often involve the spiritual part of
a human being portrayed as a miniature body that is hotly contested by angels and
demons. Vignettes of this sort record a last-minute (or just past the last minute) out-
of-body experience. The immortal essences of lucky people are saved by the better
angels of their natures — often, as in this case, with a little moonlighting by the Mother
of God. Alongside all her other obligations, she has nearly unique powers to tip the
balance in favor of those who have sinned. This capacity of hers explains why Mary is
to die for. The tumbler has not yet evolved into the juggler he will become in the late
nineteenth century, but she neutralizes gravity and renders him as weightless as any
of the juggling clubs in his descendant’s legerdemain: he floats to heaven, wafted by
divine agents.
The motif of soul-weighing is alluded to once in a version of the story of the
jongleur produced in 1906, on one folio side of a book that features pseudomedieval
164 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
artwork to accompany the text. It depicts the juggler as a monk, about to be borne
aloft by attendant spirits who have his arms in a death grip. To the side, a demon,
clutching the deceased’s one-piece undergarment, gives us a black look (see Fig. 3.23).
The tumbler is not automatically sanctified. To gain salvation, his soul still requires
intercession by way of the Madonna. Only after her intervention can her proxies truly
spirit him away, and only after it does even the sky cease to be the limit: he reaches
the empyrean.
In a quintessential Marian miracle tale, the Virgin saves the day, or at least the
sinner, during the grace period between death and heaven or hell. She intervenes, not
a moment too soon, to enfranchise from the devil a wrongdoer who has committed
either a specific or a repeating pattern of transgressions. She can do so by serving as
an eleventh-hour character witness, but often she steps in even when the malefactor
seems unsalvageable. The story of the jongleur differs from this typical formula more
than a jot and tittle. Although Mary performs her customary soteriological function
by sparing an individual after death, the real miracle take place when she arranges for
the same evildoer to be comforted during his mortal life—and so the medieval painter
fittingly chooses for the sole illumination of the poem the scene with the “towel.” Our
eyes are directed away from the celestial realm until the very end of the story. At that
juncture, it intrudes epiphanically, so that we may not forget the afterworld to follow
the present one, the hereafter to arrive after the here and now.
The protagonist of Our Lady’s Tumbler is a secular who has not been deeply
monkified. In fact, he secularizes the liturgy more than the abbey monasticizes him.
He privatizes the customarily collective action of monks as they observe the canonical
hours. In effect, he is an early adopter in embracing the practice of dedicating personal
worship to Mary. In many miracle tales, individual devotion to the Virgin laicizes the
regimen that was executed in the daily liturgical round of monks and many in the
clergy. At each of the canonical hours, the devotee carries a special load for the Mother
of God. This aping of monasticism by laypeople has come to be called the Little Office
or the Hours of the Virgin. A story about a cleric of Pisa is the most famous one in
which a worshiper sings the hours in private and in secret. After being browbeaten by
his family into marrying, he is confronted in his wedding bed by Mary and motivated
by her to return to her service. Such exclusive reverence, even more powerful when it
took place before a Madonna, would become a potent feature of lay piety during the
later Middle Ages.
We are never told of any specific act committed by the tumbler that would qualify
as a major or even a minor sin—a delict or peccadillo. The jongleur seems instead to
be the object of finger-pointing for the very nature of his premonastic profession and
way of life. Another possible fly in the ointment would be his postmonastic inability
to contribute to the abbey-wide team effort to express veneration in established ways
of worship. In any case, his off-the-cuff liturgy turns out to outclass what the choir
monks themselves manage to achieve. The similarities with other Marian miracle
tales resume when Our Lady’s Tumbler depicts the Virgin interceding on behalf of this
3. Cistercian Monks and Lay Brothers 165
Fig. 3.22 The archangel Michael and the act of psychostasis. Mural, fifteenth century. Burgos,
Iglesia de San Nicolas de Bari. Image courtesy of Ramon Muniz. All rights reserved.
Fig. 3.23 The juggler is lifted up by angels, rescued from the clutches of a demon.
Illustration by Henri Malatesta, 1906. Published in Anatole France,
Le jongleur de Notre-Dame (Paris: F. Ferroud, 1906), 9.
166 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
humble stalwart against conventional institutional hierarchy and jurisdiction. The
Mother of God is a populist, and the jongleur-become-lay-brother is one of her people.
The Latin-Less Lay Brother and Our Lady
A young clergyman asks his bishop, “May I smoke
while praying?” In response, he receives a definitive no.
Later, the clergyman scolds an older colleague whom
he observes puffing on a cigarette while praying. “You
shouldn’t smoke while praying! I asked the bishop, and he
said I couldn't!” The older padre replied, “That's strange.
When I asked the bishop if I could pray while smoking, he
told me that it was fine to pray anytime!”
The story of the tumbler promotes holiness, but it hardly glorifies monks and clerics.
If anything, it goes into rapture over a lay convert who outdoes the fully qualified
brethren around him through his meek profession of piety. While they enact the
refined rarefication of Latin chant in the choir above him, the layman engages in a
complementary, or competing, physical performance in the crypt below them.
Our Lady’s Tumbler confronts its audience with a state of play that would not have
been conceivable before the twelfth century: a laic with no grasp of Latin or liturgy
has the wherewithal to outrun the professional supplicants, that is, the monks. The
unlettered man merits salvation through an act of reverence that is not only not Latin-
based, but is indeed not even verbal at all. His performance is infralinguistic. After
finding no suitable register for himself within the world of Latinity, he ventures
outside to fashion a new one all his own. Not bilingual, he has the liability of being
tongue-tied, but the edge of being anything but two-tongued. Despite lacking all
access to diglossia and the learned language, in the end the jongleur is not rocked onto
his spiritual back foot by lacking book knowledge. The tale is at once deeply pious
and deeply seditious. It exalts monasteries, while concurrently privileging an illiterate
and Latinless lay convert. It favors deed over word, the simplicity of complete silence
over the subtlety of sign language. It can be construed as an encouragement to piety,
with the message that no matter how nonintellectual and ill-respected a profession
may be, its practitioner has a ray of hope for redemption through devotion to the
Virgin. All the same, it can be taken equally well as impugning the hollowness of
rituals or the meanness of those who subscribe to them. The lay brother becomes a
lightning rod, but what comes out of the blue is not a thunderbolt that strikes him
dead. The real issue may not be the aberrance of his worship in the crypt but the
emptiness of the formal liturgy in the choir up above. Like grace, prayer seems not to
happen by committee but in solitude.
Mary helped to open a fissure in the fracturing social system that is known as the
three orders of society. In this tripartite schema, two groups counted for their salvation
3. Cistercian Monks and Lay Brothers 167
on the rituals of the pray-ers, namely, the monks and clerics. These dependents
were the laborers who produced food and the warriors who provided defense. The
lay brothers fell into a gray area. They viewed their labor itself as a means both of
glorification to honor God and, in turn, of salvation. They straddled the line between
the prayers and the workers, in that their menial tasks became spiritual exercises. They
created a new answer to the old question of what constitutes satisfactory veneration.
In effect, they achieved a redefining moment of both work and worship, by making
grunt work itself a form of piety. Yet in Our Lady’s Tumbler, the convert is given direct
access to his own redemption, without having to bank upon the praying class. He
needs no mediation beyond what the Virgin furnishes.
By being written in medieval French, the poem could be parsed as reversing an
antiquated hierarchy by preferring the vernacular over the learned language. Yet
Our Lady’s Tumbler takes its revolution beyond the merely linguistic by validating
fictionally the movements of a layman’s body over the entire semiotics, verbal and
gestural, of monks. At the outset, the brother is handicapped by not coming up to
scratch on either side of the monastic equation that balanced contemplation and
action. The disequilibrium between the two pursuits was a sore point in the twelfth
century, encapsulated in the Latin imperatives ora, or “pray,” and labora, or “work.” (In
modern terms, the two commands lead in opposite directions: prayer is relationship-
oriented, with the other party being divine; work is task-oriented.) The pairing of the
two injunctions captures much about the spirit of Benedictinism, even though the
phrase is nowhere to be found in the Rule of Saint Benedict. In fact, the pseudomotto
has not been traced any earlier than a nineteenth-century book on Benedictine life.
The lateness makes sense, since imposing the two endeavors upon the same class of
individuals conflicted automatically with the so-called three orders of society.
In Our Lady’s Tumbler, the jongleur must make his labor his toil and vice versa. The
inextricability of the two activities of prayer and work is made clear coincidentally
by a variation in the manuscripts for the text of one line. Three manuscripts present
a reading that can be translated “as he did not know how to pray otherwise.” Taking
matters to the exact opposite pole, two others transmit wording that leads to the
English “as he did not know how to work otherwise.”
As a minstrel, the tumbler was bound by the very name of his occupation to the
notion of serving. A person’s art and service have always been closely related. The
sticking point is that the tumbler is unfit for the new type of helping hand he hopes
to lend—especially since the organ he would need most to ply as a monk would be
his tongue. He does not control the language and words that are a prerequisite to
the standard prayer and liturgy presumed by the monastic office, and the skills he
commands are not regarded as appropriate substitutes for more typical forms of toil
within a monastery. It is all very well to speak of the dignity of work, but do the
exertions of the jongleurs truly constitute labor? Yet despite these shortfalls, by the
end he has vindicated his idiosyncratic tertium quid of self-expression. In plain English,
168 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
he has staked out for himself a new middle course between two already known ways
for expressing himself.
During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Mary reaches her peak, partly courtesy
of her very accessibility through prayer. Our Lady’s Tumbler is aligned more with
popular religion than with formal theology, in that it presents the Mother of God
not so much in her role as an intercessor as in her guise as a power in her own right.
But the Madonna of the medieval French poem is, like all Madonnas, an artistic
representation of Mary. The backdrop against which she is depicted is a Cistercian
monastery and its church. This institution conjures up the hierarchy within organized
religion at its most orthodox. Churches had been dedicated to the Blessed Virgin since
the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore or “Saint Mary Major” in Rome, as early as 432.
In much of Western Europe, the Mother of God underwent a surge of veneration in
the Carolingian period. This was the time, preceding and succeeding Charlemagne,
that prevailed from the mid-eighth century through the late tenth. For all of that, the
cult of the Virgin experienced no efflorescence then on the level of the resurgence that
held sway from the twelfth century on.
Among ecclesiastics, the monastic orders generally and the Cistercian monks
particularly displayed undivided loyalty to the Mother of God during what is often
called the long twelfth century. This chronological period extends from approximately
as early as 1050 to as late as 1230. Of the many lay syndicates outside the Church that
cultivated a relation of their own to the Virgin, professional entertainers, especially
composers of song, stand out. An ardent courtly lover and love poet has one sort
of relationship to a standoffish beloved lady; a Mary-fixated trouvere another to the
Mother of God. It would be ill advised to draw facile likenesses between the two
types of association. But for all that, it would be even more erroneous to disregard
connections between the two roles. The tumbler has been wont to perform for large
audiences, but he has also become familiar for a pas de deux in which he dances alone
with an unseen Mary.
Our Lady’s Tumbler is shot through with an oddly relevant tension between the
communal, rule-based devotion of the choir monks, who chant in church within a
monastery dedicated to the Virgin, and the personal, highly irregular obeisance to her
of the jongleur. The differences between the liturgy of the monks and the leaps of the
lay brother are instantly graspable. But what distinguishes the entertainer’s love from
a courtly lover’s? A private love binds the gymnast to Mary, not to an earthbound
mistress as a aristocratic love poet might celebrate. Furthermore, the performer's
passion articulates itself not in courtly song but instead in a balletic billet doux. The
dance is not as simple as it may seem at first blush. For one thing, it must be appreciated
as an extension of the silence to which the laic so touchingly consigns himself, for
want of articulateness in words or signs. Concomitantly, and contrapuntally, the
bodily movement is a form of language. Indeed, it ties together a most physical act by
3. Cistercian Monks and Lay Brothers 169
human beings with the loftiest principles of the universe, the cosmic dance of the stars,
celestial objects, and time itself as viewed from a terrestrial perspective. In the eyes
and ears of heaven, all the operations of the cosmos are a language enunciated and
comprehended without any trace of babel. God understands what the juggler means
by his every movement, the same as he does the complex moves and music of the sun,
moon, and planets. The English journalist and playwright Frederic Vanson (see Fig.
3.24) condenses this cosmology as the concluding message in the heroic couplets of
his 1978 Our Lady’s Tumbler:
The moral of this story? Let us say
That Jesus also has his dancing day,
Who dances in the heavens and the seasons,
Who dances in the thoughts of proper reasons,
Who, to prove us far more than husks of clay,
Dances the sun itself on Easter Day?
Fig. 3.24 Frederic Vanson, age 70. Photograph by Kurt Mitherell, 2012. All rights reserved.
4. Reformation Endings:
A Temporary Vanishing Act
What Makes a Story Popular?
Mind the gap.
—Warning phrase on the London
Underground (1969-)
Our Lady’s Tumbler has been described in ways that make its narrative seem anything
but time-bound. Yet the timelessness has hardly been unqualified and unobstructed.
As it turns out, the narrative has not been immune to the repercussions of cultural
change. For as much as one half millennium, it apparently went unrepeated in any
form—untold, unsung, unpainted, and unwritten. In all candor, the tale underwent a
death and long interment, before the investigators of literary history exhumed it and
reactivated it inside the Frankensteinian operating theater of philology. From there,
artists, especially an author, a composer, and a diva, wheeled it out on its gurney
for recuperation and rehabilitation so that it could reenter the world triumphantly
once again, as a kind of medieval revenant. Never count this story out: each time the
jongleur has pulled a vanishing act, he has popped up again—a humanized bolt from
the blue, a loose cannon in the literary canon.
What makes a tale gain or lose popularity? Many storytellers, whether oral poets,
dramatists, or screenplay writers, have wrestled with this question, and laid bets on
the answer. Some have elected, or at least professed, not to care. In the case of Our
Lady’s Tumbler, we must wonder why a narrative would enjoy modest success for a
couple of centuries from around 1200 before vanishing from sight for roughly five
hundred years. Despite being anything but a hollow man, the gymnast went out not
with a bang but with a whimper. In the late Middle Ages, he performed a centuries-
long disappearing act.
© 2018 Jan M. Ziolkowski, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0132.04
FREQUENCY OF USAGE
172 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
y
Terms and phrases such as “Our Lady’s Tumbler” and “Jongleur de Notre Dame’
may now be keyboarded into search engines. Algorithms enable nearly instantaneous
trawls through corpora of digitized texts that encompass a restricted but still
meaningful fraction of all writings published in English over the past two centuries.
The quantity suffices for generating line graphs that track the relative frequency of both
titles across time (see Figs. 4.1 and 4.2). The results show visually the diachronically
rising and falling cultural impact of individual translations, literary and musical
compositions, performers, and more. With the help of such graphic aids, we can
correlate upward and downward spikes. We can map the increasing and decreasing
effects of translations into modern languages and other artistic developments, such as
Anatole France’s adaptation, Jules Massenet’s opera, and Mary Garden’s arrogation of
the leading role in the opera to herself. When comparable tools become available for
data mining in earlier bodies of literary resources, what patterns will the ripple effects
reveal to us? So far as is now known, only two versions of our story survive from the
Middle Ages. The French one bears a different title in each of the five manuscripts.
Our textual repository could swell slightly with the discovery of a new version or
two, and I would not be surprised if someday a hitherto-unknown exemplum came
to light. In the much-quoted words of Alexander Pope, hope springs eternal. Yet even
in the most felicitous circumstances, we will never possess enough medieval evidence
of Our Lady’s Tumbler to permit credible statistical analysis. The margin of error is too
high. Literature from long ago does not always even allow the geometric certainty
that two points determine a line. Words may be made into big data, but in the end,
poetry and story —like all art—defy datification.
BB Jongleur de Notre Dame
0,00000350%
0.00000300%
0.00000250%
0.00000200%
0,00000150%
0.00000100%
0,00000050%
0,00000000%
1800 1820 1840 1860 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980
YEAR
Fig. 4.1 Google Books Ngram data for “Jongleur de Notre-Dame,” showing a sharp rise in the
first decades of the twentieth century and then a steady decline. Vector art by Melissa Tandysh,
2014. Image courtesy of Melissa Tandysh. All rights reserved.
FREQUENCY OF USAGE
4, Reformation Endings: A Temporary Vanishing Act 173
BB Our Lady's Tumbler
0,000000700%
0.000000600%
0,000000500%
0.000000400%
0.000000300%
0.000000200%
0.000000 100%
0.000000000%
1800 1820 1840 1860 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000
+ of February 2016
YEAR
Fig. 4.2 Google Books Ngram data for “Our Lady’s Tumbler.” As with “Jongleur de Notre-Dame,”
the phrase peaks before 1920; unlike “Jongleur,” the decline is more fitful, dropping deepest only
after 1980. Vector art by Melissa Tandysh, 2014. Image courtesy of Melissa Tandysh.
All rights reserved.
The thin dribble of the narrative into written culture before the Reformation indicates
much in its own right. Even before the first millennium, Marian miracles were
established in Byzantium. These tales became archetypes on which subsequent
adaptations were based in the West. The more different the versions in circulation,
the less likely a story was to ebb away altogether, either permanently or temporarily,
without being retrieved and reanimated. In contrast to the French poem, we have only
two versions of our Latin narrative, the one in a very cursory exemplum. The exiguity
of transmission made the survival of the story insecure.
Rather than seek vainly for information that pertains specifically to Our Lady’s
Tumbler, we would do better to probe by comparison and analogy what we can learn
from the sizable medieval literature of Marian miracles. The distribution of this
trove across regions, languages, and literary traditions may procure at least some
enlightenment. We discover speedily that the impetus toward collecting miracles ran
particularly strong in England in the twelfth century. Yet it did not evidence itself
commensurately in the mother tongues. In fact, the meager residue of miracles of
Our Lady in medieval English and Anglo-Norman pales alongside the multitude in
Anglo-Latin versions and even alongside ones in other Western European vernaculars.
The outpouring of literature, at its most intense from the late twelfth through the
thirteenth century, matched a devotion to Mary that cut across geographical, linguistic,
and social boundaries. Around the time Our Lady’s Tumbler was set down in writing,
Louis IX ruled as king of France. His piety was legendary, and he was canonized in
1297. With good reason, he is commonly designated merely as Saint Louis. Every
day he heard the offices of Our Lady. On Tuesdays and Saturdays, the Mass was
dedicated to her. On the vigils of the four principal feasts of the Virgin, the king would
174 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
mortify his flesh. Two of the six times a year on which he took communion were
feasts of Mary. Finally, he made pilgrimages to Marian shrines such as Chartres and
Rocamadour.
The Middle Ages and early modernity overlap in multiple ways. The periodization
that differentiates between them deserves to be tested and refined. In fact, it has been
so sharply faulted that some would favor scrapping any hope of a meaningful division.
All the same, the two periods still constitute distinct time zones in the evolution of
European culture. Many systems rest on gradations that can be at variance, but even
so we rely upon them. In this case, the separateness of the medieval and early modern
worlds appears strongly in religion, not only in those regions where Protestantism
threw down the gauntlet to Catholicism.
During the Reformation, the whole world of faith implied in Our Lady’s Tumbler
was desecrated and deserted, deteriorated passively from dereliction, endured active
destruction, or underwent some composite of such sea changes. In England, one
important aspect of the dismantling has become known formally as the dissolution
of the monasteries. In the late 1530s, close to one thousand Catholic religious
houses were disbanded at the instigation of King Henry VII. Among the manifold
consequences, much of medieval material and textual culture hung by a thread or
was even lost. In many places, the iconoclasm of the switch in religions obliterated
imagery that had accumulated for centuries. In architecture, the outcome was
what Ralph Adams Cram, an early twentieth-century American apologist for the
preceding medieval culture (and pre-Reformation Catholic religion), could describe
as “the eviscerated, barren, and protestantized cathedrals.” Thus, a reality wrought
by Reformation and civil war prompted William Shakespeare to allude to “bare
ruin‘d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.” Throughout England, the churches of
monasteries and abbeys were dispossessed and devastated in rapid-fire succession,
with the disappearance of both the physical trappings of Catholic Christianity and
the human presence of chanting monks.
True, the changes took hold to varying degrees in different locales. The baring
and the ruining were not ubiquitous. In fact, the spectrum could be large within a
country such as Germany where a geographical division emerged between Catholics
and Protestants. For all that, in general Protestantism of the time acquired an anti-
Marian accent. Concomitantly, the Reformation had the effect of diminishing the
prominence of the Virgin in Christianity. Even in what remained a mainly Catholic
region such as France, medieval culture came under a cloud. More than buildings
were affected. In confronting the cult of the saints, the reformers felt bound to
reshape or eradicate shrines, relics, images, and miracle tales. Protestants were
anti-pilgrimage. A logical extension of the same compulsion was to obliterate the
narratives underpinning them. Those who disavowed Catholicism had to confront
and calumniate all these interrelated phenomena without granting a special
dispensation for the worship of Mary. The Mother of God was not given a free pass
in the sectarian violence—on the contrary.
4, Reformation Endings: A Temporary Vanishing Act 175
Protestant zones, and Catholic hot spots located close to the battle lines between
the factions, came to the boil. It became increasingly dangerous there to claim to have
witnessed a Marian apparition. The wrath of the Inquisition could be threatened, and
supposed visionaries were executed. At the same time, the cultures that came to be
bracketed within the catchall designation of the Middle Ages became suspect too.
Afterward, it took a long time to overcome the lingering reserve and even disdain
for the period. By the seventeenth century, French highbrows could be found who
expressed admiration for medieval times and affinity for its literature. But their
attraction skewed toward knights and the major protagonists of heroic poetry, not
toward monks and monasteries.
The most intemperate reformers in England, Germany, and elsewhere, such
as Calvinists, were intent on extirpating from popular culture and discourse all
saints, but foremost among them the Virgin. They challenged the extremely slender
scriptural, and in fact primarily apocryphal, evidence undergirding some of the
beliefs and worship that had burgeoned around Mary. They paid the mother of Jesus
her due as the Mother of God, and recognized that she conceived as a virgin, but they
emphasized more vehemently than the Catholics the preeminence of Christ, and they
denied that the Virgin had escaped from original sin. To accord Mary more attention
was Romanism, papism, and idolatry.
The Mother of God had been associated especially with lilies, but now the
flower show was over. After being in full bloom in the late Middle Ages, the plants
were fading fast. The second of the Ten Commandments enjoins the faithful from
worshiping graven images. Out of antipathy to idols, the reformers systematically
uprooted, tore asunder, and even incinerated the traditional cult and images of Mary
like so many overgrown weeds.
This recrudescence of iconoclasm within Christianity deprived the faithful of
the direct engagement that Madonnas facilitated with the characters and events of
the New Testament. At the same time, it ruled out the danger of ignorant believers
becoming confounded and regarding the objects themselves as inherently divine,
rather than as stepping-stones toward the divine. Along with the Virgin, the rabble-
rousing reformers got rid of monastic orders, many of which had cherished a special
devotion to her. Where monasticism was outlawed, monasteries fell into abeyance
and monks disappeared. Additionally, the reform movement contributed to the
demise of jongleurs, not because of Mary but because the leaders of the Reformation
harbored general reservations about entertainment and art of all sorts. The reformers
were antitheatrical and therefore perforce antijongleur.
English Protestants, whose religion acquired the backing of the state, achieved
success in their full-force and head-on assaults on the cult of the Virgin. England had
bestowed upon the Mother of God a favor second only to that for Christ himself; in
fact, the entire country had earned recognition as “Mary’s dowry” in acknowledgment
of its especial devotion to her. Two and a half centuries earlier, a bishop of Exeter
had mandated that every church in his diocese should contain an image of the
176 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
Virgin, but now Madonnas incurred acute risk. Depictions of her and of other saints
caused consternation because of their anthropomorphism. The importation of the
Italian madonna, or “my lady,” to designate a picture or statue of Mary is attested
in England first in 1644, well after Protestantism had asserted a firm grasp there. By
then such images were alien and foreign. They were talismanic, objects possessing
extraordinary powers, whose veneration was dissonant with the anti-idolatrous and
antisuperstitious tenets of Christianity.
In the fundamentalist process of editing the Virgin back to the rather faint contours
she had in scripture, the iconoclast reformers felt obliged to wipe out the images of
Mary around which para- and postbiblical traditions had ramified into a primordial
jungle. Wooden figures of the Mother and Child, enclosed often in tabernacles,
were a fixture of most English parish churches, as medieval inventories confirm.
Of all these numberless Madonnas, only one from the early thirteenth century has
survived. A particularly painful episode to contemplate is the iconophobic (or miso-
iconic) vandalization of the Lady Chapel attached to Ely Cathedral (Fig. 4.3). Today
the space is strikingly austere, its niches bald of statuary. The sole representation
only accentuates both the neat-as-a-pin beauty and the unrelieved bareness. In 1541,
reformers beheaded nearly all the dozens of brightly colored statues and smashed
almost every single stained glass window that illustrated the biblical typology of the
Mother of God and her life story. In 1643, William Dowsing, as commissioner with the
charge of destroying “monuments of idolatry and superstition,” carried out a further
round of iconoclasm, with close attention to image of the Virgin Mary.
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Fig. 4.3 Lady Chapel, Ely Cathedral. Photograph by Max Gilead, 2010. Image from Wikimedia
Commons, © Maxgilead (2010), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File: DSCF0563,_UK,_Ely,_Cathedral, Lady_Chapel.jpg
4, Reformation Endings: A Temporary Vanishing Act 177
Another notorious episode took place in England in 1538, when zealots effectively
imprisoned cult statues of the Virgin in a large storage closet known as Thomas
Cromwell's wardrobe of beds. Eventually, they put these images on trial. The
reformers were not swayed by the defense mounted on behalf of the admittedly tight-
lipped sculptures. Instead, they publicly executed them by burning. The punishment
approached state-sanctioned murder. The objects of wood and stone themselves were
almost living heretics. By having their statuesque feet put to the fire, they were treated
with no more and perhaps even less respect than what was due to common criminals.
The point was iconoclastic, to demolish the worship of idols. In that context, the
effigies were lightning rods that took a hit for the whole Catholic Church.
Yet inadvertently this treatment of the images by the firebug fanatics perpetuated
the very assumptions that it sought to end. In the process, it conceded to them the status
of living beings: they were old flames in more than one sense. To the executioners, the
broiling of the representations was retributive justice. To their impassioned devotees,
the mass cremation must have seemed tantamount to martyrdom. Cult statues of the
Virgin were hauled in from such sites as Cardigan, Caversham, Coventry, Doncaster,
Ipswich, Lynn, Penrhys, Southwark, Willesden, and Worcester. Then this rogues’
gallery was raked over the coals so that Mary could go out in a blaze. To take one out
of alphabetical order, a final Madonna hailed from the most hallowed late medieval
English shrine of Our Lady, Walsingham in north Norfolk. Along with her sanctuary,
she deserves further discussion.
Walsingham, England’s Nazareth
The demolition of the shrine and the dispersal of its contents at Walsingham was a
singularly earth-shattering act of ruination. The Holy House and church surrounding
it have been reconstructed from their image as transmitted in the wax seals of the
medieval abbey. Despite all the care, in the replication the originals have been
reduced to the merest facade of what they once were (see Fig. 4.4). Reappearances can
be deceiving.
The chapel had an elaborate foundation legend. In the account as recorded much
later, a Saxon noblewoman and widow experienced three times in 1061 a vision in
which the Virgin first transported her mystically in a true flight of fancy to the Holy
House of the Annunciation in Nazareth. Then, the Mother of God bade her to honor
the announcement of the Incarnation by erecting in Walsingham an exact replica of
the home. It would not be easy for her to determine the building site and achieve the
construction. For her pains, the visionary was assured that when built, the shrine
would enable all those who sought succor there from Mary to receive it. The prediction
came true. Between the mid-twelfth century and 1538, Walsingham became one of the
most heavily frequented sanctuaries to the Blessed Virgin in England and even in the
Christian world. The connection with the unveiling of the birth of Jesus meant that
178 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
the Latin prayer known as the Hail Mary was held in special reverence at the chapel
and later at the priory on the spot. Among many relics, the holy place was particularly
renowned for a phial that allegedly contained milk from the Mother of God.
Fig. 4.4 The remains of Walsingham Priory, Norfolk. Photograph by John Armagh, 2011. Image
from Wikimedia Commons, © JohnArmagh (2011), CC BY-SA 3.0, http://commons.wikimedia.
org/wiki/File:WalsinghamPriory.jpg
Fig. 4.5 The Walsingham Virgin and Child. Seal (obverse), late twelfth to early thirteenth century.
Cambridge, Archives of King’s College. Image courtesy of King’s College, Cambridge.
4, Reformation Endings: A Temporary Vanishing Act 179
Most germane to the story of Our Lady’s Tumbler is that the Holy House in Walsingham
contained a wooden majesty, with Mary on a throne with the infant Jesus seated
on her lap. The effigy may have been a Black Virgin or Black Madonna, so called
because of its dark hue, an artistic application to the Mother of God of the “I am
black but comely” image of the Bride in the biblical Song of Solomon—the closest
that the Middle Ages came to the late twentieth-century trope of “black is beautiful.”
In any event, the carving was annihilated close to a half millennium ago. Yet despite
its disappearance hundreds of years before now, we can still form a picture of the
Walsingham statue thanks to a representation of it on a seal from the late twelfth or
early thirteenth century (see Fig. 4.5). Other portrayals are found on the badges of
lead or pewter that were retailed as souvenirs to pilgrims. Such tokens could prove
that a person had completed a pilgrimage to a given destination. In addition, they
could convey the grace of the Virgin to those who encountered them. Other similar
keepsakes included pewter flasks. These vessels contained water from the holy wells
that were located not far from the shrine. In many regards, these objects functioned
as amulets.
The foot traffic of pilgrims to what became the Augustinian priory grew extremely
heavy in the late Middle Ages. Walsingham developed into the principal Marian
destination in England. The growth in movement gave rise to a rat-a-tat drumbeat of
criticism even before the Reformation. In 1356, the Archbishop of Armagh delivered a
sermon in which he denounced worship by those who failed to distinguish between
a Madonna and the Virgin Mary in heaven herself. By his lights, images of this sort
included the representations of Saint Mary at Lincoln, Newarke in Leicester, and
Walsingham. Further, he charged the custodians of such holy places with fomenting
miracles so as to pad their own coffers. A chronicler described how the Lollard
iconomachs slurred the Virgin of Walsingham by calling her in vernacular English
“the Witch of Walsingham.” These followers of John Wycliffe protested against the
custom of referring to the cult image as “our dear Lady of Walsingham” rather than as
“our dear lady of heaven.” Likewise, they condemned it as “vain waste and idle to trot
to Walsingham rather than to each other place where an image of Mary is.” To such
dissenters, an image is an image is an image: local images and relic cults have no point.
The Renaissance humanist Erasmus gives a detailed picture of Walsingham and
his observations when he made a pilgrimage to the site in the summer of 1512, in
appreciation of the success that the Church scored against the schismatic King Louis
XII of France. The Dutchman’s portrayal of his experience is far from altogether
positive. He characterizes the community as depending wholly on revenue from
pilgrims. His account of their moneymaking machine is acerbic and sharp-tongued,
with flashes of hilarious comedy. His hard-edged description of the shrine gives vent
to his distaste for the popular devotion of the late Middle Ages. In his finickiness,
he shrank back from the physicality of the practices that the canaille pursued. Thus
he conjures up vividly, and mostly not flatteringly, the lighting, smells, and even
180 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
tactile qualities of the objects and spaces involved in the expression of lay piety. In
other words, he executes the mental process of sensory integration, by which he
makes meaning from information collected by his senses. This is what common sense
is all about. He describes the windowless chamber where the image was domiciled,
probably with curtains or a canopy billowing around it. This separate space was the
original Holy House, which by Erasmus’s time had been encased in a far larger chapel.
In it, the light of shimmery candles reflected from scores of gold and jewel objects,
alongside masses of humbler oblations. Erasmus gives us to believe that despite all
the blazing tapers, the inner sanctum offered to the spirit more heat than light.
As a pilgrimage site, Walsingham may be usefully compared with Loreto. The
Italian town is by many accounts home to the Holy House. This structure purports to be
the home in Nazareth in which Mary was born and raised, received the Annunciation,
and lived during the childhood and after the ascension of Jesus. The little building
has drawn pilgrims since at the latest the fourteenth century. It was transported, so
the story goes, from the Virgin’s hometown on the wings of angels to rescue it from
infidels. The timing may not be purposeless. The movement began only three years
after 1291. That date saw the toppling of Acre, the tail end of the crusader kingdoms
in the Holy Land. The retreating campaigners could have transported with them from
Nazareth stones from the edifice where the angel Gabriel broke the news to Mary that
she would conceive and become the Mother of God. Alternatively, they could have
brought back the trauma of having abandoned the house and other important sites
to the Muslims. They could have assuaged at least partially the hurt of loss through
wish-fulfillment, in the fantasy of the angelic levitation.
Whatever the historical realities of the building and its move, the Holy House
offered within the bounds of the European landmass a destination for Christian
pilgrims who could no longer venture safely into the Holy Land after the collapse
of the crusader states. It became notable in the late fifteenth century. After the
destruction of Walsingham, it had every basis on which to surge in popularity. At first,
the Holy House was a simple edifice. The chief adornments were a statue of the Virgin
beside an altar and a blue-painted ceiling spangled with golden stars. Eventually,
the domicile was enclosed within a larger building, and the image of Mary shifted
to a plush, jewel-lined niche. This Madonna is held to have been a Black Virgin. A
holy card from 1899 illustrates the scene in tacky pastel colors, with a German legend,
“Miraculous Transportation of the Holy House to Loreto” (see Fig. 4.6).
Despite undeniable parallels between Walsingham and Loreto, the two shrines
diverged in major ways. For one, the scale of the Holy House of Nazareth in the Italian
hilltown differed substantially from the one in England. In contrast, the dimensions of
the Santa Casa (to use the Italian name for the stone building in Loreto) corresponded
reasonably closely to those of the fourteenth-century Slipper Chapel in Walsingham
(see Fig. 4.7). This other church, so called because it marked the point at which
pilgrims removed their shoes to trudge in their stocking feet to the Holy House itself,
was located about a mile south of Walsingham proper.
4. Reformation Endings: A Temporary Vanishing Act 181
Fig. 4.6 Postcard depicting the miraculous transfer of the Holy House of Loreto
(Milan, Italy: Tipografia Santa Lega Eucaristica, 1899).
Fig. 4.7 Postcard depicting Slipper Chapel, Walsingham (Norwich, UK: Jarrold & Sons,
early twentieth century). © Jarrold & Sons. All rights reserved.
182 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
The pilgrims to the settlement in Norfolk included royalty, who made sumptuous
gifts for the maintenance of the staff as well as for the adornment of the sanctuary. As
elsewhere, candle devotion was central to the cult of the Virgin at Walsingham. By
no mere coincidence, the statue of Our Lady there was taken away to be consumed
by fire in the aftermath of a royal injunction in 1538, “Forbidding the Placing of
Candles before Images and Other Superstitious Practices.” Tapers figured largely in
the monarchs’ generosity to the shrine. King Henry III, the first royal to come, paid
at least thirteen visits, with the initial one in 1226. In 1240, for the feast of the Virgin’s
Conception, he ordered two thousand votives to be burned there and at Bury St.
Edmunds. In 1246, he commissioned a golden crown to be placed upon the head
of the Madonna at Walsingham. In 1251, he spent the feast of the Annunciation on
pilgrimage there, and made the gift of both two silver candlesticks and a valuable
chasuble of red samite. King Edward I betook himself to the shrine twice, the second
time on Candlemas Day in 1296. The candlelight can be pictured easily that would
have coruscated when the feast of this holiday was celebrated. King Henry VII came
no fewer than four times. King Henry VIII of England, who was responsible for the
demise of the statue and much else in the community, paced barefoot two miles to
reach the site in 1511, made lavish donations there, and kindled a candle before the
Madonna in March 1538.
The character Avarice in William Langland’s late fourteenth-century personification
allegory Piers Plowman takes a pledge that reflects the author’s reprobation of the
motivations that propelled pilgrims to make the trek to Walsingham. The mention
of a peregrination there had a special cachet. Of course, worshipers also journeyed
to other sites relating to the Virgin in England as well as on the continent. For
example, rich documentation survives on Marian pilgrimage in late medieval and
early modern Germany. Such voyages eventuated in an unalterable syllogism:
pilgrimages led to shrines, and such holy places (above all, ones connected with
Mary) centered upon images. For the reformers, the counter-syllogism was patent: to
end such veneration, desacralize its objectives. The corollary was equally unmissable:
to desecrate sanctuaries, destroy Madonnas. In the Reformation, modernizing meant
de-Madonna-izing.
Toward the end of 1538, the reformist bishop of Worcester Hugh Latimer (see
Fig. 4.8) notoriously decreed that the image of the Virgin in his diocese—and others,
including the one at Walsingham — should be charred. Latimer addressed the letter in
question to none other than to Thomas Cromwell, chief minister of King Henry VIII.
The bishop’s aspiration was soon fulfilled. The incineration of the carvings, and the
shutting down of all shrines in England, were concomitants to the suppression and
dissolution of the monasteries. Henry VIII ordered these draconian acts in 1536 and
1539, and Cromwell oversaw them as agitator-in-chief. The aftereffects included the
abandonment and devastation of many abbeys. The figure of Our Lady of Walsingham
was abducted to be put to the torch; the swank sanctuary was first despoiled of its
4, Reformation Endings: A Temporary Vanishing Act 183
gold and silver ornaments and then dismantled; and the priory and its dependencies
were largely razed and abandoned. The sites and image of Our Lady that can be seen
today are anything but original. Rather, they have resulted from a Marian revival in
Britain that has been supported by the papacy since the late nineteenth century.
Fig. 4.8 Unknown artist, Hugh Latimer, late sixteenth century. Oil on panel, 55.9 x 41.9 cm.
London, National Portrait Gallery. Image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.
All rights reserved.
The Madonnas that have been enumerated were neither the first nor the only ones to
suffer the fate of destruction. When the impetus to remake the fabric of the Church
was taken very literally, many others were denuded of their garments, irreparably
mangled, or even summarily destroyed in expressions of iconoclasm by the riffraff. In
England, a hard-edged campaign was waged against what was regarded as Mariolatry,
the according to Mary of worship due to God and God alone.
The first bout of statue-tory abuse extended to the removal in 1535 of an Our Lady’s
girdle, worn by expectant mothers to help them in their pregnancies and especially
in childbirth. Often effigies suffered radical mastectomies in which their breasts
were stabbed or hacked off. Their arms were severed and their faces defaced. The
representations of the infant Jesus that they held were cut away. In 1581, for instance,
the Virgin and Child along with other figures were subjected to what might be called
holy (or unholy) vandalism wrought upon the Cheapside Cross in London. In a
renovation, the Madonna was replaced by a semi-nude image of the Roman goddess
Diana. Later, the Mary was reinstalled but after twelve nights she was de-crowned,
beheaded, and shorn of her offspring. Another relatively late manifestation of the
184 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
iconoclasm came in 1578, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, nearly two decades
after she succeeded her Catholic half sister Mary to the throne in 1559. While touring
Norfolk near Thetford, the ruler made what was presented as being a chance discovery.
In a hay house, she happened upon an image of Our Lady that she considered an idol,
and she had it carbonized.
The sixteenth century lacked most of the devices that are for the taking today to
record and document such barbarism visually. Yet around 1570, an unknown artist
captured a scene of iconoclasm within a picture painted with oil paints. The panel
depicts the young King Edward VI receiving the blessing of a bedridden Henry VIII
and the Pope, who along with the monks to his right is being crushed by the Bible
(see Fig. 4.9). Through a window, reformers are visible outside. The two nearest tug
on ropes to tip and overthrow a statue of the Virgin and Child. Not only in England
did what could be called Mariaphobia express itself in anti-Marian iconoclasm. In
Germany, one excruciating act of such Madonna mayhem put in the crosshairs not a
statue but a painting. An artwork of the Virgin and Child by the artist Hans Holbein
the Elder suffered destruction in the cathedral in Augsburg in 1537. In some locations,
images of Mary became the objects of literal tugs-of-war between opposing factions of
Protestant reformers and Roman Catholics.
What have been nicknamed “cults of battered Marys” arose. All over Europe,
Protestant hooligans would subject to misuse and mutilation Madonnas that would
be rescued and sometimes repaired by Catholic handymen of holiness. Thus, specific
representations of Our Lady endured abuse in Paris repeatedly, in Geneva, and in the
English College Chapter of Valladolid (see Fig. 4.10). Mistreatment of a similar sort was
supposedly meted out to depictions of the Virgin during conflicts between Catholics
and Protestants in the nineteenth century in England. By the mid-seventeenth century,
a census of images would have found their number and distribution pared back
sharply because of iconoclastic reformers.
In the 1650s, a Jesuit tallied over one thousand Marian shrines, providing for each a
brief history and an engraving of its Madonna (see Figs. 4.11 and 4.12). The four-digit
headcount is remarkable. As a sequel, the author drew up a discrete index containing
a subsection listing wounded Virgins, as well as taxonomies of weapons wielded
against them, portions of the likenesses that suffered thuggery, types of damage, and
kinds of action taken by Mary in response to the contusions. A roll call taken in the
early nineteenth century in France would have tabulated another sharp drop, since
the French Revolution brought about the destruction of the effigies and relics that
had outlasted the Reformation. Across the ages, Madonnas that have demonstrated
a special capacity to withstand persecution have become the objects of popular
devotion, legends, and superstitions. We will see medieval images that demonstrated
impressive skills as proto-survivalists, but for the present let us focus on the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries.
4. Reformation Endings: A Temporary Vanishing Act 185
Fig. 4.9 Unknown artist, King Edward VI and the Pope, ca. 1575. Oil on panel, 62.2 x 90.8 cm.
London, National Portrait Gallery. Image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London. All
rights reserved.
Fig. 4.10 Nuestra Senora de la Vulnerata. Statue, sixteenth century. Valladolid, Real Colegio de San
Albano. Photograph by Rubén Ojeda, 2010. Image from Wikimedia Commons, © Rodelar (2010),
CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nuestra_Sefiora_de_la_Vulnerata.jpg
186 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
Re "€ Societate TI
_LIBER TL. .
Figs. 4.11 and 4.12 Title page and title illustration of Wilhelm Gumppenberg, Atlas Marianus sive de
imaginibus Deiparae per orbem christianum miraculosis, vol. 1 (Ingolstadt, Germany: Haenlin, 1657), with
Virgin and Child on the Holy House, and beams showing its westward movements.
Madonnas of the World Wars
A man is ready to leap to his death from a tall building.
An Irish policeman barrels up and yells, “Don’t do it!
Think of your mother!” The man answers, “My mother’s
dead; I am going to do it.” The cop says, “What about
your father?” “He left when I was a baby.” The cop goes
down the list with no success until finally he shouts,
“Don’t jump! Remember the Blessed Virgin!” The would-be
suicide asks, “Who is that?” The officer answers, “Jump,
Protestant! You're blocking traffic!”
Mary is an obvious dividing line between Protestants and Catholics. After the
Reformation, the disparity between the two branches of Christianity sharpened.
Among other changes, different regions became distinguished by the absence or
presence of the Virgin on street corners, in statues or paintings. To Protestants, the
sight of such images grew to be unfamiliar in every respect, whereas to Catholics in
many places, these representations were unexceptional and even humdrum in daily
life. In 1859, Henry Adams commented upon the “old road-side saints, crucifixes and
4, Reformation Endings: A Temporary Vanishing Act 187
Madonnas” that he encountered in the German region of Franconia, which he would
never have seen in New England. During World War I, such sculptures and pictures
belonged to the religious paraphernalia of Catholicism that took doughboys from the
United States and their equivalents from other predominantly Protestant countries by
surprise. Those soldiers who had been born and bred Catholic were more accustomed
to the trappings of Marianism.
On both the front lines and the home front in France, Catholic Germany, and
elsewhere, people were likelier in wartime to turn for comfort to the Mother of God
than at any time since the years surrounding the Franco-Prussian war. Military
conflict, political tension, and economic desperation have often furnished a powerful
recipe for sightings of the Virgin and for miracles associated with her and with her
representation in Madonnas. Our Lady of Fatima in Portugal was the foremost case
in point. A cult arose there from appearances of Mary to three shepherd children that
took place once a month over one half year in 1917. This manifestation of the Virgin
was later made the basis for what became effectively a Marian Cold Warrior, since for
the first few decades in the second half of the twentieth century the message of Fatima
was construed as a denunciation of Communism and the Soviet Union.
Particularly awesome in the apocalyptic land- and cityscapes of World War I were
postbellum representations of images that appeared to have been spared divinely
from mangling or burning after bombardment. For instance, a statue miraculously
unaffected by the fracas of warfare was the Mary of Igny, a thirteenth-century jewel
in the crown, which came through without a scratch despite all the harm inflicted
upon Reims cathedral by bombs and fire in September 1914 (see Fig. 4.13). Another
such representation was a carving of Notre Dame of Lourdes that stood on the altar
of the Holy Virgin in the church of Bouchoir in Picardy, which was shelled in the
Battle of the Somme (see Fig. 4.14). On a postcard the caption explains: “The shrapnel
exploded in the war and destroyed everything in front of the statue. The Virgin was
touched by neither the shrapnel nor the stones that came loose all around her head.”
A third survivor was a gilded Madonna, sometimes called the “Divine Shepherdess,”
that crowned the basilica of Notre-Dame de Brebieres. This sizable house of God was
built in the modest town of Albert in Picardy at the end of the nineteenth century to
replace the parish church that had grown too cramped to accommodate pilgrims. The
worshipers who descended upon the basilica were caught up in the Marian fervor
connected with the sites of apparitions of the Mother of God at La Salette and Lourdes.
This sanctuary became an objective because it housed the Black Virgin after which
it was named. The Madonna in question is so called after the small community of
Brebieres. The noun, meaning “pastures,” derives from the French brebis, or “sheep.”
The onomastic lore is not beside the point. After all, legend held that this representation
of Notre Dame was unearthed in a field near the town by a shepherd whose flock kept
returning to the same patch of tufts of verdant grass. When the herdsman clawed at
the sod with a hoe, the tool banged upon a statue of the Virgin and Child that had
been buried there.
188 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
Fig. 4.13 Postcard depicting a damaged thirteenth- _ Fig. 4.14 Postcard depicting a ruined chapel of
century statue of the Virgin after the bombardment the church of Bouchoir, with the miraculously
of Reims (Paris: H. George, 1914). unharmed Virgin in the background (ca. 1915).
The sculpture atop the basilica was different and unusual, since it depicted Mary
holding the infant Jesus aloft to God. The dome supporting it was struck in howitzer
and mortar shelling by German artillery in 1914, during the Battle of the Somme (see
Fig. 4.15). Despite being hit, the artwork was not destroyed. Nor did it plummet to the
earth, but dropped more than ninety degrees to dangle slightly below parallel to the
ground. From its posture it become world-famous as the Leaning or Golden Virgin
of Albert (see Fig. 4.16). To many members of the military, the representation was
part and parcel of their first exposure to Catholicism, whose beliefs, practices, and
expressions seemed exotic and alien. The combatants developed many interpretations
of the Madonna’s circumstance. Apparently her stance could mean almost anything,
except nothing. To one, she looked to be leaning down to snag the Child, like a fallen
infantryman. To others, she was presenting him as a sacrifice or as a peace offering
to expedite the close of the war. To saltier wits, the destabilized statue looked like
a flunking phallus as it flopped flaccidly at less than half mast. Not accepting that
sometimes a statue lolling below the horizontal is just a statue lolling below the
horizontal, she was dubbed the “Lady of the Limp.”
4, Reformation Endings: A Temporary Vanishing Act 189
267 — La Basilique de Notre-Dame de Brebiéres:
Vue prise de la rue Jeanne d'Harcourt
aprés le bombardement du 29 Septembre 1916
The Basilica of N.-D, de Brebiéres
after several bombardment — Sept. 1914,
Fig. 4.15 Postcard depicting the “Golden Virgin of Fig. 4.16 Postcard depicting the “suspended
Albert” dangling atop the Basilique de Notre-Dame Virgin of Albert Cathedral” (London:
de Brebieres (Amiens, France: G. Lelong, ca. 1914). Pictorial Newspaper Co., ca. 1914).
Soldiers on both sides subscribed widely to two related conventions, too recent
and too male to be termed old wives’ tales. One was that the battle royale would end
when the statue finally fell. The other held that the side to bring her down would lose
in the conflict. Neither superstition was borne out. What was the upshot, so to speak?
To begin with ballistics, the Virgin remained attached to the dome until annihilated
by British heavy guns in 1918. The war stretched out for a little while, and the Allies
carried the day. In the meantime, the mangled Madonna had not fifteen minutes of
fame but four years of it. During that stretch, it became known worldwide through
postcards dispatched from the battlefront to the home front. Many belligerents saw
the statue in its partly unglued condition and shared the experience with far-off
friends and family in their own countries by mailing images. Eventually a replica, no
longer drooping, was put back in place when the basilica was reconstructed from 1927
to 1931.
World War I did not mark the end of miraculously preserved Marian images.
In World War II, a thirteenth-century wooden Madonna in the nave of the parish
church at La Gleize in Belgium was the only item in the war-scarred building to stay
190 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
unscathed when the town was leveled in 1944 during the bruising Battle of the Bulge
(see Fig. 4.17). Nearly seventy years later, in October 2012, Hurricane Sandy struck the
spit of land in Queens, New York, known as Breezy Point. Its gusting wind and storm
surge left tremendous havoc in their wake. Torrential rains gave way to even worse.
The windblown and waterborne disrepair was compounded by the conflagration that
burned uncontrolled afterward. One house at the corner of Oceanside Avenue and
Gotham Walk was among the more than one hundred homes fried to ashes. Even so,
the site became a cause for hope. Amid all the rubbish from the destruction, a statue
of the Virgin that had been placed in a niche in the garden was somehow left upright
and intact (see Fig. 4.18). Whether by fluke or by miracle, the future will no doubt also
have its share of Marys uninjured after catastrophes, and those images too will be
made rallying points for survivors.
Fig. 4.17 Statue of the Virgin in the ruins of Le Gleize Church, Belgium, after the Battle of the
Bulge. Photograph, 1945. Washington, D.C., Archives of American Art, Thomas Carr Howe papers,
1932-1984. Image courtesy of the Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. All rights reserved.
4. Reformation Endings: A Temporary Vanishing Act 191
Fig. 4.18 A Madonna statue among the wreckage of Hurricane Sandy
in Breezy Point, New York. Photograph by Mark Lennihan, 2012.
Image courtesy of the Associated Press. All rights reserved.
192 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
Literary Iconoclasm
To return to the Reformation: in those regions where effigies of the Virgin were
destroyed, a commensurate effacement of stories about her would have taken place.
Sometimes the clampdown probably took place through the handling or mishandling
of manuscripts by the reformers. A 1535 letter to Thomas Cromwell from a royal
commissioner lists among items seized from a monastic library during a visitation “a
book of Our Lady’s miracles, well able to match the Canterbury Tales; such a book
of dreams as you never saw, which I found in the library.” The only record of a
Marian miracle text to be so confiscated, this missive to the Vicar General— despite its
reference to Chaucer—leaves unclarified whether the volume is long or short, Latin
or vernacular, prose or verse; nor do we come to know what fate it endured. The
invocation of the Canterbury Tales, along with the categorization of the miracles as
a dreambook, signal the letter writer’s belief that legends of Mary are nothing more
than vaporous fiction.
The disappearance of the tales may not be described as bonfires of virginities or
even just of images. Unwritten or seldom written narratives are erased not by torches
or sledgehammers, but through suppression and silence. All the same, tales that center
on devotion to images will fare poorly in times of image-breaking. Theologians may
draw fine distinctions between veneration rendered to images, known technically
as iconodulia, and outright worship of images, or iconolatry, but others would not
necessarily find much relevance in such casuistry. To them, the two practices look very
similar, if not even synonymous. Furthermore, the goal of iconoclasm was not merely
to rid churches of physical representations, but to rewire the devotional system within
which they functioned. Nor did the assault on iconodulia and iconolatry stop there.
The likenesses might be turned to cold cinders and smoldering embers; the liturgies
associated with them might be discarded and outlawed—for all that, it took much
longer and more sustained efforts to sear recollection and to scour mental images of
them from minds.
An Elizabethan ballad concluded with two lugubrious stanzas of valediction to the
Walsingham Madonna. The lines decried the satanic sin that moved in to occupy the
spiritual space vacated by the destruction of the image. Still greater impact came from
a ballad that recorded the story of the disappearance. The song places special emphasis
on miracles of healing and revivification that the carving enabled. One of Cromwell’s
agents, Sir Roger Townsend, wrote to him about a woman whose chattiness about the
sculpture brought unpleasant consequences down on her. She gossiped about what
he regarded as a “false tale of a miracle done by the Image after it had been carried
away.” For this jabbering, she received the penalty of being placed in the stocks and
then drawn around the marketplace in a cart with a paper hat on her head to identify
her as a “reporter of false tales.” Even so, the Lord Protector’s henchman remained
of two minds. Had he extirpated the memory of the Walsingham Madonna or not? “I
cannot help but perceive that the aforesaid image is not yet out of some of their heads.”
One of the crania at issue belonged to another local lady who also was convinced,
4, Reformation Endings: A Temporary Vanishing Act 193
even after the statue had been taken down and transported to London, that it had
wrought a miracle. Like the above-mentioned teller of falsities, this poor Mariophile
got more than a mere rap on the knuckles: she was put in the pillory on market day at
Walsingham and then carted around to be pelted with snowballs.
Language was affected as well by the ruthless about-face. Obviously, the learned
language of Latin would have been laundered of many features associated with the
Catholic Church, but the vernacular did not escape untouched either. Any major
alteration of a society requires modifications of speech and writing, both high and
low. Reformers wished to scotch the invocation of saints, including the Mother of
God, so as to train the sights of the faithful upon God and Christ. The commoners of
the late Middle Ages prayed most often to the Virgin. To exemplify how improper and
unbecoming such invocations could be, Erasmus derided the prayers of a mercenary
who had impudently called upon Mary, “Blessed Virgin, give me rich spoils.” In fact,
the Dutch scholar went so far as to quote putative direct appeals from the Mother of
God herself in a letter against the shameless and unprincipled entreaties lodged with
her. Folks who invoked Mary aloud in prayer were reproved, and subtle changes were
wrought in the psalter to constrict the powers ascribed to the Virgin. The eradication
of saints from language would find its most telling confirmation in an exception to
the rule. According to a widely accepted etymology, the slang expletive bloody is a
minced oath that originated in the phrase “by Our Lady.” From the measureless sea
of saints’ invocations, only this one dysphemism survived. It remained in existence
only because its very meaning and provenance became unrecognizable, its vestiges of
religiosity trumped by its coincidental blot of vulgarism.
On a narrative level, a similar bowdlerization may have played out in some
stories by replacing Mary and other saints either with nothing at all or with figures
sanitized to be presentable within a Protestant context. Mainly what happened was
the expunction that results from censorship, both self-imposed and otherwise. The
sorts of narratives that would once have commanded respect and awe came to be
derided. The atmosphere would have brought Marian miracle tales at full tilt to
oblivion. For example, the Protestant bishop John Bale heaps mockery upon a vision
that was reputedly experienced in 1470 by the Dominican theologian Alanus de Rupe.
Female virgin saints are often supposed to undergo mystical marriages, in which
Christ appears to them and places a ring upon their fingers as a sign that he is taking
them as mystical brides. That is all very well, but in this case Blessed Alanus claimed
in writing to have received a house call from the Virgin, who placed a ring on his
finger, encircled his neck with a necklace braided of her hair, and presented him with
a rosary (see Fig. 4.19). Bale’s restatement of the events puts a different, salacious,
even tawdry spin on the symbiosis between the Roman Catholic theologian and a
touchy-feely Mary. In the English churchman’s interpretation of Alanus’s account of
the episode, the Mother of God came to the friar’s cell and made her gifts to him so
that they might plight their troth. Then the proceedings take a decidedly deviant turn.
Alanus first fondles his visitor's breasts, then engages in sexualized breast-feeding,
and finally progresses to actual coitus, all somehow without de-virginating the Virgin.
194 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
Fig. 4.19 Guido Reni, Madonna col Bambino in gloria e i santi Petronio, Francesco, Ignazio,
Francesco Saverio, Procolo e Floriano, 1631-1632. Oil on silk, 390 x 220 cm. Bologna, Pinacoteca
nazionale di Bologna. Image from Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/
wiki/File:Guido_Reni_057.jpg
In Protestant theology, saints, among whom Mary was foremost, lost their stature
as mediators between God and people. Since Christ alone fulfilled that function, the
Mother of God was decentered as the object of special devotion. In the Middle Ages,
the Virgin stood supreme as mediator above all others. By the thirteenth century, her
ascendancy made her almost a fourth person of the Trinity. For centuries afterward,
she retained this lofty status, to the abiding scandal of non-Catholics. Even in the mid-
nineteenth century, a Protestant magazine in England reported on an Irish immigrant
who allegedly considered Mary to be a member of the Trinity.
This same elevated status was reflected in the reverence the Mother of God received
throughout the later Middle Ages in her images, Madonnas. Protestant reformers
condemned the cult of the Blessed Virgin as a form of respect gone too far—as
adoration that verged on adulation and idolatry. In Catholic theology, the Ecumenical
Council of Trent, which extended from 1545 to 1563, brought reform. Most relevantly,
it reaffirmed the importance of the veneration of saints, particularly the cult of Mary.
At the same time, the Council laid great emphasis on the legitimate use of images,
including those of the Virgin. It emphasized that honor shown to the representations is
referred to the prototypes represented by them. The faithful do not worship, petition,
or trust the Madonna itself, but rather the Mother of God represented by it. Even in
northern Europe Mary was never altogether ousted among Catholics as happened to
a great degree in Protestantism. Yet despite the Trentine reform, she was nonetheless
sometimes shunted aside in favor of a Christocentric viewpoint.
4, Reformation Endings: A Temporary Vanishing Act 195
Some jongleurs would have suffered the same diminishment, if not demise, as
befell the Virgin, Madonnas, and texts about her. The reason is not far to see. The
performers would have been linked with the pilgrims and preachers who teamed up
to spread her cult. In effect, the entertainers belonged to the whole, vast pilgrimage
industry that reformers were keen to exterminate. This is why around 1546, the English
clerk William Thomas fawns upon King Henry VIII for having investigated the many
malfeasances of the friars, whom Thomas calls jugglers. The tumbler and his like had
been popular at certain times because the Virgin and he had been believed in tandem.
Now the equal and opposite came true. He became unpopular as Marian miracles fell
into disbelief and as Mary herself faded from the ubiquity she had achieved between
the twelfth century and the late Middle Ages.
Among Protestants, Mary held an ambiguous position. Her cult was roundly
castigated. As an object of study and devotion, English writers strikingly avoided her
for hundreds of years after the Reformation. The publication in 1827 of John Keble’s
Christian Year marks the commencement of the Marian revival in nineteenth-century
England. To look at the situation somewhat differently, in many places the Virgin was
largely excluded from the transition that led from manuscript to print culture. Miracle
tales dropped out of vogue just as the presses began to bring forth torrents of books.
Yet even within Protestantism, the Mother of God was not universally thrust aside as
almost all other saints were cast away. A cleavage is perceptible between Lutheranism,
in its defense of Mary, and Calvinism, in its assaults on her. Martin Luther, who
himself owned an image of the Virgin and Child, argued that iconoclasts should spare
Madonnas, since they could serve as devotional aids. At the same time, the German
reformer commented with disapproval on images that depicted the lactation of
Bernard of Clairvaux, in which the so-called Marian Doctor is represented receiving
a spurt of milk from the Virgin’s breast. Thanks to Luther’s generally supportive
outlook, Marian images continued to be fabricated and displayed in some places. Even
so, they came with the caveat, explicit in inscriptions or implicit in doctrine, that the
Mother of God was to be honored but not worshiped. The emphasis on reverencing
her was codified in Luther’s writing. In a commentary he opined at length about the
type of veneration and lauds to be given to the Virgin. She is cherished most truly by
honoring the Almighty. If esteem and praise are accorded to her, the objective is to
attain God through it.
For all the support that the reformer offered, Lutherans have retained their
discomfort with freestanding statues of Mary as potentially idolatrous. The lingering
worry about the verisimilitude of this three-dimensional form of Madonna may help
to explain why in the one recent retelling of our tumbler’s story for children by a
Swedish artist and author, the carving is replaced by a painting. For that matter, in
its title the book makes no mention of the Mother of God, the Virgin, or a Madonna,
and the illustrations on its dust jacket avoid representing any of them as well. These
omissions need not be driven explicitly by religion, but by general cultural context.
Sweden has been predominantly Lutheran since the sixteenth century. Outside a
196 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
denominational context, the self-serving inconsistency of Christian views on idolatry
has long attracted remark within the framework of world religions: “We sneer when
we read of some Indian spinning tops before his child god Krishna, but we weep over
the story of the jongleur de Notre Dame and await with sympathy the Madonna’s
approval of his pathetic juggling.”
Marian Apparitions
The tale of Our Lady’s Tumbler belongs to a vast complex of medieval narratives and
images connected with the intervention of heaven upon earth through appearances of
Mary. In fact, it falls within the far larger category of Marian apparitions. At the latest
tally, counted down to the present day, more than 2,500 have been reported. Visions,
shrines, relics, and images of the Virgin interact with each other in constantly varying
but often intersecting ways. If Mary and Madonnas have been shrouded in clouds of
misgivings within a large part of Christianity since the Reformation, so too have been
attitudes toward phantasms of the Virgin. Direct physical experiences of her, such as
seeing her, hearing her, and being touched by her, were everywhere in the medieval
period, as for example at Loreto and Walsingham, but they have been primarily a
Catholic phenomenon since then. The basics of an official policy emerged only long
after the Middle Ages in the writings of the future Pope Benedict XIV (see Fig. 4.20).
Fig. 4.20 Pierre Subleyras, Benedictus XIV, eighteenth century. Oil on canvas.
Palace of Versailles. Image from Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Benoit_XIV.jpg
Marian apparitions remain objects of fascination and perplexity, as much within
the Catholic Church as without. What passes muster as an apparition? A definition,
probably unhelpfully short, would be that it is a private revelation. A longer version
would hold it to be a type of vision in which someone claims to see a person, being, or
object that would not normally be apprehensible to the visionary. The degree to which
4. Reformation Endings: A Temporary Vanishing Act 197
such sightings are corporeal or incorporeal can be hard to gauge. When manifestations
of this kind are not documentably physical and leave no material traces, they may be
differentiated from statues that move or crybaby paintings that shed a monsoon of
tears or blood.
Many iterations of the story of the jongleur are unusually elliptical about the
relationship between the Madonna, which is an image, and the Virgin herself. The
ambiguity only increases because we are left in limbo as to whether the performer
himself or just the onlooking monks witnesses the apparition, whether either the
animation of the image or the appearance of Mary has happened before, or whether
the miracle (or is it two?) has been performed to teach a lesson to the monk-voyeurs.
The overwhelming majority of Marian apparitions have become unwanted
stepchildren of the Church. Even so, the most successful ones resulted in the foundation
of sanctuaries that are magnets for pilgrimage. An early instance would be the showing
of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico (see Figs. 4.21 and 4.22). (The location in the
New World has significance, since it places the miracles far from the friction between
Catholics and Protestants in Europe. The natives who were converted because of it
knew nothing of iconoclasm within Christianity, only of Christian militancy against the
idols of pre-Christian religions—heathenism.) According to official accounts, a maiden
appeared on the morning of December 9, 1531 to Juan Diego. The Virgin directed this
native American convert to Christianity to collect blossoms from the top of the nearby
eminence. Despite the wintry season, he found Castilian roses flowering there. At least
since the Middle Ages these beauties have been associated with Mary, as have lilies.
Both blooms have insinuated themselves, sometimes with sub rosa stealth, into many
versions of the narrative about the juggler of Our Lady.
z
4
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oa
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Fig. 4.21 Juan Diego’s image of Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe, 1531. Mexico City, Nueva
Basilica de Nuestra Sefiora de Guadalupe. Image from Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File: Virgen_de_guadalupel jpg
198 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
Fig. 4.22 Postcard depicting Nuestra Sefora de Guadalupe
(Zurich: Kunzli Hermanos y Cias, early twentieth century).
The Mother of God arranged the colorful harvest in Juan Diego’s tilma, or “cloak.”
When he opened the mantle before the archbishop, the petals fell out. What is more,
the fabric of the garment was discovered to bear the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
The miraculous pictorial representation on the cloth has been revered ever since in
the Chapel of the Virgin Mary in Tepeyac, which was constructed for mounting and
displaying it. The depiction relates intriguingly to the so-called Black Virgins of earlier
centuries, since the complexion of this Madonna is dark, often brought home in mass-
produced images through the addition of black eyelashes. The Virgin of Guadalupe is
sometimes designated affectionately among Spanish speakers as La Morenita, literally
“the Little Moor,” to suggest by extension “the Little Dark One.”
After the Virgin of Guadalupe, a gap of a few centuries ensues in high-profile Marian
apparitions. A later example is Our Lady of Lourdes in France, connected especially
with the showing of Mary on February 11, 1858 to Bernadette Soubirous. A third case
is that of Our Lady of Fatima in Portugal, as noted above, based on appearances of the
Mother of God to three shepherd children, with the central visionary being a ten-year-
old shepherdess. Their sightings took place on the thirteenth day of six sequential
months, beginning on May 13 and ending on October 13, 1917 (see Figs. 4.23, 4.24
and 4.25). This vision exhorted the young ones who saw her to be conscientious in
reciting their rosaries, and even called herself Our Lady of the Rosary. Each of these
pilgrimage sites attracts millions of visitors per annum. A tale containing the germ of
4, Reformation Endings: A Temporary Vanishing Act 199
Fig. 4.23 Postcard depicting Our Lady of Fatima Fig. 4.24 Postcard depicting Our Lady of
appearing before shepherd children (Porto, Fatima (Porto, Portugal, 1967).
Portugal: V. Matos Trigo, 1960s).
ewan +
Bem SOMOS TERRA DE SANTA MARIA! 5
e Te e wy.
Fig. 4.25 Postcard depicting Our Lady of Fatima
(Zurich: Hermanos S. A., early twentieth century).
200 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
this pattern, with a Madonna and an apparition, as does Our Lady’s Tumbler, would
have been by its very nature out of bounds within Evangelical denominations.
If it is painless to see why Our Lady’s Tumbler could not survive in Protestant regions,
the explanation for why the story dropped out of vogue in Catholic regions may seem
harder to fathom. Then again, consider a paradox that makes the tale profoundly
unsettling. Our Lady’s Tumbler could not be more deeply imbued with organized
religion. After all, the events take place within a monastery and all its chief characters
save one are monks. At the same time, that one exceptional individual, not just a
mere layman but even the humblest sort of one, attains direct contact with the sacred.
Furthermore, his interaction is unmediated by a priest or any other representative
of the Church—apart, of course, from the mediation of the mediator par excellence,
the Virgin Mary herself. If we make the improbable leap of drawing an analogy
based on present-day corporations, we could put the dilemma into the tracery of an
organizational chart. By the vow of obedience, a monk, even a lay brother, in a matrix
structure would report formally to the abbot as manager, but also to God and through
God to others such as Mary. The tumbler’s relationship with Mary would be a solid
line, that with the man who heads his abbey dotted. The ecclesiastical hierarchy
stipulated the reverse.
Our Lady’s Tumbler is about prayer, devotion, and worship. Simultaneously, it
illustrates how those acts do not require learning, Latin, or priests. In contradistinction,
it implies that praying has the objective of transcending mere linguistic signification
and verbal pronouncement so as to achieve silent communion. In rallying words to
conjure up the movements of an acrobatic dancer, the poem has enormous graphic
power. Yet in its content and outcome, it subverts its own potential as a text by flatly
denying or at least depreciating the very importance of writing and even language
more broadly. Ultimately, the narrative’s message is that to be saved, the only
necessity is to curry favor with the Mother of God, whose intercession can accomplish
anything. As a rule, the Virgin never forsakes a votary. Obeisance done to her is done
at the same time to the Child, through whom grace and salvation come, since Mary’s
prayers to her son carry a special weight. The infant Jesus is not mentioned in the
medieval French poem, nor even Mary’s status as mother. All the same, they are both
singularly important. They are left unsaid only because they are givens.
The tumbler does not know his catechism, or at least not his monastery’s Latin
one. What is more, he has the insouciance to reach out directly in worship to the
Virgin, by performing a trifling act, the only form of devotion feasible for him. Yet
his personalized trivial pursuit turns out to succeed far better than all the elaborate
liturgy of his fellow monks. He undergoes a deeply personal conversion, and he
expresses his reverence through a faith based on experience. His sincerity is deemed
meet and proper by Mary, who bestows her renowned clemency on him. The lesson
is a typically Protestant one: when everything is taken into account, what matters is
inner spirit rather than outer formalism. In the words of an American historian who
4, Reformation Endings: A Temporary Vanishing Act 201
studied life in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, “the story implies that the interior
spiritual disposition of the believer, more even than his external behavior, defined
the character of true holiness.” Thus, Our Lady’s Tumbler anticipates later pietist
movements within Christianity that focus on the efforts of lay people to achieve
individual sanctity by leading a consistent Christian life. So far, so good, except for
two provisos. The first is that we are accorded almost no insight into the tumbler’s
innermost thoughts and feelings; the second is that the validation of this ground rule
comes after a supremely un-Protestant miracle involving an image. For these reasons
and others, the story may have been superficially too Catholic for a Reformation era
but too latently Protestant, or at a minimum too popular in its underlying religious
presuppositions, for a Counter-Reformation. It ran the risk of serving neither the
reformers nor the counter-reformers. To round off the problems that the narrative
posed, both groups would have clucked their tongues over the salience within it of
such a questionable activity as dance.
Such inferences would clarify not only why this of all tales wilted away but also
why, in general, apparitions of the Virgin would have failed to win backing from the
Church in the centuries immediately following the Reformation. The showings that
have become entrenched in Catholicism came much later, such as those at Lourdes
in 1858, Fatima in 1917. By the same token, sites that had been suppressed were
revived during the same period: Walsingham has been rebuilt only since the Catholic
revival of the nineteenth century. To remain in Britain, it has been observed that in the
nineteenth century, just a few Catholic churches there possessed a Madonna before
Victoria became queen. Representations of Mary returned only under the influence
of the Gothic revival, spearheaded by the English architect and tastemaker Augustus
Welby Northmore Pugin (often confused or conflated with his similarly named
pro-Pugin-ators).
One other point merits mention. Our Lady’s Tumbler is deeply preoccupied with
the nature of offering. In other words, the tale is concerned with the type of gift that
can win acceptance. It transmits at least two messages about giving. First, an offer is a
private matter between individual Christians and their God. Second, it has nothing to
do with physical property or financial instruments. The story makes sense for use by
churchmen to incentivize prayer, to encourage conversion to lay monasticism, and to
achieve various other ends. If, on the other hand, eliciting donations is a priority, this
exemplum is not necessarily the logical first choice.
In the short run (although we are discussing a centuries-long stretch) Mary,
Madonnas, and exempla about apparitions of her were displaced or suppressed. No
facile invocation of the aphorism “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” can
explain away the few hundred years that present neither a text nor even a citation,
reference, or allusion to fan hope that Our Lady’s Tumbler was known to anyone at
all. In literature, unpopularity in its most hard-baked form can lead to ostracism so
complete that the exclusion is tantamount to extinction. But a door remained open at
202 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
least a crack for the prospective later return of Mary, Marian images, and masterpieces
about her apparitions and miracles. Gothic as an architectural style and tales from the
original Gothic era (not that they were yet “Gothic tales”) did not die out altogether
in the early sixteenth century. Rather, they hid in open view, awaiting archaeological
rediscovery and excavation. The story may have all but died. Then again, no text
preserved in manuscripts ever is eliminated entirely. Works of literature seldom
vanish into thin air.
In 1873, the tumbler was discovered in the cryogenic vat of a manuscript, a one-
man iceblock but still capable of being brought back to life. Since that time the big
names on the medical team that took charge of his case have been, with surprising
frequency, unbelievers, Catholics lapsed into libertinism, Protestants without a solid
background in Marianism, and even Jews. Yet at the same time, many others who
helped to keep the tumbler in good trim and the juggler on his way were practicing
adherents of Roman Catholicism, who sometimes had the special zeal that comes
from recent conversion. Thus, the tumbler was revitalized in the late nineteenth
century and later benefited in equal measure from the faithful and the faithless. To
understand, we will need to observe microscopically those who raised him from the
dead (or unliving, to be more precise) and how they accomplished it.
5. A Troupe of Sources and Analogues
It would be interesting, from the point of view of the
folklorist, to try to find parallels to the chief motif on
which this legend is founded—namely, the notion that
Heaven regards with favour the most trivial and lowly
offerings, nay, even such as may appear abject and sinful
to men on earth.
The poet of the original Our Lady’s Tumbler may have encountered the quiddity of the
tale and recycled it from stories in oral circulation, including exempla. We will never
pin down to everyone’s liking even roughly how many such narratives he had heard
or read. Yet we would be guilty of a serious infelicity if we refrained from speculating
about what the author may have owed to literary traditions behind and around him.
We would do well to consider Christian and especially Cistercian accounts that could
have inspired him. At the same time, it would be idiocy to undervalue the possible
contribution of the writer’s own imagination. After all, he drew on not only oral and
written literature, but also on life experiences and informed perspectives that he had
gained in the school of hard knocks. Thus, we have a dilemma in evaluating the degree
of originality in the anonymous poet. The human capacity to imagine is boundless.
Nonetheless, many themes that at first appear unique to a specific individual or
culture turn out upon close examination to have occurred independently to others.
For a periscope that grants views into what the poet could have felt or seen, we
could do far worse than to look at other reports, both fictitious and not, of comparable
behavior from other cultures. We would serve our interests well by seeking out
accounts of episodes in which individuals act in ways that cry out to be compared
with the tumbler. Such records can help us with the challenge of such questions as:
Did a tumbler ever actually exist who performed before a Madonna? Did the poet
hear a story of a real man like the acrobat? Did he invent him? Or did he tap into a
true-seeming fiction created by an earlier author about a performer like the gymnast?
The scrapbook of possible sources and analogues to follow makes no claim to
be encyclopedic. The clippings in it, gathered in from the Hebrew scripture, New
Testament, and medieval legends and miracles, constitute only part of the panorama.
© 2018 Jan M. Ziolkowski, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0132.05
204 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
They supplement the real-life histories that have already been provided of actual
individuals, from antiquity to the present day, who have elected to express through
their performance arts their devotion to God. They anticipate tales to come that are
tied to Christmas in Christian tradition as well as to the high holy days in Jewish
tradition. Indubitably, the basis of comparison could be multiplied by thorough
trolling for oral and written literature from other parts of the world, such as South
and East Asia. Whatever the omissions, the comparative scaffolding established here
represents at least a start.
King David’s Dancing
She liked the story of David, who danced before
the Lord, and uncovered himself exultingly. Why
should he uncover himself to Michal, a common
woman? He uncovered himself to the Lord.
—D. H. Lawrence
David, of slingshot fame, was second king over Israel and Judah, thanks in part to
his having proved his mettle in hand-to-hand combat and his moral fiber in other
capacities. He was also a poet, singer, and musician of the first order (see Fig. 5.1).
Almost half of the Psalms in the Bible have been transmitted with an ascription to him.
His attainments as a performer were familiar in the Middle Ages and were associated
with the figure of the jongleur. At the same time, he was recognized also as a dancer.
The medieval tumbler’s gymnastics before the image of the Virgin show parallels
to the prancing of King David in his linens before the ark of the covenant in Holy
Writ. Features of the single extant miniature that accompanies the text of Our Lady’s
Tumbler in one manuscript have helped to bring home the resemblances: in both cases,
men in possibly inappropriate clothing behave before altars in surprising ways, not
fully accepted by close members of their communities. Both the posture and dress or
undress of the gymnast in the illustration call to mind David.
The ark was a chest that contained the two stone tablets inscribed with the Ten
Commandments. It had been taken from a battlefield by the Philistines, and its return
to Jerusalem delighted David. In the vignette before the ark, three verses pertain
suggestively to the story of the tumbler, and bottle the kinetic energy of the king’s
performance. They bring home his near-nakedness as well as his athleticism and sheer
joy in whirling. The context makes crystal clear that although he is among others, his
ecstatic dance is solo. The passage also records how David's wife, Michal, turns up
her nose at his exhibition. She is the female onlooker. When she scolds him for his
dancing, the king replies: “I will both play and make myself meaner than I have done,
and I will be little in my own eyes, and with the handmaids of whom thou speakest,
I shall appear more glorious.” In punishment for her chiding about his sacred dance,
she is rendered sterile.
5. A Troupe of Sources and Analogues 205
All the physical features in David’s dance were sometimes conjured up
in medieval visual images of the scene, particularly in manuscript art. In one
representation from the first half of the twelfth century, the sovereign is presented
arched backward in a circle. This stance is designated technically as a bridge, and
jongleurs were commonly depicted in such a pose. A moralized Bible emphasizes
the contrast between the prophet, whose kingliness is signified by his crown, and
his spouse, who averts her gaze and makes a sweepingly dismissive gesture with
her left arm (see Fig. 5.2).
‘DRA P
S edinlege dyin
dee ae maree T comerms ta. die. ae nocre
Fig. 5.1 King David the harpist. Miniature, Fig. 5.2 King David dancing.
fourteenth century. Dublin, Trinity College, Miniature. Vienna, Osterreichische
MS 53, fol. 151r. Image courtesy of Trinity Nationalbibliothek, Cod.
College, Dublin. All rights reserved. Vindobonensis 2554, fol. 44r.
The whole episode of David’s dancing is too thorny to be reduced to a dichotomy
between a regal king (and what else could one be?) and his derisive consort. On
the contrary, it acquired various kinds of charge. In the first half of the eleventh
century, one monk overlaid the actual performances of real-life entertainers in his
day upon the biblical ruler. He describes how the seer “sounds the lyre before the
ark of the Lord, dances naked, plays, and walks about upside-down.” A century later,
the Cistercian preacher Bernard of Clairvaux calls upon the auditors of a sermon to
heed the spirit of joy and wisdom in which the monarch performs his two actions of
dancing and rebuking. In one tercet in the Divine Comedy, Dante singles out David’s
humility for emphasis. The leader’s humbling of himself would have seemed all
206 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
the more extraordinary to medieval readers or viewers, since by frisking around in
scanty clothing he put himself on a level with jongleurs and other socially marginal
performers.
Politically, the transportation of the ark to Jerusalem signaled the union of the
northern and southern tribes under the single kingship or monarchy of David. This
circumstance explains why the potentate is customarily represented wearing his
crown prominently, no matter how hyperkinetic he is depicted as being. On the
Christological plane, the regal status was particularly relevant to medieval Christians.
Allegorically, the taking of the ark can be likened to the capture of Jesus by the Jews.
Most frequently, the special chest was aligned with the Virgin. Its triumphal entry
into David’s earthly city came to be regarded as prefiguring Mary’s entrance into
the heavenly Jerusalem or as foretelling the advent of Christ into the earthly one
before the Passion. A retelling of The Juggler of Our Lady ona little more than a single
page in a heavily illustrated and highly religious weekly for Catholic children from
1949 follows loosely the story as it was spun in an early twentieth-century opera. It
describes the jongleur as being primarily a fiddle player (see Fig. 5.3) but as dancing
in the crucial scene, “like David before the ark of the covenant—do we not so call the
Virgin Mary?”
In the Middle Ages the episode of David’s dancing was assimilated fast and furious
to the motif of the jongleur of God. In a Spanish text written or at least overseen by
King Sancho IV the Brave of Castile, who ruled from 1284 to 1295, an exemplum draws
on the Bible to recount how the prophet bounded around the ark like an entertainer,
with a cithara in hand. When his wife inveighs against him for comporting himself
in this manner before his servants, he responds that he feels no stigma. As a jongleur
of God, he depreciates himself in the presence of his creator. A metrical paraphrase
of Psalm 44, known after the first word in the Latin as Eructavit, exists in medieval
French. This poem presents the biblical ruler not merely as a jongleur but even as a
wise one. When we consider attitudes in the Middle Ages, attaching that epithet to
such a professional almost risked being an oxymoron.
Translating Greek that means more precisely “he uncovers himself like one of the
naked dance performers,” the Latin of the Vulgate for the final phrase of 2 Kings
(2 Samuel) 20 could be translated into English as “one of the buffoons” or even
“one of the jongleurs.” Was David then taken to be a prototype of Saint Francis as a
jongleur of God? Later expositors had to decide whether by virtue of being Davidic
the dancing constituted legitimate spiritual jubilation, or whether it deviated wildly
and distracted from genuine godliness. Religious dance is so widespread as to seem
almost universal, and yet dancing, especially within or in proximity to churches, has
often been demeaned within Christianity as being inherently immodest, overly sexual,
and unsuited to worship.
In the very beginning of the twentieth century, Maurice Léna, who devised the
libretto for Massenet’s opera Le jongleur de Notre Dame, drew an immediate connection
between the biblical prophet David and the medieval jongleur Jean. When the
roy
5. A Troupe of Sources and Analogues
Au temps jadis, quand il y avait encore des princes
et des seigneurs, des ménestrels ou troubadours al-
laient de chateau en chateau pour faire entendre
leurs chansons qu'ils accompagnaient de !a_ vielle.
Non seulement ils chantaient, mais faisaient mille
tours d’adresse pour distraire leur noble auditoire.
C'est pourquoi on ad nommait aussi baladins ou jon-
gleurs.
L’un d’entre eux se trompa et frappa a la porte
d'un couvent. [] y fut bien accueilli, car les moines,
trés hospitaliers, voient en chaque voyageur une
image de Jésus parcourant Jes chemins de la Judée.
Pour les remercier, le jongleur offrit de chanter
les poémes de gloire ct d'amour dont il régalait or-
dinaisement les seigneurs et les dames des cours sei-
gneuriales.
— Mon fils, lui dit alors le Prieur du Couvent, je
yous remercie de votre bonne intention. Mais votre
art, si remarquable qu'il soit, ne peut cependant
égayer des moines qui ont renoncé & tous les plaisirs
du monde. Les chants de guetre ne conviennent pas
aux serviteurs du Dieu de paix. Quant aux poémes
d’amour, nous ne voulons entendre que ceux qui
chantent les beautés de Notre-Dame Marie, Mére de
Jésus, qu'on ne célébre pas avec dés paroles profa-
nes. Reposez-vous done paimi nous, et quand vous
aurez repris vos forces vous pourrez poursuivre votre
route.
xk *
Ces paroles paternelles ct sages touchérent [ame
du jongleur. Il pensa que les moines qui chantaient
chaque jour, et méme la nuit, les louanges du Sei-
ot Jésus et de Madame Marie, consacraient leur
& des maitres bien plus grands que ceux aux-
quels lui-eméme s’adressait, Ii se sentit pressé par la
force intérieure de Ja grace A faire comme eux. Aus-
si, aprés avoir -vécu quelques jours dans ce couvent,
alla-t-il se prosterner aux pieds du Pare Prieur, lui
demandaat la faveur d'étre recu au noviciat.
On ui fit subir un temps d’essai. I] était pieux et
docile, et, bien qu'il edt beaucoup de peine, n‘étant
plus assez jeune, pour apprendre le Jatin, il fut ad-
mis dans la communauté. Il fit son noviciat et pro-
nonca ses vecux, prometiant solennellement de vivre
dans Ja*pauvreté, !a pureté et l'obéissance, d’obser-
ver la Régle de l’Ordre et Ja constitution du monas-
tére.
Mais il comprenait toujours fort mal le latin des
hymnes et des psaumes, et il en souffrait cruellement,
craignant, le pauvyre homme, que sa priére ne fit
agréable & Dieu.
76
Il s‘humiliait successivement devant tous les fré-
res qui, de Ja cuisine au jardin, s‘exercaient, chacun
selon son talent, & bien servir Dieu en servant Jeurs
fréres.
kkk
— Mon frére, lui disait le cuisinier, ne vous déso-
lez pas. Moi non plus. je ne sais pas Je latin. Je fais
cuire les legumes et les macaronis : ce n'est pas dif-
ficile, mais c’est tout ce que je sais faire. Chacun
doit faire ce qu'il peut @ la place ot Dicu I'a mis.
Moi, frére Boniface, j'ai été chargé par mon Supé-
rieur de ceite humble tache et je mets tout mon
amour a l'accomplir. Ainsi mes fréres sont déchar-
gés du souci de savoir ce qu'ils mangeront et peu-
vent, sans autte préoccupation, chanter au bon Dieu
de beaux chants en latin, pour eux, pour moi, pour
tout le monde.
Pareillernent lui parlait frére Eusébe, le jardinier
qui ne savait que planter ses choux, frére Hilarion
qui soignait Ja porcherie et la basse-cour, frére Cré
pin qui ressemelait les souliers, frére Ange qui cou-
sait les vétements, et tous, et tous, heureux de servir
& quelque chose et humbles de sie servir qu’a cela.
ae a ae
— Chacun fait ce qu'il sait, se répétait l’ancien
jongleur. Mais moi je ne sais rien faire. Du moins
rien d'utile...
Il pensa a sa vielle, suspendue au grenier, couver-
te de poussiére. Grelottant de fievre, car i} était
malade, il alla la chercher, se rendit & l'église.
— Pour Madame Marie, songeait-il, je vais chan-
ter les chants qui égayaient jadis les dames des cha-
teaux.
Fig. 5.3 “Le jongleur de Notre Dame.” Printed in Le Croisé: Organe belge
de la croisade eucharistique 23.5 (October 1949): 76.
207
208 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
entertainer dances, the Prior quotes from scripture the verse “Unto his vomit, the dog
has turned again.” We have transitioned from eructation to emesis. In other words,
he accuses the erstwhile performer of backsliding to his old ways—a gag reflex, in
multiple senses. The other monks rant at the newcomer’s impiety and sacrilege for
dancing, and call out for him to be anathematized, expelled, or executed. Only Brother
Boniface, the bon-vivant chef at the monastery who befriends and protects Jean, leaps
to the defense of his fellow lay brother. The potbellied cook, salt of the earth as befits
his profession, does so in part by invoking none other than King David.
More than a half century later, and probably independently of Massenet, Duke
Ellington revealed similar intuitions in the program note for the Concert of Sacred
Music. This was the first of three full-evening jazz suites that he composed for a big
band, complemented by a full choir, vocal soloists, and dancers. His cogitation in this
First Sacred Concert pertains directly to his own creativity and devotion. As nearly the
last of its parts, it contains a piece for full band, choir, and solo tap dancer entitled
“David Danced before the Lord with All His Might.” In his comments, the jazz musician
connected first the juggler of our story with the biblical prophet, and then the act of
juggling with drumming, instrumentalism, dancing, and other nonverbal expressions
of a person’s temperament during worship. The performance of this song featured
dancing by a tap master, visible in the film. The distinctive rat-a-tat of tap dance, like a
solo of scat singing performed by feet shod with metal-plated soles, is plainly audible
in the sound track. The Third Sacred Concert contains the track “Every Man Prays in
His Own Language.” Ellington once expanded upon these words by adding, “and
there is no language that God does not understand.” Close associates of the composer
have reported that he was inspired by the Juggler of Notre Dame in both the overall
series of sacred concerts and in this particular piece.
The dance of King David before the ark may underlie a motif concerning the
girlhood of Mary in the late fourth-century Protevangelium of James. This “first
Gospel,” to break down the first word of the title into its two Greek elements, is an
extraordinarily influential apocryphon. Among other things, the Protogospel helps
considerably to flesh out the extremely sparse treatment of the Mother of God in the
New Testament. In turn, the text was expanded in later accretions to these books of
the Christian Bible. Its most notable successor would be the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew,
probably datable to the first quarter of the seventh century. This Latin paraphrase tells
of the Virgin’s parents, birth, and life. Such accounts developed to plug many gaps in
the canonical Bible and thus to satisfy the otherwise unfulfilled curiosity of believers.
The Protevangelium is devoted in the main to Mary’s biography, including her infancy,
and family relations before the Nativity. The apocryphal account is ascribed to
a certain James, who was probably meant to be Jesus’s half-brother, the son of his
father Joseph by a former marriage. Despite this ascription, the composition probably
took shape—or at least began to do so—in the second half of the second century. The
earliest manuscript is of the early fourth century, but it was not rediscovered and
made accessible in the West until long afterward.
5. A Troupe of Sources and Analogues 209
The seventh chapter of Pseudo-Matthew describes how at the age of three Mary was
taken by her parents Joachim and Anna to be presented in the temple in Jerusalem.
By devoting her to God, her father and mother rendered thanks for the blessing
of parenthood. Upon being placed on the third step of the altar, the little girl felt
impelled by the same sort of sacred ecstasy or holy high spirits that had overcome
David before the ark. Like a sacralized Shirley Temple, she performed a little shimmy.
Then (the jig was up) she scampered up the rest of the fifteen steps on her own
without any unusual behavior. The future Mother of God remained as a temple virgin
until she was twelve. Both the dance on the staircase and the service in the sanctuary
corroborate the inference that she descended directly from the lineage of David.
Whereas Michal greeted David’s prancing with derision, all those present to witness
Mary’s fancy footwork take delight and show wonder in it. Although a relatively low-
stakes element in the story, the little dance would have been mentioned occasionally
when commemorating the Presentation of the Virgin in the temple. But evidence that
the girl’s jaunty hopping had any broad impact is elusive. The scene was represented
seldom in art, if at all. Among the few images that depict the Mother of God’s ascent
of the steps, only a fresco in the Duomo at Prato may make even a faint gesture at
alluding to the episode—and not even by showing her dancing but by showing her
at the point in the ascent where she could have stopped to do so (see Fig. 5.4). In this
composition, her back foot is about to leave the third step as she races up the stairway
toward the priest.
Fig. 5.4 Paolo Uccello, Presentazione di Maria al Tempio, ca. 1435. Fresco. Prato, Duomo di Prato.
Image from Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paolo_uccello,_
presentazione_di_maria_al_tempio.jpg
210 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
The situational parallels between King David’s nimble-footed exultation before
the ark and the agile performance of the humble tumbler before the statue of the
Virgin have struck various readers independently over the centuries. Despite any
similarities, Our Lady’s Tumbler is by no stretch of the imagination merely a calque
upon one scene in the Bible. Even the specific moment when the tumbler enacts his
routine is not necessarily modeled upon the prophet’s wild prancing. Rather, it has
about it an archetypal quality that ties it to stories from cultures elsewhere in the
world and time. In fact, the stark chasm in social stature between a lofty biblical king
and a lowly medieval performer argues against a cozy association between them.
The Widow’s Mites
Underlying all these stories, a common spirit affirms that God will receive with
appreciation even the humblest gift from the humblest person. The only codicil is that
the pittance be proffered with sincerity. The distillate of this idea can be found in the
New Testament account of the widow’s mites. Jesus witnesses the incident when it
happens in the Temple in Jerusalem, and expounds upon it (see Fig. 5.5). Mites are
little coins of the least valuable denomination, minted of a base metal such as bronze
or copper. The woman’s pair of two such coppers, although minute in comparison
with the presents of others, gains scope when measured against her net wealth: they
are all she possesses. By tendering just two pieces of small change, the exceedingly
poor widow utterly bankrupts herself. As a consequence, the proportionate value of
her donation to God tops by far the large amounts of money contributed by richer folk.
Fig. 5.5 Alexandre Bida, The Widow’s Mite, 1874. Etching. Published in Edward Eggleston,
Christ in Art; or, The Gospel Life of Jesus: With the Bida Illustrations
(New York: Fords, Howard, & Hulbert, 1874), 293.
5. A Troupe of Sources and Analogues 211
Our Lady’s Tumbler sets within the framework of dance, gymnastics, and juggling
the same issues that are embedded in both biblical episodes, first of David’s dance
and later of the widow’s mites. The resemblance between the medieval tale and the
incident in the Gospels, although limited to their shared spirit rather than extending
to the motif of dancing, appears to have struck at least one later interpreter. In 1918,
the Irish writer Bernard Duffy published a coming-of-age novel entitled Oriel. Among
other things, the book describes a priest, Dean James Joseph MacMahon. The fourth
chapter, set in the novelist’s hometown, is narrated by an altar boy. References to
Our Lady’s Tumbler neatly frame this section. Near the beginning of the chapter, the
Dean subjects the youth to sweet-natured raillery about his dreams for the future. In
the process, MacMahon admits that in his own adolescent days he had cherished
an ambition to be a traveling entertainer who specialized in gymnastics. Somewhat
earlier the good cleric had asked what the boy intended to be when he grew up. The
young man had given two answers that in their antitheticality had made the priest
double up in gales of laughter: “I think I’ll be a bishop” and “I think—I think a clown
in a circus.” In the incident that caps the chapter, Oriel, who has been tasked with
manning the collection box, feels shamefaced at having no coins to drop in. Instead
of pocket money, he thinks himself virtuous for contributing an enameled button.
The Dean, not knowing who made this deposit, admonishes the congregation sternly.
After the boy confesses, the ecclesiastic responds by telling the story of Our Lady’s
Tumbler, which he finds apt for both of them because of their youthful aspirations. As
the chapter closes, the older churchman concludes that “the value of an offering is to
be gauged only by the spirit in which it is offered.”
Such expressions of devotion may well up from many different drives within
individuals, including dancers. Not all acts of dancing as performances of faith need
to have had a text or ritual as provocation or inspiration. After all, they can arise from
nearly universal human impulses. Thus, in a work of scholarship printed in 1923, an
academic author on dance vouched for “the literal truth” of two related anecdotes,
in which small children performed rhythmic steps or simple gymnastics before God
or Jesus. Many physical performances have the aim of showing off, not solely for the
Virgin. With complex anachronism, a volume of literary history brought out in 1948
referenced the jongleur of Notre Dame in describing an escaped French prisoner of war
during the Napoleonic Wars. With his companions, the fugitive staged a performance of
athletic feats, including jumping hurdles: “It’s the story of the jongleur of Notre Dame.
The episode is one of the prettiest. The war then had these oases, or these pauses.”
Beyond reflexes that may occur to this or that type of person almost irrespective of
the century or culture, we cannot rule out the specificity of local traditions. Christian
qualms about dance were severe. Despite them, regional folklore and folkways retained
their resilience. For all the gnawing doubts, this form of expression may have been
accorded a place in quasi-religious rituals outside formal worship or even in the liturgy
itself. Such customs can be onerous to recover from ancient and medieval times, since
the literate who could set them down in writing were often either condescendingly
212 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
uninterested in or actively antipathetic to them. On the whole, the ecclesiastical
authorities managed to keep the practice out of churches and liturgical contexts, or to
squelch it if it had somehow insinuated itself there anyway. Yet the suppression was
never complete, especially outside houses of worship. Spain and Spanish-speaking
America have a celebration called the Festival of the Crosses or May Cross in which
dance often plays a role. A Spanish print from around 1875 captures a couple dancing
in a courtyard before seated onlookers (see Fig. 5.6). In 1920, a researcher made an
aside that referred to many Spanish children disporting themselves before the May
altars in their own homes, in a ritual loosely comparable to a Maypole dance. How far
back such rituals reach is at this point, and will abide forevermore, a matter of wide-
open guesswork rather than absolute historical certainty.
Fig. 5.6 Dancers celebrate Cruz de Mayo in Spain. Albumen print. Illustration by J. Turina, 1875.
The medieval tale demonstrates dash and daring in depicting dance positively, as
the object of reward from the Virgin herself. In contrast, in the Middle Ages, dancing
was often presented by churchmen as a profane pastime, and was condemned for
its deleterious character. Stephen of Bourbon, French Dominican of the thirteenth
century, declared, “The devil is the inventor of carolers and dancers.” The best-known
and longest-lived of anti-balletic exempla tells of the cursed dancers of Kélbigk. On
Christmas Eve of 1017 or thereabouts, these women and men allegedly violated
an interdiction against dance within church space during a service. To be specific,
they made a racket as they danced in the round and sang in the churchyard. In so
doing, they disturbed the Mass in their small town. When the parish priest shushed
them, they turned a deaf ear (see Fig. 5.7). Ignored by the merrymakers, the minister
eventually called upon God, pronounced a malediction, and execrated them. Through
the pox he put on them, the miscreants were given a kind of homeopathic punishment
for their profanity. For transgressing the sanctity of the space and ignoring the good
father, they were prevented for an entire year from leaving the yard and from ceasing
5. A Troupe of Sources and Analogues 213
Fig. 5.7 The cursed dancers of Kélbigk. Etching, 1674. Artist unknown. Published in Johann
Ludwig Gottfried, Historische Chronick oder Beschreibung der Merckwiirdigsten Geschichte, vol. 1
(Frankfurt, Germany: Merian, 1674), 505. Image courtesy of Universitatsbibliothek Diisseldorf.
to sing and dance. After this living purgatory, the legend maintained that they were
permitted to return to normal life. The tale is sometimes held to relate to ecclesiastical
anxiety as ballads and carols spread at full bore. Christian ambivalence about dance
appears nowhere more remarkably than in a short story by the Swiss author of poetry
and fiction, Gottfried Keller (see Figs. 5.8 and 5.9). Entitled “The Little Legend of
Dance,” the tale is the last of his Seven Legends from 1872. All of these accounts have
settings in early Christianity. This narrative, based on one preserved in Gregory the
Great’s Dialogues, recounts an episode in the life of Saint Musa. As a young lady, the
future holy woman was reputed to have had only one fallibility: she suffered from
an intractable mania for dance (see Figs. 5.10 and 5.11). She indulged her passion
everywhere, even when walking to the altar or before the church door. Keller reports
that once “when she found herself alone in the church, she could not refrain from
executing some balletic moves before the altar, and, so to speak, dancing a pretty
prayer to the Virgin Mary.”
At this juncture an elderly gentleman appeared, and she took a long and elaborate
whirl with him. At the end, he introduced himself as King David himself, and he
pledged her eternal bliss in cavorting (see Fig. 5.12). His only rider to the agreement
was that for the rest of her life in the material world she renounce her hedonism,
including dancing, and that she give herself over instead to penance and devotion.
Musa consented to this stipulation, returned home, and took up an anchoritic existence
in which she forwent all pleasures, most especially the balletic ones. Before too long,
the girl fell ill and died, whereupon she enjoyed the delights of gamboling that the
prophet had promised her (see Fig. 5.13).
214 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
Fig. 5.8 Gottfried Keller, age 54. Photograph Fig. 5.9 Gottfried Keller. Photograph, before
by Jean Gut, 1873. 1929. Photographer unknown.
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Fig. 5.10 Title page of Gottfried Keller, Fig. 5.11 Musa dancing. Drawing by Hannes
Das Tanzlegendchen (Berlin-Charlottenburg, M. Avenarius, 1919. Published in G. Keller, Das
Germany: Axel Juncker, 1919). Tanzlegendchen, 9.
5. A Troupe of Sources and Analogues 215
Fig. 5.12 Musa speaks with King David. Drawing by Hannes M. Avenarius, 1919. Published in Gottfried
Keller, Das Tanzlegendchen (Berlin-Charlottenburg, Germany: Axel Juncker, 1919), 13.
Ns
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Fig. 5.13 Musa dances in heaven. Drawing by G. Traub, 1921. Published in Gottfried Keller,
Sieben Legenden (Munich, Germany: Franz Hanfstaeng]l, 1921), 139.
216 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
The Virgin’s Miraculous Images and Apparitions
The Gospels do not brim with details of Mary’s life history, beyond the facts that she
was a maiden who married Joseph, accompanied him to Bethlehem, and bore Jesus
after conceiving miraculously. For her role in this procreation, the Virgin was hailed
at the Council of Ephesus in 431 CE by the Greek epithet Theotokos, meaning literally
“God-Bearer” but interpreted often as “Mother of God.” This edict helped to ramp
up Marian devotion. In addition, it led eventually to recognition of Constantinople
as the Theotokoupolis, or “City of the God-Bearer.” Legends and miracles gradually
arose that documented subsequent interventions of the Virgin in the lives of human
beings. The Mother of God steps on stage as the mediator of God’s mercifulness and
as the surest advocate for uneasy souls. She proves able and willing to work miracles
to spare almost any sinner who resorts to her. Narratives of miracles wrought by
Mary are not unknown in the earlier Middle Ages in Western Europe, and in fact the
contribution of what is now France to the stockpile of Marian miracle tales began
early, in the writings of Gregory of Tours. But they metamorphosed into a major
literary phenomenon only in the twelfth century and later, extant first in Latin prose
and later in Latin verse and vernacular verse. Once again, the French-speaking region
contributed in an outsized fashion.
The making of a miracle literature required extensive efforts. Monks, clerics, and
performers gathered stories. In the process, they sometimes conducted the medieval
equivalents of oral history or news interviews. Occasionally they may have spun the
tales largely out of their own fancies. In any case, they were not aided in their work
by recording devices beyond stylus and wax tablet, pen and parchment, or other such
tools for note-taking. Since the wonders were often preserved and transmitted at first
separately, others later bundled them into more or less coherent groupings. Later
still, vernacular poets translated or adapted written collections from Latin or from
unwritten intermediaries. In Marian miracles, both the quality and quantity of the
prose and verse generated in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries rate as nothing
short of astounding. This holds true of texts in both the learned language and the
vernaculars.
The wonders of most saints, set down posthumously, were attached to specific,
physical shrines. The written accounts were customarily presented as historical
documents, serving primarily to shore up the case for officially canonizing the martyr
or virgin responsible for them. In contrast, the miracles of the Virgin were unhampered
by the cumbersome dictates of papal canonization, since her sainthood was already
unequivocal. Instead, they were generally literary compositions not tied to a single
place. As the genre surpassed most other forms of hagiography, the Marian collection
soaked up miracles that had been associated previously not with the Mother of God
but with other saints.
5. A Troupe of Sources and Analogues 217
Suppliants sometimes sought to be healed through the intercession of Mary —they
could read and hear of many therapeutic miracles. All the same, her wonders tend
much less to emphasize remission and recovery from physical ailments than salvation
from what could be styled spiritual dilemmas. Finally, considerably fewer relics of the
Virgin existed than of many other major saints, since her body had been taken into
heaven at the Assumption. Although nail trimmings and hair ringlets are to be found,
remains of direct contact with her generally came through relatively paltry pieces of
clothing and drops of milk. Counteracting that scantiness, the Mother of God barged
into the real world long after death through frequent apparitions. Many sightings
took place thanks to images, either icon-like paintings on panels or representations in
the round — that is, statuary standing free with all sides shown.
The assemblages of miracles that are known best today are in the spoken languages.
To list only three examples, our thoughts turn first to the Miracles of Our Lady in
medieval French verse, from about 1220, by the Benedictine monk Gautier de Coinci.
A second would be the Miracles of Our Lady in Castilian verse, from about 1230, by
Gonzalo de Berceo, secular priest of Rioja. He has just title to being the first Spanish
poet known by name. His poem was based on a Latin text that may have been of
Cistercian origin. A third would be Songs of Saint Mary in Galician-Portuguese, from
about 1250, by King Alfonso X the Wise of Castile and Leon. This is to say nothing of
various anonymous collections. These compendia amass hundreds upon hundreds
of legends—for instance, King Alfonso the Wise’s anthology alone comprehends 360.
Compounding the impressive bulk of narrative is the effort invested sometimes
in making the manuscripts vehicles for all the media that were capable of being
recorded at the time. Thus, the most luxurious of the extant codices of the Songs has
folio sides that are segmented into six panels, each of which exhibits a snippet of text
accompanied by an illustration. A substantial proportion of the total word count, and
number of the illuminations in the manuscript, is devoted to miracles that revolve
around living images of the Virgin. The representations were icons and statues that
somehow or other become animate. Further supplementing and enhancing wordcraft
and artwork is musical notation. Yet even this kind of accounting evokes only a small
corner of the picture. To cite the old aphorism, the whole is greater than the sum of
its parts in these collections. Beyond being encyclopedias of the miraculous, the texts
express passionate love for Mary. Furthermore, none of them merely translates a Latin
source word for word. Rather, they interject commentary, both explicit and implicit,
that delves into social issues that would not have occurred to or been relevant to the
churchmen who wrote in the learned language. They reached audiences across the
societal spectrum. Thus, the Songs may well have been intended for a courtly audience,
whereas the Miracles may have been designed for performance before pilgrims as they
partook of the hospitality of a monastery.
218 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
The Jongleur of Rocamadour
Analogues that manifest a near kinship, both chronologically and culturally, with Our
Lady’s Tumbler can be detected in other Marian exempla and miracles. The earliest is
probably a twelfth-century occurrence recorded first in the anonymous Latin prose
Miracles of Saint Mary of Rocamadour. This narrative offers evidence for the importance
of literature in writing down miracles and thereby promoting pilgrimage to specific
locales. Later this specific shrine wonder relating to the Virgin received treatment
in Old French verse by Gautier de Coinci. At the outset of his own version, the
vernacular poet acknowledged his intimate familiarity with the prose in the learned
language. Last but not least, the account was rendered into Galician-Portuguese by
(or under) King Alfonso the Wise (see Fig. 5.14). The tale recounts an episode that is
alleged to have befallen a jongleur from the German Rhineland community of Sieglar.
According to the story, this Peter Iverni made music on his vielle in praise of the Virgin
before the miracle-working statue of her in the sanctuary at the basilica of Saint Mary
in Rocamadour in France. The element roc- in the place name, akin to English “rock,”
refers to a crag. Considerable speculation has been made about the exact identity of
the Amadour or Madour whose cognomen completes the toponym. He is often taken
to have been an early Christian hermit who was ostensibly a retainer in the household
of the Virgin, and was dispatched later across the seas from the Holy Land to the
Alzou gorge, as a missionary to Gaul.
On this occasion Peter prayed to the Mother of God that, if gratified by his
production of songs and melodies, she should reward him with either a consecrated
taper from among those that combusted around her statue, or a piece of wax from it.
That is to say, he petitioned for the turnaround of the usual pattern in which a devotee
of the Virgin would bestow a votive candle upon her. In a trice, the petitioner’s wish
came true. In repayment for the service done her, Mary prompted a taper to levitate
and descend upon his musical instrument. In wonderment, an overflow crowd of
pilgrims witnessed the airborne wax with its lighted wick. The episode filled them
with hope. Like Peter, the worshipers performed pilgrimage and veneration. In him,
they had a role model for the success of such performances in eliciting miracles.
At this point the story is still far from over. The official in control of caring for
the church was a monk. Upon noticing the marvelous event, this Gerard grew
irritated. Taking the fiddler unjustly to be a sorcerer, the testy sexton flounced over
to the musician, seized the taper, and replaced it near the statue. Both the levitation
and the confiscation were repeated, which made the official only more fed up: he
had a meltdown. When the Mother of God caused the burning wick with its wax
to boomerang and to alight on the musical instrument a third time, the miracle was
proven definitively to be legitimate and celebration ensued. The bystanders who
witnessed the wonder exclaimed in a lovefest for God (see Fig. 5.15). The jongleur,
crying for joy, restored the votive. Every year thereafter, so long as Peter lived, he
5. A Troupe of Sources and Analogues 219
venadohnals de
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nae
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Fig. 5.14 Musical performers before the Virgin, as depicted in the Cantigas de Santa Maria
(Codice Rico). Madrid, Real Biblioteca del Escorial, MS T.I.1., fol. 14v. Image courtesy of
Real Biblioteca del Escorial, Madrid.
220 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
returned to the site of the original miracle to offer the Virgin a candle weight of more
than a pound. The moralization that follows the narrative emphasizes that the monks
and clerics tasked with singing would do well to emulate the red-blooded devotion
of the jongleur in praying to God and his mother, in thanking them, and in extolling
them.
Fig. 5.15 A taper miraculously alights upon a jongleur’s vielle, prompting wonder from
bystanders. Illustration by Pio Santini, 1946. Published in Jér6me and Jean Tharaud, Les contes de
la Vierge (Paris: Société d’éditions littéraires francaises, 1946), between pp. 130 and 131.
Reports of miracles entailing candles were not uncommon. The chapels and images
that drew pilgrims, petitioners, and performers would have often been illuminated
by the light of tapers. The flickering could readily have produced the impression of
movement, and witnesses could easily have included individuals capable of singing,
narrating, miming, or writing what was supposed to have happened. Sometimes it
takes little imagination to guess how a press of wonder-hungry onlookers could have
construed a normal occurrence as being miraculous. Take, for example, the monastery
of Jesse, where a carpenter saw a statue of the Virgin and Child come to life. One night,
the votive placed before the image relit itself twice and did not cease to burn after the
beadle had doused it.
5. A Troupe of Sources and Analogues 221
The location of the miracle at Rocamadour is apropos, since in the second half of the
twelfth century and the early thirteenth century this site became a famed pilgrimage
destination. If their health permitted, pilgrims were meant to proceed on their knees
during the homestretch, the final steep ascent from the thoroughfare up to the shrine.
In 1170, King Henry II of England made the trek there in search of cures for physical
maladies and political misfortunes. Of relevance for our literary purposes, Caesarius
of Heisterbach, the Cistercian author of exempla, was moved to enter his cloister as
part of a conversion process that involved a pilgrimage to this sanctuary in 1199. At the
same time, it bears note that the jongleur in this miracle manifests no desire to enter the
monastery in the locale. Rather, he remains from beginning to end a layman. Ina further
difference from Our Lady’s Tumbler, he is not a dancer or gymnast but an instrumentalist
and singer. Additionally, he both requests and observes the miracle that takes place.
The Virgin herself is not reputed to have made any appearances at Rocamadour,
although the shrine possessed a sample of her treasured milk. All the same, her image
in the house of worship there elicited particularly strong attachment and (as we have
seen) was ascribed miraculous powers (see Fig. 5.16). The Madonna at Sainte-Marie
of Rocamadour is a wooden image of the Virgin and Child. The composition is not
unusual for the period, since it depicts Mary supporting the infant Jesus on her left knee.
This type of statue, with its very formal posture, is known as a maiestas, or “majesty.” An
alternative name for the Mother of God in the same pose is “throne of wisdom.”
LMP A
Sissi te Poet
Set
Fig. 5.16 Postcard depicting Rocamadour’s “Chapelle miraculeuse” (Saint-Céré, France: J. Vertuel, 1977).
222 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
If the Rocamadour Madonna’s austere composition conforms to the compositional
norms of its day, it displays a relatively rare feature in its coloration. As the statue now
exists, Mary is portrayed as having swarthy skin (see Fig. 5.17). For obvious reasons,
a representation of this sort is known as a Black Virgin or Madonna. Such dark-hued
images in the round are customarily treated as distinct phenomena from ones that are
not black. Although paintings in which the Mother of God has a blackened hue may
also be designated likewise as Black Madonnas, it makes sense to examine the pictural
and sculptural media separately. The best known of such paintings would be an icon,
that is, a depiction on wood. The original was supposedly made of wax mingled with
the ashes of martyred Christians. This artwork was preserved in a Marian shrine
located in the section of Constantinople, modern Istanbul, that was called Blachernae.
From its location the depiction became known technically as the Blachernitissa. In
Byzantine coins issued between 1055 and 1057, a representation of the Virgin has
an inscription identifying her by this designation. The difficulty lies in ascertaining
whether the numismatic type corresponds with the famous image or with another
icon or some other sort of decoration in the church of Blachernae (see Fig. 5.18).
Fig. 5.17 The Black Madonna of Rocamadour. Photograph by Martin Irvine, no date.
Image courtesy of Martin Irvine. All rights reserved.
5. A Troupe of Sources and Analogues 223
Fig. 5.18 Mary as Blachernitissa on Byzantine coinage. Coin (obverse), two-thirds miliaresion of
Constantine IX Monomachos, 1075-1077. Washington, D.C., Dumbarton Oaks Research Library
and Collection. Image courtesy of Joe Mills. All rights reserved.
Mysterious in their misty origins and murky meanings, the Black Virgins have
exercised a special fascination since the Middle Ages. The color coding that Western
societies have often imposed upon their citizens has been extended to their statuary.
Among the caveats in order, one is that the demographics of such Madonnas have
changed. Not all representations categorized as having this color today were dark
at all or as black when they were first created or earlier mentioned. The chromatic
change has taken place in the opposite direction as well: the Church has sometimes
replaced, without ado, older Black Virgins with newer white ones. Then again, older
does not mean original: what has darkened may have once been lighter. Candle soot
and other grime, natural and unnatural aging of paint and other materials, additional
layers of varnish, and replacement of lighter with darker images have all produced
modifications. In any event, for a millennium the most important of these dusky
Madonnas as a pilgrimage destination has been the Black Virgin at Santa Maria
de Montserrat. Located less than fifty miles from Barcelona as the crow flies, the
Benedictine abbey was founded there in 1025. The site’s jagged-edged topography
gave rise to the name “sawed mountain” of both mount and monastery in the
language of the region, Catalan. Various hypotheses have been advanced to explain
the coloration of these Madonnas. For example, what could be called the “holy
smoke” theory holds that these images could have grown discolored inadvertently.
They could have been fumigated by the acrid fumes of candles and lamps in ordinary
worship, or by pungent fire when churches burned. (If so, the carvings have become
hidden behind a permanent smoke screen.) Since many legends surrounding them
claim that they were unearthed mysteriously by animals or shepherds in the wild,
their color could have resulted from exposure to the elements or burial. Alternatively,
they could have been intended to be black from their creation, to acknowledge the
swarthiness of women who were familiar where they were originally carved. In some
cases, they could have been fabricated from material that was naturally dusky from
the beginning, while in others, they could have been made of wood that darkened as
it aged. Whatever the reason for the blackness, the Black Virgin of Rocamadour was
224 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
made the totem of the site. The figure was recorded first in the seal of the Benedictine
priory and later in the special lead token that pilgrims sewed as a badge onto clothing
and hats (see Fig. 5.19).
Fig. 5.19 A pilgrim’s badge depicting the Black Madonna and child.
Metal badge, late twelfth to early thirteenth century.
Although the parallelism is inexact, the miracle of Rocamadour shows many parallels
to Our Lady’s Tumbler. In both stories a lay entertainer merits the special favor of the
Virgin by putting on a show before a Madonna within a famous institution dedicated
to her, the Mother of God accepts the service, and an insentient object moves
miraculously to signal her amiable disposition toward him. Also, in both narratives
the professional has an antagonist from the religious establishment where he delivers
his performance, in one case a sacristan and in the other a monk. In the last stage,
the performer is vindicated. Both tales signal that ecclesiastics have no monopoly on
the quality of veneration. With her discernment, Mary may grant her favor to the
sincerity of a layman over the soul-destroying professionalism of a monk or cleric.
Iconographically, representations of the jongleur can form eye-catching tableaux. The
fiddler cradling his instrument can echo the Madonna dandling the Child.
Small wonder that in one of the five manuscripts of the medieval French Our
Lady’s Tumbler, our poem follows immediately upon a version of this Rocamadour
miracle tale by an anonymous poet. The analogies between the tales of Peter Iverni
and the nameless tumbler are strong. In fact, during the early twentieth-century
heyday of Our Lady’s Tumbler—when literary, operatic, and even cinematic
re-creations of the story were ubiquitous—a French daily cultural newspaper ran
an account of the Rocamadour miracle on its front page, under the headline “The
Jongleur of Our Lady: The True Legend.” In the English-speaking world, an early
5. A Troupe of Sources and Analogues 225
volume of translations from medieval French contains Our Lady’s Tumbler as well
as Gautier de Coinci’s version of the Rocamadour tale. But why stop dead with just
this one parallel? Another close analogue is to be found. Set within an even larger
framework, Gautier’s miracle and Our Lady’s Tumbler can be seen to flank another
spellbinding narrative that belongs very much in the same company, the miracle
of the Holy Candle of Arras. If nothing until now has kindled your interest, this
scintillating version should make the sparks fly.
The Holy Candle of Arras
It is better to light a candle than
curse the darkness.
Fig. 5.20 Holy card depicting the miracle at Arras (Bruges, Belgium, ca. 1890).
Above all, in the motif of the taper and in the character of the jongleur, the story about
the miracle of the performer before the Madonna of Rocamadour relates loosely but
intriguingly to the Marian miracle of the Holy Candle of Arras (see Fig. 5.20). This
other wonder set up a ménage a trois that triangulated the Virgin and two entertainers.
The events recounted in the legend reputedly took place in the opening years of the
twelfth century, but they are not documented in extant texts until more than a half
century later. The action in the story centers upon the northern French city within
226 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
the bosom of a region called the Artois. In both the municipality and the region, the
Picard dialect prevailed. The general backdrop is a citizenry beleaguered by a plague
of ergotism. This poisoning, with cramps, spasms, and gangrene as its chief symptoms,
is recognized now to result from consumption of rye and other cereals contaminated
by ergot. In the Middle Ages, what caused this fungal disease stayed in doubt. The
populace felt even more at a loss about workable medical treatments than it did about
the causes. As a result, many concluded that the pestilence inflicted divine retribution
for sin: sweet justice. They believed that one of the best remedies lay in appealing to
Mary for mercy through her intercession with Christ.
The chief characters in the miraculous tale are two jongleurs. They became
implacable enemies after the one, Pierre (but often called by the stage name Norman),
slew the brother of the other, Itier (see Fig. 5.21). The Virgin, a beauty dressed in white,
manifested herself to them in separate but simultaneous visions, instructing them to
betake themselves to Arras, which was ravaged by ergotism (see Figs. 5.22 and 5.23).
They were to find Bishop Lambert in her church there, iron out their differences before
him, and keep vigil on Saturday. At midnight, a woman was to appear and give them
a taper, which became known as the Holy Candle. The cylinder, alight with heavenly
fire, would drool wax. In a kind of homeopathic medicine, when diluted in water the
drippings could be drunk or drizzled to heal those burning from ergot poisoning.
Fig. 5.21 “Normand kills Itier’s brother in a Fig. 5.22 “In a vision, Itier receives the order
quarrel.” Illustration, 1853. Published in Auguste to go to Arras.” Illustration, 1853. Published
Terninck, Notre-Dame du Joyel, ou Histoire légendaire in A. Terninck, Notre-Dame du Joyel, ou Histoire
et numismatique de la chandelle d’Arras... (Arras, légendaire et numismatique de la chandelle
France: A. Brissy, 1853), 111. d’Arras..., 111.
5. A Troupe of Sources and Analogues 227
Fig. 5.23 “Normand receives the same order.” Fig. 5.24 “Normand makes his prayer at the door
Illustration, 1853. Published in A. Terninck, of the cathedral.” Illustration, 1853. Published in A.
Notre-Dame du Joyel, ou Histoire légendaire et Terninck, Notre-Dame du Joyel, ou Histoire légendaire
numismatique de la chandelle d’Arras..., 111. et numismatique de la chandelle d’Arras..., 111.
Fig. 5.25 “The Bishop Lambert reconciles Itier Fig. 5.26 Mary appears to the bishop and
with Normand.” Illustration, 1853. Published in A. jugglers. Illustration, 1876. Published in Le
Terninck, Notre-Dame du Joyel, ou Histoire légendaire et Monde illustré (1876), 356.
numismatique de la chandelle d’Arras..., 113.
228 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
On the following day, both men made a beeline as bidden to the Artesian cathedral
of Notre-Dame. Norman arrived first (see Fig. 5.24). Upon hearing his claim, the
prelate believed that the fellow was being true to his trade. Since jongleur is cognate
with joker, Norman must have been jesting. Then Itier showed up and explained his
identical experience and mission. Even so, Lambert remained leery. In his view, the
two entertainers were colluding in a prank. Itier, who had not known that Norman
had undergone the same vision, made clear that he would not be in the least inclined
to pair up with his colleague. In fact, he exclaimed acrimoniously that he would like
to run Norman through with a sword for having killed his sibling. At this juncture, the
two foes were poised to settle their differences of opinion through physical violence.
Happily, Lambert soon had them holding out olive branches: what threatened to
become mano a mano became instead a handshake (see Fig. 5.25).
What happens next flies in the face of the old adage “The lights are on, but no one is
at home.” As all three men prayed in the church, Mary wafted down from the heights
of the choir, cradling in her hand a candle flaming with heavenly fire (see Figs. 5.26 and
5.27). She gave the cylinder to them. With water in which they had dripped drops from
the taper (see Fig. 5.28), the three began at once zealously to cure the infirm (see Figs.
5.29 and 5.30). The legend of this thriller held that on the first night, with excitement
truly at a fever pitch, 144 of the afflicted were healed. In this account, the jongleurs do
not play or perform to achieve the miracle, and the Virgin’s intercession comes about in
a vision rather than by moving through the go-between of an image.
\
aN Nir
Fig. 5.27 “The Holy Virgin brings the miraculous Fig. 5.28 “The bishop blesses the water where
candle.” Illustration, 1853. A. Terninck, the drops of the candle fall.” Illustration, 1853. A.
Notre-Dame du Joyel, ou Histoire légendaire et Terninck, Notre-Dame du Joyel, ou Histoire légendaire
numismatique de la chandelle d’Arras..., 113. et numismatique de la chandelle d’Arras..., 113.
5. A Troupe of Sources and Analogues 229
——
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}
Fig. 5.29 “Healing the sick.” Illustration, Fig. 5.30 Interior view of the Cathédrale d’Arras. Drawing, 1853.
1853. Published in A. Terninck, Notre- Published in A. Terninck, Essai historique et monographique sur
Dame du Joyel, ou Histoire légendaire et lV'ancienne Cathédrale d’Arras (Paris and Arras, France: La Société
numismatique de la chandelle d’Arras..., 113. de Saint-Victor, a Plancy [Aube], 1853), between pp. 42 and 43.
After the curative miracle, Itier and Norman allegedly started a society. Called the
Brotherhood of the Holy Candle, this lay religious guild was instituted so that its
members could serve as watchmen for the waxy relic. They also commemorated
the miracle, which of necessity entailed honoring the Virgin (see Fig. 5.31). The
confraternity of jongleurs existed from around 1175 until 1792. Without going into the
particulars of this group, it is worth pointing out that guilds for minstrels took firm
shape only long after the twelfth century. Gradually, such performers became more
settled through attachment to royal courts and to the households of other notables.
As they became less transient, they gained regular incomes and took to wearing
distinctive livery. Such costumes remain with us in popular images of clowns and
jesters. To house the candle, the members of this fraternal organization eventually
constructed the chapel of Notre Dame des Ardents. In the Latin form of her name,
this Mary is likewise Our Lady of the Fevered. She is customarily portrayed with
a taper. The Latin designation of the group is written out so as to emphasize in its
final two letters VM, the initials of Virgin Mary (see Fig. 5.32). Alongside the chapel
stood a distinctive stone tower, which became popular as a pilgrimage site (see Fig.
5.33). The medieval structure was built to have the aptly tapered cylindrical form of a
candle. The construction survived until pulled down by a mob during the iconoclastic
upheaval of the French Revolution.
230 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
S
5
S
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§
5
5
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5
5
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g
SP. LOLOL L OV LOL LOI OL OL SLO OL FADS PESOS.
Fig. 5.31 The Holy Candle. Miniature, fourteenth century. Private collection. Reproduced in
Auguste Terninck, Notre-Dame du Joyel, ou Histoire légendaire et numismatique de la chandelle d’Arras
(Arras, France: A. Brissy, 1853), 99.
Cerne VM
er.
Domina Nostra Ardentium.
Fig. 5.32 “Domina Nostra Ardentium.” Illustration, 1910. Published in Cavrois de Saternault,
Histoire du Saint-Cierge d’Arras et de la Confrérie de Notre-Dame des Ardents, 3rd ed. (Arras, France:
La Société du Pas-de-Calais, 1910), frontispiece.
5. A Troupe of Sources and Analogues 231
Fig. 5.33 “Vue perspective d’une partie de la petite place d’ Arras, vis a vis l’hdtel-de-ville.”
Drawing by Joseph Victor David, 1773. Reproduced in Cavrois de Saternault, Histoire du Saint-
Cierge d’Arras et de la Confrérie de Notre-Dame des Ardents, 3rd ed. (Arras, France: La Société du
Pas-de-Calais, 1910), 41.
For what it is worth, there would not be much challenge in formulating a Freudian
interpretation here. The large actual candles, the reliquary, and the lapidary tower
from the Middle Ages are all phalliform. Furthermore, the language of Marian
miracles and Marian devotion is hardly destitute of amatory elements to connect male
devotees with a highly feminine Mary. But sometimes, to ring a change upon the
famous saying ascribed again and again to Sigmund Freud, a candle is just a candle.
Or, to take the thought as formulated by the American horror novelist Stephen King,
“Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a story’s just a story.”
The confraternity has a neatly twofold nexus with Our Lady’s Tumbler. Both the
professional occupation of the performers who made up the guild and the Marian
nature of the miracle at the root of their foundation legend make unsurprising that
the Festival of Our Lady of the Fevered is conflated to this day with the “jongleurs de
Notre Dame.” What further relevance does the foundation legend for the confraternity
of jongleurs at Arras have for Our Lady’s Tumbler? When the poem was composed,
such entertainers still lacked any formal organization or institution to support them
collectively—they were cats waiting to be herded. In early medieval society they
had been marginalized and often cast out. They belonged to a seamy underbelly
232 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
that encompassed beggars, ladies of the night, and petty criminals. In the fullness of
time, jongleurs turned sedentary, professionalized, and concentrated on skills that
qualified them as minstrels—a term that they would have had good reason to prefer
when describing themselves. Simultaneously, they moved by degrees toward being
able to establish group identities along the lines of other craftsmen. In so doing, they
naturally modeled their new professional unions on those found in existing crafts.
In other words, they formed guilds. In their case, they were devoted to the shared
pursuit of waxing poetic. In the transitional period between peripheralization and
institutionalization, the jongleurs still had no mechanism for achieving individual
stability within a collective. This lacking may explain why so many performers of
this type entered monasteries, first especially Cistercian ones and later Franciscan
friaries. Such groups afforded them a field day, their only means of belonging to a
fixed collectivity. The tale of Norman and Itier may be untangled not only as a Marian
miracle, but equally as a social parable that urges overcoming individual differences
for the common good. The explication could even be stretched to produce a reading
of the story as a foundation myth for what would be considered today unionization.
Thejongleurs in the tale of Arras are musicians, who could find overlapping interests
and bond together to protect them. By comparison, the physical performers remained
poor pariahs. Within the monasteries too, former entertainers faced condemnation
if they could not segue from bodily movement to voice and instruments in their
performances. One lesson latent in Our Lady’s Tumbler is the mistrust of physical self-
expression and entertainment. The Virgin showed herself far more understanding
than did the monks about the antics of the converted tumbler. Medieval churches,
especially cathedrals, witnessed many forms of conduct that would appear decidedly
incongruous and indecorous today. Particularly where pilgrims congregated,
much behavior that nowadays would be permissible only on the streets played out
instead within places of worship. But the dividing line between the acceptable and
unacceptable may have run between music—even instrumental music—and dance.
The Pious Sweat of Monks and Lay Brothers
Genius is one percent inspiration,
ninety-nine percent perspiration.
—Thomas Alva Edison (1903)
Beyond the miracle of Peter Iverni or that of the holy legend of Arras, other exempla
and legends relate to Our Lady’s Tumbler not by having as the central character a
professional entertainer but by involving a specific narrative motif. For instance,
an exemplum attested in no fewer than five different versions shows Mary as she
comforts those who are sweating. We have seen how the legendary Veronica sought
to take the edge off the suffering of Jesus when he was en route to the crucifixion and
came away with a miraculous memento that became the main motif of the episode.
5. A Troupe of Sources and Analogues 233
Here, the wonder is the Virgin’s activity in succoring monastic devotees as they ooze
sweat or sniffle tears from the relevant glands. Where miracles induced by perspiration
enter the picture, medieval authors and audiences imposed no compulsion to take the
proverbial grain of salt.
One form tells of a twelfth-century brother of Clairvaux. This Rainald would
watch admiringly as his fellow Cistercians toiled in the fields. Even brethren of noble
birth pitched themselves into the task. Once he had a vision in which the Virgin, her
cousin Elizabeth, and the follower of Jesus named Mary Magdalene paid a visit to the
brothers as they labored in the meadows. Another version of the same story relates
that the miracle took place while the white monks of Clairvaux were reaping in the
valley. The Virgin, her mother Anne, and Mary Magdalene swooped down in a great
flood of light (here the meaning of the toponym Clairvaux in French merits mention:
“Bright Valley” or “Valley of Light”). After making their free-fall, the three women
wiped the sweat from the brows of the harvesting brethren and fanned them with the
arms of their garments. In a much later telling, a long-in-the-tooth knight who had
become a brother at Clairvaux saw one of the three, a beautiful young woman, greet
each brother, give him a kiss and hug, and sopped the sweat from his sautéed brow
with a linen cloth. In the thirteenth century, a monk of Villers in Brabant witnessed
the Virgin, in the company of Mary Magdalene, fan the toiling brethren and pat away
their perspiration with her sleeve.
At the Cistercian abbey of Heisterbach near Cologne in the Rhineland, Caesarius
claims to have been so deeply moved upon first hearing this exemplum that in response
he entered the monastery. In his account, the Virgin Mary visited with Anne as the
monks of the abbey worked in the fields. The two saintly women daubed the men’s
brows and dispatched a breeze to cool them. Between 1219 and 1223 Caesarius served
as master of novices. During this stretch he composed his own collection of miracles,
chock-full of exempla (746 of them). The twelve books, entitled “Great Dialogue of
Visions and Miracles,” are presented as a dialogue between a probationer and the
author himself, in his magisterial capacity (see Fig. 3.12). Through the illustrative
stories, the writer aimed ultimately to contribute to the training and formation of
monks, with all due attention to the special circumstances of lay brothers too. He
devoted the seventh book to tales relating to Mary. Ample room existed for strong
overlap between the exempla incorporated into such collections and records of
apparitions of the Virgin to Cistercians. Eight such apparitions are known to have
befallen the brethren of Clairvaux alone in the second half of the twelfth century. The
Mother of God visited the “bright valley” continually.
Beyond the five interrelated exempla, in other cases the Virgin also undertakes an
antiperspirant role. One appears in the medieval French verse of Gautier de Coinci.
His voluminous Miracles of the Virgin extends over roughly 30,000 verses. In this
poem he tells of one miracle involving a Carthusian brother which exhibits many
striking similarities to Our Lady’s Tumbler. The poet relates this tale very briefly. With
234 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
the omission of the moralizing coda, it totals a mere sixty-five verses. To date, the
exact relationship between the two miracles has not been unsnarled, although Gautier
seems likely to have known and been inspired by some form of Our Lady’s Tumbler.
Probably he read or heard a version along the lines of what has survived. Then again,
he may have encountered an iteration of it that was never written down. In this case,
the meager synopsis in the Latin exemplum could well be only the tip of an iceberg of
tellings and retellings, and writings and rewritings, that has melted out of our grasp.
The author himself claims at the outset to have read a version of the miracle about the
Carthusian, but if a text existed, it too has evaporated.
In Gautier’s miracle, a monk of the order in question remains in church after all the
daily and nightly offices. There he devotes himself with intensity and persistence to
mortifications of prayer and devotion. In each session he prostrates himself on bared
knees fifty to a hundred times as he prays before an image of the Virgin. Despite
having peeled off the leggings that would have shielded his joints, he exerts himself
so much that runnels of sweat stream from him. One of the brethren spies on him
one night to see what he does in the chapel after the office. At the end of the ritual,
his fellow monk sees Mary dismount from heaven to stroke with a snow-white veil
the perspiring face of the devout Carthusian. After revealing to the prior and to his
devout comrade the miracle that he witnessed, the brother dies. A second episode
is recorded in the Song of the Knight and the Squire, by Jehan de Saint-Quentin. The
poet, a self-described clerk, composed songs in Picard that deal with many topics, but
especially frequently with Marian miracles. He seems often to have followed oral or at
least otherwise unattested sources. In the poem under consideration, a castellan, the
commander of the castle, looks on unperceived at a poignant scene. The Virgin dries
with her kerchief the teardrops welling from the eyes of a repentant knight while he
gets down on his knees before her. A related third form of the legend is transmitted
by Gautier de Coinci. This one pertains to the icon of Our Lady of Saydnaya, a city
in the mountains near Damascus in Syria. The convent to which the icon belonged
supported a cult that was a going concern in the late twelfth century. The miracle tells
of a Carthusian whose extreme devotion elicits a similar display of compassion from
the Virgin. In this case, the monk kneels so long in prayer on bare knees before the
Madonna that wetness courses down from his brow. At this, Mary comes down from
heaven to dry his face with her soft, snow-white hand towel.
These many other miracles of the Virgin add both inevitability and mystery to
the successful formula of Our Lady’s Tumbler. Probably loosely under the influence
of the Veronica legend, the idea arose that the Mother of God might concern herself
with assuaging the toils—or, more particularly, the sweat and tears—of mere mortal
monks as they executed either fieldwork or choir devotions. Her governing principle
appears to have been “no sweat.” On a higher plane, another component in the story
was Sheer love. The sheerness refers partly to fabric, while the affection derives its
exceptionality from being directed to a statue.
5. A Troupe of Sources and Analogues 235
The Love of Statuesque Beauty
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
In Our Lady’s Tumbler the protagonist conducts the strangest of charm offensives. He
strips down to the lowest and most intimate layer of clothing as he exerts himself to
the utmost to be obsequious to the woman he adores. The proverbial saying “worse
for wear” seems here to find its inverse in the concept of being “better for not wearing.”
The scene, when described in this bare-bones way, brings to mind other acts between
lovers.
The incident is also curiously reminiscent of another famous Marian miracle,
recounted by Gautier de Coinci and others. In it a youth, seeking a secure place for
his engagement ring before engaging in an athletic event, deposits it on the finger
of a statue of the Virgin. He finds the image “so fresh and beautiful... a thousand
times more beautiful than she who gave this ring” that he plights his troth of lifelong
service. He is soon set to renege upon his pledge. On the night after he has uttered his
official “till death do us part,” the Virgin intervenes as an animate anti-aphrodisiac
and interposes herself between him and his bride. The double-cross does not aim
for Mary to consummate the wedding in place of the newlywed woman—in other
words, the substitution is not the motif known as the bed trick. Rather, it amounts
to a means of preserving chastity. The story ends with the young man joining the
monastery, as he had pledged. In this tale, an adolescent takes the habit after an
encounter with a Madonna, who turns out to be both seducing and sedating. The
sequence of events conforms to a narrative line used much earlier by similar accounts
in which fabric and sweat are not always key components. Ultimately, the Marian
tale appropriates elements from these other accounts, which have the boy becoming
affianced to a sculpture of Venus. Many versions of the Venereal tale, including some
that transmogrify earlier ones, have been told over the centuries. The most famous
may be the 1837 short story “The Venus of Ille” by Prosper Mérimée (see Fig. 5.34).
Eventually, the miracle has loose analogues in reality. In some cases, a young man
would make an oath of celibacy by donning a ring and putting an identical one on a
carving of the Virgin.
The still bigger picture is stories, such as the legend of Pygmalion, in which a man
falls in love with a sculpture. Loosely related too are equal and opposite tales, in
which to beguile her beloved a woman assumes the guise of an effigy. The archetype
here would be the myth of Pasiphaé, a daughter of the sun god Helios, who is hexed
to fall in love with a bull. To copulate with the beast, she enters a wooden cow that
her beloved bovine mounts. The cross-species coupling and very real insemination
achieved by the ploy of this decoy leads to the birthing of a monstrous hybrid, the
Minotaur.
236 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
Fig. 5.34 Front cover of Prosper Mérimée, La Vénus d’Ille / La double méprise / Les dmes du purgatoire,
illus. Mario Labocetta (Paris: Nilsson, 1930).
Fig. 5.35 Postcard depicting the Volto Santo in the church of St. Martin, Lucca
(Milan, Italy: Cesare Capello, early twentieth century).
5. A Troupe of Sources and Analogues 237
Love of manmade representations remains with us. The ability of individual sculptors
to hew marble into lifelike form may have dwindled from the glory days of ancient
Greece and Rome, but machines enable the mass manufacture of ever more realistic
and even hyperreal three-dimensional replicas. Stories of inflatable dolls, mannequins,
and robots proliferate, to say nothing of narratives in which disembodied simulations
of human characters play leading roles. Yet these other tales of images evidence only
superficial overlap with medieval Western ones. Our investigations need to turn
elsewhere for further analogues to Our Lady’s Tumbler.
The Holy Face of Christ and Virgin Saints
If we venture beyond miracles attributed specifically to the Virgin Mary, or rather to
thaumaturgic images of her, the most relevant parallel emerges in a wonder ascribed to
the Holy Face. This statue hangs upon a crucifix at the church of Saint Martin in Lucca
(see Fig. 5.35). It became the object of the first cult devoted to a carving of Jesus on the
rood. This wooden pictorialization shows the crucified Christ triumphant, wearing
an ankle-length tunic, This specific representation of him standing against the cross
became popularly renowned, being mentioned already as the habitual oath (“by the
Face at Lucca”) of King William Rufus in the late eleventh century. Three hundred years
later it is still assumed to be common knowledge. At one point in Dante’s Commedia,
demons cry out to a sinner from the sculpture’s adoptive hometown: “This is no place
for the Holy Face!” Piers Plowman, the eponymous pilgrim in William Langland’s
late fourteenth-century alliterative poem, vows by it that at least metaphorically
his pilgrimage consists in plowing. As such mentions certify, the image was widely
revered throughout Western Europe. Among other things, the Lucchese artifact is
attested over a large area on pilgrims’ badges of lead.
Medieval legend maintained that the statue’s countenance was crafted by an angel,
whereas all the rest was sculpted by Nicodemus. The story merits being put into
an easily assimilated recapitulation. According to the Gospel of John, this Pharisee
became a disciple of Jesus. After the crucifixion, he assisted Joseph of Arimathea in
deposing Christ from the cross and laying him in the tomb. Thereafter he set out, at
the urging of God, to shape an image of the Christian savior on the crucifix. While
the would-be sculptor slept, a divine emissary completed the face. Nicodemus hid
the precious sculpture in a cave, where it remained closeted for centuries. The larger
than life-size effigy of cedar was miraculous not merely in its creation but also in
its subsequent transportation. It reputedly arrived in Lucca in the eighth century
thanks to the enterprise of two Italian bishops (see Fig. 5.36). A procession known as
the Illumination of the Holy Cross still takes place annually. In it, participants carry
lighted candles through the streets to the church.
The rich dossier of miracles about the Holy Face contains one highly relevant to Our
Lady’s Tumbler. This legend originated in the twelfth century, to judge by its style and
content. In the key Latin form, a poor young man from Gaul stops on a pilgrimage to
Jerusalem to see the carving in Lucca. Praying and weeping amid the great huddle of
238 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
pilgrims as they make offerings, he thinks that he will confer on her his only good in
a no-charge performance: he will sing hymns to the Holy Rood while accompanying
himself on the musical instrument, a fiddle, he has on his arm. As a sign of favor to
the suppliant, God demonstrates his appreciation by causing the figure of the Holy
Face to look down at the musician and to let fall a silver slipper from its right foot into
his lap. After leaving the chapel with the footwear, the unnamed young man returns
with it, but the miracle is confirmed by the circumstance that it will no longer fit on
the foot of the image. The plight is a near opposite of the pivotal episode in Cinderella.
Fig. 5.36 Postcard reproduction of Vincenzo Barsotti’s L’arrivo a Lucca del Volto Santo (Lucca, Italy:
Archivio di Stato, early twentieth century).
The unique medieval French telling of this miracle appears in a large mishmash of
verse texts that was probably compiled by a monk of the Benedictine monastery
of Saint Bertin in France. The date of composition has been disputed. The crucial
personage in the account is a minstrel often named Jenois, who plays in vain to earn
his sustenance. Although seven hundred people pass by him, no one treats him to
even one coin. Then, he enters the church where the Holy Face had only recently
arrived. After finding out that the image represents Jesus Christ, he begins to sing
to the accompaniment of his string instrument, the vielle (see Fig. 5.37). The poem
remains reticent about the controversy over the playing of musical instruments of
any sort within the church. Whether fiddles or organs, everything beyond the human
voice (and even at times it too) has been suspect. In any case, the performance sets in
motion a miracle. First, the sculpture, inspired by the Holy Ghost, becomes animate.
5. A Troupe of Sources and Analogues
a Ply
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4 alee uaticee Le (anne Ccpuldne cribeeafalan. ct
_ ff pure — autore “ee foyis Oy Dire drat -
Fig. 5.37 Jenois before the Holy Face. Miniature, fifteenth century. Vatican,
Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Palatinus Latinus 1988, fol. 1r.
= == 1 — rt q
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239
240 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
Then, it loosens one of its feet from the nails holding it to the cross, stretches it out,
and kicks the shoe, encased in silver and gold and encrusted in precious stones, to
the jongleur. When the young man goes off to eat, the bishop enjoins him to return,
but tells him that he may keep the trove if the miracle is repeated. At this point, the
image fills with spite, loses its temper, takes back the foot covering, and orders that it
not be taken from the jongleur unless with substantial reparation, which is provided.
Jenois is now able to dine and offers a repast to the poor of the city, to whom he also
allocates the wealth he has acquired. Afterward follows what qualifies as a celebratory
outcome only in the unusual confines of medieval hagiography. The performer
resumes his pilgrimage, but is captured by pagans, tortured, and decapitated. His
body is subsequently venerated in Rome.
In all its forms, the story has encoded within it an argument to validate largesse
to entertainers in recompense for their performances, at least when they sing on
pious topics. This dimension of the tale is discussed unreservedly in the medieval
French Aliscans. This long “song of heroic deeds” from the second half of the twelfth
century tells of the pitched battle and bloodletting from which it takes its name. At
one point in the narrative, an itinerant jongleur endeavors to elicit generosity from his
audience by singing an editorial. He exhorts noblemen not to listen to entertainers of
his sort unless they stand ready to open their wallets. To prove his point, he cites the
beneficence of the Holy Face of Lucca. All ought to cherish performers for the joy they
seek and their love of singing. A wayfaring professional could also take the episode
to heart as betokening the miracles that God could deign to perform for even the
humblest spectators.
Not everyone was willing to take the miracle tale on faith and deem it plausible.
Overt incredulity is recorded at the latest by the beginning of the thirteenth century.
The nagging doubts are likely only to have been magnified when the story underwent
a still stranger transmogrification at a later stage. However improbable the sex change
may seem, the person crucified was alleged to have been a king’s daughter. To avoid
a forced marriage that would necessitate her violating the vow of chastity she had
taken, the nubile girl prayed for help from heaven. Whether she was dysphoric at
her physiological sex or not, we cannot know. Yet she was horrified by the prospect
of married life. She spared herself from a wedding by undergoing extemporaneously
a partial transgender transformation. In what is known clinically as hirsutism, the
damsel suddenly sprouted such scruffy and unkempt facial hair that she became
unmarriageable. Her condition made her the medieval anticipation of the later
standard in two-bit sideshows, the bearded lady. At this point the would-be suitor
soured on the idea of monogamy (at least with her) and withdrew his proposal. The
father flew into a rage and put his own daughter to the cross. The account goes on to
merge with that of the Holy Face, with a further miracle involving a jongleur and the
shoe from the image of the martyred (and bearded) virgin. The jury is still out on the
reasons for which these disparate motifs would have originated and amalgamated.
Face up to it: if ever a case called for a close shave by Occam’s razor, this would be
5. A Troupe of Sources and Analogues 241
the one. Of the many accounts, the most representative one may be the most famous.
In 1812 the Brothers Grimm incorporated a version into the first edition of their
so-called fairy tales, drawing upon a collection of exempla from 1700. In this version,
the woman in question is called Saint Kummernis, meaning “care” or “anxiety” (see
Fig. 5.38). Among sundry other names that have been attached to the mostly female
leading character, Wilgefortis supposedly derives from the Latin signifying “strong
maiden.” The tale is widely attested between the mid-fourteenth and mid-nineteenth
centuries: approximately one thousand records of it survive in texts and images. The
best-known representation may be a 1507 woodcut produced in Augsburg by Hans
Burgkmair the Elder. The artwork juxtaposes a narrative in text and an image that
shows the fiddler kneeling before the Holy Face, identified as “The Image at Lucca”
(see Fig. 5.39). The legend continued to be illustrated for centuries in art, even folk
art. A last major expression of the tale was literary, in an 1816 ballad. Here, the poet
assigned to Saint Cecilia the place formerly spoken for by Kummernis. In the poem,
an impecunious violinist moves an image of Cecilia so deeply that the saint tosses him
her golden shoe. Although this gesture leads to his being sentenced to death, he is
saved from execution when she also bestows upon him the matching item of footwear
(see Fig. 5.40).
Fig. 5.38 Unknown artist, St. Kiimmernis, 1678. Oil on panel. Museum im Prediger, Schwabisch
Gmiind. Image from Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Kuemmernis_museum_schwaebischgmuend.JPG
Santkumernus
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ainormes syer lin fur das bilo ond Sey get lo lang bef ym Das gecreutsiger bild ann lows
febucb gab Den nam er wno crag yn 3a ainem goloicbmud ynd wolt yn verkaulfen Do ipract>
per golofcbmio.icb hauff fern nit. villeicbt baftou yn gcftolen, Do antwartcr.nam.das gekrew
fyiger bilo bar mur pn gcbcn.man horet ficb nat daran nd fieng yn end rolt ynbcm ken, Dobe
gcret Der Serger D6 man Fo woiD<r 3 Dom bild fret. dae thet man. ynd rbet ocm bilo Den le
Din febiich widcranden far.do ger get er POIDEr oie Yor. Do licF Das hreutsger Dild den (cb
eider berab valle. Dee waroda gerger gar fro. wnd Danchet got vad fant kumeruus.
Fig. 5.39 St. Kimmernis. Woodcut by Hans Burgkmair, 1507. Augsburg. Image from Wikimedia
Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Burgkmair_Kuemmernis.JPG
Fig. 5.40 A fiddler plays before the Virgin, with a crowd assembled.
Drawing by Herman Kanckfuss, 1871.
5. A Troupe of Sources and Analogues 243
Loosely related to the story of Kummernis is an 1884 painting by the Swiss symbolist
painter Arnold Bocklin (see Fig. 5.41). Called The Hermit or The Fiddling Hermit, the
painting depicts an old solitary playing the fiddle before a simple Madonna, as little
angels who look on applaud him and chuckle. More closely connected is a text entitled
“The Miracle” that was published in a German newspaper in 1899. The author leaves
muzzy whether the piece is a folktale, legend, or fiction. He sets the action in an
indeterminate but presumably Italian locale. The young protagonist is a lazy Pietro,
with a sister named Manuela. Otherwise unaccomplished, the good-for-naught young
man could turn somersaults, stand on his head, and walk on his hands. As the result
of a romantic unhappiness, his sibling took her own life. Lacking the wherewithal
to pay for her burial, her do-nothing brother was at his wit’s end. He resorted to a
Madonna, whom he propitiated by making the only offering he could: he walked
on his hands. In return he received the miracle of hearing a gold coin clink upon the
church floor stones. When the pastor became aware that the Virgin had authorized (or
even authored) this wonder, he was persuaded to bury Manuela even though she had
sinned by committing suicide. The story, if in any of its elements not entirely fictitious,
offers a noteworthy example of a legend in the making.
The chances of conflation between the miracle of the slipper and the tale of Our
Lady’s Tumbler have been compounded in German. In that language, the two narratives
have been name-twins. Sometimes the miracle of the slipper is called simply by the
noun equivalent to The Minstrel or The Jongleur (see Fig. 5.42). More misleadingly, the
title The Dancer of Our Lady has been used to designate both legends. Consider the
case of Friedrich Hedler, who made a specialty of Marian and related material in his
theatrical oeuvre after World War II. One of his plays, printed in 1950, was titled thus
(see Fig. 5.43), which might awaken a reasonable expectation that it would deal with
the story of Our Lady’s Tumbler. Such is not the case. Instead, the text tells of a young
man whose playing of a flute persuades a statue to give him its golden shoes so that
he can purchase a wedding band.
In 1954, the story of the golden footwear, under a different title, is found once
again in a German collection called The Miracle of the Golden Shoes and Other Legends.
The volume also includes a tale with the title “The Minnesinger of Our Dear Lady.”
Unexpectedly and confusingly, this is a lightly fictionalized account of episodes from
the life of the eleventh-century poet, Hermann the Cripple of Reichenau, well known
for having composed the Marian prayer “Loving Mother of the Savior.” In the same
year, the well-shod narrative surfaces in the United States in a basic German reader
entitled Tell Me Something! The story, here called “The Minstrel of Our Dear Lady,” is
presented as having originated in the Rhine River valley in the Middle Ages. To be
specific, the tale is set in Mainz, Germany. This locale points ultimately to the poem
“The Poor Minstrel” by Guido Gorres, first brought out in 1836, entitled “The Poor
Minstrel.” Its whose action takes place in the same Rhineland city. Yet we cannot be
sure whether the anthologist knew the nineteenth-century poem, for he acknowledged
nothing about his source or sources. Despite the book’s title, we are left wishing in
vain to be told something more.
244 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 1
The essential contours of the miracle narrative about the golden shoes remain
impressively constant across the ages. A minstrel who has fallen on hard times
performs on his violin in a little chapel before a statue of the Virgin and Child. The
Mother of God cracks a smile, her son beckons to her with both arms outstretched,
and to satisfy him Mary lets the golden shoe on her left foot drop before the minstrel.
When the entertainer takes it to a goldsmith, he is suspected of larceny. The judge
condemns him to death by hanging. On the way to the gallows, the performer asks as
his last wish to play the fiddle before the sculpture. By doing so, he manages to cheat
the hangman in an unconventionally happy ending. All happens exactly as before,
except that this time the shoe falls from the Madonna’s right foot. The convicted man
Fig. 5.41 Arnold Bocklin, Der Einsiedler, 1884. Painting. Berlin, Museum Alte Nationalgalerie. Image
from Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bocklin_Einsiedler.jpg
5. A Troupe of Sources and Analogues 245
is now recognized as blameless, is led away triumphantly in a throng, succeeds in his
performing thereafter, and is granted a little house of his own.
The path of Our Lady’s Tumbler is a major highway in comparison with the minor
byways of the many other stories we have encountered thus far. Although hold-ups
can stop or slow motion to a crawl, and the types of conveyance can change, we at
least have an easier time determining who were the first travelers, and what arteries
they followed as they made their passage. The moment has come to bob ahead past
the bottleneck of early modern times to the early 1870s, when the medieval tale was
rediscovered and brought back to life. All the central agents of the resuscitation can be
identified —in the first instance, they were the literary scholars known as philologists.
a=
TANZER
UNSERER
LIEBEN
Fig. 5.42 “Der Spielmann.” Illustration by Fig. 5.43 Front cover of Friedrich Hedler,
Wilhelm Schafer, 1925. Published in Fritz Der Tanzer unserer Lieben Frau: Ein Spiel nach
Schlo&, ed., Legenden: Alte Erzahlungen in der altfranz6sischen und altdeutschen Motiven,
Dichtung unserer Zeit (Sannerz, Germany: illus. P. J. Paffenholz (Munich, Germany:
Eberhard Arnold, 1925), 35. Buchner, 1950).
Notes
Art and beauty and poetry. E. K. R[and], “Editor's Preface,” Speculum 1 (1926): 3-4, at 4.
Notes to Preface
Overture
unattributed joke. The incidentals (the regional origins of the two musicians, the specific
cathedrals where they played, etc.) vary in different texts, but the most common form has the
particulars as retold here. The earliest versions date to the summer of 2011.
the Virgin. Our Lady of the Assumption.
The Story of a Story
In the introduction. Arthur Langfors, review of E. Lommatzsch and M. L. Wagner, eds., Del
Tumbeor Nostre Dame, in Romania 48 (1922): 288-90, at 290.
reflexes of the Italian Renaissance. W. D. Robson-Scott, The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival
in Germany: A Chapter in the History of Taste (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 3-17; Thomas
Cocke, “The Wheel of Fortune: The Appreciation of Gothic since the Middle Ages,” in Age
of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England, 1200-1400, ed. Jonathan Alexander and Paul Binski
(London: Royal Academy of Arts, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987), 183-91.
my godmother. Mary Koenig Weigand. I use the word godmother figuratively, not literally.
reception. Reception here signifies the ways in which later periods have received and re-created
a literary work. Earlier generations might have spoken instead of sources and influences. Such
was their means of charting the cosmic chain of being that leads down to the latest copy from
the earliest, whether we are fortunate enough or not to possess the original.
flight attendant. Bette Nash, whose likely status as the world’s oldest flight attendant, with
sixty years of service, has been discussed in various media, including newspapers, magazines,
television, and online resources.
Erich Segal. “Rencontre avec Erich Segal,” L’Express, March 29, 1971.
© 2018 Jan M. Ziolkowski, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0132.06
248 Notes to Preface
From Our Lady’s Tumbler to The Jongleur of Notre Dame
from the French. Le jongleur de Notre Dame.
writing mania. | refer to the fugue state called furor scribendi in Latin.
medievalism. In analyzing medievalism in French literature, Janine Dakyns stops at 1870: see
Dakyns, The Middle Ages in French Literature 1851-1900 (London: Oxford University Press, 1973).
In English historiography, the same year is also frequently a dividing line, e.g., R. C. K. Ensor,
ed., England, 1870-1914, Oxford History of England, vol. 14 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936).
It is presented as a decisive demarcation in David Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History
(Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015).
movements in art and culture. See, for example, John Steegman, Victorian Taste: A Study of the
Arts and Architecture from 1830 to 1870 (London: Nelson, 1970); Walter Edwards Houghton, The
Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 (New Haven, CT: Published for Wellesley College by Yale
University Press, 1957).
conventional scheme. Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (London:
Constable, 1928), 214.
Notes to Chapter 1 — The French Poem 249
Notes to Chapter 1
back to the twelfth century. Henry Adams, Letter to Charles M. Gaskell, Paris, October 9, 1899, in
LHA 5: 41-43, at 42.
The French Poem
Our Lady’s Tumbler. Del Tumbeor Nostre Dame, in the original medieval French (literally, Of the
Tumbler of Our Lady).
from the Middle Ages. Pierre Kunstmann, ed. and trans., Vierge et merveille: Les miracles de Notre-
Dame narratifs au Moyen Age (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1981), 11-12.
quintessentially medieval puzzles. The most comprehensive presentation is in Paul Bretel, Le
Jongleur de Notre-Dame, Traductions des classiques du Moyen Age, vol. 64 (Paris: Honoré
Champion, 2003), which provides a translation into modern French, a text of the Old French,
and a commentary, as well as the text of Anatole France’s story. A scholarly translation into
English with the original en face can be found in Everett C. Wilkie Jr., trans., “Our Lady’s
Tumbler,” Allegorica: A Journal of Medieval & Renaissance Literature 4 (1979): 81-120.
stand-alone moralizing piece. Adrian P. Tudor, “Preaching, Storytelling, and the Performance of
Short Pious Narratives,” in Performing Medieval Narrative, ed. Evelyn Birge Vitz et al. (Cambridge:
D. S. Brewer, 2005), 141-53, at 141.
the friars, too. David Jones, trans., Friars’ Tales: Thirteenth-Century Exempla from the British Isles
(Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2011).
arts of preaching. The Latin for these manuals is artes praedicandi.
songs of heroic deeds. In French, chansons de geste.
comedies. In Latin, comoediae.
av
exempla. G. T. Shepherd, “The Emancipation of Story in the Twelfth Century,” in Medieval
Narrative: A Symposium, ed. Hans Bekker-Nielsen et al. (Odense, Denmark: Odense University
Press, 1979), 4-57.
physical. For two inspirational guides to this vast topic, see Peter Brown, The Body and Society:
Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, Lectures on the History of Religions,
New Series, vol. 13 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Caroline Walker Bynum, The
Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336, Lectures on the History of Religions,
New Series, vol. 15 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
underclothes. A light cotelle or tunic.
acrobatics. Lines 135-36: “they serve by chanting, and I will serve by tumbling.”
The sequence culminates. Lines 163-67.
vida. See The Vidas of the Troubadours, trans. Margarita Egan, Garland Library of Medieval
Literature, Series B, vol. 6 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1984).
250 Notes to Chapter 1 — The Manuscripts
miracles about Mary. Guy Philippart, “Le récit miraculaire marial dans l’Occident medieval,”
in Marie: Le culte de la Vierge dans la société médiévale, ed. Dominique Iogna-Prat et al. (Paris:
Beauchesne, 1996), 563-90, at 574.
The Manuscripts
No mass-produced items of this sort exist. The closest would be manuscripts produced by the
pecia system. Yet our derivative piecemeal speaks to the difference between it and machine-age
manufacture.
five codices. Hermann Wachter, “Der Springer unserer lieben Frau,” Romanische Forschungen 11.1
(1901): 223-88, at 299. The five manuscripts are Chantilly, Musée Condé (formerly Bibliotheque
et archives du Chateau), MS 475 (previously 1578), fols. 190-196; Paris, Bibliotheque nationale
de France, Arsenal MS 3516, fols. 127ra—128vb; Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France, Arsenal
MS 3518, fols. 89r-93r; Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France, MS frangais 1807, fols. 142-146;
and Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France, MS nouvelles acquisitions frangaises 4276, fols.
78v-.
a form of French. Charles Théodore Gossen, “Considérations sur le franco-picard, langue
littéraire du Moyen Age,” Les dialectes belgo-romans 13 (1956): 97-121.
langue d’oil. The French could be translated “the language of oui.” Most often it is contrasted
to langue d’oc, “the language of oc.” In both cases, the words in the native language were the
common way of expressing the affirmative “yes.”
common errors. For the broader intellectual consequences of this focus on error, see Seth Lerer,
Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2002).
Arsenal library. Since 1934, the Arsenal collection has belonged to the National Library of France
in Paris. Bibliotheque nationale de France, Arsenal MS 3516, fols. 127ra—128rb.
major errors. On the errors in the archetype a, see Wachter, “Der Springer unserer lieben Frau,”
226-29.
Gautier de Coinci and Anonymity
miracles of the Virgin. The standard early description of the manuscript and its contents is Henry
Martin, Catalogue des manuscrits de la Bibliotheque de l’Arsenal, 9 vols. (Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit,
1885-1895), 3: 395-405, at 399. The closest study of this one codex is Claudia Guggenbihl,
Recherches sur la composition et la structure du ms. Arsenal 3516 (Basel, Switzerland: A. Francke,
1998), 270, on fols. 127ra—139re. Guggenbiihl’s invaluable study touches upon Our Lady’s
Tumbler repeatedly, especially at pp. 122 (on the table of contents), 131, 225, 354, 371.
unequivocally but wrongly. The error has continued to be made even recently: see Christophe
Ghristi and Mathias Auclair, La belle époque de Massenet (Montreuil, France: Gourcuff Gradenigo
Editions, 2011), 160.
translated and read. For one prominent case, see Erhard Lommatzsch, “Anatole France und
Gautier de Coincy,” Zeitschrift fiir romanische Philologie 58 (1938): 670-83, repr. in idem, Kleinere
Schriften zur romanischen Philologie (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1954), 126-38.
Notes to Chapter 1 — Gautier de Coinci and Anonymity 251
Coinci-L’Abbaye. The place of Gautier’s birth, and the spelling of its name, have been debated:
see Louis Allen, “The Birthplace of Gautier de Coincy,” Modern Philology 33 (1936): 239-42.
dedicated to Mary. As far as the association with the Mother of God is concerned, the name of
Notre Dame (“Our Lady”) says it all.
slipper. Anne L. Clark, “Guardians of the Sacred: The Nuns of Soissons and the Slipper of the
Virgin Mary,” Church History 76 (2007): 724-49.
Hugh Farsit. Hugo Farsitus, Libellus de miraculis beatae Mariae virginis in urbe Suessionensi, in PL
179: 1777-800. For analysis, see Gabriela Signori, Maria zwischen Kathedrale, Kloster und Welt:
Hagiographische und historiographische Anniherungen an eine hochmittelalterliche Wunderpredigt
(Sigmaringen, Germany: Jan Thorbecke, 1995), 125-51.
discomfort. It is known technically as burning dysesthesia.
books of verse Marian miracles. Miracles de Nostre Dame. They encompass fifty-eight narratives,
of which thirty-five are in book 1, twenty-three in book 2. In addition, the miracle collection
contains two sermons, eighteen songs, and five prayers. The whole amounts to a total of
roughly 35,500 octosyllabic lines.
language and rhetoric. On the language and rhetoric, see Tony Hunt, Miraculous Rhymes: The
Writing of Gautier de Coinci, Gallica, vol. 8 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007).
images of the Mother of God. Jean-Marie Sansterre, “La Vierge Marie et ses images chez Gautier
de Coinci et Césaire de Heisterbach,” Viator (English and Multilingual Edition) 41.1 (2010): 147-78,
at 150-51.
representations as characters. Anna Russakoff, “The Role of the Image in an Illustrated Manuscript
of Les Miracles de Notre-Dame by Gautier de Coinci: Besancon, Bibliotheque municipale 551,”
Manuscripta 47.1 (2004): 135-44, at 138.
subgenre. Philippart, “Le récit miraculaire marial,” 566-67.
extant manuscripts. Kathryn A. Duys, assisted by Kathy M. Krause and Alison Stones, “Gautier
de Coinci’s Miracles de Nostre Dame: Manuscript List,” in Gautier de Coinci: Miracles, Music, and
Manuscripts, ed. Kathy M. Krause and Alison Stones, Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern
Europe, vol. 13 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2006), 345-66.
musical notation. Gautier de Coinci, Les chansons a la Vierge, ed. Jacques Chailley, Publications
de la Société francaise de musicologie, First Series, vol. 15 (Paris: Heugel, 1959); Kathryn Duys,
“Manuscripts that Preserve the Songs of Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles de Nostre Dame (Listed by
Date and Siglum),” in Krause and Stones, Gautier de Coinci, 367-68.
Likenesses of Madonnas. See, for example, Christine Lapostolle, “Images et apparitions:
Illustrations des Miracles de Nostre Dame,” Meédiévales 2 (1982): 47-66; Russakoff, “Role of the
Image,” 135-44; Sansterre, “La Vierge Marie et ses images”; Nancy Blake, “Images of the Virgin
Mary in the Soissons Manuscript (Paris, BNF, nouv. acq. fr. 25451),” in Krause and Stones,
Gautier de Coinci, 253-77; Alison Stones, “Notes on the Artistic Context of Some Gautier de
Coinci Manuscripts,” “Appendix ITI: Illustrated Miracles de Nostre Dame Manuscripts Listed by
Sigla,” and “Appendix IV,” in Krause and Stones, Gautier de Coinci, 65-98, 369-96.
genuflection. An act designated in Greek as proskunesis (also prostration or bowing).
252 Notes to Chapter 1 — Picardy
describing himself. 1 Miracle 11, 2315-17, cited by Hunt, Miraculous Rhymes, 49: “Car troveres ne
sui je mie / Fors de ma dame et de m’amie / Ne menestrex ne sui je pas.”
vielle. Also often viele, with a single 1.
parchment. The parchment here is a bifolium, which in a manuscript signifies the equivalent of
two sheets, side by side, that have not been cut—the equivalent of four pages in a printed book.
minstrelsy and monasticism. See Kathryn A. Duys, “Minstrel’s Mantle and Monk’s Hood: The
Authorial Persona of Gautier de Coinci in His Poetry and Illuminations,” in Krause and Stones,
Gautier de Coinci, 37-63.
does not suffice. For example, the wrong ascription has been made by Sheldon Christian, Our
Lady’s Tumbler: A Modern Miracle Play (Portland, ME: Anthoensen Press, 1948), viii; Henri
Marmier, Le bateleur de Notre-Dame (d’aprés Gautier de Coincy) (Paris: H. Piazza, 1951), 9-14.
has been described. Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972).
gain some sense of him. Female poets existed, but they were greatly outnumbered by male ones.
Furthermore, the details of monastic life suggest strongly that the person who wrote the poem
was a man.
Picardy
dialect that became modern French. See especially Bernard Cerquiglini, Une langue orpheline (Paris:
Minuit, 2007).
1268. In scholarly parlance, that year represents the terminus ante quem, signifying the date
before which the composition of a work must be situated.
around 1200. In fact, the year of 1200 was emblazoned confidently on the cover of the 1920
standard edition. For the most reliable and succinct details about the text and its constitution,
see Erhard Lommatzsch and Max Leopold Wagner, eds., Del tumbeor Nostre Dame: Altfranzésische
Marien-legende (um 1200), Romanische Texte zum Gebrauch fiir Vorlesungen und Ubungen, vol.
1 (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1920).
thoroughgoing analysis. The study in question was produced by an American scholar of
medieval French language and literature who brought out his dissertation five years later in
1925. See Louis Allen, De l’hermite et del jougleour: A Thirteenth Century “Conte Pieux.” Text, with
Introduction and Notes, Including a Study of the Poem’s Relationship to “Del Tumbeor Nostre Dame”
and “Del Chevalier au Barisel” (Paris: Joseph Solsone, 1925), 53 (between 1223 and 1233). See
also Louis Karl, “La légende de 1l’Ermite et le Jongleur,” Revue des langues romanes 63 (1925):
110-41. Few of Allen’s contemporaries took note of the case that he built: for one exception,
see the slightly skeptical stance of Joseph Morawski, “Mélanges de littérature pieuse, III: Les
miracles de Notre-Dame en vers frangais,” Romania 64 (1938): 454-88, at 457. Among later
scholars, one who acknowledged Allen’s reasoning was Wilkie, “Our Lady’s Tumbler,” 83.
For having brought home—nearly nine decades later—its validity, much credit is due to Earl
Jeffrey Richards, “La devotion mariale et la politique a deux temps: Le Tumbeor Nostre Dame et
Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame d’ Anatole France,” in La Vierge Marie dans la littérature francaise: Entre
foi et littérature / Actes du colloque international Université de Bretagne-Sud, Lorient, 31 mai—ler juin
y
Notes to Chapter 1 — The Identity of the Poet 253
2013, ed. Jean-Louis Benoit (Lyon, France: Jacques André éditeur, 2014), 233-42, at 238. I leave
aside the resemblances between Our Lady’s Tumbler and the sermons of William of Auvergne
that have been posited by Richards, “La devotion marial,” 239. On William, Richards points
to Pierre Boglioni, “Peuple et culture populaire chez Guillaume d’Auvergne,” in Mensch und
Objekt im Mittelalter und in der friihen Neuzeit: Leben, Alltag, Kultur. Internationaler Kongress,
Krems an der Donau, 27. bis 30. September 1988, ed. Gerhard Jaritz, Osterreichische Akademie der
Wissenschaften, Sitzungsberichte: Philosophisch-Historische Klasse 568, Verdffentlichungen
des Instituts fiir Realienkunde des Mittelalters und der Friihen Neuzeit, vol. 13 (Vienna: Verlag
der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1990), 193-222.
retreat from the world. The desirability of retreat from the world is mentioned at lines 13, 16,
275-78, 510, while Ponthieu is named at 620. See Allen, De l’hermite et del jougleour, 54.
The Identity of the Poet
likely a brother himself. Maurice Léna, “Massenet (1842-1912),” Le Meénestrel, no. 4422, 83.4
(January 28, 1921): 33-34, at 33.
Could the poet. If so, he would have been a real-life antecedent for the Franciscan friar William
of Baskerville in Umberto Eco’s 1980 novel and the 1986 film The Name of the Rose, or for the
Welsh Benedictine detective, Brother Cadfael, in the mystery novels written between 1977 and
1994 by Ellis Peters, and in the subsequent television series starring that character. Such a man
would not have been unique.
The Knight of the Barrel. The original titles are respectively Le chevalier au barisel and De l’hermite et
del jougleour. Brian Levy, “L’ironie des métiers, ou le récit chiasmique: A propos du conte pieux
de l’Ermite et du Jongleur,” Reinardus: Yearbook of the International Reynard Society / Annuaire de la
Société internationale renardienne 5 (1992): 85-107.
pendant. Allen, De l’hermite et del jougleour, followed by Tudor, “Preaching, Storytelling,” 151.
repentance. The theme of penitence has been seen also to connect Our Lady’s Tumbler (for mutual
illumination rather than because of any putative shared authorship) with another anonymous
text, Robert le Diable. For a comparison, see Elisabeth Gaucher, “Le ‘jeu’ de la pénitence au
XIIe siecle: Robert le Diable et le Jongleur de Notre-Dame,” in Regards étonnés de l‘expression de
Valtérité a la construction de l’identité: Mélanges offerts au professeur Gaél Milin (Brest, France: Amis
de Gaél Milin, 2003), 261-71.
Only tears will be weighed. Emile M. Cioran, Tears and Saints, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 6.
this tale. For the text, see Félix Lecoy, ed., Le chevalier au barisel: Conte pieux du XIIIe siecle. Edité
d‘aprés tous les manuscrits connus, Les classiques francais du Moyen Age, vol. 82 (Paris: Honoré
Champion, 1955). The poem has been translated into modern French, Italian, Spanish, and
English. For the French, see Le chevalier au barisel: Conte pieux du XIIIe siécle, trans. Annette
Brasseur, Traductions des classiques francais du Moyen Age, vol. 23 (Paris: Honoré Champion,
1976); Italian, I cavaliere e l’eremita, ed. and trans. Franco Romanelli, Biblioteca medievale, vol.
4 (Parma, Italy: Pratiche, 1987); and Spanish, Le chevalier au barisel de anonimo, ed. and trans.
Miguel Angel Garcia Peinado and Ricardo Redoli Morales, Analecta Malacitana Anejo, vol. 46
(Malaga, Spain: University of Malaga, 2003).
254 Notes to Chapter 1 — The Identity of the Poet
Both it and the other text have been translated at least once into English, together with
“The Tumbler of Our Lady,” but in a virtually inaccessible book that was printed in a run of
only twenty-six copies: Wilson Lysle Frescoln (1912-1997), trans., Old French Contes Dévots
(Wallingford, PA: Press of the Cheerful Snail, 1962), no page numbers.
For interpretation, see Jean-Charles Payen, “Structure et sens du Chevalier au Barisel,” Le
Moyen Age 77 (1971): 239-62, and Franco Romanelli, “Le Chevalier au Barisel: L’acculturazione
dei cavalieri tra lo spazio dell’aventure e il tempo della confessione,” Medioevo romanzo 11.1
(1986): 27-54.
two additional versions. One was composed from approximately 1216 to 1218 by Jean de Blois,
also known as Jean de La Chapelle. The other, Conte du Baril or “The Tale of the Barrel,” is
closely related to two later reflexes. One is a Latin exemplum in the “Mirror of Laymen”: see
no. 121, in Le speculum laicorum: Edition d’une collection d’exempla, composée en Angleterre a la
fin du XIlle siécle, ed. Jean-Thiébaut Welter (Paris: A. Picard, 1914), 27. The other comprises
later French versions that descend directly or indirectly from Life of the Fathers: see “Del halt
home qui empli le barrillet d’une lerme” [Baril], 19 [18], ed. Félix Lecoy, La Vie de Peres, 3 vols.
(Paris: Société des anciens textes francais: A. et J. Picard, 1987-1999), 1: 288-300. For details and
analysis, see Lecoy, Le Chevalier au Barisel, XVII-XXII; Jean-Charles Payen, “Y a-t-il un repentir
cistercien dans la littérature francaise médiévale?” Citeaux 12 (1961): 120-32, at 126-31.
held to be a Cistercian. More than eighty years ago Jean de Blois was identified by his editor as
a monk of Blois. See Le conte dou barril, poéme du XIIle siécle par Jouham de la Chapele de Blois, ed.
Robert Chapman Bates, Yale Romanic Studies, vol. 4 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1932). This identification was contested by Louise W. Stone, “Sur le Conte du Baril de Jean de
Blois,” Romania 59 (1933): 24-40, at 25-35. Bates reaffirmed his stand in “Le Conte dou Barril par
Jean de Blois et le Tournoiement d’Enfer,” Romania 62 (1936): 359-75, at 361n3.
afterlife in exempla. For references, see Elisabeth Pinto-Mathieu, La Vie des Péres: Genése des contes
religieux du XIIle siecle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2009), 830, no. 19.
source and influence. Karl, “La légende de l’Ermite et le Jongleur,” 123: “En vitis patrum un haut
livre / Qui les bons essample nous livre / Nous raconte d’un saint hermite...” (“In the Vitas
patrum, a lofty book that furnishes us good exempla, we are told of a saintly hermit”).
paradise. The account related in The Hermit and the Jongleur resembles another story, that of the
provost of Aquileia, composed in the mid-fifteenth century by Jean Miélot. This other narrative
is attested in two medieval French forms. The one in Life of the Fathers (pp. 13724-14177) tells of
an ascetic who after many years of fasting and prayer in solitude yields to the sin of pride. He
prays to learn from God who is his peer in piety. It raises his hackles to be told that his equal on
earth is not a recluse but rather the provost of Aquileia, whom he then resolves to see with his
own eyes. Upon arriving at the Italian city, he crosses paths with this very man who is on his way
out (see Fig. n.1). From him, he receives a ring to present to the official’s wife, who is to treat him
exactly as she would her own husband. From this moment, the hermit is shown how the dutiful
laic resists earthly temptations. At table, everyone but the provost’s spouse and the hermit is
served the finest food and drink. She and he share a bed. She attempts twice to seduce him, but
on each occasion insists that he plunge into an ice-cold bath. In the final accounting, the solitary
realizes that to live abstemiously in the world measures up fully to an existence as a religious.
He returns to his hermitage, implores forgiveness, and earns heaven for his soul when he dies.
the cycle of brotherhood. Karl, “La légende de |’Ermite et le Jongleur,” 110.
Notes to Chapter 1 — The Bas-de-Page Miniature: Of Marginal Interest 255
Fig. n.1 The Hermit and the Provost. Miniature, fourteenth century. Paris, Bibliotheque nationale
de France, MS frangais 25440, fol. 54v. Image courtesy of Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris.
All rights reserved.
The Bas-de-Page Miniature: Of Marginal Interest
sliced out. Alison Stones, Gothic Manuscripts, 1260-1320, 2 vols. in 4 (London: Harvey Miller,
2013-2014), 2: 501-5, at 501-3 for the excised miniatures.
placement. The miniature is found in Paris, Bibliotheque de l’Arsenal, MS 3516, folio 127r (dated
1268). It has been discussed in two fine studies by Johann-Christian J. A. Klamt, Een gebaar
van deemoed: De interpretatie van een middeleeuwse miniatuur (Utrecht, Netherlands: Faculteit der
Letteren, Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht, 1988), and ““Le tumbeor de NotreDame’—Gaukler in Demut,”
Zeitschrift fiir Kunstgeschichte 60 (1997): 289-307. The highest-quality color reproduction of it to
date has been in Sylvie Barnay, Le ciel sur la terre: Les apparitions de la Vierge au Moyen Age (Paris:
Cerf, 1999), 54. It has also been reproduced as the frontispiece of Agata Sobczyk, Les jongleurs
de Dieu: Sainte simplicité dans la littérature religieuse de la France médiévale (Lask, Poland: Oficyna
Wydawnicza Leksem, 2012).
stylistic separateness. Stones, Gothic Manuscripts, 2: 503.
created in Arras. Alison Stones, “The Illustrated Chrétien Manuscripts and Their Artistic Context,”
in Les manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes | The Manuscripts of Chrétien de Troyes, ed. Keith Busby et
al., 2 vols., Faux titre, vols. 71-72 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), 2: 227-322, at 241.
256 Notes to Chapter 1 — The Bas-de-Page Miniature: Of Marginal Interest
iconographic hierarchy. For a concise overview, see Jan Svanberg, “Acrobata,” in Enciclopedia
dell‘arte medievale, 12 vols. (Rome: Istituto della enciclopedia italiana, 1991-2002), 1: 126-30. On
the frequency of acrobatic jongleurs in French art of the twelfth century, Svanberg relied on
Emile Male, L’art religieux du XIle siecle en France: Etude sur les origines de l’iconographie du Moyen
Age (Paris: A. Colin, 1922), translated as Religious Art in France, the Twelfth Century: A Study of the
Origins of Medieval Iconography, Bollingen Series 90.1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1978), and Henri Focillon, “Sculpture romane: Apdotres et jongleurs (études de mouvement),” La
revue de l'art ancien et moderne 55 (1929): 13-28. In older scholarship, particular note should be taken
of Arthur Watson, “Tumblers,” The Reliquary and Illustrated Archaeologist: A Quarterly Journal and
Review Devoted to the Study of Early Pagan and Christian Antiquities of Great Britain, 9 (1903): 186-202.
Svanberg’s own book remains the fullest presentation of information: Jan Svanberg, Gycklarmotiv
i romansk konst och en tolkning av portalrelieferna pa Hairja kyrka, Kung]. Vitterhets-, historie och
antikvitets akademien: Antikvariskt arkiv, vol. 41 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1970).
nineteenth-century interpreter. Louis Petit de Julleville, Histoire de la langue et de Ia littérature
francaise des origines a 1900, 8 vols. (Paris: A. Colin, 1896-1899), 1: 40.
exemplum that compares a sinner with a jongleur. Stephen of Bourbon, Tractatus de diversis materiis
praedicabilibus, ed. Jacques Berlioz, 3 vols., Corpus Christanorum Continuatio Mediaevalis,
vols. 124-124B (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2002-2015), 1: 335 (book 1.8, lines 692-95), 532-33
(bibliography).
freak show. The most convenient repertory remains Lilian M. C. Randall, Images in the Margins
of Gothic Manuscripts, California Studies in the History of Art, vol. 4 (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1966), 134, 135 (jongleur, juggling). The most provocative study,
in all senses of the adjective, is Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval
Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). For reviews of the scholarship, see
Lucy Freeman Sandler, “The Study of Marginal Imagery: Past, Present, and Future,” Studies
in Iconography 18 (1997): 1-49; Anja Grebe, “The Art of the Edge: Frames and Page-Design
in Manuscripts of the Ghent-Bruges-School,” in The Metamorphosis of Marginal Images: From
Antiquity to Present Time, ed. Nurith Kenaan-Kedar and Asher Ovadiah (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv
University, The Yolanda and David Katz Faculty of the Arts, Dept. of Art History, 2001),
93-102; Laura Kendrick, “Making Sense of Marginalized Images in Manuscripts and Religious
Architecture,” in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed.
Conrad Rudolph (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 274-94.
One common form. The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, MS 78 D 40, fol. 108r; Lausanne,
Bibliotheque cantonale et universitaire, MS U 964 (Biblia Porta), fol. 343v; Oxford, Bodleian
Library, MS Bodley 264, fol. 90r (ca. 1338-1344).
sculpted limestone pilaster. Dated ca. 1150-1170, from the Lyonnais in France.
mobility. In a sense I extend the contention that jongleurs in Romanesque sculpture represent
movement in contrast to the rigidity surrounding them: see Walter Cahn, “Focillon’s Jongleur,”
Art History 18.3 (1995): 345-62.
Metamorphoses. 1.84.
stand erect. Hans Walther, ed., Proverbia sententiaeque Latinitatis Medii Aevi: Lateinische
Sprichworter und Sentenzen des Mittelalters in alphabetischer Anordnung, 6 vols., Carmina Medii
Aevi posterioris Latina, vol. 2.1-6 (Gottingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1963-1969),
nos. 22635 (3: 988), 20438a (3: 674).
Notes to Chapter 1 — The Bas-de-Page Miniature: Of Marginal Interest 257
monstrous races. John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought, 2nd ed.
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 301 (with listings passim).
Queen of Heaven. On Mary as Queen, see Gabriel M. Roschini, “Royauté de Marie,” in Maria:
Etudes sur la Sainte Vierge, ed. Hubert Du Manoir de Juaye, 7 vols. (Paris: Beauchesne, 1949-—
1964), 1: 603-18.
a figure with a nimbus. In both Jewish and Christian art from late antiquity and the early Middle
Ages, the injunction against idolatry meant that God was seldom depicted as a full human
figure. Yet divine intervention or approval could be signified, with the compromise of only
partial aniconicity, through the synecdoche of a detached right hand. In Christian theology, all
miracles are the work of God, and the hand of God (manus Dei, in Latin) reminds the viewer of
this silent partner in thaumaturgy.
towellike cloth. Anatole France, Abeille, Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame, Les Pains noirs, ed. R. L Greeme
Ritchie, illus. Henry Morin (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1928), 133.
extending the thumb. In reference to the Western tradition this gesture is known formally as “the
Latin benediction” (benedictio Latina): see Betty J. Bauml and Franz H. Bauml, eds., A Dictionary
of Worldwide Gestures, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1997), 143-45. The name for the
gesticulation can be a misnomer, since nearly the same position of the fingers is conventional in
Eastern Orthodoxy too (see Fig. n.2).
Fig. n.2 Christ Pantokrator, sixth century. Mosaic. Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna. Image from
Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Christus_Ravenna_Mosaic.jpg
another sort. On the norms in other representations of Madonnas who become animate, see Michael
Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), 233—but compare Russakoff, “Role of the Image,” 140-42, 144.
258 Notes to Chapter 1 — The Bas-de-Page Miniature: Of Marginal Interest
star-cross. Chr. Konstantinides, “Le sens théologique du signe ‘croix-étoile’ sur le front de la
Vierge des images byzantines,” in Akten des XI. internationalen Byzantinistenkongresses, Miinchen,
1958, ed. Franz Délger and Hans-Georg Beck (Munich, Germany: C. H. Beck, 1960), 254-66.
fresco. Ca. 1305.
similar-sounding noun in German. In English, jig; in modern French gigue, Italian and Spanish
giga. The German is Geige.
green tiles. In medieval color symbolism, green was sometimes associated with the devil. See D.
W. Robertson, “Why the Devil Wears Green,” Modern Language Notes 69.7 (1954): 470-72.
viol. It was known in Italian as viola (whence the modern-day violin), spelled also viuola and
in numerous similar ways, and in German as Fidel (fiddle). For basic information, see Nigel
Wilkins, Music in the Age of Chaucer, Chaucer Studies, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK:
D. S. Brewer, 1995), 150-51.
Manesse Codex. Made in Zurich, ca. 1300-1340, also known as the “large Heidelberg Lieder
Manuscript.”
Frauenlob. Universitatsbibliothek Heidelberg, Codex Palatinus Germanicus 848, fol. 399r. The
poet’s nickname, meaning “praise of Our Lady” or “praise of women” in German, designates
Heinrich von Meifsen (Eng., Henry of Meissen), born in Meifsen and educated in the cathedral
school there.
Virgin herself. Barbara Newman, Frauenlob’s Song of Songs: A Medieval German Poet and His
Masterpiece (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006).
reproduced repeatedly. Alice Kemp-Welch, Of the Tumbler of Our Lady & Other Miracles Now
Translated from the Middle French (London: Chatto & Windus, 1908), reprinted a year later in the
series King’s Classics (London: Chatto & Windus, 1909). It was then published with omission
of the first word, Of, from the title and without indication of translator or date (New York and
London: G. P. Putnam’s Songs The Knickerbocker Press, [n.d.]). Later, the whole folio side was
reproduced in Maurice Vloberg, La légende dorée de Notre Dame: Huit contes pieux du Moyen Age
(Paris: D.-A. Longuet, 1921), between pp. 192-93, and printed fifty years later in Henri-Paul
Eydoux, Saint Louis et son temps (Paris: Larousse, 1971), 156, from which it was reprinted twice
by Klamt, first in Een gebaar van deemoed, plate 1, and later in “Le tumbeor,” fig. 1 (p. 291). In
the old reproductions, the miniature is better preserved than in the latest digitization obtained
from the Bibliotheque de I’ Arsenal.
modern illustrations. The most recent illustrator who sought out the manuscript itself appears
to have been Barbara Cooney, in preparation for her 1961 picture book, The Little Juggler. In
her research, she collected photographs of Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France, Arsenal MS
3516, fols. 127ra—128rb. She had the lower portion of the first folio side reproduced on the back
of the dustcover.
minstrel’s routine. Without reference to Our Lady’s Tumbler, see Isabelle Marchesin, “Les jongleurs
dans les psautiers du haut Moyen Age: Nouvelles hypotheses sur la symbolique de I’histrion
médiéval,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 41.162 (1998): 127-39.
Notes to Chapter 1 — The Genre: Long Story Short 259
pair of carvings. Both are corbels carved ca. 1311-1326, in the time of Bishop Stapledon, on the
vaulting shafts of the great piers that face each other in the crossing and east bay of the nave.
They still carry two layers of medieval paint, which gives a sense of their original polychromy.
The extremely useful cathedral website indicates that the two corbels are among “the most
intricately painted sculptures in the Cathedral. The first painting had the tumbler in scarlet,
and the minstrel’s fiddle off-white including the peg-box which was outlined in black; the red
strings stopped short of it, the tail-piece and bow were green and the hairs of the bow black. In
the repainting, the tumbler became a deep blue, with elaborate embroideries. The tumbler has
particoloured shoes and stockings. His belt is gold. The minstrel has a similar loose garment
(note the slit dividing the front): it is white, edged with gold, and embroidered. His fiddle has
four painted cross-shaped sound holes.”
supporting projections. In the system of letters and numbers that has been conventional for more
than a century to designate keystones and carvings in the cathedral, these two corbels are K
and K’ respectively. The designation system dates back to E. K. Prideaux and G. R. Holt Shafto,
Bosses & Corbels of Exeter Cathedral: An Illustrated Study in Decorative & Symbolic Design (Exeter,
UK: Commin; London: Chatto & Windus, 1910), who discuss these corbels at 197-200 and
219-20.
translation. By P. H. Wicksteed.
allusion. A medieval wall-painting in the sacristy of the Finnish town of Hattula has been
interpreted as a juggler juggling for Mary. True, the performer is attired in a small smock, as
may well be the case in Our Lady’s Tumbler. The stumbling block is that the figure in the wall-
painting is indeed juggling, whereas the jongleur in the medieval French poem is described as
performing a dance or gymnastic routine, but not as juggling. So far as we can deduce from
existing evidence, a juggler did not become part of the story until it was reworked in modern
French literature, first as a poem and then as a short story in the last decade of the nineteenth
century. See Helena Edgren, Mercy and Justice: Miracles of the Virgin Mary in Finnish Medieval
Wall-Paintings, Suomen Muinaismuistoyhdistyksen aikakauskirja, vol. 100 (Helsinki: Suomen
Muinaismuistoyhdistys, 1993), 109-15, 204-5.
New York City. Saint Thomas Parish at Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street is the fourth church to be
built on the site. It was designed by the architectural firm of Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson.
church of Saint Thomas. The panel is located in the front tier of the choir stalls at the altar end of
the kneeling rail on the north side: see Saint Thomas Church (New York: The Church, 1965), 34;
J. Robert Wright, Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2001),
161. This woodwork was fabricated across the Atlantic by the Boston firm of Irving and Casson,
after designs by none other than Bertram Goodhue.
The Genre: Long Story Short
it is to be read. Legenda or legendum est.
feast-days of given saints. Hippolyte Delehaye, The Legends of the Saints, trans. Donald Attwater
(New York: Fordham University Press, 1962), 8.
260 Notes to Chapter 1 — The Genre: Long Story Short
pious tale. In French, conte dévot or conte pieux. For succinct definitions, see J. A. Cuddon,
Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 5th ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013),
154; Urban T. Holmes, “Conte dévot,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed.
Roland Greene, 4th ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 302. The poem is thus
classed by Walter Morris Hart, The Short-Story, Medieval and Modern: Syllabus and Bibliography,
University of California Syllabus Series, vol. 57 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1915), 6.
fabliau. For example, Léon Gautier, Les épopées francaises: Etude sur les origines et l’histoire de la
littérature nationale, 2nd ed., 4 vols. (Paris: Societé génerale de librairie catholique / H. Welter,
1878-1892), 2: 222 (“fableau”); Louis Bethléem et al., Les opéras, les opéras-comiques et les opérettes
(Paris: Revue des Lectures, 1926), 332-36, at 332 (“fableau”); André Lagarde and Laurent
Michard, Moyen Age: Les grands auteurs francais du programme, Collection Textes et littérature,
vol. 1 (Paris: Bordas, 1962), 108-10, at 108.
pious fabliau. Fabliau pieux: Otakar Novak, La littérature francaise des origines a la fin du XVIIle
siecle, Opera Universitatis Purkynianae Brunensis, Facultas philosophica, vol. 195 (Brno, Czech
Republic: Universita J. E. Purkyne, 1974), 28.
comic. Adrian P. Tudor, “Nos rions de vostre bien: The Comic Potential of Pious Tales,” in Grant
risee? The Medieval Comic Presence / La Présence comique médiévale. Essays in Memory of Brian ].
Levy, ed. idem and Alan Hindley, Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, vol. 11
(Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2006), 131-50, at 132.
laughable. Edmond Faral, Les jongleurs en France au Moyen Age, Bibliotheque de I’ Ecole des hautes
études, 4e section, Sciences historiques et philologiques, vol. 187 (Paris: Honoré Champion,
1910), 157n2.
exemplum. For definitions and overviews, see Claude Bremond and Jacques Le Goff,
L’“exemplum,” Typologie des sources du Moyen Age occidental, vol. 40 (Turnhout, Belgium:
Brepols, 1982); Jacques Berlioz and Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu, eds., Les exempla médiévaux:
Nouvelles perspectives, Nouvelle bibliotheque du Moyen Age, vol. 47 (Paris: Honoré Champion,
1998).
expanded and dramatized. Jacques Monfrin, “L’exemplum médiéval: Du latin aux langues
vulgaires,” in Berlioz and Polo de Beaulieu, Les exempla médiévaux, 243-65, at 264.
mentalities. The term mentality refers to an approach that is associated with the theory
and practice of medieval French historical studies in France in the 1970s and 1980s. For a
convenient introduction, see Aaron J. Gurevich, “Medieval Culture and Mentality according
to the New French Historiography,” European Journal of Sociology / Archives européennes de
sociologie / Europdisches Archiv fiir Soziologie 24.1 (1983): 167-95.
many rhetorical devices. It has even been speculated that the exemplum was a fertile source for
the later novella. See Salvatore Battaglia, “Dall’esempio alla novella,” Filologia romanza 7 (1960):
21-84. Like the pious tales, exempla could be intimately related to fabliaux. See Brian J. Levy,
“Le fabliau et l’exemple: Etude sur les recueils moralisants anglo-normands,” in Epopée animale,
fable, fabliau: Actes du IV Colloque de la Societé Internationale renardienne, Evreux, 7-11 septembre
1981, ed. Gabriel Bianciotto and Michel Salvat (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1984),
311-21.
Notes to Chapter 1 — The Table of Exempla, in Alphabetical Order 261
preamble. “In the lives of the ancient fathers, / the contents of which are good, / we are told a
little exemplum. /I do not say that people have not heard / equally nice ones many times, / but
this one is not so flawed / that it does not do good to tell it. / So I want to speak to you and to
tell / of a minstrel, what happened to him.”
little exanrple. The medieval French diminutive derives from Latin exemplum “exemplum, moral
example, anecdote, illustration.”
Clairvaux. Brian Patrick McGuire, “The Cistercians and the Rise of the Exemplum in Early
Thirteenth Century France: A Reevaluation of Paris BN MS lat. 15912,” Classica et mediaevalia:
Revue danoise de philologie et d’histoire 34 (1983): 211-67, at 225-26, 230-32, 257, repr. in idem,
Friendship and Faith: Cistercian Men, Women, and Their Stories, 1100-1250, Variorum Collected
Studies Series, vol. 742 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2002), no. 5.
Cistercian literature.On the Cistercians and exempla, see James France, Separate but Equal: Cistercian
Lay Brothers, 1120-1350, Cistercian Studies Series, vol. 246 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press,
2012), xix-xxiv, 199-230, 325-32. On Clairvaux as a center of Cistercian exemplum production,
see Stefano Mula, “Geography and the Early Cistercian Exempla Collections,” Cistercian Studies
Quarterly 46 (2011): 27-41.
authorial sermon. Lines 293-314.
The Table of Exempla, in Alphabetical Order
Table of Exempla. Latin title, Tabula exemplorum secundum ordinem alphabeti. The full title is often
given as Tabula exemplorum adaptacionum secundum ordinem alphabeti ordinata: see Jean-Thiébaut
Welter, ed., La Tabula exemplorum secundum ordinem alphabeti: Recueil d’exempla compilé en France
a la fin du XIlle siécle (Paris: Occitania, 1926). For concise information, see Jean-Thiébaut Welter,
Liexemplum dans Ia littérature religieuse et didactique du Moyen Age (Paris: E. H. Guitard, 1927),
294-97; Isabelle Rava-Cordier, “Tabula exemplorum,” EdM, 13: 139-43. The Table of Exempla
enjoyed a robust transmission of more than twenty manuscripts from its time of composition
into the fifteenth century.
reference work. On such alphabetical reference-books, see H. G. Pfander, “The Mediaeval Friars
and Some Alphabetical Reference-Books for Sermons,” Medium Aevum 3 (1934), 19-29.
about 1277. Definitely between 1261 and 1292, possibly specifically around 1277. This resource as
it survives is considered today to be the abridged form of the older Book of Likenesses and Exempla
(Latin title, Liber de similitudinibus et exemplis). See Lynn Thorndike, “Liber de Similitudinibus et
Exemplis (MS. Berne 293, Fols. 1r-75v),” Speculum 32 (1957): 780-91.
151 headings. The collection has keywords from the Latin accidia (“sloth”) to Xristus (Christ).
The chief source is Tractatus de diversis materiis predicabilibus, compiled in the mid-thirteenth
century by the French Dominican inquisitor, Stephen of Bourbon. A concatenation of more than
three thousand exempla that remained unfinished at Stephen’s death, the Tractatus was the first
systematic collection of exempla, arranged according to the gifts of the Holy Spirit.
alphabetization. Lloyd W. Daly, Contributions to a History of Alphabetization in Antiquity and the
Middle Ages, Collection Latomus, vol. 90 (Brussels: Latomus, 1967).
262 Notes to Chapter 1 — The Latin Exemplum
tables of contents. Tables of contents were closely related to subject indexes: on the evolution of
both, see Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, Preachers, Florilegia and Sermons: Studies on the
Manipulus florum of Thomas of Ireland, Studies and Texts, vol. 47 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of
Mediaeval Studies, 1979), 11-23.
Franciscanism. Jean-Claude Schmitt, “Recueils franciscains d’exempla et perfectionnement des
techniques intellectuelles du XIIIe au XVe siécle,” Bibliothéque de l’Ecole des Chartes 135 (1977):
5-21.
gestures at reenactment. Tudor, “Preaching, Storytelling,” 152.
preachers from any order. In closing, I will disclose a frustrating riddle. For this tale, the anonymous
author of the Table of Exempla was claimed by its nineteenth-century editor to have drawn upon
Stephen of Bourbon: see Welter, La Tabula exemplorum, xxxii (see xxix—xxx for explanation of the
abbreviations). From his own tally of exempla in the manuscript at the Bibliotheque nationale
de France (MS lat. 15970), Welter assigned the number 1649 to this exemplum as it appears in
Stephen’s Tractatus de diversis materiis predicabilibus. But the exemplum has not been printed
in the Tractatus volumes that have appeared to date in Corpus Christianorum Continuatio
Mediaevalis 124-125B (ed. Jacques Berlioz et Jean-Luc Eichenlaub [Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols,
2002, 2006]), and Jacques Berlioz assures me that he has found nothing similar to the tale of the
jongleur even in the as-yet unpublished portion of the Tractatus.
The Latin Exemplum
still unknown. Anonymous, “Chronique,” review of Hermann Wachter, Der Springer unserer
lieben Frau, in Romania 29 (1900): 159.
Joy. In Latin, Gaudium. The exemplum is classified in Frederic C. Tubach, Index Exemplorum:
A Handbook of Medieval Religious Tales, Folklore Fellows Communications, vol. 204 (Helsinki:
Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia / Academia scientiarum fennica, 1981), 219, no. 2780, “Jester,
dancing during chants.” It is omitted from the tables in Les exempla médiévaux: Introduction a
Ia recherche. Suivie des tables critiques de I’’Index exemplorum” de Frederic C. Tubach, ed. Jacques
Berlioz and Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu (Carcassonne, France: GARAE/Hesiode, 1992), 175-80.
entertainer. In Latin, ioculator.
he did not know his letters. This observation means not merely that the erstwhile jongleur was
analphabetic and hence illiterate, but also that he was ignorant of Latin and Latin texts.
as I know how. My transcription (and translation): “Quidam ioculator seculum relinquens
intrauit religionem et cum uideret socios suos psallere, quia litteras ignorabat, cogitauit qualiter
[Welter quomodo] posset cum aliis laudare Deum. Unde, aliis psallentibus, incepit bal[lJare
[et] tripudiare et cum [Welter omits cum] inquisitus fuisse cur talia faceret, respondit: “Video
unumquemque de suo [officio] seruire Deo, ideo de meo sicut scio uolo Deum festiuare.” See
Catalogue of Romances in the Department of Manuscripts in the British Museum, 3 vols. (London:
Printed by Order of the Trustees, 1883-1910), vols. 1-2, ed. H. L. D. Ward, and vol. 3, ed. J. A.
Herbert, at 3: 417, which summarizes, on the basis of London, British Library, MS Additional
18351, Liber exemplorum secundum ordinem alphabeti, chapter 49 (no. 28), “Gaudium.” The Latin
is also quoted in Tabula exemplorum secundum ordinem alphabeti, no. 87, in Welter, La Tabula
exemplorum, 27-28, and later in Morawski, “Mélanges de littérature pieuse. I,” 456-57.
Notes to Chapter 1 — The Life of the Fathers 263
American folklorist. Thomas Frederick Crane, “Mediaeval Story-Books,” Modern Philology 9
(1911): 225-37, at 231. On Crane’s career, see Jack Zipes, “Introduction, Thomas F. Crane: The
Uncanny Career of a Folklorist,” in Thomas Frederick Crane, Italian Popular Tales (Santa Barbara,
CA: ABC-CLIO, 2001), ix—xxiii.
the compilers. On miracle collecting in England during this period, see Rachel Koopmans,
Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 4, 112-38.
minstrel manuscript. The most widespread original term was the French manuscrits de jongleurs,
qualified as volumes a l’usage des jongleurs. The corresponding German is Jongleurhandschriften.
The Song of Roland. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 23, known as the Oxford Roland.
dictation. Andrew Taylor, “The Myth of the Minstrel Manuscript,” Speculum 66 (1991): 43-73.
tapped by friars. McGuire, “Cistercians and the Rise of the Exemplum.” For more recent
investigations, see Victoria Smirnova et al., eds., The Art of Cistercian Persuasion in the Middle
Ages and Beyond: Caesarius of Heisterbach’s “Dialogue on Miracles” and Its Reception, Studies in
Medieval and Reformation Traditions, vol. 196 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2015), 161-210.
earlier friars and Cistercians. Schmitt, “Recueils franciscains d’exempla,” 11.
The Life of the Fathers
More than any other literary genre. Michel Stanesco, “Le bruit de la source: Les contes chrétiens et
la resonance d’éternité,” in Translatio litterarum ad penates / Das Mittelalter Ubersetzen: Ergebnisse
der Tagung von Mai 2004 an der Université de Lausanne / Traduire le Moyen Age. Actes du colloque
de l'Université de Lausanne (mai 2004), ed. Alain Corbellari and Catherine Drittenbass (Lausanne,
Switzerland: Centre de traduction littéraire, 2005), 331-44, at 333.
drawn from a respected work. Vloberg, La légende dorée, 234.
both miracles and pious tales. Allen, De l’hermite et del jougleour, 11-12.
overlap substantially. Adrian P. Tudor, “Telling the Same Tale? Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles de
Nostre Dame and the First Vie des Péres,” in Krause and Stones, Gautier de Coinci, 301-30, at 304-7.
Latin collection. The collection is often associated with the name Heribert Rosweyde, whose
printing of it was reprinted in PL 73-74. The predictable nominative form of this title would be
Vitae patrum, but it is commonly known by the Vulgar Latin form Vitas patrum, which has the
same meaning, but with the first word in a different morphological state—the accusative plural
of the first-declension Latin noun vita, “life,” instead of the nominative plural.
useful tales. Respectively, the Greek duyyyoets WuXwePEdcic (often with the words in reverse
order), the Latin narrationes animae utiles. For an index of these tales, see John Wortley, “A
Repertoire of Byzantine ‘Beneficial Tales,” http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~wortley/. For a
concise discussion of the genre, see John Wortley, “Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell in
Byzantine ‘Beneficial Tales,”” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 55 (2001): 53-69, at 53-54.
Iate fourth century. In the Greek History of the Monks in Egypt. The customary title is the Latin
Historia monachorum in Aegypto.
264 Notes to Chapter 1 — The Life of the Fathers
chronological spectrum. A kind of midway point would be the Pratum spirituale (Spiritual
Meadow) by the Byzantine monk and ascetic John Moschus, whose edifying stories include
some in which the Virgin plays a decisive role, and others in which holy fools are the central
figures. See Henry Chadwick, “John Moschus and His Friend Sophronius the Sophist,” Journal
of Theological Studies n.s. 25 (1974): 41-74, at 65-66, 71-72.
centuries afterward. In the Greek East the genre reached its terminus in the eleventh century, in
the massive dossier known as the Synagoge (Assembly) by Paul Euergetinos.
Rule of Saint Benedict. The Rule of Saint Benedict, ed. and trans. Bruce L. Venarde, Dumbarton
Oaks Medieval Library, vol. 6 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 144—45 (chap.
42.3-4).
desert fathers. Terryl N. Kinder, Cistercian Europe: Architecture of Contemplation, Cistercian Studies
Series, vol. 191 (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), 135.
versions. For example, an anonymous Anglo-Norman version in verse was dedicated to the
Templar Henri d’Arci. Later, Wauchier de Denain and an anonymus of Champagne wrote
versions in prose.
Life of the Fathers. In French, Vie des Peres.
agglomeration. It comprehends seventy-four pious tales, for a total of more than thirty thousand
octosyllabic verses. For a short introduction to the collection and the unjust disregard it has
suffered, see Adrian P. Tudor, “The One That Got Away’: The Case of the Old French Vie des
Peres,” French Studies Bulletin 16.55 (1995): 11-15.
related Latin compositions. Such as the Verba seniorum (Words of the elders).
laymen may overshadow monks. I see the poem as taking a stand more robustly in favor of the
laity than Jean Charles Payen considers typical for miracles and exempla: see his Le motif du
repentir dans Ia littérature francaise medieval, Publications romanes et francaises, vol. 98 (Geneva:
Droz, 1967), 556.
1220s or thereabouts. Another date mentioned is 1241.
lay brothers. Paul Bretel, Les ermites et les moines dans la littérature francaise du Moyen Age (1150-
1250), Nouvelle bibliotheque du Moyen Age, vol. 32 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1995), 56.
reflex of the legend. The claim to have Vie des Péres as source is common to at least five thirteenth-
century French poems, only one of which in fact has an established relationship with a tale in
the collection: see Allen, De l’hermite et del jougleour, 11. Allen’s detailed arguments to support
his view that the three poems he discusses had the same author have not been assessed over the
past eighty years, so far as I can judge. On Vie des Péres, the classic study remains, much more
than a century later, Edouard Schwan, “La Vie des Anciens Peres,” Romania 13 (1884): 233-63.
For the most recent research (especially the forty-one tales of the first series, from around the
1220s), see Adrian P. Tudor, Tales of Vice and Virtue: The First Old French “Vie des Peres,” Faux titre,
vol. 253 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005). On its authorship, see Adrian P. Tudor,
“Past and Present: The Voice of an Anonymous Medieval Author,” Mediaevalia 24 (2003): 19-44.
Notes to Chapter 1 — True Story: Why the Story Succeeded 265
short titles. Gaston Paris gave them their names in a note to Schwan, “La Vie des anciens péres,”
240.
the story. Lines 11884-12231, in Lecoy, La Vie des Peres, 2: 60-72. The episode is recapitulated and
analyzed by Tudor, Tales of Vice and Virtue, 226-27, 229-36. Pinto-Mathieu, La Vie des Péres, 831,
no. 26, notes that Stephen of Bourbon offers a distant parallel: see Albert Lecoy de la Marche,
Anecdotes historiques, légendes et apologues, tirés du recueil inédit d’Etienne de Bourbon, dominicain du
XIlle siécle (Paris: Librairie Renouard, H. Loones, successeur, 1877), 448-49.
spurious source. I compiled a list of parallels before becoming aware of Tudor, Tales of Vice and
Virtue, 236, who comments simply upon “an interesting analogy to be drawn with the Tumbeor
Nostre Dame.”
feet up to his head. Lines 234-36.
Miserere. Verses 2743-3116. For a glossed edition of this episode, see Claudio Galderisi, Diegesis:
Etudes sur la poétique des motifs narratifs au Moyen Age, de la Vie des Peres aux lettres modernes
(Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2005), 181-94.
a miracle in Gautier de Coinci. 1 Miracle 18, “De un provoir qui toz jors chanoit Salve, la messe de
Nostre Dame.” See Tudor, “Telling the Same Tale?,” 307.
Rule of Saint Benedict. Venarde, Rule of Saint Benedict, 150-51 (chap. 44.1-8).
self-depiction. Called Historia Anglorum (History of the English), produced at the Benedictine
abbey of Saint Albans between 1250 and 1259 by Matthew of Paris, who was a monk there.
framed drawing. London, British Library, MS Royal 14. C. VII, fol. 6.
redemption through humility. On conversion as a theme in Vie des Péres, see Michel Zink, Poésie et
conversion au Moyen Age (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2003), 203-50.
True Story: Why the Story Succeeded
less attractive to us. A twentieth-century scholar who devoted much of his career to the study of
twelfth- and thirteenth-century Latin arts of poetry came out forthrightly in hypothesizing that
the best Old French poems would have been devalued if they had been put into the high-brow
rhetoric that scholastic practices favored. He faulted pedants who would not leave well enough
alone, and who would ruin vernacular French texts by embellishing them, dilating them, and
making them static. Charles Sears Baldwin, “Cicero on Parnassus,” Publications of the Modern
Language Association 42 (1927): 106-12, at 112: “These pedagogues would have recommended
embellishing the eloquence of Aucassin and Nicolete at the expense of the story, dilating the
Tumbeor de Notre Dame, and making the Chatelaine de Vergi static.”
sermons. Beverly Mayne Kienzle, ed., The Sermon, Typologie des sources du Moyen Age
occidental, vols. 81-83 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2000).
the application of exempla. Jean-Claude Schmitt, Précher d’exemples: Récits de prédicateurs du Moyen
Age (Paris: Stock, 1985).
266 Notes to Chapter 1 — True Story: Why the Story Succeeded
collecting and employing exempla. Stefano Mula, “Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Cistercian
Exempla Collections: Role, Diffusion, and Evolution,” History Compass 8.8 (2010): 903-12.
rivalry. Jacques Berlioz and Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu, “The Preacher Facing a Reluctant
Audience according to the Testimony of Exempla,” Medieval Sermon Studies 57.1 (2013): 16-28,
at 26-28.
familiar with each other's techniques and practices. Maria Dobozy, Re-Membering the Present: The
Medieval German Poet-Minstrel in Cultural Context, Disputatio, vol. 6 (Turnhout, Belgium:
Brepols, 2005), 120-42.
William of Malmesbury. William of Malmesbury, The Deeds of the Bishops of England (Gesta
Pontificum Anglorum), trans. David Preest (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2002), 227-28; idem, De
gestis pontificum Anglorum, ed. N. E.S. A. Hamilton (London: Great Britain Public Record Office,
1870), 336: “Denique commemorat Elfredus, carmen triviale, quod adhuc vulgo cantitatur,
Aldelmum fecisse; aditiens causam qua probet rationabiliter tantum virum his qua videantur
frivola institisse. Populum eo tempore semibarbarum, parum divinis sermonibus intentum,
statim, cantatis missis, domos cursitare solitum. Ideo sanctum virum, super pontem qui rura
et urbem cantinuat, abeuntibus se opposuisse obicem, quasi artem cantitandi professum.
Eo plusquam semel facto, plebis favorem et concursum emeritum. Hoc commento sensim
inter ludicra verbis Scripturarum insertis, cives ad sanitatem reduxisse; qui si severe et cum
excommunicatione agendum putasset, profecto profecisset nichil.”
Ecclesiastic History of the English People. Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Historia
ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum), ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1969), 414-21 (book 4, chap. 23 [22]). On the episode, see John D. Niles,
“Bede’s Caedmon, ‘The Man Who Had No Story’ (Irish Tale-Type 2412B),” Folklore 117.2 (2006):
141-55; Joaquin Martinez Pizarro, “Poetry as Rumination: The Model for Bede’s Caedmon,”
Neophilologus 89.3 (2005): 469-72.
Christian song in Old English. A nine-line Old English poem, conventionally entitled “Caedmon’s
Hymn,” survives. For detailed information, see Cadmon’s Hymn: A Multimedia Study, Archive
and Edition, ed. Daniel Paul O’Donnell, Series A, vol. 7 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, in association
with SEENET and the Medieval Academy, 2005). It may preserve the very lines recited by the
herdsman to Abbess Hilda.
a Latin letter written in 797. Epistolae Karolini aevi 2, ed. Ernst Dummler, Monumenta Germaniae
Historica: Epistolae, vol. 4 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1895), 183 (no. 124): “Verba Dei legantur in
sacerdotali convivio: ibi decet lectorem audiri, non citharistam, sermones patrum, non carmina
gentilium. Quid Hinieldus cum Christo?” On this passage, see Donald A. Bullough, “What
Has Ingeld To Do with Lindisfarne?” Anglo-Saxon England 22 (1993): 93-125, at 124 for the
translation quoted here. Hinield (or Ingeld) is familiar from mentions in both the heroic epic
Beowulf and another Old English poem that deals with Germanic heroes, Widsith.
Notes to Chapter 2 — The Tumbler 267
Notes to Chapter 2
Now a God dances in me. Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra (Part 1:7).
discourses. This designation, one of the most ill-defined in current critical terminology, refers
to the conceptual frameworks that underlie and surround social practices, customs, and
institutions.
The Tumbler
Of the Tumbler of Our Lady. The titles in French are to be found in Wachter, “Der Springer unserer
lieben Frau,” 223-24: “Del tumbeor nostre dame,” “C’est du tumeeur nostre dame,” “Le conte
dou jugleur,” “D’un menestrer qui se rendi moynes a qui nostre dame fit grace,” and “D’un
menestrel qui servoit nostre dame de son propre mestier.”
tombeur. Within the poem itself, the Old French noun tumeor is employed once to mean “dancer,”
while the verb tumer “to dance,” from which it derives, is used repeatedly. The two words (with
and without “b”) are tumer and tumber/tomber. Despite having distinct etymologies, they were
soon conflated and became transposable. Their crossed destinies are apparent in the equivalence
of tombeor in the title and tumeor in the text. They are roughly synonymous with other verbs of
heterogeneous etymology in Old French to which the poet resorts in describing rhythmic or
artful movement: saillir, from Latin salire “leap, spring, jump”; baler, most immediately from
Late Latin ballare “to dance,” but ultimately from Greek ballein “to throw”; espringuier, from Old
Frankish springen “to spring”; treper, deriving from Germanic “trippén, related to Old English
treppan “to tread, trample,” Middle Dutch trippen “to skip, hop,” and modern English “to
trip.” The verb espringuier generated the noun espringeor, closely related in meaning to tombeor.
On the lexicon relating to dance, see Fritz Aeppli, Die wichtigsten Ausdriicke fiir das Tanzen in
den romanischen Sprachen, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fiir romanische Philologie, vol. 75 (Halle,
Germany: Max Niemeyer, 1925), with specific reference to Our Lady’s Tumbler at pp. 50, 68, 70.
The medieval verb. It may be compared with the Old English tumbian, attested only twice, in
both instances to describe the dance of Salomé in the New Testament episode recounted in
the Gospel of Mark. See Eric Stanley, “Dance, Dancers and Dancing in Anglo-Saxon England,”
Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 9.2 (Autumn 1991): 18-31, at 19, 25 (on
the West Saxon and Kentish Gospels), 30n17. The verb may emphasize somehow the acrobatic
nature of the dance.
The relation between the Old French and the Old English forms remains murky, despite their
suggestive similarity. On the French, see Walther von Wartburg, ed. Franzésisches etymologisches
Worterbuch: Eine Darstellung des galloromanischen Sprachschatzes (Bonn, Germany: Schroeder,
1922-2003), 13.2: 403-9, 17: 384-86.
a tumbler or performer of tumbles. Emile Abry, Charles Audic, and Paul Crouzet, Histoire illustrée
de Ia littérature francaise, précis méthodique (Paris: H. Didier, 1912), 33: “Un tombeur ou faiseur
de tours.”
Notre Dame. The last two words are now and again hyphenated, since purists in French
have sometimes designated the Virgin Mary as Notre Dame, but called churches and other
institutions dedicated in her honor Notre-Dame (such as the cathedral Notre-Dame de Paris).
Despite the straightforwardness of the theory, practice has often been inconsistent.
268 Notes to Chapter 2 — Notre Dame versus Saint Mary
Notre Dame versus Saint Mary
universal in the Romance languages. Paule Bétérous, “Quels noms pour Marie dans les collections
romanes de miracles de la Vierge au XIIle siecle,” in La Vierge dans Ia tradition cistercienne:
Communications présentées a la 54e session de la Société francaise d'études mariales, abbaye Notre-Dame
d’Orval, 1998, ed. Bernard-Joseph Samain and Jean Longere (Paris: Médiaspaul, 1999), 175-92.
For a paragraph on the most general context across languages, see Marina Warner, Alone of All
Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976), 153-54.
her relation to Christ. The theology of Jesus’s nature and person is known as Christology.
accepted her role. See Luke 1:38.
siege of the Byzantine capital. The episode has been reinterpreted most radically by Bissera V.
Pentcheva, “The Supernatural Protector of Constantinople: The Virgin and Her Icons in the
Tradition of the Avar Siege,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 26.1 (2002): 1-41.
to violate the Cathedral. Maurice Landrieux, The Cathedral of Reims: The Story of a German Crime,
trans. Ernest E. Williams (London: Kegan Paul Trench, Trubner, 1920), 109-10 (with change of
“outrage” to “violate” twice at the end).
The Equivocal Status of Jongleurs
Not all those who wander. “All That Is Gold Does Not Glitter,” a poem in J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord
of the Rings, vol. 1, The Fellowship of the Ring, book 1, chap. 10; book 2, chap. 2.
protean character. The best general source on the definition and classification of jongleurs
remains Faral, Les jongleurs, 1-24, 66-86.
wear many hats. Faral, Les jongleurs, 1. For a later exploration of the issue, see Tito Saffioti, I
giullari in Italia: Lo spettacolo, il pubblico, i testi (Milan, Italy: Xenia Edizioni, 1990), 11-19.
artists of the word. Juan Paredes Nunez, “El juglador contador de cuentos,” in La juglaresca: Actas
del I Congreso Internacional sobre la juglaresca, ed. Manuel Criado de Val, Historia de la literatura
hispanica desde sus fuentes, vol. 7 (Madrid: EDI-6, 1986), 115-21.
buffoons, clowns, fools, and jesters. Heather Arden, Fools’ Plays: A Study of Satire in the Sottie
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 16-18.
wandering minstrels. A standard monograph on medieval jongleurs remains Faral, Les jongleurs,
which touches in passing on our story (p. 157n2) and on the diversity of performing skills
among jongleurs (p. 1). Another discussion of jongleurs that refers to “The Tumbler of Our
Lady” can be found in G. K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi (London: Hodder and Stoughton,
1923), 77-80 (chap. 5, “Le jongleur de Dieu”).
discreditable places and activities. Decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council 16, in Decrees of the Ecumenical
Councils, ed. and trans. Norman P. Tanner, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University
Press, 1990), 1: 243, 243*. As a decree of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 held, “Clerics should
not practice callings or business of a secular nature, especially those that are dishonourable.
They should not watch mimes, entertainers and actors. Let them avoid taverns altogether,
Notes to Chapter 2 — The Equivocal Status of Jongleurs 269
unless by chance they are obliged by necessity on a journey. They should not play at games of
chance or of dice, nor be present at such games.”
climb on (the) bench!. Monta in banco! The noun can be correlated with the French saltimbanque or
Italian saltimbanco, from the imperative “leap on (the) bench!” (salta in banco!).
one of these compositions. The relevant snippet from the poem Fadet joglar is quoted and translated
into French by Edmond Vander Straeten, La musique au Pays-Bas avant le XIXe siécle: Documents
inédits et annotés, 8 vols. (Brussels: G.-A. van Trigt, 1867-1888), 4: 236-37. The standard editions
of the passage are Wilhelm Keller, “Das Sirventes Fadet joglar des Guiraut von Calanso: Versuch
eines kritischen Textes,” Romanische Forschungen 22 (1905): 99-238, at 144-47, and Francois
Pirot, Recherches sur les connaissances littéraires des troubadours occitans et catalans des XIle et XIIIe
siécles: Les “sirventes—ensenhamens” de Guerau de Cabrera, Guiraut de Calanson et Bertrand de
Paris, Memorias de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, vol. 14 (Barcelona: Real
Academia de Buenas Letras, 1972).
etymology of jongleur. The Old Occitan (or Provengal) is joglar, Old French jogleor and joculer,
modern French jongleur, Spanish juglar, Galician jogral, Italian giullare and gioculare, Old English
géogelere, jugelere, and jogler, Old High German gougalari, Middle Dutch gokelaer. The German
word Spielmann, meaning literally “game-man,” was calqued on the Latin and its derivatives
in Romance languages.
The English word “joke”. Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Glare, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012), 1: 1059.
contaminated. For the catchy assertion that “jongleur is the scion of a haplologic cross-breeding
with jangler,” see Raphael Levy, “The Etymology of Franco-Italian: Cubler,” Italica 29.1 (1952):
49-52, at 49.
jangler. In medieval orthography, janglere or jangleeur. Alan Hindley et al., Old French-English
Dictionary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 375 (for “jangleor”). On the
presumed interference, see Oscar Bloch and Walther von Wartburg, Dictionnaire étymologique de
Ia langue francaise, 5th ed. (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1968), 351: “jongleur.” Joglerre
is the subjective or nominative case and jogleor is the objective or oblique case in Old French.
For concise information on the development of the word, see Bloch and Wartburg, Dictionnaire
étymologique, 351. For a more searching examination, see Raleigh Morgan Jr., “Old French
jogleor and Kindred Terms: Studies in Mediaeval Romance Lexicology,” Romance Philology 7
(1953-1954): 279-325.
verbal, musical, and physical skills. The Medieval Latin ioculator meant, both broadly and loosely,
entertainer; musician, minstrel, actor, mime, buffoon, conjurer, jester, juggler”: see Dictionary of
Medieval Latin from British Sources, ed. R. E. Latham, 17 vols. (London: Published for the British
Academy by Oxford University Press, 1975-2013), 1503.
“
sprawling Medieval Latin nomenclature. To give a modest selection, other terms were (to offer in
alphabetical order a lexical smorgasbord) fabulator, goliardus, histrio, mimus, ministrellus, saltator,
and scurra. In Old French, corresponding words are jogleor and menestrel (later modified into
menestrier, with a suffix that aligns it advantageously with the names of other professions), in
Middle High German spilman.
270 Notes to Chapter 2 — The Equivocal Status of Jongleurs
eventually displaced them. The comparable jacks-of-all-trades histrio, mimus, and scurra lost much
ground in the medieval period to the benefit of the jongleur and minstrel.
sometimes conflated. On differentiating between jongleur and minstrel in French, see Silvere
Menegaldo, Le jongleur dans Ia littérature narrative des XIléme et XIléme siécles: Du personnage au
masque, Nouvelle bibliotheque du Moyen Age, vol. 74 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2005), 15-17,
219-28.
minor court official. Bretel, Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame, 114-15, 123; John Southworth, The English
Medieval Minstrel (Woodbridge, UK and Wolfeboro, NH: Boydell, 1989), 3.
ministerium. Latin ministerialis, from minister (attendant or servant), Old French menestrel or
menestrier, Modern French ménétrier. Bloch and Wartburg, Dictionnaire étymologique, 402,
indicate that the word minstrel acquired pejorative associations in the Middle Ages as a result
of having been applied to poets and musicians, that it dropped out of use before the sixteenth
century, and that it was revived in the nineteenth.
minstrel. Old French menestrel.
jongleurs and trouveres. For a critical analysis of the distinction, see Giuseppe Noto, II giullare e
il trovatore nelle liriche e nelle biografie provenzali, Scrittura e scrittori, vol. 13 (Alessandria, Italy:
Edizioni dell’Orso, 1998). For a description in English that was particularly influential in
America of the 1950s and 1960s, see Will Durant, The Age of Faith, The Story of Civilization, vol.
4 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950), 1054-55.
language of southern France. This language is Old Occitan, persistently still called Provencal, to
the frustration of those who explain that the language was not confined to the geographical
extent of present-day Provence.
rightly challenged. L. M. Wright, “Misconceptions concerning the Troubadours, Trouveéres and
Minstrels,” Music & Letters 48 (1967): 35-39. More recently, see Joseph Harris and Karl Reichl,
“Performance and Performers,” in Medieval Oral Literature, ed. Karl Reichl (Berlin: De Gruyter,
2016), 141-202, at 180-81.
abandoned the rootless itinerancy. Eventually they became associated with music. For another
perspective, see Constance Bullock-Davies, Menestrelorum multitudo: Minstrels at a Royal Feast
(Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1978).
poem of supplication. Declaratio, lines 168-91. See Valeria Bertolucci Pizzorusso, “La Supplica di
Guiraut Riquier e la risposta di Alfonso X di Castiglia,” Studi mediolatini e volgari 14 (1966):
9-135; Joseph Linskill, Les epitres de Guiraut Riquier, troubadour du XIIe siecle, Association
internationale d’études occitanes, vol. 1 (London: AIEO, 1985), 167-245, at 225-26, with notes
on 235-37, 243. For broad context, see Miriam Cabreé, Cerveri de Girona and His Poetic Traditions,
Coleccién Tamesis, Serie A, Monografias, vol. 169 (London: Tamesis, 1999), 55-59, and, in
Catalan, Cerveri de Girona: Un trobador al servei de Pere el Gran, Blaquerna, vol. 7 (Barcelona:
Publicacions i edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2011), 88-91.
instrumentalists, imitators, troubadours. He writes joglars, remendadors, segriers, and cazuros.
jongleurs. For jongleurs, he writes joglars.
Notes to Chapter 2 — The Equivocal Status of Jongleurs 271
existed at the fringes. John W. Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants: The Social Views of Peter
the Chanter and His Circle, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 1: 198-204.
characters in fiction. On such fictions, see Menegaldo, Le jongleur dans Ia littérature narrative.
devotion to the Virgin. For examination of the jongleur in connection with this issue, see Viviane
Cunha, “O topos do jogral no acervo mariano medieval,” Revista do CESP 31.45 (January-June
2011): 167-87.
Thomas of Chobham. The toponymical element in his name is known alternately as Chabham,
Cobham, and Cabham. On his life, see Joseph Goering, “Chobham, Thomas of (d. 1233x6),”
in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), s.n.; online
edition, May 2005, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/5007
vade mecum of practical theology. On the influence of his treatise, see Helen F. Rubel, “Chabham’s
Penitential and Its Influence in the Thirteenth Century,” Publications of the Modern Language
Association of America 40 (1925): 225-39.
three classes of performers. Thomas of Chobham, Summa confessorum, ed. F. Broomfield, Analecta
mediaevalia Namurcensia, vol. 25 (Leuven, Belgium: Nauwelaerts, 1968), 291-92 (6.4 [Distinctio
4, De officiis penitentium”] Questio 2a [“De histrionibus”]): “When prostitutes and performers
come to confession, penance must not be given to them unless they abandon such practices
altogether, because otherwise they cannot be saved... . Butit is to be observed that there are three
sorts of performers. For some distort and transfigure their bodies through indecent acrobatics
or coarse gestures, or by laying bare their bodies indecently, or by putting on frightful costumes
or masks, and all are worthy of damnation unless they abandon their trades. There are also
other performers who work not at all but curiously meddle (2 Thessalonians 3:11), not having
a fixed abode, but they gad about the courts of grandees and speak slander and vileness about
those who are not present. Such people are worthy of damnation, because the Apostle forbids
‘with such a one to eat’ (1 Corinthians 5:11). And such people are called vagabond men-about-
town, inasmuch as they are useful for nothing but devouring and slandering. There is also a
third type of performers who have musical instruments to delight people, but there are two
types of them. For some frequent public drinking fests and lusty gatherings to sing lusty songs
there, to stir men to lust, and such people are worthy of damnation just as the others are. But
there are also others who are called jongleurs who sing chansons de geste and lives of the saints
and bring solace to men either in sickness or distress and do not engage in undue crudeness as
do male and female acrobats and others who play in unseemly masks and cause themselves to
seem as if they are apparitions through enchantments or in some other way. If however they
do not engage in such conduct but sing to the accompaniment of their instruments chansons
de geste and other useful topics to bring solace to men as has been said, such performers can
well be tolerated, as Pope Alexander [III] said when a certain jongleur asked of him whether he
could save his soul while in his profession. The pontiff asked him if he knew how to earn his
living in another manner. Upon receiving a negative reply from the jongleur, he allowed him to
live from his trade, so long as he abstained from all lustiness and scandalousness.”
Discussed by Faral, Les jongleurs, 67n1; Jacques Le Goff, “Meétiers licites et métiers illicites
dans l’occident médiéval,” in idem, Pour un autre Moyen Age (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 89-126,
at 101; Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 65. Both Thomas of Chobham and Peter the
Chanter, Summa de sacramentis et animae consiliis (summa on the Sacraments and Counsels of the
272 Notes to Chapter 2 — The Equivocal Status of Jongleurs
Soul, from ca. 1191 or 92-1197), ed. Dugauquier, 3 (2a): 177, are examined by John W. Baldwin,
“The Image of the Jongleur in Northern France around 1200,” Speculum 72 (1997): 635-63, at 644.
physical comedy or burlesque. Summa confessorum, 6.4.2a, ed. Broomfield, 291: “Quidam enim
transformant et transfigurant corpora sua per turpes saltus vel per turpes gestus, vel denudando
corpora turpiter, vel induendo horribiles loricas vel larvas, et omnes tales damnabiles sunt nisi
reliquerint officia sua” (“Certain ones transform and transfigure their bodies through shameful
jumps or gestures, or in shamefully stripping naked or donning frightful masks; and all such
ones deserve damnation, if they do not abandon their practices”). Quoted in Faral, Les jongleurs,
67n1.
lustfulness and turpitude. In his criticism, Thomas followed Peter the Chanter, who is conjectured
to have been his teacher. See Peter, Summa de sacramentis et animae consiliis, ed. Jean-Albert
Dugauquier, 5 vols. in 3, Analecta mediaevalia namurcensia 4, 7, 11, 16, 21 (Leuven, Belgium:
Nauwelaerts, 1954-1967), part 3, 2a: 177 (§ 211, lines 140-41): “Quidam enim cum ludibrio
et turpitudine sui corporis acquirunt necessaria, et deformant ymaginem Dei” (“For certain
ones obtain the necessities with mockery and debasement of their body, and they disfigure the
image of God”).
excepts from condemnation. Summa confessorum, 6.4.2a, ed. Broomfield, 292: “Sunt autem alii qui
dicuntur ioculatores qui cantant gestas principium [sic] et vitas sanctorum et faciunt solatia
hominibus vel in egritudinibus suis vel in angustiis suis et non faciunt nimias turpitudines sicut
faciunt saltatores et saltatrices et alii qui ludunt in imaginibus inhonestis et faciunt videri quasi
quedam phantasmata per incantationes vel alio modo.” By gestas principium is presumably
meant chansons de geste. Quoted in Faral, Les jongleurs, 67n1. For a study of such interdictions,
see Carla Casagrande and Silvana Vecchio, “L’interdizione del giullare nel vocabolario clericale
del XII e del XIII secolo,” in II Teatro medievale, ed. Johann Drumbl (Bologna, Italy: Il Mulino,
1989), 317-68.
Romance of Flamenca. The Romance of Flamenca: A Provencal Poem of the Thirteenth Century, ed.
Mario E. Porter, trans. Merton Jeome Hubert (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962),
58-59 (lines 612-17): “While one with mannequins contrives / Good sport, another juggles
knives. / One tumbles, while another leaps / And somersaults, yet nimbly keeps / His feet. Some
dive through hoops. Each man / Performs his stunt as best he can.”
we are told explicitly. Verses 25-28.
Debate poems. The standard reference remains Théodor Batiouchkof, “Le débat de l’ame et du
corps,” Romania 20 (1891): 1-55, 513-78. Batiouchkof’s categorization of the genre has been
disputed by Michel-André Bossy, “Medieval Debates of Body and Soul,” Comparative Literature
(1976): 144-63.
Canticles of Saint Mary. Cantigas de Santa Maria.
Daurel and Beton. Paul Meyer, ed., Daurel et Beton: Chanson de geste provencale, Société des anciens
textes francais (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1880), 41 (section 32, lines 1208-10); Janet Shirley, trans.,
Daurel and Beton: A Twelfth-Century Adventure Story (Felinfach, UK: Llanerch, 1997), 58: “Next
he took his harp and played two lays, then entertained them on the viol, and gave a display
of leaping and tumbling (‘Sauta e tomba’).” Compare Arthur S. Kimmel, ed., A Critical Edition
of the Old Provencal Epic Daurel et Beton, University of North Carolina Studies in the Romance
Languages and Literatures, vol. 10 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971).
Notes to Chapter 2 — The Equivocal Status of Jongleurs 273
instead gives him a boot camp. Meyer, Daurel et Beton, 48; trans. Shirley, section 37, lines 1419-
21: “At seven years old Beton could play the viol well, also the citole, and was a fine harpist.”
This discrepancy between the two passages was remarked upon by Glunnis M. Cropp, “The
Disguise of ‘Jongleur,” Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association
65.1 (1986): 36-47.
thirteenth-century poem. See Kurt Lewent, “Old Provengal Saig ‘Hangman’ and Two Poems
on Jongleurs by Cerveri de Girona,” Modern Language Quarterly 7 (1946): 411-44, at 421
(interpretation), 434-36 (text and translation of Sirventes, incipit “Juglar, prec vos, ans que
mortz vos aucia”; here, stanza 5, lines 25-30), and 442-44 (commentary): “I am blaming you,
brethren, for no other reason than that I should like you to give up that false brotherhood and
praise Saint Mary; for it is she that [sic] defends and watches and guides the world and all of us,
and by singing songs in her praise one could exorcise the one who, without her, would easily
lead us astray.”
stabilitas loci. The phrase stabilitas loci is untapped in the Rule, but stabilitas and the corresponding
adjective stabilis appear repeatedly: Venarde, Rule of Saint Benedict, 18-19 (chap. 1.11), 36-37
(chap. 4.78), 186-89 (chap. 58.9, 17), 194-95 (chap. 60.9), 196-97 (chap. 61.5).
pilgrim and pilgrimage. The Latin terms are peregrinus and peregrinatio. See Gerhart B. Ladner,
“Homo Viator: Mediaeval Ideas on Alienation and Order,” Speculum 42 (1967): 233-59.
gyrovague. On gyro- and vagus, see J. Kevin Newman, “Gyrovagues in Dante and St. Benedict,”
American Benedictine Review 54 (2003): 414-19.
vagrant. The Latin word is vagans.
he could epitomize instability. Paul Zumthor, La lettre et la voix de la “littérature” médiévale (Paris:
Editions du Seuil, 1987), 72: “Au coeur d’un monde stable, le ‘jongleur’ signifie une instabilité
radicale; la fragilité de son insertion dans |’ordre féodal ou urbain ne lui laisse qu’une modalité
d’intégration sociale: celle qui s’opére par le jeu.” In primary texts, see Pseudo-Hugh of Fouilloy,
De bestiis et aliis rebus, in PL 177, 13-56 (book 1, chap. 45), at 46B: “Hujusmodi homines vix
possunt stabiles” (“People of this sort can scarcely be stable”).
He led a vagabond life. Lines 10-12.
prone to recidivism. Pseudo-Hugh of Fouilloy, De bestiis et aliis rebus, 46D: “Sed et joculatores,
ante conversionem leves, cum ad conversionem veniunt, saepius usi levitate, leviter recedunt”
(“Jongleurs are frivolous people before they are converted. If they are ever made to repent, they
often fall back into the easy-going life they are used to”). Both this and the preceding quotation
from Pseudo-Hugh are cited by Wolfgang Kemp, The Narratives of Gothic Stained Glass, trans.
Caroline Dobson Saltzwedel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 138.
intermediaries. Martine Clouzot, “Un intermédiaire culturel au XIIle siecle: Le jongleur,” Bulletin
du centre d'études médiévales d’Auxerre| BUCEMA Hors-série 2 (2008), https://cem.revues.org/4312
body movements and gestures. The study of such expression is called kinesics.
the real nature of the drill. Since the Cistercians have been connected with ring dancing, it would
be tempting to speculate that the sequence followed a circular pattern. See Annette Kehnel
and Mirjam Mencej, “Representing Eternity: Circular Movement in the Cloister, Round
Dancing, Winding-Staircases and Dancing Angels,” in Self-Representation of Medieval Religious
274 Notes to Chapter 2 — The Equivocal Status of Jongleurs
Communities: The British Isles in Context, ed. Anne Miller and Karen Stéber, Vita regularis.
Abhandlungen, vol. 40 (Berlin: Lit, 2009), 67-97.
Chauny. For discussion passim, see Georges Lecocg, Histoire du théatre en Picardie depuis son origine
jusqu’a la fin du XVIe siécle (Paris: H. Menu, 1880). The key evidence is Rabelais, Gargantua, 1.24,
where the character Gargantua and his tutor “went to see the jugglers, conjurers, and sellers of
quack remedies, and noted their antics, their tricks, their somersaults, and their smooth words,
attending especially to those from Chauny in Picardy, for they are great babblers by nature, and
fine reciters of stories on the subject of green monkeys.” Trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin,
1955), 93.
systematic exposition. The text is Elucidarium (in English, “Elucidator”). It is so called because
“St elucidates the obscurity of various things.” For the text, see Honorius Augustodunensis,
Elucidarium, in PL 172, 1148CD (2.188): “[Discipulus: Habent spem joculatores? Magister:]
Nullam: tota namque intentione sunt ministri Satanae, de his dicitur: deum non cognoverunt;
ideo Deus sprevit eos, et Dominus subsannabit eos, quia derisores deridentur” (“None. For by
their entire application they are the ministers of Satan, of whom it has been said: They knew not
God; therefore God has despised them and God shall deride them”). At the close of the Master’s
response, the most relevant biblical quotation is Psalms 2:4.
lecher and ribald. Willem Noomen, Le jongleur par lui-méme: Choix de dits et de fabliaux, Ktemata,
vol. 17 (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2003), 5-6. The definitions of the two Old French words are
from Hindley et al., Old French-English Dictionary, 390 (lecheor “debauchee, glutton, rake”), 533
(ribaut “rogue, scoundrel”).
relationship of the jongleurs with the clergy. Carla Casagrande and Silvana Vecchio, “Clercs et
jongleurs dans la société médiévale,” Annales: Histoires, sciences sociales 34.5 (1979): 913-28.
their standing shot up. Baldwin, “Image of the Jongleur”; Faral, Les jongleurs, 44-60; Christopher
Page, The Owl and the Nightingale: Musical Life and Ideas in France (1100-1300) (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 19-33.
property and wealth. On the spectrum, see Gretchen Peters, “Urban Minstrels in Late Medieval
Southern France: Opportunities, Status and Professional Relationships,” Early Music History
19 (2000): 201-35. On the marginality, see Wolfgang Hartung, Die Spielleute: Eine Randgruppe in
der Gesellschaft des Mittelalters, Vierteljahrschrift fiir Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte: Beihefte,
vol. 72 (Wiesbaden, Germany: Franz Steiner, 1982), with coverage at p. 13 of Our Lady’s Tumbler.
professional buffoon. The last-mentioned character was attested as “clown” first in English after
the Middle Ages in the mid-sixteenth century and only subsequently in French and other
Western European languages.
mime of Christ. Hermann Reich, Der Kénig mit der Dornenkrone (Leipzig, Germany: B. G. Teubner,
1905), 31 (mimus Christi).
imitation of Christ. In Latin, imitatio Christi.
itinerant sermonizers. Kunstmann, Vierge et merveille, 31, translating a passage in the coda to one
of Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles.
Notes to Chapter 2 — Trance Dance 275
anti-Catholic. A major flashpoint in discussion of such satire has been discussed in Tracey
Sedinger, “And yet woll I stiell saye that I am I’: Jake Juggler, the Lord’s Supper, and Disguise,”
English Literary History 74.1 (2007): 239-69; Beatrice Groves, ““One Man at One Time May Be in
Two Placys’: Jack Juggler, Proverbial Wisdom, and Eucharistic Satire,” Medieval and Renaissance
Drama in England 27 (2014): 40-57. Have no fear, fellow scholars: the quotation within the title
is [sic].
the devil’s jugglers. Paul Whitfield White, Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage, and
Playing in Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 126 (“the divels
iugglers”).
Trance Dance
he became a dancer to God. T. S. Eliot, “The Death of Saint Narcissus,” in idem, Poems Written in
Early Youth (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), 34-35 (text), 42-43 (note).
prayer books of many denominations. Here I transfer to Christianity observations made about
Judaism by Lawrence A. Hoffman, Beyond the Text: A Holistic Approach to Liturgy (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1987), 71.
Theodosius banned such pagan cults. In 393.
disposed to condemn dancing. See Louis Gougaud, “Danse,” in Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne
et de liturgie (Paris: Letouzey, 1920), 4.1: 248-58; E. Louis Backman, Religious Dances in the
Christian Church and in Popular Medicine, trans. E. Classen (London: Allen & Unwin, 1952),
154-61; Yvonne Rokseth, “Danses cléricales du XIIIe siécle,” in Melanges 1945, vol. 3: Etudes
historiques, Publications de la Faculté des Lettres de Strasbourg (Paris: Société d’édition Les
Belles Lettres, 1947), 93-126: Gianfranco D’Aronco, Storia della danza popolare e d’arte, con
particolare riferimento all’Ttalia (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1962), especially 113-37; J. G. Davies,
Liturgical Dance: An Historical, Theological, and Practical Handbook (London: SCM Press, 1984),
19-28; Jeannine Horowitz, “Les danses cléricales dans les églises au Moyen Age,” Le Moyen-Age
95.2 (1989): 279-92.
texts concerned with penance. Particularly penitentials, texts that listed sins and prescribed
penances for them.
extirpate dance. In general, see Alessandro Arcangeli, “Dance and Punishment,” Dance Research:
The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 10.2 (1992): 30-42. On prohibitions, see Louis Gougaud,
“La danse dans les églises,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 15 (1914): 5-22, 229-45; Horowitz, “Les
danses cléricales,” 279; Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: A Classification of Narrative
Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books, and
Local Legends, 6 vols., 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955-1958), C 51.1.5
“Tabu: Dancing in Churchyard.” With specific regard to the medieval French poem, see Jessica
Van Oort, “The Minstrel Dances in Good Company: Del tumbeor nostre dame,” Dance Chronicle
34 (2011): 239-75.
even priests engage in ritual dances. Davies, Liturgical Dance, 36-57.
276 Notes to Chapter 2 — Trance Dance
ecstasy. Erika Bourguignon, “Trance Dance,” in International Encyclopedia of Dance, ed. Selma
Jeanne Cohen et al., 6 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 6: 184-88; Barbara
Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (New York: Metropolitan Books,
Henry Holt, 2006), 5-6.
Dionysus. Dionysus was equivalent to the Roman Bacchus. The followers of Dionysus included
bacchantes and maenads.
penitential pain. France, Separate but Equal, 182-84.
with gritted teeth. Bretel, Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame, 37-38, 41, 145, emphasizes the body as a
means of redemption, and as a cause of exaltation and exultation. Sobczyk, Les jongleurs de Dieu,
126-28, rejects this emphasis. Along similar lines, see also Gaucher, “Le ‘jeu’ de la pénitence,”
261-71.
flagellantism. On flagellants, see Backman, Religious Dances, 161-70.
mass hysteria. Known variously as choreomania, danseomania, or dancing mania, plague, or
rage; epidemic dancing; Saint Vitus’s or Saint John’s dance; or Tarantism.
solo act of an individual. On the choreography of medieval solo dance, see Walter Salmen, “Zur
Choreographie von Solotaénzen in Spielen des Mittelalters,” in Mein ganzer Kérper ist Gesicht:
Groteske Darstellungen in der europdischen Kunst und Literatur des Mittelalters, ed. Katrin Kroll and
Hugo Steger, Rombach Wissenschaft: Reihe Litterae, vol. 26 (Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany:
Rombach, 1994), 343-55. On the iconography, see Gabriele Busch-Salmen, Ikonographische
Studien zum Solotanz im Mittelalter, Innsbrucker Beitrage zur Musikwissenschaft, vol. 7
(Innsbruck, Austria: Musikverlag Helbling, 1982), esp. 16, on Our Lady’s Tumbler.
dances himself into oblivion. The motif of an individual who dances to death is found in Hans
Christian Andersen’s “The Red Shoes” (made into a strong underlying element in a 1948 film),
but there the compulsion is diabolic: a woman is cursed to dance by the red shoes she dons.
aligns. The story resembles time as it operated in the Middle Ages, as an intersection of the
iterative and the one-time, the diurnal round and the special, the immovable and the movable
feast.
dancing mania. J. F. C. Hecker, The Dancing Mania of the Middle Ages, trans. B. G. Babington, Burt
Franklin Research and Source Works Series, vol. 540 / Selected Essays in History, Economics,
and Social Science, vol. 169 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), 1.
Giselle, or The Wilis. Giselle, ou Les Wilis, two acts with music by Adolphe Adam, choreography
by Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot, first performed in Paris in 1841. The libretto by Jules-Henri
Vernoy de Saint-Georges and Théophile Gautier rested upon a legend recounted by the German
poet Heinrich Heine. The Wilis are themselves drawn from Slavic tradition.
The Wilis. In Slavic and especially South Slavic mythology that is attested already in medieval
sources, the vily are beautiful nymphlike spirits who have the power of flight. Associated with
the mountains and waters, they overlap with the female water spirits known as rusalki, who
amused themselves on land sometimes and who tickled to death or drowned their victims.
Notes to Chapter 2 — Jongleurs of God 277
Shakers. They are known more fully as the Shaking Quakers.
sang and danced. Edward Deming Andrews, The Gift to Be Simple: Songs, Dances and Rituals of the
American Shakers (New York: J. J. Augustin, 1940); Robert P. Emlen, “The Shaker Dance Prints,”
Imprint: Journal of the American Historical Print Collectors Society 17.2 (Autumn 1992): 14-26.
praise dance. See Karen Clemente, “Dance as Sacred Expression,” Journal of Dance Education 8.2
(2008): 37-38; Avis Hatcher-Puzzo, “Popular to Proficient: Cultivating a Contextual Appreciation
of Dance on a Rural Historically Black College Campus,” Journal of Dance Education 14.2 (2014):
67-70.
dervishes. Ahmet T. Karamustafa, God’s Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Later Middle
Period, 1200-1550 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994), 20, 73, 74.
collective delusions. Hecker, Dancing Mania of the Middle Ages, 2.
Jongleurs of God
captured the theologians’ attention. Kemp, Narratives of Gothic Stained Glass, 137.
murmurs of approval. Compare Faral, Les jongleurs, 25-43, 44-60; Helen Waddell, The Wandering
Scholars (London: Constable, 1927), Appendix E, “Councils relating to the ‘clericus vagus’ or
‘joculator”; and J. D. A. Ogilvy, ““Mimi, scurrae, histriones’: Entertainers of the Early Middle
Ages,” Speculum 38 (1963): 603-19.
God's jesters. John Saward, Perfect Fools: Folly for Christ’s Sake in Catholic and Orthodox Spirituality
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 58-79 (“God's Jesters: The Cistercians”).
ditties and suave melodies. Apologia Berengarii Pictavensis contra Sanctum Bernardum Claraevallensem
abbatem et alios qui condemnaverunt Petrum Abaelardum, in Rodney M. Thomson, “The Satirical
Works of Berengar of Poitiers: An Edition with Introduction,” Mediaeval Studies 42 (1980):
89-138, at 111: “quem audiuimus a primis fere adulescentiae rudimentis cantiunculas mimicas
et urbanos modulos fictitasse.”
acrobat of God. Saltator domini: see Jean Leclercq, “Le theme de la jonglerie chez S. Bernard et ses
contemporains,” Revue d’histoire de la spiritualité 48 (1972): 385-400; Jean Leclercq, “Le theme
de la jonglerie dans les relations entre saint Bernard, Abélard et Pierre le Vénérable,” in Pierre
Abélard—Pierre le Vénérable: Les courants philosophiques, littéraires et artistiques en Occident au
milieu du XIle siecle. Abbaye de Cluny, 2 au 9 juillet 1972, ed. René Louis et al., Actes et mémoires
des colloques internationaux du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, vol. 546 (Paris:
Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1975), 671-84; Zink, Poésie et conversion,
161-78.
letter dated around 1140. Letter 87, ad Ogerium §12, in Bernard of Clairvaux, Opera, ed. J. Leclerq
et al., 8 vols. in 9 (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957-1977), 7: 224-31, at 231, lines 111-18 (= PL
182, 217): “Nam revera quid aliud saecularibus quam ludere videmur, cum, quod ipsi appetunt
in hoc saeculo, nos per contrarium fugimus, et quod ipsi fugiunt, nos appetimus, more scilicet
ioculatorum et saltatorum, qui, capite misso deorsum pedibusque sursum erectis, praeter
278 Notes to Chapter 2 — Jongleurs of God
humanum usum stant manibus vel incedunt, et sic in se omnium oculos defigunt. Non est hic
ludus puerilis, non est de theatro, qui femineis foedisque anfractibus provocet libidinem, actus
sordidos repraesentet, sed est ludus iucundus, honestus, gravis, spectabilis, qui caelestium
spectatorum delectare possit aspectus” (“For in fact what else do we seem to worldly people
to do than to play, when what they desire in this world, we on the contrary flee, and what they
flee we strive for, like jongleurs and tumblers, who contrary to human usage stand or proceed
on their hands with head downward and feet raised upward, and thus rivet upon themselves
everyone’s eyes. This is not a childlike game, not from the stage, to elicit lust with shameful,
womanly contortions and to represent vile activities. On the contrary, it is a joyful game, decent,
serious, and admirable, which can delight the sight of heavenly onlookers”). The letter was
addressed to a canon regular named Ogier of Mont Saint-Eloi (and unrelated to his fellow
Cistercian Ogier of Locedio). For another translation, see Letter 90, “To Oger, a Canon Regular,”
in Bruno Scott James, trans., The Letters of St Bernard of Clairvaux (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian
Publications, 1998), 129-35, at 135. The passage has been quoted often, notably by Jean Leclercq,
“Yoculator et saltator’: Saint Bernard et l'image du jongleur dans les manuscrits,” in Translatio
studii: Manuscript and Library Studies Honoring Oliver L. Kapsner, ed. J. G. Plante (Collegeville,
MN: St. John’s University Press, 1973), 124-48; Meyer Schapiro, Romanesque Art (New York:
George Braziller, 1977), 9; Camille, Image on the Edge, 59.
attested first in English. Earliest use at least according to the citations in the Oxford English
Dictionary.
hopping and dancing of tumblers. “Hoppynge & daunceynge of tumblers and herlotis, and ober
spectakils.”
sacred play. The Latin word ludus that is employed here could encompass an immense ambit. If
a book can be considered a passage, the locus classicus is Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study
of the Play-Element in Culture (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1949).
jongleurs of God and of the holy angels. Caesarius, Dialogus miraculorum, ed. Joseph Strange, 2 vols.
(Cologne: J. M. Heberle, 1851), 1: 360 (distinctio 6, capitulum 8); for an English translation of
which, see The Dialogue on Miracles, trans. H. Von Essen Scott and C. C. Swinton Bland, 2 vols.
(London: G. Routledge, 1929), 1: 414, with the word jester(s) changed to jongleur(s): “Simplex
quandoque mimo vel ioculatori comparatur. Sicut illorum [illius] verba vel opera in eius [libri
eorum] ore vel manibus, qui ioculator non est, saepe displicent, et poena digna [digni] sunt
apud homines; quae tamen ab eis dicta vel facta, placent: ita est de simplicibus. Ut sic dicam,
ioculatores Dei sunt sanctorumque angelorum simplices. Quorum opera, si hi qui simplices non
sunt, quandoque facerent, haud dubium quin Deum offenderent, qui in eis, dum per simplices
fiunt, delectatur” (“The simple man is often compared to an actor or jongleur, for as their words
or actions would often be displeasing in the mouth or hands of one who is not a jongleur, and
would be worthy of punishment, yet when the same things are said or done by jongleurs they
give pleasure; and so it is with the simple-minded. If I may put it in such a way, the simple-
minded are the jongleurs of God and the holy angels. But if their deeds are sometimes done
by those who are not simple-minded there is no doubt that they are displeasing to God who
delights in them when they are done by the simple”).
humility, ordinariness, and inexperience. Chrysogonus Waddell, “Simplicity and Ordinariness:
The Climate of Early Cistercian Hagiography,” in Simplicity and Ordinariness, ed. John R.
Sommerfeldt, Studies in Medieval Cistercian History, vol. 4 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian
Publications, 1980), 1-47, at 8-9.
Notes to Chapter 2 — Jongleurs of God 279
minstrels of the Lord. Ioculatores domini is not documented before its use in Legenda Perusina of
1320-1312. On the expression, see Raoul S. Manselli, Francesco d’Assisi (Rome: Bulzoni, 1980),
145-53. The degree to which the phrase has become associated with Francis may be gauged from
its use in titles. For example, the most famous film about the saint is undoubtedly “Francesco,
giullare di Dio” (1950, known in English as “The Flowers of Saint Francis,” “Francis, God’s
Fool,” and “Francis, God's Jester”), directed by Roberto Rossellini, screenplay by Federico
Fellini (1920-1993). At least two books flaunt the phrase in their titles: André Séailles, Francois
d’Assise ou le jongleur de Dieu (Brussels: Desclée De Brouwer, 1971) and Henri Queffélec, Francois
d’Assise: Le Jongleur de Dieu (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1982). G. K. Chesterton’s fifth chapter is
entitled “Le Jongleur de Dieu” in his St. Francis of Assisi.
,
Brother Juniper. Fra Ginepro, in Italian. On him, see Aviad Kleinberg, Flesh Made Word: Saints
Stories and the Western Imagination, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2008), 225-38.
defied social norms. Described repeatedly in Fioretti di san Francesco (Little flowers of Saint
Francis) and Vita di frate Ginepro (Life of Brother Juniper): see La Vita di frate Ginepro (testo latino
e volgarizzamento), ed. Giorgio Petrocchi, Scelta di curiosita letterarie inedite 0 rare dal secolo
XII al XIX, vol. 256 (Bologna, Italy: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1960).
two classes of artists. Berceo uses the terms trovador and joglar. For his guise as joglar of Saint
Dominic, see Vida de Santo Domingo de Silos (The Life of Saint Dominic of Silos), book 2, stanza
289: “Querémosvos un otro libriello comengar, / e de los sus milagros algunos renungar, / los
que Dios en su vida quiso por él mostrar, / cuyos joglares somos, él nos dene guiar” (“We want
to begin another little book, / and make known to you some of his miracles, / those God willed
to show through him while he lived; / may He whose minstrels we are deign to guide us”):
compare book 3, 759. The translation can be found in The Collected Works of Gonzalo de Berceo in
English Translation, trans. Jeannie K. Bartha et al., Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies,
vol. 327 (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2008), 259, 314.
sermon collections. Sermon on All Saints’ Day (incipit “Laudate Dominum in sanctis eius”), Paris,
Bibliotheque nationale de France, MS lat. 13953, folio 145r: “Ioculatores, id est confessores qui
Dominum et sanctos mouent ad risum et leticiam optimis uerbis et factis suis, quorum unus
legit in ecclesia, alter cantat, alter romanizat, id est ‘enromiante’ id est exponendo latinum in
romano laicis scilicet predicando” (“Jongleurs, these are confessors who occasion laughter
and joy from God and the saints by the excellence of their words and actions. One does the
reading at church, another sings, another speaks in vernacular, which is to say that what is in
Latin, he sets forth in vernacular for the laity in his preaching”). Quoted and cited by Nicole
Bériou, “Introduction,” in Prédication et liturgie au Moyen Age: Etudes réunies, ed. idem and
Franco Morenzoni, Bibliotheque d’histoire culturelle du Moyen Age, vol. 5 (Turnhout, Belgium:
Brepols, 2008), 7-22, at 13n24.
Blessed John Buoni. From Romagna, he is also known as Johannes Bonus, Giovanni Bono,
Giambono, Zanibono, and Zannebono. His feast day falls on October 23: see Acta Sanctorum,
October, “Dies 22,” 9: 698-99. For a more approachable account, see “October,” ed. Peter Doyle,
in Butler’s Lives of the Saints, ed. David Hugh Farmer and Paul Burns, 12 vols. (Collegeville, MN:
Liturgical Press, 1995-2000), 160-61. For the relevant texts and Italian translations, see Vita di
Giovanni Bono, ed. Mario Mattei, Vite dei santi dell’Emilia Romagna, vol. 5 (Cesena, Italy: II
ponte vecchio, 2004).
280 Notes to Chapter 2 — Holy Fools
Holy Fools
fools for Christ's sake. Paul the Apostle, in 1 Corinthians 4:10. Compare 1:18, 23, 25.
fool of God. On the fool of God, see Saward, Perfect Fools; Thomas Lederer, “Fools and Saints:
Derision and Regenerative Laughter,” Comitatus 37 (2006): 111-45.
fool for Christ. Alexander Y. Syrkin, “On the Behavior of the ‘Fool for Christ’s Sake,” History of
Religions 22 (1982): 150-71 and Youval Rotman, Insanity and Sanctity in Byzantium: The Ambiguity
of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
Symeon of Emesa. Symeon flourished sometime between the middle and end of the sixth century.
Emesa is the modern-day Homs, in Syria. He is known from a brief account in the sixth-century
Evagrius Scholasticus and a detailed one in the seventh-century Leontios of Neapolis. For the
English of the latter, see Derek Krueger, Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius’s Life and the Late Antique
City, Transformation of the Classical Heritage, vol. 25 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1996). Leontius was the first to use the phrase “fool for Christ.” For further
information, see Vsevolod Rocheau, “Saint Siméon Salos: Ermite palestinien et prototype des
‘Fous-pour-le-Christ,”” Proche-Orient chrétien 28 (1978): 209-19.
Lausiac History. The Lausiac History was named after Lausus (or Lausos), who commissioned it.
This eunuch became the imperial chamberlain at the court of Emperor Theodosius II (r. 408-450).
(unintentional absurdism. E. Poulakou-Rebelakou et al., “Holy Fools: A Religious Phenomenon
of Extreme Behaviour,” Journal of Religion and Health 53.1 (2014): 95-104. This article offers in
condensed form comprehensive information on different traditions of holy fools.
Saint Francis of Assisi. The Assisi Compilation (1244-1260) 18, in Francis of Assisi: Early Documents,
ed. Regis J. Armstrong et al., 3 vols. (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1999-2001), 2: 118-230,
at 132-33, relates Francis’s claim at the chapter of Mats (dated often to 1221): “God has called
me by the way of simplicity and showed me the way of simplicity... . He wanted me to be
a new fool in the world.” Francis’s status as a fool of God has become deeply entrenched in
modern biographies of him, cf. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi, 106: “It was a solid objective fact,
like the stones in the road, that he had made a fool of himself. And as he stared at the word
‘fool’ written in luminous letters before him, the word itself began to shine and change”; 107-8:
“When Francis came forth from his cave of vision, he was wearing the same word ‘fool’ as a
feather in his cap; as a crest or even a crown. He would go on being a fool; he would become
more and more of a fool; he would be the court fool of the King of Paradise.”
fools to the world. Literally, the Latin mundi moriones means “fools of the world.” Erasmus, “The
Rich Beggars” (“Ptokhoplousioi”), in Opera omnia (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing
Company, 1969-<2017>), Ordo 1, 3 “Colloquia” (ed. L.-E. Halkin, F. Bierlaire, and R. Hoven
[1972]), 389-402, at 397.
individuals whose holiness goes undetected. Lennart Rydén, “The Holy Fool,” in The Byzantine Saint:
University of Birmingham, 14th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, ed. Sergei Hackel, Studies
Supplement to Sobornost, vol. 5 (San Bernardino, CA: Borgo, 1983), 106-13; Derek Krueger,
“Tales of Holy Fools,” in Religions of Late Antiquity in Practice, ed. Richard Valantasis (Princeton,
Notes to Chapter 2 — Holy Fools 281
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 177-86; Bernard Flusin, “Le serviteur caché ou le saint
sans existence,” in Les vies des saints a Byzance: Genre littéraire ou biographie historique. Actes du
Ile colloque international “Hermeneia,” Paris, 6-7-8 juin 2002, ed. Paolo Odorico and Panagiotis
A. Agapitos, Dossiers byzantins, vol. 4 (Paris: Centre d’études byzantines, néo-helléniques et
sud-est européennes, E.H.S.S., 2004), 59-71.
Scetis. Modern-day Wadi al-Natrun, then a monastic center, in the desert of the northwestern
Nile Delta.
Mark the Fool. In Greek oxAdc (transliterated salos or salds), with the accent on the final syllable.
pretends to be demented. The story, entitled De Marco salo (On [...] Mark), is no. 3 in “Vie et
récits de l’Abbé Daniel de Scété,” ed. Léon Clugnet, Revue de l’orient chrétien 5 (1900): 49-73,
370-91, at 60-62; no. 2 in Saint Daniel of Sketis: A Group of Hagiographic Texts, ed. and trans. Britt
Dahlman, Studia Byzantina Upsaliensia, vol. 10 (Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University, 2007);
trans. Krueger, “Tales of Holy Fools.” The story has been classified as no. 2255 in Bibliotheca
Hagiographica Graeca, ed. Francois Halkin, 3rd ed., Subsidia Hagiographica, vol. 8a (Brussels:
Société des Bollandistes, 1957), and as no. 2099z (compare nos. 2254-55) in Novum auctarium
Bibliothecae Hagiographicae Graecae, ed. idem, Subsidia Hagiographica, vol. 65 (Brussels: Société
des Bollandistes, 1984), which correspond to Wortley, “Repertoire,” W468. Transliterated by a
purist with fidelity to best practice, Scetis would be Skéetis.
Another example. The story, entitled De virgine quae ebrietatem simulabat, is no. 7 in Clugnet, “Vie
et récits,” 69-70. The same tale has been subsumed in Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca, no. 2101,
and Wortley, “Repertoire,” W461. See also Sergei Arkad’evich Ivanov, “From ‘Secret Servants
of God’ to ‘Fools for Christ’s Sake’ in Byzantine Hagiography,” in The Holy Fool in Byzantium
and Russia, ed. Ingunn Lunde (Bergen, Norway: [Universitetet i Bergen, Russisk institutt], 1995),
5-17, at 10-11; idem, Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond, trans. Simon Franklin (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006).
other tales in the genre. Ivanov, “From ‘Secret Servants of God,” 188-89.
Maximos. [Kausokalybites (“of the burning hut”)] of Mount Athos, whose biography is recorded
in four saints’ lives: see Halkin, Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca, nos. 1236z, 1237, 1237c, 1237f.
Two of these are included in Holy Men of Mount Athos, ed. Richard P. H. Greenfield and Alice-
Mary Talbot, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, vol. 40 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2016), 369-439 (by Niphon), 441-567 (by Theophanes).
church of Saint Mary of Blachernae. As its name predisposes us to believe, this great church was
associated with the Virgin. It was located in the northwestern section of Constantinople, in the
suburb known as Blachernae.
holy fools. The key Russian term is iurodivyi.
stock characters. Ewa M. Thompson, Understanding Russia: The Holy Fool in Russian Culture
(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987).
Fool. Tale 10, in Fou, dixiéme conte de la Vie des péres: Conte pieux du XIIle siécle, ed. Jacques
Chaurand, Publications romanes et frangaises, vol. 117 (Geneva: Droz, 1971).
282 Notes to Chapter 2 — Holy Fools
Gautier de Coinci wrote a miracle. Gautier de Coinci, Les miracles de Notre Dame, ed. V. Frédéric
Koenig, 4 vols., Textes littéraires francais, vols. 64, 95, 131, 165 (Geneve: Droz, 1955-), 3: 74-106
(book 1, miracle 37 [D. 39: “D’un escommené”]; Le miracle d’un excommunié, trans. Annette
Llinarés Garnier, Traductions des classiques du Moyen Age, vol. 92 (Paris: Honoré Champion,
2013). For analysis, see Huguette Legros, “Les fous de Dieu,” in “Sia parlé par moult ruiste vertu”:
Mélanges de littérature médiévale offerts a Jean Subrenat, ed. Jean Dufournet, Colloques, congress
et conferences sur le Moyen Age, vol. 1 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000), 339-53. She returns to
the topic in her recent book, idem, La folie dans la littérature médiévale: Etude des représentations de
Ia folie dans Ia littérature des XIIe, XIIIe et XIVe siécles (Rennes, France: Presses universitaires de
Rennes, 2013).
Gottfried Keller composed a poem. The original episode was recorded in the sixteenth-century
family chronicle known as the Zimmern Chronicle (1519-1566).
The Fool of Count von Zimmern. Gottfried Keller, “Der Narr des Grafen von Zimmern,” in Sémtliche
Werke in sieben Biinden, ed. Thomas Boning and Gerhard Kaiser, 7 vols., Bibliothek deutscher
Klassiker, vol. 3 (Frankfurt, Germany: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985-1996), 1: 718-19. For
interpretation, see Gerhard Kaiser, “Inkarnation und Altarsakrament: Ein nichtchristliches
Gedicht tiber die Mese und was es Christliches sagt. Zu Gottfried Kellers ‘Der Narr des Grafen
von Zimmern,” Zeitschrift fiir Theologie und Kirche 94 (1997): 253-62.
large lidded flagon. The cup is known as a ciborium. For the source, see Zimmerische Chronik, ed.
Karl August Barack, 4 vols. (Tiibingen, Germany: Litterarische Verein in Stuttgart, 1869), 2: 585
(in 1528): the fool is identified as Michele, serving Count Johannes Werner von Zimmern.
The Holy Jester Francis. Lu santo jullare Francesco, ed. Franca Rame (Turin, Italy: Einaudi, 1999),
33-37 (Italian and dialect, in facing-page format).
immersed himself. Antonio Scuderi, “Dario Fo and Oral Tradition: Creating a Thematic Context,”
Oral Tradition 15 (2000): 26-38.
holy jester. Antonio Scuderi, “Unmasking the Holy Jester Dario Fo,” Theatre Journal 55.2 (2003):
275-90.
jonglery. The Italian for jongleur is giullare, for jonglery is giullarata. The most obvious evidence
would be pieces such as Dario Fo, La giullarata con Concetta Pina e Cicciu Busacca (Verona, Italy:
Bertani, 1975), and Mistero buffo: Giullarata popolare (Turin, Italy: Einaudi, 2003). See Scuderi,
“Unmasking.” On Fo as a medievalizer, see Louise D’Arcens, “Dario Fo’s Mistero Buffo and the
Left-Modernist Reclamation of Medieval Popular Culture,” in Medieval Afterlives in Popular
Culture, ed. Gail Ashton and Daniel T. Kline (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 57-70;
idem, Comic Medievalism: Laughing at the Middle Ages, Medievalism, vol. 4 (Cambridge: D. S.
Brewer, 2014), 68-87.
arrogated or effaced. The framework he assumes derives from Antonio Gramsci and Mikhail
Bakhtin, among others, and it posits subaltern masses of lower classes, which are oppressed
by hegemonic elites.
the most successful and significant. Conrad Greenia, “The Laybrother Vocation in the Eleventh
and Twelfth Centuries,” Cistercian Studies 16 (1981): 38-45, at 43.
Notes to Chapter 2 — Fact or Fiction? 283
Fact or Fiction?
Truth is stranger than fiction. Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1897), chap. 15.
The City of God. De civitate Dei.
On Superstition. De superstitione.
performs daily. “A leading pantomime actor of great experience, grown old and decrepit, used
to put on his act every day on the Capitol, as if the gods still took pleasure in his performance
now that human beings had abandoned him.” For a translation of the passage, see Augustine,
Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth, UK:
Penguin Books, 1972), 250.
The parallel to De civitate Dei 6.10 was first drawn in Francesco Novati, “L’archimimus di
Seneca ed il tombeor Nostre Dame,” Romania 25 (1896): 591, and later reexamined by G. SamSalovié,
“Del tumbeor Nostre Dame,” Ziva antika / Antiquité vivante 10 (1960): 320. In the retelling of the
Old French by the latter, the jongleur dies at the end of performing and supplicating. A monk
witnesses the death and brings the abbot, who explains that the dancer's activity pleased God
more than any other.
the show must go on. A similar impulse may explain another historical anecdote. In 211, a mime
play is interrupted when the alarm is sounded of an approaching enemy. The crowd first rushes
to arms and later returns to the performance, where the spectators find that in their absence
the mime has continued dancing to the accompaniment of a flute player. See Sextus Pompeius
Festus, De verborum significatione, ed. W. M. Lindsay, in Glossaria latina, 5 vols. (Paris: Société
anonyme d’Edition “Les Belles lettres,” 1926-1931), 4: 93-506, at 419 (item 436), “Salva res <est;
saltat> senex,” discussed by Paul Veyne, Le pain et le cirque: Sociologie historique d’un pluralisme
politique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1976), 392, 499-500 (n58).
cases from western Christendom. The odds are good that if we wished to track down instances
from other traditions, they could be found readily. For Muslim examples, see Fritz Meier, Abii
Sa‘td-i Abii l-Hayr (357-440/967-1049): Wirklichkeit und Legende, Acta Iranica, vol. 11 (Leiden,
Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1976), 256-59.
Dancers are the athletes of God. This saying is often identified, without any source, as a quotation
from Albert Einstein.
sixteenth-century friar. Known as Pascual Bailo6n in Spanish, often called “The Saint of the
Eucharist,” he is sometimes designated simply by a diminutive of his first name, Pascualito.
His feast day is May 17. For concise and reliable biographical information, see Niccolo Del
Re, “Pasquale Baylén,” in Bibliotheca sanctorum, 13 vols. (Rome: Istituto Giovanni XXIII nella
Pontificia Universita lateranense, 1961-1970), 10: 358-63. His life story was written by his
fellow Franciscan and superior, Father Juan Ximenez. See Juan Ximenez (Jiménez), Chronica
del B. Fray Pasqual Baylon (Valencia, Spain: Iuan Crysostomo Gariz, 1601). The abbreviated
Latin translation of the original Spanish vita by Father Ximenez can be found in Acta Sanctorum
(May 4, 1866): 48-132; the episode to follow is at p. 53A, section 17. For uncritical biographies
(all three of them often reprinted), see Louis-Antoine de Porrentruy, The Saint of the Eucharist:
Saint Paschal Baylon, Patron of Eucharistic Associations, trans. Oswald Staniforth (London: R. &
T. Washbourne, 1908); Autbert Groeteken, Paschalis Baylon: Heiligenbild aus Spaniens goldenem
Jahrhundert (Cincinnati, OH: Verlag des “Sendbote,” 1912); Innocenzo Russo, Vita di s. Pasquale
Baylon francescano (Naples, Italy: Federico & Ardia, 1931).
284 Notes to Chapter 2 — Fact or Fiction?
attachment to the Eucharist. This aspect is symbolized by the ostensory and the chalice.
King of the Graveyard. In Spanish, San Pascualito, also known as San Pascualito Muerte (Saint
Paschal Death) and El Rey San Pascual (King Saint Paschal). As the “King of the Graveyard,”
Paschal is represented as a skeleton with a crown, cape, or both.
known for dancing. Ivan Innerst, Saints for Today: Reflections on Lesser Saints (San Francisco:
Ignatius, 2000), 18. On the conventional iconography, see Maria Chiara Celletti, in Bibliotheca
sanctorum, 10: 363-64.
blessed the saint. “El pastor de Torrehermosa,” section 68, “La danza de los gitanos,” in San
Pascual: Boletin informativo de las obras del templo 17.168 (July-August 1965). The episode is
recounted in Ximenez, Chronica.
broke into a jubilant jig. The caption reads: “Then, full of joy, he sang and danced like a
madman....” The voice bubble exclaims, in reference to the Eucharist with the veneration of
which Paschal became celebrated: “Let all mortals eat fruit by which they will live, which is
God underneath the bread.”
Baylon. The name has been construed as having in its first syllable a stem that derives from the
Spanish verb bailar “to dance.” Its second syllable is the augmentative —6n, with an affective
meaning — expressing a liking. See Eric O’Brien, “Omer Englebert’s The Last of the Conquistadors,
Junipero Serra: A Critical Appraisal,” The Americas 13 (1956): 175-85, at 179.
Obando. In the province of Bulacan, on the island of Luzon in the Philippines.
church dedicated to him. The church is first documented in 1754 as being called Iglesia de San
Pascual Baylon del Pueblo de Ovando.
Our Lady of Salambao, Our Lady of Salambao is an image of the Virgin (now in the church of San
Paschal) that was reportedly found by two brothers inside their fishing net (salambao) in 1793.
the dancing saint. Both traits may be investigated by searching for Pascual Baylon and “the
dancing saint.” This association seems to be endemic in the Philippines.
a second jongleur de Notre-Dame. Butler’s Lives of the Saints, ed. Herbert J. Thurston and Donald
Attwater, 4 vols. (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1981), 2: 335.
Saint John Bosco. In Italian, Giovanni Melchiorre Bosco.
say the rosary and attend Mass. John Bosco, Memoirs of the Oratory of Saint Francis de Sales from 1815
to 1855: The Autobiography of Saint John Bosco, trans. Daniel Lyons, with notes and commentary
by Eugenio Ceria et al. (New Rochelle, NY: Don Bosco Publications, 1989), chap. 3 (“The Young
Acrobat”), 27-29, 29-31 (notes). An Italian biography by Eugenio Pilla is entitled II piccolo
giocoliere, 4th ed., Fiori di cielo, vol. 38 (Bari, Italy: Paoline, 1967).
lay brothers. The lay brothers are known as coadjutors.
dance as a spiritual medium. Ruth St. Denis, An Unfinished Life: An Autobiography (New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1939), 57: “But without any question I was at that time a kind of dancing
ritualist. The intensities of my spiritual life had found a focus of action in exactly the same
way that another earnest young person would enter the church.” She has become indelibly
associated with dance as an expression of religion. For example, an account of her life story
Notes to Chapter 2 — Fact or Fiction? 285
by Suzanne Shelton is entitled Divine Dancer: A Biography of Ruth St. Denis (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1981); a book by Janet Lynn Roseman that studies her art is called Dance Was Her
Religion: The Sacred Choreography of Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis and Martha Graham (Prescott,
AZ: Hohm Press, 2004); and a documentary on her (a Mentor-St. Ives production, produced
by Edmund Penney and Gertrude Marks, directed by Edmund Penney, written by Edmund
Penney and Charles Curran) bears the title The Dancing Prophet (Derry, NH: Chip Taylor
Communications, 1999).
founded a Society of Spiritual Arts. Jane Sherman and Christena Schlundt, “Who’s St. Denis? What
Is She?,” Dance Chronicle 10.3 (1987): 305-29, at 318.
made a specialty of dances on Christian themes. Suzanne Shelton, “St. Denis, Ruth,” in Cohen et
al., International Encyclopedia of Dance, 5: 490-98, at 497; Shelton, Divine Dancer, 241-43 (on a
possible connection through Norman Bel Geddes with Max Reinhardt’s The Miracle); Sandra
Meinzenbach, “Tanz ist eine Sprache und eine Schrift des Géttlichen”: Kunst und Leben der Ruth St.
Denis, Beitrage zur Tanzkultur, vol. 8 (Wilhelmshaven, Germany: Florian Noetzel, 2013), 200-5.
The dancer was introduced. The introduction came after an organ prelude and Gospel readings.
the incarnation of femininity and creative love. St. Denis, Unfinished Life, 365: “The White Madonna
is the total being of woman, passive, waiting, hidden behind the heavy veil of time. She is the
being of creative love.” For interpretation, see Kimerer L. La Mothe, “Passionate Madonna: The
Christian Turn of American Dancer Ruth St. Denis,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion
66.4 (1998): 747-69.
Madonnas were the passion of her last years. Shelton, Divine Dancer, 268. Quoted by La Mothe,
“Passionate Madonna,” 748.
One Sunday in 1935. February 25, 1935.
religious dance. A rhythmic interpretation of the Psalms, it was entitled When I Meditate on Thee in
the Night-Watches. Soignée in a white, black, and red outfit, she proceeded through motions that
she stated symbolized “the gradual ascent of man’s soul from the moment he acknowledges his
need of spiritual light to the final radiation.” See “Ruth St. Denis Dances before Church Altar”
(Associated Press), The Stamford Daily 87.5, February 25, 1935.
Manhattan church. The church was Central Presbyterian, which had been constructed in Gothic
revival style between 1920 and 1922 at the corner of 64th Street and Park Avenue, on the Upper
East Side.
scorching controversy. Rachel K. McDowell, “Dance by Ruth St. Denis in Church Stirs Up a
Presbyterian Row: Denominational Leader Presses for Disciplinary Action against Those
Responsible for Her Appearance at Service in Park Avenue Chancel,” The New York Times,
February 28, 1935, 21.
huffing and puffing. In “Dancing Before the Lord,” The Morning Oregonian, February 26, 1935, 8,
a journalist opined against the rush to condemn: “An ingrained and lingering puritanism, not
yet completely exorcised by our liberal and irreverent times, induces us to look askance on the
dance as an aid to religion.”
one writer. “Dancing Before the Lord,” The Morning Oregonian, February 26, 1935, 8. On the
puritanical reaction to the dance, see Shelton, Divine Dancer, 244.
286 Notes to Chapter 2 — Fact or Fiction?
Mireille Negre. Her story can be read most fully in Mireille Negre, with Mireille Taub, Une
vie entre ciel et terre (Paris: Balland, 1990). Accounts can be found also in Jean-Roger Bourrec,
Mireille Négre, “alliance” (Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 1984); Mireille Negre and Michel Cool, Je
danserai pour toi (Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 1984); Mireille Negre, Danser sur les étoiles (Paris:
Balland, 1993).
achieved ever greater success. Eventually she danced in the corps de ballet, and ultimately she
became the first dancer.
Carmelites. Known in full as the Order of the Brothers of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, this
religious society owe its name to having been founded on Mount Carmel in the Holy Lands
during the Crusades. Since the thirteenth century its members have been recognized within the
Church as having a distinctively Marian devotion, under the Virgin’s special protection in her
capacity as the Mother of God or God-Bearer. See Christopher O’Donnell, “Maria nel Carmelo,”
in Dizionario carmelitano, ed. Emanuele Boaga and Luigi Borriello (Rome: Citta Nuova, 2008),
539-46.
holidays associated with Mary. James Boyce, “Maria nella liturgia carmelitana,” in Boaga and
Borriello, Dizionario carmelitano, 546-49.
many a long tale. My translation of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede, lines 48-49, in John Scattergood,
“Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede: Lollardy and Texts,” in Lollardy and the Gentry in the Later Middle
Ages, ed. Margaret Aston and Colin Richmond (Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1997), 77-94, at 87: “Thei
maketh hem Maries men (so thei men tellen), / and lieth on our Ladie many a longe tale.”
striking a balletic pose. The pose in question was an arabesque, in which the dancer balances on
one leg with the other unbent at the knee and extended back.
the passion for dance. Her narrative of the time is replete with pronouncements of devotion to
both God and dance. Negre, Une vie, 119: “I kept alive over a long period the secret of dance,
and if I had to sign in my own hand a love letter to God, my words would be: ‘Your dancer,
forever.’... God would speak to me of dance: ‘Our God is lord of the dance, he whose spirit
hovers over the waters.” Negre’s devotion to dance as a devotional outlet calls to mind a much
earlier female mystic, Mechthild of Magdeburg, who made dance a metaphor in her appeals
to God, with the most striking concision in a poem that has been entitled “I Cannot Dance”: “T
cannot dance, Lord, unless you lead me. / If you want me to leap with abandon, / You must
intone the song. / Then I shall leap into love, / From love into knowledge, / From knowledge
into enjoyment, / And from enjoyment beyond all human sensations. / There I want to remain,
yet want also to circle higher still.” Mechthild of Magdeburg, Das flieSende Licht der Gottheit, ed.
Hans Neumann, 2 vols., Miinchener Texte und Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literatur des
Mittelalters, vols. 100, 101 (Munich, Germany: Artemis Verlag, 1990), 1: 28-29 (book 1, section
44); The Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans. Frank Tobin, Classics of Western Spirituality, vol. 92
(New York: Paulist Press, 1998), 59.
IT will dance for you, Lord. Negre, Une vie, 84: “Je danserai pour Toi, Seigneur, tant que je dure.”
exasperated at not being able to pray for God. Negre, Une vie, 114-15.
painful sacrifices. Negre, Une vie, 148: “I had renounced dance, made an abstraction of my body,
tolerated the worst sufferings that a dancer could know: in the name of God, I had accepted
silence.”
Notes to Chapter 2 — Fact or Fiction? 287
protracted tribulations. Negre, Une vie, 85.
Order of the Visitation. It was founded in 1610.
dedication to Him of her body as a dancer. Negre, Une vie, 159, 179: “Dance always has a purpose;
mine is to offer myself to Him.”
God was the lord of the dance. Neégre, Une vie, 167.
consecrated as a sister. Negre, Une vie, 123 (the chapter is entitled “A virgin, consecrated to
dance”), 177.
choreographed the words of the liturgy. Negre, Une vie, 133 (cf. 147).
ballet in linguistic terms. Negre, Une vie, 184: “Classical dance is a wonderful tool for expressing
Christian spirituality, for making of one’s body a language for understanding and dialogue... .
Dance is also a school of tolerance, since its language is universal and can be understood by
everyone, whatever their creed or origins.”
jongleur on the facade of Notre-Dame. Neégre, Une vie, 98. It is hard to know which sculpture Neégre
has in mind.
transcendence of mere art. It should come as no wonder that the cataract of publications by Negre
includes a coauthored volume on the relationship between art and life. See Mireille Negre and
Eric de Rus, L’art et la vie (Toulouse: Carmel, 2009). A recent book by her is a meditation upon
the Gospels entitled Dance with Jesus. See Mireille Negre, with Michel Cool, Danse avec Jésus:
Mireille Négre médite et illustre l’Evangile (Paris: Salvator, 2014).
I dance for God. Her convictions regarding dance are summarized simply but nicely in a French
weekly for children, Fripounet 52, December 28, 1983-January 4, 1984, 28-29.
Nick Weber. Nick Weber, The Circus That Ran Away with a Jesuit Priest: Memoir of a Delible Character
(Indianapolis, IN: Dog Ear Publishing, 2012).
sacred comedy. M. Conrad Hyers, The Comic Vision and the Christian Faith: A Celebration of Life and
Laughter (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1981).
I Dance with God. Anna Nobili, with the assistance of Carolina Mercurio, Io ballo con Dio: La suora
che prega danzando (Milan, Italy: Mondadori, 2013).
Worker-Sisters of the Holy House of Nazareth. In Italian, Suore Operaie della Santa Casa di Nazareth.
imbroglio. Nick Squires, “Lap Dancer Turned Nun Angers Pope,” The Telegraph, 26 May 2011,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/8536052/Lap-dancer-turned-nun-
angers-Pope.html
[f it is not true, it is well conceived. Proverbial at least since the sixteenth century, it is best put in
Italian: Se non é vero, é ben trovato, and by authors as famous as Giordano Bruno, Gli eroici furori
(book 2). For further information, see Michael Cole, “Se Non é Vero, é Ben Trovato,” Intellectual
History Review 24.3 (2014): 429-39.
288 Notes to Chapter 3 — The Order of Citeaux
Notes to Chapter 3
He who labors as he prays. “Qui orat laborat, cor levat ad Deum cum manibus,” in pseudo-Bernard
of Clairvaux, Ad sororem de modo bene vivendi.
The Order of Citeaux
Vox clamantis in deserto. These words are drawn from the Vulgate Latin translation of the Gospel
of Mark 1:1-3 and of the Gospel of John 1:22-23 in reference to John the Baptist, which in turn
quotes Isaiah 40:3.
remunerated in kind. Clothing and horses were frequent tokens of largesse from wealthy patrons.
Poets mention them often as coveted perquisites.
plenty of vilification. David Knowles, The Monastic Order in England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1940), 662-78; David Neil Bell, ed. and trans., “De grisis monachis: A Goliardic
Invective against the Cistercians in London, B. L., Cotton Vespasian A.XIX,” Studia monastica:
Commentarium ad rem monasticam investigandam 41 (1999): 243-59. The attackers included clerics
such as Gerald of Wales and Walter Map.
the founder. The founder was Abbot Robert of the Benedictine abbey of Molesmes in Burgundy,
who was persuaded to undertake this innovation by two fellow monks, Alberic and Stephen
Harding.
cistern. The Latin place name Cistercium is related to the noun cistellum. The English word
“cistern” belongs to the same family of words.
paludal and fluvial. Kinder, Cistercian Europe, 81-88. There were obvious exceptions: we will
encounter more than once a monk named Helinand of Froidmont. The place name means “cold
mountain.”
Bernard loved the valleys. “Bernardus valles, colles [alternately, montes] Benedictus
amabat, / Franciscus vicos [alt., “Moenia Franciscus” or “Franciscus oppida”], magnas [alt.,
magnus, celebres] Ignatius [Dominicus] urbes” (Bernard loved valleys, Benedict hills, Francis
villages, and Ignatius the big cities). See Anselme Dimier, Stones Laid before the Lord: A History
of Monastic Architecture, trans. Gilchrist Lavigne, Cistercian Studies Series, vol. 152 (Kalamazoo,
MI: Cistercian Publications, 1999), 51-52. The maxim merits comparison with the saying of
Confucius that “The wise delight in water; the humane delight in mountains”: Analects, trans.
Annping Chin (New York: Penguin, 2014), book 6.23.
desert. Exordium parvum, 3, in Chrysogonus Waddell, ed., Narrative and Legislative Texts from Early
Citeaux (Brecht, Belgium: Citeaux commentarii cistercienses, 1999), 421 (eremum). See Benedicta
Ward, “The Desert Myth: Reflections on the Desert Ideal in Early Cistercian Monasticism,” in
One Yet Two: Monastic Tradition East and West. Orthodox-Cistercian Symposium, Oxford University,
28 August-1 September, 1973, ed. M. Basil Pennington, Cistercian Studies Series, vol. 29
(Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1976), 183-99.
alone. Ménakhos, from monos.
individualism with communitarianism. Two strands of scholarship have credited the long twelfth
century with an unprecedented appreciation of individuality. One has emphasized the quality
Notes to Chapter 3 — Cistercians and the Virgin 289
as it appears in literature, the other as it comes to the fore in religious sensibilities. The poem
about the tumbler straddles both categories: in this literary work, he creates a paradoxically
solo community within a monastery. It bears recalling that his individuality has nothing to
do with personality in a modern sense, of which he puts on display none. On the scholarship,
see Caroline Walker Bynum, “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?,” Journal of
Ecclesiastical History 31 (1980), 1-17, reprinted in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the
High Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 82-109.
The term abbot. The word has reached us by way of first Greek and then Latin.
Jesus and Paul. The three instances are in Mark 14:36, Romans 8:15, and Galatians 4:6.
the oldest communities. Other monasteries in this category are La Ferté, Morimond, and Pontigny.
convers. Jean Batany, “Les convers chez quelques moralistes des XIle et XIIIe siecles,” Citeaux:
Commentarii cistercienses 20 (1969): 241-59, at 242.
eulogies on Clairvaux. William of Saint Thierry, Vita sancti Bernardi (also known as Vita prima),
book 1, chap. 8, 35, in PL 185, 225-68, at 247C—248B.
convert monk. The Latin terms are monachus conversus and monachus laicus or illitteratus,
respectively. See Constance H. Berman, “Distinguishing between the Humble Peasant Lay
Brother and Sister, and the Converted Knight in Medieval Southern France,” in Religious and
Laity in Western Europe, 1000-1400: Interaction, Negotiation, and Power, ed. Emilia Jamroziak and
Janet Burton, Europa Sacra, vol. 2 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2006), 263-83.
to the monastic way of life. Ad conversionem.
metaphor. For the larger context, see Giles Constable, “The Interpretation of Mary and Martha,”
inidem, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), 1-141.
Lectio divina. Duncan Robertson, Lectio divina: The Medieval Experience of Reading, Cistercian
Studies Series, vol. 238 (Trappist, KY: Cistercian Publications, 2011).
separate spaces. Dimier, Stones Laid before the Lord, 45.
a sermon. Exordium magnum Cisterciense, sive, Narratio de initio Cisterciensis Ordinis, ed. Bruno
Griesser, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, vol. 138 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols,
1994), 255-57 (4.13) (in 1961 edition, 238-39).
Cistercians and the Virgin
hyperdulia. Huper and douleia, respectively.
point person for their whole order. Gabriela Signori, ““Totius ordinis nostri patrona et advocata’:
Maria als Haus und Ordensheilige der Zisterzienser,” in Maria in der Welt: Marienverehrung im
Kontext der Sozialgeschichte 10.-18. Jahrhundert, ed. Claudia Opitz et al., Clio Lucernensis, vol. 2
(Zurich: Chronos, 1993), 253-73.
service of the Virgin. Pierre-André Sigal, L’homme et le miracle dans la France médiévale, XIe—XIe
siécle (Paris: Cerf, 1985), 107-15.
290 Notes to Chapter 3 — Cistercians and the Virgin
Marianism. For a concise introduction, bibliography, and anthology in translation, see Luigi
Gambero, Mary in the Middle Ages: The Blessed Virgin Mary in the Thought of Medieval Latin
Theologians, trans. Thomas Buffer (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2005), 131-41.
Cistercian writers. Albert van Iterson, “L’ordre de Citeaux et le Coeur de Marie,” Collectanea
ordinis cisterciensium reformatorum 20 (1958): 219-312; 21 (1959): 97-120; Norbert Mussbacher,
“Die Marienverehrung der Cistercienser,” in Die Cistercienser: Geschichte-Geist—Kunst, ed.
Ambrosius Schneider et al. (Cologne, Germany: Wienand, 1977), 165-82.
Divine Comedy. Paradiso, 31.100-102: “E la regina del Cielo, ond’io ardo / tutto d’amor, ne fara
ogne grazia, / pero ch’i’ sono il suo fedel Bernardo” (“And the queen of Heaven, for whom
I burn / All from love, will grant us every grace, / Because I am her faithful Bernard”). To
Bernard, Dante also assigns the culminating prayer to the Virgin in the final canto of the same
concluding canticle, Paradiso (33.1-39), in his masterpiece.
Bernard, among others. On Bernard of Clairvaux and Mary, see Jean Leclercq, “Saint Bernard
et la dévotion médiévale envers Marie,” Revue d‘ascétique et de mystique 30 (1954): 361-75. On
Mary’s humility, see Bernard of Clairvaux, “Dominica infra octavam Assumptionis B. V. Mariae
sermo,” in PL 183, 429-38, at 435A, and the German monk (and bishop of Eichstatt) Philip
of Rathsamhausen, Expositio super Magnificat, ed. Andreas Bauch, Das theologisch-aszetische
Schrifttum des Eichstitter Bischofs Philipp von Rathsamhausen (1306-1322) (Eichstatt, Germany:
Verlag der Katholischen Kirche in Bayern, 1948), 178-250, at 214.
unvoiced grief. 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), 197-201.
Humility, chastity, and silence. France, Separate but Equal, 164-66, 200-207 (humility); 211-15
(silence); Edmond Mikkers, “L’idéal religieux des freres convers dans l’ordre de Citeaux aux
12e et 13e siecles,” Collectanea ordinis Cisterciensium reformatorum 24 (1962): 113-29, at 127-28
(humility).
fealty to the Virgin. See a monk of Sept-Fons, “Citeaux et Notre Dame,” Jean-Baptiste Auniord,
“Citeaux et Notre Dame,” and Robert Thomas, “Autres Cisterciens,” in Maria: Etudes sur la
Sainte Vierge, ed. Hubert Du Manoir de Juaye, 7 vols. (Paris: Beauchesne, 1949-1964), 2: 579-83,
583-613, 614-24; Stephan Beissel, Geschichte der Verehrung Marias in Deutschland wihrend des
Mittelalters: Ein Beitrag zur Religionswissenschaft und Kunstgeschichte (Freiburg im Breisgau,
Germany: Herder, 1909), 195-213; Janet Burton and Julie Kerr, The Cistercians in the Middle
Ages (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2011), 127-33; Howard Haeseler Lewis, “The Cistercian Order
and the Virgin in the Twelfth Century” (AB Honors thesis, Harvard University, 1956). For an
anthology of texts relating to Mary in English translation, see E. Rozanne Elder, ed. and trans.,
Mary Most Holy: Meditating with the Early Cistercians (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications,
2003).
Peter Abelard. Letter 10, in Letters of Peter Abelard, beyond the Personal, trans. Jan M. Ziolkowski
(Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 85-98, at 94.
seals. Pierre Bony, “An Introduction to the Study of Cistercian Seals: The Virgin as Mediatrix,
Then Protectrix on the Seals of Cistercian Abbeys,” in Studies in Cistercian Art and Architecture,
vol. 3, ed. Meredith Parsons Lillich, Cistercian Studies, vol. 89 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian
Notes to Chapter 3 — Cistercians and the Virgin 291
Publications, 1987), 201-40. The tendency was made obligatory in 1335 by a ruling of Pope
Benedict XII: see Joseph-Marie Canivez, ed., Statuta capitulorum generalium ordinis Cisterciensis
ab anno 1116 ad annum 1786, 8 vols., Bibliotheque de la Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, vol. 9
(Louvain, Belgium: Bureaux de la Revue, 1933-1941), 3: 411 (for 1335, 2).
every Cistercian church and cloister. On cloisters, see Exordium Cistercii et Summa Cartae caritatis
(The beginning of Citeaux and the summa of the Charter of Charity), chap. 9, “On the Dedication
of the Cloister,” in Les plus anciens textes de Citeaux: Sources, textes et notes historiques, ed. Jean de
la Croix Bouton and Jean Baptiste Van Damme, Citeaux: Commentarii cistercienses: Studia et
documenta, vol. 2 (Achel, Belgium: Abbaye cistercienne, 1974), 121 (“in honore reginae coeli et
terrae”). On churches, see the Cistercian statutes “of 1134” that were compiled shortly before
the mid-twelfth century, in Canivez, Statuta, 1:17 (Statuta ord. cisterciensis 1134,18 “in memoria
eiusdem caeli et terrae reginae sanctae Mariae”), and Waddell, Narrative and Legislative Texts,
463 (Instituta generalis capituli 18 “Quod omnia monasteria in honore beatae Marie dedicentur”:
“in memoria eiusdem caeli et terrae reginae sanctae Mariae”).
liturgies of the Cistercians. The monks lavished care upon the celebration of the four Marian
holidays then in existence: the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin or Candlemas, on February
2; the Feast of the Annunciation, on March 25; the Assumption of Mary, on August 15 (and
the Octave of the Assumption, on August 22); and the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary,
on September 8: see Goffredo Viti and Malachia Falletti, “La devozione a Maria nell’Ordine
Cistercense,” Marianum: Ephemerides Mariologiae 54.1-2, no. 143 (1992): 287-348.
daily offices. On the offices, note the prescription of the Commemoratio beatae Mariae and the Horae
beatae Mariae virginis: Viti and Falletti, “La devozione a Maria,” 305-9. See also Burton and Kerr,
Cistercians in the Middle Ages, 127.
Hail, Holy Queen. Latin “Salve, regina”: Viti and Falletti, “La devozione a Maria,” 296, 311-14.
they explained the color. Adam of Perseigne, “102 Sermo V. in Assumptione B. Mariae,” in PL
211, 733C-744B, at 739D: “O quantus debet esse in meis candor cordium, et morum puritas,
(20) qui et candore habitus et titulo nominis virginalis lilii albedinem imitantur! Albi nimirum
monachi dicuntur, non modo quod albedine vestium fulgeant, sed quod candoris virginei
ministri spirituales existant.”
Saint Alberic. Feast day, January 26. Acta sanctorum.
Marian Doctor. Latin Doctor Marianus or Doctor Marialis.
missionaries of Marianism. For this characterization of Bernard, see Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A
History of the Virgin Mary (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 121.On Doctor Marianus,
see Dorothee Lauffs, “Bernhard von Clairvaux,” in Marienlexikon, ed. Remigius Baumer and
Leo Scheffczyk, 6 vols. (St. Ottilien, Germany: EOS, 1988-1994), 1: 445-50, at 445. On Doctor
Marialis, see Henri Barré, “Saint Bernard, docteur marial,” Analecta Sacri Ordinis Cisterciensis 9
(1953): 92-113. For the Cistercians, see Walter Delius, Geschichte der Marienverehrung (Munich,
Germany: E. Reinhardt, 1963), 157-58.
The angel Gabriel was sent. Luke 1:26, in Latin, Missus est angelus Gabriel.
On the Praises of the Virgin Mother. Latin De laudibus virginis matris.
292 Notes to Chapter 3 — Mother’s Milk
dynamics of courtly love. Hilda C. Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion, 2 vols.
(Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1990), 1: 235-41.
Hail, Star of the Sea. Latin Ave, maris stella. It is actually the work of the eighth-century Ambrosius
Autpertus. For the definitive study of the hymn, see Heinrich Lausberg, Der Hymnus Ave maris
stella, Abhandlungen der Rheinisch-Westfalischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. 61
(Opladen, Germany: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1976).
Memorare. The title is an imperative in the learned language for “Remember!”: The Catholic
Prayerbook: From Downside Abbey, ed. David Foster (Edinburgh, UK: T & T Clark, 2001), 153:
“Remember, O most merciful Virgin Mary, that it has never been heard that anyone who ran
to your protection, entreated your help, and sought your intercession has been abandoned.
Heartened with this faith, I run to you O Virgin of Virgins, Mother, I come to you, I stand asa
grieving sinner before you. Mother of the Word, do not spurn my words; but hear and hearken
to me favorably. Amen.” The translation is mine.
Greetings, Bernard. Salve, Bernarde.
Mother's Milk
nursing Madonna. Mary in this guise can be designated in Latinate terminology as the Madonna or
Virgo Lactans, in Greek as panagia galaktotrophousa. This is not the place to examine the broadest
implications of the motif, which has strong relevance to female spirituality. In this connection,
the milk could be tied to the blood of Christ in the Eucharist as well as to the motif of the gore
that comes forth when his side is lanced during the crucifixion. On the parallel between milk
and blood, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of
Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 270-71.
the saint prays before a Madonna. Purportedly in the church of Saint Vorles at Chatillon-sur-Seine,
involving a statue known as Notre-Dame du Chateau. The event was celebrated annually on
January 29. See Patrick Arabeyre, “La lactation de saint Bernard a Chatillon-sur-Seine: Données
et problemes,” in Vies et légendes de saint Bernard de Clairvaux: Création, diffusion, réception
(XIXe-XXe siécles). Actes des Rencontres de Dijon, 7-8 juin 1991, ed. idem et al. (Citeaux, France:
Commentarii Cistercienses “Présence Cistercienne,” 1993), 173-97.
no statue exists. Bernd Nicolai, “Die Entdeckung des Bildwerks: Frilhe Marienbilder und
Altarretabel unter dem Aspekt zisterziensischer Frommigkeit,” in Studien zur Geschichte der
europdischen Skulptur im 12.-13. Jahrhundert, ed. Herbert Beck and Kerstin Hengevoss-Diirkop
(Frankfurt, Germany: Henrich, 1994), 29-43.
show herself as a mother. The imperative monstra te esse matrum (show yourself to be a mother)
quotes verbatim a verse in Ave maris stella, the aforementioned hymn to Mary that is from the
ninth century or earlier. For the text and translation, see Peter G. Walsh, with Christopher
Husch, One Hundred Latin Hymns: Ambrose to Aquinas, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, vol.
18 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 200-203 (at stanza 4.1).
projecting a jet of milk. The development of the legend and its iconography have been treated
together in Léon Dewez and Albert van Iterson, “La lactation de saint Bernard: Légende et
iconographie,” Citeaux in de Nederlanden 7 (1956): 165-89; Jacques Berlioz, “La lactation de
saint Bernard dans un ‘exemplum’ et une miniature du Ci nous dit (début du XIVe siécle),”
Citeaux: Commentarii Cistercienses 39.3-4 (1988): 270-84; Brian Patrick McGuire, “Bernard and
Notes to Chapter 3 — Mary’s Head-Coverings 293
Mary’s Milk: A Northern Contribution,” in idem, The Difficult Saint: Bernard of Clairvaux and
His Tradition, Cistercian Studies Series, vol. 126 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1991),
189-225; Cécile Dupeux, “La lactation de saint Bernard de Clairvaux: Genese et évolution d’une
image,” in L’Image et la production du sacré: Actes du colloque de Strasbourg, 20-21 janvier 1988,
organisé par le Centre d’historique des religions de l'Université de Strasbourg II, Groupe “Théorie et
pratique de l’image cultuelle,” ed. Francoise Dunand et al. (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1991),
165-93; idem, “Saint Bernard dans l’iconographie médiévale: L’exemple de la lactation,” in
Arabeyre et al., Vies et légendes de saint Bernard de Clairvaux, 152-66; James France, “The Heritage
of Saint Bernard in Medieval Arts,” in A Companion to Bernard of Clairvaux, ed. Brian Patrick
McGuire (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2011), 305-46, at 329-35. For an archive of 119 images, see
James France, Medieval Images of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Cistercian Studies Series, vol. 210
(Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2007), CD/ROM “Lactatio.”
Saint Bernard alone. For a broad overview, see Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 192-205; for a synoptic
list of examples, see Dewez and Iterson, “La lactation de saint Bernard,” 168.
this legendary episode. The most important early record of the story, in which the woman is Pero
and her father Cimon, appears in Valerius Maximus, Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium.
assorted miracle tales. Barnay, Le ciel sur Ia terre, 35.
nursing mother. Mary in the manifestation of nursing mother is often styled in Latin as mater
lactans.
Mary’s Head-Coverings
sermons for Marian feasts. On Helinand’s Marian sermons, see Rubin, Mother of God, 154-57;
Beverly Kienzle, “Mary Speaks against Heresy: An Unedited Sermon of Hélinand for the
Purification, Paris, B.N. ms. Lat. 14591,” Sacris erudiri 32 (1991): 291-308; more generally, on the
special devotion of the Cistercians to Mary, see Rubin, Mother of God, 149-57.
everlasting service to her. “Sermo II, I in Natali Domini,” in PL 212, 486-96, at 495C: “magnae
huic Dominae faciunt homagium, et ejus servitutem perpetuam profitentur.” Another white
monk addressed his brother as, “You, monk of the Mother of God, who have arrived in the lot
of the Order of Mary.” See Ogier of Locedio (Oglerius de Tridino), Tractatus in laudibus sancte
Dei genetricis, in Beati Oglerii de Tridino Abbatis Monasterii Locediensis ord. Cist. in divec. Vercell:
Opera quae supersunt, ed. Giovan Battista Adriani (Turin, Italy: Augustae Taurinorum, 1873),
46: “Tu monache Matris Domini qui in sorte Ordinis Mariae venisti.” For a full translation, see
Ogier of Locedio, In Praise of God’s Holy Mother: On Our Lord’s Words to His Disciples at the Last
Supper, trans. D. Martin Jenni, Cistercian Fathers Series, vol. 70 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian
Publications, 2006).
subverted by her maternal power. Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 154-59.
Our Lady of Mercy. Alternatively, Our Lady of Pity. The corresponding Latin is Mater
Misericordiae; the French, Vierge de Misericorde; the German, Schutzmantelmadonna. The classic
reference is Paul Perdrizet, La Vierge de Miséricorde: Etude d’un théme iconographique, Bibliotheque
des Ecoles francaises d’Athénes et de Rome, vol. 101 (Paris: A. Fontemoing, 1908). For recent
reappraisals, see Christa Belting-Ihm, “Sub matris tutela”: Untersuchungen zur Vorgeschichte
der Schutzmantelmadonna, Abhandlungen der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften,
Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, Jahrgang 1976, vol. 3 (Heidelberg, Germany: Carl Winter,
294 Notes to Chapter 3 — Mary’s Head-Coverings
1976), 131-46; Sylvie Barnay, “Une apparition pour protéger: Le manteau de la Vierge au XIIIe
siecle,” Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes 8 (2001): 13-22; Sonja Reisner, “Sub tuum
praesidium confugimus’: Zur Instrumentalisierung von Visionen und Wunderberichten in der
dominikanischen Ordenshistoriographie am Beispiel der Schutzmantelmadonna,” Acta Antiqua
43.3 (2003): 393-405.
beneath her mantle. For the motif in general (often designated by the German Schutzmantelmaria),
see Perdrizet, La Vierge de Miséricorde; Alois Thomas, “Schutzmantelmaria,” in Die Gottesmutter:
Marienbild in Rheinland und in Westfalen, ed. Leonhard Kiippers (Recklinghausen, Germany:
Bongers, 1974), 227-42; Barnay, “Une apparition pour protéger,” 13-22. For the Byzantine
backdrop, see Belting-Ihm, “Sub matris tutela.”
Constantinople. Bissera V. Pentcheva, “The Virgin of Constantinople: Power and Belief,” in
Byzantine Women and Their World, ed. Ioli Kalavrezou (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art
Museums, 2003), 112-38, at 115.
white-hooded monks. James France, “Cistercians under Our Lady’s Mantle,” Cistercian Studies
Quarterly 37.4 (2002): 393-414.
an episode in the Dialogue on Miracles. On the origins of this tradition, see McGuire, “Cistercians
and the Rise of the Exemplum,” 227-29. The first telling of it as an exemplum is in Dialogus
miraculorum 7.59 (ed. Strange, 2: 79-80): see Reisner, “Sub tuum praesidium confugimus.””
anonymous collection. Johannes Maior, ed., Magnum speculum exemplorum (Douay, France, 1611),
an expanded version of the anonymous Speculum exemplorum that was printed first in 1481.
dries the sweat. Maior, Magnum speculum exemplorum, 285-86 (“Dives 1”).
ventilates them. Maior, Magnum speculum exemplorum, 84-85 (“Bona injuste acquisita 8”).
white towel. Une touaille blance.
medieval vernacular noun. Harri Meier, “Fortschritt und Riickschritt in der etymologischen
Forschung: Als Beispiel: die Herkunft der romanischen Familie von ital. tovaglia,” in Italic and
Romance Linguistic Studies in Honor of Ernst Pulgram, ed. Herbert J. Izzo, Amsterdam Studies in
the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, Series 4, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, vol.
18 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1980), 103-11. The corresponding term in Latin was mappa. It was
an ancient lexical import from Punic, a language that went extinct in late antiquity. It likewise
meant “napkin” (a derivative of it) or “towel,” but eventually also denoted a cloth dropped
into an arena to mark the start of games. Later it became a term for “map,” which also derives
from it.
table napkin. Tovaglia and tovagliolo.
personal cleanliness. Frangoise Piponnier, “Linge de maison et linge de corps au Moyen Age:
D’aprés les inventaires bourguignons,” Ethnologie francaise 16 (1986): 239-48.
Mary had an up-close-and-personal connection. See Libri de natiuitate Mariae: Pseudo-Matthaei
Euangelium (Gospel according to Pseudo-Matthew), ed. Jan Gijsel, Corpus Christianorum Series
Apocryphorum, vol. 9 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1997), 333 (chap. 6.1).
Notes to Chapter 3 — Mary’s Head-Coverings 295
overspreads the head and chest. Barnay, Le ciel sur la terre, 202-5.
head cover. The French phrase is couvre chef or cuerchief.
cloth towels. Unfortunately, neither lexical development nor the premodern cultural history
even in the English-speaking world receive any attention in Helen Gustafson, Hanky Panky: An
Intimate History of the Handkerchief (Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 2002).
The Virgin’s textile. For the fullest information, see Annemarie Wey] Carr, “Threads of Authority:
The Virgin Mary’s Veil in the Middle Ages,” in Robes and Honor: The Medieval World of Investiture,
ed. Stewart Gordon (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 59-93.
made stellar. Konstantinides, “Le sens théologique”; George Galavaris, “The Stars of the Virgin:
An Ekphrasis of an Ikon of the Mother of God,” Eastern Churches Review 1 (1966-1967): 364-67.
Assumption. The Assumption of the Virgin corresponds to the Dormition of the Theotokos in the
Greek Orthodox Church.
transferred. Norman H. Baynes, Byzantine Studies and Other Essays, ed. R. A. Humphreys and
A. D. Momigliano (London: Athlone Press, 1955): 240-48 (“The Finding of the Virgin’s Robe”).
Constantinople. John Wortley, “The Marian Relics at Constantinople,” Greek, Roman, and
Byzantine Studies 45 (2005): 171-87; Stephen J. Shoemaker, “The Cult of Fashion: The Earliest
‘Life of the Virgin’ and Constantinople’s Marian Relics,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 62 (2008): 53-74.
tidal wave. On Byzantine influence as a tidal wave, see Wilhelm Koehler, “Byzantine Art in the
West,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 1 (Dumbarton Oaks Inaugural Lectures, November 2nd and 3rd,
1940) (1941): 62-87, at 79, 86.
chemisettes. Chemisette now refers to a distinct article of women’s clothing that was common in
the late Victorian era. Similar to a dickey, it covered the lower neck and upper chest, when worn
over a bodice that would otherwise have left those areas exposed.
pilgrims to Chartres. E. Jane Burns, “Saracen Silk and the Virgin’s Chemise: Cultural Crossings
in Cloth,” Speculum 81 (2006): 365-97, at 366-68, 374-75, 391-95, which corresponds roughly to
idem, Sea of Silk: A Textile Geography of Women’s Work in Medieval French Literature (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 156-84; Brian Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular
Badges (London: Stationery Office, 1998), 225-27.
Mary's veil. Carr, “Threads of Authority,” 59-93.
brouhaha at Chartres. Marcel Joseph Bulteau, Monographie de la cathédrale de Chartres, 2nd ed., 3
vols. (Chartres, France: R. Selleret, 1887-1892), 1: 105-8.
spotless towel. For instance, it is pictured in the background of a famous painting on wood behind
an altar: see Margaret B. Freeman, “The Iconography of the Merode Altarpiece,” Bulletin of
the Metropolitan Museum of Art 16 (December 1957): 130-39, at 132. More broadly, see George
Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), 182.
during her pregnancy. Carr, “Threads of Authority.”
296 Notes to Chapter 3 — Cistercian Lay Brothers
Cistercian Lay Brothers
No one can serve two masters. Matthew 6:24, Luke 16:13.
wordplay. On the wordplay, see Batany, “Les convers,” 246-48; France, Separate but Equal, 269-71.
heroic age of the Cistercians. James France, “The Cistercian Community,” in The Cambridge
Companion to the Cistercian Order, ed. Mette Birkedal Bruun (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2013), 80-86, at 85.
lay brothers. Latin fratres laici.
y
members of the institution. See Jacques Dubois, “The Laybrothers’ Life in the Twelfth Century,’
Cistercian Studies 7 (1972): 161-213; France, Separate but Equal. The bibliography of scholarship
in other languages leading up to these two is extensive, with notable resources being Othon
Ducourneau, “De I’institution et des us des convers dans l’Ordre de Citeaux (XIle-XIIle
siécles),” in Saint Bernard et son temps, 2 vols. (Dijon, France: Association bourguignonne des
sociétés savantes, 1929), 2: 139-201; Jean Leclercq, “Comment vivaient les freres convers,” in I
Laici nella “Societas Christiana” dei secoli XI et XII: Atti della terza Settimana internazionale di studio,
Mendola, 21-27 agosto 1965, Pubblicazioni dell’Universita: Contributi Serie 3/varia 5, Miscellaea
del Centro di studi medioevali, vol. 5 (Milan, Italy: Societa editrice vita e pensiero, 1965),
183-261; Jean A. Lefevre, “L’évolution des Usus conversorum de Citeaux,” Collectanea ordinis
Cisterciensium reformatorum 17.2 (1955): 66-96.
custom of silence. Chrysogonus Waddell, “The Place and Meaning of the Work of God in Twelfth-
Century Cistercian Life,” Cistercian Studies 23.1 (1988): 25-44, at 33-39.
good reason. Leclercq, “Comment vivaient les freres convers,” 170.
bore such a garment. Line 137.
facial hair. For portrayals of medieval Cistercian lay brothers with their beards, see James France,
The Cistercians in Medieval Art, Cistercian Studies Series, vol. 170 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian
Publications, 1998), 122-38, figs. 77-99. On the specific nature of the facial hair, see France,
Separate but Equal, 76-84.
bearded brothers. In Latin, fratres barbati.
cannot chant, read, or understand Latin. Line 155.
illiteracy. On their illiteracy, see France, Separate but Equal, 57-75.
simpleminded morons. Usus conversorum, ed. Lefevre, “L’évolution des Usus conversorum,” 65-97,
with the edition 84-97, here at 86. See Bretel, Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame, 110. On the educational
level and culture of the lay brothers, see Clemens Van Dijk, “L’instruction et la culture des
fréres convers dans les premiers siecles de l’ordre de Citeaux,” Collectanea Ordinis Cisterciensium
Reformatorum 24 (1962): 243-58.
simplicity of lay brothers. On the simplicity of the lay brothers, see France, Separate but Equal, 3;
Mikkers, “L’idéal religieux des freres convers,” 125-27; and especially Sobczyk, Les jongleurs de
Dieu, who takes under consideration repeatedly the medieval poem of interest to us here.
Notes to Chapter 3 — Cistercian Lay Brothers 297
snobbery. In the Latin, see Usus conversorum, Prologue 3, in Chrysogonus Waddell, Cistercian Lay
Brothers: Twelfth-Century Usages with Related Texts, Citeaux: Commentarii cistercienses: Studia et
Documenta, vol. 10 (Brecht, Belgium: Citeaux: Commentarii cistercienses, 2000), ed. 56, trans.
164: “Some [of our abbots] hold them [the lay brothers] in contempt because of their innate
simplicity.” In the French, Us des convers, prologue: “S’il sunt simple et sans clergie, tant ont il
plus besoig de no cure de no porveance.” See Bretel, Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame, 107.
the monks in his charge. Brian Patrick McGuire, “Taking Responsibility: Medieval Cistercian
Abbots and Monks as Their Brother’s Keepers,” Citeaux: Commentarii cistercienses 39.34 (1988):
249-68, repr. in idem, Friendship and Faith, no. 6.
convert. Bretel, Les ermites et les moines, 32-54. The category of convert is bound up with those
of layman, illiterate, and more, and overlaps at times with lay brother: see Leclercq, “Comment
vivaient les freres convers.”
the Latin equivalent. Bretel, Les ermites et les moines, 54-67.
second-class citizen. Del tumbeor Nostre Dame, lines 54, 65, 391.
exploited for physical labor. Berman, “Distinguishing between the Humble Cistercian Lay Brother
and Sister, and the Converted Knight in Southern France,” 263-83.
fidelity to Mary. For an illustration of a lay brother kneeling before Mary in an early thirteenth-
century manuscript, see France, Cistercians in Medieval Art, 137, fig. 88.
the Virgin intervened. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.
1400-c. 1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 319.
last rites. France, Separate but Equal, 154-58. The representation of the death ritual in the medieval
poem matches approximately what is documented for Benedictine monks: see Frederic S.
Paxton, The Death Ritual at Cluny in the Central Middle Ages / Le rituel de la mort a Cluny au Moyen
Age central, Disciplina monastica, vol. 9 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2013). For Cistercian
practices, see Megan Cassidy-Welch, Monastic Spaces and Their Meanings: Thirteenth-Century
English Cistercian Monasteries, Medieval Church Studies, vol. 1 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols,
2001), 228-32.
The Great Beginning of Citeaux. Exordium magnum Cisterciense, ed. Griesser.
One anecdote. Exordium magnum Cisterciense, ed. Griesser, 255-57 (4.13); Anthelmette Piébourg,
trans., Le grand exorde de Citeaux, ou Récit des débuts de l’Ordre cistercien, Citeaux: Studia et
documenta, vol. 7 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1997), 236-38; E. Rozanne Elder, ed., and Paul
Savage and Benedicta Ward, trans., The Great Beginning of Citeaux: A Narrative of the Beginning of
the Cistercian Order; The Exordium Magnum of Conrad of Eberbach, Cistercian Fathers Series, vol.
72 (Trappist, KY: Cistercian Publications, 2012), 344-47.
Our Father. Pater noster.
Apostles’ Creed. Credo in Deum (I believe in God), etc.
Psalm 51. Usus conversorum, chap. 11. Alternately, Psalm 50, beginning Miserere mei, Deus (Have
mercy on me, O God).
298 Notes to Chapter 3 — Conversion Therapy
Our Lady’s Tumbler. See line 32.
Hail, Mary. Ave Maria.
salutation to Mary. Recorded in Luke 1:28.
stuff of higher learning. Lines 57-67.
exemplum. Caesarius of Heisterbach recounts this celebrated anecdote twice.
Dialogue on Miracles. Dialogus miraculorum.
written and oral sources. Brian Patrick McGuire, “Written Sources and Cistercian Inspiration
in Caesarius of Heisterbach,” Analecta Cisterciensia 35 (1979): 227-82; and “Friends and Tales
in the Cloister: Oral Sources in Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus Miraculorum,” Analecta
Cisterciensia 36 (1980): 167-247, repr. in idem, Friendship and Faith, nos. 1, 2.
medieval miracle stories. The text known previously as Liber visionum et miraculorum (Book of
visions and miracles) was assembled at Clairvaux between 1171 and 1179: see Olivier Legendre,
ed., Le Liber visionum et miraculorum: Edition du manuscrit de Troyes (Bibl. mun. ms. 946) (thesis,
Ecole des Chartes, 2000). Its title has now been emended: see idem, ed., Collectaneum exemplorum
et visionum Clarevallense e codice Trecensi 946, Exempla medii aevi, vol. 2/Corpus Christianorum
Continuatio Mediaevalis, vol. 208 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2005). For discussion, Brian
Patrick McGuire, “A Lost Clairvaux Exemplum Collection Found: The ‘Liber Visionum et
Miraculorum’ Compiled under Prior John of Clairvaux,” Analecta Cisterciensia 39 (1983): 26-62,
repr. in idem, Friendship and Faith, no. 4.
scores of tales. There are eighty-three chapters in all.
book. Caesarius, Dialogus miraculorum, Distinctio 7, “De sancta Maria,” ed. Strange, 2: 1-80;
idem, Dialogue on Miracles, trans. Scott and Bland, 1: 453-546.
sightings of Mary. Caesarius, Dialogus miraculorum, Distinctio 7, Capitula 12-13, ed. Strange, 2:
15, trans. Scott and Bland, 1: 469-70.
Conversion Therapy
portrayals of jongleurs. The first to point out this phenomenon and to cite examples was Faral,
Les jongleurs, 157n2.
final years. Anselme Dimier, “Mourir a Clairvaux!” Collectanea ordinis Cisterciensium reformatorum
17 (1955): 272-85.
Lives of the Fathers. Vitae Patrum, in PL, 73: 1170.
such an entertainer. Named Gondran or Goderan, he is the supposed founder of Saint-Gilles
in Septimania. See Hubert Silvestre, “Goderan, le fondateur de l’abbaye liégeoise de St-Gilles,
était-il un jongleur provencal?” Revue d'histoire ecclésiastique 55 (1960): 122-29. Silvestre rejects
the foundation for the legend, while paying attention in passing to the credence given it in the
Middle Ages and later.
Notes to Chapter 3 — Conversion Therapy 299
an abbey in Liege. See Gaston Paris, “Introduction,” in La vie de saint Gilles par Guillaume de
Berneville: Poéme du XIle siécle d’aprés le manuscrit unique de Florence, ed. idem and Alphonse Bos
(Paris: Firmin Didot, 1881), lxxiv.
The Monk of Montaudon. This text supplies nuggets that may be combined with other oddments
of biographical information to be gleaned from the monk’s poetry. On Lo Monges de Montaudon,
a vida in Old Occitan, see Egan, Vidas of the Troubadours, 69-71. The poet himself is now identified
as Peire de Vic from Auvergne, a troubadour of noble birth. On him and his poems, see Michael
J. Routledge, ed. and trans., Les poésies du moine de Montaudon (Montpellier, France: Centre
d’études occitanes de l’Université Paul Valéry, 1977); Jean-Lucien Gandois, Le troubadour Pierre
de Vic: Moine de Montaudon, XIle-XIIle s. La vie, l’‘homme et l’ceuvre, Mémoires de |’ Académie
des Sciences, Belles-Lettres et Arts de Clermont-Ferrand 2nd series, vol. 61 (Clermont-Ferrand,
France: Académie des sciences, belles lettres et arts de Clermont-Ferrand, 2003).
what he earns. As prize for his poetry, the monk is awarded a sparrow hawk.
no relation to the Virgin. Rather, the name corresponds to the Latin Marius, a male saint.
Folquet of Marseille. On his conversion, see Nicole M. Schulman, Where Troubadours Were Bishops:
The Occitania of Folc of Marseille (1150-1231) (New York: Routledge, 2001), 37-62.
Folquet’s conversion. See Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 149-50; Stephen of Bourbon, Tractatus de
diversis materiis praedicabilibus, ed. Berlioz, 71.
other troubadours. Jean de la Croix Bouton, “Citeaux,” in Robert Bossuat et al., Le Moyen Age,
ed. Genevieve Hasenohr and Michel Zink (Paris: Fayard, 1992), 300-307, at 304, on Bertran
d’Alamanon, Bernart de Ventadorn, Bertran de Born, Perdigon, and Gausbert de Puycibot;
M.-Jér6me du Halgouet, “Poetes oubliés,” Collectanea Ordinis Cisterciensium Reformatorum 20
(1958): 128-44, 227-42.
Guiot de Provins. Despite his conventional name, Guiot may have been from the relatively small
region then known as France, which occupied only a north-central portion of what is now the
country by the same name.
Bible Guiot. For more information, see Jean Batany, “Les moines blancs dans les Etats du Monde
(XIIe-XIVe siecles),” Citeaux: Commentarii cistercienses 15 (1964): 5-25; idem, “Les convers,”
241-59.
Helinand of Froidmont. Jenny Lind Porter, ed. and trans., The Verses on Death of Helinand of
Froidmont, Cistercian Fathers Series, vol. 61 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1999).
finished his days in an abbey. This possibility rests on a disputed interpretation of the final two
lines: see Jean Renart, Le Roman de la Rose, ou, de Guillaume de Dole, ed. Félix Lecoy, trans. Jean
Dufournet, Champion Classiques. Moyen Age, vol. 24 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008), 414-15
(lines 5654-5655). Jean Renart’s text is entitled Le Roman de La Rose, but it is called by the other
title to forestall confusion with the more famous Romance of the Rose by Jean de Meun and
Guillaume de Lorris.
Adam of Lexington. “The Chronicle of Melrose,” in The Church Historian of England, 4.1, ed. and
trans. Joseph Stevenson (London, 1854), repr. in Medieval Chronicles of Scotland: The Chronicles of
Melrose and Holyrood, Llanerch facsimile (Felinfach, UK: Llanerch, 1988), 7-124, at 96.
300 Notes to Chapter 3 — The Language of Silence
he would take a seat. Julie Kerr, Life in the Medieval Cloister (New York: Continuum, 2009), 36n38.
monks who composed poetry. William D. Paden, “De monachis rithmos facientibus: Hélinant de
Froidmont, Bertran de Born, and the Cistercian General Chapter of 1199,” Speculum 55 (1980):
669-85.
av
statement against versifying. Jean Leclercq, “Les divertissements poétiques d’Itier de Vassy,’
Analecta Sacri Ordinis Cisterciensis 12 (1956): 296-304, at 304: “Flere decet monachum, non
fabricare metrum” (“It suits a monk to weep, not to craft verse”).
The Language of Silence
schooling. Evelyn B. Vitz, “Liturgy as Education in the Middle Ages,” Medieval Education 20.16
(2005): 7-20.
system of hand signs. On this language, see Walter Jarecki, “Die Ars signorum Cisterciensium
im Rahmen der metrischen Signa-Listen,” Revue Bénédictine 93 (1988): 329-99; idem, “Die
zisterziensische Zeichensprache unter besonderer Beriicksichtigung der Loccumer Quellen,”
Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft fiir Niedersdchsische Kirchengeschichte 88 (1990): 27-40; Scott G. Bruce,
“The Origins of Cistercian Sign Language,” Citeaux: Commentarii cistercienses 52 (2001): 193-209;
idem, Silence and Sign Language in Medieval Monasticism: The Cluniac Tradition c. 900-1200,
Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007), 144-48.
monastic silence. On monastic silence, see Paul F. Gehl, “Competens silentium: Varieties of
Monastic Silence in the Medieval West,” Viator 18 (1987): 125-60. For the overall Christian
context, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Silence: A Christian History (New York: Viking, 2013).
crying and caterwauling, moaning and mewling. Lines 73-75. Like Bretel in his commentary,
Sobczyk, Les jongleurs de Dieu, 127n19, construes the lamentation in lines 211-212 as meaning
not that the tumbler’s sole form of prayer was weeping, but rather that he was moved to tears
by his recognition that his sole form of prayer was dancing.
the importance of quiet. On silence, see Rule of Saint Benedict, chaps. 6, 38.5-7 (and on signs in
preference to words), 42, 48.5, 52.2 (ed. and trans. Venarde, 42-43, 134-35, 144-45, 160-61, and
170-71).
signs of speaking. Latin signa loquendi.
even to lay brothers. Bruce, Silence and Sign Language, 162-65; Wim Verbaal (and is this a case
of nomen omen?), “Oleum de saxo durissimo: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Poetics of Silence,” in
Understanding Monastic Practices of Oral Communication, ed. Steven Vanderputten, Utrecht
Studies in Medieval Literacy, vol. 21 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2011), 319-35. The silence
of lay brothers is presented as virtuous by Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum, ed.
Strange 2: 95, trans. Scott and Bland, 2: 18-19 (Distinctio 8, Capitulum 17). For broad background
(but without consideration of Our Lady’s Tumbler), see Uwe Ruberg, Beredtes Schweigen: In
lehrhafter und erzdhlender deutscher Literatur des Mittelalters (Munich, Germany: Fink, 1978);
pages 93-118 provide information on Greco-Roman, biblical, and Christian traditions of silence.
Notes to Chapter 3 — Gym Clothes 301
signals were to be practiced. Gregor Miller, “Die Zeichensprache in den Kléstern,” Cistercienser
Chronik 21 (1909): 243-46; Bruce, “Origins,” 203-4. The urgency of controlling signing is
apparent not only in Cistercian customaries and other such texts, but also in their exempla
collections. For instance, Caesarius of Heisterbach relates a tale of a monk who as punishment
for overindulging in signs and speech suffered the horrors of hell, only to be revitalized so that
he could admonish his brethren (Caesarius of Heisterbach, Libri VIII Miraculorum 2.32, “De
converso de Dus, qui a mortuis suscitatus, que in penis viderat, declaravit”): Alfons Hilka, ed.,
Die Wundergeschichten des Caesarius von Heisterbach, 3 vols., Publikationen der Gesellschaft fiir
rheinische Geschichtskunde, vol. 43 (Bonn, Germany: P. Hanstein, 1933-1937), 3: 115-16.
daily cycle of monastic offices. See Venarde, Rule of Saint Benedict, 164 (chap. 16.5, on Psalm 118/119).
acedia. First conveyed in English by the now obsolete word accidie.
characteristic of modern existence. For example, see Aldous Huxley, “Accidie,” in Essays New and
Old (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1927), 47-53.
clinical depression. Siegfried Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967); Stanley W. Jackson, “Acedia the Sin
and Its Relationship to Sorrow and Melancholia,” in Culture and Depression: Studies in the
Anthropology and Cross-Cultural Psychiatry of Affect and Disorder, ed. Arthur Kleinman and Byron
Good (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 43-62.
not being permitted to participate. 1 am indebted to Megan Cassidy, “Non conversi sed perversi: The
Use and Marginalisation of the Cistercian Lay Brother,” in Deviance and Textual Control: New
Perspectives in Medieval Studies, ed. Megan Cassidy et al., Melbourne University Conference
Series 2 (Parkville, Australia: History Dept., University of Melbourne, 1997), 34-55, at 45 and
55n84. This article was revised and incorporated in Cassidy-Welch, Monastic Spaces, 191.
strictly limited. Leclercq, “Comment vivaient les freres convers,” 171n120.
A third exemplum. Cassidy, “Non conversi sed perversi,” 46 and 55n86; Cassidy-Welch, Monastic
Spaces, 190-91.
way of negation. Via negativa or via negationis.
against sculptural art. Conrad Rudolph, The “Things of Greater Importance”: Bernard of Clairvaux’s
Apologia and the Medieval Attitude toward Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1990).
Gym Clothes
little coat. The French words used are cotele in line 140 (diminutive of the source of English coat),
chemise in line 142 (from which English chemise).
principal names. Batany, “Les moines blancs,” 17-18.
De nugis curialium. Walter Map, De nugis curialium: Courtiers’ Trifles, ed. and trans. M. R. James,
rev. C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 100-103 (Distinctio
1, Capitulum 25).
302 Notes to Chapter 3 —- Gym Clothes
the order's policy on underclothing for lay brothers. The most comprehensive treatment of the
clothing worn by lay brothers is France, Separate but Equal, 84-87. Lay brothers wore a very
basic outfit of a robe with capuce, belt, socks, and footwear. Brothers who had special duties
as smiths or herdsmen were authorized additional extra garments. Nothing is said about
underclothing.
cloaks. A classic study is Therese Latzke, “Der Topos Mantelgedicht,” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch
6 (1970): 109-31.
such items. On the clothing of jongleurs, see Noomen, Le jongleur par lui-méme, 11-12.
only his undergarment. John 19:23.
pornographic. For the most extreme development of this equation, see Bill Burgwinkle and Cary
Howie, Sanctity and Pornography in Medieval Culture: On the Verge (Manchester, UK: Manchester
University Press, 2010).
medieval culture. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard
R. Trask, Bollingen Series, vol. 36 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 433-35.
difference in status. On implications of naked jongleurs in art to questions of gender relations
and social status, see Elizabeth Moore Hunt, “The Naked Jongleur in the Margins: Manuscript
Contexts for Social Meanings,” in The Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art, ed. Sherry C. M.
Lindquist (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 85-102 and ix (list of illustrations).
medieval commentary tradition. A very useful overview of terminology and metaphors remains D.
W. Robertson, Jr., “Some Medieval Literary Terminology, with Special Reference to Chrétien de
Troyes,” Studies in Philology 48 (1951): 669-92, repr. in idem, Essays in Medieval Culture (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 51-72. A thorough treatment in German is offered by
Hennig Brinkmann, Mittelalterliche Hermeneutik (Tubingen, Germany: Niemeyer, 1980), 169-98.
Latin terms. Integumentum and involucrum: see Marie-Dominique Chenu, “Involucrum: Le
mythe selon les théologiens médiévaux,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age
22 (1955): 75-79; Winthrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century: The Literary
Influence of the School of Chartres (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 36-48;
Brian Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century: A Study of Bernard Silvester (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1972), 49-62.
coordinates. Lines 225-226.
new moves. Line 217.
sweat-slicked. Lines 234-236.
Goswin of Bossut. Martha G. Newman, “Disciplining the Body, Disciplining the Will: Hypocrisy
and Asceticism in Cistercian Monasticism,” in Asceticism and Its Critics: Historical Accounts and
Comparative Perspectives, ed. Oliver Freiberger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 91-115,
at 91-92, especially at n2. A key passage is Goswin of Bossut, Vita Arnulfi, book 1, chaps. 2-6
(10-21), in Acta sanctorum, June, vol. 7, 606-31 (Antwerp), 558-79 (Paris); in English, Goswin of
Notes to Chapter 3 — Sweat Cloth 303
Bossut, Send Me God: The Lives of Ida the Compassionate of Nivelles, Nun of La Ramée, Arnulf, Lay
Brother of Villers, and Abundus, Monk of Villers, trans. Martinus Cawley, Medieval Women, vol. 6
(Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2003), 125-205, at 132-40.
one of the desert fathers. Gesta Sanctorum Villariensium 26, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica:
Scriptores 25, ed. Georg Waitz (Hannover, Germany: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1880), 234, lines
43-44 (“Hic carnem suam adeo castigavit, quod qui videret eum Arsenium se vidisse putare
potuit vel unum ex antiquis heremi cultoribus”), cited by Newman, “Disciplining the Body,” at
107n61.
dribbles down. Lines 400-402.
Sweat Cloth
come to life. On stories from the Middle Ages about statues of the Virgin that come to life, the
locus classicus is Paull [sic] Franklin Baum, “The Young Man Betrothed to a Statue,” Publications
of the Modern Language Association 34 (1919): 523-79. The motif has been explored further in
its medieval context by Berthold Hinz, “Statuenliebe: Antiker Skandal und mittelalterliches
Trauma,” Marburger Jahrbuch fiir Kunstwissenschaft 22 (1989): 135-42; Camille, Gothic Idol, 220-
41, 383-85 (notes).
sudarium. A sudarium, also mentioned in the Gospel of John (see below), was seen in Jerusalem
about 680 by Arculf, whose report on it appears in Adomnan, De locis sanctis, 9, ed. Denis
Meehan, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae, vol. 3 (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies,
1958), 52-55.
Gospel of John. John 20:6-7.
alleged. Others are held in Compiegne and Cadouin, both in France.
hybrid form. It joins together vera and icon.
this very item. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art,
translated by Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 215-24.
one of Christ's contemporaries. The contemporary was Ananias, also known as Hannan. See
Andrea Nicolotti, From the Mandylion of Edessa to the Shroud of Turin: The Metamorphosis and
Manipulation of a Legend, Art and Material Culture in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, vol. 1
(Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2014).
not handmade. Acheiropoeieton.
towel. The Latin is toella, cognate with French touaille.
a holy cloth. See Jannic Durand and Marie-Pierre Lafitte, eds., Le trésor de la Sainte-Chapelle (Paris:
Réunion des musées nationaux, 2001), 37, 71.
identical with the mandylion. See Nicolotti, From the Mandylion, 191-93.
304 Notes to Chapter 3 — The Weighing of Souls
The Weighing of Souls
angels and demons. For orientation, see Rosa Giorgi, Angels and Demons in Art, ed. Stefano Zuffi,
trans. Rosanna M. Giammanco Frongia (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005), 217-19;
Laura Rodriguez Peinado, “La Psicostasis,” Revista digital de iconografia medieval 4.7 (2012): 11-20.
For specifics, see Leopold Kretzenbacher, Die Seelenwaage: Zur religiésen Idee vom Jenseitsgericht
auf der Schicksalswaage in Hochreligion, Bildkunst und Volksglaube, Buchreihe des Landesmuseums
fiir Karnten, vol. 4 (Klagenfurt, Austria: Verlag des Landesmuseums fiir Karnten, 1958). For
careful analysis of the Marian psychostasis, see Catherine Oakes, Ora pro nobis: The Virgin as
Intercessor in Medieval Art and Devotion (London: Harvey Miller, 2008), 129-66.
a cleric of Pisa. Kati Ihnat, “Marian Miracles and Marian Liturgies in the Benedictine Tradition
of Post-Conquest England,” in Contextualizing Miracles in the Christian West, 1100-1500:
New Historical Approaches, ed. Matthew M. Mesley and Louise E. Wilson, Medium Aevum
Monographs, vol. 32 (Oxford: The Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature,
2014), 63-97, at 78-79.
against conventional institutional hierarchy. David A. Flory, “The Social Uses of Religious
Literature: Challenging Authority in the Thirteenth-Century Marian Miracle Tale,” Essays in
Medieval Studies 13 (1996): 61-69.
The Latin-Less Lay Brother and Our Lady
tripartite schema. In Latin, the three classes are, respectively, Iaboratores, bellatores, and oratores.
This distinctively medieval expression of the trifunctional framework familiar from various
other Indo-European cultures has been traced back most notably to Adalbero of Laon, Poéme
au roi Robert, ed. Claude Carozzi, Les Classiques de l’histoire de France au Moyen Age, vol. 32
(Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1979). In modern scholarship, the essential reference is Georges Duby,
The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980).
nineteenth-century book. By Maurus Wolter, the German abbot of a Benedictine monastery: see
M. D. Meeuws, “Ora et Labora: Devise bénédictine?,” Collectanea Cisterciensia 54 (1992): 193-214.
one line. At line 212, the three manuscripts with “Que ne sot orer altrement” are A, D, and E; the
two with “Que ne sot ovrer altrement,” B and C. See Bretel, Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame, 85 (note
on text of line 212), 126.
reaches her peak. In the boundless literature on medieval Marianism, a very accessible treatment
that has deservedly won the status of a classic is Warner, Alone of All Her Sex. Among more
recent general studies, another book that has been paid widespread attention is Rubin, Mother
of God.
long twelfth century. See John D. Cotts, Europe’s Long Twelfth Century: Order, Anxiety and
Adaptation, 1095-1229 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
cosmic dance. James L. Miller, Measures of Wisdom: The Cosmic Dance in Classical and Christian
Antiquity, Visio: Studies in the Relations of Art and Literature, vol. 1 (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1986).
Notes to Chapter 4 — What Makes a Story Popular? 305
Notes to Chapter 4
What Makes a Story Popular?
anything but time-bound. For example, “Some stories are so worthwhile that they belong to every
age and every generation.” Vincent Arthur Yzermans, Our Lady's Juggler (St. Paul, MN: North
Central, 1974), 1.
archetypes. Philippart, “Le récit miraculaire marial,” 569.
other Western European vernaculars. For dual-language versions of medieval English miracles
with facing modern English translations, see Adrienne Williams Boyarin, ed. and trans., Miracles
of the Virgin (Peterborough, Ontario, Canada: Broadview, 2015). For a late but important version
in English, see Peter Whiteford, ed., The Myracles of Oure Lady: Ed. from Wynkyn de Worde’s
Edition (Heidelberg, Germany: Carl Winter Universitatsverlag, 1990). For an overview of what
survives in Middle English, see Thomas D. Cooke, “Tales,” in A Manual of the Writings in Middle
English, 1050-1500, ed. Albert E. Hartung, 11 vols. (New Haven, CT: Connecticut Academy
of Arts and Sciences, 1993), 9: 3177-258, 3501-51. One of the most beautiful and best known
Middle English versions is Geoffrey Chaucer's tale of the Prioress in the Canterbury Tales. Latin
authors from England included Dominic of Evesham, Anselm of Bury, William of Malmesbury,
the Canterbury monk known often as Nigel de Longchamps or Nigel Wireker, Roger of Ford,
and John of Garland. See R. W. Southern, “The English Origins of the Miracles of the Virgin,”
Medieval and Renaissance Studies 4 (1958): 176-216; A. G. Rigg, History of Anglo-Latin Literature,
1066-1422 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 35, 104, 172. The successors in the
vernaculars came first in France and later in Spain, where substantial collections took shape.
The Latin digests of miracle tales tend to be labeled simply Mariale (“Marian”), a Latin neuter
adjective. In titles of Latin works the masculine form is sometimes used instead, assuming the
noun liber “book” as the unexpressed substantive.
feasts of Mary. The Assumption and the Purification.
pilgrimages. See Nicholas Vincent, “King Henry III and the Blessed Virgin Mary,” in The Church
and Mary: Papers Read at the 2001 Summer Meeting and the 2002 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical
History Society, ed. R. N. Swanson, Studies in Church History, vol. 39 (Woodbridge, UK and
Rochester, NY: Published for the Ecclesiastical History Society by the Boydell Press, 2004),
126-46, at 126.
some would favor. Most voluminous is Brian Cummings and James Simpson, eds., Cultural
Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010). More recent is Ronald Hutton, ed., Medieval or Early Modern: The Value of a Traditional
Historic Division (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2015). Most approachable
is the essayistic Jacques Le Goff, Must We Divide History into Periods?, trans. M. B. DeBevoise
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). An old classic that well repays reading is Wallace
K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought (Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1948).
protestantized cathedrals. Ralph Adams Cram, My Life in Architecture (Boston: Little, Brown,
1936), 130. The damage experienced by English cathedrals during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries and the evolution in their constitution and financing as institutions are examined
in two magisterial books by Stanford E. Lehmberg: The Reformation of Cathedrals: Cathedrals in
306 Notes to Chapter 4 — What Makes a Story Popular?
English Society, 1485-1603 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), and Cathedrals under
Siege: Cathedrals in English Society, 1600-1700 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1996).
bare ruin‘ choirs. Sonnet 73.
Catholics and Protestants. Bridget Heal, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany:
Protestant and Catholic Piety, 1500-1648 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
worship of Mary. Alain Joblin, “Les Protestants, Marie et le culte marial,” in La dévotion mariale
de l’an mil a nos jours, ed. Bruno Béthouart and Alain Lottin (Arras, France: Artois Presses
Université, 2005), 323-36.
supposed visionaries were executed. Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Mary and Sixteenth-Century
Protestants,” in The Church and Mary: Papers Read at the 2001 Summer Meeting and the 2002 Winter
Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. R. N. Swanson, Studies in Church History, vol.
39 (Woodbridge, UK and Rochester, NY: Published for the Ecclesiastical History Society by the
Boydell Press, 2004), 191-217; Barnay, Le ciel sur la terre, 172-73.
knights. Nathan Edelman, Attitudes of Seventeenth-Century France toward the Middle Ages (New
York: King’s Crown, 1946), 85-276, devotes close to two hundred pages to knights and other
heroes, especially Charlemagne, Saint Louis, and Jeanne d’Arc, but only two (191-93) to
religious subjects.
Ten Commandments. Exodus 20.
second only to that for Christ himself. Edmund Waterton, Pietas Mariana Britannica: A History
of English Devotion to the Most Blessed Virgin Mary Mother of God. With a Catalogue of Shrines,
Sanctuaries, Offerings, Bequests, and Other Memorials of the Piety of Our Forefathers, 2 vols. (London:
St. Joseph’s Catholic Library, 1879). Waterton is particularly good on destroyed Madonnas.
Mary’s dowry. The Latin epithet used was dos Mariae.
image of the Virgin. Bishop Peter Quinel (or Quivel) of Exeter, Synodal Statutes for the Diocese
of Exeter, April 16, 1287, 12, “De ecclesiarum ornamentis et eorum custodia”: see F. M. Powicke
and C. R. Cheney, eds., Councils and Synods with Other Documents Relating to the English Church,
2 vols. in 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 2.2: 982-1059, at 1006 (“ymago beate virginis”).
first in 1644. The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1991), Madonna 2.b.
one from the early thirteenth century. From Langham Church in Essex: see Jonathan Alexander
and Paul Binski, eds., Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England, 1300-1400 (London: Royal
Academy of Arts, 1987), 303, no. 249.
beheaded. Gary Waller, The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Literature and
Popular Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 12. See also Anne Stanton, “On
the Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral” (MA thesis, University of Texas, Austin, 1987).
mass cremation. Some of these lost Madonnas have been studied individually. One very close
study is Stanley Smith, The Madonna of Ipswich (Ipswich, UK: East Anglian Magazine, 1980).
Notes to Chapter 4 — Walsingham, England’s Nazareth 307
Walsingham. Ronald C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (New
York: St. Martin’s, 1995), 204-5.
Walsingham, England’s Nazareth
foundation legend. H. M. Gillett, Walsingham: The History of a Famous Shrine, 2nd ed. (London:
Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1950), is a helpful guide. The most recent general overview is
Walsingham: Pilgrimage and History. Papers Presented at the Centenary Historical Conference,
23rd—27th March 1998 (Walsingham, UK: R. C. National Shrine, 1999). The fullest premodern
account is in a ballad (op. cit., 82-85).
noblewoman and widow. Named Richeldis of Faverches.
Holy House. By the designation Holy House was meant the home of the Holy Family where
Mary had been when she received the visit from God’s messenger, the angel Gabriel.
mid-twelfth century. On the dating of the shrine at Walsingham, see Mary Clayton, The Cult of
the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Saxon England, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England, vol. 2
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 139-41.
Hail Mary. In Latin, Ave Maria.
milk. Sixty-nine holy places throughout Europe claimed to possess such relics, with samples
of this precious liquid or of stones impregnated with it. None of these sites was more famous
than the English. See Paule-Vincenette Bétérous, “A propos d’une des légendes mariales les
plus répandues: Le ‘lait de la Vierge,”” Bulletin de l’Association Guillaume Bude, 4th ser., 3 (1975):
403-11, at 405. On the stone galactite, see F. de Mély, “Les reliques du lait de la Vierge et la
galactite,” Revue archéologique 15 (January-June 1890): 103-16.
Song of Solomon. 1:5.
seal. See, for example, Ean Begg, The Cult of the Black Virgin, 2nd ed. (London: Arkana, 1996),
165-66.
flasks. The flasks are known technically as ampullae. For further information, see Spencer, Pilgrim
Souvenirs, 135-48; Scilla Landale, “A Pilgrim’s Progress to Walsingham,” in Walsingham, 13-37,
at 27-28.
Archbishop of Armagh. Richard Fitzralph.
failed to distinguish. G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England: A Neglected Chapter in
the History of English Letters and of the English People (Cambridge: University Press, 1933), 141, at
n2, citing London, British Library, Landsdowne MS 393, fols. 105v—106.
pad their own coffers. Owst, Literature and Pulpit, 141, at n3. Both passages are treated by William
R. Jones, “Lollards and Images: The Defense of Religious Art in Later Medieval England,”
Journal of the History of Ideas 34 (1973): 27-50, at 29.
chronicler. Henry Knighton, Chronica de eventibus Anglie a tempore regis Edgari usque mortem regis
Ricardi Secundi, in Henry Knighton’s Chronicle, 1337-1396, ed. and trans. G. H. Martin (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1995), 292-99, at 296-97.
308 Notes to Chapter 4 — Walsingham, England's Nazareth
our dear lady of heaven. Owst, Literature and Pulpit, 145.
vain waste and idle. Reginald Pecock, The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy, ed. Churchill
Babington, Rolls Series, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Green, Longman, & Roberts, 1860), 1: 194.
Both this and the preceding are cited by Jones, “Lollards and Images,” 35, at nn42-43.
Erasmus. For translations of the text (one of his famous Colloquies, composed between 1523 and
1526 while he was studying in Cambridge, and published in 1526), see Erasmus, Peregrinatio
religionis ergo (A pilgrimage for religion’s sake), in Pilgrimages to Saint Mary of Walsingham and
Saint Thomas of Canterbury, trans. John Gough Nichols (Westminster, UK: John Bowyer Nichols
and Son, 1849), 11-43; idem, Colloquies, trans. Craig R. Thompson, 2 vols., Collected Works of
Erasmus, vols. 39-40 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 619-50 (translation), 650-74
(notes). For discussion, see Gary Waller, Walsingham and the English Imagination (Farnham, UK:
Ashgate, 2011), 65-85.
pilgrimage. Thanks to the account that he left of his expedition, we have the texts of the Latin
prayer that he pronounced while kneeling at the shrine. Likewise, we can peruse the Greek ode
he had inscribed on a plaque as a votive offering, despite his grave doubts that the canons on
site would have the linguistic wherewithal to appreciate what he wrote. See Gillett, Walsingham,
46-48; Landale, “Pilgrim’s Progress,” 18.
Loreto. In the Marche region of Italy, not far from Ancona. The town takes its name from
the clump of laurel trees into which an entire home is supposed to have been miraculously
transferred from afar.
Holy House. In Italian, Santa Casa, known alternatively as the House of the Angelic Salutation.
transported. It was supposedly carried first to Tersatto in Dalmatia on March 10, 1293, later
to a forest in Recanati on December 10, 1294, and, finally, to its present location in Loreto in
December of 1295.
larger building. Sanctuario della Santa Casa, the Sanctuary of the Holy House.
Black Virgin. Begg, Cult of the Black Virgin, 242.
Slipper Chapel. Landale, “Pilgrim’s Progress,” 82-83.
Superstitious Practices. Landale, “Pilgrim’s Progress,” 33.
y
Henry III. Vincent, “King Henry III,” 133-34, mentions ten, while Landale, “Pilgrim’s Progress,’
17, writes of “about 13 visits.”
Candlemas Day. Gillett, Walsingham, 30-31.
four times. In 1487, 1489, 1498, and 1506: see J. P. Dickinson, The Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 41-42.
demise of the statue. John Phillips, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535—
1660 Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), 74-75; Finucane, Miracles
and Pilgrims, 205.
Piers Plowman. William Langland, Piers Plowman, ed. Walter W. Skeat, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1886), 1: 148-49 (B. Passus 5.230-31; compare A. Passus 5.144—45): “But wenden
Notes to Chapter 4 — Walsingham, England’s Nazareth 309
to Walsyngham, and my wyf als, / And bidde the rode of Bromholme brynge me out of dette”);
trans. J. F. Goodridge (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1959), 67: “And Ill make a pilgrimage to
Walsingham, with my wife as well, and pray to the Rood of Bromholm to get me out of debt.”
The Rood of Bromholm, at the Cluniac priory of Saint Andrew near Norfolk, was reputedly
made from fragments of the True Cross. Pilgrims would stop at the Priory to worship it.
Marian pilgrimage. Ludwig Hiittl, Marianische Wallfahrten im siiddeutschdsterreichischen Raum:
Analysen von der Reformations- bis zur Aufklirungsepoche (Cologne, Germany: Béhlau, 1985).
bishop of Worcester. First Catholic and then Anglican.
decreed. Sermons and Remains of Hugh Latimer, Sometime Bishop of Worcester, Martyr, 1555, ed.
George Elwes Corrie, Parker Society, vol. 19 (Cambridge: University Press, 1845), 393-395
(Letter 31), at 395: “She hath been the Devil’s instrument to bring many (I fear) to eternal fire:
now she herself, with her old sister of Walsingham, her younger sister of Ipswich, with their
other two sisters of Doncaster and Penrice, would make a jolly muster in Smithfield; they would
not be all day in burning.” Contrast text in Gillett, Walsingham, 64.
Marian revival. Sean Gill, “Marian Revivalism in Modern English Christianity: The Example
of Walsingham,” in The Church and Mary: Papers Read at the 2001 Summer Meeting and the 2002
Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. R. N. Swanson, Studies in Church History,
vol. 3 (Woodbridge, UK and Rochester, NY: Published for the Ecclesiastical History Society by
the Boydell Press, 2004), 349-57.
iconoclasm. Phillips, Reformation of Images. See Leopold Kretzenbacher, “Das verletzte Kultbild:
Voraussetzungen, Zeitschichten und Aussagewandel eines abendlandischen Legendentypus,”
Sitzungsberichte, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, 1977, Heft
1 (Munich, Germany: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, in Kommission
bei C. H. Beck, 1977).
removal in 1535. Charles Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England during the Reigns of the Tudors, from
A.D. 1485 to 1559, ed. William Douglas Hamilton, 2 vols., Camden Society Publications 11, 20
(Westminster, UK: Printed for the Camden Society, 1875-1877), 1:31.
cut away. Waller, Virgin Mary, 14.
shorn of her offspring. Phillips, Reformation of Images, 144.
Elizabeth I. Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 318; Patrick
Collinson, “Pulling the Strings: Religion and Politics in the Progress of 1578,” in The Progresses,
Pageants, and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I, ed. Jayne Elisabeth Archer et al. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007), 122-41, at 129-30.
Hans Holbein. Heal, Cult of the Virgin Mary, 119.
Paris. In 1528, 1545, and 1551.
Geneva. In 1532.
Valladolid. In 1600. The Valladolid image had been relabeled Nuestra Senora de la Vulnerata or
Santa Maria Vulnerata (Wounded Saint Mary) after having been victimized during the English
310 Notes to Chapter 4 — Madonnas of the World Wars
raid on Cadiz in 1596. For the information in this paragraph, see MacCulloch, “Mary and
Sixteenth-Century Protestants,” 198-99.
conflicts between Catholics and Protestants. John Singleton, “The Virgin Mary and Religious
Conflict in Victorian Britain,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 43.1 (1992): 16-34, at 25.
Jesuit. Wilhelm Gumppenberg, Atlas Marianus sive de imaginibus Deiparae per orbem christianum
miraculosis, 1st ed., 2 vols. (Ingolstadt, Germany: Haenlin, 1657); 2nd ed., 2 vols., Atlas Marianus
quo Sanctae Dei Genitricis Mariae imaginum miraculosarum origines duodecim historiarum centurtis
explicantur (Munich: Johannes Jaecklin, 1672).
four-digit headcount. One noteworthy dimension of the total is the paucity of overlap with
Madonnas that are touched upon anywhere in the present book.
discrete index. Idea Atlantis Mariani (Trent, Italy: Ex typog. Caroli Zanetti, 1655), 31-36 (chap. 3,
index 5).
Madonnas. Joan Carroll, Miraculous Images of Our Lady: 100 Famous Catholic Portraits and Statues
(Rockford, IL: Tan Books and Publishers, 1993).
Madonnas of the World Wars
street corners. Edward Muir, “The Virgin on the Street Corner: The Place of the Sacred in Italian
Cities,” in Religion and Culture in the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Steven E. Ozment, Sixteenth
Century Essays and Studies, vol. 11 (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers,
1989), 25-40.
Henry Adams. Henry Adams, Letter to Charles F. Adams Jr., Niirnberg, July 3, 1859, in LHA 1:
49-52, at 51.
Bouchoir. The caption has the name of the municipality misprinted as Bouchois.
Divine Shepherdess. La Divine Bergere.
Notre-Dame de Brebieres. Black Virgin. Begg, Cult of the Black Virgin, 167.
statue. The sculpture became the object of devotion for Saint Colette, who won exaltation from
prostrating herself before the altar of Notre-Dame de Brebieres, and of pilgrimage for others, as
well as the basis for the foundation of a confraternity.
mortar shelling. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1975), 131-35. On the destruction, see Alphonse Gosset, Une glorieuse mutilée: Notre-Dame
de Brebiéres, Albert (Somme) (Paris: Blanchard, 1919), repr. as Notre-Dame de Brebiéres, a Albert
(Inval-Boiron, France: Vague verte, 2011); Pierre Laboureyras, La destruction d’une cité picarde
et d’une basilique mariale: La ville d’Albert avant et pendant la guerre, 1914-1915 (Amiens, France:
Grau, 1916; repr. Paris: Le Livre d’histoire-Lotisse, 2012).
Lady of the Limp. Fussell, Great War, 44.
La Gleize. Robert M. Edsel, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest
Treasure Hunt in History (New York: Center Street, 2009), 173-76, 214-19.
Notes to Chapter 4 — Literary Iconoclasm 311
Literary Iconoclasm
letter to Thomas Cromwell. Dr. Richard Layton, in G. H. Cook, Letters to Cromwell and Others on the
Suppression of the Monasteries (London: J. Baker, 1965), 38. This letter, written August 7, is found
in the Cromwell Correspondence (Public Records Office), xx: “a bowke of or lades miracles
well able to mache the canterberie tailles. Such a bowke of dremes as ye never saw wich I
fownde in the librarie.”
lugubrious stanzas. Gillett, Walsingham, 86-87, at 87: “Weep, weep, O Walsingham, / Whose dayes
are nightes, / Blessings turned to blasphemies, / Holy deedes to dispites. / Sinne is where our
Ladye sate, / Heaven turned is to helle; / Sathan sitte where our Lord did swaye, / Walsingham,
oh, farewell!”
a ballad. Printed in 1496 by Richard Pynson, the twenty-one verses have come to be known in
recognition of him as the Pynson Ballad.
out of some of their heads. Waller, Virgin Mary, 3; Gillett, Walsingham, 65-66; Aston, England’s
Iconoclasts, 29. The original text reads “I cannot perceive butt the seyd Image is not yet out of
sum of their heddes.”
pelted with snowballs. The National Archives, State Papers 1/157, fol. 67, in Letters and Papers,
Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, 21 vols. in 37 (London: Longman, Green,
Longman and Roberts, 1862-1932; rept. Vaduz: Kraus Reprint, 1965), 15: 28, no. 86, cited by G.
W. Bernard, The Late Medieval English Church: Vitality and Vulnerability before the Break with Rome
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 147.
God and Christ. Heal, Cult of the Virgin Mary, 53-54.
most often to the Virgin. Eamon Duffy, Faith of Our Fathers: Reflections on Catholic Tradition
(London: Continuum, 2004), 101 (apparently an error for 110, cited by Waller, Virgin Mary, 31).
rich spoils. Erasmus, Colloquies, trans. Thompson, 289-90. I have changed “booty” to “rich spoils.”
subtle changes. See Thomas S. Freeman, “Offending God: John Foxe and English Protestant
Reactions to the Cult of the Virgin Mary,” Studies in Church History 39 (2005): 228-38, at 228-32.
bloody. In the distended bibliography, a relatively recent and thorough treatment is by Stefania
Biscetti, “The Diachronic Development of Bloody: A Case Study in Historical Pragmatics,” in
English Historical Linguistics 2006: Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International Conference on
English Historical Linguistics, 3 vols., vol. 2: Lexical and Semantic Change, ed. Maurizio Gotti et al.,
Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, Series 4, Current Issues in
Linguistic Theory, vols. 295-97 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008), 53-74.
John Bale. With no specific reference to the present context, see Cathy Shrank, “John Bale and
Reconfiguring the ‘Medieval’ in Reformation England,” in Reading the Medieval in Early Modern
England, ed. Gordon McMullan and David Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007), 179-92.
presented him with a rosary. John Bale, Scriptorvm illustriu[m] maioris Brytannie, quam nunc Angliam
& Scotiam uocant: Catalogus (Basel, Switzerland: apud I. Oporinum, 1557-1559), 624-25: “The
Blessed Virgin entered the cell of Alanus although it was shut and, fashioning a ring out of her
312 Notes to Chapter 4 — Literary Iconoclasm
hair for him, betrothed herself to the friar, that she kissed him, and gave him her breasts to be
fondled and milked and, finally, that she gave herself to him as familiarly as a wife customarily
does to her husband.” See Freeman, “Offending God,” 233-34 (with information on other
accounts of the same episode).
mediator. Mary Vincentine Gripkey, The Blessed Virgin Mary as Mediatrix in the Latin and Old
French Legend Prior to the Fourteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America,
1938).
Irish immigrant. Sheridan Gilley, “Protestant London, No-Popery and the Irish Poor, II: 1850-
1860,” Recusant History 11 (1971-1972): 21-46, at 43.
Madonnas. Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 425, 772; trans. Gareth Evan
Gollard (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 335, 632.
cult of Mary. Contrast Heal, Cult of the Virgin Mary, 5, 148.
great emphasis. The Council of Trent, Twenty-Fifth Session, “On the Invocation, Veneration, and
Relics, of Saints, and on Sacred Images” (December 4, 1563), in The Canons and Decrees of the
Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent, ed. and trans. J. Waterworth (London: Dolman, 1848),
232-35.
shunted aside. Michael P. Carroll, Madonnas That Maim: Popular Catholicism in Italy since the
Fifteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 106.
William Thomas. William Thomas, The Pilgrim: A Dialogue on the Life and Actions of King Henry the
Eighth, ed.J. A. Froude (London: Parker, Son, and Bourn, 1861), 43: “[H]is Highness had found
out the falsehood of these jugglers, who led the people unto this idolatry of worshipping of
saints, believing of miracles, and going on pilgrimage here and there (as unto this hour you see
it used here in Italy).”
Mary held an ambiguous position. Joblin, “Les protestants.”
Marian revival. Singleton, “Virgin Mary,” 28-29.
A cleavage is perceptible. Heal, Cult of the Virgin Mary, 145.
Martin Luther. On Luther's attitudes concerning the Virgin Mary, see Peter Newman Brooks, “A
Lily Ungilded? Martin Luther, the Virgin Mary and the Saints,” Journal of Religious History 13
(1984-1985): 136-49; Hans Diifel, Luthers Stellung zur Marienverehrung, Kirche und Konfession:
Ver6ffentlichungen des Konfessionskundlichen Instituts des Evangelischen Bundes, vol. 13
(G6ttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1968).
commented with disapproval. Diifel, Luthers Stellung, 235.
honored but not worshiped. The principle was summed up in a Latin superscription, Maria
honoranda, non adoranda, which in 1619 was appended to an image of Mary as queen of heaven
that was restored and put on display anew in the Lutheran city of Zittau, in southeast Saxony.
Hans Carl von Haebler, Das Bild in der evangelischen Kirche (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt,
1957), 37.
Notes to Chapter 4 — Marian Apparitions 313
commentary. In 1520-1521 he composed a “little exposition of the Magnificat,” a Marian hymn
known likewise as the Song of Mary or the Canticle of Mary. The hymn was based on Luke
1:46-55. He maintained that a person should honor Mary as she herself wished and as she
expressed it in the Magnificat. See Sermon on the Mount and the Magnificat, in Luther’s Works,
ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, 55 vols. (Saint Louis, MO: Concordia, 1955-1986), vol. 21; The Magnificat:
Luther’s Commentary, trans. A. T. W. Steinhaeuser (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1967).
potentially idolatrous. Heal, Cult of the Virgin Mary, 82-83.
recent retelling. Helena Olofsson, Gycklarpojken (Stockholm: Rabén & Sjégren, 2000); trans. Kjersti
Board, The Little Jester (New York: R and S Books, 2002).
We sneer. Henry Warrum, Some Religious Weft and Warp (Indianapolis, IN: Hollenbeck, 1915),
3. The sentence is preceded by “Idolatry is the worship of idols or images either as gods, the
sanctuaries of gods, or the symbols of gods, and is man’s effort to reduce the abstract to the
concrete in order to establish closer communion with the unknown. Images and icons still have
their place in the religions of civilization.”
Marian Apparitions
medieval narratives and images. For a beautiful treatment of both medieval texts and art, the
reader can do no better than to consult Barnay, Le ciel sur la terre.
latest tally. René Laurentin and Patrick Sbalchiero, Dizionario delle “apparizioni” della vergine
Maria (Rome: ART, 2010).
official policy. Finality came in 1734-1738, in a five-volume treatise written by the archbishop of
Bologna, just a few years before his election as Pope Benedict XIV. See Prosper Lambertini, De
servorum Dei beatificatione, et beatorum canonizatione (On the beatification and canonization of the
servants of God).
fascination and perplexity. A little more than a decade ago, a book probed both sightings of the
Virgin and official ecclesiastical investigations of such phenomena, including the appearance of
the Virgin to six young people in 1981 in the village of Medjugorje, in what is today Bosnia and
Herzegovina, and to others in Scottsdale, Arizona. See Randall Sullivan, The Miracle Detective
(New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2004).
Our Lady of Guadalupe. On the development of the cult down to the present day, see David
A. Brading, Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe, Image and Tradition across Five Centuries
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
official accounts. The apparition, which took place at a location called the hill of Tepeyac, in Villa
de Guadalupe, a northern suburb of Mexico City, was described in two accounts published
in the 1640s. It became the object of official fact-checking in 1723. However, it led to formal
beatification of the visionary only in 1990 and sanctification in 2002.
associated with Mary. Barnay, Le ciel sur la terre, 124-28.
314 Notes to Chapter 4 — Marian Apparitions
black eyelashes. The phenomenon is so widespread that it has even received literary treatment:
see Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (New York: Random House, 1991),
114-15 (“Anguiano Religious Articles Rosaries Statues Medals Incense Candles Talismans
Perfumes Oils Herbs”).
La Morenita. The same nickname, in the form La Moreneta, is used for the Black Madonnna of
Montserrat.
shepherdess. Her name was Lucia dos Santos.
millions of visitors. Carroll, Madonnas That Maim, 2. On apparitions deemed false, see Vraies et
fausses apparitions dans I’Eglise, ed. Bernard Billet et al. (Paris: P. Lethielleux, 1973).
American historian. David Herlihy, Medieval Culture and Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1968),
292.
Walsingham. For the modern history, see Dominic Janes and Gary Waller, eds., Walsingham
in Literature and Culture from the Middle Ages to Modernity (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010); in a
nutshell, John Milburn, The Mariological Lectures (London: Society of Mary, 1998), 1-6.
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin. Singleton, “Virgin Mary,” 20.
Notes to Chapter 5 — King David’s Dancing 315
Notes to Chapter 5
It would be interesting. Herman Oelsner, “A Story by Anatole France,” The Academy 55 (November
5, 1898): 218.
King David’s Dancing
She liked the story of David. D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989), 170 (chap. 6, “Anna Victrix,” of the pregnant Anna Brangwen,
who dances naked before the mirror in her bedroom, out of exultation at her pregnancy).
Lawrence also discussed this episode in David's life in an essay entitled “The Crown” that he
wrote at roughly the same time. See D. H. Lawrence, Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished, and
Other Prose Works, ed. Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore (New York: Viking, 1968), 365-415,
at 380.
figure of the jongleur. Martine Clouzot, Le jongleur: Mémoire de l'image au Moyen Age. Figures,
figurations et musicalité dans les manuscrits enluminés (1200-1330) (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang,
2011), 219-304.
vignette before the ark. The entire passage is 2 Kings (= 2 Samuel) 6.13-23. The dancing is also
mentioned at 1 Chronicles 13.8 and 15.2729. The Douay-Rheims Bible, produced for Catholics
at roughly the same time as the King James Bible, follows closely the Latin of the Vulgate Bible
that Jerome had assembled more than a millennium earlier, in the fourth century. The early
seventeenth-century English of the Douay-Rheims reads:
2 Kings (2 Samuel) 14. And David danced with all his might before the Lord: and David
was girded with a linen ephod.
16. And when the ark of the Lord was come into the city of David, Michal the daughter
of Saul, looking out through a window, saw king David leaping and dancing before the
Lord: and she despised him in her heart.
20. And David returned to bless his own house, and Michal the daughter of Saul coming
out to meet David, said: How glorious was the king of Israel to day, uncovering himself
before the handmaids of his servant, and was naked, as if one of the buffoons should
be naked.
kinetic energy. The Hebrew verb kirker denotes “whirling” or “pirouetting.”
manuscript art. For a listing, see Colum Hourihane, ed., King David in the Index of Christian
Art (Princeton, NJ: Index of Christian Art, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton
University, in association with Princeton University Press, 2002), 118-21. For analysis, see
Adelheid Heimann, “A Twelfth-Century Manuscript from Winchcombe and Its Illustrations:
Dublin, Trinity College, MS. 53,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 28 (1965): 86-109;
Herbert Schade, “Zum Bild des tanzenden David im friithen Mittelalter,” Stimmen der Zeit
172.4 (1963): 1-16; Sandra Pietrini, “La santa danza di David e il ballo peccaminoso di Salomé:
Due figure esemplari dell’imaginario biblico medievale,” Quaderni Medievali 50 (2000): 45-73;
Julia Zimmermann, ““histrio fit David...’: K6nig Davids Tanz vor der Bundeslade,” in Kénig
David, biblische Schliisselfigur und europiische Leitgestalt: 19. Colloquium (2000) der Schweizerischen
316 Notes to Chapter 5 — King David's Dancing
Akademie der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften, ed. Walter Dietrich and Hubert Herkommer
(Freiburg, Switzerland: Universitatsverlag, 2003), 531-61.
one representation. Dublin, Trinity College Library, MS 53, fol. 151r (accompanying Psalm 1).
The manuscript is a so-called double psalter, in which the two most important Latin texts of
the Psalms are presented in parallel columns. The psalter, dated 1130-1140, is thought to have
come from the Benedictine monastery of Winchcombe. See Zimmermann, “‘histrio fit David,”
fig. 1.
walks about upside-down. Leclercq, “
Flanders).
Joculator et saltator,” 147, quoting Drogo of Bergues (in
Bernard of Clairvaux. Sermones de diversis 41.6, in Bernard of Clairvaux, Opera, 6.1: 248-49; ed.
Leclercq, Rochais, and Talbot, trans. Pierre-Yves Emery, Sources chrétiennes, vol. 518 (Paris:
Cerf, 2007), 2: 236-71, at 252-53: “Respice David ante arcam Domini hilariter saltantem, quam
sapienter superbientis feminae reprimat indignationem: Ludam, inquit, et vilior fiam ante
conspectum Domini” (“Consider David dancing joyously before the Lord’s ark, and how
wisely he restrains the indignation of his haughty wife”).
Dante. Purgatorio 10.64-66: “Li precedeva al benedetto vaso, / trescando alzato, l’umile
salmista, / e piu. e men che re era in quel caso” (“There, going before the blessed vessel, / his
robe hitched up, was the humble Psalmist, / and on that occasion he was both more and less
than king”).
prefiguring Mary's entrance. For the Virgin, see Gaston Duchet-Suchaux and Michel Pastoureau,
La Bible et les saints: Guide iconographique, 2nd ed. (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 120; for Christ, see
Ferguson, Signs and Symbols, 64.
do we not so call the Virgin Mary?. Le Croisé: Organe belge de la croisade eucharistique 23.5 (October
1949): 77. The original quotation is “Alors le moine jongleur dansa, comme David devant l’Arche
d’alliance—n/appelle-t-on pas ainsi la Vierge Marie?”
Spanish text. The book, generally agreed to have been completed in 1293, is now conventionally
entitled Castigos e documentos para bien vivir ordenados del Rey Don Sancho IV (Teachings and
writings for right living arranged by King Sancho IV), ed. Agapito Rey, Indiana University
Publications: Humanities Series, vol. 24 (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1952). For the
exemplum, see the ed. by Pascual de Gayangos, in Escritores en prosa anteriores al siglo XV,
Biblioteca de autores espanioles, vol. 51 (Madrid: M. Rivadeneyra, 1860), 1: 79-228, chap. 17 at
127 (“come joglar con una citole en la mano”).
jongleur of God. In Spanish, juglar de Dios.
a wise one. L’“Eructavit” antico-francese: Secondo il ms. Paris B.N. fr. 1747, ed. Walter Meliga,
Scrittura e scrittori, vol. 6 (Alessandria, Italy: Edizioni dell’orso, 1992), 123 (Eructavit 235):
“Joglerres soi, sages e duiz” (jongleur, wise and learned). On this passage, see Zink, Poésie et
conversion, 161.
one of the buffoons. Unus de scurris. The noun that has been translated as “buffoon” here is scurra
(whence the etymological root of the adjective “scurrilous”), which is glossed at least once as
“jongleur.” See Die Reichenauer Glossen, 2 vols., ed. Hans-W. Klein and Andre Labhardt, Beitrage
Notes to Chapter 5 — King David’s Dancing 317
zur romanischen Philologie des Mittelalters, vol. 1 (Munich, Germany: Hueber and M. Fink,
1968-1972), 1: 97, line 1103: “Scurris: ioculator.”
dancing. Davies, Liturgical Dance.
Unto his vomit. Proverbs 26:11, 2 Peter 2:22.
invoking none other than King David. “Before the Ark of our God King David danced. / We do not
read that David from grace was driven.” Alternatively, “Before the ark danced King David. /I
believe that David was no pagan.” From Le Jongleur de Notre Dame (The Juggler of Notre Dame):
Miracle Play in Three Acts, trans. Charles Alfred Byrne (New York: Charles E. Burden 1907), 27.
Duke Ellington. The American jazz pianist, orchestra leader, and composer Edward Kennedy
“Duke” Ellington.
three full-evening jazz suites. It was performed originally in San Francisco on September 16, 1965,
in Grace Cathedral, and recorded later from a performance in Manhattan on December 26, 1965,
at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. The second Sacred Concert, which premiered at the
cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York on January 19, 1968, concluded with a different
piece that expressed a similar devotion, Praise God and Dance. When Ellington’s funeral was
held in Saint John the Divine on May 27, 1974, excerpts from the Sacred Concerts were played:
see The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 377.
his own creativity and devotion. Duke Ellington Reader, 371-72: “It has been said once that a man,
who could not play the organ or any of the instruments of the symphony, accompanied his
worship by juggling. He was not the world’s greatest juggler but it was the one thing he did
best. And so it was accepted by God. I believe that no matter how highly skilled a drummer or
saxophonist might be, that if this is the thing he does best, and he offers it sincerely from the
heart in—or as the accompaniment to—his worship, he will not be unacceptable because of lack
of skill or of the instrument upon which he makes his demonstration, be it pipe or tom-tom. If
a man is troubled, he moans and cries when he worships. When a man feels that that which
he enjoys in this life is only because of the grace of God, he rejoices, he sings, and sometimes
dances (and so it was with David in spite of his wife’s prudishness).” For another pairing of
David and the Jongleur a few years earlier, see Alan H. Morriss, “A Twentieth-Century Folk
Mass,” Musical Times 98, no. 1378 (1957): 671-72, at 672.
David Danced before the Lord. The title is from a verse of the Bible (2 Kings 6:14), as we have seen,
which describes how King David danced before the ark of the Covenant as it was brought into
Jerusalem. As recorded on December 26, 1965, this piece is the nine-minute track 10.
tap master. In introducing one performance, Ellington described the dancer as “the most
superleviathonic, rhythmaturgically syncopated tapsthamaticianisamist.” The performance of
Dr. Bunny Briggs on this occasion “broke new ground for modern tap dancing on the concert
stage”: see Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2010), 206.
Third Sacred Concert. Duke Ellington Reader, 371. For discussion, see Thomas Lloyd, “The Revival
of an Early ‘Crossover’ Masterwork: Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concerts,” Choral Journal 49.11
(May 2009): 8-26, at 9.
318 Notes to Chapter 5 — King David's Dancing
this particular piece. Bill Hall, “Jazz-Lewd or Ludens?,” in Creative Chords: Studies in Music,
Theology and Christian Formation, ed. Jeff Astley and Timothy Hone (Leominster, Herefordshire:
Gracewing, 2000), 194-209, at 203.
Protevangelium of James. The Greek noun protevangelion (“first gospel”) could be rendered almost
synonymously as Protogospel.
apocryphon. The apocrypha are, as the Greek adjective for “secret” or “hidden things,”
noncanonical texts that complement scripture.
sparse treatment. The presence of Mary in the Bible is concentrated in the accounts of Christ’s
infancy in Matthew and Luke. The earliest of the three Synoptic Gospels, Mark, names Mary
just once (Mark 6:3), Matthew mentions Mary five times, and Luke provides more evidence
in his Gospel. In Matthew, Mary is silent, whereas in Luke she speaks four times. Outside the
Synoptic Gospels, John brings up Mary twice. The Acts of the Apostles, the earliest text that
mentions the Christian church, refers to her only a single time (Acts 1:14).
Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. For a concise introduction, see Luigi Gambero, Mary and the Fathers
of the Church: The Blessed Virgin Mary in Patristic Thought (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1999), 33-42.
gaps in the canonical Bible. Mary Clayton, The Apocryphal Gospels of Mary in Anglo-Saxon England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
seventh chapter. Protevangelium Jacobi (Protevangelium of James), in New Testament Apocrypha,
ed. Wilhelm Schneemelcher, trans. R. McL. Wilson, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Cambridge: James Clarke;
Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1991-1992), 1: 429 (7.3): “[T]he Lord God put grace
upon the child, and she danced for joy with her feet, and the whole house of Israel loved her.’
For background information, see 1: 421-25, and especially Hans-Josef Klauck, Apocryphal
Gospels: An Introduction, trans. Brian McNeil (London and New York: T & T Clark, 2003), 65-72.
The fifteen steps, but not the little jig after the third step, are mentioned in William Emmet
Coleman and James Boyce, eds. and trans., Officium presentationis Beate Virginis Marie in
Templo / Office of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary: Which is Celebrated on the 21st Day of
November. Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France, MS latin 17330, fols. 7r-14r, Wissenschaftliche
Abhandlungen / Musicological Studies, vol. 65/ Historiae, vol. 5 (Lions Bay, Canada: Institute
of Mediaeval Music, 2001), 7, 9. The episode of the dancing has apparently not survived in
either medieval or Byzantine art: see Jacqueline Lafontaine-Dosogne, “Iconographie comparée
du cycle de l’Enfance de la Vierge a Byzance et en Occident, de la fin du [Xe au début du XIIle
s.,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 32.128 (1989): 291-303.
y
lineage of David. The genealogy in Luke 3:23-38 is taken by some to be Mary’s, by others to be
Joseph’s.
Presentation. The Presentation is commemorated traditionally on November 21. Such celebration
began perhaps as early as 730 (but no later than 1150) in the East, where it is one of the Twelve
Great Feasts of the Orthodox Church, and in the late fourteenth century (although known
earlier) in the West.
fresco. By Paolo Uccello, from around 1435.
Notes to Chapter 5 — The Widow’s Mites 319
Prato. In Tuscany. An association of the painting with the episode in the Protevangelium has
been rejected by José Maria Salcador Gonzalez, “La Presentacién de Maria en el Templo en la
pintura italiana bajomedieval: Analisis de cinco casos,” Espéculo: Revista de estudios literarios 44
(March-June 2010).
The Widow’s Mites
Jesus witnesses the incident. Gospel of Mark, 12:41-44: “And Jesus sitting over against the treasury
beheld how the people cast money into the treasury, and many that were rich cast in much.
And there came a certain poor widow, and she cast in two mites, which make a farthing. And
calling his disciples together he saith to them, Amen I say to you: this poor widow hath cast in
more than all they who have cast into the treasury. For all they did cast in of their abundance;
but she of her want cast in all she had, even her whole living.” The Vulgate Bible: Douay-Rheims
Translation, ed. Edgar Swift and Angela M. Kinney, 6 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2010-2013), 6: 259. Compare Luke 21:1-4.
novelist’s hometown. Carrickmacross, a town in County Monaghan, Ireland.
dreams for the future. Bernard Duffy, Oriel (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1918), 45: ““Have you decided
yet,’ he asked, smiling, as they left the church, ‘whether your life is to be sublime or ridiculous?’
This reference to the ambitions he had disclosed to the bishop made Oriel blush, and in his
shyness he could find no answer. ‘Come now,’ said the Dean, ‘there’s nothing to be ashamed of.
Why when I was your age I wanted to be an itinerant tumbler. So you see we have something
in common.” The bishop is none other than Dean James. For a reprint of the chapter with
brief background information, see Bernard Duffy, “Portrait of a Parish Priest,” Clogher Record
3 (1975): 269-81.
I think I'll be a bishop. Duffy, Oriel, 38-39.
the value of an offering. Duffy, Oriel, 64-68.
small children. W. O. E. Oesterley, The Sacred Dance: A Study in Comparative Folklore (New York:
Macmillan, 1923), 23: “A little girl, not exceeding five years, was dancing before a picture of the
Madonna and Child; after her dance she turned to her mother and said: ‘Do you think the Baby
Jesus liked to see me dance?’ It is not quite easy to say in this case in how far the purpose was
to please the ‘Baby Jesus,’ and in how far the perfectly natural and innocent purpose was to
‘show off’ before Him: probably both motives were combined. But the second is purely one of
‘showing off.’ A child of about three, a boy this time, kept on jumping as high as he could in the
field; presently his father heard him say: ‘See, God, how high I can jump!”
volume of literary history. Emile Henriot, Courrier littéraire: XIXe siécle, vol. 1: Autour de
Chateaubriand (Paris: Marcel Daubin, 1948), 31: the hero in question is Captain Gervais (1779-
1858), nom de guerre of Etienne Béniton.
Festival of the Crosses. In Spanish, Fiesta de las Cruces.
May Cross. Cruz de Mayo.
plays a role. On May 3.
320 Notes to Chapter 5 — The Virgin’s Miraculous Images and Apparitions
Spanish print. An albumen print. Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida produced a painting, as well as
preliminary studies, on the same theme.
researcher. J. B. Trend, “The Dance of the Seises at Seville,” Music & Letters 2 (1921): 10-28,
at 28. For fuller information on the May dance, see José Manuel Fraile Gil and Eliseo Parra
Garcia, El mayo y su fiesta en tierras madrilerfias, Biblioteca basica madrilena, vol. 10 (Madrid:
Comunidad de Madrid, Consejeria de Educacion y Cultura, Centro de Estudios y Actividades
Culturales, 1995).
dancing was often presented. On positive portrayal, see Van Oort, “Minstrel Dances.” On
condemnations, see Arcangeli, “Dance and Punishment,” 30-42.
Stephen of Bourbon. De luxuria 461, in Lecoy de La Marche, Anecdotes historiques, 397, in Aeppli,
Die wichtigsten Ausdriicke, 47n56, 77n181.
their small town. In the German region of Saxon-Anhalt.
ceasing to sing and dance. Thompson, Motif-Index, no. C 94.1.1 (compare C 51.1.5 “Tabu: Dancing
in Churchyard”); Tubach, Index Exemplorum, no. 1419. The episode was investigated first in
detail by Edward Schréder, “Die Tanzer von Kolbigk,” Zeitschrift fiir Kirchegeschichte 17 (1897):
94-164, and later exhaustively (although also very speculatively) by Ernst Erich Metzner,
Zur friihesten Geschichte der europiischen Balladendichtung Der Tanz in Kélbigk: Legendarische
Nachrichten, Gesellschaftlicher Hintergrund, historische Voraussetzungen, Frankfurter Beitrage zur
Germanistik, vol. 14 (Frankfurt, Germany: Athenaéum Verlag, 1972). Metzner’s book includes
the Latin originals of the three oldest accounts, alongside ample commentary and interpretation.
For the best balance between thoroughness and brevity (with extensive bibliography), see Rolf
Wilhelm Brednich, “Tanzersage,” in EdM 13: 201-4.
The Little Legend of Dance. In German, “Das Tanzlegendchen.” In idem, Sédmtliche Werke in acht
Banden, 8 vols. (Berlin: Aufbau, 1958-1961), 5: 409-16. See also Sémtliche Werke: Historische-
kritische Ausgabe, ed. Walter Morgenthaler (Frankfurt, Germany: Stroemfeld; Zurich: Verlag
Neue Ziircher Zeitung, 1996-2012), 7: 421-27. For an English translation, see Gottfried Keller,
“A Legend of the Dance,” in Seven Legends, trans. Martin Wyness (London: Gowans & Gray, 1911),
98-105, and Gottfried Keller, The People of Seldwyla and Seven Legends, trans. M. D. Hottinger
(London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1930), 294-300.
Seven Legends. In German, Sieben Legenden.
Gregory the Great’s Dialogues. Trans. Odo John Zimmerman, The Fathers of the Church, vol. 39
(Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1959), 211-12 (book 4, chap. 18).
The Virgin’s Miraculous Images and Apparitions
Theotokos. Corresponding to the Latin Deipara. For brief overviews of the theology connected
with this conception of Mary, see Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary through the Centuries: Her Place in the
History of Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 55-65; Sarah Jane Boss, “The
Title Theotokos,” and Richard Price, “Theotokos: The Title and Its Significance in Doctrine and
Devotion,” in Mary: The Complete Resource, ed. Sarah Jane Boss (London: Continuum, 2007),
50-55 and 56-74, respectively.
Notes to Chapter 5 — The Jongleur of Rocamadour 321
City of the God-Bearer. The patriarchate acquired this status because it boasted eventually not
only many precious relics of Mary but fully 117 churches and monasteries dedicated to her. See
Cyril Mango, “Constantinople as Theotokoupolis,” in Mother of God: Representations of the Virgin
in Byzantine Art (Milan, Italy: Skira, 2000), 17-25.
soaked up miracles. For this absorption, the ugly but serviceable neologism “Marialization” has
been minted. See Philippart, “Le récit miraculaire marial,” 566.
taken into heaven. On the complex and much-debated evolution of doctrines relating to this
aspect of Mary, see Henry Mayr-Harting, “The Idea of the Assumption in the West, 800-1200,”
in The Church and Mary: Papers Read at the 2001 Summer Meeting and 2002 Winter Meeting of the
Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. Robert Norman Swanson, Studies in Church History, vol. 39
(Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2004), 86-111.
Miracles of Our Lady in medieval French verse. Miracles de Nostre Dame.
Miracles of Our Lady in Castilian verse. Milagros de Nuestra Senora, in Collected Works of Gonzalo de
Berceo, trans. Bartha et al., 13-141.
Cistercian origin. See Patricia Timmons and Robert Boenig, Gonzalo de Berceo and the Latin
Miracles of the Virgin: A Translation and a Study (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 3.
Songs of Saint Mary. Cantigas de Santa Maria. For an English translation, see Kathleen Kulp-Hill,
trans., Songs of Holy Mary of Alfonso X, the Wise: A Translation of the “Cantigas de Santa Maria,”
Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 173 (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval
and Renaissance Studies, 2000).
illustration. On the images, see Jacques Le Goff, “Le Roi, la Vierge, et les images: Le manuscrit
des ‘Cantigas de Santa Maria’ d’Alphonse X de Castille,” in Rituels: Mélanges offerts a Pierre-
Marie Gy, o.p., ed. Paul De Clerck and Eric Palazzo (Paris: Cerf, 1990), 385-92.
living images. Alejandro Garcia Avilés, “Imagenes ‘vivientes’: Idolatria y herejia en las ‘Cantigas’
de Alfonso X el Sabio,” Goya: Revista de arte 321 (2007): 324-42; Jean-Marie Sansterre, “L’image
‘instrumentalisée’: Icons du Christ et statues de la Vierge, de Rome a I’Espagne des Cantigas de
Santa Maria,” in Hagiographie, idéologie et politique au Moyen Age en Occident: Actes du colloque
international du Centre d’études supérieures de civilisation médiévale de Poitiers, 11-14 septembre 2008,
ed. Edina Bozéky, Hagiologia, vol. 8 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2012), 463-76.
performance before pilgrims. San Millan de la Cogolla.
The Jongleur of Rocamadour
other Marian exempla and miracles. An individual specimen from this genre of compilations
is sometimes designated by the Latin term Mariale. This specific collection, attested in eight
manuscripts, comprises 126 Marian miracles. The text was composed around 1172 by a monk
in the priory of Rocamadour, in south-central France, but it refers to miracles occurring before
1166. For the Latin Miracula Sancte Marie Rupis Amatoris, book 1, miracle 34, see Edmond Albe,
ed. and trans., Les Miracles de Notre-Dame de Rocamadour au douziéme siécle, rev. 2nd ed. Jean
Rocacher (Toulouse: Le Pérégrinateur, 1996), 142-45; Marcus Graham Bull, trans., The Miracles
of Our Lady of Rocamadour: Analysis and Translation (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1999),
122-23.
322 Notes to Chapter 5 — The Jongleur of Rocamadour
writing down miracles. See Signori, Maria zwischen Kathedrale, 202-28; idem, “The Miracle Kitchen
and Its Ingredients: A Methodical and Critical Approach to Marian Shrine Wonders (10th to
13th Century),” Hagiographica 3 (1996): 277-303.
shrine wonder. For the Old French, see Gautier de Coinci, Les Miracles de Nostre Dame, 4: 175-89
(2.21: “Dou cierge qui descendi au jougleour”), which supersedes the text in Reino Hakamies,
Deux miracles de Gautier de Coinci, d’un vilain qui fut sauvé pour ce qu'il ne faisoit uevre le samedi
et du cierge que Nostre Dame de Rochemadour envoia seur la viele au jougleour qui vieloit et chantoit
devant s’ymage publiés d’aprés cing manuscrits, Suomalaisen Tiedeakatemian toimituksia, B,
vol. 113:1 (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Kirjapaino, 1958). In my recapitulation I
follow the French; in the Latin the object that moves is not a taper, but instead (apparently) a
piece of wax. For analysis, see Anna Drzewicka, “La viele du coeur: Une metaphore musicale
de Gautier de Coinci,” in Contez me tout: Mélanges de langue et littérature médiévales offerts a
Herman Braet, ed. Catherine Bel et al., La république des lettres, vol. 28 (Leuven, Belgium:
Peeters, 2006), 175-89.
Galician-Portuguese. For the concise account, see Alfonso X the Wise, Cantigas de Santa Maria, ed.
Walter Mettmann, 3 vols. (Madrid: Castalia, 1986-1989), 1: 75-77 (no. 8); trans. Kulp-Hill, 13-14.
Sieglar. The place name is spelled multifariously, as for example Sygelar, Sigelar, and Siegelar,
in medieval and modern texts alike. It is in the diocese of Cologne.
Rocamadour. The French commune is located in a gorge above the river Alzou, a tributary of the
Dordogne, in the diocese of Cahors.
Amadour. Henri Fromage, “Rocamadour: Qui est (A)madour?” Bulletin de la Société mythologie
francaise 161 (1991): 5-14.
official in control of caring for the church. The medieval equivalent of the facilities director, he held
the monastic office of sacristan.
crying for joy. As in the title of the Latin exemplum about the jongleur, the word used here is
gaudium.
after the beadle had doused it. Dialogus miraculorum, book 7, chap. 46, ed. Strange, 2: 64-65; trans.
Scott and Bland, 2: 528-30, at 529. On such miracles, see Jaap van Moolenbroek, Mirakels
historisch: De exempels van Caesarius van Heisterbach over Nederland en Nederlanders, Middeleeuwse
studies en bronnen, vol. 65 (Hilversum, Netherlands: Verloren, 1999), 113-14.
King Henry II. Emma Mason, “‘Rocamadour in Quercy above All Other Churches’: The Healing
of Henry II,” Studies in Church History 19 (1982): 39-54.
Caesarius of Heisterbach. Dialogus Miraculorum, book 1, chap. 17, ed. Strange, 1: 24-25; trans. Scott
and Bland, 1: 25-26.
wooden image. Jacques Juillet, Rocamadour: Symboles et histoire, 2nd ed. (Grenoble, France: Le
mercure dauphinois, 2005).
Black Virgin. In French, Vierge Noire. For English-speakers, the most widely available account
and census of such images is probably Begg, Cult of the Black Virgin; see especially p. 216 on
Notes to Chapter 5 — The Jongleur of Rocamadour 323
Rocamadour. A Jungian, Begg promotes a theory that the phenomenon had pagan origins and
that it came to the West during the Crusades, thanks to the Templars. His evidence must be
verified on a case-by-case basis. The best short account is Sarah Jane Boss, “Black Madonnas,”
in idem, Mary, 458-75.
The most convenient compilation and exposition of information in French is Sophie Cassagnes-
Brouquet, Vierges noires (Rodez, France: Editions du Rouergue, 2000). Cassagnes-Brouquet cites
repeatedly a 1550 census of Black Virgins in France, which tallied 190. She provides (on pp. 17
and 20) helpful maps to indicate the geographic distribution of such statues. A count today
would be difficult, since older Black Virgins have been stolen, deliberately removed by the local
ecclesiastical authorities, or spirited away for other reasons, while copies or alleged copies of
now lost ones have appeared in many locations.
icon. Anicon by this name survived in Russia until 1941. The panel belonged to the iconographic
type known as Hodegetria, from the Greek for “she who shows the way.” It represented
the Virgin Mary as she holds the infant Jesus while pointing to him as the way of salvation.
Byzantine depictions of the Virgin and Child in this pose exercised a great influence upon
Italian panel painting, which used the golden highlighting known technically as chrysography.
See Jaroslav Folda, Byzantine Art and Italian Panel Painting: The Virgin and Child “Hodegetria” and
the Art of Chrysography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Blachernitissa. It is also known as Theotokos of Blachernae, Virgin of the Sign, or Our Lady of
Blachernae. A catch is that no representation of the Byzantine image from the Middle Ages that
has been explicitly labeled Blachernitissa depicts Mary holding the infant Jesus. Instead, the
figures show her in a praying posture that is designated technically (from the Latin participle
for praying) as orans or orant. Sometimes the Virgin has a medallion of the Christ Child that is
inscribed within her breast or that levitates upon it.
Byzantine coins. Vasso Penna, “The Mother of God on Coins and Lead Seals,” in Mother of God:
Representations of the Virgin in Byzantine Art, ed. Maria Vassilaki (Milan, Italy: Skira, 2000),
209-17, at 211.
the Church has sometimes replaced. For a recent controversy, see Benjamin Ramm, “Which Past
Should We Preserve?” The New York Times, September 2, 2017, C1, C6.
less than fifty miles from Barcelona. In Catalonia, in the northeastern region of the Iberian peninsula.
lead token. The token was called in Latin sportula, in French sportelle. Both words derive ultimately
from Latin sporta, referring to the pilgrim’s scrip, pouch, or purse to which they were attached.
On these objects, see Ludovic de Valon, “Iconographie des sportelles de Rocamadour,” Bulletin
de Ia Société des études littéraires, scientifiques et artistiques du Lot 51 (1930): 1-30; Esther Cohen,
“In haec signa: Pilgrim-Badge Trade in Southern France,” Journal of Medieval History 2.3 (1976):
193-214; Jean Rocacher, “Les sportelles de Rocamadour (enseignes de pélerinage),” Bulletin de
Ia Société des études littéraires, scientifiques et artistiques du Lot 106 (1985-1986): 269-88; Gilbert
Foucaud and Régis Najac, “Sur deux sportelles de Rocamadour trouvées a Capdenac-le-Haut,”
Bulletin de la Société des études littéraires, scientifiques et artistiques du Lot 125.4 (2004): 303-5. For
illustrations, see Jean Rocacher, Rocamadour: Un prétre raconte la roche mariale (Paris: Editions de
l’Atelier, 1999), 25, and especially Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs, 234-37.
324 Notes to Chapter 5 — The Holy Candle of Arras
On pilgrimage to Rocamadour in the twelfth century, see Jean Rocacher, “La Vierge Marie
dans le pélerinage de Rocamadour,” in Marie et le Limousin: Actes de la journée d‘études organisée
a Seilhac le 9 aotit 1991, ed. Sophie Cassagnes et al., Mémoires et documents sur le Bas-Limousin,
vol. 12 (Ussel, France: Musée du pays d’Ussel; Paris: Diff. de Boccard, 1992), 53-83.
In both stories. Allen, De l’hermite et del jougleour, 51.
a version of this Rocamadour miracle tale. “D’un jongleur a cui Nostre Dame envoia son sierge,”
which begins “La douce mere au creator / A l’eglise a Rochemadour... .”
anonymous poet. Chantilly: Le cabinet des livres. Manuscrits, 3 vols. (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1900-
1911): 2: 56 (nos. 68-69).
The True Legend. “Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame: La véritable légende,” Comedia 17, no. 3893,
August 15, 1923, front page. The newspaper, then influential, has been defunct since World
War II.
Gautier de Coinci’s version. Kemp-Welch, Of the Tumbler 127-37. A German translation, also based
on the mid-nineteenth-century Poquet edition, was made by Erhard Lommatzsch, Geschichten
aus dem alten Frankreich (Frankfurt, Germany: J. Knecht, 1947), 113-18, notes 216-17.
Holy Candle of Arras. Gustave Cohen, “La Sainte Vierge dans la littérature francaise du Moyen
Age,” in Maria: Etudes sur la Sainte Vierge, ed. Hubert Du Manoir de Juaye, 7 vols. (Paris:
Beauchesne, 1949-1964), 2: 17-46, at 24-28.
The Holy Candle of Arras
Holy Candle. Known in French as the Sainte Chandelle.
This other wonder. The miracle was studied by Faral, Les jongleurs, 133-42; Adolphe Henri
Guesnon, La Confrérie des jongleurs d’Arras et le tombeau de l’évéque Lambert (Arras, France: Cassel,
1913); and, most recently and insightfully, Carol Symes, A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life
in Medieval Arras (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 85-92. For popular coverage, see
Claude Esil, “Les jongleurs de Notre-Dame: Arras, la féte des ardents,” La France a table 110
(October 1964).
opening years of the twelfth century. Perhaps not too long before 1115, during the episcopacy of
Lambert de Guines, who served as bishop of Arras from 1093 to 1115.
half century later. The earliest and fullest written records of the miracle are found in a Latin text
that was supposedly composed between 1175 and 1200, and in a French version that, at least in
its present form, had to have been composed after 1237. Whatever we decide about the date of
its original composition, the official prose account was recorded in a Latin charter drawn up in
May of 1241. The original of the charter is no longer extant, but late fifteenth-century evidence
attests to its existence. On the dating, see Symes, Common Stage, 85-86. For information on the
manuscripts and editions and for presentation of the texts alongside each other, see Roger
Berger, Le nécrologe de la Confrérie des jongleurs et des bourgeois d’Arras (1194-1361), Commission
départementale des monuments historiques du Pas-de-Calais: Mémoires, vols. 11.2, 13,2 (Arras,
France: [Commission départementale des monuments historiques du Pas-de-Calais], 1963—
1970), 137-56. A briefer account is in Faral, Les jongleurs en France, 133-42. The latest terminus
post quem would be when a fourteenth-century minstrel refers to the miracle: Jean de Condé,
Notes to Chapter 5 — The Holy Candle of Arras 325
Dit des Jacobins et des Fremeneurs (Song of the Dominican and Franciscan friars), dated 1313; for
which, see La messe des oiseaux et le Dit des jacobins et des fremeneurs, ed. Jacques Ribard, Textes
littéraires francais, vol. 170 (Geneva: Droz, 1970). For brief discussion, see Wilkins, Music in the
Age of Chaucer, 143.
ergotism. The disease is known variously as le mal des ardents (the malady of the burning, or
fevered) in French, ignis sacer (holy fire) in Latin, and Saint Anthony’s or Saint Martial’s fire in
English. A form of ergotism caused by ergot poisoning, this affliction resulted from ingesting
alkaloids produced by a fungus (in the Linnaean nomenclature, Claviceps purpurea) on grains
such as rye. Long-term consumption of fungus-ridden foodstuffs, especially infested rye
bread, resulted in disease, which in turn led to both convulsive and gangrenous symptoms,
with the latter being associated with a burning skin condition. The ergot contained a natural
hallucinogen, the psychoactive ingredient of which is lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). See
Jacques Devalette et al., La peste de feu: Le miracle des Ardents et l’ergotisme en Limousin au Moyen
Age, Les cahiers d’ Archéa, vol. 3 (Limoges, France: Archéa, 1994).
Itier. Normand was a native of Saint-Pol-sur-Ternoise, while Itier hailed from Brabant.
Brotherhood of the Holy Candle. In French, Confrérie de la Sainte Chandelle.
confraternity of jongleurs. It was also known more fully as the Brotherhood of Jongleurs and
Burghers of Arras (Confrérie des Jongleurs et des Bourgeois d’Arras) and as the Charity of Our Lady
of the Fevered of Arras (Charité de Notre Dame des Ardents d’Arras). See Berger, Le nécrologe de la
confrérie; L. B. Richardson, “The ‘Confrérie des jongleurs et des bourgeois’ and the ‘Puy d’Arras
in Twelfth and Thirteenth Century Literature,” in Studies in Honor of Mario A. Pei, ed. John
Fisher and Paul A. Gaeng, Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, vol. 114 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 161-71; Catherine Vincent, “Fraternité révée et
lien social fortifié: La confrérie Notre-Dame des Ardents a Arras (début du XIIle siécle-XVe
siécle),” Revue du Nord 337 (2000), 659-79. For useful tidbits of antiquarianism (and images),
see also Louis Cavrois de Saternault, Histoire du Saint-Cierge d’Arras et de la Confrérie de Notre-
Dame des Ardents, 3rd ed. (Arras, France: Imprimerie de la Société du Pas-de-Calais, 1910). Such
confraternities were religious associations that brought together individuals of the same social
class, often of the same profession, who agreed to abide by the statutes of the group and to
support its other members. In return for an entrance fee and annual dues, this organization
connected its members with the church and saw to the support of the impoverished and the
burial of the deceased.
One activity of the confraternity, the foundation of which is documented around 1175, was
to present plays: a member was Adam de la Halle, the author and composer of the famous early
French play with music, The Play of Robin and Marion (Jeu de Robin et Marion), composed in 1282
or 1283. Not much is to be made of the fact that the woman’s name Marion is a variant of the
French Marie (Mary).
,
guilds for minstrels. Wilkins, Music in the Age of Chaucer, 126.
Our Lady of the Fevered. Domina nostra ardentium.
pulled down by a mob. For a depiction of the destruction as it took place, see Charles de Linas, La
Confrérie de Notre-Dame des Ardents d’Arras (Paris: Didron, 1857), plate between pp. 56 and 57. A
very different replacement in Romanesque revival style, sadly banal in contrast to the original,
was completed and consecrated in 1876 (see Fig. n.3).
326 Notes to Chapter 5 — The Holy Candle of Arras
Fig. n.3 Consecration of the new Cathédrale d’Arras. Illustration, 1876.
Published in Le Monde illustré (1876), 356.
reliquary. Linas, La Confrérie, frontispiece.
the language of Marian miracles. Philippart, “Le récit miraculaire marial,” 580.
a story's just a story. Stephen King, 11/12/16: A Novel (New York: Pocket Books, 2011), 52.
Festival of Our Lady of the Fevered. Féte de Notre Dame des Ardents.
conflated to this day. Esil, “Les jongleurs de Notre-Dame,” 29-30.
establish group identities. Kay Brainerd Slocum, “Confrérie, Bruderschaft and Guild: The Formation
of Musicians’ Fraternal Organisations in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Europe,” Early
Music History 14 (1995): 257-74.
guilds. On the precise nature of the guilds, see Wilkins, Music in the Age of Chaucer, 138 (he
identifies the Confrérie des Jongleurs et des Bourgois d’Arras as “probably merely a benefit society”
and the Confrérie de Notre Dame des Ardents as “really a religious guild”).
segue from bodily movement. John Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants, 1: 198-204, posits that
the change from bodily to musical performance was favored during the thirteenth century.
Notes to Chapter 5 — The Pious Sweat of Monks and Lay Brothers 327
within places of worship. To take but one example, the French vernacular verse La vie de saint
Thomas Becket, by Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, was recited at the tomb of the saint in the
cathedral at Canterbury. See Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, A Life of Thomas Becket in Verse:
La Vie de saint Thomas Becket, trans. Ian Short, Mediaeval Sources in Translation, vol. 56 (Toronto:
Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2013).
The Pious Sweat of Monks and Lay Brothers
Genius is one percent inspiration. Although attributed traditionally to Edison, the quotation
has a disputed origin and wording. See https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/12/14/
genius-ratio/#note-5018-8
five different versions. For further information, see Albertus Poncelet, “Miraculorum B. V. Mariae
quae saec. VI-XV latine conscripta sunt index,” Analecta Bollandiana 21 (1902): 241-360, no. 576;
Tubach, Index Exemplorum, 265, no. 3404: “Monks of Clairvaux harvesting” (Tubach connects the
exemplum with another motif, p. 386, no. 5114: “Virgin, Blessed, collects drops of sweat. The
Virgin Mary collected drops of sweat from hardworking monks and nuns”); France, Separate but
Equal, 42-43; McGuire, “Lost Clairvaux Exemplum Collection Found,” 38-41.
twelfth-century brother of Clairvaux. Herbert of Clairvaux (died ca. 1198), Liber miraculorum, in PL
185: 1273-36, at 1273-75 (1.1). See Michael Casey, “Herbert of Clairvaux’s Book of Wonderful
Happenings,” Cistercian Studies 25 (1990): 37-64, at 49-50 (with Engl. trans.).
Bright Valley. Likewise, Clara Vallis in Latin. The etymology is explained gracefully in passing in
Wilhelm Preetorius, Der Ténzer unserer lieben Frau (Zurich: Die Waage, 1964), on the third and
fourth unnumbered pages.
wiped the sweat. The same miracle story appeared earlier in Conrad of Eberbach, Exordium magnum
Cisterciense, 3.13, 2nd ed. Griesser (1994), 161-64; ed. Griesser (1961), 176-77; Collectaneum
exemplorum 4.16 [90]: ed. Legendre, 289 (text), 409-10 (sources); and London, British Library,
MS Additional 15,723 (late twelfth century), for which, see Ward, Catalogue of Romances, 2: 629.
much later telling. This much later version is by a fifteenth-century German Dominican, Johannes
Herolt (d. 1468), called Discipulus: Miracle 6, in Miracles of the Blessed Virgin Mary, ed. C. C.
Swinton Bland (London: Routledge, 1928), 23. See Guy Philippart, “Les miracles mariaux de
Jean Herolt (1434) et la Legenda aurea,” Le moyen francais 32.1 (1993): 53-67; Philippart, “Le récit
miraculaire marial,” 578.
monk of Villers. Abundus of Villers, as related by Goswin of Bossut, “Life of Abundus,” in
Martinus Cawley, Send Me God (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2003), 234.
first hearing this exemplum. Caesarius heard the exemplum in 1199 as told by Gevard, abbot of
Heisterbach.
dispatched a breeze to cool them. Caesarius, Dialogus miraculorum, book 1, chap. 17: ed. Strange, 1:
24-25; trans. Scott and Bland, 1: 25-26.
chock-full of exempla. On exempla in Caesarius, see Jaap van Moolenbroek, “Over exempels,
wonderen en visioenen in het werk van Caesarius van Heisterbach,” Millennium: Tijdschrift voor
middeleeuwse studies 12.1 (1997): 15-29.
328 Notes to Chapter 5 — The Love of Statuesque Beauty
Great Dialogue of Visions and Miracles. Dialogus magnus visionum atque miraculorum.
Eight such apparitions. Laurentin and Sbalchiero, Dizionario, 170-72.
In this poem. For the original text, see Gautier de Coinci, Miracles, ed. Koenig, 4: 412-17 (2.31:
“De un moigne de Chartrose”). For discussion and translation (into modern French), see
Gautier de Coinci, Cing miracles de Notre-Dame, trans. Jean-Louis Gabriel Benoit, Traductions
des classiques du Moyen Age, vol. 78 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2007), 139-51. For appraisal
of the resemblances between Gautier’s miracle and Our Lady’s Tumbler, see especially trans.
Benoit, 139-40, 143; Bretel, Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame, 13-14, 18-19. This miracle was omitted
from Adolfo Mussafia’s source study of Les Miracles de Nostre Dame, on the grounds that Gaston
Raynaud, in “Le Miracle de Sardenai,” Romania 11 (1882): 519-37; 14 (1885): 82-93, had sourced
the miracle with which it is transmitted. As poor luck would have it, Raynaud does not deal
at all with the miracle of the Carthusian monk. See Adolfo Mussafia, Uber die von Gautier de
Coincy beniitzten Quellen, Denkschriften der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in
Wien, philosophisch-historische Classe, vol. 44.1 (Vienna: In Commission bei F. Tempsky, 1894),
6.
fellow monk sees Mary. Identified solely as a “virgin” or “maiden” (pucele).
Song of the Knight and the Squire. Jehan de Saint-Quentin, “Le dit du chevalier et de l’escuier,” in
Dits en quatrains d’alexandrins monorimes de Jehan de Saint-Quentin, ed. Birger Munk Olsen (Paris:
Société des anciens textes francais, 1978), 68-76.
third form of the legend. Gautier de Coinci, Miracles, ed. Koenig, 4: 378-411 (2.30: “Miracle
Nostre Dame de Sardenay”). On the worship of the icon, see Bernard Hamilton, “Our Lady of
Saidnaiya: An Orthodox Shrine Revered by Muslims and Knights Templar at the Time of the
Crusades,” in The Holy Land, Holy Lands, and Christian History, ed. Robert Norman Swanson,
Studies in Church History, vol. 36 (Woodbridge, UK: Published for the Ecclesiastical History
Society by the Boydell Press, 2000), 207-15; Benjamin Z. Kedar, “Convergences of Oriental
Christian, Muslim, and Frankish Worshippers: The Case of Saydnaya,” in De Sion exibit lex et
verbum domini de Hierusalem: Essays on Medieval Law, Liturgy and Literature in Honour of Amnon
Linder, ed. Yitzhak Hen (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001), 59-69, and in The Crusades and
the Military Orders: Expanding the Frontiers of Medieval Latin Christianity, ed. Zsolt Hunyadi
and Jozsef Laszlovszky (Budapest: CEU, 2001), 89-100; Michele Bacci, “A Sacred Space for a
Holy Icon: The Shrine of Our Lady of Saydnaya,” in Hierotopy: The Creation of Sacred Spaces in
Byzantium and Medieval Russia, ed. Alexei Lidov (Moscow: Indrik, 2006), 373-87.
hand towel. In French, touvaille: Abbé Alexandre-Eusébe Poquet, ed., Les miracles de la sainte
Vierge, traduits et mis en vers par Gautier de Coincy (Paris: Parmantier, Didron, 1857), cols. 647-672,
at 669, line 922.
The Love of Statuesque Beauty
another famous Marian miracle. Pinto-Mathieu, La Vie des Peres, 793-818; Camille, Gothic Idol,
237-39.
bed trick. See Wendy Doniger, The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2000).
Notes to Chapter 5 — The Holy Face of Christ and Virgin Saints 329
elements from these other accounts. For the broadest perspective, see Theodore Ziolkowski,
Disenchanted Images: A Literary Iconology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 18-77.
We will return to the Marian tales in Chapter 18.
The Venus of Ille. This is a tale that Marcel Proust said he was not allowed to read: see Bernard
de Fallois, ed., Contre Sainte-Beuve (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 238.
The Holy Face of Christ and Virgin Saints
Holy Face. In Italian, Volto Santo.
Lucca. An Italian commune in Tuscany. On the origins and spread of the cult, see Diana Webb,
“The Holy Face of Lucca,” Anglo-Norman Studies: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 9 (1987):
227-37. With specific reference to the tale of the jongleur and the Madonna at Lucca, see Valeria
Bertolucci Pizzorusso, La Vergine e il Volto: Il miracolo del giullare (Lucca, Italy: M. Pacini Fazzi,
2009). More generally, see Chiara Frugoni, “Una proposta per il Volto Santo,” in II Volto Santo:
Storia e culto. Catalogo della mostra (Lucca, 21 ottobre-21 dicembre 1982), ed. Clara Baracchini and
Maria Teresa Filieri (Lucca, Italy: Maria Pacini Fazzi, 1982), 15-48.
ankle-length tunic,. The garment is designated in Latin by the term colubium.
This is no place for the Holy Face!. Inferno 21.48: “Qui non ha luogo il Santo Volto.”
Piers Plowman. Piers Plowman 6.103.
the image was widely revered. Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs, 254-55. In the process, images of it became,
and have stayed, influential in iconography. See Reiner Hausherr, “Das Imerwardkreutz und
der Volto-Santo Typ,” Zeitschrift fiir Kunstwissenschaft 16 (1962): 129-67; idem, “Volto Santo,”
in Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, ed. Engelbert Kirschbaum, 8 vols. (Freiburg, Germany:
Herder, 1968-1976), 8: 471-72; Jerzy Golos, “The Crucified Female and the Poor Fiddler: The
Long Life of a Legend,” RIdIM/RCMI Newsletter 11.1 (Spring 1986): 8-10; Olimpia Gotdys, “Ein
mysteridser Spielmann: Zu den kulturgeschichtlichen Aspekten der ‘Spielmanns-Ikonographie’
in den Volto-Santo-/Kiimmernis-Darstellungen vom 13. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert,” Music in Art
33.1-2 (Spring—Fall 2008): 149-67.
Gospel of John. 3:1 and 19:39.
deposing Christ from the cross. Relatio Leboini 1, in Bibliotheca hagiographica Latina antiquae et mediae
aetatis, ed. Société des Bollandistes, Subsidia Hagiographica, vol. 6, 2 vols. (Brussels: Société
des Bollandistes, 1898-1901), 1: 629 (no. 4236). For discussion, see Corine Schleif, “Nicodemus
and Sculptors: Self-Reflexivity in Works by Adam Kraft and Tilman Riemenschneider,” The Art
Bulletin 75.4 (1993): 599-626, at 608-10; Michele Camillo Ferrari, “Imago visibilis Christi’: Le
‘Volto Santo’ de Lucques et les images authentiques au Moyen Age,” in La visione e lo sguardo nel
Medioevo—View and Vision in the Middle Ages, SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2 vols. Micrologus:
Natura, scienze e societa medievali/Nature, Sciences and Medieval Societies: Rivista della Societa
internazionale per lo studio del medio evo latino 6 (1998): 29-42.
arrived in Lucca. To this day, the cross is situated in the same Tuscan city, in a chapel of the
cathedral of San Martino. The chapel was built in 1484 to house it in the right-hand nave.
Illumination of the Holy Cross. In Italian, Luminara di Santa Croce.
330 Notes to Chapter 5 — The Holy Face of Christ and Virgin Saints
takes place annually. On the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, each September 13.
miracles about the Holy Face. For edition and for dating on stylistic basis, see the still foundational
work by Gustav Schniirer and Joseph M. Ritz, Sankt Kiimmernis und Volto Santo: Studien und
Bilder, Forschungen zur Volkskunde, vols. 13-15 (Diisseldorf, Germany: L. Schwann, 1934), 133,
and, in addition, Michele C. Ferrari, “Identita e imagine del Volto Santo di Lucca,” in La Santa
Croce di Lucca: Storia, tradizioni, immagini. Atti del convegno, Villa Bottini, 1-3 marzo 2001 (Lucca,
Italy: Dell’ Acero, 2003), 92-102, at 97.
let fall a silver slipper. In Thompson, Motif-Index, the gesture is subsumed as motif D1622.3:
“Saint’s image lets golden shoe (ring) fall as sign of favor to suppliant.” This motif is closely
related to D1622.2: “Image of Virgin bows to indicate favor.”
the miracle is confirmed. Schniirer and Ritz, Sankt Kiimmernis, 159-78; Peter Spranger, Der Geiger
von Gmiind: Justinus Kerner und die Geschichte einer Legende (Schwabisch Gmiind, Germany:
Stadtarchiv, 1980; 2nd ed. 1991).
Saint Bertin. In Saint-Omer, France. Wendelin Foerster, “Le saint vou de Luques,” Romanische
Forschungen 23.1 (1907): 1-55. The account is given in the prologue to a work known as La
Vengeance Jhesu Christ (ca. 1430) by Eustache Marcade.
Jenois. His name probably derives from that of an early Christian martyr named Genesius.
encrusted in precious stones. Bejeweled half-shoes of silver were an uncommon adornment but
are known from the wardrobe of Madonnas elsewhere, as in the English town of Ipswich
(where the Madonna no longer exists) and in the Italian town of Nettuno: see Smith, Madonna
of Ipswich, 23.
substantial reparation. The most complex and radical explanation has been prompted by the
parallel to Cinderella in the motif of the shoe. See Jean-Claude Schmitt, “Cendrillon crucifiée:
A propos du Volto Santo de Lucques,” in Miracles, prodiges et merveilles au Moyen Age. Actes
des congreés de la Société des historiens médiévistes de l’enseignement supérieur public. XXVe Congres,
Orléans, juin 1994, Série Histoire ancienne et médiévale, vol. 34 (Paris: Publications de la
Sorbonne, 1995), 241-69; idem, “Réalité matérielle et réalité symbolique: A propos du soulier de
Christ,” in “Pictura quasi fictura”: Die Rolle des Bildes in der Erforschung von Alltag und Sachkultur
des Mittelalters und der friihen Neuzeit, ed. Gerhard Jaritz, Internationales Round-Table-Gesprach
Krems an der Donau, vol. 3 (Vienna: Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1996),
73-85.
song of heroic deeds. In French, chanson de geste.
singing an editorial. Aliscans, ed. Claude Régnier, trans. Andrée Subrenat and Jean Subrenat,
Champion classiques. Moyen Age (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2007), 328-31 (4821-31 [4759-69]):
“T can well tell you and assert as true: a nobleman should not listen to a jongleur if he does not
wish, by God, to give of what he has, for the jongleur does not know another way of working
for his living... You can verify by the Holy Face of Lucca, which threw down to him its shoe...
We ought to love jongleurs greatly: they seek out joy, and love to sing it” (my translation).
Overt incredulity. Boncompagno da Signa, Rhetorica antiqua (or Boncompagnus): no citation is
provided by Gustav Schniirer, “Die Spielmannslegende,” in Die Gérresgesellschaft im Jahre
1914: Jahresbericht und Abhandlungen der Herren Birkner, Biichi, Ehses, Riicker, Schniirer (Cologne,
Germany: J. P. Bachem, 1914), 78-90, at 83.
Notes to Chapter 5 — The Holy Face of Christ and Virgin Saints 331
stranger transmogrification. The bibliography on the tale is extensive. Key studies are Schniirer
and Ritz, Sankt Kiimmernis; Spranger, Der Geiger von Gmiind; Regine Schweizer-Viillers, Die
Heilige am Kreuz: Studien zum weiblichen Gottesbild im spdten Mittelalter und in der Barockzeit,
Deutsche Literatur von den Anfangen bis 1700, vol. 26 (Bern, Switzerland: P. Lang, 1997). For
a good distillation in English of what is known and what has been hypothesized, see Ilse E.
Friesen, The Female Crucifix: Images of St. Wilgefortis since the Middle Ages (Waterloo, Canada:
Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001), 35-45. In German, the standard encyclopedia entry is
Peter Spranger, “Kiimmernis,” in EdM, 8: 604-7.
Brothers Grimm. The Brothers Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmdrchen (repr. Gottingen, Germany:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986; Ist ed. 1812-1815), 2: 293-94 (no. 66: “Die heilige Frau
Kummernis”) and xxxxix (notes). In the overall count of the Grimm’s tales, this one is reckoned
no. 152a (and may be compared with no. 139). In the standard system of folktale tale types, this
one is now subsumed as ATU 706 D: “Kiimmernis,” according to the standard classification
system, ATU. The same motif also appeared in the Brothers Grimm, Deutsche Sagen, ed. Hans-
Jorg Uther, 3 vols. (Munich, Germany: Diederichs, 1993), 1: 269-70 (no. 330: “Die Jungfrau mit
dem Bart”). In this instance they followed Johannes Praetorius, Gazophylaci Gaudium: Das ist, Ein
Ausbund von Wiindschel-Ruthen, oder sehr lustreiche und ergetzliche Historien von wunderseltzamen
Erfindungen der Schédtze Wiinschelruthe (Leipzig, Germany: Ritzsch, 1667), 152-53. See Johannes
Bolte and George Polivka, Anmerkungen zu den Kinder- und Hausmarchen der Briider Grimm, 5
vols. (Leipzig, Germany: Dieterich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1913-1932), 3: 241.
collection of exempla from 1700. Entitled Ovum paschale novum, oder, Neugefirbte Oster-Ayr (new
Easter egg or newly colored Easter eggs) das ist, Viertzig geistliche Discurs auff den H. Ostertag
und Ostermontag, by the Catholic preacher and parish priest Andreas Strobl (Salzburg, Austria:
M. Haan, 1694), 216-17, who drew in turn upon Benignus Kybler, Wunder-Spiegel, oder géttliche
Wunderwerck auss dem Alt- und Neuen Testament zu einem beyhiilfflichen Vorrath allerhand Predigen
(2 vols. [Munich, Germany: In Verlegung Johan Wagners: Johann Hermanns von Geldern;
gedruckt bey Sebastian Rauch, 1678-1682], 1: 505). On the sources of the exemplum in the
latter, see Renate Vollmer, Die Exempel im “Wunderspiegel” des P. Benignus Kybler S.J. von 1678,
ed. Wolfgang Briickner und Lenz Kriss-Rettenbeck, Verdffentlichungen zur Volkskunde und
Kulturgeschichte 35 (Wiirzburg, Germany: Bayerische Blatter fiir Volkskunde, 1989), 31, no.
144.
Kummernis. This corresponds to the more common Kiimmernis, with an umlaut.
sundry other names. She is known also in English as Saint Uncumber, which derives in turn from
the Middle Dutch Ontkommer, signifying “freedom from care” (from the negative prefix ont-
and the noun kommer). Names in other languages are: Liberata in Italian and Librada in Spanish,
presumably implying something similar to the German, since both mean “freed” in Italian and
Spanish. The French Débarras is similar, since it denotes “riddance.”
strong maiden. Latin, virgo fortis. For Wilgefortis, see Acta Sanctorum (July), 5: 63. For iconography
and history, see Friedrich Gorissen, “Das Kreuz von Lucca und die H. Wilgifortis/Ontcommer
am unteren Rhein: Ein Beitrag zur Hagiographie und Ikonographie,” Numaga 15 (1968): 122-48.
The tale is widely attested. Hans-Jorg Uther, Handbuch zu den “Kinder- und Hausmiairchen” der Briider
Grimm: Entstehung, Wirkung, Interpretation, 2nd ed. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 457. See also
Friesen, Female Crucifix, 9-18 (on Volto Santo), 47-62 (on Ontkommer and Uncumber), 63-80 (on
Wilgefortis), 81-110 (on Kummernis). On the iconography, see Marco Paoli and Carla Simonetti,
332 Notes to Chapter 5 — The Holy Face of Christ and Virgin Saints
“L’iconografia del Volto Santo in codici e stampati,” in Il Volto Santo: Storia e culto. Catalogo della
mostra (Lucca, 21 ottobre—21 dicembre 1982), ed. Clara Baracchini and Maria Teresa Filieri (Lucca,
Italy: Maria Pacini Fazzi, 1982), 49-58.
The Image at Lucca. In German, “Die Bildnus [sic] zu Luca.” The woodcut is labeled “Sant
Kiimernus.” For information and reproduction, see Hans Burgkmair, Das graphische Werk:
1473-1973 (Augsburg, Germany: Stadtische Kunstsammlungen, 1973), no. 38, catalogue no. 39.
folk art. Koraljka Kos, “St. Kitimmernis and Her Fiddler (An Approach to Iconology of Pictorial
Folk Art),” Studia Musicologica 19 (1977): 251-66.
1816 ballad. Entitled Der Geiger zu Gmiind (The fiddler of Gmiind) by the Swabian poet Andreas
Justinus Kerner.
Saint Cecilia. The writer had been inspired to compose his poem by seeing a representation of
Kummernis with an accompanying account of the legend.
image of Cecilia. In a chapel in Gmiind.
matching item of footwear. The ballad, still known today, enjoyed surges of popularity in the
past. The German painter Hermann Knackfuss produced an engraving of this version as a
book illustration that was printed in 1871, at the time of the Franco-Prussian War: Hermann
Knackfu&, “Der Geiger zu Gmiind Buchillustration,” in Alte und Neue Welt: Illustrierte Katholische
Monatsschrift zur Unterhaltung und Belehrung 5 (1871): 308, reproduced at p. 103 as fig. 49.
The Hermit. Der Einsiedler or Der geigende Eremit: Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen,
Preussischer Kulturbesitz (Inv. Nr. A I 363), 90 x 69 cm (oil on wood): see Rolf Andree, Arnold
Bocklin: Die Gemiéilde, 2nd ed. (Basel, Switzerland: F. Reinhardt; Munich, Germany: Hirmer,
1998), 457 (no. 384). The painting’s relevance as an analogue to the juggler tale was pointed out
first in 1898 by Oelsner, “A Story by Anatole France,” 218.
The Miracle. Kurt Elbau, “Das Wunder,” Liibeckische Anzeigen 149, Morgen-Blatt, no. 393, August
6, 1899, 3. Cited by August Andrae, “Das Weiterleben alter Fablios, Lais, Legenden und anderer
alter Stoffe,” Romanische Forschungen 16 (1904): 321-53, at 327.
the noun. See Wilhelm Schafer, “Der Spielmann,” in idem, Erzdhlende Schriften, vol. 2: Rheinsagen
(Munich, Germany: Miiller, 1918), 73-74; repr. in Legenden: Alte Erzihlungen in der Dichtung
unserer Zeit, ed. Fritz Schlo&, 29-30 (Sannerz, Germany: Gemeinschafts-Verlag, 1923), and ed.
Fritz Schlo&, 34-36 (with Scherenschnitt on 36) (Sannerz, Germany: Eberhard Arnold, 1925).
The Dancer of Our Lady. The German is Der Ténzer unserer lieben Frau. To take four examples
from across more than four decades, this was the case with the 1921 adaptation of the tale as a
play by Franz Johannes Weinrich, the 1922 translation of the Old French into German by Carl
Sigmar Gutkind, a 1963 setting of the story to electronic music composed in 1963 by Konrad
Boehmer for a ballet that was performed a year later, and the 1964 scissor-art version of the
story by Wilhelm Preetorius.
The sixty-minute composition by Boehmer was commissioned by the Wuppertal ballet
company (Wuppertaler Biihnen) during a spell when the composer was active in the West
German Broadcasting Company (WDR) in Cologne. The music was recorded in the broadcaster's
electronic studio and was performed by the ballet company on January 30, 1964. The ballet was
by Erich Walter and Heinrich Wendel, with soloists Inge Koch and André Doutreval. See Konrad
Notes to Chapter 5 — The Holy Face of Christ and Virgin Saints 333
Boehmer, Doppelschldge: Texte zur Musik, vol. 1: Texte zur Musik: 1958-1967, ed. Stefan Fricke
and Christian Grtin, Quellentexte zur Musik des 20./21. Jahrhunderts, vol. 12 (Saarbrticken,
Germany: Pfau, 2009), 158-59.
Friedrich Hedler. Friedrich Hedler, Der Tiinzer unserer lieben Frau: Ein Spiel nach altfranzdsischen
und altdeutschen Motiven (Munich, Germany: Buchner, 1950). The cover has a woodcut by P.
J. Paffenholz, and the foreword indicates that the accompanying music (formerly available
through the publisher) was by Erwin Mausz. Hedler had been an opponent of Goebbels within
the Rosenberg faction of the National Socialists: see Friedrich Hedler, “Wiedergeburt der
Schauspielkunst aus dem Geist der Dichtung,” Bausteine 2 (1934): 97-103. Works with the same
German title that tell instead the story of Our Lady’s Tumbler have been written by Wilhelm
Preetorius and Franz Johannes Weinrich, as well as the translation by Curt Sigmar Gutkind in
Fraenger.
The Miracle of the Golden Shoes. Maria Dutli-Rutishauer, Das Wunder der goldenen Schuhe und
andere Legenden, illus. Johannes Wohlfahrt (Rottenburg/Neckar, Germany: Pfeilerverlag, 1954).
Loving Mother of the Savior. Dutli-Rutishauer, Das Wunder der goldenen Schuhe, 65-68: Alma
redemptoris mater.
Tell Me Something!. Henry Blauth and Kurt Roderbourg, Erzdhl mir was! (Boston: Ginn, 1960),
126-33 (“Der Spielmann unserer lieben Frau”).
The Poor Minstrel. “Der arme Spielmann,” in Festkalendar von Frz. Graf Bocci, G. Gérres und ihren
Freunden, 10 (Munich: Cotta, and Vienna: Mechitaristen, 1836), 6. Cited by Schniirer, “Die
Spielmannslegende,” 89-90.
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Abbreviations
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Erzahlforschung. 15 vols. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1977-2015.
LHA The Letters of Henry Adams, ed. J. C. Levenson et al. 6 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1982-1988.
PL Patrologiae cursus completus, Series latina, ed. J.-P. Migne. Paris, 1844-1880.
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