i
GENDER, READING,
AND TRUTH IN THE
TWELFTH CENTURY
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MEDIEVAL MEDIA AND CULTURE
Medieval Media and Culture responds to a vibrant contemporary research field by
foregrounding ways in which individuals interacted with written, visual, dramatic, and
material media in medieval and early modern cultures. It seeks to illuminate and contextualize particular aspects of medieval culture through in-depth, insightful examination, and in so doing, to shed light on the ways in which the social may be revealed
through the cultural.
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GENDER, READING,
AND TRUTH IN THE
TWELFTH CENTURY
THE WOMAN IN
THE MIRROR
MORGAN POWELL
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Published with the financial support of the Swiss National Science Foundation
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
© 2020, Arc Humanities Press, Leeds
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution
only licence CC BY 4.0. We acknowledge support by the Open Access
Publication Fund of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
The author asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of the work.
Permission to use brief excerpts from this work in scholarly and educational works is hereby granted
provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is an exception or limitation covered by Article 5 of the European Union’s Copyright Directive (2001/29/EC) or would be
determined to be “fair use” under Section 107 of the US Copyright Act September 2010 page 2 or that
satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the US Copyright Act (17 USC §108, as revised by PL
94-553) does not require the Publisher’s permission.
ISBN: 9781641893770
e-ISBN: 9781641893787
DOI: 10.17302/MMC-9781641893770
www.arc-humanities.org
Printed and bound in the UK (by Lightning Source), USA (by Bookmasters), and elsewhere using printon-demand technology.
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For Julian and Sandu
vivant et floreant
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CONTENTS
List of Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
PART ONE:
READING AS SPONSA ET MATER
Chapter 1. Mutations of the Reading Woman. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Chapter 2. Reading as Mary Did . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Chapter 3. Constructing the Woman’s Mirror . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Chapter 4. Seeking the Reader/Viewer of the St Albans Psalter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
PART TWO:
READING THE WIDOWED BRIDE
Chapter 5. Quae est ista, quae ascendit? (Canticles 3:6): Rethinking the
Woman Reader in Early Old French Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
Chapter 6. Ego dilecto meo et dilectus meus mihi (Canticles 6:2): Mary’s
Reading and the Epiphany of Empathy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
Chapter 7. A New Poetics for Âventiure: The Exposition of Wolfram
von Eschenbach’s Parzival . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277
Chapter 8. The Heart, the Wound, and the Word—Sacred and Profane . . . . . . . . . . . . 325
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Contents
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 375
Appendix: The Prologue to Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 381
List of Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 411
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ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 0.1. Memory in the Bestiaire d’amour rimé, ca. 1300 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Figure 1.1. Tomb effigy of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Abbey of
Fontevraud, France, ca. 1200 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Figure 2.1. Annunciation. Abbey Church of Sainte-Foy, Conques, France,
early twelfth century. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Figure 2.2. Annunciation. Lintel frieze, Chartres Cathedral, France,
ca. 1145–1150 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Figure 2.3. Annunciation (detail). St Albans Psalter, ca. 1120–ca. 1140 . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
Figure 2.4. Annunciation. Ivory book cover, Northern France, ca. 1100 . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
Figure 2.5. Annunciation. Capital from the Abbey of Saint-Martin d’Ainay,
Lyon, France, first third of the twelfth century. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Figure 3.1. Frontispiece of the Speculum virginum, ca. 1140 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Figure 3.2. The House of Wisdom, Speculum virginum, ca. 1140. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
Figure 3.3. Frontispiece of the Speculum virginum (detail), ca. 1140 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
Figure 3.4. Peregrinus and Theodora, Speculum virginum, beginning of the
thirteenth century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
Figure 3.5. The Struggle between Spirit and Flesh, Speculum virginum,
early thirteenth century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
Figure 3.6. The Fruits of the Flesh (verso) and the Fruits of the Spirit (recto),
Speculum virginum, ca. 1140 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
Figure 4.1. Initial to Psalm 105, St Albans Psalter, ca. 1150. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
Figure 4.2. Initial to the Litany, St Albans Psalter, ca. 1120–ca. 1140 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
Figure 4.3. Annunciation, St Albans Psalter, ca. 1120–ca. 1140 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
Figure 4.4. The Supper at the House of Simon the Pharisee, St Albans Psalter,
ca. 1120–ca. 1140. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
Figure 4.5. The Descent from the Cross, St Albans Psalter, ca. 1120–ca. 1140. . . . . . 149
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LIst of ILLustratIons
Figure 4.6. The Deposition, St Albans Psalter, ca. 1120–ca. 1140 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
Figure 4.7. Mary Magdalene’s Annunciation to the Apostles, St Albans
Psalter, ca. 1120–ca. 1140 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
Figure 4.8. The Ascension, St Albans Psalter, ca. 1120–ca. 1140 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
Figure 4.9. Pentecost, St Albans Psalter, ca. 1120–ca. 1140. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
Figure 4.10. Proemium to the Chanson de Saint Alexis, St Albans Psalter,
ca. 1120–ca. 1140 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
Figure 4.11. The conclusion of the Chanson de Saint Alexis and Gregory’s
letter, St Albans Psalter, ca. 1120–ca. 1140 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
Figure 4.12. The Road to Emmaus, St Albans Psalter, ca. 1120–ca. 1140 . . . . . . . . . . 161
Figure 4.13. The Supper at Emmaus, St Albans Psalter, ca. 1120–ca. 1140. . . . . . . . . 162
Figure 4.14. The Disappearance at Emmaus, St Albans Psalter,
ca. 1120–ca. 1140 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
Figure 4.15. Proemium to the Chanson de Saint Alexis, St Albans Psalter
(detail), ca. 1120–ca. 1140 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
Figure 7.1. Tristan and Isolde in the orchard, bone casket, 1180–1200 . . . . . . . . . . 294
Figure 7.2. Tristan and Isolde in the orchard, ivory mirror case, first half of
the fourteenth century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294
Figure 8.1. Reading the Widow in Yvain (diagram) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 332
Figure 8.2. Reading the Widow in Parzival (diagram) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333
Figure 8.3. The funeral of Esclados, end of the thirteenth century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357
Figure 8.4. West wall of the Iwein cycle, Schloss Rodenegg, South
Tyrolia, ca. 1220 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 370
Figure 8.5. Contour reconstruction, west wall of the Rodenegg Iwein cycle . . . . . . 371
Figure 8.6. West wall of the Iwein cycle (detail), Schloss Rodenegg, South
Tyrolia, ca. 1220. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 372
Figure 9.1. Bestiaire d’amours, late thirteenth century. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
WHERE TO BEGIN? Perhaps on this most personal of pages it is permissible to write out
the simple question that plagues all writers, over and over again. This is a book that was
long in the making, longer even than most others I know of, longer than I care to state.
Many, many people have helped along the way; many have lent time and advice, intellectual and emotional or even financial support. Still, writing is in essence a lonely process,
and great stretches of this process were very lonely indeed. In looking back, I see those
who stood as bulwarks or life-rings in that process and without whom I must truly wonder
if a book would be in this binding today. Out of care to do honour to these I am omitting
many others, for which I beg understanding or forgiveness, as the case may be.
For my main and sustaining intellectual inspiration I thank the late Michael
Curschmann. One of the saddest consequences of the time passed is his own passing
before the end was reached. It would be an honour to have this book received as I see
it: as a logical extension of his work. For continuing friendship and generous intellectual guidance since my first semester in the PhD programme at Princeton, my thanks
go to Giles Constable. Among colleagues, stalwart support and hands in the dark
were repeatedly extended by Carol Symes (inimitable as she is), Renate BlumenfeldKosinski, and Adam Cohen. I also thank Bonnie Wheeler for unfailing faith in a project whose worth she saw before almost anyone else—that she had to let it go in the
end makes the gratitude only greater. At the end of a long road stand my editor, Anna
Henderson, and Simon Forde of Arc Humanities: their decisive agility rescued a ship
foundering on the rocks and have brought it, at long last, to safe haven.
Crucial financial and institutional support came from several quarters. I was
both fortunate and privileged to spend two different sojourns of research (1998 and
2000–2001) at the Institute for European History in Mainz. A postdoctoral fellowship
in art history and the humanities from the Getty Foundation provided the funding for
the second of these—over a full year. I also profited immensely from a junior faculty
fellowship at the Erasmus Institute of the University of Notre Dame from 2003 to
2004. Less characteristically, perhaps, I wish to thank the citizens of Switzerland for
having the wisdom and generosity to provide unemployment compensation adequate
for a family for well over a year. And no less thanks go to the Swiss National Science
Foundation, which has provided a generous grant to enable publication of the finished
manuscript. All these provided assistance when it was most sorely needed.
Deep personal gratitude goes to my soror in Christo, Sr. Monica Lawry, OSB, for
reading, prodding, inspiring, and persevering—no matter what.
There are sacrifices, however, that thanks cannot make good, life sacrifices that are
real and growing and become part of ourselves, next to which all others pale. These
are not voluntary, but are no less borne with love. For such I can only extend my own
unending love and care, and finally these humble pages, to my wife, Marianne, and my
sons, Julian and Sandu.
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ABBREVIATIONS
For full bibliographical entries, see the List of Works Cited.
AA SS
AP
CCC
CCCM
CCSL
CSEL
JP
LA
LCM
LDMA
LVM
MGH SS
PL
Rule
SAP website
SAP
SV
VCM
Verfasserlexikon
VSA
Acta Sanctorum quotquot toto orbe coluntur. Antwerp and
Brussels, 1643–
The Albani Psalter, facsimile of Hildesheim, Dombibliothek, MS St
Godehard 1 (St Albans Psalter), with commentary
Rupert of Deutz, Commentaria in Canticum Canticorum
Corpus christianorum continuatio mediaevalis
Corpus christianorum series latina
Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum
Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the
Virgin Mary, 800–1200
The Life of Alexis in the Old French Version of the Hildesheim
Manuscript, ed. and trans. Odenkirchen
The Life of Christina of Markyate, trans. Talbot, rev. Fanous
and Leyser
Walter Haug, Literaturtheorie im deutschen Mittelalter
Bernard of Clairvaux, In laudibus Virginis Matris
Monumenta Germaniae Historia, Scriptores
Patrologia cursus completus: series latina, ed. J.-P. Migne
Aelred of Rievaulx, A Rule of Life for a Recluse, trans. Macpherson
www.abdn.ac.uk/stalbanspsalter/
Otto Pächt, C. R. Dodwell and Francis Wormald, The St Albans
Psalter (Albani Psalter)
Speculum virginum, ed. Seyfarth
Vie de Christina de Markyate, ed. L’Hermite-Leclercq and Legras
Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon
La Vie de Saint Alexis, ed. Christopher Storey
Citations and translations from scripture retain, wherever relevant and as far as possible,
the sense of the medieval source in which they are cited, paraphrased, or discussed. Thus,
in translating my medieval Latin sources I have also translated the scriptural passages
within them. For direct citation of scripture I have used Robert Weber’s edition of the vulgate: Biblia sacra iuxta Vulgatam versionem, 4th ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft,
1994). When citing an English translation directly I have used the Douay-RheimsChalloner translation of the Vulgate: The Holy Bible: The Catholic Bible, Douay-Rheims
Version (Fitzwilliam: Loreto, 2005, first published 1750). For translation of the Song of
Songs I have also frequently relied on E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of
Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1990), pp. xvi–xxxv.
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1
INTRODUCTION
TOWARDS THE MIDDLE of the thirteenth century in Amiens, Richard of Fournival,
churchman, polymath, and poet, wrote an unusual, illustrated love letter to his recalcitrant
lady. “All men naturally desire knowledge,” he begins, quoting Aristotle’s Metaphysics.1
The didactic premise is more than a pose, for the content is in fact a treatise in the bestiary tradition, which uses animals as exempla to exhibit moral teaching, and Richard
proclaims his most ardent desire is to penetrate and inhabit the lady’s memory. Thus he
will resort to a double appeal, or two different “paths,” painture and parole, for “everyone
knows that painted letters are returned to voice when they are read,” and “a painting can
render its subjects so immediate that the viewer believes herself placed before them.”2
The Old French text is accompanied by pictures; pictures and the vernacular word are
taken as two aspects of one aesthetic experience because of the physical immediacy
proper to each: “on fait present de chu ki est trespassé par ces ii coses, c’est par painture
et par parole” (one renders present what has receded into the past through these two
things, that is, through image and word).3 Moreover, this same equivalency of aesthetic
experience extends to the great literary invention of the latter twelfth century, the roman
(romance), “Car quant on ot un romans lire, on entent les aventures, ausi com on les veïst
en present” (For when one hears a roman read, one perceives the adventures just as if
one could see them in the present).4 Writing (escripture) “is both image (painture) and
the spoken word (parole),” which “is only too obvious,” in that writing “exists in order to
manifest the word (parole),” to render it as physical presence.5
This is a remarkably concise and highly unusual statement of the nature and use of
media in the European High Middle Ages; it also provides, seemingly by the way, a rare
medieval statement on the mode of reception of romance narrative. What was “obvious”
did not normally need saying to contemporaries; for us it serves to demonstrate how complementary and interchangeable the use and understanding of writing, pictures, and voices
could be. Moreover, Richard’s self-conscious play on this interchangeability defies reduction
into oppositions between an “oral” and a “literate” mentality, between literate and illiterate
1 Bestiaires d’amours, p. 3.
2 “Car quant on voit painte une estoire, … on voit les fais des preudommes ke cha en ariere furent,
ausi com s’il fussent present” (Bestiaires d’amours, p. 5). The preceding passage is my paraphrase of
Richard’s text, which appears in note 5, below.
3 Bestiaires d’amours, p. 5.
4 Bestiaires d’amours, p. 5.
5 “Car il est bien apert k’il [cis escris] a parole, par che ke toute escripture si est faite pour parole
monstrer et pour che ke on le lise; et quant on le list, si revient elle a nature de parole” (Bestiaires
d’amours, pp. 6–7).
2
2
IntroduCtIon
education, or even between (sacred) scripture and (profane) love poetry—oppositions that
routinely serve to situate texts and images of the Middle Ages in the eyes of modern readers
and scholars.6
But there is still more to this configuration: the recipient, the lady, who figures both
as the object of amorous desire and as human memory, the receptacle of the instructive
message. On the one hand, it is only this double identity of his audience that allows
Richard’s bizarre hybrid of bestiary instruction and lover’s seduction to exist. On the
other, “ ‘she’ is not an individual woman, but a figure available to and deployed by both
female and male audiences.”7 This “woman” is to contemplate the painture and attend
to its voice, to open “the twin doors” of her eyes and ears such that the author, or his
instruction—but really both—will be indelibly lodged in her memory. What Richard has
in fact done with his triangle of female memory, image, and word is to reduplicate a
model of sacred reading for a purpose ostensibly profane. “Hear, daughter, and see, …
and the king shall desire your beauty” (Psalm 44:11–12): thus sainte escripture spoke to
every Christian, with the voice of the Spirit calling the bride to instructive seduction by
the bridegroom. A woman’s audio-visual “reading” figures the aspiration of every human
soul to the embrace of its saviour, Christ. The prologue of Richard’s “Love Bestiary”
shows how the media of (secular) loving and (religious) reading, of (sacred) instruction and (profane) seduction, could be one and the same; namely, when the recipient
was woman.8
This playful discourse on media poetics is only possible because of major transitions
that had occurred over the preceding century and a half on all three corners of Richard’s
triangle, changes in the relationships between knowing in an experiential sense (which
I refer to as gnosis), and, each in its turn, gender, visual art, and vernacular literature
(Richard’s text itself brings three different genres into play). Women and woman were
centre stage in the twelfth century as never before, and this in conspicuous conjunction with innovative exploration of new ways of seeing, reading, and knowing. A striking
individual example is Hildegard of Bingen, the first female visionary (or mystic) in the
Christian tradition, whose audio-visual gnosis resulted in a voluminous Latin oeuvre
and some of the most unusual visual art of the Middle Ages. More popularly celebrated
is the role of Eleanor of Aquitaine: was she indeed the queen of a new cult of “courtly
love” and sometime patron or inspiration of new vernacular literature? Eleanor’s prominence is as tangible as her actual role is intangible—and in this regard, at least, she is
typical as a figure of the female reader in the twelfth century. But women were likewise
placed at the imaginative centre of the narrative world of vernacular romance, while
the monastic imagination was captivated by a reading enterprise gendered as female,
following the sponsa through the verbal imagery of the Song of Songs. And in devotional
6 Critique of earlier scholarship on the first two oppositions in Schnell, “Literaturwissenschaft”;
Kiening, “Medialität”; Chinca and Young, “Orality and Literacy”; Green, “Terminologische
Überlegungen”; and, a decade earlier, Coleman, Public Reading.
7 Solterer, “Medieval Senses,” 142.
8 For a full reading of the text in this vein, see Powell, “Instruction for Religious Women,” pp. 343–57.
3
IntroduCtIon
3
practice a spectacular expansion of the roles of visual art and pictorial narrative can be
grasped primarily in psalters and prayer books known to have been commissioned or
designed for women.9 This visual turn in prayer brings up an all-important conjunction
that subtends Richard’s reflections: that between women’s use of images and their use
of books and literacy.
The visual turn proceeds in lock step, it would seem, with a turn to writing in the vernacular, and both have found an explanation in modern scholarship through a connection
with women’s use of prayer books. This conjunction in itself suggests that we are dealing
with something other than an advance of literacy or literate instruments. It also points
up a curious contradiction. The medieval sources most frequently justify the inclusion of
images or writing in the vernacular as a concession to “illiteracy,” whether for women or
for laypeople in general. The modern argument on the literary turn, on the other hand,
has repeatedly emphasized lay noblewomen’s higher level of literacy relative to their
male counterparts.10 The contradiction is not irresolvable, but it goes largely unmentioned because modern reflection on the two has taken place in separate disciplines.
Our distinction between the histories of “art” and “literature” and their several methodologies long ensured that visual and literary elements of one manuscript, even of the
same work, were excised from their contexts and studied separately. For several decades
now, text-image studies and new attention to the manuscript context in medieval culture have been at pains to correct this, but the consequences have not yet been intently
applied to our question: the question of what happened around women, painture and
escripture—that is, image and script(ure)—and thus around women and reading, in the
lettered cultures of twelfth-century western Europe.
The object of study is as elusive as it is pervasive; hence the pages that follow may
seem to proceed with some disregard for familiar divisions and boundaries. To study
texts together with the images they accompany is a logical correction, but to read texts
of monastic instruction together with those of courtly leisure, to read texts of biblical
exegesis and those of romance narrative as reciprocally illuminating, and still more, to
read texts from the German vernacular tradition as if intellectually imbricated with the
literary culture(s) of the courts in what we now call France will seem less immediately
justified. It is a given that the early Middle High German romances were adapted from
Old French texts, but this relationship has generally been regarded as a kind of subordination and dependency in which the former emulates the latter and seeks to reproduce its
cultural achievements from a position of relative isolation and linguistic separation. The
texts considered here instead reveal self-assured manipulation of the same strategies of
legitimization, the same claims to the mediation of truth—nevertheless differently staged
and formulated—and finally even a form of intertextual and intercultural dialogue that
would seem to flout the obvious linguistic barrier dividing their several audiences, if not
their authors. The questions raised cannot, however, be dealt with in this volume. I see
this work as part of a larger move towards translinguistic and transcultural study of the
9 Hamburger, “Illustrated Prayer Book,” pp. 149–95.
10 Grundmann, “Frauen,” 129–61; Green, Women Readers; along with many others in the seventy
years between these two.
4
4
IntroduCtIon
Middle Ages—such as has been recently advanced among scholars of Mediterranean
Studies—in that it suspends cultural, linguistic, and disciplinary boundaries long assumed
to apply in search of insights that may have eluded us precisely because of the blind spots
and disconnections such divisions impose.11 The results, I hope, will prove in themselves
a call to investigate more closely the mechanics on the ground.
As a case in point: the St Albans Psalter (ca. 1130), thought to have been made for
the recluse and holy woman Christina of Markyate at St Albans Abbey just north of
London, appears to embody Richard’s media triangle as a historical event. It contains a
first milestone and something of a fountainhead of pictorial narrative in its forty-page
prefatory picture cycle portraying Christ’s salvation of humanity. It also contains the
earliest extant escripture of any complete work of literature in French, a vernacular
chanson of the Life of St Alexis, which somehow interlopes between the picture cycle
and the Psalms. Michael Camille made of this codex an object lesson in the way both
pictures and vernacular text had been excised, removed from their contexts entirely
to become protagonists in their respective histories of art and French literature.12 The
St Albans Psalter will be the subject of chapter 4; here I wish to draw attention only to
the double page at the end of the Alexis, where the two histories meet, so to speak (figs.
4.11–4.12).13 The chanson concludes there on the verso, and immediately following
the scribe penned in two versions, one Latin, the other Anglo-Norman, of Gregory the
Great’s apology for pictures as the scripture of the illiterate. On the recto, another fullpage picture cycle begins, a three-part cycle telling the story of Christ’s appearance
at Emmaus. Here then the visual and the literary turn both occur together, with testimony to the “illiterate reading” they serve inscribed (or “painted”) in not one but two
languages. Should the translation have been included for Christina, the inconsistencies
only multiply, as her own vernacular was surely Anglo-Saxon.14 But that is almost beside
the point. The two pages ought to have shown us long ago that it is not our histories
that matter here but a history that was being written even for the eyes of its contemporaries, one in which script is both word and image and reading is both viewing and
listening (and possibly not the decoding of script at all), a history of new modes of
mediating between homo and Logos. Homo, in this history, was frequently conceived of
as a woman and a psalter-reader.
A word is needed here on the local and circumstantial manifestations of the
vernacular(s) versus the idea of the vernaculars as languages of a culture apposite
to that of the Latinate clergy. The St Albans Psalter manifests both the circumstantial
and the conventional: its French texts appear in both continental and insular dialects,
no doubt because the insular insertions were composed for the purpose, without an
11 See Akbari and Mallette, Sea of Languages, esp. chaps. 1–3.
12 Camille, “Iconoclasm,” pp. 371–401.
13 Powell, “Media and Presence,” 340–45, and Powell, “Making the Psalter,” 307–15.
14 The term “vernacular” loses some of its categorical force here, as Anglo-Norman (or AngloFrench) served in English monasteries as a lingua franca of a sort one step below Latin and would
most likely have represented to Christina a koiné of the ruling class.
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exemplar.15 At the same time, the scribe appears oddly deficient in Anglo-French or at
least its spelling, giving rise to the suspicion that he, too, may have been more comfortable in Anglo-Saxon.16 Conversely, the pages manifest an equivalence of vernacular
estoire and pictures as characteristic of lay culture and thereby appeal to a system of
conventions (for example, Gregory’s letter) that is translinguistic (and transcultural) in
that it stems from and is legitimized by the Latin culture of the church.17 As a rule, it
is this latter system of conventions that is operative in the arguments used to present,
situate, and legitimize the texts and images considered in these chapters.
The same interest in women’s reading just pinpointed, as a figure of mediation
between homo and Logos, somehow finds a culmination in Richard’s bestial love letter,
one so self-consciously aware of its origins and possibilities that it can assimilate several
literary genres, sacred and secular reading, religious instruction, and literary seduction
into a veritable vernacular poetics of image, word, and script; all figured as one parodic
“assault” on the memory of his beloved. The story that leads from the one to the other,
from Latin psalter to vernacular love literature, is in large part the story of the psalterreading woman as a chiffre of the vernacular audience. Richard’s triangle delineates
something like the focal point of twelfth-century exploration of the role(s) of media in
the reading enterprise. Women’s devotional use of prayer books appears to have been
both an imaginative and a factual matrix around and through which this took shape. The
figure of the woman-as-reader, which signals a way of knowing gendered as female, thus
determines the path taken in the chapters that follow; she is the woman in the mirror of
my title. If her history has not yet been written, then it is clearly not for lack of important
connections to issues and inquiry of concern in our time. In fact, it is not least because
competing histories have obscured our view.
Modern Scholarship and Medieval Women Readers
The hypothesis that women’s literacy triggered the emergence of vernacular literature,
with its corollary that they were its primary readers, originated in German scholarship
with the foundational work of Herbert Grundmann on literacy and medieval religious
movements.18 As Helen Solterer correctly observed two decades ago, this “long-standing
link … is too fraught to allow for a one-to-one correspondence between textual figure
and social role.”19 For Solterer, Grundmann’s work “typifies the habit of interpreting
the numbers of medieval women linked with bookish culture as proof of their decisive
15 These are two, the prologue to the Alexis and the translation of Gregory’s letter; the Chanson
itself was copied, it seems, from a continental exemplar. See Mölk, “Bemerkungen,” 289–303, also
the note following.
16 Mölk, “Albani-Psalter,” pp. 53–56; paleographer Malcolm Parkes, however, identified the hand as
typical of the northern French schools: see Nilgen, “Psalter,” p. 162.
17 Powell, “Media and Presence,” 343–45; Curschmann, “Pictura,” pp. 211–19; more generally on
such conventions, Curschmann, “Epistemologisches.”
18 “Frauen,” 129–61; also Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen, pp. 452–75.
19 Solterer, Master, p. 3.
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activity.”20 In view of the groundbreaking position of Grundmann’s essay in 1935, this
charge is best levelled at all those who happily espoused his conclusions without further
probing the question. As recently as 2007, D. H. Green enlarged what remains basically
Grundmann’s approach into a survey of women and reading that fills an entire monograph.21 While Green’s accumulation and categorization of the evidence is valuable, the
methodological problem that Solterer singled out is only compounded by his tendency
to speak of the European Middle Ages as a monolithic “society,” which in turn reflects a
failure to distinguish chronologically or contextually between examples or, most importantly, to untangle their figurative from their potentially factual dimensions.22 This latter
point is the one so fraught with difficulty; it is no less essential to a methodologically
defensible treatment of the question.
There is no doubt today of the higher level of reading ability and widespread use of
books among (noble-)women of the High Middle Ages so long as the discussion concerns
the laity. But this in itself offers no explanation for why it became legitimate and desirable in the mid twelfth century to found a literary culture in the vernaculars. To begin
with, the kind of devotional literacy that Grundmann singled out among women in this
period was by no means a new development; women’s use of psalters and other devotional works is well documented in earlier periods.23 Beyond this, the basic assumptions
behind Grundmann’s argument are no longer accepted. For him, new vernacular writing
represented the recording of works produced as oral compositions by lay poets; thus,
the new texts were there to be read by recipients capable of perusing the pages themselves.24 Both assumptions have since given way to a model that sees the texts as designed
for some form of recitative performance (read aloud by one for many) and their composition as the highly literary work of clerics. The idea that women needed vernacular texts
to be able to listen to them is not compelling. As work on the learning of the laity has by
now adequately established (and Grundmann was among the first to document this),
where such was desired, the knowledge base of the Latin written tradition was routinely
made accessible through a combination of oral translation and instruction provided by
the learned.25 Vernacular texts did not arise as access to an otherwise inaccessible body
of knowledge.26
20 Solterer, Master, p. 3.
21 In Women Readers, Green makes much of a need to correct Grundmann’s views on literacy in the
Middle Ages, but refers only to a different and later essay and with criticism that is often misplaced.
Cf. Grundmann, “Litteratus-Illitteratus,” 1–65. Grundmann’s earlier essay on women and the vernacular literary turn barely receives mention, still less are its conclusions questioned.
22 Unzeitig, Review of Green, 26–28.
23 Haubrichs, Anfänge, p. 50; McKitterick, “Frauen und Schriftlichkeit,” pp. 111–18; Clanchy,
“Images of Ladies,” pp. 107–8.
24 In Grundmann’s time, the great German romances were thought to be the work of knights or
lay court officials.
25 Grundmann, “Litteratus-Illitteratus,” 42–43 and 47–48; see also Clanchy, Memory, pp. 208–13,
221–22, 252–53; and Bumke, Höfische Kultur, pp. 607–10.
26 Constable, “Language of Preaching,” pp. 131–52; Sharpe, “Latin in Everyday Life,” pp. 315–41.
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Neither can the difficulties be resolved by resort to an “intermediate” or “double
model” of reception such as Green put forward, envisioning both public performance
and individual or private reading as part and parcel of the conception of the new texts.27
For one thing, such a construct is largely the outgrowth of a teleological view of the
period as a “transition” between a primarily oral and a primarily written society or
mentality. Green’s “intermediate mode” finds very little basis in the sources other than
the same problematic literary figuration, the reading woman, which is to be examined
more closely here. For another, the manuscript record simply does not support the idea
of a significant spread of vernacular literacy before the mid thirteenth century—when
the texts of the German Blütezeit (literary “blossoming”), as it is known, were already
on their way to becoming classics.28 Green was a prominent Germanist and argued primarily on that ground. The situation in French, however, does not alter this picture.29
The literacy hypothesis, the idea that “Growing literacy brought vernacular literature
onto the written page,”30 should itself be abandoned as a fallacy where the crucial period
of the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries is concerned. It was not new readers
who triggered the composition of written texts but rather the existence of a written literature that only gradually called forth readers alongside a far larger body of listeners.31
If the idea persists, then it is because Grundmann’s question (one that, when he wrote,
literary studies had barely posed, far less answered), the “why” of the twelfth century’s
vernacular literary turn, still lacks a compelling answer today.32 In the third edition of
his seminal study of the uses of literacy in medieval England between 1066 and 1307,
Michael Clanchy formulates the question in a way that lays much of the groundwork
necessary to a corrective approach: “The hardest question to answer precisely is why
a growing number of patrons and writers in the twelfth century ceased to be satisfied
with Latin as the medium of writing and experimented with [the vernaculars] instead.”33
Posed this way, the question does not pair writing with reading; it does not assume that
vernacular texts make a literate culture of an illiterate one, whether directly or vicariously; it does not even assume that those interested in vernacular written texts are primarily laymen, or that they were previously without access to writing and a written
tradition. It circumscribes a different reality than we have previously had in view as the
27 Green, Medieval Listening, pp. 169–233 and passim.
28 Bertelsmeier-Kierst, “Aufbruch,” 157–74; esp. 160; 170–71; Palmer, “Manuscripts for Reading,”
pp. 67–102; Wolf, Buch und Text, pp. 81–82 and 316–18.
29 Busby, Manuscrits de Chrétien, pp. 17–25, esp. pp. 17–18, 24; Wolf, Buch und Text, pp. 79–81;
Vitz, Orality and Performance, pp. 218–20.
30 Parkes, “Literacy of the Laity,” p. 556.
31 Clanchy, Memory, pp. 79–80, 235–36, 249–50, 252–53 (writing of the situation in England);
Coleman, Public Reading (on England and France); Curschmann, “Hören–Lesen–Sehen,” 218–25 (on
Germany).
32 Grundmann, “Frauen,” 131: “die Bedeutung der Frage … die die Literaturforschung bisher kaum
gestellt, geschweige denn beantwortet hat: wie, wann und wodurch ist aus dem Sprachwerk des
Dichters (und des Predigers!), das vorgetragen und gehört, nicht geschrieben und gelesen wurde,
Schrifttum geworden?”
33 Clanchy, Memory, p. 220. The passage first appeared in the second edition of 1993.
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parameters for inquiry and redefines these such that the new question is, appropriately,
one that addresses not the uses of texts but the uses of writing.34
The argument pursued in this book reveals a much stronger case for the idea that
it was not reading but performance itself that “brought vernacular literature onto the
written page.” What we see in the bilingual (or indeed, multilingual) culture of written
texts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is an expanded use of the stage, of the vernacular performance space, to accommodate new combinations of writing and performance, written texts and their oral delivery. At one end of the spectrum there were Latin
texts to be orally translated and interpreted in the vernacular for a listening audience;
at the other, there was the performance of memorized, orally recomposed or orally
improvised vernacular poetry and tales. What begins to occur in the course of the twelfth
century is the use of this space to perform poetic works with fixed vernacular texts. The
opportunity involved was one doubtless felt first and foremost by the authors rather
than the audience. New vernacular literature may be thought of as a hybrid or marriage
of the art of the preacher and that of the jongleur.
Written composition in the vernacular offered the clerical author distinct advantages
over oral translation of a Latin text. It gave him greater control over the content of the
performance and allowed him to explore greater literary complexity; at the same time,
the use of the stage (understood very informally) allowed him to exploit the appeal and
entertainment value of the art of jongleurs and oral poets. But for him to be sure of the
success we know followed, there must have been an equivalent advantage felt among
the audience; that is, among the lay nobility and others who frequented their courts. The
idea that these texts, romance narrative in particular, both affirmed and aggrandized
the identity and social position of the lay nobility has been thoroughly explored in the
past—but the answer must surely reach beyond this idea to one that comprises the
hermeneutic value of the texts, the meaning they mediated to new audiences. Modern
scholarship has located this added value in the idea of romance as the (re)invention of a
poetics of fiction. As I will argue here, not least among the discoveries that lay behind the
woman in the mirror of this audio-visual poetics is a new idea of how romance narrative
could constitute an experience not of fiction but of divine truth. In this model, then, the
layman’s performance space and the layman’s language were elevated to a position from
which they could aspire to their own mediation of the Word.
The question of women’s significance for new visual and verbal forms has been not
only posited as a relationship of causal agency but also more recently and provocatively
explored through the lens of gender ideology in cultural representation. In Women
Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance, Roberta Krueger
promises “a reconceptualization of the ‘woman question’ in the theory of romance as a
genre,” and successfully challenges the older assumption that the attention to women
34 See also Bumke, “Bestandsaufnahme,” 490–91, also 485, 486. Foundational for my understanding
of the culture of communication (written, visual, and oral) in courtly society ca. 1200 is Curschmann,
“Hören–Lesen–Sehen.”
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in the texts, whether as protagonists or audience, reflects their tastes or preferences.35
She likewise dismantles the simplistic tendency to equate the narrator’s cultivation of
a female audience with women’s patronage of the genre or of new vernacular poetry.
But her analysis then becomes embroiled in a trap not dissimilar to that of the literacy
hypothesis. Postulating as a “central claim of this study” that “the highly problematic
presentation of the women readers within romance fiction reflects the problem of historical women’s reception of the genre,” Krueger sets out to recover this latter from the
texts themselves.36 Thus literary representation once again is mined for information on
women’s social reality and even their aesthetic responses; moreover, it is not a medieval
understanding of “the theory of romance as a genre” that is to be discovered but rather
our own that is to be redefined. That the representation of female reception of the texts
might have been part of the textual articulation of a theory of the genre—such as I argue
here—is a possibility Krueger does not entertain.
In another provocative study of women and medieval courtly literature, R. Howard
Bloch recasts the question in the broadest terms, seeking the nature of the relationship between “the question of woman” and “that of reading in the literary history of
the West.”37 Bloch analyses “the double bind of Christianity’s founding articulation of
gender,” arguing that it leaves women trapped between “the polarized position[s]
of seducer and redeemer,” and thus “idealized, subtilized, frozen into passivity that
cannot be resolved.”38 The two poles manifest themselves in medieval literature as the
cleric’s misogyny and the obverse idealization of women in courtly love poetry. Bloch
offers a valuable review of the patristic rhetoric on woman, body and representation,
arguing convincingly that the Christian “feminization of the aesthetic” extends the
notion of the woman as flesh to the entire realm of signs and representations, and thus
to art, poetry, and theatrical performance.39 But his analysis of the way these ideas play
out in the crucial twelfth century fails to conceptualize a history interior to the rhetoric
and representations themselves, instead once again mapping the medieval discourse
into a larger history of gender ideology (and even romantic love) so that its meaning
is predetermined by a desire, as Krueger stated her objective, to “contribute to the dismantling of the pervasive myths of gender in our culture.”40 This largely external view
of the workings of gender structures precludes inquiry into a manipulation of the same
concepts that is internal to the staging of communication between text and audience.
Where applied not to (what we see as) secular literature but instead to religious texts,
analysis of gender ideology has put forward fundamental correctives necessary to our
understanding of the twelfth-century situation. The work of Caroline Bynum offers in
itself the solution to Bloch’s “contrary abstracted double,” and it is one that she deduces
35 Krueger, Women Readers, p. 12.
36 Krueger, Women Readers, p. 30.
37 Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, pp. 47–48.
38 Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, pp. 196, 91.
39 Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, pp. 44–46 and passim.
40 Krueger, Women Readers, p. 32.
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from the medieval texts. Bynum’s work has taught us to “consider not just the dichotomy
but also the mixing and fusing of the genders implicit in medieval assumptions” and,
above all, that men might be just as likely as women were to assume and identify with
roles and experiences gendered as female.41 The position of woman that Bloch finds so
paralyzing was one that, in religious discourse at least, men and women adopted and
elaborated freely as an image of their own abject state before God. The opportunity
hidden in such a debasement was contained in the most basic fact of the Christian faith,
the Incarnation: God had required flesh from a woman, Mary, to manifest his love in
human form; to identify with woman was to appeal for divine love from the only position truly available, that of human weakness. For Bynum and the medieval writers she
studies, Bloch’s conundrum becomes an opportunity expressed in remarkably similar
terms: “the image of both a sinful and a saved humanity is the image of woman.”42
Bynum’s work has been extended since to areas that very much overlap with my own
project. Rachel Fulton sensitively probes emergent Marian commentary on the Song of
Songs in the twelfth century as a locus for men’s reading through Mary as the biblical
bride and human counterpart to Christ’s unattainable divinity.43 Elizabeth Robertson
analyses the position of the female audience as constructed in English vernacular texts
written for recluses by their spiritual directors in the thirteenth century and shows how
the gendering of the audience also legitimizes the use of the vernacular as a medium
appropriate to their affinity with the body and the senses, seen as a natural and thus
insurmountable incapacity for learning.44 This idea was deeply intertwined with contemporary understanding of the epistemological place of the vernacular and the image,
in and through which the reader-as-woman was seen to experience the metaphors of
scripture as literalized, located in the body, and continuous with her own biography.
Robertson sees the beginnings of this alternative understanding of reading in the affective
meditations of Anselm of Canterbury and as closely connected with a new emphasis on
the human body of Christ, likewise the central focus of Fulton’s work. Sarah McNamer
in effect combines the two approaches to look probingly into the role of gender and
women’s devotional needs in “the invention of medieval compassion,” and argues that
it occurs from the beginning as the codification through male writers (Anselm and John
of Fécamp) of patterns of devotion and emotional response in themselves understood
as female.45 Of particular interest is the way McNamer then reads devotional texts in
Middle English prose from the fourteenth century onward as overtly cultivating a position of female reading identification and emotional response (“Feeling Like a Woman”)
for audiences of either sex.46 Compassion, then, was articulated as a woman’s pleading
41 Bynum, “Female Body,” p. 205; Bynum, Holy Feast, pp. 282–88.
42 Bynum, Holy Feast, p. 265; also pp. 267–68.
43 “Quae est ista,” “Mimetic devotion,” and JP.
44 Robertson, Early English Devotional Prose, see esp. pp. 181–94.
45 McNamer, Affective Meditation.
46 “To perform compassion is to feel like a woman. So pervasive is this tacit axiom that it is, I propose, a ‘robust’ feature of the genre” (Affective Meditation, p. 119).
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position before God that is projected into vernacular religious texts as a female response
prescribed for lay people of either sex.
McNamer’s work complements and develops ideas found in a stimulating essay by
Nicholas Watson on the vernacular in England in the same period. Likewise focusing on
Passion meditations produced for an audience of women and the “unlettered,” Watson’s
“Conceptions of the Word” reveals an incarnational epistemology in vernacular texts, a
theory of vernacular literature that sees their textuality as grounded in the idea of kenosis, the idea that Christ took human form out of love for humanity and so that he could
be more fully understood.47 From this perspective, affinity with the body could signal
proximity to Christ and “contains the potential for a revalorization of … the role of the
vernacular writer, the ‘uneducated’ reader, and the vernacular itself”; resulting even in
“a view of the vernacular as equal, or superior, to Latin as an instrument of revelation,
and a view of [its] readers as equal, or superior, to the learned in their capacity to receive
such revelation.”48 Surprising though these conclusions are, they point directly to those
that I will argue towards in my later chapters, and this not for the fourteenth but rather
the late twelfth century, not in England but in France and Germany, not even necessarily
in what we recognize as “religious” texts but also in courtly romance.
From Bynum by way of Fulton and Watson to McNamer, the studies just discussed
have all pointed to the twelfth century as the intellectual incubator of the ideas that define
the role of woman and women in a gendered recasting of epistemology.49 Moreover, they
suggest that it was the devotional practice of reading in the monastic sphere that placed
the woman at the centre of a reading model for “unschooled” users of the vernacular. In
this conception, the literary turn would—in a later period—share the same justification
as has been identified for the twelfth century’s visual turn in prayer. In such models of
female knowing, the hierarchies of gender and learning not only posited or enforced
exclusions, they also served as concepts through which to justify and articulate alternative inclusions, whether the factual “readers” were women or not.
It is my argument that the advent of vernacular literature in the later twelfth century
takes shape as the transfer of a poetics of reading from monastic culture to the lay aristocracy by way of the intermediary position of women as alternative reading subjects.
This transfer emerges from a larger field of experimentation in the monastic milieu with
new ways of reading and knowing that focus from the beginning on the image, the voice,
and the vernacular, performance and a new poetics of bodily media; and treats these
as the appropriate means of engaging both the opportunities and the paradox that the
woman-as-reader was seen to represent: the need for knowledge where exclusion from
learning is an immutable condition. As a category, as essence, woman was body and as
such always potentially held the place of a helpless humanity before the omniscience
47 See esp. 91–98.
48 Watson, “Conceptions,” 104, 102.
49 Solterer (“Medieval Senses,” 142) makes a complementary argument on the Bestiaire d’Amours
and texts constellated around it, which she reads as effecting a “physical recasting of epistemology”
around “the figure of the woman reader.”
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and omnipotence of divinity. The woman-as-reader serves the intellectual and spiritual
landscape of the twelfth century as the posited necessity for an alternative to reading as
spiritual asceticism, reading as the separation of chaff from kernel, letter (as flesh!) from
spirit, body from truth. In this “she” was the fulcrum of profound change: no less than an
ontological reversal of the structure of Christian gnosis.
The final chapters of this book will propose a new understanding of the relationship between empathy, truth, and the emergence of fictional narrative around 1200,
focusing on two capital achievements in romance narrative: Le Chevalier au Lion
(Yvain), by Chrétien de Troyes, and Parzival, by Wolfram von Eschenbach. One key to
this understanding is a transfer of the devotional experience of compassio as articulated
through Mary to the experience of romance narrative: the audience learns with the
protagonist how to assume a compassionating attitude not to Christ but rather to the
sufferings of his mother and “widowed bride,” Mary; he or she learns to feel as a woman.
Mary’s experience at the cross represents a bodily knowing of the bodily sufferings of
Christ and thus a bodily communion with divine love: feeling as knowing in the most profound sense.50 Thus, to “feel as a woman” was also to “read” as she did, in and through the
body. But the original image of identification with Mary’s experience of bodily knowing
was not the image of her compassio; it was rather that of her conceptio, the image of Mary
at the Annunciation. Beginning with chapter 2, I will examine the way Mary’s experience of the conception of Christ through the Spirit was imagined in twelfth-century male
monastic culture as a reading act—that is, as the image of a perfect Christian gnosis
communicated and received directly in the body. This act was imitable and Mary’s
experience was accessible by following the reading bride through the images of the Song
of Songs. The same reading path is recast for monastic women, themselves seen as “illiterate” recipients of the Word, through the audio-visual (audi filia, et vide) delivery of
their monastic instructors in the Speculum virginum, to be explored in chapter 3. There
we observe how Mary’s conception of the Word could be generalized for a female audience and expanded into a programme of “illiterate” and picture-assisted lectio. The special privileges of this female receptive position and the nature of its connection to vision
and presence are explored over chapters 1, 2, and 4 through the figure of Hildegard of
Bingen and the intricate construction (or commemoration?) of a holy woman’s reading
in the pages of the St Albans Psalter. Two intermediate chapters, chapters 5 and 6, trace
the transfer, or really the translatio, of this woman’s reading, Mary’s reading, from the
monastic to the courtly sphere, and thus from religious women to lay men and women,
in three early Old French texts ranging from vernacular exegesis to one of the early
romances of antiquity, the Roman de Troie.
This book is thus an investigation in search of a discourse always situated on multiple boundaries, those between the social estates of the clergy and the lay nobility and
their largely separate educational and professional paths, between men and women,
between the religious and the secular life, and between sacred and profane. The medieval terms of opposition that we associate with the historical uses of literacy and the
50 JP, see esp. pp. 195–203; 426–28.
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distribution of learning—litteratus and illitteratus, clericus and laicus—and those we see
as the instruments of social and sexual oppression—mulier (woman) and vir (man)— fill
the function of “theory” within this discussion; they become the rhetorical chess pieces
for a field of epistemological reflection that mediates at once between tradition, orthodoxy and innovation, and between the text and its reception, author and audience. It
was one of the singular advantages of these terms that they always retained the potential to play on identification with the real capacities and identities of members of their
audiences. The terminology has no more obligatory correspondence to real audience
or authorial capacities, the actual function and reception of text or image, than do the
knight, the bishop, or the queen on a chessboard to the social reality from which they
take their names. But this last boundary is no less consciously exploited than the others.
This was a discourse, finally and above all about the boundary between reading experience and reality, the life of the body and eternal truth, and it developed, had to develop,
its own polysemic terms appropriate to a position poised between the same. These did
not derive from the methods of textual interpretation so avidly cultivated and discussed
in the schools, nor can they be read as directly indebted to the tradition of theological
authority on reading and knowing that gave birth to those same. They are instead the
somewhat experimental result of reading experiences constructed and expounded upon
in statu nascendi. As such, they can only be recovered through careful attention to the
roles and functions assigned in each case to speaker, audience, and media in relation to
the constitution of meaning. Each of the chapters to come must therefore reconstruct
these elements within a new and shifted, or “translated” staging of the same and then
attempt through close reading of the texts (understood to include visual constructs
of pictorial nature) to understand their specific contribution to a history of media
and knowing as explored for marginal audiences, guided always by the figure of the
woman-as-reader.
The woman-as-reader is thus very much what Richard’s text initially stages her
to be: all humanity in its natural desire to know (Toutes gens desirent par nature a
savoir). In the century following the composition of the Bestiaire d’amours, illuminators
took their turns at rendering Richard’s triangle of media poetics in iconic form as an
opening miniature to the text. In one version we see the eye and the ear—the receptive
counterparts to image and word—disembodied and placed as insignia on each of two
doors to the castle of memory.51 In another, the same sensory doors are “opened” to
reveal the castle’s inhabitant standing front and centre: a woman (fig. 0.1). Woman as
memory and thus the mirror of our reception of parole and painture: some 200 years, it
seems, beyond the initial developments considered here, one artist fixed the visual epigraph that stands no less suitably at this book’s beginning.
51 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale fr. 412, fol. 228r. On these images, see Sears, “Sensory Perception,”
pp. 17–22.
14
14
IntroduCtIon
Figure 0.1. Memory in the Bestiaire d’amour rimé, ca. 1300, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale
MS fr 1951, fol. 1. © Bibliothèque nationale de France.
15
PART ONE
READING AS SPONSA ET MATER
16
17
Chapter 1
MUTATIONS OF THE READING WOMAN
Pucele and Sinnec wîp
In Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain, the protagonist of the same name is twice placed in the position of watching women “read,” once in advance of his path through aventure and once
near its conclusion. In the first scene, he voyeuristically observes Laudine’s desperation
as she prays from a psalter while mourning the loss of her husband, killed by Yvain.1 The
second occurs as part of the Pesme Aventure, the “most dire adventure,” which is Yvain’s
penultimate trial and the last he accomplishes before returning to the Arthurian court.
Here he becomes a third spectator and listener among a private group, a nobleman and
his wife who, relaxing in their garden, “take great pleasure” (mout esjoïr) in “seeing and
hearing” (veoir et oïr) their only daughter read from a vernacular text (lisoit une puchele
devant li / En un rommans; cf. lines 5356–69). And well they should, for, as the narrator
elaborates in an aside to his own audience, the reading girl is so “beautiful and noble”
that the god of love, witnessing the same, would descend to earth in human form to claim
and keep her for none but himself:
Et s’estoit si bele et si gente
Qu’en li servir meïst s’entente
Li Dix d’amours, s’i le veïst;
Ne ja amer ne la feïst
Autrui, s’a lui meïsmes non.
Pour li servir devenist hom,
S’issist de sa deÿté hors
Et ferist lui meïsme el cors
Du dart dont le plaie ne saine
Se desloiaus mires n’i paine.
(lines 5371–80)
(And she was so beautiful and so gracious that the god of love himself would have desired
to serve her, had he seen her, and would have had her love no man if not himself. To serve
her he would have changed himself into a man, would have given up his divinity and
wounded his own body with the arrow whose wound does not heal unless a faithless
doctor tend to it.)
Yvain is smitten with much the same desire—but not on seeing the eminently eligible
courtly bride, the pucele of the Pesme Aventure. Yvain is inflicted with the wound of love
while watching the suffering reading, the grieving devotion of his victim, Laudine:2
1 Le Chevalier au Lion (Yvain), ed. Hult, lines 1410ff. Further references to this edition are
parenthetical.
2 The description of Yvain’s wound shows striking similarity to the later passage. See lines 1367–81.
18
18
readIng as sponsa et mater
Et Mesire Yvains est encor
A le fenestre ou il l’esgarde;
Et quant il plus s’en donne garde,
Plus l’aime et plus li abelist.
Che qu’ele pleure et qu’ele list
Vausist qu’ele laissié eüst,
Et qu’a li parler li pleüst.
En chest voloir l’a Amour mis,
Qui a la fenestre l’a pris.
(lines 1420–28)3
(And my Lord Yvain is once again at the window where he beholds her, and the more he
beholds her, the more he loves her and the more he is delighted, that she weeps and that
she reads, these he wishes she would leave off and that it would please her to speak to
him. Love had put him in this state, who befell him at the window.)
There, indulging his desire by spying through a window, he conceives an illicit love
that launches his narrative path, while here, at its end, he refuses a bride legitimately
won and all but forced upon him.4 The narrative is constructed such that it displays this
latter—an ironic inversion of the desire that structures the most basic narrative units of
romance—as the appropriate response, even as it serves to demonstrate the depth of Yvain’s
own “wound” and his fidelity to and worthiness of Laudine and thus signals the reformatio
of his initial illicit desire. But both are represented as responses to reading women.
For “Chrétien’s male heroes, … nothing, it would seem, is more overpowering to a
knight than the spectacle of a woman reading a well-wrought text.” Thus Eugene Vance
observed of Yvain’s observation of Laudine.5 To refer to Laudine’s action—performed
while also wringing her hands, beating her palms together, and apparently even
attempting to strangle herself (lines 1416–18)—as reading may appear as ill-seeming
as the unbridled desire it kindles in Yvain, but there are two reasons for doing so.
First, images of psalter-reading women have long been the star witnesses to an idea
that women could and did read not only as Laudine does, not only as the pucele does,
“prelecting” a vernacular text,6 but also as some hybrid of the two: enjoying vernacular
texts as they read psalters; that is, “in private,” or unto and for themselves. Laudine’s
reading would then correspond historically to a variety of female literacy that led, so the
argument goes, directly to the composition of vernacular romances such as Chrétien’s.7
3 This passage, its punctuation and translation are discussed in chap. 8, pp. 358–60.
4 The continuation of this episode sees, as it must, Yvain accomplishing the aventure associated
with this castle and thus winning the bride for whose hand it was the precondition.
5 Topic to Tale, p. 7.
6 Joyce Coleman introduces the term, “prelection,” borrowed from John of Salisbury, to describe
the medieval practice of public reading for a listening audience (Coleman, Public Reading, pp. 35,
230, and passim).
7 See below, pp. 24–27.
19
MutatIons of the readIng WoMan
19
But more revealing and less disputable is another association: Laudine’s action is
placed in an analogous position not only, through Yvain, to the pucele’s reading but
also—through the “reading” of the audience in parallel position to Yvain—to the
narrator’s performance of the text. The narrator continues his aside on the god of love
by casting his own performance (or reading as illustrated by the pucele) as the potential
cure for love’s wound, in which case the interested parties, whether wounded or not, are
his own audience:
N’est droiz que nus pener i puisse
jusque deslëauté i truisse,
et qui an garist autremant
il n’ainme mie lëaumant;
de ces plaies molt vos deïsse
tant qu’a une fin an venisse
se l’estoire bien vos plëust;
mes tost deïst, tel i eüst,
que je vos parlasse de songe,
que la genz n’est mes amoronge
ne n’ainment mes, si con il suelent,
que nes oïr parler n’an vuelent.8
(It is not right that anyone take pains to cure it unless faithlessness be found there, and
he who recovers from it otherwise does not faithfully love. I would gladly tell you more of
this wound until I reached an end of it, if the story should well please you; but no sooner
would I start than someone among you would say that I speak of mere dreams. There are
no more true lovers; people no longer love as they once did, for they don’t even want to
hear of it anymore.)
Those who still truly love, the desired audience, would suffer the same wound and
hear him out. But this allows Laudine’s devotional reading, the pucele’s reading performance, and the performance of the narrator’s text to overlap in one “reading”
experience. The audience is placed in an analogous position to both Yvain—with
whom they, too, spied on Laudine—and the god of love: all of them “read” the reading
woman, and the love, or wound, thereby inflicted has no cure other than the completion of the story, Yvain’s narrative adventure. Yvain’s wounding at the sight of a
woman’s suffering and the narrative trajectory it initiates—one that also leads, in
some sense, from a woman’s devotional reading to the performance of vernacular
texts—are the audience’s as well. Chrétien’s reading women are inseparable from an
articulation of the experience of romance narrative, the poetics of the performance
of the narrator’s text.
In another passage frequently cited as evidence that women are anticipated as the
“literal” readers of romance, Wolfram von Eschenbach interrupts the narration of his
8 Le Chevalier au Lion (Yvain), ed. Roques, lines 5379–90. On my preference for Guiot’s copy of this
passage (I have elsewhere relied on the edition of David Hult), see below, p. 351 note 69.
20
20
readIng as sponsa et mater
Parzival at the conclusion of the sixth book and calls upon the women in his audience to
judge for themselves how well he has represented their fictional counterparts:
nu weiz ich, swelch sinnec wîp,
ob si hât getriwen lîp,
diu diz mære geschriben siht,
daz si mir mit wârheit giht,
ich kunde wîben sprechen baz
denne als ich sanc gein einer maz.9
(Now, I know, whatever woman of sensitive understanding—be she but of mind and body
true—who should see this tale in writing, she will vouch for me in all truth that I’ve given
a better account of women here than in the songs I sang of one.)
The narrator’s proud stance is based on the claim that he has fulfilled a promise—made
to the same women in an excursus some 3,500 lines earlier—to deliver a new and truer
portrayal of women with his poem.10 Here he invites them, it seems, to “see for themselves” what he has presented in his favour—portraits of bereft and suffering women
that have peopled the poem to this point. And to jog their memories he recapitulates
them: the beautiful Belakane, thoughtlessly abandoned by her much beloved foreign
husband; Herzeloyde, left a young and pregnant widow after an even shorter marriage
to the same husband; Ginover, mourning the loss of her murdered kinsman; Jeschute,
mistreated by an intruder and then mercilessly punished by her jealous lover; and
Cunneware, pummelled black and blue merely for laughing. Are the women “who see
the tale in writing” to be seen as readers called upon to reconsider what they have read,
or are they instead listeners who verify a claim to the effect of the performed text? The
promise in question would require the latter: the point at which the narrator engaged
himself to accomplish the task is the same one at which he makes his famous claim to
illiteracy, says his “right” as narrator can be “seen and heard,” and refuses to continue
his tale for any who would “take it for a book.”11 There, launching his “new” narrative
with the birth of the hero, Parzival (4,9; 112,9–12), he likewise announces it as his own
knightly service to a suffering woman: “der lobes kemphe wil ich sîn, mir ist von herzen
leit ir pîn” (I’ll be the fighting champion of her praise; her grief is my heart’s sorrow)
(115,3–4). This profession of “militant illiteracy” may well be a literary pose, but the
claims it stakes, as we shall see in a later chapter, are anything but tongue-in-cheek.12
Here it is most notable that they are put forward with the pose and the language of a
legal transaction.
9 Parzival. Studienausgabe, ed. Lachmann, lines 337,1–6. Further references to this edition are parenthetical. Translations of the text, unless otherwise noted, are my own, for which I have consulted
and compared those of Hatto, Spiewok and Kühn in addition to Knecht’s in the Studienausgabe.
10 A contrast is intended with the Minnesang, recalling polemic from the earlier passage, lines
114,5–116,3.
11 Cf. 115,8–9, 25–26; also pp. 319–20, below.
12 The term “militanter Illiterat” was coined by Bumke in Wolfram von Eschenbach, p. 6.
21
MutatIons of the readIng WoMan
21
As the earlier passage makes clear, the women evoked as addressees in either case
are the figments of a fictional, or “original,” performance of the text. They are conjured
at several points in the text as audience members to whom Wolfram directs pointed
remarks on the legitimacy of his narration and its relationship to truth.13 It would be singularly inconsistent then, at the later juncture, to figure the same women as readers; it
would be a glaring contradiction, should the renewed “contract” for continuation of the
story depend on its being a book, and not only this but also on book-reception to guarantee its claim to truth.
The resolution of these seeming contradictions can be found in two aspects of the contemporary meaning and experience of written text and the use of books. First, whether
between books 2 and 3 or at the end of book 6, Wolfram’s challenge turns around seeing
as believing or witnessing; in fact, it need not be taken as reading in the second case
at all. Studying the process whereby written documents began to assume a role within
traditionally oral legal practice, Michael Clanchy finds that documents of a legal transaction initially filled the same function as did objects that symbolized its completion,
typically a knife or turf from the parcel of land exchanged. “Witnesses ‘heard’ the donor
utter the words of the grant and ‘saw’ him make the transfer by a symbolic object.”14
This audio-visual witnessing made the transaction a manifest reality. As charters came
to replace the exchanged object, they also became the visual (and audible) manifestation
of truth: Clanchy cites a number of charters that preserve in writing the call to witnesses
to see and hear the transaction, in effect extending the act of witnessing through time
and space.15 The act of visually displaying a charter—at times on the church altar—then
served to authenticate the validity of a transaction. The viewer became as if a witness of
the original transaction by viewing the charter that was its record. Seeing, then, may or
may not be reading. Seeing is believing and, called upon in this way, signals an appeal to
pre-literate conceptions of juridically empowered communication predicated on physical presence.16 Rather than reflecting an expectation that women could or would read
his text, then, Wolfram’s remark makes the women in his audience into the decisive
witnesses to the truth of his narrating performance.
The second point is suggested by Wolfram’s appeal to the women’s memory of the
suffering of their fellows in the narrative. This gesture evokes an act of visual memoria,
an association between participation in a performance, visual perusal of its script, and
the remembering or recalling to presence of the speech and actions of others. This is the
13 These passages, which also include the prologue, 2,23–3,24, and the epilogue, 827,25–30, are
necessarily among the most disputed in the text and are treated in detail in chap. 7, below.
14 Memory, p. 256.
15 Memory, pp. 255–62, see also Wenzel, Hören und Sehen, pp. 356–65, and the literature cited
there; Wolf, Buch und Text, pp. 308–9.
16 Clanchy, Memory, p. 259; also Stock, Implications of Literacy, pp. 48, 59. Green, Medieval
Listening, p. 141, argues that geschriben sehen was used to mean ‘read’ by recalling examples in
which Wolfram and his contemporaries use the phrase to speak of consultation of a written source.
These examples as easily prove my point: the gesture is again one of visual witnessing, in which a
text source now stands in for the authority of the author as eyewitness.
22
22
readIng as sponsa et mater
basic relationship of medieval devotional reading to the performance of the mass. As
Horst Wenzel observes, “Script, image and sculpted figure are understood in the Middle
Ages as memorials serving the re-presentation, the recall to presence of persons in their
speech and actions, and their significance in the court sphere resided in this function
even as it did in the sphere of the Church.”17 We encounter this mirroring of the culture
of memoria between the courtly and religious spheres specifically described as reading
practice in a passage from the prologue to the Life of Saint Margaret of Scotland. The
life of Margaret was commissioned by Matilda, her daughter, during her reign as queen
of England (1100–1118) and is dated between 1104 and 1107.18 Margaret’s exemplary
devotional reading and its effect on her husband will be discussed below. It had an
effect on her daughter as well—herself a litterata of some renown.19 As Lois Huneycutt
convincingly argues, the vita was not composed as hagiography so much as it was “a
didactic tool for Matilda, to instil in her an ideal of queenly behaviour, and to provide a
pattern which she could follow in her daily activities.”20 Either way, however, the reading
practice was the same. This is what the author has to say about Matilda’s reasons for
commissioning her mother’s vita:
Venerandae memoriae matris vestrae placitam Deo conversationem, quam consona
multorum laude saepius praedicari audieratis, ut litteris traditam vobis offerem et
postulando jussistis et jubendo postulastis. … Vobis congratulor, quae [i.e. Matilda] a
Rege Angelorum constituta Regina Anglorum, vitam matris Reginae … non solum audire,
sed etiam litteris impressam desideratis jugiter inspicere; ut quae faciem matris parum
noveratis, virtutem ejus notitiam plenius habeatis.21
(You have both entreated and commanded me to offer you, committed to writing, that
way of life, pleasing to God, of the revered memory of your mother that you have so often
heard publicly and unanimously praised. … I congratulate you, who, made queen of the
English by the king of the English, had desired not only to listen to the life of your mother
the queen but also to inspect its impression in letters continually; so that, having too little
known your mother’s face, you might have ample experience of her virtue.)
As envisioned by the text, Matilda’s “reading” is an ancillary, additional act to that of
hearing the same content recited (non solum audire), evoked with a conspicuous circumlocution, litteris impressam inspicere. Matilda is to contemplate visually the memory
of her mother, the impressam, “in the letters,” a practice that serves to compensate for
her too brief acquaintance with her mother’s face. The auditory and visual “impresses”
are thus complementary ways for Matilda to recall her mother’s presence and “know”
her virtue—just as Wolfram’s female audience is called upon to recall to memory the
17 Wenzel, Hören und Sehen, p. 323: “Schrift, Bild und Figur gelten im Mittelalter als Denkmäler
der Vergegenwärtigung, als Memorialfiguren sprechender und handelnder Personen, und in dieser
Funktion sind sie für den Raum des Hofes ebenso wie für den Raum der Kirche wirksam geworden.”
18 Huneycutt, “Perfect Princess,” 81–97; on its significance for women’s literacy and devotional
reading see Gameson, “Gospels of Margaret,” pp. 149–71.
19 Thompson, Literacy of the Laity, p. 171; Bumke, Mäzene, pp. 234–35.
20 Huneycutt, “Perfect Princess,” 88–89.
21 Vita S. Margaritae 2, 328 B–C.
23
MutatIons of the readIng WoMan
23
experience of his female protagonists, an experience they encounter in the performance
of the text.22 If this experience was “true,” the way Margaret’s life is a true exemplum
of Christian virtue, then this will be verified in the women’s response, in their act of
memoria performed by contemplating the vestiges of those “lives” on the written page,
the script. Image, performance, and script all serve one purpose; all are vestiges of the
absent life. As we shall see over and again, women (or the woman) represent human
memory in the experience of image and word as this recalled presence.
For the authors of these texts and their audiences, the act of perusing letters on a
page was, first and necessarily, one of contemplating a visual representation of sounds
and presence.23 Whether and to what extent it involved the decoding of script as language is seldom a point of interest. Matilda was certainly capable of reading her mother’s
life, but, as the biographer tells us, her father Malcolm of Scotland was just as decidedly
incapable of the same.24 And yet (as we shall see) his love of his wife, Margaret, moves
him, too, to listen to and to similarly contemplate (inspicere) and leaf through the pages
of her books.25 What counts is exactly what both texts say: seeing, looking at, inspecting
the letters painted on the page. In either case, the reading involved is not the site of
primary contact with the content, and such is not its object. The object is meditation
and memoria, and it relies on an idea of reading as commonly practised by women with
prayer books.26
This type of “memorial reading,” which would see the written recording as a sort
of relic of the performance, offers an explanation for the luxury copies of medieval
romances that begin to appear in the second quarter of the thirteenth century; that is,
no earlier than one or two generations after the arrival of the texts themselves. For the
preceding period we possess only the most modest and functional working copies, and
this in only the rarest cases.27 Such memorial reading copies testify, I would argue, more
22 As Wenzel, Hören und Sehen, p. 330, writes, “Die Buchstaben gelten primär als materielle
Repräsentanten der Sprache, sekundär—über die Sprache—als Representanten von Dingen und
Personen, auch und gerade wenn dieselben nicht anwesend sind.”
23 This act could include touch, a haptic experience of letters and pictures on the page as a kind
of secondary material presence. See Borland, “Unruly Reading”; Kay, “Original Skin”; and Rudy,
“Kissing Images.” On the one hand, such should not be overemphasized, as pictorial evidence of
reading practice reveals striking care and respect in the handling of prayer books in particular, and
a manuscript such as the St Albans Psalter (see chapter 4) could never have been preserved such
as it is, had its users regularly stroked its images or letters (its paintings, for instance, were originally covered by silk screens sewn in to protect them). On the other hand, touch—as the affirmation
of complete physical proximity—would constitute the ultimate object of religious reading, which
seeks to conjure presence. It is in this latter sense that touch is relevant to my inquiry.
24 “ille [Malcom], ignarus licet litterarum” (Vita S. Margaritae 2, 330C).
25 The effect of this vicarious reading is not left in doubt: “Fateor, magnum misericoridiae Dei
mirabar miraculum, cum viderem interdum tantam orandi regis intentionem, tantam inter orandum
in pectore viri saecularis compunctionem” (Vita S. Margaritae 2, 330C). On the rest of the passage,
see below, pp. 34–35.
26 Green, Women Readers, pp. 61–63.
27 As reviewed in detail by Wolf, Buch und Text, pp. 72–87, 316–21.
24
24
readIng as sponsa et mater
to the power of the experience in performance than to a desire to read rather than to
witness that experience. The layout, in particular of illustrative material, in these new
manuscripts shows striking parallels to luxury psalters designed for high-ranking
nobles, most prominently women, the production of which increases markedly around
1200.28 The psalters, too, had a highly representational function coupled with an aura
bordering on the numinous, which resided in their capacity to render the experience of
the monastic office as something akin to a personal possession.29 This idea does not at
all exclude the literate use of the codices by their owners; it shows, however, that neither
their value nor their use depended on such skills.
Finally, then, Wolfram’s stylization of this memorial response as a way of guaranteeing
the veracity of his text, its true-to-lifeness, suggests in itself that not women’s literacy but
their response to performance is what is held up and acknowledged as characteristic of
romance and even made imperative to its genesis and meaning. The ploy relies on audience acknowledgement of such a female response as typical and also exemplary for the
audience as a whole. Women were the representative practitioners of the use of books as
sites of memoria, the relics of an experience of presence, a “witnessing” of the spoken word
to which reading was an ancillary act performed after the fact. The response envisioned
suggests a sort of symbiosis between the experience of liturgy and literature that revolves
around women as representative viewers and listeners—and “readers,” if this last term is
understood to apply as much to the illiterate Malcolm as to the literate Matilda.30
The narrator of Wolfram’s Parzival plays throughout the poem on the idea of his
performance as a “ride.” He is himself a knight-protagonist whose adventures the audience follows, just as narrator and audience equally observe and follow the adventures of
Parzival. When this narrator launches his performance as the champion of the suffering
widow, Herzeloyde, when he interrupts the story once again to insist that his promise
to portray women in her image is at least partially fulfilled, he is not speaking to women
alone: the narrator models a path of proper orientation to images of women’s suffering
that is offered to his audience as a whole and possibly to men in particular. The same
path, the same task is also Parzival’s: his oblivious childishness deals the final blow to his
mother’s, Herzeloyde’s, suffering heart; he is the blundering ignorant who manhandles
Jeschute; with an ignominious spear-throw he kills “the flower of chivalry,” Ginover’s
kinsman, Ither; even Cunnewâre laughs only for his sake. The women both inside and
outside the story have crucial, authenticating roles to play in this poetic construct, but
they do not represent new readers, nor are they its only or even its primary audience.
The “reading” they represent, it seems, models something that is essential to the constitution of meaning in the performance, just as in Chrétien’s Yvain.
28 Wolf, Buch und Text, pp. 91–100; Wolf, “Psalter,” pp. 165–66; see also Clanchy, “Images of Ladies”;
and Vitz, Orality and Performance, pp. 114–15.
29 Lentes, “Psalter,” p. 335; see also below, pp. 32–33, 35
30 Katharina Mertens Fleury argues that Parzival and the luxury psalters created for Sophia, the
wife of Wolfram’s patron, Hermann of Thüringen, had a complementary function in instilling compassion as a religious ideal in their audience and readers: Mertens Fleury, Leiden lesen, pp. 80–83
and passim.
25
MutatIons of the readIng WoMan
25
Parzival’s path, too, is punctuated by the appearances of a psalter-reading woman.
The mourning and remorse of his cousin, Sigune, another bride bereaved, are made into
a counterpoint and even a parallel apotheosis to his search for the Grail. She reads in
only one of these appearances because her devotional use of a book is only one image,
one attribute, of the larger idea she represents both for the male observer and for
Wolfram’s poetic project.31 The same is true of Laudine: Yvain observes her desperation
and grief in three distinct situations, and only the last—though crucial one—shows her
reading from a psalter.32 What is primarily portrayed is her grief and devotion as such,
into which a psalter, a book, has been incongruously inserted. The book functions to
assimilate Christian devotion to secular grief and not to distinguish the lady for her literate skills or model the historical use of texts. Laudine’s grieving reading is an image of
human weakness seeking the presence of the divine, a moment in which, as in the case
of the reading pucele, “the god of love” (or God-as-love?) might be inspired to “give up
his divinity,” “wound himself,” and descend to earth incarnate. For the male protagonists
as for the audience who “sees” through their adventures, this moment is one in which
they read woman—and learn to read as women, much as Malcolm of Scotland did. That
is, they manifest, in the moment of loving identification that they learn in response—the
moment of identification that authenticates the truth of the performance—an authentication of meaning that is identified, as Wolfram attests, with the judgment of women as
(devotional) “readers.”
The complexity of the relationships evoked in these two brief accounts we cannot
begin to resolve here. It is rather the task of the following chapters to trace the development of a model of the mediation of knowledge and truth (understood as “reading”) that
is gendered as female from its articulation in monastic sources to its implementation in
early vernacular texts and thus to uncover the rhetorical building blocks that serve its
construction and manipulation. I have introduced these examples in this suggestive and
unresolved way to make a point: their complexity points far beyond the factual representation of a relationship between women’s literacy and the historical use of written texts.
They have something to communicate that lies quite outside the boundaries of such
documentary interest and requires a different approach entirely to the relationship
between women and reading than has prevailed to date.
Readers and Representations
To a great extent, Herbert Grundmann’s argument on “Women and Literature in the
Middle Ages” is a reverse extrapolation of phenomena that can be much more readily
historically documented for religious literature from the later thirteenth century
onwards.33 In other work, Grundmann used his unmatched acquaintance with the
31 In Parzival’s third encounter with her (cf. lines 435,23–25; 437,20–21; 438,1).
32 Lines 1144ff, 1286ff. The text makes clear that it is the sight of Laudine’s tearful psalter prayer
that finally strikes him with love’s wound.
33 “Die Frauen und die Literatur im Mittelalter”; see pp. 5–8, above.
26
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readIng as sponsa et mater
literature of religious reform from the early to the late Middle Ages to show that the
emergence of vernacular religious texts in the later period is persistently associated
with religious women.34 And in this period vernacular devotional literacy indeed became
widespread among the laity and led, increasingly, to a “personal” perusal of vernacular
texts alongside the continuing practice of prelection; that is, women’s use of vernacular
texts in the religious life served a facilitating and even exemplary role in the introduction of such texts as lay reading material.35 But these later developments are not part of
an inexorable march of literacy that has its beginnings in the vernacular texts of the late
twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. They may well be in part a later manifestation of
the equivalence between the “reading” of monastic women and that of laymen, which is
a persistently recurrent feature of medieval cultural representation.
Whatever their level of literacy, there is no evidence that women (or anyone else)
in the later twelfth century desired to read rather than to see and hear vernacular texts
performed.36 In fact, excluding Chrétien’s reading pucele and Wolfram’s address to
women who may “see” his performance “in writing,” there are very few passages in Old
French and Middle High German literature of the twelfth or early thirteenth centuries
that might be seen to envision lay men or women as the readers or even prelectors of
this new written vernacular poetry.37 But both Yvain and Parzival display the connection
between reading women and their prospective audience quite differently: as an analogy embedded in the narrative structure and manifest in the performance of texts. My
argument is that these mutations of the reading woman are essential to a new poetics
of vernacular writing, that is, to the way these authors communicated with their audience on the value, function, and meaning of the scripted, vernacular performance. In
this function, the woman-as-reader serves not to portray literate subjects but rather as
the mirror of a layman’s gnosis and the embodiment of an interface between sacred and
secular reading, the clergy and the laity, and monastic and courtly ideals.
In more recent scholarship, the “evidence” for women as the special readers (and
not only audience) of vernacular texts has seen itself appropriately reduced from
Grundmann’s over-eager inclusion of all manner of references to women in the texts to
the historical evidence of women’s use of psalters, juxtaposed with Chrétien’s reading
34 Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen, pp. 452–75.
35 Now reaffirmed in Wolf, Buch und Text, pp. 190–99.
36 “Ausserhalb der höfischen Dichtung selbst führt die Suche nach entsprechenden Zeugnissen
jedoch fast immer ins Leere. Belege fehlen, Nutzungsszenarien lassen sich kaum zuverlässig
rekonstruieren” (Wolf, “vrowen,” 176); previously also Bumke, Mäzene, p. 257.
37 One of these stands out in that it claims to document real events. In the epilogue to Heinrich
von Veldeke’s Eneasroman, the Duchess of Cleves is said to have borrowed his unfinished manuscript “ze lesine und ze schawen” (352,36); the phrase cannot be assumed, however, to mean, “to
read it for herself,” pace Green, Medieval Listening, p. 164; cf. Curschmann, “Hören–Lesen–Sehen,”
243, 253–54. The private reader in Gautier d’Arras’s Eracle, lines 4240–44, is possibly a remonstrative exception that proves the rule; see Vitz, Orality and Performance, pp. 220–21. A last instance,
a scene from Wigalois by Wirnt von Gravenberc, lines 2710–22, in which the “daughter of the King
of Persia” has a beautiful maiden read to her from the story of Eneas and Dido is doubtless, like
Chrétien’s reading pucele, a playfully idealized representation of the genre itself.
27
MutatIons of the readIng WoMan
27
maiden or her counterpart from the German adaptation by Hartmann von Aue.38 Further
complicating the situation is the fact that medieval writers alternately and persistently
present the woman both as book-user and as non-reader, as exemplum of lay literacy
(and sometimes learning) and veritable pariah with respect to clerical learning. Both
observations lead straight to the heart of the problem, because in both cases the evidence
is reduced to the problem of the value of representations. As she occurs in the sources
from the mid twelfth century onward, the reading woman is always potentially an ideologically loaded image. One meaning or “valence” of this image was, in fact, illiteracy, the
incapacity to engage and process the written words on a page. Another was religious
devotion. A third, and new valence of the same image that emerges in the twelfth century, is that of an alternative gnosis, a communion with God that bypasses letters.39 This
last is the focus of my argument in this chapter. It is the result of a conflation of the first
two possibilities and, as such, represents a characteristic habit of medieval thought, the
conjunction of opposites, collatio contrariorum or discrepantis naturae coniunctio. If the
woman’s presumed incapacity for letters is collapsed into her status as a figure of lay
devotion, she signifies the necessity of unlettered access to wisdom, a layman’s gnosis.
The insistence on paradox forces recognition of a gap and thus of a necessity to redefine
the terms that prohibit its negotiation.
In the remainder of this chapter and in the next I hope to illustrate, primarily
through the figure of Hildegard of Bingen, the ideas that were associated with or accrued
to a “female” apprehension of the Word in the twelfth century and were increasingly
represented through the verbal and visual metaphor of women’s devotional reading.
This woman reader thus becomes a figure through which clerico-monastic ideas of religious perfection could “translate” into laico-courtly social practices and ideals.
Reading, Gnosis, and the “Weak Sex”
Something profound and far-reaching occurs around the questions of woman, women
and reading in the course of Hildegard’s long lifetime (1098–1179). The Annals of the
Premonstratensian monastery Pöhlde records it as an event fixed in the year 1159, in
which the divine descended into the female sex: “In these days, God showed signs of
his power in the weak sex in two of his handmaids, namely, Hildegard in Rupertsberg
near Bingen and Elisabeth in Schönau, whom he filled with the spirit of prophecy, and
he revealed many kinds of visions to them.”40 The year chosen by the author (for choose
he did) and the idea of the two women’s revelations as (nearly) simultaneous betray
manipulation to a purpose.41 Hildegard and Elisabeth are taken together to represent
38 Hartmann von Aue, Iwein, lines 6455–70. Appropriately, then, the most recent research has
concentrated on examining the evidence of readership in the corpus of late twelfth-century and
thirteenth-century psalters: Wolf, “Psalter,” and Wolf, Buch und Text.
39 Poor, “Mechthild,” 230–38; and Green, Women Readers, pp. 38–41.
40 Annales Palidensis, 16:90; as translated in Clark, Elisabeth, p. 5.
41 Hildegard dates her visionary turning point to 1141 (though she revealed it only five or six
years later); Elisabeth’s first visions are reported from 1152. See Clark, Elisabeth, p. 5; and Newman,
“Visions,” 173–74.
28
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readIng as sponsa et mater
the female and the weak; God’s “descent” is manifest as a privilege accorded them as
representatives of these human characteristics. It is curious, indeed, that a writer in
the last quarter of the twelfth century could have had such uncanny knowledge of the
future: Hildegard and Elisabeth are today acknowledged as the first in a long and rich
tradition of women’s visionary and mystical writings that comes into full flower by the
mid thirteenth century. They stand on nothing less than a chronological gender divide in
the history of Christian mysticism. The distribution of such experience shifted dramatically from men to women beginning at this point, and with it the nature of the experiences
and the understanding of their significance.42 But, as Kurt Ruh described it, Hildegard
and Elisabeth do not so much initiate the experience that was typical of later women
mystics or of mysticism generally; rather, they initiate a paradigm of women’s perception and recommunication of the divine that is of epochal significance: “the visual and
auditory mediation of the contents of mystic vision” is for the first time effable, not only
comprehensible to the receiving subject, but recommunicable through her. This subject
is “unlearned” and female.43
As I will discuss further in chapter 3, Hildegard’s and Elisabeth’s voices emerge
within a broad contemporary context of interest in and literary activity around women’s
religious lives that brings into high relief the question of women’s relationship to scripture, their apprehension of the Word. Through the figure of Hildegard in particular
we can observe the way gendered categories are brought into play in the authentication of an alternative “reading,” that is, an alternative gnosis, and the way this latter is
then reassimilated to the categories themselves. This process exhibits at the same time
clear points of intersection with the articulation of a female path to knowledge within
the commentary on the Song of Songs, such that Hildegard’s visionary experience and
prophetic knowledge could be received as an avatar of Mary’s experience, or the idea
of reading the Song of Songs as one woman, the woman who is sponsa, did before her.
The latter point is the subject of the next chapter. Here, by examining the way Hildegard
positioned herself with respect to reading, in particular to psalter-reading, and the way
this position translated into a commonplace of medieval thought, I wish to illustrate a
process by which all these ideas become part of the copiousness that could be evoked ca.
1200 through the image of the psalter-reading woman.
But first, what was psalter literacy? What did it entail and enable the “reader” to
accomplish? Primarily the recitation of texts from memory, the repetition for purposes
of personal devotion of a set canon of prayers.44 The practice of learning to read these
texts was one and the same as the practice of memorizing them; it was not training in
the cognitive processing of writing for its own sake. The written text was used as much
or more to cue pronunciation; vocalization of the words served the mnemonic process, which was regarded, always, as operating through the ear and the mouth as well
42 Dinzelbacher, Vision, pp. 226–29.
43 “Was jetzt mit Hildegard und Elisabeth und allen späteren Visionärinnen einsetzt, ist die
visionäre und auditive Vermittlung der Inhalte der Schauung, “Ruh, Frauenmystik, p. 68, s.a.
pp. 66–67; also McGinn, Growth of Mysticism, pp. 333–37.
44 Saenger, “Reading Habits,” p. 142; also Lentes, “Psalter,” pp. 340–41.
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MutatIons of the readIng WoMan
29
as the eye: one ate or drank the text, masticated as one produced the sounds that the
memory recorded. This form of literacy has the objective of rendering obsolete the tool
of its training—the written text. In visual and verbal representations of prayer with the
psalter, the open book may serve primarily to represent the content of the devotee’s
memory, the spoken texts that cannot be otherwise easily visualized. (Thus Laudine can
“read” her psalms despite eyes full of tears and dramatic gestures of grief.) The primer
of this form of recitation of texts comes to be the visible attribute that represents its
successful assimilation to the person portrayed.45 The laywoman (or, later, the layman)
with her psalter does not need to read (in our sense) the book in front of her—if she were
not understood in this way, then she would be an incomplete, a deficient exemplar of the
very piety she represents. Her reading does not, in itself, imply any aspiration beyond
this practice to other books and “higher learning”—it does aim beyond its book to a
higher objective: the ear of God.46
Beginning in the late twelfth century, women’s psalter-reading is associated repeatedly, and by several different writers, with Hildegard’s extraordinary visions, prophetic
writings, and musical compositions. The conjunction between a less-than-literate
reading and communication with the divine in the idea of the woman as psalter-reader
explains at once why it was so useful as a representation of Hildegard, and why it comes
to be a preferred clerical representation of a layman’s use of books: it maintains a clear
distinction between what clerics called reading, lectio, and a use of texts that, for whatever reason, is placed outside its bounds.
Two chroniclers, Alberich of Troisfontaines and Albert of Stade, offer nearly identical
witness to the idea that Hildegard’s (self-professed) rudimentary reading ability could
be represented through the image of psalter-reading noblewomen:
Repente intellectum expositionis librorum, videlicet psalterium, ewangeliorum
et aliorum catholicorum, tam veteris quam novi testamenti voluminum, sapiebat.
Non autem interpretationem verborum textus eorum nec divisionem sillabarum nec
cognitionem casuum aut temporum habebat; solum psalterium legere didicerat more
nobilium puellarum a quadam inclusa in Monte sancti Desibodi.47
(She suddenly acquired an understanding of how the scriptures should be expounded, that
is, the psalter, the Gospel, and other sacred books, both of the Old and New Testaments.
However, she had no understanding of the vocabulary of their texts or ability to divide
syllables, or knowledge of cases and tenses; she had only learned, from a woman recluse
at Disibodenberg, to read the psalter the way girls of the nobility do.)
45 Clanchy, “Images of Ladies,” pp. 112–18, esp. 113; likewise Gameson, “Gospels of Margaret,”
p. 163.
46 The secondary literature has witnessed an over-eagerness to conflate the use of prayer books
and “a hunger for learning”; for example, Schreiner, “Marienverehrung,” 332–38; Bumke, Höfische
Kultur, p. 474; Scholz, Hören und Lesen, p. 207; Groag Bell, “Medieval Women Book Owners,” 754;
and now Wolf, “Psalter,” and Wolf, “Vrowen.”
47 Alberich of Troisfontaines, Chronica, 834; the translation is modified from Millett, “No Man’s
Land,” p. 90.
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That is how Alberich put it; Albert’s version says the same thing in fewer words and
using the same key phrase: psalterium [legere] more nobilium puellarum.48 Their interest
in this phrase—and that of others who use the same phrase to characterize Hildegard’s
level of learning—lies in authenticating a claim to gnosis without letters. By playing
on an assumption that women’s reading inside the religious life was the equivalent
of that of women outside it, they mobilize the noblewoman’s reading as a convincing
image of Hildegard’s inability to have read scripture herself, that is, to have composed
what she did without divine inspiration. A commonplace of women’s “illiteracy” thus
authenticates her visionary experience. Rhetorically, women’s incapacity for booklearning—laywomen’s “reading”—becomes a precondition for a miraculous gnosis.
One of the major arguments of this book is that the woman in this image is just as
potent a sign as her psalter is. If she holds the psalter because it is the symbol of illiterate
reading, it is also true that the layman’s reading is represented through her because she
cannot be clericus.49 There is no term for female cleric, as Philip of Harvengt noted in
his contemporary critique of twelfth-century usage, and while he tells us that a woman
who excelled in the literate arts could be called—“improprio sermone” (improperly
speaking)—a bonus clericus, this, too, was a rhetorically charged statement: Philip thus
illustrates what he sees as the absurdity of contemporary usage, which doggedly equates
litteratus with clericus and illitteratus with laicus.50 And though he claims often to have
heard this malapropism, I have found no instance in which such usage was applied. Even
Heloise, whose learning was famous in her own time, is never termed bonus clericus (or
clerica). Woman was necessarily non-cleric, and thus she could serve to represent nonreading, or the extra-literate use of books.
Two different poles of rhetorical association can be readily identified for the image
of the psalter-reading woman in the period around 1200 and will be discussed below.
The meaning of the image depends entirely on who is using it, on its rhetorical value
to the idea at stake. What we observe in the articulation of Hildegard’s persona is the
way a contradiction in terms, or the meeting of opposed valences of one and the same
figure, could be manipulated to speak new possibilities with and within orthodox terms.
The extraordinary is expressed through a commonplace as a way of placing it in social
memory, or assimilating it to types.51 This process could result, however, in the displacement of the commonplace towards the formerly unique, or the reassimilation of the
unique to the category such that the category itself acquires new rhetorical value. To
48 Albert of Stade, Annales Stadenses, 330: “Haec cum quadraginta duorum esset annorum, magnae
choruscationis igneum lumen aperto coelo adveniens totum cerebrum eius transfudit et totum
cor et totum pectus eius, et sic eam sanctus Spiritus inflammavit, ut statim omnium katholicorum
librorum seriem, tam novi quam veteris testamenti, ad integrum intelligeret, cum tamen nichil
umquam didicerit, nisi solum psalterium more nobilium puellarum.”
49 Duby, Three Orders, pp. 131–33; Bynum, Holy Feast, p. 286.
50 Philip of Harvengt, De continentia clericorum 110, 816–17. See also Landgraf, “ ‘clericus’ im 12.
Jahrhundert,” 74–78.
51 Carruthers, Craft of Thought, pp. 44–46; and Carruthers, Book of Memory, pp. 180–83.
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MutatIons of the readIng WoMan
31
overhear this process, it is essential to read the topoi as figures open to differing, but
nevertheless fixed, possibilities of rhetorical inflection.
Sicut mulier legit psalterium: Women as Illiterates
The association between women and psalter-reading occurs with some frequency from
the mid twelfth century to the mid thirteenth in contexts that witness its use among
clerics for clerics. Used this way, the image serves a derisory intention: woman is the
antipode of the cleric’s self-definition through reading. The writer Saltimbene reports
in his chronicle for the year 1248 a public debate between two monks, Hugh of Digne
and one Peter, over Joachimite teachings. Because the latter, reported to be a “lector et
litteratus homo et magnus prolocutor,” had expressed his disdain for these teachings,
Hugh challenged him to a debate that he began by asking whether Peter had even read
Joachim’s writings.52 Peter replied, “Legi et bene legi,” to which Hugo retorted:
Credo, quod sic legisti, sicut una mulier legit Psalterium, que, quando est in fine, ignorat
et non recordatur, quid legerit in principio. Sic multi sunt legentes et non intelligentes,
vel quia contemnunt que legunt, vel quia obscuratum est inscipiens cor eorum.53
(I believe you read it, just as a woman reads the psalter: when she reaches the end, she
neither knows nor remembers what she read at the beginning. There are many who read
without understanding, either out of contempt for what they read, or because their heart
is obscured by foolishness.)
The woman is in neither of the last categories that Hugh mentions. These apply to those
who should be able to make better use of books than they in fact do, that is, clerics who
use their schooling poorly. By comparing such monks or clerics with psalter-reading
women, Hugo says they might as well not read at all, or, to be more precise, they might as
well use books after the fashion of illiterates.
A satiric verse from the thirteenth century captures just as vividly the way clerics
used women’s psalter-reading to evoke a use of books that is discontinuous with their
own, this time also reflecting the existence of separate schools in which this use was
learned—independently of training in grammatica:
Si vero grammaticam nequis scire plene,
Defectu ingenui, defectu crumene,
Horas et psalterium discas valde bene,
Scolas si necesse est puellarum tene.54
(If you cannot fully master grammar, whether for lack of ability or lack of money, learn
the canonical hours and the psalter well, and if necessary you can keep a school for girls.)
52 Saltimbene, Cronica, 239–40.
53 Saltimbene, Cronica, 240.
54 Rudolf Peiper, “Beiträge zur lateinischen Cato-Litteratur,” as cited in Thompson, Literacy of the
Laity, p. 115, no. 154, and described as “a thirteenth-century poem in praise of study and the clerical
life.” See also Ferrante, “Education,” p. 12.
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readIng as sponsa et mater
Both these examples post-date the identification of Hildegard as a woman who “reads
the psalter in the fashion of young noblewomen.” In the only example of similar “clerical”
usage known to me from the twelfth century, women’s psalter-reading is implemented
in a way that comes much closer to the way it is applied to her; that is, it expresses the
idea of complete contradiction between psalter literacy and knowledge of scripture, this
time exploited not by God to reveal his prophetess but by the Devil to display his disdain
for the church and its learning. The life of Norbert of Xanten recounts how the Devil, who
has possessed a girl, demonstrates his contempt for the efforts of those who would exorcise him by reciting and then explicating the Song of Songs, first in Latin, then in German:
Tunc igitur, ut vere superbus est daemon, scientiam suam volens ostentare, Cantica canticorum,
a principio usque ad finem, per os puellae edidit, et iterans verbum ex verbo, in Romanam
linguam usque in finem interpretatus est; et reiterans verbum ex verbo, in Teutonico totum
expressit; cum illa puella, dum adhuc sana esset, nihil nisi Psalterium didicisset.55
(Then, as a sign of his insolent contempt, and desiring to demonstrate his knowledge,
the Devil recited the Song of Songs from beginning to end through the girl’s mouth, and
then commenting on the Word, he interpreted it to the end in the romance tongue, and
repeating his commentary, translated it all into German; while this girl, so long as she was
healthy, had learned nothing but the psalter.)
The image of sublime knowledge of scripture coming from a girl’s mouth authenticates
the presence of the Devil in her body—even as it will authenticate the presence of the
Spirit in Hildegard. It is an image of the impossible, an inversion of order that, here, instils
horror, there, instils awe. The assumed contradiction on which it relies is manipulated
in either case to force recognition of the supernatural: the Devil incarnate, the woman
imbued with the Spirit. Both images represent the rhetorical manipulation of paradox,
or collatio contrariorum.
Litterata, deo cultrix: Woman as Mirror of Lay Devotion
Evidence of the layman’s perspective on women’s psalter-reading has to be collated from
different sources, but it is plentiful enough. The advent of courtly ideals brought with it
an image of the psalter-reading woman as an ideal of lay piety and feminine perfection.
Felix Heinzer, a specialist in codicology of the High Middle Ages, writes of the psalter
as no less a “signature” of courtly culture ca. 1200 than was the courtly lady herself.56
Eleanor of Aquitaine (d. 1204), a figure who, for her contemporaries, epitomized both
glory and infamy of the courtly ideal, is portrayed on her tomb (ca. 1200) at the monastery of Fontrevraud holding an open book that doubtless represents a psalter (fig. 1.1).57
55 Vita Sancti Norberti, 8.45, 1288B.
56 Heinzer, “Psalter,” 158; also Wolter-von dem Knesebeck, Elisabethpsalter, p. 84.
57 The tombs of the Plantagenets at Fontevraud are “among the first fully sculptural, life-sized
effigies of contemporary or recently deceased monarchs,” and Eleanor’s is likewise the earliest of
many sculpted examples of a psalter-reading woman. See Nolan, “Queen’s Choice,” pp. 377–405 at
p. 382. Nevertheless, Eleanor’s open book is more likely the result of an idealizing and generalizing
representation than a personal decision or a reflection of Eleanor’s personal tastes, as argued in
Clanchy, “Image of Ladies,” pp. 115–18.
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MutatIons of the readIng WoMan
33
Figure 1.1. Tomb effigy of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Abbey of Fontevraud, France, ca. 1200.
© Abbaye Fontevraud/Anne-Sophie Asher.
In his detailed accounts of medieval courtly culture, Bumke pointed out the increasing
frequency of such representations in visual art of the thirteenth century and argued generally that they monumentalize a courtly ideal.58 Around 1200, the production of lavishly ornamented and illuminated manuscripts shifted dramatically from the Gospels to
the psalter—in connection with patronage of high-ranking noblewomen.59 The practice
among the nobility of sending their daughters to monastic or other schools to learn the
psalter seems to have increased to the point that by the early thirteenth century there
was a shortage of available places.60 Prayer and psalmody figured prominently in the
sections dedicated to women in Vincent of Beauvais’s treatise on the education of young
nobles (ca. 1247), while he makes no mention whatever of vernacular literature and is
clearly against introducing women to Latin learning.61
This evidence has been noted often enough. But it is neither sufficiently nor even
appropriately addressed by the idea that it documents a new or expanded use of books.
As noted above, women’s use of psalters and other devotional works is not lacking in
earlier periods.62 What we see in the elevation of the psalter-reading woman to a courtly
ideal by the late twelfth century is the creation of a new image of lay piety. It is not simply
the result of greater numbers of literate or even psalter-literate women, nor does it, in
itself, imply a growing prestige of literacy; rather, the visual monumentalization, the
numbers, the fetish value of the codices: all attest to a dramatic increase in the representational value of a well-established social practice. Just as she suddenly appears in visual
58 Bumke, Mäzene, pp. 242–43; Bumke, Höfische Kultur, p. 474; now also Wolf, “Psalter,” pp. 145–46.
59 Bumke, Mäzene, p. 161; Heinzer, “Psalter,” 158; Wolf, “Psalter,” pp. 156–57, and Wolf, “vrowen,”
176–80; also Stirnemann, “Women and Books,” pp. 247–52. The shift is so marked and the books so
lavish, that Lentes, “Psalter,” p. 335, speaks of an “Auratisierung des Codex.”
60 Specht, Geschichte, p. 294; and Ferrante, “Education,” p. 12; Wolf, “Psalter,” pp. 144–45.
61 Rosemary Bartin Tobin, Education of Women, pp. 33, 71, 79, 90–91, 143.
62 See p. 6 note 23, above.
34
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readIng as sponsa et mater
art at around this time, the psalter-reading woman “becomes an image”—or rather a
mirror—during the later twelfth century.
This image can include the attribution of learning, a cleric’s grammar literacy, to
particular women. But even where a woman’s more general learning gives occasion for
the rare term litterata—denoting, no doubt, real expertise in letters—it occurs within a
catalogue of her courtly perfections, cited alongside features of physical beauty, admirable comportment—and, most inseparably, devotion to God. Thus Otto Morena extolled
the perfections of Beatrice of Burgundy (d. 1184), wife of Frederick Barbarossa:
Beatrix vero coniunx ipsius imperatoris fuit, et ipsa de nobili genere orta de provincia
Burgundie, … facie pulcherrima, dentibus candidis et bene compositis, erectam habens
staturam, … suavibus et blandis sermonibus pudica; pulcherrimis manibus, gracilis
corpore; viro suo plenissime subdita eumque timens ut dominum et diligens omnifariam
ut virum; litterata, Deo cultrix; et cum Beatrix nominaretur, re vera summe beata erat.63
(Beatrice, of noble descent from the province of Burgundy, was the wife of this emperor,
… with a beautiful face, teeth white and well formed, an erect stature, reserved in her
pleasant and charming speech, with most beautiful hands and a graceful body; completely obedient to her husband whom she feared as her lord and loved in all ways as
her husband; a learned woman, worshipping God; and just as she was called Beatrice, so
truly was she blessed above all.)
Beatrice is the mirror of both the perfect wife and the perfect queen, blessed in all things,
and this image culminates with her place as a devout literate: litterata, Deo cultrix. Her
prayer serves the same representational purpose as do her beauty and courtly manners,
reflecting well on her husband and modelling an ideal for her subjects. The idea of
women’s learning, when it appears at all, is assimilated to their role as models of devotion, and the latter function is readily fulfilled without it.64
The same assimilation and the role of the woman’s reading as a mirror of lay
devotion are documented with remarkable poignancy in Malcolm of Scotland’s use of
his wife’s books, mentioned earlier. Queen Margaret’s devout reading and learning is
extolled in no uncertain terms by her biographer; she outdoes even the most learned
doctors. And this had consequences “not only for her own salvation, but also for that of
others, first among them the King himself.” Margaret brings Malcolm to keep even the
nocturnal hours of prayer and teaches him to pray “with a sighing heart and abundant
tears.”65 The biographer then describes how Malcolm’s love of his wife, causing him “to
love all that she loved,” brings him to take up her books, and, although he was “ignorant
63 Otto Morena, Historia frederici, 167–68. Morena and the two other authors of this history were
contemporaries of Frederick Barbarossa.
64 Beatrice was also a patron, or at least the addressee, of Gautier d’Arras’s Ille et Galéron
(1170–1184), where she is likewise extolled in the highest terms. Gautier, however, overlooks the
idea of literacy entirely; see lines 2–3.
65 “Nec in his solummodo suam, sed etiam aliorum quæsivit salutem: primoque omnium ipsum
Regem, ad justitiæ, misericordiæ, eleemosynarum, aliarumque opera virtutum, ipsa, cooperante
sibi Deo, fecerat obtemperantissimum. Didicit ille ab ea etiam vigilias noctis frequenter orando
producere; [et marito Regi omnis boni hortatrix erat;] didicit, ejus hortatu et exemplo, cum gemitu
cordis et lacrymarum profusione Deum orare” (Vita S Margaritae 2, 330C).
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35
of letters,” to inspect them and turn the pages, and even to kiss and fondle them affectionately. The account culminates in the production of a lavish codex: “Once he ordered
a certain manuscript to be adorned with gold and jewels, and gave it to the queen as a
token of his devotion.”66 For the biographer, Malcolm’s physical affection for books is neither a misguided form of idolatry nor an aspiration to literacy but rather the means by
which the benefit of his wife’s reading transfers to him, by which he identifies his salvation in her devotion. It matters nothing that he cannot read the texts, the benefits of her
devotion accrue to the books as its attribute, and in loving them, Malcolm loves his wife,
yes, but also God and God’s word. This presumably could all have occurred even had
Margaret’s reading itself been little more than psalter-literate. From the lay perspective,
the psalter-literate woman has access to books, but the degree of this access is not at
issue, only the degree of her devotion.
The remarkable concentration of evidence associating prayer with lay noblewomen
in this period is characteristic of a function that other scholars have underlined: women
take on a mediating position both between monastic and lay culture and between their
male counterparts and the service of God.67 Women are the “pray-ers” of lay courtly culture, just as, within the social order of “preachers, prayers, fighters,” monks and nuns
are those who pray for humanity as a whole. Seen from this perspective, women’s use of
psalters could represent a layman’s aspiration to monastic intimacy with the divine, an
emulation of monastic practice that singled out the backbone of the monastic office, the
psalter, and made it into an attribute of the courtly noblewoman. Such representation no
more reveals how literate these women were than Eleanor’s effigy at Fontevraud reveals
a sincere conversion to a pious monastic life. It does, however, reveal the aspirations of
the lay nobility to the spiritual privileges of the monastic elite.
The recognizable social connection between women and their psalters thus serves
either as a topos of illiteracy or as an ideal of lay devotion. Both valences of the image in
effect acknowledge that this is how laymen pray, how they obtain God’s ear. But in neither case is the woman’s reading any indication of nascent literary ambitions, and in the
clerical usage, at least, the image expresses exactly the opposite idea: there is no skill
continuum between this use of books and the cleric’s.
The two representations in fact belong to two entirely separate frames of reference,
despite their use of one and the same figure. But they have this in common: each side is
using the woman’s psalter-reading as a form of self-representation, a mirror in which
the respective beholders define themselves in relation to an ideal. While the usefulness of
the image to fulfil this function can be taken as evidence neither of women’s literacy nor
of their illiteracy, it does begin to illuminate the frequent appearance of psalter-reading
66 “Quæ ipsa respuerat, eadem et ipse respuere; et quæ amaverat, amore amoris illius amare.
Unde et libros, in quibus ipsa vel orare consueverat, vel legere; ille, ignarus licet litterarum, sepe
manuversare solebat et inspicere; et dum ad ea quis illorum esset ei carior audisset, hunc et ipse
cariorem habere, deosculari, sæpius contrectare. Aliquando etiam advocato aurifice ipsum codicem
auro gemmisque perornari præcepit, atque perornatum ipse Rex ad Reginam, quasi suæ devotionis
indicium, referre consuevit” (Vita S Margaritae 2, 330C–D).
67 Hamburger, “Illustrated Prayer Book,” p. 187.
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readIng as sponsa et mater
women in literary representation in the same period, and most particularly the
appearances of Laudine and Sigune as images that initiate, or accompany, a reorientation of their male “readers’ ” lives. Moreover, this Janus-faced relationship to the ideas of
literacy and access to God displays exactly the position of the woman reader into which
Hildegard would insert herself, the real woman whose miraculous gnosis proceeded
without reading. This simple substitution has the effect of embodying the paradox that is
already latent in the overlap between the two representations. The woman now speaks
this paradox: a “reading” without letters, a knowing without learning. Rather than simply
serving two separate fields of representation, the incapacity for reading now fuses with
access to sublime knowledge. The result is an inversion of the cleric’s understanding,
based nevertheless on the terms it endorses. The idea of a woman’s “illiteracy” thus
potentially becomes the mirror of a layman’s lectio, or a different, unlearned path to the
cleric’s gnosis. And precisely this Janus-faced image is what Wolfram von Eschenbach
bears on the rhetorical shield he proudly displays for his female audience: the illiterate
reading of women. But that is another—and not a different—story, to which I will return
in due course.
Hildegard’s Persona and the Psalter-Literate Woman
There is a discrepancy, rarely noted, between the way Hildegard’s reading was
represented by her contemporaries and the way she represented it herself. Hildegard
never used the phrase more nobilium puellarum or the image of psalter-reading or
training in reading the psalter to represent her own position. Nowhere, moreover, does
she call herself illiterata, and only rarely does she say anything specific at all about the
extent of her training in litteris, that is, in the ability to read the alphabet. She does make
statements about the nature of her reading and compositional abilities, and these concern not literacy as we think of it but the interpretation of texts.68 In these statements,
Hildegard clearly represents her use of written texts and the Latin language as acquired
without any training in the ars grammaticae. Her shorthand term for this is indocta
(untaught). Thus she stated her position in 1141, when she presented it, for the first
time, to the scrutiny of male spiritual authority, writing to Bernard of Clairvaux: “sed
tantum scio in simplicitate legere, non in abscisione textus … quia homo sum indocta
de ulla magistratione cum exteriori materia, sed intus in anima mea sum docta” (rather
I am able to read only in a simple way, I cannot analyse and interpret the tex … or I am
uninstructed, without any exposure to exterior teachings, but I am instructed inwardly,
in my soul).69
In this way, Hildegard makes clear that she has no formal schooling, and thus her
ability to interpret scripture and to write about its meaning must come from outside
herself—without the aid of any human intermediary. Her use of the term indocta is
68 On Hildegard’s positioning vis-à-vis church authority and male learning and letters, see
Newman, “Visions”; and Ferrante, “Hildegard,” pp. 103–35.
69 Epistolarium, p. 4.
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MutatIons of the readIng WoMan
37
entirely consistent with her representation of herself otherwise as a prophetess.70
Indoctus was a term with a rhetorical tradition of its own, in which it generally served literate authors as a way of throwing off the mantle of literacy in favour of a claim to inspiration directly through the Spirit.71 As I will argue below, Hildegard most likely takes over
this term, or the position it designates, in emulation of Rupert of Deutz, who—certainly
litteratus, but no doctor—used the same idea to introduce a radically new and experiential form of scriptural exegesis. But the identity of the indocta could not conceal the difference between Hildegard and others—men—who had used it before her. If they were
litteratus but composed indoctus, she remained indocta because her sex required that
she could not compose in any other way.
Hildegard also foregrounds her sex in her introduction to Bernard and does so in
a circumlocution that is typical of her other writing: “Ego, misera et plus quam misera
in nomine femineo” (I pitiful and more than pitiful in my female person).72 Elsewhere,
this became, in several variations, her favoured self-identification as paupercula feminea
forma (insignificant womanly form).73 Hildegard represents her relationship to both literacy and gender through linguistic displacements, terms that are no doubt intentionally defamiliarized. In this way, she occupies the cleric’s commonplace of the illiterate
woman while simultaneously attempting to reshape its terms. Characteristic of this
strategy is likewise the careful denial in her letter to Bernard that she receives her knowledge in the vernacular or through her “bodily eyes”—even though her most urgent concern is whether she should “speak what she has seen and heard,” “quatenus dicam quod
vidi et audivi.”74 The woman, the vernacular, and learning through the corporeal senses
form a field of association from which she borrows the terms in which to articulate her
persona, but she clearly wishes at the same time to escape definition through these same
categories. That is, Hildegard, whose careful circumscription of her own position always
aims solely to establish the authority of her prophetic voice, necessarily carved out a
position that was instantly reversible into the image of the female reader, the reader
who cannot read, who is, ipso facto—as the first witness to the reception of Hildegard’s
persona reveals—“laica et illiterata” (a laywoman and illiterate).75 These were the terms
in which, for a Cistercian monk in the 1170s, Hildegard’s position—that of a renowned
religious superior and author of voluminous Latin works—translated into recognizable
categories. The same is exactly what occurs when her twelfth-century biographers and
then early thirteenth-century chroniclers recast her description or rather translate it
into an equivalent commonplace: that of the psalter-literate woman.
70 Newman, “Visions,” and Newman, “Hildegard-Bilder,” pp. 126–52.
71 Ohly, “Wolframs Gebet,” 6–17; and more generally, Auerbach, Literary Language, pp. 25–66.
72 Epistolarium, p. 3.
73 Others include paupercula et imbecillis forma (insignificant and feeble form) and paupercula
mollis forma, with a suggestion of a feminine, fleshly softness; cf. Liber divinorum operum, p. 46.
74 Epistolarium, pp. 3, 4–5.
75 See below, p. 38.
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readIng as sponsa et mater
One telling example suffices to see this process at work. One of the only other specific statements Hildegard makes on her education—as opposed to statements on the
source of the knowledge she writes down—is a passage from one of the autobiographical sections of her vita. It follows there on the description of her visionary illumination
that is lifted from the Protestificatio of the Scivias, her first work:
In eadem visione scripta prophetarum, evangeliorum et aliorum sanctorum et quorundam
philosophorum sine ulla humana doctrina intellexi ac quedam ex illis exposui, cum vix
notitiam litterarum haberem, sicut indocta mulier me docuerat. Sed et cantum cum
melodia in laudem Dei et sanctorum absque doctrina ullius hominis protuli et cantavi,
cum numquam vel neumam vel cantum aliquem didicissem.76
(In that same [experience of] vision I understood the writings of the prophets, the
Gospels, the works of other holy men, and those of certain philosophers without any
human instruction, and I expounded certain things based on these, though I scarcely had
literary understanding, inasmuch as an untaught woman had been my teacher. But I also
composed, with their melodies, songs which I also sang in the praise of God and of the
saints without the teaching of any man, although no one had ever trained me in either
musical notation or voice.)
One valuable witness of this passage lies in the way it represents women’s monastic
learning—in this case that of recluses attached to a male monastic community. Instruction
given by a woman is not “human teaching,” and the “untaught” woman can teach.
Hildegard implicitly endorses an idea that women’s learning follows a different trajectory
than men’s; it is not simply at a lesser level on the same scale but rather a different kind
or mode of instruction altogether and delivers a different body of knowledge. And yet, to
state this does not seem to be her interest; she appears rather to endorse the categories
through her experience, not to use them to define that experience. Moreover, the details
of her education receive only cryptic description; they do not serve her purpose beyond
being another apodictic statement that her knowledge comes from God.
Within the same text, the final author and redactor of the vita, Theoderich, offers
his account of the same process in a passage which he no doubt composed using
Hildegard’s own:
Recluditur in monte sancti Disibodi cum pia Deoque dicata femina Iuttha, que illlam
sub humilitatis et innocentie veste diligenter instituebat et carminibus tantum Daviticis
instruens in psalterio dechacordo iubilare premonstrabat. Ceterum preter psalmorum
simplicem notitiam nullam litteratorie vel musice artis ab homine percepit doctrinam,
quamvis eius extent scripta non pauca et quedam non exigua volumina.77
(She was enclosed in a cell on the Disibodenberg with the pious woman Jutta, also
dedicated to God, who, under the mantle of humility and innocence, diligently instructed
her, teaching her enough of David’s songs that she could rejoice along with the tenstringed psalterium. Beyond this simple knowledge of the Psalms she received no human
instruction in the literary or musical arts, although there exist many writings by her,
among them several weighty volumes.)
76 Vita sanctae Hildegardis 2.2, lines 10–17; translation taken, with my addition, from Dronke,
Women Writers, p. 145.
77 Vita sanctae Hildegardis 1.1, pp. 86–88.
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MutatIons of the readIng WoMan
39
The comparison could hardly be more revealing: Theoderich “translates” Hildegard’s
account into one that associates her firmly with women’s devotion and psalter literacy.
This training is described so as to suggest a foundation of both her exegetical and her
musical compositions, the same two activities she mentioned. When one recalls the clerical understanding of reading sicut mulier legit psalterium, it becomes clear that this
description is in fact synonymous with the one expressing the same ideas, but using
different terms, by the Cistercian chronicler who had visited Hildegard in 1172:
Hoc anno vidi in Alemmanie partibus feminam provecte etatis, virginem, cui tantam
gratiam contulit virtus divina, ut, cum ipsa laica et illiterata sit, mirabiliter tamen ab hoc
mundo rapiatur frequencius et in summis discat non solum quod postea in imis dicat, sed
pocius, quod satis mirabile est et unauditum, etiam scribendo Latine dictet et dictando
libros catholice doctrine conficiat.78
(In this year I saw a woman of advanced age in German territory, a virgin on whom
divine power has conferred such grace that, although she is an illiterate laywoman, she is
miraculously taken from this world on many occasions, and not only learns in the heights
what she afterward tells here below, but also—which is most wondrous and unheard
of—composes writings in Latin and delivers her books thus composed to the teachings
of the church.)
In his own unfinished account of Hildegard’s life, Guibert of Gembloux, her last secretary
and one of her most inveterate admirers, hits upon the formula that would stick: “Indocta
quippe quantum ad eruditionem artis grammatice erat … instar mulierum psalterium
solummodo discentium simpliciter scripturas in usu habens legere, non sensus earum
acumine ingenii” (She was uneducated as to learning in the art of grammar … used to
reading scripture only in the simple way of women who have learned the psalter, without
their minds being sharpened to its meanings).79
Finally, this “press-release” version of Hildegard’s relationship to reading was taken
over in the first half of the thirteenth century by Alberich of Troisfontaines and Albert
of Stade, who both seem to have used Hildegard’s passage from the vita as their source,
in that both report it in the context of the description of her illumination taken from the
Scivias. But they “translate” following Theoderich, and both using, either independently
or following a predecessor unknown to us, the phrase solum psalterium [legere] more
nobilium puellarum.
All these descriptions, whether from Hildegard or her male observers, agree on a
basic idea: Hildegard’s use of books was radically discontinuous with the clerical arts.
She could not have written what she did unless by divine inspiration. But the men’s
descriptions accomplish something that Hildegard avoided: they reassimilate her alternative, miraculous gnosis to the commonplace, the image of the psalter-literate (or “illiterate”) woman. Hildegard’s indocta and paupercula feminea forma were novel ways
of circumnavigating an equation between gender and illiteracy that was tantamount
to a prohibition of women’s involvement in letters such that an outlet emerged for a
woman’s voice that was not previously there—and would never again be fully stopped
78 Pseudo-William Godellus, Chronicon, 198.
79 Guibert of Gembloux, Epistolae, 38, p. 377.
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up. This much is undeniable. But at the same time, this unique and lexically unconventional description was “packaged” for public consumption in terms of images that could
be more readily and broadly understood—without, in the cases cited, any intention of
diminishing Hildegard’s claim to prophetic wisdom.
Two developments are documented with unique clarity here: the clerical valence of
women’s psalter-reading acquires an entirely positive articulation, even while it remains
a portrayal of the illiterate use of books, and the lay valence of the same image, the
woman as image of a layman’s devotion, becomes associated with an alternative gnosis.
By the time Alberich and Albert can express the irrefutability of Hildegard’s divine illumination by reference not to the psalter-training of recluses, and not to women’s psalterreading generally, but to the current ideal of young noblewomen’s education, Hildegard’s
gnosis has become potentially a facet of a layman’s devotion, the devotion of those who
are laica et illiterata, that is, of the noblewoman with her psalter.
In her own use of this new image of the illiterate woman’s wisdom, Hildegard
proclaimed nothing so often and so persistently as the means by which it was
received: audivi et vidi. The woman’s prophetic voice proclaims an audio-visual apprehension of the Word. In terms of the same topoi on learning and social groups that she otherwise manipulates, the emphasis on seeing and hearing is another that aligns Hildegard’s
gnosis with a layman’s learning in obligatory opposition to the cleric’s reading.80 To defamiliarize this image, Hildegard can do little more than to deny, as she did in the letter to
Bernard, that she speaks of the physical senses. But the massive repetition of the verbal
pair, in her treatises as in her correspondence, has the opposite effect: this sensory mode
of apprehending knowledge comes to denote her prophetic authority in itself, similarly
to the way the incapacity for letters becomes inseparable from her access to the divine.
She sets this up already in the Protestificatio of the Scivias, where the phrase occurs no
fewer than six times.81 It abounds in her letters, often as a form of address: “In vere
visione hec verba vidi et audivi” is the basic formula, and she uses variations of it over
and over again.82 The synaesthesia suggested by this phrase receives real emphasis in
the more elaborate descriptions Hildegard offered of her moment of apprehension. As
she described it late in life (ca. 1175) to Guibert, “Et simul video et audio ac scio, et quasi
in momento hoc quod scio disco” (And I see and I hear and perceive all at the same time,
and almost in the same moment as I perceive, I also learn).83 A letter to Odo of Soissons
from the beginning of her career (1148–1149) reveals the same understanding.84
Hildegard redefines the idea of learning through the eyes and ears as a moment of apprehension that is not reducible into its composite sensory elements and that surpasses all
knowledge delivered by means of representations. Its authority resides in an experience
80 On the significance of the same verbal pair to designate the layman’s learning, see Wenzel,
Hören und Sehen, pp. 25–37.
81 Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, pp. 3–6.
82 Epistolarium 33, p. 90.
83 Epistolarium 103, pp. 261–62.
84 Epistolarium 39, p. 101.
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MutatIons of the readIng WoMan
41
of presence, of face-to-face communication, and in this sense it is inescapably “sensory”
and “physical.” As I will argue in chapter 3, this use of the audio-visual moment exploits
an understanding of women’s religious instruction, or “reading,” that was articulated
as a picture-text method in the Speculum virginum in the decade preceding Hildegard’s
public career—a work widely used, if not also composed, in the monastic world of the
middle Rhine. The same ideas take the form of an audio-visual theatre as the basis for
the embodied reading life of another psalter-reading woman: Christina of Markyate.
Hildegard’s persona, the packaging of her identity, documents the accretion of habits
of thought, commonplaces, to a historical identity; the embodiment, one could say, of
an image such that its opposing rhetorical valences coexist as a historical fact. This persona serves my argument as a historical illustration of the mutations of the reading
woman in twelfth-century discourse. Hildegard’s self-positioning situates her voice
on a seam, a boundary between literate and illiterate, monastery and “world,” Latin
and vernacular—and between God and humanity—in a way that offers a sensational
reflection of ideas that were increasingly being associated with women’s position in lay
society. All these thus become part of one image, manifest and broadly disseminated
through the figure of the living woman, Hildegard. As Theoderic put it:
Igitur dum ad hunc modum bonorum operum rivis affluentibus quasi paradysi fluminibus
irrigaretur non modo tota vicinia, verum etiam omnis tripartita Gallia atque Germania,
confluebant ad eam undique utriusque sexus populorum examina, quibus per gratiam
Dei utriusque vite affatim accomoda impendebat exhortamina.85
(When therefore not only the entire surrounding area but also tripartite Gallia and
Germany in their entirety had been irrigated with the full streams of good works as if with
the rivers of Paradise, crowds of people of either sex flowed in turn from all directions to
her, to whom she gave appropriate advice for every walk of life.)
Whether or not Theoderic exaggerates the numbers of visitors who sought Hildegard’s
advice, he had no need to exaggerate the extent of her fame. As her extraordinary correspondence vividly demonstrates and John Van Engen has shown, word of her visionary
gifts was spread abroad “on an unprecedented scale. … Talk in cloisters, chapters, courts,
marketplaces, even church councils, turned her person, story, and writings into the buzz
of high-level gossip and intrigued religious interest.”86 Letters were sought from her with
a fervour otherwise reserved for the relics of a saint.87
Nonetheless, it is not my argument that the developments I have outlined could
not have occurred without Hildegard; they are by nature only the articulation of
possibilities latent in the topoi she manipulates. It is the process itself that is most
revealing: Hildegard’s persona emerges from a broader context of interest in the relationship between the gendered other and apprehension of the Word, and it accumulates
or reassimilates to ideas associated with this interest because she is so readily recognizable as their embodied voice. The categories within which she carefully manoeuvres
85 Vita sanctae Hildegardis, 2.4, p. 132.
86 Van Engen, “Letters,” p. 395.
87 Van Engen, “Letters,” p. 412.
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were the building blocks of widespread activity exploring the innovative use of media in
the interest, ostensibly, of reaching the receptive capacities of the reading other, that is,
non-clerics, or laymen and women. The woman and the layman represent to this project just what they do to Hildegard and those who represent her: a justification for an
alternative gnosis, the posited necessity of a “reading” that proceeds without the use of
writing. The association of women as representative “readers” with an alternative audiovisual gnosis is one that will resurface repeatedly in the vernacular texts analysed in the
later chapters of this book. This is where we discover the surprising complicity between
Hildegard’s esoteric Latin treatises and the emergence of vernacular literature; this is
“what happened” in the twelfth century with regard to women and reading—and not the
sudden emergence of women as vernacular readers, or, for that matter, the emergence
of vernacular literacy.
In the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the figure of a woman reader posing
as the memory or receptive faculty of the audience is repeatedly mobilized to articulate a
poetics of the vernacular text such that not reading but witnessing, not clerical learning
but identification with feminine desire and suffering are meant to bring about the descent of the divine to human apprehension. This is where the mutations of the woman
reader lead to the reading women of Chrétien’s Yvain and Wolfram’s Parzival. These
reading women are not literary mirrors of social practices; they are rather signposts that
relate the experience of the narrative (both the protagonists’ and the audience’s) to the
concept “women’s reading,” situating it somewhere between a sacred and a secular performance and between the “illiterate’s” and the “literate’s” apprehension of the Word.
We are still far from resolving the complexity of these representations within their
respective narratives; the point to be retained here is that a historical coincidence
between the prevalence of the psalter-reading woman and the inscription of vernacular
poetry has long been recognized, but the assumption that she represented book-learning
rather than gnosis, that she articulates literacy rather than poetics, has itself precluded
consideration of the overlap between sacred and secular ideas of what “reading” is and
that the transition from Laudine to the pucele might imply.
43
Chapter 2
READING AS MARY DID
MY DISCUSSION OF the image of women engaged in devotional reading has to this point
ignored the most outstanding and best-known representative of the type: the image
of Mary before an open book at the Annunciation. While the concern of the previous
chapter was with images of women’s reading as an activity defined (in part) through
exclusion from higher learning, this idea does not preclude Mary as its archetype and
model. As “handmaiden of the Lord” (Luke 1:38), Mary was a figure of humility comparable to the manger in which Christ was laid in the stable in Bethlehem; in this aspect,
she represented a simplicity and purity of faith that, to the medieval imagination, is preliterate and extra-clerical. It is in this aspect of the unwitting Annunciate that we find her
as a model of women’s prayer. In the illumination of Books of Hours and other prayer
books, beginning in the later thirteenth century, Mary’s reading at the Annunciation
is frequently represented as a visual model of the owner’s act of prayer or use of the
book in question.1 In fact, the visual representation of Mary engaged in devout reading
at the Annunciation—so familiar today that with hindsight we easily forget that it is an
invention of medieval anachronism—establishes itself in Western art at a conspicuous
moment, a moment that witnesses, as I will argue in this chapter, several other pivotal
developments: the emergence of the psalter-reading woman as an ideal of lay piety, the
meditative exploration of Mary’s experience of the Passion, and the feminization of the
monastic reading subject as the bride of the Song of Songs. “Mary’s reading,” as I will
explore it here, effectively reveals the relationship between these developments as
features of a larger effort in the twelfth century to redefine the relationship between the
reading subject and the Word.
The persistent misunderstanding of images of women with books as indicators of literacy and learning arises essentially from a failure to replace the social and intellectual
context in which reading is embedded in our world with one that is appropriate to the
time and place in question. The points of intersection between texts, reading, and the
lives of the lay nobility of the twelfth century were largely determined by the liturgy or
religious instruction. Still, it is not the idea that literacy emerged from or was limited to
religious reading that I wish to evoke but rather the idea that, though the use of letters
was only one rather technical aspect of the relationship between the Christian soul and
the Word, reading was the prevailing metaphor, both visual and verbal, for this larger
1 This emulation of the Annunciate is not limited to her devout reading but rather extends to the
entire experience of Mary’s encounter with the angel, into which the devotee was often visually
inserted. See Büttner, Imitatio pietatis, pp. 70–77; further, Clanchy, “Images of Ladies,” 112–13;
Watson, “Conceptions,” 85–124; and Miles, “Annunciation as Model.” I am grateful to Laura Miles for
sending me the manuscript of her study, “The Origins and Development of the Virgin Mary’s Book
at the Annunciation,” which has since appeared in Speculum; see also below, pp. 28–29 note 23.
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relationship.2 Reading, legere, signified the process by which the Word was apprehended,
understood, and put into action, and in this sense it was the object of every Christian life,
regardless of training in letters. It could, and necessarily did, occur through listening or
viewing, through observation and imitation, far more often, in fact, than it did through
the decoding of letters.3
The master task of learning in the church was the exegesis of scripture, its proper
understanding and implementation, a negotiation of the hermeneutic distance between
sign and signified, letter and spirit, humanity and God, and in this the learning of monks
and clerics was the alchemy of human salvation.4 As one such monk, Rupert of Deutz,
wrote in the early twelfth century, “While it is true we do not yet see the Lord face to face
when we read and understand the scriptures, nevertheless, the revelation of the divine,
that is one day to be entirely fulfilled, begins here below in the reading of scripture.”5
Sacred scripture, theology, and doctrine were habitually regarded as one thing and used
as synonyms.6 Thus, the ability to decode letters, our reading, was understood to afford
a greater proximity to God, but it was no object in itself. The science it served was, traditionally, the affair of a specialized and highly trained elite, but its fruits were for the
benefit of all, and the work of salvation required they be extended to all.7 To the extent
that other media and methods were implemented and explored as ways of bringing the
Word to the larger body of the church, these could be understood as forms and variations
of, or alternatives to, lectio, the monks or cleric’s reading. The terms laicus and auditor
were used as near synonyms in the sense that laymen received through sermons what
the doctores could gain by reading;8 equally common was the identification of laymen
2 The following have most influenced my thinking in this area: Carruthers, Memory, esp. chap. 5,
“Memory and the Ethics of Reading”; Clanchy, Memory, esp. pp. 192–98, 268–72, 285–89; Leclercq,
Love of Learning; and Morrison, History. See also Robertson, Lectio divina.
3 The various metaphors for sacred reading, such as gathering flowers in a field (whence the term
florilegium), the bee collecting pollen to produce honey, or the pervasive emphasis in monastic culture on reading as ruminatio (the remastication of partially digested food); are more than poetic
embellishments; they are pregnant visual and sensory models for inward experience. Legere originally meant “to gather, to collect”; the same is true of the German verb for ‘read’ or lesen, which
still means ‘to harvest, to choose or select today. The images thus visualize the larger process
of collection and memory as the true objective of legere, in which literacy was only one useful
technical skill. See Leclercq, Love of Learning, pp. 15–17, 182–85; and Robertson, Lectio divina,
pp. 57–71, 104–7, and passim.
4 See Henri de Lubac’s introduction to “Scripture and Revelation,” in Medieval Exegesis, pp. 24–39.
5 Rupert of Deutz, In Apocalypsim, 825; the introduction is also printed in Deutsche Mystikerbriefe,
p. 14. On Rupert’s and contemporary views of scripture in the contemplative life, see Van Engen,
Rupert of Deutz, pp. 69–70, and more generally Leclercq, Love of Learning, pp. 71–86.
6 Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, 1, pp. 27–29.
7 Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, 1, p. 28, summarizes Augustine’s teaching in De Doctrina Christiana
with the words, “Knowledge of the faith amounted to knowledge of Scripture”; and cites St Julian of
Toledo as stating that “All doctrinal teaching was ‘an explication of the Scriptures.’ ” Such statements
become all but commonplace in the twelfth century, when scripture is seen as the mirror or measure
of all things Christian.
8 Grundmann, “Litteratus-Illitteratus,” 43–44.
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as viewers, for, as it was put in the favourite authority on the use of images in worship,
Gregory the Great’s reply to Bishop Serenus of Marseille:
what writing offers to those who read it [legentibus], a picture offers to the ignorant
[idiotis] who look at it, since in the picture the ignorant [ignorantes] see what they ought
to follow, in it they read who do not know letters; whence especially for the gentiles
[gentibus] a picture stands in place of reading [pro lectione].9
The justification for this equation appears to have resided for Gregory himself in the
idea that legere constitutes access to deeper understanding of a sign, successful negotiation of the distance between sign and signified. The idiotae of which he spoke became
legentes, and thus qualified members of the Christian community, when they properly
apprehended “through a picture’s story … what must be adored.”10 But the layman’s
visual reading could take place only exceptionally through actual visual art; far more
common and in any case more forward in the twelfth-century mind were the role of
the visible exemplum and a learning through the visible presence of moral models.11 To
receive moral instruction in this way could likewise be seen as an alternative form of
reading.12 Just as scripture was synonymous with all Christian teaching, one was engaged
in reading/legere whenever Christian teaching was assimilated to the self.
In keeping with these contours of the medieval culture of the written word, I apply
the term “reading” in this book not only, and not even primarily, to the activity of meditating on and interpreting written texts; I take it instead to comprise potentially the
broad spectrum of mediary practices that served the larger objective of which the
monk’s or cleric’s reading was the masterwork: the assimilation of the Word to the self.
Understood in this way, all reading points to Mary’s experience at the Annunciation as its
archetype and enabler. But before I return to this subject, some attention to the broader
context of the developments addressed in this chapter is in order.
Few are the moments in the history of the church when the pastoral obligation just
evoked was felt so acutely and engaged with such innovative fervour as in the twelfth
century. The advent of a new, interiorized piety—most especially the emphasis on devotion to the humanity of Christ and the corollary role of Mary as mediatrix between man
and God—the intensity and fervour with which the various orders renew the ossified
enterprise of biblical commentary, most specifically and remarkably with respect to
the Song of Songs, the diverse experimentation among authors of religious instruction
with new ways of implementing images in combination with text, the renewal of musical
composition and liturgical innovation undertaken by the Victorines, and, independently
9 As translated in Chazelle, “Pictures,” 139–40. The Latin text reads: “Alius est enim picturam
adorare, aliud per picturae historiam quid sit adorandum addiscere. Nam quod legentibus scriptura,
hoc idiotis praestat pictura cernentibus, quia in ipsa ignorantes vident quod sequi debant, in ipsa
legunt qui litteras nesciunt; unde praecipue gentibus pro lectione pictura est” (Gregory, Registrum
epistularum, p. 874).
10 Chazelle, “Pictures,” 145–50.
11 Bynum, Docere.
12 Mulder-Bakker, “Metamorphosis of Woman,” pp. 117–19.
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of them, Hildegard: all these projects can be understood as the exclusive province of a
monastic or semi-monastic elite, but they are no less expressive of a redefinition of the
relationship between humanity and the Logos, a media revolution accomplished through
monastic reading. The nature and understanding of this “elite” was itself in transformation in this period, part of what Giles Constable has described as “the reformation of the
twelfth-century.” The diversification and intensification of the monastic search for spiritual perfection that is so evident in the founding of the various reformed orders beginning in the late eleventh century is part of a broader effort “to monasticize the world and
interiorize monastic virtues [that] ended by consecrating everyone and all human activities.”13 The innovative uses and combinations of media evoked here were understood
in their own time as various means of “translating” the Word, that is, of rendering the
experience of scripture accessible to new audiences both inside and outside the cloister
walls. This reading experience, from its monastic understanding, is one of entering into
the presence of the divine. In the discussion of the exegesis of the Song of Songs below,
the task of interpreting the biblical text is to be understood in this way, as the lexical
alchemy of divine presence.14 The new interest among the clerical elite in the jongleur’s
art of performance, which will concern us in later chapters, is another aspect of this
larger project: performance translates presence.
Hildegard offers here a case in point. As Margot Fassler has argued, the innovations
represented by Hildegard’s music, dramatic compositions, and theological works—that
is, her extraordinary breadth of production in sound, image, and text—can be understood as parallel and interdependent attempts at a multi-medial translation of the Word;
an educational programme for her nuns, to be sure, but one that saw them as being
taught and transformed through the act and experience of listening and singing, viewing
and performing. Moreover, as both Fassler and Bruce Holsinger have emphasized,
Hildegard “defined the rendering of communal song as an incarnational act.”15 In song,
as in their reading lives as a whole, her nuns understood and experienced their performance of the monastic office as a continuation or re-embodiment of Mary’s conception and bearing of the Word.16 This idea is central to Hildegard’s understanding of her
compositional powers, and it is only further underlined in the way contemporaries saw
these powers in relation to their own lives. Hildegard became herself a mediatrix, an
avatar of Mary’s function as the body that gave flesh to the Word. As I will argue here, this
understanding of her relationship to Mary effectively places Hildegard’s creative activity
at the point of intersection between two major wellsprings of twelfth-century religious
renewal: the articulation of a feminine position for the reading subject, which is at the
centre of a redefinition of monastic lectio, and the “pastoral revolution,” which witnessed
13 Constable, Reformation, p. 326.
14 Fulton, “Mimetic Devotion,” 88–89 and passim; Robertson, Lectio divina, pp. 163, 167–68.
15 Fassler, “Composer,” p. 149; Holsinger, Music, pp. 87–136, esp. pp. 93–94 and 126.
16 Fassler, “Composer,” pp. 166–68. Holsinger, Music, p. 125, argues similarly, but the idea is secondary to his attempt to elucidate the “homoerotics of Marian devotion” in Hildegard’s musical
compositions.
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“a radical transformation of the catechesis based on the valorisation of the word as an
instrument of mediation and seduction,” the attempt to deliver the Logos as presence to
the entire church.17 Equally, the descent of the divine into the “weak sex,” as recorded in
the Annals of Pöhlde and manifest in the writings of Hildegard and Elisabeth, was not a
renegade new idea of middle-Rhenish female monasticism. It belongs within a context of
intense activity around the female religious life that comprises both French and Germanspeaking Europe beginning in the late eleventh century and includes the recasting of the
monastic reading life for religious women—the subject of the next chapter.
It is my argument in what follows that Hildegard’s visionary exegesis and her own
understanding of her position as the untaught and unworthy female body that serves
as vessel of God’s word constitute the embodiment—one woman’s experience—of an
epochal development in monastic reading: the invention of Mary’s life as the perfect
(female) act of Christian reading. This invention is first fully articulated by Rupert of
Deutz in his commentary on the Song of Songs. Hildegard takes the authority for her
visionary persona from Rupert’s definition of his own exegetical persona as altera
Maria. His commentary defines the position and experience of the sponsa, the bride, as
fully realized in Mary’s life, and thus as an object of reading imitatio accessible directly,
not through the learned arts of exegesis but rather as human experience that was also
inescapably female. From Rupert’s conception of his reading self to Hildegard’s prophetic persona—first as she, the woman, formulated and understood it, and then as
others, men, received and recorded it—we see exemplified how one woman’s experience of God, Mary’s, inimitable and ineffable, becomes nevertheless a model for reading
as a feminized soul; how the same could be re-embodied as a living woman’s auditory
and visual reception and “bearing” of the Word, and, finally, how this woman’s gnosis
represented the singular embodiment of the reading of the “non-reader”: the woman,
the layman, and the illiterate. Women, once again, become the focal point, the living
exemplars, of an illiterate lectio, here offered them as the embodied bride.
Both Rupert and Hildegard are in this regard at once extraordinary innovators and
merely the voices of much larger phenomena in twelfth-century spiritual renewal.
My concern is not to treat these phenomena in a comprehensive way but rather to
explore—as in the preceding chapter—the way the reading identities of key figures
articulate and embody latent possibilities such that these solidify as the commonplaces
of a new discourse on reading and gnosis.
The Annunciation as a Reading Moment
There was and could be no more perfect example of the assimilation of the Word to
the self than Mary’s experience of the Annunciation, where this was understood as the
moment in which she conceived.18 A human body conceived the Word and gave it flesh,
17 Vauchez, Laity, p. 100; see also Watson, “Conceptions,” 102.
18 Despite competing opinions and moments of dissent, the two moments had been taken as identical since patristic times; see Gössmann, Verkündigung, p. 20. On the idea of Mary’s experience as a
model of perfect assimilation of the Word, see Gössmann, Verkündigung, pp. 77–85, esp. pp. 77 and
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later to bring it forth as life. The hermeneutic leap from letter to gloss, from the prophetic images of the Old Testament to their fulfilled meaning as God-made-flesh, was
completed by Mary one time for all, in such a way as to enable Christ, the Book of Life, to
become accessible to all. Still, the potential analogy between this moment and an idea of
reading in the Christian life does not seem to have been truly discovered and exploited in
the Latin West until the late eleventh or early twelfth century. Moreover, the importance
of this discovery, the significance of Mary’s experience to the redefinition of the reading
subject in twelfth-century monastic thought, has yet to be recognized as such by modern
scholarship.19 It is no surprise then, that the same is true of the significance of the introduction, around 1100, of an open book into the iconography of the Annunciation.20
In the Eastern church, Mary, when given an occupation, was generally shown
spinning thread for the veil of the temple, and this representation persisted there into
modern times. The Western iconography of the Annunciation at times also used this
motif (fig. 2.1) but more often showed Mary standing, often in orans, facing Gabriel as
he delivered his message (fig. 2.2). This representation is increasingly displaced in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries by one of Mary interrupted in devout reading, which
dominates the late-medieval iconography.21 In 1960, Otto Pächt, as part of his analysis
of the St Albans Psalter (ca. 1120–ca. 1140), which contains a reading Annunciate that
stands near the beginning of this last development (fig. 4.3; see p. 147), noted that
although “this motif revolutionized the pictorial treatment of the Annunciation,” it had
at the time of his writing scarcely even been identified as a problem in the scholarship.22
More recent work has considered the function of the instruments of literacy within
medieval iconography of the Annunciation in some detail, but it has neither addressed
Pächt’s findings nor adequately accounted for the moment at the turn of the eleventh
century when, as his evidence indicated, the idea of Mary’s reading at the Annunciation
appears to acquire a special meaning and becomes broadly established as both a verbal
and visual image. Instead, subsequent scholarship has concentrated on late-medieval
examples as evidence of developing literacy and a literate mentality.23 What has been
81. On the same idea in the later Middle Ages, see Miles, “Annunciation as Model”; and Guldan,
“Verkündigungsbild,” 145–69.
19 JP constitutes a comprehensive corrective in this regard; see esp. pp. 464–66.
20 Miles “Origins,” 632–33; but see below, note 23. For a general overview of the Annunciation
in church doctrine and iconography, see Hirn, Sacred Shrine, pp. 271–301; and Gössmann,
Verkündigung, esp. pp. 77–87 for the period around 1100.
21 Emminghaus “Verkündigung,” pp. 423–31; Hirn, Sacred Shrine, pp. 279–80; Künstle,
Ikonographie, pp. 336–41; Gössmann, Verkündigung, p. 129.
22 SAP, p. 63.
23 Schreiner, “Marienverehrung,” 314–68; Schreiner, “Konnte Maria lesen?” 1437–64; Wenzel,
“Verkündigung,” pp. 23–52; Wenzel, Hören und Sehen, pp. 270–91. Schreiner’s work in particular
tends to leave the eleventh and twelfth centuries out of account, instead linking late-medieval
texts and images with biblical commentary and apocrypha of the early Middle Ages. As a result, he
overlooks the changing significance of Mary’s reading act, equating it throughout with literacy and
bookishness. Miles, “Origins,” remedies Schreiner’s chronological oversight but not the conceptual
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overlooked is the isolation of Mary’s experience at the Annunciation as a reading
moment, a moment, that is, when the Christian soul is privileged to a perfect knowledge
of the Word. This moment appears to have been discovered as a focal point of devotional reading sometime around 1100, and one way of visualizing the development was
to place the Annunciate before an open book.
The idea that a book was one of the essential accoutrements of Gabriel’s encounter
with Mary was not unknown before the period around 1100, but examples of it in
visual art are rare.24 The two earliest appear to stem directly or indirectly from one
Carolingian workshop in Metz.25 These and a textual counterpart from the same period,
the Annunciation as recounted in Otfrid von Weissenburg’s Evangelienbuch (ca. 860),
doubtless drew their inspiration from apocryphal gospels such as the Pseudo Matthew,
which portrayed Mary weaving and singing the Psalms.26 As a rare textual witness,
Otfrid’s description provides our best indication of how the visual invention should
be read.27
In Otfrid’s text, Gabriel finds Mary “with the psalter in her hands, which she often
sang from beginning to end.” Lest the question whether the book was open—that is,
whether Mary was “reading” and praying as Gabriel arrived—seem overly punctilious,
it should be noted that the continuation reads, “[he found her] occupied with the
weaving of beautiful fabrics … an activity that always pleased her.”28 The complications
involved in holding the psalter and weaving simultaneously have not gone unnoticed
in commentary on the passage, and, as Gisela Vollmann-Profe concludes, the reason
is that Otfrid’s description is not concerned with “what happened in that moment
when,” but rather with the conduct of Mary’s life in general, that is, with the portrayal
one: here, too, an open book is necessarily an invitation to and a model for engagement of the
literate arts; Miles’s account of the twelfth century in particular is faulty and under-documented.
Lesley Smith recognizes the need to distinguish between Mary’s psalter prayer and literacy or
reading generally in Smith, “Scriba, femina,” pp. 22–23; see also Clanchy, “Images of Ladies,” 112–13.
24 In SAP, pp. 63–67, Otto Pächt traced both iconographic and textual precedents; further detail
on textual precedents is found in Schreiner, “Marienverehrung,” 318–25. For an updated and incisive account of the few examples that precede the Saint Albans Psalter, see Deshman, Benedictional,
pp. 9–17, 262–66, and passim. Three further examples from the final quarter of the tenth century
can be seen in Palazzo, Sacramentaires, pp. 39–41 and plates 14, 34, 109.
25 An ivory casket in the Herzog-Anton-Ulrich Museum in Braunschweig, dated ca. 860–870,
and an ivory situla in the Metropolitan Museum in New York (cat. no. 17.190.45), dated there
to ca. 860–880 (www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/17.190.45, accessed January 24,
2013); but cf. Deshman, Benedictional, p. 265: “c. 1000”; on both examples see Deshman,
Benedictional, pp. 262–66 and figs. 1, 207, 208; on the casket, SAP, p. 66, pl. 118e; and Goldschmidt,
Elfenbeinskulpturen, pp. 52–53, no. 96, plates 44, 45; and vol. 2, p. 45.
26 Vollmann-Profe, Evangelienbuch, p. 199.
27 Evangelienbuch 1.5, lines 1–72.
28 “er … fand sia … / mit sálteru in henti then sáng si unz in entí; / Wáhero dúacho werk wírkento /
diurero gárno, thaz déda siu io gérno,” Evangelienbuch, lines 10–12; for commentary (and the
modern German translation on which mine is based) see Vollmann-Profe, Evangelienbuch, pp. 191
and 199–202.
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Figure 2.1. Annunciation. Abbey Church of Sainte-Foy, Conques, France, early twelfth century.
Photo © Daniel Villafruela, GNU Free Documentation License.
of Mary as a model of the contemplative life.29 Ora et labora, Otfrid’s own Benedictine
ideal, is identified with the beginning of the Christian faith through the portrayal of
the Annunciation.
A number of modern scholars have been more inclined to the idea that Otfrid was
modelling an ideal of the devout noblewoman, which then leads Klaus Schreiner to the
conclusion that his description “played a decisive role in making Mary into the prototype of the reading woman.”30 Certainly a lay audience of Otfrid’s vernacular biblical epic
29 Vollmann-Profe, Evangelienbuch, p. 199; see also pp. 198–99, 200, 202.
30 Schreiner, “Marienverehrung,” 323. The view that Otfrid portrays Mary as the ideal noblewoman
stems from the text’s first editor, Oskar Erdmann, Otfrids Evangelienbuch, p. 356.
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51
Figure 2.2. Annunciation. Lintel frieze, Chartres Cathedral, France, ca. 1145–1150.
Photo © Jane Vadnal.
may have opted for a gendered identification between Mary and women’s prayer. For
Schreiner, however, Mary’s psalter prayer points to literacy, bookishness, and hunger
for learning.31 These ideas, for the High Middle Ages at least, turn out to be very much
beside the point.
The most salient indications that literacy is not the issue are found in the iconography itself, and here the Annunciation in the St Albans Psalter proves an extraordinarily revealing witness. Not only a book has been interpolated into the scene. The
second all but ubiquitous feature of the (later) Annunciation as a visual event, the
descending dove, also makes one of its first appearances here. From our vantage point,
31 “Maria, mit den Augen des Mittelalters betrachtet, war der Inbegriff einer bücherhungrigen,
lesefreudigen und wissenschaftlich gebildeten Frau” (Schreiner, “Marienverehrung,” 317).
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Figure 2.3. Annunciation (detail), St Albans Psalter. Hildesheim, Dombibliothek, MS St Godehard
1 (Property of the Basilica of St Godehard, Hildesheim), p. 19.
© Dombibliothek Hildesheim.
it is only too easy to overlook the fact that only the descending dove visually identifies Gabriel’s announcement as the moment in which Mary conceives the Word, that is,
as the Incarnation. Rubbing of the painted surface has partly effaced the detail in the
St Albans picture, but a dove is still visible flying horizontally as if directly into Mary’s ear
(fig. 2.3).32 The dove enters the iconography with a chronological progression conspicuously parallel to that of Mary’s book. Before the period ca. 1100, Annunciation scenes
that thus visualize the Spirit’s descent are rarer still in Western art than are those with
books, the sole known examples being a fifth-century mosaic in Santa Maria Maggiore
in Rome and an illustration in a psalter from Saint-Germain-des-Prés of the first half of
the ninth century.33 The dove then reappears from the late eleventh century onward to
become, in the later Middle Ages, nearly as indispensable as Gabriel himself.
32 All illustrations from the St Albans Psalter appear by generous permission of the Dombibliothek
in Hildesheim. The codex, MS St Godehard 1, is the property of the Basilica of St Godehard,
Hildesheim. To avoid repetition, I have included this information below the first illustration from
the psalter only, figure 2.3.
33 Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, bibl. fol. 23, fol. 83v, widely known as the
Stuttgart Psalter. See also Kitzinger, “Descent,” pp. 99–115.
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An early recurrence of the dove in one Annunciation from ca. 1100 may, in its very
peculiarity, reveal the point of the change. This is an ivory book cover that not only
illustrates Luke 1:35 but also, it seems, visualizes the conception itself (fig. 2.4).34 Gabriel
raises his hand in speech to Mary, who is seated on the right in a configuration very like
the one in the St Albans Psalter. Above the two and possibly outside or beyond their
view—it is in a space in the centre over the architectural frame—a dove is shown flying
vertically downwards. The rays from its beak extend to a small bust, apparently of Christ,
which emerges from a horizontally oriented quarter-moon, possibly a symbol of Mary. If
it is correct to interpret this scene as integral to the Annunciation, then what it portrays
is “what occurs in Mary’s body and what is made known to her.”35 From the illustration
of an episode from Mary’s life we have moved to one that instead seeks to visualize the
point of origin of all Christian knowing.
Yet a third element distinguishes the St Albans Annunciation as a prototype of
later medieval understanding of the Annunciation. The dove does not pass alone from
Gabriel’s lips to Mary’s ear. It rides, as it were, on his voice, manifest in fine white
lines that span the distance (fig. 2.3). The picture is perhaps the earliest known visual
representation in the West of a conceptio per aurem, the idea that the Word penetrated
Mary’s body by passing through her ear. The role of this idea in shaping the meaning of
the Annunciation within Christian devotion has been sorely neglected. It is, however, no
mere visual conceit but rather emerged as a focal point of doctrinal controversy over
Christ’s dual nature, divine and human, that was first played out in the Eastern church
in the early fifth century.36 Within this controversy—of which twelfth-century authorities were well informed—Mary’s conception through the ear served as the response
to dissenting opinions over whether Christ was divine from conception or merely “the
mortal man Jesus in whom it pleased the Word to dwell.”37 The only scriptural moment
available to refute such ideas was Luke’s account of the Annunciation; the conceptio per
34 Skulpturensammlung und Museum für Byzantinische Kunst, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin,
Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Nr. 2787, possibly from Northern France; see www.smb-digital.de/eMu
seumPlus?service=ExternalInterface&module=collection&objectId=1719650&viewType=detailV
iew (accessed August 26, 2019).
35 Gössmann, Verkündigung, p. 126. Indeed, the tip of Gabriel’s “speaking” index finger touches the
bottom of the quarter-moon. Both Gössmann and Guldan, “Verkündigungsbild,” 149–50, interpret
the scene as the conception; Guldan therefore calls it the oldest representation of the Incarnation
in Western art.
36 Constas, Proclus, pp. 273–313. So far as the Western church is concerned, the conceptio per
aurem has been studied only in art historical literature, where it is at times dismissed as the
embarrassing materialization of a properly spiritual idea. One exception, although of limited use
to study of the Middle Ages, is Jones, “Empfängnis,” 135–204. For art historical study of the latemedieval tradition, see Steinberg, “Filippo Lippi’s ‘Annunciation’,” 25–44; and Jongh, “De conceptie,”
24–43. The most useful general introduction remains Hirn, Sacred Shrine, pp. 296–98.
37 Constas, Proclus, p. 51. For twelfth-century reception of these ideas, see Gerhoh of Reichersberg,
De gloria, 1073–160, esp. 1105A–B, 1148C, 1151B. Gerhoh’s treatise recapitulates the entire controversy to establish anew that Mary conceived in the moment the angel spoke the words concerning
“the Most High” (Luke 1:32), thereby conceiving and bearing the divine Word.
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Figure 2.4. Annunciation. Ivory book cover. Northern France, ca. 1100. Skulpturensammlung
und Museum für Byzantinische Kunst, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—
Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Nr. 2787. Photo: Jörg P. Anders, Berlin
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aurem, therefore, established that Mary had conceived in the moment of Gabriel’s communication to her and that she had conceived from his voice as the vehicle of the Word,
a sound that passed through her eardrum and entered her womb.38 As she was made to
say through the preachers who spoke for her, “An angel appeared and … I heard a word,
I conceived a Word, and I delivered a Word.” Similarly, Christ reported that Gabriel had
been sent before him to “speak into the ears of the spiritual ark, and to prepare for me
the entrances of her ear.”39
Nicholas Constas, to whom we owe the recent excavation of these origins of the
conceptio per aurem for modern scholarship, has argued that the fifth-century Byzantine
school of thought that promulgated Mary’s auricular conception and her status as
Theotokos, “birth-giver to God,” established by the same means a new poetics of sound
and sight, more generally then, of the sensory mediation of the Logos. His words are
worth quoting in full, for they provide an uncannily appropriate introduction to the parallel developments in the Latin West that concern us in this book:
When the “Word became flesh” (John 1:14) the verbal was woven together with the
visual in a seamless fabric fashioned from two fundamental modes of communication.
In the ongoing intertwining of word and image, the experience of the ear is reinforced
by that of the eye, which in turn seeks confirmation though touch, for “that which was
from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes,” was also
“touched with our hands” (1 John 1:1–2). Doubt seeks certainty in the desire to touch
the wounded body of the Word (John 20:25); faith seeks fulfilment by clasping the hem
of his garment (Matthew 9:21), for the infringed form of the divine longs not merely to
be gazed upon but to be touched. “Put your finger here, and place your hand in my side”
(John 20:27) is an invitation which beckons the eye of the spectator to become the hand
of a participant.40
In the twelfth century as in the fifth, Mary’s role in humanity’s salvation lay like a latent fulcrum awaiting discovery. It offered the leverage to move into place and mobilize an entire
mediary orchestra in the service of devotion to the humanity of Christ and thus also to
suggest a paradoxical divinity of the body. The conceptio per aurem served as “a form of
symbolic shorthand” for the idea at the theological centre of this momentous development;
moreover, as Constas concludes, this
appropriation of hearing as a theological category required an imaginative charting of
the (female, virginal, maternal) body and its senses … [in which] the ambivalent logic of
the lower bodily material zone was relocated to the highest levels of sense perception
and intellection, thereby de-sexualizing the virgin birth of Christ, or, in what is also true,
re-sexualizing it within a different view of sexual union.41
38 As Pseudo-Athanasius put it, “Just as the sunlight passes through a pane of glass without
shattering it, so too did the Son of God pass through the glass window, that is, through the ears of
the Virgin without destroying her virginity” (Quaestiones aliae, 19; cited in Constas, Proclus, p. 281).
39 Proclus of Constantinople, Homily 36; and Ps.-Gregory Thaumaturgus, Homily 3; both as cited
and trans. in Constas, Proclus, p. 280.
40 Constas, Proclus, p. 315.
41 Constas, Proclus, pp. 282, 312.
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Such a statement brings us into remarkable proximity with the project of Rupert of Deutz,
to be examined shortly for its generative significance in the twelfth century’s own Marian
media revolution.
The Annunciation in the St Albans Psalter has itself come to us as part of one of
the most notable early examples of such deliberate mediary orchestration, one
that charts, promotes, or abets a woman’s visionary—or, more properly, sensory—
experience of the presence of Christ in her life and will be examined as such in chapter 4.
Such unequivocal portrayals of the conceptio per aurem remain very much the exception
in Western art until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and one reason for this may
well be the complexity of the argument of which it is a part.42 In monastic theological and
exegetical writing of the first half of the twelfth century, on the other hand, the conceptio
per aurem finds explicit and repeated mention after having been apparently more or
less forgotten by Western writers since patristic times.43 But the central idea was not
inextricably bound to Mary’s ear. With its illustration of Gabriel’s voice as the apparent
vehicle of the dove’s flight, the St Albans Annunciation can be taken as a reminder that
the idea that Mary conceived in the moment of Gabriel’s announcement and through
his words to her could as easily be stated as a conception through the voice, a voce, as
it were.44 We will encounter it in this form elsewhere, and thus it is treated as well in a
42 Another prominent twelfth-century example (dated 1181) is found in Nicholas of Verdun’s elaborate typological image programme for the altar at Kloster Neuenburg. It likewise includes an open
book on a lectern, but lacks the dove.
43 These statements reflect current knowledge of the Western tradition, which is in need of further study. A search of the Patrologia Latina reveals no mention of the conceptio per aurem before
the twelfth century and later than Agobard of Lyons (d. 816), but Deshman points out that it occurs
in a hymn for the Annunciation feast at Winchester in Aethelwold’s time (late tenth century; see
Deshman, Benedictional, pp. 13–14). It is common in patristic writings up to and including Gregory
the Great, as also noted by Constas, Proclus, p. 274n4. To the list of occurrences in the Latin church
given there, the following additions or corrections should be noted: Pseudo-Ambrose, Sermo 47.
In cap. 30 Proverbia de differentia Salomonis et aliorum prophetarum, PL 65:700; Eleutherius
Tornacensis, Sermo in annuntiationis festum, PL 65:98; Gregory the Great, Liber responsalis sine
antiphonarius, PL 78:731; Agobard of Lyons, De correctione antiphonarii, 8, as cited in Jones,
“Empfängnis,” 137. The passage listed by Constas as Augustine, Sermo in natali Domini 7, PL 39:1991,
is also found in a nearly identical text attributed elsewhere to Fulgentius, Sermo 36 De laudibus
Mariae ex partu Salvatoris, PL 65:899. Twelfth-century witnesses include Bernard of Clairvaux,
Sermo 2 in festo Pentecostes, Sancti Bernardi opera, 5, ed. J. Leclercq and H. Rochais (Rome: Editiones
Cistercienses, 1968), p. 167 (PL 183:327); Hugh of St Victor, De inquisitione mysticae arcae, PL
176:733–34; Geoffrey of Vendôme, Sermo 8 in omni festivitate B. Mariae Matris Domini, PL 157:267.
The idea occurs in German vernacular works beginning in the early twelfth century with Frau Ava
(see below pp. 59–60) and then the Sankt Trudperter Hohelied (pp. 36/37, 551–52); and is found
among courtly poets by ca. 1200, as witnessed by Walther von der Vogelweide’s “Leich,” lines 5,23–
26, p. 6. Another frequently cited instance from Walther’s work (for example, Künstle, Ikonographie,
p. 339) is no longer regarded as authentic: see Walther von der Vogelweide, Werke, 12a.3, lines 5–6,
and commentary p. 433.
44 This is especially apparent in comparison with the iconographic tradition of the Byzantine
Psalters, which always show the dove descending directly from Heaven, often guided or released by
the hand of God. The Trinitarian emphasis that Kitzinger sees in this iconography would not seem
to apply to the St Albans picture; here it is instead the efficacy of Gabriel’s voice that is given visual
form; cf. Kitzinger, “Descent,” 106–9 and 114–15.
57
readIng as Mary dId
57
twelfth-century treatise on the fifth-century controversy by Gerhoh of Reichersberg.45
The central point for my argument remains the same: whether through the dove, the
open book, or the auricular conception, what we encounter in early twelfth-century
representation of the Annunciation, verbal or visual, is a concentrated focus on the event
as that moment in time in which Christian knowing was conceived, in body as in mind.
But what then, finally, do we make of Mary’s open book? Of the three distinctive
features just discussed, the book is the one that most clearly reflects the twelfth-century
mind; it is also the only one that could serve as a bridge between Mary’s experience
and that of the medieval Christian.46 Once the Annunciation was associated with Mary’s
reading (or prayer, or meditation on scripture), it became an experience that was implicitly, and for some explicitly, approachable through that same activity. If our continuing
concern thus remains with “her” book and the reading act it implies, it should now be
amply clear that actual literacy is not at stake; similarly, it must be remembered that
what is at stake is far more momentous, and could be and was being represented in several ways at once.
Otfrid’s account of Gabriel’s visit to Mary makes psalter prayer into an attribute
of Mary’s devout way of life and is neither concerned with the specific event of the
Annunciation as conception nor with a causal relationship between it and Mary’s
reading.47 This latter notion is, in fact, an ancient one, but it rather arises in connection
with Mary’s reading of the prophet Isaiah. The idea that Mary “had read” the prophetic
words announcing her own role in the Incarnation occurs in the biblical commentaries
of the church fathers, and the difference between these and one twelfth-century witness,
the Cistercian abbot Aelred of Rievaulx (d. 1166), is most revealing.48 Both Ambrose
(d. 397) and Bede (d. 735) mention that Mary had read, before Gabriel’s arrival, of the event
that was to be fulfilled in her and emphasize the idea that the meaning of the prophet’s
image was not clear to her; even she could not know how it was to be accomplished.
As Ambrose put it (commenting on Gabriel’s words): “Denique, ‘Accipe,’ inquit, ‘tibi
signum: Ecce virgo in utero accipiet, et pariet filium.’ Legerat hoc Maria, ideo credidit
futurum; sed quomodo fieret, ante non legerat” (“Indeed,” he says, “receive unto yourself
the sign: behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son” [Isaiah 7:14]. Mary had read this,
thus she believed it would happen, but how it would happen, this she had not read).49
The idea of reading enters into the commentary on Luke to demonstrate a theological
45 See note 37, above.
46 Constas, Proclus, pp. 315–58, argues that the idea of Mary spinning at a loom operated as a
similar “bridge” for the Christians of fifth-century Constantinople.
47 Most telling on this point is the fact that Otfrid’s otherwise copious account entirely omits the
crucial words, Spiritus sanctus superveniet in te, et virtus Altissimi obumbrabit tibi; see VollmannProfe, Evangelienbuch, pp. 205–6.
48 SAP, pp. 64–66.
49 Ambrose, Expositio evangelii secundum Lucam, p. 38. The passage from Bede, which is nearly
identical to Ambrose’s, is found in In Lucae evangelium expositio 1.35, p. 33: “Quia ergo legerat, ‘Ecce
virgo in utero habebit et pariet filium’ [Isaiah 7:14], sed quomodo id fieri posset non legerat merito
credula his quae legerat sciscitatur ab angelo quod in propheta non invenit.”
58
58
readIng as sponsa et mater
idea: Mary represents humanity in its unenlightened state before the Incarnation. What
was not yet written, she had “not yet read,” that is, she could not yet know. In addition, neither commentator mentions when Mary read the prophecy; indeed, legerat might mean
she had previously committed it to memory by whatever means. The important idea is
the state of her and our knowledge before the coming of Christ; what was knowable was
what was “readable.” What happens in this moment is no less clear. As Ambrose goes on,
“Hodie primum auditur, ‘spiritus sanctus superveniet in te’ et auditur et creditur” (For
on this day was heard for the first time, “The Holy Spirit shall come upon you” [Luke
1:35], thus it was heard and thus it was believed).50
By the mid twelfth century this idea has been altered in telling ways. In a sermon
for the feast of the Annunciation, Aelred of Rievaulx envisions the very event as follows:
Ingressus, inquit, angelus ad eam. Non est igitur inventa foris in oculis carnis, non est
inventa in nundinis. Intus erat, in secreto cubiculo suo erat, ubi orabat patrem suum
in abscondito. Audeamne conicere quid eo momento temporis agebat, quibus utebatur
meditationibus, quali oratione pascebatur? Forte in manibus tenebat Isaiam et ordine
legendi in illud inciderat capitulum: Ecce virgo concipiet et pariet filium et vocabitur
nomen eius Emmanuel.51
(The angel came to her, it says [Luke 1:28]. This did not happen out of doors under
worldly eyes, it did not happen at the marketplace. She was inside, concealed in her
chamber, where she was praying to her father in seclusion. May I venture to suggest what
she was doing at that moment in time, to which meditations her attention was devoted,
what prayer she was savouring? Perchance she held in her hands the book of Isaiah, and
in her reading had just come upon the chapter: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear
a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel [Isaiah 7:14].”)
Aelred’s portrayal changes the emphasis entirely. His interest is in the moment, eo
momento temporis; he seeks to know the precise state of Mary’s mind when Gabriel
arrived and thus to enter into her experience.52 Aelred in fact revisited the same moment
in two other sermons, always with the same intense concentration on Mary’s meditation
over the very prophetic words to whose fulfilment she will lend the flesh:53
Credo quod in hac serie lectionis humilitas et caritas in Virginis pectore compugnabant,
… Ecce virgo concipiet. Felix, inquit, virgo cui cum virginitatis signaculo caelestis
promittitur generatio! Felix venter in concipiendo, felicia ubera in lactando, felicia
brachia in amplectando! … Forte in hac meditatione concalvit cor eius et aculeis
amoris excitabatur affectus eius et in lacrimas solvebatur. Forte sic affectam angelus
inveniens: “Ave,” inquit, “gratia plena.”54
50 Bede (see the preceding note) follows Ambrose in this respect as well. For either commentator,
the focus of argument is faith as opposed to skepticism; Mary’s faith in what she had read properly
disposes her for the event that makes the truth manifest, once and for all time.
51 Sermones, 59.9–10, 2B:121.
52 Bernard of Clairvaux amply displays the same interest in his In laudibus “Maria, mit den Augen des
Mittelalters betrachtet, war der Inbegriff einer b ü cherhungrigen, lesefreudigen und wissenschaftlich
gebildeten Frau,” Schreiner, “Marienverehrung,” 317. Virginis Matris, otherwise known as “Missus
est.” See the discussion in the next chapter, pp. 102–6.
53 Sermones, 9.18–19, 2A:74–75; also Sermones, 60.16, 2B:132–33.
54 Sermones, 59.10, 2B:121.
59
readIng as Mary dId
59
(I believe that while she was thus reading, humility and love were wrestling with one
another within the virgin’s breast. … “Behold a virgin shall conceive.” [Isaiah 7:14] “O
how happy,” she says, “is a virgin to whom it is granted to bear heavenly offspring with
her virginity intact! O happy womb thus conceiving, happy breasts thus giving milk,
happy arms thus embracing!” Perhaps her heart burned in just such a meditation and her
emotions were stirred by the sharp prickings of love and released in tears. Perhaps she is
thus moved when the angel, arriving, says “Hail, full of grace” [Luke 1:28].)
In none of his three variations on this moment does Aelred state explicitly that Mary
conceived on being greeted by the angel, but neither does he state how or when this
otherwise occurred. By leaving the idea unspoken, he arguably allows it more inner force.
Twice he sets the scene thus: “Hauriebat sibi aquas in gaudio de fontibus Salvatoris, id
est de Scripturis sanctis, ubi legerat et Virginis partum et Salvatoris adventum.” (She
was drinking unto herself the “waters with joy from the fountains of the Saviour”
[Isaiah 12:3] where she read of the virgin giving birth and the Saviour’s coming.)55 What
interests him is in its essence ineffable, an experience in which scripture becomes so
immediate, so present, as to be imbibed into the self as body. The event is therefore
not named but instead made present for our own contemplation. Moreover, by making
Mary’s reading of the prophecy, the signum, into the act that prepares its fulfilment in
her body, he makes her experience of the conception, the fulfilment of the letter as flesh,
into her own reading—that is, praying–act. Mary does not merely submit to the will of
the Lord, she reads in a way that implies a role in making it come about.56
A similarly striking alteration of the scene surrounding the idea of Mary’s prayer
is recorded in the very early German poems of Frau Ava (d. 1127). In “Das Leben Jesu,”
Gabriel arrives to find Mary “where she sat alone in her room. She was praying for the
world’s salvation.” The ensuing exchange is then summarized first with these lines:
si bette umbe daz heil der werlte,
do chom ir des sie gerte.
der heilige spiritus sanctus
der bephiench ir die wambe.
er bescatewet ir den lichnamen,
do wart si swanger ane man.57
(She was praying for the salvation of the world, and then that came to her which she desired.
The holy spiritus sanctus impregnated her womb. It beshadowed her body, and so she became
pregnant without a man.)
As if to leave no shadow of doubt, Gabriel then speaks to Mary of the conception in the
perfect tense, “niht furhte du dir, / iz ist dir wol ergangen. / du hast ein chint enphangen”
55 Sermones, 9.18, 2A:75; s.a. 60.16, 2B:132–33.
56 This idea also emerges in twelfth-century commentaries on the Song of Songs. Possibly the
earliest example is found in Rupert of Deutz. See below, pp. 253–55; also Ohly, commentary to
Trudperter Hohelied, p. 843.
57 “Das Leben Jesu” 4,6–12, in Ava’s New Testament Narratives, pp. 32–34. Further references are
parenthetical.
60
60
readIng as sponsa et mater
(Do not be afraid: it has gone well with you, you have conceived a child) (6,4–6). Finally,
Mary’s experience of the event is described such that Gabriel’s greeting transmits the
breath of God to Mary’s womb:
Do diu magit des verstunt
daz iz chome vone got,
und der hailige adem
entswebete ir den lichnamen
von den vuozen unze an den wirbel,
do gihte her himel zuo der erde.
daz wart da ze stete scin,
do er sprach daz wort sin.
(7.1–8)58
(When the maiden understood that it came from God, and the holy breath shook her body from
her feet to the top of her head, then Heaven was married to the earth. This was revealed there
and then, when he spoke his word.)
Ava’s interest in the Annunciation, like Aelred’s, lies in knowing that moment of Mary’s
experience when the Word was conceived in the body.59 This moment constitutes the
original act of Christian knowing (or reading), without which no other is possible. But
the female recluse of Bavarian or Austrian origin writing in the vernacular at the beginning of the twelfth century testifies emphatically that this interest neither began with
Aelred nor with the Cistercian order, nor was it limited to the speculation of exegetes.60
Aelred’s sermons instead represent the highly interiorized and refined expression of
what was undoubtedly already a popular idea: Mary conceived the Word when Gabriel’s
words were delivered to her ears and as the result of an inward preparedness that was
represented as her reading of scripture, or better: the conception occurs as the perfect
realization of her reading act.
In visual art, the change in the understanding of this moment is mirrored in the portrayal of Mary with an open book. The first known instance in which the text of Isaiah
58 I have modified Rushing’s translation. “Heiliger adem” is indeed “Holy Spirit,” but the meaning
“breath” is still present in the German, and the conception could also be attributed to a breathing
from God by way of Gabriel or the Holy Siprit; see Hirn, Sacred Shrine, pp. 297–98. In the parallel scene in “Johannes,” Ava names the Spirit in Latin as spiritus sanctus (in Ava’s New Testament
Narratives, line 8,1).
59 Similarly, Gössmann, Verkündigung, p. 102. Frau Ava treats the Annunciation similarly in a
second poem on John the Baptist, where it seems that Gabriel actually announces and even effects
the conception (Gössmann, Verkündigung, pp. 100–101), as he speaks of it first in the present and
then in the perfect tense: “Uber dich chumet spiritus sanctus, / Er bescatewet dine wamben. / du
hast ein chint enphangen” (The spiritus sanctus is coming over you and beshadowing your womb.
You have conceived a child) (Ava, “Johannes,” in Ava’s New Testament Narratives, 8,1–3, pp. 33–34).
60 Ava most likely did not enter the religious life until middle age, after having raised two sons. She
is thought to have become an inclusa under the protection of the Benedictine abbey of Melk. See
Rushing, introduction to Ava’s Narratives, pp. 1–5.
61
readIng as Mary dId
61
Figure 2.5. Annunciation. Capital from the Abbey of Saint-Martin d’Ainay, Lyon, France,
first third of the twelfth century. Photo © Morgan Powell.
7:14 is inscribed on the pages she holds is found on a capital of the abbey church of SaintMartin d’Ainay in Lyons and dates from the first third of the twelfth century (fig. 2.5).61
Pächt speculated that the ruled lines in Mary’s open book as portrayed in the St Albans
Psalter may have been intended to receive the same inscription.62 But perhaps the real
content is no longer to be sought there, on the parchment page of Mary’s book or of the
psalter itself. By adding the dove that enters Mary’s ear, the image dramatizes Mary’s
lectio of the prophetic word as the event in which Christ the Word was given human
61 The four capital letters would read E[cce] V[irgo] C[oncipiet] E[manuel]. Miles, “Origins,” 654–55,
is both misinformed on the dating and misreads the letters; cf. Reveyron, “L’Abbatiale de SaintMartin d’Ainay, p. 110; and, in the same volume, Parron and Becker, “L’Abbaye d’Ainay,” pp. 137–40.
62 As the picture cycle neither contains any other inscription nor any place in which one seems
likely or planned, this one would have acquired an extraordinary importance. Where a book
appears in earlier Annunciation scenes, it is likewise always blank.
62
62
readIng as sponsa et mater
flesh. Aelred’s sermons and Ava’s poems, I would argue, offer the verbal equivalent; in
visual representation, the materialization of the idea has simply made the implicit role
of the ear visibly manifest. In all three cases, the content, what is known or “read,” is to
be sought in the heart or soul of the listener or viewer.
Whether in verbal or visual images, the imagination of the early twelfth century dramatically isolates the Annunciation as “that moment in time” when Mary experienced
the fulfilment of the letter of scripture as life; the moment of the conception is identified with the fundamental exercise of Christian reading, that is, Christian knowing. It is
not simply the idea of the ignorance of the church before the coming of Christ that is
at stake here but rather the passage from imperfecta to perfecta cognitio as a moment
of illumination experienced in the—female—body. This is the perfect, or perfected
act of Christian reading, and Mary’s perusal of an open book is only a metaphor for its
point of departure; indeed, the substance of her knowledge as of her experience reaches
her by way of the ear, from which it passes directly into her venter and viscera, her womb
and her flesh. Such an understanding of Mary’s reading act has everything to do with the
medieval import of the letter and the spirit of the Word but next to nothing to do with
the social value, distribution, extent or even the use of literacy. Indeed, as we shall see,
its greatest potential for the twelfth-century imagination lay in the opposite direction: in
empowering an “illiterate” gnosis.
Mary’s Reading and the Song of Songs
In terms of the desire they express to enter into and know Mary’s experience, Aelred’s
sermons are no exception. They are rather typical of the development of Marian devotion beginning in the late eleventh century. As both Ann Astell and Rachel Fulton have
shown, the intense desire to enter into Mary’s experience by meditating on the scriptural images of her life is at the centre of and even provides the decisive impetus for
Marian commentary on the Song of Songs, the interpretation of the biblical text as a
prophetic account of Mary’s life.63 Fulton, above all, has argued that this reading of the
sensus historicus, far from being merely another application of the established method
of scriptural allegory, served the discovery of a new experience of the text. Where all
commentators of this period share an idea that the Song expresses the feminine position of the soul before God, within the Marian interpretation this position is not allegory but history, fulfilled one time for all in the life of a woman. By mapping the images
of the dialogue between lover and beloved onto the events of Mary’s life, the exegetes
of this mode did not aim beyond the text to an objective, allegorical signified but rather
sought a way to sink further into it, to fuse with its “historical”—that is, subjectively
lived and experienced—meaning, a “sensible union with both Mary and Christ in time.”64
Consequently, this reading of the Song for historia resulted in a transformation of the
exegetical category itself. That dimension of meaning that could otherwise be taken
63 Astell, Song of Songs; Fulton, “Mimetic Devotion”; and Fulton, “ ‘Quae est ista,”
64 Fulton, “Mimetic Devotion,” 116; see also Fulton, “Quae est ista,” 117.
63
readIng as Mary dId
63
as identical with the letter of the text was now instead the gloss, but both letter and
gloss began and ended in lived, bodily experience.65 The truth of history, previously
constructed as the report of an eyewitness, became one in which “witnessing” instead
occurred through the reader’s experience of the text, the apprehension of “historical”
truth through contemplation of the prophetic image.
The preconditions for this development are two, and their collusion is of paramount
significance for later developments. One resides in the history of exegesis, another in
the history of the liturgical expression of devotion to Mary. The idea that the prophetic
images of the Old Testament could reveal to the contemplative reader details that were
“missing” from the New goes back to the fathers of the church, who relied on it as a
way of discovering (invenire), among other things, the narrative details of the Passion
and Crucifixion, which were so sparsely accounted for in the Gospels.66 Christ himself
had authorized such discovery, indeed, made it an obligation, when he said, necesse est
impleri omnia quae scripta sunt in lege Moysi, et prophetis, et psalmis de me (all things
must needs be fulfilled which are written in the law of Moses and in the prophets and in
the Psalms, concerning me) (Luke 24:44); the evangelists had shown the way by making
the fulfilment of prophetic images explicit in the Gospel narratives. The fathers then
undertook to “complete” the Gospel narrative by scanning the Psalms—held in part to be
Christ’s own words—and the texts of the prophets for prefigurations that would allow
them to “see” what the Gospels themselves did not reveal. In this way, the contemplation
of scripture accomplished a kind of visualizing completion of the scriptural narrative.67
It is not until the turn of the eleventh century, however, that we find this store of images
beginning to serve as the basis of sequential devotions to Christ’s life and Passion in
image and text.68
Some three centuries previous, the Song of Songs began to fill a role with regard to
Mary’s life analogous—but not identical—to that of the Passion Psalms (Psalms 21 and
56) for the life of Christ.69 In the entirety of the Gospels, Mary spoke only six times, the
last occurring at the wedding at Cana (John 2:3 and 2:5). An account of her suffering
over the Passion and Crucifixion was all but entirely lacking. And yet who could have
experienced these things more intensely, who could have felt them more personally, than
Mary? The devotional need to know and enter into Mary’s experience became acute with
the introduction of the feast of her Assumption into Heaven, which occurred in the West
beginning ca. 800. The new feast became “one of the most solemn observances of the
medieval church, ranking alongside Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, and the dedication of
65 Fulton, “Mimetic Devotion,” 116.
66 The foundational study is Pickering, “Crucifixion,” here p. 24. See also Marrow, Passion
Iconography, pp. 190–205.
67 Pickering, “Crucifixion,” pp. 233–34, 245–47, 307 and passim; Bestul, Texts, p. 27.
68 Marrow, Passion Iconography, pp. 8–9; Bestul, Texts, pp. 34–35; Hamburger, “Illustrated Prayer
Book,” p. 184 and passim; and Constable, Three Studies, pp. 203–6. For indications of an earlier tradition, see Deshman, “Galba Psalter,” 118–19, 123–24.
69 In what follows, I am summarizing Fulton’s conclusions in “Quae est ista,” and “Mimetic
Devotion.”
64
64
readIng as sponsa et mater
the local sanctuary as one of the five principal celebrations of the liturgical year.”70 But
there existed no vita and no body, no relics, textual or physical, from which to commemorate, to relive in memory, the events of Mary’s death and her Assumption into Heaven.
The Song of Songs, the sole scriptural dialogue between a man and a woman, allowed the
development of a liturgy in which the voices of the scriptural text were understood as
Mary’s and Christ’s, embodied in the hymns and antiphons of the chanting choir. Thus,
through the language of desire of the biblical text, members of the medieval church could
“hear” the words and “see” the events that transpired between the eternally suffering
sponsa derelicta and mater dolorosa and her son as she was reunited with him and
crowned the queen of Heaven. Words that bespoke the desire of every soul were fulfilled
once and for all as the historia of the mother of God.
In this way, as Fulton argues, the words of the Song of Songs served the celebration of
the Assumption as the “relics” of Mary’s life, the vestigia of her path through, and passing
from, this world. To know Mary’s historia was a work of memoria that operated through
imaginative identification, that called upon the participants to experience the truth of
Mary’s words by witnessing their expansion into narrative as the drama celebrated
through the liturgy of her feast. In this way also, Mary’s experience of the fulfilment
of scriptural prophecy as life became that of the participants in the celebration: “The
feast, transformed into a bridal occasion, celebrated the Incarnation of the bridegroom
both in the womb of his mother-bride and in the heart of the faithful soul.”71 Standing
at the core of the experience was, however, not an allegorical embodiment of the collective, the church, but instead the eyewitness, “a woman, a woman who had lived and
died in history.”72 The idea of reading scriptural prophecy to recover sacred history as
presence—what the fathers had done—became an act identical with Mary’s experience
as sponsa et mater, the body that bore the Word. “Mary’s reading” was then an experience of truth available to every human soul.
The attempts of twelfth-century exegetes to know Mary’s historia through the prophetic images whose truth she fulfilled thus undertook as formal exegesis what had been
developing since the ninth century as the object of the experience of Mary’s feast.73 Mary’s
historia was now completed as Christ’s had been. These two dimensions of “imaginated”
historia subsequently found a powerfully productive point of intersection in Mary’s experience of Christ’s Passion.74 Some of the earliest and most influential Passion narratives are
in fact Marian laments, planctus Mariae, that begin to appear by the mid twelfth century.
Mary is interposed between the contemplative viewer and the suffering Christ to the extent
70 Fulton, “Quae est ista,” 55–56.
71 Fulton “Quae est ista,” 117.
72 Fulton “Quae est ista,” 117.
73 Before Rachel Fulton’s work, the Marian interpretation was generally regarded in the scholarship as simply a “type” of a primary identification between the sponsa and the church. Fulton has
convincingly established the priority of the liturgical texts as well as their independence from the
preceding commentary tradition.
74 With this coinage “imaginated” I wish to draw attention to the role of visualization in contemplation, without implying the whimsical or “unreal,” as would the term “imaginary.”
65
readIng as Mary dId
65
that what the viewer “knows” is far more Mary’s grief and compassion than the sufferings
of Christ himself.75 In these texts, Mary figures as the very source of our ability to know
and, above all, to experience what happened. That is, our ability to know Christ’s suffering
through scripture has been superseded by Mary’s perfect knowledge-in-the-body of all
scriptural prophecy. We now experience the truth of the prophetic images not as exegetical
conjecture but rather as historical narrative delivered to us by the woman “who was there.”
The history of the Marian interpretation of the Song of Songs thus exhibits the way
this project of biblical exegesis related to deeply felt devotional needs and, most importantly for the idea of reading, made the Song into a dramatic performance, “a dialogue
between Mary and Christ” that “could bring the worshiper into their presence, transcend time, and allow him or her to participate in their conversations.”76 Through the
Marian interpretation, the exegesis of the Song of Songs potentially opens onto and abets
the development of a different kind of reading experience altogether, one focused on
identification with narratives that are performed for the reader by texts, but also by
pictures, and may take place as much through oral (for example, liturgical) performance
as through meditative reading. The Marian trajectory became the key to a translation
or recasting of the monastic reading experience of the Song into other media and for
other social groups. Mary’s place in the literature (both devotional and dramatic) and
iconography of the Passion represents the most prominent and influential outgrowth of
this development. But, as we shall see in the later chapters of this book, the same can be
found at the very centre of a new poetics of vernacular narrative.
The full potential of this narrative, experiential dimension of the images of the
Song—the potential to transform the relationship between reading subject and
Word—was first fully articulated, if not discovered, by Rupert of Deutz; or rather,
this potential is performed in Rupert’s commentary on the Song of Songs as a reading
act.77 With the protagonist of this performance, at once Mary and Rupert’s feminized
reading self, Rupert’s text reveals the contours of the woman in the reading mirror
that later becomes the focal point of a vernacular poetics. As such it must be examined
in some detail before I return, in conclusion, to its relationship to Hildegard’s
audio-visual gnosis.
75 In Stabat mater, Andreas Kraß argues that the twelfth century constitutes the true high point
of compassio as a devotional ideal, with Mary at its centre. The first fully developed Marian lament
is the Planctus ante nescia of Gottfried of St Victor (d. 1194; sometimes attributed to Gottfried of
Breteuil, as in Kraß, Stabat mater, p. 121), followed by the Stabat mater, which Kraß redates to the
twelfth century (Kraß, Stabat mater, pp. 133–42), and the decisively influential Quis dabit capiti
meo (before 1205). See also Mertens Fleury, “Klagen,” pp. 143–52; and Bestul, Texts, pp. 121–28.
76 Fulton, “Mimetic Devotion,” 115.
77 Rupert’s text cannot be called the first commentary devoted to a Marian interpretation.
This distinction may belong to the Sigillum beatae Mariae of Honorius Augustodunensis, now
thought to date from ca. 1100; see Flint, “Chronology,” 215–42. On Honorius’s text as a Marian commentary, see Ohly, Hohelied-Studien, pp. 251–54; Fulton, “Mimetic Devotion,” 91–93 and 102–3; JP,
pp. 244–88; and Matter, Song of Songs, pp. 155–58.
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Reading as Mary Did: The De incarnatione Domini
of Rupert of Deutz
Femina mente Deum concepit, corpore Christum
Integra fudit eum nil operante viro.
(Rupert of Deutz, CCC, Epistula)
Reading scripture in a new way was a lifetime career for Rupert of Deutz. In fact, his
commentary on the Song is one of the last works in a long list of firsts in the history of
exegesis, listed by his modern biographer as follows:
The first work ever on the whole of scripture under a single theme (the work of Triune
God), the first new commentary on John’s Gospel since Augustine, the first new commentary on the twelve Minor Prophets since Jerome, the story of salvation narrated as an epic
battle, the most innovative commentary on the Apocalypse before Joachim, and the first
consistently Marian interpretation of the Song of Songs.78
But if Rupert unlocked many new doors in the art of exegesis, he did it with only one
key: he dispensed with the ossified tradition of commentary that consisted in the citation and collation of the church fathers and, with audacious and unwavering confidence,
put personal inspiration in its place, his own reading experience of the text.79 Moreover,
Rupert was the first author to locate his authority to expound the meaning of scripture in
visionary experience, an idea that Hildegard and Elisabeth, and after them a long line of
women mystics, would shape into a rich tradition.80 As such, and as he himself protested,
he was hesitant to speak openly on the source of his knowledge.81 But the period from
1125 to 1127, the same in which he composed his commentary on the Song of Songs,
saw Rupert under increasing pressure to silence critics and oblige supporters with a
fuller justification of this self-acknowledged novum.82 To a great extent, the most profound and extensive answer that Rupert gave or could give on his ability to read through
experience rather than through the authority of the learned doctors was his meditation
on the text of the Song as an account “Of the Incarnation of God.”83
78 Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz, p. 372.
79 Ohly, Hohelied-Studien, p. 129; also pp. 124–28; and Ohly, commentary to Trudperter Hohelied,
p. 324; Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz, pp. 67–72 and 345–52; Meier, “Literarische Sendung,” 29–52;
Haug, “Autorität,” pp. 56–58.
80 McGinn, Growth of Mysticism, pp. 328–29; Dinzelbacher, Mystik, p. 103. See also Meier,
“Literarische Sendung,” 30–32, 50; Meier, “Befreiung,” 267, 271, 282–83; and Powell, “Authorial
Identity,” pp. 267–95.
81 Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz, pp. 349–50.
82 Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz, pp. 336–52.
83 Thus the title Rupert gave his text, now published as Commentaria in Canticum Canticorum,
cited hereafter as CCC. Shortly afterward (ca. 1127), Rupert offered a more direct, autobiographical
account, or apologia, in the twelfth chapter of his De gloria. There he made the defiant claim that
“[one] visit from the Most High is worth ten such patres” such as his critics demanded he cite, and
that “I speak and have written down [only] what comes to me from that teacher [the Holy Spirit]”
(De gloria, p. 386).
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In Rupert’s reading, the entire biblical text of the Song of Songs is focused on one
event: Mary’s conception and bearing of the Word. Rupert takes up the idea of Mary’s
experience as a passage from imperfect to perfect knowledge of the Word and uses
the erotic images of the Song as the key to feeling and knowing as she did. This places
the life and reading of the exegete in the same position vis-à-vis the text as the one
he “reads” in Mary’s experience. That is, Rupert’s commentary tells two historiae,
two dramas of awakening to the Word are intertwined within it. The first recounts
Mary’s awakening as prophetissa, mater, and finally magistra or mater ecclesiarum.
The second, parallel to hers, is that of the reader-exegete, Rupert. Both become
“mouths” of scripture, able to expound its full meaning because of the reading performance that, for each, Rupert’s text represents.84 For Mary, this is accomplished in
the body, as her life fulfils and manifests the scriptural images of the Song and other
prophetic texts. For Rupert it is possible through Mary’s body; that is, not only by
reading her life as embodied truth but by repeating her own revelatory act of reading
in the body.85
The three stages of Mary’s awakening correspond to her conception of the Word at
the Annunciation (prophetissa), her own experience of the Word as flesh (mater), and her
awakening as the fountain of all church doctrine (mater ecclesiarum). Rupert constructs
his own “awakening” to the task of writing the commentary on the Song around three
visions in the prologue, which, taken together, make clear that he is to “make the lamb
with the Holy Trinity”; that is, in no uncertain terms, give the Word flesh as Mary did
before him.86 This is the Annunciation to Rupert.87 His account of Mary’s experience
is thus from its inception simultaneously reading and imitatio, but, as the text amply
reveals, this imitatio is not contained in the emulation of virtues or admired actions. It is
a quest to know and fuse with Mary’s experience in all its psycho-sexual specificity, the
process whereby he discovers how to be she, in which he relives her historia. Rupert is
fully aware of the magnitude of this claim, and far from shying away from the opportunities it offers to sensualize and eroticize reading, far from forestalling implications that
point to a somatic gnosis, a knowing that resides entirely in the senses and the body, he
rather orchestrates the full power of the text in service of his reading performance. One
is confronted here with the force of conviction of a writer who is offering the key to his
most profound creative experience.
84 Similarly, Fulton, “Mimetic Devotion,” 103–4; also in JP, pp. 323–36; Fulton’s reading and my
own of Rupert’s text are highly complementary; I am grateful to her for reading and commenting
on mine in 2002.
85 Meier, “Literarische Sendung,” 32 and passim, analyses Rupert’s slightly later commentary
on Matthew to conclude that the experiential identification between reader and work being
read, between commentator and the voice of scripture, constitutes in itself Rupert’s reading
method and a new model of authorial consciousness of epochal significance. See also Haug,
“Autorität,” p. 116.
86 “… per visum mihi dicere visa es: Pascha cum beata Trinitate facies” (CCC, p. 7).
87 Cf. Astell, Song of Songs, pp. 65–66.
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I cited earlier a passage in which Rupert saw the reading of scripture as the starting
point for all knowledge of God that is accessible in this life; in the commentary on the
Song of Songs, this starting point is Mary’s life:
Ecce hic, o Maria beatissima, ecce hic nobis “quasi per speculum in aenigmate” sublucet
vita tua, vita inclita. … Totus fere huius capituli sensus ad illud pertinet, quod in te latet.
… Admoveamus igitur hoc speculum et diligenter oculis cordis exinde contemplemur, ut
saltem aliqua ex parte cognoscamus sanctissimam conversationem tuam.88
(CCC, p. 106)
(This, then, o most blessed Mary, this chapter [that is, Canticles 5:2–8] illuminates your
life for us “as a mirror darkly” [1 Corinthians 13:12], your glorious life. … Nearly the
entire meaning of this chapter pertains to that which lies concealed in you. … Let us
approach this mirror, then, and contemplate thence lovingly with the eyes of the heart, so
that we may know if only in part [cf. 1 Corinthians 13:9] your most holy life.)
This statement on Mary as mirror, which might easily have found its place at the opening
of the text, Rupert reserves for the point at which she awakens to expound and teach as
mater ecclesiarum. The reason for this delay lies in the importance that Rupert attaches
to “this chapter” of the biblical text: it corresponds not only to Mary’s awakening but also
to his own. “This chapter” refers to the verses of Canticles 5:2–8, which recount how the
bride is woken to open to her beloved and contain possibly the most intimately erotic
imagery of the text. When he reaches the chapter’s fourth verse, “Dilectus meus misit
manum suam per foramen, et venter meus intremuit ad tactum eius” (My beloved but his
hand through the opening, and my belly trembled at his touch), in one of the best known,
if not fully understood, passages of his commentary, Rupert substitutes two of his own
visions for an explication of the experience that is properly Mary’s life—and reports
them as the experiences of quaedam adulescentularum, “one among the young women.”89
Scholarship has long recognized that Rupert later revealed the same visions as his own
experiences and as the indispensable keys to his exegetical vocation.90 Nevertheless, this
young woman is not “a certain nun”; neither does the interpolation of a young woman
signal an attempt to disguise Rupert’s experience as that of another. This identity rather
generalizes his experience as that of an altera Maria, a reader and emulator of Mary’s
experience.91 Rupert’s text takes place not only as a dialogue between Mary and Christ
but also, even primarily, as a dialogue between Mary and the inquiring voice of the exegete, her emulator, whom she addresses either as one among her adulescentulae or as
88 CCC, p. 106.
89 CCC, p. 110.
90 Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz, pp. 50–53; analysed in Meier, “Literarische Sendung”; and Meier,
“Befreiung.”
91 Ohly, Hohelied-Studien, p. 133, took quaedam adulescentularum to mean “a nun.” The phrase
has since been consistently mistranslated or overlooked in the scholarship. For more on this point
and its significance for Rupert’s reading persona, see Powell, “Authorial Identity,” pp. 285–86. The
new German translation in the Fontes Christiani series gives “ein junges Mädchen,” (p. 419), thus
perpetuating the error, which follows from a failure to grasp the significance of this reading persona
within the project of the text.
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one of her amici. Mary thus addresses the readers and auditors just as, in the biblical
text, the sponsa addresses the daughters of Jerusalem who accompany her search for
the beloved. That is, Rupert places himself and his readers/auditors inside the drama
of the biblical text; they are female characters and witnesses, as well as Mary’s pupils
and “readers.”92 The exegete then, does not interrogate tradition or learning as to the
meaning of the text. He interrogates Mary, and what she can tell him, she knows because
it happened to her, and he believes because he sees and hears it—and finally because
it happens to him. The expositio mystica, as Rupert states in his prologue, “stands more
firmly,” when constructed over (superaedificata) a foundation in the events of a certain
time or identifiable facts (historiam certi temporis vel rei demonstrabilis). His experience
vindicates the biblical text by revealing its meaning in and as historia.93
The “young woman’s” vision functions as the answer to the exegete’s question
to Mary:
Quomodo, o dilecta, “misit dilectus tuus manum suam per foramen”? Quae est illa
“manus”? Quod est illud “foramen” Quis ille “tactus”? Quis ille “tremor”? Quomodo
“intremuit venter tuus,” aut quid est venter tuus? Mirantes ista quaerimus, quia talium
inexperti sumus.94
(How, o beloved, did “your beloved put his hand through the opening.”? What is this
“hand”? What is this “opening”? What the “touch”? What the “tremor”? How did “your
belly tremble,” or what is your belly? We ask this in wonder, for we are without experience of anything comparable.)
The concluding statement is then at least implicitly denied by the answer, as Rupert
reports that nostra aetate (in our time), “The young woman, that is, the soul devoted
to these nuptials and earnest in these wedding songs, was recalling the same [verses],”
when she had a half-waking experience on her bed that reduplicates all the queried
particulars of the biblical text.95 There is no further response, either from Mary or the
exegete, none, that is, but the second “vision” Rupert relates (non vana visio, as he states,
but rather a somatic experience), in which the same tremor was felt again, this time as
an experience of bodily fusion with the crucified Christ, “so that mouth seemed moved
to mouth, her whole body to his body.”96 This second vision, beyond being reported elsewhere as the crucial turning point that enabled Rupert to write, recalls the opening of
both the commentary and the biblical text, in which Mary experiences “the kiss of his
92 With this technique Rupert is continuing a tradition that goes back at least as far as Origen; see
Robertson, Lectio divina, pp. 165–69.
93 CCC, p. 8.
94 CCC, p. 110.
95 In view of the confusion over this passage as only just discussed, it is best to clarify: I am conflating two successive paragraphs of the text here, the first beginning “Nostra aetate, quaedam
adulescentularum …” and then making a first account of the experience; the second beginning
“Memorabat etiam eadem adulescentula, scilicet anima nuptiis istis dedita canticisque nuptialibus
intenta, quoniam dilectus in visu noctis,” which further develops the same “vision” (it is, properly
speaking, rather an experience of unio mystica). Cf. CCC, p. 110.
96 “… ita ut os quoque ori, totumque corpus admotum videretur eius corpori,” CCC, p. 111.
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mouth” (Canticles 1:1) as the moment of the conception.97 The two visions together, then,
show the emulating reader having completed, as visionary experience, the same development revealed as Mary’s by the biblical text. “Reading Mary” is not so much exegesis
as it is a psychosomatic imitatio. The reading exegete seeks identity with Mary, fusion
with her experience, which he knows not through the Gospel but through the fusion of
the letter—the sensual images of the Song—with the gloss, her life. What Rupert reveals
in this text as Mary’s experience—and Rachel Fulton has called “the story of Mary’s contemplative development and visionary birth, of her awakening as the scriptural exegete
par excellence”—is thus also always implicitly his.98 In this way, Rupert’s commentary
relates the drama “Of the Incarnation of God” as the beginning of a new gnosis, and this
new gnosis, Mary’s reading, is the foundation of his vocation as scriptural exegete.
The commentary begins with the moment that is the key to its own existence, the
Annunciation to Mary, understood both as an intensely physical experience and as the
fusion of letter and gloss, prophetic image and life:
“Osculetur me osculo oris sui.” Quae est ista exclamatio tam magna, tam repentina? O
beata Maria, inundatio gaudii, vis amoris, torrens voluptatis, totam te operuit totam te
obtinuit penitusque inebriavit, et sensisti “quod oculos non vidit et auris non audivit et
in cor hominis non ascendit,” et dixisti: “Osculetur me osculo oris sui.” Dixisti enim ad
angelum: “Ecce ancilla Domini, fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum.”99
(“Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth” [Canticles 1:1]. What is this exclamation,
so great and so unexpected? O, blessed Mary, the floodwaters of joy, the force of love, a
torrent of pleasure filled you totally, possessed you totally, intoxicated you completely,
and you felt “what eye has not seen, nor ear heard, and what has never entered into the
heart of man” [1 Corinthians 2:9], and you spoke: “Let him kiss me with the kiss of his
mouth!” You spoke to the angel, indeed, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord, may it be done
to me according to your word” [Luke 1:38].)
Rupert’s opening takes the image of the Song as an intensified expression of Mary’s
words as reported by the Gospel, their meaning is “the same,” and both equally describe
an experience, which, in itself, reveals their equivalence to Mary alone:
Nonne sensus idem est in verbis seu vocibus diversis? Sicut audisti et credidisti, sicut
tibimet imprecando dixisti, “fiat mihi,” ita et factum est tibi. Deus Pater te osculatus est
“osculo oris sui.” Quis oculus hoc vidit? quae auris audivit? cuius in cor hominis ascendit?
Tibi autem, o Maria, semetipsum revelavit, et osculans, et osculum, et os osculantis.100
(Is this not the same meaning in different words and voices? Just as you heard and you
believed, just as you, beseeching yourself said, “let it be unto me,” just so it was done to
97 In his slightly later commentary on Matthew, Rupert makes a seemingly contrite admission of
a “foolish sentiment” that had led him earlier to “transfigure the narrative so as better to speak
the truth, and yet not allow the person to be recognized” (De gloria, pp. 394–95); see Powell,
“Authorial Identity,” pp. 281–87; and Meier, “Literarische Sendung,” pp. 29–52. See also notes 83
and 85, above.
98 Fulton, “Mimetic Devotion,” 94.
99 CCC, p. 10.
100 CCC, p. 10.
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you. God [the] Father kissed you “with the kiss of his mouth.” Who has ever seen this kiss?
what ear heard it? into whose human heart has it ever ascended? But to you, o Mary, he
revealed himself, the kisser, the kiss, and the mouth that kisses.)
In this moment, “when He with that vehement love and through the Holy Spirit implanted
the substance of his Word deep in your heart, in your womb,” Mary was granted full knowledge of scripture.101 Having first immersed himself in Mary’s experience of the moment,
the kiss, Rupert turns to its significance with the next verse, “Quia sunt meliora ubera tua
vino” (How much better is the milk of your breasts than wine) (Canticles 1:2). In the kiss
of the conception, Mary was nursed from the two breasts of the Holy Spirit. The first is
man’s redemption and had never been drunk of before (the New Testament), and the other
nursed the prophets and produced the miracles of the Old Testament.102 As he elaborates
somewhat further on, “all prophets were born out in you, because in your feeling as ‘the
Holy Spirit came upon you’ all prophecies and scriptures were conjoined with it.”103
Elsewhere, as we have seen, Mary is the speculum that is also scripture; she is also
called “secretarium omnium Scripturarum sanctarum” (the secret receptacle of all
holy scriptures).104 This kiss, unheard and unseen by any but Mary, is nevertheless that
experienced later in the text by the emulating adulescentula. And here, too, while he uses
an allegorical referent for the images of the text, Rupert insists on their physical realization as a woman’s experience. The moment is still emphatically that of the Annunciation
seen as conception, and the experience of the milk is a drinking in the womb, a gnostic
counterpart of sexual intercourse:
Utrorumque huiuscemodi uberum laetificata dulcedine ineffabili, dum concipis, o virgo
beata, … quibus duabus clausulis iam dicta significantur duo data eiusdem Spiritus sancti,
quid aliud diceres, nisi quia “meliora sunt ubera tua vino, fragrantia unguentis optimis?”
Non fueras experta vinum huius saeculi, vinum voluptatis carnalis, sine cuius ebrietate
nulla umquam mulier praeter te concipere potuit aut poterit, et tamen diiudicare nosti
quam melior aut vehementior, dulcior atque fortior esset voluptas sive amor Dei, in quo
concepisti, sine dubio potata illius torrente voluptatis.105
(Having been nursed by each of these breasts in unspeakable sweetness when you
conceived, o, blessed virgin, … when these two things had been spoken, which signified the same two gifts of the Holy Spirit, what else could you say, if not, “Your breasts
are sweeter than wine, and their fragrance surpasses all precious ointments” [Canticles
1:1–2]? You had no experience of the wine of this world, the wine of carnal pleasure,
without whose intoxication no woman before you was able to conceive, nor ever will conceive; and yet you knew to judge how much better, how much more vehement, how much
sweeter and more powerful was the desire, or love of God, in which you conceived, once
having drunk of the “torrent of that desire” [Psalms 36:9, 35:9].)
101 “… dum substantiam Verbi sui cum illo amore suo Spiritu sancto tuae menti, tuo ventri penitus
insereret” (CCC, p. 11).
102 CCC, pp. 11–12.
103 “Immo prophetae omnes ad te accesserunt, quia prophetiae omnium et Scripturae omnes in
tuum sensum cum superveniente in te Spriitu sancto convenerunt” (CCC, p. 12; see also p. 147).
104 CCC, p. 89.
105 CCC, p. 12.
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The difficulty of translating voluptas with one term in this passage—I have used
“pleasure” as well as “desire”—is possibly due to a play on yet another meaning of
the word: male semen.106 But the pun would only enhance an identification otherwise
completed in the text. Rupert is describing a moment in which scriptural images—words
of the prophets such as those of Solomon’s Song—fused with physical experience in the
same way and at the same time as the love of God (voluptas Dei) fused with the flesh of
Mary’s womb. The intensity with which the exegete explores the physical dimensions
of both image and event, letter and gloss, witnesses him seeking to know the experience in which Mary became, as she is named here, prophetissa. Like the visual portrayal
of the Annunciation beginning around the same time and like Aelred after him, Rupert
cites Isaiah’s prophecy in connection with this moment, but he opts for a variation of it
that occurs one chapter later in the biblical text: Et accessi ad prophetissam, et concepit
et peperit filium (And I approached the prophetess, and she conceived and bore a son)
(Isaiah 8:3).107 The emphasis for Rupert is displaced from the virginal birth to the way in
which Mary “became a prophet.”
At his point, Mary herself is still silent, her experience ineffable, and the “kiss” cannot
be communicated. When Rupert returns to the moment of the conception a second time
(to be discussed shortly), Mary as mater will speak her own experience to the amici,
her reading emulators and initiates.108 Finally—after Rupert’s text has reached its crucial midpoint (“Ecce in medio nuptiarum sumus”),109 and thus passed from the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy to proclamation of New Testament doctrine—Mary
will “awaken” to her calling as exegete with the words “ego os meum aperui in doctrina”
(I opened my mouth to teach).110 The kiss itself will be felt again “nostra aetate” by the
“young woman” who is Rupert as Mary’s reader. At this juncture of the text, then, the
exegete and Mary fuse, her experience is knowable to him, or “her.” More properly, the
hermeneutic distance between letter and gloss has been collapsed and with it the difference between his reading self and hers. But Rupert’s text does not content itself with
the justification of one inspired career. It constructs Mary’s moment of conception and
cognition as the redemption of the body and bodily vehicles of knowledge, that is, as a
new lectio in which the body can both perceive and reveal the Word.
Rupert’s identity as adulescentula in the text is far more than a convenient way
to project himself into the drama of the Song. This feminine reading identity is the
key to understanding how his visionary authority as exegete could become a model
of an alternative, women’s, or “illiterate’s” gnosis. He introduces his female persona as the “immature soul” (anima imperfecta), and as she “whose education is not
106 Lewis and Short, Latin Dictionary, p. 2013; Blaise, Dictionnaire Latin–Français, p. 860.
107 CCC, p. 12.
108 The amici are identified as the prophets and apostles (cf. CCC, p. 55)—that is, as the voices of
scripture. But as with the daughters of Jerusalem, the way Mary and Christ address them, explaining
their words, puts them in a position indistinguishable from that of the audience.
109 CCC, p. 85.
110 CCC, p. 112.
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yet complete.”111 The term adulescentula is generally identifiable with a position of
weakness and insufficiency before God—the same position then, that Hildegard
renames as paupercula feminea forma. Elsewhere, for purposes of contrasting his personally inspired exegesis to the learned methods that he rejected, Rupert was fond
of characterizing himself as an indoctus. For him this term meant “untutored monk”
as opposed to licensed schoolman or doctor.112 Speaking of the formal intellectual
training of the schools that others had pursued and he himself lacked, Rupert wrote
to Abbot Cuno in 1125, “I did none of all this; instead I was like the simple Jacob who
stayed at home with his mother.”113 The fact that prominent doctores such as William
of Champeaux and Anselm of Laon were among his most tenacious detractors lent dramatic force to this self-image.
Rupert was in reality by no means unlearned; the indoctus served him as it served others,
as a claim to personal inspiration through the Spirit. But Rupert took this claim much further than his predecessors in that he used it not as a topos of modesty or authenticity—not
as a way, that is, to reinforce his position within tradition, but rather as a way of introducing
a voice from outside it. As such, the topos alone was not sufficient to his claim of inspiration through personal visionary experience. In the adulescentula of the Song of Songs, an
immature female who witnesses Mary’s original reading in the body, he constructed a new
basis for his claim, one that is intrinsically appropriate to his exegetical project, because it
appropriates Mary’s experience of the Incarnation as the authority for a direct knowledge
of the Word that is free of “learned intervention,” because it is female.
In the prologue, Rupert traces his inspiration to undertake the task at hand to an
experience from his youth in which knowledge of Mary’s accomplishment is revealed to
him by the Spirit when “a whistling breath of air blowing in both ears, faster than can
be described, placed [deposuit] these verses in me”:114 “Femina mente Deum concepit,
corpore Christum / Integra fudit eum nil operante viro” (A woman conceived God in
her soul, Christ in her body / Intact she brought him forth without male intervention)
(CCC, p. 6). These verses mention neither the Song of Songs nor Mary by name. They
instead contrast a woman’s knowledge of the Word, simultaneous in spirit and body,
with “male intervention.” As noted earlier, the final vision reported in the prologue sees
Mary summoning Rupert to repeat her own miraculous bearing of Christ the Lamb.
Rupert’s initial auditory experience, on the other hand, collapses the idea of prophetic
inspiration as a breath of air (cited from the experience of Elias in 3 Kings 19:12) with
that of the conceptio per aurem.115 A patristic sermon, for example, evoked the latter with
111 CCC, pp. 13, 119; see also p. 138. The first instance follows from the introduction of the
adulescentulae in the biblical text at Canticles 1:2, ideo adulescentulae dilexerunt te.
112 Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz, pp. 347–48; Ohly, Hohelied-Studien, pp. 121–24.
113 Deutsche Mystikerbriefe, p. 32.
114 “… et ecce quasi sibilus aurae tenuis (3 Kings 19:12) per utramque aurem transcurrens,
velocius quam dici possit, istos in me versiculos deposuit” (CCC, p. 6).
115 The idea that Mary conceived through God’s breath, or a wind, also had its tradition and
could be assimilated to the conceptio per aurem; see Jones, “Empfängnis”; and Hirn, Sacred Shrine,
pp. 297–99; also below, pp. 238–39.
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these words: “Oh blessed Virgin … made mother without the coupling of man. For here
the ear was the wife, and the angelic word the husband.”116 The inspiration for Rupert’s
account would appear to lie in similar verses extolling Mary’s conception through the
ear, while transferring the receptive act to his own audition.
The verses placed in Rupert’s creative “womb” thus not only described the miracle
of Mary’s unaided conception of the Word but also his own calling to expound on scripture, most specifically, to bring forth the “flesh” of Mary’s experience from the images
of the Song of Songs.117 Where the idea at stake is this vocation, the opposition between
Mary’s experience of the Word and that effected by the intervention of man is manifest as one between divine inspiration—Rupert’s experience—and human learning. The
adulescentula thus provides Rupert with the perfect position to describe his reading self
vis-à-vis Mary. He is an “imperfect” or “immature” version of herself, the gender reversal
makes Mary’s teaching in the emotionally and sexually charged images of women’s
physical experience specifically appropriate not only to what he knows (his circumvention of learning or reading through previous authorities) but also to how “she” knows
(a different, bodily gnosis). Rupert’s new gnosis is thus female sui generis, in its beginning as in its end, in its relationship to learning, to the body, and to God.118
The adulescentula, marked as the female soul not suited to the man’s learning and
spiritual strength, learns from Mary because Mary’s way of knowing redeemed her entire
sex. When the prophetissa becomes the mater and first speaks herself of the ineffable to
her amici, she proclaims women’s redemption in the same breath as she proclaims the
fulfilment of the prophetic letter in her experience:
O amici, hoc ego experta sum. Humilitatem meam de illo accubitu suo sensit et respexit
et valde delectatus est et placuit sibi, quod in isto sexu tantam humilitatem invenit: in
isto, inquam sexu, a quo initium superbiæ generi humano superveniens totam massam
corrupit.
(CCC, p. 30)
(O my friends, this I have experienced. From where he reclined on his couch he perceived
and gave heed to the scent of my humility, and truly he was delighted and it pleased him
that in that sex such humility should be found: in that same sex, I say, from which superbia
sprang, thence to overcome and corrupt the whole body of the human race.)
116 “O Virgo benedicta … mater effecta absque alicujus viri copulatione. Ibi enim auricula uxor fuit,
angelicus autem sermo maritus exstitit” (PL 65:98), attributed to Eleutherius of Tournai, as cited in
Jones, “Empfängnis,” p. 153.
117 Similarly, JP, p. 338.
118 Powell, “Authorial Identity,” pp. 285–87. This becomes only more apparent in the commentary on Matthew, where Rupert mobilizes a still more explicit account of his “coupling” with the
Word—including an insemination of the uterus animae and a joining of reclining bodies, in which a
male form lowers itself in a dream onto the visionary and presses itself upon him like a seal upon
wax, perceived as a drunkenness in love (viva et vera voluptas). See Meier, “Literarische Sendung,”
39–44, esp. 42–43, who notes that the dates of the visions undoubtedly coincide with Rupert’s work
on the Song commentary; and JP, pp. 309–14. I cannot follow Fulton’s determination to render the
experience somehow genderless (JP, pp. 336–40).
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Letter becomes life in Mary’s body, as she emphatically proclaims with the words “ego
experta sum.”119 Mary is speaking here of the conception, seen to correspond to the
words of Canticles 1:11: nardus mea dedit odorem suum. Here and elsewhere in Rupert’s
text, Mary’s experience is referred to her sex specifically. She reverses the fall of the
body in Eve, and the reversal corresponds to a redemption not only of humanity but
also of woman’s body and of woman as body. This factum, proclaimed in its theological
import here, is evident on every level of Rupert’s project: the identification sought with
the images as a woman’s physical experience, the doubling of the “literal” meaning as
bodily experience both in letter and gloss, the claim to gnosis through a fusion with this
same literal physicality. But most of all it is evident in the way the fulfilment of the sponsa
as mater, the transformation of a woman’s body as a life-giving act, corresponds both
to the fulfilment of this text as life and to the knowing of all scripture In the body. Thus
Mary explains to her amici, Rupert and his readers or auditors, the prophetic knowledge
she received with the conception of Christ:
Prophetissa namque eram, et ex quo mater eius facta sum, scivi eum ista passurum. Cum
igitur carne mea taliter progenitum, talem filium sinu meo foverem, ulnis gestarem,
uberibus lactarem, et talem eius futuram mortem semper prae oculis haberem, et
prophetica, immo plus quam prophetica mente praeviderem, qualem, quantam, quam
prolixa, me putatis materni doloris pertulisse passionem? Hoc est quod dico: “Fasciculus
myrrhae dilectus meus mihi, inter ubera commorabitur.” O commoratio, dulcis quidem,
sed plena gemitibus inenarrabilibus!
(CCC, p. 32)
(For I was a prophetess, and from the moment that I was made his mother, I knew he was
going to suffer these things. When, therefore, I fondled such a son, born of my flesh, at
my bosom, carried him in my arms, nursed him at my breasts, and had always before my
eyes such a death as was destined for him, and foresaw everything with a prophetic, nay
rather, a more than prophetic mind; what kind, how much, and how extensive a passion
of maternal grief, do you imagine me to have endured? This is what I mean when I say: “A
bundle of myrrh is my beloved is to me; he shall abide between my breasts” [Canticles
1:12]. O sojourn sweet indeed, but filled with unutterable groanings!)120
Mary speaks, here and throughout, in the past tense of her own experience, which puts
her in the present of the reader who seeks to know that experience. This fact, coupled with
the physical and emotional intimacy that Mary offers her adulescentulae, renders complex
ideas of theology and gnosis as a mother would initiate her daughter into the heights and
depths of intrinsically female experience. Mary’s intervention in the text is not only drama,
it is also method, and one conceived around the “female” position of her pupil.
119 A later passage is more explicit. Speaking to Christ of an Old Testament passage just cited
(Genesis 19:26), Mary says, “Quam veraciter ille te appellaverit desiderium, ego maxime in visceribus
meis experta sum, et hoc amicis est intimandum” (I have experienced in my flesh and blood the
truth of his words when he called you [the bridegroom] the object of desire, and this must be made
known to [our] followers) (CCC, p. 56). Mary then speaks to the amici and the filiae Hierusalem of
the desire that is also theirs. On Rupert’s corresponding use of expertus sum and experimentum, see
McGinn, Growth of Mysticism, p. 328; and Miquel, “Expérience spirituelle,” pp. 56–58.
120 Trans. slightly modified from Astell, Song of Songs, p. 64.
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In passages such as the above Mary teaches the reading exegete how to read her life
by evoking as if in pictures the actions that constitute her fulfilment of the biblical text.
These pictures of her experience, and the narrative and emotional context they evoke,
are redistilled into the images of the biblical text and thus recommended to her emulating reader, who can become Mary through meditation on them, through “reading” the
images of the Song as the vestiges of her own reading life. The same connection Rupert
makes here between the fasciculus myrrhae and the “picture” of Mary holding in her
arms simultaneously her infant son and the crucified Christ grew into an independent
complex of image and text that continued to inspire meditational texts, devotional
images, and combinations of the two, including the figure known to art history as the
pietà, throughout the Middle Ages and beyond.121 The image aims at a moment of loving
identification with suffering that corresponds to Christ’s own descent and wounding
in love to redeem mankind. Mary as sponsa derelicta and mater dolorosa teaches this
moment of identification with her narrative experience, distilled into an image. We will
encounter a translation of the same image into vernacular narrative that is also profoundly aware of its significance as a woman’s gnosis in the final chapters of this book on
Wolfram’s Parzival. The woman as a focus for identification in suffering and love, whose
“reading” act can motivate God’s loving descent into the bride: this is likewise the same
woman that Chrétien de Troyes places at the beginning and end of Yvain’s narrative path.
Another image of woman as “reader,” one that identifies her sooner with the opposite
pole, Eve, explicitly makes her into a viewer whose desiring gaze is the starting point for
her transformation into Mary. Mary as magistra magistrorum recommends this reading
position explicitly to her adulescentulae as the image of a woman seduced by a picture. They are to imitate the biblical whore Ooliba, the woman whose lust for the forms
she sees painted on the wall led her to take their living counterparts as lovers (Ezekiel
23:14–17). The response of Mary’s followers is not a different one, it is only properly
directed to a different image:
Non, inquam, talis pictura haec, verumtamen aemulamini in melius visum illum et
concupiscentiam illam. … Et ego vobis dico: Sicut illa videlicet non Hierusalem, sed
Ooliba, exhibuit oculos suos videre viros depictos in pariete, videre imagines Chaldeorum
expressas coloribus, videre balteos eorum, tiaras eorum et formam eorum, ita nunc
exhibete oculos vestros, oculos interiores, videre dilectum hunc, videre aureum caput
eius, nitentes oculos eius reverendas genas eius, candida et gratiosa labia eius, tornatiles
et aureas manus eius, eburneum et sapphiris distinctum ventrem eius, rectissima crura
eius, et tangite suauissimum guttur eius, iuxta illud: “Gustate et videte, quoniam suavis
est Dominus.”
(CCC, p. 130)
(Not, I tell you, before a picture such as this, but indeed before a better you should emulate her same gaze and desire. … And I say to you: even as that woman—not Hierusalem
but Ooliba—opened her eyes to see men depicted on a wall, to see the images of the
Chaldeans expressed in painted colours, to see their belts, their crowns, and their bodily
beauty [cf. Ezekiel 23:14–15], so now you: open your eyes, you interior eyes, to see this
beloved, to see his golden head, his brilliant eyes, his awe-inspiring cheeks, his radiant
121 Schawe, “Pietà und Hoheslied,” 161–212.
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and glorious lips, his smooth and golden hands, his ivory stomach set with sapphires, his
upright legs. And touch his throat, surpassingly sweet, in accord with the words: “Taste
and see how sweet the Lord is” [Psalm 33:9].)122
Rupert is not only reading according to his own inspiration here; he is also expressly
reversing precedent: Origen, too, had briefly evoked Ooliba’s response in connection with
the reading of the Song, but as a negative counter-example.123 For Rupert, Ooliba’s lust
is the way Mary instructs her reading daughters to emulate her own life. Ooliba is to the
reader’s objective as Eve is to Mary. While Mary reverses the seduction of Eve by seducing the bridegroom with her humility, this fact takes place and is made known to her
followers in the language of human erotic love. That is, Mary’s reading relives, transforms,
and thus redeems the seduction of Eve. The reader/auditor, the adulescentula, seeks
identification with Mary, but the means and capacity to do so she inherits from Eve/
Ooliba, the woman as symbol of the flesh seduced. The woman-as-reader is suspended
between opposite manifestations of the identification between women and flesh, Eve
and Mary, and seeks to approach the latter by adopting and redirecting the response of
the former. Sacra pagina becomes an act of visual contemplation, sensory and sensual
desire, authorized by a female experience of the Word, reading as Mary did.
Rupert’s text thus displays a tendency to open onto a devotional practice focused
on images both as visible and physical experience and as moments of a narrative development, and it is important to emphasize the way this moment in devotional aesthetics
emerges inextricably bound to the idea of Mary’s experience as a woman’s reading. As a
reading identity, Rupert’s adulescentula represents the conflation of a series of dualistic
oppositions that formed the hierarchical scaffolding of medieval thinking about knowledge and its acquisition. These constellate around three related notions: the capacity for
and extent of learning, the limits of human knowledge of God, and the place of humanity
before God. As seen in the first chapter, the indoctus, the illitteratus, and the laicus are
all potentially facets of the negatively marked pole of the first opposition, that between
learned and unlearned. The immaturity that is emphasized in Rupert’s use of the
adulescentula, however, sooner recalls his own repeated citation of Paul’s words from
first Corinthians on perfecta and imperfecta cognitio, knowledge of God gained face to
face as opposed to that available in this life, which is received per speculum in enigmate,
“through a glass in a dark manner.”124 Paul equated perfect (and unattainable) knowledge with the man, vir, and imperfect knowledge with the child, parvulus.125 Finally, as
I have argued here, Rupert identifies most strongly not solely with the adulescentula’s
122 Trans. slightly modified from Astell, Song of Songs, p. 69.
123 Astell, Song of Songs, pp. 69–70.
124 Rupert cites 1 Corinthians 13:9–12 seven times in all, five times in the fifth book alone, which
recounts Mary’s awakening as exegete.
125 “For we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come,
that which is imperfect shall be done away. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But when I became a man, I put away the things of a child”
(1 Corinthians 13:9–11).
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immaturity but also with her gender; the figure perfectly accomplishes the jump from
Paul’s opposition to that between man and woman, or between Rupert and Mary. This
last opposition takes the duality beyond the realms of learning and social status and into
an ontological field in which the woman’s position corresponds to the flesh as opposed
to the spirit and to the body as opposed to the mind.
All three of these metaphorical fields meet in the idea of bodily vehicles of knowledge. The woman who is flesh is seen as limited to “non-cognitive” or “non-intellectual”
ways of knowing; she must learn through the body, identified with images and personal
experience, pictures and narrative. The laicus and illitteratus likewise learn through
“the eyes and ears,” that is, by example, through pictures and others’ oral explanations,
means that are “sensory” as opposed to the intellectual means of the literate and cleric.
Paul’s speculum was the favourite medieval image for knowledge gained through the
natural, visible world and became the characteristic justification for bestiaries and
other compendia of natural lore as well as justifying the place of pictures in these and
other works.126 That is, seen through the question of reading, of man’s ability to know
the divine, these three oppositions always potentially overlap, a fact that affords the
opportunity to mix and match their terms wherever a common denominator is at stake.
This is the possibility of which Rupert avails himself so as to equate Mary’s role in the
Incarnation with his own vocation to read scripture: once both are understood as ways
of “knowing the Word,” slippage and fusion can occur between other potential identities
on the same side of the different oppositions. The same possibility invites the paradoxical identification of Hildegard as laica et illiterata: as a woman, she cannot be clericus.
But Hildegard’s fate also exhibits the double jeopardy in the woman’s position: while the
illitteratus or the indoctus might represent a stage of individual development, potentially
to be surpassed, the woman’s relationship to the man’s knowledge was not one of lack
of training but rather of incapacity; her position depends not on education but on her
state of being.
What we encounter in Rupert’s use of the adulescentula as a figure through which to
engage in imitatio of Mary’s experience—and in the embodiment of this same figure in
Hildegard, to be examined shortly—is the point at which the articulation of reading and
gnosis, or a redefinition of the relationship between reading subject and Word, meets and
becomes co-generative with a new theology of the body and the flesh that, as Caroline
Bynum’s work has amply demonstrated, formed the foundation of late-medieval religiosity and shaped the development of women’s spirituality, in particular as visionary
and mystical experience.127 Bynum’s work focuses on an opportunity discovered in the
extension of the opposition between man and woman as spirit and flesh to that between
God and humanity. The Incarnation itself demonstrated that God could dispense neither with woman nor with flesh to assume human form and redeem humanity, and the
twelfth century—Bynum locates the beginnings of these developments in the writings of
126 On the use of the passage to justify new media in instruction see Powell, “Instruction for
Religious Women,” pp. 377–83 and 424–25; and Wenzel, Spiegelungen, esp. pp. 64–96.
127 See the essays collected in Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption; and Bynum, Holy Feast.
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Bernard of Clairvaux and other Cistercians among men, and in Hildegard’s and Elisabeth’s
writing among women—witnessed the discovery of this idea as a way of exploring the
human aspect of Christ. Christ’s flesh, his woman-self, was humanity’s way of knowing
him. Thus, men, to identify with their own redemption, identified with the feminine as
a reversal of their symbolic selves as man, spirit, and intellect. As Bynum puts it, “the
image of both sinful and saved humanity is the image of woman.”128 Both woman and
flesh undergo a revaluation and even a value inversion as the possible and indispensable medium of divine will: just as God required the vessel of woman’s, Mary’s, body
to take human form; so humanity as God’s flesh is afforded the possibility of epiphany
in the body. But woman is body and thus cannot know the Spirit except through this
exemption, through the flesh. Woman thus becomes a symbol of an imperative integration of the life of the flesh into that of the spirit, for which the authority is found in the
Incarnation and the model is Mary’s experience. In Rupert’s use of a feminine persona,
Maria imperfecta, as double of his own reading identity and a model offered readers and
auditors of his text, the same understanding redeems the faculties of sensory knowing
along with the corporeal vehicles of knowledge. Mary is the body as woman, as image,
as letter, as reader and as the flesh of Christ; all collapse into one moment of perfect
knowing that her life represents.
Reading as the Bride Embodied: Hildegard and Her “Publicists”
Hildegard’s awakening as prophetissa is the same awakening Rupert sees revealed in
Mary’s life as the Bride of the Word. As she stated repeatedly, her gift was one of reading,
of knowledge of the full meaning of scripture: “I know then by the book the interior
meaning of the explication of the Psalter, the Gospels and other scriptures, which is
demonstrated to me through this vision that touches me in heart and soul like a burning
flame, teaching me the depths of meaning.”129 The paupercula feminea forma who
penetrates to the deepest meaning of scripture “sine ulla humana doctrina” or “absque
doctrina ullius hominis” is a reading identity that follows precisely in the footsteps
Rupert set out before her.130 With the circumlocution of her sex, Hildegard identifies her
prophetic persona with the female principle as manifestation of the divine (as the Spirit
put it for Rupert: “Woman conceived God in her soul, Christ in her body”), and her claim
to have no experience of human learning is a claim to educational virginity that, from the
position of bodily identity with the female that distinguishes her from Rupert, does not
renounce the learned male but rather states the facts of her biography: “sicut indocta
mulier me docuerat.”131 The equivalence between the three positions, Mary’s, Rupert’s,
and Hildegard’s, only eludes modern sensibility because the common denominator
128 Bynum, Holy Feast, p. 265; see also pp. 267–68. The point is also emphasized by Astell, Song
of Songs, pp. 6–7.
129 Epistolarium, 1, p. 4; see also Scivias, 1, p. 4. For the vita, see above, p. 38.
130 Vita Hildegardis, 2.2, p. 128 (s.a. p. 38, above).
131 Vita Hildegardis, 2.2, p. 128.
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between them, reading, has shrunk in the succeeding millennium from its scope as a
metaphor for all human knowledge of the divine to the mere decoding of written signs
and interpretation of texts.
The Incarnation is the mystical centre and eternal wellspring of Hildegard’s theology.132 Mary’s role as model and originator of her ability to know and bear the Word
is nonetheless somewhat elusive in her works, but this is only because it is suffused
into her creative process and pervades her complex imagery in ways that are not
demonstrative but experiential. There are as yet few studies that attempt to grasp
Hildegard’s oeuvre through the interrelationship of music, text, image, and voice that
made up the experience at which all her creative production aims. In her attempt
to relate these different dimensions as they are found in the Scivias and the Ordo
virtutum—a work that, as a fully staged drama, realizes the otherwise implicit dimension of performance—Margot Fassler has shown how this process of suffusion of
a central, generative image—in this case, that of the Tree of Jesse as a figure of the
Incarnation—could, for those who both performed and witnessed these texts in their
monastic lives, accomplish a transformational experience in which they “lived” the truth
of the mystery that the image expressed.133 In this specific sense, Hildegard recreated
the experience of Marian imitatio as the formative centre of the spiritual identity of her
community and as an experience of presence in performance. This latter conclusion
only appears to go against the grain of the view that Hildegard was little concerned with
Mary’s person, with the events of her life as a focus for devotion. As Barbara Newman
observes, Hildegard’s disregard for the human biography of Mary was only a way of
affirming the supreme and all-encompassing importance of her transformative act: the
Incarnation.134 Bynum argues that this focus is the way to grasp the importance of Mary
not only to Hildegard but to medieval women’s spirituality generally.135 And, indeed,
Rupert’s understanding of Mary’s significance not only fertilized Hildegard’s imagination but also became, through the Speculum virginum, fundamental to a universal
model of women’s monastic, reading lives.
These larger developments are examined further in the next chapter. My concern
in the remainder of this one is to show first how Hildegard communicated her creative
activity as a reincarnation of Mary’s and then how readily the same idea was taken up by
her admirers and even explicitly referred to the model to which it was indebted, Rupert’s
awakening as exegete through Mary’s experience.
As suggested above, Hildegard suffuses the identity between her prophetic persona
and Mary’s bearing of the Word into the imagery of her texts. Thus, one of the most
telling testimonies to this identification occurs embedded in a threefold “annunciation”
from God at the beginning of the third part of Scivias. In the first instance, God, speaking
through a male figure seated on a throne, renews his command that she “Write what
132 Newman, Sister of Wisdom, pp. 156–95 and passim.
133 Fassler, “Composer,” p. 161 and passim; s.a. Holsinger, Music, pp. 87–136.
134 Newman, Sister of Wisdom, pp. 159–60; 187–88.
135 Bynum, Holy Feast, p. 269.
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you see and hear.” Hildegard, characteristically, humbly protests her unworthiness, and
pleads that he first
grant me the understanding that will enable me to give these mystical things recountable
form [ennarabiliter proferre] … strengthen me in the dawn light of your justice, in which
your Son became manifest, and show me in what way I can and how I should bring forth
[proferre] the divine plan that was concluded in eternal wisdom, how you wanted that
same Son to be incarnated. … You determined before all Creation in your simplicity and
in the fire of the Holy Spirit that your Son should rise up like a radiant sun in the morning
of virginity and truly, for the sake of humanity, take on the garment of humanity and
human form.136
That is, the key to fulfilling her commission is a complete knowledge of the mystery of
the Incarnation, an ability to bring forth mystical truth in narrative form. The “dawn
light” that Hildegard evokes is a characteristic image in her work for Mary at the moment
of the conception and as the feminine principle that gave birth to the son; it is no less,
however, an image of the bride from the Song of Songs.137 The dawn light runs through
this “annunciation” as a leitmotif that accomplishes the identification—as seen through
the eyes of God—of Hildegard with Mary. The second iteration, which follows immediately the reply just given, offers a rare acknowledgement of the scriptural archetype of
the image: “Et iterum audivi eum dicentem mihi: ‘O quam pulchri sunt oculi tui in divina
narratione, dum ibi surgit aurora in divino consilio!’ ” (And I heard him speak to me
again: “O how beautiful your eyes are when you recount things divine and the dawn light
arises there in the divine plan!”)138 The words collate language from several verses of
the Song of Songs—4:14, 2:1, and 6:9—such that Hildegard, Mary, and the bride become
one in a visual moment extolled by the voice, which, thus inspired, descends and fills
Hildegard with its light as it once filled Mary in her conception of the Word. Hildegard
does not generally display a preference for citation from the Song of Songs to describe
her place before God, but she is, all the more so, the bride of God even as Mary was; the
language that describes the bride’s experience is fused with the creative process that
brings forth her work.
Hildegard then responds with a renewed and more extended expression of her
unworthiness, to which the voice, concluding the discussion, commands,
Speak now, as you have been taught. It is because you are nothing but ashes that I want
you to speak. Speak the revelation of the Bread that is the son of God. … He himself begins
to stir as sanctity in the human person before it fully awakens within her. For this reason
136 “… ut mihi des intellectum, quatenus possim ennarrabiliter proferre haec mystica … confirma
me in aurora iustitiae, in qua manifestatus est Filius tuus, et da mihi quomodo possim et qualiter
debeam proferre divinum consilium quod in antiquo consilio ordinatum est, quomodo eundem
Filium tuum voluisti incarnari … hoc volens ante omnem creaturam in simplicitate tua et in igne
columbae scilicet Spiritus sancti, ut idem Filius tuus quasi splendida solis forma mirabiliter surgens
in incipiente capite virginitatis veraciter indueretur humanitate sumpta hominis forma propter
hominem” (Scivias 3.1, p. 329).
137 Gössmann, Verkündigung, p. 114; Newman, Sister of Wisdom, p. 166; Fassler, “Composer,” p. 166.
138 Scivias, 3.1, p. 329.
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God the magnificent, the glorious and incomprehensible gave to man a great instrument
(magnum instrumentum), sending His Son into the chaste purity of virginity.139
Hildegard is to understand the growth of her mission within her and her ability to
fulfil it as a parallel to God’s election of another humble virgin and her awakening to
the life contained in her womb. Mary’s virginity and humble state served to conceal
the secret within her “when in great silence the son of God came into the dawn light,
that is, into the humble girl.”140 Thus the voice gets the last word in the argument and
with it reminds Hildegard of the parallel between her self-description and that of the
virgin: “The Virgin herself lived in a poor and humble state, because divine majesty
wished to find her so. Now write as follows about the true recognition of the Creator’s
beneficence!”141
Mary, too, hesitated in her humility to acknowledge herself as the vessel of God’s
“eternal plan.” This exchange between another angelic voice and a new virgin turns
around forcing her to recognize the very grounds for her reluctance as identical to those
that distinguished Mary in God’s eyes to perform a task that is the archetype of her own.
The same fundamental identification underlies Hildegard’s descriptions of herself and her
task in others of her works, although this passage illustrates with unusual eloquence the
way she preferred to express it: not as dictum but as factum, not as an argument but as an
experience embedded in vision, in images that are the rhetoric of her audio-visual gnosis.142
Hildegard’s admirers and biographers were more direct in their statement of
her reading archetype. The testimony of her correspondents shows, in the words of
John Van Engen, that “An untaught or nearly illiterate woman, able to draw beneficial
communications from the depths of the divine hiddenness, … such a person was explainable only as a living intimate of the divine spouse, a dwelling place of the Spirit.”143 This
idea was frequently extolled in language calqued or quoted from the Song of Songs,
and not infrequently in direct comparison to Mary. But the most emphatic affirmation
comes from one who knew her well and admired her above all, Guibert of Gembloux.
With his first letter to Hildegard, Guibert describes Hildegard’s “extraordinary
and unheard of gifts” from the Holy Spirit in terms that make Hildegard fulfil for her
139 “ ‘Nunc dic ut docta es. Volo ut dicas, quamvis cinis sis. Dic revelationem panis qui Filius Dei
est. … Ipse initium suscitationis sanctitatis in homine exsistens, antequam in illo exsuscitetur. Unde
etiam magnificus et gloriosus ac incomprehensibilis Deus dedit magnum instrumentum, mittens
eundem Filium suum in pudicitiam virginitatis’ ” (Scivias, 3.1, p. 330).
140 “… quando Filius Dei in magno silentio venit in auroram, videlicet in humilem puellam”
(Scivias, 3.1, p. 330).
141 “Ipsa enim Virgo erat in pauperculis rebus, quia divina maiestas eam ita invenire voluit. Nunc
scribe de vera agnitione creatoris in bonitate ipsius sic” (Scivias 3.1, p. 330).
142 Further instances are found in Liber vitae meritorum, p. 291, and Liber divinorum operum, p. 462.
Holsinger, Music, pp. 124–25, sees the Virgin’s womb as the generative centre of Hildegard’s entire
creative oeuvre, likewise encompassing its communal performance, which “brings women together
in the clausurum ventris—the ‘cloister of the womb’ of the Virgin, … that physically constitutes their
institution and contains their musical lives.” See also Ferrante, “Hildegard,” pp. 104, 117.
143 Van Engen, “Letters,” p. 415.
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contemporaries the role Rupert gives to Mary. Her experience as the bride makes her
the fountain of all scripture. She is “like a pure vessel” into which the Spirit pours its
gifts, thus, “Truly, ‘thy breasts are better than wine’ to us, your fragrance better than the
‘best ointment’ (Cant. 1:1–2).”144 Guibert continues extolling Hildegard’s experience in
words from the Song of Songs for two paragraphs. In the second, he addresses her as
mater sancta, and she becomes, again like Rupert’s Mary, the origin of all church doctrine as the fons hortorum, from whose womb flow the “rivers of living water.” “Truly,” he
concludes in words from the Ave Maria, “save for her through whose Son we attain our
salvation, your grace is unique among women,” and like Mary, she exhibits the reversal
of the failing of her sex in Eve: “For through the same sex by which death entered the
world, life has been restored—through His mother. And the same hand that served us
the deadly cup of perdition has now poured out for us the antidote of recovery through
your salvific teaching.”145 In a gesture not atypical of his later letters, Guibert offers devotion to Hildegard as it is offered to Mary:
Hail, therefore, lady full of grace, after Mary, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among
women [cf. Luke 1:28] and blessed the speech of your mouth, which conveys the secrets
of invisible things to men, and couples the heavenly to the earthly, and joins the divine to
the human. Believing this with our whole heart, we confess with our mouth that you are
the fountain of gardens, the well of living water that flows from Libanus [cf. Cant. 4:15].146
“The speech of [Hildegard’s] mouth” is one with the fruit of Mary’s womb, which
it displaces in Mary’s prayer, and lest one not give this parallel its full force, Guibert
elaborates that Hildegard, too, “joins the divine to the human.” Once again the fons
hortorum completes the equation. Hildegard is quite simply Mary’s identity as magistra
magistrorum and secretarium omnium Scripturarum sanctarum embodied here and now
in the teaching of a living woman.
Whether Guibert’s rhetoric is inspired by Rupert’s text or another intermediary, it
establishes that, by the 1170s, the idea that Mary’s fulfilment of the prophetic images of
the Song of Songs is an act of reading, a kind of living exegesis that makes her the origin
of all scripture, can serve as a way of understanding a woman’s reading without learning.
Hildegard’s biographer, Theoderic, confirms this point in a way that makes the direct
connection to Rupert as a model all but unmistakable.147
The key passages to this identification occur exactly where one would expect them,
at the beginning of the vita’s second book, where Theoderic is concerned to establish Hildegard’s visionary authority. Having first solicited awe and disbelief over her
accomplishments (“Quis vero non miretur …”) he offers the following explanation:
Que omnia quia ei clavis David aperuit, “qui aperit et nemo claudit, claudit et nemo aperit,”
gratulari merito et cantare anime sue licuit, quod eam “rex in cellaria sua introduxerit,” ut
“inebriaretur ab ubertate domus” sue et potaretur torrente voluptatis sue [cf. Psalm 35:9];
144 Letters of Hildegard, 2:16–17.
145 Letters of Hildegard, 2:17.
146 Letters of Hildegard, 2:44.
147 Argued in detail in Powell, “Authorial Identity,” pp. 278–91.
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unde et ipsa, sicut scriptum est, a timore Domini concipiens pareret et spiritum salutis
super terram faceret.148
(Because all this had been opened to her by David’s key, the key that “opens and no one
closes, closes and no one opens” [Revelations 3:7], her soul could rightfully rejoice and
sing that she “had been lead into the king’s wine cellar” [Canticles 1:3], so that she might
be “inebriated of the abundance of his house” and made drunk by the torrent of his desire
[cf. Psalm 35:9], so that she, too, as it is written, conceiving from fear of the Lord might
give birth and bring forth the spirit of salvation on earth.)
When Theoderic uses the bride’s experience to explain Hildegard’s prophetic gift,
he, like Guibert, concentrates on the image of her “drinking” knowledge of scripture.
Rupert used the image of Canticles 1:3, introduxit me rex in cellaria sua, to describe how
Elisabeth, “in whose womb the Spirit had also been at work,” is introduced after Mary
into the mysteries of scripture.149 In Theoderic’s description of Hildegard, the same
equation between knowledge of scripture and the conception and bearing of a child
applies, but with reversed significance: Hildegard’s manifest knowledge of scripture
shows that she drank of the “torrent of God’s desire/pleasure/semen,” just as Mary did;
for good measure, Theoderic also cites Canticles 1:3, in effect combining the moments in
which, for Rupert, Mary and Elisabeth become prophetissae.
Theoderic’s account presents a battery of such textual allusions to Rupert’s prophetic awakening.150 A connection between the two had been noted before, though not
fully examined or appreciated; moreover, some have dismissed it as an invention of
Theoderic’s that is somehow at odds with Hildegard’s own.151 Our interest lies no less in
Theoderic’s contribution than Hildegard’s, but there is no need to postulate any crucial
difference between them. On the contrary: two scholars have shown that Hildegard’s
work betrays extensive knowledge of Rupert’s, and the connection is nowhere clearer
than in Hildegard’s concept of and justification for her own position as prophetissa.152
Like Rupert, she places herself in this regard directly in Mary’s footsteps. Theoderic’s
demonstration serves only to set the construction of Hildegard’s prophetic authority
explicitly into the mould from which it was first formed: that of Rupert’s adulescentula
from his commentary on the Song of Songs.
Rupert had revolutionized exegesis by interpolating his own “autobiography”—his
visionary experience—as the fulfilment of the biblical text, in effect as its gloss.
Theoderic’s account is constructed explicitly to accomplish the same; he announces the
interpolation of one of Hildegard’s visions into the text as proof of “how fittingly” the
148 Vita Hildegardis 2.1, pp. 118–20, emphasis added.
149 CCC, pp. 15–16.
150 Powell, “Authorial Identity,” pp. 283–89.
151 Klaes, “Einleitung,” Vita sanctae Hildegardis, pp. 61–63; Newman, “Hildegard,” pp. 16–34,
esp. 25–27.
152 Kerby-Fulton, “Prophet and Reformer,” pp. 70–90; Meier, “Autorschaft,” pp. 232–44, 261–62,
265; Meier, “Befreiung,” 282, 288–89.
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same biblical verse, Canticles 5:4, “can be applied to her.”153 What is inserted begins as a
vision but soon gives way instead to Hildegard’s account of her youth and education—
that is, to autobiography. In this way, Theoderic would seem to collapse Rupert’s account
from his Song commentary with the well-known “transfiguration” of the same in his
Matthew commentary, completed only slightly later.154 There Rupert inserted an autobiographical narrative in which the same visions reported for the adulescentula are claimed
directly, rather than through the biblical dramatis persona, as his own.155 Theoderic
frames the insertion of Hildegard’s autobiographical “vision” with the two halves of
the biblical passage (Canticles 5:4 and 5:5) that defines the visionary awakening in
Rupert’s original version, the Song commentary.156 That is, in Hildegard’s case, the identity of Rupert’s adulescentula is simply her own, or she is quadam adulescentula whose
experience serves to gloss the biblical text in our time. She embodies an identification
that, for Rupert as the receiving male, was accomplished through gender reversal. The
“awakening” of the bride and opening to her beloved (Canticles 5:5–6) is Hildegard’s
awakening to her vocation to preach and write, just as it had been for Rupert and Mary
before her.157
This gesture provides the logical and suitable completion of an identity Hildegard had
discovered and assimilated to her own voice decades earlier.158 Theoderic’s treatment
only foregrounds the way this identity is embedded in the history of exegesis and the
images of the Song of Songs; moreover, he again inflects the account such that Hildegard
appears not merely as indocta but rather as the illitterata limited to her vernacular.159 His
exposition of her prophetic authority operates to force recognition of her visionary gifts
as a re-embodiment of Mary’s reading nostra aetate in a psalter-literate woman.
The Marian devotion, or Marian epistemology, of Rupert and Hildegard was focused
on the Incarnation as a gnostic event, the moment when human flesh apprehended and
revealed the Word, when divinity became knowable and accessible as matter, as body.
Rupert’s De incarnatione Domini revealed this experience as one that was knowable and
readable in the Song of Songs as the images of the bride’s experience. Mary’s reading
revealed divinity in the body, redeemed the body as it redeemed the sex of Eve, even as
it revealed divinity in this most carnal and sensual, this most “female” of biblical texts.
Imitatio Mariae was, for Rupert as for Hildegard, identification with the sponsa et mater, a
way of reading and of re-experiencing the gnostic event in which sponsa becomes mater.
153 Vita Hildegardis 2.2, pp. 120–22: “Congruum autem videtur, ut hoc in loco scripta visionum
eius aliqua inseramus, et ex his, quam convenienter sententia illa de Canticis: ‘Dilectus meus misit
manum suam per foramen, et venter meus intremuit ad tactum eius’ sibi adaptari queat, videamus.”
154 The term is Rupert’s own in De gloria, p. 395.
155 Powell, “Authorial Identity,” pp. 281–87.
156 Vita Hildegardis 2.2, pp. 120–22; 130.
157 Vita Hildegardis, 2.3, p. 130.
158 As argued in Powell, “Authorial Identity,” passim.
159 Vita Hildegardis 2.1, p. 120; see the remarks in Klaes, “Einleitung,” p. 60.
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This same idea reveals where Rupert’s text and the Marian reading of the Song of
Songs contained possibilities to transform lectio that distinguish them from other contemporary and later understandings of this central monastic reading experience. As
Ann Astell lays out, to cast the act of reading in feminized terms became the hallmark
of twelfth-century commentary on the Song of Songs. Whether Marian or not, whether
Benedictine, Cistercian, or Victorine, “The exegetes all encourage their auditors to identify their ‘bridal self’ with the Bride, using the feminine figura as a way of evoking,
expressing, and directing the emotional domain within themselves.”160 But Rupert’s
adulescentula is not an alter ego of the reading self through which first to identify with
and then to transcend the carnal images of human experience. She is the reading soul’s
initiation into Mary’s experience of the Word, an experience itself so intimate—that
is, so physical—that it can never be surpassed. Its very carnality is its authenticity and
its objective.161
Rupert, then, put a woman on both sides of the epistemological mirror. The act of
reading the Song is one that seeks fusion with this female experience of the Word, the
body as woman reads the life of the woman as bride; “she” is the reader and what is
read, her experience is letter and gloss, starting point and objective. Only in this fusion,
which he expressed as startlingly physical and sensual, could he claim the privilege of
an alternative gnosis that bypassed the learned tradition of sacra pagina and that Mary’s
experience claimed as female (hoc ego experta sum). Rupert thus fully anticipated “the
descent of the divine into the weaker sex,” and revealed, in effect, the exegetical master
key to a new domain of women’s religious experience.
As I indicated in the last chapter, the packaging of Hildegard’s identity documents
with surprising fullness the ideas that accrued to the image of the woman-as-reader in
the twelfth century. Mary’s reading has its place at the centre of this complex image, as
one of the varying facets of one and the same mirror. But one more aspect of the fate of
Hildegard’s gnosis remains to be emphasized before this picture is complete. It is now
apparent that Hildegard, in adopting her identity as a poor, unlearned female form, was
donning a mask devised by Rupert. For her, however, the same must have seemed to
reveal her true identity as prophetissa. That is, just as she never claimed to be illiterate,
but only to have acquired full knowledge of scripture without learning, so she did not
foreground her sex as such, but only as a manifestation of identity with Mary’s gnosis.
She was, first and foremost, homo and, as such, knew God as feminea forma. But for her
contemporaries, admirers and “publicists,” another equation was only too clear, the one
inherent in the model she adopted.
Rupert’s reading begins and ends in the female, and for others, Hildegard manifested
this reading in her being, that is, she reads as Mary did, because she is a woman, and
woman’s reading proceeds without learning, because she is flesh; it is authenticated, as
160 Astell, Song of Songs, p. 10.
161 Astell makes clear in her discussion of other exegetes that the “feminine figura” is transcended
in the rhetorical structure of the reading process. See, for example, the analysis of Bernard of
Clairvaux in Astell, Song of Songs, pp. 73–77 and 89–104, esp. p. 94.
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we saw in the last chapter, by the incapacity, or “illiteracy” that is deemed a consequence
of woman’s nature. This is where Theoderic’s, and Guibert’s representations of Hildegard
diverge from her own, but in so doing they only restore the underlying assumptions of
the model on which she relied. Theoderic’s exposition of Hildegard’s prophetic authority
is argumentative where her own was experiential; it substitutes the rhetoric of biblical
exegesis for her complex use of imagery. Thus its rhetorical thrust lies in demonstrating
that Hildegard is the embodied bride; the sponsa et mater lives and speaks among us,
and as such she can only be a woman. Guibert’s praise of Hildegard as “the modern-day
Mary” reveals the same shift: Hildegard’s gift is a special privilege granted her sex. This
emerges in the passages quoted above when he sees Hildegard, like Mary, as the representative of “the same sex by which death entered the world,” the sex of Eve, and, equally,
in the way her sex invites him to refer the significance of the images from the Song to
the female body. The breasts that “are sweeter than wine” become, in his treatment,
her own, and the image expresses her importance to “us” as that of a mother to her offspring. In effect, a male church (clerical authority) is nursed from the breasts of a lowly
woman’s special intimacy with God.162 Like Mary, she was God’s “chosen vessel, dear to
God, pleasing to angels, indispensable to men,” and, as Guibert adds, no less beloved by
the clergy, “For they understand that the female sex has been divinely honoured through
the sacred merits of your excellence, and they see your glory, the glory of a woman given
new life by the Father, full of grace and truth.”163
Guibert thus recognized in Hildegard the “special privilege among the women of
our time” that was chronicled for the year 1159 by the author of the Annals of Pöhlde,
one granted the weaker sex as the embodiment of human incapacity before God.164 This
same, however, clarifies how Hildegard stood before the church: not as homo before God
but as a woman before the clergy, one who “teaches many through her sound doctrine,
pouring forth abundantly from her two breasts,” but who also “bears in mind her sex,
her appropriate condition, and especially the Apostle’s … prohibition” against women
teaching in church (cf. 1 Timothy 2:12).165
Rupert’s text thus potentially articulated a woman’s lectio, and when completed by a
woman, this lectio was no self-renunciation, not a reversal of a male identity, but an identification with herself as woman, as the weakness, humility, and ignorance—an emptiness longing to be filled—that Mary’s reading represents. Rupert’s circumvention of
learned tradition, applied to Hildegard’s case, is understood as factual incapacity, and
the reading identity of the adulescentula becomes biography as the laica et illiterata.
Women, Hildegard and Elisabeth and many others after them, now read through their
own physiological being and sexually defined selves, as vessels capable of conceiving and
162 Epistolae xvi, Letters of Hildegard, 2:16–17.
163 Epistolae xxii, Letters of Hildegard, 2:43–45.
164 Epistolae, xviii, Letters of Hildegard, 2:27. The same was a favourite argument of Abelard’s in
his letters to Heloise see pp. 146, 189–90, below, and Powell, “Listening to Heloise,” pp. 270–72.
165 Epistolae, xviii, Letters of Hildegard, 2:31.
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bearing the Word. Similarly, women’s physiological being is a living symbol of a bodily
gnosis. The profound implications of this moment for the development of women’s spirituality, mysticism, and late-medieval devotion have been amply demonstrated in the
work of Caroline Bynum. But the superstructure that accumulates over such historical
moments generally obscures from view the way they were perceived in their own time.
In the twelfth-century context, what we have observed is a redefinition of the reading
subject that gives reading form to a latent possibility of Christian gnosis. Its impact in its
own time is to be sought, accordingly, in a new poetics of reading and gnosis that takes
the woman as its focal, receptive point, and from there explores the relationship of alternative media—images, narrative, performance, and the vernacular as varying facets of
body and presence—to the enlarged, or recast, epistemological landscape.
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Chapter 3
CONSTRUCTING THE WOMAN’S MIRROR
The Speculum virginum
“Audivi et vidi”: Hildegard’s tirelessly reiterated description of her visionary illumination emerged in the last two chapters as, on the one hand, the announcement of a
reading that proceeds without training in letters and writing and, on the other, as the
moment in which the unlearned woman re-embodies Mary’s experience as sponsa of the
Word. To experience the meaning of scripture unlocked, unmediated and at once, was
to relive Mary’s original reading of the Song of Songs as Rupert of Deutz had read the
same in her wake. But Hildegard’s emphasis on the audio-visual nature of the message
sooner recalls the other epithalamic song of monastic spirituality, Psalm 44. “Audi filia
et vide” (Psalm 44:11), begins the psalmist’s instruction and praise of the bride as she
is led to meet the king at the heavenly wedding. Within the same two decades that separate Hildegard’s prophetic awakening from Rupert’s De incarnatione Domini, sometime
between 1125 and 1141, that is, the same passage was chosen to shape a programmatic
introduction to women’s instruction in scripture in the Speculum virginum.1 The work’s
original introduction, now found at the beginning of the third of twelve parts, assimilates
the psalmist’s song to the bride to its own call to instruction:
Audi filia et vide et inclina aurem tuam et obliviscere populum tuum et domum patris tui. Et
concupiscet rex decorem tuum. Audi sanctae ecclesiae filia, uni viro Christo Iesu virgo casta
desponsata et consignata, audi sponsum tuum ad æterna dona te vocantem, vide premia
premonstrantem, sequere precedentem.2
(Hear, daughter, and see, and bend your ear, and forget your own people and the house of
your father. So shall the king desire your beauty [Psalm 44:11-12]. Hear, daughter of holy
church, chaste virgin betrothed and promised in everlasting fidelity to Jesus Christ [cf. 2
Corinthians 11:2], hear your bridegroom calling you to eternal gifts, see the rewards he
shows you beforehand, so that you follow him who leads.)
The earliest and best manuscripts of the Speculum virginum come from important
monastic centres along the middle Rhine within Hildegard’s and Rupert’s greater
vicinity.3 By the late twelfth century, if not before, the oldest, known as manuscript L
(ca. 1140), belonged to one “Hugo magister” of the Cistercian abbey at Eberbach—a
mere day’s walk up the Rhine from Eibingen, where Hildegard re-established her own
community after leaving the Rupertsberg.4 Another, manuscript K, was written ca.
1 Powell, “Audio-Visual Poetics,” pp. 111–35.
2 Speculum virginum, p. 58; cited hereafter as SV. Translations are my own, assisted by the German
in the Fontes christiani edition and the selections found in Mews, Listen Daughter, pp. 269–96.
3 For a detailed account of the institutional history of women’s communities in the region, see
Felten, “Frauenklöster,” pp. 189–300.
4 London, British Library MS Arundel 44; see Palmer, Zisterzienser, pp. 72–80 and 144–47.
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1150 at the Benedictine abbey Maria Laach for use in the Augustinian congregation
of Springiersbach, near Koblenz.5 Whether Hildegard herself perused this work is far
from certain; it appears very likely, however, that she was intimately familiar with its
contents.6 The entire project is conceived as if her extraordinary case were recast as a
general method.
This “Mirror of Virgins,” the first treatise since the patristic period to offer a comprehensive introduction to the female monastic life, does so on the assumption that
women do not, and at least in the learned sense cannot, read. Its twelve parts with their
accompanying pictures are presented as if the transcript of oral instruction between the
magister, Peregrinus, and his female pupil, Theodora. The extant manuscripts—which
are plentiful even from the first century of its existence7—appear to have been used in
men’s houses, leading to the conclusion that the text was a handbook and sourcebook for
women’s male instructors and spiritual mentors.8 It thus offers an idealized portrayal of
practice and a model for its own use. Within this ideal model the audience reads, as we
shall see, in a way so fully compatible with Rupert’s and then Hildegard’s understanding
of Mary’s reading that it is best seen as the translation of the same into different media
for a new audience: the monastic art of lectio is recast as pictures and oral instruction
for the female religious. The injunction to hear and to see acquires tangible objects in
the oral address and the pictures, but even more so in a method conceived as if a dialogic
meditation on scripture presented through oral performance.9
Most likely composed and progressively adapted over a period reaching from ca. 1125
to ca. 1145, the Speculum virginum emerges in the middle of the most dramatic expansion
and reform of the monastic life in the history of the Western church.10 The Cistercian, the
Premonstratensian, the Carthusian, and the Gilbertine orders all originated between the
end of the eleventh and the middle of the twelfth centuries. The Cistercian order alone,
founded in 1098, had expanded by 1153 to well over 300 houses.11 The total number
of monastic houses in some regions probably increased by a factor of ten.12 Women
5 Cologne, Historisches Archiv W 276a, which also served as exemplar for the third extant twelfthcentury copy, Rome, Vatican Library, Cod. Pal. lat. 565 (MS V ); see Cohen-Mushlin, Medieval
Scriptorium, pp. 116–19; and Seyfarth, introduction to SV, pp. 45*–46*, 61*–62*. The Springiersbach
reform was heavily engaged in the foundation and care of women’s houses, as discussed in Felten,
“Frauenklöster,” pp. 257–63.
6 Also suggested in Fassler, “Composer,” pp. 157–59.
7 Ten manuscripts before the mid thirteenth century, an eleventh contains an excerpt.
8 Bernards, Speculum virginum, p. 12; Powell, “Audio-Visual Poetics,” p. 113; Powell, “Instruction
for Religious Women,” pp. 107–18.
9 Powell, “Audio-Visual Poetics.”
10 Seyfarth’s dating (introduction to SV, pp. 32*–37*) “bald nach 1140,” reflects little more than
the date assigned MS L. Cf. Jónsson, Miroir, pp. 171–74, esp. 172; and Powell, “Picture Program,”
p. 128n18.
11 Venarde, Women’s Monasticism, p. 13.
12 Constable, Reformation, p. 47. For estimates of the numbers of men and women concerned, as
well as the size of communities, see Constable, Reformation, pp. 88–92.
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loomed very large in this expansion, both in numbers and in substance, as it was only
in this period that a monastic life under the Benedictine rule—one parallel in practice
and equivalent in profession to that of monks—was broadly established and given clear
institutional form.13 Two of the new reformed orders, the Premonstratensian and the
Gilbertine, were founded expressly as double orders, with men and women living under
the same rule and jurisdiction. Their foundation was preceded by a concerted movement
within the Hirsau Benedictine reform in southern Germany to integrate women into
the order in double monasteries; the Augustinian canons likewise founded numerous
double houses or entered into looser associations with women’s communities for which
they provided pastoral care.14 Elsewhere, entire female monastic congregations sprang
directly from the activity of reform-minded thinkers: the charismatic preacher Robert
of Arbrissel founded the abbey of Fontevraud to house his female following in 1101; by
his death in 1116 it had fifteen daughter houses scattered across western France; by
1149 the number had grown to nearly fifty.15 When the all-but-outcast Peter Abelard
assumed the burden of housing Heloise and her sisters in the 1130s—themselves previously disowned by the Benedictines at Argenteuil—at his oratory of the Paraclete, the
modest foundation grew to comprise six daughter houses by 1163.16 Reliable figures
recently compiled for England and France show a fourfold expansion in the number of
women’s communities between 1080 and 1170, from around 100 to over 400.17 Similar
expansion has long been acknowledged in Germany.18
The dramatic increase in the numbers of women in the monastic life placed the
church before the enormous challenge of providing for their pastoral care, for the performance of the mass, preaching and confession, and religious instruction. The urgent
need for more priests, canons, and monks to assume these duties is palpable in many
sources, as are the disputes that often arose over the legitimacy of the intervention,
over the challenge it presented to monastic vows of seclusion and chastity, and, most
often, over the assignment of responsibilities.19 Evidence of positive engagement is no
13 Bertelsmeier-Kierst, “Bräute Christi,” pp. 1–7; the situation should not, however, be over-simplified,
as emphasized in Felten, “Frauenklöster,” pp. 189–95. A useful overview of female religious houses in
the earlier period is Gerchow, “Klöster und Stifte,” pp. 156–62; also Delarun, “Monachisme,” pp. 1–20.
14 Visually demonstrated by the map in Krone und Schleier, p. 309. See also Hotchin, “Female
Religious Life,” pp. 59–83.
15 Venarde, Women’s Monasticism, p. 62; see also Felten, “Verbandsbildung,” pp. 306–21.
16 McLaughlin, “Heloise the Abbess,” pp. 8–9; and Felten, “Verbandsbildung,” pp. 287–301, esp. 299.
17 Venarde, Women’s Monasticism, pp. 11–12.
18 For Benedictine and Augustinian foundations in the period 1050 to 1200 the current state of
research is displayed on the map in Krone und Schleier, p. 309. Bernards, Speculum virginum, p. 1,
estimated the number of women’s monasteries in Germany at seventy in 900, 150 in 1100, and
500 by 1250; Bertelsmeier-Kierst, “Bräute Chisti,” p. 7, counts 220 Cistercian houses for women
in Germany by the mid thirteenth century, making them far more numerous than those for men.
19 These duties would be formally institutionalized as the cura monialium in the course of the
thirteenth century, primarily among the Dominican and Franciscan orders. See Küsters, Garten,
pp. 170–72; Schreiner, “Seelsorge,” pp. 53–65; and Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen, pp. 199–318.
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less striking, however. Beyond its celebrated story of frustrated love—and head-on confrontation with sexual desire in the religious life—the correspondence of Abelard and
Heloise has been incisively interpreted as putting forward a carefully wrought argument justifying men’s tutelage of the female religious and serious engagement of their
specific practical, liturgical, and spiritual needs.20 That Abelard filled this role for the
Paraclete is amply evident: before his death in 1142, he left the nuns with a body of
writings that “define the authority and the justification for their religious life,” including
the first medieval monastic rule for women since the sixth century and a considerable
body of sermons and liturgical texts.21 We also know that Abelard’s literary efforts in this
direction were avidly received elsewhere. The Guta-Sintram Codex from the Augustinian
house of Marbach in Alsace, so named for the canoness and the priest who wrote and
illuminated it, uses one of Abelard’s sermons for the Paraclete as a pièce justificative for
the relationship between male and female religious that the codex itself serves and in
some ways embodies.22 The codex contains texts for use in the canons’ pastoral care of
the women, while a necrology that was maintained for both communities by the women
makes up the body of the book. A necrology serves monastic memory of and prayer for
the dead; the same reciprocal benefit is what Abelard so avidly seeks for himself from
the sisters of the Paraclete.
Such relationships are not atypical. The mutual benefit envisioned, the intensity with
which it is pursued, and the willingness to experiment are features as deserving of appreciation in the pastoral writings of Abelard as they are essential to an appreciation of the
Speculum virginum or the subject of the next chapter, the St Albans Psalter. The same are
reflected in other literary and artistic examples of a new engagement of women’s needs
that cluster around the middle of the twelfth century: Irimbert of Admont’s commentaries
on the Old Testament, which originated in sermons and lessons for his monastic sisters,23 a
commentary on the Song of Songs written by Wolbero of St Pantaleon for the Benedictine
nuns of Nonnenwerth—the first ever specifically addressed to women,24 another commentary on the Song of Songs, the first in any vernacular, written for a women’s community most likely within the Hirsau reform;25 Aelred of Rievaulx’s Rule for Female Recluses,
with its intensely “visual” meditations on the life and Passion of Christ,26 and a group of
illustrated monastic prayer books that circulated in Germany and include possibly the
20 Von Moos, “Palatini quaestio,” 124–58; also Powell, “Listening to Heloise,” pp. 255–86.
21 Abelard, Epistres, 7, pp. 107–47; and “Abelard’s Rule,” 241–92; Abelard’s rule, however,
seems never to have been put into effect, either at the Paraclete or elsewhere; see Haarländer,
“Chancengleichheit,” pp. 41–60, esp. 55, 60. For a complete list of Abelard’s writings for the Paraclete
and their modern editions, see Mews, Peter Abelard, pp. 36–41 and Appendix 2.
22 Strasbourg, Bibliothèque du Grand Séminaire, MS 37, dated 1154–58; see Griffiths, “Abelard’s
cura monialium,” 57–88, esp. 79.
23 See Beach, “Claustration,” pp. 57–75.
24 Ohly, Hohelied-Studien, pp. 271–76.
25 Known as the Sankt Trudperter Hohelied; study and historical context in Küsters, Garten.
26 See below, pp. 144–46, 154–56.
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earliest cycles of illustrations supporting such meditations.27 These works represent the
beginnings of a new literature dedicated to the articulation and development of women’s
spirituality, monastic and otherwise. A new literature, however, assumes instruction in
how to read. Once again, this might or might not mean training in literacy; in any case, it
means an introduction to the function and place of “what is written” in the monastic life.
As a work that served equally well within different reformed orders and is found within
little over a half a century of its completion in an area stretching from Bohemia to eastern
France, the Speculum virginum claims a prominent place in the vanguard of new forms of
interaction and collaboration between men and women in the religious life, and above all
in women’s introduction to the monastic culture of scripture, or lectio.
The relationship between the literacy skills of its female audience and the audiovisual method of instruction is articulated in the Speculum virginum in terms of a now
familiar duality: privilege goes hand in hand with incapacity, and, as a rule, the latter
serves apologetically to justify the former. As virgins the women are singled out for a
“special” and elite experience of scripture; the nature of this experience is, however,
determined by limitation: as women they are repeatedly identified as the weak sex
(sexus fragilior or infirmior) and thus as bound to the senses and the body, which is seen
as confining their understanding to the literal meaning of scripture.28 The use of the
pictures is justified in analogous terms, favouring the allusion to Gregory the Great’s
equation: what scripture offers to those who read, the picture offers to the illiterate.29
This equation, while conventional, is applied with real intention, for it is indeed alternative access to the meaning of scriptura, and not simply written texts, that is truly at stake.
When Theodora asks at the end of part 5 for an explication of the parable of the Wise
and Foolish Virgins, Peregrinus replies:
Quod ergo de hoc capitulo queris, sicut a patribus accepimus, pauca ponenda sunt,
premissa tamen figura, ut consodales tuæ, si forte quod legunt non intelligunt, vel
proficiant ex forma subposita, quia ignorantibus litteras ipsa pictura scriptura est et
exemplo excitatur ad profectum, cui littera non auget intellectum.
(SV, 5, p. 159)
(What you seek on this passage of scripture, as we have received it from the fathers, will
shortly be our subject. This picture precedes, however, so that your sisters in communal
life may progress through a substituted figure if perhaps they do not understand what
they read, for this picture is scripture for those who are ignorant of letters, and they may
be incited to improvement by example for whom the letter does not aid understanding.)
27 Hamburger, “Illustrated Prayer Book,” p. 151.
28 See, for example, Theodora’s naïvely “letter-bound” inquiries, SV, 4, p. 113; 6, p. 175; 9, p. 287;
and Peregrinus’s increasingly impatient responses to such inquiries towards the end of the work: SV,
12, p. 352; and 12, p. 357; also Powell, “Audio-Visual Poetics,” p. 114; and Powell, “Instruction for
Religious Women,” pp. 145–50. This representation of the inquiring pupil as a simpleton is exceptional within the genre tradition of the dialogue; it is also oddly mismatched with the knowledge
and understanding of scripture Theodora displays elsewhere: Flanagan, “Medieval Dialogue,”
pp. 192–93.
29 See, in addition to the passage cited here, SV, 1, p. 39, and 10, p. 310; also Powell, “Instruction
for Religious Women,” pp. 119–21 and 145–48.
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The picture is neither here nor anywhere else a substitute for the ensuing
text—Peregrinus’s oral explication of the “chapter” in question. The activity of reading
refers instead to the encounter with sacred scripture, though possibly in a context other
than (or in addition to) that of the ensuing conversation, and clearly occurs with or without
understanding. It does not necessarily even imply functional literacy, for the “readers” can
still be referred to as ignorantes litteras, and the letter is no aid to their comprehension.
The picture is instead a substitute for a process of meditation on the scriptural passage,
and in this sense Gregory’s apology can serve as a literal and pointed description of its
function. What the study of scripture offers to the literate, the picture offers those who do
not read: a deeper understanding of God’s word. What the Speculum means by “reading”
is thus, again, the process through which the Word was apprehended and assimilated to
life. For its female audience, this process is clearly seen to revolve around the oral presentation of the magister, a performance of the voice of Christ. In the final part, part 12,
the audi-et-vide opening is paraphrased within the dialogue when Peregrinus says, “Hear,
then, the voice of Christ, in His voice, the law of Christ, so that in Christ and through Christ
you overcome what you once were.” In this case Theodora can respond, “This voice let me
hear through you, this law let me hear through you.”30
The Speculum virginum constructs female monastic identity as a reading process,
seeking to transform “an old woman into a new” by introducing its female audience into
the specific relevance of scripture, in particular scriptural imagery, to their monastic
lives. It thus presents us with the singular opportunity to observe the point at which
reflection on a “female” way of knowing the Word meets the lives and needs of large
numbers of monastic women—as church authority and an ancient ontology portrayed
them. The casting of the audience as semi-literate auditors and viewers performs as a
smokescreen for the major innovation that the work represents: it undertakes to transform the lectio divina into an audio-visual performance, an instructor’s manipulation of
voice, physical presence, and visual perception that is to deliver the Logos as a present,
sensory experience.31
The lectio divina was the monk’s experiential counterpart of the scholastic’s exegesis; twelfth-century writers, above all, elaborated it as a progression from lectio
through meditatio to oratio and, ultimately, contemplatio.32 Rupert’s commentary on the
Song of Songs is in effect a performance of the lectio divina that is offered as authoritative
and exemplary and thus displaces or fuses with exegesis. The way the analogy between
reading process and exegesis is understood and implemented in the Speculum will
emerge below. It is in the pictures themselves, however, that the intricate connections to
Rupert’s text are most evident, and these have been previously elucidated.33
30 “Peregrinus: Attende igitur vocem Christi, in voce legem Christi, ut in Christo per Christum
vincas hoc, quod fuisti. … Theodora: Vocem istam de te audiam, legem de te legam” (SV, 12, p. 360).
31 Powell, “Audio-Visual Poetics,” pp. 115–16 and passim.
32 Edsall, “Reading,” pp. 1–18 and passim; Stock, “Lectio divina,” 172–77. For a complete overview,
see Robertson, Lectio divina.
33 Powell, “Picture Program,” pp. 142–52; Greenhill, Voraussetzungen, pp. 88–97.
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The Speculum virginum went through several stages of composition, of which the last
two can still be clearly reconstructed: the audi-et-vide opening once served as the introduction to a complete version of eight parts, now parts 3–10. To this trunk, two parts
each were added to the beginning and end, now parts 1, 2, 11, and 12.34 The addition
thus displaced the original introduction and necessitated its reformulation. The author
used this opportunity in a way that displays at once the importance of Rupert’s text to
his project and considerable innovation and ingenuity in its recasting as pictures for the
virgins’ contemplation. In its crucial passage on the hortus conclusus of Canticles 4:12,
Rupert’s account provided the image complex that inspired the “mirror picture” of the
“fruits of the flesh and the spirt” as trees of vices and virtues, which we will have reason
to discuss further on. There, Mary is identified with a new Paradise as Eve is identified
with the old one, and both exist as potential images of self-identification (mirroring)
and orientation in the virgin’s personal transformation from “an old woman to a new.”
This concept was then recast, or rather, complementary dimensions of its meaning were
captured through changing visual perspectives, in the two pictures that were added
with parts 1 and 2, the frontispiece and the picture of “mystical Paradise” near the end
of part 1. The author’s conception of his method as demonstrated in text and picture
can thus be seen as ongoing and repeated attempts to capture what Rupert presents as
Mary’s experience of the images of the Song of Songs, in particular of Canticles 4:12–16,
but also in relationship to other passages of both his and the scriptural text.35 Rupert’s
imaginated ideas of Mary’s life as bride become pictures that serve almost as maps to
guide the women in its recapitulation.
These conclusions are of relevance not merely as further evidence of the capital
importance of Rupert’s model of Mary’s reading for the Speculum virginum, but also, and
more important, because they reveal women’s reading taking shape as a visual translation, a kind of crystallization on the page, of the lectio divina. In the first section of this
chapter, I will revisit the two successive introductions to the work to show how they also
articulate a method in which the female religious are to realize a personal meaning of
scripture for themselves as brides in an audio-visual theatre, performing a conceptio per
aurem et oculum that was to be felt and lived as particular to their bodily selves. Mary’s
reading provides the model for a woman’s assimilation of Word to self that bypasses
learned exegesis and is to be felt as much as understood, to be “heard and seen,” rather
than acquired by cognition. As in Hildegard’s case, the metaphors of male reading experience are re-embodied in the woman as audience of the Word. This idea of embodied
reading is then the subject of the second section, while a third and final section distils
from the investigation the outlines of a female poetics of body and truth that will serve
in the following chapters as our guide to the emerging poetics of vernacular literature.
The adaptation of Rupert’s imaginated ideas of Mary’s experience into visual constructs
that themselves serve as models for the reimplementation of a reading path provides
34 Powell, “Audio-Visual Poetics,” pp. 117–19; Powell, “Instruction for Religious Women,”
pp. 517–39.
35 Powell, “Picture Program,” pp. 151–52, 154–55.
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surprisingly intricate evidence of the way reading as a process was being reconceived
through “bodily” media, translated into forms that sought to transfer not knowledge but
experience to new audiences.
The Woman in the Mirror: Listening as Adulescentula
Rupert’s Marian gnosis sees the exegete reliving an experience in which letter reveals gloss
through a simultaneity of physical and spiritual experience that is expressed one time for all
in the sensual imagery of the Song of Songs. Mary is the key to a knowledge of scripture as
experience, and the key to Mary’s experience is found in the reading path she took, the path
of the sponsa. Rupert’s text offers two female alter egos, or reading selves, through which he
or his audience complete this experience: the one is Ooliba, a figure of Eve, or the woman
seduced by the flesh. The other is the “young woman” who, taken from the dialogue of the
biblical text itself, “follows” Mary in her conception and bearing of the Word. Through the
adulescentula Rupert is able to cast his own experience of union with the sponsus as witness
to a reliving of Mary’s experience. The same two feminine models of reading in the body
serve the Speculum’s recasting of lectio for monastic women: the two introductions cast the
virgins in the position of the adulescentula, a Maria imperfecta who seeks to imitate Mary’s
original conception of the Word through the instructor’s audio-visual address; while the
reading process through which this takes place mirrors Ooliba’s transformation from Eve
to Mary, making “a new woman from the old” (SV, 3, p. 59).
At the geometric centre of the work’s frontispiece, the visual introduction added with
part 1, Mary reads from a large open book (fig. 3.1).36 This centre is determined by the
four corners of a square, created by two pairs of speaking figures: above, two prophets,
Isaiah and Zachary, below, Peregrinus and Theodora. Mary herself, however, stands as
one figure in a progression from bottom to top that appears at first to be genealogical
but is in fact a portrayal of the history of God’s word in its human apprehension.37 Seen
iconographically, it is the visual embodiment of the first prophetic announcement of the
Incarnation, “And there shall come forth a rod [virga, also “branch”] out of the root of
Jesse: and a flower shall rise up out of this root” (Isaiah 11:1–2).38 The same recurs in a
much more straightforward realization of the prophet’s words at the work’s conclusion
(that is, preceding parts 11 and 12; see fig. 3.2). There too, however—as nowhere else in
the iconographic figure known as the Tree of Jesse—, Mary reads.39 In the frontispiece,
36 The frontispiece is considered here as it occurs in manuscript L. The picture is missing in the
one other mid-twelfth-century manuscript, K, but judging from its copy, MS V (see note 5, above),
was nearly identical. Cf. Cohen-Mushlin, Medieval Scriptorium, fig. 245. On the proximity of L to
the author, see Powell, “Instruction for Religious Women,” pp. 517–34, esp. 529–30; and Seyfarth,
“Speculum Virginum,” pp. 45–48.
37 Powell, “Picture Program,” pp. 141–42.
38 Resolved from its extemely abbreviated form, the passage in Isaiah’s book reads, “Egreditur
virga de radice Iesse et flos de radice eius ascendet et requiescet super eum spiritus domini.”
39 This statement applies to the best of my knowledge through the end of the twelfth century;
I have not pursued it in the later period.
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Figure 3.1. Frontispiece of the Speculum virginum, ca. 1140, London, British Library
MS Arundel 44, fol. 2v. © The British Library Board.
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Figure 3.2. The House of Wisdom, Speculum virginum, ca. 1140, London, British Library
MS Arundel 44, fol. 114v. © The British Library Board.
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the words in her book are taken from those spoken by Lady Wisdom in Ecclesiastes
24:22: “I have stretched out my branches as the turpentine tree.” Mary thus describes
herself (more properly, reads of herself) in a metaphor that creates identity between the
tree metaphor of Isaiah’s prophecy, Lady Wisdom, and the bride of the Song of Songs;
the identity of the metaphor is realized in her life as the one bride who conceived the
Word.40 Prophetic letter becomes experience as Mary’s life fulfils the words of the Old
Testament and the Word becomes flesh. Without this moment there is no Christian scripture, and, accordingly, from Mary’s reading act the new book is generated, Christ and the
scriptures of his church: from Christ’s head emanate the septiform “gifts of the Spirit”
(cf. Isaiah 11:3–4), that here collate key textual elements of the Christian faith as the
petals of a floral growth.41 With one more unique addition to the stirps iesse, which follows
from Zachary’s (initially mysterious) contribution to the conversation and no less from
its latter-day double between Peregrinus and Theodora below, the author’s conception
of the virgins’ reiteration of Mary’s reading is complete: in four roundels below Mary
are six virgins gazing upwards at her generative reading act and its result (fig. 3.3). In
odorem unguentorum tuorum curremus (Canticles 1:3), they proclaim, in the inscription
distributed over the four roundels: “We will run after the fragrance of your ointments.”
This scriptural passage has programmatic value in the Speculum virginum. Combined
with the preceding words of the same verse, Trahe me post te, it signals a moment in
which the listening virgins’ reception of scripture achieves identity with Mary’s own, a
kind of ascent to the letter of the word in which letter becomes gloss, or the recipient’s
story is identical with historia. To fully appreciate its place and function in the Speculum’s
model of reading, we need to turn to the work’s original introduction at the opening of
part 3. But within the first exchanges of the dialogue in part 1 this significance is no less
underlined. The full verse occurs there spoken by the one bride, Mary, and such that her
moment of conception is identified as its meaning fulfilled. Mary is
the unplowed field … that, made fertile by this seed without the aid of a gardener, brought
forth a flower and the flower’s fragrance for the eyes of man [visibus humanis], exclaiming
with the bride to the bridegroom, Trahe me post te, curremus in odore unguentorum tuorum
[Cant. 1:3]. Does she not speak of the fragrance of that flower?42
40 Ecclesiastes 24:22 was possibly favoured over a passage from Canticles for its first-person
speech as a tree. The imagery of Ecclesiastes 24 is replete with echoes of Canticles and the two were
intermingled in the liturgy. The verses preceding, in which Wisdom speaks of yielding a “sweet odor
like the best myrrh,” and “my odor is as the purest balm” (Ecclesiastes 24:20–21), taken together
with the following verse, “I have brought forth pleasant odor: and my flowers are the fruit of honour
and riches” (Ecclesiastes 24:23), are richly reminiscent of Canticles 1:11 as the moment when the
bridegroom embraces the bride, lured by her odor of spikenard (cf. CCC, 1, pp. 29–30). Seen this
way, Ecclesiastes 24:22 reads as another announcement of the conception.
41 One part of each of the following appears in each leaf: the Beatitudes, the Pater noster, the
voces Domini (Psalm 28), the coronæ triumphales (Apocalypse 2 and 3), Articles of the Creed, the
scriptures, and the Virtues (as listed by Watson, “Speculum virginum,” 459–61; transcription of the
text also in Seyfarth, introduction to SV, pp. 134*–36*).
42 The entire passage reads: “Campus heremi terra inculta est vel integritatis in Maria virginalis,
de quo germine sine culture fecunda florem et floris odorem visibus humanis produxit, proclamans
sponso cum sponsa: ‘Trahe me post te, curremus in odore unguentorum tuorum’” (SV, 1, pp. 7–8).
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Figure 3.3. Frontispiece of the Speculum virginum (detail), ca. 1140, London,
British Library MS Arundel 44, fol. 2v. © The British Library Board.
“That flower” is, here as elsewhere, the flos filius eius seen in the picture, identified in the
opening lines that furl out below it as the flos campi et lilium convallium of Canticles 1:2.
The picture describes the virgins’ reception of scripture as a sensory call from the bridegroom and the bride’s response. These virgins interpolated into the history of the Word
as flesh are there to relive Mary’s reading act, to experience scripture as an imitatio verbi
conceptionis completed through the eye and the ear. As the passage just cited elaborates,
Mary takes her identity as the unploughed field,
in which “dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead corporeally” [Colossians 2:9], …
from that same flower, brought forth from the rod that sprang from the root of Jesse.
This is then the flower that “young women [adulescentulae] so dearly love” [Canticles 1:2],
embrace and follow devotedly while the mother and the son go before, so that they
in turn may blossom among flowers and in this flowering chastity win the fruit of
eternal life.43
43 “ ‘in quo habitat omnis plenitudo divinitatis corporaliter,’ … de hoc flore suo trahit, quem virga
de stirpe Iesse producta produxit. Hunc igitur florem adulescentulae nimis dligunt, amplexantur,
colendo sequuntur habentes matrem et filium praecedentes, ut cum floribus floreant et fructum
aeternitatis in castimonia floribunda conquirant” (SV, 1, p. 8).
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The adulescentulae from the Song of Songs are thus offered as figures of reading identification for the female audience, who in assuming this identity enter into the moment
in which sponsa becomes mater.44 The frontispiece is a visual reiteration of Rupert’s
reading model as a method of instruction in scripture for the female religious.45
Little has yet been said of the conversation on the lower register of the picture’s
frame. This configuration, simple as it is, is the sole element of the earlier introduction
to have been integrated as such into the new one. Two similar figures in conversation,
with the man holding a scroll and the woman a book, are found at the beginning of book
3 in four other manuscripts; in the filiation of MS L, they were apparently displaced to
appear rather unremarkably at the bottom of the preceding page, marking instead the
end of part 2.46 However, this is enough to indicate that what occurs between the two
interlocutors in the frontispiece is the visual reiteration of a different, textual presentation of the same concept in the original introduction. Where the frontispiece keys the
visual template of the flos de virga iesse to a dialogue from the Song of Songs, the original
opening takes its visual template from the Annunciation and its textual inspiration from
Psalm 44. Accordingly, it is more focused on the mode of communication, the articulation
of a conceptio per aurem et oculum.
The original opening, cited at the beginning of this chapter, projects the argument for audio-visual presentation into an extended elaboration of the eleventh verse
of Psalm 44. The psalmist’s words Audi filia et vide signal at once the twin media of
the method—although these receive no explicit mention—and the identity of their
addressee. As the incipit indicates, this is “the address of the Holy Spirit to the daughter”;
she is church, bride, and female religious. The verbs audire and videre are repeated
eight times as a pair in this opening address (the first thirty-one lines of the modern
edition), with four additional instances of audire alone. For us they might recall the
(later) opening of Hildegard’s Scivias, in which the “Voice of the Living Light” calls her to
her own vocation. As a call to its monastic audience, however, the words unmistakably
echoed the prologue to the monastic arch-text, the Rule of St Benedict: “Obsculta, o fili,
praecepta magistri, et inclina aurem cordis tui.”47 The author thus anchored the opening
44 In MS V (n. 5, above), the words adulescentule dilexerunt te nimis are included in the inscription
in the roundels, which suggests they also occurred there in its exemplar, MS K (see note 36, above).
45 While the phrase following from Canticles 1:3 (Trahe me, curremus, etc.), figures repeatedly in
the text, the phrase adolescentulae diligunt te occurs only this once. Close examination suggests
that it serves, upon the addition of parts 1, 2, 11 and 12, to underline the relationship between the
Speculum’s reading model and Rupert’s understanding of the Song of Songs. The Speculum’s elaboration of the stirps iesse in text and picture reveals a reshaping of at least three different passages
from Rupert’s commentary (cf. CCC, 4, pp. 87–88, and CCC, 1, pp. 13 and 33), in which visual ideas
that arise in his text are reified and visualized on the page in the Speculum virginum.
46 In one of these four, Zwettl, Bibliothek des Zisterzienserstifts, Cod. Zwetl. 180, the male figure,
labelled as Peregrinus, also holds a book. The other three of this type are the Clairvaux group,
discussed below. The manuscript from Himmerod (Baltimore, Walters Art Gallery, W. 72), was
copied from L and reproduces its solution. In the remaining manuscripts these pictures are either
missing or were never executed. See also note 52, below.
47 Benedict of Nursia, Règle de S. Benoît, p. 412; for the translation, see below, p. 102.
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of his introduction to the female monastic life firmly within Benedictine tradition—with
equally pointed variation from that tradition. While the Rule relies on the injunction from
Psalm 44 to inaugurate the monastic life, it also clearly suppresses the visual component
of the scriptural text. Moreover, for Benedict, the voice of scripture is distinct from that
of the orally expounding magister, who is accordingly identified: “Listen, carefully, my
son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart.”48 The
master’s teaching echoes but does not appropriate the voice of scripture; accordingly,
the son listens but is not asked to “see” the meaning he is to receive, and even the act
of hearing is rather a metaphor for the reception of the truth, which properly occurs in
the heart. For Theodora, the voice of the Spirit and that of her instructor are one: “Audi
filia et vide, et inclina aurem tuam. … Audi sanctae ecclesiae filia … audi sponsum tuum
ad aeterna donum vocantem, vide premia premonstrantem, sequere precedentem.
Audi, inquam, legibus divinis intentendo, vide legibus … ferventer obtemperando, audi
quid sponsus precipiat, vide quid promittat” (Hear, daughter, and see, and bend your
ear [Psalm 44:11]. … Hear, daughter of holy church … hear your bridegroom calling you
to eternal gifts, see the rewards he shows you beforehand, so that you follow him who
leads. Hear, I say, by attending to the divine laws, see by fervently obeying those laws. …
Hear what the bridegroom requires, and see what he promises) (SV, 3, p. 58). There is
thus also no distinction (in the introduction) between letter and gloss, scripture and its
exegesis. The biblical text is not explicated but rather appropriated to the instructor’s
purpose: “Hear, I say …” For the Speculum virginum and for the model of instruction
it portrays, the woman re-embodies the addressee of the biblical text. Like Rupert’s
adulescentula, she is part of the cast of its drama; her hearing and seeing are an immediate reception of its truth.49
But it is another text, contemporary with Rupert’s, that more immediately
illuminates the author’s project in this case: Bernard of Clairvaux’s four homilies on the
Annunciation to Mary, In laudinibus Virginis Matris (also known as “Super missus est”),
dated to 1125. Like Rupert’s De incarnatione Domini, Bernard’s text is a meditation on
Mary’s experience of the Incarnation, in his case focused entirely on the Annunciation
as the moment and mystery of Mary’s conception. This moment he characterizes not as
reading but rather as the perfect act of hearing and seeing, “to which she had long before
been called by her father David” in Psalm 44.50 “The king desired her beauty” (Psalm
44:12), because of the perfection he saw in Mary’s virginity and her humility, which are
the expression of her full understanding—avant la lettre. For as Bernard elaborates at
length, Mary could not yet have “heard or read” of the New Testament’s ideal of virginity (LVM, 3.7, pp. 40–41). Mary, then, “heard and saw not such as those who ‘hearing
do not hear, and seeing do not understand’ (cf. Matthew 13:13); rather she heard and
she believed, she saw and she understood” (LVM, 3.3, p. 37). The call to the bride from
48 Benedict of Nursia, Rule of St Benedict, p. 15.
49 The same point can be demonstrated by contrast with Jerome’s use of Psalm 44 in his letters to
Eustochia and Principia. See Powell, “Audio-Visual Poetics,” pp. 119–20.
50 In laudibus Virginis Matris 3.4, p. 37; hereafter LVM; references are parenthetical.
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Psalm 44 is thus collated with a passage from the parable of the sower (Matthew 13:18–
23), whose subject is none other than the assimilation of the Word to the self as it applies
to all Christians but is fulfilled in differing degrees. Bernard’s audience is exhorted earlier
as “all mothers” and “daughters, who, after Eve, are born and bear in pain,” to “run … to
the bridal chamber … where, behold, the angel is addressing Mary.” There they may seek
to overhear what Mary heard, to hear as she did: “press your ear to the wall and listen to
what he proclaims, see whether you can hear whence you may be consoled.”51
The original opening of the Speculum virginum collates the same scriptural passages
to exhort its audience to emulate the same perfect act of hearing and seeing—not, however, by overhearing but rather by direct address. Following the fivefold exhortation
to hear and to see at the outset, the magister continues with a paraphrase of Matthew
13:13, reformulated as an affirmative directive, “Querit enim Christus aures audiendi,
querit oculos videndi,” then adding an explanation that defines this hearing and seeing
for the purposes of his method: “id est ut resideat interius, quod sonus innuit exterius,
et fructificet ad mentis intuitum, quod trahitur per oculorum aspectum” (Christ seeks
ears that hear, he seeks eyes that see, that is, so that what the voice intimates externally may dwell internally, and what is drawn in through the eyes’ gaze may bear fruit
in inner contemplation) (SV, 3, p. 58). These few lines contain the Speculum’s audiovisual poetics of the virgins’ assimilation of the Word to the self, its conceptio per aurem
et oculum, an idea which becomes fully clear to us only once we recognize the model
for the communication as Bernard constructed it on the same scriptural authority: the
Annunciation as Mary’s perfect act of hearing and seeing. The virgins as audience reembody Mary’s experience of the Word even as they embody the bride of Psalm 44. The
means to their accomplishment is to “hear and see” as she did, that is (in our terms), to
read the prophets’ words as she did. Appropriately, then, Mary’s historia per se, and in
particular the text of Luke’s account of the Annunciation, play no role in the exposition;
the act of communication is nonetheless entirely modelled on hers with Gabriel, as on
its objective.
The manuscript tradition offers visual evidence of this latter idea. In the three
manuscripts that were copied at Clairvaux at the beginning of the thirteenth century,
the picture that originally accompanied the audi-et-vide introduction is still found in the
original position above that text (fig. 3.4).52 It doubtless shows us the predecessors of
the two figures facing each other on the lower frame of the frontispiece in manuscript
L. A male figure holding a scroll on the left addresses a woman on the right. These are
51 “Currite matres, currite filiae, currite omnes, quae post Evam, et ex Eva, et parturimini cum
tristitia, et parturitis. Adite virginalem thalamum, ingredimini, si potestis, pudicum sororis vestrae
cubiculum. Ecce enim Deus mittit ad Virginem, ecce affatur Angelus Mariam. Apponite aurem
parieti, auscultate quid nuntiet ei, si forte audiatis unde consolemini” (LVM, 2.2, p. 22).
52 Troyes, Bibliothèque municipale, MSS 252 and 413; and Berlin, Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, MS
Phil. 1701. The Berlin MS shows the figures seated, but the configuration is otherwise identical.
A fourth copy not related to the Clairvaux group, Zwettl, Bibliothek des Zisterzienserstifts, Cod.
Zwetl. 180, also shows standing figures and bears some resemblance to an Annunciation scene; for
further discussion and reproductions, see Powell, “Instruction for Religious Women,” pp. 194–207.
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Figure 3.4. Peregrinus and Theodora, Speculum virginum, beginning of the thirteenth century,
Troyes, Médiathèque Jacques Chirac MS 252, fol. 20r. Photo © Médiathèque Jacques Chirac,
Troyes Champagne Métropole.
not properly understood if taken simply as Peregrinus and Theodora.53 The best copy
of the Clairvaux group, which also remained there, would suggest they should be identified as the Holy Spirit and the daughter of the biblical text: the incipit, de allocutione
spiritus sancte ad filiam, appearing directly below it, reads as if a caption to the picture
(fig. 3.4). In all three copies, the image contains hints of sacred or even divine communication: the figures are both nimbed as if saints or figures from scripture, the woman is
in orans, and the man’s raised hand and scroll are possibly reminiscent of the portrayal
of prophetic speech.54 The answer to the identity question lies in the relationship just
observed between this text and Bernard’s: the template for the image is in fact Gabriel’s
Annunciation to Mary.55 What it presents is, nonetheless, not this communication but in
53 The Zwettl MS is in fact the only one in which the figures are labelled as Peregrinus and
Theodora.
54 Camille, “Visual Signs,” 111; and Camille, “Seeing and Reading,” 28. As Camille notes, the scrolls
can likewise be taken as indicating oral performance; see also Huot, Song to Book, pp. 78–79.
55 On similar Annunciation scenes, see Wenzel, “Verkündigung,” pp. 23–52, esp. fig. 5 (from
Nicholas of Verdun’s altar at Kloster Neuenburg); and Wenzel, Hören und Sehen, pp. 274–82. The
filia in Troyes MS 252 (fig. 10) bears a striking resemblance to a portrayal of Mary in the same
manuscript on fol. 58v, its picture of the Wise and Foolish Virgins.
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a sense its typological predecessor. Some of the earliest examples of the Annunciation in
visual art in fact occur as “illustrations”—typological materializations on the page—of
either the third or eleventh verses of Psalm 44.56 Thus the image in the Speculum presents
a precursor of the communication between Gabriel and Mary that it is not yet resolved
into its realized form as Christian history: just as its listening woman is a Maria imperfecta, it is an annunciation about to happen. And just as the final frontispiece does, this
image places its interlocutors on a threshold between the prophetic image and its incarnate form, a threshold that is crossed as scripture speaks and the daughter responds.
The later frontispiece does not, in fact, simply reproduce this conversation on the
lower register of its frame but instead splits the communication into three different
exchanges: one that occurs between prophets above, another between figures of the
present day, and the third, the object of the whole, between sponsa and sponsus—in
turn doubly represented—inside the frame where the generative act is revealed. The
“Tree of Jesse” inside the frame of the frontispiece is to an extent a visual condensation
of the content of the conversation that follows (that is, the text), but this idea falls far
short of its primary subject, which is the process of instruction as initiated on the same
page between Peregrinus and Theodora, its origin, authority, and objective.57 It shows
how the virgins read within the frame of a once and present communication. The two
introductions to the work articulate for the first time the position of the woman as audience of an audio-visual delivery of the Word.
Dialogue, then, is far from being a genre convention in this work. The call from the
bridegroom and the soul’s response are at the heart of its conception, this exchange
forms the very moment of apprehension on which its audio-visual model of reading is
based. Dialogue between the Word and the bride is the communicative fact that links
the Song of Songs, Psalm 44 and Luke’s account of the Annunciation. This same fact
forms the very motor of both Rupert’s and Bernard’s texts, though for its concentration on, and suspense over, the single moment of Mary’s response, Bernard’s text is
unmatched. At one point, he, the admiring observer, pauses to sum up what she has
heard, urging her to consider and respond, to “open your heart to faith, your lips to confession, your womb to the creator,” and conceive.58 The passage, which begins, “Audisti
inquam …” and then continues in incantatory repetition of the verb, may have inspired
our author’s use of the same in the present imperative (“Audi inquam …”); in any case,
Bernard’s text again shows us what he is about. The entire introduction is an incantatory exhortation intended to lead to one moment: the virgins’ response. This response,
however, is not given to Theodora, who (as she often does) comments on Peregrinus’s
words as if an observer; it is instead supplied as part of the address, just as it also occurs
within the picture (and not on the frame) in the frontispiece: “Proclamat enim: ‘Anima
mea liquefacta est, ut dilectus locutus est. Trahe me post te!’ (Canticles 5:6, 1:3)” (She
56 This tradition enjoyed a revival in Norman Sicilian churches of the mid twelfth century; see
Kitzinger, “Descent,” pp. 99–115, esp. 106–7, 112–13.
57 Powell, “Picture Program,” pp. 140–42.
58 LVM, 4.4, pp. 53–54 at 54.
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thus exclaims: “My soul melted as the beloved spoke. Draw me after you!”) (SV, 3 pp.
58–59).59 This programmatic response in the words of Canticles 1:3, which occurs in the
text a total of five times, will occupy us once more in the analysis of the reading method.
Its use in the introduction corresponds perfectly to what we have thus far observed as
the parallel between this annunciation and Gabriel’s to Mary: rather than speaking as
Mary does, Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum, the virgins are to attain identification with
Mary’s experience of the prophetic image. Their own response is thus spoken in those
images, the words of the bride through whose experience the images first become life.
What is most noteworthy in this conception is, however, not the idea in itself of a
conceptio per aurem as completed through the oral delivery of scripture to the believing
soul but rather the way the female audience is seen to re-embody an experience that
is understood, as we saw in the previous chapter, as Mary’s experience of the Word as
life; the way “she” embodies Rupert’s reading path. An ancient metaphor for life lived in
the Christian faith, that of Christ’s rebirth in the hearts of the faithful, is claimed as specific to their persons and their experience—as their historia, even as it is Mary’s.60 The
real affinity between the Speculum’s understanding of the conceptio and Bernard’s is
found here: both participate in an exploration and intensification of the metaphor such
that its meaning is experienced in a way that, despite an obvious paradox, is somehow
insistently visceral, proper to the body and a literal understanding of scriptural imagery.
This same is responsible for the surprising equivalence, visually unmistakable, between
Isaiah’s first prophecy of the coming of Christ and the apparently unrelated response
from Zachary on the right: “Quid pulchrum Domini nisi vinum germinans virgines (cf.
Zachary 9:17)” (What is the beauty of God if not wine bringing forth virgins?).61 The
connection between the two requires some explanation.
Zachary’s words have no known connection to the Tree of Jesse or to the Incarnation,
but image and text together leave no doubt as to their place there in this case. The wine
is the liquid that pours out from the two vases held in Christ’s hands and descends in
carefully drawn tendrils to touch all the virgins in the picture (fig. 3.3).62 It thus causes
the women to be reborn (“germinate”) within the tree as virgins “who follow the lamb
wherever it goes” (Revelations 14:4; SV, 1, p. 18). But Zachary’s words in the frontispiece would also have been felt as the echo of another of Isaiah’s prophecies of the
59 I have corrected the punctuation as it stands in the edition, which misunderstands the
prosopopeia in these lines. The words are all to be assigned to the bride (as tradition and the biblical text require). The exclamation Trahe me post te stands here as elsewhere in the text for the
virgins’ inner assent; without these words she would offer no real response.
60 Rahner, “Gottesgeburt,” pp. 13–87.
61 The words et frumentum electorum (the corn of the elect), properly part of the scriptural text,
were added later in extremely abbreviated form outside and to the right of Zachary’s “speech tablet
and are not included when the passage is cited in the text.
62 These include John the Bapist and John the Evangelist to either side of Mary (as clarified in
the text of part 5), but Mary herself does not appear to require the wine; its blue color instead
already surrounds her nimbus as it does Christ’s. Peregrinus clarifies that the wine is Christ himself;
Theodora then equates it with his blood shed on the cross: SV, 1, p. 11.
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coming of Christ: rorate caeli desuper et nubes pluant iustum, aperiatur terra et germinet
savatorem (Drop down dew, ye heavens, from above: and let the clouds rain the just.
Let the earth be opened and bud forth a saviour) (Isaiah 45:8). The understanding of
Mary as the “unploughed” earth that brings forth the “flower” we encountered earlier
in the exposition of part 1 of the Speculum, and Isaiah’s words on the rain “germinating” the Saviour were habitually associated with his other prophecies on the coming
of Christ (for example, the stirps iesse) in exegesis and the liturgy—Isaiah 45:8 had
been recited daily in the Office of Advent at least since Carolingian times.63 Another
Old Testament image, that of rain falling on Gideon’s fleece in Psalm 76:1, was well
known as a typological precursor of Mary’s conception, which, like, the verses of Psalm
44, also found early illustration as the Annunciation.64 Thus the idea of germination or
impregnation through a liquid that falls from God—the equation of wine and water
only serves further Christological association—is used here to grant the virgins a typological authority for their place in the tree that is equivalent in meaning (not in magnitude) to Mary’s own: Zachary’s words stand opposite Isaiah’s as the prophetic image
whose visual realization identifies the virgins’ reception of the Word with Mary’s conception of Christ.
An image complex of rain, fertility, and plant growth that reveals the mystery of
Christ’s descent to man in human form is thus variously and interchangeably evoked
in the frontispiece as the gathering point, the quintessential locus for meditation on
that mystery and its meaning for the female religious, an imitatio verbi conceptionis.
That the experience and its meaning are intended as applying to the virgins specifically and exceptionally is the second point that Zachary’s words are made to demonstrate. As just indicated, the idea that Christ was received in the heart through
baptism, dwelt there, and was born anew through every life lived in Christian virtue
was a tenet of ancient sacramental theology.65 The same idea could be extended to
the reception of God’s word through his prophets and preachers, so that the Virgin’s
conception of the Word was metaphorically repeated not only in the moment of initiation into the Christian faith but also whenever the Word was received in the community of the Spirit: the listening congregation was continually witness to the event
of Gabriel’s Annunciation to Mary as the embrace of Christ’s teaching in the individual
soul.66 The imagery of rainfall and fertility was similarly applied to this idea, such that
the prophets become clouds and Isaiah’s words on the coming of Christ a rain that is to
fertilize the understanding of the faithful even as Gabriel realized their meaning with
his own words to Mary.67
In the light of such generalization of the metaphors, it is no wonder that Theodora
interrupts her magister to wonder for her own part, “why you ascribe the fruit [the
63 Deshman, Benedictional, pp. 11–13.
64 Kitzinger, “Descent,” 106–10.
65 Rahner, “Gottesgeburt,” pp. 13–17.
66 Deshman, Benedictional, pp. 13–14.
67 Deshman, Benedictional, p. 14.
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bearing of Christ] solely to the virgins to the exclusion of the other orders.”68 She insists
at some length that the fructus spiritus is not their privilege specialiter but rather one
available generaliter to the entire church, citing scripture effectively to her purpose. All
of this merely sets up Peregrinus’s response, which builds on two scriptural passages.
Matthew 19:11—“All men take not this word, but they to whom it is given”—he says,
defines an elite reception of the Word among virgins (SV, 1, pp. 9–10). Zachary’s words
then make their entry into the conversation to vindicate this understanding: “Note well
what the prophet said, ‘What is the beauty of God if not wine bringing forth virgins?’ ”
(SV, 1, p. 10). What the frontispiece portrays as the virgins’ imitatio verbi conceptionis is
thus theirs and theirs alone.
This idea is elaborated in the work as a whole as the virgins’ experience of scripture
specialiter. The same had already been more amply developed in the original introduction (part 3), where the author repeatedly distinguishes the virgins’ experience as closer
to, if not identical to, Mary’s own, insisting on a reification of the metaphor as justified by
their bodily identity with Mary’s virginal state. There, too, he begins with Matthew 19:11
and the idea that “[Virginity] is truly a special gift, not a general one, and is given only to
the few.”69 The idea of the virgins’ conception and bearing of Christ (with no picture to
support it) is then more explicitly developed. The virgins are entitled to this gift as “special” compensation for their exclusion from carnal procreation, that is, in their sexual
specificity as women. They conceive and bear a child inwardly in direct analogy to the
reproductive roles of women in the world.70 Peregrinus first underscores the women’s
experience as a counterpart of Mary’s that is specific to their bodily virginity.71 He then
uses the same reasoning to imply an experience of scripture for the virgins that is specific to their persons, in fact, to their bodies, because it originates from a bodily continuity with scriptural imagery:
Quamvis igitur generali comprehensione virginem dicat apostolus corpus universalis
ecclesiae “desponi,” inquiens, “vos uni viro virginem castam exhibere Christo,” specialiter
tamen, quae vere virgines sunt, flores sunt ecclesiae mentis et corporis integritate, sicut
idem ait apostolus: “Virgo domini cogitat, quae domini sunt, ut sit sancta corpore et spiritu.”
(SV, 3, p. 65)
(Even though the apostle calls the body of the entire church a virgin in the general sense
when he says, “I have promised you to one man alone so that I may lead a chaste virgin to
68 “Miror, cur solis virginibus fructum istum sic asscripseris, ut ordines licet magni meriti de hoc
exclusisse videaris” (SV, 1, p. 9).
69 “Vere enim speciale donum est, non generale, paucis quidem datum” (SV, 3, p. 61).
70 “Maius est, inquam, spiritaliter Christus concipere et parere quam filios morituros carnaliter
procreare. … Carnalis igitur Christi virginum sterilitas sancta et voluntaria fecunditate compensatur
spiritali et aeterna, in qua quia Christum bonis operibus virgo manens parturis, mater et fiia
sororque vocaris” (SV, 3, p. 64). See also Greenhill, Voraussetzungen, pp. 83–84; Bernards, Speculum
virginum, pp. 189–92.
71 “Si igitur ordo fidelium in se Christo facit habitaculum, quanto magis cor virginum, cor pudicum
et humile Christi est sacrarium? Christus semel a matre virgine natus est corporaliter, portatur,
nascitur a virginibus sacris semper spiritualiter. O decus incomparabile virginitatis!” (SV, 3, p. 64).
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Christ” [2 Corinthians 11:2], this applies in a special sense to those who are truly virgins,
the flowers of the church by integrity of body and soul, just as when the same apostle
says, “The virgin of the Lord attends to the things of God, so that she is sanctified in both
body and spirit” [1 Corinthians 7:34].)
Thus, where the virgins’ bearing of Christ is a spiritual reliving of Mary’s corporeal
experience, as women and virgins it is they who live out scripture specialiter, “in body
and spirit,” while the church in general does so only “in spirit.”
This notion, however, begins to exhibit the Janus-faced duality of the woman’s position: what is extolled as the exclusive privilege of an elite at the same time approaches a
literal understanding of scriptural imagery otherwise associated with the incapacity of
the body to proceed beyond a sensory level of understanding. The latter can thus serve
equally well to justify the former, an observation born out in the Speculum’s characterization of its audience as puellae before their mirrors (as we will see shortly) and consistent with the reading identity of the adulescentula as discussed in Rupert’s use of the
same.72 The two ideas became one in Mary’s experience, a female understanding that is
at once inveterately sensual and bypasses all cognition, and this is finally the significance
of the virgins’ “special” imitatio of Mary’s perfect act of hearing and seeing. The same
visceral imitatio was the consistent objective of Rupert’s reading of the Song of Songs;
Bernard likewise makes it the culmination of his meditation on the Annunciation.
For Bernard, Mary’s conception of the Word figured as the extreme case of knowledge of God specialiter, that is, it proceeded not solely through love or the harmony
of wills (concordia voluntatis) but also through the flesh (carnem conjungere, LVM 3.4,
p. 38). The apostles were imbued with the Spirit, yet by no means such as Mary was, who
conceived the Spirit in the body (LVM 3.2, pp. 36–37). The last word on the idea of such
experience specialiter Bernard leaves to Mary herself in what are likewise the last words
of In laudinibus Virginis Matris, her so urgently awaited response:
Fiat mihi non tantum audibile auribus, sed et visibile oculis, palpabile manibus, gestabile
humeris. Nec fiat mihi verbum scriptum et mutum, sed incarnatum et vivum, hoc est non
mutis figuris, mortuis in pellibus exaratum, sed in forma humana meis castis visceribus
vivaciter impressum, … Nolo ut fiat mihi aut declamatorie praedicatum, aut figuraliter
significatum, aut imaginatorie somniatum; sed silenter inspiratum, personaliter
incarnatum, corporaliter invisceratum. … Fiat quidem generaliter omni mundo, sed
specialiter fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum [Luke 1:38].
(LVM 4.11, p. 57)
(Let me experience this not only such that ears may hear, but also such that my eyes
may see, my hands touch, and my arms bear. Let me know the Word not in mute, written
form, but rather alive and embodied: that is, not through dumb signs drawn on dead
parchment skins, but as human form impressed in my chaste, living flesh. … I do not
wish to experience this either through the preacher’s rhetoric or through figural signs or
fanciful dreams, but as if filled with a silent breath, given personal flesh, in the depths of
bodily sensation. … Let this happen generally, then, to the entire world, but to me especially, according to your word.)
72 See note 28, above.
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Bernard’s rhetorical invisceration of the Logos goes far beyond anything Peregrinus
attempts. Nevertheless, both are engaged in the same “historicization”—a kind of
narrative reinvention in the life of the body—of the birth of the Logos in and through the
hearts of believing Christians.73 The distinction between Mary’s experience and that of
the entire church, in which for her alone is “special” and literal what for others is “general” and allegorical, was part of the same tradition.74 But the fervent plea of Bernard’s
Mary is in truth no less the author’s own, in turn recommended to his audience (suitably,
then, the text culminates in desire, rather than its fulfilment), and it leaves no shadow
of a doubt. Her entire being is focused on a palpable, visceral experience of the Word,
voiced in terms that reject, by contrast, an intellectual cult of the “dead letter.” This
experience specialiter is still uniquely hers, but by being hers it holds the promise of
being available to others: “Let this happen generally, … but to me especially.” Bernard’s
Mary thus expresses her desire in terms that encourage identification with the sensory
reality of a seemingly inimitable experience.
By adopting this model for its own audio-visual wedding between the Word
and its female audience, the Speculum virginum completes a next, crucial shift in the
understanding and application of reading through the body of the sponsa et mater. Its
audience becomes a sponsa corporaliter, a remanifestation of the truth of the biblical
text in our lives—just as the adulescentula figures in Rupert’s text to vindicate his own
attempt to “make the lamb with the Holy Trinity.” With the Speculum virginum this idea
is no longer one of a feminized or female reception of the Word but rather a model
for women’s reading, their general reception of the truth of scripture as specifically
determined by their female nature. The tradition of a millennium of Christian thought,
which had seen a life in Christian virtue as part of the larger body of Christ, his church,
and thus as participating in the generation of that body, is reified and focalized in the
experience of the woman-as-audience, who herself re-embodies the life of the Christian
faithful, an imitatio verbi conceptionis.
The Woman in the Mirror: Reading as nova ooliba
Religious women … understood that “man … signifies the divinity of the Son of God and
woman his humanity.” And they understood that both equations were metaphorical. But
given the ultimate dichotomy of God and creation, the first was only metaphorical. Man
was not divinity. The second was in some sense, however, literally true.75
Thus Caroline Bynum formulated the basic equation that stood behind the genderspecific trajectory of women’s spirituality from the twelfth century onwards. This idea
is possibly codified for the first time when the Speculum articulates it as the meaning of
73 On the increasingly somatic understanding of the metaphor in the High and Late Middle Ages,
see Dinzelbacher, “Gottesgeburt,” pp. 94–128; on gender identification, see JP, pp. 421–22, and
Fulton, “Quae est ista,” 117.
74 Rahner, “Gottesgeburt,” pp. 14–17, 33, 59, 63, 65, 70.
75 Bynum, “ ‘And Woman,” p. 178.
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scripture in the virgins’ lives specialiter. Their experience is continuous with the sensus
litteralis of the biblical text not only semantically but also ontologically; that is, not only
do scriptural images of the bride’s experience apply in a specific, personally experienced
way to the lives of the female religious, but also their experience of scripture generally,
as a result of their physicality, is seen as remaining bound to and never fully renouncing
the literal meaning.76
With its definition of the woman-as-audience, the Speculum virginum extends the
understanding of woman as the flesh of the Incarnation into the realm of reading and
poetics; this single gesture provides the seminal idea for the introduction of the project, whether in the original or the final version. We observed the same in Hildegard’s
announcement of her prophetic persona: she could see Rupert’s understanding of
Mary’s reading as continuous with her own biography because woman’s physicality
provided the vessel that originally embodied the Word. As others saw and represented
it, however, Hildegard was privileged to immediate and full knowledge of scripture
because she was a woman, unlettered and body-bound. In this way her miraculous
gnosis proclaimed the arrival of the symbolic position of woman as the key to a new
understanding of the place of the body, the flesh, and material representation—visibilia,
“visible forms,” was the twelfth-century term—within the relationship between homo
and Logos, human capacity to know the divine. The Speculum virginum fleshes out the
position of woman in this relationship and in so doing reveals the relationship between
a collection of topoi associated with women’s religious lives and questions of epistemological aesthetics—the same that will be encountered in later chapters at the centre of a
new vernacular poetics.
The position of woman as body is here at the basis of a continuing development
of women’s and men’s spirituality that witnessed a divergence in the nature and
understanding of their religious experience. As recalled in the last chapter, “The image
of both a sinful and a saved humanity is the image of woman.”77 Just as humanity fell into
a life of sin through the action of a woman, Eve, so its redemption from that life, the life
of the flesh, occurred through Mary as the New Eve. The foregrounding of women as
subjects fundamentally alters the structure of identification with this idea. Rupert, as a
man, could assume a position of feminine identification as a self-conscious act of renunciation, one no less discontinuous with his biography than his monastic life was discontinuous with the life of a man in the world. The male writer sought this reversal “because
reversal and renunciation were at the heart of a religion whose dominant symbol is the
cross—life achieved through death.”78 With this idea of reversal and renunciation as “the
heart of religious dedication, women, who were already inferior, did not have much to
offer. Moreover, neither maleness nor femaleness could serve for them as an image of
renunciation.”79 As a result, women, to define and fulfil their spiritual selves, embraced
76 On representation of Theodora in this respect, see above, n.28.
77 Bynum, Holy Feast, p. 265; see also pp. 267–68; also emphasized by Astell, Song of Songs, pp. 6–7.
78 Bynum, “And Woman,” p. 171.
79 Bynum, “And Woman,” pp. 178–79.
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their humanity, their physicality and fleshliness, as the expression of their own proximity to God: “Women reached God not by reversing what they were but by sinking more
fully into it.”80 Thus they reported their religious experience “in images that continued
ordinary female roles (bride, child, mother) and stereotypical female behaviour (vulnerability, illness, bleeding).”81
With its audi-et-vide opening, the Speculum virginum projects this idea into the staging and conception of instructional communication itself, inviting the female audience
to “sink into” the scriptural imagery of the bride’s seduction and thus to receive the
letter of the Word as continuous with her own experience. The further consequences
of mediary translation—exegesis becomes oral address, lectio becomes bodily experience, its visualizing process becomes picture—can all be seen to proceed from this first
shift: the rhetorically feminized audience, such as figures so prominently in male monastic
reading of the Song of Songs, becomes a real audience of women, male renunciation
becomes female self-contemplation.82 The idea is then enshrined, no less, in the work’s
titulary mirror. It is likewise readable as a method that is repeatedly demonstrated in the
text. Properly understood, then, this is the guiding idea behind the Speculum’s translation of lectio into a method suitable for women: the woman’s position replaces the idea
of renunciation with that of self-contemplation, the identification between woman and
flesh as mirror of her own life in its spiritual transformation.
In the discussion of Rupert’s completion of this redemptive value inversion of the flesh,
I argued that Mary’s reading in the body also redeems the vehicles on which it depends: the
historical/literal sense of scripture, narrative, and the image. Mary’s reading functions as a
basic theological switch capable of unleashing an enormous expansion in the implementation of bodily media as vehicles of an experience of the presence of the Word. The full magnitude of this shift and the way woman and women’s roles were implicated within it can
only be grasped against the background of the fusion of the feminine and the aesthetic, of
the female body and the ornamental and rhetorical arts, which the twelfth century inherited
from patristic thought. In Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love,
R. Howard Bloch marshals an impressive array of anti-feminist topoi from patristic tradition to demonstrate what he sees as the eternal conundrum of woman in the Christian
world. Because his subject is so intricately tied to literary poetics—in particular vernacular
literary poetics—the terms of his argument are doubly relevant to my own—with inverted
significance. They constitute a powerful résumé of precisely those patterns of thought that
were overcome in the twelfth century’s reinvention of woman as reader and sign to be read.
80 Bynum, “And Woman,” p. 172.
81 Bynum, “And Woman,” p. 172. See also Newman, “Golden Bowl,” 26–27.
82 Another crucial shift, that from the abstracted world of Latin to the concrete and biographical
world of the vernacular, may have occurred as well in varying degree. It is conceptually fully in
keeping with the rest, but whether the instructor delivered from or paraphrased the text directly or
orally translated as he went or a mix of these was used doubtless depended on the circumstances
in each case. See Powell, “Audio-Visual Poetics,” pp. 131–32; and Powell, “Instruction for Religious
Women,” pp. 45–48, 127–31, and 151–53.
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Bloch’s project is to map the origins of a “feminization of the esthetic” that, he argues,
is so pervasively influential in Christian thought that it makes up the very origin of the
association of “the question of woman” with “that of reading in the literary history of
the West.”83 The identification of woman with flesh and with secondary representation
originated in the story of creation itself. Not only because it was Eve who seduced Adam
but also because “the creation of woman is synonymous with the creation of metaphor,
the relation between Adam and Eve is the relation of the proper to the figural, which
implies a derivation, deflection, denaturing, a tropological turning away.”84 Thus, the Fall
was a fall into the order of Eve, “a fall into mediations, signs, representations that imply
a gap between inner and outer, the [prelapsarian] body and its cover.”85 Such thinking
was at the root of “a metaphysics that abhorred embodiment,” in which “woman’s supervenient nature” was “indistinguishable from the acute suspicion of embodied signs—of
representations.”86
Women’s proclivity for ornament and cosmetics figures as proof positive of their
perversity in this argument, and on this point in particular, the point at which the flesh
seduced glories in itself as seductress, one finds some of the most vehement displays of
misogynist rhetoric. The following is taken from Tertullian’s treatise “On the Apparel of
Women”:
Come, now; if from the beginning of the world the Milesians had been shearers of sheep,
and the Chinese spinners of silk, the Tyrians dyers and the Phrygians embroiderers, and
the Babylonians weavers of tapestry, if pearls had gleamed, and gemstones sparkled; if
gold and the greed it inspires had already issued from the earth; if the mirror, too, had
already been allowed to lie so largely; all these things, I imagine, Eve would have coveted,
once she was banished from Paradise and thus already dead. Any woman, therefore, who
hopes to live again [in Christ] should not long for them now, or even know of them, since
she did not possess them or know of them when she lived in Paradise. All these things
are but the baggage of woman in her condemned and dead state, arrayed as if to lend
splendor to her funeral.87
Woman-Eve (or homo Eva, for Tertullian admonishes his audience, “Do you not recognize Eve as yourself?”) is the author of a multiplication of signs, of corporeal forms
experienced as a movement away from God; to indulge herself in those same, to see them
as enhancing her beauty and the means of enticing others’ gazes—this was the height
of depravity, devilry itself. It identified woman as a Christian Pandora, generator of the
entire catalogue of vices known to man.88 All these ideas, and even the specific ornaments
and accessories of women’s seductive art with which they were frequently illustrated,
play an explicit role in the central demonstration of women’s lectio in the Speculum
83 Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, pp. 47–48, s.a. pp. 90–91, 45.
84 Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, pp. 38, s.a. pp. 22–29.
85 Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, p. 99.
86 Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, p. 37.
87 Translation of this passage has proven troublesome; this one is my adaptation based on several
others in consultation of the Latin text as found in Tertullian, Toilette des femmes, pp. 43–45.
88 Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, p. 45.
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virginum. There, however, they are the starting points of a transformation that repeats
the original redemption of woman and flesh through Mary as nova Eva, the New Eve. But
before I turn to the Speculum’s solution to this metaphysical conundrum—and here one
should not overlook the place given its titular mirror in Tertullian’s tirade—one further
point in the patristic tradition deserves special emphasis. The world of representations
is verbal as well as visual, woman is synonymous with rhetoric, the seductive power of
the spoken word, and ultimately with poetry and poetics as “representational pleasures”
appealing to the senses and prone to the decorative and ornamental.89 This dimension
of the argument is witnessed in the long tradition of Christian rhetoric in rejection of
ioculatores, or jongleurs, who were also the primary purveyors of vernacular poetry:
If any one delights in the sports of the circus, or the struggles of athletes, the versatility of
actors, the figure of women, in splendid jewels, dress, silver and gold, and other things of
the kind, the liberty of the soul is lost through the windows of the eyes, and the prophet’s
words are fulfilled: “Death is come up into our windows” (Jer. ix. 21). Again, our sense of
hearing is flattered by the tones of various instruments and the modulations of the voice;
and whatever enters the ear by the songs of poets and comedians, by the pleasantries and
verses of pantomimic actors, weakens the fiber of the mind.90
Jerome broadens Tertullian’s focus from a perversion of the soul that operates through
the eye to include the ear as well. All the senses are gendered feminine, but the eye and
the ear together are the primary “windows” of a seduction exercised on a female body.
If preoccupation with the visual remains the most pervasive feature of the rhetoric
that conflates woman, flesh, and ornament, it is because visual perception, above all,
makes the woman into the image of the flesh as both the seductress and the seduced.
The same idea implies, as a consequence, the doubling or mirroring of an essentially
feminine gaze. When it delights in material form, the flesh gazes upon itself. As Bloch
observed, “If woman is conceived to be analogous to the senses or perception, then any
look upon a woman’s beauty must be the look of a woman upon a woman, and the male
gaze is a non-sequitur.”91 Rupert exploited this very idea to an opposite purpose through
his feminine reading models. “You should emulate [Ooliba’s] gaze and desire,” Mary tells
her followers, but that desire should be directed towards “a better picture.” For Rupert
and other twelfth-century thinkers, the problem lies not in the seductive nature of visible forms, in exterior things, but only in the intentio of the viewer, the inner orientation
of “her” desire, or the direction of “her” gaze.
There is no doubt that Bloch is correct to insist on the persistent and comprehensive identification of woman with a dualistic abhorrence of the flesh—in all conceivable manifestations. The problem with his argument lies in a failure to recognize that it
was medieval thinkers themselves, and not modern scholarship, who first dismantled it
by reversing its assumptions. Where Bynum’s work reveals that the same extension of
dualistic oppositions on which such thinking was based could be employed to enable its
89 Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, p. 46.
90 Jerome, Against Jovinius, 2.8, p. 394; emphasis added.
91 Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, p. 106.
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reversal, Bloch sees no such possibility: “Poised between the contradictory abstractions
implicated in each other, women are idealized, subtilized, frozen into a passivity that
cannot be resolved. … Woman, at least no real woman, can resolve the dilemma of the
contradictory abstracted double.”92 In women’s reading as it is offered in the Speculum
virginum, we will see how the twelfth century answered Bloch’s supposed conundrum
by calling upon “young women” to gaze upon Ooliba’s gazing as the mirror of their own
desires, a process that takes place almost entirely as juxtaposition of opposites and
postulates that it is the very doubling of the flesh on both sides of the mirror that makes
integration out of opposition, Mary out of Eve.
The most concise formulation of the effort to “redeem” woman and the vehicles of
her perception in the Speculum virginum poses the paradoxical possibility of redemption through “fallen” media as a figure of the relationship between flesh and spirit. The
passage in fact introduces the picture that begins part 8, the picture of the colluctatio
carnis et spiritus (struggle of flesh and spirit) (fig. 3.5). Taking the bull by the horns, as it
were, it begins with Eve and Adam:
Nonne et hoc habes in apostolo, quod: “Caro concupiscat adversus spiritum et spiritus adversus carnem?” Eva seducens virum Adam carnis concupiscentia est seducens
spiritum, in qua colluctatione nisi ratio et sapientia moderetur utrumque, alterum
periclitatur ab altero. Quod ut apertius clareat, rursus figuram ponamus, et quomodo
sensus carnales obvient spiritalibus, quomodo trahant isti, illi fugiant, ostendamus.
Sepe enim aliud per aliud consideratur, et per rerum imagines visibilibus obiectas
intellectus acuitur. Sicut igitur proprium habet qualitas et natura uanitati studentium
puellarum, vicio curiositatis pre ceteris laborare et in speculis leuitates nugarum
suarum exercere, sic Christi uirgines, quacumque rerum similitudine uel collatione
uisibilia possunt inuisibilibus conferri ipsæque per hoc ad profectum uirtutum excitari,
gratanter intuentur, coniectantes maiora de minoribus et quandam ueritatis soliditatem
in figuralibus speculantes rationibus.
(SV, 7, p. 220, punctuation slightly modified)
(Did not the apostle write: “The desires of the flesh are in conflict with the spirit, and
the desires of the spirit are in conflict with the flesh?” [Galatians 5:17]. Eve seducing
the man, Adam, is the desire of the flesh seducing the spirit. Unless the power of reason
and wisdom governs each in this struggle, the one is imperilled by the other. So that this
may appear more clearly, let us once again turn to a picture, and show in what way the
corporeal senses impede the spiritual, in what way the latter draw forth, even as the
former flee. Often, though, the one is contemplated through the other, and understanding
is sharpened by images of things offered for visual inspection. Just as it is characteristic
of the quality and nature of girls studious of vanity to cultivate curiosity above other
vices and to tend to their frivolous trifles before a mirror, so also the virgins of Christ
gladly contemplate whatever similitude or analogy through which visible things may be
transformed into invisible ones such that they be excited to the perfection of virtues,
understanding greater things through lesser ones and seeking [speculantes] the solidity
of truth in figural representations.)
The passage makes a jump from the equation “woman is to man as flesh is to spirit,”
to the equation “the carnal senses are to the spiritual (senses/things) as picture is to
92 Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, pp. 90–91.
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Figure 3.5. The Struggle between Spirit and Flesh, Speculum virginum, early thirteenth century,
Baltimore, Walters Art Gallery, MS W. 72, fol. 73r. Creative Commons License.
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idea.” The process of the first equation is said to be seduction, while in the second it
has become instruction—but is nonetheless reidentified as one in kind with young girls’
preening before their mirrors. This last image is by no means a mere topos: the mirror
as an image of human recognition is equated here for the first time with the mirror as
an accessory of female beauty, and this with remarkable intentionality.93 The movement
back and forth between the opposition of spirit and flesh and that of picture and idea
allows the two processes to become one in this image of woman before mirror, which is
itself both object and mirror of the audience’s own gaze. The emphatic opposition of the
Pauline dictum that opens the passage is simply elided; the defence of the flesh is not
overtly espoused, it rather emerges as a simple consequence of the extension by analogy
of the binary opposition. At the end we are left with the idea of a continuity between the
female gaze of curiositas and an equally female gaze that seeks spiritual enlightenment.94
In the picture thereby announced, caro is represented as a woman and spiritus as a man (fig. 3.5).95 Caro receives the attribute bonum and is thus hierarchically
distinguished from spiritus–melius and deus–optimus but also placed in a continuous
relationship to them: the separation is one of degree, not of kind. Beyond this, this picture offers little that would seem immediately to fulfil the promise of the passage with
which it is introduced.
Demonstration of the women’s reading as the way to the spirit through the flesh
instead forms the central, structuring idea of the original presentation of the project; that
is, in the text of part 3 and the double, mirror picture that follows, commonly referred
to today as the “Trees of the Vices and Virtues” (fig. 3.6). Reversal of patristic rhetoric
occurs there in a form analogous to that observed in the passage above, by seizing on
the very terms of the rejection and performing their transformation. Eve becomes a wise
virgin who gazes on a new mirror twice over, through two media jointly employed. The
text of part 3 transforms the seductive finery—the “ornaments”—of the daughters of
Sion (Isaiah 3:16–22) together with their mirror into the “mystical wedding finery of
virgins.”96 The whole is to serve at once as a mirror of spiritual beauty and as the exemplary demonstration of how the women read. The picture, which the text designates
as “the fruits of the flesh and the spirit” (fructus carnis et spiritus) (fig. 3.6),97 is likewise identified as a mirror, the contemplation of which is conflated with the process of
reading scripture:
93 Jónsson, Miroir, pp. 196–97.
94 On this point, too, Jónsson underlines the originality of the Speculum: “Cette juxtaposition des
deux functions du miroir est tout à fait remarkable à l’epoque; … aucun auteur médiévale n’avait
dans le meme texte défini et séparé les deux functions avec tant de netteté” (Jónsson, Miroir, p. 189,
s.a. 193–99).
95 The sex of the caro figure is readily evident in both L and K, the two oldest and best copies, and
it is especially clear in H, the direct descendant of L, as seen in Figure 3.5.
96 “Mystica virginum ornamenta sponsalia” (SV, 3, p. 72).
97 SV, 3, p. 83, and 4, p. 85. Elsewhere, the text does refer to the pictures as “trees,” but never offers
the title arbores viciorum et virtutum.
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Figure 3.6. The Fruits of the Flesh (verso) and the Fruits of the Spirit (recto), Speculum virginum,
ca. 1140, London, British Library MS Arundel 44, fols. 28v and 29r. © The British Library Board.
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Figure 3.6. (continued)
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Speculum, filia queris. Ecce quantum profeceris vel defeceris, in alterutro fructu speculari
poteris. Hic enim, si te queris, reperis. Speculum dici non potest nisi quod intuentis
imaginem representat. Igitur ex consideratione sacrae scripturae te ipsam consule,
et aliqua vel virtutum vel viciorum vestigia reperis impressa conscientiae tuae.
(SV, 4, p. 85)98
(You ask for a mirror, daughter. Here you can behold, in the one fruit and the other, how
much you have progressed and where you are still wanting. Here, indeed, if you seek,
you will find yourself. Nothing can be called a mirror unless it reveals the image of its
beholder. Therefore, advise yourself through the consideration of holy scripture, and you
will discover the signs of the vices and virtues impressed on your conscience.)
Only apparently the representation of two irreconcilable opposites, the picture in fact
superimposes an idea of growth or progress in the moral, inner life onto a history of salvation as the transformation of the old Paradise into the new, a transformation whose
human agents are Eve and Mary.99
In the picture of the fructus carnis et spiritus as in the passage on the “struggle”
between them, opposition is not a figure of antithesis but an invitation to join, compare, and retain what is useful in movement from the one to the other; to observe, as
Peregrinus says, “how much you have progressed and where you are still wanting.”
The trees are an image of their beholder in that her gaze invents a self-image in the
space between them, supplying a mediating position in the void between evil and good,
superbia and humilitas as the roots of the trees. The progression from the old to the new
Paradise is made most immediately evident through their respective “fruits,” labelled as
vetus and novus Adam. Around the left tree a serpent coils. This tree, Babilonia sinistra,
as its inscription reads, represents the old woman, who brings forth the old man; while
the right tree, or Ierusalem dextra, generates the new man, Christ as an outgrowth or
“fruit” of her inner virtue. This tree stands in the same relationship to Mary’s generation
of Christ as the communication illustrated above the audi-et-vide address does to the
Annunciation. The virgins, contemplating their “beauty” in this mirror, fulfil the pedagogical value envisioned for flesh and picture (fructus carnis) in the passage from part 8;
they fulfil no less the conception and bearing of Christ (fructus spiritus) as envisioned in
the final frontispiece. In a remark occasioned by discussion of the other mirror at hand,
the ornaments of the daughters, Peregrinus makes clear that the contemplation of either
mirror is an exercise in reading scripture, which, in turn, is the process that allows the
virgins to bear Christ within: “For Christ is the Word of the Father, and thus Christ is
reborn within your breast even so much as you delight in the Word of Life. Where then
should the vices take root, when within you grows the fountain of all virtue?”100
The female viewer reconstitutes Mary’s transformation in her hermeneutic mediation between the left and the right tree. Mary is thus present in the image to the extent
that it is properly “read,” even as Christ is conceived and born anew through the same
98 The words in alterutro fructu refer to the two pictures. A passage later in part 4 describes the
effects of scripture as a mirror in similar terms (SV, 4, p. 107).
99 Powell, “Picture Program,” pp. 136–38.
100 “Cum enim Chirstus verbum sit patris, totiens Christum geris in pectore quotiens delectaris
verbo vitae. Ubi igitur locus erit vitiorum, quando apud te geris fontem virtutum?” (SV, 3, p. 68).
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hermeneutic act. The picture visualizes as a process the invitation to the bride in the
opening address to make “the new woman from the old, a beautiful woman of an ugly
one, a strong woman of a weak one”; that is, to enter into the transformation from Eve
to Mary, which is itself the redemption of woman. Here, then, lies the solution to the
woman’s reading conundrum: woman as body contemplates obverse images of the body
as woman and “seeks herself” as a moment of transformation from the one to the other;
her reading life is a figure of the integration of the life of the flesh into the life of the
spirit. No less was described above as the process whereby the virgins “gladly contemplate” their self-image as young girls who “tend to their frivolous trifles before a mirror,”
seeking to transform visibilia into invisibilia even as they seek “the solidity of truth in
figural representations”: these pictures of her reading path.
As indicated above, Rupert’s understanding of the Song of Songs stands behind this
image and is present on the same terms as Mary is herself: the picture maps out the generation of the paradisus novus from the paradisus antiquus, which Rupert, in a passage
he singled out as the inner mystery of his text, had read as Mary’s realization of Canticles
4:12, hortus conclusus, soror mea, sponsa, hortus conclusus, fons signatus.101 The picture
offers the virgins a stage of reflection and visualization that corresponds to the tropological dimension of this reading act: the way it is relived in the inner life. The text affirms
this idea in the same way as it does elsewhere, through the words of Canticles 1:3 to signal
the virgins’ identification with the images of Mary’s experience—a moment to which
I will return below. It is the idea of the woman’s reading of the Song of Songs as a mirror in
which she relives and transforms, as Mary did, the seduction of Eve, that unites scripture,
picture, and Mary’s reading path equally as the “visual” objects of the virgins’ reading,
as one and the same mirror in which she sees “herself”—as a woman before a mirror.102
In the discussion of the daughters of Sion, woman’s reading life is presented, literally speaking, as the process in which she is clothed and adorned as the bride.
Theodora requests treatment “of this mirror and ornament in both literal and figurative meanings” so that she might not arrive at the wedding “improperly dressed,” or,
in the words given her by scripture, “that she not be found naked even while clothed”
(2 Corinthians 5:3).103 “This mirror” is thus also that used by young girls in the art of
pleasing the beloved:104 “Looking-glasses [specula] are so-called because women use
them to look on their faces and their finery,” says Peregrinus as he catalogues this item
with the rest of the ornaments.105 As he turns from the literal to the figural, or “mystical”
101 CCC, 4, pp. 85–86. Rupert begins his fourth book with the words, “Ecce in medio nuptiarum
sumus, nuptiarum hominis regis.” See also Ohly, Hohelied-Studien, p. 132.
102 Eleanor Greenhill’s attempt to interpret the text as a commentary on the Song of Songs was
thus not so abstruse as it appeared to many, as affirmed (exceptionally) by Leclercq, Review of
Greenhill, 477–79. See also Jónsson, Miroir, pp. 187–99.
103 “Quia igitur speculum visibus nostris proponere decrevisti, non pigeat te de hoc speculo et
ornatu isto ad litteram et figuram aliqua resolvere, ut ipsa de his scientia sit … Christi virginibus
cautelæ providentia, ne iuxta apostolum vestitæ nudæ inveniantur” (SV, 3, p. 68).
104 Also emphasized by Jónsson, Miroir, pp. 196–97.
105 “Specula dicta sunt a speculando, eo quod facies suas et copitis ornatum in eo soleant
speculari…” (SV, 3, p. 71).
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explication, he substantiates the analogy by appropriating a passage from Paul to his
own purposes: “Nonne et habes in apostolo, quod ‘mulier innupta cogitat, quomodo
placeat deo, quæ autem nupta est cogitat, quæ mundi sunt, quomodo placeat viro?’
Diversus amor utriusque discernit inter utrumque” (Does not the apostle say, where “the
unmarried woman is intent on how to please God, she who is married is intent on things
of this world, on how to please her husband” [1 Corinthians 7:34]? The different love of
each distinguishes between them) (SV, 3, p. 71). The continuity that Peregrinus intends
between worldly and religious women is the result of a liberty taken with the biblical
text. In a contrast between virgins’ attention “to the things of God” (quae Domini sunt)
and that of married women to what pleases men (quomodo placeat viro),106 Peregrinus
replaces quae Domini sunt with quomodo placeat Deo, forcing a parallel in the efforts
made to please the beloved. The injunction to contemplate things divine he omits
altogether: the flesh, the entire concern of the worldly woman, is implicitly upheld as the
starting point for the spiritual quest of the virgin, while “a different love,” the differing
direction of their attention, will distinguish between them.
This starting point of the virgins’ quest to become the consummate bride thus puts
them in the same position as Rupert defined for his audience through Ooliba. The same
attention is to be devoted to a different picture-beloved. This basic movement of affective
identification that then undergoes a transfer of object governs the entire presentation of
the ornaments of the daughters; rather, the presentation serves to initiate its audience
into the same as their way of reading in the body. Accordingly, Peregrinus’s attention to
the ornaments ad litteram does not treat of the “historical” sense of scripture—the cautionary tale of how the daughters of Sion fell out of favour with the Lord107—it is rather no
more than a glossary that allows the listener to situate the Latin names of the ornaments
in the world of her own experience (SV, 3, pp. 70–71). The images themselves apply
to the virgins in the special sense: “Crede verbis nostris, filia, sermo iste propheticus
specialiter adversus eas dirigitur, quae … sanctimonialum nomen acceperunt” (Believe
our words, daughter! The prophet’s words apply in a special way to those who … have
accepted the sacred name of nun) (SV, 3, p. 69). Having gathered these scriptural images,
Peregrinus proceeds to their individual relevance for the virgins’ inner lives, their
meaning ad misticam (SV, 3, pp. 71–77). They are mapped onto an ideal image of self,
which becomes—very much in the sense just seen for the picture—the mirror of what
the listener sees in the daughters as women in the world, daughters of Eve.
Peregrinus’s instruction thus performs as lectio and meditatio within the lectio
divina. Passages of scripture are selected in their relevance to the reader and then
assimilated to self through a meditative process. As recast for the female religious, however, this process corresponds to an interiorization of the images of Eve’s seductive
106 The Vulgate reads: Et mulier innupta et virgo cogitat quae Domini sunt, ut sint sancta corpore, et
spiritu. Quae autem nupta est, cogitat quae sunt mundi, quomodo placeat viro (1 Corinthians 7:34).
This passage is cited all of nine times in the Speculum. The other eight instances limit themselves to
the first sentence, pertaining to the virgin, and follow the Vulgate text.
107 This same is briefly considered earlier, SV, 3, pp. 66–67, such that the daughters are identified
with superbia and the virgins with humilitas, but only as a preliminary.
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art and their transformation into an image of inner, spiritual growth. Theodora refers
to the same idea as the proper function of the ornaments of the daughters when she
urges Peregrinus to continue “ut quod feminis ornatus iste conferre videtur exterius,
misticis siginificationibus pro nobis agat interius” (so that what this finery is seen to
bestow on women outwardly may work through its mystical meaning for us inwardly)
(SV, 3, p. 74). The image of the virgins’ inner life is in turn realized as fusion with the
letter of scriptural imagery—but within “a different picture”: the process culminates
repeatedly in a fusion between Word and self that corresponds to a fusion between letter
and gloss as witnessed through the experience of the bride in the Song of Songs. The
process of clothing and adorning the bride is in this way demonstrated as a reading process that uses woman’s proclivity for ornament and the exterior as the inverted means
of her redemption.
Virgins and daughters are initially equated in their original vocation as “viewers,”
or “watchful souls”: “Syon speculatio dicitur, cuius filiæ sunt sanctæ animæ virgines
precipue ad auctorem suum ardentissimo amore speculandum procreatæ” (Sion means
“lookout,” and the daughters are the holy souls, above all virgins, who were created to
watch in ardent love for their creator) (SV, 3, p. 68). Later, the daughters’ moral failing
is identified explicitly as one of visual cupidity; wandering eyes trigger depraved moral
development:
Denique in nutibus oculorum filiarum Syon duplex cor et inconstans intellige, ubi quod
mens maliciose vel vane concipit, indecenti gestu corporis prodit et, quod gerit intus,
exterius ostendit.
(SV, 3, p. 69)
(Finally, you should see in the lustful glances of the daughters of Sion a duplicitous and
inconstant heart, in which that which the mind conceives in malice and vanity is manifest
in an indecent bearing of the body, and what is born within becomes manifest without.)
This passage finds its implicit reversal in Theodora’s statement of her objective as just
cited, which itself echoes the conceptio per aurem et oculum as evoked in the audi-et-vide
address: “so that what the voice intimates externally may dwell internally, and what is
drawn in through the eyes’ gaze may bear fruit in inner contemplation” (SV, 3, p. 58).
The gaze of the bride of Christ, no less than her hearing, draws from the exterior to
the interior, where her moral life takes shape as the progressive perfecting of her own
image as the sponsa corporaliter. The virgins seek to become the sponsa et mater, but like
Rupert’s adulescentula, they inherit the capacity to do so from Eve, represented here by
her descendants, the daughters of Sion. The assimilation of scriptural imagery to their
reading selves occurs as the visual reclaiming of the images of woman as seductress so
that these may instead seduce the heavenly bridegroom.
The seductive intention of the literal ornaments is emphasized especially for the first,
the calciamentes (sandals), and the last, the fascia (corset). Lascivia muliebris is responsible for the ornaments on sandals, “so that they may please their lovers all the more.”108
The fascia is a cloth wrap that pushes up the breasts, “to offer them more generously to
108 “… ut magis ex hoc amatoribus suis placeat” (SV, 3, p. 70).
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the eyes of the beholder.”109 The same features recur in the mystical explication, where the
idea of physical beauty, far from being suppressed, is expanded and supported in each case
by a citation from the Song of Songs. Peregrinus begins, “What else is to be understood of
[the virgins’] footwear, if not what you read in the Song of Songs: ‘How comely your steps
in your sandals, o daughter of the prince!’ [Canticles 7:2].”110 All told, he will cite the Song
of Songs eight times in the mystical explication of the ornaments.111 The repeated effect
is to refer the worldly beauty of the daughters not only to an abstract inner virtue but
also to the equally physical beauty of the bride of the Song. The explication ad misticam
culminates in the fascia and the olfactoriola. Of the fascia, which is worn by the virgins as a
sign of their chaste fidelity to Christ, the Song is made to bear double witness:
“Pone me,” inquit, “ut signaculum super cor tuum, ut signaculum super brachium tuum.”
Sicut enim lascivia virgo seculae papillas carnis erumpentes stricta premit fascia, sic
vera virgo, veri sponsi sponsa castitatis et pudiciciæ vinculo vinciat interiora ubera
sua, ut spiritu sancto preventa possit proclamare: “Dilectus meus mihi inter ubera mea
commorabitur.”
(SV, 3, p. 76)
(“Place me,” the bridegroom says, “as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm
[Canticles 8:6].” For just as the lustful young woman in the world presses up the swelling
flesh of her breasts with a tightly wrapped cloth, so the true virgin, bride of the true
bridegroom, should bind her inner breasts with the bond of chastity and modesty, so
that, once filled with the Holy Spirit, she may proclaim, “My beloved will rest between by
breasts” [Canticles 1:13].)
The text makes its own explanation here of “how” the listener can be brought to “proclaim”
identification with the letter of the bride’s experience, and the understanding operates by
strict analogy (sicut … sic) with the worldly woman’s concern for physical appeal to her
lover. The virgin understands her experience through this analogy—the “special” relevance
of scriptural images to her life as embodied bride—and proclaims it in the words of the
bride of the Song. The transfer of the experience of worldly women to the spiritual life does
not suppress or even mitigate its sensual appeal; the literal meaning is not relinquished but
rather realized in the poetic eroticism of the Song of Songs.
This is the ascent to the letter of the bride’s experience that we saw illustrated in the
frontispiece and announced in the original introduction. The reading moment—Mary’s
own—occurs over and over again in the text; it serves several times to portray the fulfilment of the instructive process as either the realization of an inner Paradise or the
consummate virgin’s entry into the heavenly Paradise.112 The first of these occurs in the
mystical treatment of the olfactoriola (perfume vials), which concludes the ornaments
of the daughters of Sion. “The pure hearts of Christ’s virgins are the holy olfactoriola,”
Peregrinus begins, and then unleashes a rhapsodic accumulation of aromatic spices
109 “… ut gratior intuentum oculis videatur” (SV, 3, p. 71).
110 “Quid de calciamentis aliud intelligendum est, nisi quod habes in canticis canticorum: ‘Quam
pulcher sunt gressus tui in calciamentis tuis, filia principis?’ ” (SV, 3, p. 72).
111 One of these, SV, 3, p. 77, was overlooked in the edition.
112 In addition to the passage discussed below, see SV, 1, pp. 37–38; 4, p. 97; and 10, pp. 306–8.
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and floral growths as the virgins’ inner virtues.113 The passage serves to assimilate the
emissiones of the hortus conclusus in Canticles 4:12–13 to the virgins’ inner lives, thus
completing as reading practice the identity between them and the same scriptural image
that, while itself the fons et origo of the visualization of their lives in the fructus spiritus,
remains otherwise unspoken in the text:114
In his olfactoriolis humilitatis redolet viola, hic aureae spirat verecundiae rosa, lilium
albae castimoniae, poma spiritualis exuberantiae, ibi denique “ciprus cum nardo, nardus
et crocus, fistula et cinamomum cum universis lignis Libani, mirra et aloe cum omnibus
primis unguentis,” hoc est in cordibus virginum perfecto amore Chirstum querentium
inveniuntur suaveolentia germina omnigenarum virtutum, quarum radices mentis et
corporis puritas et humilitas.
(SV, 3, pp. 76–77)
(In these perfume bottles the violet of humility releases its fragrance, the rose breathes
golden modesty, the lily chastity, the apple spiritual exuberance; there, where “the cyprus
with nard, nard and saffron, cane and cinnamon with all the trees of Lebanon, myrrh and
aloe with all the best unguents” [Canticles 4:13]—that is, in the hearts of virgins who
seek Christ in perfect love, there are found the sweetly fragrant shoots of every kind of
virtue, whose roots are purity of mind and body and humility.)
The exposition of the daughters of Sion—as Peregrinus indeed indicates at the
outset—is none other than the same transformation as reading process that is visualized
in the two trees as the Old and the New Eve. The two presentations duplicate each other,
but as consummate translations of one idea into two different media. The passage that
follows concludes, then, in the only way possible, by describing the assimilation of letter
to life as identification with the archetype of the sponsa’s response: “His unguentis et
aromatibus Christi virgines delibutae cum apostolo possunt proclamare, ‘Christi bonus
odor sumus’ … et illud: ‘Trahe me post te, curremus in odore unguentorum tuorum’ ”
(When they have been daubed with these unguents and perfumes, Christ’s virgins may
proclaim with the apostle, “We are the good fragrance of Christ” [2 Corinthians 2:15],
… and that word, “Draw me after you, we will run in the fragrance of your ointments”
[Canticles 1:3]) (SV, 3, p. 77).
The same programmatic moment, here applied to the virgins’ listening “conception”
(scripture as speculum), is applied to its ocular complement once the picture-mirror of
the same process has been introduced between parts 3 and 4. The demonstration of the
pictures as speculum builds to an analogous rhetorical crescendo evoking the virgin’s
entry into heavenly Paradise.115 In this last instance, the picture itself opens like a
113 “Munda Christi virginum corda sancta sunt olfactoriola …” (SV, 3, p. 76).
114 This identification was then indeed made explicit in the reconception of the opening in part 1
and its pictures; see Powell, “Picture Program,” pp. 147–48.
115 The inspiration for the Speculum’s use of Canticles 1:3 possibly came from the liturgy of the
feast of Mary’s Assumption, where it occurs as Mary’s dying words, marking the culmination of a
narrative in which she seeks reunification with Christ; see Fulton, “Quae est ista,” 101–17, esp. 107,
113. The congregation would have known it as such.
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window onto Paradise116—when the instructor asks his pupil to witness the “mutation”
of the one tree into the other:
Sed leva relicta, dexteram repetamus, ligno vitae transgressionis stipitem mutemus,
paradisum intremus amentitate sua ultra gratiam secularis exuberantiae deliciosum …
ubi tanta quinis sensibus haurias delicias, ut gratanter odorifero haustu perfusa domino
tuo sursum residenti proclames: “Trahe me post te, curremus in odore unguentorum
tuorum.”
(SV, 4, p. 97)
(But leaving the left side, let us return to the right, let us transform the trunk of transgression into the tree of life, let us enter Paradise, in its delight and by its flowing abundance
beyond all the rewards of this world. … where all your five senses imbibe such delights,
that, filled through and through with this fragrant draught, you will cry out in gratitude
to your lord who abides above, “Draw me after you, may we run in the fragrance of your
ointments” [Canticles 1:3].)
The trees that are a map of the plan of salvation, portraying the generation of the New
Man as the mirroring repetition of the generation of the Old, effect the same transformation in real time as a result of the reading process that is the instructional dialogue. The virgin relives the original transformation of Eve into Mary, and she does so
through the experience of scripture in an audio-visual theatre. Peregrinus confirms as
much when he next identifies the same tree as the image of her inner and her monastic
life. The virgins as “virtutum cultores” are to be seen as the same “hortus deliciarum”:
“Accordingly, the Paradise I place before you is the rule of the monastic life, this garden is
the harmonious communal life of holy virgins in Christ.”117
In addition to the repetition of Canticles 1:3 as the announcement of identification
achieved, four other instances signal a similar moment either through other passages
from the Song of Songs or with the words of the adorned bride from Isaiah 61:10.118
That the woman repeatedly ascends—through the embodied media of the instructional
method—to a position of identification with the scriptural image is a reification of the
vertical fusion of letter and gloss. That she cultivates the hortus within her as the progressive re-enactment of the salvation narrative and the Incarnation is likewise a consequence of the same reification, a reconstitution of the narrative transformation from
Eve to Mary in her life. The hortus conclusus of Canticles 4:12—in which Rupert was able
to read Mary as the new Paradise, thus inspiring the Speculum’s picture of the fructus
carnis et spiritus—resurfaces in the Speculum virginum as the hortus deliciarum, a figure
that equates it with the Paradise to come (in Heaven), the monastery, and the virgins’
reading lives. The woman’s body is the site of the integration of the life of the flesh into
116 To designate this function for the picture of “Mystical Paradise,” added later with parts one and
two, the author hits upon the moniker paradisus speculatorius (SV, 2, p. 39). See Powell, “Picture
Program,” pp. 152–53.
117 “Verum non solum fores premissos, id est virtutes, sed et virtutum cultores studiosos hortum
istum deliciarum dixerim. … Itaque paradisus, quem propono, monasticae vitae regula est, hortus
iste sanctarum virginum concors in Christo commanentia est …” (SV, 4, p. 98).
118 SV, 3, p. 76; 6, pp. 174–75; and 1, p. 38; 4, p. 113.
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that of the spirit, fulfilled through the assimilation of image/letter to life. She reifies the
reading experience that Rupert first revealed through Mary in his commentary on the
Song of Songs.
A Female Poetics of Body and Truth
When seen through this reading model of integration, the audi-et-vide address that once
opened the work is revealed as far more than an expansion of Benedict’s prologue to
include the eye in instruction; it is an inversion of the eye and ear as the windows of
Eve’s seduction such that they become the instruments of “her” transformation, the
extension into poetics of Mary’s original inversion, the transformation of the Old into
the New Eve.119 When the audi-et-vide address states that Christ seeks “open eyes and
open ears,” so that what is heard and what is seen are drawn from the outer to the inner
world to form the consummate bride, it describes the same process that elsewhere
accomplishes continuity in rupture between the seductive wiles of worldly women and
the inner beauty of the virgin, the use of mirrors there, the use of scripture and picture
here, the woman as body and the body as woman’s mirror.
The method reproduces over and over again this essential doubling of the female gaze
as the implicit rationale for the necessary integration of a female dependency on the flesh
and the senses into the life of the spirit. The oppositional pairs that shape the instructive
project are all alternative remanifestations of the analogy in opposition between Eve’s
seduction and religious instruction. The woman’s way of knowing the Word attends to
and seeks the latter through the former and discovers in the process the “special” meaning
that this “conjunction of divergent natures” brings to her understanding of her spiritual
life.120 The original “mirror” of this process in the treatment of the daughters of Sion
itself contains the seductive instrument mirror as one of the women’s ornaments—what
Tertullian had called “the baggage of woman in her condemned and dead state.” Like the
continuity between secular and religious roles that became characteristic of female religious experience, women’s reading was a figure of continuity in rupture, of integration
between opposite poles: “In hac itaque carnis et spiritus coniunctione vel disiunctione
vigilandum est Christi virgini” (Thus to this conjoining and separation of spirit and flesh
Christ’s virgins should give their utmost attention) (SV, 8, p. 221).
The figure of the woman reader has attracted considerable attention in study of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but this attention has focused primarily on vernacular
literature and has thus generally substituted the replica for the original and overlooked
or misunderstood the substance of the transfer between them. In a contribution
119 The contrast between Eve’s seduction through the voice of the serpent and Mary’s conception
of Christ through the voice of Gabriel is a constant of the tradition of the conceptio per aurem from
the earliest witnesses onward; see Constas, Proclus, pp. 282–90; also Steinberg, “Filippo Lippi’s
‘Annunciation’,” 26–27.
120 The opening of part 6 features the relationship between the five bodily senses and their inner
spiritual equivalents as a “coniunctae naturae discrepantia vel discrepantis naturae coniunctio” (SV,
6, p. 161).
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investigating the woman reader as cast in Richard of Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amours and
its anonymous Response—a multilayered persiflage of the complicity between models
of reading sacred and profane in later thirteenth-century France—Helen Solterer identifies in its “figure of the woman reader” an innovative “iconoclasm” that “suggests in its
widest terms a physical recasting of epistemology.”121 This woman reader “reclaims her
senses as a mode of self-defense,” an attitude towards sensory experience that affirms
value in all its vehicles and rehabilitates women’s habitual vice, curiositas, to restore it to
a more neutral semantic field122
Just as it is characteristic of the quality and nature of girls … to cultivate curiosity above
other vices, and to tend to their frivolous trifles before a mirror, so also the virgins of
Christ gladly contemplate whatever similitude or analogy through which visible things
may be transformed into invisible ones such that they be excited to the perfection
of virtues.
(SV, 7, p. 220)
Behind Richard’s playful manipulation of an audio-visual form and the genres of instruction (the bestiary) and seduction (the love letter) lay a tradition of women’s “special”
relationship to the voice and truth of scripture that was well over a century old. The
physical recasting of epistemology in the figure of the woman-as-reader occurred in the
monastic culture of the early twelfth century.
In the patristic discourse on woman and body, women’s proclivity for ornament and
exterior charms was an expression of depravity sui generis because it further multiplied the sin, manifest in her bodilyness, that she brought into the world. For Tertullian,
merely to catalogue all manner of luxuriant finery known to the early Christian world
was to render transparent his abhorrence of Eve and her sex. The Speculum’s woman
reader, it should be clear, is not presented with a reversal of the value of ornament itself.
What was formerly depraved is not now “good.” But depravity is no longer the inescapable consequence of the woman’s position. She is given a different way of understanding
the role of the body in her own life:
“Omnis igitur gloria filiae regis ab intus,” quia illum, qui facit aeternaliter beatos et
gloriosos, possidet intus. Sicut enim Christus humana fragilitate deitatem celavit,
et vili indumento “speciosum forma prae filiis hominum,” sic virgo Christi, mundo
foris despecta, mundi conditorie plena est. … Quid igitur opus habent virgines Christi
olosericis indumentis vel aurotexta ciclade superius amiciri, armilla, anulis, inaruibus
margaritarum granis splendientibus onerari, cum sacramentis spiritalibus fulgeant
interius, quorum summa omnium est Christus?
(SV, 3, p. 63)
(“For all the splendor of the king’s daughter comes from within” [Psalm 44:14], because
within she possesses him who grants eternal grace and glory. Just as Christ hid his divinity in the frailty of human flesh, concealing “his beauteous form from the sons of men”
121 “Medieval Senses,” 129–45 at 142. On the Bestiaire d’amours as understood here, see above,
pp. 1–2 and Powell, “Instruction for Religious Women,” pp. 343–57.
122 Solterer, “Medieval Senses,” 142. For the frequent association of curiositas with woman and
Eve’s failing within contemporary instructional literature, see Newman, “Golden Bowl,” 119.
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[Psalm 44:3], under this wretched garment, so the virgin of Christ, abject to the eyes
of the world, bears within the world’s creator. … What need then, have the virgins of
Christ to wrap themselves in garments of pure silk, to don a stately cloak worked in gold,
or to adorn themselves with bracelets or rings or earrings hung with brilliant pearls,
when they shine from within with the light of the spiritual sacraments whose essence is
Christ himself?)
The body that willingly humbles itself and assumes an abject exterior joins Christ in
the Incarnation. This body is no longer irretrievably a vile cover or deceptive exterior
but rather can become the diaphanous vehicle of divinity and truth: Christ, born within,
“shines” through it. The true virgin of Christ in this way reveals her own beauty, her
own radiating ornament—evoked over and over again in the text through a visual
idea, that of inner virtue manifest in the body as light radiating through material form.
As Peregrinus says of the ornament that consists in the harmony between faith and
action: “Iunge utrumque et deo placebis ex utroque. … Fulget alterum ex altero et fit
ornatus communis utriusque collatio” (Join the two together and you will please God in
both. … The one shines forth through the other, and from the combination results their
reciprocal beauty) (SV, 3, p. 78). Or again, of the ornament afforded by a pure mind in a
chaste body: “alterum splendeat ex altero et compositione specierum ornatus communis
augeatur” (The one shines through the other and the combination of two substances
increases the beauty of each) (SV, 3, p. 73). As Theodora affirms, “Magnus decor iste
virginis, in quo deus homini coniungitur” (Great is this beauty of the virgin, in which God
joins himself to humanity) (SV, 3, p. 73).
Such beauty radiating from within mirrors Christ’s bodily divinity because it
manifests a perfect accord between will and action, between inner truth and outer form.
The gold ring that encloses a radiant gemstone—as the ornament bestowed on betrothal,
whether of secular or sacred brides—becomes the archetypal symbol of women’s perfection: “What then, is the precious stone enclosed in gold if not a pure heart enclosed
in a chaste body?”123 Woman as body lives in the peril of an immanently corruptible
nature; her spiritual task is thus constantly to seek this state of perfect integrity, a state
in which she again embodies the Word as it was originally embodied in Mary’s flesh.
The continuity with secular roles and desires in the female religious life is only one
manifestation of a continuity between woman in the carnal and woman in the spiritual
life that stems from the inability to renounce the flesh. The abject exterior, an exterior
that abnegates its very exteriority, acknowledges woman as humanity’s physicality and
marks this as weakness and incapacity before God; it manifests the inner humility that is
then the only true mirror of her outward state. This position does not renounce or revile
the flesh but rather embraces it—as Christ did—as the true nature of humanity. The
body contemplates itself as the available mirror of divinity. By injecting the woman-asreader into the patristic epistemology of gender, twelfth-century monasticism reversed
the significance of “the question of woman” for the question “of reading in the literary
history of the West.”124
123 “Quid est enim lapis pretiosus in auro nisi pudica mens in corpore casto?” (SV, 3, p. 73).
124 Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, pp. 47–48.
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This shift from the abhorrence of the exterior, of embodiment, to a position that abhors
only discontinuity in representation between the idea and its embodiment thus proceeds
from the same understanding of woman’s position and shares the same structural order of
importance, as that noted earlier from self-renunciation to self-contemplation. It is fundamental to the formulation of woman’s spiritual experience and generates an entire complex
of metaphors centring on the inner truth and outer form, the primacy of intention in virtuous action, the dangers of worldly praise and, once again, the mirror as the image of the
desired continuity between flesh and spirit, as between self-image and imago Dei. These are
the terms that, from this point on, define the spiritual life of the “New Eve.”
The imperilled, corruptible state that is immanent in the woman’s position is
featured most frequently in the Speculum virginum—and elsewhere—in two ways: as
the imperative preservation of her bodily integrity, that is, her virginity; and as the desire
to please and her resultant susceptibility to praise. These latter represent the flesh
as seductress and seduced, respectively, and therefore reveal the weakness that most
often endangers the former. To please and be praised are behavioural manifestations of
woman’s attraction to the exterior—both tendencies find their place in the Speculum as
equally central to women’s religious vocations. The desire to please makes women adopt
false exteriors, whether in ornament or action; in the virgin’s instruction it is made the
motivator—quomodo placeat deo—of her inner adornment in the virtues. The attraction
to the exterior makes women susceptible to others’ deceits; in the Speculum virginum it
is the basis of their use of the mirror, “whatever … analogy by which visible things may
be transformed into invisible ones.”
Virginity itself is the sign of the vulnerable body, “the glass that is shattered with
one blow.”125 The woman preserves both beauty and bodily integrity for the bridegroom, Christ, and does so literally, because she is the embodied bride. The imperative
of continuity between inner intention and outer form—outer form being, in this case,
bodily virginity or good works—is a rejection of bodily integrity or outward beauty as
meriting reward in themselves. The woman who understands these latter as her own
accomplishments rather than as the gift of her creator is as false as the flatterers who
encourage her with their praise.126 Thus, virginity as the vulnerable body, the false
exterior, and “false praise” are intrinsically linked and mark a trajectory towards spiritual perfection that is essentially female.
Speaking in terms of poetics, the ideas of woman’s body as exterior form and her task
as the realization of the diaphanous body mean that both woman and representational
forms retain integrity through the abject exterior, the one that seeks no praise, acknowledging its own baseness. Truth is manifest in the rejection of ornament and rhetorical
eloquence but also of learning and letters, ideas that will figure largely in the justification
125 The idea is a commonplace; I cite it here from Gautier de Coincy, Les Miracles de Nostre Dame,
vol. 3, p. 490, lines 788–89.
126 These ideas recur throughout the Speculum virginum and are also made the subject of part 6,
within the explication of the parable of the Wise and the Foolish Virgins (Matthew 25:1–13). See
esp. SV, 6, pp. 162–65, 172–73. The same complex of ideas is central to Abelard’s pastoral concern
for Heloise and her sisters at the Paraclete; see Powell, “Listening to Heloise,” pp. 269–78.
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of vernacular literature. The “reader” who corresponds to this idea of representation
through the body diaphanous is the mulier indocta or laica illiterata, the body that is
simple in its understanding not by negligence or mere ignorance, but by virtue of an
incapacity that redeems the sensory means on which it depends—Ooliba on the way to
becoming the adulescentula. We encountered her in singularly exalted form as Hildegard
of Bingen; she will recur in vernacular literature both inside and outside the narrative,
as protagonist and as audience.
Gregory’s apology for visual art lends itself in the Speculum to this same notion of
woman as monastic laicus. Idiotas and ignorantes … qui litteras nesciunt came to be
understood as referring to laymen generally in opposition to clerics or doctores; in this
way women were perpetual illiterates because they were never clericus.127 But, as we
have seen, the equation is more properly understood the other way around: laymen, as
illiterates, are in fact a special category of woman as the sex that embodies humanity’s
weakness and insufficiency before God, humanity as bound to the body and dependent
on the physical senses. A corollary thus emerges that we will find exploited in later
chapters: laymen, in as much as they are “illiterates,” are epistemologically female. This is
the equation that makes the recasting of lectio for monastic women so readily accessible
as the poetics of a layman’s way of knowing the Word, how the woman-as-audience, the
central concern of the Speculum virginum, could become an audience-as-woman in vernacular literature. The articulation of a spiritual path particular to the nature of woman
as monastic laicus contains an implicit rehabilitation of the secular and vernacular, of the
spiritual value of lay experience, which corresponds to yet another instance of reification, or the play between metaphor and experience.
The reading method of the Speculum virginum witnesses the woman as body seeking
the integrity of the body in visible forms as the traces, the vestigia, of her absent beloved.
They are her mirror. Part 1 identifies this woman reader through the scriptural figure of
the sponsa derelicta:
Sit igitur laudis divinæ confessio operum eius considerata magnitudo, ubi ratio ipsa
visum intuentis in sapiente prevenit quia ex consideratione rerum visibilium, quod
futurum est purificatæ mentis intellectu iam precurrit. Ubi dum virgo licet in hac carne
posita steterit, interiori mentis auditu sponsum clamantem attendit: “Non vocaberis ultra
derelicta et terra tua non vocabilitur amplius desolata.”
(SV, 1, p. 29, emphasis added)
(Therefore from the contemplation of the greatness of his creation comes the outpouring
of his praise, wherever the viewer’s gaze is endowed with a reasoning mind, for that
which will be is prefigured in the understanding of a pure heart through the contemplation of visible things. In which place once a virgin, though she remain in the world of the
flesh, has established herself, she hears the voice of the bridegroom calling, “You shall
no longer be called the foresaken one and no more shall your land be called desolate”
[Isaiah 62:4].)
In the corporeal forms of this world, the audio-visual call to the bride comes directly from
the bridegroom. This possibility is the bride’s assurance that she is not truly forsaken,
127 For Gregory’s text, see pp. 44–45, above.
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and serves as consolation for the physical loss her religious life requires. In response
to a dubious inquiry from Theodora, Peregrinus gives this quasi-widowed state special
emphasis:
Numquid non videtur tibi virginitas quodammodo ex hoc derelicta, quæ licet sponso
cælesti desponsata coniugalis gratiæ vel prolis manet tamen penitus ignara? Totius
humanæ culturæ vel sementis nescia est ac per hoc ad multiplicandos filios Adæ penitus
infecunda est. Itane menti tuæ querimonia lugubris excidit, quam vox una feminarum
sterilium in veteri lege coram domino effudit se derelictas a deo conquerentium, quia
sterilitate ventris earum populus dei non accepit incrementum?
(SV, 1, pp. 29–30)
(Does the state of virginity not seem to you forsaken in that a virgin, though she be
betrothed to the heavenly bridegroom, remains utterly without experience of the grace
of marriage and offspring? Of human conception and reproduction she knows nothing
and is therefore entirely infertile for the increase of the sons of Adam. Has your heart forgotten the mournful lament that the infertile women of the old law poured forth as if in
one voice before God, lamenting that He had forsaken them, because the sterility of their
wombs had stopped the increase of God’s people?)
Here again the virgins’ position is not affirmed through negative representation of its
alternative, the secular roles of women. The passage instead directly addresses the
depth of deprivation felt by the infertile woman through the lamenting voices of Sarah
and Rachel in the Old Testament. This mourning lament is made the virgins’ own in
preparation for the consolation offered in the ensuing discussion of marriage and birth
in the Spirit. “Thus women reached God not by reversing what they were but by sinking
more fully into it.”128
As Augustine had written: “The entire church is a widow, whether men or women,
husbands or wives, whether young people or the aged or virgins: all the church is a
widow, forsaken in this world.”129 Thus the woman as “widowed bride” is a figure of all
humanity, the church, but she remains no less a figure of her own bodily experience. She
replicates in her own life the scriptural metaphors of the Fall, the Incarnation and salvation. The reification of the strategy of audience response defined as feminine identification produces a mirror experience in which the woman contemplates images of self as
metaphors for the transformation from flesh into spirit and completes these metaphors
as bodily transformation.
The life of the woman as a progression towards epiphany in the body thus constitutes
a narrative dimension of the scriptural image, the rediscovery of coherence in the disjunct images of the Song and the prophets as a model of reading and viewing. The
sponsa derelicta, or widowed bride, is herself a figure of the fusion between the bridal
metaphor of Christian experience and its narrative, or “historical” dimension. In the
use of this figure the experience offered the female religious through the instructional
128 Bynum, “And Woman,” p. 274; see also Newman, “Golden Bowl,” 26–27.
129 “Tota ecclesia una uidua est, sive in uiris, siue in feminis, siue in coniugatis, siue in maritatis
feminis, siue in adolescentibus, siue in senibus, siue in virginibus: omnis ecclesia una uidua est,
deserta in hoc saeculo” (Augustine, Ennarrationes in psalmos, 131.23, p. 1923).
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process of the Speculum virginum joins both in media and in conception that offered
the user or users of the St Albans Psalter, to be considered next. There the experience
of the widowed bride is presented such that both the medium (vernacular narrative)
and the content make it immediate and accessible, linguistically and conceptually. It is
placed alongside a pictorial narrative of the history of salvation that fulfils essentially
the same functions. The entire assemblage of images and texts serves the recreation
of an aesthetic experience equated with that of dramatic performance, another multimedial translation through which the woman-as-reader completes her spiritual ascent
as sponsa corporaliter.
In the Speculum virginum, what we have seen is the missing third dimension of
the relationship between text and auditor, picture and viewer: the performance in
which scriptural imagery is rendered as personal experience and the receptive act is
a continuing process of assimilation of letter to life. The woman’s life is a narrative reenactment of the fusion of letter and gloss, sponsa (body) and sponsus (head/soul), flesh
and spirit. She identifies affectively with the images and metaphors of this abstract
ascent from letter to spirit and seeks to make them continuous with her own experience, re-embodying the original historia that constitutes their fulfilment. Because she
embodies the metaphor, her life as narrative is a figure of the same progression—recast
not as a reading process in which cognition accomplishes the renunciation of the image
but as experience that is communicable as such through the retention of its corporeality.
This is as much as to say that in the woman, the reading experience of the clericus/
litteratus becomes physically apprehensible as narrative, as “our” historia.
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Chapter 4
SEEKING THE READER/VIEWER OF THE
ST ALBANS PSALTER
St Albans, a Psalter, a Life
Something happened in the 1120s at the English abbey of St Albans, not far north
of London. Under an abbot of Norman origin, Geoffrey of Maine (r. 1119–1146), formerly a magister and schoolman of Le Mans, illustrated manuscripts “suddenly
gushed forth like a released torrent.”1 The most notable example is the St Albans Psalter
(ca. 1120–ca. 1140).2 For Otto Pächt, its prefatory cycle of forty full-page pictures
represented an “unparalleled outburst of pictorial narrative” in Western art and as
such testified to “one of the most astonishing phenomena in the history of medieval
art, second in importance only to the rise of monumental sculpture.”3 To be sure, AngloSaxon England had boasted a rich tradition of manuscript illumination that was abruptly
broken off with the Norman Conquest. In particular, the tradition of psalter illustration
and the inclusion of one or more full-page pictures marking the divisions between the
Psalms was ancient and apparently well developed—even if the extant examples are
few.4 But this was not so much a revival as a completely new beginning: in style, execution, and content, “these pictures reject everything that Anglo-Saxon art had stood for”;
and this above all in their representation of narrative.5 These were not singular, timeless
scenes of largely allegorical or symbolic significance but frozen moments of time made
present and real, sacra historia dramatically arrested for the viewer’s contemplative
gaze (see figs. 4.3–4.9). For Pächt, this made St Albans into “the birthplace of a new art
of storytelling,” for “wherever in twelfth-century England we come across a sequence of
narrative scenes, their iconography and style invariably points back to St Albans as the
fountainhead of the pictorial tradition.”6
By this account, the St Albans Psalter would have all but accomplished the visual turn
of the twelfth century in reading and prayer. The significance of the reading Annunciate
near the beginning of its picture cycle (fig. 4.3), which yielded a good deal to our attention
in chapter 2, thus looms potentially very large. Immediately following the picture cycle is
1 Dodwell, Pictorial Arts, p. 329.
2 Hildesheim, Dombibliothek, MS St Godehard 1. Attempts to rename the book as the Psalter of
Christina of Markyate (as I earlier did myself) or, most recently, the Markyate Psalter (see Collins
and Fisher, eds. in the list of works cited), are more a hindrance than a help to continuing inquiry.
On the dating, see Collins and Fisher, p. 3.
3 Pictorial Narrative, p. 13.
4 Openshaw, “Symbolic Illustration,” 41–60; Openshaw, “Weapons,” 17–38; Deshman, “Galba
Psalter,” 109–38.
5 Dodwell, Pictorial Arts, p. 329.
6 SAP, pp. 170–71.
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another vehicle of narrative renewal, the Chanson de Saint Alexis (fig. 4.10). The earliest
extant manuscript of any monument of French vernacular literature thus occurs, on
the one hand, bound into the material body of monastic prayer, the psalter, and on the
other, twinned with a new art of pictured lectio, or visual storytelling. The visual and
the vernacular turn, both in one binding: the understanding of Mary’s reading agency as
captured in the psalter’s portrayal of the Annunciation appears to inaugurate a radical
expansion in the use of images, narrative, and the vernacular, the translation of sacra
historia into bodily media.
In the selection and treatment of its subjects, which reach from the Fall to Pentecost,
the picture cycle offers much to sustain such a hypothesis. The reading Annunciate
follows a two-page sequence of the Fall, identifying its narrative context as the making of
the New Eve.7 Of the remaining thirty-seven full-page pictures, Mary appears in no fewer
than nine, including oddities such as the doubling of the Flight to Egypt with a mirroring
image of the return and a striking entombment scene in which Mary displaces Joseph of
Arimathea to figure at the centre of the composition (fig. 4.6). Mary is likewise found at the
centre of the capital events that conclude the narrative and determine humanity’s continuing relationship to Christ: his Ascension and the Pentecost (figs. 4.8 and 4.9). These
latter examples, while not unprecedented, constitute striking iconographic gestures of
theological significance.8 Indeed, where Mary is not found at the centre of the images
in which she appears, her experience constitutes the event portrayed (Annunciation,
Nativity), with one exception: the Descent from the Cross, in which her position holding
one of Christ’s hands is symmetrical with John’s (fig. 4.5). Other than Christ, she is the
only figure portrayed within the cycle in both a three-quarter turn and full front, in the
Annunciation and Pentecost, respectively.9 This last feature serves to arrest attention on
the two pictures that allow Mary’s position to frame the whole. The connection between
the two is marked by another feature as well: the descending dove.
The cycle displays the story of Christ’s salvation of humanity, but it does so such
that a woman’s body is front and centre at every possible opportunity. It is the history
of the Logos on Earth, shaped no less into a history of Mary’s body as the meeting place
of divinity and humanity. Nowhere is this idea more imposing than in her enlarged and
central intrusion in the picture of Pentecost (fig. 4.9). There she all but displaces the
apostles, who appear to be as much in awe of her as they are of the event. This is Mary as
Rupert named her, as omnium Scripturarum secretarium and magistra magistrorum: she
seems herself to create the enabling axis between humanity and the descending dove of
the Spirit, as she does at the Ascension on the facing page. Her conception of the Word
through the dove at the Annunciation thus appears as the enabling predecessor of the
later event. What the apostles learned at Pentecost, Mary had known, completely and
perfectly, “from the beginning,” and thus in some way imparts to them.
7 Connections between the two images are noted by Heslop, “ ‘Grand Tour’,” p. 24.
8 SAP, pp. 67–70; and, on the Ascension in particular, Deshman, “Disappearing Christ,” 525–27.
9 One other figure, the Devil, receives a single full-face portrayal in the Harrowing of Hell. As a
marker of prominence, the gesture is typical of the Alexis Master’s work; see Bepler, Kidd and
Geddes, Albani Psalter (cited hereafter as AP), pp. 125, 127, 174–76.
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The real fountainhead of pictorial narrative thus appears to be the reading
Annunciate herself; or rather, this spectacular emergence of pictorial narrative within
psalter prayer is presented as a reflex of Mary’s incarnatory reading. Immediately
following the Old French narrative poem there is a bilingual insertion of Gregory the
Great’s apology for picturae as the scripture of the illiterate (fig. 4.11). The Psalter as a
whole, with its illuminated calendar and finally the unprecedented programme of 215
historiated initials to the Psalms and other prayers, stands as if the material realization of the stereotypical equations Hildegard exploited to justify her audio-visual gnosis;
that is, as if voice and vision had been translated, reified on the page as the material
media suitable for the laica et illitterata, pictures and vernacular narrative.10 It is the
new mediary compendium of the reading bride. And, what is more, this reading bride
appears to be identifiable as the holy woman Christina of Markyate.
Enter the adventurous and restlessly creative abbot, Geoffrey, who, if we are to
believe a text he apparently commissioned, doted on the sometime vagrant recluse,
Christina, housed on the periphery of his dominion.11 Such is the story told in the vita of
Christina of Markyate, a vivid and deceptively candid portrayal of a girl’s bitter struggle
against parents and church authorities alike to remain a virgin bride of Christ, of her
flight from home into the shelter of a hermitage, of subsequent challenges to her vow
of virginity and inner chastity, and, finally, of her growing powers as a holy woman and
eventual establishment as prioress of a female community at Markyate.12 Christina’s
Life reads very much as a narrative enactment “in our day” of the sponsa derelicta, the
virgin bride left to maintain fidelity to an endlessly absent spouse. The text, written
ca. 1135–ca. 1145, and thus well within the “saint’s” lifetime and contemporary with
the assembly of the Psalter, prominently represents Geoffrey as almost a second protagonist; his protection and admiration finally afford security and stability to her religious vocation. The latter half of the vita is devoted almost entirely to the relationship
between these two, which is that of chaste lovers, portrayed in highly emotional terms
frequently less than flattering for the abbot. While her benefactor in material affairs, the
powerful prelate is made clearly dependent on his beloved puella’s special privilege to
the presence of Christ. Several figures named in the vita recur in the obits of the psalter’s
calendar, among them Christina’s parents and two brothers, and Geoffrey and Christina
themselves. The case would seem clear: Christina is the psalter-reading double of Mary
as the reading bride; the picture cycle and the Psalter as a whole were made for her and
commissioned by Geoffrey, just as the vita was.13 More detailed inquiry confirms the first
proposition over and over again; the second, oddly enough, is far less certain.
Both appear to be visually affirmed in most ingenious fashion in an initial to one
of the Psalms. Now often referred to as “the Christina initial,” it is the sole initial in the
programme to exhibit no connection to the psalm it begins, Psalm 105; no more, that is,
10 For detailed discussion, see Powell, “Media and Presence.”
11 Vie de Christina de Markyate, 2:15–21. The text is cited from this edition, abbreviated hereafter
as VCM.
12 See the preceding note.
13 On date and patronage of the vita, see VCM, 2:15–21, also 42–44, 66–68.
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than the letter “C” in which its picture is enclosed (fig. 4.1). It shows a woman who can
reach into the heavenly sphere to touch the right hand of Christ, while a group of monks
crowded behind her looks on with intent interest. The inscription, Parce tuis queso
monachis clementia iesu (O Jesus, I beseech you in your mercy to spare your monks),
would then clarify that what we see is Christina interceding with Christ on the monks’
behalf—apparently from her position still among them in this life. Beyond its visual realization of the sponsa mediatrix, the image displays intricate connections to both the vita
and the prefatory picture cycle. Christina has a vision in the vita in which the central gesture of the image, her contact with Christ’s right hand, becomes a disquieting issue, precisely because the privilege appears to exclude Geoffrey, who stands on her right (VCM,
p. 196). The echoes in textual and descriptive detail offer a convincing interpretation of,
as well as an explanation for, the otherwise anomalous initial. The nature of Christina’s
position between Christ and her benefactor, or benefactors, thus received explicit commemoration in the Psalter.14
The same image is no less striking as visual homage to the picture cycle.15 From the
colours and type of her clothing to the positioning and rendering of her feet and hands
and her oddly levitating position opposite Christ, this portrayal of Christina is a pastiche
of striking features in the picture cycle and, in particular, a copy of Mary within it. Yet the
Alexis Master, whose masterpiece is the psalter’s picture cycle, was not one of the two
artists of the psalm initials, nor did either of these latter create this stylistic and physical
intrusion on their work: the image is painted on a parchment patch that was pasted over
an earlier initial that had first been carefully scraped away.16 Features of its style as well
as the hand of its inscription may indicate it was executed some twenty to thirty years
later.17 It is possibly even a posthumous portrayal—is Christina shown moving beyond
the earthly sphere? Whatever the circumstances were, someone assimilated the visual
insignia of the picture cycle to the portrayal of Christina sponsa et mediatrix and used
this idea as a way of inserting her presence into the psalm section of the codex—a good
many years after that section’s completion. Put differently: someone styled Christina as
the ideal viewer of the picture cycle at some point after the two independent sections
had been combined in one book.18 Sacra historia has assimilated to the reading bride, or
she appears as if re-embodying it “in our day.” As we will see shortly, this latter idea, too,
finds an emphatic complement in the vita.
Oddly, though, the “Christina initial” is in one way not exceptional: its after-the-fact
adaptation is rather the rule where Christina’s presence in the codex can be ascertained.
The artist may have borrowed its central gesture from the initial to the litany, where, once
14 Powell, “Media and Presence,” 352–53.
15 For more detail on the following points see Powell, “Media and Presence,” 353–54.
16 Powell, “Making the Psalter,” 352; also Kidd in AP, pp. 105–6.
17 Powell, “Making the Psalter,” 353; Thomson, Manuscripts, p. 35; and Ayres, “Angevin
Style,” 215–16.
18 The psalm section and the picture cycle are clearly separate projects, sharing neither artist nor
scribe and the former possibly a decade earlier.
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139
Figure 4.1. Initial to Psalm 105, St Albans Psalter, ca. 1150. Hildesheim, Dombibliothek,
MS St Godehard 1, p. 285.19
again, a woman at the forefront of a community, this time of praying women, can alone
reach across a boundary to access a space occupied by the Holy Trinity (fig. 4.2).20 This
image has been no less convincingly identified with a passage from the vita of Christina,
and yet it is the work of one of the psalter artists.21 Close inspection shows, however,
that the litany initial was originally laid out differently. The illustrated area was enlarged
at some point rather drastically to accommodate this scene, in which, if the usual interpretation is correct, Geoffrey is once again also present. Even the obits in the calendar,
often taken a priori as solid evidence of her ownership and use of the Psalter, may have
been added all at once as part of a campaign to appropriate the codex for Christina.22 Or
should we sooner say: to commemorate her as the reading bride?
19 See p. 52 note 32.
20 On this and the following see Kidd in AP, pp. 108–9; Powell, “Media and Presence,” 349–52; and
Powell, “Making the Psalter,” 319–21.
21 See Powell, “Visual,” 349–51 and earlier literature cited there; also AP, pp. 108–9, 213–14.
22 Kidd in AP, pp. 68–69, 119–20; contra Gerry, “Cult and Codex,” pp. 87–88.
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Figure 4.2. Initial to the Litany, St Albans Psalter, ca. 1120–ca. 1140. Hildesheim, Dombibliothek,
MS St Godehard 1, p. 403.
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141
The St Albans Psalter, for all its spectacular qualities, is an oddly composite book
with curiously unfinished or unresolved seams between its parts, duplications that defy
simple explanation, and a number of clearly ad-hoc modifications and additions.23 The
more I have studied the subject, the more I have become convinced of two things: first,
the four parts of the Psalter and the vita, all products of one scriptorium and showing
significant chronological overlap, became, at some point, collaborators in one campaign: the establishment of Christina as sponsa et mediatrix. Second, the connection of
the Psalter to Christina is more likely constructed than real, that is, it results largely from
this campaign and only minimally (if at all) from the circumstances of her biography or
from her personal needs in reading and prayer.24 Both the book and the Life of Christina
reveal, above all, the varying facets of a reading persona, the woman who reads in and
through the body as a figure of humanity, the bride who is allowed in this world a special bodily knowledge of Christ. This figure is the focal point of the Psalter’s multimedia
display no less than it is the model for the vita’s idealized portrayal of Christina. Its pertinence to the Psalter does not properly derive from the idea of Christina as the posited
recipient or user but rather is created and defined in the texts and images themselves.
Psalter and vita together are vivid testimony to the intense interest of the male monastic
world in a woman’s privilege to the presence of the Word and, above all, in the mediary
expansion of reading that “she” enabled.
The Christina initial fuses the visual display of the Psalter with a portrayal of the
specific import of the woman’s position in relation to knowledge of the divine. As such,
it implies a poetics of the visual specific to that position, and in this regard it is not so
much an intruder as an image of the entire Christina phenomenon, the way one woman’s
experience comes to serve as the focal point just described. The most striking elements
and episodes of both the vita and the codex can be seen to support one idea, a poetics
of the woman-as-viewer in which women’s desire effects a bodily knowing in physical
presence, a reincarnation of sacra historia that appears to find its material consequences
and accessories in the Psalter’s picture cycle and, above all, in its prototype, the Emmaus
sequence found in the Alexis Quire (figs. 4.12–4.14). The specific presentation and
treatment of the Chanson de Saint Alexis reveal it as a narrative analogue of this idea;
or rather, as I will argue, the Chanson and the Emmaus sequence present the central
arguments for this entire reading model, they represent its preliminary justification and
articulation.
As a hinge-text, a narrative poised between monastic and secular audiences, as it
is between Latin psalter and chanson, prayer and public performance, the Chanson de
Saint Alexis points directly to the chapters to come and is my main object of interest
in this one. The St Albans Psalter thus provides us with an uncannily effective bridge
23 For a summary, see Kidd in AP, pp. 139–43; also Powell, “Making the Psalter”; and Gerry,
“Psalmist,” pp. 219–48.
24 Such judgments must always distinguish between the different parts of the Psalter. In particular
the making of the calendar and the Alexis Quire may well be more biographically connected to
Christina. On the calendar, see Morgan, “Patronage and Ownership,” pp. 54–58; on the Alexis Quire,
see Powell, “Making the Psalter,” 299–319.
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between the two halves of this investigation. But in addition to this, taken together with
the representation of Christina in the vita, it shows us the construction of the woman
as psalter-reader as a material project, as full-fledged implementation of visual media
and performed texts. The elements I will examine here, the vita’s account of Christina’s
experience of sacra historia, the picture cycle, the Emmaus sequence, and the Chanson
all represent varying approaches to reading in historia, each implying an embrace of
corporeal representation and identification that is equally the embrace of a female
reading self, favoured over and even explicitly contrasted with a position of male selfrenunciation. As we found at the end of the last chapter: the bride lends her body to the
lectio of the male and the result is woman as the narrative embodiment of reading experience. The intently constructed doubling of this figure with the biography of a contemporary woman makes codex and vita into mirroring images of a receptive instance that
truly exists only between the two, the woman-as-reader as reinvented within monastic
culture of the twelfth century. We will encounter the same figure, as a rule suspended in
the same productive ambiguity between figurative and historical existence, in the construction of a female audience for vernacular texts, successors at the secular courts of
France and Germany to the Chanson de Saint Alexis.
Pictures, Sacra historia, and Reading as Mary Did
In the last episode of the incomplete vita, Christina effectively accomplishes a reincarnation of the Word within and for her monastic community, and she does so as if in fulfilment of the promise of the audi-et-vide opening of the Speculum virginum: the bride
conceives and bears the Word as life. This same episode, which I have elsewhere called
“Emmaus at Markyate,”25 exhibits Christina’s devotional life as if it were the narrative
counterpart of the initial to Psalm 105 in the Psalter: that is, as if it consisted of the reembodiment of episodes of sacra historia through the desirous meditation of the reading
bride. Taken together, then, the two ideas suggest that the picture cycle itself arises from
a similar understanding and that Mary’s reading act is indeed its origin.
Christina twice receives “a certain pilgrim” as her guest at Markyate, and the description and progression of events leave no doubt that these two episodes and a third, in
which he reappears only to mysteriously disappear from inside the Markyate church,
show Christina reliving the story of Christ’s post-resurrection appearance in the guise of
a pilgrim to two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13–32).26 That is, she relives
the Emmaus story in a highly nuanced reinterpretation current at St Albans, one that is
elaborated here no less than it is in the Alexis Quire, beginning opposite the conclusion
of the Chanson de Saint Alexis (figs. 4.12–4.14). The three pictures of one Gospel episode
parallel the vita’s account of three separate appearances of a pilgrim. But through the
resulting intervals between the Markyate visits, a Gospel narrative on the presence and
25 Powell, “Media and Presence,” 346–47.
26 VCM, 1:196–202.
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absence of the bodily Word is recast as one on the power of women’s desire to restore
that presence to their lives.27
With the pilgrim’s second appearance, the story incorporates another Gospel event,
which also effects a gender shift, as Christina and her sister Margaret are seen to reembody Mary and Martha serving Christ at Bethany (Luke 10:38–42), referred to in the
vita as service of his humanity (humanitatis officio).28 The combination of the two stories
fuses the question of recognition at Emmaus with the behaviour of women as archetypes
of Christian faith, and further with a complex of interchangeable historiae—a confusion of suppers and Marys and of serving and anointing women in the different Gospel
accounts—that were inseparable from the notion of infirmioris sexus praerogativa,
women’s privilege to Christ’s physical presence.29 This also allows the narrator to pause
over the women’s delight in the pilgrim’s beauty and manners, and then, during the
second interval, over their longing for his return. Christina’s longing becomes a lovesickness so severe that it confines the visionary virgin to bed, not on the occasion of Easter,
as the Emmaus story would require, but rather at the approach of Christmas.30
The scene is thus set for Christina to relive the capital events of Christian knowing,
the conception and birth of Christ, and finally, in the final disappearance, the Ascension.
Because Christina is confined to bed, two monks perform the liturgy of the Christmas vigil
at her bedside, and the scene takes shape as if the embodied aspiration of this “vigilating”
choir, with Mary, “the recumbent virgin,” about to give birth in their midst.31 The Word
incarnate is then brought forth from the heart in the hearing and seeing of the bride.
The choir’s chanting fuels a steady crescendo of Christina’s desire, leading to the
conception through the ear: “audit inter cetera” the passage continues, “totaque mente
concipit versiculum hore none speciale scilicet singularis illius feste gaudium: ‘Hodie
scietis quia veniet Dominus’ ” (among the other versicles she heard and conceived with
her entire soul that special one from the hour of None that expresses the singular joy of
this feast, “Today you shall know of the coming of the Lord”).32 This unleashes within her
the indescribable joy that Mary must have felt:
No sooner had she perceived that versicle’s meaning than she was transported by such
spiritual joy that for the rest of the day and the following night, her heart was bent continuously on meditations of this sort: Oh, at what hour will the Lord come? Oh, how will
He come? Who shall see Him when He comes?33
27 As argued in Powell, “Blindness and Insight,” pp. 249–78.
28 VCM, 1:196.
29 On the suppers at Bethany and in the house of Simon, see below, pp. 145–46 and 154.
30 VCM, 1:198.
31 “Cumque decumbenti virgini horas vigilie dominice psallerent,” VCM, 1:198. See also Fulton,
“Quae est ista,” 117.
32 VCM, 1:198.
33 “Cuius versiculi percepto sensu tanto spirituali gestivit gaudio ut in residuo die vel in
subsequenti nocte vix ab ejus corde hujusmodi meditationes exciderent: ‘O qua hora veniet
Dominus? O quomodo veniet? Quis videbit venientem?’ ” (VCM, 1:198).
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And so on, such that her longing for “her pilgrim” finally identifies its true object. All
the while Christina remains ill and confined to bed, for relief comes only with the actual
birth. What the editors can reconstruct of the mutilated text then reads, “cum audiret
Cristina, ‘Christus natus est’ sic videt Christum natum, ac se ad illius Nativitatis gaudium
comperit invitatam. Morbo enim omni sublato, tanta spirituali jocunditate perfusa est”
(When Christina heard, “Christ is born,” she also saw the newborn Christ, and realized
that she had been invited to the joy of His birth. Her illness vanished and she was filled
with such spiritual happiness).34 Christina’s gaudium will then culminate with the physical return of her pilgrim on Christmas day, an event to which she has in effect “given
birth” for her community.35
It is difficult to imagine how such a description could go farther, that is, how it could
more fully embody the spiritual birth, combine this with the experience of the liturgy
as Mary’s conception and birth, and somehow embed the whole in the contemporary
monastic life. This is Mary’s reading non plus ultra; it takes Hildegard’s understanding
of the experience of Rupert’s quaedam adulescentula to a new extreme of the embodied
bride, the sponsa corporaliter. The incorporation of the Emmaus story into the vita
thus reads as if the narrative fulfilment of an idea that, in the Psalter, pertains only as
a suggestive possibility: that the Annunciation of the picture cycle stands to introduce
the entire Psalter as a mediary compendium serving the renewal of Mary’s reading.
By relating an episode in Christina’s life as if it displayed the re-embodiment of four
different events of sacra historia, the narrative appears even to function as the account of
such practice fulfilled; one is tempted to see the pictures in the Psalter as the accessories
of a visual lectio divina that itself inspired Christina’s experience.36 But this would once
again take the vita as history rather than historia.
No such transgression is necessary, however, to establish how closely the pictures
can be associated with female desire for presence in sacra historia and with the technique prescribed to conjure it. There exists a vivid account of visualizing meditation
for religious women in Aelred of Rievaulx’s Rule of Life for a Recluse, written, ostensibly,
for his sister, ca. 1160.37 While not so precocious as the St Albans picture cycle, this text
is nevertheless the earliest example we possess of serial meditations on scenes from
the life of Christ.38 The St Albans cycle, while rarely noted as such, is the earliest extant
narrative picture cycle to have possibly served the same purpose. The striking similarities between the two include both the selection of the scenes and their treatment; they
have been noted often and accounted for at some length.39 My objective is to discover
34 VCM, 1:198
35 Powell, “Media and Presence,” p. 346; Powell, “Blindness and Insight,” p. 270.
36 Thus I interpreted the situation in Powell, “Media and Presence,” p. 346.
37 “Ego certe qui tibi carne et spiritu frater sum, … faciam quod hortaris” (De insitutione inclusarum
1, p. 637).
38 Edsall, “Reading,” p. 171.
39 Carrasco, “Imagery,” 73–75; also Powell, “Media and Presence,” 355–57; earlier literature in note
51, below. The emphasis, however, has been to demonstrate that the picture cycle was designed for
Christina, once a quasi-inclusa herself.
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the st aLbans PsaLter
145
whether the aspects of Aelred’s treatment that are most clearly gender-specific find
their equivalents in the psalter’s pictures. Three instances will illustrate the affinity
between the two: once again, the Annunciation (fig. 4.3), the Supper at the House of
Simon (fig. 4.4), and the Descent from the Cross (fig. 4.5).
The persistent objective of Aelred’s text is to offer an experience that immerses the
listener/viewer in a flood of presence, encouraging her not to observe and reflect, but
to hear, see, touch, and even taste the reality of sacred history.40 “Why are you standing
there?” Aelred admonishes his listener on the sight of Christ prostrate and perspiring as
he prays alone in the Garden of Gethsemane, “Run up, consume those sweet drops and lick
away the dust from his feet. Do not sleep with Peter.”41 Unlike the apostles then, the men,
who—as Abelard, too, emphasized in his “On the authority and dignity of the holy order
of nuns”—slept in the garden and fled from witnessing the Passion, while the women
steadfastly followed;42 she should intervene and accompany, even assuage the sufferings
of her saviour. This appeal is doubly gendered: the contrast to the men in the narrative
stands in analogy to one between male and female viewers. For monks, such indulgence
in affective, “image” meditations was generally discouraged, permissible only in “the
elementary stages of sensory imagination.”43 The female meditant, for her part, is not
only to immerse herself in the sensory “reality” of the scene, she is also to intervene and
act within it in difference to the male participants.44 Far from being merely enthralled to
the literal sense, the female devotee can alter history through her own participation.
The attention to Christ’s feet (licking the dust from them) might seem oddly chosen as
a gesture of consolation, but it appears here as another emphatically gendered gesture.
Aelred makes women’s devotion to Christ’s feet the particular boon accorded the female
devotee and the leitmotif of their participation in his text.45 Already at the Nativity they
are to kiss the infant’s feet, and the entire meditation concludes with the image of the
Magdalene clasping Christ’s feet at the tomb after he had first refused (Noli me tangere).
“Linger here as long as you can, virgin” (Rule, 31, p. 92), are Aelred’s last instructions to
his meditant with regard “to things past.” Gregory the Great had identified Christ’s feet
in the anointing scenes (which occur both at the house of the Pharisee and in three of
the four versions of the supper at Bethany) with his humanity and his head with his divinity.46 For Aelred, the image thus becomes the epitome of a specifically female devotion
40 Dumont, introduction to La vie de récluse [De institutione inclusarum], p. 26.
41 The English translation is cited from Aelred, “Rule of Life for a Recluse,” here p. 88 (hereafter Rule).
42 Epistres, 7, “De auctoritate vel dignitate ordinis sanctimonialium,” pp. 111–14.
43 William of St Thierry, On Contemplating God, p. 152. See also Hamburger, “Illustrated Prayer
Book,” pp. 184–90; Edsall, “Reading,” pp. 138–44 and 167–71. Compare also Aelred’s teaching
for monks, as in the discussion of meditation and weeping over the life of Christ in De speculo
caritatis, 41–63.
44 Carrasco, “Imagery,” 74.
45 Rule, 31, pp. 81, 83–84, 86, 88, 92; see also Carrasco, “Imagery,” 73.
46 “Potest quoque per pedes ipsum mysterium incarnationis ejus intelligi, quo divinitas terram
tetigit, quia carnem sumpsit. … Si pedes Domini mysterium incarnationis ejus accipimus, congrue
per caput illius ipsa divinitas designatur,” XL Homiliarum in evangelia libri duo 33, PL 76:1242–43.
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to Christ’s humanity, a point in which he also had Abelard’s example to follow. Abelard
makes the scene of the supper at the house of Simon the Pharisee (Luke 7:36–50) the
first point of departure for his extensive exposition of “the intrinsic dignity of women” in
the Gospels and, above all, for the extraordinary favour of the weaker sex with Christ—
what he marvels over as “infirmioris sexus praerogativa.”47 The episode at the house of
Simon is unique among the various supper scenes in the Gospels for the contrast Christ
draws between the male host’s neglect (he did not extend the usual courtesy of washing
his guest’s feet) and the extremity of attention shown him by the unnamed “woman who
had sinned” (Luke 7:44–47).48 For both Aelred and Abelard, this attention to the feet
becomes the woman’s special point of entry into the presence of the Word. Where this
privilege is denied, Aelred abjures the woman to “raise your eyes to him brimming with
tears and exhort from him with deep sighs and unutterable groanings what you seek.
Strive with him as Jacob did.” (Rule, 31, pp. 83–84). Thus the meditant is encouraged to
participate in the supper at Simon’s house.
The inclusion of the same scene in the St Albans cycle (fig. 4.4) is remarkable in two
ways: it is unusual within psalter illustration of Christ’s life,49 and, placed at the beginning
of the Passion cycle, it displaces (in terms of Gospel chronology) the supper at Bethany,
where, in John 12:2–8, Mary’s service is contrasted with Martha’s, and where, in two
other accounts, Matthew 26:6–12 and Mark 14:3–8, a woman anoints Christ’s head, not
his feet. The choice of scene thus allows devotion to Christ’s feet—which the woman first
weeps over, then dries with her hair and anoints (Luke 7:38)—to appear as the woman’s
privilege as opposed to the men’s. With a second and more extraordinary inclusion, that
of the Magdalene’s Annunciation to the Apostles (fig. 4.7), the cycle contrives, as Aelred
did, to frame the entire Passion sequence with demonstrations of a woman’s privilege to
the human presence of Christ.50
The Psalter’s scene at Simon’s house visually accentuates separation between the
woman’s embrace of Christ’s feet and the men’s discourse with him: the division of the
scene places the kneeling woman in a different register, almost in a different plane of
reality, from the other participants, a separation bridged only by Christ’s foot. In this
way it somewhat surprisingly recalls what occurs in the “Christina” initial and the vita’s
account of her privilege to Christ’s right hand, except that in the supper scene the division would not be between men and a woman as between Heaven and earth but rather
between the men with Christ and the woman who cannot sit at the same table, but is
nevertheless physically and affectively closer to him. Aelred uses the later supper at
Bethany to underline a similar contrast. Returning once again to Mary’s embrace of the
47 Epistres, 7, pp. 108–9.
48 In medieval tradition the woman’s identity was firmly established as Mary Magdalene.
49 Carrasco, “Imagery,” 69; see also the note following.
50 AP, p. 168. The same two scenes form beginning and end of Abelard’s presentation on the dignity of women in the Gospels; cf. Abelard, Epistres, 7, pp. 108–10, 114–15. Neither scene appeared in
the (sole) comparable contemporary (or slightly earlier) picture cycle, known from its description
as the Psalter of Sigardus. The Crucifixion did, along with the Descent; see Wormald, “Illuminated
Psalters,” 22–24, nos. 12–13, 20–22, 25–26.
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Figure 4.3. Annunciation, St Albans Psalter, ca. 1120–ca. 1140. Hildesheim,
Dombibliothek, MS St Godehard 1, p. 19.
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Figure 4.4. The Supper at the House of Simon the Pharisee, St Albans Psalter, ca. 1120–ca. 1140.
Hildesheim, Dombibliothek, MS St Godehard 1, p. 36.
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the st aLbans PsaLter
149
Figure 4.5. The Descent from the Cross, St Albans Psalter, ca. 1120–ca. 1140. Hildesheim,
Dombibliothek, MS St Godehard 1, p. 47.
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150
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Figure 4.6. The Deposition, St Albans Psalter, ca. 1120–ca. 1140. Hildesheim, Dombibliothek, MS
St Godehard 1, p. 48.
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the st aLbans PsaLter
Figure 4.7. Mary Magdalene’s Annunciation to the Apostles, St Albans Psalter,
ca. 1120–ca. 1140. Hildesheim, Dombibliothek, MS St Godehard 1, p. 51.
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152
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readIng as sponsa et mater
Figure 4.8. The Ascension, St Albans Psalter, ca. 1120–ca. 1140. Hildesheim, Dombibliothek,
MS St Godehard 1, p. 54.
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the st aLbans PsaLter
Figure 4.9. Pentecost, St Albans Psalter, ca. 1120–ca. 1140. Hildesheim, Dombibliothek,
MS St Godehard 1, p. 55.
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feet, he has Christ silence the men’s objections, saying, “I am wholly taken up with Mary
and she with me” (Rule, 31, p. 86).
There are few to no signs within the St Albans picture cycle of an intended viewer.
I am arguing that this scene stands out, then, among the rest; indeed, it was chosen
and represented in this way to suggest identification between the woman at Christ’s
feet and the viewer, and to offer “her” this point of entry into the Gospel narrative.
Moreover, the peculiar figure standing on the frame at the left offers another such
indication: not a second woman (as with Mary and Martha at Bethany), but a servant
has been interpolated into the account. This might suggest the quality of the devotion
involved and anticipate the complementary gesture at Bethany, in which the woman
will (also) anoint Christ’s head. Either figure, woman or servant, offers an avenue of
identification on the margins, but the servant is doubly unique: he has no equivalent
in the Gospel accounts, and he accomplishes a connection between the image and
the space beyond it in two ways nowhere else repeated: his left hand crosses under
the frame (and not over it, as his foot and the woman’s do) to touch Christ, while his
right arm reaches entirely beyond the border and into the empty parchment space.
A “genre figure,” then, one with no other particular identity, observes the scene from
the threshold, as if entering from the outside.51 This viewer would be a man aspiring to
a woman’s embrace of Christ.
Another striking conjunction between the two cycles occurs in the Descent from
the Cross (fig. 4.5).52 This image takes on special importance in the Psalter as it must
double as a picture of the Crucifixion, which figures as the psalter cycle’s most notable
exclusion. The gesture is, however, neither an omission nor a replacement but rather
a fusion of two subjects.53 The Descent as elsewhere encountered is usually a scene of
action and physical effort, emphasizing the roles of Joseph and Nicodemus removing
the nails and receiving the body. Where Mary is present, she holds one of Christ’s hands,
while the other is still affixed to the cross, clearly accentuating diagonal and downward
movement.54 The St Albans scene—with one hand held each by John and Mary, and
Joseph placed completely behind Christ’s erect body, which thus remains in its familiar
position as crucifix—has instead become a symmetrical, static, even ceremonious display for the viewer. The overall arrangement, then, reproduces the Crucifixion as it
occurred in earlier devotional books, with Mary and John to either side of Christ,55 but
by superimposing it on the Descent, bestows one of Christ’s hands on the adoration of
each devotee.
51 SAP, p. 87.
52 Mayr-Harting, “Functions,” pp. 351–52; also Heslop, “Visual Arts,” pp. 168–69.
53 Otto Pächt in SAP, p. 70. In AP, pp. 72–73, Kidd confirms that the “omission” was planned as
such. See also note 49, above.
54 SAP, pp. 70–71, where the few exceptions are also discussed. Another early example occurs in
the so-called Prayer Book of Hildegard of Bingen (ca 1180), reproduced in Hamburger, “Illustrated
Prayer Book,” p. 151.
55 See Carrasco, “Imagery,” 73; also Southern, Middle Ages, p. 237.
155
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155
Similarly, Aelred’s text insists that his sister can join Mary and John before the crucifix, weep with Mary and even kiss Christ’s wounds—if only she awaits the arrival (“Sed
adhuc expecta donec”) of Joseph of Arimathea to loose the nails.56 She should see how
Joseph, “in his most happy arms … embraces that sweet body and clasps it to his breast”
saying, “ ‘My beloved is a bundle of myrrh for me, he shall rest upon my breast’ [Canticles
1:12]. It is for you to follow … and either hold the feet or support the hands and arms.”57
The two scenes have become successive and complementary moments in one experience, the Descent, here too, a static moment of embrace and contemplation. The visual
artist, however, can go a step further and achieve the illusion of synchronicity realized,
with the result that the crucifix becomes available to the viewer’s embrace. Performed
on the subject sine qua non for identification and compassion with Christ’s humanity, the
transposition of this idea to the visible image makes a radical statement on presence in
devotion. Rupert of Deutz affirmed that, alone of all physical images, the crucifix permits
a realized unio between viewer and viewed.58 The St Albans artist has effectively fused
the same privilege with the narrative of the Passion.
Finally, though, we should reconsider the beginning, the Annunciation (fig. 4.3). Aelred’s
treatment of this moment for his female audience operates very much as Rupert’s did in his
prophetic awakening; it is the beginning of and an invitation to their bodily reading:
First enter the room of blessed Mary and with her study the books59 which prophesy the
virginal birth and the coming of Christ. Wait there for the arrival of the angel, so that you
may see him as he comes in, hear him as he utters his greeting.
She is then to receive Gabriel’s greeting, “and so, filled with amazement and rapt out of
yourself,” to “cry with a loud voice” Gabriel’s words, up to benedicta inter mulieres. These
she is to repeat to herself, to meditate over “what this fullness of grace is in which the
whole world shared when the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (Rule, p. 80).
From this intimate participation in Mary’s reading, or rather its doubling in the devotee’s
life, Aelred, the devotee’s male onlooker, immerses himself in a meditation over Mary’s
experience of the conception strongly reminiscent of Rupert’s:
O sweet Lady, with what sweetness you were inebriated, with what a fire of love you were
inflamed, when you felt in your mind and in your womb the presence of majesty, when he
took flesh himself from your flesh and fashioned for himself from your members in which
all the fullness of the Godhead might dwell in bodily form. All this was on your account,
virgin, so that you might diligently contemplate the Virgin whom you have resolved to
imitate and the Virgin’s son to whom you are betrothed.60
56 De insitutione, 31, p. 671. The continuous flow of the text is somewhat obscured by its modern
division into paragraphs and, in the English translation, by the rendering of the words as “But wait
yet a while until …” It is precisely this “while” that Aelred’s text elides. Before the crucifix the woman
is told to kiss the wounds; for her to do this, Joseph must first arrive.
57 Rule, 31, p. 91.
58 Schmitt, Corps des images, pp. 83–84.
59 Macpherson’s translation, “read,” does not fully capture the sense of Aelred’s evolve, which
might also be rendered as “immerse yourself in.”
60 Rule, 31, pp. 80–81.
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Aelred’s text is in part an exercise in self-indulgence: the male author, ostensibly
denied the experience he offers his audience, embraces the same to the extent that,
imaginatively, he becomes the woman for whom he writes. Aelred’s sister thus takes
on for this text the function fulfilled by Rupert’s adulescentula, that of the female surrogate from whose position the male exegete reads Mary’s experience. The gender
reversal disarms the taboo that would otherwise have applied to such pure immersion
in historia.61 Aelred describes the same scene, with the same focus on Mary’s reading act,
in his sermons cited earlier in consideration of the “new” Annunciation. But there was
nothing in those passages comparable to this immersion in experience, a sort of “realtime” recapitulation of the event. Aelred’s female surrogate (or audience) does not need
to wonder what it was that Mary was reading—she enters the room and reads together
with her; moreover, “all this” occurred so that she might undertake this very reliving of
the event, knowing it corporaliter, in bodily presence. The result is a succinct statement
of the origin, mode, and meaning of Mary’s reading as a way of knowing the Word.
As we saw earlier, the St Albans picture is committed to the same idea, and its signal
innovations perform just as Aelred’s text does to capture the event as a moment in time.
Placed before it, the viewer could see herself on the same threshold and enter the same
understanding of the event. In Christina’s experience of the conceptio per aurem on
her Christmas Eve birth-bed, we possess, from the same abbey scriptorium, cast in a
different genre, the portrayal of a parallel experience as fulfilled in a woman’s life.
Placed as gateways to presence directly before their viewer with no textual support,
the pictures of the St Albans cycle all but declare themselves “female,” an idea their content amply bears out. There is no need and no room here for “spiritual interpretation.”62
Participation is meaning at its fullest and most complete. The immersion in presence
renders Aelred’s visualizing text and the Psalter’s visual scenes all but equivalent in
the way each abandons all need, even all means, to renounce the potential embrace of
the image, which becomes an embrace of the body of the Word. Repeatedly within the
pictures one can find suggestive parallels to the position of the “servant” in the supper
scene, that is, of men who seem to assist secondarily in the woman’s embrace or to
learn it from her. Where Mary displaces Joseph in the entombment scene, her embrace
appears as the real object of attention for her male onlookers (fig. 4.6). In the Descent
from the Cross, preceding, the women seem to weep while the men appear to observe
their response as if it prompted their own. The prominent position of Mary at the centre
of the Ascension and the Pentecost scenes (figs. 4.8 and 4.9) raises this idea to a theological statement: what humanity knows of its saviour comes to us through the body of
woman; a similar statement is made with the Magdalene’s Annunciation to the Apostles.
The Christina initial only restates the same idea within the self-referential visual language of the completed Psalter, translated into the life of the re-embodied bride.
61 See note 42, above, and Powell, “Media and Presence,” 356–57.
62 Such was seen as obligatory in men’s use of meditation on Christ’s life, see Edsall, “Reading”;
to my mind, her attempt to elucidate something similar for De institutione inclusarum (Edsall,
“Reading,” pp. 161–66) sooner demonstrates the difference.
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157
The picture cycle, then, was created for a reader-as-woman. That reader, however,
need not always, nor even in the first instance, have been a woman. If he was not, then
he will have had a woman as reading model in mind; this picture cycle was the means for
him to be her, his access to her privilege to the presence of the living Word. It afforded an
experience of historia that bypassed the reading process of exegesis to proffer a fusion
with Christ as the body of humanity, the experience of the reading bride. The key to this
fusion is the woman’s desire and her acknowledgement of her abject state as body—she
is the sinner, the servant, or Gregory’s “illiterate,” overjoyed to clasp and kiss the feet of
her lord and desiring no more. Her reward is an embrace that brings her to the heart of
knowing, as is revealed both in Christina’s experience of the Christmas Nativity and in
the historiated initial in the Psalter.
A Female Gaze and Women’s Vision
The vita never offers any account of Christina contemplating pictures, whether of scriptural events or other subjects, just as Aelred offers no real pictures for his sister (in fact,
he proscribes their presence in her enclosure; see Rule, 24, p. 171). The visual language of
the Christina initial provides a tenuous link in that it seems to acknowledge a connection
between the pictures and Christina’s own privilege to the presence of her Lord. There is
more to be found, however, in the Psalter, both on the representation of the bride who
seeks the embrace of her Lord and on the poetics of the visual. For the first we must only
proceed from the last page of the picture cycle to the opening of the Chanson that faces
it. The nexus for all inquiry into the second is then found at the poem’s end, beginning
on the two pages that also contain Gregory’s apology for pictures and the first picture of
the Emmaus sequence (figs. 4.11 and 4.12). As has been amply demonstrated before, the
Chanson and the Emmaus sequence are made to relate to each other on these two pages,
most overtly through their respective statements on vision and knowing.63
On the first folio of the Alexis Quire, the dialectic between male renunciation of the
flesh and a female longing for its embrace is made the theme of a striking visual narrative
(fig. 4.10). The proemium to the Chanson de Saint Alexis (the text begins only on the verso)
places a female gaze front and centre, the gaze of Alexis’s bride. The contents of this first
outer folio were very likely added sometime after the text itself was copied to adapt it to
a more specific purpose. Logically speaking, this would occur when the loose quire was
bound to other parts, as the outer folios would then be protected from wear.64
In the legend of Alexis, a young patrician of Rome, on the night of his wedding, abandons
his inheritance and his bride in preference for a pilgrimage to Edessa and a life of chastity and extreme asceticism. After seventeen years he returns, but as a terribly disfigured
beggar, who, irony of ironies, lives unrecognized under the staircase of his paternal home
for another seventeen years, until he finally dies there. The tripartite miniature on the
63 Powell, “Making the Psalter,” pp. 309–13, and Powell, “Media and Presence,” pp. 343–45; previously, SAP, pp. 78–79 and 138–39; now also Strahuljak, “Alexis Quire,” pp. 203 and 209–12.
64 Powell, “Blindness and Insight,” p. 257; and Gerry, “Psalmist,” p. 203; see also the detailed
account in Gerry, “Cult and Codex,” pp. 72–82.
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opening recto of the Alexis Quire, unique in the illustrative tradition of Alexis’s life, reshapes
this story into one simply of union (marriage) and separation. Seen as the life of Alexis, it
recounts only the events (two days) that launch his lifelong path of renunciation. Seen as the
life of his bride, however, it tells very nearly the whole story, for she remains the immobile
embodiment of her own desire, staring into the void of Alexis’s absence, until the poem’s
conclusion. Whether her gaze is seen as following the departing Alexis or as awaiting his
return, it is partially turned out to the “audience.” The sponsa gemebunda, as the inscription
calls her, can on this basis alone be taken as one of the most significant figures portrayed
in the codex.65 She appears in three-quarter turn twice on one page. Alexis, by contrast, is
shown only in profile.
The transition from union to separation shown in the picture is also an invitation
to participation. In full, the inscription above the bride reads, “O, sponsa beata semper
gemebunda!” (O, blessed bride, ever grieving)—unlike the others to its left and right,
this inscription is no mere titulus; it rather prescribes the viewer’s response.66 This
viewer of Alexis’s life—whether the bride or her double evoked by identification beyond
the page—provides a reading model for the entire quire and possibly for the Psalter as
a whole. It is a reading model that stands in contrast to the renunciation of the body
exemplified in Alexis’s life, and it likewise represents a model of vision constructed in
opposition to the same renunciation.
Below the picture, a prologue, very likely composed specially for this page, tells us
more: the young man commended, or left, his young bride “al spus vif de veritet, ki est
un sul faitur e regnet an trinitiet” (to the living bridegroom of truth, who is one sole
creator and who reigns in the Trinity). Of Alexis’s own trajectory nothing is said. The
bride, given no other name here or in the poem, also needs none. She is quite simply
the sponsa derelicta, that is, every human soul longing for the return of its beloved. The
remainder of the prologue then qualifies its audience and aim: “Icesta istorie est amiable grace e suverain cunsolaciun a cascun memorie spiritel, les quels vivent purement
sulunc casthetet e dignement sei delitent es goies del ciel & es noces virginels” (This
story is a sweet gift of grace and supreme consolation for all those of spiritual disposition who live purely in the chaste life in worthy anticipation of the virginal wedding
and its heavenly delights).67 The viewer who greets the sponsa gemebunda is thus her
mirror image in the religious life, the sponsa Christi; to this audience the poem offers
suverain cunsolaciun. As I will argue below, the emergence of Alexis’s bride as secondary
protagonist and object of identification corresponds to a shift in envisioned audience
65 See p. 136 and note 9, above.
66 This inscription possibly recalls the viewer’s identification with the figure of the bride in a performance; see Geddes, Book for Christina, p. 73; also AP, p. 175.
67 My translation, relying on Mölk, “Bemerkungen,” 295. The prologue is a puzzle, as it contains a
number of syntactical and morphological errors, see Mölk, “Bemerkungen,” 19–20, and Bullington,
Alexis, pp. 218–19. It appears to be either a topical modification of an earlier prologue, or perhaps a
reproduction from memory rather than a written copy (Hunt, “St Alexis,” p. 222). See also Tyssens,
“Prologue, pp. 1165–77.
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159
Figure 4.10. Proemium to the Chanson de Saint Alexis, St Albans Psalter, ca. 1120–ca. 1140.
Hildesheim, Dombibliothek, MS St Godehard 1, p. 57.
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Figure 4.11. The conclusion of the Alexis text and an excerpt from Gregory’s letter to
Serenus of Marseille, St Albans Psalter, ca. 1120–ca. 1140. Hildesheim, Dombibliothek,
MS St Godehard 1, p. 68.
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Figure 4.12. The Road to Emmaus, St Albans Psalter, ca. 1120–ca. 1140. Hildesheim,
Dombibliothek, MS St Godehard 1, p. 69.
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Figure 4.13. The Supper at Emmaus, St Albans Psalter, ca. 1120–ca. 1140. Hildesheim,
Dombibliothek, MS St Godehard 1, p. 70.
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Figure 4.14. The Disappearance at Emmaus, St Albans Psalter, ca. 1120–ca. 1140. Hildesheim,
Dombibliothek, MS St Godehard 1, p. 71.
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response: more than admiration and awe before the sufferings of the spiritual athlete
the audience is to feel compassion for his abandoned bride.
To further support its specific understanding of the Chanson, the makers of the Alexis
Quire offered an epilogue, or rather two: the conclusion of the Alexis itself was possibly
reworked and expanded for this manuscript, and it is followed by the tripartite picture
story of Christ’s appearance at Emmaus (figs. 4.12–4.14). On the double page where the
two meet, it seems all the avenues of reflection on media and knowing represented in
the Psalter come together (figs. 4.11–4.12). The Alexis Quire as a whole has a unifying
theme, found in the opposition between sight and blindness, presence and absence,
and the role of body and visio corporalis—of which the media on the page form pointed
examples—in knowledge of the divine. Gregory’s letter, which, sandwiched between the
vernacular and the pictorial narratives, speaks of pictures as the vehicles of stories and of
what, within these, “should be worshipped” (per picturae historiam quid sit adorandum
addiscere), acts as an invitation to enter into reflection on the relationship between the
media on the pages and the message they contain.
The Alexis and the Emmaus sequence are connected on these two pages by a
common discourse on blindness and insight.68 In the concluding stanza of the Alexis, the
people lament their inability to recognize Alexis as a holy man before his death: “how
we are blinded! … Through this man we should receive new light.”69 This then relates
to the Emmaus story, in which Christ is not recognized until he disappears—or so commentary on this relationship has often maintained. In fact, it is only in the St Albans
Emmaus sequence that disappearance appears to trigger recognition for the disciples.
In the biblical story as in the medieval commentary tradition, recognition was triggered
instead when Christ broke the bread at supper.70 To effect this shift, the third scene of
the St Albans sequence (fig. 4.14) is taken over from a strikingly “visual,” Anglo-Saxon
portrayal of Christ’s Ascension, known as the Disappearing Christ—the same portrayal
of the event as is seen in the Psalter’s picture cycle (fig. 4.8).71 The discourse on the
visual evoked by the Disappearing Christ also plays a role in the final scene—and the
meaning—of the vita’s account of Emmaus at Markyate.
As we learn in Acts 19, it was the event of the Ascension that first initiated the apostles
into Christ’s true nature, for until his body was given up, they remained blind to his
divinity.72 Thus bodily and spiritual vision were mutually exclusive, and the Anglo-Saxon
iconography displayed this fact by allowing the viewer to see in the picture exactly what
bodily vision could reveal—nothing but the feet of Christ that had not yet disappeared
into a cloud, itself situated on the frame of the image (cf. fig. 4.8). The frame defined the
boundary between (human) vision and blindness, even as it identified the same with the
68 See note 9, above. In what follows, I am summarizing also from Powell, “Blindness and Insight.”
69 Life of St Alexius, ed. and trans. Odenkirchen, lines 616–20. Hereafter cited as LA.
70 Hall, “Narrative Strategies,” 1, 7; also SAP, 78–79.
71 Deshman, “Disappearing Christ,” 543–45.
72 This paragraph summarizes the argument in Deshman, “Disappearing Christ.”
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human and divine natures of Christ. The divine was thus unavailable, inapprehensible
to corporeal vision, unless simply as cloud. This cloud itself, however, doubly underlined
Christ’s removal from humanity: not only did it obscure him from view forever, but it
was also interpreted as the sign of his sinless flesh. By virtue of the weightlessness of
this perfect flesh, Christ was able to rise to Heaven unassisted (as if a cloud). In this way,
even his human body marked separation from, rather than community with, mankind.
In the St Albans Emmaus, the same motif is adopted, but the result is a reversal of its
message on the visual. In the biblical account, the disciples at Emmaus are not deficient
in vision. Instead, it is Christ who chooses to deceive them with his pilgrim disguise (Luke
24:16). Once they demonstrate their charity to a stranger, he reveals himself—only to
vanish. Visual recognition is thus not an issue. In the Alexis Quire, however, not merely
the picture of the disappearance, but rather the entire sequence is skewed to this new
idea. The pictures consistently show the viewer what the disciples cannot see: Christ,
whether pilgrim or no. Whether the disciples ever “see” him is, visually at least, left oddly
ambiguous, regardless of their charity. In either event, in the second picture (fig. 4.13),
Christ displays for “us” the bread of the Eucharist as if to remind the viewer that he is
indeed present and visible in the lowliest forms of this world—as a pilgrim, a stranger,
or in the fish on the table. In other words, blindness and insight are certainly at issue, but
the opposition is now one between inner and outer vision; that is, at issue is the use of
bodily vision to see beyond appearances. In this visual discourse, the body reveals even
as it conceals, at least to those who can see with the heart.73
This latter vision is not what the internal audience of the Alexis laments as
lacking—their self-admonishment disparages human blindness to the spiritual. The discourse on the visual as communicated by the Emmaus sequence is a clue instead to a secondary message within the same story, a message delivered through the spuse, Alexis’s
bride. The same message is delivered, again through contrast with the Disappearing
Christ, in the story of Emmaus at Markyate, where it becomes an implicit insistence on
“women’s vision.”
The vita’s Emmaus account, as already noted, is an amalgamation of several Gospel
scenes used to appropriate it to the life of the reading bride. The casting of the women as
Mary and Martha serves not only to identify the story with female roles and desire, however, but also to underscore their recognition of the pilgrim’s divinity from the beginning. In his presence, Christina and Margaret are “filled with such spiritual joy” that they
feel “they ha[ve] before them an angel rather than a man”; they can scarcely contain their
affection for him, and only virginalis pudor, their “virginal modesty” prevents them from
retaining “their pilgrim” for the night.74 This is indeed a feminine twist on the Emmaus
story, but not merely for the erotic suggestion: it is most clearly gendered in the fact of
the women’s surety of the inner truth. Their love of Christ allows them to penetrate the
exterior in perception even if it cannot allow action unseemly to that same exterior. In
this they are the doubles of the anonymous female sinner of the supper at Simon’s house.
73 Powell, “Blindness and Insight,” pp. 268, 272.
74 LCM, p. 84; cf. VCM, 1:78.
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This implicit insistence on women’s vision is then contrasted with what might be
termed men’s vision through Christina’s experience in her lying-in as she awaits Christ’s
birth and the pilgrim’s return. Once she has “conceived” and knows the Lord will come,
she is “rapt to another heaven” where she sees, among the monks at St Albans, Christ
seated in majesty as if presiding over the Christmas service. But neither is she seen nor
does anyone else see Christ. As I have argued elsewhere, the function of this scene is
to contrast a visio spiritualis with the women’s experience at Markyate.75 In the choir
of the men’s abbey Christ is unapproachable and, for bodily eyes, invisible. As the biographer comments, “whether she saw these things in the body or out of the body … she
never knew.”76 At Markyate, the women experience Christ’s divinity as if through a third
mode of vision. It becomes both approachable and tangible but is also obscured and one
step removed by his human form. The message of the entire narrative progression thus
joins what we found in the Emmaus sequence of the Alexis Quire, and, accordingly, the
vita’s account too restages the Disappearing Christ, alluding to it, however, not so much
by ekphrasis as through the ideas it was known to evoke: the poetics of vision and the
obscuring cloud.
The pilgrim’s Christmas return ends when he vanishes from within the church. In
the ensuing comment, the narrator’s voice seems to merge with that of the women
who witnessed the event. Christ had appeared by night (among the men) in all his
glory—that is, such that bodily eyes could not perceive him. During the day, he appeared
(to the women) as “that glory appears to us in this present life, since we see it only
through a glass, darkly. Hence God is said to inhabit a dark cloud; not because cloud is
his habitation, but because his light in its immensity blinds us who are weighed down
by the body.”77 The cloud of divinity is here analogous to an obscuring exterior such as
the pilgrim’s or to Paul’s speculum, the preferred instrument of recognition of women
and the immature. Both the story of Emmaus at Markyate and the picture sequence in
the Alexis Quire, then, offer a subtle but insistent affirmation of a third mode of vision, a
vision of the heart’s desire that is accessible to those who are dependent on an affective
approach to their bridegroom and, no less, on corporeal forms. Successful completion
of this bodily vision depends on the corresponding bodily disposition of the viewer. Not
everyone sees the immanent truth; in fact, as the Emmaus sequences show, it generally
goes unrecognized. Such insight is the privilege of simplicity, of loving humility, even of
ignorance. The diaphanous body is made possible by Mary’s mediation, by Christina’s
no less. Their privilege resides in an ability to see with the heart in and through what
presents itself to the eyes.
The vita makes this privilege evident over and over again in the reliance of Geoffrey,
the prelate and schoolman who bustles about in the service of popes and kings, on his
75 Powell, “Blindness and Insight,” pp. 270–72.
76 “Ista tamen sive in corpore sive extra corpus viderit, … se fatebatur nescire (2 Corinthians
2:13),” VCM, 1:200; LCM, p. 186. The translation is modified to follow VCM’s text, which is undoubtedly justified in making emendations to follow 2 Corinthians 12:2–3.
77 As translated in Powell, “Blindness and Insight,” p. 271; cf. VCM, 1:200/02.
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beloved puella’s access to Christ; the same privilege is the subject, from the inverse perspective of Christina’s loving humility, of the vision concerning Christ’s right hand. The
episode immediately precedes the story of Emmaus at Markyate, whereby it acquires a
justification in bodily vision that was itself, so we must conclude, constructed on a template derived from pictorial art as that medium’s own defence of figural representation.
Here the question, for purposes of my argument, of Christina’s ownership or use of the
codex becomes moot. Far more important is the recognition just stated: each, vita and
codex alike, is an exploration of the same privileges of the woman-as-reader.
Alexis Recognized
The vita shows us the Emmaus story as assimilated to the life of the reading bride. The
text of the Old French Alexis and its specific staging in the Alexis Quire do the same with
the Alexis story: it becomes one to be read through the position of the abandoned bride,
her desire and its trajectory to the heavenly embrace are the audience’s own. But still
more than this is at stake. In the story of Emmaus at Markyate an opposition between
two views of body and gnosis that is implicit in the visual treatment of the narrative is
made explicit in the women’s own understanding of their and Christina’s experience. In
the St Albans Alexis this opposition becomes embodied in the two protagonists. Alexis
exemplifies a contempt for the body and its attachments that prohibits what the bride
must seek: his embrace, or at least, in this life, continuing assurance of his love. Yet she
is denied not only this but also any knowledge of his fate and thus any recognition of his
holiness. Here, the Emmaus drama of recognition and blindness is played out antagonistically, not merely as a game of disguised identity but as an existential conflict between
two different quests for recognition from God.
Visual recognition is made the crux of the story of Alexis in the text preserved in the
St Albans Psalter, and in this it is intricately tied to the Emmaus sequence that follows.
The lament over blindness and failed recognition recurs four times before the poem’s
conclusion, figuring above all in the family’s original lament over his departure and
again as part of both the father’s and the mother’s planctus over Alexis’s dead body.78
The message is then driven home in the closing verses on blindness and new light that
stand opposite the first Emmaus picture.79 The body of l’ume deu (the man of God), once
recognized by the people after death, shows them, visibly, how to lead righteous lives.80
Alexis in fact acquires his capacity for illumination solely through his position as imitator Christi, or, better, as a visible remanifestation (for the audience) of Christ’s suffering.81
Once he is discovered, we learn of the people of Rome that, “Because of the holy body [of
Alexis] that they possess, / It seems to them that they hold God himself.”82 This despite the
78 Vie de saint Alexis, ed. Storey; for the original lament see lines 238–40, the parents’ planctus are
at lines 394–95, 434–45, 439. The Old French text is cited from this edition, hereafter VSA.
79 Cited above, p. 167; see also Powell, “Media and Presence,” 343–44.
80 Powell, “Media and Presence,” 343–45: SAP, pp. 78–79.
81 Mölk, “Culte,” 533–35; also Bullington, Alexis, pp. 201–3, 211.
82 LA, lines 538–39.
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fact that, as Ulrich Mölk notes, “Saint Alexis … is not a priest, is an ascetic but not a hermit,
converts no one to the faith and performs not a single miracle.”83 His holiness resides
entirely in renunciation—of his inheritance, the world, the flesh—manifest in a body
so disfigured that not even his mother recognizes the man that was. This “man of God”
devoted his life to the pursuit of a weightless body, a purity of the flesh finally reserved
solely for the Saviour and the same that enabled his unassisted ascent to the heavens.
Still, the struggle at the centre of the Old French version of the Alexis Quire is not
contained in Alexis’s victory over the flesh—this it presents simply as a progressively
realized fact. The central problem is the paradox contained in a holiness that appears to
glory in its own concealment while nevertheless requiring recognition if its purpose is
to be fulfilled. The very revelation of Alexis’s sanctity depends on a contrivance whereby
a mysterious voice announces the city’s oddly unmotivated but impending destruction
should the ume deu in its midst not be discovered. Not to be outdone, Alexis passes from
this world rather than suffer this discovery, leaving an account of his life behind. Once
he has entirely escaped the flesh, recognition of his person can occur, his historia can be
acknowledged by the community—but not before.84 In this, Alexis’s “disappearance” is
again reminiscent of the Disappearing Christ at the Ascension, where divinity was manifest only once the body was removed from human apprehension. But the same point
underscores the difference between Alexis’s story and the message contained in the
Emmaus pictures on seeing in the body. Whereas there we are taught to see divinity in
the material manifestations of this world; here visual recognition and spiritual vision
are mutually exclusive, hence the troubling dissonance that arises from the family’s
suffering for their own “blindness” and Alexis’s apparent lack of compassion, indeed, his
utter indifference to their pain.
The dissonance in question has been the subject of a great deal of discussion on
the vernacular Alexis legend, for this version amplifies the mourning laments of mother,
father, and bride considerably over the Latin text.85 In these laments the theme of
blindness is brought to a head. Where modern readers have frequently debated whether
this constitutes a moral reproach to Alexis’s indifference or instead points up the family’s
failure to merit revelation of his identity, the crucial point is instead that it cannot be
otherwise: Alexis flees recognition as he flees the flesh; he cannot be reintegrated into
the family home, for this would mean retying the bonds from which he has liberated
himself. There is no moral failing at stake but only an aporia between two opposing
views of body. While his indifference evinces freedom from the weight of the flesh, it also
precludes recognition of his holiness and thus any benefit for the larger community. The
conclusion, which contrives to bring about recognition only after his death, makes clear
that the problem cannot be resolved in this world.
83 Mölk, “Culte,” 535: “Saint Alexis, qui n’est pas prêtre, qui est ascète sans être ermite, qui ne
convertit personne à la foi et qui n’exécute aucun miracle.”
84 Alexis’s final flight, to Heaven, is fully analogous to his earlier one from Edessa, provoked
by another mysterious voice that announced his holiness (VSA, lines 166–90). In both cases his
imperative is to escape recognition as the man of God.
85 For an overview, see Cartlidge, Medieval Marriage, pp. 79–86, 91–99.
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This would likely be the last word on the matter, if the legend had not been reshaped
to tell the story of two holy lives rather than one. This development becomes evident
already to a degree with the expansion of the Latin legend as performed in the Latin
West; it is enhanced considerably in the vernacular Chanson, and, as presented in the
Alexis Quire, it advances to the position of an a priori interpretation of the poem.
The basic structure of the story as we find it in the Chanson is a medieval version of
the legend, disseminated in the Latin West beginning in the later tenth century.86 Older
Syriac versions, apparently not unknown in the West in the eleventh century, told a simple
story of a saint known only as “the man of God,” who flees from his patrimony before
being married, never to return. He “is exceptional only in seeking to efface—indeed
to erase—his own individuality.”87 This story, along with its objective, clearly persists
as the trunk of the medieval Latin and vernacular narratives, but scholars have long
conjectured that an intermediary Greek “composite” version, now extant only in later
copies, made a major structural modification by introducing Alexis’s return to his family
home, in this case in Constantinople, and an account of his recognition after death. In this
version, Alexis likewise returns to his bride, for the marriage is now completed before
his departure, introducing a “double threshold” that effectively combines two structures
of hagiographic narrative, the flight from the domo patris and the entry into a chaste
marriage, into one.88 But if his bride therefore acquires a presence in the poem, it is not
yet the one we see illustrated in the double threshold on the opening page of the Alexis
Quire. There she is seen on the threshold of her own trajectory to blessedness, as sponsa
beata seemingly the equal of beatus Alexis. In the Latin legend her place is merely one
alongside Alexis’s parents. Together, the three represent the worldly duties, obligations,
and temptations that the saint must overcome to follow Christ in the chaste life.89 By
the later eleventh century, however, when the Alexis legend first spread across western
Europe, the same ascetic ideal was about to run up against a new definition of Christian
piety, within which Alexis’s bride represented a latent opportunity for expression.
The vernacular Chanson offers a clear indication of this shift when it adds to the
legend’s conclusion a final image of Alexis and his bride reunited in Heaven:
Sainz Alexis est el ciel senz dutance,
Ensembl’ ot Deu e la compaignie as angeles,
Od la pulcela dunt se fist si estranges;
Or l’at od sei, ansemble sunt lur anames:
Ne vus sai dirre cum lur ledece est grande.
(VSA, lines 606–10)
(Saint Alexis is in Heaven, without any doubt,
86 In this account I follow the summary in Hunt, “Alexis,” pp. 217–21; along with Cartlidge, Medieval
Marriage, pp. 84–91; and Uitti, Story, pp. 27–36. See also Ulrich Mölk, “Alexiusvita,” 293–315.
87 Cartlidge, Medieval Marriage, p. 87. A text of the Syriac version is reprinted in LA, pp. 21–29.
88 Gaiffier, “Intactam sponsam relinquens,” 157–95.
89 This remains true (pace Uitti, Story, pp. 37–43) for the Bollandist vita thought to lie behind the
OF Chanson; see Mölk, “Épouse,” p. 164.
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Together with God, in the company of the angels,
Together with the maiden to whom he had made himself
so long a stranger.
Now he has her with him; their souls are together:
I don’t know how to tell you how very happy they are.)
(LA, lines 606–10, translation modified)
This image was thoroughly foreign, indeed nearly inimical, to the idea of sanctity that Alexis
otherwise represented and in fact still largely represents in the St Albans text; if we can
anticipate it as the poem’s ending, then primarily (although not solely) because of the prologue and miniature on the opening page, which contrive to make us do so. The symmetry
of union so artfully evoked in these verses corresponds to the symmetry of separation
represented in the miniature and then identified as the life of the sponsa Christi through the
prologue. Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann has sensitively analysed the variable meaning of the
gifts, the transfer of which is portrayed in the miniature’s first frame, to demonstrate that
here, in contrast to a notable silence on the point in the text, the bride engages herself in a
sacred vow, freely entering into a life of chastity together with her newly-wed husband.90
And the artist has indeed used the composition to produce a visual rendition of the same
idea (fig. 4.15): the couple is shown symmetrically inclined the one to the other over their
untouched wedding bed; the circle of the ring at the centre of the exchange is reduplicated
in a larger circle formed by their hands and Alexis’s sword belt, with a third, broken circle
formed by the bed and the two figures and interrupted by the descent of the Holy Spirit. The
concentric circles perfectly unite the couple visually exactly as the gifts are to do: in a mutually binding life of marriage (the ring), fidelity (the gifts), then chastity (the broken circle).
Thus, while the objects are all given by Alexis to the bride, the image produces the impression of a reciprocal exchange—the content of their vows.91 The artist offers the visualization
of a formally contracted and mutually engaged agreement: this action is the true marriage
between the two, completed in their own intention, as if in place of the physical consummation foreseen by the previous, secular ceremony and the empty bed.92
In the Alexis Quire, then, the conclusion as written, with its surprisingly completed
embrace, becomes a necessary consequence of the legend as presented from its beginning.93 The Psalter restages the story of Alexis’s austere and single-minded asceticism as
one—also—of marriage, separation and reunion. With the same change, the (original)
story of Alexis’s disdain for the wedding bed is transformed (for the audience) into
one that understands the experience of human love and marriage as a kind of earthly
vessel, or bodily vehicle, through which to experience love for and marriage to Christ.
90 “Ring,” 304–13.
91 In fact mistaken for such by Geddes, Book for Christina, p. 73; cf. Mölk, Albani-Psalter,” p. 47.
92 In the vernacular poem, in notable contrast to the Latin vita, the marriage is not performed in
church or by a priest.
93 It is possible that the added “second” conclusion (stanzas 111–25) is original to St Albans,
though recent editors have not taken this view. To my knowledge it was last maintained by Elliott,
“Ashburnam Alexis,” 254–58.
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Figure 4.15. Proemium to the Chanson de Saint Alexis, St Albans Psalter, ca. 1120–ca. 1140.
Hildesheim, Dombibliothek, MS St Godehard 1, p. 57 (detail).
This latter is a consequence, in fact, of the new focus of audience identification, now the
desire and suffering of Alexis’s bride, the bride. This figure, the sponsa gemebunda, or,
in more general terms, the sponsa Christi in her “widowed” state as sponsa derelicta, is
another iteration of Eve on the way to Mary, but in narrative translation the aspiration
native to her position becomes a longing for the bridegroom’s return and the desire for
a renewed embrace. Thus we encounter in the figures of Alexis and his bride once again
the opposition between two fundamentally different ideas of the place of the body in the
apprehension of the Logos. The difference is more than a contrast, however. It results in
a contradiction: whereas Alexis’s sanctity remains in the Chanson an expression of the
complete victory over human and earthly attachments, and consequently an abhorrence
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of the flesh, above all his own; a woman who conceives of her fidelity to a conjugal bond
as the basis of her love for Christ cannot simultaneously abhor such a bond in its earthly
form. The sponsa Christi instead longs for the one in place of the other, as its extension
into a spiritual realm.
We have encountered this idea repeatedly before. The woman’s virginity is not a form,
first and foremost, of renunciation, but rather a consequence of her fidelity to a “conjugal” bond. Corollary to this, her fidelity is expressed as the preservation of bodily integrity, witnessed as well in the idea that she preserves her beauty for Christ, rather than
denigrating her flesh as Alexis does. Similarly, she seeks her bridegroom in, or within,
her bodily role and its affective expression. The absolute precondition then becomes
the complete subordination of outer form (body) to inner truth and intention (her one
true commitment), for only then can the two remain commensurate. What she invariably
seeks, and must seek, is the recognition of her “truth” in the eyes of her beloved, while
any gesture of seeking the same is inherently subject to suspicion.94
We have only just seen the suffering desire of the sponsa Christi vindicated through
the descent of her bridegroom in dissimulated form (“dimmed” or obscured by the body)
in the vita’s retelling of the Emmaus story as a triple iteration of arrival and departure.
But the same also highlights the difference between Christina and the bride of Alexis. The
vita actually affirms over and over again how present Christ is in his absence, primarily
to Christina herself but through her also for others. If the story becomes a romance of
the bride forsaken, then only because she is so long tormented for her fidelity at the
hands of a world that cannot “see” her husband. For her tormentors, her spouse is
decidedly absent, because invisible. The sponsa Christi is thus continually caught in a
drama of presence and absence in which her own ability to “see” is her only consolation.
This vision is also what the pages of the Psalter train and serve. Alexis’s bride teaches
the same vision in a narrative iteration of the sponsa derelicta, but her narrative is not
Christina’s. The primary differences are two: Alexis never “returns” to his bride, nor does
he ever acknowledge the sacrifice her radical fidelity represents. The recognition that
occurs on the first page between the viewer and the figure painted there, a woman seemingly confined to a tiny “cell,” never occurs within the couple itself. Recognition is once
again the central problem, the veritable crux, of this text—not in one life, but two, and in
the opposition between them.
Where the opening page of the Alexis Quire is constructed to anticipate the poem’s
final embrace between bride and bridegroom, the same is only implicit in the text of
the Chanson. It shows us the story of the bride in a progression from newly-wed to
abandoned bride to widow (she in effect lives through the three orders, the virgin, the
spouse, and the widow, always as a virgin) as one in which she suffers not only for the
absence of her beloved but also as the loving mirror of his suffering. This latter image of
herself she can, admittedly, only express in retrospect, because it depends on recognition. But it is finally because of the reciprocal nature of her suffering, the expression of
94 The sheer difficulty of this position finds no more eloquent witness than Heloise; see Powell,
“Listening to Heloise,” pp. 255–86.
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the woman’s perfection, that she can be so surprisingly assumed into Heaven with him
at the poem’s conclusion.
In the text as in the prologue, it is Alexis who enjoins his newly-wed bride to embrace
the heavenly sponsus: “Oz mei, pulcele! Celui tien ad espus / Ke nus raens[t] de sun sanc
precïus” (Hear me, maiden! Take him as your bridegroom / Who redeemed us with his
precious blood) (VSA, lines 66–67). Her response, if there is one, must await her final
lament over his dead body:
‘Or sui jo vedve, sire’, dist la pulcela,
‘Ja mais ledece n’avrai, quar ne pot estra,
Ne ja mais hume n’avrai, an tute terre.
Deu servirei, le rei ki tot guvernet:
Il nem faldrat, s’il veit que jo lui serve’.
(VSA, lines 491–95)
‘Now I am a widow, my lord,’ the maiden said,
’I will never have happiness again, for that cannot be,
In the whole wide world I shall never have a man again.
I shall serve God, the king who rules over all.
He will not fail me, if he sees me serving him.”
(LA, lines 491–95)
The resigned dignity of this statement is a reminder ex post facto that the bride never
questions the idea or fact of her marriage to Alexis; nowhere is there so much as a hint
that she desires other than the chaste marriage he offered her.95 Discrepancy arises
instead over the second threshold—his departure from the domo patris and only dissembling return. In her final statement, the widowed bride makes clear that she sees
herself as both uni viro–that is, faithful to her husband until death–and as ancilla Dei: her
devotion is both to Alexis and to God. The same is implicit earlier, when, on acknowledging Alexis’s disappearance, she announces, “Henceforth I shall live in the manner of
a turtledove” (LA, line 149). We will have reason to recall this passage shortly.
It is the idea of love of Alexis as service to God that allows the bride’s longing and
love for her sponsus to model the response of the people of Rome, who in turn figure as
the model for the poem’s more general audience.96 The bride’s lament begins with the
words, “Sire Alexis, tant jurz t’ai desirrét” (My Lord Alexis, I longed for you so many a
day) (VSA, line 471). Somewhat surprisingly, a similar formulation is then twice repeated
for “La gent de Rome, ki tant l’unt desirrét” (The people of Rome who so much longed
for him) (VSA, line 571, s.a. 519). This “longing” of the people for Alexis has no real
motivation unless his absence and return are understood to remanifest Christ’s own.
The (thoroughly unmotivated) threat of the destruction of the city (from which the man
95 Gnädinger, Eremetica, p. 46; Mölk, “Épouse,” p. 168.
96 The conclusion of the Latin text does not allow for, still less elicit, identification of the people’s
devotion with the bride’s.
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of God is to deliver them), of which they first learn only that same day, hardly allows
for a sentiment expressed as the equivalent of the bride’s. The people then complete
a familiar topos of women’s grief in hyperbole by refusing to relinquish the body for
burial for seven days, for “It seems to them that they hold God himself” (LA, line 539). In
other words, the people display the same devotion to the holy man and to God through
him that is properly the province of the bride alone; their relationship to the saint cors
appears as an extension of hers. She is a model or exemplum of a perfect Christian life,
and one that stands partly in opposition to her husband’s own.
The story of Alexis is one of radical separation from the body or at least radical desire
for the same; the story of his bride is one of radical fidelity, which, in that she lives in a
human and not a spiritual marriage, is a desire for the body’s embrace, chaste or otherwise. The tension and even opposition between two models of sanctity appears to be
native to the genesis of the vernacular poem: the legend that began as the story of exemplary imitatio Christi, understood in the most penitential sense, progressively acquired
a secondary model of devotion and sanctity, above all in the vernacular versions. In the
Chanson, the same tension is not only unresolved but also enhanced.
If the bride’s suffering for love reciprocates Alexis’s own sacrifice within the capacity
proper to her female nature, if the two of them are to remanifest the love between
sponsus and sponsa, then we should expect some acknowledgement on his part of the
continuing dignity of their bond, but difference on this point instead becomes a focus
of interest at the story’s conclusion. Any possibility of reciprocity is prohibited, because
flight from recognition is the very objective of Alexis’s denial of the flesh; he cannot be
seen if he is to be holy, whereas the truth his bride seeks and must seek can only be
revealed in reciprocal recognition.
This problem is not to be excused or explained away. Alexis’s trajectory is launched
quite explicitly as a flight from woman as body. The poem reads: “When he sees the bed,
and looks at the maiden, he is reminded of his heavenly lord.”97 Alexis’s response is to call
upon God to assist in his escape: “ ‘Ah, my God,’ he said, ‘What heavy sin oppresses me! /
If now I do not flee, I greatly fear I shall lose you’ ”) (LA, lines 59–60). Some have argued
that this implies Alexis wishes to preserve his marriage bond for the pure embrace
possible only in Heaven; Alexis himself does not so much as bat an eyelid in this direction.98 The passage has even been misread as if Alexis’s fear was of losing not God, but
his bride.99 It is instead simply naked in its aversion to carnal union and the temptations
of the flesh;100 equally clear is that this position is of no possible service to the bride,
identified in her person with what is to be fled. When she is received into Alexis’s
embrace in Heaven, the poem recognizes the necessity of accommodating her path to
the same end; it does nothing to accommodate Alexis to the same path. The bride’s
97 “Cum veit le lit, esguardat la pulcela; / Dunc li remembret de sun senior celeste,” VSA, lines 56–57.
98 For the earlier position, see Petit de Julleville, Histoire, p. 13; and Uitti, Story, pp. 24, 37; contra
Cartlidge, Medieval Marriage, pp. 95–96.
99 Cartlidge, Medieval Marriage, p. 94.
100 Sckommodau, “Alexius,” 177; see also Burger, “Mariage,” pp. 230–34.
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lament even includes a veiled reproach to this effect. Read from within the Psalter, the
same lines poignantly recall the gaze of the sponsa gemebunda: “E tantes feiz pur tei an
luinz guardét. / Si revenisses ta spuse conforter, / Pur felunie nïent ne pur lastét” (And
I searched the horizon for you so many times. If you returned to comfort your bride, it
would be no perjury or frailty) (VSA, lines 473–75). It is symptomatic and no less unfortunate that this passage has proven such a puzzle.101 Like Alexis’s own confession of
terror before the wedding bed, it is one of the rare moments (I count a possible three)
when the underlying ideological conflict is actually acknowledged by the protagonists
themselves. Notably, the bride evokes their vows, understood as mutual, and chides her
husband for shunning her very presence rather than solely the conjugal embrace. The
double threshold of chaste marriage and flight from the domo patris receives a moment
of self-conscious reflection. The bride does not participate in the parents’ lament over
blindness, and with these lines she shows why: the problem in her case is not that she
could not see but rather that no acknowledging gaze from Alexis ever returned her own.
This is the crucial point, but before we examine it further, a brief glance at the Latin
life of Alexis is instructive. The Acta sanctorum text, which is thought to represent
a common Latin redaction standardized early in the Western tradition, is generally
regarded as the best basis for comparison.102 In this text, the wedding chamber scene
displays none of the anxiety that is so apparent in the vernacular version; the entire
encounter is devoid of emotion. Alexis simply enters the room, and, because he is “so
highly knowledgeable in Christ,” begins to instruct his bride “and to discuss some of the
sacraments with her,” whereupon he hands over his ring and sword and departs, with
the words, “May the Lord be between us.”103 The bride’s presence in no way provokes
a flight nor does Alexis deflect her embrace by instead engaging her to her heavenly
spouse. Accordingly, in her final lament, the bride makes only a leaden statement of her
own position, in which she sees neither future nor hope: “My mirror is shattered and my
hope has perished. A sorrow has just now begun which has no end” (LA, p. 49). Far from
declaring continuing devotion to husband or God, such despair is barely compatible with
Christian faith and serves to underline, as do the parents’ laments, how hopelessly bound
she remains to the vanities of worldly life in contrast to her husband’s apotheosis. With
neither beginning nor end as a sponsa Christi, this bride can enter no heavenly embrace;
neither does she function, then, as a focus of audience identification or as an alternative
to Alexis’s radical renunciation. Yet this portrayal is entirely consistent in itself, and what
is more, it is fully consonant with the legend’s model of sanctity as embodied in Alexis.
Not so the bride in the vernacular poem. To return to its moments of acknowledged
dissonance: all three turn on vision. Alexis sees the bed, looks at the bride. In lines 473–75,
the bride’s seeking gaze serves as a metonym for her long-suffering desire, the antithesis of
101 See the notes in VSA, pp. 117–18; and LA, p. 129; also Gaiffier, 158–62; and Cartlidge, Medieval
Marriage, p. 98n107. The line is found only in the St Albans MS and in MS V, Biblioteca apostolica
Vaticana, Vaticani latini, 5334.
102 LA, p. 34; Uitti, Story, pp. 42–43; Hunt, “Alexis,” pp. 218–19; for a close comparison of the relevant passages, see Burger, “Mariage,” pp. 227–30.
103 LA, p. 37.
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his fear. The third moment we have also already encountered: “I shall serve God, the king
who rules over all. He will not forsake me, if he sees me serving him” (LSA, 494–95, emphasis
added). The last two instances are part of one speech, the moment when, in fact, she all but
takes over the poem. Without this lament there could be no final embrace, and it merits a
closer look. But the central statement is here: God, the true bridegroom, will not fail her,
because he will see her. The failure in her case resides not in blindness but in a dichotomy
arising from opposed conceptions of the body: the one renounces what the other embraces,
the one flees while the other does not move, the one seeks transcendence, the other integration. The aporia persists to the very end; if it appears to dissolve, then only because,
as with Christ at the Ascension, Alexis can be recognized once his “flesh,” his worldly self,
becomes cloud.
In this sense the audience experiences the poem as a negotiation between the spiritual aspiration to the divine and the suffering incapacity of a female humanity. The gent
de Rome and the audience alike are to understand the story of Alexis and his bride as a
re-enactment of the copula sacra, a narrative understanding of the Song of Songs and
Mary’s reunion with Christ at the Assumption. In an essay that offered fundamental
reflections on the ideas of the holy woman, the vernacular, and history in this period, Karl
Uitti argued that such an understanding pertains generally to the early vernacular lives
of female saints; moreover, “the woman saint—and we must never forget this—is invariably assimilated to the figure of the bride of Christ.”104 The focus on fidelity as the repository of female holiness is characteristic of the emergence of vernacular hagiography; in
fact, the process of vernacularization itself appears to signify a feminine embodiment
of scriptural truth “among us,” in the world of lay experience. The old Provençale “Song
of Saint Fides” completes this idea of re-embodiment twice over: a seemingly unrelated story appended to Fides’s song and portraying the persevering fidelity of a noble
couple can be seen as an indispensable consequence of the vernacularization of Fides’s
life. It completes the embodiment of the copula sacra on a third level, “where that ‘life’
is lived, so to speak, by all of us in the world of human history, in the very specificity
and reality of the Occitanian ‘vernacular’ community.”105 Thus, “She is rooted in our own
‘vernacularness,’ which, in turn, her story does much to define for us. We too are of her.”106
This, I believe, is the best explanation for the oddly anonymous position of a figure who
nevertheless becomes so pivotal to the poem. Alexis’s bride cannot properly be called a saint,
but she does allow the story of Alexis to remanifest the sacred narrative, making it present
here and now.107 The people’s impression of embracing the divine in Alexis determines their
joyful response over his “return” and also constitutes their recognition of the inner truth
through the body. Before God, la gent share the bodily weakness that is woman’s, and they
104 Uitti, “Women Saints,” p. 249.
105 Uitti, “Women Saints,” p. 259.
106 Uitti, “Women Saints,” p. 260.
107 This explanation finds unexpected support from historical linguistics, in that the graphy spuse
(as opposed to espuse), unique to the St Albans copy, appears to be a a reflex of the Latin sponsa, and
thus may insist on such as properly the bride’s identity; see Sampson, “Reluctant Bride,” 137–54.
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experience the truth in the same way. When the bride is received into Heaven to embrace her
spouse, she thus stands also as a human intermediary between their dependence on the body
and the severity of Alexis’s self-mortification.108 In this way, the position of the bride in the
poem becomes part of the explanation of how a vernacular narrative found its way into the
Psalter: here as in the other “prefatory” additions, the medium itself is part of the message on
the place and use of corporeal vision. In the same way, what we see in the staging of the Alexis
as it occurs in the Psalter is something very close to the birthplace of identification with the
bride as a focus of vernacular narrative poetics. She represents body in a new way of reading
that allows our experience and its medium, the vernacular, to contain and reveal divine truth.
Enter the Widowed Bride
To understand fully the significance of this moment we must do as the text does and look
with one eye back and another forward. The rapidly spreading popularity of the Alexis
legend in the first half of the eleventh century is easily understood when one recalls the
penitential severity of the eremitic and apostolic movements that seized the imagination
of the time.109 One of the few sermons on Alexis to survive from the period was written
by Peter Damian, whose circle of self-flagellants can be taken as an extreme espousal of
the model of holiness Alexis represents.110 I suggested earlier that Alexis is engaged in
the attempt to make his flesh weightless, that is, sinless, like Christ’s. The motivation for
this self-mortification lies in the idea of a distance between Christ and humanity that is
unbridgeable, by reason, paradoxically, of the body both share. A body born in sin could
never hope to recompense Christ’s sacrifice of his sinless flesh, and this led to a terror
of the judge who would arrive, as some imagined, in the very image of his suffering.111
Alexis’s fear of recognition is a fear of the persistence of the sinful flesh with which
he was born. There is no other motive for his words, “cum fort pecét m’apresset!” (VSA,
line 59) on entering the bridal chamber; the same lapsarian sin is acknowledged by the
bride when, in her first response to his departure, she cries, “Pechét le m’at tolut” (Sin
has taken him from me) (VSA, line 108).112 It is this fear that leads him progressively to
disfigure and flee his own worldly identity; the only solution was to configure oneself in
advance to the crucified.113 As Peter Damian wrote, it is
as if the holy penitent were saying to God, “There is no need, Lord, for you to order your
officer to punish me. … I have laid hands upon myself, I have taken up my own defence,
and I have offered myself in place of my sins.” … This is the victim, which is sacrificed
108 Cartlidge, Medieval Marriage, p. 112.
109 Mölk, “Culte,” 353–55.
110 See Mölk, “Culte,” 355; and PL, 144:652–60. Damian extols the saint’s heroic feat of conquering
his own emotions to the point of indifference to his family’s suffering.
111 JP, pp. 142–43 and 153.
112 This line, too, has been a point of dispute. Compare the translation in LA; Uitti, “Women Saints,”
p. 251n4; Gaiffier, “Intactam sponsam relinquens,” 159; and Burger, “Mariage,” p. 233.
113 JP, p. 143, paraphrasing Peter Damian.
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while still alive, born away by the angels and offered to God; thus the victim of the human
body is invisibly commingled with that unique sacrifice that was offered on the altar of
the cross.114
To enter into the presence of God, “the victim” (for which Damian writes both hostia and
victima) could only hope to have become effectively invisible. Such was the outlook on
judgment within a view of the crucified Lord as perfection in the flesh obliterated by
human hands. The broader undercurrents of these sentiments played their part in the
rise of veneration to Alexis in the West.115
The story of how this view was displaced by another in the transition from the later
eleventh to the twelfth century has been told often enough. The two aspects that specifically interest us, however, have only recently moved into the historiographic field
of view. The first, which I have evoked before, is a shift in the way identification is
configured: for the judge is substituted the man of sorrows, and between him and the
penitent devotee a third figure was interposed, Mary. In this constellation Mary was not
primarily an intercessor but a model of human suffering, that is, a model of response.
As sponsa et mater, she was likewise not only a bereaved mother but also a widow, the
bereaved bride. The second aspect is a profound shift in the nature of identification with
these same female roles. The idea that the sponsa Christi, once an allegory of the church
as a collective, became humanly identifiable and furthermore (sexually) embodied in
the lives of women is by now familiar; we have seen it in Hildegard as in Christina and
I have only just cited its importance for the advent of vernacular hagiography.116 But
only recently have we begun to take note of an equivalent shift in the role of the widow.
The conjunction of this figure with that of Mary at the Passion serves to represent and
promulgate a new idea of identification with Christ’s suffering, the significance of which
is nothing short of epochal.
By the twelfth century, the “three orders” of the married, the widows, and the virgins
had served for nearly 800 years to distinguish the differing heavenly rewards—thirty, sixty-, and a hundred-fold, respectively—for differing ways of life within the church,
regardless of sex. As Bernhard Jussen has shown, this hierarchy of remuneration underwent a crucial transformation in the course of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries,
not such that its categories changed but such that they signified differently: rather than
an immutable correspondence between the social stations of the sexual body and heavenly reward, merit came to be defined instead by the truth of inner commitment.117
A “virgin” was no longer merely one who lived under vows of celibacy but rather one
who maintained the corresponding degree of inward integrity. All humanity was, metaphorically, a widow—as Augustine had said—but this was no merit in itself; it was rather
114 Opusculum 43 (Letter 161), chap. 4, as quoted and trans. in JP, p. 103; emphasis added.
115 Mölk, “Culte,” 353–55.
116 Excellent historical overview is found in Bugge, Virginitas, pp. 59–110.
117 Jussen, Witwe, p. 147; see also pp. 91–92, 140–47 and passim.
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179
a way of recognizing the true moral significance of humanity’s place in the world and its
history.118 Moral progress lay in knowing the widow’s experience as one’s own.
Corresponding to this shift to merit in inner growth or inner truth was another that
saw the categories become increasingly literal and gender-bound. Women now themselves embodied the earlier ideas of humanity’s relationship to its heavenly exemplar.119
The two shifts, despite the seeming contradiction, are in fact interdependent. As we have
seen, woman as body embodied humanity’s search for truth in the body; her varying
dispositions to body thus emerge as if the biographical manifestations of eternal truths;
that is, of the three dispositions of the sexual body: virgin, bride, or widow. Within this
equation, however, women, with no possibility finally to overcome the weakness they
embodied, were barred from Heaven unless allowed the exemption of inner truth, the
recognition of service of the heart, which was, sui generis, not manifest as physical
struggle or accomplishment.
Jussen identifies the inner life of the widow as the exemplar of penance and contrition; in this her loss and mourning made her the singularly appropriate figure of ecclesia
on earth.120 “Das Heil liegt in der Buße” (Salvation is found in penance), is the formula
she represents, and this continuously, despite and beyond the shift just evoked.121 This
idea turns out to be incomplete: the penitent’s position assumes a debt that can be
repaid in order finally to be found worthy of a renewed embrace, and this is essentially
Alexis’s endeavour. For the woman, however, there could be no “castration solution,” as
Heloise passionately argued to Abelard, no weightless flesh such as Alexis is seen to seek
but only a path that integrates her experience into the love of God.122 Thus, the woman
reached Christ by reversing the male’s spiritual trajectory, not by reaching beyond herself but by sinking into the truth of her bodily roles as remanifestations of the experience
of the sponsa et mater and thereby discovering the truth of her unity with the bodily
Christ. It is precisely the difference between the two, between the spiritual athlete and
the suffering bride, that we see exhibited in the incommensurability of the legend of
Alexis with that of his sponsa beata et gemebunda. Two different trajectories in the history of Christian devotion are here found collapsed into one narrative. This bride is a
preliminary representation of the life of the New Eve and of the new widow.
It was not that the new widow knew no compunction or needed no penance but
rather that she discovered a path around and beyond these, a path to surmount the insurmountable, in Mary’s role at the Passion.123 Throughout the twelfth century and especially in its later decades, the minimal scriptural account of this role was dramatically
118 See p. 132, above.
119 Jussen, Witwe, p. 154; see also Bugge, Virginitas, pp. 59–110.
120 Jussen, Witwe, pp. 35–36.
121 Jussen, Witwe, p. 35.
122 See Powell, “Listening to Heloise,” pp. 264–67.
123 Jussen acknowledges Mary’s place as the widowed bride but is unable to penetrate further the
significance of her role: Jussen, Witwe, pp. 232–35 and 238–40, esp. 233. Devotion to the Passion
receives only peripheral consideration in his investigation, for example, Jussen, Witwe, pp. 241–42.
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expanded in a number of highly influential texts,124 thus giving voice, body and a capital place in scriptural narrative to the sponsa derelicta. The more this narrative expansion progressed, the more humanly contemporary—that is, the more like every grieving
woman—Mary became. This triple convergence of Mary, the sponsa derelicta, and the
worldly widow in a new sanctification of human suffering will concern us increasingly
in the chapters to come.
Mary’s position as mother and widow at the Passion was unique, as she alone could
know no penance, did not share in the sin that was repaid but rather knew the full depth
of compassio cordis felt entirely and selflessly for love alone; that is, simply by remaining
true to who she was. As a woman therefore, Mary (thus it would be pronounced more
and more forcefully), by suffering with Christ as one flesh, originally and perfectly
accomplished a human reciprocation of Christ’s inestimable sacrifice where no possibility otherwise existed for satisfactory recompense.125 Peter Damian’s aspiration was
finally no more attainable than was Christ’s weightless flesh. The keys to the alternative
were two: the widow’s virtue, that is, a woman’s unfailing fidelity even to the bitterest
end (Bernard of Clairvaux would soon imply that Mary’s sacrifice was equal or even
somehow greater, as the pain she endured in the soul was greater than any suffered in
the body),126 and a reciprocal gaze.127 Christ looked on his bride and mother and knew
the full extent of her pain, and if he assented, twelfth-century writers were certain,
he also felt and acknowledged her sacrifice. Here was the diametrical opposite of the
dilemma experienced by Alexis’s bride. As Mary attested in one of the most popular and
influential Passion tracts, attributed in the Middle Ages to Bernard and known today by
its incipit, “Quis dabit” (ca. 1200): “Ego videns eum et ipse videns me, plus dolebat de
me quam de se” (I looking on him and he looking on me, he grieved more for me than for
himself).128 The idea is well in evidence by the middle of the twelfth century, as attested
with remarkable eloquence in a sermon by Odo of Morimund (d. 1161). Odo addresses
his audience from within the characteristic configuration, as the spectator to Mary’s
suffering with the suffering Christ:
Quid putas quod cogitaverit, quam plena singultibus fuerit, cum oculis lacrimosis
intueretur oculos liuidos innocentis filii ad se directos? O vere stupendos radios visionis!
O sacratissima lumina matris et filii, ad quorum mutuum respectum non immerito solis
radius in tenebras conversus est! Quam profunde infixus est radius huius visionis in
corde tuo, mater sancta, quo te mundi dominus, iam moriens, intueri dignatus est!129
124 See above, pp. 64–65 and 65n75.
125 JP, pp. 143–46.
126 Dominica infra octavam Assumptionis, par. 14, as cited in Kraß, Stabat mater, p. 106. The idea
was also voiced by other writers; see JP, 304, 425–26.
127 Mertens Fleury, “Klagen” pp. 150–52, 160–65, sees the compassionate gaze as communication
that succeeds where words, language and the voice itself fail.
128 “Quis dabit capite meo,” ed. and trans. Bestul, p. 170; translation modified. See also below,
p. 331 note 19.
129 “Homilia super Stabat iuxta crucem Iesu,” lines 72–79.
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(What do you think might have gone through her mind when, her throat constricted by
inarticulate sobs, with eyes full of tears, she beheld the leaden eyes of her innocent son
directed at her? O what a stupendous axis of vision! O most sacred light of mother and
son, for the sake of whose reciprocal gaze not without reason the sun’s rays converted
to darkness! How deeply the axis of this gaze fixed itself in your heart, holy mother, by
which you were made worthy to behold the Lord of the world even as he died.)
When their gazes meet at the cross, each acknowledges and understands the other’s
suffering and God and his widowed mother are one. This was the full meaning of
compassio as it emerged in the twelfth century.130 Alexis’s ascetic excellence, grounded
in utter indifference to human suffering, itself shuns every gaze; this moment of recognition is his anathema. By contrast, humanity as the widowed bride holds forth her
“blackened” body as the very testimony that she is worthy of the embrace communicated
in Christ’s compassionate gaze.
At St Albans in 1119—by which time a chapel had been consecrated to Alexis, and, it
has been conjectured by some, this very poem may have been compiled and sung131—we
are still far from the expression of such a visual epiphany of reciprocal suffering. Mary
in her role as humanity suffering with Christ was only beginning to come into view, but
it is amply anticipated in writings avidly received at St Albans and originating at the
same Abbey of Bec where, according to one widely held view, the Old French Alexis itself
was first composed.132 These are the prayers and meditations of St Anselm (d. 1109), in
which, as Thomas Bestul writes, already “the role of Mary is especially crucial: she, in
actually witnessing the events, suffered greatly, and Anselm finds in her emotional reaction to the Passion an ideal model of [response].”133 Still, it was Anselm who had pleaded
directly to Christ,
I want you, I hope for you, I seek you;
to you my heart has said, seek my face;
your face, Lord, have I sought;
turn not your face from me.
…
my soul is like a widow.
turn your gaze and behold my tears
which I offer to you till you return.134
130 Mertens Fleury, “Klagen,” passim; JP, pp. 199–200, 232–41, 424–28.
131 Goldschmidt, Albanipsalter, pp. 34–35; now further argued in Gerry, “Alexis Quire,” 606 and
passim.
132 Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature, pp. 342–43; Cingolani, “Normandia,” pp. 281–93. The Alexis
Master’s team appears to have illustrated a copy of Anselm’s Meditations at St Albans and copied
the same for other houses. As Rodney Thomson concludes, “The abbey seems to have played an
important role in popularizing St Anselm’s devotional works” (Thomson, Manuscripts, p. 41, see
also pp. 39–40).
133 Bestul, Texts, p. 37; also JP, pp. 232–41.
134 Prayers and Meditations, p. 98.
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To write these lines Anselm did not need Mary as intermediary; he does, however
assume the position of the widowed bride, a soul whose highest, concluding aspiration
was one day to hear the words, “Soul, behold your bridegroom.”135 The aspiration of this
devotee was not invisibility, to become the host on the altar, but visual acknowledgement
and an embrace. How not to hear, then, in a monastic world that was being reshaped in
the image of Anselmian piety, the same plea in the final words that the bride addresses to
her now definitively departed bridegroom, Or sui jo vedve, sire … ? Does the bride turn to
God because she has recognized the emptiness of her hopes in earthly marriage or rather
by way of fully assuming her new role as Alexis’s widow? There is a note of opposition,
it is true, between her disappointment over the gaze ever-denied by her earthly beloved
and her own confidence that God will, in Anselm’s words, “turn [his] gaze and behold
[her] tears.” The conclusion assures us that He did, and this was her suverain cunsolacion
as promised the followers of les noces virginels in the St Albans prologue. But we can
hardly presume to hear in her chiding of Alexis a corresponding rejection of the earthly
bridegroom, whom she will shortly embrace in Heaven. This is a vernacular bride; she
lives her love in the world and subject to its imperfection, but her conviction is as her
nature demands and her story tells; that is, that there is no unbridgeable gap between
human experience and the divine embrace. It is the depth of her own commitment, the
ability to “sink into” her own earthly role so completely and unquestioningly, that finally
forces a fusion of the two experiences, of love human and divine—and in this she joins
Mary at the cross. This is a moment we will encounter repeatedly at the centre of an
avowedly vernacular poetics of truth in romance narrative. It is to some extent in itself
responsible for the possibility of identification between the vernacular and narrative as
“bodily media” and women’s reading or women’s knowing—identifications too easily
oversimplified and too often wrongly understood—because, essentially, it redelivers the
moment that first enabled Mary to “read.”
Anselm does in fact rely on Mary in the same prayer to Christ, and in conjunction
with a particular anxiety that he cannot quell: his sense of failure and loss over not
having accompanied, in fact reciprocated, Christ’s suffering: “Why, o my soul, were you
not there / to be pierced by a sword of bitter sorrow / when you could not bear the
piercing of the side of your Savior with a lance?”136 The question, “Why were you not
there,” he repeats over and over again as his own way of recapitulating the events of
the Passion, but nowhere more tellingly than in these lines, perhaps—at least as seen
in retrospect.137 They offer one of the earliest known occurrences in which the sword of
sorrow, the gladius doloris, is referred to as gladius compassionis. Simeon had foretold at
Christ’s birth (Luke 2:35) that a sword would pierce Mary’s soul as the complement of
Christ’s own demise, and from the twelfth century onward the idea that the prophecy
135 Prayers and Meditations, p. 98.
136 Prayers and Meditations, p. 95.
137 “Why could you not bear to see the nails? … Why did you not see the blood? … Why did you
not share the sufferings of the most pure virgin?” Prayers and Meditations, p. 95. See also Constable,
Reformation, p. 203; Bestul, Texts, pp. 36–37.
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was fulfilled at the cross served to confirm Mary’s union, her true oneness in one body,
with Christ in his pain; the sword, it would be said, pierced her heart—her soul—even as
the lance did his, but she did not die.138 The reciprocal gaze was thus one with a reciprocal
wound, but, like Mary, the emulating Christian was left behind as a “widow” to long for
her bridegroom’s return.
The focus of Anselm’s anxiety in this passage is, however, not the extent of the pain
but instead his own absence: how could he claim to suffer with Christ, if he had not seen,
had not “been there,” if, still worse, as these lines indicate, he “could not bear” to stand at
the cross as Mary had? “What do I know,” he confesses to Mary,
of the flood that drenched your matchless face,
when you beheld your Son, your Lord, and your God,
stretched on the cross without guilt,
when the flesh of your flesh
was cruelly butchered by wicked men?139
In his quest to know Mary’s tears and, through them, know the reciprocal wound and
the reciprocal gaze, Anselm’s longing all but fully anticipates that expressed in Odo’s
sermon, or even, as we shall see in a later chapter, that of the author of the “Quis dabit.”
What occurs in this perfect alignment of human suffering in the divine and the human
heart is a renewal of the embrace of the Word that Mary experienced in the conception. It is possible because of that conception, because Mary and Christ are one flesh.
The continuation of Odo’s portrayal of the gaze clarifies the relationship between the
two embraces as reciprocal wounding, using Canticles 4:9 in a way characteristic of the
twelfth century’s understanding of the conception as God’s response to a wound of love:
Ecce reddit tibi amoris sagittam, quam a te missam acceperat. Ipse namque dicit ad
te: Vulnerasti cor meum, soror mea, sponsa, in uno oculorum tuorum, et in uno crine
colli tui. Tu autem nunc dicere potes: Vulnerasti cor meum, fili mi, in visione qua me
de cruce respexisti, et in colloquio quod mecum iam moriens habuisti. Et ista fortassis
est ille gladius, de quo prophetavit symeon, ad te dicens: Tuam ipsius animam
pertransivit gladius.140
(Even thus he returned your arrow of love, which he had accepted at your hand. And now
verily he said to you, “You have wounded my heart, my sister, bride, with one of your eyes
and with one lock of hair from your neck” [Canticles 4,9]. And now you can truly say, “You
have wounded my heart, my son, in this gaze which you cast upon me from the cross, and
in the thoughts you exchanged with me as you died.” And this undoubtedly is that sword
of which Simeon foretold, when he said to you, “And a sword will pierce your soul through
and though” [Luke 2:35].)
The “arrow of love” Christ had accepted is a wound to his divinity that brings him to
assume Mary’s human flesh, through which the two experience one pain.141 The promise
138 Kraß, Stabat mater, pp. 99–132, and p. 114; also JP, p. 199.
139 Prayers and Meditations, p. 96. See also JP, pp. 191, 235–40.
140 Odo of Morimund, Homilia, lines 79–91.
141 See also below, pp. 251–53 and 269–70.
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of the Incarnation was that it made God and all humanity share one flesh; hence Mary’s
compassio extended the same possibility to all who followed her. To experience the
reciprocal wound was to acknowledge and sustain the body’s weakness, which was prerequisite to the reciprocal gaze as recognition of compassio achieved. As it was proper to
Mary, this conjunction of wounding and recognition, knowing and suffering was proper
to the female body, and it is at the root of the role of women’s grief in romance poetics.
In lamenting his absence from this possibility, Anselm in effect accuses himself a
priori of the failing of the men, the disciples who slept as Christ prayed in Gesthemane
or fled rather than accompany their lord to Golgotha. This was the key: whether ontologically, that is, by nature, or historically, that is, by experience, the male was denied
this privilege of presence, the ability to immerse and lose himself in the fullness of a
“historical” moment (that is, of and in historia, the letter and the body), which might
compensate for his factual absence, which could collapse time and space and allow a
true witnessing of the event with all the psycho-emotional terror this would bring. This,
so wonderfully and paradoxically, was instead the privilege of weakness, the privilege of
the reading bride, accessible to men only through her and above all through her realization in history, Mary.
The shift from awe before and emulation of the spiritual athlete Alexis to empathy
and identification with his bride thus effects in situ a transformation of audience that
corresponds to a devotional transformation of profound proportions. An audience that
was doubtless a male monastic elite (at least for the Latin text) becomes identified with
women and laymen and in this new persona is initiated into a “female” experience of the
presence of God in this world. The new audience is in a passive position of suffering and
searching, waiting for return and reunion; in short, “she” is a widow. Parallel to this shift is
a corresponding alteration of narrative genre, a movement towards a structure of union,
separation, and reunion, and either appears to be enhanced with the vernacularization
of the legend. The new genre has been called “a hagiographic romance.”142 While this
term is appealing as a metaphor for the hybrid quality of the text, to suggest the text truly
moves in the direction of later courtly romance as a genre is, I think, mistaken: as I see it,
the opposition at stake is not one between legenda and romance, but rather between two
different monastic models of reading.143 The new structure creates a narrative mould in
which to accommodate and articulate the suffering of a “female” soul. The bride of Alexis
is as Anselm sees himself: no sooner a bride than also a widow, a widow who lives on,
nevertheless, in the sole hope of a renewed embrace. Clearly then, this shift does not
mean that the text no longer includes its former male, learned and monastic audience.
But in substituting the vernacular for the Latin it also displaces the demonstration of
ascetic excellence to accommodate identification with human emotional needs and a
narrative in which the bride “reads” alongside the bridegroom. The body is introduced
into the prospect of a noetic union.
142 Cartlidge, Medieval Marriage, p. 90.
143 Cf. Cartlidge, Medieval Marriage, pp. 87–99.
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Just as in Anselm’s text, this bride’s lament cannot yet fuse with Mary’s suffering,
the suffering of the woman for whom Jesus was “flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone.”144
But the spuse reveals herself in a number of ways as a precursor of telling developments
to come. One is her use of the image of the turtrele, the turtledove, to declare lifelong
fidelity to her absconded bridegroom. The turtledove had been known from bestiary
lore since patristic times as the image of unfailing widowed fidelity. Beginning in the
early twelfth century (if not before) it became, with the dove (columba) and through the
images of either in the Song of Songs (Canticles 2:11, 2:14), both a symbol of Mary and
the exemplar of devotion to Christ’s Passion.145 The spuse refers her fidelity to this model
in both the Latin and the Old French texts, but in the latter, the mother joins her with an
uncanny anticipation of the identity between Mary, widow, and compassio that the image
would come to express: “Let us grieve together for the loss of our beloved: you for your
husband, I shall do it for my son” (LA, 154–55).
By contrast, the Chanson’s treatment of the mother’s mourning of the dead Alexis
emphatically illustrates the distance between the understanding of female grief at the
century’s beginning and end. She runs up in a dishevelled state (eschevelede) “as if a
woman bereft of her senses” (cum femme forsenede), and then falls to the ground in a
faint. Then we see her beating her hands together, beating at her chest, tearing at her
hair, disfiguring her face, throwing her body about, and, finally, embracing her dead
son.146 The description reads like a catalogue of the most extravagant gestures of medieval women’s grief, and they may be noted to purpose: Laudine’s grieving psalter-reading
was our point of departure, and these gestures will take on a quite different significance
when we reconsider her in the final chapter. And once again, a retrospective view from
the end of the twelfth century would reveal a number of these gestures—notably the
fainting, the beating of the head, chest or neck, and the embrace of the dead beloved—as
Mary’s own in the planctus Mariae and related Passion tracts, where she increasingly
becomes the image of the original wellspring of human grief.147 The mother’s grief in the
Alexis remains instead a portrayal of worldly loss obscuring spiritual vision. The Pope
accordingly calls the family to order once each has had their say: “My lords, … What is
the meaning of these outcries, this sorrow and this clamour? / Although one may grieve,
he is, in our need, a joy” (LA, lines 502–3). Even the mother’s tears—despite those that
144 The transfer of Adam’s words on the creation of Eve in Genesis 2:23 to Mary occurs in William
of Newburgh’s commentary on the Song of Songs (second half of the twelfth century): “Assuredly,
the pious mother (pia mater) shared all the sufferings of her most sweet son through her maternal
affection (per maternum affectum). In him she was afflicted with abuses, scourged, spat upon, and
crucified for him, because he was bone of her bones, and flesh of her flesh (os ex ossibus eius et
caro ex carne eius).” Explanatio sacri epithalamii in matrem sponsi 3 (Canticles 3:6), as cited and
translated in JP, p. 428.
145 On the dove and widowed fidelity, see Jussen, Witwe, pp. 210–42; on the association with Mary
and the sponsa, see Messelken, “Rabe und Taube,” pp. 80, 111, 150–53.
146 I follow the corrections suggested in Zufferey, “Tradition manuscrite,” 41–44, to address the
textual oddities of this description.
147 An insightful treatment of this complex subject is Schwab, Sigune, Kriemhilt, Maria, pp. 97–109.
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Anselm evokes in a flood over Mary’s face—might still be understood in the Alexis as a
mark of excessive worldly attachment.
As Ambrose had pronounced of Mary at the cross, with lapidary certainty and an
authority that endured beyond the millennium, “I read that she was standing; I read
nothing of weeping.”148 Accordingly, in her own lament, Alexis’s bride is never said
to weep, and she completes no physical gestures of mourning—this in contrast, once
again, to the Latin vita.149 The contrast with the mother, coupled with her distance from
later portrayals that would allow the mourning sponsa Christi to fuse with the mater
dolorosa, displays this bride once again on a threshold where these human sentiments
remained marginal within Christian devotion but were nonetheless beginning to claim
their future place.
Rather than the mother’s bitterness, which goes so far as to declare that her son
must truly have hated her to be so cruel (VSA, lines 433, 446), we find in the bride
a resigned, almost wistful reflection that professes profoundly disappointed desire
but also enduring love, looks back in sadness but also embraces (as already seen) her
new future. In reflecting on Alexis’s seventeen years under the stairway she makes no
reproach, no lament of blindness, but rather a moving testimony of her ability to see
the inner truth:
Se jo’t soüsse la jus suz lu degrét
Ou as geüd de lung’ afermetét,
Ja tut gent ne m’en soüst turner
Qu’a tei ansemble n’oüsse conversét:
Si me leüst, si t’oüsse guardét.
(VSA, lines 486–90)
(If I had known that you were there under the stairs,
Where you lay in your long infirmity,
All the world could not have prevented me
From being together with you.
Had it been permitted me, I would have watched over you!)
(LA, lines 486–90, translation modified)
Here, if not before, the bride’s place as sponsa Christi is secured. For her, there would have
been no question of restoring Alexis to his rightful place in society, her love is selfless and
would have conformed to him as if to the apostolic dictum, nudus Christum nudum sequi.
But this is likewise the antithesis of the family’s idea of recognition: she would have
remained devoted to the inner truth—in explicit disregard for worldly judgment—and
served, or “looked after,” the man in his abject and surely physically abhorrent state.150
Once again, this devotion, like the bride’s profession of undying love, can only be seen
148 ‘Stantem illam lego, flentem non lego’, De obitu, par. 39, 1371. See also JP, pp. 205–14; and
Kraß, Stabat mater, p. 109 and passim.
149 The Latin text sees the bride run up in a “tattered garment” and then seized by sobs (LA, p. 49).
150 The verb guarder carries a double meaning, “to regard, look at,” and “to care for.”
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as fully motivated with reference to the “man of God,” that is, to the holy individual first
revealed to her and to the city by Alexis’s cartre, which has only just been read. The bride
claims, in other words, that she would have “recognized” and embraced her true spouse,
or the true Alexis beatus et electus, an alter Christus (already) in the beggar under the
stairs. She does not say so explicitly, but it seems he needed only to reveal his own heart,
that is, to cast a loving gaze. How else should we understand, “Si me leüst” (Had it been
permitted me)?151
Only with the dignity of this lament and its transformation of the Latin text does one
begin to grasp the full depth of voices in opposition that I have argued is nonetheless
central to the vernacular poem. As portrayed for us in the St Albans Psalter, the bride
is a model of Christian devotion still in progress. From her initial tacit acceptance of
the chaste marriage—an acceptance only affirmed in retrospect—she progresses to the
position of the turtrele, in her case a devotion in lifelong fidelity to an absent spouse, and
finally to the position of the widowed bride, the sponsa Christi who will be embraced
only in Heaven.
The fate of this abandoned or widowed bride runs like a red thread through the
development of vernacular literature, and, as I will argue, is bound up again and again
with the articulation of a vernacular poetics of truth. The same is implicitly elucidated
for us in the St Albans Alexis, where the widow’s fate emerges to view as the indispensable resolution of a fundamental opposition, that is, as the focal point of an inverse
poetics of body, such that not an ability to renounce, erase or simply cast off the outer
shell, but rather an attempt to manifest the truth in the self results in a body that no
longer obscures but reveals. This possibility, cast invariably as the privilege of bodily
dependency or of a weakness for the flesh, was in fact extremely exacting in its uncompromising abhorrence not of body, but, as we saw in the last chapter, of the discontinuity
between semblance and truth.
The Mediatrix and Her Last Gifts
It would distort the preceding argument and overstretch the evidence to make these
claims for the Chanson de Saint Alexis standing entirely on its own. The real affirmation
of the ideas just expressed comes from the poem’s embedding in monastic devotion as
embodied in the rest of the Psalter. The two models of vision that—taken over from the
Ascension and fundamental to the Psalter’s adaptation of the Emmaus story—connected
the latter so pointedly with the Alexis and both with Gregory’s letter are encountered in
the Alexis itself as the opposition between a male and a female relationship to the body,
virile renunciation and female integration. As the implicit viewer and audience of these
reflections, the sponsa gemebunda stands for the possibility, indeed the necessity, that
human experience can be continuous with the experience of the divine; earthly marriage
151 See the entry for leisir in the Anglo-Norman Dictionary, www.anglo-norman.net/cgi-bin/forms1. Mölk, “Épouse,” 169, proposes reading the line as if the bride suddenly retracts her protest in
self-doubt, as in “If I had been capable.” This is neither lexically justified nor logically sustainable in
the passage itself. Uitti, Story, p. 54, reads “If only she had known he was there.”
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becomes a vessel through which to experience love of God—that is, she lends the speculative ideas articulated in the quire their grounding in human historia and, most significantly, an affective centre in loving desire. This is the “reader” for whom this media
revolution in a binding was undertaken, although we have no more discovered his or her
historical identity than we could ever stipulate that only one individual necessarily was
intended to use, or ever used, the book.
The entire Alexis Quire is inserted as it stands in the Psalter as if an appendage to
the great sequence of visual participation in Christ’s life, what we might imagine as
the efforts of Anselm’s “widow-self” to regain presence at the crucial events of sacra
historia. Aelred’s text for his sister expanded on the same need and projected before
her mind’s eye entire scenes into which she could insert herself, thereby dramatically
collapsing the same distance that caused Anselm such despairing self-recrimination.
Somewhere in between these two the St Albans artists actually dared to embody such
verbal stage settings on the pages of a psalter in resplendently material form, as the
monumental extension of the same gendered gaze into a veritable personal theatre, a
space in which the tension between corporeal and spiritual vision has dissolved into a
“physical” encounter with historia—just as we saw the same spectacularly played out for
us in the Christmas Emmaus experience recounted in Christina’s vita. There is no further
need in these pictures to overcome the dread felt by Peter Damian before the crucified
Christ nor even to weep over the soul’s tardiness or cowardice that kept it from actually
accompanying the sufferings of its saviour. Instead, now guided by Mary’s own conception and bearing of the Word, the female gaze could draw into the self those same scenes.
The obligation that now fell upon her was to bring forth a mirror of that truth in her own
body, to become the loving mirror of Christ’s sufferings in his human form. How better
to encapsulate this transition, all these ideas, in one image, than by fusing the Crucifixion
with the Descent from the Cross (fig. 4.5) and thereby collapsing not only the otherwise
unbridgeable distance between Christ crucified and the devotee but also—impossibly,
it should seem—transforming the Crucifixion itself into an embrace, a moment of reciprocal ascent and descent that enabled the agonized gaze to alight on its object in a caress
and flowing tears. Do the women weep in this scene? Their gestures certainly seem to
imply as much, and in this possibly to differentiate between them and the men. Aelred,
in any case, left no doubt on the point:
Draw near to the Cross with the Virgin Mother and the virgin disciple, and look at close
quarters upon that face in all its pallor. What then? Will your eyes be dry as you see
your most loving Lady in tears? Will you not weep as her soul is pierced by the sword
of sorrow?152
This woman, whether sister, widow, or sponsa, reads to restore an embrace, to regain
an experience of voice and body that, on the one hand, is itself a secondary representation, a performance “she” once heard and saw (the liturgy, its dramatic presentation, the
Life or the life of a saint); and, on the other, an unmediated apprehension of the Logos,
a visionary gnosis in which she is witness to the embodied truth. This is the meaning
152 Rule, p. 90.
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of the sponsa derelicta when understood as a figure of the human dispensation before
the divine, a metaphor for the body that once knew, carnally and wholly, its beloved
but now is consigned to a life of conjuring that presence from the relics of his passing,
the vestigia available in this world. As the inscription reads that appears to encapsulate
the entire visual narrative on the opening page of the Alexis Quire (fig. 4.10), “Ultima
pudice donantur munera sponse anulus et remge verboru[m] finis et ave” (The final gifts
are given to the chaste bride: a ring and a sword belt, last words, and hail!). The items
consigned by bridegroom to bride, and with them the contents of every page of this
expanding image-text corpus, are the ultima munera, the gifts the bridegroom has left
behind and through which he can be found again. The viewer sees the bride accept these
gifts; she sees her alone, watching, waiting; she sees the bridegroom exit and leave—and
on the same threshold her own meditation and her own life begins, at the point of separation and promised return. United by this desiring female gaze, the Alexis Quire and the
picture cycle become an inseparable pair—not in production, certainly, but in the experience they are designed to serve—the one a multi-medial and still somewhat ambivalent reflection on its way to the monumental expression found in the other. Together,
they embody and all but inaugurate the new experience of women’s psalter-reading, or
reading as a psalter-literate woman.
What then do we make now of the idea of Christina of Markyate as the sometime
owner and user of this book? To the extent that we know this Christina, she is the one
who is portrayed in the vita, and the woman encountered there is every bit the mediatrix
anticipated by the pages of the Psalter itself. When the initial to Psalm 105 was supplied
with all its visual reminiscence of the display that was already there, the gesture was
doubtless intended to mark this very relationship and complete the circle: the embrace
mediated over and over again through the pictures and texts in the Psalter between
sponsa Christi and sponsus was now realized visually on the page in its mediary function
for the monks of St Albans, who had made the book and written the vita. The insertion
of the initial adds as if a final affirming seal to the intricate relationship between the
woman-as-reader in the codex and the protagonist of the hagiographic text. But the hermeneutic circle of representation remains unbroken: was Christina’s actual use of the
book thus commemorated or rather only recognition after the fact of the complementary
nature of the two projects in themselves? This is the question we can never answer, and
one that we do well to force to the background as long as possible. The same directive
applies still more in the following chapters, where the focus turns to cameo insertions
such as the Christina initial represents into the narrative body of texts, not as pictures,
but no less as reflections of historical women in a poetic mirror.
Having arrived at the end of our consideration of the Psalter, it remains instructive
to pull Geoffrey and Christina back into the foreground, that is, to recall their place in
a larger historical context. One might consider the surprisingly parallel example of a
roughly contemporary body of texts that has fascinated readers for centuries in the
belief that it, too, was personal and confessional: the peculiar dossier of correspondence between Peter Abelard and his own beloved sponsa Christi, Heloise. Abelard’s
penultimate letter, with its portentous title, “On the authority and dignity of the holy
order of nuns,” offers concentrated exposition of the same themes as have emerged
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from this chapter.153 Not only does Abelard begin from the same concern for physical
immediacy and a specially favoured bodily closeness to Christ to delineate the privilege
of the female religious but his favourite scriptural witnesses to the point are also the
women who persevere at the cross when all the apostles have scattered, the women who
stand vigil alone at the tomb, and the Annunciation of Mary Magdalene—together no
less reminiscent of the St Albans picture cycle than they are of Aelred’s meditation for
recluses. The women’s lesser strength, their more fearful constitutions and their tears
are all emphasized as the characteristics that, for the very reason that they highlight
women’s lesser capacity for such trials, make their fidelity and suffering far more dear in
the eyes of Christ.154 At this juncture then, Abelard pauses to wonder over the nature of
this “intrinsic dignity of women,” over this “privilege of the weaker sex,” infirmioris sexus
praerogativa, a special favour with God that allowed a woman to consecrate the King of
Kings,155 that made women “the first to see and touch the risen lord,” and “set them as if
female apostles over the apostles themselves … such that the apostles had to learn first
from the women what they then preached to all the world.”156 Such was the privilege
granted her as “humility itself,” though she was “invested with no distinction of office but
solely with the merit of her devotion.”157
Abelard’s first reply to Heloise, concerned more immediately to obtain the nuns’
intercession with their heavenly spouse on his own behalf, is a longwinded exposition of
the special hearing their prayers find with God, “most especially the prayers of women
for such as are dear to them, and those of wives for their husbands.”158 There, too, he cites
his scriptural examples of women’s steadfastness at Christ’s death and their witness to
the Resurrection. In fact, as I have argued at length elsewhere, within the monastic context that produced it, the entire correspondence between Abelard and Heloise is best
understood as a staging of the narrative of the widowed, or “black bride” as a model
for the nuns and as embodied in the experience of Heloise herself.159 Together with
Abelard’s own story, the Historia calamitatum, and his subsequent insistence on the
“castration solution” as his personal victory over the flesh, the dialogue between these
two voices offers a surprising parallel to the opposition we have only just observed
embedded in the Alexis—even if the protagonists there are allowed only a faint whisper
153 Epistres, 7, pp. 107–47.
154 Abelard, Epistres, 7, pp. 111–13.
155 “Quae est ista, quaeso, Domini benignitas, aut quae mulierum dignitas … Quae est ista, obsecro,
infirmioris sexus praerogativa, ut summam Christum omnibus Sancti Spiritus ungentis ab ipsa ejus
conceptione dleibutum, mulier quoque inungeret.” Abelard, Epistres, 7, p. 109.
156 “… demum ipsum Dominum prime viderunt et tenuerunt. … Ex quibus colligimus has
sanctas mulieres quasi apostolas super apostolos esse constitutas, … ut per eas apostolic primum
addiscerent quod toti mundo postmodum predicarent.” Abelard, Epistres, 7, p. 114.
157 “Humilis mulier … hec in Christo sacramenta peragit non prelationis officio, sed devotionis
merito.” Abelard, Epistres, 7, p. 110.
158 “Quantum autem locum apud Deum et sanctos ejus fidelium orationes obtineant, et maxime
mulierum pro caris suis et uxorum per viris …” Abelard, Epistres, 7, p. 55.
159 Powell, “Listening to Heloise,” pp. 255–86.
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when compared to the celebrated drama of the philosopher and his sometime pupil.
Thus, the major themes that run through and shape both the portrayal of the relationship between Geoffrey and Christina in the vita and the representation of reading in the
St Albans Psalter are also those marshalled to define a new female monastic spirituality.
The Paraclete was founded in 1129; Abelard’s letters of direction and the compilation
of the correspondence most likely took place around 1140. The case of Abelard and
Heloise is without doubt one grounded in a true effort to establish a woman’s monastic
community and provide it with a body of texts made necessary, as Heloise is seen to
protest in her third letter, because women’s needs are in countless ways not those of
men. And yet, until recently, these letters were thought of as a scandalous confession of
illicit passion behind cloister walls. We would do well, then, while not subordinating our
understanding of the St Albans Psalter to a literary creation (the vita), to take no less seriously the engagement of women’s spirituality and devotional needs that forms at least
one side of the representational coin in either case.
Great fascinations feed on real historical presence, but they are not necessarily born
of such nor at all limited by historical identities. The fascination with the position of
woman as reader is at the centre of nothing less than a revolution in monastic reading
practice, where reading is the metaphor for human apprehension of the divine and the
objective is finally an alternative bodily gnosis. The first notable breach in the learned
wall of exegesis occurred not as the attempt to address the needs of a woman or women,
but rather in Rupert’s rejection of the patres in favour of the reading subject as auctor, a
new theology of the Word as experience that he articulated as female, occurring in the
body, and modelled on Mary’s conception and bearing of Christ. Behind Abelard’s articulation of a spiritual place for his wife’s widowed passion, behind Geoffrey’s assiduous
efforts and extravagant expense to provide for and sanctify his beloved Christina, behind
the intensity and extended eloquence with which Aelred indulges what are supposed
his sister’s affective needs there stands a man’s longing for a closeness to God and an
immediacy of experience that the spiritual male could explore only through a female
intercessor, a bodily other for whom bodily gnosis was the cunsolacion for an otherwise
insurmountable incapacity.
Geoffrey’s relationship to Christina, not only as it is portrayed in the vita but also
as it is apparently, one way or the other, incorporated into the Psalter, tells this story in
uniquely scintillating fashion. However the two projects began, they end up as complementary commemorations of a woman’s privilege to enter the presence of her absent
spouse—and to bring this presence into others’ lives. The reading practice that the book
shaped and served brings about an expansion and materialization of Rupert’s exegetical figures as narrative and pictures even as it recalls a layman’s fascination with the
reading practice of noblewomen and their devotional books. As seen earlier, Malcolm
of Scotland’s love and admiration for his wife’s devotional reading brings him, under
her guidance, to learn to read as a woman, keeping “even the nocturnal hours … with a
sighing heart and abundant tears.”160 The lavish codex he commissions for her represents
160 Vita S. Margaritae, 2, 330C; see pp. 34–35, above.
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his gratitude over this gift. If Geoffrey was indeed the designer of the St Albans Psalter,
then he, too, learned to read as a woman, in part through his relationship to Christina,
but most of all by intently exploring the possibilities to represent that reading, to shape
it as a process and an experience through the varying and increasingly bold implementation of new mediary vehicles for the Logos as presence. As sometime dramaturge whose
experience with the staging of the Word as flesh informed much of the staging of this
bridal reading, Geoffrey the magister and abbot exemplifies perfectly the meeting of the
art of the pastor and that of the jongleur, a meeting in which liturgy and prayer make
common cause with pictorial narrative and vernacular poetic performance.161 All of this
would then occur, however, in the same way it does for Malcolm, because the abbot of
St Albans—like many other prominent religious men of his time—was smitten with the
spectacle of the psalter-reading woman, the devotion of the forsaken, or widowed bride.
This was the twelfth century’s reinvention of the woman as reader and sign to be read.
The same movement will recur as a generative motor of romance narrative when
Yvain is smitten with the devotional reading of his own sponsa derelicta, Laudine.
Learning to read as a woman cannot, for Yvain, take the form just postulated for Geoffrey;
it operates instead through the form in which the codex’s patron offers it to the reading
bride, through historie, or aventure, a narrative structure that will teach Yvain how to
love the woman who is the embodiment of human suffering and loss. Only one more
step remains to bridge what seems the great gap between the devotional book and the
staging of vernacular narrative poetry as we know it: the substitution of audience. The
religious woman reverts back to the layman on whose position her reading diorama was
based, but she will retain her place in the mirror of the text, both as a model of audience
response and as guarantor of an “illiterate’s” epiphany.
161 While still a schoolmaster at Dunstable, Geoffrey staged and possibly composed a play of the
life of St Catherine, triggering the first extant reference to the performance of a miracle play; see
Gesta abbatum, p. 73.
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PART TWO
READING THE WIDOWED BRIDE
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Chapter 5
QUAE EST ISTA, QUAE ASCENDIT? (CANTICLES 3:6):
RETHINKING THE WOMAN READER IN EARLY
OLD FRENCH LITERATURE
En romans traire: Translating Reading Experience
Few cultural developments of the High Middle Ages are more far-reaching in their
consequences for later centuries than the definitive emergence in the later twelfth century of literatures in the European vernaculars—and few are so poorly understood. As
argued at the outset of this book, the hypothesis that sees this development as a response
to the needs of literate women for reading material is sooner a product of the habits and
assumptions of the modern literate mind than a viable interpretation of historical evidence. Conversely, as demonstrated in the intervening chapters, the idea of the womanas-reader has a history of its own within the textual culture of the twelfth century that
we have scarcely begun to grasp.
We have seen how the song of the bride came to be understood as the fundamental
Christian reading endeavour and how this bride’s reading had been accomplished in
the body, as history, by one woman, Mary. The same could be re-accomplished by any
Christian soul who assumed Mary’s position, that of the humility of the abject body, the
receptive position of woman opposite the omnipotence of the (male) spirit. The reading
of the Song of Songs as Mary’s experience thus enabled a redefinition of the reading
subject as female, weak and unlettered. This woman now read in and through the body
and the media of its expression, which resulted in a new inclusion of both images and
the vernacular. Alexis’s bride is first interpolated into his story and then assigned a role
as the complementary opposite of his attempt to obliterate the flesh; the text becomes
the vernacular body of this new reading trajectory even as the pictures in the same
codex appear as if the material realizations of a meditational practice, and each is to
lead the reading bride to a heavenly embrace. This bridal reader was the epistemological fulcrum of a media revolution that began in the expansion of monastic reading—
the aspiration to know the Word as experience—ostensibly to comprise non-learned
subjects. The seemingly straightforward image of a woman reading in or reciting from
a vernacular text thus appears as the highly compressed visualization of a much larger
web of associations, one that, rather than simply cameoing the use of texts, instead
visually encapsulates their place within a new range of mediary practices and their
relationship to gnosis.
With the Speculum virginum, the reading position of the bride was expanded into
a method of women’s lectio that takes Psalm 44 and the Song of Songs as its two archtexts, its authorizing models and prophetic prefigurations in scripture. In the next two
chapters we will see how the same scriptural songs of the bride and her heavenly wedding
were transferred to the vernacular stage, allowing us to witness the socio-linguistic
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translation of women’s lectio to the courts of the lay nobility. The two key texts, both in
Old French and neither of them well known, could hardly be more intriguing, not only for
their status as missing links but also, and most fortuitously, for the information we have
or that they provide on their relationship to a literary and social context.
In the first case, known by the incipit of Psalm 44 as the Old French Eructavit and
most likely composed between 1180 and 1187, reference to ma dame de Champaigne and
la jantis suer le roi de France have led to the conclusion that the text was commissioned
by the celebrated patron of Chrétien de Troyes, Marie, Countess of Champagne.1 This
conclusion—while tenable in itself—foreshortens consideration of a larger argument
revolving around Marie as the text’s inscribed addressee. The text presents itself as an
instructor’s offering to Marie as his spiritual daughter; but this offering is none other,
so it claims, than the chançon sung by a jongleur, David, to the heavenly couple at their
wedding—that is, Psalm 44, here expanded into over 2,000 vernacular octosyllabic
verses. In other words, the text represents a perfect transposition of the instructive communication articulated in the successive openings of the Speculum virginum onto the
stage of courtly literature. It is addressed to Marie as the reigning princess of that stage.
Whether or not she factually had an interest in the Eructavit, then, its author seeks her
ear as a way of performing a marriage between sacred and secular poetic forms for his
general audience. The text reshapes the Spirit’s seduction of the bride into instruction
for the woman seen to preside over the poetry of courtly seduction. By evoking Marie it
is not, first and foremost, relating factual history. It is shaping itself as fact within a poetic
history of the vernacular text and thereby creating the facts of such a history.
The Old French translation of the bride’s reading of the Song of Songs is found in a
commentary by Landri of Waben (ca. 1200), which survives in only one manuscript in Le
Mans.2 In an excursus redolent of courtly lyric, Landri makes a riddling reference to his
“Lady,” which scholarly commentary has most often taken as a reference to his patron.
Closer attention to the text reveals that this lady and another, the bride of the biblical
arch-text, are indistinguishable; once again the basic identification between bride and
present female addressee is intertwined with the text’s account of its genesis. The real
patron, however, in the nearest approximation of fact available to our reconstruction,
was no woman at all, but rather Baldwin II of Guines, eminently learned illiteratus and
creator-collector (so we are told) of a veritable vernacular library. Taking the two ideas
as they stand, we are confronted with a text that teaches Baldwin to read as Mary did,
1 “Eructavit,” lines 3, 2079. Further references are parenthetical. The editor, T. A. Jenkins,
“Introduction,” pp. ix–ii, dated the poem 1181–1187; several revisions have since been proposed,
the most recent and conservative, 1179–1198, by Ruini, “Appunti,” 215; further literature is also
found there. Philip Augustus, half-brother to Marie de Champagne, was crowned late in November
1179 and ascended the throne in September 1180; Marie died in 1198. While Marie’s death offers
the only firm terminus ante quem, Jenkins’s argument for composition before 1187 should not be
dismissed.
2 Le Mans, Mediathèque Louis Aragon (formerly Bibliothèque municipale) MS 173, on the dating,
see below, 38.
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and the elusive reference to the poet’s lady serves as the point of variable identification
enabling this reading.
A similar instance of riddling reference to a woman as audience occurs in a text of a
very different sort, and the third to command our attention in the next two chapters: the
Roman de Troie by Benoît de Sainte-Maure (1160–1165). In this case the authornarrator’s bow to a riche dame de riche rei (powerful lady of a powerful king) among the
imagined audience has led to the assumption that the poem was written for Eleanor of
Aquitaine, mother of Marie and likewise presumed grande doyenne of new vernacular
poetry, in particular of the adulterous persuasion. The assumption is as factually dubious
as it is imaginatively suggestive; once again, it is the riddle and the identities it evokes
as possible solutions that truly count. If Eleanor is potentially one of these, then she, like
Marie, figures as a representative of the audience in any given performance of the text;
her primary function lies not, or not merely, in the realm of historical fact. She rather
figures as a link between the present performance and the author’s project, a work that
initiates the appropriation of pagan history—the matière de Rome—for a Christian and
courtly audience and the vernacular stage.
The three texts would seem initially to make odd bedfellows, and they have doubtless
never been considered as part of one argument before. Their association runs counter
to several categorical distinctions habitually assumed to apply in medieval literary culture. No less within the texts than between them, liturgy meets entertainment, exegesis
meets narrative, history meets fiction, pagan meets Christian, and sacred meets profane.
Beyond the fact that each is purportedly addressed to a woman in whom scholarship has
persistently also seen the historical patron, they would appear as a group to have only
their French vernacular verse in common. But this seeming incongruity is instead the
oddity that portends a discovery: to pursue “the problem of the woman reader”3 through
early vernacular texts is to discover a body of texts and literary aspirations that is as
apparently disparate as it is inwardly unified. It is, in fact, to discover a different history
of the emergence of vernacular texts—a history as it was being written into the texts
themselves.4 A fourth text and our only source of information pertaining to Landri’s Song
commentary, the Latin chronicle of the counts of Guines by Lambert of Ardres, provides
us with just that: an account of the genesis of vernacular literature as if telescoped into
the lives of two illustrious members of one family. The history being written in these
texts is aware of the prominent position of certain key figures in a new cultural development and uses this prominence as a way of communicating, legitimizing, and aggrandizing the objectives and significance of the text at hand and, no less, of the vernacular
literary project as a whole. In each instance, the woman invoked as the receiving ear of
the authorial address is the centrepiece of a strategy for the transformation of the vernacular performance space into a restaging of Mary’s reading, a poetics of the vernacular
3 Cf. Krueger, Women Readers, p. 4, quoted below, p. 208.
4 As argued of a different selection of texts in Powell, “Instruction for Religious Women,” chaps.
5 and 6.
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text in which its performance becomes the site of the woman’s audio-visual lectio and
vernacular literature poses as a layman’s scripture.
This female instance, in a sense, writes a different history of the emergence of vernacular texts, and it is the task of the remaining chapters of this book to explore this
history. Despite the central position of notable patrons within it, whether supposed or
confirmed, it is not a history of patronage any more than it is a history of new readers. It
is a history of the reading bride and her successor, the widow; it is likewise a history of
the new possibilities of written texts devised for oral performance. Finally and above all,
it is a history of new ways of mediating the truth.
The idea that with vernacular renditions of the reading of the two great scriptural
epithalamia, Psalm 44 and the Song of Songs, the project of a woman’s lectio becomes
one of a layman’s scripture is, logically speaking, not difficult to grasp. The idea that a
romance of antiquity, a seemingly endless account of warfare and revenge, the Roman
de Troie, could share in such a project will meet with greater scepticism. Precisely this
discovery, however, is what hinges on Benoît’s riddle as to the nature and identity of
his female addressee, the question, Quae est ista? that echoes like a refrain through the
Song of Songs itself (Canticles 3:6, 6:9, 8:5).5 As others will after him, Benoît confronts
his audience with this question as a call to assume the role of the reading bride. The gesture intrudes on the text at a highly conspicuous juncture, raising the equivalent of a red
flag over the element of the tale most blatantly in contradiction with the author’s claim
faithfully to follow his historical source, the story of Briseida, which is entirely his own
invention. This story of a woman vacillating between two loves presents readers with
a conundrum, yielding no clear avenue of moral judgment, even while embedded in an
epic tale of the immeasurable destruction wrought by the changeable love of women.
As I will argue in the next chapter, Briseida’s story is an exercise in learning to read as a
woman, which, for Benoît (and for Landri of Waben no less), means learning to read love
as suffering and suffering with a woman in love, that is, learning to recognize Eve’s part
in Mary and reliving Mary’s transformation of Eve. This mirror of suffering love in itself
contains the meaning of Briseida’s story. Still better, it alone allows the meaning of the
story of Troy, as Benoît retells it, to be understood. La vertez, the very truth, of the story
of Troy is thus discovered through the interpolation of a woman’s story into history and
of woman’s reading into learned tradition.
Several concepts rather surprisingly conjoin in this construction: the truth of history
is subordinated to the truth of experience, and the key to this experience is a woman’s
suffering for love. The discovery of truth through such experience is the reading project
shared by the various texts discussed in the conclusion of the last chapter, whether La
Chanson de Saint Alexis, Anselm’s Prayers and Meditations, Aelred’s Rule for a Recluse,
5 The words quae est ista quae ascendit sicut aurora consurgens … (Canticles 6:9) began the liturgy
of the Assumption feast at Lauds, thus more or less at sunrise. The response, Hodie Maria virgo
coelos ascendit identified the woman who realized the truth of the prophetic text, in whose honour
the feast was held. It seems reasonable to assume that even many lay people attending the celebration would have been well aware of the meaning of this much, if not more, of the chants. See Fulton,
“Quae est ista,” 104–5.
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or the meditation on Mary’s experience of the Passion, the “Quis dabit.” Benoît flouts
the rules of his own claim to truth, the claim to relate the story as told by an eyewitness, by inserting a fiction through which the audience could discover history not by
“being there” but rather by “being her.” The truth of the eyewitness is displaced by the
woman’s ability to mediate presence through affective experience. Briseida’s role in the
poetics of the romans recalls that of the suffering bride as a model for audience or reader
identification; she is, like Alexis’s bride, a prototype of the new widow in vernacular
literature. Exegesis and history meet in the rediscovery of historia as reading through
the body of Christ’s humanity. As the later chapters of this book will argue, this is the
project, in fact, that has thus far been discussed in the scholarship as “the discovery of
fiction” in romance narrative of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. It is not a
project committed to a literary experience “liberated … from the horizons of religious
meaning” (as Walter Haug most prominently argued)6 but rather, and most profoundly,
one that articulates a layman’s way of knowing the Word and produces a body of cultural
monuments that affirm the place of lay identity within God’s plan for human salvation.
If the idea of romance as the (re-)discovery of a narrative aesthetic of fiction has
become the prevailing scholarly consensus, it is not least because the many attempts
to discover how romance texts might transmit a religious meaning have met with little
success. Research in this direction has, however, inevitably relied on hermeneutic
models that derived either from the traditions of the schoolman’s exegesis or from
Latin antiquity.7 The very nature of the project, as understood here, predetermines the
failure of such efforts. A literature that translates reading experience for the use and
needs of the non-learned—and these texts are often emphatic, even belligerent, on this
point—could not employ the hermeneutic methods of the litterati to effectively appropriate the layman’s stage. But neither should such an adversarial stance be taken
entirely at face value. Modern scholarship has had a good deal invested in the discovery
of a literature ca. 1200 in which lay courtly culture lays the foundation for the secular
literary aesthetic that flourished in later centuries. It has thus too readily embraced
the assumption that this literature rejected not only the learned methods of religious
reading but also the objectives they served.
For a cultural achievement that looms so large in the eyes of posterity, vernacular
literature appears to have commanded very little attention within the literate and intellectual discourse of its own time, but notable exceptions exist, and one of them, found in
Thomasin of Zirklaere’s Der Welsche Gast, will serve to inform us of a conservative cleric’s
critique in chapter seven. Another, far more incidental, but better known and widely
cited exception has been consistently misread as reinforcing the existing assumptions
rather than revealing what it otherwise might. I am referring to the comments of Peter
of Blois in his Liber de confessione on the tearful response of his contemporaries to
6 “… die neue, vom religiösen Sinnhorizont abgelöste Literatur,” Haug, “Autorität,” p. 124; similarly
Haug, “Neue Poetologie,” 70.
7 The last to receive serious consideration, integumentum theory, is decisively rejected as model
for narrative poetics in Bezner, Vela veritatis, pp. 69–88.
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Arthurian tales. Peter’s words are worthy of detailed consideration, as they touch on the
very juncture between sacred and secular that will be increasingly at the centre of our
attention, that of a compassionating response to performance.
A consummate litteratus and familiar of some of the most fashionable and influential
courts of his day (among them those of Henry II Plantagenet and Eleanor of Aquitaine),
Peter of Blois composed his short treatise on the confession of sins towards the end of the
twelfth century. The text would no doubt have remained obscure in our time but for its
rare mention of performances of Arthurian tales, a passage seldom overlooked wherever
such witness is sought. Only occasionally acknowledged, however, is Peter’s extensive
debt—we would call it plagiarism—to Aelred of Rievaulx, specifically to his De speculo
caritatis, a treatise for the instruction of Cistercian novices written towards the middle of
the century.8 Not only is nearly all of Peter’s brief digression on tears lifted directly from
Aelred’s text, but this entire section of his text is likewise a patchwork sewn together
from various sections of De speculo caritatis.9 In other words, Peter’s text generally is
engaged in a translation from one social milieu to another, from the spiritual discipline of
a Cistercian monastery to the pastoral care of the courtly laity. Where Aelred evoked tales
of tragedians and jongleurs and, for example, a “fellow called Arthur” as the spectres of
a novice’s distant past, for Peter’s audience the last example is part of a very present and
now literary (that is, written), reality.10 Comparison with Aelred’s text thus reveals precisely how Peter handles this transition. The result is an amplification of the Arthurian
side of the comparison on the one hand and of the specifics of compassionating response
on the other, in addition to a parallelism in suffering that points suggestively to Christ’s
Passion. As printed below I have placed in italics the terms and phrases that constitute
Peter’s contribution:
Vera siquidem poenitentia non in lacrymis momentaneis, aut horaria compunctione
consistit. Nulla etiam affectio pia meritoria est ad salutem, nisi ex Christi dilectione
procedat. Saepe in tragoediis et aliis carminibus poetarum, in joculatorum cantilenis
describitur aliquis vir prudens, decorus, fortis, amabilis et per omnia gratiosus.
Recitantur etiam pressurae vel injuriae eidem crudeliter irrogate, sicut de Arturo et
Gangano et Tristanno, fabulosa quaedam referunt histriones, quorum auditu concutiuntur
ad compassionem audientium corda, et usque ad lacrymas compunguntur. Qui ergo de
fabulae recitatione ad misericordiam commoveris, si de Domino aliquid pium legi audias,
quod extorqueat tibi lacrymas, nunquid propter hoc de Dei dilectione potes dictare
sentientiam? Qui compateris Deo, compateris et Arturo. Ideoque utrasque lacrymas
8 The textual dependency was first noted, it seems, by Von Moos, Consolatio, pp. 213–14. See also
Cotts, Peter of Blois, pp. 9, 14, 234; where extensive use of Aelred’s De spiritali amicitia is noted in
Peter’s treatise on the same subject, but not the reliance on De speculo caritatis in De confessione.
9 From columns 1087 to 1089, at least four-fifths of the text is assembled and adapted from
Aelred’s. I have identified material that ranges from sections 23 to 66 of De speculo caritatis; there
is undoubtedly more.
10 De speculo caritatis, 2:17, par. 50, p. 90. In Aelred’s text Arthur is mentioned only once and then
only by the novice in response. The master’s remarks concern “fictitious” (fabulosus) tales generally.
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pariter perdis, si non diligis Deum, si de fontibus Salvatoris spe scilicet fide et charitate,
devotionis et poenitentiae lacrymas non effundis.11
But true repentance does not consist in the tears of the moment or the compunction
which lasts for an hour, for no pious disposition contributes to salvation unless it issues
from the love of Christ. Often in tragedies and other compositions of the poets or in the
songs of the jongleurs you will find descriptions of a man prudent, worthy, strong, amiable, and agreeable in all things. You will find also the account of the trials and injuries
cruelly inflicted on him, just as actors repeat certain tales about Arthur and Gangano
[Gawain?] and Tristan, at which the hearts of the audience are stirred with compassion
and pierced to the point of tears. You therefore who are moved to pity by the recitation
of romances, if tears are drawn from you by something pious that is read to you about
the Lord, does that mean that you are able to make pronouncements about the love of
God? You who are moved to compassion for God are no less moved to compassion for Arthur.
Therefore you are wasting your tears on both counts if you do not love God, if you do not
shed tears of devotion and repentance from the fountain of the Saviour; from the fountain, namely, of faith, hope and charity.)12
Almost invariably, ever since it was pointedly brought to the attention of literary
scholarship by Erich Auerbach, this passage has been read more or less as Auerbach
did himself: Peter was “obviously disturbed by the effect of courtly poetry on a public of
developing sensibility,” and thus wished to make clear that
Tragic compassion with persons involved in earthly tragedies is not compatible with religion, which has concentrated all tragedy in the cardinal point of history, the divine sacrifice of Christ. This event has absorbed all the grief in the world; worldly grief has lost its
independent value and has no further claim to tragedy in its own right. … The tears shed
over such tragedy are worthless, so much so that the tears shed over Christ by those who
weep for King Arthur or Tristan lose their value.13
This is decidedly not what the passage says, not even in Auerbach’s translation (given
above).14 No causal connection pertains between weeping for Arthur and vainly
weeping, that is, worthless tears for Christ; the one does not impinge upon the other.15
What is at stake is readily grasped through context: Peter’s subject in this section of his
11 Peter has not only lifted and adapted the passage from De speculo caritatis, 2.50–51 but
also included within it points made elsewhere in Aelred’s discussion. Thus, for example, Peter’s
statement, “Nulla etiam affectio pia meritoria est ad salutem, nisi ex Christi dilectione procedat,”
taken together with the last sentence of this passage, effectively summarizes Aelred’s point in
section 63, where he specifically addresses Peter’s subject, tears and penance.
12 Translation slightly modified (see below, note 14) from Auerbach, Literary Language, p. 304.
13 Auerbach, Literary Language, pp. 305–6.
14 I have modified only the statement on parallel compassion for God and Arthur. Auerbach’s text
reads, “You who lament over God lament also over Arthur.” There is no mention of vocal lament; on
the other hand, Peter’s use of compassio and compatior merits retention.
15 This misunderstanding continues, despite more differentiated treatment in the most recent
scholarship; see for example, JP, pp. 441–42; and Mertens Fleury, Leiden, pp. 6–7. More typical
is Ursula Schaefer’s use of the passage to demonstrate “keen competition” between courtly and
religious literature, thus resulting in the former’s “unconditional condemnation” in texts such as
Peter’s; Schaefer, Vokalität, p. 98.
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text is compunction; that is, distinguishing what can be judged to signal the soul’s true
repentance as opposed to mere outward display. In this regard, he rejects the simple
testimony of tears: they are too transitory (momentaneis et horaria) and too easily
feigned; that is, their true source is never assured (nisi ex Christi dilectione procedat).16
Here, characteristically similar responses to romance narrative serve his purpose: how
can one claim that tears manifest true repentance, given that they are as easily shed
in the aesthetic pleasure of entertainment? On the relative value of these tears versus
those no point is made; still less do the protagonists of romance steal tears from Christ.
Nevertheless: prompted by Peter’s own modifications of the earlier text, one might
well ask the converse question; that is, what to make of tears, whether for Arthur or for
Christ, when they stem from the proper source, when the affective movement in either
case indeed manifests a loving heart?
In this regard Peter’s specific diction reveals something beyond or behind his
foregrounded meaning. It tells us that tears for Arthur and those shed “over the story of
our Lord’s suffering when read or sung in church or pronounced publicly in a sermon”17
arose from a strikingly similar and intensely physical, no less profoundly painful
response. One that shook the heart and pierced it, thus bringing forth its essence, tears.18
Tears explicitly ascribed —in Peter’s preferred language—to a fellowship in suffering,
a con-passio. Again, as if to underline this point, Peter speaks of “punctured” hearts,
compunguntur; that is, he literalizes the term whose figural meaning is that centrally
at stake: compunctio, the heart’s repentance. This language of the punctured or pierced
heart, which we shall have reason to revisit in later chapters, comes from the ancient
exegetical tradition of another heart-wound, this time received by the bride through the
“arrow” cast by the bridegroom.19 Hence, Peter’s testimony on the reception of romance
suggests that the response to Christ’s Passion and the response to romance heroes could
be felt as one thing; they did not (necessarily) differ in quality nor did they, judged in
and of themselves (and not by their object), differ in value. Monastic devotion (as Aelred
expounded it) and love en romans met, for better or worse, in the wounding of the compassionate heart—and Peter regarded the same meeting as a commonplace useful to
bring his own meaning home to a lay, courtly audience ca. 1200.
This, as I hope to make clear, is no small contribution to our understanding of the
reception and meaning of romance narrative at the time. The value of the remarks
does not lie where most have seen their emphasis—in a comparison, favourable or
not, between the achievements and sufferings of romance heroes and those of the
Christian saviour; it lies instead in what they say on audience response and the way
16 As Peter says in the preceding paragraph (1088B), “Si ergo senseris in te gratiam compunctionis
et affluentiam lacrymarum, non tamen ideo te statim arbitreris Domino reconciliatum.”
17 Aelred, De speculo caritatis, 2.51.
18 “Hearts moved to tears,” is to be understood literally, as the other verbs suggest. The heart
was held to be the physiological source of tears no less than of blood. Many examples in Weinand,
Tränen, pp. 127–29, 186.
19 Arising from the passage “Ego charitate vulnerata sum” (Canticles 2:5, Old Latin and Septuagint
versions). See pp. 253–55, below.
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this was understood. Compassio was proposed as the possible key to a religious experience of romance narrative long ago, in particular for Wolfram’s Parzival;20 it has been
resuscitated in recent decades to some profit but without decisive success.21 To realize
the full potential of the idea, it must first be recognized that what is at stake is not a
key to interpreting the texts, a key to their moral or ethical “meaning”; still less is it
an exemplary function of the hero for the audience. At stake is, instead, a model of
audience—in fact “female”—participation in the experience of the text, which alone
delivers the experience of a larger truth. Second, the premise that compassio as
experienced for the suffering of fellow men and women could share in the meaning and
religious experience of the compassio Christians increasingly sought in following Mary
to the cross has been disputed on theological grounds, grounds that Peter’s text has been
wrongly assumed to endorse.22 His remarks do not so much deny this premise as they
acknowledge its currency among his audience. As Katharina Mertens Fleury shows in
her investigation of the meaning of compassio in courtly society of this period, the same
premise finds prominent support in the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux, among others.
The experience of one’s own suffering was the foundation of the ability to recognize the
suffering of others, of one’s neighbour and thus of Christ, and this idea “was the basis of
Bernard’s Christology, which foresaw that Christ had to experience human suffering and
human compassion to release the world from its sins through his own suffering. Thus, to
gain experience of compassion for one’s neighbour could be understood in some sense
as an imitatio Christi and as affording access to God.”23 Compassio, in this historical and
social context, could be seen as “engaged in hermeneutics, [as] an art of understanding.”24
Paraphrasing Peter with none of his possible misgivings then, we can surmise that the
tears of compassion he cites as a commonplace of romance performances could be
understood by those who shed them as evidence that the message had arrived, that they
were touched by the suffering they saw in a way that afforded an experience of truth
of the type first communicated to humankind by Mary’s experience at the cross. This
surmise contains in a nutshell what the ensuing chapters will derive from reading the
bride’s reading in vernacular texts that place their performance under her banner.
The history of the new vernacular text revealed here thus acknowledges no incompatibility between the sacred and the secular or even between the sacred and the profane. The texts are keenly aware of their position as mediating instances between got
20 Above all in three essays by Julius Schwietering: “Parzivals Schuld,” “Wandel,” and “Tristan.”
21 Schwietering’s ideas (see the preceding note) are taken up anew with stimulating insight by
Krass, “Mitleidfähigkeit,” 282–304; and further developed with reference to Parzival in Mertens
Fleury, Leiden lesen.
22 Störmer-Caysa, “Mitleid,” pp. 64–93.
23 “Bernhard von Clairvaux leitet daraus seine Christologie ab, nach der Christus das menschliche
Leiden erfahren und Mitleid erlernen musste, um die Welt durch sein Leiden erlösen zu können. So
bedeutet in gewisser Weise sogar das menschliche Erlernen von Mitleid mit dem Nächsten noch
eine imitatio Christi und einen Zugang zu Gott.” Mertens Fleury, Leiden lesen, p. 46, also pp. 24–27.
24 “Compassio [bietet] aufgrund ihrer Erkenntnisfunktion also eine Hermeneutik, im Sinn einer
Kunst des Verstehens,” Mertens Fleury, Leiden lesen, p. 46.
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und der werlde, the formula featured in more than one German romance for the balancing act between God’s claim to the soul and society’s claim to the body.25 They likewise
witness no true rivalry between clerical learning and the layman’s vernacular stage.
The new literature designed for this stage was, on the contrary, a bold attempt to use
the advantages of the latter to better transmit the content—or rather the experience—
of the former. Conceptually speaking, it was written by preachers to be performed by
jongleurs. In actual fact the cleric doubtless appropriated the stage himself with the
promise to deliver better—and in some texts he declares no less. In Parzival, conversely,
we will overhear the narrator as knight-jongleur as he in turn ousts the cleric from the
new literary experience the latter has only just established. But these literary rivalries no
more reflect operative historical or personal circumstances than the women the texts purport to address were the actual patrons or necessarily the audience of their performances.
The voice of the text instead makes use of such roles to communicate a new literary project, to define the relationship between audience, message and messenger such that, as
proper to each case, the original communication of the Word to the bride is refigured and
recreated and thus claimed for a present vernacular audience. The woman we have been
trying to locate as historical patron is in fact constructed in the text to elude identification
or rather to be available for identification with each new audience and audience member.
She exists as much within the text as beyond it, is as much a member of the audience as
she is an unattainable ideal or a figure of their reading process.
To discover this identity, the answer to the question, Quae est ista? from the Song of
Songs, was the key to an experience of the vernacular performance as the embrace of
the Word. The discovery begins with the beginning, as we have first encountered it: with
Mary’s experience of the Annunciation as the conception of the Word through the Spirit.
This inimitable and miraculous gnosis is more and more overlaid with one that must
have felt far more immediate, more accessible and likewise more present in the lives of
the participants: Mary’s experience of the sufferings of her son, bridegroom and saviour,
in which the perfect connection between God and humanity was re-established through
a communion in human pain, an epiphany of empathy.
Riche dame de riche rei? Eleanor of Aquitaine and
Le Roman de Troie
In the account that went unchallenged for over a century, no historical personage was
held to have played a more crucial and broadly influential role in the irruption of vernacular literature in France than Eleanor of Aquitaine (ca. 1122–1206), sometime queen
of France, later queen of England, duchess of Normandy and Aquitaine, and countess of
Poitou, Anjou and Maine. Eleanor has been credited with having brought troubadour
lyric to the northern regions of France, being the driving force behind the adaptation of
the great epics and legends of antiquity into French, and introducing the Celtic legends
25 Cf. Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan, lines 8016–17; Hartmann von Aue, Erec, lines 10125–29;
Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, lines 827, 19–24; see also Bumke, Höfische Kultur, pp. 428–30.
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surrounding King Arthur into France where they gave birth to Arthurian romance.26
Together with her daughter, Marie de Champagne, she is the object of satire in the De
amore of Andreas Capellanus (ca. 1185) as the female arbiter presiding over a cult of
“courtly love” and has therefore been seen as the central inspiration not only for literary
projects but also for their content.27
More recently, this broad-stroke picture has been subjected to rigorous re-examination
and revision. In a study of the patronage of both Eleanor and her second husband, Henry
II of England, Karen Broadhurst shows that “not a single text can be said to have been
commissioned by Eleanor”; moreover, only three texts contain even possible references to
her.28 One of these, found in Philippe de Thaon’s vernacular translation of the bestiary, is an
explicit dedication, but it clearly postdates the work’s composition by at least two decades.29
In a second, Bernart de Ventadorn sends off a poem to “the queen of the Normans.”30 The
third is doubtful indeed; it is the passage from the Roman de Troie that will occupy us shortly.
Leaving aside all debate over the appropriate criteria for patronage, not one of these three
references can be stretched into evidence of active interest on Eleanor’s part.
Broadhurst was not the first to have raised such objections, and the consensus today
regards Eleanor’s patronage of literature as at best a probable conjecture.31 But the
idea of Eleanor as a driving force behind this great literary birth is difficult to dispense
with. A development as significant as the arrival of courtly vernacular literature in the
twelfth century begs for an explanation of transformative proportions, and we have as
yet found little to put in place of either Eleanor’s captivating and charismatic personality or the considerable power and influence she wielded for a large part of the twelfth
century in all the crucial regions in question. More important, however, is the argument
that Andreas’s characterization suggests. While his is the sole known representation of
Eleanor as connected to the culture of literary developments that dates from her own
lifetime, by the mid thirteenth century at the latest it seems she was often understood
to have filled such a role, whether this was merely legend or remembered fact.32 This,
26 The foundational studies are Lejeune, “Rôle littéraire,” 5–57; and Bezzola, Littérature courtoise,
pp. 247–311.
27 See Bourgain, “Aliénor,” 29–36; and Turner, Eleanor, pp. 196–200.
28 Broadhurst, “Patrons,” 82. See also Broadhurst, “Patronage.”
29 After the death of his former patron, Adeliza (d. 1151), the second wife of Henry I of England,
Philippe—in one of three extant manuscripts (Oxford, Merton College MS 249)—re-dedicates his
work (dated to 1121–1135) to Eleanor with a plea for her legal intercession on his behalf; it must
therefore postdate her coronation in 1154.
30 “Pel doutz chan que l rossignols fai,” Bernart von Ventadorn, p. 197; verses 43–45 read, “Huguet,
mos cortes messatgers / Chantatz ma chanso volenters / A la reïna dels Normans.”
31 Varvaro, “Corti anglo-normanne,” pp. 283–84, also 253–54; also Turner, Eleanor, pp. 167–93,
196–204. For Flori, Eleanor, pp. 394–413, the revisionist view has in some cases gone too far. In
Ferrante, Glory, pp. 112–18, the standard portrayal of Eleanor is still alive and well; likewise in
Green, Women Readers, pp. 213–17, and 250.
32 The mention in Layamon’s translation of Wace’s Roman de Brut (early thirteenth century) that
Layamon used as one of his sources a copy of Wace’s text that Wace had presented to Eleanor, may
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I think, is the crucial point. Literature speaks to the imagination of its audience, and
when the texts offer vague or suggestive allusions in the direction of historical figures,
they may be accomplishing something entirely more useful to their reception than
puzzles for future historians.
Given a closer look, Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s supposed homage to Eleanor reveals itself
as the textbook example of a rhetorical strategy that we will encounter repeatedly in other
vernacular texts:
D’icest vers crien je estre blasmez
De cele qui tant a biautez,
Qui hautece a, pris e valor,
Honesté e sens e henor,
Bien e mesure e seinteé
Noble largece e honesté,
En qui mesfait de dames maint
Sunt par le bien de li esteint,
En qui tote scïence abunde,
A la quel n’est nul secunde
Qui el mond seit, de nule lei.
Riche dame de riche rei,
Sans mal, sans ire, sans tristece,
Puissez aveir toz jorz leece!33
(But I fear much to be blamed for these verses by that lady who is of such great beauty,
she who possesses nobility, esteem and merit, virtue, judgment and honour, goodness
and temperance and holy purity, noble generosity and probity; she through whom the
failings of so many women are by her excellence again undone; she in whom all knowledge abounds, and who is without equal in all the world, regardless of faith. O powerful
lady of a powerful king, free of evil, free of anguish and of sorrow may you live forever
in happiness!)
Critical judgment has vacillated over whether to call this passage a “dedication” to
Eleanor or rather a “delicate homage” or, more recently, an “apology,” but few indeed are
those who have doubted that the lines are addressed to Eleanor.34 One of these is Roberta
well belong in this category; see Broadhurst, “Patrons,” 70–72. For an account of both the historical
and legendary dimensions, each in its own right, see Owen, Eleanor, esp. pp. 37–42.
33 I cite the text from the partial new edition of the Milan manuscript, Biblioteca ambrosiana D55,
ed. and trans. Baumgartner and Vielliard; here lines 13457–70. For passages not included there
I have cited the earlier critical edition by Constans.
34 “Dedication” goes back to the text’s first editor, Leopold Constans, Roman de Troie, pp. 189–90.
For “homage” see Lejeune, “Rôle littéraire,” 23, and Bezzola, “Littérature courtoise,” p. 289; the French
term excuse is used by Jung, Légende de Troie, p. 32. The Dictionnaire des lettres françaises: Le Moyen
Age (rev. 1992), speaks of a “dédicace allusive”; for Baumgartner and Vielliard, “Introduction,” p. 18,
“Tout permet de penser que la riche dame de riche rei longuement célébrée aux vers 13457–13470
est bien Aliénor d’Aquitaine”; similarly: Petit, Naissances du roman, p. 820; Flori, Eleanor, p. 409;
and Green, Women Readers, pp. 213, 250.
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Krueger, who called attention to the immediate context of the remarks and pronounced
the connection with Eleanor to be problematic at best.35
Benoît’s authorial intrusion interrupts the narration of the most celebrated love
story in his voluminous romance, one also of his own invention: the ill-fated love of
Briseida and the Trojan prince, Troilus.36 Briseida is the daughter of the arch-traitor,
the Trojan priest Calchas, who, leaving her behind, fled to the Greeks before the war
had even begun.37 Calchas later succeeds in negotiating his daughter’s release from the
city, and the scene preceding our crucial passage recounts the lovers’ last night together
and their parting. A narratorial digression deflates the scene’s pathos entirely, however, by revealing that Briseida will quickly—“within three days”—bestow her love on
another, the Greek hero Diomedes. The narrator’s disapproving remarks broaden to
become an indictment of women in general; these are the “verses” for which he fears
reprimand: “Women’s woe does not last long: she cries with one eye and laughs with the
other.” Worse, “no matter how grievous an offense they’ve committed or who may have
seen it, as women would have it, they are never to blame. They will never believe they
have done wrong, and of all follies this is the greatest.”38 The ensuing apology excepts
from these remarks the one lady who is the object of his apposite praise.
Krueger’s reservations are based on the “antifeminist framing” of the passage; she
argues that the preceding remarks could only have offended a woman or women in
the audience.39 Indeed, if the apology is taken as directed at Eleanor in particular, its
purported praise sooner smacks of sarcasm. Briseida is condemned for opportunistically changing horses, and sides, midway through the war. Assuming close association of
the poem with Eleanor or her court, how could such an invention fail to evoke parallels
with Eleanor’s jilting of one husband’s crown for another’s? She is the one noted to have
most avidly sought the annulment of her marriage to Louis VII of France, finally granted
in 1152, and her second, to the king of England, Henry II, was completed within less than
two months. The parallel is intensified in that her former husband was reputed (much in
Troilus’s vein) to have doted on her somewhat desperately. Is an apology to Eleanor then
more in order than one might have believed?
If that is the case, Benoît’s gesture can hardly suffice. Its exorbitant praise only
exacerbates the wound by flying in the face of what was popularly believed and
chronicled of Eleanor’s behaviour. As early as 1146–1149, when Eleanor and her
retinue accompanied Louis on the second crusade, if not before, the rumours of
35 Krueger, Women Readers, pp. 5–7, although she still sees Eleanor as “a recognized patron for
many early works” (Women Readers, p. 4). See also Varvaro, “Corti anglo-normanne,” p. 284; Jaeger,
“Patrons,” p. 57; and Hansen, Frauengestalten,” p. 150.
36 Modern readers recognize Troilus’s beloved as Cressida. On her remarkable literary afterlife,
furthered by no less than Boccaccio, Chaucer and Shakespeare, see Barbara Nolan, Roman Antique.
37 Curiously, Benoît attributes royal descent to this lineage, calling Briseida “Fille de rei,” near the
end of the romance (Roman de Troie, ed. Constans, line 27947).
38 Lines 13441–544, see below, pp. 260–61.
39 Women Readers, pp. 5–7.
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Eleanor’s infidelities—to that point evidenced by no more than her husband’s obsessive
jealousy—were treated as certainties.40 Later times would enlarge these into stories of
her running off with the pagan ruler, Saladin.41 But even the most reliable contemporary
sources—most notably John of Salisbury, writing in the 1150s—do not paper over the
fiasco of Antioch. The royal couple was received there by Eleanor’s uncle, Raymond,
“and his constant, indeed almost continuous conversation with her, aroused the king’s
suspicions.”42 Other contemporaries explicitly report a sexual affair.43 His jealousy now
given apparent cause, Louis made to leave early, but Eleanor refused to accompany him,
with Raymond joining in her entreaties to remain at Antioch. Louis, not to be duped, then
resolved the issue by conducting a night-time kidnapping of his wife! But perhaps even
more significantly, John reports that it was at Antioch that Eleanor first announced she
wanted the marriage annulled, at which “the king was deeply moved.”44
The historical accuracy of these reports is not the issue here. They leave beyond
doubt that amorous adventures, political scandal, and even disloyalty in war were an
established facet of Eleanor’s celebrity by mid-century.45 They likewise show that
popular understanding of the divorce saw it as her ardent desire; this, coupled with her
swiftly contracted marriage to Henry, would have made her appear to Benoît’s audience in a rather worse light, even, than his Briseida. The ensuing “apology” would then
be nothing of the sort, but rather a thinly veiled jab in Eleanor’s direction encouraging
the audience to make an unfavourable comparison. And the sole textual support for
Eleanor’s encouragement of new vernacular narrative would be quite irretrievably lost.
Still, what remains in its place? As Krueger tellingly stated, Benoît’s Roman de
Troie “marks an important step in the development of courtly romance’s literary
self-consciousness. It also marks the beginning of the woman reader as a problem.”46
Krueger’s understanding of “the woman reader” nonetheless misses the point in that
40 On the crusade and in particular the episode at Antioch as the origin of the “légende noire”
surrounding Eleanor, see Flori, Eleanor, pp. 295–335. Owen, Eleanor, p. 107, summarizes the progressive elaboration of the events over the ensuing century, and concludes, “In Eleanor’s progressive vilification regarding her relationship with her uncle [Raymond of Antioch], we have seen her
possibly tactless behaviour the subject perhaps of general rumour followed by spiteful hints, then
accepted as a guilty liaison, and finally turned into a poisonous brew of half-remembered history
laced with lust and treason.” See also McCracken, “Scandalizing Desire,” pp. 247–63.
41 Owen, Eleanor, pp. 104–5. See also Flori, Eleanor, pp. 311–12, 328, 332.
42 John of Salisbury, Historia pontificalis, as translated in Owen, Eleanor, p. 104; also Flori, Eleanor,
pp. 318–19.
43 Owen, Eleanor, pp. 104–5; Flori, Eleanor, pp. 315–21.
44 John of Salisbury, Historia pontificalis, as translated in Owen, Eleanor, p. 104.
45 Flori, Eleanor, pp. 302–7; 323–24; O’Callaghan, “Tempering Scandal,” pp. 248–50. Even the
passage in Wace’s Roman de Rou (1160–ca. 1174), so often cited as a dedication to Eleanor along
with the patron, her husband Henry, acknowledges that Eleanor and Louis “went to Jerusalem on a
long pilgrimage” where “each suffered distress and pain. / When they came back, by counsel of their
baronage / the queen left him with her rich kin” (p. 208, lines 27–30, as trans. in Ferrante, Glory,
p. 112). See also Pappano “Marie de France,” p. 358.
46 Krueger, Women Readers, p. 4.
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she assumes that a woman apostrophized or represented in the text was identified by
the medieval audience as a representation of women as opposed to men, or of women
as “woman.”47 Benoît’s gesture, on the contrary, first undercuts audience sympathy with
his protagonist by declaring her depraved “as all women are,” then undercuts this stance
in turn by protesting that one woman’s excellence nevertheless disallows such generalization. Women—or a hackneyed battery of misogynist jibes—are compared with one
woman, and it is our sympathy that is at stake and called to judge between the two. The
position of the audience is that of the recipient placed between opposite manifestations
of the equation between woman and body, Eve and Mary, and understood as identifying her own position between the two. The identities at stake are left unnamed, and
this, along with the pointed narratorial address, is the signal that the audience itself is
included among them.
On the surface of things, Benoît’s romance remains authentically placed in a pagan
world whose protagonists know only of li deu, the multiple gods of antiquity.48 But his
praise of an unknown model of female perfection can easily be read as a signpost for the
Christian audience to a new and better world that began in Mary. One manuscript actually supplies such a reading:
Riche fille de riche roi,
Sanz mal, sanz ire et sanz tristece,
De vos nasquié tote leece
Le jor de la Natevité:
Vos fustes fille et mere Dé.49
(Powerful daughter of a powerful king, without evil, without anger or sorrow, from you
all joy was born on the day of the Nativity: you became daughter and mother of God.)
Through a mere exchange of feminine for masculine pronouns, the lines preceding this
passage in the same manuscript (13457–69) are addressed to God.50 The alteration
is not entirely successful and in any case shows little appreciation for the subtlety of
Benoît’s riddle. But it demonstrates how easily this catalogue of female excellence could
be transferred to divine persons in the minds of the medieval audience. The original
text almost indisputably invites a similar interpretation. The woman “through whom
47 Krueger, Women Readers, pp. 3–4, 6, 12–13, 30 and passim.
48 Schöning, Rezeption der Antike, pp. 249 and 327–31; this is not to deny that the characters frequently invoke “deus,” that is, one god alone.
49 Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal MS 3340. The manuscript is dated in a colophon to 1237. These
verses would correspond to 13468–70 a, b, c. They are printed in Jung, Légende de Troie, p. 138,
and Roman de Troie, ed. Constans, 6, p. 25. Benoît’s complex gesture would seem to have puzzled
not a few of the poem’s later copyists: while seventeen manuscripts retain it, four of these omit the
crucial line, riche dame de riche rei. In another thirteen manuscripts, the entire passage is omitted.
As noted by Jung, Légende de Troie, p. 32, the changes occur independent of the filiation of the
manuscripts and therefore require a different explanation.
50 “Dicés vers crieng estre blasmez / De celui qui tant a bontez.” This (following Constans’s critical
apparatus) renders lines 13463–64 incoherent: “Qui les mesfaiz des dames veint / Sont par le bien
de lui esteint.” See also Jung, Légende de Troie, p. 138.
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the failings of other women are again made good” can hardly be identified as anyone but
Mary; the list of her virtues includes sanctity (seintée), in her all knowledge abounds,
and in all the world—under any faith (lei, or “law”)—no woman can second her.51 The
passage immediately following (lines 13471–91) sees the rare intervention of biblical
authority as Solomon underscores the narrator’s opinion with his praise of the mulier
fortis (“fort femme”) from Proverbs 31:21–24, who was understood to prefigure Mary or
the church awaiting Christ’s return. Moreover, the words riche dame need not be altered
to riche fille if one considers Mary as the sponsa et mater, the position that corresponds
to her reversal of woman’s failing.52 Benoît has not only offered a persiflage of Eleanor,
he has identified the praise that would be hers with a model to which she cannot compare. Eleanor, if she figures here at all, is left aligned with Briseida; more certain is that
Briseida, as Mary’s counterpart, is another Eve.
Thus, the juxtaposition of “women’s failing” as represented in Briseida with the
narrator-poet’s praise of an anonymous female ideal rather more suggestively inscribes
Eleanor in the text than would either alone. The narrator steps forward in the guise of the
author who appears to take his bow before a woman as ultimate judge of his work, but
in so doing invites his audience to locate their own response to the narrative somewhere
between two opposing representations of woman, one inside, one outside the text; that
is: one whose qualities and dilemma they “see” before them and doubtless understand, the
other, supposedly among them, whose qualities constitute the first woman’s indictment
and rejection—and are all but unattainable. The result is an ingeniously crafted trap in
which the audience must either reject the narrator’s judgment to identify with Briseida’s
dilemma or align its response with one only allowed a supreme model of female moral
perfection. The ploy recalls the story of Jesus and the adulterous woman: “Let him who is
without sin cast the first stone” (John 8:7). If the narrator takes the lead with his verbal
lashing, the audience is left inclined to hold its moral punches, suspended, for the time
being, in Bloch’s conundrum of the “contradictory abstracted double,” which “no living
woman can resolve.”53 Certainly Eleanor could not—and this may be the real meaning of
the author’s wink in the direction of the most powerful woman of his time. But the experience of narrative, the experience offered the audience-as-woman, can, and it will. The
elucidation of this experience in Benoît’s text awaits us in the next chapter.
Benoît’s “Apology” is the only point at which the narrator problematizes “out loud”
the reception of his text, and women, or a woman, are chosen to represent this act.54
51 These phrases in particular receive a neutralizing treatment in the translation of Baumgartner
and Vielliard (Roman de Troie, pp. 287/89): seintée becomes “pureté,” toute scïence becomes simply
“sagesse,” and the phrase de nule lei (under any law or faith) is suppressed.
52 Gautier de Coinci frequently refers to Mary with the adjective riche, and calls her a rich dame.
See Miracles de Nostre Dame, 1:140, 173; 2:23.
53 Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, p. 91.
54 As Krueger, Women Readers, pp. 6–7, writes: “What is remarkable about this digression in its
entirety (lines 13429–94) is the way it so conspicuously problematizes the woman within and
beyond the text … Benoît’s dedication inscribes the problem of gender and interpretation. The clerk
signals the female reader’s centrality to the project he is undertaking: “she” is the only member of
the audience whose response he so engages.”
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In construction, posture and relationship to the narrative in which it is embedded, this
gesture found clear successors, the most notable in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival;
but we shall also encounter it shortly in Landri of Waben’s commentary on the Song of
Songs and in Thomasîn of Zirclaria’s Der welsche Gast. Krueger was indeed correct to
identify Benoît’s text as “the beginning of the woman reader as a problem,”55 but not
in the sense she intended: this is the beginning, in courtly vernacular literature, of the
problem of reading as woman, of woman as the key to a poetics of vernacular texts in
performance and to their claim to deliver sacred truth.
As for Eleanor, then, her position and reputation are in play, but not by way of flattery,
solicitation or even thanks. She represents a point of vulnerability, a point of entry
through which the tale hits home. It is no less the point that serves Benoît to communicate the audience’s position in relationship to la letre, as he refers to his Latin sources,
and thus to justify the mediating position of his text between these and the vernacular
performance space. In this way, Eleanor’s presumed role as hub of a vernacular literary
wheel undoubtedly enlarges the significance of the gesture and is perhaps even why it
is there.
Benoît’s romance, as evidenced by the number of extant copies and adaptations of his
text, was without doubt among the most popular of its time, demonstrably more popular
that any by Chrétien de Troyes, and this popularity extended over two centuries, if not
more.56 And yet, if it has found modern attention, then rarely as more than a prototype of
its genre, a contrast or prelude to study of Chrétien’s romances. But we have little indication that contemporaries even recognized such a genre. Vernacular romance narrative
was not born as the singular project our literary canon often lets it appear to be. Rather,
the same interest in vernacular writing that produced these texts transgresses indiscriminately our definitions of genre and subject matter and evinces rather different interests
from those fancifully ascribed to an impetuous and passionate queen furthering a new
doctrine of love. The texts considered in this and the next chapter are a reminder of both
the breadth of those interests and of the fact that scholarship has only very selectively
attended to them.57
Translating Scripture for Ma dame de Champaigne
Compared to those of her mother, the literary interests of Eleanor’s daughter, Marie de
Champagne, are better documented. They were not limited to illicit or adulterous love,
55 Krueger, Women Readers, p. 4.
56 Three manuscripts survive from the late twelfth century to around 1200, one of them complete. Another thirty-three copies have survived in at least fragmentary form from the thirteenth
century alone; see Jung, Légende de Troie, pp. 19, 22–23. As noted in Kelly, Chrétien de Troyes, p. 1,
these numbers far surpass those associated with the romances of Chrétien or, for that matter, of any
other twelfth-century romance. In addition, and also beginning in the thirteenth century, Benoît’s
romance was the object of multiple prose adaptations in French as well as two verse translations
into German, the first already around 1200.
57 For a parallel discussion of the same period in the Middle High German tradition, see Powell,
“Instruction for Religious Women,” pp. 281–310.
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the witness of Chrétien de Troyes and Andreas Capellanus notwithstanding. While the
former attributed matiere et san of his Chevalier de la Charrette to Marie, and the latter
placed her “judgments” in the “courts of love” alongside similar ones attributed to her
mother—both purportedly insisting that true love existed only outside marriage—Marie
is equally well attested as the patron of literature of religious instruction and biblical
exegesis.58 One such text, a commentary on Genesis by a poet who identifies himself as
Evrat, was first edited in 2002.59 Another, the so-called “paraphrase” of Psalm 44 known
as the Eructavit, has found more attention, but far less than it deserves.60 The Eructavit
is extraordinary for its manuscript transmission alone, which comprises fifteen copies
of the full text.61 No fewer than ten date from the thirteenth century, ranging geographically from the southern to the northern reaches of France.62 The text demonstrates an
acute awareness of Marie’s celebrated literary position: the princess of a purported cult
of adulterous love stands in here for the contemporary audience of courtly vernacular
literature as a whole and of romance in particular; by evoking her as the poem’s audience, the poet makes the religious instruction for a courtly lady that it is announced to
be into a reformation of the vernacular performance and its audience in the image of
Mary’s conception of the Word. Marie as courtly audience is another Ooliba; the poem’s
performance is the means of her transformation into the New Eve. No text more clearly
illustrates the hybrid project of adapting women’s lectio for the courtly audience and the
vernacular performance space, a new form of cultural mediation between the clericomonastic and the courtly elites, and this fact doubtless largely accounts for its preeminent position among comparable texts of the twelfth century.63
An adaptation of David’s “chançon de chambre” (2075), or epithalamic psalm,
undertaken for a prominent noblewoman in the second half of the twelfth century could
scarcely have been seen otherwise. As noted in the discussion of the Speculum’s audi-etvide address, the eleventh verse of the psalm was seen as David calling Mary to the perfect act of seeing and hearing at the Annunciation; this verse and another from the same
58 Le Chevalier de la Charrette, lines 1–2 and 26–27. Marie is the most frequently cited authority
for decisions in Andreas’s “courts of love”; see Andreas Capellanus, Art of Courtly Love, pp. 167–77.
On the evidence for Marie’s literary interests, see Zaganelli, “Corte di Champagne,” pp. 303–25; and
Benton, “Court of Champagne,” 551–91.
59 La Genèse d’Evrat, edited by Wilhelmus Boers, PhD diss., Leiden University, 2002. See also
Grundriss der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters, vol. 6.2, no. 1824.
60 Three contributions since 1999 offer a foundation for further study: Ruini, “Appunti”; Powell,
“Translating Scripture”; and McCash, “Sacred Love.” Ruini provides an overview of the scant previous scholarship and main questions surrounding the text.
61 Among other biblical verse “translations” of the twelfth century only one is transmitted in more
than two or three manuscripts: see Varvaro, “Traduzioni,” pp. 496–97.
62 Jenkins listed fifteen manuscripts in his edition, one of which merely excerpts the concluding
Gloria, lines 2131–68 (Le Mans 173, see note 2, above). Unknown to him was the thirteenth-century
copy contained in St Petersburg, National Library of Russia, Fr. F. v. XIV 9 (fols. 264r–277v); since
described in Ducrot-Granderye, Etudes, pp. 73, 241; and identified for Eructavit scholarship in
Powell, “Translating Scripture,” p. 102; see also Ruini, “Appunti,” p. 216.
63 See Varvaro, “Traduzioni,” pp. 496–97, 505, 508.
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psalm (Psalm 44:3) were seen as prophetic images fulfilled in the Annunciation, and the
Speculum demonstrates how Mary’s experience was to be relived in women’s reception of
the text. The wedding that calls the Eructavit into existence is identified as that between
God and holy church (86) and, shortly thereafter, as Mary’s conceptio a voce: Deus … an
son precïeus cors se mist / a la voiz que li angles dist” (God … entered her precious body
through the voice [word] that the angel spoke) (119–21). Accordingly, communication is
very much at the centre of the Eructavit’s presentation, constructed in a distinctly parallel configuration to that seen in the Speculum. David, as “uns des prophetes,” is granted
a vision of Heaven that is recommunicated through the poet’s delivery of his song; with
the same song and in the same “voice,” however, David calls the heavenly bride to the
embrace of the bridegroom. The frontispiece of the Speculum virginum displays the same
transfer and simultaneity of communication on three analogous levels: the prophets
receive and communicate God’s plan above, Peregrinus reiterates this communication
to Theodora below—and both exchanges are equally involved in the communication at
the centre, which portrays Mary’s reception of the common message as her conception
of the Word. The purpose of this construction is the same in either case: to demonstrate
that what happens in the central communication, the wedding of the Word and the soul,
happens in analogous form on its borders, that is, in the framing before and after of prophetic and present-day communication.
The Eructavit identifies neither its author nor its recipient by name. The text instead
foregrounds a relationship between an unnamed personal spiritual adviser and a
woman named in the poem’s opening lines only as “ma dame de Champaigne.” He is her
“true friend” who “has taught her all she knows.”64 The poem literally performs a fusion
of prophetic speech and oral performance, of religious instruction and courtly chanson,
that is suggested in its opening lines:
Une chançon que David fist
Que nostre sire en cuer li mist
Dirai ma dame de Champaigne,
Celi cui Damedés ansaigne
Et espire de toz ses biens
(1–4)
(A song that David composed
That our Lord placed in his heart
I will recite to my Lady of Champagne,
She whom God teaches
And inspires in all her virtues)
64 “Li bons maistre don vos avez / Retenu quanque vos savez, / Si comme il est verais amis,”
lines 2097–99; s.a. line 3. Based on this relationship, the author has been conjectured as Adam de
Perseigne, who is known as the spiritual adviser of several prominent noblewomen and members
of Marie’s family and to have been called to her bedside before she died. The poem offers no further
indication of his identity.
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The chain of communication suggests an equation between God’s, David’s, and the poet’s
songs and instruction that is amply born out in the poem as a whole.65 The equivalence
is manifest as an apparent simultaneity, accomplished through a continuous blurring
of boundaries between David’s audience, the poet-instructor’s and the narrating
performer’s. One example is reminiscent of Benoît’s supposed address to Eleanor:
Rëine estes de riche cort,
Veez la joie qui vos sort!
…
Ceste chançon que ge vos chant,
Par quoi je vos guarnis avant
Ainsi con Dex le me consoile,
Vos dirai je pres de l’oroile
Quant ceste joie iert avenue
Que j’ai en vision vëue
(1951–1960)
(You are the queen of a powerful court
See the joy that awaits you
…
This song that I sing to you
—With which I prepare you in advance
As God advises me to do—
I will whisper in your ear
When this joy has come to pass
That I saw in a vision.)
These lines are ostensibly addressed by David to the heavenly bride, another vivid
reminder that Benoît’s riche dame de riche rei need not refer to a worldly woman at all.
But here, as there, the full meaning can only be grasped by allowing the worldly and the
heavenly audience a moment of conjunction, as two images superimposed. The vision
David evokes as past (line 1960) in fact makes up much of the poem’s narrated present; it is the vision that allows David to attend the heavenly wedding and thus both
to receive and to deliver his song as his knowledge of those events. As part of the same
vision the bride has no use for advance preparation for the wedding or joie; in this David
can only be speaking to his “daughter” the church.66 From the audience’s perspective,
however, the lines read as addressed by the poet-instructor to his lady. Like the woman
addressed as the bride of the psalm in the original opening of the Speculum virginum, she
is the bride, the daughter, and the representative of the present audience. This suggests
a portrayal of the several senses of scripture through the persons of various brides, all
65 Powell, “Translating Scripture,” pp. 85–91 and passim; also Zink, “Dédicace,” pp. 591–600, esp.
p. 596.
66 As the narrator explains of the eleventh verse: “David, qui sainte eglise apele / Sa fille comme
une pucele / Qui de son paranté fu nee” (1343–45).
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simultaneously the recipients of one communication, and the poem does indeed stand
as a recasting of such a quadripartite understanding.67 But to read it as such would be to
efface precisely what the author’s work of translation has accomplished: to suffuse such
theological knowledge, or rather the truth it expresses, into the experience of narrative
and performed speech. For the audience, this truth is an experience grasped through
the simultaneity of various levels of communication in performance, an experience
they grasp on their own terms and in their own language and even through their own
literary experience.
The author’s initial identification of his audience as “Ma dame de Champaigne” is not
the result of mere reticence over the use of her name. In the opening lines of Le Chevalier
de la Charrette, Chrétien used the identical phrase to make the extraordinary claim that
Marie, not otherwise named, was responsible for both the content and the meaning,
matiere et san, of his romance of adulterous love between Lancelot and “la reïne.”68
This queen in turn is named only after more than a thousand lines as Guenievre.69 The
Eructavit poet’s only subsequent allusion to the identity of his addressee, near the end
of the poem, apostrophizes her with a circumlocution that emphasizes her royalty: “La
jantis suer le roi de France” (The noble sister of the king of France) (2079);70 while David’s
addressee is named as la reïne throughout. The use of a phrase identical to Chrétien’s in
the same crucial position and for the same purpose—only one of several allusions to
Chrétien’s oeuvre in this poem—announces the poem’s overarching objective of claiming
its place on the courtly vernacular stage.71 More than this, it implicitly evokes Marie (and
with her the courtly audience) as a “queen” poised in her literary life (her life as audience) between the scandalous love of Guenievre and that of the true bride and queen.
The same idea may echo behind the sole remarks the poet makes on her character: she
is given to an excess of largesse, which may “all too often trouble a noble nature with
worry and hardship.”72 Chrétien had written (at the outset of his Cligès) of Largesse as
the queen of courtly virtues; in romance generally it has a more ambivalent role to play.73
In particular one thinks of Arthur’s ill-fated boon that puts his queen’s life in jeopardy
67 The church as sensus allegoricus, Marie or the present audience as sensus tropologicus, and the
queen of Heaven as sensus anagogicus. Mary is also amply present as the sensus historicus.
68 Charrette, lines 1–2 and 26–27. The romance is usually dated from 1177 to 1181.
69 Guenievre is named at line 1099. While consistent with Chrétien’s oeuvre as a whole, in which
Arthur’s queen is rarely named, the fact remains remarkable in a romance that turns so entirely
around her person.
70 See note 1, above.
71 Powell, “Translating Scripture,” pp. 92–93 and n20; the reverse hypothesis (that Chrétien’s
“dedication” alludes to the Eructavit) is argued (unconvicingly, I think) in Zink, “Dédicace.” On other
allusions to Chrétien, see note 78, below.
72 “Largecë et li hauz despans / Metent cusançon et espans / Mainte foiz an jantil corage” (lines
11–14, s.a. 6–9).
73 Que largece est dame et reïne / Qui toutes vertuz enlumine” (Cligès, lines 193–94). Zaganelli,
“Corte di Champagne,” pp. 318–19, sees a possible reference to problems arising from the largesse
of Marie’s husband Henry, which was so notable as to provide his epithet, “the Liberal.”
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and thus sets in motion the entire plot of the Charrette, eventually leading to the queen’s
excessive “largesse” towards Lancelot. Ma dame de Champaigne, whether or not she
is truly the poet’s patron and avid pupil of religious wisdom, is in any case evoked in
her position as the grande dame of literature en romans, she presides over this courtly
performance space as the queen of Heaven (with the king) presides over David’s. She
presides no less as a psalter-reader; this text is a reading of the psalm as fit for a queen
of courtly literature—it is “her” reading, presented for us as a poetic performance. Dame,
bride and the present audience are all one, and this fusion of identities is content and
objective, matiere et san, of this poem, the central purpose of which is to bring Mary’s
reading to the courtly vernacular performance space.74
To further collapse the distance between the original and the present communication, David, not the courtly poet, poses as the jongleur in the authorial duo. The poem
tells the story of David’s original composition and performance of his chançon as one
of many jugleor who, upon hearing news of the impending heavenly wedding, set out
to perform there. The song he performs is, however, not simply the text of the psalm.
Instead the verses of the biblical text are embedded in a presentation that expands them
to over 500 lines, or a quarter of the Old French text. To perform the verses “God placed
in his heart” for his audience, guests at the heavenly wedding, David adapts and expands
upon them. The poet of the Old French Eructavit does the same in his turn: the narrative
frame that stages David’s performance is itself the result of the poet’s dire, his retelling
of the Song for Marie de Champagne and the courtly audience. The narrative context
and exegetical comment that make up this “third saying” (God’s, David’s, poet’s) constitute expansion by another 1500 lines. This despite the poet’s claim to “add not a word,
except where rhyme requires using a different one with the same meaning.”75 That is: the
expansion is a necessary aspect of proper translation of the message as appropriate to a
new audience. The author’s narrative embedding of the poem and its staging as David’s
performance are part and parcel of translation into romans.
The poet’s narrative begins with the announcement of a great feast: “It is the custom
and a familiar one, that a king who wishes to crown his son or give him a bride spreads
the news well in advance. … God who is king and lord acted similarly in his own realm”
(cf. lines 21–25, 35–36). The focus of the analogy is the communication of knowledge,
the way “the news” is made known. With this idea the poet situates his vernacular
74 It is worth noting that, of the text’s ten thirteenth-century copies, only one, MS B in Madrid,
is thought to originate in Champagne (Varvaro, “Traduzioni,” p. 502). Two can be situated on its
northern reaches (the St Petersburg MS possibly comes from Soissons; see note 62, above; as does
MS I, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale fr. 25532). Four thirteenth-century manuscripts are notable for
expunging the two references to Marie. Three of these (H, I, K) possibly do so by way of appropriating authorship of the poem for Gautier de Coinci, whose Miracles de Nostre Dame they also
transmit. Conversely, reference to Marie was retained in roughly half of the thirteenth-century
transmission, showing that her role in the text implied neither personal nor geographical limitation. See also Ruini, “Appunti,” pp. 233–27, 247–48.
75 “Oianz toz bons clers dist il bien / Qu’il n’i a antrepris de rien / Fors la androit ou rime faut: / S’i
met le mot qui autant vaut” (lines 141–44).
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exegesis in relationship to courtly poetry and liturgical performance in relationship to
court entertainment. In the earthly sphere, the news is spread by the purveyors of vernacular poetic entertainment and through its familiar forms:
Jugleor font sonez noviaus,
Chançons et notes et fabliaus,
Que droiz est que chascuns s’atort
Contre la joie de la cort.
(31–34)
(The jongleurs spread the news,
Songs and melodies and tales,
That everyone should make ready
To attend the court celebration.)
This description stands in complementary apposition to a description of God’s
messengers, called prophets, “Por ce qu’el verroient de loing / Et nonceroient sa venue”
(because they saw from afar and announced the Lord’s coming) (48–49). Their role is
described in similar, but liturgically transposed terms: their “songs” too, are “read and
sung” by holy church as messengers of the joie to come, now formulated as “la joie de
paradis” (66).
The phrases joie de la cort and joie de paradis thus encapsulate the entire analogy, and
the former phrase is once again a pointed citation of Chrétien. At the court of Champagne
it could hardly fail to remind the audience of the grand concluding avanture of Erec et
Enide (ca. 1170). In Chrétien’s text, the name of this exploit, joie de la cort, comes to comprise all that the hero, Erec, seeks and must deliver, leading to a double coronation in
conclusion on Christmas day.76 The Eructavit poet reminds the audience from the outset
that they know the psalm from its recitation en latin within the Christmas liturgy (lines
15–17). Both at the joie de la cort and at the earlier wedding of his protagonists, Chretien
gives memorable accounts of the variety of entertainers present at great court feasts and
their arts.77 The sum total of this positioning is to place the Eructavit and its performance
in dual analogy to the various forms of secular poetic entertainment on the one hand and
to the liturgy on the other. The poet/performer injects the liturgy into the court literary
context and performs his own song for the “guests” of the weddings of courtly romance.
Thus, the wedding recounted in the course of the Eructavit is treated not only as a heavenly dimension of Chrétien’s romance; it is also an appropriation of its voice, the voice of
vernacular poetry, to a more exalted end—the same rhetorical appropriation implicit in
the address to ma dame de Champaigne.78 Identified as both prophet and jongleur, David
76 Erec et Enide, lines 5459–60, 6551–54.
77 Erec et Enide, lines 2031–50 and 6371–79; see also Powell, “Translating Scripture,” p. 92.
78 McKibben, Eructavit, p. 43, saw “a strong resemblance in style and rhetoric to Chrétien”; see
also Jung, Etudes, pp. 230–31; Sampoli Simonelli (“Parafrasi francese,” 28–36) attempts to demonstrate a direct dependence on Erec et Enide and the poems of Bernard de Ventadorn. At the least, the
author of the Eructavit is well versed in courtly poetry and imitates its masters intently and adeptly.
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himself authorizes the assimilation of poetic modes; indeed, he proclaims its arrival and
its special privilege as a layman’s key to the gates of Heaven.
As David sets out with high hopes of performing at the wedding, we are told that he
was well aware that through his descendant, Mary, God would be born of a woman.79 The
poet apparently alters history to allow this to come about, as he explicitly places David’s
vision at 714 bC, some 300 years later than the standard account of David’s life found
in patristic sources, but also at a point subsequent to the first biblical announcement
of Christ’s coming, Isaiah’s prophecy on the virga ex radice Iesse (Isaiah 11:1–2).80 The
same foreknowledge will emerge as crucial to his plea for entry into Heaven. Here as
in the Speculum virginum’s “Tree of Jesse,” then, David is Mary’s direct predecessor in
the gnostic event whose recommunication is the central objective; he partakes of and
authorizes the same privileged gnosis.81
The crucial scene for the entire narrative restaging of the Eructavit is found in
David’s encounter with the guardian of the gates of Heaven; without it, there would be
no visionary experience of the heavenly wedding and thus no song to relate. The scene
has no direct trigger in the text of Psalm 44. It derives instead from an ingenious conflation of three psalm verses, of which one is from a different psalm entirely. The idea of
audio-visual reception from verse 11 is conflated with the second verse as a statement
on composition (“My tongue will write faster than any scribe”); together these serve to
unite all levels of communication in the same mode, the mode of the eleventh verse.82
The idea of entry or opening the gates of Heaven, however, belongs to the tradition of
Psalm 70, verses 15–16: quoniam non cognovi litteraturam introibo in potentiam domini
(Because I have had no training in letters I will enter the dominion of the Lord) (Psalm
70:15–16). What the poet has done is highly intentional and unmistakable to his contemporary audience: the privilege of an illiterate’s access to divine knowledge is identified with the signal text of women’s lectio and the prefiguration of Mary’s conception of
the Word—and all together are claimed in no uncertain terms for the oral performance
of vernacular poetry.
David arrives to find the gates securely closed—with the sword of the angel who
drove Adam and Eve from Paradise—and, not daring to knock or call, he strikes up a
song with his vielle, or fiddle (“Por ce qu’il n’osa apeler / Si comança a vïeler” 201–2).
The song is the elaboration of the psalm’s first verse, Eructavit cor meum, and forms a
humble entreaty for entry that is at once the poet’s appeal for divine inspiration: “Sainz
esperiz, ovrez moi l’uis! / Je chanterai s’antrer i puis” (Holy Spirit, open the gate for me!
If I am allowed to enter, I will sing) (211–12). The guardian’s reply contains the first echo
79 Bien sot que de ses hoirs seroit / La virge ou Deus s’aomberroit; / De ce n’ot il nule dotance /
Ainz I mist tote s’esperance, / Que puis que Deus naistroit de mere … (lines 87–91). The passage
continues in an extended discussion of the Annunciation and Incarnation (lines 87–134), to which
I will return below.
80 Jenkins, “Introduction,” pp. xxiii–xxiv.
81 Powell, “Picture Program,” pp. 141–42.
82 Powell, “Translating Scripture,” pp. 88–89.
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in the poem of the Audi, filia et vide (Psalm 44:11); tellingly as well, the doorman does
not so much refuse entry as he chides David for wanting to see “what no man of the flesh
may know”:
Li rois se desduit et repose;
Ne seroit pas sëure chose
A ton hues oïr ne veoir
Ce qu’hon charnés ne puet savoir;
Ne puet savoir nus hon charnés
Qués est la joie esperités.
(220–22)
(The king is taking his pleasure at rest;
It is not at all likely he will hear or see
Your clamouring:
What mortal man cannot know,
Can be known by no mortal man;
That includes the heavenly wedding.)83
The second verse of the psalm is then introduced by way of the guardian’s suggestion
that David content himself instead with written transmission:
Mais la chançon que tu viaus dire
Escri la en chartre ou en cire,
Et je ferai bien tant por toi
Que je la mosterrai le roi.
(225–28)
(But this song you want to sing
Write it on parchment or in wax,
And I will do this much for you:
I will show it to the king.)
This suggestion is met with David’s defiant defence of his art:
Merci, sire, ce dist Daviz,
Se je laianz antrez estoie
Avuec mes moz viëleroie.
Juglerre sui, sages et duiz;
Se le roi plaisoit mes desduiz
Ce sai je bien que les sodees
83 The phrase “a ton hues” can mean “to your good,” but the resulting translation is less satisfying
and introduces a contradiction. The issue is not whether entry would do David any good, but rather
a categorical exclusion from the ultimate good. It is thus preferable to assign oïr ne veoir to the king
and assume a derisory use of huëiz, for which Tobler/Lommatzsch gives “Geschrei, Kriegslärm.” Not
surprisingly, the manuscripts show a good deal of confusion over this line.
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Me seroient mout granz donees.
Ne dites pas que je l’escrive;
La langue cui li cuers avive
L’escrivra sanz doiz et sanz mains
Assez miauz que nus escrivains.
(232–42)
(Thanks, sire, says David,
But if I could get inside there
I would accompany my words with the fiddle.
I am a jongleur, skilled and adept,
If my entertainment pleases the king
I know well that there will be
Plenty of coins coming my way.
Don’t tell me to write it down;
The tongue, which the heart quickens,
Will write it without fingers or hands
Much better than any scribe.)
Writing has no place in the art of performance. The spoken word delivered in physical presence is privileged to a more immediate apprehension of truth—writes faster
than any writer, to use the formula of the biblical text. What happens next resoundingly
affirms David’s belief: the guardian repeats at length that no “man born of woman” (line
243) can ever enter the gates or see what lies beyond them until the sins of his ancestors
are atoned for and God comes to earth in the Incarnation. David refuses to despair, and
begins to implore (losangier, line 282) the guardian to open the door just a bit so that
he may see
Commant li glorïeus fiz Dé
Vandra par naissance novele
En la sainte dame pucele
Qui doit estre de mon lignage.
(288–89)
(How the glorious son of God will by a new birth come into the holy virgin lady who is
supposed to descend from me)
He then rests his case in a humble attitude of prayer. At this point, the doorman’s catechism is apparently tossed to the winds, as with a great thunderclap God opens the door.
While David’s art precludes the resort to writing, it is the twin significance of his
affinity, in the literal sense, with Mary that finally forces the gates of Heaven and allows
him to perform. This woman will bear a man who opens the gates of Heaven for all, at
least inasmuch as the Word will be revealed in its full meaning. But the same woman
is the bride and the filia, as audience in turn indistinguishable from the other Marie,
countess of Champagne, even as the mode on which David insists is the mode of the present performance of the poem. In seeking entry to Heaven, moreover, David’s rejection of
writing begs a privilege for the art of oral performance claimed in Psalm 70 not for Mary,
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but for the illitteratus.84 On these combined terms, which in the poet’s contrivance have
become inseparable, God agrees.
The construction of David’s visionary authority thus proceeds along lines very
similar to those chosen by Theoderic for Hildegard’s.85 Theoderic’s account of Hildegard’s
visionary awakening explains that “all this had been opened to her by David’s key, the
key that ‘opens and no one closes, closes and no one opens.’ ” The scriptural image comes
from Isaiah 22:22, but it is repeated in Revelations, where David’s key becomes a key
to the gates of Heaven and one that affords visionary knowledge. Admonished continually to see and to hear, John is told “these things saith the Holy One and the true one, he
that hath the key of David; he that openeth, and no man shutteth; shutteth, and no man
openeth” (Revelations 3:7); and “I have given before thee a door opened, which no man
can shut” (Revelations 3:8). Theoderic thus fused the idea of psalter literacy with the revelatory notion of David’s key, as suggested by the tradition of Psalm 70:15–16, to establish a woman’s privilege to visionary knowledge. To arrive at his scene in which David
rejects written communication as a way of begging entry into Heaven, the Eructavit poet
combined these ideas with the second verse of Psalm 44, lingua mea calamus scribae
velociter scribentis and recast the whole as a narrative of David as jongleur. The illiterate’s
entry into visionary knowledge thus becomes the privilege of the oral performer, and (in
the context of a vernacular chançon) the privilege of his lay audience—who in this case
is the filia of Psalm 44 and the audience of women’s lectio.
The poet’s idea of David as jongleur is not a new one, but his activation of this idea
to grant special entry to Heaven to an itinerant performer certainly is, and it stands in
stark contrast to the church’s view of performing artists. In keeping with Jerome’s indictment of “poets and comedians … and … pantomimic actors,” they were seen to manifest
satanic, not salvific, forces, and to rely on a seduction of the senses aligned with woman
and carnal desire.86 Honorius Augustodunensis put it bluntly: “Habent spem joculatores?
Nullam” (What hope have jongleurs of salvation? None).87 John of Salisbury admitted the
giving of alms to jongleurs—the soudees David is so sure of—only if they had previously
renounced their profession.88 The resort to flattery, or losangier (the use of the same
verb in our poem appears gratuitous in that David does not fulfil its action) was frequently noted as one of the jongleur’s standard vices.89 Christopher Page has argued that
84 The understanding of litteraturam in Psalm 70:15–16 shifted between the eleventh and the
thirteenth centuries from the Augustinian idea of an opposition between the letter of the law and
the grace of salvation to one between learning and simplicity and finally even the litterati and
laymen; see Ohly, “Wolframs Gebet,” 5–12.
85 See above, pp. 38–39 and 83–84.
86 Casagrande and Vecchio, “Clercs et jongleurs,” 25–43.
87 Elucidarium, 1148; see also Page, Musical Life, p. 8.
88 Policraticus, p. 241. Not renouncing this profession left them to burn in Hell. Such opinions were
the clerical commonplace; see Page, Musical Life, pp. 15–19.
89 Casagrande and Vecchio, “Clercs et jongleurs,” 915; Faral, Jongleurs, p. 154; Page, Musical Life,
pp. 21–22. The verb occurs once more in the Eructavit to evoke the Devil’s flattering temptation of
sinners (line 649).
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a more tolerant attitude towards jongleurs can first be detected with Peter the Chanter
in 1183—contemporary, then, with the composition of the Eructavit. Peter and others
in his circle cautiously differentiate between “good” and “bad” jongleurs, and damnable
and useful aspects of their art.90 But David makes no effort to distinguish himself as a
joculator dei; on the contrary, his attitude is doubly provocative in that he is assigned
behaviour and remarks that play on the standard points of the invective against his
proudly announced profession.91 There is more afoot here.
The “vernacularization” of this psalm makes the performing voice of vernacular
poetry into the audience’s key to Heaven and their access to Mary’s knowledge of the
Word. “The tongue quickened by the heart” that David claims for his art is the performing
complement to the reception of “the voice that touches the heart.” David’s song is
received via the ear (and the eye) by the heart—whether originally, in God’s voice, or
as David repeats it to the bride and the poet delivers it to his dame.92 David sings of this
voice once more on the occasion of the verse Diffusa est gratia in labiis tuis (Grace pours
forth from your lips) (Psalm 44:3), beginning: “La vostre bele sainte boche / Don la voiz
ist qui les cuers toche” (Your beautiful, sacred mouth, from which comes the voice that
touches hearts) (375–76). As mentioned earlier, this verse was another understood to
prefigure the Annunciation, and the continuation of the passage makes clear that the
Word of John 1:1–3 is rendered in this poem as voice.93 Thus Mary experienced the conception “A la voiz que li angles dist” (through the voice that the angel spoke) (line 120).
In performance, as the Eructavit shows, the voice of the text is both here and now and
one with the voice as originally received. The voice that inspires David’s song is one
with the art of the jongleur, and the same voice is the Word that entered Mary’s body
to become flesh. The conceptio a voce applies equally to all “brides” of the performed
Word.94 With this idea, the Eructavit demonstrates in programmatic form one of the
most fundamental tenets of a new vernacular poetics of truth and offers its own contribution to the history of the same.
Later in the poem, when David reaches the eleventh verse and addresses the bride,
the point of his song will be to summon her to the same knowledge the gatekeeper had
90 Page, Musical Life, pp. 19–33. To David’s credit, Peter and his circle are most generous in their
concessions to “string-players who also sing” (Page, Musical Life, pp. 25–26).
91 As noted by Casagrande and Vecchio, “Clercs et jongleurs,” 917, Bernard of Clairvaux compares
himself with a jongleur as a gesture of humility and identification with the basest of men—and at
the same time with the image of David as dancer. Such a humility pose illustrates at once the topos
on which the Eructavit author can draw and the reversal implicit in the positive inflection he has
given it.
92 See lines 1399–400 and 1423–28.
93 “Puisse si les noz cuers tochier / Que vers vos nos face aprochier. / Ce est la fontaine et la doiz
/ De quoi sordra la sainte voiz / Dont sainte eglise iert replenie / Et confermee et establie” (lines
377–84).
94 Cf. also the passage that explicates the “bow” as the Old and New Testament, with its arrows as
“la voiz et la parole … Qui si perce li cuer del vantre” (lines 724–26), thus renewing Mary’s conception of the Word among all humanity.
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denied him: “Hear, daughter, and see, … for the king desires your beauty.” Where the
gatekeeper begins by dismissing David’s entreaty—“David, trai t’en sus!” (David, get out
of here!) (217)—David’s address will coax the bride to draw near: “[Un] po va avant et
si voies / Se Dex a bien la chose feite” (Go just a little closer and see if God has done his
work well) (1402–3), or, “Vien avant, file, oevre les yauz” (Come forward, daughter, open
your eyes) (1413). Finally, the formula of the psalm, Audi filia et vide, occurs, but only in
the perfect tense:
File, or as öi et vëu;
Trop auras le cuer decëu
Si tu n’i mez si t’antandue
Que ta biautez li soit randue.
(1423–26)
(Daughter, now that you have heard and seen;
Your heart will be much deceived
If you do not make it your sole intent
That your beauty be rendered unto him.)
The paraphrase of the eleventh verse is reserved to express a seduction accomplished.
This is a transformative touch, for it makes the entire preceding thousand lines, in which
David praises the bridegroom (Psalm 44:3–10), into the content of her seduction. The
bride’s response is one brought about by the present performance, and the entire psalm,
in effect, is delivered for “her” benefit—exactly as the parallels in the staging of the poem
would demand.
I suggested at the outset that the opening lines of the poem implicitly position its
female addressee somewhere between the adulterous queen of Chrétien’s Chevalier
de la Charrette and the queen of Heaven, that is, somewhere between the Old and the
New Eve. Both ideas are fully realized in David’s instruction to the bride (lines 1423–
686), which also encapsulates the essential process of the bride’s transformation as
encountered in the Speculum virginum. Through the audio-visual presentation of her
instructor, she progresses from the false to the true woman, manifest as the deceptive
exterior versus truth in intention, inner as opposed to mere outer beauty. From the
outset, the poet makes clear that this “women’s instruction” is intended for all Christians.
“Every baptized soul … is espoused to the king” (cf. 1377–80), and therefore “Se doit oïr,
que dist Daviz, / Ses anseignemanz et ses diz. / Ce qu’il dist et ansaigne a l’une / Doit
a son oés oïr chascune” (All should hear what David says, his teaching and his words.
/ What he teaches for the one / Should be heard for the good of everyone) (1381–84).
Once again, this poem makes explicit what is elsewhere implicit. Thus, when the bride
is told “to beware above all things, that your love prove false or feigned” (cf. 1488–89),
that “God never had any love for hypocrites,” and to “preserve her body from all taints”
for the embrace of her bridegroom—with this latter fully elaborated as the embrace of
lovers in the language of the Song of Songs (cf. 1535–76)—all this is addressed, in fact,
to “Bishops, abbots and deacons,” to “canons, priors, nuns, lay bothers and monks,” as
it is to “barons, kings and counts, … and all the lesser folk”; in short then, to the entire
church (cf. 1503–32).
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The warning against the failings of the false virgin is followed by a description of
the true, Mary—whom David must address prophetically. The text focuses once more in
detail on the physical fact of Mary’s virginal conception and bearing of Christ; this idea of
the divine enclosed in Mary’s “sainte vantree” (holy womb) (1647) corresponds, as the
commentator then explains, to Mary as a manifestation of beauty as inner truth:
Sa biautez fu de grant merite
Qu’ele venoit devers le cuer;
Dedanz en ot plus que defuer.
(1664–66)
(Her beauty was of such great merit
Because it came from the heart within;
She had more of it within than without)
Mary’s beauty, the beauty of the Incarnation, is that of the diaphanous body, the woman
who has ornamented herself from within:
El cuer sont les frengetes d’or,
Li trecëor et li anor,
Le jöel, li tissu de soie
Que la pucele li anvoie
(1673–76)
(In her heart are the golden fringes, the hairpins and earrings, the jewels, the silken cloth
that the young girl offers him.)
Mary is the archetype of the perfectly instructed woman who has assimilated the
seductive finery of the daughters of Sion to her inner life. As such she is not only the
one-and-only who will experience the miraculous conception and birth; she is in that
specific experience a model for the addressee of this religious instruction for ma dame
de Champaigne. To realize this form of beauty is to relive or actualize the conception and
incarnation of the Word, because it manifests the truth in and through the body.
The analogy with which the poem opens, between a heavenly and a courtly wedding,
is therefore first and foremost an indication to the audience of how they are to experience
the poem. The heavenly wedding is not merely to be imagined as a more glorious version
of those seen in the world; it is the event for which the poem prepares, or “dresses” its
audience, a bride in spe poised between the Old and the New Eve. Both in mode and in
process, the instruction of monastic “virgins” is restaged for the courtly audience. But
the implications for the further development of my argument are greater still.
As the poem nears its conclusion, the poet offers a dramatic “translation” of heavenly joy into the audience’s own realm, the fulfilment of the joie de la cort announced
at the outset of the poem. At the fulfilment of all things, they are promised an entry into
David’s experience: “Lors overra li rois sa gloire / Si verrons la procession / Que David
vit en vision” (Then the king will reveal his glory, and we will see the procession that
David saw in his vision) (1743–44). The performance as experienced in the present then
offers the next best thing, what the poet calls a “samblance,” which allows “us to hear
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and to perceive” (entendre et aparçoivre) “la grant joie” (1755–56). He first asks for his
Lady’s special attention: “Cist vers aprés conte la joie, / Si est bien droiz que ma dame
l’oie” (This next verse tells of the rejoicing, it is thus most fitting that my lady hear it)
(1750–51), and then conjures once again “the way it is done in the world when the king
summons a high court” (cf. 1761–62)—but this time the celebration is of a coronation.
The ensuing description bears all the marks of a skilled dramatic artist, setting the stage,
evoking the assembled nobles—so many that the earth trembles beneath their feet—the
pressing crowds, the ringing church bells. But the culmination turns out to be the entry
of the queen: “Toz li siegles fremist et bruit / Vers la reïne esguardent tuit” (All the world
trembles and murmurs / and all gazes turn to the queen) (1774–75). The point of the
samblance is to evoke the queen’s “great joy,” “the consolation,” and “the sweetness that
infuses her heart,” such “that she entirely forgets herself.”95 Finally, the poet makes clear
that this is the experience that David’s vision promises us all:
Cel joié que la rëine a
Ansi con Dex li destina,
Ce dist David, et mout greignor
Avront devant notre saignor
Cil et celes qui sauf seront.
(1783–87)
(This joy that the queen knows as God ordained for her, David tells us—and greater
still—will know before our Lord those men and women who are saved.)
The audience is to identify with the experience of the bride as a foretaste of their joie to
come but also as the culmination of a process of their own transformation through the
text; they not only will know as she does in this vision; they do know, in part, as she does,
through their experience of the poem.
The truth of the text’s “analogy,” what it calls a samblance and the audience sees
as the staging of scriptural images in a narrative of their world, is revealed in this
experience. It seeks moments of identity between the woman’s experience inside and
outside the text and thus reveals continuity between our historia and sacred historia.
Memoria, the act of revivifying the historia of a sacred life, occurs as a process that calls
upon the participants to recognize and perceive, entendre et aparçoivre, continuity
between Mary’s historia and their own as the key to knowing the truth of the images
of the sacred text, to unlocking the experience they contain. This process is what I have
called Mary’s reading.
The remanifestation en romanz of this experience as derived from the Song of
Songs will concern us shortly. With his narrative redelivery of Psalm 44, the poet of the
Eructavit offers the other biblical ephithalamium to a lay audience; but more than this,
he transforms the liturgical experience of memoria and identification as just described
into one fully accessible to that audience. This gesture is not presented as a second best,
95 “Ele s’oblie antre lor braz / De la grant joie et del solaz; / Une douçors au cuer le vient / Si que
de li ne li sovient” (1779–82).
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but rather as one that depends in its very efficacy and authenticity on delivery in “their”
world by “their” entertainers to a bride who is placed among them, given historical existence as Marie de Champagne. The Eructavit makes explicitly manifest as does no other
work in this period the continuous relationship between the bride of the Word, the vernacular audience, and the individual woman whose presence, whether as character or
inscribed audience, is “living proof” that the transformation of the bride, the realization
of the heavenly wedding, is happening “here and now,” in the event of the text as performance, “in the very specificity and reality of the … vernacular community.”96
We are on the threshold here of a meeting between sacred and secular narrative that
occurs as a meeting between the truth of Mary’s historia and its remanifestation in the lives
of her “daughters”—queens, dames, and puceles, who live and walk not only in the layman’s
world, but also in that of the new layman’s narrative. Both through Marie’s presence as “audience” and through the analogy of the heavenly wedding with the joie de la cort, the Eructavit
poet acknowledges and exploits this meeting as the venue of his own poem, accomplishing
its crucial identification in concert with the voice of vernacular narrative as represented
by Chrétien de Troyes. Chrétien’s romance of the joie de la cort does not conclude with a
marriage but rather with a double coronation; the protagonists are married at the conclusion of the primerain vers, the initial cycle of the story, which requires another, much longer
double to achieve true union between them. The narrative development of the relationship
produces the true “marriage”; this then corresponds to the enormous celebration of the
coronation—and Enide’s triumphant reinstatement to her rightful place—which follows
Erec’s successful accomplishment of the joie de la cort. If we cannot finally know how intentionally the conclusion of the Eructavit, with its celebration of an earthly coronation as a
figure of the bride’s fulfilled joie, is meant to recall the structure of Chrétien’s romance, it is
hard to deny that that structure itself would have called to mind Mary’s historia as the path
of the sponsa annunciata, dolorosa et derelicta, regina assumpta et coronata—not as an allegory concealing hidden meaning, not as personification or imitatio; not, then, as one whose
“true meaning” is contained in Mary or church as signified but rather as an experience that
authenticates “our part” in salvation history, because through it the truth of Mary’s experience is remanifest as “our own.”
No less an idea may lie behind the Eructavit poet’s modest term samblance. It occurs
only once previously, in the opening exposition, where it denotes the imago dei and the
physical body that Christ assumed in the Incarnation.97 That is, rather than “analogy”
or allegorical figure, the poem’s concluding samblance seeks the expression of the spiritual in and through the historical and corporeal, historia and corporalia. It stands in
the same relationship to the truth of the Word as does the poet’s female addressee to
the scriptural bride, and I am suggesting no less of Enide. The most extraordinary feature of Chrétien’s first romance is undoubtedly the fact that its narrative path can only
96 Uitti, “Women Saints,” p. 259.
97 “Por voir bel homage li fist [that is, Christ to his father] / Quant an forme d’omme se mist, /
Et li douz pere voirement / Li redona an chasement / Toz cés qui sont en sa samblance” (95–99).
Similarly, Mary is said to faire samblant when she gives birth to the Christ child (125–26).
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be completed in that the bride, Enide, accompanies her bridegroom, Erec, every step of
the way—to the extent that their successful reconciliation is first signalled when they
together ride one horse. Enide’s path is itself a samblance, the earthly transposition or
bodily translation of another narrative; it stands no less as the path of the audience, who
also “rides along” on Erec’s adventures.98 The bride “reads” through love and suffering
both inside and outside the text. Chrétien’s emphatic inclusion of the woman-in-thenarrative has a function that is closely related to Marie’s vis-à-vis the wider audience
of the Eructavit: Marie is not only audience, possibly patron but, like Enide, also a character in a text, the mirror of audience participation in its reading path. The inclusion of
ma dame de Champaigne acknowledges the arrival of a layman’s narrative that is built
around identification between the seeking and suffering bride and her “accompanying”
audience—and Chrétien’s Enide may best be understood in the same way. We cannot
know what role she was given in Chrétien’s sources, the oral versions of the story contemptuously rejected in his prologue as the “shredded and corrupted” account given by
“those who make their living telling tales.”99 With the intervention of this author—thus
his unparalleled boast—there begins a new historia:
Des ors comencerai l’estoire,
Que toz jors mais iert en memoire
Tant con durra crestïentez.
De ce s’est Crestïens vantez.100
(And now I will begin the story that will remain forever in memory so long as Christianity
endures. This proud claim Christian has made.)
Is this merely a better story, more high-brow, no tall tale to fetch a meal? Or does it claim
to be a new Christian narrative, to renew Christian narrative? What project—assuming my
suggestion is correct—would be more deserving of this claim? Wolfram von Eschenbach,
the German “adaptor” and continuator of Chrétien’s last romance, Le Conte du Graal, is given
to boasts similar both in tenor and content and, as we shall see, leaves no doubt that the
claim they stake is serious, indeed.
With his “translation” of Psalm 44, the Eructavit poet has explicitly realized the
sacred dimension of this new reading model by presenting one of its arch-texts as a
poem in which exegesis is performed through narrative and women’s instruction
becomes romans. In so doing, he reveals for us with a backward glance, as it were,
where “the problem of the woman reader”—one should better speak of an epochmaking opportunity—opens onto the problem of truth in fiction. The constitution of
98 The idea that Enide’s service and suffering alongside Erec might be read as a transposition of
Mary’s alongside Christ finds, in fact, ample suggestion in the text—suggestions that become still
more explicit in Hartmann von Aue’s Erec. The attempt to resolve the analogy in an interpretation of
Erec’s path through aventure as imitatio Christi, however, proves unsatisfactory—as do all readings
that fail to place polysemic play at the centre of the experience of the text: cf. for example, Tobler,
“Ancilla Domini.”
99 Cf. Erec et Enide, lines 20–22.
100 Erec et Enide, lines 24–26.
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meaning through the experience of the text as process is the idea around which the
thesis of the twelfth century’s “discovery of an aesthetic of fiction,” or “fictionality,” has
been advanced, most influentially by Walter Haug.101 But what appears from our point
of view as a radical new beginning emerges from the contours drawn here, in its own
time, as the development of the idea of narrative actualization of truth as a “reading”
of the arch-text, a renewed experience of la letre that occurs through identification in
performance. More important, however, than the dispute over the innovative quality of
the “discovery” is the difficulty in accounting for a claim to truth—what must, by the
poets’ own acknowledgement, be a sacred truth—in view of what Haug evokes as a new
“literary autonomy,” a “liberation from all subservience to theology, philosophy, and
ethics, as well as political interests.”102 We have just brushed up against one solution
to this problem, one that points to the same identification with the woman-as-reader
with which the present journey through the landscape of medieval concepts of gender
and use of media began. This solution would reveal Haug’s idea of literary autonomy
as, in the medieval understanding, both programmatic—how else make “a new historia
that will endure to the end of time?”—and exaggerated. Achieved is an autonomy from
lettered and learning-based models of the mediation of sacred truth—but not from this
truth itself. Chrétien’s statement illustrates a claim to deliver better, to deliver an experience, no less, in which the truth reveals itself, rather than an argumentum or allegoria in
which it is concealed. An experience that partakes, somehow, of one that Mary had, one
time for all; the experience that David and his courtly adaptor orchestrate through the
simultaneity of their performances, that of identification achieved between the audience
and the bride of the Word.
101 Argued extensively in LDMA (1985), reiterated under consideration of the ensuing scholarly
debate in the second, revised edition of 1992 and continued in a variety of more recent essays,
many of which are collected in Haug, Wahrheit der Fiktion; see therein esp. “Autorität,” pp. 115–27;
and “Entdeckung,” pp. 128–44; also Haug, “Poetologie”; and Haug, “Mündlichkeit.”
102 “Poetologie,” 70: see also note 6, above.
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Chapter 6
EGO DILECTO MEO ET DILECTUS MEUS MIHI
(CANTICLES 6:2): MARY’S READING AND THE
EPIPHANY OF EMPATHY
WE ARE ON the edge of a discovery: what began as an inquiry into the historical value
of references to women as patrons of new vernacular literature has led instead to a conception of truth in the experience of text that is equally the object of and authority for
the vernacularization of scripture and the inscription of vernacular tales. The “history”
of the Word is suddenly of one stuff with stories of heroic adventure cast and performed
as if in “our world,” of our experience. Sacred and secular reading have conjoined in a
movement that proceeds equally from the opposite poles of Scripturae and cantilenas,
and this conjunction is revealed in the woman as bride and reader, mirror of suffering in
love and audience of text in performance.
This discussion only seems to have strayed far beyond the bounds of Benoît’s project.
His riddle, the trap that suspends his audience between the poles of the “contradictory
abstracted double” of woman as body, Eve and Mary, remains intrinsically relevant. Nor
should it be forgotten that his project is a romans, a vernacular recasting of crucial events
from a collective past, history conceived of as collective memoria. No less a romans, in its
author’s parting words, is the text that concerns us next, a so-called “commentary” on
the Song of Songs written near the end of the twelfth century by one Landri of Waben.
Our literary vocabulary fails here. The text actualizes the reading experience of the bride
for a courtly audience, it brings about a remanifestation of the “historical” dimension of
the biblical text in the audience’s present—just as did the Eructavit. Both texts engage in
commentary, as they also engage in paraphrase, but they are thereby no more accurately
described than a romance is adequately described by the various techniques that make
up its narration. The problem is here: all three texts, the examples of courtly exegesis
and the courtly history, are romans, they pour a reading experience from one mould
into another, from the Latin-mediated textual community of the monastery or cathedral
school to the vernacular-mediated and equally textual community of the aristocratic
courts. This is their genre distinction, what makes them coherent and distinct elements
of the medieval world of reading.1 As Friedrich Ohly wrote, with Landri’s romans, “the
exegesis of Canticles stepped for the first time into a new world … We find it uprooted
from the theological schools and the monasteries and transplanted to the courtly garden
of a dukedom.”2 Romans describes cultural appropriation accomplished as a new reading
1 The debate over the meaning of romans in the twelfth century, that is, whether it is still strictly
linguistic or rather was already associated with new narrative genres, and thus secondarily with
narrative invention, is thus, in my view, committed to anachronous distinctions.
2 Ohly, Hohelied-Studien, p. 280.
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experience. The genre’s various representatives—narrative or exegetical, historical,
or fabulous—approach this common ground from different directions rather than
departing from an existing norm in new, divergent directions. This last idea is verified
with singular clarity in an account of the genesis of Landri’s text found in Lambert of
Ardres’s Latin History of the Counts of Guines and the Lords of Ardres, to which we will
turn later in this chapter.
Benoît’s romans of ancient history and Landri’s of monastic lectio display surprising complicity in overall objective and the way this is communicated and made
accessible to the audience. The story of Troy’s fall is the story of a world that collapsed
as the result of a woman’s desire or desirability. Rather than telling Helen’s story,
however, Benoît interpolates one of another Eve, Briseida, a story whose outcome
and message—the narrator’s claims to the contrary notwithstanding—must first be
discovered as narrative experience, as the revelation of truth in the abject body. The
story effects the redemption of Eve and even of Helen herself but can do so only through
the woman’s painful recognition of her own weakness: to love is her nature and her
excellence as it is her fall. The romance bends the ancient tale of pagan warfare and
revenge into a succession of narrative realizations of the widowed bride, in effect anticipating a model of Christian reading avant la lettre, or allowing its audience to re-read
ancient history through a lens borrowed from the experience of the reading bride. The
effect is to recuperate that history and its figures for a Christian world-view, which
amounts to a revaluation of human history such that it mirrors and participates in God’s
plan for human salvation.
Landri’s text, on the other hand, fuses the images of the Song of Songs and their
explication into a continuous dramatic narrative staged for several voices. The prophetic images of God’s plan for the union of humaine et divine nature are recast as
historia, the staging of truth in and through human experience. The human protagonist
is the fallen bride, the sponsa derelicta who, like Eve before her, seeks to regain a lost
state of union, the kiss of Canticles 1:1. The text is a process that continuously renews
the redemption of Eve; that is, to read this text is to experience the reversal of the fallen
body and the possibility of its renewed elevation to join with the divine as this occurred
once and for all time in the Incarnation, but will recur in Landri’s text as befits the
widowed bride, through communion in the “blackened” flesh of the Passion, the experience of compassio.
What Benoît’s romance effects upon pagan history differs from Landri’s reshaping
of reading through the fallen bride not in nature but only in kind: what the one
effects as the renewal of a sacred love story the other undertakes as the recuperation of a mythical past; each is a romans, even as in each the new reading experience is conceived for puceles, that is, for a vernacular, lay audience. Accordingly, each
announces this fact through a riddle on the identity of the elusively present, singularly
significant woman-as-reader. And each aims at the same end: the realization of truth
in the body as an epiphany of empathy accomplished through woman as the suffering
body of love. This woman-as-reader is to be able to speak the words of Canticles, Ego
dilecto meo et dilectus meus mihi (Canticles 6:2), as an expression of union in shared
human pain.
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Espeuse and Damoisele: the Song of Songs en romans
Landri’s adaptation of the Song of Songs has two outstanding features, one of which
has been repeatedly recognized as such, although its significance is somewhat disputed.
The other has sooner bred confusion. The first is the author’s expansion of the scriptural text into dramatic dialogue, a kind of commentary that is cast in large part as the
textual voices elaborating—as we heard Christ and Mary do in Rupert’s commentary—
on their own experience as the reconstitution of a narrative context. The second is that
the poet appears to state that his text is written at the behest of an anonymous lady;
the same statement would imply that he is her spiritual adviser or religious instructor,
yet also remove her to the highest reaches of power. Dramatic re-presentation of scripture and a woman who presides over its performance: these are the same pillars that
sustain translation from lectio to performance, women’s instruction to romans, in the
Eructavit. There, too, the bride has several identities, among them one grounded in the
audience’s historical reality, Marie de Champagne. In Landri’s poem, neither the bride
nor his dame are given proper names, and indeed, this is possibly because the poem was
in this case known to have a male patron, Count Baldwin II of Guines; the bride and the
lady, “cele por cui jo travail,”3 cannot so easily assimilate his identity to their own. Put
differently, Baldwin cannot so easily assume a role in the dramatis personae of this poem
as Marie could in the romans of Psalm 44. Landri’s “patroness,” moreover, like Benoît’s,
is only evoked once the poem is well under way; she emerges as the result of a performance in progress. It is thus highly likely that the poem’s two outstanding features are
interrelated; that is, that the poet’s address to his dame is itself part of and to be understood through the mise-en-scène of the Song of Songs.
The definition of roles and distinction between their voices is the first concern the
author puts forward, once he has introduced his audience to the matere, or content, of
this biblical saint livre, “which is entirely made of love” (1–32, cf. 7). The lead role is
held by the espeuse or amie, the bride, who speaks nearly a third of the entire text and
two-thirds of all that is not left to the poet-narrator. This bride is given two identities, if
not names, as holy church and the devout soul (27–28). The narrator then turns to his
audience with an address that acknowledges both the novelty and the difficulty of the
approach:4
Or aiez bon antendement:
Quant vos orrez diversement
Parler ceste sainte escriture,
3 Landri of Waben, Song of Songs, line 2367. The text is cited, with corrections, from Pickford’s edition,
which remains the only one available, despite the unanimously devastating appraisal of its quality by
scholarly reviewers. As there is only one extant manuscript, I have been able to remedy this problem
for my purposes by first consulting the extensive lists of corrections offered in the reviews and then
comparing them myself with a microfilm of the manuscript. Translations are my own. On the edition,
see Hunt, “O.F. Commentary,” 267–80, esp. 278 (where the reviews are also listed); reviews I consulted
for corrections to the text are listed with the edition in the list of works cited.
4 There is thus little point in arguing that the dramatic presentation merely reflects sermon technique, as does Hunt, “O.F. Commentary,” 274–78.
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Por cho ne vos soit pas oscure,
Ne soit de ço nuls esmariz.
(43–47)
(Now be sure to listen carefully:
When you hear in diverse voices
This holy scripture speak,
Let it not therefore be obscure to you,
Nor anyone be troubled by this.)
The poem is thus announced as a dramatic presentation of holy scripture, and
throughout its “first book” (lines 1–1446, somewhat less than half of the poem), the
unidentified narrator who makes this announcement remains just that. No authorial
“I” is allowed a voice, still less an identity, either in the prologue’s exposition or in the
text.5 The narrator’s interjections generally supply necessary context, accomplishing
transition from one exchange to the next, addressing his audience with explanatory
remarks on the action—and at times with instructive indications as to how to understand the speakers. These last can expand into a rudimentary form of commentary, but
this is experienced as the voice of a narrator who presents the dramatic action to the
public, directs their attention, orchestrates their absorption into, and reflective distance
from, what is seen and heard. He is more a puppeteer than an exegete, a performer who
exploits a special space between audience and action—the mediator of a romans. In fact,
he is as much a player as the other voices cited, takes on multiple roles (author, narrator,
exegete, instructor and lover), and at times assimilates his own voice to those of bride
and bridegroom.
Landri’s exposition introduces the story on two levels, corresponding to the two
identities of the bride and referred to as the meaning according to allegorie and moralité,
respectively (113–20). The first is the story as it has already once been completed. This
bride enters as Eve, though named only as la damoisele (35), laments the loss of her
beloved through the eating of the apple, sun ultrage (36, see also 87–92), and longs for
the kiss that would reconcile her with him. Her lament can serve as an example of the
emotional immediacy the poet achieves with his dramatic elaboration of the words of
the biblical text:
Repairs a moi, viengne e me baist,
Por Deu sen maltalent abaist!
Port moi le baisier de sa boche,
C’est ço ki plus al cuer m’atoche!
Ja mais n’avrai ne bien ne aise,
Se ses baisiers ne me rapaise!
(75–78)
5 An unobtrusive exception occurs at lines 699–700: “Cele respont—si com jo pense / al paroles
nient al sens.”
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Mary’s readIng and the ePIPhany of eMPathy
233
(May he return to me, come and kiss me, and put off his ill humour for God’s sake! Bring
me the kiss of his mouth [Canticles 1:1], that is what my heart most dearly desires! Never
more will I be at ease, unless his kiss bring me peace!)
This desire was fulfilled in the Annunciation to Mary (cf. 89–98), when God “came to
reclaim his bride, and bestowed the kiss that had been so ardently desired” (cf. 97–100).
In this kiss “divers cuers” (differing hearts) and two bodies were joined, “Si s’asemblerent
sens desjoindre / Deus natures: humanitez / L’une, l’autre fu divinitez” (110–12). From
this perspective of salvation history, then, the damoisele is, properly speaking, Eve’s
daughter, holy church.
Thus concludes the first account of this text, its “sentence premeraine” (113). At this
point the narrator introduces the meaning according to moralité, in which “there is more
sweetness and devotion” (118). “Al cuer touche plus dolcement / Cho ke chascons de
soi entent” (That which each understands as pertaining to himself touches the heart
more sweetly) (119–20). This “new meaning” begins exactly as the other did: the bride
is introduced in the midst of her lament, which repeats in large part the first one, but
this time with no mention of a sin or fall. She is likewise tormented, but her torment
arises from languishing in love (languir d’amour, cf. Canticles 5:8); her dilemma is that
love will not let her remain silent, whereas she hardly dares speak for fear she will displease. The motivation for this shame is identified only vaguely as “si mal,” her faults or
unworthiness (125). The tension between speech and silence in the loving heart, which
might seem a first feature of courtly cultural adaptation, becomes a leitmotif of the poem
and is bound up with its inner meaning. Here, as in what follows, amor vincit omnia and
compels her to make the same daring plea: “May he come, my sweet, and kiss me, and
with one kiss put my soul at peace” (cf. 147–48). The main difference between this presentation and that of the first bride is that the bride herself, not the narrator, elaborates
on what the kiss means: “Sa presence me doinst sentir, / Cho est le baisiers ko jo desir. /
A soi me joigne par esperit” (That he let me feel his presence / This is the kiss that
I desire. / That he join me to him in spirit) (149–52). The fulfilment of the kiss is now
projected into the future and follows from fidelity in loving and serving God. She who
fulfils this charge, as this bride has “found it written, is one spirit with him,” un esperiz est
avec lui (157–58). The objective of this reading of the Song of Songs, then, is for this bride
to regain a feeling of the presence of the Word, of oneness with Christ.6
Neither bride offers a suitable presentation of “her” meaning of the text, the allegorical or tropological senses; rather, each serves as the focal point of a narrative that
dramatizes an understanding of the prophetic text, the first as it occurred once, in history and the second as it occurs now, “in our lives.” Beyond the opening exposition, both
the exegetical terminology and the distinction between two meanings recede entirely
into the background. Eve’s story is not presented as another level of meaning but is
nevertheless ever-present, because this story is simply a repetition of that one or an
attempt to relive its meaning, an experience of the union, separation and reunion of
humaine e divine nature. Such reunion occurs as moments of identification between the
6 Similarly, Ruh, Frauenmystik, pp. 58–60.
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original sentence, Eve’s and Mary’s story, and that of the bride who instructs this audience. Recurrent references to and recapitulations of the capital events, the Incarnation
and the Passion, accompany and punctuate the text, for these are the windows through
which the new bride will experience the kiss of reunion, the events that open onto a
revelation of the divine in the human. The identities of Eve and Mary as the original
brides thus always loom behind the text and its present characters.
Reading and performance, prophetic image and narrative realization, the Word and
its (present) fulfilment in the life of the bride: all are combined here as they were in the
Eructavit, with the positions shifted as appropriate to the biblical text and the voices it
reveals. What these two romans finally show is that the act of adapting la letre to the
venue and audience of vernacular poetry, en romans traire, is one of narrative expansion
that renders truth as an experience grasped in performance. This experience operates
both through identification with a protagonist (David/bride) and through the text as
process; that is, the protagonist in the text is not only a figure in a narrative, but also a
figure of how narrative is read, how the audience reads in the body—the way I suggested
earlier that we should read Enide. These brides are vernacular translations of the reading
life of the sponsa derelicta. The later emergence of poet-exegete and then dame in the
text, presented as the very communication that renders it as a present performance, are,
as we shall see, a demonstration of this renewal of scripture as experience; their emergence into speech shows the power of the text in action as it applies to different readers.
Beyond the first book extensive stretches of the text are spoken by an exegete to the
audience, and he frequently announces his interventions as such. This exegete at times
consults other livres or feuills to interpret what the speakers say, but he also presents his
commentary as his own experience of the saint livre.7 “Jo vos dirai cho ke j’en sent” (I will
tell you what my feeling is about this) (1501), is the way he announces his first intervention in book 2; he also claims God’s inspiration for the same: “Cil ki tot seit, Deus, m’I
ensent” (He who knows all, God, instructs me) (1502).8 The intervention of the exegete
or instructor does not mean that the original dramatic conception has been abandoned
or displaced. Something quite different occurs, something that was significant enough
to divide the poem into two parts and bring an author and exegete to step forward and
speak in his own voice.
The transition from the first to the second book rather remarkably interrupts a crucial address by the bride, which then continues in the second book; that is, the transition does not correspond to a division in the biblical text but rather interrupts the
treatment of one of its parts, the description of the bed and litter of Solomon (Canticles
3:7–10).9 This is because the event it announces is the “awakening” of the exegete out of
7 Ohly, Hohelied-Studien, pp. 290–91.
8 Ensent could also be read as a subjunctive (as proposed by Hasenohr, Rev. of Pickford, 292; see
note 3, above), which would see the poet requesting divine inspiration rather than claiming to
receive it. In view of the way this authorial emergence is staged, I think the indicative reading is
justified. See also lines 1438–39, 1799–800, 2362–64, 3159–60.
9 Hunt’s conjecture—that this division corresponds to the end of Bernard’s commentary and the
beginning of Geoffrey’s continuation—is of little help: Bernard’s sermons conclude with Canticles
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235
the “sleep” of the bride: she reports her own experience of the biblical text at this point
as a vision received in sleep, while she was “gone to the world, rapt in God,” and now
reported to her “followers,” the puceles, once she awakes (1323–26).10 The vision, which
appears not to derive from previous commentary, shows the bride Solomon’s palace.11
The author/exegete emerges seamlessly from between the lines of the bride’s account
with the words, “Volez ore ke je vos die / Kel preu cho fait a nostre vie?” (Shall I tell you
now / What boon this brings to our lives?) (1357–58). From this point on, a new communication between this exegete and his audience occupies the stage side by side with the
dramatic exposition.
The division between the two books, which occurs slightly later, constitutes the formal
introduction of this communication. The new jo identifies itself as one “in the school of
love” (1443) and requests permission to speak: “Deu le soverain pere / Parler me doinst
a son plaisir, / O se che non del tot taisir” (God the sovereign father grant that I speak to
his pleasure, or, if not, that I remain entirely silent) (1438–40). But silence is no more
an option for him than it was for the bride, as it is love that spurs him on to “enter the
second book” (cf. 1445–46). Book 2 then begins with the explanation that love cannot be
held in any prison; once it has progressed so far as to burn the heart, it will not be silent,
it must be made known, whether in speech or actions—as evidenced in abundance “par
les paroles de cest livre” (by the words of this book) (1447–54). The drama resumes
with the words, “L’Espeuse ne s’i puet taisir, / E ne.l fait pas por mielz plaisir; / Mais
grant amor ki son cuer art / Le torne tot de se part” (The bride cannot keep silent, and
she does not speak merely to please; rather the great love that burns her heart turns her
entirely to its purpose) (1455–58).
The text has staged the emergence of an authorial communication through an
experience of loving identification with the bride. The entire passage is introduced
when the bride announces she will ensure that holy church will embrace the beloved
just as she has; to this purpose the bride-protagonist prepares “a beautiful bed in [the]
heart” of the reader-as-bride.12 In fact it is the author-exegete who, awakening as the
reading bride, now knows something of the experience of love that the bride has thus far
related; his voice thus takes its place alongside the others of the biblical text and with
an authority like theirs. In the text as it progresses, the same voice is frequently indistinguishable from the bride’s; it also displays a special complicity with her, occasionally
addressing her directly in the second person familiar. The exegete shares in the love of
the “damoisele”—and thus in her vision and authority to expound on the matere de cest
saint livre, love.
3:1—some 260 lines earlier in Landri’s text—as Hunt concedes. See idem, “O.F. Commentary,” 271,
274 and 289.
10 The exegete himself will refer to the account as a vision: “Ne cuidés pas k’en vision / Aviengne
riens se por nos non” (1357–58).
11 Hunt, “O.F. Commentary,” 289; Ohly, Hohelied-Studien, pp. 293–95.
12 “S’ele bien vuelt, n’i faldra mie: / Pose a k’il l’apele s’amie. / Tant ferai jo k’ele l’avra, / E en son
cuer le guardera. / La li ferai un molt bel lit, / Molt precios e molt eslit. / Ja nel laira, s’ele m’en croit, /
Ainz le tenra molt bien estroit” (1225–32).
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This emergence of the exegete in the text is strongly reminiscent of Rupert’s exegetical awakening and the way it transformed not only his text but also exegesis itself.
In Rupert’s treatment the crucial point of conjunction between his experience and the
bride’s occurred at the opening verses of the fifth chapter of Canticles, where the halfwaking vision of a young woman allowed his experience to become the double of Mary’s
and thus take the place of hers in Rupert’s text as the historical dimension of the biblical
images. The same juncture of the biblical text is the site, in Landri’s work, of a second
lengthy passage (to be examined later) in which the bride relates her experience for
her audience, the puceles, to follow, this time called an aventure.13 Experience has equal
authority in either text; it can reveal truth whether “inside” or “outside” scripture, that
is, this experience can occur in sacred history or in our history. Increasingly in this text
the exposition works to put forward human experience, as known by the bride, as a
double of the divine meaning of the text and as revelatory of that meaning.14 When
the exegete steps forward to introduce a meaning “in our lives,” he initiates a process
through which the communication experienced by the audience is included in and fuses
with that between bride and bridegroom, in which it is equally engaged in revealing the
truth of the biblical text.
All the more significant, then, is the emergence of a relationship between poetexegete and “Lady” that completes a parallel between the “original” (divine) communication of the text and its recommunication in the (human) present. Most
immediately revealing is the manner and place in which the poet steps forward to
pay his respects:
Ceste nostre exposicions
Que nos de ces deus venz faisons
Solonc le sens que Dex nos done,
Plairoit a une altre persone.
Mais cele por qui jo travail,
Quar tot est suen, se jo rien vail,
Certes most s’esmerveilleroit
S’ele altre chose n’en öoit,
Quar jo li ai maintes foiz dit
Qu’aster signe Saint Esperit.
Cist sens li plaist, cestui atent,
Cist li savroit plus dolcement.
E quant jo sai le sien plaisir,
Jo ne m’en puis mie taisir,
Quar faire vueil qu’ele por moi
Prie son ami, li Sovrain Roi.
(2363–79)
13 Discussed below, pp. 247–50.
14 Particularly emphasized by Ohly, Hohelied-Studien, pp. 295–302, esp. 298–99, who saw the text
as daringly innovative in this regard, possibly even heretical (Ohly, Hohelied-Studien, p. 300).
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237
(This exposition of ours
That we make of these two winds
According to the meaning that God gives us,
Might please another person.
But she in whose service I labour—
For all is hers, if I’m worth a jot—
Would surely be much surprised
If she did not hear something else thereof,
For I’ve told her myself often enough
That the South Wind announces the Holy Spirit.
She likes this meaning, it’s what she expects,
Its savour to her is the sweeter.
And when I know her pleasure,
I cannot help but speak accordingly,
For I wish her to speak on my behalf
To her beloved, the sovereign king.)
Once again, the author thematizes speech and silence, thus echoing his earlier emergence into the text. This echo accounts for the judgment that the passage at hand
contains hidden homage of “courtly” love to the poet’s patron, but there is no mention of
the “school of love” or the poet’s burning heart here.15 The same idea already confuses
the supposed patron with the bride of the earlier passage and a love supposed to exist
outside the text with one experienced inside it. The confusion is difficult to avoid. In fact,
it is the very point of the newly introduced relationship, as the last line above already
suggests: this woman and the bride are intimate with the same beloved.16
The parallels with Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s apology are notable. The poet’s confidant is the powerful amie (queen?) of a powerful king; this woman’s displeasure over
a preceding statement is the scandalon that forces the poet to explain himself in a
direct address; he acknowledges that she would much prefer a different tune. She thus
takes a position as the ultimate judge of his work, a position that places her among its
audience—whether or not she is physically present. But most importantly, despite the
implication, here quite marked, that she might be understood as the patron, neither poet
names his all-important dame; that she finds mention at all appears an accidental consequence of the poet’s position between two audiences, one with a general interest in the
text, the other especially, even intimately implicated in its composition.
15 For example, Ohly, Hohelied-Studien, pp. 282–83.
16 At line 2378, the manuscript reads “Prist son ami,” which yields little sense; both Hunt and
Hasenohr, Rev. of Pickford (see note 3, above), correct it as given here. A similar doubling of identities troubles reading of the epilogue in the only other mention the poet makes of this relationship.
Verses 3497–500 can only be resolved, as I see it, by taking their seeming contradiction as the
overlay of two relationships: on the one hand the poet “presents” his lady (his charge as instructor)
to God, on the other, no doubt as Mary, she is to plead with God for him. Thus once again identity is
circumscribed with a riddle.
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In both cases, the remarks are a riddle teasing audience participation in their conceit.
This is where the differences between the two become of interest: missing in Landri’s
address is the contrast drawn between this woman and one in the narrative itself and
thus the opposition between Mary and Eve; instead of enumerating “his lady’s” praises,
then, the poet remarks obscurely on the content of his conversations with her, further
defining their relationship. In Benoît’s riddle, it is above all the terms of the contrast
that point to the lady as Mary; in Landri’s, identity is invested in a contrast between two
readings of one passage of the Song of Songs.
The two contrasted readings—in the preceding passage, the poet identifies the south
wind with prosperity and the north wind with adversity; in the apology to his dame he
refers to a reading that sees them as the Holy Spirit and the Devil, respectively—are not
treated in the commentary tradition as either competing or contrasting but sooner complementary. They occur alternately within the same texts, notably in the poet’s preferred
source, Geoffrey of Auxerre, but also in earlier commentaries, among them the Expositio
in Cantica Canticorum of Honorius Augustodunensis.17 The question, then, is rather one
of the significance of the lady’s preference. “Who is she,” the audience is led to ask, “for
whom this distinction should be of such importance?” Quae est ista? And the riddle’s
solution is found—at least for us—in Honorius’s first commentary on the Song of Songs,
not the Expositio, but the Sigillum beatae Mariae.
The Sigillum was written as an explanation of the verses within the Song of Songs that
had become a fixed part of the Assumption liturgy. Its project is announced as revealing
how these verses could apply specialiter to Mary’s life, when they also apply generaliter
to the church.18 On the “South Wind,” then, Honorius has something else, or something
more, to relate than in his later Expositio. In words originally spoken by God and reported
by “Christ of his mother,” the text defines the north wind as the Devil, “who shall have no
part in you,” and the south wind as “the Holy Spirit, who shall possess you as my garden.
‘And its spices shall flow,’ that is, through you shall my only Son become flesh.” The next
verses of the biblical text, beginning “Veniat dilectus meus” (Canticles 5:1), are treated as
“the words of the Virgin, desiring Christ to enter her.”19 In a Marian understanding, then,
the Holy Spirit blowing through the garden is the prophetic image of Mary’s conception
of the Word. This is not a different or competing meaning, but rather one that manifests
the biblical text as a single, historical event, to which one “lady” in particular especially
holds—for it is (and was) her experience.
17 Geoffrey of Auxerre, Expositio in Cantica Canticorum, p. 349, lines 15–17, and p. 268, lines 19–
20; Honorius Augustodunensis, Expositio, 429C–430A. Other corroborating readings are given in
Hunt, “O.F. Commentary,” 292. For a detailed overview of the commentary tradition see Ohly, commentary to Trudperter Hohelied, pp. 895–910.
18 On the importance of the Marian reading as Honorius treats it, see Fulton, “Mimetic Devotion,”
102; and JP, pp. 247–88.
19 Honorius Augustodunensis, Sigillum beatae Mariae, 508A–B. Rupert of Deutz reads the bride’s
“veniat” and the bridegroom’s “veni” (Canticles 5:1) in the same way as Honorius does, but does
not explicitly identify the blowing of the south wind with the Spirit’s descent into Mary’s womb
(CCC, 4, pp. 93–95).
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239
“Ecce in medio nuptiarum sumus” (We are now in the midst of the nuptials).20 Thus
Rupert opened the fourth book of his De incarnatione Domini, which had arrived at this
same passage, crucial in his treatment, describing the bride as the garden enclosed,
the hortus conclusus (Canticles 4:12–16). The biblical text at this point reaches the culmination of the bridegroom’s praise of the bride, which will lead, as both Rupert and
Honorius saw it, to their union in Mary’s conception through the Spirit. At this stage
of Landri’s text, in the midst of book 2, the passages spoken by the biblical voices are
generally introduced as such and thus made discreet from the commentator’s elaboration on them. This procedure continues through most of the bridegroom’s praise
of the bride (Canticles 4:1–10; lines 1715–2282), but at its culmination in Canticles
4:11–16, all distinction between the voice of the bridegroom and that of the exegete
disappears, and the audience hears instead one lyric voice in loving praise of the bride
(lines 2283–356). The poet, in effect, borrows the voice of the biblical text to praise a
female addressee as yet unannounced. This vocal harmony concludes when the poet
is obliged to acknowledge that his lady requires a reading of the Spirit in the garden
specialiter, according to her experience, thus also acknowledging her presence as his
“special” addressee.
The poet-exegete in Landri’s text has staged the emergence of his dame much as
he previously staged his own: his experience there was the mirror of the bride’s on
Solomon’s bed; it was “awakened” by hers to speak and thus remanifests in the here and
now the love she felt there and then. Here, in “the golden hour,”21 the address to the bride
is suddenly acknowledged as one made to a lady here and now—an address made in
the voice of the bridegroom about to descend into his garden, the womb of the motherbride. The voice that is made flesh in a woman’s reception of the Word is identified with
the poet’s speech to his lady; indeed, this voice causes their relationship to take shape in
the text. In this moment, then—in a rhetorical gesture that, as in other texts, doubles as
a colophon—the text has accomplished the identification of audience and the sponsa et
mater, of poetic voice and the voice of the Spirit, that is the objective of women’s lectio
and reading as Mary did.
Quae est ista? The lady’s identity is a mystery and a riddle because her very significance depends on its multiplicity; the riddle is meant to initiate reflection on the
different possible meanings of the scriptural image for differing manifestations of its
“female” audience. Benoît’s version, cast in terms of the distance from Eve to Mary, best
suits his project as the recuperation of pagan history for a Christian present. Landri’s
version points to the origins of the multiple identities of the bride in exegesis itself. His
dame represents a reading as historia, one of special importance to a specific woman
who is here, among us—and also as far removed as the queen of Heaven. This woman is
my patron, the poet says—“because, after all, everything is hers, if I’m worth a jot” (cf.
3678). That is: if I have anything to say to you, it is because she gave it to me; without her,
20 CCC, 4, p. 85.
21 “Quant bise cesse e auster vente, / E la dolce ore se presente (2395–96). The translation, which
assumes a pun on “gold” and “hour,” is Ohly’s, Hohelied-Studien, p. 283.
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the text could not be “ours.”22 This lady brings both poet and audience into the presence
of the Word as personal experience. Her specificity, her “historicity,” we might say, makes
her experience of the text a “real” one, and this is why she and Mary appear to be one.
Through her, the two experiences of the text, the one historical in time, the other historia
as renewed experience of la letre, are collapsed into one. “Cele por cui jo travail” is then
no conceit, no mere “patroness,” no ploy to curry favour with a woman or women. She
is the clef-de-voûte of this textual architecture, the point at which all arcs of meaning
meet. This is her role as well within the same architecture in other texts; Landri’s Song
of Songs, however, shows us the construction returned to the text that is the original
authority for the reading path it describes.
Landri’s romans delivers the Song of Songs as the song of two voices longing to
be joined, and the event that is announced as its objective, the kiss between divinity
and humanity, is accomplished when the song of a woman’s suffering for love elevates
human experience and human weakness to the point where the audience can know what
Mary knew. The primary focus of this knowing shifts, however, from Mary’s conception
of the Word to her perfect compassio at the cross, God’s descent into the pain of human
flesh. The divine and the human approach each other equally, each in the attempt to
know the other’s pain. As conduit and enabler of this experience, Mary is the image of a
possibility of human empathy in which physical individuation is overcome and the bride
can say to the bridegroom, “I am you,” or, in the words of the biblical text, “Ego dilecto
meo et dilectus meus mihi” (I am to my beloved as my beloved is to me) (Canticles 6:2).
This experience is not simply that of union in compassion with the suffering Christ but
also, and primarily, a realization of human pain and compassion as a mirror of the divine.
For this reason, it too depends essentially on identification with the woman as spectator
and audience. She collapses the distance between the human and the divine even as
she allows sacred history to become human history—and, finally, for this is where our
argument aims—allows an estoire that reproduces a similar experience of empathy to
partake of the same epiphany, an experience of truth in stories of human suffering, or
“fiction.” But before we follow through on this idea as it is articulated in Landri’s text,
let us see how his fellow at the court of Guines, Lambert of Ardres, represents the same
literary developments in a larger context.
Lambert of Ardres, the Counts of Guines, and the Mutations
of Lay Literary Identity
Not to apprehend the riddle on the woman-as-audience as such is clearly to miss an
opportunity. In the scant scholarship on Landri’s case it has meant a double loss: the
idea that the poet’s “Lady” is his patron or at least a historical personage who inspires
his writing has obscured the value of a rare witness to the genesis and nature of the
text. In his History of the Counts of Guines and the Lords of Ardres, Lambert of Ardres
22 The formula “Quar tot est suen,” applied to the lady in this line is another nod to her divine
status. At line 2484, the bride makes a similar statement of her dependence on God: “Or face tot,
quar tot est sien.” Elsewhere, Mary is referred to as “Ki de totes est damoisele” (line 2876).
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leaves no doubt that “Landericus de Wabbanio” wrote his “translation” of the Song of
Songs at the behest and for the personal edification of a prolific male patron, Baldwin
II of Guines.23 Such a text was almost certainly an unicum, not only one of a kind but
quite likely the first of its kind anywhere in Western Christendom. Nowhere else, so far
as we know, had anyone undertaken to make the monastic reading experience of the
Song of Songs into a romans for a secular court, and when word got out in the Picard
region just south of Flemish-speaking Guines that someone had, the Cistercian General
Chapter of 1200 ordered that it, in particular, be burned, “and any other such books
along with it.”24 Lambert, as we shall see, is in full agreement on the capital significance
of this particular romans, and the text found in MS Le Mans 173 concludes with a gesture
perhaps intended to temper the scandal: “Mais tant requier que cist romanz / Unques
ne viengne en main d’enfant” (But I stipulate that this romans should never be given
into a child’s hands) (3505–6). And yet, solely on the basis of Landri’s riddling nod to
a lady “for whom I labour,” some scholars would have us believe that, at the same time
and in the same region, a second (female) patron and another author ventured the same
thing—rather than, that is, entertain the idea that Baldwin might lurk behind the poet’s
dame.25 The greater loss, however, may lie in missing the converse opportunity to see in
this supposed contradiction the simple truth, for once, about “the problem of the woman
reader” in the history of vernacular literature: the woman as audience stands in for an
audience-as-woman. Baldwin’s patronage does not stand in contradiction to the dame
who enables and inspires the poet’s work; it is simply the wax into which this seal, the
seal of Mary’s reading, was impressed.
Lambert’s Historia is itself a mise-en-scène of the arrival of vernacular literature.
As such, it yields very little in terms of historical “facts,” but does offer something in
many ways much better: a unique “glimpse into the budding awareness around 1200 of
the way the various elements [Lambert] evokes began to constellate as the image of an
23 Lambert of Ardres, Historia comitum Ghisnensium, 81, p. 598.
24 “Praecipitur abbatibus Ursi campi et Caricampi, ut venientes ad Carolilocum, librum qui
dicitur: Canticum canticorum translatum in romanum [MS J: in vulgari gallico], incendi faciant,
et si quos huiusmodi libros aliquis abbas invenerit in domo sua faciat eos concremari.” Statuta
Capitulorum Generalium, p. 255, par. 34. The location in question is Chaalis, today in the department
of the Oise. Vernacular books became the object of incendiary orders elsewhere at this time as well;
see Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen, pp. 447–48.
25 Pickford, “Introduction,” pp. xxiv–xxv, deemed Landri’s authorship a “possibility rather than a
probability,” because of “the reference … to a Lady for whom the author was working.” Baldinger,
Rev. of Pickford (see note 3, above), reiterated the objection, while Ruh, Frauenmystik, pp. 54–55,
attempted to resolve the “contradiction” by proposing that Baldwin’s wife, Christine, “perhaps
showed more interest in the work than he did”—a suggestion that is chronologically prohibited by
Christine’s death in 1177. The following regard the attribution to Landri as established: Bonnard,
Traductions, pp. 152–62; Curschmann, “Höfische Laienkultur,” pp. 164–66; Ohly, Hohelied-Studien,
pp. 282–83; Ohly first proposed the idea that Landri’s dame should be seen as a “Kunstfigur.”
Curschmann also rebuts the additional objections based on dating raised by Hunt, “O.F. Commentary,”
pp. 271–72, who makes no mention of the issue of Landri’s dame (see also note 38, below).
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epochal turn.”26 Lambert seeks a representation that will “render this radical turn comprehensible, both as such and in its consequences” as he perceived them.27 Under this
lens, nothing is mentioned for its own sake, but rather only “by way of measuring and
testifying to cultural activity.”28 All the more valuable, then, is the testimony given on a
text that we still possess—once this is appropriately evaluated.
The advent of vernacular literature is featured in Lambert’s chronicle as part of
the “praise of princes” that necessarily makes up a large part of its content. He divides
the development into three clearly discernible stages, two of which take shape in two
successive chapters of the history of Count Baldwin, in whose employ Lambert spent
most of his life. The third is reserved for the reign of Baldwin’s son, Arnold II of Guines
(r. 1206–1222). The first stage, entitled De sapientia comitis Baldwini, is entirely devoted
to the “astounding” contradiction between Baldwin’s status, omnino laicus et illitteratus
(in all ways a layman and illiterate) and his achievements in learning: “he was an indescribable man of both wonderful ability and wit, a pupil of every philosophy, and a most
learned son!—although he was, as I have just said, completely ignorant of the arts,”
Baldwin was able to dispute with the best doctors and get the better of them.29 Lambert
makes it explicit that Baldwin’s learning occurs as a result of his clerical instructors’
oral vernacular delivery of Latin texts. He “was a most diligent retainer of what he had
heard,” Lambert writes, and “was more instructed in many things than he needed to be
by the clergy.”30 The content of Baldwin’s learning is given as defined by the scriptures
and their deeper meaning, and its imparting is treated as a marvel that has all the qualities of an illumination: “Since he was no deaf auditor of theological writing, he grasped
and heeded with his attentive hearing the pronouncements of the prophets and not just
the literal meaning of divine histories and evangelical doctrine, but also their mystical
power. … Indeed, he received divine eloquence (divinam eloquium) from them.” It is at
this point that the “matter” of vernacular poetry is introduced: “in exchange [Baldwin]
told and related to them popular trifles (gentilium nenias) that he got from story-tellers
(a fabulatoribus).”31
The precise value of this last, seemingly incongruous gesture becomes apparent in
the second stage of the account, which is the subject of Lambert’s next chapter, Quomodo
translatari fecit multos libros (How he had many books translated).32 Because “he was
26 “Was wir damit an liebgewordenen Gewißheiten punktueller Art verlieren, wird allerdings
mehr als wettgemacht durch den Gewinn an Einsicht in das Bewußtsein, dem [sic!] sich die
herangezogenen Details bereits um 1200 zum Bild einer epochalen Wende zusammenfügen,”
Curschmann, “Höfische Laienkultur,” p. 166.
27 “… diesen Umbruch als solchen und in seinen Konsequenzen verständlich zu machen…, das …
wollte Lambert offensichtlich,” Curschmann, “Höfische Laienkultur,” p. 165.
28 “… als Maßstab und Zeugen kultureller Aktivität,” Curschmann, “Höfische Laienkultur,” p. 165.
29 English translation, unless otherwise indicated, is taken from Lambert of Ardres, History of the
Counts of Guines trans. Shopkow, here 80, p. 113.
30 Counts of Guines, 80, p. 113.
31 Historia comitum Ghisnensium, 80, p. 598; Counts of Guines, p. 113.
32 Historia comitum Ghisnensium, 81, p. 598; Counts of Guines, p. 114.
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not able to retain all knowledge in his heart,” Baldwin begins to commission written
translations into the vernacular.33 This change reflects neither one in his reading abilities nor one in reading practice. Baldwin remains omnino illitteratus; the translations
are rather read to him out loud over and over again: “sepius ante se legere fecit.”34
Rather than listening to an ad-hoc prose translation, however, he now hears a fixed text,
doubtless in verse (as in Landri’s Song of Songs), and can thus memorize rather than
simply “retain.” Eventually this activity expands to include the Sunday Gospel readings
and the appropriate sermons, the life of St Antony, treatises on physics and philosophy
and even the craft of building and architecture. Finally, although their recording is
never made explicit, his library is said to include as well a comprehensive collection
of vernacular literature, from the chansons de geste to courtly romance to the fabliaux
(cantilenas gestoriae, eventuras nobilium, fabulas ignobilium).35
It is unlikely, to say the least, that the Christian equivalent of an Alexandrian library
could be compiled by a minor provincial lord to comprise a literature that had only just
begun to appear in writing during his later lifetime. But Lambert’s appraisal aims elsewhere. It is retrospective and establishes Baldwin as a major force in a development that
had likely not reached anything approaching such proportions until shortly before his
death, if at all within his lifetime. That is, Lambert is projecting the logically constructed
account of an epochal transformation onto the history of the houses of Guines and Ardres.
He shows us that transformation as his patrons preferred to remember it and have it
remembered. The recording of the stuff of vernacular poetry, layman’s entertainment, is
inserted into an account of one lay nobleman’s extraordinary desire for instruction and
learning; in an imperceptible transition, it is assimilated to that same endeavour just as
its texts are listed as part of the same library. Oral tales figure as part and parcel of an
exchange between cleric and nobleman that results in their in-scription; they become
books, and this in itself places them in the same library, so Lambert’s text would have it,
as Augustine and Dionysius the Areopagite. Moreover, this inclusion is seen to result not
from Baldwin’s interest but from that of his clerical instructors!
The vernacularization of exegesis and the inscription of vulgar tales, then, approach
the same centre of interest from different directions. This centre of interest is an interchange of knowledge and poetic forms between clerical and lay culture; its medium
becomes the oral performance of written vernacular texts. And at the point of transition from the ad-hoc interpretation of orally expounding instructors to the creation of
new literary experience inscribed in the vernacular, Lambert gives priority and pride of
place to one text in particular. Thus begins his crucial account of “how Baldwin had many
books translated”:
But because the count avidly embraced all learning and was not able to retain all knowledge of all things in his heart, he commissioned, while the county of Ardres was in his
dominion, the services of the most erudite master, Landri of Waben, to translate the Song
of Songs for him from Latin to French and then read it to him frequently; a translation to
33 Counts of Guines, 81, p. 113.
34 Historia comitum Ghisnensium, 81, p. 598.
35 Historia comitum Ghisnensium, 81, p. 598.
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be made not only according to the letter, but also according to the mystical understanding
of spiritual interpretation, so that he could both understand and taste the mystical power
of the words.36
The passage goes on to mention other texts as named above. By comparison with the
remarks on Landri’s text, however, the other works are little more than items in a list. The
parallel with the description of Baldwin’s wondrous learning in the preceding paragraph
is only too clear: Baldwin “grasped … not just the literal meaning of divine histories … but
also their mystical power. … Indeed he received divine eloquence from them.”37 That is, the
remarks on Landri’s Song of Songs stand as the model of a project and a procedure in which
the others are included; moreover, this particular text is made the keystone within that project. It is featured as the foundation for a new level of experience of the same material, one
shaped around a new form of delivery with a fixed text, which insures that the experience
is the same from one performance to the next—and allows the listener “to taste” in their
full power the words of the Spirit. The impetus for change thus stems, apparently, from an
extension of the use of texts in performance to include and exploit the power of the vernacular and its poetic forms.
What Lambert tells us is doubtless of little chronological value. The circumstances
surrounding the transfer of power in Ardres from Baldwin to his son, Arnold, are complex, such that Lambert’s time frame—Baldwin’s dominion over Ardres—is open to
diverse interpretation, even should it be accurate in itself.38 But the more important
point is this: Landri’s text need no more truly have been the chronological primus in
36 “Sed cum omnem omnium scientiam avidissime amplecteretur et omnem omnium scientiam
corde tenus retinere nequivisset, virum eruditissimum magistrum Landericum de Wabbanio,
dum Ardensis honoris preesset comes dominio, Cantica canticorum non solum ad litteram, sed
ad misticam spiritualis interpretationis intelligentiam de Latino in Romanum, ut eorum misticam
virtutem saperet et intelligeret, transferre sibi et sepius ante se legere fecit.” Historia comium
Ghisnensium, 81, p. 598. The translation is my own; cf. Counts of Guines, p. 114.
37 Counts of Guines, 80, p. 113.
38 This question is in need of further investigation. Baldwin’s dominion over Ardres began in 1176,
but partial rights of rule were conferred on Arnold well before Baldwin’s death in 1206, apparently with great reservation (see Counts of Guines, 92, p. 125). On the date of this probationary
transfer of power, Shopkow is willing to state only that it “seems to have happened sometime
after 1177” (Counts of Guines, p. 231n310); while Bonnard, Traductions, p. 154; and Hunt, “O.F.
Commentary,” p. 271, state conclusively and without explanation that Baldwin ruled Ardres from
1176 to 1181, apparently taking the date of Arnold’s knighting as decisive (if so, this deduction
finds no support in the text). Pickford, and after him Curschmann, “Höfische Laienkultur,” p. 150,
state (likewise without explanation) that Arnold’s rule began in 1187. Based on Lambert’s words
dum Ardensis honoris preesset comes dominio, the date of Landri’s text could fall anywhere between
1176 and 1206, when Arnold fully assumed all his father’s powers. Similarly in need of review is
Hunt’s objection (“O.F. Commentary,” 271–72) that Landri’s text, because it relies on Geoffrey of
Auxerre’s Expositio de cantica canticorum, cannot be dated earlier than about 1200. According to
the Lexikon des Mittelalters, Geoffrey was born between 1114 and 1120; as for his death, we know
only that he was still alive in 1188. But if his commentary was not completed before the mid 1190s,
as Hunt, following Geoffrey’s modern editor, maintains, then he wrote the lengthy work at a very
advanced age.
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Baldwin’s patronage of translations than we need seek a lady at his court to stand in
for Landri’s dame. Both features tell us something, instead, about how the text was
conceived and received. Together, they suggest that the recasting of the bride’s reading
for a courtly audience-as-woman was seen as the key to a new layman’s learning and an
enabling precondition of the phenomenon that follows: the vernacularization of letters
and the in-scription of vulgar entertainments.
What of Lambert’s third stage in the development? The actual emergence of vernacular
literature in its own right and its patronage by the lay nobility he reserved for the next
generation. As Curschmann elucidates, Arnold, who succeeds his father as Count of Guines
on the latter’s death in 1206, is provided with all the trappings and experiences of a new
layman’s chivalric culture (including a youthful romance gone awry, in which he ends up
disgraced and imprisoned as just dessert for pursuit of a wayward beauty). Along with
the texts it produces, this culture ascribes spiritual aspirations and legitimacy to the life of
the miles by way of promulgating its emancipation from clerical caretakership.39 Arnold’s
orally expounding instructors—and such they are, no less than his fathers’ were—are
not only clerics, but also older noblemen whose areas of expertise now divide along the
lines we know from other (literary) sources: the matters of Britain, Rome and France. In
similarly comprehensive fashion to the catalogue of his father’s library, this vernacular
“learning”—veterum eventuras et fabulas et historias, which are made the vehicles of
moralitatis seria—now receives expanded treatment, including, in addition to the general
categories, mention of histories of the crusades and tales of the orient, Tristan and Isolde,
Gormond and Isembard, Merlin, and Solomon and Marcolf.40 That is, the content of Arnold’s
sapientia is now given almost entirely through the “history” of his own kind. The last item in
the list is then a history of the lords of Ardres, “de Ardentium gestis,” a fact that reflects tellingly
on the place of Lambert’s own work, which culminates in Arnold’s reign, although remaining,
unlike the veterum eventuras of which he reports, committed to the Latin language.
With this transition the Lord who rivals the doctores in his illiterate learning (quasi
litteratus) is transformed into one whose “illiterate’s literature” rivals Latin tradition
as a vehicle of knowledge and truth. Taken together with the representation of audience in Landri’s “Song of Songs”—where, as we shall see shortly, seignors become
puceles who follow the bride, herself encoded in a parallel communication as the poet’s
dame—we also witness a transition in which the cleric’s instruction for the illiterate
layman is displaced by Mary’s reading. The same basic building blocks that make up
Lambert’s representatively staged and ideologically charged transition we will find similarly and still more noticeably configured to advance romance as a layman’s scripture in
Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival. Wolfram, and Lambert no less, uses this argument
as a platform from which to launch his own claim to mediate truth for his audience. But
Lambert still casts himself as the literate, mediating cleric; Wolfram, as is well known,
steps forward in the pose of a militant illiterate.41
39 I am summarizing in this paragraph from Curschmann, “Höfische Laienkultur,” pp. 158–61.
40 Historia comitum Ghisnensium, 96, p. 607; Counts of Guines, p. 130.
41 See Curschmann, “Höfische Laienkultur,” pp. 149–51, 166–67.
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Reading as the New Eve—en romans
According to Lambert of Ardres, then, Landri of Waben’s romans on the Song of Songs
was a bridge to new realms of knowing, exemplifying an extension of the illiterate’s
learning into new reading experiences, an extension that founded an autonomous tradition in so far as this learning was no longer dependent on the oral recapitulations of
another’s reading. And so far as this momentous claim is concerned, Lambert’s testimony can be affirmed, because Landri’s text is every bit an attempt to render the Song
of Songs as a reading path both accessible to the “weak” and body-bound and leading to
Mary’s embrace of the Word. It is a layman’s initiation into how to read as a woman, as
Eve on the way to becoming Mary.
The poet’s emergence in Landri’s text occurs as a reading performance that models
identification with the love and suffering of the bride. What remains to be seen is how,
and in what terms, this experience is constructed for the larger audience: the seignors
whom the narrator apostrophizes only once, when he first intervenes in the exposition
to comment on the plaintive lament of the second bride. By way of explaining the oddity
of Canticles 1:2, in which the bride praises her beloved’s mameles (breasts) (165), the
narrator delivers a crucial point behind a touch of humour:
Seignors, ci nos convient entendre
Ke nos en puissoms raison rendre,
Kar mameles, al dire voir,
Seulent femmes nient homme avoir.
Or sachiez donc ke par figure
Parole ici Sainte Escriture.
(173–77)
(My lords, here we must exercise good sense to recognize what is meant, for breasts,
in truth, only women have and not men. Know therefore, that here holy scripture is
speaking metaphorically.)
As with the reference to meanings according to allegorie and moralité, the poet masks
the innovation undertaken in his adaptation of lectio to romans behind conventional
terminology. The notion that the bridegroom can be seen to have breasts par figure
suggests that, in this text, women may be men and vice versa. The seignors receive no
further mention, because they are to see themselves throughout the text as puceles or
jovenceles, terms we have encountered before as equally applicable to young women, to
nuns, and to those who follow the bride, her adulescentulae. Landri defines them several times in his text; they are “those who have just begun to love” (cf. 1492), who are
“less wise” for lack of experience (cf. 251–52). The common denominator to all these
identities is the weakness or incapacity proper to the female as body; we have also seen
how this overlaps with both illiteracy and the privilege to a different gnosis, the defining
characteristics of Lambert’s portrait of Baldwin. “Outside” the experience of Landri’s
text, Baldwin is an illiterate lay nobleman; “inside” that experience, he is one among the
puceles who seek to read as Mary did. As surprising as it would seem to an uninitiated
modern reader, Baldwin is no less the type of the psalter-reading woman than Hildegard
was—but where she used this platform to step forward as a prophet and visionary, in
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Lambert’s portrayal of Baldwin it is presented as the self-image of a male patron of vernacular letteratura.
Until the poet/exegete emerges at the end of the first book, the primary, directive
address of the poem comes not from a narrator addressing an audience, but rather from
the bride to her puceles. Just as in Rupert’s commentary, the audience is drawn into the
biblical drama through the role of the young women, who serve as a witnessing “chorus”
to the dialogue between bride and bridegroom. Landri of Waben expands the possibilities of this technique by interpolating several occasions for which no prompt exists in
the biblical text and by making the bride’s addresses into explicit directives to follow after
her. The two most important sections of the text in this regard are the bride’s vision of
Solomon’s palace and her later aventure, mentioned earlier. But the bride’s first address
to her followers is that of the “black bride” in Canticles 1:4, which could hardly be more
opportune for this poem and its project. The narrator comments by way of introduction
that “the bride … exhorts [the young women) to follow her well, by her example she
encourages them to seek a glorious life” (cf. 259–62). The bride then explains the words
“I am black but beautiful” as referring to her inner beauty in an ignoble exterior:
Se jo sui noire par defors,
Dedenz sui clere come ors.
…
Dedenz le cuer, la o Deus voit,
Est ma beltez, com estre doit.
(297–98, 307–8)
(If I am black on the outside, inwardly I am bright as gold. … Within the heart, where God
sees, lies my beauty, as it should.)42
The narrator concludes: “The bride speaks thus to her young women, whom she wishes
to render inwardly beautiful” (cf. 311–12).
Thus begins the bride’s explicit instruction to her followers, couched in the now
familiar rhetoric of inner truth vs. outer appearance, here seen as a blackened exterior
and a golden heart. With this initiation of her followers as young women seeking the
beauty of the abject exterior, the diaphanous body, the bride has implicitly identified
their search for the “kiss”—a reunion of divinity and humanity—with a mirroring-inthe-body of Christ as the divine in abject human form. The New Eve follows the same
reading path here, in a text for seignors, as she did in the Speculum’s instruction for
virgins. Both groups read in the body because the body is their way of knowing the Word.
The black bride’s body, moreover, is such in one sense because her amis “discoloured”
her (299) and, in another, because of the blows and insults, the humiliation she suffers
at the hands of sinners (300–304). All of this is as it should be, “For he on my account
suffered sorrow, and I want to suffer the same for him.”43
42 This passage is distinctly reminiscent of the treatment of the black bride and the problem of
inner truth and outer appearance in Abelard’s third letter to Heloise; see Powell, “Listening to
Heloise,” pp. 272–78.
43 “Mais sofri por moi ennui / E jo le vueil sofrir por lui” (305–6).
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When Landri’s text next evokes the “blackness” of human flesh—towards its end—it
will be to recall this same idea of inner beauty, but a beauty manifest as compassio, as
a suffering in the heart that mirrors Christ’s bodily suffering on the cross. The black
bride’s introduction opens the same parenthesis as do the words of the seeking bride
in the initial narrative staging of the poem. Her blackness corresponds to the shame
that makes it so difficult for her counterpart to speak; the golden interior is, as we shall
see, the sincerity of the loving heart, devocions de cuer, as Landri calls it. It is finally
the sheer weakness of this loving heart—that is, its inability to remain silent despite its
shame—that testifies to its sincerity. In a later passage that displays all the art of Landri’s
text, this fragrance of sincerity all but delivers the response to the question of the choric
refrain, the quae est ista of the biblical text. Canticles 3:6 enters the drama such that the
bride’s heart produces the “tendril of smoke rising from the desert, fragrant with frankincense and myrrh” of the biblical verse.44 This smoke is like incense or “the powders of
all perfumers” because it is produced by the heart of the bride burning on the coals of
love, and is thus “dear to God” (1304).
How the bride’s path is accomplished from the disadvantaged position of weakness
and simple understanding is in large part communicated by the other two most prominent passages of her instruction. The first contains the bride’s vision of Solomon’s
palace, but actually extends, despite interruptions by the bridegroom, the commentator, and the author, from line 1172 to line 1604. The bride begins—in an address to
the puceles that has no corresponding prompt in the Song of Songs—by saying, “Ladies,
I want to tell you of this lord for whom my heart yearns, in what way I seek him, and what
trouble I have taken in this search. Much there is that you can learn, if you will only lend
me an ear. I remember well that I was lying then in my bed and resting.”45 She concludes
in a passage inspired by Canticles 3:11, calling the damoiseles forth to see Solomon in his
glory for themselves, after which the narrator summarizes:
Par tels paroles les envie
Totes l’espeuse, sains envie.
Ne vuelt pas seule avoir se joie,
Mais les altres en met en voie.
(1601–4)
(With these words the bride encourages them all, selflessly. She does not desire to keep
her joy for herself, but rather sets the others on her path.)
The text seeks to lead its audience towards the bride’s experience of joie, and offers this
experience by allowing them to be present as she recapitulates it, sharing her visionary
experience as an imitable reading path. That it is, indeed, imitable, is then revealed by
44 The biblical text in the margin reads, “Que est ista que ascendit per desertum sicut virgula fumi
ex aromatibus mirre et thuris et universi pulveris pigmentarii?”
45 “Damoiseles, jo vos vueil dire /De cel Seignor o mes cuers tire, /En kel maniere jo le quis, / E al
querre kel paine mis. / Molt i porrez de bien aprendre, / Se vos a moi volez entendre. / Bien m’en
sovient ke jo gisoie / Ja en mon lit e reposoie” (1171–78).
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the emergence of the authorial voice, which reports to the audience as if he had only just
awakened from her sleep.
The same is true of the later passage, lines 2489 to 2684, only here the bride’s search
in the biblical text, Canticles 5:2–8, is announced with the words “A ses compaignes s’est
tornee / E lor reconte une aventure” (She turned to her companions and told them a
story) (2486–87). This “story,” which is thus introduced as the audience knew storytelling from minstrels or jongleurs and romances, begins much as the last one did: “I
am sleeping, but my heart keeps watch, this marvel occurs not seldom” (cf. 2489–90).
The subsequent verses that recount the bride’s waking, the mysterious touch of the
beloved’s hand “through the hole,” and her ensuing search for him are then taken as a
past experience in which she “held her Beloved in the fealty of love” (cf. 2492). At the
conclusion, the narrator reports: “Tot cho conte la Deu Amie / As puceles, puis se lor
prie / Que, s’eles voient son ami, / Ne.l oblient, mais dient li” (All this is related by God’s
beloved to the young women, and then she begs them not to forget, if they should see her
beloved, to tell him) (2631–34). The narrator thus makes a parenthesis of the address to
the “daughters” at Canticles 5:8 such that it both opens and closes the account, framing
verses two to seven of chapter five as an aventure related for their benefit. This aventure
is, in fact, another “visionary” experience, one not unlike Rupert’s, in which the Word
is known as presence in a loving embrace. The conclusion, however (here the biblical
text, si inveneritis dilectum meum annuncietis, perfectly fuses with the author’s purpose),
would indicate that the bride’s audience relives the same story, or undertakes the same
aventure, also called “une anciene entrepresure” (an ancient quest; 2488), such that they
might encounter the beloved in her stead. What are they to tell him? Just as the biblical
text says, “how she languishes in love for him” (cf. 2636 and Canticles 5:8). This they will
know not only because she has told them, but also because they have felt it themselves—
just as, at the earlier juncture, the poet revealed of his own experience on the bed of
contemplation.
Reading through aventure, in this case an extraordinary experience retold by the
protagonist to whom it occurred, follows the previous, analogous presentation through
vision as an alternative way of staging Mary’s lectio. It is in fact the bride’s aventure that
most closely resembles the story of Rupert’s adulescentula as “the foundation of mystery
in historical things”;46 the same recalls the Eructavit poet’s use of a samblance to allow
his audience “to see and hear” the grant joie felt by the triumphant bride. Historia in
this understanding is very close to story; it is a way of understanding figures of scripture through their contextualization in situations and relationships, a world of human
contingencies that allows the words to appear as if spoken by persons like “ourselves,”
with motivations and emotions that relate to “our” experience. We are at the productive
centre of a realm of imaginative representation that allows the report of a woman’s
visionary gnosis to overlap with the report of the bride’s experience as aventure, with
both offered as ways of presenting scripture for puceles, that is, estoire for “simple folk,”
as we shall see shortly. The apparent equivalence between the two derives from the
46 See above, p. 69.
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capacity they share to deliver an experience of presence. Refracted as it is in Landri’s
text through the commingled voices of poet and exegete, lover and instructor, this call
to follow the bride through her visionary and narrative experiences is a call to experience how a woman loves and reads, or reading as a profession of love. Loving devotion to this “Lady” is a commitment to a reading path of empathy, a desire to become
one with her desire. What we see here, then, is the same identification with the feminine that motivated the transformation of reading among the male monastic elites—a
sustained preoccupation with a woman’s way of knowing the Word and the construction
of corresponding reading practice—which has in this case precipitated into a romans of
the life of the sponsa derelicta. The narrative dimension of women’s reading experience
is now the poetic vehicle for its presentation to a courtly, lay audience.
The vehicles of vision and narrative are privileged, here as elsewhere, for mediating an experience of presence that is the reward of those who seek the beloved in the
simplicity of loving devotion alone. The text frequently indicates that its instruction is
not intended for sage gent; but rather offers the milk that is appropriate to the
immature—its final warning against “the hands of a child” notwithstanding.47 Just preceding the bride’s aventure, then, the narrator speaks of the different groups that have
found their place in the “spiritual garden” of the beloved—the same garden through
which the South Wind blows—and special, final mention goes to “the fervent hearts”
who in earthly life were dependent on mediation through their instructors (maistres), “E
ki de pure estorie peurent / La simple gent, quar plus ne seurent” (And who nourished
themselves on pure historia / The simple folk, for they knew nothing more) (2459–60).
This bride who relates her experience as a coalescence of vision and aventure is presented
through historia, or rather, she re-presents, makes present the historical dimension of
the biblical images. As she relates it, moreover, her visionary experience makes this
historia into a layman’s access to the presence of the beloved that can dispense with, or
“bypasses” learned intervention.
In a surprising passage that precedes her vision of Solomon’s palace—expressly
introduced as showing “in what way I seek him and what trouble I have taken in this
search”48—the bride tells how she first asked her way of “the good masters who know the
depths of the scriptures.” But it was only by “passing beyond” (trespasser) these “guards”
that she finally found her beloved—and she clarifies: “It is fitting that one leave them
behind,” because “many of them tell us much that is useful, but don’t practice what they
preach … mere words without actions will never find him.”49 The only true precondition
is found in the heart and divine grace: “Devocions de cuer le trueve, / Kant il Deu plaist
ke il l’esmueve” (Devotion of the heart finds him, / When it pleases God to be so moved)
47 Here lines 185–98; see also 1571–76, 1983–86, 2027–40. Further passages are discussed below.
48 See the text in note 45, above.
49 “Li buen maistre, quant il s’an painent, / Ke del parfont de l’Escriture / Sevent traire buene
peuture. / Kant ses guardes oi trespassé, / Donc trovai je le desirré. / Pluisor nos dient molt de
bien, / E il meisme n’en font rien. / En cho covient c’on les trespast / Ainz ke om Deu tiengne e
embrast, / Kar par dirre e neint ovrer / Ne le puet om mie trover” (1199–208).
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(1209–10). The path reserved for these simple but pure of heart is then revealed in her
vision of Solomon’s litter with its purple ascent (Canticles 9–10): “The steps leading to
it were steep it is true, but charity had softened the slope. For the weak, for the puceles
who have only begun to love, the king made a passage between the other steps that was
much easier.”50 The exegete (awakening from the same vision), elaborates, interpreting
the litter much as he will later the “spiritual garden,” enumerating the different “hearts”
that repose there—the martyrs, who arrive by their blood, the doctors by their eloquence, and nos foibles (we the weak), the “little ones,” the jovenceles, who arrive by the
tempered ascent of love (cf. 1549–80).
This is how, then, the audience is taught to read as a woman. The bride’s experiences,
communicated as vision and aventure, are ways of initiating an unlearned, lay audience
into its own way of seeking the beloved, the equivalent of Gregory the Great’s historia
in pictures wed to Mary’s lectio. By locating the ability of the soul to know the Word in
historia and pictura, Mary’s experience and Ooliba’s gaze, Rupert of Deutz had implicitly
pointed the way to this layman’s gnosis in which the weakness of humanity before God,
figured as female, meets the incapacity of the illitteratus. In figures such as Hildegard and
Christina and even Marie de Champagne, historical women’s lives could be conceived of
as the bodily remanifestation of Mary’s experience, sponsae corporaliter who represent
fulfilment of the historical dimension of scripture as “our history,” in our world, among
us. The license to translate the Word into bodily media, shaping new experiences of
presence, walks hand in hand with an understanding of human experience as revelatory of the divine. The woman as a figure of suffering in love is the lightning rod and
original vessel of a divine descent into human form, the crucible of a transformative
moment in which divinity is “visible” in base matter, experienced as a symmetry of inner
truth and a knowing from heart to heart. To the question why this should be the case,
Landri’s text articulates a response that perfectly reflects the most far-reaching devotional developments of the later twelfth century, one that takes the position of Alexis’s
espuse a step further and sees the woman’s capacity for compassion as the way her
bodily weakness mirrors and reciprocates Christ’s supreme sacrifice.
This poem is the song of humanity seeking its complement in the divine—but not
through an ascent that leaves the flesh behind. The flesh and body as bride seek their
complement in Christ as the flesh and body of divinity in an act of reciprocal recognition and reciprocal wounding—through a gaze—that allows each to know the other in
the experience of human pain.51 Beginning from opposite poles, the two are to meet in a
chiastic symmetry of the body diaphanous, the original image of which is Mary’s union
in suffering with Christ as “flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone,”52 Mary’s suffering as
bride and mother who could speak the words Ego dilecto meo et dilectus meus mihi in
50 “Voirs est ke roiste ert la montee / Mais charitez l’a atempree. / Por les foibles, por les puceles /
Ki d’amer estoient noveles / Fist le rois entre les degrez / Une voie legiere asez” (1489–94).
51 In addition to the passages discussed below, see 1007–16 and 2683–712; see also Ohly,
Hohelied-Studien, pp. 287–89; and Ruh, Frauenmystik, p. 59.
52 See above p. 185 note 143.
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their most uniquely fulfilled sense: “I am of him as he is of me.” The locus of Mary’s
suffering was her heart, both because it occurred through love and because Simeon’s
prophecy of the gladius doloris that would pierce her soul (Luke 2:35) was identified
with Longinus’s spear piercing the heart of the crucified son.53 She felt there—some said
all the more intensely—all that Christ felt physically.54 In this experience, the twelfth
century discovered the Passion as the humanly comprehensible and physically sensible counterpart of the noetic union of the conception and Incarnation. Landri’s idea of
devocions de cuer as the loving devotion that merit’s the embrace of the beloved from the
position of human weakness thus empties into a union that sees conception and compassion as one. With a notable difference: Mary’s loving devotion in the Passion could be
relived as human suffering in love, and for love, of others.
The Incarnation as a “leap” in which God “took flesh from the Virgin” finds repeated
mention in the text, also occurring in conjunction with corresponding review of Christ’s
suffering in the Passion.55 But the key passage chosen to allow the bridegroom to speak
of his descent is Canticles 4:9: “You have wounded my heart, my sister, my bride, you have
wounded my heart with one of your eyes and one of the locks of your neck.” Here, contrary to more established tradition, the wound is not seen simply as Christ accepting the
Passion and Crucifixion on humanity’s behalf, that is, for man’s redemption.56 Instead,
it is inflicted by an “arrow of love,” as a heart-wound that moves God to embrace his
bride, that is, to assume human flesh. The wounding of the Incarnation, as a later passage
makes clear, consists not so much in real wounds as it does in knowing another’s pain:
il prist char en la pulcele
Ki de totes est damoisele.
Par cui nos Deu trovons plus prest,
Quar or seit il coment nos est,
Seit voire par experiment,
Se reguarde plus dolcement
A nos, e a no povreté,
Que il prist par sa volenté.
(2873–82)
(he took flesh in the Virgin who reigns as lady over all others. For this reason we find God
closer to us, for now he knows how it is with us, he knows truly by experience, and thus
looks more kindly on our miserable state, which he took on by his own will.)
53 See pp. 182–83, above.
54 See p. 180, above. Landri’s principle source, Geoffrey of Auxerre, refers to the same idea in
company with the gladius doloris as part of his discussion of the “wounded heart” of Canticles
4:9: Expositio, 3, p. 243.
55 For example, lines 865–70 and 879–82, and lines 1757–64.
56 For an overview of the patristic tradition, see Cabassut, “Blessure d’amour,” 1727–29; for the
Middle Ages, Schleusener-Eichholz, Auge im Mittelalter, pp. 787–97. Discussion and commentary
on specific examples in Ohly, commentary to Trudperter Hohelied, pp. 841–46.
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The Incarnation is not only an act of grace in which the divine becomes knowable to
humanity; here is it also the act of a loving will that wishes more completely to know
its beloved.57 This insistence on reciprocal identification is then also what motivates the
innovative treatment of Canticles 4:9, Vulnerasti cor meum, soror mea, sponsa, … The
passage’s meaning is revealed through the image of a reciprocal gaze between the bride’s
contemplative eye, seeking in vain to comprehend the divine, and God’s own gaze, which
“the king” explicitly adds to the equation:
Cho dist li Rois:—Espose, suer,
Molt as parfont navré mon cuer
D’un te tes crins et d’un tien ueil
Cui jo resguart, si con jo sueil,
Molt m’atalant tes mameles
Ki tant sunt nobles e tant beles.
(2211–15)
(Thus speaks the king: “Bride, sister, you have deeply wounded my heart with one hair
of your head and one of your eyes [Canticles 4:9], which I look upon as is my wont. Your
breasts greatly arouse my desire, so refined and beautiful they are [cf. Canticles 4:10].”)
This heart-wound so moved the king that he “descended into the virginal womb” to
assume our humanity.58 The central passage intertwines past and present even as it
entangles gazes divine and human, the ever-recurrent desire to understand and the
unique descent of the Incarnation:
Li altre uels tent a le haltesce59
Nostre Seignor e sa grandesce,
Mais comprendre ne puet mie
Parfaitement en ceste vie.
Cist esguarde cum cist est pius,
Cui comprendre ne puet nuls lius,
E vint el ventre virginal
57 Hunt, “O.F. Commentary,” p. 294, finds no source for this passage. The ideas expressed may be
indebted to Bernard of Clairvaux, although not to his sermons on Canticles. As Bernard relates,
before the Incarnation, Christ existed in a blessed state of impassivity (impassiblis) like to the father,
“sicut miseriam vel subjectionem expertus non erat, sic misericordiam et obenientiam non noverat
experimento. Sciebat quidem per naturam, non autem sciebat per experientiam” (De gradibus
humilitatis 3.9; as cited in Auerbach, Literary Language, p. 69). See also Köpf, Religiöse Erfahrung,
pp. 214–16; and Miquel, Expérience spirituelle, pp. 56–82, esp. pp. 61, 63.
58 The reciprocal gaze was perhaps suggested by Geoffrey’s Expositio, which speaks of the wound
as struck by the bride’s gaze, or aspectus, with spicula (arrows), and then evokes Christ’s reaction with the words “Aspectus aspectum provocat” (her gaze provokes his) (Expositio, 4, p. 339).
The idea of the “eye” as the soul’s intentio, or inclination towards God, and of the one hair as her
cogitatio, or attempt at understanding, likewise occur in Geoffrey’s text (Expositio, 4, pp. 339–40),
but the development of these ideas as found in Landri’s text appears to be very much his own.
59 Lines 2231–36 first discuss the eye of “the active life.”
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Prendre armes e destruire mal.
Il esguarde la pieté
Par cui Deus prist humanité,
E que por nient, u por petit,
Done as siens le sovrain delit.
Cist est li uels ki Jesu Crist
A si plaié, com Il nos dist.
(2237–50)
(The other eye is turned to the loftiness of our lord in his magnificence, which it cannot
possibly comprehend perfectly in this life. This eye contemplates the great mercy of his
gaze whom no vessel can contain, but who entered the virginal womb to take arms and
destroy evil. This eye sees the compassion that moved God to assume our humanity, that
grants to his own the greatest gift for next to nothing. This is the eye that so wounded
Jesus Christ, as he tells us himself.)
There was precedent for reading Canticles 4:9 as Christ’s or God’s words on his own
descent into the flesh, but it was, as one would expect, confined to the understanding of
the text as Mary’s experience rather than the church’s or the individual soul’s.60 Rupert
of Deutz provided what may be the earliest such reading, in terms that find distinct
echoes in Landri’s complex passage: Mary’s eye is for Rupert, too, an eye of contemplative prayer, her exclusive orientation to the will of God; and with this gaze, as Christ tells
her, “with this one of your eyes you wounded my heart, whence in your regard I could not
restrain my inner longings” (viscera mea). The result? “You are mother and virgin, and
this is the fruit of one of your eyes.”61 It is Rupert, too, who (uniquely) identifies the lock
of hair with a sharpened dart or arrow thrown by Mary.62 As Landri goes on to explain:
De celui crin ki l’a navré
Vos redirai la verité
La sainte arme dont nos parloms
A crinz, ses meditacions,
Ki li naiscent de la pensee
60 The Middle High German Sankt Trudperter Hohelied (ca. 1160), begins its remarks on Canticles
4:9 with the words “this was spoken to the mother of God” (cf. 54,10) and then says it was her loving
gaze that brought Christ to descend to this world (cf. 54,15). As Ohly notes, the Marian reading
originates in the twelfth century (commentary to Trudperter Hohelied, p. 841, see also p. 843).
61 “In hoc uno oculorum tuorum vulnerasti cor meum, unde et viscera mea super te continere se
non potuerunt” (CCC, 3, p. 80). With regard to Canticles 4:10, in which the bridegroom praises the
bride’s breasts, Christ then announces, “Amici ascultant haec, … quia mater et virgo es, et hunc esse
fructum unius oculorum tuorum …” (CCC, 3, p. 81). The text thus gives Mary a role in bringing about
the Incarnation, a remarkable motif that it once again shares with the Sankt Trudperter Hohelied;
see the preceding note. As part of the same exposition, Rupert has Christ remind Mary of the lament
of the sterile Anna, whose tearful prayers so wounded God’s heart that he granted her a son (CCC,
3, p. 79; cf. 1 Samuel 1:2–20).
62 “… unum illum crinem tuum … in me iecisti veluti spiculum praeacutum, et vulnerasti cor meum”
(CCC, 3, p. 80). Rupert apparently transports this arrow from the traditional reading of Canticles 2:5
(see the following note).
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Ki chiés del anme est apelee,
Ausi come li crins del cors
Naiscent del chief cha de defors.
Un en a cui Deus tant aime
Que saiete d’amor le claime
Quar il dist qu’il en est navrez
Si com vos oï avez.
(2251–62)
(Of this same lock of hair that wounded him I will recount the truth to you: the holy
weapon that we’re speaking of, the strand of hair, are her meditations, born of her mind,
which is called the soul’s head, just as locks of hair on the body are born of the head to
extend outward. One among these is so beloved of God that he calls it an arrow of love,
for he says that it has wounded him, as you have just heard.)
The “arrow of love” properly belongs to the tradition of a different verse, Canticles 2:5,
as it was known from the Septuagint version: Vulnerata charitate ego sum (I have been
wounded by charity/your love). In this case, the wound was inflicted by Christ, who,
as an arrow or sword, filled Mary or the soul with love and longing.63 Rupert’s reading
imports the arrow of love from this tradition into the reading of the obverse wound,
which itself had long been identified with Christ’s Passion. Odo of Morimund relies on
the same understanding when he speaks of an “arrow of love” that Christ “had accepted
at [Mary’s] hand,” and that he returns to her in his gaze from the cross, thus identifying
either gaze and either wounding with Canticles 4:9.64 Landri’s text, in adopting the Marian
understanding of Canticles 4:9 along with the arrow of love, reflects a coalescence of the
two readings and the two woundings that develops over the course of the twelfth century: both Mary and Christ are twice wounded, at the conception and at the cross, and
either event is a reciprocal wounding for love inflicted through a reciprocal gaze.
Landri’s treatment of Canticles 4:9 thus provides a particularly pregnant demonstration of what occurs in his text as a whole: the singular events of Mary’s experience provide the basis for, the very origin of, his portrayal of the bride and thus for the audience’s
understanding of the biblical text; moreover, they model that text as experience here
and now. The focus of attention is thus not contrition or remorse over Christ’s suffering
for our redemption, but recognition and gnosis, a knowing as Mary knew, experienced
as reciprocal vision that induces, or rather inflicts, a symmetry of suffering in love. One
more witness to the wound of love in Mary’s experience, from Bernard of Clairvaux’s
sermons on the Song of Songs, makes these ideas particularly clear. Speaking for his part
of Canticles 2:5, Bernard says, “The special love of Christ” came to Mary in the conception and “not only pierced [her] soul but penetrated through and through [cf. Luke 2:35],
63 The “arrow of love” entered commentary on the Song no later than with Origen’s reading of
Canticles 2:5 and was known to the Middle Ages through him; cf. Origen, Commentarium in Canticum
Canticorum, 3.8, p. 194. John of Fecamp saw this love-wound in reciprocal relationship to Christ’s
wounds; see Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles, p. 74; and JP, pp. 169–70.
64 See above pp. 180–81 and 183–84.
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so that even the tiniest space in her virginal breast was permeated by love.” The arrow
(or sword)
transpierced her thus that it might come down even to us, and of that fullness we might
all receive. She would become the mother of that love whose father is the God who is
love. … In this process she experienced through her whole being a wound of love that was
mighty and sweet. I would reckon myself happy if at rare moments I felt at least the prick
of the point of that sword. Even if only bearing love’s slightest wound, I could still say: “I
am wounded with love” (Cant. 2:5 Septuagint version).65
Bernard’s passage incorporates the language of Simeon’s prophecy on the gladius doloris
even as he speaks of the conception and Mary being filled with the sweetness of love; the
arrow (sagitta) cited at the beginning is, further on, called a sword (gladius). Meditation
on the embrace of the Word is poised between the two events, Conception and Passion,
and for this reason, Bernard, in this sole instance in his sermons on the Song, makes use
of Mary as the protagonist of the text: her experience makes the two embraces into one
and knowable as such, “that it might come down even to us.”66
With the idea of the Incarnation as provoked by Mary wounding the heart of the
bridegroom we have arrived once more at a point of surprising convergence between
the reading brides of vernacular exegesis and secular narrative. Chrétien’s Yvain likewise
conjures the image of a “god of love” descending to his pucele as the result of a wounding
through love’s dart: “he … would have had her love no man if not himself. To serve her he
would have changed himself into a man, would have given up his divinity and wounded
his own body with the arrow whose wound does not heal.”67 The oddity derived from
Amor wounded by his own arrow only recalls the reciprocal wounding native to the
sacred image and the fact that God’s plan effects the wound; it is thus self-inflicted.
That Landri’s pucele is likewise a “reader” in her garden is suggested not solely by the
metaphor of the eye’s vain attempt fully to understand the divine, her meditacions. The
passage we have just examined is part of the bridegroom’s praise of the bride, which
turns next to the “garden enclosed” and the north and south winds, where the author
is brought to speak of reading the text (in a garden?) with his own lady-bride. Both
author and sponsus are equally smitten with their “reading” damoisele, and her reading
culminates in the wounded descent of “the God who is love” (to use Bernard’s words)
to claim her as his own; the Holy Spirit blows through the hortus conclusus, the garden
enclosed. I suggested in chapter 1 that Chrétien’s young bride-to-be who reads aloud
from a romance in the secluded garden while Yvain looks on as an uninvited guest is
the “secularized” double of Laudine’s suffering reading; that is, as we can say now, she
stands at the conclusion of a narrative transformation of the grief of the sponsa derelicta
65 On the Song of Songs, 29.8, pp. 109–10.
66 Similarly, JP, pp. 304–6.
67 Yvain, ed. Hult, lines 5374–78; see above, p. 17. Chrétien may be playing as well on Apuleius’s
story in which Cupid strikes himself with his own dart for love of Psyche; this story, however, was
all but unknown to the Middle Ages until Boccaccio. See Kern, “Iwein liest ‘Laudine’,” pp. 396–97.
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into the image of another form of reading—as the fulfilment of the idea that both reading
brides enable a special gnosis, itself a fusion of desire and empathy, love and suffering.
No less important is the complementary extension of the same wound to the general audience that, in Chrétien’s Yvain, causes the relationship between the narrator and
his audience to participate in the relationship between Yvain and his reading brides or
between the god of love and the pucele. Both texts see wounding in love as a moment
in which the divine can be revealed in the body—and as the result of participation in a
reading process that occurs both “inside” and “outside” the text, or rather itself creates
continuity between readers then and now, here and there. Chrétien’s pucele doubles
the narrator’s delivery of the text not because young women often prelected romances
in secluded gardens, but because a woman’s knowing is the image and medium of this
experience. The same doubling occurs in reverse when, in Landri’s text, the poet emerges
with his wounded heart from the bed of the bride’s vision.
How did such a parallel come about? Was the distance between Champagne and
Guines less significant, were communications more frequent than we might expect? Is
there a common textual ancestor that might have served equally well for either poet?
The full answer may comprise such factually traceable connections, but another applies
in any event, that between Marie de Champagne and Baldwin of Guines as patrons of
literature en romans, of the dame and the illitteratus as the twin focal points of the construction of a new reading experience whose claim to truth is equally dependent, in
either case, on the idea of an audience-as-woman inside and outside the text.68
For now, though, our central concern is with the wounded God whose wounding
embraces his earthly bride, making her suffering his and his suffering hers.
I mentioned earlier that the idea of the bride’s “black flesh”—that which reveals her
inner beauty—resurfaces late in the poem as the suffering of Christ in the Passion. Christ
is “blackened by tribulation,” by “humiliation, pain and derision” (cf. 2779–80); which
is then enumerated as the injuries that deformed his flesh in the Passion (2785–90), of
which the bride herself says:
De cez griétez chascune amaine
Noirtume a la char humaine
Dont coverte est la deiteiz
En Jhesu Crist, bien le saveiz.
(2791–94)
(Each of these wounds brings blackness to the human flesh with which the deity is
covered in Jesus Christ, as well you know.)
68 Composition of Le Chevalier de la Charrette and Le Chevalier au Lion is widely acknowledged to
have been concurrent, taking place between the years 1177 and 1181. Moreover, the allusions to
the central problem of the Charrette in Yvain, which embed the former narrative in the latter, all but
force the conclusion—in the absence of conflicting evidence—that Marie is the operative addressee
of either romance. In “Missing Prologue,” Barbara Sargent-Baur argues that the prologue to the
Charrette should be taken as applying to both romances. More important to my argument, however,
is the idea of the two centres of literary activity, each with a prominent patron who is given literary
representation as such.
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But the same blackness reveals even as it conceals. It is the black hair that covers a head
of fine gold, “that does not allow the head to be seen in all its true beauty” (2803–6).
“This hair is the nuptials of the Virgin, and her restoration after childbirth; it is the place
where the child was born and the manger where he was found … all of this covers the
purity of the holy head, and the truth” (2809–16). In other words: Christ’s blackness, the
flesh that obscures his divinity, is also the very humanity that allows his bride to know
him—the equivalent of the “cloud” as an intervening medium mitigating the brilliance
of divinity otherwise intolerable to human eyes.69 In blackness, then, in the shame and
compassion that make her flesh the mirror of his on the cross, she is also closest to
him, she becomes “one spirit with him,” receiving the “kiss” she sought at the outset of
the poem:
L’espose Crist ki tant est sage,
Quant se porpense k’il sofri
Sains son mesfait e tot por li,
Les comps tant durs e les liens
Que il sofri, tien ele a siens.
Li clous k’il eut par mi les piez,
Est en son cuer fort enfichiez.
Les clos des mains, tot la croiz,
Met en son cuer li granz destroiz.
Cele corone del Saint Chief
Li fait al cuer dolors molt grief.
Trestot par compassion sent
Qua[n]qu’il sofri corporeilment.
El est uns espirz avec lui,
Se sont comun tot li anui.
(2075–92, emphasis added)
(The bride of Christ, who is wise, when she considers that he suffered with no fault and
all for her, feels the heavy blows and the bonds that he suffered inflicted on herself. The
nail that pierced his feet is fixed hard in her heart. The nails in his hands, the entire cross
makes her heart seize up in pain. This crown on the holy head brings a dolorous pain to
her heart. Verily she endures by co-passion whatever he suffered in the flesh. She is one
spirit with him, all the injuries are common to each.)
The text itself announced this moment as the culmination of the bride’s desire when she
described the kiss she sought with the same words (157–58). Three times this passage
locates the bride’s compassionating pain in her heart. It is not the exterior, physical
affliction that constitutes the “kiss,” but rather one that pierces the heart; a fulfilment
of perfectly reciprocal suffering in love, or devocions de cuer. To enter into this radically loving empathy as Mary did is to manifest the same truth that she did, the truth
of the body diaphanous, which becomes in its abnegation of exteriority the manifest
vehicle of inner truth, the female humility that merited conception and bearing of the
69 See above, pp. 30–31, 33; and Deshman, “Disappearing Christ,” 520–29.
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Word—and merited the gladius compassionis, the sword of “co-sufferance” that made
Mary’s suffering of the heart into the mirror of Christ’s in the flesh.
This is a momentous conjunction. Where the kiss of the Annunciation joins the kiss
of the Passion, the search for truth in and through the blackened exterior—the materia
of our experience that, in all its abject, fallen unworthiness, is nevertheless and for
this very reason the humanity that Christ displayed on the cross—joins the ineffable,
unknowable bliss that was Mary’s own in the original conjugal embrace of the Word.
Therein lies a dimension of the new devotion to Christ in his humanity, and with it a
dimension of devotion to the Passion and of the imitatio Christi, that has thus far been
largely overlooked. The promise it holds was by no means Landri’s invention—as we
saw earlier, the reciprocal wounding of sponsus and sponsa in love was articulated beginning early in the twelfth century as the conjunction of suffering and knowing, pain and
love human and divine, that made the cross itself not so much the site of a victory over
human flesh as a sinking into and embrace of its weakness, a marriage of Heaven and
earth: “The Mediator of God and men hangs midway between Heaven and earth, unites
the heights with the depths and joins the things of earth to the things of Heaven. Heaven
is aghast, earth marvels.”70
Devocions de cuer is the site of this conjunction, the humbly inadequate human reciprocation of Christ’s inestimable pain that by its very incapacity wounds the heart of God
and moved/moves him to descend to this most abject point, to the cross, where his sacrificing love could become one with the loving devotion of his bride. This integration
of human pain and suffering for love into the hermeneutics of the Word is among the
most momentous cultural achievements of the High Middle Ages. What was unknowable
as bliss became knowable as pain, what the Spirit had performed “without the intervention of man” and, most incredibly, without the slightest injury to human flesh; this,
or some part in it, could now be re-experienced through the loving embrace of a body
lacerated, mutilated, crucified at the hands of men. An experience perhaps more accessible, but requiring a capacity for suffering and a tolerance to pain—pain of the heart—
that the medieval imagination did not reserve for male stoicism but rather for the body
of humanity, the mother whose love could not turn away—whatever her fear, whatever
the agony, finally without regard for self-preservation.
It is all the more startling to find such a moment placed at the centre of meaning of
one of the earliest attempts to make a romans of the Song of Songs, to shape a layman’s
way of knowing the Word out of an only recent transformation of monastic reading. The
most essential point for our inquiry is that a different “historical” truth is made in the
idea of the truth of truths of the Christian faith: if God became man in order “to know
our experience,” then we know God through that same. The Song of Songs is the archtext of this reciprocal knowing, because it contains the prophetic images, once fulfilled
and ever to be renewed, of the same mystery. If “every woman’s” experience can manifest that of the bride, if Marie is Mary, dame is sponsa, then truth resides not finally and
not only in what happened once in the historical fulfilment of the sacred text, but in a
70 Aelred, Rule, p. 89.
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renewed experience of text that makes it happen now—and this same idea is itself the
“why” of the mystery lady, whose identity, even as it is withheld, is also made essential
to the genesis and meaning of the text. Just as our experience, our history becomes a
manifestation of sacred history, so the truth of “being there” (the truth of history as an
eyewitness account) gives way to a truth of “being her”—a truth of empathy in which
human experience can reconstitute the epiphany of inner truth originally accomplished
in the continuity between Christ’s flesh and Mary’s. And, surprisingly enough, it is just
this point that brings us full circle, back to the concerns that lie at the centre of Benoît de
Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie.
Mutations of the Old Eve: Reading Woman as History
Two points of difference stand out between Benoît’s romans and, on the one hand, the texts
of vernacular exegesis just considered, and later Arthurian romances on the other. Both
are essential to an understanding of the position of the Roman de Troie in the development
of a new poetics of truth in narrative. For Benoît and his audience this narrative is not a
“romance,” but rather history, the re-presentation of past events.71 The poet’s task is not
to make the events “believable,” but rather to make them present, to allow his audience
to experience them anew. Second, Benoît does not overtly assimilate his narrative into a
Christian world-view; true to the historical nature of his project, its characters act in a world
that still awaits its salvation. Benoît’s task is to perform on secular history an operation that
allows the capital tale of pagan warfare and destruction to open onto a redeeming Christian
reading experience. Briseida’s story is the fulcrum this translatio, because, being Benoît’s
invention, it can replicate Helen’s story as one in which the audience is asked to seek itself
somewhere between opposed images of the identification between woman and body.
A femme dure duels petit,
A un oil plore, a l’autre rit.
Molt müent tost li lor corage,
Assez est fole la plus sage:
Quant qu’el a en set anz aimé,
A ele en treis jorz oblïé.
Onc nule ne sot duel aveir.
Bien lur pareist de lur saveir:
Ja n’avront tant nul jor mesfet
Chose ne rien que si seit let,
Ce lor est vis, qui que les veie,
Que l’on ja blasmer les en deive.
Ja jor ne quideront mesfere.
Des folies est ce la meire.
(13441–54)
71 Green, Beginnings, pp. 153–55; and, more generally, Knapp, “Historische Wahrheit,” 581–635,
and 585–87 on Benoît specifically; also Knapp, “Fiktionales Erzählen,” pp. 3–22.
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(Women’s woe does not last long: she cries with one eye and laughs with the other. Their
hearts are quick and easy to change and even the wisest among them is but a fool. Though
she might have loved for seven years, she’ll forget it in three days! Not one of them knows
what it is to suffer—that’s clear enough from the way they see things: no matter how
grievous an offense they’ve committed or who may have seen it, as they would have it,
they are never to blame. They will never believe they have done wrong, and of all follies
this is the greatest.)
The most remarkable thing about the narrator’s misogynist excursus in the Roman de
Troie has consistently been overlooked in modern discussion: it is not prompted by
Helen. Scholars have recognized in Briseida’s story a chiastic parallel to that of Paris and
Helen, with the woman passing from a Trojan to a Greek prince rather than the other
way around.72 Rarely noted is the way Briseida’s story both plays out and problematizes
the audience’s expectations of Helen. Helen was held up in the courts of France and
Germany around 1200 (still) as the epitome of a negative female example; indeed, her
story was so depraved as to be better left untold—especially where “young women”
were concerned: “Young ladies cannot better their understanding through the story of
the beautiful queen in Greece of those days; she did wrong whoever first read it, for bad
examples sorely distort good manners and good instruction.”73 Thus a churchman from
Friulia, Thomasin of Zirclaria, posing as mediator of French courtly mores for the courtly
world of the German empire, pronounced judgment on the value of “reading Helen.” The
reasons for this judgment would have been apparent enough. In his Latin history of the
Trojan War, written at the Angevin court ca. 1180, Joseph of Exeter’s abhorrence of Helen
is equalled only by the indulgent eroticism of his description of female desire: “With all
her heart she opens up her loins; with eager mouth she steals his dormant love, … For
shame, foul whore!”74
The discordant note in Benoît’s emphatic gesture derives from two expectations, one
fulfilled and the other denied. Affirmed is the idea that women’s conduct in love plays a
crucial role in the story; oddly disappointed and displaced is the expectation that Helen
is the reason. For where Benoît’s narrator spares no quarter in his condemnation of the
female sex with Briseida as its representative, Helen’s relationship to Paris can be read
as expressing a courtly ideal,75 and the reflection on women’s treachery with regard to
a minor and unknown character finds no complement in the portrayal of history’s most
treacherous woman.76
72 O’Callaghan, “Tempering Scandal,” p. 308; see also Nolan, Roman Antique, p. 110.
73 Thomasin of Zirclaria, Der welsche Gast, lines 773–78. Translations are my own; for the original
text see below, p. 287. Further citations are parenthetical.
74 Joseph of Exeter, Trojan War, as cited in O’Callaghan, p. 306. On the importance of the fall of Troy
in the medieval view of world history, see Jung, “Storici Troiani,” p. 179.
75 O’Callaghan, “Tempering Scandal,” pp. 305–8, with other scholarship cited there; see also
Hansen, Frauengestalten, pp. 20–24.
76 An exception might be claimed to this statement near the poem’s conclusion, when Helen,
having been taken from the sacked city by the Greeks, arrives in Crete with her former husband,
Menelaus (lines 28425–34). As Schöning, Rezeption der Antike, pp. 273–74, argues, however, this
passage can only be read in the light of the romance as a whole, which has made more than clear
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Omissions frequently serve as the signpost of authorial intent in Benoît’s romance,
and this is one of his most conspicuous. Briseida’s story is held up to the audience as a
surrogate for their expectations of “reading Helen”; that is, of the Trojan War as proof
of the wanton destruction wrought on the world through the daughters of Eve. In this
way the poet invites the audience to consider Briseida’s story—his invention—as the
potential key to their experience of his retelling of historical verité. One suspects already
that the truth is not found in the old interpretations of Helen, and if that is the case, then
neither does it lie in the traditional poetics of body, for—as Thomasin likewise informs
us—Helen constituted the archetype of woman as the false exterior. Benoît’s project is
no small undertaking, whether for history or for the idea of truth in narrative: to redeem
Helen would be to redeem the body itself; conversely, to embrace the body as vehicle of
truth, Helen must yield a different story, or at least a different way of reading.77 Precisely
this is what Benoît makes manifest through the audience’s experience of Briseida’s story.
With his narratorial trap Benoît communicates the point of conjunction between the
pagan past and the audience’s reading present, the way their experience of a secular
narrative can remanifest Christian truth. When Briseida’s story is juxtaposed with
Solomon’s forte femme, a scriptural ideal, Helen’s story meets Mary’s reading; the history
of Eve—“our” history—is projected onto the account of pagan history such that her salvation through Mary—from a perspective available to the audience alone—comes into
view as the vanishing point of Benoît’s narrative geometry. “Reading Briseida” becomes
a test of the narrator’s credibility (in condemning women) on the one hand and of the
audience’s own worthiness (who recognizes itself in the fallen bride) on the other. The
narrative then orchestrates an experience in which the audience will discover far more
sympathy with Briseida than the narrator’s judgment would allow; her story is not one
of contemptible opportunism and deceit but rather one of suffering and remorse over
temptation unsuccessfully resisted and a loving heart unsuccessfully repressed. The
story thus displays its narrator as an unreliable witness; Solomon’s scriptural authority,
which he cites in support of the same conventional wisdom, fares little better. In their
place is left the experience of the audience-as-woman, the audience who reads as the
bride through the discovery of itself in her. The new truth of Benoît’s history is born of
this experience, of reading woman’s suffering as object of desire and object of exchange,
object of war and object of peace, as lover, concubine, wife, queen, and, in every case,
bereaved bride. The truth of history as presence, purportedly mediated by eyewitness
account, is in fact revealed through the truth of empathy, the experience of truth in
narrative as self-recognition. This is the meeting of history and Rupert’s historia, the
identification of what happened then and there with an experience of the same as it
happens now, of the truth of being there with the truth of being her.
that Helen was not the cause of the war. Its refrain of “par qui … par qui …” with reference to all
that has come to pass “through her” can thus only be read as a reflection on history and not on a
woman’s conduct, on which the passage is once again notably silent.
77 Helen is in fact Thomasin’s prime example of improper reading, that is, a stage of perception
that cannot see beyond the (false) exterior. See below, pp. 287–89.
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Benoît’s prologue insists above all on verité, defined as the reliable reporting of truth
in history, and he aligns himself with classical tradition by insisting on the account of an
eyewitness to events. Homer is summarily rejected for having lived far too long after the
fact; in his place Benoît relies on Dares, whose status as an eyewitness to the Trojan War
was an established tradition.78 All this is a fanfare for reversal, or rather a stage set for
transformation. Benoît’s expansion of Dares’s terse brevity into well over 30,000 lines
of octosyllabic verse reaches far beyond the bounds of simple amplificatio materiae, a
patent fact he pretends to deny:
Ci vueil l’estoire commencier:
Le latin sivrai e la letre;
Niul autre rien n’i voudrai metre
S’ensi non cum jel truis escrit.
Ne de mie qu’aucun buen dit
N’i mete, se faire le sai,
Mais la matire en ensirrai.
(138–44)
(Here I wish to begin the story. I will follow the Latin text to the letter; I would not include
anything except what I find and as I find it written—unless it be to add a few good words
here and there, as I am able, but always faithfully following my source.)
The tongue-in-cheek tenor of this limiting statement is reinforced by the flexible limits of
the term dit (142), which can mean anything from a few words to a short descriptive or
narrative poem.79 Like the rest, this claim is not made for factual value but rather to alert
audience attention to the questions of historical truth and source translation and their
respective value in assessing his romans.80
Benoît’s version of the fall of Troy most notably amplifies the story by multiplying
women’s fates as objects of exchange in love and war. He launches his estoire with one
of the most expansive examples: the story of Jason and Medea; for the same reason he
insists the cause of the war resides in the first destruction of Troy by Hercules and the
resulting rape of Hesione (Priam’s sister and thus Helen’s precursor in the previous
generation). Dares had included brief mention of Jason’s story—so brief, indeed, that
it did not even mention Medea: “Thus, reembarking, they [Jason and his companions]
departed from Phrygia, and set out for Colchis, and stole the fleece, and returned to their
homeland.”81 For Benoit the treasonous heroine constitutes the very centre of interest.
With this narrative preamble of over 1,300 lines he attunes his audience to the point of
the sequence of love stories, which becomes increasingly prominent in the latter half
of his text. Each is the story of a woman changing sides in an epic struggle; in all but
78 See lines 45–116; Green, Beginnings, pp. 153–55; and Jung, “Storici troiani,” pp. 182–83.
79 See Godefroi, Complément, p. 397, and the entry “dit” in Electronic Dictionary of Chrétien de
Troyes, www.atilf.fr/dect (accessed August 12, 2019).
80 See, for example, Haug, “Autorität,” pp. 121–22; pace Knapp, “Fiktionales Erzählen,” p. 22.
81 The Trojan War, p. 135.
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Briseida’s case this action also clearly jeopardizes or (in Polyxena’s case) could save a
people: the course of history hinges on a woman’s heart. These women are daughters
of Eve. And yet, just as he will later Helen, Benoît all but exonerates Medea; in his
account she is the victim of love ill-bestowed (2030–44). Her filiocidal revenge receives
no mention, making up another of his conspicuous omissions, and for this fact Benoît
then makes his “source”—that is, verité—responsible! Concluding, he takes another
ironic bow, asserting that no more is known to him of Medea’s fate because Dares told
no more (Ovid, from whom he lifted the rest, certainly did), and Heaven forbid that he
should “lie”:82 “Ne Beneeiz pas ne l’alonge, Ne pas n’i acreistra mençonge” (Benoît neither enlarges on his source nor does he amplify it with lies) (2061–66). The message,
for those who knew “the truth” in Medea’s case, is twofold. On the one hand, truth is to
be constituted differently in this romance than through exclusive reliance on the eyewitness; on the other, preconceived moral distinctions—with reference to women’s stories
in particular—are highly questionable.
Benoît’s restoration of Medea as a central figure highlights what the narrator will
make unmistakable with his intervention preceding Briseida’s story: women’s stories are
the thing wherein he means to catch the conscience of his dame—the audience in general.
With his misogynist excursus the trap is set; it is sprung only gradually, as the narrative
reverses the tale of woman’s treachery to offer portrayals of woman’s suffering in its
place. The succession of love stories continues in Helen’s with Paris, Briseida’s with her
two loves, and Polixena’s with Achilles. These become the narrative backbone of Benoît’s
roman, “devising a space for love in material traditionally dominated by the theme of
warfare.”83 But they accomplish far more: the men’s epic of the siege and destruction of
Troy plays the supporting orchestra here to a succession of soloists’ arias on women’s
treason for love and its final inversion—and of their suffering in either case. The injection
of these women’s fates redirects audience identification in the same way observed in La
Chanson d’Alexis but with appropriately substituted pre-Christian identities, that is: from
the heroism of pagan warriors to the suffering of their proto-Christian widows.
With the exception of the preamble on Jason and Medea, the couples’ stories are
concurrent and carefully interwoven with each other and with the account of the war.
The increasing interdependence between the two culminates in the story of Achilles
and Polyxena, in which the very outcome of the war hangs in the balance of love.84 The
chronological interweaving of the latter three stories allows their conclusions to occur
as a trio of women’s laments, moving monologues of self-examination and remorse that
have few equals among Benoît’s vernacular predecessors or contemporaries. These are
distributed over the last third of the narrative in a rising crescendo, and their effect is
82 For Benoît’s reliance on Ovid, see Nolan, Roman Antique, pp. 99–102.
83 Green, Beginnings, p. 156; see also Nolan, Roman Antique, pp. 96–118, esp. 117. The original
study of the love stories as the structural key to the Roman de Troie is Lumiansky, “Structural Unity.”
Thereafter, see Adler, “Militia et amor”; Jones, Theme of Love, pp. 43–59; Hansen, Frauengestalten,
pp. 86–164; Petit, Naissances du roman, pp. 463–83; and Kay, Courtly Contradictions, pp. 111–21,
esp. pp. 116–17.
84 Petit, Naissances du roman, p. 475.
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a resounding reversal of the narrator’s blanket condemnation of women’s fickleness in
love and incapacity to suffer; above all, they give the lie to the fault he singles out as
their worst: “They will never believe they have done wrong, and of all follies this is the
greatest.” The narrator’s misogynist excursus is the starting point of a narrative transformation that will conclude in the image of its reversal: the golden likeness of Polixena
as a woman’s sorrow transfixed for eternity, a sorrow so truly represented that “no one
ever looked upon it without believing that she wept.”85 The virgin “widow” of the story’s
most formidable hero stands bearing his funerary remains atop a monument ostensibly
erected to his memory, making of the same a monument to women’s sorrow that will
endure not merely for three days but rather, we are told, “until the end of time.”86
Of these three stories, only Briseida’s case, the case of the fictional invention, is traced
in detail, or rather, from the inside; in this way it stands as the centrepiece of reflection
through which to interpret the others, the “historical” figures. By contrast, beyond the
account of her initial submission to Paris during the sea passage, we are privy to nothing
of Helen’s inner life or development; the same is only more true of Polixena, who before
her final monologue is evoked only as the object of Achilles’s love and negotiations with
her parents. Once again, conspicuous absence is a key to authorial intent. The absences
are filled, so to speak, with the unique tale of a woman gradually falling in love,87 which
thereby acquires a weight in the poem far exceeding quantitative proportion.88
The author’s rant against women’s inconstancy emerges from similar remarks
about Briseida (13828–37). The word “soon” repeats three times in these nine lines
alongside other adverbial expressions emphasizing speedy change of heart; slightly
later the narrator will specify that it took four (not three) days (13859–61). Briseida’s
story, however, is told in four scenes that span a period of more than two years and
only in the last does she finally acknowledge and declare her love for Diomedes.89 If the
story complies at all with the narrator’s initial description of women, then only in that
Briseida’s affections do change; why they do so or precisely when remains inscrutable.
We are told repeatedly that Diomedes’s incessant attentions avail him nothing, not so
much as a favourable word—until the conclusion of the third scene, when, following
another lengthy and eloquent protestation of love, Briseida—without comment or
explanation—gives him her right sleeve to bear into battle. Even the final scene is no
lovers’ tryst, as Diomedes lies moribund with a wound suffered at the hands of Troilus
and we see and hear only Briseida, who delivers not a fervid declaration of love, but
rather a lucid and mournful confession of her own guilt.
85 Ja hom l’image n’esgardast, / Ne li fust vis qu’ele plorast” (22471–72). The image, we are told, is
no less visible to and no less admired by the Trojans (lines 22479–82).
86 Cf. lines 22489–90.
87 Kelly, “Briseida’s Story,” 236.
88 Other points support this judgment: the poem’s midpoint occurs within the scene in which
Brseida gives her sleeve to Diomedes—the first indication of a transfer of her affections. Similarly,
in Benoît’s catalogue of characters that precedes the outbreak of the war, Briseida is introduced at
the point of transition from the Greeks to the Trojans (lines 5275–88).
89 Kelly, “Briseida’s Story,” 235; O’Callaghan, “Tempering Scandal,” p. 304.
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Briseida is decidedly, as her initial description states, “a woman who was much loved
and loved as much” (5285), and in this role her behaviour is, or becomes, duplicitous. The
moral conundrum that results is not meant to yield conclusive judgment but rather to be
experienced in all its ambiguity and complexity, such that the audience finds an easy way
into Briseida’s dilemma but no easy way out. If we accept her loving heart as her nature
and thus her love as a mark of sincerity, then she cannot be condemned. Certainly, the
narrator’s charge of never recognizing her own fault is soundly contradicted, as it will
be in other women. But is the weakness of a loving heart sufficient justification? Can
devocions de cuers excuse a heathen harlot?
On this point biblical authority ought to be decisive. Solomon, however, figures as
its only prominent representative in this text, and his testimony works to similar effect
as the narrator’s. Nothing in the world is more rare, Solomon chimes in, than a “fort
femme” who combines beauty with a firm disposition that is proof against “fols corages”
(13471–81). But it is not Solomon’s mulier fortis who turns out to offer the measure of
virtue as the story progresses but rather his own (notorious) experience in love and
that of other men, notably the story’s premier hero, Achilles. Before the mulier fortis,
Solomon is evoked twice in the text: once, prominently, in the prologue and again in a
somewhat obscure reference to Jason’s spurs. The connection to Jason may not be trivial,
as it would point to the two heroes’ confrerie in the medieval catalogue of men who
were fools for love. The same allies them with Achilles, an idea made explicit in the only
two other mentions of Solomon in the poem. In these later references Solomon is no
guarantor of wisdom but rather proof that no degree of strength or wisdom, male or
female, can resist the force of love. This perspective carries double credibility, being first
represented by Achilles, who evokes Solomon’s example alongside David’s and Samson’s
in his own defence (18043–50), and subsequently espoused in almost identical form
by the narrator commenting on Achilles’s demise: “Who can keep his wits in the face
of love? … Solomon fell under love’s spell, and little good all his wisdom did him then.
With all men, love does as it wills. Belief and faith, father and lord, even great lands and
kingdoms have been abandoned more than once on its account. He who falls into the
grip of love has no refuge in sense or reason.”90
Solomon as “fool for love” belongs in a discourse on the power of women who
brought great men to their fall—precisely the perspective Benoît has omitted from his
tale of Helen’s Troy. What Benoît offers instead is the parallel portrayal of a woman’s
(Briseida’s) and a hero’s (Achilles’s) fate, placed severally under Solomon’s aegis and
confronting love in conflict with loyalty and reputation. Within this understanding
Solomon might sooner have lamented his own moral inferiority to the mulier fortis. Once
again, the shoe is on the other foot. How should Briseida resist, in all her female frailty
and desolate state, where the greatest of heroes cannot? The question is pressed on the
audience by the way Benoît interlaces the concluding episodes of Briseida’s story with
the progress of Achilles’s fole corage. By the time Briseida finally succumbs to her new
love the Greek hero’s fate is likewise sealed; to keep his agreement with Hecuba and
90 Cf. lines 18044–50.
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Priam for Polixena’s hand he has pled with the Greeks to abandon the siege and forbidden his Myrmidons to fight. Moreover, the parallel undoing of the two protagonists—
the Greek hero smitten with the Trojan woman and the Trojan woman resisting the Greek
hero—can only underline the reversal of the narrator’s authority along with
Solomon’s: not only does love make putty of men’s moral constitutions as easily as of
women’s, but the woman also resists, in fact, far longer than the man does. Achilles needs
no three days, still less two years, to turn his back on the Greek cause; rather, like Diomedes,
he is instantly and entirely the slave of love once he lays eyes on Polixena’s beauty.
“Women may fall,” Shakespeare would write, “when there’s no strength in men!”91
Such was also the argument presented on this point in the contemporary literature
of women’s instruction, where it serves to underline women’s inability to deny the
flesh—and thus her search for an inner integrity that shuns all outward display of
virtue.92 The woman, as we have seen in the earlier chapters, seeks to embrace her
weakness with an inner humility that reveals a different truth through the abject exterior.
The difficulty in assessing Briseida, the fascination she holds in a narrative world
accustomed to clear moral distinctions, lies here: her outward behaviour and its results
prove to be an inadequate measure of her inner integrity; and where her inner strengths
prove unequal to the challenge of her social destiny, this fall exhibits neither insincerity
nor opportunism nor even inner inconstancy; on the contrary, it is represented as an
eruption, long restrained, of pure feeling and its genuine manifestation.93 This accounts
for the primary oddity of her story: that she must fall in love differently from medieval
convention, not immediately but only gradually and over time, as only this allows her
predicament to develop and the audience to feel its way in; only this allows her and the
audience alike to see how Diomedes suffers for her sake, such that she finally suffers
for his sake and the audience for hers. Briseida is to be judged not against her promise
of fidelity to Troilus but rather against the contemporary judgment of Helen. Likewise,
Benoît shows his audience, his story of Troy is meant to display a new woman, not she
who is the downfall of men (such as both the narrator and Solomon might have wished),
but she who manifests truth in the corrupt flesh of our humanity.
It is not solely the narrator’s comparison between Briseida and the woman whose
virtue redeemed the faults of others of her sex that aligns Briseida with Eve. The poet
dresses her as such before she enters into the story of her inevitable fall. Briseida dons a
rich gown for her departure from Troy, a kind of investiture of all that she once had and
91 Romeo and Juliet, act 2, scene 3. The verses chide Romeo for his despair over exile.
92 After citing David and Solomon among examples of men who fell to the desire for worldly praise,
the Speculum virginum exclaims on the even greater danger to women as the weaker sex: “mirum
non est, etiamsi humilitatis callem professus est, quod vero mulier, quo sexu nihil fragilius est, in
alta levatur, monstro simile est” (SV, 6, p. 173).
93 Here I emphatically differ with (among others) Kelly, “Briseida’s Story,” 234, who speaks of
Briseida’s love as a “rational” and “fundamentally prudent decision.” According to Briseida, it is
rather the inability to deny her own heart that leads her to abandon her better instincts; see lines
20275–76, and 20281–82. Only retrospectively, and by means of reconciling herself to this failing,
does she declare “Des jués partiz ai le meillor” (20298).
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will now lose: “She adorned her body and dressed it with the richest garments that she
owned,” are the words that open the lengthy description.94 The main attraction is a gown
that “shaped her body so well that there was nothing else in the world she could have
worn that suited her better.”95 The material is magical in origin and comes from “upper
India”; “neither the rose so red nor the lily so white would retain their brilliance held
next to it.”96 Its ornament contains all creation, for “there is under the sun neither flora
nor fauna of which the gown did not display portraits, forms, semblances and figures.”97
The fur lining displays all the colours of God’s creation; neither balsam nor incense nor
thyme emits a more delightful fragrance; the fur of its border is of beasts that live in the
river of Paradise, and so on.98 What Briseida wears before her fall is the sum of the gifts
man received when placed in the garden of Eden, the stola prima amissa, the original and
lost garment that must be regained by “donning the new man,” Christ.99 That she wears
this robe of bodily perfection is another, but different, sign of her impending demise,
because with it she assumes the body of humanity and its fate.
Benoît never defines fine amor, the term that describes her love for Troilus, but he
does, through Briseida, define its opposite, male amor, which would seem to be his own
(and thus also her) invention.100 Briseida accuses Diomedes of male amor when he has
Troilus’s horse, seized in battle, brought to Briseida as a prize to further his unrelenting
suit. To his messenger Briseida replies:
“Di mei,” fet ele, “ton seignor
Que ci me porte male amor;
Quar, se rien se fait bien de mei
…
Tant com vers mei iert depreianz,
Nel deit laidir ne damagier:
Co qu’est de mei aint e ait chier.
Bien sai, s’il m’aime de neient,
Que mieuz en sera a ma gent:
A toz en deit porter manaie.”
(Constans, ed., 14326–35)
94 Cf. lines 13331–32; the description extends to line 13409.
95 “… un bliaut … / Qui fu riches e avenanz / E a son cors se bien estanz / Qu’el mont n’a rien, que
le vestist. / Qui plus de ce li avenist” (13335–40).
96 Cf. lines 13341–46.
97 “Si n’est soz ciel beste ne flors / Dont l’on n’ie veie portretures, / Formes, senblances e figures”
(13348–50).
98 Cf. lines 13369–71, 13392–93, 13396–400.
99 Speaking of the new garment of salvation, Peregrinus states in the Speculum viriginum
(4, p. 111), “Fontis gratia ista contexitur, ut homo stola prima amissa in secundo Adam decentius
adornetur.”
100 On Benoît’s idea of fine amor, see Kelly, “Briseida’s Story,” 234–36; Hansen, Frauengestalten,
pp. 106–31, esp. p. 120; and Schöning, Rezeption der Antike, p. 283.
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(“Tell your lord for me,” she said, “that with this he brings me false love; for if he cared
a bit for me as he has professed often enough, he should spare me from offense and
harm: That which is mine he should hold dear. Well I know, if he loves me at all, then he
will show more kindness to my people and should have mercy upon them all.”)
Male amor acts in pride and self-interest; true love, in Briseida’s view, would put the
needs and feelings of the beloved above even one’s own desire. To seek one’s own in love
is not fine amor, but vanity. It is the inner intention that is all-determining and not the
outward show of favour or service—or fidelity.
This idea is at the centre of Briseida’s moral conundrum. From the moment she
enters the Greek camp, she shows more concern for her own reputation and safety than
she does for her earlier love; in other words, she resists Diomedes more out of personal
shame (concern for appearances) than out of inner fidelity to Troilus.101 Where she is
able initially to upbraid Diomedes for such false intention in professed love, in their
next, and final encounter, the roles are reversed. If Diomedes seems at first the opportunistic seducer—of which his gift of Troilus’s horse is the emblem—he now becomes
the epitome of self-deprecation and suffering in fine amor. The narrator accordingly
underlines his sincerity even as he maligns Briseida for calculating manipulation.102
The scene begins when Diomedes comes upon Briseida still contemplating the
horse, wishing she could return it to Troilus. The initial image of continuing fidelity is
undercut, however, in that her earlier promise to see the horse returned “within four
days” has given way to concern for social position and personal well-being: “the lady
does not dare, for fear of shame and displeasure; gladly she would have returned it, but
she might have been the worse off for it and brought the wrath of the Greeks upon her.”103
Thus the apparent image of her constancy—her attention fixed on Troilus’s horse—is in
fact one of the opposite. If Diomedes sent the horse out of “false love,” she evinces the
same towards Troilus by retaining it.
The seemingly inscrutable reversal of Briseida’s affections in this second scene
comes about as a result of her susceptibility to “praise.” Concern for appearances and
others’ perceptions makes her persist in feigned fidelity rather than faith of heart,
while at the same time her delight over Diomedes’s blandishments makes her for the
first time a wilful coquette.104 By contrast, when Diomedes, oblivious to her slights to
his honour, accepts Troilus’s horse for safekeeping, he not only accepts a rebuff of his
former pride, but also agrees to care for the steed of his enemy because it is dear to
his beloved (15136–40). Briseida’s change of heart, or sleeve (which is all we know for
sure), marks her acknowledgement of this change even as it marks her own slide into
101 See lines 13649–62; and Nolan, Roman Antique, p. 112; Hansen, Frauengestalten, pp. 64–68,
shows how the concern for reputation links the fates of Briseida, Helen, and Polixena.
102 See lines 15019–24, 15033–45, 15063–78.
103 “Se la danzele l’osast faire, / Que n’en crensist honte e contraire, / Voluntiers li eüst tramis, /
Mes tost l’en peüst estre pis, / Car trop en fust en l’ost haïe” (15087–91).
104 That Briseida has a reputation to protect with the Greeks we learned earlier, when her entry
into the camp finds her showered with praise: “Molt fu la danzele esgardee, / Molt l’unt entr’elz
Grezeis loee: / “Molt est bele” ce dient tuit” (13815–17).
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manipulative self-interest in pride over her new conquest. The narrator’s judgment of
her, however, shifts at the scene’s end in the opposite direction, from the vindictive to
the ambivalent: “Ja est tochee de la veine / Dont les autres font les forfeiz, / Qui sovent
sunt diz e retreiz” (Now she is tainted with the trait that has led to so many other tales
of transgression told and retold) (15180–82). Victim as well as perpetrator, Briseida’s
failing is now not distinctly female, but sadly all too common human history. Nothing less
and nothing more is the judgment demonstrated by the story as a whole—manifest with
particular relevance to Briseida through favourable contrast with her traitorous father
(whose manoeuvrings got her into this mess), and again by comparison with the behaviour of Achilles in his love for Polixena.105
Briseida’s new position, while certainly duplicitous, is not yet that of the “fallen”
woman—she still refuses to surrender her love to Diomedes, whether in public acknowledgement or private fulfilment. It is only after another lengthy interlude—with seven
more battles fought, separated by truces lasting from one month to a full year—that the
decisive point is reached. But here we find no further trace of the triumphant coquette.
Instead, fear for her new suitor’s life coupled with compassion for his suffering bring
Briseida to Diomedes’s pitiable state; she is no more the master of her affections than
the “perilous wound” he has suffered in battle is within her control to heal. Her fall thus
takes place not as a continuation of self-interested calculation (such would at this point
dictate loyalty to the victorious Troilus), but rather as an eruption of true sentiment.106
Hers is the loving heart that cannot help but speak: “Mes ne puet pas son cuer covrir, /
Que plaint e lermes e sospir / N’isent de le a neisun fuer” (She can no longer hide her
heart’s desire and prevent her laments, tears and sighs from breaking forth) (20205–7).
As a result, and very like Landri’s bride, she suffers as intensely for shame and compassion as she does for a love whose sincerity will not be silenced. Moreover, this shame is no
longer that of revealing her infidelity to others. This concern she tosses to the winds. It is
rather remorse over a double unworthiness:107 she has not been worthy of the sufferings
of Diomedes on her account, but in her compassion for these she becomes unworthy of
all that she earlier held dear. It is this dilemma and the self-effacement it demands that
manifests her own fine amor: “From this moment she loves him,” the narrator affirms,
“From now on all can see that she has turned entirely to him her love, her heart and her
thoughts.”108 No sooner is this said than the subject turns to her intense remorse: “E si
105 Tellingly, Achilles makes a similar comment on his own fate (lines 20812–13). With reference
to Calchas, see lines 13862–66 and 13721–75.
106 Briseida’s story can only be evaluated together with the relevant events of the warfare with
which it is interlaced. In the preceding two battles, Troilus’s fame in war reaches its apogee; in addition to Diomedes, he has also wounded the Greek commander Agamemnon.
107 The poet underlines her expression of grief and compassion over Diomedes’s wound as an
explicit reversal of concern for “reparlance” (others’ opinions) (line 20214) and for the maintenance of appearances to which Calchas—the arch-traitor—would hold her by means of “reproaches,
threats and interdictions” (cf. lines 20222–25).
108 “Des or l’aime, des or l’en tient, / … / Des or puet hom aperceveir / Que vers lui a tot atorné /
S’amor, son cuer e son pensé” (20217, 20226–28).
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siet bien certeinement / Qu’ele mesfeit trop laidement” (And she knows only too well
that she is committing a most repugnant fault) (20229–30).
Is she a picture now of self-serving infidelity or of suffering for inner integrity?
Briseida’s final monologue is no expression of new-found love, but rather a searing selfindictment, full of sadness and remorse—including the recognition that her new love
will never be free of suffering over the circumstances that gave it birth (20308–17). Most
of all, however, it operates as the manifest reversal of all that the narrator first promised,
because in it the self-recognition earlier denied all women but one—her “through whom
the failings of other women are again made good”109—is most eloquently attested to by
her antipode, the woman who is the bane of her sex. Thus Briseida speaks as Eve after
the Fall:
Harront mei, et grant dreit avront,
Les dames qui a Troie sunt:
Honte i ai feit as damaiseles,
Trop leide, e as riches puceles.
Ma tricherie e mon mesfet
Lur sera mes toz jors retret.
Peser m’en deit, e si fet el.
Trop ai lo cuer muable e fel.
(20257–64)
(They will all hate me, and well they should, the ladies of Troy: I have disgraced the ladies
in the worst way, and the noble maidens as well, for my treachery and my misdeed will
be held against them forever. This cannot help but burden my soul, and so it does. I own
a heart too fickle and mean.)
In short, her constancy fails, but only under sore and desperate trial; she will suffer
without end from the pangs of her conscience, and in recognition of her own failings
she can be faulted only for lack of leniency. If she cannot be vindicated, she can certainly be pitied—that is, the audience recognizes and feels her pain. But more than
this, if she “falls,” she finally does so out of an experience of suffering for another as he
has suffered for her. Not as stated, but rather as experienced, Briseida’s story turns the
tale of woman’s weakness into one of an adulterated but no less authentic inner truth,
that of knowing another’s pain as one’s own—with the additional pain of remorse over
personal unworthiness. Briseida’s experience transforms Helen’s story into the story of
Eve, but this is Eve as we met her in Landri’s romans: Eve as the sponsa derelicta in search
of regaining the kiss of redemption, Eve as the loving heart all but stifled for shame, Eve
as the “reading bride” who seeks to join Mary at the cross. For the audience as Benoît
evoked it, “reading Helen” has become an exercise in self-recognition, an exercise in
compassion in which the suffering of the other acts as the mirror of weakness in the self.
The conclusions of Helen’s and Polixena’s stories reiterate and magnify the reversals
in reading woman that Briseida’s story first performs. Helen grieving over Paris’s body
109 See lines 13463–64 and p. 206, above.
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is the image of inconsolable self-incrimination and remorse, indeed, “Her grief surpasses
all other sorrows, no one ever knew greater distress.” So much for the idea of the woman
who “knows not what it is to suffer,” or never assumes blame: “Oh may the earth no
longer bear my weight, nor ever again a woman cause such terrible grief as have I!”
Helen cries, and in this remorse she feels herself united for life, and death, with her
dead husband:110
Ja sui je vostre douce amie,
Cele qui por vos se forsene,
Qui riens ne conforte n’asene,
Cele qui por vos sent la mort,
Cele qui ainc ne vos fist tort,
Ne qui ainc jor de votre vie
Ne pensa vers vos vilenie,
Cele qui ne desirre rien,
N’autre confort ne autre bien,
Ne mes m’ame o la vostre seit.’
(22992–3001)
(Always I will remain your sweet beloved, she who mourns you without measure, whom
none and nothing can console, she who suffers death in your place, she who never once
wronged you nor ever once in your life wished you harm, she who desires nothing, no
other consolation or boon, than for my spirit to be united with yours.)
Helen the whore has become the image of fidelity even beyond death, the faithful wife
who magnifies Briseida’s suffering even as she evinces a higher level of personal integrity in the chastity and penance of the widow. The audience’s intended response is
amply displayed: Priam and what is left of the royal family now both love and honour
her as never before, and as for the people of Troy, “Ne la poeit riens esgarder, / Hom ne
femme, jounes ne vielz, / Qu’el ne feïst plorer des ielz” (No one could look upon her, man
or woman, young or old, without tears coming to their eyes) (23026–28).
This final verdict on Helen finds its equivalent in the response to Polixena, whose
statue fixed at the top of Achilles’s tomb “no one ever looked upon … without believing
that she wept.” In Polixena the woman who recognizes her own guilt is displaced by the
image of a woman who suffers for the guilt of all—just as her commemorative likeness
is admired equally by Trojans and Greeks, from inside or outside the city walls.111 This
likeness as virgo dolorosa oddly forecloses on her fate, which is only sealed more than
4,000 lines later.112 Thus Benoît postpones the final aria until after Troy’s fall. Likewise,
110 Cf. lines 22916–29. Helen’s monologue extends from line 22920 to 23011, followed by the
narrator’s comments (lines 23012–28) and a second scene in which Paris is laid to rest and others’
sympathy and admiration for Helen is emphasized (lines 23073–88).
111 See note 85, above.
112 Polixena’s monologue, the first and last time she speaks, occurs at lines 26475–539; Achilles’s
tomb is described at lines 22405–91. In the interim we learn only that Eneas absconds with Polixena
at Hecuba’s request during the sacking of Troy (lines 26190–94).
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the praise due the widow gives way to that merited by the virgin martyr, as Polixena’s
morbid defiance before her Greek executioners shows:
Ne refus pas ma destinee
O ma virginité morrai.
Biau m’est, quant jo ne maumetrai
La hautece de ma valor.
Ne dei aveir ja mais amor
O rien vivant: Ja Deus nel doint!
(26510–15)
(I do not refuse my destiny and will die with my virginity. Happy I am that the nobility
of my birth will suffer no corruption. God grant that I never again love any living man!)
As she walks to her death, Polixena’s beauty recalls Mary’s symbols of the lily and the
rose. The same were evoked in the beauty of Briseida’s robe, and Polixena’s beauty similarly comprises all of Nature’s perfection.113 Polixena’s virginity is the mark of her perfect
sacrifice: though she could never truly love, she would willingly have been exchanged for
peace;114 had she changed sides it would have been not treason but her people’s salvation. But she is not a mere allegory of Mary nor only a sign of Mary’s coming. Polixena is
slaughtered on the altar of human vanity, on the ambitions and ideals of a world inveterately committed to the pursuit of honour and revenge, a world that has not yet found
its saviour—whose coming her golden likeness awaits in sorrow that will last “to the
end of time.” Her anguish and her suffering belong to all, and her image elevated to the
heavens is the elevation of human pain to a level of recognition in which it will be worthy
of divinity’s descent into female flesh—the blackened body that is all that remains of
Briseida’s once splendid gown.
In her own defence, Briseida’s final reflections recall her desolate state:
E n’eüst pas ensi esté
Se encor fusse en la cité:
Ja jor mis cuers ne porpensast
Qu’il tressaillist ne qu’il chanjast;
Mes ci esteie sans conseil
E sans ami e sans feeil;
Si m’ot mestier tiel entendance
Qui m’ostast d’ire e de pesance.
(20283–90)
(And all this would not have been if I were still within the city walls: Never once did
my heart then conceive that it could waver or change; But here I found myself without
counsel, without even a friend to confide in; I had great need of some confidence that
might relieve my pain and suffering.)
113 “Pitié en ont, n’est pas merveille / Le lis e la rose vermeille / Sunt envers li descoloré; Quant
que ot Nature de beauté / Mist ele en li par grant leisir” (26449–53).
114 See Constans, ed. lines 21227–33.
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Briseida, too, is a worldly bride bereaved. Without hope of regaining her beloved Troy
or Troilus, she must remain true to memory in a life of exile among enemies. Such was
no less the language of Christ’s virgins; the Life of Christina of Markyate describes her
position no differently—although she struggles bitterly to escape betrothal to a second
spouse, where in others’ eyes she has none. Benoît’s romans presents the pagan history
of Troy through the multifaceted refraction of the sponsa derelicta, seen once through
this mutable fate of the “married woman,” the woman who knows worldly love; next
through the widow, Helen, and finally through the virgin martyr, Polixena. In the resulting
succession of women’s reflections on their place in the destructive march of history, the
romans presents the progress of this female consciousness on the way to a Christian recognition of self, a self that acknowledges and embraces its bodily weakness—its femaleness—as the sole source of its redemption.
With his Roman de Troie, Benoît, like Landri of Waben or the author of the Eructavit,
offers his courtly audience the translation, in both the spatial and the linguistic sense,
of a reading experience from the world of Latin learning to that of the layman’s vernacular stage. “Le voudrai si en romanz metre / Que cil qui n’entendront la letre / Se
puissent deduire el romanz” (I would like to put it into romans so that those who are
not lettered may take delight in the romans) (37–39). Once again the term romans as
clearly signals the mediation of knowledge for a new group of “readers” as it mediates
in itself as a new literary form, what we would call a genre. This reformation of a literary
experience promises as well a new or different truth. For although the estoire is “rich and
great, telling of great acts and great feats” and “knowledge of how Troy was lost has been
drawn from many sources; the truth has scarce been heard” (40–44); la vertez est poi
oïe. What is at stake in this claim to truth is not entirely or even truly identified with the
dismissal of Homer for Dares (and later, Dictys); rather, Benoît initially piggy-backs on
the idea of the eyewitness as guarantor of factual truth in history to construct something
quite different, a truth not of facts, but rather of experience, and a witnessing that is not
dependent on the chronological proximity to events, but rather on restoration to the
present of a true experience. Benoît’s real eyewitnesses are, finally, the contemporary,
present members of his audience, who witness the story in the immediacy of the vernacular performance and recognize truth by entering into the experience of characters
who are most like themselves.
With his implicit exoneration of Helena-Briseida and the romance’s multiplication of
brides raped and bereft, Benoît orchestrates a reorientation of audience response away
from a peremptory condemnation of woman as the root of all ills and towards an identification with women’s inner struggle for integrity and fidelity in a world that cannot
sustain “her” weakness. If Helen can be seen as a Christian widow, then only because
Briseida’s story has turned hers inside-out, such that it is judged not by her apparent
actions or their consequences but by the testimony to inner integrity given by her final
monologue. Briseida’s story brings the heroically over-burdened tales of Medea, Helen
or Polixena down to a level where the audience is forced to judge for themselves and of
themselves; neither the narrator nor even a representative biblical authority prove to
be of any help. Only the implicit recognition of a different, perfected image of woman
evokes the truly Christian dimension of this task—and at the same time shows the
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275
audience itself in Helen’s mirror. This fictional amplification of historical “truth,” the
fusion of “being there” with “being her,” allows Benoît to transform the tale of tales from
pagan antiquity into a kind of prefiguration of sacred scripture. By requiring his audience to descend into woman’s failing, to know the body’s fall from the inside rather than
judging from without, Benoît squeezes the Christian truth out of the pagan past and,
in so doing, offers a key to the experience of invented narrative as revelatory of sacred
truth. The discovery must have captivated contemporaries and later generations alike,
as is amply witnessed by Briseida/Cressida’s extraordinary literary career.
Benoît’s use of the Eve–Mary paradigm to orchestrate identity between his audience’s
experience and Briseida’s shows us the point at which “reading as Mary did” becomes
independent of the exegesis of scriptural texts to manifest itself entirely as truth in the
body, truth found in narratives of the layman’s historia. The point of such narratives is
not to discover or uncover some symbolic arch-referent to which they defer for their
meaning, but rather to offer an experience in which we rediscover our own weakness,
our corporeality, its limits and its possibilities, its origins in Eve and its future in Mary;
in which we discover ourselves in the other, then; “I am you” as also union with that
which is most desired, the Word of God. This is the beginning, truly, of “the problem
of the “woman reader” in romance. But “the problem” does not begin with romance
or with courtly narrative nor can it be grasped through study that subscribes to genre
distinctions indebted to our own literary experience. It signals a convergence of sacred
and secular “reading” around a model of the experience of truth as presence that derived
its legitimacy from the position of the woman as embodied bride. By identifying the
reception of text with this identification between audience and bride, the narrator of
vernacular poetry communicates that his performance of the text is a present manifestation of the life of the bride, an assimilation of truth to personal experience that mirrors
Mary’s conception of the Word.
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Chapter 7
A NEW POETICS FOR ÂVENTIURE: THE EXPOSITION
OF WOLFRAM VON ESCHENBACH’S PARZIVAL
Swelhem wîbe volget kiusche mite,
der lobes kemphe wil ich sîn:
mir ist von herzen leit ir pîn.
(Where a woman keeps company with chaste modesty I’ll be the fighting
champion of her praise; her grief is my heart’s sorrow.)
(Parzival, lines 115,2–4)
THERE ARE FEW more conspicuous junctures in medieval romance narrative than the
so-called “Apology” between books 2 and 3 of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival.1 The
excursus comes at the audience with the force and belligerence of a jousting charger.
It is sandwiched between narrative events of no less impact, events that form a radical
transformation in the life of Parzival’s mother, Herzeloyde. In the space of this transition
(ca. 270 verses), the queen of three lands and wife of the flower of chivalry is widowed,
becomes a mother, and then abandons both her crowns and her courtly existence. She is
the figure who—quite “literally,” as we say, but the fact is emphatically physical, a pregnancy of bodily meaning—carries the narrative and its hero from book 2 to book 3, from
the old story to the new, as she brings them from her womb into the world. Both are
“flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone.”2
The three verses cited above form the midpoint of the narratorial excursus; they are
the pivotal point of a renewal that was first announced at the conclusion of the poem’s
prologue:3
ein mære wil i’u niuwen,
daz seit von grôzen triuwen.
(4,9–10)
(I will renew a tale for you that tells of great faith and devotion.)
1 The division of the text into sixteen books reflects manuscript evidence and cannot be attributed
to the author with any certainty. The division between books 2 and 3 is, however, clearly authorial.
See Schirok, “Einführung,” pp. 84–87. The paradoxical use of the term “book” for these units—where
the author/narrator explicitly forbids the same term—has unfortunately not been questioned in the
scholarship and I retain it despite misgivings. The scholarship on Parzival is vast, most especially
on the passages under consideration in this chapter. I cite below only the most recent or significant contributions on most points. For a general introduction and overview, see Bumke, Wolfram
von Eschenbach. Scholarship on the relationship between the Gahmuret and Parzival narratives is
reviewed in Hartmann, Gahmuret und Herzeloyde, 1:394–407.
2 See p. 185 note 143, above.
3 Wolf, “Meditationsgeflecht,” 9–73. I do not subscribe, however, to a “typological” understanding
of the relationship between the two stories; that is, Gahmuret’s story is not an “Old Testament” to
the “New” revealed in Parzival’s (cf. Hartmann, Gahmuret und Herzeloyde, 1:396–402).
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With these words, an unnamed poet embarks on the unspecified tale of an unnamed
protagonist, for this latter is, in a curious turn of phrase, “as yet narratively unborn,”
mæreshalp noch ungeborn (4,25). Neither the tale’s hero nor, in some sense, the tale
itself yet exist; the introduction of either awaits the conjunction of niuwen and triuwen,
a renewal through suffering in love and loving devotion that is the key to Wolfram’s
narrative poetics and is first realized in the description of Herzeloyde at the conclusion
of book 2, where we learn:
hiest der âventiure wurf gespilt,
und ir begin ist gezilt:
wand er ist alrêrst geborn,
dem diz mære wart erkorn.
(112,9–12)
(Here at last âventiure has cast her dice and her beginning has its direction, for only now
has he been born for whom this tale was destined.)
This image of woman is then the basis of the narrator’s proud claim, Swer nu wîben
sprichet baz, deiswâr daz lâz ich âne haz” (Should anyone now give a better account of
women, truly, I’d be the last to object) (114,5–6); her transformation is the moment that
enables this narrator to emerge and lay claim to his tale, no less than, by giving birth to
its hero, she enables the tale to begin.4 The hiatus that follows, the passage so long misunderstood as an “apology,” should rather be seen as the work’s second prologue: it is
the delayed and indispensable continuation of the first. It is likewise a poetic credo of a
sort that had never before been heard.5
The narrator’s part in this transition is staged as if also a poet’s conversion from
the flattery of courtly love lyric to chivalric narrative, from a previous “misreading” of
woman to a new song in her true praise; that is, this moment is a kind of narrator’s
metanoia. “Ich … Wolfram von Eschenbach” (114,12)—who, no less a character in this
performance than any of the others, introduces himself for the first time here—has
rolled three more “births” into the one: the woman, the story and its narrator are all
born anew—born, as was all humanity, of a woman.
These observations notwithstanding, the portrayal of Herzeloyde’s transformation is
most notable not for the account of Parzival’s birth but rather for the surprising images
which precede and follow that event. The first sees her acknowledge her husband’s
death and the child’s coming in an auto-lactation; that is (in her words) she “baptizes”
herself into a widowed maternity by pressing milk from her own breasts (110,22–
111,12). In the second she describes herself as if a Madonna lactans, nursing her son as
Mary nursed Christ (113,17–26), while the narrator’s remarks have been seen to evoke
a pietà, saying she feels as if by nursing her son she also holds her dead husband to her
breast (113,13–14, 113,27–114,3).6 The entire crescendo is rhetorically orchestrated to
4 Kuhn, “Wolframs Frauenlob,” 200–202. On the significance of Herzeloyde’s name, see below, note 36.
5 Curschmann, “Erzähler,” 25; see also Hartmann, Gahmuret und Herzeloyde, 2:365.
6 I am suggesting only that the descriptions spring from the same visual ideas—and not from
examples in visual art. The earliest examples of the Madonna lactans date from the late twelfth
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the exPosItIon of WoLfraM’s parzival
279
fix this visual moment in memory, absorbing the rush of events into an iconic stasis that
extends over thirty verses (113,5–114,4).7 With this eruption of the sacred into the text
and Wolfram’s quasi-iconographic invention of grieving lactation, a Lactans dolorosa,
something is achieved that constitutes the essence of his narrative project and that only
the narrative arc from the first prologue to this transition could accomplish, something
that brings forward the authentic voice of a new tale—one that is to be seen and heard,
in particular by women, so long as they recognize that it will tolerate “no help from
books” (cf. 115,8–10, 21–30). Herzeloyde’s transformation is the microcosm of a much
larger web of meaning; a woman is once again the keystone of an intricate poetic architecture in which the myriad forms of a narrative world, the world of âventiure, combine
and collude to shape an experience of Christian truth.8
As Alois Wolf puts it, “Herzeloyde is the exposition of Wolfram’s Parzival.”9 Moreover,
with the insistent coalescence of divine and human, sacred history and human history
that confronts us in her transformation, “Wolfram had arrived at an art of integrating
the Bible into the earthly world of romance narrative that was entirely new.”10 For Karl
Bertau, the concluding image of Herzeloyde marks an “epochal” divide, “heralds a new
human authenticity,” and shows Wolfram “lending voice to the discoveries in human
sensibility of his time.”11 Others have made similar statements, but dissenting opinions
and even disapproval have been no less common.12 Still more controversy surrounds the
exposition that Herzeloyde so iconically comprises, the argument that must begin in the
first prologue and find its at least preliminary conclusion here. The integral interpretation of this exposition remains the unsolvable puzzle confronting our understanding of
Wolfram’s Grail romance.
The preceding chapters have put key pieces of this puzzle into place. The woman
who holds both a dead beloved and a baby to her breast is, in the reading of Rupert
of Deutz, Mary’s description of herself as the fulfilment of Canticles 1:12 (“A bundle of
myrrh is my beloved is to me; he shall abide between my breasts”), as the woman who
became prophetissa when she knew present joy and future suffering all in one loving
embrace. Wolfram’s Herzeloyde is very much a narrative re-embodiment of Rupert’s
Mary, of Mary’s knowing as fulfilled in “our” lives. Wolfram’s text recalls Rupert’s in
myriad ways, but one is evident already in that Herzeloyde’s awakening into wisdom, as
it might be called, prompts her narrator’s emergence into his own text. But Wolfram’s
“bride” is (unlike Landri’s) neither female ideal nor reading abstraction; like Briseida,
she is presented as a woman of flesh and blood “who was much loved and loved as
much,” whose headstrong character and moral duplicity are as undeniable as they are
century; those of the pietà are more than a century later. See Bertau, “Regina Lactans,” pp. 259–85;
further literature in Hartmann, Gahmuret und Herzeloyde, 2:358–59.
7 Wenzel, “Herzeloyde und Sigune,” p. 221.
8 See esp. Schröder, Soltane-Erzählung; and Wolf, “Meditationsgeflecht.”
9 Wolf, “Meditationsgeflecht,” 13.
10 Wolf, “Meditationsgeflecht,” 15–16.
11 Bertau, Regina lactans, pp. 284–85.
12 An overview is found in Hartmann, Gahmuret und Herzeloyde, 2:333–34; also Heckel,
“Interpretation der Herzeloyde,” pp. 35–52.
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inscrutable. Thus, she too serves to force the issue of a woman’s worthiness in suffering
and love to the centre of audience attention, prompting a narrator’s intervention in which
the nature of woman and the proper reception of the tale—the discovery of meaning and
truth, no less—are all at stake. The resemblance is by no means fortuitous or incidental,
but neither need it point to textual dependency. Herzeloyde is like Briseida because
each in her turn is a cousin to Landri’s fallen bride, the sponsa derelicta; Herzeloyde
demonstrates how a woman’s suffering for love can elevate human experience and
human weakness to the point where the audience knows what Mary knew. Wolfram’s
Lactans dolorosa is a logical extension into vernacular narrative of the way Mary’s union
with Christ as one flesh in the conception was reiterated and revealed anew through her
suffering at the cross.
The point of this demonstration is, appropriately, a regeneration of narrative, for in
it, through it, courtly vernacular narrative is relocated within a hermeneutics of truth
that sees suffering for or with others as a way of embracing and revealing Christ’s love of
humanity in our lives. Benoît de Sainte-Maure used this idea to shape the audience’s discovery of Christian truth through the fates of his own bereaved brides. The last chapters
of this book finally reveal why the portrayal of women’s suffering, and in particular
women’s grief, takes such prominent place in new vernacular narrative and why it is
portrayed in such extremity. When Herzeloyde baptizes herself into life as widow, she
does no less for the project of vernacular narrative, which Wolfram thereby formally
initiates as an exercise in reading women’s suffering. This was, however, not his invention, nor did he seek to present it as such. In a later excursus on Sigune, Herzeloyde’s
niece and personal extension into Parzival’s story, he flags Laudine, the widowed bride
of Chrétien’s Yvain, as the romance touchstone of a widow’s worth. Neither the relationship between this gesture and Wolfram’s poetic exposition nor the relationship of either
to Chrétien’s romance has as yet been explored. These relationships will be at the centre
of attention in my last chapter, as they are of capital significance for the understanding
of either author’s idea of romance as a mediation of truth.
If the relationship between narrator and Lady at the crucial juncture of Wolfram’s
exposition recalls the readers of reading brides, his narratorial persona is not therefore
a “young woman.”13 On this stage it is emphatically the miles, the warrior in his specifically courtly guise as knight servitor, who claims the legitimate mediation of truth and
the true praise of woman. Moreover, unlike the purveyors of romans we have thus far
considered, “ich Wolfram von Eschenbach” does not pose as a cleric mediating reading
for a lay audience; unlike his predecessors in German and French romance, neither does
he claim qualification through a cleric’s learning. The polemical and notably unapologetic stance of his narrating knight has a clear forebear, nonetheless, in the portrayal
of David as an oral performer in the Eructavit. Translated to the stage of âventiure, this
stance proclaims the arrival of a layman’s literature that is to be seen and heard in defiant
rejection of clerical models of learning and knowing. The voice that David claimed as
13 In a riddle on the lady’s identity in the epilogue to book 6, the narrator appears to deny this very
possibility: “Only from the mouth of one born by different feet than those wagging in my stirrups”
will he assume the authority to continue his tale; cf. 337,27–30.
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authority for this privilege was none other than that of the Spirit in Mary’s ear. Once we
have traced the development of Wolfram’s poetic positioning from its beginning back to
this point, we will see that his own claim is no less ambitious. The objective is to establish an autonomous layman’s reading experience with Mary’s bodily gnosis not only as
its authority but also and above all as a generative moment that gives birth to an allinclusive narrative universe.
Already in its own time Wolfram’s poem must have been seen as a narrative that
exceeded all bounds, conformed to no model, and, in many ways, subsumed all others.
As the speaker in the first prologue puts it: “You show me three such fellows as I, each
of them no less capable a story-teller, and they would still need a wild imagination to
manage the tale that I’m about to tell you on my own. It would keep them busy indeed!”
(cf. 4,2–8). Wolfram’s 24,000-verse Grail romance, completed by ca. 1210, is the romance
of romances; it subsumes the Arthurian and the “historical” worlds, the Christian and
the pagan, Occident and Orient, the antique, the heroic and the burlesque. Beyond its
dependency on Chrétien’s unfinished Perceval and the knowledge displayed of his other
romances,14 its explicitly cited literary horizons include Heinrich von Veldeke’s Eneit,
Hartmann von Aue’s Erec and Iwein, the Nibelungenlied, the Spruchdichtung of Walther
von der Vogelweide, and the Minnesang. Implicit reference can be found to a number of
other works in the vernacular tradition,15 and the narrator delights in displaying medical, astronomical, and other areas of “scientific” knowledge.16 Overarching this panoply is the search for the Grail, the ultimate layman’s entry into communion with the
divine. Wolfram’s Parzival is more than anything else a romance of reading, that is, of
the nature, limits and possibilities of knowing.17 Its attempt to comprise and inscribe a
layman’s literature is akin in spirit and scope to the achievements of the counts of Guines
as Lambert recorded them, but its aim is still more ambitious: if they had vulgar tales
recorded and placed in a library alongside the church fathers, Wolfram is out to make a
layman’s library of romance in itself. And all of this, it turns out, is subsumed under the
question of who speaks best for, of, or to, women.
Wolfram communicates with his audience primarily through a battery of metaphors
that are grounded in a contemporary debate over knowledge, its legitimate apprehension and adequate transmission, which this book has sought throughout to discover
14 Nellmann, “Wolframs Bildung,” argues plausibly that in composing Parzival Wolfram most likely
used a compilation of Old French romances such as Paris, Bibliothèque nationale fr. 1450, which
begins with Benoît’s Roman de Troie and the Roman d’Eneas and inserts Chrétien’s romances into
Wace’s Roman de Brut. Curschmann, “Erzähler,” 11–32, suggests he was no less familiar with the Old
French continuations to Perceval that were available before 1200.
15 Kern, “Iwein liest Laudine,” pp. 399–400, sees Wolfram establishing a literary canon together
with his fictional audience. See also Draesner, Wege, pp. 171–76; and Bumke, Wolfram von
Eschenbach, pp. 10–12 and 207–9.
16 In addition to the literature in Bumke, Wolfram von Eschenbach, p. 7, see Kästner and Schirok,
“Bücher,” pp. 61–152; esp. 114–17.
17 Later scholarship has emphasized themes of perception and recognition, for example,
Greenfield, ed., Wahrnehmung im Parzival; Bumke, Blutstropfen; and Green, Art of Recognition.
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anew. Without an awareness of the interrelated significance of the woman, the incapacity of the unlearned, seeing and hearing, performance and reading, inner truth and
bodily cover—to name a now familiar few—in this debate, the would-be interpreter is
adrift in a sea of indeterminate signs. The prologue itself has been pronounced irretrievably removed from our understanding, if not by reason of historical and cultural
distance, then by reason of wilful obscurantism that is the author’s own.18
Wolfram’s argument for the presentation of his narrative puts forward the
emancipated layman’s literature as if superimposed on a map of the argument justifying
woman’s alternative reading. As such it becomes a poetological history of the genre and
the manifesto of new narrative art. Such a tour de force is inconceivable without an audience that was both capable of anticipating the general thrust of the argument and familiar
with its signal terms. In a new approach to the puzzle presented by the first prologue,
I illuminated the basis of this communication by pitting Wolfram’s argument against that
of his clerical adversaries, as represented by Thomasin of Zirclaria.19 The juxtaposition
leaves no doubt over what was at stake in either author’s understanding: the legitimate
authority over the layman’s reading path to salvation. Moreover, their confrontation
shows that each was acutely aware of the need to displace the other’s claim to the stage.
Âventiure, whether for its champion, Wolfram, or its detractor, Thomasin, is no merely
attractive new literary entertainment, still less is it an experiment in an as yet unarticulated poetics of literary fiction.20 As Thomasin sees it, âventiure pretends to a capacity
and an authority that are properly his own, those of the clerical instructor in mores
and morality, and has all but succeeded in convincing his German-speaking audience
to accept its claim. In this confrontation, then, we overhear something that scholarship
has otherwise sought in vain: an account of the contours, the status, and the intellectual place of romance narrative within the lettered culture and larger developments of
its time, expressed in terms appropriate to the courtly audience of German vernacular
literature.
My larger concern, both in this chapter and in my earlier article, is to show how
Wolfram’s prologue presents a lucid and tightly structured progression through familiar
ideas of the mediation of knowledge to in fact orchestrate an initiation of both audience and narrative into the female poetics of body and truth. This project can now be
completed, and once again, Thomasin reliably traces—by way of rejecting them—a
18 “Der Prolog gehört zu den dunkelsten und schwierigsten Textpartien der Dichtung.” This was
Joachim Bumke’s appraisal in the seventh edition (1997) of Bumke, Wolfram von Eschenbach; it
remains unchanged in the latest edition (2004), with an addition to contradict directly the claims
of the most recent interpretations: “Der Prolog enthält kein zusammenhängendes poetologisches
Programm. Er enthält eine Reihe von Aussagen, von denen nicht sicher ist, ob sie sich auf die eigene
Dichtung beziehen,” (8th ed., pp. 40, 204). See also Ohlenroth, “Wolframs Widerpart,” 28. I consider
the most fundamental and troublesome issues to be resolved in Powell, “ ‘Parzival’-Prolog,” and rely
on these insights here.
19 Powell, “ ‘Parzival’-Prolog.”
20 For Haug and those who followed in the fictionality school, the prologue is the manifesto of the
new fictional narrative: see LDMA, pp. 155–78; and Haug, “Konzept,” 211–29.
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startlingly complete outline of the woman-as-reader and the arguments that serve the
new poetics of body and narrative.21
Reading Women False and True: The Cleric’s Instruction
Thomasin’s Der welsche Gast is a work of nearly 15,000 verses, completed, as he tells us,
in 1216 by a prelate from today’s Friulia for an audience of the German-speaking nobility.
He is himself “the guest from Romania” who seeks, with his instruction in courtly mores
and the ways of the world, a place in their “house.”22 The guest entreats the “German lands”
to receive him as a hûsvrouwe (lady of the house) should one “who lovingly serves your
honour.”23 This feminization of the German audience goes hand in hand with its identity,
especially in the early stages of the work, as diu kint, “the children.” In Thomasin’s usage
this term is best understood simply as those in need of instruction, regardless of age; it
is the counterpart to wîse liute, or “wise folk,” who dispense the same and among whom
Thomasin counts himself (61–62). This treatment of the audience as at once “lady” and
the immature is only the first indication of Thomasin’s attempt to assume native dress,
the operative arguments for an alternative layman’s lectio.24 As he states with reference
to his decision to write solely in German, “der zühte lêre gewant sol gar / von sime gebote
sin einvar” (the objective of moral instruction and its medium should be of one colour)
(37–38). His prologue features this idea most particularly in relation to his use of German, but
it is no less evident in the representation of delivery through performance and even extends
to an accompanying cycle of pictures that visualize his moral instruction on the page.25
The guest is thus at pains to insert himself on a foreign stage, which he acknowledges in the same breath as the stage of Arthurian romance. Begging indulgence for his
possibly awkward German verse, he apostrophizes the audience as if they embodied its
protagonists:
ich heiz Thomasîn von Zirclaria:
boeser luite spote ist mir unmære.
hân ich Gâweins hulde wol,
von reht mîn Key spotten sol.
(71–78)
21 In Powell, “ ‘Parzival’-Prolog,” the argument was limited to the prologue’s first half, the so-called
“men’s prologue”; similarly, I did not consider Thomasin’s presentation of Helen as “bad reading,”
which follows below.
22 Cf. lines 55–95. Thomasin’s adjective welsch designated the entire romance-language area, or
Romania, as opposed to the German territories; he thus makes no distinction between his place as
welscher gast and that of the new literature adapted from Old French, or rather intentionally allows
the two to seem identical.
23 See below, note 26, for the original text and the full passage. The hûsvrouwe is apostrophized
again at the prologue’s end, line 127.
24 See Powell, “Instruction for Religious Women,” pp. 364–65; and Powell, “ ‘Parzival’-Prolog,” 55–56.
25 Powell, “Instruction for Religious Women,” pp. 361–63, 365–68.
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(My name is Thomasin von Zirclaria. The scorn of scoundrels is no matter to me: if I’m in
Gawain’s good graces, then Kay’s mockery is only to be expected.)
His remarks to the “lady of the house” then likewise acknowledge his predecessors in
mediation from French to German: “You have often enjoyed hearing what is taken from
romans (welsch), as adapted for you by German people. And so you shall hear today
whether a man from Romania can perhaps treat in German such things as will please
you.”26 Thomasin’s ambition is thereby clearly announced and his later showdown with
âventiure programmed in advance. The feigned indulgence of the opening is all part of
the pose; this moral instructor is out to displace a literature that he considers—when
he speaks candidly—little better than a highway to Hell. The “pretty dress” of the key
passage in fact says as much, although the attack is cloaked in false assurances:
die âventiure sint gekleit
dicke mit lüge harte schône:
diu lüge ist ir gezierde krône.
ich schilt die âventiure niht,
swie uns ze liegen geschiht
von der âventiure rât,
wan si bezeichenunge hât
der zuht unde der wârheit:
daz wâr man mit lüge kleit.
(1118–26)
(These tales of âventiure are richly clad in a most beautiful covering of lies: deceit, indeed,
is their crowning glory. Far be it from me to scold such tales—what matter that their
counsel land us in a liar’s bed?—for they do contain signs at least of virtue and truth: the
truth is simply clothed in lies.)27
Thomasin’s text offers one of only a very few contemporary witnesses to the reception of new vernacular narrative that have come down to us; as a discussion of âventiure
per se, his is the only one we possess, whether from France or Germany. As a result,
these lines (and the rest of the excursus, lines 1079–162) have found much scholarly discussion, and I have argued elsewhere that they at best consign âventiure to an
understanding of narrative, body, and truth that is diametrically opposed to what this
book has thus far discovered.28 Thomasin goes on to discuss âventiure as the medieval
equivalent of the comic book (of which his own illustrative programme is oddly reminiscent), citing Gregory’s apology for pictures as the appropriate medium for, as he would
26 The whole passage reads: “Tiusche lant, enphâhe wol, / als ein guot hûsvrouwe sol, / dise dînen
welhschen gast / der dîn êre minnet vast. / der seit dir zühte mære vil, / ob du in gern vernemen
wil. / du hâst dicke gern vernomen / daz von der welhsche ist genomen, / daz hânt bediutet tiusche
liute. / dâ von solt du vernemen hiute, / ob dir ein welhischer man / lîht ouch des gesagen kan /
tiuschen daz dir müge gevallen” (87–99).
27 Translations of the text are my own, though I have also consulted the sole integral modern
translation, recently provided by Marion Gibbs and Winder McConnell.
28 Powell, “Instruction for Religious Women,” pp. 371–84; and Powell, “ ‘Parzival’-Prolog,” 55–62.
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have it, kindes muot, a childish disposition. Those who have not yet progressed beyond
the understanding of a simpleton or a peasant can “find their ‘pictures’ there” (1091–92).
Thomasin’s term is bilde nemen, “to take examples.” A double conflation occurs here that
is most revealing for his argument. The one, between Gregory’s picturae and exemplary
behaviour, is made possible by two meanings of the Middle High German Bild, “image”
and “example” (as in modern German Vorbild). The power of the image is admitted only
as a cliché (literally speaking): it must transfer its value directly as if from one body to
another. The other takes this use of moral models as interchangeable with a proposition that is, in terms of visual evidence, quite the opposite: truth hidden in allegory, or
bezeichenunge.
The common denominator between the two possibilities Thomasin allows for truth
in âventiure is given by his own bias: both are standard vehicles of clerical instruction
for the layman. Morally exemplary character and the readable sign (bezeichenunge or
significatio) stand here together, and exclusively so, for the legitimate mediation of truth,
whether through narrative or in his own instruction. Of particular interest as well is the
way Thomasin treats proper application of such vehicles as dependent, above all, on the
idea of muot, with which he acknowledges the differing capacities and dispositions of
different groups. Wolfram (as we shall see) had constructed his prologue with the same
building blocks to reach an opposite end. As far as Thomasin’s project is concerned, the
following applies: he concedes to new courtly narratives a part in the legitimate models
of truth only to reveal with the same gesture that that part is all but non-existent. To identify before a courtly audience this reduced value as suitable fare for peasants betrays the
same intention. A later comment on Arthur works to similar effect: Thomasin speculates
that, should Arthur be in Hell, then our high opinion is of no use to him; on the contrary, “our praise heaps sin on his sin, because he gives us reason for great lies without
cease.”29 With these underhanded arguments, the tales of âventiure are forced from their
own stage; in their place there should stand, unchallenged, the purveyor of “true” moral
instruction:
werz gerne tuon wil,
der mag uns sagen harte vil
von der wârheit, daz waer guot.
er bezzert ouch unsern muot
mit der wârheit michels baz
denn mit der lüge, wizzet daz.
(1143–48)
(Anyone who truly wishes to can tell us a great deal about the truth, and that would be
best. He does us far more good by relying on the truth than by resorting to lies, be sure
of that.)
Thus the supercilious gatekeeper reasserts his authority over the layman’s access to
knowledge.
29 Cf. 3539–45; Powell, “ ‘Parzival’-Prolog,” 58.
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Thomasin is no less familiar with the opposite argument than he is aware of the
appeal of the alternatives it serves, which is why so many of its requisite components
turn up in his own. This becomes all the more evident when one considers the excursus
on âventiure in the context Thomasin provides: as the culmination of a discussion of good
and bad reading material, or “waz diu kint suln vernemen unde lesen” (what the young
should hear and read) (1026–27). For the purpose of speaking to a lay courtly audience “in their own tongue,” he in fact understands the entire problem of “reading”—the
choice of subject matter, media and mode, as well as the nature of the audience’s receptive experience—as defined by the nature of woman and the considerations governing
her instruction.30
Thomasin couches this entire discussion within the contrast between the “false” and
the “true” woman as the embodiments of false and true instruction; at the same time,
he implicitly casts his audience as juncfrouwen, and this identification is constructed
through a repeated insistence on the dichotomy between exterior form and inner truth.
Beauty is once again synonymous with lies and deceit, even moral depravity, and the
entire discussion of boesiu mære, depraved reading material, is carried by one figure
alone: Helen of Troy. Thomasin’s knowledge of vernacular narrative may thus be more
penetrating than he has generally been given credit for.
The discussion begins by proclaiming that the kint should limit his “reading” to
“guotiu mære” (virtuous tales) leaving aside “boese geschiht” (wicked stories) (761–65).
This audience is then renamed as “wîp unde man” (woman and man) (767), and a few
lines later Thomasin begins his prescriptions, starting, or so it would seem, with “wicked
tales” (boesiu mære, line 779) and reading advice for young women (juncvrouwen, line
773). Some 250 lines later he announces his task as accomplished, boesiu mære have
been properly defined, and now he will turn to “what young people should hear and
read, and what can be of use to them” (cf. 1023–28). There follows a catalogue of “good”
examples from romance narrative (a mere fifty lines), divided between juncvrouwen
and juncherren. I will return to this passage below. But the implicit dipartite division
between the sexes is never carried through. The much longer passage preceding never
shifts from the young women to the young men, despite Thomasin’s claim to have fulfilled his promise. Moreover, only two short passages within it, lines 773–82 and lines
821–28, give any explicit advice on “reading” material, and within them only one example
is given of bœsiu mære: Helen. What Thomasin instead presents, and with tiresome
repetition, is a continuous, if shifting, reflection on woman as the negative embodiment
of the inner/outer dichotomy. Represented variously as schœne/sinne, schœne/zuht,
schœne/gemüete, lîp/sin, and lîp/muot (beauty/wits, beauty/upbringing, beauty/character, body/intelligence or meaning, body/disposition), this basic opposition is what
in fact unites the entire passage—and what ties it both to Helen and to reading. The
advice offered, whether it pertains to morals and mores or to the choice of appropriate
examples, applies not to women alone but to the audience generally and to women in
particular. This last point is revealed through repeated shifts of address.
30 Argued in greater detail in Powell, “Instruction for Religious Women,” pp. 383–96.
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the exPosItIon of WoLfraM’s parzival
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Helen is introduced with the remarks cited previously in chapter 6:
Juncvrouwen bezzernt klein ir sinne
von der schœnen küneginne
diu wîlen dâ ze Kriechen was;
diu tet unreht diuz êrste las,
wan bœse bilde verkêrent sêre
guote zuht und guote lêre.
(773–78)
(Young ladies cannot better their understanding through the story of the beautiful queen
in Greece of those days; she did wrong whoever first read it, for bad examples sorely distort good manners and good instruction.)
But this gives way almost immediately to thoughts equally applicable to women’s condition generally: “swa ein wîp hât reinen muot, / hœret si dan übel ode guot / daz mag
ir werren nihtes niht” (Provided a woman has a pure heart, it will make little difference
whether she hears evil things or good ones) (783–85). In turn, these reflections, which
pertain to the potentially harmful effect of Helen as boesiu mære, are then applied to
both men and women with the phrase “swelich wîp und swelich man” (whatever woman
and whatever man) (795). The advice on reading for juncvrouwen becomes a general
comment on the ability to distinguish between good and bad for both sexes—an ability
in which Thomasin has little faith as far as his specific audience is concerned. Thus his
meditation on inner truth and outer form is launched.
Immediately attention shifts back to women: “Sumelîchiu wîp sint gemeit” (Some
women are happy) (800), and then broadens to comprise men as well: “der und diu
triegent sich gar” (man and woman alike are only fooling themselves) (812), and just
as quickly shifts back to women: “dâ von ein biderbe wîp sol” (thus, a worthy woman
should) (845). In the meantime Thomasin has all but abandoned the discussion of
reading and ventured into general moral education. He picks up his ostensible subject,
Helen, again at line 821, but this turns out to be only another tack in the same strategy.
Helen is presented as the example of a woman who possessed “vil schœne und lützel
sinne” (great looks but poor wits) (826). At this point, Thomasin has staked out the
ground he wants to build on. The rest of the passage follows the same pattern of shifting
address from woman to general audience and back again, as it expounds over and again
on its one theme: the inherently deceptive quality of the bodily exterior and the necessity to “read” beneath it for the truth. Thomasin no doubt felt quite at home reading
Tertullian and other representatives of the patristic poetics of gender and the body.
Behind this lengthy elaboration on her own nature Helen fades from view altogether,
but she is more than a mere pawn. She is the point of departure for the whole discussion, because she constitutes the epitome both of the beautiful exterior that may deceive
the immature “reader” (this Thomasin concentrates on in the first passage devoted to
her) and, in her own dependency on schœne lacking sinne, of an unsuccessful “reader,”
one who has fallen to the seductive exterior. Through her alignment with the body, the
woman is both the seductress and the seduced, both the boesiu mære and its misguided
recipient. Reiner muot, the pure disposition, elsewhere placed in opposition to the lîp, or
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body, guarantees surety against such deception—that is, only the woman who has overcome her proclivity for external attraction can successfully read through the deception
of external form.
To read woman is to read the world—as a woman. This is the underlying equation
that subsumes the male readers under the category of the juncvrouwen or wîp and
assimilates instruction on the inner and the outer to reading advice for women. The
corollary is also true: to read the body, or corporalia, is to read as a woman. Thus the
woman as embodiment of the inner/outer dichotomy is both reader and text, viewer and
image: here too, the mirroring of the body is operative. These are the same equations to
which Benoît and Wolfram subscribe. In Thomasin’s case, however, they provide not a
justification for women’s reading or reading as a woman but rather a statement of her
inevitable fallibility or “bad reading,” which thus cannot dispense with the cleric’s mediation of the truth.
If Benoît undertook to upend Helen’s story, redeeming the body by redeeming its
most infamous representative, Thomasin is under no lesser onus to reinstate her as
she was previously known. Thomasin in fact stages his discussion of reading in the
body—boesiu mære—in distinctly parallel fashion to Benoît, for he, too, makes a sudden
heartfelt declaration of personal admiration to Helen’s opposite at the passage’s end,
extolling the mulier fortis, who embodies continuity between beauty and chastity, truth
and representation:
ist triuwe, stæte und senfter muot
an schœnem wîbe, so ist si guot.
diu mac mich âne netze gereichen,
durch sî wil ich mîn herze weichen,
und wil daz ir einvaltic herze
sî gar mîn angel âne smerze,
daz si mich ziehe swar si wil:
swaz si gebiut, dunkt mich niht vil:
wan guotes wîbes reiner muot
den widerwiget dehein guot.
(1013–22)
(When devotion, constancy and a gentle disposition are found in a beautiful woman, then
is she good. Such a one can catch me without a net. For her sake my heart would soften,
I would gladly accept her simple heart as my painless hook and follow wherever she
leads: whatever she commands, it seems to me not much. For the pure disposition of a
good woman is truly an incomparable possession.)
Benoît had placed his audience between Briseida-Eve and the mulier fortis to force consideration of what, in the audience’s knowledge, was unworthy: Helen’s story, the story
of Ooliba. The audience was thereby engaged in a narrative process that revealed truth
in the fallen body, the body in search of its saviour. When Thomasin wrote, Wolfram
had gone one step further and posited a new female ideal as one realized through that
process; the woman, in effect, redeemed the narrative body. For Thomasin neither
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possibility could apply. As indicated above, the strategy is always the same: Thomasin
indulges mære/âventiure only long enough to expose its immanent failings and induce
his audience to “leave behind childish things” (cf. 1 Corinthians 11), that is, to hearken to
his own moral teaching as the unadulterated truth.
Consequently, when Thomasin tells the story of reading in the body, the audience
remains transfixed between clear moral models, images of evil and good, depravity
and purity. The final alternatives are no different from those Benoît first frames in his
misogynist intervention, and thus we find Helen restored as the image of the depraved
woman, where Benoît had made her conspicuous by absence. Thomasin’s scorn for “she
who first read Helen’s story”—an otherwise unclear remark—is quite possibly a sideswipe at Benoît’s riche dame de riche rei, in this case limited to her identity as Benoît’s
ideal audience. But whether or not he has Benoît’s Helen or Wolfram’s exposition in
mind, Thomasin is, at the least, fully aware of the significance of this “reading woman”
to the layman’s narrative. He undertakes to invert her significance entirely, and with it
a competing poetics of body and truth. There can be no redeeming value in following
a Helen or a Briseida through the struggle of a New Eve, for Thomasin posits no process for her transformation. Her value lies instead in her immutability, which serves as a
warning to shun seductive form. The body and woman alike are here inherently suspect;
no less suspect, then, is the “pretty dress” of lies that he ascribes to âventiure generally. Nevertheless, for him as for his rivals, the two, woman and âventiure, are one and
the same. His indictment of this new reading is merely the reversal of a subversion, the
reconstruction of a traditional view of gender and body in relation to truth built on the
foundation of his opponents’ best arguments.
Before turning to Wolfram’s opposite treatment of these questions, it remains to
consider the positive examples that Thomasin does cite from the world of the layman’s
narrative before making his definitive charge at âventiure. The catalogue initially makes
no distinction between the Arthurian, the antique and the chanson de geste, listing Arthur
alongside Charlemagne or Alexander. In conclusion, however, Thomasin focuses solely
on âventiure, waxing apparently enthusiastic in imitation of romance poets: “wartâ,
wartâ, wie si drungen, / die rîter von der tavelrunden, / einr vürn ander ze vrümkeit”
(Look! Look! how they strove, those knights of the Round Table, to surpass one another
in bravery) (1053–54). The examples that immediately precede (1051–52), however,
deliver the real point: Segramors (oddly obscure, but not so for Thomasin’s purpose)
was the brash and reckless youth who ended up shamefully unhorsed in the snow.
Kalogrenant, the next listed, tells a story of such shameful deport that Yvain/Iwein must
set out to rectify it—which produces another tale of âventiure (we shall revisit this crucial juncture in the next chapter). And the inveterate adulterer and fool for love, Tristan,
can hardly be taken seriously as a model of vrümkeit, upright virtue, from the mouth of a
churchman and moralist.31 All this then sets up Thomasin’s regretful conclusion: Key, the
31 Haug (LDMA, p. 234), concludes similarly; see also the broad comparison of these characters
across the different Arthurian tales in Düwel, “Lesestoff,” 67–93, esp. 72.
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ubiquitous heckler and troublemaker of Arthurian narrative, is not at all dead (much to
the contrary of Hartmann von Aue’s statements in the prologue to his Iwein).32 His own
“children,” or emulators, are so common that “I hardly know where to turn,” Thomasin
says (1062–66). As the coup de grâce, then, he concludes with a feigned lament, not on
the dearth of apposite Gawans in the audience, but rather over Parzival: “of his kind
it seems none are alive. … Alas, where are you, Parzival?” (1065/1075). Thomasin is
explicit on his reasons for the choice: such a one would break another of Key’s ribs—as
Wolfram’s Parzival does in the same scene and by reason of the same singularly inimitable moral oblivion that delivers Segramors into the snow (1072–74).33 Moral ambivalence is found even here. As an object of bilde nemen, Wolfram’s anti-hero is the least
suitable of choices, and this is finally the point. Just so much nütze, or useful value (cf.
1028), lies in such a story, for a literature that cannot serve as a moral mirror, that offers
no imitable models, is no litteratura at all but rather childish foolishness.
Thus, if the didactic churchman dons the mediary mask of a new layman’s literary
culture, then it is because he understands himself to be competing with the poets of
âventiure for rightful authority over the layman’s moral instruction. It is not that the
new narrative art is a mere pack of frivolous lies that disturbs him. His entire stance
proceeds instead from the assumption that âventiure must and does make its own claim
to a mediation of truth; and truth, for him as for his audience, means that which legitimately leads to the soul’s redemption. In this undertaking a new presence had emerged,
a new way of articulating the relationship between layman and Logos that derived from
an alternative women’s lectio. In Thomasin’s treatment, therefore, the woman’s reading
quest for an integration of body and truth is bound back into the old opposition between
deceiving exterior and sensus moralis. Such was the usefulness of “new media” and alternative gnosis to this reactionary revisionist. His argument provides us with very nearly
the photographic negative of the entire complex of questions at the centre of this revolution in reading. This extends right to his epilogue, in which the completed instructive
compendium is sent into the world—“nu var hin, welhisch gast” (now be on your way,
romance guest) (14681)—with the instruction to avoid lodging with a wicked man
(boesewicht) and to seek out different audience groups, each defined by a qualification
that assures his or her “good reading”: “vrume rîtr und guote vrouwen und wîse phaffen
suln dich schouwen” (Brave knights and virtuous ladies and wise clerics are to be your
beholders) (14695–96).
The formula pfaffen—leien—frouwen (clerics—laymen—women) had some currency
in early Middle High German texts, possibly as a way of acknowledging differing receptive tasks in one communication and communicative space.34 Wolfram’s Parzival prologue
32 Hartmann’s prologue laments the loss of the “historical” figures of the Arthurian world as true
moral models to claim we are nonetheless all the better off to be able to feel their presence through
literary works. See Iwein, lines 4–20, 50–58; also LDMA, pp. 122–29.
33 At stake is the extraordinary scene in which Parzival remains transfixed before three drops
of blood in the snow, which proves no hindrance to his ability to best the best of Arthur’s knights
when attacked (lines 282,23–300,5). The scene has a literature all its own; see Bumke, Blutstropfen.
34 Curschmann, “Hören–Lesen–Sehen,” 251; Powell, “Instruction for Religious Women,” pp. 306,
311–12, 369.
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addresses the same three audience groups and elaborates on his project through a discussion of their differing reading capacities and objectives—their mout and the zil of their
participation. For Wolfram, however, these differences become the justifying argument
for a new way of mediating knowledge with no lesser claim to deliver the soul’s salvation
than Thomasin’s. For Thomasin the formula serves merely the reiteration of his moralist’s
aesthetic: placed in the epilogue it evokes not so much what his readers bring to the performance as it does the moral imprint his instruction is to leave on each audience group.
Reading Women False and True: The Knight’s Narration
Sîn lop hinket ame spat,
Swer allen vrouwen sprichet mat
Durch sîn eines vrouwen.
(115,5–7)
(He who lauds his one and only such that all other women are left without hope, delivers
crippling praise.)
Thus Wolfram’s narrator continues after his declaration of suffering service to the
suffering woman: “der lobes kemphe wil ich sîn: / mir ist von herzen leit ir pîn.”
Clarification is overdue on the connection of this declaration to Herzeloyde.35 The verses
avoid a direct identification, which in part explains why many have been reluctant to
accept herzen leit as a pun on Herzeloyde’s name.36 Here, as so often in Wolfram’s art,
the deflection or defamiliarization of an image in fact reveals its true significance, one
that is always more and less than simple identification: “I’ll be the fighting champion
of her praise; her grief is my heart’s sorrow.” The narrator’s affective identification
with his heroine, his ability to know her pain, is the key to her identity. The reverse is
also true: this moment, in which the speaker reveals his new female ideal, allows him
to declare his identity. At the same time, by not naming Herzeloyde, Wolfram does not
single out one woman but instead the experience she embodies, one that is therefore
open to all women, an idea underlined in the otherwise oddly unmotivated verses on the
“crippling praise” of only one.37
35 First argued as such by Kuhn, “Wolframs Frauenlob,” 200–202.
36 The reluctance (see, for example, Hartmann, Gahmuret und Herzeloyde, 2:366–67, where the
issue is passed over in silence) is not entirely comprehensible: such klingende Namen are all but
a habit of Wolfram’s, especially where major female characters are concerned: Sigune’s name is an
anagram of “Cusine” (she is Parzival’s cousin), Condwiramurs’s name means “love-guide,” Orgeluse’s
name is likewise derived from the French “orgeuilleuse,” Cunneware’s suggests “true witness” or
“true knowledge,” as well as verecundia—to name only the most prominent. As has been noted
before, leide would, in Wolfram’s Bavarian dialect, have sounded much like loyde. Whether or not
one can locate possible French inspirations for the name (such as have been proposed are considerably less compelling) is beside the point: the audience is far more likely to have made the connection
available in their own language; indeed, it appears abstruse to argue that they could have missed it.
37 The images have long been recognized as borrowed from the Minnesang poet, Reinmar der Alte;
see Hartmann, Gahmuret und Herzeloyde, 2:377–79. The overlay of a position inherited from clerical authors with features from the Minnesang is characteristic of the second prologue.
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The verses in fact offer the solution to a riddle on Wolfram’s female ideal that is
initiated in the first prologue. They make up only the first of several such riddling
representations on a female identity in his text, the quae est ista with which we have
made repeated acquaintance.38 Tellingly, this riddle, too, is announced by a pun on the
name of a woman, but one who represents the opposite relationship of body to truth:
manec wîbes schœne an lobe ist breit:
ist dâ daz herze conterfeit,
die lob ich als ich solde
daz safer ime golde.
ich enhân daz niht für lihtiu dinc,
swer in den kranken messinc
verwurket edeln rubîn
und al die âventiure sîn
(dem glîche ich rehten wîbes muot).
(3,11–19, emphasis added)
(Many a woman’s beauty is admired far and wide, but where the heart is false, the woman
I appraise accordingly, as a bauble in a gold setting. But he who works into base brass all
the âventiure of a noble ruby, this I hold to be no small feat—to this I compare the true
woman’s disposition.)
These verses constitute the first positive statement in the prologue on Wolfram’s art as
opposed to what he previously is concerned to reject, and I will discuss their larger context
shortly.39 The subject is once again, ostensibly, the true praise of women, and at this point
the speaker aligns the false woman, that is, the false exterior, with a stock image of that discourse, the glass bead in a gold setting. This he would praise “as he should” (als ich solde)
or, with more pregnant meaning, as Isolde. The opposite image, a ruby worked into “base
brass,” is linked to âventiure, and here again Wolfram obscures the simple identification.
Woman is not âventiure; rather, the power of her inner truth is so named.40 Moreover, the
“name” of the opposite woman, Isolde’s counterpart, has been cleverly withheld. In fact, if
we are at all prompted (beyond knowledge of the topos) to see the false-hearted woman as
an allegory of poetic representation, then it is because her counterpart is upstaged by an
38 The others are well known (though their significance has gone unrecognized): the “one” woman
against whom Wolfram rages in lines 114,8–18; the woman who must desire the continuation of
the tale in the epilogue to book 6 (lines 337,27–30), and the woman named as a triple hypothetical
in the final epilogue to the entire poem (lines 827,25–30). Yet another play on the gesture occurs at
the beginning of book 3, discussed below. Clearly, it is the idea of the changeable rather than fixed
identity of this female instance that is at stake.
39 The full text of the prologue, with translation, is found in the appendix.
40 Schnyder, “ ‘Frauenpassage’,” 5–7 and passim. The medieval idea that the ruby possessed an
endogenous light makes it an apt image for the truth that shines through a base exterior; see
Engelen, Edelsteine, p. 81. But contrary to all previous readings, Schnyder shows there is no lexical
support for the idea of âventiure as such a “wondrous” or “magical power”; Wolfram’s image therefore identifies the image of the ruby’s inner light metaphorically with his narrative art—and both
with the true woman (thus earlier also Powell, “Instruction for Religious Women,” p. 435).
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image of (poetic) craftsmanship. Woman is no longer the subject under comparison, tenor
and vehicle of the metaphor all but change places: her excellence is not equivalent to a ruby
in base brass (dim praise, taken as such); rather, the craftsman who can work the power
of the ruby into a base material is the true master—and this (by the way) is akin to rehter
wîbes muot, the disposition of a true woman.
To invoke the woman’s position in this way anticipates a renaming of Eve and Mary as
obverse archetypes of the identification between woman and flesh. Thomasin supplied
Helen as the woman who falls victim to the false exterior, Benoît supplied a misogynist
rant on women in general, by way of not naming the same “one woman.” Wolfram, it has
often been claimed, supplies Isolde as a reference to Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan.41
Such a reference would indeed be relevant if not chronologically precluded, but it is by
no means necessary.42
Isolde (and not Gottfried’s Isot) was one of the best-known female figures of contemporary vernacular narrative, whether written or not, although previous written versions
of her story existed in Germany as well as France. Wolfram evokes her as a point of reference in the layman’s literary experience as such; moreover, he did not need to invent
the pun himself, nor even its use as a reference to rhetorically ornamented beauty. In
his Erec, Hartmann von Aue’s knight-narrator declines to describe Enite’s beauty “als
ich solde,” that is, with the rhetorical flourish exhibited by other poets in the description of female excellence.43 Enite/Enide figured as an “anti-Isolde” through the idea of
Chrétien’s Erec et Enide as an “anti-Tristan,” a romance in praise of marital fidelity. The
poetic appraisal of Isolde’s beauty figures for Hartmann (as for Wolfram) as a non plus
ultra in the use of ornamental rhetoric, plainly with no possible reference to Gottfried,
but all the more in a moral rejection of rhetorical show—which Wolfram’s prologue
aligns with the clerical mediation of knowledge.
The visual tradition offers another suggestive image of the popular understanding of
Isolde (figs. 7.1 and 7.2). The lover’s tryst in the orchard, with King Mark hiding above
them in a tree, was the predominant medieval image of the Tristan story, serving in
41 Brall, “Programmatik,” 26–32, gives a review of the overall thesis of a literary rivalry between
the two authors; accepted by Haug, LDMA, p. 175. Nellmann, commentary to Parzival, pp. 450–51,
rejects the connection to Gottfried.
42 Those who argue for an allusion to Gottfried’s Tristan see Wolfram later amending his text in
reaction to Gottfried’s remarks in the celebrated passage in praise of vernacular poets (Tristan,
lines 4619ff., completed after Parzival). The allusion would be problematic in other ways as well,
as detailed in Nellmann’s commentary to the Deutscher Klassiker edition, pp. 450–51. If Wolfram
alludes to any specific text, it is far more likely to be Eilhart von Oberge’s Tristrant, as argued by
Bertelsmeier-Kierst, “Verortung,” p. 38.
43 Erec, lines 1590–603. The connection between the two poets’ attitudes is striking: Hartmann
professes incapacity by calling himself a tumber kneht who lacks the rhetorical expertise of the wîser
man (lines 1592, 1595), thus setting up the same tump-wis opposition that Wolfram uses in his prologue (see below pp. 298–300). The entire gesture occurs as the poet’s reaction to the change in his
heroine’s dress. She lays off the humble rags in which Erec first found her for the rich dress of the court.
The narrator reminds us that her true beauty shone forth clearly enough before (lines 1585–89);
his unwillingness to describe her now thus appears as an insistence on a more innate beauty.
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Figure 7.1. Tristan and Isolde in the orchard, bone casket, 1180–1200. London, British Museum,
nr. 1947,0706.1. © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.
Figure 7.2. Tristan and Isolde in the orchard, ivory mirror case, first half of the
fourteenth century. Paris, Musée de Cluny–Musée national du Moyen-Âge, Cl. 13928.
Photo © RMN-Grand Palais/Gérard Blot.
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numerous extant examples “as the pictorial emblem of the Tristan legend as a whole.”44
This distillation of the story as icon was constructed as if superimposed on the iconography of Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge, resulting in a “visual conjunction
of deceitful love and original sin.”45 Wolfram evokes Isolde as this manifestation of Eve
within an autonomous culture of vernacular narrative and does so as a way of defining
an alternative model of reading in the body.
The riddle, however, contrives to leave the counterpart to Eve/Isolde unnamed,
instead shifting the terms so that the power of âventiure is compared to a true woman
and the centre of interest becomes a craftsman’s commitment to the inner truth. Like
the other open questions of the first prologue, this one defers to the narrative, postponing its resolution to the second prologue, where the craftsman of âventiure names his
female ideal, once again through a pun that refers to his response, his lob (praise). The
same woman is not to be mistaken as “one and only,” because she represents an ideal of
a different sort than Benoît’s riche dame de riche rei or Thomasin’s courtly adaptation of
the mulier fortis. This woman has more in common with Briseida, the new Helen, than
she does with such a nonpareil, the woman whom “no other can second.” She too serves
a poetics of identification in love and suffering, and the images of her loving suffering,
which re-embody Mary’s experience, constitute proof of the same truth, one available
to all who can feel her pain. Thus the parenthesis is closed once the new woman has
emerged as the narrative embodiment of the new poetics.
All this has so far been couched in terms of the artist’s relationship to his art (or
to women). At the outset of the new narrative, the beginning of book 3, the Eve–Mary
equation is reiterated and transferred explicitly to the audience. The opening address
places the audience squarely in the familiar position, between opposite images of
women: “It pains me to the quick, that so many claim the name of woman,” the narrator
begins, “many of them rush into falsehood’s embrace, yet others are utterly free of deceit”
(116,5–9). He next evokes the Christian ideal of poverty, espoused by an unnamed
woman who is praised in terms that initially suggest the New Eve: “die dolte ein wîp
durch triuwe: / des wart ir gabe niuwe / ze himel mit endelôser gebe” (Such poverty
one woman endured for the sake of triuwe; thereof she made a heavenly offering both
endless and ever new) (116,19–21). The audience—men and women alike—is then put
to a shaming (self-)examination:
ich wæne ir nu vil wênic lebe,
die junc der erden rîhtuom
liezen durch des himeles ruom.
ich erkenne ir nehein.
man und wîp mir sint al ein:
die mîdentz al gelîche.
(116,22–27)
44 Curschmann, “Images of Tristan,” p. 16; on the body of medieval visual artefacts of the Tristan
legend, see Curschmann, “Images of Tristan,” pp. 7–8. “Nearly half” of these show the scene in
question.
45 Curschmann, “Images of Tristan,” p. 16.
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(I’ll wager there are precious few alive today who would in youth abandon worldly
wealth and fame for the glory of Heaven. I can’t make out even one! Whether man or
woman makes no difference: they shun the idea all alike.)
Quae est ista? If not Mary, then surely another female saint similarly beloved. The
following lines respond: “frou Herzeloyde diu rîche / ir drîer lande wart ein gast: / si
truoc der freuden mangels last” (Lady Herzeloyde, once rich and powerful, abandoned
her three kingdoms: she bore the burden of joyless days) (116,28–30). Thus the narrator
not only concludes his affirmation of Herzeloyde’s testimony but also now explicitly
recommends her “reading” model to his audience.
In this resumed narration, the very name “woman” has acquired a value of which one
must first prove one’s worthiness; Wolfram evokes wîpheit, womanhood, as an “order”
whose true nature—the substance of its rule, one might say—is found in triuwe: “wîpheit,
dîn ordenlîcher site, / dem vert und fuor ie triuwe mite” (“Womanhood, the nature of
your order was ever and remains to triuwe bound”) (116,13–14).46 The entire audience, man und wîp … al ein, is bound to prove itself worthy of this order. Benoît’s trap,
which inverts audience expectations to enlist their participation in a narrative enterprise of “being her,” has been sprung and instead reformulated as a solemn contract,
for the woman transformed is in this case already manifest as the origin of the tale. In a
statement replete with multiple meanings, the distinction between true and false women
from the opening lines (116,5–9) is said to “divide the tales”: “sus teilent sich diu mære”
(116,10).47 Placed on this all-important narrative seam, the words refer to Gahmuret’s
story and that of Parzival—the two lives of Herzeloyde. They may equally be taken to
announce the same distinction as “the touchstone of this tale”—or indeed of all tales.48
For these lines complete Wolfram’s initiation of audience and âventiure into the new
female poetics of body and truth. The all-determining distinction between the false and
the true body thus alludes to the transformation in the text, to that envisioned among its
audience, and finally to a transformation of reading itself. This was the argument’s conclusion; it remains for us to trace its beginnings.
The primary task of Wolfram’s first prologue is to set the stage with a progression
of narrator and audience identities whose relationship to meaning and the narrative
is finally left unresolved.49 The first half (1,1–2,22), often called the “men’s prologue”
because it focuses on mannes muot (the man’s disposition, 1,5)—the same that has
proven such a conundrum for modern scholarship—sets up an opposition between
clerical instruction and the knight’s narrative. With this gesture romance seeks its place
46 The term triuwe (loyalty, love, devotion) somewhat defies translation; see p. 308, below.
47 The first ten lines of the opening read: “Ez machet trûric mir den lîp, / daz alsô mangiu heizet
wîp / ir stimme sint gelîche hel: / geguoge sint gein valsche snel, / etslîche valsches laere: / sus
teilent sich diu mære. / daz die gelîche sint genamt, / des hât mîn herze sich geschamt. / wîpheit,
dîn ordenlîcher site, / dem vert und fuor ie triwe mite” (116,1–10).
48 Mære is here a collective plural (cf. modern English “news”), which leaves the referent (this tale
or all tales) ambiguous.
49 In what follows, I rely on the evidence and conclusions presented in Powell, “ ‘Parzival’-Prolog.”
See also Powell, “Instruction for Religious Women,” pp. 408–41.
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by impinging directly upon the traditional delivery of religious truth to lay folk. In an
abrupt shift, the argument then makes a preliminary exposition of wîbes muot (women’s
disposition) (2,23–3,34). An audience position between false and true female beauty is
put forward as a counterweight or complement to the preceding discussion of mannes
muot and its own struggle to grasp the truth. Thus, for the contemporary audience, the
players—pfaffen, rîter, frouwen (clerics, knights, women)—had been identified and the
stakes were clear, but the translation of the solution, Mary’s reading, onto their stage had
yet to be performed. The narrator then breaks off this venture into Thomasin’s territory,
his moral examination of man and woman (wîp unde man ze rehte prüeven, 3,25–26),
as “it would make a weary tale,” and turns instead to the story itself: “nu hoert dirre
âventiure site” (3,27–28), that is, “now hear how this story goes,” its “custom” or “character.” With the resumption of the narrative in book 3, audience, narrative and narrator
alike have all been enlisted in the enterprise of reading in the body; the movement
from the Old to the New Eve transforms narrative as it transforms body. The repeatedly
repackaged riddle on the identity of the poet’s Lady is no less than the key to Wolfram’s
poetics of narrative and truth.
The stated ambitions of the prologue are far larger than what it delivers. It proposes,
at least implicitly, to mediate between extremes of the human condition poised between
good and evil, to distinguish (prüeven) the moral worth of men and women alike, to
serve as a touchstone for the soul’s progress to Heaven or its fall into Hell, and to tell a
story of such imaginative dimensions as would exhaust the capacities of three such as
the narrator himself. Notably, all these, except the fourth, are unusual claims for a secular
narrative; in Thomasin’s moral instruction, on the other hand, we too would find them
quite within their place. The subject of the prologue’s opening is in fact the mediation
of instruction across the divide between clericus and laicus, and it begins in the voice of
such a clerical instructor:
Ist zwîvel herzen nâchgebûr,
daz muoz der sêle werden sûr.
gesmæhet unde gezieret
ist, swâ sich parrieret
unverzaget mannes muot,
als agelstern varwe tuot.
der mac dennoch wesen geil:
wand an im sint beidiu teil,
des himels und der helle.
der unstæte geselle
hât die swarzen varwe gar,
und wirt och nâch der vinster var:
sô habet sich an die blanken
der mit stæten gedanken.
diz vliegende bîspel
ist tumben liuten gar ze snel,
sine mugens niht erdenken:
(1, 1–14)
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(Where doubt lives close by the heart, the soul is surely imperilled. Wherever the steadfast, manly disposition makes room for company, it is both debased and glorified, as
in the colouring of the magpie. Such a one can still meet with a happy end, for in him
both Heaven and Hell have a part. The wholly inconstant fellow is black all over, and will
come to a dark end, while he whose intentions do not waver, holds fast to the light. This
fluttering fable flies too fast for simple folk, they can’t think it through:)
The opening fourteen lines are designated as a bîspel, a rhetorical figure that corresponds largely to the Latin exemplum, for it denoted the demonstration of a moral
message through application of the methods of significatio (what Thomasin refers to
in German as bezeichenunge) to an image isolated from the natural world or human
behaviour—in this case the colouring of the magpie.50 It was, then (this, too, is clear in
Thomasin’s presentation), a standard vehicle of clerical instruction.51 With lines 15–16,
the prologue thus identifies a rhetorical mode in one breath with the audience to whom
it is directed: “diz vliegende bîspel / ist tumben liuten gar ze snel” (this fluttering fable
flies too fast for simple folk) (1,15–16). That is: no sooner is the communication staged
than it is also proclaimed unsuccessful.52
For nearly two centuries, interpretation of this passage was deflected into all
manner of difficulties because this key identification of the audience was misunderstood.53 Tumbe liute stands in Wolfram’s usage for the illitterati, and it is especially
notable that he takes this understanding from previous works in the German tradition that adapt religious learning for the lay public.54 The same appeal to the sermo
humilis tradition connoted a rejection of learning and eloquence as tainted by worldly
vanity.55 Read through this understanding, the opening confrontation between an
audience of simple folk and the learned sophistry of the bîspel (critics’ lack of success
in resolving it stands witness) suggests for Wolfram’s audience the presentation of
an alternative.
Wolfram’s bîspel is a travesty of a learned method of moral instruction.56 As has been
demonstrated often enough, the argument consistently assumes a continuity between
50 Powell, “ ‘Parzival’-Prolog,” 65–68; also Ohlenroth, “Wolframs Widerpart,” 34–36. On the art of
the bîspel, see Yao, Exempelgebrauch; and De Boor, Fabel und Bîspel.
51 Thomasin places bîspel alongside the role of the exemplary stories found in “the old books” as
complementary vehicles of moral instruction. The one offers models from the past, the other from
the visible world of daily life (Der welsche Gast, lines 10675–80 and 10899–905).
52 Powell, “ ‘Parzival’-Prolog,” 62–64.
53 Ever since the text’s first editor, Karl Lachmann, referred to the tumbe liute as “die Leichtsinnigen,”
the imprudent or foolish, it has been taken as all but given that “no audience member would want to
find himself aligned with the tumben.” See, respectively, Lachmann, “Eingang des Parzivals,” p. 488;
and Schirok, “Konzept,” 75.
54 Powell, “ ‘Parzival’-Prolog,” 62–64, 69–77. The term was a common audience designator in the
bispel tradition. Wolfram’s understanding, however, appears closest to that of Armer Hartmann in
his Rede vom Glouben, a vernacular adaptation of the creed.
55 Powell, “ ‘Parzival’-Prolog,” 71–73; more generally, Auerbach, Literary Language, pp. 25–66.
56 Likewise Brall, “Programmatik,” 17, 23.
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colour and character that it inconsistently applies.57 The result is a conundrum: either the
possibility of salvation is framed as a dualistic struggle between black and white, in which
any admixture of the two would imperil the soul, or such a mixture is a given of the human
condition (parrieret sein), and the object is then not to struggle against this condition but
to attain salvation within or through it. But Wolfram’s point concerns not so much this
content as it does its delivery: the initiated communication, this delivery of instruction,
fails, and it does so because the mediating form is inappropriate to the capacities of its
intended audience. As he then elaborates, it flitters or flutters about, leaps this way and
that (like a startled hare); finally, it is no more reliable than fleeting reflections in a mirror
(zin anderthalb ame glase), or the visions of one who himself cannot see (des blinden
troum): “this dim and darkling light offers little comfort indeed” (cf. 1,18–25).58 Beasts and
birds and their allegorical meanings, the speculum as the symbol of such “reading,” and the
exegetical interpretation of dreams: none of this is of any true comfort to the simple soul
poised between damnation and redemption. This “flight into images”59 of the initial exposition is a critique of the schoolman’s poetics of material apparitions and their meanings, of
a mediation of moral knowledge that claims on the one hand that all physical form is but a
mirror that reveals God’s truth, and on the other disparages all such form as both ephemeral and deceiving—a paradox that made the cleric’s intervention indispensable, for it was
only his learning that could decode the bodily cover as a symbolic map of the latent truth.
The initial staging of the communication, then, calls the clerical instructor onto the
stage to indict and dismiss him. With the subsequent shift to remarks on disiu mære
(Wolfram’s tale) just such a wîser, or learned man, one seen to insist on the delivery of
“good teaching” and the appropriate stiure (guidance) to seek it out, is treated to his just
desserts. For, as Wolfram says, here he can get his fill of ins and outs, ups and downs and
zigzagging meanings; here meaning is made in the saddle of the jousting knight:
ouch erkante ich nie sô wîsen man,
ern möhte gerne künde hân,
welher stiure disiu mære gernt
und waz si guoter lêre wernt.
dar an si nimmer des verzagent,
beidiu si vliehent unde jagent,
si entwîchent unde kêrent,
si lasternt unde erent.
swer mit disen schanzen allen kan,
an dem hât witze wol getân,
der sich niht versitzet noch vergêt
und sich anders wol verstêt.
(2,5–16)
57 Brall, “Programmatik,” 9; Stein, Studien, p. 173; Groos, Romancing the Grail, p. 2; For the principle different interpretations, see Nellman, commentary to Parzival, pp. 445–47.
58 See the full text, with translation and explanatory remarks, in the appendix; also Martin,
Kommentar, p. 6; and Powell, “ ‘Parzival’-Prolog,” 64, 66–67, 82.
59 Haug, “Konzept,” 221 speaks of a “Bilderflucht.”
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(And I’ve yet to meet a man so very learned that he didn’t himself need to ask how to
approach this story and what good teaching it delivers. It’s no slouch on that score! It’ll
show you its heels and then come charging, it will leave you the field and then take it back
again, thus doling out both shame and honour. He who can hold the saddle through all
these ups and downs, he has the gift of wit indeed: one who neither sits out the fight or
takes to flight and other-wise knows where he stands.)
The “man’s prologue” has been appropriately designated as such in that it confronts
the cleric first with the layman’s incapacity and then with his no less formidable expertise
as knight or miles. Verses 2,9 to 2,12 serve to identify this latter expertise—the terminology describes tournament technique—with the necessary capacity to understand
Wolfram’s tale, disiu mære.60 There is no place on Wolfram’s wild ride for fellows (clerics)
who would rather sit on their duffs (versitzen) or are likely to waver and wander from
the field (vergên); here they would learn to “stand their man,” which is to under-stand in
a different way (anders wol verstên).61 And with this brilliantly multifaceted retort, the
project is launched. The perils and vicissitudes of a chivalric existence, the world of the
miles, are the medium of this opposite way of knowing. The cleric’s disingenuous sophistry, meanwhile, has drawn the ethical charge of untriuwe; the wenken, or fickle mutability, of his representations of truth call their purveyor equally into question:
wil ich triwe vinden
aldâ si kan verswinden,
als viur in dem brunnen
unt daz tou von der sunnen?
(2,1–4)
(Shall I seek true fellowship [triuwe] where it’s as like to vanish as fire in a fountain or
dew under the sun?)
His muot is therefore identified as the bedfellow of falseness and consigned to the fire of
Hell—precisely where, and with analogous justification, Thomasin places Arthur:
valsch geselleclîcher muot
ist zem hellefiure guot,
und ist hôher werdekeit ein hagel.
(2,17–19)
(the disposition of false friends deserves the fire of Hell and batters noble bearing like a
hailstorm.)
This stage belongs to the narrating knight. “Disiu âventiure vert âne der buoche stiure!”
(This knight’s adventure rides without a bookish bridle!) (115,29–30).
With this much in place, the prologue as a whole not only offers a transparent confrontation between two different models of knowledge and its delivery, it also reads like
60 Martin, Kommentar, p. 9; Brall, “Programmatik,” 24.
61 I have intentionally offered different, complementary renderings of this passage in an attempt
to capture the various layers of the puns.
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301
a map of the logical argument for woman’s reading. In the first, the “men’s” section, we
are confronted with a dipartite division of humanity into the learned and the unlearned,
with no distinction of gender necessarily implied; that is, mannes muot might comprise all humanity before God. This dipartite division results in an impasse, the failure
of the cleric to provide for the layman’s redemption. In the second section, the discussion abruptly shifts to women’s dispensation, wîbes muot, and the distinction based on
knowledge and learning capacities is apparently superseded by this introduction of
a gender distinction. Man, then, is either humanity or only its male members or male
principle, depending on the terms chosen for discussion, and intellectual capacity is the
distinguishing factor only as long as man is all of humanity. This view of humanity as
“man” results in exclusion and hierarchy based on access to learned methods. Insistence
on the category “woman,” on the other hand, makes an all-encompassing opposition
between the ignorant and the learned into only one male half of a new gender equation,
or an equation, perhaps, in which all humanity is one before God. If we can all be “man,”
so too we can all be “woman.”
Despite what I have argued is the resultant transparency of this argument, its novelty in another regard should not be overlooked. Neither this adversarial valence of the
clericus–laicus opposition nor even the tripartite audience typology of pfaffen–leien–
frouwen had, before Parzival, been introduced onto the stage of âventiure, much less
that of its more “historical” and learned predecessors, the romances of antiquity. In the
same way, the other texts considered here, with the partial exception of the Eructavit,
have been more concerned with a project of rapprochement, a negotiation of the distance
between “readers” and “non-readers,” than inclined to polemic. This is no less true of
the self-proclaimed literate knight, Hartmann von Aue,62 than it is of avowedly clerical
authors like Benoît or Wolfram’s other predecessors, Chrétien de Troyes and Heinrich
von Veldeke. The shift in Wolfram’s position is only comprehensible to his audience as
a move to assimilate to the project of romance narrative a discourse thus far specific to
religious reading, the mediation of the Word for lay audiences, and thus to present his
narrative as a similarly alternative entry into knowledge. For this reason the layman
discharges the clerical gatekeeper openly and as a prerequisite, no less, to the telling of
his tale.63
But where is the substance of his claim, what is the content of anders wol
verstên—aside from the tournament pun? The knight and his jousting do not signify, in
themselves, a different reading path to the truth, whether or not they have successfully
lifted the cleric out of the saddle. Thomasin began by foregrounding woman’s failing as
proof positive that beauty and body are never free of deceit and from there proceeded to
concede to âventiure only so much truth as might be concealed beneath such deceiving
62 In his own prologues, Hartmann twice calls himself a “learned knight” who composed with the
help of books; cf. Der arme Heinrich, lines 1–3; Iwein, lines 21–22.
63 There is therefore neither room nor need here for an adversary from within the realm of vernacular narrative itself (such as the scholarship has almost invariably assumed); the idea is nearly
a logical contradiction. Wolfram “leaps” from a vantage point he owes to his predecessors and still
in their cause. See Powell, “ ‘Parzival’-Prolog,” 51, 60, 85–86.
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exteriors. His real point only emerges once read within this presentation of “good and
bad reading”—in fact the restoration of a traditional view of woman, body and truth. The
missing dimension in Wolfram’s argument likewise first acquires real contours through
his ensuing discussion of women’s zil, their reading objective. It proceeds in the reverse
direction, first indicting the learned manipulation of material forms to then advance
woman and body as the abject vehicles of an accessible truth.
On its surface, we could easily mistake Wolfram’s “women’s prologue” for a page
out of a standard book of instruction on morals and social mores, and, until recently, it
was frequently dismissed as such.64 It is instead where he shows his audience “how to
read.” Women’s reading objective, as we saw above, is made one with the attempt to read
woman, and the whole breaks off with an open parenthesis, an equation between the
inner truth of âventiure and rehter wîbes muot, the disposition of the true woman. Here
we discover in addition how this disposition is aligned with triuwe, long-suffering devotion. Together, wîbes muot, âventiure and triuwe form the substance of Wolfram’s claim
to pre-eminence in the layman’s quest for truth.
The women’s prologue opens with the narrator—who thus slips from his stirrups
into the shoes of women’s spiritual advisers—promising that his counsel (râten) will
show them where best to bestow their prîs and êre, their reputation and their honour:65
Dise manger slahte underbint
jedoch niht gar von manne sint.
für diu wîp stôze ich disiu zil:66
swelhiu mîn râten merken wil,
diu sol wizzen war si kêre
ir prîs und ir êre,
und wem si dâ nâch sî bereit
minne und ir werdekeit,
sô daz si niht geriuwe
ir kiusche und ir triuwe.
(2,23–3,2)
(But all these deliberations pertain by no means only to men. For the women I promise
this reward: she who pays heed to my counsel will know well where to entrust her
honour and her good name, likewise on whom she should thereafter bestow her love and
her precious person, such that her chaste virtue and her true devotion not be abused.)
Mîn râten (line 2,26) does not refer to the lines that follow but rather to the entire process of the narrative; the speaker engages women as his audience by promising the
64 For example, Schröder, “Prolog,” p. 187; and LDMA, p. 175. Among the few exceptions
are: Schnyder, “Frauenpassage”; and Rausch, “Destruktion der Fiktion,” 55–58 (further literature
cited there). My own reading remains largely as presented in Powell, “Instruction for Religious
Women,” pp. 430–41.
65 On the difficulty of translating prîs, see this passage in the appendix.
66 See the note on this passage in the appendix.
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303
means to their zil, their moral end, as well.67 Dâ nâch, that is, after the performance, they
will know where best to bestow their love such that their trust is not abused. Already
in these lines, praise and judgment of women become synonymous with the impending
narration and its reception, and kiusche and triuwe are as much aspects of this communication as of a potential love relationship.68 The woman brings something to the performance, triuwe, an investment of loving constancy and faithful love, that the narrator
promises will not be disappointed. By implication, and based as well on the preceding
rejection of the cleric’s untriuwe, the narrator promises equal returns, his own triuwe as
their proper companion. Both the diction and the idea of reciprocity anticipate the later
presentation of Herzeloyde and her place as the narrator’s model of kiusche and triuwe.
But here in the prologue we are speaking, ostensibly, of the audience’s relationship to
the narrator, while there it is the narrator’s relationship to what he has narrated that
is at stake. At opposite ends of the narrative arabesque we find the same woman, once
as an audience, once as representational ideal. The task of reading woman is the same
as that of the woman’s reading; the identity between the woman inside and outside the
narrative frames the entire exposition.
This contract between the narrator and his female audience is then solidified in an
indirect prayer whose placement recalls that of a Fürbitte, a prayer in which the poet
traditionally submits himself and his work to God’s judgment:
vor gote ich guoten wîben bite,
daz in rehtiu mâze volge mite.
scham ist ein slôz ob allen siten:
ich endarf in niht mêr heiles biten.
(3,3–3,6)
(Before God I pray that all good women might keep proper discretion as their constant companion. Modesty holds the key to all other virtues; I can wish their souls no
greater help.)
The difference is plain enough: Wolfram does not pray for his poem or for himself, but
rather for his audience.69 The same audience, the sinnec wîp whom he calls upon in
the epilogue to book 6, is the receptive instance on which the truth of his endeavour
depends.70 Narration thus becomes a form of service to women, or Frauendienst, but if
this is true, then it is because the woman-as-audience performs a receptive act as a form
of worship, or Gottesdienst.71 We will discover the full meaning of this equation in the
portrayal of Herzeloyde. The remainder of the remarks to women (as discussed above)
then present the narrative, its proper reception, and the audience all at once within the
67 Schnyder, “ ‘Frauenpassage’,” 11; Powell, “Instruction for Religious Women,” p. 431.
68 Powell, “Instruction for Religious Women,” pp. 431–32; similarly, Schnyder, “ ‘Frauenpassage’,”
11–13.
69 Schnyder, “ ‘Frauenpassage’,” 11–12.
70 See the passage and the discussion in chapter 1, pp. 20–21.
71 Similarly, Schnyder, “ ‘Frauenpassage’,” 15.
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opposition between the false and the true woman, false and true praise. Masterfully,
this activation of the woman’s reading position takes the form of a contrafact of the
earlier discussion. The images of paradox that there defined and disparaged material
representations here characterize the false woman (3,8–9), that is, only the false
exterior, the brilliance of form and schœne. “Diu valsche erwirbet valschen prîs” (The
false woman reaps false praise) (3,7), the narrator begins, and then identifies this
woman with an image of inconstancy that recalls the same used to indict the cleric’s
allegoresis: her repute fades like thin ice in the August sun.72 As an attribute of the
body-to-be-read, then, an attribute of representational art, the true woman, or women’s
triuwe, is the antipode of the cleric’s untriuwe. The false woman does not display bodily
form as inherently deceptive, but rather stands in for the cleric’s unreliable conceit, the
(arbitrary) construction of continuity between representation and truth by means of
rhetorical artifice. The proper orientation to these “pretty lies” is then made clear in an
opposition between two women, the one defined by the “praise” her falseness deserves
(loben als ich solde/Isolde), and the other, no less a poetic construction, identified with
a craftsman’s commitment to the inner truth; that is, the truth as conveyed in the base
body of âventiure. The stage is now set to perform Benoît’s exercise in leading the audience from Eve to Mary, a task accomplished in Wolfram’s poem as a mere prelude to the
“new tale.”
Thus, in Wolfram’s first prologue, the cleric’s way to salvation through allegoresis
is juxtaposed with a layman’s (knight’s) persevering struggle amid the vicissitudes of
worldly experience; clericus and miles emerge between the lines of a reflection on signs
(bezeichenunge) and salvation only to give way to woman as herself sign and embodiment of truth—and to the voice of her instructor. The tension between the principles
of exclusion and inclusion, between the dualistic opposition of black and white and
parrieret sein, that shapes the bîspel in fact governs the remainder of the prologue and
is implicitly resolved there though an articulation of competing modes of reading, each
of which mirrors one of the opening ontological positions as a hermeneutic task. The
woman’s life in-corporates the task of distinguishing between varwe and muot, exterior
and character, body and truth as the attempt to realize a self-effacing exterior that no
longer conceals: once again, she reifies the reading task that polarized the terms of the
laicus-clericus opposition. Through these positions and their several relationships to one
and the same enterprise Wolfram constructs his prologue to describe generations in a
poetological history of his genre.
For Wolfram’s âventiure as for the texts of the new romans tradition examined
earlier, woman thus embodies the new poetics: it is not an exegesis of the outer form
that will reveal the truth but rather the ability—or, as Wolfram presents it—the willingness to perceive truth in and through a base exterior; not knowledge, not method, but an
audience response, rehter wîbes muot. As a designator both of the knight’s experience
and of the literary event, the key term, âventiure, is introduced such that narrative art,
chivalric experience, and the appraisal of women converge on the as yet still incomplete
72 Cf. lines 3,7–10 in the appendix and the corresponding note.
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proposition of the knight’s “reading.” It is then also âventiure, the narrative process
and its unexpected twists of fate, that finally gives the image of woman’s perfection a
name: Herze-Leid.
Lactans Dolorosa: Herzeloyde and Mary’s Reading
Herzeloyde’s transformation, as I have indicated, is a demonstration of how meaning
is made in Wolfram’s romance. The key moments in the demonstration are two, and
each figures as a lactation, something medieval romance narrative had never witnessed
before. These are made to emerge from the circumstances of Herzeloyde’s life such that
the whole functions as the restaging of Mary’s reading in the layman’s narrative world: it
is not Mary’s person or Mary’s place as mother of God or theotokos that is at stake but
rather the truth that is communicated to humanity through her fulfilment of the images
of the biblical text. Herzeloyde’s experience constitutes a re-embodiment, a vernacular
renewal, of Mary’s original experience as sponsa et mater, the experience that manifests
woman as the body of the Word.
Herzeloyde’s first lactation, an auto-lactation, occurs where the audience expects the
exhibition of a woman’s grief.73 That the one exhibition can replace or repress the other
is, to some extent, the result of an illusion: the audience only learns that the queen is
pregnant once she already lies unconscious on the ground, having fainted at the news
of Gahmuret’s death. The woman who regains consciousness is thus newly widowed as
well as newly an expectant mother; the narration contrives to compress the two as if the
result of one event. Herzeloyde then affirms this impression as her own understanding
of her new state, “ich … bin sîn mouter und sîn wîp” (I … am his mother and his wife)
(109,25). These words stand on the one hand for her own confusion: all that remains of
Gahmuret is the child she carries in her womb. On the other, they mirror Mary’s experience as the words only Mary can truly speak: sponsa et mater sum.74 The phrase itself
contains the full meaning of Mary’s reading: she is both identities at once, the letter
and the gloss, the image and its living realization as historia. Herzeloyde’s condition is
reported such that she can plausibly make the same statement, that is, such that her
experience begins to reveal Mary’s own. That she then addresses her own breasts and
their milk as manifest proof of her new state, herself sucks of their milk, besprinkles her
body with it, and declares this her rightful baptism: all these follow, as we shall see, from
the same principle of representation, her place as the revelation of Mary’s truth in the
body of the layman’s narrative.
The same is true of the second lactation, when she nurses her infant son. Again, the
mother “awakens” into new consciousness. The text uses the same verb, versinnen, in
73 Attempts to understand the passage as the expression of grief have not proved successful. See
Greenfield, “Zweifache Witwe,” pp. 135–39. Accordingly, Herzeloyde does not figure in the survey of
courtly mourning in Küsters, “Klagefiguren.”
74 The echo has been noted before, but with no satisfying explanation; see Hartmann, Gahmuret
und Herzeloyde, 2:336–37.
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either case, in the second without apparent motivation.75 And again it is the compression of her experience of a mother’s joy and a widow’s grief that contrives to fix a lasting
image for the audience: “it seemed to her that her desire had conjured Gahmuret into her
arms,” we are told, as she now weeps, in fact, over the infant son who also sucks from her
breast.76 The second scene is as if the material fulfilment of the first. What Herzeloyde
foresees as her role in life in the first scene—“Often I shall sprinkle myself with you (her
milk) and with my eyes, outwardly and inwardly, for I wish to mourn my Gahmuret”—
that is, the promise contained in her swollen breasts and their milk is fulfilled in the
second lactation.77 This fulfilment applies as well to the baptism she evoked but in this
case transferred to her son, who receives no other baptism.78 In either case, the love for
husband and son, the widow’s grief and the mother’s love, are experienced as one; her
response to either and both is the same: grieving lactation. The Lactans dolorosa, as the
text constructs the experience, is an image of the fusion of the Annunciation (conceptio)
and the Passion (compassio) as the two moments in which woman as body was one with
the Word.
As she thus carries his narrative from an old order to a new, Wolfram’s Herzeloyde
becomes a re-embodiment of Mary’s entry into knowledge as Rupert had staged the
same in his De incarnatione Domini. The experience cannot, however, be communicated
by allusion to the text of a monk’s lectio divina; it must instead be delivered in a language and a use of images that become in themselves comprehensible to the audience’s
understanding. A mother’s breasts and breastfeeding offered Wolfram the necessary
associations for this purpose; they are used in this scene to articulate triuwe as the
human capacity to reciprocate God’s loving sacrifice for humanity; to reach that state of
humility, then, in which body can reveal truth.
Taken as parallel to Rupert’s understanding of Mary’s knowing, Herzeloyde’s
double lactation acquires a justification, if not an explanation: Mary first knew the
Word in the kiss of Canticles 1:1, which Rupert saw as the Annunciation. This experience doubled with drinking from the breasts of the Spirit, which, as required by the
oddity of the biblical text, the bride (and not the bridegroom) praises in the following
image of the same verse. Thus, in Rupert’s understanding, Mary, too, experienced two
lactations, one in which she drinks and one in which she nurses, but the first did not
involve her own milk.
75 Line 109,18: “Aldâ wart ir versinnen kunt” (In that moment she recognized her consciousness);
and line 112,21: dô diu künigîn sich versan” (When the queen gained consciousness). The translation of these passages is intentionally literal; see the discussion of sin, below, pp. 321–23.
76 “Si dûht, di hete Gahmureten / wieder an ir arm erbeten” (113,13–14).
77 “Ich sol mich begiezen vil / mit dir und mit den ougen, / offenlîche und tougen: / wand ich wil
Gahmureten clagen” (111,10–13).
78 Also noted by Wolf, “Meditationsgeflecht,” 16n14, this point has received little attention
elsewhere. The omission is no matter of narrative economy, as the parodic staging of the baptism of Parzival’s heathen half-brother Feirefiz at the poem’s conclusion—as a precondition of the ability to see the Grail—serves retrospectively to beg the question. Cf. Gnädinger,
“Wasser—Taufe—Tränen,” 67–69.
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Even if Rupert’s treatment inspired Wolfram’s, however, it was certainly not an exclusive source. Rupert was not alone in understanding the kiss of Canticles 1:1 as a conception of the Word through the Spirit, and the words of a more celebrated commentator
come surprisingly close to anticipating Herzeloyde’s initial thoughts and actions. In the
following passage, Bernard of Clairvaux describes the experience of the soul seeking its
beloved in prayer. The breasts of Canticles 1:1, first praised as the bridegroom’s, as the
breasts of grace, then become, secondarily, hers:
Kissing her, the bridegroom satisfies her desire and thus fulfills in her the Word that is
written, “Thou hast given her her heart’s desire, and what her lips longed for, you have
not denied her” [Psalm 20:3]. And this is manifest in the milk that fills her breasts. For
the holy kiss is of such powerful effect that no sooner has she received it than the bride
becomes pregnant, her breasts begin to swell and seem to burst with milk as proof of her
new state. Those who persist in frequent prayer have experienced that of which I speak.
… Thus the bridegroom can say, “Your wish has been fulfilled, my bride, and it is a sign
of this that ‘Your breasts are sweeter than wine’ [Canticles 1:1]. You will know that you
have received the kiss when you feel yourself to be pregnant. For this reason your breasts
have begun to swell.”79
Herzeloyde exhibits her breasts and their milk “as proof of her new state” and as proof of
gotes triuwe. In her initial mourning recollection of Gahmuret, she recalls their conjugal
embrace as the child’s origin and pleads with God to show getriuwe sinne by bringing
the seed to fruit (lines 109,26–110,1). In the next scene—Wolfram introduces it as
“ein ander mære” (110,10)—she repeats this plea as “mînes herzen bete” (my heart’s
prayer) (110,16). She then tears open her bodice to expose her swollen breasts as proof
of the chlid’s coming, sent before him “since I first felt him living in my body” (cf. lines
110,30–111,2). Their milk would offer her a fitting baptism, for it is evidence of a covenant fulfilled between God and humankind, the answer to her prayer: “Diu frouwe ir
willen dar an sach, / daz diu spîse was ir herzen dach” (The lady recognized her wish
had been fulfilled, for the milk had become her heart’s covering) (111,5–6). Thus, the
milk is addressed with the words, “du bist von triuwen komen” (out of triuwe you have
come to me) (111,7).
Bernard’s text relies on knowledge of the relationship between pregnancy, swelling
breasts and their milk, and impending birth to make the images of the Song intelligible as
metaphors for spiritual experience. Wolfram’s text uses the same knowledge to exhibit
a woman’s experience of these events as proof of a spiritual experience, a revelation of
triuwe as reciprocal devotion between God and humankind. For this he relies, whether
directly or indirectly, on Rupert’s understanding of Mary’s experience as the bodily
realization of the scriptural images, as he likewise relies on other aspects of Rupert’s
79 “[Sponsus] annuit voto, dat osculum, impletque in ea sermonem qui scriptus est: Desiderium
corids eius tribuisti ei, et voluntate labiorum eius non fraudisti eum. Quod et probat ex eius uberum
repletione. Tantae nempe efficaciae osculum sanctum est, ut ex ipso mox, cum acceperit illud, sponsa
concipiat, tumescentibus nimirum uberibus, et lacte qusi pinguescentibus in testimonium. Quibus
studium est orare frequenter, experti sunt quod dico. … Dicat ergo, ‘Habes, sponsa, quod petisti, et
hoc tibit signum, quia meliora facta sunt ubera tua vino: hinc te scilicet noveris osculum accepisse,
quod te concepisse sentis. Unde et ubera tibi intumuerunt.” Sermones super Cantica, 9.7, p. 46.
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portrayal. To these we must return shortly. First it is instructive to follow Herzeloyde’s
presentation of the epiphany of triuwe.
Triuwe is in fact ascribed to all manner of characters and actions in Wolfram’s text;
it is one of the most commonly evoked positive attributes.80 Most readily identified
with fidelitas and pietas—and thus with the loyalty, or Treue, associated with feudal
and filial bonds—in Wolfram’s world triuwe, like God’s truth, is potentially manifest
everywhere.81 It is nevertheless—or for this very reason—expressly identified with no
less than God and God-as-love. As Trevrizent instructs Parzival, “got selbe ein triuwe
ist” (triuwe is the essence of God himself) (462,19); furthermore, God, most especially
as the Son, is likewise the wâre minnaere (466,1), the true lover. And in an excursus
on “good” and “bad” love (lines 532,1–19), the narrator distinguishes erotic attraction
from love as experienced by those who know herzenlîchiu triwe (heartfelt love). The
latter is no temporary affliction but rather the constant accompaniment of their existence and incorporates joy and sorrow equally. He then states apodictically, “reht minne
ist wâriu triuwe” (love properly conceived is true triuwe) (532,10). His authority to distinguish in this question can itself stem only from triuwe: “sol ich der wâren minne jehn,
/ diu muoz durch triwe mir geschehn” (If I am to speak of true love, then it must come
to me through triuwe) (532,17–18). In Herzeloyde’s case, as Sigune informs Parzival,
“grôz liebe ier solch herzen furch / mit dîner muoter triuwe” (True love ploughed such
a furrow in your mother’s heart with her triuwe) (140,18–19). As Herzeloyde and later
Sigune exhibit it, triuwe is best understood as the capacity to suffer for another in love,
to embrace the other no less in pain than in love, that we have found at the centre of
romans translation of Mary’s reading and at the centre of “the problem of the woman
reader.”82 As Wolfram develops the concept above all through these two figures, its
function and significance make it closely comparable, in fact, to Landri’s devocions de
cuers. Both terms denote the potential of fidelitas, caritas, and compassio alike to move
the soul towards God, to bring forth in humanity its innate resemblance to the divine,
the imago dei.83
80 For a comprehensive review of the place of triuwe in Parzival, see Schmid, Studien, pp. 111–86,
esp. pp. 155, 168, 173–74, 179–84, and 186.
81 To insist on the term’s relationship to the feudal bond is only to state the etymologically obvious.
The extent to which Wolfram enlarges this concept to comprise a religious experience of compassio
has been established at least since the work of Schwietering (see the following note and above, p.
203 note 20). See also Bertau, Regina lactans, pp. 275, 279–84.
82 Julius Schwietering argued that Wolfram’s triuwe reflects a new religious feeling of the twelfth
century that focused on the sufferings of Christ and compassion from man to man: “Leiden ist
triuwe und trifft ins Herz” (Schwietering, “Parzivals Schuld,” p. 378).
83 As I have argued before, triuwe is remarkably similar both in etymological development and
range of meaning to the twelfth century understanding of the term devotio and may be Wolfram’s
translation of that term, see Powell, “Instruction for Religious Women,” pp. 463–64; and Chatillon,
“Devotio,” 702–16 at 702–5 and 708. Devotio has likewise been identified with the experience of
loving suffering that is the object of the text-image tradition that (later) precipitates in visual art as
the pietà; see Schawe, “Pietà und Hoheslied.”
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Triuwe accompanies the events surrounding Parzival’s birth like a leitmotif, evoked
all but exclusively by Herzeloyde herself.84 Her testimony is affirmed and continued in
the voice of the narrator in the transition to the new narrative.85 This narrator’s affirmation begins in the concluding lines of book 2, in the form of an echo of Herzeloyde’s
words: as she mourns Gahmuret, Herzeloyde rhymes wîbes riuwe (women’s sorrow)
with manlîch triuwe (manly triuwe) (lines 110,7–8); the same rhyme receives a chiastic echo within the narrator’s concluding description of her: “si kunde wîbes triuwe
haben … ir schimpf ertranc in riuwen vurt” (She knew the way of woman’s triuwe …
her joy was drowned at sorrow’s ford) (113,30; 114,3). In the first instance woman’s
suffering, wîbes riuwe, evokes triuwe as the man’s devotion to the woman, in the
second this devotion is mirrored in the woman’s devotion, wîbes triuwe, to her son.86
Once again, before the birth, Herzeloyde evokes mannes triuwe as an expression of the
conjugal act of love. With these lines—as she reasons out loud over the need to moderate her grief (“got wende mich sô tumber nôt” 110,17 [God keep me from foolish
desperation])87—she speaks of the child she bears as the charge of her own responsibility to her husband:
die wîle ich bî mir trüege
daz ich von sîner minne enphienc,
der mannes triwe an mir begienc.
(110,20–22, emphasis added)
(while I carry within me what I conceived through his loving embrace who fulfilled a
man’s triuwe unto me.)
And as she fulfils this responsibility and manifests her own triuwe by nursing her son,
identifying herself in this act with Mary, the same rhyme and parallel phrasing effectively
identify the devotion (and act) of conjugal love with Christ’s supreme act of devotion to
humanity:
[frou] Herzeloyde sprach mit sinne
“diu hœhste küneginne
Jêsus ir brüste bôt,
der sît durch uns vil scharpfen tôt
ame kriuze mennischlîche enphienc
und sîne triwe an uns begienc.”
(113,17–22)
84 Lines 109,30, 110,7–8, 110,22, 111,7, 113,22.
85 Lines 113,30, 114,9–10, 116,14, 116,19–20.
86 The rhyme on riuwe/triuwe occurs elsewhere in contexts similarly marked in their significance,
among them the first prologue (lines 3,1–2) and the passage just quoted in which Sigune reveals
Parzival’s name and its meaning (lines 140,16–20). See also lines 140,1–2 and 451,3–8; and Schmid,
Studien, pp. 179–82.
87 Trans. Hatto.
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(Lady Herzeloyde spoke from true knowledge: “The queen of queens offered her breasts
to Jesus, who later died our human death most cruelly on the cross, thus fulfilling his
triuwe unto us.”)
Triuwe is thus at the centre of the ideas behind Wolfram’s creation of the lactans dolorosa; its meaning is articulated through the scene itself to reveal in turn the meaning
of the image—in fact, both images and verbal concept are engaged in the same attempt
to articulate the experience of truth through the layman’s narrative. We previously saw
that the one image, that is, Herzeloyde’s first lactation, displays milk as the manifestation
of God’s triuwe. But Herzeloyde’s statement, “out of triuwe you have come to me,” has a
double referent, or double origin: the milk comes both from God and from Gahmuret. As
she says, “sînes verhes sâmen, den gâben unde nâmen unser zweier minne” (the seed of
his flesh was given and received in our loving embrace) (109,27–29), and “I conceived
through his loving embrace who fulfilled manly triuwe unto me.” The exchange of semen
in conjugal love thus manifests the same reciprocity expressed between Mary’s nursing
of her son and his dying on the cross; at the same time, Christ’s death on the cross is
analogous to Gahmuret’s mannes triuwe.
This somewhat mysterious chain of association, the progression of triuwe from pregnancy as the bodily fulfilment of conjugal love through lactation to the crucified Christ,
contains a still more startling equation: Gahmuret’s mannes triuwe is to Herzeloyde’s
lactation as Mary’s lactation is to her son’s crucifixion—where mannes triuwe occurs in
the release of semen, in the conception. Each act “nourishes” the other in love, but no less
contains the seeds of a life of suffering. This is the underlying equation that Wolfram’s
text shares with Rupert’s double lactation; that is, his development of the idea of triuwe
works to transport the same equation. It is likewise accessible to the audience through
the ideas associated in Wolfram’s time with breast-baring and lactation.
The baring of a woman’s breasts had been, from antiquity, a privileged gesture
of supplication and the appeal for mercy; her breasts were a symbol of the universal
bond between mother and child and thus of the love and compassion owed to one’s
fellow human.88 Medieval ideas of human physiology, likewise inherited from antiquity,
offer the underlying explanation, which is more visceral than we might expect. Stated
simply, “breastmilk was transmuted blood, and a human mother—like the pelican that
also symbolized Christ—fed her children from the fluid of life that coursed through her
veins.”89 The breast-baring woman thus appealed for recognition of her physical sacrifice
in the generation of human life. The analogy with Christ’s sacrificial suffering is found
as early as the second century, when Clement of Alexandria compared the blood of the
Eucharist with “a human mother whose blood becomes food for her child.”90 In visual art
88 Schreiner, “Deine Brüste,” pp. 103–4; also Panofsky, “ ‘Imago Pietatis’,” p. 302n75; and Seidel,
“Ubera Matris,” 41–98.
89 Bynum, Holy Feast, p. 270. Beginning in the thirteenth century, lactation and bleeding—not only
Mary’s and Christ’s, but also that of their devotees—could be seen as analogous acts of compassion
and nourishment, Christ’s wounds could be seen as nourishing “breasts” and a woman’s breasts as
bleeding wounds (Holy Feast, pp. 270–75).
90 Bynum, Holy Feast, pp. 270–71.
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somewhat later than Wolfram’s time, this parallel appeared in images of Mary and Christ
as twin supplicants for sinful souls to either side of God the Father: Mary appealed by
baring her breast, cradled in one hand as if to nurse, while Christ did the same by indicating his own bleeding for the life of man, the wound in his side.91
Thus we arrive at an answer to why Herzeloyde so immediately refers Mary’s
nursing of Christ and hers of Parzival to Christ’s bleeding on the cross: Either act was a
sacrificial bleeding, one that was also “sacred” in a universal sense. In reference to Mary
it was sacred in a quite specific sense. The “solidarity of the flesh” that joined all men as
nourished in and on a woman’s body was the same bond that joined Christ to mankind.92
As Herzeloyde reminds her audience: Mary gave Christ his flesh and Christ suffered on
the cross mennischlîche, in his—and our—human flesh (lines 113,18–22).
A similar solidarity pertains in the exchange of semen, for it too was understood as
a kind of boiling-over of the blood.93 Thus the connection, for Wolfram sublimated as
triuwe, between coition, lactation, and bleeding resided in the fact that each required
an equivalent bodily sacrifice. For Wolfram triuwe itself might be an abstraction but
the experiences it calls forth and instils have undeniably visceral reality. Still, we might
well note, Herzeloyde does not supplicate with her bared breasts; she rather proclaims.
Moreover, none of this offers an explanation for her auto-lactation.
These remaining ideas have two explanations. The first lies, once again, in
Herzeloyde’s own testimony; the second lies in Mary’s reading as the explanation for
how she knows these things. For whether or not we can find symbolic ideas that render
Herzeloyde’s actions coherent to a medieval audience, it still remains to explain how the
same are suddenly the manifest wîsheit of a woman who formerly showed no particular
possession of wisdom.
In her testimony, Herzeloyde’s pressing of her milk is a physical demonstration of
her transformation from the old woman into the new, that is, from the old body to the
new. When she addresses her milk with the words, “Out of triuwe you have come to me,”
she acknowledges it as the physical manifestation of the inner bond between wife and
husband, woman and God; that is, as the inner truth of this entire presentation. The key
statement is the narrator’s, because it reveals this startling exhibition, a public display
of bodily humility, as the female ideal left unnamed in the first prologue: “Diu frouwe ir
willen dar an sach, / daz diu spîse was ir herzen dach” (The lady recognized her wish had
been fulfilled, for the milk had become her heart’s covering) (111,5–6, emphasis added).
The odd phrase first occurred in the prologue, where it signalled the mere beauty of
the exterior, daz man siht, by which the narrator would not judge a good woman, she
who is instead “inrehalp der brust bewart” (steadfast within her breast) (3,22–23). In
Herzeloyde, “the heart’s covering” has become an inner fluid and the essence of human
91 The earliest visual examples occur in manuscript illumination in the second half of the thirteenth century, while the textual tradition is generally traced to Arnold of Chartres in the mid twelfth. See Marti and Mondini, “Marienbrüste,” pp. 79–85 and plates 48, 50, 51; and Bynum, Holy
Feast, p. 272 and plates 28–30.
92 Brown, “Notion of Virginity,” p. 439, see also pp. 437–38.
93 Brown, Body and Society, p. 17; also Bynum, “Female Body,” p. 220.
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triuwe, which she then herself brings to view—in explicit defiance of decorum and
other’s opinions: “Diu vrouwe enrouchte wer daz sach / daz hemde von der brust si
brach” (the lady cared not who might see her / she tore her bodice from her breast)
(110,23–24). Just as her actions are a contrafact, to some extent, of the conventions of a
widow’s grieving, so too her breast-baring has finally no basis in public appeal: it is, in
effect, an affair between her and God alone. The same self-effacing gesture accompanies
her nursing of her own son; the reference to Mary, as has been pointed out often enough,
in part serves to justify the flouting of social convention. Social standing, that is, êre and
prîs, honour and reputation, dictated that a queen did not nurse her offspring. What the
queen of Heaven deigned to do, however, this earthly queen will not refuse; “diemuot
was ir bereit” (humility was her part) (113,16). In her two demonstrations of the solidarity of the flesh between humankind and God, then, Herzeloyde becomes the diaphanous body, the truth as revealed in “base brass.”
Wolfram, however, goes still further. His queen does not merely press, but also sucks
the milk from her breasts. It is here that we must return to Rupert’s Mary.
As seen in the earlier discussion of Rupert’s text, when Mary refers to “the moment that
made me a mother” and her entry into knowledge (prophetissa eram) as one event, she is
recalling the opening of the text, in which the enquiring exegete explored her conception
as the realization of the bridegroom’s kiss (Canticles 1:1). In Rupert’s description—for
Mary herself does not yet speak—Mary’s conception of the Word comprised the transfer
of two substances: God’s voluptas (desire, delight, or semen), which entered her womb,
and the milk she drank from the breasts of the Spirit, from which she acquired knowledge of all scripture.94 Thus Rupert could perfectly preserve the juxtaposition of longing
for “his kiss” with praise of “your breasts” in the opening verse of the biblical text: Let
him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth, for your breasts are sweeter than wine (Canticles
1:1). Not only does Rupert’s diction play insistently on either as a “drink” imbibed by
Mary, but also the two are offered as alternative understandings of the one ineffable,
unknowable moment:
uberum laetificata dulcedine ineffabili, dum concipis, o virgo beata, dum tibi fit secundum
hoc verbum angeli: “Spiritus sanctus superveniet in te, et virtus Altissimi obumbrabit
tibi.” … Quid aliud diceres nisi quia “meliora sunt ubera tua vino”?95
(When you were sucked with the ineffable sweetness of those breasts, even as you
conceived, o blessed virgin, even as it happened to you according to the words of the
angel: “And the Holy Spirit shall come upon you and the power of the Most High shall
overshadow you” [Luke 1:35]. … What else could you say but “Your breasts are sweeter
than wine?” [Canticles 1:1].)
For Mary as for Herzeloyde, then, the reception of voluptas and the drinking of
breastmilk are twin predecessors to the lactans dolorosa, the embrace in which sponsa
and mater are one and the Word is incarnate as human experience. The very oddity of
94 As noted earlier (p. 72, above), voluptas could also mean “semen,” a pun of which Rupert
appears well aware.
95 CCC, 1, pp. 11–12.
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the biblical text, its conflation of the bride’s “prayer” for the kiss and the praise she, not
the bridegroom, speaks of the breasts and their milk; this oddity calls forth the chronological compression and attempted coalescence—for Rupert a simultaneity—of conception and auto-lactation in Wolfram’s text; it likewise calls forth Herzeloyde’s praise
of breast milk addressed in the second person (111,7 ff.). More important still is the
bodily wisdom with which she is filled—no less, as she says, than she is with the child
and the milk it has sent before, “since I felt him living in my body.” The merging of the
two experiences, on which both the narrative and Herzeloyde insist, the continuity she
expresses between before and after, reproduces the inimitable simultaneity of Mary’s
historia in our history, as we can know it. Everything in Wolfram’s presentation operates
to reinforce this one idea: Herzeloyde knows as Mary knew in this “same” moment, and
we, in turn, are to know as Herzeloyde knows.
The lactans dolorosa, as spoken by either woman, is then the fulfilment of this
knowing in loving and suffering, knowing as sponsa et mater:
For I was a prophetess, and from the moment that I was made his mother, I knew he was
going to suffer these things. When, therefore, I fondled such a Son, born of my flesh, at
my bosom, carried him in my arms, nursed him at my breasts, and had always before my
eyes such a death as was destined for him, and foresaw everything with a prophetic, nay
rather, a more than prophetic mind; what kind, how much, and how extensive a passion
of maternal grief, do you imagine me to have endured?: This is why I say, “My beloved is
for me a bundle of myrrh; he will dwell between my breasts” [Canticles 1:12]. O sojourn
sweet indeed, but filled with unutterable groanings!
This is the moment, in all its insistent physicality and tenderly human devotion, that
Wolfram could re-embed in a narrative context in which the mother relives the embrace
of her dead husband as she nurses the infant son and identifies this memoria with the
memoria of Christ’s suffering. Rupert’s text prefigures not only the fusion of “widow”
and mother, bereavement and nourishment, not only the viewer’s/listener’s introduction into a woman’s intimate emotional and physical experience, but also the idea of reciprocity between Mary’s lactation and Christ’s Passion, between the mother’s “bleeding”
body and the bloodied body of the Word. That is, what Rupert’s text introduces, above all,
is the idea of this moment in Mary’s life as the image that embodies the mystery of the
bodily bride and makes it available to human apprehension, precisely what Wolfram’s
exposition requires.
Mary’s experience, too, is designed to communicate a before and after, the progression from promise to fulfilment, conception to Incarnation. As Rupert witnessed it, she
does not introduce the image of her grieving lactation as an “explanation” of Canticles
1:12. She rather offers Canticles 1:12 to her amici as their way of grasping the ineffable,
how she was one with the Word (dilectus meus mihi et ego illi), how the fragrance of her
humility “could rise so high as to reach him. O friends, this I have experienced!”96 Thus
Mary revisits her experience of the conception (here seen through Canticles 1:11) as the
unspeakable grace that allowed her to reverse the failing of her sex in Eve: “Non possum
96 “… qualis … usque ad ipsum spiravit vel spirare potuit. … O amici, hoc ego experta sum”
(CCC, 1, pp. 30–31).
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eloqui, non possum verbis consequi: res ista non est effabilis” (It cannot be uttered,
words cannot describe it, this thing is ineffable).97 The transition to Canticles 1:12 then
introduces the “bundle of myrrh” as at once the movement from conception to birth and
her attempt to give this mystery communicable form:
descenditque de illo accubitu suo, et requievit in tabernaculo meo. Hic requievit, hic
habitavit totis novem mensibus, et cuius erat Dominus, eiusdem ancillae suae factus est
filius. Vultis audire, amici, qualis exinde fuerit iste dilectus meus mihi, et ego illi? Ecce
dico vobis: “Fasciculus myrrhae dilectus meus mihi, inter ubera mea commorabitur.”
(CCC, p. 31)
(and so he came down from his couch [cf. Canticles 1:11] to rest in the shelter of my
womb. There he rested, there he lived for nine months and she of whom he was lord, of
that same handmaid he became the son. Do you want to hear, my friends, how it could
then be that “my beloved was to me as I was to him”? Here I tell you: “My love is to me as
a bundle of myrrh, between my breasts he shall rest” [Canticles 1:12].)
The image of the lactans dolorosa is thus to be understood (by the audience)
as the same mystery differently “spoken,” as its manifestation in apprehensible
reality. Conception and lactation, respectively, signify the experience of the Word as
apprehended before and after the Incarnation. The ineffable union of the one experience is made knowable to humanity as the reciprocity in love and suffering, passio and
compassio, that allows us to know God’s pain as our own. “If you ponder this rightly,”
Mary says before she speaks Canticles 1:12 as the image of the lactans dolorosa, “truly,
you will discover it in me, whence with me you will be pierced with pain and with me
you will be sweetly consoled.”98 This knowledge lies in a communion of the flesh whose
perfect realization pertained in Mary and Christ; the milk with which Mary nourishes
her son is a sign for all to see of the invisible union that took place in her womb.99 With
it she completes the new covenant between God and woman, “that same sex from which
the root of superbia came forth and corrupted the entirety of the human race.”100 The
Old Eve has become the New.
Mary’s knowing thus derives from the same equation—conception is to lactation
as lactation is to crucifixion—that Wolfram manifests in the way Herzeloyde attests
to her experience of triuwe. Dilectus meus mihi et ego illi: the experience of the New
Eve is that of a reciprocity between woman and God and of a continuity between love
human and divine, and no less between physical and spiritual experience. Herzeloyde
understands her experience through this continuity and refers it to the same fact of
Mary’s experience: the mother’s bodily nourishing of her child and the suffering each
will endure for love of her son-spouse constitute (and this is one-half of the mystery)
97 CCC, 1, p. 31, see also pp. 10–11; and above, pp. 74–75.
98 “Si haec scitis, si ista rite perpenditis, profecto in me invenietis, et unde mecum compungamini,
et unde mecum dulciter consolemini” (CCC, 1, p. 31).
99 Rupert returns to this idea with still greater emphasis in the passage on Canticles 4:10, Quam
pulchrae sunt mammae tuae, CCC, 3, p. 81.
100 “In isto … sexu, a quo initium superbiae generi humano superveniens totam massam corrupit”
(CCC, 1, p. 30).
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the exPosItIon of WoLfraM’s parzival
315
the equal exchange between the mother’s bleeding breasts and the son’s bleeding body;
they express and instil the same union in love. The other half of the mystery Herzeloyde
expresses with her auto-lactation: the fulfilment of conjugal love as manifest truth in
her pregnant body is a renewed experience of the covenant between God and humanity.
The equation between semen and milk, coition and lactation, that is so remarkable in
Herzeloyde’s transformation is to be understood as the consequence and even the physical proof of her re-embodied reading. These fluids form the substance of her continuity
with Mary’s experience and the substance of a sacramental power in human experience.
When she announces her initial lactation as an experience of the original Christian
sacrament, Herzeloyde testifies to this generative moment in her narrative as a “translation” of the fundamental moment of Christian renovatio. It is no less her Annunciation,
the moment when the bride becomes aware of her impregnation through the Spirit—not
such that she will bear another Christ, not such that Parzival becomes the second person
of the Trinity, not such that she is Mary, but rather just as Rupert defined it: such that
body becomes the diaphanous vessel of truth. The final image of the lactans dolorosa is
the receptacle into which all of this pours. Herzeloyde’s Klage, as it is known to the scholarship, is thus only a scene of grieving insofar as a woman’s love and her suffering, one
woman’s grief and her audience’s compassion, had come to represent the most humanly
accessible way to know God’s humanity.
Romans, or Wolfram’s âventiure, was the vehicle through which such ideas were being
translated to lay audiences. When the as-yet-anonymous narrator of Parzival finally
steps forward to claim his poem by name and in the same gesture acknowledges this
woman as his new female ideal, when he grounds his narrative art in his heartfelt identification with her pain, he, unlike Rupert, does not claim to be illuminated, touched by
the Spirit. He instead holds up his heart as the mirror of her pain; he claims the truth of
knowing this pain, of being her, as the truth of being there—that is, in the humble aspiration of feeling as she felt he has experienced what she did. Here the knight-narrator
and man of action has learned a different way to truth, one that resides in entering the
experience of the gendered other, in compassionating the woman.
This woman has known the truth as manifest and experienced in the body. This is the
meaning of the intricate parallels between the two texts. The same idea is undoubtedly
the key to what have proven her most inscrutable words. Here Herzeloyde explains, or at
least elaborates on the identification between her experience and Mary’s:
[frou] Herzeloyde sprach mit sinne
“diu hœhste küneginne
Jesus ir brüste bôt,
der sît durch uns vil scharpfen tôt
ame kriuze mennischlîche enphienc
und sîne triwe an uns begienc.
swes lîp sîn zürnen ringet,
des sele unsamfte dinget,
swie kiusche er sî und waere.
des weiz ich wâriu mære.”
(113,17–26)
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(Lady Herzeloyde spoke from true knowledge: “The queen of queens offered her breasts
to Jesus, who later died our human death most cruelly on the cross, thus fulfilling his
triuwe unto us. He who denies his own flesh shall fare ill on Judgment Day, however virtuous he might be or have been: of this I have true knowledge.”)
The interpretation of the final four verses of this passage has remained poised between
readings that, oddly enough, fall as if on either end of the devotional shift that is at the
centre of Wolfram’s interest: the shift from the fear of Christ as judge to loving compassion
for the suffering Man-God. What are the wâriu mære that Herzeloyde has learned? Not,
surely, that Christ’s wrath will land a soul in Hell. Quite aside from seeming as obvious
as it would be unmotivated, such a final proclamation would deny the very import of
the preceding testimony, a paean to God’s mercy and compassion, his capacity to feel
our pain.101 Herzeloyde’s statement must be taken in its entirety: the truth to which she
attests is that expressed in the lactans dolorosa, in the reciprocity between Mary’s lactation and Christ’s Passion, their triuwe. This reciprocity is testimony, in turn, to the reality
of the Incarnation and its import for our lives, what it enables us to know in and through
the body, through, as Herzeloyde says, Christ’s triuwe unto us. The fourth element in
the analogy, the triuwe humanity owes Christ, is what she alludes to in lines 113,23–24;
should it fail, this gift is lost, and the soul with it.102 The translation above reflects this
understanding of the passage as a whole. The words recommend Herzeloyde’s response
to her own bereavement, one that honours rather than flagellates the body, to her audience.103 The truly significant statement then, is her last: “des weiz ich wâriu mære” (of
this I have true knowledge). Just as Mary proclaimed before her with the words, “O amici,
hoc ego experta sum,” Herzeloyde proclaims the covenant of the Incarnation anew, a covenant between God and the vessel of his Word, woman.
The image of Herzeloyde as regina lactans is reiterated three times in this scene
before it is finally replaced by that of Mary as her forebear. Wolfram uses the repetition
not only to underline its importance but also to allow the one woman’s experience to seep
into the other’s, to allow the earthly vernacularity of his Herzeloyde to coalesce with a
sacred image. Initially we are shown a mother who “grasped those dun-red buds: I mean
the little tips of her teats, and thrust them into [her baby’s] tiny beak” (cf. 113,5–8).
Then the statement: “she who bore him in her womb was herself his nursemaid” (where
wamme, womb or belly, sustains the attention to a woman’s sexual physiology) gives
101 On the varying interpretation of these lines, also in relation to lines 110,17–21, see Elisabeth
Schmid, “ ‘Swes lîb,” 377–90; and Hartmann, Gahmuret und Herzeloyde, 2:361–62.
102 As printed here, line 113,23 is Lachmann’s conjecture, based on MS D, which reads, “swes sîn
lîp zürnen ringet.” Lachmann rejected the alternative found in MS G, swes lîp sînen zorn erringet;
while Nellmann has argued for restoring the latter in “Zum zweiten Buch,” 191–202. In the controversy over these two verses, the words sîn zürnen have invariably been seen to refer to Christ; I take
then to refer to the subject evoked with swes lîp. This yields the meaning, “He who rages against his
own flesh,” or, to paraphrase what would then be Herzeloyde’s meaning: “he who denies the flesh
denies Him who suffered on the cross.” Ringen I read as a transitive verb with the meaning, “sich
umarmt halten … abmühen, quälen,” following Lexer, Mittelhochdeutsches Handwörterbuch, 449.
103 In lines 110,17–22, Herzeloyde explicitly forgoes the self-flagellation that customarily accompanied a woman’s mourning. See above, pp. 55–56.
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the exPosItIon of WoLfraM’s parzival
317
way to what seems a third repetition, “she nourished him at her breast,” but instead
introduces an incongruous epithet: die wîbes missewende vlôch (she who shunned
woman’s failing) (113,11–12). Finally, this image is transformed in Herzeloyde’s imagination into that of her holding her dead husband in her arms, followed again by a generalizing comment: “she was not given to flattering foolery, humility was her sole intent”
(cf. 113,15–16).
On the one hand, this progressive coalescence of bodily particularity and generalized
exemplarity might be explained, and too often has been explained, as the narrator’s
attempt to forestall objections to unseemly behaviour.104 To thus trivialize its import
nevertheless flies in the face of the concluding statement to which it clearly builds. Why
or how Herzeloyde remedies a failing inherent in her sex is unclear at best; the woman
who indisputably “fled”—or reversed—such a failing is Mary, the New Eve. The idea
that Herzeloyde might be charged with moral laxity or frivolity (lôsheit, line 113,15)
is jarring at this juncture of the text, whatever judgment we may apply to her earlier
life. The contrast lôsheit–diemout, however, completes one more circle in a narrowing
spiral: Herzeloyde’s bodily experience becomes, in the process of the narrative, a translucent vessel of Mary’s; at the same time, Wolfram’s vernacular diction becomes as
if a blurred or reshaped imprint of biblical and liturgical imagery; his text as if a palimpsest of one written before, once and for all time. In her transformation from the
manipulative and self-centred queen of the Kanvoleis tournament to widowed bride
and self-immolating mother, Herzeloyde has relived Mary’s redemption of Eve. The real
meaning of both her words and Mary’s is: “Behold the image of this truth, manifest in
my experience.”
The Layman’s Key to Peter’s Gate
Swer nu wîben sprichet baz,
deiswâr daz lâz ich âne haz:
ich vriesche gerne ir freude breit.
wan einer bin ich unbereit
dienstlîcher triuwe:
mîn zorn ist immer niuwe
gein îr, sît ich se an wanke sach.
ich bin Wolfram von Eschenbach,
unt kan ein teil mit sange,
unt bin ein habendiu zange
mînen zorn gein einem wîbe:
diu hât mîme lîbe
erboten solhe missetât,
ine hân si hazzens keinen rât.
104 Thus, still, Hartmann, Gahmuret und Herzeloyde, 2:354–61, where earlier interpretations are
reviewed.
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readIng the WIdoWed brIde
dar umb hân ich der andern haz.
ôwê war umbe tuont si daz?
(114,5–20)
Should anyone now give a better account of women, truly, I’d be the last to object: I’d
happily hear them held in high esteem. Only to one among them do I deny my devoted
service: I hold a grudge ever-new against her, since I found her untrue. I am Wolfram von
Eschenbach, and have sung my share of love songs, but I’m like a pair of pincers where
my grudge against one woman is concerned. She caused me, life and limb, such grievous
injury that I can’t help but despise her. And this all the others hold against me. Alas, why
do they do so?
When the narrator steps between the concluding image of Herzeloyde as lactans dolorosa
and his audience to speak these words, he does so as a poet-champion throwing down
the gauntlet to any and all contenders: whoever might “now,” that is, in the presence
of this female ideal, best him in women’s praise has his unbegrudged blessing.105 This
woman is the essence of his new narrative art. She is the manifest reversal of the old
body poetics and “living” proof of the promise contained in the new.
The conclusion of Wolfram’s poetic exposition in the second prologue stages the
transformation from the old to the new narrative as that from the Old to the New Eve
on several levels at once. The transformation of Herzeloyde is the primary and moving
force that carries the rest. But next there is the narrator’s own, ostensibly “biographical”
conversion from a false to a true woman, from the woman an wanke to she who inspires
his herzeleit, his loving compassion. This, in turn, is portrayed as a conversion from
singing the praise of the One Lady of the Minnesang (lines 115,5–7) to a narrative art
in which all women are equally entitled to his attention in as much as they manifest and
inspire the same triuwe. And finally there is the audience’s transformation, evoked in
the narrator’s admonishments on the resumption of the narrative in book 3. The transformation comprises protagonist and narrator, audience and medium, in a symmetry of
triuwe on both sides of the narrative mirror.
As pointed out above, this juncture of the text exhibits parallels both to Benoît’s
introduction of Briseida’s dilemma (likewise transferred to the audience) and to Landri
of Waben’s union of the heart with the reading bride and his “awakening” from her contemplative sleep. Wolfram’s exposition incorporates both gestures, the one from history and the other from exegesis, and surpasses both: Like Benoît’s, his text serves the
articulation of a new experience of truth in narrative, like Landri’s, it articulates this
experience as a “translation” of the reading experience of the Song of Songs. The shifting
voices of the speaker and changing identities of his prospective audience reflect the
masterful manipulation of a discourse on media and truth previously proper to religious
literature—and its appropriation for a new translation onto the stage of the layman’s
narrative.
The layman’s advocate of the first prologue promised reliable counsel on woman’s
redemption somehow derived from chivalric experience, a model of reading in
105 Kuhn, “Wolframs Frauenlob,” 200 and passim.
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the exPosItIon of WoLfraM’s parzival
319
experience to supplant the cleric’s mediation of truth. Having now provided the proof
before her eyes and ears, the narrator proudly steps forward to claim his literary spurs,
the knight-narrator’s right to the stage. The challenge from the end of book 6 (“swelhiu
diz mære geschriben siht …”), with which the narrator calls women to witness the truth
of his portrayal, is formulated here as an insistence on aural and visual evidence that corresponds to the proof of action as opposed to mere words or intellectual sophistry. Reht
and art of this poetic project are established in personal risk of life and limb:
swelhiu mîn reht wil schouwen,
beidiu sehen unde hœren,
dien sol ih niht betœren.
schildes ambet ist mîn art:
swâ mîn ellen sî gespart,
swelhiu mich minnet umbe sanc,
sô dunket mich ir witze kranc.
ob ich guotes wîbes minne ger,
mag ich mit schilde und ouch mit sper
verdienen niht ir minnen solt,
al dar nâch sî sie mir holt.
vil hôhes topels er doch spilt,
der an ritterschaft nâch minnen zilt.
(115,8–20)
(Whatever woman now wishes to inspect my credentials, both to see and to hear them,
she I shall not lead astray. My craft is that of the shield: Where my courage isn’t put to
the test, where a woman will love me merely for singing, I’d say she’s weak in the head.
If I seek a good woman’s love yet fail to earn it with shield and lance—then let her favour
me accordingly. He who woos for love with the knight’s craft shows that he’s playing for
keeps.)
Narratorial legitimacy is here—as in the first prologue—grounded in steadfast service
through thick and thin, guaranteed above all through a palpable experience of presence.
Where there the clerical instructor was discharged for valsch geselliclîcher muot, manifest
as the inconstant and insubstantial surface apparitions of significatio, here the polemic
against the deceptive exterior discharges the rhetoric of the Minnesinger as falscher prîs,
mere flattery that peddles a no less elusive and deceptive image-ideal. Either purveys a
false reading of the body, the one its rejection as merely arbitrary form, the other its elevation to ornamental conceit. The summary preconditions for a continuation of what he
has just begun are therefore two:
hetens wîp niht für ein smeichen,
ich solt iu fürbaz reichen
an disem mære unkundiu wort,
ich spraeche iu d’âventiure vort.
swer des von mir geruoche,
dern zels ze keinem buoche.
ine kan decheinen buochstap.
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readIng the WIdoWed brIde
dâ nement genuoge ir urhap:
disiu âventiure
vert âne der buoche stiure.
(115,21–30)
(If the women will do without the usual flattery, I’ll gladly go on to tell you in this tale
things unheard of, I’ll continue the story for you. But whoever desires this of me had
better not think it a book. I am no man of letters. There are plenty of that sort around: this
knight’s adventure rides without a bookish bridle!106)
Somewhere equally removed from the poles of merely flattering vernacular love poetry
and instruction derived through Latin learning (litterae) and books lies the true vocation
of den wîben sprechen, speaking for or to women—and with it this poet’s audio-visual
claim to truth. But praise and appraisal of woman had been at the centre of a debate over
body and truth from the early centuries of Christianity; when Parzival was completed,
“she” had been the pivotal point in a renewal of bodily media for nearly a century.
Wolfram’s exposition exploits the full consequences of this idea for a poetics of narrative
experience. The proud defiance and exuberant confidence of his misnomered “Apology”
stem from the knowledge that his audience will not only agree but also knows full well
what is at stake. To read woman is to read the world—as a woman. To read as a woman is
to endure the trials and limitations of bodily experience as the authentic medium of truth.
Reading Wolfram’s poetic exposition from the perspective of a debate over the new
body poetics repeatedly introduces a fundamental departure from previous interpretations that is also the fundamental departure of this book from previous ideas of what
new vernacular narrative was: Wolfram is not primarily concerned with positioning
himself against other vernacular poets nor even to position narrative against the lyric
of the Minnesang. His real thrust is to champion a layman’s litteratura, and this means
a layman’s entry into knowledge, a legitimate means to the constitution and apprehension of moral truth that operates outside the bounds of clerical authority and its
monopoly over writing and hence over scripted and scriptural truth. The necessary
antecedent is then clear: an alternative reading for non-readers, a layman’s, or rather
a woman’s, lectio.
Thus, if Wolfram’s narrator begins his second prologue from a position squarely
within the culture of courtly poetry, if the motivation for his intervention is initially most
reminiscent of Benoît’s, the remainder of the second prologue is more readily recognized
through its predecessors in women’s monastic instruction and vernacular exegesis. The
Speculum virginum modelled a woman’s (that is, a non-reader’s) lectio that derived its
legitimacy from Mary’s conception of the Word as the renewal of the body and bodily
media—the promise of an audio-visual apprehension of truth through performance
and physical presence. Landri’s “teaching of the bride” was directed at puceles, those
106 More literally: “This âventiure needs no help from books!” Wolfram’s second prologue has
in fact proven no less resistant to scholarly interpretation than his first, precisely because the
connection between reading and the appraisal of women has continuously eluded our grasp.
For a detailed account of the points of controversy and the various interpretations, especially of
Wolfram’s denial of books and learning, see Kästner and Schirok, “Bücher.”
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the exPosItIon of WoLfraM’s parzival
321
as yet unschooled in love who were privileged to a different path, the unlearned who
received the milk of instruction as estoire from the mouths of their maistres—whose
intervening role, however, the reading exercise at hand was designed to bypass. But it
is the Eructavit, as the adaptation of women’s audio-visual lectio to the courtly stage,
and most particularly its performer-protagonist, David, that most clearly prefigure
Wolfram’s poetic positioning.
In the Eructavit we find all the same elements that seem so incongruously bundled
together in the introduction of the German courtly narrative: The proud insistence on
the vocation of the singer and entertainer paired with humble devotion to (a) woman as
audience and inspiration, the idea of women’s instruction conducted as if a moral step
beyond the courtly chanson, the defiant confrontation between an entertainer’s song
and a cleric’s catechism, between “the voice of the heart” and the dry learning of the
written page; and all this in service of one objective: to lend Mary’s reading a voice on
the stage of courtly vernacular literature. David’s defiant humility before the gates of
Heaven (no less and no more a paradox than Wolfram’s) claimed a privileged entry into
knowledge for himself as for the poem’s dame, Marie de Champagne, that was to take
place through his audio-visual delivery of the call to the bride—vernacular lectio as no
less than a reactivation of the voiz that performed the Annunciation to Mary. Such was
the reading aspiration that could be ascribed to the “queen” of scripture en romans. We
have seen that Wolfram fully espoused the same aspiration for his poem and the woman
at its poetological centre. But here, there is no David and no elevation to heavenly vision;
the vernacular bride is herself witness to the transformative power of the Spirit and the
poetic voice; its medium is her own—and our own—bodily experience.
When Herzeloyde speaks the concluding lines of her testimony to this experience, so we are told, she speaks mit sinne (line 113,17). At the end of book 6, when the
narrator challenges his female audience to authenticate his “true” portrayal of women,
he qualifies their competence with the same term: not to just any woman, but to swelch
sinnec wîp he submits his work for judgment (cf. line 337,1). The epilogue insists on
the same qualification: “goutiu wîp, hant di sin …” (Good women, so far as they have
sin …) (827,25). The woman with sin authorizes and presides over the performance of
this narrative. Yet a connection between these three instances of the term has so far
escaped recognition. None of the standard translations render all with the same idea; no
more is there agreement among the translators on the meaning in any one of the three
passages. As Wolfram applies the term to women, sin does not mean simply or alternately “understanding” or “discernment,” still less “learning” or “cleverness.”107
107 These observations are based on the translations of Hatto, Knecht, Kuhn, and Spiewok. Sin
is generally taken in these passages as a reference to reasoning ability or education. Herzeloyde’s
words are qualified as spoken “pensively” or with reflection; sinnec wîp are taken as “educated,”
“sensible,” or “intelligent” women—with a strong tendency to read the statement as a reference to
women’s literacy (for example, despite his earlier reservations, Nellmann, commentary to Parzival,
p. 625); and the qualification evoked in the epilogue is rendered somewhere between “prudent”
and “clever” (klug), or as “discerning.”
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Much more has been made of Wolfram’s use of sin in another highly conspicuous
context, the prologue to his second epic poem, Willehalm. There it occurs in direct opposition to bookish knowledge as the source of his own poetic inspiration:
der rehten schrift dôn und wort
dîn geist hât gesterket.
mîn sin dich kreftec merket.
swaz an den buochen stât geschriben,
des bin ich künstelos beliben.
niht anders ich gelêret bin
wan hân ich kunst, die gît mir sin.108
(What is spoken of holy scripture derives truth from your spirit. My own inner ear [sin]
is turned to you alone; what is written in books has been no help to me. I’ve had no other
education than what I find in my craft, and that comes to me from within [sin].109
Willehalm derives from the legenda tradition, in which the poet serves as mouthpiece
of the Spirit whose works he recounts as the life of a saint. Sin/sensus thus signifies the
human faculty to apprehend the Spirit directly, access to a higher wîsheit (wisdom) that is
granted by grace alone; similarly then, it stands for sensus in opposition to litteratura, the
living wisdom of Christ as opposed “to the dead letter.”110 The same idea stands midwife
to David’s insistence on performance in the Eructavit, with additional scriptural authority
lent through the psalm verse, non cognovi litteraturam et introibo in potentiam domini.
The parallels with the literary positioning in Parzival as we have pursued them are
clear. The same have been repeatedly discussed in the scholarship to return always to
the same conclusion: the poet of âventiure cannot pose a priori as the inspired vessel of
the Spirit proper to the legenda tradition, and if he nonetheless invokes the illiterate’s
privilege through the authority of the psalm verse, it remains unclear at best where we
are to locate his alternative guarantor of spiritual truth.111
Wolfram’s claim, however, is not at all made a priori but rather in the presence of the
manifest truth of Mary’s reading. The truth of this narrative mode is not invested in the
poet’s inspiration, but rather in the woman’s reception, her sin, through and of which
Herzeloyde speaks with her wâriu mære. The key to this understanding of the term
108 Willehalm, lines 2,16–22.
109 This translation, too, is inevitably an interpretation, which in this case must speak for itself.
I have largely followed LDMA, p. 189. For detailed discussion and the various readings, see (most
recently) Fasbender “Dôn und wort,” 21–33; and Ochs, “‘Willehalm’-Eingang”; also Ohly as in the
note following.
110 “Der sin 2,18 ist der sensus als das Organ der Wahrnehmung des heiligen Geistes” (Ohly,
“Wolframs Gebet,” 19, and passim). Ohly continues: “Der schöpferische sin des heiligen Geistes
macht im Empfangen auch den Menschen schöpferisch, so wie die ehrfahrene triuwe Gottes für
Wolfram auch den Menschen triuwe lehrt” (“Wolframs Gebet,” 19). This statement might serve to
describe Herzeloyde’s function for the genesis of the narrative in Parzival.
111 See Haug’s discussion in LDMA, pp. 177–78 and 189–90. Bumke, Blutstropfen, pp. 134–35,
argues anew that Ohly’s conclusions are pertinent to Parzival as well.
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the exPosItIon of WoLfraM’s parzival
323
is contained in the moment when Herzeloyde experiences the transforming power of
epiphany in the body that brings a transition from figurally concealed to bodily immanent
truth. Just as the milk she drinks affords her a different wîsheit (“alsus sprach diu wîse,”
110,28), so the narrator qualifies her recognition of affinity with Mary (lines 113,17–26)
with the words: “[frou] Herzeloyde sprach mit sinne” (113,16). That is, either lactation
and either awakening—each is announced with the verb sich versinnen—attests to her
entry into Mary’s gnosis.
It is thus neither the author of the Psalms nor another poet similarly inspired but
instead Wolfram’s lowly knight-narrator in the here and now who justifies, as David did,
his “right” to perform for diu wîp as one that must be “seen and heard,” with the same
proud insistence on the insignia of his otherwise disqualifying social class. In effect, the
position of the poet-exegete is now occupied by the illitteratus, the same who previously sat in the audience alongside Landri’s seignors or Baldwin of Guines, while the
positions of the heavenly and the courtly bride, of sponsa et mater and adulescentula, are
collapsed into an experience witnessed by his indispensable counterpart, the woman as
human mirror of divine truth. And if this narrator now insists both on his own status as
illitteratus and on independence from bookish guidance, it is because he claims the privilege of a layman’s entry into knowing—non cognovi litteraturam et introibo in potentiam
domini—and then also proclaims the consequences. David’s insistence on the privilege
of his art as jongleur is literally a rejection of writing as mediation and implicitly a rejection of the written authority that the gatekeeper evokes and represents: “Don’t tell me
to write it down; / The tongue, which the heart quickens / Will write it without fingers or hands / Much better than any scribe.”112 Wolfram’s is an explicit rejection of the
authority that litteras represent and thus a claim to a layman’s reading autonomy.
The illiterate knight-narrator who assumes his identity only once he has also “read”
the tale of the transformation of Eve as âventiure has taken the implications of Rupert’s
reading to their extreme. Like Rupert’s and Landri’s exegetes, this new lady’s champion
poses as the voice of a new experience of the truth—but can only do so as an accessory to
the adulescentula. The layman has assumed his position as a special category of woman,
of humanity’s weakness before God. The woman he follows is no longer Mary herself but
a representative of that same weakness and its gnostic privilege in the here and now. The
reception of truth through audio-visual experience now resides in a symmetry of position and disposition on both sides of the communicative act, a mutual manifestation and
mutual recognition of triuwe, or that which is of God in our fellow (wo-)man. Meaning
is made only as a result of the joint participation of audience, performer/narrator, and
text in the making of âventiure. This “renewal” of tale-telling would transform the most
secular of narrative experiences into the vessel of a privileged gnosis, an entry into
the presence of the Word reserved for the weak, the young women, and the illiterate.
Devocions de cuer—that is, triuwe such as Herzeloyde represents—is the layman’s key
to Peter’s gate.
112 Cf. lines 239–42, quoted above, pp. 219–20.
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readIng the WIdoWed brIde
This was Wolfram’s answer to “the truth question” in vernacular narrative. Notably,
it has little to do with our idea of fiction but much to do with a discovery of empathy
as a locus of Christian meaning and truth. It accomplishes the same substitution, in far
more ambitious form, that we observed in Benoît’s narrative: the truth of “being there” is
superseded by the truth of “being her.” In effect, Herzeloyde’s words stand as an attestatio
res visae in which the truth born of personal witness in physical presence is instead
known through identification in affective experience: loving, suffering, and thereof
knowing, as another did before. Gottfried von Strassburg subsequently introduced a
similar substitution in more playful form in his Tristan.113 After the extended and indulgently allegorical description of his celebrated love grotto, the narrator attests to the
truth of the portrayal with the words, “Diz weiz ich wol, wân ich was dâ” (This I know
well, for I was there) (17104). But after another thirty-five lines in which he describes
his trip to the location in question it is abundantly clear that what he intends is instead
a witness of the heart: “ich hân die fossiure erkant / sit minen elif jâren ie / und enkom
ze Kurnewâle nie” (I’ve known the grotto since I was eleven years old and without ever
setting foot in Cornwall) (17140–42).
What Gottfried intended this statement to mean for the construction of truth in
Tristan cannot be pursued further here. I will explore in the last chapter how Wolfram
developed the idea of witness through the heart in Parzival. But the contours of the
experience are already delivered through Herzeloyde: the truth of narrative is found
in a response in which we know one another through identification in experience, in
the humanity that we share with Christ. The enabling model and mirror of this truth
is Mary’s experience of conception, birth, and motherhood, the joy and suffering of
humanity over its part in the life of the divine on earth. With the exposition of his “new
narrative” Wolfram reinscribed the original act of Christian reading, the act in which the
body became the vessel of divine truth, as the model of how meaning is made in his performance space; he claimed the truth manifest in the reading of the bride as the truth of
the layman’s romance.
113 Green, Beginnings, pp. 186–87.
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Chapter 8
THE HEART, THE WOUND, AND THE WORD—
SACRED AND PROFANE
The Advent of Âventiure and the Reconception of the Word
In one of his last essays on the formation of a poetics of fiction in early romance narrative,
Walter Haug described this “liberation” from “the horizons of religious meaning” as a
continuation of the revolutionary renewal of biblical exegesis that began with Rupert of
Deutz.1 It was Rupert, Haug wrote, who had established “the right” of every new exegete
(and thus also every new poet) “to ask after the meaning [of scripture] independently of
all previous authority.”2 In the new fictional narrative, the poet’s
work is, for him, a search for meaning, and this as an existential problem, for at stake is
the claim that a poetic fiction can constitute the path to meaning and its delivery even
within a world for which interpretation as God’s creation according to Christian teaching
no longer provides the operative authority.3
How this existential search for meaning could have grown out of Rupert’s testimony
that personal reading experience could reveal not “meaning,” but truth; that all reading
experience, approached through the authentic “foundation” of sacred historia, led to the
truth—that is, to God—is a problem that Haug did not directly address.
The idea of a connection between the experience of narrative fiction and Rupert’s
reading experience served Haug as a way of accounting for Wolfram’s persistent appeal
to the figures and metaphors of religious inspiration to authorize his work. In particular,
he was building on an essay by Friedrich Ohly of thirty years previous, which elucidated
the same for the central image of Wolfram’s third Parzival prologue, the advent of Frou
Âventiure, “Lady Taleteller,” at the opening of book 9:4
“Tuot ûf.” wem? wer sît ir?
“ich wil inz herze dîn zuo dir.”
sô gert ir zengem rûme.
1 “… die neue, vom religiösen Sinnhorizont abgelöste Literatur,” Haug, “Autorität,” pp. 115–27 at
p. 124.
2 “… das Recht, in Freiheit von jeder Autorität die Sinnfrage zu stellen” (Haug, “Autorität,” p. 126
and passim).
3 “Sein Werk ist für ihn Sinnsuche, und zwar Sinnsuche als Problem, denn es geht um die prekäre
Frage, ob eine poetische Fiktion ein Weg der Sinnfindung, einschließlich ihrer Vermittlung, im
Rahmen einer Welt sein kann, der gegenüber man sich nicht mehr damit begnügt, sie als Schöpfung
Gottes heilsgeschichtlich zu deuten” (Haug, “Autorität,” p. 124).
4 “Cor amantis,” pp. 128–55.
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readIng the WIdoWed brIde
“waz denne, belîbe ich kûme?
mîn dringen soltu selten klagn:
ich wil dir nu von wunder sagn.”
(433,1–5)
(“Open up.” To whom? Who are you? “I seek the way to you inside your heart.” Then
you’re after cramped quarters! “What, you don’t think I’d fit? My prodding shall give you
little to complain of: I want to tell you wondrous tales.”)
For both Ohly and Haug, this encounter between the narrator and his story-as-muse
recast the idea of divine inspiration as invention occurring in the author’s heart. Both
singled out the unusual use (unique in Wolframs oeuvre) of the verb erliuhten in the
narrator’s plea for news of Parzival in reply: “nu erliuhtet mir die foure sîn” (Now illuminate his path for me) (434,2). The term referred to a spiritual illuminatio, but in this
case it occurred through “the spirit of the story” itself.5 For Ohly this was a gesture to
God’s intervention in the story as manifest in book 9 (“the story of an act of grace”),
but he did not extend a claim to such truth to the act of narration itself.6 For Haug, the
allusion to spiritual inspiration claimed similar authority for narrative invention alone.
Either conclusion offers a striking display of how reluctant scholars have been to
admit of a true interpenetration of the sacred and the profane in the “classics” of medieval romance, for there have been few better informed on such questions.7 As Ohly laid
out, the image of a beloved who seeks entry into (or once admitted, is locked inside)
a Herzkluse, the “chamber” or “cell” of the heart, was by 1100 a common, even somewhat hackneyed one, whether in spiritual use as God’s place in the hearts of the faithful
or in secular love poetry. His interest in Wolfram’s verses lay in the way they crowned
a renewal that was characteristic of the twelfth century: “a fresh approach that takes
the image literally and this literal understanding seriously, that restores its appeal to
the imagination even as it seems to eliminate the imaginary.”8 That is, this treatment
of scriptural imagery witnesses the transition from the imaginary to the experiential,
the figural to the “historical.” Moreover, it does so as a consequence of reinvigoration
through the miracle of the Incarnation: the literalization of the metaphor in question
takes place in the first half of the twelfth century just as Wolfram has recorded it, as
speculation over how such a small space can possibly accommodate such an imposing
guest, that is, how Mary’s heart, or womb (the two were often interchanged, in Latin
and in German), could have accommodated Christus Gigas, he who was more immense
than the world itself.9 Ohly, however, did not make the causal connection that has proven
5 Both authors take the phrase “der Geist der Erzählung” from Thomas Mann’s Der Erwählte; Haug,
“Autorität,” p. 123; Ohly, “Cor amantis,” p. 155.
6 In “dem geistigen Herzen der Dichtung, … der Geschichte eines Gnadengeschehens,” “Cor
amantis,” pp. 148, 154.
7 Similarly: Palmer, “Herzeliebe,” pp. 203–4.
8 “Cor amantis,” p. 129, “Seit dem 12. Jahrhundert gibt es einen frischen Zugriff, der das Bild beim
Wort nimmt, mit ihm ernst macht, ihm den Reiz des Phantasievollen zurückgibt, indem es ihn zu
nehmen scheint.”
9 Ohly, “Cor amantis,” pp. 143–44; see also Palmer, “Herzeliebe.”
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the heart, the Wound, and the Word
327
central to developments considered in these chapters: Mary was the wellspring of the
twelfth century’s literalization of scriptural imagery; it sprang from her generative and
gnostic act. Thus, the images of her conception and bearing of Christ did not merely
“influence, or incite” the complementary images in love poetry10 but rather mediated
the experience of reification itself. The mediation of this act as reading experience to
twelfth-century audiences is where Rupert’s contribution is properly situated. With the
reopening of Parzival’s story in book 9, Wolfram not only illustrates the literalization of
a metaphor. He also appropriates the original authority for the realization of scriptural
imagery as experience and identifies it with the heartfelt reception of narrative. What
this meant for the construction of meaning and truth in courtly romance is to be further
explored in this chapter.
The juncture at which Wolfram avails himself of these ideas has much in common
with that between books 2 and 3: here as there, the story must introduce its absent hero,
as Parzival has not appeared for the length of two intervening books on the adventures
of Gawan. Where we witnessed there his original entry as born from his mother’s bodily
conception of a new narrative, his return in book 9 must emerge from the entry of frou
âventiure into the respondent’s heart; the “conception” of narrative depends on “his”
opening to “her” loving knocking.
But Wolfram’s image is not therefore one of the poet’s illuminatio. The singular use
of the verb erliuhten—familiar from religious literature in connection with the divine
illumination of the heart11—is a telling point, but it occurs far on into the passage,
embedded in a cascade of anxious queries like those of some amorous adulescentula
eagerly awaiting news of her beloved, a litany of desire itself (433,8–434,10). Moreover,
it is not the poet’s wish to narrate that initiates this exchange but rather “Lady Taleteller,”
who, in the manner of a wooing lover, herself seeks entry “to you into your heart.” That
the person addressed is the composing poet or even the narrator is open to question.
Whatever his or her identity, and despite initial scepticism over the available space
(Mary, too, balked at Gabriel’s announcement), the addressee’s reaction evinces exactly
what the exegetical elaboration of this figure assured: once the “lady” is recognized, the
heart expands sufficiently to accommodate all manner of possible tales (or guests).12
Entry here requires no great persuasion, for this heart’s enclosure has already been
punctured by love’s dart.
This “narrator” is singularly ignorant of his own tale, and what he seeks is not so
much illumination as simply presence. His heart opens as the poet intends ours to
do—this is the real objective—in anticipation of encountering the hero. For when we
receive frou âventiure we receive her hero no less; or rather, to receive this lady in love is
10 Ohly, “Cor amantis,” p. 144.
11 In the Sankt Trudperter Hohelied, lines 128,2–7, for example, God, seen as the sun, is said to
enter and entliuhten the hearts (souls) of the faithful. Further examples of the illuminated heart in
Middle High German literature are cited in Ertzdorff, “Herz,” 290–91.
12 God (or love) makes the heart into an infinitely expanding enclosure, capable (as Mary’s was)
even of receiving him “whom no vessel can contain” (Landri of Waben, Song of Songs, line 2242). See
Ohly, “Cor amantis,” pp 135–39; esp. p. 139n22.
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to follow her hero’s path, die fuore sîn, with all the loving anxiety modelled in the receiving
heart’s response. This is, then, no more a model of poetic inspiration (divine or otherwise)
than the denial of letters in the second prologue can be directly equated with the legendapoet’s invocation of the Spirit. In the poetic construction of the niuwe mære, authority is
invested in the “female” receptive act. The obverse is also true: this generative rebirth of
narrative partakes of the same power and truth as Herzeloyde’s did. Consequently, the
continuing story is now born of our hearts, of our own burning desire to follow the path
of “the beloved”—we need only hear the first person singular pronouns as plurals:
Beidiu iur hêrre und ouch der mîn[,]
nu erliuhtet mir die foure sîn:
der süezen Herzeloyden barn,
wie hât Gahmurets sun gevarn,
sît er von Artûse reit?
ober liep od herzeleit
sît habe bezalt an strîte.
habt er sich an die wîte,
oder hât er sider sich verlegn?
sagt mir sîn site und al sîn pflegn.
(434,1–10)
(Both your lord and also my own, now illuminate his path for me: how has the sweet child
of Herzeloyde, how has Gahmuret’s son fared since he rode from Arthur’s court? Tell me
whether he has since won happiness or heartfelt sorrow in his battling. Does he persist
in his wide wanderings, or has he rather turned to his bed? Tell me how it is with him and
what he’s been about.)
The generative transformation that took place once before as the experience of
Herzeloyde, that is, in the body of narrative, must take place here in the hearts of the
“believing” audience. The resumption of the narrative thus begins with the celebrated,
seemingly blasphemous pronouncement, never sufficiently explained: “Swerz niht
geloubt, der sündet. / diu âventiure uns kündet” (He sins who does not believe this.
Lady Âventiure tells us) (435,1–2). This would be heavy artillery, indeed, to employ in an
advance charge so far afield as an annunciation of narrative fiction. But it is none such.
Wolfram is merely taking the metaphors to their experiential extreme. Should the manifestation of truth in experience itself depend on the believing participation of the experti,
then to fail in that faith, that is, to fail in triuwe to the telling of the tale, would offend
against the new covenant between humankind and God.
Wolfram’s renewed generation of Parzival’s story is thus here as before fused with
the constitution of sacred truth. In exegetical tradition the idea of God’s knocking on
the door of the heart to gain entry, either for instruction or loving reception, was centuries old when Wolfram composed his Parzival.13 Its scriptural antecedents were
two: Canticles 5:2, in which the bride wakens to “the voice of [her] beloved, knocking,”
13 Ohly, “Cor amantis,” pp. 150–51; on development from the thirteenth century onward, see
“Knocking at Heaven’s Gate,” in Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, pp. 158–68.
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the heart, the Wound, and the Word
329
and Revelations 3:20, “I stand at the door and knock.” Middle High German sermons
and religious poetry of the thirteenth century play on the same themes in a way that
suggests Wolfram captures ca. 1210 a vernacular understanding that is on the threshold
of written tradition. A dialogue between God and the soul from the late thirteenth century, for example, has Christ paraphrase Canticles 5:2 with these words: “ich klopfe an
daz herze dîn, / dîn friuntschaft mir daz niht verbunne, / tuo ûf, mîn hort und lâ mich în”
(I knock on the door of your heart, your friendship will not begrudge me entry, open up,
my darling, and let me in!).14
The voice that announces itself as if knocking at the door of the heart is borrowing
the voice of the beloved, knocking, to which we have seen the bride rise and open over
and again (cf. Canticles 5:2, 5:5). This voice speaks here through a lady who is the incarnation of narrative itself. What more clever construction could one imagine to conflate
Mary’s conception of the Word, the audience’s reception of narrative, and the resumption of the tale at hand all in one “opening” gesture? The opening to book 9 is a call to
make room in one’s heart for a heartfelt participation in the continuation of the story and
thus in its manifestation of triuwe as truth. The awaited illuminatio, the heart’s induction
into knowledge, is found in compassion with the story’s protagonist; here as elsewhere
this loving entry is also a wound.15 With the penetrated heart thus evoked, the audience’s
experience joins with the narrator’s words of conversion to the new woman: Mir ist von
herzen leit ir pîn. To open one’s heart to Lady Âventiure’s urgent knocking is to participate in—or rather to renew—a fellowship of suffering hearts that was first conjured in
the second prologue.
What eluded both Ohly and Haug in reading this passage was the transfer of the
stage of communication to the hearts of the recipients and the consequent modelling of
empathetic response as the heart of truth. Such would have accorded well with Haug’s
model of meaning formed in the act of narrative received, “in a shared path of loving and
suffering.”16 It was not, however, a new way of making meaning peculiar to the composition of secular or romance narrative. In fact, as has become increasingly apparent in
the preceding chapters, it was a new truth that comprised both our history and Christ’s,
that made our pain into a mirror of Christ’s and held the two together in one suffering
heart, Mary’s. To open one’s heart to this truth was to know as Mary knew, to experience
as she did the descent of the Word into the all-too-cramped space of a human heart,
to speak with her the words, Fasciculus myrrhae dilectus meus mihi, inter ubera mea
14 As cited in Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, pp. 165–66. As Hamburger notes, the poem elaborates
“the imagery of the Song of Songs in combination with that from Revelation 3:20 to give nuns
models for an amorous colloquy with Christ.” Similar passages are found earlier in the thirteenth
century; see Messelken, “Rabe und Taube,” pp. 112–13 and 164.
15 The ideas of the knocking on and opening the door to the heart and that of penetrating and
wounding it are interchangeable; both equally identified with Christ’s side wound as the door to
his heart. By the first half of the thirteenth century this image complex becomes conventional: see
Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, pp. 158–68, esp. 164–66.
16 “… im liebenden und leidenden Mitgehen mit dem … literarisch gestalteten Schicksal,”
LDMA, p. 178.
330
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readIng the WIdoWed brIde
commorabitur (Canticles 1:12), and enter into her mystery, one that united conception
and compassion, an embrace of both loving and suffering. In such compassionating participation empathy is sanctified, for it constitutes a condition in which the heart opens,
that is, bleeds, for fellow men as Christ bled when he, as Herzeloyde informs her son,
“died the death of our flesh most cruelly on the cross.”17 The heartblood of compassion is
our equivalent of Herzeloyde’s flowing milk, our triuwe in return for Christ’s. Swerz niht
geloubet, der sündet.
Both the second and third prologues thus serve one message: compassio, this reciprocal entry into a heart-wound, could reveal history, it could generate narrative as an
experience of the truth. There were conditions on this possibility, which Wolfram lays
out in his prologues. Their essence is the acknowledgement of an abject, body-bound
humility that enables reciprocal recognition of inner truth—the same that we saw initially articulated through the expanded role of Alexis’s spuse, or through the interpolation of Briseida’s story as a contrafact to the audience’s expectations of Helen. With
Herzeloyde, three different personifications of female suffering for love, the sponsa
derelicta, Mary’s compassio, and the worldly widow, meet and their convergence is complete; the three have become one in her testimony to a woman’s renewed experience
of Mary’s knowing. The reiteration of the moment of heartfelt identification staged as
the regeneration of Parzival’s story in the opening to book 9 is a signal to the audience
that an arc of meaning is on the verge of completion, the aimless drifting of âventiure is
about to touch land again, which will occur in a renewed and decisive encounter with a
woman’s widowed grief, the third meeting between Parzival and Sigune. The relationship between witnessing audience, a woman’s suffering, and the constitution of truth
through shared tears, first demonstrated in Herzeloyde’s transformation, is remixed and
restaged at the opening of book 9 through a reverse arrangement: here the poetic exposition, or communication about the making of the story in the penetrated heart, precedes.
The crucial moment of identification with women’s suffering follows in Parzival’s own
encounter with the widowed bride, his entry into the compassionating heart.
In this final chapter we return to the two images of the psalter-reading woman with
which we began, Sigune and Laudine, to rediscover them as widows. What the two
finally have in common is that each represents the widowed bride within a carefully
constructed presentation of narrative poetics as Mary’s reading en romans—Wolfram,
in fact, tells us as much by twice evoking Laudine’s dilemma as the point of reference for
his portrayal of Sigune, measuring either woman against an ideal of widowed fidelity.
What Chrétien had communicated to his audience through Yvain’s path from Laudine
to the pucele, Wolfram incorporated into a parallel construction in Parzival that leads
from Herzeloyde’s grieving lactation to the apotheosis of grief in Sigune. In both Parzival
and Yvain, proper orientation to the suffering of the widowed bride, to a woman’s tears,
is where audience and protagonists alike learn proper response to a story told. This
process, in which the protagonist learns to read the widow, forms the narrative arc or
17 Herzeloyde’s statement is echoed early in book nine by Kahenis, lines 448,10–12 (see below,
pp. 335–36).
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the heart, the Wound, and the Word
331
horizontal axis between two encounters that each double an identification in suffering
within the narrative with an appeal to the audience to accomplish the same; indeed, in
which continuation of the tale is made contingent on such continuity of heartfelt participation (see figs. 8.1 and 8.2). The resulting four-cornered construction accomplishes
a presentation of narrative poetics such as, when Chrétien first laid it out in Yvain, had
never been attempted before. The scenes together, in either text, build up a complex of
images and associations between love, suffering, and knowing; where knowing resides
in the initiation into another’s pain, an act of reading that penetrates the heart of the
beheld and thereby wounds the heart of the beholder. The heart, the wound and the
Word; compassio as union in the wounded heart mediated by a woman’s grieving and
reading or reading grief: this was the point in which the popularizing potential of the
monastic transformation of reading culminated.
This increasing focus on the widow’s grief as the centrepiece of the new poetics of
body and truth I outlined previously, in chapter 4.18 By the end of the twelfth century, the
literature of Mary’s compassio had developed such that the relationship that Wolfram
repeatedly exploits between witnessing audience, a woman’s suffering, and the constitution of truth through shared tears is readily recognized as its derivative. The influential
Passion tract known as the “Quis dabit,” written before 1205 and probably of Cistercian
origin, begins with the words, “Who will lend my head and eyes a stream of tears so that
I might weep night and day until the Lord appears to his servant in a vision or a dream
to console my soul?”19 The tears the author seeks are Mary’s. To share in Mary’s tears is
to know her experience, which reveals sacred history: “I beseech you,” he addresses her,
“pour out for me those tears which you had at his Passion, and, so that they might flow
more copiously, let us exchange words with each other concerning the Passion of your
son, my lord and God. Tell me, I beg, the true sequence of events.”20 In order to know, then,
the interrogating devotee must first learn from Mary how to weep, for, as he protests, “I
am a wretch with a stony heart, and I cannot weep.” Mary in turn requires the devotee’s
tears as the condition for her speech, for him to know and to write of her experience: “Tu
tamen, cum lacrimis scribe ea, que cum magnis doloribus ipsa perpensi” (You, however,
write with tears those things which I have pondered with great pain).21 Thus, this text,
too, is generated and can only be generated out of a moment of heartfelt identification
with a woman’s suffering.
This is a most revealing beginning; it also demonstrates what had occurred over the previous century with regard to tears and stories told. Before the twelfth century, long-standing
18 See pp. 177–87, above.
19 Translation modified from Bestul, ed. and trans., p. 167. Medieval tradition attributed the text
to Bernard of Clairvaux; the modern attribution to Oglerius of Lociedo is questionable, as noted in
Büttner, Überlieferung, p. 31; all that is certain is that Oglerius used and expanded on the text of
“Quis dabit” in his De laudibus sanctae dei genitricis, thus giving a terminus ante quem of 1205. An
informative discussion is Marx, “Lamentation of Mary,” pp. 137–57.
20 “Quis dabit,” ed. and trans. Bestul, p. 169, emphasis added.
21 “Quis dabit,” ed. and trans. Bestul, p. 168/69.
332
Performing avanture I
(for Arthur’s court)
Calogrenant and the conceptio per aurem
The pucele reads a romans
God of love wounded
au
di
en
c
‘false’
e re
reception
(vi
lenc
(violence)
ds
a
re
e
ds
a
re
seeking avanture =
‘true’ reception
learning to read the woman’s grief
e
id
br
d
we
do
i
ain
ew
Yv
th
re
a
ds
Performing avanture II
The widow mourns and reads
Yvain wounded by love
(for the narrative audience)
Reprise on listening with the wounded heart
Figure 8.1. Diagram design by Barbora Hanova. © Morgan Powell.
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Reading the Widow in Yvain
333
Woman’s Reading I
Performing âventiure II
Herzeloyde conceives
and bears the niuwe maere
Conception/reception of âventiure
= Lady received in the heart
th
ew
Pa
rz
id
ow
ed
iva
l
ds
a
re
br
id
e
ds
a
re
seeking the Grâl =
reception as “herze-leid”
reception as recognition
in the wounded heart
learning to read women’s grief
na
r
to
rra
ce
en
i
d
au
re
a
ds
re
a
ds
Woman’s Reading II
Performing âventiure I
“Wolfram v. E.” and second prologue
Sigune embodies the layman’s lectio. Mutual
recognition on entering the wounded heart
Figure 8.2. Diagram design by Barbora Hanova. © Morgan Powell.
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Reading the Widow in Parzival
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monastic tradition had condoned tears only out of compunction for sins, secondarily out of
desire for Heaven, and the tears Mary requires are neither.22 Mary herself had not been seen
to weep, but rather to stand, stoically, at the cross.23 In the “Quis dabit” and other texts of
Marian compassio, participation itself requires the tears of a woman’s loving grief. Tears are
the visible manifestation of shared inner suffering without which no telling is granted; the
story is received with the wounded heart or not at all. But more than this: tears generate
narrative, for what Mary revealed was neither exegesis nor interpretation but sacra historia
itself, the story that scripture did not tell and thus was discovered by being her. It was revelation, or erliuhten, that occurred in the communion of wounded hearts.
To know this story, then, required the reader to become the mirror of Mary’s pain,
and the content of the “Quis dabit” is dedicated entirely to this purpose. To the same
purpose, Mary had begun to weep, to sigh and groan and even to swoon and fall to the
ground; that is, she became more and more the mirror of a secular widow’s grief.24 Even
as she had begun to speak, her pain found expression in a familiar language of gesture so
that it could be known, and through it, Christ’s: Mary makes the Word knowable as flesh
at the Passion even as she did in the Incarnation. The devotee seeks not only to know
what she knew but also to learn how to know as she did; her tears are the metonymic signifier for this process. To the extent that the reader-devotee is able to assimilate Mary’s
pain to the self, Mary’s story is revealed—in terms of the same pain. A symmetry of
inner disposition allows the blackened body, the body in grief, to reveal sacred truth.
As Mary herself says, she, now glorified and in Heaven, can no longer weep; her human
interlocutor must therefore reconstitute the humanity she expressed at the cross,25 and
this, the human complement to the divine, will reveal “the true sequence of events,” as it
enables Mary to tell, and her audience to feel, what she felt.
The ultimate objective of this knowing was the renewed embrace of the Word, the
mystery that saw Mary’s experience of conception and compassio as one, an experience offered the audience (like the author) of the “Quis dabit” by learning to be her.26
The promise of the same experience is what inspires Wolfram to the extraordinary
22 McGuire, “Monks and Tears,” pp. 133–51; also Weinand, Tränen, pp. 172–82; Adnès, “Larmes,”
9:295–97.
23 See above, p. 186.
24 All these gestures occur in the “Quis dabit”; in one redaction, Mary also shakes her head and
beats at her neck. See Schwab, Sigune, Kriemhilt, Maria, pp. 99–101.
25 “Illa respondet: ‘Illud quod queris conpungitiuum est et magni doloris; sed quia iam glorificata
sum, flere non possum. Tu tamen cum lacrimis scribe ea, que cum magnis doloribus ipsa perpensi”
(“Quis dabit,” ed. Bestul, p. 168).
26 Both the “Quis dabit” and Odo of Morimund’s sermon (discussed in chapter 4), point to this
connection by attributing the strength Mary needs to sustain her suffering to an infusion from
the “Most High,” an overshadowing of the Spirit just as it occurred at the conception; “Quis dabit,”
ed. Bestul, p. 180; Odo of Morimund, “Homilia,” p. 420. In keeping with the same idea, a tradition
developed beginning in the twelfth century that saw Mary giving birth a second time at the cross,
this time to holy church; see Neff, “Mary’s Labor,” 254–73. The “Quis dabit” identifies Mary’s pain at
the cross with the pain of childbirth that she was spared at the birth of Christ (ed. Bestul, p. 177).
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representation of Herzeloyde’s transformation as a bodily coalescence of conception,
grieving and birth. The heart of knowing lay in the woman’s suffering heart, and through
this, her human suffering in dialogue with Christ’s on the cross, Mary with Christ sanctified all human suffering, initiated a reciprocal gaze and a reciprocal wound that could
be reconstituted in compassio, a loving suffering with and for one’s fellows; that is, to
reconstitute this reciprocity of “hearts … stirred with compassion and pierced to the
point of tears”—as Peter of Blois evoked it in passing—was itself to fulfil (though he
does not say so) Peter’s condition for the salutary value of tears: that they proceed from
the love of Christ.27 Decisive was not the object of attention, whether Christ’s suffering
as human flesh or the flesh of suffering humanity, whether tears for Arthur or tears for
Christ, but rather the constitution of a true knowing from heart to heart, a negation of
bodily difference through the reciprocal manifestation of inner truth. This possibility
was delivered to humanity through the woman who conceived the Word as flesh and
redelivered through her when she became the human mirror of Christ’s Passion. Lady
Âventiure’s Annunciation prepares the audience for a redelivery of the same possibility
through the woman who is Herzeloyde’s extension into the body of narrative, Sigune.
Ist iemen dinne? (Is Anybody There?)
With her foster-mother, Herzeloyde, Sigune shares the dual distinctions of generating
some of the most unforgettable images of German romance narrative and being the
object of widely divergent interpretations. For the moment I will leave these latter aside
in favour of offering a new interpretation of her third and final living appearance, reading
it as the narrative embodiment of entry into the heart of compassion.28
This third scene is entirely Wolfram’s invention and by far the most extensive of
Sigune’s four appearances. These occur (1) just before Parzival enters the knighthood,
(2) after he leaves the Grail Castle, having failed in the destiny appointed him, (3) here,
before he meets Trevrizent and recognizes God’s grace, and finally, (4) when, after
ascending to the Grail kingship, he finds Sigune dead in her cell. In Chrétien’s unfinished
Conte du Graal, Perceval makes a single encounter with a young woman, said to be his germaine cosine but otherwise anonymous, holding her slain beloved in her lap.29 Wolfram
distributed the content of this scene over Parzival’s first two encounters with Sigune
(Cu-si-ne), and then added two more.30 The resulting sequence suggests a progression
parallel to Parzival’s narrative path, his unceasing action and displacement contrasted
with her passivity and stasis—a stasis so complete as to seem to exist outside the passage
of narrative time.31 This is a narrative doubling we have seen before, in the expanded
27 See above, pp. 200–202.
28 Similarly, Mertens Fleury, Leiden lesen, p. 196.
29 Chrétien de Troyes, Le Conte du Graal, lines 3368–628, see esp. 3538–39.
30 For extensive comparison see Mertens Fleury, Leiden, pp. 150–63.
31 Bumke has repeatedly drawn attention to Sigune’s development as “einen Heilsweg …, der
offenbar kontrapunktisch zu Parzivals Weg zum Gral konzipiert ist”; here Bumke, Wolfram von
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role of the abandoned bride in the Chanson de Saint Alexis, and it serves very much the
same purpose. The layman’s struggle and the woman’s grieving become contrasting
and complementary trajectories, hermeneutic cousins, in a seemingly endless and—if
Trevrizent’s wisdom is to be believed—pointless narrative quest.32 Ultimately, the quest
reveals the reversal of that wisdom. But why? Neither Parzival’s adventures nor those
of Gawan offer any more than a tangle of possible and often contradictory answers to
this question. Wolfram’s first prologue would indicate that the answer is in some sense
Sigune’s to give; the revelation of meaning in the knight’s narrative was referred there
to a reading objective identical with the woman’s zil, in which she constitutes the diaphanous body of truth.
Lady Âventiure’s “wondrous tidings” concerning Parzival reveal him merely
wandering as before, somewhat aimlessly through a forest.33 The remarkable wind-up of
the story’s reopening is staged, it seems, merely to bring Parzival to Sigune’s doorstep,
that is, to the window of her cell:
Swerz niht geloubt, der sündet.
diu âventiure uns kündet
daz Parzivâl der degen balt
kom geriten ûf einen walt,
ine weiz ze welhen stunden;
aldâ sîn ougen funden
ein klôsen niwes bûwes stên.
(435,1–7)
(He sins who does not believe this. Lady Âventiure bears us tidings that Parzival, the bold
warrior, came in his riding upon a wood—I’ve no idea at what hour—and there his eyes
fell on a cell, newly built.)
The content of Parzival’s third meeting with Sigune is of no consequence for the progression of the narrative—as if to underline this point, its sole result is that Sigune
puts Parzival on Cundrîe’s path, which he no sooner takes up than he loses it again
(442,25–30). Neither does it provide any new information on the hero’s progress. No use
is made of the opportunity to recount his adventures since the two last met; Parzival’s
reply to Sigune’s questions reveals nothing beyond his double longing for his wife and the
Grail (441,4–14). The scene’s importance lies in the encounter itself, in the progressive
and reciprocal process of recognition that it brings about between the bereaved woman
and the errant knight, cousins in suffering. For the first time, each opens to the other’s
Eschenbach, pp. 87–88. Similar conclusions in Mertens Fleury, Leiden lesen, p. 163, and Draesner,
Wege, pp. 265–84.
32 As Parzival learns from Trevrizent, the Grail can be neither sought nor won, cf. lines 468,10–14.
33 The brief summary of Parzival’s adventures in the interim (lines 434,11–30) is notable only
for the lack of information of any consequence. The one specific event named, the restoration of
Anfortas’s sword in the fountain of Lac, serves to illustrate the point: the sword is never mentioned
again; moreover, at the tale’s conclusion, when Parzival battles Feirefiz, his sword is not the one he
received from Anfortas, but the one he stole from Ither (cf. lines 744,17–18).
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heart and the nature of its grief. Wolfram manages to postpone this moment nearly to
the scene’s end, when, echoing the “heart’s” words from the book’s opening, “sît irz, frou
âventiure?” (Is it you, Lady Taleteller?) (433,7), Sigune exclaims, “ir sîtz hêr Parzivâl?”
(It’s you, Lord Parzival?) (440,28), and then contributes her own series of questions out
of heartfelt concern: “sagt an, wie stêtz iu umben grâl? / Habt ir geprüevet noch sîn art?
/ oder wiest bewendet iwer vart?” (Tell me, have you news of the Grail? Have you indeed
learned its nature? Or what then is the reason for your wandering?) (440,29–441,2). Their
interaction reiterates the encounter between Lady Âventiure and the locked heart from
beginning to end. It is initiated when Parzival approaches the window, the sole opening in
Sigune’s sealed enclosure, and calls, “ist iemen dinne?” (Is anybody there?) The woman’s
voice within returns, “jâ” (437,2). The question that should follow and could from either
side, Who is it? (wer sît ir? as in line 433,1), is spoken by neither, because its answer is a
matter of deeper recognition, which is the objective of the entire scene.
Sigune’s simple, opening ja announces the first meeting between the two that
begins with speech rather than with her wuofen, or mourning wail. Her existence, as
the scene reveals, has taken a decisive turn. For Parzival, too, a decisive turn is at hand.
As he “knocks” here we are reminded that he seeks the Lady herself—“der junge degen
unervorht / reit durch âventiur suochen” (the fearless young warrior rode in search of
âventiure). But God has something else in mind: “sîn wolte got dô ruochen: er vant ein
klosnærinne” (God then took his part: he found a holy recluse) (435,10–13). God, then,
personally provides for a knocking at a different door. To communicate the result of this
encounter, Wolfram awaits the conclusion of the next one, on Good Friday, with the penitent pilgrims:
hin rîtet Herzeloyde fruht.
dem riet sîn manlîchiu zuht
kiusch unt erbarmunge:
sît Herzeloyd diu junge
in het ûf gerbet triuwe,
sich huop sîns herzen riuwe.
alrêrste er dô gedâhte,
wer al die werlt volbrâhte,
an sînen schepfære,
wie gewaltec der wære.
(451,3–12)
(On rides Herzeloyde’s child; so advised by his manly upbringing, his candour and his
feeling heart: because the young Herzeloyde had passed her triuwe on to him, he came
to know heartfelt suffering. Only now did his thoughts turn to Him who had brought the
world into being, to his Creator, and how almighty he must be.)
We open our hearts to Lady Taleteller; Parzival opens his to the sufferings of Sigune, of
his fellow men, and of Christ on Good Friday—this latter being recalled by the pilgrim
Kahenis in an echo of Herzeloyde’s words: “wâ wart ie hôher triwe schîn, / dan die got
durch uns begienc, / den man durch uns anz kriuze hienc?” (Where was greater triuwe
ever revealed than in that which God endured for us when he was nailed to the cross
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for our sakes?) (448,10–12). The wheel has come full circle: Parzival’s “baptism” in the
triuwe of milk and tears, the narrator’s wounded heart, and the audience’s participation
in the tale are all joined in the heart of the suffering woman—and thereby also to Christ.
Sigune’s enclosure is the final station of her existence and the one in which it
will reach fulfilment. How we are to see it makes up in large part the content of
the scene, including a lengthy preamble of some three strophes before the conversation can be fully engaged. This is devoted to telling us what Parzival finds as opposed to
what he thinks he sees: aldâ sîn ougen funden ein klôsen (And there his eyes fell on a cell)
(435,6–7). What “his eyes find” is not what they see:
er vant ein klôsnærinne,
diu durch die gotes minne
ir magetuom unt ir freude gap.
wîplîcher sorgen urhap
ûz ir herzen blüete alniuwe.
unt doch durch alte triuwe.
Schîânatulander
und Sigûnen vand er.
(435,13–20)
(He found a holy recluse who for the love of God had offered up her virginity and her
happiness. That fountain of all women’s sorrow bled ever fresh from her heart and yet by
reason of an old wound. Schianatulander and Sigune were those he found.)
These verses form a carefully constructed chiasm that describes the central paradox of
Sigune’s existence. In all outward appearance, this woman is a virgin recluse who has
devoted her body and her life exclusively to Christ. Neither we nor Parzival initially know
any more of the occupant’s identity than this. But the apparently factual statement, er
vant ein klôsnærinne, undergoes a reversal when we learn that this virgin is not enclosed
with her heavenly bridegroom, or not with him alone: Schîânatulander und Sigûnen vand
er. This incongruity is underlined by the occupant’s isolation from human settlement
and ecclesial support, brought to a point when the narrator insists: “Sigûne doschesse
/ horte selten messe: / ir leben was doch ein venje gar” (Duchess Sigune all but never
heard mass; still, her life was one long prayer on bended knee) (425,23–25). And the
continuing description, which lingers over the pallor of Sigune’s faded beauty, her renunciation of “all worldly joy,” her hairshirt and grey habit and the psalter in her hands,
leaves no doubt as to her station in life. Regardless of the paradox then, this is in truth a
holy life, but its very holiness is inseparable from the central statement that bridges the
gap between Parzival’s visual impressions and what is inside the cell, between outward
appearance and inner truth: “That fountain of all women’s sorrow bled ever fresh from
her heart, and yet by reason of an old wound.”34 These words contain the entire meaning
34 My translation restores what I take as the more immediate sense of the image. Line 435,17
contains a pun, as both blüete and bluote (the reading offered in MSS D and G) can mean either ‘bled’
or ‘blossomed’ (Lexer, Handwörterbuch, 315, 317; and Beneke, Müller, Zarncke, Mittelhochdeutsches
Wörterbuch, 1: 215, 219). But while the idea of sorrow “blossoming” ever new, which is that adopted
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339
of the encounter, the enclosed truth that it opens to Parzival’s knocking. The process of
recognition the scene describes is Parzival’s entry, and ours with him, into communion
with this wound. The same process replays the familiar question, the Quae est ista?, as a
knock-knock riddle, an entry from exterior to interior, such that it becomes a narrative
iteration of the locus of truth as it was announced in the first prologue: woman as the
blackened body that reveals inner truth.
But what is the alte triuwe that I have translated as the “old wound”? The opposition between old and new is one—like that between the two different identities of
the woman Parzival “finds,” the klosnærinne and his cousin Sigune—between women’s
suffering in worldly love and another “wound” that is not contingent, not temporally
limited, continuous with Sigune’s suffering as it is continuous through time. It is the
opposition between sacra historia and the mære, between gotes minne and Sigune’s
minne. Alte triuwe evokes Christ’s triuwe on the cross but even more Mary’s triuwe as
the woman who suffered the same heart-wound for and with him. Sigune’s love reveals
that love, the new reveals the old; love of others renews our love of Christ. This is essentially the same message as that communicated through Alexis’s bride, whose unfailing
fidelity finally merits a heavenly embrace in which she is (re-)united with her husband
and with Christ at the same time. It is above all Herzeloyde’s message, the import of the
lactans dolorosa for the niuwe mære.
Still, while the audience is now informed of the identity of the occupants of the cell,
Parzival is not: “dennoch was im hart unkuont / wer si wære od möhte sîn” (Still he had
no idea who she was or even might be) (437,22–23). For him recognition will come only
after the conversation is well under way, at the end of the sixth of eight strophes (240
verses) that comprise the full encounter; that is, only after the klosnærinne has initiated
him into the mystery of her existence as she understands it. The point of departure is
her ring, which thus becomes the quintessence of all that she represents. Enquiring after
its justification, Parzival goes so far as to suggest she is a fraud: “For whose sake, then,
do you wear that ring,” he scoffs (in schimpfe), “ich hôrt ie sagen mære, / klôsnærinne
und klôsnære / die solten mîden âmûrschaft” (If I’ve heard right, holy men and women
aren’t supposed to be lovey-dovey) (439,13–15).35 The audience feels this reproach as
as a rule in modern translations, is not at all foreign to the imagery of the heart’s wounding in love
and mystical imagery of Christ’s wounds, this only underlines its essential character as bleeding.
The related rendering of alte triuwe as “old wound” I will discuss shortly.
35 Parzival’s confusion is shared—but in reverse—by modern critics. Nellmann remarks in his
commentary on these lines that, as a recluse, Sigune should have been formally inducted into this
life with a church ceremony; Green, Women Readers, p. 148, feels Parzival must be ignorant of the
role played by a nuptial ring in the same ceremony, which the bride of Christ (nun or recluse) then
wore as a sign of her profession. Neither custom had, however, been widely established by 1200;
they appear instead to have formed part of the church’s attempt to reign in and regulate the female
eremitic and monastic life in the course of the thirteenth century; see VCM, 2:89 and 224–25, esp.
n377. Aelred of Rievaulx makes no mention of either custom in his rule for recluses of ca. 1160,
and Hildegard’s nuns created a scandal in the eyes of another abbess, Texwindis, in part because of
their habit of dressing as brides and wearing rings. Sigune’s understanding of her ring, on the other
hand, perfectly anticipates the sentiments that were to find representation in the ring of profession.
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Sigune must: like acid on a wound. Sigune responds, however, with the solemnity of a
sworn witness in her own defence, “swenne ich nu valsch gelerne, / sô hebt mirn ûf, sît
ir dâ bî. / ruochts got, ich pin vor valsche vrî” (Should I ever learn false ways you may
well denounce it, should you be present. As God is my witness, of falsehood I am free)
(439,18–20). Her ensuing account of herself forms the “heart” of the encounter.36 “This
betrothal band” she says, she wears “for a man whose love I have never known in the
human act, but whom the counsel of my virginal heart teaches me to love.”37 For this man
(still a riddle to Parzival) her love is unending, for he fought and died for her sake; she
retains her virginity, but before God he is no less her husband. “Of true marriage this ring
shall be my witness before God; this, the lock of my true devotion, and the heart’s stream
that flows from my eyes.”38
I have selected and paraphrased Sigune’s words so as to underline the echoes they
contain of the life of a bride of Christ. Wolfram has ingeniously reconstructed the riddle
between narrator and audience, the Quae est ista, such that the protagonist is in the
dark about an identity in this case known to the audience. Parzival’s confusion serves
to allow the audience to approach the same question on a different level. The crucial
identity question concerns not the woman’s name but the truth of her existence, the central and obstinate insistence on continuity between human and divine love, between the
grief of the bereaved Minnedame and the devotion of the bride of Christ—the meaning
of her ring. For Parzival, “finding” the identities that lie within the enclosure will bring
this revelation: the bride of Christ is also his cousin, Sigune. For the audience, the
grieving existence of the woman it knows as Sigune becomes continuous with devotion
to Christ, this devotion is revealed in and through that “historical” body, tears shed for
Schianatulander are tears of triuwe to God.
That Sigune’s ring so immediately attracts Parzival’s attention is due to its luminosity.
As we are told, this seal of “rehter minne rât” (the counsel of true love) “darts its rays
like fiery sparks” from the darkness of her cell. “The noble ruby set in base brass with al
die âventiure sîn,” the ring that, in the first prologue, identifies rehten wîbes muot with
the corrected ideal of poetic representation, has found an equivalent here in historia, as
a product of narrated experience that we can know and feel. That the ruby is replaced
by a garnet in Sigune’s ring is only in keeping with Wolfram’s insistent displacement of
symbolic identification: we are not to seek factual equivalence, but rather inward identity in ever-changing external manifestations. As the centre of luminous beauty in an
otherwise utterly disconsolate existence, Sigune’s ring completes a statement of paradox
that inwardly identifies her triuwe with the commitment the ring would appear to belie,
the integrity, or triuwe of the bride of Christ. Sigune embodies this integrity in a literal
sense; she lives it as apprehensible reality. The identity discovered by the audience is
36 Likewise Bumke, Wolfram von Eschenbach, pp. 87–88.
37 “… disen mähelschaz / trag ich durch einen lieben man, / des minne ich nie an mich gewan /
mit menneschlîcher tæte: / magtuomlîchs herzen ræte / mir gein im râtent minne” (439,22–27).
38 “der rehten ê diz vingerlîn / für got sol mîn geleite sîn. / daz ist ob mîner triwe ein slôz, / vonme
herzen mîner ougen vlôz” (440,13–16).
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341
one that identifies Sigune’s grief, a woman’s grief over her earthly beloved, with the grief
of every Christian sponsa over Christ’s death on the cross. She is his widow no less than
Mary was, because she effects the incarnation of the same truth.
The clearest parallels are thus the apparently most unseemly, because they embody
spiritual experience: the inclusa was seen as truly “interred,” consepulta with Christ, dead
to the world and thus enclosed in a living tomb. As the narrator says, “der helt lac dinne
begraben tôt: / ir leben leit ûf dem sarke nôt” (the warrior lay within dead and buried;
her life was but suffering over his tomb) (435,21–22), and, “si minnete sînen tôten lîp”
(she served in love his dead body) (436,3). The inward truth of this morbid obsession is
once again other than it seems. Sigune experiences her existence not, or not only, as one
of eternal grief, still less of penance, but rather as one of union with her beloved. With
the following words she allows Parzival the long-delayed moment of recognition, and
identity is revealed simultaneously with the idea that is the centre of her existence: “Ich
pin hinne selbe ander” (Here within I am two together), she concludes her defence of
the ring, “Schîânatulander / ist daz eine, dez ander ich” (Schianatulander is the one and
I the other) (440,17–19). The two verses together suggest one place that comprises two
beings, an identification of two in one, or two persons in one heart: “Dilectus meus mihi et
ego illi” (My beloved is mine and I am his) (Canticles 2:16). Here, too, tears lead to unio.
Sigune’s factual enclosure recalls the celebrated verses on the beloved enclosed in
the heart, long mistaken as the epitome of Minnesang, that have come to us within a
collection of love letters from the monastic literary centre of Tegernsee:
Dû bist mîn, ich bin dîn
des solt dû gewis sîn
dû bist beslozzen
in mînem herzen:
verloren ist daz slüzzelîn:
dû moust ouch immêr darinne sîn.39
(You are mine, I am yours, of this you should be sure. You are locked within my heart; lost
thereto the key: there within you ever must remain.)
The female voice of these verses emerged from the monastic experience of the Song
of Songs; they, too, are a translation of the reading life of the bride.40 The words du bist
mîn unt ich bin dîn occurred no less readily in sermons on the beloved’s knocking and
entry from Canticles 5:2.41 Sigune’s “necrophilia,” as some have called it, reifies this
39 Minnesangs Frühling, 1.1.8, p. 21. For an inquiry into the entire “love-letter” collection with an
edition and translation of the texts, see Kühnel, Dû bist mîn; the famous verses are discussed there
on pp. 27–34.
40 As argued in detail by Ohly (and others previously), “Du bist mein,” see esp. pp. 375–78, 391.
41 Ohly, “Du bist mein,” p. 383, cites two sermons on Canticles 5:2 (one of them on Mary) that
each contain a passage in which the bride’s “cohabitation” in the heart is described as follows: “[er]
ruowet da mit ir unt si mit ime. … So sprichet denne diu sele o lieber herre du bist min und ich bin
din” (He lies therein with her and she with him. … Thus the soul proclaims, ‘O dear Lord, you are
mine and I am yours.) See also Edwards, “Winileodos,” pp. 195–96.
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metaphoric complex, both the enclosure of the heart and knocking for entry, but such
that its promise of blissful union is accomplished only through suffering and grief. Her
cell is to be understood as a Herzkluse, but to enter here is to enter a wound and to
be likewise wounded, to be enclosed with another in a communion of suffering, a compassio of a most body-bound sort.42 Through obstinate insistence on the destiny that
is singularly her own, Sigune reveals the meaning of the universal, the truth contained
in suffering with the suffering Christ. But such meaning is revealed only to those who
“knock on her heart,” a gesture that in fact corresponds to the opening of their own to
empathy. This is the truth contained in the ring, in Sigune’s wounded heart, and in her
Herzkluse, the truth of the true woman.
The reciprocity that is then established between the heart of the suffering bride,
Sigune, and her audience, Parzival, is one that restores a bridge between earthly and
divine love as it does between the life of the body and divine truth; it recapitulates,
then, Mary’s gnostic act through the process of narrative, which is also a process of
suffering. Sigune re-embodies Herzeloyde’s wâriu mære, but where Herzeloyde’s experience mirrors the simultaneity of birth and death, joy and suffering, contained in Mary’s
uniquely prophetic apprehension of the Word, Sigune’s exhibits the apotheosis of purely
human grief into a oneness with devotion to God even as it empties the imagery of love
lyric into a union in suffering with the suffering Christ. And all of this is obliquely evoked
as the obligation of the “believing” audience when Lady Âventiure seeks to penetrate
their hearts.
Reading the Widow
It is Sigune’s function in the narrative to manifest a mystery, that is, how our history, in
and of itself, can remanifest the truth of sacra historia. Accordingly, Wolfram does not
refer Sigune’s mourning explicitly to devotion to the dead Christ. No words escape her
lips equivalent to Herzeloyde’s when she cites Mary’s breastfeeding as the triuwe or the
heart’s bleeding that reciprocates Christ’s on the cross. Where he does refer Sigune’s
suffering devotion to a model or exemplar beyond his own text it is instead one from the
world of âventiure, and the model appears to be the negative counter-example of her literary forebear, Laudine, the widow who marries the man who slew her husband in the
romance of Yvain/Iwein. Precise understanding of this gesture is the key to the relationship between Wolfram’s poetic superstructure and its foundations in Chrétien’s Yvain.43
42 Similar conflation of sacred and profane, of Minnesang and religious imagery, characterized the
further development of this image complex in the female monastic tradition; see Hamburger, Nuns
as Artists, pp. 151–58.
43 A comparison with Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein (concluded by ca. 1200), while rewarding,
cannot be attempted here. There are parallels between Chrétien’s text and Wolfram’s that directly
concern my argument but are not found in Hartmann’s. These reinforce the conclusion, already
acknowledged in the scholarship, that Wolfram knew and used both texts. Where the parallels directly concern the communication with the German audience over the nature of the narrative project
in relation to its forebears, this admittedly raises questions that require further attention.
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Its significance reaches beyond even the realm of romance poetics to the fundamental
questions of reading and knowing that have shaped this book, to the function and identity of the woman as mirror in the long twelfth century. Wolfram’s audience was well
aware that the question, “who is the truest widow,” was no simple matter of poetic rivalry,
that it evoked a figure that held a central position in the very production of meaning
within the western Christian church.44 The question Sigune raises (and the audience is
to answer) is once again that of the relationship between “woman … and reading in the
literary history of the West.”45
As I laid out earlier, Mary’s grieving allowed a response to and recognition of Christ’s
suffering that acknowledged the weakness of the body; the widowed bride responded
not by reaching beyond herself, but by discovering the truth of her oneness with the
bodily Christ. Standing with Mary at the cross and weeping her tears, the new widow
did not so much plead for forgiveness as she simply sank into the heart of her grief;
her suffering could bypass penance to emerge from her own compassion and loss.46 Her
response was one of steadfast fidelity and selfless love (Wolfram’s triuwe) that enabled
her to know and to bear Christ’s pain. In this embrace, the twelfth century discovered a
new understanding of the widow. Not in an approximate or merely metaphorical sense
but in the reality of human experience, Mary’s experience at the cross expressed that
of grieving widows in the world, and vice versa. This conjunction between love sacred
and secular thus became both the accessible point of entry into and a generative pole of
the continuity Mary creates between sacra historia and our experience. This is the conjunction that we find so puzzlingly distilled into the existence of Herzeloyde, Sigune and
Laudine, and what is at stake in Wolfram’s claim to the truest portrayal of a widow’s grief.
It is only one of the oddities of this apparently polemical gesture, which occurs not
only in the third scene but also in the preceding (in which Parzival finds Sigune perched
with her baleful burden in a linden tree), that it is aimed not at the remarrying widow
directly (who receives no explicit mention) but instead at her confidant and lady-inwaiting, Lunete. Likewise unclear is precisely what motivates the narrator’s indignation.
In the first instance, we are told that “Sigune had heard no such advice as Lunete gave”
(cf. 253,10–11). The narrator then castigates Lunete’s dame indirectly by stating that
Sigune desired no other man as replacement (ergetzen) of her loss, “als wîp die man bî
wanke siht” (as with women of fickle will) (253,16). Again we hear an echo of the presentation of women’s triuwe and inner truth, this time from the second prologue.47 The
contrast with Chrétien’s widow, whom Chrétien names only once (if at all) as Laudine,
would seem clear in that she gives up her mourning to remarry, while Sigune perseveres
44 See Jussen, Witwe, p. 224 and passim, who describes his project as tracing “wie die Figur der
Witwe ins Zentrum der christlich-occidentalen Sinnproduktion geraten ist.”
45 Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, pp. 47–48.
46 See above, pp. 179–80.
47 Draesner, Wege, pp. 265–84, overlooks this point, despite making an argument constructed
entirely around inter- and intratextual references. See also note 56, below.
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in her triuwe in extremis.48 The Quae est ista, the audience’s search for meaning in a
female identity, has been expanded to an intertextual frame of reference, with Sigune—
the widow unto death—as the new female ideal.
Doubt arises, however, if we recall that the wîp whom Wolfram found untrue (an
wanke sach, 114,11) stands in contrast to Herzeloyde, herself a remarried widow—
circumstances of which Parzival will shortly be informed by Trevrizent (494,15–30).
On being widowed a second time (from Gahmuret), Herzeloyde chooses Sigune’s path,
with consequences that can only cast a favourable light on the reasoning that motivates
Laudine’s decision.49 Within the narrative, moreover, the idea that Wolfram might seriously advocate that widows continue in fidelity unto death is resoundingly countered
by Orgeluse’s story, the entire object of which appears to be that she overcome her
embittered grief not as Sigune does but through remarriage to Gawan.
A third oddity is that, while Herzeloyde and Laudine are truly secular widows—
the latter can be taken as the near epitome of the expression of a woman’s grief in this
period; in three successive descriptions of her, Chrétien delivers the entire catalogue
of gestures this entailed50—Sigune is in reality no widow, but rather a grieving, virgin
beloved. Mary herself, however, was not a widow in factual understanding; she became
one, no less, through her own realization of scriptural imagery as history, sponsa was
mater not in the succession of personal biography but as roles filled in relation to one
male entity. Sigune’s existence manifests Mary’s realization of scriptural imagery as a
process that defines her own narrative trajectory, a process to which we will later return
in more detail. As one aspect of this existence, Sigune insists simultaneously on the
roles of the virgin, the abandoned bride, and the widow—and appears to fulfil them
all. In this, once again, she is very like Alexis’s bride, whose persevering fidelity alone
constitutes a holy trajectory that culminates in virginal widowhood as a position from
which she surprisingly ascends to the heavenly embrace of the saint and the sponsus.
Sigune remanifests this destiny in and as âventiure. True to the ironic cast of his gestures
to Chrétien’s romance, Wolfram claims that Sigune is the better widow because she is
not one in the factual sense but rather only through inner truth.
48 Wolfram’s gesture, naming only Lunete, is in fact consistent with the texts of both Chrétien and
Hartmann, which name Laudine either not at all (seven of ten manuscripts of Yvain) or extremely
seldom (the other three manuscripts use the name once, at line 2153, while in Hartmann’s text she
is named only twice, at lines 2421 and 2758). As a rule Chrétien refers to Yvain’s bride only as la
dame, in marked contrast to the frequent use of Lunete’s name and in keeping with the anonymity
of the bridal reader we have repeatedly observed. I use the name Laudine solely for clarity’s sake.
See the note in Yvain, ed. Hult, at line 2153.
49 Herzeloyde’s initial widowing is perhaps as close to Sigune’s as a married woman’s can be,
while nonetheless recalling Laudine’s responsibility in magnified form: Castis, her first husband,
dies before the marriage is consummated but nevertheless leaves his two kingdoms in her care.
Both are then lost after she flees to Soltâne (lines 494,15–30).
50 Laudine wails, swoons and falls to the ground, tears at her hair and clothes, wrings her hands,
weeps, scratches or beats her face and breast, clutches at her throat, and is described as delirious.
See Yvain, lines 1152–59, 1204–5, 1300–1301, 1415–17, 1471–91.
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Accordingly, the argument is made ex negativo, by discrediting the alternative, outward qualification of inward excellence. The renewed allusion to Laudine in the third
encounter all but entirely retracts the idea that the “best” widow should never remarry.
We are first informed once again that “Today’s Lady Lunetes likewise arrive all too
hastily on the scene wherever a woman’s fidelity is at stake” (cf. 436,8–10); and then,
here, of all places, we are reminded that Sigune is not a widow: If Sigune had become his
wife, Lunete would not have dared … (cf. lines 436,4–5). But what reason would we then
have to reprehend a hypothetically hasty Lunete for her advice in Sigune’s factual case?
Rather than clarify, the narrator only multiplies the confusion. His deliberations conclude with the statement that a man whose wife maintains her fidelity while he lives has
been granted the greatest gift; should he die, she is free to do as she pleases—although
her reward for faithful widowhood will be greater (her crowning “wreath”) “than if she
joins the pleasure of the dance” (cf. lines 436,11–22).
These concluding remarks are not, or not only, the narrator’s own but rather a paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 7:39–40.51 This passage and the preceding verses (1 Corinthians
7:32–38, in particular verse 34) formed, together with the parable of the sower
(Matthew 13:18–23; Luke 8:5–15), the scriptural authority for the several heavenly
rewards of the married, the widowed and the virgins.52 As seen above, the transformation of the role of the widow in the twelfth century went hand in hand with a shift in
the understanding of this hierarchy of bodily roles, such that inner intentio, rather than
socio-sexual station, became the decisive determiner of merit.53 Wolfram is playing a
shell game, and the shells involved are the three sexual lives of women, which should
contain their respective thirty-, sixty- and hundred-fold rewards in Heaven. The models
for each state are provided, in this case, not by saints’ lives or from scripture, but rather
from the pantheon of avanture. The final remark on the crowning wreath appears to
defer to the conventional system of model behaviour and its reward.
Sigune, however, would qualify for none of the conventional roles: for all her carnal
devotion uni viro to a deceased knight servitor, she is factually a virgin and was not so
much as betrothed to Schianatulander, so that she is neither widow nor wife. Conversely,
while she insists on nothing if not her fidelity to her beloved and “spouse,” her intact virginity does not constitute that fidelity, but rather her deepest regret.54 On the other hand,
her place as the earthly embodiment of triuwe is never in doubt, as we were reminded
at the opening of the second encounter: “al irdisch triwe was ein wint, wan die man an
51 “A woman is bound by the law as long as her husband liveth: but if her husband die, she is at
liberty. Let her marry to whom she will: only in the Lord. But more blessed shall she be, if she so
remain, according to my counsel. And I think that I also have the spirit of God.” Groos, “Sigune,”
641–42, also commented on this connection.
52 Jussen, Witwe, pp. 46–147; the resulting image idea can be seen in the picture of the “tree” of the
three orders that is the object of discussion in part 8 of the Speculum virginum (cf. Jussen, Witwe,
figs. 3–6).
53 See pp. 178–79, above.
54 As Schwab, Sigune, Kriemhilt, Maria, p. 109, observed, “Die Klausnerin ist nun Witwe (438,9),
Jungfrau und Vermählte zugleich (435,13–15; 440,7ff.).”
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ir lîbe sach” (all earthly triuwe was as nothing next to the affliction visible in her person)
(249,24–25). What this shell contains is clear, regardless of its outward appearance, and
therein lies the point: such model categories and the corresponding social mores, “the
condition and behaviour of the body,” have no real bearing here.55 Hence the narrator’s
corrective epilogue to his digression, as if calling himself to order: “wes mizze ich freude
gein der nôt / als Sigûn ir triwe gebôt? / daz möhte ich gerne lâzen” (But who am I to
count out rewards in the face of the affliction Sigune endured for her devotion? That’s
better left alone!) (436,23–25).
The consequences of this multiple refraction are several. First, there is no criticism
properly to be levelled at Laudine, for it is the inner truth (on which in her case we are
left in the dark) that is decisive, the essence of Sigune’s ring. Only Lunete is clearly in the
wrong, but her position is nowhere in evidence—unless it is to be inferred among the
audience.56 Once again, the argument on women’s fidelity points finally, inevitably, to the
eyes of her beholders—reception of the mære. The indictment of Lunete serves to direct
the audience to beware a misjudgement not infrequently encountered among modern
critics: that Sigune’s fidelity should be called into question as overly extravagant, selfindulgent or better overcome (such were among Lunete’s arguments to Laudine); indeed,
that it should require any justification other than the one she claims herself: inner truth.
Beyond this, it is in her virtual widowhood, especially, that Sigune stands in opposition
to the wîp an wanke and the woman whose exterior beauty (or virtue) hides a counterfeit heart, who are both evoked, in the second and first prologue, respectively, in opposition to an ideal of truth in narrative art. The narrator’s endorsements thus serve to
recall and renew Herzeloyde’s position in the romance’s exposition. If Sigune surpasses
“all earthly triuwe,” then it is—as the preceding line states—because she is the child
of Herzeloyde’s sister: “si was doch sîner muomen kint” (249,2). In Wolfram’s ongoing
exposition of romance poetics she assumes Herzeloyde place.
Finally, then, exemplary exteriors and their presumed rewards are disenfranchised in
favour of something that defies external imitation. Sigûnen triwe is the extreme protraction of grief over the dead beloved into a state of permanent loving contemplation and
unending embrace, that is, into a Marian devotion to the crucified Christ. The narrator’s
first indignant swipe at Lunete responds to Parzival’s suggestion that the body be buried;
the second follows the words, “si minnete sînen tôten lîp” (446,3). These remarks defend
an all but monumental expression of a woman’s grief at the same time as they suggest the
same bears directly on the relationship of this tale to one told before. With the feigned
sideswipes at Laudine that set up his “widow,” appearances notwithstanding, as the
epitome of wîbes triuwe, Wolfram indicates that “she”—his narrative as her body—at the
same time surpasses previous embodiment of truth in romance narrative. But what claim
had Chrétien made before him?
55 “Der Zustand und Haltung des Körpers,” Jussen, Witwe, p. 147.
56 Draesner’s idea (Wege, pp. 271–73) that Parzival, by advising in the second encounter that
Sigune (in effect) bury her sorrow, is placed in the position of Lunete, is ingenious, but Wolfram
undercuts it immediately when he makes the point of comparison reside not in such a release from
grief but rather in ergetzen, or compensation for the loss. For the third encounter as well, Draesner
argues that Lunete’s position is implicitly placed among the audience.
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Yvain and the “tres bele crestïenne”
We last revisited Chrétien’s Yvain by reason of parallels exhibited between the description
of the pucele reading in the garden and the descent of the Word to claim its bride. Landri of
Waben’s understanding of Canticles 4:9, Vulnerasti cor meum, soror mea sponsa, vulnerasti
cor meum uno oculorum tuorum et in uno crine colli tui (You have wounded my heart, my
sister, my bride, you have wounded my heart with one of your eyes and with one hair of
your neck), is remarkable for its recording en romans of an understanding of this passage
such that the bride inspires and even prompts the descent of the loving god through her
“reading” act—to paraphrase the terms in which Chrétien hypothetically extolled the sheer
irresistibility of his young lady’s reading. Compassion, as Landri (among others) saw it,
the desire better to know our pain, moved God to reciprocate the bride’s reading gaze, her
attempt “to comprehend what no place can hold,” and nonetheless take human form in the
tiny space of her womb. That is, as Chrétien put it, “to serve her he [became] a man, issuing
from his divinity and striking the love-wound in his own body.”
Pucele avanture, as we might call her, in this scene effects the descent of the Word en
romans by wounding the heart of her audience with her reading. The scriptural image
at stake was presumably unmistakable to a twelfth-century audience, and it implied a
reverse wounding that enabled compassio, the reciprocal recognition of suffering that
was constituted in the reciprocal gaze, the moment that Odo of Morimund paused over
as the “stupendous axis of vision” that changed the world forever.57 A doubling in the
wound of love is likewise built into Chrétien’s four-cornered construction: the wounding
of the god of love at the sight of a woman’s reading is the reprise of Yvain’s wounding
over the sight of Laudine’s reading grief; the wounding of incarnation should find here
its parallel in a wounding of compassion—once again as received by the audience of
the suffering woman (fig. 8.1). But the parallel between the two scenes only serves
to underline their incommensurability. Chrétien’s romance of love conceived for the
woman widowed by the lover’s violence is constructed as the result of an illicit, indeed,
an invisible gaze; reciprocal vision is precluded, even as loving compassion is displaced
by predatory lust. The task of the romance, then, is somehow to correct the distortion,
to teach its audience and Yvain alike—both loving voyeurs—how to read the woman
suffering for love. This, it turns out, is none other than instruction in how properly to
read tales told, tales such as the pucele or the narrator relate, tales, most crucially, such
as the one Yvain was told at Arthur’s court: avantures.
The four-cornered configuration we found in Parzival requires two generative moments, one narrated and the other staged as narration, to allow the romance
to unfold (fig. 8.2). In Yvain these first two corners are Yvain’s wounding for love of
Laudine and, preceding this, a narrator’s exposition presented though the disjoint staging of avanture as eyewitness report (ce que je vi, 174) at Arthur’s court (fig. 8.1). The
latter event, Calogrenant’s tale, has been perhaps more often discussed as a portrayal
of the generation and staging of romance narrative than any other scene in the canon.
Arthur is absent, lingering too long in bed with his queen (who is not named). Her later
57 See above, pp. 180–81, 183–84. On the relative obscurity to a medieval audience of the possible
reference to Cupid and Psyche, see above p. 256 note 67.
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and somewhat surreptitious entry interrupts Calogrenant’s tale, which, upon altercation with Key, he threatens not to continue—unless his lady, the queen, should insist.
Wolfram’s narrator twice renewed this gesture, directed to the women in his audience.
For our purposes, two observations are key: first, the narrative is resumed only under
the auspices of the listening lady, and Calogrenant now (why not before?) requires of his
audience that they listen with their hearts.58 As Chrétien’s narrator has already reminded
us, to belong to Arthur’s court was—or should have been (should be?)—to belong to an
order of the heart in which stories (nouveles) are told, most especially of love,
of its torments and of the suffering and the great good that are the part of disciples of its
order, who, in those days, were great both in number and quality. But today few remain
true to love. … Today, indeed, love is little more than a fiction [tournee a fable], because
those who have in fact felt nothing of it say they love, but they lie. They make of love a pack
of fables and fairly tales [fable et menchonge] who expound on it with no right to do so.59
Calogrenant’s exordium thus joins the narrator’s own; he sets about (re-)establishing this
truth, one contingent upon lived experience received in the loving heart.60 As he elaborates
before his newly constituted audience (with the lady in its midst), truth is made not in the
ears, but in the heart, “Car parole oïe est perdue / S’ele n’est de cuer entendue” (For that
word is lost that is not heard with the heart) (151–52). This brings up the second key
point. There follows what may be regarded as the actual prologue to Chrétien’s romance,
delivered instead by the knight telling his tale of personal shame. What it describes we
have seen several times before, a conceptio per aurem, here en romans:
As oreilles vient le parole,
Aussi comme li vens qui vole,
Mais n’i arreste ne demore,
Ains s’en part en mout petit d’ore,
Se li cuers n’est si estilliés
C’a prendre soit appareilliés;
Que chil le puet en son venir
Prendre et enclorre et retenir.
Les oreilles sont voie et dois
Ou par ent y entre la vois;
Et li cuers prent dedans le ventre
Le vois que par l’oreille y entre.
(157–68)
58 “Such a demand from him was [at this point] quite unnecessary,” Hunt, “Rhetorical
Background,” 14.
59 “Des angousses et des dolours / Et des grant biens qu’ont souvant / Li desiple de son couvant, /
Qui lors estoit riches et boens; / Mais or y a molt poi des siens, / … / Or est Amours tournee a fable
/ Pour chou que chil qui riens n’en sentent / Dient qu’il ayment, mes il mentent; / Et chil fable et
menchongne en font / Qui s’en vantent et droit n’i ont” (12–27).
60 Alois Wolf points out the connection between the two passages, but relates them to the idea of
truth in narration rather than to a true heartfelt reception—a misinterpretation that, not surprisingly, all but ignores Calogrenant’s extensive appeal (lines 150–70) for this latter: Wolf, “Roman
vom Löwenritter,” pp. 191–209 at 200–201.
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(The word comes to the ears like the whirling wind but does not linger there or remain,
but is gone in a whiff if the heart is not properly disposed and prepared to grasp it, so that
it seizes the word as it arrives, locks it in and retains it there. The ears are the pathway
and the conduit through which the voice enters; and the heart encloses the voice in the
belly, which enters through the ears.)
Such a wind whistled in the ears of Rupert of Deutz to tell him that “a woman conceived
God in her soul, Christ in her body.” It blew again through the garden enclosed in which
Landri’s reading bride awaited the Spirit. In the Eructavit, the voiz cui li cuers toche was
identified explicitly as God’s word that was to enter Marie’s heart even as it “entered
[Mary’s] precious body through the voice of the angel.”61
To date, comment on Calogrenant’s invocation of the conceptio per aurem has largely
contented itself with the observation that it constitutes a “typical prologue topos” in
allusion to Matthew 13:14–15.62 This is misleading: the passage relates to a tradition, certainly, that arises from these biblical verses, but the tradition is enormous and properly
implies the entire parable of the sower (Matthew 13:18–23 and Luke 8:5–15). This is the
biblical locus classicus for a fertile reception, by way of eyes and ears (“beati oculi quia
vident et aures vestrae quia audiunt” [Matthew 13:16]), of the Word of God.63 A topos,
indeed: we have encountered it repeatedly in connection with the eleventh verse of Psalm
44 and Mary’s conception of Christ. The biblical passage is part of a complex of imagery
used to evoke Mary’s reading as a model for the audio-visual reception of performance.
And this is clearly where Calogrenant/Chrétien intends our own ears to turn: his is no
mere evocation of the need to listen carefully or even empathetically but instead also a
description in anatomical terms of the way the Word is conceived in the heart and the
pathway it takes to get there. As Bernard was led to insist, it was not enough that Mary
merely hear Gabriel’s greeting, that she be filled with grace in mentem; there was a further penetration necessary that took place with the words, “the Most High will overshadow you,” and so on, in which “etiam ventrem perfundere debet” (her very womb was
to be flooded), where venter takes on the meaning that is in play wherever the conceptio
per aurem is evoked.64 We have seen that this entry was also a wound, which Bernard
and others saw as one with the heart-wound both Christ and Mary experienced at the
cross. The author of the Eructavit completes the triangle by referring to the voice and the
Word of God as the point and shaft, respectively, of an arrow shot to convert “the king’s
enemies,” but also as the arrow of love that Bernard had written of, striking a wound
both “suave and sweet” that pierces (as Calogrenant also specifies) “li cuer del vantre /
Que nus ne set quant il i antre” (the heart of the belly / such that no one knows when it
enters there) (Eructavit, lines 727–28). This is “the wound of which no one complains,”
61 Cf. lines 119–21, cited above, p. 213.
62 Cf. Wolf, “Roman vom Löwenritter,” p. 200 (who does not identify the biblical passage); similarly: Hult, ed., Yvain, n.3; Hunt, “Rhetorical Background,” 13n76; and Woledge, Commentaire, 1:64.
More incisive is Ribard, “Calogrenant,” p. 425 and passim.
63 See also Luke 8:15, where those who receive the word “on the good ground are they who, in a
good and perfect heart, hearing the word, keep it and bring forth fruit in patience.”
64 LVM, 4.3, p. 50.
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consisting of love and faith, and which anyone should count himself lucky (as Bernard
would) to have felt.65 This jump from receiving and seizing in the heart to the idea of
suffering a wounded heart is not completed in Calogrenant’s prologue. If reception of
his tale were properly accomplished, the hearts of his listeners would be pierced just as
Mary’s womb was, and Chrétien’s audience is advised to experience the text from within
the wounded heart that is thereby evoked. Calogrenant’s audience, however, receives this
wound quite differently, which is both why the discourse on the wound is postponed and
part of the explanation for why this prologue is projected into the narrative rather than
delivered by the narrator. Further reflection on the point awaits development through
the narrative and finally restatement by the narrating poet at the completion of the fourcornered exposition, once we have learned, with Yvain, to read the widow.
Because this prologue is embedded in the narrative, two observations apply: the
constitution of audience for Chrétien’s text does not occur, unless it is taken as figured
in Calogrenant’s. Second, the scene offers Chrétien the opportunity to stage the proper
constitution of audience as well as the model of reception of avanture. These normative gestures then go awry: as we are twice reminded in the course of Yvain, the queen
has eloped into an avanture of illicit love of her own; one, moreover, required to satisfy
a historical woman-as-audience, “ma dame de Champaigne”: Chrétien’s Chevalier de la
Charrette.66 This absence intrudes on the narrative we are about to hear in that it disrupts
the proper functioning of Arthur’s court. In effect, the action of the one tale is collapsed
into the other, such that both tales—this one of the fountain of Broceliande and the other
involving its absent audience—are observed by the sole audience evoked beyond the
texts, Marie de Champagne. The result is a highly suggestive triangle: the princess of
poetry en romans, Marie, witnesses the staging of a tale (Yvain) in which the queen, as
audience, wanders into her own tale (Charrette); or Marie requires a tale (as the queen
does of Calogrenant) of illicit love that, in effect, results in the absence of the womanas-audience (the queen) from Yvain. The main narrative of Yvain is the result of another
audience member’s, Yvain’s, attempt to step into and thus re-enact a tale he has heard.
At the same time, ca. 1180, once again, another text, the Eructavit, was written claiming
the same historical audience, in this case by way of staging the arch-communication,
David’s or the Spirit’s to the heavenly bride, to which Calogrenant’s model of reception—
Chrétien’s staged communication of avanture—ultimately refers. In either case, whether
scriptural model or avanture, the woman’s ear is required inside and outside the text in
order for the parole to be properly received. This condition is secure only in the romans
of Psalm 44, the model on which Chrétien’s puzzle-piece variations are based.67 In these
65 Cf. Eructavit, lines 723–36.
66 Cf. Yvain, 3702–7 and 3914–23. In a third reference, lines 4734–39, the queen is reported to
have been restored to the court only three days before. See also above, pp. 215 and 257n68.
67 These observations need not depend on historical circumstances and are not intended to claim,
for example, historical patronage of Yvain by Marie de Champagne. Most significant is the way
Chrétien has woven the two texts together so as to encourage reflection between them on the construction of audience and of avanture and its reception.
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latter, we in one case observe an audience who submits to Ooliba’s failing and in the
other an audience—Yvain—who learns to read the New Eve.
To return to Calogrenant’s normative staging of an avanture: this is renewed at the
express request of a queen of romans, whose request is accepted on the condition that the
speaker’s parole be received as Mary received the Word, through her ear to be enclosed in
the heart-womb, the generative centre of truth in the body. Conditional upon the fulfilment
of these requirements, and echoing the narrator’s words on tales of true love, Calogrenant
makes his own claim to truth in storytelling depend on his story’s “true” reception:
Et qui or me vaurra entendre,
Cuer et oreilles me doit rendre,
Car ne veul pas servir de songe,
Ne de fable, ne de menchonge,
Dont maint autre vous ont servi,
Ains conterai che que je vi.
(171–74)68
(Anyone, then, who would understand me must lend me both ears and heart, for I do not
wish to serve you dreams, or fairy tales, or lies such as so many others have done. I will
tell you instead what I saw myself.)
Calogrenant in effect claims his story is commensurate with “true” stories told by
those who have experienced true love, for either derives from experience in opposition
to vain fantasies; such tales require reception by “true” hearts capable of receiving
the same experience. The combined message of the two passages (the narrator’s and
Calogrenant’s) results in the position taken by the narrator in his later excursus on the
wound of love, where he disparages of his audience’s capacity for heartfelt, “wounded”
reception of the story because they themselves “no longer truly love.”69 That is, “today’s”
lovers have become today’s listeners, and true love is true listening, or the ability to
receive the word with the heart (see fig. 8.1). Truth, then, is constituted in response,
in the act of listening with the loving (= wounded) heart. At this later juncture, however, Chrétien has only just evoked the same act of reception by restaging Calogrenant’s
delivery of avanture as the prelecting of a romans in an enclosed garden, where some
knight’s tale (ne sai de qui) has become a text delivered by an exquisitely desirable
maiden, and this act provokes the godhead to descend into human form to embrace his
68 The last two verses are missing in two major manuscripts, including the copy by Guiot, on which
the CFMA text is based (see the note following). The lines are, however, perfectly in tune with the
overall argument.
69 Here the copy of Guiot (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS fr. 794), used in the CFMA edition
(ed. Mario Roques), may preserve the text closest to Chrétien’s: “mes tost deïst, tel i eüst, / que je
parlasse de songe, / que la genz n’est mes amoronge / ne n’ainment mes, si con il suelent” (5386–89).
As Woledge, Commentaire, 2:98, notes, amoronge is a hapax legomenon, and thus clearly the lectio
difficilior. But the more compelling argument in its favour is that it is used to echo Calogrenant’s
rhyme on songe/mançonge (Roques, ed., lines 171–72), which in turn echoes the narrator’s remarks
in the prologue (lines 26–27). With the rhyme songe/amoronge the place of the passage in the
exposition of truth and narrative is lexically fulfilled.
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bride—or would, if he had seen her (cf. line 5373). We do see her, as Yvain does and her
mother and father do, who “greatly rejoice to behold and listen to her,” de li veoir et oïr
(lines 5367–68). That is, the response of the god of love re-enacts the moment that is
the origin of the reception of tales evoked in Calogrenant’s prologue on receiving the
word with the heart. We, however, are not the god of love, whether from the literature
of antiquity or Christian scripture; our place is with the maiden and her reading. Love
properly conceived is a wound reciprocal to that (once) sustained by the god of love
over the reading of a maiden, and the proof of worthiness required of the audience is to
aimer loiaument; that is, to bear this secondary wound, a wound of compassio, to the end
of the tale (cf. 5381–87).70 The hypothetical conception effected through the god of love
is to be truly completed in our listening hearts. Vulnerasti cor meum soror mea, sponsa,
with one word of your mouth, with one verse of your romans. Yvain’s own avanture, a
reiteration of the one told by his cousin—the “microcosm of a romance,”71 related “non
de s’onnor, mais de sa honte” (not for his honour, but for his own shame) (60)—is a story
that teaches how to receive the story of another’s suffering.
When we reach the second generative moment of Chrétien’s romance, Yvain’s
wounding in love for the grieving widow, things are even more amiss than at Arthur’s
court, and the reason derives from misguided reception of the tale recounted there: Yvain
does not take Calogrenant’s words “to heart.” His cousin’s intention was clearly not that
his shame should be avenged (he has waited six years to tell of it—175), nor that any
should undertake the “fool’s adventure” that he recounts, nor that it ever be told again
(cf. 575–78). Yvain’s response, which instead insists his cousin is a fool for having sought
no restoration of (family) honour (580–83), continues a never-ending cycle of violence
and vengeance—“G’irai vostre honte vengier” (I will go and avenge your shame) (587)—
which is the nature of the fountain of Broceliande (in German “Briziljan,” where Sigune
will endlessly deplore the violence of Orilus). The initial cycle of the romance up to
Yvain’s wedding of the widow represents false, or not “heartfelt” reception of a tale and
a wound—one that cannot sustain compassionating participation without rising in the
wish to correct or avenge the wrongs displayed, that is, to perpetrate further violence.
The Passion narrative, one might recall, begins with Christ’s admonition to Peter to put
away his sword.
70 Our text, and Foerster’s critical edition (with standardized spelling), read: “De cheste plaie vous
deïsse / Tant quë huimés fin ne preïsse, / Se li escouter vous plëust” (I would tell you more of this
wound, such that I would never reach the end, if it pleased you to listen to it) (5385–87). The CFMA
edition, following Guiot, reads: de ces plaies molt vos deïsse / tant qu’a une fin en venisse / se
l’estoire bien vos pleüst” (I would tell you much of this wound, until I reached the end of it, if the
story were to your liking) (Roques, ed., lines 5383–85). Woledge, 2:96–98, examines the differences
between Guiot’s text and Foerster’s in some detail to conclude that the two texts, despite the
differences, yield the same meaning. In either case, it is clear that the audience lacks willingness to
suffer the wound, and this suffering is prolonged through narration. As indicated in the preceding
note, however, Guiot’s text displays the greater sensitivity to the overall argument in relation to the
earlier exposition.
71 Ribard, “Calogrenant,” p. 428.
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With some panache, Chrétien/Calogrenant turns this idea of reception as
intervention-in-a-story against those who insisted on truth as tangible fact. The most
pointed reference to the relationship between fiction and truth is intertextual, and
comes with Calogrenant’s concluding words:
Ainsi alay, ainsi reving,
Au revenir pour fol me ting.
Si vous ai conté comme fox
Çou c’onques mais conter ne vox.
(575–78)
(Thus I went forth, and thus I returned, and returning held myself a fool. And as a fool
I have told you what I wish never to tell again.)
As is well known, these lines take up a derisory rejection of the fabulous quality of
romance and place it in the mouth of one who himself protests to be eyewitness to the
truth of what he tells—within a patently fantastical narrative. In his Roman de Rou,
Wace, a contemporary writing as a vernacular historian for Henry II, had taken his distance from the marvellous dimensions of Arthurian tales by claiming to have gone to see
the fountain of Berenton in the forest of Broceliande for himself (here we should recall
Gottfried’s words on his visit to Cornwall):
La alai jo merveilles querre,
vi la forest e vi la terre,
merveilles quis, mais nes trovai,
Fol m’en revinc, fol i alai;
fol i alai, fol m’en revinc,
folie quis, por fol me tinc.72
(I went there seeking marvels, I saw the forest and the country, marvels I sought but none
did I find, a fool I returned, as a fool I set forth; a fool I set forth, and a fool I returned,
foolishness I sought and held myself a fool.)
It is highly likely that Chrétien’s narrative turns so entirely around the adventure of the
fountain because it is conceived as a direct response to the question of how the encounter
with the marvellous—not in life, but through stories told—can deliver experience that
contains the truth that Wace so foolishly sought with his foolish “eyewitness” expedition.73 The retort to such pedantry is delivered by Calogrenant in the brilliant exchange
72 Wace, Roman de Rou, lines 6393–98; see also Wolf, “Roman vom Löwenritter”; and Green,
Beginnings, pp. 179–80. The dates generally accepted for the section of the Roman de Rou in
question are 1170 to 1183, thus only shortly before the Chevalier au Lion; on this question see
Woledge, Commentaire, 1:85–86.
73 Wolf, who points out the neglected significance of the allusion to Wace, nevertheless misinterprets
it. Calogrenant’s self-avowed foolishness attests to the grievous reality of the peril and shame that
befell him; I cannot see how it can be taken as undercutting the “truth” that he earlier claimed for
his tale; cf. Wolf, “Roman vom Löwenritter,” pp. 200–201 and passim. This truth, that of eyewitness
experience, is affirmed step for step (within the overall fictional frame) through Yvain’s adventures.
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with the wild man, when he defines the knight errant—that is, his own existence—as the
narrated object of an avanture with the words, “I am—as you can see—a knight, one who
seeks what I cannot find.”74 Or is it “what cannot be found”?75 Truth can be seen, heard,
and felt in avanture, but not such that one can reach out and grab it nor even such that it
is “found” in the tale itself.
No less foolish than Wace’s response, we can surmise in retrospect, having heard the
story, was Yvain’s own expedition in search of Calogrenant’s adventure. Such wisdom is
not the privilege of the audience at the outset, however; on the contrary, we are taken in
the same trap and assume that Yvain’s exploits are those he is rightfully to fulfil in conception of his own heroic tale of avanture. Thus Yvain’s narrative proceeds from a point
that finds its inverted complement in the later staging of the maiden’s romance performance and the narrator’s address to the audience. Reception in the wounded heart is
the objective in either case; in Yvain’s case we see what occurs when this reception is not
fulfilled. His arrival in the secluded garden in which the pucele’s reading seduces the god
of love signals completion of an arc of meaning in the same way (and with very similar
meaning) as does the arrival of Frou Âventiure at the beginning of book 9 in Parzival.
The misguided reception of what he sees and hears (and invariably wishes to reach
out and grab) becomes the explosive seed and motor of Yvain’s narrative when, in voyeuristic fascination with the grievous consequences of his intervening violence, the
husband’s slayer falls in lust with the bride and actually succeeds in replacing him in
the conjugal bed. Yvain is a far cry here from the response contained in Wolfram’s credo,
proclaimed in heartfelt suffering for the suffering widow, Herzeloyde. But we, as audience, are on the same path as is initiated there—to a reception of the Word in the heart—
and find ourselves at very much the same juncture of narrative (see figs. 8.1 and 8.2).
Not surprisingly, it is this introduction of the widow—the second corner in Yvain
and the first in Parzival—that displays most emphatically what the latter romance owes
to the former. Either narrative is exceptional for two things (at least): the story to be
told begins only after a lengthy proemium, really an independent narrative complete in
itself, which serves to deliver its heroine into widowhood, such that the emerging tale
is born—in Parzival literally—from this portrayal of female suffering. That is, narrative
experience takes place first as the introduction to and performance of a woman’s’
grief and then as a renewed trajectory entirely determined by (one might say, under
the sign of) the same, as the search for an adequate and reciprocal response. In Yvain
this search overtly drives the protagonist’s narrative path as the reformation of male
desire; in Parzival it is instead a kind of genetic inheritance unknown to the hero but no
less essential and all the more inevitable. Wolfram removed the personally contingent
dimension of this search to make it instead a human destiny, or humanity’s destiny.
What is most extraordinary about the introduction of the heroine in Chrétien’s Yvain
is also what is most obvious: her incomparable beauty is perceived and described only
through the extremity of her grief and as disfigured by her grief; for Yvain, the two are
74 “Je sui, çou vois, uns chevaliers / Qui quier che que trouver ne puis” (356–57).
75 Ribard, “Calogrenant,” p. 432, likewise suggests the line is better understood in the latter sense.
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inseparable, even as his love is inseparable from her distress. This beauty receives qualification worthy of Benoît’s riche dame de riche rei; given the circumstances, however,
it is more reminiscent of the heavenly queen in her earthly pain. As the invisible Yvain
watches the frantic search for her husband’s assassin,
Vint une des plus bele dames
C’onques veïst riens terrestre.
De si tres bele crestïenne
Ne fu onques plait ne parole;
Mais de duel faire estoit si fole
C’a poi qu’ele ne s’ochioit.
(1146–51)
(There arrived one of the most beautiful ladies who have ever walked this earth. Of a
more beautiful Christian woman word has never been heard, but she was so consumed
with her grieving that she might well have taken her own life.)
The opposition between “Christian beauty” and the excess of grief is apparent—but
not reported as irresolvable (in Herzeloyde’s display of her grief it is, in effect, spontaneously resolved). While Yvain suffers for seeing where he dares not be recognized, for
Laudine it is the inability to see the author of her wound that is most unbearable—for
the sake of vengeance, not for recognition. God himself takes a scolding from her for
this injustice; a fact which initially underlines the extremity of her own position and
its need of correction (lines 1212–16). The fascination exerted upon Yvain is nevertheless immediate—but there is as yet no talk of love. As the text says later, “Love took
him at the window”76—that is, in the position that renders unmistakable both his seeing
unseen and the intensity of his desire to step into a scene from which he is irrevocably
excluded: “Then she swooned and tore at all that was on her person and came within her
grasp. My Lord Yvain, regardless of the consequences, could only barely restrain himself
from rushing out to hold her hands.”77 What Chrétien so carefully constructs as the catapult from which this narrative is launched is an almost intolerable suspension between
the desire for inclusion in, and factual exclusion from, a woman’s suffering; experienced,
so the fabulously constructed narrative would have it, on one side as a negated body
(Yvain’s invisibility, or inability to show himself), and on the other as negated vision
(Laudine’s inability to see him). The rest of the romance takes place as the struggle to
establish a reciprocal gaze in which each recognizes the other’s wound. This, as we have
seen, can also be stated differently, as the desire for inclusion in woman’s truth. It was no
less the realization of the diaphanous body, the body whose blackness—unlike Laudine’s
in this scene—could serve to reveal rather than to obscure the beauty of the bride.
The same construction thus witnesses a collision of the sacred and the profane in
which Yvain figures as the cause of their incompatibility and Laudine as the site of their
potential convergence. Despite the crass profanity of Yvain’s position, however, all sense of
76 “En chest voloir l’a Amour mis, / qui a la fenestre l’a pris” (1427–28).
77 “Lors se pasmë et se dessire / Trestout quanques a mains li vient. / A mout grant paine se
detient / Mesire Yvains, a quoi que tort, / Que les mains tenir ne li cort” (1300–1304).
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contingent impropriety is passed over in silence, for the audience alone to ponder. Lunete
expresses neither indignation nor even surprise at her captive’s vampiric voyeurism; on
the contrary, his suggestion that he “would gladly see the procession and the body” is
met with her immediate indication of the fateful window.78 The funerary procession, by
contrast—which Chrétien describes previously and which proceeds as if continuously
in the background of these transactions—is lent all possible marks of Christian solemnity: a company of nuns precede, bearing the consecrated water, the cross, and candles;
behind them come “li texte”—doubtless the Gospel books—and the censers born by
priests “who dispense the holy absolution that is the concern of every frail soul (chetive
âme)” (cf. lines 1166–72). The manuscript on which our text is based provides its own
window onto this scene, a large single miniature inserted not where the procession is first
described but instead above and directly opposite Lunete’s instructions to Yvain on how
he is to behave as its viewer (lines 1314–37, fig. 8.3).79 These instructions are remarkable
in themselves. Once again, they contain no reference to Yvain’s position as a chetive âme
in need of his own absolution; they read instead as if advice to a bumpkin about to attend
his first performance of tragic theatre. Her remarks are in part a response, it is true, to
Yvain’s demonstrated difficulty to control his impulses (lines 1303–4), but what can
Lunete mean, at this point, when she evokes the “grant biens” (great good) that can result
from his visual participation in the funerary procession if only he will stay seated; and
the “enormous profit” that will be his if he refrains from “scandalous outbursts” (dire outrage)?80 “For he who lets himself get carried away,” she explains, “or even sets about some
bold action when it is neither the time nor the place, he I would rather term vulgar than
honourable.”81 The specific, perilous, and painful peculiarity of Yvain’s position vis-à-vis
Laudine is here whitewashed in favour of general instruction in how properly to conduct
oneself as the compassionating audience of a performance, of events that no measure of
chivalric bravado can set aright. In this much Yvain succeeds, although not without great
difficulty. It is his first attempt to “read” as a woman.82
78 “Verroie volontiers la hors / La prochession et le cors” (1273–74).
79 As seen opposite, the miniature is itself a sophisticated “window” view: the procession is
portrayed as inside the church while framed by an exterior view of the same. Yvain is nowhere visible; we see what he sees. The text’s description of the procession occurs on fol. 71r.
80 Cf. lines 1314–22.
81 “Car qui se derroie et sourmaine, / Et d’outrage faire se paine, / Quant il n’en a ne tans ne lieu, /
Je l’appel plus mauvais que preu” (1323–26). The lines occur only in Guiot’s copy (MS H) and
Bibliothèque nationale fr. 1433 (MS P), the two manuscripts also generally held to be the most reliable.
Other redactors possibly found them awkwardly inappropriate. Foerster originally excluded them in
his “Große Ausgabe,” only to restore them later in the “Petite Edition.” See also Woledge, 1:107.
82 A somewhat comical effect is achieved when Yvain, immediately before being wounded by love,
is suddenly preoccupied once again with Keu’s renewed mockery, should he not “grab” some proof
(tesmoing et garant) of the truth of his exploits, a trophy to bring home (cf. lines 1345–57). This
relapse into male reading anticipates Yvain’s later absorption in tournament games, over which he
will simply forget his all-important promise to Laudine.
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newgenrtpdf
Figure 8.3. The funeral of Esclados, end of the thirteenth century. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale fr. 1433, fol. 72v. © Bibliothèque nationale de France.
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His position at the window, on which the text repeatedly insists, is in fact
superfluous—being invisible, he has no need to conceal himself behind a wall—and
serves properly as a “visual” analogy to the position of the audience before a performance. Like them, Yvain must learn to sustain suffering felt in the heart—suffering for
love of another who takes the real blows—as the only way to enjoy even an illicit proximity to the object of his desire. All this in preparation for the decisive, third “scene,”
in which he finally observes Laudine alone. As further necessary introduction to this
scene, we first learn the result of Yvain’s lesson in compassionating participation: an
incomparably wounded heart that will, finally, subsume his entire identity and reduce
him to only the barest semblance of a man—for failure to aimer loiaument, a failure of
reciprocal recognition in suffering.
This wound, significantly, is not struck by the male god of love who will be evoked
in the garden at Pesme Avanture but rather by a consistently female personification
who works, ostensibly, in service of Laudine’s revenge, “which she exacts more severely
than ever [Laudine] could have done.”83 Yvain is wounded not as the sponsa is but
rather indirectly, through the wound to the suffering woman. Like Mary’s (as Odo tells
it), his wound is struck “through the eyes to the heart” and lasts far longer than any
administered by lance or sword (1372–74). There follows the complement to the later
remarks on its “cure,”
Cols d’espee garist e saine
Mout tost, des que mires y paine;
Et la plaie d’Amours empire
Quant ele est plus pres de son mire.”
(1375–78)
(Sword wounds can be cured and heal quite quickly, once a surgeon attends to them, but
the wound of love only worsens when its surgeon is near.)
Afflicted with a wound for which the only “healing” is its protraction, the victim has no
choice but to learn to sustain its pain—which becomes the object of Yvain’s next lesson,
and which the narrator later announces as the burden of his own audience.
It is this next scene, in which Yvain no longer observes the public grief of the ruling
lady but rather her private devotion, “reading her psalms in a psalter illuminated in
letters of gold” (cf. lines 1418–19), that clarifies exactly how he is wounded: on the one
hand by her grieving reading, on the other by—among other points—her eyes, her hair,
and her neck, in uno oculorum tuorum et in uno crine colli tui (Canticles 4:9). This is likewise the scene that makes Laudine’s significance clear, in which she briefly becomes the
diaphanous body and the lightening rod for the descent of the Word into our experience,
into avanture. First the grieving reading:
83 “Venjanche en a prise gregnor / Qu’ele en prendre ne l’en peüst” (1368–69). Hult’s translation
does not preserve the female gendering of love, apparently assuming it is merely grammatical. That
did not prevent the poet from speaking of a male god in the later scene.
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Et Mesire Yvains est encor
A le fenestre ou il l’esgarde;
Et quant il plus s’en donne garde,
Plus l’aime et plus li abelist.
Che qu’ele pleure et qu’ele list
Vausist qu’ele laissié eüst,
Et qu’a le parler li pleüst.
En chest voloir l’a Amour mis,
Qui a la fenestre l’a pris.
(1420–28)
(And my Lord Yvain is once again at the window where he beholds her, and the more he
beholds her, the more he loves her and the more he is delighted, that she weeps and that
she reads, these he wishes she would leave off and that it would please her to speak to
him. Love put him in this state, who fell upon him at the window.)
The five verses (1422–26) that are framed here by a pair each before and after, stating
and restating the position at the window, defy linear interpretation. The reason is an
apokoinu, a construction in which one syntactical element serves to form two consecutive statements. That element is the central verse, Che qu’ele pleure et qu’ele list.
This is the heart of the matter, for us as well as for Yvain. Laudine is an all but mandatory inclusion in any discussion of women’s grieving in romance narrative; as we saw
in chapter 1, she has become no less obligatory to the discussion of women’s literacy.
But the two are never discussed as Chrétien emphatically represented them: together,
as inseparable and complementary. The reason for this is simple: Laudine is the sole
example to be found of a courtly lady who chants her psalms while also fulfilling the prescriptive gestures of a widow’s grief.84 Was it this sense of incongruity that led Chrétien’s
German adaptor, Hartmann von Aue, to omit all reference to Laudine’s psalter prayer?
Wolfram, for his part, would appear to have understood perfectly and conceived his
portrayal of Herzeloyde’s grief analogously: each woman’s grieving is defamiliarized
through an element that suggests an interpenetration of sacred and profane and is to be
read as a reference to the woman who sacralized human grief, Mary.
To read the crucial and central verse such that the syntax is entirely successful it is
necessary to substitute a comma for the full stop after abelist. Laudine’s tears and her
prayer can or indeed must be taken as both what increasingly pleases Yvain and what
he wishes would stop.85 The resultant state, “which love put him in at the window,” is
84 Characteristically, a recent contribution judges Laudine’s portrayal to be composed “all but
exclusively of conventional literary topoi from the widow’s planctus,” but makes no mention whatever of her psalter-reading: Breulmann, Weibliches Agieren, pp. 194–95. Comparative studies of the
grieving women of courtly narrative are found in Küsters, “Klagefiguren,” and Peil, Gebärde; neither,
however, comments on Laudine’s psalter prayer. Vitz, Orality and Performance, pp. 113–15, is one of
the few to have so much as paused over the striking incongruity of the scene.
85 In the first case the sense would be, “The more he beholds her, the more he loves her and the
more it pleases him to see her weep and read; nevertheless, he wishes she would leave these and
that it would please her to speak to him.” In the second: “The more he beholds her, the more he loves
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admittedly peculiar: he is most possessed by that which also precludes all contact with
his beloved; similarly, love’s wound most craves that which makes it suffer: in either
case, reading and weeping, prayer and tears.
The more she does this, “the more he loves her and the more he is delighted”: the
collision of profane desire and a sacred attention to the dead continues; Laudine’s
psalter appears in part as if a sacral remnant of the funerary procession that accompanied her previous lament, accentuating the continuing incongruity of Yvain’s desire.
To these incongruities I will return shortly. But the grieving widow’s psalter is no less
the counterpart of the pucele’s romance, its reading responsible for an equivalent wound
of love: Yvain’s ill-conceived participation in the suffering of the widow reaches its own
resolution (which offers no resolution in his relationship to Laudine!) at the castle of
Pesme avanture, where he again witnesses a woman’s reading performance, this time
purely profane, but with a power to wound that is capable of re-enacting Mary’s original
reading act—or at least affecting another god in the same way. It is in fact Laudine’s
tearful reading that bears the appropriate resemblance to the dart cast by the Christian
bride, while Yvain’s response to the wound he receives beholding Laudine is what
romance convention would dictate for the later scene. His response to pucele avanture,
on the other hand, constitutes redress of his earlier transgression: rather than seeking
possession of the reading woman, he ends up freeing the 300 weeping ladies held in
slave labour (see lines 5769–79). The prelude to this latter act is a scene in which hearts
meet in mutual recognition and explicitly reciprocal vision—“Il les voit et eles le voient
/ Si s’enbronchent toutes et pleurent” (He sees them and they see him, and they all
bow their heads and weep) (5202–3)—and in God’s name: “Dix, s’il plaist,” Yvain hails
the ladies, “Chel doel, qui ne sait dont vous naist, / Vous ost des cuers et tourt a joie!”
(May God, if he please, lift from your hearts this sorrow, of which I know not how it
befell you, and turn it to joy!) (5243–45). The echo returns from within the enclosure
(un prael clos—line 5187), “Dix vous en oye, / Que vous en avés apelé!” (May God hear
you, as you have called upon him!) (5246–47). Once Yvain has encountered the pucele
and accomplished the Pesme Avanture and they are thus rescued, the ladies manifest
a joy such as “I doubt they would have shown over him who created all the world, had
he descended from Heaven to earth.”86 The hypothetical descent of God-as-love marks
not only the maiden’s reading but also Yvain’s arrival as a reader of Mary’s reading, one
able to know and embrace her tears. This is the same point, at the same corner of the
poetic exposition, at which Parzival has arrived when he knocks on the door to Sigune’s
wounded heart and “finds” her true identity.
her and the more she pleases him. Her reading and her weeping he wishes she would leave, and that
it would please her to speak to him.” Separated into two distinct statements, neither is entirely satisfactory without an interpolated element (given above in italics). Neither Woledge, Commentaire,
nor the editors (Roques, Hult) offer any comment on these lines.
86 “Ne je ne cuit qu’eles feïssent / Tel joie com eles le font / De celui qui fist tout le mont, / S’il fust
du chiel venus en terre” (5776–79).
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In response to the spectacle of “the Lady’s” grieving reading,87 Yvain delivers a monologue in fascinated admiration that continues Chrétien’s study in compassio ill-conceived
even as it ostensibly enumerates the hallmarks of her beauty. These are (as alluded to
above) her hair, “surpassing fine gold, such is its luster,” which, Yvain says, “m’esprennent
et auguisent” (inflame[s] and prick[s] me like needles) (1468) as she tears at it; her
eyes, the most beautiful he has ever seen, despite their ever-flowing tears, which “me
dessïent” (rob me of my senses) (1472); her face, the beauty of which is disfigured by her
scratching, thus causing him “grant destreche” (great constriction) (1477); and, finally,
her neck (or bosom, the word is gorge), which, as she clutches at it, “me par a acouré”
(nearly tears out my heart) (1482). On this last he elaborates: “Ne nus cristaus, ne nule
glache / N’est si bele ne si polie / Que se gorge est, ne si onnie” (No crystal nor any
mirror is so beautiful or so bright as is her bosom, nor so defiled) (1486–88).88
Chrétien delights in this climax of discord between the lustful gaze and the suffering
widow, which is the echo of his original description of this “most beautiful Christian
woman who ever walked the earth” (cf. Yvain’s reprise of this superlative description,
lines 1496–510) and, in some sense, its resolution. The woman’s wound is open in this
scene, her suffering unobscured by desire for vengeance or defiance of God. The image
of her bosom as a sullied mirror is the telltale signal of the body diaphanous; through
the disfigurement of her grief, or rather because of it, the key scriptural image shimmers
as if below the surface. With her psalter prayer Laudine represents the widow’s grief as
the potential convergence of human and divine, suffering and the kiss of heartfelt recognition. What Yvain experiences is beauty inverted, the joy of the flesh transmuted into
the image of suffering for its loss, the body as mirror of its own infirmity: the nature of
the widowed, or black bride. In one possible interpretation his suffering is that of the
sponsus who suffers in reciprocation of her suffering, wounded at the sight of her eye,
her hair and her neck. At the same time, it remains that of the erotic voyeur, marvelling
over purely exterior beauty. The correspondence between the image of Canticles 4:9
and the body parts that so physically afflict Yvain is only partial and in itself not compelling. It becomes so, once again, through the jarring peculiarity of the situation: erotic
love conceived as physical pain over a woman’s grieving pain. We had reason to pause
over such wilfully obscured allusion to sacred models with reference to Herzeloyde and
Wolfram’s text generally. Despite all incongruity, Yvain suffers with the widowed bride
as Landri’s bride suffered with Christ, she who “endures by co-passion whatever [Christ]
suffered in the flesh. She is one spirit with him, all the injuries are common to each.” But
neither sees the other’s wound. Love here does indeed proceed from pain that is reciprocal and interdependent, but it is neither shared nor mutually acknowledged; the gaze
cannot be returned.
87 See note 48, above.
88 Guiot’s copy omits all reference to Laudine’s neck or bosom (gorge), which results in a less satisfactory text and suggests that the special and extended emphasis the gorge receives was felt as
incongruous—possibly exactly what Chrétien intended.
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The woman’s psalter-reading was our point of departure, we saw that it could stand
for an incapacity for letters and the learned path to God as well as for an ideal of lay
devotion and a layman’s gnosis. In Laudine’s hands, the psalter mitigates the portrayal
of grief, for it joins her with the image of the woman as expectant, potential vessel of
the Word and “our” access to God. Such reading frequently involved tears, as illustrated
when Malcolm of Scotland, Margaret’s husband, leafed through the lavishly ornamented
book he had given her and, in admiration of her devout reading, kept “even the nocturnal hours … with a sighing heart and abundant tears.89 But these were tears of contrition, not tears of grief, tears of desire for Heaven, not for a lost beloved. The moment
of incongruity insisted upon here is entirely characteristic of Chrétien’s art; such
moments serve to provoke the audience to seek further meaning. In this case, the sponsa
derelicta has joined the grieving widow-in-the-world, tears of prayer have joined those
of suffering for love—precisely the shift that received its sacred authority in the invention of Mary’s weeping grief at the cross. The ideas evoked thus comprise the power
of women’s prayer and the special privilege of their tears—what Abelard evoked as
infirmiora sexus praerogativa—as well as Mary’s weeping at the Passion and her reading
at the Annunciation. The reading of the sponsa derelicta, Mary’s reading, and the worldly
widow’s grief are all briefly superimposed in the meaning potential of this moment that
launches the reformation of male desire—or, as for Malcolm and others cited earlier,
Yvain’s instruction in how to read as a woman.
This is the moment that corresponds to Wolfram’s lactans dolorosa as the generation of a narrative and an experience of truth. Wolfram’s adaptation of Chrétien’s
exposition shows us a path from the image of Herzeloyde and its reception in the
narrator’s heart (in the transition from the preliminary narrative to the niuwe
mære) to the audience’s reception of Lady Âventiure and Parzival’s recognition of
the commortua and consepulta, the woman who dies and is buried with her beloved,
as his cousin. As we witness Yvain’s path, the grief of the sponsa derelicta (she who
weeps and reads in search of the new kiss) leads to the kiss of the Annunciation,
while we are led from Laudine’s psalter prayer to the pucele’s prelecting of a romans
and Yvain is led from the gaze of possession to one of reciprocal recognition, from a
desire to seize and act upon what he “sees” (unseen), to a suffering participation in
others’ suffering. The result is a continuity accomplished between loving, suffering
and knowing that applies in our reading of and participation in this romans just as
it applies as the objective of Yvain’s reading the grieving woman, as it is expressed
in Sigune’s Herzkluse, and, finally (or rather originally), as it applies to the sponsa,
whose generative reading act is made to shimmer through the diaphanous body of
either poet’s narrative art. The extremity of women’s grief potentially opens in either
poem onto an epiphany of empathy that is then the objective of the narrative experience. The widow serves as a point of convergence of reading and historia sacred and
secular, of our history and Christ’s, sustained in her suffering heart.
89 Vita S. Margaritae, 2:330C; see pp. 34–35, above.
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“My widow is better than that one,” Wolfram tells us, and the one-upmanship was more
than idle boasting. In both Laudine’s grieving reading and Herzeloyde’s grieving lactation, sacred and profane join in a forced coalescence that corresponds to a contemplative
suspension of narrative time, opening a kind of vertical window onto sacred meaning.
With Sigune, however, Wolfram made this moment of conjunction into her very function
in the narrative. Each scene finds her in a new position of iconic stasis, first in the cleft
of a rock-face, next perched improbably in a linden tree, and finally in a cell that is built
over a stream. Each of these reveals how she realizes Mary’s reading, making scriptural
images into lived experience.
A great deal has been made in the scholarship of Sigune’s possible relationship to Mary,
whether iconographic or moral, and decades ago Arthur Groos drew (renewed) attention
to her relationship to the dove and turtledove as the bestiary symbols of mourning and
undying widowed fidelity, which served equally as symbols of Mary, the widow, and
devotion to the Passion.90 The key, however, is neither bestiary lore nor images of Mary’s
suffering in visual art but rather the behaviour of the dove as it was informed by the dove
imagery of the Song of Songs. Sigune’s final residence, the cell curiously poised over a
stream (lines 435,7–9), provides the clearest reference to the biblical text, doubling the
image of the dove’s eyes “above streams of waters” and its abode “beside the brimming
streams” (Canticles 5:12). The passage was traditionally explicated as revealing the bride’s
reading of scripture, for just as “the dove’s eyes” sought the shadows of approaching
enemies (raptors) in the water, so the Christian sought refuge in meditation on scripture.91
Sigune finds refuge from the raptors of her world—Orilus and his kind—on the one hand
in religious devotion (psalter prayer), and on the other in a withdrawal that is simultaneously a total immersion in the fate of her slain beloved. Her first “nesting place,” vor eines
velses orte (below a spur of rock) (138,12),92 already expresses this last idea through an
image that fused the widowed fidelity of the dove with devotion to Christ’s Passion.
This first position is that of the dove in Canticles 2:14, columba mea in foraminibus
petrae in caverna maceriae (my dove in the clefts of the rock, in the hollow places of the
wall), which both Rupert and Bernard in their Song commentaries identified (respectively) as Mary’s or the bride’s contemplation of Christ’s wounds, “for she turns all her
devotion to the wounds of Christ, abiding there in constant contemplation.”93 From
the early twelfth century onward (if not before), Canticles 2:14 situated the bride of
Canticles in devotion to the Passion; moreover, this led to the understanding of the
preceding image, Vox turturis audita est (The voice of the turtledove has been heard)
90 “Sigune,” 631–46. An account of Sigune’s possible relationship to Mary, useful for its analysis
despite dubious conclusions, is found in Schwab, Sigune, Kriemhilt, Maria, pp. 97–108.
91 For example, CCC, 5, pp. 122–23; other examples cited in Messelken, “Rabe und Taube,”
pp. 81–83.
92 Trans. Hatto.
93 Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones in Cantica, 61:7, p. 152.
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(Canticles 2:11), as the endless grieving felt in the same compassio.94 Before he sees
Sigune as the dove of Canticles 2:14, Parzival first hears her wuofen (mourning wail) (cf.
lines 138,11–14) as the turtledove of Canticles 2:11; the same occurs again to initiate
the second meeting at the linden tree (lines 249,11–12). Sigune is not Mary, but she is
the columba or turtur just as Mary was in that her life realizes the truth of the scriptural
images of the mourning bird, their common denominator, as experience.
Sigune’s perch in the linden tree is her most singularly memorable position and that
which is most obviously birdlike. However, it is also the most problematic, as comment
in the scholarship has shown.95 This image in particular at once provokes and defeats all
attempts at reduction, both sacred and profane, which makes it for my argument the most
instructive of the three. Groos insisted on Sigune’s position in the tree as a “metaphorical
identification” with the “turtledove on the dry branch,”96 which entered commentary on
Canticles 2:14 with Bernard of Clairvaux, who cited it as the widowed bride’s conversion
solely to heavenly things. As others have duly noted, Sigune’s branch is decidedly green,
a fact for which the notion has either been rejected or, alternatively, seen as a cautionary
exemplum with the dove positively clinging to her earthly existence (a green branch) as
Sigune does to the deceased.97 But, repeatedly and above all, association with the dove and
the turtledove, with or without the dry branch, has been rejected for lack of unambiguous
mention in the text—such as Wolfram provides for Belakane, whose “happiness settled on
the dry branch even as turtledoves still do” (cf. lines 57,9–14).98 This—a transparent reference to bîspel and bilde geben—is, with regard to Sigune, precisely what we must not expect.
Sigune’s leafy perch can be most directly understood, first, as an intensification of the
identification between her, the dove, and devotion to the Passion as introduced in her first
station, in which Parzival “finds the dead prince lying in the virgin’s lap” (cf. lines 138,22–
23). The second scene continues the embrace from the first but constitutes its elevation
94 Jussen, Witwe, pp. 230–31; and Messelken, “Rabe und Taube,” pp. 77–81. In German, the
dove’s mourning call could be rendered as wuofen (examples in Messelken, p. 87). How close the
understanding of this behaviour comes to Wolfram’s Sigune is readily apparent in the extremely
popular “Branch B” of the Latin Physiologus—of which the first vernacular translations (though
in Old French) began to appear in the twelfth century: “Es gibt einen Vogel, der heißt Turteltaube.
Von diesem steht geschrieben: ‘Die Turteltaube läßt sich hören in unserem Lande’ (Canticles 2:12).
Der Physiologus sagt von der Turteltaube, daß sie ihren Mann sehr liebt, daß sie enthaltsam mit
ihm lebt und nur ihm die Treue halt. Wenn es also passiert, daß ihr Mann vom Habicht oder vom
Vogelsteller gefangen wird, verbindet sie sich mit keinem anderen Mann, sondern verlangt immer
nach dem einen und sehnt sich jeden Moment nach ihm, und in dieser Erinnerung und diesem
Verlangen verharrt sie bis zum Tod” (as quoted and trans. in Jussen, Witwe, p. 219). Groos discusses
the Physiologus in relation to Sigune at length (“Sigune,” pp. 639–45, this passage on p. 639).
95 For a critical overview, see Backes, Stellenkommentar, pp. 161–66.
96 Gross, “Sigune,” 633.
97 The last position is taken by Schwab, Sigune, Kriemhilt, Maria, pp. 134–35; similarly Messelken,
“Rabe und Taube,” pp 100–101. To be sure, Groos, “Sigune,” 638, addressed the “green” branch, and
his solution remains to my thinking perceptive, if not wholly satisfactory.
98 Messelken, “Rabe und Taube,” p. 100; Nellman, commentary to Parzival, pp. 589–90 (249,14);
and Backes, Stellenkommentar, p. 166. Wenzel, “Herzeloyde und Sigune,” pp. 229–30, remains sympathetic to Groos’s conclusions.
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and thus a movement heavenwards; it is entirely in keeping with the dove’s search for
isolation and seclusion “on the summits of mountains or in the tops of trees.”99 The dove’s
devotion to its crucified beloved, moreover, was often visualized, both verbally and materially, as its nesting in the centre of the cross as a tree. In this “nest in the tree,” as Hugh of
Fouilloy put it, the dove (soul) seeks Christ as a faithful widow in unceasing remembrance
of his suffering: “Redit saepius ad arborem, frequentat nidum, videt effusionem sanguinis,
indicium videlicet mortis; dum haec attendit gemit” (Often she returns to the tree, remains
close to the nest, looks on the flowing blood, the reminder of his death. And as she looks
on this she mourns).100 Sigune’s nesting place would thus reify the metaphor of cross as
tree in its relevance to devotion to the Passion. But as suggestive as such a description is
of Sigune, Wolfram renders its exemplary value seemingly useless: Sigune mourns not the
absent Christ but her (very physically) present earthly beloved; she does not merely seek
a treetop refuge but also persists in embracing her dead (and now embalmed) beloved
there. As we have seen, Sigune’s literal “imitation” of the image denies its allegorical referent as well as its edifying value. And herein lies the rub: invariably, the assumption has
been that Sigune either mirrors these images of the dove and is therefore to be read in
terms of the bestiary exemplum—a living bîspel—or she cannot be read for exemplary
value and therefore the dove, turtledove, and the pertinent images from Canticles cannot
be used to inform our understanding of her place in the narrative.101. This winged bîspel
flutters too fast for simple folk: what we need here is a different way of reading, which is
what Wolfram’s (and Chrétien’s) widows represent and teach.
Sigune’s embrace opens an avenue for meaning derived from the secular experience of grief, which has given rise to a third position. As Ute Schwab shows, Sigune’s
seemingly endless embrace of her dead beloved, whether it be regarded as sublime, grotesque, or merely impossible, would have suggested the Schoßhaltung—a ritual form of
Totendienst in which the newly deceased was held in the lap of a close relative—more
readily than Mary’s embrace of the dead Christ (as yet iconographically unknown). On
this point there will be more to say shortly. In Sigune’s case the gesture would not only
be obsessively extended (over a year), but would also occur in utter isolation, thus negating its ritual function, which in itself—she is neither wife nor relative—it would not
be Sigune’s place to perform.102 Whether she thus becomes a cautionary example of
99 “… qui semper in jugis montium, vel in verticibus arborum morantur.” This phrase was a standard
element of commentary on Canticles 2:11–12, as seen in the Glossa ordinaria, PL 113:1141 (cited in
Groos, “Sigune,” p. 624), and Bernard’s Sermones super cantica, 59.7, p. 139.
100 Hugh of Fouilloy, Aviarium, 29, pp. 146–50. See also Jussen, Witwe, pp. 237–40; related remarks
in Groos, “Sigune,” 635–37, and Messelken, “Rabe und Taube,” pp. 105–6. An excellent study of the
symbolism of the Tree of the Cross, also in relation to romance texts, is Greenhill, “Cosmological
Tree,” 323–71.
101 Groos, too, sought to demonstrate “strong and apparently deliberate echoes of the turtledove tradition … which Wolfram employs in delineating Sigune’s exemplary character,” or “to articulate the exemplary nature of Sigune’s chaste fidelity” (“Sigune,” 635, 641). Jacobson, “Cundrie and Sigune,” 1–11, sees
Sigune as an exemplary penitent, although for a sin that is not her own but rather a human universal.
102 Schwab, Sigune, Kriemhilt, Maria, p. 107. For Schwab, the extremity and incongruity in Sigune’s
fulfilment of Totendienst, or ritual mourning, contributes to an appraisal of her as a solely cautionary figure, intended to evoke revulsion and disgust; see also pp. 132, 135.
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immoderation or not, to explain the embrace in this way only begs the question, once
again, of the perch in the tree.103
If Sigune is not exemplary, then neither is she a penitent; she suffers not primarily
for guilt, but simply for love. Similarly, if Sigune “follows” the dove, then she does so by
immersing herself in the images of its suffering fidelity; its “nesting places” serve as her
residences, points of immersion that constitute intersections between the sacred and
the wilfully personal historicity of her existence. The same images that inform her first
station, the dove’s mourning call and its place in the clefts of rocks, served—as seen in
the Rheinisches Marienlob of the early thirteenth century, a text that addresses its female
monastic audience as “pure doves”—to identify Mary as the dove of Canticles; that is,
Mary was the dove because she “sighs and weeps in the crevices of the rock” or because
she “has always been found in the holes of the five wounds,” in other words, because she
fulfilled prophetic images as historia, as the monastic audience was to do in their lectio of
the same text.104 To go one step further, in Aelred of Rievaulx’s rule for women who had
chosen Sigune’s third nesting place, the enclosed cell, the same three-way identification
between the dove in the wounds, Mary, and the female religious gives place to a vivid call
to the bride of Christ to enter sacred historia by stepping up to the cross next to Mary and
John to experience the same images in her own life:
Hasten, linger not, eat the honeycomb with your honey, drink your wine with your milk
(Cant. 5:1). The blood is changed into wine to gladden you, the water into milk to nourish
you. From the rock streams have flowed for you (Ps. 77:16), wounds have been made in
his limbs, holes in the wall of his body, in which, like a dove, you may hide (Cant. 2:14)
while you kiss them one by one. Your lips, stained with blood, will become like a scarlet
ribbon and your word sweet (Cant. 4:3).105
Such texts as these are where we should seek the confluence of image, experience and
affective devotion that informs, whether directly or indirectly, Wolfram’s portrayal of
Sigune. They are a far cry from the moralizing exempla of bestiary literature and derive
from a different understanding of image and historia altogether; their aim is not the
emulation of specific virtues or behaviour (whether sacred or secular), but rather the
immersion in an experience of shared pain. If Sigune is a dove, the bride, or Mary, then
only because she reads the scriptural images as Mary did. Similarly, Sigune does not
recapitulate Mary’s experience at the cross, she does not suffer along with her wounded,
scourged, dying beloved; Schianatulander is no Christ-figure any more than Parzival
is. She instead re-experiences the images of scripture as her own experience; her
experience is a renewal of Mary’s reading of those same images, their embodiment as
life, as her own suffering. That is, quite simply, her experience is Herzeloyde’s experience: o amici, hoc ego experta sum, or dez weiz ich wâriu mære.
This is then also where we discover the decisive explanation for Sigune’s perch in
the tree. Sigune is the narrative reiteration of Heryeloyde’s lactans dolorosa:106 where
103 On this point, accordingly, Schwab is silent.
104 Messelken, “Rabe und Taube,” pp. 80, 86–89.
105 Rule, pp. 90–91.
106 Bertau, Regina lactans, pp. 278–79.
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the one image shows us the nursing mother and evokes the embrace of the dead
beloved, the other shows us the embrace of the dead beloved such that it accomplishes
the meaning of the lactating mother: image becomes incarnate experience. Herzeloyde,
Sigune, and Mary are one in a singular experience: the intensity of grief experienced as a
loving embrace or the intensity of love experienced as a grieving embrace. This was the
central mystery of Rupert’s Mary, the significance of the “bundle of myrrh” that is the
beloved resting “between my breasts,” the simultaneity of maternal joy and widowed
grief, of conception and compassion, Mary’s explanation of “how I knew these things.”
The one experience contains the other even in the very truth that all three communicate: the incarnation of the image as experience. Sigune’s perch in the tree thus implies
Mary’s position in a more familiar image, the Tree of Jesse, the tree that itself becomes
image through her incarnation of the prophetic word.107 Twelfth and thirteenth-century
examples still reveal this older visual idea, with Mary holding her child at the centre
of a tree;108 in the Speculum virginum we saw this idea of the virga Iesse as it was used
to visualize the virgins’ completion of Mary’s reading. Wolfram uses it in Sigune’s case
to communicate the same: what Mary knew in the conception and bearing of Christ,
what Herzeloyde knew through her bearing of Parzival, Sigune knows and makes known
through compassio with a dead beloved—and we know, as Parzival comes to know, by
entering her suffering heart.
In this, and only in this, does Sigune’s experience offer access to sacred truth, for
her and for us: as her experience of the Word. But that is exactly the point of Wolfram’s
poetics of triuwe. Meaning is made only through a shared experience of the inner truth,
not through bilde geben or bilde nemen, not through bîspel or mirrors or allegorical
representation. Meaning was found in triuwe to women’s truth, in the reciprocity of
wounded hearts.
There is intriguing evidence of the rarest sort, material testimony to the reception
of the Yvain/Iwein story from around 1220, to indicate that the audience of the German
adaptation of Chrétien’s romance two generations later retained an acute awareness of
the widow’s significance as only just stated. In a cycle of al secco paintings that runs
across three walls of a room of the castle of Rodenegg in South Tyrolia, eleven separate
scenes present the story up to the point of Iwein’s first appearance before Laudine.
107 This association merits further treatment, which cannot be undertaken here. The “tree” in
question was interchangeably the Tree of the Cross, the Tree of Life, and the Tree of Paradise, as is
suggested in the French Grail romance tradition in a scene in which Perceval encounters an angelic
child in a tree—and which may have inspired Wolfram’s scene. Sigune’s linden tree, which has often
been taken as a reference to the love idylls of the Minnesang, performs similarly to the linden tree
under which Tristan and Isolde are caught by Mark: as a symbol that refracts the sacred through
the profane and itself raises the question of their interpenetration as of the relation between
love human and divine. On the cosmological tree and the scene from the Perceval continuations,
see Greenhill, “Cosmological Tree,” 323–71; on Wolfram’s possible use of the continuations,
Curschmann, “Erzähler,” 15; and on the significance of the linden tree, Groos, “Sigune,” 638; Wenzel,
“Herzeloyde und Sigune,” pp. 229–30; and Curschmann, “Images of Tristan,” pp. 7–17.
108 Watson, Tree of Jesse, plates vi, vii, x. In an illustrated manuscript of ca. 1220, the same
visual idea made an early appearance in a German vernacular work as the frontispiece to Priester
Wernher’s “Three Songs of the Virgin” (Cracow, Biblioteka Jagiellonska MS germ. oct. 109, fol. 1v).
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The sequence has been described by others and the point that I wish to make amply
noted: front and centre in the composition, opposite the doorway which forms the only
entrance, is a scene that never occurs in the text: Laudine grieves over the dead body of
her husband, holding him in her lap (figs. 8.4 and 8.6).109 The text grants us a view only
of Laudine grieving over the body on its bier, but even should the Rodenegg scene be a
more expressive variation on that narrative moment, it is markedly out of place. Three
scenes make up this shorter middle wall (figs. 8.4–8.5): immediately to the right, Iwein
storms the sanctuary, pursuing his victim to the very gates of his castle; to the left, still
fully armed, he receives the ring from Lunete that will allow him to see Laudine—and
looks not forward to the funeral on the following wall, but rather back at the grieving
woman whose presence there so radically interrupts his own charge from outside to
inside, as it will so radically alter his own life.110 One scene, then, is offered for contemplation as if its content comprised the whole. Laudine’s arresting presence in this visual
narrative bears an uncanny similarity to Sigune’s existence somehow inside and outside,
subordinate to and yet beyond narrative time; just as either does to the sculptures of
Mary as pietà that would emerge a century later.
As mentioned earlier, Hartmann’s text, on which the Rodenegg paintings must
be based, does not include Laudine’s psalter prayer, but neither does it relate this
“Deposition” or “Lamentation” pose, to cite the iconographic types that have been
evoked as possible models for the artist’s work.111 The same types have frequently
been cited as models for Sigune’s “Lamentation” over Schianatulander.112 Finally, we
might have cited a Lamentation scene as a chronologically admissible inspiration for
Herzeloyde’s (imaginary) fulfilment of the same embrace. But none of these associations is finally compelling. The pose in which the deceased is taken onto the lap of a
mourning relative needed, and possibly had, no properly established sacred model,
whether visual or verbal, in these early decades of the thirteenth century; the ritual
gesture of the Schoßhaltung was instead well known in secular literature, most prominently displayed by men on the battlefield.113 On the other hand, this gesture was, as far
as we can tell, not part of the repertoire of female mourning; in this regard Wolfram’s
Sigune constitutes—possibly—the earliest example on record.114 But such considerations somewhat lose sight of the forest for the trees. What so strikingly links these three
portrayals of a woman’s grief over her dead beloved is their iconic isolation, the way
109 Curschmann, Wandel, p. 17; also Bonnet, Rodenegg.
110 As described by Curschmann, Wandel, p. 17. The scenes are badly damaged; I am most grateful
to Anne-Marie Bonnet for permission to use her reconstructions in executing my own (cf. Bonnet,
Rodenegg, plates 12, 14, 16).
111 Curschmann, Wandel, pp. 17–18; Rushing, Images of Adventure, p. 55.
112 Wenzel, “Herzeloyde und Sigune,” pp. 226–27.
113 As argued extensively, with many examples, by Schwab, Sigune, Kriemhilt, Maria, pp. 77–99.
114 Schwab’s evidence belies her own conclusion on this point: In reply to Peil, who first recognized
Sigune’s exceptional position (Peil, Gebärde, pp. 133–34), she compiles a catalogue of examples, but
none of those preceding Sigune in fact shows a woman performing this ritual act (Schwab, Sigune,
Kriemhilt, Maria, p. 98).
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the heart, the Wound, and the Word
369
each interrupts the rushing flow of (male) narrative to command a “viewer’s” attention,
the way each then also attains a significance that extends far beyond its moment in
time—in Sigune’s case, the very pose is protracted into the surreal, continuing well over
a year later in her perch in the linden tree. Should it not be here, in the intensification
and monumentalization of a woman’s grief, that we should seek both the impetus behind
this new addition to the repertoire and the affinity with Mary’s lament over Christ?
“Through its very absurdity,” as Schwab writes, “reaching beyond human possibility and
thus prohibiting imitation ad litteram, the action points, or rather forces the viewer into
the sphere of compassio, where his triuwe is to be proven.”115
This, I think, is the key. Whether or not the Rodenegg artist consciously adapted
Marian iconography to his Iwein cycle, the isolation and monumentalization of Laudine’s
embrace captures the visual origin of Yvain’s/Iwein’s wounding in love and isolates it for
individual, extra-narrational contemplation, which elicits entry into Laudine’s wounded
heart even as it seeks to wound the viewer’s: we are to know and share her tears and
in this we join Mary’s experience. This is, after all, the image that Yvain—and we, the
audience of the romans, with him—must learn to “read.” If the artist resorts to the interpolation of an improbable or even physically impossible gesture (Ascalon, or Chrétien’s
Esclados, must surely still be armed), then it is in order to communicate an intensity of
love and suffering as a moment suspended in time; the embrace is the visual rendition
of the mourning widow’s determination not to allow the inevitable separation from the
beloved body. It is the widow’s appeal to her onlookers for compassion with her pain.
The same embrace enters the textual tradition of Mary’s lament over Christ with the
Quis dabit.116 “In gremio meo te mortuum teneo,” (I hold you dead in my bosom), Mary
says, when Christ has finally been taken from the cross.117 Both Sigune and Mary initially
refuse to relinquish their beloved for burial; failing in this, they seek to die and be buried
with him.
There is indeed nothing imitable nor intended as such in these extreme portrayals
of a woman’s grief. The “widow” takes and holds her position as the central, generative image in each case—Mary’s, Herzeloyde’s (continued in Sigune) and Laudine’s—
because she makes reciprocal suffering all but a moral imperative; she serves to require
this response. Wolfram gives us the verbal rendition of this imperative, isolating the
same image as chosen by the artist at Rodenegg:
115 “Es ist beiden Szenen [Sigune’s embrace and Mary’s as pietà] … wohl gemeinsam der abseitigausserwirkliche und eben dadurch emblematisch-wirkungsvolle Charakter. …Durch das Absurde,
das ad litteram nicht nachzuahmen ist, weist, ja drängt dieses Handeln, das Menschenmögliche
überbietend, den Beschauer in die Sphäre der Compassio, worin sich seine ‘triuwe’ beweisen mag,”
Schwab, Sigune, Kriemhilt, Maria, pp. 107–8.
116 If not before: I have not been able to investigate this specific point myself. Moreover, it is not
clear when the gesture enters the textual tradition of the “Quis dabit,” as, once again, this gesture
is not in the version transmitted by Oglerius. It was included, at the latest, in the first half of the
thirteenth century, and the formula was then taken up in the Meditationes vitae Christi. See Schwab,
Sigune, Kriemhilt, Maria, pp. 100–103.
117 “Quis dabit,” ed. and trans. Bestul, pp. 180–81.
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newgenrtpdf
Figure 8.4. West wall of the Iwein cycle, Schloss Rodenegg, South Tyrolia, ca. 1220. © Schloss Rodenegg, reproduced with permission of
Rafael Emmenegger and Graf Oswald von Wolkenstein.
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newgenrtpdf
Figure 8.5. Contour reconstruction, west wall of the Rodenegg Iwein cycle. © Morgan Powell.
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372
readIng the WIdoWed brIde
Figure 8.6. West wall of the Iwein cycle (detail), Schloss Rodenegg, South Tyrolia, ca. 1220.
© Schloss Rodenegg, reproduced with permission of Rafael Emmenegger and
Graf Oswald von Wolkenstein.
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the heart, the Wound, and the Word
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ein gebalsemt ritter tôt
lent ir zwischenn armen.
swenz niht wolt erbarmen,
der si sô sitzen sæhe,
untriwen ich im jæhe.
(249,16–20)
(A dead knight embalmed lay between her arms. Should anyone see her sitting thus and
feel no compassion, I would charge him with untriuwe.)
Untriwe: for Wolfram, this is no less than the sin of disbelief. Evoked thus before Sigune’s
third entrance one might as easily say, “Such a one is unworthy to hear this tale,” or Swerz
niht geloubet, der sündet. This call to compassion encompasses onlookers inside and outside the text, audience, narrator and protagonist, and had previously found all but identical expression in the tradition of Mary’s lamentation:
Quis est homo, qui non fleret,
matrem Christi si videret
in tanto supplicio?
Quis non posset contristari,
piam matrem comtemplari
dolentem cum filio?118
(Where is the man who, seeing the mother of Christ in such distress, would not weep?
Who could possibly remain unmoved, contemplating the pious mother as she suffers
with her son?)
In the “Quis dabit,” the injunction extends even to angels who “sorrowed with [Mary]
… if they were able to sorrow,” for “what angel … would not weep here, even contrary
to nature, where contrary to nature, the author of nature, the immortal God, lies dead
as a man?”119 Hartmann von Aue devised his own echo of such extremity in his portrayal of the lamentation of Enite (Enide): there it is nature itself, the surrounding
forest and hypothetical beasts who must in absence of all other onlookers echo her pain
and helfen weinen (help her weep); while the call for compassion from all present—
very close to Wolfram’s—occurs in the preceding scene, in which Erec is in the same
position as Parzival and the devotee of Mary’s compassio, observing the compassio of
Cadoc’s beloved.120
118 “Stabat mater dolorosa,” stophe 3, as cited in Kraß, Stabat mater, p. 294.
119 Bestul, ed. and trans., p. 181.
120 “si hâte auch gwunnen / von jâmer solhe swaere / daz doch niemen waere / alsô vestes
herzen, / haete er ir smerzen / zuo den zîten gesehen, / sît ich der wârheit sol jehen, / si enmüeste
im erbarmen” (Erec, 5327–34).
For Enite’s lament, see Erec, lines 5746–54, 5860–68, 6081–83. See also, Kraß, “Mitleidfähigkeit,”
294–97.
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374
readIng the WIdoWed brIde
These scenes require exactly what their authors’ injunctions claim: reciprocity, a recognition of other as self such that the heart opens—or rather is “stirred with compassion
and pierced to the point of tears,” as Peter of Blois described the conjunction of tears for
Arthur and for Christ. This was no call to action or to imitatio Christi, to acts of charity or
misericordia (to say nothing of vengeance); neither is the truth it seeks constituted as a
model of moral progress contained in the narrative itself.121 It was a call instead to feel
as woman feels, to enter her helplessness, weakness, and her desire and embrace them
as one’s own; a call thus to reconstitute the mirroring gaze of wounded hearts in which
humanity, as woman and through woman, had last known its saviour on earth. Such was
the new conception of truth in narrative—both as we read it in Wolfram and as he and
his contemporaries had seen and heard it in Chrétien.
121 While Yvain—as outlined above—makes such progress, this is itself a model of the reception of
suffering; its truth is constituted not through action, but through mutual recognition.
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CONCLUSION
THE READING AND grieving widow had become, by 1200, the face of the woman in the
mirror of the reading revolution that transformed Western understanding of the place
of man before God. She stands at the end of a succession of mediary translations that
consistently serve one and the same experience of identification achieved between audience and bride, and that we have been able to trace from the beginning to the end of the
long twelfth century. Rupert’s new Marian reading of the Song of Songs itself derives
from the possibly original locus of this identification as it was embedded in the much
older liturgy for the feast of Mary’s Assumption. His project, however, translated the
same into a hermeneutic event accessible to “immature” and “female” souls, through
which they could “read” the scriptural images as Mary had. From there it was translated
into an alternative, audio-visual lectio for women in the monastic life in the Speculum
virginum or, in Hildegard’s audio-visual gnosis, into the model of a new authority for a
woman’s unmediated apprehension of divine teaching. The woman’s reading position
enters the conception of vernacular textuality as the locus of a reorientation of identification in narrative in the Chanson de Saint Alexis as staged in the St Albans Psalter. In
the rendering of scripture en romans, this position fused with a new conception of the
poetic performance space itself, from there to enter narrative representation, where figures of secular historia could double and prefigure the audience’s own transformation
as envisioned in the delivery of the text. Finally, then, it rejoins and cross-fertilizes, it
seems, the expanding treatment of Mary’s narrative, most especially in her suffering at
the cross, to deliver a new poetics of truth in the reception of romance narrative. In this
process of translation for new audiences and the corresponding sites of delivery, Latin
becomes vernacular, lectio becomes oral performance, scriptural images acquire bodies
in narrative or visual art, the experience of the liturgy is transferred to instruction and
poetic entertainment. Through all these changes however, the experience that is aimed
for remains the same one with the same claim to gnosis and truth and the same authorizing privilege as a “female” and “illiterate” access to the Word.
What we have most basically discovered in pursuing this woman in the mediary
mirror is that there was an alternative way of reading being articulated in the twelfth
century that has as yet barely been detected in the pages of modern scholarship: an
alternative poetics of body and truth, an alternative to the oppositions between letter
and spirit, kernel and chaff, masking exterior and inner truth—all the familiar dichotomies that subtended exegetical reading and allegoresis. The alternative resides in the
possibility that the body and bodily experience themselves can reveal truth to the extent
that they approach the abject humility of God-in-human-flesh. The body here reveals
in and through its materiality and historicity, in its particularity as in its pain: it shuns
exemplarity even as the “true woman” shuns praise and all external display, all semblance of manifest, external excellence. Thus, the body as object-to-be-read negates its
376
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ConCLusIon
own quality as sign to empty itself of the presumption inherent in all re-semblance. Here
the body can only become more itself, sink into its own immanence to the point that it
attains the inverse perfection evinced by Christ on the cross. Where external perfection is inherently suspect, truth in the other is grasped only as the sense of loss and
bereavement of the suffering body; that is, through empathy achieved, identification
with the other in the fullness of his or her humanity. It is finally by knowing Parzival or
Yvain as ourselves, their struggles as ours, that we know something of Christ through
their respective narrative fates and not by knowing or decoding Parzival or Yvain as
Christ. The woman in the narrative mirror taught her audience how to do just this. She
does not teach imitation but rather herself seeks identification with Mary’s experience
as the steadfast, suffering beloved and mother, even as she requires the same from
protagonists and audience. Mary as the protagonist of the Stabat mater, the steadfast
woman as mirror of Christ’s human pain, was the position from which the human soul
learned to read as woman.
The search for and articulation of this new reading is not hidden from view nor is
the field in which it was articulated one that can be easily overlooked: it occurs through
the lectio of the Song of Songs. Here we discover somewhat differently the significance
of this biblical book, even the reason for its extraordinary and pervasive predominance
in twelfth-century letters and thought, meditation, and devotion. The Song of Songs
was the site of the creation of a new reading experience; the text itself, in contemporary understanding, created or generated this experience, one in which the search
for oneness with the Word was a process of identification with body and bride as self, in
which the images of human sensual and sexual experience become not objects of renunciation but rather points of immersion through which to experience the humanity of the
flesh in its communion with the humanity of the bridegroom. To read the Song was to
immerse oneself in the dialogue of humanity and divinity as each sought to know the
other, a song of separation and union in which knowing was a communion experienced
as suffering and love, the body in pain and joy; the song of two voices seeking perfect
reciprocity in love and in pain, a moment of perfect, reciprocal knowing, figured finally
as enclosure in one heart. Meaning and truth were to be found in moments of continuity
with this experience, moments in which the body knew itself as the chiastic complement
of Christ’s place in the stable at Bethlehem, sucking from Mary’s breast, or hanging from
the cross.
With the discovery of the moment at the centre of a claim to vernacular literary truth
we have also identified the place of romance narrative within the hermeneutics of the
sacred. It is worth reviewing in conclusion what this means for our understanding of the
mediary landscape that generated this new literary form.
First, what we have called courtly romance served the communication of Christian
truth and was driven by parallel developments in Christian devotion. It embraced a
project defined by this message, which also contributes to its understanding as a distinct reading experience, a genre. To announce a text as avanture or âventiure implied it
operated within the new body poetics and its larger model of knowing and truth.
The development of new vernacular narrative is complicit with the history of exegesis, but not such that the latter serves as a model for the former or offers methods
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ConCLusIon
377
through which to encode or decode meaning. Rather, their common ground lies in the
understanding of narrative as the recreation and renewed projection of a reading experience and above all in the conception of reading as an encounter with sacred history as
presence. We need to consider whether and to what extent en romans treire and ze diute
sagen, the process of inscription in the vernaculars, can be understood as the imaginative
projection of scriptural images as historia; that is, as the projection of a reading process
whereby the “meaning” found, an identification of self in sacred history, is placed in a
new narrative context that enables a renewed identification through shared experience.
Where lectio seeks truth as an experience of presence, exegesis likewise becomes “an
exercise of recognition of self in history,”1 a search for an experience of identification so
strong that it could substitute for the reader’s own factual absence at the events. In this
it at once subscribed to the historian’s idea of truth as guaranteed by the eyewitness and
substituted for the same an experience achieved through reading empathy. This convergence of exegesis and history, of reading to “be her” and reading to “be there,” of empathy
and presence, describes the space in which the new poetics of narrative emerged. It did
not operate in opposition to historical truth any more than it sought autonomy from
sacred truth. The new body poetics and the idea of reading empathy were fully interdependent. They had their adherents and their detractors; the latter were no doubt most
numerous among the likes of Thomasin; that is, among the more traditional clerics and
magistri who saw themselves as potentially or factually displaced by this new mediation
of knowledge. There is no basis in contemporary sources for an opposition between historical truth and a new narrative “fiction” other than this reactionary position, which
thereby seeks peremptory disqualification of the latter as simply lies. As long as we
discuss romance narrative in terms of an opposition between fiction and history, our
attempts to grasp what is at stake are inevitably deflected back into the very opposition
that served this disqualification. The operative polarity is instead one between the truth
of cognition, whose vehicles are exempla (bîspel) and other applications of allegoresis,
and the truth of experience, which is the claim made for “new” mære and avanture.
There did exist, finally, among the authors and audiences of the new narrative,
a keenly developed awareness of its place in epistemology and poetics, as well as a
discourse—a conceptual and terminological toolbox—that served to articulate the same.
True to the nature of its justification and the audiences it (at least ostensibly) served, this
discourse and its terminology were not those of the schools, which the Middle Ages had
inherited from antiquity and have to this day been at the centre of our own inquiry. Their
very authority derived from the predicated necessity of a knowing without schooled
learning; the appeal to the same may at times have served to justify “extra-curricular”
explorations, the possibility to operate outside the boundaries of learned tradition,
and at others have been truly motivated by a concern to meet the needs of otherwise
excluded groups.
Here we encounter an explanation not only for the intellectual complexity and literary quality of the first generation of romance narrative but also for its—still lamentably
1 JP, p. 469.
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ConCLusIon
neglected—existence in an almost symbiotic relationship to scripture en romans, texts
whose declared purpose is to deliver the art of exegesis or religious instruction as recast
in the vernacular. The authors of romance narrative were themselves no more illitterati
than the most prolific of twelfth-century biblical commentators, Rupert of Deutz, was
truly an unschooled monk. We should think of them instead as among the most intellectually adventurous minds of their time, in the company of Peter Abelard or Hugh of
St Victor—and with no lesser commitment to their religious beliefs. This might seem
no surprise, except that—within our previous idea of romance as a fictional world unto
itself, one even outside the bounds of the communication of Christian truth—there was
no more a school or other intellectual milieu from which to envision these authors’ emergence than there existed an intellectual foundation for their purported idea of truth in
fiction. Nor could much explanation be found for the persistent nonchalance with which
contemporary witnesses and manuscript collections alike treated what the scholars of
our own time considered such a radical divide, even antipathy, between texts of religious
instruction and romances glorifying a chimera, a fictional truth.
What began, then, as an inquiry into supposed female vernacular readers and
patrons ends up demonstrating how to understand new vernacular scripture—whether
Arthurian or antique narrative, or exegesis and religious instruction—as varying facets
of one experience, an experience that reveals truth in the body, in reading empathy as
united with the truth of history. The key lies in recognizing that affective identity with
the sufferings of Christ was felt to bring one into the presence of the crucial events of
sacred history, and vice versa: to have been present at these events would be to know
the truth and the Word as Mary and the apostles did, to know the Man-God by sharing
his experience. All of this applies, however, because of the body that God took from Mary.
The woman as bride and audience is our way of knowing these experiences; she makes
them “our own” because she knew them as body, in her body, one time for all before us.
This is why the mystery lady in the audience is always potentially Mary herself, why the
successful constitution of meaning depends on moments of identity achieved between
bride and protagonist, bride and audience. In such moments historia sacra becomes not
only true but also “real” in an experiential sense, and secular history becomes not merely
factual, but also “true” in the full Christian sense. The truth becomes a manifest dimension of human experience here, now, and among “us.”
What, now, should we make of the idea of female readers of new vernacular literature? The illustration tradition of Richard of Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amours—which
provided a visual epigraph at the outset of this study—includes, in a different manuscript from the late thirteenth century, a very rare attempt to visualize the reception
of romance narrative (fig. 9.1). Here, if anywhere, in a text so self-consciously staged
as a written appeal to the author’s ladylove, we ought finally to find the elusive female
reader of vernacular literature. The illustration instead shows a man seated in a private chamber with an open book on his knees. Neither is his gaze directed at the pages
nor are these directed to his face—they are turned instead as if offered to the viewer.
The man’s gaze is preoccupied with something far more immediate: armed figures in
full battle dress (so close that the outstretched hand of the foremost among them all
but touches the book) appear to address him, “For when one hears a romans read, one
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ConCLusIon
379
Figure 9.1. Bestiaire d’amours, late thirteenth century, Oxford, Bodleian Library
MS Douce 308, fol. 86d v. © The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.
perceives the adventures just as if one could see them in the present.”2 It is not clear that
what happens here corresponds to our idea of reading at all. If the text is to be believed,
the illustration instead demonstrates that romance texts operate even as pictures did for
Ooliba, creating the illusion of presence of the persons and events they portray.
What occurs when the objective is instead a more generalized representation of the
reception of the text in the mind or (as Richard would far prefer) in the heart, we have
already seen: a lady stands between the doors of the eye and the ear to “her” memory
(fig. 0.1). This model of female reception of Richard’s example of vernacular scripture is
a vernacularization of the audio-visual address to the bride. It may or may not involve
the literate perusal of texts; its central concern is rather a conception in the womb of
memory. For a truly telling visual representation of the female reception of new vernacular narrative, and one chronologically closest to the fact, we are best referred
instead to the grieving widow of the Rodenegg Iwein cycle. This Lady, placed in iconic
stasis front and centre, is no less—and perhaps still more—the mirror of audience/
viewer participation than she is a figure from the story itself.
2 Bestiaires d’amours, p. 5; as quoted above, p. 1, note 2.
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381
Appendix
THE PROLOGUE TO WOLFRAM VON
ESCHENBACH’S PARZIVAL1
A translation of Wolfram’s prologue is always also an interpretation. The prologue
operates primarily through metaphors, images that are calculated to evoke a realm of
associations familiar to the audience. To supply this common denominator in translation is to interpret the whole. But not to do so would be to leave the text an unintelligible
and clumsy approximation of the literal meaning of its metaphors. Thus, I have rendered
bîspel (line 1,15) as “fable” because we have no equivalent, and I understand Wolfram’s
primary message to his audience to refer to the incommensurability of allegorical
teaching and the layman’s experience. The “blind man’s dream” (line 1,21) is rendered as
a vision, not only because dreams were treated as visionary seeings in the Middle Ages
but also because the focus is on the idea of a communicable knowledge of the divine.
Antlützes roum (line 1,22), always troublesome, I have rendered as a “shimmer” of the
“true visage” i.e. God’s), and “trüebe lîhte schîn” as “darkling-light image,” because with
these terms Wolfram’s mirror evokes Paul’s speculum (1 Corinthians 13.12), the all but
universal image in the High Middle Ages for human incapacity to know God “face to face.”
1
Ist zwîvel herzen nâchgebûr,
daz muoz der sêle werden sûr.
gesmæhet unde gezieret
ist, swâ sich parrieret
5 unverzaget mannes muot,
als agelstern varwe tuot.
der mac dennoch wesen geil:
wand an im sint beidiu teil,
des himels und der helle.
10 der unstæte geselle
hât die swarzen varwe gar,
und wirt och nâch der vinster var:
sô habet sich an die blanken
der mit stæten gedanken.
15 diz vliegende bîspel
ist tumben liuten gar ze snel,
sine mugens niht erdenken:
wand ez kan vor in wenken
rehte alsam ein schellec hase.
When doubt lives close by the heart,
the soul is surely imperilled.
Wherever the steadfast, manly disposition
makes room for company, it is both debased
and glorified,
as in the colouring of the magpie.
Such a one can still meet with a happy end,
for in him both Heaven
and Hell have a part.
The wholly inconstant fellow
is black all over
and will come to a dark end,
while he whose intentions do not waver,
holds fast to the light.
This fluttering fable
flies too fast for simple folk.
They’re unable to think it through,
for it can cut and dash before them
just like a startled hare.
1 Text taken (with minor adaptation) from Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival. Studienausgabe,
2nd ed., following the 6th ed. by Karl Lachmann (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2003).
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382
ProLogue to WoLfraM’s parzival
20 zin anderhalp ame glase
gelîchet,2 und des blinden troum.
die gebent antlützes roum,
doch mac mit staete niht gesîn,
dirre trüebe lîhte schîn:
25 er machet kurze fröude alwâr.
wer roufet mich dâ nie kein hâr
gewuohs, inne an mîner hant?
der hât vil nâhe griffe erkant.
sprich ich gein den vorhten ouch,
daz glîchet mîner witze doch.
2 wil ich triwe vinden
aldâ si kan verswinden,
als viur in dem brunnen
unt daz tou von der sunnen?
5 ouch erkante ich nie sô wîsen man,
ern möhte gerne künde hân,
welher stiure disiu mære gernt
und waz si guoter lêre wernt.
dar an si nimmer des verzagent,
10 beidiu si vliehent unde jagent,
si entwîchent unde kêrent,
si lasternt unde êrent.
swer mit disen schanzen allen kan,
an dem hât witze wol getân,
15 der sich niht versitzet noch vergêt
und sich anders wol verstêt.
valsch geselleclîcher muot
ist zem hellefiure guot,
und ist hôher werdekeit ein hagel.
20 sîn triwe hât sô kurzen zagel,
daz si den dritten biz niht galt,
fuor si mit bremen in den walt.
Dise manger slahte underbint
jedoch niht gar von manne sint.
It’s like tin on the backside of glass
or the visions of a blind man:
they offer a shimmer of the true visage,
but such dim and darkling light
never lasts long;
it gives brief comfort indeed.
Who would try to get hold of me by hair
that’s never grown, on the palm of my hand?
He’d need a sure grip, indeed!
And if I cry “ouch!” for fear’s sake alone,
even so may my wits be judged.
Shall I seek true fellowship
where it’s as like to vanish
as fire in a fountain
or dew under the sun?
And I’ve yet to meet a man so very
learned that he didn’t himself need to ask
how to approach this story
and what good teaching it delivers.
It’s no slouch on that score!
It’ll show you its heels and then come
charging,
it will leave you the field and then take it
back again,
doling out both shame and honour.
He who can hold the saddle through these
ups and downs,
he has the gift of wit indeed:
one who neither sits out the fight or takes
to flight
and other-wise knows where he stands.
The false fellow’s friendship
deserves the fire of Hell
and batters noble bearing like a hailstorm.
His loyalty has such as short tail
that it couldn’t beat off the third bite
if flies chased it into the woods.
But all these deliberations
pertain by no means only to men.
2 As argued in Powell, “ ‘Parzival’-Prolog,” 66–67, Lachmann’s conjecture, geleichet, is no longer
necessary, so that I have restored the reading in all manuscripts but D.
383
25 für diu wîp stôze ich disiu zil:3
swelhiu mîn râten merken wil,
diu sol wizzen war si kêre
ir prîs und ir êre,
und wem si dâ nâch sî bereit
minne und ir werdekeit,
3 sô daz si niht geriuwe
ir kiusche und ir triuwe.
vor gote ich guoten wîben bite,
daz in rehtiu mâze volge mite.
scham ist ein slôz ob allen siten:
ich endarf in niht mêr heiles biten.
diu valsche erwirbet valschen prîs
wie staete ist ein dünnez îs,
daz ougestheize sunnen hât?
10 ir lop vil balde alsus zergât.
manec wîbes schœne an lobe ist
breit:
ist dâ daz herze conterfeit,
die lob ich als ich solde
daz safer ime golde.
15 ich enhân daz niht für lîhtiu dinc,
swer in den kranken messinc
verwurket edeln rubîn
und al die âventiure sîn
(dem glîche ich rehten wîbes muot)
5
ProLogue to WoLfraM’s parzival
383
For the women I promise this reward:
she who pays heed to my counsel
will know well where
to entrust her honour and her good name,
likewise on whom she should thereafter
bestow her love and her precious person,
such that her chaste virtue
and her true devotion be not abused.
Before God I pray that all good women
might keep proper discretion as their
constant companion.
Modesty holds the key to all other virtues;
I can wish their souls no greater help.
The false woman wins false praise.4
What constancy is there in a thin sheet of ice
exposed to the hot August sun?
Her reputation will fade just as fast.
Many a woman’s beauty is praised far
and wide,
but if her heart is counterfeit,
then I praise her as I should [as Isolde]:
a glass bauble set in gold.
But I hold it to be no small feat,
when someone works into base brass
a noble ruby
with all the âventiure it contains;
the true woman’s disposition.
3 Something is lost regardless of which punctuation mark is used here, although I find Nellmann’s
colon an improvement over Lachmann’s period. The line artfully carries the relevance of the
aforegoing underbint into the prologue’s second half, and simultaneously announces something
very different. The resulting apokoinu is a rhetorical figure of the woman’s significance to the argument, and to the poetic project.
4 The entire women’s prologue exhibits the dual meanings of prîs and its complement, lop. Prîs
is both the opinion of others (clearest here and in line 3,24) and an attribute of the subject itself
(line 2,28), both “praise” and “honour” or “worth.” It is characteristic of Middle High German usage
that the overlap between these two is not yet objectified as “reputation.” Lop is the action through
which others manifest prîs and the latter accumulates to the subject. Prîs and lop thus imply moral
obligations in both beholder and beheld. Through this idea the remarks on moral disposition continuously collapse the distinction between the truth (here: rehter wîbes muot) and its appraisal, the
narrative and its reception.
384
384
ProLogue to WoLfraM’s parzival
20 diu ir wîpheit rehte tuot,
dane sol ich varwe prüeven niht,
noch ir herzen dach, daz man siht.
ist si inrehalp der brust bewart,
so ist werder prîs dâ niht verschart.
25 Solt ich nu wîp unde man
ze rehte prüeven als ich kan,
dâ füere ein langez mære mite.
nu hoert dirre âventiure site.
diu lât iuch wizzen beide
von liebe und von leide:
4 fröud und angest vert tâ bî.
nu lât mîn eines wesen drî,
der ieslîcher sunder phlege
daz mîner künste widerwege:
5 dar zuo gehörte wilder funt,
op si iu gerne tæten kunt
daz ich iu eine künden wil.
si heten arbeite vil.
ein mære wil i’u niuwen,
10 daz seit von grôzen triuwen,
wîplîchez wîbes reht,
und mannes manheit alsô sleht,
diu sich gein herte nie gebouc.
Where a woman to woman is true,
you won’t find me examining her
complexion
or the mere cover of her heart, that which
meets the eye.
If she be steadfast within her breast,
there no noble name will come to shame.
Were I to go on and tell you all I can
on the judgment of woman and man,
it would make a tiresome tale.
now hear what sort of story this one is.
it will give you a part in either,
in love and in sorrow.
joy and fear go along for the ride.
If there were three men here in my place
and each of them with skill enough
to equal my own:
they’d still need a wild imagination,
to try and tell you all
that I alone intend to do.
They’d have trouble enough.
I intend to renew a tale,
that tells of great devotion,
of true woman’s womanhood
and man’s manhood no less upright,
that never faltered under trial.
385
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INDEX
The index is designed to provide access to the concepts, persons, or things that play a
substantial role in the argument and to exhibit by means of subentries their inter-relationship
within and implications for the same. No attempt has been made to list items that fall below
this order of importance, as more detailed search capacity is available at no cost through the
electronic version.
Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations.
Annunciation (to Mary) see also conception;
Mary
book in, 48–52, 57, 60–62
as conceptio per aurem, 53–57, 103,
280–81, 348–49
as conception, 47–48, 52–57, 102–5, 204,
222, 306–7, 315, 349
dove in, 51–53, 56n44, 57, 61–62, 136
and gnosis, 49, 57–62, 70–71, 233
imitation of, 57, 67, 70–71, 155–56,
212–13, 315
as lactation, 71, 306
and Psalm 44, 102–5
as a reading act, 12, 43–62, 45, 47,
70–71, 102–5, 107, 136–37, 144,
155–56, 236–38
transferred to the courtly audience,
327–28, 335, 348–49
arrow of love see love
audio-visual mediation (of knowledge)
see audio-visual in subentries to
instruction; performance; poetics;
reading
body, the see also body in subentries to
images; poetics; truth; vernacular;
vision; woman
and Christ, 11, 55, 129, 141, 164–66,
190, 248, 251, 257–59
diaphanous, 129, 130–31, 166, 224,
247–48, 251–52, 258–59, 312, 355,
358, 362
fall of, 75, 113, 128, 267–68, 273
and gender, 167–77, 187, 110–15,
127–33, 190–91
and gnosis, 10, 12, 67, 72, 73–75, 141,
184, 191, 246, 257–59, 281, 306
and historia, 184, 188, 199, 225–28,
274–75, 305
and narrative, 277, 288, 362
redemption of, 72, 85, 113–14, 115,
117, 120–24, 131, 133, 230, 262,
272–74, 288
theology of, 55, 72, 78–79, 111–12
and truth, 128–29, 165–66, 172, 176–77,
179, 187, 188–89
books; see also Annunciation; Psalters
as learning, 279, 298n49, 301n61, 320,
320n105, 322
in prayer, 29, 50–51
symbolizing devotion, 23–24, 25, 29, 35
symbolizing knowledge, 29, 49
bride see also embodied bride in subentries
to Herzeloyde; Hildegard von Bingen;
Laudine; Mary; Sigune
and (earthly) marriage, 169–70, 182,
187–88, 217
and compassio, 248, 257–59
embodied, 47, 79–87, 103, 130, 138–39,
142–44, 156, 176–77, 225–28, 262,
263–65, 271–75
and the heavenly wedding, 89, 169–70,
177, 213–15, 222–23, 224–28
as reading model, 2, 43, 95, 99–107,
121–27, 137–39, 141–42, 157,
165, 167, 195–96, 198–99, 203,
212–28, 229–40, 247–60, 263–75,
375, 378
in romance narrative, 17–18, 76, 217,
226–28, 260, 274–75
412
412
Index
as widow, 131–33, 158, 164, 167, 171–76,
178, 182–83, 186–87, 190–91, 230,
234, 262, 264–65, 271–74
bridegroom see Jesus Christ: as bridegroom
Christina of Markyate
Life of, 137, 142–44, 165–67, 189,
191–92
as mediatrix, 138, 141, 142–44, 191–92
as psalter-reader, 137, 142, 189, 191–92
and the St Albans Psalter, 4, 135–42, 189,
191–92
visions of, 138, 142–44, 157, 166
as widowed bride, 137
clerics see instruction
commentary, biblical see exegesis
compassion see also compassio in subentries
to bride; empathy; Mary; tears
and conception, 254–56, 330, 334–35,
349, 352, 367;
see also Passion readers, 17–18, 20–21,
195, 256–57, 345, 351–52, 362;
see also Psalters: and women: and
Incarnation
failure in, 354–58, 361
gendered, 10–11, 12, 315
and gnosis, 240, 251–52, 258–59, 306,
314, 329–35, 367
and romance narrative, 200–203,
270–71, 329–31, 335, 347, 352, 374
and triuwe (devotion), 308, 308n80,
308n81, 316, 339, 367
and women’s devotion, 10, 270–71
as audience response, 164, 178–86,
188–89, 200–203, 230, 315, 318,
329–35, 352, 354, 356–57, 369,
373, 374
as mirror, 188, 251–52, 258–59, 308, 329
as reciprocal gaze, 174, 180–81, 183–84,
187, 253–55, 347, 355, 360–61, 374
as reciprocal wounding, 251, 253–56,
258–59, 330, 335, 338–39, 342, 347,
349, 361, 367
conception see also Annunciation;
compassion: and conception
a voce, 56, 222
as gnostic event, 55–60, 67–71, 73–75,
126, 222, 251–52
as imitable event, 55–56, 67, 69–71, 82,
95–110, 123–25, 142–44, 212–13,
222–24, 238–40, 256–57, 275,
326–28, 348–49
and lactation, 306–7, 310–11,
312–15, 330
Mary’s, 46, 52–62, 69–75, 96–110, 155,
204, 218, 224, 238–40, 255–56,
326–27, 329, 349–50, 351
per aurem, 53–57, 73–74, 95, 103–6,
123, 143–44, 156, 348–49; see
also Annunciation: as conceptio per
aurem
as response to performance, 212–13,
222, 321–23, 348–52, 354
empathy, 12; see also compassion; fiction:
and empathy
as epiphany, 204, 230, 240, 258–60, 362
and narrative identification, 184, 249–
50, 259–60, 262, 271, 274–75, 376
and recognition, 291, 336–37, 339–40
and truth, 12, 258–60, 262, 274–75,
329–30, 342, 376–77
and vernacular poetics, 184, 204,
256–57, 362, 324, 362, 377–78
Eve
failing of, reversed, 75, 83, 113–26, 210,
230, 313–14, 317
and Mary, 77, 87, 95–96, 111, 113–15,
120–21, 111–27, 198, 209–10, 212,
238, 262, 272–73, 293, 295, 297,
314, 317
as reading identity, 76–77, 110–27,
209–10, 212, 224, 230, 232–34,
246, 262–65, 267–68, 271, 288–89,
318, 323
as seductress, 113, 115, 122–23, 128,
262, 264
as woman seduced, 76, 113–15, 128
exegesis
and historia, 62–65, 67–69, 122, 133,
233–34, 249–50; see also reading: in
historia
levels of meaning in, 12, 62–65, 232–33,
242, 244
and narrative, 214–15, 217–18, 231–34,
249–51, 376–77
413
Index
as personal experience, 66–79 (esp.
66–67), 73–75, 84–85, 216–21,
234–36, 377
as revelation of the divine, 44, 216–21,
222–23, 224–28
vernacular, 199, 212, 214–15, 216–17,
222–28, 231–36, 242–44, 378
female see woman
flesh see also body, the
desire for, 157–58, 167–77, 187–89
as female, 115, 117, 157, 174, 180, 187,
267, 273
of Mary and Christ, 180, 183–84, 252–54,
260, 311, 314
new covenant of, 311–12, 314–15
and recognition, 167–68, 175–76
renunciation of, 157–58, 167–77,
177–78, 187
women and, 172, 187–89, 266–67
fiction see also romance narrative
and empathy, 240, 274–75, 329–30, 377
as lies, 284–85, 290, 377
poetics of, 8–9, 199, 226–28, 274–75,
282, 325–26
gender see also body: and gender; man;
reading: gendered; woman
in Christian thought, 9–10, 110–15,
127–33
and epistemology, 11, 13, 77–79, 111–17,
120–21, 122–23, 126–27, 127–28
and the flesh, 115, 117, 167–77, 179,
187–88, 190–91
and gnosis, 28, 41–42, 73–74, 111, 133,
165–66, 184
and literacy, 72–73, 77–78, 111, 131
and narrative identification, 158, 164,
176–77, 179, 184
reversal, 10, 74, 85, 111–12, 156–57
and the sexual body, 178–79
and use of images, 145–46, 154, 156–57
grieving see also widows
beauty obscured by, 355, 361
in romance narrative, 182, 184, 315, 330,
334, 343, 346, 354, 359, 362, 367
Mary as model of, 178–84, 186, 331, 334,
343, 366–67, 369
413
reading, 358–61, 363
sacred, 178–84, 331, 334, 355
secular, 25, 185–86, 271–75, 312,
343, 344
women as models of, 173–74, 272,
368–74
women’s, 25, 174, 185–86, 271–74,
280, 305–6, 312, 315, 354,
359, 361
Herzeloyde see also lactation
as body of narrative, 277, 306, 328
as devotion (triuwe) embodied,
307, 310
as diaphanous body, 306, 311–12,
314–15, 316–17
as embodied bride, 279–80, 305–6, 307,
312–15, 316–17
and identification in suffering, 278,
291, 315
and Mary’s reading, 279–80, 305–6, 311,
312–15, 330
as mediatrix, 279, 307, 314–15, 343
as New Eve, 295–97, 317
as widow, 343, 344, 280, 305–6,
312, 313
Hildegard of Bingen, 2, 12
and the Annunciation, 80–82
and audio-visual gnosis, 40–42,
79–82, 89
as embodied bride, 46–47, 79–88
(esp. 85)
and illiteracy, 36–40, 82, 85,
86, 111
and the Incarnation, 46, 80–82
and learning, 36–40, 79, 85, 86
and Mary, 46, 79–88, 111
as mediatrix, 82–83
and psalter reading, 29, 32, 38–40, 85
and Rupert of Deutz, 84–88, 89, 111
and the Song of Songs, 82–87
and the Speculum virginum, 89, 90,
95, 101
and use of media, 46, 80
as visionary and prophetess, 36–37, 47,
79, 83–85
historia see body and historia; exegesis and
historia; reading in historia
414
414
Index
illiteracy see also woman: as illiterate;
women: and illiteracy
and gnosis, 11, 36, 41–42, 77–78, 131,
218–21, 320, 322–23
and images, 3, 4, 44–45, 78, 93–94,
131, 164
and performance, 218–19, 320,
322–23
images
affective power of, 1, 120–26, 188, 366
and the body, 10, 95–96, 111, 112–14,
115, 117, 120–21, 122–27
and laypeople, 4, 44–45, 131, 284–85
and narrative, 3, 76, 133, 135–37,
144–45, 156–57, 188, 284–85
and presence, 1, 112, 126, 135, 144–46,
154–57, 188
in the Song of Songs, 76, 121–26, 132;
see also Sigune: and the Song of
Songs
justification(s) of, 44–45, 78, 93–94, 115,
117, 131, 164, 284–85
use of, 1–3, 45, 76–77, 114–15, 117,
120–21, 122–27, 131, 136–37,
144–46, 154–57, 188
women’s response to, 76–77, 115, 117,
144–46, 154
Incarnation, the see also Annunciation;
conception
as act of love, 25, 76, 183–84,
251–56, 347
as descent, 25, 76, 252–56, 347
as embodied truth, 313–14, 316, 326
as gnostic event, 80, 85, 183–84
and poetics, 55, 326–27
as redemption of the flesh, 230
as wounding, 183–84, 251–56, 347
instruction
audio-visual, 89–90, 93–94, 101–6,
109–10, 117, 120–26, 127, 128, 133,
212–15, 222–23
clerical, 282–83, 285, 293, 296–99,
319, 320
for laymen, 242–45, 283–91, 298–99
from Mary, 68–77
with pictures, 115, 117, 120–21, 122–23,
125–27, 283, 284–85
as seduction, 2, 5, 77, 89, 101–2, 112,
115, 117, 120–25, 128, 196, 212–15,
222–23
for women, 38, 75–77, 89–94, 101–6,
115, 117, 120–27, 130–31, 133,
144–46, 155–56, 189–91, 212,
222–24, 286–88, 302–4
Jesus Christ
as bridegroom, 2, 62–64, 69–70,
99–102, 130–33, 172–73, 176,
231, 238–39, 329
dual nature of, 53–54, 164–65
as fulfilment of the Old Testament,
63–64, 99–101
humanity of, 55, 79, 129, 145–46, 179,
180–81, 183–84, 251–52, 309–11,
314, 316, 311
imitation of, 167–68, 174, 186
and the Incarnation, 11, 76, 129, 183–84,
252–56, 316
Passion of, 63–66, 155, 178–85, 188,
251–52, 257–59; see also Passion,
the
presence of, 56, 139, 141, 146, 154,
165, 172
reborn in the heart, 106–8, 129
sinless flesh of, 165, 168, 177
lactation
auto-, 278, 305, 311, 313, 315
as baptism, 305–6, 307, 315
and bleeding, 310–11
and Christ’s Passion, 306, 310–11,
315–16
and compassion, 310, 310n88, 330, 367
and grieving, 278–79, 305–6, 312–15
as gnostic experience, 71, 305–7, 311–16
Mary’s of Jesus, 75, 309–16
as mediation of knowledge, 71, 87
as mediation of knowledge, 71, 87
as truth in the body, 311–12, 305, 307,
310–16, 367
Laudine
and compassion, 361, 369, 373–74, 369
as embodied bride, 361
grieving reading of, 17–18, 25,
358–62, 363
as mediatrix, 358
415
Index
as psalter reader, 17–19, 25, 185, 330,
358, 362
as widow, 25, 185, 192, 280, 330,
342–46, 355, 359, 367–68, 369
laypeople
as audience, 225–26, 246, 283–91,
297–99
as female, 131, 221, 241, 245, 251,
283–84, 286–88, 323
as illiterates, 3, 30, 131, 196, 242–46,
298, 323
as immature, 283, 286–87
and learning, 44, 242–46
literacy of, 3, 6, 26, 43, 44
and narrative, 250–51, 283–85, 300–301
literacy see also illiteracy; laypeople;
women
and the Annunciation, 48–49
and education, 1–2
as metaphor, 12–13
vernacular, 7, 26
versus orality, 1–2, 7–8, 21
love
arrow of, 183–84, 252–56, 349
Christ as, 183, 255–56, 347
courtly, 209–10, 204–5, 237
as devotion (also triuwe), 248, 250–52,
269–75, 278, 308–10, 339–40
god of, 17–18, 256–57, 258–59, 347, 352,
354, 358
as reading path, 235, 250–51,
256–57, 347
in romance narrative, 17–19, 261–62,
263–67, 268–71, 348, 351
as suffering (for another), 180–81,
183–84, 230, 251, 255–59, 267,
270–71, 280, 308, 315–16, 330, 334,
361–62, 366
wound of, 17–19, 25, 183–84, 251–56,
258–59, 329–30, 338–39, 347,
351–52, 358, 360, 361
male see man
man (the male)
as angelic word, 73–74
and body, 184, 298–99
as Christ’s divinity, 110
and the Incarnation, 73–74
415
as learned, 72–73, 79, 301
as miles, 300–301, 305
and renunciation of the flesh, 87, 111,
179, 187
as spirit, 74, 113–14, 115, 117
Mary, mother of Christ see also Eve
as biblical bride, 10, 12, 62–79, 80–81,
85–86, 111–12, 121, 124–27,
238–40, 254–55, 375, 378
as body of scripture, 71, 75, 99, 136,
327, 367
as body of the Word, 46, 64–65, 67,
136–37
and compassio, 12, 64–65, 178, 179–84,
185–86, 203, 240, 251–52, 258–59,
313–16, 330–35, 343; see also
Passion: Mary’s role in
and the Incarnation, 10, 12, 55–56,
99–103, 106–10, 183–84, 218, 220,
224, 256; see also Annunciation;
conception
and literacy, 43, 48–51; see also
Annunciation: book in
as mediatrix, 45, 46, 48, 55–56, 136, 343
as model of reading and knowing, 43, 45,
47, 48, 62–79, 79–80, 83, 95–110,
111–15, 120–21, 124–27, 142, 144,
155, 197–98, 209–10, 220, 222,
225–26, 239–40, 245, 249, 251,
255–56, 262, 271, 275, 279–80,
305–6, 309–17, 321, 322–23, 329,
330, 349–50, 351, 360, 363, 367,
375–76, 378
and psalter prayer, 49–51, 57
and the sword of sorrow, 182–83, 188,
251–52, 256, 258–59
in the pietà, 279, 368
as prophetess, 67, 70–71, 74–75, 279,
312–13
as widow, 178, 179–81, 183, 185–86,
330–31, 343, 359, 362, 363, 369;
see also grieving: Mary as model of
men
as audience, 24, 231, 246, 286–87,
296–301, 350–51, 352, 354,
355–56, 358
and desire, 355–56, 359–61, 362
failing Christ, 145, 184
416
416
Index
as “fools for love”, 266–67
knowing through women, 67, 73–74,
82–83, 86, 138, 154, 156, 190–92,
256–57
as patrons, 241–45, 246–47
reading as woman, 25, 47, 67–76, 86,
111–12, 142, 156–57, 191–92, 231,
241, 245, 246–47, 356, 362
and use of images, 145, 156
and women’s suffering, 347, 355,
358–61, 330–31, 333–34, 336–40
mirror
body as, 117, 120–26, 127–29, 131–32,
288
as cosmetic device, 113–14, 115, 117,
121–22, 127–28
as earthly knowledge, 77–78, 117, 299
and epistemology, 127–28, 299
as ideal image, 33–34, 117, 120
literature as, 290
Mary as, 68–69, 71, 86, 95
pictures as, 95, 115, 117, 120–23,
125–26
scripture as, 44n7, 120
for self-appraisal, 95, 112, 117, 120–21,
127–28, 130
woman as, 5, 8, 13, 26, 33–36, 65,
86, 361
mourning see grieving
Passion, the
devotional texts on, 10–11, 64–65, 180,
185, 331–34
and the Incarnation, 183–84, 230, 234,
252–59, 280, 306, 334; see also
compassion: and conception
Mary’s role in, 64–65, 178, 179–84,
185–86, 251–52, 255–56, 331–35;
see also compassion
and the Psalms, 63
performance, 11, 133; see also subentries to
romance narrative; truth; vernacular
literature
audio-visual, 1–2, 17, 20–21, 94, 95,
102–6, 218–21, 280–81, 320,
322–23; see also poetics: audio-visual
and gnosis, 212–15, 216–23, 224–25,
244, 320, 322–23
as presence, 46, 102, 105–6, 133,
212–13, 216–23, 224–25, 228, 275,
319, 324, 356, 358, 378–79
response to, 200–203, 351–52, 356, 358
romance narrative as, 280–81, 283–84
vernacular, 197–98, 204, 212, 375
as witnessing, 17–21, 23–24, 26, 274,
319, 324
of written texts, 1–2, 6–8, 17–21, 26,
231–32, 242–45
pictures see images
poetics, 11–12; see also truth
audio-visual, 1–2, 4, 40–42, 55, 64,
95–96, 103, 110, 120–21, 122–23,
127, 128, 218–23, 320–21, 323;
see also performance: audio-visual
of body, 251, 262, 284–85, 286–91,
292–95, 296–97, 299, 303–4, 318,
320, 361, 375–76, 377
female, 95–96, 112–15, 117, 120–27,
127–33, 188–89, 295–97, 302–4
of religious reading, 75–79, 111, 112–14,
184, 188–89, 191–92
of romance narrative, 1, 65, 184, 192,
225–28, 260, 274–75, 279–81,
282–83, 292–97, 318, 320–24,
325–30, 332–35, 362, 375–79
vernacular, 1–2, 5, 26, 42, 111, 112,
177, 182, 187, 197–99, 203–4, 222,
377–78
of vision, 164–66, 188, 224–25
prayer books see Psalters; reading:
religious
Psalter(s)
illustration in, 3, 24, 135–37
and literacy, 3, 6, 28–36
reading of, 18, 358, 362
and women, 24, 28–36, 39–40, 189
reading
audio-visual, 22–23, 94–95, 101–6,
109–10, 115–26, 127, 128,
131–32, 197–98, 280–81; see also
performance: audio-visual
as experience, 46, 47, 74–75, 94–96,
106–10, 224–28, 229–30, 234–35,
249, 299–300, 318–19, 323; see also
exegesis: as personal experience
417
Index
and gnosis, 43–44, 46, 56–62, 78–79,
87–88, 109–10, 244, 248–50, 347
as incarnatory act, 57–62, 62–63, 69–70,
72–75, 87–88, 96–107, 111, 120–21,
123, 137, 347, 363, 366–67; see also
Annunciation; conception
and presence, 22–23, 46, 62–65, 188–89,
233–34
gendered, 2, 10, 29–36, 46, 47, 72–79,
86–88, 107–10, 111–12, 113–15,
127–33, 181–82, 184, 188–89,
191–92, 198–99, 203, 216, 220–21,
223–24, 229–31, 241, 246–47,
280–81, 286–89, 375–76, 379;
see also Song of Songs: gendered
reading of
in historia, 62–65, 67, 69, 74–76, 122–23,
133, 136, 138, 142–43, 156, 184,
188, 199, 225–28, 233–34, 238,
239–40, 249–51, 259–60, 262, 275,
305, 366, 377–78
laypeople’s, 282, 283, 284–89, 298–305,
320, 323, 365
monastic, 11, 44–46, 92–94, 184, 191,
195
in pictures, 115, 117, 120–21, 188,
284–85
portrayals of, 17–19, 26–27, 34–35, 195,
242–45, 256–57, 347
religious, 2, 34–35, 43–45; see also
Psalters
romance narrative; see also vernacular
literature: as romans
audience of, 1, 19–21, 197–99, 204–11,
282–86, 297, 298
and fiction, 8–9, 12, 197–98, 226–28,
260, 262–64, 274–75, 282, 284, 324,
325–26, 328, 353, 377–78
as knight’s reading, 24, 299–300, 304–5,
318–19, 323
manuscripts of, 23–24, 356, 357, 378
patronage of, 2, 197–98, 204–7, 215–16,
245, 257
performance of, 1, 17–21, 23–24,
199–204, 256–57, 283–84, 350–51,
352, 354, 374, 378–79
and religious truth, 12, 226–28, 256–57,
274–75, 279–81, 285–86, 290–91,
417
301, 303, 305–6, 318–24, 326–28,
346, 369–74, 376–77; see also truth
structure of, 18, 184, 192, 226–28,
330–31, 332, 333, 347, 351–52, 354
as woman, 286, 288–89, 295–96, 302–3,
320, 346
and women, 2, 8–9, 18, 24, 197–99,
204–11, 261–75, 281, 318–19, 321
romans see vernacular literature: as romans
Rupert of Deutz see Song of Songs: Marian
reading of and subentries to Hildegard
of Bingen; Speculum virginum;
Sigune
and the Song of Songs, 340, 341, 363–67
as body of narrative, 346
as cousin (to Parzival), 336, 339, 340
as devotion (triuwe) embodied, 345–46
as diaphanous body, 336, 338–39,
340–41, 346
as embodied bride, 340–41, 363–73
as mediatrix, 343, 366–67
as psalter-reader, 25, 330, 338
as recluse, 337, 338–42
as virgin, 338, 344
as widow, 25, 330, 341, 343–46,
363–65, 369
Song of Songs, the, 62–79, 231–41, 246–60
gendered reading of, 2, 12, 43, 47, 83–86,
121, 123–25, 230–31, 246–47
and the Incarnation, 81–86, 99, 100–101,
234, 236–39, 252–56, 306–7,
312–14
Marian reading of, 47, 62–79, 85–86,
95–96, 121, 238–40, 279, 306–7,
312–14, 328–30, 375
men’s reading of, 67–68, 70, 78–79,
86, 112
and the Passion, 155, 183, 185, 255–59,
363–67
as reading path, 47, 67–70, 85–86,
95–96, 100–101, 121, 123–27, 132,
229–40, 246–52, 255–56, 259–60,
318, 363–67, 375–76
in the twelfth century, 45–46, 86,
229–30, 241, 244–45, 376
vernacular, 92, 231, 241, 244–45,
254n60, 318, 327n11
418
418
Index
Speculum virginum, 89–134
composition of, 90
date of, 90
manuscripts of, 89–90
pictures in, 90, 93–94, 95, 114–15, 117,
120–21, 122–27, 131
and Psalm 44, 89, 101–6
and Rupert of Deutz, 94–96, 121, 126–27
and the Song of Songs, 95–101, 112, 121,
123–27
sponsa Christi see bride
tears
as audience response, 182, 188,
200–203, 272, 330–35, 369, 374
changing meaning of, 185–86, 331–34
and compassio, 202–3, 270, 330–35,
369, 374
Mary’s at the Passion, 181–83,
331–35, 362
and reading, 34, 359–60, 362
and revelation, 183, 330–35
women’s, 146, 182, 188, 190, 156, 362
triuwe see compassion: and triuwe; and
subentry as devotion (triuwe) in
Herzeloyde; love; Sigune
truth
in the body, 129–31, 165–66, 172,
176–77, 178–79, 182, 187, 188–89,
223–24, 230, 247–48, 251, 257–59,
262, 267–68, 274–75, 282–83,
284–91, 292–93, 295, 296–97,
301–5, 305–17, 320, 331, 335,
345–46, 351, 366–67, 375–76
and eyewitnesses, 20–23, 63, 199, 260,
274, 353, 377
in history, 62–63, 198, 226–27, 238, 260,
263–64, 274–75, 377–78
made in the heart, 325–29, 348, 351–52
manifest in visions, 68–69, 221
and performance, 219–22, 224–25, 234,
280–81, 320
as (reading) experience, 62–70, 123,
124–27, 198–99, 203–4, 215,
225–28, 236, 259–60, 274–75,
279–80, 313–17, 320, 324, 354, 362,
366–67, 375–76, 377, 378
in romance narrative, 8, 11, 12, 20–21,
182, 187, 198–200, 203–4, 210–11,
226–28, 230, 257, 260, 262, 274–75,
279–81, 285–86, 290–91, 300–302,
318, 320, 323–24, 325–27, 342–43,
367, 374, 375–78; see also romance
narrative: and religious truth
vernacular, the; see also poetics: vernacular;
performance: vernacular
and body, 10, 37, 177, 182, 305,
316–17
translation into, 215–16, 224–28, 378;
see also vernacular literature: as
romans
use of, 1, 4, 10–11, 136, 137, 283–84
writing in, 3, 5–8, 378
vernacular literature; see also exegesis:
vernacular; romance narrative
emergence of, 2–3, 5–8, 11, 18–19,
25–26, 195–99, 203–4, 240–45, 375,
377–78
jongleurs as performers of, 114, 216–17,
200–201
as layman’s scripture, 216–17, 229–30,
234, 244–45, 257, 259–60, 274–75,
280–82, 301, 320–21, 323, 378
and literacy, 7–8, 219–21
patronage of, 8–9, 204–11, 211–16, 231,
241–45, 257
and performance, 7–8, 216–28, 243–44,
280–81
as romans, 211, 229–30, 234, 241, 263,
274, 378
vision see also poetics: of vision
and blindness, 164–67, 175, 355
and the body, 37, 40–41, 76–77, 113–14,
115, 117, 158, 164–77, 186–89, 251
and the divine, 166–67, 258
and gnosis, 27–28, 38, 40–41, 42, 72–74,
79, 180–84, 221, 225, 248–50,
253–55
and performance, 213–15, 222–23,
356, 358
as recognition, 22–23, 167–77, 181–84,
338, 355, 360
and truth, 20–22, 66, 67–70, 84–85,
165–66, 172, 176–77, 186–89,
234–36
419
Index
and women, 27–28, 72–73, 102, 114,
115, 117, 120–21, 122–23, 138–39,
143–44, 165–66, 248–51
widow(s) see also grieving; and subentries
in bride; Herzeloyde; Laudine; Mary
church as, 132, 178–79, 183
and compassio, 178–82, 330, 363–65
exemplary use of, 342–46, 364–65
fidelity of, 343–45, 346, 363–65
humanity as, 178–79
as mediatrix, 343, 366–67
reading the, 330–31, 332, 333, 340–44,
345, 350, 352, 360–62, 367–69,
373–74
as reading model, 131–33, 158, 164,
167, 184, 230, 234, 271–74, 264–65,
280, 330–31, 343–44, 346, 363,
366–67, 375
as turtledove, 173, 185, 363–65
virgins as, 131–32, 272–73, 265, 344
woman (the female)
as audience, 2, 5, 10–12, 13, 26–27, 42,
126, 184, 196–99, 240–41, 246–47,
262, 264, 280–81, 283–84, 292–97,
301–5, 318–23, 328, 348, 350–51,
378, 379
as body, 9–11, 75, 86, 110–17, 127–33,
179, 184, 187, 188–89, 195, 209–10,
221, 223–24, 251, 260, 262, 267–68;
see also flesh: as female
and gnosis, 256–57, 259–60, 322–23
as human weakness, 25, 72–73, 129,
145–46, 143, 176, 179, 184, 190–91,
230, 246, 251, 259, 266–67, 271,
274, 280, 323, 362
as illiterate, 30–40, 111, 131, 195, 221,
287–89, 322–23
as mediatrix, 86–87, 141, 189, 191, 347
as memory, 1–2, 13, 23
as psalter-reader, 141–42, 189–92, 221,
330, 362
419
as reader, 27, 72–77, 86, 111–15, 117,
120–33, 156–57, 167, 188–89,
195–99, 208–11, 236–40, 241, 250,
251, 256–57, 259–60, 275, 282–83,
286–89, 308, 320, 322–23, 347, 375
and reading, 9, 41–42, 113, 127, 129,
131, 133
as unlearned, 72–74, 111, 250–51
women
as audience, 20–21, 24, 90, 93–94,
101–3, 206–16, 247–49, 261, 279,
281, 290–91, 292–97, 319, 321–23
and Christ’s humanity, 143, 145–46,
154–55, 156, 189–91
and illiteracy, 12, 27–36, 47, 93–94,
246–47, 322–23
and images, 2–2, 93, 115, 117, 120–24,
127, 144–46
literacy of, 3, 5–6, 18, 22–23, 26, 29–36
as literary patrons, 2, 9, 196–98,
204–16; see also romance narrative:
patronage of
as models of devotion, 27, 32–36,
145–46, 190–92, 270–74, 280
monastic, 12, 47, 89–93, 110–11, 144
and praise, 280, 292–97
readers, 17–18, 20–21, 195, 256–57,
345, 351–52, 362; see also Psalters:
and women
and scripture, 93–94, 107–9, 110–11,
120–27
and suffering, 20–21, 24, 270–74, 280,
291; see also men: and women’s
suffering
and the vernacular, 2–3, 182, 195
and vernacular literature, 17–21, 25–27,
195–96, 204–16; see also romance
narrative: and women
as virgins, 105–9, 99–101, 120–26, 130,
131–32, 178
visionaries, 27–28, 47, 87–88, 138–42
wound of love see love
420