Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination, c. 1150–1400
Also by Megan Cassidy-Welch MONASTIC SPACES AND THEI...
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Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination, c. 1150–1400
Also by Megan Cassidy-Welch MONASTIC SPACES AND THEIR MEANINGS: Thirteenth-Century English Cistercian Monasteries PRACTICES OF GENDER IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN EUROPE
(Co-edited with Peter Sherlock)
Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination, c. 1150–1400 Megan Cassidy-Welch Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Monash University, Australia
© Megan Cassidy-Welch 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–24248–7 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cassidy-Welch, Megan. Imprisonment in the medieval religious imagination, c. 1150–1400 / Megan Cassidy-Welch p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978–0–230–24248–7 (hardback) 1. Imprisonment – Religious aspects – Christianity – History – To 1500. 2. Imprisonment – Psychological aspects – History – To 1500. 3. Imprisonment – Social aspects – History –To 1500. I. Title. HV8687.C37 2011 261.8⬘3—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
2011004886
For Steve, Robert and Timothy
Contents List of Illustrations
ix
Acknowledgements
x
Introduction
1
1
Incarceration of the Body and Liberation of the Spirit Containment and the female body Enclosure Regulation and the monastic prison
15 16 20 28
2
Prison Miracles and the Cult of Saints Saintly prisoners The cult of St Leonard The miracles from Inchenhofen Confinement and liberation miracles Conclusion
36 37 41 43 51 56
3
Imprisonment, Memory and Space in the Early Inquisitions Background Heresy and imprisonment Imprisonment in the inquisitorial imagination: fear Imprisonment in the prisoners’ imagination: memory Conclusion
58 59 61 63 71 77
4
Didactic Uses of Imprisonment and Captivity Imprisonment as moral example The living exempla of female saints Imprisonment, captivity and action Conclusion
80 82 85 91 99
5
Imprisonment and Freedom in the Life of Louis IX Prisoners of war during the crusades Louis IX as prisoner of war: explanations for his captivity Louis IX’s letter to his subjects, 1250
vii
101 103 107 109
viii
Contents
Hagiographical texts Conclusion
113 122
Conclusion
124
Notes
135
Bibliography
170
Index
189
Illustrations I.1 I.2 2.1 5.1 5.2 5.3
The imprisonment of St Margaret (Book of Hours, the Life of St Margaret, c. 1300) The imprisonment of St Margaret (Book of Hours, Paris, c. 1470) St Leonard releasing a prisoner, from the Legenda Aurea Saladin’s troops with prisoners Christian prisoners Louis IX as prisoner
ix
2 3 49 104 105 117
Acknowledgements This book has its origins in a postdoctoral fellowship project funded by the Australian Research Council. The Australian Research Council also funded some research in Italy and France through its small grant scheme, while the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne assisted with research funding in Germany. The work for this book was started while I was teaching at the University of Tasmania. I would like to thank various colleagues there for their support and for interesting discussion on prisons, especially Michael Bennett, Rod Thomson, Emma Cavell, Hamish Maxwell Stuart, Jenna Mead and Ian Buchanan. Colleagues at the University of Melbourne have also provided much support along the way. Thanks to Charles Zika, Stephanie Trigg, Roger Scott, Catherine Kovesi, Joy Damousi, Pat Grimshaw, Ian Coller, David Phillips, Erica Mehrtens, June McBeth, David Hardy, Gabrielle Murphy, Robin Harper, Geraldine East and Angela Khoury. For research assistance at various points, I thank Jenny Spinks, Angeline Brasier, Timothy Jones and Julianna Grigg. For major and minor words of encouragement along the way, I would like to thank Helen Hickey, Kim Phillips, John O. Ward, John Arnold, James Given, Jean Dunbabin, Philippa Maddern, Guy Geltner, Peter Sherlock, Dianne Hall, Craig d’Alton, Dolly McKinnon, Constant Mews, Patrick Geary, the members of the Medieval Roundtable, Mary Elizabeth Perry and Isabelle Heullant-Donat. Various versions of the contents of this book have been presented at conferences and symposia over the past few years. Thanks to participants at the International Medieval Congress at Leeds; the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo; the Cistercian Studies conference; various Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies conferences; the organisers and participants of Enfermements: Le cloître et la prison du Ve au XVIIIe siècles, Clairvaux/Troyes, 2009; the International Medieval Society, Paris; the State Library of Victoria. The archives and libraries which provided the source material for this book are to be acknowledged too. Particular thanks for the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; the Vatican Secret Archives; the Baillieu library at the University of Melbourne; the National Archives, London; the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich; the British
x
Acknowledgements
xi
Library, London. The following institutions have given permission for their photographs to be reproduced in this book: Troyes, Bibliothèque Municipale (Figure I.1); Chambéry, Bibliothèque Municipale (Figure I.2); the Universitätsbibliothek, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität, Heidelberg, (Figure 2.1); London, British Library (Figure 5.1); Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Figures 5.2 and 5.3). Finally, I thank my parents and sisters for being interested in this book, and I especially thank my husband and dear boys for reminding me that there is more to life than medieval prisons.
Introduction
A late thirteenth/early fourteenth- century French book of hours includes a scene of the incarceration of St Margaret of Antioch. This saint was one of the more popular virgin martyrs and the elements of her particular story were very typical of the medieval female vitae contained in such texts as the Legenda Aurea. St Margaret of Antioch was incarcerated by a thwarted suitor, who had her periodically taken out of the prison for lurid and distressing torture sessions. Within the prison space itself, Margaret found both consolation and confrontation. According to some versions of her vita, light surrounded her in prison, as a sort of protective reminder of the presence of Christ. But the prison space was also where Margaret confronted the devil, first in the form of a dragon and then in the form of a black man. By making the sign of the cross Margaret overcame the dragon who attempted to swallow her – in some versions she was expelled from the monster’s gut – and she stood on the head of the man-devil to subdue him. The image from Troyes (Figure I.1) represents the moment of Margaret’s imprisonment. It is an image that stresses the spatial confinement of the prison building: it is smaller than the individuals who push Margaret into it, there is no aperture other than the door through which the saint is being bundled, and there is no redeeming light within the small, stone building which might hint at anything other than enclosure as the prison’s defining characteristic. Almost 200 years later, a different image uses a more popular iconography of St Margaret to represent the saint in prison (Figure I.2). Unlike the Troyes book, this Parisian book of hours (now held in the Bibliothèque municipale, Chambéry) emphasises the permeability of the prison space. The saint is already benimbed. She holds a cross, the sign of which was said to have released her from the jaws of the dragon, 1
2
Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination
Figure I.1 The imprisonment of St Margaret (Book of Hours, the Life of St Margaret, c. 1300. Troyes, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 1905, fol. 163)
and the monster within the prison is itself gruesome and large, but docile. The prison structure is made of open spaces. The viewer may engage with the saint through a barred but highly accessible window, the shape of which almost replicates the architectonic frame of the whole image. Another smaller window draws the viewer’s gaze through to the blue distance and a bucolic aspect meanders to the horizon behind the prison. This is a recognisable prison, but it is a prison punctured by openings, visible and invisible: the prayer of the saint liberates her from the confinement of the world, while the open spaces in the walls and background encourage the viewer to look beyond the limits of space to the promise of freedom beyond. These images contain two foundational elements of imprisonment in the medieval religious imagination. The first image focuses on the spatial confinement of the prison through an emphatic depiction of forced enclosure. The second shows imprisonment as a porous or permeable state, both through the open material of the prison walls and
Introduction 3
Figure I.2 The imprisonment of St Margaret (Book of Hours, Paris, c. 1470. Chambéry, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 0001, fol. 203)
4
Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination
through the representation of transcendence embodied in the figure of the saint within. Both these aspects of imprisonment – confinement and the promise of freedom – may be traced in a number of textual and visual representations of imprisonment throughout the Middle Ages. Together, the images also invite broader questions about the meaning of imprisonment in medieval Christian culture. How was imprisonment represented and understood in religious discourses? How important were ideas of imprisonment in different types of ecclesiastical text? How did ideas around spatial confinement give expression to and mirror wider ideas around Christian understandings and practices of space? These questions are at the heart of this book. This is not a book, therefore, about the ‘rise’ of the medieval prison, or the relationship of the medieval prison to modern (or medieval) penological practices. Rather, I seek to explore how imprisonment as a set of ideas was given cultural meaning, particularly in a variety of religious contexts. Thus, this book has two principal aims. The first is to provide a fresh synthesis of medieval religious imaginings of imprisonment. The second is to argue that, although recent work on medieval prisons has done much to flesh out the political and social contexts in which the widespread use of imprisonment came about, there is still a need to recognise the significant and enduring impact of religious thinking on imprisonment during the same period. In particular, the ‘long’ thirteenth century, with its emphasis on religious reform, prosecution of heresy, delineation of the boundaries of the community of the faithful and the defence of Christendom, was also a period that saw the production of a range of texts in which ideas of imprisonment were central. Such texts show that imprisonment constituted an important set of concepts which provided potent and meaningful ways for medieval people to describe the spaces they inhabited, the secular and divine structures that governed them and ordered their lives, the ways in which they related to those familiar to them and to strangers, and their own subjective positions in community, region and cosmos. Imprisonment was a set of discourses which was deployed to express a range of subjective and collective ideals. Unpacking these ideas provides insights into what I describe as a particularly medieval spatial mentalité: that is, a conception of the relationship between confinement in all its forms (imagined or actual, forced or voluntary, bodily or spiritual) and the promise of eternal liberation through participation in the Christian devotional economy. I suggest that the tension between material, physical space and abstract, imagined space was articulated, tested and resolved (at
Introduction 5
least in part) through the metaphorical, comparative and ideological deployment of imprisonment. At this juncture, it is important to specify what I mean by imprisonment throughout this book. Part of my argument is that imprisonment as it was expressed in ecclesiastical texts was a multivalent concept, and deliberately so. The texts I shall discuss in the following chapters include notions of captivity, enclosure, bondage and sometimes even exile. These notions are grouped under the general rubric of imprisonment because they share a common spatial vocabulary which exposes the dichotomy I have illustrated above: the tension between containment and liberation. The reasons vary as to why individual texts emphasise one over another, but, as a whole, the host of ideas which go to construct the discursive phenomenon of imprisonment have significant and consistent elements in common.
Imprisonment This book draws on suggestions made by Jean Dunbabin and Guy Geltner – that for medieval people imprisonment was certainly more than the judicial punishment of crime and that ‘premodern prisons are better studied without recourse to modern penological concepts’.1 Although the concern of this book is not to chart or account for the increased use of the prison itself, it nonetheless draws on the newer literature around the importance of wider cultural aspects of imprisonment as a historical phenomenon.2 Until very recently, historical studies of medieval imprisonment had tended to focus on the place of the medieval prison in the longer trajectory of penological development leading to the ‘birth’ of the modern prison.3 Thus, the function of imprisonment was integral to a number of these studies. For historians like Ralph Pugh, who extended Gotthold Bohne’s notion that there were three main categories of medieval imprisonment, custodial, punitive and coercive forms of incarceration were dominant in the various types of medieval English prison.4 More recently, the rigidity of such categories has been questioned. Richard Ireland and Jean Dunbabin, to name just two, have shown that (in Dunbabin’s words), the categories ‘automatically’ used by sociologists (and we might add, historians) to describe different types of imprisonment in the modern world – punishment, coercion and custody – ‘would have meant little to the inhabitants of western Europe in 1000’ and it was only by about 1300 that the links between imprisonment and criminal law were more coherently established.5
6
Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination
Emphasis on the function of the prison also innately envisaged the medieval prison in legal and political terms, as part of the history of crime and punishment. In the late twentieth century, the history of prisons and imprisonment was also marshalled to indicate deeper historical attitudes towards deviance and the maintenance of social order. Sociologists such as Erving Goffman, whose work on ‘total institutions’ showed parallels between prisons, psychiatric hospitals, army boot camps and so on, was one non-historian whose integration of the prison into studies of social discipline was highly influential in historical studies of the prison.6 Another was Michel Foucault. In his Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison, Foucault located the ‘birth’ of the prison within the context of modernisation.7 As is well known, Foucault postulated that the modern prison (that is, the prison from the eighteenth century) could be equated with a particularly disciplinary society, in which power is not wielded from above, but is produced within each individual who consents to be part of modernity’s disciplining regimes. For Foucault, premodern systems of punishment had been primarily spectacles aimed at the public shaming of the accused’s body. Modernity’s systems of punishment and social control, he argued, transformed public punishments into private and individual events while a prisoner’s body was made ‘docile’ through being hidden, surveyed and taught to be self-monitoring. Foucault’s arguments have long been challenged by those who tested his historical generalisations about premodern punishments and found more nuanced ways of talking about sixteenth and seventeenth- century punitive and penal systems.8 Nonetheless, Surveiller et punir stands as something of a watershed in the history of writing about the prisons of the past, not only because the book politicised the process and the meanings of imprisonment, but also because Foucault rightly insisted that a history of the prison could reveal profound and compelling truths about a society’s systems of punishment and social values.9 For those like Foucault seeking to find the ‘birth’ of the modern prison, the medieval world reveals a chaos of uneven developments in penal theory and practice. For Foucault, the ‘rational’ project of prison reform and the creation of the Panopticon (Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth- century model prison where inmates were unable to discern when they were being surveyed) was the means by which modernity’s political programmes of control and uniformity were expressed. Such programmes were characteristic of the modern state – the lack of a single prison system in the European Middle Ages simply emphasises the rupture between the premodern and the modern worlds, the so- called
Introduction 7
‘epistemic shift’ which for Foucault at least was the marker of deeper historical and political change. Others may not agree with Foucault’s overall historical paradigm but nonetheless continue to establish a historical trajectory between the messy medieval past and the orderly modern present by reading the history of imprisonment as a narrative of penological destiny. The deeper post-Enlightenment assumptions on which such studies are based are quite transparent. The notion that the prison is an institution which developed from immature origins to a rational system (whatever its faults) in modernity is an intellectual position founded on a progressivist and essentially positivist apprehension of historical change. Guy Geltner’s work on Italian urban prisons has done much to update the ways in which we must now consider the place of the prison in medieval and modern contexts.10 In The Medieval Prison: A Social History, Geltner shows that prisons in towns such as Florence, Bologne and Venice functioned as important elements in the construction of civic and political identities. Moreover, Geltner argues that ‘the birth of the prison was more than a legal development ... [r]ather, it was a complex and contingent creation in which politics engaged architecture, religious imagination fused with penal practices, and an ancient legal tradition that abhorred punitive incarceration yielded to the reorganization of urban space according to new attitudes toward social marginals’. Geltner’s careful reading of what he calls ‘documents of practice’ as his primary instruments of analysis provides significant empirical advances in our knowledge of the operation and nature of these Italian prisons. And Geltner offers the historian of the prison a broader perspective from which to view the meaning of the prison in a medieval – especially urban – environment. Although still primarily interested in the advent and function of the prison, Geltner’s work is an important advance in seeking to integrate society and culture into a history of the medieval prison.11 This will not seem unusual for scholars of the modern prison, who have established a significant historiography on this very point.12 A smaller literature on the use of the prison in monastic and inquisitorial contexts is more pertinent to the subject of this book. Such studies have ranged from investigations of the role of the Church in the consolidation of imprisonment as an effective and meaningful form of punishment to the use of imprisonment in monastic and inquisitorial milieux. Scholars like Jean Leclerq have also teased out some of the connections that might be made between monastic enclosure and imprisonment in general, finding that, although the language of the prison could be applied to the solitude, withdrawal and the spatial
8
Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination
confinement of the monastic enterprise, a direct equivalent between imprisonment and the monastic life is to be resisted, given the voluntary nature of the latter.13 Elisabeth Lusset has more recently traced the practical application of imprisonment to criminal religious, also finding that enforced solitude was meant not only to separate, but also to serve as a particular form of penance.14 Others have considered the notion that the state of imprisonment was a state of purgation in medieval religious thought, and that the penitential quality of incarceration was foundational to early religious literature describing the value and meaning of imprisonment. Recent work by Julia Hillner, for instance, has connected the more widespread use of monastic imprisonment as penance in Merovingian contexts, with the production of contemporaneous saints’ lives that emphasise repentance.15 These and other studies of the use of imprisonment in religious (primary monastic) environments have built up a useful picture of the prison’s practical use in medieval Christian experience. The use of imprisonment by the early inquisitorial tribunals, especially in the Languedoc, has also attracted some more recent attention. In particular, the work of James Given has shown how central the prison was to the production of inquisitorial knowledge about heresy and the gradual dismantling of heretical communities and networks from the mid-thirteenth century.16 This book expands on such literature by shifting attention away from the links between religious writing and the practical application of incarceration, to look at how ideas around imprisonment could describe participation, belonging, exclusion and alienation from the Christian community more generally. It was not only members of religious houses, those who came into contact with the inquisitio heretice pravitatis or those who were subject to the practice of detrusio – penal cloistering – who encountered religious ideas around imprisonment during the thirteenth century. All medieval Christians who belonged to the community of the faithful could benefit from the sermons, miracle stories, hagiographies and exempla which used images of imprisonment to convey fundamental messages about inclusion in the temporal and eschatological landscapes of Christian space and time. The means by which these messages were articulated and the contexts in which they were voiced are the focus of this book.
Space I have stated that the argument of this book is that we can trace a particular spatial mentality in medieval religious thinking through a
Introduction 9
study of the idea of imprisonment. The creation and meaning of space and its practice in social, ecclesiastical, political, ritual and other contexts is a rapidly growing historiographical field, and one with which this study most directly intersects.17 Recent works have particularly examined the ways in which space was not only a material/territorial reality, or bounded place, but was also imagined through word and image, text and practice. Such studies have mostly grown from older theoretical work on the conceptual qualities of space. Henri Lefebvre’s work has been particularly influential for historians, as he attempted to track larger historical changes through the organising category of space.18 Lefebvre argued broadly that the advent and growth of capitalist society was predicated on lived acts of spatial practice, the representation of space and the performance of space (in ritual, for instance). For Lefebvre, space was the driving force behind historical change, and might be mapped or described by articulating a symbiotic relationship between its material and abstract dimensions. That is, he argued that space was a productive force, not a void to be filled or a signifier of absence. Medieval space was for Lefebvre the precursor of significant historical change, especially urban space, where he found the genesis of the abstract space of capitalism. Lefebvre’s overarching claims for space as the driving force behind the triumph of capitalism have been criticised. Nonetheless, his categorisation of forms of historical space and his delineation of modes of spatial thinking continue to provide the theoretical basis for much of the modern scholarly literature on this theme. This book does not deal with Lefebvre’s claims for medieval urban space, but draws on his idea that space is productive, historical and discursive as much as it is material. It is worth nothing that similar ideas have driven the more recent work of social geographers such as Doreen Massey, who have drawn out the constitutive dimensions of social space. For Massey, space is a continual process made by connections, thus signifying multiple meanings.19 Specifically, Massey imagines space as a ‘simultaneity of stories-so-far’, generated and reflected by social interactions, plural and infinite.20 Massey’s work looks for the political promise of space in a global context. Yet, for a historian of the Middle Ages, her thinking signals some intriguing possibilities. To what extent would a spatial approach to the medieval past add to our understanding of the social relations of medieval people? To what extent was spatial thinking embedded in medieval ideas of self, society and cosmos? The dynamic and conceptual quality of space as outlined by Massey and others, who are not medievalists, seems to me to offer great promise
10 Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination
in unravelling the discursive web of social and self-imaginings of the premodern past. To a certain degree, the specific historiography on medieval space, especially ‘sacred’ or religious space, has already implicitly accepted Lefebvre’s and Massey’s claims for productivity and dynamism. Historians who have looked at the spaces of spiritual and religious practice and discourse already claim that such spaces are multivalent. They might be material and visual (the church, the abbey, the image), textual (the sermon, the miracle book) or ritual (the procession, the sacrament). 21 One collection of essays that deals with such issues in early modern Europe has described sacred space as extremely fluid: spatial ‘gradations of holiness’ might emanate outwards from a holy site such as a monastery, making very unclear any marked division between sacred space and what Mircea Eliade long ago named ‘the profane’. 22 However, the ways in which physical space was used to stabilise social and political hierarchies within religious contexts has also revealed the simultaneous anchoring of spatial meaning. The interdisciplinary approach taken by scholars such as Roberta Gilchrist has done much to reveal the tangibility of spatial demarcation in monastic and cathedral sites, for instance, and it is clear that, despite the many meanings that could be attached to particular ecclesiastical spaces such as the church, cloister or cathedral close, fixed and regulated uses and associations were central to their meaning too. 23 The means by which boundaries around such categories as ‘the sacred’ or ‘the holy’ were thus dissipated and reinforced provides historians of the Middle Ages with useful ways to navigate the worlds of sacrality that ‘haunt’ that past. 24 Imprisonment is a particularly useful idea with which to examine those worlds of sacrality. This is because ideas of imprisonment stressed not just metaphorical links with otherworldly space such as purgatory, but also constitutive spatial elements of Christian individual and collective practice. Enclosure, inclusion, separation and the careful circumscribing of real and tangible boundaries worked with – not in opposition to – liberation of the spirit and broader forms of freedoms. Imprisonment also provided medieval people with ways of describing their place in the social and cosmological order of things. This is particularly true of ecclesiastical understandings of the prison, where both longer associations between physical confinement and spiritual freedom were expressed in narrated experience, didactic texts and actual practice. The monastic prison, for instance, was connected to Tertullian’s description of incarcerated Christian martyrs’ experiences
Introduction 11
of a productive aloneness with God, while for commentators like St Bernard of Clairvaux, the monastery as prison allowed for deeper musings on the nature of confinement.25 For the men, women and children who travelled to the shrine of St Leonard of Noblat, patron saint of prisoners, imprisonment might have been real and painful, but pilgrimage to the shrine reminded them that the Christian promise of freedom could truly work through the efficacious actions of the saint. 26 Even in the prisons of the medieval inquisitorial tribunals, prisoners were reminded of the promise of liberation should their testimonies prove productive: ‘Why don’t you say what will free you?’ wondered the guards of the inquisitor Jean Galand’s prison in the 1280s, as prisoners there failed to deliver the right sort of information.27 Some years ago Valerie Flint suggested that the early monastic practice of ‘distancing as punishment ... may have developed as a result of some quite refined thought about the efficacy in general of space as a means of punishment’.28 More recently, Laura L. Howes noted the ‘heightened awareness of enclosed spaces, or locked towers, of small, private rooms, gardens or closets’ in medieval narratives, wondering if the presence of such motifs ‘suggests the noteworthy nature of isolation in medieval society’.29 Punishment and isolation are certainly important elements in medieval mappings of enclosed space. But imprisonment, especially in medieval religious discourses, also seems to have been about the value of inclusion, the opportunities that could be provided by the state of captivity or incarceration, and the liberating propensities of faith. The spatial language with which these ideas were expressed may thus be connected to wider religious concerns.
Sources The sheer volume of sources in which medieval prisoners appear may well act as something of a deterrent to any historian of imprisonment in the later Middle Ages. Individual prisoners are mentioned sometimes incidentally in legal sources, such as the records of gaol delivery in England, or more fully in their own words in meditations on captivity by writers in prison like François Villon.30 Administrative sources such as prison registers document the quotidian experience of imprisonment in prisons like the Châtelet in Paris or Le Stinche in Florence.31 Prisoners are found in coroners’ inquests into deaths in custody, and they are found in hagiographic writings on the trials of incarcerated saints.32 They appear in historical texts, including chronicle reports of hostage-taking during times of war, and they appear constricted by the
12
Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination
bonds of love or even the bonds of life in the literature of writers like Froissart, Christine de Pizan or Chaucer.33 As a matter of necessity, therefore, the sources I consider in this book are diverse. Some will be very well known to readers; others less so. The first chapter of this book explores monastic conceptions of imprisonment and principles and articulations of voluntary and forced enclosures. I am interested in how imprisonment appears in various Benedictine and Cistercian regulatory texts, including twelfth and thirteenth- century monastic statutes, visitation registers and advice texts in this chapter, which also looks at a gendered language of enclosure. The second chapter considers the cult of St Leonard of Noblat, the ‘patron saint’ of prisoners, and the miracles he is said to have effected, particularly liberations from captivity. Here I focus on the corpus of hagiographical texts which created the cult of this saint, including his vita, the libri miraculorum produced in south-western Germany from the thirteenth century which contain liberation miracles, and visual representations of the saint in various media. Inquisitorial registers and more polemical treatises against heresy from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries form the focus of the third chapter. Here I look at the inquisitorial prison as a site of fear and memory, which was both productive and commemorative for inquisitors and prisoners alike. The fourth chapter deals with what we might describe as ‘didactic’ texts: sermons, exempla and hagiographies, mostly produced by members of the mendicant orders from the early thirteenth century. This chapter deals mainly with the ways in which imprisonment was brought to bear on new anxieties about protecting Christendom from its enemies. Chronicles, sermons and other materials relating to the crusades of St Louis underpin Chapter 5. In this final chapter, I explore the intersections between the imprisonment of a specific individual, the crusading context in which Louis’ captivity occurred, and the meanings he and others attached to his time as a prisoner of war. I deal with the specific issues surrounding each particular text as they arise throughout each chapter of this book. Together, these areas connect the spatial language of enclosure, and the promise of liberation (earthly or bodily). They show that imprisonment was an enduring and useful set of concepts which could not just express a range of experiences, but articulate a picture of the order of things which was mapped in material and abstract space. I have chosen to explore this variety, indeed plethora, of sources in order to at least touch on the enormous reach of ideas about imprisonment in the medieval religious imagination: in almost every variety of
Introduction 13
text composed in the Western European monastic and clerical milieu, we find elements of thinking on imprisonment, some overt and central, others more opaque. I make no claim to ‘cover’ all these literatures. Rather, I hope to open up discussion of the integration and dissemination of carceral thinking and expression in a range of religious contexts. By religious contexts, I refer to the various cultural practices, texts, images and ideas that stem from a direct engagement with Christianity: specifically, monastic practices, that of crusading, pilgrimage, preaching and inquisitorial practice. I am aware that there is much to be said about imprisonment and the medieval prison outside a specifically Christian context. For the purposes of this book, however, it is sensible to mark out some contextual parameters in order to deal with the material as fully as possible. For this reason I confine my discussion to Western Europe and most particularly England, France and south-western Germany. I am also aware that ‘Christianity’ itself is an extremely broad, often difficult term to define, even in the late medieval period.34 I hope that the following chapters will reveal the various manifestations of Christian expression surrounding the meanings of imprisonment as they arise. Before delving into the world of the thirteenth- century medieval west, I want to locate my own interest in this particular topic of imprisonment. In Australia, my home country, the history of white settlement began with a violent mix of invasion and imprisonment. Running parallel with the British imperial claim that Australia was terra nullius, and therefore free to be taken, was the use of the country as a destination for convict transports. For a long time, genteel Australians considered it shameful to have one of these prisoners in the history of the family – ‘the convict stain’, it was called, and white histories of Australia were written to promote the progress of the brave pioneers who settled here voluntarily. Over my lifetime, this has changed, and it is now darkly glamorous to be able to tell one’s friends that a distant relative was deported to Australia to be incarcerated in this vast country for street fighting or stealing. The country as a prison, however, remains a potent idea in the Australian cultural imagination, and has been reinforced in recent years by the advent of a policy of mandatory detention for asylum seekers. In my national context, imprisonment has been a foundational tool for the historical construction of Australian identity; the idea of the prison remains embedded in Australian historical consciousness. This is why, as a medievalist, I was drawn to the more reflective thinking around imprisonment in the area of my academic research that has resulted in this book. In exploring the words, ideas and images
14
Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination
of imprisonment that flood the medieval religious imagination, I am also thinking about the reasons why imprisonment is culturally important, or becomes so, across time and space. It is my hope that the medieval past will provide one means of explaining this enduring and often painful phenomenon.
1 Incarceration of the Body and Liberation of the Spirit
In medieval monastic discourse, enclosure was often gendered feminine, and physical inclusion was thought to be particularly valuable and appropriate for women. The containment of the body, the need for material, spatial boundaries and the protection of female virginity were foundational elements of religious enclosure and may easily be traced through the variety of texts advocating and describing anchoritic practice. Modern historians have long read the regulatory and reflective tracts on female monastic and anchoritic practice as evidence for both the restriction of the female body and the burgeoning culture of somatic piety that was to characterise female religious practices from the thirteenth century. In medieval contexts, too, enclosure could also be expressed in a number of ways, one of which was through the metaphor of imprisonment. In this chapter, I am interested in exploring the ways in which enclosure was understood to be meaningfully expressed through ideas of imprisonment in monastic discourse. As many studies have indicated, early monasticism used the idea of imprisonment first to describe the separation of monastic communities and the secular world and secondly to express the notion that living a monastic life was a sort of ‘purgation’ on earth.1 The equation of cloister and prison thus had a long history in Western monasticism. Although it has been argued by some that the prison metaphor diminished from the twelfth century in favour of ‘a new connotative definition of solitude’ (imagined, rather than lived), it seems that in cenobitic terms, imprisonment remained strong in idea and more so in practice. Given the significant shifts in religion from the twelfth century, especially for women, it is useful to explore how imprisonment maintained (or otherwise) its discursive value from this period.2 15
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Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination
My central questions relate to the spatial connections between enclosure, gender and imprisonment. How were ideas of imprisonment used to describe and reinforce monastic space? If religious enclosure tends to be gendered feminine, do we also find that the idea of imprisonment in monastic discourse is feminised, too? It is clear from a reading of what we might call ‘carceral language’ in monastic texts that the purity or flawlessness of monastic space continued to centre on the stabilising qualities of physical enclosure. At the same time, the unstable and porous female body provided a useful instrument with which to articulate the liberating aspects of voluntary and involuntary enclosure. In this way, monastic understandings of imprisonment were expressed through both a regulatory language of containment and a language of permeability which was highly feminised.
Containment and the female body Finally she was stripped, stretched out and mercilessly subdued by the whip. She was bound and thrust into a prepared prison. Shackles ringed each foot, into which chains of no small weight were inserted, one of which was fixed to an immense tree trunk by a key and the other, drawn through a hole, was closed outside the bar to the door. She was kept alone on bread and water and daily covered with shame. Meanwhile her swelling uterus displayed the fetus. Oh, how terrible was the sorrow of it all.3 The sorrow to which the twelfth- century English Cistercian abbot Aelred of Rievaulx refers here is not the sorrow his reader should feel on hearing of the violence inflicted on an incarcerated pregnant woman. Aelred refers instead to the sorrow felt by the twelfth- century community of Gilbertine nuns of Watton, one of whom was the imprisoned woman. The nuns ‘wept’ when they found out that one of their number, an oblate gone bad, had violated the space of the monastery and the principles of holy virginity to become pregnant to a male religious of the same house – ‘they feared that the crime of one should impinge on them all, for they felt exposed to the eyes of all those who would mock them’. It was the nuns themselves then who imprisoned the wayward woman within their monastery. The episode culminates in the nun being forced by the sisters to castrate her lover, and then, ‘one of the women standing there seized what had been taken and thrust it all stinking with blood into the mouth of the sinning woman’. The nun was then returned to the prison cell, where she remained enchained
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until a miraculous act of divine mercy removed the fetus from her one night – ‘she touched [her] body with her hand and it was empty’. After that, her fetters simply dropped off and she was reincorporated into the monastery. De Sanctimoniali de Wattun describes an awful story in graphic detail. That the violence inflicted on both the nun and the male religious takes place in a prison cell certainly raises serious questions about the nature of monastic discipline. But the telling of the tale also invites questions about Aelred’s own (prurient?) narration of the events, and his understanding and representation of sin and vengeance. We know that the story was written by Aelred after he was invited to intervene in the aftermath of the events at Watton. His status as an actor in the resolution of the crisis is important to acknowledge, as it is Aelred who ultimately forbids the nuns from putting new chains on the woman, ‘asserting that it would show a lack of faith’ once her baby had been removed.4 The prison cell itself, then, is the beginning and the end of violence and retribution in this story. It is a place into which the community retreats to assert their principles and to redress wrongs; it is also the place where the divine is present and where the chains fall away from the nun once she has encountered God’s mercy. But it is also a place in which the woman is attacked by her community, both physically and verbally, while for the male religious who was mutilated within, the deep space of the prison was where he was forced to confront the outraged female community, ‘laid out and bound’ (prosternitur et tenetur) as he was, returning only to his brethren once he was a castratus. To consider the importance of the prison and the state of imprisonment in this story, it is more generally important to consider what Aelred of Rievaulx might have been doing in telling these distressing events. A number of theories have been offered. Perhaps he was warning the Gilbertines against the practice of oblation? Perhaps he is simply reaffirming old monastic principles of stability and enclosure? Perhaps he was offering the reader a new version of a virgin-martyr narrative? Or maybe Aelred reveals a psychosexual affirmation of gendered violence?5 Aelred himself frames the story as a miracle tale which needs to be publicised: ‘It is a sort of sacrilege to know about a miracle of the Lord, a manifest indication of divine piety, and conceal it’, he writes. For him, the tale of the nun of Watton is a ‘wonderful thing’ (rem mirabilem), as it illustrates Christ’s mercy – ‘let sinners hear and never despair of that goodness which exercises such judgment and never deserts mercy’, Aelred marvels. The fervour with which the nuns defended the virtue of virginity (and thus avenged the injuries to Christ, as Aelred notes)
18 Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination
is to be extolled, while ‘the secret of the miracle’ was surely ‘worthy of eternal memory’ (aeterna memoria digna) so as not to ‘silence the glory of Christ’. It is also worth noting that there is no corroborative source to add the story of the nun of Watton, so the reader is unable to either verify or expand on the identity of the nun, her punishment or even the source of Aelred’s information. A modern reader must then engage with this shadowy and silent woman only in terms of the text which presents her.6 Her words are given to her by the author; her experience is the means by which spiritual lessons can be learned; her imprisonment is the impetus for divine intervention. Let us first find the words attributed to the nun of Watton by Aelred of Rievaulx. When we hear of her speaking, we learn that as she grew from childhood to womanhood, her talk was always ‘indecent’ (sermo indecens). Her affair with the male religious takes off after they, ‘breaking silence, [ ... ] exchanged sweet words of love’ (she ‘as she said later, thought only of love’, whereas he ‘anticipated fornication’ from the start). There is some suggestion that he may have raped her, as their first sexual encounter took place with her being ‘thrown down, made silent so she not cry out’ (prosternitur, os ne clamaret obstruitur), devoid of speech in fact. When the nun does speak, it is to confess her actions to her sisters and to reveal her pregnancy. Her confessional words are not given by Aelred and the nun does not speak either reportedly or dialogically until she has been incarcerated and beaten. Her first ‘declaration’ during this time is an acknowledgment that she is ‘deserving of the torments though she maintained that the others would suffer no evil because of her infidelity’. Direct speech is given to the nun when she agrees to meet the man again, ostensibly to be turned over to him for care: ‘if that would remedy things for you, though I know it would ruin my future, then ... may it be your will to turn me over to him. As heaven wills, so let it be done’. Immediately the nuns ‘tore the words from her mouth’ (rapiunt verbum de ore eius), narrates Aelred, as the sequence of violence then continued. In her prison cell, the nun speaks in a dream to the vision of the Archbishop of York who urges her to confess: she answers his question as to why she ‘cursed’ him daily by saying, ‘Indeed, lord, because you handed me over to this monastery where so much evil has found me out.’ She has a similar vision again, which results in the miraculous disappearance of the unborn child. The final words she speaks in the narrative are ‘I don’t know’, when the sisters ask her where the baby has gone. The voice of the prisoner, then, in Aelred’s text, is hard to hear. She does not speak directly more than a few times, and then very
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briefly. More pertinently, perhaps, her narrated experience is almost buried under the weight of other concerns. For Aelred, who did not ‘praise the deed but the zeal’ (non laudo factum sed zelum) with which the sisters exacted their vengeance, the nun of Watton is written as if it were an object or a receptacle – a ‘cave full of echoes’ – replete with lessons to be learned.7 But there are other ideas at work behind Aelred’s textual use of imprisonment. In part, his characterisation of the prison space derives from and reflects general Cistercian views on the ordering and transcendence of enclosed space. A careful relationship between material and abstract space was constructed by members of the Cistercian community in order to illuminate and facilitate the individual monk’s quest for union with God. The built environment of Cistercian houses was one means by which space was ordered to reflect this goal, with the Cistercian monastery variously described as like an earthly paradise, the gateway to heaven, and a place of sweet delights.8 Aelred’s use of the prison space in De Sanctimoniali de Wattun to describe eventual mercy and miracle draws on such ideas. When the nun dreams of the Archbishop of York while imprisoned, the prison space itself becomes not just porous but almost otherworldly, as the bishop appears and disappears over two nights in her dreams. Of course, there is also a practical and orderly function to the dreams. The bishop sternly reminds the nun of the need for confession and for the need to chant certain psalms daily in a sort of ritual or even para-liturgical expression of monastic penance. The performance of appropriate penance in the permeable, transformative space of the prison should be read as underscoring and mirroring quite conventional Cistercian representations of the function and meaning of monastic space. We might also note that the miracle of intervention is reminiscent of other interventions in prisons. St Peter was liberated from prison by an angel, while the patron saint of prisoners, St Leonard of Noblat, appeared to incarcerated men and women rather like St Peter’s angel, urging them to get up (Surge! he is said to have shouted), dissolving their fetters and creating temporary apertures in the walls to enable them to flee. But monastic precincts could also be places of involuntary enclosure, because space itself could be activated to prevent members of the community from leaving. This worked in very material ways, through the eventual integration of monastic prisons into all Cistercian houses by the beginning of the thirteenth century.9 And it also worked through the transformative potential of monastic boundaries. De Sanctimoniali de Wattun tells us that the geographical boundary around Watton itself
20
Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination
tried, ‘through divine power’, to keep the nun within: ‘You rise, miserable woman, you go to the gate. Divine power prevents your effort to get out; trying again, you get nowhere.’10 The miraculous attempts of the precinct boundary to warn and prevent the nun from leaving are echoed in Aelred’s own biography, written by one of his monks at Rievaulx Abbey, Walter Daniel.11 When a potential apostate at Rievaulx attempted to escape, he found ‘empty air at the open doors as though it were a wall of iron’. Repeated attempts to force his leg through the open gate failed, and eventually the novice returned, resigned, to Rievaulx.12 Aelred also incorporates the idea that monastic space should be rigorously guarded by the community and its abbot to exclude vice: Where then, father Gilbert, was your most vigilant sense in the keeping of the discipline? Where was all that exquisite machinery for the exclusion of vice? Where then that prudent care of every gate and window and corner so faithfully girded that access should be denied to sinister spirits? A single girl, father, eluded all your industry because ‘unless the Lord keeps the city, he who guards it is frustrated’.13 The idea of a prisoner within a monastery, therefore, did not necessarily contradict the voluntary nature of Cistercian monastic life, according to writers like Bernard of Clairvaux who described the monastery as a prison, ‘but with open doors’.14 It is quite clear that this sort of language in which confinement and liberation are conflated had deeper historical and spiritual roots. In particular, the dichotomy is reliant on the precedent set by Tertullian in describing the confinement of the Christian martyrs as facilitating their aloneness with God.15 For monks and nuns who had made their profession, the language of captivity could provide useful means by which to describe their journeys toward union with God. For those like the nun of Watton, imprisonment – whether in the monastery or in the ergastulum – was perhaps less of a spiritual vocabulary than a restrictive corporeal reality enforcing a different sort of enclosure. The text that describes the value of her experience, however, constructs the prison as marking out the opportunity for this wayward nun to redeem herself through aloneness and mercy.
Enclosure The creation and maintenance of monastic boundaries was a source of great anxiety to the religious orders from the thirteenth century. Any reader familiar with monastic regulatory or didactic literature from the
Incarceration of the Body
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high and late Middle Ages cannot fail to notice that the principle of enclosure occupies a significant place in such texts. This is particularly the case in texts designed for or about women religious, whose bodies were the subject of increasing interest and control during this period.16 Women themselves were certainly represented as being a source of danger to male religious, while various regulations against allowing women into monastic houses reinforce such a view.17 More often, however, we find that women religious themselves are encouraged and required to consider enclosure as a defining element of their religious practice. As Alexandra Barratt has recently noted, two of the most common Latin words to describe a recluse in the Middle Ages are inclusus and inclusa, both of which derive from includere, to enclose.18 The Cistercians themselves were advocates of enclosure for women, as can be seen in another text by Aelred of Rievaulx, his Rule of Life for a Recluse, produced during the 1160s.19 This was a highly influential text in which the subject of enclosure for women is outlined carefully. The text is addressed to ‘my sister’ (who we should understand to be Aelred’s own sibling) and is constructed in three sections: ‘The Outer Man’, ‘The Inner Man’ and ‘A Threefold Meditation’.20 The text addresses an anchorite, those religious women and men whose enclosure was total, as they were, in the words of Aelred ‘completely enclosed in a cell with the entrance walled up’. Aelred condemns those recluses who believe that corporeal enclosure is sufficient, ‘while the mind roams at random, grows dissolute and distracted by cares, disquieted by impure desires’.21 He is critical of those recluses who gossip and chatter, who encourage visitors, overburden themselves by providing hospitality or allow children access to the cell. He reminds the recluse of the importance of silence, solitude and modesty. A recluse may speak with a priest, preferably ‘an elderly man of good character’ and she must avoid idleness through prayer and reading (the Lives of the Fathers, Cassian’s Institutes, the miracles of the fathers) or manual work. 22 A recluse should fast regularly and especially during Lent. Clothing should be plain and functional; food should not be extravagant. These specific strictures around ascetic practice are outlined in the first section of Aelred’s text and together they delineate the foundations of solitary life as articulated by the ‘monks of old’. Complete corporeal enclosure protected them, as it does the recluse, by removing ‘the very freedom inherent in solitary life and the opportunity it affords for aimless wandering’.23 Aelred reiterates the need to ‘show by our actions that we are but strangers and pilgrims in this world’: this might be done by Lenten fasting in particular, but it is also done by Aelred’s general
22
Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination
emphasis on the essentially exilic state of all humans.24 The recluse, walled up and separate, is the living embodiment of humanity’s current state of exile and the promise of liberation: ‘[the recluse] understands more clearly the significance of Lent insofar as her whole life is the expression of it’. 25 A recluse who protects and uses her enclosed body as an expression of eschatological confinement and liberation outwardly demonstrates the condition of all people. This point is teased out when Aelred comes to consider ‘the Inner Man’. For a recluse, the inner virtue that must be protected is virginity. Aelred writes: ‘what could be more precious than the treasure with which heaven is bought, which delights your angel, which Christ himself longs for, which entices him to love and bestow gifts?’26 The cell in which a recluse lives provides only layer of protection for her virginity, however, as it is the recluse’s own inner conviction which will safeguard her ‘innocence’. A recluse should remember that her body is reserved for Christ, ‘consecrated to God, incorporated in Christ, dedicated to the Holy Spirit’. Her day should be marked with meditation on the virgin saints, like St Agnes, who ‘turned a brothel into an oratory, while the angel who entered together with the virgin flooded the darkness with light and punished with death the man who sought to corrupt her’.27 Central to Aelred’s invocation of the sanctity of virginity and the means by which it may be protected is the space of the recluse’s cell itself. The cell is a porous space which may accommodate an angel, but which should also be the site where the recluse activates her memory to recall and meditate on examples of other religious who have fought with carnal temptations. Here, Aelred effectively encourages the transcendence of physicality through the inspiration of example. Further, the body itself functions as a vessel of enclosure and a protective device. Aelred requires that the recluse should engage in severe fasting if ‘troubled by the warmth of passion’, ‘for when the flesh is sorely afflicted there can be no or little pleasure’.28 It is only by ‘bodily affliction’ coupled with contrition of heart that chastity can be maintained. The recluse should remember that such affliction must be perpetual and Aelred narrates the example of a monk (possibly himself) who found joy in chastity only after plunging himself in cold water, rubbing his body with nettles, inflaming his bare flesh, begging Christ for relief and realising that, even as an old man, his battle with the ‘spirit of fornication’ still needed to be fought. The material body, then, houses the recluse’s virginity and is the physical terrain on which ‘war’ is waged. A ‘glorious triumph over the tyrant’ (gloriosum retulit de tyranno triumphum) will be won if the recluse makes a ‘fierce attack’ on herself.29
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Aelred’s advice to the recluse’s ‘inner’ life turns to describe the virtue of humility as the foundational virtue: ‘the beginning of all sin is pride’ (initium omnis peccati superbia est), he argues. Aelred chooses to emphasise exterior manifestations of humility in the recluse’s life, however, especially in relation to the space of her cell. There should be no decorations in the cell, no ‘paintings or carvings’ or hangings. The altar cloths should be white linen; there may be a representation of Christ on the cross on the altar and perhaps an image of the Virgin mother and John, ‘the virgin disciple’. These external objects will serve to increase the recluse’s charity, by drawing her mind toward ‘the refreshing coolness of chastity’ (refrigerium castitatis) when considering the white linen altar cloth, and union with God when contemplating the images. As Mary ‘sat at Jesus’ feet and listened to what he had to say’, so the recluse’s vocation is to be ‘dead and buried to the world [ ... ], deaf to all that belongs to the world and unable to speak of it’.30 A recluse’s love for her neighbour is thus manifested in the prayer, pity and compassion which proceed from ‘those who resolved to have nothing, to desire nothing’. Her enclosed cell is the means by which these virtues can be achieved and the recluse’s focus can remain with Christ: ‘Let him be your barn, your store cupboard, your purse, your wealth, your delight; let him alone be all things in all.’31 A number of years ago, Ann Warren made the point that the male or female anchorite’s cell contained a number of cultural meanings: ‘it was a version of the desert home of the first Christian anchorites, the arena of spiritual warfare, a place for contemplation, a representation of the prison of the early martyrs, a penitential prison, a refuge, a way station’.32 Warren argued that ‘the cell of enclosure ... was equated with a prison into which the anchorite propelled himself for fear of hell and for love of Christ’.33 The confined physical space of the anchoritic cell replicated the metaphorical monastery/prison in this regard. The opportunity to be alone with God and the opportunity to reject worldly temptations and distractions, as Aelred expresses in the De institutione inclusorum, is the real function of confinement. Indeed, for Aelred and other Cistercian writers, ascetic space – whether cenobitic or anchoritic – is the space of freedom, while the world outside is the real prison, the ‘symbol of death’ as one thirteenth-century Cistercian wrote.34 Aelred’s words were replicated in part in the famous Ancrene Wisse, a treatise written in the vernacular probably after 1215 in the West Midlands in England.35 This was a text composed for three sisters and forms part of a bigger corpus of texts including saints’ lives and meditations which survives in 17 extant manuscripts.36 Recent scholarship
24 Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination
has shown a strong Dominican character to the text, in part due to the emphasis on confession as one of the central anchoritic practices, and it has been argued that the author of the treatise was himself a Dominican. The Ancrene Wisse is divided into a preface and eight distinctiones which deal with various modes of protecting the ‘inner’ self and with external or ‘outer’ regulatory practices such as dress. There is also a handful of explicit references to incarceration as a state on which the recluse should ponder, and as a fruitful analogy to the anchoritic condition. In the first part of the treatise on devotions, the author instructs the recluse to meditate on the state of Christian prisoners: At some time, day or night, gather in our heart all sick and sorrowful who suffer hardship and poverty, the pains that prisoners suffer and endure where they lie heavily fettered with iron – especially for the Christians who are in heathendom, some in prison, some in as much slavery as an ox or an ass. Have pity on those who are in strong temptation: set all their sorrows in your heart, and sigh to our Lord that he may take pity on them and look toward them with the eye of his mercy. And if you have time say the psalm I have lifted up my eye (Psalm 120); and Our Father; the Versicle Return, o Lord, how long?37 This exhortation relates to the meditative context of anchoritic prayer, while the bodily suffering of Christian captives is stressed. It has been suggested that the author is perhaps thinking specifically of Christian captives in the holy land here, and if this is the case, then it is abundantly clear that the recluse’s meditation on those faraway prisoners forms one part of her wider social function as performer of prayer and supplication on behalf of others.38 That is, although physical enclosure is the precondition of the anchoritic life, the ability to act outside the walls of the cell – as an anchorite would do with prayer – is also important.39 The anchorite’s own state of prison-like enclosure is more forcefully articulated in a longer section on the protection of the heart in a discussion of the ‘outer’ senses. The heart must be protected with every defence, writes the author, ‘for if she is locked well away the soul’s life is in her’.40 This might be done in quite specific physical ways, including disciplining the eyes against wandering to the window: ‘love your windows as little as you possibly can’, he writes. Looking out will lead to sin, just as Eve sinned by contemplating the forbidden fruit. Eve first looked at the apple and ‘leapt after her eyes, from the eye to the apple, from the apple to paradise down to the earth, from the earth to hell,
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where she lay in prison four thousand years and more, she and her husband both, and condemned all her offspring to leap after her to death without end’.41 This form of terrestrial imprisonment is terminal as it results in the permanent confinement of the soul. The eyes, with their natural fleshly propensity to wander, should be guarded against moving toward the material outside world lest Eve’s precedent be replicated. Such advice and the ocular economy which it supposes had a longer history: St Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermon De conversione, for example, also advised the Cistercian novice to enclose the senses in the monastic cloister, to ‘close the windows, fasten the doors’ against sin, and to think on the consequence of Eve’s gaze.42 A third use of the prison motif appears in the third section of the treatise on ‘the inner feelings’. Describing the best remedy against harmful words and deeds, the author provides the following analogy: A man who lay in prison and had to pay an enormous ransom, and could in no way come out except to the hanged unless he had paid his ransom in full – would he not greatly thank someone who threw a bag of coins at him to redeem himself with and release himself from suffering – even if it was thrown very hard at his heart? All the pain would be forgotten in his gladness.43 He continues: ‘In the same way we are all in prison here, and owe God great debts of sin ... For without payment no-one is taken out of this prison who is not hanged at once either in purgatory or in the torment of hell.’44 This most interesting passage throws the highly contractual nature of Christian devotion into sharp relief. God has established the terms for participation in this contract and had offered the quid pro quo of forgiveness as payment for the debt of sin. Imprisonment, it is inferred, is a temporary state which can be negotiated even if that negotiation involves pain; for the anchorite, payment takes the form of penitence and confession. It is only without adequate payment that imprisonment will assume the eternal quality of punishment, either (rather loosely) in purgatory or hell. This language of punishment gained some longevity; it is also found in an early sixteenth- century enclosure ceremony for anchorites where the preface explains that an anchorite should ‘therefore think he is convicted on his sins and committed to solitary confinement as to a prison and that on account of his own weakness he is unworthy of the fellowship of mankind’.45 The kind of anchoritic space imagined in the Ancrene Wisse and in De Institutione inclusarum is at once porous and carefully delineated.46 It
26 Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination
may be equated with a prison both metaphorically and metonymically, as the material boundaries of the cell are simultaneously intended to signify and exist as a protective form of enclosure. Yet the conditions of imprisonment possess a liberating purpose: an anchorite who is described as being ‘in a strange land, put in a prison, enclosed in a torture chamber’ may, through the sublimity of the soul become as a bird – light, with little flesh and many feathers, able to ‘fly well’ and free of the constrictions and distractions imposed by the weighty carnality of her own body.47 The protective function of enclosure should thus be understood to be multi-layered, beginning with the outer walls of the cell which house the body. The body in turn houses the heart, which keeps and defends the soul itself.48 Protecting the soul so that it may ultimately be free is the purpose of anchoritic incarceration. A final forceful example of spatial confinement is given in the Life of Christina Markyate. This famous twelfth- century English recluse had escaped the snares of marriage in order to protect her virginity.49 Frustrated in her desire to join a convent, Christina hid in the holy space of an anchorite’s cell. Christina’s vita describes her anchoritic prison thus: Near the chapel of the old man and joined to his cell was a room which made an angle where it joined. This had a plank of wood placed before it and was so concealed that to anyone looking from outside it would seem that no one was present within, since the space was not bigger than a span and a half. In this prison, therefore, Roger placed his happy companion. In front of the door he rolled a heavy log of wood, the weight of which was actually so great that it could not be put in its place or taken away by the recluse. And so, thus confined, the handmaid of Christ sat on a hard stone until Roger’s death, that is, four years and more, concealed even from those who dwelt together with Roger. O what trials she had to bear of cold and heat, hunger and thirst, daily fasting! The confined space would not allow her to wear even the necessary clothing when she was cold. The airless little enclosure became stifling when she was hot. Through long fasting, her bowels became contracted and dried up.50 Christina’s body endured many trials in this ‘prison’, which is also described as a ‘her hiding-place’ (latebras suas). Although we know that Christina had wished to assume a cenobitic rather than a solitary life (which she eventually did, and which provides the mise en scène for the rest of the vita), the experience of physical incarceration remained
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important to the subsequent narration of her spiritual outlook. When Christina was relocated to a hermitage attached to the monastery of St Albans, her visions describe ‘an enclosure surrounded by transparent high fences’ (constituta vida ambitum quemdam de lignis candissimis) which looked like ‘a cloister without doors and windows’ (et hiis perspicuis circumseptum ostio fenestrisque carentem ad modum claustri). She acts as an intercessor for the abbot of St Albans, who came to view Markyate as a sanctuary (si asilum suum) and she ‘freed him from those things which had nearly consumed him, by fasting, keeping vigil, exhorting from God, supplicating the saints in heaven and on earth with prayers and pleas for the mercy of God to be upon him’.51 Here, the language of enclosure at either end of Christina’s vita reflects both the protective quality of bodily imprisonment for Christina herself and the permeability of sacred space through the activities of the recluse. That the reclusive body is frequently female in these examples is also important in accounting for the emphasis on protecting virginity. Although male anchorites and monks were also to be chaste, the particular purity associated with the bodies of female religious is consistently emphasised in these regulatory anchoritic texts.52 Virginity, that ‘treasure with which heaven is bought’, in Aelred’s words, was understood to be the most superior state of the flesh and required special and strict protection for women.53 It is perhaps no surprise that prison imagery provided an important means of describing such protection, given its concurrent implications of corporeal enclosure and spiritual freedom. The fleshly, sensory female body which houses that ‘treasure’, may be understood to require more efforts at protective enclosure – more confinement – than a male body might.54 At the same time, that permeable female flesh could also experience the body of Christ in acutely somatic ways: a later redaction of Aelred’s De Institutione inclusarum instructs the recluse to ‘crepe into that blessed syde’ of Christ, for instance, while other images urge the recluse to consider the anchoritic cell as a womb.55 Such terminology might be read as encouraging the enclosure of the body, but it also reminds the female recluse that her untainted and protected body may encounter God and attain the perfection of spiritual union in unique fashion. And although scholarship on the female body usually stresses a shift from anchoritic to mystical spirituality from the thirteenth century, the language of imprisonment used throughout the period suggests that there were already highly somatic and complex discourses at work in female piety which predated the rise of the ‘beguines’.
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Regulation and the monastic prison Monastic regulations dealing with the actual practice of imprisonment should be read in the light of the vocabularies of enclosure, containment and imprisonment outlined above. In so doing, it is clear that the functions of separation, solitude and punishment embedded in monastic uses of imprisonment were directed at maintaining the boundaries of monastic space in order to secure and make active its transcendent properties. Again, the Cistercian order provides a good example. The Cistercian order avoided the imposition of external discipline through episcopal visitation by virtue of early exemption. Cistercians had their own institutional system of regulation which required all abbots of every Cistercian house to attend the annual General Chapter meeting at Cîteaux, and to visit each of their ‘daughter’ houses each year, too. Indeed, it was the Cistercian model of visitation which provided the template for episcopal visitation of other religious houses.56 The decisions made by the Cistercian General Chapter were recorded in the statutes (Statuta) issued from their annual meeting at Cîteaux. It was expected that the abbots of individual houses would report on the decisions made at the General Chapter meeting to their own houses, and, through visitation to their daughter houses, oversee the implementation and maintenance of the various policy outcomes of the Chapter. The General Chapter thus dealt with an enormous range of issues, from finance to liturgical practice, from the uniformity of dress to instructions to individual houses to repair their premises. Many of the Statuta relate to that rather nebulous category of monastic ‘discipline’. Overall the Statuta are a crucial repository of information about the administration of the Cistercian order from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. There are also numerous examples of imprisonment throughout. The first formal statute relating to Cistercian monastic prisons appears in 1206, when the General Chapter formally decreed that new prisons should be constructed in whichever abbey desired them, and should be used specifically for the incarceration of troublemakers and apostates.57 By 1229 the General Chapter was more forthright about the need for prisons within monastic precincts, declaring that all Cistercian abbeys that were able ought to build a strong prison in which criminals would be held.58 Other monastic legislation followed the Cistercian lead: in 1238 Dominican convents were ordered to build prisons, in 1261 Carthusian houses were required to do the same, while much later – in 1343 – it was decided that Benedictine houses must incorporate a prison.59
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The General Chapter distinguished between ‘light’ fault (levi culpa) and what was considered to be serious fault (gravi culpa) in deciding on a sentence of incarceration for monks and lay brothers of their order. In every case imprisonment was reserved for those crimes considered to be grave, especially those which were intended to be violent or which were acts of violence. In 1226, for instance, a monk of Jouy was sentenced to perpetual incarceration for threatening to kill his abbot with a razor.60 Perpetual incarceration appears more frequently after 1229, when we find examples such as the violent lay brother (conversus) in 1241 being sentenced to perpetual imprisonment for mutilating the abbot of the German house of Eberbach.61 In 1261, reacting to an outbreak of conversi violence at Eberbach, the General Chapter declared that anyone who killed an abbot would be condemned to life imprisonment.62 Lay brothers again were sentenced to imprisonment in 1275 for cutting off the nose of one of the choir monks. They were not to leave their carcer until the General Chapter decided to release them.63 This discretionary aspect to incarceration is also found in a case from 1290 where we are told that the abbot of Clairvaux who was selected to deal with the perennially difficult house of Eberbach ought to deal with the troublesome monks and conversi by imprisonment or whatever other punishment he saw fit to exercise.64 Perpetual incarceration seems to have been viewed with some desperation by those religious who were required to live out that sentence. When Thomas de Tonge of Buildwas Abbey in Shropshire murdered his abbot and was incarcerated in the monastic prison, he found himself able to endure only a short period of his sentence before he broke out of the prison in 1341.65 Less violent crimes were occasionally punished by imprisonment as well. The unspecified crimes committed by the subversive lay brother of Maris Stellae in 1256 resulted in a sentence of perpetual incarceration for the ‘many indecent and dishonest things’ (multa indecentia et inhonestia) he committed against the order.66 Only two years later the abbot of Berola, Andreas, was also sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, this time for a variety of unspecified contumacious acts, which saw him transform, in the words of the statute, from ‘sheeplike humility to beastlike rabidity’, damning many, mourned the General Chapter, by his pernicious example.67 The General Chapter subsequently passed legislation in 1266 that any monk found committing sodomy was to be incarcerated.68 And as late as 1397 a monk was imprisoned after having been convicted of theft and discovered with a woman in the dormitory.69
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It does appear that certain transgressions seem to have warranted imprisonment more than others. Apostasy, like crimes of violence, was one of these. Apostasy had long been of concern to the Cistercian order and apostates were subject to a range of responses and punishments, depending on the nature of the act of apostasy itself and the crimes which accompanied it. The General Chapter distinguished between types of apostasy: at one end of the spectrum were monks who ran away from their monastery with the permanent intention of never returning (generally described as fugitives), and at the other end were monks who might have travelled outside the monastic precinct without permission and who may or may not have committed other crimes beyond the monastery walls. Once apostates were found and returned to the monastery, they faced various forms of public punishment, as was the case in nonCistercian houses. In 1221 the General Chapter decreed that fugitive priests should fast on bread and water every Friday for one year, and on those days should ‘accept the discipline’ (or be beaten) in chapter.70 Lay brothers and monks who returned to the monastery as thieves,71 would be last in all things, fast on bread and water every Friday for a year and eat rough bread for 40 days, while lay brothers would eat their meals from the floor of the refectory for 40 days and be beaten in chapter for a year.72 By 1271, all apostates were to eat their meals from the floor for a year and wear the habit which the abbot decreed for them. Monks were to be shaved in the same way as conversi.73 Such rituals of humiliation for fugitives worked alongside various sentences of incarceration. Brother Michael, a runaway monk who had had committed an ‘unspeakable vice’ and then fled from the monastery of Sancta Maria in 1266 was to be captured and held in the strongest chains; conspiratorial and fugitive monks of Dobrelech were to be found, excommunicated and where possible incarcerated; while the conversi of Neath who stole the abbot’s horse and rode off on it from their monastery were given one month to return both themselves and presumably the horse to Neath in 1269, or be captured and imprisoned.74 In 1282 the General Chapter decided that whichever monk or lay brother (among other crimes) left the order and adopted regular or non-monastic clothing would be held in shackles or chains or imprisoned by the order.75 This ‘blanket’ decree was enforced in 1291, when Brother Peter, a fugitive, was ordered to be captured and imprisoned.76 As I have argued in an earlier study, it is useful to read the use of imprisonment by the Cistercian monastic order as evidence of their continued interest in the foundational principles of stability and enclosure.77 This would perhaps explain why the thirteenth- century
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legislation is so full of instances of imprisonment as a means of enforcing these principles: we might imagine that in the light of newer mendicant and peripatetic forms of the religious life from around 1200, those enclosed orders like the Cistercians may have found it more necessary to remind their monks of the particular spatially confined nature of their monastic vocation. Cistercian writers had long found notions of imprisonment useful in expressing the monastic enterprise generally, and the physical environment of the monastery more specifically. This was not peculiar to the Cistercians, but it does seem that this reform order did find something especially meaningful in ideas of bodily and metaphorical imprisonment, and that enforcing confinement within monastic space provided opportunities to remind the entire monastic community of the continued need for withdrawal from the world. That incarceration was considered to be a suitable penance for apostates indicates the Order’s general commitment to enforcing such withdrawal. The importance of enclosure was articulated in non- Cistercian monastic settings, too. Another regulatory text (or set of texts) in which monastic prisons make an appearance is the well-known register of the thirteenth- century Norman archbishop, Eudes Rigaud.78 As with other episcopal registers, Rigaud’s records the visits made by the archbishop to various religious houses in his archdiocese, and thus provides intriguing insights into the issues felt by the archbishop to be important to record and correct, and the state of various monastic houses around Normandy during the mid-thirteenth century. Eudes Rigaud’s register provides a useful comparison with the Cistercian efforts at regulating enclosure and stability through the use of the prison. Much of the work done by Rigaud can be said to relate directly to the enforcement of enclosure in both general and specific ways. At St Martin-la- Garenne, for instance, the archbishop was concerned to find that in 1249 ‘the cloister is not kept closed’, while in the same year at Cormeilles he recorded that his visitation team ‘enjoined the abbot to provide a better guard for the cloister’.79 The following year at the Augustinian monastery of Cherbourg ‘we ordered that a porter be appointed to stand at the cloister gate and prevent layfolk from entering’ – ‘so far as he can do it tactfully’ – and in 1259 at St Georges ‘we gave orders for the cellarer to keep the keys of the doors at night’.80 There are dozens of similar examples where Rigaud expresses concern that monastic enclosures are being violated by the presence of lay people and prescribes the employment of porters to mitigate access. Specific mentions of prisons in the register turn up a range of different situations. We find that some monasteries possessed their own
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prisons, such as the priory at Juziers, which the archbishop visited in 1259. This priory had a prison adjoining the cloister ‘where malefactors and thieves were confined’. Rigaud noted that ‘we ordered them to hold court somewhere else, far from the church, and to build their prison beyond the consecrated ground and beyond the cemetery’.81 In 1266, Eudes Rigaud ordered that an imprisoned canon at the priory of Bourg-Achard (whose name was Geoffrey Boîte) should be given some ‘breviary or other book so that [he] could say his Hours and pray. We ordered the prior to make him confess and receive Communion every week’ (28 June). We hear of the same prisoner a year later, where it is noted that there were 12 canons, one of whom, ‘Geoffrey, called Box, was being held in prison there’.82 At the abbey at Le Val- Sainte-Marie in 1267, Rigaud recorded that a ‘certain canon was being kept there in prison. Sometimes he was given to vociferation and unbridled vituperation and thus disturbed and molested the community. We then ordered the abbot to put distance between this simpleton and the community, and to have his prison constructed somewhere else’.83 Tantalising references to the practice of imprisonment appear in an entry for 1250, when Rigaud was at Ste Catherine, where the monastic population numbered 30. There, ‘Caleboche and another monk, who are now in prison, sing dissolute songs; we ordered that they be corrected by cutting off their food and subjecting them to discipline’.84 We do not know whether these ‘dissolute’ monks were imprisoned within the abbey itself, or elsewhere, or whether the period of imprisonment was a temporary state until the penances of flagellation and fasting had been undertaken. The same vagueness occurs in the 1250 entry for the monastery of St Martin-de-Pontoise: ‘Herbert, the vicar of Melli, is said to have been apprehended with a certain married woman; he was treated harshly and put in prison, and paid a fine to the mayor. Herbert has promised to regard his vicarate as resigned if he is ill-famed of this again, provided however that the ill-fame can be proved’.85 Where this prison may have been is unclear, although the payment of the fine to a secular official would suggest that the place of incarceration was outside the monastery itself. Some cases indicate that members of the religious house could certainly be confined within the monastery, although a specific prison building is not necessarily mentioned. This is the case at the priory of Murzy, which Rigaud visited in 1258: ‘there was a certain insane monk there, Dom Simon by name, who was thoroughly deranged and a living scandal to all monks; we admonished the companions of the prior to strive to have him confined to the cloister or sent to the infirmary’.86
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And a similar entry appears in 1259 at Valmont where ‘there were twenty-six monks; one was simple-minded; we gave orders that he be well-watched and guarded lest he escape’.87 When Rigaud discovered that one monk, Brother Richard of Eprèville, had ‘performed a clandestine marriage between a certain man and his own daughter, whom he had begotten after he had become a monk and after receiving priestly orders’, the monk was placed in grave fault for 40 days and ‘not permitted to leave the cloister during the said penance, nor even when it had been completed’.88 In 1265, Rigaud upheld a decision by the community of St Wandrille to separate brother William of Modec, one of their monks. William had been ‘ordered to remain alone in a certain room, entirely shut off and separated from all association with the community and the monks, for that he had unadvisedly and evilly spoken words in open chapter which had scandalized and disturbed the community, we did not care to make any change in such an ordinance’.89 The entries relating to monastic imprisonment in the archbishop’s register are minimal. Nonetheless, they are helpful in indicating the various functions of incarceration according to one archbishop. The principal purpose of imprisonment was – unsurprisingly – physical separation. The monks who speak scandalous words, such as William of Modec, or the singers of dissolute songs, were imprisoned as a way of creating physical distance between them and the rest of the monastic community, as was Rigaud’s order to relocate the prison further away from the community at Juziers. This is reflected in other sources including episcopal registers of the same period. One example may be found in northern England in 1286, where Archbishop John le Romeyn of York included in his register an order to search for a monk of Rievaulx Abbey, Godfrey Darel. According to the archbishop, Darel had apostatised and was said to be wandering around in secular habit, deceiving the faithful by his words of sorcery and ‘nefarious incantations’ to the scandal of all orthodox Christians.90 The archbishop ordered that Darel be found and his case investigated.91 Given that by 1286 the principal punishment for apostasy in the Cistercian order was incarceration, this was presumably the fate of Godfrey Darel.92 In the register of John Peckham, Archbishop of Canterbury, prisons are also used for the separation of unruly members of the community – a nun of Llanthony Priory in Monmouthshire who is described as pertinax was ordered to be separated from the rest of the community and housed alone in a room, where she was to eat and drink and speak to no one until she was penitent. If she continued to be obdurate, then she was to be chained and imprisoned (carceri et vinculis mancipetur).93 And in the Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond, the
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incarceration of Ralph the gatekeeper served the same purpose. Ralph had created some dissension in the monastery and a split in the community between those who wanted to support the abbot and those who didn’t. To illustrate the principle that ‘Every kingdom that is divided against itself shall be brought to desolation’, the abbot ‘commanded one of our brethren, whom he most suspected to come to him and because he did not come, since he feared to be seized and bound, he was excommunicated and afterwards put in chains for a whole day and remained till morning in the infirmary’.94 We might also note that Archbishop Rigaud was clearly concerned to assert his jurisdiction over specific non-monastic prisons and various wrongdoers. In one instance, Rigaud petitioned the French queen in 1252 to confirm a non-written agreement allowing him the right to transfer some particular prisoners from royal custody to the episcopal prison at Rouen.95 We know from an entry in the register for the previous year that the bishop’s manor at Rouen was also used for the purposes of detention, in this case for one Thibaut of Chateau, a cleric pledged to the crusade, who was a suspected homicide.96 The archbishop speaks again of his ‘own prison’ in 1253 when he reports on issuing a condemnation of heresy against Jean Marel, ‘a heretic whom we had long detained in our prison’.97 Again, the references are few, but indicate at least in outline that this archbishop maintained some interest in preserving the rights of jurisdiction attached to his office. The register of a committed upholder of ecclesiastical discipline such as Eudes Rigaud thus provides a useful set of issues with which to think about the use and meaning of imprisonment in a monastic context. The continued assertion of the foundational principle of enclosure in monastic practice, either voluntary or involuntary, was clearly a priority for this archbishop. For monastic houses themselves, which also had their own regimes of disciplinary practice, the same principle was also asserted throughout the thirteenth century and beyond, and connected to other, broader discourses around the function of enclosure. Jacques de Vitry tells the tale of a monk who had been brought up from childhood in a monastery and had never seen a woman: This monk accompanied the abbot on a journey. While the abbot’s horse was being shod, the monk picked up the hot horseshoe in his hand, and was not burned, much to the abbot’s surprise. They spent that night in the house of a secular family, and the monk, through ignorance, sinned with the wife of the host. On their return the horse had to be shod again, and the abbot told the monk to pick up
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the horseshoe. When he did this, his hand was burned. The abbot asked him what he had done, and, on learning the truth, shut him up in the cloister, and did not let him travel again.98 Ignorance was one reason why this monk had unwittingly sinned. But the fact that monk was ‘contaminated’ by the secular world, the world outside the protective boundaries of the monastic precinct, nicely summarises the notion that monastic space itself was considered to be ideally flawless. The burnt skin of the sinning monk in this exemplum marks him out as having violated both his own body and the perimeter of purity that delineated monastic space. The forcible enclosure of this monk who is ‘shut up in the cloister’ as a result of his sin provides Jacques de Vitry with the means to stress the preservation and protection of the corporeal and spatial boundaries separating the monk from the outside world. Jacques de Vitry’s exempla would have resonated with monastic writers who, as I have shown, also mapped monastic space through a vocabulary of enclosure in which the idea of imprisonment was central. The often feminised language of monastic enclosure and the use of imprisonment were connected to frame and emphasise the unique nature of monastic space. Regulatory and disciplinary texts emphasised containment and enclosure through the delineation of prisonlike boundaries that were activated in a restrictive sense when the monastic community was threatened. But those same boundaries also marked out monastic space as a site of opportunity for its inhabitants. Whether voluntarily or involuntarily enclosed, monks and nuns were reminded that bodily containment, physical enclosure and withdrawal from the world were all pathways to the limitless but safely inclusive eternity that awaited them.
2 Prison Miracles and the Cult of Saints
The month of May was a busy time in the Bavarian town of Inchenhofen, when during the warm southern German spring the volume of pilgrim traffic to the small Markt increased. The source of the pilgrims’ interest was a shrine to St Leonard of Noblac, a French saint, whose cult had spread to Bavaria and become firmly entrenched in the market economy and spiritual landscape of the region since the late thirteenth century.1 Leonard was a general thaumaturge – he healed the sick and cured the mad; he rescued small children from drowning; he assisted women who endured suffering during childbirth. But by far the most frequent miracle performed by this most active saint was the liberation of prisoners from captivity. Men and women alike arrived at Inchenhofen to narrate their escapes from various situations of imprisonment after invoking St Leonard, some still wearing the chains that had shackled them to the walls of dank dungeons and impenetrable towers. Others brought votive offerings – wax or iron representations of chains and fetters, models of limbs which had been bound and were now released, and even microcosmic replicas of the towers which had served as their prisons. These objects were donated to the shrine as mementos of prison experiences and thankful testimony to the wondrous workings of the saint. St Leonard was not the only saint to be associated with imprisonment during the medieval period. Many saints were either said to have experienced imprisonment themselves, or they were said to provide comfort to or liberate captives. But St Leonard’s particular and central association with freeing prisoners is unique. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the representation of imprisonment in the miracles of St Leonard, particularly the collection of miracles that were produced at the pilgrimage church of Inchenhofen in Bavaria (south-western Germany) from the later thirteenth century 36
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and written down primarily in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. These miracle stories documented the tales told by pilgrims at the Inchenhofen church and, as the narrative link between the captive’s experience of imprisonment and the efficacious work of the saint, they served powerful testimonial and constructive purposes. Indeed, the miracle stories were part of a highly dynamic process of cultic production in which imprisonment and liberation were tied tightly together. The act of pilgrimage itself was central to these stories because a prisoner’s vow to visit Leonard’s shrine at Inchenhofen if he or she were liberated by the saint was the moment at which St Leonard would then act. Thus, the promise, the pilgrimage and the public telling of St Leonard’s miracle work together delineated a community that was specially protected by the saint. Further, the miracles of St Leonard demonstrate that ideas of imprisonment in medieval religious thinking were not the sole preserve of monks and nuns who had chosen lives of voluntary (or involuntary) enclosure. Imprisonment and liberation could also be useful discourses for all pious Christians, whether captive or free. The cult of St Leonard disseminated the message that whatever the bonds of captivity one might endure – corporeal or spiritual – active participation in the veneration of this saint could effect liberation from those bonds. Such liberation was both corporeal and spiritual, too, but more importantly, it was eternal. Medieval Christians could avail themselves of this reward by including themselves in the devotional community around St Leonard through the performance of specific acts of piety like the ones recorded and publicised in the miracle books.
Saintly prisoners Medieval audiences were familiar with images and representations of imprisonment in the cult of saints. In a number of hagiographies, a saint is incarcerated as part of a longer set of tortures prior to martyrdom. In others, saints miraculously appear to those in prison, either to liberate them or provide comfort. And the example of St Peter ad vincula provided something of a model for representations of liberation from captivity. The use of imprisonment in medieval hagiographies can therefore be linked to both conventions of hagiographical narrative (the tale of martyrdom), and to the discursive value of the prison as a space where lessons on the liberating propensities of the faith could be expressed. Typically, imprisonment was frequently represented as constituting part of the process of suffering which would lead to a saint’s martyrdom.
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The Legenda Aurea typically lingers over the gruesome tortures inflicted on various saints while they were held captive. We hear of St Barbara of Nicomedia, for instance, who was incarcerated prior to being decapitated by her father, and brought out of the prison in order to undergo further bodily tortures including being beaten and having her bloodied body covered with salt. St Agatha is said to have been stretched and twisted on a rack while in prison until she eventually died. And St George underwent a protracted period of imprisonment before being tortured to death.2 The spatial dimensions of these saint-prisons are also emphasised. Sometimes they are described as dark, or the saint is ‘shut fast’ within it, and so on. But at other times, they are endured happily by the saint: St Agatha was said to have refused to leave her prison although the jailers had fled and the doors were open, as to do so would deny her ‘the crown of patience’ her martyrdom required. But this initial emphasis on saintly suffering should be read alongside another function of imprisonment in saints’ lives, which was to emphasise a saint’s unique encounters with the divine. Mostly drawing on the model of St Peter ad vincula, hagiographers spoke of the prison as a space where Christ appears, where angels visit, where rays of light suddenly break through stone walls. It was from this tale that other liberation miracles (including those of St Leonard) were partly drawn. The narrative of St Peter derives from Acts 12:1–10, which tells that Peter had been imprisoned by Herod and chained up between two guards. One night, an angel appeared to him in the prison, filling the space with light and commanding him to get up, and after Peter’s chains dropped off, the angel led him past the two guards (who did not rouse from their slumbers) and out of the prison. The story was retold throughout the early Christian and medieval period, and immediately assumed a place in the repertoire of images of captivity used in sermons, among other texts.3 One rather poignant and very early example may be found in a sermon preached by the Italian ecclesiast Arator in 544 at the church of St Peter ad vincula in Rome, on the eve of Justinian’s invasion. Arator likened Rome itself to the captive saint, reminding his anxious audience of the protective and liberating power of St Peter: It is through these chains Rome, that your faith was strengthened, through these chains that your salvation was made eternal. Encompassed with their bonds, you will always be free: for what can these chains fail to provide which were touched by a man who has the power to set everything free? Because of his hand, these walls are invincible, because of his triumph are they holy, never to suffer total
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destruction at the hands of any enemy. He who opens a gateway to the stars also closes off the way to war.4 Odo of Canterbury, in a twelfth-century sermon Ad vincula sancti Petri, stressed that the illumination of Peter’s own prison at the appearance of the angel should be likened to a human mind enlightened by the inspirational presence of the grace of Christ, while the angel’s cry to Peter to arise should alert the individual to awaken his soul to receive the illumination that is Christ. Christians should follow Christ to escape the bonds of their inner captivity (sin) just as Peter followed the angel from prison. When Peter said in wonderment, ‘now I know that it is really true: the Lord did sent his angel and save me from the hands of Herod and from all that the Jewish people were expecting’, Odo explains that Christians, too, should understand that Christ will lead them to safety from the devil and his angels.5 St Peter’s own incarceration represents, for Odo, the interior journey of all Christians toward God. That journey will culminate, for those who follow Christ, with death and entry to paradise. The Dominican evangelist and great sermon writer St Vincent Ferrer is another who composed on St Peter ad vincula and added a more elaborate gloss on the text from Acts. In one sermon St Vincent explained that there were three ways in which the example of St Peter could be explored: literally, figuratively and morally.6 A literal reading is a historical one, as Ferrer outlines, while a figurative or allegorical reading would explore the symbols within the tale. The carcer, for example, signifies a state of mortal sin (peccati mortalis), which might be further emphasised by the prison’s physical characteristics. There are seven of types of prison condition, according to Ferrer, which equate with various specific sins. For instance, the shadowy darkness of the prison signifies the sin of pride, and the subterranean aspect of the prison signifies the sin of avarice. The moral or tropological reading is where the individual is reminded of the necessity to place himself within the Christian community of the faithful, in interior and exterior senses, in order to free himself from sin.7 The sermon ends with a reminder to the individual to partake in the sacrament in memory of Christ’s promise that whomever should ‘eat my flesh and drink my blood has eternal life’. When Peter uttered the words ‘the Lord saved me from the hands of Herod’, we should understand Herod’s hands to mean sin (Dominus eripuit me de manu herodis, id est peccato). The tale of St Peter ad vincula should be also read alongside the more familiar potestas claves iconography of the saint. As the holder of the
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keys to ‘bind and loose’, St Peter has both liberating and confining functions: he may exclude just as much as he may include. In his representations ad vincula, Peter reminds the viewer that captivity is not simply a material matter, but a spiritual one. The miraculous intervention of the angel, or the presence of the divine, can release one from earthly, bodily confinement, but only if one is part of the community of the faithful – described sacramentally in the example of Vincent Ferrer, above. The prison space thus provided a rich vocabulary for describing the true nature of captivity. It was not the incarceration of the body alone which created the condition of imprisonment. Rather, sin and exclusion from the Christian community were the real conditions of captivity, as these had eternal consequences. St Peter, as both the holder of the keys to the kingdom of heaven and a human example of freedom through faith, allowed those who heard his story to remember the possibility of mercy and the promise of reward in eternal life. In other hagiographies, saints themselves are the ones to release prisoners. Again, this is frequently narrated in the Legenda Aurea. One example comes from the Life of St Mark, in which we hear the story of a man from Mantua who was imprisoned after being falsely accused of slander: After forty days he could not stand the confinement any longer. He disciplined himself by fasting for three days, then prayed to St Mark for help. The saint appeared to him and ordered him to leave the prison without hindrance. Half asleep with boredom, he thought he was suffering illusions and did not obey the saint’s order, but Mark repeated the visit and the order a second and third time. Now the prisoner paid attention and, seeing the door wide open, broke his shackles as if they were flaxen thread and walked out at midday unmolested, passing by the jailers and everyone else, seeing them all but invisible to them.8 The narrative debt to the tale of Peter ad vincula is clear in Jacobus de Voragine’s account. Like the angel, St Mark appears within the prison cell, commands the prisoner to rise, and the bonds which hold the prisoner are miraculously dissolved. Similar, too, is the subsequent ease with which the prisoner leaves the prison: he departs in broad daylight, he walks past the guards and others, but he is protected by the saint who prevents him from being seen. Saints who performed miracles of liberation could also be connected with more local concerns. Saint Ubaldo of Gubbio, for example, was said
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to have been responsible for the release from prison of 20 local knights who had been captured by the Saracens. These imprisoned men had prayed to their patron saint, who promptly appeared to them, dissolved their fetters and led them to safety.9 In Merovingian hagiography, where a substantial literature exists on the prominence of liberation miracles, these miracles served to bolster the developing power of both the episcopate and newly founded monasteries. Fortunatus’ Vita Germani is one example where the bishop (Germanus) himself is depicted as the liberator of souls unjustly oppressed by tyrants. Fortunatus tells of a group of prisoners who were urged by Germanus to dig their way out after his petitions to the authorities to release them had failed. This they did, using a rib-bone from an animal and the grateful prisoners then ran to Church to thank the bishop.10 In the miracles of Our Lady of Rocamadour, the Virgin is said to have intervened in local disputes to free prisoners captured during times of warfare. One squire, Peter, was captured, incarcerated in a tower of such impregnability that no one had ever escaped from it, and was chained up with a noose around his neck. His prayers were heard and he was released, only to be captured again. This time, he fasted with more vigilance and ‘fortified his spirit with diligent prayer’ until Our Lady released him again.11 Such miracles localised saintly and divine intervention while offering tales of comfort to those who heard them.
The cult of St Leonard Chief among the medieval saints who freed prisoners was St Leonard of Noblac. Leonard’s cult was French in origin, and his primary shrine was in Noblac, some 20 kilometres from Limoges in the Limousin region. The cult itself is mentioned for the first time in the Chronicon of Adhemar of Chabannes,12 and it was also in the eleventh century that the earliest vita of St Leonard was composed. It has been shown that St Leonard’s written vita itself cannot be dated any earlier than 1028, although it had certainly been produced by 1031, and it is generally accepted that the cult was invented during this same period.13 According to the vita, the future saint Leonard was a member of a noble Frankish family at the time of King Clovis. His godfather was St Remigius of Reims. Remigius had himself persuaded the Frankish king Clovis to decree that whenever the king entered the city of Reims, all prisoners there, either in chains or in prisons (in vinculis seu in carceribus) would be set free. As a disciple of Remigius, St Leonard was granted the power to visit and free anyone held in prison (si eos ipse voluisset visitare, omnino solverentur) and his particular association
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with the liberation of prisoners quickly grew. Leonard entered a monastery for a short time, and was then active as a preacher throughout Aquitaine. After praying successfully for the health of Queen Clothilde as she laboured in childbirth, Leonard was granted land near Limoges by Clovis in order to live there as a hermit. It was this place which Leonard called Nobiliacum, or Noblac. As St Leonard’s reputation grew, so did the pilgrimage traffic, and the little church established at Noblac soon became full of the chains and fetters these pilgrims brought with them as evidence of their miraculous releases from captivity.14 From the outset, both pilgrimage and the accumulation of ex voto objects were part of the cult of this saint, and in the church of Noblac itself was one stop on the more popular route to Santiago de Compostela. Attached to the eleventh- century vita (and reproduced in the Acta sanctorum) are two early groups of miracles attributed to St Leonard, which were composed sometime after 1030 and during the twelfth century respectively.15 These are posthumous miracles and the Acta sanctorum entitles them the Liber prior miraculum and the Liber alter miraculorum. The Liber prior miraculum contains nine short chapters in total, seven of which specifically relate to miraculous liberations from captivity, while the Liber alter miraculorum (twelfth- century) book includes six tales of miraculous liberations mostly relating to the nobility out of seven chapters in total. One particular story which relates to Bohemond of Antioch occupies a central place in these miracles and came to greatly influence the popularity of St Leonard’s cult. Bohemond, one the first crusade’s most famous heroes, visited the shrine of St Leonard at Noblac in 1106 as part of a longer tour of France conducted with the purpose of garnering support for the defence of Antioch.16 During this tour, Bohemond publicised the story of his own experience of captivity. He had been captured and imprisoned for three years in 1100 by the Turkish emir and was released only on payment of a large ransom and a military alliance with the emir. A long account of Bohemond’s exploits is given in the miracles and his release is attributed to his prayers to St Leonard.17 The liberation of Bohemond found its way into the twelfth- century vita of St Leonard composed by bishop Walfram of Naumberg (also included in the Acta sanctorum), who visited the shrine at Noblac between 1106– 1111 and whose vita of the saint represents one of the earliest instances of German interest in Leonard’s cult. It is clear that Bohemond’s visit to Noblac was a subject of popular interest elsewhere: Orderic Vitalis included mention of it in his Historia Ecclesiastica, while by the time the Norman Gesta Tancredi was composed, Bohemond’s gratitude to St Leonard had been long publicised.18
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These mainly twelfth- century miracles which came to be included in the Acta sanctorum were not intimately related to the region around the shrine at Noblac, and did not necessarily narrate the individual experiences of local people. These were miracles which demonstrated the universality of the saint: prisoners anywhere could petition St Leonard for his assistance, whether they be a crusader captive in the Holy Land, or a knight incarcerated by his enemies. This changed with the expansion of the cult. Once the cult of St Leonard had grown in sufficient esteem, it was gradually exported throughout France and then to England, Italy, Germany and beyond, where other tales of Leonard’s wondrous and efficacious liberations came to reflect more regional and specific local influences and concerns. Indeed, the fullest collection of Leonard’s miracles were produced not in France, but in Bavaria from the late thirteenth/early fourteenth century by the Cistercian monks at Fürstenfeld Abbey.19 By the time these monks began to produce their own textual accounts of the saint’s miracles, there was both a significant corpus of written information about the saint from which they could draw, and a need to localise Leonard’s relevance to the southern German context where he had already become popular. It is to this southern German context and the two Latin miracle books produced by the Fürstenfeld monks who had jurisdiction over St Leonard’s shrine at the small village of Inchenhofen that I now turn.
The miracles from Inchenhofen A church dedicated to St Leonard existed in the little Bavarian village of Inchenhofen from at least the mid-thirteenth century, but it was not until the foundation of the Cistercian monastery at Fürstenfeld nearby in 1259 that the church developed into a major pilgrimage site for those devoted to this saint’s cult. It is clear that the shrine to St Leonard was very actively promoted by the Fürstenfeld community, and from the early fourteenth century, when a provost was appointed to oversee the pilgrims and their associated business, the pilgrimage traffic considerably increased.20 Part of the development and promotion of St Leonard’s cult in this region was achieved by the written documentation of his miracles, as they were told at the church of Inchenhofen by grateful recipients of his favours. St Leonard’s saintly activities in Bavaria are chiefly contained in two libri miraculorum which collectively record some 637 miracles. These miracles were reported at the shrine at Inchenhofen between 1346 and 1447. The manuscripts containing the miracles are both now held in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in
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Munich. Steven Sargent has demonstrated persuasively that these books were written by four scribes, two of whom (Eberhard of Fürstenfeld and Ulrich Riblinger) did the bulk of the work, and that the miracle reports were written down in German before being translated into the Latin copies we possess today.21 The principal manuscript, Munich BSB Clm 7685, contains most of the miracles that were then copied into Clm 27332 with an additional 180 miracles, some written in German, added to the second manuscript. Other very fragmentary German miracles appear in a third manuscript, Munich BSB Clm 4322, while later miracles produced during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries appear respectively in Clm 26509 and Cgm 1722.22 The stories of release from captivity in miracle books stress the physicality of the bonds which held the captives and the unpleasant spaces of confinement which were penetrated by St Leonard. We mostly hear of towers and castles as prisons, which are frequently described as dark, squalid, windowless and airless, given light only by the presence of the saint.23 The heights and depths of these prisons are consistently expressed too, partly to emphasise the often dramatic escapes facilitated by St Leonard. One typical example is the case of Ulricus de Meran, a religious who was imprisoned in a tower and chained with silver chains. St Leonard appeared to him in the tower, dissolved the chains, created a window in the tower and helped frater Ulricus to escape. Likewise, Hans Gundran of Liechtenstein escaped two rabid dogs and the castle which imprisoned him once St Leonard loosened his chains.24 The prisoners within these tower and castles are almost always chained in various ways, a narrative feature which emphasises both the confinement of the prison and the wonder of the miraculous release. Sometimes we hear of prisoners’ hands and feet being shackled, some are in stocks, others are unable to move their limbs at all for weeks on end.25 Prisoners’ mental states are also described: some exist in a state of great anxiety (in magna anxietate), while others are heard to weep as they pray to St Leonard. 26 Some report being fearful they were going to die in their prisons.27 Torture was also sometimes a feature of these prisoners’ experiences. One honest, young and pretty widow (vidua honesta, iuvenis et pulchra) called Ursula Swartzerinne was captured by a tyrant who imprisoned and tortured her after she refused to become his serf by alienating herself from the monastery of St Gall.28 Some other prisoners experienced bodily suffering through starvation: in 1392 a young man arrived at Inchenhofen to narrate his tale of miraculous release from a prison in which he had been given nothing to eat or drink for eight weeks but bread and water. After imploring St Leonard for help and consolation,
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the manacles of iron which bound his hands and feet were loosened, and he escaped.29 Occasionally what we might describe as torture took the form of forced labour: for over three years one man was forced to build fortifications for the Muslims of Granada who had captured him at sea.30 Occasionally another location serves as a prison, as in the case of a noble woman who was captured by a tyrant covetous of her property. He led her to a wood, tied her up and buried her in a hole covered with foliage. She was able to escape with the help of the saint, as she later reported at Inchenhofen.31 Others were simply abandoned in the forest, sometimes tied to trees.32 One man, Nicholas Prütsel, was captured and tied to a horse which led him towards the castle of Purtswab. As he drew closer to the castle, he prayed to St Leonard, whereupon his bonds miraculously dropped off and he was able to appropriate the horse and ride it to safety.33 Those prisoners who were captured outside of Germany were also housed in a variety of prisons, and were sometimes captured as prisoners of war. A few were victims of the Hussite wars. One man was attacked and captured by pirates; one Italian was captured in Paris. Several were the victims of ‘pagans’ (which seems to mostly mean Muslims), and an interesting handful were spies.34 A great variety of liberated prisoners thus attested to the miraculous intervention of St Leonard when they narrated their stories at Inchenhofen, and in some of the narratives the crimes for which people had been imprisoned are specifically mentioned. In 1346, pilgrims at the shrine heard the thrilling story of two men from the Alsace region convicted of homicide, who were held in chains and stocks in a firmly closed tower with only one window of approximately four fingerswidth across to let in air. After learning that they were facing imminent execution, the men desperately called on St Leonard, who appeared to them in their sleep, saying, ‘Get up!’ while tapping the prisoners’ feet. The chains that bound them miraculously fell away and the men escaped from the tower through a magical aperture in the wall. Later, the authenticity of their tale was verified by an honest matron from the same region, who happened to be at Inchenhofen as they narrated their story.35 Another convicted homicide from the town of Tanner was imprisoned for eight days in chains. Leonard appeared to him, this time speaking in German (hilff ich dir auch) whereupon his chains were dissolved and he was able to escape. Some, like the honest man from Franconia who had wounded an Italian while in Florence, committed their crimes outside Bavaria.36 But even those sentenced to death or to life imprisonment could be liberated by the saint, often on the specific
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proviso that they subsequently made their way to Inchenhofen to give thanks.37 Other prisoners, usually described as honestus/a, had endured more arbitrary incarceration by local tyrants or had been kidnapped and held for ransom. One woman was even enchained by her own husband, who claimed that she was mad.38 The Princes’ War of 1421 was a time of great evil and injustice according to the miracle books, and many innocents were imprisoned by tyrants during that time.39 They too found themselves in castles and towers with no means of escape.40 The escapes from imprisonment narrated in the miracles generally commenced with the act of prayer to St Leonard himself. Indeed, Steven Sargent has noted that some 76 per cent of the miracle reports contain some sort of specific invocation to St Leonard. These range from a simple statement that the captive pleaded with St Leonard to intervene, to sometimes more elaborate and lengthy requests for help over a longer period of time.41 In some of the miracles reported at Inchenhofen, St Leonard was said to have worked in conjunction with the Virgin Mary. One grandevus vir who had been imprisoned in a tower prayed to both Leonard and Mary after having been tortured for eight days. Together they delivered him from the tyrants who had captured him, and he went to Inchenhofen to offer thanks for his release.42 And on other occasions, a different saint was invoked before St Leonard was finally named. One man who had appealed to John the Baptist to free him from a tower was only eventually freed after he had a vision in which he was told that he ought to invoke the name of St Leonard and he would be freed.43 Occasionally St Leonard acted on his own, without the specific prayer of an individual, but generally it was the naming of the saint which precipitated his actions. Once the petition had been made, St Leonard mostly provided the means by which a prisoner could escape his physical bonds. He appeared in dreams to sleepy captives occasionally, or his voice would be heard, but the actual mechanics of escape were completed by the prisoners themselves with the aid of St Leonard. The visions in which prisoners are awakened by Leonard are reminiscent of the freeing of St Peter ad vincula, where the angel tells Peter to rise. One man, Johann Menhart, told the Inchenhofen scribes that St Leonard tapped him on the face to rouse him, while another said that he had heard a miraculous voice saying, ‘Surge! Et teipsum adiva’.44 Once awake, the prisoners found that their chains had miraculously weakened so that they could be broken off by hand, or that a knife or other useful object had suddenly appeared in their cell, and they were able to use this to cut their bonds.
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The narratives also stress the sequential elements of escape. Once a prisoner had freed his physical body from fetters or chains, he or she still needed to escape the prison building. Those who were held at the top of towers needed to abseil down to safety and those who were held in subterranean dungeons had to escape either by climbing to the very top of the tower and fleeing through a window, or by tunnelling out underground. Whatever the case, St Leonard was able to offer assistance. In a large number of cases, the saint created a hole in a wall through which a captive could flee. This was sometimes described merely as a clausura, and sometimes more specifically named as a window or door. Guards were made to fall asleep, a motif that is also reminiscent of the story of St Peter’s escape from prison, and sometimes barking dogs were miraculously silenced by the saint so that a captive could escape without notice.45 What is clear from these stories of liberation is that although St Leonard provided the means with which prisoners might free themselves, it was up to the prisoners to effect the physical escape. The practical elements of liberation were therefore contingent on the ingenuity of the prisoner to some degree. We hear of one captive using the handle of a dish to create pegs which he stuck in the tower walls as ad hoc steps to climb, and we hear of another who tore up his clothing to make a rope which he lowered out of a window to descend to freedom.46 Once a prisoner had wriggled out of constricting bonds and navigated a path out of the prison, his or her journey was still not complete. This was because one of the conditions of St Leonard’s actions was that the newly freed prisoner had to go to Inchenhofen to give thanks to the saint, and to publicise the miracle. Thus, the culmination of the liberation miracle was the arrival of the prisoner at the shrine at Inchenhofen. The miracle reports often indicate that the pilgrim’s tale was told in public (public ennarravit), and the testimony was given credence by the statement of an honest witness who confirmed the truth of the pilgrim’s tale. The promise to travel to Inchenhofen had usually been made as part of the petition to the saint. For instance, one man who had been captured in a war in 1392 and chained up in a castle called Castival was freed by St Leonard after both praying to him and promising to go to the shrine.47 Another man released from capitivity had promised not to eat meat or drink wine until he had been to Inchenhofen, while a convicted homicide, certain that he was going to die, invoked Leonard and promised to visit the shrine should he be released.48 The journey to Inchenhofen and the narration of the miracles in public were thus significant elements in both the individual stories of liberation but also
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in the dynamic process of cult creation, part of which rested in the act of witnessing at the shrine itself. Representations of St Leonard in various visual media frequently stress the petition and gratitude of prisoners, and in doing so reflect the themes present in the (contemporaneous) miracle books. Often depicted in monastic habit and holding chains, St Leonard appears with these prisoners, some of whom are in the act of escaping their prisons. In a mid-fifteenth- century manuscript from Augsburg, Leonard is shown clasping the hand of one of two prisoners as they escape from a tower. A chain is visible on the foot of one of the escapees, while the words O sancte Leonarde ora pro nobis are written in the saint’s nimbus (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library M 45, fol. 2r). In a number of German printed copies of the Legenda aurea, images of Leonard also appear. One from the Reutlingen workshop dated to 1480 shows a prisoner in the act of escape, climbing backwards down a ladder propped up against the window of a building, while St Leonard grasps a chain attached to the prisoner’s foot (Figure 2.1). An earlier Legenda aurea manuscript from the Strasbourg workshop dated c. 1418–19 (Heidelberg Cod. Pal. Germ. 144, fol. 161 – the ‘Elsässische’ Legenda Aurea) shows a tonsured St Leonard blessing three men, at least one of whom is clearly depicted as a prisoner with chains. The saint holds a chain and book in his left hand as the petitioners kneel before him.49 Grateful pilgrims are also evident in fourteenth and fifteenth- century visual culture. One example may be found in a winged altarpiece now held in Munich’s Bayerisches Nationalmuseum (from the so- called Meister des Untermenzinger Altars, dated to around 1500). Here a prisoner dressed in red kneels at Leonard’s feet, looking up at the saint with one hand raised. This prisoner has a soft cloth bag tied around his waist, open at the top, signifying that he is a pilgrim. St Leonard appears in company with other saints in various visual representations although the specific groupings are inconsistent. He is occasionally inserted into the Nothelfer (or ‘helper’ saints) groupings or, more infrequently, into other scenes of incarceration and liberation. One early Italian altarpiece of the thirteenth century that depicts the Virgin and infant Christ flanked by St Leonard and St Peter visually relates this saint to the life of the apostle. The six scenes surrounding the central figures illustrate moments from the life of St Peter, including his own liberation from prison. The apostle holds his usual keys, while Leonard, although tonsured, is without the chains he customarily possesses, holding instead a book.50 Leonard appears more conventionally in the so- called Tucher Alter in the Frauenkirche, Nürnberg
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Figure 2.1 St Leonard releasing a prisoner, from the Legenda Aurea (Heidelberg Cod. Pal. Germ. 144, fol. 161)
(mid-fifteenth century), where he holds both manacle and chain together with the book and wears monastic robes. The adjacent panel represents the vision of St Augustine. In an altar shrine dated to 1438 in the Filialkirche Sankt Leonhard in Berghogen, Leonard and St Agatha
50 Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination
stand on either side of the Virgin, while in an altarpiece of 1470, now held in the Städtische Sammlungen Heimatmuseum in Donauwörth, Leonard stands with St Nicholas and St Walburga.51 The inclusion of St Leonard in these groupings serves more general devotional purposes in reminding the viewer of both the range and specificity of the saintly individuals who worked on their behalf. Visual or material evidence of the saint’s efficacy also took the form of various objects which the pilgrims brought with them to the Inchenhofen church. The miracle books themselves tell us of a range of offerings brought by prisoners in particular to Leonard’s shrine. One ministeriale, for instance, who had been captured by the Venetians in the early fifteenth century, brought the chains which had held his arms to the wall of his prison tower. Another ‘honest man’ from Nürnberg arrived at Inchenhofen with two chains which had bound him for 13 weeks. Leonard himself was said to have consoled one Prussian merchant whose neck and hands were chained, telling the prisoner that once he was released he should take his chains to Inchenhofen, while one Andreas Violfalt brought his leg irons to the shrine after Leonard released him. 52 The nature of these offerings has been tabulated by Steven Sargent, who notes that the instruments of captivity (chains, fetters, stocks, neck and leg irons) or their representations were particularly numerous at Inchenhofen. Sometimes these offerings were wax (which had the advantage of providing candles for the church), and sometimes the offerings were iron. Of the 192 iron offerings recorded in the miracle books, almost all of these were instruments of captivity. 53 Similar votive offerings may still be seen in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, where an early sixteenth- century grouping, possibly from Kärnten, includes a small figure of the saint himself and nine iron votive figures variously shaped.54 Occasionally, the very flesh and blood of pilgrims themselves were donated to the shrine, as some visitors pledged themselves or their children as grateful serfs – or even prisoners – of St Leonard. 55 It is worth noting that St Leonard himself was not physically present at the Inchenhofen church. This was a shrine without relics. The saint’s body was held in the small village of Noblac, near Limoges in France, Leonard’s place of origin. Also a pilgrimage site, Noblac was allegedly rather cavalier about Leonard’s corpse, losing the remains in the early fifteenth century and mounting a search (eventually successful) to find them again. Other sites in Germany did seem to possess parts of St Leonard’s body. In 1139, for instance, bishop Otto of Freising
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‘consecrated an altar containing a relic of St Leonard’ on the Petersberg in upper Bavaria. An earlier report of the saint’s relics in Germany appears in a letter written sometime after 1111 by Bishop Walfram of Naumberg, who had visited Noblac between 1106 and 1111. The letter was written to Gertrude, a daughter of Margrave Echbert of Saxony and mentions that the bishop and Gertrude both possessed body parts of the saint.56 At the time that the miracle books were composed at Inchenhofen, however, there was no relic of St Leonard at that church, and it was only in the fifteenth century that an iron statue of the saint himself was made and kept at the shrine.
Confinement and liberation miracles The substantial literature on the cult of saints in the mid- to late Middle Ages, especially as it pertains to the German context, tends to stress that the actual body of the saint became less necessary as a devotional focus, and that miracles were more and more often effected ‘at a distance’, in André Vauchez’s words.57 This means that it is important to distinguish between saints’ graves or relic sites and holy places which were particularly blessed by a saint, and were associated with a saint by virtue of legend rather than saintly presence. 58 As the body of the saint was less of a focal point for pilgrims, more universal relics, such as the blood of Christ, became more important in later medieval Germany.59 Inchenhofen seems to fit this model. As indicated above, pilgrims did not come to Inchenhofen to venerate St Leonard’s body. They mostly came to offer thanks for what the saint had already done elsewhere and to bring with them the proof of his actions. This was a shrine that retained and extended its popularity almost entirely on the basis of the saint’s miracles as they were reported there. At the same time, the act of recording the miracles and the bringing of objects to the shrine did create a physical or material dimension to St Leonard’s cult which was otherwise lacking. The votive offerings of wax and iron in the shape of body parts, chains, fetters and towers effectively embodied the saint himself. They were the things that created a repository of relic-like objects to construct St Leonard, as were the words that were written about him. Both of these things connected the saint to the particular location of Inchenhofen.60 Secondly, economic language has also driven recent commentary on the later medieval and counter Reformation cult of saints in Germany. Following Robert Scribner’s idea of an ‘economy of the sacred’, Phillip
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Soergel remarks that shrines like Inchenhofen were ‘marketplaces in a sacred economy’ and that miracles were the ‘product of an unequal yet contractual exchange’.61 The dynamics of such exchange are also reflected in the act of pilgrimage to St Leonard’s shrine which, as explored above, was part of the promise made by freed prisoners to the saint. Moreover, the reporting and publicising of the miracles also worked as part of the quid pro quo in the relationship between saint and community. Ebenhard of Fürstenfeld, one of the principal scribes of the Inchenhofen miracle books, delineated the centrality of miracles to this cult in the preface to his account. He wrote, ‘I have decided not to bury silently in the ground the various accounts of St Leonard’s miracles reported in my presence, but rather to tell them in the spirit of devotion for the benefit of all the faithful in Christ, and in honour of God and St Leonard.’62 Eberhard went on to outline the various reasons why the miracles should be reported: to publicise God’s works; to honour and glorify God and Leonard; to correct evil, edify the good and to excite devotion and love. Eberhard’s words reflected a much longer theology of the miracle and its importance. St Augustine, for instance, had argued that the purpose of a miracle was to console and edify the faithful, bringing them closer to God, and that prayer or the power of grace could precipitate a miracle.63 Others had stressed the ‘unnatural’ qualities of a miracle as one of its defining characteristics.64 Closer to Eberhard’s own time, distinctions between miracles and mirabilia (explicable phenomena) had emerged, while the moral message (rather than the fantastic nature) of miracles was increasingly emphasised. At the same time, it was understood that the narration of miracles could be a useful weapon against heresy and may be used to convert the unfaithful. There were therefore a series of significant and tangible benefits to reporting and recording saintly miracles that extended far beyond the immediate location of the miraculous act itself. Reporting and recording these miracles was an act of obligation. In both these ways, the cult of St Leonard seems to slot nicely into the wider landscape of late-medieval saintly devotion. More specific to this cult, however, are its links between imprisonment and liberation as they were expressed in both the miracles and the act of pilgrimage. These connections were more than discursive. They were deeply active and experiential. My suggestion here is that St Leonard’s cult reveals a relationship between confinement and liberation that reflected more general principles of inclusion and participation in the Christian community. The liberation miracles reported at Inchenhofen thus reflected
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and generated wider meanings around the saint as conduit of freedom, while the individual act of pilgrimage to the shrine served as a public declaration of Leonard’s efficacy and the released captive’s identification as a favoured beneficiary of St Leonard’s, and God’s, mercy. St Leonard was understood to operate, like any other saint, as a link or bridge between the earthly and the divine, between God and his people. And like any other saint, Leonard demonstrated this bridge through the performance of his miracles, which could then be publicised to boost the cult’s prestige. But Leonard was specifically associated with releasing prisoners from captivity, so the miracles reported at his shrine may be read as signifying more fundamental and symbiotic meanings of imprisonment and the idea of freedom. In the miracle books, the state of imprisonment or captivity is the product of justice and injustice. For those prisoners who were convicted of a particular crime, their state of captivity was the lawful result of judicial reckoning. Many of these crimes were homicides, some particularly heinous. One miracle tells of two religious (Augustinian canons) who had murdered two of their brethren, while another mentions a man convicted of counterfeit who was sentenced to execution, tied up and thrown into the Lech river. Leonard released him when the prisoner desperately invoked his name.65 Such prisoners are sometimes described as ‘unworthy’ (indigno). Yet they were still able to benefit from the intervention of St Leonard once a petition had been made. What was crucial was the individual penitent state of mind of the prisoner, and his or her conviction that Leonard would indeed act effectively. For such prisoners, the real state of imprisonment was not simply the bodily confinement they experienced; rather it was the unresolved, unrepentant state of sin. In relation to this variety of prisoner, Steven Sargent, whose work on St Leonard remains the fullest study to date, wondered if Leonard’s actions meant that ‘divine justice could in some cases appear to contradict and even undermine secular rational justice’.66 Michael Goodich also thought that escape miracles by convicted criminals were an ‘extralegal form of judgment’ by God through his saint. I would agree with both views, but would also extend them to suggest that St Leonard’s interventions were not only a form of divine judgment. His actions were also a reminder to individuals that their atonement for crime could truly be sparked from within, and that progress toward freedom began with a confessional and subjective attitude of repentance, which was then carried through the act of pilgrimage to the saint’s shrine.67
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Imprisonment was also the product of injustice, according to the miracle books. In particular, those described as honestus are distinguished from convicted criminals. These men and women are frequently imprisoned by a tyrant (tyrannus) or noble (graf or nobilista). Some captors are called ministeriales, as in the case of Heyntz von Ketz who captured two men and imprisoned them in a castle in 1423.68 The victims of these men were also often the victims of extortion or robbery. One noble who captured three merchants and imprisoned them in Liechtenstein Castle in 1392 demanded money from them, as did the soldiers of a Bavarian duke, who seized a villager and imprisoned him in the duke’s castle.69 Sometimes these prisoners were captured by opportunists in contexts of war, too. Unlike convicted criminals, these prisoners had not committed any crime themselves, and appear as the unfortunate and random victims of lawlessness. As such, these situations of imprisonment did not require a confessional form of repentance on the part of victim. Stressed in these particular cases are the confines of the prison space together with an unshakeable faith in the saint’s actions. The honest matron held in chains by a tyrant who demanded money from her was successful in her escape because she prayed to Leonard cum cordis devotam. Likewise, an honest Italian man captured in Venice, enchained and incarcerated by adversaries from Padua was released in the midst of great affliction and anguish, because he confidently called on St Leonard.70 The message of these miracles is that despite situations of grave confinement and great anxiety, a prisoner could still count on St Leonard’s intervention if his or her prayers were fervent and sincere. Captivity could be distressing and the body could be enchained, but prayerful conviction could overcome these tribulations. If imprisonment signified both sinfulness and misfortune in the miracles of St Leonard, what then was meant by escape and liberation? The miracles suggest a number of levels of liberation which are narrated through the structure of the miracle story itself, and through the act of pilgrimage to Inchenhofen. At the outset, liberation meant the sudden freedom of the physical body from intensely uncomfortable circumstances. The body of the prisoner is almost always described as chained, fettered, tied up or bound in some way which emphasises the innately corporeal nature of captivity. We hear of Hans Senft of Tiespeck who was held in leg irons in a tower; two honest men from near Herbipolim who were captured, led to the castle of Werperg and there were put in chains, leg irons and manacles for 25 weeks; and a merchant from Prussia who was captured by pagans and chained up by the neck and
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hands.71 Dozens of these accounts note that, once released, the prisoners had brought their chains to Inchenhofen as offerings. The dissolution of a prisoner’s chains was the moment at which a longer process of liberation began. As noted above, bodily escape also involved negotiating the prison building or location, evading guards and dogs, crossing moats and travelling across the countryside in order to establish distance between the prison and the escapee. But the process of pilgrimage was also part of the escape narratives told in the miracle books and the arrival of the escapee at Inchenhofen is described with some drama. The recently liberated Prussian merchant told the crowd at Inchenhofen that Leonard had appeared to him three times at night to console him during his imprisonment, telling the merchant not to worry but to go to the shrine in Bavaria. The merchant arose, found his chains had dissolved, and made his way to the sea, where a small boat carried him for three days and nights without food back home. He had come to the shrine to fulfil his obligation to St Leonard and to tell his story.72 Another man, Eberhard Aeletzhofer, came to shrine still wearing his chains, after having been imprisoned in a castle until his miraculous release by St Leonard. The scribe of the miracle book (at this point Ulrichus Riblinger) was the one to cut Eberhard out of his chains, and both then gave thanks to St Leonard and God.73 The public narration of these escapes, together with the material evidence of captivity, was the culmination of the physical escape from imprisonment: the act of travelling to Inchenhofen itself was the final stage of bodily freedom for these captives. In these stories of travel and freedom, the idea of being imprisoned served as a useful narrative event in a longer story of liberty. For the escaped prisoner whose fetters wondrously vanished, whose pursuers inexplicably failed to find him, whose windowless cell suddenly opened to let in light, captivity was negotiable – if the saint was on his side. The same was true of other situations of captivity. The woman whose husband tried to acquire a special licence from the bishop of Augsburg to wall her up forever on the grounds that she was insane found that physical and domestic imprisonment could be evaded once St Leonard was inserted into her life story.74 The serf who had been robbed of his livelihood could negotiate the fixed bonds of feudal society once society was transcended via the presence of the saint.75 These stories acquired meaning in orality, performance and the written word, once the pilgrim reached the shrine at Inchenhofen and redefined his or her status. Indeed, the
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fulfilment of the promise to go to Inchenhofen which was so central to the miracle stories was also a demonstrative act of self-inclusion in the special community of Christians for whom the saint’s actions had been effective. Moreover, the freedom now experienced by these grateful pilgrims indicated a more eschatological freedom of spirit. This idea can be seen in the preface to the miracle books composed by Eberhard of Fürstenfeld. Eberhard indicates that, in his view, the telling of the miracle stories could be understood through the biblical story of Tobias. Tobias had been taken captive and blinded in Assyria, but so faithful to God’s will was he that the angel Raphael appeared to him and restored his sight.76 The sort of sight received by Tobias is narrated as ‘the light’, and ‘the light of my eyes’, while Eberhard quotes Raphael’s words that it is ‘right to reveal and publish the works of God as they deserve’ (opera autem dei revelare et confitieri honorificum est). Eberhard’s use of the story of Tobias as an appropriate model for describing the spiritual quality of liberation from captivity suggests that the transitory state of bodily imprisonment may be mitigated by the divine and eternal liberation offered to the faithful who are willing to accept both the truth of the saint’s miracles and the light of God’s word. The balance between confinement and freedom expressed in the miracles of liberation was thus reflective of deeper spiritual messages about participation and belonging in late-medieval devotion to this particular saint.
Conclusion This chapter has sought to describe the ways in which imprisonment was integrated in the medieval cult of saints, especially focusing on the cult of St Leonard of Noblac. I have suggested that the idea of imprisonment was closely linked to ideas of liberation in this context, and that the miracle books produced at the shrine at Inchenhofen can provide modern readers with insights into how those phenomena were understood and negotiated in a later medieval setting. It is clear from these miracles that St Leonard himself had much in common with other saints who were associated with releasing prisoners. But the cult of Leonard was especially concerned with the active participation of captives in their liberation. Those who were imprisoned justly or unjustly were reminded that liberation was only partly corporeal. More important was the sort of spiritual liberation that could be found through
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the pious practices of prayer and pilgrimage, those fundamental actions that could locate a captive within the eschatological realm of saintly intervention. The cult of St Leonard thus offered medieval people not so much a theological resolution to the problem of captivity, but an intensely pragmatic and participatory one.
3 Imprisonment, Memory and Space in the Early Inquisitions
In the previous two chapters I have explored ideas of imprisonment in the context of medieval monastic and lay piety to argue that in both milieux there are clear connections between imprisonment and liberation. In monastic writings, confinement of the body and freedom of the spirit are two important strands of the discourse of monastic enclosure; while in the cult of saints, prisoners could partake of the corporeal and spiritual freedom offered by St Leonard by including themselves in a sacred and contractual economy of petition and pilgrimage. In this chapter I turn to a rather different religious context: the context of the thirteenth and early fourteenth- century inquisitio heretice pravitatis in southern France. The early inquisitions are useful for exploring ideas of imprisonment for two preliminary reasons. Ideas of imprisonment were used to describe the character of heretical belief and activity, and its terrible effect on Christian souls. Imprisonment was also a central tool of discipline and punishment for the inquisitors. The procedural deployment of imprisonment was very much bound up with the generation of testimonial truth and useful information, as James Given has shown, and the inquisitorial prison was a highly productive carceral space carefully and deliberately manufactured as a place to inspire revelation through fear.1 The discursive and actual use of the prison can therefore shed light on the inquisitors’ broader perceptions of their work as both a pastoral and punitive response to heresy. More importantly for the concerns of this book, we can also detect some interesting uses of the inquisitorial prison by its inmates, some of whom found opportunities for agency within the prison space. Others used the idea of the prison to anchor protests against individual inquisitors and their practices. Further, imprisonment was linked very clearly with acts of memory in the various inquisitorial testimonies of the 58
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thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. For prisoners, remembrance of time spent in the prison, memories of people who had died in the prison and memories of injustices committed in the prison all went to create the prison as something of a site of memory which could be used to report and negotiate actual and imagined wrongs committed by the inquisitors.2 It is the relationship between the inquisitorial space of imprisonment and the prisoners’ experience of that space which is the focus of this chapter.
Background The inquisitio heretice pravitatis moved into the region generally called the Languedoc almost as soon as the Albigensian crusade had formally come to an end in 1229. To a degree, the crusade had been very effective in combating heresy in the area: noble families such as the Trencavel had been all but decimated, Cathars and their sympathisers had been displaced from their homes and were either moving secretly from place to place around the region or had fled further afield, the Count of Toulouse (Raimon VII) had betrothed his daughter to Alfonse of Poitiers (the brother of King Louis IX), and large portions of the region were now incorporated into the Capetian royal domain. But the presence of the remaining heretics and the threat of their re- emergence was still a problem, and the inquisitio heretice pravitatis was brought into the Languedoc to uncover and prosecute these heretics from 1233.3 These early tribunals were predominantly staffed by the mendicant orders, members of which both produced the voluminous bureaucratic documentation of their activities as inquisitors and created much of the wider discourse around heresy, Catharism and Waldensianism with which modern historians continue to grapple.4 The 1229 Council of Toulouse provided the initial basis for the eventual incorporation of imprisonment into (what would soon become) inquisitorial practice in the south of France. This Council had indicated that the lay power that received confiscated property from heretics was to be in charge of the maintenance of prisons. This is also a provision which reveals that, very early on, lay cooperation was necessary to varying degrees in matters of incarceration.5 This early decree did not resolve the issues of prison upkeep, the maintenance of prisoners or even the specific provision of a prison building, but nonetheless is an early indicator of a perceived need for imprisonment in dealing with heresy after the Albigensian crusade.6 At the same council, it was also declared that heretics who returned to Catholic unity through fear of death or from
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any other questionable cause were to be imprisoned by the bishop ‘to perform their penance, with proper caution, to prevent their having the power of corrupting others’.7 Only a few years later, the king of France granted a concession to the prison at Toulouse, while in 1234 Pope Gregory IX issued a bull stating that those who had been convicted of heresy and who had not received another punishment in the diocese of Narbonne should be imprisoned.8 These preliminary examples do suggest that even at the earliest stage in the formation and pre-practice of the developing inquisitorial tribunals, imprisonment included both penitential and punitive qualities. Although there are clear indications that the pragmatic issues surrounding prison construction and security were yet to be resolved, imprisonment was nonetheless present in the very infrastructural requirements of this formative inquisitorial procedure.9 Various councils thereafter mention imprisonment as a routine element in the practice of inquisition, while the sentence of imprisonment for various manifestations of heretical practice was gradually expanded. At the Council of Béziers (1246), for instance, it was decided that relapsed heretics should be sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, as should fugitives and those who were contumacious.10 By contrast, only three years earlier at Narbonne, inquisitors there were still dealing with the absence of a prison building, and sentences of imprisonment were suspended until adequate building materials were found with which to construct prisons. The Council of Narbonne (1243) had for the first time also provided advice to inquisitors on various aspects of prison administration, this time in the context of penance, with various guidelines for discretionary penances to be given alongside sentences of imprisonment.11 Royal intervention at Béziers in 1246 had meant that the seneschals of Louis IX were required to make dungeons available for the use of the inquisitors, while at Carcassonne Louis had also granted a concession to the prison there to receive prisoners of the inquisitors.12 Inquisitors had purchased a house near the Church of St Sernin in Toulouse to be used as a temporary prison in 1245–46, and certainly by 1269, when the chateau of Lavour was appropriated for the incarceration of heretics, the practice of incarcerating suspected heretics was an integral part of the inquisitorial process. James Given has thoroughly analysed inquisitorial uses of imprisonment to show that the prisons of the medieval inquisitions were extremely productive spaces, and that the use of coercive imprisonment was highly effective for the creation of knowledge about heresy and its networks in the Languedoc. In this context, imprisonment was far
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more than punitive; it functioned as one strategic institutional element of a complex manifestation of power relations within the community.13 Others have concentrated on the relationship between imprisonment and penance in the same context. Andrew Roach, for example, understands that the elements of exile and contrition embedded in some thirteenth- century monastic thinking on the prison were considered to be ‘peculiarly appropriate for heretics’, and that from the 1240s in the south of France, such thinking came to inform the systematic use of imprisonment by the inquisitions.14 These broader understandings of inquisitorial imprisonment indicate that punishment was only part of the agenda behind its use. Indeed, it is important to distinguish between the two situations where imprisonment was deployed by inquisitors: as part of a sentence handed down to a convicted heretic, and as a means of housing suspects in the process of testifying. It is in the former case that Roach sees elements of deeper spiritual and religious thinking on imprisonment, and in the latter type of imprisonment that Given notes the productive character of the inquisitorial prison.
Heresy and imprisonment Polemical literature against heresy from the twelfth century reveals some of the more abstract meanings associated with imprisonment in the inquisitorial imagination.15 One key theme in such literature is a complex and fluid notion of confinement as both synonymic with secretive and unorthodox activity, and as necessary to contain the spread of heresy. As early as 1163, Hildegard of Bingen wrote of heretics taking advantage of confinement, like secretive beasts who should be ‘tortured with words’ and sent into their holes ‘like snakes’.16 Almost 20 years earlier than Hildegard’s treatise, Heribert, a monk from Périgueux, warned that the heretics who had appeared in his neighbourhood were more than evasive: ‘there is no way to confine them’, he wrote, ‘for when they are captured, no chains will hold them because the devil himself sets them free’.17 That the nature of heretics was essentially transformative may also be found in Stephen of Bourbon’s account of the early Waldensians: ‘the more dangerous, the more they lie hidden from sight, they conceal themselves under various disguises ... one could transform himself like Proteus’.18 By far the most central image is the equation of heretics with foxes who are destroying the Lord’s vineyard (Matthew 8:20): this fox, for Bernard of Clairvaux and others, not only destroys the vineyard from within, but is secretive, rejoices in concealment, and hides underground
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in ima terrae, in the depths of the earth.19 For St Bernard, ‘concealment causes the difficulty’, and it is the work of the faithful to expose the heretic and his or her beliefs. An earlier Cistercian precedent for the image may be found in the letters of Henry of Clairvaux in the later twelfth century: here, as Beverly Kienzle has shown, Henry argued that the preaching of orthodoxy ‘forced the heretics into hiding, causing foxes to metamorphose into moles and go underground where they could gnaw and destroy the roots of holy places’.20 This conflation of secrecy, confinement and destruction finds echoes in the later literature of the inquisitors. Perhaps the fullest account of the wiles of heretics is Bernard Gui’s manual for inquisitors composed in around 1323, the Practica inquisitionis heretice pravitatis, in which the inquisitor premises his line of questioning on the assumption that the heretic needs to be trapped and will attempt to avoid the inquisitor’s rigorous questioning. Noting, for instance, that the Waldensians take pride in reciting the Credo, Gui tells us that they can be ensnared in this way, as they will not be able to give the Catholic version.21 The generically secretive character of heretics is also associated with captivity in reports that heretics capture the souls of others by temptation and error. False and heretical teaching drew the souls of many persons to hell, according to Roger of Hovedon, while for Alain of Lille, heretics ‘creep into the houses of widows and lead them astray’.22 Bernard Gui also talked of the Waldensians ‘securing a hold’ over those who listened to them, while trying to avoid being entrapped by their errors when confronted by the inquisitors. The inquisitor Anselm of Alessandria, in a treatise written between 1266 and 1276, noted that Cathars could snare individuals by performing the rite of consolamentum even without touching them, and ‘even when separated by the walls of a house or a city, or by a river’: ‘great care is necessary when we detain any suspects, lest Cathars come near those who are ill, or even come close to the buildings in which they are being held’.23 For the Cistercian chronicler Pierre les Vaux- de- Cernay, in his Historia Albigensis, such people and their supporters were the ‘oppressors’ of the Catholic faithful. In one instance, this was literal: the Count of Foix was said to have locked the abbot and canons of St Anthony’s at Pamiers inside the church while he pillaged the wealth of the monastery and slept in the infirmary with his harlots. ‘Surely a new kind of barbarity!’ exclaimed Pierre. ‘A church is usually a refuge for those condemned to imprisonment or death; this author of evil had made the church a prison for the innocent!’24 It is worth mentioning Pierre les Vaux- de- Cernay’s text in a little more detail, given its accounts of captivity and forms of confinement
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in the context of pre-inquisition Languedoc. The Historia Albigensis was composed in 1212–18, during the first phase of the Albigensian crusade, and is known for being both supportive of the crusade and effusive about Simon de Montfort, the crusade leader after 1208.25 As a Historia, the text includes the narration of events and a number of illustrative miracles and stories which go to record the divine justice at work in the crusaders’ victories during this unique holy war. The Historia also includes some images of confinement: some of these are brief mentions of prisoners of war during the crusade, but a couple are more discursive accounts of miracles and other events describing captivity. The first miraculous ‘digression’ from the historical narrative concerns two heretics, one of whom (a novice) repented on hearing that they would both be burned. Despite a ‘heated’ discussion among the people as to the truthfulness of the novice’s repentance, both heretics were tied with strong chains and consigned to the flames, the novice declaring that ‘this fire will serve for me instead of purgatory’. Once the fire was lit, the novice’s chains broke and he was able to escape: the other heretic, a perfect, however, was ‘consumed by the flames instantly’.26 Another miracle occurred at Puisserguier, when Giraud de Pépigeux defected from Simon de Montfort’s army and, faced with the unwelcome prospect of taking his prisoners of war with him, decided instead to bury them alive in a ditch and set fire to them. Three days later, de Montfort found the men still imprisoned in the ditch, but miraculously ‘unhurt and unaffected by the fire’ – ‘what a great miracle!’27 Captivity was often associated with confinement of the spirit in this pre-inquisitorial literature, while the image of flames in Pierre les Vauxde- Cernay’s text was used to remind his readers that a purgatorial effect could ensue, even from dire situations of bodily constraint, if the heart was open to receiving the truth. The heretic was seen to endanger this possibility by evasion, concealment and attempts to snare the souls of Christians. It was the work of polemicists – and later inquisitors – to expose and eliminate these dangers. Images of captivity were deployed to describe the terrible act of heresy and, eventually, to provide the most efficacious means by which heresy could be eradicated.
Imprisonment in the inquisitorial imagination: fear You will kill me – don’t lead me back to the prison. I appeal to God, to the Pope and to the archbishop of Bourges. Don’t put me back in the prison.28
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Once imprisonment was firmly integrated into the inquisitorial landscape from the 1240s, we find that the prison as a place and the idea of imprisonment soon came to house a range of more abstract meanings for inquisitors. In particular, it is clear that the prison was consciously and publicly represented as a solemn and grim place by the inquisitors in each sermo generalis, where the sentences for heresy were read out. Here, the audience heard that the prison was a place where the bread of sorrow and the water of tribulation were offered; they were in no doubt that incarceration was a grave punishment, despite the distinction between murum largum, or ‘light’ imprisonment, and murum strictum, or ‘severe’ imprisonment. Those condemned to the former could expect some freedom of movement, visitors, food and a finite sentence, while those condemned to the latter could expect solitude, shackles and a short life.29 When Alamande Guilabert was condemned to imprisonment in the Tour des Allemans in 1321, for instance, she heard the following: We condemn you Alamande, wife of Johannis Guilaberti of Montaillou ... to perpetual strict imprisonment in the castle of the Allemans, with chains and iron fetters [binding your] feet, where the bread of sorrow and the water of tribulation alone will be ministered to you ... 30 However, imprisonment was used not only to punish convicted heretics, but also to detain suspects and encourage ‘full proof’ of heresy, that is, a confession. Fear of imprisonment is clear from the testimony of a number of individuals in the inquisitorial register of Bishop Jacques Fournier, which records the witness testimony of those detained by his inquisitorial tribunal during the period 1318–25. Alazaïs Azém said that she confessed to heresy in this context not because she was penitent, but because she was frightened of being put in the mur.31 Fabrissa den Riba, who was incarcerated for seven weeks, also said that she was afraid of being mistreated during her detention, so she had deliberately withheld information which might have harmed her.32 Mengarde Buscail de Prades told the inquisitors that the bishop had told her that unless she confessed she would be imprisoned in the Tour des Allemans.33 Other examples show that prisoners could also be approached by those outside the prison who were fearful for their own safety. Guillemette Benet of Montaillou, for instance, was visited by the rector who told her to confess to what she had done in heretical matters, but not to say anything against him or his household because if she did, ‘bad things
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would happen’ to her.34 Should she concede to his request, he could help her avoid a protracted sentence of incarceration. Aycret Bourret de Cassou is said to have uttered menacing words to the people of Cassou, saying that he would see to it that they were put in the mur or the Tour des Allemans. 35 The famous Béatrice of Planisolles, too, recounts – perhaps a little disingenuously – the fear that caused her to run away from the inquisitors. Béatrice of Planissoles (or Béatrice de Lagleize) was questioned by the inquisitorial tribunal headed by Jacques Fournier for a month in the summer of 1320.36 She had been a member of the community of Montaillou for most of her life, although she had moved to Catalonia with her priest-lover, Barthlémy, just prior to being summoned by the inquisitors. Béatrice talked only partly about ‘heresy’. Much of the information she disclosed was really about the events of her life, her sexual partners and social practices, the conversations and actions of others who might be considered ‘heretical’ and her own association with witchcraft and magic. Béatrice’s testimony has been examined many times for what it tells us about the intimate details of her own life and what it tells us about female subjectivity.37 At the very beginning of the text that records her confession, we discover that although Béatrice initially appeared before the inquisitors voluntarily and in response to their initial citation, she failed to reappear for an interrogation scheduled to take place the following Tuesday. This was despite her apparently ‘accepting this day willingly, promising by her oath to appear’. The bishop, Jacques Fournier, waited all that day for Béatrice but she did not come and was subsequently declared to be ‘defiant’. Béatrice was then found hiding in Mas-Saintes-Puelles in the diocese of Saint Papoul. ‘She was taken prisoner by the men of my lord bishop and the sergeants of the court’, writes the notary.38 We are to understand that she then remained in custody from that time on (from 1 August 1320), while the dates of her separate interrogations during the following month are given throughout the text. One area of interest for the inquisitors was the question of Béatrice’s initial flight; indeed, it was because of her failure to appear and her attempt to flee combined with the taint of heretical association and the discovery of certain objects associated with magic that Béatrice seems to have become more interesting to the inquisitors. At the end of her testimony, the inquisitors ask her openly: ‘Why did you flee when you were called to my lord bishop and you appeared on the accusation of heresy? Did someone advise you to flee or to absent yourself?’39 Béatrice is reported to have replied quite fully that she had run away because she
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was fearful of the bishop’s response to her acts of heresy, and because it was clear that her father’s heretical status was being brought to bear on her. Béatrice went on to indicate that she was aware of the investigation going on about her activities before she was formally cited to appear, and that her lover Barthlémy had advised her to respond to the citation because the bishop would surely never do her an injustice. Béatrice continued to think of running away, even in a dream, and she ‘gathered all the things’ she wanted to take with her – a great ‘trousseau of clothes’ (trocellum raube). Her plan to flee was secretive and even one of her daughters was told that Béatrice would be appearing before the bishop. The testimony indicates that Béatrice did not feel guilty at this point, as she knew that she was right in saying that she had not seen the famous Authié brothers after they had been declared heretical. Nonetheless, her fear prevented her from presenting herself to the tribunal. Even when she turned up to meet Barthlémy who advised her to go to the bishop, Béatrice resisted. It is only in the eventual words of her formal confession that Béatrice promises ‘never to flee or to knowingly absent myself in the spirit of rebellion’, to become in fact a docile captive and a cooperative witness.40 Fear of prison was not only personal, but can be seen in more general anxieties about the welfare of incarcerated family members. Jean Maury revealed that his family dissolved completely once his father, mother and brother were imprisoned in the mur. His mother and brother died there and at the age of ten or twelve, Jean himself left for Catalonia.41 Jean Pellicier told the tribunal that he stopped believing in heretical notions handed down to him by his grandmother when he witnessed the whole village of Montaillou being arrested and detained: the fear provoked by this event caused him to make a spiritual break from his own family.42 Raimonde Guilhou revealed that she had been married to her husband for 21 years, but had spent only ten years living with him before his incarceration and eventual death in the mur at Carcassonne.43 The mother and sister of Guillaume Austatz of Ornoloc both died in the mur at Carcassonne.44 That imprisoned individuals relied heavily on family members for support is clear: Guillemette Bec told the inquisitors that her son brought her a shirt, two wheat cakes and a piece of dried pork while she was detained, and that she had sent the jailer to ask her son if he would bring some clothing for her as well.45 The importance of family in maintaining the prisoner, coupled with the use of the prison to fracture families presented the inquisitor with a new means with which to observe and dismantle heretical networks.
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Ecclesiastical authorities were not insensible to potential abuses of imprisonment, and occasional inquiries were held from the later thirteenth century into inquisitorial prisons. One of these inquiries into the prisons run by the vigorous and effective heretic-hunter, Jean Galand, inquisitor of Carcassonne from 1278 to 1293, had turned up some worrying information about this inquisitor’s use of the prison. A formal appeal against Galand was drawn up by the consuls of Carcassonne in 1286 (after a number of previous complaints about the inquisitor), and sent to the young Philip IV, ‘the Fair’.46 Many of these complaints relate to Galand’s ready and harsh use of incarceration. The consuls noted that the particular sort of prison used by Galand was a new type of prison, a mur, or wall. The physical space of the prison they describe is hellish, small, dark and designed with little rooms used specifically for the purpose of tormenting and torturing people.47 These airless rooms are so dark that no one therein can discern whether it is day or night. Movement is impossible as the prisoners are shackled and cannot move to relieve themselves. There is no food but the ubiquitous ‘bread of sorrow’. There is no interaction between prisoners, no visitors, and the only sounds one may hear in the cells is weeping, pleading and stridor dentium, the rattling (with fear?) or gnashing (with misery?) of teeth. For these prisoners, reported the consuls, life is a torment and death is a solace. The specific request made by the consuls in this document is that there should be an investigation into the conditions of the mur, together with an inquiry into the activities of the inquisition in Carcassonne. Embedded in this complaint is the notion that confessions made by prisoners in Galand’s prison had been exacted under trying conditions and that the ‘truth’ that had been produced in the prison was thus redundant. The consuls were evidently quite aware that the inquisitorial prison was used as a place for the production of truth. The problem, however, was that the truths produced in this space were not really truths, but empty words uttered by desperate people eager only for escape. That Galand and his associates could nonetheless use these truths as evidence of heresy was anathema to the consuls, and indeed to other inquisitors. It was not, then, the use of imprisonment per se that was the problem; it was what prison conditions did to the production of information within that concerned the consuls. Some suspects are said to have uttered falsehoods simply to avoid being incarcerated in the mur,48 while others admitted to family and friends later on that they had told lies to escape. Of particular concern to the consuls was the fact that the custodians of the prison knew perfectly well that prisoners
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were terrified by their circumstances, and that their fear could be manipulated in order to produce confessions or to extract information. ‘Why don’t you say what will free you?’ the prison guards are said to have asked the prisoners.49 When asked what should be said to achieve this aim, the custodian of the prison is supposed to have suggested a number of suitable confessions that could release the prisoners. A later papal commission into the prisons maintained by the bishop of Albi, Bernard de Castanet, in 1306 together with a series of complaints about the bishop’s use of imprisonment on the pretext of eradicating heresy shows similar anxieties.50 Clement V ordered the visitation of the prisons of Albi, Carcassonne and Toulouse and a number of extant letters pertaining to these commissions are informative in relation to prison conditions. A letter dated 13 March 1306 says that prisoners in these prisons were allegedly held in perpetuity ‘contra Deum et justitiam et inique’, against God and justice and unfairly, as they were good Christians. It was also alleged that prisoners were tortured and deprived of their goods. In 20 April 1306 the cardinals charged with the investigation visited the prison at Carcassonne. There they found 40 prisoners, all of whom are named and all of whom were highly critical of their treatment, speaking as though with one voice (quasi una voce) about the evils done to them.51 The cardinals subsequently recommended some specific improvements to the prison structure: prisoners should be moved to larger rooms; ill or old prisoners should be in airier rooms; they should be able to walk around; there should be two keys for each cell, one for each of the jailers so that the prisoners could be cared for properly; and the provisions sent to the prisoners should be given to them. New prison guardians should be appointed and interestingly, it was specifically prohibited that a guardian should speak ‘secrets’ with a prisoner that the other guardian could not hear. Soon thereafter, all bar one of the guardians of the Carcassonne prison were removed. The survivor was joined by new staff from 27 April 1306 including Bernard Trenceval. These two men were required to promise that they would not speak alone with the prisoners, that they would distribute provisions sent to the prisoners properly and that they would not violate the recommended principles of incarceration outlined in the cardinals’ report. On 4 May 1306 a visitation of the Albi prisons was reported. Conditions here were worse than in Carcassonne, as the prisoners were all confined to strict imprisonment and were all chained. The rooms in which they were held were dark. The cardinal (Pierre Taillefer de la Chapelle) ordered that the prisoners be released from chains and that new rooms should be built in which there was
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light and air. Taillefer also noted that some prisoners had been there for five years. The guardians of the prison were joined by a Cistercian monk from Candeil, all of whom were then required to promise that they would uphold the custody of the prisoners diligently according to the cardinals’ recommendations. Again, they were each to have a key, and not speak to the prisoners alone, while provisions for the prisoners were to be distributed properly.52 Bishop Bernard de Castanet himself was the target of a long, lurid list of complaints against him and his use of the episcopal prison, which was sent to the papal curia in 1307. The investigation into these grievances, contained in a document entitled Processo di Bernard de Castanet, shows just how central the prison was to Castanet’s agenda of asserting episcopal authority in the region, and how he used the excuse of inquisition to conceal his nefarious activities. The bishop was said to have kept male and female prisoners in foul and squalid conditions in his prison, while many of the people who were incarcerated, beaten and tortured were in fact imprisoned because they had spoken out against the bishop, or attempted to appeal against the severity of their sentence.53 According to the many citizens who testified to the bishop’s use of imprisonment, the bishop also kept women in the cells, who would be brought to his palace occasionally for his sexual gratification:54 some of these women were never seen again, while others were found dismembered in rivers and on remote roads outside the city.55 One man, Bertrand Pelapol, whose desperate words are quoted above, was said to have been beaten severely by Guillelmus Durandus and another of the bishop’s servants, who intercepted him in the cemetery of Saint Cecilia after Pelapol had escaped the bishop’s prison. As he was led back to the carcer, Bertrand was heard to appeal to the Pope, asking why he was being beaten, even as the blood gushed from his head.56 Raymund Goffrei, a merchant, was able to remember the exact words uttered by Pelapol as Guillaume Durandus beat him. ‘Where are you taking me and why are you capturing me and why are you beating me? I will appeal to the pope ...’57 Bernard Fenassa, a servant, also witnessed Pelapol’s fate. He added that Pelapol had tried to escape the clutches of Durandus, but that the bishop’s servants had caught up with him and clearly stated that he would be returned to the prison.58 Raymund Goffrei told the investigators that he saw another man, Pierre Talafer, being beaten by the bishop’s men in the courtyard while being dragged toward the episcopal prison. Talafer, too, cried out that he would appeal against the injustices being perpetrated against him, and that his sentence of perpetual imprisonment was unfair and the result of ‘great
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malice’ on the part of the bishop.59 This time, another of the bishop’s servants named Bertrand was seen to strike Talafer with a stick, making a great tumult as he did so.60 Bernard de Sancto Irlayndo said that he saw Petrus Brose in chains in the ‘putrid’ prison and could testify to the fact that he had been tortured, eventually to death.61 Perhaps the most notorious of deaths in custody was the case of Johannes Fresqueti, onetime guardian of the episcopal prison at Albi. Fresqueti was allegedly murdered by the bishop’s men after it was found that he had planned to testify against the bishop for Bernard Délicieux.62 It is clear, then, that the inquisitorial prison in its various guises proved to be a very useful site for questioning those suspected of heresy, interrogating those awaiting sentence and punishing those for whom imprisonment was penitential. Inquisitors like Bernard Gui were well aware that time spent in prison was both expensive and stressful; such stresses were felt to be particularly conducive to extracting confessions and gleaning other information. Constructing the prison as a place to be feared was in the interests of the inquisitors as part of what James Given has called a penal strategy, or a working theory of imprisonment as a means of producing knowledge.63 Although there was no coherent theory of imprisonment in evidence at the outset of inquisitorial practice as it was conducted in the south of France, by the end of the thirteenth century at the latest, it is perfectly sensible, indeed necessary, to talk of an inquisitorial ideology of imprisonment. When Nicholas Eymerich completed his Directorium inquisitorum towards the end of the fourteenth century, this ideology of imprisonment was clarified.64 Eymeric tells us that heretics who fail to confess within the designated time (one month) should be condemned to prison for life and that this should be a terrible prison as it serves punitive rather than custodial purposes.65 Such prisons, Eymeric qualifies, should not be so excessively rigorous that people die, although the recommendation is that these cells should be individual and without light.66 Prisoners should be separate from others so that they cannot ‘infect’ them. Eymerich also noted that the extraction of a confession should best be done within the confines of the prison space, where the accused should be frequently questioned and examined, and even tricked into a full confession. One ruse outlined by Eymerich in order to extract a confession is to pretend that the inquisitor has to go somewhere, and that he will have to leave the suspect in prison until he returns, and that it is a shame as he seems so delicate and might get sick. Others (including his old friends) could be introduced into the prison cell to assist in extracting a confession by encouraging conversation with the suspect in which he might reveal something.67
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Imprisonment in the prisoners’ imagination: memory I have often seen those thus ... detained for many years confess ... deeds committed long ago, going back thirty or forty years or more.68 Eymeric’s text tells us quite clearly that the inquisitorial prison was used to jog the sometimes recalcitrant memories of its inhabitants. Here prisoners, especially during their initial period of detention, were encouraged to remember people, places, events and actions of the past. The quality of remembrance encouraged in the prison was testimonial and was closely related to the production of truth which was then enshrined in the written record. Inquisitors asked many questions, while witnesses and suspects were expected to have long and specific memories that could be sparked and reconstructed through careful questioning about themselves and others. Bernard Gui’s Practica inquisitionis tells us that witnesses should swear ‘to speak the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the fact or the crime of heresy and everything pertaining thereto, both in respect of himself as a principal and also as a witness in the case of other persons, living or dead’.69 For some like Bernard Gombert, for instance, this meant recalling conversations that had taken place 11 years previously.70 The outrages allegedly committed by bishop Bernard de Castanet took place, in some cases, many years prior to the investigation into his conduct, and those who spoke of seeing, hearing and being otherwise aware of the bishop’s activities were frequently drawing on their own subjective memories or on communal memories of events long past. One witness admitted that the death of Bertrand Pelapol had occurred some seven or eight years earlier, while the death of Pierre Talafer had occurred 15 years ago, ‘or thereabouts’, but that he could nonetheless recall with great clarity the sequence of events, the conversations and the locations of the events he described.71 Some witnesses could not state with any certainty at all exactly when particular events were said to have happened, but still felt able to claim that their memories of the events themselves represented the reality of what had taken place.72 Coupled with the inherent authority assumed by eyewitnesses, the testimonial use of memory was an important means for those who testified of manufacturing credibility. Witnesses brought to testify against Guillaume Austatz of Ornoloc in 1320 were required to think back on conversations and meetings they had with Guillaume four years earlier. One of them, Gaillarde Ros, remembered a conversation about the resurrection well enough
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to describe Guillaume’s views on the passage of the soul after death, but failed to remember who else was present (‘other people [were there] whose names she does not recall’, notes the register). According to the register, Gaillarde was able to recall with certainty that over a 12-year period Guillaume had never taken communion, even on feast days; but later on, when asked about a conversation that occurred ‘around Easter this year’, she was not at all certain of the actual day it took place.73 Accurate testimony was thus a difficult matter to encourage and perceive: a ‘wise inquisitor’, says Gui, ‘should be careful to set his course by the replies of the witnesses, the sworn statements of accusers, the counsel of men taught by experience, the shrewdness of his own natural intelligence, and the following questions or interrogatories’, in order to elicit the testimonial truths he sought. When Guillaume Austatz himself appeared before the tribunal after a month in the prison, he was much less certain about the people with whom he had associated, the conversations he had held, and the words he or others had spoken than were the witnesses who had testified against him. He was not sure which of two women staying at his house had recently lost a son and he certainly did not remember who had asked him some 18 months ago where the souls of the dead resided. Another week in prison found Guillaume’s memory somewhat sharper: now he recollected that it was Alazais Mounié who had wept over her dead child, and could recall quite clearly the words of comfort he offered her. By the following March (1321), Guillaume, having been in the Tour des Allemans since July 1320, was ready to confess and his last testimony provided full details of conversations, ideas, places and times.74 Unravelling networks of heretical association was one of the reasons behind this mode of historical questioning. The formulaic question asked of all witnesses as to whether they had ever known, associated with, assisted, lived with or even seen a heretic, was important in both determining whether someone might be a fautor or aider of heretics, but also in establishing the social and communication networks on which heretical association might be founded. In 1285, Bernard Lagarrigue confessed that while he had himself been a heretic, he had witnessed a group of perfects encouraging a sick man to abjure eating meat, eggs and cheese, to promise to live chastely should he survive his illness, and to receive the words of the perfects as those of the apostles. Lagarrigue recalled the words of the prayer uttered by the sick man at the prompting of the perfects, and could attest to the fact that the perfects themselves prayed idem heretici mori, in the same heretical way.75 Family associations were perhaps easier for inquisitors to identify, especially
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in small communities like Montaillou, where the relatively contained population was also very interrelated. When Guillaume Austatz finally remembered that he did, in fact, have some heretical associations, he described the time his mother revealed to him that she was a heretic, and described the time that she had met, eaten with, adored and believed the words of heretics, including the famous Pierre Authié. Austatz thought much about his mother’s revelation later, and spent more time talking to her in detail about her ideas on spiritual practice and the afterlife.76 The words recalled by the witnesses and confessing heretics were thus crucial in the formal and written construction of inquisitorial evidence. Indeed, it was an inquisitor’s dread that a suspect or witness should remain silent, as the written record of truth was in essence dialogic and depended entirely on the participation of the subject.77 The registers reveal some desperation when suspects refused to speak. One example may be found in Fournier’s register, where for three pages of transcript, Agnes Francou refused to comply with increasingly desperate attempts to get her to swear that she would defend the Church, implicate other heretics, and would do penance. To every question relating to oathtaking, her only response was a non- discursive refusal. The notes on this case written by the notary summarise the process: The above named woman [i.e. Agnes] was admonished, begged and ordered by our said lords bishop and inquisitor, once, twice and three times for charity to leave and abandon the ... errors and heresies which she avowed to have held, ... to abjure the Waldensian heresy ... and to denounce all her companions, accomplices and believers and return to the faith and unity of the Roman Church. She replied that she would not take an oath, and our lords bishop and inquisitor protested that unless she wished to take an oath and abandon her errors, proceedings would begin against her as a heretic according to canonical sanctions and the forms of law.78 Memory worked here as a way of producing historical and legal truth. As such, the entrapment of the witness and suspect was important in engaging him or her in what we might call a dialogic matrix. This matrix was crafted on the notion that testimony was most authoritative if given by an eyewitness, and that careful questioning might circumvent the reluctance of some witnesses to enter into dialogue with the inquisitors. Eyewitness testimony was also highly sensory and highly individual: people saw, heard, had heard it said or rumoured. Remembrance could
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also be second-hand, as the evidence given against Bishop de Castanet indicates, but was just as effective as a first-hand eyewitness account. It is worth noting that eyewitness testimony was deeply embedded in legal tradition, even after written documents were trusted as reliable sources and repositories of evidence. In asserting that he or she had seen an event take place, heard a conversation or seen a heretic, a witness or a suspect was asserting an authority already recognised in medieval legal and textual discourses as proof of credibility and truth.79 The relationship between memory and knowledge assumed in the construction of testimonial evidence was also premised on Augustinian memorial tradition. Augustine had argued that memory is the highest intellectual faculty of the soul; indeed, memory is the faculty that bridges the gulf between God and man. For Augustine, memory is not simply recollection, but it is knowledge itself. This broad and symbiotic relationship between memoria and knowledge is certainly evident in the use of memory in inquisitorial testimonies.80 In these testimonies, knowledge of the events of the past was produced through the specific activation of the memory. The prompts given to witnesses helped them to remember and retrieve knowledge of past events and experiences: ‘Who was present?’, ‘What time did this take place?’, ‘Did you hear this or that conversation?’ This type of questioning process effectively served to bridge the difficult gap between the acquisition of the original memory or perception of the event, and the act of retrieving that memory sometimes years later as a form of knowledge which could then be enshrined in the written word. Memory itself could also work against witnesses and suspects, and not just because the words they spoke condemned them. Guillemette Tournier de Tarascon sur Ariège was burned for having venerated, in the mur where she was condemned to perpetual imprisonment, the memories of Authié and Bélibaste, while from the time of the Council of Toulouse (1229), the eradication of common memory of heretics within communities was legislated. Convicted heretics could expect to have their houses destroyed, and the minority of heretics ‘relaxed’ to the secular arm could expect their bodily remains to be completely eradicated. Bernard Gui was careful to remind inquisitors to ask suspects if they held in their possession any material memories of convicted heretics: ‘any bones, ashes or any other objects belonging to the aforesaid person who had been condemned or burned, which he keeps as relics out of devotion and reverence’.81 The act of recollection and the creation of testimony indicate that for some the prison was central in their experiences of inquisitorial
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practice. For others, the prison could also be used to publicise more general protests against the presence of the inquisitors in the Midi. The famous case of Bernard Délicieux is one example. This most extraordinary Franciscan was at the centre of a series of communal protests made against the presence and activities of the Dominican inquisitors in late thirteenth- century Carcassonne. His career has been narrated a number of times, most recently by Alan Friedlander, who has also edited the Processus of Délicieux, which took place from 3 September to 8 December 1319.82 These protests mobilised by Délicieux were well organised and involved launching formal appeals against inquisitors, the eruption of riots in the town, the mockery and humiliation of Dominicans in the streets, plots to steal the inquisitorial registers and, eventually, the storming of the prison at Carcassonne. Although the inquisitors of the region had, from the beginning, experienced hostility just as much as cooperation in the region, the well-planned and coordinated efforts of Délicieux and the townspeople were new and significantly threatening. The inhabitants of the prison at Carcassonne had been arrested from late 1299 to early 1300 en masse by Bernard de Castanet. Having first been interrogated in the dreaded episcopal palace at Albi, they were then sent to the mur at Carcassonne to be guarded by, among others, the embezzling Jacques de Poloniac. These inmates were not ‘ordinary’ heretics, if indeed they were heretics at all. They were some 30 burghers of Albi, Cordes and Réalmont, who although possibly not untainted by Catharism, were arrested primarily for political reasons. In August 1303, Délicieux led a crowd of Carcassonais to the mur, where the vidame (Jean de Picquigny) ordered the gates opened, and where the prisoners were released into royal protection. This was a highly symbolic moment in the struggle against the inquisitors, although the triumph was, in reality, short-lived. Délicieux’s key supporters were arrested and hanged for their part in Délicieux’s broader plot to raise a general revolt in the Midi, while Délicieux himself was spared only by his network of sympathisers in both court and curia. When he was eventually brought to trial in 1317, Délicieux faced a number of questions about his activities in Carcassonne and Albi, together with his more recent activities as supporter of the Spiritual Franciscans, his alleged role in the death of Pope Benedict XI, and suspected treason against the French king. In her testimony at Délicieux’s trial, Guilhelmus Francie says that the wives of the Incarcerati were vocal in the protest against their husbands’ incarceration, and that their ire had been inspired after Délicieux had given an emotional and rousing sermon to the public, in which the
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bishop and inquisitors were accused of acting as the devil, bent on destroying ‘that most beautiful green meadow’, Carcassonne. The sermon allegedly opened with the familiar image of Christ weeping over Jerusalem, the captive city providing another analogy for Carcassonne besieged by the inquisitors. After setting himself up as the ‘saviour’ of the city, Délicieux painted a lurid picture of the inquisitorial forces surrounding the walls. One man testified that Délicieux spoke of the inquisitors as butchers and the Carcassonnais as rams who were led one by one off to the slaughter.83 This sermon generated enough tension over the couple of weeks that inquisitors in the town found themselves in an increasingly dangerous position. Finally on 24 August the vidame, together with a great crowd, many of whom were armed (quorum multi erant armati), assembled outside the prison and threatened to break down the door. The guards of the prison resisted for only a short time before opening the door to the vidame, who collected the Incarcerati. The prisoners, although soon to be returned to the prison, were symbolic of a greater victory for Délicieux, a victory over the perceived injustice and malpractice of the inquisitors themselves. The prison site itself fulfilled material and symbolic functions for inquisitor, prisoner and protester. For Délicieux and his supporters, the prison was a physical space that symbolised past injustices, but also provided a narrative focus for the memories associated with the past. In many other testimonial narratives, the prison assumed a central role in the anchoring of memory. For the friends of Guillaume Borelli, it was the doorway of the prison that represented a means of access to their friend, as well as simultaneously underlining the vast distance between their understanding of his condition and the reality of his demise.84 For others like Bertrand Pelapol, the prospect of being incarcerated in the bishop’s prison was the cause for noisy and desperate protestations of innocence, scenes which were communicated years afterward among the townspeople. The register of Jacques Fournier provides ample evidence that the space of the prison could also be used for the maintenance of existing networks and for the exchange of information between prisoners, both male and female. Esclarmonde, wife of Raymond Authié, indicates in her testimony against Simon Barra that she and two men shared a room in the mur at Carcassonne, except at night, and that they ate together in that space and talked to each other about their experiences and ongoing interrogations.85 Such prisoners used their incarcerated circumstances to keep informed about each other’s testimony. The testimony of a number of other prisoners, such as Barthélemy Amilhac, reveals that while being held for interrogation purposes, prisoners were
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together a lot of the time, although segregated along gender lines for sleeping. His own room had a view of the mountains, which drew his attention outside the confines of the prison itself.86 Certain forceful personalities among the prisoners seemed also to have used the enclosure of the prison to assert their own wills and to attempt to influence the prisoners. Bernard Clergue is one example. He is accused of pushing certain prisoners in the mur to retract their confessions by means of bribery, threats and prayers. Barthélemy Amilhac said that around 22 July 1321 he and Clergue were sharing a room together in the Tour des Allemans, and that Clergue had promised him money if Amilhac were able to persuade Beatrice de Lagleize to retract statements she had made about Clergue’s brother, Pierre, the rector of Montaillou. Bernard Clergue is also alleged to have said that those recently sentenced to incarceration in the mur would certainly be treated badly there, and that as the guardian of the mur was his friend, Clergue was in a position to make the experience of imprisonment for these people even worse.87 Again, his hostility toward these prisoners was due to the testimony they had given against his brother. One witness also testified to the fact that Bernard had given four fleeces to the sergeant of the prison so that he could wander around at will, and that the wife of the sergeant had given Bernard the keys to the condemned cells so that he could converse with the condemned in secret.88 Alazais Faure of Montaillou mentioned in her testimony that the room she shared with her mother and the late Guillemette Benet was at the top of a staircase, and that the conversations of other prisoners were clearly audible from her room, especially if the windows were open. Everyone in the mur, she said, could hear Bernard Clergue crying when he was finally told by the sergeant, Garnot, of the death of his brother.89
Conclusion Thus space indeed ‘speaks’ – but it does not tell all.90 A productive carceral space was envisaged by the inquisitors of thirteenth and fourteenth-century France, a space in which memory, fear and truth were sought and represented. The procedural deployment of imprisonment was, in the first instance, bound up with the generation of testimonial truth and useful information, while the idea of the prison was carefully and deliberately manufactured as a space to inspire revelation through fear. For prisoners, the prison served a different sort of memorial function: remembrance of time spent in the prison, memories
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of people who had died in the prison, and memories of injustices committed in the prison all went to create the prison as a space which could be used to report and negotiate actual and imagined wrongs committed by the inquisitors. Overall, despite Gaston Bachelard’s belief that the hostile space of a prison prevents any imaginative integration of thoughts, dreams and memories, the inquisitorial prison was a place where imagination, memory and knowledge in fact worked very closely together. Despite the sunny scene implied by the inquisitor Jean Galand’s remonstration to the guardian of the prison of Carcassonne in 1282 to stop playing games, sharing meals and giving presents to the inmates, thirteenth and fourteenth- century inquisitorial prisons were not generally joyous places.91 For eighteenth and nineteenth- century historians, the inquisitorial prison was the Inquisition itself – violent, unjust, barbarous and, worst of all, medieval. Lea and others understood the Inquisition to be a punitive and monolithic institution with fanatical overtones that could be contrasted easily and sharply with a rational, humanist and enlightened post-medieval Protestantism. We know now, through the work of Edward Peters and others, that the practice of inquisition needs to be very carefully extricated from this mythology: no longer can we speak of the many individual inquisitorial tribunals set up to investigate heresy from the mid-thirteenth century as possessing an initially uniform, institutional set of characteristics indistinguishable from (say) the later Spanish or Venetian or even Roman Inquisitions.92 And with some careful work by James Given, Andrew Roach and others on the use of imprisonment by the thirteenth and fourteenth- century inquisitorial tribunals, we must also read the inquisitorial prison itself as having a number of purposes. Certainly, imprisonment could be a punishment when enforced as a sentence for a convicted heretic. But imprisonment could also operate as a particular sort of penance, as a way of producing knowledge and extracting information and as a way of preventing the ‘corruption’ of Christian communities by the exposure of suspected and convicted wrongdoers. The meanings imputed to imprisonment by those who enforced it and by those who experienced it, then, were myriad. For inquisitors, the prison delineated clear, disciplinary spatial parameters for observing people by locating them in one space. This space was used to produce knowledge and to expose and eliminate heretical networks. Yet the prison also created networks by placing people in the prisons together; while elements of self- discipline can be seen in cases like Arnaud de Savinhn de Tarscon, for whom the experience of imprisonment had
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taught to be wary of being too talkative. The moral and spiritual lessons that could be learned from enforcing and enduring imprisonment were complex. To be sure, the convicted heretic was faced with the probability of suffering within the prison, but for those who were truly repentant, the prison could be simultaneously represented as a site of some opportunity for finding the real comfort of Christ. Prisoners might discover for themselves other opportunities within the inquisitorial carcer: their memories and words helped to shape the culture that held them there, while for some the prison was a symbolic space for protest and action. Bertrand Pelapol was right to be frightened of Bishop de Castanet’s abuse of the prison, but his shouts of fear also publicly communicated and shaped common knowledge of a carceral world that could be manipulated and challenged.
4 Didactic Uses of Imprisonment and Captivity
A poor man, who had but a single fur garment, wrapped himself up in it to sleep during the cold weather, and consoled himself with the thought that he was much better off than the rich in hell or tormented in prison.1 During the siege of Ascalon, a number of Templars were captured by the Saracens, and hanged above the city gate. When the king of Jerusalem and the other Templars saw this, they were about to relinquish the siege in despair, but were dissuaded from this by an eminent man of great faith, Master of the Templars, who declared that their martyred brethren had preceded them, and gone to God, in order to deliver the city to them. The result proved the truth of this, for the city was captured, contrary to all hope, two days later.2 In the previous chapter I looked at how inquisitors imagined the protection of Christian souls through the use of the prison and its careful mapping as a space that was to be feared. In this manner, inquisitors were more generally concerned to mark out the boundaries of heretical and anti-heretical behaviours, in order to encourage confession and penitence. I also suggested that the same space of imprisonment could be appropriated by prisoners and their sympathisers in order to challenge or at least contradict the inquisitors themselves. These challenges were often formulated in response to specific abuses of imprisonment, but they also illustrate a particular use of memory as a tool of opportunistic witnessing, with varying degrees of success. Imprisonment as a protective and even moral idea may also be traced in mendicant literature of the thirteenth century, as the two short 80
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81
exempla (above) illustrate. The first exemplum uses the prison as a space where a simple truth may be articulated: that poverty is deserving of eternal reward, while wealth, linked in other medieval Christian didactic texts to envy, avarice and pride, will lead only to eternal punishment. The second exemplum focuses on captivity more generally, especially in the context of warfare. The Templars are first captured as prisoners of war before being martyred, while their deaths signify the liberation of a captured city, ultimately by divine ordination. The message here reinforces that well-known assertion of divine will in a crusading context, and simultaneously provides an uplifting tale of encouragement for the Knights Templar who were still, in the early thirteenth century, recovering from the devastating loss at Hattin in 1187 and the wave of criticism that followed them thereafter.3 The author of these two exempla was Jacques de Vitry, a significant preacher of the Albigensian Crusade and the Fifth Crusade, and Bishop of Acre from 1216 to 1226.4 He saw the crusading armies fail at Damietta in 1218 and he preached the Sixth Crusade in Europe before his appointment as Cardinal Bishop of Tusculum. Prior to his involvement in crusading activity, Jacques de Vitry had already produced a hagiographic text on the holy woman Mary of Oignies, who he claimed had inspired him to preach. Once established as an important preacher of the crusades, Jacques de Vitry continued to produce a range of written texts, including important histories and over 400 sermons.5 The ‘illustrative stories’, or exempla, that Jacques de Vitry included in his sermons derived from and influenced other sermon and didactic literature, and they have also long been studied for what they tell us about the practice of preaching and for what they might inadvertently reveal about the social and cultural worlds from which they emanated. The two exempla which open this chapter are also quite typical of the ways in which ideas of imprisonment were used in didactic and illustrative contexts. The exempla that deal specifically with incarceration as a subject incorporate either the location of a prison or the experience of a prisoner as a means of indicating that the prison space could be understood as something of a site of opportunity for individual Christians. First, the narrow parameters of spatial focus might allow for a sustained and honest engagement with God. Secondly, moral and behavioural norms might be reaffirmed through tales of prisoners who demonstrated exemplary conduct. In these ways, the exempla continue to maintain a very fluid view of the state of involuntary confinement in the same way as the images of captivity or the tales of miraculous liberations I have explored in previous chapters.
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The early thirteenth century was both a time of enormous pastoral reform, especially in relation to the practice of orthodox preaching, and a time of significant cultural anxiety around heretical practices, the redirection and justification of the crusades, and the transformation of monastic practice. One of the means by which ecclesiasts attempted to shore up doctrinal and ritual orthodoxies was through the production of a range of specifically didactic texts – exempla, sermons, hagiographies and calls to crusade. These texts form the empirical nucleus of this chapter. Specifically I am interested in exploring how images and understandings of imprisonment and captivity assisted the authors of these texts in their dissemination of deeper and urgent messages about the protection of the community of the faithful. In doing so, I argue that the prison and the state of imprisonment provided powerful ideas for asserting the collective unity of the Christian community and for describing the means by which particular actions, through God’s grace, could liberate the soul of each individual.
Imprisonment as moral example Exempla literature is usually associated with the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and predominantly with the religious orders who preached against heresy and who eventually staffed the inquisitorial tribunals.6 These moral tales, often very short, were included as memorable and sometimes entertaining illustrations in denser texts, such as sermons. We might expect, given the mendicant connection in the production and use of exempla, that imprisonment in relation to heretics would often feature in these texts. In fact the opposite is true. From the 46 surviving exempla collections produced across the thirteenth to fourteenth- century period, none talk about incarcerated heretics. Indeed, the only exemplum from the standard collections I have able to locate that tangentially includes heresy and imprisonment tells us that when two preachers conspired against St Apollinarius, one was thrown into prison.7 We also rarely find the idea that imprisonment is deserved punishment for wrongdoing. One exception may be found in the Liber exemplorum where we hear that imprisonment was a just punishment for a group of brigands, and we are told that some prisoners experienced terrible fear before judgement.8 However, the prison space and ideas of imprisonment do appear in the exempla in different manifestations. First, the prison space itself serves as a location in which various moral and spiritual duties might be promoted. One tale concerns a woman who breastfeeds her mother
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(or father or husband) while her parent is incarcerated. This tale originated from Valerius Maximus’ collection and appears in, among others, Jacobus de Voragine’s Sermones aurei, where a mother condemned to die of starvation is suckled by her daughter.9 Valerius Maximus’ text is glossed to explain this tale as an example of familial responsibility: ‘Where does the sense of duty not penetrate? ... even in jail it invented a novel way of saving a mother’s life. What could be so extraordinary, what could be so unheard of as the tale of a mother being breastfed by her own daughter. Someone might think that this action was against the laws of nature, but in fact, to honor one’s parents is the greatest law of nature’.10 Likewise, the bourgeoise who sought to liberate her husband from prison by engaging in sexual relations with his guards was said not to have sinned because she was being obedient to her husband’s wishes.11 Such stories may be related to the more general theme of evading the privations of the prison space through adherence to moral and spiritual orthodoxies. Many of the exempla relating to incarceration deal primarily with liberations from prison through power or prayer, devotion to the sacraments or the miraculous intervention of the saints. There are a number of versions of tales in which a captive’s bonds simply fall off when masses or prayers are said for him or her. One concerns a Franciscan whose bonds disappear when the Salve Regina is sung;12 another concerns a man who was captured by the Persians and, imprisoned for three years, told his wife on his return home that at the same time that she had prayed for him for those three years, his irons were loosened.13 As we have seen, saints are particularly efficacious in liberating prisoners, and even here St Leonard makes an appearance. The Alphabet of Tales tells us that a knight in Brittany prayed especially to St Leonard, who subsequently appeared to him, broke his fetters and brought him out of the prison.14 Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus miraculorum tells us that the power of faith liberated a German man who had prayed to St James, while the Virgin herself came to another knight who was then able to escape.15 Mary also appeared in prison to a matron and a monk who had eloped together with the monastery’s treasures. Moved by their prayers, Mary restored both the treasure and the reputations of the sinners.16 Etienne de Bourbon narrates the tale of St Margaret who, although gripped by fear when a dragon shared her prison cell, was able to repel him by making the sign of the cross.17 These types of miraculous liberations, as we have already seen, were not unusual in medieval descriptions of the prison space and the state of imprisonment more generally.
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One common prison tale in the exempla collections concerns a child who was born in a prison to a woman incarcerated for adultery. The exemplum tells us that when the child’s mother described to him the real world outside, he was unable to comprehend it. This inability to understand the freedom of external space is used to illustrate the point that the realities of the terrestrial world are created by God to evoke the celestial realities to come, and to encourage yearning for release.18 A glossed version of this tale in the Gesta Romanorum explains that the emperor who incarcerates the mother is the celestial king who has decreed that if the soul (the wife) forsakes the Bridegroom Christ (the husband), then she will be condemned to the prisons of hell.19 In another version, a knight who pleads for the emperor’s compassion is likened to a prelate who prays for sinners to be rescued from the prison of sin.20 The Old English version elaborates slightly on this: here, the child asked his mother why she wept every day, but when the mother told him that while the prison is in perpetual darkness, overhead is the shining sun and the comings and goings of other people, the child was not comforted, but simply bewildered. The compassion of the emperor was aroused on hearing of this episode, in the same way we are told that the heavenly Father shows compassion to penitent souls. Another exemplum includes the advice of an abbot to like a prisoner awaiting judgement, while repentant sinners are compared to escaped prisoners.21 A curious inclusion in the Sermones aurei hints at a more complicated theological association of prison and hell. Jacobus de Voragine notes that just as an ostrich rescues his young trapped in a glass cage with the blood of a worm, so God, through the blood of Christ, delivers the patriarchs from their infernal prison.22 This analogy relates to the theology surrounding Christ’s descent into hell, and the debate that emanated from questions about the presence and liberation of the saints and patriarchs there. The long and complex theological history of this question was dealt with in a dense and detailed fashion by Thomas Aquinas, whose Summa Theologica talks of Christ’s descent into hell as proper in saving humankind from imprisonment there.23 The stain of original sin, which had led to the imprisonment of saints in hell, was washed away by the power of Christ’s passion: the patriarchs, on the other hand, who had died prior to the Incarnation of Christ, had been instructed in the Incarnation by ‘certain visible signs’ (which Aquinas calls sacraments) and were therefore able to be saved. The place which housed these ancient dead was a special sort of prison, then, the limbus inferni or limbo of hell, which also exhibited the qualities of the bosom of Abraham in implying ‘comfort and exemption from punishment’.24
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The living exempla of female saints Exempla were incorporated into a wide range of didactic texts throughout the Middle Ages, some of which were also circulated orally (the sermon) and some of which had more limited textual readership. Chronicles, which served both historicising and moral functions, are frequently dotted with exempla, some of which may also be traced to the conventional exempla collections, and some of which seem unique to a particular chronicle.25 Texts which might be grouped under the general umbrella of ‘hagiography’ are also repositories for exempla. Here, exempla are sometimes incorporated into hagiographical collections in the form of miracle reports and are thus part of a longer tradition of writing about the activities of saints. More generally, we might also read the whole life story of a saint as an exemplum, or a ‘living sermon’, as we are invited to do by Jacques de Vitry in his Vita Maria Oigniacensi. This holy woman’s vita is often identified as the first of a number of hagiographies of thirteenth- century mystics, sometimes described as beguines, and in a number of ways provides something of a template for this group of texts.26 The prison and the experience of imprisonment is central to some of these hagiographical texts, especially those associated with the holy women of Liège (of which Marie of Oignies was one). One example is the extraordinary vita of Christina Mirabilis composed by Thomas of Cantimpré, where we find that Christina’s own life story, as well as the broader purpose of the text, is represented in terms of imprisonment and liberation.27 Thus, although the extreme ascetic behaviours of Christina are conventionally discussed in terms of the highly somatic nature of thirteenth- century female mysticism, there remains much to be said about this unusual woman in the context of discourses of imprisonment.28 Such discourses are primarily connected through Christina’s function as the living embodiment of penance. Indeed, Dyan Elliot has shown that Christina’s penitential function must be understood as one element of the mendicant ‘war on heresy’, part of which was played out through the writing of hagiographical texts.29 Just as Jacques de Vitry’s Vita Maria Oigniacensi was in many ways ‘a retaliatory initiative on behalf of orthodoxy’,30 so too the vita of Christina Mirabilis equipped clerical and lay audiences with new and potent ways of understanding the necessity and efficacy of penance. Christina’s hagiographer was an Augustinian canon prior to joining the Dominicans in 1232: he composed two other hagiographies of female mystics from Liège (Lutgard of Aywières and Margaret of
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Ypres) as well as his well-known treatises Bonum universale de apibus and De Natura Rerum. He also wrote a continuation of Jacques de Vitry’s Vita Maria Oigniacensi. As John Coakley has pointed out, Thomas of Cantimpré and Jacques de Vitry both wrote texts which essentially reveal the reciprocal relationship between holy women and their confessors/confidants: Marie of Oignies provided spiritual rewards for Jacques de Vitry, while Lutgard of Aywières provided spiritual inspiration for Thomas of Cantimpré.31 By the same token, both authors were concerned to underscore the internal devotion which set these female saints apart from those who had simply suffered during martyrdom. Specifically, in a world where heretics were also prepared to die rather than recant their beliefs, saintly women’s corporeal experiences of the divine were emphasised in order to distinguish the uniqueness of their particularly elevated and orthodox sort of suffering. Marie of Oignies and her counterparts were literally branded with the evidence of their superior devotion: by oozing oil, becoming miraculously drenched with blood when contemplating the Passion, by transforming into ‘a round mass’ of flesh while in a state of rapture, these women were shown by their hagiographers to contrast in the most overt ways with the heretics who also laid claim to suffering as a pious and devotional act.32 When we come to consider the place of imprisonment in the life of Christina Mirabilis, it is crucial to remember that this particular individual stands apart from the other female mystics of the same period in one fundamental way: Christina had died and been returned to life. Her vita thus tells of Christina’s life post-resurrection. This is significant in accounting for the particularly penitential nature of Christina’s actions as they are narrated by Thomas de Cantimpré. Indeed the focus on penance here has led some to describe the whole text as ‘a sermon on purgatory’, because the agreement between Christina and God on her resurrection was that she would live out her life on earth as purgatory.33 This is certainly made clear in Thomas of Cantimpré’s prologue, in which he quotes Jacques de Vitry’s Vita Maria Oigniacensi: ‘God granted that she endure purgatory in the world while still living in the body ... finally after she had completed her penance with great serenity, she earned so much grace from God that many times, ravished in spirit, she led the souls of the dead either to purgatory or through purgatory to heaven, without any harm to herself’.34 Christina’s vita begins with a conventional and brief account of her humility in undertaking menial domestic responsibilities and indicates that the presence of Christ in her life came early – she was given ‘the gift of inner sweetness’ (gratiam internae dulcedinis). Christina’s anonymity
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is described in terms of her being ‘hidden’ from all men but Christ: ‘the more hidden she was, the more she was known to God alone’.35 Christina died after her physical body weakened from the stresses of interior contemplation (ex interno contemplacionis) but to the amazement of the mourners at her Requiem Mass, Christina’s body rose from the coffin and, bird-like, ascended to the rafters of the church. Christina was eventually able to tell what had happened to her during the hours of her death, and we hear that her soul was taken to a ‘dark and terrible spot which was full of the souls of men ... I asked them [the angels of God] what this place was. I thought it was hell, but my guides said to me, “This place is purgatory and it is here that repentant sinners atone for the sins they committed while they were alive.” ’36 Christina then claims that she was also taken to hell and then to paradise, where God gave her the choice either to remain in heaven or to return ‘to the body and suffer there the sufferings of an immortal soul in a mortal body without damage to it, and by these your sufferings to deliver all those souls on whom you had compassion in that place of purgatory, and by example of your suffering and your way of life to convert living men to me and to turn aside from their sins ...’37 Thomas of Cantimpré tells us that Christina decided to return to her body without hesitation (sine alique haesitatione). The rest of the vita is spent narrating the extraordinary feats of devotion and ascetism practised by Christina through her newly restored but singular body. This text is an interesting one to examine in terms of imprisonment and the exemplum as it contains so much captivity imagery, much of which is narrated through the remarkable lightness of Christina’s physical body and its inability to remain imprisoned. Christina is said to have fled the presence of men ‘into deserts, or to trees or to the tops of castles or churches or any lofty structure’, leading others to believe that she must be possessed. The community’s anxiety meant that Christina was perennially being captured, tied up with chains and fetters, bound to trees and imprisoned in dungeons. From all of these situations of physical confinement, Christina was able to escape. Early on we are told that with the help of God one night, her iron chains and fetters dropped off and she was able to live freely for a time – like a bird, in trees – nourishing herself with her own breast milk until captured and bound once more.38 These attempts to imprison this phantasm/woman are narrated in the context of Christina’s more extreme acts of self-torment in the first part of the vita. As she creeps into fiery ovens, throws herself into flames, leaps into cauldrons of boiling water, stays underwater for six days at a
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time, hangs herself from the gallows and climbs into the graves of the dead, Christina is continually under siege from her persecutors who eventually draw close and capture her. In one significant instance, Christina’s sisters and friends bribe a man to capture and bind her with iron chains: he broke her leg with a cudgel and she was then bound (by the doctor who subsequently treated her broken leg) firmly to a pillar in a dungeon where ‘chains hung on all the walls’ (vinculis fortiter constrictam). The doors of this prison were locked as this physician ‘knew her strength’. Thomas of Cantimpré tells us that Christina first removed her bandages ‘since she thought it shameful to have any doctor for her wounds but Christ’, and then, when the Spirit came upon her one night, her chains dropped off and her wound miraculously healed. Christina then joyously walked and danced around the prison – typical physical expressions of mystical ecstasy or rapture.39 Moreover, feeling her spirit to be still imprisoned, Christina is said to have taken a stone from the dungeon floor and thrown it at the wall with such force that the wall was punctured; her spirit was then able to fly, ‘with her body in its weak flesh through the empty air like a bird, because “where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” ’.40 Captured once again, Christina was tied to a wooden stake and fed like a dog. God caused her to exude miraculous oil and her captors finally realised her status as a manifestation of God’s will and, ‘begging for mercy for their injuries to her’, released her from her chains permanently. Once Christina’s spirit has been liberated, the narrative is thereafter concerned with recounting her deeds, culminating with Christina’s eventual death. The theology of grace is one discourse with which this text might be interpreted. Margot King has described the structure of Thomas de Cantimpré’s narrative as a delineation of the three stages of the mystical growth of the soul: nutrition (the animal level of growth), education (the rational level of growth) and freedom (the spiritual level of growth).41 Imprisonment is an important and emphatic metaphorical device in this context, as it allows the reader to understand that the constraints of the physical body are limiting only until the soul is freed, and that this particular sort of spiritual liberty can only come with God’s grace. Christina’s own experiences are thus illustrative episodes with which Thomas de Cantimpré outlines the tripartite and hierarchical process toward God: less of a biography than an exposition on mystical union, the vita has Christina herself function in a narrative and didactic structure as an exemplum. We might also extend this theological reading of Christina’s vita to consider the centrality of penance and its relationship to captivity and
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enclosure here. As I have indicated, Christina’s vita is not simply an account of her life but also serves the wider purpose of presenting her two particular functions as example to the living and deliverer of souls in purgatory. Christina’s bodily suffering was meant to convert men to God and to turn them away from sin (homines vero viventes exemplo poenae et vitae tuae converti ad me, et a scleribus resilire) and her experiences of imprisonment and bodily confinement are represented as part of this general but purposeful suffering. In her various states of imprisonment, Christina endured bodily pain and even torture; these conditions were endured in order that Christ ‘might show in her the remarkable miracle of his strength’ (Ut ergo praerogativum in ea virtutis suae miraculum Christus ostenderet, superari eam ad tempus ac tribulari sustinuit) and provide inspiration to individual Christians. Moreover, the act of bodily suffering as a specific result of entrapment was intended to resonate with an audience for whom purgatorial entrapment was defined ever more clearly over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Although Jacques Le Goff’s influential thesis that the twelfth century witnessed the ‘birth of purgatory’ has been qualified and refined, there is no doubt that the twelfth and thirteenth centuries did see more detailed articulation on the place and space of purgatory, and more concerted efforts on the part of hagiographers to relate the intercessionary qualities of saints to the freeing of souls in purgatory.42 Texts such as the vita of Christina Mirabilis are part of this body of evidence indicating increased interest in negotiating this otherworldly space, fulfilling the twin purposes of describing the efficacious work of a saint while bolstering the very doctrine of purgatory itself. When Christina Mirabilis told of: A place near hell which was ordained by God for the purgation of those who were stained by great sin but who had nevertheless repented at the end. This place, she said, was so fearsome because of its torments that there was no difference between these torments and the pains of hell except that those who were suffering these pains breathed the hope of mercy.43 She reminded her listeners that purgatory was a painful and localised but temporary state. To qualify for purgation, one must have sinned but have formally repented; the torments one would undergo in purgatory would thus be penitential and expiatory.44 Christina’s marvellous ability to suffer on behalf of those condemned to purgatory, combined with her ability to foresee who would end up there (or in hell, or paradise),
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were means of expressing the eschatological ties that connected all Christians in their collective enterprise to protect each other, the community of the faithful and the discursive worlds that bound them. The relationship between the prison and purgatory is more than incidental, according to some who understand the penitential and confessional slant of medieval spirituality from the twelfth century to be historically connected to the broader societal development of a ‘penal culture’ that saw, among other developments, the revival of bodily torture as a judicial procedure.45 As prisons became more penitential in character, so the argument goes, purgatory assumed a more carceral aspect – ‘earthly images of confinement, penance and redemption [were carried] into the world hereafter’.46 Although there are rather fewer direct equations between prison as purgatory and purgatory as prison than we might expect in the primary sources, it is clear that, in the thirteenth- century texts that describe the space of purgatory, prisonlike conditions are certainly envisaged. Christina Mirabilis’s account of purgatory emphasises both its torments and its promise of release in the same way that Bernard of Clairvaux had imagined a Cistercian monastery as a prison but with open doors. Lutgard of Aywieres, passed ‘in front of purgatory’, blessing its incarcerated inhabitants as though performing one of the seven works of mercy.47 Gerard de Frachet’s Vitae Fratrum tells the tale of one Dominican, Brother Walter, who is said to have had a vision as he was saying Mass. An apparition of a dead friend appeared before him to thank Walter for his prayers, which had delivered him from purgatory after only six weeks, whereas he had been condemned ‘to detention’ there for two years.48 These are conventional inclusions in purgatory writing, that emphasise the confining aspects of purgatorial space while reminding Christian audiences of the means by which this space could be negotiated. Such imagery was enduring: as late as the fifteenth century, Jean Gerson was able to deliver a sermon in which purgatory was directly equated with the prison.49 Outside of an ecclesiastical context Guy Geltner has recently noted one fourteenth- century Italian prison in Padua, which was described as a palace divided into three parts, one of which could be likened to Limbo (for people who owe the commune for taxes or fines), one of which could be likened to purgatory (for those who committed minor crimes) and one of which could be likened to hell (for those who have committed serious crimes).50 Women like Christina Mirabilis were thus represented by their hagiographers as living remarkable lives, as possessing remarkable bodies and as being charged with highly practical spiritual duties. The language of
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captivity was appropriate to describe all of these functions, while the model of the exemplum, drawn out and elaborate, provided the structured textual framework for the articulation of the work of these individuals. Moreover, the texts produced by hagiographers such as Thomas of Cantimpré ‘strove to affirm certain contentions about the afterlife that were denied by Cathars and Waldensians alike’.51 Emphasis on confession and penance in these texts should thus be understood to underscore other didactic and preaching literature against heresy. Such literature was naturally directed, either orally or in written form, to wider audiences who would find some inspiration within themselves and among each other to participate in the collective and urgent effort to protect Christendom from its enemies.
Imprisonment, captivity and action By the thirteenth century, these enemies were more clearly defined, while the spiritual economy that bound together the ‘community of the faithful’ was delineated more precisely, especially from the time of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. As we have seen, chief among the enemies of the thirteenth- century universal Church were heretics, whose activities were variously understood to be subversive, contagious and motivated by a desire to entrap the souls of good Christians. Anxiety about the spread of heresy also coexisted with concerns about the fate of the Holy Land, particularly during the pontificates of Innocent III and his successor Honorius III. Both these men understood individual penance and collective enterprise to be essential to the defence of Christendom, while the singular task of crusading was considered to be particularly effective in combining the two acts.52 The motivational literature that was produced to promote the crusade also employs images and ideas of imprisonment. Indeed, just as the exempla contained within sermons and hagiographies provided models for good Christian behaviour through metaphors of captivity and release, so the crusading literature of the early to mid-thirteenth century linked the captivity of Jerusalem and collective Christian responsibility for its freedom with individual penance and the promise of individual, eternal freedom in God. Crusade preaching may usefully be linked to other exempla which stressed liberation through one’s own penitential actions. The very earliest crusade preaching had emphasised both the captivity of Jerusalem and the necessity to liberate it, while also incorporating a general moral obligation to liberate fellow Christians who
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were suffering in captivity.53 In this way, the liberation of both people and place were central to crusading justifications for action: ‘this royal city, placed at the centre of the world, is now held captive by her enemies’, wrote Robert the Monk. ‘Your blood brothers ... are subject to foreign lords ... or are driven out’, wrote Baldric of Bourgeuil, and ‘in every place the sanctuary of God ... has been profaned’.54 Two brothers whose purpose in joining the first crusade was recorded in a charter, planned through this unique pilgrimage, to ‘wipe out the defilement of the pagans and the immoderate madness through which innumerable Christians have already been oppressed, made captive and killed with barbaric fury’.55 It is also clear that the liberating purpose of a crusade – whether described as the liberation of territory or fellow Christians – remained in discursive currency throughout the twelfth century, and was still being repeated even after the disaster of the Fourth Crusade, and well into the thirteenth century. This was expressed in various ways. Innocent III’s encyclical of 1198, Post miserabile, had added to the notion of the captive city of Jerusalem by describing the captivity of Christ himself. As Penny Cole and others have pointed out, this encyclical is also replete with ‘feudal’ imagery stressing the theology of redemption. Here, Innocent states that Jerusalem ‘is our inheritance ... our Lord Jesus Christ by his death redeemed us from our captivity, and now like a prisoner he is forced by unbelievers to depart from his own land’.56 Again, we see here the notion that expulsion or exclusion rather than forcible inclusion is a concomitant state to captivity or imprisonment. It is the duty of crusaders to fulfil their side of the Christian contract, which is to defend and restore Christ as he did for them. A similar message may be found in one of Innocent’s letters, written some ten years after Post miserabile and intended for the people of Lombardy and the March. This letter, Utinam Dominus, also stresses the sins and ingratitude of Christians which has led to the captivity of Jerusalem. Moreover, the captivity of the Holy Land is part of God’s great plan to discern ‘who are his’, while the crusade offers Christians a chance for salvation.57 Likewise, the great crusading letter Quia Maior of April 1213, which called for the launch of the Fifth Crusade, asked how anyone could remain inactive in liberating the Holy Land, knowing ‘that his brothers, Christian in faith and name, are held in dire imprisonment among the perfidious Saracens and most profoundly subjected by the yoke of servitude’.58 The crusading canon Ad liberandam terram sanctam which was appended to the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council was, in essence, a reiteration of Quia Maior, drawing together concepts of collective obligation,
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Christian ownership of the Holy Land and its captive state to articulate the crusade as a great act of charity to Christians enslaved by ‘the son of perdition and that false prophet, Mohammed’.59 Thirteenth- century crusade preachers continued to use diverse images of captivity in their sermons. When the Cistercian Abbot Martin of Pairis preached his great crusade sermon in Basel Cathedral in 1205, he stressed the captive state of the Holy Land’s most significant relic, the True Cross, which had been captured by Saladin at the battle of Hattin and which remained in Muslim hands: That most sacred and venerable Cross of wood, which was drenched with the blood of Christ, is locked and hidden away by persons to whom the word of the Cross is foolishness, so that no Christian might know what was done with it or where to look for it.60 This sermon, unusual in that the full text of it was preserved in a contemporary chronicle (possibly at the request of Abbot Martin himself), relates the captivity of the True Cross to the expulsion of Christ from his patrimony. Abbot Martin claimed that Christ ‘in pain’ was speaking directly through him, and that the exile of Christ from the holy city of Jerusalem, which he had ‘consecrated with his own blood’, was a particular and agonising form of exile. The exilic state of Christ together with the material captivity of the relic which most directly reminded medieval audiences of the suffering undergone by Christ on behalf of all people, served to infuse Abbot Martin’s listeners with collective and subjective senses of obligation to act. The redemptive rationale of participation in a crusade was also emphasised by preachers like Jacques de Vitry who, as well as being a significant preacher of the crusade in various theatres himself, penned two ‘model’ sermons specifically directed at crusaders and those who might be motivated to join the crusade, as well as a number of other sermons which are relevant to crusading. The two crusading sermons are difficult to date precisely, but it has been argued that they were written down as model sermons after Jacques de Vitry’s return from Acre in 1225 and were intended for use by other preachers of the crusade.61 The first of these sermons immediately frames the call to crusade in apocalyptic terms, quoting the book of Revelation on ‘the angel arising from the sunrise carrying the sign of the living Lord’ (vidi angelum ascendentem ab ortu solis habentem signum Dei vivi), and casting the act of preaching the crusade as central to the means by which ‘the Holy Land may be freed from the hands of the enemies’ (ut scilicet Terra Sancta de manibus
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inimicorum liberetur). The condition of Christians in the desolated Holy Land is described as enslavement, while the physicality of territory is represented in bodily terms which are highly gendered: ‘the mistress of the nations, the princess of the provinces has been made a tributary, and the enemies of the Cross of Christ reached out their sacrilegious hands as far as the most noble limb, the inner organs and the pupil of the eye, attacking and conquering the city of our redemption, that is the mother of faith’.62 The feminisation of Jerusalem continues when Jacques de Vitry uses the voice of a mother to have the city ‘talk’: ‘as Baruch ... says: Listen burghers of Zion, God has sent me great sorrow, I have seen the captivity of my people, my sons and my daughters; I reared them joyfully, in tears and sorrow I let them go ...’63 The special friendship which binds Christians to God in faith is the reason why crusaders should liberate the Holy Land, according to this sermon, which stresses the obligation of vassalage in typically feudal terms. Moreover, crusaders themselves are bound together by the significance of the cross, which functions as both the means by which crusaders will be marked out from others and as the means by which an individual crusader will be saved. In Jacques de Vitry’s second sermon, crusaders are variously described as ‘key-bearers, treasurers and chancellors’ of Christ (clavigeris, thesauriis et cancellariis), while the cross itself is ‘the key that opens the gates of paradise’ (Crux enim clavis est reserans portas paradisi). As a liberating device, the cross will also free individual crusaders from undergoing the punishment of purgatory in the afterlife: individual crusaders will hold ‘the key to the heavenly treasure and the seal with which the flesh of Christ is stamped’ (clavem celestis thesausri et sigillum cui impressa fuit caro Christi). The salvific virtue of crusading is thus understood to incorporate freedom, not only of the territory of the Holy Land itself, but individual freedom from sin and suffering after death. This is borne out further in the same sermon when Jacques de Vitry urges his audience to ‘pray to the Lord that today the sinners may be led out of their caves by the string of the Cross of Christ’, and reminding his listeners that sinners are still protected by the Lord, who ‘extends his arms over the sinners so that they leave their nest of sins and climb the height of the cross where the devil cannot reach’, just as ‘the eagle flutters above its offspring in order to make them fly when people want to steal them’.64 An exemplum which is incorporated into this second sermon also employs the image of captivity and escape in order to demonstrate the
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important effect of preaching and to underscore the liberating potential of taking up the cross. De Vitry writes that: Once when I preached in some town, one man did not want to come to the sermon with the others since his wife objected. But he began to watch through a window in the loft out of curiosity and listen secretly to what I would say. When he heard that through the properties of the cross and without any other penitence people received such a great indulgence as people mostly do not obtain who fast and wear a hairshirt for sixty years and that nothing less than the whole may be remitted ... when he also heard that for the labour of a short time the penance in this world and the punishment of purgatory were remitted, the punishment of hell avoided and the kingdom of heaven gained, he was full of remorse and inspired by God; afraid of his spouse, who had locked the door so that he would not leave, he was watching from the window and jumped out into the crowd and was the first to come to the cross. And since he showed a good example to others and many followed him, he is now enjoying all universal benefits. He who corrupts many by bad example must give back to God by good example what he took away from him.65 This exemplum, like the other moral tales I mentioned earlier in this chapter, certainly emphasises the practical and active means by which individual Christians could fulfil their obligations to God. If Penny Cole is right in her argument that this sermon was also directed at noncombatants – both those who might yet take up the cross and those who might support them – then we might read this exemplum as a reminder to families and spouses that they could partake in the benefits of crusading themselves by offering support to men who decided to join the crusade. Furthermore, I would argue that the general function of this language of example served to engender a more specific sense of inclusion among the crusaders and their social groups both as individuals and as members of the Christian body. This sense of inclusion has been noted by Christoph Maier, who has pointed out that the individual, devotional aspect of crusading was expressed by sermonists in terms that emphasised union with Christ: Eudes Châteauroux wrote of ‘striving to “catch” (comprehendere) or “hold” (capere) Christ in his heart’, while others like Jacques de Vitry wrote of those ‘who have been exiled from the Lord’ being ‘united beneath the standard of the cross’.66 The inclusive nature of the crusading enterprise is also emphasised by Jacques de
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Vitry’s second sermon which, as Penny Cole has described, assured the non- combatant audiences (and potential crusaders) of the supplementary value of listening to crusade sermons, financing crusaders, making confession and taking the cross.67 The communities who were to be motivated by crusading sermons were diverse; the act of crusading, however, was understood and marketed as a unique and common enterprise that would unite Christians as a body while providing individual spiritual benefits to each participant and supporter. Inclusion in the body of Christ through participation in the active and defensive work of crusading was a fundamental premise on which preachers built their motivational sermons. The ongoing captivity of Jerusalem was a situation which a number of crusade preachers of the early and mid-thirteenth century felt increasingly compelled to explain. Jacques de Vitry himself told his audiences to ‘note carefully that, although God could liberate his land by himself with one word, he wants to honour his servants and wants to have companions in its liberation, giving you the chance to save your souls, which he redeemed and for which he spilled his blood and therefore does not like to lose them’.68 The special amicitia between individual and God, expressed through the theology of redemption, explains the lack of divine intervention in the liberation of the Holy Land, according to this preacher. Another sermonist whose motivational preaching confronted the seemingly perpetual captivity of the Holy Land was John of Abbeville, a cardinal bishop of Sabina and legate of Pope Gregory IX from 1227. John of Abbeville, when he was deacon of Amiens, wrote and preached a crusade sermon sometime between 1217 and October 1218 in which he attempted to explain why Jerusalem was allowed to continue in captivity, despite (by now) numerous attempts to release it.69 This sermon begins by admonishing Christians for failing to grieve for the Holy Land, and states that their forgetfulness and sinfulness has angered God. John of Abbeville stresses the interior and individual failings of each Christian, arguing that it is a grievous lack of compunction, or a lack of spiritual and emotional empathy, that causes Christians to neglect to mourn the loss of the Holy Land and to remember the suffering of Christ. All Christians must, according to this preacher, recall both the suffering of Christ and their own past sins. Only sufficient penitence will revive compunction and lessen sin. It is with this eventuality alone that the terrestrial Jerusalem can be freed through God. Moreover, John of Abbeville equates the captivity of the earthly Jerusalem with the captivity of the spiritual Jerusalem, the Church.70 In
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scholastic form, he carefully outlines the need for Christians to understand that the literal captivity of the material location of Jerusalem is allegorical as well as historical (non solum hystoriam sed allegoriam), and he argues that once the captivity of the earthly Holy Land ceases, then the captivity it signifies will also cease (si cessaret captivitas significata, cessaret et illa que significat). Who were those subjecting the Church to captivity? Abbeville describes them as ‘Moabites’ (those excluded from office as the issue of an incestuous union), ‘Amonites’ (oppressors of the poor), ‘eunuchs’ and ‘bastards’ – all Old Testament terms.71 In something of an attack on the state of clerics and their neglect of theology, he charges ecclesiasts with privileging the lesser intellectual study of science over the only true science, which is the science of God’s law (scientia divine legis). The final part of this sermon is devoted to the means by which the Holy Land/Church might be delivered. John of Abbeville observes a general societal lack of faith, which is manifested in the sins of usury, simony, plunder and deceit, and argues that it is only with the restoration of faith that deliverance might ensue. In what we might see as a rather realistic acknowledgement of the possibility of military defeat, Abbeville also provides the uplifting example of the Israelites, who failed twice to overcome the tribe of Benjamin but who nonetheless retained faith in God.72 In the same way, he suggests, Christians should undertake an active restoration of faith by a proper fulfilment of penance. By ensuring that contrition, confession and satisfaction are discharged, then God will remove ‘our shame’ (obprobium nostrum) and the earthly and spiritual Jerusalems might then be liberated. Abbeville’s sermon is one example of what Cole sees as a developing discourse of crusading as a penance in the early thirteenth-century context, where preachers focused more and more on the notion of crusade as a ‘personal spiritual pilgrimage to the heavenly Jerusalem and as a spiritual war against temptation’.73 The obligation of each Christian either to actively take up the cross or at least offer support for those who did was increasingly framed in penitential terms. Ideas of captivity were, in this context, important in describing the interior, sinful state of individuals as a state of bondage which precipitates a subjective need for penitential action. The crusade could therefore be promoted easily as an opportunity for individuals to free themselves through performing this singular act of penance. Even the biographer of Christina Mirabilis had the saint publicise this opportunity: her vita tells us that ‘long before the event’ she knew that Jerusalem would be taken by ‘the ungodly Saracens’. Thomas de Cantimpré writes that for Christina the
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knowledge of this event and its eventual occurrence was a cause of exultation. When questioned by those around her about why she rejoiced, Christina answered that: ‘I exult because today Christ the Lord rejoices with the angels and He exults because so many men have been given the occasion by which they might be saved.’ When those present asked what this occasion might be, she said, ‘Know that today the Holy Land has been handed over into the hands of the ungodly and through this event a great occasion for salvation has been given. Today Christ has produced something worthy from what had been an insult to himself, for the land has been delivered into shame although it had been consecrated at his Passion. Although it shall perish with the world at the end of time, yet by its recovery souls shall endure forever and shall be redeemed by His blood and they shall be turned to the path of justice from the path of injustice, and men shall shed their blood in the affair of the Holy Land and they, in turn, shall repay the death of Christ with great devotion.’74 Those who failed to take up the chance to crusade were themselves in a state of entrapment, according to preachers like Humbert of Romans, who described such men as ‘the devil’s hostages’, while another great Dominican sermon writer of the thirteenth century, Berthold of Regensburg, saw Christians imprisoned by vice and sin as the result of the devil throwing his net over the world.75 In a cultural context where the captivity of Jerusalem was increasingly associated with individual spiritual failings, the action of crusade as a penance fulfilled functions of both obligation and penitence. Yet the language of crusading was also highly collective, as the sermonists continued to emphasise. Inclusion in the enterprise to free both the literal and metaphorical Jerusalem from captivity may have been premised on the individual crusading vow, but it also depended for its real success on common and collective action. Indeed, the language of obligation inherent in calls to crusade articulated by such preachers as Jacques de Vitry and central to the general calls to crusade such as Quia Maior appealed to a collective Christian body just as much as it appealed to individuals in search of salvation. For Jacques de Vitry, those who fought on behalf of God were a distinct group who were marked with the cross ‘to distinguish them, so that they can be told apart from the unfaithful and reprobate’; while for Eudes of Châteauroux, war against Muslims should not be understood to be as justified only if an
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individual Christian had been wronged, but is justified on behalf of collective insult: ‘But someone will say: The Saracens have not done me any harm. Why should I take the cross against them? But if he thought about it well, he would realise that the Saracens greatly insult every Christian.’76 Eudes trusts that ‘the Holy Land will be emptied of the treacherous Saracens by the efforts of this army’. Those who are not military participants in this collective enterprise could also be considered part of the crusade, according to Eudes: But you other ones, what ought you to do? You ought to do just as young deer do: when they see the older deer leave on their journey, they walk after them and follow them. You, too, ought to do this, and if you do not want to follow them in person, you must at least follow them with your heart, your prayer and your financial help, if not soon in another passage. We say good-bye to you: Pray to the Lord to lead you and, if he pleases, bring you back healthy and without injury, and to guide us and you to everlasting joys.77 It is active participation in the crusade, expressed in both individual and collective terms, which binds Christians with the love of God and frees them from other bonds, according to this sermonist. Indeed: This is what the love of God does: the love of God and the fear of hell break all fetters. In Judges 16 one reads: He broke the fetters as a strung strand of tow snaps, when it takes on the smell of fire. In the same way the fire of the Holy Ghost breaks all fetters in them, whence at the end of the Song of Songs [it says]: Love is as strong as death, which severs all connections and in particular the connection between the body and the soul. Zealousness is as arduous as hell because, just as those who are in hell do not care about their loved ones, so these who are inflamed by the zealousness of God do not seem to care about their loved ones, leaving their spouses and sons behind for the sake of the Lord.78
Conclusion Didactic literature from the early thirteenth century employed images and ideas of imprisonment in a number of different ways. It is clear overall that spiritual captivity was understood as exclusion from the community of the faithful or distance from God, more so than as any form of symbolic or physical inclusion. In the exempla, for instance, the
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prison space itself was imagined as a site of opportunity, both for direct engagement with God and, through his mercy, liberation from sin. In hagiographical literature which used holy figures as living exempla, imprisonment was deployed as one element in biographical narratives which built towards liberation of the spirit. For women like Christina Mirabilis, incarceration and suffering were life episodes illustrative of the virtue of penance and the eventual grace of God’s freedom. The practical and active function of such women helped their hagiographers to disseminate broader messages about the need for individual penance and adherence to spiritual orthodoxies. Such messages were reinforced in the early to mid-thirteenth century crusading milieu, where both sermon literature and papal propaganda drew heavily on images of captivity and imprisonment in order to stress the urgent individual and collective efforts that were needed to liberate the earthly and metaphorical Jerusalem. Subjective, individual penitence thus worked with a common enterprise to protect and defend the Christian community from its enemies and all the forms of captivity they represented.
5 Imprisonment and Freedom in the Life of Louis IX
Who can tell this story or recall it without tears, when such noble, such elegant, such prominent Franks were massacred, trodden down, or like thieves seized by base men and dragged off to imprisonment, subjected to the judgment and the grinning mockery of God’s enemies?1 In April 1250, the king of France, Louis IX, found himself in captivity after the devastation of his crusading army at the battle of AlMansurah in Egypt. Louis had taken the cross in 1244 and his army set out four years later in 1248. In June 1249 the army arrived in Damietta after a protracted stay in Cyprus, but although successful in taking the Egyptian city, was quite unprepared for the flooding of the Nile Delta from July to October that year. The army was forced to remain in Damietta before moving forward to the bigger plan (never achieved) of conquering the rest of Egypt, and it was at this point that the morale of the army seems to have sunk. Once the army was able to advance, the ill-advised decision of Louis IX’s brother, Robert of Artois, to make a charge for the town of Al-Mansurah spelt disaster for the crusaders on 8 February 1250. Trapped in the labyrinthine network of Al-Mansurah’s streets, Robert of Artois’ army was massacred. The part of the army led by Louis himself was forced to dig in, but once the supply lines were cut, and after an outbreak of disease decimated the surviving crusaders, Louis IX retreated to Damietta. It was during this retreat that the king and a number of his companions were captured, while so many crusaders were taken prisoner that ‘the country’s prisons were quite full’.2 Louis was to spend a short but tense time in captivity (from 8 April to 6 May 1250, after which time he sailed to Acre). During this period, a ransom of 800,000 bezants was negotiated, a number of the 101
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poor and sick prisoners of war were killed and Louis was forced to surrender Damietta.3 Louis IX’s captivity is well documented in the contemporary sources that detail the life of this famous Capetian. Best known of course is the long biography of Louis composed by Jean de Joinville, who travelled with Louis on this crusade and who was also captured.4 Joinville’s biography of Louis was completed in the early fourteenth century, and was one of a group of life stories composed about the king (which include those written by Geoffrey of Beaulieu, William of Chartres and William of St Pathus) and used to bolster his reputation during and after the lengthy proceedings of canonisation after his death in 1270.5 Louis achieved sainthood in 1297. All of the biographical texts deal to a greater or lesser extent with the short period of time Louis was held as a prisoner of war, as do a range of other sources which attempt to explain the defeat at Al-Mansurah. Sermons preached by Eudes of Châteauroux and Eudes Rigaud in 1250–51, for instance, detail the disaster and the divine meaning and purpose of Louis’ captivity; testimony at Louis’ canonisation proceedings, especially from Charles of Anjou, mention the king’s captivity; chronicle accounts such as the Rothelin continuator of William of Tyre’s Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum all represent this episode.6 A letter written by Louis himself from the Holy Land also describes the aftermath of his captivity, while visual material, especially the king’s famous psalter, link broader ideas of captivity and imprisonment to the king’s own experience.7 There is ample material, therefore, with which to explore bigger questions around the representation of Louis’ captivity and the meanings imputed to it by those who included the event in various types of written text. The purpose of this chapter is to explore representations of Louis’ imprisonment and liberation in order to consider how the king’s status as prisoner of war and failed crusader was explained from 1250 until the early fourteenth century. Having argued in the previous chapter that images of imprisonment and captivity were used in thirteenthcentury crusade sermons and other literature to stress the urgency of the crusading effort, I wish to consider how these ideas worked in the context of one exceptional individual’s unexpected and demeaning state of captivity. Louis’ own writing seems to indicate that he understood sin to have led to his captivity and the defeat of the crusading army. For his later biographers, it was somewhat easier to integrate the king’s imprisonment into accounts of his saintliness, given the narrative opportunities to stress Louis’ steadfast devotion and suffering while a prisoner. There is a shared emphasis in Louis’ writing and these later
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texts on the divine mercy which allowed the king to be spared death and then released. Louis was also deeply concerned for the fate of his fellow prisoners, and his letter from Acre which describes the aftermath of Al-Mansurah delineates very precisely the responsibility the king felt towards other, suffering captives. Indeed, collective responsibility for rescuing prisoners and restoring the holy places to Christendom is one central feature of Louis’ account, which balances his own experience with the imperative to safeguard others. Overall, the example of Louis IX’s captivity reveals some deliberate and careful textual efforts to link the king’s imprisonment and liberation both to divine mercy and to the continued need to engage in the collective and redemptive effort of crusading.
Prisoners of war during the crusades An image from an Old French continuation of William of Tyre’s Histoire d’Outremer, produced between 1250 and 1259, contains an image of Saladin’s troops ravaging the Holy Land during the time of the Third Crusade (1189–92).8 Within the initial ‘B’, from the 22nd book of William’s Histoire, we see a group of prisoners with bound hands and tied at the neck by a rope, being driven from a burning city by a group of knights, who are also ushering a herd of animals before them. This image connects the taking of prisoners with the general destruction of war, and with the taking of plunder, while the supplicating posture of the prisoners (hands bound in prayer) indicates both immobility and faith.9 This image underscores one reality of crusading warfare: captivity was part and parcel of the dangers faced by all crusaders to the Holy Land, and although (as Caroline Smith has recently shown) captivity was not often mentioned to potential crusaders as a real possibility (such as martyrdom was), prisoners of war were indeed taken on both sides throughout the crusading period for a range of political, economic and military reasons (Figure 5.1).10 A number of major studies have explored this issue. Mostly, these have focused on the question of ransom.11 Yvonne Friedman has argued that in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem a shift is perceptible in attitudes towards ransoming captives, and that it was only after the catastrophic Battle of Hattin (1187), when the bulk of the Christian fighting force was taken prisoner, that we see evidence for a collective feeling of responsibility for liberating captives and the ‘institutionalization of ransom’. According to Friedman, the narrative and poetic image of prisoners of war changed after this point too: from mostly represented as
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shamed, dishonoured ‘anti-heroes’ in Friedman’s words, captives could be represented as brave, as suffering in captivity just as Christ had, and as being appropriate recipients of the charitable act of ransom redemption. Overall, Friedman says that only when great leaders were taken captive, such as the king of Jerusalem (Guy de Lusignan) at Hattin, do we see the beginnings of this shift in attitudes to captives and actual practices of ransom. Negative stereotypes of prisoners of war mostly focused on the shame of capture and the ignominy of defeat, and these representations did continue to abound during the crusading period and beyond despite the more general shift observed by Friedman. Frequently, the shame of captivity was associated with enslavement. This had a literal pedigree, as Matthew Strickland has shown in relation to Anglo-Saxon practices.12 And as late as the fifteenth century, writers who documented the aftermath of the battle of Agincourt (1415) were still using this comparison to describe the capture of the senior French nobility in scathing terms: the
Figure 5.1 Saladin’s troops with prisoners (London British Library, MS Yates Thompson 12, fol. 161)
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Religieux of St Denis, for instance, called the ransomed prisoners ‘a vile troop of slaves’.13 In the crusading world, William of Tyre notoriously wrote that knights should choose death rather than captivity, and he wrote in disgust of noble fighters who ‘surrendered without resistance like the lowest slaves, utterly regardless of the shameful yoke of slavery and the ignominy which would cling to their names forevermore’.14 A fourteenth- century image from the Roman de Godefroi de Bouillon (Paris, BN MS Fr. 22495, fol. 215v) depicts the physical mortification of captivity: here, a group of Christian prisoners kneels before Saladin, their heads bowed, their hands chained and their hands bound. The prisoners’ downcast gazes, their kneeling posture and the visual dominance of the chains in this image all emphasise the diminished status of these men, just as the textual analogies to servitude and slavery did. Further, captivity in this image (as with the image above) is not represented by an architecturally enclosed space of confinement such as a prison, dungeon or even a room. Captivity is denoted purely by the restraint of the captives’ bodies in otherwise open space (Figure 5.2). William of Tyre’s Historia had, like most other crusading chronicles, emphasised the liberation of the Holy Land as the central purpose of the crusaders’ presence there. Therefore, it was not only a matter
Figure 5.2 Christian prisoners (From the Roman de Godefroi de Bouillon, Paris, BN MS Fr. 22495, fol. 215v)
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of personal dishonour for a crusading knight to allow himself to be taken captive. But it was a sign of a more serious dereliction of the knight’s primary obligation – formalised in the crusading vow – to protect and defend his Christian brethren and to free Christ’s patrimony. The notion that the crusader himself was at fault for his capture and imprisonment was also articulated in explanations of captivity as divine punishment for sin. For example, William of Tyre believed that Bohemond of Tarento was captured because of his sins (ipse verus dominus Boamundus peccatis exigentibus captus est ab hostibus).15 Such connections between captivity, sin and divine punishment reflected broader criticisms of the crusaders, their motives and their actions, especially from the mid-twelfth century. After the fall of Edessa in 1144, more attention was paid, especially among clerical and monastic writers, to the reasons for misfortune in these holy wars.16 In the famous crusading letter Quantum praedecessores (written to Louis VII and his subjects in 1145 and reissued in 1146), Pope Eugenius III lamented that ‘because of our sins ... demanded it, there has occurred what we cannot make known without great sadness ...’17 In his treatise De Consideratione sent to the same Pope accounting for the failed second crusade, Bernard of Clairvaux grieved that God had forgotten his mercy, ‘provoked by our sins’ (provocatus peccatis nostris).18 The anonymous author of the Annales Herbipolenses (1147) wrote more radically that ‘God allowed the western Church on account of its sins to be cast down’.19 Responsibility for failure was increasingly perceived to lie with individual and collective sin, and captivity, already associated with dishonour, could also be interpreted in this way. However, if captivity was a punishment of God, then those who busied themselves redeeming captives were thought to be performing an act of great piety and charity. Yves Gravelle has found that such actions were also a means for individuals to identify with Christ, who had said, ‘I was naked, and you gave me clothing. I was sick, and you cared for me. I was in prison, and you visited me’ (nudus et operuistis me infirmus et visitastis me in carcere eram et venistis ad me, Matthew 25:36), and that the redemptive act of liberation served spiritual purposes for both captive and ransom-negotiator alike.20 In this way, orders like the Trinitarian Order, set up in France after 1187 to assist with ransoming captives, worked under the assumption that prisoners were not unworthy per se and the act of releasing these suffering captives (through ransoming) could work for mutual benefit.21 It is in this environment that Friedman has found more positive representations of prisoners of war, including the story, for instance, of Les Chétifs, included in the romantic
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epic of the First Crusade (The Old French Crusade Cycle) which concerned a noble group of captives who became valuable to their captor and his reputation.22
Louis IX as prisoner of war: explanations for his captivity Louis IX was not the first king to be captured during a crusade, but his misfortune is certainly the best and most widely documented. And, as I have sketched above, by the time of Louis’ capture, there were already a number of meanings attached to the status of prisoner of war and of captured crusaders specifically. Almost immediately after the news of the disaster at Al-Mansurah had spread, there were attempts to explain both the defeat and the king’s captivity. A letter to the cardinals from Robert, Patriarch of Jerusalem written in 1250 talks of the catastrophe as ‘tragic news’ which should move ‘the hearts of men to lamentation and mourning ... [and] wailing’. Commenting on the disease that had broken out in the crusaders’ camp, the Patriarch said that ‘[F]rom that day forward, by I know not what judgment of God, everything turned out contrary to our desires, as a severe and fatal pestilence afflicted both men and horses’.23 Pope Innocent IV, too, in a letter to Archbishop Eudes Rigaud, talked of the shame of the defeat, while even sources that subsequently present a more measured explanation for the events include the idea that Christians have been deeply shamed by the defeat. 24 From the outset, however, it is clear that attempts were made both to exonerate the Church and Louis from blame for the events and to connect the deaths at Al-Mansurah to the freeing of Louis from captivity. Pope Innocent IV’s letter to Eudes Rigaud is a good example of the former concern. After having acknowledged the sadness and tragedy of the fate of the crusading army, the Pope wrote that it was not the fault of the universal Church, nor any fault of Louis IX himself that had caused this disaster. Louis, he wrote, had devoted so much time and expense to the business of the crusade (negotium ipsum), and had made such a sacrifice in leaving his kingdom to travel to Egypt, that his devotion to the crusading cause simply could not be questioned. God was not punishing Louis for some sin he had committed. Rather, wrote the Pope, God was chastising other sinners by striking the one he loves; the whole catastrophe at Al-Mansurah was a sort of chastisement of sinners in general.25 This view of defeat was not uncommon in crusading discourse, and may be linked to other ideas of crusading itself as an act of chastisement, as Jonathan Riley-Smith has outlined in his work on crusading as an ‘act of love’.26 Following Augustine’s justifications for
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the conduct of Holy War, it was argued by a number of commentators and preachers of the crusades that crusading was justified as charitable violence in both protecting Christians and in bringing God’s word to unbelievers in order that they might then choose the correct path. Crusading was therefore a disciplinary act in the sense of correcting those who had erred or who remained unseeing. This sort of disciplina was also meted out by God, who sought the merciful correction of his sons. Other writers sought to link the deaths of Robert of Artois and the other knights at Al-Mansurah to the ‘miracle’ of Louis’ release from captivity. This may be seen in sermons composed and preached soon after Louis’ capture. Eudes of Châteauroux, for instance, wrote two ‘memorial’ sermons for the dead at Al-Mansurah,27 which also attempted to account for the disaster more generally. Both of these may have been preached at Acre, one perhaps in the presence of Louis during the winter of 1250–51.28 If this is the case, both sermons were directed at an audience to whom the events it explained were directly relevant. This also perhaps explains Eudes’ preliminary emphasis (in the first sermon) on the idea that the men of the crusading army had separated themselves from their homeland and their wives and children in order to fight a laborious and expensive war ‘for the sake of His honour and to spread the worship of Him’ (pro honore ipsius et pro dilatando cultu eius). These brave and devoted miles Christi were ‘lions in nobility, fortitude and boldness’ (nobiles leones fuerunt nobilitate, fortitudine atque audacia), and their sacrifice was both worthy of memory and exemplary. Penny Cole has also noted that Eudes quite consciously integrated the Augustinian notion of violence as caritas into his first sermon by stating that Robert of Artois and his fellow knights had been attempting to liberate the Muslims from their lack of faith and from hell – ‘those nobles fought with the intention of snatching the ungodly Saracens from an infidel death, and a death in Hell and bringing them to salvation’.29 In this way, their goals, although carried out through the act of just war, were considered to be purely devotional and altruistic. Eudes of Châteauroux offered a number of reasons why the events of 1250 had occurred, some of which followed already familiar explanations for crusading defeat. There were six reasons outlined in the first sermon: first, because God wanted to demonstrate how much Christians had offended him; second, to instil fear into other Christians; third, to provide evidence to Christians that these nobles had feared God; fourth, to create martyrs; fifth, to prove God’s love for the victims; and sixth, to show that the death of the crusaders at Al-Mansurah was ‘a powerful
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intercession’.30 It is the last of these explanations which most directly related to the capture of Louis IX. Eudes clearly linked the death of the crusaders at Al-Mansurah to the freeing of the king himself, by arguing that those who died at Al-Mansurah had sacrificed themselves, and that the power of their sacrifice was so great that it had impacted on the outcome of subsequent events to ensure the freedom of the king and his entourage. The death of Robert of Artois, then, was part of God’s plan for Louis’ freedom. This symbiotic relationship between death and release, or sacrifice and redemption, is extended in Eudes’ second sermon on the dead at Al-Mansurah. This sermon is not directly concerned with the imprisonment of Louis himself or the other prisoners, but rather focuses on the death of Robert of Artois and the other nobles who died at AlMansurah. Eudes relates these dead crusaders to the people of the Old Testament who died for sins they had not committed, and who could not share in Christ’s redemptive death. Robert of Artois and his companions underwent, in Eudes’ view, such things as we are unworthy to undergo: again, it is the work of the survivors to mourn for themselves and to impute the disaster to their own sins. The sacrificial aspect of the crusaders’ death, achieved as it was by the spilling of blood, supported broader theological articulations of sacrifice: Augustine, for instance, had stated that sacrifice emanated from good work and was an act of love for God, while Aquinas refined this to argue that the human act of spilling blood contains redemptive and purificatory qualities, both of which are integral to the definition of sacrifice. In a crusading context, both the Augustinian and Thomist aspects of sacrifice could be supported, and eschatological meaning thus attributed to the disaster of defeat.31 Overall, these early rationalisations of the king’s defeat and its associated losses may be read as attempts to lift Louis’ experience out of a more traditional discourse of shame in order to show how his freedom from captivity was part of – indeed the fulfilment of – a bigger story of sacrifice and a clear indicator of Louis’ own unique status as pious and chosen survivor.
Louis IX’s letter to his subjects, 1250 Once Louis IX arrived in Acre in 1250, he composed a public letter to the French people in order to reassure them of his safety and to explain to his subjects why he was not returning to France immediately.32 In this letter, the subject of captivity is central, particularly the fate of
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Christians still held as prisoners. Louis began the letter by outlining the circumstances in which he was taken captive and the army defeated. According to him, God allowed this (permissione divina) and it was because of sin that he had fallen into the hands of the enemy. The words Louis used to express this – peccatis nostris exigentibus – follows a longer tradition of accounting for the failure of a crusading enterprise, as I have outlined above. William Jordan also understands the phrase to describe Louis’ own feelings of fault and failure; the king believed himself to be personally responsible for the events of 1250. Jordan further suggests that Louis’ subsequent acts of piety, which included remaining in the Holy Land for four more years, should be seen as acts of penance and part of Louis’ attempts to atone for his sins. Indeed, according to Jordan, from that point onwards, Louis’ life was one long penance.33 More recently Cecilia Gaposchkin has described Louis’ time in captivity as a period during which ‘he obsessed about the cause of his failure and capture, which he could only understand as the result of sin and of his own unworthiness’.34 What did Louis himself write about this unfortunate episode? The letter to his subjects begins with an explanatory account of the military circumstances which led to his captivity and the failure of the crusade: ‘by the wish of God and because of our sins, we fell into the enemy’s power. We, our dear brothers the counts of Poitiers and Anjou and those who had come back with us by land, we were all taken prison not without great carnage and a great effusion of Christian blood’.35 He then went on to outline the truce that was negotiated after they had been held in captivity for ten days, the first condition of which was to deliver from prison and let go freely himself and all those who had been taken prisoner by the Saracens since they had arrived in Egypt – and all those who had been taken prisoner elsewhere since the time of Sultan Kamel.36 A number of other conditions were contained in the truce, too, but it is noteworthy that the issue of prisoners in general – not only the release of the King himself – was central. On this subject, Louis also wrote that he had decided that it would be better for those other prisoners if they agreed their release by means of a collective truce (presumably rather than individual ransom negotiations) and he maintained a firm hope that they would be released with all the other Christians still in captivity. This notion of collective responsibility for Christian prisoners is an important element of Louis’ letter overall, and certainly reflects the idea of a more general Christian responsibility for captives that Friedman has found emerging from the catastrophe of Hattin some 70 years earlier.
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Louis’ letter goes on to describe the experience of his own captivity, although he refrains from explaining it in terms other than God’s will (‘since the ways of man are not in himself, but rather in Him who “directs all men’s steps and disposes according to what pleases His will” ’). Louis does mention that there were moments of what must have been anxiety among the captives, especially when the Sultan was murdered and: immediately following this, many Saracens appeared at our tent, armed and inflamed with frenzy as if they sought – so many feared – to vent their rage on us and other Christians. But the divine mercy allayed their fury and they pressed us urgently to confirm the truce ... Although they stormed and threatened, at length, as it pleased the Lord, Who as the Father of mercies and even more a comforter in tribulation heeds the groans of those in bondage, we confirmed with them on oath the truce we have previously made.37 The uncertainty of captivity caused some prisoners to convert to Islam, according to the letter. Those who refused were ‘like strong athletes, rooted in the faith’ (tanquam athletae fortissimi in fide radicati) and ‘wore the martyr’s crown’ (coronas martyris receperunt), while those who apostasied were ‘enfeebled and vulnerable’ (multi imbecilles et fragiles), like sheep, and were the youths (iuvenes) among the prisoners. Louis then states that the emirs openly violated the truce, obliging him to seek the advice of the French barons, the military orders, and the barons of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. It was after this consultation that Louis’ decision to remain in the Holy Land was made. One significant feature of the remainder of the letter is Louis’ feelings of obligation toward those Christians still held prisoner in the Holy Land, and this is one of the principal reasons why he does not return to France. Indeed, he notes that the ‘majority’ of those he consulted believed that if the king and the remnants of his army were to leave the Holy Land, they would not only be leaving ‘the country exposed to complete loss’, but they ‘would also have to count as lost the Christian prisoners who were in the enemy’s hands and give up all hope of their release’. Louis also believed that the political rivalry between the Sultan of Aleppo and the rulers of Cairo might be exploited to Christian advantage. But it is the issue of the prisoners which seems to have preoccupied Louis the most here. He declares that he wishes to help ‘our prisoners in captivity’, and he writes that he does not want to ‘leave our prisoners exposed to such dangers’ (sub tantis periculis in carcere). This danger was quite real, if Jean de Joinville is to be believed: he reported that even after the truce was
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signed, Christian prisoners had been massacred, either because they were ill or because they refused to convert to Islam. Louis, having paid half his ransom to secure his own release, needed to do the same for others. Louis’ letter to the people of France also follows an established tradition of declaring the French to be the chosen people, specially selected by God ‘for the deliverance of the Holy Land’ (Clerici [read Franci], qui de illorum sanguine descendistis, quos Dominus ad Terram Sanctam acquirendam, tanquam populum peculiarem ...). The famous version of Pope Urban II’s sermon at Clermont in 1095 written by Robert of Reims is one of the earlier precedents for this notion of French responsibility: ‘Frenchmen and men from across the mountains; men chosen by and beloved by God as is clear from your many achievements; men set apart from all other nations as much by geography as by the Catholic faith and by the honour of the Holy Church – it is to you that we address our sermon, to you that we appeal’.38 Pope Eugenius III’s call for a second crusade, Quantum praedecessores, had also appealed particularly to the French, those ‘strong and vigorous warriors’ who ‘by the grace of God and the zeal of your fathers’ worked with previous popes for the liberation of the eastern Church’.39 Louis IX’s decision to remain in Acre to work on behalf of the prisoners may thus be understood as part of his responsibility as French king to protect his subjects, while also continuing to fulfil his crusading vow of liberating his brethren, defending the holy places and restoring the Christian patrimony. It was not until 1252 that all prisoners were finally released, and a new truce was arranged at this time between Louis and Aybeg, the Mamluk Sultan.40 At the conclusion of his letter, Louis makes a call for another crusade which draws heavily on ideas of sacrifice and redemption. Reminding Christian knights as ‘men of the Church’ that they are ‘descended from the blood of these whom our Lord chose as a special people for the deliverance of the Holy Land’, he notes that they may count that land as their own ‘by right of conquest’. Moreover, Louis summons Christian knights ‘to the service of him who on the Cross served us, and shed His blood for your redemption’. He reminds his subjects of the desecration of holy places and urges them to take up arms and be strong to avenge these outrages and insults: ‘Imitate the example of your ancestors, who of all nations were distinguished by their devotion to the exaltation of the faith’ (actus vestros ad antecessorum vestrorum exempla reducite, qui specialiter inter caeteras nationes fuerunt in fidei exaltatione devoti). The king asks them to follow his own path to claim the divine rewards promised to all crusaders, and to earn the gratitude and respect of men. This part
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of Louis’ letter is certainly meant as a rallying call to crusade. It also balances his description of the misery of defeat at Al-Mansurah and his own captivity with the renewed possibility of liberating the Holy Land. The structure of Louis’ letter, beginning with a shocking defeat but ending with the anticipation of redemption, replicates other calls to crusade, while also contextualising Louis’ own experience within a bigger plan for individual and collective redemption. The state of captivity, for himself and for the remaining prisoners, is thus linked to the promise of divine mercy, once sin has been atoned for and washed away by the fulfilment of the crusade promise.
Hagiographical texts The various hagiographical texts which were composed after Louis’ death in 1270 also included accounts of the king’s time in captivity, and M. Cecilia Gaposchkin has noted that the crusade episodes in Louis’ life were problematic for his hagiographers, as both crusades ended badly. Nonetheless, Louis’ status as a pious and dedicated crusader was integrated into the body of evidence supporting Louis’ canonisation because they showed his ‘steadfast faith, his enduring commitment to Christ, and ultimately, his martyr’s virtue ...’, while also allowing his hagiographers to connect Louis more directly with the experience of suffering.41 For the purposes of this chapter, I concentrate on four of these texts, three of which were composed by men who had been captured with Louis in 1250. Two were written by Dominican clerics at Louis’ court, the biographies of Geoffrey of Beaulieu and William of Chartres. Both of these authors were concerned to add weight to the evidence for Louis’ saintliness during the canonisation proceedings and their biographies contain personal testimony to Louis’ character and actions while fulfilling more traditional narrative hagiographical functions.42 Another biography by William of St Pathus, a Franciscan, also incorporated testimony from returned crusaders into his narrative. The fourth text is the very well-known and intensively studied biography of Jean de Joinville, which contains a lengthy and very personal, although still hagiographical, account of his and Louis’ time as prisoners. Geoffrey of Beaulieu’s Vita Ludovici Noni was composed by Louis IX’s Dominican confessor (from 1250), who had been captured with the king after the battle of Al-Mansurah and who accompanied Louis on his second crusade and was present at his deathbed in Tunis in 1270.43 The section in Geoffrey’s Vita concerning the capture of the king is short but quite descriptive. Geoffrey describes Louis’ crusade as a pilgrimage
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(peregrinatio) and notes that at the outset God ‘miraculously gave him Damietta’ (sibi Dominus miraculose reddiderit Damietam). Both these small points show Louis’ presence in the Holy Land as a true crusade, fulfilling personal or interior devotional aspects (pilgrimage) and being part of God’s divine plan. It is also God who allows Louis to be captured by the Saracens (quomodo postmodum divina permissione a Sarracenis captus), and the idea of divine purpose allows Geoffrey to record Louis’ demeanour while imprisoned. Louis is said to have been calm and wise in deeds and answers, and this was witnessed by others who were present (presumably including Geoffrey himself). Indeed, Geoffrey notes that even the Saracens were struck by the king’s piety, truthfulness and wisdom during this time (ita quod ipsi Sarraceni cum sanctissimum, ac veracissimum necnon sapientissimum reputabant). Geoffrey is also concerned to note the suffering Louis endured while in captivity, particularly the physical pain he experienced as a result of his illness, and records that the king was near death but was cared for by his captors. Geoffrey ends this short section by quoting Psalm 105 (104 in the Vulgate): ‘he gave them mercies in the sight of all those who had made them captives’ (Et dedit eos in misericordias in conspectu omnium qui ceperant eos). The psalm with which Geoffrey concludes the brief account of Louis’ captivity traces a particular episode in the biblical history of Israel; that is, the path from the children of Israel’s time in the wilderness to their deliverance to the Promised Land. This psalm is one that stresses the theme of liberation from captivity, but it also stresses the covenant between God and Abraham; God had promised the land to Abraham and the Patriarchs and the psalm’s narrative of the return of the land serves to remind the reader of the binding nature of God’s promise. The story of Joseph is recounted in this psalm, and his imprisonment and liberation in Egypt is used to illustrate both suffering and release as elements of salvation. The quote with which Geoffrey of Beaulieu ends his account of Louis’ captivity comes from the final lines of the psalm. There is no doubt that the story of Joseph was particularly meaningful to both Louis IX himself and to his hagiographers, as William Jordan has shown in his study of Louis’ famous psalter, which was made for the king in the mid-1260s.44 In the psalter, 78 full-page miniatures depicting episodes from the Old Testament precede a liturgical calendar and the 150 psalms of David. The story of Joseph occupies 14 of the miniatures and Jordan has shown how these miniatures built up a story of salvation history by linking Joseph with Christ and by emphasising the elements of triumph and resurrection. The location of the story in Egypt and Joseph’s capture there and subsequent liberation resonated
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deeply among those who wrote hagiographical texts in support of Louis IX’s canonisation, and Geoffrey of Beaulieu was no exception.45 More recently Harvey Stahl has argued that the psalter illustrations emphasise repentance and humility too.46 In this way, the Joseph story also serves as a reminder of individual conscience, just as the psalm directs the Christian reader to retain faith in God’s promise. William of Chartres, who was Louis’ chaplain, was also captured with the king after Al-Mansurah, and although not recorded as one of the witnesses who testified at Saint-Denis in 1282–83 he had nonetheless added to the corpus of hagiographical texts about Louis used to support the king’s canonisation by producing the De vita et actibus.47 William of Chartres’ treatment of Louis’ captivity is a little fuller and more self- consciously explanatory than Geoffrey of Beaulieu’s account, and it also includes some familiar hagiographical elements of prison stories. At the outset, William locates the experience of Louis’ imprisonment within the context of the king’s unshakeable piety: ‘when he was captured by the unfaithful in Egypt, he never ceased his private devotions and prayers’. Indeed, the king’s devotions were almost monastic, according to William, who notes the sequence of prayer throughout the day, no matter how uncomfortable the prison space. The emphasis on prayer within the spatial confines of the carcer or ergastulum also allows William to integrate other hagiographical elements into his narrative. Most overt is the account of a miracle that occurred while the king was imprisoned. According to William, Louis was unable to recite some of his usual prayers, because the breviary he carried with him had gone missing when he was captured. However, William reported that a Saracen brought him the lost breviary so the king could recite Vespers. This story was later elaborated to have a dove or an angel depositing the breviary in Louis’ prison, a development which Gaposchkin reads to indicate a shift toward representing divine intervention in Louis’ captivity rather than simply his steadfast devotion.48 The most famous pictorial example of this later elaboration is to be found in the Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux (1325–28) in which one image depicts Louis being given the breviary by the Holy Spirit (in the form of a dove).49 Like Geoffrey of Beaulieu, William stresses the courage and integrity of the king while he was imprisoned, despite the violent threats made against him, and again notes that Louis’ captors were impressed by his demeanour.50 William concludes by reiterating that it was a miracle of God that prisoners were released, and that Louis’ good and pious kingship helped too.
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William of St Pathus’ Vie Monseigner saint Loys (written 1302–3) is another hagiographical text which emphasised Louis IX’s strength in captivity, as Gaposchkin has outlined.51 In this text, written by the confessor of Louis’ wife and daughter, we also see more attention devoted to the trials of Louis’ time as a prisoner, and William of St Pathus is concerned to underline Louis’ steadfast refusal to concede to his captors’ demands, although his life was in jeopardy. Much of the commentary is framed in spiritual terms: William even reports that Louis was threatened with crucifixion by one of his captors (vous serez crucefié vos et les voz), but that the king retained his composure to state that perhaps his body would be taken, but his soul would never be. Like Geoffrey of Beaulieu and William of Chartres, William of St Pathus emphasised Louis’ control over the more pragmatic negotiations of his release. Although referred to as a slave, and although his captors announced that they would do with him what they wanted, Louis is represented as assured in his insistence on his terms and his unwavering faith. Louis’ strength as a leader is reiterated in another text by William of St Pathus, this time a sermon. Here, William also reports that Louis would not leave his soldiers behind in captivity and had stated categorically that he would lead them to safety or die with them.52 These three texts certainly construct Louis’ time in captivity as a time of trial. But each author is also keen to attribute some more profound meaning to the episode. This is done, in all three cases, by emphasising not so much the suffering of the king as his liberation. Partly this is achieved by describing Louis’ own control of his circumstances, but partly also by linking the king’s imprisonment to the strength of his own faith and to the intervention of the divine. God’s release of Louis and the incorporation of miraculous events in prison (in William of Chartres’ account especially) go to connect Louis’ status as prisoner with the conventions of other saints’ vitae where imprisonment is central. This is not surprising, given the evidentiary functions of the three biographies. But the effect of writing Louis’ captivity in hagiographical terms also has the effect of removing any vestige of shame from his experience – at least in the textual record of this difficult event. Indeed, by the time Louis IX was depicted as a prisoner in a fourteenth- century manuscript of William of St Pathus’ Vie, the saintly nature of his captivity is made overt, not only by the nimbus Louis wears, but also by the portrayal of a very porous prison (Figure 5.3).53 The windows are shown so that Louis’ face is clearly visible, while the scene on the left of the image shows the moment at which the king was captured and his life threatened. The narrative link in this image
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Figure 5.3 Louis IX as prisoner (From La Vie de S. Louis de Guillaume de Pathus. Paris, BN MS Fr. 5716, fol. 128)
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between violent capture and imprisonment is tempered by the visual, spatial reminder of the material prison as a site that will not truly enclose the saint-king. Like other representations of saints in prison, as I have discussed in previous chapters, this image denotes confinement and the promise of freedom through, in Louis’ case, the pious act of crusading. It is also worth noting that other testimonies recorded during Louis IX’s canonisation proceedings replicated the themes of collective responsibility, devotion and steadfastness. Not least of these is the testimony of one of Louis’ own brothers, Charles of Anjou, who along with Alphonse of Poitiers was sent back to France from the Holy Land in 1250 to comfort their mother after the death of Robert of Artois.54 Charles of Anjou was also captured with Louis after Al-Mansurah. His testimony recorded that he was kept apart from Louis for four or five days while they were captives, but once he was in communication with the king he found him to be conscientious in his protection of fellow prisoners. It is in this testimony that we hear that Louis refused to allow captives to negotiate their own releases: ‘the reason is that if this came about it would cause the worst trouble and scandal, because the only people to be released by these means would be the wealthy, while all the poor who lack the wherewithal to ransom themselves, would remain captive in perpetuity’.55 Charles also said that Louis had chosen to remain a prisoner as guarantee for the others, and although his brothers and knights tried to dissuade him from doing this, Louis was adamant: There followed a lengthy altercation about this until the Saracens discovered through the interpreter that they were engaged in a pious dispute about mutual charity, whereby the lord wanted to remain hostage for his subjects and they for their lord; and God touched the tyrants’ hearts.56 Charles of Anjou testified to Louis’ great charity in this regard and reported that ‘this compassion for the captives was his major reason for wanting to stay’ (ista compassio captivorum fuit illud propter quod magis voluit remanere). Likewise, Louis’ continued prayers while a prisoner are noted in Charles’ testimony. He describes the chaotic situation after the murder of the Sultan, when Louis and others had concluded the truce and were in transit before being stopped and threatened with death. According to Charles, Louis was convinced that he was going to be killed at this point, and immediately began to pray: ‘he had the office of the Mass for the Cross recited, and that for the day, for the Holy Spirit, and for requiem’. Devotion, compassion and steadfastness are once again
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the qualities of Louis IX recounted through Charles’ narrative: even when it seemed certain that he would be put to death for refusing to deny the faith, ‘three times the King refused to add this condition’. A fuller account of Louis’ time in captivity is found in Jean de Joinville’s well-studied memoir of the king.57 This text was completed only in the early fourteenth century and thus followed the biographies of Geoffrey of Beaulieu, William of Chartres and William of St Pathus. It has long been noted that the character of Joinville himself is perhaps more prominent in this text than even the king he depicts; for Daisy Delogu, this is self- conscious and is intended to underscore Louis’ own comparative virtue. Françoise Laurent has suggested that if we read the biography as a traditional saint’s vita, then the crusade episode may be seen to inhabit the place usually reserved for miracles in other vitae.58 Caroline Smith has also argued for the importance of the crusade episode, arguing that it was separately composed and later inserted into Joinville’s protracted writing of the royal biography.59 All of these recent, close studies of the text share a similar conviction that Joinville’s Vie de S. Louis may be approached as hagiography, crusading chronicle, royal biography, even autobiography, and that thematic approaches to this multi-layered text may turn up valuable insights into not only these genres but into the ideologies which shape them. This is certainly true for the themes of captivity and liberation which are so carefully described in Joinville’s text. The section of the Vie de S. Louis which concerns Louis’ (and Joinville’s own) captivity is substantially longer than the discussions in the earlier biographies, but similar themes are emphasised.60 Joinville begins by situating the capture of Louis in the chaos of the aftermath of AlMansurah, during which time ‘a disloyal sergeant’ (uns traitres serjans) named Marcel had caused the crusaders to surrender prematurely, endangering the king’s chances of negotiating a proper truce and causing the land army to be taken captive en masse. Joinville spends some time describing the massacre of the troops along the banks of the river, but although advised by one of his cellarers to join the ranks of these martyrs ‘for thus we shall go to Paradise’, did not take this option and decided to surrender.61 Joinville talks of his own capture as a narrow escape from death, and relates the murder of his priest, Jean, who was killed and thrown into the river when he fainted, but he also recounts the very cordial manner in which he and others of his men were treated. He even warned his captor not to trust those men who converted to Islam to save their lives, as ‘just as lightly as they had left our side, so they would leave his’.
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Once Joinville was brought to the king, barons and other surviving members of the army, who were being held separately in pavilions at Al-Mansurah, the threat of violence becomes more pressing. Joinville reports the systematic murder of groups of the 10,000 prisoners who were collected there and at this point the negotiations, as yet not directed specifically by the king, seem to have begun. The strange episode of the old man, ‘with hair as white as snow’, who was brought into the pavilion seems to be Joinville’s attempt to give some kind of transcendent religious meaning to the capture and chaos. He reports that this old man asked the prisoners ‘if we believed in a God who had been taken prisoner for our sake, wounded and put to death for us and who on the third day had risen again’. When the assembled crusaders responded affirmatively, the old man ‘told us we ought not to be disheartened if we had suffered these persecutions for His sake: For ... you have not yet died for Him, as He died for you; and if He had power to come to life again you may rest assured that He will deliver you whenever if pleases Him to do so.62 Joinville uses these words of comfort to account for the general rallying of spirits among the prisoners. It is only after Joinville’s own capture and circumstances have been narrated that he spends some time narrating the experience of Louis himself. He begins by noting that Louis’ refusal to hand over the castles of the military orders caused his captors to threaten him with torture (in a device Joinville calls a ‘barnacle’, a leg-crushing machine; bernicles in the original). The king is said to have announced that ‘he was their prisoner and they could do with him what they pleased’ (A ces menaces lour respondi li roys que il estoit lour prisonniers et que il pouoient faire de li lour volentei). Likewise, Joinville represents Louis as being particularly calm over the question of ransom, forcing the emirs to give him ‘their sworn word’ (leur serment). Here, the king is represented as master of his own fate and very much in control of the proceedings. The orderly organisation of the ransom and release of prisoners was interrupted, however, by the sudden murder of the Sultan by his bodyguards. The murder is dramatically narrated, with the Sultan fleeing from the top of a burning tower, along a covered walkway to the river, where ‘they had to take to swimming. So they came and killed him in the river not far from where our galley lay. One of the knights ... cut him open with his sword and took the heart out of the body. Then with his hand all dripping with blood, he came to our king and said “what will you give me now I have killed your enemy?” ’63
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The crisis created by this act of violence in Joinville’s galley is narrated as a pivotal test of faith for the captured men, some of whom ‘crowded around to confess their sins to a monk of the Holy Trinity’. Joinville himself knelt at the feet of one of the Saracens, who was holding an axe, and reminded himself ‘thus Saint Agnes died’.64 The moment is given further dramatic intensity as Joinville describes the men being bundled into the hold of the galley where they lay in great misery and closely packed together. The king himself, however, is absent from these anxious scenes, and when he reappears in the narrative, he does so as a negotiator of the conditions for his release. As with the other hagiographical accounts of the king’s captivity I have outlined above, Joinville’s text points out the firm but calm character of Louis. He is said to have declared that ‘he would never take such an oath’, when required to swear that if he did not keep faith with the emirs he would be as dishonoured ‘as a Christian who denies God’; he is said to have announced that ‘he would rather die a good Christian than live at enmity with his Lord and His mother’ (il amoit miex mourir bons crestiens que ce que il vesquist ou courrous Dieu et sa Mere); and he is said to have been described by his captors as ‘the most steadfast Christian that could be found’. Although it has been asserted that the theme of suffering is central to Joinville’s account of Louis’ captivity, the corporeal nature of this is principally narrated through the experiences of people other than the king.65 Prisoners who were tortured to force them to apostasise, the suffocatingly close conditions of the galley where Joinville was held and the tying of the Patriarch to a pole where he was threatened with death are all given fairly substantial narrative space, and Joinville does not shy from telling his readers exactly how the prisoners were slaughtered. But Louis IX’s own special body, although weakened by illness, remains untouched by these mere physical tortures. Instead, Louis’ body performs his devotions: he was said to have ‘placed himself crosswise on the ground every time he left the tent and made the sign of the cross all over his body’. Indeed, Joinville represents the cause of Louis’ own suffering as simply being the state of captivity itself, rather than the physical suffering other captive bodies were forced to endure.66 This group of hagiographical accounts of Louis IX’s time in captivity during the seventh crusade share various thematic elements, while also serving as textual reminders of the king’s claims to sainthood. These texts also reveal something of the ways in which an event contemporaneously recognised as a personal and military disaster could be incorporated into a bigger and more important story of sacrifice and
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redemption. Louis IX’s status as prisoner of war, although shameful per se, was quite quickly rewritten as part of the king’s suffering on earth and as a sign of his great and unique piety. It is interesting to note that Gaposchkin has found similar ideas in the Cistercian liturgies of St Louis, many of which include images of captivity. These images, according to Gaposchkin, must have been directly related to Louis’ own experience, as they stress the liberation of the Old Testament king Manesseh who, like Louis, was captured and then restored. Such images in the Cistercian liturgies were connected with other Cistercian understandings of the body as prison of the soul: the Manesseh image could remind those participated in the liturgy that the suffering endured by one on this earth was temporary, and that the spirit would eventually be freed.67
Conclusion Captivity was certainly considered to be demeaning and damaging to captives and their interests at home and abroad. Nonetheless, crusaders were forced to accept the reality of imprisonment – perhaps more often than they would have cared to contemplate.68 Although there was no glory in captivity in the same way as there was glory in martyrdom, it is clear that in the case of Louis IX, captivity could be represented in a variety of texts to temper the discourse of shame that would normally surround this state. The disgrace of becoming a prisoner of war was mitigated by very deliberate attempts by Louis’ hagiographers especially to connect the experience of the king’s captivity to Old Testament kings who had been taken captive and then liberated. At the same time, ideas of imprisonment leading to the liberation of the spirit – and in crusading discourse to the liberation of the Holy Land itself – were incorporated in these texts to help construct a portrait of a pious and penitential king, and later, to add weight to his claims for sanctity. By linking captivity with both suffering and the models of saintly incarceration already in circulation, those who wrote about Louis IX’s time as a captive were able to represent this episode as a crucial point in the trajectory of piety that would create a new and singular royal saint. More generally, the space of the Holy Land itself provided a tangible locale, redolent with the historical and biblical imagery of other captivities and associated already with the possibility of redemption for penitent and active Christians. The trouble in which Louis IX found himself in Egypt was quickly linked to biblical precedents and to the
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promise of possession of territory through the continuation of the crusade. Ideas of imprisonment, in the form of captivity, bondage, slavery and ransom, were drawn into a more generalised reminder of both the need to free the Holy Land and the freedom that could ensue once, with God’s mercy, this was achieved.
Conclusion
The aim of this book has been to explore some of the ways in which imprisonment was used and understood in a variety of medieval religious contexts. I have argued that imprisonment was extremely useful in medieval religious thinking about the parameters of the community of the faithful and its obligations. Imprisonment could signify various states of voluntary and involuntary confinement. But most frequently, and perhaps most unexpectedly to modern readers, is the idea that imprisonment in all its guises could also signify access to various forms of spiritual freedom, especially the liberation of the spirit. Indeed, it is the value of imprisonment and the value of the prison space itself as a site of spiritual opportunity which is most pervasive in the texts I have discussed throughout this book. In the first chapter I argued that the gendering of enclosure which is a typical feature of monastic and anchoritic literature (both prescriptive and descriptive) was often expressed through ideas of imprisonment. Monastic understandings of imprisonment were also expressed through a regulatory language of containment and a language of permeability which was highly feminised. I looked at these ideas of containment and how they were represented by the female body in Aelred of Rievaulx’s famous text, De Sanctimoniali de Wattun, to show that the prison space was represented as a site of opportunity for the nun’s redemption. I then considered the concept of spiritual enclosure in Aelred’s De Institutione inclusorum to show that the bodily delineation of containment was understood to be a space of freedom from the world, rather than a state of repressive inclusion. The same ideas are found in the anchoritic text of the thirteenth- century Ancrene Wisse. I followed discussion of these more discursive texts with an exploration of the regulations around actual uses of imprisonment in Cistercian houses to show 124
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that these regulations were meant to enforce stability and enclosure. The idea that these monastic principles could effectively be enforced by imprisonment was not confined to Cistercians: the parallel example of the thirteenth- century archbishop, Eudes Rigaud, reveals similar thinking. Together, prescriptive, descriptive and regulatory texts mapped out monastic space as a unique spiritual landscape of promise, where enclosure and imprisonment informed each other to create boundaries and reinforce stability. By locating themselves in this space, monks and nuns could gain access to the infinite space of eternity. In the second chapter of this book, I continued the discussion of imprisonment as a situation of opportunity and value in the context of the medieval cult of saints. I focused on St Leonard of Noblac, who was especially associated with releasing prisoners, in order to demonstrate how active participation in the cult of saints could free all Christians from whatever bonds of captivity they might endure. The miracle books produced at the German shrine to St Leonard at Inchenhofen included dozens of stories of prisoners released from various forms of captivity by the saint, and also emphasised the value of pilgrimage as an act of witnessing and gratitude by the liberated prisoners. Overall, I argued in this chapter that the participation of individuals through the interior act of contrition and the exterior act of pilgrimage were both needed to effect true liberation. The cult of St Leonard is a good example of how pragmatic participation and conscious inclusion in Christian devotional practices were the forces which could effect true liberation from imprisonment (either spiritual or corporeal). Chapter 3 dealt with ideas of imprisonment in early inquisitorial discourse. The chapter began with an outline of the integration of imprisonment into inquisitorial practice, and the expression of captivity in anti-heretical polemical literature from the twelfth century. I then showed how the space of the prison was used by inquisitors to engender fear among suspected heretics, while also providing a productive site in which useful testimony could be gathered. For prisoners themselves, the idea of the prison was also useful in providing a location for memory and resistance. Although the inquisitorial prison may be assumed to be singularly repressive, it is clear that imprisonment as both reality and idea furnished inquisitors and prisoners alike with opportunities for redemption and challenge. In the fourth chapter of this book, I looked at imprisonment as a protective and moral idea in the didactic literature associated with sermons during the thirteenth century. An examination of the exempla containing images and ideas of imprisonment reveals a shared emphasis on the
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prison as a space where spiritual orthodoxies might be affirmed and where liberation from sin might be effected. Further, ideas of imprisonment could also work to assert the urgent and collective effort to protect Christendom. In the living exemplum of Christina Mirabilis, images of captivity were used to underscore the importance of individual penance, while in the crusade preaching of the thirteenth century, captivity and imprisonment were used to motivate all Christians to protect the Holy Land. Didactic texts, particularly those associated with preaching, thus constructed imprisonment as a set of ideas which could usefully underscore the importance of individual conformity and collective effort in the protection of a Christendom considered to be threatened from within and without. The final chapter of this book considered the ways in which King Louis IX of France was represented as a prisoner of war. Louis IX provides an interesting individual example of someone who experienced captivity, who wrote about the experience himself (albeit briefly), and whose time as a prisoner was integrated into a body of hagiographical texts composed in support of and as evidence of the king’s saintliness. In this chapter, I showed that the texts which explained Louis’s captivity initially did so in terms of sacrifice and redemption, while collective responsibility for the king’s fellow prisoners is also central. The later biographies, however, tended to use more traditional images from hagiography to depict the king’s imprisonment as a time of personal trial throughout which Louis’s great devotion was evident. The emphasis is on the liberation of the king in these texts, and the activation of divine mercy in response to Louis’s singular piety. Overall, the case of Louis IX shows how ideas of captivity and imprisonment in a crusading context could be deployed to emphasise not only the greater significance of the crusade, but also the personal piety of the individual crusader. The chronological parameters of this book mostly coincide with the thirteenth century, although some of the discussion ranges across the years before and after 1200. This ‘long’ thirteenth century has been recognised as a pivotal time in the deployment of imprisonment as a form of punishment, as Guy Geltner has recently shown. I would further argue that the thirteenth century witnesses a consolidation of religious thinking on imprisonment, not only as a form of punishment within ecclesiastical contexts (such as the monastery), but as a newly invigorated way of affirming the individual and collective obligations of all Christians. This may be attributed to a number of broader historical and spiritual shifts.
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First, it is possible to trace a renewed and general religious emphasis on the idea of inclusion within the community of the Christian faithful, especially after 1215. The Fourth Lateran Council, of course, had reaffirmed the singularity of the Christian community in its first decree, which unequivocally asserted that no salvation existed outside of the universal Church. At the same time, the Council’s formal statements on sacramental participation delineated very clearly the practices which marked belonging to that Christian community. The Fourth Lateran Council is often cited as something of a watershed in the history of medieval religion, given the very foundational nature of its decrees, its place in what used to be described as the state building pontificate of Innocent III and its convocation in the midst of a war on heresy. I do not wish necessarily to over- emphasise the novelty of the Council’s decrees, many of which drew on intellectual and theological debates of the twelfth century. But the Fourth Lateran Council does provide a something of a window into the concerns of a papacy confronting, as Innocent thought he was, grave threats to Christendom from within Europe and from further afield. The emphasis on participation, belonging and inclusion that we see in the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council is one marker, I suggest, of a more general set of anxieties around the protection of Christian souls. Related to this general point is a clear emphasis on sacramental participation which found strong expression in a variety of religious texts from the thirteenth century onwards. The importance of the sacraments to medieval religious practice is very well known and I shall not rehearse all the arguments here. But in relation to the themes of inclusion, participation and protection, some points may be noted. Eucharistic devotion was one element of medieval sacramental practice which especially emphasised these themes, and was also a ritual which was increasingly central to individual and collective reception of the divine. Eucharistic theology and the performance of the mass had been defined and elaborated from the eleventh century, and by the thirteenth century, there was uniformity in the action of the ritual: eventually, too, the doctrine of transubstantiation was conclusively elaborated. Scholars such as Caroline Walker Bynum have shown that both the theology and ritual of the Eucharist were particularly appealing to women, who used their bodies to receive and partake in the flesh and blood of Christ in a very intimate form of devotional mysticism.1 The body – Christ’s body and the body of the devotee – were both focal point of this sacrament which brought together in communion all believers.
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Part and parcel of Eucharistic culture was its anti-heretical value, and this too became more articulated in the early years of the thirteenth century. As Dominique Iogna-Prat has argued, heresies which denied the sacrificial basis of Christianity were progressively excluded from Christian anthropology from the twelfth century.2 By the time the German Cistercian, Caesarius of Heisterbach, wrote his Dialogus miraculorum around 1220, the Eucharist had gained particular power against the secrets and lies of heresies. Caesarius told the story of a group of Albigensian heretics who were seen to ‘display certain signs and wonders’, one of which was to walk upon water without sinking. A devout and faithful Christian challenged the heretics, by carrying the Lord’s body in a pyx to the riverside and then casting it into the water. ‘As soon as the sacrament touched the elements, trickery gave way to truth, and those false saints went down like lead into the deep and were drowned.’ The pyx containing the sacrament was carried away by angels.3 Once inquisitorial tribunals had become active from the 1230s, sacramental participation became more and more important in delineating the parameters of orthodoxy. As has been pointed out many times, inquisitorial literature, especially the registers of depositions, reveals overt anxiety around the denial of the sacraments by various heretical groups. The very questions asked of suspected heretics about the nature of their beliefs were frequently about the sacraments, and often about the body and blood of Christ specifically.4 Likewise, Eucharistic culture contained a strong anti-Jewish element throughout the thirteenth century and beyond. As Miri Rubin has shown, the notorious ‘hostdesecration’ miracles which intensified from the later thirteenth century served as narrative markers of difference and signals of a perceived danger to the Christian body itself.5 The violence which ensued at sites of alleged host desecration was not only meant to exact revenge on those who were charged with attacking the host, but it was also meant to expose the real substance of the host, too, and its power over disintegration. This ‘logic of violence’, in Rubin’s words, rested ultimately on the place of the Eucharist at the heart of Christian religious and social culture. The trend, too, toward enforcing individual acts of penance for heretical practice, and the symbolic exclusion of Jews and heretics from the community through the wearing of ‘stigma symbols’, as Jütte (and Arnold) have noted, were also ways of marking out not just difference and rejection, but inclusion and integration, too.6 Conscious and overt inclusion in the community of orthodox Christians was demonstrated, at least in part, by correct participation in the sacraments of the Church.
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Transformed from the early thirteenth century, too, was monastic practice. The rise of the mendicant orders, particularly the Franciscans, with their overt apostolic agendas of poverty and preaching, led some monastic writers to rethink or redefine the nature of enclosure as the key to a spiritual life. How was enclosure and stability to be retained and practised in a new social context where some monks lived without physical boundaries? The trajectory of enclosure for women which eventually led to the papal bull Periculoso in 1298 did not apply to male religious in the Benedictine orders, who were still committed to stability of place and firmness of boundaries, at least in principle. The thirteenth- century literature describing monastic enclosure and stability sometimes hints at the concerns held by monastic writers about the practice of an enclosed spiritual life for men: the preponderance of foundation narratives among the Cistercians, for instance, which emphasised the early virtues of boundaries and walls, were partly written to remind the monks of the value of cenobitic life. Likewise, the rigour with which runaway monks and nuns were searched for and returned to their monastic houses from the mid-thirteenth century (in England at least), indicates a range of concerns around monastic profession and vows and the need to stay within one’s chosen house.7 Such anxieties around the continued need for enclosure need not be connected with monastic ‘decline’ as is often still done. Rather, they show real and significant concern for the continued importance of the enclosure as a spatial demarcation of Benedictine life. The enterprise of the crusades, which had begun with such triumph for Western Christians with the fall of Jerusalem in 1099 had dramatically altered in character throughout the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. By the time Louis IX had taken his crusading vow in the 1240s, the Latin states of Outremer were not only under siege, but much of the territory had already been lost. The loss of Jerusalem itself after 1187 required new explanations for the crusading mission and new reasons to account for what some thought to be the removal of God’s approval for the missions. The Emperor Frederick II’s regaining of the holy city in 1229 via a truce with Al-Kamel was both temporary and unsupported – the Patriarch of Jerusalem accused him of obtaining the city by malice and fraud as an excommunicate – while Elizabeth Siberry has shown that the literature of criticism directed at crusaders and crusading from as early as the fall of Edessa in 1144 further intensified during the thirteenth century.8 The early years of the thirteenth century had seen two particularly significant shifts in the direction and conduct of the crusades: the attack and sack of Constantinople during
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the Fourth Crusade, and the crusade against the heretics of the south of France, the Albigensian crusade. These two crusades, instigated and promoted by Innocent III, were both unique in being ultimately conducted against people who described themselves as Christians. This was not Innocent’s intent at the outset of the Fourth Crusade, although he came to accept the events of 1204 and he certainly did not accept the bons hommes of the Languedoc as members of the orthodox faithful. But the Pope did see these two enterprises as missions of union: in May 1205 he reprimanded one papal legate over the sack of Constantinople, writing ‘[h]ow indeed is the Greek Church to be brought back into ecclesiastical union and to a devotion for the Apostolic See when she has been beset with so many afflictions and persecutions that she sees in the Latins only an example of perdition and the works of darkness ... ?’9 Even in his letter confirming the excommunication of the recalcitrant Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, Innocent offered the Count the conventional benefit of absolution if he made satisfaction for the long list of sins he was accused of committing.10 The pastoral effort behind such statements is easy to overlook given the violence with which both enterprises were conducted and the policies of exclusion that they also represented. I do not reject either of those features. But it is important to recognise the concomitant and constructive discourse of inclusion that, sometimes paradoxically, ran alongside the crusading effort. For a Pope such as Innocent III, committed to effective and universal papal governance, the crusade represented a useful tool of protection and collective piety just as much as it represented a weapon against heterodoxy and challenges to the faith. It is not my argument that ideas of imprisonment were the only cultural vocabularies with which these complex historical and spiritual issues (of which I have outlined only a few) were described or represented. What I do suggest is that imprisonment did seem to find a new discursive value in the medieval religious imagination throughout this period, which paralleled contemporary religious and spiritual anxieties and concerns. As a quite deliberately multivalent concept which could denote captivity, confinement and enclosure, among other ideas, imprisonment was deployed in a variety of ways to express concerns about the relationship between individual and community, the circumstances of belonging and exclusion, the ties between interior conscience and collective duty. These were relationships which were not always binary, but which wove together the bonds of society in both immediate and eschatological ways, reminding all Christians of their complex place in the social and spiritual fabric of their time.
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More specifically, I have also suggested in the Introduction to this book that a particular ‘spatial mentality’ can be traced through these uses of imprisonment. By this I mean that a consideration of ideas of imprisonment reveals that imprisonment and freedom are not at opposite ends of a discursive spectrum, but exist as symbiotic and dependent tools of ideological and cultural mapping. The ostensible tension we might expect between confinement in all its forms and freedom did not, for many medieval religious writers, exist as a neatly dualist signification of contrast. Rather, imprisonment and freedom together constructed an imagined space where inclusion and participation were understood to be the means to the limitless and secure space of eternity. Imprisonment thus furnished medieval writers with a rich set of images with which they delineated the Christian promise. The precise cultural meanings attached to these images could vary across time and place, but it seems clear that such images were particularly meaningful to medieval Christians. As a set of ideas which depended on the delineation of imagined and actual space, imprisonment could describe the location of individuals and groups in times of change. Imprisonment could represent the connections between individuals and their God, and it could express stability, suffering and hope simultaneously. Imprisonment in the medieval religious imagination was, for many writers, a set of concepts which integrated confinement and spiritual freedom. The connection between these two ideas was enduring and could work outside specifically spiritual or religious contexts as my final example shows. The fifteenth- century writer Philippe de Commynes described in his memoirs a pitiless and paranoid King Louis XI of France. The king, says Commynes: ordered some rigorous prisons to be built, such as cages of iron, or of wood, covered with iron plates on the inside and on the outside, with terrible locks, about eight feet wide and higher than a man by one foot. The first to invent them was the Bishop of Verdun, who was put straightaway into the first cage that was made and spent fourteen years in it. A number of people have cursed him since then, including me, for I tried one of them out for a period of eight months under our present king. [King Louis] had once ordered from the Germans some very heavy and very terrible chain links to be put around the feet; and there was a ring to be put on one foot only, which was hard to open, and fitted like an iron collar, with a thick and heavy chain attached to a large iron ball, which was much heavier than was reasonable or proper11
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The use of such terrible jails brought Louis nothing but torment and apprehension. It was his secret dread that various foes might depose him, and this fear encouraged him to devise another sort of prison – a prison for himself: [The king] toward the end of his life had everything around his residence of Plessis-lez-Tours enclosed with large iron bars in the shape of a thick grating, and at the four corners of the house he had four iron cabins built, which were solid, large and thick. The grates were against the wall on the outside; they were also adjacent to the moat ... He had many iron spikes put in the wall; each one had three or four points and he had them planted very close together ... He understood very well that this fortification was not strong enough to resist ... an army, but he was not afraid of that kind of assault. He only feared that one or more lords might make an attempt to take the place by night, partly by love and partly by force, by means of some connivance [with those inside] and that these men might take over his authority and force him to live like a man without sense and unfit to govern12 The prisons fabricated by Louis XI were thus both material and imagined. For the Bishop of Verdun, Commynes himself, various prisoners of war such as the Lord de Piennes and the Lord de Vergy and others who were faced with confinement in the king’s barbarous jails, imprisonment was punitive, corporeally constraining, cruel and mercifully temporary. Prisoners released from the king’s detention lived in subsequent freedom according to Commynes, and many were elevated to compensatory positions of wealth and authority. But Louis XI’s own experience was different. Barricaded inside the fortress at Plessis, the king’s imprisonment was self-inflicted, imagined and permanent. His prison cell was not only the castle, although the iron fortifications preventing rivals from getting into the building had the same effect as one of his jails. More frightening was the prison of Louis XI’s imagination which lent an oppressively purgatorial quality to the king’s life. Indeed, remarks Commynes, the king’s suffering can only be understood ‘as a punishment which our Lord inflicted upon him in this world, in order to deal more mercifully with him in the next’. For Louis XI, life itself was a prison and it was through the manufacture of prisons for other people and the creation of his fortress prison at Plessis that the web of his own perceived captivity could be negotiated and controlled. ‘Is it then possible to confine a king in a closer prison than that in which he kept himself?’ asked Commynes rhetorically.13
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Commynes is one of many medieval writers to use notions of captivity, imprisonment and confinement to describe various ontological and psychological states of being. His description of the king’s prisons focuses very much on the relationship between the containment of the body and the containment of the spirit; indeed, the careful narration of the physical discomfort of the prisons is brought to bear on the more abstract idea of the king’s mental captivity. There could be eventual release from the awful conditions of the material prison, but there was no freedom for the king: his prisons in fact only really housed himself. In these extracts from Philippe de Commynes’ memoirs, a direct relationship is established between the nature of imprisonment and the eschatological language used to describe it. Real imprisonment is primarily spiritual and subjective, according to the author; it affects the ontology of the king far more than the physical incarceration of political prisoners affects their bodies. Commynes himself was released from the king’s prison but, the spiritual and psychological freedoms he so desperately sought by the king himself could only be realised with his death. And this is what occurred, when God, accomplished a miracle for him and cured his soul as well as his body, as it is always his custom when he performs his miracles. For he took him away from this miserable world in excellent health of sense and understanding, and with his memory in good state. After receiving all the sacraments and without suffering any pain ... he continued to speak, finishing with a Paternoster just before his death.14 Within this multi-layered text, the prison space is one that is useful for Commynes, as it helps him to represent Louis’s mental anguish as a serious spiritual challenge for a singular individual: ‘If the place where he confined himself was larger than a common prison, he also was much greater than common prisoners.’ The transition, too, from imprisonment to liberation, is also ‘greater’, as it marks the transition from this life to the next. The location of these descriptions of imprisonment is important: they appear at the end of the sixth book of the Memoirs, in the context of the death of the king. Commynes’ insistence that Louis’s later life was ‘purgatory on earth to him’ is a pivotal moment in the text overall: the king, having undergone with Christ-like patience the sufferings of this world, was able to die a good death despite the troubles and care which had confined his spirit during his life. The liberation of the king by means of a good death signified more than the simple release of his physical body. It signified the king’s
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acceptance of God’s mercy as the means to a more enduring and important kind of release. In positing this relationship between spiritual, judicial, punitive, historical, metaphorical, ontological and personal forms of imprisonment and the promise of eternal freedom, Commynes was drawing on and perpetuating a longer imaginary, one that, as I have argued in this book, can be located in the transformations and anxieties of the recent medieval past and its concerns about the nature and meaning of inclusion. The meanings generated and reflected by words and objects, actions and things, are timebound. The very moments in which jokes are made, rituals performed and associations formulated are transient if not ephemeral, and are shaped in many ways by an audience more than by a narrator or performer. Thus, the immediate vibrancy of cultural meaning may seem to slip away at the point of articulation. Yet it is also quite true that words and deeds, texts and practices do exhibit powerful longevity and may acquire a historical and cultural capital that transcends and outlasts that irreplaceable moment of first utterance. Imprisonment is an excellent example. Now considered to be a tool of punishment and (increasingly less) rehabilitation, imprisonment connects with post-Enlightenment discourses of correction and discipline. For medieval people, however, as much as imprisonment could be deployed for punitive reasons, it was also a category of expression which spoke more profound truths about the nature of belonging. When Bernard of Clairvaux compared monks to fat fish held captive in a pond, he was not musing about the horrors of involuntary confinement, but about the value of a contemplative life of enclosure.15 When Hans Gundran of Lichtenstein was liberated from prison by St Leonard of Noblac, he was reminded of the wonderful hope of eternal freedom through locating himself within the protection of the cult of saints.16 And when writing to Louis IX’s wife about her husband’s captivity, Innocent IV was able to remind her that the king ‘will be able to rise up magnificently ... both for the completion of the affairs of Jerusalem and for the performance of everything that has to do with the promotion of the Christian religion’.17 Such comments reflect the intricately woven relationship between space, imprisonment and freedom that lay at the heart of the medieval religious imagination.
Notes Introduction 1. Jean Dunbabin, Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002); Guy Geltner, The Medieval Prison: A Social History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 10. 2. Some of these include: Cécile Bertrand-Dagenbach et al., eds, Carcer 1: Prison et privation de liberté dans l’Antiquité classique (Paris: De Boccard, 1999); Cécile Bertrand-Dagenbach et al., eds, Carcer II: Prison et privation de liberté dans l’empire romain et l’Occident médiéval; actes du colloque de Strasbourg (Décembre 2000) (Paris: De Boccard, 2004); Julie Claustre, Dans les geôles du roi: L’emprisonnement pour dette à Paris à la fin du Moyen Âge (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2007); James Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline and Resistance in Languedoc (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1997); Joanna Summers, Late-Medieval Prison Writing and the Politics of Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Esther Cohen, The Crossroads of Justice: Law and Culture in Late Medieval France (Leiden: Brill, 1993). 3. Annik Porteau-Bitker, ‘L’Emprisonnement dans le droit laïque du moyen âge’, Revue historique du droit francais et etranger ser. 4: 46 (1968), 211–45, 389– 428; Laura Ikins Stern, The Criminal Law System of Medieval and Renaissance Florence (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Norval Morris and David Rothman, eds, The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). For a critique of this trajectory, see Geltner, The Medieval Prison, especially pp. 6–10. 4. Gotthold Bohne, Die Freiheitsstrafe in den italienischen Stadtrechten des 12–16. Jahrhunderts, Leipziger Rechtswissenschafliche Studien 4, 9 (Leipzig: T. Weicher, 1922–25). For a good account of Bohne’s influence, see Geltner, The Medieval Prison, introduction. Ralph Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). And for an accessible overview see Guy Geltner, ‘Medieval Prisons: Between Myth and Reality, Hell and Purgatory’, History Compass 4 (2006), 261–74. 5. Dunbabin, Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe. See also Richard Ireland, ‘Theory and Practice within the Medieval English Prison’, American Journal of Legal History 31 (1987), 57–67. 6. Erving Goffmann, Asylums: Essays on the Condition of the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Chicago, IL: Aldine, 1961). 7. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). 8. Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression. From a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 9. Morris and Rothman, eds, The Oxford History of the Prison, p. viii. 135
136 Notes 10. Geltner, The Medieval Prison; Guy Geltner, ‘Coping in Medieval Prisons’, Continuity and Change 23 (2008), 151–72; Geltner, ‘Isola non Isolata: Le Stinche in the Middle Ages’, Annali di Storia di Firenze 3 (2008), 9–30; Geltner, ‘Detrusio: Penal Cloistering in the Middle Ages’, Revue Bénédictine 118 (2008), 89–108. 11. See also Claustre, Les Geoles du Roi, for the urban environment and the use of the prison for debt. 12. For some examples, see Victor Brombert, La Prison Romantique: Essai sur l’Imaginaire (Paris: J. Corti, 1975); David Garland, Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980); Martin J. Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England, 1830–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 13. Jean Leclercq, ‘Le cloître est-il une prison?’, Revue d’ascétique et de mystique 47 (1971), 407–20; Gregorio Penco, ‘Monasterium- Carcer’, Studia Monastica 8 (1966), 133–43; Paul Meyvaert, ‘The Medieval Monastic Claustrum’, Gesta 12 (1973), 53–9; Joan M. Ferrante, ‘Images of the Cloister – Haven or Prison?’, Medievalia 12 (1989), 57–66. 14. Elisabeth Lusset, ‘La Criminalité dans les communautés régulières en l’Occident (France et Angleterre principalement) (XIIe–XVe siècles)’, unpublished PhD Dissertation, Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne, 2009. 15. Julia Hillner, Prison, Punishment and Penance in Late Antiquity (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press); see also Julia Hillner, ‘Monastic Imprisonment in Justinian’s Novels’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 15 (2007), 205–37; for a recent reading of the context of penance in the early period, see Mayke de Jong, The Penitential State: Authority and Atonement in the Age of Louis the Pious, 814–840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 16. Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society; see also Andrew Roach, ‘Penance and the Origins of the Inquisition’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 52 (2001), 409–33. 17. Some recent volumes are: Barbara H. Rosenwein, Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1999); Barbara A. Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka, eds, Medieval Practices of Space, Medieval Cultures 23 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall, eds, The Place of the Dead in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); John Howe and Michael Wolfe, eds, Inventing Medieval Landscapes: Senses of Place in Western Europe (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2001); Virginia Chieffo Raguin and Sarah Stanbury, eds, Women’s Space: Patronage, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005); Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing, eds, A Place to Believe In: Locating Medieval Landscapes (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006); for the genesis of ideas concerning the social construction of space, see, inter alia, Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans., Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson, The Social Logic of Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). For the most frequently cited theoretical models for the study of space, see Pierre Bourdieu, Algeria
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18.
19.
20. 21.
22.
23.
24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.
30.
1960, trans., R. Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans., S. Rendall, (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1984); Michel Foucault, ‘Espace, savoir et pouvoir’, in Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits 1954–1988, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 4, pp. 270–85; Foucault, Surveiller et punir; Régine Le Jan, ed., Construction de l’espace au moyen age. Pratiques et representations (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2007). Lefebvre, Production of Space; see also Kanishka Goonewardena, Stefan Kipfer, Richard Milgrom, Christian Schmid, eds, Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre (London and New York: Routledge, 2008); and the selected essays translated into English in Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden, eds, and Gerald Moore, Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden, trans., Space, State, World (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Space is ‘constituted through interactions, from the immensity of the global to the intimately tiny’, Doreen Massey, For Space (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 9. Doreen Massey, For Space, p. 130. See, inter alia: Dominique Iogna-Prat, La maison Dieu: Une histoire monumentale de l’Église au Moyen Âge (Paris: Seuil, 2006); Dawn Marie Hayes, Body and Sacred Place in Medieval Europe, 1100–1389 (New York: Routledge, 2003); Andrew Spicer and Sarah Hamilton, eds, Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Dominique Iogna-Prat, ‘Constructions chrétiennes d’un espace politique’, Le Moyen âge 107: 1 (2001), 49–69; Megan Cassidy-Welch, Monastic Spaces and their Meanings: Thirteenth- Century English Cistercian Monasteries (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001); Léon Pressouyre, ed., L’espace cistercien (Paris: Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 1994). Will Coster and Andrew Spicer, eds, Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 9, drawing on Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959). Roberta Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women (London and New York: Routledge, 1994); Roberta Gilchrist, Norwich Cathedral Close: The Evolution of the English Cathedral Landscape (Woodbridge, UK and Rochester, New York: Boydell, 2005). Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 254. For both examples, see Leclercq, ‘Le cloître est-il une prison?’ Megan Cassidy-Welch, ‘Pilgrimage and Embodiment: Captives and the Cult of Saints in late-medieval Bavaria’, Parergon 20: 2 (2003), 47–70. J.-M. Vidal, Un inquisiteur jugé par ses victimes. Jean Galand et les Carcassonnais (1285–1286) (Paris: A. Picard, 1903). Valerie Flint, ‘Space and Discipline in Early Medieval Europe’, in Hanawalt and Kobialka, eds, Medieval Practices of Space, pp. 149–66 at pp. 159–60. Laura L. Howes, ‘Introduction’, in Laura L. Howes, ed., Place, Space and Landscape in Medieval Narrative (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), p. viii. For gaol delivery roles, see Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England and Richard W. Kaeuper, ‘Jail Delivery’ in the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed., Joseph Strayer (New York: Scribner, 1982–89), vol. 7, pp. 44–5; for Villon see
138
31.
32.
33.
34.
Notes François Villon, Oeuvres, ed., Auguste Longnon, 4th ed. rev. by Lucien Foulet (Paris, 1932). Claustre, Les Geoles du Roi; Claude Gavraud, ‘Le Châtelet de Paris au début du XVe siècle d’après les fragments d’un register d’écrous de 1412’, Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes 157 (1999), 565–606; Geltner, ‘Isola non Isolata’. For the English coroner’s roles, see R.F. Hunnisett, The Medieval Coroner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961) and Barbara Hanawalt, The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Barbara A. Hanawalt, ‘The Voices and Audiences of Social History Records’, Social Science History 15 (1991), 159–75; for some examples of hagiographies of imprisoned saints see Michael Goodich, Violence and Miracle in the Fourteenth Century: Private Grief and Public Salvation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Anthime Fourier, Jean Froissart: La Prison amoureuse (Paris: Klincksieck, 1974); Josette A. Wiseman, trans. and ed., Christine de Pizan. The Epistle of the Prison of Human Life; With, An epistle to the Queen of France; and, Lament on the Evils of the Civil War (New York: Garland, 1984); on Chaucer and his influence on prison poetry see inter alia Julia Boffey, ‘Chaucerian prisoners: the context of the Kingis Quair’, in Julia Boffey and Janet Cowan, eds, Chaucer and Fifteenth- Century Poetry (London: King’s College, Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 1991), pp. 84–102; Lois A. Ebin, ‘Boethius, Chaucer and the Kingis Quair’, Philological Quarterly 53 (1974), 321–41; for some analysis of the prison theme in the Canterbury Tales, see V.A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative. The First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984); Anna Marie Babbi and Tobia Zanon, eds, Le Loro Prigioni. Scritture dal Carcere (Verona: Fiorini, 2007). For various discussions on forms of religious practice in medieval Christianity and associated critiques, see most conveniently the essays in Constance Berman, ed., Medieval Religion: New Approaches (London and New York: Routledge, 2005).
1 Incarceration of the Body and Liberation of the Spirit 1. Most recently Geltner, The Medieval Prison. For ideas and practices of penance in monastic culture, see Abigail Firey, ed., A New History of Penance (Leiden: Brill, 2008); Sarah Hamilton, The Practice of Penance, 900–1050 (London: The Royal Historical Society, 2001); the classic Cyril Vogel, Le Pécheur et le pénitence au Moyen Âge (Paris: Cerf, 1969). 2. Ellen Caldwell, ‘An Architecture of the Self: New Metaphors for Monastic Enclosure’, Essays in Medieval Studies 8 (1991), 15–24. 3. Aelred of Rievaulx, De Sanctimoniali de Wattun, in J.-P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae cursus completus, series Latina [hereafter PL], 221 vols (Paris, 1844–64), vol. 195, col, 789–96: ‘Attamen spoliatur, extenditur, etiam absque ulla miseratione flagellis atteteritur. Praeparato ergastulo vincitur, intruditur; singulis pedibus duo annuli cum suis catenulis inducuntur; quibus duae non parvi ponderis catenae insertae, quarum una immani trunco clavis infigitur, altera per foramen extracta foris sera concluditur. Sustentatur pane et aqua; quotidianis opprobriis saturatur. Interea tumens uteras evolvit conceptum. O quantus tunc erat luctus omnium!’
Notes 139
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10. 11. 12. 13.
Translation by Jo-Ann McNamara, ‘The Nun of Watton’, Magistra: A Journal of Women’s Spirituality in History 1 (1995), 122–37. PL 195, col. 796: ‘Quaedem autem nec dum timore deposito quaesierunt a nobis, si alia ei vincula deberent imponi. Prohibui, importunum hoc asserens, et quoddam infidelitatis indicium.’ For argument in favour of these respective points, see John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), pp. 296–321 and Giles Constable, ‘Aelred of Rievaulx and the Nun of Watton: An Episode in the Early History of the Gilbertine Order’ in Derek Baker, ed., Medieval Women (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), 205–26; Elizabeth Freeman, ‘Nuns in the Public Sphere: Aelred of Rievaulx’s De Sanctimoniali de Wattun and the Gendering of Religious Authority’, Comitatus 27 (1996), 55–80; Shari Horner, The Discourse of Enclosure: Representing Women in Old English Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001); Sarah Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late-Medieval England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001), p. 152 and following; Martin Irvine, ‘Abelard and (Re)Writing the Male Body: Castration, Identity and Remasculinization’ in Bonnie Wheeler and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, eds, Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997), 87–106. For the sole manuscript containing the story of the nun of Watton, see Bernard Meehan, ‘Durham 12th- Century Manuscripts in Cistercian houses’ in David Rollason and Michael Prestwich, eds, Anglo-Norman Durham: 1093–1193 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1994), 439–49. The manuscript is now held in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 139; the nun of Watton appears at fols 149r–151v. The words are Angela Carter’s. See Angela Carter, ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (London: Gollancz, 1979), p. 93. Thanks to Michaela Sahar for the reference. See Megan Cassidy-Welch, Monastic Spaces and their Meanings: ThirteenthCentury English Cistercian Monasteries (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), chapter 2, for the thirteenth- century precentor of Aelred’s abbey at Rievaulx, Matthew, who wrote a number of poems and letters describing the abbey as holy ground (terra sancta) with paradisal attributes. J.M. Canivez, ed., Statuta Capitulorum Generalium Ordinis Cisterciensis, [hereafter Statuta], 8 vols (Louvain: Bibliothèque de la Revue d’Histoire ecclésiastique, 1933–39), 1206, 4, vol. 1: ‘Qui voluerint carceres facere, ad fugitivos suos et maleficios, qui talia meruerint’. PL 195, col. 792: ‘Surgis misera, pergis ad ostium. Contantem egredi vis divina repellit; tentans iterum, sed nihil profecisti’. F.M. Powicke, trans. and ed., The Life of Ailred of Rievaulx by Walter Daniel (Edinburgh and London: Nelson, 1950). Life of Ailred, pp. 24–31. PL 195, col. 792: ‘Ubi tunc, pater Gilbertus, tuus in custodia disciplinae vigilantissimus sensus? Ubi tot tam exquisita ad excludendam vitiorum materiam machinamenta? Ubi tunc illa tam prudens, tam cauta, tam perspicax cura, et circa singula ostia, fenestras, angulos tam fida custodia ut sinistris etiam spiritibus negari videretur accessus? Elusit totam industriam tuam, pater, una puella, quia nisi Dominus custodierit civitatem, frustra vigilat qui custodit eam’.
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14. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermo in Dedicatione Ecclesiae I, 2, in PL 183, col. 519c. 15. Tertullian, Opera I, in E. Dekkers et al., eds, Corpus Christianorum, series Latina, I (Turnhout: Brepols, 1954), 1–8. On this point, see Gregorio Penco, ‘Monasterium – Carcer’, Studia Monastica 8 (1960), 133–43; Jean Leclercq, ‘Le cloître est-il un prison?’, Revue ascétique et de la mystique 47 (1971), 407–20; Joan M. Ferrante, ‘Images of the Cloister – Haven or Prison?’, Medievalia 12 (1989), 57–66. 16. See, inter alia, Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, ‘Strict Active Enclosure and its Effects on the Female Monastic Experience (500–1100)’, in John A. Nichols and Lillian Thomas Shank, eds, Medieval Religious Women I: Distant Echoes (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984), pp. 51–86; Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Age’, in idem, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays of Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), pp. 181–238; idem, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987); Jeffrey F. Hamburger, ‘Art, Enclosure and the Cura Monialium: Prolegomena in the Guise of a Postscript’, Gesta 31:2 (1992), 108–34; Penelope D. Johnson, ed., Equal in Monastic Profession: Religious Women in Medieval France (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995); David Aers and Lynn Staley, The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996); Elizabeth Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women: Periculoso and Its Commentators, 1298–1545 (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997). 17. For instance, Statuta 1297, 3: ‘praecipit Capitulum Generalis quod quicumque monachus vel conversus Ordinis comprobatus vel convictus fuerit mulieres introducere in abbatias, grangias vel etiam cellaris, in quibus feminae non consueverunt habitare vel ingredi, usque ad nutum Capituli Generalis carceri mancipatur’. 18. Alexandra Barratt, ‘Context: Reflections on Wombs and Tombs’ in Liz Herbert McAvoy and Mari Hughes-Edwards, eds, Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs: Intersections of Gender and Enclosure in the Middle Ages (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005), pp. 27–38, at p. 36. The literature on enclosure is voluminous. For some recent work, see various essays in Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin, eds, Framing Medieval Bodies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994); Roberta Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture: the Archaeology of Religious Women (London and New York: Routledge, 1997); Horner, The Discourse of Enclosure; Heike Uffmann, ‘Inside and Outside the Convent Walls: The Norm and Practice of Enclosure in the Reformed Nunneries of Late Medieval Germany’, Medieval History Journal 4:1 (January–June 2001), 83–108; various essays in Virginia Chieffo Raguin and Sarah Stanbury, eds, Women’s Space: Patronage, Place and Gender in the Medieval Church (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). 19. De institutione inclusarum, in C.H. Talbot, ed., Aelredi Rievallensis Opera omnia (Turnhout: Brepols, 1971), 636–682; translated in Aelred of Rievaulx, Treatises & Pastoral Prayer, intro. David Knowles (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1971), pp. 41–102; a parallel Latin/French edition is by Charles Dumont, ed.,
Notes 141
20.
21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.
27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.
36.
37. 38. 39.
Aelred de Rievaulx, La Vie d’un Recluse. La Prière pastorale (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1961). Unless otherwise indicated, I am using Knowles’s translations and Talbot’s Latin text. The manuscripts do not contain these divisions but the critical editions and translations, with Aelred’s own conclusion to the text indicate that he understood the text as having a tripartite structure. See Knowles, trans. and ed., Rule of Life, p. 62, note 1. Rule of Life, pp. 45–6. Ibid., p. 51: ‘aliquis senex maturis moribus et bonae opinionis’. Ibid., p. 45. Ibid., p. 58. ‘Hic autem sumus in timore, in labore, in dolore, proiecti a facie oculorum Dei, exclusi a gaudiss paradisi, ieiuni ab alimento coelesti’. Ibid., p. 59: ‘[s]ed inclusa maxime quae temporis huius rationem tanto melius intelligit, quanto eam in propria vita sua expressius recognoscit’. Ibid., p. 63: ‘quid hoc pretiosius thesauro, quo coelum emitur, angelus delectatur, cuius Christus ipse cupidus est, quo illicitur ad amandum et ad praestandum. Quid?’ Ibid., p. 65: ‘Felix quae lupanar vertit in oratorium, quod cum virgine ingrediens angleus lucem infudit tenebris, et insectatorem pudicitiae morte multavit.’ Ibid., p. 66: ‘Adiuvet conatum tumm in tali necessitate districtior abstinentia, quia ubi multa carnis afflictio, aut nulla aut parva potest esse delectatio.’ Ibid., pp. 66–70. Ibid., p. 75: ‘Haec pars tua, carissima, quae saeculo mortua atque sepulta, surda debes esse ad omnia quae saeculi sunt audiendum, et ad loquendum muta ...’ Ibid., p. 97: ‘Ipse sit horreum tuum, ipse apotheca, ipse marsupiam, ipse divitiae tuae, ipse deliciae tuae; solus sit omnia in omnibus.’ Ann Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons in Medieval England (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), p. 8. Ibid., p. 93. E. Mikkers, ‘Un Speculum novitii inédit d’Etienne de Sallai’, Collectanea Cisterciensis Ordinis Reformatorum 8 (1946), 17–68, at p. 68. For an overview of the manuscripts, seventeen versions and the historical scholarship of Ancrene Wisse, see Yoko Wada, ed., A Companion to Ancrene Wisse (Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 2003), esp. pp. 1–28. For an English translation see Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson, eds, Anchoritic Spirituality: Ancrene Wisse and Associated Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1991). Wada, ed., Companion, p. 1, fn. 5 for a complete list of the 17 English, Latin and French manuscripts. For some mention of prison terminology in the group of female saints’ lives which form part of the corpus, see Karen Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late-Medieval England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 37ff. Savage and Watson, eds, Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 58 Wada, ed., Companion, p. 17; Eric Dobson, The Origins of Ancrene Wisse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 239. The current historiographical trend accepts that anchorites had much more active interaction with the world outside their cells. See McAvoy and Hughes-Edwards, eds, Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs, for a series of essays on this.
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40. Savage and Watson, eds, Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 66 quoting Proverbs 4:23. 41. Ibid., p. 68. 42. For a fuller discussion, see Suzannah Biernhoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), esp. pp. 114–20. 43. Savage and Watson, eds, Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 95. 44. Ibid. 45. From the Sarum Missal, cited in Ibid., p. 17. 46. See Linda Georgianna, The Solitary Self: Individuality in the Ancrene Wisse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981) 47. Savage and Watson, eds, Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 101. 48. For a similar argument on the ‘inner- outer pattern of images’, see Janet Grayson, Structure and Imagery in Ancrene Wisse (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1974); and Georgianna, The Solitary Self. 49. See Sharon Elkins, Holy Women of Twelfth- Century England (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Ruth Mazo Karras, ‘Friendship and Love in the lives of two twelfth- century English saints’, Journal of Medieval History 14 (1988), 305–21; Rachel M. Koopman, ‘The Conclusion of Christina of Markyate’s Vita’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 51 (2000), 663–98; Christopher Holdsworth, ‘Christina of Markyate’ in Baker, ed., Medieval Women, pp. 185–204; Nancy Partner, ‘The Hidden self: psychonanalysis and the textual unconscious’, in Nancy Partner, ed., Writing Medieval History (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005), pp. 42–64, esp. pp. 52–8. 50. C.H. Talbot, tr. and ed., The Life of Christina of Markyate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 102: ‘Carcer erat iuxta oratorium senis. et domo illa con[tiguus qui] cum illo fecit angulum coniun[ctione] sua. Is antepositam habens una[m tab] ulam pote rat ita celeri. Ut de for[is] aspicienti nullam interius haberi [per]suaderet. ubi tamen amplitudo plus palmo semis inesset. In hoc ergo carcere Rogerus ovantem sociam posuit. et ligni robur pro hostio conveniens admovit. Et hoc eciam tanti ponderis erat. quod ab inclusa nullatenus admoveri sive removeri poterat. Hic igitur ancilla Christi coartata supra duram petram sedit usque ad obitum Rogeri. Id est iiii annis. et eo amplius. Latens illos quoque qui cum Rogero simul habitabant. O quantus sustinuit illic incommoditates frigoris et estus. famis et sitis. cotidiani ieiunii. Loci angustia non admittebat necessarium tegumentum algenti. Integerrima clausula nullum indulgebat refrigerium estuanti. Longa inedia contracta sunt et aruerunt sibi intestina.’ 51. Talbot, The Life of Christina of Markyate, p. 192: ‘Familiaris et amici supradixium, Christina die ac nocte memor erat, et circa eum quod illi expidiret probe satagebat ieiunando, vigilando, deum exorando, angelos et alios sanctos in celo et in terra supplicando misericordiam Dei super illum precibus et obsequiis ...’ 52. For instance, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ‘Chaste Bodies: Frames and Experiences’ in Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin, eds, Framing Medieval Bodies, pp. 24–42. 53. Rule of Life, p. 63: ‘Quid hoc pretiosius thesauro, quo coelum emitur ...’ 54. See Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption. 55. See Kristen McQuinn, ‘ ”Crepe into that blessed syde”: Enclosure imagery in Aelred of Rievaulx’s De institutione inclusarum’, in McAvoy and HighesEdwards, eds, Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs, pp. 95–102.
Notes 143 56. C.R. Cheney, Episcopal Visitation of Monasteries in the Thirteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1931). 57. Statuta, 1206, 4, t. 1: ‘Qui voluerint carceres facere, faciant, ad fugitivos suos et maleficios, qui talia meruerint.’ 58. Statuta 1229, 6, t. 2: ‘Statuitur ut in singulis abbatis Ordinis, in quibus fieri poterit fortes et firmi carceres construantur, ubi ad abbatis arbitrium retrudantur et detineantur, secundum quod exgerint crimina, criminosi ...’ 59. See Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, p. 377. 60. Statuta 1226, 25, t. 2: ‘De monachi Joiaci de quo dicitur quod abbatem proprium per novaculam voluit occidere, committitur patri abbatis qui rem diligenter inquirat, et si tanti flagitii reum invenerit, in carcerem perpetuum retrudantur.’ 61. Statuta 1241, 19, t. 2: ‘Conversus ille pessimus quo abbatem Everbacensem tam enormiter mutilavit, si ullo modo capi potuerit, perpetuo carceri mancipetur.’ 62. Statuta 1261, 32, t. 2: ‘... et ad cuiuscumque manum abbatis dictus homicida devenerit, prisum auctoritate Capituli generalis faciat carceri mancipari’. 63. Statuta 1275, 24, t. 3: ‘Cum ad aures Capitulum generalis factum quoddam horribile pervenerit, scilicet quod quidam conversi de Suetia nasum cuiusdam monachi praeciderint, abbati dicti loci praecipit Capitulum generalis ut dictos conversos incarcerent nec exeant de dicto carcere absque mandate Capitulum generalis.’ 64. Statuta 1290, 14, t. 3: ‘Item negotium monachorum et conversorum de Everbach committitur domino Clarevallis in plenaria potestate ut per se vel per alios capiendo vel incarcerando vel aliis faciendo prosequatur prout viderit expedire.’ 65. F. D. Logan, Runaway Religious in Medieval England c. 1240–1540 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 207. 66. Statuta 1256, 7, t. 2. 67. Statuta 1258, 4, t. 2: ‘Item sicut dolentes accepimus, frater Andreas quondam abbas de Berola, post sui cordis ambulans pravitatem, confracto paternae et generalis Capituli obedientiae levi iugo, convertens quoque ovinam humilitatem in rabidem beluinam, non solum contumax, inobediens et rebellis ... existit ... Ne igitur tantae absurditatis perniceies per inpunitatem unius pluribus damnabiliter transeat in exemplum ...’ 68. Statuta 1266, 6, t. 3; 1266, 7, t. 3 for instances of the ‘indicibilia vitia’. 69. Statuta 1397, 23, t. 3: ‘Ut cum Stephano Clarin, monacho monasterio de Eschalleiis cum una muliere in ipsius monasterii dormitorio deprehenso, et de furto convicto, de et super quibus per dimidiam annum poenam carceris humiliter sustinuuit ...’ 70. Statuta 1221, 11, t. 1: ‘Sacerdotes fugitivi ... omni sexta feria per annum sint in pane et aqua, et ... in ipsa die in capitulo accipiant disciplinam ...’ 71. Which they would do if they had left the monastery with more than two habits and cowls. Statuta 1195, 7, t. 1 and repeated with slight emendments in Statuta 1266, 4, t. 3, when the problem had evidently grown: ‘Cum per apostasiam monachorum et conversorum Ordo laedatur enormiter, et maxime et pluralitate vestium quas secum deferunt ad saeculum, multa fiant incommoda, statuit et ordinat Capitulum Generale ut monachi et conversi quos apostatare contigerit, si plus quam duas tunicas et cucullam monachus, conversus vero cappam ad saeculum deportare praesumpserint, pro furto residuum habeatur.’ 72. Statuta 1221, 10, t. 2: ‘Monachus vel conversus qui cum furto recesserit, seu in proprietate aut in furto deprehensis fuerit, ultimus omnium quos invenerit semper erit, et omni sexta feria per annum sit in pane et aqua, et quadraginta diebus
144
73.
74. 75.
76.
77. 78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
Notes grossiori pane vescatur. Conversus autem in terra comedat per eosdem diebus, et ... omnibus capitulis per annum quibus intererit, vereberetur ...’ Statuta 1271, 3, t. 3: ‘... Cum per apostasiam monachorum etc., hoc additur quod si recipiendi fuerint fugitivi recipiantur ad victum, et habitum quem abbas suas decreverit, et per annum comedant ad terram in refectorio et si fuerit conversus, radatur ei barba in rasuris consuetis; si vero monachus fuerit in anno tantummodo barbam radat.’ Statuta 1266, t. 3; Statuta 1268, 2, t. 3; Statuta 1269, 19, t. 3 for the preceding examples. Statuta 1282, 3, t. 3: ‘... Capitulum ordinat et diffinat quod quotiescumque monachus vel conversus iactando seu commonando dicere praesumpserit in audientia ceterorum se velle ab ordine exire, aut habitum deponere regularam cum tale saepe colloquium corrumpat et inficiant bonos mores, per custodem Ordinis in catenis, vinculis aut carceris retrudatur ...’ Other monastic orders also used incarceration to deal with returned apostates. F.D. Logan has shown that Carmelite houses from 1281 were required to incarcerate apostates for 40 days after other ‘reconciliation’ rituals had been completed. See Logan, Runaway Religious, p. 152. Statuta 1291, 42, t. 3: ‘Item super excessibus gravibus fratris Petri di Artespac fugitivi, abbati de Ebraco patri abbati dicit monasterii praecepit Capitulum generale ut dictum fugitivum capi faciat et si possit fieri carceri mancipetur ...’ Megan Cassidy-Welch, ‘Incarceration and Liberation: Prisons in the Cistercian Monastery’, Viator 32 (2001), 23–42. T. Bonnin, ed., Regestrum visitationum Archiepiscopi Rothomagensis (Rouen: A. Le Brument, 1852). The register has also been translated in English in J. F. O’Sullivan, ed. and S. M. Brown, trans., The register of Eudes of Rouen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964). The most complete and recent study of Eudes Rigaud and his career is by Adam Davis, The Holy Bureaucrat: Eudes Rigaud and Religious Reform in Thirteenth- Century Normandy (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 2006). See also Joseph Strayer, The Administration of Normandy under Saint Louis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932); Jennifer D. Thibodeaux, ‘Odo Rigaldus, the Norman Elite, and the Conflict over Masculine Prerogatives in the Diocese of Rouen’, Essays in Medieval Studies 23 (2006), 41–55. For prisons in the same region in a slightly later period, see Jean- Claude Capelle, ‘Quelques aspects des prisons civiles en Normandie aux XIVe et Xve siècles’, Archéologie Médiévale 5 (1975), 161–206. Regestrum visitationum Archiepiscopi Rothomagensis, p. 45 for St Martin-laGarenne (‘claustrum non servatur’); p. 60 for Cormeilles (‘iniunximus abbati quod claustrum melius faceret custodiri’). Ibid., p. 90 for Cherbourg (‘ordinamus quod ad officium claustri apponatur custos diligens, qui seculares arceat quantum poterit bono modo’); p. 352 for St Georges (‘precepimus quod cellarius custodiret claves portarum de nocte’). Ibid., p. 350: ‘habebant carcerem iuxta claustrum, ubi recludebantur malefactores et latrones; precepimus quod tenerent placita sua alibi, longe ab ecclesia, et construi facerent carcerem suum extra locum sanctum et extra cimiterium’. Ibid., p. 548: ‘Item quod Gaufrido Boite, canonico incarcerato, breviarium quoddam vel aliquem librum studeret, ubi posset horas dicere et orare, et faceret eum confiteri qualibet ebdomada et communicare’; p. 585: ‘Ibi erant XII canonici
Notes 145
83.
84. 85.
86.
87. 88.
89.
90.
91.
92.
93.
commorantes, quorum unus, videlicet, Gaufridus disctus Boite, incarceratus erat ibi.’ Ibid., p. 578: ‘Quidam canonicus erat ibi incarceratus, qui aliquando vociferabat et clamabat adeo infrunite, quod turbabat conventum et molestabat, et tunc precepimus abbati quod elongaret prefatum fatuum a conventu, et carcerem alibi construi faceret.’ Ibid., p. 103: ‘Caleboyche et alter, qui sunt incarcerati, dissolute cantant: precipimus ut corripiantur per surreptionem ciborum, et disciplinam.’ Ibid., pp. 105–6: ‘Herbertus, vicarius Guillelmi de Milliaco, ut dicitur, deprehensus fuit cum quadam coniugata, et maletractatus et incarceratus, et emendacionem fecit maiori super hoc; promisit quod vicariam suum habebit pro resignata, si amplius infametur super premissis, dum tamen posset probari.’ Ibid., p. 307: ‘Item, quidam monachus fatuus erat ibi, dominus Symon nuncupatus, qui ridiculum erat mulits, et scandalum cunctis religiosis existebat; monuimus etiam socios prioris quod cum ad claustrum vel infirmariam revocari procurarent.’ Ibid., p. 353: ‘Ibi erant XXVI monachi. Unus fatuus erat ibi; precepimus ipsum bene custodiri et teneri, ne evaderet.’ Ibid., p. 364: ‘Propter quod, iniunximus priori quod ipse dictum Richardum revocaret ad claustrum ... et quod non exiret claustrum, ipse dicta penitentia existente, nec etiam ipsa peracta.’ Ibid., p. 516: ‘Frater Guillelmus de Modiis debebat solus esse in camera quadam, omnino exclusus et separatus a consortio conventus et monachorum, pro eo quod inconsulte et male prposuerat in capitulo coram eis verba quedam per que scandalizatus fuerat conventus et turbatus, de ordinatione huiuscemodi aliquid noluimus immutare.’ The Register of John Le Romeyn Lord Archbishop of York, Publications of the Surtees Society 123, 2 vols (London: The Surtees Society, 1834) 1.437: ‘... quod quidam Godefredus Darel, qui a religione et ordine Cisterciensi, quem in monasterio de Ryevalle professus fuerat, apostatavit, ut dicitur, in seculari habitu probosius iam vagatur, maleficiis et incantacionibus nefariis inserviens, per que et quas plebem Dominicam decipit fidemque ecclesie reicit in proprie salutis dispendium et orthodoxorum scandalum ... manifestum’. Register of John Le Romeyn 1.437: ‘Proth dolor ... Cum nostro itaque incumbat officio errantes oviculos ad rectitudinis semitam meditacione sollicita revocare, devocioni tue committimus et mandamus quatinus vias prefati apostate scrutari studeas diligenter, ipsumque caute repertum nobis presentare procures, ut viso vultu morbosi pecoris, premissa investigemus plenius, et quatenus saluti predicti vagi expedire viderimus, ordinemus consulcius de eodem.’ We might also note that dependent priories in medieval England could sometimes be used as quasi-prisons for criminous or difficult monks. See Martin Heale, The Dependent Priories of Medieval English Monasteries (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004), p. 120ff. C.T. Martin, ed., Registrum epistolarum fratris Johannis Peckham, archiepiscope Cantuariensis, 3 vols (London, Rolls Series, 1882–85), vol. 3, pp. 803: 1284. Llanthony priory seems to have been over-zealous in its use of incarceration. Peckham carefully stated that the only reason to incarcerate a member of the community should be for grave crimes (‘nullus scilicet incarceretur nisi pro crimine enormi’) and that prisoners should be released as soon as they
146
94.
95. 96. 97. 98.
2
Notes showed signs of sufficent penitence (‘illos vero quos prior facit pro suis sceleribus in forma predicta carceri mancipari, possit post sufficientis signa poenitentiae de fratrum consilio a carcere liberare’), p. 803. H.E. Butler, trans. and ed., The Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond: Concerning the Acts of Samson, Abbot of the Monastery of St. Edmund (London: Nelson, 1949), pp. 118–19. Regestrum visitationum Archiepiscopi Rothomagensis, p. 142. Ibid., p. 127. Ibid., p. 160: ‘hereticum quem in carcere nostro diu detinueramus ...’ Thomas Frederick Crane, ed., The Exempla or Illustrative Stories from Sermones Vulgares of Jacques de Vitry (London: D. Nutt, 1890), pp. 237–38.
Prison Miracles and the Cult of Saints
1. For accessible résumés of the cult of St Leonard, see, inter alia, Amy G. Remensnyder, Remembering Kings Past: Monastic Foundation Legends in Medieval Southern France (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 119–21 for the Limousin context; Michael Goodich, Violence and Miracle in the Fourteenth Century: Private Grief and Public Salvation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), passim; a number of older studies of the saint remain useful. See A. Poncelet, ‘Boémond et S. Léonard’, Analecta Bollandiana 31 (1912), 24–44; Louis Guibert, Histoire de SaintLéonard- de-Noblat: la commune de Saint-Léonard- de-Noblat au XIIIe siècle (orig. 1890, repr. Paris: Res Universis, 1992); Etienne Oroux, Histoire de la vie et du culte de saint Léonard de Limousin (Paris: J. Barbou, 1760). See below for the German context. 2. Theodore Graesse, ed., Jacobi a Voragine Legenda aurea. Vulgo historia lombardica dicta (orig. 1890, repr. Osnabruch, 1969), pp. 889–902 for St Barbara; pp. 170–4 for St Agatha; pp. 259–64 for St George. 3. For an account of the dissemination of this iconography, see Carolyn Kinder Carr, ‘Aspects of the iconography of Saint Peter in medieval art of Western Europe to the early thirteenth century’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 1978; Heinrich Brinkmann, Die Darstellung des Apostels Petrus. Ikonographische Studien zur deutschen Malerei und Graphik vom ausgehenden Mittelalter bis zur Renaissance (Dusseldorf: G.H. Nolte, 1936); C. Ceccelli, San Pietro (Rome: Giunta Centrale per gli Studi Storici, 1937). 4. See Richard Hillier, Arator on the Acts of the Apostles: A Baptismal Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 4–5: ‘hic solidate fides, his est tibi Roma, catenis perpetuata salus; harum circumdata nexu libera semper eris: quid enim non vincula praestent quae tetigit qui cuncta potest absolvere? Cuius haec invicta manu vel religiosa triumpho moenia non ullo penitus quatientur ab hoste. Claudit iter bellis, qui portam pandit in astrus’. 5. Charles de Clerq, The Latin Sermons of Odo of Canterbury (Brussels: AWLSK, 1983), pp. 191–2. 6. Joseph Sanchis Sivera and Gret Schib, eds, St. Vincent Ferrer, Sermons, 6 vols (Barcelona: Editorial Barcino, 1932–88). See also Matthieu Maxime Gorce, Saint Vincent Ferrer (1350–1419) (Paris: Plon, 1924) and for a recent treatment,
Notes 147
7.
8.
9.
10.
11. 12.
13.
14.
15. 16.
Laura Smoller, ‘Miracle, Memory, and Meaning in the Canonization of Vincent Ferrer, 1453–1454’, Speculum 73:2 (1998), 429–54. For St Vincent Ferrer’s emphasis on ideas of community, see, inter alia, David Nirenberg, ‘Enmity and assimilation: Jews, Christians and Converts in Medieval Spain’, Common Knowledge 9:1 (2003), 137–55. Graesse, ed., Legenda aurea, De sancto Marco evangelista, p. 270: ‘Vir quidam in civitate Mantuae falso ab immundis accusatus in carcerem est reclusus, qui cum XL dies peregisset ibidem et nimio afficeretur taedio, tandem triduum jejunio se macerans beati Marci patrocinium invocavit, qui sibi apparens jubet, ut de carcere securus abscedat. Ille vero, dormitans prae taedio, neglexit patere jussionibus sancti existimans illusionibus se deludi. Deinde secundo et etiam tertio sibi apparuit et eadem similiter imperavit. Qui ad se rediens et ostium apertum conspiciens de carcere securus exiit et instar stuppae compedes mox confregit. Ibat igitur die media per medium custodum caeterorumque omnium, ita ut ipse cunctos videns a nemine videretur.’ For the translation see William Granger Ryan, Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), vol. 1, p. 247. Cited in Augustine Thompson, Cities of God: The Religion of the Italian Communes, 1125–1325 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), p. 202. See John Kitchen, Saints’ Lives and the Rhetoric of Gender: Male and Female in Merovingian Hagiography (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 40. Also Frantisek Graus, ‘Die Gewalt bei den Anfängen des Feudalismus und die “Gefangenenbefreiungen” der Merowingischen Hagiographie’, Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte, part 1 (1960), 61–156; Annette Wiesheu, ‘Bischof und Gefängnis. Zur Interpretation der Kerkerbefreiungswunder in der merowingischen Hagiographie’, Historisches Zeitschrift 121 (2001), 1–23. Marcus Graham Bull, ed. and trans., The Miracles of Our Lady of Rocamadour (Rochester/New York: The Boydell Press, 1999), pp. 196–7. P. Bourgain-Hemeryck, R. Landes, G. Pon, eds, Ademarus Cabannensis. Chronicon (Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 129 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999). Steven D. Sargent, ‘Religious Responses to Social Violence in EleventhCentury Aquitaine’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 12:2 (1985), 219–40. A. Poncelet, Acta sanctorum vol. III November (Brussels: Bollandianists, 1910), pp. 149–55 at p. 154: ‘Multi vero de longinquis regionibus ex ergastulis aut ex vinculis liberati per ipsum requirebant in quo loco beatus Leonardus haberet hospitium; quin etiam compedes catenarumque pondera apportabant secum et ad vestigia pedum eius cadentes humiliter praesentebant ...’ For a clear account of these, see Sargent, ‘Religious Responses to Social Violence’, esp. pp. 235–8. For the establishment of the principality and the situation in Antioch after 1099, see R.B.C. Huygens, ed., William of Tyre Chronicon (Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 63, 63A, Turnhout: Brepols, 1986); trans. E.A. Babcock and A.C. Krey, A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, 2 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948).
148
Notes
17. See Poncelet, ‘Bohemond et S. Leonard’; George Beech, ‘A Norman-Italian Adventurer in the East: Richard of Salerno, 1097–1112’, in Marjorie Chibnall, ed., Anglo-Norman Studies XV: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 1992 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1993), pp. 25–40 for the circumstances of Bohemond’s capture. 18. Marjorie Chibnall, ed., The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969–75) at vol. 6, p. 68ff.; Bernard S. Bachrach and David S. Bachrach, trans. and eds, The Gesta Tancredi of Ralph of Caen: A History of the Normans on the First Crusade (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 169; Carol Sweetenham and Linda Patterson, eds, The Canso d’Antiocha: An Occitan Epic Chronicle of the First Crusade (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 8–9. 19. Franz Machilek, ‘Die Wittelsbacher, Kloster Fürstenfeld und die Wallfahrt St Leonhard zu Inchenhofen’ in T. Grad, ed., Die Wittelsbacher in Aichacher Land. Gedenkschrift der Stadt Aiach und des Landeskreises Aichach-Friedberg zur 800-Jahr-Feier des Hauses Wittelsbach (Aichach: Mayer, 1980), pp. 197–208. 20. Edgar Krausen, ‘Zisterziensertum und Wallfahrtskulte im bayerischen Raum’, Analecta Sacri Ordinis Cisterciensis, 12 (1956), 115–29; Machilek, ‘Die Wittelsbacher, Kloster Fürstenfeld und die Wallfahrt St Leonhard’; Birgitta Klemenz, ‘Die Zisterzienserniederlassumg (Superiorat) St. Leonhard’, in Wilhelm Liebhart, ed., Inchenhofen: Wallfahrt, Zisterzienser und Markt (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1992), pp. 107–25; Klaus Wollenberg, ‘Die Zisterzienser in Altbayern, Franken und Schwaben – ein Überblick’, in Klaus Wollenberg et al., eds, In Tal und Einsamkeit. 725 Jahre Kloster Fürstenfeld. Die Zisterzienser im alten Bayern. Band III: Kolloquium “Die Zisterzienser in Bayern, Franken und den benachbarten Regionen Südostmitteleuropas. Ihre Verbandsbildung sowie soziale und politische Integration” 29.8.–2.9.1988 (Fürstenfeldbruck: E. Wewel, 1990), pp. 15–28. 21. Munich BSB Clm 7685; Munich BSB Clm 27332. Steven D. Sargent, ‘Religion and Society in Late Medieval Bavaria: The Cult of Saint Leonard, 1258– 1500’, PhD Thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1982, pp. 201ff. 22. See Elisabeth Dafelmair, ‘Die Mirakelbücher’ in Liebhart, ed., Inchenhofen. Wallfahrt, Zisterzienser und Markt, pp. 65–82. 23. Munich BSB Clm 7685, fol. 86r. 24. Ibid., fol. 111v. 25. Ibid., fol. 77r. 26. Ibid., fol. 48v; fol. 86r. 27. Ibid., fol. 112r. 28. Ibid., fol. 20r. 29. Ibid., fol. 30v. 30. Ibid., fol. 114r-v. 31. Ibid., fol. 48r. 32. Ibid., fol. 105v. 33. Ibid., fol. 93r. 34. Ibid., fols 33v–35r for one example. See Sargent, ‘Religion and Society’, p. 276 for more discussion. 35. Ibid., fol. 4v.
Notes 149 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.
43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.
50.
51. 52. 53.
54. 55.
56.
Ibid., fol. 32r. Ibid., fols. 81r; 56v. Ibid., fol. 25r. Ibid., fol. 85r. Ibid., fol. 109r. Munich BSB Clm 27332, fol. 123r. Munich BSB Clm 7685, fol. 14r. For more on Mary as redeemer of captives, see Amy Remensnyder, ‘Christian Captives, Muslim Maidens, and Mary’, Speculum 82 (2007), 642–77. Munich BSB Clm 7685, fol. 13v. Munich BSB Clm 27332, fol. 135v; 142r. Munich BSB Clm 7685, fol. 90v. Munich BSB Clm 27332, fol. 155v–156r. Munich BSB Clm 7685, fol. 30r. Ibid., fol. 36r; 54v. Werner Williams-Krapp, ‘Die deutschen Übersetzungen der “Legenda aurea” des Jacobus de Voragine’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 101:2 (1979), 252–76; Konrad Kunze, ‘Ein neues Instrument zur historischen Wortforschung. Das Variantenregister der elsässischen Legenda Aurea’, in A. Greule and U. Ruberg, eds, Sprache, Literatur, Kultur: Studien zu ihrer Geschichte im deutschen Süden und Westen. Wolfgang Kleiber zu seinem 60. Geburtstag gewidmet (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1989), pp. 57–69; Konrad Kunze, ‘Überlieferung und Bestand der elsässischen Legenda Aurea. Ein Beitrag zur deutschsprachigen Hagiographie des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts’, Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur: mit Anzeiger für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 99:4 (1970), 265–309. Master of the Magdalen (Italian, c. 1265–95), Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints Leonard and Peter, c. 1270, tempera and gold on panel. Now in the Yale University Art Gallery (accession number 1871.3). Bildindex der Kunst und Architektur (Bildarchiv Photo Marburg), obj. no. 00071808 (the image may be viewed online at www.bildindex.de). For the preceding stories, see Munich BSB Clm 7685, fol. 73v; fol. 77r; fol. 80r; 98v. For votives more generally see Rudolf Kriss, Eisenopfer: Das Eisenopfer in Brauchtum und Geschichte (Munich: Hüber Verlag, 1957) and Richard Andree, Votive und Weihegaben des katholischen Volks in Süddeutschland (Brunswick: Vieweg, 1904). For more recent work on this subject see Joseph Moos, ‘Iron Votive Offerings: Hope forged from Iron’, Hephaistos. Internationale Zeitschrift für Metallgestalter, 9(10) (1996), 38–9. For some later examples of votive pictures of St Leonard, see Lenz Kriss- Rettenbeck, Das Votivbild (Munich: Verlag Hermann Rinn, 1958), especially pp. 58, 95, 108. Bildindex der Kunst und Architektur (Bildarchiv Photo Marburg), obj. no. 00180103, T (the image may be viewed online at www.bildindex.de). Sargent, ‘Religion and Society’; A. Vauchez, Sainthood in the Late Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 455. Sargent, ‘Religion and Society’, p. 68ff for the preceding.
150 Notes 57. André Vauchez, La sainteté en Occident aux derniers siècles du Moyen Age: d’après les procès de canonisation et les documents hagiographiques (Rome: École française de Rome, 1981). 58. Lionel Rothkrug, ‘Popular Religion and Holy Shrines. Their Influence on the Origins of the German Reformation and Their Role in German Cultural Development’, in James Obelkevich, ed., Religion and the People, 800–1700 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), pp. 20–86. Also see Robert W. Scribner, ‘Ritual and Popular Religion in Catholic Germany at the Time of the Reformation’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 35 (1984), 47–77; P. M. Soergel, Wondrous in his Saints: Counter Reformation Propaganda in Bavaria (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1993), esp. pp. 15–44. 59. Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 60. For an expanded discussion of pilgrimage to Inchenhofen as an act of embodiment, see Megan Cassidy-Welch, ‘Pilgrimage and Embodiment: Captives and the Cult of Saints in Late-Medieval Bavaria’, Parergon 20: 2 (2003), 47–70. 61. Soergel, Wondrous in his Saints, p. 28. 62. Munich BSB Clm 7685, fol. 1r: ‘Varias de miraculis Sancti Leonardi narrationes coram me prolatas nequaquam fodere in terram silentio, sed ea cunctis Christi fidelibus in laudem dei ac S. L. devota mente recitare decrevi.’ 63. W. Fountain, ed., De Trinitate Libri XV (Corpus Christianorum series latina 50, Turnhout: Brepols, 1968), 3, 4–10. For a deft outline of the theology of the miracle, see Michael Goodich, Miracles and Wonders: The Development of the Concept of Miracle, 1150–1350 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 64. Joseph Strange, ed., Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum, 2 vols (Cologne: J.M. Herberle, 1851), distinctio 10, c.1, 2: 217. 65. Munich BSB Clm 7685, fol. 60r–v; and fol. 21r–v. The counterfeiter swam away but was captured again and imprisoned. This time, he was released as an act of mercy by Duke Stephanus of Bavaria. 66. Sargent, ‘Religion and Society’, p. 279. 67. For the growth of confession from the Omnis utriusque sexus decree of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), see Thomas Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); Peter Biller and A. J. Minnis, eds, Handling Sin. Confession in the Middle Ages (Rochester, New York: York Medieval Press in association with the Boydell Press, 1998). 68. Munich BSB Clm 7685, fol. 86r. 69. Ibid., fol. 31r; Munich BSB Clm 27332, fol. 127r. 70. Munich BSB Clm 7685, fol. 51r; fol. 51v. 71. Ibid., fol. 101v; fol. 111r; fol. 80r. 72. Ibid., fol. 80r. 73. Ibid., fol. 88v. 74. Ibid., fol. 101r. 75. Ibid., fol. 20v. 76. Tobias 11.
Notes 151
3 Imprisonment, Memory and Space in the Early Inquisitions 1. James Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline and Resistance in Languedoc (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1997). 2. Pierra Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de mémoire’, Representations (special issue) 26 (1989), 7–25. 3. For the establishment of the inquisition at the Council of Toulouse, see Céléstin Douais, ‘Les Sources de l’histoire de l’inquisition dans le Midi de la France aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles’, Revue des Questions Historiques 30 (1888), 383–459. 4. For a recent study of the nature of the written record and its use by the inquisitors of Languedoc, see Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society. For an account of the inquisitorial archives at Toulouse and Carcassonne, see Yves Dossat, Les Crises de l’inquisition toulousaine au XIIIe siècle (1233–1273) (Bordeaux: Bière, 1959). 5. For a résumé of this council, see Douais, ‘Les Sources de l’Histoire de l’Inquisition’. For the decree, see G.D. Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum nova, et amplissima collectio, 39 vols (Paris: H. Welter, 1903–1910), vol. 23, col. 196. 6. It is clear that in 1237 the prison was still to be constructed in Toulouse. See Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Departement des manuscripts, fonds Doat [hereafter Doat] MS 21, fol. 152r–v. 7. Mansi, 23, col. 196, cap. xi. 8. Charles Molinier, L’Inquisition dans le Midi de la France au XIIIe et au XIVe siècles: étude sur les sources de son histoire (Toulouse: Privat, 1880), p. 435; Doat 31, fols 27–28r. 9. For examples of prison insecurity in the late 1230s see Walter L. Wakefield, ‘Friar Ferrier, Inquisition at Caunes and Escapes from Prison at Carcassonne’, Catholic Historical Review 58:2 (1972), 220–37. For a résumé of the early history of the inquisitorial prison, see Andrew Roach, ‘Penance and the Making of the Inquisition in Languedoc’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 52 (2001), 409–33. 10. Mansi, vol. 23, col. 719–20, cap. XX; cap. XXII. 11. Ibid., col. 357–8, cap. IV-IX. 12. Cited in Roach, ‘Penance and the Making of the Inquisition’, note 62. 13. Given, Inquisition and Power, p. 23. 14. Roach, ‘Penance and the Making of the Inquisition’. 15. Beverly Mayne Kienzle, Cistercians, Heresy, and Crusade in Occitania, 1145– 1229 (Rochester, New York: York Medieval Press and Boydell and Brewer, 2001); Karen Sullivan, Truth and the Heretic: Crises of Knowledge in Medieval French Literature (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 16. Hildegard’s 1163 Mainz treatise is to be found in L. van Acker, ed., Hildegardis Bingensis Epistolarium II, CCCM 91a (Turnhout: Brepols, 1993), 348–51. For commentary, see Beverly Kienzle, ‘Defending the Lord’s Vineyard: Hildegard of Bingen’s Preaching against the Cathars’ in C. Muessig, ed., Medieval Monastic Preaching, (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 163–91 at p. 170. 17. Walter Wakefield and Austin P. Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages: Selected Sources Translated and Annotated (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 139.
152 Notes 18. Albert Lecoy de la Marche, ed., Anecdote historiques, légendes, et apologues tirées du recueil inédit d’Etienne de Bourbon, dominicain du XIIIe siècle (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1887), p. 291. 19. For the general Cistercian context, see Kienzle, Cistercians, Heresy, and Crusade. 20. See Kienzle, Cistercians, Heresy and Crusade, p. 123. 21. Célestin Douais, ed., Bernard Gui, Practica inquisitionis hereticae pravitatis (Paris: Picard, 1886), p. 254. 22. Alan of Lille, De Fide Catholica, PL 210, cols. 305–430. 23. Wakefield and Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages, p. 365. 24. P. Guébin et E.D. Lyon, eds, Petri Vallium Sarnaii (Pierre des Vaux- deCernay), Historia Albigensis, 3 vols (Paris: H. Champion, 1926, 1930, 1939); an English translation is W.A. Sibly and M.D. Sibly, trans., Peter of les Vauxde- Cernay, The History of the Albigensian Crusade (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1998), p. 105. 25. Anne Brenon, ‘Les Cisterciens contre l’héresie, XIIe –XIIIe siècle. De vignes domestiques au vignes du seigneur: des croisés dans l’âme’ in Ferran Garcia Oliver, ed., El Císter, ideals i realitat d’un orde monàstic: actes del Simposi Internacional sobre el Císter. Valldigna (1298–1998) (Universitat de Valencia: CEIC, 2001), pp. 47–72; Yves Dossat, ‘La Croisade vue par les chroniqueurs: Pierre des Vaux- de- Cernay, cistercien et correspondant de guerre’, in Paix de Dieu et guerre sainte en Languedoc au XIIIe siècle, Cahiers de Fanjeaux 4 (Toulouse: Privat, 1969), pp. 247–61; Christopher Kurpiewski, ‘Writing beneath the shadow of heresy: the Historia Albigensis of Brother Pierre des Vaux- de- Cernay’, Journal of Medieval History 31 (2005), 1–27. 26. Peter of les Vaux- de- Cernay, The History of the Albigensian Crusade, p. 63. 27. Ibid., p. 70 28. Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Collectorie 404, fol. 69v: ‘Interficiatis me, non reducatis me ad carcerem. Ego appello ad deum et ad papam et ad archiepiscopum bituriense, non reducatis me intus in carcerem.’ 29. See the list of general points to be included in the sermons and sentences against heresy at Toulouse and Carcassonne in Paris, Doat 29, fol. 128r and following, including at fol. 158v a description of perpetual imprisonment, ‘ubi panis doloris in cibum et aqua tribulationis inpotum vobis tantum modo ministretur ...’ At fol. 159r adds to the nature of this sentence: ‘... et ideo estis gravitus puniendi vos in muro stricto et in loco antiori in vinculis seu compedibus per hanc nostram sententiam decernimus perpetuo includendos ...’ 30. Cited in Molinier, L’Inquisition dans le Midi de la France, p. 327. 31. Jean Duvernoy, ed., Le Registre d’inquisition de Jacques Fournier, 1318–1325, 3 vols (Toulouse: Privat, 1965), vol. 1, p. 319: ‘... [D]ixit, timebat sibi si predicta confiteretur, quod immuraretur’. 32. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 329: ‘[R]espondit quod timebat sibi de dicto rectore et fratribus eius si predicta confiteretur, quod male tractarent eam’. 33. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 497: ‘[R]espondit quod non, sed bene fuit ei dictum per dictum dominum episcopum quod nisi confiteretur veritatem, quod iret ad Alamannos’. 34. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 476: ‘Item dixit quod quando ipsa stetit capta in muro Carcassone quia confiteri nolebat, dictus rector venit ad ipsam muro et dixit ei quod confiteretur illa que comiserat in crimine heresis, sed caveret sibi ne aliquid confiteretur
Notes 153
35.
36. 37.
38.
39.
40. 41.
42.
43.
44. 45.
46. 47.
48.
super dicto crimine contra pisum rectorem vel alias peronas de domo dicti rectoris, quia hoc faceret, malum sibi contingeret ...’ Ibid., vol. 3, p. 349: ‘Audiverat Aycredum Boreti dicentem aliqua verba cominatoria contra aliquos personas de Causone, quod ipse faceret ipsas poni in muro vel in carcere de Alamannis ...’ See Ibid., vol. 1, 214–50. See: Daniela Müller, Frauen vor den Inquisition: Lebensform, Glaubenszeugnis und Aburteilung der Deutschen und Französischen Katharerinnen (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1996); Anne Brenon, Les Femmes Cathares (Paris: Perrin, 1992); Sullivan, Truth and the Heretic; John Arnold, Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001) for some examples. Duvernoy, Le Registre d’inquisition de Jacques Fournier, vol. 1, p. 217: ‘Qua die martis dicta Beatrix non comparuit, licet sufficienter et per totam diem fuisset exspectata, quare idem dominus episcopus reputavit eam contumacem et pro contumace habuit et mandavit et fecit eam poni in defectu. Postmodum, cum dicta Beatrix in fuga constituta perquisita per gentes dicti domini episcopi cum litteris suis directis baiulis, officialibus et iusticiariis quibuscumque reperta fuisset per gentes domini episcopi predicatas latitans in villa de Manso Sanctarum Puellarum diocesis Sancti Pauli, adducta fuit capta per gentes eiusdem domini episcopi et servientes curie ...’ Ibid., p. 246: ‘Interrogata quare aufugit quando fuerat citata per dictum dominum episcopum, et comparuerat pro crimine heresis, et si aliquis dederat ei consilium quod fugeret, vel se absenteret ...’ Ibid., p. 250: ‘Item promitto ... nunquam fugere nec me scienter et contumaciter absentare ...’. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 445: ‘Dixit etiam interrogatus quod propter punitionem patris et matris suorum et quoa bonum eorum fuerant confiscata, recessit ipse testis de partibus suis in etate X vel XII annorum et venit usque Cathaloniam ...’ Ibid., vol. 3, p. 82: ‘Predicitis ... errores credidit, ut dixit, instructus per dictam suam aviam per unum annum et dimidium, et resilivit a credentia dictorum errorum, ut dixit, quia videbat quod male aliis qui fuerant hereticorum credentes contingebat, quamvis, ut dixit, iam omnes homines de Monte Alionis capti fuissent de mandato domini inquisitoris Carcassone, et positi in castro de Monte Alionis ...’ Ibid., vol. 2, p. 221: ‘Dixit quod XXI anni sunt quod ipsa accepit in virum Arnaldum Vitalis de Monte Alione quondam et stetit cum eo quasi per X annos antequam immuraretur ...’ Ibid., vol. 1, p. 192: ‘... [M]ater eius et soror mortue fuerunt in muro Carcassone ...’ Ibid., vol. 2, p. 355: ‘... Ramundus portavit ei unam camisiam et duos fogassetos et unum frustrum carnium salsarum, que dedit sibi Guillelmus carcerarius ex parte dicti filii sui. Et ipsa dixit dicto carcerario quod diceret dicto filio quod portaret unam cotam de lino ...’ The text is edited in J.-M. Vidal, Un inquisiteur jugé par ses victimes. Jean Galand et les Carcassonnais (1285–1286) (Paris: Picard, 1903). Ibid., p. 40: ‘... et verius posset infernus merito nuncupari; in eo enim multos construxistis domunculas ad torquendum et cruciandum homines diversis generibus tormentorum’. Ibid.: ‘Ceteri quod falsum est verum asserunt’.
154
Notes
49. Ibid., p. 41: ‘Miseri, quare non dicitis ut vos liberetis?’ 50. Douis, Documents, pp. 304–49 for the 1306 commission; Archivio Segreto Vaticano [hereafter ASV], Collectorie 404 for the complaints of the townspeople against Bernard de Castanet. 51. Ibid., pp. 322–27. 52. Ibid., pp. 331–33. 53. See for instance ASV, Collectorie 404, fol. 8r where it is said that ‘multos innocentes et sine culpa fecit in tormentis ... confiteri’. 54. Ibid., relating to a woman called Marquesia, who ‘per plures annos in carcere ... detinuit’ and with whom the bishop ‘pluries adulterium perpetravit’. 55. Ibid., fol. 8v: relating to ‘quaedam puella qui ... rapta fuit ... in domo episcopi. Que post aliquos dies inventa fuit capite truncata in flumine tarni ...’ See also the case of a ‘divina’ who the bishop was said to have kept in his prison, and who was never seen again (see fol. 23r). 56. For instance, Ibid., fol. 10r, fol. 69r, fols 82r–v. One witness claimed that Pelapol was accused of assaulting one of the prison guards. See fol. 80v. 57. Ibid., fol. 52r. 58. Ibid., fol. 69r–v: ... Guillelmus Durandus et Bertrand de Avellano, familiares ... dicti episcopi, ceperunt dictam Bertrandum Pelapol, dicentes sibi ‘Vos reibitis ad carcerem ...’ 59. Ibid., fol. 52v: ‘magna malicia’. Another case is that of Pierre Vasconis, who was led away to the bishop’s prison shouting ‘Ego appello de ista sententia quae fuit lata contra me ...’ (fol. 79r). 60. Another witness said that Talafer had been hit in the shoulder with the back of a sword by the bishop’s servant (see fol. 71v). 61. Ibid., fol. 120v ‘in carcere totum putridum’. 62. For Fresqueti see Alan Friedlander, Hammer of the Inquisitors: Brother Bernard Délicieux and the Struggle Against the Inquisition in Fourteenth- Century France (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. 108–10. 63. Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society. 64. Claudia Heimann, Nicolaus Eymerich (vor 1320–1399) ‘praedicator veridicus, inquisitor intrepidus, doctor egregius’. Lebene und Werk eines Inquisitors (Münster, Aschendorff Verlag, 2001). There is a manuscript of Eymerich’s three works in Palma de Mallorca, Bibliotheca Bartholomeu March, Codex 104-11-7 with corrections by Eymerich himself. 65. Eymerich, Directorium inquisitorum, ed. and trans. Louis Sala-Molins as Le Manuel des inquisiteurs (Paris: Albin Michel, 2001), pp. 150–51. 66. Ibid., p. 255. 67. Ibid., pp. 171–73. 68. Douais, Bernard Gui, Practica inquisitionis, p. 284. 69. Ibid., pp. 235–355. 70. Duvernoy, Le Registre d’inquisition de Jacques Fournier, vol. 1, p. 298. 71. ASV, Collect. 404, fol. 10 re. Pelapol: ‘Interrogatus de tempore quo predicta fuerunt. Dixit quod septem ut viii anni preteriti ut circa’ and fol. 10r re. Talafer: ‘Dixit quod xv anni sunt elapsi ut circa.’ 72. Ibid., fol. 87r, for instance. 73. Duvernoy, Le Registre d’inquisition de Jacques Fournier, vol. 1, pp. 191–213 for the witnesses against Guillaume Austatz and pp. 191–94 for Gaillarde’s testimony: ‘et alique alie persone erant ibi de quorum nominibus dixit se non recordari’;
Notes 155
74. 75. 76. 77. 78.
79.
80.
81. 82.
83. 84. 85.
86.
87.
88.
‘... respondit quod XII anni sunt elapsi quod ipsa stat in vill de Ornolaco, et non vidit dictum Guillelmum communicantem etiam in egritudinibus, nec in festivitatibus in quibus homines communicare solent ...’; ‘quadam die de qua dixit se non recordari’. Ibid., pp. 200–13. Doat 26, fols 245–254v. Duvernoy, Le Registre d’inquisition de Jacques Fournier, vol. 1, pp. 200–213. Arnold, Inquisition and Power. Duvernoy, Le Registre d’inquisition de Jacques Fournier, vol. 1, p. 127: ‘Et ibidem fuit monita, rogata, et preceptum fuit eidem per dictos dominum episcopum et inquisitorem semel, secundo, tertio et caritative, ut dictos errores et hereses quos confessa est tenuisse et tenere pluries ... et quod abiuraret heresim Valdesiam ... et quod revelaret omnes socios et complices suos et credentes, et reverteretur ad fidem et unitatem Ecclesie romane; que respondit quod nullo modo iuraret, et dicti domini episcopus et inquisitor protestati fuerunt eidem quod nisi ipsa iurare voluerit et dictos errores relinquere voluerit, contra ipsam tanquam contra hereticam procedetur secundum canonicas sanxiones et quantum de iure fuerit procedendum ...’ For a more detailed exploration of this in light of the accusations brought against Bernard de Castanet, see Megan Cassidy-Welch, ‘Testimonies from a Fourteenth- Century Prison: Rumour, Evidence and Truth in the Midi’, French History 16:1 (2002), 3–27; and on the same ms, Julien Théry, ‘Les Albigeois et la procédure inquisitoire: le procès pontifical contre Bernard de Castanet, évêque d’Albi et inquisiteur (1307–1308)’, Heresis 33 (2000), 7–48. Augustine, De Trinitate Libri XV, esp. pp. 14–15. See also Patrick Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance; Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), esp. pp. 16–19. Wakefield and Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages, p. 430. Friedlander, Hammer of the Inquisitors; Alan Friedlander, ed., Processus Bernardi Delitiosi: The Trial of Fr. Bernard Délicieux, 3 September–8 December 1319, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 86, part 1 (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 1996). Friedlander, Processus, 221. ASV, Collect. 404, fol. 12, fol. 20v. Duvernoy, Le Registre d’inquisition de Jacques Fournier, vol. 1, p. 295: ‘Ipsa erat in muro Carcassone et comedabant simul et morabantur excepto quod in nocte in una camera, ipsa, Bernardus Gomberti et Bernardus Arqueiatoris ... qui erant immurati ...’ Ibid., vol. 2, p. 279: ‘ipse testis erat ad solem supra turrim de Alamannis et venit ipsum dictus Bernardus Clerici, ducens secum Aladaycim uxorem Arnaldi Fabri de Monte Alione immuratam, et tunc cum sic starent ad solem, dictus Bernardus ostendebat montaneas Savartesii et Alionis, dicens quod in partibus istis erat terra eorum ...’ Ibid., p. 281: ‘Modo sunt capti et ponentur in malo loco, et non egredientur de illo loco, quotcumque et quantoscumque amicos habeant, quia hoc ego bene scio, quia ita est amicus meus magister Iacobus custos muri, quod male servietur dictis captis in muro Carcassone, et si ipse illuc ire posset adhuc eis peius serviretur.’ Ibid., p. 289: ‘Item dixit quod dictus Bernardus IIIor vellera lane Garnoto servienti muri et ex tunc fecit in muro quicquid voluit, et accipiebat claves camerarum
156
89.
90. 91. 92.
Notes in quibus morabantur immurati quas ei tradebat Honors [uxor] dicit Garnoti quoando dictus Garnotus erat absens, et poterat loqui cum immuratis cum quibus volebat loqui.’ Ibid.: ‘... quando Garnotus serviens muri dixit dicto Bernardo quod ... frater eius mortuus erat, dictus Bernardus vociferando plorabat ... et omnes qui erant in dicto muro audire potuerunt’. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 142. Doat 32, fols 125–26r. Edward Peters, Inquisition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989); Richard Kieckhefer, ‘The Office of the Inquisition and Medieval Heresy: The Transition from Personal to Institutional Jurisdiction’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 46 (1995), 36–51; Christine Caldwell Ames, ‘Does Inquisition Belong to Religious History?’, The American Historical Review 110: 1 (2005), 11–37.
4 Didactic Uses of Imprisonment and Captivity 1. T.F. Crane, The Exempla or Illustrative Stories from the sermones vulgares of Jacques de Vitry (London: Publications of the Folk-Lore Society, 26), 1890, p. 298. 2. Crane, The Exempla of Jacques de Vitry, p. 290. 3. For the Knights Templar, see Malcolm Barber, The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Alan Forey, The Military Orders: From the Twelfth to the Early Fourteenth Centuries (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1992); Helen Nicholson, ed., The Military Orders: Welfare and Warfare (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998); on the event and impact of Hattin, see inter alia Benjamin Z. Kedar, ed., The Horns of Hattin: Proceedings of the Second Conference of the Society for the Study of the Crusades, Jerusalem and Haifa, 2–6 July 1987 (Jerusalem and Aldershot: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi and Variorum, 1992). 4. On Jacques de Vitry, see Jessalyn Bird, ‘The Religious’ Role in a Post-Fourth Lateran-World: Jacques de Vitry’s Sermones ad Status and Historia Occidentalis’, in Carolyn Muessig, ed., Medieval Monastic Preaching (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 209–30; Bird, ‘Heresy, Crusade and Reform in the Circle of Peter the Chanter, c. 1187–1240’ (D. Phil. Thesis, University of Oxford, 2001), Bird, ‘Crusade and Conversion after the Fourth Lateran Council (1215): Oliver of Paderborn and James of Vitry’s Missions to Muslims Reconsidered’, Essays in Medieval Studies 21 (2004), 23–48; Monica Sandor, The Popular Preaching of Jacques de Vitry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). For editions of some of the sermons, see J.-B. Pitra, Analecta novissima Spicilegii Solesmensis. Altera continuatio, vol. 2 (Paris: Roger and Chernowitz, 1888), 344–461; Crane, The Exempla of Jacques de Vitry. 5. See above. Individual sermons may also be found in: Jean Longère, ‘Quatre sermons ad religiosas de Jacques de Vitry’, in Michel Parisse, ed., Les Religieuses en France au XIIIe siècle, Actes de la table ronde de Nancy, 25 et 26 juin 1983 (Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy, 1985), pp. 215–30; Longère, ‘Un sermon inédit de Jacques de Vitry: “Si annis multis vixerit
Notes 157
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11. 12.
13.
homo” ’, in Jean Lemaitre, ed., L’Eglise et la mémoire des morts dans la France médiévale (Paris: Institut d’études augustiniennes, 1986), pp. 31–51; Longère, ‘Quatre sermons ad canonicos de Jacques de Vitry’, Recherches augustiniennes 23 (1988), 151–212; Longère, ‘Deux sermons de Jacques de Vitry ad servos et ancillas’, in Michel Rouche and Jean Heuclin, eds, La femme au Moyen Âge, Actes du colloque de Maubeuge, 1988 (Maubeuge-Lille: Ville de Maubeuge, 1990), pp. 261–97; Longère, ‘Un sermon de Jacques de Vitry ad praelatos et sacerdotes’, in Caroline Bourlet et al., eds, L’Ecrit dans la société médiévale, textes en hommage à Lucie Fossier (Paris, CNRS, 1991), pp. 47–60; Longère, ‘Jacques de Vitry: Deux sermons de mortuis du recueil inédit de sanctis’, in Moines et moniales face à la mort: Actes du colloque de Lille, 2, 3 et 4 octobre 1992 (Villetaneuse: Centre d’archéologie et d’histoire médiévale des établissements religieux, 1993), pp. 183–222; Longère, ‘Deux sermons de Jacques de Vitry ad peregrinos’, in P-A. Sigal, ed., L’Image du pèlerin au Moyen Âge et sous l’Ancien Régime (Rocamadour: Association des Amis de Rocamadour, 1994), pp. 93–103; M.- C. Gasnault, ‘Jacques de Vitry: sermons aux gens mariés’, in Jean- Claude Schmitt, ed., Prêcher d’exemples: récits de prédicateurs du Moyen Âge (Paris: Stock, 1985), pp. 41–67; Carolyn Muessig, The Faces of Women in the Sermons of Jacques de Vitry (Toronto: Peregrina Publishing, 1999). Frederic C. Tubach, Index exemplorum: A Handbook of Medieval Religious Tales (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1969); Claude Bremond, Jacques Le Goff et Jean- Claude Schmitt, L’Exemplum (Turnhout: Brepols, 1982); JeanThiébaut Welter, L’exemplum dans la littérature religieuse et didactique du Moyen âge (Paris and Toulouse: Guitard, 1927). Jacques Berlioz and Jean-Luc Eichenlaub, eds, Stephani de Borbone Tractatus de diversis materiis predicabilibus. Prologus. Prima pars de dono timoris (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), p. 244. Andrew G. Little, ed., Liber exemplorum ad usum praedicantium saeculo XIII compositus a quodam fratre minore Anglico de provinciae Hiberniae (Aberdeen: Typis academicis, 1908), p. 176; G. Baldassarri, Esempi, in G. Varanini and G. Baldassari, Racconti esemplari di predicatori del Due e Trecento, t. II, (Rome: Salerno editrice, 1993), p. 1–491, at p. 164. The tale also appears in M.M.L. Banks, ed., An Alphabet of Tales. An English 15th- Century Translation of the Alphabetum Narrationum of Etienne de Besançon, EETS, vol. 126–27 (London: Early English Text Society, 1904–1905), p. 166; Crane, The Exempla of Jacques de Vitry, p. 238; J.A. Herbert, ed., Catalogue of Romances in the Department of Manuscripts in the British Museum, vol. 3 (London: British Museum, 1910), p. 220; Giordano da Pisa, Esempi in Varanini and Baldassari, eds, Racconti esemplari, p. 149. Henry John Walker, trans., Valerius Maximus, Memorable Deeds and Sayings: One Thousand Tales from Ancient Rome (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2004), p. 180. G.E. Brereton and J.M. Ferrier, eds., trans. K. Ueltschi, Le Mesnagier de Paris (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1994), pp. 248–50. Herbert, Catalogue of Romances, p. 673. Cf. Gregory the Great, Dialogues IV, 57 in PL 77, col. 424, in which a prisoner is released from his bonds by the singing of the Mass. Banks, ed., An Alphabet of Tales, p. 205; this exemplum is repeated with various modifications in the Liber exemplorum, pp. 19 and 21.
158 Notes 14. Ibid., p. 299. 15. Joseph Strange, ed., Caesarii Heisterbacensis Monachi Ordinis Cisterciensis Dialogus Miraculorum, 2 vols (Köln: Sumptibus J.M. Heberle, 1851/1857), vol. 2, p. 222 for the liberation of the knight; vol. 2, p. 37 for the Marian miracle. 16. Crane, The Exempla of Jacques de Vitry, pp. 117–119. 17. Berlioz and Eichenlaub, Stephani de Borbone, p. 157. 18. Catalogue of Romances, p. 182. 19. Charles Swan, trans. and ed., Gesta Romanorum (London: George Bell, 1905), pp. 212–13. 20. Sidney H. Heritage, ed., The Early English Versions of the Gesta Romanorum (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 12–15. 21. Both from Herbert, Catalogue of Romances, pp. 592 and 651. 22. Jacobus de Voragine, Sermones aurei, p. 164b. 23. Summa Theologica diligenter emendata de Rubeis, Billuart et aliorum, 9th edn (Turin: Marietti, 1901), vol. 4, pars III, quaestio liii, De descensus Christi ad inferos in octo articulos divisa, pp. 732–41. 24. For the above see Ralph V. Turner, ‘Descendit ad inferos: Medieval Views on Christ’s descent into Hell and the Salvation of the Ancient Just’, Journal of the History of Ideas 27:2 (1966), pp. 173–94, 187–91. 25. On the difficulty of separating ‘historical’ writing and ‘fiction’, see Monika Otter, Inventiones: Fiction and Referentiality in Twelfth- Century English Historical Writing (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Gabrielle Spiegel, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Fritz Peter Knapp and Manuela Niesner, eds, Historisches und fiktionales Erzählen im Mittelalter (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 2002); Nancy Partner, ed., Writing Medieval History (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005). 26. For the beguines, see Ernest W. MacDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture, with Special Emphasis on the Belgian Scene, 2nd edn (New York: Octagon, 1969); Herbert Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter, 2nd edn (Hildesheim: Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1961); Brenda Bolton, ‘Mulieres Sanctae’ in Susan Mosher Stuard, edn, Women in Medieval Society (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), pp. 141–58; Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200–1565 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Tanya Stabler Miller, ‘What’s in a name? Clerical Representations of Parisian Beguines (1200–1328), Journal of Medieval History 33:1 (2007), 60–86, and Caroline Muessig ‘Paradigms of sanctity for thirteenth- century women’ in Beverley Kienzle et al., Models of Holiness in Medieval Sermons (Louvain-laNeuve: Fédération internationale des instituts d’études médiévales, 1996), pp. 85–102. 27. On Thomas of Cantimpré, see Simone Roisin, ‘La méthode hagiographique de Thomas de Cantimpré’ in Miscellanea Historica in honorem Alberti de Meyer, vol. 1 (Louvain: Bibliothèque de l’Université, 1946), 546–47. The vita appears as De S. Christina Mirabili Virgine, AASS Jul. 24, 5, pp. 650–60. 28. See Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), pp. 141–42; 236–37; Robert Sweetman, ‘Christine of St Trond’s Preaching
Notes 159
29.
30. 31.
32. 33.
34.
35. 36.
37.
Apostolate: Thomas of Cantimpré’s Hagiographical Method Revisited’, Vox Benedictina 9 (1992), 67–97; Barbara Newman, ‘Possessed by the Spirit: Devout Women, Demoniacs and the Apostolic Life in the Thirteenth Century’, Speculum 73: 3 (1998), 733–70, esp. pp. 763–68. Dyan Elliott, Proving Women: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), ch. 2 and passim. See also André Vauchez, ‘Prosélytisme et action antihérétique en milieu féminin au XIIIe siècle: la Vie de Marie d’Oignies (d. 1213) par Jacques de Vitry, in Jacques Marx, ed., Propagande et contre-propagande religieuses (Brussels: Editions de l’Universite de Bruxelles, 1987), pp. 95–110. Elliott, Proving Women, p. 62. Note that Thomas was not Lutgard’s confessor, but as Dyan Elliot points out, she ‘fulfilled a symbolic function for Thomas similar to the one that Mary of Oignies fulfilled for James [sic] of Vitry’. Ibid., p. 56. Christina Mirabilis oozes oil; Lutgard of Aywières is drenched in blood; Christina Mirabilis became a formless mass while in an ecstatic state. Anne E. Passenier, ‘The Life of Christina Mirabilis: Miracles and the Construction of Marginality’ in Anne-Marie Korte, ed., Women and Miracle Stories: A Multidisciplinary Exploration (Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 145–78 at 177. See also François-Xavier Shouppe, Purgatory Illustrated by the Lives and Legends of the Saints (1893; reprint, Rockford, IL: Tan Books, 1973). De S. Christina Mirabili, p. 650: ‘Vidi, inquit aliam (Christinam intellige) circam quam [tam] mirabiliter operatus est Dominus, quod cum diu mortua jacuisset, antequam in terra corpus ejus sepeliretur, [anima ad corpus revertente] revixit; et a Domino obtinuit, ut in [hoc] seculo vivens in corpore, purgatorium sustineret. Unde longo tempore ita mirabiliter a Domino afflicta est; ut quandoque in hyeme, in aqua glaciali diu morraretur; quandoque etiam sepulchra mortuorum intrare cogebatur. Tandem in tanta pace peracta poenitentia, et tantam a Domino gratiam promeruit, ut multotiens rapta in spiritu animas defunctorum usque in purgatorium vel [per] purgatorium sine aliqua sui laesione usque ad superna regna conduceret’. Unless otherwise specified, I am using the translation given by Margot H. King, trans., The Life of Christina Mirabilis by Thomas de Cantimpré (Toronto, 1986), p. 10 for the above. De S. Christina Mirabili: ‘Mansit tamen cunctis incognita, solique Deo tanto notior, quanto secretior’ (King, trans., The Life of Christina Mirabilis, p. 12). Ibid.: ‘Statim, inquit, ut defuncta sum, susceperunt meam animam ministri lucis, angeli Dei, et deduxerunt me in locum quemdam tenebrosum et horridum, animabus hominum plenum. Tormenta, quae in ipso loco videbam, tanta et tam crudelia erant, ut nulla lingua haec loqui sufficeret. Et vidi inibi multos defunctos, quos dudum, in carne cognoveram. Ego autem illas miseras animas non modice miserata requirebam, cujusmodi esset hic locus. Cogitabam autem hunc esse infernum. Et responderunt mihi ductores mei: Quia hic locus purgatorius est, in quo poenitentes peccatores in vita poenas luunt’ (King, trans., The Life of Christina Mirabilis, pp. 12–13). Ibid.: ‘Revera, inquit, dulcissima mea, hic mecum eris; sed nunc tibi duorum optionem propono: aut nunc scilicet permanere mecum; aut ad corpus reverti, ibique agere poenas immortalis animae per mortale corpus sine detrimento sui, omnesque illas animas, quas in illo purgatorii loco miserata es, ipsis tuis poenis eripere; homines vero viventes exemplo poenae et vitae tuae converti ad me, et a scleribus resilire ...’ (King, trans., The Life of Christina Mirabilis, p. 14).
160 Notes 38. King, trans., The Life of Christina Mirabilis, p. 15. 39. Walter Simons suggests that the bodies of these female mystics are portrayed differently when they are in a state of rapture; indeed, it is the state of ecstasy which sees their physical appearance and conduct alter to become remarkable: Walter Simons, ‘Reading a saint’s body: rapture and bodily movement in the vitae of thirteenth- century beguines’ in Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin, eds, Framing Medieval Bodies (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 10–23. 40. De S. Christina Mirabili: ‘Conscius autem medicus fortitudinis illius, eam in cellario ex omni parte munito, vinculis fortiter constrictam et ad columnam ligatam, januis obseratis inclusit. Cumque fascibus medicinalibus tibiam illius stringeret et foveret, medico recedente, apposita detrahebat, indignum ducens alium suis plagis medicum adhiberi praeter Salvatorem nostrum Jesus Christum. Nec illam fefellit Omnipotens. Nam nocte quadam, cum divinitatis in eam spiritus irruisset, solutis vinculis, quibus ligata erat, sanata ab omni incommodo, per aream cellarii deambulabat ac tripudians, laudans et benedicens illum cui soli mori et vivere delegisset. Claustris ergo celarii spiritus ejus arctari se sentiens, arrepta saxo de area cellariii, in spiritu vehementi murum pervium fecit; et ut utamur exemplo, velut sagitta, quae quanto fortius in arcu stringitur, tanto robustius jaculatur, sic spiritus ejus ultra quam justum erat arctatus (quia: Ubi spiritus Domini, ibi libertas) cum ipso carneae molis corpore per aeris vacuum instar volucris volasse perhibetur’ (King, trans., The Life of Christina Mirabilis, pp. 19–20). 41. King, trans., The Life of Christina Mirabilis, p. 42, note 3. King relates these three stages to William of St Thierry’s Expositio super Cantica Canticorum. See Jean M. Déchanet, ed. and Pierre Dumontier, trans., Exposé sur le Cantique des cantiques (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1962); David N. Bell, The Image and Likeness: the Augustinian Spirituality of William of Saint-Thierry (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984). 42. Jacques Le Goff, La Naissance du purgatoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1981); qualifications are found in R.W. Southern, ‘Between heaven and hell: review of J. Le Goff La Naissance du purgatoire’, Times Literary Supplement 18 June 1982, pp. 651–52; Philippe Ariès, ‘Le purgatoire et la cosmologie de l’au- déla. Note critique’, Annales 38 (1983), 151–57; Graham Robert Edwards, ‘Purgatory: “Birth” or evolution?’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36 (1985), 634–46; Barbara Newman, ‘On the threshold of the dead: purgatory, hell and religious women’ in her From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), pp. 108–36. 43. De S. Christina Mirabili: ‘Referebat autem locum esse vicinum inferis in purgationem eorum constitutum a Deo, qui immanibus sceleribus foedati erant, contriti tamen fuerant in extremis. Hunc locum in tantum cruciatibus horridum referebat, quod nulla ei ad supplicia inferorum esset distantia, excepto quod ii, qui in his suppliciis vexbantur, spe veniae suspirabant’ (King, trans., The Life of Christina Mirabilis, p. 13). 44. For the theology, see Le Goff, Naissance du purgatoire, passim; Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 280ff. 45. Andrew Skotnicki, ‘God’s Prisoners: Penal Confinement and the Creation of Purgatory,’ Modern Theology 22:1 (2006), 85–110; Edward Peters, Torture
Notes 161
46. 47. 48.
49.
50. 51. 52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
(Oxford and New York: B. Blackwell, 1985); Esther Cohen, ‘The Animated Pain of the Body’, The American Historical Review 105:1 (2000), 36–68. Skotnicki, ‘God’s Prisoners’, p. 96. Margot H. King, trans. and ed., The Life of Lutgard d’Aywières by Thomas de Cantimpré (Toronto: Peregrina Publishing, 1987), p. 98. Gerard de Frachet, Vitae fratrum ordinis praedicatorum, ed. Benedictus Maria Reichert, Monumenta ordinis fratrum praedicatorum historica 1 (Louvain: Typis E. Charpentier & J. Schoonjans, 1896). Louis Mourin, ed., Six sermons francais inédits de Jean Gerson: étude doctrinale et littéraire suivie de l’édition critique et de remarques linguistiques (Paris: Vrin, 1946), p. 196. Geltner, ‘Medieval Prisons: Between Myth and Reality’, p. 266 and more recently, Geltner, The Medieval Prison, p. 90. Elliott, Proving Women, p. 58. For the policies of these two popes on crusading, see, inter alia, James M. Powell, Anatomy of a Crusade 1213–1221 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986); Powell, ‘Honorius III and the Leadership of the Crusade’, Catholic Historical Review 63: 4 (1977), 521–36; Powell, ed., Innocent III: Vicar of Christ or Lord of the World? (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1994); Rebecca Rist, ‘Papal Policy and the Albigensian Crusades: Continuity or Change?’, Crusades 2 (2003), 99–108; Brenda Bolton, Innocent III: Studies on Papal Authority and Pastoral Care (Aldershot and Vermont: Ashgate, 1995); on papal policy more generally, see Maureen Purcell, Papal Crusading Policy 1244–1291 (Leiden: Brill, 1975). For an outline, see Yvonne Friedman, Encounters between Enemies: Captivity and Ransom in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Leiden: Brill, 2002); also Penny Cole, ‘Christians, Muslims and the “Liberation” of the Holy Land’, The Catholic Historical Review 84:1 (1998), 1–10. There is a longer historiography on whether the liberation of Jerusalem was the primary goal of the first crusade. See, inter alia, H.E. Cowdrey, ‘Pope Urban II’s Preaching of the First Crusade’, History 55 (1970), 177–88, reprinted in Thomas Madden, ed., The Crusades: The Essential Readings (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), pp. 15–30. Both to be found (in abridged form) in Louise and Jonathan Riley Smith, eds, The Crusades: Idea and Reality, 1095–1274 (London: E. Arnold, 1981), pp. 44 and 49. Cited in Jonathan Riley Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (London: Athlone, 1986), pp. 23–4. See also Riley Smith, ‘The idea of crusading in the charters of early crusaders, 1095–1102’ in La Concile de Clermont de 1095 et l’appel a la croisade. Actes du colloque universitaire international de Clermont-Ferrand (23–25 juin 1995) organisé et publié avec le concours du Conseil Régional d’Auvergne (Collection de l’Ecole Française de Rome 236, Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 1997), pp. 155–66. Othmar Hageneder et al., eds, Die Register Innocenz III, 2 vols (Graz and Köln, H. Böhlaus, 1964), Reg. 1, no. 336, pp. 499–505. See Penny Cole, The Preaching of the Crusades to the Holy Land, 1095–1270 (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1991); John Gilchrist, ‘The Lord’s War as the Proving Ground of Faith: Pope Innocent III and the Propagation of Violence (1198–1216)’, in Maya Shatzmiller, ed., Crusaders and Muslims in TwelfthCentury Syria (Leiden: Brill, 1993), pp. 65–83.
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57. Innocent III, Opera Omnia, PL 215, cols. 1500–1503. 58. G. Tangl, Studien zum Register Innocenz III (Weimar: H. Böhlaus, 1929), p. 90. A translation may be found in Riley Smith’s The Crusades: Idea and Reality, p. 120. 59. J.D. Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio, vol. 12, col. 1063. 60. The Latin text may be found in Gunther of Pairis, Historia captae a Latinis Constantinopoleos, PL 212: 223–56. For a translation, see Alfred J. Andrea, ed., The Capture of Constantinople: The ‘Hystoria Constantinopolitana’ of Gunther of Pairis (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). See also Jonathan Phillips, The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople (London and New York: Viking, 2004), esp. pp. 26–38 and Francis R. Swietek, ‘Gunther of Pairis and the Historia Constantinopolitana’, Speculum 3 (1978), 49–79. 61. The sermons are printed in Christoph Maier, Crusade Propaganda and Ideology: Model Sermons for the Preaching of the Cross (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 82–127. See also M.G. Briscoe, Artes Praedicandi and B. Haye, Artes Orandi, Typologies des sources du moyen âge occidental, fasc. 61, (Turnhout: Brepols, 1992). 62. Maier, Crusade Propaganda and Ideology, pp. 92–3: ‘Hodie autem domina gentium, princeps provinciarum facta est sub tributo [Lam. i., 1] et usque ad nobilius membrum, ad interiora viscerum, ad pupillam oculi extenderunt manus sacrilegas inimici crucis Christi impugnantes et expugnantes civitatem redemptionis nostre, que mater est fidei ...’ 63. Maier, Crusade Propaganda and Ideology, pp. 96–7: ‘Ut verbis Baruch [iv. 9–13] loquitur in persona Ierusalem: Audites, civitates Syon, adduxit michi Deus luctum magnum, vidi enim captivitatem populi mei, filiorum meorum et filiarum mearum; nutrivi illos cum oicunditate, dimisi autem illos cum fletu et luctu.’ 64. Maier, Crusade Propaganda and Ideology, pp. 110–11: ‘Sicut autem aquila provocans ad volandum pullos suos volitat ipse super illos dum homines rapere volunt illos, sic Dominus super peccatores brachia sua extendit provocans eos, ut nidum peccatorum relinquant et altitudinem crucis, ad quam diabolus non potest attingere, ascendant.’ 65. Ibid., pp. 121–22: ‘Nam et ego cum aliquando in quadam villa predicarem, quidam uxore sua dissuadente ad sermonem cum aliis noluit venire. Cepit tamen quasi ex curiositate de solario per fenestram inspicere et quid ego dicerem latenter auscultare. Cumque audisset quod per crucis compendium absque alia penitentia tantam indulgentiam obtinerent quantam plerumque non obtinent qui per annos sexaginta ieiunant et portant cilicium et nichil enim amplius potest remitti quam totum dominus enim papa nichil excipit sed universaliter omnia dimittit tanquam Dei minister qui non vult esse avarus ubi Dominus est largus, audiens insuper quod pro labore modici temporis penitentia huius seculi et pena purgatorii remittitur et pena gehenne evitatur regnumque celorum acquiritur, ipse valde compunctus et a Deo inspiratus, timens uxorem, que ostium clauserat et ne exgrederetur, observabat per fenestram, in turbam exilivit et ipse primus ad crucem venit. Et quia bonum aliis prebuit exemplum et multi secuti sunt eum, ipse particeps extitit meriti universorum. Qui enim malo exemplo multos corrumpit bono exemplo debet restituere Deo quod illi abstulit; iustum quidem est ut qui cum multorum destructione se prodidit cum multorum edificatione se redimat.’
Notes 163 66. Ibid., p. 60. 67. Cole, Preaching the Crusades, p. 139. 68. Maier, Crusade Propaganda and Ideology, pp. 116–17: ‘Hoc autem diligenter debetis attendere quod, cum Deus terram suam uno verbo per se posset liberare, ipse tamen servos suos honorare vult et socios habere in eius liberatione, dans vobis occasionem salvandi animas vestras, quas redemit et pro quibus sanguinem suum fudit [cf. Lc. xxii, 20], unde non eas libenter perdit.’ 69. The sermon is transcribed in Cole, Preaching the Crusades, pp. 222–26. For John of Abbeville, see inter alia Peter Linehan, The Spanish Church and the Papacy in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). 70. Cole, Preaching the Crusades, p. 224: ‘... sic hodie Dominus captiri permisit terrenam Ierusalem ut nobis insinuaret captivitatem Ierusalem spiritualis, scilicet, ecclesie ...’ 71. Deuteronomy 23:1–3. 72. Judges 19–21. 73. Cole, Preaching the Crusades, p. 218. 74. De S. Christina Mirabili: ‘Recte, inquit, exulto, quia Christus Dominus hodie cum angelis laetabundus exultans occasionem dedit, qua humani generis multitudo salvetur. Cumque praesentes, inquirerent, quae esset occasio: Terram, inquit, sanctam hodie impiorum manibus traditam cognoscatis, magnamque occasionem per hoc datam salutis: dignam enim Christus suam contumeliam ducit, ut terra tradatur in dedecus, licet consecrata suae praesentia passionis, peritura tamen cum mundo in fine mundi, cum per recuperationem ejus animae perpetua permansurae; et suo sanguine redemptae, a via impietatis ad viam justitiae convertentur; fundentque homines sanguinem in negotio Terrae sanctae, vicemque mortis Christo in magna devotione rependent’ (King, trans., The Life of Christina Mirabilis, pp. 27–8). 75. Cole, Preaching the Crusades, p. 210; the image of the devil’s net derives from the Old Testament (Habach. 1:15–17; Ecclesiastes 7:27). See D.A. Kaiser, ‘Sin and the Vices in the Sermones de Dominicis of Berthold of Regensberg’, PhD dissertation, Columbia University, New York, 1983, p. 89. 76. Maier, Crusade Propaganda and Ideology, pp. 140–41: ‘Set dicet quis: Sarraceni nichil michi nocuerunt. Ad quid ergo crucem accipiam contra eos? Sed si bene recogitaret, intelligeret quod Sarraceni magnam iniuriam faciunt cuilibet Christiano.’ 77. Ibid., pp. 158–59: ‘Sed vos alii, quid deberetis facere? Deberetis facere sicut faciunt iuniores cervi: quando vident maiores cervos iter arripere, vadunt post eos et eos [f. 23vb] sequntur. Sic deberetis et vos facere, et si non vultis eos sequi corpore, saltem corde et oratione et subsidio debetis eos sequi, et si non modo saltem in alio passagio. Vale vobis dicimus: Rogate Dominum, ut vos conducat et, si ei placuerit, reducat sanos et incolumes, et nos et vos perducat ad gaudia sempiterna.’ 78. Ibid., pp. 156–57: ‘Et hoc facit amor Dei: omnia enim vincula rumpunt amor Dei et timor gehenne. Iudicum xvi [9] legitur: Qui rupit vincula quomodo si rumpat quis filum de stupa tortum cum sputamine, [f. 23va] cum odorem ignis acceperit. Ita ignis Spiritus Sancti omnia vincula rumpit in istis, unde in fine Canticorum [viii, 6]: Fortis est ut mors dilectio, que omnes iuncturas dissolvit et maxime iuncturam corporis et anime. Dura ut infernus emulatio quia, sicut illi qui in inferno sunt non curant de caris suis, sic hii emulatione Dei accensi de caris suis curare non videntur, uxores et filios propter Dominum dimittentes.’
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5 Imprisonment and Freedom in the Life of Louis IX 1. A Templar, c. 1250, in Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, vol. 6, Additamenta, pp. 191–97, in Peter Jackson, ed., The Seventh Crusade, 1244–1254: Sources and Documents (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 102. 2. Janet Shirley, trans., Crusader Syria in the Thirteenth Century: the Rothelin Continuation of the History of William of Tyre with part of the Eeracles or Acre Text (Burlington and Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), p. 103. 3. For narrative accounts of Louis’ crusade (conventionally known as the Seventh Crusade), see Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis (Paris: Gallimard, 1996); Jean Richard, Saint Louis: Roi d’une France féodale, soutien de la Terre Sainte (Paris: Fayard, 1983); Richard, The Crusades, c. 1071–1291, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Joseph Strayer, ‘The Crusades of Louis IX’ in Medieval Statecraft and the Perspectives of History: Essays by Joseph R. Strayer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 159–92. For an argument about the centrality of Louis’ crusades to his kingship, see William Chester Jordan, Louis IX and the Challenge of Crusade: A Study in Rulership (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). For a recent account of Louis’ canonisation, see M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, The Making of Saint Louis: Kingship, Sanctity, and Crusade in the later Middle Ages (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2008). 4. Joseph Natalis de Wailly, ed., Jean de Joinville, Histoire de Saint Louis (Paris: Hachette, 1872). On Joinville, see Caroline Smith, Crusading in the Age of Joinville (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Jean de Joinville: de la Champagne aux royaumes d’Outre-Mer, ed. Danielle Quéruel (Langres: D. Gueniot, 1998); the collection of essays in Jean Dufournet and Laurence Harf, eds, Le Prince et son historien: La vie de saint Louis de Joinville (Paris: Honoré Champion Editeur, 1997); for a recent focused study of Joinville’s Vie see Darla Rudy- Gervais, ‘Wordly Saintliness: A Study of Jean de Joinville’s “Vie de Saint Louis” ’, unpublished PhD Dissertation, Princeton University, 2005. 5. See Louis Carolus-Barré, Le Procès de canonisation de Saint Louis (1272–97): Essai de reconstitution (Rome, 1994); Gaposchkin, The Making of Saint Louis. For Geoffrey of Beaulieu, William of Chartres and William of St Pathus, see below. 6. For Eudes of Châteauroux, see Penny Cole, The Preaching of the Crusades to the Holy Land, 1095–1270 (Cambridge, MA: The Medieval Academy of America, 1991), pp. 176–85; for Eudes Rigaud, see Louis Duval-Arnould, ‘Trois Sermons synodaux de la collection attribute a Jean de la Rochelle,’ Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 70 (1977), 35–71; for the testimony of Charles of Anjou, see below; for the Rothelin continuator, see the recent English translation by Janet Shirley, Crusader Syria in the Thirteenth Century. The standard Latin edition is to be found in Recueil des Historiens des Croisades: Historiens Occidentaux vol. 2, pp. 489–639. There are of course many other sources which represent this episode. 7. Epistola Sancti Ludovici regis de captione et liberatione sua in Historiae Francorum scriptores a Philippo Augusto rege usque ad regis Philipp dicti pulchri tempora, ed., François Duchesne, 5 vols (Paris, 1636–49), vol. 5, pp. 428–32; Paris, BN MS Lat. 10525 for Louis’ psalter. 8. London, British Library, MS Yates Thompson 12, fol. 161.
Notes 165 9. For plunder during the early crusades, see William G. Zajac, ‘Captured Property on the First Crusade’ in Jonathan Phillips, ed., The First Crusade: Origins and Impact (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 153–80. 10. Smith, Crusading in the Age of Joinville, p. 139. 11. James Brodman, Ransoming Captives in Crusader Spain: The Order of Merced on the Christian-Islamic Frontier (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986); Giulio Cipollone, Cristianità-Islam: cattività e liberazione in nome di Dio. Il tempo di Innocenzo III dopo ‘il 1187’ (Rome: Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1992); Yvonne Friedman, Encounter between Enemies: Captivity and Ransom in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Leiden: Brill, 2002); Jean Richard, ‘Les Prisonniers et leur rachat au cours des croisades’ in J. Dufour and H. Latelle, eds, Fondations et oeuvres charitables au Moyen Age (Paris: Éditions du C.T.H.S., 1999), pp. 63–74; Alan Forey, ‘The Military Orders and the Ransoming of Captives from Islam (twelfth to early fourteenth centuries)’, Studia Monastica 33 (1991), 259–79. For ransom more generally, see Maurice Keen, The Laws of War in the Late Middle Ages (London; Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), pp. 156–85. 12. Matthew Strickland, War and Chivalry: The Conduct and Perception of War in England and Normandy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 183 and following. 13. Chronique du Religieux de St Denys contenant le regne de Charles VI de 1330 à 1422, ed. and trans., M. Bellaguet, 6 vols in 3 (Paris: Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, 1994), 3:562. 14. William of Tyre, Chronicon, ed., R.B.C. Huygens, 2 vols, CCCM 63, 63A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1986), 18.14, pp. 830–31. Also translated by E.A. Babcock and A. Krey as A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, 2 vols (New York, 1941), vol. 2, p. 261. 15. William of Tyre, Chronicon, 9.21. 16. Elizabeth Siberry, Criticism of Crusading: 1095–1274 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). 17. A translation is available in Louise and Jonathan Riley- Smith, The Crusades: Idea and Reality 1095–1274 (London: E. Arnold, 1981), pp. 57–9. 18. Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘De consideratione ad Eugenium papam’, in Jean Leclercq and Henri Rochais, eds, Sancti Bernardi Opera, 8 vols (Rome, 1955–77), vol. 3, pp. 379–493. 19. Annales Herbipolenses A convenient translation may be found in S.J. Allen and E. Amt, eds, The Crusades: A Reader (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2003), pp. 145–46. 20. Yves Gravelle, ‘Le Problème des prisonniers de guerre pendant les croisades orientales (1095–1192)’, unpublished MA dissertation, Université de Sherbrooke, 1999, pp. 120–22. 21. Suffering was literal in many cases. See Piers D. Mitchell, ‘The torture of military captives in the crusades to the medieval Middle East’ in Niall Christie and Maya Yazigi, eds, Noble Ideals and Bloody Realities: Warfare in the Middle Ages, History of Warfare, Vol. 37 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 97–118. For a recent account of the Trinitarian Order see James Brodman, ‘Community, Identity and the Redemption of Captives: Comparative Perspectives across the Mediterranean’, Anuario de Estudios medievales 36:1 (2006), 241–52.
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22. Friedman, Encounter between Enemies, p. 220 and following; see also Norval L. Bard, ‘ ”C’est bien costume que soit pris chevaliers”: a consideration of captivity in the Guillaume Cycle’, Olifant, 25:1–2 (2006), 111–22. 23. Robert, Patriarch of Jerusalem to the Cardinals, 15 May 1250, ‘Annales Monasterii de Burton’. Translated in Jackson, ed., The Seventh Crusade, pp. 103–6. 24. Epistola Innocentii, directa Archiepiscopo Rothomagnesi (1250), in Historiae Francorum scriptores a Philippo Augusto rege usque ad regis Philipp dicti pulchri tempora, ed., François Duchesne (Paris, 1636–49), 5 vols, vol. 5, pp. 415–17; Eudes of Châteauroux, Sermo in eodem anniversario, in Cole, Preaching of the Crusades, appendix D, pp. 240–3 (‘We ought to mourn because of the reproach to the Christian people’). See below for more discussion of the sermons of Eudes of Châteauroux. 25. Epistola Innocenti, p. 417: ‘... non enim odit quos corripit, nec salutem illorum negligit quos flagellat, quinimo eum percutit quem diligit, tunc ostendit, quia filio quem diligit assidue parat virgam, nec restringit in ira misericordiam ...’ 26. Jonathan Riley- Smith, ‘Crusading as An Act of Love’, History 65 (1980), 177–92. 27. Arras BM, MS 137 (876), fols 159va–161ra and fols. 161ra–162ra. The two sermons are numbered 887 and 888 in Schneyer. They are edited in Cole, The Preaching of the Crusades, Appendix D, pp. 235–39. 28. For a study of these sermons, see Penny Cole, David L. d’Avray and Jonathan Riley- Smith, ‘Application of Theology to Current Affairs: Memorial Sermons on the Dead of Mansurah and on Innocent IV’ in Nicole Bériou and David L. d’Avray, eds, Modern Questions about Medieval Sermons: Essays of Marriage, Death, History and Sanctity (Centro Italiano di Studi Sull’Alto Medioevo, Spoleto, 1994), pp. 217–45. 29. Cole, The Preaching of the Crusades, p. 236: ‘Illi etiam nobiles ad hoc intendentes ut impios Sarracenos a morte infidelitatis et a morte etiam inferni eruerent pugnabant et eos reducerent ad salutem ...’ 30. See Cole et al., ‘Application of Theology’, pp. 229–32. 31. See Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), pp. 216–17. 32. Epistola Sancti Ludovici regis de captione et liberatione sua in Historiae Francorum scriptores a Philippo Augusto rege usque ad regis Philipp dicti pulchri tempora, ed., François Duchesne, 5 vols (Paris, 1636–49), vol. 5, pp. 428–32. 33. Jordan, Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade, p. 127. 34. M.C. Gaposchkin, ‘Louis IX, Crusade and the Promise of Joshua in the Holy Land’, Journal of Medieval History 34:3 (2008), 245–74. 35. Epistola sancti Ludovici, p. 429: ‘Et sicut accidit, permissione divina, peccatis nostris exigentibus, in manus inimicorum incidimus: nobis et karissimis fratribus nostris, A. Pictavensi et K. Andegavensi Comitibus, et caeteris qui nobiscum revertebantur per terram, nemine penitus evadente, captis et carceribus mancipatis, non sine maxima strage nostrorum, et effusione non modica sanguinis Christiani ...’ 36. Ibid., p. 430: ‘omnes qui capti fuerant a Sarracenis postquam venimus in Aegytum, Christianos captivos, nec non et omnes alios de quibuscumque patribus oriundos, qui capti fuerant a tempore quo Soldanus Kyemel’.
Notes 167 37. Ibid.: ‘Quo perpetrato, statim multi Sarraceni armati, in illo furoris calore, venerunt ad nostrum tentorium, ac si vellent, ut timebatur a multis in nos et alios Christianos desavaevire, sed divina clementia eorum furiam mitigante super firmandis treugis praehabitis cum Soldano, et civitatis Damiatae liberatione festina, nos requisierunt instanter. Cum quibus, praemissis tamen ab eis verborum et comminationum conitruis, tandem sicut Domino placuit, qui tanquam pater misericordiarum, et pius in tribulationibus consolator, gemitus compeditorum exaudit, firmavimus cum iuramentis treugas quas feceramus antea cum Soldano ...’ 38. Carol Sweetenham, trans., Robert the Monk’s History of the First Crusade (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 79. 39. Quantum praedecessores, translated in Jonathan Phillips, The Second Crusade: Extending the Frontiers of Christendom (Yale: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 280–82. 40. The Rothelin continuator gives a list of all the released knights. See Shirley ed. and trans., Crusader Syria in the Thirteenth Century. 41. Gaposchkin, The Making of Saint Louis, p. 45. 42. Ibid., pp. 33–6 for the background. See also Louis Carolus-Barré, ‘Guillaume de Chartres clerc du roi, frère prêcheur, ami et historien de saint Louis’, Collection de l’école française de Rome 204 (1995), 51–7. 43. The text is to be found in E. Bouquet, ed., Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, 24 vols (Paris: L’Imprimerie Royale, 1738), vol. 20, pp. 3–27. 44. Paris BN MS Lat. 10525; William Chester Jordan, ‘The Psalter of SaintLouis (BN MS Lat. 10525): The Program of the Seventy-Eight Full-Page Illustrations’, Acta: The High Middle Ages 7 (Binghamton, New York, 1983), 65–91. 45. See also Gaposchkin, The Making of Saint Louis, p. 117, who notes that some Dominican liturgies linked Louis to Joseph being led out of prison in Egypt. 46. Harvey Stahl, Picturing Kingship: History and Painting in the Psalter of Saint Louis (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 2008), especially chapter 4 which deals with thirteenth- century interpretations of the Old Testament. 47. Recueil des historiens, vol. 20, pp. 27–44. 48. Gaposckin, The Making of Saint Louis, p. 36. 49. L.S. Crist, ‘The Breviary of Saint Louis: The Development of a Legendary Miracle’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 28 (1956), 319–23. 50. Recueil des historiens, vol. 20, p. 50. 51. Ibid., pp. 58–121. 52. Henri Delaborde, ‘Une Oeuvre nouvelle de Guillaume de Saint-Pathus’, Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes 63:1 (1902), 263–88 at p. 282: ‘Volebat eam reducere secum, si posset, vel capi seu mori cum eis’. 53. Paris BNF Ms Français 5716, fol. 128, Louis IX prisonnier, fourteenthcentury copy of William of St Pathus’ Vie de S Louis. 54. Charles of Anjou’s testimony is recorded in Comte Paul Riant, ‘Déposition de Charles d’Anjou pour la canonisation de saint Louis’ in C. Jourdain, ed., Notices et Documents publiées par la Société pour l’Histoire de France a l’occasion du cinquantième anniversaire de sa fondation (Paris: Société pour l’Histoire de France, 1884), vol. pp. 170–6.
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55. Déposition de Charles d’Anjou, p. 172: ‘... quia dec res si fieret malum et scandalum pessimum generaret, quia per hoc soli divites liberarentur, qui possent dare pretium, et omnes pauperes qui non haberent unde se ipsos redimere, capti perpetuo remanerent’. 56. Ibid., p. 174: ‘Facta est longa concertatio super istis, quousque Sarraceni per intepretem dedicerunt quod inter eos erat pia contentio de mutua caritate, qua dominus pro subditis, et illi pro domino volebant obsides remanere, tetigitque Dominus corde tyrannorum ...’ 57. Wailly, Histoire de Saint Louis. 58. Françoise Laurent, ‘La Vie de Saint Louis ou le Miroir des Saints’, in Dufournet and Harf, eds, Le Prince et son Historien, pp. 149–82, at p. 158. For a discussion, see Daisy Délogu, Theorizing the Ideal Sovereign: The Rise of French Vernacular Royal Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), p. 38. 59. Smith, Crusading in the Age of Joinville. 60. Book 62 in Wailly’s edition, p. 169 and following. 61. Wailly, Histoire de Saint Louis, p. 174: ‘Il me dist: “Je m’acort que nous nous lessons touz tuer; si nous en irons tuit en paradis”. Mais nous ne le creumes pas’. 62. Ibid., pp. 183–4: ‘car encore, dist-il, n’estes-vous pas mort pour li, ainsi comme il fu mors pour vous; et se il ot pooir de li resusciter, soiés certein que il vous deliverra quant li plaira’. 63. Ibid., p. 192: ‘Et il dist: “Que me donras tu? Que je t’ai occis ton ennemi, qui t’eust mort, se it eust vescu’. 64. Ibid., pp. 192–93. 65. Maureen Slattery, Myth, Man and Sovereign Saint: King Louis IX in Jean de Joinville’s Sources (New York: Peter Lang, 1985). 66. For an account of the shared experience of Louis and Joinville’s captivity, see Laurent, ‘La Vie de Saint Louis’, in Dufournet and Harf, eds, Le Prince et son Historien. 67. Gaposchkin, The Making of Saint Louis, pp. 132–37. 68. Smith, Crusading in the Age of Joinville, p. 139.
Conclusion 1. Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Women Mystics and Eucharistic Devotion in the Thirteenth Century’ in her Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), pp. 119–50. 2. Dominique Iogna-Prat, Ordonner et exclure: Cluny et la société chrétienne face à l’hérésie, au judaïsme et à l’islam, 1000–1150 (Paris: Aubier, 1998). 3. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogue on Miracles, trans. in John Shinners, ed., Medieval Popular Religion, 1000–1500: A Reader (Ontario: The Broadview Press, 1997), p. 94. 4. See Malcolm Lambert, The Cathars (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), p. 248 for a number of examples of heretical opinions on the Eucharist. 5. Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1999). 6. Arnold, Inquisition and Power, p. 66; Robert Jütte, ‘Stigma-Symbole: Kleidung als identitätsstiftendes Merkmal bei spätmittelalterlichen und
Notes 169
7.
8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.
frühneuzeitlichen Randgruppen (Juden, Dirnen, Aussätzige, Bettler)’, in Neithard Bulst und Robert Jütte, eds, Zwischen Sein und Schein. Kleidung und Identität in der ständischen Gesellschaft 44:1 (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1993), 66–90. See Elizabeth Freeman, Narratives of a New Order: Cistercian Historical Writing in England, 1150–1220 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002); Logan, Runaway Religious in Medieval England. Siberry, Criticism of Crusading. Edward Peters, ed., Christian Society and the Crusades 1198–1229 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), p. 23. Sibly and Sibly, trans., Peter of les Vaux- de- Cernay, The History of the Albigensian Crusade, p. 305. The Memoirs of Philippe de Commynes, ed., Samuel Kinser, trans., Isabelle Cazeaux, 2 vols (Columbia, SC: 1973), vol. 2, p. 422. Ibid., p. 423. Ibid. Ibid., p. 424. See Meyvaert, ‘The Medieval Monastic Claustrum’, Gesta 12 (1973), 53–9. Munich, BSB Clm 7685, fol. 111v. In Jackson, ed., The Seventh Crusade, p. 168.
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Index Adhemar of Chabannes, Chronicon, 41 Aelred of Rievaulx, 16–23, 124 Agatha, saint, 38, 49 Agincourt, battle of (1415), 104 Al Mansurah, 101–3, 107–9, 113, 115, 118, 120 Alain of Lille, 62 Albi, 68–70, 75 Alfonse of Poitiers, 59 Alphabet of Tales, 83 Ancrene Wisse, 23–5, 124 Annales Herbipolenses, 106 Anselm of Alessandria, 62 Apollonarius, saint, 82 Apostasy, 30, 121 Arator, 38 Arnold, John, 128 Augustine, saint, 52, 74, 107, 108–9
Cathars, 59, 62, 91 Charles of Anjou, 102, 118–19 Châtelet, prison, 11 Chaucer, 12 Christianity, 13 Christina mirabilis, 85–91, 97–8, 100, 126 Christine de Pizan, 12 Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond, 33 Cistercian order, 28–31, 122, 124, 125, 129 Clement V, pope, 68 Clothilde, queen, 42 Clovis, king, 41 Cole, Penny, 92, 95, 96, 108 Confession, 53–4, 91 Consolamentum rite, 62 Constantinople, 129, 130 Council of Béziers (1246), 60 Council of Narbonne (1243), 60 Council of Toulouse (1229), 59, 74 Crusades, 42–3, 59, 63, 81, 91–100, 101–23, 126, 129–30
Baldric of Bourgeuil, 92 Barbara of Nicomedia, saint, 38 Barratt, Alexandra, 21 Béatrice of Planisolles, 65–6 Benedict XI, pope, 75 Benedictine order, 129 Bernard de Castanet, 68–71, 74, 75 Bernard Délicieux, 75–6 Bernard Gui, Practica inquisitionis, 62, 70, 71–2, 74 Bernard of Clairvaux, 11, 20, 25, 61–2, 90, 106, 134 Berthold of Regensburg, 98 Béziers, 60 Body, 22, 27, 35, 54, 58, 74, 86–8, 95, 105, 121, 124, 127, 128, 133 Bohemond of Antioch, 42 Bohne, Gotthold, 5
Damietta, 101–2 De Sanctimoniali de Wattun, 16–20, 124 Delogu, Daisy, 119 Detrusio, 8 Dunbabin, Jean, 5 Eberhard of Fürstenfeld, 44, 52, 56 Edessa, 106 Enclosure, 10, 15–16, 20–7, 124, 129, 130, 134 Escape, 45–8, 65–6, 87, 94–5 Eucharist, 127–8 Eudes of Châteauroux, 95, 98, 102, 108–9 Eudes Rigaud, archbishop, 31–4, 102, 107, 125 Eugenius III, pope, 106, 112 Exclusion, 99 Exempla, 81–5, 91, 95, 125
Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum, 83, 128 Captives, 24 Carcassonne, 66–8, 75–6, 78 189
190
Index
Flint, Valerie, 11 Fortunatus, Vita Germani, 41 Foucault, Michel, 6–7 Fourth Lateran Council (1215), 91, 127 Franciscan order, 129 François Villon, 11 Frederick II, emperor, 129 Freedom, 55 Friedlander, Alan, 75 Friedman, Yvonne, 103, 104, 106, 110 Fugitives, 30 Fürstenfeld abbey, 43–4 Gaposchkin, M. Cecilia, 110, 113, 115, 116, 122 Geltner, Guy, 5, 7, 90, 126 Geoffrey of Beaulieu, 102, 112–15, 119 Gerard de Frachet, 90 Gilchrist, Roberta, 10 Given, James, 8, 58, 60–1, 70, 78 Goffman, Erving, 6 Gravelle, Yves, 106 Gregory IX, pope, 60, 96 Guy de Lusignan, 104 Hattin, battle of, 93, 103, 104, 110 Hell, 84, 90 Henry of Clairvaux, 62 Heresy, 59–78, 91, 125, 128 Heribert of Périgueux, 61 Hildegard of Bingen, 61 Hillner, Julia, 8 Honorius III, pope, 91 Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux, 115 Howes, Laura, 11 Humbert of Romans, 98 Humility, 23 Imprisonment: concepts of, 130; inquisitorial, 12, 58–79; monastic, 12, 15–35; as moral example, 82–4; representations of in art, 1–4, 48–50; and war, 12, 46 Inchenhofen, 36–7, 43–56, 125 Injustice, 54, 68, 75–6 Innocent III, pope, 91, 92, 127, 130
Innocent IV, pope, 107, 134 Inquisition, 8, 58–79, 125, 128 Iogna-Prat, Dominique, 128 Ireland, Richard, 5 Jacobus de Voragine, 83, 84 Jacques de Vitry, 34–5, 81, 85–6, 93–5, 98 Jacques Fournier, 64–5, 73, 76 Jacques Le Goff, 89 Jean de Joinville, 102, 111, 119–22 Jean Froissart, 12 Jean Galand, 67, 78 Jean Gerson, 90 Jerusalem, 91, 92, 94, 96, 100, 103 Jews, 128 Johannes Fresqueti, 70 John le Romeyn, archbishop, 33 John of Abbeville, 96–7 John Peckham, archbishop, 33 Jordan, William, 110, 114 Joseph, 114–15 Kamel, sultan, 110 Kienzle, Beverley, 62 King, Margot, 88 Laurent, Françoise, 119 Lay brothers (conversi), 29–30 Le Stinche, prison, 11 Lea, Henry, 78 Leclerq, Jean, 7 Lefebvre, Henri, 9–10 Legenda Aurea, 1, 38, 40, 48 Leonard of Noblac/Noblat, saint, 11, 12, 19, 36–8, 41–58, 83, 125, 134 Liber exemplorum, 82 Liberation: by death, 133; through prayer, 83, 122; by saints, 26, 36–58; from sin, 100; spiritual, 12, 26, 37, 40, 56, 58, 88, 114 Life of Christina Markyate, 26–7 Limbo, 84, 90 Limoges, 42 Louis IX, king of France, 12, 59, 60, 101–23, 126, 129 Louis XI, king of France, 131–4 Lusset, Elisabeth, 8 Lutgard of Aywières, 85, 86, 90
Index 191 Maier, Christoph, 95 Margaret of Antioch, saint, 1–3, 83 Margaret of Ypres, 85 Mark, saint, 40 Martin of Pairis, abbot, 93 Mary, 41, 46, 83 Mary of Oignies, 81, 85–6 Massey, Doreen, 9–10 Memory, 58–9, 71–9, 80, 108, 125 Miracles, 36–41, 43–56, 115 Montaillou, 64, 66, 73, 77 Mur (prison at Carcassonne), 66, 75–6 Nicholas, saint, 50 Nicholas Eymerich, Directorium inquisitorum, 70 Nothelfer (‘helper’ saints), 48 Odo of Canterbury, 39 Orderic Vitalis, Historia Ecclesiastica, 42 Otto of Freising, 50 Penance, 88–91, 98 Periculoso (1298), 129 Peter ad vincula, saint, 37–40, 46–7 Peters, Edward, 78 Philippe de Commynes, 131–4 Pierre les Vaux-de-Cernay, Historia albigensis, 62–3 Pilgrimage, 48, 53–7, 114, 125 Post miserabile (1198), 92 Potestas claves, 39–40, 48 Princes War (Bavaria, 1421), 46 Prison: building, 2, 28, 32, 44, 59, 60, 67–8, 76–7, 131–2; historiography of, 5–8 Prisoners: child as, 84; mental state of, 44, 53–4, 63–79, 111, 116, 120; St Louis IX, 107–9, 126; of war, 45, 81, 101–2, 103–7; welfare of, 66 Pugh, Ralph, 5 Punishment, 25, 58, 64–5, 106 Purgatory, 25, 63, 86–7, 89–90 Quantum praedecessores (1145), 106, 112 Quia maior (1213), 92, 98
Raimon VI count of Toulouse, 130 Raimon VII count of Toulouse, 59 Ransom, 103, 104, 106, 110, 120 Relics, 50–1, 93 Religieux of St Denis, 1–5 Remigius of Reims, 41 Riley-Smith, Jonathan, 107 Roach, Andrew, 61, 78 Robert of Artois, 101, 108–9, 118 Robert of Reims, 92, 112 Roger of Hovedon, 62 Roman de Godefroi de Bouillon, 105 Rubin, Miri, 128 Rule of Life for a Recluse (De Institutione Inclusorum), 21–3, 27, 124 Sacraments, 84, 127–8 Sacrifice, 112, 126 Saladin, 103, 105 Sargent, Steven, 44, 46, 50, 53 Scribner, Robert, 51 Sermons, 93–9 Siberry, Elizabeth, 129 Simon de Montfort, 63 Sin, 39, 84, 97, 106, 107, 109, 110 Smith, Caroline, 103, 119 Soergel, Phillip, 51–2 Space: concept, 4–5, 8–11, 19, 23, 25–6, 31, 77–9, 80–1, 115, 116–18, 122, 124, 131 Stahl, Harvey, 115 Stephen of Bourbon (Etienne de Bourbon), 61, 83 Strickland, Matthew, 104 Templars, 80, 81 Tertullian, 10, 20 Thomas Aquinas, 84, 109 Thomas of Cantimpré, 85–91 Torture, 38, 44–5, 69, 70, 120–1 Tour des Allemans (prison), 64–5, 72 Trinitarian Order, 106 Tunis, 113 Ubbio of Gubbio, saint, 40 Ulrich Riblinger, 44, 55 Urban II, pope, 112 Valerius Maximus, 83
192 Index Vauchez, André, 51 Vincent Ferrer, 39–40 Virginity, 22, 27 Votives, 50–1 Walburga, saint, 50 Waldensians, 61, 62, 91 Walker Bynum, Caroline, 127
Watton, Augustinian priory of, 16–20 William of Chartres, 102, 113, 115–16, 119 William of St Pathus, 102, 113, 116, 119 William of Tyre, 102, 103, 105, 106 Women, 15, 55, 69, 82–4, 85–91, 124