Transformative Objects in Texts About Conflict, 1160-1390

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Transformative Objects in Texts About Conflict, 1160-1390 Remembering Things: Transformative Objects in Texts About Conflict, 1160-1390 Elizabeth Bonnette Eliott Lockhart Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2014 © 2014 Elizabeth Bonnette Eliott Lockhart All rights reserved ABSTRACT Remembering Things: Transformative Objects in Texts About Conflict, 1160-1390 Elizabeth Bonnette Eliott Lockhart Relics and the Eucharist, powerful physical links between the divine and the human, sit at the heart of narratives about twelfth-century English religious conflicts. These conflicts centered around internal strife between Jews and Christians, prior to the Jews’ expulsion from England in 1290, and external discord between English Christians and Ottoman Muslims in the Third Crusade (1189-1192). Relics and the Eucharist, though, do not tell the whole story, especially in literature about conflict such as saints’ lives, crusade chronicles, and romances. In Christian cults, battles, and narratives, religious objects that are not relics function doubly: they are simultaneously “transformative objects,” in bringing about miracles, and “remembering things,” or memorative objects, in that they hold memory or identity within themselves for a community or group. As devotional materials in local English cults, relic-like objects provided models for interaction between humans and the divine. They existed in shrines as an expression of faith, as well as an expression of collective identity for a Christian community in confrontation with a newly othered Jewish one. In the Crusades, such sacred things took on similar roles in that they physically identified groups of English Christians while also defending that identity in battle. In contrast to earlier studies of medieval images in texts, and following on from more recent investigations of the unique status of Christian materials, my dissertation considers “sacred” objects that are not relics or the consecrated host but can act like them. These objects take the materiality of relics, and their openness to being narrativized, as a model. Memorative things, which hold identity, act as transformative objects in literature about conflict – that is, they transform themselves and their narratives in the telling and even have the ability to shape collective identities by means of texts. I argue that these objects are unique to literature about religious conflict, and that they created a condition of mutuality between written culture and the material world – a quality that sometimes proves dangerous. In generically diverse medieval works that tell or re-tell narratives of religious conflict, these relic-like memorative things are contextualized in ambiguous and unexpected ways. Such transformative objects include: handmade, dedicated wax cult objects, like a wax foot, that both heal and memorialize; crusaders’ defiled icons and crosses that subsequently become weapons; a Muslim belt and healing balm, each with a Christian past; and Eucharist-like miraculous objects, placed in the mouth, that enable the dead to sing. Here, I examine the ways in which such Christian memorial objects begin as conduits for group identities in a conflict and transform in unanticipated ways through narratives. The first half of this project looks at twelfth-century texts that purport to record events in conflicts. These are Anglo-Latin miracle books of Saints William and Cuthbert, and Norman and Anglo-Latin Third Crusade chronicles. The second half considers fourteenth-century works of fantasy that re-imagine these conflicts, including the Charlemagne romance Sir Ferumbras and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale. My investigation of this surprising variety of devotional things – which, I argue, stretch far beyond the official categories of “relic” and “Eucharist” – will show that texts about religious conflict both define, and are defined by, the materials they represent. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page List of Abbreviations.....................................................................................ii Dedication......................................................................................................iii Introduction: The Object in Conflict ...........................................................1 Chapter 1: Wax and Memory in Saint Cuthbert Texts and the Vita et Passione Sancti Willelmi Martyris Norwicensis ..................23 Chapter 2: Testimony, Imagery and Defiled Crosses in Two Chronicles of the Third Crusade ...........................................................69 Chapter 3: Objects of Uncertain Power in Three English Charlemagne Romances ................................................................................116 Chapter 4: Lily, Pebble, “Greyn,” and Gem: Objects and Ritual Murder in Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale and Three of its Analogues.............................159 Conclusions: “Break or Worship” ................................................................199 Bibliography ..................................................................................................209 Appendix: On the Manuscript Family of the English Charlemagne Romances.......................................................................................................222 i Abbreviations EETS ES Early English Text Society, Extra Series, 124 vols. London: Trübner & Co., 1867-1927. EETS OS Early English Text Society, Original Series, 326 vols. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1864–. MED Hans Kurath, Sherman M. Kuhn, Robert E. Lewis, et al., eds., The Middle English Dictionary, vols. A-Z. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1954-2001. MGH SS Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores, 39 vols. Berlin, 1826–. PG J.-P. Migne, ed. Patriologiae cursus completus: Series graeca, 161 vols. in 167. Paris: J.-P. Migne, etc., 1857-[1905?]. PL J.-P. Migne, ed. Patriologiae cursus completus: Series latina, 221 vols. Paris: J.-P. Migne, etc., 1841-64. RHC Occ. Recueil des Historiens des Croisades: Historiens Occidentaux, ed. Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 5 vols. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1844-95. RHC Orient. Recueil des Historiens des Croisades: Historiens Orientaux, ed. Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 5 vols. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1872-98. RS Rolls Series: Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores, ed. Master of the Rolls, 99 vols. London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1858-96. ii For my grandmother, Sue Caroline iii Introduction: The Object in Conflict 1. Memory and Transformation Caesarius of Heisterbach’s thirteenth-century didactic collection of miracles, the Dialogus Miraculorum, is alive with objects which participate in everyday miracles; however, some of the strongest imagery in the Dialogus is reserved for those objects sitting at the center of conflict.1 During “the time of the quarrel between Otto [IV, the Holy Roman Emperor] and Philip [Duke of Swabia]” and with the deterioration of the Fourth Crusade in its background, Caesarius relates a story of a crucifix placed in defense of a church under siege.2 People who had taken refuge in the oratory of St. Goar “set up against the enemy a wooden image [imaginem] of the crucified in a certain window, hoping that through respect for it they would spare the place.”3 One of the bowmen, though, “caring nothing for the cross,” shot an arrow at it, “wounding the sacred image [sacram yconam] deep in the arm.”4 The cross begins to bleed profusely “as if from human veins,” which frightens Warner de Bonlant, the attacking lord.5 He subsequently takes the cross, publicizing his intention to go on crusade. The Lord Abbott of Ottirburg hears of the miracle and “enquires into the truth of the story;” a Jew testifies to him that 1 Throughout this dissertation, I use the single term “objects” to refer to both objects outside texts and those represented in them. I do, however, in reference to textual objects, acknowledge the term “image” as it was used in the sense of the Latin “imago” – that is, something which is represented – and Middle English “image/ymage” – that is, a figure or imprint rather than the thing itself. This usage persisted through to the Reformation in England. MED s.v. 1. a. c. d. 2. a. 2 “Tempore discordiae inter Ottonem et Philippum”: this designation places the miracle approximately CE 1201-8, on the west bank of the Middle Rhine. Dialogus Miraculorum (first published Cologne, Bonn, and Brussels: H. Lempertz & Company, 1851; Repr. Ridgewood, NJ: The Gregg Press Incorporated, 1966), Vol. II, Distinctio Decima, Cap. XIX. Trans. Dialogus Miraculorum (Dialogue on Miracles) (1220-35), trans. H.V.E. Scott and C.C.S. Bland (London: Routledge and Sons, 1929), Vol. II, Book 10, 188-9. 3 “Imaginem crucifixi ligneam hi qui deintus errant contra hostes in quondam posuerunt, sperantes quod ob illius venerationem loco parcerent.” 4 “De cruce non curans… sacram yconam in brachio profunde satis vulneravit.” 5 “Ad instar venae humanae, sanguis de loco vulneris coepit stillare.” 1 the story is the truth, which impresses the abbott since “he was much more pleased with the testimony of an enemy.”6 Not only is the abbott’s (hostile) witness central to the text’s truth-claim, but the physical remnant, or imprint, of the event is equally as important: “the shaft is still preserved there, the wound and the marks [stigmata] of blood still shown… our abbott testifies that he has seen both.”7 The story of the bleeding cross exemplifies
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