Spoken Word and Social Practice Medieval and Renaissance Authors and Texts

Editor-in-Chief

Francis G. Gentry (Emeritus Professor of German, Penn State University)

Editorial Board

Teodolinda Barolini (Columbia University) Cynthia Brown (University of California, Santa Barbara) Marina Brownlee (Princeton University) Keith Busby (University of Wisconsin-Madison) Craig Kallendorf (Texas A&M University) Alastair Minnis (Yale University) Brian Murdoch (Stirling University) Jan Ziolkowski (Harvard University)

Volume 14

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/mrat

Alexander Cowan, Reader in History (2 February 1949–30 November 2011) Spoken Word and Social Practice Orality in Europe (1400–1700)

Edited by Thomas V. Cohen and Lesley K. Twomey

LEIDEN | BOSTON Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Spoken word and social practice : orality in Europe (1400–1700) / Edited by Thomas V. Cohen and Lesley K. Twomey. pages cm. — (Medieval and renaissance; Volume 14) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-28868-3 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-29182-9 (e-book) 1. Oral communication—Europe—Medieval, 500–1500. 2. Oral communication—Europe—Modern period, 1500–. 3. Social history—Medieval, 500–1500. 4. Social history—Modern period, 1500–. 5. Sociolinguistics— Europe—History—Medieval, 500–1500. 6. Sociolinguistics—Europe—History—Modern period, 1500–. 7. Speech acts (Linguistics)—Europe—History. 8. Europe—Intellectual life—History. 9. Europe—Social conditions—History. I. Cohen, Thomas V. (Thomas Vance), 1942– editor. II. Twomey, Lesley K., editor.

P95.55.S63465 2015 302.2’242094—dc23 2015007832

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual ‘Brill’ typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0925-7683 isbn 978-90-04-28868-3 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-29182-9 (e-book)

Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhofff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change.

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Contents

Acknowledgements ix List of Figures x List of Contributors xi Life and Works of Alexander Francis Cowan xii Bibliography of Alexander Cowan xiV

Introduction 1 Thomas V. Cohen and Lesley K. Twomey

Witches’ Words

1 Oral Transfer of Ideas about Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Norway 47 Liv Helene Willumsen

2 St Helena and Love Magic: From the Spanish Inquisition to the Internet 84 Susana Gala Pellicer

Words on Trial

3 The Power of the Spoken Word Depositions of the Imperial Chamber Court: Power, Resistance, and ‘Orality’ 115 Matthias Bähr

4 Tracking Conversation in the Italian Courts 139 Thomas V. Cohen

Preaching the Word

5 Tears for Fears: Mission Preaching in Seventeenth-Century France – a D ouble Performance 185 Anne Régent-Susini vi contents

6 Powerful Words: St Vincent Ferrer’s Preaching and the Jews in Medieval Castile 206 Carolina Losada

7 ‘A Most Notable Spectacle’: Early Modern Easter Spital Sermons 228 Sonia Suman

Word on the Street

8 Orality and Mutiny: Authority and Speech amongst the Seafarers of Early Modern London 253 Richard J. Blakemore

9 ‘A Blabbermouth Can Barely Control His Tongue’: Political Poems, Songs and Prophecies in the Low Countries (Fifteenth–Sixteenth Centuries) 280 Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers

10 Proverbs and Princes in Post-Reformation England 300 Marcus Harmes and Gillian Colclough

Gossip and Gossipers

11 The Meanings of Gossip in Sixteenth-Century Venice 321 Elizabeth Horodowich

12 Gossip and Social Standing in Celestina: Verbal Venom as Art 343 Joseph T. Snow

Prayer, Teaching, and Religious Talk

13 Oral Rites: Prayer and Talk in Early Modern France 375 Virginia Reinburg

14 The Seducer’s Tongue: Oral and Moral Issues in Medieval Erotodidactic Schooltexts 393 Rosanna Cantavella Contents vii

15 Preaching God’s Word in a Late-medieval Valencian Convent: Isabel de Villena, Writer and Preacher 421 Lesley K. Twomey

16 Afterword 446 Michael J. Braddick

Bibliography 463 Index 486

Acknowledgments

This book is dedicated to the memory of Alex Cowan, scholar and friend, who was to have been co-editor of this volume. Dialogue has taken place with many contributing and reviewing scholars; they wrote of Norway’s winter snows, catching the northern lights, and dry Australian summers, and of far-flung beaches, rains, gardens, and babies born. For each of those precious words, and all other conversations, thank you. Special thanks go to Professor Nicholas Round for his critical support for the whole project. And thanks (from Lesley) go in particular to Professor Tom Cohen for step- ping in following Alex’s untimely illness for enabling this project to go ahead as fĳirst conceived.

Tom Cohen and Lesley Twomey List of Figures

0.1 Altarpiece, St Laurence, Valencia, Museo de Bellas Artes. Reproduced with permission. 33 1.1 Map of Scandinavia, Inger Bjerg Poulsen. 53 1.2 Map of East Finnmark, Tomas Willumsen Vassdal. 54 1.3 Court records of Maritte Thamisdatter, Makkaur, Finnmark (1634), selected part page, Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark Regional Governor, no. 2543, Witchcraft Sentences. 61 1.4 Vardøhus castle. Watercolour, Hans H. Lilienskiold, Finnmark County Library. 69 1.5 Court records of the trial of Bodelle Danielsdatter, Vardøhus, Finnmark (1652), Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 8, fol. 65v. 71 1.6 Domen Witch Mountain outside Vardø, Watercolour, Hans H. Lilienskiold, Finnmark County Library. 72 1.7 ‘About the Taxes’, Watercolour, Hans H. Lilienskiold, Finnmark County Library. 73 7.1 John Gipkyn, A Sermon at Paul’s Cross (1616), Society of Antiquaries. Reproduced with permission. 235 15.1 Woodcut of Isabel de Villena, Vita Christi de la Abbadessa del monestir de les monges de la Trinitat (Barcelona [Jorge Costilla], 1513), fol. 232v; Biblioteca Històrica, Universitat de València. Reproduced with permission. 430 List of Contributors

Matthias Bähr, Technische Universität Dresden Richard J. Blakemore, University of Oxford Michael J. Braddick, University of Shefffĳield Rosanna Cantavella, Universitat de València Thomas V. Cohen, York University, Toronto Gillian Colclough, Curtin University Jan Dumolyn, Ghent University Susana Gala Pellicer, Universidad de Alcalá Jelle Haemers, University of Leuven Marcus Harmes, University of Southern Queensland Elizabeth Horodowich, New Mexico State University Carolina Losada, Universidad de Buenos Aires Anne Régent-Susini, Université Paris III-Sorbonne Virginia Reinburg, Boston College Joseph T. Snow, Michigan State University, Emeritus Sonia Suman, University of Leicester Lesley K. Twomey, University of Northumbria Liv Helene Willumsen, University of Tromsø Life and Works of Alexander Francis Cowan

Alex and one of us two editors worked together sharing ideas to develop a Medieval and Early Modern Research group at Northumbria University. Together we ran a series of mini conferences Speech into Text, Text and Textiles, and then Author and Authority. Together we wrote a British Academy bid to underpin the conference we planned. Together we ran the successful conference ‘Gossip, Gospel, Governance: Orality 1400–1700’ in July 2011, hosted by the British Academy, which laid the foundation for this book. Both he and I had prepared a ‘back-up paper’ just in case and, fortunately, Alex was the one who generously stepped in at the last minute and presented his paper: ‘Gender, magic, and gossip in early modern Venice and Bologna’. Both editors are thankful now that Alex gave his paper and there was a great deal of praise for his contribution. Those who knew him a lot and those who knew him a little were touched by his presence, commenting that Alex was a scholar of the ‘old school’ and even that he was the ‘nicest’ of scholars to meet at a conference. The conference took place short months before Alex became ill and before he died in November 2011, after a very brief period of illness. Alex was ‘born in Wilmslow, Cheshire, near Manchester, to a printer father from northwest England of Polish-Jewish ancestry and a mother who was a ref- ugee from Nazi Berlin. This combined British and European background contributed to his cosmopolitanism, urbanity and joie de vivre, and helped him to profĳiciency by the age of 21 in four modern languages and the ability to read sixteenth-century German and Italian’.1 Alex attended the County Grammar School for Boys from 1960–67 and then went to read for BA (Hons) History in 1967 at Warwick University. He was awarded 2.1 in History in 1970 and, as part of his programme of study, he spent a period in Venice which began his lifelong love of the city. Alex went on to LSE to complete his PhD in 1976 under the supervision of Peter Earle with a thesis about comparison of the social and family strategies of early modern patriciates in Lübeck and Venice. It was later published as The Urban Patriciate: Lübeck and Venice, 1580–1700 and also as Venezia e Lubecca, 1580–1700. Alex joined Northumbria University (then Northumbria Polytechnic) in 1973 and rose to be Head of History and later Reader in History. After retiring in 2010, Alex became Visiting Fellow at Northumbria. He edited Parliaments,

1 Henry J. Cohn, ‘In memoriam Alexander Francis Cowan (1949–2011)’, Parliaments, Estates, and Representation, 32 (1) (2012): 1–2, at p. 1. Life And Works Of Alexander Francis Cowan xiii

Estates, and Representation and was elected as Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in recognition of his original contribution to history scholarship. He was a member of the National Council of the Historical Association. Alex was a delightful colleague, whose zest for his work was infectious, and whose support for other scholars was beyond generous. And his own scholarship was adventuresome and wonderfully humane. He was always fair when allocating resources and praise. His work on gossip, indicated in the bibliography, was charming and full of fun. He was able to bring the past to life through his research skills. Alex was an excellent teacher as well as colleague and his deep love of the past touched the lives of many young students taught by him over the years. ‘As a gifted classroom teacher he motivated thousands of students over a period of 37 years and in national forums took a leading role as a fĳierce defender of the teaching of history at all levels of education’.2 Alex supervised two PhD students to completion, Fiona Colclough, ‘Widows and widowhood in early modern Venice’ (2000) and Paula Baxter (AHRB funded), ‘Women’s networks in the North of England in the 17th and 18th centuries’ (2001).

When a Good person dies Night is coming on. The last birds fly hurriedly to their nests. Slowly but surely darkness takes possession of the world. However, no sooner has darkness fallen, Than the lights come on Below us, around us, above us, Near and far away from us A candle in a window A lamp in a cellar, A beacon in a lighthouse, A star in the sky. And so we take heart and fĳind our way again.3

Slowly the editors of this volume took heart after the death of a much loved and respected colleague. His co-organizer and his friend dedicate this volume now to his memory.

2 Cohn, ‘In memoriam’, Parliaments, Estates, and Representation, p. 2. 3 http://www.poeticexpressions.co.uk/Whenagoodpersondies.htm. Bibliography of Alexander Cowan

Books

Marriage, Manners and Mobility in Early Modern Venice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) (co-edited with Jill Steward), The City and the Senses: European Urban Culture, 1500 to the Present (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). (edited), Mediterranean Urban Culture, 1400–1700 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000). Urban Europe 1500–1700 (London: Arnold, 1998). Venezia e Lubecca 1500–1700 (Rome: Il Vetro, 1990). The Urban Patriciate: Lübeck, 1500–1700 (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 1986).

Chapters and Articles

‘Seeing is Believing. Urban Gossip and the Balcony in Early Modern Venice’, Gender and History, 23 (2011): 721–738. ‘Touching her Reputation: Marriage, Gossip, and Social Networks in Early Modern Venice’, Acta Histriae, 19 (4) (2011): 611–644. ‘Social Derogation and Political Irresponsibility in Early Modern Venice’, in Papers of the ICHRPI conference in Alghero, ed. by F. Soddu (Sassari, 2011). ‘Chaste Widows and Lusty Widows in Early Modern Venice’, in Famiglie e poteri in Italia tra Medioevo et Età moderna, ed. by Anna Bellavitis & Isabelle Chabot (Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 2009), pp. 383–396. ‘Gossip and Street Culture in Early Modern Venice’, Journal of Early Modern History, 12 (3–4) (2008): 313–333. ‘Cities, Towns, and New Forms of Culture’, in The Renaissance World, ed. by John Jefffries Martin (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 101–117. ‘Les étrangers et la ville, le cas d’un grand marchand néerlandais à Venise au dix- septième siècle’, in Commerce, voyage, et expérience religieuse à l’époque moderne (XVe–XVIIIe siècles), ed. by A. Burkhardt (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007). ‘Nodes and Networks’, in Cities and Cultural Change in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Donatella Calabi & Stephen Turk Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007; repr. 2013), pp. 28–41. ‘Cultural Trafffĳic in Lübeck and Danzig in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 28 (3–4) (2003), pp. 175–185. Bibliography Of Alexander Cowan xv

‘Mogli non ufffĳiciali e fĳiglie illegittime a Venezia nella prima età moderna’,Quaderni Storici, 114 (3) (2003), pp. 849–865. ‘Foreigners and the City—the Case of the Immigrant Merchant’, in his Mediterranean Urban Culture, 1400–1700 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), pp. 45–54. ‘Innuendo and Inheritance: Strategies of Scurrility in Medieval and Renaissance Venice’, in Scurrility and Subversion, Popular Discourse in Europe from 1500 to the Present, ed. by Dermot Cavanagh & Tim Kirk (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 125–137. ‘Patricians and Partners in Early Modern Venice’, in Medieval and Renaissance Venice: Studies in Honour of Donald T. Queller, ed. by Ellen E. Kittell & Thomas F. Madden (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999), pp. 276–293. ‘Designing a History Curriculum’, in History in Higher Education: New Directions in Teaching and Learning, ed. by A. Booth and P. Hyland (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995). ‘Love, Honour, and the Avogaria di Comun in Early Modern Venice’, Archivio Veneto, Ser. V, 144 (1995): 5–19. ‘The Urban Patriciate: An Endangered Species?’, Historical Research, 64, (1991): 123–37. ‘Rich and Poor among the Patriciate in Early Modern Venice’, Studi Veneziani, n.s. 6 (1982): 147–160.

Introduction

Thomas V. Cohen and Lesley K. Twomey

Palabras y plumas el viento las lleva1

We begin with a scholarly metaphor that, tellingly and wittingly, draws on not hearing, but seeing: the purpose of this book is to explore orality, not just from the optic of a single fĳield of scholarship, but from that of many, to enable insights into the spoken word to illuminate the broadest mix of disciplines and cultures. Our choice of terms here suggests how far our modern writing has drifted from an earlier oral mode of persuasion, reasoning and transmission of knowledge. Now, whatever the metaphor, this book plays a double game: it both investigates the forms and functions of late medieval and early modern oral practice, and also traces the workings of those speech habits, as they shaped writing at a time in European history when, far more than today, the realm of script echoed with the arts and attitudes of a vast world of talk. This collection of essays has many strands. It traces the impact of the oral on the literary arts of medieval and early modern Europe: stories, drama, epic poems, and other genres. It seeks also to trace that impact on sermons and prayers, political ditties, and school texts. Meanwhile, using both literary texts and more utilitarian types of prose, it strives to get behind the screen of writing to rediscover the vanished world of speech, not only to illuminate prose narrative and poetic genres but also to plumb the social world where speech was action, news, and memory. First, then, this essay looks at traits of orality itself, to sharpen the discussion. That done, we return to literature, to survey how the oral, with its manifold practices, contributed to poetry, proverbs, sermons, and drama, and to prose narrative. We argue here that orality was a complex thing indeed, a vast phenomenon and subject, inviting a multitude of questions for today’s scholars of history and literature. We mean this essay as an invitation to observation, reflection, and analysis, and as a caution: to put it simply, some scholars, to their detriment, think that, if they only catch those elusive spoken words, they will have grasped the whole oral event. Little could be further from the truth. For scholars, merely detecting the oral, before we assay it, is already a challenge. Can there be anything beyond gut feeling, that sense that we are in the presence of the spoken word, anything sturdier and more scientifĳic than the

1 Juana G. Campos & Ana Barilla, Diccionario de refranes (Madrid, 1993). [Words and quills blow away in the wind.] Translations unless otherwise stated are the authors’ own.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004291829_002 2 Cohen and Twomey impression that we hear a voice from long ago? For whilst instinct is doubtless a precious tool, it cannot be the only voltage tester in the scientifĳic toolkit, and even the canniest instinct must be subjected to scientifĳic proof. This book contrasts approaches in social history, literature, sermon studies, and the history of religious practices and folk magic, to tease out and display the presence of the oral in a great range of texts, and to show how subtle and complex were the connections between what a person wrote and those things heard, seen, felt, or otherwise perceived, in communication face to face with fellow Europeans. Much more than most adults, modern children live still in a culture devoted to the oral. So, when the Twomey children were tiny, their father, a bard in the Irish tradition and long-time storyteller, made up tales about Oisín the Leprechaun, which he sang many times, over a number of years, and to each child in turn.2 Although Oisín always experienced the same adventure and advised searchers for his crock of gold in similar words, his story was constantly elaborated in the telling and no one telling ever exactly matched any other.3 Was the magical adventure afffected by the written culture in which both performer and auditors were embedded?4 Although the narrator and the leprechaun now spoke educated English and not Gaelic, there seemed no overt signs of literate culture. The stories seemed to hark entrancingly to eras long gone by, and there was no script. Yet their structure, words, and content could be mapped onto tales known to their narrator by telling, and reading too. So this modern oral practice, like that of Europe in medieval and early modern times, remained in touch with the sphere of script. At the same time, these magical stories for children, by their nature, illustrate many of the traits of oral practice to which this essay will return. They had their time and setting, their

2 For performance of folkloric tales, see Elizabeth C. Fine, The Folklore Text: From Performance to Print (Bloomington, IN, 1985), pp. 57–88. 3 For the place of repetition in tradition ancestor rituals, see Jack Goody, Interface between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 150–153; for the oral story as a repository for cultural attitudes, values, beliefs, and customs, although he is writing of the epic and not of folktales, see John Miles Foley, ‘Man, Muse, and Story: Psychohistorical Patterns in Oral Epic Poetry’, Oral Traditions, 2 (1987): 91–107; for a study of the performance of stories in terms of facial expressions, impersonation of voices in a story, albeit in relation to a diffferent folktale genre, see Eric Shepherd, ‘Singing Dead Tales to Life: Rhetorical Strategies in Shandong Fast Tales’, Oral Tradition, 26 (2011): 27–70. 4 See Bruce A. Rosenberg for the co-existence of literate and oral cultures, ‘The Complexity of Oral Tradition’, Oral Tradition, 2 (1987): 73–90. In this, he follows Ruth Finnegan, Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Signifĳicance and Context (Cambridge, 1977), p. 23. Albert B. Lord deplores the efffect of the advance of written culture on oral performance in The Singer of Tales, ed. by Stephen Mitchell & Gregory Nagy, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA, 2000), pp. 124–125. Introduction 3 occasion, their ceremonies, their story-teller and listeners all present together, their subtle dialogue between bard and doting audience, their oral art, their deep mimesis and gestures. The stories were a social moment, and the act of telling, and of hearing, produced a kind of communion for all involved. Not all acts of speech in earlier times shared all these qualities, but many did, as we will show below, and many of these traits were hard for script to capture and emulate. Nevertheless, we will argue here, pre-modern script was deeply marked by oral modes, in ways both subtle and varied. Much like modern storytellers, from time immemorial poets, bards or troubadours have sung and recited to their audiences.5 In northern Europe, the Norsemen recited epic stories, sagas about deeds of bravery. They sang about heroes of the past. They told stories about the ancestors of those present and some poets began to write down the poems, or created their own versions of them along traditional lines.6 With the Twomeys and the Cohens, as with any family, children’s favourite stories were called for over and over, night after night, just as bards’ sung stories must have been repeatedly requested by their patrons to celebrate occasions when storytelling was deemed fĳitting. Victory in battle would have called for noble deeds of ancestors, and a turn-of-the-year feast suggested a story where despair turned to hope.7 Epic narrative required feats of memory, as

5 John Miles Foley summarizes the major debate which raged throughout the twentieth century on oral formulaic versus written composition of poetry in Immanent Art: From Structure to Meaning in Traditional Oral Epic (Bloomington, IN, 1991), pp. 2–6. For oral composition transcribed, see Lord, The Singer of Tales, pp. 124–130. Ruth Finnegan in a study of ‘oral tradition’ sagely warns how oral tradition can quickly become imbued with connotations of the primitive and written associated with what is modern, creative, and individual, in her ‘ “Oral Tradition”: Weasel Words or Transdisciplinary Door to Multiplexity’, Oral Tradition, 18 (2003): 84–86, at p. 84. 6 Many have wrestled with the concept of how an oral genre might be turned into writing, see for example, Eric Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven, CT, 1986); Lord, The Singer of Tales, pp. 132, 134; See also Fine, The Folklore Text. 7 We fĳirst knew from the work of the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars that juglar poets operated at court. Yet, at eight centuries’ remove, we still do not know exactly the relationship of their oral poetry with the written versions which survive. It was sometimes believed that the oral poets dictated versions to scribes. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the oral process was romanticized. It was believed that clerics began to compose epic poems, far surpassing the early oral versions, see, for example Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Poesía juglaresca y juglares: aspectos de la historia literaria y cultural de España, Publicaciones de la Revista de Filología Española (Madrid, 1924), p. 353; and also his updated Poesía juglaresca y orígenes de las literaturas románicas. Problemas de historia literaria y cultural, 4 Cohen and Twomey the bards recalled a hero’s exploits and feats of bravery.8 Changing the tale and its principal events was sure to disappoint, but embellishments were always welcome. In Celtic traditional circles, routine storytelling fell to lower-grade poets and the master-poet would only spin a tale at a special occasion.9 Oral stories travelled far, reshaped as they changed hands. Borrowing and invention intertwined, so that scholars debate whether distinct peoples created their very own poetry and assay the links between traditions.10

Biblioteca de Cuestiones Actuales (Madrid, 1957). Alan Deyermond takes up the question of the oral composition of the Spanish epic in his El ‘Cantar de Mio Cid’ y la épica medieval española (Barcelona, 1987), pp. 40–43 concluding that the poet of the Cid inherited an oral version to which he brought ‘una técnica individual notable por su madurez y complejidad’ (p. 43). Twenty-fĳirst century scholars have picked up on the oral-written debate, such as Matthew Bailey in his Poetics of Speech in the Medieval Spanish Epic (Toronto, 2010), noting that Spanish clerical composition is far superior to the Yugoslav composition studied by Lord and Parry. Bailey determines that composition was more akin to dictation and that ‘producing a text in the Middle Ages involved speaking’, p. 36. In the article which precedes his monograph, Bailey reminds the reader that speech dominated power- broking in knightly society, ‘Oral Composition in the Medieval Spanish Epic’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 118 (2) (2003): 254–269, at p. 255. Modern scholarly work on the presence of juglares at royal courts continues, for example in the work of Antonio Sánchez Jiménez, ‘Catalan and Occitan Troubadours at the Court of Alfonso VIII’, La Corónica, 32 (2) (2004): 101–120. Meanwhile, an attractively named critical cluster: ‘Story Weavers and Textual Critics Interpret the Poema de mio Cid’ returns again to the interface between the oral and the written in Joseph J. Duggan’s ‘The Interface between Oral and Written Transmission of the Cantar de mio Cid’, La Corónica, 33 (2) (2005): 51–63; also Juan Carlos Bayo’s article in the same cluster. Bayo summarizes the way the Lord- Parry debate has played out with regard to composition of the Cid: ‘On the Nature of the Cantar de mio Cid and its Place in Hispanic Medieval Epic’, La Corónica, 33 (2) (2005): 13–27. Within the warp and weft of the study of oral and written composition, the lost literature of the epic plays its part, see Alan D. Deyermond’s insuperable La literatura perdida de la Edad Media castellana. Catálogo y estudio. I: Épica y romances, Obras de referencia, 7 (Salamanca, 1995). 8 For an anthropological study of memory in literary and oral cultures, see Goody, The Interface, pp. 171–189; for genre-related examples, see Timothy W. Boyd, ‘Memory on Canvas: Commedia dell’Arte as a Model for Homeric Performance’, Oral Tradition, 26 (2011): 553–560; for memory as opposed to oral formulaic composition, see Ruth Finnegan, Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Signifĳicance, and Social Context (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 52–87. 9 Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Oral Tradition and Welsh Literature: A Description and Survey’, Oral Tradition, 3 (1988): 61–87, p. 63. 10 Part of the issue was French scholars’ eagerness to set France at the epicentre of the lyric tradition, see, for example Alfred Jeanroy in his Les Origines de la poésie lyrique en France (Paris, 1925). Scholars elsewhere were equally determined to reject French influence and Introduction 5

These musings on the listening habits of epic audiences and modern children alert us to the many questions the study of orality brings with it. Like the oral world conjured up by parents, that of our late-medieval and early modern forebears was not sealed offf from written culture. As we remarked, the exchanges went both ways. Written culture was interlaced with oral practices, while oral arts and usages bore many marks of script. Our investigation into the oral in the written confronts us with a set of queries. First comes an ontological question: just what is orality, in the most general sense? What is its nature, shape, and socio-cultural function? Just what diffferentiates it from its intimate antithesis, the zone of script? Second comes an historical question: we engage here not with some time- less orality, but with a particular orality, that of late-medieval and early modern Europe. How, then, did orality function in that world, with its social practices, cognitive habits, institutions, and habits of recording, transmitting, and storing words on paper or other media. And just what, in that particular world, was the nature of the ever-shifting exchange between oral and written spheres? Third comes an epistemological question, best broached after pondering history. How can we modern scholars know the nature of the oral, in a world fated, given the limitations of recording, to remain henceforth forever silent? How can we reconstruct long-lost performances from later renditions eventually been written down? How can we hear the words on paper, parchment, stone, wood, cloth, and other media? And how can we pluck further clues from buildings and original settings, still extant or fĳigured on old images, to bring oral performances back to life? And, further, how can graphic arts and material artefacts illuminate delivery? Fourth comes the question of poesis, best seen at the interface of performance and literature. Poesis, the art of composition, or poetica the poetic art, the origin of the early modern poesy, is more than a versifĳied speech or a written form. Because it emphasizes creativity it can also bring us to a new approach to orality. For orality is resonant; it relies on play on words, on asso- nance, on musicality. It draws on but is never bound by rhetorical techniques. It takes account of shared knowledge and shared ideals. Such creativity can be seen in the words of a stand-up comedian who builds a bond with the audience when spinning tales and constructing a comic crescendo. These same techniques are behind some written puns and scurrilous verse, although the

establish their own autonomous national poetic tradition, hence Ramón Menéndez Pidal’s approach to Hispanic epic poetry linking it to traditional Norse themes and setting a distance between French and Hispanic lyric, see Los godos y el orígen de la epopeya española (Madrid, 1955). 6 Cohen and Twomey shared knowledge is long gone and we can no longer fĳinger the victim, as fĳirst hearers did readily. For them, the written mimicked the gossip rife at court or the tales and banter heard in the market, by the washtubs and at the well. The oral world and the written arts moulded one another in subtle ways. So how many poets trapped echoes of popular song in their poems? How much speech persisted in literature, in any of its myriad forms? And, there, what shape did it take and how, like the social talk that Shakespeare reshapes as verse, did its incursion transform literature? And how many idioms and memorable words from performance and narrative flowed back to speech?11 Nor did this exchange end with one-way flows; reflux happened, as when script, in recording speech, picked up haunting echoes of older scripts or speech, or song caught and bandied script’s echoes of speech elsewhere. The exchange was, and is, immensely complex; just what were literature’s many ways of trap- ping and refracting moments of the oral?

Ontology

At fĳirst glance, to defĳine orality seems a simple matter: it is what is spoken, while script is written down. ‘Orality’, the term connects, after all, to the Latin word for ‘mouth’, logically must entail what human mouths do. Mouths after all mouths have a range of functions: they eat, suck, kiss, and nuzzle, they test the temperature of a baby’s brow, they smile, pout, and grimace. So, perhaps orality might be what we do with mouths when we communicate, making words. Talking and, perhaps, singing. But what of humming or whistling, both wordless, but still expressive? Not to mention laughing, sighing, groaning, gasping, cooing and other non-verbal vocalizations, plus assorted voiceless breath-sounds. And what of clicking the tongue, ‘tsk’-ing behind the teeth, or smacking the lips, breathless actions all, but still audible communications that

11 Shakespeare’s speech by Richard III is a case in point: ‘A horse! a horse! My kingdom for a horse!’ (p. 746). We have heard this phrase repeated to mark something which had reached a desperate pass, by ordinary people, not Shakespearean scholars. This seems to further substantiate Nancy Marino’s comments that Jorge Manrique’s fĳifteenth-century Coplas ‘seeped into popular culture in the form of festivals, parodies, and even rap songs’. See her ‘Reading Jorge Manrique’s Coplas in the Nineteenth Century’, in ‘De ninguna cosa es alegre posesión sin compañía’: Estudios celestinescos y medievales en honor del Profesor Joseph Thomas Snow, Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, Spanish Series, 144 (New York, 2010), pp. 210–219, at p. 210. Introduction 7 pass judgement or provide commentary on words and actions? This catalogue of oral performance suggests we ponder harder. Or abandon the mouth and ponder snapping fĳingers, clapping hands, and silent gestures of hands, arm, and body. So, perhaps, we should think of orality as language, in the whole of its complexity, which is spoken, even if it sometimes later drifts into writing; it makes some sense to posit that orality is all communication, between persons in one another’s presence, without the use of script, or, where script is indeed present, communication that goes beyond silent reading, like, for instance, recitation or performance. This looser, more generous sense liberates orality from the mouth that inspires its name, and attaches it instead to the whole person and, in important ways, to the hearers and to the setting in which communication happens. That very liberal, and liberating, defĳinition loosens the conceptual tie between orality and speech, if conceived narrowly as a string of words, uttered in time. Speech is, of course, a crucial component of oral practice, as any traveller knows when among strangers who fail to share his or her single or several tongues. Bereft of efffective words, the traveller is sharply awakened to two things: fĳirst, the utter loss of words and, second, the great utility of the rest of the oral repertoire, including facial expression, emotive cries, vocal mimicry, gesture, pantomime, and the great convenience of props to signify facts, needs, appetites, or intentions.12 So, words matter, but so do all those other aids, the gestural panoply on which an adroit traveller relies to convey meaning without benefĳit of speech. Speakers use such mechanisms all the time, often uncon- sciously, even when their interlocutors share their language. Demoting words and even all of speech, we are reminded that manifold gestures and actions, as formalized as the handshake or as fluid as love-making, adolescent horse-play, or duelling with intent to kill, belong to the oral sphere, whenever their function is to communicate. Does that mean that all human action connects to the oral? Not at all. Laying bricks is seldom an oral practice, unless done expressively, as perhaps by Churchill, showing calm amidst the Blitz. Nor is parking a car, sieving pasta, pulling up dandelions, or throwing the dog a stick. Clearly, the frontiers of oral practice are vague indeed. Many actions are oral only when mixing with a message: posture, gait, dress, work, play, even breathing itself, all may attach to oral practice.

12 Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body (London, 2005), for the ancient roots of mimicry, probably far older than speech. 8 Cohen and Twomey

Here is an example from personal experience. Peter Burke writes of the theatricality of Renaissance Italian life.13 Yet in Rome, as elsewhere in Italy, and across Mediterranean countries, theatricality still thrives. A visit to the butcher’s stall in an open market in Rome proves our case, for shopping there involves far more than trading cash for meat. A regular customer is a client, and the butchers, as have their ilk for centuries, take pains to sustain a connection, both commercial and human. There are courtesies, mixed banter and comments on soccer or the base follies of government. And, amidst the remarks and raillery, the butchers sharpen knives with noisy grace, parade cuts of meat with professional aplomb, slice them with emphatic energy, wrap them handily, weigh and price them, and with seemly flourish present them to the customer. It is a polished routine, where every action speaks, expressing pride in work, pleasure in service, mastery, and benign interest in the customer’s satisfaction. It would be an outrageous stretch to call this entire performance speech, but orality still pervades the whole of it. The lesson here is not the silly one that slicing veal is discourse, even if perhaps it is, but rather that the boundary between speech, a profoundly communicative action, and other activities with other ends that also bear messages is a very blurred frontier. So this modern market scene is pregnant with lessons for us scholars, as we ponder the delicate problem of knowing the oral culture of past centuries. But, fĳirst, let us scan orality’s most salient traits, comparing them all along to the traits of script.

Bandwidth

As the butcher’s stall reminds us, orality, to borrow a term from communications theory, possesses a very wide bandwidth. Let us ponder, fĳirst of all, a mere stream of words, as if, to discourse, words were all that counted. In script, almost always, the string of words is all the reader sees, unless, as in a novel, short story, or modern screenplay, the text adds some indication of delivery’s sounds and gestures: ‘she purred; he replied with piteous moan; with a quiet chuckle she observed; eyes closed, hands raised to heaven, the hermit intoned . . .’

13 Peter Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication (Cambridge, 1987). Introduction 9

I was of a mind to kill him, and so I would have given him a blow to the neck, and if Signor Giulio had not shouted, ‘Back! Back!’ either I or another of us would have fĳinished him offf.14 My Lady, the Duchess answered with a laugh, ‘Sometimes it is fĳitting to joke even with great lords’.15 When he heard this, my friend, slapping himself on the forehead and letting out a bellow of laughter, said to me, ‘By God, brother, now I have just been disabused of a misunderstanding, which led me astray all the long years I’ve known you’.16

Here we do have clues to delivery, but note that none of these scanty glosses delivers volume, pitch, or pace of utterance, and none conjoins gestures snugly to words’ pace and flow. Speakers may use a nearly-infĳinite variety of deliveries of even a single sentence, just by modulating the play of voice. But no more than a Roman butcher does any speaker stop at words: every movement of the body – hands especially, every expression of the mouth and eyes, every movement of the pupils, every breath, every non-verbal cry, as Erving Gofffman calls those wordless sounds we use, adds to the meaning of words uttered.17 Language engages the whole of the speaker, from head to foot. The speaker is present in the speech; the words and the whole act of speaking, all its movements and actions, serve as the speaker’s extension. Words’ power, or weakness, and words’ knowledge, intentions, desires and feelings, cannot for an instant be sundered from the speaker’s own. Despite all this shape and colour, speech, once uttered, is evanescent. It is lost in the breeze. Its sounds drift away, imper- fectly recalled, like a radio which has slipped offf station. Script, meanwhile, has very narrow bandwidth. It is largely disembodied. If a writer wants, as often happens, to embody it, script then demands internal signals, to evoke wisps of the speaker’s absent body. Script is still; it never moves. It can merely awaken thoughts of motion. And script is also silent. But the reader’s mind is often loud, as is the writer’s, and script must labour if it is to command that interior loudness by script-devices that coax or compel the

14 Archivio di Stato di Roma, Governatore, Processi Criminali, busta 38, case 35, fol. 780r, (1557) [A sixteenth-century trial of some soldiers who assaulted the Governor of Rieti]: ‘le vene fanatasi de amazarlo e cossi li ho datta una botta nel collo e se non era el S.or Iulio me ha gridato areto areto o io o qualchunaltro lhaveria fĳinito.’ 15 Castiglione, Il Cortigiano, 2 vols (Venice, 1606), II, p. 103. ‘Replicò la S. Duchessa ridendo. Non si disconuien tal hor vsar le burle ancor co i gran Signori.’ 16 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, 2 vols (Madrid, 2005), I, p. 9. 17 Erving Gofffman, ‘Response Cries’, in hisForms of Talk (Philadelphia, PA, 1981), pp. 78–123. 10 Cohen and Twomey reader’s mind to align itself at least partly with the writer’s interior voice. So script, to re-awaken the lost sounds and even the missing gestures and expressions of an oral moment, may devise internal signals, words that reawaken the dead, quicken the vanished voices, an act of strenuous mental resurrection that oral communication, a busy, facile mimic, needs seldom to perform.

Reciprocity

Unlike script, orality is profoundly reciprocal. We have encountered this trait already, in our reflections on the stories we tell our children and on bardic performances. Now almost always, when speaking, men and women address persons present. But not always. Sometimes, as Gofffman writes, we cry out alone, as when we trip or hurt ourselves, or when startled or afraid, stumbling upon a rattlesnake or alarmed by a speeding car. And at times we speak aloud to ourselves, to absent companions, or to the dead. Prayer is a fascinating special case, as those who pray are confĳident in the presence of a divinity who hears them, but that presence is generally invisible, if sometimes signalled by a holy image or other charismatic artefact, or by other sensory objects, and it is largely silent. And, whether by speech or action, a god may be slow to answer. Now God, and holy beings, do respond to prayer, as Virginia Reinburg’s essay argues. Dialogue, though not prayer’s only motive, is a major one. Prayer, she notes, can take the form of a colloquy, between an audible or thinking speaker and a divine interlocutor. Reciprocity is there, but it is inaudible. The other world may also take its good time. Most prayer is patient with little expectation of instantaneous reply, unless amidst a battle, or, say, storm-tossed at sea, or below an avalanche. That reflection on prayer is useful, illustrating, by prayer’s exceptional patience, the general rule: most oral communication unfolds amidst abundant, swift feedback. When we humans speak to humans, all the while we observe our efffects on our hearers. Some of that observation is deliberate and conscious, but much or most takes place so fast and subtly that, in conscious mind, we never track our observations. Note that what holds for humans holds as well for other creatures we deal with, especially domestic mammals and certain birds. A Canadian hunter we know is a canny wild- turkey caller who puts on the amorous hen-voice to cluck and hoot a wary tom-bird into shotgun range. That is an example from the edge; we have yet to meet a fĳisherman who successfully dialogues with fĳish. Meanwhile, before returning to human-human interaction, ponder awhile the complex dialogue between dog-owners and their dogs, the rich interplay of vocalization, movement, and posture on both sides and the fascinating mimicry, where we humans adjust our own repertoire of sound and body language to match canine idioms Introduction 11 and where dogs, after millennia of dependent co-existence, have evolved an uncanny ability to read and address us humans, even though they make little lexical sense of our words. This meditation on dogs is instructive and far from trivial. Police forces and commandos use dogs not only for their obedience and courage or ferocity, and their sense of smell, but also for their subtle senses of what people are feeling. Our own civilian dogs, though not trained at all, are far quicker than are we to know when a stranger is drunk or emotionally unstable. Social animals, dogs respond to subtle social cues. We would not call those cues oral, unless they involve the voice, but such cues, for us humans as for our canny pets, pervade any oral exchange. We humans, when speaking, continually adjust every aspect of our speech: words, pacing, stress, and gestures, to signals sent back by our hearers and interlocutors. Not all who hear reciprocate in words. A preacher before a congregation, an actor on stage, a lecturer in the classroom (more often in the days before the personal computer put up its barrier-screen), all such speakers, seldom hearing many words back from their audience, remain alert to eyes and faces, sounds or silence, and to the stirring, and even the breathing of the gathering. Laughter, shouts, cries, sobs, and other sounds might be orchestrated by the performer. Carolina Losada’s essay on the preacher Vincent Ferrer provides examples of this rich exchange. What matters for oral performance is that the interplay between speaker and hearers is immediate, continual, and efffective. In the making, no written sermon, play, or lecture, evolving on its author’s silent desk, ever benefĳits from that dialogue and exchange. The composing must carry on in the face of readers’ silence; the best a writer can do is imagine the words’ efffect. Texts are not altogether oblivious to an eventual dialogue, but the textual response is often indirect. To retrieve the dialogic aspects of a spoken sermon, or a speech, for instance, or a scene upon a stage, one must work with elusive hints and subtle clues. Surely the densest interplay between a speaker and a hearer takes place in conversation. A whole sub-discipline of linguistics, Conversation Analysis, has arisen to study just what happens inside conversation.18 Its conclusions abound with deep lessons for historians of orality. Note, fĳirst, that some forms of talk are never conversation. Warning shouts, battle cries, stallholders’ pitching of wares, hurrahs for athletes and roars of the goal-hungry crowd, lamentations, keenings, and yelps of pain, the yowls of infants and their minders’ crooning, shouts of greeting or farewell, proclamations, speeches, military commands

18 Jack Sidnell, ‘Comparative Perspectives in Conversational Analysis’, in his Conversation Analysis: Comparative Perspectives (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 3–27; Ian Hutchby & Robin Woofffĳitt,Conversation Analysis: Principles, Practices, and Applications (Cambridge, 1998). 12 Cohen and Twomey and orders to a workforce, for instance, are not conversations.19 Generally, nobody answers, or, where an answer is called for, it produces no conversation. To join the wailing or hurl back a counter-shout is a diffferent oral response. At the centre of Conversation Analysis is the phenomenon of ‘turn-taking’, the regulation of who gets to speak when. Conversation Analysis sees conversation as a beguiling amalgam of agonism and cooperation. Agonism arises because almost everybody wants a say, speakers often striving to hold the floor against others struggling to seize it, so there is a subtle battle to break in and, once one enters, to keep the flow of talk in one’s possession in the face of rivals. It is a verbal cousin of children’s rambunctious ‘king of the mountain’. Meanwhile, conversation is also collaborative, as protagonists often jump in, furnishing missing words: ‘that was when, that was when, we all went to. . . .’ ‘to Birmingham!’ ‘Ah, yes, to Birmingham . . .’. The adepts of Conversation Analysis record, fĳilm, and observe conversations, and then put down, in script, a painstakingly elaborate coded record, not only of the words, but also of their timing. And they strive to include the paralinguistic, or perhaps linguistic but non-verbal, messages as well: laughter, breathing, clucking sounds, movements of the hands, nodding of the head. Their notation records pauses, loudness, length of syllables, shifts in pitch and other moves of voice. One lesson: speech is extraordinarily complex. Another lesson: speech is, in its orderly way, remarkably disorderly, or, perhaps, vice versa. A third lesson: the feedback is swift and dense. A fourth: no matter how many symbols Conversational Analysis devises, no script record can ever catch and freeze the whole of what rushes by. Not that the science is futile; indeed, were one to encode and qualify every single thing that mattered, analysis would buckle under the weight of evidence. There are reasons to omit things, but the very abundance of what scholars do include suggests the richness of oral interchange. Moreover, that very richness poses problems for all us historians and scholars of early literature; how to trace those subtle oral things no writer, either now or long ago, could ever catch.

Situatedness

Orality is set in time and place. An oral utterance has a physical, temporal, social, and semiotic setting. Script, usually, has little or none. Monumental

19 Scunthorpe Council recently fĳined one stallholder for ‘calling offf or pitching’ his wares in the indoor market in December 2012, Daily Mail. The reason given: it was too annoying to the public. The stallholder claimed it was an ancient right to bring the attention of the public to his goods and announce his prices. Introduction 13 inscriptions, on tombs, on buildings, do have locus, as do grafffĳiti. But, more often than not, script sits on a portable medium: paper and parchment travel. Thanks to this portability, script was often a suitable medium for gift exchange and sale, and many books and papers ended up exhibited in places that enshrined or framed and glossed them.20 Meanwhile, script can describe or evoke a setting for an utterance, but that evocation, or description, however skilled the ekphrasis, will always be a mere sketch. ‘And from the pulpit, he said . . .’, ‘And, surveying her lover’s pale corpse, the maiden cried out. . . .’. Orality, however, has a richly complex physical setting, which conditions and glosses the message. At table in the tavern, around the embers of the camp fĳire, between the sheets, at the public washtubs, in the confessional: such places all helped set words’ weight and meaning. The setting was a signifĳier, both formally and informally, as we see with Matthias Bähr’s villagers gathering in the tavern to recite their legal grievances; Richard Blakemore’s mariners cursing on deck; Liv Helene Willumsen’s Norwegian villagers memorizing witchcraft in their coastal settlements; Susana Gala’s Spanish women teaching love-charms: all mark places where speaking took place. Formal settings shaped rhetoric and set boundaries for permissible, condign, risqué, or insubordinate speech. Are we in council with the monarch or is this a mere conversation about policy? Is this a pilgrimage, or an idle stroll? Script could record such matters, and often did. And script, as object, most certainly often had its own setting, on loose pages, in books, carved solemnly on monuments, scrawled casually on walls and so on. Script might however sometimes illustrate place inside its covers, as for example when a miniaturist captured an image of the owner kneeling in his or her accustomed place of prayer, praying the accustomed prayers. Book history is a rich subject. But then, for orality, there was more: the furnishings, the arras, the ambient sound, the atmosphere, the acoustics and rival sounds (the clash of arms, the tolling of bells, thunder, drunken song, chickens clucking), the smells, whether of incense or rotting vegetables, all such things gave oral speech a setting, while, in script’s interior especially, and its formal setting too, such things generally fell away. Yet, paradoxically, on script we rely to trace things oral. For orality has lost its ambience with the passing years, whilst script might just retain it. Incense might just cling to the venerable pages of a lectionary.

20 Filippo L.C. De Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford, 2007), for excellent examples of the place of manuscript exchange in the gift-economy of Venice. 14 Cohen and Twomey

Attachment to Persons and Their Dealings

Most importantly, orality has a social setting; every utterance has its speaker or speakers and its hearers. Here, script sometimes does take pains to lay things out, but certainly not always. An oral utterance took resonance from the one who uttered. How old, young, able, experienced, astute, connected, well- placed, and confĳident is this speaker? How is he or she dressed, how healthy, how robust, how sane? Listeners imbibe such things, swiftly, instinctively. They respond to complexion, body tone, the quality of teeth, the smell of breath and body, and to posture, gait, musculature, suppleness, coifffure, timbre of voice, carefully constructed signals from cloth and clothing, strength of mind and countless other cues that tell just who a speaker is and gloss the import and impact of the words delivered. Our ears and eyes are acutely attuned to subtle signals about prestige, and to those favourites of sociology: wealth, power, gender, race, and station. Not only that, but also, when possible, the hearer takes into account whatever he or she knows about the history and present circumstances of the speaker. Script tends to strip most such things away, and to offfer words, disembodied, devoid, or nearly devoid, of the personhood of the speaker. The intimate connection of oral practices to persons means that, mostly, utterances are transactional. People often speak to have an efffect, and to adjust relations with their fellows. Utterances are often gambits in the dense game of social interaction; they stake positions; very often, they work as gifts, or as gifts’ obverse, injurious acts. Both gifts and hurtful actions, as gift-theory is swift to argue, entail reciprocity, any offfering demanding a condign response in kind or measure. Therefore, speech entangles interlocutors in webs of social and material debt; that is one of its chief functions. Ponder courtship’s blandishments, a merchant’s ploy, a drinking partner’s cajolery, an enemy’s raillery, or prayers chanted or slowly read aloud to God, a poem performed, accompanied by music, before king and court, and it comes clear how transactional is so much of speech. Script is not immune to transaction, witness its blandishments and mutterings; indeed, medieval and early modern script, which was especially prone to social gesturing, sought to mirror the intensely social habits of speech.

Orality’s Own Epistemology

As Walter Ong notes, with great efffect among scholars, the great gulf between the spoken word and the word in writing lies in the ephemeral nature of Introduction 15 speech.21 No sooner is speech uttered than it floats away like a feather on the breeze, vanishes into silence, and into the maze of the half-remembered. Script, meanwhile, is often preserved through the ages, so long as fĳire, seepage, moths, mice, or bleaching sunlight, rain’s corrosion and keepers’ negligence fail to damage it. Providing the words are thought worth keeping by someone in the fĳirst place, of course. Script’s value, fĳirst offf, is its durability; what it loses in bandwidth, it regains in permanence, which is why it sometimes does preserve the evanescent spoken word. Script’s second great strength is its capacity for complex order. Speech is utterly one-dimensional; speakers string it like beads on time’s thread. Script, by virtue of perdurance, has more than one dimension; it permits cross-reference, glosses, and schemata of great complexity. That is why, Jack Goody argues, it took the alphabet to open the door to Greek philosophy, with its abstractions and overarching schemes of cosmic order.22 As Ong has argued, the ephemeral nature of the spoken word imposes a whole mnemonic science: a speaker, desirous of impressing an enduring memory of things said, uses direct address to hearers, lays on repetition, luxuriates in proverbs and old saws, deals in familiar types, formulae, and topoi, to lay out a world easily evoked and readily grasped. An orator or storyteller without notes needs an art of memory, a set of reminders, often familiar, to help propound a long or complex tale or statement. He or she also requires a set of handy formulae to fĳill lines which would serve for any warrior or any beauteous maiden. Gala, in this volume, shows us love-charms with powerful mnemonic structures and hypnotic narrative devices. Clearly they evolved, but still held their shape for centuries. Like these charms, all speech, to Ong, is conservative, less prone to invent than to modulate, in the mode of a jazz musician or an epic poet, the original Beowulf bard for instance. The oral hearkens to the known, whether memorized or formulaic, while, for Ong, perhaps correctly, script is abler at inventing things quite new. The oral thus has an epistemology, and a sense of space and time – what we might call an historiography; its world is populated by the familiar, with space and time somewhat flattened, reduced to wondrous, often legendary simulacra of our own world here. That epistemology, like so many other traits of speech, would make its mark on medieval and early modern literature.

21 Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word (London and New York, 1982). 22 Jack Goody & Ian Watt, ‘The Consequences of Literacy’, in Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. by Jack Goody (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 27–68. 16 Cohen and Twomey

The Oral and the Written in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

As hard as it is to treat medieval and early modern Europe as a single place, from Muscovy to Lisbon, from Dublin to Sarajevo, it is worth a stab, for there was, for orality, a period context, or condition. Its prime traits were the relative scarcity of writing (despite the rapid spread of print), the immaturity of print’s institutions, the need to communicate with the many illiterate, the solemnity and power of the spoken word, and the great appetite for using language to entangle and engage persons. The subject, thus, is vast; we venture here only a hasty flight across uneven terrain. It might seem strange, for the epoch of Gutenberg’s portentous invention, to stress script’s still-frail apparatus. After all, book history makes clear how swift was progress, as printing houses and editorial scholarship took wing and books, pamphlets, proclamations, pious tracts, and learned treatises spread across the continent. Even those groups which might be thought reluctant to embrace such a new mode of dissemination in the late Middle Ages has- tened to use it, such as a long-forgotten abbess in Valencia, keen to send her convent predecessor’s book to a queen.23 Print also stimulated new uses for manuscript. Alongside the new medium, handwritten copy was retained for homely functions. Hand-copied prayers, such as those studied in this volume by Reinburg, handwritten books of household hints, carefully drafted accounts of a family’s income, outlay, and purchases, and pharmacists’ recipes for medications abound; some such handwritten things may even have looked to printed exemplars.24 By more modern standards, even in 1700, print’s place was small and its machinery of production, distribution, and conservation remained primitive. The world remained very oral: news, lore, command, and memory still often went by mouth. Press runs were short and, in the absence of fĳirm copyright, texts were easily purloined and altered, much as they had been in the Middle Ages. Book markets were small and often occasional. There were, of course, popular print runs. Chivalry novels, devoured by women readers, were eagerly transferred from manuscript by enterprising printers, whilst lives of Christ, like Isabel de Villena’s ran to fĳirst, second, and even third editions. Many households could affford a book of hours, once print brought down the cost; Reinburg demonstrates in her study of France that quite ordinary families possessed one. Meanwhile, libraries were few, confĳined to the nobility and religious

23 Isabel de Villena, Vita Christi, ed. by Ramon Miquel i Planas, 3 vols (Barcelona, 1916), I, p. 6. 24 De Vivo, Information and Communication, offfers many examples of the surviving role of written copies in the information economy of Venice. Introduction 17 houses, and to an occasional academy or school, and seldom open to a general public. Archives and repositories, whether public or private, remained scarce, hard of access, and open to vagaries of neglect and damage. Thanks to print, and a spread in schooling, there was indeed far more writing, of letters, mem- oirs, diaries, records of conquest, how-to books, tales of travel and of marvels or discoveries, and observations on the shape of the natural and supernatural realms. Nevertheless, for all its impact on the oral world, the zone of print, and script, was, by our standards, modest in scope and impact. What is more, print often had to rely on the oral to promote it. So, when, following the discovery of the Americas, cofffee-houses sprang up across Europe, it was there that pamphlets were mulled over, spoken about, and there that interest was stimulated by debate. Similarly, in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, political rhymes and slogans passed from mouths to broadsheets, and, thence, back to the hub- bub of street and tavern. Meanwhile, a great many Europeans could not read, or write, or could barely do so. Accordingly, unlike now, the sphere of writing had to engage, continually, with the zone of speech. So civic authorities resorted to their cri- ers, who, heralded by bell, drum, or trumpet, bellowed out the most recent decrees or news from the paper in their hands. Churches looked to preachers to broadcast teachings, and authorities often exploited those same preachers to spread news of civic note or to promote civic feast days to replace the medieval Church processions, as Sonia Suman fĳinds. Merchants used mountebanks to mime the virtues of their merchandise, and sellers cried out wares to markets. Many a news item or story spread by means of gatherings of listeners, hearing a reader.25 A marvellous seventeenth-century painting from Brescia shows a room of girls, each one making lace upon her work-pillow, while one girl reads to all, helping busy fĳingers by fĳilling minds with words from print. The complex relations between speech and script were especially clear in legal papers; many a notarial act recorded for posterity verbal transactions, using precise formulae and careful statements of who was present, when, and where, to freeze oral agreements in a social setting, as ink on paper. And trials, in Catholic Europe where the law strove for verbatim records, showed the dense interplay between speech and writing. Many suspects and witnesses could not read or write. While they spoke, in response to the court’s often-menacing questions, a scribe took pains to catch their words and sometimes, even, their mien and gestures. But then, for confĳirmation, the court read back the words

25 Similar gatherings, albeit around a single radio, continued well into the twentieth century and marked for example hearing of news about the world war or the day of victory. 18 Cohen and Twomey on paper and recorded, in writing, the witness’s oral assent to the written version of things spoken. The dialogue between speech and writing could be complex indeed. We have seen an occasion (in 1556) where villagers who came to Rome, standing in an excited throng on St Peter’s porch, made an earnest petition to the Pope.26 A literate villager with notarial training wrote down their gist and, at once, read back his draft. The crowd gave assent and soon both paper and delegation were in the presence of the Pope. Then, back at the village some weeks later, came time for a more formal paper for a judge sent from Rome to hear those grievances out, so the author of the petition read back to the villagers his St Peter’s draft, and they chimed in with a long list of new ideas. This the peasant scribe recorded, item by item, as a fĳirst draft, and then the village leaders and their scribe appeared before the judge and his own more offfĳicial notary, who read aloud this new second draft. At that second reading, again the villagers added further words and items. These the court notary recorded in his own, somewhat more polished and precise Italian, which he read back to the assembled petitioners. They assented, and their formal complaint therewith entered the court’s records as the authentic, legal vox populi. Many a written record of oral thought and diction must have had a history no less fĳilled with earnest dialogue and complex accommodation and translation. The incompleteness of medieval and early modern literacy made such busy trafffĳic necessary. Pre-modern Europe was of mixed minds about the written word. It still often preferred speech to text. As Michael Clanchy has written, in his subtle meditation on the spread of writing in the English eleventh and twelfth centuries, many were the reasons to prefer speech to writing.27 To an oral world where men and women often knew one another, the written word seemed disembodied. Not only did it lack tone and voice; it lacked a speaker. Who was to vouch or swear for it, as a person, exposed to the gaze and ears and hands of others? How, for all the prestige and grammar-glamour, even the magic, of writing, was one to trust a lonely word? The solution, for script, was to reach out for traits that both elevated and personalized it, via opening rubrics in Latin, via seals, signatures, ceremonious scripts and layouts, as with chancery parchments, via

26 Thomas V. Cohen, ‘Communal Thought, Communal Words, and Communal Rites in a Sixteenth-century Village Rebellion’, in Sociability and its Discontents: Civil Society, Social Capital, and their Alternatives in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by Nicholas Eckstein & Nicholas Terpstra (Turnhout, 2009), pp. 23–50, for this peasant march on Rome. 27 Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (Cambridge MA, 1979). Introduction 19 verbal gestures that evoked the habits of speech, and to wrap itself in procedures that strove, via their scrupulous observance of good form, to reassure the reader that they deserved trust. Another of script’s prestige-ploys was to use a lofty, alien language that soared above the mere vernacular, Latin, for instance, or, for a while in England, Norman French. If script did gain its medieval footing, it was because it was much more durable and copious than oral memory, and less slippery. Nevertheless, many of the considerations that led Clanchy’s medieval English people to prefer speech to writing remained weighty four and fĳive centuries later. Much like eleventh-century England, Europe retained orality’s desire to see words as lodged in persons, even down to early modern times. A word without its speaker, or a writer without his or her very human self, lost credit. In a world of villages, towns, and modest cities, everyone tended to know who speakers were and knew as well, fairly often, their age, sex, wealth, prestige, knowledge, experience, position, and moral character, so that words took on much of their speaker’s circumstance and nature. In oral transactions, the urge to link words to persons was usually swiftly satisfĳied: listeners observed the speaker atten- tively. When it came to writing, in the fĳirst age of print, authors often inclined to locate themselves. The very personhood behind a script weighed heavily on the scales that assayed its message. Yet, paradoxically, early medieval authors often failed to identify themselves and, even at the end of the Middle Ages, Íñigo López de Mendoza, Marqués de Santillana, a nobleman and poet, remained ostensibly ambivalent about his craft.28 This desire to place the author behind a written message appears very clearly in the rise, florescence, and eclipse of a genre we might call ‘the relation’, the report of things strange, distant, or otherwise notable.29 The relation was very distinctly an early modern genre; the Middle Ages had nothing quite like it. Its medieval origins traced to legal deposition, and the name itself is probably Venetian, referring initially to the reports of returned ambassadors to that city’s senate. Copies of such reports circulated, despite prohibitions, and there grew up a lively commerce in manuscript or printed copies, so the term spread widely, attaching itself for instance, famously, to the reports of Jesuit missions to distant places. As a literary artefact, the relation presupposes

28 See Julian Weiss’s study of Santillana’s literary theory and his self-justifĳication, in The Poet’s Art: Literary Theory in Castile 1400–60, Medium Aevum Monographs, New Series, 14 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 165–228. 29 Thomas V. Cohen, & Germaine Warkentin, eds, ‘Things not easily believed: Introducing the Early Modern Relation’, Renaissance and Reformation, 34 (1–2) (Winter-Spring, 2011): 3–243. 20 Cohen and Twomey a relater, a person who, by virtue of experience, standing, and competence, vouches for the otherwise suspect truth of reports of things not easily believed. It is fascinating how, as reportage, the relation gradually went under, supplanted, with the Enlightenment, by another model of reporting, the ‘article’, where the person of the observer was progressively efffaced, supplanted by the reliability of methodical observation. The culmination, for the sciences, was a prose so devoid of persons, so stripped of all orality, that the very rhetoric banished any ‘I’ or ‘we’. Passives reigned, by their very impersonality validating the objectivity and reliability of the science. And that, still, is how such writing works today. Orality, then, desired persons in words, whether they were written or uttered. Meanwhile, early modern Europe also desired words in persons and their actions, to a degree that we no longer encounter. That is, given oral habits, words spoken bore a weight, a transactional power, no longer often seen. As is clear from prose narrative and legal papers, things said could have weighty social consequences. That is why promises, curses, spells, blessings, prayers, greetings, and words of praise and blame are so central to early modern tales of dealings. And that is why, before the courts, suspects were so keen to argue that of course they had been merely joking, for courts of law, and of public opinion, took spoken words very, very seriously. Intercourse, together with verba de futuro – ‘do not cry my dear, I will marry you’ – sufffĳiced till Trent, and often longer, to snare a husband.30 Not that early modern Europeans always spoke the truth, with unalloyed intent, but one tended, in a slippery world, to act as if spoken, and written, words were binding. Moreover, reputation, formed by words spoken over time, was paramount.31 As Gala’s, Willumsen’s, and Blakemore’s essays show, Inquisitions and other courts were keen to sweep up words: wrong speech could even lead a speaker to the gallows or the stake. Words, in a semi-oral world, were gravid with social, political, and cosmic

30 Sandra Cavallo & Barbara Cerruti, ‘Female Honor and the Social Control of Reproduction in Piedmont between 1600 and 1800’, in Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective (Selections from Quaderni Storici), ed. by Edward Muir & Guido Ruggiero, trans. M.A. Gallucci (Baltimore, Md, & London, 1990). See also Thomas V. Cohen, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 2004), pp. 201–227, for a story involving such calculations by the court and by a girl and her family. 31 In the Kingdom of Aragon, when women had a good name, attested by their neighbours, they were able to give testimony. Women of ill-repute were not permitted to speak. See Marie A. Kelleher, The Measure of Woman: Law and Female Identity in the Crown of Aragon, The Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia, PA, 2010). For the late medieval and early modern jurisprudence of reputation, see Thelma S. Fenster & Daniel Lord Smail, Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY, 2003). Introduction 21 meaning. They bound persons to one another, to the polity, to the saints, and the devil, and to God. With its fragile institutions, early modern Europe took refuge in social devices to bind persons to each other. Fervidly, Europeans relentlessly courted ‘entanglement’, angling for succour, protection, information, support, and advancement, in the face of many dangers and uncertainties.32 To entangle one another, they slid into exchanges, weaving webs of debt and obligation of every shape and nature. Some such exchanges involved goods and money. Others entailed services or bids for payment: I will put in a word for you; I will advance your son or help marry offf your daughter; can you give me a gift of money?33 Or, as in the Celestina, where the heroine is keen to bind all to her through serving their deepest desires, ‘how happy I would be to see you come to my poor house and have some light relief with a few girls’.34 Other gambits profffered information, scarce and precious, in a semi-opaque environment.35 Indeed the paucity of fĳirm information is one more trait of early modern orality. The scarcity of print made news a prized commodity, to sell, or trade in exchange for gratitude and further entanglement. In this entangling social and political milieu, words served as gifts, inviting reciprocity, in counter-words or assorted other token. The gift of literature, an author’s copy for instance, fĳit this model.36 That is why the Renaissance habit of praise and blame, of hon- ouring and shaming, was so prominent. Persons, intimately attached as they were to their own words in the pre-modern fashion, profffered them as tokens of exchange in the scramble to build, bolster, or adjust their human relations. ‘You mean nothing to me!’ ‘You cur!’ ‘Had anybody told me that today I had to come to jail, I would have pulled his beard!’ ‘Let the fĳires of St Anthony burn

32 Renato Ago, Economia barocca: mercato e istituzioni nella Roma del Seicento (Rome and Bari, 1998) lays out the social and economic functions of webs of mutual obligation. I hope to write elsewhere of the wider social uses of similar skeins of exchange. 33 See, for example, Alfonso Álvaro de Villasandino, ‘Onrador e muy onrado’, Cancionero de Juan Alfonso de Baena, ed. by Brian Dutton & Joaquín González Cuenca (Madrid, 1993), p. 210. As late as the 1660s, the diary of Samuel Pepys is a scrupulous record of the diarist’s uneasy awareness of the awkward and sometimes crooked obligations he incurs on account of the courtesies, services, and material gifts he so eagerly receives. 34 Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina: Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, ed. by Dorothy S. Severin, with foreword by Stephen Gilman (Madrid, 1969), p. 121. 35 This is a major contention of De Vivo, Information and Communication. 36 See the ‘Prohemio y carta’ to the Constable of Portugal which accompanies a copy of Santillana’s poems, Poesías completas, ed. by Maxim P.A.M. Kerkhof & Ángel Gómez Moreno, Clásicos Castalia, 270 (Madrid, 2003), pp. 641–660. 22 Cohen and Twomey me!’37 In this collection, Blakemore’s essay on English shipboard language has a myriad of examples of such outbursts, as has the Dumolyn – Haemers article on subversive political talk, poetry, and song in urban Flanders. As Daniel Lord Smail has noted, ‘hatred was a social institution’ and enemies, a luxury, functioned as social capital.38 Whoever can affford many enemies entangles many friends, enemies of those enemies. So not all entanglement involved gifts; there was the anti-gift, character assassination, or, of course, the knife itself. That knife brings to mind one other discursive habit already well established in the Middle Ages: things spoke. They spoke volumes. Many a gesture had the weight of a solemn declaration. A suitor lays a necklace around a woman’s neck.39 That necklace does not just symbolize his claim on her; rather, it becomes that claim, and if she does not remove it at once, she becomes his, almost ineluctably. An angry man lays a hand on his dagger, not to draw it but to signal rage.40 A father, shocked at the murder of his pregnant daughter’s seducer and despairing of the compensation money that would restore her honour by marrying her offf, takes her by the elbow to the seducer’s corpse and, under the eyes of his whole village, cuts her throat.41 Her blood washes both father and daughter clean of clinging shame. A rival bedecks a door with cuckold’s horns, and those horns, again, are the house’s shame.42 A lord has a widow’s lover stufffed into a bag and paraded through the village, and then invites the village lads to rape the widow; the bag is no mere blindfold.43 A lord takes jurisdiction of a village, and sends his representative to carry out the transfer. The agent arrives, opens and closes the village gate, and then goes

37 ‘You mean nothing to me!’ comes from a fraternal quarrel in Rome in 1557, see Cohen, Words and Deeds, p. 101; ‘ “Ea, canalla”, respondió Don Quijote’, Cervantes, Don Quijote, II, p. 995; for the beard-pull boast (Rome, 1557) and the invocation of St Anthony’s fĳire (Rome, 1559), see Cohen, Words and Deeds, pp. 49, 210. 38 Daniel Lord Smail, ‘ “Hatred as a Social Institution in Late-Medieval Society”, Speculum, 76 (1) (2001): 90–126. 39 Archivio di Stato di Roma, Governatore, Tribunale Criminale, Processi, busta 38., case 3 (1558), fff. 39v-404: ‘One day the said messer Flaminio, in my presence, laid onto the neck of Livia a false chain [i.e., false gold], on her neck, and told her that she should accept it for his love.’ Flaminio was a judge, and Livia and her sister, who speaks here, were prisoners, ill placed to fend offf a predatory judge. See Cohen’s essay in this volume for the story. 40 Cohen, Love and Death, p. 92. 41 Archivio di Stato di Roma, Governatore, Tribunale Criminale, Processi, 34 (1558), fol. 45r. 42 Elizabeth S. Cohen & Thomas V. Cohen, ‘Open and Shut: The Social Meanings of the Renaissance Italian House’, Bard Graduate School of Design Journal, 9 (1) (Fall-Winter, 2001–2002): 61–84, for assorted symbolic insults to doors, horns among them. 43 Irene Fosi, Papal Justice: Subjects and Courts in the Papal State, 1500–1750 (Washington D.C., 2011), p. 89. Introduction 23 to the church, and having opened and closed its door too, pulls the rope to ring the bell.44 Such speaking actions from the past are not lost even today, for when, in Anglican churches, new clergy are installed, as part of their taking offfĳice they must sound the bell and, like that necklace, modern rings still bind to love. So we still have our pregnant ceremonies, even now, but early-modern Europeans had far more than we. Even when wordless, all such actions spoke. They attached to the gestural habits of an oral world, where, for solemnity and import, words and things intertwined in tight embrace.

Epistemology for Scholars of the Oral

With all these difffering manifestations of the oral, mostly thus far studied in isolation, can there be any possible single epistemology for orality and, if one were created, how would it look? This book sets out to explore interstices between fĳields of knowledge and to draw together scholarship on, for instance, epic and troubadour poetry copied on manuscript and written reconstruc- tions of oral epics or ballads, and on preaching and performance, on private prayer, on rumour and gossip, on narrative and on the spoken word, be it as art or as demotic social performance, on courtroom depositions captured by the meticulous record-keeping of the Inquisition or lay courts. Our volume thus blends literary study with social and cultural history. Many of its essays deal with the detection of the oral via written documents. Bähr, for instance, asks how we can hear the voices of South German villagers in legal papers; Gala excavates trials for women’s spoken love charms; Willumsen explores the judicial record for networks of gossip about witchcraft in the coastal settlements of northernmost Norway; Horodowich likewise explores gossip and then asks just how Venetians classifĳied its varieties; Blakemore dredges the admiralty courts for shipboard speech; Dumolyn and Haemers bring back the wry or defĳiant political voices of Flemish townsmen; Snow sets gossip and its manipulation at the heart of the Celestina; Reinburg scours books of hours for habits of lay prayer; both Suman and Régent-Susini seek to bring sermons back to life. In these essays, the subject is speech, and the written record acts as both screen and conduit. What then are the barriers to smooth transmission, and what are the scholar’s devices for skirting them? The issues are several: did a given written record preserve spoken words or alter them? And how can we tell? That is the main, most urgent question. And, if it altered speech, then how?

44 Archivio di Stato di Roma, Sforza-Cesarini, Pergamene, I, 852, 21–22 (June 6, 1561): this is a notarized act of possesso of an Italian village, where all the ceremonies of opening, closing, and ringing appear in due order. 24 Cohen and Twomey

But there are many other questions. Aside from the words themselves, there comes the nature of their delivery, and here barriers abound, for it is the rare written record that attends to delivery. How did a preacher preach? How did a lover recite his poetry? How did a woman say a love charm? In such matters, scholars usually must scramble for rare hints about delivery. Pre-modern literature sometimes does furnish not the actual speeches queried, but others like them; images in plays and tales of how a lover speaks might help, or tales about insulting gestures around a scufffle, as, famously, the thumb-biting in Act 1, scene 1 of Romeo and Juliet. And preachers’ manuals often expound techniques for delivery, and, sometimes, accounts by a sermon’s witnesses offfer further hints. So, in such matters, reconstruction of the missing bandwidth requires inference from sources that depict other speeches. The sole exception to the records’ usual taciturnity is the occasional aside in the legal record, where a punctilious scribe might cite tears, sighs, blushes or pallor, outbreaks of sweat, stammering, hesitation, or anxious, febrile movements of the hands. Meanwhile, for the setting, costume, posture, and gestural vocabulary of oratory, prints, drawings and paintings can furnish hints: what did an ambassador wear, and how did he bow and gesture before a monarch; how did a preacher lean and gesticulate from his pulpit? Also, sometimes, a church or palace survives with its acoustics little altered; see Suman’s query into the precise outdoor setting for famous London sermons. In short, any stab at full reconstruction, vain desire but worthy goal, must mine a wide variety of sources and make nimble inference from clues. One task of scholars, then, is to turn to the written record, and to its sup- plements, to ferret out the nature of speech itself. A second is to quiz literary sources, asking how much they still bear marks of the world of speech. In a time when theorists preached verisimilitude, art aspired to imitate life. There, the questions are legion. There is speed of delivery and vocabulary: does literature capture speech as people used it? The oral, however, does not only pervade literature in this obvious way. There is oral rhetoric: does literature capture, if not the words themselves, the habits of address of speech? Does it pick up orality’s curiously promiscuous intimacy of persons with words, and things? And then there is content: does literature flaunt subjects typical of speech, as Snow argues in his essay on gossip in the Celestina? And then there are questions easily scoured from Ong, who argues that the oral had its habits of narration, more often cyclical than linear, as in many epics. So one can ask of literature: is its narratology shaped by that of speech? Or, to stay with Ong, what of its habits of characterization? Ong holds that the oral indulges in character, in types, not in personalities. So there might be an oralist psychology, a view of motivation. And, again with Ong, the oral is given less to sche- Introduction 25 mata than to genealogies, so our inquiry can look to a large Weltanschauung, an image of the basic structure and patterns of existence. And, fĳinally, there comes the matter of the attachment of tale to teller, the desire to give words a social persona, and to engage the reader in all those entangling acts that glue society and polity. So one might look for orality in dedications, among other places, and in a general picture, in plays and stories, of how men and women used language to rearrange and secure their worlds. In short, the quest for the oral is more than a matter of hunting for themes and story lines; it opens up a plethora of inquiries. Let us begin then with the matter of how oral art might fĳind its way onto script’s page. Who was it who fĳirst put oral narrative into writing, turning oral tales into written poetry? And what transformation did that transfer work? The move, from original creation to eventual writing, was no simple thing. The poets who set ancient sagas and epics on manuscript were unlikely share the background of the bards of old.45 An exception: some of the troubadour poets might have become clerics and then written down their old oral compositions. But this seems an unlikely explanation of how the oral and written art interfaced, in the absence of clear evidence that such troubadour clerics ever existed.46 Further, many scholarly proponents of the primacy of oral composition scorn the written as somehow second best, although they acknowledge that writing down the poems did save archaic forms from being lost.47 In scholars, a preference for the oral, as somehow more genuine, scants the creativity of those who recorded, revised, or just wrote poetry. Our purpose here, however, is not to appraise the oral, but just to place it, and to trace its influence on what appeared in writing. The troubadour, an oral poet typical of royal and noble courts, depended for his livelihood on singing and accompanying lyric verse. Vestiges of the songs he may have performed surface in twelfth- and thirteenth-century histories, proof that the modern separation between poetry and history hardly applied in the medieval period.48 Each romance is a piece in constant evolution, sometimes

45 Menéndez Pidal, for example, in his day argued that juglares, or poets skilled in oral composition, served as a model for clerics, Poesía juglaresca, p. 352. 46 Albert B. Lord, ‘Oral Composition and “Oral Residue” in the Middle Ages’, in Oral Tradition, ed. by W.F.H. Nicolaisen, pp. 7–29. 47 Goody, The Interface, p. 285. 48 Joseph Falaky Nagy discusses the way oral poetry is preserved in Welsh prose narratives, ‘A Leash and an Englyn in the Medieval Welsh Arthurian Tale Culhwch ac Olwen’, in New Directions, ed. by Mark C. Amodio, pp. 36–53, at p. 242, whilst Menéndez Pidal traced vestiges of epic poetry in prose chronicles in Spain, Reliquias de la poesía épica española (Madrid, 1951). 26 Cohen and Twomey appearing, as so often with oral fluidity, in diffferent forms in neighbouring regions.49 People began collecting troubadour romances from the sixteenth century onward, and, in some areas, these continue to be collected.50 Some nineteenth- and twentieth-century collections aver that such poems are somehow more authentic than other types of poetry.51 But any attempt to pin down and evaluate authentic oral models, if such there were, for written literature, is fraught with problems. And if there were an oral original in whole or part or literary aspect, that fact in no way would impute its aesthetic authority or greater authenticity. In some medievalists, the drive to establish literary genres, such as the chanson de geste or the lai, as originally oral reflects eagerness to claim for these texts a raw immediacy in their original context, as a foil to the arch artifĳiciality and ironic distance of other (written) genres, most notably courtly romance.52 Meanwhile, other scholars, oral-agnostics or sceptics, have seen the pursuit of orality in lyric as pursuit of a red herring that distorts how medieval poetry came about.53 Any quest for

49 Diego Catalán, ‘The Artisan Poetry of the Romancero’, Oral Tradition, 2 (1987): 399–423, at p. 401. 50 See, for example, Manuel Alvar’s fĳieldwork onromances he collected in the Granada area in ‘Una recogida de romances en Andalucía (1948–68)’, in El romancero en la tradición oral moderna. Primer coloquio internacional, ed. by Diego Catalán & Samuel Armistead (Madrid, 1972), pp. 95–116; and also his El romancero: tradicionalidad y pervivencia, 2nd edn, corregida y muy aumentada (Barcelona, 1970). Ramón Menéndez Pidal also collected romances, see his Flor nueva de romances viejos que recogió de la tradición moderna y antigua (Madrid, 1928). For sixteenth-century interest in collecting romances, see, for example, Pedro Moncayo, Flor de varios romances nueuos: primera, segunda y tercera parte: agora nueuamente recopilados puestos por su orden, y añadidos muchos romances que se han cantado después de la primera impression (Madrid, 1595). Collections of songs or carols can be found across the continent. See, in France, Parnasse des muses ou recueil des plus belles chansons à danser (1641); in England, K. Palti, ‘An Unpublished Fifteenth- Century Carol Collection: Oxford, Lincoln College MS Lat. 141’, Medium Aevum, 77 (2008): 260–278. 51 See, for example, Julio Cejador y Frauca, La verdadera poesía castellana: floresta de la antigua lírica popular, 9 vols (Madrid, 1921–30). Bruce W. Wardropper praises the work of pioneer collectors like Cejador, as well as that of Blecua and Alonso, in his ‘The Reluctant Novice: A Critical Approach to Spanish Traditional Song’, Romanic Review, 55 (1964): 241– 247, at pp. 241–242. 52 ‘Fictions of Orality in Troubadour Poetry’, in Orality and Literacy in the Middle Ages: Essays on a Conjunction and its Consequences, ed. by Mark Chinca & Christopher Young, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 12 (Turnhout, 2005), pp. 119–138, at p. 121. 53 Oral performance of lyric is roundly rejected by Simon Gaunt, Retelling the Tale: An Introduction to Medieval French Literature (London, 2001); he summarizes his arguments in ‘Fictions of Orality’, p. 119. Introduction 27 oral origins, in the written records we now have, may prove a blind alley; in any case, it is no straight, smooth, well-lit thoroughfare. There is no doubt that songs and epic poems were sung across Europe, although we no longer know exactly what was sung, when, and where; there is also no doubt that some songs and poems were written down, sometimes as historical records, by historians of the day, leaving a corpus that some scholars have fruitfully explored. Also, certain poets composed using written forms, but the relationship of their compositions to putative original versions is hard to establish. Pursuing these vestiges as somehow more authentic than the version preserved in medieval codices is certainly imprudent; Gaunt has warned against the hunt for a putative Ur-version, sung by troubadours, to the exclusion of all else.54 He flags how important it is not to reject the literary sources we have as less valid than previous, oral traditions, which are no longer accessible and indeed may never have existed. The same arguments have run their course for Hispanic literature, as for French and other traditions. Did the French Chansons de l’aube [songs of the dawn], the Galician-Portuguese Cantigas de escarnho y maldezir [songs of insult and badmouthing] and the Cantigas de amigo [Lover’s Songs] originate in an oral genre or were they merely a courtly game?55 Did the serranillas, poems about mountain girls who accosted travellers in the mountain ranges of Castile, now preserved in the collections of Íñigo López de Mendoza, the Marqués de Santillana, and in the Libro de Buen Amor by the cleric, Archpriest of Hita, depend on folk literature or were they also a courtly invention?56 Courtly poets like the Marqués, who wrote down his poems, and had them copied in his own scriptoria, moved in very diffferent circles from those of early bardic storytellers or itinerant troubadour poets. The serranillas and other such poetry confound scholars today, when they ask if they had an oral model; the confusion is very instructive. This modern muddle reminds us that the oral can be present as pure exemplar, as model for a whole work, or as a source for diction, narrative, mnemonic technique, or vision of the world. There is far more to seeking the oral in the written than the mere search for a lost oral artist.

54 Here we take account of Gaunt’s ‘Fictions of Orality’. Gaunt has shown that troubadour poets like Marcabru operated in a written tradition and played with the topos of a perfect time, long ago, when poets sang songs at court. 55 D.H. Green, ‘On the Primary Reception of Narrative Literature in Medieval Germany’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 20 (1984): 289–308. 56 Íñigo López de Mendoza, Marqués de Santillana, Poesía lírica, ed. by Miguel Ángel Pérez Priego (Madrid, 1999). 28 Cohen and Twomey

The interplay between literature and the oral was therefore not only a matter of origins; there was also the use to which its public put the art. Whatever the case, whether poets remembered verses they had heard sung and wrote them down, or composed freely from their own inspired ideas, or copied from written sources, or blended the half-remembered or the copied with their own new words, still, poetry as performance slips right back to the oral sphere. That, in late medieval times, lyric poetry, written or remembered, was performed to an audience has been taken as a given for years. Lyric poetry was clearly sometimes read for an audience and poems were still performed, even in the later Middle Ages, when written collections flourished. There is a ballad where the poet Eustache Deschamps (1340–1404) recalls reading Guillaume de Machaut’s Le Voir dit before the assembled noble guests of Louis de Mâle (1330–84), Count of Flanders. We know that, then, Deschamps would have read from a written copy.57 We also know that poetry competitions in Aragon allowed poets to showcase their poems and win prizes. In the Kingdom of Valencia, the fĳirst published volume of poetry, inLes trobes en lahors de la Verge [Verses in Praise of the Virgin], was of poems read, or performed, at a poetry competition in honour of the Virgin.58 Ferrando Díeç launched a new competition for the ‘Sacratíssima Conceptió de la intemerada Mare de Déu’ [Most Sacred Conception of the Fearless Mother of God] with a declamatory poem providing a few tantalizing details about the place where the competition was to be held, at the house of the Virgin’s confraria [religious association]. He refers to ‘aquesta praderia’ [that meadow] (p. 437, line 10). The staging of the reading and the theatricality of the prize-giving suggest that the poets performed before an audience. Here we encounter that other aspect of orality, performance, here of poems already on paper, with all its adjunct elements of voice, gesture, dramatic engagement of the auditor, and facial expression. Yet, here again, we must not assume that most people consumed poetry mainly through hearing others read aloud; written poems must have had their solitary readers.59 Neither all our effforts to reconstruct original versions, nor all our effforts to catch poets performing, can tell us which mattered more, reading or hearing. Yet, of course, if a courtly reading public existed, some of the collec-

57 Joyce Coleman, ‘The Text Recontextualized in Performance: Deschamps’ Prelection of Machaut’s Voir Dit to the Count of Flanders’, Viator, 31 (2000): 233–248, at p. 235. 58 For a modern critical edition including the Trobes and other poetry competitions held in Valencia between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Antoni Ferrando Francés, Els certàmens poètics valencians del segle XIV al segle XIX (Valencia, 1983). 59 See the work of M.G. Scholz, Hören und Lesen. Studien zur primären Rezeption der Literatur im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden, 1980), cited and summarized by D.H. Green, ‘On the Primary Reception of Narrative Literature’, pp. 289–290. Introduction 29 tions compiled by courtiers, like Juan de Baena, or put to copy in scriptoria, by noble poets like the powerful courtier and man-of-arms, Santillana, and sent to those who requested them, may have aimed for private reading. Once again, to describe reality requires a middle way. Private reading took place alongside performance; they were not mutually exclusive. And even then, private reading did not lie at the far end of a spectrum, opposite public recitation, for a poem may have been voiced aloud, whispered, or mouthed silently. If poets assumed that their works would have hearers as well as silent readers, they probably crafted their writings for such uses; so the oral, as mode, could enter even written compositions intended, mainly, for silent reading. Most poetry, even today, heeds speech. The poet is to ponder here, for he (or she), worked in a lively zone of exchange between oral custom and practice, and written text. Court poets were educated men (and, more rarely, women) and often noble. They read or heard recitations as a courtly activity, so they were readers, auditors and, perhaps, reciters. Some courtiers and kings took up poetry as a pastime, unpaid for this service to the muse, alongside their other pursuits as nobles of the realm. There were disputes, poetic ones, over arms and letters. It would not do for a poet to neglect his other duties to his lord, for that could cause his writing to be ill-received.60 Yet in Castile, as elsewhere, professional poets survived. Some of these, like Alfonso Álvarez de Villasandino (1340–1424), a professional poet at the Castilian court in the late fourteenth and early fĳifteenth centuries, complained of tardy patrons’ payments, and sometimes pleaded, in writing, for prompt relief, much as troubadours must have pleaded for emolument in years past. Villasandino often does this whilst sending a sly poem praising the donor’s generosity.61 Yet, even a poet who sold his wares for livelihood responded liberally to the written stimulus of another’s verse and glossed hymns, whether written in a breviary or heard at holy offfĳices. Generally literate, both noble amateurs and court professionals could tap both oral and written models for their work. There was a vast gulf, in so far as we can tell, between oral stories and songs and those eventually preserved in writing. Now, to the original versions we now lack direct access. We may, however, sometimes glimpse a diffferent style, some

60 See Nicholas Round, ‘Renaissance Culture and its Opponents in Fifteenth-Century Castile’, Modern Language Review, 57 (1962): 204–215. 61 The rubric in the Cancionero de Baena to one of Alfonso Álvarez de Villasandino’s poems states: ‘Este dezir fĳizo el dicho Alfonso Álvarez de Villasandino en loores del noble Infante don Ferrando cuando estava en Ayllón, por el qual le recuenta todos sus trabajos y pobre- zas, e soplicándole por él que le fĳiziesse merçed e ayuda para su mantenimiento, por quanto la moneda del correo era ya toda gastada e non tenía para sustentar su persona, e que su merçed le proveyesse sobre ello’ (ID 1206). Villasandino’s poem was written in 1411. 30 Cohen and Twomey long-remembered words, in the stanzas of the literate poet, as he wrote down his version of an epic or troubadour lyric. In some traditions, a scribe is called to write down the words of the songs.62 Over the years, critics have postulated that oral versions of epic poems existed, recounting, for instance, the deeds of the mighty Cid, from which the written version derives.63 Traditionally studies of the Cantar de Mío Cid, Castile’s earliest epic poem, have accepted that it derives in some way from an earlier, now lost, oral tradition. The Mocedades de Rodrigo [The Youthful Exploits of Rodrigo], later than the Cantar, represents a stage when all the hero’s deeds have been told and nothing is left to invent or recount except, as in Batman fĳilms, what went before the canonical main story. The tale’s apparent narrative exhaustion suggests a fĳinite, now vanished, Ur-version, probably an oral epic. Poets were not the only writers to turn to oral sources. Preachers embedded short folkloric tales in sermons and some also gathered or wrote folk tales, or perhaps embellished the oral versions, for the wisdom they contained. Preachers used some story collections as sources for exempla; this may be the purpose of compilations like the Libro de exemplos por a.b.c., the Livre des abeilles, and Les Proverbes communs, this last collected by an abbot of Clairvaux.64 And what of those folkloric pearls of wisdom in one or another culture, imbibed from earliest days? ‘Where there’s muck, there’s brass’, and the brass, or money, certainly followed in the Yorkshire hills, where every valley belched forth chemicals or was polluted by the ‘dark satanic mills’ that William Blake thought to redeem. The muck has gone from those valleys. And money is certainly in shorter supply there. Yet we have no longer any idea of who fĳirst spoke those antique words, a truism in the Industrial Revolution. Why were they said, if not to justify the despoiling of the landscape, and who speaks

62 Joseph Falaky Nagy, ‘Oral Tradition in the Acallam na Senórach’, in Oral Tradition in the Middle Ages, ed. by W.F.H. Nicolaisen, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 112 (Binghamton, NY, 1995), pp. 77–95. 63 Diego Catalán, ‘La intencionalidad del Poema de Mío Cid’, in Entra mayo y sale abril: Medieval Spanish Literary and Folklore Studies in Memory of Harriet Goldberg, ed. Manuel da Costa Fontes & Joseph T. Snow (Newark, DE, 2005), pp. 182–205. For Catalán, the ironic approach taken by the unknown author and the way important families of the time are represented in the poem, has little to do with earlier oral versions. 64 Clemente Sánchez de Vercial, ed., Libro de exemplos por a.b.c. (Pisa: 2005); Thomas de Cantimpré, Les Exemples du ‘Livre des abeilles’, trans. Henri Platelle (Paris, 1997). J. de Vesprie, Les Proverbes communs (1498). Not all compilations of exempla were for sermon- writing. Juan Manuel, scion of the powerful Mendoza family, collected folk tales in his Conde Lucanor. His masterpiece is a repository of wisdom intended as advice to noble- men. See Juan Manuel, Libro del Conde Lucanor y de Patronio, ed. by Germán Orduna (Buenos Aires, 1972). Introduction 31 those words now?65 The link between muck and brass may take its origin, fĳirst in speech, and then on paper, in some of the collections of proverbs, printed and reprinted throughout the early modern period.66 Even for writers in high places, proverbs long connoted weight and wisdom, as the essay here by Marcus Harmes and Gillian Colclough demonstrates for Stuart England. Sometimes, though, literature used proverbs to suggest not wisdom but simplicity of mind; they spill from the mouth of Sancho Panza, Don Quijote’s squire, to situate his words in the realms of the homely: ‘Dijo el sartén a la caldera: Quítate allá, ojinegra’.67 Such sayings with their homespun wisdom are part of the characterization of the squire, and feed the joking between the two protagonists, as here, where Sancho castigates his semi-rustic master for using too many proverbs. Sometimes the oral uses of a written piece are largely invisible now; this happens where the writing merely suggests the eventual performance. We offfer a pertinent modern example with abundant pre-modern parallels easy to imagine but hard to prove: sermon-writing is a weekly task in the Twomey household. It has been for some years, so there have been many opportunities to see at fĳirst hand the written words, as formulated, and to note how variable the gulf is between script and delivery. The gap grows and narrows, widening when the preacher delivers with familiarity or confĳidence. Delivery varies with the perceived difffĳiculty, audience, and formality or importance of the event. Where the auditors are children, or a friendly parish, the preacher may require not a full written version, but just short notes, which can be expanded, or pictures inspiring ex tempore commentary. In more solemn situations, a Jubilee event, a Christmas Eve, delivery will hew much closer to the written form, because of the exegesis required. We know that a sermon must be written in the speaker’s own style of speaking, to ease the transfer back from the written to the oral. On occasion, when the preacher’s wife has amended words or style, her husband loses track and stumbles over some unfamiliar word or a phrasing

65 http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/408900.html [accessed 1.11.12], assures us that the phrase is now ‘rarely used’. It is unclear what, if any, research underlies this bold assertion. 66 John Ray, A Collection of English Proverbs with Short Annotations, whereunto are added Local proverbs, Old Proverbial Rhymes, Less Known or Exotick Proverbial Sentences, and Scottish Proverbs (Cambridge, 1670). Ray’s proverbs were frequently reprinted, as in A Compleat Collection of English Proverbs; also, the Most Celebrated Proverbs of the Scotch, Italian, French, Spanish and other Languages [The Hebrew collected by R. Kidder]. With Annotations. To which is added A Collection of English Words not generally Used. With an account of the Preparing and Refĳining such Metals and Minerals as are Gotten in England. The Third Edition, 5th edn (London, 1813). 67 It is like the pot calling the kettle black; literally. The frying pan said to the pot, get away you black-eyed thing. 32 Cohen and Twomey natural to another. So, as we have seen with poetry, with sermons, here, and other oratory too, the anticipation of public reading readily oralizes text. This modern example points out how supple are the links between oral practices and written texts; however writerly, a good sermon will hew to speech’s accustomed rhythms. Were preachers ever thus? Did they write the words they intended to speak, or just suggest them, nuancing them later for diffferent audiences and, if preachers planned to have their sermons copied or printed to preserve them, did they afterwards improve them, making them a bit less oral for the new reading public? On occasion, preachers read from writings of preachers with greater authority than theirs, such as St Bernard, St Anselm, or St Augustine. What then was the relationship between the words written, and perhaps spoken, centuries before, and the words now read aloud, spoken by preachers in very diffferent circumstances? Medieval sermons, as oral performances, present a host of problems. They are beginning to be better understood, yet Carolyn Muessig still wishes to begin by defĳining what constitutes a sermon.68 The sermons preserved are ambiguous written records of the oral event; depending on the period, they can be preacher’s notes or, perhaps, notes taken by the hearers, of events spoken, read, or performed.69 We have access to these great oral events only through the ‘lletra mort’ [dead written form]. Some scholars believe that the less reworked version of sermons is closer to the preacher’s real words because rawer.70 However, raw viva voce sermons may also have flaws, such as missing citations, because the reportator, or scribe, charged with writing down the words of the sermon in real time as it was preached, knew the quotation and once planned to fĳill in the missing words later.71 Meanwhile, it is not quite true that we have access to the medieval preaching events only through the written word; we have contemporary paintings too, such as the magnifĳicent altarpiece of St Laurence completed in the late fĳifteenth-century (FIG 0.1).72 It depicts the saint’s audience, some chatting,

68 Carolyn Muessig, ‘What is Medieval Monastic Preaching: An Introduction’, in her Medieval Monastic Preaching, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 90 (Leiden, 1998), pp. 3–16, at pp. 3–5. 69 See also Ong’s chapter on ‘Auditory Synthesis. The Word as Event’, in his The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New York, 1970). 70 Joan Fuster, ‘L’oratòria de Sant Vicent’, in his Obres completes, 7 vols (Barcelona, 1922–92), I, p. 38. 71 Tomàs Martínez, ed., Sant Vicent Ferrer: estudi introductori (L’Estel, Valencia, 1993), p. 20. 72 Valencia, Museo de Bellas Artes. Castilian altarpiece. Introduction 33

figure 0.1 Altarpiece, St Laurence, Valencia, Museo de Bellas Artes. 34 Cohen and Twomey some resting, some sitting on a variety of seats brought from home, one or two with their backs to the preacher, some listening intently, and the saint gesticulating at them from the pulpit. Such painted images, though unable to convey sound and movement, and only sketchy as to the exact setting’s shape and volume, are a very suggestive clue to postures and gestures, not only of sacred oratory, but also of listening and receiving a preacher’s message. Now, when preached, medieval sermons were so akin to medieval drama that the boundary between them is very hard to draw. Even a written sermon makes this obvious.73 With both, many dramatic movements become encapsulated within the words on the page, or leave some subtle traces there.74 Like a stage play, most sermons, whatever the occasion, invited the performer to enrich the narrow written text, widening script’s bandwidth by adding elements of drama: expressive voice, broad gesture, a striking setting, interaction with the audience, and even the occasional objects to serve as props. Even sermons by other authors read aloud, far from being dreary regurgitations, could sparkle, as happened with certain medieval Advent sermons dramatized in their delivery, the Ordo prophetarum.75 Losada’s, Régent-Susini’s and Suman’s essays in this collection all show in diffferent ways how dramatic a sermon could be.

The Silence of Women

In all our written history of oral practice and oralizing literature, women’s voices are seldom read, read about, and heard. In the face of St Paul’s injunction that they were to remain silent, medieval and early modern women struggled to fĳind authority to take up their quill.76 Not that they were slow to speak. But, as a consequence, women’s real and imagined spoken words had to be doubly mediated by male voices and pens, with few exceptions. First, like all oral language, theirs is mediated by the written page but, for women, forbidden to engage in teaching, when their voices appear in trials, contracts and

73 Erick Kelemen, ‘Drama in Sermons: Quotation, Performativity, and Conversion in a Middle English Sermon on the Prodigal Son and in a Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge’, English Literary History, 69 (2002): 1–19. 74 For commentary on gesticulatory words like ‘així’ [like that], spoken by Vicent Ferrer, see Martí de Riquer, Antoni Comas, & Joaquim Molas, Història de la Literatura Catalana, 10 vols, 4th edn (Barcelona, 1984), II, p. 414. 75 Robert Lagueux, ‘Sermons, Exegesis, and Performance: The Laon Ordo Prophetarum and the Meaning of Advent’, Comparative Drama, 43 (2009): 197–220. 76 ‘During instruction a woman should be quiet and respectful. I give no permission for a woman to teach or to have authority over a man’ (1 Tim.11). Introduction 35 other legal papers, and even in many letters, and in plays, poems, or stories, the words given to them are at a further remove, for they are frequently written by male authors. It becomes more difffĳicult to gauge whether the words are, in any sense, truly women’s. The female voice, in literature, always warrants subtle reading, so as to hear the women, thickly, or thinly, veiled by hands and thoughts of men. Still, a good example of the trace of women’s voices in poetry is in the kharjas, the fĳinal lines of Iberian Arabic poetry, where women’s voices are heard, speaking alongside ‘young folk, drunkards, and even doves singing in the branches’.77 The company here, creatures easily dismissed, does not prove that the poets always traduced the female voice, otherwise so rare in such medieval poems. There are other ways in which women’s voices could be indirectly heard. Sometimes women authors, unable to write eloquently, or even to write at all, would have their spoken words taken down by a scribe, as so often occurred with women, and with everybody, who testifĳied in a Roman-law court. And dictation was how some women put their words on the page, such as the fĳifteenth- century mystic Julian of Norwich, and Angela of Foligno before her, as well as Catherine of Siena. The written words may be at a far distance from the ones Julian spoke to her confessor, yet paradoxically, they make it easier to recover Julian’s words than the words of a more literate woman, like Isabel de Villena’s. It is no longer possible to be sure that the clerical scribe, Julian’s confessor, has been faithful to her words or whether he has trimmed them to fĳit to male culture, sanitizing, and improving them:

After this I fell into a serious mood and said: I see! I see three things: game, scorn and earnest. I see game in that the fĳiend is overcome; I see scorn for that God scorns him and he shall be scorned; and I see earnest – that he is overcome by the Passion of our Lord and by death that was done full earnestly and with grievous travail.

After completing the original transcript, the scribe might have been obliged to make further changes. Julian’s words, because she was a woman, denied authority, fell subject to the hierarchy’s approval. It is, however, a question that

77 S.M. Stern, Les Chansons mozarabes: les vers fĳinaux (kharjas) en espagnol dans les muwashshahs arabes et hébraux (Oxford, 1964), p. 303. For a useful overview of the history of critical study of the kharjas and of oral poetry, see Margit Frenk, Las jarchas mozárabes y los comienzos de la lírica románica (Mexico, 1975), pp. 21–31. Vicente Beltrán turns afresh to the fĳinal stanzas, the refrain or vuelta in his ‘De zéjeles y danzas: orígenes y formación de la estrofa con vuelta’, Revista de Filología Española, 64 (1984): 222–266. 36 Cohen and Twomey contributors to this volume seeking to recover spoken word from written will still need to ask.78 And, if the words of Julian and Margery, at one remove, are the closest we have to some women’s writing, how much more difffĳicult is it to see whether women’s words written by a male author, without the slightest input from a woman, such as the ones we fĳind in Celestina, relate to words heard on the street. Although a good half of oral life was female, and female speech was in some ways diffferent, we have to labour to catch its nature. With Julian, we must fĳind our way through the scribe, straining to catch the social, and the personal, in her mystic’s voice. Another route is to turn to narrative fĳiction, where, far more sustainedly than in the last lines of Arabic poems, a male author attempts to give authentic but heightened voice to a female protagonist. The Celestina offfers a rich, complex example. As Joseph Snow argues in an essay here, the heroine, Celestina, erstwhile bawd and now a go-between for rich clients, who peddles ribbons and uses spells and potions to remake virgins, offfers a rich seam of women’s words. Hers are not the words of a real person, transcribed like Julian’s, but behind them stand real women, market women, curanderas, prostitutes, and low-life tricksters, who may have spoken words like them. Fernando de Rojas, to make his eponymous Celestina believ- able, surely imitated speech he heard, and amplifĳied it playfully. Were other authors with other purposes equally attentive, and realistic, when their female characters speak? When Jaume Roig, a virulent misogynist in fĳifteenth-century Valencia, embeds dialogue in his Espill o Llibre de les dones [Mirror or Book of Ladies], he is just one step away from enabling the wives to speak for themselves. So are these words a real Valencian woman would or could have used, at the altar, making an assignation with her priest-lover?

Puis alt parlaven perquè s’oís: ‘En Paraís, que desijam prest nos vejam.’ ‘Ai, pare meu, fóssem-hi breu!’ ‘Ja, fĳilla mia, hui fos lo dia.’ ‘Io ja só presta. Aquesta sesta ja lla fruís.’79

78 Felicity Riddy, writing about women’s words and their approval albeit with regard to Margery Kempe’s writing: ‘Text and Self in The Book of Margery Kempe’, in Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. by Linda Olson & Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, (Notre Dame, IN, 2005), pp. 435–453, at p. 435, n. 1. 79 Jaume Roig, Espill o llibre de les dones, Les Millors Obres de la Literatura Catalana, 3 (Barcelona, 1978), p. 78. Introduction 37

[then they spoke out loud so they could be heard. ‘In Paradise, which we long for, we will soon see each other.’ ‘O, Father, would that we were soon there!’ ‘Now, my daughter, may this be the day.’ ‘I am ready. By midday prayer, you will be in heaven!’]

How much are the words that Shakespeare, Cervantes, Fernando de Rojas, or Jaume Roig place in mouths of female characters women’s words at all? Despite the internal rhyme, which might remove Roig’s speech here from the everyday language and cadence of real women, there is some feel of conversation, particularly with the reciprocal apostrophe, for instance, ‘my father / my daughter’, in the exchange between the narrator’s wife, a former Beguine, and her priest, as they make their assignation for later that day. Roig is poking fun at sexually pro-active women who, under the guise of piety, go to church to meet the few men with whom they come into contact, and lead them on with promised sexual favours. Roig’s rhyme plays on religious language, such as the plays on words in ‘la sexta’ [Sext (midday prayer), or siesta], and ‘paradís’ [Paradise, or copulation’s glories]. His Beguine’s and lover’s words certainly echoed well enough the usual pious palaver at the altar to let readers share the joke. Yet here another trap awaits the scholar of orality: as with Rojas, so with Roig, verisimilitude often used a slyly distorted mirror. Of course some women did write down their own words and thoughts; female authorship might bring us closer to glimpsing how women spoke. But we must not assume this always to be true: a woman with quill in hand might become more writerly, and less oral, than a woman simply speaking to a careful scribe. For Julian of Norwich or Angela of Foligno, who dictated to scribes, speaking their thoughts and seeing them written down were distinct, but inter- dependent acts. Speaking imbues the written word, although the spoken words are masked by choices made by scribes, generally male, and also by the speaker, who fore- saw inscription. Scribes’ habits, and rules of engagement, could vary greatly. Brother A. wrote down the words of Angela of Foligno. What he wrote may be a mere summary of what was said, and he may, like the sermon scribes, have missed small details. Angela, illiterate, could not have read back what the scribe wrote down, but maybe he relayed her words back to her, as part of the process. Certainly, the custom of reading transcripts back to speakers was widespread; secretaries, notaries and court offfĳicials did such things often. But secretaries, and professional letter-writers, were expected to improve markedly on the spoken word, and notaries, generally, aimed for perfected, legal language. Court offfĳicials, meanwhile, had their formal procedures, some of which, as in Matthias Bähr’s essay on the oath-bound testimony of German villagers, 38 Cohen and Twomey demanded scrupulous verbatim records, ‘everything as it had fallen out of the witness’s mouth’, that might be among the most faithful to the authentic male, or female, voice. Offfĳicials sometimes read such transcripts back. Yet other women seem to reject the inhibitions of writing as they think they ought. St Teresa of Ávila, with quill in hand, writes as though she were speaking directly to her sisters in the convent, as she offfers advice, to enable them to journey towards mystical union with God. When she speaks of why she is writing down her Las moradas [The dwellings] and, explains the apparent contradictions between her work’s earliest sections and later parts, she interjects ‘no es maravilla’ [that’s hardly surprising]. She has been constructing the text for fĳifteen years, and now knows more than she did at the beginning. Surprisingly, her comments suggest she did not revise the earlier parts. She kept them, as though she believed they were correctly spoken at the time. She then explains how her nuns can align their will with God’s. Her direct address, her warning against pushing things along too quickly, seems to bring her voice close, and to make her words lift from the page. The saint speaks to us across the centuries: ‘Yo os diré lo que en esto he entendido. Dejemos cuando el Señor es servido de hacerla, porque su Majestad quiere y no por más; Él sabe el por qué; no nos hemos de meter en eso’ [I will tell you what I have understood in all this. Let us leave it that it occurs when the Lord is ready, because his Majesty is willing and for no other reason. He knows why; we must not get involved in those matters].80

Conclusion

We have moved from an ontology of the oral to tracing its social workings in the time-span running from the end of the Middle Ages, across the whole Renaissance and early modern period. We have outlined an epistemology and also a poesis to help us defĳine what orality means. We have pointed to the oral in everyday experience and traced the lively scholarly debate over how oral composition fĳirst infĳiltrated the page. Performing words with the aid of gesture and movement is part of sermonizing but also of theatre. At the end, we discuss how women’s voices were silenced and how women sought authority and began to be heard. All our comments here point to the richness and varied nature of oral culture, and to the subtlety and complexity of the subject

80 Santa Teresa de Ávila, Las moradas, ed. by Tomás Navarro Tomás, Clásicos Castellanos, I (Madrid, 1968). Introduction 39 for scholars of history and literature, which modern disciplines separate but which for the bards were one and the same. Some aspects of orality are relatively easy to detect and others so ephemeral or so far from writing’s habitual path that clues are hard to catch and investigation is arduous. So now let us watch out how the contributors to this volume ply their ingenuity and craft to speak to us of voices heard in the street or on the decks of ships, of sermons heard and delivered, of charms and prayers, of witchcraft trials, of proverbial sayings, and of political manoeuvring. The voices of the past speak across the centuries, from Italy, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, and England to open a new window on orality between 1400 and 1700.

Works Cited

Alvar, Manuel, El romancero: tradicionalidad y pervivencia, 2nd edn, corregida y muy aumentada (Barcelona, 1970). ———, ‘Una recogida de romances en Andalucía (1948–68)’, in El romancero en la tradición oral moderna: Primer coloquio internacional, ed. by Diego Catalán & Samuel Armistead (Madrid, 1972), pp. 95–116. Bailey, Matthew, ‘Oral Composition in the Medieval Spanish Epic’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 118(2) (2003): 254–269. ———, Poetics of Speech in the Medieval Spanish Epic (Toronto, 2010). Bayo, Juan Carlos, ‘On the Nature of the Cantar de mio Cid and its Place in Hispanic Medieval Epic’, La Corónica, 33(2) (2005): 13–27. Beach, Alison I., ‘Listening for the Voices of Admont’s Twelfth-century Nuns’, in Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. by Linda Olson & Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Notre Dame, IN, 2005), pp. 187–198. Beltrán, Vicente, ‘De zéjeles y danzas: orígenes y formación de la estrofa con vuelta’, Revista de Filología Española, 64 (1984): 222–266. Bohn, Henry S., A Handbook of Proverbs Comprising Ray’s Collection of English Proverbs: with his Additions from Foreign Languages and a Complete Alphabetical Index (n. p., 1905). Boyd, Timothy W., ‘Memory on Canvas: Commedia dell’Arte as a Model for Homeric Performance’, Oral Tradition, 26 (2011): 553–560. Burke, Peter, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication (Cambridge, 1987). Campos, Juana G., & Ana Barilla, Diccionario de refranes (Madrid, 1993). Castiglione, Baldassare, Il Cortigiano (Venice, 1606). 40 Cohen and Twomey

Catalán, Diego, ‘La intencionalidad del Poema de Mío Cid’, in Entra mayo y sale abril: Medieval Spanish Literary and Folklore Studies in Memory of Harriet Goldberg, ed. by Manuel da Costa Fontes & Joseph T. Snow (Newark, DE, 2005), pp. 182–205. ———, & Samuel Armistead, eds, El romancero en la tradición oral moderna: Primer coloquio internacional (Madrid, 1972). ———, La épica española: Nueva documentación y nueva evaluación (Madrid, 2000). ———, ‘The Artisan Poetry of the Romancero’, Oral Tradition, 2 (1987): 399–423. Cejador y Frauca, Julio, La verdadera poesía castellana: floresta de la antigua lírica popular, 9 vols (Madrid, 1921–30). Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quijote de la Mancha, 2 vols, Edición del IV Centenario (Madrid, 2005). Chinca, Mark, & Christopher Young, ‘Orality and Literacy in the Middle Ages: A Conjunction and its Consequences’, in their Orality and Literacy in the Middle Ages: Essays on a Conjunction and its Consequences, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 12 (Turnhout, 2005), pp. 1–15. Clanchy, Michael T., From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (Cambridge, 1979). Coleman, Joyce, ‘Lay Readers and Hard Latin: How Gower May Have Intended the Confessio Amantis to be Read’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 24 (2002): 209–235. ———, ‘The Text Recontextualized in Performance: Deschamps’ Prelection of Machaut’s Voir Dit to the Count of Flanders’, Viator, 31 (2000): 233–248. Costa Fontes, Manuel da, & Joseph T. Snow, eds, ‘Entra mayo y sale abril’: Medieval Spanish Literary and Folklore Studies in Memory of Harriet Goldberg (Newark, DE, 2005). De Vivo, Filippo L.C., Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford, 2007). Deyermond, Alan D., El ‘Cantar de Mio Cid’ y la épica medieval española (Barcelona, 1987). ———, La literatura perdida de la Edad Media castellana. Catálogo y studio. I: Épica y romances, Obras de referencia, 7 (Salamanca, 1995). Duggan, Joseph J., ‘The Interface between Oral and Written Transmission of the Cantar de mio Cid’, La Corónica, 33.2 (2005): 51–63. Ferrando Francés, Antoni, ed., Els certàmens poètics valencians del segle XIV al segle XIX (Valencia, 1983). Fine, Elizabeth C., The Folklore Text: From Performance to Print (Bloomington, IN, 1985). Finnegan, Ruth, ‘ “Oral Tradition”: Weasel Words or Transdisciplinary Door to Multiplexity’, Oral Tradition, 18 (2003): 84–86. ———, Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Signifĳicance, and Social Context (Cambridge, 1977). Introduction 41

———, ‘What is Oral Literature Anyway?: Comments in the Light of Some African and Other Comparative Material’, in Oral Literature and the Formula, ed. by Benjamin A. Stolz and Richard S. Shannon (Ann Arbor, MI, 1976), pp. 127–147. Foley, John Miles, Immanent Art: From Structure to Meaning in Traditional Oral Epic (Bloomington IN, 1991). ———, ‘Man, Muse, and Story: Psychohistorical Patterns in Oral Epic Poetry’, Oral Traditions, 2 (1987): 91–107. ———, Frenk, Margit, Corpus de la Antigua lírica popular hispánica (siglos XV a XVIII), Nueva Biblioteca de Erudición y Crítica, 1, 2nd edn, (Madrid, 1987). ———, Entre la voz y el silencio (Alcalá de Henares, 1997). ———, Las jarchas mozárabes y los comienzos de la lírica románica (Mexico, 1975). Fuster, Joan, ‘L’oratòria de Sant Vicent’, in his Obres completes, Clàssics Catalans del segle XX, 7 vols (Barcelona, 1922–92), I, pp. 23–151. Garner, Lori Ann, ‘The Role of Proverbs in Middle English Narrative’, in New Directions, ed. by Mark C. Amodio, pp. 255–277. Gaunt, Simon, ‘Fictions of Orality in Troubadour Poetry’, in Orality and Literacy in the Middle Ages: Essays on a Conjunction and its Consequences, ed. by Mark Chinca & Christopher Young, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 12 (Turnhout, 2005), pp. 1–15. ———, Retelling the Tale: An Introduction to Medieval French Literature (London, 2001). Gofffman, Erving, ‘Response Cries’, inForms of Talk (Philadelphia, PA, 1981), pp. 78–123. Goody, Jack, and Ian Watt, ‘The Consequences of Literacy’, in Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. by Jack Goody (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 27–68. ———, The Interface between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge, 1987). Green, D.H., ‘On the Primary Reception of Narrative Literature in Medieval Germany’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 20 (1984): 289–308. Havelock, Eric, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven, ct, 1986). Jeanroy, Alfred, La Poésie lyrique en France au Moyen Âge: études de littérature française suivies de texts inédits (Paris, 1925). Johnson, Dafydd, ‘Oral Tradition in Medieval Welsh Poetry (1100–1600)’, Oral Tradition, 18 (2004): 192–193. Julian of Norwich, A Shewing of God’s Love. The Shorter Version of Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love, ed. by Anna Maria Reynolds (London, 1958). Kelemen, Erick, ‘Drama in Sermons: Quotation, Performativity, and Conversion in a Middle English Sermon on the Prodigal Son and in A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge’, English Literary History, 69 (2002): 1–19. Kelleher, Marie A., The Measure of Woman: Law and Female Identity in the Crown of Aragon, The Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia, PA, 2010). 42 Cohen and Twomey

Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn, ‘When Women Preached: an Introduction to Female Homilectic, Sacramental, and Liturgical Roles in the Later Middle Ages’, in Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. by Linda Olson & Kathryn Kerby- Fulton (Notre Dame IN, 2005), pp. 31–55. Kienzle, Beverly M., ‘Defending the Lord’s Vineyard: Hildegard of Bingen’s Preaching against the Cathars’, in Medieval Monastic Preaching, ed. by Carolyn Muessig, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 90 (Leiden, 1998), pp. 163–181. Lagueux, Robert, ‘Sermons, Exegesis, and Performance: The Laon Ordo Prophetarum and the Meaning of Advent’, Comparative Drama, 43 (2009): 197–220. Lord, Albert B., ‘Characteristics of Orality’, Oral Tradition, 2 (1987): 54–72. ———, ‘Oral Composition and “Oral Residue” in the Middle Ages’, in Oral Tradition, ed. by W.F.H. Nicolaisen (Binghamton, NY, 1995), pp. 7–29. ———, The Singer of Tales, ed. by Stephen Mitchell & Gregory Nagy, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA, 2000). Manuel, Juan, Libro del Conde Lucanor y de Patronio, ed. by Germán Orduna (Buenos Aires, 1972). Marino, Nancy F., ‘Reading Jorge Manrique’s Coplas in the Nineteenth Century’, in ‘De ninguna cosa es alegre posesión sin compañía’: estudios celestinescos y medievales en honor del Profesor Joseph Thomas Snow, Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, Spanish Series, 144 (New York, 2010), pp. 210–219. Martínez, Tomàs, ed., Sant Vicent Ferrer: estudi introductori (L’Estel [Valencia], 1993). Menéndez Pidal, Ramón. Los godos y el orígen de la epopeya española (Madrid, 1955). ———, Poesía juglaresca y juglares: aspectos de la historia literaria y cultural de España, Publicaciones de la Revista de Filología Española, 7 (Madrid, 1924). ———, Reliquias de la poesía épica española (Madrid: 1951). Mithen, Steven, The Singing Neanderthals: the Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body (London, 2005). Moncayo, Pedro, Flor de varios romances nueuos: primera, segunda y tercera parte: agora nueuamente recopilados puestos por su orden, y añadidos muchos romances que se han cantado después de la primera impression (Madrid, 1595). Muessig, Carolyn, ‘What is Medieval Monastic Preaching: An Introduction’, in her Medieval Monastic Preaching, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 90 (Leiden, 1998), pp. 3–16. Nagy, Joseph Falaky, ‘A Leash and an Englyn in the Medieval Welsh Arthurian Tale Culhwch ac Olwen’, in New Directions, ed. by Mark C. Amodio (Tempe, AZ, 2005), pp. 36–53. ———, ‘Oral Tradition in the Acallam na Senórach’, in Oral Tradition in the Middle Ages, ed. by W.F.H. Nicolaisen (Binghamton, NY, 1995), pp. 78–95. Nicolaisen, W.F.H. (ed.). Oral Tradition in the Middle Ages, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 112 (Binghamton, NY, 1995). Introduction 43

Ong, Walter J., ‘Before Textuality: Orality and Interpretation’, Oral Tradition, 3 (1988): 259–269. ———, Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word (London and New York, 1982). ———, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New York, 1970). Palti, K., ‘An Unpublished Fifteenth-Century Carol Collection: Oxford, Lincoln College MS Lat. 141’, Medium Aevum, 77 (2008): 260–278. Parry, Milman, The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, ed. by Adam Parry (Oxford, 1971). Ray, John. A Collection of English Proverbs with Short Annotations, whereunto are added Local Proverbs, Old Proverbial Rhymes, Less Known or Exotick Proverbial Sentences, and Scottish Proverbs (Cambridge, 1670). ———, A Compleat Collection of English Proverbs; also, the Most Celebrated Proverbs of the Scotch, Italian, French, Spanish and other Languages [The Hebrew Collected by R. Kidder]. With Annotations. To which is added A Collection of English Words not generally Used. With an account of the Preparing and Refĳining such Metals and Minerals as are Gotten in England. The Third Edition, 5th edn (London, 1813). Regalado, Nancy Freeman. ‘Speaking in Script: The Construction of Voice, Presence, and Perspective in Villon’s Testament’, in Oral Tradition in the Middle Ages, ed. by W.F.H. Nicolaisen (Binghamton, NY, 1995), pp. 211–225. Riddy, Felicity, ‘Text and Self in The Book of Margery Kempe’, in Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. by Linda Olson & Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Notre Dame, IN, 2005), pp. 435–453. Riquer, Martí de, Antoni Comas, & Joaquim Molas, Història de la Literatura Catalana, 10 vols, 4th edn (Barcelona, 1964–84). Roberts, Brynley F., ‘Oral Tradition and Welsh Literature: A Description and Survey’, Oral Tradition, 3 (1988): 61–87. Roberts, Phyllis B., ‘The Ars praedicandi and the Medieval Sermon’, in Preacher, Sermon, and Audience, ed. by Carolyn Muessig, A New History of the Sermon, 3 (Leiden, 2002), pp. 41–62. Roig, Jaume, Espill o llibre de les dones, Les Millors Obres de la Literatura Catalana, 3 (Barcelona, 1978). Rosenberg, Bruce A., ‘The Complexity of Oral Tradition’, Oral Tradition, 2 (1987): 73–90. Round, Nicholas, ‘Renaissance Culture and its Opponents in Fifteenth-Century Castile’, Modern Language Review, 57 (1962): 204–215. Sánchez Jiménez, Antonio, ‘Catalan and Occitan Troubadours at the Court of Alfonso VIII’, La Corónica, 32(2) (2004): 101–120. Sánchez de Vercial, Clemente, ed., Libro de exemplos por a.b.c. (Pisa, 2005). 44 Cohen and Twomey

Santillana, Marqués de, Íñigo López de Mendoza, Poesía lírica, ed. by Miguel Ángel Pérez Priego, Letras Hispánicas, 475 (Madrid, 1999). ———, Poesías completas, ed. by Maxim P.A.M. Kerkhof & Ángel Gómez Moreno, Clásicos Castalia, 270 (Madrid, 2003). Shakespeare, William, The Complete Works, ed. by Peter Alexander (London, 1951). Shepherd, Eric, ‘Singing Dead Tales to Life: Rhetorical Strategies in Shandong Fast Tales’, Oral Tradition, 26 (2011): 27–70. Stern, S.M., Les Chansons mozarabes: les vers fĳinaux (kharjas) en espagnol dans les muwashshahs arabes et hébraux (Oxford, 1964). ———, Les Chansons mozarabes: editées avec introduction, annotation, sommaire et glossaire par S.M. Stern (Palermo, 1964). Teresa de Ávila, Santa. Las moradas, ed. by Tomás Navarro Tomás, Clásicos Castellanos, 1 (Madrid, 1968). Tinnell, Roger D., ‘Authorship and Composition: Music and Poetry in Las Cantigas de Santa Maria of Alfonso X el Sabio’, Kentucky Romance Quarterly, 28 (1981): 189–198. Vaquero, Mercedes, ‘Orality and Folklore in the Libro del Caballero de Zifar’, in Entra mayo y sale abril, ed. by Manuel da Costa Fontes & Joseph T. Snow (Newark, DE, 2005), pp. 365–374. Veprie, J. de la, Les Proverbes communs (1498). Villena, Isabel de, Vita Christi, ed. by Ramón Miquel i Planas, 3 vols (Barcelona, 1916). Wardropper, Bruce W., ‘The Reluctant Novice: A Critical Approach to Spanish Traditional Song’, Romanic Review, 55 (1964): 241–247. Weiss, Julian, The Poet’s Art: Literary Theory in Castile c.1400–60, Medium Aevum Monographs, New Series, 14 (Oxford, 1990). Zumthor, Paul, Oral Poetry: An Introduction, trans. Kathryn Murphy-Judy, foreword Walter J. Ong, Theory and History of Literature, 70 (Minneapolis, MN, 1990). ———, Speaking of the Middle Ages, trans. Sarah White, foreword Eugene Vance (Lincoln, NE, 1986). ———, Langue, texte, énigme (Paris, 1975). Witches’ Words

∵

CHAPTER 1 Oral Transfer of Ideas about Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Norway

Liv Helene Willumsen

This essay deals with ideas related to the learned doctrine of demonology prevalent in the northernmost part of Europe in the seventeenth century. Through oral transfer these notions found a foothold among the peasants living in the district of Finnmark, with disastrous results for a number of women accused of witchcraft. This essay will show how these local voices, so nicely audible in the court records, illustrate how rapidly the old North Norwegian folk beliefs about witches, under the impact of the prosecution, became assimilated to learned West European doctrines about witchcraft. The aim of the essay is twofold: fĳirst, to analyse the records of local courts for recurrent ideas about witchcraft and oral transfer of such ideas. It will therefore sift witchcraft cases for notions about witchcraft seemingly transmitted orally during the witch-hunt, with a focus on the confessions of the accused. A heavy stamp of orality surfaces in these confessions, underlining how accurately the scribe transcribed speech, and, thus, made visible in the records such markers of orality as additive sentence structures, redundancy, sequential ordering, cause-efffect relations, as well as features from folklore and dialectal expressions. Second, the essay will examine the speed of oral transmission of particular ideas after they were fĳirst introduced to a group of witchcraft suspects, until the same ideas resurfaced in a confession. I argue that new ideas spread rapidly, like gossip, and that with these new ideas, it very much mattered who introduced them. During the witchcraft trials, new ideas fused with traditional beliefs about witchcraft, already widespread, and these were reworked and blended in court. The sources for the Finnmark trials are very well suited for study and discourse analysis, as the records are detailed and rich in linguistic nuance. A variety of ideas about witchcraft appears in the confessions, evinc- ing a widening spectrum of ideas on witchcraft as the witch-hunt went on. My methodological approach is based on Gérard Genette’s narratology.1 Genette’s

1 Genette’s main work, Discours du récit (Paris, 1972), is a study developing a narratological methodology through the analysis of a fĳictional work, Marcel Proust’sÀ la recherche du temps perdu, 7 volumes published during the years 1913–1927. Discours du récit is published in

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004291829_003 48 Willumsen main work, Discours du récit (Paris, 1972), is a study developing a narratological methodology through the analysis of a fĳictional work.2 Genette’s next two works, Nouveaux Discours du récit (Paris, 1983) and Fiction et diction (Paris, 1991), expand his original narratology and discuss the boundaries between fĳictional and factual narratives.3 Genette has been particularly known for his methodological handling of the voices of the diffferent persons in a narrative.4 He is frequently acknowledged in narratological studies, and his methodological approach has been used for studying stylistic and rhetorical mechanisms that emerge from historical documents.5 Genette uses for non-fĳictional texts the term ‘diction’ and ‘factual narratives’, stating that ‘it is unlikely to exempt us from having to undertake a specifĳic study of factual narrative [. . .] Such a study would require a large-scale inquiry into discursive practices such as those of history, biography, personal diaries, newspaper accounts, police reports, judicial narratives’ [Chapter author’s italics].6 Narratology examines structures in narrative texts – to explore the narrator’s function in fĳictional as well as factual narratives, which includes judicial narratives.7 Such an approach makes it possible to distinguish between diffferent voices heard in the records: the voice of the law,8 the voice of the accused person, the voices of the witnesses, and the voice of the scribe. One can detect a meta-level of language in the voice of the scribe.9 For all factual narratives, interpretation, Genette says, must heed

English with the title Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca, NY, 1980). The original titles are Nouveaux Discours du Recit (Paris, 1983) and Fiction et diction (Paris, 1991). 2 Genette’s fĳirst study is based on Marcel Proust’sÀ la recherche du temps perdu, 7 volumes published during the years 1913–1927. Discours du récit is published in English with the title Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method (Ithaca, NY, 1980). 3 Narrative Discourse Revisited, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY, 1988) and Fiction and Diction, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY, 1993). 4 Susana Onega and José Á.G. Landa, Introduction to Gérard Genette: ‘Voice’, Narratology, ed. by S. Onega and J.Á.G. Landa (London, 1996), 172–173; A. Ferraiuolo, ‘Pro exoneratione sua propria coscientia: Magic, Witchcraft, and Church in Early Eighteenth-century Capua’, in Beyond the Witch Trials: Witchcraft and Magic in Enlightenment Europe, ed. by Owen Davies & Willem de Blécourt (Manchester, 2004), pp. 26–44. 5 See for instance David Herman, ed., Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis (Columbus, OH, 1999), p. 390. 6 Genette, Fiction and Diction, pp. 55–56. 7 The narrator is seen as an absolutely necessary textual device. Cf. Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited, p. 101. 8 Understood as the voices of the representatives of the law in the courtroom as well as the letter of the law. 9 Willumsen, ‘Seventeenth-Century Witchcraft Trials in Scotland and Northern Norway’, Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2008, pp. 30–32; Onega & Landa, Introduction to Gérard Genette: ‘Voice’, Narratology (London, 1996), pp. 172–173. Oral Transfer Of Ideas About Witchcraft in norway 49 context.10 While a close reading of the historical document might give access to shades of meaning that would otherwise have been overlooked, this analysis has to be placed in an historical context for further interpretation. The heart of witchcraft persecution in Finnmark was the Castle of Vardøhus, on the coast, east of North Cape and close to the Russian border, where the highest regional offfĳicial of the kingdom of Denmark-Norway, the District Governor of Finnmark, resided. Demonological ideas spread rapidly to the neighbouring village of Vadsø and to the castle’s immediate surroundings. As I see it, demonological ideas were introduced to the peasants in Finnmark by courtroom offfĳi- cials during interrogation, in witchcraft trials, and during preaching in church. Then, assimilation took place – stories about the devil started to be retold in the local communities. The meetings between learned and popular culture in the villages was a continuous process, as pointed out by Per Sörlin.11 Orality, I claim, was crucial to the transmission of these new demonological ideas from learned persons who knew contemporary demonologies to the populace in a barren, cold area of Europe. Without this oral transfer, whether by means of the court or the church, the accused peasants would not have had them in mind. The accused seemed to know the narratives about the devil, before they came into the courtroom, and responded to leading questions with long and detailed confessions. Had these new beliefs not infected local folklore, one woman after another would not have confessed to the fĳictitious deeds of a pact with the devil and to joining witches’ meetings. In a society where very few peasants could read and write, oral transfer of ideas was the means by which elite ideas could reach ordinary men and women. In eastern Finnmark these same ideas were then retold by women accused of witchcraft in a series of trials of the cruellest kind.

The Scene

The scene in which the extraordinary drama of trials took place is unusual. Situated north of the Arctic Circle, the Castle of Vardøhus lay in darkness for about two months in winter and in endless sunshine for the same stretch in summer. Against a background of the Northern Lights and snow-covered fĳields, the burning of women at the stake flared much more often in the winter. In this landscape, in the seventeenth century, an ethnically mixed population lived side by side – Norwegians and Samis. Among the 3000 in the district

10 Genette, Fiction and Diction, pp. 55–56. 11 Per Sörlin, ‘The Blåkulla Story: Absurdity and Rationality’, Arv: Nordic Yearbook of Folklore, 52 (1997): 131–152, at p. 149. 50 Willumsen were some 660 Samis.12 Norwegians spoke Norwegian, Samis Sami. Norwegian settlements lay along the coast, where the population lived from fĳishery and small-holdings. The Norwegian population was in part long-established locals, in part migrants who had come north in the previous century, settling in Finnmark, well known for rich fĳisheries. Sami settlements were partly inland and partly along the coast, particularly up the fĳjords. The inland Sami settlements were reindeer-keepers, migrating coastwards in summer. Each ethnic group had its culture, making Finnmark a meeting place for coastal and inland people, fĳishermen and reindeer herders. Due to the fĳish trade on the west coast of Norway, several Bergen merchants had settled in Finnmark. In addition, people had come from many European countries, including Scots, Danes, Germans, and Dutch. In this colourful melting pot, the hybrid witch-hunt had some strong similarities to the Central European witchcraft persecution, but in some ways local particularities were kept intact. The local courts were the main arenas for witchcraft trials. Finnmark’s local courts were at the lowest judicial level in Denmark-Norway. Present in the courtroom were the bailifff, the deputy bailifff, the magistrate, a jury of trustworthy men, often the District Governor, the accused person, the witnesses, and the local people who attended the session. The local courts held sessions all along the coast. Cases from local courts could be sent to the Court of Appeal, presided over by the Court-of-Appeal Judge, who came to Finnmark every third year to hold sessions, also on the coast. If a case was not settled there, it could be referred to Copenhagen for a fĳinal decision. It took several weeks to receive any answer from Copenhagen. For this reason Finnmark’s local courts were largely autonomous. The district magistrate, the sorenskriver, was charged with making records at the local trials.13 In the seventeenth century, he was usually Danish, and educated in Copenhagen.14 Therefore, he sometimes found it hard to

12 In 1597 there were 561 Norwegian families and 154 Sami families in Finnmark. With a family size of fĳive, the number of Norwegians would be 2805 and the number of Samis 770 in the seventeenth century. With a hypothetical family size of four, which is also used for stipulations of Finnmark population at this time, the number of Norwegians would be nearly 2100, and the number of Samis would be 660. See Vilhelm A. Båkte, ‘Den samiske befolkning i Nord-Norge’ [The Sami population in Northern Norway]. Artikler fra Statistisk Sentralbyrå [Articles from the Central Bureau of Statistics] no. 107 (Oslo, 1978), p. 14. 13 Etymologically the word means ‘a sworn writer’, a writer who had sworn an oath, in Norwegian ‘en ed’. 14 The University was placed in Copenhagen. Hans E. Næss, ‘Innledning’, For rett og rettferdighet i 400 år [For law and justice over 400 years], ed. by Hans E. Næss (Oslo, 1991), p. 11. Oral Transfer Of Ideas About Witchcraft in norway 51

understand the dialect and its local terms. The main sources for the Finnmark witchcraft trials are the exceptionally well-preserved records from local courts. They invite detailed reading. The series of court records is almost continuous from 1620 onwards in the archives of the Finnmark District Magistrate.15 These records have been published in full in English.16 There exist a few complementary sources for the two fĳirst decades of the witch-hunt.17 For a lacuna period from 1633 till 1647, there are some alternative sources.18 There was a jury of trustworthy men from the local communities elected to judge in local courts. Initially, from 1591, the sorenskriver was the court recorder.19 The magistrates’ powers increased throughout the seventeenth century. The recorder was gradually accorded more responsibilities, increasingly becoming to all intents and purposes a full magistrate in function. Finally, in 1687, in minor cases, he replaced the jury altogether.20 The records in the archives are fair copies made from detailed notes taken during the trials. The documents are in the Gothic hand, in Danish, with some

15 The Archives of the Finnmark District Magistrate are held in the Regional State Archives of Tromsø, Norway. There is a gap between 1633 and 1647. 16 Liv H. Willumsen, The Witchcraft Trials in Finnmark, Northern Norway, trans. by Katjana Edwardsen (Bergen, 2010). 17 Because court records of local courts in Finnmark are lacking before 1620, other sources are needed to document witchcraft trials during the period from 1600 to 1619. Documents in the archives of the Finnmark District Governor and district accounts supplement the court records of local courts for the early years of the witch-hunt. Cf. Willumsen, Witchcraft Trials in Finnmark, Northern Norway, pp. 11–12. The Archives of the Finnmark District Governor are held in the Regional State Archives of Tromsø, Norway. The District Accounts of Vardøhus are held in Riksarkivet, The National Archives of Norway, Oslo. 18 In addition to district accounts, there is a document by Hans H. Lilienskiold, ‘Troldom oc anden ugudelighed udi dette seculo sig hafuer tildragen blant fĳin som Nordmand’ [Sorcery and Ungodliness which has happened in this century among Sami as well as Norwegians], Thott’s collection, 950, 2°, National Library of Denmark, Copenhagen, containing a number of copied and edited court records of local courts. The manuscript was written at the very end of the seventeenth century by Lilienskiold, who was Regional Governor at Vardøhus. Also a book by Hulda Rutberg, Häxprocesser i norska Finnmarken (Stockholm, 1918), contains edited copies of a number of the Finnmark court records. 19 This was following a decree from the previous year imposing considerable new administrative and judicial burdens on the local courts. Cf. Willumsen, Witchcraft Trials in Finnmark, Northern Norway, p. 11. 20 In a revised Act of 1634, the sorenskriver was to judge together with the jury. In a new Act of 1687, he replaced the jury altogether in all minor cases. Cf. Willumsen, Witchcraft Trials in Finnmark, Northern Norway, p. 11. 52 Willumsen words from the local North Norwegian dialect inserted.21 Some Latin words have been kept, particularly unassimilated words. The records were in third person, but the recorder strove to catch speech verbatim. These sources are instructive because they record trials from beginning to end. They invite a multi-layered interpretation of the witch-hunt, particularly of confessions.

The Trials

From 1600–1692, 135 persons were accused of witchcraft in the Finnmark local courts; 91 were executed, almost all burned at the stake.22 Two types of trial in the witch-hunt corresponded to two diffferent concepts of witchcraft. There were isolated trials, with just one suspect, based on the perception of traditional sorcery practised alone. Such trials pursued solitary traditional sorcery, what both early modern courts and modern historians call malefĳicium. And there were closely linked witchcraft trials, now called panics. There were three notable panics in Finnmark, in 1620–21, 1652–53, and 1662–63. The accused came from the village of Vardø, where Vardøhus Castle was situated, the neighbouring village of Vadsø, and the immediate surroundings. See fĳigures 1.1 and 1.2, for maps. This type of trial was based on a learned European doctrine, demonology, often called by modern witchcraft research ‘the cumulative concept of witchcraft’, a term encompassing a pact with the devil, witches’ meetings with the devil present, night flights, metamorphosis, and collective witchcraft operations.23 According to this doctrine, a suspect’s ability to do evil was based on transfer of power from the devil through a pact. Confessions of witches’ meetings and collective acts of sorcery led to several new suspects being denounced, who then in turn were brought to court. The witchcraft trials in Finnmark were intense, with many accused, given the tiny population. With an average of 1.5 persons per year, in 20 years, 1% of the population (30/3,000) would be accused. About four fĳifths of the accused

21 The language situation in contemporary Norway, with several variants of the Norwegian language on the same formal level, like ‘bokmål’ and ‘nynorsk’, difffers a great deal from what was the case in the seventeenth century. At that time the written language was Danish. The distinction between ‘bokmål’ and ‘nynorsk’ developed in the nineteenth century. 22 Liv H. Willumsen, ‘Seventeenth-Century Witchcraft Trials in Scotland and Northern Norway’, pp. 93–94; Willumsen, The Witchcraft Trials of Finnmark, Northern Norway, p. 11. 23 Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 3rd edn (London, 2006), pp. 32–51. Oral Transfer Of Ideas About Witchcraft in norway 53

Figure 1.1 Map of Scandinavia by Inger Bjerg Poulsen. 54 Willumsen

figure 1.2 Map of East Finnmark by Tomas Willumsen Vassdal. Place of residence and place of sentence of execution during the Finnmark witchcraft panic of 1662–63. The dotted circle denotes place of residence and the solid circle denotes place of sentence of execution.

were women, a distribution common in Europe.24 Among the executed were 77 women and 14 men. Thus, given that there were four women for each man accused, the demographic efffects of the witch-hunt in this thinly populated district were tremendous. Very few families were untouched by the trials and

24 Willumsen, ‘Seventeenth-Century Witchcraft Trials in Scotland and Northern Norway’, pp. 93, 96. Oral Transfer Of Ideas About Witchcraft in norway 55 few women were spared some sort of involvement.25 Notably, most of the women were accused in the six years of the panics. The execution rate was 67%, high when compared to most such trials.26 Also ethnicity mattered. Around four fĳifths of the accused were Norwegian, the rest Sami.27 This rate is proportional; Norwegians made up around four fĳifths of the population. The gender of the accused varied with ethnicity. Among the women accused, the majority were Norwegians. Among the men, most were Sami.28 Sami men were well versed in sorcery, as European readers might learn from Olaus Magnus’s History of the Nordic Peoples.29 Sami sorcerers were particularly known for selling wind to boats and for shamanism, playing the rune drum. During fĳirst twenty years of the Finnmark witchcraft trials, most accused were Sami men. Also Sami sorcery was again targeted at the very end of the hunt.30 During the middle period, the time of panics (1620 to 1663), however, most of those accused and executed were Norwegian women. In a court record, the whole document might be seen as a narrative, with the scribe as the narrator, structuring his text.31 This scribe is much like the sorenskriver, recording the Finnmark trials. The voices of the various trial participants are fĳiltered by this authoritative narrator. The accused’s confession is a narrative embedded within the larger narrative of the entire trial. The confession, which the scribe transposes into indirect discourse, is formed as a coherent story about learning and performing witchcraft. Thanks to their closeness to spoken language, court records, particularly confessions, represent individualized discourse, even though the words are rendered in indirect discourse. Features of orality like additive sentence structure and magical numbers echoing folkloric tales are seen, for instance, in the confession of twelve-year-old

25 Ole Lindhartsen, ‘Lensherrer, heksejakt og justismord i Finnmark på 1600-tallet’ [District Governors, Witch-hunt and Legal Murder in Seventeenth-century Finnmark], Flytting og forandring i Finnmarks fortid [Movement and Change in Finnmark’s Past], ed. by G.J. Valen, K. Skavhaug, & K. Schanche (Alta, 2002), p. 61. 26 Willumsen, ‘Seventeenth-Century Witchcraft Trials in Scotland and Northern Norway’, pp. 54–56. 27 Willumsen, ‘Seventeenth-Century Witchcraft Trials in Scotland and Northern Norway’, p. 107. 28 Willumsen, ‘Seventeenth-Century Witchcraft Trials in Scotland and Northern Norway’, pp. 106–108. 29 Olaus Magnus, Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (Rome, 1555). 30 Willumsen, The Witchcraft Trials in Finnmark, Northern Norway, p. 13. 31 Liv H. Willumsen, ‘Narratologi som tekstanalytisk metode’ [Narratology as text-analytical method], Å begripe teksten [To understand the text], ed. by Mary Brekke (Kristiansand, 2006), pp. 61–64. 56 Willumsen

Maren Olsdatter, who spoke about entering into a pact with the devil by drinking a little beer in a bowl: ‘And when she fĳinished drinking, the Devil came in to her as a black dog. And it had horns on its head, like goat horns. And he asked her twice to serve him.’32 However, Maren did not accept this offfer at once. ‘Now he asked her once more to serve him, for then he would give her money. Then she replied, Yes, and agreed to offfer him her services.’33 Individualized discourse is rendered by a personal detail inserted when Maren told about a trip to hell, where people were screaming, lying in the water, boiling: ‘The Devil also had a leg of ham which he dipped into the said water, bringing it up again at once, and now it was cooked.’34 This detail about the leg of ham was not given by other accused persons telling about the same trip to hell, it was Maren’s own invention. Another orality feature is that the whole narrative about the trip to hell is framed by literary devices as we know them from traditional oral tales; fĳirst they left the human, recognizable world, and at the end they went back to their daily lives: ‘And when they had made their arrangements and fĳinished dancing with the Devil, each went back to her home led by the Evil One.’35 Linguistic research has analysed historical courtroom discourse. Barbara Kryk-Kastovsky, in a study of early modern English court papers, has found that trial records preserved many traces of orality.36 Kryk-Kastovsky and Kathleen L. Doty maintain that courtroom records reflect language spoken in some historical periods more faithfully than in others, depending on the degree of orality.37 In the Finnmark records, too, many of the orality markers

32 Cf. Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 10, fol. 245r. 33 Cf. Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 10, fol. 245v. 34 Cf. Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 10, fol. 245v. 35 Cf. Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 10, fol. 246r. 36 The study is based on two features: turn-taking and closeness to the socio-cultural context. Turn-taking is defĳined as ‘involving such detailed issues closely related to spoken language as responding to the interlocutor, power relations, the use of performatives and discourse markers’. Closeness to the present sociocultural context encompasses among other meta-comments and forms of address. See Barbara Kryk-Kastovsky, ‘Representations of Orality in Early Modern English Trial Records’, Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 1.2 (2000): 201–230, at p. 209. 37 Barbara Kryk-Kastovsky, ‘Historical Courtroom Discourse’, Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 7.2 (2006): 213–245; Barbara Kryk-Kastovsky, ‘How Bad is “Bad Data”? In Search of the Features of Orality in Early Modern English Legal Texts’, Current Issues in Unity and Diversity of Languages. Collection of Papers Selected from the CIL 18, held at Korea Oral Transfer Of Ideas About Witchcraft in norway 57 pointed out by Walter J. Ong are present, such as additive sentence structures, aggregative language elements, redundancy, closeness to the human life world, and an agonistical tone.38 Nevertheless, the confessions, and the entire court records, are still written texts, demanding interpretation as writings too. This particular position of court records, between oral and written text, is pointed out by Elizabeth S. Cohen.39 In an article on testimonies before the Governor’s criminal tribunal in early modern Rome, Cohen says:

These testimonies and additional texts all occupy in-between positions on a spectrum between oral and written domains of expression. Sharing an intermediate textual zone that has attracted increasing scholarly attention in early modern cultural studies, these several sorts of non- l iterary sources invite a comparative analysis and double modes of reading. On the one hand, they are ‘documents’ to be read as straightforward descriptions of the world; on the other, they are constructed texts conceived strategically to represent their speakers and negotiate more complex meanings.40

Through close readings that engage both modes, Cohen uncovers a variety of accents in the documents: ‘Not only do they speak, but they tell, assert, complain, argue, and correct’.41 Each voice seems distinct, even if the agendas are common. They resist marginalization, claim legitimacy, and seek, ‘within the bounds of law and convention, a greater measure of respect and security’.42 Cohen’s interpretations argue for the individualization of voices in northern confessions too, as attested to by witchcraft researchers of Nordic Europe,

University in Seoul on July 21–26, 2008. Seoul; The Linguistic Society of Korea; Kathleen L. Doty, ‘Telling Tales. The Role of Scribes in Constructing the Discourse of the Salem Witchcraft Trials’, Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 8.1 (2007): 25–41, at pp. 26, 27, 39. 38 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word (London, 1982), pp. 37–45. 39 Elizabeth S. Cohen, ‘Back Talk: Two Prostitutes’ Voices from Rome c. 1600’, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2 (2007): 95–126; Elizabeth S. Cohen, ‘Between Oral and Written Culture: The Social Meaning of an Illustrated Love Letter’, Culture and Identity in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800): Essays in Honour of Natalie Zemon Davis, ed. by Barbara B. Diefendorf & Carla Hesse (Ann Arbor, MI, 1993), pp. 181–201. 40 Cohen, ‘Back Talk’, p. 95. 41 Cohen, ‘Back Talk’, p. 95. 42 Cohen, ‘Back Talk’, p. 96. 58 Willumsen among them Jari Eilola, Marie Lennersand, Linda Oja, Per-Anders Östling, Raisa Maria Toivo, and myself.43 Other researchers have worked with discourse perspectives in court records and witchcraft trials. Some linguistic research from southern Germany has argued that witchcraft confessions are merely confections by the scribe.44 In a study of testimonies, in particular witness narratives, from English cases, Peter Rushton focuses more on structure than on content. He maintains that the type of narrative we hear from the witnesses ‘depends on a number of shared understandings’.45 These understandings are all intended to substantiate signs of the diabolical. On structural grounds, these linguistic fĳindings posit a pattern. Rushton’s argument is that ‘bewitchment is constituted in the depositions themselves, we cannot go behind the testimonies to fĳind another source’.46 If he is right, the suspects and witnesses are essentially inaudible to us. This cramped reading of testimonies as constructions created during the trial has

43 An in-depth study of narrative structures inherent in a Swedish ‘non-panic witchcraft case’, a case which did not end with execution, is seen in Raisa Maria Toivo’s Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society. See also Per-Anders Östling, ‘Blåkulla Journeys in Swedish Folklore’, Arv: Nordic Yearbook of Folklore, 62 (2006): 81–122; Marie Lennersand, ‘Rättvik’, 375–596, in Livet går vidare [Life goes on], ed. by Marie Lennersand and Linda Oja; Marie Lennersand and Linda Oja, ‘Vitnande visionärer. Guds och Djävulens red- skap i Dalarnas häxprocesser’ [Witnessing Visionaries. God’s and the Devil’s Tools in the Witchcraft Trials in Dalarne], in Mellom Gud og Djævelen. Religiøse og magiske verdensbill- eder i Norden 1500 –1800 [Between God and the Devil. Religious and magical world images in the Nordic countries 1500–1700], ed. by Hanne Sanders (Copenhagen, 2001), pp. 177– 184; Jari Eilola, ‘Lapsitodistajien kertomukset Ruotsin noitatapaukissa 1668–1676’ [Child witnesses’ stories in witchcraft trials in Sweden 1668–1676], E-journal Kasvatus and Aika, 3 (2009), unpaginated; Liv H. Willumsen, ‘Children accused of witchcraft in 17th century Finnmark’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 38 (1) (2013): 18–41. 44 Cf. Jürgen Macha, ‘Redewiedergabe in Verhörprotokollen und der Hintergrund gespro- chener Sprache’, Bayerische Dialektologie. Akten der Internationalen Dialektologischen Konferenz 26.–28. Februar 2002, ed. by Sabine Krämer-Neubert & Norbert R. Wolf, Schriften zum Bayerischen Sprachatlas, 8 (Heidelberg, 2005), pp. 171–178; Deutsche Kanzleisprache in Hexenverhörprotokollen der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. by Jürgen Macha, Eva Topalovic, Iris Hille, Uta Nolting, & Anja Wilke, Auswahledition 1 (Berlin, 2005); Eva Topalovic, ‘ “Ick kike in die Stern vndt versake Gott den Herrn”. Versprachligung des Teufelspaktes in westfälishen Verhörsprotokollen des 16./17. Jahrhunderts’, Augustin Wibbelt-Gesellschaft. Jahrbuch 20, pp. 69–86. 45 Peter Rushton, ‘Texts of Authority: Witchcraft Accusations and the Demonstration of Truth in Early Modern England’, Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern Culture, ed. by Stuart Clark (Houndmills, 2001), pp. 21–39, at p. 31. 46 Rushton, ‘Texts of Authority’, p. 35. Oral Transfer Of Ideas About Witchcraft in norway 59 been challenged by Malcolm Gaskill, among others. He allows access to the minds of the people who made the confessions, and not just to the expectations of those who demanded them or wrote them down.47 In my view, Gaskill is right that historical narratives are complex texts that permit semantic interpretation based on sources behind the documents. There is a fundamental diffference between factual narratives and fĳictional narratives. In factual narratives, the narrator is obliged to recount events which really happened. Johan Tønnesson says that ‘subject-oriented prose’, or ‘factual prose’ (in Norwegian sakprosa), has a mainly direct relationship to reality.48 There is a layer of reference to factual, historical events, missing in fĳiction. This is the case with court records, as with all historical narratives; ‘historical worlds are subject to restrictions that are not imposed on fĳictional worlds’.49 Obvious source-critical questions – such as who the speaker is, and what the intention and motivation of the narrative in its legal frame are – prove crucial to the analysis of court records. However, one must distinguish between form and content. The influence of legal conventions on courtroom records mostly afffect form. With the content of the confessions, it is the accused’s own knowledge which is decisive and which demonstrates language’s ability to convey meaning. As we will see, confessions all have a personal touch, and no two are identical. In content, they seem not to be subject to the scribe’s dictation. The authority of the magistrate to shape interrogation was probably weaker in Scandinavia than in Germany. Questioning in northern Europe and Scotland was open, engendering a wide variety of answers, very unlike in southern Germany, where question lists, Fragenkatalogen, with a rigid set of questions,

47 Malcolm Gaskill, ‘Witches and Witnesses in New and Old England’, Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. by Stuart Clark (Houndmills, 2001), pp. 55–80, at p. 56–58. 48 In English the term for non-fĳictional prose is not as distinct as in Norwegian, where the word ‘sakprosa’ is used, a term used almost exclusively in Nordic countries. Johan Tønnesson has discussed diffferent terms in English for this type of prose. He maintains that a negative defĳinition like ‘non-fĳiction’, which literally means ‘everything other than fĳiction’, is too superfĳicial. Tønnesson discusses whether the terms ‘factual prose’ and ‘subject-oriented prose’ could be used to denote this type of prose, and maintains that the latter of the two is the best, but that neither of these terms catches the history of meaning related to the Norwegian ‘sakprosa’. Cf. Johan Tønnesson, Hva er sakprosa [What is non- fĳictional prose] (Oslo, 2008), p. 24. 49 Lubomír Doleźel, ‘Fictional and Historical Narrative: Meeting the Postmodernist Challenge’, Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analyses, ed. by David Herman (Columbus, OH, 1999), pp. 247–273, at p. 247. 60 Willumsen prompted stereotyped answers.50 Collins argues a similar thing for Russia as is the case for Northern Norway, that legal procedures – who interrogated and by which steps – influenced closeness to spoken language.51 In Finnmark the interrogator was the district governor or the bailifff, not the magistrate. There the scribe may have influenced the form of the records as a professional of the pen. However, it is unlikely that he changed the contents of utterances. Like Stuart Clark, I argue against assuming that the rules and conventions dictated that the accused merely shape their statements to satisfy legal requirements: ‘Through the adaptation of narrative themes, idioms, and motifs of their own and their culture, they were able to give voice to their interests and suspicions, their feelings and desire, all within the formal setting of persuasive storytelling.’52 The documents do not just show ‘the expectations of those who demanded them or wrote them down’; they also reveal the ‘mental and psychological worlds of people who made them’.53 The court records give access to the voices of the participants. This understanding underpins all discourse analysis of such papers. Kryk-Kastovsky and Doty share this stance, that the language in trial proceedings provides rich historical and socio-cultural information.54 The same point is also made by Norman Fairclough.55 As for the Finnmark records, because the scribe knew how to preserve faithfully words spoken, they not only reveal courtroom events, but also illustrate discourse. In general, court records may be rendered in direct as well as indirect speech, the latter being the case for the Finnmark court records. Linguists fĳind that the use of direct speech makes it easier to reconstruct an actual dialogue.56 However, also the use of indirect speech in court records fĳit orality, as argued

50 Rita Voltmer, ‘Hexenjagd im Territorium der Reichsabtei St Maximin vor Trier’, Quellen zur Geschichte des Rhein- Maas- Raumes, ed. by Winfried Reichert, Gisela Minn, & Rita Voltmer (Trier, 2006), pp. 249–250; Wolfgang Behringer, Hexen und Hexenprozesse (Munich, 1995), pp. 279–281. 51 Daniel Collins, Reanimated Voices Speech Reporting in a Historical-Pragmatic Perspective, Pragmatics and Beyond New Series, 85 (Amsterdam, 2001). 52 Stuart Clark, ‘Introduction’, Languages of Witchcraft, p. 12. 53 Clark, ‘Introduction’, Languages of Witchcraft, p. 12. 54 Kryk-Kastovsky, ‘Historical Courtroom Discourse’, pp. 167–168; Kryk-Kastovsky, ‘How Bad is “Bad Data”?’, pp. 1, 8; Doty, ‘Telling Tales’, pp. 26, 27, 39. 55 Norman Fairclough, Discourse and Social Change (Cambridge, 1992). 56 Matti Rissanen, ‘ “Candy No Witch, Barbados”: Salem Witchcraft Trials as Evidence of Early American English’, Language in Time and Space: Studies in Honour of Wolfgang Viereck on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday, ed. by Heinrich Ramish and Kenneth Wynne, (Stuttgart, 1997), pp. 183–193. Oral Transfer Of Ideas About Witchcraft in norway 61

figure 1.3 Part of a page from the Finnmark court records containing at line 2 the vernacular word ‘dubbell’, which means a bob. Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark Regional Governor, no. 2543, Witchcraft Sentences 1634.

by Kathleen Doty and Daniel Collins from studies of Salem witchcraft papers and Russian court records.57 Collins even suggests that the shift to indirect speech may signal suppression of orality. He concludes that this shift can be traced to changes in the law’s needs and structure. The same might hold true for Finnmark. Oral features stand out in Finnmark’s records. Nevertheless, the scribe, like court recorders elsewhere, had ways of amending records. He could omit passages and abbreviate what was said. He could also stress certain words. The spoken language challenged him, as he had to puzzle out dialect and render unfamiliar terms phonetically. He recorded unfamiliar words in distinct letter- ing, and Latinized terms like names of months. The vernacular and Latinized terms are often written larger, with more space between the letters than ordinary words. Thus the page flags the unfamiliar words the scribe took down phonetically. Figure 1.3 shows part of a page from the Finnmark court records containing italicized words. Often, a modern Norwegian reader must now read aloud such vernacular words rendered in the records to catch their meaning. They are frequently obsolete, even in today’s dialect areas. But specifĳic words only occasionally troubled the scribe; the Norwegian and the Danish languages are so similar that a Danish scribe most of the time had no problem in rendering

57 Doty, ‘Telling Tales’, p. 26; Collins, Reanimated Voices, pp. 46, 47, 56, 204, 253–259, 274–280, 283, 286–302. 62 Willumsen spoken Norwegian.58 The dialect afffected only a few words, of diffferent pronunciation, and the prosody of sentences.59 The scribe took notes during the trial and wrote his complete record shortly after. So there was a time lapse between notes and writing up. Hence it would be natural to use indirect speech. This scribal device did not eliminate all orality; rather, note-taking and transcription preserved oral features. As Malcolm Gaskill has noted, ‘vernacular authenticity’, fĳidelity to diction, attests to a more general accuracy of such written testimonies.60

The First Ideas about Demonology in the 1620s

There came a radical shift in the Finnmark witchcraft trials in 1620. The fĳirst witchcraft panic flared up, introducing demonological ideas, and causing chains of trials. In the 1620–21 panic, 12 women were executed. While the fĳirst two decades of witchcraft trials in Finnmark had been characterized by isolated accusations and malefĳicium, for the next fĳive decades linked trials took over.61 This afffected the geographical pattern of the trials as well. Until 1620 trials had been spread across the whole coastline of Finnmark; after 1620 they took place largely in East Finnmark. The increase in persecution after 1620 may have had several causes. In 1617, Christian IV issued a decree against ‘Witches and their Accomplices’. The Finnmark courts referred to this decree repeatedly, from 1620. In it, witchcraft is – for the fĳirst time in Danish-Norwegian legislation – linked to a connection with the devil. Real witches are defĳined as persons ‘who have attached themselves to the Devil or who consort with him’. Mere use of charms, meanwhile, is to be punished with banishment and ‘forfeiture of real property’. For these ideas to spread, oral transfer was necessary, as most peasants were illiterate. Information could have passed orally from the court to the common people, as many local people gathered at court sessions. Furthermore, preaching

58 There was no standardization of spelling in seventeenth-century Norwegian court records. In this essay, people’s names and place names in quotations from the original sources are rendered verbatim. In running text people’s names and place names have been standardized. 59 Næss, For rett og rettferdighet i 400 år, pp. 11, 23–35. 60 Gaskill, ‘Witches and Witnesses in Old and New England’, Languages of Witchcraft, ed. by Clark, p. 55; Gaskill, ‘Reporting Murder: Fiction in the Archives in Early Modern England’, Social History, 23 (1) (1998): 1–29. 61 From 1600 till 1620 nine persons were executed for practice of witchcraft, seven men and two women. Six of the men were Sami. Liv H. Willumsen, Steilneset. Memorial to the Victims of the Finnmark Witchcraft Trials (Oslo, 2011), pp. 11–19. Oral Transfer Of Ideas About Witchcraft in norway 63 may also have contributed to rapid oral transfer, especially of ideas of the devil’s seductive power. Books of sermons and psalms, by leading Danish theologians, were in use in Finnmark.62 These post-Reformation liturgical texts portray the devil as a menace and stress his battle with God for supremacy over souls.63 Certain men connected to the courts may have helped transmit ideas. Thus, the persecution of the 1620s may trace back to the Scotsman John Cunningham, who took up offfĳice as District Governor of Finnmark from 1619.64 Cunningham hailed from Fife; he knew James VI, who recommended him in service of the Danish King Christian IV, where he had a remarkable career.65 After serving two Danish expeditions to Greenland, Cunningham was a naval captain on the North Sea.66 Based at Vardøhus Castle, he was charged with strengthening the northern border and introducing stricter taxes.67 He was reputedly a strong and decisive leader. His fĳirm hand may have extended to chastening witches. During Cunningham’s time in offfĳice, 41 Finnmarkers were executed for witchcraft, thirty-fĳive of them women.68

62 Among the authors of these books are Niels Hemmingsen, Jesper Brochmand and Poul Andersen Medelby, in addition to psalm books by Hans Tommesen and Thomas Kingo. Cf. Liv H. Willumsen, Trollkvinne i nord [Witch in the North] (Tromsø, 1994), ‘The Role of the Church’, pp. 60–65, at pp. 60–62. 63 The Reformation took place in Denmark in 1536 and in Norway in 1537. 64 This was the position of the king’s highest representative in Northern Norway. Cunningham had this position until 1651. Liv H. Willumsen, ‘Exporting the Devil across the North Sea. John Cunningham and the Finnmark Witch-Hunt’, Scottish Witches and Witch-hunters, ed. by Julian Goodare (Basingstoke, 2013), pp. 49–66; Liv H. Willumsen, ‘Von Fife nach Finnmark – John Cunninghams Weg nach Norden’, in Europaeische Hexenforschung und Landesgeschichte – Methoden, Regionen, Vergleiche, ed. by Rita Voltmer (Trier, 2015). 65 National Archives of Denmark, Tyske Kancelli, Udenrigske Afdeling 1223–1770, Topografĳisk henlagte sager, England Brevveksling mellom Kongehusene 1602–1625, 63–2, England AI 85. Letters from King James VI/I to Christian IV dated 18 February 1605; Letters from James I to Christian IV, 1603–1625, ed. by R.M. Meldrum (Washington, 1977), p. 41; Diane Baptie & Liv H. Willumsen, ‘From Fife to Finnmark – John Cunningham’s Way to the North’, The Genealogist, 28 (2) (2014), pp. 180–199. 66 Jon Olafsons oplevelser som bøsseskytte under Christian IV, nedskrevne af ham selv [Jon Olafsen’s experience as gunman during the reign of Christian IV], Memoirer og Breve, ed. by J. Clausen & P. Fr. Rist (Copenhagen 1905), pp. 130–131; H.D. Lind, Kong Kristian den fĳjerde og hans mænd paa Bremerholm [King Christian IV and his men at Bremerholm], 2nd edn (Copenhagen, 1899), pp. 166–167. 67 Rune B. Hagen, ‘At the Edge of Civilisation. John Cunningham, lensmann of Finnmark 1619–51’, Military Governors and Imperial Frontiers c. 1600–1800, ed. by Andrew Mackillop & Steve Murdoch (Leiden, 2003), pp. 29–51, at p. 30. 68 Willumsen, Steilneset: Memorial to the Victims of the Finnmark Witchcraft Trials, pp. 20–60. 64 Willumsen

Cunningham took part in interrogations in Finnmark, and was in a position to introduce demonological notions into the questioning, just like King James did during the North Berwick trials in 1590–91. Born in c. 1575, Cunningham as a young man must have been familiar with King James’s 1597 treatise on witchcraft, as he was acquainted with the Scottish king.69 In his 1597 treatise King James emphasized two types of circumstantial evidence to be used during witchcraft trials, witch pricking and the water ordeal. Of these, witch pricking was used intensively in Scotland, whereas the water ordeal was frequently used during the Finnmark trials, introduced by Cunningham.70 Cunningham would also have known about the North Berwick witch-hunt of the early 1590s, where most of the accused persons came from villages near his home, even if the trials were central trials held in Edinburgh. Cunningham would also have knowledge of the 1597 Aberdeen witchcraft panic, where the king again participated in interrogation.71 In addition to the letter of recommendation for serving the Danish king, James VI wrote a letter of support for John Cunningham two years later in a situation of conflict between the Danish king and the Scotsman.72 Thus the acquaintance between Cunningham and the Scottish king, Cunningham’s knowledge of demonological ideas as he was a young man when the North Berwick trials took place and when King James published his treatise, Cunningham’s installation as district governor one year before the fĳirst Finnmark panic started, and Cunningham’s introduction of demonological ideas during interrogation in the 1620–21 Finnmark witchcraft trials, all point to his role as crucial as for bringing demonological ideas to Finnmark. After Cunningham came to Finnmark, narratives containing demonological concepts spread rapidly. The witchcraft confessions attest to an oral assimilation of demonological ideas among the peasants, who retold them before the local courts. In addition to the links between the Scottish governor and the

69 King James was the only monarch in Europe to publish a demonological treatise, Demonology, in 1597. Cf. Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland: James VI’s Demonology and the North Berwick Witches, ed. by Laurence Normand & Gareth Roberts (Exeter, 2000), pp. 327–426. 70 One third of those executed in Finnmark were subjected to the water ordeal. There were 30 water ordeals carried out during the Finnmark witchcraft trials, 21 during the period John Cunningham was in offfĳice. See Liv Helene Willumsen, Steilneset: Memorial to the Victims of the Finnmark Witchcraft Trials, pp. 6; 11–101. 71 Stuart Macdonald, The Witches of Fife: Witch-hunting in a Scottish Shire, 1560–1710 (East Linton, 2002); Julian Goodare, ‘The Scottish Witchcraft Panic of 1597’, in The Scottish Witch-hunt in Context, ed. by Julian Goodare (Manchester, 2002), pp. 51–72. 72 Letter from King James VI/I to Christian IV dated 18 February 1605; Letters from James I to Christian IV, 1603–1625, ed. by R.M. Meldrum (Washington, 1977), p. 41. Oral Transfer Of Ideas About Witchcraft in norway 65

Finnmark witchcraft trials mentioned above, namely his acquaintance with the Scottish monarch, his knowledge of Scottish demonological trials in the 1590s, the time of his instalment at Vardøhus, and his participation during interrogation in the 1620 trials, two examples of parallel linguistic terminology in Scottish and Finnmark witchcraft records support a Scottish connection: the words ‘admiral’ and ‘Balduolden’. In both Scotland and Finnmark, we fĳind the notion of a woman being ‘admiral’ or leader for the other witches in a group. The same title for the leader surfaces in both areas. In Finnmark, seven women denounced Kirsten Sørensdatter for witchcraft in 1621, and claimed that she was their ‘admiral and master’.73 In the North Berwick trial of Euphame McCalzean, 1591, a man is said to be her ‘admerall and m[aiste]r’.74 The same string of words is used both places, a fact which points to oral transfer. The evidence is far stronger than had it just been a single word which appeared in both places. An ‘offfĳicer’ or ‘Oberst’ occurs in other European witchcraft cases as a leader’s title, but the word is not connected to the sea, as admiral is.75 Another language usage found in both areas is the name of a meeting place for witches at a fĳield. The accused in Finnmark confessed to witches’ gatherings at ‘Balduolden’, while in Scotland they had met at ‘the Ball Ley’.76 In seventeenth-century Norway ‘Ball’, could be written ‘Ball’, ‘Bald’ or ‘Bal’; all were pronounced in the same way. (Today the toponym is written ‘ball’.) The second part of the word may surface as ‘Volden/ Uolden/ Vollen/ Uollen’. The word denotes an open fĳield, a slope, or just a piece of land. Today this word in Norwegian is written ‘voll’ and in Danish ‘vold’. In Norway, meanwhile, most earlier place-names ending in ‘ld’ have changed to ‘ll’. Now note the meanings of this word in Scotland: seventeenth-century Scots orthography was not standardized either. ‘Ball’ was ‘Ball’, but ‘Ley’ took many forms: ‘lee’, ‘ley’, ‘lay’ are closest. The Scots ‘Ball Ley’ denotes a piece of

73 Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 6, fol. 27r. A similar image is found in Sweden, see Lars Manfred Svenungsson, Rannsaknin- garna om trolldom i Bohuslän 1669–1672 (Uddevalla, 1970), pp. 59, 89. 74 Cf. National Archives of Scotland, JC2/2, fol. 224r; Cf. Willumsen, ‘Seventeenth-Century Witchcraft Trials in Scotland and Northern Norway’, pp. 169, 262. 75 In German sources ‘Die Oberste’ is mentioned related to a leader of a group of alleged witches for instance in the trial against Susanna Gretchen Sundtgen zu Fell, 1588, Landeshauptarchiv Koblenz, 211/ no. 2222, fols 8 and 9. 76 Willumsen, ‘Seventeenth-Century Witchcraft Trials in Scotland and Northern Norway’, pp. 261–263; Liv H. Willumsen, Witches of the North: Scotland and Finnmark (Leiden, 2013), p. 183; Arne Kruse and Liv H. Willumsen, ‘Ordet Ballvollen knytt til transnasjonal overføring av idéar’ [The word Ballvollen related to transnational transference of ideas], Historisk Tidsskrift, b. 93, no. 3 (2014), pp. 407–423. 66 Willumsen grassland, used for games and sports. Hence the Norwegian scribe, to render a name he heard within the orthography he knew, had one option for ‘ball’ but several for the rest of the word. Thirdly, the comparison: it is the particular meaning of the fĳirst syllable that makes the word interesting. ‘Ball’ is literally a ball to throw, as has been argued by a Norwegian toponymist.77 He, however, did not know the connection to Scotland, nor the use of ‘Ball Ley’ in Scottish and Orkney seventeenth-century witch trials, with their famous ball-play, so he failed to link together the whole North and Norwegian Seas. So my argument cites the similarity of sounds, as well as the similarity of meaning in two countries connected with another by just one man, Cunningham. Norwegians and Danes listened to Scots. The migrant word was pronounced in a Finnmark courtroom by the District Governor himself. Probably Cunningham knew from Scotland that witches met at the Ball Ley. He came from Fife, not far from North Berwick and the fĳirst tremendous hunts, in the 1590s. He had lived in Denmark since 1603, and knew Danish well. I think he used this word in an interrogation in 1621, two years after he came to Finnmark. He probably translated Ball Ley into Danish to ask, had a woman met other witches at Baldvolden. The scribe sat struggling to get all words down on paper. So ‘Balduolden’ entered the Finnmark records, via an oral exchange. The name is devoid of local sense, as neither in the seventeenth century nor today is there a place near Vardø called Ballvollen. In Germany, witches met, supposedly, at a ‘Tanzenplatz’.78 In Scotland and Finnmark they met at a place for sports and ball-games. The Scottish notion that the witches met at a fĳield near the village, not at a witches’ mountain, is found in Finnmark just temporarily during the early 1620s, when Cunningham was in position to influence the trials. Thus semantically and phonetically, the Finnmark court records point not to the continent but to Scotland. To exemplify the oral features I will now turn to one separate case. Karen Edisdatter was the fĳirst woman accused in the 1620–21 panic. She was an unmarried Sami, a maid, from the fĳishing village of Omgang, about two hours by boat from Vardø. First testimonies raised malefĳicium, causing sickness. A more serious accusation linked Karen to Abraham Nielsen, who disappeared from a boat and drowned, after having threatened to hit Karen’s fĳiancé on the

77 Nils Hallan, ‘Balvolden (Baluolden)’, Håløygminne, 14, pp. 276–287. 78 For instance trial against Eva Zeihen, Greth Schlossel, and Greth Kettern from Kenn and Kirsch, 1572, Bibliotek des Bischöflichen Priesterseminars Trier, Handschrift 30, fols 317v and 325v. Oral Transfer Of Ideas About Witchcraft in norway 67 mouth.79 The interrogation moved towards demonology. Karen, tried by water, floated like a bob.80 Afterwards she confessed

that she was far too involved with the evil Devil [. . .] The fĳirst time she was involved with the Devil was when she was but a lass and was tending herds in the fĳields. A heaviness came over her near a hill, and presently a big headless man came to her asking her whether she was asleep. She said, I am neither asleep nor awake. In his hand, he was holding a large ring of keys which he offfered her, saying, If you accept these keys, all you wish to undertake in this world will come to pass. She noticed he had a beautiful ribbon and she said, Give me that ribbon, I do not know how to use the keys. She got her ribbon, and when she reached home, she became demented, and since then, she confessed, the Devil has always been with her, unless the minister was present.81 [Chapter author’s italics]

The pact is crucial. The confession features a narrative of temptation, as in numerous other witchcraft confessions, where the devil offfers his victim something to become his servant and hold part of his kingdom on earth. The devil’s offfers of money or gifts are frequent in witchcraft confessions, as is his reassurance that she who enters into the pact should lack nothing.82 Also the topos of confusion after the pact is frequently found in the Finnmark confessions.83 Oral features are strong in Karen’s confession, for instance additive structures like ‘and presently’, ‘and she said’, ‘and she went home’, all Ong’s markers.84 There is a clear linear progression, emphasizing the order of events, for example ‘The fĳirst time she was involved with the Devil’ and ‘since then’. The dialogue with the devil enlivens the narrative and draws attention to the context, which is oral. There is a clear exit point, much as in oral tales: ‘when

79 Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 6, fol. 11v. 80 The procedure of the water ordeal consisted of throwing the accused person into the sea with his or her hands and feet tied. Water, which was considered a sacred element, was thought to repel evil, so the suspect’s rising to the surface and floating, was an indication of guilt. Sinking was a sign of innocence. Cf. Willumsen, The Witchcraft Trials in Finnmark, Northern Norway, p. 15. 81 Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 6, fol. 12rv. 82 In Scottish sources the formulation is often ‘never want’. Cf. Willumsen, ‘Seventeenth- Century Witchcraft Trials in Scotland and Northern Norway’, pp. 102, 169, 247. 83 I have not seen this feature often mentioned in trials from Norway, Scotland or Germany. 84 Ong, Orality and Literacy, pp. 36–75. 68 Willumsen she reached home’. Resonance with traditional Norwegian folk tales surfaces, for example in the expression ‘neither asleep nor awake’.85 This confession suggests fusion between traditional folk belief and new demonological ideas, on both structural and semantic levels. The pact with the devil clearly evinces new demonological ideas, from abroad. Karen confĳirmed her confession, denounced two other women, and was sentenced to the stake. Traces of orality are visible fĳirstly in the structure of the narrative, secondly in the stock phrasing, thirdly in the oral-style mnemonic practices, fourthly in memory-signs, fĳifthly in connection to traditional oral tales, sixthly in repetition of very similar phrases. All these devices which Karen uses reflect bonds with spoken language. Although her confession is in indirect discourse, the accurate scribe keeps its oral features intact. The strong oral features taken down initially survive in the reported speech. This signals the expertise of the recorder, whose task it was to give a detailed account of what was said. In order to make the text cohere, he has probably added words, but the contents, I sustain, are Karen’s own. The trial itself, lasting just one day, seems to have left the scribe unmoved. Whether torture was applied beforehand is unclear; it was not legal before the sentence. Afterwards it was allowed, to get names of accomplices. Therefore torture seldom surfaces in the court records. The water ordeal, however, not regarded as torture, was recorded openly, as in Karen’s case. Recording the confession, the scribe used no distancing devices, neither irony nor sympathetic words. So he must have shared with his fellow offfĳicers the prevalent fear of witchcraft. He has been listening to a very dramatic set of speeches, leading to a terrible conclusion. And yet he, the hearer, the writer, keeps calm and professional. His equanimity is no surprise, given institutional practices. Judicial routine and appetite for structure seem to have overwhelmed any urge to reveal emotion.

Consolidation of Demonological Ideas in the 1650s

To judge from the confessions, by the second panic (1652 to 1653), knowledge of demonological ideas seems more established. Thirteen women were burned during this panic.86 A new District Governor, Jørgen Friis, was installed in 1651.

85 Cf. The Norwegian fairy tale ‘Ikke kjørende og ikke ridende’ [Not driving and not riding], Peter Chr. Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, Norske folkeeventyr 2 [Norwegian folk tales] (Oslo, 1983), pp. 47–48. Originally published 1841–44. 86 Three death sentences were given in February and March 1652, and ten similarly from January till March 1653. Cf. Willumsen, Steilneset: Memorial to the Victims of the Finnmark Witchcraft Trials, pp. 61–73. Oral Transfer Of Ideas About Witchcraft in norway 69

figure 1.4 Vardøhus Castle. Watercolour by Hans H. Lilienskiold. Archive: Finnmark County Library.

The next year a panic arose, perhaps because of him. The witchcraft fĳires, usually in winter, must have been spectacular. Darkness, snow, frozen ground, howling wind, storms, shipwrecks – surrounded the women brought to the execution place at Steilneset.87 They had endured long weeks in ‘the witches’ hole’, at Vardøhus Castle. (The seventeenth-century fortress appears in Figure 1.4, a watercolour made at the end of the seventeenth century by Regional Governor Hans H. Lilienskiold.) There must have been fear everywhere, everyone wonder- ing who would be denounced next. The women were accused of raising storms, causing two shipwrecks and damaging Vardø, and of preventing fĳish from coming in-shore, ruining the

87 Steilneset, which etymologically means a headland where persons were executed by means of ‘steile og hjul’. This was a method of execution using a heavy hjul, a wheel, which crushed the knuckles of the victim. Then the parts of the body were put on display on a stick, steile, which often had a wheel placed horizontally at the top, where the parts of the body were put. Steilneset is today the location of a memorial commemorat- ing the victims of the Finnmark witchcraft trials, Steilneset Memorial, opened June 2011. See Reidun L. Andreassen & Liv H. Willumsen, eds., Steilneset Memorial: Art Architecture History (Stamsund, 2014). 70 Willumsen catch.88 The panic had two winter waves, the fĳirst lasting from January 1652 until February 1652, and the second lasting from December 1652 until March 1653. Bodelle Danielsdatter was the second woman accused in this panic. A married woman from Vadsø, she was denounced by the fĳirst accused, Gundelle Omundsdatter, at Vardøhus on 24 January 1652, for wrecking a Bergen merchant ship. After confession, Gundelle was transported to Vadsø, where her death sentence was passed on 5 February 1652. The same day, Bodelle Danielsdatter was imprisoned in Vadsø and interrogated. She confessed, then retracted. She was then brought to Vardøhus Castle and put before the court again on 23 February, where once more she repudiated her confession. As the accused had to confĳirm a confession before sentence, ‘it was found, in view of her previous confession, given of her own accord before worthy people, that she should be interrogated under torture’.89 Such entries are unusual. Here the argument for torture seems to be her previous confession before certain dignitaries, probably the jury. Most torture took place at Vardøhus, so torture was decided upon after her arrival there. Five days later, Bodelle was brought before the court again, at Vardøhus; this time she confessed ‘willingly’.90 Witchcraft trial records often contain such formulae after documented use of torture: ‘she confessed of her own free will’ or ‘she confessed without torture’. So, even when no torture is recorded, such expressions suggest that torture had fĳirst been used. The voice of Bodelle Danielsdatter is recorded in the records in this way, as seen in Figure 1.5:

Now the said Bodelle is once again brought before the court, and she willingly upholds her fĳirst confession, in the sense that she says that what Gundelle has said about her is true. She initially learned witchcraft from Kierstenn, Niels Pedersenn’s wife in Waadtzøe, who gave it to her in a drink, and she says that her apostle is called Belsebou, and she fĳirst tried out such crafts on her own sheep, which then burst asunder. Item, last autumn, in the likeness of a swan, she went with the others, namely Mette who was in the likeness of a raven, Wilanndt’s wife Baarnne, in the likeness of a goose, Bergite the wife of Little Jfffuer from Eckerøe, and the said Gundelle, to cast a spell on the ship belonging to Captain Jonn Jonnsenn from Bergenn, which was lost at sea, all because of Lauridtz Braas, because

88 Willumsen, Trollkvinne i nord, pp. 29–31. 89 Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 8, fo. 65r. 90 Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 8, fo. 65v. Oral Transfer Of Ideas About Witchcraft in norway 71

figure 1.5 Court records of the trial of Bodelle Danielsdatter, Vardøhus, Finnmark, 1652. Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 8, fol. 65v.

he was always cursing and quarrelling with her and her husband. After such confessions from the said Bodelle Danielsdatr herself, Bailifff Hans Jennsenn Ørbech put to the court that she should be punished with loss of life in fĳire at the stake. Chapter[ author’s italics]91

91 Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 8, fols 65v–66r. 72 Willumsen

This brief confession contains key demonological notions. The motif of a pact with the devil by means of food or drink given by a female mentor appears often in Finnmark records. This idea also appears in other parts of Scandinavia, in Germany, and in Scotland. So does testing the newly acquired art on an animal. Similarly the idea of persuading an ‘apostle’, a personal demon, to join her in acts of mischief, is often found in Finnmark. Then there is metamorphosis. Often Finnmark’s alleged witches confess to shaping as befĳitted the environment and the operation’s intent, even becoming a whale to overturn a boat. The names of assorted birds also colour the narrative. Those mentioned here appear in the area. Swans summer in Finnmark, as do geese. (See fĳigures 1.6 and 1.7 for watercolours by Hans H. Lilienskiold.) Ravens were also found there. Swans and ravens also inhabit Norwegian fairy tales, albeit recorded at a much later date. In the panic, new names led to the imprisonment of new suspects and to swift escalation. The panic must be seen against the economic conditions at the time, with fĳishermen chronically indebted to Bergen merchants and to their agents up the coast. Bodelle’s confessed revenge motive, a quarrel with local factors, points to social inequality and economic stress.

figure 1.6 Domen Witch Mountain outside Vardø. Watercolour by Hans H. Lilienskiold. Archive: Finnmark County Library. Oral Transfer Of Ideas About Witchcraft in norway 73

figure 1.7 About the Taxes. Watercolour by Hans H. Lilienskiold. Archive: Finnmark County Library. 74 Willumsen

Bodelle Danielsdatter’s confession was more purely demonological than Karen Edisdatter’s in 1620. Like hers, it is very oral. It is especially additive, using ‘and’ to link sentences. The confession is marked by linearity, using time markers such as ‘now’, ‘initially’, ‘fĳirst’, ‘last autumn’, and ‘after’. In a more scriptual fashion, however, it also has subordinating grammatical structures to signal cause-and-efffect connections:fĳirst witchcraft was learned, then it was tried out on an animal and death occurred as a consequence [Chapter author’s italics]. Bodelle’s demonology bore the marks of rapid oral contagion. Her demon, for instance, Belsebou, was internationally known.92 The name, of Hebrew origin, means ‘Lord of the Flies’.93 Demons in Finnmark trials bore a mix of international and local names.94 Moreover, Bodelle’s motif of flight was an import. Confessing to all these elements, she drew on her own knowledge of witchcraft. Interrogated soon after she was imprisoned, she most probably knew these ideas already. Such courtroom stories had an oral starting point, as is documented for instance in Scotland.95 Orality moved ideas both into and out of court. Many inhabitants attended court sessions, and probably relayed demonological ideas to the world outside. Bodelle shared the fate of many others: ‘The said Bodelle Danielsdatter [. . .] delivered herself from God unto the Devil and by means of his craft caused the wrecking of Captain Jon Jonsen’s ship, the court fĳinds she is to be sentenced to loss of life by fĳire at the stake’.96 Here we hear the voice of the representative of the law, his discourse formal. Weight is put on Bodelle’s allegiance to the devil and on the devil’s capacity to transfer his evil power to human beings.

92 Cf. Willumsen, Trollkvinne i nord, p. 31. 93 It is also known in Arabic, Greek and Latin. Beelzebub was a Semitic deity worshipped in the Philistine city of Ekron. In later Christian and Biblical sources, he appears as a demon and the name of one of the seven princes of Hell. 94 Cf. Willumsen, Trollkvinne i nord, p. 31. 95 In an Orkney witchcraft trial from 1643, as part of her confession, Barbara Bowndie said, referring to a story with demonological content known among the populace, that it was eleven years since ‘The dancers of Munes’ were fĳirst spoken of. Cf. Willumsen, ‘Seventeenth-Century Witchcraft Trials in Scotland and Northern Norway’, p. 169; Willumsen, Witches of the North, pp. 186, 194, 196. 96 Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 8, fol. 66r. Oral Transfer Of Ideas About Witchcraft in norway 75

Additional Demonological Ideas in the 1660s

The last Finnmark witchcraft panic was the most severe. It lasted from November 1662 until April 1663, again in the dark of winter. This fĳinal spasm executed 20 women.97 Also six small girls were accused of witchcraft during this panic. New demonological ideas surfaced. The precision of the sources permits us to say when these latest witchcraft ideas fĳirst came into circulation and when they were retold in the court-room. Thus the Finnmark sources testify to the speed of oral transfer of ideas in general. Adam Fox, using court records to study the oral transmission of news, proved that among the lower social orders of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, news spread rapidly across networks.98 Likewise in Finnmark, where the ideas fĳirst spread among women jailed at Vardøhus Castle, and later difffused across communities. Witchcraft lore seemingly spread like gossip; it was easily accessible and of broad public interest. The new ideas were brought to the North by a learned couple, Ambrosius and Anne Friedrichsdatter Rhodius. The husband and wife, considered subversive, were fĳirst imprisoned at Akershus Castle in Norway’s capital,99 and then transferred to Vardøhus.100 Anne Rhodius was the granddaughter of the king’s physician; Ambrosius Rhodius was a physician and astrologist from Germany. The couple was well acquainted with the ideas of demonology. At Vardøhus, they were incarcerated in a house within the castle walls. From the start, Anne Rhodius had much contact with women imprisoned for witchcraft, and later also with imprisoned children.101 The Rhodius couple arrived in May 1662. Next October, the fĳirst suspect of the third panic was imprisoned. We know exactly what was said by Anne Rhodius and how she influenced adults and children, from records from the Court of Appeal, from its summer

97 After this panic only three persons lost their lives during the witch-hunt in Finnmark. 98 Adam Fox, ‘Rumour, News and Popular Political Opinion in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England’, The Historical Journal, 11 (3) (1997), pp. 597–620. 99 The capital of Norway, nowadays Oslo, was then called Christiania. 100 Willumsen, ‘Seventeenth-Century Witchcraft Trials in Scotland and Northern Norway’, pp. 212–214. 101 It was most likely that at least one of the small girls imprisoned for witchcraft, Maren Olsdatter, was placed in the same house as the Rhodius couple. See Liv H. Willumsen, ‘Children Accused of Witchcraft’, p. 23; Kirsten Bergh, ‘Til ild og bål’, Vardøhus festning 650 år, ed. by G.I. Willoch (Oslo, 1960), pp. 126–144, at p. 135. 76 Willumsen

1663 sessions at Vardoe.102 The reason is that there are sources written down later than the witchcraft trials in local court that retrospectively throw light on Anne Rhodius’s influence on adults and children accused of witchcraft during the early 1660s. First, there are the records from the Court of Appeal, from its summer 1663 sessions at Vardoe, just a few months after the severe panic was fĳinished.103 When questioned by the Court-of-Appeal Judge, adult women confessed that Anne Rhodius threatened them with the rack and being burned with hot irons, if they did not confess to having practised witchcraft. Even the accused children were threatened that they would be tortured, if they did not confess, and they were instructed by Anne Rhodius what the name of their devil was and where on their bodies they had the devil’s mark. One of the small girls, Sigri Pedersdatter, said that Anne Rhodius had threatened her as she sat in her room and told her to confess all she knew, then she would become God’s child and Anne Rhodius would then have her as her own child, therefore, it was better she confessed.104 Also the other children confessed in the Court of Appeal that Anne Rhodius had led them astray, to lie about their parents, saying that they had learned witchcraft from their mothers.105 The six small girls accused of witchcraft during the 1662–63 panic were all acquitted by the Court-of-Appeal Judge in summer 1663. We have further information from the local court in 1666, when Ambrosius Rhodius entered a plea to have his wife cleared of suspicion of influencing witchcraft suspects.106 These records reveal that Anne Rhodius had contact with the imprisoned adults and children during the 1662–63 panic. She had a key to the ‘witches’ hole’, where most of the suspected women were imprisoned, she helped with medical examination of the women, and she even assisted when one of the imprisoned women delivered a child.107 It seems that Anne Rhodius had plenty of opportunity to influence the children about what to confess. The bailifff said: ‘It may well be that the late Rev. Herr Hans, as well as myself, interrogated Peder Oelsen’s daughter, at the District Governor’s orders, though never the way Magister Rhodius’s Anne tried to persuade her, something

102 Regional State Archives of Trondheim, Court records of Court of Appeal 1647–83, fols 152–157. 103 Regional State Archives of Trondheim, Court records of Court of Appeal 1647–83, fols 152–157. 104 Willumsen, ‘Children Accused of Witchcraft’, p. 30. 105 Willumsen, ‘Children Accused of Witchcraft’, pp. 24, 30–32. 106 Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 11, fols 96v–114r. 107 Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 11, fol. 103v. Oral Transfer Of Ideas About Witchcraft in norway 77 that may be confĳirmed by the said Peder Oelsen’s daughter who is still alive, as well as by the Appeal Court Judge’s passed sentences’ [Chapter author’s italics].108 Both documents throw light on Anne Rhodius’s activity within the walls of the Castle before and during the panic. The sources portray her as keen to coax adults and children to confess to demonological ideas. The new demonological ideas made much of the mother-daughter relationship. Of the imprisoned six girls, we learn the age of two; one twelve, the other eight. Among the new ideas were child-sacrifĳices to the devil by mothers, the devil’s mark, the devil as impregnator, and difffĳiculty of jettisoning the Evil One once he found a foothold in a family. One girl, Ingeborg Iversdatter, spoke about her sister Karen and herself, saying ‘they both learnt it from their mother, for the Evil One was always with them in the past, and they cannot be rid of him, no matter how the priests work on them and try to convert them to Our Lord the Christ, he will never relinquish them, since they have been sac- rifĳiced to him by the mother’ [Chapter author’s italics].109 Also, the idea that a mother taught her eldest daughter witchcraft, appeared.110 Barbra Olsdatter confessed in April 1663 ‘that she taught her own eldest daughter the craft about two months ago’.111 She then denounced Gjertrud Siversdatter for the same, saying that ‘Giertrud allegedly taught her own eldest daughter witchcraft’.112 Both these sentences appear in Barbra’s long, fluent confession, and so not seem to be the result of leading questions. The fĳirst confession, about teaching her own daughter, comes after a confession of how she herself entered a pact with the devil, ratifĳied by the devil’s ‘pinching her with his claws on her left thigh’.113 This stamp was exhibited in court. Barbra was given a god called Isach, and tried her craft on her dog, ‘giving it the craft in a piece of fĳish, whereupon it burst asunder and died’.114 The other sentence, against Gjertrud, is also

108 Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 11, fol. 105r. 109 Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 10, fol. 257v. 110 For instance Nicolas Remy, Demonolatry (London 1970), chapter 3. Originally published 1595. 111 Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 10, fol. 267v. 112 Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 10, fol. 268r. 113 Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 10, fol. 267r. 114 Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 10, fol. 267v. 78 Willumsen inserted in a part of Barbra’s confession, where Barbra tells how ‘they set offf and conjured up the storm from the Castle to the ship’.115 The whole confession has clear oral features. Barbra’s tale of teaching daughters witchcraft seems not to have been a response to leading questions, but comes embedded in her discourse, as if she knew these notions before the trial started. She acquired them within the year, after Anne Rhodius came to Vardøhus. Thus, ideas fĳirst were fĳirst brought within the walls of Vardøhus by Anne Rhodius, to imprisoned women, and then confessed by the same women, then spread in the community, and fĳinally confessed by local women, never before imprisoned, who were brought straight to court, all this in the course of less than one year. The idea that a pregnant woman carried a devil foetus came to the fore in a conversation Anne Rhodius had with Ragnilde Endresdatter. Ragnilde, pregnant when fĳirst imprisoned, gave birth in prison. Anne Rhodius tried to make Ragnilde confess to witchcraft. First, she threatened her, evoking every con- ceivable form of torture. Ragnilde answered, the record says, ‘then I must lie about myself so that my life will end when I give birth to my child. Then the answer she got from Anne Rhodius was, you are carrying not a child but a Devil’ [Chapter author’s italics].116 Nowhere else in the Finnmark material does this notion surface. The allegation smacks of Anne Rhodius’s brush with learning. Ragnilde escaped the flames; she had her case brought to the Court of Appeal, in Vardoe, in the summer of 1663. The records do not tell how this happened. At the Court of Appeal she was acquitted.117 These new ideas about witchcraft spread rapidly. It took less than half a year from when the ideas were launched among prisoners at Vardøhus until they were recounted in court by others. However, this dissemination was not restricted to the Castle area alone. The ideas spread widely around Vardø as well, as several suspects lived in neighbouring villages and were imprisoned close to home. The ideas quickly reached common people near Vardøhus. For instance, the younger sister of Ingeborg Iversdatter, Karen Iversdatter, who lived in Vadsø, was imprisoned there. Karen also knew a range of witchcraft ideas:

115 Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 10, fol. 268r. 116 Regional State Archives of Trondheim, Court Records of the Court of Appeal for Nordland and Finnmark 1647–68, fol. 155. 117 Regional State Archives of Trondheim, Court Records of the Court of Appeal for Nordland and Finnmark 1647–68, fol. 157; Willumsen, The Witchcraft Trials of Finnmark, Northern Norway, p. 257. Oral Transfer Of Ideas About Witchcraft in norway 79

So now she, this little girl Karen, confesses and admits exactly what her sister maintained, that her mother gave it to her in some milk. When she went out of the cottage the day after, the wicked Satan immediately came to her, at fĳirst in the doorway, in the likeness of a black dog, and bit her hand, and the marks are [now] exhibited [to the court]. After that, the wicked Satan came in when she was with her mother, but now he was in the likeness of a black man, and her mother gave him her hand upon it that she would serve him, and his hand was black, whereupon she promised to serve him, saying she would invoke him, and she calls him her god and names him Christopher.118

Karen Iversdatter, not more than eight years old, knew about learning witchcraft by drinking milk, about the shape of the devil as a black dog and as a black man, about the devil’s mark, and about the ritual of promising the devil her service. She also knew about shape-shifting, the naming of other suspects, and an imagined plot against the District Governor. All this suggests that demonological ideas were known in the fĳishing villages, among not only adults but children, who seem to have learned just as fast.119 Karen Iversdatter confessed to having practised witchcraft against the District Governor together with adults:

She also confesses that she went to Waardøhuus Castle a short while back, and then she was in the likeness of a crow, together with the bell ring- er’s wife, also from here, and a lass ibidem, by the name of Elen, who at the time was staying with big Per Gundersen in Andersbye, and a woman from Echerøen whom she does not know. And she maintains that they, too, were attired as crows. She believes their intention was to kill the District Governor with pins, all except for her, for she had none, and it was night. They could not accomplish their deed, as the District Governor often listened to God’s word and was very God-fearing. So they each went their separate ways again. [Chapter author’s italics.]120

118 Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 10, fol. 252r. 119 Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 10, fol. 252r. 120 Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 10, fols. 252r–252v. 80 Willumsen

Karen Iversdatter was apparently aware of the seriousness of a confession, that it endangered those denounced. She told how Nils the transport purveyor’s wife came to her in Nils Pedersen’s cottage in the likeness of a crow, and for- bade her to confess anything at all:121

She also gives an account of how the said transport purveyor’s wife came to her last summer, in the likeness of a white bird, and asked her to go with her from the said Andersbye up onto a mountain. She refused, but she [the transport purveyor’s wife] took her with her anyway and then she, too, was attired as a bird, and there were many other people there in their various shapes, people she did not know, and they were drinking beer poured out for them from a pitcher by the wicked Satan, but she did not get any. [Chapter author’s italics.]122

Just like one of the other girls, in her confession Karen Iversdatter touches upon sexual relations with the devil: ‘She also confesses how the wicked Satan, in the likeness of a medium-sized, black man, came to her in Wadtzøe, when her mother was there, and slept with her in the animal shed one night.’123 It is unclear whether ‘her’ refers to the girl or to the mother. The many notions recounted by this small girl, who lived in Vadsø, and was brought before the court in Vadsø, help argue for rapid transfer of demonological notions. Karen confessed to both new ideas, like learning from her mother and the devil’s mark, and older notions, like the appearance of the devil and getting an apostle of her own. Oral transmission suggests the importance of a carrier. Clearly, the activity of one person was often crucial for the spread of new ideas. As for the children, it turns out that Anne Rhodius had trained them in memorizing particular demonological ideas, for instance, that they should know where they had their devil’s mark.124 This came clear when the Judge of Appeal questioned the children in June 1663, and it became clear that Anne Rhodius had manipulated

121 Orig.: ‘Schydtzschafffer’; a public servant responsible for providing means of transport for the gentry. 122 Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 10, fol. 252v. 123 Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 10, fol. 252v. 124 Ibid. Oral Transfer Of Ideas About Witchcraft in norway 81 them in many ways.125 Other small girls were influenced by Anne Rhodius. One of them was Kirsten Sørensdatter, the daughter of Gjertrud Siversdatter, mentioned above, denounced by Barbra Olsdatter for joining the plot against the District Governor:

Likewise the aforementioned Barbra confesses that when she was with the large crowd of witches at the Castle, before the District Governor and his young woman sailed in to Wadtzøen, the said Giertrud and her daughter were allegedly amongst those who wanted to cast a spell on His Honour. But since His Honour always feared God so much, they had no power over him.126

In retrospect, through the confession of Sigri Pedersdatter at the Court of Appeal, we learn that Anne Rhodius tried to teach Kirsten Sørensdatter several points to retell when interrogated. Anne Rhodius had also put little Kirsten on her lap and asked her if the devil was with her. The girl said no. Then Anne Rhodius asked Kirsten what was the name of Sigri’s god, and Kirsten answered: it was Isach. Then Anne Rhodius asked Kirsten what mark Sigri had, and she answered that she did not know where Sigri’s mark was, but her own was on her right arm. Apparently, Kirsten Sørensdatter had confessed that she had learned witchcraft from her mother. Then the court asked after Anne Rhodius’s influence on the children, and she was fetched to counter the accused persons:

Likewise, the said M. Rodius’s wife, Anne Fredrichsdatter, asked Sørenn Christensen’s oldest daughter Kiersten, who is currently at the Castle, whether she [Anne Fredrichsdatter] ever coaxed her into lying about her own mother or anybody else. Whereupon she [Kiersten] denies this; she has not done so in any way, merely urging her to be guided by the truth and to say what is true.127

In the case of Kirsten Sørensdatter and her mother, the husband played an active part, trying to help his wife. On 25 June 1663, at the Court of Appeal, a letter from Kirsten’s father, Søren Christensen, was read in court, concerning

125 Regional State Archives of Trondheim, Court Records of the Court of Appeal for Nordland and Finnmark 1647–68, fols 152–157. 126 Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 10, fols 268r–268v. 127 Regional State Archives of Tromsø, the Archives of Finnmark District Magistrate, no. 10, fol. 269v. 82 Willumsen the rumour and good name of his wife. At this session, Kirsten admitted that Anne Rhodius had led her to lie about her parents.

Conclusion

In this essay, I have argued that oral transfer of demonological ideas from learned persons to peasants took place during the seventeenth-century Finnmark witchcraft trials. In an early phase of the witch-hunt, demonological ideas circulated in Finnmark’s settlements and fused with already-known popular narratives. On linguistic grounds it might be argued that structural similarities between demonological and traditional narratives facilitated this assimilation. These older mental structures may have eased the memorizing process. When imprisoned and interrogated, the accused retold the narratives they had heard about the devil, the witches’ gatherings, and the pact. Stories about the devil had a narrative structure. They attached easily to structures that linked them to folk beliefs. Many traits of the confessions – their demonological content, their length, their rich details, and their language – all testify to an assimilation of demonological notions in the local communities and a retelling of such ideas before the court. This retelling indicated that the ideas were already known by the accused before the interrogation started. The personalized character of the confessions support this argument; each of the accused knew the demonological notions and retold them in an individual way. Prominent oral features in the confessions indicate fusions between traditional and demonological narratives; the same holds true for vernacular words. The Finnmark witchcraft trials documents two types of oral transfer of ideas. Firstly, oral transfer of demonological ideas may have taken place within the walls of Vardøhus Castle, among suspects held for long periods. This transmission was swift. Nothing in the sources suggests that the transfer happened during the trial itself. Even if leading questions were asked, these were short, the record shows, and directed towards certain demonological points to be answered, while the answers were long and comprehensive. However, while an oral transfer of notions among imprisoned witchcraft suspects was quick, learned ideas about witchcraft were known not only among prisoners, but also in the areas round about Vardøhus. A contagion of new witchcraft ideas and their retelling in a trial took only a few months. Ideas most probably spread from judicial offfĳicials to the populace by transmission of information from the local courts, where many people from the local communities attended. Also events like the water ordeal and the burnings attracted Oral Transfer Of Ideas About Witchcraft in norway 83 many spectators and helped ideas to spread, particularly since peasants were ordered to attend. Moreover, preaching must have fostered the transmission of demonological ideas in a Lutheran, post-Reformation area. With regard to the two modes of reading of court records mentioned, the Finnmark court records give comprehensive and fluent information about the witchcraft trials. Meanwhile, the records can be analysed using a narratological approach, focusing on the role of the scribe, textual structures, and accused persons’ voices. Then various accents come to the fore. In the Finnmark witchcraft records, the voice of the scribe very rarely can be heard through comments. His voice seems withdrawn. But the scribe is accurate in rendering questions posed by the District Governor and the bailifff during the interrogation, as well as the answers. The confessions by the accused persons are rendered with a strong oral accent, with regard to contents as well as form. Individualizing features distinguish the persons’ voices from one another, creating diversity, resulting in separate versions of an original story. These features suggest that the scribe has tried to preserve the individual touch. Repetitions might occur during one confession, for the scribe was following the oral presentation. This essay has concentrated on the voices of the accused. The proliferation of demonological notions in confessions during the witch-hunt argues that oral transfer of ideas about witchcraft was central. However, the other voices heard during the trials, like the voice of the law and the voices of the witnesses, are rendered in an authentic way as well. So there was an oral accent in the records as a whole. They are not constructed by the scribe to content the governors alone, but to attempt to deliver a correct transcript, rendering the discourse of learned and lay persons alike. In all this investigation, oral history enriches our understanding. CHAPTER 2 St Helena and Love Magic: From the Spanish Inquisition to the Internet

Susana Gala Pellicer

Introduction

Popular sorcery is often hard to track: its oral nature leaves few written traces. But Spanish Inquisition documents do sometimes preserve alleged confessions by women accused of sorcery.1 Inquisition processes were deeply oral.2 In predominantly rural seventeenth-century Spain, most proceedings took on ‘delitos verbales, word crimes’. These were simple conversations of those who perhaps said something against the teachings of the Church, something very likely in a very rural world, where so much that one said might seem blasphemy, heresy, or rejection of good teachings.3 So the oral transfer of information was crucial to a court case: the grounds for accusation were alleged speech, so that a trial easily began with a neighbour’s denunciation of something said in conversation. Thus, it was often words rather than actions that attracted the Inquisitors’ suspicions. While in the fĳifteenth- and sixteenth centuries, Inquisitors sought out heretical acts, thereafter their rural visits became

* The fĳirst version of this article was translated by Morten E. Jelby and Richard Ludlow. Victoria Hughes then translated additional text and edited the fĳinal version. Special thanks must be given to Lesley Twomey and Thomas Cohen, whose corrections showed exceptional patience and generosity. 1 TN: Throughout the article, the word ‘sorcery’ (sorcerer, sorceress) has been used to translate the Spanish term ‘hechicera’ and the word ‘witchcraft’ (witch) to translate ‘brujería’. For this distinction, see: Henry Charles Lea, Historia de la Inquisición Española, trans. Ángel Alcalá & Jesús Tobío (Madrid, 1983), III, pp. 557–567. 2 For the Inquisition, see, for example, Luis Suárez, La expulsión de los judíos de España (Madrid, 1991), pp. 302–306; Jaime Contreras Contreras and Jean-Pierre Dedieu, ‘Geografía de la Inquisición Española’, Hispania, 144 (1980): 37–94, p. 42; Jean-Pierre Dedieu, L’Administration de la foi. L’Inquisition de Tolède, XVIeme–XVIIIeme siècle (Madrid, 1989). 3 Jean-Pierre Dedieu, ‘El modelo religioso: las disciplinas del lenguaje y de la acción’, Inquisición española, poder político y control social, ed. by Bartolomé Bennassar (Barcelona, 1984), pp. 208–230; Helen Rawlings, Church, Religion, and Society in Early Modern Spain (Basingstoke, 2002), p. 82.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004291829_004 From The Spanish Inquisition To The Internet 85 perfunctory. Most cases arose in towns and cities, where news spread quickly; judges only ventured into the country when an especially alarming accusation reached their ears. Court hearings much relied on the spoken word. So, since magic smacked of heresy, scribes wrote down sorceresses’s confessions, zealously recording every word, and so left a written record of the spells, charms, and prayers, otherwise so hard to fĳind in other records.4

Helena of Constantinople – the Origins

When it comes to love magic many inquisitorial records invoke St Helena. Let us fĳirst track the origins of the legend that later gave rise to charms that invoked St Helena, also known as Helena of Constantinople. The actual woman lived from the late third to the early fourth century.5 The fĳirst wife of Constantius Chlorus, she was the mother of Constantine. She encouraged her son to become a Christian and then began spreading the faith, building new churches, and recovering relics, such as the alleged true cross; their purported powers helped feed a growing demand for such fragments, particularly in churches built after the fourth century.6 Although St Helena’s pilgrimage to Jerusalem was real, her discovery of the cross was laid to her only posthumously. Between the late fourth century and the middle of the fĳifth, the Helena legend, the Protonike legend, and that of Judas Kyriakos all recounted a discovery of the cross.7 In her legend, Helena had a revelation of where to fĳind the actual cross after it appeared to Constantine, before his famous battle against Maxentius. The son funded an

4 For written transmission of love magic see. Araceli Campos Moreno, Oraciones, ensalmos y conjuros mágicos en el Archivo Inquisitorial de la Nueva España. 1600–1630 (México, 1999), p. 33. 5 Her husband later repudiated her in favour of a more advantageous match. For St Helena’s own times, see María Lara Martínez & Laura Lara Martínez, ‘Santa Elena y el hallazgo de la Cruz de Cristo’, Comunicación y Hombre 3 (2007), pp. 39–50; Jan Willem Drijvers, Helena Augusta: The Mother of Constantine the Great and the Legend of her Finding the True Cross (Leiden, 1992). 6 Francesco Scorza Barcellona, ‘Le origini’, Storia della santità nel cristianesimo occidentale (Roma, 2005), pp. 19–89, p. 59. Jack Goody, Representaciones y contradicciones: Ambivalencia hacia las imágenes, el teatro, la fĳicción, las reliquias, y la sexualidad, trans. Ernesto Thielen (Barcelona, 1999), p. 93. 7 H.J.W. Drijvers & Jan Willem Drijvers, The Finding of the True Cross. The Judas Kyriakos Legend in Syriac (Lovanii, 1997), pp. 11–16. 86 Gala Pellicer expedition to the Holy Land, led by his mother, by then elderly, an envoy of imperial authority and the new religion. These real events would have dated to 326 or so.8 Once in the Holy Land, Helena had to fĳind where the Crucifĳixion had happened.9 After much thought, the expedition opted to excavate a Temple of Venus, on Mount Calvary, where all subsequent relics of the cross were found.10 A large delegation that demolished a temple, and excavated Mount Calvary, made its mark on the history of early Christendom. Having ransacked Jerusalem, Constantine and his mother, according to legend, sent relics to Rome and Constantinople, whence they were distributed to other sites. This story blurs the line between real and imagined events and persons. By the seventeenth century, for popular culture, the famous relics had taken second place to the legend of the woman who had found them. Her popularity spread through the West, and a literary and iconographic tradition grew up around her, for two very special powers were attributed to her.11 Having miraculously found the cross, it was thought she could fĳind lost things.12 She was also invoked as a prime helper for the lovelorn. It is unclear how or when the saint took on those powers.13 Finding objects and fĳinding love are

8 Lara Martínez & Lara Martínez, ‘Santa Elena y el hallazgo de la Cruz de Cristo’, p. 45. 9 The holy day known as the ‘fĳinding of the cross’ took place on 3 May. Later, the feast moved to 14 September. 10 For Helen’s own relics, see Drijvers, Helena Augusta: The Mother of Constantine the Great, p. 75. Recently, Helena relics have been shown at the British Museum (London): Martina Bagnoli, Holger A. Klein, C. Grifffĳith Mann, & James Robinson, eds,Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe (London, 2011). There are few Helena relics in Spain: the Cistercian abbey at Cañas is a skeleton with a letter of the 18th century: ‘ “lugar d[ond]e Sta Elena / encontró la Sta Cruz”, con su reliquia’. Antonio Cea Gutiérrez, ‘Catálogo’, El Tesoro de las Reliquias. Colección de la Abadía Cisterciense de Cañas (Logroño, 1999), pp. 117–199, p. 128. 11 Piero della Francesca, Jan Van Eyck and Cina de Conegliano, for instance, have shown Helena with the cross. 12 Some charms have this power only: ‘Helena, que al monte / Tabor subiste, / a Jesús los tres clavos / le quitaste / Uno se lo diste / a tu hermano Constantino; / otro a la mar / lo tiraste; / el tercero clávalo / en lo que se me ha perdido.’ Collected by José Manuel Fraile Gil, Conjuros y plegarias de tradición oral (Madrid, 2001), p. 26. 13 For the use of love magic and women’s material and social needs, see Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage and Power at the End of the Renaissance (New York, 1993), pp. 59–60. María Helena Sánchez Ortega, ‘Sorcery and Eroticism in Love Magic’, in Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition on Spain and the New World, ed. by Mary Elizabeth Perry & Anne J. Cruz (Berkeley, CA, 1991), pp. 58–93, p. 62. From The Spanish Inquisition To The Internet 87 often linked and other saints share the same two powers, such as St Anthony of Padua.14 References to the saint, and to the relics, and to her powers, appear in Spanish sources of many sorts. We study closely here two sevententeenth- century trials. By then references to St Helena were common, as she had entered Spanish culture very thoroughly.15

Helena of Constantinople: Saint of Matchmaking and Lost Things in Spain

The legendary discovery of the cross was attributed to the saint years after her death, and contains at least as much fĳiction as reality. The appearance of historical characters in the story blurred the line between real and imaginary events. St Helena’s pilgrimage to Jerusalem is considered historical fact; the discovery of the cross, however, stood open to diffferent interpretations. Between the end of the fourth century and the mid fĳifth century three legends arose around it: the legend of Helena, the Protonike legend and the legend of Judas Cyriacus.16 Many surviving historical texts reflect the prevalence over time of belief in the story of St Helena and in the veracity of the cross. Centuries down the line, it can be found in Spain. A fragment of the Crónica del Moro Rasis, written in the fĳirst half of the fĳifteenth century, refers to the events leading up to the discovery:17

14 Susana Gala Pellicer, ‘Magias inquisitoriales y magias virtuales: del conjuro amoroso en los procesos inquisitoriales de los Siglos de Oro al conjuro web del siglo XXI’, Rumbos del hispanismo en el umbral del cincuentenario de la AIH, 7 vols (Rome, 2012), VII, pp. 74–80. 15 See Crónica del moro Rasis, ed. by Diego Catalán & María Soledad de Andrés (Madrid, 1975), pp. 196–197, for Helena’s trip to Jerusalem. For a humanist critique of spurtious relics, especially the true cross, see Alfonso de Valdés, Diálogo de las cosas acaecidas en Roma, ed. by Rosa Navarro Durán, Letras Hispánicas, 357 (Madrid, 1992), pp. 200–201. 16 Drijvers dedicates various chapters of his book to describing her origins and subsequent evolution. He concludes that the latter two are based on the former and are of Syrian origin. 17 Crónica del moro Rasis, ed. by Diego Catalán & María Soledad de Andrés (Madrid, 1975), pp. 196–197. Throughout this article, I follow the editorial conventions adopted in each of the published editions cited, also providing an English translation of the quoted texts for the reader’s convenience. Given the time that has elapsed between the production of the texts and the current day, the language used may at times seem obscure to contemporary Spanish readers, and the translator has tried to maintain the distance between 88 Gala Pellicer

E basteçieron muchas naves e grandes poderes ella e su fĳijo, e pasaron ultramar, e destruyeron a Iherusalem, que non fĳinco piedra, e destruyeron los judios otrosi. E aduxeron la cruz en que Ihesu Christo fuera puesto, e la Veronica, e el feno de Velen en que Ihesu Christo echaron en el pese- bre, e la sangre de Ihesu Christo, e la leche de Santa María e los cabellos, e otras muchas rriliquias que aduxeron a Rroma. E quando fueron en Rroma, ouieron muy grant plazer todos los pueblos. E Costantino puso muchos obispos en muchas çibdades que los non avia ante.

After ransacking Jerusalem, legend had Constantine and his mother transport- ing relics to Rome and Constantinople, from which they were distributed to other sites. However, neither the prominence acquired by the relics, nor the worship- pers’ fĳirm belief in their efffĳicacy, explain their miraculous multiplication. By the time of the Renaissance, critics already abounded, ready to state the obvious truth that, given the scarcity of the original resource, the vast majority had to be replicas. Alfonso de Valdés, in the Diálogo de las cosas acaecidas en Roma (1527) declared:

Pues desta manera hallaréis infĳinitas reliquias por el mundo y se perdería muy poco en que no las hobiese. Pluguiese a Dios que en ello se pusiese remedio. El prepucio de Nuestro Señor yo lo he visto en Roma y en Burgos, y también en Nuestra Señora de Anversia; y la cabeza de Sanct Joan Baptista, en Roma y en Amians de Francia. Pues apóstoles, si los quisiése- mos contar, aunque no fueron sino doce y el uno no se halla y el otro está en las Indias, más hallaremos de veinte y cuatro en diversos lugares del mundo. Los clavos de la cruz escribe Eusebio que fueron tres, y el uno echó Santa Helena, madre del Emperador Constantino, en el mar Adriático para amansar la tempestad, y el otro hizo fundir en almete para su hijo, y del otro hizo un freno para su caballo; y agora hay uno en Roma,

text and reader in the translated English version, respecting the characteristics of the speech insofar as possible. [And she and her son provisioned many ships and great powers and they went overseas and they destroyed Jerusalem so not a stone remained, and they destroyed the Jews as well. And they discovered the cross on which Jesus Christ was put, and Veronica’s veil, and the Bethlehem stable where Jesus Christ had been laid in the manger, and the blood of Jesus Christ, and the milk and the hair of Holy Mary, and many other relics that they brought to Rome. And when they went to Rome, all people took great pleasure in their arrival. Constantine placed many bishops in many cities that had not previously had them.] From The Spanish Inquisition To The Internet 89

otro en Milán y otro en Colonia, y otro en París, y otro en León y otros infĳinitos. Pues de palo de la cruz dígoos de verdad que si todo lo que dicen que hay della en la cristiandad se juntase, bastaría para cargar una carreta.18

The authenticity (or not) of the relics took second stage to the legend of the woman who had done so much to fĳind them. Her popularity spread as two very special powers were attributed to her.19 The fĳirst was her ability to fĳind lost things, presumably deriving from the miraculous discovery of the cross. It is harder, though, to fĳind out why or when she was fĳirst invoked as a helper for the lovelorn. However, fĳinding objects and fĳinding love would not seem to be unrelated skills. People turn to saints when something is lacking, whether it is a material or an emotional gap in their lives.20 Historians have numerous testimonials from women (stories involving men are less frequent) who turned to sorcery in search of a cure to their suffferings. Their longing was so intense that not even the threat of being prosecuted by the Inquisition mitigated their impatience. It is precisely in those prosecution documents that we fĳind today some of the most interesting manifestations of the belief in magic. Their sheer number shows that such invocation was a common phenomenon at the time.

18 Alfonso de Valdés, Diálogo de las cosas, pp. 200–201. [For thus you will fĳind infĳinite relics around the world and very little would be lost if they were not there. May it please God that there be a remedy for it. The foreskin of Our Lord I saw in Rome and in Burgos, and also in our Lady of Antwerp, and the head of St John the Baptist, in Rome and in Amiens in France. As for the Apostles, if we were to count them, even though there were only twelve and one who was not included and another is in India, we fĳind over twenty-four in various parts of the world. There were three nails from the cross, according to Eusebius, and one of them was thrown into the Adriatic by St Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine, in order to calm the storm; another she melted down to make a helmet for her son, and from the other she made a bit for his horse; and now there is one in Rome, another in Milan, another in Cologne, another in Paris, and another in Lyon and an infĳi- nite myriad of others. Then, as for splinters of the cross, I tell you truly that if all the pieces that are said to be in the Christian world were to be brought together, it would be enough to fĳill a wagon.] 19 We do not know the exact date when such powers were fĳirst attributed, but seventeenth- century inquisitorial documents refer to them as common knowledge. 20 This information is from a paper I presented at a congress at the Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas, which took place in Rome, July 2010. The text, entitled ‘Magias inquisitoriales y magias virtuales: del conjuro amoroso en los procesos inquisitoriales de los Siglos de Oro al conjuro web del siglo XXI’ has been published in the conference proceedings. 90 Gala Pellicer

The further we go back in time, the fewer documents we have attesting to spells and prayers in which our saint is invoked. Paradoxically, the truly exceptional ones that survive do so due to their condemnation. The Inquisition archives are an extraordinary source, preserving a number of spells almost in full, thanks to the zeal with which the confessions of the accused were transcribed.21

The Spanish Inquisition

Sorcery was prosecuted on the Iberian Peninsula from the Middle Ages, in both civil and church courts; both judicial forums were alert to any practices that might link to the devil.22 Magic had fuzzy boundaries, which left jurisdiction’s borders vague.23 And, from 1520 onwards, magic, divining, and witchcraft fĳig- ured in Castile’s and Aragon’s Edicts of Faith among the crimes of heresy.24 Meanwhile, from the 1560s, inquisitorial attention swerved from converted Jews (conversos), the fĳirst main target, to Old Christians. By then, two thirds of detainees were Catholics untainted by the heresies blamed on converted Jews or Muslims.25 The Council of Trent reinforced this trend, condemning unorthodox conduct and devising procedures for rooting out error among the masses.26 In offfĳicial eyes, the problem sprang from defĳicient instruction in religion and deep ignorance of good doctrine.27 Superstition, reformers said, touched the institutional Church itself, which showed, they thought, its evident weaknesses, and tapped lay religion at its most intimate.28

21 Although, everything seems to suggest that knowledge associated with the love magic was mostly spread by word of mouth, references to documents lead us to assume that there was also written transmission of the love spells, which was later lost. 22 See note 2. 23 For the close kinship of heretical and orthodox ‘magic’, see Lea, Historia de la Inquisición española, p. 259. 24 Kamen, La Inquisición española, trans. María Morrás (Barcelona, 1999), pp. 246–249, p. 261. 25 Kamen, La Inquisición española, p. 261. 26 Adriano Prosperi, El Concilio de Trento. Una introducción histórica, trans. Jesús Villanueva (Ávila, 2008), pp. 87–97. 27 Antonio Luis Cortés Peña, ‘La cristianización de la sociedad’, in Discurso religioso y Contrarreforma, ed. by Eliseo Serrano, Antonio Luis Cortés, & José Luis Beltrán (Zaragoza, 2005), pp. 395–412, p. 396; Jean Delumeau, La reforma, Nueva Clío: la historia y sus problemas, 30 (Barcelona, 1967), p. 263. 28 Jean Delumeau, El catolicismo de Lutero a Voltaire, Nueva Clío: la historia y sus problemas, 30bis (Barcelona, 1973), p. 198. From The Spanish Inquisition To The Internet 91

Some suspect practices were on the part of women, who sought alternate means to alleviate their precarious state. To game the rules of life, they developed arts of magic that mixed orthodox, and semi-orthodox ritual with callings on the devil.29 Still, most sorceresses, hechiceras, were really illiterate women who had no thought to oppose offfĳicial religion; they just knew no way to tell where orthopraxis ended. Some, like the two sorceresses this article examines, specialized in love magic. Our fĳirst case comes from Valencia, the second from Toledo.30 Both have remarkable anthropological interest and both illustrate how the St Helena prayers worked. Incantation and rituals made rich use of words. A hechicera’s linguistic art could make her reputation, for her clients trusted in the power of the formulae she wielded to reshape the world.31 Power of suggestion was crucial and, doubtless, a sorceress’s performances must often have been astonishingly dramatic.32 For such performances, sadly, we have only faint hints on paper. We cannot see the gestures or hear the tone of voice, nor, to us, are the reactions of her clients at all perceptible.33 Despite the court’s pressures, invoking the saints never disappeared, nor did love prayers cease. They merely went underground. In the punishment of witchcraft the Spanish Inquisition was among the most lenient in Europe, largely because it would rather re-educate than burn. In the seventeenth century, it was reluctant to try witchcraft, allowing the State to handle most cases. Thus there were relatively few accusations, and such trials as happened could

29 Charles Lea, Historia de la Inquisición, p. 578. For very similar magic, as fĳiction, see Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina, ed. by Dorothy Sherman Severin, Letras Hispánicas, 4 (Madrid, 1990), p. 146. 30 AHN (Archivo Histórico Nacional Español), 12, 525; AHN, 91, fols 58v–59v. 31 For the pragmatic rhetoric of charms, see José María Díez Borque, ‘Oraciones, conjuros, ensalmos: Formas marginales de poesía oral en los Siglos de Oro’, Bulletin Hispanique, 87 (1985): 47–87, p. 49. 32 Ronald E. Surtz, ‘A Spanish Midwife’s Uses of the Word. The Inquisitorial Trial (1485/86) of Joana Torrellas’, Mediaevistik, 19 (2006): 153–168, p. 160. 33 For the ambiguities and richness of trial testimony, see, Carlo Ginzburg, ‘The Inquisitor as Anthropologist’, in his Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (Baltimore, MD, 1989), pp. 156–164; Jean-Pierre Dedieu, ‘The Archives of the Holy Offfĳice of Toledo as a Source for Historical Anthropology’, in The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe: Studies on Sources and Methods, ed. by Gustav Henningsen, John A. Tedeschi, & Charles Amiel (De Kalb, IL, 1986); James S. Amelang, ‘Ethnographies of error’, in L’Europa divisa e i nuovi mondi, ed. by Massimo Donattini, Guiseppe Marcocci, & Stefania Pastore, 2 vols (Pisa, 2011), II, pp. 105–115. 92 Gala Pellicer undermine the standard devil-pact theory.34 Spain therefore escaped the great witch-hunts that infected northern Europe.35

Invocation to St Helena: Forbidden Prayers Confessed before the Inquisition. Analysis of Proceedings in Valencia

Our fĳirst trial comes from Valencia. Statistics from the tribunal there show a falling offf of witchcraft trials in the fĳirst decades of the seventeenth century, and an increase in trials for mere sorcery.36 The Valencia Tribunal most often prosecuted divination (51.8% of the entire caseload), love magic (25.9%), and curative magic (17.7%).37 Francisca la Gila, a local hechicera, was known for her special skills in magic; she attracted young women eager learn techniques. Troubled customers also turned to her – women wanting their lovers back, or hoping to attract a man. Some impotent men also requested she remove the evil-eye curse behind their plight.38 Francisca would invoke Santa Helena in the belief that she was efffective in such love matters.39

34 For Inquisitors as precocious sceptics, see Kamen, La Inquisición española, p. 261. 35 Stephen Haliczer, Inquisición y sociedad 1478–1834, trans. Carles Xavier Subiela i Ibáñez (Valencia, 1993), p. 493. 36 For statistics on superstion trials, see Blázquez Miguel, Eros y Tánatos, p. 263. 37 Statistics from Haliczer, Inquisición y sociedad, p. 499 38 For male sexual worries and their remedies, see the bibliography in Blázquez Miguel, for example; Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, El martillo de las brujas (Madrid, 1976), p. 363; Benito Remigio Noydens, Práctica de exorcistas (Valencia, 1660), p. 257; Hermann Josef Schmitz, Die Bussbücher und die Bussdisziplin der Kirche, I (Mainz, 1883), pp. 409– 452 and A. Álvarez de Miranda, ‘Magia y medicina en el mundo clásico y en la Península Ibérica’, Archivos Iberoaméricanos de la Historia de la Medecina, 5. 2 (1953): 309–326. For female causes for male impotence, see Juan Blázquez Miguel, La hechicería en la región murciana (Yecla, 1984). 39 Blázquez Miguel, working in the Inquisition Archives detected prayers to St Helena in Murcia, see La hechicería en la región murciana (Yecla, 1984), pp. 94, 104, 110, 127; in Madrid, see Madrid: judíos, herejes y brujas. El Tribunal de Corte. 1650–1820 (Toledo, 1990), p. 119, and in Valencia, see Eros y Tánatos, p. 266. Francisco Fajardo Spínola found Helena in the Canary Islands Inquisition. See Francisco Fajardo Spínola, Hechicería y brujería en Canarias en la Edad Moderna (Las Palmas, 1992), p. 151. From The Spanish Inquisition To The Internet 93

Francisca’s apprentices included her niece, Vicenta Gracia Almenar, who, in 1623, lived on Barcelona Street.40 That year, on 14 November, Vicenta turned up in court for reasons we cannot see, in order, she said, to ‘unburden her conscience’. She was then 25, more or less. She told that court that she had turned to Francisca, her father’s sister, for help in getting back a lover, Vicente Baldés, who some six or seven years back had, she said, broken a marriage promise. Francisca, she said, had profffered St Helena’s charm, and this she repeated to the court. It was, said Vicenta, not her aunt’s only magic prayer. Here is what Vicenta recited:

Gloriossa y bienaventurada Sancta Elena, muy triste y muy pensativa estávades vos en vuestro apossento quando, por divina inspiración, sentistes una boz de un ángel que os dixo, ‘Elena, Elena, ¿cómo no vas a buscar la cruz de tu señor Jessu Christo?’ Y ella respondió, ‘¿cómo la yré yo a buscar si yo no sé de ella?’ Y el ángel le respondió, ‘Elena, Elena, el mar romperás y las puertas de Jerusalem partirás; tres judíos allarás, los toma- rás y los encarçelarás, ansí me encarçeles el coraçón y entrañas de Fullano’.41

Both Vicenta’s trial and confession and the prayer itself are both dialogical; so one charm dialogue sits inside another, both now preserved within a third in court, for the charm takes the form of a discourse, directed to St Helena, who never answers the postulant. Rather, in the fragment here, we have a fĳicti- tious dialogue between St Helena and the Angel of the Annunciation, with its verbal cues: ‘y ella le respondió’, ‘y el ángel le respondió’. And the angel comes as a revelation, note, in the form of a voice: ‘sentistes una voz’. First offf, let us look at the rhetoric of this text. Prayers, charms, and conjuration are a form of oral poetry, whether transmitted by the spoken word or by

40 AHN (Archivo Histórico Nacional Español), leg. 12 (box 525), without foliation: ‘Viçenta Gracia Almenar, soltera, vezina de Valencia, que vive en la calle de Barçelona, de edad que dixo ser de veinte e cinco años poco más o menos [. . .]’. 41 [Glorious and blessed St Helena, very sad and very thoughtful you were in your room, when by divine inspiration you heard the voice of an angel that said to you, ‘Helena, Helena, why do you not go looking for the cross of your Lord Jesus Christ?’ And she answered, ‘How will I go looking for it if I do not know of it?’ And the angel answered her, ‘Helena, Helena, the sea you shall break and the doors of Jerusalem you shall part. Three Jews you shall fĳind, you shall take them and you shall imprison them, thus you imprison the heart and inner being of Whomsoever’.] 94 Gala Pellicer writing.42 They are given to formalism, to dialogue, to insistent parallelism, to two-part structures, to alliteration, and, in general, to a poetics of repetition: all this marks them as poetry. So, for example, a hypnotic repetition of future verbs, ‘romperás’, ‘partirás’, ‘tomarás’, ‘encarcelarás’, creates a chain of cause and efffect, revealing the inevitability of the saint’s actions. And the story calls out St Helena’s name over and over, ‘Elena, Elena’, as, meanwhile, does the sorceress herself, before her the client, giving time a double sense. These formulae essentialize. It is a characteristic trait of oral poetry that explains other of its most representative traits, its simplicity of syntax, much given to nouns, far less so to adjectives. These features, taken together, lend these charms a particular rhythm that eases both memorizing and recitation.43 The role played by the Jews of the story is worth noting: according to the prayer, it is they who are chosen to reveal the location of the Crucifĳixion. The link between the fĳigure of the Jew and the act of hiding and with secrets needs to be interpreted in a double sense. First, there is a rich tradition that attributes to Jews the knowledge of dangerous occult knowledge that could undermine the integrity of Christianity.44 Second, conversions en masse caused a part of the ex-Jewish population to keep up their old religious practices in secret.45 From then on, Christians, anxious to smoke out ‘enemigos de la fe’, lived in a state of permanent unease in face of the risk of heretical contagion.46 The prayer compares imprisoning the Jews with possessing a man’s heart; there, the two planes, religion and love, intersected. Yet the charm’s Jews were at fĳirst chosen to reveal where the cross was, but turned out not to be the secret’s true keepers:

La mar rompistes, la mar pasastes y navíos armastes; y a judíos hallastes y los encarçelastes y tres días los dejastes sin comer ni bever y, al cavo de tres días, te dijeron, ‘fam, fam, fam. Dadme de comer y te diremos dónde

42 For the poetry in oral charms and other vernacular modes, see Díez Borque, ‘Conjuros, oraciones, ensalmos’, p. 50. 43 Díez Borque, ‘Conjuros, oraciones, ensalmos’, pp. 47–87; Todorov Tzvetan, ‘Le Discours de la magie’, L’Homme, 4 (1973): 38–65; Francisco Rodríguez Marín, Ensalmos y conjuros en España y América (Madrid, 1927). In Araceli Campos Moreno, Oraciones, ensalmos y conjuros mágicos, see the section: ‘Rasgos formales de las oraciones, ensalmos y conjuros’, pp. 38–49. 44 Enrique Cantera Montenegro, ‘Los judíos y las ciencias ocultas en la España medieval’, En la España medieval, 25 (2002): 47–83, p. 53. 45 Julio Caro Baroja, Inquisición, brujería y criptojudaísmo (Barcelona, 1970), pp. 21–28. 46 David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York, 2013), p. 222. From The Spanish Inquisition To The Internet 95

está la cruz de tu señor Jessu Christo’. Tú los sacastes y desencarçelastes y les distes de comer y de bever y ellos te llevaron al Monte Tabor donde fue muerto tu Señor Jesu Christo y, quando allá os vistes, os arrodillastes y muchas graçias distes a tu señor Jessu Christo de las merçedes que os havía hecho, que havíaseis llegado donde murió tu señor Jessu Christo.47 Ellos os dixeron, ‘Elena, Elena, nosotros no savemos de la cruz, sólo Judas save donde está la cruz de tu señor Jessu Christo’.48

Again the prayer uses a hypnotic string of preterite verbs ‘rompistes’, ‘pasastes’, ‘hallastes’ to recount with angel’s compliance with Helena’s message. The Jews, locked away for a magical three days, replicating Jonah’s days in the belly of the whale, and those Christ and Lazarus spent in the tomb, cry out for food with another tripartite formula, breaking into Valencian: ‘fam, fam fam’. In this part again, links between religious and sexual metaphors underpin the prayer’s structure. The Jews are in jail, as is the desired one’s heart, in love’s prison. In the fĳire that appears in the passage that will follow, the parallels become even clearer – the bonfĳire Helena will have to kindle at the centre of the square matches the fĳire that should burn in the beloved’s heart:

Un grande fuego mandastes hazer en una grande plaça, ansí ençendáis el fuego en el coraçón de Fullano que no pueda reposar, ni en casa menjar, ni en casa viuda, ni casada, ni ramera estar, ni en lo nit ni en taula, sino que vinga, vinga que ningu nol detenga.

Note how, in this court transcript, amidst the Castilian are Valencian phrases the suspect surely used: ‘menjar’, ‘nit’, ‘taula’. The scribe’s fĳidelity to idiom proves that we are hearing some of Francisca’s words as she spoke them. The confession continues:

47 The charm here mistakes Mount Tabor for Golgotha. 48 [The sea you broke, the sea you passed and the ships you built and Jews you found and you imprisoned them and for three days left them with nothing to eat or drink, and after three days they said, ‘Hunger, hunger, hunger. Give me something to eat and we will tell you where the cross of your Lord Jesus Christ is.’ And when you found yourself there, you fell to your knees, and gave many thanks to your Lord Jesus Christ for the mercies He had shown you, for you had arrived where your Lord Jesus Christ died. They said to you, ‘Helena, Helena, we do not know about the cross, only Judas knows where the cross of your Lord Jesus Christ is.’] 96 Gala Pellicer

Fuisteis a Judas, y Judas os dixo que no savía en dónde estava la cruz de tu señor Jessu Christo; tú le tomastes y le encarçelastes y le dexastes tres días sin comer. Dixo, ‘fam, fam, fam, y sácame destas prissiones y dadme de comer y de bever y yo te diré en dónde está la cruz de tu señor Jessu Christo’. Tú le sacastes y le desencarçelastes y le distes de comer y de bever y, quando fuera de la cárcel se vio, us dixo, ‘Elena, Elena, yo no sé de la cruz de tu señor Jessu Christo’. [. . .] Judas os dixo, ‘Elena, Elena, azada traherás y trenta tres palmos cavarás’.49

Tripartite symbolism continues here, plus other number symbolism. Thirty- three strikes of the hoe, each representing a year of Christ’s life, fĳinally reveal the cross, just as Judas predicted. As Christ was crucifĳied with two thieves, Helena found three crosses. To determine which cross was Christ’s own, she sent for three corpses placing each in turn on one of the crosses.50 All legends agree that only the true cross could resuscitate the dead:

Azada llevastes y azada tuvistes. Trenta tres palmos cavastes, tres cruzes hallastes. Thomastes la primera y la adorastes y la pusistes ençima de un hombre muerto que en aquel punto havia fĳinado. Thomastes la sigunda y la pusistes encima de un hombre muerto que en aquel punto havia fĳinado. Thomastes la terçera y la adorastes y la pussistes sobre un hombre

49 [You ordered a great fĳire be lit on a great square, thus you light the fĳire in the heart of Whomsoever, so that he can neither rest nor eat at home, nor be in the house of a widow, unmarried woman or whore, not in bed or at table, but let him come, let him come, and may no man stop him. You went to Judas, and Judas said that he did not know where the cross of your Lord Jesus Christ was. You seized him and you imprisoned him and you left him for three days without food. He said, ‘Hunger, hunger, hunger, take me out of this prison and give me something to eat and drink and I will tell you where the cross of your Lord Jesus Christ is.’ You took him out, and you released him and you gave him food and drink and once out of prison he said to you, ‘Helena, Helena, I do not know about the cross of your Lord Jesus Christ. Judas said to you, ‘Helena, Helena, you shall bring a hoe and you shall dig down 33 hand-breadths’.] 50 For eighteenth-century cure stories about the cross, see Hilario Santos Alonso, Historia verdadera del Emperador Constantino el Magno. Aparición e invención de la SS.ma cruz de Christo, y virtudes de santa Elena (Madrid, 1767), pp. 23–24. From The Spanish Inquisition To The Internet 97

muerto que en aquel punto havía fĳinado y, como vistes que ressusitó, creístes que era aquella la cruz de tu Jessu Christo.51

This section is heavy with formulae and mnemonic devices. As in the earlier passages, repetition, rhythm, and formulaic utterance mark the style, in both syntax and content. Two-part structures are salient: (‘azada llevastes y azada tuvistes / Trenta tres palmos cavastes, tres cruzes hallastes . . .’), and the copula- tive, ‘y’, recurs insistently. These devices to make the prayers easier to memorize and recite suggest its oral transmission, as do the lists. Next, the prayer will invoke a second relic vital to its power, the nails of the Crucifĳixion. In the prayer, each nail has its function. The fĳirst protected sailors. The second went to Constantine, to protect him and ensure him victory (it was destined for his helmet, armour, and saddle); this second nail bespoke the alliance of Church and Empire.52 The third remained, left for desperate lovers, to vouchsafe their spells:

Thomastes los tres clavos en que el señor fue enclavado. El uno lo hechastes en el golfo de León para que cualquier marinero que passe no pueda peligrar, ansí no pueda peligrar [Fulla]na con Fullano, que no pueda repossar, ni en taula menjar, en casa viuda, ni soltera, ramera, ni rami- guera, sino que vinga, que ningún le detinga. El segundo distes a vuestro hijo Constantino porque en qualquier batalla que entrasse saliesse vençe- dor. Assí salga vençedora Fullana con Fullano para que no pueda repossar, ni en taula menjar, en casa viuda, ni cassada, ni soltera, ramera, ni ramigera, sino que vinga, que ningún nol detinga. El terçero reservastes para vos, para viudas, cassadas, rameras, ramigeras. Emprestádmelo en esta nessesidad y en esta ocassion. Incádselo en el coraçón de Fullano, que no pueda repossar, ni assentar, ni en taula menjar, etc., ni en amichs parlar, sino que vinga, que ningu nol detinga.53

51 [You took the hoe and had the hoe. Thirty-three hand-breadths you dug, three crosses you found: you took the fĳirst one and adored it, and laid it on a dead man who had just died. You took the second one, and laid it on a dead man who had just died. You took the third one, and you adored it, and you laid it on a dead man who had just died, and as you saw him resuscitate, you believed that this was the cross of your Jesus Christ.] 52 Drijvers, Helena Augusta: The Mother of Constantine the Great, p. 95. 53 Blázquez Miguel, Eros y Tánatos, pp. 268–269. [And you took the three Nails by which the Lord was nailed; one you threw into the Gulf of Lyon so that any passing sailor would pass without danger, as with Whomsoever can pass without danger (the text is obscure): that he may not rest nor at table eat in the house of a widow, an unmarried woman, whore or harlot, but may he come and may no man stop him. The second you gave to your 98 Gala Pellicer

Here again, verb-forms shape the rhetoric of the prayer. The descriptive narrative uses second-person preterites: ‘thomastes’, ‘hechastes’, ‘distes’, ‘reservastes’ and others. Meanwhile, for when supplication to the saint, it moves to impera- tives, ‘emprestádmelo’, ‘incádselo’, for instance, or to subjunctives such as: ‘que no pueda’, ‘que vinga’. Francisca Gila hardly restricted herself to just this one prayer; she seems to have had assorted magical devices, or so says the witness, sobrina Vicenta, who admits to witnessing, or hearing of, divination rituals, prayers to demons or saints – to the Ánima Sola, the Lonely Soul in Purgatory, to St Julian, to the Nuncio, the Herald, and St Sylvester, and who lists sorcery with salt, stars, sun, and wind, plus a rich crop of potions and ointments. Of these last, some seem ingenious and others offf-putting, not only to modern readers but even to early modern clients who, on hearing of their contents, said Vicenta, queasily turned them down. Vicenta’s testimony was a calculated attempt to protect herself, often at others’ cost. It is sometimes evasive about names and events. It is however, richly descriptive and precise with dates. Thus we have some reason to trust the general accuracy of the Helena prayer, which, in her prolix trial stands out for the richness of its detail.

Analysis of Proceedings in Toledo

We fĳind another St Helena charm in the 1633 trial of Antonia de Acosta. In Toledo, the seventeenth century saw a spate of sorcery trials.54 Antonia made a

son Constantine so that whatever battle he fought he would always emerge victorious. Thus Whomsoever (female) will emerge victorious with Whomsoever (male), so that he may not rest nor eat at the table, neither in the house of a widow, married or unmarried woman, whore nor madam, but may he come and may no man stop him. The third you kept for yourself, for widows, married women, whores, bawds, lend it to me in this necessity and on this occasion. Drive it into the heart of Whomsoever, so that he may not rest nor sit down, nor eat at table etc, nor speak with friends, but may he come and may no man stop him.] 54 For the Toledo tribunal, see Contreras and Dedieu, ‘Geografía de la Inquisición Española’, p. 86. For the Valencia tribunal, see Dedieu, L’Administration de la foi, pp. 78–79. AHN, 91, for the trial at Toledo. The prayer to Santa Helena appears on fols 58v–59v. Julio Caro Baroja quotes it in note no. 51 of Vidas mágicas e Inquisición (Madrid, 1992), p. 131. See also Sebastián Cirac Estopañán in Los procesos de hechicerías en la Inquisición de Castilla la Nueva. Tribunales de Toledo y Cuenca (Madrid, 1942), pp. 148–149. François Delpech mentions it in ‘Sistème érotique et mythologie folklorique dans les “conjuros amatorios” From The Spanish Inquisition To The Internet 99 pre-emptive voluntary declaration in Madrid in December 1632, having heard that dissatisfĳied clients had denounced her. The accuser had, it seems, been a woman whom Antonia called doña María, who lived between the Cordobeses and San Felipe gateways and with her mother ran a shop selling headdresses and belts. María had gone to Antonia to win back the man who had left her pregnant. Antonia had tried bean magic, but all in vain. To placate the Inquisition, Antonia mentioned many people with whom she had shared her arts; for the historian it is a tangled social story.55 As with Francisca de Gila in Valencia, one notes the speed and efffĳiciency with which magic lore passed from one to another person. Antonia not only tallies the chief sorcerers and sorceresses; she add Greeks, and gitanas and even errant friars. Antonia’s efffort to depict the busy trade in secrets renders remarkable witness to magic’s mental world and networks of transmission. The trial runs for dozens of pages, abrim with spells and rituals – of beans, of candles, of ‘the Lonely Soul’, of the ram’s heart, of the Sun, the Moon, the Stars, the Knife. For its complexity and popularity among sorceresses, the charm of St Mary stands out. In Antonia de Acosta’s trial, there appear far more spells and operations than in Vicenta Gracia’s. As a magician, she shows more nerve and initiative. Keen on results, she used risky methods that alerted both her neighbours and the authorities. On of her favourite ploys was the St Helena charm. She used it with Francisca de Torres, who had consulted her about getting a lover back. The man in question, one Licenciado de León, seems to have caused more than one woman heartache.56 Antonia’s version of the prayer uses the form of address for important people and begins by setting out Helena’s qualifĳications:

Señora Santa Elena, santa sóis y dina Emperadora de Greçia. De Roma salisteis, a Herusalen pasasteis, con mi Señora Úrsula os ospedasteis, con los clabos y cruz de mi Señor Jesu Christo sanasteis, y a la mañana un turco judío aporisionasteis, y la cruz y clabos de mi Señor Jesuchristo le demandasteis. Dixo que no la tenía, ni della sabía. Tres días estubo apri- sionado sin comer ni sin beber y, al cabo de los tres días, le fuisteis a ver y le bolbisteis a preguntar por la cruz y clabos de Nuestro Señor Jesuchristo.

(XVIe–XVIIe siècles)’, Amours légitimes, amours illégitimes en Espagne (XVIe–XVIIe siècles), ed. by Augustin Redondo (Paris, 1985), pp. 213–229. All the data on this trial come from the same Inquisition archive. Some of them also appear in Caro Baroja’s work. 55 Fols 32r–32v; see fol. 68r for elusive allusions. 56 Antonia had already been asked to help another woman interested in this Licenciado, and meted out a spell that would keep him awake to make love all night long. 100 Gala Pellicer

Y que esto se ha de decir tres veçes por los tres turcos que la dicha santa prendió.57 Y el último dellos responde que no la tenía ni della savía, y entonces al verdugo ymbiasteis llamar, y tres tratos de cuerda le mandas- teis dar, y dixo, ‘suéltame, Reyna Elena, que yo te daré la † y clabos de Cristo nuestra luz y, por más señal, que el sacerdote que oy murió con la † de mi señor Jesuchristo murió resucitará, y en eso la conocerás’. Y al turco soltáis, y la † y clabos de mi Señor Jesuchristo allasteis, al sacerdote resucitasteis y los clavos el uno en el mar hechasteis porque los muertos fuesen abueltos a culpa y pena. Y el otro a vuestro hijo Constantino lo ymbiasteis que en las guerras donde estubiese saliese vencedor y nunca vençido. El otro vos le tenís para todos aquellos que le ubiesen menester. Éste en el coraçon de Fulano le enclabéis para que me ame y me quiera y me dé lo que ubiere menester.58

Invocations called on saints to act.59 The sorceress did not doubt that St Helena would respond to her words, tailored to the customer’s needs. The prayer insists on St Helena’s lofty importance, particularly where, at the end, her power is invoked with the evocation of a nail driven through the heart: ‘le enclabéis’.

57 With this instruction for repetition, we have a rare documentary hint about actual practice. 58 TN: The scribe writes enclabar, as do several other prayers here. The word links to ‘clavo’ or nail. [St Helena, saint you are and worthy empress of Greece, from Rome you set out for Jerusalem. You went, with my Lady Ursula you took shelter, with the nails and the cross of my Lord Jesus Christ you were healed, and in the morning a Jewish Turk you imprisoned, and about the cross and the nails of my Lord Jesus Christ you asked him, he said that he did not have them and did not know of them, three days he was imprisoned without eating nor drinking, and at the end of three days you went to see him, and you asked him again about the cross and nails of our Lord Jesus Christ, and this has to be said three times for the three Turks that the mentioned saint seized, and the last one answers that he did not have it nor know of it, and then the executioner was sent for, and you ordered him to give three whippings, and he said, ‘Release me Queen Helena and I will give you the cross and nails of Christ our light and for further omen that the priest who died today with the cross of my Lord Jesus Christ will be resurrected, and thus you will know the cross’. And the Turk you released, and the cross and nails of my Lord Jesus Christ you found, the priest you resurrected, and of the nails one into the sea you threw, so that the dead were absolved of guilt and hardship, the second to your son Constantine you sent, so that in the wars where he would take part he would be victorious and never defeated, the other you keep for all those who may need it.] 59 For invocations, and the devil, see Ricardo García Cárcel, Orígenes de la Inquisición espa- ñola. El tribunal de Valencia. 1478–1530 (Barcelona, 1976), p. 209. From The Spanish Inquisition To The Internet 101

The Valencian and Toledan entreaties to St Helena are similar in structure and content. Quintessentially, their poetics are very similar. They do however have diffferences. The latter is shorter. In the way of oral poetry, it is given to fragments; this device was not only a conscious technique but also a response to memorization’s needs.60 Parsimony naturally afffected content. In the Toledo version, some things are missing; after a brief invocation, the prayer goes straight to the trip from Rome to Jerusalem. There is no conversation with the angelic guard, who nowhere appears. Instead St Ursula serves as St Helena’s companion at the discovery.61 From there on, the two prayers match well. St Helena imprisons and interrogates the three Jews, who this time also fĳigure as Turks, to make them reveal the cross’s place.62 The third Jew, the only one with whom she has a dialogue, reveals the location and counsels the saint to make contact with three crosses to be found with the body of a dead priest. The experiment succeeds and the true cross is identifĳied. The charm then goes on, without more interlocutors, to lay out the destiny of each nail. Here the Toledan version difffers from the Valencian: Helena throws the fĳirst nail in the sea, ‘so that the dead may be absolved of sin and punishment’. She then destines the second to protect Constantine, while the third remains at the disposition of whoever might need it, as, here, the sorceress. Here the trial record itself once more confĳirms the importance of oral recitation, as the sorceress explains to the court how to perform the prayer.

Y que para decir estas oraciones, havian de encender dos belas de cera blanca, la una mayor que la otra, y juntas entrambas y que luego tomasen un clabo y la atrabessasen la bela que estaba senalada para el hombre y que con la punta del dicho cabo llegase a erir un poco de otra vela que signifĳicaba la muger que hacia la oracion y que, estando hincando dicho clabo por las dichas belas, havia que decir: ‘este clabo enclabo (o conjuro) y enclabo, por el coracon de Fulano para que me quiera y me ame.63

60 Díez Borque, ‘Conjuros, oraciones, ensalmos’, p. 56. 61 For Helena and Ursula and the 11000 Virgins, see Drijvers, Helena Augusta: The Mother of Constantine the Great, p. 102. 62 For the very loose use of ‘Turk’ in early modern Europe, see Daniel J. Vitkus, ‘Early Modern Orientalism: Representations of Islam in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe’, in Western Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Perception of Other, ed. by David R. Blanks & Michael Frassetto (New York, 1999), pp. 207–230, 225. 63 [So, to say these prayers, it is necessary to light two candles of white wax, one larger than the other. And when they are together, right away take a nail and drive it through the candle that stands for the man, so that the point of that nail goes far enough to wound 102 Gala Pellicer

These candles fĳinish the ritual and supply a sexual metaphor: the sorceress advises that they should be of diffferent size, as if one were male and the other female, and the the nail that transfĳixes the male candle should wound the female one, lightly. When the two candles are pinned, as if in intercourse, come the magical phrases that fĳinish offf the invocation. Here, magic ritual evokes Catholic ritual, as the piercing of a candle by nails fĳigures in the Easter Vigil. In her eagerness to spill all there is to tell about her errors, Antonia confesses to the Inquisitor how she came to know the prayer. It was, she claims, via one Elena, from Valencia, wife to one Gabriel; she had turned up at court thanks to a lawsuit.64 Note two things. One is how this Elena, in her role, matches Vicenta, in the other story. We have seen how the Valencia tribunal had become particularly busy with sorcery cases, so that city may have also been a site for such lore’s difffusion. The second thing to note is that this Elena is tied up in a legal case. We do not know who this supposed woman really was, or to what type of law case Antonia refers, but, if real, it may have entailed an accusation like Antonia’s own. Indeed, pressure from the courts may have forced such women to keep moving from place to place and thus helped difffuse the very doctrines that the law laboured to suppress. The trial lets us learn other important things about the Helena-prayer’s transmission. According to Antonia, ‘This prayer – this charm, [Elena] the wife of that Valencian taught it to her [Antonia], and she [Antonia] gave it in writing to that Francisca de Torres, so that she could say it in order to win the friendship of that Don Diego’.65 We have here a chain of three women and, as Antonia’s words show, transmission goes by a double channel, at once oral

just a little the other candle, which stands for the woman who is saying the prayer, and who is driving that nail through those candles, and it is necessary to say, ‘This nail I drive, and drive through the heart of So-and-so, to make him desire me and love me.] Y que para decir estas oraciones, havían de encender dos belas de çera blanca, la una mayor que la otra, y juntas entrambas y que luego tomasen un clabo y la atrabessasen la bela que estaba señalada para el hombre y que con la punta del dicho cabo llegase a erir un poco de otra vela que signifĳicaba la muger que haçia la oraçion y que, estando hincando dicho clabo por las dichas belas, havía que decir: ‘éste clabo enclabo (o conjuro) y enclabo, por el coraçon de Fulano para que me quiera y me ame’, fol. 58v. 64 The report: ‘Y asimessmo le dixo esta [Antonia] a la dicha Francisca de Torres una oración de Santa Elena que se la enseñó una mujer de Valencia que estaba en esta corte en un pleito y se llamaba Elena y era cassada con un hombre que ella llamaba Gabriel. No sabe el ofĳicio, ni ante quién traía el pleito, ni adonde al presente está’, fol. 58v. 65 ‘Esta oraçión la enseñó a ésta la otra muger del dicho valençiano y se la dio ésta por escrito a la dicha Francisca de Torres para que la dixesse para el efecto de volver a la amistad del dicho don Diego’, fol. 59v. [Chapter author’s italics] From The Spanish Inquisition To The Internet 103

(‘la enseñó’) and written (‘se la dio ésta por escrito’). References to writing as a means of transmission of magical knowledge are rare (as indeed must have been its use), so we should heed them. For women who could read, written charms had their advantages: with page in hand, the user could recite the prayeer without having to learn it, or could use the written version to jog her memory (the trial record proves that some confessions came years after the deeds confessed). Not only was there the passage of time. Some of the formulae were long and complicated, and it could have help stoke the memory to read them over. But the oral channel must have been the main one, as Antonia’s latter statement suggests: “And she has not taught (‘enseñado’) the aforesaid prayer of St Helena to any other person, nor has she had further dealings with that Francisca de Torres.”66 In the Toledo trial of 1633, the prosecutor, Bartolomé Guijarro y Carrillo, presented a long accusation with 47 charges, listing both Antonia’s own allegations against herself and further points from sundry witnesses. Antonia fully accepted the accusations. However, the defending counsel, Miguel Sánchez, on April 22 submitted a written defence, citing Antonia’s ignorance and lack of judgement. The sentence came a month later, on May 22. Despite Antonia’s long and intense involvement in sorcery, punishment was lenient: public humiliation, the de levi abjuration, six years of banishment from Madrid, and a 200-ducat fĳine.67 Thanks to her voluntary confession she avoided a much harsher sentence.

Conclusions from the Proceedings

Women made these confessions, with their news of magic’s transmission and uses, under the pressures of interrogation. These circumstances, and the gulf in time and culture separating us from them makes it impossible to sift truth from untruth with any degree of scientifĳic certainty. On the one hand, the charms we have now form part of the Inquisition’s own paper record; they bespeak its institutional mind. Nonetheless, we have reason to think that the voice of the women can be discerned behind the words transcribed by scribes, even though they, with their higher social status, copied only what they thought they heard. So, mindful that the Inquisition may have modifĳied and contami-

66 ‘Y la otra oraçión de Santa Helena no la ha enseñado ni dicho a otra persona ni con la dicha Francisca de Torres tubo más comberssaçión’, fol. 60r. 67 For ‘De Levi’ abjuration, see Miguel Jiménez Monteserín, Introducción a la Inquisición (Madrid, 1980), p. 442. 104 Gala Pellicer nated the text, the much later transmission of these prayers, as we shall argue here, leads us to believe that it did not much change its nature. During interrogation, via their questions the judges guided the women.68 Terror of the devil may have also determined how events unfolded, although the Inquisition was cautious about this. Certainly, the trial record proves that prayers to St Helena existed and women used them as love spells, associat- ing St Helena with lovers’ needs. Adept recitation in court proves clandestine memorization. In the seventeenth century, prohibited prayers had to be passed on in secret. Thanks to repetition, the prayers were open to repeated reinter- pretation, some elements remaining fĳixed while others surely varied with the occasion. So we must ask ourselves: did the hechiceras change their prayers in court, before the Inquisitor? The evident similarity among assorted versions in the record leads us to think not, at least in substance. Sometimes, during the recitation (be it in private practice or in confession) there must have been variation that, without changing the main sense, gave the texts new shades of meaning. Such variation is characteristic, of oral transmission, and helps to explain the diffferences among the surviving texts of prayers.69 In other words, the diffferences between the two prayers described here suggest a process of re-creation and transformation during transmission.70 As for the mise en scène, the written record tells us little about the gestures, the tone of voice, and the intensity of ritual performance. Most certainly these prayers to saints, and others like them, were practical, aiming, for example, to catch or recover the loved one. Whether transmitted in writing or orally, they were thought efffĳicacious only when said aloud (surely accompanied by gestures).71 When people sought the services of a magician, they wanted to see and hear the ritual they were purchasing. The sorceress would stress the key words for the formula and say them solemnly. Words had the power to alter reality. They invoked the suitable saint who, the sorcerer judged, had power to clinch the spell.72

68 Julio Caro Baroja, Magia y brujería (San Sebastián, 1987). See, in particular, the chapter ‘El ballet del inquisidor y la bruja’, pp. 137–159. In this volume, Liv Helene Willumsen explores the diffferent voices in confessions. She argues that the accused’s voice is present in the transcribed texts, despite the scribe’s intermediation. Although Willumsen is addressing witches, not sorcerers, her conclusions are valid here. 69 For the variations of poetry, see Campos Moreno, Oraciones, ensalmos y conjuros mágicos, p. 17. 70 Campos Moreno, Oraciones, ensalmos y conjuros mágicos, pp. 34–50. 71 María Helena Sánchez Ortega, ‘Sorcery and Eroticism in Love Magic’, pp. 60–61. 72 Lea, Historia de la Inquisición, p. 576. From The Spanish Inquisition To The Internet 105

St Helena thus inhabited a substratum shared by women (and some men) who believed in the efffĳicacy of her prayers. Women passed them on from generation to generation. Some records bear witness to written transmission, as we saw with Francisca de Torres. Both of our accused said they had learnt the prayers from other practitioners. The prevalent illiteracy of seventeenth- century Spain (especially amongst lower-class women) also suggests that oral transmission was the main channel.73 The written record of charms often records such oral learning. But such things must have been said quietly, making it hard to hear clearly. Voices and silences, strident tones and hushed words bring us fully into the world of oral communication, and remind us that the essence of such charms is their enactment.

[email protected]

Despite the Inquisition’s attempt to erradicate superstitious practices, prayers to St Helena were hard to quell and condemning women who used them did little to eradicate spells and prayers to saints. Persecution may have forced users to modify their use and driven them underground. Unfortunately, we cannot tell today how the prayers adapted, but it is clear that the Inquisitor failed. The power of the popular beliefs bested the desire to lay them low, and women still use these prayers now. Internet search reveals dozens of them, and, to a surprising degree, they still resemble those confessed by women before the Inquisition. My interviews with women who use these prayers show that they learnt them by listening to elders (almost always their mothers).74 Although there may have been written copies, levels of literacy among women made oral transmission the most efffĳicient way to pass on the prayers from one generation to the next. Women, reciting words similar to those used by the sorceresses on trial, continue to believe in their magic powers for solving lovers’ problems. The prayers have adapted to the new media, and although prayer is less frequent today, women still rely on it, as online prayer sites show. There are several websites, collectively known as santería sites. Santería is belief in saints’ powers and actions, without direct reference to the Catholic Church. More materialistically, it also refers to commerce in images of saints and religious

73 Unlettered women, unable to read the texts for themeselves, may have an active role in their transmission and dissemination. See Surtz, ‘A Spanish Midwife’s Uses of the Word’, p. 167. 74 For two months I interviewed women aged between 50 and 70, who, I discovered, had all learned the prayer from older kin. None cited a written source. 106 Gala Pellicer objects. The internet, so far little studied, can offfer an investigator a surprising amount of material for ethnography. As a medium, it offfers a space for unusually untrammeled expression, and, therefore, one can fĳind documents of exceptional quality (if uncertain provenance). In a tide of trash, a researcher must attend to quality, but, with care, one fĳinds things of great interest. It is surprising that some aspects of the magical thinking of the seventeenth century are still reflected in a modern medium that seemingly has nothing whatsoever to do with the world of the Inquisition. Today, as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, St Helena is often invoked alongside other saints, such as St Martha. One prayer in one of the santería forums begins with colloquial (and ungrammatical) testimonials to its efffĳicacy:75

Oración santa elena para que tu amor vuelva a buscarte o aparecer funciona! Esta oración es muy efectiva a mi me surtió muy buen efecto, se debe rezar junto a una vela rosa, roja o blanca y concentración pueden comenzarla en la próxima luna nueva día miércoles y seguirla haciendo noche a noche.

Santa Elena, Reina fuiste y al calvario llegaste, tres clavos trajiste, uno lo tiraste al mar, el otro se lo clavaste a tu hijo, el que te queda no te lo pido dado sino prestado para clavárselo a (decir nombre de la persona amada) para que venga a mí, amante y cariñoso, fĳiel como un perro, manso como un cordero, caliente como un chivato, que venga, que venga, que nadie lo detenga. Ven . . . Ven . . . Ven . . .

75 I keep to the punctuation of the original texts. Foro en femenino [online], http://foro.enfemenino.com/forum/loisirs7/__f37034_loi sirs7-Oracion-santa-elena-para-que-tu-amor-vuelva-a-buscarte-o-aparecer-funciona. html [Accessed: 1 April 2011]. From The Spanish Inquisition To The Internet 107

yo soy la única persona que te llama Ven . . . Ven . . . Ven . . .76

This prayer is much shorter than the early modern ones. The interesting beginning, where the saint was in dialogue with Jews or Turks, is thus altogether gone. After a brief initial invocation the prayer mentions the three nails supposedly from the cross. This change may trace to an involuntary process of selection, as those who used the prayer focused on the relics, seemingly more efffective than the gradually forgotten Jews. In the Inquisition papers, the dialogue with the Jew played a lesser role, as introduction to the crux of the prayer, the magical power of the three nails. The verses that beg the lover to come are novel, except in the fĳinal rhyme ‘que venga, que venga, que nadie lo detenga’ already seen in the Valencia trial. One of the most beguiling things about the internet is its closeness to orality. True, thanks to the net, nowadays, prayers are usually transmitted not verbally but in writing. Many forums contain similar invocations, perhaps simply copied and pasted from site to site. Copying and abbreviating the contents is the general rule, with a few exceptions. Variants from oral transmission thus become less common:77

76 [Pray to Santa Elena to make your lover come back to fĳind you or to show up. It works! This prayer is very efffective, and it gave me a very good result, one must recite it by a candle which is pink, red, or white, and concentration you can begin with the next new moon on Wednesday and keep on saying it from one night to the next. St Helena, Queen you were and to calvary you arrived, three nails you brought, one you threw into the sea, the other you nailed to your son, the one left to you i do not ask be given only borrowed to nail to (say the name of the beloved) to let him come to me, loving and tender, loyal as a dog, meek as a lamb, hot as a goat let him come, let him come let no man stop him Come . . . Come . . . Come . . . I am the only one calling you Come . . . Come . . . Come . . .] 77 Foro de magia y brujería [online] http://hechizosgratis.es/foro/discussion/5373/ [Accessed: 1 April 2011]. 108 Gala Pellicer

Here is another example.

Oración a Santa Elena

OH! Gloriosa Santa Elena madre del gran Constantino, emperador romano, vos que siendo hija de Rey y Reina al Monte Olivetti fuiste por vuestro entrañable amor al divino JESUS yo quiero o vuestra poderosa intersección para conseguir lo que deseo.

OH! Gloriosa Santa Elena que al monte fuiste y tres clavos trajiste, uno se lo diste a tu hijo Constantino, otro lo tiraste al mar para salvación de los navegantes, y el que quedo en tus preciosísimas manos Santa Elena no te lo pido dado si no prestado para clavarle el corazón a z (JLz) para que no tenga paz ni sosiego. Espíritu de la Luz que alumbras las tinieblas alum- bra el corazón de (JLz) para que se acuerde de mi que me llamo (mrn) que no pueda comer ni en cama dormir, ni en silla sentarse, con mujer u hombre hablar, ni tenga momento de paz hasta que por vuestra intersec- ción se rinda a mis pies.

Tranquilidad no lo des hasta que regrese a mí que me llamo (mrn) amante y cariñoso, fĳiel como un perro, manso como un cordero, caliente como un chivato, que venga, que venga, que venga que nada lo detenga.

Ven (JLZ) que soy yo (mrn) la única que te llama a ti (jlz), ven (JLz), ven (JLz), ven (JLz).78

78 [Plea to St Helena. OH! Glorious St Helena mother of the great Constantine, Roman emperor, you daughter of King and Queen, who went to the Mount of Olives for your heartfelt love of the divine JESUS, I want [oh] your powerful intervention to achieve what I desire. OH! Glorious St Helena who went to the mount and brought three nails, one you gave to your son Constantine, another you threw into the sea for the safety of sailors, and the one which remained in your most precious hands St Helena I do not ask to be given, only to borrow to nail it into the heart of (JLz) so that he have neither peace nor serenity. Spirit of Light who lights up the darkness, light the heart of (JLz) so that he remembers me, whose name is (mrn), so that he may not eat nor sleep in bed, nor sit on a chair, speak with man nor woman, nor have a moment’s peace until through your intervention he sur- renders at my feet. Do not give him rest until he returns to me, whose name is (mrn), loving and tender, loyal as a dog, meek as a lamb, hot as a goat, may he come, may he come, may he come, may nothing stop him.] From The Spanish Inquisition To The Internet 109

In this second modern prayer, the introduction is much richer. The saint ascends not Calvary but the Mount of Olives; here the prayer garbles history. But it matches the other internet prayer in what it lacks: the dialogues of Santa Helena, and the personages. It preserves the discovery and allocation of the nails and it keeps the spell to prevent the man from recovering his sexual potency unless with the woman who is calling him. The plethora of websites causes owners to devise stunts to prevent competitors from stealing their business. Catch phrases promise the immediate efffec- tiveness of the advertised spell, such as ‘it’s true, it works!’ Colourful images accompany the spells, to catch the eye. Prayers may offfer a detailed guide of items to use and rituals to follow. Participants are fĳirst advised of the basic ingredients, and then given the method, or recipe, for preparing the spell:79

Oración a Santa Elena. Conjuro para ligar. Para atraer a una persona ingredientes: una medalla de Santa Elena 3 clavos pequeños dorados retrato o fĳigura dedicado a la persona

Preparación:

Hay que consagrar una medalla a santa Elena del siguiente modo: Se la coloca sobre un trapo de tela verde en el que se clavan tres clavos pequeños dorados, que servirán para la ceremonia. Se clava uno de los clavos en el retrato o fĳigura dedicado a la persona que se quiere ligar. Santa Elena, Santa Elena, hija sois de rey y reina, el paso de la mar pasasteis con las mil vírgenes encontrasteis con ellas os abrazasteis en una laja os acostasteis un dulce sueño soñasteis del dulce sueño recordas- teis para el monte Calvario caminasteis con la cruz de mi Señor Jesucristo encontrasteis con ella os abrazasteis tres clavos de amor le quitasteis uno al mar lo tirasteis con que la mar ensangrentasteis otro a vuestro hermano

Come (JLz), it is I, (mrn), the only one calling you, (JLz), come (JLz), come (JLz), come (JLz). The initials in parenthesis are those of the love-struck woman (mrn) and her victim (JLz). 79 Galeón [online], http://www.galeon.com/2222rescatados/cot-msg114.htm [Accessed: 1 April 2011]. 110 Gala Pellicer

Constantino de Belén distes con que batallas y guerras venció y otro, santa, os quedó ese clavo es el que os pido o me lo presteis o que en el corazón de fulano lo claveis que me quiera y que me estime y que no me deje por otra.80

The presence of a list of ingredients and a recipe for ‘preparación’ make these prayers especially interesting, as they give the mise en scène and the words to match. These instructions add complexity to the ritual. A medallion and gilded nails and the portrait are the necessary elements, while one says the prayer aloud. One must put the medallion on a cloth and then pierce it with one of the nails. Nothing odd, so far, as, according to the prayers, St Helena was to have relinquished one nail for the use of lovers. This prayer has some diffferences from the others. St Helena, as usual, becomes involved after having crossed the sea and she encountered the 1000 [sic] Virgins.81 But the revelation that impels her to seek the cross of Christ

80 ‘Ligar literally means to bind or tie (together), although in modern Spanish the term also means ‘to seduce’. I translate it in the older sense, as ‘bind’, as with the English adjective ‘spellbound’. See Ruggiero, Binding Passions, for an exploration of the early modern sense of sexual love as not seduction but magical binding. This modern charm, with little care for history, refers to Constantine as Helena’s brother, not her son. [Plea to Santa Helena. Spell to bind. In order to attract a person Ingredients: a Santa Helena medallion 3 small gold nails portrait or fĳigure dedicated to the person Preparation: You must consecrate a medallion to Santa Helena as follows: Place it on a green cloth into which you nail the three small golden nails which will be used for the ceremony. Nail one of the nails into the portrait or fĳigure dedicated to the person that you wish to bind. Santa Helena, Santa Helena, daughter you are of king and queen, the sea you crossed, the thousand virgins you encountered, them you embraced, you went to sleep on a slab a sweet dream you dreamt you remembered the sweet dream set out walking for Mount Calvary you found the cross of my Lord Jesus Christ you embraced it three nails of love you took out of it, one into the sea you threw with which the sea with blood you stained another you gave to your brother Constantine of Bethlehem with which battles and wars he won and another, saint, was left to you this nail is the one I ask of you either to lend to me or to nail in the heart of Whomsoever so that he may love me and so that he may hold me in esteem and not leave me for another.] 81 See note 115. The charm, oblivious to tradition, has just 1000 Virgins, not the traditional 11000. From The Spanish Inquisition To The Internet 111 now comes to her via a dream, which leads her to Mount Calvary. Having found the cross and the nails, she deftly allocates them. As in all the prayers, the spell ends by declaring the desire: to make ‘someone’ fall in love. In these web forums, the participants question and comment on the prayers proposed by other people also interested in them. Almost always, the participants are young women, although there are also some men who resort to santería in search of a remedy.

Conclusion

Since it is hardly likely that website users accessed Inquisition archives, the most likely explanation for St Helena prayers in the santería forums is that they were passed down orally from generation to generation. The St Helena prayers have moved from the repression of the Inquisition into open, demo- cratic cyberspace. Twentieth-century women, like seventeeth-century sorceresses, continue to carry a rich cultural patrimony which, even if now modifĳied, still keeps its root meaning. For all their simplifĳication, the modern prayers have a notable resemblance to their antecedents. In general, all the subsidiary elements have faded. That is why the old stories, like the conversations with the Jews and singling out the true cross, are no longer there, while the nails, the famous relics, even if they have lost part of their original meaning, are still central. Both the inquisitorial texts and the web prayers are written texts that take on meaning when recited. For that reason, many of their essential ritual elements are hard to catch in silent reading. Both the early modern and the modern prayers that echo them suggest that gossip was stronger than governance: despite the effforts of the Inquisitors to repress the spells and invocations, they passed clandestinely from woman to woman, for centuries. In past ages, as today, some women were led by desire for a man’s love to use love magic, which gave them hope. In this matter, governance has ceased and gossip has been given a free rein, whilst love magic now avails itself of the latest advances in technology and marketing strategy. Perhaps it is precisely this ability to adapt that has allowed the age-old prayers to St Helena to survive and reach us surprisingly intact.

Words on Trial

∵

CHAPTER 3 The Power of the Spoken Word Depositions of the Imperial Chamber Court: Power, Resistance, and ‘Orality’

Matthias Bähr

‘And his body looked like a piece of black cloth, and his head was burst open like a spoon, so that one couldn’t even see his nose’. This was the way Martin Fick, a prosperous member of the small village community of Berkach in Franconia, described the corpse of his neighbour Hans Dietz who had been maltreated and killed by soldiers in the summer of 1698.1 Fick made this deposition as a witness before the Imperial Chamber Court [Reichskammergericht], one of the two High Courts of the Holy Roman Empire, and his statement was duly recorded. But what did Fick actually say? How does the spoken word relate to the written transcript that is our only means of accessing face-to-face interactions that took place more than 200 years ago (after all, “our speakers are far too dead”, as Tom Cohen puts it)?2 This question lies at the heart of our topic. For me as for many others who contributed to this volume, the study of oral communication is no mere means to an end. Rather, I look for traces of orality so that I can better understand early modern society as a whole. In face-to-face interactions, power relations are often condensed and clearly visible, and sometimes altered or even completely overthrown. From this point of view, the main objective of the study of orality is to get a clearer picture of ‘how the social and political order was in play in face-to-face contexts’, as Michael Braddick has pointed out.3 This is particularly true for court records, where the question of what exactly ‘in the continuous flow of talk’4 is recorded does not only depend on the scribe’s scholarly tradition or judicial expertise, but is also deeply embedded in power relations. Whenever we encounter something that seems to resemble the spoken word,

1 Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv München (BayHStA) RKG 4024 Q 39 Art. 20–22: ‘Und sein Leib [hat] ausgesehen als wie ein schwarz gemangtes Tuch, und der Kopfff [ist] wie eine Gelte [i.e. eine Schöpfkelle] aufgeprallt gewesen, daß mann nicht einmal die Nasen hätte sehen können’ (Art. 20). 2 Thomas V. Cohen, ‘Tracking Conversation in the Italian Courts’ (chapter 4 in this volume). 3 This is what Michael Braddick stresses in his conclusion to this volume. 4 Again, I refer to Braddick’s remarks.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004291829_005 116 Bähr as the deposition of Martin Fick does, we are forced to think about power, resistance and popular agency. In this essay, I will show why, and under what circumstances, courts, at least in part, put down a literal record of things said. At the Imperial Chamber Court, procedures were remarkably prone to political bargaining, because it functioned as an arbiter and, generally speaking, not as an adversary for villagers.5 Orality was, I argue, part of this bargaining, and was deliberately employed to achieve political aims. The spoken word was, for the most part, included into the transcripts if it fostered these aims, and it was excluded if it did not. For village communities such as Berkach, orality was a means to alter current relations of power, to create an impression of sincerity and virtue, and to win new allies in the face of seemingly invincible foes. While my fĳindings may, in the end, apply to no other court than the Imperial Chamber Court itself, they will still say something about popular agency in early modern Germany.

Villages, Witnesses, and the Imperial Chamber Court

Before I begin I will establish why the Imperial Chamber Court is so interesting for the study of orality, and why I concentrate on village communities. Early modern Germany was by and large a rural society. Of course, there were dozens of economically important cities and numerous small towns. But compared to the urban hotbeds of Holland and Flanders, the Holy Roman Empire remained relatively sparsely populated and agrarian. Most people, over seventy per cent of the population, lived and died in villages.6 But this says little about the circumstances with which rural communities had to deal. Villages varied greatly in size, wealth, and powers. Some merely struggled for survival, often to the extent where they were altogether aban- doned and became Wüstungen [deserted places] that, after a generation or

5 David M. Luebke, His Majesty’s Rebels. Communities, Factions, and Rural Revolt in the Black Forest, 1725–1745 (New York, 1997), pp. 193–194; Rita Sailer, Untertanenprozesse vor dem Reichskammergericht. Rechtsschutz gegen die Obrigkeit in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts (Cologne, Weimar & Vienna, 1999), p. 475; Bernhard Diestelkamp, ‘Die Bedeutung des Reichskammergerichts für die Rechtsentwicklung im Heiligen Römischen Reich. Eine (Zwischen-)Bilanz’, Kultur- und rechtshistorische Wurzeln Europas. Arbeitsbuch, ed. by J. Wolfff (Mönchengladbach, 2005), pp. 459–474. 6 Jan Dumolyn & Jelle Haemers, ‘ “A Blabbermouth can barely control his tongue”: Political Poems, Songs and Prophecies in the Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Low Countries’ (in this volume), Ulrich Rosseaux, Städte in der Frühen Neuzeit (Darmstadt, 2006), p. 6, Heinz Schilling, Die Stadt in der Frühen Neuzeit, 2nd edn (Munich, 2004), pp. 2–17. Depositions of the Imperial Chamber Court 117 two, vanished into oblivion.7 Others enjoyed material prosperity, cultivated specialised crops like wine, hops or hemp and became important marketplaces in their own right.8 Villages might have a great variety of rulers, ranging from assorted landlords, judges, bailifffs andLeibherren [lords] to the prince residing in a far away capital.9 Others, like the ‘Reichsdörfer’ Gochsheim and Sennfeld, remained immediates subjects of the Empire at a time where even Imperial Cities were under pressure and had to fear for their privileges.10 Lordless communities like the Eglofser Freien and the Freien auf Leutkircher Heide were famous for the amount of liberty they successfully defended in a feudal world and, later, against the early modern State.11 But wherever a peasant in early modern Germany might live, whether in a modest hamlet or a self-confĳident, semi-autonomous village, he could do something, contemporaries claimed, few people anywhere in Europe could. If he had grievances and they were not met, he could sue any individual, even his landlord or prince. If all other attempts proved futile, he could even take the matter to the Imperial Courts, either to the Aulic Council [Reichshofrat] in Vienna or to the Imperial Chamber Court in Speyer and later Wetzlar.12 In fact, this is what Martin Fick and his neighbours did when they sued the Bishop of Würzburg who had been trying to tax them. If an entire community like Berkach took legal action against its prince, Imperial Law spoke of an ‘Untertanenprozess’ [a trial concerning subjects] and took measures to protect

7 Wilhelm Abel, ed., Wüstungen in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main, 1967). 8 David W. Sabean, Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870 (Cambridge, 1990), p. 43 and subsequent pages; Hans Medick, Weben und Überleben in Laichingen 1650– 1900. Lokalgeschichte als Allgemeine Geschichte (Göttingen, 1997); Josef Ehmer & Michael Mitterauer, eds, Familienstruktur und Arbeitsorganisation in ländlichen Gesellschaften (Vienna, Cologne & Graz 1986). 9 Werner Trossbach, Bauern 1648–1806 (Munich, 1993), pp. 6–20. 10 Friedrich Weber, Geschichte der fränkischen Reichsdörfer Gochsheim und Sennfeld (Schweinfurt, 1913), p. 212, and subsequent pages, p. 224, pp. 240–259; Harald Mackh, Die fränkischen Reichsdörfer. Dargestellt an den beiden ehemaligen Reichsdörfern Gochsheim und Sennfeld bei Schweinfurt (Erlangen, 1951), pp. 66–74. 11 Peter Kissling, Freie Bauern und bäuerliche Bürger. Eglofs im Spätmittelalter und in der Frühneuzeit (Epfendorf, 2006), Catherine de Kegel-Schorer, Die Freien auf Leutkircher Heide Ursprung, Ausformung und Erosion einer oberdeutschen Freibauerngenossenschaft (Epfendorf, 2007). 12 Winfried Schulze, Bäuerlicher Widerstand und feudale Herrschaft in der frühen Neuzeit (Stuttgart & Bad Cannstatt, 1980), pp. 73–85; Bernhard Diestelkamp, ‘Die Bedeutung des Reichskammergerichts für die Rechtsentwicklung im Heiligen Römischen Reich: Eine (Zwischen-)Bilanz’, Kultur- und rechtshistorische Wurzeln Europas. Arbeitsbuch, ed. by Jörg Wolfff (Mönchengladbach, 2005), pp. 459–474. 118 Bähr the claimant against undue pressure by local authorities.13 To be sure, the Imperial Courts were not unique. There were many provincial courts that were no less important for the administration of justice.14 But as the Imperial Courts often acted as ‘third party’ in conflicts that involved subjects and princes alike, their proceedings had a deeper impact on the Empire as a whole, offfering judicial remedy to everyone who dwelled within its borders. Particularly in the eighteenth century, scholars were thrilled by the possi- bilities this broad ‘juridifĳication’, to use a term coined by historians in the 1980s, offfered.15 They called it a ‘blessing’ without precedent in the world, the ‘most noble gem of the Imperial crown’ and the ‘stronghold of German liberty’.16 In 1798, the lawyer Johann Nikolaus Becker, while browsing the archives, remarked: ‘In the fĳiles [of the Imperial Chamber Court] I have found examples of a language used against unjust princes that, if better known, would excite admiration and compared to which the cries of the British opposition that never acts seem like an empty bell’s ring and like the clatter of a children’s rattle.’17 But there was also the other side of the story. Not everyone was thrilled. The famous eighteenth-century legal scholar Johann Jacob Moser complained about the ‘Proceß-Lust’ [delight in trials] he saw spreading among the villages. Unruly peasants would, Moser wrote, keep the Imperial Courts from fulfĳilling their actual duties, while entire communities allegedly were bankrupted by the enormous costs an Untertanenprozess brought about.18 Christian Jakob

13 Heinrich von Schelhaß, Über die Gerichtsbarkeit der höchsten Reichsgerichte in Klagen zwischen den mittelbaren Reichsunterthanen und ihrer Landes-Obrigkeit (Stuttgart, 1795). 14 Peter Oestmann, Geistliche und weltliche Gerichte im Alten Reich. Zuständigkeitsstreitig- keiten und Instanzenzüge (Cologne, Weimar & Vienna, 2012), Anja Amend, ed., Gerichtslandschaft Altes Reich. Höchste Gerichtsbarkeit und territoriale Rechtsprechung (Cologne, Weimar & Vienna, 2007). 15 The concept of ‘juridifĳication’ has been suggested by Winfried Schulze, ‘Die veränderte Bedeutung sozialer Konflikte im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert’, Der Deutsche Bauernkrieg 1524– 1526, ed. by Hans-Ulrich Wehler (Göttingen, 1975), pp. 277–302. 16 Günther Heinrich von Berg, Über Teutschlands Verfassung und die Erhaltung der öfffentli- chen Ruhe in Teutschland (Göttingen, 1795), p. 104, Schelhaß, ‘Gerichtsbarkeit’, p. 3. 17 Johann Nikolaus Becker, Fragmente aus dem Tagebuche eines reisenden Neu-Franken (Frankfurt & Leipzig, 1798, reprint Bremen, 1985), p. 26: ‘In den Protokollen [habe ich] Beyspiele gefunden, daß man hier gegen ungerechte Fürsten eine Sprache führt, die, wenn sie bekannt wäre, Bewunderung erregen würde, und gegen welche das Geschrey der brittischen Opposition, die nie handelt, nur leeres Schellengeklingel und Rasseln einer Kinderklapper ist.’ 18 Johann Jacob Moser, Von der Landeshoheit in Ansehung der Unterthanen, Neues teutsches Staatsrecht 16.8 (Frankfurt am Main/Leipzig 1773, reprint Osnabrück 1968), p. 84. Depositions of the Imperial Chamber Court 119 von Zwierlein, who worked as a lawyer or ‘procurator’ at the Imperial Chamber Court from 1730 onwards, claimed that village delegates from all parts of Germany would flock to the chancellery ‘day in, day out’, thereby undermin- ing the court’s regular business.19 It would be highly unlikely, another writer remarked, to fĳind a single village in the entire Empire that had not yet sued his landlord or prince.20 The ‘quarrelsome peasant’ soon became a topos regularly employed by scholars and satirists alike.21 In fact, there was a grain of truth in these comments. While they overes- timate the sheer number of Untertanenprozesse, they point to the largest problem the Imperial Courts, and the Imperial Chamber Court in particular, had to face. At fĳirst glance, the Imperial Chamber Court was inefffĳicient and slow, its judges seemingly unable to cope with the court’s regular business. Proceedings sometimes took decades or, in some infamous cases, even centuries. Furthermore, since the Empire lacked troops of its own, no independent power could enforce the court’s rulings. Rather, the court had to rely on the help of neighbouring princes, leading to all kinds of political considerations that could sometimes hamstring decision making. Often, there was no fĳinal ruling at all. Under such circumstances it seems stunning that hundreds of communities turned to the Imperial Chamber Court for help. What did they hope to achieve? One key to a better understanding of this Proceß-Lust is to take a closer look at the inner workings of the Imperial Chamber Court. Its judicial ‘flaws’ were well known among contemporaries, but some of these flaws were deeply rooted in procedural law and had good reasons to exist. The so called ‘Dispositionsmaxime’, for example, required the parties to actively apply for a fĳinal ruling if they indeed desired formal legal closure to their case. If they

19 Christian Jakob von Zwierlein, Vermischte Briefe und Abhandlungen über die Verbesserung des Justizwesens am Kammergericht mit patriotischer Freimütigkeit entworfen (Berlin, 1767), I, p. 105. ‘Diese Gattungen von Klagen, sind leider in neuern Zeiten so häufĳig, daß man täglich die Bauren, Schaarenweise in Wezlar auf die Sollicitatur ziehen siehet.’ Procurators were lawyers who were allowed to deal with the Imperial Chamber Court directly, whereas everyone else had to rely on representation by proxy. 20 Johann Gottlob Klingner, Sammlungen zum Dorf- und Baurenrechte (Leipzig, 1749), I, [II]. 21 See, for example, Adolf von Knigge, Über den Umgang mit Menschen (Hannover, 1788, reprint Darmstadt, 1967), II; Christian Garve, ‘Üeber den Charakter der Bauern und ihr Verhältniß gegen die Gutsherren und gegen die Regierung’, Vermischte Aufsätze, welche einzeln oder in Zeitschriften erschienen sind, ed. by Christian Garve (Breslau, 1796, reprint Hildesheim, 1985), I, pp. 3–228, Urban Dorfffgast,Curiöse Bauer-Historien. Oder: Allerhand merckwürdige Begebenheiten, und Zum Theil lustige und lächerliche Schwencke (1709, reprint Würzburg, 1987) pp. 26, 41 and following pages, p. 46. 120 Bähr did not make use of their privilege, as was often the case, no ruling was delivered. Rather, the court tried to mitigate the conflict by sending commissioners, issuing temporary injunctions or openly encouraging the parties to reconcile. Thus, like much of early modern justice, legal proceedings at the Imperial Chamber Court were a matrix for mediation, and not just a device for top- down judgment. They were often highly political rather than strictly judicial. For villages trying to get the Imperial Chamber Court to intervene in their local conflict, this institutional practice meant that they had to provide a means to gain the political advantage, rather than to just furnish proof. Often, particularly if no ruling was imminent, it was important to create informal goodwill. The court had to be convinced that political measures, such as sending commissioners as mediators, were inevitable. This was not easy, at least for the ‘common people’. They usually had no archives and registries of their own, and they did not have access to state archives, so they often had no legal papers at their disposal.22 Supplications were often made, but they were stereotyped and usually composed by trained lawyers. They were by and large beyond the peasants’ control.23 For rural communities, the most important means of gaining political influence was to name witnesses as spokesmen for their neighbours, and this is exactly what was expected of Martin Fick and his companions. Consequently, witnesses before the Imperial Chamber Court were often pleading their own case and, in turn, that of their home villages. The court, according to Roman Law procedure (or Ius Commune), was bound to pay close attention to these village voices, as depositions were,

22 Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer, ‘La circulation des idées politiques parmi les élites pay- sannes’, in Les Élites rurales dans l’Europe médiévale et moderne, ed. by François Menant & Jean-Pierre Jessenne (Toulouse 2007), pp. 179–193. 23 This only goes for this particular genre of judicial supplications. As a matter of fact, supplications and petitions were drawn up by villages all over Europe, and were often highly complex. One particularly revealing example for a village’s ‘political campaign’ is cited by Thomas Cohen, ‘Communal Thought, Communal Words, and Communal Rites’, in Sociability and its Discontents: Civil Society, Social Capital, and their Alternatives in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by Nicholas A. Eckstein & Nicholas Terpstra, pp. 23–50, at pp. 43–44. For a general assessment of communal voices in petitions and supplications, see Andreas Würgler, ‘Voices From Among the “Silent Masses”: Humble Petitions and Social Conflicts in Early Modern Central Europe’, in Petitions in Social History, ed. by Lex Heerma van Voos (Cambridge 2002), pp. 11–34, Cecilia Nubola & Andreas Würgler, eds, Praktiken des Widerstandes. Suppliken, Gravamina und Revolten in Europa (15.–19. Jahrhundert) (Bologna, 2002). Depositions of the Imperial Chamber Court 121 technically at least, of the same probative value as legal documents.24 That is why judges were inclined to listen, even if the witnesses did, in the end, not furnish proof. As a matter of fact, from the records made by the Imperial Chamber Court, the importance of depositions is obvious from the outset. To be sure, the records vary greatly. Some are merely a couple of pages long, containing no more than the writ of summons and maybe one or two written submission. Others have more than twenty volumes, each of them several hundred pages strong, with all kinds of judicial writings, charters, supplications, declarations and, of course, depositions.25 Indeed, this is where most records of ‘Untertanenprozesse’ correspond: In almost every case, witnesses were summoned to testify.

The Setting

It is important to note that, when I speak of witnesses before the Imperial Chamber Court, this is only half true. The witnesses did not actually travel to the place of trial, and the judges never even saw them. Most of the time, the matter remained in the hands of a local notary public. The witnesses were required to testify at a place of the notary’s own choosing, usually the local inn or the home of a village offfĳicial.26 Thus, the stage was not a ‘neutral’ courtroom, but often the village itself.27 Proceedings began relatively early in the morning, often at seven, eight or nine o’clock.28 The witnesses were, one after another, summoned into the room. After the oath had been administered, they were allowed to take a seat.

24 See Peter Oestmann, Rechtsvielfalt vor Gericht. Rechtsanwendung und Partikularrecht im Alten Reich (Frankfurt am Main, 2002), pp. 370–372, 678. 25 See Peter Oestmann, Ein Zivilprozeß am Reichskammergericht. Edition einer Gerichtsakte aus dem 18. Jahrhundert (Cologne, Weimar, & Vienna, 2009). 26 For ‘public spaces’ in towns and villages, see Beat A. Kümin, Drinking Matters: Public Houses and Social Exchange in Early Modern Central Europe (Houndmills, 2007). 27 See my dissertation, Die Sprache der Zeugen. Argumentationsstrategien bäuerlicher Gemeinden vor dem Reichskammergericht (Konstanz & Munich, 2012). 28 Abraham Saur, Teutscher Proceß, Auch Gründtliche und rechter Underweysung Weltliches Bürgerliches Rechtens, mit allen nottürftigen Formen der Klagen, Antworten, und aller anderer fürträge, von der Citation an, biß auf die Execution inclusive (Frankfurt am Main, 1595), fol. 35 and following folios; Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv-Staatsarchiv Osnabrück (StAOs) Rep 900, Nr. 32, fol. 47r; StAOs Rep 900 Nr. 931 Bd. 1, fol. 242r; StAOs Rep 900, Nr. 375, fol. 32r. 122 Bähr

Except for offfĳicials, no audience was present.29 Now the actual depositions could begin. Each witness had to answer to a number of questions (‘positio- nes’) that had been drawn up by the community and its lawyers (questions were, generally speaking, never prepared ex offfĳicio and had to be submitted by the parties involved). The notary was, in turn, assisted by two scribes who were required, in theory at least, to record everything as it had ‘fallen out of the witness’s mouth’.30 The transcripts were then, again in theory, read out aloud so that every witness had the opportunity to correct or amend his or her statement.31 Of course, technical instructions such as these are paramount to all questions of ‘orality’, and I will return to them in more detail. First I will deal with another important issue. After the questioning was completed, the scribes compared their transcripts, clarifĳied any inconsistencies and prepared a clean copy. Everything happened under the auspices of the notary public. Only afterwards did the judges get access to this fĳinal transcript, which remained the only information available in court. Consequently, procedures were remarkably diffferent from, for example, penal law where the Inquisitor was usually present while the questioning was taking place.32 The most important diffference is easily identifĳied: while the Inquisitor could take a closer look at the witness at any time, checking on the witness’s conduct and looking for traces of honesty or dishonesty, at the Imperial Chamber Court, everything depended on the notary public. It was the notary’s duty to note any suspicious behaviour, to be alert for ‘fear, stammering, or ambivalent talk’ and to watch for the witness’s ‘gestures’.33 Sadly for us, the notaries seldom adhered to these requirements. We know little at all about the non-verbal signals Martin Fick and the other witnesses in the Berkach case might have conveyed. They are almost entirely lost. When it came down to a witness’s honesty, the notaries seem to have ascribed

29 Ralf-Peter Fuchs, ‘Gott läßt sich nicht verspotten. Zeugen im Parteienkampf vor früh- neuzeitlichen Gerichten’, Kriminalitätsgeschichte. Beiträge zur Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte der Vormoderne, ed. by Andreas Blauert & Gerd Schwerfhofff (Konstanz, 2000), pp. 315– 335, at p. 324. 30 StAOs Rep 900, Nr. 32, fol. 52v: ‘aus dem Munde gefallen’. 31 Saur, ‘Teutscher Proceß’, fol. 33. 32 Richard van Dülmen, Theater des Schreckens. Gerichtspraxis und Strafrituale in der frühen Neuzeit, 4th edn (Munich, 1995), pp. 23–29. 33 BayHStA RKG 4146: ‘wie sich ein jeder Zeug, in seiner Aussag, mit den Geberden verhalten [. . .] würdt’; Saur, ‘Teutscher Proceß’, fol. 33v: ‘Forcht, Stameln, und etwa zweispaltige Rede’; Johannes Oldendorp, Tractatus de testibus et universa testimoniorum materia (Cologne, 1596), p. 856, VI, pp. 859–861. Depositions of the Imperial Chamber Court 123 more meaning to words than gestures. There was, in fact, a whole set of questions designed to establish the validity of a witness’s deposition, the so called ‘generalia’, even before the matter at hand was dealt with. Interestingly, these generalia were the only questions beyond the community’s control, as they were usually pre-prepared according to the instructions of a handful of very influential judicial textbooks.34 The way the ‘generalia’ worked is telling. In practice, the notaries asked the witnesses, but also other persons, about a given deponent’s age, religion, occupation, property, kinship and personal relations, and the answers to these questions were often considered sufffĳicient to vouch for a witness’s honesty and moral authority.35 Yet, the witnesses often used the ‘generalia’ to attest to one another’s good reputation (not surprisingly, as they were friends and neighbours). Usually, they bluntly stated that they knew only ‘good things’, ‘nice and good things’ or ‘nothing dishonest’ of their co-witnesses, or that they considered them to be ‘honest and unblemished people’.36 While there is some evidence that the notaries took a closer look at the reality of a witness’s moral conduct, in most cases, these biased statements remained by and large unchallenged.37 The reason for this is, at fĳirst glance, surprising. The notaries had very practical reasons not to cast any suspicion on the witnesses. Many notaries were far from impartial. They were often carefully selected, hired and paid for by village communities. In Berkach, the community sent envoys to the most important cities of the neighbouring principalities to search for an appropriate candidate. The one they found received 23 Reichstaler for his trouble out of the community’s purse.38 In some cases, the notaries even resided within the boundaries of the village itself, with their offfĳice adjacent to public places, such as the churchyard.39 Consequently, they were embedded into the community’s

34 Ralf-Peter Fuchs & Winfried Schulze, ‘Zeugenverhöre als historische Quellen – einige Vorüberlegungen’, in their Wahrheit, Wissen, Erinnerung. Zeugenverhörprotokolle als Quellen für soziale Wissensbestände in der Frühen Neuzeit (Münster, Hamburg & London, 2002), pp. 7–40, at pp. 10–13. 35 Fuchs & Schulze, ‘Zeugenverhöre’, pp. 10–13. 36 Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen (LAV NRW) W RKG S 464a fol. 31r: ‘nichts anders dann alles Gutt’; Landesarchiv Speyer (LASp) E6 576: ‘nichts als Liebs unndt Guts’, ‘nichts Unehrlichs von ihnen’; LAV NRW W S 464a fol. 34r: ‘ehrliche unverleumbte Leut’. 37 BayHStA RKG 4146. In this case, the witnesses were confronted with their neighbors’ alleged infĳirmity, drunkenness and their unmarried life. 38 Kreisarchiv Schmalkalden-Meiningen (KASM), Gemeinde Berkach 09/205–209. 39 StAOs Rep 900 Nr. 32 fol. 52r, 54r; Jan Brademann & Werner Freitag, eds, Leben bei den Toten. Kirchhöfe in der ländlichen Gesellschaft der Vormoderne (Münster, 2007). 124 Bähr social structures. Thus they were virtually or even literally the witnesses’ next door neighbors, and they had to live with them day in, day out. This is one of the keys for understanding this particular setting: If your neighbours testifĳied in a lawsuit the whole village had promised to support, or if you were paid by the people named as witnesses, this was perhaps the wrong time to call their reputation into question. But even if this were not the case, even if the notary were, in fact, a stranger to all involved, the depositions nevertheless took place within the boundaries of the village. On the day before the set date (as, for practical reasons, he usually spent the night), the notary entered the community’s sphere of control, and did not leave it again until proceedings were completed. In practice, the landowner was not present, either in person or by proxy, and his cooperation, though technically required, was not sought. In many cases, he was not even allowed to submit his own set of questions, the so called ‘Interrogatoria’, a formality normally permitted to any defence at law. This was another technical requirement of Imperial Law that was often undermined in practice.40 Consequently, the balance of power often shifted towards the community, as the community had all the means necessary to exercise far greater influence. It controlled the witnesses and the questions, the flow of money, and in many cases, even the setting. The landlord and his offfĳicers were all but excluded, and judicial control was sometimes reduced to a minimum. In short, the weakness of external constraints worked to support the agenda of the village and its witnesses. While this is important for many reasons, the most important one for ‘orality’ is that in these cases, the notary had every reason to ‘record everything as it had fallen out of the witness’s mouth’. The villages named their witnesses as spokesmen, and, consequently, they had something important to say, something that was supposed to be read by the judges. Why should a notary who was in favour of the community and acted under communal power have worked against these intentions? He probably would have gone at great lengths to foster the community’s case, and therefore usually would have avoided abbreviations and, to a certain extent, would have refrained from judicial language (that is, if he did not believe that it was exactly this kind of professional language that would be benefĳicial in court). Thus, the transcripts, very much like the Roman judicial papers Tom Cohen analyses in his essay, should be read assuming their general fĳidelity, rather than

40 Fuchs, ‘Zeugen im Parteienkampf’, p. 321 and following pages; Gail, Practicarum Observationum tam ad processum iudiciarum, praesertim Imperialis Camerae, quam cau- sarum decisiones pertinentium, libri II (Köln, 1721), p. 165. Depositions of the Imperial Chamber Court 125 stressing the offfĳicial’s shorthand and his other changes (even if we do have ample evidence for them).41 In fact, one thing that strongly hints in this direction is the oath every participant was required to take.

The Oath

An oath is very often essential for every kind of testimony. Even to this day, the oath, if administered correctly, vouches for the probative value of a deposition. In early modern examinations the oath was even more important and served as a link between temporal courts and the Last Judgment, between immanence and transcendence.42 The crucial scenario was the intimation of a punishing God whose wrath might be unleashed upon the perjurer: whoever swears a ‘false oath’, as it was commonly stated in early modern protocols, is destined to ‘condemn himself’.43 Thus, every oath was ‘bedingte Selbstverfluchung’44 [conditional self-dooming] set to strike those whose oath was ‘false’. The scale of sanctions that a perjurer had to expect for his crime applied not only to the afterlife, but to this life too. For his conspiracy against the court the perjurer was likely to lose a signifĳicant amount of honor and sufffer worldly punishment. Meanwhile, for his conspiracy against God, the perjurer had to fear for his salvation.45 This is where the ‘invisible justice of God’ and the ‘visible world’ met.46 Eternal punishment, it was believed, should outweigh any

41 For example Oestmann, ‘Rechtsvielfalt’, p. 372. Again, see Cohen, ‘Tracking Conversation’ (in this volume). 42 For this, read the book by Paolo Prodi, Il sacramento del potere. Il giuramento politico nella storia costituzionale dell’Occidente (Bologna, 1992), which also available in translation (English and German); a very good introduction is Paolo Prodi, ‘Der Eid in der europäischen Verfassungsgeschichte. Zur Einführung’, in his Glaube und Eid. Treueformeln, Glaubensbekenntnisse und Sozialdisziplinierung zwischen Mittelalter und Neuzeit (Munich, 1993), pp. vii–xxix. 43 E.g. StAOs Rep 900 Nr. 899, II, 326: ‘[Wer einen] falschen Eyd schweret (. . .) vermaledeyet sich selbsten’. 44 André Holenstein, ‘Seelenheil und Untertanenpflicht. Zur gesellschaftlichen Funktion und theoretischen Begründung des Eides in der ständischen Gesellschaft’, Die metaphy- sische Begründung gesellschaftlichen Zusammenlebens und politischer Ordnung in der ständischen Gesellschaft, ed. by Peter Blickle (Berlin, 1993), pp. 11–63, at p. 12. 45 Fuchs, ‘Zeugen im Parteienkampf’, p. 323. 46 Martin Scheutz, ‘Frühneuzeitliche Gerichtsakten als ‘Ego’-Dokumente. Eine problem- atische Zuschreibung am Beispiel der Gaminger Gerichtsakten aus dem 18. Jahrhundert’, in Vom Lebenslauf zur Biographie. Geschichte, Quellen und Probleme der historischen 126 Bähr terrestrial gains which might be achieved through perjury. The oath was supposed to force a witness to tell the truth ‘as he is striving to be united with God’, ‘to become a child of God’ and ‘to enter heaven’.47 But it is important to note that, at the Imperial Chamber Court, oath- taking was not limited to the witnesses. The notaries and scribes were required to declare under oath that they would adhere to the correct procedures. This explicitly included the promise to record all testimonies ‘faithfully’.48 Thus, the oath was not just a means to discipline the ‘common people’. Oath-taking was directed at everyone. Every person involved had to face the ‘invisible justice of God’.49 So everyone, and not just the witnesses, had to decide how much authority he attributed to the oath he was required to take. Of course, the question of whether and how each participant felt bound to remain faithful to an oath he gave was consonant on individual piety. But even if one subscribes to the notion of an ‘oath crisis’, according to which the use of God for worldly purposes became increasingly contested in early modern Europe, it would be far-fetched to assume that the oath worked if taken by the ‘common people’ while it was largely ignored by judicial elites.50 Generally speaking, it is probably more appropriate to see the oath as a safeguard against deviant behavior that worked (or failed) regardless of social background. For recording ‘orality’, this would mean that oath-taking could work against a scribe’s shortening or altering depositions. In fact, there is empirical evidence to support this: The depositions of witnesses who had been put under oath were often recorded in greater detail than those of witnesses who had made afffĳirmations in lieu of an oath.51

Biographik und Autobiographik, ed. by Thomas Winkelbauer (Waidhofen, 2000), pp. 99–134, at p. 122. 47 E.g. StAOs Rep 900 Nr. 899, II, 221, 241, 245, 269, 380, 397, 405, 406, 420, 435, 481, 484, 498: ‘so wahr er gedencke zu Gott zu kommen’, ‘bey Verlust des Himmels’, ‘bey Verlust zeitli- chen undt ewigen Glücks’, ‘so wahr er Gedencke ein Kind Gottes zu werden’, ‘so wahr er Gedencke in Himmel zu kommen’. 48 See for example StAOs Rep 900 Nr. 899, II, 333: ‘getreulich’. 49 Scheutz, ‘Frühneuzeitliche Gerichtsakten’, p. 122. 50 For this alleged ‘Oath Crisis’, see Holenstein, ‘Seelenheil’, p. 40; Fuchs, ‘Zeugen im Parteienkampf’, p. 326 51 E.g. LAV NRW W N 161 fol. 21; StAOs Rep 900 Nr. 931, I, fol. 248; I have more on this in my dissertation (forthcoming). Depositions of the Imperial Chamber Court 127

Orality Interrupted?

For the moment, I have established two things: First, that the setting of the questioning, at least on a technical level, favoured the literal transcription of oral speech, as judicial control was often not intrusive and all proceedings took place within the community’s sphere of control. The notaries were, for the most part, unlikely to work against the community’s interests. Second, that the oath was not just a means to discipline the ‘common people’, but was also directed at the commissioners, notaries, and scribes, and prescribed a truthful depiction of every witness’s statement. But what were the specifĳic legal obligations a lawyer involved in questioning witnesses had to face? There is a simple answer to this: there were hardly any. Most early modern legal scholars had little to say on how depositions were to be recorded, even though there were, in fact, guidelines on how to summon and question witnesses. Abraham Saur, who had published his influential textbook Teutscher Proceß in 1595, simply stated: ‘Every commissioner needs to decide on his own how to act, depending on the character of the matter at issue and the smartness of the witness, and apply such diligence as he would take account of before Almighty God.’52 Saur, habitually careful to be as precise as possible in almost every other regard, completely entrusted the matter to the notaries, while implicitly invoking the Last Judgment. This was actually one of the most important safeguards contemporary scholars stressed: The notaries, they said, were required to apply the utmost measure of diligence (‘diligentia’), so they were safe from eternal damnation.53 Every notary had to behave accordingly, so that ‘he would not damn himself eternally’, as Saur explicitly stated.54 Again, as with the oath, it was up to the notary and his scribes. They had to decide on the ‘moments’ in the flow of talk that would be incorporated into (or excluded from) the fĳinal transcript. There was but one rule to which most offfĳicials adhered: the depositions were recorded in the third-person narrative (‘witness says’), with very few exceptions where the fĳirst-person voice was given preference, so there is one constraint to village voices we had better not underestimate. And, even though the overwhelming majority of these documents were written in what passed as

52 Saur, ‘Teutscher Proceß’, fol. 38r: ‘Es sol sich ein jeder Commissarius, nach Gestalt deß Handels, und Geschickligkeit deß Zeugen, selbst richten, schicken, und solchen Fleiß anwenden, wie er für dem Allmechtigen Rechnung darumb zu thun schuldig ist’. 53 Rutgerus Rulant, Tractatus de Commissariis et Commissionibus Camerae Imperialis (Frankfurt am Main, 1618), I, I.XIX.5 54 Saur, ‘Teutscher Proceß’, fol. 33: ‘sich selbst ewiglich nicht verdamme’. 128 Bähr

High German or in a local dialect, there was always the option of just recording ‘afffĳirmat’, ‘negat’, ‘nescit’ and so on. But apart from the fact the many notaries were not in a situation where that seemed feasible, they were, to a certain extent, even prohibited from doing so. Andreas Gail, whose textbook Practicarum Observationum was widely read in the eighteenth century, while advising commissioners and notaries to adhere to efffĳicient procedures, left no doubt that transcripts where one ‘similiter’ was written down after another were, in efffect, illegal.55 Neither the Teutscher Proceß nor the Practicarum Observationum encouraged their readers to make use of abbreviations that were, from the point of view of ‘orality’, not even remotely similar to the statement that might have been originally delivered, such as remarks in Latin (‘nescit’). But as I already mentioned, the most important authority each notary had to face was that of his own Christian conscience. While this was a matter of individual piety, in practice, he also had to face communal power or, at times, even the pressures of his kinship to the witnesses. Above all, long before the fĳirst deposition was recorded, he had committed himself to a ‘faithful’ transcript.56 Everything hinted to a, by and large, comparatively close proximity of his transcript to the face-to-face talk as it actually happened. Of course, for historians, the only authority that really counts is the records themselves and what they reveal about the question of orality. Which moments in the flow of talk were recorded, and why? Of Martin Fick’s deposition, only the fĳinal transcript survives, and that goes for the bulk of all testimonies. Usually, the actual minutes are lost, because there was no reason for them to be preserved. The judges only required access to one single, fĳinal and authoritative document. Consequently, each notary public was responsible for the minutes made during the proceedings he chaired, and these were often simply discarded. Luckily, there are a few cases where some minutes nonetheless survive, because they were just sent to Speyer or Wetzlar (along with the fĳinal transcript) without regard for what the court actually desired. These rare minutes let us test the accuracy of the eventual good copy. One of these cases is that of the village of Fürfeld near Kreuznach in the south-western part of the Empire. From 1618 to 1633, the community undertook legal proceedings at the Imperial Chamber Court against Johann Philipp Boos von Waldeck, its landlord. The matter in dispute was compulsory labour. The village claimed that Johann Philipp had violated local custom by demanding an unfĳixed amount of services (‘ungemessene Dienste’), according to which

55 Gail, ‘Practicarum Observationum’, p. 183. 56 E.g. StAOs Rep 900 Nr. 899, II, 333: ‘getreulich’. Depositions of the Imperial Chamber Court 129 only unnecessary services could be refused, whereas Fürfeld merely conceded fĳixed services (‘gemessene Dienste’).57 At a very early stage of this ‘Untertanenprozess’, witnesses were summoned of behalf of the village community. Of the three transcripts that survive of these depositions, document (1) was made by the Imperial Commissioner Johann Lottler, having been compiled out of the two other transcripts by the notary public Jacob Adenau, document (2) were the notes by Adenau himself (‘originale prothocollon’, as stated at the end of the manuscript), who had been hired by the community, and document (3) had been made by the scribe Marcus Herfff, who had been appointed in addition to Adenau by Lottler himself. All three records offfer transcripts of the same depositions. In transcripts (2) and (3), the unsteady hand and the many abbreviations and deletions indicate that they were written down immediately, that is: while the oral communication was still taking place. In fact, this is what labels such as ‘originale prothocollon’ suggest right from the start. In some instances though, remarks and comments were obviously only inserted afterwards. For example, specifĳic locations were often added in retrospect. Already in the original manuscripts, the deposition ‘Boos von Waldeck has the fourth part of bans and rules [Gebot und Verbot]’ was later corrected to ‘bans and rules at Fürfeld’, and ‘he did not know to which’ became ‘he did not know whether to the house of Montfort or the house of Waldeck’.58 One explanation for this might be that the judges, in marked contrast to all those involved on the local level, lacked a sure grasp of the geographical circumstances. Therefore, locations probably had to be described more carefully than the actual depositions might have permitted. Likewise, specifĳic names that were not obvious from the outset had to be inserted afterwards in order to avoid misunderstandings. For example, a witness who had just referred to a ‘nobleman’ [‘Junckher’] in his deposition and thus had remained unclear was later quoted as having stated the exact name.59 The same goes for time specifĳications. The exact amount of time that had passed since a certain event took place was important to establish the local custom, or usus, of the matter at issue.60 Consequently, the notaries

57 LASp E6 576; for ‘ungemessene Dienste’, see Sailer. ‘Untertanenprozesse’, p. 183. 58 LASp E6 576, Witness 1, Interrogatorium 2 (Herfff): ‘Antwort Zeug, er wise das Junckher Bos von Waldeck das vierte Theil an Gebott und Verbott habe, ob zu Fürfelt habe, wisse aber nicht zu was ob es zum Haus Montfort oder Waldeck gehöre.’ 59 LASp E6 576, Witness 3, Article 12 (Adenau). 60 Peter Oestmann, ‘Die Grenzen richterlicher Rechtskenntnis’, in his Aus den Akten des Reichskammergerichts. Prozeßrechtliche Probleme im Alten Reich (Hamburg, 2004), 130 Bähr often insisted that the witnesses be more specifĳic than their original statement had been. In the margins of the original transcripts, remarks such as ‘roughly 12 years ago’ or ‘for the last 60 years’ were then added.61 This was, in fact, in accordance with what judicial textbooks prescribed. A witness who claimed to know something had to give a reason (Ursache) for his knowledge, particularly if he had not been able to ‘see, hear or touch’ the matter at issue himself. The notaries and commissioners were not allowed to let the witnesses get away with just saying ‘he knows it because he knows it’.62 For this reason, in the Fürfeld case, ‘reasons’ were usually found out, most likely on inquiry, and carefully added in the margins. Comments such as ‘because he had been a servant there for three years’ must be read in light of this.63 Thus, it cannot be taken for granted that, even though transcripts (2) and (3) were made simultaneously to the actual depositions, they always aim to reflect the face-to-face communication as it had originally happened. Rather, and particularly in the case of the ‘reasons’ for knowledge, questioning witnesses was more of a language game where the commissioner or notary asked the question, the witness answered accordingly, and then many subsequent questions and answers could follow. This led to the paradoxical situation that the deposition, as it was recorded, often contained more than one question and more than one answer, but was written down as if there had just been one question and one answer. For source criticism, deciphering this language game is probably one of the most difffĳicult tasks. Just as striking as the remarks added ex post are those parts of the depositions that were deleted from the notes and were therefore omitted from the fĳinal transcript. But these exclusions do not necessarily indicate that what the witnesses had said was considered superfluous. On the contrary, since notes (2) and (3) often contain the same deletions at the exact same positions, it seems very likely that Adenau and Herfff sought to stick to the witnesses’ exact words. If the witness corrected or amended his fĳirst statement, then the transcripts do, of course, reflect this. In the Fürfeld case, for example, one of the witnesses talked about the food and

pp. 317–319; Oestmann, ‘Rechtsvielfalt’, p. 7; Ralf-Peter Fuchs, ‘ ‘Soziales Wissen’ in der ländlichen Lebenswelt des 16. Jahrhunderts: Ein kaiserlich-kommissarisches Zeugen- verhör’, Westfälische Forschungen, 48 (1998): 419–447, at p. 429. 61 LASp E6 576, Witness 1, Article 16 (Herfff): ‘ungefehr vor 12 Jahren’, Witness 3, Interrogatorium 7 (Herfff): ‘von 60 Jahren her’. 62 Saur, ‘Teutscher Proceß’, fol. 42v: ‘sehen, hören noch [zu] greifffen’, ‘darum daß ers wisse’; Gail, ‘Practicarum Observationum’, p. 165; Oldendorp, ‘Tractatus de testibus’, p. 857 and subsequent pages. 63 LASp E6 576, Witness 2, Interrogatorium 7 (Adenau): ‘da er bey denselben an die drey Jahr, in Dienst gewesen’. Depositions of the Imperial Chamber Court 131 drink in remuneration for compulsory labour and supposedly called it ‘Speiß und Trank’, while his statement was later corrected to a more colloquial ‘Essen und Drincken’.64 In fact, certain features of oral communication are very prominent. Remarks such as ‘never in the days of his life’ (instead of the judicial term ‘negat’) probably helped to avoid the reproach of having misrepresented the witness’s deposition.65 Redundancies typical of actual speech hint at the same direction.66 All things considered, it could be argued that authenticity, in the sense of a faithful reflection of the actual face-to-face situation, was at least one of the aims the offfĳicials pursued.67 This is particularly obvious in those cases where the statement was recorded in Low German, the colloquial language of daily life in some parts of Germany, while the records themselves where written in High German.68 One case which is particularly revealing is that of a transcript made in the County of Bentheim in 1774, where the notaries and scribes failed to distinguish between ‘Frost’ (‘frost’) and ‘Forst’ (‘forest’), probably because the scribe misunderstood the witness’s idiom or idiolect.69 In the Fürfeld case, transcript (1) took great care to record what a witness had said about other deponents, that he ‘does not know any dishonest thing about them’.70 This was probably considered important because it was more authentic than the remark Herfff had suggested in his original transcript (he ‘doesn’t know’, whereas Adenau has the full expression

64 LASp E6 576, Witness 2, Interrogatorium 32 (Herfff). 65 LASp E6 576, Witness 1, Interrogatorium 9 (Adenau): ‘die Tagh seines Lebens niemalen’. 66 E.g. LASp E6 576, Witness 3, Interrogatorium 26 (Adenau). According to this witness’s statement, the ‘mayor’ of his town repeatedly opened court proceedings (‘Gedingh’), while saying it once would have been enough. Adenau did correct this while doing his revisions. 67 While I do focus on speech patterns here, one could also look at narrative patterns to unveil the ‘social knowledge’ of early modern rural society. A good example for this is Stefan Breit, ‘Das Geschenk der heiligen Frau Ayd. Legitimation bäuerlicher Interessen als soziales Wissen’, in Wahrheit, Wissen, Erinnerung. Zeugenverhörprotokolle als Quellen für soziale Wissensbestände in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. by Ralf-Peter Fuchs & Winfried Schulze (Münster 2002), pp. 155–198. A second step would be to examine how this knowledge was used to gain the advantage in court. In fact, this is similar to what I did in my dissertation (Bähr, Die Sprache der Zeugen: Argumentationsstrategien bäuerlicher Gemeinden vor dem Reichskammergericht (1693–1806) (Konstanz, 2012). 68 E.g. StAOs Rep 900 Nr. 249, fol. 129: ‘Dat sollen wy wol nicht syn.’ 69 E.g. StAOs Rep 900 Nr. 249, fol. 642v: ‘Bey Forst Zeiten wären [. . .] Schafffe alldaer gehütet, wihen sonsten wegen Wasser [. . .] nicht wol geschehen könnte.’ 70 LASp E6 576, Witness 1, Generalia 3 (Lottler): ‘Aufff das dritte, Andtwordt: Hab seiner mit Zeugenn theils mit Wissen niemahlen mehr gesehenn, darumb keine Kuntschaffft, oder unehrlich Stuck ufff sey wisse.’ 132 Bähr in his original), plus it sheds a more positive light on the witnesses in question, since the lack of rumours was a positive thing in itself.71 And, fĳinally, there are some rare instances where the deposition was recorded in the fĳirst-person narrative, rather than in the third person, and this is one of the most striking attempts at authenticity.72 To sum up, while the transcripts are highly selective in what exactly ‘in the continuous flow of talk’ they record, there are nonetheless plenty of traces of oral communication. These colloquial elements were by and large not included arbitrarily. Rather, the commissioners, notaries and scribes actively tried to keep their transcripts, to some extent, authentic. While this was sometimes just a matter of proper judicial treatment, as in the case of the usus, it more often helped to foster the purpose witnesses’ depositions had at the Imperial Chamber Court: in many cases, they were supposed to gain a political upper hand by convincing the judges to intervene in the community’s favour. Therefore, it was not in the interest of the Zeugenführer and the people he had hired to present a transcript that lacked the hallmark of being genuine. In this regard, judicial reframing was not always feasible, and traces of oral communication were evidently included on purpose.

Social Knowledge

Now that I have established that there are, in fact, at least some instances where the transcripts aim to reflect the oral communication that had occurred in a given face-to-face situation, one of the most important questions remains and that is what these sources reveal about those who ‘speak’. One way of analysing depositions would be to look for the most important arguments, the most important narrative patterns that were used to gain the political advantage in court. This I have done in my previous work, where I fĳind that witnesses employed a number of ‘political languages’, like the language of custom or the language of ‘imperial liberty’, to influence decision-making.73 Another example would be to use the transcripts as a means to uncover the ‘social knowledge’ of early modern rural society, or, in other words, to tackle what people knew of the world surrounding them, and how they made sense

71 LASp E6 576, Witness 1, Generalia 3 (Herfff); Fuchs, ‘Zeugen im Parteienkampf’, p. 328. 72 E.g. StAOs Rep 900 Nr. 466, fol. 40r: “Daß ich seit dem Jahre 1752 bey dem verstorbenen Oberforstmeister [. . .]”. 73 Bähr, ‘Die Sprache der Zeugen’. Depositions of the Imperial Chamber Court 133 of the things that happened to them.74 Even though the transcripts are embedded in all kinds of tactical situations, they always reveal traces of this ‘social knowledge’. Here, I will just make a few remarks on two of the fĳields of knowledge that might occur. These are, fĳirst, knowledge of time, and then of space and power. It is not self-evident that, if you were living in an early modern village, you could tell the time, nor can it be taken for granted that you had a sure grasp of the calendar. In fact, many contemporaries, namely scholars and burghers, would have argued the opposite. Peasants, they would have said, had no need for telling time by means of a clock, as they had to rely on sunrise and sunset, rain, sunshine, frost, and other such natural occurrences. Likewise, since their life and work was governed by the seasons, those ‘outsiders’ would have continued to argue, the peasants’ sense of time was cyclical rather than linear and, consequently, they lacked all understanding of history. Thus, a calendar was not needed or even detrimental to the ‘natural’ economy of time on which the villages could rely.75 Historical research has shown that, in many cases, this was simply not true. In early modern Germany, many villages were beginning to instal clocks on their church spires, and quite a few schoolmasters educated their pupils on newly acquired hourglasses. Already during the sixteenth century, these artefacts had become a matter of honour for rural elites, and in many instances it can be seen that they were used to telling the time. To take this development into account, the term ‘Veruhrzeitlichung’ [the emergence of clock time] has been suggested.76

74 See, for example, Ralf-Peter Fuchs, ‘Soziales Wissen’, pp. 419–447; Fuchs & Schulze, ‘Zeugenverhöre’, pp. 7–40; Winfried Schulze, ‘Zur Ergiebigkeit von Zeugenbefragungen und Verhören’, in his Ego-Dokumente. Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschichte (Berlin, 1996), pp. 319–325. The term ‘social knowledge’ (‘soziales Wissen’) is introduced by Alfred Schütz & Thomas Luckmann, Strukturen der Lebenswelt (Neuwied/Darmstadt, 1975), I, pp. 243–326. 75 For a critical assessment of this older view, see Werner Rösener, ‘Die Bauern und die Zeit. Anmerkungen zum bäuerlichen Zeitverständnis in der vormodernen Gesellschaft’, Zeitschrift für Agrargeschichte und Agrarsoziologie, 52.2 (2004), pp. 8–24; Werner Troßbach, ‘Historische Anthropologie und frühneuzeitliche Agrargeschichte deutscher Territorien. Anmerkungen zu Gegenständen und Methoden’, Historische Anthropologie, 5 (1997): 187–211; Jan Peters, ‘Die Recht-Zeitigkeit bäuerlichen Lebens und Arbeitens: Wiederholen oder Verändern?’, in Die Autorität der Zeit in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. by Arndt Brendecke, Ralf-Peter Fuchs, & Edith Koller (Münster, 2007), pp. 133–147. 76 Erhard Chvojka, ‘Zeit der Städter, Zeit der Bauern. Ein Fallbeispiel für die gegen- seitige Wahrnehmung der Zeitordnungen und Zeitmentalitäten von Städtern und 134 Bähr

As a matter of fact, all of this is reflected in the transcripts, as the witnesses were always summoned to a specifĳic hour of the day, and were virtually never late. This comes as no surprise, as many of them had probably learned to tell the time from an early age. Nonetheless, and in accordance with popular discourse, the notaries often worried that, when it comes down to ‘artifĳi- cial’ time, the witnesses were ignorant. They handed out ‘memory sheets’ (Memorialzettel) so as to explain to the witnesses what was required of them. In this way, they seemed to hope that those who had some understanding of artifĳicial time and who could read and write would serve as interpreters.77 But that might have been completely unnecessary. Telling the time had become an integral part of social knowledge. But the transcripts suggest more than this. The witnesses could, it seems, switch between natural and artifĳicial time, depending on the specifĳic situation they had to face. If, to again take the Berkach case as an example, a witness claimed that a company of soldiers had been attacking his neighbours while ‘the church bell rang for prayer’, there is an obvious reason behind this.78 Saying something like ‘when the bell rang seven o’clock’ would have been less efffective, as the soldiers would have seemed less ruthless. Likewise, and under particular circumstances, ‘natural’ time could offfer a safe haven against the reproach of having not told the truth. A witness who claimed that something had happened ‘late last year’ to exonerate himself got into trouble because his statement was simply not true. It all had happened later, already in the new year. But the witness found a way out of his dilemma: He quickly remarked that for him, ‘late last year’ (the ‘Spath-Jahr’) just meant ‘during the winter’, and now his statements was true again, as the seasons overarched the calendar year.79 The ‘natural’ time had saved his day. Natural time could also be used to gain the moral high ground. A landlord who forced his peasants to do compulsory labour during high holidays ran the risk of being criticised harshly. A subject of the Count of Wittgenstein, for example, remarked that his lord had made the labour ‘harder’ because he expected it to be done ‘at the holy Pentecost’.80

Landbewohnern im Wien des frühen 18. Jahrhunderts’, in Zeit und Geschichte. Kultur- geschichtliche Perspektiven, ed. by Erhard Chvojka (München, 2002), pp. 192–202; Erhard Chvojka, ‘Die Uhr in den Mund nehmen. Neuzeitliche Diskurse zur ‘Rückständigkeit’ bäuerlichen Zeitbewusstseins’, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften, 13 (2002–2004): 89–97. 77 Ralf-Peter Fuchs, ‘Soziales Wissen’, p. 427; e.g. LASp E6 576. 78 BayHStA RKG 4024 Q 39, Art. 4: ‘als mann das Gebeth geläutet’. 79 LASp E6 Nr. 120, 916r: daß er unter dem Spath Jahr den Winter verstehe. 80 LAV NRW W RKG Anhang L 2, VII, 219f.: ‘[am] heilig Pfĳingst Fest.’ Depositions of the Imperial Chamber Court 135

But if it served their interest, entire communities were summoned to testify on Sundays or holidays without the slightest complaint.81 All things considered, the question does not seem to be diffferentiating between artifĳicial or natural time, but rather combining artifĳicial and natural time, since both ‘orders’ were part of the social knowledge of rural society and could be applied in diffferent situations. Another perspective on time is, of course, the question of how the witnesses perceived their own age. Generally, witnesses just gave an approximate age or completely relied on drastic events to measure their lifespan.82 For example, one witness noted that during the Peasants’ War, he was already able to ‘put on his trousers and vest’.83 Another witness coming from a village near Minden in Westphalia stated in 1596 that he was born ‘when the Counts of Hoya were for the fĳirst time expelled and chased away from their lands and people’, referring to a border dispute between the Counts of Hoya and the Bishop of Minden.84 Particularly noteworthy is the fact that there are, statistically speaking, far too many people who claimed to be ‘100 years old’, and this might hint at the fact that, for early modern rural society, a timespan of ‘100 years’ signifĳied that something allegedly had entered custom and therefore possessed great authority. In fact, the role of the ‘100 years’ as a popular expression can also be traced in diffferent contexts, such as questions of ownership, usage rights, dating of events, and was not limited to age.85 The time specifĳications that were used

81 E.g. StAOs Rep 900 Nr. 375, fol. 49r. 82 Ralf-Peter Fuchs, ‘Protokolle von Zeugenverhören als Quellen zur Wahrnehmung von Zeit und Lebensalter in der Frühen Neuzeit’, in Prozessakten als Quelle. Neue Ansätze zur Erforschung der Höchsten Gerichtsbarkeit im Alten Reich, ed. by Anette Baumann, Siegrid Westphal, Stephan Wendehorst, & Stefan Ehrenpreis (Cologne, Weimar & Vienna, 2001), pp. 140–154; Ralf-Peter Fuchs, ‘Zeit und Ereignis im Krieg. Überlegungen zu den Aussagen Steinfurter Zeugen in einer Befragung zum Normaljahr 1624’, in 1569–1648: Zu den Auswirkungen des Achtzigjährigen Krieges auf die östlichen Niederlande und das Westmünsterland, ed. by Timothy Sodmann (Vreden, 2002), pp. 65–76. 83 BayHStA RKG 4146, Q 10: ‘Gedencke ime des Bauren Kriegs gar wol, hab Hosen und Wammes dazumahl schon ausmachen können’. 84 Ralf-Peter Fuchs, ‘Soziales Wissen’, p. 430: ‘[. . .] das erste mall vonn lant undtt leutten vertriebenn und verjagt worden’. 85 Helmut Maurer, ‘Bäuerliches Gedächtnis und Landesherrschaft im 15. Jahrhundert. Zu einer oberschwäbischen ‘Kundschaft’ von 1484’, in Recht und Reich im Zeitalter der Reformation. Festschrift für Horst Rabe, ed. by Christine Roll (Frankfurt am Main, 1996), pp. 179–198, at p. 190 et subsequent pages; Ralf-Peter Fuchs, ‘Soziales Wissen’, p. 430; e.g. StAOs Rep 900 Nr. 249, 268 v. 136 Bähr to establish the usus can also be enlightening for popular time-sense, as I have mentioned above. Likewise, the notions of space and power discernible in the transcripts also hint at the way the ‘common people’ saw the world they were living in. Generally speaking, for early modern rural society, space was not an abstract matter. Parishes, districts and territories were by and large not perceived as monolithic units with clear boundaries, as a bird’s eye view would see them.86 The witnesses often described boundaries as something unclear, something inherently contested that needed to be asserted by ritualised demarcations such as ‘Schnadegänge’ [a walk from one point to another] or ‘Geleitsritte’ [a landlord’s trip through all of his possessions, on horseback, and accompanied by some of his subjects]. Boundaries were only accepted as such if they could be experienced visually as well as physically, and if they could be connected with a specifĳic event that had occurred during the witness’s lifetime.87 Similarly, a ruler was expected to exercise power in a way that could be ‘seen’ or ‘felt’ in order to be accepted as such. A nobleman who cuts down a tree under which the customary village dance is being held lays claim to the village itself, and the event is remembered as such by those who witnessed it.88 A landlord who requires all peasants from the nearby villages to assist him on a hunting trip, who then kills the deer himself and orders it carted through the whole district for everyone to see makes his lordship palpable.89 Likewise, a witness from a village near Augsburg perceives someone as his lord because he had seen that the nobleman had, in court, ordered ‘one to be burned, one to be hanged, one to be drowned, and one to be beheaded’.90 By saying this, the witness referred to one of the most striking ways of exercising power, corporal punishment, and this hints at the way the ‘theatre of terror’ worked on the most basic level, and indeed, as complement, kindness and forgiveness

86 Ralf-Peter Fuchs, ‘Ob Zeuge wisse, was das Burggraftum Nürnberg sei? Raumkenntnisse frühneuzeitlicher Untertanen’, in Beiträge zur Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte des Wissens, ed. by Achim Landwehr (Augsburg, 2002), pp. 93–114. 87 Ralf-Peter Fuchs, ‘Soziales Wissen’, p. 436. 88 Alexander Schunka, ‘Die Visualisierung von Gerechtigkeiten in Zeugenaussagen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts’, Justiz und Gerechtigkeit. Historische Beiträge (16.–19. Jahrhundert), ed. Andrea Griesebner/Martin Scheutz/Herwig Weigl (Innsbruck, 2002), pp. 95–114. 89 Schunka, ‘Visualisierung’. pp. 100–102. 90 BayHStA RKG 3976, 122r: ‘Er wisse, hab gesehen unnd gehört, das man ainen hab ver- prennt, ainen gehenckt, ainen ertrenckt und ainen köpffft [. . .] die hab man all mit solchen besammbten Herrschaft Gericht, furgenommen und berechtet’. Depositions of the Imperial Chamber Court 137 were, if practised in the open, also remembered.91 For early modern rural society, space and dominion were not abstract entities, but rather needed to be experienced physically to be memorized, recounted, and, one might add, to be accepted accordingly. Time and space as two dimensions of ‘social knowledge’ exemplify the rich potential this genre of witness depositions offfer. None of the published literature, so far, explicitly asks which elements of ‘knowledge’ can be ascribed to the peasants themselves, and which are just ascribed to them by notaries, scribes, and other trained professionals, like lawyers. This essay might point to the direction future research on these questions needs to take. The way orality is presented (or suppressed) in the transcripts has to be taken into account more systematically. In fact, this might be key for a better understanding of early modern society: Of the 75,000 records that survive of the Imperial Chamber Court, several thousand (up to 10 per cent, depending on the territory) were trials concerning subjects, and virtually all of them have depositions.92 Or, in other words they record voices of the common people.

Conclusion

In his deposition, Martin Fick invoked the powerful image of a man who had been murdered in the most violent way, without regard for the community’s liberties. Berkach was now at the disposal of foreign troops, and thus the villagers wanted the Imperial Chamber Court to grant them ‘Reichsfreiheit’ (imperial liberty), hoping that the Emperor would offfer them protection. This narrative worked (and, to some extent, still works) exactly because it seemed to reflect what the witness had actually said. It was the supposedly authentic

91 Richard van Dülmen, Theater des Schreckens: Gerichtspraxis und Strafrituale in der frühen Neuzeit (Munich 1985), Alexander Schunka, ‘Verbrechen, Strafen, Obrigkeit. Zeugenaussagen aus dem Nürnberger Landgebiet’, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, 26 (1999): 323–348, at p. 342 and subsequent pages. 92 Sailer, ‘Untertanenprozesse’, p. 16, Filippo Ranieri, Recht und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter der Rezeption. Eine rechts- und sozialgeschichtliche Analyse der Tätigkeit des Reichskam- mergerichts im 16. Jahrhundert (Köln/Weimar/Wien 1985), Manfred Hörner ‘Anmerkungen zur statistischen Erschließung von Reichskammergerichtsprozessen’, Prozessakten als Quelle. Neue Ansätze zur Erforschung der Höchsten Gerichtsbarkeit im Alten Reich, ed. by Anette Baumann (Cologne, Weimar & Vienna, 2001), pp. 70–81, Anette Baumann, Die Gesellschaft der Frühen Neuzeit im Spiegel der Reichskammergerichtsprozesse. Eine sozialgeschichtliche Untersuchung zum 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Cologne, Weimar, & Vienna, 2001). 138 Bähr depiction of what had happened that made the deposition a powerful political device. What Fick and his neighbors said was aimed at the Imperial Chamber Court, where the judges had the power to intervene in the community’s favor. They needed to be convinced, and the transcripts they read were part of the relatively few instruments a village in early modern Germany had to state its case. Communities such as Berkach tried to appear virtuous, while the witnesses they named denounced their foes as violent and corrupt. In this regard, oral communication, as it was staged and recorded by those involved on the local level, was a means to gain the political advantage in court. It was a matter of popular agency. The decision whether to exclude or to include parts of ‘the continuous flow of talk’ did not, as the Fürfeld case reveals, happen arbitrarily. It was governed by considerations that were at once judicial and political. The transcripts needed to be precise and authentic at the same time, and this was an important task for the commissioners, notaries and scribes. But, as they were often far from independent and relied on the village community in many ways, not all power rested with them. The villages and their witnesses were important protagonists in their own right. They could, at times, exercise signifĳicant influence, and the power of the spoken word was their most valuable tool. CHAPTER 4 Tracking Conversation in the Italian Courts

Thomas V. Cohen

My topic here is conversation, my argument, deep historicity. Early modern conversation reflected the conditions of its very oral world. Now, like most other chapters here, this essay took fĳirst form as a paper for a London conference on early modern European orality.1 There, like the other scholars, I read aloud a text, refracting my writing into a performance partly oral, glossing my text via pace, intonation, gesture, facial expression, eye-play and larger movements of the body to enrich its message. Why do we academics, in halls or on screen, speak our texts this way? Why oralize to publics and not just flash pages? This academic rite has drawbacks; my own ear is far slower than my eye; it loses the thread of speeding argument and, as Walter Ong has noted, speech’s past is no hardier than slippery memory.2 Unlike labile speech, text is stable, deeply memorious. But script is narrow, its expression straitened; meanwhile, reading aloud, by adding interpretation, broadens bandwidth, addressing ears as well as eyes: oral performance, aural reception, an old device. In early modern Europe, as we read below, even touch enriched messages. Although we academics read aloud, our performance remains writerly. We scholars stay short-hitched to our essays, our diction staid, our gestures sub- dued. Thus, at fĳirst glance, the sharp contrast between this anthology’s subject, the oral world, with all its flair and fluidity, and our medium here, ink on paper (or words on screen), notorious for fĳixity, seems ironic. Yet who ever expects historians of cuisine to cook, or those of crime to ambush colleagues in the dark or lace their stew with arsenic or powdered diamond? So sober academic prose, silent or read aloud, is reasonably suitable. I remember though a poi- gnant lesson, sheerest magic, when a willowy musicologist without warning broke into a Venetian love-song and then, at the last tremulous, yearning note, slouched back to prose. The lesson there is the usual double one – distance,

1 Like the other authors here, I write in sadness, as Alex Cowan, who invited and inspired this essay, will never read it. I began writing already warned of his dire illness, hoping that he would enjoy it, but death took him far too quickly, so I polished it as tribute, hoping to evoke Alex’s unquenchable enthusiasm for talk’s rich history. 2 On how things not written down disappear at once when said, Walter J. Ong, Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London & New York, 1982, repr. 1996), pp. 31–36.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004291829_006 140 Cohen and closeness, intertwined. Closeness is the more facile claim. What then of distance? Clearly, despite the enchanting melody, intimacy is harder than fĳirst appears. The real Renaissance performances are lost – their gestures, style, diction, feeling, and shades of meaning, wrapped in the mental worlds of the original singer and her public, in their spaces, light, and world of sound and meaning. What survives intact is not the song, but text, perforce imperfect but still powerful. So we historians of orality, like those of music, pursue a tantalizing quest. Notoriously, down to 1900 or so, all clues to a vast world of sound are silent, all are marks on paper or other media. The task for us is to make such writings sing or speak, and breathe and move. Pre-modern Europe was far more oral than script-run. Most memory – individual, collective, and even institutional – was oral.3 Communication likewise. That fact afffected both form and content, and shaped channels and modes of communication: how one said things, to whom, when, where, and before whom all were warped by the scarcity of writing and paucity of competent writers and readers. So, after a wide-based writing culture gradually emerged, in, for instance, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in England, writing coexisted for centuries with illiteracy and semi-literacy that condi- tioned writers’ strategies and tactics.4 Meanwhile, in myriad subtle ways the gradual expansion of script’s ambit remodelled the mental world of those who could not read. This article takes up one particular oral practice: conversation. What distinguishes conversation from other oral activities is its busy reciprocity: for success and efffĳiciency, conversation needs two or more persons engaged; without collaboration, it fails. The list of oral practices and performances in no sense conversation is imposing: sermons, harangues and other public speeches; proclamations; prayers; magicians’ incantations; grief’s keenings and laments;

3 Adam Fox, ‘Remembering the Past in Early Modern England: Oral and Written Tradition’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, 9 (1999): 233–256, for oral-auricular historical memory even among the literate; Ethan Shagan, ‘Print, Orality and Communication in the Maid of Kent Afffair’,Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 52 (1) (January 2001): 21–33, for the power of word of mouth and the mix with print for the rapid spread of a holy reputation (see p. 30 for the role of rumour, and pp. 31–32 for networks); Judith Bryce, ‘The Oral World of the Early Accademia Fiorentina’, Renaissance Studies, 9 (1) (1995): 77–103, for a stress on oral elements and social promiscuity even in high Italian culture. 4 M.T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, England 1066–1307 (Oxford, 1979; second edition, 1993), for the rapid rise in the use of documents and the incipient spread of a reading, writing public. For an argument for more gradual transformation, and complementarity, see Patrick Geary, ‘Land, Language, and Memory in Europe 700–1100’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, 9 (1999): 169–184, especially p. 173. Tracking Conversation in the Italian Courts 141 pain’s moaning; sex’s groans and babbling and other ecstatic racket; great shouts of jubilation, rage, or derision; market cries; hallooing after thieves; calls to summon or herd domestic stock; hunting yells; hails to passing ships or mule trains; poems, songs, riddles; stories, children’s chants in play – none of these were conversations. And other speech acts inhabited conversation’s penumbra, vituperation, for instance. A hurled insult might provoke or garnish a testy conversation, or break it rudely offf. Milder ribbing, on the other hand, along with cajolery and afffectionate banter, fĳit in readily. Meanwhile, conversation itself shaded offf; sundry collaborations hovered on its edges. Take confession to a priest, for instance. It did collaborate, but was strained by the confessant’s obligation and by clerical authority of offfĳice. Or consider the exchange between magistrate with suspect, or between a tortured prisoner and agony’s ministrants. Collaboration notwithstanding, were such interrogations conversation, or do we reserve the term for exchanges more balanced and more willing? This essay takes up two subjects, fĳirst conversation as reported, by vernacular Italian voices, and, second, conversation as actually conducted. These topics interweave; reported conversation teaches richer lessons, about both reporting and conversation, when we also ken the thing itself. My inquiry here borrows from anthropology and (unschooled) linguistics. I argue that both the descriptions and the thing itself difffered in deep, subtle ways in Renaissance Italy from the same phenomena in our world today. That earlier world’s pervasive orality produced the diffferences.

The Nature of the Sources

What allows me at all a history of Italian conversation are the judicial records of criminal courts in Rome. That city’s richest, best preserved issued from the tribunal of the Governor, who, though usually a prelate, served not the church but the pope’s lay state, and his court, despite its several rivals, had a largely uncontested primacy in criminal matters involving laity, in Rome itself and its immediate hinterland. As tribunal of last instance, the court also held sway over the whole state, from Bologna and Ancona down to Gaeta, where the Neapolitan border met the Tyrrhenian Sea. For richness, scope and organization, no other surviving judicial records from Rome rival the Governor’s. Some other Italian cities, towns, and rural courts left records similar in form and content, but, so far as I can tell, neither Naples, Florence, Venice, nor Milan comes close in bulk or richness. Bologna has a vast store, as rich Rome’s, though less easily navigated. 142 Cohen

The Governor’s court, like those elsewhere using revived Roman law – in Portugal, Spain and Italy especially – compiled rich documents, processi, in preparation for the formal act of judgment. Inquisition tribunals used this same model. The processus was no trial in the Anglo-Saxon mode, with open sessions and cross-questioning; rather, to compile a dossier for prosecution, defence, and magistrates, the court applied interrogation, in camera, before a scribe, who was to record verbatim whatever a witness or suspect said, but just summarized the court’s own words (as they were not evidence) in efffĳicient Latin. Historians debate whether the scribal transcript was meticulous or slip- shod. Certainly, there are signs of distortion. Witnesses might complain of mis- transcription, a clue that, whatever the protest’s own merits, such slips could happen. And the scribal record seems smoother than real speech; the false starts and back-trackings of normal talk, and the non-verbal ploys, cousins of our English ‘uh-oh!’, ‘um’, and ‘er’, seldom surface. And the richly varied dialects of Italy emerge homogenized, far closer to the semi-Tuscan peninsular koine than many speakers must have sounded. So these records are hardly modern ‘tape recordings’ of past voices. Still, textual evidence argues for much fĳidelity to the spoken word. For one thing, speakers clearly paused to let the writing catch up. We know this from lapses, where a witness failed to wait: ‘as these things were being written down’, he added, wrote harried notaries. Slower testimony made for fewer hasty losses and, probably, a more faithful record. Moreover, the transcriptions often retain the flavour of speech, abounding in expressions typical of everyday talk. And individual speakers do have voice; they vary in diction and vocabulary, as if scribes caught expressive habits.5 All these traits make the papers of the Governor’s court and its judicial ilk rich, subtle sources for how language worked. First, how did Italians describe their world, and appraise, explain, and narrate its events? Second, outside the courtrooms, how did they speak? Court papers, by evoking the speaking, acting world, invite an historical anthropology of actions, structures, beliefs, and values, and also allow an ethnographic linguistics, where the shape, tonality, esthetics, and strategy of expression all lodge in Italy’s culture and political economy. I have long used Roman judicial papers to such ends, but never before pondered conversation. The conversation by far most salient in a processo is the fraught colloquy between the court and its the witnesses and suspects, but, ironically, here our seeing-glass is dark. This anxious dialogue was barely conversational; the

5 For a much fuller discussion of these issues, see Elizabeth S. Cohen, ‘She Said, He Said: Situated Oralities in Judicial Records from Early Modern Rome’, Journal of Early Modern History, 14 (4–5) (2012): 403–430. Tracking Conversation in the Italian Courts 143 collaboration was forced and often recalcitrant. Moreover, whatever the dynamic and the tone, processi are for historians of talk imperfect tools, thanks to the record’s linguistic asymmetry. We read close, often vivid transcripts of witnesses’ words, but the court itself skulks behind the veil of Latin summary. So we harvest clear responses to blurred stimuli. So, for early modern conversation, we had best look elsewhere.

Conversations Reported: A Nested Account

One line of inquiry, then, is to examine accounts of conversations held outside court. In trials, references to talk were as common as those to reading rare. Even for skilled readers, after all, speech remained the chief informant for matters out of sight, touch, or earshot; news seldom found its way to paper. Thus, for everybody, listening well, remembering carefully, and recounting tellingly were critical to politics, business, work, and social life. The same, note, was true of seeing well, whence the fulsome complexity of descriptions of things seen, even just in passing, in, for instance, a sudden nocturnal brawl. Witness had an eye fĳine indeed for clothing, bodies, and faces. An oral world had an art of memory, for things seen, heard, handled, felt, smelt or tasted. Visual memory lacked our modern spatial habits; it eschewed abstract metrics, but, rather, organized space in accord with human act and efffort: stone-throws, cross-bow shots, days spent traveling or at the plow. The same was true of time, scanned in lengths of common prayers. In an oral culture, memory mapped the world of space, time, acts, and information by storing, stressing, and retrieving mnemonic monuments to what went on just as news arrived. Thus reported conversations, garnished with attendant circumstances, both served memory and vouched for credibility. Thus, like Boccaccio or Chaucer, an early modern speaker with an urgent story would often render not just the tale, but, as well, its frame. Here, from a Roman processo of 1558, is a handsome piece of mnemonic framing. The speaker, Capitano Michelangelo, is a recent commander at Corte Savelli prison.6 Judge Flaminio Rufffo, lately with the Governor’s court, is suspected of extorting sex from young female prisoners jailed some six months prior as crucial witnesses against Alessandro Pallantieri, a prepotent chief

6 Corte Savelli prison was one of two in Rome much used in the sixteenth century for ordinary prisoners; the elite were lodged in the great fort, Castel Sant’Angelo. 144 Cohen prosecutor (Fiscale), now deposed, tried, and imprisoned.7 Rufffo too is now on trial. When deposing here, Michelangelo has earlier been grilled by the Governor and the current Fiscale. Though he joined court stafff after Rufffo left, Capitano Michelangelo has, via conversation, picked up hearsay the court pursues, as he deposes to its notary.8

He [Michelangelo] answered: [the Governor and the Fiscale] talked to me about whether I knew anything – that Messer Flaminio Rufffo, who was a judge of the Governor, had had any sexual dealings with any woman of the last Fiscale, when they were in jail. And I told him that I knew nothing, for I was not then in Corte Savelli.9 And then the Lord Governor asked me if I knew, and if I had been told by anybody.

So Capitano Michelangelo now recounts, to the Governor’s notary, his earlier conversation with the Governor and Fiscale. That earlier exchange, he says, had relayed a nested series of conversations, fĳirst another of his own, and then those of others, fĳinally leading back to the discovery of scandalous deeds important to Michelangelo’s masters.

I said that, at the time when I had arrived at the house of the Cardinal of Spoleto, or of the pope, Capitano Horatio came, on some October date.10 He told me that he had left the company of Capitano Antonio, who was then at Corte Savelli.

7 Roman courts did not hesitate to imprison important witnesses. Those who had local assets were more likely put under bond; it was those who lacked resources or local networks whom courts would jail, to assure their availabilty. Archivio di Stato di Rome, Governatore, Tribunale Criminale (henceforth GTC), Processi (16c secolo), busta 38, 36r: on February 7, 1558, Pallantieri’s trial is still continuing. It may still be running in late March. 8 GTC, busta 38, case 3 (= fols 35r–42v), 22–24 March, 1558. The testimony recorded below alludes to parts of the investigation that do not appear in this short record here. The original trial of Alessandro Pallantieri fĳills busta 36 (1558–1558). For an extended discussion of the case, and of the career of the fĳiscale accused, see Thomas V. Cohen,Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, IL, 2004), pp. 125–170. 9 Michelangelo deposes to a notary assigned by the Governor, on Thursday, 24 March, 1558, fols 41v–42v. 10 Captain Horatio has already testifĳied, two days earlier. Busta 36 (1558), fols 37r–38v. Tracking Conversation in the Italian Courts 145

Here, Capitano Michelangelo sets the location and approximate date for that earlier conversation, and, citing Horatio, places him no longer in the jail’s employ.

And he told me: ‘Michelangelo, one could give a cudgeling to Messer Flaminio, and ruin him’. And I said to him, ‘For what reasons?’ And he said to me: ‘The fellow has screwed [chiavata] one of those women who were in jail on account of the Fiscale [i.e., the disgraced Pallantieri].’ And I answered him: ‘Yes! What did he [Horatio] know about it?’ [Here, direct discourse slides to indirect, as often happens in these transcripts.]

He told me that his youngster [putto, a family servant] had found him [the judge] in bed together.

And, when I asked him how the boy had seen it, he told me that Camilla [Horatio’s mistress] had sent that boy upstairs for a striped cloth, and that when he was about to enter the visit-room, he saw the said judge in an embrace, in bed, with that women, and that the boy came back.

Here, note the long chain of relations: interlocutor Horatio, in Michelangelo’s prolix account, reports, tersely, a conversation further back, with his mistress Camilla, wherein she relates her own exchange with the family’s servant. And, in that most distant communication, the young servant reports something startling, yet further back, not heard but seen: a judge in carnal embrace atop a female prisoner.

And, when Camilla asked him for the piece of cloth, why he had not brought it, he told this. And this is how I know it, and not by any other route.

The court then asks Michelangelo, had he told anybody. He says he told Capitano Horatio that he did not believe the story and wanted to cause no trouble.

One day in Corte Savelli, when I was sick in bed, after I had returned there – it was the month of November – [I spoke] to Signor Alvaro, who came to fĳind me there, and he talked to me in the ear [i.e. not to be 146 Cohen

overheard]. And he asked me if I knew this thing said here above about Messer Flaminio, and what it was all about. I answered him that I had not been there and that I did not know anything. He answered me: ‘This lad of Horatio’s, who is staying with you, knows the whole of it. I told him: ‘Talk to the boy!’

So now, to introduce another report from the youngster, Michelangelo recounts a second conversation, with another offfĳicial, and this time gives the circumstance: his sickness, their cautious private, solitary exchange.

And he spoke to him, on the side, And Messer Alvaro then told me that it was true, that the boy told it handsomely [gagliardamente].11

11 38.3, fols 41v–42r: (for easier reading, I add some modern punctuation and expand abbreviations). Rdit: [The Governor and Fiscale] me ragionorno si io sapevo cosa nessuna che mr flaminio Rufffo quale era iudice del gubernatore si haveva havuto ad fare con nissuna donna del fĳiscale passato in corte Savelli q.n furono pregione. Et gli disse che io non sapevo niente perche io non ero alhora in corte Savella. Me disse poi il Signor gubernatore se io lo sapevo et me era stato ditto da nessuno. Io disse che mentre che io ero arrivato in casa del Cardinale di Spoleti o del papa venne Capitano Horatio non so ad quanto doctobre. Et me disse che si era partito della compagnia del Capitano Iovanni antonio alhora di corte savella. Et me disse, ‘Michelangelo se potria dare una bastonata ad mr flaminio et ruinarlo’. Et dicendoli io, ‘Per che cose?’ Et me disse, ‘Questui ha chiavata una di quelle donne che erano pregione per conto del fĳiscale’. Et replicandoli io, ‘Si che ne sapeva?’ Me disse che cel haveva trovati il putto suo in lecto insieme. Et domandandoli io come lhaveva visto il putto, Me disse che Camilla femina di Horatio haveva mandato quel putto di sopra per un panno listato et che quando volse intrare dentro nella stantia della visita viddi detto Iudice abbracciato in lecto con quellei et che il putto torno areto, et domandandoli Camilla del panno, perche non lhaveva portato, li disse questo. Et per questa via io lo so et non per altra via. lo disse un di in corte savella essendo io amalato in lecto doppo che io ce ero rintrato che fu del mese del 9.bre ad Signor Alvaro quale me venne ad trovare illi et me parlo a lorecchia. Tracking Conversation in the Italian Courts 147

So Michelangelo ends the tale, with the results of his own third conversation on the subject. To summarize: in Capitano Michelangelo’s deposition, we have an account of a conversation with the governor, about a conversation with Horatio, about a conversation between Horatio’s mistress and their servant, about a sexual misdeed upstairs in prison. Michelangelo followed up with a well framed account of a second conversation, in sick-bed, with Alvaro, a second offfĳicial, and then, in brief, a mention of Alvaro’s eventual report of his own second exchange with the young servant. All this on two pages of processo. So, as story, the jailhouse bed-misdeed is deeply embedded. It is thus deep deep hearsay, but remote news, under lax evidentiary rules, often foddered early modern prosecutions. And the chain of hearsay, all the way down from the boy at the doorway to the prison chamber, passes via conversations, noted as such.12 The more recent conversations come well furnished, with a clear setting and a smattering of dialogue, as direct quotation, indirect discourse, or mixed-mode. Only these outer frames, the conversations where Michelangelo himself was there, have that lively tone and content. The further back the captain ranges, the simpler and flatter his report. But, all along the line, as befĳits an oral world careful to map its information networks, Capitano Michelangelo notes who spoke to whom. Capitano Michelangelo’s careful rendition probably owed a debt to his police- man’s skills in observing events and reporting to superiors. Sixteenth-century constabulary testimony sports narrative clarity and attention to circumstantial

Et me domando se io sapevo questa materia dicta di sopra di messer flaminio et como stava. Li respose che io non ce ero et che io non sapevo niente. Me respose, ‘Questo putto di horatio che sta con voi sa il tutto’. Et io li disse, ‘Parlate al putto!’ Esso lui li parlo da banda. Et disse messer Alvaro poi a me che era vero, che il putto lo raccontava gagliardamente. 12 Capitano Horatio himself tells the court more about Capitano Michelangelo, that, for instance, he fĳirst arrived at Corte Savelli on 29 October, that judge Rufffo wanted to buy an emerald from him, that Michelangelo refused to sell, and that Rufffo then, according to Michelangelo, drove him from his position: ‘et a me et a piu persone et a chi monstrava quel smiraldo diceva che era stata la ruina sua perche non lhaveva voluto donare ad mr flaminio dicendo che si li havese voluto donare non saria stato cacciato di corte savella et che haveva speranza che un di lo videria prigione lui anchora’ [And to me and to many persons, and to whomever he showed that emerald, he said that it had been his ruin, because he had not wanted to donate it to Messer Flaminio, saying that if he had been willing to give it he would not have been chased from Corte Savelli, and that he wished that one day he would see him in jail too], fol. 38r. 148 Cohen detail. Early police were thuggish, but not without offfĳicious skills. Meanwhile, reasons of state fed the governor’s interest in Judge Rufffo’s cruel, sordid conduct with female prisoners, for the three molested sisters, back in October of 1557, were in jail as central witnesses to a major case. When Fiscale Pallantieri fell, in September, 1557, what actually brought him down was not his graft, fĳishy wealth, or sordid sexual bullying of teen-aged sisters across the street, but the Cardinal Nephew’s raw displeasure. His own trial, then, was a political afffair, a judicial fĳig leaf for a scheme to dump an overweening offfĳicial. But, for that trial’s success, the prosecution desired telling witnesses to Pallantieri’s abuse of women. The credibility of the three sisters, by the logic of early modern honour, was hostage to their chastity. Any sexual dealings in jail, then, could undercut the prosecution’s case against the fallen Fiscale. Having already published this story, I rued my failure to fĳind this trial sooner, and wondered, was louche judge Rufffo, spilling sperm on at least two of three, just re-enacting Pallatieri’s serial exploitations of these unlucky sisters, or was he a secret ally of the disgraced prosecutor? Certainly, Pallantieri’s son, snifffĳing the Rufffo case, had swooped in to gather hints of female lapses, to rescue his father. Police testimony about courthouse gossip makes clear that everybody around the jail knew very well who was who and understood these forensic connections. So Capitano Michelangelo had good reason to learn and tell this story carefully, and to reach far back along his train of nested conversations. When Capitano Horatio, Michelangelo’s informant, testifĳies as to what the boy has said, the chain of tellings is shorter: he heard straight from the lad. But, his account, like Michelangelo’s, renders conversation about conversation:

Three or four days ago, when I had come home, my women told me that two gentlemen had been there, that is the father of that girl and another [Pallantieri’s son], to ask for Cincione [the boy], and that they had spoken together.13 So I called my boy and asked – about what they had interrogated him. And he told me that they had asked him if he had seen Messer

13 ‘Tre o quattro di fa, essendo io tornato a casa le mie donne me dissero che ce erano stati illi dui gentilhomini cioe il padre di quella putta et un altro a domandare Cincione et che li havevano parlato. Cossi io chiamai mio putto et li domandai di che cose lhaveva inter- rogato, et lui me disse che li havevano domandato se lui haveva visto mr flaminio che stava qui con monsignore gubernatore per iudice criminale chiavare quelle donne che stavano prigione in corte Savella per conto del pallantiero e io li domandai che cosa ne sapeva lui. me disse che li haveva d.cto la verita et che haveva trovato mr flaminio sopra una di quelle donne con le calze calate in quella sala disopra dove se fa la visita nel lecto et che una delle altre stava fuora in unaltra stantia, et che detto mr flaminio era adosso ad una di quelle donne in su il lecto’, fol. 37v. Tracking Conversation in the Italian Courts 149

Flaminio, who was here with Monsignore Governor as a criminal judge, screwing those women, who were in jail in Corte Savelli on account of Pallantieri. And I asked him what he knew. He said that he had told the truth and that he had found Messer Flaminio on top of one of those women, with his hose down, in that room on the upper floor where they have the visits, in the bed, and that one of the other women was outside, in another room, and that the said Messer Flaminio was up close against one of those women atop the bed.

We could follow the case further: more from the boy about his sighting of the judge, the judge’s gift of a gold necklace to Livia, whom he bedded, Livia’s sister’s alleged reproaches to Livia for taking the gift, the judge’s assistance to a courtesan in jail, and his later dinners and grateful sexual treats at her house, and his promise to her, still unfulfĳilled, of fĳine textiles. The case emits bright flashes and then flickers out, but our own matter lies elsewhere, not with sexual bargains with law-men, extorted or willing, but with language.14 We should move to other matters. But before departing, though, glance for a moment at how Livia, who denies intercourse, describes one encounter with judge Flaminio:

One day among the others, he had unlaced his hose and he showed that which he had for doing that which gave him pleasure, and he placed himself there, next to me, standing, but I was sitting next to Lucretia my sister, on a mattress next to the window on the right hand side when you go in but that day he did not do anything to me except that he took me by the arm and made me touch that thing he had by force and I could not protect myself from it, so he unlaced himself and then he took me and kissed me.15

14 Rome, capital of Latin Christendom, was still a surprisingly small city, and paths kept crossing. The courtesan in question, the vituperative Camilla the Skinny, fĳigures often in Thomas V. Cohen and Elizabeth S. Cohen, Words and Deeds in Renaissance Rome (Toronto, 1993), pp. 45–103, especially pp. 49–52, 63–64, 85–94, 98–101. 15 ‘Un di fra le altre se haveva dislacciato le calze et monstrava cio che lui haveva per fare cio che li piaceva se messe illi accanto a me ritto pero et io stava assisa accantoa lucreti a mia sorella sopra un materazzo accanto alla fĳinestra a mano dritta nel intrar dentro ma quel di non mi fece niente sinon che me prese per il braccio et me fece toccare cio che haveva per forza che io non me ne poteva guardare cossi se slaccio le calze et poi me prese et bascio’, fol. 39r. 150 Cohen

Livia, young but married, had sexual knowledge. But, when dealing with the court, both she and her sisters had ample reason to downplay their sexuality. Modesty, honour, self-respect, revulsion, and, fĳinally, success of the state’s case against the fallen prosecutor, a man still dangerous, all required the women to stake what claims they could to chastity of body, mind, spirit and speech.16 Livia’s expressions here, circumlocutions for the judge’s penis, resemble nothing I have ever seen on Roman papers. The usual formal term is membro and a rough word, common in the records, is cazzo, as ubiquitous in 1558 as today. Livia’s strained circumlocution here is one proof among many of the sedulous exactitude of Roman legal scribes.

Conversations Reported: Embodied Language

It is again 1558. Since Christmas time, 1555, the papal state has garrisoned the village of Rocca Sinibalda, in the eastern Sabine mountains, with its great castle looming above a riverine gorge. The place was near the district town, Rieti, and, just across a ridge, lay the northward reach of the Kingdom of Naples. Through three years of anxious peace, defeat in war with Spain, and hungry, confused new peace, Paul IV’s regime has stripped the usual baron, Giuliano Cesarini, of enjoyment of this well-armed fĳief. Cesarini, by dynastic marriages, was tied to noble friends of Spain, the Colonna and the Sforza. To neutralize this potential foe, ally of its enemies, the papacy had tried him for misgover- nance, and, until the defeat by Spain, imprisoned him in Rome. In Cesarini’s absence, restive villagers had rebelled against his heavy-handed rule. Though the rebellion played for papal lordship, some villagers retained nostalgia for earlier noble masters, the Mareri, ousted in the late 1520s by the Cesarini. The Mareri had their own villages and retained alliances with the Savelli, their baronial kinsmen, who ruled Sabine towns near Rocca Sinibalda. The restless Mareri heir, Giacobo, never stopped yearning for his lost possessions.17 All this helps explain the next conversation we examine here.

16 Pallantieri, with the next pope, not only enjoyed a pardon but returned to his old job as fĳiscale, where he served the state’s interests well. He was a key fĳigure in the campaign of Pius IV to destroy the previous cardinal nephew, driving him to the scafffold. Pallantieri then rose to the post of Governor of Rome. A vengeful man, he could easily have harmed the three young sisters who fĳigured in his trial. Did he do so? We do not know. 17 For a fuller account of village political events, see: Thomas V. Cohen, ‘Communal Thought, Communal Words, and Communal Rites in a Sixteenth-century Village Rebellion’, in Sociability and its Discontents: Civil Society, Social Capital, and their Alternatives in Late Tracking Conversation in the Italian Courts 151

In the spring of 1557, thanks to a shift in Roman winds, a judge had descended on Rocca Sinibalda to try assorted miscreants, among them the chief rebels, jailing them in the castle, then hauling many to Rome. Among the rebellion’s leaders was rough and ready Nuntio di Polisena, given to banditry and mayhem. The ring-leaders were sentenced to the galleys, but Nuntio escaped, fĳind- ing his way back to the mountains and into the conversation reported here. Now, in autumn 1558, Giuliano Cesarini seems about to get back his village, and the small papal garrison expects to surrender the castle. Just then a soldier profffers his commander a confession that lands him in prison, fĳirst in the castle, and then in Rome where soon he has to answer to the Governor himself. Soldier Giovanni Battista di Bartolomeo’s deposition difffers sharply from any other I have read; never have I found another rendered conversation so long and vivid.18 But, like any account, it transforms what it describes. Its poetics and narrative strategy are fascinating; translation obscures the workings, so, section by section, I present the Italian fĳirst, with the English just after.19 Take Giovanni Battista’s account as a profoundly oral rendition of a profoundly oral exchange between two men locked in intense negotiation, with high stakes and abundant dangers. We have here not just a conversation, then, but what Erving Gofffman calls an “encounter”, a collaboration obeying tacit rules as much socio-political as linguistic. It has three participants, one who makes a bid, another who slowly spurns it, and, on the margin, the bidder’s sponsor. The rules of engagement are unstable and only weakly consensual, so that, to steer the delicate exchange, the protagonists struggle for footing.20 In what follows, I modernize punctuation, plump out abbreviations, and smoothe some spelling. I also bold-face expressions that, by dint of repetition,

Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by Nicholas Epstein & Nicholas Terpstra, eds. (Leiden, 2009), pp. 23–50; Thomas V. Cohen, ‘Social Memory as Therapy and as Village Politics’, Social History/Histoire Sociale, 35 (1997): 291–309. 18 GTP, Busta 38, case 6, fols 75r–82r is the fĳirst part of Giovanni Battista’s deposition: eight folios or sixteen pages, and more than 3000 words, before the fĳirst introjection by the court. The whole case goes to fol. 97v. 19 The soldier’s long account, though it contains a dialogue, is itself a narrative. For discussion of the nature of some deposition as narrative (as versus dialogue with the court), and for narratological considerations (master-narratives, counter-narratives, tasks, parts, strategies) available for the analysis of (modern) forensic deposition, see Malcolm Coulthard & Alison Johnson, An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics: Language in Evidence (Abingdon and New York, 2007), pp. 81–86, 97–101. 20 Erving Gofffman, ‘The Neglected Situation’,American Anthropologist, special publication, 66 (2), (1964): 133–136. Gofffman argues usefully, to linguists, for very careful attention to social situations and to the interactions that they structure. 152 Cohen carry the narrative forward, stitching it tightly. Their resonance renders a cadence that, I suspect, was deeply oral. The numbers in brackets track the repetitions. Soldier Giovanni Battista di Bartolomeo, under arrest, in court before the Governor himself, begins as follows:

Ce andava [to Poggio Maiano, a Savelli town] mo uno mo l’altro delli quali uno chiamato Cola Anthonio Caroso retornato alla Rocca me disse da parte di Nunzio[1],

[‘]Nuntio [2] te se racomanda.[’]

Stando esso alla porta [1] della terra et io su le muraglie [1].

Et io dissi, [‘]Gramarci a te et a lui[’]. [1]

subdens: A questo Nuntio [3] io non havia mai parlato ne havea altra cognoscenza di lui se non quando che li pregioni di Rocca Sinibalda forno presi et messi in rocca tra quali vi era detto Nunzio [4] furno messi una parte nelle Casemate et l’altra nelle stantie

et nuntio [5] et un altro nel pozo [1]

il qual nuntio [6] mentre stava nel pozo [2] si doleva e lamentava [1]

et andando io li per veder il pozo [3] sentendolo lamentar [2]

gli dissi che non dubitasse che se non havia fallito non faria [1] la penitentia.21 …

There went [to Poggio Maiano, a Savelli town], fĳirst one, then another, one of whom, called Colantonio Caroso, once back at the Rocca, said to me on behalf of Nuntio [1], ‘Nuntio [2] commends himself to you’.

He was standing at the village gate [1] and I was up on the fortifĳication wall. [1]

21 Fols 75v–76r. Tracking Conversation in the Italian Courts 153

And I said, ‘Blessings on you and on him’. [1] [these greetings and blessings use informal te pronouns] The witness added: To this Nuntio [3] I have never spoken, nor have I had other acquaintance with him, except when the prisoners of Rocca Sinibalda were arrested and put in the castle, among whom there was the said Nuntio [4], and some of them were put in the casemate and others were put in the rooms.

And Nuntio and another in the well. [1]

That Nuntio [6], when he was in the well [2], grieved and lamented [1],

and I, going there to see the well [3], hearing him lament [2], told him not to worry, for, if he had not done wrong he would not do the penance. [1]

Note, in the Italian, and in the English translation, this passage’s quasi-hypnotic density of repetition. Nuntio’s name, in brief compass, appears six times; he is one Leitmotif. ‘The well’ repeats, as does ‘lament’, and many other passages, also flagged here in bold, will recur shortly. Note too the density of quotation, largely in direct discourse. And observe the soldier’s care to set the scene for speech, as did Captain Michelangelo, in the example above, and to place in a real space himself and Colantonio, in their exchange of exploratory messages. As for the portent of these greetings and blessings, and those that follow, read on and watch how they play out.

Et uscendo io una volta di Rocca incontrai la madre de detto Nuntio, [7]

la quale mi domando di detto Nuntio [8] – come stava et che se ne intendeva di pregione e che ne saria. [1]

Io gli dissi che non ne sapevo niente ma chi non havia fallito non saria [2] castigato.

E me disse ancora detta madre [‘]se li bisogna niente a mio fĳigliolo io te lo racomando [2]’. Non posso andar la su. …

And, going out one time from the Rocca, I met the mother of the said Nuntio. [7] 154 Cohen

She asked me about the said Nuntio [8] – how he was doing, and what they heard from the jail, and what would become of him. [1]

I told her that I did not know a thing, but that, if he had not done wrong he would not be punished. [2]

And the mother also told me, ‘If my son needs anything, I commend him to you. [2] I cannot go up there’.

Note the length and complexity of these many repetitions, all weaving a social relationship between the narrator and Nuntio, mainly via intermediaries. The whole narrative rolls forward very slowly, like a musical composition, replay- ing and resituating the same phrases to diffferent efffects: the soldier comforts the prisoner, and then the prisoner’s mother, with the same stock sentiment. Meanwhile, the theme of commendation continues – always from Nuntio, via others – fĳirst Colantonio, then the mother, and fĳinally, next, the villager, Guidone, who will escort, stitch, and gloss the soldier’s entire story.

Et persequend. seriem facti dixit:

Guidone [1] ancora tornando del poggio maiano me disse:

[‘]Nuntio [9] te se racomanda.[’] [3]

al qual dissi [‘]gramarci a te e a lui[’] [2]

Et unaltra volta detto Guidone [2] havendomi piu volte per prima fatto dette racommandatione venendo lui su verso la porta [2] a portar non so che ad un soldato detto la Becca [?] et stando io su la muraglia [2] esso Guidone [3]

me disse [‘]un tuo amico [1] te se racomanda[’] [4]

Io li respose, [‘]che amico[?] [2] che amico [3] e questo[?] dimello adesso![’]

esso usci un poco dalla stradetta et si acosto alla muraglia [3] e disse[:] [‘] e Nuntio[’] [10]

e mi sogionse [‘]se tu potessi dimani uscir fora havera bisogno di parlarti[’] Tracking Conversation in the Italian Courts 155

io gli risposi che domandarei licentia [1] al capitan.o e vedrei se me lassi uscire[.] …

And, continuing his narrative, he said:

Guidone [1], also returning from Poggio Maiano, told me:

‘Nuntio [9] commends himself to you. [3] And I answered him: ‘Blessings to you and to him’. [2] Another time, the said Guidone [2], having fĳirst given me the saidrecom- mendations, when he was coming up towards the gate [2] to bring I know-not-what to a soldier called ‘La Becca’ [?] and I was standing on the walls [2], and this Guidone [3] told me: ‘A friend [1] of yours commends himself to you.’ I answered him, ‘What friend [2]? What friend [3] is this? Tell me now!’ He stepped a bit from the little street and went close to the walls [3] and said, ‘It’s Nuntio! [10]’ And he added: ‘If you could come out tomorrow, he will be needing to speak to you’. I answered him that tomorrow I could ask permission [1] of the captain and see if he would let me come out.

It is hard to say if soldier Giovanni Battista is a gifted storyteller, or just an anxious witness striving to set his story right. The Governor is no congenial listener, but a powerful offfĳicial who inflicts both interrogatory torture and harsh punishments. And Giovanni Battista is in deep trouble. Whatever his motives, he wants, via vivid telling, to keep his interlocutors attentive to his story. He goes on:

et cosi il di seguente che fu circa lultimo del mese d’agosto passato proximo io domandai licentia [2] al Capitano Macone che fu un sabbato subito chio hebbi pranzato qual me diede et usci di rocca solo et andai li alla porta [3] dove stava quel guidone [4] che faceva il sarto

et li disse [‘]be a che siamo[?][’] 156 Cohen

et lui disse [‘]orsu gimo[’] et se accompagno con me et andamo insieme la verso la posticiola circa un miglia lontano et andamo su un poggietto in un aia nella qual questo anno non s’e tritato et ce larivarno Nuntio [8] solo armato con un scopo a rota e spada et guidone [4] non mi disse mai niente per la strada anzi domandando io dove andavamo me disse [‘]qui apresso[’].22 …

And so the next day, that was around the last of the month of August, most recently past, I asked permission [2] of Capitano Maccone. It was a Saturday, right after I took the midday meal which he gave me. And I left the Rocca and I went there to the gate [3], where there was that Guidone, [4] who was a tailor.23 And I said, ‘Well, what are we up to?’ And he said, ‘Well then, let’s get going!’ And he went along with me and we went together towards La Posticciola, going about a mile offf.24 And we went up a little hill, onto a threshing floor where this year there was no threshing, And up came Nuntio [11], alone, armed with a wheel-lock long-gun and sword. And Guidone [5] never said anything to me on the way. Rather, when I asked him where we were going, he said to me: ‘Near here!’

So Giovanni Battista has delivered his hearers from one discourse-setting, the fortifĳied village walls, to another, a remote threshing floor. The absence of har- vesting, at summer’s end, matters for the tale. No unfĳinished harvest work will bring intruders to interrupt the dramatic encounter. Guidone’s taciturnity on the walk sets a foil for the intense parley that follows.

22 Ibid., 76v–77r. 23 The castle of Rocca Sinibalda, then as now, stood slightly back from the circle of the village walls. There was a single principal gate, on the local road that led, eventually, to Rome. Giovanni Battista, leaving the village, had to thread two enclosures. 24 La Posticciola is the next village south, up river. Tracking Conversation in the Italian Courts 157

et retrovato li Nuntio [9] esso me venne incontro e disse [‘]o parente mio[!][’] [1]

et mi messe le braccia al collo et mi basso [1]

dicendomi [‘]o parente [2] chi haveria creso che me havesti [voi form] revisto mai piu[!][’]

et resposi [‘]che non more l’homo [1] sempre si ritrova et mi ralegro che siati [voi form] sano e gagliardo[.][’]

e me disse [‘]parente [3] Io ho mandato per voi [1]

se no lo dico so che non lo sapete[’] [voi form]

et io dissi [‘]non senon me lo dite[!] [’] [voi form]

et lui disse [‘]ho mandato per voi [2] che so che ce havuto sempre com- passione a nostre aversita et ho mandato per voi [3] che voglio [1] che mi siate compare [1] e mi accetate [1] [voi form] per fratello et per compare[.][’] [2] et io dissi che lo accettavo [2] per compare [3] e per fratello[.] [2]

et di novo mi pigliò per la mano e messe il braccio al collo e mi basso [2] [.]25 …

And when we met Nuntio [12], he came up to me and said: ‘Oh my kinsman!’ [1] And he put an arm around my shoulder [my neck], and he kissed me. [1]

Saying to me, ‘Oh kinsman [2], who ever would have believed that You would have seen me again!’ this exchange and almost all that follows between Nuntio and the soldier is in the more formal voi form, rendered here with upper-case ‘You’ And I answered, ‘If he does not die, a man [1] refĳinds, and I am happy that You are well and in good spirits.’

25 Fols 77r–v. 158 Cohen

And he said to me, ‘Kinsman [3], I have sent for You. [1]

If I do not say it, I know that You do not know it’.

And I said, ‘Not unless You say it to me!’ And he said, ‘I have sent for You [2], for I know that you have always had compassion for our adversities.

And I have sent for You [3], because I desire [1] that You be my compare [god-kinsman] [1] and that You accept me as brother and as a compare [2]’.

And I said that I accepted him as a compare [3] and a brother [2]. And again he took me by the hand and put his arm around my shoulder and he kissed me. [2]

All these hand-clasps, embraces, and kisses are about not afffection but transaction and transformation, in afffection’s guise. We have three terms of increasing intensity: ‘amico’, ‘parente’, and ‘fratello’ / ‘compare’. Giovanni Battista’s Nuntio wields all three, in a bid to climb a ladder, or tighten a loop, of social closeness and implicit mutual obligation. The soldier, of course, never becomes Nuntio’s actual brother or baptismal sponsor for his children. We are in the gray zone where social fĳiction slides to fact. The pervasive use here of thevoi , and its formal plural verbs, sits oddly with Nuntio’s offfer of spiritual kinship. Watch the slippery play of pronouns in what follows next.

e mi disse, [‘]compare [4] io ho mandato per voi [4] per un altra cosa de importanza [1] e quando l’homo [2] parla con li homini [2.5] et persone honorate e sol- dati quel che l’homo [3] dice deve esser secreto bisogna avertir [1] compare [5] che queste son cose de Importanza [2] non vorrei che si sapresse [1] e quel che l’homo [4] parla bisogna avertire[’] [2]

et io li dissi [‘]compare [6] Io ti [sudden tu form] do la fede mia che quel che voi mi direte [back to the voi form] non lo sapra altro che questi arbori e questo terreno[’]

et queste parole le senti guidone [5] che lui lo chiamo perche se era scostato un poco dicendo [‘]vien qua che ce ha esser anco tu[’] [tu form] Tracking Conversation in the Italian Courts 159

e me disse [‘]vedete compare [7] [voi form] queste son cose de importanza [3] dove l’homo [5] e minimo soldato [1] bisogna cercar di venir in credito[.][’]

e mi fecce un prologo longo di parole delle quale non mi ricordo

et al fĳine me disse [‘]compare [8] e un nobil cavalieri che e fori di Roma et ha doi [2] bolgie di danari

vedete compare [9] queste son cose che non vorrei poi che si sapesse [2]

questo gentilhomo [1] a grandissimo desiderio de haver la rocca[.][’]

(intendendo di rocca sinibalda)26 …

He said to me: “Compare [4], I sent for You for another thing of importance. [1]

When a man [2] speaks with men [2.5], and honoured persons, and soldiers, what a man [3] says has to be secret.

It is necessary to pay attention [1], compare [5], that these are things of importance. [2]

I would not wish that they be known. [1]

And what a man [4] says – it is necessary to pay attention.[’][2]

And I said to him, ‘Compare [6], I give you my faith [a sudden tu form], that what You will say to me [back to the voi form] – will know it only these trees and this piece of land.’

And these words, Guidone [6] heard them, for he [Nuntio] called him, because he had drawn offf a bit, saying, ‘Come here, for you too [tu] also have to be here.’

26 Ibid., 77v–78r. 160 Cohen

And he said to me, ‘You see [voi-form verb], compare [7], these are things of importance [3], where a man [5] is a merest soldier [1], it is necessary to try to come into credit [1: venir in credito: gain reputation].’

And he made me a long prologue of words which I do not remember.

And, at the end, he said, ‘Compare [8], there is a noble knight who is in exile from Rome, and he has two [1] saddle-bags of money.

You see, compare [9], these are things that I would not wish, later, that they be known. [2].

This gentleman [1] has a very great desire to have the Rocca.’

(meaning Rocca Sinibalda).

This plot quickens and thickens. Despite the mounting tension, Giovanni Battista twice steps outside of his very direct, very conversational narration, fĳirst to tag a speech that does elude his capacious memory or his craft for imag- ining words, and second, to distinguish among the three meanings of rocca: neither just any castle, or this village of Rocca Sinibalda, but this very castle. His two departures from colloquy-mode lack rhetoric; they are without that pervasive verbal echo.

[‘]et se voi lo volete [voi form] far l’homo [6] ve ce ha messo inanti doi [2] per farra [fare] questo bene

perche se ha da considerar che l’homo [7] e povero

se lo volete far voi [1][,] metteremo una scala alla muraglia de la campanella quando siate di per//pentitarela [?]

e metterete dentro quel gentilhomo [2]

qual vi fara tal manera che harete [voi form] contento compare [10]

queste so venture da pigliarle [.]

se voi lo fate beato a voi [1][!] Tracking Conversation in the Italian Courts 161

dove siate [voi form] minimo soldato [2] se volete star [1] [voi form] In rocca ve ce terra per castellano

et se volete star [2] in la terra vi dara vigne possessione e cio che volete voi[’]

Io gli resposi [“]non piaqua a Dio [1] chio vogli mai far tal cosa

et che vado tal nominanza di me alla patria mia[.]

se voi volete [(3)] la vita mia pigliatela [1] [voi form all along]

et se volete [(4)] chio sia con voi a far qualche cosa io mi offfero metter la vita [1.5] per voi[’]

et mesi mano alla spada dicendoli [“]se volete [(5)] la mia vita pigliatela[!][“] [2] [voi form]

et lui disse [“]compare [11] non volemo altro che questo [1]

che quando noi voremo difffĳinir le lite nostra siamo homini da farlo

no volemo sinon questo [2]

O fattelo compare [12] che beato a voi [2] [!][’]27 …

“And, if You are willing to do be the man [6] [to man up and do it], he has set aside two [2] [bags of money] for doing this favour,

For it one must keep in mind that the man [7] is poor.

If You want to do it, [1] we will put a ladder to the fortifĳication walls by the bell, when you are inside [?: transcription hard],

and You will put inside that gentleman [2],

27 Fols 78r–v. 162 Cohen

And we will do it with You in such a way that You will gain satisfaction, compare. [10]

The are opportunities to seize.

If You do it, blessings upon you! [1]

Where you are the merest soldier [2], if you want to stay [1] in the Rocca, he will keep you there as castellan.

If You want to stay [2] in the village, he will give You vineyards and lands and whatever You want.”

I answered him: “Let it not please God [1] that I ever want [1] to do such a thing.

And that I carry such a reputation in my native place.

If You want [4] my life, take it. [1]

And if You want me with you to do some thing, I offfer myself,to put my life on the line [1.5] for You.’

And I put my hand on my sword, saying to him, “If You want [5] my life, take it!” [2]

And he said, “Compare [11], we do not want any other thing than this. [1]

For, when we come to settle our quarrel, we are men [3.5] to do it.

We don’t want anything but this. [2]

Oh do it, compare [12], and blessings upon You! [2]’

The more dramatic the passage, the thicker the on-lay of echo. Now, whatever really did transpire at the village gate and on the threshing floor, in his story, Giovanni Battista, calls forth not only words, direct speech especially, but also gestures. We have seen already hands, arms, necks, and kisses. Here, at a moment of high tension, he recounts his hand upon his sword, profffering his life. The offfer was no more literal than his god-kinship with Nuntio; these are Tracking Conversation in the Italian Courts 163 gestures, deeply resonant, but imprecise and polyvalent. The combination of words and bodily actions, deeply oral, penetrates the scribal world of the court. Notaries, inured to oral practice and trained in visual observation, were alert to gesture, as were suspects and witnesses.28 As for the central message, or master narrative, Giovanni Battista depicts himself as a man beholden to his reputation in his native place, and equally beholden to any master who asks him to do right. This notional double obligation, to community and patrons, not only binds him but also frees him to say No.29

Io gli replicai che non lo volevo far [1]

et li profersi di novo se voleva la vita mia [3] di darcela

et lui rispose [‘]beato a voi compare se lo fatte [3, 12]

voglio [2] che voi lo fatte[’]

et io dissi che non lo volevo far [2] [.]

et lui disse [‘]il signore ha ben altra strada[.]

se volesse la rocca lui a la misura della muraglia che va alla campanella et da scender giu[.]

et gia haveamo pensato a scalar la fenestra[,]

ma il signor desidera di haverla che una minima [3] creatura che fosse dentro li apresse la porta [4][.]

28 For notaries’ witnessing skills, as conceived and practiced, see Laurie Nussdorfer, Brokers of Public Trust: Notaries in Early Modern Rome (Baltimore, MD, 2009), especially pp. 7–22. See also Thomas V. Cohen, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy, pp. 188–191. Daniel Lord Smail, Imaginary Cartographies, Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseilles (Ithaca, NY and London, 1999), for notarial habits of perceiving and describing a city, especially pp. 67–69. 29 Giovanni Battista is constructing a typical ‘strength from weakness’ argument. For the cultural logic of such a gambit, see Thomas V. Cohen, ‘A Long Day in Monte Rotondo: the Politics of Jeopardy in a Village Rising (1558)’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 33 (1991): 639–668. 164 Cohen

potressemo metter una scala alla muraglia quando vi partite dalla guardiola e andate verso il maschio e andate la disotto[.] [voi forms]

che sara un tempo crudele [.]

voi retornarete su et entrarete in la guardiola [voi forms] quando della la volta da basso possono entrar otto a diece homini e venir su tre o quattro ben armati[.]

che po far un pover soldato[!][’][3]30 …

I answered him that I did not want to do it. [1]

And I offfered again,if he wanted my life [3], to give it to him.

And he answered, ‘Blessings upon You, compare, if you do it.[3, 13]

I want [2] You to do it.’

And I said that I did not want to do it. [2]

And he said, ‘The Signore has a whole other path.

If he wanted the Rocca, he has the measure of the wall that goes to the bell, and to descend down.

And we have already thought of climbing the window,

But the Signore desires to have it in such a way that a merest [3] creature who would be inside would open the door for him.

We could put a ladder to the wall when You leave the guardhouse and go towards the keep and go down below,

For there will be a bad weather.

30 Ibid., 78v–79r. Tracking Conversation in the Italian Courts 165

You will go back up and enter the guard house, when, from down below, eight or ten men can come in, and three or four well armed can come up.

What can a poor soldier [3] do!’

Giovanni Battista is a good storyteller. His account shows him ever more anxiously dodging ever sharper blandishments and darker threats lobbed by Nuntio. The details of the fort: wall, keep, guardhouse, and window, give the menace plausibility, as does the spectre of malign weather, un tempo crudele.

ma compare [14] voglio [3] che lo fatte voi che beato a voi [4] havete a far pensier che e un bravo gentilhomo [3] e cavalieri

che li recognoscerra et servirlo re/ve desse be et inamoraria [=? ][’]

et Io gli dissi che mi curavo di cognoscerlo

che se ce venivano et me trovano in sentinella mi amazzassero

che lo haveria piu acoro che de perder il mio honore

alhora disse [‘]compare [15] se Io vengo arrecco un morso tanto grosso [’]

mettendo le pugne insieme[.] [’]

e quidone [6] disse[:] [‘]parente [4] sta quieto non dubitare che lo apos- taremo bene che non ce sarai tu[’] [tu form]

et Io dissi [‘]Non dubito tal [1]

dubito tal [2] cosa non piacia mai a dio [2][’]

et cosi ce partimo da detta aia tutti tre et andamo per una stradella verso la fonta del marmo[.]31 …

31 Fols 79r–v. The Fonte del Marmo spring was a well-known landmark on the village lands. 166 Cohen

‘But, compare [13], I want [3] You to do it, for, blessings upon You [4], you have to keep in mind that he is a brave gentleman [3] and a knight.

And recognize him and to serving him will he will hold you in afffection [?] [passage hard to read]

And I told him that I was wary of making his acquaintance.

For, if they came and they found me on guard duty, they would kill me

and that would weigh heavier on me than losing my honour.

Then he said, ‘Compare [15], if I come I am going to bring a bit [morso: a horse bit, a bite?] as big as this!’

And he put his fĳists together.

And Guidone [6] said, ‘Kinsman [4], rest easy. Do not be afraid, for we will take steps to assure that you [tu] will not be there.’

I said, ‘That is not what I am afraid of.

I am afraid that such a thing will never please God. [2]’

And so we left the threshing floor, the three of us, and went along a little road towards the Fonte di Marmo.

So ends this fĳirst scene in Giovanni Battista’s long narrative. The tale will go on far longer than space here allows. The soldier, without prodding from the court, next depicts a colloquy with Mareri himself, who emerges from the bushes to profffer treason money. Giovanni Battista grumbles over late back pay but cagily rebufffs betrayal, for his captain’s sake, with condign offfers to die at any other task.32 Mareri vanishes, and Nuntio’s mother and another woman come up, and two of Nuntio’s relatives, invoking kinship and laying a hand on the soldier’s shoulder. The blandishments continue, and Nuntio whispers to the soldier to keep their fĳictive kinship secret till the time be ripe. After all others withdraw. Guidone says:

32 Fols 79v–80r. Tracking Conversation in the Italian Courts 167

[‘]che voi chio facci [!]

io so che a otto di 7bre la rocca toma in mano del signor giuliano il qual mi ha fatto impicar mio padre[.]

pensa tu come sti[!]

e un mio fratello e morto pregione[.]

Io son resoluto che come il signor Giuliano ha la rocca de non ce star piu[.]

Io sapevo questa cosa ma non te ne haverei mai ricerco perche mi par che il cor me dicesse che tu non lo faresti[.]

nuntio me disse che te lo voleva dir lui[.]

per questo son venuto qua insieme con te[.][’]

et disse che faceva quel conto di me come che ce fosse tornato il fratello dalla fossa[.] …

‘What do you want me to do?

I know that on September 8, the Rocca goes into the hand of Signor Giuliano, who had my father hanged.

You, [tu] just think how things stand!

And a brother of mine died in prison.

I am resolved that, when Signor Giuliano has the Rocca, not to stay here further.

I knew all this, but I would never have sought you out because, I thought, my heart told me that you would not do it.

Nuntio told me that he wanted to say it to you himself. 168 Cohen

And for this reason I came here together with you.’

And he said that he so relied on me that it was as if his brother had returned from the grave.

How much of all this tale is true, in large or small, is hard to say. The exchange with Guidone, abrim with local knowledge, does ring true. Other things are dubious, and the court smells lies. It has little interest in Giovanni Battista. The soldier is small fry, his temptation and tardy notifĳication, a week late, to his commander, if crimes, are hardly matters of state. What concerns the Governor himself is Giacobo Mareri, a noble with allies, portending mischief. The court disbelieves the soldier’s tale of noble Giacobo Mareri skulking near the village, and tortures Giovanni Battista to shake him from the claim. He disowns the tale, as a mere garnish for greater weight, but sticks to the whole rest of his story. That steadfast avowal does not guarantee that his long recital of things said is at all exact, in phrasing, order, tone or sense. We have not truth, but deep verisimilitude, a persuasive account, to content the court, of how such talk would sound. Both the soldier’s artful narrative and the dialogue he portrayed partake of the oral craft of his world. Nevertheless, Giovanni Battista, for all that he has presented the substance, rhythms, and gestures that build a conversation, has not reproduced the thing itself. For that, we must look elsewhere.

Conversations Staged: Confrontatio in Court

The branch of linguistics, or sociology of language, called Conversation Analysis has developed an impressive set of methods for dissecting what occurs in an actual conversation.33 Its practitioners anatomize what they call

33 Two fĳields share the notational system: conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics. The former science is very purist, restricting itself to in the internal mechanics of turn-taking. It tends to treat conversation as a universal, and to scant ethnography and history. See Sandra Lee McKay & Wendy D. Bokhorst-Heng, International English in its Sociolinguistic Contexts: Towards a Socially Sensitive EIL Pedagogy (New York and Abingdon, 2008), pp. 149–152, for this point. Meanwhile, Dell Hymes, the founder of sociolinguistics, insisted on asking of speech questions like those that historians pose of written documents: who uttered this, to whom, where, when, to what end, under what circumstances, and according to what canons of expression? See Dell Hymes, ‘Toward Ethnographies of Communication’, in The Ethnography of Communication, ed. by John J. Gumperz & Dell Hymes, American Anthropologist, special publication, 66, Tracking Conversation in the Italian Courts 169

‘turn taking’ – a conversation is a project at once semi-collaborative and semi- competitive. Participants, as collaborators, continually offfer prompts and fĳill gaps, to help their interlocutors to correct and refĳine messages or complete their statements. Meanwhile, through interruptions and signals – words, sounds, breaths, gestures, facial expressions – participants work to gloss, amplify, deflect, reshape, subvert, block or otherwise transform what a speaker strives to say. Much conversational work aims to seize and hold the floor: turn- taking is semi-agonistic. As the flow of communication is swift, broad-band, and many-faceted, the social scientists who anatomize conversations employ recording equipment; their meticulous transcripts often require countless replayings of what happened.34 Early modern court scribes shared some interests of modern linguistic scholars, but not all. Moreover, they lacked the recorders, the rich notation, and the scientifĳic stance. Their goal was not to reconstruct a whole conversation, catching every inhalation or gufffaw, but just to fashion a sure record of who said what, to whom, how, wherever content and delivery bore upon a case at law. One conversation in particular received careful scribal treatment. It was the confrontatio, a well-orchestrated legal ritual staged when a court brought rival witnesses face to face. After the swearing in, the court read aloud their conflicting depositions, asking the parties if they stood by their utterances. Very often, both stood fĳirm, each lambasting the other as a shameless liar. If no one budged; the court then dismissed one witness and resumed grilling the other. Occasionally, however, the exchange came to life as witnesses locked horns, striving each to toss the other. Such richer dialogues could take the look of an actual conversation, the court fading back, the witnesses mustering tropes and tricks of free talk. The patient scribe, then, records a conversation more natural, and less artful than anything in Renaissance dialogues, plays, or stories. Such exchanges model social talk elsewhere in that world. But we must heed

(6.2) (1964): 1–34, especially p. 13. Meanwhile, Conversation Analysis has moved towards a more comparativist perspective alert to diffferences across linguistic boundaries. But the approach still eschews cultural issues, restricting itself to linguistic habits. See Jack Sidnell, ‘Comparative Perspectives in Conversational Analysis’, in Conversation Analysis: Comparative Perspectives, ed. by Jack Sidnell (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 3–27. 34 Ian Hutchby & Robin Woofffĳitt,Conversation Analysis: Principles, Practices, and Appli- cations (Cambridge, 1998); William M. O’Barr, Linguistic Evidence: Language, Power, and Strategy in the Courtroom, Studies in Law and Social Control (San Diego, CA, 1982); Malcolm Coulthard & Alison Johnson, An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics: Language in Evidence (London and New York, 2007); Erving Gofffman,Forms of Talk (Philadelphia, PA, 1981). 170 Cohen the artifĳiciality of all court talk. Interlocutors could never overlook the magistrates, for whom, perforce, they performed their conversation, as if on stage.35 We step back two years from our fĳirst two stories, to winter, 1556.36 The police have cracked a minor ring of Spanish cutpurses, side-liners in burglary. They have arrested two thieves, but a third has fled, and some rich loot, silver- ware snatched from a Roman house, has gone missing. Just before the arrests, one thief, Gaspar Narbais (Narvaez), had enlisted Damian, a discharged soldier, to shake down his two companions to track the vanished treasure. When they nabbed Gaspar, the cops took Damian too. When the trial opens, then, three are prisoner, and the court, keen to trace the silver, plays rough. It puts the feet of cutpurse Gomez to the fĳire; his screams and imprecations, diligently recorded, sear a modern reader’s soul. In court, Gomez falls back on supplication. Damian, meanwhile, parades his honour. As I have written elsewhere, both rhetorical strategies use jeopardy to warrant trust; Gomez puts in hock his soul and body, Damian stakes his social reputation. Meanwhile, Gaspar plays a third card; he turns state’s evidence, offfering, he boasts, secrets of every Spanish crook in Italy. In his proto-empiricism Gaspar, bright and articulate, stakes his credibility on a third jeopardy, to refutation. Towards the close of the transcript, the court confronts Damian with Gaspar. The two spar, and act out their moral-epistemological personae, Damian thrusting as an honourable soldier, Gaspar parrying with mastery of fact: Et statim adducto ipse damianus conversus ad eum Dixit[:]

[‘]Gasparre mirais no danneis l’anima per ninguno se io sono un ladron dizillo se io sono un traditor dezildo se io sono vigliacco dezildo ma se io sono huomo da bien no lo digais et se io sono da ben dezilldo ricordais che haveis da morir come totos nos otros et guadagnais vostra Anima[!][’][.]37

35 Patrick Geary, writing of the creation of early medieval land charters, offfers the very useful notion of the performance of a script: see ‘Land, Language, and Memory’, p. 175 36 Busta 31, case 7, fols 397r–448r. I published an analysis of this law case: ‘Three Forms of Jeopardy: Honor, Pain and Truth-telling in a Sixteenth-Century Italian Courtroom’, Sixteenth-Century Journal, 29 (4) (1998): 975–998. 37 Busta 31, case 7, fols 440v–441r. The case begins before the court of the senator and moves to the Governor’s court. On fol. 421, Alessandro Pallantieri, of whom we read above, Tracking Conversation in the Italian Courts 171 …

And, as soon as he [Gaspar] was brought in, Damian himself, turning towards him said: Gaspar, look! Don’t damage your soul for anybody. ‘If I am a thief, say so! If I am a traitor, say so! If I am a coward, say so! But if I am a man-of-worth, why don’t you say so? And if I am of-worth, say so. Remember that you have to die like the rest of us and gain your soul!’

Note, fĳirst, the scribe’s fĳidelity to what he hears. He strives to catch Damian’s half- or three-quarters Spanish.38 Observe too how the scribe records Damian’s turn away from the court to Gaspar, newly present, and not yet addressed by the judge. As with Nuntio at the threshing floor, there is the repetition so typical of oral discourse, here denser. Repetition pervades the syntax: seven imperative verbs march in serried order. And ‘if I am’ echoes again and again. Meanwhile, ‘soul’ brackets this whole exordium.

Deinde interogatus praedictus gaspar an omnia ea quae deposuit in suis examinibus fuerit vera et sint vera et pro veritate dicta Rdit [‘]Signor che tutto quello che io ho detto e la verita[’][.]

subdens ad Interrogationem Domini [:]

[‘]questo che e qui presente e questo damiano del quale io ve ho fatto mentione nelle altri mei examini[’][.]

Ints an viderit unquam dictum Damianum in societate francisci morale et recenseat quoties in quibus locis et de quo tempore [.]

appears, as fĳiscale, a sign that the case is gaining weight. The session here takes place in the torture room of Corte Savelli (fols 436v fff). 38 Code-switching, the shift from one to another language, is a subject for linguistic analysis. For a study of code-switching before a modern court, see (gratefully received) Philipp Angermeyer, ‘Language and the Law’, forthcoming in Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. by Jan- Ola Östman & Jef Verscheueren. 172 Cohen

Rdit [‘] io ho visto piu volte damiano qui presente piu et piu volte in compagnia de Francisco de morales et gli ho visto magnare et bevere insieme[’][.] et dum paedicta scriberet ipse damianus statim dixit[:] [‘]Vostra Signoria gli domandi un poco dove mi ha visto magnare col francisco de morales[’][.]39 …

Then the aforesaid Gaspar was asked whether everything that he deposed in his examinations was true and is true and was said as the truth. He answered: ‘Signore, that everything that I said is the truth.’

Adding in response to a question of the lord [judge]:

‘This person who is present here is this Damian, about whom I have made mention in my other examinations.’

He was asked if he had ever seen the said Damian in the company of Francisco Morales, and let him tell how often, in what places, and when.

He answered: ‘I have seen many times Damian, present here, many, many times in the company of Francisco Morales, and I have seen them eat and drink together.’

And while the aforesaid things were being written down, Damian himself without waiting said:

‘Your Lordship, ask him a bit where he saw me eating with Francisco de Morales!’

As Renaissance courtroom behaviour, this last line is truly striking. As linguists who study courtroom talk remark, before a judge suspects dare not set the rules; it is not their place to compel the offfĳicers of the law.40 Damian, a suspect, has already addressed Gaspar out of turn, hectoring him. Now, to steer the line

39 Fol. 441r. 40 Conley & O’Barr, Just Words, pp. 22–24, on the control of silence (in Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence). Tracking Conversation in the Italian Courts 173 of questioning, he breaks into the magistrate’s dialogue with Gaspar. Damian interrupts not speech but writing; this is not standard turn-taking; he signals his impatience, with an apostrophe to the court followed by another peremptory imperative verb. Ipse vero gaspar statim dixit[:]

[‘]lho visto magnare nel Ceccigglio in compagnia di francisco alvarez e io m’ho nominato nel mio Examine

et questo fu del mese di ottobre et novembre proximo passato[.][’]

Ipse vero damianus interrumpens dixit[:]

[‘]chi e questo francisco morales[?][’]

Et dicente Dicto gaspare[:]

[‘]achel che enviaron in galea per la platta che tomaron en Hostia[.][’] Rdit[:] mira che cosa es esta[!] [‘]io nuncha e saglido da napoles senon hora[!][’]

Predictus vero gaspare replicavit[:]

[‘] no se visto de saglir da napoles con la compagnia de diego Riola in busca de fuorausciti per quanto io credo[!]

Et per contrasegni di Calzoni bardigli et l’archibuso[.][’]41 …

Gaspar himself [i.e., not the court], without waiting [for the judge] said:

‘I have seen him eat in the Chechillio [a place in Naples? Sicily?] in the company of Francisco Alvarez.

And I named him in my interrogation.

41 Fols 441r–v. Bardigli is the Italian scribe’s stab at pardillos [grey]. 174 Cohen

And this was in the month of October and November last.’

And Damian himself [not the court], interrupting, said,

‘Who is this Francisco Morales?’

And the aforesaid Gaspar said:

‘The one whom they sent to the galleys for the silver that they took in Ostia.’

He [Damian] replied: ‘Hey, what is this thing!

I never left Naples, except now!’

The aforesaid Gaspar answered:

‘Weren’t you seen going out of Naples in the company of Diego Riola, on a hunt for bandits, so far as I can tell?

And for a countersign: grey hose and the harquebus.’

Gaspar, parrying Damian as ever with facts, addresses the court, saying just where it was that he saw him eat with shady Alvarez. Damian again interrupts, addressing not the court but Gaspar: who is this Morales? (we have two bad characters in play: Alvarez and Morales). Gaspar replies, facing Damian or the magistrate – his reference to silver works either way. Damian thrusts right back with a peremptory exclamation: ‘Mira! ’ [Hey!], and claims never to have left Naples (so thefts at Ostia, near Rome, cannot tar him). Gasper counters with a rhetorical question about a sally from Naples; the syntactical clues do not show to whom he speaks. He then profffers a countersign, the ‘telling marks’ of grey hose and gun. Such signs, a rhetorical gambit widely used in depositions, were a device from oral culture, a stab at verisimilitude. They mean ‘I indeed know this, as I remember details vividly’. Gaspar here aims to convince, fĳirst offf, Damian. Only Damian will know he wore gray hose that day. But the move addresses the court too. The notary, meanwhile, with his refrain of ‘statim’ and ‘ipse’, keeps recording how the whole exchange has slipped the groove of court control. Tracking Conversation in the Italian Courts 175

Respondente dicto damiano[:[ [‘]a fede d’huomo da bene che io non mi ricordo de quello di che io usci di napoles[!]

fu il di del corpo de christo o altro

ma so bene che dipo io mi ero accasato [. . .]

Ma quello francisco morales io non lo cognosco[’][.]

Et Respondente dicto gaspare[:] [‘]tu lo cognosi melior che me[!]

no stette lui teco prigione quando tu fosti preso per la costione fatta per lui in casa della bruna[?]

et stando tu prigione venne prigione francisco morales nella medesma prigione dove tu stavi

et uscisti fuori restando il detto morales prigione

et andasti allo sanendente Maggiore

et lo pregasti volesse aggiutare il detto Morales perche era spagnolo et era soldato

et gli offferisti dieci scuti

et che dipiu se guadagnasse le robbe che gli havevano tolte

et el sergente Maggiore gli respose che gli portasse piu danari che vederebbe de accommodarle

et vedendo che non ci erano piu danari ti fece poi mettere prigion con dire

[“]con questo mi ruini tu a me sono io huomo dar far queste cose[”]

et ti fece star molti giorni prigione.[’] … 176 Cohen

The said Damian answered: ‘On my faith as a man-of-worth, I don’t remember that day when I left Naples!

It was the day of Corpus Christi, or some other.

But I know that, since I was married [. . .]

But that Francisco Morales, I do not know him.’

And the said Gaspar answered: ‘You know him better than I!

Was he not in jail with you when you were arrested for the brawl made by him in the house of La Bruna?

And while you were in jail, Francisco Morales came to jail in the same prison where you were.

And you came out, but the said Morales stayed in jail.

And you went to the sergeant major.

And you begged him to help the said Morales because he was a Spaniard and he was a soldier.

And you offfered him ten scudi.

And on top of that, [you offfered] that he could get his hands on the goods that they had taken from him [from Morales].

And the sergeant major told him [the pronoun-switch suggests that Gaspar turns to the court that he [Damian] should bring him [the sergeant major] more money, and that he would do his best to accommodate him.

And seeing that there was no more money, then he had you [Gaspar turns back to Damian] put in prison, saying:

“With this, you are ruining me! Am I a man who would do these things?”

And he made you stay for many days in prison.’ Tracking Conversation in the Italian Courts 177

Note in this passage how the meticulous scribe picked up Damian’s trailed- offf sentence. Note too how, reading the play of pronouns, historians can reconstruct Gaspar’s switch from one to another interlocutor. As for the dynamics of the exchange, Gaspar, as ever, smothers his adversary with details. Damian will fĳire back with bluster. He addresses the judge:

Replicante vero damianus[:] [‘]Jesus signor Jesus signor[!] non es nada d’esto, no es verdad[!]

es bien verdad che io fui preso per la question mas luogo che saglii prigione mio ermano diede una cuccigliada a valdes et me ne venni a roma,

et non son stato piu prigione et questo lo posso provare[.][’]

et volvens erga dictum gasparem dixit[:]

[‘]poveretto de ti come guardes tu anima[?]

no ti ricordi tu che hai da morire et che dio lo pagara[!][’]

Replicante dicto Gaspare[:] [‘]se dios non mi dimandasse altro peccato che quello che io ho detto in questo examine io me ne andarei al cielo derito perche io no ho detto ne dico cosa nessuna che non sia vera del fatto tuo[.]

tu sai bene chel sergente maggiore ti diede le mani im petto et ti disse che

[“]senon fusse per non so che io ti farei et ti direi[.] non ti doveresti impicciare di queste cose et ti mando prigione.[”]

Tu sai ben che io dico la verita

et se non fusse la verita se non fusse il vero et [. . .]

perche harei io a dire senon fusse il vero[?][’]

Et cum uterque persisteret in dicto suo p.s gaspar fuit Interrogatus an viderit praedictum Damianum conversantem cum aliquo ex illis qui in praedictis aliis in suo examine narravit[.]

Respondit[:] [‘]io lho visto praticare con francisco alvarez et con Morales[.][’] 178 Cohen

Ipse vero Damianus interrumpens dixit[:][‘] francisco alvares lo cognosco nel gricoglio[?] in palazzo et nella rua catalana

et lho dishonorato molte volte

et che non se thomasse con mico et che se fusse a tomar con otros come ello . . .

che era stato preso per cherer a mattar ombre et io[. . .]

todo aesto varano [vaiano?] ad ello

et sel dirra che in toda mi vida stiamos comido iuntos et io il morale io chiero che mi adorchino[!][’]42 …

And Damian replied: ‘Jesus, señor, Jesus, señor. Nothing of this! It is not the truth!

It is true that I was arrested for the brawl, but right after I left prison my brother knifed Valdez and I left for Rome

And I have not again been in prison, and this I can prove.’

And turning towards the said Gaspar he said:

‘Poor fellow. How will you protect your soul?

Don’t you remember that you have to die and that God will pay you back!’

Gaspar replied: If God asked no other sin of me than that which I said in this interrogation, I would go straight to heaven, because I have not said any thing that is not true about your afffairs. You know that the sergeant major put hands to heart with you and told you that

42 Fols. 442r–v. Tracking Conversation in the Italian Courts 179

“if it were not for I-know-not-what, I would give you a really hard time. You should not get yourself mixed up in the things, and I am sending you to jail.”

You know well that I am speaking the truth.

And if it were not the truth, and if it were not the truth . . .

Why would I be saying it if it were not the truth?’

And because both persisted in what they were saying, the said Gaspar was asked if he had seen the said Damian conversing with any of those persons which he had told about in his fĳirst interrogation.

He answered: ‘I have seen him keeping company with Francisco Alvarez and with Morales.’

And Damian, interrupting, said: ‘Francisco Alvarez, I know him in the Gricoglio [?], in the palace and in the Rua Catalana’ [in Naples]

And I have dishonoured him many times.

And he never drank with me, and he drank with other men like him [. . .]

He was arrested because he intended to kill a man

and I . . .

All this summer to him . . . [?] [passage unclear]

and if he says that in all my life we ate together, I and Morales, I want them to string me up!’

At this point, both speakers are struggling for coherence. Even Gaspar loses the train of a sentence. The court brings Gaspar back into focus, on Damian’s two suspicious companions. Damian cannot pretend not to know Alvarez, so he heaps all possible scorn on the man and then, concerning Morales, with a flourish puts his own body in metaphoric hock to hanging to vouchsafe his denial. 180 Cohen

The two men will wrangle on about links between Damian and the two reputed thieves, Gaspar claiming that Damian is a shake-down man who strips thieves of spoils. Then, at the court’s urging, Gaspar tells how he and other travellers found Damian lurking with a troop of bandits in the Terracina woods, towards Naples. Finally, Gaspar lays out the tale of enlisting Damian to shake down his erstwhile cronies for the missing silver trays. Finally, with Damian still present, the court tortures Gaspar, as it notes, ‘to corroborate his testimony.’ The logic here is telling. The court tortures Gaspar not to shift him from his words, but rather, to confĳirm that he will stand fast. So, hoisting Gaspar up, the judge does him a favour.43 If his body can withstand the pain, his words have weight and his campaign to betray all past comrades and save himself advances. The conversation ends with Gaspar swinging on the rope, in agony, and Damian still struggling to shake his empiricist foe loose from his dire allegations.

Ex tunc fuit de mandato D. elevatus[:] [‘] oh per la passione de christo la verita[!][’]

et dicente domino ut dicat veritate [sic] et si non dixit revocet quod nil aliud ab ipsi convenit

Respondit[:][‘]io lho detta Signor[!] Io lho detta cosi dio mi aggiuti come lho detta[!][’]

et pluries a domino exortatus ut dicit [sic] veritatem millies[:] [‘]io ho detto il vero ho detto il vero et non si trovera altrimente[!][’]

Et cum stetisset elevatus per spatium trium miserere [a temporal measure] dominus mandavit ipsum leviter deponi[.]

Prefatus vero damianus semper ad dicta per dictum gasparem Respondit[:] [‘]non e il vero vagliami dios[!][’]

Ex tunc mandavit Dominus ambo pro nunc reponi ad locum suum animo

43 This treatment is like the friendly torture given victims of rape, weak witnesses, by cultural logic, because of sexual defĳilement. See Elizabeth S. Cohen, ‘The Trials of Artemisia Gentileschi: A Rape as History’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 31 (1) (2000): 47–75; Thomas Cohen, Love and Death, pp. 135–137 Tracking Conversation in the Italian Courts 181 …

Then, at the command of his lordship, he was hoisted: ‘Oh, for the passion of Christ, the truth!’

And his lordship said that he should speak the truth and if he had not spoken the truth he should revoke, for nothing else from him is appropriate.

He answered: ‘I have said it, Signore! I have said it. God help me, as I have said it.’

And he was exhorted by his lordship many times to tell the truth, and he said a thousand times: ‘I have said the truth. I have said the truth and you will not fĳind anything diffferent!’

After he was hoisted for the space of three Miserere prayers, the lord ordered him put down lightly [i.e., with no jerk].

The aforesaid Damian kept saying to the aforesaid Gaspar: ‘It is not true, may God vouch for me!’

Then the lord ordered both of them put back in their place [of detention] for now, with a mind [to continue].

This tense and complex dialogue of court and prisoners bears many clear ‘countersigns’ of conversation. The stakes are high, and many powers – of law, God, pain, honour, and evidence all come into play. This was heavy talk, not relaxed fĳireside chatter. The scribe was splendidly professional; clues to gambits of voice and body abound. We see direct address, expostulation, quotation, cross-talk, admonition, talking over or interruption, hesitation, and self-correction, all classic marks of conversation. For all that, much remains inaudible and invisible – the timing, breathing, vocal introjections, cadence and volume of the voices, the movements of face and body. But the imprint of time, place, person, situation, stakes, and culture are deep. Historians will fĳind other documents just as rich or richer. We will never replicate the painstaking exactitude of CA or ethnolinguistics; our speakers are far too dead. Still, we can follow the suggestion of these sciences, to listen with patience and attention, if merely with our eyes.

Preaching the Word

∵

CHAPTER 5 Tears for Fears: Mission Preaching in Seventeenth- Century France – a Double Performance

Anne Régent-Susini

Fides ex auditu? Before the Council of Trent, this old Christian motto did not seem to be taken for granted in France. For want of time or preparation, parochial clergy were often reluctant to preach, while, according to a popular saying, ‘there were even fewer preaching bishops than flying donkeys’.1 ‘Extraordinary’ preaching, be it interior missions or stations, was a response to this lack of ordinary preaching – and a successful response it was, since it attracted large crowds, by developing a dual pastoral approach, combining a supposedly therapeutic use of fear and the seduction of richly decorated churches and ceremonies. This renewal was especially noticeable in rural areas. There, missions aimed at the mostly illiterate middle and lower classes created a new type of orality, with sermons often delivered in vernacular language, and integrated into a complex set of ‘exercices’ or ‘actions’ which involved speeches, but also various verbal interactions, gestures and visual efffects such as posters, dramas and, most of all, processions.2 During the mission, not only was the landscape made sacred by becoming the theatre of various devotional practices (for example, processions or sermons performed in public spaces), but the ‘soundscape’ of the community was radically changed. Admittedly, it was more disrupted, since the very attraction of such events seems to have generated

1 In early modern France, a distinction was often made between two ‘socio-spiritual’ events involving extraordinary preaching (as opposed to the ordinary Sunday homily). Extraordinary preaching was expected and commented upon, and sometimes associated with signifĳicant fĳinancial stakes. It might refer tostations (series of sermons delivered by the same preacher, which were put in place for special liturgical occasions, such as Advent, Lent, or Corpus Christi) or missions. Missions incorporated a whole set of exercises generally performed by several clerics, which included sermons, catechisms, private and group confessions, processions, or even theatre plays. See Marc Venard, ‘L’Épiscopat catholique à l’époque du Concile de Trente. Les réalités’, in his Le Catholicisme à l’épreuve dans la France du XVIe siècle (Paris, 2000), p. 148. 2 Bernard Dompnier, ‘Le Missionnaire et son public. Contribution à l’étude de la prédication populaire’, in Bossuet. La Prédication au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1980), pp. 104–122, p. 105.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004291829_007 186 Régent-Susini loud quarrels beforehand).3 But what was more important, it was enriched. Indeed, missions involved well-read and professionally trained speakers, who spoke a relatively sophisticated vernacular language. During a period mostly dedicated to spiritual activities, they juxtaposed several kinds of oral practices, which appeared as intensifĳied and enriched versions of ordinary religious verbal interactions: a more intense level of preaching, a more thorough moral and spiritual teaching, and longer and deeper confessions than were usually allowed by ordinary parish life. Though internally polyphonic by nature (the preacher’s voice encompassing various voices of auctoritates, such as Holy Scriptures, Church Fathers or even Graeco-Latin poets), the sermon was, from an outside point of view, the most monologic of those forms – while catechisms were often performed as ‘questions and answers’ (though these questions and answers were often written in advance and meant to be learned by heart), and while ‘conference’ was a kind of dialogue between the preacher and the listeners.4 Whereas processions and religious dramas

3 See, for instance what Nicolas Canteleu, chronicler and sacristan at the Abbey of Saint- Germain-des-Prés, writes about a mission, organized in 1660 by Saint Jean Eudes: ‘[Missionaries] probably were very fruitful while they were here; however, they also caused us some troubles. Our church was almost always open and many people passed through it. Walls and altars were always covered by a one-thumb layer of dust, and many insolent remarks and irreverences were performed in front of the Blessed Sacrament by those who came booking seats, among whom some fought, others shouted’ (Jean-Baptiste Vanel, Les Bénédictins de Saint-Maur à Saint-Germain-des-Prés. 1630–1792 (Paris, 1896), p. 19; (translation is author’s own). The contrast between the popular devotion and the usually quiet and intellectual atmosphere of this erudite centre must indeed have been striking. Furthermore, I shall not take into account ‘usual’ parasite noises, which were still frequent in churches, at least until the eighteenth century, but were not specifĳic to missions – which bishops often deplore during episcopal visits: playing children, barking dogs, and even fĳights. See, for instance, Louis Pérouas, Le Diocèse de La Rochelle de 1648 à 1724. Sociologie et pastorale (Paris, 1964), p. 165. 4 See, for instance, Dominique Deslandres on the teaching of catechism by César de Bus, largely inspired by Borromeo (Delandres, Croire et faire croire. Les missions françaises au XVIIe siècle (1600–1650) (Paris, 2003), p. 111 and subsequent pages). See also Antoine Boschet, Le Parfait Missionnaire, ou Vie du R.P. Julien Maunoir de la Compagnie de Jésus, missionnaire en Bretagne (Lyon, 1834), p. 266: ‘Cet entretien [la conférence] est en cela diffferent du sermon, que le sermon est un discours continu & que la conference est un discours interrompu: & en cecy diffferent du catéchisme, que dans le catéchisme le catéchiste interroge, & l’auditeur répond; au lieu que dans la conference le prédicateur & l’auditeur interroge et répond chacun à son tour. Ainsi dans le premier discours le Père permettoit à son auditoire de l’interroger sur les doutes qu’ils avoient touchant la conscience & la religion.’ [This discourse (the presentation) is in this way diffferent to the sermon, for a sermon is continuous discourse and the presentation is a discourse which is broken up; and, in another way, it is diffferent to a catechism, for in a catechism the catechist asks a question and the auditor responds; whilst, Mission Preaching in Seventeenth-Century France 187 fully involved the believers, the sermon appeared as a ‘top-down’ speech. That probably explained why, during ordinary masses, the homily, less interactive and participatory than were the chants, hymns and recited prayers, was often neglected by believers, who sometimes withdrew under a porch during the sermon to chat freely.5 To remedy this lack of interest, missionary sermons, though just as monolithic in their content as ordinary parochial homilies, put an emphasis on the nature of preaching as a dialogue, by inviting greater active participation from the listeners.6 While the faithful seem to have attended ordinary Sunday masses rather passively and to have chosen, whenever possible, to hear shorter low masses rather than longer high masses, they almost invariably flocked to hear, and see, missionaries, and to take part in their long and interactive celebrations.7 Mission preaching thus can be called polyphonic in two ways. First, because it involved several missionaries, who preached either at diffferent times of the day or at the same time, when preaching was outside and the crowd was huge.8 Second, because the listeners themselves interacted with the preacher or preachers. In other words, the mission as a whole was a profoundly polyphonic system, involving not only several preachers (that was precisely what distinguished a mission from a station, both being extraordinary preaching), but also a rich oral, if not always verbal, exchange between preacher and auditory. Not that the early modern Catholic missionary preachers already practised Baptist-style ‘answering congregation’.9 But they certainly claimed – and in many cases really had – a spectacular efffect on their audience, an efffect that

in a presentation, the preacher and the auditory ask and respond in turn. thus in the fĳirst discourse the preacher allows his auditory to question him about the doubts they have about their conscience and about religion.] 5 See Brigitte Maillard, ‘Méthodes et pratiques pastorales dans les campagnes du diocèse de Tours au XVIIIe siècle’, in La Christianisation des campagnes. Actes du colloque du C.I.H.E.C., ed. by Jean-Pierre Massaut & Marie-Elizabeth Montulet-Henneau (Bruxelles, 1996), pp. 471– 483, at p. 477. 6 That was to be Maury’s advice, in his famous book on pleading and preaching, Principes d’éloquence pour la chaire et le barreau, XXIV: ‘Du style direct et du dialogue’ [in direct style and dialogue] (Paris, 1804), p. 118. 7 See Louis Pérouas, Le Diocèse de La Rochelle de 1648 à 1724, pp. 165, 423. 8 Oratorians missioning in Provence offfered a morning sermon in vernacular language (Southern French patois) and an evening sermon, more solemn, in French; Capuchin missions by Honoré de Cannes, for instance, did the same. See Marc Venard, ‘Les missions des oratoriens d’Avignon aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles’, Revue d’Histoire de l’Eglise de France, 48 (145) (1962): 16–39, at p. 24. 9 See Bill J. Leonard, Baptists (New York, 2005), p. 200. 188 Régent-Susini was part of the performance itself. Just as in processions, at mission sermons there were actually no, or very few, mere spectators. The audience and their reactions were actually part of the show. The responses supposedly prompted by the sermon could be words, or other forms of orality (loud sighing, terrifĳied shouting, for instance) or actions beyond orality (tears or even fainting). Deep down, missionary preaching aimed at converting listeners, at turning them irrevocably towards God, at intensifying their religious life so as to radically change their inner self. However, in the short term, it also aimed at a very tangible efffect, the démon-‘ stration d’estre grandement touchez de Dieu’ [showing they were greatly moved by God]. And according to most mission narratives and missionary preaching treatises and manuals, this ‘demonstration’ involved two complementary aspects: fĳirst, attentive silence, then lamenting and crying. A mission narrative by M. de Moncrif, quoted in Antoine Albert’s Nouvelles Observations sur les dif- férentes méthodes de prêcher (1757), exemplifĳies the complex orality inherent in mission preaching, which combines internal polyphony and dialogism, striking dramatization and interaction with the auditory, but also, conversely, the pathos of silence:

L’orateur commence, et la vision d’Ézéchiel se présente à son esprit. Il appelle d’une voix forte et mystérieuse, les morts cachés sous la terre; ils l’entendent.[. . .] Dans le cours de ce récit, je voyais les auditeurs assujet- tis, frappés: la terreur était peinte sur leur visage. Tout à coup l’orateur reste en silence; il regarde avec trouble un nouveau spectre qui se présente, il l’interroge, la frayeur redouble, c’est son spectre à lui-même. Ce spectre lui parle et l’accuse, il le rend coupable des erreurs dont il n’a point guéri tant de pécheurs qui sont venus l’entendre. [. . .] À ces mots, le prédicateur tombe à genoux, il adresse au Seigneur la prière la plus fer- vente et la plus tendre [. . .]; des larmes coulent de ses yeux, et tout l’auditoire fond en pleurs comme lui.10

10 Antoine Albert, Nouvelles Observations sur les diffférentes méthodes de prêcher (Lyon, 1757), pp. 205–207. The speaker began and Ezekiel’s vision came to his mind. He called upon the dead hidden below ground in a loud voice full of mystery; they heard him.[. . .] In the course of the speech, I could see the auditors spellbound and wonderstruck: terror was writ large on their faces. Suddenly the speaker fell silent; he looked, troubled, at a new ghost, he spoke to it. Fear intensifĳied, for it was his own ghost. The ghost spoke to him and accused him of being to blame for the mistakes he had made when he had failed to remedy the sin of the great many sinners who had come to hear him. [. . .] With these words, the preacher fell to his knees and directed a tender and fervent prayer to God [. . .]; tears streamed down his face, and the whole auditory burst into tears as he did. Mission Preaching in Seventeenth-Century France 189

Preaching thus proves to be, also, an art of silence – silence enhancing other oral manifestations, just as night enhanced the lights of torches during processions. However, being more spectacular, the second element, tears, which were supposed to express a second stage of awareness, is more frequently mentioned in the mission narratives. Evocations of the lachrymal efffects of missionary preaching are too numerous not to be understood as topoi, but also too many not to be somewhat grounded in reality, and it would probably be just as naïve to take them at face value as to discredit them altogether. A product of the institutionalization of penance and the organization of public penance by the Catholic Church, they could be seen as a product of oral as well as written culture, and of lay as well as religious traditions. On the one hand, this public cry and lamentation might be seen as a continuation of medieval practices and immemorial customs, be it mourning the dead, or in a completely lay context, expressing contrition and asking for forgiveness, or peacemaking after an afffront or a quarrel. On the other hand, the importance given to crying was grounded in a solid written Christian tradition starting with the Sermon on the Mount (‘Happy are those who mourn’), and continued by Desert Fathers with their theorization of the ‘gift of tears’ as act and proof of spirituality, and by vitae of saints.11 Far from being the simple outcry of spontaneous emotion, the listeners’ body language, just like the preacher’s words, was highly intertextual. In particular, the importance given to tears could be traced back to Augustine (notably in De Doctrina Christiana, IV, 24), who valued them as the main sign of spiritual awareness, and, therefore, of fruitful preaching.12 Reporting Maunoir’s missions, Boschet explicitly comments:

Tout l’auditoire se prit à pleurer et à sanglotter: il fallut que le prédicateur s’arrête là. Ce sont là des manières de se récrier fort consolantes pour un ouvrier évangélique. Le Père voulut plusieurs fois reprendre son discours, mais les sanglots et les cris de douleur ne le permettant pas, il fut obligé de descendre de chaire: aussi bien la prédication avoit-elle eu son efffet.13

11 See Piroska Nagy, Le Don des larmes au Moyen Âge. Un instrument en quête d’institution (Ve–XIIIe siècle) (Paris, 2000). 12 See Antoine Boschet, Le Parfait Missionnaire, p. 248: ‘Les larmes qui coulent des yeux de tout le monde, viennent d’un cœur contrit, et sont les gages d’une pénitence sincère et durable’ [the tears which flowed from every eye spring from a contrite heart and signal sincere, lasting penitence]. 13 Antoine Boschet, Le Parfait Missionnaire, p. 170. And on reactions expected by Jesuits during their missions, see Dominique Deslandres, ‘Des ouvriers formidables à l’enfer. Epistémè et missions jésuites au XVIIe siècle’, Mélanges de l’Ecole Française de Rome, 111 (1) 190 Régent-Susini

Such a passage enables us to grasp the paradoxical nature of tears, and more generally, of oral expressions from the audience. On the one hand, they prove the success of preaching, the strength of its efffects on the listeners, who cannot but cry, moan, or sigh. On the other hand, these manifestations of emotion and spiritual awareness unavoidably compete with the preacher in the agitated ‘soundscape’ of the mission, since they are as oral as the sermon itself. Crying, especially mass crying, battened offf preaching and ran the risk of drowning out the preacher’s voice. In other words, the very success of preaching, made manifest in loud crying, could paradoxically herald its end. Accounts of such moments are many throughout the early modern period. Not surprisingly, they might refer to the highly emotional Capuchin missions, as in the famous narrative of Capuchin missions in the Alps by Charles de Genève:

Ce peuple pour l’ordinaire éclatait en des cris et actes de douleur et affflic- tion si hauts et lamentables qu’ils contraignaient les prédicateurs à fĳinir leurs prédications et catéchismes avant que les avoir bien commencés.14 Les pleurs et gémissements ont été la conclusion de plusieurs prédica- tions. D’autres ont été interrompues au milieu, le prédicateur étant con- traint de sortir de chaire et de donner lieu aux clameurs et gémissements, ne pouvant être entendu ni mettre fĳin à ces lamentations.15

But even the Lazarist missions, according less importance to visual signs and gestures, and to body language in general, claim to have encountered such paradoxes. Here is an account of a mission in Cardroc (Brittany) from 27 to

(1999): 251–276, at pp. 270–271. [The whole auditory began to cry and sob. The preacher had to stop at that point. These ways of crying out aloud are most comforting for a missionary worker. The preacher wished on several occasions to begin speaking again but the sobs and shouts did not permit it, and he was obliged to step down from the preaching desk. The preaching, even so, had had its required efffect.] 14 Charles de Genève, Les Trophées sacrés, ou Missions des Capucins en Savoie, dans l’Ain, la Suisse romande et la vallée d’Aoste, à la fĳin du XVIe et au XVIIe siècles, F. Tisserand, ed., (Lausanne, 1976), p. 211. [The crowd in general cried aloud with shouts and acts of sorrow and lament. They lamented so long and so loudly that they caused the preacher to stop preaching and delivering the catechism before they were fĳinished.] 15 François Lebrun, ‘Une mission à Brissac en 1707’, Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’Ouest, 81(3) (1974): 517–535, p. 522. [The weeping and groans put a stop to many preaching events. Other were halted midway and the preacher had to step down from the preaching desk, and to let the shouts and groans run their course. They could not otherwise be understood nor put a stop to the wailing.] Mission Preaching in Seventeenth-Century France 191

31 December 1685: ‘Le peuple estoit fort touché, tout le monde pleuroit ordi- nairement à la prédication si haut qu’on n’entendoit point le prédicateur’.16 Despite the obvious tendency to exaggerate that pervades these texts, they should not be taken as mere fĳictional clichés. At a time and in social groups where emotions were often revealed quite dramatically, the very efffĳicacy of public speech could genuinely rupture the fundamentally monologic pattern associated in theory with this kind of address. Furthermore, as a comparison between missionary preaching and court preaching would demonstrate, people used to expect more tangible efffects from missionary preaching than from social preaching. They not only expected tears, but also, if the stereotyped picture painted in most mission narratives is to be believed, communions, confessions, public reconciliations and restitutions.17 A more dramatic orality leading to greater dramatic efffect seems to characterize missionary preaching in early modern France. Tears were not only a fĳine mnemonic or a way of capturing the audience’s attention, they were meant to be a catalyst for action, for an active and visible renovation of one’s life. Even if such narratives exaggerate, these hagiographical tales do tell us something of the complex interaction built up between the voice of the preacher, and the voice of the auditory.18 On the one hand, even the louder reactions from the auditory seem, in the narratives at least, prompted by the preacher, who by his words and his own body language invites them to shout, to moan, to lament, or to cry. He remains the ‘director’ of the preaching stage, the ‘con- ductor’ of this human orchestra. This oral and visual dialogism seems perfectly staged and orchestrated. Most of the time, nothing is said about unexpected or hostile reactions – or about the lack or absence or reaction. Such examples would be innumerable, and as any topos, this one produced parodic inversions. In England, for instance (since this topos can be found throughout Europe), a traditional joke tells about a preacher, flattered to see a woman weeping during his sermon, but mortifĳied when he discovers why she is actually crying. His braying voice reminded her of the loss of an irreplaceable

16 Archives du diocèse de Rennes, quoted by François Lebrun, ‘La pastorale de la conversion et les missions intérieures: l’exemple des Lazaristes en Haute-Bretagne au XVIIe siècle’, La Conversion au XVIIe siècle. Actes du XIIe colloque du CMR, 17, (Marseille, 1983), pp. 247–255, at p. 249. 17 See Anne Régent-Susini, ‘Prêtres des grands et prêtres des champs: stations d’apparat et missions rurales au XVIIe siècle’, Revue Bossuet, 2, special issue: ‘La prédication à l’âge classique’ (2011): 41–60. 18 On the resistance which the pathos aroused by Honoré de Cannes’ preaching, see, for instance, Isabelle Bonnot-Rambaud, Hérétique ou saint? Henry Arnauld, évêque janséniste d’Angers au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1984), pp. 396–397. 192 Régent-Susini donkey.19 In fact, the omnipresence of tears in mission narratives makes it dif- fĳicult to discern if it was a mere stereotype, or a faithful evidence for tears really shed, all the more so as mission narratives were often written by missionaries themselves, or their sympathizers, who had to demonstrate the success of their missions to their superiors, or to the world, or perhaps to themselves.20 Another difffĳiculty, for the twenty-fĳirst-century reader of these mission narratives, is to interpret the real meaning of those tears. As a matter of fact, in the early modern period, tears were not only, and maybe not primarily, an intimate expression of a particular sensibility. People could cry in various public spaces, and even the king himself could cry in public. Tears could be ‘sincere’ as well as formal, sudden as well as programmed by circumstances. Therefore, we should not read mission narratives as unbiased historical testimonies, but rather as part of a rhetorical enterprise to justify and promote this new kind of pastoral. We also should keep in mind that the semiotic of emotions has changed over time, and that tears were probably public and formal just as often, if not more often, as private and spontaneous. Nevertheless, the very recurrence of this motif in mission narratives suggests at least, four features:

1 a great importance was given to the listeners’ reaction, or rather, since this reaction is often evoked globally and without many details, a great importance was given to the efffect the sermonshould have on listeners, to its illocutionary (rather, maybe, than perlocutionary) force.21 2 This expected reaction was not just about orality or body language, but it was expected to link the moment of preaching with a whole Christian tradition. Boschet writes about Le Nobletz’s follower, Maunoir, that he

19 See H. Leith Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford, 1993), p. 102. This joke can be considered as a satirical inversion of a famous exemplum linked to the fĳigure of the ‘Repentant Harlot’: a prostitute who had killed her child and parents enters a church in curiosity, in order to discover what attracts people there. That is when she hears a sermon about divine mercy, which moves her to tears and leads her straight to confession and conversion. 20 Exploring Jesuit missions, Bernard Dompnier recalls how difffĳicult it is to make use of mission narratives, which are often fĳirst aimed at Superiors, and are not meant as a document or impartial narrative, but rather as a claim and testimony for a complete commitment in the missionary apostolate. See ‘La Compagnie de Jésus et la mission de l’intérieur’, in Les Jésuites à l’âge baroque (1540–1640), ed. by L. Giard & L. de Vaucelles (Grenoble, 1996), p. 179). 21 Illocutionary force refers to the intended efffect of a speech act on the intended listener, while perlocutionary force refers to the actual efffect of that same speech act. Mission Preaching in Seventeenth-Century France 193

prêcha sur les tourmens de l’enfer avec une si grande véhémence, que tout l’auditoire efffrayé se mit à crier miséricorde. Le Père passa de la chaire au confessionnal selon sa coutume, son compagnon le suivit, et tous deux eurent dès lors bien de l’occupation. La douleur des pénitens fut si vive et ils versèrent tant de larmes, que les confesseurs s’aperçurent que leurs surplis en étoient tout trempés.22

Here, the reaction of the auditory, as in so many mission narratives, is obviously stylized in a hyperbolic way, and the transposition it undergoes in the narrative has more to do with a literary and spiritual tradition than with historical realism. Through its very exaggeration, however, it also shows how important it was for the audience to manifest very tangible responses and how their emotions were immediately linked to their bodily expressions. Furthermore, through the motive of tears wetting the missionaries’ surplices, it also suggests that tears become a kind of fluid link between the audience and the preacher.

3 Preaching was expected to afffect the group of listeners as such, as a community and not as isolated individuals. In that regard, the audience’s reactions were not only a mean of expressing their individual emotion; they became melded into a single (crying, weeping) body. Hence the paradoxical pleasure taken in these public displays of sorrow, as illustrated by the evidence of an eye-witness, Julien Blauf, a bourgeois who had attended a Capuchin ceremony of ‘Forty Hours’ organized by Capuchins in Issoire for Pentecost 1607. Here is what he wrote in his diary:

[les fĳidèles criaient] ‘Miséricorde à Dieu’ tant haut qu’on pouvoit. Ce qui se faisoit avec telle ardeur et dévotion, larmes et battements de poitrines, qu’il n’y avoit rien sy endurcy qui ne larmoyât. Cela fait, il y avoit d’autres notables [que ceux qui ont régulé l’entrée] qui faisoient sortir cette procession par la porte du cloitre, sans laisser personne dans l’église, pour faire place à la procession qui devoit entrer à l’heure subséquente, qu’étoit

22 Antoine Boschet, Le Parfait Missionnaire, p. 145. [preached on hell’s torments with so much vehemence that the whole auditory in terror began to cry for mercy. The preacher went from the preaching desk to the confessional as he was wont to do and a companion went with him. Both were kept busy from that time. The penitents’ sorrow was so acute and they wept so many tears, that the confessors found their surplices were soaked through.] 194 Régent-Susini

une chose difffĳicile à faire, car le peuple prenoit un tel plaisir qu’yl ne vouloit sortir de l’église.23

4 The emotional efffect of preaching was supposed to afffect, fĳirst, the preacher himself, and expected signs of such efffect (sighs, tears) were actually the same for the preacher and for listeners. So that the emotional and spiritual community created by preaching would include the preacher himself and erase, in a way, the diffference of status between him and his flock.

A kind of physical contagion, comparable to what happens in theatre, appears between the preacher and his flock.24 Tears are even more contagious than words. Such a contagion could spread from the preacher to the listeners, as Antoine de Saint-André illustrates, when he writes about the famous Breton missionary Le Nobletz:

Quand il montoit en chaire, ses paroles estoient si animées de l’Esprit de Dieu, & il estoit luy-mesme si vivement touché des véritez qu’il voulait persuader, que parlant le Crucifĳix à la main & apostrophant à son ordinaire le Sauveur crucifĳié, il versoit beaucoup de larmes, & en tiroit des yeux de tous ceux qui l’écoutoient.25

23 See Julien Blauf, Issoire pendant les guerres de religion, ed. by André Serre (Clermont- Ferrand: La Française d’Édition et d’Imprimerie, 1977), p. 245. [(The congregation shouted) ‘Mercy to God, as loudly as they could. They did this with such fervour and devotion, tears and beating their breasts that there was none so hard of heart that did not weep. After that, there were other dignitaries (those who were watching over the entrance), who made the procession leave by the cloister gate, and did not allow anyone to remain in the church, to allow in the next procession which had to come in during the following hour. This was difffĳicult to do, as the crowd was so taken up that they did not wish to leave the church.] 24 Rural listeners do not have the monopoly on this contagion of tears. See, for instance, what Madame de Maintenon writes after having heard Bourdaloue preaching for the Court and Louis XIV himself, who had just recovered from a serious illness: ‘Il a parlé au roi sur sa santé, sur l’amour de son peuple, sur les craintes de la cour: il a fait verser bien des larmes, il en a versé lui-même: c’était son cœur qui parlait et qui parlait à tous les cœurs’ [He spoke to the king about his health, about the love his people had for him, on the fears the Court had: he made many weep, and wept himself. He spoke from the heart and spoke to everyone’s heart.] Letter to Madame de Brinon, 25 décembre 1686, quoted in Le Correspondant. Recueil périodique, 39 (Paris, 1856), p. 221. 25 Antoine Verjus, La Vie de Monsieur Le Nobletz, prestre et missionnaire de Bretagne (Paris, 1666), p. 134. [When he went up to the preaching desk, his words were so full of the Holy Mission Preaching in Seventeenth-Century France 195

Or the other way around, as in this text written by an eyewitness about a Jesuit preacher addressing female listeners in the end of a mission in Brissac (Anjou), in September 1707:

Elles poussèrent cela si loin que le père, craignant que quelques-unes n’en fussent incommodées, leur ordonna de cesser leurs gémissements pour entendre le reste de son exhortation. Il ne lui fut pas possible de l’obtenir, quelque espérance qu’il leur donnât de la rémission de leurs péchés. Il fut obligé de répandre lui-même des larmes et de cesser son discours.26

In other words, mission preaching becomes a show, and while the lead role goes to the preacher, believers also have to play their part, to literally make a spectacle of themselves, thus increasing the efffect of the preaching by becoming either sources of emotional contagion or potential models of imitation for others. ‘As such, preaching produced a homonoia which was not only interior, mental, spiritual but also a bodily communion, in the same gestures and voicing.’ These collective oral expressions were often non-verbal, as seen above (crying, moaning, beatings or thumping of the breast, or prostrations), but they could also be verbal, forming a collective voice which responded that of the preacher, in a kind of choral structure. This is without mentioning the proper chants which were sung before and after sermons, ensuring that all listeners focused on expressing their faith in a united and formalized form, while saturating the ‘soundscape’ and, thus, replacing chatter and individual cries or shouts.27 The Relation of a mission in Angers by famous Capuchin Honoré

Spirit, and he was so clearly afffected by the truths of which he wished to persuade others, that, speaking with the Cross in his hand, regularly mentioning the crucifĳied Saviour, he began crying and brought tears to the eyes of all who heard him.]. 26 Quoted by F. Lebrun, Histoire des catholiques en France, du XVe siècle jusqu’à nos jours (Paris, 1980), p. 175. [They went so far that the preacher, fearing that some might feel uncomfortable, ordered them to cease groaning so as to hear the remainder of his exhortation. He was not able to gain from them any expectation of remission of their sins. He was forced to shed tears himself and to cease speaking.] 27 Only in singing does the preacher’s voice completely merge with the voices of listeners. For evidence of how it worked during missions, see, for instance, Relation de la Mission des Pyrénées (1635–1649). Le jésuite Jean Forcaud face à la montagne, ed. by S. Brunet (Paris, 2008), p. 42. In a broader perspective, about the union of voices as a Tridentine image for union of souls, see Frédéric Gabriel, ‘Communauté vocale, traditions et pastorale tridentine: le modèle borroméen’, Le Jardin de Musique, 2 (2008): 39–47. 196 Régent-Susini de Cannes, in 1684 makes this choral nature of the exchange very clear. This is all the more so, maybe, because it is written by Joseph Grandet, one of the main local clerics and a well-known opponent to Jansenism. Asked by the pro- Jansenist bishop of Angers to relate the mission, he probably takes this opportunity to show the prodigious efffĳiciency of an emotional and popular pastoral event which Jansenists regarded with suspicion:

Quelquefois, au milieu d’un discours, [Honoré de Cannes] s’interrompoit luy-même et répétoit cinq ou six fois ces mots: ‘Pécheurs, pécheurs, péch- eurs’, avec un son de voix éclatant et terrible. Quelquefois, dans ses sermons de la mort et de l’enfer, il prononçoit de suite ce seul mot: ‘Eternité, éternité, éternité’, élevant sa voix de plus en plus à chaque fois qu’il le prononçoit d’une manière capable de faire trembler les plus endurcis. Souvent il crioit à Dieu: ‘Miséricorde, miséricorde, miséricorde’, en sorte qu’il faisoit fondre son auditoire en larmes sans qu’on pût s’empêcher de crier avec luy à haute voix: ‘Miséricorde!’28 L’air, la terre et l’eau retentirent des cris et des soupirs d’un nombre infĳini d’auditeurs qui demandaient à Dieu à haute voix en frappant leur poitrine ‘pardon, grâce et miséricorde!’ Ces cris n’étaient que l’écho du P. Honoré, lequel tenant un crucifĳix à la main excitait les peuples d’une manière si forte que sa voix eût été capable de briser les âmes les plus dures.29

28 Joseph Grandet, Mémoires, published under the title Histoire du séminaire d’Angers depuis sa fondation en 1659 jusqu’à son union avec Saint-Sulpice en 1695, ed. by G. Letourneau, 2 vols (Angers, 1893), II, p. 256: [Sometimes part way through a speech, (Honoré de Cannes) interrupted himself and repeated fĳive or six times the words: ‘Sinners, sinners, sinners’, in a booming and terrifying tone. Sometimes in his sermons on death and hell, he sometimes spoke this single word: ‘Eternity, eternity, eternity’, raising his voice each time he said it in a way which was able to make the most hardened listeners tremble. Often he cried out to God: ‘Mercy, mercy, mercy’, so as to make his auditory burst into tears, for they could not stop themselves from crying aloud with him: ‘Mercy!’] 29 Joseph Grandet, Relation de ce qui s’est passé dans la ville de Saumur au cours de la mission du P.H. de C., missionnaire apostolique en l’année 1684 (Saumur, 1684), quoted by Isabelle Bonnot-Rambaud, Hérétique ou saint?, p. 392. [The air, the earth and water rang with the shouts and sighs of a huge number of listeners who called out to God, beating their breasts, ‘pardon, grace, and mercy!’ These shouts were a mere echo of those of Fr. Honoré, who held a crucifĳix in his hand and stirred up the people in such a powerful way that his voice seemed capable of breaking the hardest of hearts.] Father Honoré was not the only one to practise this carefully controlled external polyphony, which anyway was not only used with popular audiences. Godefroy Hermant, a Jansenist sympathizer, had written a bit earlier about Saint Jean Eudes preaching to the Court: ‘Leur proposant pour modèle Mission Preaching in Seventeenth-Century France 197

Here, the basic structure of the verbal interaction is iterative. Hardly can we speak of ‘call and response’, since the audience basically repeats what the preacher just said. But the choral structure sometimes happened to be more complex, when it combined a complementary structure (call and response) and an iterative structure (contagion and echo). This is the case in the far less passionate mission organized by Lazarists in a Corsican region of Niolo, as the narrative written by the Superior of this mission exemplifĳies. The following passage is quoted by Louis Abelly, an early companion of ‘Monsieur Vincent’ and the author of an anti-Jansenist Vie de saint Vincent de Paul:

Enfĳin la veille de la communion générale, comme j’achevais la prédica- tion, après avoir exhorté derechef le peuple à pardonner, Dieu m’inspira de prendre en main le crucifĳix que je portais sur moi, et de leur dire que ceux qui voudraient pardonner vinissent le baiser; et sur cela, je les y con- viai de la part de Notre-Seigneur qui leur tendait les bras, disant que ceux qui baiseraient ce crucifĳix donneraient une marque qu’ils voulaient pardonner et qu’ils étaient prêts à se réconcilier avec leurs ennemis. A ces paroles ils commencèrent à s’entre-regarder les uns les autres; mais comme je vis que personne ne venait, je fĳis semblant de me retirer, et je cachai le crucifĳix, me plaignant de la dureté de leurs cœurs et leur disant qu’ils ne méritaient pas la grâce ni la bénédiction que Notre-Seigneur leur offfrait. Sur cela un religieux de la réforme de S. François s’étant levé commença de crier: ‘Ô Niolo! ô Niolo! tu veux donc être maudit de Dieu? tu ne veux pas recevoir la grâce qu’il t’envoie par le moyen de ces missionnaires qui sont venus de si loin pour ton salut. Pendant que ce bon religieux proférait ces paroles et autres semblables, voilà qu’un curé, de qui le neveu avait été tué, et le meurtrier était présent à cette prédication, vient se prosterner en terre et demande à baiser le crucifĳix. En même temps il dit à haute voix: Qu’un tel s’approche (c’était le meurtrier de son neveu) et que je l’embrasse. Ce qu’ayant fait, un autre prêtre en fĳit de même à l’égard de quelques uns de ses ennemis qui étaient présents, et ces deux furent suivis d’une grande multitude d’autres. De façon que

ce qu’ils venaient de faire eux-mêmes dans la pompe magnifĳique de l’entrée du roi dans Paris, où l’on avait crié tant de fois Vive le roi!, il [saint Jean Eudes] leur fĳit crier Vive Jésus! Et M. de Rennes, grand aumônier de la reine mère, joignit sa voix avec celle du peuple pour crier comme les autres: Vive Jésus! et la plupart des assistants reçurent le cri de cet évêque comme la marque d’une rare piété’. The queen too, says Hermant, shouted: ‘Vive le Roi!’ See Godefroy Hermant, Mémoires sur l’Histoire ecclésiastique du XVIIe s. (1660–1663) (Paris, 1905–1910), IV, p. 481. 198 Régent-Susini

pendant l’espace d’une heure et demie, on ne vit autre chose que récon- ciliations et embrassements; et pour une plus grande sûreté, les choses les plus importantes se mettaient par écrit, et le notaire en faisait un acte public.’30

This example shows a moment in which the audience’s reaction was somehow unexpected, even though prompted by the preacher’s insistent invitation, a phenomenon quite rare in mission narratives. The balance was indeed fragile between encouraging reactions from the hall and risking losing control of it. But most preachers were probably ready to take that risk, in order to achieve an emotional intensity which would replace, in a way, the permanence of writing by acquiring an intrinsic mnemonic character. Even though sometimes on the verge, the missionary almost always appears as the powerful director of this religious scene. There is very little evidence of interactions which would not be, in one way or another, prompted by the preacher himself. This, of course, does not mean that they did not happen, but simply that they were not recorded by mission narratives, eager to show triumphs and achievements rather than faltering or difffĳicult moments. While freethinkers were relatively discreet until the eighteenth century, we know that

30 Quoted by Louis Abelly, Vie de S. Vincent de Paul: instituteur et premier supérieure général de la Congrégation de la Mission (Paris, 1839), I, p. 343. [Then the night before the mass communion, as I was fĳinishing preaching, after exhorting the people directly to penance, God inspired me to take the crucifĳix which I was wearing in my hand, and to say to them that those who wanted to be pardoned should come to kiss it; and, thereupon, I invited them in place of our Saviour who was holding his arms out to them, telling them that those who kissed the crucifĳix would be giving a sign that they wanted to receive pardon and that they were ready to be reconciled with their enemies. At these words they began to look at each other; but when I saw that no-one was coming forward I pretended to leave and I hid the crucifĳix, complaining that their hearts were hard and saying to them that they were not worthy of the grace or blessing that Our Lord was offfering them. Thereupon, a Franciscan friar of the reform movement getting up began to shout: Oh Niolo! Oh Niolo! Do you want to be condemned by God? You do not wish to receive the grace God is sending you through these missionaries come from so far away for your salvation. Whilst this good friar was profffering these words and other similar ones, a priest whose nephew had been slain with the murderer present at the preaching, came forward to lie face down on the ground asking to kiss the crucifĳix. At the same time he cried aloud: Let so and so come forward (it was his nephew’s killer) so I can embrace him. When he had done that, another priest did the same for some of his enemies who were there, and these two were followed by a huge crowd of others. So that for a full hour and a half there was nothing other than reconciliations, and embraces; and for another gage of it all, the most important matters were set down in writing, and the notary made it public.] Mission Preaching in Seventeenth-Century France 199

Protestants did sometimes confront the preacher, but such contests became less frequent as missions gradually reduced their polemic dimension and were more and more aimed at half-hearted Catholics rather than Protestants. Often written by missionaries or sympathizers, mission narratives give the impression that spontaneous behaviour, which used previously to be tolerated by missionaries gradually turned into spectacular body language expressing the feeling of guilt, intentionnally prompted and guided through diffferent stages, within the framework of a ritualized group representation. Therefore, preachers mostly evoke mass reactions and, though less frequently, stereotyped and, as such, recurrent individual reactions which can be reproduced – while evidence there is about Court preaching more often mentions one-offf anecdotes. But the fĳirst massive responses from the auditory itself appeared at the end of the eighteenth century, at a moment when missions were being questioned within the Church, either because maudlin and efffusive popular sermons did not suit the new tastes of the ascending bourgeoisie, or, adversely, because missions had lost their initial emotional strength and had become mere dry catechisms, because they had given up their powerful oral energy, because at the very moment when each believer was encouraged to go further into his inner life, missions had gradually banished the passionate expression of the listeners’ faith and replaced it with a purely monologic discourse, like a written text monotonously read aloud.31 Sometimes, hostile reactions went as far as to threaten or even beat up the missionaries but at the end of the eighteenth century, irony and mockery were the most common and formidable weapon for bourgeois seeking to discredit a mission. The Jansenist journal Les Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques complacently tells how in 1759, in Neuchâtel (Normandy), Jesuits, who had just been expelled from Portugal were mockingly greeted with turkey (which was then called ‘coq d’Inde’) crowing and with hallooing

31 See for instance, about the hostility encountered by ‘Montfortains’ (disciples of the great missionary Grignon de Montfort) around 1760–1780, Louis Châtellier, ‘A propos de la déchristianisation au XVIIIe siècle’, in La Vie, la mort, la foi, le temps: Mèlanges offferts a Pierre Chaunu, ed. by Jean-Pierre Bardet & Madeleine Foisil (Paris, 1993), p. 490: ‘Il arriva même à des religieux – prêtres de Beaupré à Vesoul en 1776 ou Jésuites à Neufchâtel en 1760 – d’être conspués ou assaillis à coups de bâton par une partie de la population’. And on a gunshot heard during a sermon delivered by Maunoir, see Dominique Deslandres, Croire et faire croire, p. 166. For instance, in Louhans (Franche-Comté), in 1788, bourgeois organized a ‘counter-mission’ with a ‘counter-drama’, performed at the same time as the mission. See Joël Saugneux, Les Jansénistes et le renouveau de la prédication dans l’Espagne de la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle (Lyon, 1976), p. 286. 200 Régent-Susini accompanied by Portuguese oranges.32 Here again, the interaction involves orality, rather than verbality proper, and actions rather than words. It is actually the mission as a whole which was about actio and orality, and as such, it experienced a new kind of preaching, deeply rooted in the senses, which gave not only much to hear, but also much to see, in order to attract as many people as possible and to involve them in a kind of mass dynamism of salvation. ‘Pure’ orality was rather rare: not only were the processions interspersed by songs, speeches, and public prayers, but non-oral devices and practices also played an important part.33 Abundant visual ornamentation could enhance the importance of spoken words, and even the most didactic sermons could include showing posters, either symbolic (representing symbols of moral virtues or religious concepts), or more fĳigurative (representing scenes meant to inspire awe and fear, such as the death of the sinner, or even Hell itself). These were images which would however require the preacher’s voice to be interpreted correctly.34 In this deliberately provocative strategy, language of signs often preceded oral communications, through opening processions for instance.35 What happened during sermons was both oral and visual. It is signifĳicant in this regard that narratives usually tell more about the preacher’s actio and the believers’ reactions (however imprecise or stereotyped their characteriza-

32 See Louis Châtellier, La Religion des pauvres. Les missions rurales en Europe et la formation du catholicisme moderne, XVIe–XIXe siècle (Paris, 1993), p. 274. 33 On the importance of processions in the early modern period, which he calls a ‘civilization of procession’, see Jean Delumeau, Rassurer et protéger (Paris, 1989), chap. III: ‘Le phénomène processionnel’. Agnès Delfosse has emphasized the intersensory nature of processions, which also involved ears (songs) and the sense of smell (flowers, incense). See ‘Exciter les sens pour bouleverser les cœurs: les processions post-tridentines dans les régions de culture baroque’, in Musiques et réformes religieuses aux XVIe et XVIIie siècles: statuts, fonctions, pratiques, ed. by Théodora Psychoyou, special edition of Le Jardin de Musique, 2, (2008): 25–37, p. 33. 34 See Anne Sauvy, Le Miroir du cœur: Quatre siècles d’images savantes et populaires (Paris, 1989); Fanch Roudaut, Alain Croix, & Fanch Broudic, Les Chemins du Paradis. Taolennou ar Baradoz (Douarnenez, 1988); Bernard Dompnier, ‘La Compagnie de Jésus et la mission de l’intérieur’, in Les Jésuites à l’âge baroque, p. 174. Le Nobletz’s taolennou, small and relatively fragile, are not really meaningful in our perspective: they are likely to have been given to pious women who learned the corresponding commentary by heart and then went from family to family to recite it. But at the same period, enlarged reproductions of Jesuit Huby’s images were already used as a support for preaching in popular missions in Brittany. 35 See Gerard Cholvy, ‘Les missions intérieures catholiques dans les campagnes en Europe aux XIXe et XXe siècles’, in La Christianisation des campagnes, pp. 505–538, at p. 573. Mission Preaching in Seventeenth-Century France 201 tion) than about the sermon’s matter or style. They sometimes tell us about the preacher’s props (a cross, a painting, a string, or a skull) and about the setting, for instance when sermons full of pathos were delivered in the evening (as a complement and counterpart to didactic sermons, which would have been often preached in the morning), and made the most of the location, be it a dark church, a vast and desolate fĳield, or even a dimly lit cemetery. And they invariably elaborated on the believers’ numbers and enthusiasm, and on their active participation through processions and confessions. In describing in detail one of his fĳirst missions in the Pyrenees, which he explicitely defĳines as archetypal, Jesuit Jean Forcaud describes in full detail a procession mimicking, as often, the procession of angels, but he says nothing about the sermon:36 ‘Enfĳin, dans quelque champs étendu où la procession doit passer, il y a un sermon’ [in the end there was a sermon in any open fĳield by which the procession would pass].37 The more troubled the context, the more important was the role of vision. In areas of confessional coexistence and tensions, which were the places missions most often visited, missions made an energic and polemic use of visual devices. More irenic and later missions would, conversely, put an emphasis on oral, and not visual elements. No wonder, then, that unlike ceremonial sermons, which had a writerly style, even if they were meant to be delivered orally, and which were often printed afterwards, mission sermons were very rarely published. They were mostly improvised, and the few published mission sermons are in fact flexible structures meant to be adapted and combined to suit the precise circumstances of preaching, possibly dislocated to provide separate thematic devel- opments, and in fact only brought to life by appropriate gestures, tone of voice, body language and facial expressions. This modular use of books to produce a mostly improvised orality bear striking similarities to the practices of commedia dell’Arte, which difffused in France throughout the seventeenth century: collective work, itinerant life, specialization in a specifĳic kind of speech, and a socially mixed auditory.38 Ceremonial preaching, and funeral orations in particular, often played on a discrepancy between the setting and the content [‘You listeners think you

36 This feature does not only characterize the narratives written by missionaries themselves; see the account by Normandy layman Julien Blauf, describing the Capuchins’ ‘Forty-Four Hours’, in Issoire, by Capuchin Father Just for Pentecost 1607: Issoire pendant les guerres de religion, p. 245. 37 Relation de la Mission des Pyrénées (1635–1649), pp. 46–47. 38 Bernadette Majorana, ‘Une pastorale spectaculaire. Missions et missionaires jésuites en Italie (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles)’, Annales, Histoire, Sciences sociales, 2 (2002): 297–320, p. 312. 202 Régent-Susini are the great men of these days, but in fact you are sinners and mortals’, ‘This funeral decoration tells us this man was the greatest of all, but in fact he was nothing if not for God’]. What was heard obviously opposed what was seen, and the truth was supposed to lie in what was said, not seen. Popular missions, conversely, were less ‘stereophonic’ and took advantage of a semiotic homogeneity between what was heard and what was seen [‘I am talking about death, I show you a skull’; ‘I am evoking Heaven, see the procession of angels’]. In Capuchin or Jesuit missions, and in others as well, preaching was, in a way, complementing and explaining religious dramas, which had been played just before. That is how, in the French Alps, François de Sales could preach about the real presence in Eucharist just after a religious drama representing the coming down of the manna.39 Moreover, while in ceremonial preaching, the setting was not required as such by the preacher, who just had to adapt to it, the setting of mission sermons was fully part of the performance, and missionaries were directors of the whole show. That does not mean that writings and printed documents played no role in the missions and several studies have shown the importance of leaflets and books circulated by missionaries, or, in the case of Honoré de Cannes for instance, sold by a bookseller who followed them everywhere.40 Honoré de Cannes did in fact publish a variety of works, from simple posters illustrating mottos such as ‘Dieu te regarde Pecheur, et tu n’y penses pas’, ‘Paradis perdu, tout est perdu; Paradis gagné, tout est gagné’ [God is watching you, Sinner, even though you may not think it; paradise lost, all is lost; paradise gained, all is gained], to a 300-page book entitled Régime de vie spirituelle, pour conserver et augmenter le fruit de la Mission, which was reprinted on numerous occasions.

39 See Bernard Dompnier, ‘Un aspect de la dévotion eucharistique dans la France du XVIIe siècle: les prières des Quarante Heures’, Revue d’Histoire de l’Eglise de France, 67 (178) (1981): 5–31, p. 12. 40 About Oratorians, see Venard, ‘Les missions des oratoriens’, p. 27. About the relatively limited use of books in missions covering largely illiterate rural areas, see François Lebrun, ‘La pastorale de la conversion et les missions intérieures: l’exemple des Lazaristes en Haute-Bretagne au XVIIe siècle’, La Conversion au XVIIe siècle. Actes du XIIe colloque du CMR17, (Marseille, 1983), p. 250. However, on the importance of printed catechisms in Jesuit missionary projects, despite the illiteracy of many believers, see Louis Châtellier, ‘Les campagnes européennes au temps de la réforme catholique: pays de missions ou centres missionnaires?’, in La Christianisation des campagnes, I, p. 311 and following pages. One could add that, conversely, Jean Eudes gradually established bonfĳires as a ritual ending his missions – and what he burned in these bonfĳires was games, images and trinkets, but also impious books. Missions were about replacing ‘bad’ images by good ones, ‘bad’ habits by good ones, but also ‘bad’ books by good ones. Mission Preaching in Seventeenth-Century France 203

Spiritual reading was thus supposed to support and fortify prayer, and therefore to prolong the efffects of the mission and multiply its fruits, either directly, when people could read, or when the book was sufffĳicently well illustrated, or indirectly, when they were aimed at the local clergy. For instance, in his book, Honoré de Cannes gives advice on how to live after conversion: prayers, meditation, retreat, spiritual readings, the latter being encouraged by a list of other pious books.41 Therefore, though primarily an oral phenomenon, missions did not only involve visual efffects and strategies, but also written texts. According to the old association between writing and durability, printed books were seen as a privileged way to root into hearts the intense, but potentially ephemeral, spiritual regeneration brought about by the missionaries’ presence. Sermon as a discourse, whether pronounced before peasants or before the Court, in accordance or in contradiction with its visual setting, was just a part of the whole semiotic system of preaching, meant to achieve a durability which was apparently reserved for writing. This semiotic system would attach a particular importance to visual signs, as if they were a kind of symbolic substitute for written words, durability being related to the eyes rather than the ears. The disciple and follower of Breton preacher Le Nobletz, Julien Maunoir, S.J., wrote:

[le sens] de l’ouye, qui est la porte ordinaire de l’Evangile, ne luy sembloit pas entierement efffĳicace, parce qu’il n’en demeure presque rien dans les esprits les plus grossiers, qui n’ont ny la mémoire assez heureuse, ny la conception assez aisée: Il jugeoit donc qu’il falloit aider ce sens par celuy de la veuë, en luy presentant des objets qui determinassent l’esprit, & qui luy imprimassent plus distinctement ce qu’on voudroit luy faire entendre.’42

41 About the role played by writings in the missionary methods, see Isabelle Bonnot- Rambaud, Hérétique ou saint?, p. 390; and Bernard Dompnier, ‘Les missions des Capucins et leur empreinte sur la Réforme catholique en France’, in Mouvements franciscains et société française: XIIe–XXe siècles, ed. by André Vauchez (Paris, 1984), pp. 127–147, at p. 140. 42 Antoine Verjus, La Vie de Monsieur Le Nobletz, pp. 172–173. See P.J. Van Schaick, ‘Le cœur et la tête. Une pédagogie par l’image populaire’, Revue d’Histoire de la Spiritualité, 50 (1974), p. 475; and Ralph Dekoninck, Ad imaginem. Statuts, fonctions et usages de l’image dans la littérature spirituelle jésuite du XVIIe siècle (Genève, 2005), pp. 285–286. [(The sense) of hearing which is ordinarily the gateway for the Gospel, did not seem entirely efffĳicacious to him, because there remains hardly anything of it in the most vulgar spirits, who do not have felicitous memories, nor facility in understanding concepts. He thought he should help hearing by the sense of sight showing some objects which would predispose the spirit and would imprint on it more clearly what he wanted the people to grasp]. 204 Régent-Susini

Le Nobletz tries to invent a written non-verbal substitute for his largely illiterate flock, by showing them illustrated panels and giving them illustrated booklets which, back home, would ‘representer à leurs yeux & à leur mémoire les sujets sur lesquels il vouloit qu’elles exerçassent leur entendement & leur volonté’ [represent before their eyes and memory matters on which he wanted them to fĳix their understanding and desire].43 Nevertheless, missionaries did not just invent a pictorial substitute for writing. They had to invent a whole new way of making their teachings last in the listeners’ consciousness. Addressing people who, particularly in the countryside, still largely belonged to an oral culture, they had to seek how to ensure their message had, if not permanence, at least a new durability commensurate with writing. And they knew it all too well, since they often lamented about the superfĳiciality and ephemerality of the changes they prompted.44 This feeling was also linked to a stereotyped representation of the lower classes, in particular, rural lower classes, as driven by their passions and subject to violent and ever-changing emotions.45 The only durability they could reach was via the visual and afffective memory of their listeners. And missionaries vacillated between considering this memory a blank, or fĳilled with impious images, which would have to be replaced by pious ones, just like pious chants should fĳill the soundscape and replace chatter and secular songs. But anyway, they thought they had to ‘print’ virtuous images in their listeners’ memory, so that they could bring them back home, thereby liberating the sermon from the particular circumstances of its delivery.46 Missions were thus

43 Antoine Verjus, La Vie de Monsieur Le Nobletz, p. 357. 44 For lay evidence about the superfĳicial and ephemeral efffect of missions, see Jean de Gaufreteau, Chronique bordeloise (Bordeaux: Gounouilhou, 1878), II, p. 173; and Journal de Jean Bauchez, grefffĳier de Plappeville, au XVIIe siècle, ed. by Ch. Abel et E. de Bouteiller (Metz, 1868), p. 467–469. Among clerics, see Antoine Arnauld’s severe judgement in a letter to Paul Lejeune, 30 October 1660 (Œuvres d’Antoine Arnauld, (Paris, 1775), I, pp. 215– 217). And among missionaries themselves, see for instance Albert de Paris (Manuel de la mission à l’usage des Capucins de la province de Paris (Troyes, 1702), p. 12 and Jean-Baptiste Badou, Exercices spirituels (Toulouse, 1716), ‘Préface’, p. 13. 45 This view is particularly explicit for Capuchin preaching, which develops a whole conversion strategy based on ‘emotional seisms’, a sort of Christian catharsis which should paradoxically liberate listeners from the immediacy of afffects. However, it also appears in members of secular clergy such as Jean-Pierre Camus. See Anne Régent-Susini, ‘Sauvage ou bon sauvage? Le paysan chez Jean-Pierre Camus’, Littératures classiques, 79 (2012– 2013): 127–142. 46 For instance, about Capuchin Chérubin de Maurienne preaching the ‘Fourty Hours’ in Savoie in the beginning of the XVIIe century and using religious drama to ‘print Christian documents, through senses, in the minds of idiot peoples’, see Charles de Genève, Les Trophées sacrés ou Missions des Capucins en Savoie, dans l’Ain, la Suisse romande et la Mission Preaching in Seventeenth-Century France 205 conceived as a total and intermedial educational system, capable of attracting people, and of making a deep and lasting impression on them. That does not mean that all missions were highly passionate, swelling with pathos, or full of sound and fury. The deliberately general survey of missionary practices given here should not lead to thinking that there was such a thing as a unifĳied method for missionary preaching. More specifĳically, diffferent types of mission granted a diffferent importance to body language, both of the preacher and the listeners. Their common goal was to leave a lasting and efffective mark on listeners. Lazarists, for instance, promoted long, sober and interiorized missions, Capuchins and Jesuits went for shorter, intensely passionate, and visual missions. The fĳirst type created a kind of ‘reasonable’ orality which would offfer the listeners an impassionate access to truth, while the second would gradually elaborate a double performance: that of the preacher, and that of the listeners, gradually ‘trained’ to play their part fully. Nevertheless, both types of mission, while still popular and successful for the greater part of the eighteenth century, would be attacked, mocked and despised, ever more frequently by rising bourgeois elites. Even when in other European countries, such as Bohemia, Netherlands, Italy, or Spain, Baroque forms of piety continued developing, had they lost, in France, their initial energy and become dry didactic sessions where public and efffusive forms of devotion were no longer expressed?47 Or on the contrary, had these devotional practices become obsolete, in a society now governed by an elitist taste for a more sophisticated and internalized devotion, where people saw missions as a relic of a sensual medieval sensibility, prone to vulgar exaggerations, and to frantic improvisations, that is, as a form of supposedly inferior orality, which had more to do with seeing than with hearing, with passion than with reason? Not that tears would be expelled from public sphere, for those same bourgeois would gladly cry in theatres, for instance, but then they would be moral rather than spiritual tears, prompted by intimate situations and feelings, rather than by eschatological fears. The great time of intermediality in French preaching had come to an end.

Vallée d’Aoste, à la fĳin du XVIe et au XVIIe siècle, ed. by I.F. Tisserand (Lausanne, 1976), 3rd series, XII, p. 84 (translation is author’s own). 47 This is Louis Châtellier’s theory. See Louis Châtellier, ‘A propos de la déchristianisation au XVIIIe siècle’, pp. 492–493. chapter 6 Powerful Words: St Vincent Ferrer’s Preaching and the Jews in Medieval Castile

Carolina Losada Translated by Lesley K. Twomey and Thomas V. Cohen

Buena gent, çerca de esta palabra propuesta yo entiendo de predicar e declarar oy [. . .]. E avremos algunos secretos de la Sancta Scriptura para alunbramiento de jodíos y moros.

[Good people, from this Word suggested I intend to preach and today declare (. . .) And we will take some secrets from Holy Scripture to enlighten Jews and Moors Vincent Ferrer, February 1412]1

Indisputably, a popular preacher must be gifted enough to turn a fĳine phrase. Vincent or Vicente Ferrer (1350–1419), a well-known medieval Dominican preacher, was exceptional in this regard. At his canonization trial, in Toulouse, Vannes, and Naples [1453–54], most witnesses attested to how he preached in Catalan and was understood equally by all those present at his many sermons, whether they were Castilian, Breton, or Swiss.2 Ferrer had the ‘gift of tongues’ or glossolalia, a gift that signals the Holy Spirit’s presence. He was understood by all those who heard him, despite the bounds imposed by diffferent

1 Vicente Ferrer, ‘Sermón de los quatro aguyjones que nos da Ihesú Christo’, preached in Salamanca between February 7 and 12, transcribed by Pedro Cátedra García in his Sermón, sociedad, y literatura en la Edad Media. San Vicente Ferrer en Castilla (1411–1412): estudio bibliográfĳico, literario y dicióne de los textos inéditos (Madrid, 1994), p. 379. 2 Proceso de Canonización de San Vicente Ferrer, trans. and ed. by Sebastián Fuster Perelló O.P. (Valencia, 2007).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004291829_008 Powerful Words: St Vincent Ferrer’s Preaching 207 languages, a feature that gave his words enormous force.3 Ferrer’s discourse could catch the attention and be understood, a capacity as influential as it was hard to measure.4 Vincent Ferrer was a wandering preacher for the last twenty years of his life, acclaimed by his peers, by those in power, and the whole populace. His strategic relationships with kings and bishops – he was an avid defender of the Avignon papacy and confessor to Benedict XIII – gave authority to his persona and his preaching and upheld his ceaseless labour for the moral reform of a society that thought itself in a permanent state of crisis.5 Ferrer worried little about theological debate; his sermons were strongly rooted in the moral and social order. His sermons were supported and promoted by secular and church authorities. Ferrer called for a Church of lay members who respected and followed the basic rules of Christianity. He made use of a main soteriologi- cal weapon to achieve this end: exclusion from salvation. His main objective – moral reform – seemed more important to him than theology’s boundaries; to give his preaching greater force he could dip into heterodox ideas.6 He was steeped in theology, fully aware of popular sermons’ limits, in subject and ideology, and became one of the most famous preachers of his time through his original and fearsome message, and his zeal to communicate.7 Thus he became

3 Glossolalia appears in Acts 2.4. See Roger Strondstadt, The Charismatic Theology of St. Luke (Peabody, MA, 1977), pp. 56–58, 71–73. For the gift of tongues in Ferrer, see Alberto Ferreiro, ‘Vincent Ferrer’s Beati Petri Apostoli: Canonical and Apocryphal Sources in Popular Vernacular Preaching’, Harvard Theological Review, 91 (1) (1998): 41–57. 4 For an historical approach to Ferrer, see Tomás Martínez Romero, Apoximaciò als sermons de sant Vicent Ferrer (Valencia, 2002); Albert Hauf’s Panorama crític de la literatura catalana: Edat mitjana. Dels orígens a principis del segle XV, ed. by Albert Hauf (Barcelona, 2010). For texts from the Castilian campaign, see Pedro Cátedra García. Sermón, sociedad y literatura en la Edad Media. San Vicente Ferrer en Castilla (1411–1412). Estudio bibliográfĳico, literario y edición de textos inéditos (Salamanca, 1994). 5 Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries (New York, 1990), pp. 41–42. See also Bernard McGinn, Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil (San Francisco, CA, 1994), p. 78; Niels Christian Hvidt, Christian Prophecy: The Post-Biblical Tradition (Oxford, 2007), p. 256; Pedro Lozano Escribano & Lucinio Anaya Acebes, Literatura apocalíptica cristiana: hasta el año 1000 (Madrid, 2002), p. 19. 6 Jean Gerson pleaded with Ferrer (letter of 1417) not to abet flagellant practices: Francisco Diago O.P., Historia de la vida, milagros, muerte y discípulos del bienaventurado predicador apostólico valenciano San Vicente Ferrer de la Orden de Predicadores (Barcelona, 1600), p. 496. For the letter see Obras y escritos de San Vicente Ferrer, ed. by Adolfo Robles (Valencia, 1996), p. 447. 7 For super-preachers like Ferrer, see Miri Rubin, ‘Europe Remade: Purity and Danger in Late Medieval Europe’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (Sixth Series), 11 (2001): 101–124. 208 Losada a social agent whose effforts make him a prime medieval example of social, moral, and cultural ‘communication’.8 The force of Ferrer’s sermons has been acknowledged by hagiographers and historians alike, who have called him the ‘conversion champion’.9 The word went that twenty thousand Jews had been converted in the Castilian mission; one story recounts how he burst into a Salamanca synagogue without forewarning, and, with divine aid, converted all those present; there is also story of a synagogue converted into a church by the crowd after Ferrer preached there.10 Such episodes, rich in imagery, are difffĳi- cult to prove historically; nevertheless, they evoke the great success of Ferrer’s sermons, both his results (so many converted) and, also, his campaign for a single religion, via conversion of the Jews. Ferrer’s campaign in Castile lasted almost a year. Called in by the regents – Juan II’s mother, Catherine of Lancaster and uncle, Fernando de Antequera – whilst the king was a minor, Ferrer brought into play two subjects of his preaching in Castile: the Jews and the world’s end. These were closely connected. To Ferrer, to get rid of Judaism, a danger in the bosom of Christian society, would reform morals and behaviour and prepare the Second Coming.11 Ferrer’s eagerness to convert the Jews and the strategies he employed surfaced in all his preaching campaigns but it was in Castile that Ferrer’s sermons were crucial when, in January 1412, segregation laws were passed there. Medieval society produced powerful and exceptional oral performances, for, where few could read or write, orality blossomed. The sermon, prominent in

8 See Marco Mostert, ‘New Approaches to Medieval Communication’, in his New Approaches to Medieval Communication, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy vol. 1, (Turnhout, 1999), pp. 16–37. 9 For Ferrer and anti-Jewish feeling see: Amran Rica, Judíos y conversos en el reino de Castilla: propaganda y mensajes políticos, sociales y religiosos (siglos XIV–XVI) (Valladolid, 2009); Yitzhak Baer, History of the Jews in Christian Spain, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, PA, 1992); Julio Valdeón Baruque, El Chivo Expiatorio, Judíos, revueltas y vida cotidiana en la Edad Media (Valladolid, 2000); Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti- Judaism (London, 1982); José María Monsalvo Antón, Teoría y evolución de un conflicto social: el antisemitismo en la baja Edad Media (Madrid, 1985), among others. 10 Alvar García de Santa María, ‘Crónica de Juan II, 1512–1517’, in Generaciones y semblanzas, ed. by Jesús Domínguez Bordona, Clásicos Castellanos, 61 (Madrid, 1941), p. 340; José Sanchis Sivera, Historia de San Vicente Ferrer (Valencia, 1896 and 1993), p. 296; Vicente Justiniano Antist, Vida de San Vicente Ferrer (Valencia, 1575); transcription by Fr. José María de Garganta O.P. and Fr. Vicente Forcada O.P., Biografía y escritos de San Vicente Ferrer (Valencia, 1956), p. 172. 11 Carolina M. Losada, ‘El adversario del profeta: estrategias discursivas de conversión de los judíos y reforma de costumbres en un sermón de San Vicente Ferrer’, Bulletin Hispanique, 115 (1) (2013): 823–838. Powerful Words: St Vincent Ferrer’s Preaching 209 a largely oral world, was both a part of liturgy and a mechanism for reflecting on religion.12 It was a tool whose influence on politics, and on social, and cultural issues was almost endless. Many sermons were taken down in situ by scribes.13 The scribal texts are a rich source, illuminating the popular sermon of the early modern period as an oral act – a cultural device, where politics, religion, and society were inextricably entwined. This essay explores orality as an activity that shaped both practice and behaviour. It rescans the records of Ferrer’s popular sermons in the ten years leading up to 1410 with an eye to his many layers of meaning. As a preacher was a great influence, transforming, ordering, or legitimizing the society in which he was active, a fruitful way to catch the practical dynamics of mass communication, in medieval preaching, is to comb Ferrer’s discourse in his campaign to bring Spain to a single religion. Ferrer’s sermons had a double strategy: to construct and foster institutions and to reform Christian morals. This was all in a counterpoint to the Jews. We can take the oral sermon, and the preaching campaign, as a performance, and the written sermon-record as their historical evidence. The written sermon is opaque, so our path to the oral sermon has recourse to the history of orality. I reflect here on how late-medieval mass preaching afffected events, and changed the mind-set in the auditory. A sermon is the art of communication in action and, with Ferrer, it sets itself in a web of everyday behaviours that allow social actors to play their part, whether they be princes or peasants.14

The Sermon as an Oral Event

First offf, note, preaching is communication both spoken and heard, an interaction between preacher and auditory. The problem for historians has always been to capture the orality of the word, given sermons’ temporary nature. Sermons most often appear in books of sermons – formal collections used as a teaching tool by trainee clergy. However, just a few years ago, scholarly attention turned to the sermons copied down by reportatores, transcribed when they were delivered.15 In the text of such homilies, orality and writing cohabit,

12 For a socio-political approach to the sermon, see Mary Morrissey, ‘Interdisciplinarity and the Study of Early Modern Sermons’, The Historical Journal, 42 (4) (1999): 1111–1123. 13 Cátedra García, Sermón, sociedad, y literatura en la Edad Media, pp. 11–26. 14 For habitus, see Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Structures, Habitus, Practices’, in his The Logic of Practice (Chicago, IL, 1992), pp. 42–51. 15 On recording sermons, see Pedro Cátedra García, Sermón, sociedad y literatura, pp. 85–87. For use of recorded sermons, see Augustine Thompson, O.P., ‘From Texts to Preaching: 210 Losada since the oral element is reconstituted – mediated by the reportator – in the written version.16 The copies of sermons from the Castile campaign catch the quality of his speech, revealing that Ferrer preached there in Castilian, but was heavily influenced by Aragonese. Despite the hagiographers’ stress on his ‘gift of tongues’, clearly, he could adapt to the language spoken where he preached.17 The words of these written versions are the closest thing we have to a transcript of the real oral event of the act of preaching. We must allow for its natural limitations; although many reportatores translated simultaneously, their quills, however swift and agile, could capture neither all the action that accompanied the words nor the full weight of their meaning.18 Despite these reservations, the sermons from the Castile mission offfer the enormous advantage of feeling set in a particular time and place, and not lost in that abstraction – the book of sermons. Intersubjectivity leaps from these copies.19 Historical context allows study of both content and form; each sermon is a product of its moment. A sermon to a medieval crowd was a totalized event, where the whole apparatus was as important as what was said.20 By its very nature as an oral act, a sermon involved a series of non-verbal events, difffĳicult to pin down. Like any source, sermons as a record of past orality have their limitations. There is no perfect pathway, no complete record to recapture the whole past event of which the sermon itself was but a part. However, by reading carefully and rein- serting the sermon into the setting of its delivery one can come closer to the social event. This efffort requires painstaking analysis and imagination.21 In any oral event, tone of voice, visual signifĳiers, and gesture add as much to transmission as does content:

Retrieving Medieval Sermon as an Event’, in Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages, ed. by Carolyn Muessig (Boston, MA, 2002), pp. 13–37, at pp. 15–17. 16 Paul Zumthor, Introducción a la poesía oral (Madrid, 1991), p. 37. 17 For Ferrer’s modifĳied Valencian, see Cátedra García,Sermón, sociedad y literatura, p. 93. 18 Joan Fuster, ‘L’oratoria vicentina’, in Panorama crític de la literatura catalana: Edat mitjana. Dels orígens a principis del segle XV, ed. by Albert Hauf (Barcelona, 2010), p. 292. 19 María Marta García Negroni & María Tordesillas Colado, La enunciación en la lengua: de la deixis a la polifonía (Madrid, 2001), p. 75; and from a historiographical perspective, Morrissey, ‘Interdisciplinarity and the Study of Early Modern Sermons’, p. 1116. 20 Manuel Ambrosio Sánchez Sánchez, ‘Predicación y antisemitismo. El caso de San Vicente Ferrer’, in Proyección histórica de España en sus tres culturas: Castilla y León, América y el Mediterráneo, ed. by Eufemio Lorenzo Sanz, 3 vols (Valladolid, 1993), III, pp. 195–204, at p. 198. 21 Thompson, ‘From Texts to Preaching’, p. 35. Powerful Words: St Vincent Ferrer’s Preaching 211

[Ferrer] was an accomplished performer, punctuating his sermons with tears, silence, singing, and numerous gestures. He reportedly changed completely during his sermons, just as an actor does during a performance. His sermons contain statements that he must have combined with gestures, and a reportator drew a circle in his notes to illustrate Ferrer’s gesture demonstrating how to make the sign of the cross.22

A religious and moral message in no way precluded entertainment, at the preacher’s discretion. So, though the sermon as a literary device had its venerable structure, straitened in the artes praedicandi, its practice involved much drama. So the orality of the sermon shaped an event far more complex than the textual form laid out; the written record reduces an event rich in sound, sight, and setting to the literary language that frames it.23 Emphasis, shouts, putting on voices, and even obscene language, were far indeed from the lessons of the artes praedicandi, the preachers’ manuals. As an oral event, the sermon aimed at impact, with teaching a second goal. Both ends looked to entertainment. A sermon turned to several media: voice joined with image and gesture. As a build-up, the Mass could turn this public act into a moment of fervour. Fray Vicente would arrive in town with a train of some 500 followers, folk of every sort.24 He cast himself as a simple pilgrim, walking barefoot or astride a humble ass. As he approached town, a long procession of flagellants drew up, their groans ascending: ‘Have pity!, Have pity!’ Marching feet and the crack of whips on blood-soaked backs set a rhythmic beat. The escort did penance, while Ferrer rode or walked at the head of this fearsome procession to symbolize his imitation of Christ. He would have a huge wooden cross just behind him; cross and preacher were the fĳirst to enter town.25

22 Beverly Mayne Kienzle, ‘Medieval Sermons and their Performance: Theory and Record’, in Preacher, Sermon, and Audience in the Middle Ages, ed. by Carolyn Muessig (Leiden, 2002), pp. 89–124, at p. 109. 23 Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy (London and New York, 2002), p. 10. 24 Rosa Vidal Doval, ‘Predicación y persuasión: Vicente Ferrer en Castilla, 1411–1412’, Revista de Poética Medieval, 24 (2010): 225–243, at pp. 237–238. For urban processions, see Robert Darnton, ‘A Bourgeois Puts his World in Order. The City as a Text’, in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1984), pp. 123–127. 25 Louis Châtellier, The Religion of the Poor: Rural Missions in Europe and the Formation of Modern Catholicism, c. 1500–1800 (London, 1997), p. 4. For such imagery’s impact, see Cynthia Polecritti, Preaching Peace in Renaissance Italy: Bernardino de Siena and his Audience (Washington, 2000), pp. 79–80. 212 Losada

Preaching generally took place in the open air, as few churches could hold all who came to hear. The preacher stood on a purpose-built stage, with the whole town, from dignitaries down to peasants watching – not omitting the Moors and Jews coerced for their instruction.26 Spain often compelled Jews to witness Christian preaching. But Ferrer, more than once, threatened the authorities, who were happy to comply, obliging Jews to attend and laying heavy fĳines or prison on them if they failed to come.27 Ferrer must have used all the non-verbal strategies at his disposal, for the sermons lasted three hours or longer, with the thousands present often all the while in ecstasy.28 The quest for reaction and engagement, desired by any performance, is all the more acute in medieval ones.29 We know that Ferrer put on voices, sometimes sang, and employed visual techniques to show how to make the sign of the cross, and often singled out sinners by pointing at them.30 But it is hard to catch the immediate reaction of those listening, because those who report on Ferrer’s preaching tend to refer to his content, not to his impact. Hearers must have conjoined ritualized response with spontaneity. The auditory participated actively, with sighs, tears, or shouts, stimulated by the preaching.31 Meanwhile, during the sermon, the auditory becomes as one, identifying with each other and with the preacher, even while the discourse stresses the diffferences inherent in that mass of people present. Written records communicate some of the passion of San Vicente’s sermons. When he is threatening the Jews to urge them to convert, he uses the second

26 Manuel Sanchis Guarner, ‘Estudi Preliminar’, Sant Vicent Ferrer, Sermons de Quaresma (Valencia, 1973), p. 17. 27 Fernando I of Aragon (the ex-regent Fernando de Antequera) writes his son in November 1414, reminding him to fĳine the Jews 1000 florins if they shun Ferrer’s preaching in Zaragoza. Months later he writes, asking his son and fray Vicente to release Jews imprisoned for failing to pay. Francisca Vendrell, ‘La actividad proselitista de San Vicente Ferrer durante el reinado de Fernando I de Aragón’, Sefarad, 13 (1953): 87–104, at pp. 97–98. 28 Preaching manuals set sermons at an hour, but many sources set Ferrer’s between two and six hours. 29 For medieval literature as performance, see Evelyn Birge Vitz and Linda Marie Zaerr, ‘Experimenting with the Performance in Medieval Narrative’, in Acts and Texts, Performance and Ritual in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. by Laurie Postlewate & Wim Hüsken (Amsterdam, 2007), pp. 303–315, p. 304. 30 Ferrer harangued Jews and clergy and sometimes scolded women, warning them not to chat idly during Mass: Vicente Ferrer, ‘Sermón sin título predicado en Ayllón, en la semana del 13 al 19 de noviembre de 1411’, transcribed by Cátedra García in his Sermón, sociedad, y literatura en la Edad Media, p. 289. 31 Polecritti tackles the relationship between Bernardino of Siena and the crowd: Cynthia Polecritti, Preaching Peace in Renaissance Italy: Bernardino of Siena and His Audience (Washington, 2000), pp. 72–81. Powerful Words: St Vincent Ferrer’s Preaching 213 person. Exclamation marks, included by the reportator in the written text, might signal that the tone of the sermon was threatening. One can imagine the impression that the aggressive body language would have made when Ferrer shouted: ‘Look, Jews! ’, pointing with his famous fĳinger at the Jews before him. Ferrer’s preaching drew huge crowds, the willing and unwilling. Such oral events were, for the medieval and early modern world, a major communication channel. The crowd’s size and the preacher’s political backing impressed the auditory, believers and unbelievers alike. Jews must have come; the sermons from Castile in 1411–12 show that, in towns with Jewish quarters, Ferrer made abundant reference to Jews – in Valladolid, Toledo, Salamanca, and in Segovia where Ferrer both alludes to Jews and addresses them directly to convert them.32 The Castilian sermons use at least three strategies for conversion: anath- emization, inclusiveness, and persuasion.33 The fĳirst blasts the Jews with the usual negatives. Ferrer calls them ‘mean’, ‘traitors’, ‘of the flesh’, ‘evil-hearted’, and ‘snakes’. Here he just rehearses standard terms.34 He aims here to uphold and reafffĳirm the separation between Jews and Christians, as interreligious contact harms the Christian community. The strategy is old; it perpetuates a stereotype, and preaches discrimination. The second strategy is very diffferent. It comes into play when the sermon’s words target all the listeners, without distinction, usually in sermons about the end of the world that aim to convert the Jews by brandishing the Final Judgement. Persuasion strategy is, probably, the mode most often present in Ferrer’s sermons. It aims to bring the Jews out of error, and convince them that Christ

32 Cátedra García in Sermón, sociedad, y literatura en la Edad Media, sermons mentioning Jews: ‘Sermón de enxienplos que Ihesú Christo nos mostró’ (in Illescas on 16 August 1411), pp. 323–335; ‘Sermón de las razones por que avemos de aver confĳiança en nuestro señor Dios’ (in Segovia between 30 August and 5 September 1411), pp. 337–348; ‘Sermón del “Pater Noster”, que fĳizo en Valladolid’ (in Valladolid or Toledo on 23 July 1411), pp. 355–365; ‘Sermón de los quatro aguyjones que nos da Ihesú Christo’ – probably the hardest-hitting of all, pp. 379–392; ‘Sermón que fabla de la natividad de Ihesú Christo’, (in Valladolid at Christmas 1411), pp. 507–524. The sermons on the Antichrist: ‘Sermón del avenimiento del Antechristo e de las otras cosas que deven venir en la fyn del mundo’, pp. 535–545; ‘Sermón segundo del Antechristo’, pp. 547–559; Meanwhile ‘Sermón III° del Antechristo’, preached in Toledo on 5, 7, and 8 July 1411, also alludes to the Jews, their salvation, and their possible alliance with the Antichrist. 33 Ricardo Muñoz Solla studies persuasion strategies in Castile in sermons 7 and 11, but overlooks the non-Jews present. ‘Estrategias de persuasión y oyentes judíos en dos sermones de san Vicente Ferrer’, El Olivo, 23 (49) (1999): 25–43. 34 For Ferrer’s Jew-stereotypes, the betrayer and the miser, see Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews, pp. 226–241. 214 Losada was the Messiah for whom they had waited. Ferrer brandishes texts from the Old Testament and from the Talmud, aiming to re-interpret passages rooted in Jewish tradition. His discourse, though not erudite, brims with standard biblical references which all knew from Christian or Jewish liturgy, plus abundant examples, to demonstrate the Jews’ error. His failure to mention the Jews’ internal hierachy is no surprise; aiming as he did to convert all, he probably saw no need for social distinctions. In a sermon preached sometime between 7 and 12 February 1412, somewhere between Salamanca and Zamora, after a dialogue with rabbis where characteristic arguments surfaced, Ferrer acts out a dialogue with the Jews and says:

Ascuchad respuesta. Dí, jodío, ¿la noche quien la fĳizo si non Dios? Pues si Dios la fĳizo, buena es e conplida, ca Dios no faze cosa menguada. ¿Pues por qué fĳizo después venir el día claro, ca Dios non se muda? Ca aquel mismo Dios que fĳizo la noche para dormir e para folgar e reposar, aquél mismo faze el día claro para trabajar e ganar la vida. Assí la ley de Moysés buena e santa es, e diola Dios para folgar en la casa deste mundo, porque non promete sinon cosas terrenales [. . .]. E ves aquí el día claro del sol de justiçia Christo Dios nuestro, el qual dio la ley nueva [. . .] para alcançar la gloria celestial de paraíso.35

This extract reproduces criticism that Jewish scholars traditionally laid against Christians: that the Old Testament is God’s Word too, given to the Jews, and should be respected. Ferrer insists that it is Christ, likened to the sun, who her- alds the true Law, the light of day, the sunlight of the Messiah. Here he translates the argument for the popular mind, via dialogue (also called platica or quaestio, a regular technique of medieval sermons in the dilatatio section).36

35 ‘Listen to the answer. Say, Jew, who made the night if it was not God? But if God made it then it is good and perfect, for God does not make anything bad. But why does he make bright day come after, for God does not change? For that same God who made the night for sleep, leisure, and rest, made the bright day for work and for earning a living. So the Law of Moses is good and holy, and God gave it to rest in the house of this world, because it only promises things of this world’ [. . .]. ‘And you can see here the bright day of the sun of justice Jesus Christ, our God, who gave the new Law, not so as to gain heavenly glory in Paradise’. Vicente Ferrer, ‘Sermón de los quatro aguyjones que nos da Ihesu Christo’, p. 384. 36 For the interfaith quaestio as rhetorical technique, see Cátedra García, Sermón, sociedad, y literatura en la Edad Media, p. 190. Powerful Words: St Vincent Ferrer’s Preaching 215

In this passage, Ferrer interrogates an imagined ordinary Jew, rebutting him, while denying him an imagined voice.37 Addressing the Jews, Ferrer makes a direct connection with them – asymmetric, it is true – recognizing them as part of his auditory, though obliged to hold their tongues. His othering-discourse uses detail to build a stereotype: the other, marginalized, had no say in this.38 The sermon, as an oral public act, is for the masses, part of their ordinary activities. Ferrer, the Jews, and the other assorted social sectors in a Castilian town unite in an event which holds and defĳines them, where being present convokes the particpants’ senses, bringing them to understand a systematic explanation of the society they inhabit. Yet the link between preacher and auditory changes signal, when it becomes clear that many of those in the crowd stand outside the social communion promoted by a sermon. Ferrer’s techniques (simplifĳied style, more practical than theoretical), also surfaced in voices like Bernardino de Siena’s or Girolamo Savonarola’s. All such preachers aimed for impact.39 Their vivid images, ready mnemonic techniques, and entertaining comparisons made the sermon a politico-pastoral tool. They invoked castles, mountains, and seas linked to the King, to baptism, or to Moses. The use of cardinal numbers and rhyme in the divisio of the thema, a technique characteristic of scholastic ars praedicandi, looked to fĳix the ideas expounded in hearers’ memories. Repetition is typical, as are numbering and rhyme, in Ferrer’s divisio of the ‘Sermón de los quatro aguyjones que nos da Ihesu Christo’ [Sermon of the four spurs which Christ gives us]. The intent is to link earthly law – here, that would be the anti-Jewish laws of 1412, so dear to the preacher – with divine foresight:

el primero aguijón es dolor corporal; el segundo aguijón es doctrina spiritual;

37 For Jewish ‘non-existence’ in the sermons, see Daniel Salas-Díaz, ‘Presencia y ausencia de los judíos en los “Sermons de Quaresma” de Vicente Ferrer’, Fifteenth Century Studies, 34 (2009): 162–171, at p. 162. 38 Michel De Certeau, La Fable mystique, I: XVIe–XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1982), p. 20. 39 Ferrer may have been influenced by the great sermon theoretician, Francesc Eiximenis, who subordinated theory to goals. See Albert Hauf, ‘Técniques manllevades a la predicació presents al Crestià’, in Panorama crític de la literatura catalana: Edat mitjana. Dels orígens a principis del segle XV, pp. 239–240. See also Lina Bolzoni, La rete delle immagini: Predicazione in volgare dalle origini a Bernardino da Siena (Turin, 2002), and Gabriella Zarri, Le sante vive, profezie di corte e devozione femminile tra ’400 e ’500 (Turin, 1990), p. 15, et passim. 216 Losada

el tercero aguijón es temor justiçial; el quarto aguijón es amor celestial.40

This free play of images helped Ferrer wield the sermon as an instrument of power, social control, and homogeneization; for these sermons served not only church needs but also, often even more so, social politics.41 Ferrer’s sermons often aimed their similitudines at political ends. His words reflect a fruitful alliance with lay authorities, intimately tied to the issue of the Jews. Ferrer, expounding Exodus in rich detail, depicted the Jews hemmed in by Pharaoh’s army, saying:

que de una parte era la mar Bermeja e de la otra parte era la montaña muy alta e áspera, que non se podía pasar. Esta montaña es el rrey de Castilla, que es montaña tan fuerte que non se pueden passar las sus ordenaçiones fechas contra los jodíos.42

The power of the King and his law is evoked by mountains’ immutable majesty, in nature and in the Bible, in many passages, mostly Old Testament, familiar to Jewish listeners, where God and his law reside on a mountain.43 In this image the preacher draws a division, subtle but clear, between two powers that act conjointly. On the one hand, lies the sea representing baptism, linked to Christianity, and, on the other, stands the royal mountain. The Jews are caught between these two powers, both urging them to convert. Ferrer uses the simile king/mountain, to defend the ordinances he had himself encouraged, and also upholds royal power.

40 The fĳirst spur is bodily pain; The second spur is spiritual doctrine; The third is fear of justice; The fourth is heavenly love. Vicente Ferrer, ‘Sermón de los quatro aguyjones que nos da Ihesu Christo’, p. 379. 41 Isabella Iannuzzi, El poder de la palabra en el siglo XV: Fray Hernando de Talavera (Valladolid, 2009), p. 233. 42 ‘For on one side was the Red Sea and on the other was the high and rugged mountain, which was impossible to cross. This mountain is the King of Castile, who is such a strong mountain that his ordinances made against the Jews cannot be crossed’, Vicente Ferrer, ‘Sermón de los quatro aguyjones que nos da Ihesu Christo’, p. 384. 43 Moses’s receiving the Tablets of the Law on the mountain is a hierophany (Exodus 24, 12.18; 25). The mountain is linked to God in: Genesis 19, 17; Isaiah 2, 2.3; Daniel 2, 45. Powerful Words: St Vincent Ferrer’s Preaching 217

The ‘Other’ in the Words of the Sermon

Co-existence between Jews and Christians in Castile became ever more tense and stormy from the second half of the fourteenth century, the trouble peaking in the 1391 pogroms.44 The violent strife went beyond urban social relations; it was no longer a matter of how to live side by side, but a religious, political, and legal issue.45 This internal violencia sagrada [holy violence] should be distin- guised from other medieval mayhem.46 For medieval Christians, Jews were an Other.47 Christians could hold a mirror to their own ideal, devout society.48 For Christians confronting on-going economic, political, and demographic crisis, the Jewish community might seem to distil every evil and cause all ills: famine, plague, poverty, and violence.49 As such evils were frequent, Jews were easy scapegoats.50 Medieval popular violence aimed at various targets – lords, barons, ghettos – but the uncomfortable presence of the Jewish community in a society that ever more saw itself as possessing universal truth offfered a way of expiating sin via attacks on Jews and ghettos.51 Meanwhile, Jews and Christians still lived side by side peacefully and sociably, but with moments of tension and violence. Fourteenth-century violence unsettled monarchs’ relations with Jews. In Castile, as in many other kingdoms, monarchs tended to protect Jewish quarters; they had their ties

44 In using ‘co-existence’ I follow David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ, 1996), p. 21. 45 Explanations vary, Marxists pointing to misdirected class struggle, others citing collective psychology, Jean Delumeau, for instance. See Sin and Fear, p. 40 and passim. 46 For varieties of medieval violence, see Jonathan Elukin, Living Together, Living Apart: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ, 2007), pp. 89–115. 47 Reinhart Kosselleck, Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main, 1979). In English, Futures Past, on the Semantics of Historical Times, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge MA, 2004), pp. 155–156. 48 For Christian mirroring of opponents, see Fabián Campagne, ‘El otro-entre-nosotros, funcionalidad de la noción de superstitio en el modelo hegemónico cristiano (España, siglos XVI–XVII)’, Bulletin Hispanique, 102 (1) (2000): 37–64, at p. 43. 49 For fourteenth-century crisis and attacks on Jews see Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London, 1967); Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, and Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century, trans. John & Anne Tedeschi (New York, 1992). 50 René Girard, Le Bouc emissaire (Paris, 1982). 51 Cohn, Warrant for Genocide; Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York, 1985). 218 Losada to the Jewish community, for they had Jews at court and relied on the taxes Jews paid.52 Meanwhile, for the Church, co-existence of the so-called ‘people that killed God’ with Christians was a problem. The matter of coexistence had been par- tially resolved by St Augustine, who saw intermingling as necessary for the Jews’ salvation.53 From the fourteenth century, however, the Church began a crusade to homogenize society and reform traditions, climaxing at the Council of Trent.54 Suppression of dissent had marked the Christian Church from its earliest times, across the crusades, down to the preaching campaigns.55 Vicente Ferrer belonged to a long line of Spanish theologians and religious writers who wrestled with the subject of the Jews.56 Raimundo de Peñaforte wrote a subtly crafted accusation of heresy about the Jews and the Talmud, engendering a long tradition urging forced conversion and seeking to bring the full wrath of the Inquisition on the heads of the Jews. The Milagros de Nuestra Señora by Gonzalo de Berceo recounts the myth of the mockery of Good Friday. Ferrer, although he inherited this tradition, departed from its harshest arguments in two key ways. On the one hand, he tried to persuade the

52 For the Crown, the Jews, and taxes, see M.A. Ladero Quesada, La Hacienda Real de Castilla en el siglo XV (Madrid, 1973), which has detailed data. Also Ladero Quesada, ‘Las juderías de Castilla según los servicios fĳiscales del siglo XV’,Sefarad , 31 (1971): 24–64; and ‘Los judíos castellanos del siglo XV en el arrendamiento de los impuestos reales’, Cuadernos de Historia de España, 6 (1975): 417–439. 53 Augustine of Hippo, De civitate dei, 18.46 in Obras Completas de San Agustín, pp. 515–517 (Madrid 2004), XVI and XVII. See also: De civitate, 20.29, pp. 736–738; Tractatus adversus Judeos, Patrologia Latina, 42, VI.7, VII.9, IX.12; Obras Completas de San Agustín (Madrid 2004), XXXVIII, pp. 858–879. 54 Michel De Certeau, Le Lieu de l’autre: Histoire religieuse et mystique (Paris, 2005). I cite the Spanish edition: El lugar del otro: historia religiosa y mística, trans. by Víctor Goldstein (Buenos Aires, 2007), p. 31. 55 Brett Edward Whalen, Dominion of God: Christendom and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA, 2009), pp. 152–159. 56 Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews, pp. 103–129, 199–224; Carlos Sainz de la Maza compares Gonzalo de Berceo’s Milagros de Nuestra Señora and Alfonso X’s Cantigas de Santa María, ‘Los judíos de Berceo y de Alfonso X en la España de las “tres religiones” ’, Dicenda: Cuadernos de fĳilología hispánica, 6 (1987): 209–216; Steven McMichael, ‘The Sources for Alfonso de Espina’s Messianic Argument against the Jews in the Fortalitium Fidei’, in Iberia and the Mediterranean World of the Middle Ages: Studies in Honor of Robert I. Burns S.J., ed. by Larry J. Simon (Leiden, 1995), pp. 72–95; Eleazar Gutwirth ‘The Jews in Fifteenth-Century Castilian Chronicles’, The Jewish Quarterly Review, 74 (1984): 379–396; Kenneth R. Scholberg, ‘Minorities in Medieval Castilian Literature’, Hispania, 37 (2) (1954): 203–209. Powerful Words: St Vincent Ferrer’s Preaching 219

Jews to convert, recommending enclosure and internal banishment for those who refused, but sought neither to expel them nor to pursue them as heretics.57 Meanwhile, he had an original persective on the Jews’ salvation when he afffĳirmed (clashing with Inquisitor Nicholas Eymerich) that Judas Iscariot was saved, since he had not sinned of his own free will but merely fulfĳilled the role assigned him by divine plan.58 For all that, San Vicente brandished the medieval stereotype of the Jew- Other.59 He repeated these arguments so often that one copyist stopped taking notes, merely writing: ‘Ut supra in aliis sermonibus.’60 A recurrent topos is the obstinacy and contumacy of the Jews.61 In Segovia Ferrer turned to the Old Testament:

Ves que dize este propheta de vosotros jodíos, diz: ‘por falsedat han traspassado la casa de Jafudá e han negado diziendo: Non es Dios’mas omne. E por este pecado han avido destruçión’.62

Here, Ferrer alludes to Jeremiah (5, 11–17), whose call to the Jews to reform their morals prophesies that Jahweh will punish the tribe of Judah ( Juda or Jafudá in Valencian) who do not believe in Him but worship a non-god or god- man (this tale links easily with the Jews’ refusal to believe in Christ’s divinity). Judah’s tribe has failed to believe, says Jeremiah, and says Ferrer too and it will not be excused on account of stupidity or blindness. They have offfended God, and still offfend him today by not converting, and they will never be saved or freed from prison, as a minority, captives in a Christian world – Augustine’s old argument – even if the kings protect them:

57 Vicente Ferrer perhaps took part in the interfaith Dispute of Tortosa (1412–1413), with his allies, Fernando I of Aragon, Jerónimo de Santa Fé, and Benedict XIII. 58 Alfonso Esponera Cerdán, ‘San Vicente Ferrer y el arrepentimiento y salvación de Judas Iscariote’, Anales Valentinos. Revista de fĳilosofía y teología, 63 (2006): 143–147. 59 Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven, CT, 1999); Joan Young Gregg, Devils, Women, and Jews: Reflections of the Other in Medieval Sermon (Albany, NY, 1997). 60 As above, in other sermons. Cátedra García, Sermón, sociedad y literatura, p. 244. 61 Christian objections to coexistence looked to Gregory IX in 1239: the Jews are stubborn. Cohen, The Friars and the Jews, p. 242. 62 You see that the prophet says of you Jews: ‘through their falsity they have transgressed against the house of Judah and have denied it saying: “He is not God but a man”. And because of this sin there has been destruction’. See Vicente Ferrer, ‘Sermón de las razones por que avemos de aver confĳiança en nuestro señor Dios’, p. 341. 220 Losada

‘E esta es la rrazón por qué los jodíos son en captividad, ca en todas las otras captividades venían algunos prophetas e avían algunas consola- çión, mas agora gente desanparada es.’63

[And that is why the Jews are in captivity, for in all the other captivities there came some prophets and they had some consolation, but this time the people is helpless.]

Here Ferrer describes the worst kind of Jew, who refuses to believe, even when knowing that Christ is the true Messiah. Often, however, Ferrer aims to instruct those who do not believe because they do not know the truth. This second sort, clearly, should be more amenable to conversion and salvation.64

E por esto, jodíos, esto es lo que avedes de fazer, que entredes en la mar Bermeja, que es el santo baptismo, que está abierto a tañido con la verga de la santa cruz e baptizadvos e seredes salvos, así e todos vuestros enemigos se afogarán. E los que se bautizaren primero o en medio o en çaga todos serán salvos. Mas, aunque todos sean salvos, así como pasaron la mar, mas aquél que entró primero, que fue el tribu de Jafudá, ganó corona rreal. Assí vosotros agora, los que primeros entrades en el baptismo ganaredes mayor corona, aunque todos vos salvedes. Ca la orde- nación que el rey ha fecha que vengades a la predicación, por vuestra salvación es fecha, aunque venides por fuerça e con aguyjones e a mal de vuestro grado.65

[So, Jews, to do this, here is what you must do. Go into the Red Sea, which is Holy Baptism, which opened up at the tap of the wand of the Holy Cross, and be baptized and you will be saved, and all your enemies will drown. And those who will be baptized fĳirst, or in the middle, or at the end, all will saved. But, just as all would be saved, as they crossed the Sea,

63 Vicente Ferrer, ‘Sermón de las razones por que avemos de aver confĳiança en nuestro señor Dios’, p. 345. 64 ‘Diz que era un jodío en tienpo de nuestro Señor Ihesu Christo que estava en error contra la fe cathólica, e era un disçípulo de Ihesu Christo ignorante, e non tenía error más ignorancia.[. . .] E Ihesu Christo le respondió por su disçipulo e dixo –‘¿Non ves tú jodío, que tienes grand viga de tu error e rreprehendes la ignorançia?’, y continúa un poco más adelante: ‘Hermano, dejame hablar e yo te lo haré entender e te sacaré la paja de la ignorançia que tienes en el ojo’, Vicente Ferrer, ‘Sermón de las razones por que avemos de aver confĳiança en nuestro señor Dios’, p. 345. 65 Vicente Ferrer, ‘Sermón de las razones por que avemos de aver confĳiança en nuestro señor Dios’, p. 345. Powerful Words: St Vincent Ferrer’s Preaching 221

but the fĳirst who went in, who were the tribe of Judah, won the royal crown, so, you, now, if you are fĳirst to enter baptism, you will have the greater crown, even if all of you will be saved. For the order that the king put out, that you should come to the preaching, was done for your salvation, even if you came by force, goaded, and unwilling.]

This passage has a double meaning. On the one hand, Ferrer tempts the Jews with sure salvation, the surer, the sooner they are baptized. On the other hand, this invitation is coloured by his assertion that the Jews are subject to the power of the king: ‘Ca la ordenación que el rey ha fecha que vengades a la predicación, por vuestra salvación es fecha’ [for the King’s ordinance requiring you to come to hear the preaching is for your salvation]. As with Augustine’s doctrine, baptism must be taken freely, but, for the unfaithful, preaching, conversion’s tool, should be obligatory.66 This dual image of the Jew fĳits the medieval view, derived from Augustine, of what Jews mean for Christians. They were liminal fĳigures on the moral landscape, ‘empty vessels’ awaiting Christian wine.67 So the innocent Jew needed completion. That was Ferrer’s lesson: the preacher’s words should fĳill him. The preacher threatened, instructed, and tempted, playing in a flexible double key of perfĳidy and innocence, cajoling the innocent and blasting the hope- lessly stubborn. This same double message implied discernimiento, the holy gift of discernment, that distinguished bad from good.68 Ferrer’s century prized discernment, of good from evil, wrong from right, thanks to the slippery nature of things: the Great Schism, the Hundred Years’ War. It was a mark of Ferrer’s preaching, a stab at a way to protect oneself amidst confusion. His two fĳigures offfered a model for social judgment: spatial separation, the use of marks, the end of contact with the Bad Jew. Citing the rectitude of patriarchs and Old Testament kings, preachers could point out how, thanks to history, they still would never know Christ.69 Ferrer exploited his Dominican education to the hilt – Spanish mendicants studied Hebrew and read Jewish texts – and plucked images from

66 Meanwhile, Ferrer scholarship says little about the preacher’s connections to the Moors. Ana Echeverría Arsuaga, ‘Política y religión frente al Islam: la evolución de la legislación real castellana sobre musulmanes en el siglo XV’, Qurtuba, 4 (1999): 45–72, at p. 49. 67 On Augustine, and later anti-Jewish arguments, see Cohen, The Friars and The Jews, p. 21; Gregg, Devil, Woman and Jews, p. 249. 68 Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 2003), p. 65, and throughout. 69 Larissa Taylor, Soldiers of Christ: Preaching in Late Medieval and Reformation France (New York, 1992), p. 153. 222 Losada the Talmud. He would revile prominent Jews, calling Simon bar Kokhba (literally Son of the Star) the Son of Lies, and flayed the Jews for taking refuge in a man he called ‘a false messiah’.70 Meanwhile, unlike those ancient good Jews, today’s bad ones refused to recognize the truth their own prophets would have yearned for. And Ferrer’s good Jews now? Any who would convert with open arms. Could they not see how Christ came and died for them! Discernment and glossolalia imbued the sermons. The logic of conversion, gift of grace, would let Christians know good Jews from bad. Discernment, then, targeted individual Jews, and not the group.

1412. Law and Word

The 1412 laws coincided with Ferrer’s conversion programme. He disapproved of forced conversion but hoped to make it inevitable for those who wished to be part of the kingdom’s social and economic fabric. A royal decree protecting converts backed his aims. Some of the decree’s rulings had a long history in Castilian legislation, for instance the requirement that Moors and Jews wear signs, or the prohibitions on employing Christian children, or visiting Jewish physicians. But no earlier decree had ever been enforced, nor in fact were those of Ayllón.71 This preaching campaign was just one part of a conversion campaign by the crowns of Aragon and Castile, and by Benedict XIII.72 Still, Ferrer was a foreigner, taken on board thanks to his fame. Ferrer’s anti-Jewish stance sat well with both people and elite. Would Fernando de Antequera, regent for Castile’s young king, accept these laws to garner the pope’s support for a try at the crown of Aragon? We know that it was the support of Ferrer and his brother Boniface that, in the Compromiso de Caspe of 1412, Fernando was made king.

70 Cátedra García points this out in his sermon translation. (Sermón, sociedad y literatura, p. 347, note 19). Muñoz Solla also fĳinds a reference to the Mishnah, under the name of Pirké Abot, in the fĳinal lines of the sermon cited in the note: ‘Estrategias de persuasión y oyentes judíos’, pp. 33–34. 71 José Amador de los Ríos, ‘Documentos justifĳicativos’, in Historia social, política y religiosa de los judíos de España y Portugal (Madrid, 1876), II, p. 619. Enrique II enforced imposed signs on Jewish outerwear at the Cortes of Toro, 1368, Córtes de León y Castilla. pp. 146–155. 72 For the disregard of the Laws of Ayllón, see J.M. Monsalvo Antón, Teoría y evolución de un conflicto social: el antisemitismo en la baja Edad Media, pp. 265–276. See also, F. Vendrell Millán, ‘En torno a la confĳirmación real de Aragón, de la pragmática de BenedictoXIII’, Sefarad, XX (1960); Mark D. Meyerson, A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, NJ, 2004), pp. 59–62. Powerful Words: St Vincent Ferrer’s Preaching 223

The date matters; the preaching campaign came to a sudden end and Ferrer was called to Valencia to help choose a new king. The Trastámara victory owed to Ferrer, thanks to his prestige. No sooner was Fernando in power than the new king returned to protecting Jews, writing to Murcia already in April to soften the new ordinances.73 In February 1412 Ferrer preached near Salamanca, a city with a flourishing Jewish population. There, protected by the Laws of Ayllón, he tried to enlighten the Jews with some secrets from the Holy Scriptures which he would unveil.74 He insisted that the Jews would be the fĳirst to fall into the clutches of the Anti- Christ and that it would be impossible for them to be saved: ‘Solamente este aguyjón de temor judiçial devría bastar a convertir los jodíos’ [Just the spur of the fear of justice should be enough to convert the Jews].75 Ferrer alluded to the punishment the Jews who had not converted would receive at Final Judgement, but he also cited the sanction of the written law on those who fell foul of it. In the sermons around the promulgation of the Laws and, even more, in towns with large or flourishing Jewish communities, Ferrer espoused a programme based on the refrain: ‘conversion or absolute segregation’. Both Ferrer’s discourse and the Ayllón Laws eschew social distinctions; forbidding Christians to contact Jewish doctors will afffect even the famous Jewish doctors at the Castilian Court. Table 6.1 lays out the relationship between fragments of two sermons and the Laws. The fĳirst, preached months before the promulgation, perhaps days before the queen asked Ferrer to preach in Ayllón, was recorded in the vernacular.76 The second, from another collection, was later translated into Latin; its orality is dimmed but its import is clear. This sermon responds to questions to Ferrer at Valladolid – there is no written record – asking why Jews and Christians should live in separate parts of town.

73 For the role of the Jewish convert, Pablo de Santa Maria, even harsher than Ferrer, see Benzion Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-century Spain (New York, 1995), p. 171. 74 Francisco Diago, Historia de la vida, milagros, muerte y discípulos, p. 379. 75 Vicente Ferrer, ‘Sermón de los quatro aguyjones’, p. 385. 76 Antist, Vida de San Vicente Ferrer, p. 171. 224 Losada

Table 6.1

Sermons Leyes de Ayllón (1412) [Ayllón Laws]

Illescas, 11 de agosto, 141177 Segregación en barrios ‘El sexto pecado es que non separados [segregation in devemos sostener entre nosotros separate quarters] jodíos nin moros, nin consentir que ellos vendan cosa alguna que sea Prohibición de comprar, vender de comer a cristianos, nin consentir o regalar cualquier tipo de que sean cirujanos nin físicos, alimento o medicina a los nin sean regidores en vilas nin de cristianos [forbidden to buy, lugares. E maldicho es el caballero o sell, or gift any type of food or señor o dueña que a jodío nin moro medicine to Christians] faze su almoxarife’ [The sixth sin is that we should not Prohibición a los judíos de maintain Jews or Moors among us, ejercer como médicos, cirujanos nor permit them to sell anything o cualquier ofĳicio fuera de su to eat to Christians nor allow them comunidad, y cualquier cargo to be surgeons nor physicians, nor público [Jews probihited from allow them to run towns or any working as doctors, surgeons, or place. And cursed is any knight, lord in any offfĳice outside their own or lady who makes a Jew his or her community and from holding store-keeper.] any public offfĳice]

Valladolid, enero de 141278 Segregación en barrios ‘[. . .] si vos moratis in simul cum separados [segregation in judeis et infĳidelibus in hoc mundo separate urban quarters] in alio in inferno morabitis cum ipsis. Et ideo si vultis hoc vitare, evitetis conversacionem ipsorum in quatuor, scilicet hospitios et Prohibición de conversación Prohibición de criar ofĳicios et negotios et servitios, entre judíos y cristianos niños de origen cristiano alias conversabitis cum eis in [‘conversation’ between Jews [bringing up Christian inferno [. . .]’ and Christians forbidden] children forbidden]

77 Vicente Ferrer, ‘Sermón de enxienplos que Ihesú Christo nos mostró’, p. 335. 78 Vicente Ferrer, sermón sin título, perteneciente a las fuentes vicentinas del Corpus Christi, citado en Cátedra García, Sermón, sociedad y literatura, p. 247. Powerful Words: St Vincent Ferrer’s Preaching 225

Sermons Leyes de Ayllón (1412) [Ayllón Laws]

Prohibición de asistir a bodas, honras o sepulturas [forbidden to attend weddings, award ceremonies, or burials]

(. . .) Et secundo infĳidelis debent Prohibición a los judíos de evitari in ofĳiciis, scilicet quod ejercer como médicos, cirujanos non sint judices, nec notari, nec o cualquier ofĳicio fuera de arrendatori, nec advocati, nec su comunidad, y cualquier almoxarifes, nec medici, nec cargo público. [Jews forbidden cirurgiani, nec ypotecari. (. . .) to work as judges, lawyers, warehouse-keepers, doctors, or surgeons, apothecaries, or take on any offfĳice outside their community or hold any public offfĳice]

(. . .) Et tercio debent evitari in Prohibición de comprar, vender negociis, nam non debent permiti o regalar cualquier tipo de vendere aliquid christianis, nam ab alimento o medicina a los inimico non est mercandum aliquid cristianos [forbidden to buy, comistionis, sed si vobis mitant sell, or gift food or medicine to unus par gallinarum, vel piscium, Christians] vel multonum vivorum bene potest recipere, quia non potest esse venenum in re viva, et ideo aliquid mortuum non recipiatis ab ipsis, nec panem coctum, nam multa mala volunt christianis si bene non apareat in eis, quia sunt in captivate (. . .) 226 Losada

Table 6.1 (cont.)

Sermons Leyes de Ayllón (1412) [Ayllón Laws]

(. . .) Quarto, debent evitari in Prohibición de dar trabajo serviciis, nam christianus non debet asalariado a un cristiano o servire judeum in domo sua (. . .) trabajar para él en cualquier ofĳicio [forbidden to pay any Christian a wage for working or to work for a Christian in any capacity]

Note the word ‘conversación’. Conversation means here not speech alone but social interaction, spending time with others, basic frequent contact; the term fĳigures in Ferrer with this conventional broad meaning. When Ferrer enumerates the sins of clerics he lists ‘corporal conversation’, so his term here evokes even sexual contact.79 When he regulates the choice of interlocutors, and the daily practice of social interchange, Ferrer acknowledges an orality above and beyond words alone. Now there is no more basic contact than exchanging words and signals. Limiting conversation undercut social equality. Since the Jewish community was well integrated in urban life, prohibiting conversation would not only remedy ‘contagion’ but also – even more importantly – it would reshape daily life. In the months leading up to the Pragmatic of Catalina, Ferrer had championed these methods, and in the Castile campaign of the next months he would proclaim and defend them. His sermon at Valladolid in early 1412 urged the authorities to apply the law, under pain of eternal damnation.80 He warned about the consequences of angering God if conversation between Jews and Christians were allowed.

79 Vicente Ferrer, ‘Colación fecha a Clérigos y religiosos’, preached in Illescas between 9 and 14 August 1411, transcribed by Cátedra García, Sermón, sociedad, y literatura en la Edad Media, p. 489. 80 ‘[. . .]Et ideo vos, rectores ville, statuatis locum intra villam ad partem ubi habitent judei et saraceni secregati a christiani et e contrari christiani ab ipsis. Et hoc bene placet domine Regine et Infanti et Regi, nam multum displicet Deum ista conversatio, in tantum quod faciet habitare in alio mundo eos inferno [. . .]’. Vicente Ferrer, ‘Sermón sin título, perteneciente a las fuentes vicentinas del Corpus Christi’, p. 247. Powerful Words: St Vincent Ferrer’s Preaching 227

Word, Law, and Power: A Conclusion

The sermon is a potent clue to medieval and early modern modes of communication. Vicente Ferrer’s sermons in particular, as mass, popular oral communication events, are a privileged document, offfering an image – albeit faded, partial, and distorted – of how words were a force for shaping history. The oral communication of ground rules, aspiring to inclusivity but built on fear, was good tool for shaping a homogenous society.81 Ferrer’s sermons can be seen as devices for constructing a new, purer, and more moral world for a long- sufffering humanity needing – so he preached – salvation when faced with the impending Last Days. The performance around the act of preaching included active participation by listeners. The preacher sought complicity and agreement, to engage his auditory and to have them agree actively with his message. By inculcat- ing behaviours for both Jews and Christians, Ferrer championed practices that would, he believed, guarantee salvation. For Ferrer, the spoken word’s efffect rested on two fĳirm supports. First, the preacher created an emotional community through his charisma and his preaching style. Meanwhile, to suit his project to reform behaviour, he exploited the political and social signs of the times.82 Thus, Ferrer had two anchors – something infrequent in medieval times: he could move the masses and mobilize his relationships with those with power to gain his fĳinal aim, moral reform, by modifying – or perhaps purifying – the relationship between Jews and Christians. Ferrer’s word, as it comes down to us, while it describes a disordered world, prefĳigures an ordered one. The charismatic preacher calls on peoples to occupy their ordained places in a design for saving souls.

81 Peter Sloterdijk, Gottes Eifer, Vom Kampf der drei Monotheismen (Frankurt-am-Main, 2007). I cite from the Spanish translation by Isidoro Reguera, Celo de Dios. Sobre la lucha de los tres monoteísmos (Madrid, 2011), pp. 65–66. 82 For apocalyptic discourse and social mobilization, see André Vauchez, Prophètes et prophétisme (Paris, 2012), particularly the introduction. CHAPTER 7 ‘A Most Notable Spectacle’: Early Modern Easter Spital Sermons

Sonia Suman

In the shadow of scholarship on Paul’s Cross lies London’s other great outdoor pulpit, St Mary Spital. Situated in North London, outside the city wall, this pulpit played host to the annual Easter sermon series, three sermons preached at the Spital, framed by two preached at Paul’s Cross. The Spital series was a long-running event, stretching from the medieval period into the seventeenth century. Indeed, the tradition persisted, even after the outdoor pulpit was dis- mantled, taking place instead at a variety of London churches. The Spital sermons were thus very much a part of early modern civic life and were engrained in the civic consciousness. They must therefore take their place alongside more famous preaching venues, as well as the pageants and processions that made London life so colourful. One Spital preacher describes the event as a ‘most notable spectacle’ alluding to the highly visual aspect of the event – indeed at least two diarists remember the event as visually pleasing.1 The event, however, was a sermon – a primarily oral event. This chapter explores the occasion and the space in which the sermons took place; the problems of audibility; the theatricality of the sermons and how the preachers reacted with stage-pulpit analogies. Ultimately, I argue that despite the solemnity of the religious occasion, Spital events were ones to see, and that preachers responded by stressing the necessity of hearing. The only extant complete series of three sermons preached at the Spital is preserved in a manuscript in St Paul’s Cathedral, discovered in 2004 by Mary Morrissey. This manuscript recording the sermons of 1588 is invaluable for what it reveals about the occasion and the serial nature of the sermons. Sermons and lectures were frequently delivered as series by an individual preacher in a fĳixed location. The Spital is unusual in that it is a series delivered by diffferent preachers. In 1588 the preachers were Dr Bisse, Dr Powell, and Lancelot Andrewes. Little is known of the fĳirst preacher, the second may have been the clergyman and historian David Powell, and the third would become one of the greatest preachers of his age. Lancelot Andrewes would later rise to

1 London, St Paul’s Cathedral Library, MS 38F22.01, fol. 26.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004291829_009 Early Modern Easter Spital Sermons 229 become a favourite royal preacher to two monarchs, a lead translator on the King James Bible who was responsible for Genesis to the Second Book of Kings, and undoubtedly one of England’s most learned men. The texts in the manuscript are probably derived from transcripts of the sermons, prepared after delivery by their authors.2 There are no printed versions of Bisse and Powell’s sermons, but Andrewes’s sermon was printed in XCVI Sermons in 1629, from Andrewes’s thorough notes prepared before delivery.3 The two versions of his Spital sermon, therefore, offfer a rare opportunity to get closer to the lost event of the sermon.4

Time, Place, Occasion

Preachers schooled in the ars praedicandi, theories of preaching, were taught to consider time, place, and occasion systematically, often naming these explicitly in the sermon itself, and so the event of the sermon must be central to our understanding of this peculiar early modern genre.5 The occasion shapes the sermon at every level from the very choice of a biblical text to the selection of examples and sources, and not least to the language and rhetorical style adopted for a particular auditory.6 If preachers were attentive to the occasion, so should we be. My focus here is how the occasion of the sermon,

2 Peter McCullough, ed., Lancelot Andrewes: Selected Sermons and Lectures (Oxford, 2005), p. 462. 3 Allegedly, ‘thrice revised’, Andrewes, Lancelot, XCVI Sermons by the Right Honourable and Reverend Father in God, Lancelot Andrewes, Late Lord Bishop of Winchester, 2nd edn (London, 1632), Preface. 4 See McCullough, Selected Sermons, for diffferences, p. lii, Appendix 2. 5 Hugh Adlington lists the most influential authors of sermon manuals: ‘Gospel, law, and ars praedicandi at the Inns of Court, c. 1570–c. 1640’, in The Intellectual and Cultural World of the Early Modern Inns of Court, ed. by Jayne Elizabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring, & Sarah Knight (Manchester, 2011), p. 56. These included the influential humanist Desiderius Erasmus, whose Ecclesiastes (1535) endorsed classical rhetoric as a suitable tool for preachers; Niels Hemmingsen, a Danish Lutheran, whose The Preacher, or Methode of Preaching appeared in English in 1574; and Cambridge-educated theologian William Perkins, author of The Arte of Prophesying (1592; trans. 1607). 6 I use ‘auditory’ rather than ‘audience’. It is the term preferred by scholars working in the fĳield of English early modern studies and it is also the term preachers used to address the congregation. For the term ‘audience’ as anachronistic, see Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 3rd edn (Cambridge, 2004), p. 108. 230 Suman including time, place, and space, shapes that sermon.7 Arnold Hunt has suggested that Paul’s Cross and Assize sermons might be considered genres, indeed the contemporary trend in English sermon studies is to group sermons determined by occasion. Hence we might speak of court sermons or Inns of Court sermons as distinct groups. The forthcoming Oxford edition of John Donne’s sermons will also arrange texts by occasion rather than chronology. This method seems more helpful than using anachronistic labels like ‘metaphysical’ and ‘anglican’, terms that Lori Ann Ferrell and Peter McCullough have described as ‘historically inaccurate’ and ‘critically amorphous’.8 Close attention to place, however, can bring us a little nearer to the event of the sermon. It is helpful, therefore, to consider Spital sermons as a genre. Hunt has recently observed of Paul’s Cross that particular biblical texts were considered appropriate for that venue, and the same is true of the Spital.9 John White preaching in 1613 described his choice of text, 1 Tim 6:17, as ‘often handled in this place’. Indeed, it is on the same text that Andrewes preaches in 1588.10 The occasion permeates the sermon, even shaping the theological stance a preacher might be required to uphold, either because of the demands of the occasion (in the case of the Spital, a plea for charity) or because of the type of auditory. In many ways, the Spital sermons were ‘occasions’ of the most spectacular sort. The Spital was a platform for aspiring preachers where pageantry and ceremony were central. Planning for this major annual event began as early as January, and unlike the Paul’s Cross preachers who were appointed by the Bishop of London, Spital preachers were appointed by the Lord Mayor and Court of Aldermen. As well as being a religious occasion, Spital sermons were therefore also a corporate event. The series began on Good Friday

7 A recent statement of the importance of the physical space of preaching has also been made by Emma Rhatigan. See ‘Preaching Venues: Architecture and Auditories’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, ed. by Peter McCullough, Hugh Adlington, & Emma Rhatigan (Oxford, 2011), pp. 87–119. 8 The labels are Horton Davies’s, Like Angels from a Cloud: The English Metaphysical Preachers 1588–1645 (San Marino, 1986). Lori Anne Ferrell & Peter McCullough, eds, The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature, and History 1600–1750 (Manchester, 2000), p. 7. 9 Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 306, 323. 10 John White, ‘A sermon preached at the Spittle in London, upon Easter Monday, 1613’, in Two sermons the former delivered at Pauls Crosse the foure and twentieth of March, 1615 being the anniversarie commemoration of the Kings most happie succession in the Crowne of England. The latter at the Spittle on Monday in Easter weeke, 1613. By John White D. D. (London, 1615), p. 44. Early Modern Easter Spital Sermons 231 at Paul’s Cross, where ‘the mayor, with his brethren the aldermen, were accustomed to be present in their violets’.11 On the following Monday and Tuesday, the City Fathers, with their wives, processed in scarlet robes to the Spital, where they were seated in a house purpose built for the occasion.12 They were joined by the children of Christ Church Hospital, dressed in blue, who sat with their governors in a pavilion constructed yearly for the event and, after 1594, in another purpose-built house.13 On Wednesday, this performance was repeated, this time with the rulers dressed in violet robes. On Low Sunday, a fĳinal rehearsal or summary sermon of the preceding four sermons was preached at Paul’s Cross in addition to that preacher’s own, a fĳifth, sermon. For this fĳinal occasion, the Lord Mayor and Aldermen donned their scarlet robes once more. The Spital sermons were thus visually striking events. The relationship between dress and the oral event may be twofold. While the violet robes may have been typically Lenten colours, they may have taken on an added signifĳicance. Violet was also the colour worn by the Lord Mayor at his inauguration, though scarlet was the colour worn on the day of the Lord Mayor’s Procession, signifying his obedience to the royal court.14 Violet robes on the fĳinal day at the Spital may thus have had a more corporate feel, rather diffferent to that of the jurisdiction of the Bishop of London at Paul’s Cross. That the event was perhaps more civic than religious is also suggested by the Spital’s location, for it was no longer attached to a functioning church or hospital.

Audibility

John Gipkyn’s painting of a sermon at Paul’s Cross (1616), now in the Society of Antiquaries, as Millar Maclure has observed, ‘represents an ideal rather than an actual occasion’ (Plate 1).15 Estimations of the audience size at Paul’s Cross

11 John Stow, A Survey of London written in the year 1598, with an introduction by Antonia Fraser, ed. by Henry Morley, LLD (Stroud, 1994), p. 182. 12 Mary Morrissey, Politics and the Paul’s Cross Sermons, 1558–1642 (Oxford, 2011), p. 22. 13 This house lasted only a year and had to be repaired at ‘great cost to the city.’ Stow, Survey, p. 183. 14 Robert I. Lublin, ‘Costuming the Shakespearean Stage: Visual Codes of Representation in Early Modern Theatre and Culture’, unpublished PhD, Ohio State University, 2003, pp. 158–159, 162–163. 15 Millar Maclure, The Paul’s Cross Sermons 1534–1642, Studies and Texts, 6 (Toronto, 1958), p. 3. Gipkyn was active between 1595 and 1629. 232 Suman ran as high as six thousand, though Maclure fĳinds this unlikely.16 There are no fĳigures for a Spital audience and no paintings. The best indicators for what the priory and preaching yard looked like come from maps of the area: the Copperplate map (c. 1559) which was the earliest surviving map of London, the Braun and Hogenberg map (1572), the Agas map (1633), and Ogilby and Morgan’s map (1677).17 An impressionistic sketch of St Mary Spital also survives in Anthonis Van der Wyngaerde’s panorama (c. 1544) (Plate 2). Ogilby and Morgan produced the fĳirst accurate map of London, to scale, and their depiction of the Spital area resembles that in the earlier maps in layout and proportion. To judge by their map, the rough area for the preaching yard was potentially 10,000 square feet. The area at the Spital was about fĳive times the yard space at The Fortune theatre and four times the size of the Globe.18 Preachers as performers thus faced a greater challenge than actors in the amphitheatres. The Globe could house more than three thousand spectators.19 It is unlikely that the Spital audience was four times the size of a Globe audience. The problem is not the size of the audience but voice projection in such a large open space. Theatres were contained spaces and even Paul’s Cross had the benefĳit of the high cathedral wall to contain sound.20 The space posed a challenge but Spital sermons were less contentious than the potentially explo- sive sermons delivered at Paul’s Cross. Paul’s Cross preachers, as we have seen, were appointed by the Bishop of London, not by the Corporation. For this reason, it is possible to understand why Lawrence Manley states that ‘the City Fathers often found themselves on the defensive’, explaining that ‘the sermons at Paul’s Cross “are principally for the governors of this Honourable City” ’ [chapter author’s italics].21 At Paul’s Cross, the Mayor and aldermen were the objects of moral instruction. Spital sermons, in contrast, might be described as being in honour of the aldermen. These two major outdoor pulpits difffered substantially and afffected a preacher’s agenda. As Hunt has suggested, Paul’s

16 Maclure, Paul’s Cross, p. 7. 17 Despite their dates of publication both Hogenberg and Agas depict London in the 1550s. Philippa Glanville states the scale of the Copperplate is ‘three chains to the inch’. London in Maps (London, 1972), p. 19. 18 Gurr estimates the yard space of The Fortune at 1,842 square feet. Playgoing, p. 19. 19 Gurr, Playgoing, pp. 19–20. 20 An exciting new project, led by John Wall, reconstructs the preaching yard both visually and aurally. This simulation allows the website user to listen to a Paul’s Cross sermon from diffferent points in the yard with ambient sound. Audibility, as expected, decreases or increases depending on the proximity to the pulpit. Wall, ‘The Virtual Paul’s Cross Project’ (2012). [accessed 14 February 2013]. 21 Lawrence Manley, London in the Age of Shakespeare: An Anthology (London, 1986), p. 99. Early Modern Easter Spital Sermons 233

Cross sermons threatened the authorities and slandered aldermen accusing them, most often, of usury.22 One preacher even drew attention to the diffference, stating:

it is well known these Spittle-Sermons difffer from those at the Crosse, and others about this City, that these are without any fee or reward, other then that of Honour, and good Acceptance. They are the farre better to be liked for that.23

This preacher goes on to suggest that Spital sermons were more honest than those at Paul’s Cross, since the sermon itself is preached out of charity. At the same time, however, Spital sermons promoted fĳinancial generosity and overtly flattered aldermen, either, generally, by alluding to the ‘city’ and the numerous good works which have made it ‘famous beyond the seas’ or collectively, by referring to, for example ‘divers worthy Citizens of this City’.24 In 1570, there was an example of more particular flattery: Thomas Drant obsequiously called attention to and presumably gestured to ‘the example of thys good gentlemen Alderman Dabbes & his euer laudable goodnes to this litle poore people’.25 Drant’s compliment was presumably sincere rather than ironic. Sermons were intimately related to governance and communication for political and theological change could be instigated via the pulpit. Indeed Hunt has discussed Elizabeth I’s ‘tuning’ of the pulpits to dictate interpretations of polemical events.26 Sermons were, thus, an instrument of the body politic, whether that body was the monarchy or the Church of England. Spital sermons, as can be seen from Drant’s fawning, were particularly concerned with City governance, and pandering to the aldermen and the Mayor, as the head of this body politic. Preaching the gospel, then, was always linked to governance of one kind or another. Paul’s Cross sermons were not always as orderly as Spital events. Bishop Bourne was nearly killed by a riotous crowd at Paul’s Cross. A dagger was

22 Hunt, Art of Hearing, pp. 330, 336. 23 John Jackson, The Booke of Conscience Opened and Read in a Sermon Preached at the Spittle on Easter Tuesday (London, 1642), p. 121. 24 Bisse, St Paul’s, fol. 26; Thomas Playfere, ‘The Pathway to Perfection’, in The Meane in Mourning (London, 1616), p. 199. 25 Thomas Drant, Two Sermons Preached the one at S. Maries Spittle on Tuesday in Easter Weeke. 1570 (London, 1570), sig. Hiv. 26 Arnold Hunt, ‘Tuning the Pulpits: the Religious Context of the Essex Revolt’, in The English Sermon Revised, pp. 86–114. 234 Suman thrown, narrowly missing the preacher.27 Regulating the crowd at Paul’s Cross was clearly a challenge and it was ‘a frequent scene of confrontation’.28 This was apparently not so at the Spital. There, preachers were not subject to attack, although there were distracting groups in the audience. In 1693, a dispute broke out between the children and governors of Christ Church and Bridewell. The quarrel had nothing to do with the content of the sermon or the preacher, but rather the more mundane (though clearly sensitive) issue of seating arrangements. By this date, the Easter sermon series was no longer preached at the Spital but at various local churches. While the event was no longer an outdoor one, the rest of the Spital tradition remained essentially intact. The conflict that emerged, however, had the hallmarks of typical institutional rivalry. It illustrates the problems and oral distractions that may well have arisen in the Spital yard. On this occasion, the boys of Christ Church Hospital, unwilling to sit with the boys of Bridewell, resorted to physical violence: ‘Sam[uell] Sams an offfĳicer of [Christ Church] Hosp[ital] w[ith] a great stafff struck Tho[mas] Peacock on the head, knock’d him downe & sett him bleeding’.29 The violence recurred on every day of the series, accompanied, naturally, by copious verbal abuse. According to the complaint, the Christ Church boys taunted their rivals, calling them ‘Bridewell doggs’, ‘clowns num- skulles loggerheads’, and clearly worse given the decorous allusion to the boys’ use of ‘other very ill & unbecoming language’ delivered in ‘a very tumultuous & indecent manner’.30 Disputes or not, Spital sermons were undoubtedly noisy events that challenged and distracted the preacher. His was not the only voice to be heard. In addition to the clamour of the crowd, the preacher had to negotiate the two other sites of display, or stages, which must have distracted auditors from the pulpit: the City dignitaries on the one side and the charity boys on the other. John Jackson’s evocative image of ‘the rest of the Citizens of this famous City, from the Scarlet to the Blue’ highlights the visual contrast between these two other stages, but equally emphasizes the poverty gap.31 The orphan boys were paraded as an emblem of the city’s charity but there must have been auditors present for whom this display only demonstrated how

27 Angelo J. Louisa, ‘Bourne, Gilbert (c. 1510–1569), Bishop of Bath and Wells’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [accessed 14 December 2011]. Millar Maclure dates the riot as 1553, Paul’s Cross, p. 8. 28 Manley, London, p. 99. 29 London Metropolitan Archive, The Case of the boys of Bridewell Hospital on the Complaint of Mr Treasurer Hawes, re a dispute with Christ’s Hospital over seating at the Easter (Spital) Sermons, CLA/066/01/001, Date of Creation: 18 May 1693. 30 The Case of the Boys of Bridewell. 31 Jackson, Booke of Conscience, p. 120. Early Modern Easter Spital Sermons 235

figure 7.1 John Gipkyn, A Sermon at Paul’s Cross (1616), Society of Antiquaries. much more needed to be done. The City Fathers probably took pride in their achievements, and the preachers took care to acknowledge them. Jackson even ends his sermon with a list of statistics.32 This enormous outdoor event, in the busiest part of London, must have attracted people of all ranks.33 To

32 Jackson, Booke of Conscience, pp. 142–143. 33 The Spital was next to Bishopsgate – the main road out of London to the North. Christopher Thomas demonstrates the Spital’s location as typical for medieval hospitals, 236 Suman the vulnerable people who had failed to benefĳit from City aid, the sermons’ claims must have rung hollow.34 Furthermore, the priory and hospital buildings, now homes for the wealthy, must have served as a sign of all that the City had ceased to do post-dissolution. St Mary Spital had been one of ‘the largest hospitals in the country.’35 Spital audiences, then, like Paul’s Cross ones, numbered thousands and the auditory itself presented a signifĳicant challenge. The two-hour long sermons at the Spital to this huge auditory was, to use Horton Davies’s phrase, ‘a trial of endurance [. . .] for both preachers and their auditors’.36 John Donne, who preached at the Spital in 1622, ‘complained that his voice was enfeebled through sheer weariness’ and ‘Even the usually indefatigable Playfere in 1595 had to admit to being “almost quite spent with speaking so long”’.37 Thomas Anyan concluded his 1615 sermon by claiming he had ‘wearied’ both himself and his listeners.38 While the Spital occasion was clearly prestigious, it appears that many preachers were not tempted to take up the challenge, perhaps for the very reasons which caused Donne and Playfere to complain. The Repertories of the Court of Aldermen, now in the London Metropolitan Archive, suggest that appointing preachers was not always easy. Every year, as early as January, the aldermen began selecting candidates for the Spital; the minutes of these meetings record this process in formulaic language. This formula, however, changes during the course of the sixteenth century, indicating the increasing reluctance of preachers to take on this responsibility. In the meetings in 1574, 1575, 1576, and 157[7], three Spital preachers were ‘nominayted and appoynted’ by the court.39

and describes Bishopsgate as ‘possibly the busiest and most important road which ran through the City and on across London Bridge to the south’ in Christopher Thomas, Barney Sloane, & Christopher Phillpotts, Excavations at the Priory and Hospital of St Mary Spital, London, Monograph series, 1 (London, 1997), p. 125. 34 J.A. Sharpe states: ‘The problem of poverty was, by the late seventeenth century, a major theme of national social debate.’ The problem of course began in the previous century with the increase in population. Early Modern England: A Social History 1550–1760, 2nd edn (London, 1997, repr. 2007), pp. 224, 225. Stow describes the streets north of the Spital as ‘too much pestered with people’ and that they were ‘a great cause of infection’, Stow, Survey, p. 180. 35 Thomas, Excavations, p. 2. 36 Horton Davies, Like Angels from a Cloud: The English Metaphysical Preachers 1588–1645 (San Marino CA, 1986), p. 418. 37 Davies, Like Angels, p. 418. 38 Thomas Anyan, A Sermon Preached at St Mary’s Spittle, April 10, 1615, by Thomas Anyan Doctor of Divinity and president of Corpus Christi College in Oxon (Oxfrod, 1615), p. 42. 39 Repertories of the Court of Aldermen, The Making of Modern London, Series One, Repertories. Reel 14, rep 19, fols 50, 57v, 59v, 175v, 423v. There are exceptions to this formula, in 1573 the phrasing is ‘whether it will please his lordshippe to preach’, Reel 13, rep 18, Early Modern Easter Spital Sermons 237

In 1583 four preachers were entreated with the view that any three of them would preach; in 1584 it was agreed that fĳive preachers would be requested to ‘take the paynes’ to preach the Spital sermons; in 1585 four preachers were to be entreated, with a fĳifth to be approached ‘if any of them resiste’.40 1594 was a particularly difffĳicult year, with no fewer than three separate entries regarding invitations to preachers, when in every other year there is only one. In this year six preachers were approached and the third preacher was appointed as late as March. One of the preachers who apparently refused the invitation is one Dr Andrewes.41 This could well refer to Lancelot Andrewes, who preached at the Spital in 1588 as a Bachelor of Divinity, but who, in 1590, had proceeded to Doctor of Divinity. Perhaps his earlier experience had put him offf. Recruiting was not always, therefore, a straightforward afffair and preaching at the Spital was perhaps seen as a daunting and exhausting task, given the challenges of being heard and the unusual length of the sermon. In the fĳirst sermon of the 1588 series, Bisse refers to the congregation as ‘so great an assemblye of all estates and degrees of people’.42 In addition to the size of the crowd, there was the added challenge of preaching to this ‘mingled people’ to use William Perkins’s term.43 Powell, the second Spital preacher of 1588, is perhaps less tactful than Perkins. In listing the range of people guilty of religious hypocrisy, he seems to be describing the groups present in the audience:

All men of all ages, states and conditions, the dootinge old man, the publike disputer, the tatlinge woman, the younge boye, the bablinge sophister, all of them will seeme religious.44

‘Disputer’ and ‘sophister’ describe academic and oral vocations and seem to be disparaging here. Powell perhaps expresses irritation at disruptive students in the auditory. The derogatory adjectives ‘tatlinge’ and ‘bablinge’ similarly describe aural distractions. For Powell, the male members of the auditory provide various and distinctive oral distractions, typical of their age, status, or vocation. The female members are indistinct. They are universally ‘tatlinge’.

fol. 155v. Old dates have been used for repertories to enable the reader to trace entries more easily in the original. 40 Reel 15, rep 21, fols 27v, 144, 269. 41 Reel 17, rep 23, fols 353v, 359, 366v. 42 St Paul’s MS, fol. 19v. 43 William Perkins, The Arte of Prophecying, or, A treatise concerning the sacred and onely true manner and method of preaching, trans. Thomas Tuke (London, 1607), p. 121. 44 St Paul’s MS fol. 37. 238 Suman

The misogynistic overtone, led by the injunction in 1Timothy 2:11 ‘Let the woman learne in scilence in all subiection’, is that all female speech is unde- sirable.45 ‘Bablinge’, associated with the sounds of birds, babies, or water, cut- tingly emasculates the ‘sophisters’, a term for Cambridge students. The accusation of false religion was perhaps meant to be a sharp reprimand to the more noisy members present. It is hard to believe, considering the size of the audience and its resultant noise, that much could even be heard. Paul’s Cross at least had the benefĳit of its proximity to the Cathedral wall, which may have helped contain the preacher’s voice. As an open space, the Spital offfered no such advantage. This further suggests that Spital sermons were events to ‘see’ rather than ‘hear’.

Pulpit and Stage, Rhetoric and Spectacle

Gipkyn’s painting, as Maclure has observed, resembles Johannes De Witt’s sketch of an Elizabethan theatre. Gipkyn depicts ‘groundlings and notables, pit and galleries, and, in the midst, the pulpit as stage’, and, as Maclure remarks, this is unsurprising in that ‘Sermons, proclamations, processions, and pen- ances were all theatrical’.46 Nowhere is this more relevant than to the Spital. On Spital sermon days, plays were banned, as if sermons were the entertainment du jour. Located in the ward of Bishopsgate Without, the Spital pulpit was outside London wall in a popular place for theatres. In 1588, the year of the Spital sermons discussed below, the two major commercial theatres, The Curtain and Richard Burbage’s aptly named The Theatre, were just a few minutes northwest of the Spital. Playwrights also attended sermons and two at least lived close to the Spital. Shakespeare, now acknowledged to have reached London by 1588, once resided in Bishopsgate.47 Christopher Marlowe, who had arrived in London by 1589, lived a stone’s throw away in Shoreditch.48 These playwrights probably attended the Spital at least once in their careers, if not in 1588. While cautioning against the temptation to argue for direct influence, Bryan Crockett, detects echoes of Playfere’s Spital sermon in Henry IV Part

45 The Bishops Bible (1568). 46 Maclure, Paul’s Cross, p. 4. 47 Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare (London, 2008), p. 357. 48 Charles Nicholl, ‘Marlowe [Marley], Christopher (bap. 1564, d. 1593), playwright and poet’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [accessed 14 December 2011]. Early Modern Easter Spital Sermons 239

One.49 That they were influenced by religious discourse is undisputed, for it was hardly possible not to be at the time. The reverse is also true. Theatrical discourse made its way into sermons and not always as an anti-theatrical invective. All three Spital preachers in 1588 draw analogies between the pulpit and stage. They also point to the very diffferent kinds of oral agency the preacher and player possess, and the diffferent aural responsibilities demanded by these two types of performance. Before turning to the sermons themselves, a word about this performative aspect. Renaissance preachers, like dramatists, insisted on the superiority of the performance over the printed version. The latter was a mere ‘second publication’, to use playwright Francis Beaumont’s words.50 The reasons for their preference may well have been diffferent. Sermons were not meant to be a commercial enterprise. Indeed, a preacher’s objection to the printed text of a sermon may at fĳirst seem puzzling, given the spiritual benefĳits that might come from private study. Furthermore, their belief in the primacy of the performance was not reflected in the growing market for printed sermons, where demand outstripped supply. Preacher Thomas Playfere, coerced into printing his Spital sermon ‘The Pathway to Perfection’ (1616) did so reluctantly, complaining ‘so much there is between that Sermon which was fĳirst once preached, and that which was after twice printed’.51 Playfere’s allusion to the pirate copies circulated without his permission further illustrates the defĳiciency of the printed text. His version is printed, allegedly, only as a corrective. The diffference between print and performance for Playfere is as great as that between ‘Ivorie and wood’. The relative worth of those materials again suggests print is a poor substitute for the more sensuous experience of the oral event. The preference for performance, Crockett argues, is due to the preacher’s belief in himself as a ‘divinely inspired prophet’.52 Morrissey elaborates: preaching was more than merely informative or instructive:

49 Bryan Crockett, ‘From Pulpit to Stage: Thomas Playfere’s Influence on Shakespeare’, Notes and Queries, 49 (2) (2002), pp. 243–245. I could be tempted to make a similar claim for Andrewes’s 1588 Spital sermon and Shakespeare’s Richard II – but it would be based on an impression. Direct influence seems unlikely without some other corroborating evidence. 50 Francis Beaumont, ‘To my friend Maister John Fletceher, vpon his faithfull Shepeardesse’ in The Faithfull Shepeardesse by John Fletcher (London, [1610?]), sig. A3v. 51 Thomas Playfere, ‘The Epistle Dedicatory’ to ‘The Pathway to Perfection’, in The Meane in Mourning (London, 1616). The Spital sermon was preached in 1595. 52 Bryan Crockett, The Play of Paradox: Stage and Sermon in Renaissance England (Philadelphia, PA, 1995), p. 8. 240 Suman

the sermon was to make that particular part of Scripture operative for the hearers [. . .] if Christ was present in the Word and that presence made operative in preaching, it was not just because of the preacher’s oratori- cal skills: the operative force in this encounter was the Holy Spirit.53

The printed sermon, then, was no match for the real thing. It could not compete with the oral agency of the spoken sermon. Ministering the gospel had, thus, never seemed so important to the Christian lives of the listeners, and many Protestants felt that hearing the sermon enabled them to grow in grace.54 The conviction that God spoke through the preacher was widespread. The idea that the sermon itself could confer grace, however, is refuted in the Spital sermons of 1588. Performance was a key element in plays and sermons, and the preachers of the 1588 series played on theatrical analogies. Dr. Bisse, in his 1588 sermon, makes the familiar ‘poor player,/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage’ comparison:55

our life here is justly compared to a stage, wheron ther are divers actors, among whome it falleth not out that he that playeth the kings part shold be a kinge, or that he that playeth the beggars pt, shold alwayse be a beggar, so in the tragedy of this life each one is not judged to be in the favour of God according to the benefĳitts which he shall receive in this life.56

The metaphor strikes a Shakespearean chord, but Bisse is speaking before any Shakespeare play had been performed on the Elizabethan stage and ten years before the immortal lines ‘All the world’s a stage . . .’ would be written. The analogy was, in fact, a commonplace in the period which reminds us that the reformed religion and theatre were not wholly at odds.57 Bisse argues that his comparison is just, possibly anticipating a mixed reception, but also emphasis- ing its relevance to the occasion. The Spital itself was described in the language

53 Mary Morrissey, ‘Scripture, Style and Persuasion in Seventeenth-Century English Theories of Preaching’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 53 (2002): 686–706, at p. 690. 54 Morrissey, ‘Scripture’, p. 689. 55 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. by Kenneth Muir (London, 2004), V.v. 24–25. 56 Bisse, St Paul’s, fols 32v, 33. 57 For example, John Foxe wrote plays and Calvin allowed plays to be performed in Geneva. Calvin’s Institues compares the world to a theatre with angels and demons looking on. Crockett, Play of Paradox, pp. 7–8. Early Modern Easter Spital Sermons 241 of the theatre. An entry in the Repertories of the Court of Aldermen in 1593 requests that three men entreat

Mr Vaughan for a further t[e]rme to be granted to this cittye the [. . .] waste grounde when uppon the stage usually standeth at St Mary Spittle for the children of [Christs] hospitall in the Easter weeke.58

The priory buildings were part of the Vaughan estate and here it is clear that this included the Spital yard. A collection of bills and orders relating to the Spital, also in the London Metropolitan Archive, documents payment received by a carpenter ‘For building plat[es]’ for the aldermen, the term ‘plates’ denot- ing a wooden platform was also used to describe stages in theatres.59 Just as Shakespeare’s language is so often meta-theatrical, so is Bisse’s. The language in which the Spital event was spoken about was couched in theatrical discourse. Bisse’s comparison is therefore more than a straightforward commonplace. Bisse’s allusion to tragedy assumes that the audience knew the genre and indeed shows that he did. Doctors of divinity had as much, indeed more, classical and rhetorical training than the playwrights of the period who were not all university educated. Most anti-theatrical feeling was directed at the popular stage, not at academic or didactic drama. The anti-Catholic pamphleteer Philip Stubbes exempts plays containing ‘good example and wholesome instruction’ from criticism, in the preface to the fĳirst edition ofThe Anatomie of Abuses in 1583.60 But Bisse is speaking at the very moment when Elizabethan popular tragedy was emerging. Thomas Kyd’s pioneering The Spanish Tragedy may well have already been performed.61 Tragedy’s emancipation from didactic

58 Repertories of the Court of Aldermen, The Making of Modern London, Series One, Repertories, reel 17, Repertory 23, Nov 1592–Oct 1596, microfĳilm X109/148. Italics added by the chapter author. 59 Bills and orders for payment for preparing the Spital for the Easter sermons (1671–1723) CLA/080/03/027, London Metropolitan Archive. The term ‘plates’ was used in reference to the building of the Red Lion theatre. See Peter Thomson, Shakespeare’s Professional Career (Cambridge, 1992), p. 58. 60 Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London 1583), Preface. This claim was retracted from later editions. For a discussion of the changing attitudes towards drama, from exempting instructive plays to the hysterical pitch of absolute anti-theatricalism reached by William Prynne in Histriomastix (1633) see Jonas Barish, The Anti-theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley, CA, 1981), p. 82. 61 Possible dates range from 1583–1592, J.R. Mulryne suggests 1587 may have been likely. See ‘Kyd, Thomas (bap. 1558, d. 1594), Playwright and Translator’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, [accessed 14 December 2011]. 242 Suman purpose in the 1580s, Martha Tuck Rozett argues, sprang from Calvin’s tragic ‘view of human existence’. Bisse’s view of life as tragedy has a Calvinist colour but his analogy, while creating pathos for the human condition, is not meant to evoke despair, as it does for Macbeth. Rather it has the dual purpose of reassur- ing the temporally affflicted that playing the beggar’s part in this life does not rule them out of God’s favour, while at the same time warning the wealthy who play the king’s part, not to be high-minded or presumptuous in their assurance of election. Bisse’s tragic metaphor comes near the end of the sermon. As Roger Pooley has argued, sermons, like plays, brought the auditor to a ‘central crisis of recognition’, a kind of anagnoresis that we witness in tragic protagonists.62 The sermon hearer experiences catharsis in being made to feel fear, guilt, and, fĳinally, consolation. This is in keeping with Cicero and Quintilian’s conventions for oratory, that were central to the Renaissance curriculum and that Erasmus had deemed suitable for the sermon.63 Preachers were thus trained to teach, docere, by moving the emotions, movere.64 The multiple emotions through which the auditory are led also follow Aristotle’s defĳinition that tragedy arouses both ‘pity and fear.’65 That Bisse feels his comparison is ‘just’ may well reflect his own education and his consequent recognition of the similarity between the efffects of epideictic oration and tragedy. Bisse’s choice of biblical text regarding the separation of wheat and tares, the separation of the elect and the damned at the fĳinal judgement, arouses precisely these emotions. Pity, according to Aristotle ‘is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear, by the misfortune of a man like ourselves’.66 Bisse’s repeated image of the tares being cast into ‘unquenchable fĳire’ mirrors the ‘destructive and painful acts’ of tragedy.67 This catharsis could be a very real and profound experience. John Manningham records a sermon in 1602 that ‘left few eyes dry’; Andrewes’s Christmas sermon of 1610 met with ‘great applause’ and the accolade of the

62 Roger Pooley, English Prose of the Seventeenth Century, 1590–1700 (London, 1992), p. 105. 63 Peter Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric 1380–1620 (Oxford, 2011), p. 98. Erasmus endorsed classical models in Ecclesiastes (Basel, 1535); there are no early modern English translations. 64 Thomas Wilson, following Cicero, states the purpose of rhetoric is to teach and delight, The Art of Rhetorique (London, 1553), fol. 1v. 65 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. by George Whalley, ed. by John Baxter & Patrick Atherton (Montreal, 1997), p. 69. Aristotle also indicates that a tragedy should be able to evoke these emotions without seeing the actors, hearing the play should be enough, p. 99. 66 Rozett, Doctrine of Election, p. 33. 67 Bisse, St Paul’s MS, fol. 19; Aristotle, Poetics, p. 69. Early Modern Easter Spital Sermons 243 king’s later placing a copy of the sermon under his pillow.68 These cathartic experiences were very much a product of the moment, a result of listening to the sermon in public rather than reading it privately. This again explains why preachers extolled the benefĳits of the sermon performed over the sermon as printed text. The printed sermon can only convey what was taught, but as Donne’s statement ‘we are not upon a Lecture, but a Sermon’ shows, pulpit oratory ‘included but also transcended teaching.’69 For Playfere the ‘afffection’ of the preacher ‘involves a circulation of energy between preacher and audience, so that each enlivens the other’.70 The sermon is therefore a collaborative act. This collaboration, or even collusion, between preacher and auditory also takes another form. That few were arrested for seditious preaching reflects the rhetorical tact that criticized the sin and not the sinner. The auditory, however, may well have interpreted the sermon as referring to a particular person.71 This almost conspiratorial relationship between speaker and listener is one of the methods playwrights used to avoid censorship. Annabel Patterson’s observation of ‘strategies of indirection’ in the Renaissance play, whereby ‘a highly sophisticated system of oblique communication’ enabled writers to ‘communicate with readers or audiences [. . .] without producing a direct confrontation’, can also be applied to sermons.72 In his stage-pulpit metaphor, Bisse selects a commonplace that clearly suited the occasion. A commonplace, however, was not the straightforward repetition of a well-known idea or image. ‘Recycling exempla’ was ‘an inherently active, discriminating and selective exercise’.73 The very day after Bisse’s sermon, Powell preaching at the Spital on Tuesday makes his own theatrical analogy:

68 Diary of John Manningham 1602–1603, ed. by John Bruce (Westminster, 1868), p. 145; P.E. McCullough, ‘Lancelot Andrewes (1555–1626), Bishop of Winchester’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, quoting the letters of John Chamberlain. 69 Bryan Crockett, ‘Thomas Playfere’s Poetics of Preaching’, in The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature, and History 1600–1799, ed. by Lori Anne Ferrell & Peter McCullough, Politics, Culture, and Society in Early Modern Britain (Manchester, 2000), pp. 59–83, at p. 66. 70 Crockett, ‘Thomas Playfere’, p. 60. 71 Hunt, Art of Hearing, p. 252. 72 Crockett, Play of Paradox, p. 18. Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison, WI, 1984), p. 53. 73 Hunt, Art of Hearing, p. 342, quoting Earle Havens, Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT, 2001), p. 8. 244 Suman

therefore come not you my beloved to the hearinge of the word, as a man wold come to a playe, account not the pulpitt to be as a stage, and the preacher to be a stage player, wherunto men resort only to heare and take those thinges that serve their corrupt h[umo]rs, lettinge the good things passe if ther be any good in them, [. . .].74

Where Bisse stated ‘our life here is justly compared to a stage’, Powell instructs the audience explicitly not to ‘account [. . .] the pulpitt to be as a stage’. Where Bisse described life as playing a ‘part’, Powell condemns the comparison of preacher and ‘stage player’. Where Bisse makes no criticism of playgoers, Powell refers to their ‘corrupt h[umo]rs’. Powell refashions Bisse’s conceit moving the focus from the playing of parts, or performing, to audition and aural responsibility. Powell was clearly irked by Bisse’s analogy, rejecting it overtly here but also more subtly throughout the entire sermon. Powell’s choice of text, ‘If any man amonge you seemeth religious & refrayneth not his tongue, but deciveth his own hart, this mannes religion is vayne’ (James 1:26) provides the starting point for a sustained attack on religious hypocrisy through an elaborate clothing conceit. Sixteenth-century England, for the most part, subscribed to a rigid dress code, as we have seen in the colours of the robes worn at the Spital. Subverting this dress code was considered a deception, as dress was meant to reflect rank and indeed gender.75 Criticism of the theatre focused on the protean nature of the players. Dressed as something other than themselves, players set out to deceive.76 Powell lays the same protean charge at religious hypocrites:

The Ape is a most deformed beast yet if she hade mans cloathes on her she seemeth to beare the shape of a man so man although he be a most deformed creature in the sight of God yet when he taketh on him the garmt of religion he thinketh that he appeareth somethinge in the sight of God.77

The reprobate is cast as the other. He is a ‘deformed creature’ purporting to be virtuous by wearing the robes of religion. Powell continues, arguing just as ‘the wolfe will take upon him the sheepes skinne [. . .] so the wicked will offfentymes

74 St Paul’s MS, fols 41r–v. 75 Sumptuary laws attempted to enforce dress codes, see for example, Lublin, Costuming the Shakespearean Stage, especially pp. 1–52. 76 See Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, especially Chapter 4 ‘Puritans and Proteans’, pp. 80–131. 77 St Paul’s MS, fols 35v–36. Early Modern Easter Spital Sermons 245 take upon the skinne of godlinesse and the showe of religion’.78 This clothing motif prepares for the stage analogy which appears roughly halfway through the sermon. In the second half of the sermon the motif develops. The reprobate’s false faith is described thus: ‘his religion is no body but a shadowe’.79 If the outward signs of religion up until this point have been described as a ‘cloak to cover [. . .] rebellion’, it is now made clear that this garment has no substance and is transparent, a shadow.80 ‘Shadow’ was, of course, a term used to denote players. The word choice here then may well be a deliberate pun. In keeping with his earlier disdain for the theatre, Powell compares the reprobate to an actor, a man whose profession depends on convincing vocal deception. Powell’s conceit and rhetorical inversion of Bisse’s original theatrical allusion demonstrates the tensions that might emerge between preachers delivering a series together. It also suggests that Spital preachers were present at all three sermons. Andrewes in his Wednesday sermon refers to the sermon ‘you heard very notablie yesterday’ and remarks that ‘Heer have these two daies bene made very iust complaint of symony’. An equivalent phrase does not appear in the printed version of the sermon. The transcript catches a phrase spoken in the moment.81 After hearing Bisse’s sermon, Powell may well have modifĳied his own. That Andrewes picked up on the discord between the two sermons in their use of theatrical imagery is likely. Educated men attended to rhetorical devices and Andrewes was profoundly learned. Andrewes would come to be known both for his tight, controlled exegetical style and his diplomacy. If he did contribute to the stage analogy, he did so in a single word. The closing images of his Spital sermon mirror the fatalism of tragedy; Andrewes warns the audience ‘think not, that when my words shall be at an end, both they shall vanish in the aire, and you never heare of them againe’.82 The single word that alludes to spectacle is ‘vanish’, and it appears in both the printed and the manuscript version of the sermon. The sermon is not, to use Prospero’s phrase, an ‘insubstantial pageant’ that ‘melted into air, thin air [. . .] Leave[ing] not a rack behind.’83 Andrewes’s synaesthetic image of spoken words that ‘vanish’ makes an emphatic distinction between hearing a sermon and seeing one. As a preacher, he seems fully aware of the whole experience of the Spital tradition

78 St Paul’s MS, fol. 36v. 79 St Paul’s MS, fol. 42v. 80 St Paul’s MS, fol. 35v. 81 McCullough, Selected Sermons, pp. 261, 262. 82 McCullough, Selected Sermons, p. 80. 83 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. by Virginia Mason Vaughan & Alden T. Vaughan (London, 1999), 4.1.150, 155–156. 246 Suman and the possible paucity of genuine religious feeling. In addition, given the size and space of the Spital yard and the masses attending the event, there must have been a great many casual spectators that could not hear anything of the sermon. Andrewes is insistent that the words of the sermon are not a spectacle that will ‘vanish’ once the preacher has left the pulpit. Hearing, for Andrewes, is no straightforward act of audition, rather it implies participation and action. True or efffective hearing initiates reformation. It realizes the ‘transformative potential’ of the preacher’s words.84 Bisse drew on the parable of the sower in his Monday sermon, likening the stony and fertile ground to ‘two sorts of [. . .] hearers’. The words of the sermons will fall on passive and active ears.85 He declares his biblical theme as ‘most convenient & fĳit [. . .] for this auditorye’.86 Later, John Donne would similarly call on the ‘hearers’ to consider the ‘art of hearing, as well as of speaking.’87 Aural responsibility was clearly a persistent concern. If the congregation treated the sermon as entertainment, expecting never to ‘hear’ the words again, Andrewes had a chilling answer for them: ‘Surely you shall; the day is coming [. . .] A fearefull day [. . .] when your life shall have an end [. . .] when the terror of death shall be upon you [. . .] then, it will be too late’.88 This warning in the printed version appears to have been tem- pered in the actual delivery. Judgement day in the manuscript is described as a ‘fearfull’ and ‘heavy’ day but the ‘terror of death’ is absent.89 In the moment, either Andrewes decided to soften his fĳinale or he simply ran out of time. The former may be the more likely. The auditory had already been thoroughly warned against belated repentance earlier in the week. Bisse warns that those who repent only in the ‘last gaspe of ther life’ will not be forgiven.90 When he repeats the image it is more graphic: ‘we draw the last gaspe of our breath’.91 The comfortable distance of the third person in the fĳirst instance is replaced

84 Raymond Powell, ‘ “A Persuasion of his Truth . . . through the Opening of his Word”: the Place of the Pulpits in the Restoration church of Mary I’, paper presented at ‘Gossip, Gospel, and Governance: Orality in Europe 1400–1700’, 14–16 July 2011, British Academy, London. 85 St Paul’s MS, fol. 17v. 86 St Paul’s MS, fol. 18. 87 John Donne, ‘A Sermon Preached at the Spittle, Upon Easter-Munday, 1622.’ in The Sermons of John Donne, ed. by George R. Potter & Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols (Berkeley, CA, 1959), IV, pp. 89–131, p. 118. 88 McCullough, Selected Sermons, p. 80. 89 McCullough, Selected Sermons, p. 264. 90 St Paul’s MS, fol. 33. 91 St Paul’s MS, fol. 33v. Early Modern Easter Spital Sermons 247 in the second with the more personal ‘we’. The abstract image of ‘life’ becomes the bodily ‘breath’. Andrewes may have felt there had been enough scaremon- gering that week.

Ear and Eye Witnesses

The preachers thus delivered a grave message at the Spital. Rather than the ear- witness accounts that these preachers might have preferred, however, two diarists at least are better described as eye witnesses. Henry Machyn and Samuel Pepys wrote more than a century apart; Machyn attended the Spital sermons in 1553, 1557 and 1563, Pepys in 1662 and 1669. The endurance of this tradition demonstrates that the Spital sermon series was engrained in early modern civic consciousness despite radical religious and political shifts. That the Spital sermons were an occasion for spectacle rather than oral instruction is suggested by the fĳirst-hand accounts of Machyn and Pepys. Neither has much to say about the religiosity of the occasion or the sermon itself and we are thus reminded that the written sermon does not constitute the full record of the event. Sermons were great social events providing communal entertainment. Machyn’s Spital experience is defĳined not by the aurality of the event, but by his admiration for the ceremony and order of the procession:

Alle the masters and rulars, and skollmasturs and mastores, and alle the chylderyn, boyth men and vomen chylderyn, alle in blue cotes, and wen[che]s in blue frokes and with skoychyons in-brodered on ther slevys with the armes of London, and red capes, and so ij an ij (to-)geder, and evere man in ys pla[c]e and offf[ice] . . . [3 April 1553].92

Machyn comments closely on the clothing, noting the orphans’ blue coats and frocks with the scutcheons embroidered on the sleeves. In 1557 and 1563 he also numbers the offfĳicials in attendance. In all of these entries Machyn is notably more interested in the visual display than in the preacher and his words. Though his usual appraisal of sermons tends to be limited to the single word ‘godly’, in the case of the Spital it does seem that Machyn is more impressed by the spectacle than by the sermons, not least because he records attendance at the Spital in three separate years. He takes care to observe the numbers of children and aldermen, some of whom he names. His familiarity with the

92 The Diary of Henry Machyn, Citizen and Merchant-Taylor of London from A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1563, ed. by John Gough Nichols (London, 1848), p. 33. 248 Suman aldermen also suggests that some of the congregation would have been able to name the various offfĳicials and known their reputations. Machyn’s observations resembled what we now call celebrity spotting. Pepys is more interested in sight than sound in both the years he attends the Spital: in 1662 he remarks on the ‘fĳine sight of charity’ but complains that the sermon is ‘so long’, leaving half way through; in 1669 he arrives part way through catching ‘a piece of a dull sermon’ but he stays to watch the City rulers leave on horses, their wives in coaches. He found ‘the sight [. . .] mighty pleasing.’93 Machyn probably enjoyed the occasion all the more for its Catholic connotations, and for the Catholic look of the Spital area, given his own Catholic proclivities.94 Archaeologist Christopher Thomas suggests that:

Little change can be noted in the buildings [. . .] The physical process of the Dissolution can be traced by analogy with the experience of the other large religious houses in London. However, an unusually high proportion of the fabric and layout of the priory buildings survived to influence the appearance and the street pattern of the area of the former precincts for the next two centuries.95

Despite the change in use then, the priory seems to have retained much of its original shape. Playfere’s initial commendation of the solitary religious life in monastries in his sermon, quickly followed by the remark that ‘as diuers have lived very badly in Monastries: so many haue liued very blessedly without them’ is more pointed when one considers the setting.96 Given the Protestant objections to, what they perceived to be, idolatry in the Catholic faith, the continued use of a pulpit loaded with Catholic connotation long after the (fĳirst) Reformation emphasizes what historians like Christopher Haigh have

93 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, A New and Complete Transcription, ed. by Robert Latham & William Matthews, 11 vols (London, 1970), III, 2 April 1662, pp. 57–58; IX (1976), 13 April 1669, pp. 517–518. 94 F.H.W. Sheppard notes a number of Catholic property owners in the area, and suggests ‘Its position within the Liberty of Norton Folgate probably made it attractive to adher- ents of the Roman Catholic faith.’ Survey of London, Volume XXVII, Spitalfĳields and Mile End New Town (London, 1957), p. 50. Catholic property owners included Robert Hare, Sir Edmund Huddlestone, and Jesuit Father Garnet. Ian Mortimer suggests ‘The earnestness of [Machyn’s] religious views, [. . .] tended towards Catholicism’, in Ian Mortimer, ‘Machyn [Machin], Henry (1496/1498–1563), Chronicler’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, [accessed 14 December 2011]. 95 Thomas, Excavations at the Priory, pp. 146, 149. 96 Playfere, Pathway, p. 189. Early Modern Easter Spital Sermons 249 long been arguing – that the Reformation should be viewed not as a discrete event, but as an ongoing process that lasted throughout the sixteenth century. The Spital setting complicates the Protestant message of the sermons, and undercuts the primacy accorded to hearing in the Protestant faith, given the visually Catholic context of performance. It is very tempting to link the Catholic associations of the Spital to my argument for the Spital as a spectacular event. Catholicism was, after all, criticized as being a ‘religion for the eye’, Protestantism a religion ‘for the ear.’97 Raymond Powell commented on the subordination of hearing to sight in Catholic education, and indeed this sense-hierarchy seems evident in witness accounts of this event.98 The lawyer John Manningham attends the Spital in 1602 but notes only the biblical text of the sermon, not the contents or the preacher. This is unusual given the forty-seven sermons summarized in his diary, some of them up to two thousand words long.99 Perhaps Manningham did not think the sermon was very good; perhaps he could not hear it; perhaps, like Machyn before him and Pepys after him, Manningham was more interested in the spectacle. The long history of this event and its popularity demonstrates that such ceremony as was played out at the Spital was clearly not objectionable to the majority and not attributed to its Catholic beginnings; it was simply a civic norm. Tremors of disapproval from the preachers, however, may be detected in the 1588 series. All three preachers are emphatic in their exhortations to act rather than simply attend sermons, to listen actively rather than passively, thus transforming the notion of the vocal agency of the preacher into the aural responsibility of the listener.

Conclusion

The perceived diffferences between print and performance point to the special agency of the spoken sermon in efffecting salvation. While there were clearly other reasons for scepticism about print, the fear of misinterpretation and repercussion, for example, a prominent reason for the preference for the

97 Ralph Brownrig, ‘The Sixth Sermon on S. Matth.’, Sixty Five Sermons in Two Volumes by the Right Reverend Father in God, Ralph Brownrig, Late Bishop of Exeter, 2 vols (London, 1674), II, p. 83. 98 Raymond Powell, ‘The Place of the Pulpit in the Restoration Church of Mary I (1553–1558), paper presented at the conference ‘Gossip, Gospel, and Governance: Orality in Europe 1400–1700’, 14–16 July 2011, British Academy, London. 99 Gurr, Playgoing, p. 98. 250 Suman

sermon performed was due to the force and immediacy of the word spoken. The ministering of the Gospel was meant to be an oral activity; a popular biblical verse among Protestant preachers was Romans 10:17, which insisted that ‘faith cometh by hearing’. Sermons provoked the same emotional responses as tragedy: they were meant to be cathartic. As Donne so eloquently put it in his Spital sermon ‘Preaching is the thunder, that clears the air’.100 The aural responsibilities of those present at plays and sermons were considered markedly diffferent. Aural distractions, however, were very similar in both: tattling women, babbling sophisters and roaring boys, as we have seen, were probably as noisy at a sermon as they were at the theatre. Spital sermons were steeped in their immediate context and were inherently theatrical, visually, rhetorically, and physically. At the same time preachers imposed an oral narrative on the auditory that may have contradicted the visual evidence before them. The preachers stressed that the City was a paragon of charity and good works but on at least one occasion these emblems of charity – the orphans – were a rowdy nuisance. Furthermore, monies raised at these ‘set piece civic occasions’, Ian Archer argues, targeted ‘otherwise neglected charitable objects’.101 John Hacket’s undated Spital sermon reminded the City fathers that the ‘Blew Coat wherewith you cloath the fatherless is more precious in Gods sight than your own Scarlet’.102 In 1588, collections may well have been limited given heavy taxation in preparation for the defence against the Spanish Armada.103 Despite Protestant effforts, which were largely successful, to ‘forg[e] an association between protestantism and charity’ at the Spital, nostalgia must have been rife, precisely because of its charitable objective. St Mary Spital had once been the largest hospital providing relief for the sick and the elderly, but it became a wealthy, private estate; its owner had to be entreated for permission to use the grounds. Advertising the City’s charitable acts must have been a sting to the most vulnerable in the audience who could plainly see the gap between ‘the Scarlet’ and ‘the Blue’.104

100 Donne, Sermons, IV, p. 105. 101 Ian W. Archer, ‘The Charity of Early Modern Londoners’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 12 (2002): 233–44, at p. 241. 102 John Hacket, A Century of Sermons upon Several Remarkable Subjects (London, 1675), p. 718. 103 McCullough, Selected Sermons, p. 304. 104 Jackson, Booke of Conscience, p. 120. Word on the Street

⸪

CHAPTER 8 Orality and Mutiny: Authority and Speech amongst the Seafarers of Early Modern London

Richard J. Blakemore

In the opening scene of The Tempest, published in Shakespeare’s posthumous fĳirst folio of 1623, as the eponymous supernatural storm threatens to engulf the ship carrying many of the principal characters, the courtiers Sebastian and Antonio insult the vessel’s boatswain as a ‘bawling, blasphemous incharitable Dog’ and a ‘whoreson insolent Noysemaker’.1 Shakespeare, it has been argued, was ‘well placed to seek the company of the mariners of his day’, and though the unnamed boatswain must be seen as a caricature of these seafarers, he could easily have been shaped by the playwright’s personal knowledge and contacts.2 The boatswain provokes the ire of the two patricians by his increasingly discourteous responses to their questioning, bidding them fĳirst ‘Keepe your Cabines’, then ‘silence: trouble vs not’. When warned to ‘remember whom thou hast aboard’ (the King of Naples and the Duke of Milan) he replies ‘None that I loue more than my selfe’ and mockingly invites his superiors to ‘vse your authoritie’ to ‘command these Elements to silence’.3 His attitude is understandable, as the aristocrats repeatedly interrupt his attempts to save the ship, but their spiteful comments seize upon the boatswain’s unruly talk, though they dismiss it as ‘Noyse’. The whole exchange highlights the central role speech played in the lives of early modern seafarers, and in contemporary imaginings of them. Seamen had their own kind of speaking, its urgency and boisterous- ness reflecting their life at sea. It also isolated mariners behind a seemingly

* I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the European Research Council for supporting the doctoral and postdoctoral research upon which this essay is based; and to Mike Braddick, Matthias Bähr, Thomas Cohen, Maria Fusaro, John Gallagher, Monika Smialkowska, David Smith, and Lesley Twomey for their discussion and comments on this topic. 1 John Heminge & Henry Condell, eds., Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623), p. 1. Unless otherwise stated, place of publication for all primary sources was London. 2 John Mack, The Sea: A Cultural History (London, 2011), p. 25. 3 Heminge & Condell, eds., Shakespeares Comedies, p. 1.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004291829_010 254 Blakemore impenetrable technical vocabulary, and loudly rejected the hierarchies of society ashore.4 This, at least, was the general opinion shared throughout early modern Europe: Shakespeare’s storm is similar to the descriptions of shipwreck in Erasmus’s Colloquies and Rabelais’s Pantagruel, which also features a profane captain.5 The Tempest’s noise-making boatswain is a fĳitting fĳigure to start with because he raises two main issues: fĳirst how this reputation connected to the reality of seafarers’ voices; and second in what ways speech embodied authority aboard ship, and which cultural and social conditions shaped the verbal exchanges by which seafarers exerted or challenged this authority. As we shall see, the two issues are closely intertwined, for while sailors cooper- ated and shared as well as wrangled and fought – in the language of the time a ship’s crew was a ‘company’, a word loaded with sociable implications – these relationships took place within a ship’s hierarchy and were perforce influenced by it.6 Shakespeare’s boatswain highlights, too, how much of the image of seafarers both in their own time was and still (among historians) is defĳined by what others said about them. In The Tempest, the courtiers do most of the talking: the boatswain’s replies are quick and curt. Seafarers were and are widely seen as mutinous ‘Noysemakers’, but this is not what seafarers said about or amongst themselves. To recover their own voices, we must turn to other sources, and principally to depositions given by seafarers in the High Court of Admiralty, which offfer a wealth of detailed, if complex, material for the study of their lives and speech. As the central court was in London, seamen who lived in the capital and its suburbs, and the words they spoke, appear regularly in its records. By far the greatest British port during a period of rapid maritime expansion, and the destination of unceasing and wide-reaching migration, the city welcomed vast numbers of both vocational and temporary seafarers from a great diversity

4 For discussions of speech, politics, and social hierarchy, see the contributions in this volume by Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers, and Marcus Harmes and Gillian Colclough. 5 Desiderius Erasmus, ‘NAVFRAGIUM’, in Familia Quaedam Colloquia ex D Eras. Roter. Colloquiis Selecta ad Utilitatem Purorum Latine Discentium (Zürich, 1540), pp. 33–40; François Rabelais, Le Qvart Livre des Faicts & Dicts Heroiques du Noble Pantagruel (Paris, 1552), fos. 41v–51v. See also Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 1994), pp. 43–6. 6 On ‘company’, see Phil Withington, ‘Company and Sociability in Early Modern England’, Social History, 32 (2007): 291–307; Phil Withington, Society in Early Modern England: The Vernacular Origins of some Powerful Ideas (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 106–123. See also Keith Wrightson, ‘Mutualities and Obligations: Changing Social Relationships in Early Modern England’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 139 (2006), pp. 157–194. Orality and Mutiny: the Seafarers of Early Modern London 255 of social and geographical origins.7 It is therefore best to see London not as a single, static community but more as a social and professional prism, refracting seafarers into larger networks of employment and activity. The recorded voices of London seafarers, caught in these documents, briefly illuminate some of these men at key moments in their labouring lives, and what they tell us is relevant to the wider community of British, and European, seafarers as well as those based in this city.

Sailors’ Talk

The popular image of sailor’s talk was an important element of the broader idea of ‘seamen’ as people set apart by their professional environment and their supposed disorderly nature. In legal documents such as wills or the admiralty court depositions, the most common term to describe a professional seafarer was ‘nauta’ or ‘marriner’, but in popular literature, in ballads, satires, and published petitions, though the terms are employed interchangeably, ‘seaman’ appeared just as often.8 A seaman, according to the popular stereotype, was wholly diffferent from other men because his time at sea changed him irrevocably, and commentators dwelt upon his inability to behave himself ashore. Nathaniel Knott, a gentleman with some experience at sea, wrote ‘how lewd, loose and debauched the common sort of sailors are I blush to think’, and Henry Mainwaring, who had been a pirate, described seamen as ‘of all men the most uncivil and barbarous’.9 Shakespeare’s boatswain is, according to The Tempest, unlikely to drown because ‘his complexion is perfect Gallows’; and Richard Brathwaite, an oft-quoted caricaturist, described sailors as ‘never acquainted much with civilitie’.10

7 Ralph Davis, The Rise of the Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Newton Abbot, 1962); Roger Finlay, Population and Metropolis: the Demography of London 1580–1650 (Cambridge, 1981); Kenneth R. Andrews, Ships, Money, and Politics: Seafaring and Naval Enterprise in the Reign of Charles I (Cambridge, 1991), ch. 1; Richard W. Unger, ‘The Tonnage of Europe’s Merchant Fleet, 1300–1800’, in his Ships and Shipping in the North Sea and Atlantic, 1400–1800 (Aldershot, 1997), pp. 247–61. 8 This is discussed in more detail in Richard J. Blakemore, ‘ The London and Thames Maritime Community during the British Civil Wars, 1640–1649’, Unpublished PhD dissertation, Cambridge, 2013, pp. 25–33. 9 Knott is quoted in Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics, p. 62; G.E. Mainwaring & W.G. Perrin, eds., The Life and Works of Sir Henry Mainwaring, 2 vols (London, 1920–1921), II, p. 42. 10 Heminge and Condell, eds., Shakespeares Comedies, p. 1; Richard Brathwaite, Whimzies: or, a Nevv Cast of Characters (1631), p. 140. 256 Blakemore

The way sailors talked was a central piece of this cultural conceit. Brathwaite added that ‘The Sea has taught him other Rhetoricke [. . .] He cannot speake low, the Sea talkes so loud’, and a satirical writer from the early 1640s described a group of fĳictional sailors as ‘of a coorse and rough conversation’, implying a simple, direct, perhaps profane style of speech.11 Like Brathwaite’s seaman, Shakespeare’s boatswain, when told to ‘be patient’, responds that he will be ‘When the Sea is’.12 The implication is that seafarers had only one kind of voice, appropriate to the deck of a ship at sea, a hostile environment where shouting was normal, small mistakes could lead to catastrophe, and quick action was essential, but such talk was out of place – impetuous, offfensive and disrespectful – elsewhere. Just as their sea-lives seemingly made it impossible for them to adjust their speech, so too their speech reflected their ‘uncivil’ and insubordinate nature. ‘Seamen’ not only inclined to mutiny and protest at sea, but contested the rules of authority ashore when these contradicted their familiar shipboard arrangements. The other trait of seamen’s language commented upon, and parodied, by contemporaries, which contributed to the sense of diffference, was their thick technical jargon. This was most likely acquired by word of mouth, though possibly from the navigational manuals that were published in increasing numbers, and in this technical literature we see a few glimpses of how this knowledge was often passed on in oral form.13 John Smith, in his enduringly popular Accidence [. . .] for Young Sea-men, reported that a ship’s boys, every Monday, had to ‘say their Compasse’.14 Out-loud rote learning was important in maritime education, but it also served an almost ritual purpose, transforming the boys into seafarers. Captain Charles Saltonstall likewise recorded that ‘We teach our [. . .] boyes (which we intend to make Navigators) the poynts of the Compass [Chapter author’s italics]’.15 The recitation of the compass points also reveals, as with much of the technical lexicon and voluble, rough speech, the dominance of maritime space in shaping seafarers’ talk. Smith himself

11 Brathwaite, Whimzies, pp. 140–141; John Hare, The Marine Mercury (1642), sig. A2v. 12 Heminge & Condell, eds., Shakespeares Comedies, p. 1. 13 For an overview, see David W. Waters, English Maritime Books Printed Before 1801 (Greenwich, 1995); and for the secondary literature, W.F.J. Mörzer Bruyns, ‘Research in the History of Navigation: Its Role in Maritime History’, I [nternational ] J [ournal of ] M [ aritime] H[istory], 21 (2009): 261–286. 14 John Smith, An Accidence or the Pathway to Experience Necessary for Young Sea-men (1626), p. 4. This text was reprinted in 127 as A Sea-grammar, in 1636 as An Accidence for the Sea, in 1652 as The Sea-mans Grammar, and in 1691, 1692, 1699, and 1705 as The Sea-mans Grammar and Dictionary. 15 Saltonstall, The Navigator, pp. 13–14. Orality and Mutiny: the Seafarers of Early Modern London 257 claimed that his work was written ‘for such as wants experience, and are desirous to learne what belongs to a Seaman’; a seaman’s possessions thus included the words to describe the ocean, the ship and its tackle, and seafaring tasks.16 This latter side of maritime talk was endorsed by seafarers themselves: it lent them a shared, professional identity which self-consciously separated them from those ashore. Mariner Edward Attwell explained in February 1645 that he knew George Key was ‘not a seaman For that if he had beene soe hee would have shewed him selfe to haue beene soe by many words uppon divers Occasions’.17 These ‘many words’ were presumably technical language, though mariners perhaps also pronounced certain words distinctly from other groups.18 For example, they had their own terms for navigational instruments, including ‘the Mariners Ring, called by them the Astralaby, which they ought to call the Astrolabe’, and the cross-stafff ‘commonly which is called Bella stella’, a term possibly from the Spanish balestilla, or from Italian.19 As with ‘bella stella’, words and phrases migrated easily between languages, another example being ‘waggoner’, meaning a printed sea-chart, derived from the name of Lucas Waghenaer, an early Dutch chart-maker.20 Maritime speech was thus to some extent an international, multilingual domain: Mainwaring in his ‘sea-dictionary’ described words ‘common to all Christian seamen to hail each other with’, while a number of testimonies from British mariners mention their ability to understand or speak various languages, principally Dutch and Spanish.21 This knowledge varied regionally, with Dutch dominant in the North

16 Smith, Accidence, sig. A2r–v. cf. Greg Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge, 1992), p. 19. 17 T[he] N[ational] A[rchives] HCA 13/59, deposition of Edward Attwell, 5 February 1644[/5]; cf. HCA 24/106, allegations in Deuell v. the Charitie, 31 January 1644[/5], 1 February 1644[/5]. 18 William Matthews, ‘Sailors’ Pronunciation in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century’, Anglia: Zeitshrift für Englische Philologie, 59 (1935): 193–251. 19 Quoting William Bourne, A Regiment for the Sea (c. 1576), fo. 27v, and Thomas Hood, The Vse of the Two Mathematicall Instruments, the Crosse Stafffe . . . And the Iacobs Stafffe (London, 1596), sig. A3r; cf. John Davis, The Seamans Secrets (London, 1595), sig. B1v. Contemporaries thought it was Spanish: Thomas Blundeville, M. Blundeville his Exercises (London, 1597), fo. 314v; W.F.J. Mörzer Bruyns, The Cross-Stafff: History and Development of a Navigational Instrument (Zutphen, 1994), p. 23, suggests ‘balestilla’. I am grateful to Maria Fusaro for pointing out that it could instead be Italian. 20 Luke Foxe, North-West Fox, or, Fox from the North-West Passage (1635), p. 172; Waghenaer’s charts were translated into English, e.g. Lucas Waghenaer, The Mariners Mirror, trans. Anthony Ashley (1588). 21 Mainwaring’s dictionary was initially circulated in manuscript, and John Smith drew on it heavily for his 1627 Sea-grammar: Mainwaring and Perrin, eds., Life and Works, II, pp. 159–60; P.L. Barbour, ‘Captain John Smith’s Sea Grammar and its Debt to Sir Henry 258 Blakemore

Sea and Baltic, while sailor Nicholas Dennis mentioned his understanding of ‘the language (being the Lingua Franca) wherein [. . .] [a] Turkish Captaine spoke’.22 Like the technical language with which it was closely connected, such multilingualism was probably learnt through informal, oral teaching, on ship or around the quays and taverns of Europe’s ports.23 Familiarity with and use of such talk, as Attwell’s comment about Key shows, was a clear mark of membership in the maritime community, and therefore helped shape authority aboard ship. Sir William Monson, a naval offfĳi- cer, observed that ‘seamen are stubborn or perverse when they perceive their commander is ignorant of the discipline of the sea, and cannot speak to them in their own language’.24 Such ignorance was a more serious problem in the navy than on merchant ships, because the political appointment of captains without sea experience could produce commanders incapable of understanding maritime activity or giving correct orders.25 Monson’s comment nevertheless indicates seafarers’ strong sense of ‘their own language’, a central element of the ‘discipline of the sea’ by which they lived their lives, and a sign among them of both membership and ability. Historians have, on the whole, been quite ready to accept these descriptions of sailors and the way they talked, especially the descriptions of seamen as

Mainwaring’s “Seaman’s Dictionary” ’, M [ariner’s] M [irror], 58 (1972), pp. 93–101. It was later published as Henry Mainwaring, The Sea-Mans Dictionary (1644). For multilingual seafarers, see TNA HCA 13/59, depositions of John Wilky, 8 November 1644, George Graves, 8 November 1644, and Steven Biles, 7 February 1644[/5]; HCA 13/60, depositions of William Phelpes, 6 March 1645[/6], and Peter Whit, 14 May 1646; HCA 13/61, depositions of Ralph Harvey, 18 March 1647[/8], John Newman, 16 March 1647[/8], Thomas Gawle, 27 March 1648, Thomas Okley, 26 May 1648. 22 TNA HCA 13/61, deposition of Nicholas Dennis, 1 June 1648. On the North Sea, see Lex Heerma van Voss, ‘North Sea Culture, 1500–1800’, in The North Sea and Culture (1550–1800), ed. by Juliette Roding & Lex Heerma van Voss (Hilversum, 1996), pp. 21–40, at pp. 25–28; and J.L. Price, ‘Regional Identity and European Culture: the North Sea Region in the Early Modern Period’, in North Sea, ed. by Roding & Voss, pp. 78–95, at p. 82. On language in the Mediterranean, see Eric Dursteler, ‘Speaking in Tongues: Multilingualism and Multicultural Communication in the Early Modern Mediterranean’, P[ast] & P[resent], 217 (2012): 47–77. 23 Edward Coxere, for example, learned to speak Dutch after he signed onto a Dutch ship: E.H.W. Meyerstein, ed., Adventures by Sea of Edward Coxere (Oxford, 1945), pp. 7–9. 24 Michael Oppenheim, ed., The Naval Tracts of Sir William Monson, 5 vols (London, 1902– 14), III, p. 434. 25 N.A.M. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea: a Naval History of Britain, 660–1649 (London, 2004), pp. 395–398, 404–405. Orality and Mutiny: the Seafarers of Early Modern London 259 conspicuously separate and generally mutinous, though many of these statements come from outsiders or social superiors contemptuous of the ‘common sort of sailors’.26 This is most evident in the uncritical use of the term ‘Jack Tar’, confusing a cultural image with real people and anachronistically applying associations which this name later acquired. Despite Daniel Vickers’ astute observation that ‘Jack Tar is a simplistic and inefffective tool for exploring the social relations that structured maritime life in the early modern period’, the often condescending ‘Jack Tar’ portrayal still haunts some writing.27 Most sig- nifĳicantly, the stereotype assumes a certain homogeneity: one scholar con- fĳidently claimed that ‘as a class mariners tend to a certain uniformity which transcends time, place, and nation’.28 The study of orality warns against these easy assumptions. Even though there was a distinctive seafaring talk, noted both by members of the maritime community and by outsiders, seafarers nevertheless had individual voices. Each seafarer probably had many, adjusting their speech to social circumstances. It is insufffĳicient, therefore, simply to describe the speech of seamen through cari- catures by contemporaries, or even through navigational literature, because these sources do not tell the full story. To understand the importance of speech in seafarers’ lives, the things that shaped it, and its role in power relationships, and to test the relationship between orality and mutiny, we must study the best extant record of seafarers’ own talk, in the papers of the High Court of Admiralty.

26 For the appearance of these ideas in more general works, see Burke, Popular Culture, pp. 43–46; Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 94–95. 27 Quoting Daniel Vickers, ‘Beyond Jack Tar’, William and Mary Quarterly, 50 (1993): 418–424, at p. 424; see also Daniel Vickers, Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail (London, 2005); and Valerie Burton, ‘The Myth of Bachelor Jack: Masculinity, Patriarchy, and Seafaring Labour’, in Jack Tar in History: Essays in the History of Maritime Life and Labour, ed. by Colin Howell & Richard J. Twomey (Fredericton, New Brunswick, 1991), pp. 179–198. For more detail on the ‘Jack Tar’ tradition, see Richard J. Blakemore, ‘Thinking Outside the Gundeck: Maritime History, the Royal Navy, and the Outbreak of British Civil War, 1625–42’, Historical Research, 87 (2014): 251–274, at pp. 251–254. 28 A.J.R. Russell-Wood, ‘Seamen Ashore and Afloat: the Social Environment of the Carreira da India, 1550–1750’, MM, 69 (1983): 35–52, at p. 35. Similarly, see Kenneth R. Andrews, ‘The Elizabethan Seaman’, MM, 68 (1982): 245–262. 260 Blakemore

Speaking in Court

Because of the admiralty court’s civil law procedure, which often compiled lengthy written depositions, the court papers preserve very detailed accounts of many aspects of early modern seafarers’ lives both at sea and ashore.29 As several contributions to this volume show, court records are a rich resource for the study of speech in history, but they must always be handled with careful attention to the circumstances and processes which produced the documents, and awareness of the personal politics at play in any courtroom.30 The depositions of the admiralty court are manifestly not transcripts of conversations which took place aboard ship; they are not even, despite the picaresque use to which they have occasionally been put, verbatim transcripts of what mariners said in court.31 The lord admiral and his representatives exercised a legal function in the Middle Ages, but the court was more formally constituted early in the sixteenth century and its business then grew until it reached a peak in the 1650s, following which jurisdictional disputes with common law courts curtailed admiralty jurisdiction after the Restoration and reduced the admiralty’s caseload.32 During the earlier period, the court heard cases relating to prizes, the handling of freight, the ownership of vessels, and the wages of seafarers: for all these things, civil law procedures applied, and the judge dispensed summary justice. The court also held an oyer et terminer commission for crimes

29 On mariners and the law more generally, see Richard J. Blakemore, ‘The Legal World of English Sailors, c. 1575–1729’, in Law, Labour, and Empire: Comparative Perspectives on Seafarers, 1500–1800, ed. by Maria Fusaro, Bernard Allaire, Richard J. Blakemore, & Tijl Vanneste (forthcoming). 30 See especially the essays in this volume by Matthias Bähr, Elizabeth Horodowich and Thomas Cohen. 31 For example Evelyn Berckman, Victims of Piracy: The Admiralty Court, 1575–1668 (London, 1979). 32 R.G. Marsden, ‘The High Court of Admiralty in Relation to National History, Commerce, and the Colonisation of America, A.D. 1550–1650’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 16 (1902): 69–96; Alwyn A. Ruddock, ‘The Earliest Records of the High Court of Admiralty (1515–1558)’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 22 (1949): 139–151; George F. Steckley, ‘Merchants and the Admiralty Court during the English Revolution’, American Journal of Legal History (AJLH), 22 (1978): 137–175; George F. Steckley, ‘Instance Cases at Admiralty in 1657: a Court “Packed up with Sutors” ’, Journal of Legal History, 7 (1986): 68–83; M.J. Pritchard and D.E.C. Yale, eds, Hale and Fleetwood on Admiralty Jurisdiction (London, 1993); George F. Steckley, ‘Litigious Mariners: Wage Cases in the Seventeenth-Century Admiralty Court’, Historical Journal, 42 (1999): 315–345; Blakemore, ‘Legal World’. Orality and Mutiny: the Seafarers of Early Modern London 261 committed at sea, including theft, piracy and murder.33 Though the court therefore held wide powers to judge disputes central to the lives of seafarers, it was also a resource which they themselves used, apparently with considerable success. The court’s procedures aimed to facilitate seafarers’ legal action: whereas in common law each plaintifff had to sue each defendant separately, in the admiralty court plaintifffs could plead collectively, sharing the cost, and accuse either a group of merchants or an object, such as a ship, which could be sold should the defendants default on payment or fail to appear.34 Even so, the independence of deponents in creating these documents is dif- fĳicult to establish. As the only contemporary guide to the court’s practice was a Latin manuscript treatise, not printed until 1667, or translated into English until 1722, it is difffĳicult to be certain how widely deponents understood the intricacies of court process, although litigants had the assistance of the court’s proctors.35 Witnesses were threatened with substantial fĳines should they not attend. They were called to present their testimonies to the court at Doctor’s Commons, near St Paul’s, so they had no control over the timing or location of their examination, although it appears that depositions were initially taken down before a public notary and then repeated to a judge, which might suggest less an interrogation than a conversation between clerk, witness, and proctor.36 The witnesses also had only limited control over the subject matter. In theory, after a plaintifff began a ‘cause’, they submitted a ‘libel’ outlining their accusations, to which the defendant could offfer a ‘personal answer’, usually denying the libel; both plaintifffs and defendants could submit further ‘allegations’, and deponents offfered testimonies in response to these and the libel.37 Each party

33 The oyer et terminer fĳiles are contained in TNA HCA 1 series; the focus here is upon the examinations of witnesses in civil cases, HCA 13 series. 34 Steckley, ‘Litigious Mariners’, pp. 320, 323, 337, and passim. 35 Francis Clerke, Praxis Curiæ Admiralitatis Angliæ (1667); Francis Clerke, The Practice of the Court of Admiralty of England (1722); see also J. Duncan M. Derrett, ‘The Works of Francis Clerke, Proctor (A Chapter in English Romano-Canonical Law)’, Studia et Documenta Historiae et Iuris, 40 (1974): 52–66; and Blakemore, ‘Legal World’. 36 Clerke, Praxis, pp. 20–21, explains that fĳines for witnesses who failed to appear ranged between 50s and £5 (for a ‘common’ mariner, approximately two to four months wages) depending on the gravity of the case, but adds that judges would usually delay these charges for a few days. The court sat at the disused church of St Margaret’s, Southwark, before it moved to Doctor’s Commons in the early seventeenth century: George F. Steckley, ‘Bottomry Bonds in the Seventeenth-Century Admiralty Court’, AJLH, 45 (2001): 256–277, at p. 258. 37 In practice, ‘libel’ and ‘allegation’ were used interchangeably with each other and with other terms, such as ‘summary petition’, to refer to documents submitted by either plaintifffs or defendants. 262 Blakemore could also produce ‘interrogatories’, a list of questions to be presented to hostile witnesses, often in an efffort to discredit them.38 Though witnesses delivered their depositions personally and orally (depositions usually begin, after the preamble describing the deponent, with the phrases ‘dicit et deponet ’ or ‘sayeth and deposeth’), the records do not give any details of the manner of witnesses’ speech. They are almost entirely phrased in formal, impersonal language – ‘this deponent sayeth’ – rather than conveying the exact words of the witness, and are peppered with Latin insertions such as ‘ut credit’ or ‘nescit deponere’. Only at moments, especially of directly recorded speech, does something of the flavour of an individual witness’s actual talk come through. Despite this, we should not presume that deponents were entirely subordinated to the court procedures and a scribe’s choice of words: witnesses participated actively and astutely in the production of these documents. Maritime historians have often assumed that seafarers were illiterate, and equated this with ill-educated, and therefore presumably unequipped to deal with legal matters; some have commented on seafarers’ ‘simplicity’.39 We should discard this assumption. Admittedly, some early modern navigational writers were openly sceptical of dependence on literature, but this was probably a stylistic device to contrast themselves with more scholarly competitors, and it is somewhat undermined in that they themselves published these

38 Libels, allegations, and some sentences are fĳiled (rather chaotically) in TNA HCA 24; interrogatories in HCA 23; and personal answers in HCA 13. The court broadly followed the procedure of ecclesiastical courts, on which Francis Clerke also wrote: see Francis Clerke, Praxis Francisi Clarke (1666). For succinct introductions, see J.S. Purvis, An Introduction to Ecclesiastical Records (London, 1953), pp. 64–96; Ralph Houlbrooke, Church Courts and the People during the English Reformation, 1520–1570 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 38–54; Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 47–51; Anne Tarver, Church Court Records: An Introduction for Family and Local Historians (Chichester, 1995), pp. 7–18; Anne Tarver, ‘English Church Courts and their Records’, The Local Historian, 38 (2008): 4–22. 39 Quoting Donald Kennedy, ‘The Naval Revolt of 1648’, English Historical Review, 77 (1962): 247–56, at p. 254; see also Christopher Lloyd, The British Seaman, 1200–1800: a Social Survey (London, 1968), pp. 73–4; John Lafffĳin,Jack Tar: The Story of the British Sailor (London, 1969), pp. 12–13, 79; Peter Kemp, The British Sailor: A Social History of the Lower Deck (London, 1970), p. 33; Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London, 2000), p. 143; and Brian Lavery, Royal Tars: the Lower Deck of the Royal Navy, 875–1850 (London, 2010), pp. 46, 67; all quote Brathwaite, Whimzies, pp. 138–47, which gives a particularly derogatory depiction of the ‘seaman’s’ mental capabilities. Orality and Mutiny: the Seafarers of Early Modern London 263 opinions in books.40 Moreover, there is evidence that literacy was more widespread in the maritime community than usually thought. We can measure literacy amongst seafarers in a rudimentary fashion through the signatures in the admiralty court documents. This method perhaps under- estimates the level of literacy, as some who could not sign their name may have been able to read; it certainly oversimplifĳies a very complex situation.41 For example, Samuel Bamfĳield, a boatswain during the 1670s, stated in court that ‘hee can reade but cannot write’; he nevertheless signed his name.42 Even so, this approach furnishes statistics which form a suggestive estimate. A recent survey of English seafarers in the seventeenth century found only 37 per cent of mariners and 63 per cent of offfĳicers signing in 1603–38, compared with 76 per cent of mariners and 94 per cent of offfĳicers in 1650–1676.43 Depositions by London seafarers in the admiralty court during the 1640s show that 90 per cent of masters and mates, and 72 per cent of other offfĳicers and mariners, could sign their names.44 These are only samples based on incidental evidence, but collated they show that a considerable rise in signature rates took place across the century, and the disparity between the Londoners and others matches evidence that literacy was well above average in the capital.45 The high proportion of offfĳicers amongst admiralty deponents may distort the tally, but even so these results throw serious doubt on the assumption that seafarers were usually illiterate.

40 For example Foxe, North-West Fox, p. 172; Saltonstall, The Navigator, sig. A3r. On Foxe, see also Katherine Neal, ‘Mathematics and Empire, Navigation and Exploration: Henry Briggs and the Northwest Passage Voyages of 1631’, Isis, 93 (2002): 435–454. 41 This method is suggested in David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1980); for Cressy’s views on the problems with this methodology, see pp. 53–54. For criticisms, see Keith Thomas, ‘The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England’, in The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, ed. by Gerd Baumann (Oxford, 1986), pp. 97–132, at p. 102. 42 TNA HCA 13/78, deposition of Samuel Bamfĳield, 6 February 1676[/7]. 43 Vincent V. Patarino, ‘The Religious Shipboard Culture of Sixteenth and Seventeenth- Century English Sailors’, in The Social History of English Seamen, 1489–1649, ed. by Cheryl Fury (Woodbridge, 2012), pp. 141–192, at pp. 176–181. 44 Blakemore, ‘London and Thames Maritime Community’, pp. 41–42. 45 Such a rise is even more signifĳicant given the probably low literacy rates in the mid- sixteenth century: see P.E.H. Hair and J.D. Alsop, English Seamen and Traders in Guinea, 1553–1565: The New Evidence of Their Wills (Lampeter, 1992), pp. 87–8; see also J.D. Alsop, ‘Tudor Merchant Seafarers in the Early Guinea Trade’, in The Social History of English Seamen, ed. by Fury, pp. 75–116; Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, pp. 72, 128–129, 132–135. 264 Blakemore

It is in any case misleading to split literacy from orality, since the two cultures coexisted and interacted.46 Seafarers certainly encountered writing regularly, usually in the plethora of legal documents involved in early modern shipping. These included charter-parties, bills of lading, bills of sale, and letters of marque; some of these documents were displayed and read aloud aboard ship. Sailors produced wills, letters of attorney, and manuscript or published petitions.47 Most seafarers, even those who could not read, would have understood the signifĳicance of both legal and other forms of writing, and seafarers acted strategically and cleverly as litigants.48 Therefore, their involvement in the production of depositions in the admiralty court cannot be seen as either casual or totally determined by court offfĳicers. Deponents were also sworn to honesty, and oaths carried substantial weight in the early modern period as not only legally but also spiritually binding.49 Benedick Straffforde, in September 1642, responded to an interrogatory concerning his faith that he ‘doth professe the protestant religion and conceiveth that hee is bounde to performe and observe an oath ministred to him by a Protestant Judge’, while William Hammon claimed he ‘understandeth what is the daunger of a false oath’.50 Of course, this does not mean that mariners always told the truth; but it perhaps dissuaded witnesses from telling an outright lie. Even if the court scribes’ legal phrasing does not totally obscure the deponents’ involvement in creating this evidence, it obviously cannot just be trusted as a true account of seafarers’ experiences. Depositions were gathered over weeks, sometimes months, and usually well after the events in question. The depositions are therefore distant, physically and temporally, from the inci- dents they describe, and the gap is evoked in the recurring phrase ‘to his best remembrance’. Moreover, only a third of warrants issued by the court resulted in

46 Thomas, ‘The Meaning of Literacy’; Andy Wood, ‘Custom and the Social Organization of Writing in Early Modern England’, TRHS, 9 (1999): 257–69; Fox, Oral and Literate Culture; see also the contribution in this volume by Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers. 47 For this period, samples of these documents can be found in TNA HCA 30/844, 30/845– 846, 30/848, 30/851–852, 30/854–855, 30/862, 30/865–867, and 30/871. There are numerous examples of sailors’ wills in TNA PROB 11. 48 This is examined in Blakemore, ‘Legal World’. 49 Clerke, Praxis, pp. 20–21, simply states that witnesses should be sworn in the same manner as in ecclesiastical courts. On oaths and speech, see Miles Ogborn, ‘The Power of Speech: Orality, Oaths, and Evidence in the British Atlantic World, 1650–1800’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 36 (2011): 109–125. 50 TNA HCA 13/58, depositions of Benedick Straffford, 26 September 1642, and William Hammon, 7 June 1643; cf. deposition of Edward Steevens, 21 October 1642. Orality and Mutiny: the Seafarers of Early Modern London 265 further legal activities, and of these, few went on to fĳinal sentence by the judge: action in the admiralty court was part of broader strategies by which seafarers pressured their opponents in labour disputes.51 Even depositions gathered immediately after an event, therefore, were moulded by witnesses, in response to the allegations and interrogatories, to fĳit their own best interests. Without other evidence (rare in this instance), we cannot reconstruct the broader activity out of court which shaped speech in court, and it is easy to overlook the personal and the contingent, since these would often be suppressed when producing testimony.52 Yet a wealth of incidental evidence emerges from these documents; and more importantly, if deponents were deliberate in giving their testimony, and understood the consequences of delivering it, then the tactics they adopted reveal both particular and general assumptions about talk and its relationship to authority aboard ship.

Wages and Punishments

Disputes over wages and punishment provide clues to seafarers’ attitudes towards speaking and authority. They demonstrate not only that speech was the medium through which power relationships aboard were expressed or challenged, as was usual in the early modern world, but also, more signifĳicantly, that mariners regularly exploited the stereotype of a particular kind of speaking to explain these relationships. Seafarers themselves harnessed the image of badly-behaved seamen to justify the need for offfĳicers to command their crews. A series of depositions from 1644 explain that the boatswain’s duty was ‘to looke after the [. . .] com[m]on men of the shippe and to have a care over them to see that they carrye and behave themselves soberlye and honestlye and doe theire worcke’, implying that without such oversight sober and honest behaviour was unlikely, and that ‘in his absence there is little worke done by the shipps Companye’.53 The deponents here included two masters, but also mariners who held no offfĳice aboard ship; authority was not only imposed from above but also endorsed by those subjected to it.

51 Steckley, ‘Litigious Mariners’, p. 325. 52 Joanne Bailey, ‘Voices in Court: Litigants’ or Lawyers’?’, Historical Research, 74 (2001): 392–408. 53 TNA HCA 13/59, depositions of George Phillips, 2 February 1643[/4], and John Howcrafte, 26 March 1644; cf. depositions of Christopher Willson, 2 February 1643[/4], John Barker, 13 April 1644, and Thomas Orrell, 27 April 1644. 266 Blakemore

An emphasis upon speech as a telling aspect of individuals’ behaviour, using this same stereotype, can be seen in practice in a few court cases. Thomas Greene and Abraham Addams, two ‘Com[m]on saylers’ of the Anne Bonaventure, were characterised by crewmates in stereotypical terms, Addams as ‘a lazy fellow for his labo[u]r’, Greene ‘a poore idle druncke & debauched fellow a great swerer & Blasfemer’, stressing profane talk as evidence of his ‘debauched’ nature.54 We have to be careful with these accusations, however, as they are pretty clearly attempts to undermine Addams’ and Greene’s testimony as witnesses against the master, William Spencer, who was being sued by the freighting merchants.55 In another case William Coates, one of the ‘com[m] on or formaste men’ of the London Merchant during her 1641–2 Mediterranean voyage, sued the boatswain Hugh Woone in December 1643 for beating him so badly that he required a surgeon costing £10, and could not labour.56 For his part, Woone called as witness crewmates who described Coates as ‘a mutinous, deboist, druncken and contentious fellow [. . .] verye negligent refractorye and quarrellsome’, and deserving punishment.57 Despite these damning comments, the judge found for Coates on 11 July 1644, but Coates later died, and in November his executor, Edward Tildeslie, submitted another libel accusing Woone not only of beating Coates but of being ‘much given to swearinge drunckenesse & such like vices & was very quarrelsome & apt to urge both the said Coates & divers others of the Companie to quarrellinge or contention’.58

54 TNA HCA 13/59, depositions of Ralph Haydon, 26 February 1643[/4], and John Jenner, 9 March 1643[/4]; cf. depositions of Clement Knapp, 27 February 1643[/4], Robert Welny, 15 March 1643[/4], John Basell, 18 March 1643[/4], Edmund Batherne, 25 March 1644. 55 Their testimonies are TNA HCA 13/58, depositions of Thomas Greene, 10 January 1643[/4], and Abraham Addams, 11 January 1643[/4]; see also the deposition of John Byam, 8 February 1643[/4]; HCA 13/59, depositions of John Baker, 24 March 1644, Richard Cox, 22 May 1644, and John Byam, 28 May 1644; HCA 13/118, answers of Samuel Mico, 19 January 1643[/4], and William Spenser, 25 January 1643[/4]; and HCA 24/106/10, allegation in Keate & co v. Badiley & co, 13 November 1643. For the accusations against Greene and Addams, see HCA 24/106/54, allegation in Keate & co v. Badiley & co, 26 January 1643[/4]. 56 TNA HCA 24/106/28, libel in Coates v. Woone, 6 December 1643; HCA 24/106/347, allegation in Coates v. Woone, 20 January 1643[/4]. 57 TNA HCA 13/59, deposition of Thomas Orrell, 27 April 1644; cf. deposition of John Howcrafte, 26 March 1644. 58 TNA HCA 24/106/142, decree in Coates v. Woone, 11 July 1644; HCA 24/106/178, libel in Tildeslie v. Woone, 21 November 1644. The case can be followed in the Acts Book, HCA 3/41, fols 344v, 348r, 363v, 381v, 404v, 410r, 430r, 435v, 436v, 445v, 450v, 456r, 461r, 469r, 489r, 496r, 500r, 556v, 570r. Orality and Mutiny: the Seafarers of Early Modern London 267

These descriptions show that, even if ‘coorse’ conversation was thought normal aboard ship, there was still a limit, an excessive and unacceptable level of profanity or spoken confrontation which could be used in court to signal general bad behaviour. Confrontation seems to have been worse than profanity. Both sides in Woone v. Coates emphasised their opponent’s ‘contentious’ and ‘quarrellsome’ talk, reflecting the need for harmony and cooperation amongst a ship’s crew, both to carry out sailing tasks and simply to get along, and stressing the damage divisive speech could do. Thus there was an edge of mutiny to confrontational talk, but it was not confĳined to a ‘vertical’ division between offfĳicers and ‘common seamen’. Disruptive behaviour by offfĳicers was just as dangerous, and just as likely to be brought up in court; the negative stereotype could be afffĳixed to any member of a ship’s company, not just the ‘foremaste men’. Leonard Pickering, who admitted that ‘hee is but a younge marin[e]r’, said of his captain, James Lyle, that ‘he thinketh [Lyle] is a mane scarse worthey to governe and take charge of any mans goods because he is a greate swearer, and given to drincke, and to use outradgious speeches’.59 In another dispute, from the 1630s, this same pattern appears. Elias Sherbrooke, carpenter of the East India Company ship Discovery, stood charged with negligence and, ultimately, instigating a collective mutiny. Sherbrooke was criticised for ‘scuffflinge’ with other offfĳicers during the voyage, particularly the gunner and boatswain, with whom he would ‘often quarrel and brable’, and even his own mate.60 To ‘brabble’ was to argue obstinately over trifling matters, or to squabble noisily, probably connected with the Dutch ‘brabbelen’, to splutter or jabber.61 Sherbrooke was also accused of failing to repair the ship, of provoking discontent over the quality of victuals and, most damningly, of mutinying when the Discovery was prevented from reaching England by bad weather, and the ship’s commanders resolved to remain at sea. The gunner, however, claimed that Sherbrooke ‘in that ymployment did behave himself very Civily temperately and Diligently, only now and then but very seldom distemperate w[i]th drincke’, and only complaining about victuals ‘in private discourse’.62 Sherbrooke’s opponents explained his eventual mutiny as the pre- dictable outcome of his unruly talk and behaviour, while his friends needed to

59 TNA HCA 13/30, deposition of Leonard Pickering, 5 August 1592. 60 TNA HCA 13/48, fols 21v–22r, 24v–26r, 129r–130r, 155r–156r, 237r–238v; HCA 13/107, fols 16r–17r. 61 Oxford English Dictionary (1989: online edn, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/22363>; accessed 24 February 2012). In Henry Hexham, Het Groot Woorden-boeck (1644), ‘Brabbelen’ is translated as ‘To Brawle, or to Brabble’, sig. E5r. 62 TNA HCA 13/48, fols 129r–130r. 268 Blakemore deflect the charge of negligence by extolling his professional character, manifest in when, how, and to whom he spoke. The implied distinction between Sherbrooke’s conduct as an offfĳicer and ‘in private discourse’ seems disingenuous, given the confĳined space of a ship at sea, where duties never really ceased. Authority aboard relied on an offfĳicer’s professional capability and on his general conduct with crew, two traits demonstrated in speech. Over the past two decades many historians have argued that power in the early modern world relied upon consent, and was negotiated through verbal exchanges.63 This potentially unstable situation was exacer- bated aboard ship by the absence, or diminution, of those distinctions which helped underpin authority in other communities. Land-ownership was naturally less important at sea, except for aristocratic naval commanders. There were great inequalities of wealth amongst seafarers, but the maritime community was economically stratifĳied in a more complex fashion than is often thought. Many masters and offfĳicers, even when part-owners of their ship, were wage-labourers like their crew, while lower-ranking seafarers regularly took up small trade ‘ventures’, meaning that labour relations varied considerably from ship to ship.64 Another blurred area was age. Seafaring was, most historians agree, a young man’s profession, and statistics from the admiralty court papers, as well as some osteo-archaeological material, seem to support this view.65 The 1640s volumes used for the earlier literacy calculations reveal some older sailors, but most were under forty, and while there was a concentration of mariners between twenty-one and twenty-fĳive, and masters, mates, and offfĳicers above

63 Paul Grifffĳiths, Adam Fox, and Steve Hindle, eds.,The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1996); Michael Braddick and John Walter, eds., Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2001); Tim Harris, ed., The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1850 (Basingstoke, 2001); Christopher Marsh, ‘Order and Place in England 1560–1640: The View from the Pew’, J[ournal of ] B[ritish] S[tudies], 44 (2005): 3–26. For a critique of this historiography, see Andy Wood, ‘Fear, Hatred, and the Hidden Injuries of Class in Early Modern England’, Journal of Social History, 39 (2006): 803–826. 64 Andrews, Ships, Money & Politics, pp. 38–44. The economic situation of seafarers is explored in more detail in Blakemore, ‘London and Thames Maritime Community’, pp. 43–47. The role of ‘ventures’ and trade in seafarers’ economic activities is the subject of my current research. 65 Andrews, Ships, Money & Politics, p. 13; cf. Hair and Alsop, English Seamen and Traders, p. 109; Ann Stirland, ‘The Men of the Mary Rose’, in The Social History of English Seamen, ed. by Fury, pp. 47–74. Orality and Mutiny: the Seafarers of Early Modern London 269 the age of twenty-fĳive, there were also many older crew and younger offfĳicers.66 The gerontocratic equation of age with authority, common in early modern society, did not always work out aboard ship, and this could cause friction.67 On the Anne Bonaventure, at the time of the court case involving Greene and Addams (within a year of the voyage), the gunner was 70, his mate was 39, and one quartermaster was 65: but the boatswain, Robert Welny, was 24, and the purser only 21, perhaps one reason why the offfĳicers struggled to impose authority on some of their crew (Greene was 26, and Addams was 25).68 As a consequence, how offfĳicers spoke, and how seafarers spoke to them, justifĳied or undermined claims to authority both aboard and in court, not only regarding their ability to speak seafarers’ ‘own language’ but more generally too. This is evident in Pickering’s opinion about Lyle, and also in the deposition of Robert Paule, master’s mate of the Hopefull Elizabeth. Paule testifĳied that while he was dining with the master, Robert Ensome, the boatswain William Tucker and ‘one of the common men of the sayd shipp’, Henry Kinge, were ‘togeither by the eares, and fĳighting togeither uppon the decke’. Ensome went out ‘to part them and struck each of them 2 or 3 times with a ropes end’, before asking Tucker ‘why he did not call up the company and sett them to worke’. Tucker replied that ‘if he should speake to any of them they would be about his eares’. According to Paule, Tucker ‘did quarrell with and beat and abuse divers of the sayd shipps company’, as well as insulting Ensome ‘over a hundred times’.69 Paule, then, presents Tucker’s behaviour and his speech as vicious and vindictive, incompatible with the role of a boatswain, reducing his authority and his ability even to speak to other crew-members. That Tucker was only promoted after the original boatswain left the ship may explain why he struggled, and after this incident he reportedly refused to act as boatswain, though he was willing to labour as a ‘common’ seaman.70

66 Blakemore, ‘London and Thames Maritime Community’, pp. 34–40. 67 For ‘gerontocracy’, Keith Thomas, ‘Age and Authority in Early Modern England’, PBA, 62 (1976): 205–248; Susan Brigden, ‘Youth and the English reformation’, P&P, 95 (1982): 37–67; Paul Grifffĳiths,Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1540–1640 (Oxford, 1996); J.A. Sharpe, ‘Disruption in the Well-Ordered Household: Age, Authority, and Possessed Young People’, in Experience of Authority, ed. by Grifffĳiths, Fox, and Hindle, pp. 187–212. 68 TNA HCA 13/58, depositions of Thomas Greene, 10 January 1643[/4], and Abraham Addams, 11 January 1643[/4]; TNA HCA 13/59, depositions of Rudolf Haydon, 26 February 1643[/4], Clement Knapp, 27 February 1643[/4], Robert Welny, 15 March 1643[/4], John Bassell, 18 March 1643[/4], and Edmund Batherne, 25 March 1644. 69 TNA HCA 13/53, fols 15v, 33r–34v. 70 TNA HCA 13/53, fol. 34v. 270 Blakemore

In this, as in other instances, verbal sparring escalated easily into physical fĳighting, and the association of speech with violence, and with the threat of mutiny, is a prime reason why confrontational shipboard talk was dangerous. The crisis between Coates and Woone came to a head at Malamocco, a small port at the southern end of Venice’s Lido island.71 According to the deposition of crewmate Stephen Eastgaute, Coates attempted to go ashore, but Woone stopped him, at which Coates ‘swore and curst [. . .] railinge at him in a verye grosse and faltye manner’.72 Coates’s own libel described how he and Woone then ‘fell out and fell together by the eares’ and Woone beat him ‘in a cruell & unmercifull manner’.73 According to Thomas Orrell, another of the London Merchant’s crew, soon after this fĳirst altercation, when Woone went into the galley ‘to lighte a pipe of tobacco’, Coates ‘snatcht upp the spit’ and again attacked Woone, before being pulled offf. In both fĳights, Orrell stated, Coates ‘pulled the Boatswaines Call from aboute [Woone’s] neck’: the ‘call’ or whistle was a symbol of offfĳice.74 Orrell here ascribes to Coates a defĳiant gesture, a deliberate and theatrical challenge to Woone’s authority matching Coates’s abusive words.75 Nor were these struggles restricted to disputes aboard ship; arguments of this kind could easily spill ashore. Aboard the Anne Bonaventure, the master Spencer, and Welny the young boatswain, beat Greene and Addams, and after they returned to London and Greene apparently sued Spencer for his wages, ‘in the Dying Chamber in D[oc]tors Com[m]ons’ Greene ‘said to the said Spencer that he would be revenged of him’.76 In the yard outside the court Greene again ‘gave [Spencer] very grosse & ill language [. . .] & though the s[ai]d Spencer had a sword & [Greene] but a stick in his hand yet [Greene] durst fĳight w[i]th the s[ai]d Spencer’.77 In this instance Greene’s reported words threatened violence though they did not, as with Coates, result in it; again, Greene’s ‘grosse & ill language’ and his reported willingness to commit violence were deployed in

71 TNA HCA 24/106/347, allegation in Coates v. Woone, 20 January 1643[/4]. 72 TNA HCA 13/59, deposition of Steven Eastegaute, 26 March 1644. 73 TNA HCA 24/106/28, libel in Coates v. Woone, 6 December 1643. 74 TNA HCA 13/59, deposition of Thomas Orrell, 27 April 1644. 75 On the theatricality of authority aboard ship, see Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language; on gesture, Michael J. Braddick, ‘Introduction: The Politics of Gesture’, P&P Supplement, 4, The Politics of Gesture: Historical Perspectives (2009): 9–35; and John Walter, ‘Gesturing at Authority: Deciphering the Gestural Code of Early Modern England’, P&P Supplement, 4, The Politics of Gesture: Historical Perspectives (2009): 96–127. 76 TNA HCA 13/59, deposition of Clement Knapp, 27 February 1643[/4]. 77 TNA HCA 13/59, deposition of Robert Welny, 15 March 1643[/4]; cf. depositions of Ralph Haydon, 26 February 1643[/4]; and John Basell, 18 March 1643[/4]. Orality and Mutiny: the Seafarers of Early Modern London 271 court to indicate his bad character, even though this possibly never happened.78 Threats such as these may have availed most seafarers little, as bad speaking justifĳied violent punishment, at sea as elsewhere in early modern life.79 Such punishment, however, had its recognised limits. Sherbrooke, despite his mis- demeanours, was spared ‘ducking’ (being dropped into the sea from the rig- ging), because he was an old man.80 Punishment’s limits were vaguely defĳined and readily debated – disputes usually hinged on whether the chastisement endangered a seafarer’s labour – but they were cited in court to explain or defend an offfĳicer’s actions. Woone, for instance, admitted to beating Coates, but maintained that this ‘was gently donne & not beyond or exceedinge the quality & meritt of the said Cotes his offfence & trespasse’, and that Coates was not disabled by it.81 Woone, and one of the witnesses, stated that Coates was not badly injured by Woone’s beating, but wounded by a drunken fall in the ship’s scuttle.82 Another crewmember reported hearing the surgeon call Coates ‘druncken sott and saye that hee had done himselfe a worlde of hurte by reason of the fall’.83 Here again a nugget of speech is crucial evidence in court; a genuine-sounding quotation attested both to Coates’s drinking habits, apparently common knowledge amongst the crew, and to their consequences for his health. Seafarers approved of punishment for disrespectful speech and behaviour, when they themselves were not the target. Two of Woone’s shipmates, neither of them offfĳicers, claimed that ‘the punishment [. . .] did not in his this ex[amina]tes judgement exceede the qualitye and meritt of [Coates’s] offfence’, one adding ‘it beinge noe more then hee beleevethe hee this ex[amina]te himselfe should have done’.84

78 This incident reportedly took place around Christmas 1643, but there is no mention of a case between Spencer and his mariners in the admiralty court Act Book for December 1643-January 1644: HCA 3/41, fols 554r–577r. No other documents relating to such a case survive in the relevant volumes from this time, HCA 13/58–59, 13/118, 23/14, and 24/106. 79 Susan Dwyer Amussen, ‘Punishment, Discipline, and Power: the Social Meanings of Violence in Early Modern England’, JBS, 34 (1995): 1–34. 80 TNA HCA 13/48, fols 24v–6r. 81 TNA HCA 24/106/347, allegation in Coates v. Woone, 20 January 1643[/4]. 82 TNA HCA 13/59, deposition of Thomas Orrell, 27 April 1644; TNA HCA 24/106/347, allegation in Coates v. Woone, 20 January 1643[/4]. 83 TNA HCA 13/59, deposition of John Howcrafte, 26 March 1644. 84 TNA HCA 13/59, deposition of Stephen Eastegaute, 26 March 1644; cf. deposition of John Howcrafte, 26 March 1644. 272 Blakemore

Relations between offfĳicers and crew should not, therefore, be understood solely as inherently antagonistic class relations, leading inevitably to mutiny.85 Rather, sailors used their voices, cooperatively or confrontationally, to jostle for position within a ship’s company, during voyages or between them. Sometimes seafarers do appear to have rejected the hierarchy of the ship, though this again may be a feature of court strategies to justify offfĳicers’ decisions or, in the Anne Bonaventure case, discredit witnesses. John Jenner, one of the Anne Bonaventure’s sailors, described how Greene, when ‘reproved for swearing [. . .] would sweare the more & aske what had any one to doe w[i]th his swearing’, as if he refused to accept the offfĳicers’ right to criticize his speech.86 Thomas Orrell deposed that after the second fĳight between Woone and Coates,

hee this ex[amina]te spoake thus to the said Coates sayinge Will did not I doe a good turne in sauenge thee from runninge the boatswayne throughe with the spit [but] hee replyed and saide noe hee was sorrye hee had not done it.87

As well as evoking intimacy through the diminutive ‘Will’ and the personal ‘thee’, Orrell presents himself attempting to reconcile Coates to his place in the ship’s hierarchy by eliciting spoken acknowledgement of his misdeed, which Coates rejects. These words, however, are exceptional, the extreme end of a spectrum of spoken interaction. Indeed, the description of Coates’s behaviour as ‘mutinous’ also suggests that we should develop a more nuanced understanding of the term ‘mutiny’ than is usually offfered.88 Mutiny meant not just collective outright defĳiance, or

85 This interpretation is advanced most forcefully in Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge 1987), and Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra; see also Clare Anderson, Niklas Frykman, Lex Heerma van Voss, and Marcus Rediker, eds, Mutiny and Maritime Radicalism in the Age of Revolutions: A Global Survey (Cambridge, 2013), and the discussion of the legal context in Blakemore, ‘Legal World’. 86 TNA HCA 13/59, deposition of John Jenner, 9 March 1643[/4]. 87 TNA HCA 13/59, deposition of Thomas Orrell, 27 April 1644. 88 For prescriptive defĳinitions of mutiny, see Rediker,Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, pp. 227–228, esp. n. 44; Andrews, ‘Seamen and Mutiny’, in his Ships, Money and Politics; Karel Davids, ‘Seamens’ Organizations and Social Protest in Europe, c. 1300–1825’, International Review of Social History, 39, Supplement (1994): 145–169; Cheryl A. Fury, Tides in the Afffairs of Men: The Social History of Elizabethan Seamen, 1580–1603 (London, 2002), p. 6; in a footnote, Fury writes ‘The term “mutiny” was an imprecise one during this period. It covered individual acts of violent insubordination as well as group actions Orality and Mutiny: the Seafarers of Early Modern London 273 an attempt to take control of a ship; it ranged across levels of oral and physical opposition, although matters did sometimes escalate, perhaps more frequently in the early seventeenth century.89 Moreover, seafarers were not routinely disposed towards mutiny in speech or action: authority was not always a struggle. Through the talk which they shared, and the stereotypes of speech which they exploited in court, seafarers placed themselves in relation to one another both within a ship’s crew and within the maritime community more generally.

Speaking at Sea and Speaking Ashore

Speech amongst seafarers, and with their offfĳicers, was clearly shaped by the peculiar conditions of maritime life, especially the close confĳines of a ship and the often immediate need for cooperation, which intensifĳied the consequences of quarrels. Ironically, this fact could make speech seem impersonal. Ships were natural breeding grounds for rumour and gossip, and in some depositions speech appears communal and almost disembodied. Richard Bishopp, boatswain of the Diamond, deposed that when the ship was near Barbados ‘there was then a voyce & speech amongst the shipps Comp[any] that they smelt the lande’.90 Nicholas Maynard, master’s mate on the Recovery whose crew refused in November 1640 to sail to Hamburg (because it was so late in the year), reported that ‘yt was the com[m]on speech amongst the company of the Recovery’ that the pilot had spoken to some experienced naval offfĳicers, who agreed on the danger of the voyage.91 Here, Bishopp and Maynard could be dodging responsibility in court for their speeches, but their depositions hint at the way in which words could slip easily from mouth to mouth aboard a ship, intermingling and even merging individual voices. Yet, even if the space in which seafarers spoke greatly afffected their talk, it did not alone shape either the way they spoke or their attitudes towards authority. Despite their assertion of a separate identity, seafarers spent much

[. . .] It could refer to the unmanageability of an individual and, as well, work shutdowns or “strikes” ’; but this is not how she uses the term. See also Frykman, Anderson, Voss, and Rediker, eds., Mutiny and Maritime Radicalism. 89 Andrews, Ships, Money & Politics, pp. 74–75, 83, argues that mutiny increased during this period. 90 TNA HCA 13/56, deposition of Richard Bishopp, 24 July 1640; cf. deposition of John Pagee, 23 July 1640. 91 TNA HCA 13/56, deposition of Nicholas Maynard, 16 December 1640; cf. depositions of Edward Bason, 4 December 1640, and John Wilde, 12 December 1640. 274 Blakemore of their lives ashore, and maintained close and meaningful relationships with their home society. More general social conditions also framed seafarers’ speaking: the stereotypes of disorderliness and bad behaviour which commentators applied to seamen, and which they themselves used in court, were not unique to maritime industry. Privateer William Ball’s comment that ‘the poor, vulgar seamen are counted the very scum and offf-scouring in England of most men (more than in all other nations)’ explicitly links seamen with the usual contemporary adjectives for plebeian labourers, even while he sets them apart as the lowest of this social group.92 The accusation that mariner William Garrett, for example, was ‘one that will forswear himself for 2 potts of beare’, or Robert Welny’s comment that ‘there is not any credit to be given to the sayings of the s[ai]d Greene & Adams’, an opinion shared by John Jenner, echo discrediting strategies employed against other poor labourers to deny the veracity of their voices.93 Drunkenness, disrespect, dishonesty, and profanity were attributed to most poor, young labourers, not just to seamen.94 On the other hand, seafarers were not all ‘poor’ and ‘vulgar’. The assumption by many historians that seafarers were universally in poverty, ‘the ne plus ultra of the displaced laborer’, is not borne out by the evidence of seafarers’ wills, which display a great variety of wealth, or by the scarcity of in forma pauperis proceedings in the admiralty court, which allowed seafarers worth less than £5 to sue without costs.95 The situation was not static, either: their status

92 William Ball, ‘Might and would not’, printed in Nelson P. Bard, ed., ‘The Earl of Warwick’s voyage in 1627’, in The Naval Miscellany V, ed. by N.A.M. Rodger (London, 1984), pp. 15–93, at p. 66. 93 William Garrett was a deponent in an ecclesiastical court, quoted in Alexandra Shepard, ‘Poverty, Labour and the Language of Social Description in Early Modern England’, P&P, 201 (2008): 51–95, at p. 83; TNA HCA 13/59, depositions of John Jenner, 9 March 1643[/4], and Robert Welny, 15 March 1643[/4]. 94 Alexandra Shepard, ‘Manhood, Credit, and Patriarchy in Early Modern England, c. 1580–1640’, P&P, 167 (2000): 75–106; Alexandra Shepard, ‘ “Swil-Bols” and “Tos-Pots”: Drink Culture and Male Bonding in England, c. 1560–1640’, in Love, Friendship and Faith in Europe, 1300–1800, ed. by Laura Gowing, Michelle Hunter, & Miri Rubin (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 110–130; Shepard, ‘Poverty, Labour and the Language of Social Description’; and Benjamin Roberts, ‘Drinking Like a Man: the Paradox of Excessive Drinking for Seventeenth Century Dutch Youths’, Journal of Family History, 29 (2004): 237–252. 95 Quoting Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: the Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (London, 2006), p. 65; this assumption is found also in many of the works cited in n. 39, above, and also Donald Kennedy, ‘The Crown and the Common Seamen in Early Stuart England’, Historical Studies Australia and New Zealand, 11 (1963–1965): 170–177. For in forma pauperis proceedings, Steckley, ‘Litigious Mariners’, p. 319. For the evidence of wills, see Blakemore, ‘London and Thames Maritime Community’, pp. 43–47. Orality and Mutiny: the Seafarers of Early Modern London 275 varied, both in specifĳic locations and across time, according to the concatenation of numerous social, legal, and economic factors, although in a general sense changes in shipping ‘productivity’ made seafarers’ position less advantageous.96 Certainly, in this period, developing but not dominant social and economic tensions between offfĳicers and ‘common’ seamen could have given the stereotype of disorderly sailors, characterised by their speech, added potency both in popular literature and in court. Again, this trend was not limited to the maritime community, but is part of the more general development of the language of ‘sorts’, with the fault line between ‘middling’ and ‘meaner’ sorts becoming sharper in England by the mid-seventeenth century.97 Another element in this dynamic of emerging tensions is seafarers’ common sense of masculinity, which also fashioned their speech and attitudes towards it. The signifĳicance of masculinity in the identity of mariners during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has gone largely unexplored, except to be described as ‘machismo’.98 Seafarers did compare themselves with supposedly less masculine men ashore, and stressed the separateness so ingrained in the ‘seaman’ stereotype; the sea seemed a dangerous place, requiring assumed

96 Michel Mollat, ‘The French Maritime Community: A Slow Progress up the Social Scale from the Middle Ages to the Sixteenth Century’, MM, 69 (1983): 115–128; Richard W. Unger, ‘Regulation and Organization of Seamen in the Netherlands and Germany before the Industrial Revolution’, in his Ships and Shipping, pp. 66–74, at p. 66; see also Jan Lucassen and Richard W. Unger, ‘Labour Productivity in Ocean Shipping, 1450–1875’, IJMH, 12 (2000): 127–141; and Jan Lucassen and Richard W. Unger, ‘Shipping, Productivity and Economic Growth’, in Shipping and Economic Growth 1350–1850, ed. by Richard W. Unger (Leiden, 2011), pp. 3–44. 97 Keith Wrightson, ‘ “Sorts of People” in Tudor and Stuart England’, in The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society, and Politics in England, 1550–1800, ed. by Jonathan Barry & Christopher Brooks (Basingstoke, 1994), pp. 28–51; see also Jonathan Barry, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–27. 98 Fury, Tides in the Afffairs of Men, p. 92. For discussions of gender in maritime communities, often focusing upon women and on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Burton, ‘The Myth of Bachelor Jack’; Brit Berggreen, ‘Dealing with Anomalies? Approaching Maritime Women’, in The North Sea: Twelve Essays on Social History of Maritime Labour, ed. by Lewis R. Fischer, Harold Hamre, Paul Holm, & Jaap R. Bruijn (Stavangar, 1992), pp. 111–126; R.B. Burg, Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth Century Caribbean (New York, 1995); Margaret Creighton and Lisa Norling, eds, Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700–1920 (Baltimore, MD, 1996); Suzanne J. Stark, Female Tars: Women Aboard Ship in the Age of Sail (London, 1996); Hans Turley, Rum, Sodomy and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity (New York, 1999); see also the roundtable in IJMH, 4 (1992). 276 Blakemore masculine qualities, especially bravery and strength.99 Alexandra Shepard has argued that those men denied access to the responsible authority attributed to early modern patriarchs, such as youths and poor labourers, articulated their masculinity in alternative ways, which could encompass ‘violent disruption, excessive drinking, [and] illicit sex’.100 This might be one way to interpret the oft-mentioned ‘swearinge’ and ‘deboist’ speech which underlay the seaman stereotype. In this light, that Greene ‘would sweare the more’ when criticized for swearing might suggest this kind of transgressive masculinity. On the other hand, mutiny was not the only way seafarers expressed masculinity, and not all seamen endorsed a rogue code. For some, labour itself was the basis of maritime masculine identity.101 Aboard the Ambrose, in a voyage during the 1630s, the boatswain, Abraham Ketcham, and the master, Edward Peach, fell out after Ketcham threw the ship’s only handspike into the ship’s boat as they were setting sail; it is not clear whether this was a deliberate gesture, and if so, what it meant. Peach reportedly insulted him as a ‘lousie wayne’, to which Ketcham replied that ‘when he came into the said shippe he was noe more a lousie wayne than [Peach]’. This provoked Peach to punish Ketcham violently and demand his ‘call’, which Ketcham refused to give up because he had already paid Peach for it. After forcibly removing Ketcham’s whistle, Peach then commanded him to work, but Ketcham claimed he had been too badly beaten, upon which Peach attacked him once again ‘in a furious and violent manner’. This left him ‘cryeing . . . sometymes upon his handes & knees, & sometymes uppon his feete with his body double’. Ketcham ‘crept downe [below deck] uppon his handes & knees as a cripple’ and was also heard to ‘cry out with paine as a woman in labour’.102 This remark was no insult. During the Elizabethan period seafarers rarely insulted one another by reference to femininity, but rather by the term ‘boy’, placing someone at the lowest rank of male hierarchy, as seems true for the seventeenth century as well.103 The description of Ketcham’s ‘cries’, his inar- ticulacy, as like those of ‘a woman in labour’ were not denying his masculinity, but rather condemned Peach’s violence. By reducing Ketcham to the perceived

99 For more discussion of this, see Blakemore, ‘London and Thames Maritime Community’, pp. 27–32, and 64–65. 100 Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003), quoting p. 94; cf. pp. 100–106, 146–147, 211–112, 253. 101 For studies of labouring identity, see Shepard, ‘Poverty, Labour’. 102 TNA HCA 13/54, fols 401v–403r, 406r–7v, 422v–424r. 103 Fury, Tides in the Afffairs of Men, n. 108, pp. 81–82. It is surprising that this point is made in a footnote, upon which Fury does not expand. Orality and Mutiny: the Seafarers of Early Modern London 277 physical capacity of a cripple or a pregnant woman, unable to work on a ship, Peach overstepped his authority and endangered Ketcham’s livelihood, and that of his family, who were mentioned in the depositions. Maritime masculinity rested not only on relations between seafarers but, like their male coun- terparts ashore, on interaction with wives and other dependants.104 Seafarers portrayed themselves in petitions as providers, concerned for the welfare of their families when trade and consequently their labour were threatened.105 The behaviour of wives, and gossip about it, was also profoundly important for seafarers’ professional reputation as well as their own sense of masculinity. In November 1647, ‘in the English house at Bantam in the South Seas’ (the major English trading post on Java), Francis Winn, purser of the Mary of London, said to Edmund Bugden, the quartermaster, ‘in an angry and disgrace- full manner [. . .] Thou art a Cuckold [. . .] a Cuckolly foole’. Samuel Andrews, the gunner, whose deposition records this incident, commented that ‘the said Winn then spake the foresaid scandalous words with a purpose and intention to slander and disgrace the said Bugden and his wife’. Andrews added ‘the good name and credit of the said Edmund Bugden and of his said wife are much blemished and impaired by reason of the foresaid words soe spoken’, though he insisted, somewhat contradictorily, that

Bugden nor his wife are not in any worse esteeme with this deponent by reason of the speaking the said words [. . .] and this deponent conceiveth that the said Bugden is of soe good credit for his honestie that hee is not any way dammnifĳied in his way of livelihood by meanes of the said words.106

That Andrews felt it necessary to explain this indicates a powerful underlying anxiety about what the impact of such ‘scandalous’ speech might be, and again the mention of ‘honestie’, the concern for Budgen’s ‘way of livelihood’,

104 Elizabeth Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex, and Marriage (London, 1999). 105 For example To the Right Honourable the Knights, Citizens and Burgesses of the Commons, Assembled in Parliament. The Humble Petition of the Marriners and Sea-Men, Inhabitants in, and about the Ports of London, and the River of Thames (1642); To the Right Honourable the Knights, Citizens, and Burgesses of the House of Commons in Parliament Assembled. The Humble Petition of the Inhabitants, of the Parishes of Stepney, Shoreditch, VVhitechappell [. . .] (1642); The Humble Petition and Desires of the Commanders, Masters, Mariners, Younger Brothers and Sea-Men of the Shipping Belonging to the River of Thames (1648), pp. 10–12. 106 TNA HCA 13/61, deposition of Samuel Andrews, 10 October 1648. 278 Blakemore and the fact that Bugden’s reputation was being attacked through the actions of his wife, all suggest that not all seamen’s masculinity transgressed normative attitudes ashore. Such insults would presumably also reduce Bugden’s authority as a quartermaster, a low rank but nonetheless a position of responsibility. Speech ashore, and in the maritime community at large, evidently shaped seafarers’ professional reputations and, consequently, their interactions aboard ship. Sailor Henry Mabb described his friend Orpheus Dunkin as

an able marin[e]r and well experienced in the arte of navigation, and [he] is well respected and well reported of amongst most M[aste]rs of ship- pes w[i]th whome he hath gonne to sea [. . .] and divers of them [. . .] have desired his companye to goe with them agayne [Chapter author’s italics].107

Reputation became especially relevant in times of misfortune: Edmund Seaman, a shipmaster whose vessel, the Plyades, sank in the Thames, could call on a number of witnesses who had known him for some time and testi- fĳied that, ‘notwithstandinge this disaster’, he was an ‘able and experte seaman’.108 These descriptions highlight the critical importance of an individual sailor’s reputation for securing employment as well as wielding authority, passed on by word of mouth and especially signifĳicant in a labour market as mobile and fluid as the maritime world.109

Authority and Orality

Studying orality shows us that authority for the seafarers of early modern London was not just a choice between mutiny and obedience. We are circum- scribed by the available evidence which, by its legal nature, highlights confrontation and division, and which cannot be taken at face value. Yet, even on those many unrecorded voyages where no major disputes occurred, speech

107 TNA HCA 13/54, fols 79r–79v. 108 Quoting TNA HCA 13/58, deposition of John Grimsbye, 21 July 1640; cf. depositions of Roger Fletcher, 24 July 1640, John Clarke, 30 July 1640, John Hobbs, 29 September 1640, Thomas Ashley, 19 February 1640[/1]. 109 On the maritime labour market, see Lewis R. Fischer, ed., The Market for Seamen in the Age of Sail (St John’s, Newfoundland, 1994); Paul C. van Royen, Jaap R. Bruijn, & Jan Lucassen, eds, ‘Those Emblems of Hell’? European Sailors and the Maritime Labour Market, 1570–1870 (St John’s, Newfoundland, 1997). Orality and Mutiny: the Seafarers of Early Modern London 279 remained central in the ‘discipline of the sea’, as a way for seafarers to place themselves within the crew and the maritime community more generally. They might demonstrate their labouring experience and capability by speaking seafarers’ ‘own language’; they might adopt ‘coorse’ conversation as an alternative masculinity; and they might criticize or commend others for doing the same. The strategies employed in court demonstrate the importance of the cultural image of the ‘seaman’ both to seafarers and outsiders – the extent to which they were defĳined by their talk, but also the way this talk tapped into wider cultural ideas about labour, gender, and authority. Mutiny was not the only way to deal with authority at sea. Seafarers were not just ‘Noyse-makers’. The evidence of the admiralty court depositions supports, too, the sheer power of speech to shape the early modern world. Numerous historians have argued that, in both legal situations and elsewhere, ‘the spoken word had a power it lacks today’, and words possessed this power long after they were uttered.110 Following the incident between Bugden and Winn, Bugden ‘charged [Winn] with the speaking of the said words’, who ‘acknowledged the speaking of them, and bidd the said Bugden take his course for the same’.111 Even though spoken halfway around the world from home, in a place few in the maritime community had visited, these words were still a matter of concern, reappearing in gossip and in court; ‘the speaking’ sounds, in the depositions, almost like a solid, tangible thing. Given this power, if we are to understand these past lives, lives spent talking, then it is vitally important – even if often very difffĳicult – for us not to rely upon stereotypical descriptions, but to listen carefully to the few surviving remnants of what they themselves had to say.

110 Wood, ‘Custom and the Social Organization of Writing’, p. 260; see also Jane Kamensky, ‘Talk like a Man: Speech, Power, and Masculinity in Early New England’, Gender and History, 8 (1996): 22–47; Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, pp. 19, 37; Miles Ogborn, ‘The Power of Speech’, p. 122. 111 TNA HCA 13/61, deposition of Samuel Andrews, 10 October 1648. CHAPTER 9 ‘A Blabbermouth Can Barely Control His Tongue’: Political Poems, Songs, and Prophecies in the Low Countries (Fifteenth–Sixteenth Centuries)

Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers

The fĳigure of theclappaert , perhaps best translated as ‘blabbermouth’, is a frequent topos in Middle Dutch poems and plays of the fĳifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a period in which literary writers in the Netherlands were typically organised in professional ‘rhetorician guilds’ (rederijkerskamers).1 This ono- matopoeic word clappaert refers to an incurable gossiper and chatterbox. Its female equivalent, less frequent in the sources, is often called the clappeye.2 Only focusing on contexts in which it is used for those jealous of lovers,3 for those condemning moral behaviour and ruthlessly gossiping without considering their own defĳiciencies,4 or simply meaning people who chatter too much,5 literary historians have usually ignored the political meaning that the word also carries in numerous cases. In general, medieval and early modern Dutch literary texts, whether fĳictional or didactic, are loaded with references to the ‘sins of the tongue’.6 These might be sins in the moral sense of lying, boasting,

* We thank Dirk Coigneau, Frank Willaert, Ulrike Wuttke, Lesley Twomey and Thomas Cohen for their comments on an earlier version of this text. We also thank Laura Crombie for cor- recting our English. 1 Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Om beters wille. Rederijkerskamers en de stedelijke cultuur in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden (Amsterdam, 2008). 2 As in a poem of the early sixteenth-century female poet Anna Bijns: Jan Frans Willems, ‘Twee refereinen van Anna Byns’, Belgisch museum voor de Nederduitsche tael- en letterkunde en de geschiedenis des vaderlands, 4 (1840), p. 87. These and other Middle Dutch texts can be consulted online in a more recent edition on www.dbnl.org. 3 Johan Winkelman, ‘Clappaerts moet men de mond snoeren!’, Madoc. Tijdschrift over de Middeleeuwen, 18 (2004): 236–240. 4 For instance in the poem Want tegen een clappaert en is geen wachten, edited by Cornelis Kruyskamp, Jan van Doesborch. Refreynen int sot amoureus wijs (Leiden, 1940), pp. 198–200. 5 For instance Jacob Verdam, ‘Kleine Middelnederlandsche overblijfselen’, Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, 11 (1892): 285–302, p. 290. 6 Carla Casagrande and Silvana Vecchio, Les Péchés de la langue. Discipline et éthique de la parole dans la culture médiévale (Paris, 1991).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004291829_011 Political Poems, Songs and Prophecies in the Low Countries 281 or gossiping but also in the ethico-political sense of dangerous and subversive muttering against the urban or princely government, and from the time of the early Reformation increasingly against the Church as well. A manuscript with rhetorician poetry dating from 1524, known under the name of its collector Jan van Stijevoort, contains several such examples. In one ‘refrain’, a typical Dutch rhetorician verse form, similar to the French ‘ballade’, an anonymous poet complains that people are now ‘sowing rhetoric in the street’, criticizing the lords as if they knew their secrets. According to the author, this endangers peace and quiet in the country. Like ravens, the poem continues, these tavern poets singing songs for coins which they spend on drinks, would do better to control their tongues; ‘each man should carry on with his trade and remain silent’.7 The text immediately following this refrain, perhaps written by the same anonymous author, with the title A false tongue, there is no worse evil (Een valsche tonghe gheen ergher quaet) is of similar tone, mixing examples of personal, moral, political, religious nature to denounce lies, blasphemy, slander, treason, and other types of indecent, venomous, and subversive speech. False tongues lead to broken households, to the destruction of lands and cities and to the loss of honour. War and hunger are in fact lesser evils than not controlling one’s tongue.8 The theme of the blabbermouth became ever more popular during the sixteenth century. During the early Reformation, in a collection of poems dating from 1528, the female schoolteacher Anna Bijns (1493–1575) uses the words clappen (‘to babble’ or ‘to prattle’), achterclap (‘prattling or talking behind someone’s back’) and clappaerts to refer to those who criticized the Catholic clergy.9 While she herself is also very critical of social injustice, she blames the laymen for judging the Pope, the bishops, abbots, and monks. According to Anna Bijns, people refuse to bow their head to the clergy, who are charged with laziness and stinginess, but she judges these people to be themselves even more sinful. The sixteenth-century Bruges poet Eduard de Dene vividly describes similar blabbing characters in his Testament to Rhetoric

7 Elc doe sijn neringhe ende swijch al stille, a poem edited by Frederik Lyna and Willem van Eeghem, Jan van Stijevoorts Refereinenbundel anno 1524 (Antwerp, s.d.), II, pp. 135–137. We analyse this poem in detail in Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers, ‘Let Each Man Carry on with his Trade and Remain Silent. Middle-Class Ideology in the Urban Literature of the Late Medieval Low Countries’, Cultural and Social History, 10 (2013): 169–189. 8 Lyna and van Eeghem, Jan van Stijevoorts Refereinenbundel, p. 139. 9 See refrains 3, 4, 11 and 13 in her fĳirst bundle of 1528:Refereinen van Anna Bijns, Adrianus Bogaers and Willem Van Helten eds. (Rotterdam, 1875). About Anna Bijns: Herman Pleij, Anna Bijns, van Antwerpen (Amsterdam, 2011). 282 Dumolyn and Haemers

(Testament Rhetoricael), a peculiar and extensive collection of texts, influenced by the work of Rabelais.10 In one of the texts in this work, where the language is so characteristic, playful and colourful that it is hard to translate even into modern Dutch, let alone into English, he jokingly writes about the blabbermouths sitting on the Bruges ‘babble bench’ (up den Brugschen clap- banck), where old and young gossips would meet. ‘It was wonder’, what this blabbermouth said, ‘even it had been forbidden on a heavy fĳine’ Twas( wonder wat hy doe slouch huut zyn bollement / ende al wast hem verboden / up de boete zwaer), he spoke ‘from the wisdom of his mouth!’ (hy clapte mondwyselick), saying ‘it was printed that the biggest crooks are most honoured’. A bystander commented to an elderly man: ‘A blabbermouth can barely control his tongue’ (een clappaert can quaelick zyn tonghe bedwynghen!), ‘even if it’s stabbed with a Liège pike’ (al zoudmen duersteken met een Luucksche pycke).11 The earliest mention of the word ‘clappaert’ we have thus far encountered can be found in the chronicle called Brabantse Yeesten (‘The Deeds of [the Dukes of] Brabant’) which describes Pieter Coutereel, the leader of a revolt in the city of Leuven in 1360, as a clappaert who incited the inhabitants against the urban aldermen. According to the chronicler who clearly sided with the authorities, Coutereel uttered thoughts that provoked injustice. The chronicler remarks that a ‘bad tongue’ should be more feared than any sword.12 Indeed, for the elite, ‘blabbing’, as in ‘telling the tale’, was often a dangerously subversive speech act.

Subversive Orality and Literacy

In recent decades, literary historians of Middle Dutch texts have increasingly focused on the emergence of a vernacular moralizing literature in the course of the later Middle Ages. Among other things, this phenomenon might reflect the growing attention of urban elites to polite behaviour. In his overview of the

10 Dirk Coigneau, Antonin van Elslander and Werner Waterschoot, ‘Eduard de Dene en zijn Testament Rhetoricael (1561)’, Jaarboek De Fonteine, 11.2 (1969–70), p. 86. 11 Ibidem, p. 87. See for similar examples: Dirk Coigneau, ‘Anthonis de Roovere als wereldlijk dichter’, Vlaanderen 31 (1982), p. 165, and Cornelis Kruyskamp, Cornelis Crul. Heynken de Luyere en andere gedichten (Amsterdam, 1950), pp. 45–54. 12 Want een quade tonghe, si u verclert, es meer tontsiene dan enich swert (Brabantsche Yeesten), ed. by Jan Frans Willems (Brussels, 1843), II, pp. 155–156. About the revolt: Raymond Van Uytven, Leuven, De beste stad van Brabant. Deel 1: de geschiedenis van het stadsgewest Leuven tot omstreeks 1600 (Leuven, 1980), pp. 159–174; Jelle Haemers, ‘Vergaderen in het belang van de stad. Over geweld en opstand te Leuven, 1360–1383’, Stadsgeschiedenis, 7 (2012): 141–164. Political Poems, Songs and Prophecies in the Low Countries 283 history of Middle Dutch literature, Herman Pleij, a leading literary scholar, has interpreted the increasing disapproval of immoral behaviour by citizens as the rise of a so-called ‘burgher morality’ (burgermoraal).13 The above comments on the foolish and dangerous gossips might also be understood from this perspective. Through emphasizing ethical norms such as virtuousness, incorrupt- ibility and moderation, as encountered in these and other texts, urban space would have been transformed into a rational environment in which burghers could behave, talk, and trade reasonably. Such ‘utilitarianism’ may then have formed a fruitful seedbed for Calvinist morality, as the Low Countries gradually became a centre of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Other literary historians have nuanced Pleij’s vision by pointing out that his views are somewhat teleological, and that he overestimates the civilizing effforts of the higher class townsfolk.14 Pleij’s approach also remains fundamentally apolitical as he never seriously takes into consideration the actual socio-economic and political tensions in the later medieval Netherlands (as historians have reconstructed them over the past decades). However, social and political motives have indeed influenced the rhetoricians’ (rederijkers), organized in their literary corpo- rations. We know for instance that the performance of a play of sixteenth- century rhetorician Cornelis Everaert was prohibited by the authorities because it contained political criticism on the ruling princes of their day.15 Other historians have argued that literary texts were excellent media to influence ‘public opinion’ in the towns of the Low Countries, but they have not systematically studied the political discourses to be encountered in them.16

13 Herman Pleij, Het gevleugelde woord. Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse literatuur (Amsterdam, 2007), pp. 100–102. A similar view in Fred Lodder, ‘Corrupte baljuws en over- spelige echtgenotes. Over het beoogde publiek van drie boerden’, Op belofte van profĳijt: stadsliteratuur en burgermoraal in de Nederlandse letterkunde van de middeleeuwen, ed. by Herman Pleij (Amsterdam, 1991), pp. 217–227. 14 For instance Femke Kramer, Mooi vies, knap lelijk. Grotesk realisme in rederijkerskluchten (Hilversum, 2009), pp. 51–60. 15 Samuel Mareel, ‘Entre ciel et terre. Le Théâtre socio-politique de Cornelis Everaert’, European Medieval Drama, 12 (2008): 93–108; see also his Voor vorst en stad. Rederijkersliteratuur en vorstenfeest in Vlaanderen en Brabant, 1432–1561 (Amsterdam, 2010). Herman Brinkman studied a popular song of the Flemish peasants (kerels), probably a revolutionary song from the fourteenth century, in ‘Een lied van hoon en weerwraak. “Ruters” contra “Kerels” in het Gruuthusehandschrift’, Queeste, 11 (2004): 1–43. 16 Jan Bloemendaal and Arjan Van Dixhoorn, ‘ “De scharpheit van een gladde tong.” Literaire teksten en publieke opinievorming in de vroegmoderne Nederlanden’, The Low Countries Historical Review, 125 (2010): 3–28. 284 Dumolyn and Haemers

For scholars studying late medieval English poetry it is a well established fact that texts on moral failings of rulers frequently carried a political message.17 In general, however, Middle Dutch orality and literature have absolutely not been considered enough in their social and political context and this remains a largely open fĳield of study. It is clear that moralist literary writings, and certainly those orally and publicly performed, have served as political weapons in the same way as shouting in the street, or libelling on church doors have. The cities of the later medieval Netherlands witnessed a long tradition of oral and written protest propagating disobedience to political practices judged immoral. As we have recently argued, these lower- and middle-class speech acts were neither uninformed by ideological models, nor spontaneous out- pourings of those ignorant about politics.18 The urban lower orders and certainly the middle class of guild masters were self-conscious about formulating their political thoughts grounded in the typical medieval political language of justice and the common weal. Their political utterances took shape in an urban society that was both strongly oral and very literate. Whether people libelled or gossiped, they used similar political utterances. Their writing and speech acts also contributed to defĳining political relationships between rulers and subjects. Expressing subversive thought, whether on paper, or spoken (before the age of the printing press), was an essential element in the politics of the populous cities and towns of the Netherlands, just as it was, for instance, in early-modern England.19

Libels, Songs, and Poems Circulating in the City

The urban authorities were well aware of the subversive character of these utterances, cried out as slogans or sung in public houses, often with recognizable rhythm structures, or circulated in written form in the urban space. In the Brabantine city of Leuven, a city ordinance was promulgated by the mayor

17 Christopher Fletcher, ‘Morality and Offfĳice in Late Medieval England and France’, in Fourteenth Century England, Volume V, ed. by Nigel Saul (Woodbridge, 2008), pp. 178–190; Aude Mairey, ‘Poésie et politique dans l’Angleterre de la fĳin du Moyen Âge: le cas du Parlement’, Revue française d’histoire des idées politiques, 26 (2007): 231–250. 18 Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers, ‘ “A Bad Chicken Was Brooding”. Subversive Speech in Late Medieval Flanders’, Past & Present, 214 (2012): 45–86. 19 Compare with Andy Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 91–142. See also his ‘ “Poore Men Woll Speke One Day” ’: Plebeian Languages of Deference and Defĳiance, in England, c. 1520–1640’,The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1850, ed. by Tim Harris (New York, 2001), pp. 67–98. Political Poems, Songs and Prophecies in the Low Countries 285 and the council of aldermen in 1444, forbidding the citizens any longer to ‘make neither public nor sing poems nor words’ to taunt Roelof Roelofs, who was a leading burgher of the town.20 The fact that the authorities of Leuven prohibited both speaking and writing subversive words obviously shows that people had spread them in oral and written forms at the same time. And there are other similar cases attested by historiographical sources. In 1460, a certain Jan De Vos was publicly punished in Ghent because he had desseminated ‘a large number of horrible [meaning offfensive], most unpleasant, and seditious pamphlets in several places’ (horrybele, quade ende veynselicke brieven te diver- sche plaetsen in grooter menichten), with the aim of humiliating the Count of Flanders.21 Another contemporary chronicle states that Jan De Vos had even desseminated these ‘leaflets’ (briefven) in front of the Count’s castle and elsewhere in the town.22 Two years earlier, the bailifff of the same town found a seditious pamphlet in St John’s church which had provoked riots during the entry of the Duke of Burgundy as prince in Ghent. In his account books, the bailifff mentioned the fĳirst words of the libel: it started with ‘Children of Ghent, be aware in time’, while ‘Fear and Hope’ was written above.23 These cases show that written pamphlets and oral mockery went hand in hand. It seems that, in its ‘aural’ form of expression, this kind of ‘subversive poetry’ was easy to memorize, whether one could read or not. Consequently, such words were sung and rapidly ‘took root’ in the narrow streets and market places and resounded throughout the workshops and alehouses of the late medieval and early modern city. Though urban and courtly offfĳicers sometimes spread rumours themselves (with the aim to weaken political opponents), they harshily condemned the gossip of townsmen because of their dangerous

20 Dat nymant wie hy sy gheenrehande dichte oft worde openbaere noch en singhe die den vorscreven Roelove tot [. . .] schempten gedragen moegen (edited by Constant Serrure, Vaderlandsch museum voor Nederduitsche letterkunde, oudheid en geschiedenis (Brussels, 1860), III, pp. 38–39. We elaborate on this in Jan Dumolyn & Jelle Haemers, ‘Political Poems and Subversive Songs. The Circulation of “Public Poetry” in the Late Medieval Low Countries’, Journal of Dutch Literature, 5 (2014): pp. 1–22. 21 They had been in grooter cleenicheden of the Duke (Dagboek van Gent van 1447 tot 1470, met een vervolg van 1477 tot 1515, ed. by Victor Fris (Ghent, 1904), II, p. 188. 22 Memorieboek der stad Ghendt van ‘t jaer 1301 tot 1737, ed. by Polydore-Charles Van der Meersch (Ghent, 1852), I, p. 255. 23 The bailifff’s account says about the piece:Lesquelles parolles estant telles: ‘Kinderen van Ghend, ziet toe in tijds’, et ung peu deseure ce eubt escript: ‘Vreese ende ope’ (General State Archives in Brussels, Chambre des Comptes, nr. 14158, fol. 8). We thank Jonas Braekevelt for this reference. 286 Dumolyn and Haemers consequences.24 In ways very similar to spreading seditious gossip and rumours, short verse libels were also harmful to rulers, rhyming harbingers of a possible political breakdown. The brevity and form of such couplets allowed them to be consumed in a variety of social settings.25 Traditionally, libels were part of an armoury of sanctions used to express disapproval of behaviour perceived as bringing the community into disrepute.26 There was a general assumption that to be libelled was a shameful, dishonourable and dangerous thing. Songs and pamphlets eroded the legitimacy of the ruling elite’s political decisions and reinforced discontent among the urban populace. During the Reformation, with the new element of religious dissent added to traditional political subversion, repression against ‘scandalous literature’ critical of the Church, often recited by rhetoricians, would become ever harsher and often even anticipated the event instead of merely following it.27 Indeed, rumour, songs, and poems about public afffairs seem to have been among the best media available to the lesser townsfolk to complain about politics, as they could be transmitted in a semi-concealed manner and did not necessarily leave written traces. Some of these ‘historical songs’, as they have been traditionally called by literary historians (while in fact ‘political songs’ would be a better term as they usually deal with contemporary events or at

24 About the use and contempt of gossip by princes in the Low Countries, see Gilles Lecuppre and Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin, ‘La Rumeur: un instrument de la competition politique au service des princes de la fĳin du Moyen Age’, inLa Rumeur au Moyen Age. Du mépris à la manipulation, ed. by Maïté Billoré & Myriam Soria (Rennes, 2011), pp. 149–175. 25 Alastair Bellany, ‘ “Raylinge Rymes and Vaunting Verse”: Libelous Politics in Early Stuart England, 1603–1628’, Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. by Kevin Sharpe & Peter Lake (London, 1994), p. 288; Hannes Lowagie, ‘Quetselike maren. De bestuurlijke reactie op geruchten in een laatmiddeleeuwse stad’, Madoc. Tijdschrift over de middeleeuwen, 25 (2011), pp. 31–38; Christian Kuhn, ‘Ballads, Libels, and Songs’, Handbook of Medieval Studies. Terms – Methods – Trends, ed. by A. Classen (Berlin, 2010), pp. 1618– 1633; Christian Liddy, ‘Bill Casting and Political Communication: a Public Sphere in Late Medieval English Towns?’, in La gobernanza de la ciudad Europea en la Edad Media, ed. by Jesús Solorzano Telechea & Béatrice Arizaga Bolumburu (Logroño, 2011), pp. 447–461. 26 Pauline Croft, ‘Libels, Popular Literacy and Public Opinion in Early Modern England’, Historical Research, 68 (1995): p. 283; Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin, ‘Des portes qui parlent. Placards, feuilles volantes et communication politique dans les villes des Pays-Bas à la fĳin du Moyen Age’, Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes, 168 (2010): 151–172. 27 Dirk Coigneau, ‘ “Tot Babels schande”. Een refreinfeestbundel in het calvinistische Brussel (1581)’, De rhetorijcke in vele manieren. Lezingen bij het afscheid van Marijke Spies, ed. by Henk Duits & Ton van Strien (Amsterdam, 2001), pp. 205–223. Alastair Duke, Dissident Identities in the Early Modern Low Countries (Farnham, 2009), pp. 163–165. Political Poems, Songs and Prophecies in the Low Countries 287 least with events with contemporary relevance), explicitly complain about corrupt politicians who ignored the muttering of the middle and lower classes, for instance by spending public means on private afffairs.28 Next to corruption, the misuse of taxes was another typical allegation which can be encountered in these popular utterances. For instance, in 1467, in the city of Ghent, a cry went up in public: ‘God and the good city of Ghent. Kill all those in power, and all the tax collectors. Kill them all, and let none of them escape’.29 The sloganesque text referred to the ‘kaliote’, an extraordinary tax on consumer goods that Philip the Good, Count of Flanders and Duke of Burgundy, had imposed on the city in 1453 after suppressing a major rebellion.30 And a Ghent chronicle testifĳies that the artisans shouted De quelloten af! (‘Down with the taxes!’) during the same turbulent episode in 1467.31 In English towns as well artisans and townsmen regularly used opportunities to complain about fraud and corruption, sometimes through violence, sometimes merely with words.32 Similar experiences of political conflict also survived in the oral narratives constituting the ‘social memory’ of rebellious Ghent craftsmen.33 Medieval and early-modern rebels constructed their own image of the past by talking about an agreed version of it.34 Likewise, Ghent rebels restructured the past, and told distorted stories and transmitted poems about revolts to cultivate a shared memory that

28 Jozef van Mierlo, Geschiedenis van de letterkunde der Nederlanden, 9 vols (Brussels, 1940), II, pp. 208–13; Cornelia Van de Graft, Middelnederlandsche historieliederen toegelicht en verklaard (Epe, 1904); Gerrit Kalfff,Het lied in de Middeleeuwen (Leiden, 1984); Paul Frédericq, Onze historische volksliederen van vóór de godsdienstige beroerten (Ghent, 1894). 29 God ende die goede stede van Ghent / Slaet al doot dat heeft regiment / ende die de kaliote hebben ontfaen / Slaet al doot / Laet nyemans ontgaen. Napoléon De Pauw, Middelnederlandsche gedichten en fragmenten, 2 vols (Ghent, 1893–1914), II, p. 395. 30 On the Ghent revolt: Jelle Haemers, De Gentse opstand (1449–1453). De strijd tussen rivaliserende netwerken om het stedelijke kapitaal (Kortrijk, 2004). 31 Dagboek van Gent, II, p. 207. About this revolt, see Peter Arnade, ‘Secular Charisma, Sacred Power: Rites of Rebellion in the Ghent Entry of 1467’, Handelingen van de Maatschappij voor Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde te Gent, 45 (1991): 69–94. 32 Christian Liddy, ‘ “Bee War of Gyle in Borugh”: Taxation and Political Discourse in Late Medieval English Towns’, in The Languages of Political Society. Western Europe, 14th–17th Centuries, ed. by Andrea Gamberini, Jean-Philippe Genet, & Andrea Zorzi (Rome, 2011), pp. 461–485. 33 Jelle Haemers, ‘Social Memory and Rebellion in Fifteenth-Century Ghent’, Social History, 36 (2011): 443–463. 34 See for instance the case studies of Rees Davies, The Revolt of Owain Glyn Dwr (Oxford, 1995); La Mémoire des guerres de réligion. La Concurrence des genres historiques (XVIe– XVIIIe siècles), ed. by Jacques Berchtold & Marie-Madeleine Fragonard (Geneva, 2007); Alain Hugon, Naples insurgée, 1647–1648. De l’Évènement à la mémoire (Rennes, 2011). 288 Dumolyn and Haemers selected heroic elements from the history of both repressed and successful revolts. They defĳined themselves through these narratives, which could also be used to legitimize past and future uprisings against excessive taxation and abuse of power, among other matters. The fact that the seditious libels of Jan De Vos are discussed in several contemporary chronicles shows that people recounted stories about such subversive actions and that they were considered worth remembering.35 Clearly, these narratives were transmitted from one generation to the next through multiple types of media, both written and oral.36 Writing and speech acts were intertwined in the transmission of urban political memory. They served to spread critical ideas about contemporay politics and acted as an important potential means to mobilize people. There are remarkable similarities in the subversive utterances to be encountered in these texts across the diffferent regions of the Netherlands. An example is the metaphor of the so-called ‘liver eater’, a topos to condemn corrupt urban and princely offfĳicals. In the opinion of the libellers, ‘liver eaters’leevereters ( ) were greedy offfĳicers who symbolically devoured the liver of the body politic of the town or the land. The poem Of the liver eaters from 1513, for instance, is a bitter complaint against the offfĳicers and the German and Walloon soldiers of the minor prince Charles V. ‘Liver eaters’ was a term that was already being used in early fĳifteenth-century revolts and by the Bruges rhetorician Anthonis de Roovere who wrote in the second half of the fĳifteenth century.37 It is not entirely clear if Antonie Gyselers was the poet of Of the liver eaters or merely the collector of the texts in the manuscript that carries his name.38 The text

35 See note 22. Note that one of these chronicles is called the Memorieboek (‘Memory book’) of Ghent. This type of chronicles was widespread in late medieval Flanders, see Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, ‘L’écriture de la mémoire urbaine en Flandre et en Brabant (XIVe–XVIe siècle)’, Villes de Flandres et d’Italie (XIIIe–XVIe siècle). Les Enseignements d’une comparaison, ed. by Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan & Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin (Turnhout, 2008), pp. 149–164; Frederik Buylaert, ‘Memory, Social Mobility and Historiography. Shaping Noble Identity in the Bruges Chronicle of Nicolas Despars (+1597)’, Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire, 89 (2011): 43–72. 36 See the example of a popular song dealing with a Bruges rebellion in 1437 still popular and printed in an Antwerp Songbook of 1544, in Jan Dumolyn, ‘The Terrible Wednesday of Pentecost: Confronting Urban and Princely Discourses in the Bruges Rebellion of 1436– 1438’, History, 92 (2007): 3–20; Het Antwerps Liedboek, ed. by Dieuwke Van der Poel et al. (Tielt, 2004), I, pp. 167–170. 37 The term is attested in fĳifteenth-century Ghent and Bruges on diffferent occasions. See Dumolyn and Haemers, ‘A Bad Chicken’, pp. 75–76. 38 Dirk Coigneau, Refreinen in het zotte bij de rederijkers (Ghent 1980), I, pp. 36–37, holds that the latter was the case. Political Poems, Songs and Prophecies in the Low Countries 289 said that the ‘House of the Lion’ was now more desolate than ever. The poem regrets that ‘the gluttonous belly’ and ‘spiteful hate’ are ruining every household and the entire land.39 The Lion, representing the minor prince Philip the Fair, is not to blame as he is too young to deal with government himself, and the country was ruled by French wolves and Spanish foxes. Salvation, the poet hopes, should come from the fearless Eagle, the Emperor, and from the English Rose, a potential ally against the French enemy of the time. The poem ends with the verses ‘Everyone wants peace except for those who eat the liver’ (dbe- ghert all peys sonder dy de lever eten). In a similar manner, in 1480 the citizens of Leiden in the county of Holland sang that they wanted to get rid of ‘the cats that eat their liver’.40 At that point, Holland was involved in a deep-rooted factional twist, in which supporters of both parties charged each other with complaints of corruption. Also, in Dordrecht in 1477, rebels used the word ‘levereter’ to complain about the (alleged) political incompetence of rulers and rivals.41 With their moralistic critique on the failings of political adversaries, these songs condemned urban elites who were guided by particular or factional interests. And yet another song chanted during this factional conflict in Holland, namely in Leiden and Haarlem in 1478, was called Brederoede hout dy veste. This particular song supported Frans van Brederode, a nobleman who supported the faction that rebelled against the Count of Holland. Details put aside, the case shows that not only the use of commonplaces, such as colourful images of ‘liver eaters’, but also well-known rhyme and rhythm schemes helped to speed oral transmission of political messages.42 The sources mention that the song about Brederode followed the rhythm scheme of the religious Latin hymn Dies est laetitae. Apparently, both the rebels who sang Brederoede hout dy veste as well as the informers of the Count’s supporters who had reported the singing event to the Count’s offfĳicials had recognized the song and its rhythm scheme (as the

39 Dat zyn huys ende lant vergaet duer den gulsigen buyc ende nydigen haet; edited by Serrure, Vaderlandsch museum, 4, pp. 192–193. 40 Die cat heft die lever gegeten; the song is quoted by Michel Van Gent, Pertijelike saken: Hoeken en Kabeljauwen in het Bourgondisch-Oostenrijkse tijdperk (The Hague, 1994), p. 421. 41 Van Gent, Pertijelike saken, p. 422; Jacoba Van Leeuwen, ‘Over slapscheten en levereters. Pamfletten en strooibriefĳjes in de laatmiddeleeuwse stad’,Madoc. Tijdschrift over de Middeleeuwen, 18 (2004): 77–85. 42 Michel Van Gent, ‘De Hoekse factie in Leiden circa 1445–1490: het verhaal van verliezers’, Bloedwraak, partijstrijd en pacifĳicatie in laat-middeleeuws Holland, ed. by Jannis Marsilje (Hilversum, 1990), p. 132. About the factional twist, see also Frederik Buylaert, ‘The “Van Boschuysen Afffair” in Leyden. Conflicts between Elite Networks in Late Medieval Holland’, Francia, 35 (2008): 95–113. 290 Dumolyn and Haemers sources noted the title of the song to which Brederoede referred). Clearly, townsmen adopted popular taunting melodies which made such songs easy for repetition. In sum, it seems that popular media which echoed religious and other common songs helped rebels to spread their message like wildfĳire through the city with the aim of convincing others to join their political actions.

Heraldic Metaphors and Political Prophecies

In the poem ‘Let each man carry on with his trade and remain silent’, mentioned at the beginning of this article, some elements of what Netherlandish rogue tavern poets were actually singing are revealed: ‘One sings that the Eagle will spread his wings / Another sings that the Lion will take his revenge / One sings the Lily has done a lot of wrong / Another sings we have lost the Rose’ (Deen singt den Aern sal syn vlueghelen slaen / dander singt den leuw salt noch wreken / Deen singt die lelye heeft veel misdaen / Dander singt die rose es ons ontgaen). In the end it is the Eagle who is praised by the poet himself. He is ‘wise enough and always knows what to do’ and chattering fools should keep their mouth shut. Clearly, this Eagle stands for Habsburg power in the Netherlands and this poem should be dated in the last decades of the fĳifteenth or in the early decades of the sixteenth century when Maximilian of Habsburg, his son Philip the Fair and his grandson Charles V peacefully ruled their Burgundian heritage after many years of civil war and dispute from their subjects. Exactly as in the case of the ‘House of the Lion’ mentioned above, widespread heraldic metaphors are employed to discuss contemporary politics. In another part of Eduard de Dene’s Rhetorical Testament, the writer puts some typical expressions in the mouth of the clappaert, which are rather close to the ones found in Let each man carry on with his trade and remain silent.43 Here again, the Eagle and a language which has a number of heraldic references are present, and numerous other examples could be cited. The Oudenaarde rhetorician Matthijs de Castelein used the same heraldic metaphors when he wrote a poem lauding the peace of Aigues-Mortes in 1538 – it shows that he was strongly in support of the ruling dynasty.44 Similar observations can be made

43 Coigneau, van Elslander, and Waterschoot, ‘Eduard de Dene’, p. 86. 44 Florimond van Duyse, Het oude Nederlandsche lied (The Hague, 1905), II, p. 1587; Karel Porteman, ‘Matthijs de Casteleins “Verblijdt u Vlaender-lant schoon blomme”. De kunst van de propaganda en de propaganda van de kunst’, Tegendraads genot. Opstellen over de kwaliteit van middeleeuwse teksten, ed. by Karel Porteman, Werner Verbeke, & Frank Willaert (Leuven, 1996), pp. 195–204; Dirk Coigneau, ‘Matthijs de Castelein: “excellent Political Poems, Songs and Prophecies in the Low Countries 291 for English ‘political poetry’, for instance when the heraldic symbolism of the Red and the White Rose was used in dealing with the civil war between the Yorkist and Lancastrian factions.45 This heraldic metaphoric language is also typical of so-called ‘political prophecies’, another literary genre which was commonly used by the medieval and early modern politically discontent. Though most prophecies deal with religious matters, others clearly refer to public afffairs and public policy using a pseudo-eschatological discourse. In England, for centuries, ‘prophecies of Merlin’ had also mentioned France and Flanders as protagonists making use of these heraldic metaphors. Echoing prophetic form was meant to give these literary comments on contemporary events a higher degree of authority.46 In the early sixteenth-century Middle Dutch cases mentioned above, there might be some influence from English prophecies like 1530s France and Flanders shall Rise, once again using the same heraldic symbolism.47 This calls for further investigation crossing the ‘national’ boundaries of literary research. At any rate such texts should be situated in a culture of political languages and literary traditions common to broad swathes of medieval Europe. Such political prophecies, however, did not contain an undecipherable code, as this modern terminology might suggest. Instead, they were used by medieval people to communicate their feelings about rulers, contemporary events, and political and military struggle in general. They were often written in the vernacular, were usually related to both moralist and chivalric discourses, and were probably read out loud before an audience. Usually written after the event, these texts present themselves as having been composed before a particular historical fact took place and they remain vague about specifĳic times. Therefore, they are also labeled as ‘pseudo-prophecies’. In almost all cases, their authors remain anonymous. Prophecies have been very well studied in the context of medieval English politics but their importance has hardly been noticed by medievalists dealing with the Low Countries.48

poëte moderne” ’, Verslagen en Mededelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde (1985), pp. 459–460. 45 John Scattergood, Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (New York, 1971), p. 215; Aude Mairey, ‘La poésie, un mode de communication politique durant la guerre des Deux Roses’, The Languages of Political Society, pp. 190–193. 46 Scattergood, Politics and Poetry, pp. 383–385. 47 Edited in Sharon Jansen, Political Protest and Prophecy under Henry VIII (Woodbridge, 1991), pp. 105–109. 48 A recent exception is Remco Sleiderink, ‘De verscheurde lelie. Velthem en het toekomstvi- sioen van Merlijn in de Vijfde Partie’, De boeken van Velthem. Auteur, oeuvre en overlevering, ed. by Bart Besamusca, Remco Sleiderink, & Geert Warnar (Hilversum, 2009), pp. 161–182. 292 Dumolyn and Haemers

It is clear, however, that in regions like Flanders, Brabant, Holland, and Gelderland these pseudo-prophetic discourses were of equally fundamental importance as one of the major political languages used both by elite writers of chronicles and political treatises and by the rogue poets and other blabbermouths commenting and singing about politics on the street and in backstreet alehouses of ill-repute. As is also the case in England, most political prophecies in the Netherlands, such as the ‘Prophecy of the Huise blacksmith’ or the ‘Prophecy of Amisins’ which date from the second half of the fourteenth century, are preserved in diffferent manuscript versions with as many textual variations.49 This shows that they were copied on many occasions and that they were adapted to changing circumstances. In addition, it is worth noting that the editor of some of these texts, the nineteenth-century erudite Napoléon De Pauw, successfully traced an alliterative rhyme scheme in the prophecies. Hence, these prophecies also seem to have been designed to be easily memorized and to be orally transmitted. It remains difffĳicult to establish whether these written forms were modelled to create an oral performance, or merely to record such utterances with the aim of repeating them frequently. It seems safer to say that this genre, as was the case for other medieval poetical forms, was transmitted in both spoken and written forms. At any rate, these pseudo-prophecies were a widespread medium for the preservation of collective memories about political events. They often predicted the coming of an heroic ruler. The intended audience had the moral obligation to support this great prince and should behave as a people chosen by God in a collective responsibility similar to that in moralizing discourses of

Heraldic languages are also mentioned in Samuel Mareel, ‘Urban Literary Propaganda on the Battle of Pavia. Cornelis Everaert’s Spel van den Hooghen Wynt ende Zoeten Reyn’, Queeste, 13 (2006): 97–108, at p. 105. In general, the best reference for this genre, upon whom we heavily draw, is Lesley Coote, Prophecy and Public Afffairs in Later Medieval England (Woodbridge, 2000), and also Erwin Herrmann, ‘Spätmittelalterliche englische Pseudoprophetien’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 57 (1975): 95–98; Bernard McGinn, Visions of the End. Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages (New York, 1979); Rupert Taylor, The Political Prophecy in England (New York, 1911); Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Oxford, 1969). 49 These texts existed in many versions, such as the ‘Prophecy of Jan Aneseus (or Amisins)’, the ‘Prophecy of Bulscamp’, and the so-called ‘Prophecy, edited by Granlund’; see their edition by De Pauw, Middelnederlandse gedichten, II, pp. 453–524; Serrure, Vaderlandsch museum, vol. III, pp. 423–430; and Raphaël De Keyser and Amber Verrycken, ‘De pseudo- profetie van Amisins: een Vlaamse visie op de veertiende eeuw’, Pascua Mediaevalia. Studies voor prof. dr. J.M. De Smet, ed. by Robrecht Lievens, Erik Van Mingroot, & Werner Verbeke (Leuven, 1983), pp. 398–451. Political Poems, Songs and Prophecies in the Low Countries 293

Christian didactic literature.50 In the medieval Netherlands this heroic ruler could be either a rebel liberator or, for those who sided with the authorities, a new prince announcing a fruitful era. While in the ‘Prophecy of Amisins’ James of Artevelde, the charismatic leader of a textile revolt in fourteenth-century Ghent, acted as the protector of widows and orphans, Charles V appeared in a sixteenth-century prophecy as the human saviour who chased the enemies out of the country.51 Above all, as is also the case for England, these discourses were concerned with power relationships, dealing with major issues such as war and peace, and the making and unmaking of kings and princes, matters of state outside the control of the subjects who wrote, proclaimed, or heard them.52 It was also through such texts that ideas about politics were clearly on many occasions transmitted among the less privileged layers of society. In the so-called ‘Prophecy of Amisins’, an enigmatic name, James of Artevelde is compared to a boar, and in other texts Charles V was the Eagle fĳight- ing against the Salamander (references to, respectively, the heraldic symbol of the Habsburg rulers and the emblem of the French king). Authors made use of animal symbolism to transmit their ideas in the same way as in fables with a social or political tone, of which the Middle Dutch Van den vos Reinaerde, a thirteenth-century adaptation of the Roman de Renart, mocking the greed and hypocrisy of those in power, was one of the most refĳined European examples in the genre.53 The ‘Prophecy of the blacksmith of Huise’, dated to 1391 and belonging to the same textual tradition as the one cited above, warns its audience about the ‘minor people who marched against the major’. As the text talks about the ‘high’, ‘middle’, and ‘little’ worms in town, it is easy to recognize in the latter category the urban wage workers who did not belong to the wealthier middle class of guild masters. These allegorical beasts were considered unreliable partners in the political resistance against the abuse of power of the offfĳicers of the count. These peopletvolc ( ) had a capricious nature (they were so wisselbaer or ‘volatile’), and they terrifĳied the ‘high’ and ‘middle’ worms in the city.

50 Coote, Prophecy and Public Afffairs, pp. 27–28. 51 See, respectively, De Keyser and Verrycken, ‘De pseudo-profetie van Amisins’, pp. 447– 448; Van de Graft, Middelnederandsche historieliederen, pp. 184–185. 52 Coote, Prophecy and Public Afffairs, p. 238. 53 Van den Vos Reynaerde. Het Comburgse Handschrift, ed. by Jozef Janssens et al. (Leuven, 1991); Frits Van Oostrom, Stemmen op schrift. Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse literatuur vanaf het begin tot 1300 (Amsterdam, 2006), pp. 464–496; an English translation of this masterpiece is now available: Of Reynaert the Fox: Text and Facing Translation of the Middle Dutch Beast Epic Van den vos Reynaerde, ed. by Andre Bouwman & Bart Besamusca (Amsterdam, 2009). 294 Dumolyn and Haemers

Hence, it is plausible that this prophecy did not circulate among the urban have-nots, but that it was written in a more well-to-do social milieu. The Flemish and Brabantine urban middle classes consisted of the richer artisans and the petty shopkeepers who were organized in craft guilds, and who had, in the course of the later middle ages, successfully fought for the preservation of political privileges.54 They could often read and write and had established their rhetoricians’ guilds following typically urban corporatist forms of social organization, maintaining a remarkable literary culture of poetry, drama, and the organization of literary festivities.55 As some of these prophecies gave a colourful description of revolts in the urban environment, we can presume that many of them, though often written anonymously, might also have been created, copied, and read out among such literate artisans and functioned as some sort of touchstone of their corporate group identity and collective memory. Such texts were of a more sophisticated format and composed in a more elaborate and literary style than the pamphlets mentioned above and, most distinctively, they made use of religious registers. But exactly like the libels posted at the church doors, political prophecies provided commoners with political arguments for future conflicts over the preservation of their rights and privileges within the urban and national polity. And as in other literary expressions of subversion, moral failures of rulers were a central issue in political prophecies. Again, they carried an unambigu- ous political message, directed both at the authorities and at their popular audience. Political elites were warned to keep the common interests of all citizens in mind when ruling the country. The fourteenth-century prophecy of Amisins, for instance, condemns the pride, envy, and sins of rulers who had spread discord ‘among innocent Christians’. ‘High treason and major quarrels among princes and in particular between lords’ were responsible for factional struggle, which had a detrimental efffect on the wealth of citizens.56 ‘Injustice’,

54 See the overview in Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers, ‘Patterns of Urban Rebellion in Medieval Flanders’, Journal of Medieval History, 31 (2005): 369–393; Marc Boone, ‘The Dutch Revolt and the Medieval Tradition of Urban Dissent’, Journal of Early Modern History, 11 (2007): 351–375. 55 Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, ‘ “A Wonderfull Tryumfe, for the Wynnyng of a Pryse”: Guilds, Ritual, Theater, and the Urban Network in the Southern Low Countries, ca. 1450–1650’, Renaissance Quarterly, 59 (2006): 374–405. 56 Binnen deser tijt zal verrijsen groete verradenesse ende groete twiste onder de printchen van der weerelt ende zonderlinghe onder alle de meeste heeren die dan zijn zullen, zo dat zij don- noezel volc van kerstijnhede zullen doen vechten onderlinghe (De Keyser and Verrycken, ‘De pseudo-profetie van Amisins’, p. 445). Much to his regret, these conflicts set up friends against friends (vrient jeghen vrient), as the ‘Huise blacksmith’ wrote in 1391 (De Pauw, Political Poems, Songs and Prophecies in the Low Countries 295 the prophecy says, made ‘the people very angry’ (zeere quaet). The little animals (cleene beestkine) would seek justice and they give a saviour (like the rebel leader James of Artevelde) a very warm welcome. However, the prophecy of Amisins also contained an unmistakable message for the artisan class. Though the urban middle class of guildmasters often sympathized and collaborated with the labourers and paid workers during a revolt, this text shows that guild masters also feared the ‘little animals’ because of the unpredictable outcome of such joint political actions. The author warns his audience that ‘the people will fĳind glory and satisfaction in their anger’, which will lead to bloody battles.57 The text advises the middle class artisans to resist the immoral political behaviour of the ruling class, but it likewise warns them that giving power to the poor would endanger their privileged position in society. Stirring up revolt among labourers and wage workers is not without danger, the prophecy says, as it risks destabilizing the order of society and the social position of the more privileged urban groups. In short, these Flemish prophecies did not incite the urban population into open rebellion against the social system, but merely condemned corruption and the violation of the privileges of ‘middle animals’ by the civic authorities. If this message would be well understood, the text concludes, ‘caritate’, the charity and brotherly love that forged the urban community, ‘will rise higher then ever before’ (Caritate zal hoeghere rijsen dan zo ye tevoren was).58

Political Plays in Town

Though we discuss this at length in another article, it is worth mentioning that not only the prophecies of middle-class artisans contain a clear political message. Also their plays give us an intriguing insight in the ideological discourse of guildsmen.59 Of course, the craft guilds were not the only organizer of political plays in the cities of the Low Countries. Their political adversaries, the urban elite or the Dukes of Burgundy, used similar means to convince the urban public of their political ideas. In these plays, they presented

Middelnederlandsche gedichten, II, p. 485). On the contemporary discourse and social reality of factionalism in the Low Countries, see Jonas Braekevelt et al., ‘Factional Conflict in Late Medieval Flanders’, Historical Research, 85 (2012): 13–31. 57 Ende tvolc zal glorie ende ghenouchte hebben in zijne quathede ende wesen al zonder vreese (De Keyser and Verrycken, ‘De pseudo-profetie van Amisins’, p. 450). 58 De Keyser and Verrycken, ‘De pseudo-profetie van Amisins’, p. 451. 59 See Dumolyn and Haemers, ‘Let Each Man Carry on’ (see note 8). 296 Dumolyn and Haemers themselves as the rightful successor of former rulers in their domains, such as the dynasties of the Counts of Flanders or the Dukes of Brabant. While chronicles served the Burgundian Dukes to spread this message ‘in a written way’, plays helped them to spread it ‘orally’, among others to reach the illiterate masses. In 1466, for instance, the future Duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold, and a sympathizing faction of the urban elite, organized a performance on the Brussels Market Square in which the popular character Menych Sympel (‘Very common man’) asked critical questions to Outgedachte (‘Old memory’) and Cronicke (‘Chronicle’). While Menych Sympel wondered about the legitimacy of the Dukes of Burgundy to succeed the Dukes of Brabant, ‘Old Memory’ and ‘Chronicle’ told the audience that there was no reason to doubt about their legal claim of succession. Moreover, as Outgedachte asked to himself, ‘What is a people without a lord? / Nothing more than animals; / the smallest wants to be the biggest. / Force and arbitrariness will chase away justice and law’.60 Therefore, as the play argued, it is better to accept Charles the Bold as the rightful successor as Duke of Brabant. Likewise, middle-class artisans tried to legitimize the political resistance against princes who violated local customs with the performance of plays. Most of these performances were organized by rhetoricians’ guilds and religious confraternities in guildhalls, in churches, and on wagons on the street.61 From the more than six hundred known dramas, mostly on religious subjects, the Dutch literary historian Mak found approximately thirty of what he called ‘social plays’. Although some of these were performed at a celebration of a vic-

60 Wats volck in landen sonder heeren? / Nyet meer om achten dan beesten sijn: / Die mynste wylt boven de meeste sijn, / Op come[n]scap en dooch ons nyet geledt / Foortse en wille ver- drijft recht en wedt. The text of the play is edited and studied at length by Robert Stein, ‘Cultuur in context. Het spel van Menych Sympel (1466) als spiegel van de Brusselse politieke verhoudingen’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen betrefffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 113 (1998): 289–321, at p. 313. About the attempts of the Dukes to manipulate the urban audience by literary means, see Christian de Mérindol, ‘Théâtre et politique à la fĳin du Moyen Âge. Les entrées royales et autres cérémonies mises au point et nouveaux aperçus’, Théâtre et spectacles hier et aujourd’hui. Moyen âge et Renaissance (Paris, 1991), pp. 179–212; Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin, ‘Maîtriser le temps pour maîtriser les lieux. La politique historiographique bourguignonne dans l’appropriation des terres du Nord au XVe siècle’, Ecritures de l’Histoire (XIVe–XVIe siècles), ed. by Daniele Bohler & Catherine Magnien Simonin (Geneva, 2005), pp. 371–383. 61 Elsa Strietman, ‘Pawns or Prime Movers?: The Rhetoricians in the Struggle for Power in the Low Countries’, European Medieval Drama, 2 (1998): 111–121, p. 111; ‘Rederijkersspelen als historische documenten’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 21; Mareel, Voor vorst en stad, passim. Political Poems, Songs and Prophecies in the Low Countries 297 tory or peace treaty, or during an entry ceremony of a prince, others seem to have offfered the playwright the chance to give voice to subversive thoughts.62 The most telling example is the play ‘Of Unequal Coinage’ (dOnghelycke Munte) of the sixteenth-century Bruges playwriter Cornelis Everaert, who had been punished by the authorities for performing it. The play used similar characters as the play which was performed by the Burgundian Dukes in Brussels in 1466, though it contained a diffferent message. The play considered war and political misbehavior as a major cause of social evil, along with human sin- fulness in general. Through the performance, Everaert explains the spectators how floating exchange rates destabilize the economy, bankrupting the middle and labouring classes, while speculators reap huge profĳits. One character, Ghemeene Neerynghe (‘Common Trade’), who represented a textile guild master, has to fĳire his wage labourer Sulc Scaemel (‘So Poor’). ‘So Poor’ then tries to convince his employer not to let him go, offfering to work for ‘Common Trade’ for a penny less per day, and even to accept payment in kind.63 Therefore, Everaert critiziced those who were responsible for the outbreak of the war, namely Emperor Charles V, Duke of Burgundy and Count of Flanders. Though he did not literally condemn the Emperor for having made political mistakes, he nevertheless let his audience know that princes had to keep peace in their lands, with the aim of protecting urban prosperity. The emphasis in these texts on the maintenance of guild privileges, monetary stability, and the political virtue of carefully managing the land as one would manage a household fundamentally reflected the economic interests of the urban artisan classes. Gossip and muttering are also central elements in Everaert’s drama. In another play of his ‘Testament to Rhetoric’, characters such as ‘Shabby Worker’ and ‘Multitude of People’ more overtly condemned the ruinous monetary poli- cies of the prince and bemoan their efffect on the trade and industry of Bruges. These were strong and dangerous statements. Even though at fĳirst glance, Everaert seemed to distance himself from this ‘popular speech’ because it was uttered by farcical and rather stupid fĳigures, use of the comical genre and the dialogue format, in which allegorical characters present their opposing views, allowed the rhetorician to speak out in a manner otherwise considered politically subversive. In Den Daghelicxschen Snaetere (‘The daily cackling hen’), a text dating from the 1530s, for instance, the main character is a woman selling

62 Jacobus Mak, De rederijkers (Amsterdam, 1944), p. 75; for an overview of Dutch rhetorician drama, see Willem Hummelen, Repertorium van het rederijkersdrama, 1500–ca. 1620 (Assen, 1968). 63 Erich Kuttner, ‘Rederijkersspelen als historische documenten’, Tijdschrift voor Geschie- denis, 57 (1942), p. 190. 298 Dumolyn and Haemers hazelnuts on the street who cannot stop talking. At one point, she tells the audience that another character, Den Scaemele Aerbeyder (‘The Shabby Worker’) was fĳired by his employerMenichte van Volke (‘Multitude of People’), and comments that wage labourers sufffer the worst in a crisis because the guild masters pass down the efffects to them. But the main cause of the crisis seems to beDen Tyt van Nu (‘The Present Time’) a fĳigure dressed as a war-mongering soldier.64 The critique does ultimately appear half-hearted, as at the end of Everaert’s plays, another allegorical character comes in to restore moral order by blaming the babbling fools of the populace for their pride and stupidity. However, the political subversion had been uttered, the audience heard it and could perhaps even have cheered in approval.65 Everaert was likely a sincere poet who did not aim to incite any kind of popular protest, just as also other middle-class writers refused to do in prophecies and chronicles. Nevertheless, he both criticized the authorities and he warned the lower townsfolk to behave properly. For Everaert, and other middle-class writers in the cities of the Low Countries, the prince, the urban elite, and daily workers had to respect local customs in general and the corporate privileges of the urban guildsmen in particular. Spreading gossip and false rumours in town about the alleged misbehavior of guildsmen was not a right thing to do.

Conclusion

In recent years, several scholars have studied the ‘public voice’ of subordinate groups in order to understand the political beliefs and the behaviour of these ‘historically inarticulate’.66 They have shown that crowds combined verbal violence with other forms of violent action to pursue their political agendas. However, this brief overview of political songs, poems, prophecies, and plays in the fĳifteenth- and sixteenth-century Netherlands makes clear that the term

64 Jacob Müller, ed., ‘Cornelis Everaerts spelen als spiegel van den maatschappelijke toes- tanden zijns tijds’, Verslagen en Mededeelingen der Koninklijke Vlaamsche Academie voor Taal- en Letterkunde (1907), pp. 442–448. For the context, see Mareel, Voor vorst en stad, pp. 183–200. 65 Hendrik van Gelder, ‘Satiren der XVIe eeuwsche kleine burgerij’, Oud-Holland, 29 (1911), p. 216. See also Wim Hüsken, ‘Cornelis Everaert on Power and Authority’, in The Growth of Authority in the Medieval West, ed. by Martin A.O. Gosman et al. (Groningen, 1999), pp. 242–246. 66 John Walter, Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2006), p. 23. See also William Beik, ‘The Violence of the French Crowd from Charivari to Revolution’, Past & Present, 197 (2007), pp. 75–110. Political Poems, Songs and Prophecies in the Low Countries 299

‘inarticulate’ does not really do justice to the social and discursive reality in this developed urban society. The middle and lower strata of society frequently employed both oral and written media to communicate their discontent about political decisions. Conscious of their power, anonymous libellers used a more ‘vulgar’ language including terms of abuse or threats with violence, to point rulers to their duties. These dangerous blabbermouths often did not control their tongues but mocked and attacked the rich and powerful in songs and gossip. But there were also more subtle literary forms and motifs to transmit subversive ideas from generation to generation, such as the heraldic language deployed in political prophecies and songs. Clearly, the urban population of the later medieval and early modern Netherlands disposed of a remarkable variety of expressive modes available for verbal political action. For, above all, the emphasis that both insults and literary texts put on the elite’s moral failure obviously carried a political message. It is probable that the authors of libels, poems and prophecies did not seriously believe that their moral criticisms would be immediately successful in changing the rulers’ political behaviour. However, what they do seem to have intended was weakening the authority of lords, princes, and urban aldermen who violated their customs and privileges, who taxed them too heavily and who were considered to be corrupt and oppressive. The ‘corrosive political efffects’ which John Scattergood attributed to medieval parody and laughter, can therefore also be encountered in the insults, songs, and poems that were spoken, read, and disseminated by the clappaerts of the Low Countries.67

67 John Scattergood, ‘Wrong’s Laugh: Piers Plowman C.IV 45–104, Law-breaking, Carnival, and Parody’, in his The Lost Tradition. Essays on Middle English Alliterative Poetry (Dublin, 2000), p. 148. CHAPTER 10 Proverbs and Princes in Post-Reformation England

Marcus Harmes and Gillian Colclough

Introduction

Proverbs could serve a serious function as mnemonic oral repositories for ideas, from weather and animal husbandry to the metaphysical, and might, thus, explain natural and unnatural worlds.1 They conveyed gnomic explanations for the joys, sorrows, frustrations, perplexities and functions of everyday life and in their oral and later written articulation they enabled dissent. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, proverbs were on the lips of those people whom the Tudor jurist and political theorist Sir Thomas Smith said ‘have no voice nor authoritie in our common wealth’.2 But proverbs provided a voice for this multitude, a voice heard at the highest levels of society as oral proverbs could be written down in works circulated by literate elites amongst each other. In Coriolanus, proverbs were ‘sigh’d forth’ by the multitude (1:1:205) during a period of social and political unrest which the play documents.3 This allusion suggests how proverbs could offfer criticisms of established order and pinpoints their origin in the lower levels but their audibility at all levels of society. This paper will follow a proverb which discussed the condition of church and state from catch phrases on the streets of London up to the conceptu- alization of princely authority at the most elite levels of English society. It questions how proverbs, seemingly humble and quotidian, could challenge institutions. Proverbs were not the language ‘of authority’ that inculcates obedience, but rather were the language ‘about authority’ that might undercut obedience and could offfer an afffront to early modern England’s controlling institutions. According to the historian of orality James Òbelkevich, proverbs are ‘strategies with authority’, meaning that they proposed ideas and courses

1 Wolfgang Mieder (pp. 2–3) argues that there ‘are over 700 “universal” proverb types’ across cultures and nations; see Mieder, Proverbs: A Handbook (Westport, CN, 2004), pp. 22–25. 2 Cited in Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford, 1989), p. 129. 3 Among the proverbs used in the play are ‘That hunger broke stone walls, that dogs must eat,/ That meat was made for mouths, that the gods sent not Corn for the rich men only’.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004291829_012 Proverbs and Princes in Post-Reformation England 301 of action.4 One particular proverb will be the focus of analysis. It was current on the streets of London by about 1605 and clergy were quoting it in their sermons.5 It reads:

Henry the 8.pulld down abbeys and cells, But Henry the 9.shall pull down Bishops and bells.6

Where many proverbs express immemorial insights, every point of this proverb is compellingly topical. Just one year earlier, with new Canons, the state had regulated the bells that hung in the towers of England’s parish churches, meaning that the idea of reforming this aspect of the auditory world of early modern England was of recent discussion and debate.7 In this proverb, bells (meaning those rung out from belfries, not liturgical sacral bells which had not been heard in England for nearly 60 years by the time of this proverb) are not our focus. Of greater moment is the allusion to the young man who had recently become the Prince of Wales: Henry Frederick (d.1612), eldest son of James VI and I. The bishops of the Church of England were also highly topical. In 1604 Henry’s father convened the Hampton Court Conference hoping to settle long-standing disputes within the Church of England about bishops and opposition to them resounded from newssheets, pamphlets, street cries, ballads, sermons and other sources. This proverb leaves two traces on the historical record, in two separate periods and in two separate formats. In 1605, or perhaps already 1604, people attending church in London or simply walking the streets of the city heard this catchy rhyme and repeated it. Among them was Sir John Harington (d.1612), who avidly collected proverbs and who wrote this one down. In this instance however, he did not record the proverb as part of his antiquarian or literary interests. Instead he had a scribe write it down on the title page of the 1608

4 James Òbelkevich, ‘Proverbs and Social History’, in The Social History of Language, ed. by Peter Burke & Roy Porter (Cambridge, 1987), p. 44. 5 David Rollison, The Local Origins of Modern Society: Gloucestershire 1500–1800 (London, 2005), p. 23. 6 BL Royal MS 17.B XXII, fol. 403. These words are cited in G.P.V. Akrigg, Jacobean Pageant, or the Court of James I (London, 1962), p. 135. 7 ‘By Canon 67 (1603), “when any is passing out of life, a bell shall be tolled, and the minister shall not then slack to do his duty. And after the party’s death (if it so fall out), there shall be rung no more than one short peal, and one other before the burial and one after the burial” ’; R. Burns, Ecclesiastical Law (edn. of 1773), I, 476–484, cited in F.G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Morals and the Church Courts (Chelmsford, 1973), p. 174. We are grateful to Dolly Mackinnon for this reference. 302 Harmes and Colclough manuscript Supplie or Addicion to the Catalogue of Bishops, his biographical sketches of Elizabethan bishops, which he presented to Henry Prince of Wales. In 1653 the proverb and the Supplie or Addicion both resurfaced, this time not in manuscript form but from the printing press. The diffference is telling. In 1608 Harington, conforming to scholarly, gentlemanly, and courtly conduct, had circulated his writings in manuscript form, just as his contemporaries circulated music they wrote or poems they composed among their friends.8 Printing was vulgar.9 Nonetheless, Harington took an instance of street vulgar- ity and introduced it into this world of refĳined courtly circulation of ideas. By 1653 Harington was dead, but his manuscript, edited by John Chetwynd, the son of Harington’s daughter, appeared as A Briefe View of the State of the Church of England, and once again, on the title page, there was the proverb.10 In 1608, the desire expressed in the proverb for the abolition of bishops was only a forlorn hope; bishops were intrinsic to the Church and State and supported by King James.11 But in 1653 it had come true; bishops had been brought down by the Long Parliament, the same body that tried and executed King Charles I and abolished monarchy. The episcopate had not been abolished by King Henry IX. The expectation of the proverb, that there be a prince but no bishops, had been swept away and the terms upon which its predicted abolition of episcopacy came true defĳied the prediction itself. By then Harington himself had been transformed and distorted, posthumously. During his lifetime, he despised the coiner of the proverb and repudiated that person’s attempt to be a prophet predicting the contours of Henry’s reign and the destruction of the episcopate. The essay will demonstrate his scorn and anger at this proverb. But in Henry’s lifetime Harington himself was a prophet, warning against the laxity and avarice of bishops and the failure of their pastoral functions. He did not want episcopacy abolished, but was not blind to the defĳiciencies of contemporary bishops and discussed these in an attempt to highlight low standards and areas for improvement. By 1653 what he warned against had come to pass; with the Church of England in abeyance, the cathedrals had been vandalized and episcopacy was gone. By then, the

8 John Peacock, ‘The Politics of Portraiture’, Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. by Kevin Sharpe & Peter Lake (London, 1994), p. 204. 9 The Venetian scholar Filippo di Strata commented: ‘Est virgo hec penna, meretrix est stampifĳicata’ (the pen is a virgin, the printing press a whore); cited in Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice (Oxford, 1979), p. 45. We are grateful to Dr Kim Wilkins for this reference. 10 John Harington, A Briefe View of the State of the Church of England, as it stood in Q.Elizabeths and King James his Reigne (London, 1653), title page. 11 Debora Kuller Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance (Berkeley, CA, 1990), p. 131. Proverbs and Princes in Post-Reformation England 303 writings of the long-dead Harington came offf the printing presses, this time as a stick with which to beat the corpse of episcopacy, and Harington was transformed into an anti-episcopal writer, all on the basis of this small fragment of oral culture, the ‘Prince Henry’ proverb. The ‘Prince Henry’ proverb engaged with these currents of conflicting and polemical thought and expressed a number of ideas connected to the arguments about the Church across the fĳirst half of the seventeenth century. It urged the abolition of episcopacy, and constructed an historical lin- eage and precedent for this action, projecting into the future reign of Prince Henry as King Henry IX and stressing the continuity between Henry VIII as the destroyer of monasteries and Henry IX as the destroyer of bishops and cathedrals. A range of complex responses to current church government, to the history of the Reformation, and to the exercise of conscience and religious toleration are wrapped up in this proverb. It stands forth distinctively from most other collected proverbs because of its topicality and relevance to a narrow set of circumstances, while most proverbs tend to the universal. It is not the only proverb to have referred to monasteries or bishops, but it is striking in its direct assault on institutions and the ceremonial apparatus of the English Church, such as its bells.12 Moreover, elite cultural productions echoed what it said orally, especially art produced at Prince Henry’s court and works written by his courtiers, and the proverb shows the intersection not only of history and contemporary issues but also of the language of the street and the intellectual activities of the court of Prince Henry. As we shall soon see, the proverb, which was a prophecy, did in some measure come true. When Chetwynd reissued it in 1653, bishops had been abolished, but then so too had princes. The proverb suggested a world view where princely authority would abolish bishops and allow the godly to exercise their consciences. But the weight of oral wisdom and its place in educated thought and writing is complex. By 1653 the proverb spoke to an England without bishops or princes. In 1603 the accession of the Stuarts had prompted hopes, in some, that episcopacy would soon vanish. The proverb about Prince Henry comments on this expectation. While its tone is destructive – speaking of breaking down – its import is constructive. In two lines the proverb constructs a particular world view. The proverb speaks to hopes that puritan consciences could be exercised under a godly prince, in a way they could not under James I, and that the future Henry IX would in

12 Other proverbs referred to the wealth and privileges of the Church, but fell short of urging absolute abolition; Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: A Collection of the Proverbs found in English Literature and the Dictionaries of the Period (Ann Arbor, MI, 1966), p. 101. Proverbs drawn from Tilley in this work will be shown in shortened form, indicating a source and a page in Tilley (T). 304 Harmes and Colclough time accept that loyalty to the crown did not entail loyalty to the episcopate of the Church of England. To break this bond would prove impossible, and when the proverb resurfaced in 1653, long after the deaths of Prince Henry and Harington, it was only to demonstrate the imbrication of monarchy and episcopacy.

Harington, the Prince of Wales and 1603

The Prince Henry proverb emerges from enduring contestation over the appropriate form of government for a reformed church. Decades of religious reform and counter-reform in sixteenth-century England had created a Church that still had bishops.13 They also held onto many of the estates of the medieval episcopate.14 In commenting on bishops, the Prince Henry proverb converged with a set of specifĳic circumstances, including the accession of James VI to the English throne in 1603 and the Hampton Court Conference in 1604. We only know of the Prince Henry proverb’s existence because a Jacobean intellectual, prominent at the court of Prince Henry, took care to write it down. Sir John Harington, godson of Elizabeth I and writer, was like many European intellectuals, such as Erasmus, in two ways; he collected and disseminated proverbs; and he wrote texts intended for the instruction and edifĳication of princes. Besides Erasmus, Burton, Fuller, Milton and other sixteenth-and seventeenth-century intellectuals and scholars collected proverbs from speech and a variety of writings, including Erasmus’s collection of Latin adages.15 But the Prince Henry proverb does not appear in a collection of proverbs, saws or adages. Harington had made his own collection of these, the Epigrams;16 however the proverb about Prince Henry was in the Supplie or Addicion to the Catalogue of Bishops, written when he was tutor to Henry Prince of Wales.17 Although, like many other men of letters, he was an avid collector of proverbs,

13 T.F. Shirley, Thomas Thirlby, Tudor Bishop (London, 1964), pp. 44–45; Felicity Heal, The Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2002), p. 187. 14 On the revenues of the post-Reformation episcopate, see Felicity Heal, ‘The Bishops and the Act of Exchange of 1559’, Historical Journal, 17 (1974): 227–246. 15 On Erasmus see Sander L. Gilman, ‘Johannes Agricola of Eisleben’s Proverb Collection (1529): The Polemicizing of a Literary Form and the Reaction’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 8 (1) (1977): 77–84, at p. 79. 16 Gerard Kilroy, ed., The Epigrams of Sir John Harington (Aldershot, 2009). 17 Gerard Kilroy, ‘Advertising the Reader: Sir John Harington’s “Directions in the Margent” ’, English Literary Renaissance, 41(2011): 64–110, at p. 66. Proverbs and Princes in Post-Reformation England 305 he placed the Prince Henry proverb not in the usual anthology, but in a treatise on the Church of England. The Supplie or Addicion is a curious work. It is no original but an augmentation of Bishop Francis Godwin’s own history of the Tudor episcopate.18 The presentation copy of 1608, which Harington gifted to Prince Henry, contains a copy of Godwin’s work, bound with the Supplie or Addicion, and is now BL Royal MS 17. B.XXII.19 Harington linked his work with Godwin’s with marginal annotations, writing on the title page’s centre the explanatory note that the ‘occasion’ of writing the work had been what he called at this point a ‘proverb’. He put it there not as a curiosity, but as an argument about episcopacy and its defence. It is also there as a warning. It did not arrive there as an afterthought. It is written in the same immaculate scribal hand as the remainder of the Supplie or Addicion, as we would expect for a presentation copy intended for princely eyes.20 Harington is not the fĳirst early modern writer to have used single proverbs as the starting point of a larger work; Jean Calvin’s sermons frequently developed a theme based around a particular proverb and a relevant proverb was the foundation of many a homily or moral treatise.21 But Calvin would use a proverb in the midst of his discourse, whereas for Harington the proverb is a starting point for a work which inves- tigated the reputations of the bishops, whom the proverb’s coiner had wished cast down. There is in fact a telling and signifĳicant irony about the preservation of this proverb through Harington’s agency. Long after Harington’s death his relative Chetwynd published the work in 1653 but the proverb is fĳirst encountered on the title page of the 1608 manuscript presentation copy of the Supplie or Addicion. Three years before giving Henry the Supplie or Addicion, in 1605, Harington heard of:

18 Francis Godwin, A Catalogue of the Bishops of England, since the First Planting of Christian Religion in this Island, 2nd edn (London, 1615). 19 Two further manuscript copies of the work surfaced in the twentieth century. On their textual history see R.H. Miller, ‘Sir John Harington’s A Supplie or Addicion to the Catalogue of Bishops, to the Yeare 1608: Composition and Text’, Studies in Bibliography 30 (1977): 145–161. 20 See Kilroy, The Epigrams of Sir John Harington, p. 72, for a useful discussion of the scribes employed by Harington. 21 Richard White, ‘ “Comme on Dit”: The Proverb in Calvin’s Sermons’, AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities’ Language and Literature Association, 88 (1997): 71–82, at p. 73. 306 Harmes and Colclough

[t]his most reasonless ryme, borne away by the vulgar auditors better perhaps than any part of the text or sermon, [which] hath bred since amongst divers men diverse cogitations.22

His observation is richly suggestive and, indeed like the Prince Henry proverb itself, contains numerous tightly packed ideas. The proverb as a rhyming device struck Harington as an important point, and suggests the link in his thinking between the hearing of the proverb by the ‘auditors’, and the nature of this oral encounter in the catchy rhyme of the proverb. That Harington feared the capacity of the proverb to ‘breed’, passing easily from mouth to mouth, but also breeding ideas as it travelled, also brings us back to the original oral experience of this proverb, as Harington reflects on people having heard the proverb in sermons and then carried it about in their own speech. Having become aware of the proverb’s oral circulation on the streets of London, Harington in fact memorialized it by producing the Supplie or Addicion, ensuring that it would be remembered by committing it to writing. The modern irony is that Harington is our sole source for what he insists was a widely circulating proverb. By itself, this circumstance is not remarkable, because so many proverbs, as ideas orally transmitted, only survive because literate elites bothered to write them down.23 But in this case, Harington preserved a proverb which he feared and which he viewed as seditious.24 Harington was in fact sensitive to the impact of hearing thoughts expressed in oral form. He shared a courtly culture where one’s writings were not read alone in silence and he was never doubted how strongly the proverb worked upon those who heard it and, as it he suggested, ‘bred’ ideas. To his friend Sir Thomas Chancellor he actually suggested that the agent of its transmission deserved to be executed: ‘yf the author were hanged I wowld think hee had but his right’.25 Harington’s sharp reaction eloquently expresses his equally sharp fear of the proverb, and of those who coined or repeated it. Christopher Hill suggests that in Harington’s time, non-elite society was thought of as ‘many headed’, a term suggesting the irrationality of the lower classes.26 Satire was also subject

22 BL Royal MS 17.B XXII, fol. 403b; see also Harington, Nugae Antiquae (London, 1804), sig. A2. 23 Adam Fox, ‘Ballads, Libels and Popular Ridicule in Jacobean England’, Past & Present, 145 (1994): 47–83, at p. 48. 24 On this point see William H. Sherman, John Dee: the Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst, MA, 1995), p. 53. 25 Harington, in Jason Scott-Warren, Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift (Oxford, 2001), p. 220. 26 Christopher Hill, ‘The Many Headed Monster’, in Change and Continuity in Seventeenth- Century England (Cambridge, MA, 1975), pp. 181–204. Proverbs and Princes in Post-Reformation England 307 to proscription by the same body of men – the Church’s bishops – who were attacked in the Prince Henry proverb, a sign of anxiety about rhymes, proverbs or libels.27 Harington feared several aspects of this proverb. One was its very nature. On the title page Harington described the rhyme as a ‘proverb’, in contravention of some scholarly defĳinitions of proverbs, as normative comments and gener- alized.28 But Harington’s proverb did speak to wide-ranging and longstanding ideas in the politics of religion in England. As the folklorists Militz and Militz point out, proverbs take on a multitude of forms.29 Harington’s understanding of what comprised a proverb was in fact malleable. Harington collected utterances like the Prince Henry proverb in large numbers, defĳining some as ‘epigrams’ rather than as proverbs. An even better seventeenth-century term for the Prince Henry proverb is ‘libel’. In Harington’s time the term not only carried the negative connotation of illegal traducement that the term still has now, but also drew attention to the small size of the criticism, as the term referred back to the Latin ‘libellus’, or ‘little book’.30 Libels circulated swiftly through towns and cities, especially libels that were short and that rhymed,31 or that were ‘witty and sharp’.32 Research into the social history of many diffferent areas of early modern Europe stress the potency and the speed of short and expressive ideas, as well as the capacity of what was heard in sermons to prompt heated discussion. Carlo Ginzburg recounts the passionate debates among Neapolitan tanners on the doctrine of justifĳication, discussion prompted by their listening to sermons by Bernardino Ochino.33 In London, libels, epigrams and proverbs swirled around the streets. King Henry VIII himself complained to parliament that debates about religion

27 Richard A. McCabe, ‘Elizabethan Satire and the Bishops’ Ban of 1599’, Yearbook of English Studies, 11 (1981): 188–193. 28 White, ‘ “Comme on Dit” ’, p. 71. 29 Hans-Manfred Militz and Klaus Ulrich Militz, ‘Proverb-Antiproverb: Wolfgang Mieder’s Paremiological Approach’, Western Folklore, 58 (1) (Winter 1999): 25–32, at p. 31. 30 Alastair Bellany, ‘ “Rayling Rymes and Vaunting Verse”: Libellous Politics in Early Stuart England, 1603–1628’, Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. by Kevin Sharpe & Peter Lake (London, 1994), p. 286. 31 Christopher Haigh, ‘The Character of an Antipuritan’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 35.3 (2004): 671–688, at p. 683. 32 John Donne, Letters to Several Persons of Honour (London, 1651), p. 89, in Andrew McRae, ‘The Literary Culture of Early Stuart Libeling’, Modern Philology, 97 (3) (2000): 364–92, at p. 364. 33 Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John & Anne Tedeschi (London, 1980), p. 20. 308 Harmes and Colclough were ‘rimed, sung and jangled in every alehouse and tavern.’34 This tendency endured into the seventeenth century. Within days of his death, the reputation of Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury, was assailed in what McRae refers to as an ‘unprecedented’ number of libels and rhymes.35 The accession of James VI as James I of England also prompted an outpouring of verses on religious topics, among them the Prince Henry proverb.36 Proverbs may have been heard in sermons, but crowded inns and taverns were also centres for heated discussion of what was heard in sermons. As centres of rumour and gossip, where doubtless alcohol added vigour to discussion, they also ensured that rhymes and libels spread quickly, not least through London. This was a city that had grown so fast that, between them, guilds, constables, and the civic corporation had to struggle to control the activities and words of the populace.37 The proverb about Prince Henry moved from sermon (as Harington reported) to street. Harington himself was sensitive to the capacity of libels to sting as they moved from person to person. His notorious text A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, called the Metamorphosis of Ajax caused sufffĳicient offfence that Harington was banished from Elizabeth’s court. In it he equated libels with ‘stercus’ and included coded references to the libels about his own family that were circulating around the court, tarnishing his reputation.38 Libels against Harington and his family threw Harington out of court, but Ajax became notorious for the libels that Harington hurled back. Harington thus feared the speed and immediacy of the Prince Henry proverb. Like other early modern men of letters, he understood proverbs to be rhymes with topical references; he also appreciated that they arose and spread quickly. The sixteenth-century epigrammarian John Heywood brought into circulation (through print, however, not through speech) over one hundred epigrams, which he claimed were ‘invented and made by’ him, suggesting the

34 Sir Edward Hall, Chronicle: containing the history of England, during the reign of Henry the Fourth, and the succeeding monarchs, to the end of the reign of Henry the Eighth, in which are particularly described the manners and customs of those periods (London, 1809), pp. 864–866. 35 McRae, ‘The Literary Culture of Early Stuart Libeling’, p. 364. 36 James Doelman, ‘The Accession of King James I and English Religious Poetry’, Studies in English Literature, 34 (1) (1994): 19–40, at p. 19. 37 Alison Wall, Power and Protest in England, 1525–1640 (London, 2000), pp. 63, 158. 38 John Harington, A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, called the Metamorphosis of Ajax (London, 1596); Paul E.J. Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 287. Proverbs and Princes in Post-Reformation England 309 rapid spread of proverbs.39 Prince Henry’s father, James I, issued proclamations against rumour and libels that he feared could be ‘suddenly raised’.40 Over the seventeenth century, other contentious sayings did spread through speech, swift verbal reactions to current events. For example on Monday 19 January 1662, Samuel Pepys reported that a scandal involving a love triangle between the Duke of York, Lord Chesterfĳield and Lord Chesterfĳield’s wife caused Lord Chesterfĳield to ‘pack his lady into the country in Derbyshire, near the Peake; which is become a proverb at Court, to send a man’s wife to the Devil’s arse a’ Peake, when she vexes him’.41 For Pepys, as for Harington, a proverb was a contentious saying that could arise suddenly in reaction to, and in comment on, highly specifĳic circumstances. With Lord Chesterfĳield, the proverb was mocking, afffronting his Lordship’s reputation and marital authority. In the case of the Prince Henry proverb, the rhyme was immediately salient to Jacobean religious controversy, and Harington feared the oral transmission of an idea scuttling through London’s streets. Yet there, on the title page of the Supplie or Addicion, stands the proverb. Harington may well have put it there, for all that he feared its import and loathed its author, because the ditty was immediately salient to the work. The Supplie or Addicion champions episcopacy, but expounds the unflattering lives of the bishops of the Elizabethan Church.42 Harington knew well that proverbial wisdom asserted Prince Henry’s reputation as a religious radical. As we have argued elsewhere, he was alarmed that the established structures of the Church were threatened not simply by external dissent, but by a current crop of weak bishops. He feared that episcopacy threatened itself. The proverb shouts out its message from the title page of BL Royal MS 17.43 B.XXII. After this title page, the proverb sets the tone for page after page of the collection, which shows an episcopate seemingly on the verge of causing its own abolition, and certainly vulnerable to criticism. Thus, he shows the Archbishop of York, Matthew Hutton, as politically inept, incurring the anger of Elizabeth I, and getting a reprimand from councillors after delivering a sermon about

39 John Heywood, An Hundred Epigrams, Invented and Made by John Heywood (1550), title page. 40 Wall, Power and Protest in England, p. 143. 41 The Diary of Samuel Pepys: Daily Entries from the London diary: Monday 19 January 1662/1663, www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1663/01/19/ [accessed 1 August 2012]. 42 Marie Axton, ‘Summer’s Last Will and Testament: Revels’ End’, in The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade, ed. by John Guy (Cambridge, 1995), p. 264. 43 Marcus K. Harmes and Gillian Colclough, ‘Henry Prince of Wales, Proverbs and the English Episcopate’, Explorations in Renaissance Culture, 37 (2) (2011): 97–115. 310 Harmes and Colclough

matrimony and motherhood.44 In Harington’s text one can also read of the time Archbishop Edwin Sandys was made the victim of a scam when a woman was secreted in his bedroom.45 Of other bishops, including the martyred Thomas Cranmer, Harington suggests they contracted marriages that made them seem ridiculous.46 Other bishops were so greedy they dilapidated their episcopal estates and undercut their order.47 Overall, Harington conceives of the bishops as a body like an army, collectively under siege, by monarchy, council, puritan clergy, avaricious laymen, and other foes and detractors.48 These threats were sharply re-focused and re-energized in 1603. James VI brought with him a royal family and a son, Henry, who became the Prince of Wales and quickly developed an immense following among his English subjects, expressed in pageants, masques, and popular acclamation.49 The accession of King James alleviated widespread fears in England of uncertain succession due to the Queen’s virginity. It also prompted hope in some quarters that the seemingly immovable Elizabethan Settlement of Religion could be altered. Such at least was the hope of clergy who moved north to greet the new King and present him with a document bearing 1000 signatures and requesting that aspects of doctrine and polity be discussed.50 James expressed openness to debating long-standing questions about the reformation of the Church and to listening to clergy and laity who urged the reduction or even the abolition of episcopacy.51 The forum for this debate was the Hampton Court Conference, between episcopal and Presbyterian parties, adjudicated by King James himself. It began in 1604 and ended the same year without resolving concerns about episcopacy; indeed the conference re-endorsed episcopal power. The conference did promulgate ninety new canons regulating doctrine, liturgy, and

44 Harington, Supplie or Addicion, ed. by R.H. Miller (Potomac, MD, 1979), pp. 171–173. 45 Discussed in context by Marcus K. Harmes, Bishops and Power in Early Modern England (London, 2013), p. 29. 46 BL Royal MS 17.B XXII, fol. 315b; BL Royal MS 17.B XXII, fols 340–42b. 47 BL Royal MS 17.B XXII, fol. 361a. 48 Harington, The Supplie or Addicion, p. 33. 49 Elizabeth E. Gardner, ‘A British Hunting Portrait’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin New Series, 3 (5) (1945): 113–117, at p. 116. ‘Harington’s analogy of the army, and his notion of the bishops as generals, captains and injured soldiers, is further drawn out in Harmes, Bishops and Power, p. 31.’ 50 Barry Coward, The Stuart Age: England 1603–1714, 2nd edn (London, 1994), pp. 129–131. 51 Patrick Collinson, ‘The Jacobean Religious Settlement: The Hampton Court Conference’, Before the English Civil War, ed. by Howard Tomlinson (London, 1983), pp. 27–51. Proverbs and Princes in Post-Reformation England 311 clerical apparel, enforced by episcopal authority.52 Accordingly, in its original Jacobean setting, the proverb prophesied the destruction of bishops, but the hope was forlorn. Bishops survived and even flourished after the arrival of the Stuart dynasty.

Proverbs and the Church

By their nature, proverbs are often hard to pin to a creator and a moment of creation. As vessels of oral culture, proverbs are of obscure provenance and birth. In addition, proverbs were often so logical in their literal sense – ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ – that their use in analogy often went unremarked.53 However, much of the force of proverbs lies in their easy application to analogies. ‘A bird in the hand’ seldom has a beak and feathers. ‘A pot calling a kettle black’ refers to people, and never cooks soup. Because they lend themselves to analogy, proverbs adapt readily to a variety of uses; they are supple. The proverb that spoke of rain could be turned around to speak of sunshine; with a subtle alteration, the proverb that explained mishaps could also explain ‘good hap’, or luck.54 The origins of many proverbs can only be speculated upon: in a largely oral world, cultural movement, changing circumstances and the passing of time could render proverbs obsolete or disguise their contextual history. But the origins of the Prince Henry proverb do present themselves in the events of 1603 to 1605 and make clear some of its impact and force. This is a rare proverb that ‘knows its father’ in what was happening in England after 1603. There are few other recorded proverbs that pair offf monarchs, although the transition from Elizabeth I to James VI and I did bring into circulation the adage ‘In Henry was the union of the roses, in James of the kingdoms’.55 In its Latin form, ‘Henricus Rosas, Regna Iacobus’ it becomes even pithier.56 There are

52 The proceedings and outcomes of this event have been examined in Nicholas Tyacke, ‘The “Rise of Puritanism” and the Legalizing of Dissent, 1571–1719’, in From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England, ed. by Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel, & Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford, 1991), pp. 17–49. The canons are printed in Edward Cardwell, ed., History of the Conferences, 2 vols (Oxford, 1849). 53 For this proverb see John Simpson and Jennifer Speake, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs (Oxford, 1998), p. 258. 54 T 288. 55 T 309. 56 Thomas Adams, ‘City of Peace’, in The Workes of Thos. Adams. Being the Svmme of his Sermons, Meditations, and Other Divine and Morall Discourses. Collected in One Volume (1629), p. 1009, in T 309. 312 Harmes and Colclough other prophetic rhyming utterances in English history. The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 bequeathed to history the celebrated rhyme ‘when Adam delved, and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?’ It was introduced in the sermons of the radical priest John Ball, and the couplet was both a topical rhyme in a period of radical political upheaval and a truism of fourteenth-century England. That Ball’s rhyming political commentary helped cost him his life after the Revolt ended suggests its potency.57 In 1484 Wyllyam Collyngbourne traduced a king and his council when he nailed the offfensive couplet to the door of St Paul’s Cathedral: ‘The Cat, the Rat and Lovel the Dog/Rule all England under a Hog’. The rhyme derided King Richard III (whose heraldry included a boar) and his councillors Catesby, Ratclifffe, and Lovel. Similarly before the Battle of Bosworth rhymes including ‘Jack of Norfolk, be not so bold/for Dickon thy master is bought and sold’ were heard circulating on the streets in comment on the Duke of Norfolk and his master, Richard III.58 Tudor chroniclers recorded these little rhymes from earlier years, ensuring they were remembered into the sixteenth century. Meanwhile, libels against persons and entire institutions spread quickly through inns, taverns, and streets. Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell featured in libelling rhymes in the 1530s; later so would Robert Cecil, secretary to James I, as did James’s favourite, the Duke of Buckingham.59 In the sixteenth century the spread of oral, prophetic rumours caused sufffĳicient concern to the Privy Council of Henry VIII that it executed the so-called ‘prophets’ who had uttered rhyming predictions fĳilled with topical references to people and events.60 People composed rhymes traducing authority fĳigures, as did John Lacy of Halifax, who went as far as to compose a libel against Henry VIII accusing him (perhaps not unreasonably, but certainly treason- ously) of wenching.61 In the seventeenth century, rhymes rejoicing in the downfall of unpopular authority fĳigures, such as Justices of the Peace, circulated in towns.62 The Prince Henry proverb talks about bishops and compares them to abbots of monasteries. There had been no abbots (and no monasteries) in England since the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558 put paid to the monastic

57 Alastair Dunn, The Peasants’ Revolt: England’s Failed Revolution of 1381 (Stroud, 2002), p. 174. 58 V.J. Scattergood, Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (London, 1971), pp. 210–211. 59 Wall, Power and Protest in England, p. 137; Pauline Croft, ‘The Reputation of Robert Cecil: Libels, Political Opinion and Popular Awareness in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 1 (1991): 43–69. 60 Sharon L. Jansen, Political Protest and Prophecy under Henry VIII (Woodbridge, 1991), p. 4. 61 Wall, Power and Protest in England, p. 132. 62 Such as one from 1621 describing the fall of Sir Francis Michell; Pepys Ballads I, 143, Magdalene College Cambridge. Proverbs and Princes in Post-Reformation England 313 revival begun by her predecessor Mary. But abbots were still remembered in the late-sixteenth century and in 1589 the clergyman Francis Trigge recorded how another proverb about abbots had been raised, at least among people who disliked monasteries: because of ‘the fatnesse and haughtiness of monkes [there] came into a proverb amongst all men: in so much that idle persons were called abbey lubbers: fatt men were said to have abbotts faces’. The Prince Henry proverb has multiple ancestries in these topical and anti-clerical statements, all the while it is also new in its opposition to English episcopacy and hopes for the son of a new King.63 The Prince Henry proverb is the fruit of an intense discussion of episcopal governance, by clergy and laity alike. Contemporary understandings of language in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England held that language itself was not simply mimetic; it was a dynamic and constructive force.64 Judith Anderson suggests that what was said did not simply offfer a nominalist reflection of reality, but sometimes actually shaped events and processes.65 If so, we can appreciate why the Prince Henry rhyme provoked fear lest what it predicted – the destruction of bishops – might actually come to pass. Proverbs were commentaries upon aspects of reality but were also subversive artifacts, capable of enunciating and encouraging change. Of course the recording and writing down of proverbs was not a characteristic of the early modern period alone, as Geofffrey Chaucer’s ‘Tale of Melibeus’ was essentially a concatenation of proverbs.66 Chaucer’s near contemporary Geofffrey of Vinsauf the grammarian and rhetorician urged the use of proverbs to achieve a ‘brilliant beginning’ to a discourse and to ensure that oral presentations sparkle and engage.67 While still folkloric, as vehicles of cyni- cism, pessimism, and ridicule as well as common sense they were also the property of intellectuals. Schoolboys at Latin Grammar schools learnt them.68

63 Quoted in Eamon Dufffy,Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition: Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations (London, 2012), p. 250. 64 Kim Wilkins, ‘ “Words of Art”: Magic and Language in Early Modern England’, Marcus Harmes, Lindsay Henderson, Barbara Harmes, and Amy Antonio, eds, The British World: Religion, Memory, Society and Culture. Refereed Proceedings of the Conference Hosted by the University of Southern Queensland, July 2nd–July 5th 2012 (Toowoomba, 2012), p. 16. 65 Judith H. Anderson, Words That Matter: Linguistic Perception in Renaissance English (Stanford, CA, 1996), p. 16. 66 Geofffrey Chaucer,The Canterbury Tales (London, 1985), pp. 168–175. 67 Cited in Peter W. Travis, Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading the Nun’s Priest’s Tale (Notre Dame, IN, 2010), pp. 120–121. 68 Lacey Baldwin Smith, Treason in Tudor England: Politics and Paranoia (London, 2006), p. 105 314 Harmes and Colclough

Parliamentarians used them in their speeches in the House.69 The Tudor chronicler Sir Edward Hall frequently illuminated the moral dimension of the political events he narrated by incorporating an ‘olde adage’.70 Moreover, proverbial wisdom was widely accepted, such as the idea that England was ‘the paradise of women’, a point frequently cited in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to counter and lampoon women’s complaints.71 So Harington’s preservation and citation of a proverb he deplored is striking. White suggests that typically there is agreement between the proverb and the proverb user, meaning that preachers, writers and other users of proverbs included them to draw out a point, or substantiate an argument.72 But Harington disagreed with this proverb and treated it as a partisan statement rather than an old saw of universally understood wisdom. The proverb enters into a peculiar and jarring dialogue with the text that follows the title page of the Supplie or Addicion. The proverb urged the abolition of bishops, whereas Harington did not. Maker and user were in disaccord. But the content of the Supplie or Addicion did illuminate an episcopate that, through laxity, avarice, and incompetence, was doing little to refute the proverb. Before he died people looked to Henry to continue work they saw as begun by Prince Henry VIII; after his death numerous texts and media mourned the lost potential. Londoners sang madrigals about Prince Henry. John Ward’s First Set of English Madrigals of 1613 included a setting of ‘Weep Forth your Tears (in memory of Prince Henry)’, that lamented the deceased Prince as a lost opportunity: ‘O had he lived our hopes had still increased/But he is dead and all our joys deceased’.73 When Henry died, his circle mourned both the man and the king he might have been. The treasurer of Henry’s household, Sir Charles Cornwallis, memorialized him as a young man who attracted ‘the admiration of all’ and as an example to future generations.74 John Bradshaw, who later, as a lawyer, would help try Henry’s brother Charles I, lamented the prince along with ‘the true-hearted English’.75 Harington saw the Prince Henry proverb as

69 Peter Mack, ‘Elizabethan Parliamentary Oratory’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 64 (12) (2001): 23–61, at p. 24. 70 Simpson & Speake, Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, p. 212. 71 Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003), p. 7. 72 White, ‘ “Comme on Dit” ’, p. 79. 73 CD notes for John Ward, The First Set of English Madrigals to 3, 4, 5 & 6 parts, apt both for Viols and Voyces (London, 1613) (Decca, CD, 2010). 74 Sir Charles Cornwallis, The Life and Death of our late most incomparable and Heroique Prince, Henry, Prince of Wales. A Prince ( for Valour and Vertue) fĳit to be Imitated in Succeeding Times (London, 1641), sig. B4. 75 Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London, 1977), p. 15. Proverbs and Princes in Post-Reformation England 315 the seditious fruit of the low born who, as we saw, deserved to be hanged. His attitude should not obscure how, as Wiltenburg points out, there were con- duits between oral and written and high and low.76 While the idea of Henry IX comes to us from a ditty heard on the streets, the same idea was known at Whitehall Palace. Courtiers and clergy at Whitehall and in Henry’s circle would have appreciated the associations between the names and in some measure seen Prince Henry as a scourge of Roman religion, for Cornwallis especially memorialized Prince Henry as a defender of Protestantism.77 The denizens of palaces certainly listened to what was said on the street. We know that Elizabethan and Jacobean spy networks relied on ‘common spies’, members of the lower classes, and the language of authority was formed from what the base elements of society could transmit.78 The state spoke to the populace in direct language that it could understand, and in return the state understood the direct language of its populace. But what was said on the street was by no means always at the service of court and government, unlike the insights of government spies. Listening from the Palace, Harington fully understood what the proverb was saying and the challenge it presented to the established Church. Admittedly there was nothing new in valorizing dead monarchs as Elizabeth I and Henry VIII’s deeds were remembered into the early-seventeenth century. A general nostalgia for the Tudor age kept both Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth prominent in public memory as defenders of Protestants and ardent reformers of the Church.79 The proverb placed Prince Henry in this trajectory.

Posthumous Harington

Harington died in 1612, barely outliving the much lamented Prince Henry. In his lifetime he did not publish his works, preferring as we have seen to let them circulate as manuscripts within a close-knit and elite circle of royalty

76 Joy Wiltenburg, ‘Madness and Society in the Street Ballads of Early Modern England’, Journal of Popular Culture, 14 (3) (1988): 101–127, at p. 103. 77 Sir Charles Cornwallis, A Discourse of the most Illustrious Prince, Henry, late Prince of Wales (London, 1641), sig. D3. 78 Emily Ross, ‘Lip Service: The Activities of Ambassadors, Spies, Newsletter Writers and Other Professional Gossips in Jacobean England and in Shakespeare’, in ‘Rapt in Secret Studies’: Emerging Shakespeares, ed. by Darryl Chalk & Laurie Johnson (Newcastle, 2010), p. 199. 79 E.K. Chambers, Sir Henry Lee (Oxford, 1936). 316 Harmes and Colclough and courtiers. But posthumously Harington reached a much wider audience because Chetwynd published the manuscript. A number of readers’ reactions to the 1653 text are known to us; they uniformly suggest that Harington was believed to have agreed with the proverb and desired the abolition of bishops. Thomas Fuller, a seventeenth-century ecclesiastical historian, found that the Supplie or Addicion contained ‘some tart reflections’ in Harington’s work and the early-eighteenth-century writer librarian John Strype thought that Harington ‘undertakes to give some strictures’ against the Elizabethan bishops, his material was critical of bishops and relied on light rumours of the court, once again stressing the oral encounter lying behind the written record.80 Strype came to this conclusion because he had read an edited edition from 1653, where adjustments to Harington’s catalogue darkened its portrayal of the Elizabethan and Jacobean bishops. The idea that Harington disliked bishops has endured and resurfaces in Phyllis Hembry’s survey of the bishopric of Bath and Wells. The point of connection here is Chetwynd’s version.81 Chetwynd, a Presbyterian who was a pastor and therefore part of a Church without bishops, deleted material from the manuscript original where Harington explained he had chosen to write of the English episcopate, in the period following the appointment of Matthew Parker to Canterbury (after 1559), because he was troubled that some had come to believe that Prince Henry would actually abolish bishops.82 The original Supplie or Addicion had concluded with a brief treatise on the entire work, which explained ‘The occasion why the former worke was taken in hand’. Harington asserted in it ‘I dare confĳidentlye afffĳirme, that noe inheritance whatsoever, is helde by more sure lawes, by trewe Justice and equitie [. . .] then is the inheritance of a Bishop to him and his successors’.83 He also berated the opponents of bishops, for it was the ‘guiddy Puritan’ who hoped that ‘their presbytery would rise by the fall of the bishops’.84 Without Chetwynd’s editorial meddling, the Supplie or Addicion show how Harington worried that any one might think Prince Henry a religious radical.85

80 John Strype, The History of the Life and Acts of the Most Reverend Father in God, Edmund Grindal (New York, 1974), p. 454. 81 The edition published in the 1650s appears to be lifted from B.L. Add. MS. 46370 (the ‘A’ manuscript), which does not include ‘The occasion why’; see Miller, introduction to Supplie or Addicion, p. 11. 82 Harington, Supplie or Addicion, p. 92. 83 BL Harleian MS1220, fol. 248. 84 BL Royal MS 17.B XXII, fol. 403b. 85 Harington, Supplie or Addicion, p. 192. Proverbs and Princes in Post-Reformation England 317

Chetwynd’s revision of Harington’s work fell at a particularly critical time for both bishops and princes; in the England of 1653 neither was to be found. The monarchy had fallen with the execution of Charles I in 1649 and an Act of Parliament had abolished the monarchy. The second appearance of this proverb belonged to this setting: the monarchy gone; the bishops and cathedrals struck down; and the bishops themselves in exile or prison.86 In these years many doubted the bishops could be anything but an ungodly, reactive body. The parliamentarian Sir Thomas Aston (1600–1645) reported in his diary questions in parliament which suggested alternatives to episcopal control and oversight, such as the proposal for ‘The making & inioyning of the Articles at vizitations without any authority than the Bishops of the Diocese’.87 His diary caught the parliamentary debate that undercut the authority of bishops, even their necessity. Already in 1641 the Grand Remonstrance called for the destruction of the episcopate, an aim accomplished by an Ordinance in 1646. The anti- episcopal mood of the 1650s suited the Prince Henry proverb. Its new readers were successors to the coiner of the proverb in about 1605, the people who heard it about 1605 or 1606 and who repeated it, and then the editor polemicist of 1653. All of them had been thinking about the abolition of bishops, but it was the Prince Henry proverb, when it moved into street-level discussion on which people living in palaces eavesdropped, that captured these desires.

Conclusion

The content of Harington’s Supplie or Addicion and the proverb on its title page existed in tense dialogue with each other and with the condition of church and state in 1605. The call in the proverb for the abolition of episcopacy did not match (although it did explain the reason for writing) a work that defended bishops by delineating their weaknesses and urging a stronger bench of bishops. But those repeating the proverb, or ‘rayling’, as Harington had it, anticipated that bishops would be abolished within a constitutional setting that included princes; indeed the prince was to be the agent of destruction. By 1653 the goal of the proverb had been achieved; bishops were gone.

86 The collapse of episcopal rule in the 1640s reflected the collapse of other organs of authority bound up with episcopal rule, such as the Star Chamber and press censorship. These points are discussed in Michael Mendle, ‘De facto Freedom, de facto Authority: Press and Parliament, 1640–1643’, Historical Journal, 41 (1998): 151–177. 87 Judith Maltby, ed., ‘The Short Parliament (1640): Diary of Sir Thomas Aston’, Camden Society Fourth Series, 35 (London, 1988), p. 93. 318 Harmes and Colclough

However gone too was princely or monarchical authority. Reading the proverb in the worlds of 1605 and 1653 indicates that the ideal of the proverb – a godly reforming prince upholding individual consciences – never came to pass in seventeenth-century England. The Prince Henry proverb had indeed entirely bypassed King James VI and I in favour of Henry, asserting Henry’s links with the defunct Tudor dynasty and efffacing James from the picture. Bishops would return, in 1660; so too would monarchy and there would be new instruments of repressive episcopal authority, such as the Clarendon Code. However, as we have argued, the proverb is no mere ‘what if’; in 1605 a King Henry IX was a reasonable outcome to predict, although by 1653 it is striking that a rhyme about a prince was being used in a republic to argue against the defunct episcopate.88 Because it appears in two periods at once so alike – fĳilled with controversy about bishops and church government – and so diffferent – 1605 was a time of episcopal triumph and monarchical rule, 1653 a time of republican- ism and anti-episcopalianism – the proverb throws into relief the ambitions of religious reformers, but also suggests the extent to which monarchy and episcopacy were joined in both ruling and decaying. In doing so, the proverb illuminates a major political reality of post-Reformation England. It does so through its original mode of transmission, as an oral proverb, but in this case the oral idea took on fĳirst written and then printed form, and in all its forms was listened to, or read, and heeded by an intellectual elite who feared its import but who guaranteed that this fragment of oral culture would be preserved. The proverb and the processes of its transmission and preservation indicate several points about speaking, listening, reading and writing in seventeenth-century England. Out on the streets, according to Harington, a strong statement was ‘breeding’. Harington cited this strong statement, but not to agree with it, but to chastise an order of the ministry which he upheld but also could criticize, and the proverb gave urgency to his discussion of the quality of bishops. In the end, Harington was right to be so worried about what he heard was bruited in sermons and on the street, for after his death both the proverb and his catalogue lived on. They spoke to a world where bishops had been brought down, and while it is an irony that our source for this proverb is a man who despised its import and its coiner, this irony is joined by another, in that princes, far from bringing them down, had fallen with the bishops, who were no longer there to hear the proverb.

88 Harmes and Colclough, ‘Henry, Prince of Wales’, p. 99. Gossip and Gossipers

⸪

CHAPTER 11 The Meanings of Gossip in Sixteenth-Century Venice

Elizabeth Horodowich

In the early modern world, gossip served myriad purposes. It was a pastime and means of entertainment, a form of sociability, a tool of education, a source of information, and a weapon of the weak, especially for the socially or economically disempowered seeking success in a great variety of social and political situations, including litigation. Anthropologists have demonstrated how gossip has long served as a bonding mechanism that promoted group unity by working to maintain the morals and values of groups.1 Gossip patrolled community behavior and disciplined community misbehavior in a wide variety of locales. As Alexander Cowan has demonstrated, the Venetian balcony was a place where information ‘that was intended to be personal and restricted lost those qualities’ and became community gossip.2 In taverns, apothecary shops, and the halls of state, men gossiped as a means to political ends, to control blocks of voters or to obtain political offfĳice. Both men and women gossiped to manipulate and control workplaces and community behavior. Through these and other examples, historians of the early modern world have demonstrated the important social and political functions of gossip.3

1 See Max Gluckman, ‘Gossip and Scandal’, Current Anthropology, 4 (1963): 307–126, at p. 308, and Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge, 1998), p. 123. 2 Alexander Cowan, ‘Seeing is Believing: Urban Gossip and the Balcony in Early Modern Venice’, Gender and History, 23 (2011): 721–38, p. 728. 3 Scholarship on gossip in history and literature is vast and growing. As just an overview, see Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003); Filippo de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford, 2007); S. Hindle, ‘The Shaming of Margaret Knowsley: Gossip, Gender and the Experience of Authority in Early Modern England’, Continuity and Change, 9 (1994): 391–419; Elizabeth Horodowich, Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice (New York, 2008); Jane Kamensky, Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (New York, 1998); Susan E. Phillips, Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England (University Park, PA, 2007); Melanie Tebbutt, ‘Women’s Talk? A Social History of “Gossip” ’, in her Working Class Neighbourhoods, 1880–1960 (Aldershot, 1995);

But what can we make of the various meanings of gossip? To Venetian and other early modern eyes, were there diffferent kinds of gossip, and if so, what were they? Rather than further consider how gossip worked, we can investi- gate how the semantic range of discussion about gossip yields diffferent results. That is to say, reflecting on the variety of terms that early modern individuals used to indicate the presence of gossip allows us to see how they identifĳied and judged various types of ‘gossiping’. Considering literary and archival texts, in this case from early modern Venice, how can we look beyond the process or existence of gossip and instead try to achieve a better understanding of how people understood the speech of gossip? What was the diffference between gossip as an activity and gossip as an allegation? Or, what was the diffference between the neutral and even benefĳicial everyday social activity of gossiping on the one hand and the activity that haunted moralists when they dis- counted talk as ‘mere gossip’? What exactly was the vocabulary for raising the importance of community talk, or for dismissing it? While such distinctions were loose and flexible, early modern individuals managed to distinguish with great insight between light talk that was frivolous or unimportant, and grave or sober talk that was productive, dangerous, or subversive. By listening not to the content of gossip or observing its social mechanisms and ramifĳications, but instead by following discussions about gossip and the language that framed it – gossip’s metalanguage, so to speak – we can better understand how individuals made distinctions between various speakers, subjects, modes, intentions, and settings in play, and amidst these variables, talk that was idle and talk that was malicious or potentially destructive. Before we delve into the complexities of Venetian metalanguage about gossip, we should pin down its varieties and essence. Gossip has numerous defĳi- nitions. To give just a handful of examples, the historian Chris Wickham for instance put it simply that ‘gossip is . . . talking about other people behind their backs’, becoming rumour as its volume increased to reach a wider audience.4 Gossip in this defĳinition is not the same as idle talk, nor is it all necessarily judg- mental, but rather is a subsection of social talk that is about people who were absent, as distinct from face-to-face social commentary. The literary scholar Patricia Spacks suggested that gossip ‘inhabits a space of intimacy [and] builds on and implicitly articulates shared values of intimates’.5 Similarly, the nov- elist Joseph Epstein more recently has defĳined gossip as when, in an ‘atmo-

Chris Wickham, ‘Gossip and Resistance among the Medieval Peasantry’, Past & Present, 160 (1998): 3–24. 4 Wickham, ‘Gossip and Resistance’, p. 11. 5 Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York, 1985), p. 15. the meanings of gossip in sixteenth-century venice 323 sphere of intimacy . . . two or three people talk about another person who isn’t in the room’ or when ‘one person tells another person something about a third person that may or may not have a basis in fact.’6 In summary here, we have three fundamental components of gossip: the absence of persons, implicit and shared values, and a loose adherence to accuracy. Such defĳinitions remain both elastic and imperfect, especially for the early modern world; indeed, these defĳi- nitions miss idleness of intent, the pursuit of pleasure, and frequent malice: other traits that might be alleged. If talk behind someone’s back was repeated directly to someone’s face, was it still gossip? Did such talk have to be in an intimate or private setting to function as gossip? Similarly, while it is relatively easy to recognize social gossip, it remains more difffĳicult to diffferentiate political ‘gossip’ from the simple act of talking about politics. Sometimes it is the subject of talk (sharing ‘new’ information) or the intent of the gossiper (with the possible goal of damaging someone’s reputation, making a clever remark, or taking pleasure in being a news bearer) that makes gossip. Nevertheless, there is a sense of consensus among modern scholars that at its most basic level, gossip constituted talking about other people or passing on talk about absent persons. While these defĳinitions intend to offfer a useful starting point for thinking about gossip, our goal here instead is to track how early modern people evaluated and judged such speech. As we shall see, early modern defĳinitions did not always square with modern ones. The categories and aims they distinguished may or may not be ours. Perhaps the best way to understand how early modern Venetians understood and employed gossip is to examine more closely the words individuals used to describe gossip and to sift through their implications. Early modern defĳinitions of types of speech and the myriad sins of the tongue overlapped to a great degree. While some speech acts implied things said directly to a person’s face itself, such as blasphemy (blasfemia or bestem- mie), cursing (execratio or maledizione), swearing (in the infĳinitive,iurare or giurare), slander (callunie), and insults (insulto, ingiuria, vituperazione), other speech acts implied that they were said behind the hearer’s back, such as rumour (rumore or mormoratione) and occasionally, gossip (pettegolezze), and there is clearly much in common among all of these types of talk. Gossip and rumour by nature remain evanescent subjects, defying the type of quantitative analysis that might apply to a study of wages or commercial exchanges, or even to other speech acts such as blasphemy or slander, which

6 Joseph Epstein, Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit (Boston, MA, 2011), p. xi, 3. Epstein claims that ‘the history of gossip has never been written’, (p. xii), a statement that the now copious bibliography on the history of gossip, as well as the essays in this volume, clearly belie. 324 Horodowich might more easily be counted. Early modern governments, for instance, often prosecuted the crime of blasphemy, resulting in archival documents that allow the historian to count the number of cases, trials, or sentences for blasphemy that civic magistrates oversaw or issued in any given year; gossip, by contrast, was never defĳined as criminal in such a way and the instances of its use therefore cannot be counted with similar accuracy. However, a great variety of terms for gossip turn up in a variety of historical texts and sources, suggesting the regular occurrence of this linguistic practice and permitting an examination of its workings. What words meant ‘gossip’ and suggested that gossip was at work, and how did individuals understand these terms, socially, morally, legally, and culturally? The ways in which they did so often depended on the specifĳic terminology people chose to refer to gossip, since in and of themselves, the practices of naming, labeling, and calling are deeply imbued with cultural and social meaning. Gossip tended to manifest itself in sixteenth- century Venice primarily – though not exclusively – through six terms: pettegolar, ciance, mormoration, sentire/dire, fama, and broglio. A closer examination of these expressions and a phenomenology of their speech classifĳication, historically rooted in Venice, allows us a better sense of how Venetians talked about gossip. The terms pettegole and pettegolar represent those that we might most closely translate to mean ‘gossipy’ and ‘to gossip’ today. To cite just a few examples of how pettegolar is used trials of the Venetian Holy Offfĳice, a female witness reporting the words of Alvise Capuano, a carpenter tried for heresy in 1577, claimed that Alvise had stated: ‘le done erano pettegole et che non bisognava fĳidarle. Et quando andavo a messa, el me diceva che non bisogna udir tante messe, basta una’ [‘women are gossips and should not be trusted. When I was going to Mass, he told me that it was not necessary to hear so many Masses – one was enough’].7 Lodovico Pico, tried for Lutheranism in 1587, was accused of yelling to several women that ‘l’andar à messa era cosa da petegolle’ [‘going to Mass was only for gossips’].8 Similarly reporting the heretical words and acts of Rinaldo Rio, a tailor from Burano, a witness stated that to a group of women going to Mass, ‘il detto Rinaldo ci diceva sette pettegole, paresti meglio andare a fĳillare, et queste parole ci le dicceva spesso’ [‘the said Rinaldo told us “you are gossips – it would be better if you went to spin” ’], suggesting that women

7 Archivio di Stato di Venezia (hereafter ASV), Sant’Ufffĳizio, bu. 47, fasc. ‘Alvise Capuano’, testimony of 20 July 1577. 8 ASV, Sant’Ufffĳizio, bu. 60, testimony of 5 May 1587, fol. 1v. the meanings of gossip in sixteenth-century venice 325 should spin wool rather than words.9 When examined about his general beliefs and piety, Rinaldo went on to argue that Mary Magdalene herself was a gossip. ‘La madalena era una pettegola, et dissi che la non era bon testimonio per che le done non son bon testimonio. . . . L’haveva fato testimonianza in horto de messer Jesu Christo che essa haveva visto in horto da hortolan’ [‘The Magdalene was a gossip, and he said that she was not a good witness because women are not good witnesses (. . .). She gave witness in the garden concerning Jesus Christ, whom she had seen in the garden dressed like a gardener’].10 Rinaldo believed that women were such infamous talkers that even female saints were gossips. Religious rituals such as processions and the Mass were one of the regular opportunities that women had to leave their domestic con- fĳines and exchange words with one another, explaining why men sought to limit their attendance at mass. Echoing the misogynist rhetoric of comport- ment literature and indicating the wide difffusion of such ideas, male voices from the records of the Sant’Ufffĳizio in Venice used pettegola in the pejorative to describe a woman whose talk was idle and unthreatening.11 Tellingly, there is no apparent use of the term pettegolo to describe a gossiping man. While people tended to use the terms pettegola or pettegolezze to indicate light or frivolous talk, such terms occasionally carried more import: the light and frivolous caused women to be led astray. For instance, the gossiping Venetian woman was so prominent of a cultural icon as to merit an image in Pietro Bertelli’s 1591 edition of his Diversarum nationum habitus, which depicted a series of

9 ASV, Sant’Ufffĳizio, bu. 55, fasc. ‘Rinaldo Rio’, testimony of 5 November 1585. Rinaldo, possibly well-read in the Bible, perhaps here draws on Proverbs 31.19, ‘She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the distafff’, and Proverbs 31.26, ‘She openeth her mouth with wisdom, and in her tongue is the law of kindness’. 10 ASV, Sant’Ufffĳizio, testimony of 9 September 1586. Rinaldo here refers to John 20:11–18, ‘Noli me tangere’, when Mary Magdalene, weeping at Christ’s tomb, encounters Jesus reborn in the guise of a gardener. The speaker here seems to be reorganizing the Gospel story, as if Mary Magdalene had fĳirst seen Jesus and failed to recognize him and that is why she tells the apostles that Jesus has been taken away and she does not know where he is [the ‘testimonianza’]. Thus, in this version, her failure to recognize that the gardener was Jesus was a good example of how women do not make good witnesses, because if she could not even recognize the Lord to whom she was devoted, how could she perceive anything or anyone else correctly? Rinaldo’s ideas here reflect a long standing topos of the medieval period that Mary Magdalene spread the news about the resurrection precisely because she was a woman and a gossip. For other trials where men state that women are pettegole or habitual talkers, see bu. 62, fasc. ‘Bernardina della Scala’, testimony of Jacob Milano, 17 November 1588; bu. 65, fasc. ‘Elisabetta Stopera’, 12 August 1589. 11 On language, women, and gender in early modern Venice, see Horodowich, Language and Statecraft, pp. 135–141, 172–174. 326 Horodowich carnival characters, including a petegola over rufĳiana [a ‘gossip or procuress’] shrouded in a long, dark gown and fazzuolo or veil covering her face, leaning over and talking to, interestingly enough, a magnifĳico or chancellor from the Venetian government.12 Here, the gossip of the rufĳiana was not idle at all, but instead represented serious and improper business that potentially worked to violate good household order. Nevertheless, when Venetians chose the words pettegola and pettegolezze, what they generally had in mind was idle, feminine, talk that was of no interest or consequence. Venetian language for chatter or murmurings – ciance, zanze, and ciacole (words with the same linguistic root, expressing the same meaning, but often spelled diffferently in variants of Venetian dialect) – also indicated the presence of chatter or gossip that was unreliable, though unlike feminine pettegolezze, it could be the talk of either men or women. For instance, in the trial of a certain Antonia, accused of witchcraft in 1574, a witness named Julia stated that she had fought with the accused Antonia ‘Perché l’era mala lengua, et andava portando ciancie in qua in là per la visinanza, et l’era una mala femina’ [‘because she had a bad tongue and went around carrying chatter here and there in the neighborhood, and she was a bad woman’].13 Ciance and zanza appear frequently in the text of Marin Sanudo, the Venetian diarist whose 58-volume chronicle captured daily life in the city between 1496 and 1533. His diaries relied heavily on the commotion and chatter he heard around the city. On 15 June 1498, he spoke of ‘di una zanza intesi da’ fĳiorentini’ [‘some chatter overheard from the Florentines’] that a certain Brother Hironimo had enacted three miracles.14 Similarly, he recounted how on 7 February 1523, he had heard ‘una zanza incerto auctore’ (‘chatter from an unclear source’) that the island of Rhodes had not been lost in battle.15 On 27 June 1525, he reported that ‘fo ditto heri et hozi una zanza, incerto auctore, che il signor ducha de Milan era morto di peste; tamen in Collegio nulla era’ [‘yesterday and today there was some gossip – who knows where it started – that the Duke of Milan has died from the plague, but in the Collegio they made nothing of it’].16 For Sanudo, zanza, like pettegolezze, generally appeared to represent a thing of naught; however, it was inconsequential not because of the topic (indeed, plague and military defeat were grave) but because it was unreliable or improbable. Zanza was ungendered, and it

12 Pietro Bertelli, Diversarum nationum habitus (Padua, 1591), p. 75. 13 Marissa Milani, Due processi per stregoneria: Venezia 1574 (Padua, 1993–4), p. 17. 14 Marin Sanudo, I diarii di Marino Sanudo, ed. by Rinaldo Fulin and others, 58 vols (Venice, 1879–1903), I, p. 987. 15 Sanudo, XXXIII: 612. See also I, pp. 653–655; XXXV, pp. 355–356. 16 Sanudo, XXXVI, p. 438. the meanings of gossip in sixteenth-century venice 327 is interesting to note that Sanudo never used the term pettegolezze, perhaps because he never took seriously the chatter of women. Similarly, the Inquisition testimony of a Giacomo, a book seller at San Marco in 1588, helps to further illuminate the meaning of ciance. The Inquisitor asked Giacomo ‘se lui sa o habia inteso dire’ [‘if he knew or had heard’] that a certain local friar was a sodomite. Giacomo responded that one day while he was selling books, a glass vendor named Bortolo approached him and described to Giacomo how a friar had come to his shop one day. Bortolo had told Giacomo: ‘[R]aggionando mi disse e quando si volimo galder un giorno in letto, et che esso li comincio a dar cianze. E mi disse che’l frate li haveva ditto che in quel proposito, il far ogni cosa non era peccato’ [‘Chatting with me, he said, “when do we want to enjoy a day in bed?” and he started to chat leisurely with Bortolo in this way. And (Bortolo) told me that the friar had told him that where this topic was concerned, it was acceptable, and not a sin, to do anything’].17 Here relating his conversation with the glass vendor, Giacomo suggests once again that ciance meant casual chatter without direction or consequence. As with Sanudo, ciance here represented a recognizable way of talking and a type of talk rather than a name or a person. When Venetians chose the word ciance, they indicated a subtle moral shift in Venetian meta-talk. In the cultural logic of such Venetian usage, pettegolezze were light, idle, and unproductive expressions, but ciance indicated talk that was more ignorant, hasty, and ill-informed, if not malicious. Venetians also used the word ciance to dismiss the speakers sometimes more than the content, even though the speakers were men, thereby diffferentiating its meaning frompettegolezze , which was dismissed outright because it was applied only to women. As with pettegolezze, however, the use of ciance was flexible, and Venetians sometimes employed this term to indicate talk that was potentially powerful or threatening. The courtesan-writer Veronica Franco (1546–91) noted that ciance represented a woman’s means of protection. As she put it, ‘è profession d’uom basso e vile/pugnar con chi non ha difffesa o schermo/se non di ciance e d’ingengo sottile’ [‘it is the act of a low and vile man to fĳight with a woman lacking defence or shield, except for gossip and a clever mind’].18 According to Franco, gossip functioned as a defensive weapon against the abuses of men. By equating gossip here with intelligence, Franco elevates the talk of ciance from that of idle chatter to speech that was witty, intelligent, and calculating. Pietro Aretino also used the term flexibly, for both something inconsequential and

17 ASV, Sant’Ufffĳizio, bu. 61, fasc. ‘Contra Fratrem Incognitum’, testimony of 26 March 1588. 18 Veronica Franco, Poems and Selected Letters, ed. and trans. by Ann Rosalind Jones & Margaret F. Rosenthal (Chicago, IL, 1998), pp. 248–249. 328 Horodowich occasionally for a language of power. For instance, Aretino addressed one of his servants Lucietta in April of 1548 to ask her to return to his house. She had broken some glasses and cups and run away in fear of Aretino’s punishment for her clumsiness. He wrote:

Diavolo, che se ne porti tutte quante voi islandre, ladre, ribalde. La stizza mi cava di bocca tali ciancie, o Lucia, e anco un pochettino di martello de I tuoi fatti. Dio me lo perdoni, e però torna a la taverna de la quale sei iscarpinata via [. . .]. Io non la prolungo più oltra perché io so che non sei pazza, e che tu sai ch’io non son ciarlone, [. . .].

[May the devil carry offf the whole lot of you, sluts, thieves, and harlots that you are! It was my anger that took these careless words out of my mouth, Lucia, also because I worry about what you might be doing, may God forgive me for it. Come back to the ‘tavern’ from which you fled (. . .). I won’t drag out my letter any more; I know that you are not crazy, and you know that I am not an idle babbler.]19

Here, Aretino uses ciancie for idle babble, and its substantive form (ciarlone) for an idle talker. However, in another letter to the lawyer Macasola from December of 1547, Aretino writes:

Andate pur dietro a l’arte cicalatoria, Dottor mio, imperoché la lingua de gli avocati si confà con la spada de i cavalieri, ancor che il ferro ne le guerre è men tagliente che la lor ciancia ne le cause; conciosia che più vale la persuasione di quegli nel difender le liti, che la forza di questi nel combattere gli stati.

[Let us get behind the gift of the gab, Doctor, since lawyers’ tongues are conflatable with knights’ swords, although iron in war is less sharp than their talk in their cases, since their persuasion in defending their cases is stronger than the power (of soldiers) to fĳight other states.]20

Aretino used ciancia to mean either talk that was an annoying nuisance or talk that, as for Franco, had the power of a real weapon. Though we surely cannot surely take these literary and even jesting passages of Franco and Aretino at face value, they accord in suggesting that ciance indicated chatter that was playfully or actually confrontational.

19 Pietro Aretino, Lettere, ed. by Paolo Procaccioli (Milan, 1990), II, letter 488, pp. 809–810. 20 Aretino, Lettere, letter 459, pp. 778–779. the meanings of gossip in sixteenth-century venice 329

Indeed, ciance sometimes indicated talk that had the ability to afffect civic politics at large or that could function as a form of popular aggression or a means of solidarity for the politically or economically subordinated. More than just a casual force in history, rumour is often an inherent part of the political process. As such, we could sometimes translate zanze to mean rumour, and leaders often likened rumour among the underclasses to a plague or contagion spread by word of mouth.21 For example, on 23 June 1509, in the midst of the Venetian military crisis with the League of Cambrai, the diarist Girolamo Priuli took time away from chronicling otherwise pressing events and daily business to record a lengthy lament about the problem of gossip in Venice:

Tante zanze et tante parole et tante nove busarde et senza fondamento se dicevanno per le piaze et per le loze et per Rialto et ecclesie et botege de barbieri in la citade predicta, che non se poteva intendere una veri- tade, et a tutti hera licito dire quello li piaceva et pensarssi la nocte una nova et la matina publicarla [. . .]. Ahora veramente non hera ordine alc- huno, et hera licito a chadauno, de ogni grado et condictione, se fusse, dire quanto li piaceva et che li fusse venuto in bocha et in piaza et in le logiette et per ogni locho. . . . ultra la vergogna, il damno, perchè, quanto se parlavanno et dicevanno sopra le piaze, tanto hera descripto fuori dela citade, perchè heranno molti et diversi exploratori et auscoltori, che subito quello intendevanno, descrivevanno fuori ali sui Signori et mag- istri et patroni, et scrivevanno molte volte le bussie et nove false. [. . .] Et altri imfĳiniti dishordeni et ruine seguite per queste nove et parole, che se dicevanno sopra le piaze, et chadauno le cognosceva che l’hera malis- simo al proposito et ruina del Stato Veneto.

[People were gossiping so much and talking so much and spreading so many lies without any foundation in the piazze and under the loggie (of the Procuratie) and at the Rialto and in the churches and barbershops that one could not fĳigure out what was true. People felt as though they

21 See Nick Cox, ‘Rumours and Risings: Plebian Insurrection and the Circulation of Subversive Discourse around 1597’, in Subversion and Scurrility: Popular Discourse in Europe from 1500 to the Present, ed. by Dermot Cavanagh & Tim Kirk (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 43–57; Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 335–405; D.V. Kent & F.W. Kent, Neighbours and Neighbourhood in Renaissance Florence (Locust Valley, NY, 1982), p. 175; Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton, NJ, 1990), p. 23; James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Ct, 1990), p. 142; Richard Suggett, ‘Vagabonds and Minstrels in Sixteenth-Century Wales’, in The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain 1500–1800, ed. by Adam Fox & Daniel Woolf (Manchester, 2002), pp. 138–172. 330 Horodowich

could say anything that they pleased; they would think up something at night and then spread it around in the morning (. . .). Then there truly was no order at all, and it was acceptable for anyone, of any class or condition, to say whatever they wanted – whatever came to mouth in the piazza or under the loggie or anyplace . . . which beyond the shame, was damaging, since whatever was spoken and said in the piazze was then described outside the city, since there were many diverse explorers and listeners who when they heard something, immediately described it to their signori and magistrates and lords outside the city, and they wrote lies and false news many times (. . .). And other infĳinite disorder and ruin followed through this news and these words that were spoken in piazze, and everyone knows it was the worst thing for the future (was) the ruin of the Venetian State.]22

According to Priuli, the forces of zanze and the creation and spread of false rumour had been so prevalent and powerful as to weaken the republic during the disastrous summer of 1509, giving a strategic advantage to the French and Milanese forces and eventually leading to the complete dismantling of the Venetian mainland empire. Neighborhood chatter is not always so clearly linked to political intrigue, but Priuli’s description of such rampant gossip decisively illuminated their connection. Private talk could have clear public repercussions. Venetians often may have chosen the word ciance or zanze when they spoke of matters of state, as if the talk of ciance or zanze could range into a political zone that was, in efffect, closed topettegolezze : a diffferentiation perhaps to be expected if pettegolezze were generally coded as feminine. The term mormoration had similar connotations to ciance, but once again had additional linguistic nuances. Venetians used mormoration to indicate shared disapproval; the term could occasionally express the neutral talk of murmurs or a kind of neutral sharing of news, but mormoration was never positive and more typically expressed a sense of complaint. For instance, on 30 August 1582, Father Andrea Morato, the parish priest of the church of Saints Mary and Donato on the island of Murano, denounced his fellow priest Basegio Pellegrino to the Holy Offfĳice. According to Morato, ‘mormora tutta la contra’ [‘the entire neighborhood was grumbling’] about the fact that Pellegrino kept

22 Girolamo Priuli, I diarii, in Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, Tome XXIV, part III (Bologna, 1940), IV, pp. 108–109. As described in greater detail by Robert Finlay, Venetians in their gossip here heaped opprobrium on a particular Venetian military commander for a defeat he had sufffered. See Robert Finlay,Politics in Renaissance Venice (New Brunswick, NJ, 1980), p. 55. the meanings of gossip in sixteenth-century venice 331 a concubine in his house.23 Another witness testifĳied that when the priest appeared to say Mass, Morato heard people saying they were leaving to hear the Mass at the church of Saint Peter the Martyr instead, because the priest at the church of Saints Mary and Donato was sleeping with a concubine. When Pellegrino said the Mass, ‘faceva mormora le brigate’ [‘he made everyone (in the neighborhood or vicinity) grumble’].24 The way individuals used mormoration suggested that such talk was more legitimate than pettegolezze or ciance. Unlike light or unreliable chatter, this was the quiet voice of justifĳied indignation. Sanudo also regularly chose the word mormoration in his chronicle. On 14 July 1524, he commented that the Council of Ten had taken note of ‘le murmuration di la terra, dico di la mazor parte’ [‘the mutterings of the city, and I mean of the majority’] that Alvise da Noal wanted to run for Grand Chancellor.25 On 1 February 1499, he remarked how that morning at the Rialto ‘fo gran mormoration per la terra’ [‘there was grumbling in the city’] when no one showed up to work at the Garzoni bank.26 After being accused of insulting someone, one of the Venetian state lawyers asked Matteo Agostino how he could claim he knew nothing about this when ‘si faceva una gran mormoratione di persone’ [‘it stirred up a lot of grumbling among many people’] about his crime.27 In a 1603 trial, the state lawyer similarly asked Giovanni Malloni how he could try to make the court believe that he knew nothing about physically and verbally insulting the Lion of St. Mark in Rovigo when ‘ha dato mormoratione a tutta la citta’ [‘the whole city was talking about it’].28 The Venetian Censors, the magistracy that oversaw Venetian servants and elections, among other things, often used the term mormoration when it complained about the manners and civility of gondoliers. On 3 September 1558, the Censors’ records stated that gondoliers ‘usano parolle sporche, et dishon- este con mormoration et despiaquimento universal’ [‘use dirty and unseemly words, creating grumbling and unhappiness among everyone’].29 The city, and the Censors in turn, used mormoration to express disapproval of gondoliers’ language. In addition, they noted many times during the sixteenth century the great mormoration that Venetian patricians caused with their unbounded

23 ASV, Sant’Ufffĳizio, bu. 49, fasc. ‘Pellegrino Basegio’, denunciation of 30 August 1582. 24 ASV, Sant’Ufffĳizio, testimony of V. Stella, 27 January 1583. 25 Sanudo, I diarii, XXXVI, p. 471. 26 Sanudo, II, p. 391. 27 ASV, Avogaria di comun, Penale, bu. 66, fasc. ‘Matteo Agostino per ingurie’, testimony of 18 April 1600. 28 ASV, Avogaria, bu. 418, fasc. 4 ‘Giovanni Antonio Malloni’, testimony of 10 June 1603. 29 ASV, Censori, Capitolari, bu. 1, 17 August 1541–1 September 1790, fol. 17r, 3 September 1558. 332 Horodowich ambition in their unseemly pursuit of honors and offfĳices at any cost.30 As one further example, the Esecutori contro la bestemmia, the Venetian offfĳice that oversaw civic morality, reported that fĳighting, the display of weapons, and the indecent clothes of prostitutes in holy places in the city had caused the ‘mormoratione de tutti’ [‘murmuring among everyone’].31 Like pettegolezze and ciance, mormoration represented a shared and communal verbal knowledge, as well as common talk that started to fĳilter up to ears of anyone paying attention, but mormoration difffered frompettegolezze and ciance in its political implications. What people had in mind when they called talk mormoration was complaining as much as gossip, but complaining about someone usually more powerful or socially elevated (there would not usually be mormoration, for instance, against a slave or a child). For both Sanudo and people on the street, while the implications of mormoration could sometimes peter out or go unnoticed, they often piqued listeners’ interest and pointed to signifĳicant pockets of civic unrest. The uses of mormoration clearly suggested that public opinion was coming into play, if not a nascent kind of public sphere. To call talk mormoration, in efffect, was to elevate it to the political realm, with a mixture of both respect and condescension. Mormoration tended to be at once justifĳied and unfortunate, understandable but regrettable, since its usage suggests that the civic realm would be better offf if the cause (the misdeed) and the efffect (the response of the public) could both be avoided. In addition, it was notably collective and general. This was quiet, group back-talk, with a tincture of rumour: short of protest, but clearly meant to be subversive of the due authority of the household (if one were to encounter its usage among servants), the church, and the state. Even more powerful than mormoration or ciance, the surprisingly simple claim that ‘I heard that’ or ‘it is said that’ (ho sentito che/si dice che) indicated that the forces of gossip were at work and informed listeners, including those in judicial settings, that a speaker had serious and important information to impart. For instance, Sanudo commonly included what was said (si dice/si diceva) on the street. Reporting the deaths of lawyer Francesco Moresini and his wife, Sanudo recounted on 6 August 1508 that, ‘si dice manzono fongi, e poi beveteno latte; e si tien si atosichasseno per ditti fongi’ [‘it is said that they ate mushrooms and drank milk, and were poisoned by the mushrooms’].32 On 16 May 1525, Sanudo related that ‘fo ditto per la terra, donde la vegna non si

30 ASV, Registro, Capitolare Primo, 12 September 1517–22 April 1762, fols 4r, 18r, 21v, 31r. 31 ASV Sant’Ufffĳizio, Esecutori contro la bestemmia, bu. 54, Capitolari 1523–1737, 16 February 1546, fol. 34r, and 30 June 1615, fol. 48v. 32 Sanudo, I diarii, VII, p. 605. the meanings of gossip in sixteenth-century venice 333 dice, che francesi vien di qua [. . .] in grandissima pressa’ [‘it was said in the city – from where it originates no one says – that the French are arriving . . . in a huge swarm’].33 There exist almost infĳinite examples of witnesses reporting what they had heard on the street in sixteenth-century Venetian trials. To offfer just a few examples: regarding the same Antonia accused of witchcraft considered earlier, the witness Faustina stated, ‘ho sentito a dir che la varisse persone herbate, et strigate’ [‘I heard it said that she cures charmed and bewitched people’].34 Describing a certain Giacomo, a fellow worker at a Venetian printing house accused of heresy, his colleague Rinaldo claimed that ‘Io non ho mai hauto dispiacer alcuno dal detto Iacomo, ne lui da me, ma perche si dice, che ha fatto a pratticar con li ugonotti, per questo io non m’impazzo de lui’ [I have never had any problems with Giacomo, nor him with me, but because everyone (in the workshop) says that Giacomo has had dealings with Huguenots, I am not keen on him’].35 Courts and their judges very commonly began the interrogation of both the accused and witnesses by asking them ‘what they had heard’, either about the case in general or about the accused. For instance, when the 1633 case of Bortholomeo Malombra came before the Avogaria di comun, the Venetian state lawyers, the court began by asking various witnesses if they had ever heard Bortholomeo speak out against the nobility. The judge asked the noble Gerolomo Memmo ‘se lo senti proffferir parole di cattivo concetto e particolarmente che’l primo gentilhomo perche li facesse ogni minima cosa gli voleva cavar un stillo tante volte nella vita fĳino che li fosse uscita l’anima’ [‘if he had heard Bortholomeo express bad thoughts, and in particular, that he would stab the fĳirst noble – who did even the tiniest thing to him – many times in the gut until his soul came out’].36 Individuals clearly used the preface ‘I heard’ to inform authorities of the general drift of social commentary. In addition, both Sanudo and individuals testifying in various courts also clearly used si dice to give weight and credit to their accounts. Sanudo used the gossip he heard on the street as evidence for the veracity of his claims, and those speaking before a judge such as the above Rinaldo, for instance, used gossip to support the legitimacy of their statements. Discussions of public reputation, denoted by the commonly used terms fama, infamia, publica voce, and commune voce, also indicated the presence of

33 Sanudo, XXXVIII, p. 295. For other examples of things that ‘were said’, see also I, pp. 651– 652, 842; VII, p. 300; XXXVI, p. 339. 34 Milani, Due processi, p. 15. 35 ASV, Sant’Ufffĳizio, bu. 53, fasc. ‘Giacomo francese’, testimony of 25 March 1584. 36 ASV Sant’Ufffĳizio, Avogaria di comun, Penale, bu. 387, fasc. 15 ‘Malombra Bartolommeo sparla contro la Nobilta’, 1 October 1633, testimony of Gerolomo Memmo. 334 Horodowich gossip and community talk. Often found in legal literature and the proceedings of trials, publica vox et fama, public opinion or hearsay, has a long history in Roman law.37 A brief discussion of the meaning of fama in a Venetian context gives us a sense of the diffferences between talk, social interpretations of talk, and institutional and political defĳinitions of talk.Fama in the Venetian ambit, it is important to note, diverged to some degree from fama in Roman law in that Venetians did not follow Roman law strictly. In Venice, the only requirement necessary to become a judge was that the candidate be of the patrician class. Judges had no formal training in law.38 Venetian legal practice often emu- lated Roman law but was not bound to it, and in fact often actively excluded it as a source of authority. When considering fama, Venetian judges decided individually how much weight to give gossip in each given case.39 Venetian law was an extension of the political system, and judges were politicians who made their decisions based on their laymen’s common sense and values, and as we might conjecture, on the gossip they heard. As with Roman law, fama in the Venetian context did not prove guilt, but it lent strength to the possibility that the accused was guilty. In the eyes of courts, fama had a fair amount of legitimacy. It was gossip, but gossip with a kind of evidentiary force, whose existence became a social and legal fact. Legal compendia frequently prescribed investigating someone’s fama as a means of gathering information.40 When considering denunciations, judges were required to evaluate the reputation of the accuser. As authors of Venetian

37 See Fenster & Smail, ‘Introduction’, in Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe, ed. by Thelma S. Fenster & Daniel Lord Smail (Ithaca, NY, 2003), pp. 1–11. 38 James Shaw, The Justice of Venice: Authorities and Liberties in the Urban Economy, 1550–1700 (Oxford, 2006), p. 12. 39 ‘The jurisdictions and responsibilities of [Venice’s] various councils overlapped or con- flicted, and Venetian law was more ‘oracular’ than guided by statute or precedent. . . . The judges in Venetian courts were politicians who lacked legal training, and their limited terms in offfĳice prevented them from relying on past experience and knowledge of prec- edents’, Edward Muir, ‘The Sources of Civil Society in Italy’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 29 (1999), pp. 394–395; ‘[L]e regole del gioco, quelle vere, le fanno giudici e notai, caso per caso, evenienza per evenienza, emergenza per emergenza’, Gianni Buganza, ‘Il potere della parola: La forza e le responsabilità della deposizione testimoniale nel processo penale veneziano (secoli XVI–XVII)’, in La parola all’accusato, ed. by Jean-Louis Biget, Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur, & Agostino Paravicini Bagliani (Palermo, 1991), p. 137. 40 For a comparison, see Richard M. Frayer, ‘Conviction According to Conscience: The Medieval Jurists’ Debate Concerning Judicial Discretion and the Law of Proof’, Law and History Review, 7 (1989): 23–88, and L.R. Poos, ‘Sex, Lies, and the Church Courts of Pre- Reformation England’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 25 (1995): 585–607. the meanings of gossip in sixteenth-century venice 335 legal compendia like Marco Ferro suggested, only if a denunciation came from a person of good standing in the community could it be taken seriously; ‘Non faccia alcuna giustifĳicazione, o prova della sua innocenza, presumendosi questa, quando specialmente l’accusatore sia di mala fama’ [‘If the accuser has a bad reputation, he need offfer no justifĳication or proof of innocence’].41 In other words, the bad fama of the source, or the negative things people said about him or her, discredited the testimony. Gossip or hearsay – information coming from a ‘public and common voice’ or ‘a voice that spread throughout the people’ – proved enough to initiate an investigation and courtroom proceedings, or gave ground to dismiss evidence. As another author of legal texts, Lorenzo Priori, pointed out, a judge could open a case based on reputation alone. In such a case:

si ricerca la fama publica precedente [. . .]. [Q]uesta fama suol venire alle volte da una publica, et commune voce, alle volte da i costumi et modi del viver, et dalla mala conversatione della persona difffamata.

[(the judge) examines one’s existing reputation (. . .). (T)his reputation usually comes at times from a public and common voice, at times from one’s customs and way of life, and from the bad company kept by the person discredited on account of their reputation.]42

Gossip and reputation always had to be checked and qualifĳied; denouncers who claimed to have heard something had to cite, in theory, from whom or by what means they had obtained that information in order for their testimonies to be valid (though courts in practice did not require this in every case). For instance, Eliseo Masini summed up inquisitorial practice by stating that ‘nel principio del processo avertiranno di far sempre mentione da chi o per qual mezzo gi siano giunte tali notitie’ [‘at the start of a trial, judges will admon- ish (everyone) always to mention from whom or by what means they have

41 Marco Ferro, Dizionario del diritto comune e veneto (Venice, 1842), I, p. 27. See also Lorenzo Priori, Prattica criminale secondo il rito delle leggi della serenissima repubblica di Venetia (Venice, 1622), p. 10; Antonio Barbaro, Pratica criminale (Venice, 1739), p. 20. It is important to note that while several of these giuriste lived much after the sixteenth century – Marco Ferro died in 1784 – their texts were designed as historical compilations and reflected the history and tradition of these legal ideas in Venice and the Veneto. 42 Priori, Prattica criminale, p. 12. On reputation as the grounds for a trials, see also Barbaro, Pratica criminale, p. 39; Ferro, Dizionario, I, pp. 30–31; Z.G. Grecchi, Le formalità del processo criminale nel dominio veneto (Padua, 1790), p. 40; Balissera Zettele, Istrutione, et prattica criminale utilissima si alli avocati come alli cancellieri, et altri (Venice, 1648), p. 41. 336 Horodowich obtained their information’].43 Texts about how the law should function did not consistently reflect legal practice, but they do offfer an idea of how both contemporaries and the legal tradition imagined the law should work. Venetian advocates on the one hand viewed fama with caution if not a lack of interest; on the other hand, they called for, accepted, and even sought out gossip, fama, reputation, and ‘what people heard’ as evidence central to the initiation, if not the outcome, of courtly proceedings. Like Venetian advocates, Sanudo was also clearly aware of people’s reputations and what Venetians thought about their neighbors and politicians, often mentioning the fama or commonly held reputation of those who peopled his chronicle. ‘Ditto avogador Venier’, Sanudo pointed out on 14 July 1524, ‘ha una dolorosa et pessima fama’ (‘The lawyer Venier has a sorry and terrible reputation’). When Doge Agustin Barbarigo died on 20 September 1501, Sanudo remarked that he was a man of:

malla fama, che, da missier Christofal Moro in qua, niun doxe taliter è morto [. . .]. [E]ra una meravega a udir le maledition ognun li dava, per la superbia, rapacità, tenacità, avaritia era in lui.

[bad reputation, such that from Christoforo Moro until today, no doge of such a nature has died (. . .). (I)t was an unbelievable thing to hear the curses that everyone gave him, for his haughtiness, greed, tenacity, and avarice.]44

Venetian judges and magistrates followed the directives of legal texts, put them into practice in the courts and employed the technique of asking about people’s public reputations. In addition, witnesses also called on community gossip through the construct of fama to make their case or offfer evidence. For instance, as just one of many examples, on 3 June 1581 a stone cutter named Orlando from the island of Burano told the Inquisitor that it was ‘publica voce et fama’ [‘public knowledge’] that a certain Father Niccolò had a concubine and did not go to confession. The Inquisitor then turned to ask the following witness, a certain Vincent Vio, ‘se sappia che in Burano sia publica voce et fama che’l detto padre Niccolo sia persona che non si confessi mai’ [‘if he knew that on Burano it was public knowledge that this said father Niccolò was a person

43 Eliseo Masini, Sacro arsenale overo prattica criminale dell’offfĳicio della S. Inquisitione (Rome, 1705), p. 17. 44 Sanudo, I diarii, XXXVI, p. 471; IV, p. 113. On fama and reputation, see also XXXIV, p. 128. the meanings of gossip in sixteenth-century venice 337 who never went to confession’].45 Here, it is interesting to note that Inquisitors commonly not only asked both what an individual knew, saw, or thought, but also directly asked about what people, workplaces, and neighborhoods in general ‘were saying’ as well. Many claimed in trials before the Inquisitor that it was ‘common knowledge’, known through public observation and talk, that certain individuals were Lutherans.46 Litigation and exchanges in the courtroom were tests of what was known and shared verbally in community talk. Judges knew that gossip was a force that shaped honor and reputation, and therefore consistently sought to access such networks of community information. In this way, litigation efffectively enabled gossip to extend into the courtroom.Fama represented talk from the street that merited codifĳication in the records of the church and state: in other words, a type of gossip that functioned as a means of establishing honor, trust, and credit, all of which were intimately bound up together.47 In this context, fama is not the same as gossip. Fama was more formal and offfĳicial, because it carried legal weight in arbitration and litigation. That is to say, fama represented more than gossip, as it also referred to the legal status of people and groups, as well as their wealth, power, and general prestige. The term summarized a process of talk, and also attached that summary of reputation to the person to whom it applied. In efffect,fama functioned as a kind of legal shorthand for an incredibly complex and fluid process of determining legal and social reputation. Fama was clearly both a legal term and a social one. Its family of social terms includes fama, infamosa, defamazione, infamante, famosa, de mala/buona fama. The relationship between gossip and fama, therefore, is always somewhat flexible and ambiguous, and ‘there was no simple, direct, or automatic connection between social fama and legal fama’.48 Fama denoted a linguistic process, almost entirely oral, that summed up talk from

45 ASV, Sant’Ufffĳizio, bu. 46, fasc. ‘Nicolo Vio’, testimony of Orlando Tagliapietra and Vincentius Vio, 3 June 1581, fol. 3r. For a similar use of fama, see Ibid., bu. 51, fasc. ‘Zancarello Trioano’, and bu. 56, fasc. ‘Francesco Condulmei’. 46 See for instance bu. 57, fasc. ‘Giovanni de Savogin’, testimony of Polidorus, 25 June 1586, and bu. 59, fasc. ‘Bartolommeo Bottoner’. 47 See Thomas Cohen, ‘Three Forms of Jeopardy: Honor, Pain and Truth-telling in a Sixteenth- Century Italian Courtroom’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 24 (1998), 975–98; and Scott Taylor, ‘Credit, Debt, and Honor in Castile, 1600–1650’, Journal of Early Modern History, 7 (2003): 8–27. 48 Thomas Kuehn, ‘Fama as a Legal Status in Renaissance Florence’, in Fama: The Politics of Talk, ed. by Fenster & Smail pp. 27–28. See also Antonella Bettoni, ‘Voci malevole: Fama, notizia del crimine, e azione del giudice nel processo criminale (secc.xvi–xvii)’, Quaderni Storici, 121 (2006): 13–38. 338 Horodowich the point of view of the law. However, the word was also social, and social circles, like the courts, also discussed fama. Despite these complexities, Venetian cases at the very least offfer a sense of the intimate connections between community and law and of the subtle play of legal purposes on the one side and social actions on the other. Fama clearly carried more legal weight than ciance or pettegolezze. Even when gossip began among women or people of ill repute, it underwent a type of ‘legal transubstantiation’ when it entered the realm of the courtroom and the voices and records of male functionaries, becoming part of the male, citywide realm of the law.49 Gossip, when described as fama, had the power to make or destroy an individual’s livelihood, well-being, and legal destiny. A fĳinal type of gossip that regularly appeared in the lagoon city was that of the broglio. The broglio was the Venetian jostling for political position and the verbal solicitation of votes that occurred in and around the Ducal Palace at the time of elections. The broglio involved rumour (often malicious rumour), vote trading, petitions for assistance, and political negotiation in and outside the assemblies of the noble class in the ambitious pursuit of offfĳice.50 Venetian nobles did not quietly fĳile in to the hall of the Greater Council to place their votes directly and quietly, but rather made deals, placed bets, whispered entreaties or threats, lobbied, and moved around exchanging messages and gossip. At the conclusion of ostensibly private political debates, senators often leaked the results, and so brought the talk out of the inner chambers of politics to the city at large. Patricians negotiated political business based on hearsay and gossip in blatant disregard for the republican ideal of the offfĳice seeking the man instead of the man seeking the offfĳice. The broglio involved a wide variety of activities: buying and selling votes, lining the steps of the Ducal Palace to chant the names of political favorites, betting on elections, following voting urns to check on political supporters, soliciting nominations, and encouraging certain candidates. Electioneering, which was just one component of this more elaborate practice, had more to it than mere gossip. Gossip was either a signifĳicant component of thebroglio , or a special form of gossip. Lengthy and repeated legislation to discourage the broglio are testimony to the role it continued to play in Venetian politics. Broglio extended back to the fourteenth century when Venetian territorial advances multiplied both the number of offfĳices and the competition to hold them; the broglio then began when the power to name these offfĳicials passed from the doge to the Greater

49 See Thomas Kuehn, ‘Fama as a Legal Status’, p. 34. 50 See Giuseppe Boerio, Dizionario del dialetto veneziano, 2nd edn (Venice, 1856), p. 101. the meanings of gossip in sixteenth-century venice 339

Council.51 The oldest legislation against the broglio dates to 1303, decreeing that once the doors of the Greater Council were closed for elections, nobles had to sit quietly and vote from their respective seats, indicating that they had been doing the opposite. In subsequent periods, the Venetians passed numerous additional pronouncements against the broglio, which imposed harsher punishments. Those found guilty lost their offfĳice and could not take part in the Greater Council.52 Laws aimed at preventing electoral corruption prohibited competitors from visiting one another at home after the Greater Council adjourned. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century legislation from both the Council of Ten (Venice’s highest security council) and the Venetian magistrates who oversaw sumptuary law and the Council of Ten paid special attention to dinner parties and patrician social gatherings as they attempted to limit the numbers in which patricians could meet in private settings.53 Though such measures were undertaken to restrict unseemly displays of private wealth, a more speculative reading suggests that they would have had the additional efffect of minimizing political gossip. Legislation aimed at reducing electoral corruption went so far as to prohibit embracing and offfering congratula- tions in an attempt to cut down on the verbal exchanges that accompanied them. Throughout the fĳifteenth century, laws repeatedly encouraged silence and restricted chatting in designated public places, such as in and around the Ducal Palace and the church of San Marco.54 In 1425, the Ten went so far as to propose removing a bench near the holy water font in the church of San Marco where nobles were accustomed to sit and chat about state afffairs.55 Towards the end of the fĳifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth, however, Venetians perceived that the broglio had taken on ‘disturbing proportions’.56 Electioneering continued to prove problematic enough to prompt the creation of the magistracy of the Censors in 1517 (the same magistracy later given jurisdiction over servants) to combat lobbying in the Senate and Greater Council.57 The Venetian state commissioned two annually elected Censors were

51 Donald Queller, The Venetian Patriciate: Reality versus Myth (Urbana, OH, & Chicago, IL 1986), p. 53. 52 Ferro, Dizionario, I, pp. 281–282. 53 Finlay, Politics, pp. 203–4, 217, and Queller, The Venetian Patriciate, pp. 75–78. 54 On the extensive and varied legislation against the broglio in the fĳifteenth century, see Queller, The Venetian Patriciate, pp. 51–84. 55 Queller, pp. 221–222. 56 Gaetano Cozzi, ‘Authority and Law in Renaissance Venice’, in Renaissance Venice, ed. by J.R. Hale (London, 1973), p. 299. 57 Ferro, Dizionario, I, p. 372. 340 Horodowich commissioned to imprison, fĳine, or exile senators who solicited, lobbied, or sold their votes. The government was at pains to curtail the gossip that went hand in hand with the broglio, demonstrating how the practice of this kind of gossip was inherent to Venetian political culture. Broglio was prevalent, as laws passed from the fĳifteenth century onward demonstrate both the prevalence of the broglio and the impossibility of its eradication. Gossip proved impossible to eradicate and flourished despite all the effforts to stop it.58 Sixteenth-century laws surprisingly became more lax and even seemed to accommodate the gossip of the broglio, suggesting that offfĳicials accepted election gossip as integral to the Venetian political process. Contemporary chroniclers, in fact, believed that the broglio was a ‘necessary evil’ and ‘the oil that made the complex machinery of state function so smoothly for so long that it seemed that Venice was free from ambition and faction.’59 Unlike violence or dueling, the broglio offfered a peaceful means of political decision-making. While both Sanudo and Priuli lamented the talk of broglio, they both recognized its political usefulness:

And as these intrigues and supplications will yet be the cause of Venice’s ruin, so that because of them I marvel it has lasted so long. On the other hand, some have said that these intrigues, [lobbying for] offfĳices and mag- istracies, and these supplications, have been the salvation of the Venetian Republic, and the principal, cause of [the nobles] not offfending in tran- quility, friendship and peace. So that if they were without intrigues, salutations and flattery, within a short time they would be seduced into factions and discord among themselves, as in all cities of the world, and there would be great discord among the Venetian nobility. From this the total ruin of Venice would certainly follow.60

As we have seen, gossip was just one component of the broglio; when Venetians said broglio, they meant a series of diffferent activities, and they did not single

58 The initial, positive results of the work of the Censors were short-lived and the magistracy eventually proved incapable of controlling electoral corruption; consequently, its functions were turned over to the Avogaria di Comun in 1521, who in turn proved no more successful in stemming the practice of the broglio. See Cozzi, ‘Authority and Law’, p. 326. 59 Finlay, Politics, p. 221. 60 Girolamo Priuli, cited in Venice: A Documentary History, ed. by David Chambers & Brian Pullan (London, 1992), p. 77. On Sanudo’s extensive observations of the broglio, see Finlay, Politics, pp. 23–27, 196–226. the meanings of gossip in sixteenth-century venice 341 out talk among them. Nevertheless, as Priuli’s language indicated, part of the mix of activities was the aggressive and often underhand verbal exchange of voting patricians (supplications, intrigues, salutations, and flattery). Political advancement through the broglio was used to legitimate the crucial practice of gossip, whose role the state reluctantly came to accept in Venetian elections. Unlike pettegolezze, ciance, and fama, the gossip behind the broglio appeared, to some, to have been a politically productive type of talk. What are we to make of this great jumble of words, and of the linguistic choices Venetians made when they discussed gossip? Looking at the various words and language that Venetian chose when they talked about gossip, beyond their practice of gossip, has much to tell about what gossip could mean in this sixteenth-century city. A great range of types of gossip existed, from that which meant nothing and could almost go unmentioned, yet was never quite so unimportant that it didn’t, to that which evolved as it climbed up through neighborhood voices and the mechanisms of the court to earn real legal or political weight. At the bottom of the pile for Venetians was clearly pettegolezza: unimportant, feminine talk. This was ‘mere gossip’. The broglio, at the other end of the spectrum, represented gossip that worked to keep the Venetian state stable and in business, and as we have seen, a range of understandings of gossip existed in between. While there exists some overlap between modern defĳini- tions of gossip and early modern understandings of this practice, this overlap is by no means complete. For instance, for early modern individuals, gossip was not always associated with intimacy or intimate relationships or surroundings. The metalanguage of gossip in early modern Venice clearly indicated a greater variety of registers of social and political meaning than we might acknowledge in gossip today; for instance, pettegolezze was talk that was clearly to be disre- garded, whereas when people spoke of ciance or mormoration, such language suggested both political complaints and possibly a sense of political threat. Venetian writers and speakers clearly thought carefully about the words they chose when they spoke of gossip, picking intentionally from a variety of carefully nuanced words and expressions that had diffferent social and political meanings: meanings that listeners in contemporary society would, in turn, have unambiguously understood. With the exception of broglio, all these words and phrases were of course common elsewhere on the Italian peninsula, and a careful examination of their use in other locales might reveal similar patterns, meanings, and understandings. However, all of the examples here were written or spoken in or about Venice and Venetians. Their use in Venice, we might speculate, appears to attach to a civic culture, one with its own famous world of news and habits 342 Horodowich of appraising it.61 Venice was most likely no more ‘gossipy’ than Florence or Rome, but it perhaps juggled more fresh news, from farther offf, amidst a clearly well-developed public culture of talk and discussion.62 It would therefore not be surprising if Venetian talk about talk had its own nuances and acuity in this culture of opinion and appraisal, where the mental universe of the city collectively made for itself an array of labels for talk with a range of socially and politically nuanced implications.

61 Peter Burke, ‘Early Modern Venice as a Center of Information and Communication’, in Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297–1797, ed. by John Jefffries Martin & Dennis Romano (Baltimore, MD, & London, 2002), pp. 389–418. 62 Even today, however, the twenty-fĳirst century Venetian editor Franco Filippi argues that ‘il petteglezzo, la maldicenza e a volte la difffamazione, abitudine ancor oggi ben radicata in citta’ [‘gossip, backbiting, and at times defamation are still well-rooted habits in the city’]. See Franco Filippi, Anche questa è Venezia (Venice, 2005), p. 133. CHAPTER 12 Gossip and Social Standing in Celestina: Verbal Venom as Art

Joseph T. Snow

At issue in this volume is how best to recover from the extant written sources the important clues to the lost orality in the cultures of early modern Europe. These written sources are many in kind and shape but most contain vestiges of lost voices, often in spare fragments.1 However, sometimes our ‘fragments’ are generous and supple, for example in the form of complete sermon texts (if we assume they were transcribed as delivered; however, of course without the original intonations, emphases and voice pitch changes) and plays and songs and stories which pretend to retransmit contemporary speech in a flow of popular, contemporary language. Although these sources, as well, are relics, or artifacts, left on written or printed pages, the text of a, play is capable of giving of giving the reader some appreciation of how oral exchanges were carried out, for we have the reactions of the auditors and the readers who get involved in the texts and perceive a beginning, a middle, and an end.2 In the example of Celestina there are also paratexts which instruct readers as to how to interpret the text in reading aloud, and many written opinions that mark diffferent receptions of the text, both positively and negatively. It is more than a fragment; it offfers us a continuum, a cohesive and organic example of oral communication. I note that reading aloud can unite the written word with an unlettered audience, adding to the impression of hearing actual speech. Additionally, many non-verbal cues are also woven into these dialogued texts which many abbreviated examples, seen in other chapters, choose to pass over in silence or else omit.

1 Particularly one conference paper by Jane Whetnall (forthcoming in a special issue on orality in the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies) on lost women’s voices in the poetry of the Renaissance courts of Spain addressed this topic. 2 Of particular interest in the broad context of complete texts were two conference papers, one on the discussions of live recitations in Irish convents located in early modern Spain, by Andrea Knox, and the second one on re-presentation of speech in Francisco Delicado’s Lozana andaluza, by Rocío Díaz Bravo. Both of these will also appear in the forthcoming special issue of the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies on orality (see note 1).

In dealing with a literary text from Spain bridging, in time, the last years of the fĳifteenth- and the fĳirst years of the sixteenth-century, I hope to clarify how orality as represented in fluid print form may help us better to conceptual- ize how social order was enacted and reproduced. As a text where oral and literate cultures meet, Celestina is a very special work; its main characters are female and what we might accept as plausible representations of real voices are recaptured from what was clearly a patriarchal society in which women played token ceremonial or stereotypical roles where forms of proper speech were often prescribed and monitored. Celestina’s characters are drawn from life and are, in the main, also members of an underclass of servants and prostitutes under the sway of a powerful and dominant go-between, engaged in face-to-face exchanges and negotiations that often are opportunities for social chatter and gossip. The text of Celestina with a few exceptions is what others in this volume have called street talk and it takes place in a small urban setting. This urban setting has helped each of the characters in this drama of pure speech to achieve a level of complicit discourse which will establish them as foils to the few characters that represent the gentry with whom they must contend for the essentials of life. I am exploring an aspect of orality in Celestina which is gossip as a component of power. But gossip, and especially the art of gossip as practised by Celestina, its main character, reveals that gossip’s power is based on the content of an accumulated mental dossier that allows its wielder to acquire, defend, and negotiate authority, to exert social and verbal dominance over her peers, as much as it binds them all together in the social mix. In my view, Celestina enhances our vision of gossip as an essential part of a complex culture. For some speakers in the work, gossip is a weapon expressing embitter- ment, disappointment and loss of social standing. For Celestina, however, the management of gossip is essential to her empowerment, social standing, reputation, authority, and even her honour. As the work’s most competent wielder of gossip, Celestina demonstrates, owing to her age, breadth of experience, and native wit a fĳirm grasp on what I will term ‘cultural competence,’ for it is in her interest to be able to tell ‘stories’ in a campaign to manipulate all those around her to her own benefĳit. That she fails in the end is merely the underbelly of the continual juggling of persuasive language in her many ‘stories’ (or gossip), and signifĳies only that she is unable to foresee the long term consequences of every story she tells. This failing is what leads to the tragedies. Let us proceed to the main course on our menu: What is gossip and what form(s) does it take in the organic structure of a work intent on underscoring the social pessimism rampant in the later years of the reign of Isabella and Ferdinand, the Catholic kings? gossip and social standing in celestina: verbal venom 345

What is Gossip?

Recently, when reading a commentary on a novel by Manuel Puig (La traición de Rita Hayworth), I learned that for Puig the most absorbing form of storytelling was gossip and that, in a real sense, both the implicit and the real readers are efffectively eavesdroppers on the stories/gossip. This eye-opening combination of gossip and its actualization as part of the reader’s role (as a silent auditor of all of Celestina’s dialogue) fĳit exactly with the development of my approach to orality. Celestina, the main fĳigure in the work once called the Comedy of Calisto and Melibea, in sixteen acts, then the Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea, in twenty-one, is a former prostitute and now an aged go-between or bawd who manipulates her interlocutors, both those of the lower social class and the upper echelons of society by self-interested storytelling, or gossip, in order to maintain and even enhance her reputation. It is Celestina, more than any other character in this dialogued lesedrama, whose verbal art – and artifĳice – impels the progress of the dramatic actions. This remains true, even after she is assassinated by her disillusioned accomplices in Act 12 of either of its two versions, and thus is central in the construction of the tragic outcomes of fĳive of the work’s protagonists, her own included. We may say then with confĳidence that – in fĳiction as in real life – ‘stories’ do not end, for although the protagonist (Celestina) is dead, the myths and stories she has circulated about her past have become components of her gossiping nature and continue to exert their strong pull on the living. And we readers are the privileged eavesdroppers on her stories, overhearing and judging all of them, which may be one of the more compelling reasons why Celestina still fascinates after more than fĳive hundred years.3 The oral stories in the

3 Although I often indicate the receptors of Celestina as ‘readers’, it is useful to know that many of the fĳirst to absorb the work were being read to in groups by a skilled reader. This style of communication was not only common in the early sixteenth century but, in one of the work’s closing poems, such a presentation of the text was indeed recommended: ‘If you are really keen to focus attention/ intoning Calisto to stir your readers/ ensure you can do it in whispers/ now in joy, hope and passion,/ now in anger and prickly fashion./ Put on a show of accents and banter/ ask and reply for every character/ laugh and cry with due declamation’. Peter Bush, trans., Celestina, p. 208. This factor is important in the spirit of orality in a text in which the public reader is asked to adopt plausible modulations of the voice in order to convince the hearers that they are hearing, in the performance, echoes of genuine discourse. Other aspects of this ‘conceptual orality’, of bringing the oral experience closer to the audience, were developed in a conference paper by Rocío Díaz Bravo (see note 2). 346 snow fĳiction reverberate efffectively over time and easily resonate with contemporary readers. What is most efffective is the sense that what we are reading is indeed plausible contemporary fĳifteenth-century speech. However, because it is plausible speech but presented as imagined dialogue (and made plausible by reading aloud), it cannot convey the same historical feel of the recorded speech of court transcripts as seen in other chapters.4 It does retain the virtue of overheard speech in a continuous story about ‘stories’ (gossip). The author’s ear for street speech, while sharp, is also attuned to literary models, just as all speech inherits antecedents as it evolves in any individual’s career. The Spanish Royal Academy Dictionary (DRAE) defĳines ‘chisme’ (Spanish for gossip) as follows, in my translation: ‘A true or false item of information with which one attempts to indispose one person with another or murmurs against that person’ (Chapter author’s italics.). Unlike the common notions we might have of gossip as harmless prattle or, at the other end of the spectrum, vicious slander, this defĳinition does recognize that gossip is not always an untruth, but may be true information so cleverly manipulated that it will foster actions by others that benefĳit the gossiper’s own designs, be those designs open to or hidden from the gossip’s interlocutors. Gossip is more often than not a kind of social cement, but in the hands of a skilled and shrewd ‘storyteller’ Celestina, gossip can become a strong and powerful tool of social interaction as well as of augmented authority for the teller. In Celestina’s circle of contacts, gossip is not intended always to indispose one person with another, as in the defĳinition in the DRAE, but rather to strengthen a private agenda in the search for profĳit and fame. Thus gossip will lead – in the literary work I am presenting – to tragedy and loss and, as such, is designed specifĳically to move the story line and actions to their dark and pessimistic closure. In the multiple ways in which Celestina enlivens gossip, it helps set the stage for the catastrophes that result from its artful insinuation in almost all of her social interactions, and serves as a slow-acting, long-term philtre, one more powerful than the powdered ones she concocts in her laboratory.5 I want to work on extending the Spanish Royal Academy’s defĳinition, having recently read modern anthropological views on gossip which have appreciably

4 Such speech is amplifĳied and evaluated by, in this volume, Tom Cohen and Matthias Bähr. 5 Celestina was more than a go-between, for she performed many other services, to wit: seam- stress, cosmetic maker and purveyor, midwife, mender of broken maidenheads, maker of perfumes and so on. Pármeno actually specifĳies six (Act I, p. 34) and Lucrecia hyperbolically inflates her services to more than thirty (Act 4, p. 71). Again, the reader has diffferent apprecia- tions of what Celestina’s reputation is based on. These make her loom perhaps larger than life. gossip and social standing in celestina: verbal venom 347 broadened my understanding.6 However, before we delve into the intricacies of the role(s) of gossip and the gossiper in Celestina, a work not familiar to everyone – although translated into English, French, Italian, German, and many other modern languages – I will sketch briefly the story line of this classic work in twenty-one acts that bridges the Spanish Middle Ages and the Renaiscence, the earliest published dates of the Comedia version being 1499, 1500, and 1501, the longer version possibly one year later. I add that many Spanish literary scholars hold Celestina as second only to the unsurpassed Don Quijote in the national canon.

Synopsis of Celestina

The two lover-protagonists, Calisto and Melibea, are well-to-do members of two of the town’s elite families. Each knows who the other is but they only meet for a fĳirst time by chance near a rural dwelling of Pleberio (Melibea’s father) in the opening scene of the work. Calisto is hunting and his hawk flies into the orchard where Melibea is walking. She, an overly-protected girl of twenty, well- read and curious, rejects Calisto’s spontaneous yet excessive declarations of love and devotion and Melibea, presumably offfended by his daring and illicit behaviour, sends him away, disconsolate and forbidden to approach her again. However, we later learn from her that she was, in fact, secretly smitten by the handsome and virile Calisto, but behaved as her upbringing demanded and not as her free will might wish. This is spontaneous speech on both sides, with both sides participating as well in a verbal masquerade with non-verbal hidden opinions. Melibea’s stinging rejection causes Calisto to seek an intermediary and he rapidly contracts the services of an ageing go-between, Celestina, well known to one of his servants, Sempronio. Celestina is handsomely paid to fĳind a way to reopen the closed door of dialogue that will, Calisto hopes, lead to the easing of his now-unconcealed sexual desire. Celestina, the work’s major gossiper, was once a famed midwife, and remains a mender of virgins supremely skilled in the arts practised by go-betweens, bringing together men and women of all classes and professions. She is now sixty years old and has fallen on hard

6 I have read with deep interest the fascinating book by John Beard Haviland, the ethnographer, Gossip, Reputation and Knowledge in Zinacantan (Chicago, IL, 1977) and have learned much about gossip as a cultural force, and his theories inform mine in this essay. His study was completed in Chiapas, Mexico, and I have abstracted and reabsorbed for this study of Celestina many of the guidelines and universally applicable principles Haviland’s work uncovers. 348 snow times and her great need of well-offf clients has her eagerly accepting Calisto’s commission. A younger servant is Pármeno who, as a young boy, served in Celestina’s house, left there after the death of his mother, Claudina, a professional colleague of Celestina’s. He fled from Celestina and the town and has recently returned after a nine year absence. The ambitious Pármeno, thinking to gain favour with his master, does all in his power to dissuade Calisto from commissioning this ‘old whore’ (puta vieja) whom he describes from personal experience – here in the form of malicious gossip – as evil and false. But his bitter denunciations of Celestina fall flat, since they ironically serve to confĳirm to Calisto the old bawd’s competence, reputation, and usefulness. Celestina, at Calisto’s door with Sempronio, overhears Parmeno’s long ad mulierem diatribe and immediately formulates a plan to include both servants in a confederation against their master for gains which will make them all rich. Calisto in the course of the work rewards Celestina with a hundred gold coins, new clothes, and a priceless gold chain. He gives lesser items to his two servants, inspiring in them not gratitude but dreams of more. While Celestina astutely assumes the furtherance of the new confederation, she is also savour- ing a personal revenge on Pleberio, Melibea’s father, a former neighbour, for the distance grown up between them over the past 20 years, as his business fortunes have multiplied and hers have dwindled. Thus, the sudden opportunity to undo the family’s reputation by seducing its only child away from her parents and into Calisto’s lusting embrace is overpowering. Though Celestina will risk anger and threats from a vacillating Melibea caught between her own desires and society’s proprieties, she will succeed in her embassy, thanks to her polished rhetorical skills but, with a nudge, too, from Melibea’s own yearning for a chance at living a life as Calisto’s paramour. The possibility of marriage is never broached. Celestina will attribute part of her success to her conjuration of the devil (here called Pluto). Sorcery, an active social problem in the fĳifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe, is another of this go-between’s many arts.7 Calisto’s denigrating treatment of the hapless Pármeno, plus Celestina’s arranging for an inflamed Pármeno to bed the high-class prostitute, Areúsa, fĳinally seals the confederation against Calisto. After the lovers have successfully been brought together, both confederates become acutely aware

7 Celestina in Act 3 conjures the devil and other characters (not all) mention her associations with magic. Demonology in an oral culture is the focus of the study in Liv Willumsen’s chapter in this volume. The problems raised as to the efffĳicacy of magic in the Spanish work have become an active scholarly polemic. Certainly Celestina believes in her incantation as it produces the efffect she hoped for, but it leaves no room for the exercise of free will on the part of an already enamoured Melibea. gossip and social standing in celestina: verbal venom 349 of Celestina’s greed and, when she refuses to share the booty with them, as promised, they ruthlessly murder the treacherous bawd in cold blood in her own home, an assassination witnessed by her last surviving sex worker, Elicia, Sempronio’s erstwhile girlfriend. The servants, when they leap from the window of Celestina’s house, are nabbed by the night watchmen who hear her dying cries for justice. The local judge, beholden to Calisto’s father, has them summarily beheaded in the town square. When Calisto learns of these three deaths, he coldly dismisses any responsibility for them. He pursues, with a new pair of servants as watchmen, a month of trysts with Melibea, in Pleberio’s own garden bower. Melibea is now forced to play by day the role of the dutiful daughter for her parents while betraying them at night as the willing and passionate mistress of Calisto. Melibea feels genuine sorrow for her betrayal of the family’s social honour but remains adamantly unrepentant, now fully devoted to her secret shadow life.8 Elicia and Areúsa, the lovers of the beheaded confederates, plan their own revenge. They hire a braggart soldier to pass by Pleberio’s house and skirmish with Calisto’s new servants, hoping this will lead to the deaths of the detested couple. The soldier, a coward, gets a lame associate to pass by the garden wall to frighten the servants, which he does. Calisto, having made love three times in rapid succession and hearing the alarmed voices of his servants below, rushes without donning his armour to help them, and falls to his death in a misstep on the very ladder he uses nightly to scale the garden wall. Melibea, unwilling to live without Calisto, climbs a tower, confesses all to her unbelieving father below and, after begging for mercy, leaps to her own death, a fĳinal act of love in imitation of Calisto’s fall. Pleberio then pronounces a fervent lament over Melibea’s broken body, accusing the World, Love and Fortune of being ruled by disorder and leading nowhere if not to total despair in this empty vale of tears. The end. Such is, in short, the sad tale of Calisto and Melibea and the wicked servants of Lust in the brief days before they all fall from grace and end up dead, some unconfessed and others unrepentant. The role that gossip plays is the catalyst for the fĳive tragedies. It will be best now to pick up on the characteristics of gossip as a cultural phenomenon, concentrating on the storytelling – the gossip – that is the key to the rhetorical sway exerted by Celestina over her

8 Melibea shows that she is, in fact, a divided soul. She fĳinally admits to herself (Act 10) who she really is or wants to become, she later remarks on her transition from passive reader of sentimental fĳictions about love to an active participant in a real afffair in which she has the leading role by declaring to Lucrecia: ‘I am sorry for the time I squandered before I began to love and know Calisto – after I came to know myself ’ (Act 16, p. 217, Chapter author’s italics.). 350 snow interlocutors. It is she who feeds and fulfĳils the needs and desires of her associates and clients and, in doing so, is the architect and manager of this rich canvas of human failings. Gossip in Celestina is largely about an egotistic and malignant power and offfers – as we shall be considering – a counterpoint to gossip as a source of solidarity and support, as noted in Alex Cowan’s commentaries and many articles on gossip.

Gossip about Celestina

As the central gossip and character, Celestina’s authority and social standing reinforce her huge ego. Let us now look at what the sensationalist stories/gossip about her, spoken by others who have dealt with her in the past, tell us. The fĳirst to contribute is Sempronio:

She’s a witch, and she’s shrewd and instructed in every evil that exists. I have heard that she has destroyed and repaired more than fĳive thousand maidenheads in this city. If she wishes, she can cause rocks and crags to melt with lust. (Act 1, p. 28)9

Pármeno next describes his personal memories as a stripling lad housed with her when his dying mother entrusted him to Celestina’s care. He details at length the activities of her public and private life, her laboratory for making potions and cosmetics, her girls, her clients, the gifts they would bring and more, but he fĳinishes offf his gossipy string of vilifĳications thus: ‘Who could ever tell you all the old creature was able to do? And it was all falsehood and trickery’ (Act 1, p. 36). Still, even knowing what he does about the bawd, Pármeno is soon bought offf by her with the promise of sex, showing that she is ever one step ahead of the devil in her deep knowledge of the needs and desires of her associates. Lucrecia, Melibea’s personal maid, contributes these characteristics, in addressing Alisa, her mistress:

[. . .] this old person is better known than rue. I really can’t believe you have forgotten the woman they exposed in public as a witch – the one

9 I will be quoting from the excellent English translation of Celestina by Mack H. Singleton (Madison, WI, 1968), keyed to act number and page. The concluding poem of Celestina is quoted (see n. 3) from a diffferent translation, as those verses are not translated by Singleton. gossip and social standing in celestina: verbal venom 351

who was selling girls to the clergy and undoing a thousand marriages. (Act 4, p. 71)

Melibea, still playing the role of virtuous virgin before succumbing to the verbal web Celestina weaves, calls Celestina a ‘false procuress, you witch, you enemy of all virtue and the cause of secret errors’ (Act 4, p. 80). But the young maid’s defences are soon adrift and she will actually, against her better judgment, seem to relent: ‘You afffĳirm your innocence so much that you are beginning to make me believe that you may very well be without blame in this matter’ (Act 4, p. 84). Celestina is exceedingly persuasive because she knows her opponent’s longings well. Sempronio, muttering under his breath, tells us: ‘This old crone is false and evil. The devil himself must have thrown us together’ (Act 5, p. 92). In the next act, both servants tell us more: Pármeno that ‘the old whore there would like nothing better than to escape the life of poverty she has been leading for fĳifty years – with three steps and in a single day’ and Sempronio chimes in with: ‘Greediness is her only defect’ and this proves to be her weakest trait (Act 6, p. 96). In the banquet scene with his confederates and their doxies in attendance, Sempronio will gossip more openly:

[I]f she goes to church with her beads in her hands, you may be sure she hasn’t got too much to eat. [. . .] While she is telling her beads, she is really thinking about the number of maidenheads she must look after, how many lovers there are in the city [. . .] and what prebendary is the young- est and freest with his purse strings. When she moves her lips, she is only inventing lies and planning tricks to get money [. . .]. (Act 9, p. 140)

What of Calisto, whose sexual frustration provides Celestina with the motive for forming a confederation which will, ironically, be the fĳinal cause of her undoing? Here he is, moments after learning of the three deaths:

They [Sempronio and Pármeno] were arrogant and rough, and soon or late would have paid the price they now have paid. The old woman was a false and evil thing, as her business with them apparently shows. [. . .] It was the divine will, too, that she should have met her death in this manner, in retribution for the many adulteries that through her intercession have been committed here. (Act 13, p. 196)

Not one of these gossipers knew old Celestina intimately over a long period of time, and some of their gossip reflects ill-will, slander, and venom against the 352 snow one they all, in one way or another, have come to depend on. However, despite the negatives here compiled in the gossip of her associates, they all recognize Celestina’s expertise and power, they respect her multiple social roles and they do not doubt her authority to bring to a happy conclusion their joint ventures. This gossip about her afffects us as readers: we are the silent eavesdroppers as we learn how others regard Celestina, speaking behind her back. We are made privy to it and can appreciate how isolated an old crone she has become and, despite the real need all have of her many skills and arts, how little an efffect their gossipy opinions have on her ability to dominate them. They all have needs that only she can assuage and no one of them seeks to limit her power to act freely.10

Celestina as Ultimate Gossip

Gossip is, for Celestina, more than a ‘true or false item of information’; rather, it is concentrated in the art of conversation (or storytelling) in always shifting contexts: it is a sign of Celestina’s mastery, and an exercise of her cultural competence. The successful gossip is one who possesses deep knowledge of human behaviour and juggles her stories around that knowledge. In Act 3, Celestina confĳirms her mastery of the many subtleties involved when she comforts her dubious confederate, Sempronio: ‘We cannot fail. However, my son, it is well for a good solicitor to give evidence of some initiative – to report some made- up conversation, some imagined activities’ (Act 3, p. 81, my italics). These sophisticated acts are the main source of her oral stratagems and it is her astonishing ability to fabricate persuasive stories on the spur of the moment that allows her to maintain her advantage over her interlocutors. There is an important moment at the beginning of Act 4 when Celestina, unaccompanied, is directing her hesitant footsteps towards Pleberio’s house with a skein of yarn that is her ploy to gain entrance and see Melibea. She is hesitant, vacillating, and maintains an interior monologue in which she reproduces imagined conversations with Sempronio and Calisto. The gossip by nature knows that others will gossip about her (we have seen that this is so), so she now fears the consequences of a failure to complete her embassy and to undergo a loss of face. Let us listen in on one phase of this private duologue:

10 For another view on the topic of gossip in Celestina, see Dorothy Sherman Severin, ‘ “Hablillas son”: Lethal Gossip in Celestina’, in Two Spanish Masterpieces: A Celebration of the Life and Work of María Rosa Lida de Malkiel, ed. by Pablo Ancos & Ivy A. Corfĳis (New York, 2013), pp. 163–173. gossip and social standing in celestina: verbal venom 353

And what will Calisto, his [Semponio’s] master, say? What do? What think? He will conclude there’s some trickery in my going to and fro. [. . .] He will throw a thousand wild insults in my face. [. . .] I can just hear him saying: “You old whore, why have you accentuated my sufffering with your promises? False procuress, you have feet for all – but for me you have only tongue; for all – works, for me – only words ( . . . ) Why then, old traitress, did you offfer to help me? [. . .] Well, all you planned has produced nothing. Believe me, you are going to pay dearly for what you have done, And I? I must resign myself to utter despair?” (Act 4, p. 69)

With trouble brewing on both fronts – she must choose between proceeding or turning back – the imagined speech of Calisto serves as a timely catharsis and clears the bawd’s head, allowing her to come to a fĳinal decision: ‘I should rather offfend against Melibea’s father, Pleberio, than bitterly disappoint Calisto’ (Act 4, p. 69). What Celestina’s thinking allows us is to sense her own fear of what other might think of her, imagined gossip against her, gossip that would unmask her own motives for accepting Calisto′s commission.11 As we can appreciate, even this imaginary story Celestina makes up serves as a spur to decisive action, one that indeed propels Celestina’s plot headlong into its fatal unfolding. Celestina’s oral control of gossip, based on a deep knowledge of her society, makes her the classic privileged insider. Gossips must maintain an active mental dossier kept in reserve for specifĳic occasions when it will furnish them with needful resources in moments of challenges or personal crises. In Celestina, the bawd alone, with her experience, broad-based activities, and years of information gathering, can qualify as the privileged insider with a mental dossier superior in quantity and quality to that of all her peers and competitors. She compares herself to the bee as kindred gatherers and transformers, in her case, of stories. Here she is, telling Calisto her version of the conquest of Melibea’s opposition to her embassy that has taken place in Act 4:

The most praiseworthy characteristic of the mysterious profession of the bees – which prudent men should emulate – is that what they touch they directly transmute into something far superior to its previous state. I in like manner have conducted myself in the presence of the fĳierce and

11 A similar fear of gossip is more real when Celestina cautions Pármeno as they near Areúsa’s house in Act 7: ‘Slow your step. There is the door, you see. Let us enter quietly, lest her neighbors hear us’ (Act 7, p. 119). Though a public woman, Areúsa lives alone and is a likely target of malicious gossip from gawking neighbors. 354 snow

harsh words of Melibea. Now all her bitter violence I bring you trans- muted into honey, her wrath I bring you converted into placid calm, her hasty bristling-up into a gentle meekness. (Act 6, p. 97)

The reader, privy to both the original scene and this self-aggrandizing recasting of it, understands better now how the verbal venom of this go-between and its deliberate distortions can work to her advantage (there are no witnesses present to challenge her story) and enhance her reputation. Like the bee, she is performing a healing act, as though she were a surgeon.12 We can now eavesdrop as Celestina boasts to Sempronio about her insider knowledge. It is a fascinating story she tells, even if it seems mildly hyperbolic in order to impress Sempronio:

There are few virgins in this town that have opened up shop without my help in selling their fĳirst yarn. Whenever a baby girl is born around here, I have her name inscribed in my register so that I will know how many of them have escaped my net. [. . .] What other patrimony do I have? What other house or vineyard? Do you know of any source of income I have besides this business? Where else do my food and drink come from – my clothes and my shoes? Born in this city, brought up here, trying to keep up appearances, as everyone knows – am I not universally known? My son, if any man knows not my name or where my dwelling is – hold him to be a stranger in this land. (Act 3, p. 61)

Indeed, her insider’s knowledge is unique and even if her interlocutor, Sempronio, has neither the years nor the experience to question these declarations, we do learn from Celestina’s own lips that she is, publicly, an immensely proud crone, even if privately dwelling within shaky walls of self-confĳidence, as seen in her monologue. There are elements that show us that Celestina indeed has a fatal blind side: part of it is her overweening professional pride and the other part, caused by her impoverished state, a now insatiable greed. She will be incapable of foreseeing the threat that faces her as she refuses her two confederates their share in the booty she has received from Calisto.

12 Indeed, Celestina imagines herself as a surgeon. When fĳirst told by Sempronio of Calisto’s love sickness, she exclaims: ‘I am delighted with this news, as doctors are when people crack their skulls [. . .]’ (Act 1, p. 32). That later Calisto will crack open his skull as he falls from the ladder to his death, is but a single sample of the role that irony plays in the unfolding of the plot of Celestina. gossip and social standing in celestina: verbal venom 355

Celestina occasionally draws on past experience and brings it to bear on urgent matters at hand, always with a view to ensuring her reputation. In this, too, she wields potent gossipy skills that blend truth with generous amounts of invention. Calisto initially seems unaware of her existence or her usefulness to him, but Celestina tells others that she brought him into this world; having served as midwife to his mother, yet another ‘story’ which lacks witnesses (Act 4, p. 85). But when Pármeno opposes her taking on Calisto’s embassy and calls her, to her face, a ‘doddering old whore’, she is instantly armed and ready to invoke her pandering past with his mother, Claudina, so as to bring him down a peg: ‘Your mother, my boy, was every bit as much of an old whore as I am’ (Act 1, p. 43). This a hard and unvarnished truth, here used by the gossip to manipulate another to redress an insult to her authority: thus does she begin her campaign to reduce Pármeno to accepting her as a second mother (segunda madre). Celestina shows herself, here and on other occasions, to be capable of telling stories to her own disadvantage. Such self-gossip must also be successful in fending offf negative criticisms as Celestina manages to do when Elicia, the last of the sex workers remaining in her bordello, chides her for staying out so late in pursuit of custom. Celestina readily invokes the past – perhaps inflating her own role – in order to regain the upper hand:

If you don’t learn these things well when you are young, then your whole life long you will be like a beast – without a profession or an income. And when you have reached my age, then you will lament your idleness now. [. . .] I was certainly better at our work when I was your age than you are. That was way back in the days when your grandmother (God save her!) taught me the profession. At the end of a year I could do a better job than she could. (Act 7, p. 128)

So it is that the gossip’s power/authority derives also from her familiarity with the forebears of her associates and clients. However, only rarely does her accounting of the past ring true, since she is so profĳicient at ‘some made-up conversations, some imagined activities’ (Act 3, p. 61). Celestina’s success as a storyteller is measured in the abilities on display as she manipulates a discourse, pursuing a long-term strategy. Her interlocutors do not see through her tactics even if the careful reader does. When Celestina accepts the hundred gold coins from Calisto (Act 1) to work her suasions on the now-distant Melibea, she is capable, simultaneously, of working against him, for even as Calisto is upstairs counting out the gold coins, Celestina begins her weaning Pármeno away from his loyalty to his master. When Pármeno pleads 356 snow his reasons for remaining loyal, he declares: ‘he [Calisto] takes care of me, he does favors for me, and he treats me well and with consideration. Those things weld the bonds of afffection that bind servant and master together’ (Act 1, p. 41). These are part of Pármeno’s arguments but in the dialogue we have seen no proof of these claims. Celestina knows she must counter this claim – whether sincere or not – and does do with a clever but moderate initial approach to the young Pármeno:

Well, it seems to me that the best guidance I can recommend to you now is to stick by your present master and serve him well until the time comes when I can give you better advice. But I do not intend to imply that you are to serve him with blind loyalty. No indeed. It is dangerous to seek security and stability in association with fĳickle and shifty masters, for all masters are fĳickle and shifty these days. [. . .] [They] waste the substance of their servants with hollow and bootless promises. [. . .] They are incon- siderate, they hurt us and promptly forget what we do for them, and they refuse to reward us properly. (Act 1, p. 44, chapter author’s italics)

Celestina is successful in planting in Pármeno a healthy seed with this story (in the text it is more detailed) of masters as ‘fĳickle and shifty’ and stingy with us, we who serve them. She succeeds through indirection, wishing to wean Pármeno away from his ‘master’ but implying that he is a member of an anonymous and plural social group. Her ultimate aim is to forge a solid friendship, based on shared sexual interests, between the formerly incompatible Sempronio and Pármeno (a sticky process that takes her from Act 1 to Act 8 to bring to full fruition), and to create a space for herself as a reliable adviser. Ironically, the seed she plants will be irrigated almost immediately from an unexpected source: Calisto. Pármeno had claimed that his master treats him ‘well and with consideration’. However, in Act 2, when Calisto wishes to attend church to pray for Celestina’s success and his stable boy is not to be found, he demotes Pármeno to saddling his horse. This, for Pármeno, is such a demean- ing task that he reacts with venom in his comment to himself:

Poor me! I am sufffering now for being so loyal. Other people get ahead by being bad, but I – I lose because I try so hard to be good. [. . .] If I had believed Celestina with the wisdom of her six dozen years, Calisto would never have thus maltreated me. But this will forewarn me forever against him. [. . .] You may, sir, give your wealth away to go-betweens, but I can tell you that I intend to get my share of it. [. . .] Now that I have learned my lines, I shall accordingly play my part. (Act 2, pp. 58–59) gossip and social standing in celestina: verbal venom 357

Celestina’s gossip/story about the evils of ‘masters’ has quietly and efffĳiciently worked its intended charm and initiates the beginning of a sea change in Pármeno, a change she greatly desires, as it will advance her plan for a confederation (with Sempronio as a third confederate) to fleece Calisto of whatever they can. Even if Celestina does not specifĳically allude to Calisto, Pármeno clearly took her meaning and, when his master fails to treat him ‘well and with consideration’, the scales are tipped away from loyal service to Calisto and into Celestina’s camp as a future confederate against his master. Gossip is also reactive and, as we have seen, often pits a participant in a conversation against his or her interlocutor. Such a case occurs when Celestina, while maligning the absent Calisto, makes an uncharacteristic slip and could reasonably fear that her interlocutor – in this instance, it is Sempronio – might challenge her authority causing her a loss of prestige. Her slip?: She uses the diminutive to refer to Sempronio’s expected one-third share in the proceeds of the confederacy against Calisto, and terms it a ‘partezilla’ (‘some little share in all our reward’), and is faced with Sempronio’s displeasure: ‘some little share, Celestina? I am not sure I quite like the way you worded that’ (Act 5, pp. 91, italics as in original). She quickly recovers from this rare slip but not all that convincingly: ‘Oh, be still, silly! A little share or a big share – it doesn’t make any diffference to me. You can have as much as you want’ (Act 5, p. 91). This wording will not be erased from Sempronio’s memory and will only increase his greed and his impatience with a bawd he knows lives on deceit, but to whose plan he has committed himself. Celestina has unwittingly altered the original script of her story of equal enrichment for the three confederates and later, when the amount of the received rewards is increased signifĳicantly, this slip will emerge as a crucial plot element in the unfolding of the deaths of the fĳive protagonists of the work. This same enhancement technique was earlier used on Lucrecia who, when she intuits that Melibea is falling for Celestina’s blandishments and speaks in a negative aside heard not by her young mistress but by a Celestina who antici- pates its potential danger to her embassy. In yet another aside, also not heard by Melibea, Celestina relies on her knowledge of the young maid’s burgeoning sexuality, and improvises on the spot a story meant to curtail Lucrecia’s opposition:

Come over to my house and I will give you some bleach to make your hair look like gold. Say nothing to your mistress, and I will give you some powders to take that odor out of your mouth, which smells a bit. [. . .] And nobody in the whole kingdom can make as good a mouthwash as I can.’ (Act 4, p. 87) 358 snow

This offfer is within Celestina’s known trades and proves efffective. Celestina shows her skill in offfering words or ‘stories’ to quell situations of potential peril to her private goals, but she does, in both these illustrative instances (Sempronio and Lucrecia), successfully stifle foreseen opposition. Celestina’s conversation will often defend specifĳic values, whether they are truly hers or only part of her posturing, in order to enhance her prestige. The bawd risks nothing in telling stories about her earlier exploits to people too young to counter them as highly embellished. I will offfer a few examples invoked at key textual moments.

1. To Melibea she claims, most plausibly, taking full advantage of key adjectives (I have italicized them), that her reputation is unsullied:

When all is said and done, my lady, the gossip of the vulgar masses [against me] has never cracked the adamantine rock of truth. I am unique in this perfectly respectable business. Few are there in this town whom I have left dissatisfĳied. I fulfĳill my obligations to all. I do what I am commanded – as if I were provided with twenty hands and feet. (Act 4, p. 83)

These statements go unchallenged as Melibea now is more than willing to collaborate with the conniving Celestina, and will soon herself be lying to her own mother. Melibea has been verbally seduced by Celestina’s subtle defence of her innocence. This seduction adds to Celestina’s status and advances her plan to undermine the reputation of Pleberio and his family.

2. When Celestina has fĳinally managed to obtain from Melibea an agreement for a secret meeting with Calisto in Act 10, and her embassy is wind- ing down with great success, she then spins a fantasy tale to her paying client, a dramatic ‘story’ starring herself (self-gossip). Her sole intent is to gain the most generous reward for her successful embassy. This is oral manipulation pure and simple, as only the last two sentences are based in reality:

This whole day long, sir, I have worked on your afffair, and I have neglected other arrangements whereby I stood to profĳit greatly. Many have complained because I cared to gratify only you, sir. I have lost more income than you think. But I accept my losses gladly, since I now return successfully from my mission, bringing you many good words from Melibea. I have left her your obedient servant. (Act 11, p. 166) gossip and social standing in celestina: verbal venom 359

This tissue of lies, yet another example of her use of self-gossip, is constructed around ‘some imagined activities’ (Act 3, 61), but it passes as truth for Calisto, who magnanimously bestows on Celestina an immensely valuable gold chain he removes from his neck. Her fĳictional embellishments and his lordly generosity feed the growing greed of the two witnessing servants, both well aware of Celestina’s actual lack of other clients and other income. The reader, privy to both sides of the ‘stories’, can only await a nasty denouement that is building minute by minute.

3. To Pármeno and Sempronio, just minutes before they murder her, Celes- tina responds defensively to their growing fury as she stalls on the promise to share in three equal parts all that Calisto has given her. She sees her professional standing and authority as under attack and she lashes out with a defence that rings true but no longer is capable of convincing her confederates.

[. . .] old as I am, I am just as God made me – no worse than the rest of them. I live by practicing my profession, as other professionals do – and respectably, too. I seek no one out. Those who require me come to my house to request my aid; and if I leave my house, I do so at their bidding. (Act 12, p. 189)

Her arrogance here is, following her slip with the ‘some little share’ to Sempronio (Act 5), are a certain invitation to violence. Sempronio makes one fĳinal plea: ‘A third of the prize is not sufffĳicient, then?’ but Celestina’s stinging rejoinder, ‘I know nothings of thirds. Get out my house, you cutthroats!’ (Act 12, p. 190) unleashes the fĳinal storm and this gossip is silenced forever with thirty sword thrusts administered by these aptly named ‘cutthroats’. But though silenced, her woven words and practised deceits will have an enduring efffect on all that happens until the last words of the text fade into a fĳinal silence. The Gossip will always be familiar with the interlocutor’s personality and propensities. Celestina, who knows many people better than they know themselves, can deal with them subtly using norms and rules that govern such conversational exchanges. Celestina, as the product of an oral upbringing would know, not through any formal learning but gained through intuition, instinct, and experience, the classic form of story telling, involving (1) the identifĳica- tion of the third-party subjects, (2) the account of related events and (3) delivery of evaluative comments. One such story of the many in Celestina will serve as an example. The ‘story’, invented on the spot in order to establish her 360 snow authority over Pármeno, involves a non-existent sum of money that Celestina claims was left him by his father, Alberto, who is here (1) the third-party subject. The account (2) follows:

When you ran away, he was so overcome with the anxiety that comes from uncertainty that he actually died from grief. He really did. [. . .] Your father, as I was saying, took me into his confĳidence and, before God, charged me to seek you out and fĳind you and watch over you. Then he told me that when you were grown up and knew how to conduct yourself properly, I was to tell you of a great store of gold and silver which he had hidden away for you – an amount actually larger than Calisto’s fortune. (Act 1, pp. 43–44)

The evaluative comment (3), after such a daring exposition of an unlikely sum of gold and silver which is better than anything Calisto can offfer, follows:

Therefore, Pármeno, my son [. . .] you must really settle down somewhere. And where will you fĳind better protection than my loving heart and the fondness I have for you? Recall that your parents commended you to my keeping and counsel. As a real mother to you I must tell you frankly that they put a curse on you if you should ever fail to follow my advice. (Act 1, p. 44; chapter author’s italics)

This story is just one part of Celestina’s campaign to seduce Pármeno away from his loyalty to Calisto as quickly and as completely as possible, as the bawd knows that time is short. Money is one story-within-a-story. The other ‘stories’ in her multifaceted campaign are about sex (Areúsa) and about the values of the bond of friendship with others of his class (Sempronio). There is a full spectrum of stories told in the work which, at their extremes, have the straight reporting of news at one end and, at the other, a combination of ridicule, defamation, libel or slander. Of the fĳirst and least complicated kind, the Celestina text is full of straight forward reporting. One example comes from Act 13, when Sosia, Calisto’s ingenuous stable lad, reports back with news of the beheadings of Sempronio and Pármeno (which have taken place offf-stage):

Oh, sir, if you had seen them, your heart would have surely cracked with sorrow. One, senseless, had his brains all hanging out his head. The other’s arms were both broken, and his face was fearfully mangled. Both were bleeding, for they had, to escape the police, leaped from high windows. And thus, almost dead, they were decapitated. I think they felt no pain by then. (Act 13, p. 195) gossip and social standing in celestina: verbal venom 361

While not exactly a blow-by-blow account, it is highly personal and dramatic and Sosia has nothing to gain in the telling. Yet we suspect that other witnesses might report the scene from diffferent perspectives, as they would not be interested friends of the executed servants. At the other end of the spectrum we have excellent instances of gossip as libel and slander in the reaction of both Elicia and Areúsa to Sempronio’s praise of Melibea as ‘that gracious and lovely lady’ (Act 9, p. 143). Their venomous slander forms a textual counterweight to Calisto’s classic head to foot description of the perfect beloved in Act 1. Here is a snippet from Elicia’s shocked – and jealous – reaction to Sempronio’s praise:

[She] has only the sort of beauty you buy at a shop. As a matter of fact, on her very street, there are any number of girls God gave more beauty to than He gave her. If she looks pretty it’s because of all the fĳine ornaments and all the make-up she puts on. Dress up an old stick and it will look as pretty as she does. Honestly – and I’m not saying this just to compliment myself – honestly, I do think I am as lovely as your old Melibea. (Act 9, pp. 143, italics as in original)

Since all those who know Melibea class her as a beauty, the venom here is far from gratuitous and her verbal deluge tells us more about the gossiper than the gossiped about. However, Areúsa’s scathing words are even more venomous, claiming as she does to have seen Melibea without makeup:

She keeps herself fastened up the whole year long, with a lot of fĳilthy old cosmetics plastered all over her, and then when she does come out, she smears her face all over with honey and gall and a lot of other dirty old things I certainly do not care to mention here at the table. It’s money that makes those girls pretty and admired, it’s not the natural beauty of their bodies. Really, for a young girl, she has breasts as big as if she had three babies already, They look just like two big gourds, I never saw her belly; but judging from the rest of her it must be as flabby as an old woman’s of fĳifty. (Act 9, p. 144, italics as in the original)

This kind of vicious gossip (where could Areúsa have seen Melibea’s body?) is an indictment of the storyteller’s poisonous depiction and reveals a heartfelt social spite, but to Areúsa’s detriment, not to Melibea’s. This hurtful jealousy, so deeply corrosive,13 will spur these two slanderers to initiate actions that will

13 In this vein, when Areúsa carps: ‘Calisto is making a big mistake in giving up a lot of other girls he could have got easier and would have given a better time than her [. . .]’ (Act 9, 362 snow lead to the death of both of the lovers. When Areúsa and Elicia hear of the deaths of Celestina, Sempronio, and Pármeno, all three for serving Calisto in his pursuit of Melibea, they will conspire to extract exact information from the stable lad, Sosia (whom Elicia knows), so as to set into action a plan to end the trysts of the despised lovers. Hearers privy to such verbal venom assume that where there is smoke, there surely is fĳire; they are tempted to fĳind in any rumour or small scrap of gossip a smidgeon of truth, even if the rumour is known to be generally unreliable. Such a case occurs when Elicia tells Sosia that Areúsa wants to meet him. The stable lad assumes that this much-praised prostitute and former paramour of Pármeno could now truly be interested in him as a replacement lover. In fact, the ‘stories’ Areúsa feeds him (Act 17) confĳirm his delusions (and Elicia, hidden behind a curtain, is a silent aural witness to a deceitful performance well worthy of Celestina). Areúsa with her seductive wiles gets Sosia to reveal the secret she is after, and he returns home, making the rumour about her attraction to him even greater in his retelling of the encounter to his companion, Tristán:

You must know that because of the satisfactory information that she [Areúsa] had about me she has fallen in love with me. [. . .] She begged me to visit her constantly, for she intended to enjoy my love for some time to come. (Act 19, p. 232)

Tristán, the older and wiser of the pair, disabuses the poor stable boy of his dream and guesses accurately the harsh reality of what has transpired and why:

This woman is, as you have yourself told me, a common whore. Her whole attitude towards you was part of a trick, I feel pretty sure. I do not think her friendliness was genuine. [. . .] Consider this and ponder whether she might not be attempting to wheedle out of you come inkling about the matter that is here afoot so as to produce a fĳight between Calisto and Pleberio – simply from envy of the pleasure that Melibea is now experi- encing. (Act 19, pp. 232–233)

The truth hits Sosia hard. It is, alas, too late: Areúsa and Elicia’s plan for vengeance is already in motion and, within an hour or more, Calisto will fall to his death this very night. Calisto’s fall will inspire the fall of Melibea before her

p. 144, italics as in original). It seems obvious that she refers – however obliquely – to herself, and is jealous and offfended that it is Melibea who has captured Calisto’s interest. It makes the vengeance she seeks later against the lovers deeply and personally motivated. gossip and social standing in celestina: verbal venom 363 father’s eyes, perhaps only an hour later. Thus, when the climax of the events that storytelling had set in motion occurs, it comes in a series of fateful falls that occur in rapid succession (Acts 19 and 20).14 In Celestina, the exacerbation of gossip, of rumours, expanding as it were in concentric circles, is especially prominent in cases of accusations of criminal activity or of magic and witchcraft, an early modern European phenomenon aired in the chapter on demonology by Liv Willumsen. We will see this with the Gala Pellicer essay as well, with its gossip about spells and witchcraft. The ever-widening ripples of rumour afffect both of the prostitutes, the spell- casters and witches. Witchcraft in Celestina surfaces in the stories about Claudina, Pármeno’s mother – who was made to sufffer in the town square after being found guilty of it (Act 7, p. 117). Magic applies to Celestina, who in Act 3 invokes Pluto in casting a spell, the god of the underworld, to aid her in the conquest of Melibea. Celestina has previously, for her working with charms and spells, ‘been covered with honey and feathers’ (Act 2, p. 56) three times. Areúsa’s mother,15 Elicia’s grandmother,16 and Celestina’s younger rivals (‘the novices in my trade’ [Act 5, p. 90]) may not all be as successful as Celestina has been with her involvements in magic. If indeed Celestina can lay claim to being best of this lot of sister bordello keepers, it is not because she tells us so, but rather it reflects what we are privileged to hear as she defĳines herself through her many social roles with her confederates, conspirators, and victims, and through what others tell us in their gossip about her. Gossip fluctuates between public and private (or intimate) information. In both instances, it often dissolves the line separating facts from pure hearsay, and thus invokes issues of ethics in the telling of such stories. Not all untruths are gossip; however, the person hearing the gossip is often incapable of separating truth from fĳiction or may be unaware that they are not the same. The lies invented by Melibea for her parents, while they protect her from discovery of her newly-adopted sexually-active persona, are also questionable ethically since they defraud her doting parents. Indeed, there are two occasions when

14 We remember that Celestina also ‘falls’ under the sword wielded by Sempronio and that both Sempronio and Pármeno jump (fall) from Celestina’s window to the ground below and are rendered helpless by the night watch who immediately immobilize them. The fĳive principals, therefore, all sufffer falls with death as a result. 15 Areúsa calls her mother a ‘pastelera’ (‘Pastry seller’, Act 15, p. 212) which is a euphemism in this case for a woman involved in selling the wares of her body. 16 Celestina claims that it was in fact Elicia’s grandmother from whom she learned so much about the profession and whose wisdom, within the space of a year, she had surpassed (Act 7, p. 128). 364 snow

Melibea and Celestina’s invented ‘stories’ allow the action to rush headlong to the tragic fĳinale. The fĳirst occurs when Alisa, the now-suspicious mother, returning home in Act 10, fĳinds Celestina again at Melibea’s side, Lucrecia attending. Celestina tells Alisa a plausible lie as her motive for a second visit: ‘I was short a little thread yesterday to make up the requested weight, and, so to keep my word, I have come today to make it good’ (Act 10, p. 164). When Celestina departs, Melibea tells her mother a diffferent ‘story’ but no less a lie: ‘She [Celestina] wished to sell me some cosmetics – some corrosive sublimate (solimán)’ and recovers her peace of mind when Alisa replies, believing her daughter: ‘I thought it was something diffferent from what the old thing said’ (Act 10, p. 164). Alisa is incapable of maligning her own daughter and Melibea’s untruth is accepted as truth and the unwitting mother becomes an accomplice in her daughter’s eventual tragedy. The second occasion is when Melibea’s parents are awakened after midnight by strange noises (Calisto and his servants departing) and Pleberio asks: ‘What footfalls are those?’ and Melibea invents this story/lie: ‘Sir, it is Lucrecia, who has gone for a pitcher of water for me, my thirst being great’ (Act 12, pp. 182– 183). Melibea, in telling these plausible but false ‘stories’, becomes a traitorous fĳifth column in her own house.

Gossip and Power

Gossip in Celestina is also very much about attaining and wielding power. We have seen that Celestina holds an advantage over many others owing to her relations with their older family members. A gossip whose knowledge of kinship relations makes that a part of the mental dossier built up over long years of experience and confers a form of power that helps to sustain her authority. Celestina knew Elicia’s grandmother, Calisto’s mother (and father, one assumes), is still familiar with both of Melibea’s parents and claimed (to Sempronio) that she and Alisa were once on rather good terms:

Why they were my neighbors for four years. We used to visit back and forth. Oh, we used to have good times together day and night, laughing and talking. Melibea’s mother knows me better than she knows her own hands’ (Act 6, p. 108)

She is blatantly embroidering the truth to impress Calisto, since we know that, from an earlier scene, Alisa was hard put to remember Celestina at all and fĳinally does remember her as a woman of limited economic means: ‘She must gossip and social standing in celestina: verbal venom 365 have dropped in to ask me for something. Tell her she may come up’ (Act 4, p. 72). Alisa’s version would contradict Celestina’s, but what could Calisto know about it? So she once again gets her gossip accepted as gospel. Celestina knows perfectly several ways to counterpoint truth with fĳiction and thus build her personal advantage, social standing, influence, and yes, power. A successful gossip knows, too, the power of persuasion that resides in the presentation of ‘stories’ as mini-dramas, using various voices. Celestina, in her zeal to convince Pármeno to join her confederation against Calisto, promises the virgin lad a sexual liaison with the desirable Areúsa. In order to make it more than her words, Celestina imagines and improvises a ‘story’ of two young lads discussing the previous evening’s revelries, recreating in her drama the male voices so as to heighten the sexual tension:

And there is nothing more pleasurable than to enjoy sensual plea- sures and to recount them and communicate them to friends: ‘I did this – she said that – we did these delightful things – I took her in this fashion – kissed her this way – she bit me like this – this is the way I hugged her – she came close to me in this wise. [. . .] What kisses! [. . .]’. (Act I, pp. 48–49)

What this elaborate and dramatic tale is aimed at is fantasizing for Pármeno what she is promising of sex with Areúsa and the after-sex rehashing of it, this drawing him deeper into her plan for confederation. This verbal anticipation is not only extremely efffective but it also becomes a sexual reality in Act 7, re-enacted verbally by Pármeno and Sempronio in Act 8, almost exactly as Celestina’s ‘story’ had foretold. Areúsa, too, adopts a dramatic vocal posture as she defends serving girls who are at the mercy of rich ladies, replicating their hated but communal voices in her unsparing portrayal of their verbal cruelty:

They give her a hundred lashes and throw her out with her skirts about her ears, saying, ‘Get going, you thief and whore [. . .].’ ‘What have you been doing, you sly slut?’ ‘Why did you eat this, greedygut?’ ‘Is that the way to wash a pan, pig?’ ‘What became of the towel, thief?’ (Act 9, p. 149)17

17 There is a strikingly similar example offfered in the essay by Elizabeth Horodowich (in this volume) from a sixteenth-century document from Venice. 366 snow

In essence, what Areúsa is defending is a quite modern notion, the idea of the equality of all, which she explicitly afffĳirms with vexation uppermost in her voice:

In the fĳinal analysis we are all children of Adam and Eve, I say, let everyone attempt to be good and not think they can prove their virtue by talking about the nobility of their ancestors. That’s what I say’. (Act 9, p. 145, italics as in original)

Indeed, in Celestina, Calisto and Melibea, although well-born and privileged, are equipped with the morals of the lower classes. They seem to the reader no better or worse than the rest. This egalitarian stripe at the base of Celestina is very old in Christian lore and is exemplifĳied in the medieval dances of death, where the artifĳicial hierarchies endemic to society become meaningless. Power is also conferred by gossip. Others gossiping about a gossip feed into that power, undergirding the reputation of the person they wish either to praise or to harm, as we have seen. When Pármeno speaks forcefully against Celestina in the famed ‘Old Whore/Puta vieja’ speech (Act 1, pp. 33–34), the harm he means to convey in this true gossip in order to avert the meeting of Calisto with this old whore only makes the prospect of the meeting more exciting for Calisto, and the ‘true story’ ironically backfĳires on the teller. Pármeno’s gossip was intended to underscore his loyalty through what he here offfers as sound advice to Calisto. However, unlike Celestina, Pármeno does not know as well as she does the propensities of his interlocutor, who here thrills at this confĳirma- tion of Celestina’s fame in arranging illicit afffairs in the town. Pármeno with his negative and fulsome diatribe contributes every bit as much as Sempronio′s glowing description of Celestina’s persuasive powers in convincing Calisto that future dealings with Celestina will prove a sound investment and provide a ‘cure’ for his lovesickness, or lust. What A tells B, A may well later tell C and, if we are fortunate to have both accounts, we can evaluate the use made of the gossip as modifĳied for the second interlocutor. The narration of Celestina’s long and difffĳicult fĳirst conversation with Melibea, to give a fĳine example, with its high and low points (Act 4) is re-told in theatrical style by Celestina to Calisto, with signifĳicant exaggerations (self-gossip) of her role in it (Act 6; the servants listening in, adding gossipy asides). A second example follows as Celestina, needing Pármeno’s complete support of the confederation, brings him together with the desirable Areúsa in Act 7 but not before extracting from him the promise of his agreeing to uphold the confederacy against Calisto. We recall now that Celestina had implied gossip and social standing in celestina: verbal venom 367 she would be his new master one day, in Act 1 (quoted above). The memory of this long night of lovemaking stage-managed by Celestina, is not only rehashed orally by Pármeno and, as his interlocutor, Sempronio (Act 8) but is also reviewed later by Areúsa in Act 17, after Celestina has been murdered. She confesses to Elicia, who has just overheard her seduction of the foolish Sosia, that perhaps ‘it was a good thing for us that Celestina died, after all’ (Act 17, p. 221). But in praising herself for the easy triumph over Sosia she refers back to the events of Act 7, saying to Elicia: ‘You see, cousin, my ways are diffferent from Celestina’s – and so she always thought I was a fool. But I wanted to act like one’ (Act 17, p. 225, chapter author’s italics). Celestina played Areúsa for a ‘fool’ and Areúsa permitted such treatment in Act 7. In these oral exchanges, we are given alternate perspectives to conversations and deeds that transpired earlier. But Areúsa was, even then, primed to become, in efffect, a new but diffferent kind of Celestina with more and subtler arts of seduction. These cases of re-presentation of oral enactments and outcomes help us to see two things clearly about gossip in Celestina. The fĳirst is that double scenes provide us with diffferent contexts for (1) the original performance of the words and (2) the later recasting of those words. We get diffferent interpretations when the teller is faced with a new audience. The second is the proof that gossip is a fluid reality. It can be transformed in the retellings. Gossip is as valuable to the one who speaks it as to the one who hears it. We are fortunate to have in the Celestina text the opportunity to see not just moments of speech as recorded in legal documents but a body of (almost) continuous speech in the oral performances that are linked in an organic chain of cause and efffect. We are not ‘listening’ to transcriptions of speech recorded without the non-verbal cues that lend them extra meaning, but following a series of interlocking conversations that, especially when read aloud, reveal the speech of late fĳifteenth- century Spain, speech which involve occasional references to non-verbal cues, tones of voice, anger, humility, pride, laughter, wine and food being consumed, movement of speakers, and so much more.

Final Reflections

In Celestina, the eponymous bawd enters the story early – in Act 1 – and leaves it – in Act 12 – when there are yet nine acts to follow.18 Yet, we can sense early

18 In the original 16-act Comedia, there are only four acts that separate the deaths of Celestina, Sempronio and Pármeno, the servants of Lust, and the end of the work: Pleberio’s lament over his daughter′s broken body. The interpolated fĳive acts in the 21-act 368 snow on that the many ‘stories’ (‘made-up conversations . . . imagined activities’ [Act 3, p. 61]) that are told by her and about her are at the very heart of the work. There is the doing and the undoing of the major plot mechanisms to be considered. In the ‘doing’ Celestina sees as fundamental to the success of the commission Calisto assigns her the complicity of his two servants and nothing will make her feel more secure than to have them as confederates, severing the social bond of master-and-servant. Ironically, the formation of this very confederation will result in their ‘undoing’, placing a fĳinal seal on the fate of all three, as it eventually will on the fate of the two protagonist-lovers. As the three confederates work against Calisto (and to an extent, against each other), Melibea will work against her own parents, with a trusted maid-companion, Lucrecia, as a willing accomplice in every step she takes to her downfall. Both commit an unprepared-for treason of the good name of the family and the household, each one of them brought to that brink by Celestina’s ‘stories’. We remember that stories do not end, because even when the protagonists are dead, their actions still have an impact on the living. Many actions of minor characters – Elicia, Areúsa, and Lucrecia – are controlled by Celestina; they do her bidding out of fear of and respect for her reputation and thus acknowledge a certain dependence on her vaunted experience. Her stories, almost all of them tissues of half-truths and gossip, and her authority in all matters pertaining to her professions (see note 4) allow her a wide berth in her constant movement about the town and involvement in its more sordid afffairs. Although Pleberio, Alisa, and Celestina have all been town elders for years – both the antagonists Celestina and Pleberio admit to being sixty years old – only Celestina is an accomplished gossip or storyteller, and a master one at that. Her lifeblood is her oral mastery, learned in the street and from a series of instructors (Elicia’s grandmother, Pármeno’s mother). Age and the variety of her professions and experiences favour her authority and standing and she is jealous of all the useful knowledge that she has acquired and keeps at the ready in her vast mental dossier. In all national literatures there have been successful go-betweens and talented bawds aplenty. I suspect that none matches Celestina as the consum- mate gossip. Her roles are many but they revolve around her ability to outwit and outmanoeuvre one and all with her storytelling and her nonpareil gifts in the art of persuasion. Surprising it is, therefore, to fĳind that in the quantity of

version, retitled Tragicomedia, indeed lengthen by one month the time the lovers have to continue their torrid afffair, but do not lessen in any way the concatenation of events initi- ated by Celestina. gossip and social standing in celestina: verbal venom 369 gossip told about her, no one singles out this gift of gab (labia in Spanish) as one of her truly singular traits. It is assumed naturally by all that she is articulate and persuasive. But so expert is she at her storytelling, her manipulation of the social dossier of her interlocutor, so very careful not to reveal much about herself, that no one could penetrate with ease her hidden motives, motives which, while vivid and obvious to the eavesdropping reader, remain opaque to her fellow townspeople. We eavesdrop on her oral performances simultaneously with the other actors in the minute-to-minute drama Celestina is creating as she cannily and efffortlessly plays them each against the other, once she has readily accepted Calisto’s mission and made her own mission one of pure personal profĳit. The gossip must be, therefore, deeply competent in the culture in order to manipulate it almost at will. There are – as is to be expected – varying degrees of competence. In Celestina, it is the bawd herself who, being the oldest and closest to the heartbeat of the town, who has best absorbed and utilized its culture to further her own professional interests and economy over her many careers and, at the same time, to enhance her standing among her closest associates and clients. She has fostered the much younger but intuitive and talented Areúsa in utilizing well-thought-out gossip for gaining personal advantage over others. Lesser characters do gossip and tell stories, trustworthy or not, but with much less fĳinesse and manipulative skills than do these two professional women, one young and beginning to establish herself, the other aged and closed down by forces that should not have been beyond her control but for which she alone is nevertheless accountable. Although Celestina ends in what we might call a wasteland of lost hopes, we do witness the rising star of Areúsa beginning to form a new manner of wielding and manipulating gossip for the future. It was overweening pride in her own superior abilities that blindsided Celestina to the potential of harm from her cowardly confederates when denied their due. We can only guess as to the ‘could have been’ after the curtain rings down on Pleberio’s work-ending peroration as he sees stretched out before him his own personal wasteland. However, the ‘what-has-been’ in Celestina is a warning to us all, to the readers of this tragic and senseless series of falls from grace. Lies, insincerity, half-truths, made-up stories about imagined activities, false promises, lip service, and play- acting all are crucially involved in the core of gossip that features Celestina in the active and tireless pursuit of profĳit and gain in an immoral society adrift in a sea of words, words, words. Sadly, none, but none, of her ‘stories’ carries the conviction of the good intentions floating on the surface of them. So it is that when we readers turn the last page of this human drama and perceive the 370 snow despairing gloom it leaves in its wake, its words – empty but, paradoxically, full of didactic meaning – will carry a strong warning. The kind of storytelling that doubles as gossip is a social malignancy and a powerfully destructive social force. It is, in fact, as Manuel Puig believed, absorbing storytelling since the work is as alive and absorbing now as it was over half a century ago. The work carries its own warning about storytelling and gossip as frail in reality as it was strong in the fĳiction itself. If truth can be perverted by words, as gossip does in Celestina, we must be forearmed against falling into the too easy acceptance of what appears as true, by judging the sources rightly.19 We would do well, as the drama of Celestina and her interlocutors warns us, to open our ears and our minds to the opaque nature of words, since they can lead, if we give them leave, to the darkness of despair. Celestina is one of the earliest Spanish works of fĳiction which gives voices to the feminine underclass – long before the picaresque fĳictions that follow a century later – allowing us to ‘hear’ of their dreams, desires, and preoccupations, to learn of their social marginalization, and their ambitions of a future that will improve upon the past. Yes, the fĳiction, even if it does represent ‘possible’ voices, is deeply rooted in oral communication, in which the telling of ‘stories’ (gossip) is a key feature of the real problems that serious students of language faced in the fĳifteenth century. The gossip as we have been able to dissect the fĳigure of Celestina is a strong feature of the culture of late medieval or early modern Spain. Celestina becomes the dominant character instead of the lover protagonists of the original title, Calisto and Melibea. The work exposes the risks of an oral language which is perverted by unfathomed mixtures of truth and lies. We, the readers, are given the opportunities to overhear this gossip as well as the constant distortions not only of the original gossip but its reflections in later versions of the ‘stories’. In this chapter, a great deal of space has been devoted to a portrayal of orality. In that space, we have been able to make important suggestions about how oral and written languages can collaborate in replicating a social situation that

19 Melibea, remember, out of her own interests, allows herself to recognize Celestina’s false- ness but allows it to pass for truth when she says to the bawd: ‘You afffĳirm your innocence so much that you are beginning to make me believe that you may very well be without blame in the matter’ (Act 4, p. 84). It is Melibea who, knowing the truth, chooses to ignore it, opening wide the door for the success of Celestina’s mission. Melibea was, in fact, forearmed, but chose of her own free will to enter the trap set for her with her eyes wide open, aware that this may be her only path to realize the full fruit of a so recently-awakened sensual self. gossip and social standing in celestina: verbal venom 371 was presented orally in public readings but read silently by the better educated. In this particular exposition, language as gossip has been inextricably linked to a mastery of cultural competence that is mined by Celestina’s author or authors (there being no narrator) in order to create an original go-between, not an archetype as we have in other classical texts but, rather, one who creates, in her weaving of stories (gossip), the very sequence of plot twists and turns on which her own life and fate – and the lives and fates of others – depend.

Prayer, Teaching, and Religious Talk

⸪

CHAPTER 13 Oral Rites: Prayer and Talk in Early Modern France

Virginia Reinburg

The written word claimed an increasingly large presence in early modern French culture, thanks to expanding literacy, schooling, and book production. Yet the oral and the written cannot be understood in isolation from one another. This was still a face-to-face world, ruled in large measure by oral performance and personal presence. From paying taxes to making contracts, all manner of business was conducted in person – yet with a written component. This custom endured for centuries, not only because rates of literacy were still low, but because personal presence combined with writing was normally required to authorize a signifĳicant act. Historians have long recognized the entanglements of orality and literacy peculiar to the early modern period. Moving away from the stark dichotomy between orality and literacy proposed by Walter Ong and others, Roger Chartier explored the links and fluid relationships between ‘speech and writings’, and further, ‘between written texts and actions’.1 He noted that one form of expression coiled back on another: ‘From the spoken word to the written text, from the written word to the act, from printed matter back to the spoken word’.2 In sum, ‘the written word lies at the very heart of the most concrete and the most “oralized” forms of traditional cultures’.3 Nicole Lemaître provided a concrete example of how oral and written spiralled together in her study of the Terrade family, three generations of peasants and notaries in rural Limousin.4 Notaries Pierre and Michel Terrade visited homes, taverns, and cemeteries, helping villagers draw up contracts, wills, and letters. There they transferred speech to text, under the notary’s seal. At home, the Terrades kept a cofffer stufffed with family records, papers, recipes, and lore, written in a combination of French, Latin, and Limousin. Some of their collected ‘writings’ (écritures) seem marked

1 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London, 1982); and Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. L. Cochrane (Princeton, NJ, 1987), pp. 5–6. 2 Chartier, Cultural Uses of Print, p. 6. 3 Chartier, Cultural Uses of Print, p. 6. 4 Nicole Lemaître, Le Scribe et le mage: Notaires et société rurale en Bas-Limousin aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Ussel, 2000).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004291829_015 376 Reinburg by oral use, while others appear to have been extracted from books. But many show signs of both orality and literacy. For example, healing remedies for horses could have been transcribed from memorized oral formulas, or alterna- tively copied from books. The Terrades worked and lived in a complex mixture of languages, talk, and text. Prayer offfers a perfect example of an early modern activity in which the oral and the written intertwined. In this chapter I explore the practice of prayer in the French Catholic world of the fĳifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as represented in manuscript and printed books of hours.5 The ‘best seller’ of the period c. 1450–1520, but still in use throughout the sixteenth century, the book of hours was the laity’s prayer book. I begin with a discussion of books of hours, and suggest some ways to understand the prayers inscribed in them. Marcel Mauss’s defĳinition of prayer as an ‘oral rite’ captures the essential nature of prayer in the early modern Catholic world.6 But I will expand the notion of ‘oral’ in Mauss’s defĳinition to the broader category of ‘speech’. More specifĳically, I will show that prayer was fundamentally speech, or talking to God, the Virgin Mary, and the saints. Such speech built relationships between the persons praying and those they addressed. Orality entails some degree of ‘aloudness’, or vocalization. But the same is not true of speech. As I will show, all prayer was speech, whether or not a devotee pronounced the words aloud. I conclude the chapter with a consideration of the entanglement of the oral and the written in the book of hours.

The Book of Hours and Practices of Prayer

The book of hours was the era’s best-selling book.7 Although also owned by priests, monks, and nuns, it was principally the prayer book of the laity. But the book of hours had multiple uses. It often served as a primer for literacy and a family record book. For many owners, the book of hours combined prayer book with art object, reference work, album, and archive. For royal, noble, bourgeois, and artisan families, it was a prized possession signifying their wealth and social position. In the sixteenth century, the book of hours was often the

5 For further discussion of both the book of hours and prayer, see Virginia Reinburg, French Books of Hours: Making an Archive of Prayer, c. 1400–1600 (Cambridge, 2012). 6 Marcel Mauss, ‘La Prière et les rites oraux’, Oeuvres, ed. by V. Karady (Paris, 1968–69), 1, pp. 355–524. 7 See Reinburg, French Books of Hours, chap. 1. Oral Rites: Prayer and Talk in Early Modern France 377 only book possessed by those who owned books.8 It became a bestseller in the second half of the fĳifteenth century, and continued to be the most commonly owned book of any kind into the fĳirst decades of the sixteenth century. Although the book of hours included liturgical texts, no ecclesiastical institution or offfĳicial controlled it. Rather, many people fashioned the book of hours: scribes, artists, printers, booksellers, devotional writers, and above all, the books’ lay owners and readers. The books’ contents were conventional – calendars, Latin offfĳices and litanies, Latin and vernacular prayers, and images. Scribes, printers, artists, and booksellers produced the standard texts and images in books of hours, working from exemplars available in their workshops. But what was inside the books varied considerably by region, scribe, and publisher. Moreover, owners chose their own books – both new and used – from booksellers’ wares, and altered inherited books. They signed their names in their books, and sometimes inscribed family records. They stitched together manuscript quires with print, sewed pilgrim badges onto end pages, added prayers to patron saints, and rebound their books. For all these reasons, each owned book was a deliberately created object. And each was unique: fabricated not only by book artisans and publishers, but also by the owners themselves, who chose and remade their books, leaving their traces scattered throughout. Because the book of hours was crafted by so many hands, it changed in concert with larger cultural, religious, and social transformations. Of special importance to questions of orality and literacy were the era’s shifts in linguistic practice.9 As French gradually began to displace Latin and the regional vernaculars, the book of hours evolved from a collection of primarily Latin texts into a Latin-French hybrid. Many of the book’s standard texts (liturgical offfĳices and sufffrages of the saints, for example) remained in Latin. But French gained ground. (Regional languages rarely appeared in books of hours.) Manuscripts from the mid-fĳifteenth century and later usually included French texts, and their number expanded as the decades wore on. In the era of print, French steadily gained more space in books of hours, and the book eventually evolved into a Latin-French hybrid. By the early sixteenth century, publishers, authors, and the reading public had transformed the book of hours into a work legible to francophone readers with a bit of facility in Latin.

8 See Albert Labarre, Le Livre dans la vie amiénoise du seizième siècle: l’enseignement des inven- taires après décès, 1503–1576 (Paris, 1971), pp. 164–177. 9 On this linguistic transformation see Paul Cohen, ‘Courtly French, Learned Latin, and Peasant Patois: The Making of a National Language in Early Modern France’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 2001. 378 Reinburg

The book of hours was a devotional guide, providing a script that owners could follow as they read and recited prayers. But because owners so often crafted their own books, the book of hours might also be fairly described as an archive of prayers that owners collected, memorized, and transcribed. These two facets of the book of hours reveal the dynamic interaction between the spoken and the written word that was at the heart of the practice of prayer. But what was prayer? A century ago Marcel Mauss proposed a useful approach. Prayer is ‘an oral religious rite bearing directly on sacred things’, he wrote.10 Moreover, prayer is fundamentally collective: ‘a fragment of a religion, [. . .] the product of the accumulated efffort of people and generations’.11 Mauss’s notion of prayer as ‘an oral rite’ was surprising in its day. He wrote partly in response to Christian spiritual writers for whom prayer a simple expression of religious belief. He also efffectively highlighted the collective dimensions of prayer in contrast to the personal experience of a transcendent reality so compellingly imagined by William James.12 Beyond that, Mauss argued against ethnologists and folklorists, for whom most prayer was a rote performance or magical incantation. Prayer was not the mechanical enactment of a formula dictated by a religious authority. Rather, Mauss insisted, prayer was both individual expression and collective creation. It engaged the whole person – mind and spirit, as well as body. It was a rite, an act ‘accomplished according to a form adopted by a collectivity or by a religious authority’.13 But prayer was an oral rite, because words were essential to every human efffort to communicate with ‘sacred beings’. Mauss’s defĳinition of prayer raises three key points about prayer as a human activity: it is oral, it is a rite, and it is necessarily collective. His approach suits very well the prayers of early modern Catholics. For in this world prayer was both discourse and act, the goal of which was to sustain a relationship with God, the Virgin Mary, or a saint. The relationships were reciprocal. Devotees asked for assistance, and in exchange offfered praise, tribute, and donations. In return, they hoped to be rewarded with help ‘in this life’ and salvation in the life to come. All gestures and words of prayer were collectively created, albeit often – not always – individually expressed. Woven into the language and rites of prayer were contemporary understandings about social relations,

10 Mauss, ‘La Prière et les rites oraux’, p. 414. 11 Mauss, ‘La Prière et les rites oraux’, p. 377. 12 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York, 1902). 13 Mauss, ‘La Prière et les rites oraux’, p. 404. Oral Rites: Prayer and Talk in Early Modern France 379 power and authority, the natural and supernatural worlds, and the bonds linking human beings to God. By specifying prayer as an oral rite, Mauss also signalled the performative dimension of prayer. For observers of medieval and early modern cultures, this is a welcome reminder: prayer was a verbal act – speech – and not just reading material. Yet fĳinding the speech lurking behind the texts that historians require for sources is a delicate business. Here we can profĳitably borrow from M.M. Bakhtin’s philosophy of language.14 For Bakhtin, speech, language, and literature were social and dialogic. Speech is inherently dialogic, he wrote: ‘any speaker is himself a respondent to a greater or lesser degree. He is not, after all, the fĳirst speaker, the one who disturbs the eternal silence of the universe’.15 ‘Our speech, that is, all our utterances (including creative works), is fĳilled with others’ words’: quotations, repetitions, questions, responses, and rejoinders.16 Yet it is not only speech that is dialogic, but language itself. Language ‘lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else’s’.17 For Bakhtin, literature is also full of speech, rendering it a patchwork quilt crafted from the utterances of many diffferent voices. Texts are ‘heteroglossic’, Bakhtin argued in a memorable formulation.18 Bakhtin wrote primarily about the novel, although he suggested that sci- entifĳic papers, offfĳicial proclamations, and other literary genres were also heteroglossic. In the following section, I extend to prayer Bakhtin’s insights that speech and text are tightly bound together, and that texts are full of half- concealed voices. Some texts in books of hours savour more strongly of oral practice and performance than others. But all written prayers were implicitly speech, whether or not a reader pronounced the words aloud.

14 See M.M. Bakhtin, ‘The Problem of Speech Genres’, in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. by C. Emerson & M. Holquist, trans. V. McGee (Austin, TX, 1993), pp. 60–102; ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin, TX, 1981), pp. 259–422; and Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN, 1984). 15 Bakhtin, ‘Problem of Speech Genres’, p. 69. 16 Bakhtin, ‘Problem of Speech Genres’, p. 89. 17 Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, p. 293. 18 See Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’. 380 Reinburg

Prayer as Speech

The book of hours is full of talk. To begin with, many texts in books of hours are psalms. And in the psalms, prayer is verbal communication between a human being and God. The psalmist sometimes speaks directly to God. Often he recounts that he spoke to God and God replied. An example is the opening psalm of the offfĳice of the dead, found in every book of hours: ‘Dilexi quon- iam exaudiet Dominus vocem orationis meae’ [I have loved because the Lord will hear the voice of my prayer].19 Readers of books of hours could easily fĳind assurance that God listened and responded to those who addressed him. For example this prayer, stitched together from biblical verses, was designed for ‘anyone in some trouble or adversity’: ‘Amen amen dico vobis quitquid orantes pecieritis [sic] credite qui accipietis et fĳiet vobis. Clamaverunt iusti et dominus exaudivit eos et ex omnibus tribulationibus eorum liberavit eos’ [Amen, amen, I say to you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. When the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears them, and delivers them out of all their troubles].20 Like many of the prayers in books of hours, this is a textual mélange. The fĳirst sentence is a paraphrase of a verse from Mark’s Gospel (11:24) in which Jesus speaks to his disciples, and the second is Psalm 34:17. But the prayer’s message is clear: God will answer those who speak to him, and grant their requests. There are additional signs in books of hours that to pray was to speak to God, the Virgin Mary, angels, and saints. Rubrics instructed readers when and how ‘to say’ particular prayers. ‘Oraison a dire [. . .] a la doulce vierge marie’ [Prayer to say . . . to the sweet Virgin Mary].21 ‘Cy apres ensuyuent aucunes deuotes oraisons à dire tous les matins’ [The following are some devout prayers to say every morning].22 Paul Saenger pointed out that such rubrics refer to the custom of reading aloud, in an era when silent reading was increasingly

19 Ps. 114.1 (Vulgate). 20 Library of Congress (Washington, DC) [hereafter LC], MS 51, fol. 131r (book of hours, use of Rome, late fĳifteenth or early sixteenth century; Flanders). 21 Bibliothèque Nationale de France [hereafter BNF], MS Lat 14828, fol. 2r (book of hours, use of Rome, fĳifteenth century with later additions; Paris region and the Loire valley). 22 Heures en Françoys & Latin à l’usaige de Romme (Lyon [printed by Macé Bonhomme for Guillaume Rouille], 1549), fol. T1r. Oral Rites: Prayer and Talk in Early Modern France 381 common.23 But it is important to add that in these rubrics ‘say [this prayer]’ is synonymous with ‘pray’. Prayer was a dialogue. More specifĳically: in the activity of prayer, the devotee’s speech forms part of a dialogue or verbal exchange with God or a saint. I do not wish to raise a theological argument here, although many late medieval and early modern writers – such as Jean Gerson (1363–1429) and Erasmus (1466–1536) – termed prayer a dialogue between human beings and God.24 Nor do I ask my readers to suspend judgment about whether a god or saint ‘really’ participates in a dialogue with one who prays (although ideally they will). Rather, my point is a diffferent one, about language: remaining strictly within the semantic and formal terms of the prayers themselves, we can see that devotees participated in a dialogue with the person or persons they addressed.25 To begin with, dialogue surfaces in the texts of prayers. Psalms provide many examples. But other prayers also include scraps of dialogue, usually paraphrased words spoken by God or a saint, or allusions to a previous exchange. Often the devotee mentions that the addressee spoke to the faithful. Here is an example: ‘et benignement parlas a la samaritaine en luy deman- dant a boyre’ [and you spoke kindly to the Samaritan woman, asking her for a drink].26 Sometimes the devotee asks for a word from the addressee: ‘Seigneur Dieu. . . . Adresse moy en ta verité, et m’enseigne’ [Lord God (. . .) Address me in your truth, and teach me].27 A prayer to Saint Catherine: ‘faiz contre moy .I. argument, selons l’usaige de clargie’ [make an argument against me,

23 Paul Saenger, ‘Books of Hours and the Reading Habits of the Later Middle Ages’, in The Culture of Print, ed. by Roger Chartier, trans. L. Cochrane (Princeton, NJ, 1989), pp. 141–173. 24 Jean Gerson, ‘La mendicité spirituelle’ (c. 1401), in Oeuvres complètes, ed. by P. Glorieux, 10 vols (Paris, 1960–73), VII, pp. 220–281; and Erasmus, Modus orandi Deum (Basel, 1524). 25 My approach is influenced by Francis Jacques Bakhtin and the anthropology of prayer developed by Stephen C. Headley and his colleagues. See Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays and The Dialogic Imagination; Jacques, Diffference and Subjectivity: Dialogue and Personal Identity, trans. A. Rothwell (New Haven, CT, 1991); Headley, ed., ‘Anthropologie de la prière: Rites oraux en Asie du Sud-Est’, special issue of L’Homme, 34.132 (1994) and Vers une anthropologie de la prière: Études ethnolinguistiques javanaises. Actes de l’atelier ethnolinguistique du programme Sumatra-Java-Madura-Bali de l’Institut de Recherche sur le Sud-Est Asiatique (CNRS, Aix-en-Provence) tenu à Aix-en-Provence, 28–30 juin 1994 (Aix-en-Provence, 1996). 26 British Library, MS Add 31838, fol. 17r (devotional miscellany, fĳifteenth century; France). 27 Heures en Françoys & Latin à l’usaige de Romme, fol. T1r. 382 Reinburg according to the clergy’s custom].28 A prayer to Mary: ‘Et in novissimis diebus meis ostende michi faciem tuam et annuncies michi diem et horam obitus et mortis mee’ [And at the end of my life show me your face, and announce to me the day and hour of my dying and death].29 Prayers took the form of many diffferent kinds of speech: confessions, laments, orations, lessons, arguments, debates, oaths, stories, poems, songs and hymns, greetings, proverbs, riddles, and street or market cries. These modes of speech are what Bakhtin called speech genres: typical forms of utterances, which are ‘real units of speech communication’.30 A few examples show the wide range of speech genres among prayer texts. There are debates resembling the long exchanges between characters in mystery plays. One such text, probably excerpted from a French mystery play, is an exchange between Our Lady of Pity and the Sinner, in which Jesus’ mother laments her son’s agonizing death to redeem the Sinner, and the Sinner asks Mary to intercede on his behalf with Jesus.31 There are rhyming jingles: ‘Se veulz donc salvacion / Acquerir brief & sans sejour / Se navez excusacion / Oyez messe une foiz le jour’ [If you want to get salvation quickly and without delay / if you have no excuse / hear Mass once a day].32 The rubrics and titles of some prayers could be described as cries – either market calls, the early modern version of advertising jingles, or public street announcements. Some call to mind the catchy tags attached to medical recipes, such as ‘Chi sensieut une orison le quelle on doit dire pour estre et demourer en bonne amour entre mari et femme’ [the following is a prayer that one should say in order for a husband and wife to fall in love and stay in love].33 Some prayers seem designed to be sung. An example is a rhyming Latin prayer to St Sebastian commonly included in books of hours: ‘O sancte sebastiane / semper vespere et mane . . .’ [O St Sebastian, every

28 Pierre Rézeau, Les Prières aux saints en français à la fĳin du Moyen Âge: Prières à un saint particulier et aux anges (Geneva, 1983), p. 139. 29 The prayer is the ‘Obsecro te’. See Ces presentes heures a lusaige de Rome (Paris: printed by Philippe Pigouchet for Simon Vostre, n.d. [calendar 1502–20]), fol. K3v. For an English translation of the entire prayer see Roger S. Wieck, ed., Time Sanctifĳied: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life (New York, 1988), pp. 163–164. 30 Bakhtin, ‘Problem of Speech Genres’, p. 60. 31 BNF, MS Lat 13286, fols 1r–1v (book of hours, use of Rome, fĳifteenth century; northern France). 32 Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (Paris), MS 2721, fol. 80r (prayer book, use of Guillemites, sixteenth century; Paris). 33 BNF, MS NAFr 4412, fol. 186v (book of hours, fourteenth century, Tournai; and sixteenth century, Savoy). Text in French (rubric) and Latin (prayer). There are also similarities with the love charms studied by Gala Pellicer, ch. 2. Oral Rites: Prayer and Talk in Early Modern France 383 dusk and dawn].34 It is easy to see how close prayer could come to everyday speech. The three most common types of prayer in books of hours are what I have called the colloquy-style prayer, the contract-style prayer, and the charm.35 The three categories are not sharply discrete. But many prayers conform roughly to these patterns, each of which can be linked to specifĳic speech genres. For colloquy- style prayers, it was audiences and other forms of conversation. Contract-style prayers resemble oaths, vows, and other legal agreements. Charms can be linked to songs, medical or culinary recipes, storytelling, and the Latin liturgy. Colloquy-style prayers are relatively formal exchanges with God, Mary, or a saint. They are like conversations one would have with a lord, magistrate, or master. They resemble audiences, a similarity reinforced by the request expressed in one prayer: ‘Sire donne moy audience’ [Lord, give me a hearing].36 Colloquy-style prayers begin with an invocation, and sometimes a request to be heard, followed by a request for assistance. Often the prayer also includes an argument in which the devotee presents a case for why God or the saint should grant a request. In the invocation, the devotee calls upon the person to whom the prayer is addressed: ‘Lord God’, ‘holy mother of God’, ‘madame Saint Martha’, and so on. The devotee then makes a request, usually followed by a promise to devote self or life to God or the saint. ‘Doulx saint Laurens . . . je te presente mon amë en tes mains’ [Sweet St Lawrence . . . I present my soul to you, in your hands].37 ‘Sire dieu vray pere tout puissant. Ie propose a present amender ma vie et vouloir seruir. Et pour ce ie te suppli donne men la grace’ [Lord God, true and all powerful Father, I now propose to amend my life and to want to serve. And for this I ask you to give me the grace for it].38 Sometimes the devotee reminds the addressee of his or her past generosity: ‘Domine Iesu Criste precor te per lacrimas quas super Iherusalem emisisti et per omnes gut- tas sanguinis tui . . .’ [Lord Jesus Christ, I pray you by the tears which you wept over Jerusalem and by all the drops of your blood].39 This is from the prayer book of Pierre II, Duke of Brittany: ‘Mon dieu mon sauveur et mon creatur ie vous rens graces et merciz de tant de biens donneurs et de graces quil vous a

34 Bibliothèque Mazarine (Paris), MS 511, fol. 258r (book of hours, use of Troyes, fĳifteenth century). 35 See Reinburg, French Books of Hours, chap. 4. 36 J. Paul Getty Museum (Malibu, CA), MS Ludwig IX.11, fol. 140r (book of hours, use of Poitiers, c. 1466–70). 37 Rézeau, Les Prières aux saints en français, p. 303. 38 BNF, MS Fr 984, fol. 9v (prayer miscellany, sixteenth century; France). 39 BNF, MS NALat 703, fol. 145v (prayer book, fĳifteenth century; France). 384 Reinburg pleu me donner . . . humblement vous supplie et requiers quil vous plaise me donner grace de my gouverner a vostre gloire et honneur’ [My God, my saviour and my creator, I give you thanks for so many goods, gifts, and graces that you were so gracious to give me . . . (I) humbly beseech you and ask that you give me the grace to govern myself to your glory and honour].40 Devotees appealed to the Virgin Mary in similar terms: ‘Tresdigne mere de dieu je me donne a vous au jourdhuy tout ma vie vous supplie quil vous plaise me conduire & adresser mes afffaires Et me garder de peche mortel & de mort subite’ [Most worthy mother of God, today I give you my entire life, I beseech you please to guide me and direct my afffairs, and keep me from mortal sin and sudden death].41 Colloquy-style prayers portray God and the saints as persons with a history of behaving intelligibly and benevolently toward human beings. More precisely, in these prayers God, Mary, saints, and devotees play roles familiar in the world of early modern lordship and patronage. Patron-client relations were hierarchical and reciprocal. They were negotiated through words and deeds. A high value was placed on personal presence, verbal tributes, and gifts. Clients assured patrons of their loyalty, deference, and obedience. They humbled pledged their fĳidelity and service, in exchange for the patron’s favour. Saints were called ‘lord’ and ‘lady’, or ‘master’ and ‘mistress’. Mary was ‘holy lady’. Christ was called ‘lord’ and ‘king’. Devotees appeal to patron saints for intercession before God, a greater lord: ‘O glorieus saint Nicolas, de toute clergie la lumiere, veulle envers Dieu estre advocas pour moy, ta povre chamberiere’ [O glorious St Nicholas, light of all the clergy, please be an advocate for me, your poor maidservant, before God].42 Colloquy-style prayers capture perfectly the logic of patron-client relations: an idiom of humility and service, and relationships inflected by honour, fĳidelity, and obedience. The contract-style prayer is a variation of the colloquy. Here the mutual obligation between the devotee and God or a saint is more concretely stated. The contract style draws on words spoken in vows, oaths, and contracts. These prayers resemble acts of ‘faith and homage’ [ foi et homage], an artifact of sei- gneurialism still very much alive in the fĳifteenth and sixteenth centuries.43 They can also resemble a less common practice: the vows or contracts made

40 BNF, MS Lat 1159, fols 21v–22v (book of hours, use of Nantes, 1455–57). 41 BNF, MS Lat 14828, fol. 2r. 42 Rézeau, Les Prières aux saints en français, p. 386. 43 J. Russell Major, ‘ “Bastard Feudalism” and the Kiss: Changing Social Mores in Late Medieval and Early Modern France’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 17 (1987): 509–35. Oral Rites: Prayer and Talk in Early Modern France 385 between sworn brothers.44 Acts of faith and homage and sworn brotherhood afffĳirm a legally binding relationship between two or more people who shared ‘one house, one hearth, and one purse’.45 Contract-style prayers share with these legal acts the statement of concrete, mutual obligation between the parties. And even more than colloquy-style prayers, they draw on a language of fĳidelity. A good example is the ‘O intemerata’, a Latin prayer found in almost every book of hours. The prayer is addressed to Mary and St John, imagined as they stood at the foot of Jesus’ cross at Calvary. The devotee declares unequivo- cal faith in the power and intercession of Mary and John: ‘Credo enim fĳirmiter, fateor indubitanter, quia uelle uestrum uelle Dei est et nolle uestrum nolle Dei est; unde et quicquid ab illo petitis sine mora obtinetis’ [I indeed believe fĳirmly and accept without any doubt that he who wants to be yours will belong to God, and he who does not want to be yours will not belong to God, for you can obtain whatever you ask from God without delay].46 The words have the air of a vow. A prayer addressed to Christ employs a slightly diffferent lexicon, closer to that used in oaths and contracts: ‘Ihesus qui es tiesmoing certain / Et de tous iustes souverain / Ie te fais protestacion / Que ie vueil comme lealle christienne / En ta foy ione & anchienne / Vivre et morir sans fĳiction’ [Jesus, you who are the true witness and true sovereign of all, I make you this assurance, that I will, as a loyal Christian, in youth and old age, live and die in your faith].47 Contracts, vows, and contract-style prayers share an almost juridical language – that used to create enforceable legal agreements between two or more parties. Like colloquy-style prayers, contract-style prayers are framed as two or more persons speaking. Dialogue is not always as apparent in the third style of prayer, the charm. These prayers have the aim of securing protection for the person saying the prayer.48 Most are short – a few sentences long – and composed of names (God, angels, saints) and Latin phrases from the Bible or liturgy, making

44 Allan Tulchin, ‘Same-Sex Couples Creating Households in Old Regime France: The Uses of Afffrèrement’, Journal of Modern History, 79 (2007): 613–47. 45 Tulchin, ‘Same-Sex Couples’, p. 614. 46 Latin text: André Wilmart, Auteurs spirituels et textes dévots du moyen âge latin: Études d’histoire littéraire (Paris, 1932), p. 489. English translation: Wieck, ed., Time Sanctifĳied, p. 164. 47 LC, MS 59, fol. 98r (book of hours, undetermined use, c. 1430; possibly from Amiens). 48 On these kinds of prayers see Don C. Skemer, Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages (University Park PA, 2006); Edina Bozóky, Charmes et prières apotropaïques (Turnhout, 2003); and Lemaître, Le Scribe et le mage, chaps 10–11. 386 Reinburg the words both familiar and sacred. Normally the prayers are introduced by rubrics explaining what ills they are meant to prevent or remedy. A good example of a charm is ‘Oratio salutifera pro salute anime et corporis et illorum qui vadunt per viam’ [a salutary prayer for the health of soul and body and of those who are on the road], added by an owner to an early sixteenth-century book of hours. The Latin text gives a good sense of the cadence and familiarity of the language:

Gaspar me ducat. ✚ Baldesar me conducat. ✚ Melechior me reducat. ✚ Michael. Vt Deus. ✚ Gabriel virtus dei. ✚ Raphael medicina dei. ✚ Omnes sancti angeli & archangeli dei orate pro me. ✚ Iesus autem transiens per medium illorum ibat. ✚ Christus vincit. ✚ Christus regnat. ✚ Christus imperat. ✚ Christus ab omni malo me defendat. ✚ Si ergo me queritis. ✚ Si nite [sic] hos abire. ✚ Te tegramaton [sic]. ✚ Si ambu- lavero in medio tribulationis vivifĳicabis me.✚ Et super iram inimicorum meorum extendisti manum tuam. Et salvum me fecit dextera tua. Amen.49

[May Gaspar lead me. ✚ May Baldesar accompany me. ✚ May Melechior bring me back. ✚ Michael. Who is like God. ✚ Gabriel the virtue of God. ✚ Raphael the medicine of God. ✚ All ye holy angels and archangels of God, pray for me. ✚ But Jesus, passing through the midst of them, went away. ✚ Christ conquers. ✚ Christ reigns. ✚ Christ rules. ✚ Christ defends me from all evil. ✚ If, therefore, you seek me. ✚ Let these go their way. ✚ Tetragrammaton. ✚ If I shall walk in the midst of tribulation, you will keep me alive. ✚ And against the wrath of my enemies you stretched forth your hand. And your right hand has saved me. Amen.]50

The prayer includes passages quoted, paraphrased, and creatively rewritten from Scripture and the liturgy, interspersed with symbols for a manual blessing (✚). Invoked are the quintessential travellers: the three kings (Caspar, Baldesar, Melchior), and God’s messengers the archangels and angels. Next is a sentence from Luke 4:3 – ‘But Jesus, passing through the midst of them, went away’ – alluding to an occasion when Jesus evaded his enemies. These words often appeared in prayers for the protection of travellers. The prayer also includes the liturgical acclamation and Crusader slogan ‘Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat’. This is followed by ‘Christ defends me from all evil’ and ‘If therefore you seek me, let these go their way’ (Jn 18:8). Next

49 BNF, MS NALat 220, fols 125r–25v (book of hours, use of Rome, 1517). 50 I opt for the most direct translation, however awkwardly phrased. Oral Rites: Prayer and Talk in Early Modern France 387 follows ‘Tetragrammaton’, a Greek word referring to the sacred Hebrew name for God. The prayer closes with a paraphrase of a longer scriptural passage: ‘If I shall walk in the midst of tribulation, you will keep me alive, and you stretched forth your right hand against the wrath of my enemies, and your right hand has saved me’ (Ps 137:7). As this example shows, charms may not seem obviously to be prayers addressed to God or a saint. Instead, the devotee appears to call a blessing directly on himself or herself. A long line of modern scholars has categorized these practices as ‘magical’ or ‘spells’ rather than prayers, because they are ‘coercive’ or work automatically rather than through ‘supplication of God’.51 The categories of magic, religion, prayer, and spell have a long genealogy, reaching back to Enlightenment ideas about the historical evolution of religion out of its more primitive ancestors, polytheism and magic.52 But these analytical categories have outlived their usefulness in capturing the language and goals of prayer in the early modern period. God may not be directly addressed in the ‘salutary prayer for the health of soul and body and of those who are on the road’ quoted above. But God is implicitly invoked, and moreover in an oral rite redolent of the authority of Scripture, holy persons, and ancient sacred tongues. Charms like these have a good claim to the title of prayer. Like other prayers, they are speech. Charms call for the presence of God and the saints, and express devotees’ effforts to strengthen the bonds joining them to those to whom they prayed. Although some may label them ‘superstitious’ or ‘magical’, a charms can also be seen simply as variant styles of addressing God, Mary, and the saints, and asking for supernatural aid in the perilous circumstances of human life.

Oral and Written in the Book of Hours

Offfĳices and many prayers found their way into books of hour by way of other books, whether liturgical books like the psalter, breviary, and missal, or devotional tracts and miscellanies. But orality lurks behind the texts. The offfĳice of the Virgin and the offfĳice of the dead were inscribed in books, but also recited in monasteries, cathedral chapters, and parishes. The lay faithful knew offfĳices via a tangle of rites, performances, memorization, and books. Similarly, liturgical sufffrages of the saints were written in breviaries, missals, and books of hours,

51 See Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971), pp. 40–43. 52 See Randall Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World (Oxford, 2004). 388 Reinburg but also read aloud and recited in church on feast days, in family prayers, and in monastic refectories. Not a few Latin and vernacular prayers were rooted in the world of oral practice. Some prayers were probably linked to pilgrimages and confraternities – learned by pilgrims or confraternity members, passed around by word of mouth or in writing, taught to children by parents, penned from memory into prayer books and family records, purchased from booksellers, or perhaps dictated to scribes for inclusion in prayer books. An example is ‘Cest lorison que nostre dame dou puy tient en sa main’ [this is the prayer that Notre-Dame du Puy holds in her hand], a short French prayer found in two women’s prayer books from Paris.53 Both known texts of the prayer were penned by a professional hand, and so probably purchased from or possibly dictated to a scribe. The prayer is a short petition for help, addressed to Mary, on behalf of the devotee ‘and your people’. The rubric links the prayer to the Marian shrine at Le Puy, a popular pilgrim destination in the late Middle Ages and early modern period. It is possible that one or both of the owners in whose books the prayer appears were veterans of the Le Puy pilgrimage. But more likely the prayer reached these women’s books by way of an image, altar, or confraternity of Notre-Dame du Puy located in Paris. Another example of a prayer that may have circulated in various oral and written modes is a Latin prayer for the benefĳit of the souls in purgatory, reported to have been inscribed ‘darriere lautel saint pierre’ [behind the altar of St Peter’s (in Rome)]. This text may have originated in devotional tableaux or tracts associated with the pilgrimage to Rome, or with French confraternities for veterans of such pilgrimages.54 Another Latin prayer appears in many manuscript books of hours, and was often included in those printed in Paris. The prayer is simple, a short petitionary prayer addressed to both Jesus and Mary, introduced by a rubric:

Ceste oroison qui sensuit est escripte en leglize de saint iohan de latren a romme a une pierre de lettres gravees et sont donnes a tous ceulx qui

53 Text quoted from BNF, MS NAL 592, fol. 120v (book of hours, use of Paris, fourteenth century). The second example is found in Bibliothèque Mazarine, MS 509, fols 107v–108r (book of hours, use of Paris, fĳirst half of the fĳifteenth century). For a translation of the prayer, see Virginia Reinburg, ‘Prayers’, in Medieval Christianity in Practice, ed. by Miri Rubin (Princeton, NJ, 2009), pp. 159–163. For further discussion of the prayer and pilgrimage, see Reinburg, French Books of Hours, pp. 225–229, and ‘Les pèlerins de Notre-Dame du Puy’, Revue d’histoire de l’église de France, 75 (1989): 297–313. 54 LC, MS 51, fols 128r–29v. Oral Rites: Prayer and Talk in Early Modern France 389

ladiront devotement a genoulx une fois le iour avecque Pater noster & Ave maria huit cent mille ans de vray pardon pour les pechies mortieulx et pour le temps perdu.

[this prayer is written in the Church of Saint John Lateran in Rome, on a stone in engraved letters. And to all who say it devoutly on their knees every day, along with a Pater Noster and an Ave Maria, are given 800,000 years of pardon for mortal sins and time spent in purgatory].55

Versions of the text are so consistent across manuscripts and printed books that a common source is likely. It may have been inscribed on a panel or wall in the Lateran, and probably also posted in a French church or shrine. Customers may have been able to select the text already prepared by a scribe, available in a bookseller’s shop. Here we might return to charms, which often bear marks of both speech and text. True to the Latin root of the word (carmen), charms have an element of song: they are arranged in rhythmic phrases, sometimes with a rhyme. Many sound the familiar ring of the liturgy. This suggests oral performance and easy memorization. So it is tempting to assume that charms originate in oral culture. But this was probably not the case, at least not in any simple way. Charms likely came from the world of texts. The words derive from the better-known liturgical rites, especially the Mass, baptism, extreme unction, and benedictions. Those rites were preserved in books like the Bible, the missal, psalters, hym- nals, and pontifĳicals. Other fragments of charms came from books of secrets and learned magic. Some probably came from medical texts, treatises of herbal medicine, or from those books via almanachs.56 Yet the texts might also have entered books of hours through oral sources. They may have been captured in writing from memory, or from sharing oral lore in families and neighborhoods. Charms are texts modifĳied by use. They migrated from one book to another. Owners may have transcribed them from memory, or had a professional scribe fĳix the words in writing. Words and phrases were pulled from one text or rite, and combined with fragments extracted from others. Words might be translated into a diffferent language, or transferred to a diffferent book, surrounded by other kinds of texts and images. Moving from one hand to another, and one place to another, changed the text. For example, inclusion in a book of hours framed a charm in a particular way, lending it the authority of the liturgy, Latin,

55 BNF, MS Lat 13276, fols 82v–83r (book of hours, use of Rouen, early fĳifteenth century). Text in French (rubric) and Latin (prayer). 56 See Lemaître, Le Scribe et le mage, chaps 1, 10–11. 390 Reinburg and written knowledge. If a head of household added such a text to a family’s book of hours, the prayer then became part of the household’s written stores of knowledge and protection. A printed book of hours for the use of Lyon illustrates this in a striking way.57 Here it was not a local lord or notary who conserved and dispensed healing prayers, as in the Terrade family, but priests. Three priests from the Flamant family of Burgundy and Franche-Comté owned the book over a century and a half, beginning in 1530. The Flamant fathers copiously annotated their book with medical recipes, additional prayers in Latin and French, and liturgical formulas useful to priests who owned no other books. Among the added texts is this French prayer for healing wounds, lesions, or plague sores (bosses):

Au nom de Dieu et de Nostre Dame et de saint Jehan Baptiste et de saint Sebastien et de saint Roch, Jesus Christ fust prins et lié sans offfense, Jesus Christ fust prins sans pechez. Bosse rouge, Dieu te frappe! Bosse blanche, Dieu te soufffle! Bosse noyre, Dieu te perde! Bosse jaulne, Dieu te charme! Et que tu ayes autant de puissance sur moy que Pilate avoit sur Jesus Christ et sur sainct [illegible] Au nom du pere et du fĳilz et du sainct Esprit. Amen. Jhesus Maria58

[In the name of God and Our Lady and Saint John the Baptist and Saint Sebastian and Saint Roch, Jesus Christ was taken and bound without sin, Jesus Christ was taken without sin. Red wound, God strike you! White wound, God extinguish you! Black wound, God banish you! Yellow wound, God charm you! And may you have as much power over me as Pilate had over Jesus Christ and Saint [illegible] In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Jesus Maria.]

The Flamant fathers were itinerant priests, travelling around villages on the borders of the Burgundies, France, and Savoy to say Mass and perform bap- tisms, marriages, and funerals. They also prayed with and for the sick. One of them entered this prayer into the book of hours as part of an arsenal of remedies to be dispensed among the faithful. Was it transcribed from memory, or perhaps dictated by a knowledgeable villager for Father’s future use? Or did

57 Gabriel-André Pérouse, ‘Des Heures à secrets’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 48 (1986): 757–70. This is a printed book of hours for the use of Lyon, published in 1527 or 1528 by Agnès Sucevin (the widow of Jehan de Brie) of Paris. 58 Pérouse, ‘Des Heures à secrets’, p. 769. Bosse can mean lesion, wound, tumour, or plague sore (bubo). The invocation of the plague saints Roch and Sebastian in the prayer suggests that the prayer could be used for plague victims. Oral Rites: Prayer and Talk in Early Modern France 391

Father copy it from another book? Any of these avenues of transmission is plausible. The Flamant book of hours shows the ways owners could use and remake books, texts, and prayers, drawing on both oral and written sources. The ways that prayers could migrate between books and oral lore is suggested by the many forms taken by a prayer known by its incipit, ‘Ante portam Jerusalem’ [before the gate of Jerusalem).59 This is how the story goes. Jesus came upon St Peter lying near the Jerusalem gate, and asked what ailed him. Peter replied that he sufffered from a fever. Jesus said, ‘Get up, Peter’. Peter rose, his fever gone. Then Peter said, ‘Lord, I beseech you that whoever wears this prayer will not sufffer from fever’. Jesus replied, ‘Let it be as you ask. Amen’. Truly protean, the ‘Ante portam Jerusalem’ appears in several variations, multiple languages (Latin and the vernaculars), with or without a rubric (‘against fever’), occasionally illustrated. Sometimes it was written by scribes in manuscript books of hours. Sometimes it appeared in print, as in the Flamant family’s book of hours.60 Sometimes a book owner added it by hand. The prayer also surfaced in books of remedies and secrets, and in textual amulets. Priests as well as laypeople collected it.61 Just as the handwritten prayers in the Flamant book of hours could have had many sources, so too the ‘Ante portam Jerusalem’ migrated around the worlds of writing and speaking. A prayer-amulet from Auvergne reveals the bundling of oral, written, and material into one object.62 Texts, medallions, rings, wax seals, images, loose rosary beads, silk ribbons, and tiny relics tied up in this small cloth sac (12.5cm × 9.5cm) date between the thirteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, although most are from the fĳifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The texts are mainly in Latin and French, but a few are in Auvergnat and Spanish. They include both manuscript and print. Many of the prayers are also found in books of hours. Prayers in the prayer-amulet include the ‘Ante portam Jerusalem’, and assorted others intended for the benefĳit of pregnant women,

59 On this prayer see Reinburg, French Books of Hours, pp. 144–145, 161; Bozóky, Charmes et prières apotropaïques, pp. 38, 41, 75; Lemaître, Le Scribe et le mage, pp. 260–61; E. Franceschini, ‘Una formula medievale contro la febbre’, Aevum, 26 (1952): 182–83; and Eamon Dufffy, ‘Two Healing Prayers’, inMedieval Christianity in Practice, ed. by Rubin, pp. 164–170. 60 Pérouse, ‘Des Heures à secrets’, p. 760 (with illustration). 61 The prayer appears to have been added to the fly leaf of a manuscript book of hours by its owner, Guillaume de Tenay, a monk of Tournus: BNF, MS Lat 13310, fol. 1v (book of hours, use of Tournus, 1508). 62 Alphonse Aymar, ‘Le Sachet accoucheur et ses mystères’, Annales du Midi, 38 (1926): 273– 347. Skemer refers to objects like these as ‘textual amulets’. Indeed, this one is densely textual. See his helpful discussion of what this prayer-amulet would have looked like: Binding Words, pp. 242–244. 392 Reinburg the sick, and travellers. Not all the texts are charms, or even prayers. There is a verse life of St Margaret, the patron of pregnant and parturient women. There are colloquy-style prayers and devotional poems. The texts may have been copied or even ripped from books of hours. The heterogeneity of materials, sources, languages, and historical periods catches our attention. But this little treasure probably did not strike its owners that way, collected as it was over many generations, from assorted places. The little bundle could be taken out and unpacked when needed – its contents displayed in a birthing chamber, the prayers read aloud, the ribbons and vellum scrolls draped across the belly of a woman in labour, shown around when stories of the family’s previous births were shared.63 Owners of the prayer-amulet loaned it to kin and neighbours, making it a local resource much like the Flamant priests’ book of hours and the Terrade notaries’ ‘writings’.64 Most, if not all, of the texts in the Auvergnat amulet are also known in books of hours. But their presence in this little prayer bundle reveals the diversity of places where prayers could lodge – to be read, remembered, and treasured. Prayers circulated in both oral and written form. They were modifĳied by use, transformed as they moved from one book to another – but above all, as they passed from voice to book and back to voice. The living, everyday practice of prayer was governed by the written word as well as the speech lurking inside it. Early modern men and women lived in a world in which the oral and the written were tightly coiled together. Writing and oral performance each possessed an undeniable – and often mutually reinforcing – authority in political, social, cultural, and religious life. But as I have proposed in this account of prayer, we cannot understand the myriad practices of orality and literacy unless we also contend with the more fundamental role that speech played in making early modern culture.

63 On birthing amulets, see Skemer, Binding Words, chap. 5. 64 Aymar, ‘Le sachet accoucheur’, pp. 273–274. On the Flamants, see Pérouse, ‘Des Heures à secrets’. On the Terrades, see Lemaître, Le Scribe et le mage. CHAPTER 14 The Seducer’s Tongue: Oral and Moral Issues in Medieval Erotodidactic Schooltexts

Rosanna Cantavella

Through erotodidactic texts many generations of medieval schoolboys in Western Europe were introduced to sexuality, and taught how to seduce girls. Such teachings gave vital importance to a young man’s choice of words and to how he used his oral skills for seduction. The way he seduced with words would also show his good breeding and his ‘urbanity’, or courteous behaviour (as opposed to country manners, considered the epitome of commonness). And, in an era where schoolchildren had to use their memory because of scarcity of material on which to write, some of these verse works, with their patterns for seduction, were expected to be learnt by heart and then recited, like other elementary schooltexts. Erotodidactics was coined by Alison Goddard Elliott in her edition of the twelfth-century text Facetus ‘Moribus et vita’ and I apply it to those texts that aim to train men in seducing women, and especially, but not only, young boys in seducing maidens, giving specifĳic advice on how to talk and how to act.1 The fĳirst steps of the child in school were based on oral teaching. In many places in Western Europe, one of the fĳirst things students learnt was to memorize and recite the Psalter and prayers. Even in the fĳifteenth century students learnt their letters, spelling, and vocabulary from school materials like the tabula, which included the basic prayers (Pater Noster, Credo, Ave Maria), the seven Psalms of repentance and the fĳirst parts of Donatus.2 The student started by memorizing and reciting the correct answers catechism-style: The master asks his students, ‘What do you read?’; they respond, ‘I do not read, I listen’. ‘To what do you listen?’ ‘I listen to the tabula’.3 In the fĳifteeenth century ‘important aspects of elementary education, and even higher levels of instruction,

1 Alison Goddard Elliott, ‘The Facetus: or The Art of Courtly Living’, Allegorica, 2 (2) (1977): 27–57. 2 See David L. Schefffler, Schools and Schooling in Late Medieval Germany: Regensburg, 1250–1500 (Leiden, 2008), pp. 98–99. 3 ‘Es tu scolaris?’ ‘Sum’. ‘Quid legis?’ ‘Non lego sed audio’. ‘Quid audis?’ ‘Tabula[m]’], quoted, translated and commented upon by Schefffler in hisSchools and Schooling, p. 99 and n. 54.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004291829_016 394 Cantavella remained essentially aural/oral experiences’.4 Orality also was often present in vernacular schooltexts, composed usually in rhymed form so as to facilitate memorizing and reciting them.5 We should add to the crucial role of orality in the medieval schoolroom the practice of oral debates based on dialectics, one of the trivium disciplines. I will address this later. The other important oral practice in school was dictation. Dictare meant ‘to dictate’ as well as ‘to compose’: the master often dictated his lesson, articulating distinctly so that students could write down his oral performance.6 We must, then, consider the medieval artes amandi against this background of schools in which the spoken word had a fundamental role. It was only natural to rely on speech, in a world where writing materials (paper, parchment) were scarce and expensive.7 Of course there is no subject closer to the hearts of gossipers than sexual relationships, therefore it comes as no surprise that discretion was among the principal pieces of advice given by erotodidactic texts to the would-be seducer. Obviously, medieval Christian moralists decried this kind of text. Naturally enough, they were not amused by these works, and protested against their use and difffusion among young men – without much success, though, as these titles kept appearing in collections of schoolbooks, where they influenced literary works at least until the fĳifteenth century, and were read up until, at least, the seventeenth century.8 However, the Middle Ages was an era of extreme contrasts, even of contradictions. That moralist preachers and writers had an important social

4 Schefffler,Schools and Schooling p. 99 and n. 55 5 See Josep Izquierdo Gil’s analysis of these scholarly uses: ‘Els llibres neotestamentaris a la Bíblia rimada e en romans de la BCC de Sevilla, MS 7-7-6’. Unpublished PhD thesis, Universitat de València, 1995. 6 See Jacqueline Hamesse, ‘Le Vocabulaire de la transmission orale des textes’, in Vocabulaire du livre et de l’écriture au Moyen Âge: Actes de la table ronde, Paris 24–26 septembre 1987, ed. by Olga Weijers, Études sur le vocabulaire intellectuel du Moyen Âge, 2 (Turnhout, 1989), pp. 168–194. 7 See the highlighting of this matter on the medieval options for literary works in verse or prose in Martí de Riquer, ‘La influencia de la transmisión manuscrita en la estructura de las obras literarias medievales’, in Historia y estructura de la obra literaria: coloquios celebrados del 28 al 31 de marzo de 1967, Revista de Literatura, Anejos, 31 (Madrid, 1971), pp. 31–38. 8 The pseudo-Ovidian Pamphilus was mentioned by Erasmus, translated into English, and printed repeatedly in the sixteenth century. It was still included in a seventeenth-century book of Ovidian Works, see Wilfried Blumenthal, ‘Untersuchungen zur Komödie “Pamphilus” ’, Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch, 11 (1976): 224–311, at pp. 291–292, and Priscilla Bawcutt, ‘Pamphilus de Amore “in Inglish Toung” ’, Medium Aevum, 64 (2) (1995): 264–72. The Seducer’s Tongue 395 influence does not mean that their advice was always obeyed. Nothing was uniform in medieval society. It is important to avoid falling into generaliza- tions when dealing with the unexpected in the period. Medieval sexual education? And for young boys? Given ostensibly by their own schoolteachers? It looks improbable at fĳirst sight, of course; this facet of medieval learning is not well known. But several generations of researchers have produced a solid body of erudition which leaves no room for doubt. This was a real phenomenon, and extensive too. The beginning of this type of education will be all important to understand how it developed. And in the beginning there was Ovid. As early as the fourth or fĳifth century, when the famousDisticha Catonis were written, the author of the Ars Amandi was being recommended as the most outstanding codifĳier of the love experience.9 And from the twelfth century onwards, Ovid’s texts were taught in schools as part of the oral approach to teaching prevalent in the Middle Ages, where they would become very popular; this century has often been labelled the aetas ovidiana.10 Ovid’s fortune in schools paralleled Aristotle’s in universities: fĳirst banned, then tolerated, then prescribed.11 The fact that De Vetula’s authorship was attributed to Ovid must have helped, as in this poem, which was a medieval composition, its narrator ‘predicts’ Jesus’ birth, a fact that set him alongside Virgil’s sybil as a Gentile prophet. This might have led to tolerating Ovid. Ovid also gained acceptance because a medieval Vita Ovidii was in circulation. It presented him as writing the Remedia Amoris from exile, repenting after his Ars Amandi and his other love poems; in this way, Ovid became an author who, in popular belief, for-

9 ‘Si quid amare libet, vel discere amare legendo, / Nasonem petito’, Disticha Catonis, book 2, lines 6–7 (http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/cato.dis.html, no editor explicited). [If anybody wants to love, or learn to love by reading, / I direct them to Ovid], my translation. When not indicated otherwise, all translations are provided by me. The reader can fĳind a full English translation of several of the French erotodidactic books quote in Norman R. Shapiro, James B. Wadsworth, and Betsy Bowden, eds., The Comedy of Eros: Medieval French Guides to the Art of Love (Urbana, IL, 1997). 10 See Dorothy M. Robathan, ‘Ovid in the Middle Ages’, in Ovid, ed. by J.W. Binns (London, 1973, repr. 2013), pp. 190–209. 11 See Edward Kennard Rand, ‘The Classics in the Thirteenth Century’, Speculum, 4 (1929): 249–69, especially p. 260; also Kurt Smolak, ‘Ovid im 13. Jahrhundert: Zwischen Ablehnung und Bewunderung’, in The Classical Tradition in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Proceedings of the First European Science Foundation Workshop on ‘The Reception of Classical Texts (Florence, 1992), ed. by Claudio Leonardi & Birger Munk Olsen (Spoleto, 1995), pp. 111–122, and, for an overview of influences, Robathan, ‘Ovid in the Middle Ages’, pp. 190–209. 396 Cantavella sook the sins of his youth once he reached maturity.12 According to a French accessus [introduction] to the Ars Amandi, its principal intention was to instruct boys and girls by precept, and to render them expert in love.13 This notwithstanding, reciting Ovid in schools in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries did not go without some opposition, and we must bear in mind that, of Ovid’s erotodidactic works, many schools chose to prescribe the Remedia Amoris alone, rather than the Remedia preceded by the Ars Amandi.14 In spite of this, Ovid became one of the most famous classical poets, and his Ars Amandi his most famous work, as its numerous scholarly commentaries and introductions show.15 Now from the very twelfth century, in addition to Ovid’s amatory poems, other erotodidactic works, written in the Ovidian style, using his characteristic elegiac distichs, start appearing in medieval lists of the books that schoolchildren should read. On these, the two most recommended pseudo-Ovidian texts were the Pamphilus and the Facetus ‘Moribus et vita’, which I will address in this article.16 Everhardus Bethuniensis, for example, in his Laborintus (before 1220), presents a rhymed handbook with a reading list. Beside the compulsory Disticha Catonis and other elementary school classics, such as Maximianus, Anianus, or Aesop, the Pamphilus is prescribed, and it is stated that all of Ovid’s

12 See Alastair J. Minnis, ‘The Author’s Two Bodies? Authority and Fallibility in Late- Medieval Textual Theory’, in Of the Making of Books: Medieval Manuscripts, their Scribes and Readers: Essays Presented to M.B. Parkes, ed. by Pamela Robinson and Rivkah Zim (Aldershot, 1997), pp. 259–279, at p. 260; Fausto Ghisalberti, ‘Medieval Biographies of Ovid’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 9 (1946): 10–59. 13 John W. Baldwin, The Language of Sex: Five Voices from Northern France around 1200 (Chicago, IL, 1994), p. 21. I confess I am curious about this ‘and girls’ reported by Baldwin, who unfortunately does not transcribe the said document. Could the inclusion of females as readers of this kind of books be deliberate? Women (or at least some women) would doubtless read them too; but what was the position of tutors and teachers? Would they put such material as a matter of course, in the hands of their female pupils? That is still unproven. 14 From the fourteenth century on most classical authors were slowly withdrawn from the elementary school canon. 15 For a brief overview, see Baldwin, The Language of Sex, pp. 21–22, and a selection of texts in Ralph J. Hexter, Ovid and Medieval Schooling: Studies in Medieval School Commentaries on Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, Epistulae ex Ponto, and Epistulae Heroidum (Munich, 1986). 16 ‘Moribus et vita’, the fĳirst words of theFacetus , often accompany its title to diffferentiate it from other educational but not erotodidactic texts also called Facetus (see below pp. 401–2). In this article, and unless otherwise specifĳied,Facetus would always refer to ‘Moribus et vita’. The Seducer’s Tongue 397 poems (turba ovidiana) should receive attention, ‘because that is the custom’.17 Another schoolteacher, Hugh of Trimberg, who writes a catalogue of Latin books for beginners, the Registrum (c. 1280), goes still further as he adds to these texts the Facetus, among others.18 Even around 1500 what looks like the same Facetus appears among the same group of texts.19 Ovidian and pseudo-Ovidian erotodidactic texts are fully embedded in the schoolroom in Western Europe in the fourteenth century. A 1318 Castilian confession handbook, for example, reproaches grammar masters for teaching children the Ars Amandi and Pamphilus.20 Ovid’s presence amongst schooltexts is made manifest also through non-Latin works, such as the Libro de Buen Amor (where it is said: ‘Don Amor a Ovidio leyó en la escuela’),21 and in one of the Catalan exempla within the text known as Salut d’amor, where it is said of the main characters, a boy and a girl brought up together, that ‘letres apreseren e latí, / e l’art d’amor, e d’autres mans / cortès mesters’.22 Here we fĳind again

17 Ernst H. Alton and D.E.W. Wormell, ‘Ovid in the Medieval Schoolroom’, Hermathena, 94–95 (1960–1961), 21–38, and 67–82; especially p. 32. 18 Alton & Wormell, Ovid, p. 32, and Nikolaus Henkel, Deutsche Übersetzungen lateinischer Schultexte: Ihre Verbreitung und Funktion im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit (Munich, 1988), pp. 248–249. 19 Rino Avesani, Quattro miscellanee medioevali e umanistiche: contributo alla tradizione del Geta, degli Auctores octo, dei Libri minores e di altra letteratura scolastica medioevale (Rome, 1967), pp. 19 and 21. 20 Martín Pérez in the Libro de confesiones: ‘Onde creo que muchos libros se suelen leer en la Gramática de que non podrían dar bien la cuenta los maestros a Dios. Ca meten en el coraçón de los excolares amores malos et carnales con ellos, assy como Ovidio mayor, De arte et Amadín [sic], Panfĳilio, et otros libros que leyen de mentiras’. See Derek W. Lomax, ‘Algunos autores religiosos’, Journal of Hispanic Philology, 2 (1977): 79–90, at p. 89. [Therefore I think that many books are usually read in Grammar for which teachers would not account before God. Because they put into the shoolboys’ heart wrong and carnal love with them, as with Ovidius Major, Ars Amandi [?], Pamphilus, and other untruthful books.] 21 Juan Ruíz, Libro de Buen Amor, ed. by Alberto Blecua (Barcelona, 1993), p. 612 [“Sir Love read Ovid at school”]. This fourteenth-century Castilian book was also strongly influenced by the Pamphilus (Gerald B. Gybbon-Monypenny, ‘ “Dixe la por te dar ensienpro”: Juan Ruiz’s Adaptation of the Pamphilus’, in Libro de Buen Amor Studies, ed. by G.B. Gybbon- Monypenny (London, 1970), pp. 123–147; Luis Jenaro MacLennan, ‘Sobre el texto del Pamphilus en el Libro de Buen Amor’, Revista de Filología Española, 68 (1988): 143–51), and has been also associated with the Facetus’ Catalan translation. See Jacques Joset, ‘El Libro de Buen Amor y el Facet catalán’, Bulletin Hispanique, 110 (2008), 279–282. 22 Paul Meyer, ‘Nouvelles catalanes inédites, II: Salut d’amour; III: Résumé de doctrine Chrétienne par Aymon de Cestars [sic]’, Romania, 20 (1891): 193–214, lines 284–86. [They learnt letters and Latin, / and the art of love, and many other / courtly subjects.] 398 Cantavella

Ovid’s erotodidactics (‘l’art d’amor’) beside the study of Grammar (‘latí’) and of letter composition or ars dictaminis (‘letres’). Pamphilus and Facetus keep appearing well into the fĳifteenth century along with other schooltexts. They are found, for example, in a miscellaneous manuscript containing educational texts usually given to schoolchildren.23 Erotodidactic influence can be tracked too in the construction of the Catalan chivalry novel Tirant lo Blanc. The main character, Tirant, unlike his cousin Diafebus, wants to respect his virgin loved one as a fĳin’aimador, an intention that is the cause of much mirth in the novel. Only in the last few chapters does Tirant embrace the lessons of erotodidactics and become Carmesina’s master by deflowering her. When he fĳinally does it, the author describes the sexual action exclusively through Carmesina’s words of protest, which exactly reproduce those of Galathea, the maiden seduced in the Pamphilus.24 Another erotodidactic work close to Pamphilus and Facetus, and studied in similar scholarly contexts, was the Rota Veneris, written c. 1215 by Boncompagno da Signa, a dictator (master of letter composition technique or ars dictaminis). The Rota Veneris is therefore a small ars dictaminis treatise, but centred on love letters. The author gives plentiful examples of these, and makes the most of his subject by adding advice on love relationships in a much broader sense, thereby also constructing it as an erotodidactic handbook. It is a fascinating text, in which, as in the Pamphilus, the love goddess herself speaks as the best teacher of seduction. The prose Rota Veneris, however, was not made to be memorized and recited, but was a handbook to teach how to write good,

23 Biblioteca Nacional de España, MS 4245. BNE catalogue description: ‘[Opera literaria, philosophica et sacra]: 1. P. Terentius: Andria (fols 4–37v). 2. Boethius: De consolatione philosophiae libri duo (fols 38–77v). 3. S. Bernardus: Epistola de regimine familiae (fols 78–83v).- 4. Septem psalmi (fols 89–92).- 5. Novus Aesopus (fols 93–121v).- 6. Eberhardus de Bethuniae: Graecismus (fols 123–200).- 7. Liber Floreti de sacra doctrina (fols 201–34v).- 8. Epistola Lentuli ad Octavianum de Iesucristo (fols 235r–v).- 9. Altercatio corporis et animae (fols 236–243v).- 10. Lectiones defunctorum (fols 244–47v).- 11. Facetus (fols 248r– 63r).- 12. Panfĳilus de amore (fols 263v–84 v).- 13. Altera doctrina mensae (fols 285–87v).- S. XV (1491).’ [Chapter author’s italics.]. 24 See Rosanna Cantavella, ‘Debate on Women in Tirant lo Blanc’, in The “Querelle des Femmes” in the Romania: Studies in Honour of Friederike Hassauer, ed. by Wolfram Aichinger et alii (Vienna, 2003), pp. 45–56. Rafael Beltrán identifĳied the borrowing of lengthy passages from Pamphilus in Tirant lo Blanc’s deflowering chapter. See Rafael Beltrán, ‘Las “bodas sordas” en Tirant lo Blanc y la Celestina’, Revista de Filología Hispánica, 70 (1–2) (1990): 91–117, and ‘Tres magas en el arte de la seducción: Trotaconventos, Plaerdemavida y Celestina’, in El arte de la seducción en el mundo románico medieval y renacentista, ed. by Elena Real Ramos (Valencia, 1995), pp. 29–38. The Seducer’s Tongue 399 persuasive love letters.25 Orality is not a feature of this text, then, as it is with Pamphilus and Facetus, but the Rota took its place beside them in the schoolroom, albeit for a diffferent purpose. Many more works throughout Europe were written, at the waning of the Middle Ages, in both Latin and the vernacular, under the influence of erotodidactics (for example certain Latin lines by Serlo of Wilton).26 For an inventory and description of these titles, see the survey in my edition of the Catalan Facet.27 I will mention fĳinally one more erotodidactic work because of its importance and vast influence: Andreas Capellanus’s well-known De amore, which, although written in prose and therefore not for memorizing, fĳits into this group of works which give oral patterns for seduction and which contains many models of speech to seduce women of all social conditions. It is signifĳicant that its anonymous author dedicated it to Walter (‘Gualterius’), a young man, for educational purposes. Persuasive dialogue here is so important that it has been said of De Amore that ‘Andreas teaches Walter how to argue, not seduce, ladies into bed’.28 Its influence, as well as that of the Facetus and Pamphilus, is noticeable in many Western European works written in the vernacular in the later Middle Ages. However, unlike the other two, it seems to have been less often present in the schoolroom.29 One can, of course, wonder how it might

25 See Boncompagno da Signa, El ‘Tratado de amor carnal’ o ‘Rueda de Venus’: Motivos lit- erarios en la tradición sentimental y celestinesca (ss. XIII–XV), ed. by Antonio Cortijo Ocaña (Pamplona, 2002); Boncompagno da Signa, Rota Veneris, ed. by Paolo Garbini (Roma, 1996); and Boncompagno da Signa, Rota Veneris: A Facsimile Reproduction of the Strassburg Incunabulum, with Introduction, Translation, and Notes, ed. by Josef Purkart (Delmar, NY, 1975). 26 See Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric, 2 vols (Oxford, 1965– 6), I, 239–40. 27 Rosanna Cantavella, ed., El ‘Facet’: Una ‘ars amandi’ medieval (Barcelona-Valencia, 2013), pp. 25–54. My inventory of European erototidactic works intersects with Cesare Segre’s overview in his ‘Le forme e le tradizioni didattice: Ars amandi classica e medievale’, in La Littérature didactique, allégorique et satirique, ed. Franz Koppe, Jürgen Beyer, Hans Ropbert Jauss, & Erich Köhler, Grundriss der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters (Heidelberg, 1968), VI. I, pp. 109–116; VI.II, pp. 162–167, but does not coincide, as Segre focuses on books which defĳine love, whereas I centre on those which, either including or not a defĳinition of love,give instructions on how to seduce women. 28 Betsy Bowden, ‘The Art of Courtly Copulation’, Medievalia et Humanistica, 9 (1979): 67–85, especially p. 71. 29 ‘The De Amore fĳitted comfortably into the clerical schools of arts where Ovid was accepted as an important text’, says Baldwin, The Language of Sex, p. 20; his documentary proof for an extended presence of De Amore in the schoolroom, however, is still scarce. 400 Cantavella be possible for schoolmasters to put this kind of writing into children’s hands. There were many reasons why this could be. The Pamphilus, for example, is confĳigured like a medieval elegiac comedy, and this kind of comedy is often associated with schools and learning Latin. Among the classics, Terence was a popular author in the schoolroom, and his works, which often included sexual innuendo, are hardly less scandalous to modern eyes.30 Grammar teachers must have used erotodidactic texts, whether Ovid’s Ars Amandi, Pamphilus or Facetus, in the same way as they did Latin comedies, to soften up a schoolboy’s fĳirst taste of Latin, by giving him a strong motivation to study and learn it. There have been other explanations for why erotodidacts were used in the schoolroom and I fĳind John Baldwin’s relevant. He focuses on two approaches. First, à propos the presence of Andreas Capellanus’ work among student clerics, an argument found in a prose vernacular commentary in which diffferent artes are classifĳied as permitted, prohibited or neither. The commentary classifĳiesartes amandi, alongside astronomy, although divination and nec- romancy are not included, in the latter group. These are techniques which are neither permitted nor prohibited, for two main reasons. These are techniques which are neither permitted nor prohibited, for two main reasons:

[. . .] if some had not read or heard about love, they will have no desire or will to love; if some are injured by love, moreover, they will not know how to seek healing and health and might fall into depraved sins against nature leading fĳinally to death. In other words, because neither love nor healing can exist without being taught, the art or teaching of love is, in the fĳinal analysis, morally indiffferent.31

Second, Baldwin also seeks an explanation for this in a classroom commentary to a quaestio by Peter the Chanter (Pierre le Chantre), which he sums up in these words:

Pierre argued that, originating from God, the ars amatoria is morally good in itself, but its use, like that of poison, can be bad. He who teaches it does not use it to seduce women, but to warn his students against ill- efffects. ‘As a caution or warning’ ad( cautelam) was a standard expression

30 See, in note 15, Terence’s presence among other scholarly texts within the MS BNE 4245. For elegiac comedies, see for example Alison Goddard Elliott, Seven Medieval Latin Comedies (New York, 1984), and Baldwin’s observations on William of Blois’ Alda in his The Language of Sex, pp. 98–99, 108. 31 Baldwin, The Language of Sex, pp. 23–24. The Seducer’s Tongue 401

among confessors in administering penance. Ovid himself had proposed Remedia to his own Ars Amatoria, not to repent of his success, to be sure, but to free himself of his conquest.32

These are important arguments but other causes for the teaching of erotodidactic texts among schoolboys may be equally valid. There appears to be a lack of concern among medieval educators about the possible conflict, still to be fully explained, between the teaching of erotodidactics and the moral precepts of the Church. A medieval accessus to Pamphilus, for example, justifĳies this work’s usefulness for men to learn how to seduce honest maidens and for the knowledge of what the book contains. It has a supposed emphasis on ethics ‘as it deals with behaviour.’33 This is a really feeble argument, but the commentator does not seem to think that any more justifĳication is needed. Of course, the late medieval Church did not treat coitus between unattached men and women with the same rigour as any other possible sexual practice. As Jacques Rossiaud explained:

To ‘qualifĳied fornication’ (which stood for the sin of lust consummated and included such public crimes as kidnapping for sex, adultery, incest, and ‘crimes against nature’), canonists and theologians opposed ‘simple fornication’ – a sin, to be sure, but severely disapproved only when unreasonably frequent. [. . .] It was, in fact, defĳined as ‘copula soluti cum soluta ex mutuo consensu’ [the coupling of an unattached man with an unattached woman with mutual consent]. This act [. . .] was not, according to Thomas, of the odious nature of errors against the theological virtues. It threatened the rights of man directly, but, since the fornicator was seeking pleasure, and not to do ill, it threatened the Supreme Legislator only through its consequences. It is not considered criminal and it imperils only the status of a potential and unborn Christian.34

Besides the said distinction, there was also the fact that, although the Church considered coitus outside marriage a sin, medieval medicine instead thought

32 Baldwin, The Language of Sex, pp. 24–25. 33 ‘Intentio auctoris est tractare de amore Pamphili et Galatheae, utilitas est ut hoc libro per- lecto unusquisque sciat sibi pulchras invenire puellas, vel utilitas est cognitio eorum quae continentur in hoc libro. Ethicae subponitur quia de moribus loquitur.’ R.B.C. Huygens, Accessus ad Auctores: Bernard d’Utrecht, Conrad d’Hirsau, Dialogus Super Auctores (Leiden, 1970), p. 53, lines 5–8. 34 Jacques Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution (Oxford, 1988), p. 77. 402 Cantavella coitus, wherever it took place, a healthy practice.35 Further, from the fĳirst outbreak of the Black Death around the mid-fourteenth century, when the European population was severely decimated and in dire need of a higher birthrate, the preaching of sexual abstinence became less easy for moralists. Defence of procreation as a natural imperative, in a range of secular texts literary, social, and of course comic, multiplied exponentially, as Jacques Rossiaud has shown.36 Erotodidactics fĳitted with this vision. Another fact to be considered is the didactic use of debate in the classroom, at every level. Dialectics was one of the principal disciplines of education, and one that particularly appealed to the scholastic method. It is well known that medieval students had to practise debate on many subjects and be able to present convincing arguments in favour of the viewpoint, usually imposed at ran- dom, which they had to defend.37 Scholarly debates intersected with debates as social games on subjects such as what was preferable, water or wine, winter or summer, whether women were essentially good or wicked,38 or whether women preferred knights or clerics for love.39 This custom of trying to see

35 See for example Michael Solomon, ‘Calisto’s Ailment: Bitextual Diagnostics and Parody in Celestina’, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 23 (1989): 41–64, especially pp. 49–50. Medical treatises thought benefĳicial, even necessary, the practice of coitus in young males; see among others Mary Frances Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The ‘Viaticum’ and its Commentaries (Philadelphia, PA, 1990), and Enrique Montero Cartelle, Constantini ‘Liber de Coitu’: El tratado de andrología de Constantino el Africano (Santiago de Compostela, 1983), or the curious Catalan sex-therapy treatise Speculum al foderi: Anna Alberni, Speculum al foder, Philologica, sèrie textos, 4 (Bellcaire d’Empordà, 2007), and Michael Solomon, The Mirror of Coitus: A Translation and Edition of the Fifteenth-Century Speculum al foderi (Madison, WI, 1986). 36 Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution, pp. 111–125. 37 See, for example, Olga Weijers, La “disputatio” dans les Facultés des arts au Moyen Âge (Turnhout, 2002); Egbert P. Bos, The Summa “In Omni Doctrina” (MS Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, CLM 14458, fols 29ra–39rb): Epistemology in Semantics: An Anonymous Early Thirteenth-century Manual of Dialectic (Louvain-la-Neuve & Sterling, VA, 2001); Catherine Brown, Contrary Things: Exegesis, Dialectic, and the Poetics of Didacticism, (Stanford, CA, 1998), and Johannes Fried, ed., Dialektik und Rhetorik im früheren und hohen Mittelalter: Rezeption, Überlieferung und Gesellschaftliche Wirkung antiker Gelehrsamkeit, Vornehmlich um 9. und 12. Jh. (Munich, 1997). 38 See Rosanna Cantavella, Els cards i el llir: Una lectura de l’‘Espill’ de Jaume Roig, Assaig, 11 (Barcelona, 1992). 39 This is the much debated subject of the Council of Remiremont. See Reuben Richard Lee, A New Edition of ‘The Council of Remiremont’ (January 1, 1981). Dissertations Collection for University of Connecticut. Paper AAI8115306. http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/disserta tions/AAI8115306). See also the thirteenth-century Castilian Debate de Elena y María. See, The Seducer’s Tongue 403 both parts of a subject can be observed in erotodidactic texts, which, in what their authors thought the manner of Ovid in his Ars Amandi and his Remedia Amoris (when taken together as medieval readers did), usually included beside their artes amandi an apparently contradictory condemnation of human love or of women. Not only does Andreas Capellanus do this in the third book of the De Amore, but so do other vernacular writers following his, or Ovid’s, cue. Other influential works in the Facetus tradition usually include the equivalent of both sides of the question. They teach seduction, but then also warn against the perils of love. There is yet another, even more important aim in setting erotodidactic texts before schoolboys. One of the purposes of elementary school was to learn courtesy, and good manners, through the libri morum. A literate man was supposed to be also one who was ‘urbanus’ [civilized] or courteous, in his behaviour. These works were written to civilize young men and good seduction skills were one element of good manners. Boncompagno justifĳies writing the Rota Veneris on the grounds of polite behaviour. A synonym of urbanus was facetus. A polite man was thought to be a man who knew how to behave in the salon as well as in bed. Bedroom manners were considered, and taught, as a part of general good manners and erototidactics fulfĳilled this function.40 Books on good manners, or courtesy books, with which Facetus shares a part of its content, are constantly present in the canon of elementary schooltexts from at least the twelfth century. Petrus Alfonsi’s Disciplina Clericalis and Hugh of Saint Victor’s De Institutione Noviciorum are among the best known. Some of these works were quite specifĳic, like Robert Grosseteste’sStans Puer ad Mensam, and gave advice on how to serve at table, and eat, in an elegant manner.41 Another work which is part of this genre, although it also gives more

for example, José Luis Mata, ‘En torno al Debate de Elena y María’, Universidad Abierta, 13 (1992): 2–29. 40 The Facetus, to begin with, already included, as examined below, its ars amandi part within more general advice on good manners. See, for example, Sister Mary Theresa Brentano, Relationship of the Latin Facetus Literature to the Medieval English Courtesy Poems (Lawrence, KS, 1935). 41 See Marie-Geneviève Grossel, ‘La Table comme pierre de touche de la courtoisie: À propos de quelques chastoiements, ensenhamens et autres contenances de table’, in Banquets et manières de table au Moyen Age (Aix-en-Provence, 1996), pp. 179–195. See also Joseph Morawski, Le Facet en françois (Poznań, 1923), pp. xvii–xx, who enumerates and describes ten similar Latin poems. More examples in Stefan Glixelli, ‘Les Contenances de table’, Romania, 47 (1921): 1–49, and Antonio Trigueros, ‘De quinquaginta curialitatibus ad mensam de Bonvesin della Riva’, in Homenaje al profesor Andrés Soria (Granada, 1985), pp. 530–543. 404 Cantavella general advice on courtesy, is called Facetus too. The Facetus ‘Cum nihil utilius’, apparently dating from the second half of the twelfth century too, was written in hexametres.42 It was to become popular, from the fourteenth century onwards, as it became part of the Auctores Octo, the basic canon of elementary texts.43 Its nature as both a morality and courtesy book shows in the titles it receives in diffferent manuscripts:Facetus De Moribus, Moralis, Liber Morum et Virtutum.44 There was at least one more Facetus: the text also called Doctrine Vivum Propere,45 as well as a Phagifacetus.46 All these titles are easily explained for, as noted above, ‘facetus’ is a synonym of ‘curialis’, ‘urbanus’, and ‘elegans’, and therefore it opposes ‘rudus’ or ‘rusticus’. A society that gave so much importance to the learning of good manners certainly would have valued these words.

Pamphilus and Facetus

Courtly manners, therefore, had to be applied also to sexual relationships, and the earlier the young scholar learned them the better. Besides Ovid’s work, the Pamphilus and the Facetus are the best-documented erotodidactic texts used in the classroom. After a brief introduction to Pamphilus, which is the better known of the two, I will focus on the Facetus and its fourteenth-century Catalan translation, the Facet.

42 Carl Schroeder, Der deutsche Facetus (Berlin, 1911). 43 See Rolf Köhn, ‘Schulbildung und Trivium im lateinischer Hochmittelalter und ihr mögli- cher Praktischer Nutzen’, in Schulen und Studium im sozialen Wandel des hohen und späten Mittelalters, ed. by Johannes Fried (Sigmaringen, 1986), pp. 203–284. However it is not impossible that, given the identical titles, sometimes (or even often) the other, naugh- tier Facetus slipped into Auctores Octo collections, rather than the moral one. Both were considered educational texts after all, and the structure of manuscripts like BNE 4245 (see note 15) provides much food for thought. See also Michael Baldzuhn, ‘Textreihen in der Mitüberlieferung von Schultexten als Verschriftlichungsphänomen: Formen ihrer Herausbildung im lateinischen (Liber catonianus, Auctores Octo) und in der Volkssprache (Cato/Facetus)’, in Erziehung, Bildung, Bildungsinstitutionen, ed. by Rudolf Suntrup, Jan Veenstra, & Anne Bollmann (Frankfurt am Main, 2006), pp. 19–54. The Auctores Octo canon had an enormous projection in vernacular literature too. For the English case see for example Jill Mann, ‘ “He Knew Nat Catoun”: Medieval School-Texts and Middle English Literature’, in The Text in the Community: Essays on Medieval Works, Manuscripts, Authors, and Readers, ed. by Jill Mann & Maura Nolan (Notre Dame, IN, 2006), pp. 41–74. 44 Henkel, Deutsche Übersetzungen, pp. 145–148. 45 Nicholas Orme, English Schools in the Middle Ages (London, 1973), p. 105. 46 Henkel, Deutsche Übersetzungen, pp. 297–298. The Seducer’s Tongue 405

Pamphilus was written in 1100 or thereabouts, according to Peter Dronke, and it has been preserved in over 170 manuscripts throughout Western Europe, which gives an idea of its extraordinary popularity.47 It is an elegiac comedy, diverging from the other artes amandi because of its form, but coinciding with them in its didactic efffĳiciency. Instead of being a treatise, it offfers a dialogue format which would facilitate the possibility of staging the text. It might be mimed, as what has been proposed is that it would have been a dumb-show with a voice-over reciting the text, in the style of Isidore.48 The young man would fĳind in Pamphilus a role model for seducing and making love to a maiden. He had only to imitate Pamphilus’ sweet words and follow them up with decisive action. The main character, Pamphilus, begins by explaining his infatuation for a maiden called Galathea, and prays to Venus for help. The goddess appears and gives him advice on how to seduce the girl. Then action starts. We hear (and maybe see by dumb-show) Pamphilus seeking help with an old woman (anus) who will act as a bawd. Indeed she attracts Galathea to her home, where Pamphilus is lurking, and she departs with an excuse, leaving the young couple by themselves. Galathea says she is not happy with this situation, but she does not leave. In consequence, Pamphilus seizes the chance and, after wooing her by praising her and declaring his love for her, deflowers her. The audience hears what is happening in Galathea’s words. She protests, as becomes a maiden, at every step the young man takes, and afterwards laments the loss of her virginity. This sounds very much like rape to us, twenty-fĳirst century people. Nowadays it is fĳirmly understood that when a woman says no, she means it. Was it so in medieval society? Did the artes amandi promote rape? I will return to this crucial moral issue after presenting the Facetus, in which the same subject arises. The Facetus is also written in Ovidian elegiac distichs. Unlike the Pamphilus it is not an elegiac comedy, but ostensibly a courtesy handbook. One could have directly influenced the other, as they have identical sentences.49 After much consideration on the few extant reference points, Peter Dronke deduced, pro- visionally, that Pamphilus must have preceded Facetus by two or three decades, and that, therefore, the Pamphilus influenced the Facetus.50

47 Peter Dronke, ‘A Note on Pamphilus’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 42 (1979): 225–30, especially pp. 228–230. 48 See Elliott, Seven Medieval, pp. xvii–xxvi. 49 As signalled by Elliott, ‘The Facetus’, pp. 56–57 and Stefano Pittaluga, ‘Pamphilus’, in Commedie latine del XII e XIII secolo, 5 vols (Genoa, 1980), III, pp. 19–24. 50 Dronke, ‘A Note on Pamphilus’, pp. 229–230. 406 Cantavella

The Facetus was also popular, although not quite so spectacularly as Pamphilus. It is preserved in over thirty manuscripts but still lacks a critical modern edition.51 This work, like Pamphilus, was read and copied well into the fĳifteenth century, and two translations into Romance languages have survived: one French and one Catalan.52 The Catalan translation, dating at latest from the early fourteenth century includes and amplifĳies the ars amandi section at length. I will not consider the French version, which is much shorter, and which leaves out all this section. The original Facetus has four parts:

(1) Advice on good manners, on right behaviour in a variety of social situations, and on personal hygiene. It briefly describes both clerical and lay men, together with diffferent professions and crafts, and pays special attention to young men (lines 1–130). (2) An ars amandi of vaguely Ovidian inspiration, written as a seducer’s handbook, to teach a young man how to woo with words and compli- ments and, then, how to deflower a maiden (lines 131–320), It includes some lines on how to keep their love relationship alive afterwards (lines 303–20). This perspective shows that the anonymous author of the Face- tus was following Ovid’s plan of how to fĳind a female lover and how to stop her from falling out of love in Books One and Two of his Ars Amandi. Book Three, addressed by Ovid to women, which deals with how to fĳind a male lover, was, unsurprisingly, left out. (3) Brief remedia amoris in the form of a reprobatio feminae or reproval of women (lines 321–84). (4) Commentaries on certain professions and situations in life: friendship, judges, doctors, soldiers, and old age (lines 385–510).

The Catalan version is written in 1742 lines of noves rimades, a narrative verse pattern easy to memorize and recite, with a structure of isometric, mainly octosyllabic, lines and an aabbccdd rhyme. It translates parts 1, 2, and 3, but omits part 4, and expands on part 3, adding around 150 original lines on the subject of the reprobatio feminae. The sections of the Facet are as follows:

51 Its fĳirst edition was Morel-Fatio’s, subsequently reproduced with a translation by Elliott. Morel-Fatio, ‘Le Livre de courtoisie’, Romania, 15 (1886): 192–235, especially 224–35; and Elliott, ‘The Facetus’. I too have reproduced it, with slight variants from another Catalan manuscript in Latin, and transcribed another fragmentary copy from Barcelona (Cantavella, El Facet, pp. 273–90). 52 Morawski, Le Facet. The Seducer’s Tongue 407

(1) Advice on good manners, on behaving in a proper manner, according to social values, and on some professions and crafts, in lines 1–351, faithfully and closely translating the fĳirst 130 lines of the originalFacetus . No oral patterns are given here. (2) The Catalan ars amandi section amplifĳies its model in the original Face- tus, whose 190 lines are expanded here into more than a thousand (352– 1370). These can be subdivided into four sections and deal with: (2a) How the young man should choose his target. For example, he should pick only maidens, or, perhaps, widows, as objects of seduction, according to the anonymous author (lines 352–91). (2b) Preliminary points for a successful seduction: to establish only one target at a time; to win the maiden’s consent to be loved smoothly, with courtly manners; to seek her among his own social class. This section includes how to establish fĳirst visual contacts and how to use a go-between (lines 392–487). (2c) Starting the seduction. This section greatly amplifĳies the original. Its 81 lines become 470 (488–910), mainly because of the models of direct speech the Catalan text presents. These are to be used by the seducer as well as by his go-between. It even predicts the maiden’s probable replies, also in direct speech. (2d) The seduction climax has 458 lines (911–1369), expanded from 67 in the original Facetus. Once the suitor knows that the maiden tolerates her suitor, he has a choice of speeches, also in a direct style, especially featur- ing words to flatter her. The rhetorical form takes its origin in the troubadour salut d’amor genre. All these direct speeches are models to be followed by the would-be seducer. The main section advises on physically preparing the girl for sexual intercourse with the young man, while he utters more words of praise and love, and then on penetrating her. At this point he should not listen to any protests at all. This sequence fĳinishes with a model of direct speech too, offfering advice on how to comfort the girl afterwards, since she will presumably cry for her lost virginity. There is an added rider that the seducer must not commit himself by making any promises of attachment to her. (3) In this last part, a mere 64 lines in the Facetus (321–84) become 443 lines in the Catalan text (1370–1742), including a totally original fĳinal section (1601–1742), all to present an extensive reprobatio feminae, including direct references to topics from the medieval literary debate on women.53

53 On these topics in the Facet, see Rosanna Cantavella, ‘Der Streit um die Frauen: Liebeslehren der katalanischen Facet um 1400’, in Heißer Streit und kalte Ordnung, ed. 408 Cantavella

A book such as the Facetus raises a number of questions.54 For this article, I plan to concentrate particularly on whether the artes amandi incited young men to rape. I will then analyse the role of words in the sexual act to determine whether words might assist them.

Is it Seduction, or is it Rape? Physical Force, Sweet Words, and Good Manners

As the question of physically vanquishing a maiden’s resistance may wound our twenty-fĳirst century sensibilities, it is important to refrain from projecting modern cultural patterns on to medieval mentality. The word rape is not to be applied without due thought to what is taught in erotodidactic texts. First of all, there were some medieval conventions which every woman would know and which a girl should avoid at all costs. A maiden should never consent to being left alone with a man; an honest maiden should never confess her sexual interest for a boy, and she should declare that she refused intercourse with him, even when she was sexually interested, because her modesty prevented it. A less than honest, lusty, maiden was, to the medieval mind, an aberration.55 Therefore the convention was that a maiden who wanted sexual intercourse had at least to pretend she did not want it, unless she was to be thought no longer a maiden. This apparent ambiguity exists in Pamphilus, as in other erotodidactic texts. Some excerpts from the sequence of the physical seduction in the Catalan Facetus-Facet will illustrate whether the writer intended rape. The Facet translates ‘Sed quia sic multis verecundia sepius obstat / ut quoque con- jugibus basia justa negent’ (lines 285–86) as:

baysar-la vaja con a sert, no foylament una vagada, mas ·L· ab abrassada, que, so que diu, vergonya u fa, majorment con vezat no u ha. (lines 1210–14)56

by Friederike Hassauer (Göttingen, 2008), pp. 63–73. An English version can be read at http://www.uv.es/cantave/FacetWien. 54 I have tried to address most of them in my edition and commentary on the Catalan Facet. 55 See, for example, Lola Badia, ‘Tot per la dona però sense la dona: Notes sobre el punt de vista masculí al Tirant lo Blanc, Journal of Hispanic Research, 2 (1993): 39–60. 56 All quotations from the Facetus and the Facet come from my edition: [He must kiss her fĳirmly, / not as a fool just once, / but fĳifty times with embraces, / as she says (her words of refusal) because of her modesty, / especially as she is not used (to sex)]. The Seducer’s Tongue 409

Then the Facetus continues:

Mobilis interea stringat manus una mamillas. Et femur et venter sentiat inde vicem. Sic postquam ludens fuerit calefactus uterque, vestibus ejectis, crura levare decet. Vim faciat juvenis, quamvis nimis illa repugnet, nam si desistat, mente puella dolet. (lines 291–96)

This section is much extended in the Facet:

palp les memeles atressí, strenga-les-li (un poc, no molt, car no seria de joch, que semblaria hom porquer, o strèmpauc, o paltuner); la cuxa e·l ventre exament. E cascú senta lo baysament, e la calor e·l foc d’amor bé li intrarà dins lo cor. Lo macip, con conexerà qu·ela trestota cremarà e la veurà tota tremolar, deu-la tantost resubinar e gir-li les faldes ensús, sí que no parega camús. Aquí·s deu lo jove sforsar si tot·elle·s sap reguitnar ne ab ell vol forsejar perquè li puxa scapar, que puys n[o] aurà saysó ne loc, ne la lex sí con a badoc, que si lavors la desempara e la lexa anar encara, no·l prearà puys ·I· diner, ne·s volrà puys en ell fĳier; apeylar-s’à benuhirada con axí li és scapada. (lines 1224–50)57

57 [Let him caress her breasts, / press them for her, just a bit, / not too hard, as it would not do, / as he would seem a pigfarmer, / a wild man, a tramp; / also her thighs and belly, / 410 Cantavella

The Facet’s instructions about seducing the girl do not give the opportunity for speaking many words. In the Facetus-Facet, if the maiden resists, it does not mean that she does not want sex, but that she refuses because of her natural modesty. This modesty, then, was an obstacle the seducer had to remove. At the same time it was also believed that maidens, because they were women, wanted what they refused. The corollary to this approach was the idea that maidens wanted at heart to be sexually forced and it had to be done that way because that was their nature.58 Ovid fĳirst said this in his Ars Amandi: ‘Scilicet ut pudor est quaedam coepisse priorem, / sic alio gratum est incipiente pati’.59 In the Pamphilus Venus puts it like this:

Si locus est, illi iocundis viribus insta; quod vix sperasti, mox dabit ipsa tibi. Non sinit interdum pudor illi primere votum; sed quod habere cupit hoc magis ipsa negat. Pulchrius esse putat vi perdere virginitatem quam dicat: ‘De me fac modo velle tuum’. (lines 109–14)60

This passage was to inspire many other late medieval erotodidactic texts and I provide some examples to show that taking a maiden’s maidenhead was always carried out in the same way. The Poissance d’amour, for example is very similar: ‘car femme est tele que de se nature doune a entendre que on li face

and let both feel the kissing, / and love’s heat and fĳire / will enter her heart./ When the young boy understands that she is burning / and sees her tremble all over, / he should then make her lie down supine / and lift her skirts, / and he should act sharp. / Then the young boy should make force / if she starts kicking / and tries to resist him, / that she does not escape, / as then he will not have another chance, / let him not make a fool of himself by letting her escape, / because if he lets her go then and there, / she will not have a good opinion of him, / and will not trust him again, / she will consider herself lucky / for having escaped him.] 58 See Badia ‘Tot per la dona’, and Xavier Renedo, ‘Quin mal és lo besar? Literatura i moral al voltant de la quarta línia de l’amor’, Caplletra, 13 (1992): 99–116. On the topic of women’s contrariness see Cantavella Els cards i el llir. 59 [That is, because modesty stops her, and therefore, provided it’s the other who starts, she likes being passive] (I, pp. 703–704). 60 J. Rubio and T. González Rolán, Pánfĳilo o el arte de amar (Barcelona, 1977): [If chance arises, put pressure on her with playful force; / she will give you herself instantly what you would not dare expect. / Modesty prevents her from opening her heart; / what she most desires she refuses. / She thinks it more honorable to lose her virginity by force / than to say: ‘Do with me what you want’.] The Seducer’s Tongue 411 par force che que bien veut et ke bien li plaira: et ce vient de boines meurs, car che vient de chou ke ele est honteuse par nature’.61 It also inspired Jakes d’Amiens’s Art d’amours:

là ou elle se desfendra et fera semblant de courcier, si le dois tu voir esforcier: là u elle s’estordera, l’enforcement molt amera. Honteuses sunt del otroier, por çou les doit on effforcier;62

Similarly in the Clef d’amours:

si veut elle que l’en la forche et qu’elle soit vaincue a forche. Et combien que forche l’appeles, tel forche plest mont as puceles [. . .] James fame n’oseroit dire de bouche cen que tant desire; mes mont li plest que nen la prenge;63

The Roman de la Rose has another such scene:

Los devez la Rose cuillir tout vaiez vos neïs Dangier qui vos acuelle a le dangier, ou que Honte e poour en grocent, mes que feintement s’en corrocent [. . .]

61 Gian Battista Speroni, La ‘Poissance d’amours’ dello Pseudo-Richard de Fournival (Florence, 1975), p. xv, line 23. [Because woman is such that by nature she implies that she is done by force what she actually wants and would like very much; and this comes from good behaviour, as she is modest by nature.] 62 Anna Maria Finoli, ed., Artes amandi: Da Maître Elie ad Andrea Cappellano (Milan-Varese, 1969), lines 1202–8: [When she defends herself and appears to resist, you must increase force: when she writhes about, she is really loving being forced. Girls are modest about giving themselves, and because of this they must be forced.] 63 Finoli, ed., Artes amandi, lines 1135–44. [Therefore she wants to be forced / and vanquished by force. / But although you can call it force, / maidens like such force [. . .] very much. A woman would never dare / utter what she desires so much; / but she very much enjoys being taken.] 412 Cantavella

car riens ne leur porroit tant pleire con tel force, qui la set feire;64

The Sept Ars libéraux d’amours is another text with similar sentiments:

quant tu seullette la tiendras, garde bien que pas n’attendras tant qu’elle die, quant venez: ‘Faictes de moy voz voulentez’; car jamais ne le te diroit, pour honte qu’elle doubteroit: dont la doibs prendre et abbatre;65

An original passage from the Ars Amandi (lines 1671–72) is discernible in each literary citation, whether it derives from Pamphilus or elsewhere: ‘Vim licet appelles, grata est vis ista puellis, / quod iuvat, invitae saepe dedisse volunt’, although Ovid did not refer there to how to pluck a virgin, but to the games played by sophisticated people.66 Alison G. Elliott observed that the type of woman whom Ovid had in mind when he talked about seduction was Corinna, a courtesan.67 Lola Badia reminds us that nowhere does Ovid say that he takes his Corinna by force.68 However this may be, his ‘grata est vis ista puellis’

64 Guillaume de Lorris & Jean de Meun, Roman de la Rose, ed. by Félix Lecoy, 4 vols (Paris, 1979–83), lines 7, 648–64. [You must pluck the rose, even if you see Rebufff himself beginning to abuse you, or Shame and Fear grumbling at you. They are only pretending to be angry and putting up a weak defence (. . .), for nothing could please them so well as that force, applied by one who understands it]. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, ed. and trans. Frances Horgan (Oxford, 1994), p. 118. 65 Auguste Doutrepont, La Clef d’amors (Halle, 1890), p. 144, lines 103–9. [When you get her all by herself, / do not care waiting until she says / ‘do with me what you want’, / because she will never tell you so / as modesty will hinder her: / therefore you must take her, force her down.] See also the Cort d’Amor: ‘E s’ill se sufffre a forsar, / prenda son ioi ses demorar, / qe dompna vol per dreita escorsa / q’hom li fasa un petit de forsa. / Q’ill no dira ia: “Fages m’o!”, / mais qui la forsa, sofre so’. Matthew Bardell, La cort d’Amor: A Critical Edition (Oxford, 2002), pp. 72–75, lines 579–84: [And if she allows herself to be taken by force, / let him take his joy without waiting, / for a lady desires, for correct appearance, / that a man compel her a little. / For she will never say: ‘Do it to me!’, / but if a man forces her, she allows it.] 66 [You may call it violence; this kind of violence is pleasant to girls, / they often wish to give what they like without giving in.] 67 See Elliott, Seven Medieval, pp. xxx–xxxi. 68 Badia ‘Tot per la dona’, pp. 54–55. The Seducer’s Tongue 413 and, particularly, the ‘puellis,’ are sure to make a medieval audience think of a forced deflowering. Another passage from Ovid seems to bolster this argument: ‘vix caret efffectu quod volere duo’.69 Mathieu de Vendôme quotes this passage in his Ars versifĳicatoria just after exposing the steps taken by love. First there should be intuitus, then concupiscentia, accessus, colloquium, blandimen- tum, and fĳinallyvotiva duorum congressio.70 If the gallant let the maiden escape, he will risk having no further opportunity, as Jakes d’Amiens indicates in his Art d’amours:

Et se d’illuec puet escaper sans li vaintre, sans li outrer, jamais ne s’i embatera puet c’iestre, ne plus n’i venra là u le puisses esforcier.71

Maidens feel contempt towards the man who, once he has had the chance to force them, does not do so, as in the Roman de la Rose:

Si sachiez que dolent seroient se par tel defffanse eschapoient; quelque leesce qu’il fainsissent, si dont qu’il ne vos en haïssent, tant en seroient corrocié, combien qu’il eüssent grocié [. . .].72

69 Amores, II, iii, 16. [Violence lacks its efffect when both want it]. 70 Edmond Faral, Les Arts poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siècles: recherches et documents sur la technique littéraire du Moyen Âge (Paris, 1924), p. 183. On the steps of love or gradus amoris, an idea to which erotodidactic texts naturally adjust, see Lionel J. Friedman, ‘Gradus Amoris’, Romance Philology, 19 (1965): 167–77. Renedo, ‘Quin mal és lo besar?’, refers to the gradus amoris in relation to several Catalan literary passages. A similar gradation was sometimes applied to literature on divine love, and even there is some case in which it appears that, under cover of divine love, human love steps are understood, as in Richard of Saint Victor; see Dronke, Medieval Latin, I, pp. 63–66. 71 Finoli, ed., Artes amandi, lines 1229–33: [And if she can escape from him / without having been vanquished, without having given in to him, / she will never give you again the chance to force her.] 72 Lecoy, ed., Roman de la Rose, lines 7671–76: [And so you may be sure that they would be sad to escape by this defense; however great the joy they feigned, I am afraid that they would be so angry that they would hate you for it, however much they may have grumbled, trans. Horgan, Romance of the Rose, p. 118]. See also the Clef d’amours: ‘et se nen 414 Cantavella

On the maiden despising the frustrated seducer, the Facet again presents an orality issue: if the young man fails to take advantage of her, he will be subject to amotinament thereafter. Amotinar is the act of chanting words of abuse, by children when playing, for example. The Facet seems to capture the kind of rhyming abuse, which people in the Middle Ages might have used: ‘Sényer n’Artús, / ja [a]vets la fĳilosa e·l fus, / babot camús, babot camús, / que ja de mi no n’aurets pus’ (lines 1276–79).73 Women, then, could not respect the man who did not seize his chance. In a Latin manuscript about love, a woman scorns her suitor because, having been alone with her, he did not take advantage of her. She says he did not follow the advice of Ovid nor of the Facetus.74 All these ideas were, of course, also well known and had taken root in the Crown of Aragon, where the longest Facetus translation originated. The fourteenth-century Franciscan friar Francesc Eiximenis bears witness to it in his Dotzè, in an exemplum in which he reproves the advice given by a certain Píndar, tutor of a young king, who recommended to his charge: ‘que no·n per- donàs a neguna [fembra], solament que les trobàs en secret, e que no y dup- tars de fer lur força, car les fembres no feyen força ne contrastaven a negun de cor, sinó per vergonya.’75 In fact, similar ideas were present in many medieval

la laisse eschaper / au point que nen la puet haper, / saches qu’elle en est mont corchie, / combien qu’elle en faigne estre lie. / De tous tens issi se mantiennent; / les unes as autres l’aprennent, / qu’els ne soient prises prouvees / c’onques s’i fussent accordees’. Finoli, ed., Artes amandi, lines 1149–56. [And if one lets her escape / when one can have her, / know that she is very angry / in spite of her feigning being glad. / They keep this throughout the times; / the ones learn from the others, / that they not be caught / showing that they agree to it]. 73 [Sir Arthur, / you got my spinning wheel and my spindle, / you big blunt fool, big blunt fool, / you would not get anything more out of me.] For a similar point about scorning and mocking young men who failed, see again Jakes d’Amiens: ‘k’elles tiennent a mauvestiés / quant escaper les laisse on: / a tous jors mais tost les piert on / [. . .] / et apries si s’en vont gabant, / et le gent vont escarnissant, / et pour ce les doit on outrer / c’apriés ne s’en puis- sent gaber’. Finoli, ed., Artes amandi, lines 1244–52. [Because they consider it disgraceful / to be allowed to escape: / it always means that one loses them quickest [. . .] and then they make fun of him, / and people mock him, / and so he must pierce them, / so that they cannot make fun of him.] 74 Dronke, Medieval Latin, II, pp. 526, 531. The MS in question is in the Escorial monastery library. 75 Francesc Eiximenis Dotzè llibre del Crestià, ed. by Curt Wittlin et al. (Girona, 1986), II (1), p. 211, lines 13–18: [That he did not spare any [woman], when he found her secretly, and that he did not hesitate in forcing her, because women did not defend themselves nor The Seducer’s Tongue 415 literary texts, Catalan or not, as Badia showed in her detailed study.76 The belief that women would enjoy being sexually forced is also reflected in the lines of an alleged trobairitz, Dama H., who, in a joc partit with the troubadour Rosin, maintains that a good lover is one who, once within his lady’s bed, will force her in spite of her words of protest.77 Apparently against the tide of this flood of literary examples, the De amore is a striking exception. The King of Love’s advice, includes this maxim: ‘In amoris exercendo solatia voluntatem non excedas amantis’.78 In this very work, however, force is advised when dealing with countrywomen: ‘Si verum et illarum te feminarum amor forte atraxerit, esa pluribus laudibus effferre memento, et, si locum invenieris opportunum, non diffferas assumere quod petebas et violento potiri amplexu’.79 In theDe Amore, then, only a class diffference permits this behaviour. No oral models are ever offfered, to accompany the act of penetration Actions must speak louder than words. Among this multitude of texts there is no uniformity, but many nuances can be distinguished. What is most usual is how the Clef d’amours, which follows Ovid, declares girls like being forced, but warns: ‘mes par force riens n’i ajoste’.80 Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose too, which seems to follow the Facetus closely on this point, after advising to take the Rose by force if necessary, makes it clear that words have a part to play: ‘mes se par paroles apertes / les sentez corrociez a certes / et viguereusement defffendre, / vos n’i devez ja la main tendre’.81 What is key to distinguishing between the medieval ideas of seduction and rape is that, in almost all kinds of medieval erotodidactic handbooks, there is consensus about forcing a maiden and that it should never be at the expense

oppose anybody from the heart, but because of modesty.] This passage is also commented upon by Renedo, ‘Quin mal és lo besar?’, p. 108. 76 Badia, ‘Tot per la dona’. 77 In her poem ‘Rosin, digatz m’ades de cors’. See Magda Bogin, Les Trobairitz: poetes occitanes del segle XII (Barcelona: laSal, 1983), pp. 172–77. 78 Book I, VI, E; Andreas Capellanus, Andreas Capellanus on Love, ed. by Patrick G. Walsh (London, 1982), p. 116, line 269 [When practising the consolations of love do not go beyond what your lover desires.] 79 Book I, XI; Walsh, ed., On Love, p. 222, line 3: [But if the love even of peasant women chances to entice you, remember to praise them lavishly, and should you fĳind a suitable spot you should not delay in taking what you seek, gaining it by rough embraces.] 80 Finoli, ed., Artes amandi, line 324: [But nothing is gained by violence.] 81 Lecoy, ed., Roman de la Rose, lines 7677–80, translated by Horgan, Romance of the Rose, p. 118: [‘But if they speak clearly and you feel that they are really angry and defending themselves vigorously, you must not stretch out your hand’.] Author’s italics. 416 Cantavella of sacrifĳicing her sexual pleasure with the oral playing its part here too. As the Castilian Libro de Buen Amor puts it:

Guárdate non la tengas la primera vegada, non acometas cosa porque fĳinque espantada; sin su plazer non sea tañida nin texnada: una vez échale el devo, que venga segurada.82

If the maiden does not feel attracted at all towards the seducer, if she refuses him unequivocally, ‘par paroles apertes’ or ‘viguereusement’, the lover should let her go. But it is also assumed that, if the maiden did not feel attracted at all towards him, she would not have consented to meet him by herself and to talk about love secretly. This lesson is clearer in the Facetus than in the Pamphilus, where Galathea looks as though she is the victim of a set-up. I have found only one exception, among erotodidactic texts, to this general agreement about forcing a maiden only if her benevolence has previously been gained: a case in which previous foreplay is not proposed. This text is the Sept Ars libéraux d’amours, a work that, when explaining how to overcome female modesty, omits all advice on how to arouse female desire, and openly instructs on how to totally force the girl, including the sinister detail of opening her closed knees by force until the pain makes her surrender: ‘lors les jambes luy verras joindre. / Adonc, amant, ne te doibs errant desserrer / et si ensemble reheurter / que des chevilles la douleur / luy faces ouvrir les genoulx’.83 Faced with this text, more or less contemporary to the Facet, which insists on preparing the maiden, with expert caresses on her breasts and thighs, and by stroking her with words of love, the Facetus looks more like kindness embodied. For rape was a form of qualifĳied, not simple fornication, and therefore a much greater sin. The argument here is that, although erotodidactic authors do not write as moralists, they do not urge anything other than fornicatio sim- plex. A sexual act to which the woman is not led willingly is a grave moral sin. And, as erotodidactic texts were a form of courtesy texts, they also saw rape as a sin against politeness. As the Facet puts it:

82 Blecua, ed., Libro de Buen Amor, stanza 646: [Take care that the fĳirst time you do not have her, / do not attempt anything that drives her into a fright; / she should not be played or felt without her pleasure: / let you fĳirst throw the hook at her, so that she comes securely.] [Chapter author’s italics.] 83 Doutrepont, ed., Clef d’Amours, p. 144, lines 111–16: [Then you’ll see that she closes her legs. / Then, lover, you must not beat about the bush / but unclose and repeatedly hurt / so that by the pain in her ankles / you make her open her knees.] The Seducer’s Tongue 417

jugant, rient, no deus vagar: adés cuxes, adés costats, per tu sien sovín palpats. Mas no u fasses con a porquer, mas fe-u con a franc cavaller, car aver manera plasent en tota res és covinent; nulla res no val ses mesura, ne deu valer senes dretura. (lines 1,166–74)84

In the original Facetus, but to an even greater extent in the Catalan version, the point is made that the seducer should always proceed by speaking pleasing words to the maiden, as he caresses her, using the good manners of a gentleman, and distancing himself thus from vulgar, uncourteous men, unable to give a female pleasure. The woman should be caressed rightly, then, not roughly. And one vital aspect of this model of good-mannered sex is the use of words to conquer her. Before he moves to physical action, the man’s patient labour of spoken words has been seeding interest, even love, in the maiden. This is essential to judge by the enormous amount of space devoted to it by erotodidactic works. In the Facet, of a total of 1019 ars amandi lines, an overwhelming 464 lines are speeches proposed to gain the girl’s goodwill. They mainly praise her, and also declare the seducer’s love for her.85 In this the Facet and the other erotodidactic texts, including particularly Rota Veneris and De Amore, rely on the well- known resort in rhetoric of laudatio as captatio benevolentiae. Praise opens all doors, and most particularly the door to love and sex. Here are two representative examples:

Àngels vos posaren lo nom certament, que no gens hom, e fos en paradís formada con axí sots agrasiada, car ceyll qui ab vós pot parlar

84 [Joking, laughing, you should act diligently: / her thighs as well as her sides / caress many times. / But do not do it in the manner of someone who minds the pigs, / but like a gentleman, / because to act with pleasing manners / in everything is important; / nothing is valid without measure, / and nothing is allowed but with propriety.] 85 Lines 495–561, 576–85 (the go-between), 666–820, 861–92 (the seducer), 915–22 (people, reporting his deep admiration to her), 943–1083, 1113–50, 1188–200 (the seducer). 418 Cantavella

no pot faylir ne pot errar. Per vós són los pechs instruïts e los pobres enriquehits, los desconsolats conortats, ve-us doncs, madona, qual bontats. (lines 680–9)86

Déus vo[s] saul, na rosa plazent! Rosa vos puix dir ni nomnar, car pus fresque sots, sens duptar, que la rosa al mes de may per lo matí, quant lo sol ray. Si eu avia lenga d’asser ja no us poria may retrer les grans laors qui en vós són. (lines 1113–20)87

What is more, the young man should add pleas for the maiden to save his life, which he alleges is in danger because of his overwhelming love for her, to his praises of her:

Ha dolsa res plasent e cara!, vós per què·m fets axí morir e·m carregats de greu martir? car la péra sclataria si tanta dolor sostenia, con fas yo per vós verament, madona, de so en res no us ment, pecat n’avets gran e forsor con axí·m fets penar d’emor. (lines 862–69)88

86 [Angels chose your name / indeed, not men, / and you were formed in Paradise / as you are so attractive, / as those who are able to talk with you / cannot fail, cannot err. / Through you the fool become learned / and the poor become rich, / the inconsolable consoled, / so see, milady, how good you are.] 87 [God save you, pleasing rose! / I can call you rose / as you are undoubtedly fresher / than roses in May / in the morning, when the sun shines. / Not even if I had a tongue of steel, / could I utter / all the praises you deserve.] 88 [Oh pleasing, dear, sweet thing!, / why are you making me die like this / and loading me with this ordeal? / Rocks would burst up / if they sufffered such pain / as the one I sustain because of you, certainly, / my lady, I’m not lying at all, / you fall into grave sin / as you make me sufffer like this for love.] The Seducer’s Tongue 419

Per què la vostr·amor m’à pres e liat con a presoner, ab ·I· fĳilet de amor enter; per què us dic certanament que yo sofĳir un greu turment, que anc Tristany l’anamorat major lo sofrí, ne nul hom nat. No pux re fer la nuyt e·l dia que ab vós, dols·amor, no sia. Menjar e beure mi toylets si vós, dolsa, no m’acorrets, e no·m fassats axí morir c·a penes pux nagun bé dir. (lines 996–1008)89

Such words sound deeply familiar to any reader of medieval love poetry. No surprise, then, that a clear pattern can be identifĳied for almost all these Facet speeches in the medieval troubadour lyric genre of the salut d’amor.90 Learned rhetorical elaborations lie, as might be expected, at the heart of these erotodidactic oral proposals. They are oral but not improvised or spontaneous. Rhetoric is, before anything else, the art of persuasion, and the erotodidactic authors turned to it as a matter of necessity. Were schoolboys expected to memorize and recite passages like these? Most probably, as they are still in verse, like the words of the adviser. And were this kind of speeches really used by would-be seducers? Well, unsurprisingly there is no oral testimony. There is, however, a written one. There are two apparently real fĳifteenth-century love letters which consist of lines 496–529 of the Facet. They reproduce the fĳirst sentences the Facet has for the go-between, from ‘Madona dolsa, Déus vos sal / missatge son [. . .]’ to ‘Mas ell és dols e vós dolseta, / qual serà cell qui torp hi meta?’91

89 [As your love has taken me / and tied me up like a prisoner, / with a thread of true love; / then I say to you truthfully / that I’m sufffering such a severe torment, / that not even the Tristan, the major lover, / was able to sufffer, nor anybody else. / I cannot do anything all day / if it is not related to you, my sweet love. / You have taken away my appetite for food and drink, / unless you, sweet one, succour me, / and please do not make me die like this / as I’m almost unable to say anything coherent.] 90 Francesca Gambino & Speranza Cerullo, Salutz d’amor: edizione critica del corpus occi- tanico (Rome, 2009). 91 See my edition of the Facet, appendix III, pp. 303–306, where I edit the two extant copies of this letter. See also Francesc Martorell, ed., Epistolari del segle XV (Barcelona 1928), pp. 25–26. [‘Hail, sweet lady, I’m a messenger (. . .). But he is sweet and you are sweet, / so who would interfere between you two?’] 420 Cantavella

In the fĳinal analysis, what characterizes these recommended erotic practices, and what most distinguishes them from rape, is the approach from the point of view of what is considered polite behaviour and good manners. Good manners demanded the woman should be wooed, before being touched. She should be conquered by words before being conquered by caresses. She had to come to intercourse willingly, even if she ostensibly played a resisting role. To induce her to crave the act she said she did not want was a task for the, perhaps untruthful but ever courteous, kind seducer’s tongue. CHAPTER 15 Preaching God’s Word in a Late-medieval Valencian Convent: Isabel de Villena, Writer and Preacher

Lesley K. Twomey

In the Santa Trinitat convent in fĳifteenth-century Valencia, the Poor Clare nuns would regularly have heard sermons. The Santa Trinitat nuns are likely to have heard sermons preached, perhaps by visiting priests come to celebrate the Eucharist in the convent and almost certainly by their abbess. Isabel de Villena was abbess of the convent for almost thirty years (1462–90) and was elected after a papal dispensation enabling an illegitimate woman to hold offfĳice. If the nuns heard sermons preached to them by their abbess, no trace has remained of these as a collection of sermons. In her magnum opus, the long Vita Christi, a life of Christ which begins with the conception of the Virgin Mary and ends, incomplete, with her coronation in heaven, however, there may lie embedded tantalizing traces of those sermons, which Villena reworked to form the addresses from Christ, from his mother, or from other characters in the Vita. She writes partly in Latin and then glosses into the Valencian vernacular. There has indeed long been speculation that Isabel de Villena wrote sermons and delivered them to the nuns in her charge.1 Her coat of arms after all incorporates a stafff of offfĳice, a crozier, like a bishop’s, symbol of spiritual leadership, a mark of offfĳice, and a signal of her unofffĳicial equivalence to the Bishop of Valencia as a spiritual pastor for those in her care.2 Although there is no certainty of such guidance being provided in the form of preaching, an

1 Bert Roest, ‘“Ignorantia est mater omnium malorum”: The Validation of Knowledge and the Offfĳice of Preaching in Late Medieval Female Franciscan Communities’, inSaints, Scholars, and Politicians: Gender as a Tool in Medieval Studies, ed. by Mathilde van Dijk & Renée Nip, Medieval Church Studies, 15 (Turnhout, 2005), pp. 65–83, at p. 80. Roest asserts that ‘as abbess of this important royal foundation, she was given permission to preach’, p. 80. He mentions the collection of sermons, which Villena wrote, lost by a Carmelite friar, p. 80. Roest also indicates that for an ‘inkling of Isabella’s [sic] homilectic message, we may have to turn to another work, namely her [. . .] Vita Christi’, p. 80. 2 Frontispiece (see Fig. 1), Isabel de Villena, Vita Christi de la Abbadessa del monestir de les monges de la Trinitat (Valencia, 1513), fol. 242. I prepared this paper for the Gossip, Gospel and Governance: Orality in Europe (1400–1700) as a paper to be given if someone had to drop out for personal reasons. Alex Cowan’s paper was prepared in the same way. Fortunately, he gave

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004291829_017 422 Twomey eighteenth-century historian of her convent, Agostín Sales, was convinced that she wrote ‘algunos tractados y sermones’ [some treatises and sermons], even though none of these have survived.3 Could the Vita Christi provide missing sermon texts? It would seem probable that a woman writing such a narrative might include expositions of Scripture she had written for convent instruction, even if unwittingly. One such potential discourse, which seems a likely starting point for discourses in the Vita Christi which might have originated as a sermon, is the Virgin Mary’s brief address or admonition to the disciples, which she gives after the Ascension. It is a discourse on praying for the Holy Spirit to descend on those present. Villena left neither book of sermons, nor collection of prayers but she did leave her lengthy narrative about the lives of Christ and his mother, a book intended to serve a didactic purpose, teaching her nuns about the events of the life of Christ and his mother, as well as to draw her sisters to prayer and contemplation. It has also been thought a text equivalent to a spiritual chivalry novel, an entertaining text to while away the dull convent hours.4 Villena chose to write a Vita Christi, although she might equally well have left as her legacy a collection of prayers, as Constanza de Castilla († 1478), Dominican prioress of Santo Domingo el Real did, or a treatise, as Teresa de Cartagena (1425–?) did, a woman writer whose order is unknown but who may be a Franciscan, or even a collection of sermons or a series of admonitions in the style of St Francis (1181/2–1226).5 Within the Vita Christi can be distinguished, however, a number of prayers which are embedded in the narrative

his. I did not give mine but I present it here in honour of my colleague with whom I prepared the conference bid in 2010 and ran the conference in 2011. 3 Tomás Agostín Sales y Alcazar, Historia del Real Monasterio de la Ssma Trinidad, religiosas de Santa Clara de la Regular Observancia, fuera los Muros de la Ciudad de Valencia (Valencia, 1761); Sales’s history of the Santa Trinitat convent is cited in Albert Hauf Valls, La Vita Christi de Sor Isabel de Villena (s. XV) como arte de meditar: introducció a una lectura contextualizada (Valencia, 2006), p. 32, n. 7. 4 Albert G. Hauf, ‘Text i contexte de l’obra de sor Isabel de Villena’, in Literatura valenciana del segle XV: Joanot Martorell i sor Isabel de Villena, ed. by G. Colón, L. Peñarroja, C. Tarancón, & A. Hauf, Serie Minor: Literatura, 6 (Valencia, 1991), pp. 91–124, at p. 124. 5 Constanza de Castilla, Book of Devotions/ Libro de devociones y ofĳicios, ed. Constance L. Wilkins (Exeter, 1998); Teresa de Cartagena, Arboleda de los enfermos y Admiraçión Operum Dei, ed. by Lewis Joseph Hutton (Madrid, 1967); for a study in English of these early Iberian writing women, see Ronald E. Surtz, Writing Women in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain: The Mothers of Saint Teresa of Ávila (Philadelphia, PA, 1995), especially pp. 21–67. Preaching God’s Word in a Valencian Convent 423 and which could be extracted by the sisters for use in paraliturgical devotions or ceremonials in the Santa Trinitat.6 Villena chose, when writing her lengthy Vita Christi, to develop a genre popular at the end of the Middle Ages, a genre to which the Franciscan confessor to the Kings of Aragon, Francesc Eiximenis (1327/32–1409), has been drawn when he wrote his Vida de Jesucrist, a life of Christ also in Catalan, and to which Villena’s contemporary, Joan Roís de Corella, also contributed when he translated Ludolph of Saxony’s Vita Christi into Catalan. Roís de Corella’s translation went to print in Valencia and came out in 1495, with the fourth book on the Passion published fĳirst, a tribute to the popularity of Passion narratives in medieval Valencia. Villena’s Vita Christi was published just two years later. Passion literature was closely linked to sermons, and Villena had made an important contribution to the tradition of Passion literature in her Vita Christi. The Tractat de la Passió, once attributed to Francesc Eiximenis, author of the Vida de Jesucrist in Catalan, opens after all with the words: ‘Aqui comença un tractat de la Passió a manera de sermó’ [Here begins a treatise on the Passion in the fashion of a sermon].7 The discourse of the anonymous Tractat, or Passion treatise, has much in common with Villena’s, for it, like hers, is ‘enérgico y deci- dido’ [full of energy and decisiveness].8 The question for this essay is what that discourse has in common with her manner of delivering sermons and how it might be possible to discern and extract these from a literary text. How the Passion drama and sermons interlink has already been examined by a number of critics. Pedro M. Cátedra argues that Good Friday sermons would have included some words of liturgical drama. He also notes that some elements of clerical circles considered that sermons should be reined in, and he attributes this to their ‘expresividad excesiva’ [excesses in expressiveness]. Sermons written for parts of the liturgical cycle other than the Passion also include dramatic interludes, such as the dialogue between San Macario and a skull in the Sermo mortuorum.9 Cátedra points to the ‘briznas de oralidad’

6 Twomey, The Fabric of Marian Devotion in Isabel de Villena’s Vita Christi, Colección Támesis, série A, Monografías, 313A (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 179–203. I discuss the crown of stars as a devotional sequence embedded in the Vita Christi. In a forthcoming article, I discuss Villena’s composition of Passion prayers as examples of her Franciscan spiritual practices. Twomey, ‘Isabel de Villena: Prayer and Franciscan Spirituality’, La Corónica (forthcoming). 7 Hauf Valls, La Vita Christi, p. 32. 8 Hauf Valls, La Vita Christi, p. 32. 9 Edited as part of Cátedra’s collection from the Real Colegiata de San Isidro de León. See Pedro M. Cátedra, Los sermones en romance de la Real Colegiata de San Isidro de Léon, Publicaciones del Seminario de Estudios Medievales y Renacentistas, 2 (Salamanca, 2002), p. 178. 424 Twomey

[traces of orality], which give a flavour of what the full Good Friday sermon tradition would have been.10 It is these ‘briznas de oralidad’ that this article seeks to trace. Before beginning the proposed study, two important questions require discussion. First, I bear in mind the wise words of sociolinguists who warn that ‘in traditional research [. . .] women are more often conceptualised in a singular condition, while men are allowed an individualism that transcends gender’.11 In discussion of women’s speech, modern linguistic practice discerns that ‘gender and language researchers have not always been successful at reflecting on the way in which politics enters their empirical work’ and that ‘theory and research on gender have often turned to women’s disadvantage’.12 In terms of Villena studies, it is certainly true that, whilst seeking to categorize her writing as women’s words, formed by a female world view and mindset, critics have often come to the conclusion that her writing was somehow of lesser status than that of her male contemporaries. It will be important in this study to ensure that Villena’s individual approach does not fade into women’s ways of approaching preaching or setting it down in writing. Villena is an exceptional case because she is the only extant female author of an extended narrative in Valencian. The relationship of the words she writes to what women’s speech might have been like in fĳifteenth-century Valencia has never been established. Many of the studies in this volume address the question of where and how real speech can be distinguished within written documents which seek to capture the speech of protagonists, say in trials, but this chapter sets out to address an even more difffĳicult task, since the Vita Christi in question never even purports to represent a real woman’s speech. Could it be the case that, when Villena puts words into the mouths of women, that she might tend towards words that real women use in the court and city? Where she has a female character deliver a sermon could that sermon bear any relationship to real sermons delivered in the Santa Trinitat? In my study, it will be important to establish, although in the Vita Christi there is access only to the written word, how far it is possible to trace vestiges of a variety of types of spoken word from Sor Isabel de Villena’s written words. From among these, in this chapter, I will examine the evidence from the Vita Christi for sermons

10 Pedro M. Cátedra, Poesía de Pasión en la Edad Media: el ‘Cancionero de Pero Gómez de Ferrol’, Publicaciones del Seminario de Estudios Medievales y Renacentistas, 1 (Salamanca, 2001), p. 226. 11 Jennifer Coates & Deborah Cameron, eds, Women in their Speech Communities: New Perspectives on Language and Sex (London, 1989), p. 8. 12 Ann Weatherall, Gender, Language, and Discourse (Hove, 2002), p. 6. Preaching God’s Word in a Valencian Convent 425 by Villena herself, Indeed modern readers, when reading with due caution, can hear vestiges of real female spoken sermons and extract much about women’s oral practices from a literary text.

Sermons Heard and Sermons Voiced in the Santa Trinitat in Villena’s Day

Sermons would have certainly been available to the nuns in the Santa Trinitat convent. Indeed, it is very likely that they were read aloud as part of the liturgy celebrated daily in the convent. In all parts of Spain, sermons were incorporated into a wide variety of offfĳices in breviaries as an element of the daily readings and there is no reason to believe that the breviaries the sisters used would have been in any way diffferent. A few examples from medieval breviaries will serve to illustrate what kind of access other nuns could have had to sermons, although there are few remaining which belonged to female Orders and none of Franciscan provenance.13 At the feast days of the Virgin, for example, an extract from a homily by one of the Church Fathers became a reading which followed the Gospel. The rubric frequently introduces it as ‘omelia’, homily. The words of the homilies of St Jerome, St Ambrose, or St Augustine, set as readings for saints’ days in the various offfĳices, would be voiced out loud for the nuns by one of the Poor Clare sisters capable of reading in Latin. Unlike sermons preached today, which are heard once, the extracts from the homilies of the Fathers of the Church would have become ever more familiar to the nuns, as the sister responsible for reading from the lectionary for the saint’s day would read the same sermons each liturgical year. The Poor Clare nuns, then, would listen to the words of the sermon in the offfĳices which, even though they had been written by a male cleric, were now voiced for them through the mediation of a female reader. We can imagine that

13 I have examined 99 breviaries, including day offfĳices [diurnales], morning offfĳices [matu- tinales], and evening offfĳice [vesperales]. I have followed the catalogue of José Janini, studying breviairies in Cathedral archives, public libraries, royal, national, and regional libraries. I have also examined breviaries in a number of University libraries. Of these just a small number of Cistercian breviaries belong to female houses, those of Sanctes Creus and Bon Repos in Catalonia. The majority of breviaries, however, belonged to male Orders. There are also liturgical books in the royal foundation convent of the Descalzas Reales, but no manuscripts date to the fĳifteenth century. My research has shown an enormous amount of similarity between breviaries from any given diocese. For that reason, when discussing breviaries from Valencia or neighbouring dioceses, I assume that the main body of the offfĳices did not difffer signifĳicantly from those found in male foundations. 426 Twomey a female voice mediating the wisdom of the Fathers might have a profound impact on the female listener. For the less wise among the sisters, those words would have seemed like an exposition of the Gospel reading by a woman, because the performance of the sermon by the reader would have made the words, as she read them, her own. Sometimes such sermons became a series of readings set for a particular feast and they might even take up six or seven of the readings for the day. A good example of this can be found in a fourteenth-century offfĳice of the Expectation of the Virgin Mary, celebrated on 18 December, from Valencia’s neighbouring diocese of Tortosa; all the readings, apart from the Gospel reading from Luke and a short adaptation of the miracle about Elsinus, abbot of Ramsey, are from a sermon by St Augustine. The Expectation feast would have been attractive to the sisters, because of its focus on the Virgin Mary, who conceived the baby Jesus in her womb, and its emphasis on how a woman took action to save humankind. The fĳirst reading has the rubric: ‘Sermo sancti Augustini episcopi in festivitate expectationis beatissime virginis Marie que celebra- tur quinto decimo kalendas januarii’ [sermon of St Augustine on the feast of the Expectation of the most blessed Virgin Mary which is celebrated on the 18 December].14 If a similar extract were being read to the sisters, this rubric may or may not have preceded the fĳirst reading. However, even if the rubric were read aloud in the offfĳice, later in the day, as further readings from the series were delivered, the nuns would have associated the voice they heard expounding the sermon less with St Augustine, whose name, mentioned in the now distant rubric to the fĳirst of the readings, could be forgotten. The set homily and its words of exposition of the Scriptures would have become a woman’s words. In the Conception offfĳice in the same breviary, several of the readings were extracts from sermons. The eighth lesson was a homily by St Gregory and the rubric to the extract from his sermon makes this clear: ‘Homilia beati Gregori, presbiteri’ (MS 18, fol. 299r). The fourth lesson also is an extract from a sermon and this time the Conception offfĳice introduces the sermon without naming the author: ‘Sermo in conceptione gloriose virginis Marie’.15 The liturgist who included the sermon no doubt believed it to be one of St Anselm’s sermons, even though it was by one of his entourage, Osbert of Clare because it was always passed offf as being by St Anselm. There could be two reasons why the feast has such an emphasis on readings derived from the sermons of diffferent doctors of the Church. The Conception feast was relatively new in the fourteenth century and it relied on supportive texts from authorities, whether

14 Arxiu de la Catedral de Tortosa, MS 18, Breviario de Tortosa, fol. 300r. 15 Arxiu de la Catedral de Tortosa, MS 18, Breviario de Tortosa, fol. 298v. Preaching God’s Word in a Valencian Convent 427

Fathers or doctors of the Church, to justify its presence in the breviary.16 The feast of St Anne for 26 July similarly has support from an important Church Father. Six of the readings are from a sermon by St Ambrose: ‘Sermo ex com- mentariis beati Ambrosii episcopi’.17 Such sermons more often than not had been written for a male audience. Many set sermons the nuns heard may have fallen into this category. The Tortosa sermon for the Conception feast begins: ‘Gaudeamus, fratres karissimi, in die hodierne festivitatis qua beatissime Dei genitricis Marie conceptionem celebramus’ [Rejoice, dearest brothers in today’s feast that we celebrate the Conception of the most blessed Mother of God, Mary].18 When these words from the breviary were read, those women present would understand they were addressed in the masculine plural, ‘fratres’. In a breviary commissioned for the female Cistercian community of Bon Repos in Tarragona, a diocese north of Valencia, at the Nativity of the Virgin on 8 September, the nuns heard a sermon by St Augustine at the fĳirst reading of the day. The rubric in the breviary attributes the sermon to St Augustine: ‘Sermo beati Augustini episcopi’ and the sermon begins with an address to those present, which is in the masculine plural, ‘dilectissimi’ [beloved]: ‘Adest nobis, dilectissimi, obtatus dies beate ac venerabilis semper virginis Marie ideo cum summa exultatione gaudeat terra nostra tante virginis illustrata natali’ [For us, beloved, the chosen day of the blessed and venerable ever-Virgin Mary is approaching and, so, with the greatest exultation may the earth rejoice given light by the birthday of so great a virgin].19 Of course in Latin ‘dilectissimi’ would subsume the female auditors into the masculine plural, together with any male cleric who happened on occasion to be present. It is very likely that, as well as hearing sermons as readings in the offfĳices of the day, some of the literate nuns read aloud – possibly from sermons, but certainly from other improving religious material – to their sisters.20 It is

16 For a study of the Conception offfĳice in Hispanic breviaries, seeThe Serpent and the Rose: The Immaculate Conception in Hispanic Poetry in the Late Medieval Period, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Tradition, 132 (Leiden: Brill) and also my forthcoming The Sacred Space of Mary in Liturgy and Literature from Gonzalo de Berceo to Ambrosio de Montesino (Toronto, forthcoming). 17 Biblioteca Pública de Tarragona, MS 45, Breviarium cisterciense, fol. 1r. 18 Arxiu de la Catedral de Tortosa, MS 18, Breviario de Tortosa, fol. 298v. 19 Biblioteca Pública de Tarragona, MS 45, Breviarium cisterciense, fol. 254v. 20 David N. Bell lists a number of devout treatises among the volumes in the library at Syon convent in Middlesex including breviaries, several works by Thomas à Kempis, a copy of a work by a female saint, Catherine of Siena’s Orchard of Syon, various collections of prayers, biblical commentaries, such as Richard Rolle’s on the Song of Songs, and Lives 428 Twomey also more than likely that in the Santa Trinitat the nuns heard extracts from Villena’s original manuscript of the Vita Christi, even as it was being written in the abbess’s own hand. Some convents had very few books and nuns had access to very few books of sermons, and this may be because female convents were often very poor and could not affford them.21 Wealthier convents in England did have access to the latest devotional books. Among these would typically be a few collections of sermons.22 Santa Trinitat was a wealthy foundation, which Queen Maria of Castile, Villena’s cousin, endowed and where she had her remains interred. The convent possessed a number of books in manuscript, including several diffferentVitae Christi, such as John of Caulibus’s Meditationes Vitae Christi and Francesc Eiximenis’s Vida de Jesucrist, as well as a number of other books which wealthy donors bequeathed to the convent.23 Up to very recent times it has been tacitly assumed that any books owned by convents were for individual consumption: ‘A century or so of medieval scholarship has operated happily with the unspoken assumption that books were meant, chiefly, and even solely, for private reading and viewing’, whereas it is

of Christ or of the Virgin, such as Nicholas Love’s The Myrroure of the Blessed Lyf of Ihesu Criste and The Myrroure of Our Lady. Whilst none are collections of sermons, sermons are written in full in breviaries. See Bell, What Nuns Read: Books and Libraries in Medieval English Nunneries, Cistercian Studies Series, 158 (Kalamazoo, MI, 1995), pp. 175–200. In the Abbey at Barking, there was a Gemma Praedicantium, as well as ‘ii bookis of Sermones’, p. 118. V.M. O’Mara does not consider that sermons from breviaries for the offfĳice of the liturgical calendar were read on each feast day. See ‘Preaching to Nuns in Late Medieval England’, in Medieval Monastic Preaching, ed. by Carolyn Muessig, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 90 (Leiden, 1998), pp. 93–119. 21 Convents could acquire books through donations from wealthy patrons. Madeleine Jeay & Kathleen Garay indicate that it was more challenging for women to copy manuscripts, as fewer women could write. Jeay & Garay, ‘ “To Promote God’s Praise and her Neighbour’s Salvation”: Strategies of Authorship and Readership among Mystic Women in the Later Middle Ages’, in Women Writing Back/Writing Women Back: Transnational Perspectives from the Late Middle Ages to the Modern Era, ed. by Anke Gilleir, Alicia C. Montoya, & Suzan van Dijk, Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture, 16 (Leiden, 2010), pp. 23–50, at p. 27. Roest also notes that there was a desire among male clerics to constrain women’s access to knowledge, Roest, “Ignorantia est mater omnium malorum”, p. 67. 22 O’Mara, ‘Preaching to Nuns’, p. 95. 23 John of Caulibus, Meditationes Vite Christi olim S. Bonauenturo attributae, ed. Mary Stallings-Taney, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Medievalis, 153 (Turnholt, 1997); Francesc Eiximenis, Vida de Jesucrist (BC MS 299). See also Daniel Benito Goerlich, El Real Monasterio de la Santísima Trinidad, Sèrie Minor, Arquitectura, 48 (Valencia, 1998), p. 71. The convent possessed these books and there are records of their being bequeathed. Preaching God’s Word in a Valencian Convent 429 now accepted that books were for hearing in a group.24 Reading as a group activity is particularly associated with the Santa Trinitat convent, because it is illustrated in the woodcut of the abbess, Villena, surrounded by her community, which fĳirst appeared in the second edition of theVita Christi, printed by Jorge Costilla in Valencia in 1513 and which is bound at the very end of the book as the fĳinal folio. In the image, the enthroned fĳigure of the abbess per- forms the role of a lectern, as she holds the book open. Other late medieval or early modern images of authors tell us more about the Vita Christi woodcut. A woodcut of Antonio Nebrija teaching from his works shows the author standing in a raised pulpit which has some features of an enclosed lectern, an open book in front of him. His students sit on a bench set in front of him, whilst two scribes busy themselves at an adjacent table. Just as Villena points at her book, so Nebrija points at his auditory, gesticulating, as he declaims his text.25 In the Villena woodcut, the nuns cluster around the abbess to look at what appears to be a copy of an early edition of the Vita Christi, whilst on the lectern placed behind the community stands another book, closed, but still available for reading aloud (FIG. 15.1). It is rather diffferent to the pictures of authors offfering their books to their patrons. Another female author, Christine de Pizan, kneels and presents her book, The Book of the Queen, to Isabeau of Bavaria. It is the queen who occupies the throne, whilst in Villena’s, it is the author who takes the position of authority, whilst the book’s recipient kneels.26 The woodcut which shows an open book on the knees of the abbess may fĳit with the concept of ‘prelection’, which has been defĳined as ‘the author reading his or her book to an audience’.27 In woodcuts and miniatures, such authors typically stand at a lectern that holds an open book. Their left hand may lie on the book and the right is often extended and may point towards one or more clusters of people. One example of an author pointing at his own work is the

24 Joyce Coleman, ‘Aural Illumination: Books and Aurality in the Frontispiece to Bishop Chevrot’s Cité de Dieu’, in Orality and Literacy in the Middle Ages: Essays on a Conjunction in Honour of D.H. Green, ed. by Mark Chinca & Christopher Young, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 12 (Turnhout, 2005), pp. 223–252, at p. 223. 25 See María Ángeles Santos Quer, La ilustración en los libros de la imprenta de Alcalá en el siglo XVI: Introducción y catálogo, Colección Tesis doctorales Cum Laude, serie A (Arte), 16 (Alcalá: Fundación Universitaria Española, 2003), p. 519, fĳig. 27. 26 London, British Library, MS Harley 4431, fol. 3r. 27 Coleman traces prelection or praelectio, a style of teaching through reading to students, back through John of Salisbury to Quintilian in her Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge, 1996), p. 35. 430 Twomey

figure 15.1 Woodcut of Isabel de Villena, Vita Christi de la Abbadessa del monestir de les monges de la Trinitat (Barcelona: Jorge Costilla, 1513), fol. 232v; Biblioteca Històrica, Universitat de València. Reproduced with permission. Preaching God’s Word in a Valencian Convent 431 miniature of Avicenna in the British Library’s digitized manuscript collection.28 However, there are examples of learned authors sitting on thrones to teach.29 Although I have previously discussed the throne on which the abbess is seated in the Vita Christi woodcut and have linked it to the posture of authority in which St Clare, the fĳirst leader of the Poor Clares and author of the fĳirst Rule of the Sisters of San Damiano, is sometimes depicted, I have not previously associated it with a posture which suggests a woman teaching nor with an auditory community paying close attention to her words.30 As a prelection picture, if the Vita Christi woodcut is to be interpreted as such, there is certainly little verisimilitude. By the time the Vita Christi fĳirst appeared in print with the woodcut in it, its author was dead and the illustration, therefore, harks back to a golden age of hearing expositions from the Vita Christi and hearing books in the convent, to the time when Villena was abbess. The woodcut, like many other prelection illustrations, is therefore intended as a statement ‘about the relationship between text, author, [. . .], and audiences past and present’. It is intended as a visual representation of the author’s authority to speak words, to write them, and to teach or preach from them.31 The past auditory for the book is depicted in the woodcut and presented for the delight and attraction of a new auditory, the public readership of the print copy of the Vita Christi. The woodcut was set by the printer and its value for the potential market was in how it established a relationship between the important status of the author and her potential audience of readers or hearers. Its value for this study is how it establishes conventual reading as a communal activity. In the Vita Christi woodcut, the abbess holds the open book with both hands. She opens it and shows it to a kneeling nun, probably intended to

28 British Library, MS 3801, fol. 1r. Jacques Despars, Commentary on Avicenna: Canon Medicinae. 29 Although she does not hold a book, Heloise is depicted teaching a male pupil; both are seated to the left of the miniature, whilst a group of female ‘listeners’ clusters to the right of the two protagonists. British Library, MS Royal 16 F II, fol. 137r. 30 Coleman, ‘Aural Illumination’, pp. 225–226, fĳig. 1. Coleman gives the example of an illustration of St Augustine teaching from a throne. I have shown that miniaturists often portray female saints, like St Clare, seated on a throne with their community around them, Twomey, The Fabric, p. 28. See ‘Sor Isabel de Villena, her Vita Christi and an Example of Gendered Immaculist Writing in the Fifteenth Century’, La Corónica, 32.1 (2003): 89–103, at p. 94. See also Twomey, The Fabric, where I discuss the centrality of the Virgin among the group of Apostles and her authority, pp. 212–220. 31 Coleman, ‘Aural Illustrations’, p. 225. 432 Twomey represent Villena’s successor as abbess, Aldonça de Montsoriu.32 Villena may indeed be intended to be giving up the rights of possession of her book, as well as her offfĳice, to her successor and whoever commissioned the woodcut may have intended for that authoritative word spoken and written to become her portion. The kneeling nun stretches out her hands to take the book. No doubt the abbess of the day commissioned the image, just as Aldonça de Montsoriu commissioned the fĳirst edition of theVita Christi. On the death of Villena, Aldonça, the new abbess of the Santa Trinitat, endeavoured to enlist the support of Queen Isabel of Castile, who was related to Isabel of Villena. It was Aldonça who instigated the process of placing the book in the public domain by having it printed.33 However, when the woodcut was viewed by those inside the convent, it could have taken on a number of diffferent meanings. The passing on of the Vita Christi from abbess to abbess could both be intended to depict passing on authoritative knowledge in written form but it might also pass on the authority to read from the book to the one who received the volume. Indeed, it could also imply handing over the authority to teach, or perhaps preach, about the life of Christ, using the book as a prime authority, to the abbess receiving it. In the woodcut, the nuns cluster to the right of the two principal fĳigures and this means that the community would also see itself depicted. The whole community is represented in its relationship with the printed book of the Vita Christi. Two of the nuns in the woodcut gesture towards the book, one points with her index fĳinger, another reaches out with her whole hand. A third stretches both hands out towards the open book and the enthroned abbess. These postures, fĳirst of all, suggest a connection with the book on the part of the nuns. This would not be the case were it to be an unknown quantity, a new book they had yet to hear. In second place, the postures suggest a desire for knowledge, to hear more of the Vita Christi. The seated or enthroned nun, Isabel de Villena, occupies the foreground of the woodcut, whilst the massive lectern, with the heavy tome closed on it, occupies centre stage to the left of the group of nuns. It is a double-sided lectern set on a solid wooden base which means that it could support two books at a time. The book visible on the lectern in the image tells another story about passing on of knowledge in the convent. First of all, it points to a listening

32 See my previous study of the woodcut in Twomey, ‘Sor Isabel de Villena, her Vita Christi and an Example of Gendered Immaculist Writing in the Fifteenth Century’, La Corónica, 32 (2003): 89–103, where I examine the Santa Trinitat as a reading community. Now I repo- sition that interpretation because the Santa Trinitat was an auditory community. 33 Twomey, ‘Sor Isabel de Villena’, p. 91; The Fabric, pp. 21, 26–29. Preaching God’s Word in a Valencian Convent 433 community, one in which words were read from the lectern, a place where reading aloud, teaching, and perhaps preaching, occurred. The book could be a Bible. It might also be one of the other Vitae Christi which the convent possessed, such as the Meditationes Vitae Christi by John of Caulibus, thought to be by the Franciscan St Bonaventure. These would be authoritative sources for Villena’s Vita Christi. It might be a liturgical book. It might even be a book of sermons. The book on the lectern is a large volume, with great metal clasps to hold it closed, and it looks to have studding on its binding. All these features suggest that the book is a valuable one to the community. Yet it is closed. It contrasts with the Vita Christi on Villena’s knee, which is open. Because Villena wrote her Vita Christi in the vernacular, it opens its contents to the community in a way that its Latin sources did not.

Sermons Preached by Women

Female religious leaders, as is well known, wrote and preached sermons, even sometimes venturing before the public gaze to do so. Towards the end of the twelfth century, Alain de L’Isle defĳined preaching as a clear instruction in public regarding matters of faith and conduct.34 Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) is the best example of a known female preacher, for she toured as a preacher and also preached in public against the Cathar heresy.35 Prioress Umiltà de Faenza (1226–1310), foundress of the Vallumbrosan order of nuns, also gave sermons, which she dictated to a member of her community.36 Other Franciscan women who engaged in preaching activities include Rose of Viterbo († 1252) and Caterina Vigri († 1463).37 Women in heretical movements may also have

34 Alain de L’Isle, Summa de Arte Praedicatoria, ed. by J.-P. Migne (Paris, 1844–64), PL210, col. 111. 35 Sabrina Flanagan, Hildegard of Bingen 1098–1179: A Visionary Life, 2nd edn (London, 1989), p. 152. 36 Catherine M. Mooney, ‘Authority and Inspiration in the Vitae and Sermons of Humility of Faenza’, in Medieval Monastic Preaching, ed. by Carolyn Muessig, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 90 (Leiden, 1998), pp. 123–144. For the image of St Umiltà dictat- ing her sermons, see Cordelia Warr, ‘Viewing and Commissioning Pietro Lorenzetti’s Saint Humility Polyptich’, Journal of Medieval History, 26.3: 269–300, fĳig. 15, at p. 285; on Umiltà’s teaching and writing, see Elizabeth Alvilda Petrofff,Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (Oxford, 1994), pp. 207–211. For extracts in English from Umiltà’s sermons, see Petrofff, ed.,Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (Oxford, 1986), pp. 247–253. 37 Roest, ‘ “Ignorantia est mater omnium malorum” ’, pp. 74, 77–80. 434 Twomey regularly preached and some were credited with converting many men to Christianity.38 Within traditional hagiography, preaching stretched back to St Mary Magdalene and to St Catherine of Alexandria.39 Yet the tradition of women preaching is not an easy one to trace. Roest helpfully sets preaching by women in the context of other exchanges between women, including letter writing. In the early sixteenth century in Spain, a Franciscan tertiary, Juana, wrote over seventy sermons and these were collected as El libre del Conforte.40 By the Middle Ages, the example of Mary Magdalene was seen as one which women should not emulate.41 Isabel de Villena, as abbess, would have had sole responsibility for admonitions and instruction to her nuns and is likely to have preached within the convent to the nuns in her charge. In her great work, the Vita Christi, she presents a woman, the Virgin Mary, as an instructor of other women. I have argued that she sets the Virgin as a role model for herself and it likely that, in this aspect of the narrative too, the Virgin, as preacher and didact, provides a pattern adapted to suit Villena’s responsibilities.42 Villena begins the chapter by establishing the Virgin’s credentials as a leader fĳit to take the authority to speak. The rubric to the chapter calls her ‘capitana’ and ‘maestressa del sant col·legi’ [captain and mistress of the collective of Apostles].43 Of course Magistra, or ‘maestressa’ is the title also given to teachers and ‘sant col·legi’ because of its etymology is not far from being a place where instruction takes place. The life of Hildegard is

38 Alcuin Blamires, ‘Women and Preaching in Medieval Orthodoxy, Heresy, and Saints’ Lives’, Viator, 26 (1995), 135–152, at p. 137. 39 Blamires, ‘Women and Preaching’, pp. 137, 143–148. Blamires traces the reaction of the male medieval hierarchy to both women, including the views of Thomas Aquinas, Eustace of Arras, and Henry of Ghent. 40 Roest, ‘ “Ignorantia est mater omnium malorum” ’, p. 81. 41 Roest, ‘ “Ignorantia est mater omnium malorum” ’, p. 75, citing Katherine Ludwig Jansen, ‘Maria Magdalena: Apostolorum Apostola’, in Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millenia of Christianity, ed. by Beverley Mayne Kienzle & Pamela J. Walker (Berkeley, CA, 1998), pp. 57–96. 42 Twomey, The Fabric, p. 229. 43 Citations from the text are from Sor Isabel de Villena, Vita Christi, compost per Isabel de Villena, abadessa de la Trinitat de Valencia, ara novament publicat segons l’edició de l’any 1497, ed. Ramón Miquel y Planas, 3 vols, 2nd edn, Biblioteca Catalana (Barcelona, 1916). I will include volume and page reference in the main body of the essay. For aspects of the Virgin’s authority to initiate devotions, see Twomey, ‘ “De aquestes raons de la Senyora, los apòstols e Magdalena e les altres dones prengueren molta consolació”: Establishing Female Identity through the Virgin’s Words in the Vita Christi of Sor Isabel de Villena’, in Identities on the Move, ed. by Flocel Sabaté (Bern, 2014), pp. 53–73. Preaching God’s Word in a Valencian Convent 435 relevant again here, as in 1136, she was elected by the nuns to head the convent when she was given the title ‘magistra’.44 Villena’s chapter rubric also states that the Virgin ‘instruhi’ [instructed] all who were present, disciples and women. A few lines into the chapter, the Virgin recalls that her son left her on earth to be ‘governadora e maestressa de aquells’ [their governor and mistress / teacher].45 When the disciples speak to the Virgin telling her of their sadness at being let without Christ, they address her as ‘de tots general advocada’ [you are general advocate of all]. Finally, after she has spoken to them later in the chapter, the disciples call on her as ‘doctoressa’ [learned doctor] and in this case there can be no doubt that a ‘doctor’ imparts learning.46 This chapter is one in which the right and authority of the Virgin as a teacher and instructor of the faithful is repeatedly established. Preachers and preaching are consistently associated with Christ, in his preaching ministry, and with male disciples, St Andrew or St John, or the group of disciples together. However, when she writes about the three women returning to the disciples with the news that Christ is risen, Villena takes this to be their initiation as preachers:

E, entrant per la porta, denunciaren als dits apòstols, qui staven en la entrada, com certament elles havien vist lo Senyor resuscitat; e ells, ab infĳinit goig alegrant-se de una tan singular nova, digueren: “Mulier, que fuerat janua mortis, prima predicat resurrectionem et ostendit januam vite.” Volent dir: “O, Senyor! E quanta gràcia és aquesta que la dona, qui en lo comensament del món fon porta e entrada de mort, e ara, per gran dignitat, la hajau feta novella preÿcadora de la vostra maravellosa resur- rectió!” E les glorioses dones entraren ab goig infĳinit en la cambra de la Senyora, e, lançades en terra, besaven moltes vegades los peus e mans de sa senyoria, no podent dir res, per extrema alegria, del que havien vist.47

[And going in, they announced to the Apostles, who were there, how truly they had seen the Lord and he had risen; and they with infĳinite joy, rejoicing in such a singular piece of news, cried: ‘Woman who was the doorway of death, fĳirst preached the resurrection and revealed the doorway of life’, meaning ‘O Lord, and how great a grace is it that woman, who at the beginning of the world was the doorway and entranceway to death

44 Very recently Hildegard was accorded the title of doctor by Pope Benedict XVI. 45 Villena (1916). Vita Christi, III, 281. 46 Villena (1916). Vita Christi, III, 285. 47 Villena (1916). Vita Christi, III, 193. 436 Twomey

and now, because of her great worth, she has been made the new preacher of your glorious Resurrection!’ and the glorious ladies went in to the chamber of the Lady, and, casting themselves to the ground, kissed her ladyship’s feet over and over, without being able to speak, because of the extreme delight of what they had seen].

There are a number of motifs at work in how the women are recognized in this post-Resurrection scene from the Vita Christi. Taking account of the words of St Paul which forbid women to speak in public, Villena has the returning Maries named and valued by the Church leaders as ‘preÿcadoras’, preachers of the Resurrection, because they have brought back the news to the disciples. Also, reversing the traditional view that women were the gateway of death, they are named ‘janua vite’, gateway of life, a phrase which Villena does not translate in her gloss.48 In third place, immediately, after their commissioning the ladies go to visit the Virgin Mary and now are unable to pronounce any more words, thus overturning the traditional view that the women were the fĳirst to see Christ so that they would tattle about the Resurrection and spread the news with their gossip. It is not clear whether Villena intends this commissioning of the three women as preachers to be a justifĳication for women preaching, although that might be the logical conclusion. However, other writers of Vitae Christi do not commission the women as preachers in this way.49 The second instance of ‘preÿcar’ used in connection with a woman relates to the Virgin Mary on the day of Pentecost. ‘Preÿcar’ can have a number of mean-

48 Ludolph of Saxony also contrasts death and life but through contrasting Eve’s mouth with the Maries’ mouths: ‘per os mulieris mors ante processerat, per os mulieris vita reparatur’ [through the mouth of a woman death came forth, through the mouth of a woman life is repaired]. Ludolphus, the Carthusian, Vita Christi, 4 vols (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 2006), p. 711. 49 Ubertinus de Casali or da Casale, merely mentions that the Maries gave the news to the disciples, in his Arbor Vite Crucifĳixae Jesu, Monumenta politica et Philosophica Rariora, series 1, 4 (Turin, 1961): ‘Peruenientes autem ad apostolos et annunciantes eis’ [coming to the Apostles and announcing to them]; Mary Magdalene however is given the title of Apostle: ‘quantoque priuilegio fuerit a Christo dotata: que prima omnium dominum uidit in uita gloriosae & ceteris resurrectionem annuncaiuit domini apostolorum apostola constituta’, p. 349. Ludolph of Saxony, Vita Christi, p. 711, singles out Mary Magdalene, because she gave the good news to the disciples ‘evangelizaret’: ‘videns eam quae tot erat subdita vitiis, in tantum culminis subito esse promotam, ut ipsis evangelistis atque Apostolis prima miraculum resurrectionis evangelizaret’. Preaching God’s Word in a Valencian Convent 437 ings, among them preach, but also to ‘anunciar o proclamar una cosa com a vertadera o com a norma a seguir’ [to announce or proclaim something as true or as a rule to follow].50 Villena consistently uses ‘preÿcar’ to refer to Christ’s and the Apostles’ preaching mission and she uses the same word when the Virgin begins preaching to the women disciples: ‘començà·ls a preÿcar’:

E la Senyora ab molt plaer les acullí, sient-se enmig d’elles, mostrant-los molta amor e favor; e començà·ls a preÿcar com a doctoressa singular, declarant-los les gràcies e dons del Sperit Sanct que aquell dia havien rebut ab tanta plenitud e abundància, donant-los inflammada disposició a tota virtut. E les dites dones, hoint sa senyoria, foren recomplides de singular delit ab lo que ja tenien, que per sobres de goig que dins la ànima tenien los paria ésser ja separades del mortal cors e posseyr plenament los delits de paradýs. E axí passaren aquell dia ab consolació no recompt- able, sperant quant tornarien los apòstols de la preÿcació e que menjas- sen ensemps, car tots eren dejuns. (III, 290)

[and the Lady welcomed them with great pleasure, seating herself in their midst, showing them great love and favour; and she began to preach just like an exceptional doctor of theology, declaring to them the graces and gifts of the Holy Spirit which they had that day received in such plen- itude and abundance, giving them all a burning disposition to be full of virtue. And the said ladies, hearing her ladyship, were fĳilled with particular delight, in addition to the existing measure they had received. They, by the excess of joy in their soul, seemed to be separated from their mortal body and fully in enjoyment of the delights of paradise. And so they spent the day in indescribable consolation, waiting for the disciples to return from their preaching so that they might eat together, for all of them were fasting.]

Unlike the earlier passage referring to the women disciples, this time the Virgin requires no male authority or permission. She begins to speak to the women present, ‘com a doctoressa’, as though she were a learned doctor. Interesting for

50 Diccionari de la llengua al Principat de Catalunya, al Regne de València, a les illes Balears, al departament francès dels Pirineus Orientals, a les Valls d’Andorra, al marge oriental d’Aragó i a la ciutat d’Alguer de Sardenya, http://dcvb.iecat.net/ [consulted 17.6.14]. By the sixteenth century in Castile at least ‘predicar’ has no other meaning: ‘llamamos predicar declarar en púlpito la palabra de Dios o el Evangelio’. Sebastián Covarrubias y Horozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (Madrid, 2006), p. 1373. 438 Twomey our examination of women and their contribution to preaching is the fact that the Virgin is seated among the women. This teaching or informal preaching which she undertakes is termed ‘preÿcar’. In this passage from the post-Pentecost scenes in the Vita Christi, Villena gives an indication of how women’s preaching might take place, behind closed doors, apart from men. The Virgin welcomes the ladies and, perhaps as was custom in the Santa Trinitat convent, seats herself in their midst to preach to them. From this, we might imagine a diffferent style of preaching in the convent, which seems to have had a more communal arrangement than the more formal type carried on outside the convent, when preachers performed before huge crowds.51 The Virgin’s preaching is in a more intimate setting. She preaches about experience, the gifts of the Spirit which all had received that day, and the result of her preaching is that all present experience a surge of joy, which inspires them to great virtue. The women then react with an out-of- body experience to the words preached: ‘per sobres de goig que dins la ànima tenien los paria ésser ja separades del mortal cors e posseyr plenament los delits de paradýs’ [by the excess of joy in their soul, seemed to be separated from their mortal body and fully in enjoyment of the delights of paradise]. The preaching of the Virgin may here be considered to have been modelled on The Legend of St Clare, which relates how the words of St Clare to her community would inspire them, inflaming their hearts, in a similar manner: ‘she brought from the altar of the Lord burning words that also inflamed the hearts of her sisters’.52 In the case of the Virgin, when she ‘començà a preÿcar’, begins to

51 See, for example, Losada, Suman, or Régent-Susini in this volume. I have argued on numerous occasions that the events and scenes in the Vita Christi match closely to the experience of the nuns. For example, I have previously examined their devotion to the Blessed Sacrament in Twomey, The Fabric, pp. 53–54, and, very recently, Villena’s rejection of tittle-tattle because of the damage it could do to a woman’s reputation, which allows us to glimpse her own position and rejection of gossip for the damage it might do to a convent’s reputation. See Twomey, ‘Mary Magdalene and Martha: Sor Isabel de Villena’s Self- Fashioning through Constructing her Community’, in Self-fashioning and Assumptions of Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, ed. by Laura Delbrugge (Leiden, 2015), pp. 298–326. All of these practices or views can be established, as here, by looking at the practice behind the words of the Vita Christi. 52 See also how this efffect of deep emotion from the words of the Virgin fĳits with Alain de L’Isle’s ideas on the resultant emotions arising from good preaching: ‘Verba etiam conmotiva interserat, quae mentes emolliant, et lacrymas pariant’ [so he may put in words which move, which soften minds, and bring forth tears], PL 210, col. 114. It is not known whether the convent in Valencia had St Clare’s letters and writings. Still, Clare’s story may well have formed an oral story recounted there. Preaching God’s Word in a Valencian Convent 439 preach, there is no indication of the words which might lead us to insight into a sermon preached at the Santa Trinitat convent.

Approaches to Preaching in Valencia

Before turning to the Virgin’s words in the Vita Christi, I will fĳirst establish the norms for preachers, laid down by Valencian preachers, such as St Vincent Ferrer (1350–1419) and Francesc Eiximenis. Writing about his own practice, Ferrer says that when he is preaching, he uses simple language:

En las predicaciones y exhortaciones uso un lenguaje sencillo y en cuanto predico, un estilo familiar para señalar los hechos particulares insistiendo con ejemplos, para que cualquier pecador que tenga aquel pecado se sienta aludido como si predicara solo para él.53

[When I am preaching and giving exhortations, I use a simple language and, for as long as I preach, a homely style to point out particular deeds, making the point with examples, so that any sinner who may have committed that sin feels it is about him, as if I am preaching just for him.]

St Vincent also talks about ensuring that he engages with the simple folk, who are to hear and act upon the words of the sermons he gives. For that he reason he does not turn to sophisms which he sees as the devil’s work, ‘diabólicos’: ‘de aquí se ve que el hombre sencillo no entiende los sofĳismos diabólicos, medi- ante los que, por un lado o por otro, se trata de engañar’ [from this it can be seen that the simple man does not comprehend devilish complicated arguments, by means of which in one way or another people seek to lead them astray].54 The rubric to the Vita Christi, although not written by Villena, similarly indicates that the purpose of the text is to write in the vernacular, in Valencian, so that simple people may come to understand the truths about the life of Christ: ‘en romanç perquè les simples e ignorants puguen saber e contemplar la vida e mort del nostre senyor Jesús, amador nostre’ [in the vernacular so that simple and ignorant people could fĳind out about and meditate on the life and death of our Lord Jesus, our beloved//who loves us].55 The simple folk are the readers

53 Alfredo Robles, ed., Obras y escritos de Sant Vicent Ferrer (Valencia, 1996), p. 324. 54 Robles, ed., Obras, p. 318. 55 Villena, Vita Christi, I, 2. See also Twomey, ‘Sor Isabel de Villena’, p. 95. 440 Twomey or hearers of the Vita Christi, when it is read to them, just as for St Vincent, ‘los sencillos’ are those who hear his sermons. The readers, or hearers of the Vita Christi are those for whom the words become their own and prompt to action. In St Vincent’s words, these simple folk recognize themselves in the example and, because of that, are led to make changes in their behaviour. In the case of the Vita Christi, the hearers or readers fĳind out about the life of Christ but are called to take action and to ‘contemplar’ the life of Christ. Francesc Eiximenis speaks about preachers undertaking their task with ‘fervor’.56 He also speaks of the state of mind of the preacher, for preaching must be undertaken ‘amb devoció’, as well as with ‘prudència’.57 It is now quite clear that the Virgin’s preaching outlined above had such an efffect on the women auditors, because it was carried out with ‘fervor’ and ‘devoció’. Eiximenis also urges preachers to approach their material from a moral stand- point (‘moralment’). Among the remaining categories of the seven which exemplify good preaching, Eiximenis also includes some which relate to pace and style of delivery. Preachers should, thus, speak slowly, perhaps with pauses for efffect, ‘parlar pausadament’ and structure their sermon in a good order, ‘ordenadament’.58 Back in the twelfth century, Alain de L’Isle’s Summa de arte praedicatoria had emphasized the need for preachers to be true to what they say, so that their own lives and the things that they do mirror their words: ‘Praedicator debet habere in opera quod proponit in voce’.59 Alain de L’Isle begins his Summa with the trope of the ladder of Jacob which connects heaven and earth.60 He then sets out the seven steps which lead up to preaching. Preachers are to begin with confession, next move to prayer, and then engage in acts of grace. After that the preacher should study the Scripture, and, then, if he has any doubts, inter- rogate Scripture more. Preachers should then explain the Scripture, ‘expositio Scripturarum’, and, fĳinally, preach.61 Alain reiterates on several occasions in his opening chapter that preaching must be carried out in public: ‘Si praedicatio occulta esset, suspiciosa esset, et videretur redolere haeretica dogmatica’ [if preaching were to be hidden, it would be suspicious and might seem to stink of heretical teaching]. Alain’s view would seem to rule out out the possibility of women preaching in their convents, and although he does not even consider it,

56 Francesc Eiximenis, Art de predicació al poble, ed. by Xavier Renedo i Puig (Vich, 2009). 57 Eiximenis, Art, pp. 19, 33. 58 Eiximenis, Art, pp. 13, 23. 59 Alain de L’Isle, PL 210, col. 162. 60 Alain de L’Isle, PL 210, col. 111. 61 Alain de L’Isle, PL 210, col. 111. Preaching God’s Word in a Valencian Convent 441 no doubt he would have thought it unorthodox in the way he recounts. Villena, by having the Virgin preach to a group of women, in a space which is probably not public, gives us another insight into preaching and women’s role in it. She is able to reclaim preaching for women, which takes place in private, because the Virgin has engaged in it and none can be more orthodox than she.

Villena’s Approach to Sermons in the Vita Christi

When the Virgin instructs the disciples about prayer in the Vita Christi, she fĳirst spends time in prayer before she addresses them. The Virgin’s conversation with God in her place of retreat and, thus, has some features in common with Alain’s counsels for preachers indicated above. The Virgin’s prayer begins, as all sermons must, with a Latin text: ‘O amor jocundissime et gloriosissime, veni in ortum tuum’ [O most glorious and happy love, come into your garden]. After her initial text, she turns immediately to providing a vernacular gloss or explanation of the Latin original. For example, St Vincent Ferrer, preaching on the day of Pentecost, takes as his text ‘Repleti sunt omnes Spiritu Sancto’.62 He then turns to Valencian to explain the Scripture. Villena’s gloss expands the text signifĳicantly in much the same way as any sermon in the vernacular might explain a text from Scripture: ‘Volent dir: “O Sperit Sanct qui sou amor e jocunditat gloriosa, veniu en lo vostre ort, qui és església sancta fundada novament per la mort e sanch preciosa del meu fĳill!” ’ [which is to say, O Holy Spirit, who are love and glorious joy, come into your garden, which is the Holy Church newly founded by the death and precious blood of my Son].63 This opening gloss uses a technique at the heart of all exegesis in sermon technique, which is to interpret the text for the auditors and Villena here, as she does throughout her Vita Christi, follows her Latin text with ‘volent dir’ [which is to say]. She thus glosses the text from the Song of Songs, which became an antiphon regularly employed in Peninsular offfĳices of the Virgin:veni ‘ in ortum’ [come into the garden].64 Villena then interprets the Lover’s call to the garden

62 St Vincent Ferrer, ‘In die Sancto Pentecostes’, Sermones, ed. by Josep Sanchis Sivera (Barcelona, 1923), I, p. 133. 63 Villena, Vita Christi, III, 283. 64 See, for example, the thirteenth-century Breviarium cisterciense in the Biblioteca Pública de Tarragona, MS 45, fol. 255v, in both the octave of the Nativity of the Virgin and the Assumption in the same breviary: ‘veni in ortum, soror sponsa mea’ [come into the garden, my sister and bride], fol. 245r. The fĳifteenth-century breviary, thought to have 442 Twomey from the Song of Songs as a call to the Holy Spirit to come into the Church. She adds an interpretation of the garden as the Holy Church, as well as adding how the Church was founded. Later in the same prayer addressed to the Holy Spirit, she glosses another Latin text: ‘O lux beatissima reple cordis intima tuorum fĳidelium’ [O blessed light, fĳill the innermost heart of your faithful people]. Villena, in her gloss, puts flesh on the bones of her text, making it apply to the scene she is setting:

O lum benaventurada! Sia de vostre clemència recomplir lo cor e entrà- mens de aquests servents vostres de aquesta sancta sciència e saber a ella necessari per a convertir lo món, e potència de fer grans miracles; car tot és menester per la gran duricia e malicia que les gents huy posseïxen’ (III, 284).

[O blessed light! May the heart and innermost being of these your servants be fĳilled in your mercy with that holy wisdom and knowledge necessary to convert the world, and the power to do great miracles; for we need all that on account of the hardness of heart and wickedness which people display today.]

Such glosses, although they cast interesting light on Villena’s approach to her source text, cannot on their own constitute evidence for sermons preached. The Virgin’s words in her prayer are part of a dialogue with the Holy Spirit. The prayer has a number of diffferent purposes. First, the words of the vernacular prayer can be used to open auditors’ or readers’ own personal meditations when they hear the Vita Christi. Second, the prayer could open a sermon, which may begin with prayer for those present. Her gloss, on the subject of exhortation to prayer, is one of Alain de L’Isle’s sermon topics.65 The ending of the Virgin’s prayer to the Spirit is that all is necessary on account of people’s hardness of heart and wicked behaviour in these times: ‘car tot és menester per la gran duricia e malicia que les gents huy posseïxen’.66 These words are not present in the original Latin, nor in any other Vitae Christi. They seem

belonged to Queen Isabel la Católica, has an adaptation of the verse in the offfĳice of the Immaculate Conception: ‘Veni Regina nostra: veni domina in ortum odoris super omnia aromata’ [Come, our Queen; Come, Lady, scented more than anything, into the garden of perfume] Escorial, Ms Vitrina, 3, Breviarium, fol. 22v. 65 Alain de L’Isle, PL 210, cols. 167–169. 66 Villena, Vita Christi, III, p. 284. Preaching God’s Word in a Valencian Convent 443 therefore to represent a call to repentance to the people of Valencia of Villena’s day, in whom the abbess discerns such attitudes. When the Virgin begins to preach about the coming of the Spirit on the disciples, she begins with a Latin text, from 1 Corinthians 6:6: ‘Nescitis quia cor- pora vestra templum Spiritus Sancti? [do you not know your body is//your bodies are a temple of the Holy Spirit?]. She then opens the gloss, adding a direct address to those present, in this case the disciples: ‘mos fĳills’, my sons. Many preachers also begin by addressing those gathered to hear the sermon. So, for example, in St Vincent Ferrer’s Pentecost sermon, he addresses those present as ‘bona gent’, good people.67 In her gloss on the text Villena deftly amends the tense of the verb to the future: ‘ja sabeu que les persones vostres han a esser huy temples del Sperit Sant, car en los vostres cors e ànimes entrarà e habitarà per gràcia e amor sua’ [for you know that your person is today to be a temple of the Holy Spirit for he will enter and dwell in your body and soul by grace and his love], which gives an insight into the way in which she is prepared to take the words of Scripture and mould them for her own purpose.68 What is more, by placing the words from the Epistle of Paul in the mouth of the Virgin, Villena appropriates the words, enabling the Virgin to take precedence over Paul, the Epistle-writer. The Virgin becomes the originator of the words which he later set down. This characteristic is further reinforced by the Virgin giving Paul her blessing and sending him out to preach:

‘[. . .] Per què restau alegre e consolat ab la benedictió mia, e continuau vostra ferventíssima preÿcació.’ E lo gloriós Pau, ab moltes làgrimes, besà les mans a la Mare de Déu, regraciant a sa altesa la benedictió que tan largament li havia donada. (III, 335–336)

[‘so remain content and consoled by my blessing and continue your most fervent preaching’. And the glorious Paul, with many tears, kissed the hands of the Mother of God, thanking her Highness for the blessing which she had given him at such length.]

Before ending the Virgin’s address to the disciples, Villena turns to Psalm 51:10: ‘cor mundum crea in me, Deus, et spiritum rectum innova in visceribus meis’ [God, create in me a clean heart, renew within me a resolute spirit].69 The

67 Ferrer, ‘In die Sancto Pentecostes’, I, p. 133. 68 Villena, Vita Christi, III, 285. 69 Translation: New Jerusalem Bible, p. 1800. 444 Twomey gloss is again much expanded and gives insight into words Villena might have uttered at a diffferent time and place:

Senyor e Déu omnipotent, creau en mi un cor munde e net e deliure de tota culpa que als ulls de vostra majestat puga offfendre, e feu-lo habitacle e posada disposta per a reposar la gràcia e amor vostra! Renovau, Senyor, dins les mies entràmenes lo sperit de rectitut que·m tinga ferm e constant en l’amor e temor vostra!70

[Lord and almighty God, create in me a clean and unsullied heart and deliver me from all sin which might offfend the sight of your Majesty, and make it a dwelling and resting-place fĳitting for your grace and love to take up residence! Renew, Lord, in my inner being the spirit of rectitude which keeps me fĳirm and constant in love and fear of you!]

In the vernacular gloss, Villena creates a prayer which she offfers to the disciples. They are to make it their own prayer for the coming of the Spirit. The prayer is also for the nuns in Villena’s charge. It is also no doubt a prayer for herself and for her own need to keep fĳirm in her vocation by constant renewal of her spirit of rectitude. The words she uses resonate with verses from Scripture and yet they are not a direct translation from Psalm 51. The heart of the believer becomes ‘munde e net’, clean and unsullied; the resolute spirit, becomes ‘lo sperit de rectitut que·m tinga ferm’, [the spirit of rectitude which keeps me fĳirm]. Villena’s words are here constructed in a series of pairs: munde/net; habitacle/posada; ferm/constant; amor/temor. Here we can draw close to her style of address in which she parallels words to deepen their meaning, a trait of her rhetoric when she delivered sermons, or even when she uttered prayers, here captured in written form and attributed to the Virgin. The patterns of pairs she creates in writing, which although it is ‘a spatial medium’, ‘remain permanently a part of this [aural-oral] world’.71 They also return to it. These words, spoken by the Virgin, stepped back into the oral world from which they came, as they were read aloud and re-read, as they were prayed aloud, and as they were taken to heart in the depth of silence in which the sisters dwelled. In this chapter, I have examined a number of aspects of women’s preaching. I fĳirst indicate how reading sermons inside the convent would have voiced

70 Villena, Vita Christi, III, 285–286. 71 Walter J. Ong, ‘The Word and the Sensorium’, in his The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven, CT, 1967), p. 116. Preaching God’s Word in a Valencian Convent 445 them in the feminine, even if they had a male author. Using the Vita Christi as evidence, I have explored how Villena on occasion refers to women as preachers, contrary to the prevalent doctrine of the day on women. She also indicates how women are able to hold their tongues in contradiction of medieval traditions. I have then explored some aspects of the Virgin Mary’s preaching to others setting them in the context of contemporary ideologies of preaching. From this, we gain an insight into the intimate nature of preaching inside the convent. CHAPTER 16 Afterword

Michael J. Braddick

I do not intend to review the potential of studies of orality to illuminate the life of early modern Europe, a task admirably undertaken in the introductory essay by Thomas Cohen and Lesley Twomey, but to reflect on some of the key themes explored by the essays in this volume. They arise from a conference which included more than thirty papers, ranging very widely indeed, and my comments also draw on the discussions at that conference. It is clear that the study of orality in early modern Europe now ramifĳies in many directions. Speech is much older than writing of course, and early modern Europe was a hybrid society, in which oral discourse interacted with text including, increasingly, printed text.1 Historians have been greatly interested in the interconnections of oral and literate culture, particularly in relation also to the transformative efffects of print, but also in trying to isolate a strain of oral tradition, or oral culture, from the wider realm of communication. Part of that project has been to explore the relationship between learned and popular, or vernacular culture.2 Oral and written traditions were an important component of social and individual memory, one of the building blocks of individual and collective identity, and therefore of fundamental importance to social relations.3 Powerful claims have been made too for the transformation of cognition consequent on signifĳicant changes in modes of communication.4 Oral expression has been seen as a relatively free and unregulated mode of

1 Peter Burke, ‘Communication’, in A Concise Companion to History, ed. by Ulinka Rublack (Oxford, 2013), pp. 157–178. 2 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1978), was of fundamental importance in this area; so too the work of Carlo Ginzburg, especially The Cheese and the Worms: the Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John & Anne Tedeschi (London, 1976), The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John & Anne Tedeschi (London, 1983); and R.W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Oxford, 1994). For England, see Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000); and Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf, eds, The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain, 1500–1850 (Manchester, 2002). 3 James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford, 1992). 4 Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Social Change (Cambridge, 1979); Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London, 1982). For a potent

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004291829_018 Afterword 447 communication, delivering power to those excluded from literacy, and a realm in which we can detect the beliefs and values of those whose opinions were not routinely recorded in writing.5 The study of orality takes us to the world of the face-to-face encounter where, as Gofffman argued, the world’s work gets done.6 The essays in this volume touch on many of these issues: the continuing power of oral communication to articulate identity, memory and social relations of all kinds, but also of the intimate connections between oral and textual communication, particularly for historians who depend on the latter for their access to the former.

It is difffĳicult, however, to describe the potential of the study of orality without at the same time drawing attention to the difffĳiculties involved in realizing that potential. One broad area of discussion in the fĳield at large, and in these essays, is the difffĳiculty of unlocking this potential – how mediated sources do or do not give us access to what was actually said. We are reliant on fragments that have been caught in text – in depositions, in formal accounts of speeches, in diaries and so forth – where we can glimpse only moments in the continuous flow of talk. A second problem is that the words we do have acquired their meaning from a domain of non-verbal communication, and other aspects of the frame or setting, which are often now lost to us: the study of oral culture takes us to the domain of face-to-face interaction, but a knowledge of what was actually said, explicitly, gives only partial access to what was communicated in a denser fĳield of inter-personal communication. Starting with the second problem fĳirst: verbal communication is at the moment of utterance embroiled with all sorts of non-verbal signals that help to give meaning to the words spoken. Many of the interactions examined here illustrate how what is said takes its meaning from what Gofffman called the whole setting of any particular interaction.7 When we come to analyse those moments of verbal exchange on the streets or in court to which we have the most immediate and arresting access we are consistently taken beyond

critique of Eisenstein see Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, il, 1988). 5 Filippo de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford, 2007). 6 Erving Gofffman, ‘The Interaction Order’,American Sociological Review, 48 (1983): 1–17. 7 Gofffman, quoted in Tom Burns,Erving Gofffman (London, 1992), p. 18. 448 Braddick what was said to how and where it was said, by whom and to whom, and in what tone. The information being transmitted had to be assayed before it could be used, and this process depended on a range of triggers from the past and the present which signalled the quality of what was being spoken. In formal settings the freight of what was said was determined partly by the wider setting; in more spontaneous speech what made a moment noteworthy often also related to setting and context as much as to content. An important element of that was the self-presentation of the speaker. Certainly, in post-Reformation England, the physical performance of preachers was commented on and consciously developed, just as the experience of religious inspiration in the wild days of the English revolution was often characterised by the physical projection as much as the words spoken.8 This is one broad area of difffĳiculty addressed by the contributors – the written record may recall the words accurately, but gives us a far less complete account of the non-verbal facts about the exchange which shaped its meaning, and conversational analysis of a formal kind is not possible for us. Tantalizingly, the notaries in the Imperial Chamber Court of the Holy Roman Empire were invited to record such matters as indicators of the credibility of deponents – to be alert for ‘fear, stammering, or ambivalent talk’ and the ‘gestures’ of the deponent, as indicators of their sincerity. Sadly, they seem to have concentrated instead on the words that ‘fell from the deponent’s mouths’, rarely recording these less tangible aspects of the impression given by a speaker.9 Sometimes details allow us to recapture the power and immediacy of the speech act – as in the courtroom scenes evoked in Thomas Cohen’s account of criminal proceedings in early modern Rome. Such close reading of the texts can take us beyond the words spoken, but only a little way into the territory of socio-linguistic, ethnographic or psychological analysis of the many things that are going on in a conversation.10 In other contexts the setting of speech was more consciously articulated, or at least a subject of more explicit reflection. Spital sermons in early modern London were, as Sonia Suman makes clear, consciously performative: they were acknowledged to be events to be seen, as much as words to be heard. Preachers were encouraged to tune their performance to time, place, and occasion, and there was conscious reflection on the staging of the sermons (to

8 Michael J. Braddick, ‘Introduction: the Politics of Gesture’, in Michael J. Braddick, ed., The Politics of Gesture: Historical Perspectives, Past & Present Supplement, 4 (1990): 1–35, at pp. 22–23 and the sources cited there. 9 Bähr, ch. 3. 10 Cohen, ch. 4. Afterword 449 the extent that direct parallels were drawn with early modern stage craft). But this was as much a threat as an empowerment. If words have more force when directly spoken, the setting may rob them of their intended meaning, and many early modern divines worried that sermons in such circumstances might not be properly heard. Thus, although there was a very conscious belief in the advantages of the spoken word over print, there were very evident anxieties that the larger event distracted from the intended message. The negotiation and reception of a spoken message is immediate, and the determining power of the speaker is clearly heavily qualifĳied the audience and the setting.11 Mission preaching in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France also drew on the relationship between words and the wider setting, and was consciously understood to be dialogic, to be aiming to work efffects on the audience. The post-Reformation emphasis on the propagation of the Word revealed a weakness in rural preaching that was addressed through mission preaching. Professional speakers gave highly tuned performances in the vernacular, which were very deliberately performative, seeking active participation from the auditors. In funeral orations the performance deliberately drew on the contrast between the setting and the words spoken, in order to draw attention to truths that lay behind or beyond the immediate social scene. In all these ways mission preaching was polyphonic – the whole performance was comprised of spoken and unspoken communication, and the words and actions not just of the preacher but also of the auditors. The sermon, a written record of which remains, was part of a larger semiotic system of preaching.12 Losada’s analysis of St Vincent Ferrer’s preaching unpicks these relationships, exploring the sermon as an event, a performance, and a model of action intended to create social transformation.13 Some of this difffĳiculty – of trying with very imperfect information and tools to enter the domain of conversational analysis in an historical context – resembles the relationship of some historians to gesture studies. There is a frustration about how much we cannot do, but also some divergence of purpose. Formal analysis can give us the grammar and syntax of oral culture – how it works – but not necessarily what work it does in a broader sense. Gofffman too, it seems to me, offfers a rich taxonomy and points to the myriad ways in which a setting is created, but pays little attention to the issues which animate social and cultural history – particularly in this volume social and political relations. Formal linguistic analysis helps us to read a poem, but to understand the

11 Suman, ch. 7. 12 Régent-Susini, ch. 5. 13 Losada, ch. 6. 450 Braddick poet we need to grasp much more about the social and literary context. Only sometimes can we engage in a close reading of the tactics of verbal exchanges and also of the context of the social relationships that they articulated and facilitated.14 The centrality of setting to the meaning of speech is particularly clear in dramatic and literary sources, which are very conscious of the context and performance of their words. In a number of chapters this is the focus of analysis – Joseph Snow’s discussion of Celestina, for example,15 as well as those on preaching that I have already mentioned. How these things operate in works of fĳiction, however, is particularly revealing since they concentrate on those issues which are silently assumed or ignored in other sources, but which in order to work for their audiences must have been recognizable versions of ‘how it actually was’. If there are methodological difffĳiculties for us in this relationship between the verbal and the non-verbal on one side, there are equally formidable problems on the other side – the relationship between the spoken and the written word. The key problem here is the relationship between the text we have, and what was actually said. During the English revolution the parliament’s oral deliberations went into national circulation through print. But there was an interesting hesitation about this, and also some ambiguity about the relationship between what was circulated and what might actually have been said. John Morrill famously showed that many of the speeches attributed to a key parliamentary fĳigure, John Pym, could not have been delivered by him simply because he was not present for the debate. Indeed they may not have been delivered at all.16 Another key feature of our record of these debates is the richness of the diary evidence, and there is a major scholarly industry dedicated to the reconstruction of what was said by comparing the various diary accounts. But this illustrates another issue – the efffect of a speech lies in the reaction of the audience, indeed of individual auditors. Morrill in his undergraduate lectures on this question would at a certain point pick on three audience members and ask them to read back their notes of the last few minutes – they

14 Braddick, ‘Introduction: Politics of Gesture’ and Richard Handler, ‘Erving Gofffman and the Gestural Dynamics of Early Modern Selfhood’, in The Politics of Gesture, ed. by Braddick, pp. 280–300. 15 Snow, ch. 12. 16 John Morrill, ‘The Unweariableness of Mr Pym: Influence and Eloquence in the Long Parliament’, in Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to David Underdown, ed. by Susan Dwyer Amussen & Mark A. Kishlansky (Manchester, 1995), pp. 19–54. Afterword 451 rarely tallied with each other or with what John had thought he had been saying.17 This relationship between what was said and what was written down is, of course, of critical importance for the study of orality. Many historians have drawn on legal records hoping to retrieve from them the speech of ordinary people. Willumsen uses narratology to unpick the relationship between what was written by the sorenskriver and what had been said. Following Gérard Genette, she considers the text as a narrative structured by the sorenskriver, but fashioned from components that were not drawn from his imagination. Embedded in the text are words of witches: even though the overall form of the narrative bears the heavy imprint of legal convention, she argues, the content of the record was driven by what witches said. The record we have, in other words, relates in some fundamental way to real events and individual experiences, as articulated in court. Her analysis then traces a shifting relationship between learned and legal expectations on the one hand and, on the other, how ordinary people articulated what had happened and their own experiences. This reveals a dynamic relationship between learned and popular culture reflected, to some extent, in the negotiation between the spoken and written word.18 Bähr’s careful reconstruction of the work of the scribe in the Imperial Chamber Court supports a similar argument – that the conventions governing the scribes’ work did not mean that what we have is too heavily mediated to be taken seriously as a reflection of what was actually said. There were no clear directions about how testimony was to be taken, but its purpose was clear – to capture the ‘voice’ of village opinion in order to mediate a dispute. This oral testimony was a source of authority, reflecting values of authenticity and sincerity – it had a probative value equivalent to legal documents, and stood in their place for a part of the population whose rights and traditions were not recorded in that form. It was crucial for the scribe to be able to perform this recording in order that the Court could serve as an efffective arbitrator and mediator.19 Reassured about the way that the record was

17 John Morrill, ‘Paying one’s D’Ewes’, Parliamentary History, 14.2 (1995): 179–186. 18 Willumsen, ch. 1. This work clearly relates to Ginzburg, Cheese and Worms, and Night Battles. 19 Bähr, ch. 3. For the political power of custom in England, knowledge of which was frequently part of a highly localised oral culture, see E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London, 2009); Fox, ‘Local Custom, Memory, and Record’, in his Oral and Literate Culture, pp. 259–298; and the work of Andy Wood, most recently The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2013). 452 Braddick constructed, Bähr is then confĳident in proceeding to use those records to gain access to social knowledge which was not otherwise recorded. Thomas Cohen’s rich and evocative essay seeks out the denseness of face- to-face communication which goes well beyond the words spoken. He offfers a tantalising glimpse of early modern conversation considered with attention to the full range of human communication, beyond simply what was said. Verbatim records of interrogation in Rome’s criminal courts give some access to the fluid and vital domain of face-to-face conversation. This was not just a matter of the care taken by the scribes, but of the matter they were recording – conversations that had taken place outside the court were nested within the conversation being had within the court. Thus, although the records smooth out all the hesitations and repetitions, and flatten out dialect diffferences, they give a clear picture of the dynamics and rhythms of normal conversation. More than this, the crafting of these narratives of reported conversations are themselves revealing. Giovanni Battista di Bartolomeo’s deposition in a dispute relating to the village of Rocca Sinibalda in 1555 is rich in detail about the dynamics of conversation, but also reflects the oral tradition of his culture, and its evocation. Such patient and sensitive reading offfers to draw a curtain aside to give us at least partial access to the rich domain of dense inter-personal communication.20 Gala Pellicer’s careful textual analysis traces in such records an oral tradition which persisted across the longue durée. Again, her sources are the product of a collision between a popular, oral tradition, and the quite diffferent concerns of a legal institution – in this case potentially heretical practices of love magic. The legend of St Helena’s discovery of the cross had led to a strong association between her and the recovery of lost things, and with love. Prosecutions in Toledo and Valencia contain records of prayers to her, which bear close textual resemblances to one another and, even more excitingly, to modern texts now circulating via the internet. This reveals not only an oral sub-stratum of prayers and incantations in early modern Europe, but its persistence into the 21st century, and its circulation in a combination of oral and written forms. This primarily female and oral transmission points up not only the hybridity of early modern culture but also that of our own, and the ambiguous place of the web 2.0 world between the oral and (at least learnedly) literate.21 Alex Cowan’s paper to the conference on love magic also used a legal record generated for one purpose – to assess whether or not heretical use had been made of sacred objects in

20 Cohen, ch. 4. 21 Gala Pellicer, ch. 2. See here, Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstacies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (Chicago, IL, 2004). Afterword 453 love-magic and divination – to approach another issue obliquely.22 This depends, of course, on how accurately the record reflects that other issue and its understanding, but that other issue is not necessarily ‘oral culture’. Indeed in many of these essays it is the place of oral culture in some other social practice or set of social relations, and the intermixture of oral and written is therefore part of the phenomenon to be explained, not simply an obstacle to the understanding of the purely oral. This is the elusive quarry of Twomey’s essay too, which unpicks and reconstructs preaching in a late medieval Valencian monastery, the interactions between written and spoken word, and between speaker and hearer, to understand what preaching tells us about women’s voices.23 Many chapters are then concerned to uncover how spoken words enter print or manuscript, or travel from there to the street. This potentially very complex relationship between literary sources and the world of the spoken word is therefore a recurrent issue, but so too is the relationship considered from the other direction: discerning in written texts the imprint of the spoken. In legal settings, or the records of representative institutions and royal courts, or in reports of what was said spontaneously on the street we have mediated access to words; but their meaning, freight or power was changed also by the process of recording. These methodological reflections direct our attention precisely to this interaction between the verbal and non-verbal, and between the oral and the written; the place of the oral in the wider web of communication and human interaction seems to me to be a question of at least as much importance as the desire to isolate a pure strain of oral culture.

These questions about the relationship between text and speech often revolve around the credibility and authority: words can have powerful efffects, and authenticity gives power in that sense: Losada’s analysis of St Vincent Ferrer’s preaching explores how these formal events expressed but also sought to transform the social order.24 This is one reason why a recurrent theme in studies of orality is the exercise of power, and resistance to it. Certainly this concern with power and its exercise in face-to-face situations is a key theme in these essays.

22 Cowan, ‘Gender, magic and gossip in Venice and Bologna’, paper presented at the conference ‘Gossip, Gospel, and Governance: Orality in Europe (1400–1700), 14–16 July, British Academy, London. See above, p. xii. 23 Twomey, ch. 15. 24 Losada, ch. 6. 454 Braddick

In many of the situations described we see the uncertainties that attended the projection of an image, and about its reception. Reputation and honour seem often to have been at stake in how people spoke, and how they framed their speech – underpinning their truth claims, or being fought out in the details of stories being retailed. In all these societies reputation, credit and honour were key terms, and they were continually expressed and contested in talk, both formal talk and in spontaneous conversation. A concentration on these verbal exchanges takes us to the heart of the negotiation of the inter- subjective values, and the valuation of individuals: to the projection, appropriation, manipulation and resistance to power. We have seen this in formalized settings – public sermons – and in more spontaneous contexts – in the to-and- fro of courtroom exchanges so richly and thoughtfully evoked by Tom Cohen, for example. In all cases it gives access to the values by which these people lived their lives. Another recurrent attraction about these moments is the potential they hold for us to recover voices that are otherwise lost to us. This was a key motivation in the pioneering studies of the demonstrative aspects of riot – the non-verbal expression of values such as those revealed by E.P. Thompson and Natalie Davis offfered the possibility of access to the opinions of those silent in the archives of political history.25 In Liv Helene Willumsen’s chapter we can hear the voices of young girls on the far northern edge of Europe, but those voices were in conversation with learned opinion – notably that of the John Cunningham whose intervention did so much to propagate demonological understandings of witchcraft in the 1620s or of Ambrosius and Anne Friedrichsdotter Rhodius in the 1660s. Deponents in the Imperial Chamber Court were invited to express themselves, often in conflict with their social superiors, so that, as we have seen, we can hear in the testimony the village voice, revealing presumptions about space and time, for example. Again, however, we hear this voice in dialogue with the learned and powerful, being transformed and mutated at the moment and through the mode of its articulation.26 Not all legal records are as transparent as this. The High Court of Admiralty records examined by Richard Blakemore yield the voices of ordinary mariners less readily, although it is still

25 E.P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd’, in his Customs in Common (London, 2009), pp. 185–258; Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘The Rites of Violence’, in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA, 1975), pp. 162–187; John Walter, ‘Grain Riots and Popular Attitudes to the Law: Maldon and the Crisis of 1629’, and ‘The Social Economy of Dearth in Early Modern England’, in his Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2006; ebook 2007), pp. 27–66 and 124–180. 26 Bähr, ch. 3. Afterword 455 possible to get behind the learned stereotypes of sailors’ talk and to understand something of how it actually was.27 In a number of other instances we can recover the voices of women of low status: in the studies of oral traditions of love magic in Susana Gala Pellicer’s essay, for example, as well as those of poor or obscure men, or the language of the streets of early sixteenth-century Rome.28 In these latter situations we can see how talk smoothed and lubricated social relations more generally – it is not just the means by which power is transacted but also the means by which status is assured, individuals are reassured and social relations are expressed. Alex Cowan’s paper at the conference explored the collision between vernacular traditions of love magic and the Inquisition in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Verona and Bologna. Verbatim records of the questioning of suspects and witnesses reveal the chains of gossip which transmitted knowledge and reputation in these early modern cities. This was primarily female knowledge, but it was communicated across gender distinctions and between diffferent parts of the cities, reputations and expertise being spread by intermediaries. Oral communication was crucial to the reputation of those who could help fĳind stolen goods or help with love magic.29 Many of us, I am sure, will have had the experience during a long day in the archives of suddenly feeling a voice speaking to us from the past – a fragment of speech or description that for a moment breaks down the barrier between us and the people that we are seeking to understand. Many of these essays turn this immediacy into an exercise in empathic engagement – paying close attention to the setting, what was in play, and how it played out. Tom Cohen’s artful chapter concludes with the harrowing reconstruction of the trial of authenticity between the rival testimonies of Gaspar and Damian, in the staged drama of the confrontatio. It captures this immediacy: when the court does Gaspar a favour by torturing him in Damian’s presence, giving him the opportunity to vouchsafe his sincerity by enduring physical trauma.30 Such a moment was unusual, of course, but in our encounter with directly reported speech we are taken to the human experience at the heart of the process by which social order is enacted and reproduced, to an individual relationship negotiated against the background of the full range of issues to which social and cultural historians attend.

27 Blakemore, ch. 8. 28 Cowan, ‘Gender, magic, and gossip’. Gala Pellicer, ch. 3; Cohen, ch. 4. 29 See above, p. xii. 30 Cohen, ch. 4. 456 Braddick

What was said clearly took its larger meaning from much non-verbal sig- nalling: the individual’s self-presentation in dress, gesture, manner; the social hierarchy as reflected in the speech order; the physical setting. Words spoken out of place at quarter sessions in Shropshire in 1635 had dramatic consequences as a result of the setting. A technical dispute about the writ being raised to pay for a professional muster master to improve the standard of the militia received a public airing. The Jury had been persuaded to present the writ as illegal and had some support from the magistrates. But this sort of thing was of course highly embarrassing, and there was a prominent opponent of the presentation of the petition. He, Timothy Tourneur, clashed verbally with another magistrate, in fact he lost out in an exchange of witticisms. In this case the immediacy of verbal communication clearly raised the stakes, because verbal competence or incompetence had immediate efffects on the reputation, honour and standing of the man defending the King’s right to impose this particular tax. But be careful who you hurt. News of the spat spread around the country, and the man who had won the battle of wits was summoned before the Privy Council. Having refused to offfer an apology he was imprisoned in the Fleet in London throughout a summer in which plague raged in the city. He was lucky that he did not receive a death sentence as recompense for this wit.31 At stake in this encounter were words that Tourneur felt were ‘unfĳitting for that time and place’. A key issue in many of our discussions has been the question of what can be said when and where, in what setting. In many of the encounters we have heard about this kind of power is at stake – a fleet- ing moment of talk can shift a hierarchy or reputation with potentially serious efffects. This is particularly true in formal settings, particularly the tense environment of the courtroom, where successful truth claims carry very signifĳicant consequences – as Tom Cohen, Matthias Bähr and others have demonstrated. Historians have often been concerned with agency, and clearly the study of the spoken word is crucial here. This question of agency has perhaps a double sense: it refers not just the demonstrable power to achieve a particular thing, but also a more general feeling of agency and dignity, what we might call self- ownership. Certainly in early modern England the juxtaposition of slavery to liberty was a commonplace, and an element of this relates to the power of free

31 Michael J. Braddick, ‘Administrative Performance: the Representation of Political Power in Early Modern England’, in Negotiating Power: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Early Modern Society, ed. by Michael J. Braddick & John Walter (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 166–187. Afterword 457 expression.32 Both elements of agency are clearly in play in many of the verbal encounters recovered in these pages. The tense jostling over truth claims in Italian courts, or the ways in which gossip led to personal tragedy in Celestina. As Joseph Snow put it, ‘gossip is power’. For Celestina the power to gossip was a marker of cultural competence and the incapacity to win a battle of wits in open quarter sessions was disastrous for the authority of Timothy Tourneur.33 Reputation and face could be at stake in publicly witnessed exchanges, offfering perhaps a counter-poise to the emphasis laid by Alex Cowan on gossip as a source of solidarity and support. Sailors were dependent on their reputation for continuity of employment.34 In power there lies danger, and there is certainly power in the spoken word. At stake in many of the encounters we have heard about has been authority – the authority of the speaker, or of the information they transmit. Many of our speakers have talked about truth claims and their connections with the wider web of social relations, particularly in the standing and influence of the speaker. Timothy Tourneur’s patron, Bridgewater heard about this exchange, which obviously afffected his own standing, not from Tourneur himself, but by ‘flying report’. One of the key concerns about vagrancy in early modern England was its relationship to the spread of false news, and when print exploded out of control in the year before the outbreak of civil war in England, there was frequent complaint about flying pamphlets spreading false news and gossip on a mechanized scale. For English commentators this common speech was itself disorderly, just as it threatened disorder – babble, chatter, noise were contrasted with knowledge and considered discourse.35 This bears a striking resemblance to the distaste for the ‘clappaert’, or blabbermouth, among fĳifteenth- and sixteenth-century moralists in the Netherlands. Against a high culture that placed value on virtue, incorruptibil- ity and moderation, of a well-governed tongue, stood a livelier and subversive popular culture of gossip and chatter. Dumolyn and Haemers show how this spoken culture of gossip, song and play overlapped with a written culture of libel, often informed by languages of the commonwealth and the common

32 Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998), esp. pp. 37–44, 68–76, 84–96. 33 Snow, ch. 12; Braddick, ‘Administrative Performance’. 34 Cowan’s paper delivered at the conference, see above p. xii; Blakemore, ch. 8. 35 Fox, ‘Ballads and libels’, in his Oral and Literate Culture, and ‘Rumour and News’, pp. 299–334 and 335–405. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 150–152; God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil War (London, 2008), pp. 172–174. 458 Braddick good. Prophecies, and pseudo-prophecies offfered a ‘medium for the preservation of collective memories about political events’. Together, this lively culture of speech, performance and text served as a restraint on governors. These blabbermouths did not mind their tongues, but mocked and criticised their bet- ters: their ungoverned and perhaps ungovernable oral culture offfered a testing ground for claims to political and social authority.36 This tense silence was, at least ideally, maintained in the claustrophobic conditions on board early modern ships, but as Richard Blakemore shows sailors’ talk was a source both of identity and influence. A common trope among the learned was that sailors had a distinctive language, marked both by technical jargon and habits of expression best suited to communication on deck during a storm. This has often been taken at face value, and as evidence of an ever-present threat of mutiny and class conflict, of a readiness to make noise. And there is certainly evidence that being able to speak the language of sailors was regarded as an important marker of belonging, and means of exclusion. But the evidence of court records relating to disputes on board reveals a more complex picture of continual jostling and positioning, in the most intimate of social settings, in which conflict could be avoided by talk. As on the streets of Italian cities speaking served to establish and express patterns of social interaction, afffording a place to speakers, rubbing the edges of social situations and continually re-stating and naturalizing a social order. Noyse-making and mutiny were not the only register for this occupational group, even in the most cramped and potentially oppressive of environments.37 Nonetheless, an ungoverned and uncivil tongue was a threat to order, and unregulated talk was a political danger. The remarkable efffects of unrestrained public discussion of afffairs of state are also evident in the continuously destabilizing influence of street talk on the conduct of Venetian politics discussed by Elizabeth Horodowich, the broglio that offfered a continuous commentary on contemporary afffairs. Here the groups of those we can now see as an influence on formal politics has been widened to include humble and obscure women.38 Marcus Harmes and Gillian Colclough trace in fascinating detail the career of one example of popular speech. Henry Prince of Wales, the elder son of James VI and I of England, was widely regarded as a potential Protestant hero,

36 Dumolyn and Haemers, ch. 9, quotation at p. 288. For the politics of popular prophecy see also Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton, NJ, 1990); Tim Thornton, Prophecy, Politics and the People in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2006). 37 Blakemore, ch. 8. 38 Horodowich, ch. 11. See also De Vivo, Information and Communication. Afterword 459 who would champion the Protestant cause, not least by perfecting the reformation begun by Henry VIII. Henry IX, it was hoped, would fĳinish the job. A proverb to that efffect was picked up in 1605 in London and used as a warning by the learned author Sir John Harington, who placed it as the epigram to his manuscript Supplie or Addicion to the Catalogue of Bishops, presented to the prince. It demonstrated the dangers posed to the church by loose tongues and ill-informed reforming spirit – it demonstrated the need for the church to win this propaganda battle. In fact, Henry died before taking the throne, and opponents of the Crown were eventually to bring down both bishops and monarchy in the crisis of the mid-seventeenth century. The proverb appeared again, in print this time, in 1653, for an unregulated audience now living without prince or bishop. This most fascinating trajectory amply illustrates the potential of the proverb as, in Obelkevich’s phrase, a ‘strategy with authority’: its appearance and setting in various media at various times tracking the political charge of the idea it expressed.39 A recurrent source of interest in oral culture is this – how it worked to spread knowledge and opinion, often at high speed, and the ways this might disrupt social and political orders. The irruption into Finnmark of central European understandings of demonology, described by Willumsen, reflected the spread of awareness of religious and political matters – oral culture has increasingly been seen as crucial to this intersection between the grand issues in the politics and learned culture of early modern Europe and the lives of ordinary people. As many of these chapters show, governments and social elites were not relaxed about this. The respectable middling sort of writers in late medieval Flanders, discussed by Dumolyn and Haemers, were themselves critical of misgovernment but were equally clear that the urban mob should remain silent under their protection. As one commentator remarked, a bad tongue should be more feared than any sword: many early modern governors would have agreed.40 The transmission of knowledge, then, and the contests that attended its reception, is clearly a crucial aspect of the essays in this collection. But it is not just transmission across space in form of false news or the assimilation at the margins of learned culture, it is the transmission through time of social values and understanding. Here Snow’s concept of gossip as ‘a mental dossier’, a reservoir of knowledge seem particularly valuable along with his stress on the close relationship between gossip and storytelling more generally: the stories told were a collective resource upon which people might draw at moments

39 See also Fox, ‘Proverbial Wisdom’, in his Oral and Literate Culture, pp. 112–172. 40 Willumsen, ch. 1; Dumolyn and Haemers, ch. 9. 460 Braddick of personal or social crisis (such as the witch-hunts, for example). The character of Celestina reveals, at least potentially, the kind of power that an individual could enjoy through command of this world of gossip and storytelling. We learn about her power and expertise through the gossip and commentary of others, while her own gossiping reflects her social command – her ability to shape and juggle stories allows her to manipulate people and situations. This successful storytelling rests on an ‘accumulated mental dossier’, which is the resource for her negotiation and domination of her circle. It involves both public knowledge and private, and moves between established fact and hearsay, and her deep competence in the use of these resources is the basis of her authority. Her ‘vaunted experience’ makes others wary, or even fearful of her. Here, in a story woven from stories we can see a reflection on the power of words in early modern society.41 Stories, retailed by gossips or in even more stylized form through song and ballad, give us access to patterns of oral transmission of values and judgements through time, and to the individual and collective resources on which people might draw in making their world. But the unravelling of the meaning of these stories is always complex and context-dependent. The frequently gruesome stories were retold amorally, and often with a comic tone that is hard to relate to the subject matter. Hearers perhaps learn a kind of shrug about the ways of the world as much as a series of more obviously moral lessons.42 The power of speech was important to some of the most fundamental aspect of personal life – as Rosanna Cantavella demonstrates. Late medieval schoolboys learned how to tune their speech to the art of seduction through classical and contemporary texts. They studied these texts in a culture that valued memory, and therefore placed a particular value on the power of the spoken word. They were encouraged to cultivate a kind of courteous dishonesty, a seducer’s tongue which wooed the unwilling. Contemporary morality required men to persuade women to overcome their unwillingness willingly – and central to that was the power of the spoken word.43 Finally, a number of chapters approach the place of oral culture from the other end, by exploring how it informed the production of written texts. Snow’s reading of Celestina reveals a text intended to be read aloud, which was itself woven from stories spoken by the protagonists. As a result, it can be read backwards, as it were, ‘to recover from the extant written sources the

41 Snow, ch. 12. 42 Robert Darnton, ‘Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose’, in his The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (London, 1984), pp. 17–78. 43 Cantavella, ch. 14. Afterword 461 important clues to the lost orality in the cultures of early modern Europe’. Reinburg’s chapter explores the relationship between oral and written prayer in fĳifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, seeing speech as fundamental to both.44 How social relations were lived, how social and political orders were produced and reproduced, how knowledge was transmitted, assessed and absorbed – these key issues are all illuminated through the study of oral culture.45 These reflections lead perhaps to a more difffĳicult question: the issue of change over time. Reinburg’s analysis seems to point to a distinctive relationship between oral and written expression in a society in which speech occu- pied an underlying, fundamental signifĳicance. The Book of Hours reflected an understanding of prayer as speech – not necessarily oral in the sense of being said aloud, but in the sense of words directed at establishing a relationship with the addressee (God, Mary, or the saints). Written prayers reflected oral practice, and particular prayers moved between oral and written forms so that, for example, ‘charms are texts modifĳied by use’.46 Elizabeth Horodowich’s chapter is also important in this respect, reflecting on how early modern Venetians talked about gossip – the meta language of gossip. Her point of departure is the myriad purposes of gossip – as entertainment, a form of sociability, a source of information, a tool of education or a weapon of the weak. Given the myriad functions for gossip identifĳied by historians in the burgeoning number of studies devoted to it, can we begin to unpick how contemporaries understood the varying signifĳicances of the spoken word? Exploring literary and legal texts she is able to identify a spectrum of categorizations of gossip – from a feminized and marginalized pellegolezze to the politically-freighted broglio. These terms were common to much of Italy, but had a distinctive meaning in Venetian discussions of gossip, revealing a particular local understanding of these various forms and meanings of talk.47 The analysis of these meta languages is potentially revealing of diffferences in these local cultures, perhaps distinguished both across space and time. Might study of the meta language of gossip allow us to develop an understanding of a distinctively early modern culture, a

44 Snow, ch. 12; Reinburg, ch. 14. 45 A number of papers at the conference explored these relationships: particularly in papers on the phenomenon of ‘flytings’ on the streets of early modern Scotland, the relationship between actor and audience in Shakespearean theatre or the representation of speech in Delicado’s Lozana andaluza. 46 Reinburg, ch. 14. 47 Horodowich, ch. 11. 462 Braddick particular understanding of the place of orality in the larger social and political culture? This attempt to characterize a distinctively late medieval and early modern relationship with oral culture is perhaps the biggest challenge posed by these essays. In order to get at this largely concealed world of oral expression some chapters have cast their net wide to capture many fragments, while others have concentrated on a richly revealed moment, or richly evoked character – there is clearly a convergence between the study of oral culture and micro-history. On the basis of such approaches, however, it is not easy to say what was distinctively early modern about the culture we have been discussing. Nor is it clear whether the relationship between the verbal and the non-verbal, and between the verbal and the written or printed, was obviously stable across the early modern period. Was the oral culture of early modern Europe distinctively shaped by the relationship between oral and literate culture? By the relationship between oral, written, and printed forms of words? Or by distinctive early modern understandings of the relationship between verbal and non-verbal expression, and contemporary consciousness of that relationship? And if so, did shifts in those relationships shape the development of oral culture, or were they themselves shaped by that developing oral culture? And if we look outside this set of relationships, to wider changes in early modern society, belief and politics, was the oral culture distinctively patterned by these features of early modern life: renaissance, reformation, escalating warfare and increased state power, print, the opening of the Atlantic, political revolutions? We see all these things in play in our micro-histories, but can we use our micro- histories to build up a picture of change over time? And, if we can, is it also possible to build up a picture of geographical patterns in Europe’s oral cultures? It is I hope a testament to the richness and stimulation offfered by these essays that they prompt these still larger questions. Bibliography

Abbot, Wilbur Cortez, ed., The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 4 vols (Cambridge, 1939). Adlington, Hugh, ‘Gospel, Law, and ars praedicandi at the Inns of Court, c. 1570–c. 1640’, in The Intellectual and Cultural World of the Early Modern Inns of Court, ed. by Jayne Elizabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring & Sarah Knight (Manchester, 2011). Alton, E.H., & D.E.W. Wormell, ‘Ovid in the Medieval Schoolroom’, Hermathena, 94–95 (1960–1961): 21–38, 67–82. Amelang, James S., ‘Ethnographies of error’, in L’Europa divisa e i nuovi mondi, ed. by Massimo Donattini, Guiseppe Marcocci, & Stefania Pastore, 2 vols (Pisa, 2011), II, pp. 105–115. Amodio, Mark C., ed., New Directions in Oral Theory, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 287 (Tempe, AZ, 2005). ———, ‘Res(ist)ing the Singer: Towards a Non-Performative Anglo-Saxon Oral Poetics’, in his New Directions, pp. 179–208. Amussen, Susan Dwyer, & Mark A. Kishlansky, eds, Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to David Underdown (Manchester, 1995). Anderson, Clare, Niklas Frykman, Lex Heerma van Voss, & Marcus Rediker, eds, Mutiny and Maritime Radicalism in the Age of Revolutions: A Global Survey (Cambridge, 2013). Anderson, Judith H., Words That Matter: Linguistic Perception in Renaissance English (Stanford, CA, 1996). Andrews, Kenneth R., Ships, Money, and Politics: Seafaring and Naval Enterprise in the Reign of Charles I (Cambridge, 1991). Arnade, Peter, ‘Secular Charisma, Sacred Power: Rites of Rebellion in the Ghent Entry of 1467’, Handelingen van de Maatschappij voor Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde te Gent, 45 (1991): 69–94. Aymar, Alphonse, ‘Le Sachet accoucheur et ses mystères’, Annales du Midi, 38 (1926): 273–347. Badia, Lola, ‘Tot per la dona però sense la dona: Notes sobre el punt de vista masculí al Tirant lo Blanc, Journal of Hispanic Research, 2 (1993): 39–60. Baer, Yitzhak, History of the Jews in Christian Spain, 2 vols (Philadelphia, PA, 1992). Bagnoli, Martina, Holger A. Klein, C. Grifffĳith Mann, & James Robinson, eds,Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe (London, 2011). Bailey, Joanne, ‘Voices in Court: Litigants’ or Lawyers’?’, Historical Research, 74 (2001): 392–408. Bailey, Matthew, ‘Oral Composition in the Medieval Spanish Epic’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 118(2) (2003): 254–269. 464 Bibliography

———, Poetics of Speech in the Medieval Spanish Epic (Toronto, 2010). Bakhtin, M.M., ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin, TX, 1981), pp. 259–422. ———, ‘The Problem of Speech Genres’, in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. by C. Emerson & M. Holquist, trans. V. McGee (Austin, TX, 1993), pp. 60–102. Baldwin, John W., The Language of Sex: Five Voices from Northern France Around 1200 (Chicago, IL, 1994). Barbour, P.L., ‘Captain John Smith’s Sea Grammar and its Debt to Sir Henry Mainwaring’s “Seaman’s Dictionary” ’, Mariner’s Mirror, 58 (1972): 93–101. Bawcutt, Priscilla, ‘Pamphilus de Amore “in Inglish Toung” ’, Medium Aevum, 64 (2) (1995): 264–272. Bayo, Juan Carlos, ‘On the Nature of the Cantar de mio Cid and its Place in Hispanic Medieval Epic’, La Corónica, 33(2) (2005): 13–27. Beach, Alison I., ‘Listening for the Voices of Admont’s Twelfth-century Nuns’, in Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. by Linda Olson & Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Notre Dame, IN, 2005), pp. 187–198. Bell, David N., What Nuns Read: Books and Libraries in Medieval English Nunneries, Cistercian Studies Series, 158 (Kalamazoo, MI, 1995). Bellany, Alastair, ‘ “Raylinge Rymes and Vaunting Verse”: Libelous Politics in Early Stuart England, 1603–28’, in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. by Kevin Sharpe & Peter Lake (London, 1994). Beltrán, Rafael, ‘Las “bodas sordas” en Tirant lo Blanc y la Celestina’, Revista de Filología Hispánica, 70 (1–2) (1990): 91–117. ———, ‘Tres magas en el arte de la seducción: Trotaconventos, Plaerdemavida y Celestina” ’, in El arte de la seducción en el mundo románico medieval y renacentista, ed. by Elena Real Ramos (Valencia, 1995), pp. 29–38. Berckman, Evelyn, Victims of Piracy: The Admiralty Court, 1575–1668 (London, 1979). Blakemore, Richard J., ‘Thinking Outside the Gundeck: Maritime History, the Royal Navy, and the Outbreak of British Civil War, 1625–42’, Historical Research, 87 (2014): 251–274. ———, ‘The Legal World of English Sailors, c. 1575–1729’, in Law, Labour, and Empire: Comparative Perspectives on Seafarers, 1500–1800, ed. by Maria Fusaro, Bernard Allaire, Richard J. Blakemore, & Tijl Vanneste (London, 2015). Blamires, Alcuin, ‘Women and Preaching in Medieval Orthodoxy, Heresy, and Saints’ Lives’, Viator, 26 (1995), 135–152. Blázquez Miguel, Juan, La hechicería en la región murciana (Yecla, 1984). ———, Madrid: judíos, herejes y brujas. El Tribunal de Corte. 1650–1820 (Toledo, 1990). Bogin, Magda, Les Trobairitz: poetes occitanes del segle XII (Barcelona, 1983). Bolzoni, Lina, La rete delle immagini: Predicazione in volgare dalle origini a Bernardino da Siena (Turin, 2002). Bibliography 465

Boone, Marc, ‘The Dutch Revolt and the Medieval Tradition of Urban Dissent’, Journal of Early Modern History, 11 (2007): 351–375. Bourdieu, Pierre, The Logic of Practice (Chicago, IL, 1992). Bowden, Betsy, ‘The Art of Courtly Copulation’, Medievalia et Humanistica, 9 (1979): 67–85. Boyd, Timothy W., ‘Memory on Canvas: Commedia dell’Arte as a Model for Homeric Performance’, Oral Tradition, 26 (2011): 553–560. Bozóky, Edina, Charmes et prières apotropaïques (Turnhout, 2003). Braddick, Michael J., God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil War (London, 2008). ———, ‘Introduction: The Politics of Gesture’, Past & Present Supplement, 4, The Politics of Gesture: Historical Perspectives (2009), pp. 9–35. ———, State Formation in Early Modern England c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000). Braddick, Michael J., & John Walter, eds, Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2001). Braekevelt, Jonas, et al., ‘Factional Conflict in Late Medieval Flanders’, Historical Research, 85 (2012): 13–31. Brentano, Mary Theresa, Relationship of the Latin Facetus Literature to the Medieval English Courtesy Poems (Lawrence, KS, 1935). Brown, Catherine, Contrary Things: Exegesis, Dialectic, and the Poetics of Didacticism, (Stanford, CA, 1998). Bryce, Judith, ‘The Oral World of the Early Accademia Fiorentina’, Renaissance Studies, 9 (1) (1995): 77–103. Burke, Peter, ‘Communication’, in A Concise Companion to History, ed. by Ulinka Rublack (Oxford, 2013), pp. 157–178. ———, ‘Early Modern Venice as a Center of Information and Communication’, in Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297–1797, ed. by John Jefffries Martin & Dennis Romano (Baltimore, MD, & London, 2002), pp. 389–418. ———, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1978). ———, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication (Cambridge, 1987). Burton, Valerie, ‘The Myth of Bachelor Jack: Masculinity, Patriarchy, and Seafaring Labour’, in Jack Tar in History: Essays in the History of Maritime Life and Labour, ed. by Colin Howell & Richard J. Twomey (Fredericton, NB, 1991), pp. 179–198. Caciola, Nancy, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 2003). Campagne, Fabián, ‘El otro-entre-nosotros, funcionalidad de la noción de superstitio en el modelo hegemónico cristiano (España, siglos XVI–XVII)’, Bulletin Hispanique, 102 (1) (2000): 37–64. 466 Bibliography

Campos Moreno, Araceli, Oraciones, ensalmos y conjuros mágicos en el Archivo Inquisitorial de la Nueva España. 1600–1630 (Mexico, 1999). Cantavella, Rosanna, ‘Debate on Women in Tirant lo Blanc’, in The “Querelle des Femmes” in the Romania: Studies in Honour of Friederike Hassauer, ed. by Wolfram Aichinger et al. (Vienna, 2003), pp. 45–56. ———, ‘Der Streit um die Frauen: Liebeslehren der katalanischen Facet um 1400’, in Heißer Streit und kalte Ordnung, ed. by Friederike Hassauer (Göttingen, 2008), pp. 63–73. ———, Els cards i el llir: Una lectura de l’‘Espill’ de Jaume Roig, Assaig, 11 (Barcelona, 1992). Cantera Montenegro, Enrique, ‘Los judíos y las ciencias ocultas en la España medieval’, En la España medieval, 25 (2002): 47–83. Capellanus, Andreas, Andreas Capellanus on Love, ed. by Patrick G. Walsh (London, 1982). Capp, Bernard, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003). Caro Baroja, Julio, Inquisición, brujería y criptojudaísmo (Barcelona, 1970). ———, Magia y brujería (San Sebastián, 1987). ———, Vidas mágicas e Inquisición (Madrid, 1992). Cátedra García, Pedro, ed., Sermón, sociedad, y literatura en la Edad Media. San Vicente Ferrer en Castilla (1411–1412): estudio bibliográfĳico, literario y edición de los textos inéditos (Madrid, 1994). ———, Los sermones en romance de la Real Colegiata de San Isidro de Léon, Publicaciones del Seminario de Estudios Medievales y Renacentistas, 2 (Salamanca, 2002). Chartier, Roger, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. L. Cochrane (Princeton, NJ, 1987). Châtellier, Louis, The Religion of the Poor: Rural Missions in Europe and the Formation of Modern Catholicism, c. 1500–1800 (London, 1997). Chinca, Mark, & Christopher Young, Orality and Literacy in the Middle Ages: Essays on a Conjunction and its Consequences, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 12 (Turnhout, 2005), pp. 1–15. Clanchy, Michael T., From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (Cambridge, 1979, 2nd edn 1993). Coates, Jennifer, & Deborah Cameron, eds, Women in their Speech Communities: New Perspectives on Language and Sex (London, 1989). Cohen, Elizabeth S., ‘Between Oral and Written Culture: The Social Meaning of an Illustrated Love Letter’, Culture and Identity in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800): Essays in Honour of Natalie Zemon Davis, ed. by Barbara B. Diefendorf & Carla Hesse (Ann Arbor, MI, 1993), pp. 181–201. Bibliography 467

———, ‘She Said, He Said: Situated Oralities in Judicial Records from Early Modern Rome’, Journal of Early Modern History, 14 (4–5) (2012): 403–430. Cohen, Jeremy, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (London, 1982). Cohen, Thomas V., ‘Communal Thought, Communal Words, and Communal Rites’, in Sociability and its Discontents: Civil Society, Social Capital, and their Alternatives in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by Nicholas A. Eckstein & Nicholas Terpstra, (Turnhout, 2008), pp. 23–50. ———, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, IL, 2004). ———, ‘Social Memory as Therapy and as Village Politics’, Social History/Histoire Sociale, 35 (1997): 291–309. ———, ‘Three Forms of Jeopardy: Honor, Pain and Truth-telling in a Sixteenth-Century Italian Courtroom’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 24 (1998), 975–998. Cohn, Norman, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (New York, 1967). Coleman, Joyce, ‘Aural Illumination: Books and Aurality in the Frontispiece to Bishop Chevrot’s Cité de Dieu’, in Orality and Literacy in the Middle Ages: Essays on a Conjunction in Honour of D.H. Green, ed. by Mark Chinca & Christopher Young, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 12 (Turnhout, 2005), pp. 223–252. ———, ‘Lay Readers and Hard Latin: How Gower May Have Intended the Confessio Amantis to be Read’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 24 (2002): 209–235. ———, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge, 1996). ———, ‘The Text Recontextualized in Performance: Deschamps’ Prelection of Machaut’s Voir Dit to the Count of Flanders’, Viator, 31 (2000): 233–248. Collins, Daniel, Reanimated Voices: Speech Reporting in a Historical-Pragmatic Perspective, Pragmatics and Beyond New Series, 85 (Amsterdam, 2001). Contreras Contreras, Jaime, & Jean Pierre Dedieu, ‘Geografía de la Inquisición Española’, Hispania, 144 (1980): 37–94. Coote, Lesley, Prophecy and Public Afffairs in Later Medieval England (Woodbridge, 2000). Cortés Peña, Antonio Luis, ‘La cristianización de la sociedad’, in Discurso religioso y Contrarreforma, ed. by Eliseo Serrano, Antonio Luis Cortés, & José Luis Beltrán (Zaragoza, 2005), pp. 395–412. Costa Fontes, Manuel da, & Joseph T. Snow, eds, ‘Entra mayo y sale abril’: Medieval Spanish Literary and Folklore Studies in Memory of Harriet Goldberg (Newark, DE, 2005). Coulthard, Malcolm, & Alison Johnson, An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics: Language in Evidence (Abingdon, 2007). 468 Bibliography

Cowan, Alexander, ‘Seeing is Believing: Urban Gossip and the Balcony in Early Modern Venice’, Gender and History, 23 (2011): 721–738. Cox, Nick, ‘Rumours and Risings: Plebian Insurrection and the Circulation of Subversive Discourse around 1597’, in Subversion and Scurrility: Popular Discourse in Europe from 1500 to the Present, ed. by Dermot Cavanagh & Tim Kirk (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 43–57. Creighton, Margaret, & Lisa Norling, eds, Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700–1920 (Baltimore, MD, 1996). Cressy, David, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1980). Crockett, Bryan, ‘From Pulpit to Stage: Thomas Playfere’s Influence on Shakespeare’, Notes and Queries, 49 (2) (2002): 243–245. ———, The Play of Paradox: Stage and Sermon in Renaissance England (Philadelphia, PA, 1995). ———, ‘Thomas Playfere’s Poetics of Preaching’, in The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature, and History 1600–1799, ed. by Lori Anne Ferrell & Peter McCullough, Politics, Culture, and Society in Early Modern Britain (Manchester, 2000), pp. 59–83. Crofts, Pauline, ‘Libels, Popular Literacy, and Public Opinion in Early Modern England’, Historical Research, 68 (1995): 266–285. Darnton, Robert, ‘A Bourgeois Puts his World in Order. The City as a Text’, in his The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1984), pp. 123–127. ———, ‘Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose’, in his The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (London, 1984), pp. 17–78. Davids, Karel, ‘Seamen’s Organizations and Social Protest in Europe, c. 1300–1825’, International Review of Social History, 39, Supplement (1994): 145–169. Davies, Horton, Like Angels from a Cloud: The English Metaphysical Preachers 1588–1645 (San Marino, CA, 1986). Davis, Natalie Zemon, ‘The Rites of Violence’, in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA, 1975). De Certeau, Michel, Le Lieu de l’autre: Histoire religieuse et mystique (Paris, 2005). Dedieu, Jean-Pierre, ‘El modelo religioso: las disciplinas del lenguaje y de la acción’, Inquisición española, poder político y control social, ed. by Bartolomé Bennassar et al. (Barcelona, 1984), pp. 208–230. ———, L’Administration de la foi: L’Inquisition de Tolède, XVIeme–XVIIIeme siècle (Madrid, 1989). ———, ‘The Archives of the Holy Offfĳice of Toledo as a Source for Historical Anthropology’, in The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe: Studies on Sources and Methods, ed. by Gustav Henningsen, John A. Tedeschi, & Charles Amiel (De Kalb, IL, 1986). Bibliography 469

Delpech, François, ‘Sistème érotique et mythologie folklorique dans les “conjuros amatorios” (XVIe–XVIIe siècles)’, Amours légitimes, amours illégitimes en Espagne (XVIe– XVIIe siècles), ed. by Augustin Redondo (Paris, 1985), pp. 213–229. Delumeau, Jean, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire: A New View of the Counter- Reformation (London, 1977). ———, Naissance et afffĳirmation de la réforme, Nouvelle Clio: l’historie et ses prob- lèmes, 30 (Paris, 1965). ———, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries (New York, 1990). De Mérindol, Christian, ‘Théâtre et politique à la fĳin du Moyen Âge: Les entrées royales et autres cérémonies mises au point et nouveaux aperçus’, in Théâtre et spectacles hier et aujourd’hui: Moyen âge et Renaissance (Paris, 1991), pp. 179–212. Dening, Greg, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power, and Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge, 1992). De Vivo, Filippo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford, 2007). Deyermond, Alan D., El ‘Cantar de Mio Cid’ y la épica medieval española (Barcelona, 1987). ———, La literatura perdida de la Edad Media castellana. Catálogo y estudio. I: Épica y romances, Obras de referencia, 7 (Salamanca, 1995). Díez Borque, José María, ‘Oraciones, conjuros, ensalmos: Formas marginales de poesía oral en los Siglos de Oro’, Bulletin Hispanique, 87 (1985): 47–87. Doty, Kathleen L., ‘Telling Tales. The Role of Scribes in Constructing the Discourse of the Salem Witchcraft Trials’, Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 8.11 (2007): 25–41. Dronke, Peter, ‘A Note on Pamphilus’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 42 (1979): 225–230. ———, Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric, 2 vols (Oxford, 1965–6). Dufffy, Eamon, ‘Two Healing Prayers’, inMedieval Christianity in Practice, ed. by Miri Rubin (Princeton, NJ, 2009), pp. 164–170. Duggan, Joseph J., ‘The Interface between Oral and Written Transmission of the Cantar de mio Cid’, La Corónica, 33(2) (2005): 51–63. Duke, Alastair, Dissident Identities in the Early Modern Low Countries (Farnham, 2009), pp. 163–165. Dumolyn, Jan, ‘The Terrible Wednesday of Pentecost: Confronting Urban and Princely Discourses in the Bruges Rebellion of 1436–1438’, History, 92 (2007): 3–20. Dumolyn, Jan, & Jelle Haemers, ‘ “A Bad Chicken Was Brooding”. Subversive Speech in Late Medieval Flanders’, Past & Present, 214 (2012): 45–86. ———, ‘Let Each Man Carry on with his Trade and Remain Silent: Middle-Class Ideology in the Urban Literature of the Late Medieval Low Countries’, Cultural and Social History, 10 (2013): 169–189. 470 Bibliography

———, ‘Patterns of Urban Rebellion in Medieval Flanders’, Journal of Medieval History, 31 (2005): 369–393. Dunbar, Robin, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge, 1998). Dunn, Alastair, The Peasants’ Revolt: England’s Failed Revolution of 1381 (Stroud, 2002). Dursteler, Eric, ‘Speaking in Tongues: Multilingualism and Multicultural Communica- tion in the Early Modern Mediterranean’, Past & Present, 217 (2012): 47–77. Echeverría Arsuaga, Ana, ‘Política y religión frente al Islam: la evolución de la legis- lación real castellana sobre musulmanes en el siglo XV’, Qurtuba, 4 (1999): 45–72. Edwards, John, Inquisition (Stroud, 2003). Eisenstein, Elizabeth, The Printing Press as an Agent of Social Change (Cambridge, 1979). Elliott, Alison Goddard, ‘The Facetus: or The Art of Courtly Living’, Allegorica, 2 (2) (1977): 27–57. Elukin, Jonathan, Living Together, Living Apart: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ, 2007). Emmison, F.G., Elizabethan Life: Morals and the Church Courts (Chelmsford, 1973). Epstein, Joseph, Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit (Boston, MA, 2011). Esponera Cerdán, Alfonso, ‘San Vicente Ferrer y el arrepentimiento y salvación de Judas Iscariote’, Anales Valentinos. Revista de Filosofía y Teología, 63 (2006): 143–147. Fairclough, Norman, Discourse and Social Change (Cambridge, 1992). Fajardo Spinola, Francisco, Hechicería y brujería en Canarias en la Edad Moderna (Las Palmas, 1992). Fenster, Thelma S., & Daniel Lord Smail, Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY, 2003). Fentress, James, & Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford, 1992). Ferraiuolo, A., ‘Pro exoneratione sua propria coscientia: Magic, Witchcraft, and Church in Early Eighteenth-century Capua’, in Beyond the Witch Trials. Witchcraft and Magic in Enlightenment Europe, ed. by Owen Davies & Willem de Blécourt (Manchester, 2004), pp. 26–44. Ferreiro, Alberto, ‘Vincent Ferrer’s Beati Petri Apostoli: Canonical and Apocryphal Sources in Popular Vernacular Preaching’, Harvard Theological Review, 91 (1) (1998): 41–57. Ferrell, Lori Anne, & Peter McCullough, eds, The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature, and History 1600–1950 (Manchester and New York, 2000). Fine, Elizabeth C., The Folklore Text: From Performance to Print (Bloomington, IN, 1985). Finnegan, Ruth, ‘ “Oral Tradition”: Weasel Words or Transdisciplinary Door to Multiplexity’, Oral Tradition, 18 (2003): 84–86. ———, Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Signifĳicance, and Social Context (Cambridge, 1977). Bibliography 471

———, ‘What is Oral Literature Anyway?: Comments in the Light of Some African and Other Comparative Material’, in Oral Literature and the Formula, ed. by Benjamin A. Stolz & Richard S. Shannon (Ann Arbor, MI, 1976), pp. 127–147. Finoli, Anna Maria, ed., Artes amandi: Da Maître Elie ad Andrea Cappellano (Milan- Varese, 1969). Fischer, Lewis R., ed., The Market for Seamen in the Age of Sail (St. John’s, Newfoundland, 1994). Foley, John Miles, Immanent Art: From Structure to Meaning in Traditional Oral Epic (Bloomington, IN, 1991). ———, ‘Man, Muse, and Story: Psychohistorical Patterns in Oral Epic Poetry’, Oral Traditions, 2 (1987): 91–107. Fox, Adam, ‘Ballads, Libels and Popular Ridicule in Jacobean England’, Past & Present, 145 (1994): 47–83. ———, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000). ———, ‘Remembering the Past in Early Modern England: Oral and Written Tradition’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, 9 (1999): 233–256. ———, ‘Rumour, News, and Popular Political Opinion in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England’, The Historical Journal, 11 (3) (1997): 597–620. Fox, Adam, & Daniel Woolf, eds, The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain 1500–1800 (Manchester, 2002). Foyster, Elizabeth, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex, and Marriage (London, 1999). Frenk, Margit, Entre la voz y el silencio (Alcalá de Henares, 1997). ———, Las jarchas mozárabes y los comienzos de la lírica románica (Mexico City, 1975). Fried, Johannes, ed., Dialektik und Rhetorik im früheren und hohen Mittelalter: Rezeption, Überlieferung und Gesellschaftliche Wirkung antiker Gelehrsamkeit, Vornehmlich um 9. und 12. Jh. (Munich, 1997). ———, ed., Schulen und Studium im sozialen Wandel des hohen und späten Mittelalters (Sigmaringen, 1986). Friedman, Lionel J., ‘Gradus Amoris’, Romance Philology, 19 (1965): 167–177. Fury, Cheryl A., ed., The Social History of English Seamen, 1485–1649 (Woodbridge, 2012). Gala Pellicer, Susana, ‘Magias inquisitoriales y magias virtuales: del conjuro amoroso en los procesos inquisitoriales de los Siglos de Oro al conjuro web del siglo XXI’, Rumbos del hispanismo en el umbral del cincuentenario de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas, 7 vols (Rome, 2012), VII, pp. 74–80. Gambino, Francesca, & Speranza Cerullo, Salutz d’amor: edizione critica del corpus occi- tanico (Rome, 2009). García Negroni, María Marta, & María Tordesillas Colado, La enunciación en la lengua: de la deixis a la polifonía (Madrid, 2001). 472 Bibliography

Garner, Lori Ann, ‘The Role of Proverbs in Middle English Narrative’, in New Directions in Oral Theory, ed. by Mark C. Amodio, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 287 (Tempe, AZ, 2005), pp. 255–277. Gaskill, Malcolm, ‘Reporting Murder: Fiction in the Archives in Early Modern England’, Social History, 23.1 (1998): 1–29. ———, ‘Witches and Witnesses in New and Old England’, Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. by Stuart Clark (Houndmills, 2001), pp. 55–80. Gaunt, Simon, ‘Fictions of Orality in Troubadour Poetry’, in Orality and Literacy in the Middle Ages: Essays on a Conjunction and its Consequences, ed. by Mark Chinca & Christopher Young, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 12 (Turnhout, 2005), pp. 1–15. ———, Retelling the Tale: An Introduction to Medieval French Literature (London, 2001). Geary, Patrick, ‘Land, Language, and Memory in Europe 700–1100’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, 9 (1999): 169–184. Genette, Gérard, Fiction and Diction, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY, 1993). ———, Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin & Jonathan Culler (Ithaca, NY, 1980). Ginzburg, Carlo, Ecstacies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (Chicago, IL, 2004). ———, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John & Anne Tedeschi (London, 1976). ———, ‘The Inquisitor as Anthropologist’, in his Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (Baltimore, md, 1989), pp. 156–164 ———, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John & Anne Tedeschi (London, 1983). Girard, René, Le Bouc emissaire (Paris, 1982). Gluckman, Max, ‘Gossip and Scandal’, Current Anthropology, 4 (1963): 307–315. Gofffman, Erving,Forms of Talk (Philadelphia PA, 1981). ———, ‘Response Cries’, in Forms of Talk (Philadelphia, PA, 1981), pp. 78–123. ———, ‘The Interaction Order’, American Sociological Review, 48 (1983): 1–17. ———, ‘The Neglected Situation’, American Anthropologist, special publication, 66 (2) (1964): 133–136. Goodare, Julian, ‘The Scottish Witchcraft Panic of 1597’, in his The Scottish Witch-hunt in Context (Manchester, 2002), pp. 51–72. Goody, Jack, Representations and Contradictions: Ambivalence towards Images, Theatre, Fiction, Relics, and Sexuality (Oxford, 1997). ———, The Interface between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge, 1987). Goody, Jack, & Ian Watt, ‘The Consequences of Literacy’, in Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. by Jack Goody (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 27–68. Bibliography 473

Green, D.H., ‘On the Primary Reception of Narrative Literature in Medieval Germany’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 20 (1984): 289–308. Gregg, Joan Young, Devils, Women, and Jews: Reflections of the Other in Medieval Sermon (Albany, NY, 1997). Grifffĳiths, Paul, Adam Fox, & Steve Hindle, eds,The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1996). Grossel, Marie-Geneviève, ‘La Table comme pierre de touche de la courtoisie: À propos de quelques chastoiements, ensenhamens et autres contenances de table’, in Banquets et manières de table au Moyen Age (Aix-en-Provence, 1996), pp. 179–195. Gurr, Andrew, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 3rd edn (Cambridge, 2004). Gutwirth, Eleazar, ‘The Jews in Fifteenth-Century Castilian Chronicles’, The Jewish Quarterly Review, 74 (1984): 379–396. Gwara, Scott, & David W. Porter, eds, Anglo-Saxon Conversations: The Colloquies of Ælfric Bata (Woodbridge, 1997). Gybbon-Monypenny, Gerald B., ‘ “Dixe la por te dar ensienpro”: Juan Ruiz’s Adaptation of the Pamphilus’, in Libro de Buen Amor Studies, ed. by Gybbon-Monypenny (London, 1970), pp. 123–147. Haemers, Jelle, ‘Social Memory and Rebellion in Fifteenth-Century Ghent’, Social History, 36 (2011): 443–463. Hair, P.E.H., & J.D. Alsop, English Seamen and Traders in Guinea, 1553–1565: The New Evidence of Their Wills (Lewiston, NY, 1992). Haliczer, Stephen, Inquisition and Society in the Kingdom of Valencia (1478–1834) (Berkeley, CA, 1990). Hamesse, Jacqueline, ‘Le Vocabulaire de la transmission orale des textes’, in Vocabulaire du livre et de l’écriture au Moyen Âge: Actes de la table ronde, Paris 24–26 septembre 1987, ed. by Olga Weijers, Etudes sur le vocabulaire intellectuel du Moyen Âge, 2 (Turnhout, 1989), pp. 168–194. Handler, Richard, ‘Erving Gofffman and the Gestural Dynamics of Early Modern Selfhood’, in The Politics of Gesture, ed. by Michael J. Braddick, pp. 280–300. Harris, Tim, ed., The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1850 (Basingstoke, 2001). Havelock, Eric, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven, CT, 1986). Henkel, Nikolaus, Deutsche Übersetzungen lateinischer Schultexte: Ihre Verbreitung und Funktion im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit (Munich, 1988). Herman, David, ed., Narratologies. New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis (Columbus, OH, 1999). Herrmann, Erwin, ‘Spätmittelalterliche englische Pseudoprophetien’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 57 (1975): 95–98. Hexter, Ralph J., Ovid and Medieval Schooling: Studies in Medieval School Commentaries on Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, Epistulae ex Ponto, and Epistulae Heroidum (Munich, 1986). 474 Bibliography

Horodowich, Elizabeth, Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice (New York, 2008). Houlbrooke, Ralph, Church Courts and the People during the English Reformation, 1520– 1570 (Oxford, 1979). Hunt, Arnold, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge, 2010). Hutchby, Ian, & Robin Woofffĳitt,Conversation Analysis: Principles, Practices, and Applications (Cambridge, 1998). Hvidt, Niels Christian, Christian Prophecy, The Post-Biblical Tradition (Oxford, 2007). Hymes, Dell, ‘Toward Ethnographies of Communication’, in The Ethnography of Communication, ed. by John J. Gumperz & Dell Hymes, American Anthropologist, special publication, 66 (6.2) (1964): 1–34. Iannuzzi, Isabella, El poder de la palabra en el siglo XV: Fray Hernando de Talavera (Valladolid, 2009). Ingram, Martin, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987). Jansen, Katherine Ludwig, ‘Maria Magdalena: Apostolorum Apostola’, in Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millenia of Christianity, ed. by Beverley Mayne Kienzle & Pamela J. Walker (Berkeley, CA, 1998), pp. 57–96. Jansen, Sharon, ed., Political Protest and Prophecy under Henry VIII (Woodbridge, 1991). Jeay, Madeleine, & Kathleen Garay, ‘ “To Promote God’s Praise and her Neighbour’s Salvation”: Strategies of Authorship and Readership among Mystic Women in the Later Middle Ages’, in Women Writing Back/Writing Women Back: Transnational Perspectives from the Late Middle Ages to the Modern Era, ed. by Anke Gilleir, Alicia C. Montoya, & Suzan van Dijk, Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture, 16 (Leiden, 2010), pp. 23–50. Johns, Adrian, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago IL, 1988). Johnson, Dafydd, ‘Oral Tradition in Medieval Welsh Poetry (1100–1600)’, Oral Tradition, 18 (2004): 192–193. Kamen, Henry, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven, CT, 1998). Kamensky, Jane, Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (New York, 1998). ———, ‘Talk like a Man: Speech, Power, and Masculinity in Early New England’, Gender and History, 8 (1996): 22–47. Kemp, Peter, The British Sailor: A Social History of the Lower Deck (London, 1970). Kennedy, Donald, ‘The Naval Revolt of 1648’, English Historical Review, 77 (1962): 247–256. Kent, D.V., & F.W. Kent, Neighbours and Neighbourhood in Renaissance Florence (Locust Valley, NY, 1982). Bibliography 475

Kienzle, Beverly Mayne, ‘Defending the Lord’s Vineyard: Hildegard of Bingen’s Preaching against the Cathars’, in Medieval Monastic Preaching, ed. by Carolyn Muessig, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 90 (Leiden, 1998), pp. 163–181. ———, ‘Medieval Sermons and their Performance: Theory and Record’, in Preacher, Sermon, and Audience in the Middle Ages, ed. by Carolyn Muessig (Leiden, 2002), pp. 89–124. Kienzle, Beverly Mayne, & Pamela J. Walker, Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millenia of Christianity (Berkeley, CA, 1998). Kramer, Heinrich, & Jacob Sprenger, Malleus Malefĳicarum (New York, 1971). Kryk-Kastovsky, Barbara, ‘Historical Courtroom Discourse’, Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 7 (2) (2006): 213–245. Kümin, Beat A., Drinking Matters: Public Houses and Social Exchange in Early Modern Central Europe (Houndmills, 2007). Lafffĳin, John,Jack Tar: The Story of the British Sailor (London, 1969). Lavery, Brian, Royal Tars: the Lower Deck of the Royal Navy, 875–1850 (London, 2010). Lea, Henry Charles, A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages (London, 1958). Lecuppre, Gilles, & Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin, ‘La Rumeur: un instrument de la competition politique au service des princes de la fĳin du Moyen Age’, inLa Rumeur au Moyen Age. Du mépris à la manipulation, ed. by Maïté Billoré & Myriam Soria (Rennes, 2011), pp. 149–175. Levack, Brian P., The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 3rd edn (London, 2006). Liddy, Christian, ‘Bill Casting and Political Communication: a Public Sphere in Late Medieval English Towns?’, in La gobernanza de la ciudad Europea en la Edad Media, ed. by Jesús Solorzano Telechea & Béatrice Arizaga Bolumburu (Logroño, 2011), pp. 447–461. ———, ‘ “Bee War of Gyle in Borugh”: Taxation and Political Discourse in Late Medieval English Towns’, in The Languages of Political Society. Western Europe, 14th–17th Centuries, ed. by Andrea Gamberini, Jean-Philippe Genet, & Andrea Zorzi (Rome, 2011), pp. 461–485. Linebaugh, Peter, & Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London, 2000). Lloyd, Christopher, The British Seaman, 1200–1800: a Social Survey (London, 1968). Lomax, Derek W., ‘Algunos autores religiosos’, Journal of Hispanic Philology, 2 (1977): 79–90. Lord, Albert B., ‘Characteristics of Orality’, Oral Tradition, 2 (1987): 54–72. ———, ‘Oral Composition and “Oral Residue” in the Middle Ages’, in Oral Tradition, ed. by W.F.H. Nicolaisen (Binghamton NY, 1995), pp. 7–29. ———, The Singer of Tales, ed. by Stephen Mitchell and Gregory Nagy, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA, 2000). 476 Bibliography

Losada, Carolina M., ‘El adversario del profeta: estrategias discursivas de conversión de los judíos y reforma de costumbres en un sermón de San Vicente Ferrer’, Bulletin Hispanique, 115 (1) (2013): 823–838. Lozano Escribano, Pedro, & Lucinio Anaya Acebes, Literatura apocalíptica cristiana: hasta el año 1000 (Madrid, 2002). Lucassen, Jan, & Richard W. Unger, ed., Shipping and Economic Growth 1350–1850, Business History Review, 86 (Leiden, 2011). Luebke, David M., His Majesty’s Rebels. Communities, Factions, and Rural Revolt in the Black Forest, 1725–1745 (New York, 1997). Macdonald, Stuart, The Witches of Fife: Witch-hunting in a Scottish Shire, 1560–1710 (East Linton, 2002). Mack, John, The Sea: A Cultural History (London, 2011). Mack, Peter, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric 1380–1620 (Oxford, 2011). ———, ‘Elizabethan Parliamentary Oratory’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 64 (12) (2001): 23–61. Mackillop, Andrew, & Steve Murdoch, eds, Military Governors and Imperial Frontiers c. 1600–1800 (Leiden, 2003). MacLennan, Luis Jenaro, ‘Sobre el texto del Pamphilus en el Libro de Buen Amor’, Revista de Filología Española, 68 (1988): 143–151. Mainwaring, Henry, The Sea-Mans Dictionary. An Exposition and Demonstration of all the Parts and Things Belonging to a Shippe: Together with an Explanation of all the Termes and Phrases Used in the Practique of Navegation (London, 1644). Mairey, Aude, ‘Poésie et politique dans l’Angleterre de la fĳin du Moyen Âge: le cas du Parlement’, Revue française d’histoire des idées politiques, 26 (2007): 231–250. Mann, Jill, ‘ “He Knew Nat Catoun”: Medieval School-Texts and Middle English Literature’, in The Text in the Community: Essays on Medieval Works, Manuscripts, Authors, and Readers, ed. by Jill Mann & Maura Nolan (Notre Dame, IN, 2006), pp. 41–74. Marsh, Christopher, ‘Order and Place in England 1560–1640: The View from the Pew’, Journal of British Studies, 44 (2005): 3–26. Martorell, Francesc, ed., Epistolari del segle XV (Barcelona 1928). Mata, José Luis, ‘En torno al Debate de Elena y María’, Universidad Abierta, 13 (1992): 2–29. Matthews, William, ‘Sailors’ Pronunciation in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century’, Anglia: Zeitshrift für Englische Philologie, 59 (1935): 193–251. McGinn, Bernard, Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil (San Francisco, CA, 1994). McKay, Sandra Lee, & Wendy D. Bokhorst-Heng, International English in its Sociolinguistic Contexts: Towards a Socially Sensitive EIL Pedagogy (New York, 2008). McMichael, Steven, ‘The Sources for Alfonso de Espina’s Messianic Argument against the Jews in the Fortalitium Fidei’, in Iberia and the Mediterranean World of the Middle Bibliography 477

Ages: Studies in Honor of Robert I. Burns S.J., ed. by Larry J. Simon (Leiden, 1995), pp. 72–95. McRae, Andrew, ‘The Literary Culture of Early Stuart Libeling’, Modern Philology, 97 (3) (2000): 364–392. Meyerson, Mark D., A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, NJ, 2004). Mieder, Wolfgang, Proverbs: A Handbook (Westport, CT, 2004). Minnis, Alastair J., ‘The Author’s Two Bodies? Authority and Fallibility in Late-Medieval Textual Theory’, in Of the Making of Books: Medieval Manuscripts, their Scribes and Readers: Essays Presented to M.B. Parkes, ed. by Pamela Robinson & Rivkah Zim (Aldershot, 1997), pp. 259–279. Mithen, Steven, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body, (London, 2005). Mollat, Michel ‘The French Maritime Community: A Slow Progress up the Social Scale from the Middle Ages to the Sixteenth Century’, The Mariners’ Mirror, 69 (1983): 115–128. Monsalvo Antón, María, Teoría y evolución de un conflicto social: El antisemitismo en la baja Edad Media (Madrid, 1985). Mooney, Catherine M., ‘Authority and Inspiration in the Vitae and Sermons of Humility of Faenza’, in Medieval Monastic Preaching, ed. by Carolyn Muessig, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 90 (Leiden, 1998), pp. 123–144. Morawski, Joseph, Le Facet en françois (Poznań, 1923). Morel-Fatio, Alfred, ‘Le Livre de courtoisie’, Romania, 15 (1886): 192–235. Morrill, John, ‘Paying one’s D’Ewes’, Parliamentary History, 14(2) (1995): 179–186. Morrissey, Mary, ‘Interdisciplinarity and the Study of Early Modern Sermons’, The Historical Journal, 42 (4) (1999): 1111–1123. ———, ‘Scripture, Style, and Persuasion in Seventeenth-Century English Theories of Preaching’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 53 (2002): 686–706. Mostert, Marco, New Approaches to Medieval Communication, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 1 (Turnhout, 1999). Muessig, Carolyn, ed. Medieval Monastic Preaching, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 90 (Leiden, 1998), pp. 123–143. Muñoz Solla, Ricardo, ‘Estrategias de persuasión y oyentes judíos en dos sermones de san Vicente Ferrer’, El Olivo, 23 (49) (1999): 25–43. Netanyahu, Benzion, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-century Spain (New York, 1995). Niccoli, Ottavia, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton, NJ, 1990). Nicolaisen, W.F.H. (ed.). Oral Tradition in the Middle Ages, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 112 (Binghamton, NY, 1995). Nirenberg, David, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York, 2013). 478 Bibliography

———, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ, 1996). Nubola, Cecilia, & Andreas Würgler, eds, Praktiken des Widerstandes. Suppliken, Gravamina und Revolten in Europa (15.–19. Jahrhundert) (Bologna, 2002). Nussdorfer, Laurie, Brokers of Public Trust: Notaries in Early Modern Rome (Baltimore, MD, 2009). Òbelkevich, James, ‘Proverbs and Social History’, in The Social History of Language, ed. by Peter Burke & Roy Porter (Cambridge, 1987). Ogborn, Miles, ‘The Power of Speech: Orality, Oaths and Evidence in the British Atlantic World, 1650–1800’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 36 (2011): 109–125. Olson, Linda, & Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, (Notre Dame, IN, 2005). O’Mara, V.M., ‘Preaching to Nuns in Late Medieval England’, in Medieval Monastic Preaching, ed. by Carolyn Muessig, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 90 (Leiden, 1998), pp. 93–119. Ong, Walter J., ‘Before Textuality: Orality and Interpretation’, Oral Tradition, 3 (1988): 259–269. ———, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London, 1982; repr. 1996). ———, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New York, 1970). ———, ‘The Word and the Sensorium’, in his The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven, CT, 1967), pp. 1–16. Orme, Nicholas, English Schools in the Middle Ages (London, 1973). Parry, Milman, The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, ed. by Adam Parry (Oxford, 1971). Patterson, Annabel, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison, WI, 1984). ———, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford, 1989). Phillips, Susan E., Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England (University Park, PA, 2007). Pittaluga, Stefano, ‘Pamphilus’, in Commedie latine del XII e XIII secolo, 5 vols (Genoa, 1980), III, pp. 19–24. Polecritti, Cynthia, Preaching Peace in Renaissance Italy: Bernardino de Siena and his Audience (Washington DC, 2000). Poos, L.R., ‘Sex, Lies, and the Church Courts of Pre-Reformation England’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 25 (1995): 585–607. Prodi, Paolo, Il sacramento del potere. Il giuramento politico nella storia costituzionale dell’Occidente (Bologna, 1992). Bibliography 479

Rawlings, Helen, Church, Religion, and Society in Early Modern Spain (Basingstoke, 2002). ———, The Spanish Inquisition (Oxford, 2006). Reeves, Marjorie, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Oxford, 1969). Regalado, Nancy Freeman. ‘Speaking in Script: The Construction of Voice, Presence, and Perspective in Villon’s Testament’, in Oral Tradition in the Middle Ages, ed. by W.F.H. Nicolaisen (Binghamton NY, 1995), pp. 211–225. Reinburg, Virginia, French Books of Hours: Making an Archive of Prayer, c. 1400–1600 (Cambridge, 2012). ———, ‘Prayers’, in Medieval Christianity in Practice, ed. by Miri Rubin (Princeton, NJ, 2009), pp. 159–163. Renedo, Xavier, ‘Quin mal és lo besar? Literatura i moral al voltant de la quarta línia de l’amor’, Caplletra, 13 (1992): 99–116. Rhatigan, Emma, ‘Preaching Venues: Architecture and Auditories’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, ed. by Peter McCullough, Hugh Adlington, & Emma Rhatigan (Oxford, 2011), pp. 87–119. Rica, Amran, Judíos y conversos en el reino de Castilla: propaganda y mensajes políticos, sociales y religiosos (siglos XIV–XVI) (Valladolid, 2009). Robathan, Dorothy M., ‘Ovid in the Middle Ages’, in Ovid, ed. by J.W. Binns (London, 1973, repr. 2013), pp. 190–209. Roberts, Benjamin, ‘Drinking Like a Man: The Paradox of Excessive Drinking for Seventeenth-Century Dutch Youths’, Journal of Family History, 29 (2004): 237–252. Roberts, Brynley F., ‘Oral Tradition and Welsh Literature: A Description and Survey’, Oral Tradition, 3 (1988): 61–87. Rodríguez Marín, Francisco, Ensalmos y conjuros en España y América (Madrid, 1927). Roest, Bert, “Ignorantia est mater omnium malorum”: The Validation of Knowledge and the Offfĳice of Preaching in Late Medieval Female Franciscan Communities’, inSaints, Scholars, and Politicians: Gender as a Tool in Medieval Studies, ed. by Mathilde van Dijk & Renée Nip, Medieval Church Studies, 15 (Turnhout, 2005), pp. 65–83. Rojas, Fernando de, La Celestina, ed. by Dorothy Sherman Severin, Letras Hispánicas, 4 (Madrid, 1990). Rosenberg, Bruce A., ‘The Complexity of Oral Tradition’, Oral Tradition, 2 (1987): 73–90. Ross, Emily, ‘Lip Service: The Activities of Ambassadors, Spies, Newsletter Writers and Other Professional Gossips in Jacobean England and in Shakespeare’, in ‘Rapt in Secret Studies’: Emerging Shakespeares, ed. by Darryl Chalk & Laurie Johnson (Newcastle, 2010). Rosseaux, Ulrich, Städte in der Frühen Neuzeit (Darmstadt, 2006). Rossiaud, Jacques, Medieval Prostitution (Oxford, 1988). 480 Bibliography

Rubin, Miri, ‘Europe Remade: Purity and Danger in Late Medieval Europe’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (Sixth Series) 11 (2001): 101–124. ———, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven, CT, 1999). Rubio, J., & T. González Rolán, Pánfĳilo o el arte de amar (Barcelona, 1977). Ruddock, Alwyn A., ‘The Earliest Records of the High Court of Admiralty (1515–1558)’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 22 (1949): 139–151. Ruggiero, Guido, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage and Power at the End of the Renaissance (New York, 1993). Salas-Díaz, Daniel, ‘Presencia y ausencia de los judíos en los “Sermons de Quaresma” de Vicente Ferrer’, Fifteenth Century Studies, 34 (2009): 162–171. Sánchez Ortega, María Helena, ‘Sorcery and Eroticism in Love Magic’, Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition on Spain and the New World, ed. by Mary Elizabeth Perry & Anne J. Cruz (Berkeley, CA, 1991), pp. 58–93. Sánchez Sánchez, Manuel Ambrosio, ‘Predicación y antisemitismo. El caso de San Vicente Ferrer’, in Proyección histórica de España en sus tres culturas: Castilla y León, América y el Mediterráneo, ed. by Eufemio Lorenzo Sanz, 3 vols (Valladolid, 1993), III, pp. 195–204. Saugnieux, Joël, Les Jansénistes et le renouveau de la prédication dans l’Espagne de la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle (Lyon, 1976). Scattergood, John, ‘Wrong’s Laugh: Piers Plowman C. IV. 45–104, Law-breaking, Carnival, and Parody’, in his The Lost Tradition: Essays on Middle English Alliterative Poetry (Dublin, 2000). Scattergood, V.J., Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (London, 1971). Schefffler, David L., Schools and Schooling in Late Medieval Germany: Regensburg, 1250– 1500 (Leiden, 2008). Schiewer, Regina D., ‘Sermons for Nuns of the Dominican Observance Movement’, in Medieval Monastic Preaching, ed. by Carolyn Muessig, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 90 (Leiden, 1998), pp. 75–92. Schilling, Heinz, Die Stadt in der Frühen Neuzeit, 2nd edn (Munich, 2004). Scholberg, Kenneth R., ‘Minorities in Medieval Castilian Literature’, Hispania, 37 (2) (1954): 203–209. Schroeder, Carl, Der deutsche Facetus (Berlin, 1911). Schütz, Alfred, & Thomas Luckmann, The Structures of the Life-World (Evanston, IL, 1995). Scott, James C., Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT, 1990). Scribner, Robert W., For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Oxford, 1994). Bibliography 481

Segre, Cesare, ‘Le forme e le tradizioni didattice: Ars amandi classica e medievale’, in La Littérature didactique, allégorique et satirique, ed. Franz Koppe, Jürgen Beyer, Hans Ropbert Jauss, & Erich Köhler, Grundriss der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters (Heidelberg, 1968), VI. I, pp. 109–116; VI. II, pp. 162–167. Shagan, Ethan, ‘Print, Orality and Communication in the Maid of Kent Afffair’,Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 52 (1) (January 2001): 21–33. Shepard, Alexandra, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003). ———, ‘Poverty, Labour and the Language of Social Description in Early Modern England’, Past & Present, 201 (2008): 51–95. ———, ‘ “Swil-Bols” and “Tos-Pots”: Drink Culture and Male Bonding in England, c. 1560–1640’, in Love, Friendship and Faith in Europe, 1300–1800, ed. by Laura Gowing, Michelle Hunter, & Miri Rubin (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 110–130. Shepherd, Eric, ‘Singing Dead Tales to Life: Rhetorical Strategies in Shandong Fast Tales’, Oral Tradition, 26 (2011): 27–70. Shuger, Debora Kuller, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance (Berkeley, CA, 1990). Sidnell, Jack, ‘Comparative Perspectives in Conversational Analysis’, in his Conversation Analysis: Comparative Perspectives (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 3–27. Simpson, John, & Jennifer Speake, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs (Oxford, 1998). Skemer, Don C., Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages (University Park, PA, 2006). Skinner, Quentin, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998). Sloterdijk, Peter, Gottes Eifer, Vom Kampf der drei Monotheismen (Frankurt-am-Main, 2007). Smail, Daniel Lord, Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseilles (Ithaca, NY, 1999). Smith, Lacey Baldwin, Treason in Tudor England: Politics and Paranoia (London, 2006). Solomon, Michael, ‘Calisto’s Ailment: Bitextual Diagnostics and Parody in Celestina’, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 23 (1989): 41–64. ———, The Mirror of Coitus: A Translation and Edition of the Fifteenth-Century Speculum al foderi (Madison, WI, 1986). Spacks, Patricia Meyer, Gossip (New York, 1985). Stark, Suzanne J., Female Tars: Women Aboard Ship in the Age of Sail (London, 1996). Steckley, George F., ‘Instance Cases at Admiralty in 1657: a Court “Packed up with Sutors” ’, American Journal of Legal History, 7 (1986): 68–83. ———, ‘Litigious Mariners: Wage Cases in the Seventeenth-Century Admiralty Court’, Historical Journal, 42 (1999): 315–345. ———, ‘Merchants and the Admiralty Court during the English Revolution’, American Journal of Legal History, 22 (1978): 137–175. 482 Bibliography

Stirland, Ann, ‘The Men of the Mary Rose’, in The Social History of English Seamen, 1485–1649, ed. by Cheryl Fury (Woodbridge, 2012), pp. 47–74. Stolz, Benjamin A., & Richard S. Shannon, Oral Literature and the Formula (Ann Arbor, MI, 1976). Strietman, Elsa, ‘Pawns or Prime Movers?: The Rhetoricians in the Struggle for Power in the Low Countries’, European Medieval Drama, 2 (1998): 111–121. Strondstadt, Roger, The Charismatic Theology of St. Luke (Peabody, MA, 1977). Styers, Randall, Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World (Oxford, 2004). Suggett, Richard, ‘Vagabonds and Minstrels in Sixteenth-Century Wales’, in The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain 1500–1800, ed. by Adam Fox & Daniel Woolf (Manchester, 2002), pp. 138–172. Surtz, Ronald E. ‘A Spanish Midwife’s Uses of the Word. The Inquisitorial Trial (1485/86) of Joana Torrellas’, Mediaevistik, 19 (2006): 153–168. ———, Writing Women in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain: The Mothers of Saint Teresa of Ávila (Philadelphia, PA, 1995). Tarver, Anne, ‘English Church Courts and their Records’, The Local Historian, 38 (2008): 4–22. Taylor, Larissa, Soldiers of Christ: Preaching in Late Medieval and Reformation France (New York, 1992). Taylor, Rupert, The Political Prophecy in England (New York, 1911). Tebbutt, Melanie, Women’s Talk? A Social History of Gossip in Working Class Neighbourhoods, 1880–1960 (Aldershot, 1995). Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971). ———, ‘The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England’, in The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, ed. by Gerd Baumann (Oxford, 1986). Thompson, Augustine, O.P., ‘From Texts to Preaching: Retrieving Medieval Sermon as an Event’, in Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages, ed. by Carolyn Muessig (Boston, 2002), pp. 13–37. Thompson, E.P., ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd’, in his Customs in Common (London, 2009), pp. 185–258. Thornton, Tim, Prophecy, Politics and the People in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2006). Tilley, Morris Palmer, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: A Collection of the Proverbs found in English Literature and the Dictionaries of the Period (Ann Arbor, MI, 1966). Trigueros, Antonio, ‘De quinquaginta curialitatibus ad mensam de Bonvesin della Riva’, in Homenaje al profesor Andrés Soria (Granada, 1985), pp. 530–543. Turley, Hans, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity (New York, 1999). Bibliography 483

Twomey, Lesley K., ‘ “De aquestes raons de la Senyora, los apòstols e Magdalena e les altres dones prengueren molta consolació”: Establishing Female Identity through the Virgin’s Words in the Vita Christi of Sor Isabel de Villena’, in Identities on the Move, ed. by Flocel Sabaté (Bern, 2014), pp. 53–73. ———, ‘Isabel de Villena: Prayer and Franciscan Spirituality’, La Corónica (forthcoming). ———, ‘Mary Magdalene and Martha: Sor Isabel de Villena’s Self-Fashioning through Constructing her Community’, in Self-fashioning and Assumptions of Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, ed. by Laura Delbrugge (Leiden, 2015), pp. 298–326. ———, Sor Isabel de Villena, her Vita Christi and an Example of Gendered Immaculist Writing in the Fifteenth Century’, La Corónica, 32(1) (2003): 89–103. ———, The Fabric of Marian Devotion in Isabel de Villena’s Vita Christi, Colección Támesis, série A, Monografías, 313A (Woodbridge, 2013). Tyacke, Nicholas, ‘The “Rise of Puritanism” and the Legalizing of Dissent, 1571–1719’, in From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England, ed. by Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel, & Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford, 1991), pp. 17–49. Tzvetan, Todorov, ‘Le Discours de la magie’, L’Homme, 4 (1973): 38–65. Valdeón Baruque, Julio, El chivo expiatorio: judíos, revueltas y vida cotidiana en la Edad Media (Valladolid, 2000). Van Bruaene, Anne-Laure, ‘ “A Wonderfull Tryumfe, for the Wynnyng of a Pryse”: Guilds, Ritual, Theater, and the Urban Network in the Southern Low Countries, ca. 1450–1650’, Renaissance Quarterly, 59 (2006): 374–405. ———, ‘L’écriture de la mémoire urbaine en Flandre et en Brabant (XIVe–XVIe siècle)’, Villes de Flandres et d’Italie (XIIIe–XVIe siècle). Les Enseignements d’une comparaison, ed. by Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan & Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin (Turnhout, 2008), pp. 149–164. Van Dulmen, Richard, Theatre of Horror: Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Germany, trans. by Elisabeth Neu (Cambridge, 1990). Van Royen, Paul C., Jaap R. Bruijn, & Jan Lucassen, eds, ‘Those Emblems of Hell’? European Sailors and the Maritime Labour Market, 1570–1870 (St John’s, Newfoundland, 1997). Van Voss, Lex Heerma, ‘North Sea Culture, 1500–1800’, in The North Sea and Culture (1550–1800), ed. by Juliette Roding & Lex Heerma van Voss (Hilversum, 1996), pp. 21–40. Vauchez, André, Prophètes et prophétisme (Paris, 2012). Vendrell, Francisca, ‘La actividad proselitista de San Vicente Ferrer durante el reinado de Fernando I de Aragón’, Sefarad, 13 (1953): 87–104. Vickers, Daniel, Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail (London, 2005). 484 Bibliography

Vidal Doval, Rosa, ‘Predicación y persuasión: Vicente Ferrer en Castilla, 1411–1412’, Revista de Poética Medieval, 24 (2010): 225–243. Vitkus, Daniel J., ‘Early Modern Orientalism: Representations of Islam in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe’, Western Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Perception of Other, ed. by David R. Blanks & Michael Frassetto (New York, 1999), pp. 207–230. Vitz, Evelyn Birge, & Linda Marie Zaerr, ‘Experimenting with the Performance in Medieval Narrative’, in Acts and Texts, Performance and Ritual in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. by Laurie Postlewate & Wim Hüsken (Amsterdam, 2007), pp. 303–315. Wall, Alison, Power and Protest in England, 1525–1640 (London, 2000). Walter, John, Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2006). ———, ‘Gesturing at Authority: Deciphering the Gestural Code of Early Modern England’, Past & Present Supplement, 4, The Politics of Gesture: Historical Perspectives (2009): 96–127. Weatherall, Ann, Gender, Language, and Discourse (Hove, 2002). Weijers, Olga, La “disputatio” dans les Facultés des arts au Moyen Âge (Turnhout, 2002). Weiss, Julian, The Poet’s Art: Literary Theory in Castile c. 1400–60, Medium Aevum Monographs, New Series, 14 (Oxford, 1990). Whalen, Brett Edward, Dominion of God: Christendom and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA, 2009). White, Richard, ‘ “Comme on Dit”: The Proverb in Calvin’s Sermons’, AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities’ Language and Literature Association, 88 (1997): 71–82. Wickham, Chris, ‘Gossip and Resistance among the Medieval Peasantry’, Past & Present, 160 (1998): 3–24. Wieck, Roger S., ed., Time Sanctifĳied: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life (New York, 1988). Wilkins, Kim, ‘ “Words of Art”: Magic and Language in Early Modern England’, in The British World: Religion, Memory, Society and Culture. Refereed Proceedings of the Conference Hosted by the University of Southern Queensland, July 2nd–July 5th 2012, ed. by Marcus Harmes, Lindsay Henderson, Barbara Harmes, & Amy Antonio (Toowoomba, 2012). Willumsen, Liv H., ‘Children Accused of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-century Finnmark, Northern Norway’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 38 (1) (2013): 18–41. ———, ‘Exporting the Devil across the North Sea. John Cunningham and the Finnmark Witch-Hunt’, Scottish Witches and Witch-Hunters, ed. by Julian Goodare (London, 2012). ———, The Witchcraft Trials in Finnmark, Northern Norway, trans. Katjana Edwardsen (Bergen, 2010). Bibliography 485

Wiltenburg, Joy, ‘Madness and Society in the Street Ballads of Early Modern England’, Journal of Popular Culture 14 (3) (1988): 101–127. Withington, Phil, ‘Company and Sociability in Early Modern England’, Social History, 32 (2007): 291–307. ———, Society in Early Modern England: The Vernacular Origins of Some Powerful Ideas (Cambridge, 2010). Wood, Andy, ‘Custom and the Social Organization of Writing in Early Modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser. 9 (1999): 257–269. ———, ‘Fear, Hatred, and the Hidden Injuries of Class in Early Modern England’, Journal of Social History, 39 (2006): 803–826. ———, ‘ “Poore Men Woll Speke One Day” ’: Plebeian Languages of Deference and Defĳiance’, in England, c. 1520–1640’,The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1850, ed. by Tim Harris (New York, 2001), pp. 67–98. Wood, Andy, The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2013). Wrightson, Keith, ‘Mutualities and Obligations: Changing Social Relationships in Early Modern England’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 139 (2006): 157–194. Würgler, Andreas, ‘Voices From Among the ‘Silent Masses’: Humble Petitions and Social Conflicts in Early Modern Central Europe’, Petitions in Social History, ed. by Lex Heerma van Voos (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 11–34. Zarri, Gabriella, Le sante vive, profezie di corte e devozione femminile tra ‘400 e ‘500 (Turin, 1990). Zumthor, Paul, Oral Poetry: An Introduction, trans. Kathryn Murphy-Judy, foreword Walter J. Ong, Theory and History of Literature, 70 (Minneapolis, MN, 1990). ———, Speaking of the Middle Ages, trans. Sarah White, foreword Eugene Vance (Lincoln, NB, 1986). ———, Langue, texte, énigme (Paris, 1975). Index

Accuse 47–50, 52–56, 58–60, 64–67, 69–70, in sermons 186, 206, 216, 229–230, 238, 75–76, 81–84, 90, 99, 104–105, 144, 188, 441 261, 267, 324, 326, 331–335 in prayer books 385–386 Accusation 62, 66, 84–85, 91, 102–103, Blasphemy 84, 281, 323–324 218, 238, 261, 266, 274, 363 Blessing 20, 118, 153, 155, 162, 164, 166, See also Testimony 386–387, 443 See also Tribunal as social gambit 153, 155, 162 Acclamation 310, 386 Body Adjective 94, 110n, 237, 274, 358, 386 and spatial sense 136 Age, sense of 135–136 and speech 7, 9–10, 14, 139, 158, 181, Agency 116, 138, 239–240, 249, 305, 456–457 189 Alehouse (locations) 285, 292, 308 Body language 110, 189, 190–192, 199, 201, See also Tavern, Inn 205, 213 Alliteration 94, 308 Book of hours 16, 376–378, 380, 382–392, Anthropology, historical 91n, 141–142 461 Aragon 20, 28, 90, 210, 212, 219, 222, 414, 423 See also Liturgy See also Fernando de Aragón See also Prayer Ars (artes) amandi, guidance on wooing Boundary marking, via perambulation See Facetus 130 See Pamphilus Brabant 282, 284, 288, 292, 294, 296 Auditor (hearer) 2, 28–29, 31–32, 186, 234, Duke of Brabant 282, 296 236, 306, 343, 345, 427, 440–442, Breathing 7, 11–12, 181 449–450 Breviary 29, 387, 426–427 See Hearer See Liturgy See Listeners and Listening See Psalm Auditory 187–189, 191, 193, 196, 199, 201, 209, Burgundy, Duke of 285, 287, 295–297 212–212, 215, 227, 229–230, 236–237, 242–243, 246, 250, 301, 429, 431–432 Capellanus, Andreas (twelfth century), Authenticity, a sign of orality 62, 131–132, author 399–400, 403, 415n 451 Castile 27, 29–30, 90, 206, 208, 210, 213, 216–217, 222, 226, 428, 432, 437n Babble 281–282, 328, 457 Catechism 185n, 186, 190, 199, 202n, 393 Babble bench 282 Ceremony 3, 18, 23, 109–110, 193, 225, 230, Clappaert (babbler) 282, 290, 299 247, 249, 296n, 297, 303, 344, 423 Bakhtin, Mikhail (1895–1975), literary Chant 14, 141, 187, 195, 204, 289, 338, 414 theorist 379, 382 See also Acclamation Ballad 23, 28, 255, 281, 301, 306, 312, 457, 460 See also Liturgy Bandwidth of speech 8–10, 15, 32, 139 See also Song Bard 2–4, 10, 15, 25, 27, 39 Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy See Poetry, Poet (1433–1467) 296 See Troubadour Charles I of England (1600–1649) 302, 314, Bible 216, 229, 385, 389, 433 317 Biblical texts Charles V (1500–1558), Holy Roman Emperor expounded for nuns 422, 425–426, and Duke of Burgundy 288, 290, 293, 443–444 297 Index 487

Charms (magical) 13, 15, 23–24, 39, 62, 85, Conversation 9–13, 37, 78, 84, 101, 111, 93–95, 98–99, 101–103, 105, 110n, 363, 139–151, 160, 168–170, 180–181, 256, 383, 385–387, 389–392, 461 260–261, 267, 279, 327, 352, 355, See also Incantation 357–359, 366–368, 441, 448, 452, See also Magic 454 See also Sorcery and sorcerers as meaning social intercourse 224, 226, See also Witchcraft and Witches 335 Christian IV of Denmark (1577–1648) 62–63, as negotiation 150–168 64n (and witchcraft law) as prayer 383 Circumstantial evidence 64 reciprocity of 140–141 as corroborator of veracity 168, 176 See also Reciprocity as narrative marker 143–148 sources for 141–143, 169–170 Civility Conversation analysis, the discipline 11–12, among seamen, as marker 269 168–169, 181, 448–449 among gondoliers 331 Court records (as a source for orality) Classroom 11, 400, 402, 404 23–24, 48, 51–52, 55–62, 66–68, 70, 74, See also Schoolroom 82, 90–105, 115–138, 141–143, 169–170, Clocks, see Time 253–279, 346, 458 Colloquy 10, 142, 160, 166, 254 read back to witnesses 18, 122 Colloquy prayer 383–385, 392 rules for transcription of 127–128 See also Conversation Court (of Aldermen) 230, 236n, 241 Comedy 345, 400 Court (law) 17, 20, 23, 35, 37, 47–56, 58, Elegiac comedy 400, 405 60–64, 66, 68, 70–71, 74–84, 85, 90–91, Tragicomedy 345 93, 101–102, 104, 115–138, 139–181, 331, Commedia dell’arte 4n, 201 333–338, 346, 447–448, 451–452, See Drama 454–457 Commendation, social device 152, 154–155, Admiralty court 23, 254–255, 259–261, 360 263–265, 268, 271, 274, 279, 454 Communication 2, 6–8, 10, 13n, 16, 105, 115, Court of Appeal 50, 75–78, 80–81 129–132, 138–140, 145, 168n, 169, 200, church (ecclesiastical) court 90, 262n, 207–209, 213, 227, 233, 258n, 286n, 342n, 264n, 274n 343, 370, 382, 446–447, 449, 452–458 Imperial Chamber Court 115–128, oblique 243 137–138, 448, 454 with the divine 380 See also Inquisition Communication theory 8 See also Tribunal Communion (social) 3, 195, 215, 227 Court (royal) 3–4, 6, 14, 25, 27, 29, 191, 194n, Composition, oral 3–5, 25, 27, 29, 38, 154 196n, 199, 203, 218, 223, 230–231, 236, Confession 141, 185n, 186, 191, 192n, 201, 301–304, 308–309, 315–316, 343n, 424, 336–337, 382, 397, 440 453 in court 47, 49, 52, 55, 57–59, 64, 67–8, Courtly 26–29, 306, 393, 397, 404, 407 70–72, 74n, 77–78, 80–83, 84–85, 90, 93, Courtesy 403–405, 416 95, 103–104 courteous 393, 403, 417, 420, 460 social 151 See also Manners, good Confessional 13, 193 Cries and crying 9–10 Congregation 11, 187, 194n, 229n, 237, 246 weeping 20, 192–193, 205, 276, 407 Consent, as social mode 268 weeping in response to sermons 188–91, Contract 34, 375 195–196 contract–prayer 383–385 See also Shout 488 Index

Cunningham, John, Governor in misunderstood by scribes 131 Finnmark 63–66, 454 neglected or harmonized by scribes 142 Curse and cursing 20, 92, 224, 336, 360 Dialogue 3, 10–11, 18, 36, 60, 67, 101, 107, 109, See also Swearing 147, 151n, 168–169, 314, 317, 356, 423 as form of prayer 93–94, 381, 385, 442 Delivery (oral) 5, 8–9, 24, 31, 34, 169, 204, as literary genre 169, 214, 343, 345–347, 210, 229, 246, 440 399, 405 See also Speed (of delivery) as sermon technique 214 See also Tone Bakhtinian concept 379 Demonology 47, 49, 52, 62–65, 67–68, 72, between Christian clergy and rabbis 214 74–75, 77, 79–80, 82–83, 363, 459 between court and prisoners 142, 173, demon 98, 240n 181 pact (demonic) 66–68, 72, 77, 82, 92 between preacher and congregation Denmark 49–51, 63, 66 186–188, 191, 449 Deposition in court 19, 23, 57, 115–116, See also Monologue 119–132, 137–138, 147, 151, 169, 174, 255, Dictation 3n, 37, 59, 388, 390, 394, 433 260–265, 269–270, 273, 277, 279, 447, Didactic 280, 370, 402 452 drama 241 amplifĳied and corrected 122–123 sermons 200–201 as collaborative 261–262 Erotodidactic texts 393–420 as conversation 261 See also Education as struggle against the court’s agenda Diminutives 272, 357 124, 172–174, 261–261, 274 Direct and indirect speech contrasted 15, as theatre 169–170 55, 60–62, 68, 127–128, 145, 147, 153, 162, colloquialisms in, as gesture of fĳidelity 262, 407, 455 131, 145 See also Discourse confrontation, a mode of 169–170 See also Speech excerpted examples of 144–146, 148–149, Discourse 8, 55–58, 74, 78, 83, 156, 171, 152–168, 170–181 186n–187n, 199, 203, 215, 223, 227n, gestures recorded in 122, 157, 162–163, 239, 291–293, 295, 313, 344, 355, 378, 168 422–424, 446, 457 person (fĳirst or third) in recording apocalyptic discourse 227n, 291 127–128, 132, 262 (pseudo-) eschatological discourse 291 probative power of 120–121 discourse analysis 47–49, 60 reputation of witnesses and 123–124, indirect discourse: See Direct and indirect 147–148, 170 speech contrasted rules for interrogation of witnesses moralizing discourse 292 123–126, 261–263 political discourse 283, 287n, 288n See also Testimony popular discourse 134 See also Tribunal (pseudo-)prophetic discourse 292 Devil 21, 49, 52, 56, 58, 62–63, 67–68, 72, theatrical discourse 239, 241 73–82, 90–92, 98, 100, 104, 240n, 309, Dissent 218, 280–299, 300, 309 328, 348, 350–351, 439 Dogs, communication with 10–11 Beelzebub 74n Dogs, and witchcraft 56, 77, 79 pregnancy by the Devil 78 Drama 1, 28, 34, 91, 162, 185–186, 188, 191, 202, See Demonology 204n, 211, 241, 294, 296–297, 365, Dialect and local idioms 47, 51–52, 128, 142, 369–370, 423, 455 326, 452 See also Theatre, Theatricality captured by scribes 171 Dress 7, 14, 231, 244, 298, 456 Index 489

Education 205, 221, 242 Folklore 2–5, 30, 47, 49, 55, 58n, 98n, 307, Catholic 249 313, 378 maritime 256 folk elements in speech 30, 47, 55 texts (educational) 398, 404n Formula 3–4, 15, 17, 70, 91, 94–95, 97, See also Instruction 103–104, 236, 376, 378, 390–391 Elite culture 49 as marker of the oral 68 dissemination of, via orality 47–83 See also Memory Entanglement, social 21–22 See also Mnemonic Epic, see Poetry Framing, as mnemonic device 143–150 Erasmus, Desiderius (1466–1536) 229n, 242, See also Memory 254, 381, 394n See also Mnemonic collector of proverbs 304 France 89n, 185–205, 291, 375–392 Euphemism, in speech 149–150, 363n Execution (punishment) 54–55, 58n, 69, Gait 7, 14 317 Genette, Gérard 47–49, 451 as mark of lordship 136 Germany 27n, 39, 58–59, 72, 75, 116–138 Exploding animals, alleged and witch terminology 66 dog 77 Gerson, Jean (1363–1429), Chancellor, sheep 70 University of Paris 207n, 381 Eye witness, see Witness Gesticulate 24, 34, 429 Eymerich, Nicholas (c.1316–1399), Inquisitor See also Gesture General for Aragon 219 Gesture 3, 7–11, 19, 24, 28, 34, 38, 91, 103, 122–123, 139–140, 162–163, 168–169, 185, Face-to-face interaction 115, 128, 130–132, 190, 195, 201, 210–211, 233, 270, 276, 378, 322, 344, 375, 447, 452–453 432, 448–449, 456 Facetus, twelfth-century courtesy handbook fĳigurative, in speech 156 393, 396–400, 403–410, 414–417 at sermons 190–191 See also Courtesy See also Gesticulate Falsehood, see Lie Gift 13–14, 21–22, 67, 149, 224, 350, 384 Faith of discernment 221 as personal trustworthiness, cited or of grace 222 pledged 159, 170, 384–385 of tears 189 as religious sentiment 195, 199, 245, 250, of the gab 328, 369 264 of the Spirit 437–438 Fama, see Gossip of tongues 206–207, 210 Fernando I of Aragon, also called Fernando Glossolalia 206–207, 222 de Antequera (1380–1416), instigator of the Gofffman, Erving 9–10, 151, 447, 449–450 campaign for the conversion of the Gospel 203n, 233, 240, 250, 325n, 380, 425 Jews 208, 212n, 219n, 222–223 reading the 246 Fictive kinship as conversational gambit Gossip 6, 23–24, 47, 111, 273, 277, 279, 157–166 280–281–286, 297–299, 321–342, Finnmark, northernmost district of Norway 366–371, 436, 438n, 455, 457, 459 47–83, 459 and fama distinguished 334–338 Fish, and witchcraft 69, 77 and witchcraft lore 75 See also Dog courthouse gossip 148 Flanders 22, 28, 116, 284–285, 287, 288n, tavern gossip 308 291–292, 294, 295n, 296, 297 Gossiper 280, 282–283, 323–325, 394 Flemish language 279 Gossipy 324, 342, 350, 352, 355, 366 490 Index

Greetings 11, 20, 153, 382 Instruction 34n, 76, 90, 212, 220–221, 232, See also Salutation 239, 241, 244, 247,304, 434, 368, 380, 396, Groan 6, 141, 190, 195, 211 433–435, 441 See also Moan Instructions 110, 122–123, 399n, 410, 416, Insult, 22, 24, 27, 141, 253, 269, 276–278, 299, Harangue 140, 212n 323–324, 331, 353, 355 Harington, John (b. 1561), proverb collector See also Scorn 301–310, 314–318, 459 Interlocutor 7, 10–11, 14, 36n, 101, 145, 155, Healing 354, 376, 390–391, 400 169, 170, 177, 226, 345–346, 350–359, Healing prayer 391 366–370 Hearer 6–7, 10–11, 14–15, 29, 32, 68, 156, 212, Intimates and intimacy 14, 21, 24, 90, 192, 205, 215, 240–246, 323, 345n, 362, 431, 440, 272, 322–323, 341, 351, 363, 438, 445, 458 453, 460 intimacy of scholars with the past See also Auditor 139–140 See also Listener Intonation 139, 343 Hearsay 144, 147, 334–335, 338, 363, 460 See also Tone Henry, Prince of Wales (d. 1612) 301–318, 458 Henry VIII (1491–1547) King of England 303, James VI of Scotland, also James I of England 307, 312, 314–315, 459 (1566–1625) 63–64, 301, 308–311, 318, 458 Heresy 84–85, 90, 218, 324, 333, 433 Jews Hesitation 24, 181, 450, 452 charms and 88, 93–95, 100–101, 107, 111 Holland 116, 289, 292 Inquisition and 90, 218 Honour 133, 150, 159, 166, 181, 233, 281–282, persecutions of 94, 213, 215, 217n, 286, 349, 384, 454, 456 221–226 and credibility in court 148, 170, 181 sermons and 206–227 and perjury 125–126 Joke 9, 20, 31, 37, 191, 192n, 282, 417 Horses, oral cures for 375–376 See also Puns Hymn 29, 187, 289, 382, 389 See also Song Kiss as act of piety 198, 436, 443 Indirect discourse, see Discourse as conversational and social gambit 6, Illiterate and Illiteracy 16, 37, 62, 91, 105, 140, 157–158, 384n 185, 202n, 204, 262–263, 296 as sexual aggression or flirtation 149, See also Literacy 365, 408–410 Imperial Chamber Court, See Court, Imperial Chamber Language of the street, see Street Imperial Law (in Germany) 117, 124 Laughter 6, 9, 11–12, 299, 345, 364, 367, 417 Incantation 91, 140, 348n, 378, 452, Lectern 429, 432–433 See also Charm See also Reading See also Spell Lecture 11, 228, 243, 450 Inn, see Tavern See also Teaching Inquisition tribunal 23, 84, 89–92, 99, Legend 15, 85–89, 96, 438, 452 103–107, 111, 142, 327, 455 Lies and Lying 76, 78, 81–82, 168, 222, 264, Inquisitors 84–85, 87, 89n, 90, 102, 105, 280–281, 329, 350, 358–359, 364, 111–112, 122, 219, 327, 335–337 369–370, 381, 418 Inquisition (inquisitio), method of judicial Listeners and listening 14, 17, 66, 79, 105, 143, inquiry 121–122 181, 188, 204–205, 213, 216, 236, 240, 243, Holy Offfĳice 91n, 324, 330 307, 315, 318, 330, 332, 341, 393, 407, See also Tribunal 425–426, 431n, 432–433 Index 491

by God, to prayer 380 Manuscript 23, 25, 51, 129, 228, 246, 257n, by servants eavesdropping 366 261, 281, 288, 292, 302, 306, 315–317, 389, in collusion with an author 243 391, 398, 404–406, 414, 425n, 428, 431, in dialogue with a preacher or other 453, 459 speaker 3, 186–187, 189–196, 199, commerce in 19 201–202, 205, 212, 227, 249 manuscript exchange 13n perceptual skill or attentiveness of 5, manuscript quires stitched 377 19 manuscript transcripts of sermons 229, represented in art 34 245 scribal or judicial 68, 121, 155, 332 uniqueness of 377 See also Auditor See also Writing Litany 377 Meditation 203, 439, 442 See also Liturgy See also Prayer Literacy 18, 105, 140, 263–264, 268, 282–284, Memory 3–4, 15–16, 160, 204, 357, 367, 375–377, 392, 447 388–390, 393, 446–447, 460 Literate 2, 18, 29, 30, 35, 284, 300, 306, art of memory, and use of signs 15, 68, 344, 403, 427, 446, 452, 462 143 See also Illiterate and Illiteracy lability of memory 19, 139 Liturgy 185n, 208, 214, 301, 310, 377, 383–390, memorizing 80, 82, 94, 97, 101, 104, 137 423, 425–428 orality of memory 1, 16, 140, 143 See also Breviary script as a memory prop 103–104 See also Missal social or political memory 287–288, 294, See also Psalm 315 Love and lovers 22–24, 27, 36–37, 195, 216, See also Mnemonic 280, 309, 347–351, 361–370, 380, 437, Mimic 6, 7, 10, 211 439, 441, 443–444 Missal 387, 389 Brotherly love 295 See also Breviary Love charms 13, 15, 23–24, 85n, 86, See also Liturgy 92–112, 382, 452–453 See also Psalm Love codifĳied 395–420 Mission, see Preaching, Mission preaching Love letter 398–399, 419 Mnemonic 15, 27, 68, 97, 143, 191, 198, 215, Love magic 84–112, 348, 452–453, 455 300 Love poems 395, 419 See also Memory Love-song 139 Moan 8, 141, 191, 195 Love sickness 354n, 402n, 418n See also Groan Lover (Song of Songs) 439 Monologue and monologic 189, 191, 199, 352, Words of love 416 354 See also Charms Mutter 14, 281, 287, 297, 331, 351 See also Magic See also Seduction Narrative 1, 6, 15, 20, 23, 25, 27, 30, 36, 49, Lying, see Lies and lying 59–60, 64, 67–68, 72, 82, 98, 131n, 137, 151–155, 163, 166, 168, 250, 406, 422–424, Magic 2, 55, 58, 84–112, 140, 363, 378, 387, 389 434 See also Love, Love Charms as nested tales 55, 143–150, See also Sorcery as social memory 287–288 See also Spell as structured by the court 55–58, 151n, Manners, good 331, 393, 403–408 451–452 See also Civility factual vs fĳictional 48, 59 See also Courtesy mission narratives 188–193, 197–201 492 Index

Narrative (cont.) as subject to seducers 415 third-person vs fĳirst-person, in court 127, peasant sense of time 133–134 132 Peasants’ Revolt 312 See also Story peasant patois 187n, 377 Narratology 24, 47–48, 83, 151n, 451 See also Dialect See also Genette, Gérard Performance 2–8, 11, 23, 139–140, 170n, Narrator 2, 37, 48, 55, 59, 154, 371 231, 292, 345, 362, 367, 369, 375, 449, Netherlands 39, 205, 280–299, 457, 453–454, 458 456 of poetry 28–29, 31 News 1, 16–17, 21, 48, 75, 85, 103, 143, 147, 301, of plays 283, 296–297,450 323, 325n, 330, 341–342, 360, 435–436, of prayers 378–379, 387, 389, 392 456–457, 459 of reading 394 Non-verbal expression 6, 9, 12, 122, 142, 195, in sermons 32, 185–205, 208–209, 204, 210, 212, 343, 347, 367, 447–448, 211–212, 227, 239–240, 249, 426, 450, 462 448–449 in magic 91, 104 Oath 37, 50, 382, 384–385 Perjury 125–126 in court 37, 50, 121, 125–127, 264 Persuasion 1, 211–216, 328, 365, 368, 419 See also Vow Phonetic, see Transcription Objects, as props to spoken language 7–8, Physical actions as communication 7, 34, 162–163, 200–203, 270 136–137, 162–163 Offfĳice (liturgical) 29, 380, 387, 425–427, See also Gesture 428n Pierre II, Duke of Brittany (1418–1457) 383 of the dead 387 Pilgrimage, and prayer 13, 85, 87, 211, 377, Conception offfĳice 426–427, 442n 388 Expectation offfĳice 426 Pitch (of delivery) 9, 12, 343 See Breviary Plague 217, 326, 329, 390, 456 See Liturgy prayer for healing against 390 See Psalm Play (ludic) 5, 7, 9, 36, 66, 141, 186n, 414 Offfĳice, Holy,see Inquisition Play (literary and linguistic) 36–37, 154, 158, Ong, Walter 14–15, 24, 57, 139 177, 200, 202, 216, 221, 240, 244, 282, Oral practice 1–2, 5, 7, 14, 34, 140, 163, 186, 354n, 415 379, 388, 394, 425, 461 Play (social play, role play) 195, 205, 209, Oral transfer 47, 49, 62–63, 65, 75, 82–84 242, 328, 344, 349, 351, 356, 367, 369, Oratory (eloquence) 24, 32, 34, 242–243 384, 410n, 412, Orator 15 Play (sexual) 416, 420 See also Preach, Preaching Play (as drama) 11, 24–25, 34–35, 169, 185n, Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) 43BCE–14CE, 201, 238–243, 250, 280, 283, 295–298, poet 395–397, 399, 401, 406, 410, 300, 343, 382, 457 412–414 Players and Play-acting 239–240, 244–245 Pace (of delivery) 9, 139, 463 Playwright 238–239, 241, 243, 253 Pamphilus, medieval Latin comedy 394n, Pleas and pleading 29, 76, 108n, 110n, 120, 396–401, 404–406, 408, 410, 412, 416 187n, 207n, 230, 261, 355, 359, 418 See also Facetus See also Supplication Pamphlet 16–17, 241, 285–286, 294, 301, 457 Poet 3–6, 15, 19, 25, 27–30, 35, 186, 281, Peasant 18, 47, 49, 62, 64, 82–83, 117, 118–120, 288–290, 292, 298, 396, 450 136–137, 203, 209, 212 See also Bard, Troubadour Index 493

Poetics 94, 101, 151 mission preaching 185–205, 449 Poetry 1–5, 22–29, 32, 35, 93–94, 101, 281, rhetorical strategies of 213–215 284–285, 291–292, 294, 419 Preaching yard 231–233 Epic (poetry) 1–5, 15, 23–25, 27, 30 Preacher 24, 30–32, 34, 85–205, 206–227, —— competition 28 228–250, 314, 394, 402, 421–445 Saga, 3, 25 preachers’ manuals 24, 188, 211, 212n, 229 See Bard, see Troubadour Prestige 14, 18–19, 223, 337, 357–358, 344, Policemen, narrative skills of 147–148 375, 453 Posture 7, 10, 14, 24, 34, 365, 431 Print 282, 343, 446, 449, 462 See also Gait difffusion of 16, 140n, 284, 457 Power of beliefs and culture 105, 451n fĳirst age of 19 Power of persons 198, 344, 348, 352, influence on writing 17 364–365, 448–449, 453, 460 runs 16 Power of words 1n, 9, 14, 16, 20, 138, 140, stimulus to manuscript 16 196n, 199, 206–227, 279, 299, 327, 330, scarcity of 21 332, 338, 344, 346, 350, 355, 365–366, and books of hours 376–377, 388–391 370, 447–449, 453, 457, 460 and catechisms 202n Power, magical 91, 104–105, 107, 346 and law treatises 261 Power, social and political 9, 29, 51, 56n, and lives of Christ 423, 431–432 115–116, 119, 124, 128, 133, 136, 138, 155, and missions 202–203 181, 207, 216, 221, 227, 259, 261, 265, 268, and proverbs 31, 302–303, 308, 318, 459 287–288, 290, 293, 295, 299, 310, 321, and sea charts 257 328, 332, 337–338, 370, 447, 454–456, and sermons 32, 34, 201, 229, 239–240, 462 243, 245–246, 249 Power, supernatural or sacred 52, 63, 74, 81, and songs 288 85–89, 91, 97, 100, 105, 107–109, 181, 216, Printer 16, 377, 431 383, 385, 390, 442 Printing house 16, 333 Prattle 281, 346 Printing press 284, 302–303, 446n See also Babble Processions 17, 185–186, 188–189, 193–194, Prayer 1, 10, 13–14, 16, 20, 23, 37, 39, 85, 200–202, 211, 228, 231, 238, 247, 325 90–95, 97–107, 109–111, 134, 140, 143, 181, See also Ritual 187, 188n, 200, 203, 375–392, 393, Professional identity and speech 253–259, 422–423, 427, 440–442, 444, 452, 461 265–269, 273–275, 279 prayer book 376, 382n-383, 388, Pronouns See also Book of hours clues to structure of a transcribed petitionary prayer 388 conversation 176–177 See also Litany informal vs. formal, in speech 153, 158, See also Supplication 161–166, 176 Preach 24, 32, 34, 185–205, 206–227, in sermons 212–213 228–250, 421–445 Pronounce, or Pronunciation 62, 65–66, Preaching 185–205, 206–227, 228–250, 402, 203, 257, 376, 379, 436 421–445 in a unique manner 257 as dialogue 187–190, 195–198, 210, 212 in another language 65 as entertainment 211 Prose 1, 20, 25n, 59, 139, 398–400 as polyphony 186–187 Proverbs 11, 15, 30–31, 300–318, 382, 459 as spectacle 185, 188, 200 Psalms 63, 380–381, 393, 443–444 as totalized event 210, 215 psalms of repentance 393 improvised as opposed to written 201 Psalter 387, 389, 393 494 Index

Pulpit 9, 13, 24, 34, 228, 232–233, 238–239, Rhetoric 13, 20, 24, 91n, 93, 98, 160, 170, 229n, 243–244, 246, 248–249, 429, 437n 238, 242n, 250, 256, 281, 297, 325, 417, Puns 5, 245 419, 444 Rhetorician 280–281, 283, 286, 288, 290, Quarrelling 266–267, 269–270, 273 294, 296–297, 313 Rhetorical 5, 48, 170, 174, 192, 214n, 229, Reading 2, 7, 18, 28–29, 37, 57–58, 83, 112, 241, 243, 245, 250, 290, 348–349, 407, 143, 210, 318, 379, 425, 448, 450, 452 419 aloud 139, 343, 346, 371, 380, 429, 433, Rhodius, Ambrosius and Anne, transmitters 460 of demonology to Finnmark 75–78, private 29, 243, 371, 380, 428 80–82, 454 public and collective 425–426, 429, Rhyme 17, 31, 37, 107, 215, 289, 292, 301, 431–432, 443 306–309, 312–313, 318, 389, 394, 396, spiritual 203 406, Reading list 396 See also Poet Reading public 377 Rhythm 32, 94, 97, 168, 211, 284, 289, 389, Readings (devotional) 425–427 452 Rebellion and mutiny 150–151, 245, 254, 256, Riddle 141, 382 259, 266–267, 270, 272–273, 276, Ritual 2, 79, 91, 98–99, 102, 104, 109–111, 112, 278–279, 287–290, 293–295, 458 136, 169, 202n, 212, 256, 325 Reciprocity (social or personal) 10–12, 14, 21, Rote-learning 103, 256, 378 140, 378, 384 Rough language, as a professional marker Reciprocity (rhetorical) 34 253–254, 266–267, 273–274, 279 See also Conversation Rumour 23, 82, 123, 140n, 273, 285–286, 298, Reciting and Recitation 3, 13, 24, 29, 93–94, 308–309, 312, 316, 322–323, 329–330, 97, 101, 103–105, 107, 111, 168, 187–188, 332, 338, 362–363, 457n 200n, 256, 286, 343n, 378, 387–388, 393–394, 396, 398, 405–406, 419 Saga Redundancies, as an oral marker 47, 57, 131 See Poetry Relic (sacred) 85–89, 97, 107, 111, 391 Salutation 340–341 Repetition, as an oral device 2, 15, 68, 83, See also Greeting 100, 104, 379, 452 Samis 49–51, 55, 62n, 66 density of, as narrative device 151–154, Satan, see Devil 171 Schoolroom 394, 397, 399–400 in poetry 94, 97 Schoolbook 394 in sermons 196, 215, 243 Schooltext 394, 397–398, 403 as activity 290 See also Education Reputation 248, 254, 277–278, 286, 292, 305, Scorn 25, 35, 179n, 302, 414 308–309, 323, 333–338, 344–348, Scotland 48n, 59 354–355, 358, 366, 368, 438n, 454–457 and transmission of witchcraft ideas See also Honour 64–67, 72, 74 Resistance (popular or personal) 116, 191, Scribes 18, 35 253–279, 281–290, 293, 296, 408, and books of hours 377, 388–389, 391 453–454 and courts of law 17, 35, 47–48, 55, Respect and disrespect, attitudes toward 57, 57–62, 66, 68, 83, 85, 95, 103, 115, 150, 256, 271, 274, 278, 332, 352, 368, 398, 122–127, 129, 131–132, 137–138, 142, 150, 414, 459 169, 171, 177, 181, 262, 264, 451–452 See also Reputation and female mystics 35–37 Index 495

and poetry 3n, 30 Sorcery and sorcerers 51–52, 55, 84–86, and proverbs 301 89–92, 94, 98–105, 111, 348 and sermons 32, 37, 209 Sami sorcery 51n, 55 as narrators 55, 57–62 See also Incantation degree of fĳidelity 24, 32, 35, 37, 47–48, See also Spell 60–62, 66, 68, 83, 85, 95, 103, 122–127, See also Witchcraft 132, 138, 142, 150, 169, 171, 177, 181, 264, Sound 6, 8, 9–11, 13, 34, 66, 140, 169, 211, 232, 451–452 238, 248, 285 depicted at work 429 Soundscape 185, 190, 195, 204 Script 2–3, 5–10, 12–16, 17–19, 23, 31, 34, 74, See also Moan 139–140, 170n, 357, 378 See also Groan Scriptorium 27, 29 See also Voice See also Transcript, Transcription Space, sense of 133, 136–137, 143 See also Manuscript space as a marker of narrative 153 See also Writing space of oral performance 140 Scripture 186, 206, 223, 240, 386–387, 422, public space 185, 192 426, 440–441, 443–444 preaching yard space 228, 230–232, 238 See also Gospel See also Preacher, Preaching yard Seduction 110n, 185, 358, 367, 393, 398–399, Speaking 4, 13, 190n, 303, 352, 391, 410 403, 407–408, 412, 415, 454 art of speaking 246 See also Love, Love Charm as more than just the words 9, 23 Self-correction 181, 380, as reflected in court papers 142 Sermon 1, 2, 11, 23,24, 30–32, 34, 37–39, 63, as social negotiation 455 140, 185–192, 195–196, 199–205, 206–217, impact of speaking on writing 37 219n, 220, 222–227, 228–250, 301, personal nature of 31 305–309, 311–312, 318, 343, 421–428, political speaking 285 433–434, 439–444, 448–449, 454 prayer as colloquy 385 Sermon book 63, 210, 422, 433 proverbs as speaking 318 See also Preach reactive nature of 11 See also Preaching seamen’s speaking 253, 265, 271, 274, 277, Shout 141, 186n, 188, 190, 191, 194–198, 279, 211–213, 256, 284, 287, 309 seduction speaking 417 See also Cries solitary speaking 10 Silence 11, 15, 34, 38, 105, 172n, 188–189, 211, speaking in court 333 253, 306, 339, 343, 359, 379, 444, 458 women’s speaking 35, 37–38 Silent 5, 7, 9, 11, 29, 34, 111, 139–140, 188n, Spoken word 1, 14–16, 20, 23, 34–37, 85, 281, 290, 345, 352, 362, 371, 380, 450, 93, 115–116, 138, 142, 200, 227, 245, 279, 454, 459 35, 394, 417, 424, 449 453, 456–457, Slander 233, 277, 281, 323, 346, 351, 360–361 460–461 See also Gossip Speech See also Rumour as action 1, 8, 379 Sob 11 as communion 2 See also Cries and crying as entangled with writing 17–19, 23, 367, See also Tears 376 Social knowledge 131n, 134–134, 137, 452 as memory 1, 288 Song 6, 13, 22,25–27, 29–30, 139–141, 200, as news 1, 143 204, 281, 283n, 284–286, 288n, 289–290, as not the whole of the oral 7–8, 162 298–299, 343, 382–383, 389, 457, 460 as preferred to writing 18–19 496 Index

Speech (cont.) See also Incantation as shaped by writing 5 See also Magic as source of writing 1, 19 Stock phrases, See Formula chaste speech 150 Storms, and witchcraft 69, 78 classifĳication of speech 324 Story 2, 3, 4 complexity of speech 12–13, 367 Storyteller 2, 3, 155, 165, 346, 355, 361, 368 conjuring as speech 84 Storytelling 3, 4, 345, 349, 368–370, 460 conservatism of speech 15 See also Narrative courtroom speech 20, 47, 52, 60–62, 68, See also Tale 127, 131, 142, 260, 262, 265, 271, 346, 367, Street 17, 36, 39, 236n, 248, 281, 284–5, 292, 424, 451, 455, 456 296, 298, 300–303, 306–309, 312, 315, dialogic nature of speech 379, 450 317–318, 332–333, 337, 344, 346, 361, drunken speech 13 368, 382, 447, 453, 461n evanescence of speech 9, 13–14, 139 Language of the street 302–303, 455, 458 importance of speech 393, 394 Subordination (grammatical), in speech 74 literature’s traces of speech 24, 343, Sufffrage (of the saints) 377, 387 346–347, 367, 375, 379 See also Supplication mariners’ speech 23, 253–254, 256–257, Supplication 98, 120, 121, 340–341, 387 259, 265–279 as a ploy in court 170 non-verbal cues to speech 367 as stereotyped 120–121 poetry and speech 5–6, 29 Suspect (in court) 14, 20, 47, 52, 58, 67n, 72, political or subversive speech 281–282, 75, 76, 78–79, 82, 95, 141–143, 163, 172, 455 284, 297, 457–458 See Trial power of speech 279, 460–461 See Witness prayer as speech 376, 379–383, 387, 398, Swearing (in vouching, as with an oath) 18, 392, 461–462 125–126, 169 presence of the speaker in speech 9 Swearing (blasphemy) 71, 266–267, 272, 274, proverbs and speech 31, 304, 306, 308, 274, 323 309, 314, 458 See also Curse and cursing reciprocity of speech 10–11, 14 See also Oath See also dialogic nature of speech seducers’ speech 399, 407, 417, 419, 460 Tale 20, 24, 25, 78, 143, 147, 156, 166, 168, 180, sermons and speech 32, 187, 191, 210, 448 219, 282, 349, 358, 365 setting for speech 448, 450 actor’s stage tale 5 situated nature of speech 13, 454, 456 attached to the teller 25 social embeddedness of speech 14 folk tale 2, 30, 55–56, 67–68, 72 sources for reconstructing past speech hagiographic tale 191 24, 260, 262, 451, 454 poet’s tale 4, 30 speech acts 141, 192n, 288, 323, 379, 448 storyteller’s tale 15, 147, 156, 168, 180, text and speech 453 358 theatre speech 201 street tale 6 women’s speech 36–37, 238, 344, 424 travel tale 17 Speed (of delivery) 24, 139 Tavern 13, 17, 258, 281, 290, 308, 312, 321, 328, Speed of oral transmission 47, 75, 99, 289, 375 307–308, 459 Inn, 121, 308 Spell, 36, 70, 81, 85, 90, 97, 99, 104–105, 109–112, as place of inquest 121 363, 387 Teaching and teachers 13, 34, 77–78, 81, 141, See also Charm 186, 209, 211, 242–243, 256, 258, 281, 381, Index 497

395–401, 403, 422, 429, 431–435, 438, time-sense of oral culture 129–130, 440 133–137, 143, 454 Teachings 17, 84, 204, 393 Tone (of voice or expression) 18, 57, 91, 104, docere 242 105, 143, 147, 168, 196n, 201, 210, 213, 281, women teaching 13, 34, 77–78, 422, 440 293, 303, 309, 367, 448, 460 Tears 188–196, 205, 211–212, 314, 383, 438, 443 See also Intonation See also Cries and crying See also Pace Testimony 20, 37, 91n, 98, 125, 144, 147–148, See also Pitch 180, 265–266, 327, 335, 338, 451, 454 See also Voice See also Deposition Torture (judicial) 68, 70–71, 76, 78, 141, 155, Textbook 123, 127 168, 171n, 180 judicial textbook 127 Touch, as perception or communication See also Schoolroom, Schoolbook 130, 139, 143, 149 Theatre 38, 194, 205, 238, 240–241, 244–245, Touch (stir) Movere 326 250 Tragedy and the tragic 240–242, 245, 250, Fortune Theatre 232 345–346, 364, 369, 457 Globe Theatre 232 See also Drama “Theatre of Terror” 136–137 See also Theatre See Drama Transcribe 3, 36, 47, 90, 103–104, 206n, 209, Theatrical and theatricality 8, 28, 228, 343, 376, 378, 389–390, 396, 406 238–241, 243, 245, 250, 270, 366 See also Scribe Threat (uttered) 165, 271, 299, 338, 348 Transcript 35, 37–38, 83, 95, 115, 116, 122, 124, Threat (not uttered, but implicit) 270, 310, 127–134, 136–138, 142–143, 145, 169, 170, 354, 449, 458 210, 229, 260 threaten 66, 76, 78, 199, 212, 221, 233, 253, Transcription 62, 127, 142, 161, 367 261, 270, 277, 309, 401, 457 phonetic transcription (scribal threatening (tone) 213, 327, 341 technique for unfamiliar terms) 61 unthreatening 325 Trent, Council of (1545–1563) 20, 90, 185, Time 2–3, 7, 12, 15, 18, 20, 27n, 32, 87, 94, 129, 218 181, 185, 259, 338, 340, 360, 389, 448, and heresies 90, 218 456, 459–462 and marriage pledges 20 age-estimates 135 and preaching 185, 195n change over time 181, 275, 278, 281, 301, Trial 17, 23, 34, 39, 47–58, 60–71, 74–78, 311, 318, 431, 462 82–83, 84, 87, 91–93, 98–99, 101–105, good times 364 107, 117–118, 121, 126, 137, 139–181, 206, lapses in time 62, 87 236, 324–326, 331, 33–335, 337, 424, natural vs. artifĳicial 129, 134–135 455 passage of time 103, 143 See also Accuse present time 298 See also Deposition telling the time 134–135 See also Tribunal time-markers 74, 143, 291 Tribunal 22, 57, 92, 98, 102, 141–142, 144 time at sea 254–255 Trickery 350, 353 times for sermons 229–231, 246 See also Lies and Lying time in prayer 441 Troubadour 3–4, 23, 25–27, 29, 407, 415, 419 time in Purgatory 389 Turn-taking 12, 56n, 168n, 173 time of misfortune /hard times 55, 278, 347–348 Utterance 9, 12–14, 60, 97, 169, 284, 287, 288, times of day 187 292, 307, 312, 379, 382, 447 498 Index

Verse 5–6, 14, 28–29, 107, 281, 286, 289, 308, Wealth and wealthy 14, 19, 116, 148, 236, 242, 380, 392, 393–394, 406, 419, 442n, 444 250, 268, 274, 293–294, 303n, 337, 339, See also Bard 356, 376, 428 See also Poet Weep, See Crying and cries See also Troubadour Witch and witchcraft 13, 23, 47–83, 84, Village 64, 66, 78, 79, 115–121, 123–124, 90–92, 104, 326, 333, 350–351, 360, 451, 127–129, 133, 135–138, 150–152, 154, 156, 454, 460 160, 162–163, 165, 168, 375, 390, 451–452, Witchcraft panics 54, 62, 64, 75 454 Witnesses and witnessing 17–18, 24, 38, 48, judicial powers of 117–121 50, 58–59, 98, 103, 115, 116–138, 148, 206, spokesmen for 122–124 212, 249, 271, 278, 324, 326, 331, 333, 336, Vituperation 141, 276, 323 354, 355, 362 See also Curse body language of witnesses recorded 122 Voice 2, 10–11, 23, 39, 142, 331, 343, 349, 405, conditions of testimony 121–132, 134, 454 141–143, 180, 261–262, 264, 266, 333, absence of voice from script 18 455 angel as a voice 93 confrontation of witnesses with one court records and voice 48, 55, 57, 60, 74, another 169–170 83, 103, 127, 142, 181 eye-witness 193, 247 interior voice 10 ear-witness 247 magic conjuring and voice 91, 104–105 imprisoning witnesses 144n, 148 mariners’ voice 254–256, 259, 272–273, lordship as seen by witnesses 136–137 274, 454–455 narrative of the witness 58–59, 130–131, men’s voice 325 137, 155 modulation of voice 9, 12, 14, 367 oath-swearing of witnesses 125–126 multiple voices in literature 379 reputation of witness tested 122–123, narrative voices 48 131–132, 143, 262, 266, 272, 325, 336 neighbourhood voice 341 spokesmen for neighbours 120, 124, Norwegian rural voice 47, 454 128–129, 132 poetry and voice 28–29 spatial sense of witnesses 136–137 political voice 23, 297–298, 300 time-sense of witnesses 132–135 prayer and voice 380, 392 torture of witnesses 180 “public and common voice” (reputation or voice, expression and mental world of rumour) 335 witnesses 48, 58, 83, 130–132, 134–135, sermons and voices 34, 186, 188n, 138, 143, 155, 163, 262, 265 190–191, 195–196, 200–201, 210–212, 215, Word of mouth 90n, 140n, 256, 278, 329 232, 234, 236, 238, 343, 425–426, 444 Writing 1, 3, 14, 19, 25, 29, 32, 39, 94, 139, 259, villagers’ voice 120, 127, 137, 141, 451, 288, 302, 303, 304, 318, 395, 400, 403, 454 446–447 voice denied to Jews 215 circulation of writings 302, 388 voiceless sounds 6–7 family collections of writings 376 women’s voice 34–36, 38, 338, 343n, 344, expansion of writing 17–18, 140 365–366, 370, 426, 444, 453, 454–455 gap between oral original and eventual Volume (acoustical) 9, 181, 322 writing 29, 31, 36, 39, 140 Volume (spatial) 34 letter writing 434 See also Pitch marginalia 305 Vow 383–385 missionary uses 202–204 See also Oath mistrust of writing 18–19, 25 Index 499

notaries’ or scribes’ writing 198n, 375, culture of the written 2, 3n, 5, 189 389, 392 disembodiment of the written and its note-taking at sermons 219 remedies 18–20 peace pacts and 198 domestic uses of the written 16, permanence of 14–15, 19, 139, 203–204, 375–376, 391 306 elite progaganda, written 294–295 political protest and writing 284–285, expansion of the written 375 288 mission narratives, written 192, 195–197 prayers in writing 388–389, 391 oral vitality or reciprocity absent in the proverbs and writing 300–318 written 11, 104, 199, 201 presence of the writer in writing 19–20 oral-written connections 5–6, 11, 17–18, reading and writing 29 23–32, 34, 52, 57, 84, 115, 210–211, scarcity of writing 16, 140 284–285, 292, 299, 315–316, 318, 343, seafarers and writing 263 370, 375–376, 378, 387–388, 391–392, sermon-writing 30n, 31–32, 198, 209, 243, 419, 424, 446, 448, 450–451, 453, 422, 424, 439 460–462 speaking and writing, interaction of oral-written relations in poetry 3n, 4n, 5, 17–18, 25, 29, 198, 209, 288, 303, 375, 389, 23, 25–30 391–392, 446 prayer, written 376, 378, 379, 386–392, tribunals’ writing what is spoken 17–18, 444, 452, 461 57, 62, 121, 142, 173 protests and social agitation, written women’s writing 36, 38, 422–424, 434, down 284–286, 288, 291–292, 294, 438n, 444 299, 457 writing materials 394 proverbs, written down 300, 303 Written 18, 31, 61, 168n, 223 puns, written down 5 accuracy of written records of sermons, written 11, 199, 203–204, speech 35–37, 62 209–211, 212–213, 223, 247, 423, 427, 449 action and the written linked 375 women’s voice, written (sometimes by catechisms 189 men) 35–37, 424–425, 428, 432, 439 charms and spells, written 85, 90n, 103, written record 18, 23–24, 27, 32, 85, 105, 110 104–105, 211–212, 316, 448, 452–453 convent instructions written 422 written submission 121 court records, written 103, 121, 128–131, written transcript 115 139, 142, 172, 260, 451, 453 written traces 84, 286