Re-Imagining the World: Sanctity and Materiality in the Vitae of Sixth-Century Gaul

by

Daniel Thomas Price

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies University of Toronto

© Copyright by Daniel Thomas Price (2021) ABSTRACT

Re-Imagining the World: Sanctity and Materiality in the Vitae of Sixth-Century Gaul Daniel Thomas Price Doctor of Philosophy, 2021 Centre for Medieval Studies University of Toronto

In the sixth-century, Gaul was undergoing a prolonged negotiation about how its communities should function, framed in terms of divine materiality, and it survives to us today in the period's most popular stories about itself: the Vitae of its saints. This thesis argues that hagiography in post-Roman Gaul was an arena in which updated frameworks for making sense of the world were put forward, and that a significant part of that undertaking was the establishment of a legitimizing logic for specific social structures and political arrangements. This was accomplished by identifying specific points of intersection between the divine and the material in order to establish tangible, particular points of meaning in an ontologically shifting world. The relationship between sensible material and story is socially produced but nonetheless deeply real by virtue of its ability to represent—make present—those stories as an embodied experience through Vitae that reveal themselves to be complex texts emerging from a cultural milieu steeped in the conventions of homiletics and exegesis.

Four roughly contemporaneous Vitae form the thesis’ source material. The first two are monastic: the Vita patrum Iurensium, which narrates the founding of a monastic community through the lives of three of its first abbots, and the Vita abbatum Acaunensium, which describes the refounding of the monastery of Agaune by Sigismund of Burgundy. The remaining two texts take an urban setting, more episcopal than monastic in focus: the Vita of Amator, an early bishop of Auxerre, and that of Genovefa of Paris,a complex figure who straddled the categories of holy virgin, Roman aristocrat, and even perhaps (albeit never explicitly) urban bishop. This selection

ii of texts, reasonably contemporary with one another, is contained enough to allow a robust exploration of each, while still diverse enough to offer a glimpse of the deep complexity and variety of hagiological projects that were at work in the world-defining project this thesis aims to explore.

iii

For Florence Stickles

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter One: A Methodology of Materiality ...... 33

Chapter Two: The Jura Fathers ...... 49

Chapter Three: The Abbots of Agaune ...... 105

Chapter Four: Amator of Auxerre ...... 141

Chapter Five: Genovefa of Paris ...... 188

Conclusion: Building a New Gaul in the Immanence of God ...... 238

Appendix: The Life of the Abbots of Agaune ...... 247

Bibliography ...... 257

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INTRODUCTION

Cosmology is a literary art, but there are two kinds of cosmology, the kind designed to understand the world as it is, and the kind designed to transform it into the form of human desire.

—Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry

In sixth-century Gaul, the world was in the midst of a long, infinitely complex undulation.

Roman rule was giving way to that of the Franks, Goths, and Burgundians; Christian bishops were rising in prominence to rival or exceed older imperial magistracies; and an exuberance of monasticism had begun to scatter the landscape with new foundations. Political and social arrangements were in flux, with factions and communities all advancing cases for their own interests in relation to one another. The framework within which this contestation occurred was unequivocally that of a newly ascendant Christianity, a cultural field concerned with negotiating the relationship between the human and the divine, and with locating the divine as immanent, incarnate, sensible and present in the material world inhabited by embodied humanity.1 The traces of this loud and ongoing negotiation about how communities should function and relate to

1 Wallace-Hadrill notes the particular eruption of the cult of relics in the fifth-century Gallic Church. J. M. Wallace- Hadrill, The Frankish Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 9; For a fuller discussion of this dynamic in early Christianity, see: Patricia Cox Miller, The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Antique Christianity. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

1 INTRODUCTION 2

one another, was, thus, framed in terms of divine materiality, and it survives to us today in what was probably the period’s most popular set of stories about itself, its people and places and things: the great, troubled corpus of Gallic hagiography.

For many inhabitants of the late antique west, the very terms of existence were changing from generation to generation. The decline in power of the western emperor coincided with the ascendance of local foederati who evolved into autonomous rulers with only nominal allegiance to Roman authority.2 Through a long and gradual process, the once-Roman lands of the west were remade as independent kingdoms. By the end of the fifth century, the emperor as the font and final enforcer of law and social order was gone, or at best withdrawn to far-away Byzantium with little power to reach beyond its diminished borders. Romanitas persisted in manifold forms long after the exile of Romulus Augustulus, of course, and much of the old Gallo-Roman population no doubt continued to live as they always had. The changes of the late fifth and sixth centuries were perhaps in many ways not significantly more profound than the great changes which characterize any century in a society’s history. But these changes were, nonetheless, real and inescapable.

This profound social reconfiguration was exacerbated by an equally dramatic and long- unfolding religious shift. The long conversion from Roman paganism to Christianity was ongoing, itself a complex and tumultuous process involving the rise and fall of countless small variations that ranged from Mithraism to Gnosticism and beyond.3 Not only were the people of

2 Here, as elsewhere, it is important not to overstate the newness of these phenomena. Raymond Van Dam points out a precedent for these monarchs by noting that, even in previous centuries, “Gallic emperors demonstrate how, in periods of turmoil, local men of authority assumed the imperial idiom of authority with the support of troops and citizens. [...] They should still be seen primarily as local leaders with limited influence.” Raymond Van Dam, Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 29. 3 “Fifth‐century Gaul was Christian and mostly Catholic in a formal sense. But behind the forms lay a scarcely converted countryside where Celtic and other pagan beliefs still worried the clergy. These beliefs remained active in the sixth and seventh centuries, and not only among the indigenous populations; they affected the way the Franks

INTRODUCTION 3

late antique Gaul trying to navigate the complex problem of shedding their pagan past, figuring out which rituals, spiritual practices, and social norms they should keep and which they should abandon, but now many of them were suddenly subject to the rule of foreigners who were, in some cases, unrepentant Arian heretics if not outright pagans of some non-Roman variety.4 Even for those attempting to adhere to Nicene orthodoxy, pivotal questions might often seem in an ambiguous state—questions of whether and how to discipline bodily desires, what goes on in the afterlife, how one might live righteously, who has spiritual authority and how does spiritual authority relate to secular authority, and how to identify the divine in the physical world.

Combined with concurrent social and political upheavals, these shifting ambiguities must have contributed to a deep and dramatic sense of ontological uncertainty in many of the inhabitants of the post-Roman west.

We now rightly reject narratives of sweeping social collapse that imagine every aspect of the

Roman world disintegrating into a Dark Age rubble that would only be rebuilt into a recognizable civilization centuries later in the High Middle Ages, if not the Renaissance or even the Protestant Reformation. The western Roman world did not collapse in the late fifth century.

It changed. Its structures and shapes undulated into new forms, forms that incorporated regional monarchies, powerful bishops, established monastic houses, and new ideas redefining everything

accepted Christianity, as indeed they had already affected the way the Gallo‐Romans themselves accepted it.” Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church, 17. 4 The presence and distribution of paganism versus Christianity in the early Merovingian period has been a matter of some debate. The eminent archaeologist Édouard Salin analyzed burial practices to conclude that the Franks were largely pagan during the early Merovingian period, but slowly moved toward a cultural synthesis with Christianity. Yitzhak Hen, among others, has challenged the reliability of such narratives. Édouard Salin, La civilisation mérovingienne d’après les sépultures, les textes et le laboratoire, vol. 4, les Croyances (Paris: A. and J. Picard, 1959); Yitzhak Hen, Culture and Religion in Merovingian Gaul, A.D. 481–751 (Leiden; New York: E.J. Brill, 1995), 197–206, 251–3; Bailey K. Young, “The Myth of the Pagan Cemetery,” in Spaces of the Living and the Dead: An Archaeological Dialogue, ed. Catherine Karkov, Kelley M. Wickham-Crowley, and Bailey K. Young, American Early Medieval Studies 3 (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1999), 61–85; Bailey K. Young, “The Imagery of Personal Objects: Hints of ‘Do-It-Yourself’ Christian Culture in Merovingian Gaul?” in The Power of Religion in Late Antiquity, ed. Andrew Cain and Noel Lenski (Farnham, Surrey, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 340; Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church.

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from the ancient civitas to the history of the world itself. These changes were facilitated by fundamental ideological and epistemological shifts as new systems of meaning-making emerged alongside the new forms of social and political organization. To the extent that those forms retained continuity with the past, so did the new epistemologies, so that what we are describing is best conceived as one phase in a long, constantly unfolding history—a shift rather than a transformation. Most succinctly, orthodox Christianity entrenched itself as the dominant religious framework, bringing with it certain fundamental conceptions about the relationship of material world to the divine and all of its meaningful potentials and implications for the human experience.

This description more or less captures the situation in Gaul in the late fifth and sixth centuries. Part of the Roman Empire since the first century BCE, Gallo-Roman society was

Latinate, urban, and heavily integrated into every imperial structure. It began the long process of

Christianization in the middle of the third century, particularly in the south and in urban areas, but this occurred in a piecemeal and highly contentious fashion.5 And in the fifth century, direct

Roman military and administrative control was supplanted by the dominion of the Burgundians,

Franks, and Visigoths, so-called barbarian groups—probably not very numerous—who, to some degree or other, were ethnically, religiously, culturally, and linguistically different from the majority of the Gallo-Roman population. Moved by the complex late Roman politics of civil war, military rebellion, and foederati diplomacy, armies were constantly crossing the countryside, and the cities of Gaul were too often helpless to resist their sieges, their leaders too

5 Hen, Culture and Religion in Merovingian Gaul, A.D. 481-751, 7; Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church, 17; Guy Halsall, Cemeteries and Society in Merovingian Gaul: Selected Studies in History and Archaeology, 1992-2009, Brill’s Series on the Early Middle Ages (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010), 273; Volker Bierbrauer, “The Cross Goes North: From Late Antiquity to Merovingian Times South and North of the Alps,” in The Cross Goes North: Processes of Conversion in Northern Europe, AD 300-1300, ed. Martin Carver (York: York Medieval Press, 2003), 437.

INTRODUCTION 5

often left with little capital of any sort to either fend off the attackers or negotiate with them.

Even as these upheavals gradually settled with the ascendency of the Merovingian Franks, a dynasty more than happy to war amongst itself, the inhabitants of Gaul found themselves having to navigate new power arrangements, new social categories, and a new definition of themselves.

The old Roman answers were no longer adequate. Gallo-Roman society was to undergo a process of reconstruction, not just of its physical landscape, but of its most fundamental ways of thinking.6

NEOPLATONISM: MATERIAL/DIVINE

The intellectual milieu of the early post-Roman west was one of nebulous neoplatonism. From

Plato, Christian thought took the idea of a divide between the material and the divine, that humans are spiritual beings inhabiting material bodies. The material world is fallen, base, and impermanent. The divine is holy, ideal, and everlasting. Humans live in exile in the material world, where we yearn for the ideals of our true home—beauty, justice, righteousness love, etc.

Our truest goal is the pursuit of those immaterial ideals, our biggest peril the temptation of temporary and unsatisfying material pleasures like food and sensuality.7

These ideas were obviously deeply influential in the development of Christianity, starting with the Apostle Paul and continuing through the Christological controversies of the fourth century. At the centre of these controversies was the concept of incarnation, which saw Christian

6 Jennifer Harris also discusses this concept when she writes: “Universal historiography allowed the newly established church to insert itself into a model of history shaped by the Bible and the Roman Empire.” Jennifer Harris, “The Bible and the Meaning of History in the Middle Ages,” in The Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages: Production, Reception, and Performance in Western Christianity, ed. Susan Boynton and Diane J. Reilly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 88. 7 Miller, The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Antique Christianity., 18–19, 32–33; R. T. Wallis, Neoplatonism, 2nd ed. (London: Hackett Pub Co Inc, 1995), 1–15, 160–78; Jaroslav Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600), The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of the Doctrine 1 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 85.

INTRODUCTION 6

thinkers grappling with questions of how God, the ultimate immaterial divine being, could also become a dying, finite material human person; what the consequences of incarnation are for the relationship between body and spirit; and how the material world should be regarded as a result.8

It was the imperative to shun the entanglements of the material world that led to the rise of asceticism, monasticism, and celibacy, and it was the idea of the spirit’s permanent entanglement with and identity with the body that led to the doctrine of bodily resurrection.9 But more significant than anything for the writers of Gallic Vitae was the idea that the divine could incarnate into the world in a way that was physically present, sensible, and active.

This was the intellectual climate of post-Roman Gaul, where the culture was deeply saturated with the classical tradition and with the discourses of Christianity, and the core project with which they were preoccupied was that of reconciling a Neoplatonic model of a division between the material and divine with the Christian idea of divine incarnation into the material.

To the textual communities of Gallic hagiography, I will argue in this thesis, the material world on its own was presented as possessing little meaning; meaning came from the divine, where spiritual and eternal absolutes called to the human soul.10 So it follows necessarily that a story- telling tradition that functioned to explain and render meaningful the new realities of post-

Roman life would be notably concerned with the relationship between the divine and the material. And that is what we observe in the hagiography produced in Gaul in the late fifth through sixth centuries. These stories of the saints, I will demonstrate, varied from one another in

8 Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600), See Pelikan’s extensive discussion of the history of these debates, and especially the chapter on “The State of Christian Anthropology” 279–291. Also see: Miller, The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Antique Christianity. 9 Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600), 141–55; Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 21–58. 10 Caroline Walker Bynum provides a useful discussion of the concept of “materiality” that engages with the history of the concept in Medieval Studies. Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality (Cambridge and London: Zone Books, 2011), 25-36.

INTRODUCTION 7

many respects, but they were all deeply, urgently preoccupied with the relationship between divinity and materiality.

Emerging understandings of that relationship interacted profoundly with social and political structures, since the pattern by which divinity intersected with the material world was also humanity’s guide in the search for truth and fulfillment. Significance, power, and authority accrued to places successfully designated as intersections between the divine and material, places like a saint’s tomb, a site where a miracle had occurred, or a city that mimetically shared qualities with holy cities like Rome or Jerusalem. And this relationship between materiality and spirituality could also produce taboos. A text could advance the norm that citizens who refused to follow a divine instruction to wear less jewellery, for example, were out of alignment—they were pursuing mundane material pleasure in defiance of an injunction to focus on spiritual things.

It is clear that in post-Roman Gaul, however, there was no single cohesive logic of divine materiality shared by all of its Christian inhabitants. These ideas were contested and in flux, emerging on an ad hoc basis to suit a particular need from a particular community.11 Although they all drew inspiration from the same intellectual milieu, particular situations determined the way that emphasis was placed and narrative was constructed. And hagiography was the field on which these projects of defining the world were conducted. It was in the Lives of its saints that

Gaul thrashed its way toward a new understanding of itself, the new world in which it existed, and the way that life should be conducted in that new world.

11 Here I am influenced, as are so many others, by Brian Stock’s notion of a “textual community,” with the provisio that I am conceiving of texts as oral objects as well, and with the heavy influence of Barbara Rosenwein’s recent influential framing of the concept of an ‘emotional community.’ Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the 11th and 12th Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 88–240; Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, New York, and London: Cornell University Press, 2007).

INTRODUCTION 8

This, then, is the central claim of my thesis: that hagiography in post-Roman Gaul was an arena in which updated frameworks for making sense of the world were put forward. A significant part of that Gallic project was establishing a legitimizing logic for specific social structures and political arrangements, and a primary mechanism by which this was accomplished was identifying specific points of intersection between the divine and the material in order to establish sharp, tangible, particular points of salience in a ontologically shifting world.

BISHOPS AND MONKS

That new epistemological configurations accompanied shifting political and social arrangements is evident from two major and well-studied developments beginning in the fifth century. The first is the explosion of monasticism, particularly in the south. Although idiosyncratic forms of

Christian living were widespread throughout the Empire from at least the third century, at the latest by the arrival of John Cassian in Gaul around 415 CE, a widespread monastic craze took root as untold numbers of Gauls abandoned their former lives to set up monastic communities in imitation of Antony and the celebrated desert fathers of Egypt and Syria.12 These new communities represented, to varying degrees, extreme breaks from previous social arrangements: property and title were abandoned or shared in a communal way; marriage and family and generational reproduction were replaced with celibate monastic solidarity; and attitudes toward everything from eating to labour to personal attire were radically reframed.

12 Marilyn Dunn, The Emergence of Monasticism: From the Desert Fathers to the Early Middle Ages (Oxford and Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2000); Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church; Douglas Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert : Scripture and the Quest of Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism (New York; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999); Friedrich Prinz, Frühes Mönchtum im Frankenreich. Kultur und Gesellschaft in Gallien, den Rheinlanden und Bayern am Beispiel der monastischen Entwicklung (4. bis 8. Jahrhundert) (München und Wien: Oldenbourg, 1965); Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catharine Misrahi, A Mentor-Omega Book (New York: New American Library, 1962). And, of course, many many others.

INTRODUCTION 9

But as much as these new forms of living and the new ideologies they reflected were radical departures from the rest of society, monastic communities, and religious communities of all types, necessarily came with deep political entanglements. They had buildings and land the rights to which they had to assert, not to mention defend from literal pillaging by passing armies, in a time when they could not rely on the leaders of those armies to respect the authority of a traditional legal claim. And as they grew in importance, various monarchs became interested in emulating the imperial Byzantine practice of buttressing secular authority with the backing of powerful monastic communities, and so the Gallic monasteries became entangled in the royal politics of the new kingdoms and had to develop ways to navigate relationships with monarchs who were prone to overthrowing one another violently, and who in many cases had a difficult relationship with Christian orthodoxy. All of this required the creative development of modes of thinking about power that both accommodated the complexities of specific situations and reflected the new monastic worldview that had been so recently taken on.

The other major development of the fifth century that signalled an epistemological shift in social and political arrangements was the rise of the episcopacy as the politically dominant office in most Gallic civitates13—epistemological in the sense that this shift represented a new way of locating knowledge and authority, so that the discourses of Christian religiosity became the tools with which one had to justify and exercise legitimate authority. This process is well-documented, especially regarding monk bishops. The turmoil of the fifth century was accompanied by many of the Gallo-Roman ruling elite retreating into monastic life, perhaps most famously on the island monastery of Lérins, before emerging again to take on the role of bishop in a Gallic city.

Here my thoughts echo the conclusions reached by Raymond Van Dam in 1985 when he wrote:

13 Ralph Mathisen, Roman Aristocrats in Barbarian Gaul: Strategies for Survival in an Age of Transition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 89–101.

INTRODUCTION 10

In earlier centuries a world view that had drawn its inspiration from the ideal of a Roman Empire, access to imperial courts, and knowledge of the classical heritage had helped aristocrats define themselves and their standing in their communities. But by the later fifth century no more imperial courts survived in Gaul, or even in Italy. Literary culture, as we have seen, still remained significant; but in addition, local aristocrats could now articulate their present roles as well as their relationship to the past through the Christian idiom of relic cults and holiness. With regard to the way Gauls viewed the Roman Empire, it is therefore possible to suggest a correlation between the decline of the authority of the empire and a waning of the ideal of Rome in Gaul, and the emergence of cults dedicated to local bishops or saints.14

These were in many cases the same people, because of family status and connections, who would otherwise have taken up imperial magistracies to govern those cities, and this is part of the explanation for why we see significant political authority beginning to accrue to the office of bishop even as it seems to also have been departing those increasingly impotent magistracies.

But a significant contributor to the rise of episcopal authority in Gaul in the fifth century was the way that Christian systems of meaning-making came to dominate the narratives and power networks of that society, so that the holy and sacral authority associated with episcopal office became a buttress for political authority.15

Both of these developments, the rise of monastic communities and the political ascendency of the bishops, required innovations in the systems of meaning-making that had currency in their societies. These innovations were accomplished by a range of different means, from the construction of imposing basilicas to the careful establishment of political alliances and legal privileges. But perhaps the chief mechanism for these social changes, certainly the one that most clearly remains for us to study, was the promulgation of hagiographical stories.

14 Van Dam, Leadership and Community, 170–71. Emphasis mine. 15 Friedrich Prinz, “Heiligenkult und Adelsherrschaft im Spiegel merowingischer Hagiographie,” Historische Zeitschrift, no. 204 (1967), 529–44; Karl Bosl, “Der ‘Adelsheilige’: Idealtypus und Wirklichkeit, Gesellschaft und Kultur im merowingischen Bayern des 7. und 8. Jahrhunderts,” in Speculum historiale: Geschichte im Spiegel von Geschichtsschreibung und Geschichtsdeutung, ed. Clemens Bauer, Laetitia Böhm, and Max Müller (Munich: Alber, 1965), 167–87.

INTRODUCTION 11

For this reason, I have selected four roughly contemporaneous Vitae as the core source material for this thesis. The first two are monastic. To begin, I will look at the Vita patrum

Iurensium, a tripartite text that narrates the founding of a community of monasteries in the Jura mountains through the lens of the lives of three of its first abbots, written by an anonymous monk of the community shortly after the death of the third abbot in the early sixth century. Next,

I will explore a related text, the Vita abbatum Acaunensium, which describes the founding or refounding of the monastery of Saint Maurice in the alpine pass of Agaune by Sigismund of

Burgundy in the year 515 CE. Although it was probably inspired by the Jura text, it is substantially different, deeply entangled in the contemporary politics of the short-lived kingdom of Burgundy and its fate.

The final two texts to which I will turn take an urban setting, more episcopal than monastic in focus. The first is the relatively unstudied Vita of Amator, who was an early bishop of fourth- century Auxerre, and its text reflects the later projects of the Auxerrian episcopacy at the time of its composition, probably the last quarter of the sixth century. The final text I will look at, perhaps the most interesting, is the Vita of Genovefa of Paris, probably written a few decades after her death in the opening years of the sixth century. The Vita presents in Genovefa a unique and complex figure who straddled the categories of holy virgin, Roman aristocrat, and even perhaps (albeit never explicitly) urban bishop. This selection of texts, reasonably close to one another in time and place, is contained enough to allow a robust exploration of each, while still diverse enough to offer us a glimpse of the deep complexity and variety of hagiological projects that were at work in the world-defining project this thesis aims to explore.

INTRODUCTION 12

HAGIOGRAPHY GENRE, POLITICS CONNECTIONS

The Lives of saints were intensely popular during this time, perhaps reflecting the tendency described by Peter Brown to seek guidance from someone with spiritual authority in a time when traditional secular authority was becoming less reliable.16 Hagiography came alongside

Christianity and was arguably part of its spread; the stories of the early martyrs were famous and powerful, as were stories of the ascetic heroism of the desert fathers.17 Indeed, the gospels themselves were hagiographic in their structure and appeal, and many hagiographers looked to them as primary models. By the time Sulpicius Severus wrote the famous and influential Vita

Martini in the 420s CE, the genre’s ability to influence and spread ideas through a population was clearly apparent.18

The power of hagiography to achieve salience lies in its relatability and particularity. As particular human beings, saints are relatable. Reading their Lives can activate the magic of empathy and sympathy. Indeed, a skilled hagiographer can call upon a whole symphony of affective resources. Descriptions of bodily mutilation and suffering, almost universal in hagiographic accounts, can create a quasi-cathartic combination of sympathy and horror, pity and revulsion, designed to generate a strong emotional reaction in the reader. The saints are recognisably human, embodied like us, with relatable experiences and circumstances, inviting as

16 This is, as I understand it, the fundamental thesis of much of Peter Brown’s early work on the cult of the saints. Peter Brown, “Arbiters of Ambiguity: A Role of the Late Antique Holy Man,” Cassiodorus 2 (1996), 123–42; Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981). 17 Jas’ Elsner, “Beyond Compare: Pagan Saint and Christian God in Late Antiquity,” Critical Inquiry 3, no. 35 (2009), 655–83; Phillippe Buc, “Martyre et ritualité dans l’Antiquité tardive. Horizons de l’écriture médiévale des rituels,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences sociales, no. 48 (1997), 63–92; David Potter, “Martyrdom as Spectacle,” in Theater and Society in the Classical World, ed. Ruth Scodel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 53– 88. 18 The best and most thorough study on the Vita Martini and its antecedents is still the foundational work done by Jacques Fontaine in the 1960s. Jacques Fontaine, Sulpice Sévère; Vie de Saint Martin (Introduction, texte, et traduction), 3 vols., Sources Chrétiennes 133–135 (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1967); Jacques Fontaine, “Vérité et fiction dans la chronologie de la Vita Martini,” Studia Anselmiana 46 (1961), 189–236.

INTRODUCTION 13

humans our compassion, understanding, and love. And yet they are often figured superlatively, superhuman, whether in their pious virtue or their bodily suffering, in a way that unavoidably alienates them from the human experience. In this sense then, the valence of hagiography is not simply to build a sympathetic bond between reader and saint, but to leverage that bond to make the audience conscious of the gap between themselves and perfection. Hagiography can render its reader abject and horrified, conscious of their own fallen humanity, but in a way that is also inspirational and demanding of a response. When this dynamic is activated in a specific political situation, it becomes extremely powerful.

Hagiography participates in the construction of political identity. One of my core arguments is that hagiographical Vitae are almost always discernibly political texts, especially in the tumultuous world of post-Roman Gaul.19 Because the saints of hagiography are, in a way, abstract divine ideas explained through and incarnated into particular human lives, they carry human affiliations. They are born in particular places. They have particular friends, and particular enemies. They hold formal positions in particular cities or monasteries. And their particular bodies remain in particular locations, sanctifying those locations, after their deaths.20

As a result, the saints’ mediating function of incarnating the divine into the world becomes entangled in mundane affiliations of the saint, creating a bridge between the divine and a specific political unit like an episcopal seat, a monastic foundation, or even a royal house. This bridge to the divine grants political authority and legitimacy, so hagiography’s moral and instructive valences are almost always complemented by a partisan intervention into a specific political

19 Kreiner makes this argument in an even stronger form for the later Merovingian period. Jamie Kreiner, The Social Life of Hagiography in the Merovingian Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 20 Raymond Van Dam identifies the beginning of an upswell in the production of local hagiography in Gaul around the end of the fifth century, replacing a hagiographic culture which was previous focused on the lives of the Christian martyrs. He attributes this new phenomenon to the need, in the absence of an imperial court in the west, for models and idioms that could be used in the political construction of identity. That is essentially what I am discussing here. Van Dam, Leadership and Community, 167–70.

INTRODUCTION 14

dynamic. This aspect of saintly Vitae was often deployed quite carefully and deliberately by its authors, who did not see any contradiction in using hagiography both as a means of high moral instruction and using it as a weapon with which to bludgeon political foes. As Jamie Kreiner says, “Although they took single protagonists as their focal points, the hagiographers wrote not just to praise the life and virtues of individuals, but also to posit a society based on the principles that those individuals represented, to shape how the kingdom saw itself.”21 And because hagiography leverages the human and superhuman identity of its saints to generate a sympathetic affective relationship of wondrous horror between audience and saint, that charge of wondrous horror, at least to some degree, also attributes politically to the saint’s affiliations.22

By the late fifth through sixth centuries in Gaul, hagiography was arguably the most potent narrative form in popular circulation, and it was deeply entangled with contemporary politics.

But these texts were not just rhetorical means by which different Gallic factions jostled for power. In their narratives, the Vitae built a vision for the world. My core claim in this thesis is that they made arguments for meaning and connection, setting up a framework wherein a post-

Roman audience could encounter their new situations as contextualized, comprehensible, and navigable. To do so, as all such texts ultimately must do, they drew heavily from Christian and

Roman paradigms that both still had deep currency in Gallic society.23 More fundamentally than anything else, they took the assumption of a dual world, of a binary between materiality and spirituality, the seen and unseen.

21 Kreiner, Social Life, 7. 22 This topic is related to hagiographical studies conducted in: Isabel Moreira, Dreams, Visions, and Spiritual Authority in Merovingian Gaul (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000), 81–107, 169–97; Yaniv Fox, Power and Religion in Merovingian Gaul: Columbanian Monasticism and the Frankish Elites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 137–94. 23 This point is one of the major themes of: Martin Heinzelmann, Bischofsherrschaft in Gallien. Zur Kontinuität römischer Führungsschichten vom 4. bis zum 7. Jahrhundert. Soziale, prosopographische und bildungsgeschichtliche Aspekte, Beihefte der Francia 5 (Munich and Zurich: Artemis, 1976).

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AUDIENCE AND AUTHORSHIP, COMMUNAL MEMORY

Questions of audience and authorship can often be challenging for these hagiographical texts, and these questions are absolutely critical for evaluating how confidently we can use these texts as evidence for something like a popular mentality of the early Merovingian period. As in most of their other features, variety abounded. Some are very clearly attributed to a known and famous author, while many more are anonymous or attributed to authors about whom we know very little. Some are directed as epistles to a named recipient, while others seem to have been circulated more generally. Our ability to reconstruct how these texts were produced and used is sharply limited, but some general statements can be made.

With a few exceptions, hagiography of the sixth century seems to have been produced with the expectation that it would be read out loud. In a monastic context, we know that it was common practice for the Vitae of saints to be read during meals and at other times during the day. And outside of monasteries, a saint’s Vita might typically be read on their feast day as part of their celebratory mass.24 The reception of these texts by a large audience is facilitated by their

Latin. In many cases, the Latin of these Vitae is quite simple, with grammatical barbarisms and sentence structures deviating sharply from the standard literary style.25 While there has been a

24 B. de Gaiffier, “La lecture des actes des martyrs dans la prière liturgique en Occident: A propos du passionnaire hispanique,” Analecta Bollandiana, no. 72 (1954): 134–66; Marc Van Uytfanghe, “L’audience de l’hagiographie au VIe siècle en Gaule,” in Scribere sanctorum gesta: Recueil d’ études d’hagiographie Médiévale offert à Guy Philippart, ed. Etienne Renard (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 157–77; Marieke van Acker, Ut quique rustici et inlitterati hec audierint intellegant: hagiographie et communication verticale au temps des Mérovingiens (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 21–49; F. Lifshitz, The Norman Conquest of Pious Neustria: Hagiographic Discourse and Saintly Relics, 684-1090 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 13–17; Hen, Culture and Religion in Merovingian Gaul, A.D. 481-751, 84. 25 The foundational work on this topic has been conducted by Roger Wright, starting with his 1982 book on Late Latin and subsequently refined in later publications. Roger Wright, Late Latin and Early Romance in Spain and Carolingian France (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1982); Roger Wright, A Sociophilological Study of Late Latin, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 10 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002); See also the essays in: Mary Garrison, Arpad P. Orbán, and Marco Mostert, eds., Spoken and Written Language: Relations between Latin and the Vernacular Languages in the Earlier Middles Ages, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 24 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013); Roger Wright, ed., Latin and the Romance Languages in the Early Middle Ages (London and New York: Routledge, 1991).

INTRODUCTION 16

tradition of scholars reading this as a sign of the decay of education and Latinity in the west, more recently this has been interpreted as reflecting textual orality; the changed grammar of the

Vitae reflects the changes in spoken Latin occurring at around this same time,26 suggesting that these texts were designed to be aurally comprehensible even to illiterate audiences, thus greatly expanding our sense of what demographics might have been interacting with these Vitae.27

This expanded model of audience also directly relates to one of hagiography’s most difficult features: what to make of its truth claims. In those cases where the Vitae produced in the sixth century dealt with the life of a saint very recently dead, many members of the audience would have had direct first- or second-hand knowledge of the details of the saint’s life. It seems reasonable to presume that tolerance for deviation from memory existed to some degree, but that it had limits.28 So the presence of this audience, their memories, and the immediate oral tradition concerning the saint’s recent life necessarily exerted a sort of gravitational influence on the text

26 The enormous contributions of Michel Banniard to this topic cannot be overstated. Here is a select list of relevant publications: Michel Banniard, Viva voce. Communication écrite et communication orale du IVe au IXe siècle en Occident latin, Collection des études augustiniennes. Série Moyen Âge et temps modernes 25 (Paris: Institut des Etudes Augustiniennes, 1992); Michel Banniard, “Les textes mérovingiens hagiographiques et la lingua romana rustica,” in L’hagiographie mérovingienne à travers ses réécritures, ed. Monique Goullet, Martin Heinzelmann, and Christiane Veyrard-Cosme, Beihefte zu Francia 71 (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2010), 83–102; Michel Banniard, “Migrations et mutations en latin parlé: faux dualisme et vraies discontinuités en Gaule (V-Xe siècle),” in Plurilinguismo e diglossia nella tarda antichità e nel Medio Evo, ed. Piera Molinelli and Guerini Federica (Firenze: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2013), 89–118; Michel Banniard, “Comment le latin parlé classique est devenu le français parlé archaïque: pour une historicisation et une modélisation innovantes (Bréviaire),” in Latin tardif, français ancien: continuités et ruptures, ed. Anne Carlier and Céline Guillot-Barbance, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 420 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 21–34. 27 See also the influential commentary of Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 25–66 and 83–180. 28 “If a work was composed soon after the death of the subject, and if a clear memory of the subject’s life was common among the intended audience (as was likely in the case of a powerful and controversial subject), any author would obviously have had to argue for his or her subject’s sanctity constrained to some extent by that memory.” Paul Fouracre, “Merovingian History and Merovingian Hagiography,” Past & Present, no. 127 (May 1990): 11; This echoes insights made by Hippolyte Delehaye, the famous scholar of hagiography, more than a century ago: Hippolyte Delehaye, Les légendes hagiographiques, 2nd ed. (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1906), 11; See also: František Graus, Volk, Herrscher und Heiliger im Reich der Merowinger: Studien zur Hagiographie der Merowingerzeit (Prague: NČSAV, 1965), 376–77.

INTRODUCTION 17

of the Vita, limiting the extent to which the text’s other projects could pull the narrative in opposing directions.

By this I do not mean to imply that a Vita contains some hard core of historical fact that moderates the fictional or imaginative interventions of a hagiographic author upon the narrative.29 As with any text, the historian simply does not have and cannot hope for unmediated access to real events. Even allowing for the role of the honest memories of the community, we should not imagine those memories as representing some sort of modern journalistic account of events of the sort that historians would often dearly love to possess instead of all this unruly hagiography.30 Memories themselves are narratives formed from the culturally available material, experiences defined in the terms provided by a specific frame of reference. We should presume that a sixth-century audience would have described and indeed sincerely remembered and perhaps even experienced their saint in terms derived from the realms of exegesis, scripture, and hagiography.31

The academic and historiographical study of hagiography has always required a high degree of critical sense, balancing a cautious respect for the genre’s truth-claims with a wariness about the authors’ distortion of history to fit a predetermined pattern or to transmit a specific didactic message.32 By turns, this has resulted in excessive credulity when attempting to extract historical

29 René Aigrain, L’hagiographie: Ses Sources—Ses Méthodes—Son Histoire (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1953); Monique Goullet and Martin Heinzelmann, eds., La réécriture hagiographique dans l’Occident médiéval. Transformations formelles et idéologiques, Beihefte der Francia 58 (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2003). 30 Kreiner, Social Life, 2; Frank Wittchow, Exemplarisches Erzählen bei Ammianus Marcellinus: Episode, Exemplum, Anekdote, Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 144 (Munich: K. G. Saur, 2001); G. W. Bowersock, Fiction as History: Nero to Julian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Ruth Morse, Truth and Convention in the Middle Ages: Rhetoric, Representation, and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Joaquin Martinez-Pizarro, A Rhetoric of the Scene: Dramatic Narrative in the Early Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989). 31 Walter Berschin, Merowingische Biographie: Italien, Spanien und die Inseln im frühen Mittelalter, vol. II (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1988), 6. 32 The process of moving away from this attempt to extract historical kernels while discarding so-called literary imaginings was notably championed by: Graus, Volk, Herrscher und Heiliger; Prinz, Frühes Mönchtum im Frankenreich.

INTRODUCTION 18

facts from hagiographical texts or, inversely, an equally unwarranted scepticism when highlighting the texts’ extraordinarily derivative and tropological structure—a structure which often seems highly contrived to modern scholars and which can lead them to dismiss hagiographical texts as works of artifice or fiction.33 A number of recent scholars have made moves to reconcile these approaches, including Aviad Kleinberg, Rachel Koopmans, and Giselle de Nie.34 They model an approach that views these hagiographical texts as representative of a broader popular discourse around sanctity, citing countless instances of explicit textual attributions to specific oral sources on a saint discussed in a given Vita. The picture painted by this evidence is of a vibrant storytelling culture where accounts of saints circulated freely within the population and were drawn upon for written texts, rather than the image, too often taken for granted as the academic conception of hagiographical authorship, of isolated clerics composing alone in their towers.35 Moreover, it is no longer sufficient to simply say that hagiography’s overt constructedness implies a conscious manipulation of historical facts. Rather, following the paradigms of phenomenology and the social construction of experience, it should be viewed as a

33 This problem in the historiography has been often discussed. For example: Kreiner, Social Life, 3; Patrick Henriet, “Texte et contexte : Tendances récentes de la recherche en hagiologie,” in Religion et mentalités au Moyen Âge: Mélanges en l’honneur d’Hervé Martin, ed. Sophie Cassagnes-Brouquet et al. (Rennes: Press universitaires de Rennes, 2003), 75–86; Emore Paoli, ed., Gli studi agiografici sul Medioevo in Europa : 1968–1998 (Florence: Tavarnuzze, 2000); Patrick Geary, “Saints, Scholars, and Society: The Elusive Goal,” in Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 9–29; F. Lifshitz, “Beyond Positivism and Genre: ‘Hagiographical’ Texts as Historical Narrative,” Viator no. 25 (1994), 95–113; Julia M. H. Smith, “Early Medieval Hagiography in the Late Twentieth Century,” Early Medieval Europe, no. I (March 1992), 69–76; Jacques Dubois and Jean-Loup Lemaitre, Sources et méthodes de l’hagiographie médiévale (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1993); Anna Taylor, “Hagiography and Early Medieval History,” Religion Compass 7, no. 1 (2013), 1–14. 34 Aviad M. Kleinberg, Prophets in Their Own Country: Living Saints and the Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Rachel Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England, The Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Giselle de Nie, Word, Image, and Experience: Dynamics of Miracle and Self-Perception in Sixth-Century Gaul (Padstow: Ashgate, 2003). 35 This was the view famously expressed, for example, in: Bruno Krusch, “Zur Florians- und Lupus-Legende: Eine Entgegnung,” Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft für altere deutsche Geschichtskunde, no. 24 (1899), 533–70; One of the first to challenge this view was Graus, Volk, Herrscher und Heiliger; Raymond Van Dam makes a similar point: “Ordinary Christians were not merely passive in the face of this divine power, because they, as the community, had largely created the values summed up in their leaders.” Van Dam, Leadership and Community, 62.

INTRODUCTION 19

product of a culture prepared to read and describe their experiences in specific culturally determined ways.

In that sense, the memories of the saint’s community should be considered not as a hard core of fact around which the literary invention of the hagiographer can be built, but as another text or set of texts which, with their own quasi-literary conventions, exert an unavoidable influence upon the final shape of the Vita. These memories could be considered similarly, for example, to the corpus of orthodox Christian theology, another set of texts, ideas, and conventions external to the Vita but exerting an unavoidable influence upon it. No hagiographer could safely compose a text without reference to doctrinal orthodoxy, just as no hagiographer could compose a text without reference to the communal memory of the text’s immediate audience. Put simply, a hagiographic text does not consist of artificial literary conventions imposed upon pure journalistic memory, but rather those literary conventions are to one degree or another the very framework in which memory itself is created.36

EXEGESIS INVOLVED IN MEMORY AND STORY-TELLING

The analysis I conduct of my hagiographic sources in this thesis is, in large part, comprised of close reading driven by the pre-supposition that medieval Vitae are multi-layered texts emerging from a cultural milieu steeped in the conventions of homiletics and exegesis. Exegesis represents an extremely diverse range of potential hermeneutics, especially in the late antique and early medieval periods before the emergence of any widespread standardization. For the purposes of demonstrating how this method will be applied, however, I will briefly present the familiar four-

36 For a discussion of hagiography as a form of social discourse, see: Martin Heinzelmann, “Die Rolle der Hagiographie in der frühmittelalterlichen Gesellschaft: Kirchenverständnis und literarische Produktion im spätantiken und merowingischen Gallien,” in Sakralität zwischen Antike und Neuzeit, ed. Berndt Hamm, Klaus Herbers, and Heidrun Stein-Klecks (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2007), 123–37.

INTRODUCTION 20

fold schema of exegetical interpretation found in the writings of both John Cassian and

Augustine, later used more broadly, with the understanding that it was by no means a universal model during the period under discussion.37 Nonetheless, it is sufficiently reflective of more widespread exegetical habits and trends to be useful for the purposes of illustration.

These four exegetical senses which I suggest are useful to apply to the reading of hagiography are, roughly: the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical. The literal reading reflected the most basic level of the text, the operation of its grammar to produce an intelligible narrative, often—but not always—expected to be vaguely ‘true’ in a sense comprehensible to moderns. And the moral reading, perhaps the second most explicit in most hagiographic texts, roughly comprises the normative examples for the conduct of Christian life that can be inferred from the Vita. But allegory and anagogy often represented more open-ended hermeneutic avenues, with anagogy pertaining to the ways in which the text relates to a sort of supernal, mystical, and atemporal view of the relationship between God and creation, and allegory functioning as the mechanism by which particular stories were placed in quasi- metaphorical relationship to other stories within the Christian tradition.

It must be kept in mind that one of the principle goals of any of these Vitae is the establishment of its subject’s legitimate credentials as a saint. On a superficial level this is accomplished simply by recounting the saint’s miracles and piety, but on a more rhetorical level this project is achieved by the industrious, perhaps even reflexive application of allegory. An image, especially in the Byzantine east, was accorded holiness by virtue of its representational, even sacramental relationship to the holy figure depicted. Similarly, the holiness of a would-be saint in a hagiographical text was enacted by creating a representative, mimetic relationship

37 John Cassian, Conlationes, 14.8; Augustine of Hippo, Genesi ad Litteram, 1.1.

INTRODUCTION 21

between that would-be saint and the lives of other figures of established holiness, with allegory functioning as the vehicle for that relationship.38

This hagiographical project of establishing saintly credentials by demonstrating a mimetic

(and thereby potentially allegorical) or quasi-metaphorical relationship between the lives of holy figures reveals a particular vision of Christian history at work in hagiographical texts—a sort of allegory-fuelled historiography.39 In this view of history, divine patterns are constantly repeating, as contemporary saints live lives that follow patterns described in older hagiographical texts, the

New Testament, and even the Hebrew Scriptures, all ultimately echoing the life of Christ described in the gospels.40 In this sense, a saint can be understood to have a relationship to Christ similar to Christ’s relationship with God the Father—that is, a relationship concerned with revealing and enacting divine patterns in the material world for the instruction of and imitation by humanity.

This exegetical mode of reading is in many ways intrinsic to Christian theology, the foundation of Christian readings of the Hebrew Scriptures or any of the numerous New

Testament allegories.41 As a result, we should expect that the conventions of exegetical reading were well-known to a Vita’s audience through any exposure they might have had to basic

Christian teaching, including but not limited to homilies and other Vitae. This means not just that

38 For a thorough discussion of the intertextuality of this genre, see: Léon Van der Essen, Etude critique et littéraire sur les Vitae des Saints mérovingiens de l’ancienne Belgique (Paris-Louvain: Bureaux du recueil, 1907). 39 See: Marc Van Uytfanghe, Stylisation biblique et condition humaine dans l’hagiographie mérovingienne (600- 750) (Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1987). 40 Marc Van Uytfanghe, “La Bible dans les Vies de saints mérovingiennes,” Revue d’histoire de l’Église de France 168, no. 62 (January 1976), 103–11. 41 The foundational texts for the study of medieval exegesis are: Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God; Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, trans. Mark Sebanc and E. M. Macierowski, Ressourcement : Retrieval & Renewal in Catholic Thought (Grand Rapids, Mich: W.B. Eerdmans, 1998). For studies focused on the development of exegetical forms in the early Middle Ages, see, to start: Frances M. Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Scott Degregorio, “Interpretatio Monastica: Biblical Commentary and the Forging of Monastic Identity in the Early Middle Ages,” in Latinity and Identity in Anglo-Saxon Literature, ed. Rebecca Stephenson and Emily V. Thornbury (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 38–53.

INTRODUCTION 22

these conventions would have been legible to and expected by that audience, but also that members of that audience were perfectly capable of framing their own stories in exegetical terms. As a result, when we find stories in a Vita with multiple layers of meaning, we should not necessarily take that as proof of an educated cleric adding theological subtlety to the raw material of communal memory. It might just as easily reflect a communally active mode of memory and story-telling that was simply being recorded into the Vita’s written form by the hagiographer.

The advantage of thinking of a Vita’s audience and authorship in this manner, especially for the project of this thesis, is that it allows us to conceptualize sixth-century hagiography as a window not just into the cultural world of a small literate elite, the hagiographers, but rather into the cultural world of a much broader cross-section of Gallic society.42 Although we should not make the mistake of assuming a universal audience—there are endless considerations we can not answer, such as how many Franks might not have spoken Latin, how many people attended mass and listened to Vitae being read, whether we are conceiving of a primarily urban and monastic audience, what the specific circulation of a particular text might have been, and on and on—this allows us to more securely view sixth-century hagiography’s project of legitimizing new social and political arrangements with a logic of materiality and sanctity as one that had broad salience for Gallic society.

42 This is not the standard conception of early medieval hagiography, which is more or less reflected by Patrick Amory when he says, “The scanty written sources of the fifth and sixth centuries, literary, legal, and hagiographical, record the activities only of the local elites that produced them. Other voices in post-Roman society are, unfortunately, mute.” Patrick Amory, “Names, Ethnic Identity, and Community in Fifth- and Sixth-Century Burgundy,” Viator 25 (January 1, 1994), 4; See also: Fouracre, “History and Hagiography,” 4.

INTRODUCTION 23

WHY HAS THIS STUDY NOT BEEN DONE?

Perhaps one of the biggest obstacles to the development of scholarship around early hagiography has been the inability of modern historians to regard the authors and audiences of saintly Vitae as serious humans deserving of serious study. A modern positivist scholarly worldview often has difficulty reconciling itself to the miracle stories of hagiography, and too often the tendency has been to dismiss these texts and their authors as superstitious, credulous, and uneducated.

Scholars seeking to identify points of historical fact from a hagiographic narrative have often been burned by a learned Bollandist demonstrating that the relevant anecdote was derived almost entirely from a scriptural model, and so generations of historians have learned to mistrust hagiographic accounts even when they claim to be saying something about a concrete historical event.43

Exceptions to this neglect are made for authors who display evidence of a formal, classical literary style, such as Venantius Fortunatus, whose ornate hagiography can be appreciated by moderns as part of a formal poetic tradition.44 But when a Vita’s author is anonymous and writes in a style that derives from a contemporary vernacular rather than classical rhetoric and poetics, it can be seen as having no value from a formal literary perspective, a perspective which reinforces ideas about early medieval hagiographers as uneducated and error-prone.

In other cases, the study of the early Middle Ages has been conducted with a focus on individual high-profile personalities and a biographical mode of writing history. As a result, whole centuries are sometimes characterized by the works of one or two very prolific writers,

43 For discussions of the development of these scholarly approaches to hagiography, see: Marc Van Uytfanghe, “Les avatars contemporains de l’hagiologie,” Francia, no. v (1977): 639–71; Friedrich Lotter, “Methodisches zur Gewinnung historischer Erkentnisse aus hagiographischen Quellen,” Historische Zeitschrift, no. ccxxix (1979): 298–356. 44 The truth of this statement can be seen even in the titles of articles like: Lucio Ceccarelli and Franca Ela Consolino, “The Metrical Forms of the Elegiac Distich in Late Antiquity: Ovid in Venantius Fortunatus,” Ovid in Late Antiquity (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 445–73.

INTRODUCTION 24

and historiography revolves around expanding the analysis of these canonical figures more than expanding the evidence base.45 For sixth-century Gaul in particular, Gregory of Tours looms large, and, to the extent that the hagiography of the period is studied at all, very often it is

Gregory’s works. These, while extensive and interesting, are, as this thesis will illustrate, not representative of the full range of approaches being taken to the composition of hagiography during this period, not to mention the full range of ways in which our central question of materiality and divinity was being taken up in hagiographic discourse. Studying Gregory of

Tours alone is not sufficient.

Moreover, the hagiographic corpus of the Merovingian period is particularly fraught by questions of forgery and authenticity. The textual history of the Merovingian hagiographic corpus appears to have dissuaded historians, since a twofold cloud of uncertainty hangs over it.

For the vast majority of these Vitae, the earliest manuscripts that remain are from the Carolingian era or later. As a result, their transmission involved passing through reform-minded Carolingian scribes who often had a very creative attitude toward the historical record.46 Since many of the texts in question pertained to institutions that still had relevance, scribes often adapted them to suit contemporary political needs while still claiming for them the authority and venerability of

Merovingian authorship. These Vitae in some cases had the status of founding documents for a monastery, describing tax exemptions or other legal rights given to a particular foundation, or they told the story of the discovery of relics that were still possessed, for example. As a result, they had a sort of value as quasi-legal documents, and scribes appear to have often ‘updated’

45 “The thoughts of the church fathers still dominate discussion, but attention is also widening to include less famous authors and more obscure works. One result has been a complication of the previous picture: different voices and diverse practices suggest the plurality of late antique Gallic Christianity.” Lisa Bailey, “Monks and Lay Communities in Late Antique Gaul: The Evidence of the Eusebius Gallicanus Sermons,” Journal of Medieval History 32, no. 4 (2006), 315–16. 46 See: Ian Wood, “Forgery in Merovingian Hagiography,” in Fälschungen im Mittelalter: Internationaler Kongress der Monumenta Germaniae Historica, MGH Schriften 33 (Hanover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1988), 369–84.

INTRODUCTION 25

texts to reflect what they felt should be the truth. In other cases, it seems that texts were invented entirely and attributed to the Merovingian period to give an impressive backstory with holy affiliations to a city or monastery that might benefit from having them. The overall result of this was that the body of texts passed down to us as the corpus of Merovingian hagiography is full of

Carolingian forgeries and alterations, so that the project of reconstructing insights into the

Merovingian world through those texts has been rendered extremely daunting, and debates about textual authenticity have characterized the field for the past two or three centuries.

The project of compiling and editing these texts has been active since at least the seventeenth century, conducted not least by the Bollandists of the Jesuit Order for publication in the Acta Sanctorum.47 It was in the later nineteenth century, however, that this work reached industrial levels, led by the rise of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. The MGH was a product of the nineteenth century’s interest in establishing a mythic national identity for modern

European states, an interest that had particular resonance in Germany as numerous small German principalities were unifying toward the centrally consolidated state of the German Empire under

Wilhelm I. Reaching to invent an impressive medieval history for this new modern state,

Germany’s historians identified their country with the Holy Roman Empire, the earliest iteration of which was the empire of the Carolingians. And since the predecessors of the Carolingian dynasty were the Merovingians, these too were adopted as part of the long history of Germany.

This goes some distance to explain why nationalist German scholars took the early Franks and

47 For an introduction to the work of the Bollandists, see: Florent van Ommeslaeghe, “The Acta Sanctorum and Bollandist Methodology,” The Byzantine Saint: University of Birmingham Fourteenth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, ed. Sergei Hackel (London: Fellowship of Saint Alban and Saint Sergius, 1981), 155–63; Lancelot C. Sheppard, “The Bollandists and Their ‘Acta Sanctorum,’” The American Benedictine Review 8 (1957), 219–34; Gautier Léon, “Les ‘Acta Sanctorum’: étude sur le recueil des Bollandistes,” La Revue du monde catholique 7 (1863), 291–312; David Knowles, Great Historial Enterprises and Problems in Monastic History, Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, 1962.

INTRODUCTION 26

Gallo-Romans into their historical project, and why the hagiography of the Merovingian era was included under the purview of the MGH, an inclusion that should not strike us as obvious.48

The largest body of Merovingian texts was edited by Bruno Krusch, who oversaw the MGH in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unquestionably one of the most important, prolific, and controversial figures in Merovingian historiography, Krusch’s approach involved not just producing critical editions of important texts, but also providing critical evaluations of their authorship claims and dating. These evaluations usually appeared in the form of an introduction to the text’s MGH edition, and their criteria were mainly philological and historical.

Obvious anachronisms could reveal a text as a Carolingian forgery, but Krusch also applied his own sense of whether or not particular words, metres, or phrases were more characteristic of the

Carolingian or Merovingian period, whether mentioned names seemed likely to have been popular at the time of the text’s claimed composition, or even if a text failed to mention a particular Merovingian fact or figure that he assumed a real contemporary would have included.

A vast portion of the putatively Merovingian hagiographic corpus contained one or more of these offences, and so they were designated by Krusch as forgeries, unfit for historical analysis of the

Merovingian period.

Moreover, perhaps unsurprisingly since the MGH was from its inception a product of

German nationalist feeling, Krusch’s analyses sometimes carried the political inflections of that

48 For more on the history of the MGH, see: Enno Bünz, “Die Monumenta Germaniae Historica 1819–2019: ein historischer Abriss,” in Mittelalter lesbar machen: Festschrift 200 Jahre Monumenta Germaniae Historica, ed. Martina Hartmann and Annette Marquard-Mois (Wiesbaden: Mentzel-Reuters, Arno, 2019), 15–36; Stefan Petersen, “Foundation of a ‘national affair’: the first statute of the Society for Germany’s Older History 1819: MGH archive B 100.15,” in Mittelalter lesbar machen: Festschrift 200 Jahre Monumenta Germaniae Historica, ed. Martina Hartmann and Annette Marquard-Mois (Wiesbaden: Mentzel-Reuters, Arno, 2019), 118–23; Peter Moraw, “Die Rolle der Monumenta Germaniae Historica bei der Erforschung des europäischen Mittelalters—gestern und heute,” in The Past, Present and Future of History and Historical Sources. A Symposium to Commemorate 100 years of Publication of the Historiographical Institute (Tokyo: University of Tokyo, 2002), 16–37; William Miller Thomas Gamble, “The Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Its Antecedents and Motives,” The Catholic Historical Review 10 (1924), 202–33.

INTRODUCTION 27

moment. This tendency combined with Germany’s industrialist Protestant sensibility to create a popular contrast between the superstitious Catholics of benighted France and the rational scientists of modern Germany.49 Krusch seems to have imagined himself as a clear-eyed German scientist going in and puncturing the pious delusions of the naive French Catholic tradition, revealing their oldest legends as forgeries and fantasies.50

Krusch’s methods often, therefore, do not survive careful scrutiny. Too many of his conclusions appear to have been based on his vague sense of whether a word or name felt

Carolingian or not, creating a sort of circular reasoning where every Merovingian text that contained one of those words was immediately categorized as a forgery. His dismissal of texts for not narrating historical events exactly as he would have liked also falls short; too often there are other conceivable explanations for why a text might or might not mention a particular detail, and we now see this as far too weak a criteria to justify discarding a text. Moreover, in many cases where a section of a text is clearly a Carolingian forgery, it is often possible to discern where that section was appended to an original that we have no reason not to consider authentic, despite Krusch’s rejection of the text as a whole. In those cases where they have been challenged, Krusch’s pronouncements have rarely held up.51

The MGH collection of edited Merovingian texts, however, remains a philological work of unparalleled scope. No present-day institution possesses the necessary resources or number of

49 Martin Heinzelmann and Joseph-Claude Poulin, Les vies anciennes de sainte Geneviève de Paris: études critiques (Paris: H. Champion, 1986), 5–6. 50 See Krusch’s article: Bruno Krusch, “Die Fälschung der Vita Genovefae,” Neues Archiv 18 (1893), 9–50; It was in response to this that Leclercq later wrote: “...nous croyons qu’en 1893 et 1896 un critique allemand et protestant nommé Bruno Krusch s’est complu à imaginer cette fable avec l’espoir d’outrager tout ce que le France catholique aime et révère: ses saints et son passé glorieux.” Henri Leclercq, “Geneviève,” in Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, ed. Henri Leclercq and Fernand Cabrol, Tome sixième, G-Hypsistariens, Première partie, G-Gotha (Paris: Letouzey, 1924), 986. 51 See, for example: François Martine, Vie des pères du Jura, Sources Chrétiennes 142 (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1968), 25–44; Jean-Marie Theurillat, L’Abbaye de Saint-Maurice d’Agaune: des origines à la réforme canoniale: 515-830, Vallesia 9 (Sion: Extrait de Vallesia, 1954); Heinzelmann and Poulin, Les vies anciennes, 3–50.

INTRODUCTION 28

trained experts it would take to repeat its undertaking. As a result, MGH editions remain definitive for a very large number of Merovingian texts if only by default, and those MGH editions typically come with a prologue by Krusch explaining why the text is a forgery. And as much as Krusch’s criteria are often conspicuously flimsy, it can often be difficult to identify any other criteria to make a claim for a text’s date of composition, and so a general miasma of uncertainty and disrepute hangs over the Merovingian hagiographic corpus. This perhaps partially explains the general neglect that has characterized the field.52

Before a text can be studied from a historical perspective, the would-be scholar has to contend with the ghost of Krusch. This involves, basically, making a case that a text should be believed about the date of its own composition unless there is substantial contrary proof, then systematically dealing with Krusch’s objections one at a time, searching around to find

Merovingian examples of words he thought were never Merovingian and all the rest. In some cases, there could be the feeling that the text cannot be adequately studied without the creation of a whole new edition. The result has been that the bulk of work that has been done on the

Merovingian corpus since Krusch has been by philologists arguing against Krusch but, or so it would seem, rarely clearing a Vita’s reputation of Krusch’s defamation enough that cultural historians feel confident enough to use it as basis for an analysis.

To avoid becoming caught up in this longstanding fight, in this thesis, although I will summarize the scholarship on a text’s dating and authenticity, I will confine myself exclusively to those texts where Krusch’s objections have been soundly answered in the course of the past hundred years or so, and I will not attempt to make any major new philological progress in this

52 For an important and extensive discussion of this question, please see: Wood, “Forgery.”

INTRODUCTION 29

arena. These texts are ready for a qualitative cultural-historical analysis centered on the

Merovingian period, and that is the perspective that this thesis takes.

SCHOLARLY INTERLOCUTORS

Anyone who writes about the early cult of the saints from a quasi-anthropological point of view is necessarily following in the footsteps of Peter Brown, whose 1981 book The Cult of the

Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity played an important role in leading future historians to conceive of late antiquity as a unified historical period no longer artificially divided by distinctions between medieval and classical or conceptions of a sharp divide between the east and west.53 Brown’s emphasis at that time was on patristic sources and the ascetic movements emerging out of Egypt and Syria, but his conceptualisation of saints’ cults as social phenomena proved deeply influential.

It was as an explicit response to Brown that Raymond Van Dam wrote his 1985 book Saints and their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul. His characterisation of his own project says much about the state of the field at the time:

Because its scholars come from so many different backgrounds, the study of late antiquity still gropes for an autonomous identity. Medievalists have long been in the vanguard of those committed to comparative studies; ancient historians and classicists have become less resistant; but patristics scholars have no strong tradition of interdisciplinary studies. Yet saints’ cults, relics, and miracles are the sorts of subjects that demand the use of the most up- to-date methodologies, and scholars who continue to be suspicious of what they call “trendy non-religious explanations” only resemble the thirteenth-century monk who in an attempt to promote his own sainthood “threw stones with all his might at anyone who jokingly talked to him of marriage.”54

53 Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity. 54 Raymond Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 7; Jean-Louis Derouet makes a similar argument in: Jean-Louis Derouet, “Les possibilités d’interprétation sémiologique des textes hagiographiques,” Revue d’histoire de l’ Église de France 62, no. 168 (1976): 153–62.

INTRODUCTION 30

In retrospect, Van Dam’s relatively conservative, reasonable analysis of his texts hardly seems like something that should have provoked a reactionary backlash from his fellow scholars,55 but that itself may be an indication of how significantly the field has changed in recent decades.

Van Dam’s study covered only the writings of Gregory of Tours, which he himself acknowledged could not be considered representative of “even other Merovingian bishops,” and so he conceptualized his work partially as providing what he hoped would be the stimulus for other works driven by “new interpretative perspectives.”56 And to a certain extent his hope was rewarded. The past twenty years have seen the publication of a number of important books doing comparative analytical work on the Merovingian hagiographic corpus. In 1998, John Kitchen attempted to investigate the lives of female saints for an understanding of Merovingian gender norms;57 in 2000, Isabel Moreira wrote on the use of dreams and visions in establishing spiritual authority;58 in 2002, Isabelle Real adapted the methods of anthropology to probe Merovingian hagiography for a better understanding of Merovingian family structures;59 and in 2003, Giselle de Nie published a study of the healing miracles of Venantius Fortunatus and Gregory of Tours that attempted to interpret them in the light of contemporary anthropological studies of miracle and healing practices.60 Most relevant for this thesis, Jamie Kreiner’s 2014 book The Social Life of Merovingian Hagiography made the argument that saintly Vitae written during the seventh

55 For example, Paul Fouracre questions the usefulness of literary criticism for studying Merovingian hagiography. Fouracre, “History and Hagiography,” 6–8. 56 Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul, 7. 57 John Kitchen, Saints’ Lives and the Rhetoric of Gender: Male and Female in Merovingian Hagiography (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 58 Moreira, Dreams, Visions, and Spiritual Authority in Merovingian Gaul. 59 Isabelle Real, Vies de saints, vie de famille. Représentation et système de la parenté dans le Royaume mérovingien (481–751) d’après les sources hagiographiques, vol. 2, Hagiologia (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001). 60 de Nie, Word, Image, and Experience: Dynamics of Miracle and Self-Perception in Sixth-Century Gaul.

INTRODUCTION 31

and eighth centuries in particular were structured as political arguments attempting to influence the Merovingian court to incorporate more Christian ideals into its policies.61

These and many others provide a substantial field of scholarly interlocutors for my project. I also draw from theorists of hagiography and cosmology without a specific focus on the early

Middle Ages. Aviad Kleinberg’s work on the formation of saint cults, Rachel Koopman’s discussion of story-telling in the hagiographic process, and explorations of medieval approaches to time and memory by Mary Carruthers and Carolyn Dinshaw will all prove foundational to this thesis.62 Carolyn Walker Bynum looms large as the instigator of a scholarly interest into medieval questions of the status of the body and its relationship to materiality; Patricia Cox

Miller brings invaluable rigour to that topic in her fine-grained analysis of conceptions of corporeality in the patristic age.63

I follow in the footsteps of Valerie Flint, who conceives of the early medieval world’s approach to magic and the supernatural as much more diverse, competitive, and fluid than many of our more formal Christian sources sometimes will admit.64 Adopting such a conception of

61 The similarities between our projects can be observed in the introductory line: “The aesthetic and semantic virtuosity of the Merovingian texts had everything to do with their social functions, which is why this book is not just an examination of hagiography but of the society that created and read it and changed in the process. It takes a wide-angle-lens view of a socially involved literature in order to help recover a political and intellectual culture whose history has been deflated.” Kreiner, Social Life, 1. 62 Kleinberg, Prophets in Their Own Country: Living Saints and the Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages; Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England; Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 63 To name only a few of their relevant works: Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200- 1336; Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Sacrality of Things: An Inquiry into Divine Materiality in the Christian Middle Ages,” Irish Theological Quarterly 78, no. 1 (February 2013), 3–18; Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Miller, The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Antique Christianity; Patricia Cox Miller, “Visceral Seeing: The Holy Body in Late Ancient Christianity,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 12, no. 4 (Winter 2004), 391–411; Patricia Cox Miller, “Subtle Embodiments: Imagining the Holy in Late Antiquity,” in Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality, ed. Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). 64 Valerie Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

INTRODUCTION 32

Merovingian hagiography is invaluable, since when we withhold the assumption of some rigid, formal, perfect orthodoxy shared by all Christians of the period, the diversity and creativity of these stories shines through more brightly. I am also deeply influenced by the work of Joan

Petersen on the hagiographic corpus of Italy in the sixth century, where she convincingly emphasised the notion that similarities between texts reflected not necessarily a direct connection

(of one text being copied by the next) but rather a common field of popular storytelling which possessed its own tropes and patterns reflected in the written texts that emerged from it.65 In their own ways, each of these perspectives represents a means of emphasizing the larger culture of orality, story-telling, and popular meaning-making that lies behind these written texts.

These and many others constitute the body of medievalist scholarship from which this thesis will draw, but the special focus of this project on the topic of materiality and its role in structuring social and political dynamics necessarily demands that I engage with the extensive theoretical work conducted on that topic outside the field of medieval studies. In the following chapter, I will lay out the methodological basis for my analysis of the four texts that form the basis of this thesis, drawing from the deep well of relevant scholarship developed in the inter- related fields of anthropology, sociology, and religious studies.

65 Joan Petersen, The Dialogues of Gregory the Great in Their Late Antique Cultural Background, Studies and Texts 69 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984).

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CHAPTER ONE

A METHODOLOGY OF MATERIALITY

Paraphrasing Kant, Georg Simmel wrote, “the possibility of experience is the possibility of the objects of experience—because to have experiences means that our consciousness creates objects from sense impressions.”66 This most basic of definitions is the starting point for my study of sacred materiality in post-Roman Gaul, encompassing a wide variety of sense objects from human bodies and body parts to landscapes, cities, and even more nebulous sense objects like smells and ocular visions. Further, borrowing Bryan Turner’s Foucauldian system for describing the idea of the body, when I refer to the material world I am pointing toward an idea that is “an effect of deep structural arrangements of power and knowledge”; “a symbolic system that produces a set of metaphors by which power is conceptualized”; and “a consequence of long- term historical changes in human society.”67 I conceive of the material as a particularly

66 Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, ed. David Frisby, trans. Tom Bottomore, David Frisby, and Kaethe Mengelberg (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 63. 67 Bryan Turner, “The Body in Western Society: Social Theory and Its Perspectives,” in Religion and the Body, ed. Sarah Coakley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 15–16; I necessarily balance this theoretical stance against the methodological point well-articulated by Appardurai, who writes: “Even if our own approach to things is conditioned necessarily by the view that things have no meanings apart from those that human transactions, attributions, and motivations endow them with, the anthropological problem is that this formal truth does not illuminate the concrete, historical circulation of things. For that we have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories. It is only through the analysis of these trajectories that we can interpret the human transactions and calculations that enliven things. Thus, even though from a

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significant arena for the social negotiation of systems of power and knowledge because it is encountered bodily, provoking embodied reactions, such that the phenomenological process of creating objects from sense impressions is experienced as the objects asserting themselves into our experience. This is one of the core insights of the phenomenologist Maurice Merlau-Ponty, that the world, “which we do not constitute, utters itself in us.”68 This is the core justification of my decision to see materiality, and in particular sacred materiality, as a site and product of not just forms of social organization but also of politics and contestation.69 But there is more to be said.

The topic of materiality as a social and historical phenomenon, especially when it comes to the body and the senses, has received a certain amount of attention from recent historians of late antiquity and the Middle Ages.70 More broadly, however, social materiality is a very serious area of study—perhaps competitive for the most serious area of study—in the scholarly fields of anthropology and sociology. Marcel Mauss’s 1925 book The Gift remains a cornerstone of anthropological analysis, identifying as it does the exchange of gifts as a fundamental means by which connections of reciprocity and obligation function to enact social connections and

theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context.” Arjun Appardurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appardurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 5. 68 Alphonso Lingis, “Translator’s Note,” in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Invisible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes, ed. Claude Lefort (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), lii. 69 Similarly, Judith Butler writes: “If materialism were to take account of praxis as that which constitutes the very matter of objects, and praxis is understood as socially transformative activity, then such activity is understood as constituitive of materiality itself.” Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (Abingdon, Oxen and New York, NY: Routledge, 2011), 250. 70 See, for example Georgia Frank, The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims to Living Saints in Christian Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336; Miller, The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Antique Christianity; Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

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community.71 Mauss and Emile Durkheim articulated the key principles for how meaning attaches to things over a century ago in their study of systems of classification occurring in what they called ‘primitive societies’—missing, unfortunately, the degree to which their insights could have been just as applicable to their own society. They concluded that the process of attributing meaning to things was fundamentally social: not only were systems of classification socially produced, but they followed a social model, so that the fundamental, primordial cognitive function of dividing people and groups of people into complex categories provided, Mauss and

Durkheim speculated, the cognitive framework for organizing everything else into complex categories.72 They also observed that ‘primitive’ systems of classification were not purely rational or utilitarian (they took it for granted that their own systems of classification were purely rational, of course) but marked and produced by the same sort of complex affect that characterized social relationships. This lack of a foundation of pure rationality, to them, explained why systems of classification varied from cultural grouping to cultural grouping:

it is thus states of the collective mind (âme) which gave birth to these groupings, and these states moreover are manifestly affective. There are sentimental affinities between things as between individuals, and they are classed according to these affinities. [...] And in fact, for those who are called primitives, a species of things is not a simple object of knowledge but corresponds above all to a certain sentimental attitude. All kinds of affective elements combine in the representation made of it. Religious emotions, notably, not only give it a special tinge, but attribute to it the most essential properties of which it is constituted. [...] This is how it happens that things change their nature, in a way, from society to society; it is because they affect the sentiments of groups differently.73

71 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (London: Cohen & West, 1954). 72 Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Primitive Classification, trans. Rodney Needham (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 48–49. 73 Durkheim and Mauss, 50; This observation anticipates the thesis that Barbara Rosenwein developed more than a century later in her book on emotional communities in the early Middle Ages. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages.

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Holding in mind these insights about the socially produced and affectively laden nature of

‘things’ which always exist in quasi-social relation to one another, I will approach one very specific model for understanding classification of things and their relationships to one another.

Beginning well before Mauss, modern thinkers have identified the ‘commodity’ as a fundamental unit of social life, giving rise in some ways to the model of modern civilization conceptualized as an ‘economy’, wherein social relationships and in fact society itself emerges from the relationships between people and material goods and between material goods and other material goods. Developed with extreme sophistication by scholars from a broad range of disciplines, the relevance of commodity theory to the cosmologies of divine materiality found in post-Roman Gaul may not be immediately apparent.74 But there are, I argue, useful conceptual parallels that can productively inform what was going on with materiality in these early medieval texts, drawing us closer to the strange anthropological idea of the ‘fetish object’ and further into a framework that can provide the conceptual structure for this thesis.

To reduce an incredibly complicated discourse down to fundamentals, a commodity is a material object that acquires a ‘value’ because of its potential to be exchanged, and that potential to be exchanged is produced by ‘demand.’ In a system of market exchange, it is only by entering into a relationship with a socially existing ‘demand’ that material objects acquire value – that is to say salience, meaningfulness, relationship to other objects and to people.75 Although to us they

74 Patrick Geary once tried to build an argument on early medieval relics using commodity theory, apparently shoehorning a medieval perspective into a volume on commodities, but the result was not particularly stunning. Patrick Geary, “Sacred Commodities: The Circulation of Medieval Relics,” The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appardurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 169–92. 75 “The problem of value and value equivalence has always been a philosophical conundrum in economics. It involves the mysterious process by which things that are patently unlike are somehow made to be alike with respect to value, making yams, for example, somehow comparable to and exchangeable with a mortar or a pot.” Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commodization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appardurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 71. Compare with the discussion of the arbitrariness of social relations between things in Mauss and Durkheim above.

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are familiar enough to be commonplace, it is to these two related concepts of demand and value that I want to turn.

When probed, ‘demand’ reveals itself to be a much more elusive idea than it might first appear. It is ultimately an expression of desire, of a group or individual’s appetite for a material object: appetite to possess, to consume, to look at, or otherwise materially experience. An object acquires value, meaning, and—in some sense—existence only when it becomes an object of desire. And that value itself only arises as a social relationship, something negotiated and produced within a community where those objects of desire are at play.

It is in this way that I believe commodity theory can be useful: if we conceive of virtus, holiness or sanctity, as a form of ‘value’ that attaches to material objects, we can conceptualize its production using elements of commodity theory. This allows us to conceive of material sanctity as something that is socially produced and negotiated, that participates in structuring social relationships, and that arises as a relationship of embodied desire between a person and a material object. Arjun Appardurai tells us that “Value is embodied in commodities that are exchanged. Focusing on the things that are exchanged, rather than simply on the forms or functions of exchange, makes it possible to argue that what creates the link between exchange and value is politics, construed broadly.”76 To conceive of material objects, laden with virtus as a form of value, having their own active social and political life is exactly the sort of paradigm we need for this project exploring sacred materiality in post-Roman Gaul.

In 1907, Georg Simmel wrote, “Objects are not difficult to acquire because they are valuable, but we call those objects valuable that resist our desire to possess them. Since the desire encounters resistance and frustration, the objects gain a significance that would never have

76 Appardurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” 3.

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been attributed to them by an unchecked will.”77 Sacred materiality also, I will argue, often acquires its social value through becoming positioned as an object of desire, and it becomes an object of desire by being something both visible and out of reach at the same time. Describing the workings of desire is an extremely elusive task, ultimately a question of socially negotiated poetics, erotics, and psychology.78 And indeed, the dynamics of sacred materiality at work in these early medieval Vitae are not exactly economic, not really to do with exchange, not really the same as modernity’s processes of commodification. As I have outlined above, however, sanctification and commodification do, I believe, share certain features in common. One way to explore the differences and thereby to refine my view of sanctification is by invoking the anthropological concept of the ‘fetish.’79

As a concept deployed for the analysis of religious cultures, ‘fetish’ has a troubled history. It first appeared in the sixteenth century among Portuguese sailors trading along the west coast of

Africa, and they used it to describe certain objects to which their African counterparts attributed value that the Portuguese were unable to understand. We might as well caricature the Portuguese traders, maybe a little anachronistically, as assigning value based on systems of commodification: value adhered to things that could be situated as objects of desire within their social context, conceived of in terms of potential exchange. Since the Africans were attributing value to objects that the Portuguese could not understand as objects of desire, the concept of

‘fetish’ was developed to describe objects to which value was ascribed outside the context of

77 Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 64. 78 For this reason, I will occasionally be using psychoanalytic vocabulary to characterize the relationship between people and the materialized divine, materiality socially situated as a focus of desire, though I am well aware of its potential shortcomings as an analytical mode. 79 Michael Taussig has colourfully commented that the “genealogy of fetish” can be treated as “a confrontation of sorcery with sociology.” Michael Taussig, “Maleficium: State Fetishism,” The Nervous System (New York: Routledge, 1992), 119.

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commercial exchange, often as a sort of racist shorthand for the assumed superstitious irrationality of non-European cultures.80

From this origin, the idea of ‘fetishization‘, related of course to ‘commodification’, developed as a way to characterize the cultural process that defined an object as significant, meaningful, and desirable—or at least productive of a range of embodied affect that potentially included desire—outside of conventional systems of economic exchange. It is as a way of characterizing affective responses to material objects that the language of fetishization was brought into psychoanalysis to describe certain dynamics of sexuality and trauma, and indeed, perhaps somewhat ironically, it was ultimately to the language of fetishization that Karl Marx turned when he was trying to describe the socially produced relationship between a material object and its abstract quality of ‘value.’81 For our purposes, if we take ‘fetish’ to essentially mean a commodity—a material thing that acquires value as a socially facilitated expression of embodied desire—which acquires that value through a logic other than the exchange logic of economics, it starts to become useful as a paradigm with which to think about material sanctification.

In his famous and influential attempt to describe the logic of fetishization for the purposes of anthropological analysis, William Pietz described a process of four stages:

1. Historicization: “The fetish is always a meaningful fixation of a historical event, the

enduring material form and force of an unrepeatable event.”

2. Territorialization: “The object is territorialized in material space (an earthly matrix).”

80 For an extremely thorough survey of the history of the concept of the fetish, see: Rosalind C. Morris and Daniel H. Leonard, The Returns of Fetishism: Charles de Brosses and the Afterlives of an Idea (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 133–320. 81 Karl Marx famously developed the concept of “commodity fetishism” in his description of how value attached to goods. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, vol. 1 (London: Swan Sonnenschien, 1904), 41–55.

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3. Reification: the “historical object is territorialized in the form of a reification […]

recognizable as a discrete thing (a res) because of its status as a significant object within

the value codes proper to the productive and ideological systems of a given society.”

4. Personalization: “This reified, territorialized historical object is also ‘personalized’ in the

sense that beyond its status as a collective social object it evokes an intensely personal

response from individuals,” producing an “intense relation to the individual’s experience

of his or her own living self through an impassioned response to the fetish object.”82

Positioned within the broader discourses about commodity theory, mutatis mutandis, this goes far toward giving us a productive way to think about material sanctification.

In Pietz’s quality of historicization, we can see the space for the operation of hagiography; hagiography produces the story that situates the material object as the continuation of a divine occurrence, “the enduring material form and force of an unrepeatable event.” It is territorialized in that it is always characterized by specific material parameters, and it is reified in the sense that the connection between that territorialized object and the historical event is ‘reified’ as a social fact (again, by the operation and circulation of hagiographic narrative.) And it is personalized in that it is positioned in its reification as an object that produces a direct, personal, embodied affective response; we will see that many of these Vitae set up models of such responses to holy objects, effectively producing socially constituted emotional/affective patterns as normative responses within its community of relevance.

So in the model I am laying out, a holy object is a material object—a body, a location, a tool, or really any other sense object that can support a socially produced definition—that social

82 William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 9 (1985), 12–13.

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processes of reification—i.e., story-telling—have identified with a historical event, usually a divine one. And, as Caroline Walker Bynum comments, the relationship of the holy object to its referent is not depiction “in the sense of having similitude to,” but rather representation, “in the sense of making present.”83 Moreover, those same story-telling processes have normalized a specific affective reaction, whether it be of desire or something else.84 We should understand these dynamics in the context of the material quality of religion as outlined by David Morgan, who writes:

Forms of materiality—sensations, things, spaces, and performance—are a matrix in which belief happens as touching and seeing, hearing and tasting, feeling and emotion, as will and action, as imagination and intuition. Moreover, religions happen not in spaces and performances as indifferent containers but as them carved out of, overlaid, or running against prevailing modes of and time. Sensation is an integrated process, interweaving the different senses and incorporating memory, and emotion into the relationships human beings have with the physical world.85

With all these things taken together, we are getting pretty close to a paradigm that might be useful for framing our discussion of sacred materiality in post-Roman Gaul. What remains is to describe how this paradigm relates to the specifically Christian vision of history and materiality that constituted the context for these processes in our period.

In his famous and formative survey of the literary representation of reality, Erich Auerbach identified as one of the primary distinguishing features of the Judeo-Christian style (as opposed to Greco-Roman) the idea of ‘scope’—that is, a world represented as being constituted in layers:

83 Bynum, “The Sacrality of Things: An Inquiry into Divine Materiality in the Christian Middle Ages,” 8. 84 Alphonso Lingis summarizes the famous phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s dicussion of the embodied nature of sensory experience and its importance for embodied, affective experience when he writes: “The things can solicit the flesh without leaving their places because they are transcendencies, rays of the world, each promoting a singular style of being across time and space; and the flesh can capture in itself the allusive, schematic presence of the things because it is itself elemental being, self-positing posture, self-moving motion adjusting itself to the routes and levels and axes of the visible. This intertwining, this chiasm effected across the substance of the flesh is the inaugural event of visibility.” Lingis, “Translator’s Note,” lv–lvi. 85 David Morgan, “Introduction: The Matter of Belief,” in Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief, ed. David Morgan (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 8.

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some things near to us and clear, other things further away and obscure. His reading of the

Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac begins with his analysis of God’s addressing Abraham.

Auerbach asks:

Where are these two speakers? We are not told. The reader, however, knows that they are not normally to be found together in one place on earth, that one of them, God, in order to speak to Abraham, must come from somewhere, must enter the earthly realm from some unknown heights or depths. Whence does he come, whence does he call to Abraham? We are not told. [...] God appears without bodily form (and yet he “appears”), coming from some unspecified place—we only hear his voice [...] Moreover the two speakers are not on the same level: if we conceive of Abraham in the foreground, where it might be possible to picture him as prostrate or kneeling or bowing with outspread arms or gazing upward, God is not there too: Abraham’s words and gestures are directed toward the depths of the picture or upward, but in any case the undetermined, dark place from which the voice comes to him is not in the foreground.86

This is an evocative expression of the dynamic at work in our post-Roman Vitae. There is a visible, sensible world where humanity lives. There is a second, distant world that cannot normally be seen or accessed. And there are points of intersection, perceptible to our senses and yet transcending them.

This echoes how Peter Brown began his seminal book on the late-antique cult of the saints, describing a “fault” that “ran across the face of the universe. Above the moon, the divine quality of the universe was shown in the untarnished stability of the stars. The earth lay below the moon, in sentina mundi—so many dregs at the bottom of a clear glass.”87 Elsewhere he says, “The men we call ‘agents of the supernatural’ were those who had brought down into the dubious and tension-ridden world beneath the moon a clarity and stability associated with the unchanging

86 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), 8–9. 87 Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, 2.

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heavens”88 and “holy persons—alive or in their tomb—gave human density to the urge to find a joining of heaven and earth.”89

It was in negotiating and reconciling the material relationship between these two realms that late antique and early medieval hagiography achieved its representational goals. In her discussion of late antique hagiography, Patricia Cox Miller concludes, “What is materialized in this discourse, that is, what is objectified and made tangible, and what we as readers are being exhorted to see in the strongest possible form, is a belief system based on the view that spiritual beings are corporeally present in human life.”90 She continues: “Holy bodies are epiphanies of transfiguration that occupy a signifying space between transcendence and immanence. This is the premise of hagiography’s version of figural realism.”91 The model of divine materiality I am trying to describe here, then, needs to account for holy objects not just as connections between the sensory present and a historical moment—as in Pietz’s model of fetishization—but between the sensory present and a transcendent plane of existence. For a vocabulary suitable to this challenge I turn to Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and Profane.

With Eliade we are on dangerous ground. Many of his claims are incredibly speculative, and his positing of a semi-universal religious mindset is unsustainable, as are his distinctions between primitive and complex cultures and the homo religiosus model he opposes to the profane-minded people he saw around him in modernity. Nevertheless, some of his insights might be useful for this project. In particular, he proposes a way of looking at the relationship between the divine and the material that I intend to basically follow: the divine is a realm of ontological certainty, contrasted with the chaos and disorder of sensory reality. The desire for ontological certainty is a

88 Peter Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 16–17. 89 Brown, “Arbiters of Ambiguity: A Role of the Late Antique Holy Man,” 140. 90 Miller, “Visceral Seeing,” 403. 91 Miller, 411.

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core human drive, and so discovering/creating divine points of reference is a basic tactic for imposing order on chaos. The means for establishing these divine points of reference are cultural—variously discursive, ritual, political, or otherwise. For our purposes, studying hagiography, the mode we have access to is the discursive mode: story-telling.

Eliade’s model for theophany or hierophany typically involves the invocation of cosmogony, the creation of the world. He says: “The world becomes apprehensible as world, as cosmos, in the measure in which it reveals itself as a sacred world. Every world is the work of the gods, for it was either created directly by the gods or was consecrated, hence cosmicized, by men ritually reactualizing the paradigmatic act of Creation”92 and “by symbolically becoming contemporary with the Creation, one reintegrates the primordial plenitude.”93 However, despite his strong universalizing tendencies, Eliade is forced to acknowledge that Christianity does not really follow this model. Christian sanctification looks toward the historical events of scripture, not the creation of the world: “Since God was incarnated, that is, since he took on a historically conditioned human existence, history acquires the possibility of being sanctified.”94 For

Christians it is this historical moment of incarnation, not the creation of the world, that is the referent of present-day sacralization, the “paradigmatic act of strength, superabundance, and creativity”95 and the “overflow of energy” that is “accomplished by a surplus of ontological substance.”96 In that sense, the life of Christ is “the myth, which narrates this sacred ontophany, this victorious manifestation of a plenitude of being” and it “becomes the paradigmatic model for all human activities.”97 Sanctification for our texts involves not a reenactment of the creation of

92 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959), 64. 93 Eliade, 105. 94 Eliade, 111. 95 Eliade, 80. 96 Eliade, 97. 97 Eliade, 97–98.

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the world but rather a reenactment, through allegory and imitation, either of the life of Christ itself or of other holy and/or scriptural things that themselves ultimately refer to the life of

Christ.

This is the way that our hagiography produces and manages associations between socially constituted material objects and embodied desire. Rather than assigning value to material objects by placing them in an exchange relationship with other objects as commodities, it assigns virtus to material objects by placing them in an allegorical relationship to a historical moment, the incarnation, that is accepted as a site of ontological overflow, a moment when the infinite and ideal divine unconditionally manifested as a material existence. Fetish objects, as Pietz showed us, excel at connecting their viewer to a past historical moment. For Christianity, the incarnation is the historical moment when the divine and the material met. In hagiography, we see the discursive social processes whereby particular material loci are brought into being as fetish objects linked by chains of figural and allegorical logic to the moment of incarnation. As social phenomena, this creation of such fetish objects is always instantly implicated in social relations.

But a little more nuance is needed to round out this model. Remember that for Auerbach it is important that the divine plane of Judeo-Christian cosmology always be just out of sight, almost absent, sometimes ambiguously present. This aspect of uncertainty, I argue, is the condition that ultimately positions these objects of Christian fetishisation as objects of desire, objects loaded with affective magnetism.

In her study of contemporary Byzantine hagiography, Patricia Cox Miller identifies a distance or “uncanny oscillation” between representations of saintly bodies as material and representations of them as divine, suggesting that this was because Christian writers were

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hesitant to depict their subjects, potentially idolatrously, as fully divinized bodies.98 I see this same distance or oscillation in my Gallic hagiography, but I do not believe it results from any theological trepidation around representing embodied divinity.99 Rather, I see that distance being leveraged to create desire, recalling Simmel’s characterization of demand: “Since the desire encounters resistance and frustration, the objects gain a significance that would never have been attributed to them by an unchecked will.”100

Auerbach’s idea of scope created by contrast of close and distant planes,101 this Eliadian idea of hierophany and the oscillating divinity of the material, might be captured in Bill Brown’s phrasing: “On the one hand, then, the thing baldly encountered. On the other, some thing not quite apprehended.” He conceives of a conceptual category that tends “to index a certain limit or liminality, to hover over the threshold between the nameable and the unnameable, the figurable and unfigurable, the identifiable and the unidentifiable” and “as what is excessive in objects, as what exceeds their mere utilization as objects—their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence, the magic by which objects become values, fetishes, idols, and totems.”102 To preserve the enigma of divinity, to keep it just out of reach even as it manifests to the senses, this ‘oscillation’, is to render it an object of desire. I am not discussing the same

98 Miller, “Subtle Embodiments,” 49–51. 99 Writing about Greek and Syriac material, Rowan Williams expresses a position similar to Miller’s: “An abiding tension in early Christianity, especially from the end of the third century onwards. How is God present in the world? Evidently and uncontroversially in the lives of the saints, above all the martyrs. But is this presence a simple union with the activity of the created spirit or a more dialectical affair in which divine power wrestles with and ‘holds down’ created will, so that this created will may in turn subdue the material body? Issues around sacramental theology and Christology are inextricably bound up with these questions, since Christ is the supreme case of holiness enfleshed; and the risks associated with some ways of understanding holiness in general are manifestly connected with the risks perceived in certain kinds of discourse about the saints and their bodies. The lines of differentiation do not run uniformly between two clearly and coherently defined theologies.” Rowan Williams, “Troubled Breasts: The Holy Body in Hagiography,” in Portraits of Spiritual Authority: Religious Power in Early Christianity, Byzantium, and the Christian Orient, ed. Willem Drijvers and John W. Watts (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1999), 76. 100 Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 64. 101 Auerbach, Mimesis, 8–9. 102 Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2001), 5.

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sources as Miller, and I do not intend to contradict her interpretations of them, but I believe this deviation from her paradigm, based on the insights from commodity theory discussed above, opens up a whole new range of insights into our Gallic sources.103 When sacred material objects are characterized by oscillation and ambiguity between the material and the divine, I read it not as the result of nervous clerics trying to walk a very fine theological line but as the deployment of a narrative strategy that renders those objects into objects that, through their resistance to “our desire to possess them,” acquire value. 104

And this more or less completes our model. A holy materiality is a type of fetish: it is a historical moment rendered as a discrete, sensible territory that provokes a visceral, affective reaction in a person encountering it. Its affective charge comes from its status as an object of desire, and the nature of that desire is usually the desire for ontological certainty, for clarity about what the world is or should be. The object exists with deep social relationships, akin to those between humans, with other objects and with specific people and communities, rendering it actively political. The relationship between sensible material and story and affect is entirely socially produced but nonetheless deeply real by virtue of its ability to represent—make present—those stories as an embodied experience. These social processes and embodied experiences generate a specific type of value that we might designate as virtus. This does not happen through systems of commodity exchange that put materially different commodities into a

103 My line of thinking about the social origin of the dynamics at work in my texts also parallels what Nicholas Constas says when he writes about how, in the absence of clear authoritative definitions of the relationship between the material and the holy: “Christian thinkers turned to the liturgical rites and traditions of their communities as a source for their theological thinking, thereby enacting a critical intervention of practice into theory. More precisely, theory was made to follow practice inasmuch as the ritual care of the dead, along with the cult of saints and relics, necessitated a rather specific set of theological commitments.” Nicholas Constas, “An Apology for the Cult of the Saints in Late Antiquity: Eustratius Presbyter of Constantinople, On the State of Souls after Death (CPG 7522),” Journal of Early Christian Studies 10, no. 2 (Summer 2002), 270. 104 Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 64.

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universalizing reciprocity with each other105 but rather by a culture of story-telling— hagiography—that places would-be loci of materialized divinity into analogical or allegorical relationship with “the paradigmatic model for all human activities,”106 the incarnation of Christ.

105 This revised model of demand and value still works remarkably well with Appardurai’s framing: “Demand, that is, emerges as a function of a variety of social practices and classifications, rather than as a mysterious emanation of human needs, a mechanical response to social manipulation (as in one model of the effects of advertising in our own society), or the narrowing down of a universal and voracious desire for objects to whatever happens to be available.” Appardurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” 26. 106 Eliade, Sacred and Profane, 97–98.

CHAPTER TWO

THE JURA FATHERS

The Vita patrum Iurensium describes the founding of the monasteries of Condadisco and

Lauconnus in the Jura Mountains, later known as the monasteries of Saint-Claude and Saint-

Lupicin respectively.107 According to the Vita, around the year 435 a man named Romanus left his family home and entered the wilderness of the Jura Mountains, founding the monastery of

Condadisco; he was soon followed by his brother Lupicinus, who founded the nearby monastery of Lauconnus.108 Each of the brothers is allotted a third of the text. After their deaths, the monasteries seem to share a single abbot. Their immediate successor is passed over, but his successor, a man named Eugendus, is the subject of the final third of the text. The anonymous author of the Vita seems to have served as a monk under Eugendus, and he frequently attributes his stories either to his personal memories, in the case of Eugendus, or to those of older brothers around the two monastic communities.

107 These two monasteries are an offshoot of an eastern-inspired monastic movement that seems to have begun in the southwest of Gaul around the start of the fifth century, including the founding of Lérins in 400 and the foundations of John Cassian at Marseille. François Martine, ed., Vie des pères du Jura, Sources Chrétiennes 142 (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1968), 11. 108 Martine, Vie des pères du Jura; Jeffrey Burton Russell, Tim Vivian, and Kim Vivian, eds., The Life of the Jura Fathers: The Life and Rule of the Holy Fathers Romanus, Lupicinus, and Eugendus, Abbots of the Monasteries in the Jura Mountains, Cistercian Studies Series, no. 178 (Kalamazoo, Mich: Cistercian Publications, 1999), 32.

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The Vita patrum Iurensium—henceforth VPJ—is a long and complex text. In summary, my argument is that it reflects a devotion to a certain sort of divinizing logic, the reconciliation of opposites. Such logic, that the divinization of the material world occurs at the junction of coinciding opposites, shows up throughout the text as a motif and even informs the tripartite structure of the text itself. This logic is applied to the practices of the monks, but also to the landscape in which the Jura monasteries are placed. The divinization achieved by this method is characterized by the absence of boundary or distinction, and this absence manifests in a number of significant ways. The lack of distinction between the monks transforms them into one social unit, nameless and faceless, united with each other, with Jura monks of the past and future, and with the divine source which allows them to perform miracles and wonders. The Jura landscape, moreover, elides itself with the landscape of the Egyptian desert, the city of Rome, and other holy places, and the abbots are able to manifest themselves elsewhere in the world from their position in the sanctified heart of the monastery. This subordination of the bounded material world to the boundlessness of the divine, a boundlessness with which both the monks and the landscape of Jura are unified, is emphasized over and over with a consistent sort of hermeneutic that I analyze in depth as a reflection of a specifically Christian, perhaps even specifically Gallic, view of the relationship between sign and signifier, a relationship of incarnation and immanence and the absolute subordination of the material world to divine will. I end the chapter by laying out the way the VPJ applies this logic to its political position in the late antique world. But first, beginning with fundamentals, I summarize the current status of scholarly views on the text’s authenticity as a product of the very early sixth century.

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AUTHENTICITY AND DATING

The author of the VPJ claims himself to be a disciple of Eugendus, the third abbot, writing shortly after his death early in the sixth century.109 However, the authenticity of the Vita patrum

Iurensium was at various points contested, beginning in the seventeenth century when Père

Pasquier Quesnel declared it a forgery on the basis that it had thirteen words that were unusual for the sixth century.110 Bruno Krusch’s edition in the MGH in 1896 repeated this argument, concluding that the text was either a total forgery or had at least suffered significant modifications by a later author.111 The process of rehabilitation started in 1934, when P. W.

Hoogterp published an extremely thorough study of the language in the Vita patrum Iurensium and concluded in favour of its authenticity.112 And in 1968, François Martine published a magisterial refutation of the remainder of Krusch’s objections, along with a new Latin edition of the text accompanied by a French translation.113 Since then the text has been treated by scholars as confirmed in its authenticity, and in 1999 an English translation was published by Tim Vivian,

Kim Vivian, and Jeffrey Burton Russell, based on Martine’s Latin edition and relying heavily on his analysis in the notes.114 In preparing the selections quoted in this chapter, I use their English translation unless otherwise noted, checking translations as necessary against the superior French translation by Martine.

109 For textual indications that the text’s author was a member of the community at the death of Eugendus, see: VPJ, c. 4, 124. 110 Pasquier Quesnel, “Dissertatio V, seu Apologia pro sancto Hilario Arelatensi episcopo et antiquis sanctae Ecclesiae Arelatensis juribus,” in Sancti Leonis Magni papae opera omnia, II, Paris 1675, p. 431–54, reproduced in PL 55, ed. Jacques Paul Migne (Paris, 1846), 430–534. 111 Bruno Krusch, “La falsification des vies de saints burgondes,” in Mélanges Julien Havet. Recueil de travaux d’érudition dédiés à la mémoire de J. Havet. (Paris, 1895), 39–56. Bruno Krusch, introduction to Vita patrum Iurensium, in MGH, SRM 3 (Hanover, 1896), 125–130. 112 P. W. Hoogterp, “Les vies des Pères de Jura. Étude sur la langue” Archivum latinitatis Medii Aevi (Bulletin Du Cange), IX (1934), 129–251. 113 Vita patrum Iurensium, Martine, 25–44, concluding: “En conclusion, aucune des nombreuses objections accumulées par Krusch contre l’authenticité de la V.P.J. ne résiste à l’examen. Tantôt les faits qu’il invoque sont manifestement faux, ou du moins très douteux ; tantôt, de faits exacts, il tire des conclusions hâtives et abusives.” 114 Russell, Vivian, and Vivian, The Life of the Jura Fathers.

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Krusch articulated several arguments against the VPJ’s authenticity. For example, he noted that the text referred to the Bishop of Besançon as “supradictae metropolis patriarcham”115 at a time when only the bishop of Lyon used the title of patriarch, and when the bishop of Besançon was not in fact a metropolitan. Martine points out that, whether or not its bishop formally held the title of metropolitan, the city of Besançon, as the chief city of Maxima Sequanorum, was certainly a metropolis.116 Moreover, Martine points out that the full context of the phrase—

Siquidem antedictus Hilarius venerabilem Caelidonium supradictae metropolis patriarcham, patricio praefectorioque fultus fauore…117—reveals this author’s consistent affection for long words and pompous turns of phrase, and that context alone is sufficient to explain the use here of the word patriarcham, which also feeds the author’s love for alliteration.118

Krusch thought that an anecdote involving Agrippinus119 seemed to have been copied from

Fredegar’s seventh-century chronicle.120 Martine remarks “C’est un étrange paradoxe de faire dériver le long épisode d’Agrippin de deux lignes de Frédégaire, d’autant que le fond de l’événement est très différent dans la V.P.J.”121 Krusch also thought that the VPJ seemed to have been copied from Gregory of Tours’ version of the story, rather than the other way around, because it offered only the same historical information as Gregory while suspiciously avoiding

115 Krusch, “La falsification des vies de saints burgondes,” 41. VPJ, c. 18. 116 Martine, Vie des pères du Jura, 1968, 41–42. 117 VPJ, c. 18. 118 Martine, Vie des pères du Jura, 1968, 42. 119 Starting at VPJ, c. 96. 120 Bruno Krusch, introduction to Vita patrum Iurensium, 129. The line from Fredegar to which Krusch refers appears to be: “Atrepennus Gallies comis et civis invedus Aegidio insignis inimicus, ut Gothorum fideretur, Narbonam tradit Theuderico.” This one brief line about an emnity between Aegidius and someone (Atrepennus) who might plausibly be identified with Agrippinus has very little to do with the story in the VPJ. Martine seems to be correct when he suggests that the multiple chapters of detailed narrative provided for this story in the VPJ cannot be reasonably rejected as a mere derivation of Fredegar’s chronicle. Fredegar, Chronicarum quae dicuntur Fredegarii Scholastici libri IV cum Continuationibus, in MGH SRM 2, ed. Bruno Krusch. (Hannover, 1888), II, 56. 121 Martine, Vie des pères du Jura, 1968, 34.

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adding more details.122 Martine addresses this acidly: “La lecture des deux auteurs suffit à anéantir cette hypothèse, sans même qu’il soit besoin, pour ce but, de recourir à la comparaison détaillée des deux textes.”123 Krusch noted moreover that the author did not appear to know even the name of the abbot who preceded Eugendus. Martine pointed out that the author clearly avoided talking about this abbot specifically because it would have undermined the tripartite nature of his literary project, and that, following Krusch’s argument, if the author had truly forged a life for Eugendus out of banalities, he could easily have done the same for a fourth abbot.124 This pattern of assertion and rebuttal characterizes how Martine addresses the remainder of Krusch’s objections.125

Martine places the date of the text’s composition at approximately the year 520, using a number of factors to reach this conclusion. Since its author claims to have composed the text shortly after the death of Eugendus, establishing that date comes first. We have a letter from

Avitus of Vienne to a Jura monk named Viventiolus offering commiserations for Eugendus’s death and suggesting that Viventiolus would soon become Bishop of Lyon.126 The Vita abbatum

Acaunensium indicates the presence of Bishop Viventiolus at the monastery’s founding in 515

CE, and the previous bishop of Lyon, Stephen, died in February of 512, placing Avitus’s letter, and therefore Eugendus’s death, between 512 and 514.127 The VPJ was addressed to the monastery at Agaune, which was founded in 515, and the tripartite Vita abbatam Acaunensium

122 “De Eugendo abbate cum Gregario destitutus praeter opera ascetica, uisiones, trita miracula nihil scire potuerit” The fact that Krusch views all the material in the text that does not meet his threshold of “historical detail” as “trita miracula” perhaps gives an indication of why hagiographic texts like this one have only recently come to be seen as worthy of substantial examination. Krusch, “La falsification des vies de saints burgondes,” 39. 123 Martine, Vie des pères du Jura, 1968, 34. 124 Martine, 33. 125 For the entirety of Martine’s refutation of Krusch, see: Martine, 13–44. 126 Avitus of Vienne, Epist. XVII, 235. 127 Alfred Coville, Recherches sur l’histoire de Lyon du Ve siècle au IXe siècle (450–800) (Paris: Picard, 1928), 308.

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(VAA) can be dated to around 523–526.128 Since the VAA seems to have been inspired by the

VPJ, that justifies Martine’s date of approximately 520 for the VPJ’s composition.129 Following his lead, we can therefore reasonably regard this text as the product of the early-sixth-century monastic community; it was a community’s account of its founders, beginning with the founding of the first monastery a generation earlier by the first abbot, Romanus, around the year 435.

CASSIAN AND THE DESERT

According to the VPJ, Romanus entered the wilderness after spending time in a monastery in

Lyon.130 That region of Gaul, roughly equivalent to the kingdom of the Burgundians, was undergoing something of a monastic upsurge, heavily influenced by the writings and ideologies of the Egyptian desert fathers imported to Gaul by figures like John Cassian in the early fifth century.131 In that context, therefore, it is not surprising to find that the VPJ (and perhaps the Jura monastic project) is, at its core, an excited Gallic response to the asceticism of the desert fathers and the ideas associated with them. The story of Romanus especially is heavily based on the Vita

Antonii, and, in case readers should miss any subtle allusions, the text makes this Egyptian orientation explicit by telling us that Romanus carried with him into the wilderness only two books: “The Life of the Holy Fathers and the admirable Institutes of the Abbots.”132 Martine notes that the first book could refer to any of a number of collections, but most likely represents a group of eastern Vitae rendered in Latin, like the Vita Antonii. Similarly, the “Institutiones” probably refer to the so-named work by John Cassian, a connection made more likely by the fact

128 Theurillat, L’Abbaye de Saint-Maurice d’Agaune : des origines à la réforme canoniale : 515–830, 41–42. 129 Martine, Vie des pères du Jura, 1968, 53–57. 130 VPJ, c. 11. 131 Martine places this text “sans doute” in the tradition of eastern monasticism, transmitted via Lérins and the monasteries at Lyon where Romanus spent his youth. Martine, Vie des pères du Jura, 1968, 86. 132 “librum Vitae sanctorum Patrum eximiasque Institutiones Abbatum” VPJ, c. 11.

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that the bishop of Lyon at the time of Romanus’s departure into the wilderness was the same

Eucherius who had been one of the recipients addressed in Cassian’s Conferences.133 The VPJ draws heavily upon the ascetic tradition of the Christian east, rhetorically and exegetically implicating their own landscape within that tradition, and using that as a basis to articulate a comprehensible early Christian perspective on sensory relations with the material world and the discipline of the self in relation to that sensory world.

The VPJ describes the attempts of Gallic monks to replicate the legendary exploits of the desert fathers and monks in the east. This was almost certainly connected to the popularity from the early fifth century of the writings of John Cassian, who was instrumental in transplanting eremitic monasticism into Gaul, as well as the impact of popular texts like the Vita Antonii of

Athanasius and the Historia Eremitica of Rufinus of Aquileia.134 One of the most important manifestations of this mimicry was the attempt to syncretize the Egyptian desert with the Jura

Mountains.135 The Jura hagiographer writes of Romanus: “enticed by the solitudes of the desert, with his mother, sister, and brother left behind, he entered the Jura woods near to his villa”136 and

“in the aforementioned place for a long time the imitator of ancient Antony enjoyed the angelic life.”137 Here and throughout the text, the word eremus (heremus)—translated as "wilderness" by

Vivian, Vivian, and Russell —is used to describe the Jura region, reinforcing the implicit connection between those mountains and the Egyptian desert.138

That the Egyptian desert should be the formative model for Gallic asceticism is not, of course, surprising. James Goehring has given some attention to the immense power that the

133 Martine, 252–253, n.1. 134 Vivian, Vivian, and Russell, 73–79. 135 “L’emploi du mot eremus (sans détermination géographique) facilite le rapprochement entre la vocation de saint Romain et celle des Pères du désert.” Martine, Vie des pères du Jura, 1968, 244 n.3. 136 “secretis heremi delectatus, relicta quoque matre, sorore, uel fratre, uicinas uillae Iurensium siluas intrauit.” 137 “in supradicto loco multo iam tempore prisci imitator Antonii uita frueretur angelica.” VPJ, c. 5. 138 Vivian, Vivian, and Russell, note 45 on page 107.

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image of the desert exerted over early Christian thought and particularly over the formation of early ascetic monasticism, describing how the myth of the desert “developed as a deeper and broader conception that captivated the late antique mind.”139 In his brief treatment of the Jura text, Goehring concludes: “In this text, the term ‘desert’ has simply become a cipher for separation from the world. The ideological power of the myth has developed so as to impose itself on and take power from any form of physical withdrawal.”140 And while this seems to be self-evidently true, I think something more can yet be said, undercutting Goehring’s use of the adverb “simply” to describe the ideological operation of the desert myth in the VPJ.

Grafting the western landscape into the cosmology of Christian thought was an ongoing project for contemporary thinkers in the western successor states. Robert Markus significantly describes the process of the Christianization of the old Roman Empire in terms of a colonialization of both time and geography. He says:

A wealth of learning had been deployed by Christian chronographers and chroniclers to establish synchronisms between their own history and the history of the various kingdoms or nations of Antiquity. In that way they could relate their own sacred time-scheme to the chronologies of the world around. An analogous task had to be carried out for geography. [...] Christians needed to take imaginative possession of it: to annex its space.141

It is precisely this process which is at work, as I argue here and at several other points in this chapter, in the VPJ’s construction of the Jura Mountains in Gaul as, at least in the way it related to monastic separation from the world, identical to the Egyptian desert.142

139 James E. Goehring, “The Dark Side of Landscape: Ideology and Power in the Christian Myth of the Desert,” The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism, and Historiography, ed. Dale B. Martin and Patricia Cox Miller (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 138. 140 Goehring, 145. 141 Robert Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 142. 142 Jennifer Harris also discusses this concept when she writes: “Universal historiography allowed the newly established church to insert itself into a model of history shaped by the Bible and the Roman Empire.” Harris, “The Bible and the Meaning of History in the Middle Ages,” 88.

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Establishing an analogical relationship between the Jura Mountains and the Egyptian desert did more than cloak the Jura abbots in the mythic aura of the desert fathers, though it certainly did that. It also emphatically added a distinctly Christian character to the Gallic countryside, by eliding the geographic distinction between the Jura Mountains—which up to this point had absolutely nothing to do with Christian history—and the Egyptian desert, which at that time was central to the conception of what constituted Christian identity and power. Just as the figure of the saint himself can collapse the distinction between himself and his typological antecedents— as, indeed, the distinction between Romanus and Antony was elided almost immediately—so here is the very landscape of Gaul entering into a typological relationship with a more established sacred archetype, partaking in the holiness of the desert to the extent that it successfully begins to share its identity with that desert. This typological mode of conceptualizing materiality is a conceptual framework that is massively important for the VPJ.

TYPICIS RELICTIS AND SATIETATE VERBI – SIGNS AND REPRESENTATION

With the turn to looking at typology, we are really arriving at the heart of the matter with which this chapter is concerned, and so, for the sake of clarity, I am going to briefly step back and frame the argument that follows.

The central claim of this thesis is that, in these hagiographical texts, we can observe communities framing or reframing the fundamental terms of their existence with reference to a specifically Christian view of history and the world, and this process is a) concerned with negotiating the relationship between the visible material world and the invisible spiritual world; and b) operating in these texts and their field of discourse more generally via a quasi-exegetical hermeneutic of allegory, typology, and anagogy.

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We have now started to discuss how the Jura monks framed their foundation narrative in a typological relationship to Antony and the desert fathers. To proceed further along these lines, we need to mobilize some of our theoretical apparatus in order to effectively describe exactly how typology is working in the VPJ. The monks are clearly considering themselves—including their bodies, their practices, their location, their history, their authority, etc. —as operating with typological reference to the divine. But how exactly is that relationship being conceived? To frame the question in semiotic terms: do the monks view themselves, inclusive of all the above- listed things, as signs pointing toward the divine? Or do they see themselves, because of the extent to which they have successfully matched divine patterns, to have become embodiements of the divine?

Neither answer seems quite right, of course. In this section, I hope to demonstrate that the typological mode active in the VPJ more or less matches Caroline Walker Bynum’s idea of representation.143 Everything material in the Jura setting becomes a sort of fetish object historicised with reference to a key historical moment of divine immanence, thereby accruing to itself the value and virtus of that divine moment, and this logic fundamentally becomes the justifying, legitimating basis for what the Jura monastic community believes about itself.

To really understand the way that the VPJ understands the material world, therefore, we need to spend some time on its attitudes toward representation, allegory, and typology. When the

VPJ thinks of the relationship between the divine and the material world, it does so in semiotic, representational terms: visible things connect to invisible things just as words connect to the

143 The relationship of the holy object to its referent is not depiction “in the sense of having similitude to,” but rather representation, “in the sense of making present.” Bynum, “The Sacrality of Things: An Inquiry into Divine Materiality in the Christian Middle Ages,” 8; Another way to phrase it, borrowing Miller’s language, is that the material features of the Jura community “are epiphanies of transfiguration that occupy a signifying space between transcendence and immanence. This is the premise of hagiography’s version of figural realism.” Miller, “Visceral Seeing,” 411.

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concepts they signify. But in the structure of that relationship, it is the invisible, spiritual thing whose reality has precedence, while the reality of the tangible sign is secondary and derivative.

In other words, the sensible features of the material world are (or can be) derivative emanations of divine reality, to the extent that the formal qualities of such representational things, whether they be beautiful and pleasant or ugly and bitter, often are dismissed in importance relative to the object’s representational qualities. The text’s consideration of representation often reflects this explicit denigration of aesthetics (broadly construed as the sensual pleasure/displeasure of encountering the representation object) and is relatively consistent, both internally and within the context of the monastic tradition in which it was situated.144 This can be clearly seen in its own self-reflective consideration of itself—after all, the VPJ is a representational object that connects the reader/listener to the past and to the divine—and its value relative to the value of the spiritual things which it points toward.

The VPJ sometimes seems to denigrate the experience of reading it compared to the experience of encountering the things it describes. Encouraging readers to visit Romanus’s tomb, the text asserts that “each person gains more belief from what he sees than he does from the things he reads and perhaps doubts.”145 Introducing the Life of Eugendus, we get a famous quotation from the Life of Martin where our hagiographer addresses his audience as “the disciples not of orators but of fishermen”, and then expands that to mean, “you look for the kingdom of God ‘not in philosophic language but in virtue’, and prefer to beseech the Lord

144 Columba Stewart presents a careful study of the relationship between truth and representational knowledge for Cassian, discussing especially Cassian’s engagement with the problem of the anthropomorphite heresy which was unable to properly read Biblical passages implying that God had a physical body, such as the theme that man was made in God’s image, as passages whose truth derives from their revelation of spiritual principles through allegory, not from the blasphemous idea that God actually had a physical body. Columba Stewart, Cassian the Monk (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 86–93. 145 “pro fide uel meritis expetentum plus uidet quisque quod credat quam legat fortasse quod dubitet.” VPJ, c. 41. Martine is probably correct when he suggests that this is also a discreet invitation for pilgrims to come visit the tomb of Romanus for themselves. Martine, 285, n. 3.

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through a pure and continuous observance rather than through a foolish and perishable eloquence.”146 And in explaining how he himself had encountered miracles associated with a relic of Lupicinus, our hagiographer tells us “none of the good deeds of that man will remain silent, since whatever words cannot spell out, deeds proclaim.”147 These passages reflect a denigration of the aesthetic status of the written or spoken word compared to pious observance and information derived directly from the bodily senses, a tricky position to take in the context of presenting a written Vita.148

This viewpoint is echoed in other places within the VPJ, where other pleasant qualities of experience—especially the sweetness or richness of food—are problematized with respect to inner contemplative discipline directed toward the ultimate reality of the divine. And yet the text preserves the idea that the divine might manifest itself as a material reality by means of a representational relationship, even a textual relationship, not because of the action of the text in pointing toward the divine but because of the action of the divine in manifesting through the text.

Later anecdotes describe the use of small scraps of written text as amulets for miracle-working, and a letter written by Eugendus operates as a divine relic performing miracles.149 These are signals of a more complex understanding of textual representation than might at first be

146 “Porro nos, ut praefati iam sumus, uobis proprie opuscula ista dicauimus, quos nouimus non oratorum, sed piscatorum esse discipulos, nec in philosophia sermonis regnum Dei, sed in uirtute prospicere, magisque pura ac iugi obseruantia Dominum exorare quam uana perituraque facundia perorare.” VPJ, c. 119. For a list of other sources that use the contrast of orators and fishermen see Martine, 367, n. 1. The language about the kingdom of God derives from 1 Corinthians 4:20. 147 “Coniciat igitur quisquis de meritis uiri nihil taceri, cum, quod uerba non explicant, facta conclamant.” VPJ, c. 78. 148 Douglas Burton-Christie attributes a fundamental ambivalence toward words to the Desert Fathers. Burton- Christie, The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest of Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism, 136–43. 149 The topic of ancient textual amulets is one that has received an enormous amount of scholarly attention. A new volume of essays on the topic provides an extremely comprehensive look at the history and dynamics of the practice. Dietrich Boschung and Jan N. Bremmer, eds., The Materiality of Magic (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2015). VPJ, c. 169–170.

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presumed, but the precise understanding of this dynamic is most clearly expressed in a story concerning bread that occurs midway through the VPJ.

In the Vita of Lupicinus, we are told of a famine that threatened the lives of everyone who lived at the monastery. The story follows the pattern of the Old Testament story of the prophet

Elijah causing a widow’s meagre supply of flour and oil to never run out during the course of a famine, with Lupicinus miraculously extending fifteen days’ worth of grain to last a three-month period. But the text takes the opportunity to play with the relationship between the absent literal bread and the spiritual “bread of life” image from the Gospel of John. Upon being told of the lack of food, Lupicinus “lifted up his soul and the eyes of his heart to the living bread that came down from heaven”150 and instructed the brothers that they had followed their saviour into the desert just as the crowd had followed Jesus away from the city before he performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes to feed them. The image of the “bread of life” emerges from the Biblical passage following that miracle where Jesus explains to the disciples that they should seek not physical material bread but the spiritual bread of life — that is, himself.151 Already this is interesting because of the play between the concepts of material bread and spiritual bread, but what follows is even more provocative.

Upon his entrance into the granary, we are told that Lupicinus prayed:

Almighty God, through your servant Elijah you allegorically promised the widow that neither the jug of flour nor the jar of oil would diminish until the rains came. This church, having left behind the need for symbols, is defended by Jesus Christ your Son, the eternal bridegroom. Just as it is filled with the Word, in the same way revive it by filling it up with bread.152

150 “animum cordisque oculos ad Panem illum uiuum qui de caelo descendit adtollens” VPJ, c. 68. 151 John 6:25–35. 152 “Omnipotens Domine, qui per famulum tuum Heliam nec hydriam farinae nec uas olei usque in diem pluuiae uiduae quondam mysticae inminui promisisti, tu hanc ecclesiam quae, iam relictis typicis, Iesu Christo, filio tuo, sponso perenni, defenditur, sicut satietate uerbi, ita saturitate refice panis.” VPJ, c. 69.

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And the granary was then filled up for three months. Here we come again to the text’s strange relationship to representation. We are told that the story of Elijah and the widow was allegorical through the use of the adverb mystice, and then we are told that that modern Christians do not need such symbols — iam relictis typicis. And yet, awkwardly, Lupicinus is not asking for spiritual bread. He is asking for actual bread. So has his church actually left behind the need for signs?

We can see easily enough where this disjunction comes from. The exegetical habit of contemporary Christian readers of the Old Testament was to read all such events as corporeal or literal symbols communicating the spiritual truth of Christianity: in this case, that God would give his followers an unperishing source of nourishment. After the incarnation of Christ and the revelation of Christian truth, these symbols were replaced by the reality—Christ. (This is more or less the very message communicated in the bread anecdote from the Gospel of John, where Jesus contrasts the bread from the story of Moses with the spiritual bread that is himself.) In this sense,

Vivian et al.’s translation of mystice as “allegorically”153 is less accurate than Martine’s choice to render it in French as “par préfiguration.”154

It is tempting to say then that this hagiographer somewhat ambivalently enjoys the rhetorical position, borrowed from Christian readings of the Old Testament, of having rejected the need for material objects to symbolize spiritual truths, while at the same time he actually is deeply interested in the symbolic status of material objects and the typicis are by no means completely relictis (especially considering the wild abandon with which the text deploys its metaphors).

Why otherwise, in fact, would this Vita be using an anecdote about a miraculous supply of literal material bread to make a statement about spiritual bread, especially when that miracle is an

153 Russell, Vivian, and Vivian, The Life of the Jura Fathers, 136. 154 Martine, Vie des pères du Jura, 1968, 315.

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explicit repetition of an Old Testament prefiguration the need for which we have supposedly

“left behind”? And yet I want to suggest that what we are seeing is not a rejection of signification but rather a reformulation of its function.

This sort of ambiguity is not unique to this text and I am not the first to notice its presence in

Christian thinking of this period. One of the most useful framings of the situation was expressed by Frances Young, who adopted the ideas of literary critic Northrup Frye’s book The Great

Code: The Bible and Literature for application to the exegesis of the early Middle Ages.155 She borrows his conception of linguistic phases, focusing in particular on the first two: the

“metaphoric phase, in which ‘this is that’, where language has mana, power, where the name is presence, the word evokes the thing” and the “metonymic phase in which ‘this stands for that’, a phase which spawns commentary and deduction, where metaphor is recognised as a figure of speech.” Adjusting his reading for her study of Athanasius and Gregory of Nyssa, she suggests the existence of an anti-Arian approach residing somewhere between the two:

Language, in the case of God, has to be distinguished from its referent whose Being transcends linguistic capacities: we are no longer in phase 1. But language is more than merely metaphorical, more than simply analogy. It is the sacramental vehicle of truth, permitting the expression of eternal Being in temporal narrative presence.156

This has remarkable resonances with the position reflected by the VPJ’s approach to representation.

It is clear that our hagiographer does not reject the allegorical relationship between physical bread and the bread of life, since that relationship is the core point of this anecdote. In that sense we are in Frye’s metonymic phase, where physical bread stands for spiritual bread. And yet what seems to be rejected is the need for a miraculous supply of bread to teach the monks about the

155 Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, Modern Classics (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2007). 156 Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture, 144–45.

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bread of life. The monks already have the bread of life! “This” may stand for “that”, to borrow

Frye’s terminology, but the monks have a prior apprehension of “that” already, so they have transcended the need for signs—typicis relictis. What they are doing is in fact the reverse of using physical bread to symbolize spiritual bread. They are using the spiritual bread that they already have to create the physical bread that they need—”Just as [this church] is filled with the

Word, in the same way revive it by filling it up with bread.”157 They have satietate uerbi158 and are seeking saturitate panis.159 There remains a connection between the physical bread and the spiritual principle of salvation, but it is not one where the bread is there to teach them the principle. Rather, because they have the principle, their experience in the material world conforms to the pattern of that principle.160

157 “ sicut satietate uerbi, ita saturitate refice panis.” VPJ, c. 69. 158 The idea of monks being “full of the word” echoes Isabelle Cochelin’s discussion of the relationship between early Christian monks and scripture, where ritualized performances of scriptural principles formed a significant part of the monastic life, so that the monks’ union with the word was constantly animating their embodied practice: “...the main reason for these rituals was not so much to educate the population as to enable the laity and monks to relive the events that had taken place in the first century. In order to do so, monks made themselves into Biblical figures and their church into Jerusalem.” Isabelle Cochelin, “When Monks Were the Book: The Bible and Monasticism (6th–11th Centuries),” in The Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages: Production, Reception, and Performance in Western Christianity, ed. Susan Boynton and Diane J. Reilly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 70. 159 Burton-Christie explores a possibly related concept in the writings of the Desert Fathers, who felt that their asceticism restored them to an Adamic state of paradise wherein they had dominion over their surroundings just as all things in the garden were accommodating to Adam. Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert : Scripture and the Quest of Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism, 231–33. 160 Olga Solovieva’s adaptation of performance theory to the practice of exegesis, rooted in the anthropological study of ritual, is deeply resonant with this line of thinking. Describing the exegetical thought of Gregory of Nyssa, she adapts foundational studies of ritual performance by Edward Schieffelin, Stanley Tambiah, Richard Schechner, and Ronald Grimes to suggest that via the active practice of exegesis, of which this scene surely is an example, "people reach fundamental symbolic understanding or arrive at the solutions to their problems not as knowers intellectually appropriating the imparted meanings, but as participants in the performative reality so vivid that it “may spill over into everyday life.” The distinctive function and efficacy of performance, then, is located in its ability to bring about the fundamental reorientation or transformation—of self-perception, social situation, and the symbolic universe. Even more importantly, these transformations and redefinitions are achieved not through any cognitive means (such as an argument or explanation), but through a performative construction of particular 'situations” affording their participants an experience of the alternative realities and selves." Olga Solovieva, “Spiritual Exegesis as an Ascetic Performance in Gregory of Nyssa,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 23, no. 4 (2015): 554–55; Edward L. Schieffelin, “Performance and the Cultural Construction of Reality,” American Ethnologist 12, no. 4 (1985): 721; S.J. Tambiah, A Performative Approach to Ritual (Oxford University Press, 1979); R. Schechner, Essays on Performance Theory, 1970-1976 (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1977), 120– 24; R.L. Grimes, Beginnings in Ritual Studies, Studies in Comparative Religion (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), 62–66.

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And this logic appears elsewhere in the text as well. We are told that Eugendus was given to the monastery as a child in the model of the Old Testament prophet Samuel, but “not to keep watch in a figurative temple, but rather to become a temple of Christ.”161 The implications of this dichotomy are almost exactly the same as the one from the previous anecdote, heavily informed by the Christian tradition of interpreting Old Testament events—like the donation of Samuel to the temple as a child—as mere allegories in contrast to the revealed truth possessed by

Christians. For the monks of Jura, their apprehension of allegory is not that the material events of their lives indicate divine truth but rather that divine truth suffuses and structures their lives.

Eugendus does not need a temple to symbolize the divine to him. Because he is full of the divine, he is himself the temple.

This mode of representation goes beyond mere allegory to evoke Young’s model of an anti-

Arian position on language; it is more complicated than either “this stands for that” or “this is that,” but is some sort of fusion of the two. In a text that makes heavy use of allegory to characterize the material surroundings of the Jura monasteries, this special understanding of representation is important. We are detecting here a means by which a visible, sensible thing becomes connected to, representative of, and somehow coincident with the invisible divine. I want to suggest that we are here in the presence of anagogy, the hermeneutic of transcendence, and that, moreover, an anagogical relationship between the material and the divine is, in this text, repeatedly established by use of a device that we might call the coincidentia oppositorum.

COINCIDENTIA OPPOSITORUM

161 “non in typico excubaturus, sed ipse potius Christi efficiendus templum.” VPJ, c. 125.

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The VPJ makes frequent use of the dialectical form. That is, it presents two things that oppose one another, a thesis and an antithesis, and then resolves them in a synthesis. When two opposite things become reconciled in one synthesis, that synthesis, by virtue of the paradoxical implication of its nature, becomes inflected with the aura of transcendence; by negating mundane boundaries, it suggests the possibility of a transmundane world.

This model of dialectical synthesis is the primary mode of the Platonic dialogues, wherein

Socrates confronts an opponent, they refine their views against one another, and the result is some sort of higher insight.162 It was picked up in the neo-Platonism of some of the Church fathers, as Ilaria Ramelli explores, and they considered the question in terms of arkhē and telos

(beginning and end) achieving a unity in homonoia, harmony.163 In a discussion that resonates with the dynamics of the VPJ, Susan Wessel explores how Gregory of Nyssa used the device of dialectic, concluding: “Gregory envisioned philosophical dialogue as a process by which the truth gradually emerged through continual discussion and revision. Because of its inherent fluidity, the dialogue was embraced by Gregory as a literary vehicle suitable for transforming apparent contradictions into paradoxical and meaningful tensions.”164 In the VPJ, the presence of a dialectical habit of mind may represent the influence of a classical education on the text— reminiscent perhaps of Gregory the Great, whose Dialogues also take the form of a Socratic

162 For a good discussion of how the dialogue form works in Plato, including a discussion of how the interplay between Socrates and his opponent was not supposed to convince a reader that Socrates was right but rather through the errors and insights of both figures point the reader to experiencing their own sublime insight, see: Kenneth Seeskin, “Socratic Philosophy and the Dialogue Form,” Philosophy and Literature 8, no. 2 (October 1984), 181–94; For a discussion of the relationship between Socratic dialogues and the well-known Hegelian concept of dialectic, see: Igor Mikecin, “Hegel’s presentation of Plato’s Philosophy in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy,” Synthesis Philosophica 27, no. 2 (2012), 323–36. 163 Ilaria Ramelli, The Stoic Doctrine of Oikeiosis and Its Transformation in Christian Platonism, vol. 47, 2014. 164 Susan Wessel, “Memory and Individuality in Gregory of Nyssa’s Dialogus de anima et resurrectione,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 18, no. 3 (2010), 391.

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exchange—though, if so, it is not proclaimed. This dialectic approach is core to the text’s vision of the monastic project and the basic worldview it advances.

Instances of a thesis producing its antithesis abound even beyond those that are resolved in a synthesis.165 We are told that the Devil attacks the monks by “producing adversity from prosperity.”166 The ruins of a destroyed pagan temple at Isarnadorum allow the sight of the vault of heaven, the home of Christians.167 At one point Romanus lists off a number of stories from scripture and local monks where someone went instantly from one extreme to the opposite, as in the conversion of Saul to Paul, the story of the church elders Ananias and Saphira being struck dead by God in their church, the prodigal son becoming generous, the thief on the cross who was redeemed in his dying moment,168 and a local monk named Maxentius who went from being a model of devotion to being possessed by demons.169 Just as the idea of light creates the idea of darkness and the idea of good creates the idea of evil, the logic of binaries bringing each other into existence is active in this text.

While such binaries are common, the more interesting feature of the text is its instinct to have the poles of its binaries fuse into a synthesis, a resolution of opposites that is read into the very landscape of the Jura monasteries. The landscape is described as sharp mountains and valleys, with the specific location of the monastery introduced as where “the natural steepness lessened and settled into a small plain. Since two streams which by nature ran separately came

165 Martine lists “antithesis” among the literary devices used by the hagiographer. Martine, Vie des pères du Jura, 1968, 119. 166 “de prosperis aduersa producens” VPJ, c. 35. 167 VPJ, c. 120. 168 VPJ, c. 31. 169 VPJ, c. 32. Martine suggests that this is a rejection of Augustinian predestination. Benedict Guevin agrees that the conversation clearly seems to be about predestination, which was a live issue in Romanus’s so-called semi- Pelagian circles at the time, but based on this text we can not definitively attribute a pro or anti Augustinian position to Romanus. Martine, Vie des pères du Jura, 1968, 270–71, n. 4; Benedict M. Guevin, “The Jura Fathers’ Rejection of Late Augustinian Predestination,” in Il monachesimo tra eredità e aperture, ed. Maciej Bielawski and Daniël Homergen, Studia Anselmiana 140 (Rome: Pontificio ateneo S. Anselmo, 2004), 530–32.

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together there, the people soon gave the place the name ‘Condadisco’ because the streams had already become one.”170 By making this idea of fusion into the etymological foundation of the monastery’s very name, the text is indicating the centrality to a specific conception of the Jura location as a space. When he picked a spot to settle, Romanus “moved no further into the wilderness, nor did he retreat towards civilization,”171 and he first sat there beneath a tree that sheltered him “against the burning heat of summer and the freezing rains of winter, producing a truly perpetual spring.”172 Elsewhere, the image of the physical monastery existing in a balance between extremes is repeated: “suspended as the place was in the hills and declivities, between overhanging cliffs and rocky ground.”173 This sets up the reconciliation of opposing extremes as the theme of the Jura monastic project. Not only was the first monastery set into a level area amidst sharp cliffs, but it was described as being perfectly positioned between the two extremes of wilderness and city, winter and summer, and moreover it took its very name from the image of two separate streams merging together into one.

This principle of reconciling opposites as the foundation of Jura monasticism is explicitly applied to the practices of monastic discipline. At one point in the Vita of Lupicinus, we are told of a monk who practiced such excessive austerity that his body ended up twisted and paralyzed.

Lupicinus carefully worked with the man and healed him, not miraculously but by setting a good example and undertaking what looks like slow, progressive steps of physical therapy. The text ends the anecdote by telling us its moral interpretation as a condemnation of both extreme

170 “Quas repperit tandem ulterius inter saxosa conuallia culturae patulum locum, qui, altrinsecus triiugi montium paululum ardua secedente natura, in planitiem aliquantulum relaxatur. Illic namque bifida fluuiorum in solidum concurrente natura, mox etiam ab unitate elementi iam conditi Condadiscone loco uulgus indidit nomen.” VPJ c. 6. 171 “non scilicet ultra promouens gressum, non citra referens pedem.” VPJ c. 10. The specificity of “civilization” and “wilderness” are supplied by Vivian et al, but the Latin “ultra” and “citra” simply imply “nearer” and “further.” Martine’s French translation holds closer to the Latin. 172 “arbor a feruore aestuum uel frigore imbrium, tamquam uere meritorum gratia uernans, praebuit iugiter tecta uirentia.” VPJ, c. 8. 173 “Siquidem cultura loci ipsius pendula collibus uel adclinis inter eminentes scopulos uel aceruos” VPJ, c. 22.

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asceticism and extreme indulgence: “Thus by means of a clear and divine example, Lupicinus clearly taught that no one, once he has embraced the monastic precepts, ought to walk along the heights to the right nor along the slopes to the left, but ought to undertake the middle course of monastic discipline that is the ‘royal path.’”174 The concept of the “royal path” of monastic moderation is not original to this text, but its application here is significant in the context of the

VPJ’s larger rhetorical project.175 The Jura monks are taught to avoid extremes, to follow a lifestyle of moderation.

We should particularly note the image deployed to describe the discipline of a Jura monk: no one “ought to walk along the heights to the right nor along the slopes to the left.”176 These heights and slopes sharply evoke the imagery of the mountainous landscape from the opening descriptions in the Vita of Romanus, and therefore the surroundings of contemporary Jura monks in the Vita’s audience. The physical location of their monastery, a small, level plain between steep slopes, becomes an image of the lifestyle that they should pursue, so that their surroundings become a manifestation of the same divine principle around which their monastic discipline is structured. Since monastic discipline is an attempt to interact with God, this principle of synthesis must be understood as a spiritual one, a way for the material world to address the spiritual world—just as Romanus’s tree “owing to the merits of the saint enjoyed a truly perpetual spring.”177 Thus for this text, the Jura landscape itself, in all the different ways that it reconciles opposites, represents or embodies a logic of reaching toward divinity.178

174 “Itaque perspicuo diuinoque exemplo perdocuit neminem in arrepto proposito ardua dextrae aut procliuia laeuae sed mediam uiae regiae debere incedere disciplinam.” VPJ, c. 77. 175 For more on this topic, see: Jean Leclercq, “La voie royale,” Supplément de la vie spirituelle, no. 7 (1948), 338– 52. 176 VPJ, c. 77. 177 VPJ, c. 8. 178 It must be noted that sometimes the text’s resolution of the binaries is to find a place of moderation and balance in between the poles, as the monastery is situated in the space between the depths and the heights, while at other times it seems to be a synthesis that fully incorporates both extremes in the final resolution.

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We have not yet touched the most important example of this logic of synthesis, however, one which has significance for the status of the text itself: the abbots. The VPJ is tripartite, with one section for each of the three saintly abbots, and those abbots are presented following the pattern of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The text consistently frames the first two abbots, the brothers Romanus and Lupicinus, as opposites. Shortly after the section describing Lupicinus’s arrival at Romanus’s foundation, the VPJ devotes a whole chapter to contrasting them against one another. It tells us that Romanus was loving and tranquil, while Lupicinus was severe and disciplined, and that Lupicinus gave harsh punishments while Romanus was quick to forgive.179

The synthesis that emerges from the two is complex and manifests in multiple places.

The first suggestion of synthesis can be detected just by looking at the Vitae of Romanus and

Lupicinus alone. They embody different monastic virtues, each vital for the success of the monastery. In a period of abundance, some monks from Romanus’s monastery became gluttonous. He was unable to control them, so he asked for his brother’s help: “Romanus, whose staff was truly gentle and easy, had to seek out the rod of his brother’s severity.”180 Lupicinus made a visit to his brother’s monastery, asked the monks to prepare sparse and tasteless meals while he was there, and then announced that he enjoyed the meals so much he would switch monasteries with his brother and maintain the menu that way permanently. The gluttonous monks were so horrified that they fled the monastery, and, pleased with the success of his prank,

Lupicinus returned home and Romanus returned his monastery’s menu to normal.181 Here already we see the suggestion of a synthesis, with the two brothers acting together to guide the monks with both mercy and severity where appropriate. Another example can be found in the

179 VPJ, c. 17. 180 “ipse blandusque baculus necessario uirgam fraternae seueritatis expetiit.” VPJ, c. 36. 181 VPJ, c. 38–40.

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previously related story from the Vita of Lupicinus where the abbot has to show compassion and care to a monk who harmed himself with excessive severity. Both of these examples will be discussed later at greater length, but further examples remain.

By far the most explicit presentation of a synthesis between Romanus and Lupicinus appears in the form of the VPJ’s third abbot, Eugendus, the most recent of the fathers and evidently the favourite of the hagiographer. We are explicitly told that “in him a twofold abundance of graces belonging to the blessed abbots who had spiritually led him flowed together; the next generation wavered in its judgement, uncertain whether in Eugendus they saw Lupicinus or Romanus.”182 It does not take the application of much deep interpretation to see here that Eugendus is being represented as the synthesis of Romanus and Lupicinus, the balanced path between their extremes of mercy and severity, or to notice that the language used of the first two abbots flowing together into Eugendus recalls the description of the rivers for which Condadisco was supposedly named, the two rivers that flowed together and became one.183

Eugendus is frequently presented as possessing a dual nature, both severe and merciful. We see examples of this when we are told that he was generous toward monks that were suffering but severe toward those that were simply lazy.184 When the text relates “never was he puffed up by praise [...] never did blame break his spirit”185 we are clearly seeing an example of the moderate middle way of earlier chapters. We are told that “Moreover, he possessed a great joy on his face, without doubt because of the one shining within him; for just as no one ever saw him

182 “In quo uere ita beatorum abbatum, qui eum in spiritu de incolatu terrestri eduxerant, gratiarum gemina confluxit ubertas ut succedua quoque posteritas, utrum in Eugendo Lupicinum potius suspiceret an Romanum, iudicio fluctuaret incerto.” VPJ, c. 125. 183 Martine approaches a similar conclusion when he writes: “Du point de vue littéraire, ce désir de glorifier saint Oyend tout en reconnaissant l’éminente sainteté des deux fondateurs, nous a valu le beau triptyque dont nous venons d’analyser à la fois l’unité et la diversité.” The idea of unity in diversity is also the way that Martine more broadly characterizes the literary style of the text. Martine, Vie des pères du Jura, 1968, 112. 184 VPJ, c. 150. 185 “Nunquam laudatus ac beatifactus inflatus est; nunquam uituperatus fractus est aut tristatus.” VPJ, c. 168.

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sad, similarly no one ever spied him laughing”,186 and it should remind us of the earlier passage from the Vita of Romanus where the saint experienced neither the heat of summer nor the cold of winter but rested in a divine and eternal spring.187 Eugendus’s illuminating inner joy is the equivalent of the perpetual spring, each a sublime transcendence brought about by a reconciliation of diametrically opposed extremes.

In this way, then, the text itself becomes a model of the spiritual process it idealizes. Its structure is to present one extreme, the compassion of Romanus, followed by another extreme, the severity of Lupicinus, and then to resolve this tension with a synthesis position: the sublime joy of Eugendus. Some scholars have suggested that Romanus, who first set out into the wilderness alone, represents the hermetic ideal of the retreat from civilization, while Lupicinus represents the disciplined living of a coenobitic community, and presenting them both as monastic founders in this way allows the Jura monks to incorporate both of those models into their conception of themselves.188 This is no doubt true, but I also want to suggest that the structure of the text is itself intended to take an active role in the spiritual development of its audience. Its monastic audience, steeped in the practices of divine lectio189 and the premise that the lives of the fathers were models for imitation, would empathetically model within themselves

186 “Habebat autem, nimirum habitatore inlustrante magnam et in uultu laetitiam; nam sicut illum tristem nemo unquam uidit, ita ridentem nullus adspexit.” VPJ, c. 168. 187 VPJ, c. 8. 188 Martine, Vie des pères du Jura, 1968, 91–93; Russell, Vivian, and Vivian, The Life of the Jura Fathers, 40–41. 189 The Jura monastic project was explicitly conducted in the tradition of the Desert Fathers, whose approach to scripture is well-captured by Douglas Burton-Christie: “Their desire to enter into the worlds projected by the sacred texts took on concrete shape as they confronted the particular demands and possibilities proposed by Scripture. The episodes contained in the Sayings refer again and again to the attempts by various monks to take into themselves a particular text, to make it part of their souls and their lives. Interpretation and misinterpretation of Scripture in the desert had little to do with doctrinal orthodoxy; rather, the aim of interpretation was moral purity and integrity and through this, the experience of God. Holiness for the desert fathers was expressed as personal transformation arising from the realization of Scripture within oneself. It is clear from the Sayings that the desert fathers exemplified in their own lives qualities that they absorbed from Scripture. They became ‘Christ-bearers,’ mediators of God to humanity.” Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert : Scripture and the Quest of Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism, 300.

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the extreme mercy of Romanus and the extreme discipline of Lupicinus, then seek a balance through contemplation of Eugendus, whose deep connection with the divine is emphasized in discussions of his inner spiritual life and the numerous visions he experiences in his Vita. In this way the text seeks to produce not monks who are mildly merciful and mildly disciplined, but monks who, like Eugendus, are both fully merciful and fully severe, embodying the balance of these opposing holy values, and thus achieving a sort of contact with the divine.190

Underscoring this point, there is indication within the text that all the monks, and not just

Eugendus, should see themselves as products of the combination of Romanus and Lupicinus.

The brothers Romanus and Lupicinus are, interestingly, represented as a reproductive couple, parents from whom many children are born. The metaphor is explicitly set out when Lupicinus first joins Romanus in the hills: “in that humble nest, that wilderness set apart, like ‘a pair of turtledoves or two young doves’ they would conceive spiritual offspring by the inspiration of the

Holy Word, and that these, born of a pure birth, would spread to the monasteries and churches of

Christ.”191 And when they founded the female monastery nearby, we are told “Romanus and

Lupicinus with parental love installed an abbess for virgins.”192 This imagery of Romanus and

Lupicinus engaging in parental reproduction to produce their community of monks is interesting on many levels, the most provocative of which probably fall outside the scope of this thesis, but it is significant for our present purposes in that it allows the monks of Jura to view themselves as

190 Martine says that the text describes the deeds of Romanus and Lupicinus, but, when it comes to Eugendus, the description is much more of his inner spiritual life. Though Martine has his own explanations for this, largely based on the premise that the author had more personal knowledge of Eugendus, this also serves to underscore the characterization of Eugendus as a sort of transcendent unity whose paradoxical combination of mercy and discipline elevates his life from a material to a spiritual plane. Martine, Vie des pères du Jura, 1968, 111. 191 “ut in nidulo illo, hoc est secreto heremi, tamquam par turturum uel duo pulli columbarum, spiritalem subolem, diuini scilicet Verbi inspiratione conceptam, monasteriis ecclesiisque Christi casta parturitione diffunderent.” VPJ, c. 12. The image of the two doves is adapted from the gospel of Luke in what Martine calls a “Réminiscence et curieuse transposition d’un passage.” Martine, 253, n. 2. Luke 2:24. 192 “parentali instituentes uirginum matrem.” VPJ, c. 25.

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the spiritual children of the two biological brothers, not just in the sense of being a succeeding generation in the monastery the brothers founded, but also in the sense of being a fusion between the two, taking inheritance from both, in just the same way that Eugendus is depicted as doing and that the text itself appears to be encouraging the monks to inwardly cultivate.

This pattern of synthesis, as it turns out, is surprisingly reflective of the principle that the great theorist of religious studies, Mircea Eliade, designated as coincidentia oppositorum, which he located in:

…the very nature of divinity, which shows itself, by turns or even simultaneously, benevolent and terrible, creative and destructive, solar and serpentine, and so on (in other words, actual and potential). In this sense it is fair to say that myth reveals more profoundly than any rational experience ever could, the actual structure of the divinity, which transcends all attributes and reconciles all contraries.193

He even offers a thought on how this concept might manifest in ascetic practice, in a line that could easily have been written about the VPJ:

...the ascetic, the sage, the Indian or Chinese ‘mystic,’ tries to wipe out of his experience and consciousness every sort of ‘extreme,’ to attain to a state of perfect indifference and neutrality, to become insensible to pleasure and pain, to become completely self-sufficient. This transcending of extremes through asceticism and contemplation also results in the ‘coinciding of opposites’; the consciousness of such a man knows no more conflict and such pairs of opposites as pleasure and pain, desire and repulsion, cold and heat, and agreeable and disagreeable are expunged from his awareness, while something is taking place within him which parallels the total realization of contraries within the divinity.194

Having observed how precisely this dynamic outlined by Eliade describes the Jura text, it is difficult to know exactly how to proceed. Although I embrace the use of conceptual frameworks from other disciplines in my analysis of these early medieval Vitae, I have all the historian’s innate suspicion of broad general claims about categories of phenomena as vast and varied as

‘religion’, and yet here Eliade’s description of coincidentia oppositorum seems extremely apt. I

193 Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (London: Sheed & Ward, 1993), 419. 194 Eliade, 420.

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can only conclude that the material from which he drew his conclusions, material which his writings represent as a vast swathe of mythological texts and practices from around the globe, includes conceptual elements that share some sort of common field with the Jura monks.

Whatever the case may be, his articulation goes far to encapsulate what appears to be a central impulse behind the asceticism and monastic practice of the VPJ.

To bring these different threads together—the sensory program of the Jura monks and their attitude toward distinctions, representation, and materiality—it is helpful at this point to turn to the concept of anagogy. Anagogy is the traditional fourth and final level of Christian exegesis, that which reads scripture as expressing a sublime connection to the divine as it exists at the end of time and outside the material world, described by John Cassian in his Collationes patrum in scetica eremo, a text which was certainly well known to the Jura community.195 To me, the efforts of the Jura monks to achieve a contemplative connection with the immaterial divine mirrors the practice of searching for an understanding of that immaterial divine in a passage of scripture. Steeped in a culture of monastic lectio as they were, anagogy would have been a reflexive habit of mind for these monks, and so we should not be surprised to find it inflecting their view of the world and their spiritual project.

More or less exactly in the way described by Eliade above, the reconciliation of opposites— his coincidentia oppositorum—as an internal practice, indeed as a sort of cognitive performance guided through contemplative reading of this very Vita, follows the model of anagogy. Inasmuch as the fundamental feature of the material world is its boundedness, the way that everything has a beginning and an end—a birth and a death, physical limits and borders—the spiritual world, eternal, boundless, and infinite, is its opposite. Therefore, the monastic contemplative practice of

195 Cassian, Collationes patrum in scetica eremo, 14.8.

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embodying opposites together at the same time results in a sort of negation of differentiation that results in a sublime state close to divinity, the quietus of the refined monastic soul—more on the concept of quietus to come.

As we have seen, however, the inner contemplative life is only one place in which we find this anagogical reconciliation of opposites, whether through the achievement of a moderate position between extremes or through a merging of the extremes. We have also seen it inscribed into the very landscape, made a feature of the cliffs and valleys, and in the monks’ bodily practices of asceticism as well as their corporate identity as the offspring of the extremes of

Romanus and Lupicinus. This has significant consequences for the VPJ’s conception of the status of the monastery as a physical place and the monks as a social community. Both are characterized by the collapsing of boundaries, not only along geographic but also along temporal and hierarchic lines.

This is the conceptual context for the VPJ view of the relationship to the material world: anagogical coincidentia oppositorum that connects the landscape of the monastery, the community of the monks, the lives of the fathers, and the sweep of human history all to each other and to the divine. Having laid out that context, we can now turn to three concrete social arenas that appear to have been structured by this understanding of materiality: the community’s understanding of itself as a composite, collective entity; the community’s internal practices of bodily discipline; and the community’s political relationship to the outside world.

THE MONASTIC COMMUNITY

Because the social and material world of the monks is implicated in their anagogical relationship to the divine, it takes on qualities of the divine. The VPJ makes this dynamic quite explicit with

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yet another vision, wherein Eugendus as a child is taken up by the spirits of Lupicinus and

Romanus, joined with a crowd of others, and shown:

…something like a vast doorway thrown open in the heavenly heights. On a gentle slope leading down to him from the summit of heaven, in the form of an inclining stairway of sloping crystal and accompanied by light, he saw angelic choirs, effulgent and snowy white, dancing and praising Christ, coming toward him and his companions. In spite of the ever- growing congregation in that place, not one of them, thoroughly terrified with the awe of the Divinity, uttered a word or moved a muscle. Slowly and carefully the angelic multitude mixed in with the mortals; the angels, singing harmoniously together, gathered and joined the earthly beings to themselves, and then ascended as they had come, returning to the holy places of heaven.196

The image here is more or less that of Jacob’s ladder, and the allegorical reading of the vision is clear, because it mirrors the story of the Vita itself: Romanus and Lupicinus go to a place, mystically bringing Eugendus between them, and are joined by a throng of others, surely the Jura monks. Where they have gathered, a connection with heaven forms, and the utterly motionless crowd of mortals is joined by and unified with a descending crowd of angels. The earthly is joined to the sublime, and then, presumably still joined, the angels return to heaven. This is a direct claim about the status of the Jura community and the place where they gather, about the mingling of their earthly nature with the celestial nature of the divine.197

Since, for this text, divine activity is often characterized by the collapsing of boundaries—

Condadisco was even named for a spot where two streams flowed together into one—it should not surprise us to find that the community of monks is consistently described as united without distinction between individuals. This monastic unity through shared contact with divinity is

196 “Et subito a parte prospicua uidet instar amplissimae portae culmina patefacta caelestia, et lento etiam deductoque ad se usque e caeli uertice cum lumine cliuo, in modum reclinis scalae crustalenta procliuitate descensum, et niueos fulgidosque angelicos choros ad se usque uel socios tripudiantes in Christi laudibus aduentare, ita tamen quod, crescente semper in loco societate, nullus omnino reuerentia Diuinitatis adtonitus aut sermone mouebatur aut nutu. Cumque sensim cauteque mortalibus multitudo sese inseruisset angelica, collectis copulatisque sibi terrestribus, concinentes angeli, ut uenerant, caelestia sacra repedantes ascendunt.” VPJ, c. 123. 197 Noting the imagery of Jacob’s ladder, Martine glosses, “Si, dans la Bible, cette image semble figurer la Providence divine et préfigurer l’Incarnation, elle est ici l’annonce de la fécondité et de la sainteté de Condat.” Martine, Vie des pères du Jura, 1968, 373, n.1.

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summarized tightly when the text says: “Everyone, I say, was one, because everyone belonged to the One.”198 We are told that the monks held no private property and that there was no difference between them with respect to reputation.199 As an example, we are told that a monk would strip himself naked to give his clothes to a cold brother, preferring that the clothes warm the other’s body rather than his own.200 While this is not out of character for a monastic ethos by any means, it resonates with the logic established throughout the text.201 The distinction between one monk and the next is so absent that, not only are they completely comfortable with each other’s nakedness, but they care for each other’s bodies as if they were their own.

The relationship between this collapsed individuality and the communal connection to the divine source is affirmed again at the end of the section on monastic unity. We are told:

…and this is why the servants of the Lord, accompanied by grace that gave them their

powers, frequently accomplished gifts of healing and other wonders; each monk, however,

would leave the scene of the wonders before his face or name could be known by anyone.

Thus the monks would teach their admirers that they had to seek out the fountain and source

of God’s gifts.202

Because they had transcended their individual identities to become anonymous, therefore, the monks had also achieved a sort of transcendence over the material world.203 They were

198 “omnes, inquam, unum erant, quia unius omnes erant.” VPJ, c. 111. 199 VPJ, c. 112. 200 VPJ, c. 113. 201 Thomas O’Loughlin explores this idea in some detail as it pertains to the tradition of monastic scholarship. In the Jura text we see an articulation of the ideal of corporate identity that produces the intellectual habits he describes. Thomas O’Loughlin, “Individual Anonymity and Collective Identity: The Enigma of Early Medieval Latin Theologians.,” Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie Médiévales: Forschungen Zur Theologie Und Philosophie Des Mittelalters: (Formerly Recherches de Théologie Ancienne et Médiévale) 64, no. 2 (1997), 291–314. 202 “Atque ideo saepe per Domini seruos, comitante uirtutum gratia, sanitatum et mirabilium dona perfecta sunt: quique paene prius loca ipsa praeteriere signorum quam uisu aut nomine noscerentur ab aliquo. Illic namque edocebant fontem atque exordium gratiarum debere expetere admirantes.” VPJ, c. 114. 203 Burton-Christie identifies a similar trend in the thinking of the Desert Fathers, a sort of “presence in emptiness” which he characterizes as follows: “There is a striking irony here: the one who had entered into the deepest

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“accompanied by grace”, united with the divine—here the image of the angels mingling together with the monks springs to mind—and thus able to do wonders, to enact divine symbols into the world. Following the example of Lupicinus’s miracle with the bread, these wonders are explicitly engaged in a relationship of signification, representation, or immanence with the divine source.

The logic unfolds like this: the Biblical miracles of multiplying material bread were signs pointing toward the divine source, the bread of life. Since the Jura monks, through their union with the divine, already possessed the bread of life, Lupicinus was able to miraculously bring bread into the material world, because the divine is almost by definition a transcendence of the boundedness and limitations of materiality. In the same way, the monks, who mimic the divine unboundedness by erasing the boundaries of their individual identity, are able to generate wonders out in the world, and those wonders were, like the Old Testament miracles, signs pointing toward the divine. The thinking here is very consistent and represents a coherent pattern.

This transcendent unity of the Jura community also applies to their temporal positioning. In some senses, the whole project of the VPJ is to describe a link between the present community and its history. This is accomplished in several ways, including a constant repetition of citations indicating that particular anecdotes were taken from the living memory of specific monks in the community.204 It is also established by means of relics, broadly conceived. In several places the

VPJ tells us about specific objects or places from the lives of the founders that could still be seen

obscurity, who had realized humility in his own life to such a great degree, emerged with immense power.” Burton- Christie, The Word in the Desert : Scripture and the Quest of Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism, 255–56. 204 For a discussion of the role of seeing with one’s own eyes in the formation of hagiographic narrative, see: Georgia Frank, The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims to Living Saints in Christian Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

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by the present-day monks, thus setting up a material basis for the collapse of temporal distance.

In at least one place the collapsing of temporal distance is explicit, when our hagiographer says of Eugendus, “This man was—or rather is—a most blessed person close to Christ.”205 The past and present are elided. The saint’s life is not bounded by the finality of his death. His life is one with the present.

The material landscape of the Jura monasteries operates to collapse not just temporal distance but also geographical. Because the text has established that the reconciliation of opposites is a feature of the monastic landscape, that landscape in this logic takes on a divinity that matches the divinity of the monastic community as a social entity. As a place, it becomes physically coterminous not just with the divine source—as we saw in the vision of Jacob’s ladder descending into the mountains—but also with other physical places, especially other places that are equivalently holy.

We have already seen how the Jura landscape becomes elided with the Egyptian desert so famous as the font of Christian monastic practice. The VPJ also extends that elision to other famous holy locations. At one point, Eugendus has a vision of three men who turn out to be the famous martyrs Peter, Paul, and Andrew. He demands for them to tell him: “how is it, my lords, that I see you in these rural woodlands—you whose bodies, we read, are buried in the great cities of Rome and Patras after your holy martyrdoms?” The saints reply: “We are indeed in those places, as you assert, but we have come now to dwell here also.” When he awoke from his vision, he was met by three monks returning to the monastery with relics of the three saints.206

This passage is asserting that the relics of those saints establish a bilocation between Jura and the

205 “Hic namque fuit, immo est apud Christum beatissimus homo” VPJ, c. 152. 206 “Et quid est, inquit, domini, quod uos in haec rura cerno siluestria, quos in magnis urbibus Romae ac Patras post sanctum martyrium legimus corpore contineri?” “Verum est, inquiunt, et illic quidem, ut adseris, sumus, et hic quoque nunc habitaturi uenimus.” VPJ, c. 154–55.

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cities of their martyrdom. Indeed, it is worth noting that even this bilocation implies a reconciliation of opposites. Eugendus refers to the monasteries as “rural woodlands” against the

“great cities” of the martyrs, vividly setting up a sharp contrast between the two that is resolved by the martyrs’ assertion that they are equally present in both extremes. The hagiographer ends this passage by informing us that those same relics can still be found at the monastery and are good for miracles, adding the temporal aspect to the collapse as well. Those physical relics, which could still be accessed by monks reading the VPJ, represented a tangible connection with the great cities of Christian history, with this story of Eugendus and their own monastic past, with the martyrs themselves, and ultimately with the divine source immanent in the coinciding of all these different layers of space and time.

In this light, we can read the preface to the VPJ as foreshadowing a fundamental point that the text is trying to make about the identity of the Jura monks and their relationship to the physical space they inhabit. Addressing his correspondents in Agaune, our hagiographer writes:

Your ‘Acaunus’, in the ancient Gallic expression, is recognized to be a rock, as much primordially from nature as now also because of the Church, through the truthful prefiguration of Peter. Nevertheless, may your Charity acknowledge among the forests of pine and fir of the Jura mountains that same rock allegorically ‘discovered’ long ago by the psalmist ‘in the fields of the forest.’ There the holy brothers who have followed, firm in their monastic stability, now tread upon this rock, whose hidden meaning is now made clear.207

This passage first identifies the physical location of Agaune, which was located in the mountains, as a literal rock. It then reads that physical rock allegorically as representing the Church and

Saint Peter, and then it asserts that the Jura monastery is founded on the same rock, cleverly pulling from a passage in the Psalms that refers to a rock in the forest. On one level this is simple

207 “Quia ergo Acaunus uester Gallico priscoque sermone tam primitus per naturam quam nunc quoque per ecclesiam, ueridica praefiguratione Petri, petra esse dinoscitur, agnoscat tamen Caritas uestra et inter pineas abiegnasque Iurensium siluas ipsam quondam a psalmographo in campis siluae mystica significatione repertam quae nunc inibi a sanctis fratribus, sublato iam praefigurationis aenigmate, pedisequa stabilitate calcatur.” VPJ, c. 3.

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allegory. Both Agaune and Jura’s physical locations allegorically signify the divine. But based on the above reading, we should view this as having more implications for the physicality of Jura than just signification. To borrow the language of Francis Young, the “forests of pine and fir of the Jura Mountains” become a “sacramental vehicle of truth,”208 and the relationship between the ground and the monks who “tread upon this rock, whose meaning is now made clear” is suddenly loaded with implication. When we read of an allegory whose “meaning is now made clear”, we should recall Lupicinus’s assertion that the monks are “leaving behind the need for symbols.”209 Through spiritual union with the divine, as shown in the vision of angels mingling with the monks, the monks are standing upon the true rock, and that spiritual position sacramentally inflects their physical position. The Jura Mountains are sanctified with them, caught up in the same transcendence toward which the monks are aspiring.

SENSUALITY AND PLEASURE

The aspiration of the Jura monks toward that transcendence was not simply hypothetical, but the major preoccupation of their daily life. The divinizing principles of the VPJ were also the foundation for the community’s monastic discipline, which attempted to transplant a modified form of desert asceticism to the Gallic hills. Their program of disciplined anti-sensuality was characterized very aptly by Olga Solovieva in her discussion of the ascetic theory of Gregory of

Nyssa, whose ideas find echoes in the VPJ:

Gregory continuously reminds his readers [that] the only way in which the invisible, incomprehensible divinity makes itself present to us is in the polished mirror of a human heart. Accordingly, this ultimate blessedness of the contemplative vision is seen both as humanity’s inherent prerogative—a birthright guaranteed by our creation in the image of God—and at the same time, as requiring a relentless ascetic effort of self-transformation. Only the eradication of the vicious passions that mark configurations of our ordinary selves

208 Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture, 144. 209 VPJ, c. 69.

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allows the elusive specter of the desired new self to emerge—the self that is a faithful image of the wholly Other and simultaneously, our finally revealed true self.210

The image of polishing the human heart into a mirror for the divine through the eradication of passions is one that nicely captures the idea behind the sense-discipline of the Jura monks, whose most threatening passion seems to have been gluttony.

It is a mark of just how intensely the Jura monks focused on the model of the desert fathers that the principle vice manifesting in the Vita patrum Iurensium is not the temptation of sexual fornication, though that is not entirely absent, but the temptation of food. As Peter Brown says of the desert ascetics:

In moments when he was close to breakdown, the ascetic felt driven to wander as free and as mindless as a wild beast, gnawing at the scattered herbs, mercifully oblivious, at last, to the terrible ache of a belly tied to morsels of human bread, cruelly spaced out by the human rhythms of prayer and fasting.211

It is the desire for fine-tasting food, and the consequences of seeking pleasure in the taste of food, that preoccupies the Jura monks. This text represents a negotiation between the dangers of gluttony and the need for sustenance, admiring, even fetishizing, the supreme asceticism of the desert fathers, while never truly requiring the same for imitation by the Jura monks, who are encouraged instead to eat moderately, not seeking or finding pleasure in their food.212 The material conditions of the Jura Mountains were never as dire as those of the Egyptian desert— indeed, the text recounts periods of great abundance which in fact constitute a temptation to the monks—and yet the analogy between the Jura Mountains and the desert is so strong that the ideology of the Jura monks is shaped most dominantly by the material conditions of a place so far away that most of them could never conceive of visiting, the Egyptian desert.

210 Solovieva, “Spiritual Exegesis as an Ascetic Performance in Gregory of Nyssa,” 540. 211 Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 22. 212 VPJ, c. 77.

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In the early section of the life of Romanus, when the hagiographer is describing the region in which the saint would found his monastery, a brief line appears which introduces a concept that will become important throughout the narrative. The line is: “In addition, there were a few wild little trees, which provided sour little apples to those devoted to pleasure, but sweet ones to a tranquil person.”213 The taste of the fruit varies according to the spiritual state of the person eating it. At first glance, it seems like a deliberate paradox: those concerned with pleasure, the voluptuosi, will taste only acid bitterness, while someone not seeking pleasure, someone quietus, will find it. But this is, I argue, not a statement about the proper frame of mind one needs in order to enjoy the taste of wild fruit. The distinction intended is between the sort of carnal pleasure sought by one voluptuous and the supernal spiritual pleasure enjoyed by one who, quietus, is content or even indifferent with respect to bodily pleasure.

I want to stress the use of the word quietus here because I think indifference is exactly what it suggests. The validated actor is not one who seeks out unpleasant-tasting fruit in order, like

Radegund with her extraordinary bodily mortification,214 to access spiritual pleasure by embracing fleshly misery. Here, rather, the pleasure comes to one who is quietus, at peace, with implied indifference to the sort of pleasure sought by the voluptuosi. But this is not presented in terms of an abstract spiritual experience. The text does not say: “The voluptuosi seeking pleasure will find the fruit to taste bitter, but the quietus one, because of indifference to pleasure, will be experiencing abstract supernal pleasure.” Rather, it says that the wild trees will provide sweet little apples to the quietus. The implication is that the sweetness achieved by someone who is quietus intersects directly with the sensory experience of the material world; because a quietus is

213 “Erant praeterea paucae siluestres arbusculae, quae acida quidem uoluptuosis, sed dulcia quieto pomula ministrabant.” VPJ, c. 8. 214 Venantius Fortunatus, Vita Radegundis, MGH, SRM 2, ed. Bruno Krusch (Hannover: Hahn, 1888), 1.25.

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peacefully indifferent to voluptuous pleasures, every experience of life, including eating bitter little apples from wild trees, becomes infused with spiritual sweetness.215

The idealization of a concept of quies is related to what Patricia Cox Miller identifies as a concept of the self with a genealogy extending to the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus, who was concerned about the “soul’s tendency toward fragmentation”, and who shared with Marcus

Aurelius and Origen a preoccupation with “the phenomenon of the self in disarray.”216 He fixates on the classical story of Narcissus’s obsession with his own beauty, addressing a problem which

Miller summarizes as “a form of attention that fixates and fragments the soul into a congeries of its own grasping desires.”217 Describing Plotinus’s resolution of this problem, she continues: “In order to perform its proper placing function, the soul must direct its vision inward”,218 and:

For Plotinus and Origen, so confident that intense inner contemplation could bring about realization of the self’s divine core, distraction was a major problem; loss of attention diminished the soul’s consciousness of its expansive identity, and this loss was often attributed by them to the particularity of the material world and the body’s involvement with it.219

This is exactly the character of the stance taken by the VPJ toward fine-tasting food. It seems as though the entire project of the Jura monasteries, at least as presented in this text, was concerned

215 The perspective on food and abstinence does not align with that assigned to the early Middle Ages by Caroline Walker Bynum, who says that “To fast [...] was to join with scarcity in order that plenty might come. [...] It was to embrace hunger, to join with the vulnerability to famine that threatened all living things, in order to induce from the creator and provider of blessings the gifts of fertility, plenty, and salvation.” Indeed, she underpins this argument with an appeal to a sort of vague anthropological impression of “pre-industrial societies,” saying “men and women frequently respond to the rhythm of plenty and scarcity, harvest and famine, by deciding to control it through voluntary fasting and believe that they can in this way coerce from the gods dreams and visions, health, good fortune, or fertility.” Without wandering too far into all of the potential objections one might make against such a monolithic account of “pre-industrial societies,” it is possible that some early Christians may have pursued fasting as leverage with which to extract favours from God. But that is not the sort of mentality which underlies the approach to food taken in the Vita patrum Iurensium. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, 34. 216 Patricia Cox Miller, The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Antique Christianity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 19–20. 217 Miller, 24–25. 218 Miller, 26. 219 Miller, 40.

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with cultivating indifference toward the distractions of bodily sensations, whether those sensations were constituted as an undue obsession with asceticism or as a preoccupation with seeking sensory pleasure. Although the technical metaphysics of this project are nowhere articulated so explicitly as might be found in Plotinus or Origen—there is nowhere in the VPJ, for example, a discussion of the soul finding a consciousness of expansive divine identity—the same or similar premises fundamentally underlie the assertion that a soul at rest with respect to pleasure-seeking will find pleasure even while eating bitter fruit.

This concept emerges again later in a more developed anecdote. Because the region has started to produce a bountiful abundance of good food, certain of Romanus’s monks become too obsessed with eating delicious food and are thus described: “given over to pleasure and luxury, they refused to be servants in a regulated manner.”220 As evoked earlier, Romanus has his sterner brother Lupicinus, abbot of nearby Lauconnus, intervene. Lupicinus visits Condadisco and asks to be served porridge made of strained barley, without salt or oil, which the gluttonous monks refuse to eat. Then Lupicinus makes a show of asking Romanus if he can switch monasteries with his brother, so that he can stay in Condadisco and eat the same meal every day. Overnight, the gluttonous monks abandon the monastery, and Lupicinus tells his brother that the menu can be returned to normal.221

The logic of the link between material indulgence here is interesting enough to be pursued.

The text says:

The familiar cunning of our ancient enemy turned itself toward softer methods, and, producing evils from prosperities, caused brothers to revolt not only against the rule but almost against the father himself. First, the largeness and abundance of the harvest provided the opporunity; next, that very abundance caused those brothers, full of food, to swell up as

220 “uoluptati luxuique dediti famulari regulariter detrectabant.” VPJ, c. 37. I have substituted “in a regulated manner” for Russell et al.’s “of the rule” as a translation for “regulariter,” because their translation implies a reference to a formal monastic rule that is not justified by the Latin. 221 VPJ, c. 39–40.

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they returned each day. And after this he caused them to become haughty as if by the affected loftiness (cothurnositate) of their knowledge.222

The relationship between this story and the earlier line concerning the wild little trees is significant. Here we have food that, quite unlike the wild little apples described above, is apparently delicious and pleasurable to eat for the voluptuosi, or, as they are called here, the voluptati dediti.223 The bitter little apples are inherent to the quasi-sanctified Jura landscape around Condadisco, privileged for their association with the saint’s original choice of the spot and for their reinforcement of ascetic monastic principles of self-denial. But the great abundance of good food that appears in this story is directly attributed to the influence of the devil, with the assumption, perhaps not extraordinarily surprising in a monastic context, that the devil works through the bodily pleasures of the material world to lure monks away from contemplation of spiritual things.224 And yet their appreciation of delicious food does not lead these bad monks just to distraction from spiritual things or to mere gluttony, but to the much more serious sins of rebelliousness and pride. Indeed, the word turgescere, to swell, used to describe what happens to the brothers as they keep returning to the table, seems to have an almost pun-like double meaning, with the implication that the brothers are physically swelling their stomachs as they eat, but also swelling with pride to become superbos.

222 “[…] vertit se ad molliora consueta calliditas [hostis antiqui], et de prosperis aduersa producens non solum contra regulam, sed in ipsum paene patrem fecit insurgere fratres. Primitus namque materia huiusce modi exstitit ubertas fecunditasque fructuum; dehinc abundantia ipsa refertos cotidiana fecit remissione turgescere; post haec autem etiam scientiae quadam effecit cothurnositate superbos.” VPJ, c. 35. Translation my own. 223 VPJ, c.37. 224 Conrad Leyser says that the VPJ has a surprising absence of angelic and demonic presence, even going so far as to talk of “the silencing of the angels” and suggests that the text might be considered “eccentric” for its “studious naturalism.” This is somewhat inexplicable, considering not only the dramatic and direct manifestation of demons in various miracles, but also the way that the text’s consistent attribution of human misconduct to demonic influence follows exactly the Cassianic pattern Leyser himself described just a few pages earlier. Conrad Leyser, “Angels, Monks, and Demons in the Early Medieval West,” in Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages: Studies Presented to Henry Mayr-Harting, ed. Richard Gameson and Henrietta Leyser (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 12–14.

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Indeed, this strange quasi-comic tone seems to repeatedly tinge the text’s portrayal of the gluttonous brothers. The inclusion of the word cothurnositate, otherwise unattested, should perhaps be read as a moment of witticism, meant to invoke the affected eastern pomp of Greek actors wearing the strange cothurni (high boots) to give themselves an artificial stature and theatrically exaggerated haughtiness.225 In another sentence, these same monks are referred to as liguritores—translated as “gourmets” by Martine and “gourmands” by Vivian, Vivian, and

Russell—another unusual word with a clear etymology from ligurire, to lick, perhaps making fun of the way the gluttonous monks were accustomed to lick their plates.226 When Lupicinus gives the public speech to Romanus requesting that he might be given the monastery at

Condadisco so that he might eat barley gruel there every day—the speech which causes the gluttonous monks to flee—it is introduced with the words quosque abba Lupicinus latenter inridens. Vivian, Vivian, and Russell translate this “in private, abbot Lupicinus ridiculed them,” but I must agree more with the translation offered by Martine: “alors, l’Abbé Lupicin, les raillant sans en avoir l’air.”227 The implication of the word latenter is not that Lupicinus was making a speech to Romanus in private, since the whole point of the speech was that it should be heard by the brothers. Rather latenter should be read with its sense of “not being perceived”, making the better English translation: “Mocking them without being perceived, abbot Lupicinus said the following.” Lupicinus’s superficially sincere speech to Romanus is in fact secretly a mocking joke on the gluttonous monks, establishing them as legitimate targets of back-handed ridicule, and the text itself seems to carry the same inflection in its depiction of them.

225 Edward James describes the Vita patrum Iurensium version of this story when glossing Gregory of Tours’ much different version, mentioning the anonymous hagiographer’s use of the word cothurnositate and glossing it: “after cothurnus, the high-soled buskin of the tragic actor, a symbol of grandeur and majesty, and hence of pride.” Edward James, Gregory of Tours: Life of the Fathers (Liverpool: Liverpool University press, 1986), note 8 on page 7. 226 VPJ, c. 38. 227 VPJ, c. 39.

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While the connection between gluttony and rebelliousness may be intuitive—presumably both the abbot and the rule of the Condadisco monastery enjoined the monks to moderation in eating, making immoderation an act of rebelliousness against both—the connection between gluttony and pride requires a little more thought. Pride is possibly the most repudiated vice in the

VPJ, and indeed more broadly. The implication seems to be that in rejecting the authority of the rule and the abbot, the monks became superbi cothurnositate scientiae, haughty as if by the affected loftiness of their knowledge, because they presumed to know better than both authorities. The resonances here with the story of Adam and Eve’s pride in the knowledge transmitted to them by the serpent in the Garden of Eden and their subsequent eating of the forbidden fruit, while not explicit in this text, perhaps ought to be borne in mind. As Peter Brown says of the desert fathers:

It was widely believed, in Egypt as elsewhere, that the first sin of Adam and Eve had been not a sexual act, but rather one of ravenous greed. It was their lust for physical food that had led them to disobey God’s command not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. By doing so, they had destroyed the perfect physical equilibrium with which they had been first created. No longer content to contemplate the majesty of God largely (if not wholly) unconscious of the needs of their body, Adam and Eve had reached out to devour the forbidden fruit. In this view of the Fall, greed and, in a famine-ridden world, greed’s blatant social overtones—avarice and dominance—quite overshadowed sexuality.228

The perils of pride, especially in a monastic context that emphasized the close unity of the monastic community according to the terms laid out by the rule, are quite familiar to any student of medieval Christian morality, but here it is the connection to bodily pleasures that I wish to stress.

Just as with the bitter little apples, it was the taste that mattered to the voluptuosi, here the quality and quantity of the food at Condadisco is what provokes sin in the gluttonous monks, not because good food is a danger in itself—for the monastery’s menu was reverted back from

228 Brown, 220.

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barley gruel as soon as the gluttons had been driven off—but because the devil was able, through good food and the desire for it, to lead some brothers into rejecting the rule and assuming a prideful stance. The implication is the same as with the little apples that have two tastes for the two different types of people who might eat them: someone striving for pleasure in food is distinct from someone eating while at peace with respect to the pleasures of food. For the gluttonous monks, Lupicinus’s barley gruel was like the bitter little apples, because they were seeking for pleasure, while for the virtuous monks, presumably, both the fine meals and the barley gruel were sweet.

What the Jura text encourages, then, is a policing of the self. It reflects practices of self- regulation that could reasonably be described in Foucauldian terms, and aligns with what

Foucault himself says about such monastic technologies of identity:

Ce qui est en jeu alors, ce n’est pas un code d’actes permis ou défendus, c’est toute une technique pour analyser et diagnostiquer la pensée, ses origines, ses qualités, ses dangers, ses puissances de séduction, et toutes les forces obscures qui peuvent se cacher sous l’aspect qu’elle présente.229

That is what the monastic practices depicted in the Jura text reflect, combined with the ideology described by Miller: a technique to analyze and diagnose thoughts, desires, and states of mind.

Some, those located in a fixation on or desire for material things, can be externalized and attributed to the devil, provoking in the unguarded mind a selfish, avaricious pride. And others, those fixated on contemplation of God, his incarnation, and the examples of those saintly figures whose lives point to and participate in that incarnation, offer the monk a chance to develop through imitation an identity the boundaries of which are collapsed in the immaterial and atemporal vastness of God.

229 Michel Foucault, “Le combat de la chasteté,” Communications, no 35, (1982), 23.

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This point is once more affirmed in the description of Lupicinus’s death. On his deathbed,

Lupicinus consents to rinse his mouth out with a little water brought by the brothers. But the brothers, thinking to do something nice for Lupicinus, slip a little honey into the water. Upon tasting it, Lupicinus exclaims: “enemy, even in death you try to corrupt my humility with the pleasure of sweetness that will pass away.”230 Gone is the abbot who eats good food and wine to encourage an emaciated monk to do likewise, and returned are the warnings about the perils of good-tasting food.

Once again, as in the case of Romanus’s gluttonous monks, the danger of finding pleasure in taste is ultimately one involved with pride, for it is his pious humility that Lupicinus feels to be threatened. Pride in this case seems to mean a preoccupation with self in the sense of the body and its corporeal pleasures, to the exclusion of spiritual things. And the pleasure that appeals to the glutton is described more explicitly in the story surrounding Lupicinus’s death. It is periturae dulcedinis oblectione, the pleasure of sweetness that will pass away. The idea of material things passing away is a recurring one in scripture, with one significant passage coming from II Peter:

Seeing then that all these things are to be dissolved, what manner of people ought you to be in holy conversation and godliness? Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of the Lord, by which the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with the burning heat?231

Another comes from the gospel of Matthew:

Lay not up to yourselves treasures on earth: where the rust, and moth consume, and where thieves break through and steal. But lay up to yourselves treasures in heaven: where neither the rust nor moth doth consume, and where thieves do not break through, nor steal.232

230 “Inimice, inquit, etiam in exitu conaris humilitatem meam periturae dulcedinis oblectatione corrumpere.” VPJ, c. 116. 231 II Peter 3:11–12 Douay-Rheims. In the Vulgate: “Cum igitur hæc omnia dissolvenda sunt, quales oportet vos esse in sanctis conversationibus, et pietatibus, exspectantes, et properantes in adventum diei Domini, per quem cæli ardentes solventur, et elementa ignis ardore tabescent?” 232 Matthew 6:19–20 Douay-Rheims. In the Vulgate: “Nolite thesaurizare vobis thesauros in terra: ubi ærugo, et tinea demolitur: et ubi fures effodiunt, et furantur. Thesaurizate autem vobis thesauros in cælo, ubi neque ærugo, neque tinea demolitur, et ubi fures non effodiunt, nec furantur.”

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This is the vision of materiality that underlies the Vita patrum Iurensium and its relationship to corporeal pleasure. Finding pleasure in the taste of good food is, for this text, the equivalent of laying up treasures on earth to the exclusion of laying up treasures in heaven. And the fundamental distinction between these two categories is a temporal one, the distinction between temporal boundedness and unboundedness. This text emerges from a culture alive with the idea that everything perceptible to the senses is supremely transitory, destined to pass away, but that careful, disciplined, cultivated indifference to material things could allow access on this earth to things that do not pass away, things from the “day of God” beyond time, and those things are constituted as affective or emotional experiences, often referenced in shorthand as “pleasure.”

That is why, to return again to the wild little trees with their bitter little apples, the fruit is sweet to one quietus, indifferent to their taste. The sweetness does not come from the taste of the fruit, but from the sublime state of being indifferent to the taste of the fruit.

This idea—this attitude toward material things—is most articulately expressed in the description of a vision experienced by the final abbot, Eugendus, shortly before assuming office.233 He finds himself standing in the oratory, its darkness illuminated only by candles and lamps held in the hands of elderly monks. He sees a vision foretelling his assumption of the office of abbot from his predecessor, and then all the monks at once dash their lights against the wall, plunging the oratory into darkness. Then:

And while the blessed man stood waiting for the course of events, astonished and enclosed in the confines of darkness, a voice came to him: “Do not be saddened, Eugendus, by the trickery of these momentary and material lights; turn your view to the east of the room, and you will see there that light from heaven will be furnished to you without any human aid.”

233 Martine notes that Eugendus more than any other character in the text is predisposed to mysticism and visions. This is consistent with my suggestion that his representation as a fusion of the previous two abbots provides an example for transcendent monastic spirituality. Martine, Vie des pères du Jura, 1968, 94.

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And, immediately extending his gaze there, he saw, with dawn slowly breaking, a ray of daylight flowing toward him, and returning to himself he rose out of bed, happy.234

The message of this important passage is a clear restatement of the principles we have been discussing. First, there is a sharply foregrounded distinction between things that are “momentary and material” and that which is “from heaven.” The former are bounded by space and time and thus have limits, beginnings and endings, and will unreliably come and go. The latter, following the model of the sun, manifests reliably, effortlessly, and infallibly. The instruction given to

Eugendus is that he should look away from the former and look toward the latter; this is ultimately the goal of Jura’s monastic discipline, to turn the soul’s attention away from material particularities and toward the infinite divine. These alternatives are affectively inflected, evoking the aesthetic logic of pleasure and enjoyment that so clearly animates other parts of the text: paying attention to the “momentary and material lights” leaves Eugundus saddened, contristans, but when he extends his gaze toward the light of heaven, he is made happy, laetus.

The passage also indicates a specific direction toward which Eugendus should look: the east, orientalis prospectus. Obviously this is the direction in which one would always look to find a sunrise, but it is also conveniently the direction from which both the desert monastic model and

Christianity more broadly arrive to Jura. The light from the east could plausibly be identified with the real, historicised places, people, and events whereby divinity entered the world; the model of the desert fathers and their monastic life that shines from the east to illuminate the monks of Jura, but also the events of scripture, the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ—to use

Eliade’s terminology, the “paradigmatic act of strength, superabundance, and creativity,”235 the

234 “Cumque uir beatus tenebrarum angustiis coercitus euentum rei adtonitus praestolaretur in uisu, uox ad eum facta: ‘Noli, ait, te, Eugende, fraude horum praesentium ac materialum luminum contristare; orientalem namque cellulae huius adtende prospectum, et uidebis ilico tibi absque opitulatione humana lumen diuinitus ministrari.’ At ille, confestim illic porrigens uisum, adspicit, sensim dilucescente aurora radium ad se diei ac lucis influere, et in semet reversus lectulo laetus excutitur.” VPJ, c. 137. 235 Eliade, Sacred and Profane, 80.

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“overflow of energy” that is “accomplished by a surplus of ontological substance,” 236 and “the myth, which narrates this sacred ontophany, this victorious manifestation of a plenitude of being” which “becomes the paradigmatic model for all human activities.”237 To find the divine, the monks are not just looking at God. They are looking at a set of historicized, particular material places, practices, and events whereby the divine overflows into the material, and they are analogically eliding the act of looking at those things with the act of looking at the divine itself, of looking at the sun as it rises in the east. This is the Jura model of divine materiality, a model that allows a relatively newly formed community in the wilderness of Gaul to define itself as occupying a representational, materialized, immanent relationship to the core events of

Christian ontology, the Christian view of what most profoundly exists and has meaning in the world.

JURA AND THE WORLD

The vast majority of what the VPJ has to say appears to be directed internally, teaching the Jura monks about their own monastic ideals and training them to read their surroundings as bridging the distance between them and their monastery’s past, if not the distance between them and divinity itself. However, the monasteries did not exist in a vacuum, and there are a few sections where interaction with the broader world occurs. These productively indicate how the monastic community viewed itself in relationship to the broader political dynamics of the time.

Indeed, in a few places the text presents an image of the Jura monastery as a hub from which monks went forth to fill the world, perhaps informed by the ways in which alumni of the

236 Eliade, 97. 237 Eliade, 97–98.

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monastery at Lérins went on to occupy significant ecclesiastical positions elsewhere. For example, the text tells us:

The venerable swarms of fathers, impelled by the Holy Spirit, then began to spread out so far from there as from a beehive filled with bees; they spread so far that not only the more remote parts of the province of Sequania but also many regions far and wide in different regions of the earth were filled with monasteries and churches by means of the grace spread abroad by that godly group of people. Nevertheless, it is of course at the source—which these religion institutions, flowing like small rivers, had as their origin—that the institution of the masters reveals itself: ancient, to be sure, but ever more new and pure.238

This coincides nicely with the image of the Jura monasteries as occupying a sort of axis mundi, a place where heaven meets earth, and from which heavenly influence radiates out to fill the world. There is little to be said here in terms of concrete political consequence, except that such a place is not likely to have seen itself as naturally subordinate to some other power, whether king or bishop.239

If any figure in the text becomes a symbol of more particular engagements with the broader world, it appears to be Lupicinus. We do not know exactly what his background was, but the way he operates strongly suggests a Gallo-Roman aristocrat of some variety. In particular, we see him at least twice take on a specific role in Roman legal proceedings.

The first occurs in 467 CE240 when he goes before the local Burgundian king Chilperic I to argue for the release of some prisoners, a common trope in hagiography but, as Ralph Mathisen suggests, possibly an actual intercessory role that highly placed Gallo-Romans played with

238 “coeperunt exinde uenerabilia patrum examina, uelut ex referto apum alueario, Spiritu sancto ructante, diffundi, ita ut non solum Sequanorum prouinciae loca secretiora, uerum etiam territoria multa longe lateque spatiis distincta terrarum, diuinae subolis diffusa gratia, monasteriis atque ecclesiis replerentur, sic scilicet quod in illo tamen fonte unde institutionum diriuati sunt riuuli uetusta quidem, sed purior semper recentiorque exstitit institutio magistrorum.” VPJ, c. 16. 239 Marilyn Dunn makes an argument that the Jura monasteries represented a site of “conscious opposition” to the pre-eminence of Lérins. Though her argument would have to be further developed to be truly convincing, there can be no doubt that the VPJ is making an argument for its monasteries as the central hub. Dunn, The Emergence of Monasticism: From the Desert Fathers to the Early Middle Ages, 84–85. 240 For this date, see: Martine, Vie des pères du Jura, 1968, 337, n. 3.

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respect to active military leaders vying for power in the region at the time.241 Lupicinus has an opponent in these proceedings: an unnamed man, possibly another Gallo-Roman, who was holding the prisoners as slaves, and who accuses Lupicinus of—ten years earlier—inaccurately predicting doom and the end of civilization and Roman law. The point of this accusation seems to have been to embarrass Lupicinus before Chilperic, since Lupicinus would either have to assert that the arrival of the Burgundians had been the fall of Roman civilization in the region or he would have to concede that his prediction had been wrong.242

What happens next is a little ambiguous. We are told that Lupicinus extended his hand to

Chilperic and commenced a speech that consisted of a series of attacks and insults. Ralph

Mathisen understands these as insults directed toward Chilperic, and reads Lupicinus’s behaviour as part of a pattern of haughty Gallo-Romans reacting angrily to the arrival of the barbarians.243

However, there are a few reasons why I do not believe this reading is justified. First, the narrative voice (distinct from Lupicinus’s voice) of the Vita describes Chilperic in glowing and, notably, Roman terms: “illustrious Chilperic, formerly patricius of Gaul” and “a man of singular intelligence and remarkable goodness.”244 Mathisen asserts that the difference between this narrative voice and the insults of Lupicinus reflects a change in attitudes between Lupicinus’s generation and that of the hagiographer, but it is important to note, of course, that the words attributed to Lupicinus were written by the same person who wrote the praise of Chilperic just a few lines earlier, and it seems extremely unlikely that the hagiographer would speak so highly of the king if the saint himself had such a terrible opinion of him.

241 Ralph W. Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism and Religious Controversy in Fifth-Century Gaul (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1989), 200. 242 Martine points out that if Lupicinus had given the prophecy ten years earlier, it would have been in the context of Gallic expansion toward the Jura region after the fall of Avitus. Martine, Vie des pères du Jura, 1968, 337, n. 3. 243 Mathisen, Roman Aristocrats in Barbarian Gaul: Strategies for Survival in an Age of Transition, 123–24. 244 “[…] uiro inlustri Galliae quondam patricio Hilperico,” and “Tum ille audacter, manum ad memoratum Hilpericum, uirum singularis ingenii et praecipuae bonitatis, extendens.” VPJ, c. 92–93.

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More, Lupicinus’s speech continues. He says “I do not deny that I have decided to besmirch my little reputation with a mark of infamy, caught on a dual hook of either being afraid of the king or anxious concerning the outcome of the case. But similarly I do not deny that you know and understand this!”245 Here he is clearly addressing his opponent in the argument, not the king.

In the same sentence there is a clear addressee, te, as well as a reference to the king, rege. They are clearly not the same person. There is no indication anywhere in the speech that Lupicinus changed his addressee partway through, so it follows that the bitter insults were not directed at the king either. Lupicinus raising his hand to the king, who was there in the role of judge, before he began his speech surely was just an example of well-known formal Roman gestures associated with declaiming speeches in a legal context. As a result, I cannot agree with

Mathisen’s reading that this passage represents an attack against the king.246 Indeed, the text is quite respectful of Chilperic, understandably since the Burgundian kings were still the local power at the time the Vita was written.

Indeed, Martine’s reading here seems to be the most likely: Lupicinus’s denunciation is directed at his Gallo-Roman adversary, who, after all, had been unjustly holding people in slavery. Lupicinus says: “Behold, oh treacherous and predatory man! Consider the wrath which I predicted for you and those like you!” Here he is probably referring to a class of citizens, perhaps a wealthy local elite. He continues:

Do you not realize, oh you degenerate and wretched man, that law and morality have been thrown into confusion because of the sins committed by your and your friends in repeatedly

245 “Quae tamen sicut te scire non abnuo uel sentire, ita personulam meam unco bicipiti, aut rege timidum aut euentu trepidum, stigmatis nota turpare decreuisse non denego.” VPJ, c. 95. Here my translation departs both from that of Russell et al. as well as Martine (though neither construe the speech as being addressed to Chilperic). The grammar and sense of the sentence are difficult but, having received advice from Alexander Murray, I feel confident that my translation more accurately matches the Latin. 246 Although he cites Martine’s edition of the VPJ, Mathisen does not indicate that he is proposing a reading of the passage entirely different from Martine’s French translation and the analysis Martine provides in footnotes on the same page. Mathisen, Roman Aristocrats in Barbarian Gaul: Strategies for Survival in an Age of Transition, 299; Martine, Vie des pères du Jura, 1968, 339.

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transgressing against the innocent, and that purple fasces has been changed in the hand of a judge who is wearing skins? Finally, smarten up a little and look whether a new guest might not claim and assume your farms and fields for themselves through unexpected legal inquiry!247

These are accusations, denouncements, and prophetical warnings aimed against a badly behaved wealthy class of people who had been engaging in their bad behaviour for a long time. The appearance of Chilperic and the attendant disruption are presented as natural reactions to the violations of justice practiced by the local elite, an insinuation that is mildly insulting to

Chilperic but not overly so, and more are threatened should the depravations continue. Indeed, decrying an evil wealth-obsessed elite that had abandoned justice and was mistreating the poor was a standard activity for many of the Hebrew prophets, and in addressing his opponent this way Lupicinus is quite comfortably operating within established scriptural paradigms.

This is very interesting on many levels. First, it suggests that the Jura monks viewed the arrival of the Burgundian armies as a sort of divine punishment for the corruption of the Gallo-

Roman aristocracy, and the violence attendant on that arrival as part of a sort of apocalyptic collapse. Since the Jura monasteries were founded by two aristocrats, Romanus and Lupicinus, who had abandoned their worldly lives for monasticism, and perhaps many of their followers had done the same, it would reflect no shame on them to criticize those aristocrats who remained in the world, and this logic that the Gallo-Romans had deserved to be conquered by the

Burgundians would have allowed the Jura monks to maintain a reasonably positive or at least non-adversarial stance toward the Burgundian kings.

247 “Ecce, ait, perfide ac perdite! Iram quam tibi tuisque similibus praedicabam adtende. Nonne cernis, degener et infelix, ius fasque confusum, ob tuis tuorumque crebra in innocentum peruasione peccatis, mutari muriceos pellito sub iudice fasces? Tandem resipisce paulisper et uide utrum rura ac iugera tua nouus hospes inexspectata iuris dispectione sibi non uindicet ac praesumat.” VPJ, c. 94.

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That stance is what we see reflected in the VPJ, where Chilperic is both praised for his virtues and represented as a skin-clad emblem of the confusion of law. Since the Jura monks had withdrawn from the world and had already taken the position that the world was full of sins and wickedness, they would have no reason to view Burgundian occupation of Gallo-Roman lands as a particularly unacceptable occurrence. To provide a metaphor of my own: Lupicinus is here like

Noah, prophesying the destruction of the wicked. The monks are those people saved within the ark, and the secular aristocracy are the scoffing sinners outside. In this paradigm, the

Burgundians are the floodwaters, themselves neither good nor evil but simply a natural agent of

God’s righteousness.

It would be a distortion of this passage to say that materiality was its central feature, but materiality is not absent either. The disorder and injustice of the secular world, almost eschatological in its trajectory, are here represented mainly through property. The wicked adversary of the saint unjustly converts free people into property, and the punishment predicted by Lupicinus for this disruption of justice was that someone else, equally disdainful of property rights, would in turn claim rights over his lands. Although not explicitly drawn out, this pattern is consistent with the attitude toward personal property expressed elsewhere in the text. The monks eschew private property and any behaviour that would elevate one person above another; enslaving someone would certainly count. Moreover, the text emphasizes the futility of putting value in material possessions, since they are subject to the limitations of the physical world and as such they will surely be lost or destroyed at some point. In that context, the assertion that the rich wicked man’s unjust vaunting of himself over others would ultimately result in his own misfortune begins to take on wider implications.

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It could be, and perhaps the evidence here is not sufficient to justify too firm a claim in this area, that what we are seeing reflects attitudes of the Jura monastery toward secular life. If so, that would imply that their vision of the monastic life, with its lack of personal property or social hierarchy, was positioned not just as a holy way to live for those select few who were called to it, but even as the only way to live for those seeking to avoid the destruction associated with a life of private property and personal status. More securely, it certainly does represent a critique of the avariciousness of Romanus and Lupicinus’s aristocratic peers, together with a relatively neutral and philosophical attitude toward Burgundian rule.

Lupicinus also became entangled in complex imperial politics. His friend Agrippinus, 248 the comes Galliae, was being secretly defamed before the emperor Majorian by Aegidius, the magister militiae of Gaul around 456.249 Aegidius treacherously convinced Agrippinus that he should go before the emperor to make his case, but before he was willing to do so Agrippinus first required that “the holy servant of God, Lupicinus, who is present here, act from this time forward as a guarantor of Your Nobility.”250 Aegidius agreed and formally placed Lupicinus’s hand into Agrippinus’s hand “as a pledge of the agreement they had made.”251 The word used here for guarantor, fideiussor, evokes the sense of a technical term from Roman law, where the fideiussor becomes liable as surety for another.252

It is at first unclear why exactly Lupicinus would agree to serve as the surety in this situation, since Aegidius was lying in an attempt to have Agrippinus present himself before an

248 Mathisen thinks that Agrippinus’s network of support seemed to be in eastern Lugdunensis. Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, 218. 249 This account is tricky to reconcile with our other sources on the conflict between Aegidius and Agrippinus. Martine, Vie des pères du Jura, 1968, 444–45. 250 “obsecro ut mihi sanctus Dei seruus Lupicinus, qui adpraesens est, ex hoc uice Nobilitatis tuae fideiussor accedat.” VPJ, c. 99. 251 “Confestim, aprehensam Dei serui dexteram deosculans, arram foederis tradidit accusato.” VPJ, c. 99. 252 Adolf Berger, “Adpromissio,” Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law (Union, N.J.: Lawbook Exchange, 2002).

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emperor who was likely to kill him. The reason for this declaration of surety unfolds, however, as the story proceeds. Agrippinus runs into trouble in Rome and is imprisoned, and, from his monastery in Gaul, Lupicinus senses this and begins intense prayers of intervention. The description of his actions recalls the fideiussor agreement: “Lupicinus knew right away all about the villainy because the above-mentioned Agrippinus was by constant petition through the Spirit asking for his pledge and surety [fideiussorem suum conueniebat]”253 In response, Lupicinus comes to Agrippinus in a vision and shows him a way to escape from his prison: “One night he came in a vision to his friend in prison, to whom he had pledged his support [fidedictum].”254

The implication seems to be that the agreement of surety made between Lupicinus and

Agrippinus was the basis for Lupicinus’s miraculous intervention in Agrippinus’s problems.

Despite the fact that Aegidius was operating in bad faith, when Lupicinus became surety for

Aegidius’s promises of Agrippinus’s security, Lupicinus took on the obligation of ensuring that security. And, it turns out, Lupicinus was quite effective at fulfilling such obligations.

Agrippinus ultimately escaped from jail and, through another miraculous intervention from

Lupicinus, won the pardon of the emperor and his court, Majorian having come to immediately regret his harsh treatment of Aegidius in an abrupt change of heart.255 In the broader context of the VPJ, Lupicinus’s ability to spiritually bilocate is unremarkable, since the whole logic of Jura monasticism aimed at transcending the limitations of bounded space. From his position in the mountain monastery, the axis mundi where a celestial ladder connected to heaven and earth,

Lupicinus could partake in the qualities of divine omnipresence. This does not add to our understanding of the text. However, the application of that metaphysics to a specific political

253 “At uero sanctum Lupicinum confestim facinus omne non latuit, nam et memoratus Agrippinus iugi suggestione fideiussorem suum conueniebat in spiritu.” VPJ, c. 101. 254 “nocte quadam in carcerem per uisionem ad fidedictum ueniens.” VPJ, c. 102. 255 VPJ, c. 109–110.

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relationship does. What this anecdote with Agrippinus suggests is that powerful generals or officials who won the support of the Jura monks could expect to have the divine capacities of those monks leveraged to their practical advantage. It is easy to see how propagating such a belief would appeal to the practical interests of the Jura monks while at the same time be perfectly consistent with their own understanding of their spiritual status. Their conception of the sacred materiality of their landscape and their community was not an abstract one, but one that had real consequences for the political stances they might take with respect to the broader world.

CONCLUSIONS

The major premise of this thesis is that early Gallic hagiography contributed to the production of a specific phenomenological experience of the material world, and that that produced experience was heavily characterized by the mediation of the divine and the material worlds as conceptualized in the Christian tradition. In turn, the schema by which points of divine intersection with the material world were identified became models from which communal identity, social structures, and political relationships could be derived. In the example of the Jura

Fathers, we see all this play out quite clearly.

The VPJ consistently maintains a unifying conceptual pattern for how connection with the divine might be achieved: the paradoxical union of opposites, which acts anagogically as a manifestation of the divine into the material world. This pattern is applied to the physical location and geography of the Jura region, establishing it as a site of axis mundi where heaven connects to earth; it applies to the models of self-regulation practiced by the monks, who are to cultivate severity and mercy, refining the two against each other to produce monastic perfection; and it applies to the structure of the text itself, inviting the implication that the VPJ as an object that produces a representation of the holy abbots and their miracles might thereby itself be a

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point of connection to the divine, so that the reading of it becomes a spiritually significant activity.

By setting up this framework for achieving a connection with the divine, the text establishes how the monks ought to relate to their own material bodies: by cultivating a quiet indifference to their sensory relationships with the material world, neither focusing on the pains of asceticism nor the pleasures of indulgence, with the expectation that such indifference would lead to a sublime state where all sensory experiences of the physical world would become equally sweet.

It also establishes how they should relate to one another and how they should function as a collective, with all differences of status or rank negated between them, rendering them into a sort of universal anonymity that brought with it the capacity for performing miracles. And it establishes their relationship to the external world, developing for themselves the assumption that they might, by standing in Jura, also stand in Rome or Jerusalem or the Egyptian Desert, intervening in politics at the highest level should any figure be wise enough to seek their patronage, with boundaries of time and space miraculously collapsed, by virtue of their cultivation of monastic identity and proper attitude toward their own persons and their own bodily senses.

We cannot be entirely sure of the circulation of these stories. Certainly they circulated in the

Jura monasteries themselves, and it is reasonable to assume that they reflected and contributed to the Jura monks’ own sense of themselves. And despite how unique this text is to the Jura community, it also exists in dialogue with other communities also building their own models of materiality. It engaged not just with the communities at Lérins and Lyon and in Egypt, from whom it gathered so much of its inspiration, but also with the nearby new monastic community of Saint Maurice at Agaune, the community to whom the introductory epistle of the VPJ is

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attached. It is to Agaune, then, and to the tripartite Vita abbatum Acaunensium—probably written in imitation of the VPJ—that we turn our attention in the next chapter.

CHAPTER THREE

THE ABBOTS OF AGAUNE

For the monks of Agaune in the kingdom of Burgundy, there was nothing abstract about their relationship to sacred materiality. Not only did it define their surroundings, a high mountain pass brutally sanctified by violent martyrdom, but it was also their most powerful weapon in the fraught political landscape of their sixth-century kingdom. Raised up in 515 by a collaboration between Prince Sigismund and the local bishops, the Agaune monastery of Saint Maurice occupies a significant place in the history of relations between royal power, the episcopacy, and monastic institutions. Positioned between the Arian court of King Gundobad and the orthodox bishops of Burgundy, invested with a spiritual responsibility for the fate of a small kingdom with powerful enemies, the monks of Agaune found their strength in the holy soil beneath their feet, transcending history to stand in community with the martyrs who shared the sacred space with them.

In a text that recounts the details of Sigismund’s foundation and the lives of the monastery’s first three abbots, the Vita abbatum Acaunensium, henceforth VAA, we find the expression of a community’s political and spiritual identity that is quite literally grounded in the materiality of its

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surroundings.256 In this chapter, I will pursue a close reading of that text which will elucidate, among other things, the role of sacred materiality in producing not just the Agaune community’s self-identity but also their political authority and independence.

The Vita patrum Iurensium was addressed to the monks at Agaune shortly before the VAA’s composition, and so these texts are the most closely connected of any in this thesis. Nevertheless, although it borrows the VPJ’s tripartite structure, the VAA is in almost every other way a very different text. Most immediately, it is much shorter. Any one of the VPJ’s three sections is significantly longer than the entirety of the VAA. Spending most of its time on the life of

Hymnemodus, the first abbot, the Agaune text devotes only a few token paragraphs to each of the next two abbots. But perhaps more significantly, the VAA has a strikingly different set of preoccupations than its putative prototype.

Whereas the VPJ devotes the bulk of its commentary to articulating a nuanced vision of the monastic life, building a complicated metaphysical logic to describe the relation of the Jura community to the divine with only tangential mention of that logic’s political implications, politics are at the very heart of the VAA. This should be unsurprising. The Jura monasteries were founded by two brothers (albeit politically well-connected brothers) who seem to have been motivated by enthusiasm for Cassian-style eastern asceticism, but the Agaune monastery was founded by Sigismund of Burgundy along with that kingdom’s powerful Nicene bishops as a move in a very complicated set of Burgundian political relationships.257 The monks of Agaune

256 Vita abbatum Acaunensium, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SRM 7 (Hanover: Hahn, 1920), 322–36. 257 Another way of differentiating the communities is through the lens offered by Marilyn Dunn, who suggests two trends in the Gallic monasticism of the fifth century: “small and informal communities” that “sprang up as aristocrats or the prosperous took to a life of religion”; and “the rise of the cult of holy places and relics.” Marilyn Dunn, The Emergence of Monasticism: From the Desert Fathers to the Early Middle Ages (Oxford and Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 90.

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did not have the option of being as politically indifferent as the Jura monks appeared to be, especially when narrating the events of their foundation.

There is every reason, moreover, to believe that the political dynamics of the foundation were still at play when the Agaune text was written, notwithstanding the intervening murder of

Sigismund himself by the Merovingian Franks. Indeed, carefully defining their relationship to the regional monarchy might have taken on even more importance once the monastery came into the domains of a Frankish kingdom that had just waged a war to eradicate that Burgundian monarchy. Moreover, the principle of Agaune’s subordination to royal and episcopal power in general was very much still a live one, playing out the very familiar dynamic of independent- minded monasteries pushing to assert their independence from control by those other locuses of authority. It is in service of intervening in this critical political dynamic that the VAA mobilizes its paradigms of materiality.

DATING THE TEXT

Scholarship on the authenticity of the VAA has a troubled history. Like the Jura text, and like every other piece of Burgundian hagiography published in the MGH, Bruno Krusch rejected it as a forgery.258 The text as found in the manuscripts has two sections. The first is a prose description of the lives of the first three abbots at the monastery of Saint Maurice of Agaune. The hagiographer identifies himself as a monk contemporary with the third abbot, Achivus, writing after the abbot’s death, probably sometime in the third decade of the sixth century. The second section contains some verses about a fourth abbot, Tranquillus, as well as some verses about the first three abbots. The third section contains some verses about the life of a man named Probus,

258 Bruno Krusch, introduction to Vita abbatam Acaunensium, in MGH SRM 3 (Hanover: Hahn, 1896), 171–174.

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who was supposedly a pious friend of the earlier abbots. Only the third section has a named author, the priest Pragmatius, and its style, according to Krusch, is clearly Carolingian.259

In 1954, Jean-Marie Theurillat published a new review of the text, agreeing with Krusch that the verse sections were almost certainly Carolingian in style, but suggesting that there is no real reason to doubt the authenticity of the earlier prose section, to which a different Carolingian priest named Pragmatius probably appended some verses at a later point. In a vigorous refutation, Theurillat went point-by-point through Krusch’s objections to the authenticity of the text and decisively rejected each. A single example should suffice to show the character of these disputes, and it concerns the name of the monastery’s first abbot, Hymnemodus. Bruno Krusch believed this name to have been made up via a conflation of the name Imemund or Ememund with the Greek ὕμνος, hymnos, alleging that the text’s author invented a founding abbot whose name reflected his role in establishing a liturgy of perpetual chant.260 Theurillat corrects him:

“Malheureusement pour B. Krusch, qui croyait tenir là un argument apodictique, son ingénieuse conjecture s’est trouvée démentie par la découverte d’un fragment de l’épitaphe d’Hymnémode qui contient précisément la première syllabe du mot litigieux.”261

Since Theurillat’s intervention, the prose sections of the text have been treated as reliably sixth-century in provenance, although no new editions or translations have yet been published, so scholars must continue to rely on the aging MGH Latin edition.262 Based on various elements within the text itself, especially the fact that in places its chronology is more accurate than in later documents, Theurillat places its composition around 523–526 AD.263

259 Krusch, introduction to VAA, 171 260 Krusch, introduction to VAA, 171–172. 261 Theurillat, L’Abbaye de Saint-Maurice d’Agaune: des origines à la réforme canoniale: 515–830, 18. 262 For the purposes of this thesis, all translations are my own, and a complete English translation of the VAA can be found at the end as an appendix. 263 Theurillat, L’Abbaye de Saint-Maurice d’Agaune, des origines à la réforme canoniale, 515–830, 32–42.

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The text itself is composed in a relatively simple style. In the prologue, its author explicitly sets out its purpose as the preservation of a living oral history, the story kept alive by virtue of its merits—opinio meritis vivificata—for future generations, making the normal apologies for his unpolished style—sermo incultus.264 The manuscript tradition is extremely sparse, and we do not possess a single copy anywhere near the time of the original, so it is difficult to make speculations about the text’s use on that basis.265 But if we take seriously the intention expressed in the prologue, it was a text intended to be used by the community at Agaune as a crystallization of communal memory, preserving the stories of the lives of the founding abbots for the following generations, as those abbots began to recede from living memory.

Presumably the audience for this text was to a large extent the monks of Agaune themselves.

Although it does not possess the same depth of normative instruction which we find in the Vita patrum Iurensium, it nevertheless seems to be endeavouring to communicate several normative monastic points about relations between monks and friends or family members from their secular lives. But perhaps the text should also be read as an attempt to position the monastery within the oncoming Frankish political milieu. It explicitly establishes the monastery’s Catholic credentials vis-à-vis the Arian heresy, and it also positions itself and its place-based martyr cult as existing in a reciprocal relationship with kings and their kingdoms.

A SHORT HISTORY OF AGAUNE

Agaune had entered into the Christian imagination no later than the first half of the fifth century, when Eucherius of Lyon, an aristocratic monk-turned-bishop-turned-saint266 associated with the

264 Vita abbatum Acaunensium, Krusch, introduction. 265 Theurillat, L’Abbaye de Saint-Maurice d’Agaune: des origines à la réforme canoniale: 515–830, 33. 266 This was not an unusual career progression for a Gallic aristocrat of the time, especially one associated with Lérins.

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monastery of Lérins, composed his Passio Acaunensium martyrum.267 According to Eucherius’s account, the third-century Roman emperor Maximian sent a legion of Theban soldiers into

Burgundy with orders to destroy the Christians dwelling there. Following the example of their primicerius, Maurice, the legion instead declared their allegiance to Christ and refused to carry out the emperor’s orders. The legion was subjected to multiple decimations—the famous Roman punishment of killing every tenth soldier to discipline an insubordinate legion—but refused to relent, and at last the emperor had the entire legion killed.268 A monastic community of some sort grew up on the site later, their presence before the events of the VAA attested by the Vita patrum

Iurensium.269

In the late fifth and early sixth centuries, the pass of Agaune fell under the control of the

Kingdom of Burgundy, ruled by King Gundobad, whose alliance with the Frankish Merovingian

King Clovis had created a brief period of relative stability for the kingdom.270 The Burgundian kingdom’s status was in flux. Originally foederati of the Roman Empire, their relationship to the

267 Eucherius of Lyon, Passio Acaunensium martyrum, in MGH SRM 3, ed. Bruno Krusch (Hannover: Hahn, 1896), 20–41. 268 Rosenwein says, “Eucherius was almost certainly substituting Maximian for Constantius Chlorus, father of Constantine, thus writing the latter out of the story of Christian persecution.” Eucherius of Lyon, Passio Acaunensium martyrum, in MGH SRM 3, ed. Bruno Krusch (Hannover: Hahn, 1896), chap. 2; Rosenwein, “One Site, Many Meanings: Saint-Maurice d’Agaune as a Place of Power in the Early Middle Ages,” 272, n. 5. 269 VPJ, c. 44. When considering the question of Burgundian monasticism, it is important to remember that the region had a robust monastic tradition, mostly associated with the influence of Lérins, predating the arrival of the Burgundians in the fifth century. David Boyson, “Romano-Burgundian Society in the Age of Gundobad: Some Legal, Archaeological and Historical Evidence,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 32 (1988), 112. I am perhaps unfairly ignoring the Vita Severini abbatis Acaunensis, which claims to narrate the life of an abbot of Agaune who lived prior to Sigismund’s 515 foundation but which seems to be at least in large part if not entirely a Carolingian fabrication. Bruno Krusch, Vita Severini abbatis Acaunensis, in MGH SRM 2 (Hannover: Hahn, 1888), 166–70; Jean-Marie Theurillat, L’Abbaye de Saint-Maurice d’Agaune: des origines à la réforme canoniale, 20–27. 270 We know distressingly little about the group identified as “Burgundians” at this time, from their exact or approximate numbers, their religious inclinations, or even the nature of their relationship to groups designated as “the Burgundians” in previous centuries. Archaeologically, it is nearly impossible to find a distinction between the Burgundian and Gallo-Roman populations of this period. Katalin Escher, “Le mobilier archéologique du royaume burgonde (443–534),” in Les Royaumes de Bourgogne jusq’en 1032 à travers la culture et la religion, vol. 30, Culture et société médiévales 30 (Brepols Publishers, 2018), 24–25.

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emperor in Constantinople after the events of 476 seems to have been both complex and ill- defined.

One of the complicating factors in that relationship must have been the fact that, like many of his contemporaries, King Gundobad subscribed to the doctrine of Arianism, a Christological heresy from the point of view of the Church’s orthodox theologians. It is unclear to what extent the king’s religion was a matter of politics or personal conviction; it was certainly a stance to which he demonstrably gave consideration and from which he exhibited reluctance to deviate.271

It is also unclear the extent to which the king’s Arianism was shared by the population, or whether the distinctions between orthodoxy and Arianism were even of interest to the average

Burgundian.272 What is relatively clear is that the bishops of the kingdom, drawn principally from Gallo-Roman aristocratic families with an orientation toward the orthodox religious of the court at Constantinople, were both orthodox and uncomfortable with the Arianism of the king.273

Early in the sixth century, the son of King Gundobad, Sigismund, publicly converted from

Arianism to orthodoxy. It was at this point that, in cooperation with a number of local bishops,

271 A very provocative and plausible discussion of this question is offered by Bruno Dumézil, who suggests that the Burgundians had no direct connection to the heavily Arian regions around the Danube, and indeed that the historical evidence shows they had converted to Christianity long before this point. He suggests that Burgundian Arianism was limited to the royal family and its direct supporters, because of their connection to the Visigoths, and that, indeed, we can imagine the Burgundian kingdom along the Rhone as a direct Visigothic client state, and its ruling family at this point might actually have been drawn from the upper echelons of Visigothic politics. Bruno Dumézil, “Religion et ethnicité dans le royaume burgonde,” in Les Royaumes de Bourgogne jusq’en 1032 à travers la culture et la religion, vol. 30, Culture et société médiévales 30 (Brepols Publishers, 2018), 79–80; Ian Wood’s speculations on the same topic run in a similar vein: “Indeed, it is hard to identify any individual Burgundian as being arian, except for Gundobad, who seriously considered converting to catholicism, and Sigismund, who did convert and was remembered as a martyr. It seems, therefore, that the Burgundians should be seen as a largely catholic people, but that for a brief period under Gundobad they had an arian church. Since Gundobad may have been out of step with the majority of his people and his family, his own beliefs should perhaps be connected with those of his uncle, the arian Ricimer.” Ian Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450–751 (London and New York: Longman, 1994), 45. 272 Paxton, “Power and the Power to Heal: The Cult of St Sigismund of Burgundy,” 95. 273 Ian Wood has some influential reflections on how we should understand the category of ‘Arian’ during this period. His case, though sound, is sometimes overstated to unduly diminish the religious and political relevancy of Arianism to contemporaries of the period. Ian Wood, “The Latin Culture of Gundobad and Sigismund,” in Probleme einer germanisch-romanischen Kultursynthese in Spätantike und frühem Mittelalter, ed. Dieter Hagermann, Wolfgang Haubrichs, and Jorg Jamut, Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde 41 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), 367–80.

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he founded a new orthodox monastery at Agaune dedicated to Saint Maurice and the Theban

Legion in 515.274 A key feature of the new foundation was a commitment to constant prayer, the ordering of the monastery so that no hour of the day should pass when someone was not singing from the psalms. This practice is sometimes referred to as as laus perennis, a later term frequently used in modern scholarship275 to describe the practice of the monks at Agaune but nowhere present in contemporary texts.276

It is extremely difficult to reconstruct the exact political situation of the early sixth century, but the material we have is suggestive of complex and shifting networks of power involving not just Sigismund and the local bishops but also implicating the king and his positioning relative to the court of the eastern emperor. What we can see in the VAA, however, is the way that the monks of Agaune, much like those of Jura, turned to arguments based in materiality to establish their own footing in this complex political world.

Including the VAA, there are four sources for the (re-)founding of the monastery at Agaune in

515. The first is a homily by Avitus, bishop of Vienne and orthodox advisor of King Gundobad.

This homily was apparently delivered as part of the dedication of the new institution—dicta in basilica sanctorum Acaunensium in innovatione monasterii ipsius vel passione martyrum—and it survives to us at the library of the church of St-Jean de Lyon in an extraordinary papyrus

274 This foundation is in keeping with what Marilyn Dunn describes by saying: “In fifth-century Gaul, large basilicas were constructed over the tombs or relics of a number of saints and were served either by clergy or by monks from a linked monastery who chanted a liturgy in the basilica at regular hours of the day.” Another early example of such a church foundation was in Paris associated with Genovefe, the subject of a later chapter in this thesis, and may reflect Clovis and Clothilde, Sigismund’s aunt, doing something similar there. Dunn, The Emergence of Monasticism: From the Desert Fathers to the Early Middle Ages, 92. 275 Corbinian Gindele, “Die gallikanischen ‘Laus perennis’Kloster und ihr ‘Ordo Officii,’” Revue Bénédictine 69 (1959), 32–48; Jean Leclercq, “Prière incessente: A propos de la ‘laus perennis’ du Moyen Âge,” in La liturgie et les paradoxes chrétiens (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1963), 90–101. 276 The question of Agaune’s perpetual prayer has been carefully treated in: Barbara Rosenwein, “Perennial Prayer at Agaune,” in Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts, ed. Barbara Rosenwein and Sharon Farmer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 37–86; Marilyn Dunn suggests that “multiplicity of offices and lengthy psalmody” were a distinct characteristic of Gallic monasticism, perhaps connected to the presence of relics in monastic churches. Dunn, The Emergence of Monasticism: From the Desert Fathers to the Early Middle Ages, 95.

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manuscript which seems like it might even have been created in Avitus’s own lifetime. 277 The chronicle of Marius Aventicensis asserts that the monastery was founded by Sigismund in 515.278

Writing at about the same time in the last decades of the sixth century, Gregory of Tours asserts that the monastery was founded after the death of Gundobad in 516 CE.279 We possess a contemporary epitaph for the Hymnemodus recording his date of death as January 3rd, 516, a date corresponding with the VAA, which states that Hymnemodus died soon after the monastery’s foundation. This affirms the dating provided in the VAA and the chronicle of

Marius, and it suggests that the sequence of events narrated by Gregory of Tours contains an error.280

Sigismund succeeded his father as King of Burgundy in 516, one year after his foundation of the monastery at Agaune. The sons of King Clovis did not continue the alliances of their father; they attacked Sigismund’s kingdom, and Sigismund was killed by the Merovingian King

Chlodomer in 524, either just before or just after the composition of the VAA. Burgundy survived under Sigismund’s brother Godomar until 534, at which point it was subsumed into the kingdom of the Franks.281 Sigismund’s body was recovered and returned to the monastery of Saint

Maurice at Agaune, where it eventually became the focus of a healing cult that eclipsed the veneration of the Theban martyrs at the site.282

277 Avitus of Vienne, dicta in basilica sanctorum Acaunensium in innovatione monasterii ipsius vel passione martyrum, ed. Rudolf Peiper, MGH AA 6.2 (Berlin: Hahn, 1883), 145–146. Barbara Rosenwein notes that the title of the dedication sermon delivered by Avitus of Vienne indicates a ‘revival’ rather than a ‘foundation.’ Rosenwein, “One Site, Many Meanings: Saint-Maurice d’Agaune as a Place of Power in the Early Middle Ages,” 273 n. 9. 278 “monasterium Acauno a Sigimundo constructum est.” Marius Aventicensis, Marii episcopi Aventicensis Chronica, in MGH AA 11, ed. Theodor Mommsen (Berlin: Hahn, 1894), 234. 279 Gregory of Tours, decem libri historiarum, in MGH SRM 1.1 editio altera, ed. Bruno Krusch (Hannover: Hahn, 1951), 3.5. 280 Theurillat, L’Abbaye de Saint-Maurice d’Agaune: des origines à la réforme canoniale: 515–830, 43–45. 281 “decem libri historiarum,” bk. 3, chap. 5–6. 282 Theurillat, L’Abbaye de Saint-Maurice d’Agaune: des origines à la réforme canoniale: 515–830, 83–84; Bruno Krusch, ed., “Passio sancti Sigismundi regis,” in MGH SRM 2 (Hannover: Hahn, 1882), 338–39; Paxton, “Power and the Power to Heal: The Cult of St Sigismund of Burgundy,” 96; Gregory of Tours, “Liber in Gloria Martyrum,” in MGH SRM 1.2, ed. Bruno Krusch (Hannover, 1885), chap. 74.

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The monastery of Saint Maurice persisted and even flourished under Frankish rule, becoming one of the most important and powerful monastic institutions of later centuries. The set of exemptions and privileges that defined the monastery’s relationship to the crown and episcopacy, perhaps but not necessarily those set by Sigismund’s foundation, became an important model for later foundations, and it was known for its special status as a royal monastery—again perhaps, but not certainly, originating from the terms of Sigismund’s foundation.283

KINGS AND MARTYRS IN THE VITA ABBATUM ACAUNENSIUM

Friedrich Prinz, the eminent historian of early monasticism, introduced the concept of

Musterkloster, arguing that Agaune’s monastery of Saint Maurice was one of several monastic foundations whose privileges were used formulaically as models for later charters.284 In 637, the

Privilege of Rebais listed Agaune along with Lérins, Luxeuil, and the basilica of Marcellus as the models for the new foundation. Rebais’s privilege included autonomy in the selection of its abbot, over its own grounds and possessions, and over access to reserved parts of the monastery.285 On this basis, along with Eugen Ewig, Prinz also attributes these privileges to the four named monasteries, including Agaune.286 But we actually know very little about the privileges the monastery of Saint Maurice was granted at the time of its founding, and even less about those it may have acquired after the transition into Merovingian hands and over the years

283 Rosenwein, “One Site, Many Meanings: Saint-Maurice d’Agaune as a Place of Power in the Early Middle Ages,” 280–81. 284 For more on this, see also: Rosenwein, “One Site, Many Meanings: Saint-Maurice d’Agaune as a Place of Power in the Early Middle Ages,” 273–74. 285 Barbara Rosenwein, Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint, and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 68–69; The text of the privilege can be found in: Maurice Lecomte and Victor Leblond, eds., Les privilèges de l’Abbaye de Rebais-en-Brie (Melun: Michelin, 1910), 51–53. 286 Friedrich Prinz, Frühes Mönchtum im Frankenreich. Kultur und Gesellschaft in Gallien, den Rheinlanden und Bayern am Beispiel der monastischen Entwicklung (4. bis 8. Jahrhundert) (München und Wien: Oldenbourg, 1965), 85–86; Ewan Ewig, “Beobachtungen Zu Den Klosterprivilegien Des 7. Und Frühen 8. Jahrhunderts,” in Adel Und Kirche. Gerd Tellenbach Zum 65. Geburtstag Dargebracht von Freunden Und Schülern, ed. Josef Fleckenstein (Freiburg: Herder, 1968), 52–65.

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between 515 and 637. However, the monastery’s special status as a royal monastery in later periods, especially after the establishment of the cult of Saint Sigismund, is quite well attested.287

In any case, these appear to be been live issues for the community at Agaune. The VAA emphasizes that the monastery’s abbots were elected by the community of monks there, not appointed by bishops—with the possible exception of Hymnemodus, the first abbot, who was brought to Agaune by the council of bishops as part of the foundation.288 And Marius

Aventicensis tells us that in 565 the monks of Saint Maurice violently expelled a bishop who attempted to enter the monastery.289 Without being in any way conclusive, these two points suggest that the issues of independent election of abbots and the principle of bishops not being able to enter the monastic enclosure were at least in play at Agaune.

Frederick Paxton says, “While the bishops had an initial advantage at Saint Maurice in the early sixth century, they slowly lost ground to the independent spirit of the monks and the direct interest of the Frankish kings over the next two centuries.”290 There is no evidence of direct involvement by the Frankish kings before 574, when Guntram rebuilt the monastery after it was occupied by the Lombards.291 And it seems unclear what the basis is for Paxton’s claim of the bishops “slowly [losing] ground to the independent spirit of the monks.” This narrative, which

287 Paxton, “Power and the Power to Heal: The Cult of St Sigismund of Burgundy,” 107. Albrecht Diem has provocatively argued that the monastery at Agaune was a first instance in the long medieval tradition of royal or national monasteries, with an orientation toward a kingdom and a duty to pray for the king. Diem, “Who Is Allowed to Pray for the King? Saint-Maurice d’Agaune and the Creation of a Burgundian Identity”; This characterization is consistent with Dunn’s description of how “such basilica monasteries marked a departure from the concept of the monastery as the extension of and setting for the personal asceticism of its founder: instead, such houses represented the desire to invoke the protection of the saints for the living and the dead.” Dunn, The Emergence of Monasticism: From the Desert Fathers to the Early Middle Ages, 92. 288 See especially the opening of VAA, c. 8, which asserts that Ambrosius was elected by the congregation of monks after the death of Hymnemodus. 289 Marius Aventicensis, Marii episcopi Aventicensis Chronica, in MGH AA 11, ed. Theodor Mommsen (Berlin: Hahn, 1894), 237. 290 Paxton, “Power and the Power to Heal: The Cult of St Sigismund of Burgundy,” 106–7. 291 “Marii episcopi Aventicensis Chronica,” 239; Theurillat, L’Abbaye de Saint-Maurice d’Agaune: des origines à la réforme canoniale: 515–830, 105.

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more or less seems to function as the consensus, really only has two points of foundation: first, that the monastery of Agaune was founded in 515 by bishops seeking to create an orthodox stronghold where previously there had been Arian heresy; and second, that by 565 the monks of

Agaune were trying to murder their bishop and his attendants. Paxton’s description of the bishops “slowly losing ground” is mainly a guess created to make sense of the apparent discontinuity between those two points. In fact, as my reading of the VAA will demonstrate, I do not believe that the monks of Agaune saw themselves as subordinate to anyone even as early as the time of its composition.

The monastery of Saint Maurice of Agaune has received a considerable amount of scholarly attention, but this particular text, the prose portion of the VAA, has been underutilized. Barbara

Rosenwein has devoted some effort to the study of the monastery at Agaune, mostly preoccupied with Hymnemodus’s introduction of perpetual prayer. She has a footnote explaining Paxton’s theory about the power struggle between the bishops and the monks, which she concludes by saying that the Vita represents the bishops’ side of the story because it does not give any description of the community that had inhabited the site before the founding of the monastery.292

My reading of the text will complicate that analysis. Although it is true that the earlier monastic community is not given significant attention, and I agree with Rosenwein that we should read that omission as pejorative, nevertheless the Vita is emphatically about the autonomy of the monks of Agaune, not about their subjugation to bishops or kings.

Key to the question of the relationship between the Burgundian monarchy and the community at Agaune is that of the specific political goals that aligned to produce Sigismund’s

292 Rosenwein, “Perennial Prayer at Agaune,” 48 n. 39.

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foundation.293 King Gundobad and the Burgundian kingdom were officially adherents to the doctrines of Arianism, but virtually everyone involved with Sigismund’s foundation was explicitly orthodox. Some modern commentators identify the so-called laus perennis of Agaune with the practices of the Akoimetoi “sleepless” monks of the eastern empire, who were known as fierce opponents of the monophysite heresy.294 There is little on which to base this speculation, but it has the advantage of contributing to a tidy narrative: the monastery at Agaune was established by orthodox Sigismund, orthodox Avitus, and the orthodox bishops of Burgundy as an attempted importation of an aggressively orthodox Byzantine faction to counter the power of

Arianism in the kingdom. In 2000, Barbara Rosenwein completely rejected the Akoimetoi idea, and its basis was so speculative in the first place that no one has bothered to seriously revive it since.295

Sigismund’s founding of a Catholic monastery with an implicit mission to combat Arianism while his Arian father was still alive should probably not thus be read as anything like an act of pious defiance against his father, who after all seemed perfectly content with the Catholicism of

Burgundy’s episcopate. Indeed, it seems possible that Gundobad’s Arianism and Sigismund’s concurrent Catholicism were deliberately balanced against one another by the two men so that each faction within the kingdom would feel represented, just as the emperor and empress of the

Byzantine Empire, Justinian and Theodora, seem to have done during the monophysite

293 Barbara Rosenwein suggests that Sigismund’s relatives were making similar foundations, and that may have contributed to his motivations. Rosenwein, “One Site, Many Meanings: Saint-Maurice d’Agaune as a Place of Power in the Early Middle Ages,” 274–76; Ian Wood and Danuta Shanzer, Avitus of Vienne, Translated Texts for Historians Series 38 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002), 217. 294 Ian Wood supports the plausibility of this association by demonstrating the degree to which Avitus of Vienne was aware of and engaging with the theological controversies of the eastern empire. Wood, “A Prelude to Columbanus: The Monastic Achievement in the Burgundian Territories,” 16. 295 Rosenwein, “Perennial Prayer at Agaune.”

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controversy at around that same time.296 The Burgundian kingdom still had a large Gallo-Roman population—indeed, they were probably a majority—and as a political entity it was still relatively new.297 Gundobad and his sons were engaging in a careful political balance, trying to forge legitimacy and stability for their complex and multicultural new territory.298 Part of that balance involved mollifying both the Roman and Burgundian factions of their kingdom, as well as the Nicene and Arian factions.299 It is in the context of that balance that we should read

Sigismund’s activity at Agaune, and not as an act of rebellion against his father.300

In fact, I will argue that the Vita presents a significant challenge to the current model of the first few decades of Saint Maurice of Agaune. The text begins by telling us that Hymnemodus, the founding abbot, was a barbarian “by birth” but nevertheless he was “modest and gentle, immune from all ferocity.”301 Somehow he had come to be some sort of minister in the king’s court; presumably this was Gundobad, Sigismund’s father. The text says:

296 Dumézil notes the same pattern in the Burgundian royal family, where Arian men were frequently marrying Nicene queens. “Il semble évident que les souverains burgondes utilisèrent sciemment ces couples mixtes pour stabiliser leur pouvoir. Le roi arien protégeait les homéens tandis que la reine catholique intercédait pour les personnalités catholiques.” Dumézil, “Religion et ethnicité dans le royaume burgonde,” 82. 297 David Boyson shows how the Lex Gundobada preserved the legal distinction between Romans and Burgundians, arguing that it represented an attempt to normalize relations. Katherine Fischer Drew points out that the Burgundian laws give an equality of status to Romans that is not found in the equivalent Frankish Lex Salica. In an unfortunately flawed article, David Frye makes the case that analysis of the Burgundian laws as they were updated during the reigns of Gundobad and Sigismund shows that Sigismund was having trouble establishing control over the Roman population of his province. If so, this might help explain his conversion and the foundation of St. Maurice. David Boyson, “Romano-Burgundian Society in the Age of Gundobad: Some Legal, Archaeological and Historical Evidence,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 32 (1988), 92; Katherine Fischer Drew, “The Burgundian Code: Book of Constitutions or Law of Gundobad, Additional Enactments,” 1976, 13. 298 The Burgundians were relying heavily on the Roman legal framework for their authority, using predominantly Roman titles and even striking coins in the name of the emperor. Boyson, “Romano-Burgundian Society in the Age of Gundobad: Some Legal, Archaeological and Historical Evidence,” 93–94; For a discussion of how these early law codes were about image-building and securing royal power, see: Patrick Wormald, “Lex Scripta and Verbum Regis: Legislation and Germanic Kingship, from Euric to Cnut,” in Early Medieval Kingship, ed. P.H. Sawyer and Ian Wood (Leeds: School of History, University of Leeds, 1977), 105–38. 299 Dumézil places the foundation of Agaune in the context of a series of benevolent gestures from the ruling Burgundians toward the Nicene episcopacy. Dumézil, “Religion et ethnicité dans le royaume burgonde,” 83. 300 Boyson suggests that because Sigismund was given the title of Caesar, he “must have been regarded as some form of minor or sub-king.” David Boyson, “Romano-Burgundian Society in the Age of Gundobad: Some Legal, Archaeological and Historical Evidence,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 32 (1988), 95. 301 “natione quidem barbarus, sed morum benignitate modestus, ita inmunis ab omni feritate beneficio divinitatis.” VAA, c. 1.

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While he stood in the hall of the king as an attentive servant to royal power, [Hymnemodus] fulfilled the office commissioned to him with perfect integrity of mind, meanwhile training a soldier of Christ within the lodging of his heart. Following the instruction of the saviour, he rendered to God those things that were God’s; and he also peacefully performed his debt of service to the king.302

This is of course the famous command of Christ to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to

God what is God’s.303 The clear implication is that Hymnemodus was giving secular service to the king because it was required of him as a secular person, but his spiritual life was utterly fixated upon God. This might seem a fairly conventional point, but it comes from a community of monks who are supposedly acting as agents of the royal will in Burgundy. It certainly makes sense that the new abbot for Saint Maurice of Agaune would be one with previous connections to the royal court, but it is important to see the way that the author is framing that connection; it is a qualified one, with a strict hierarchy between secular duties which are owed to the king and spiritual duties which have no connection to the king and must be rendered to God alone. From the very first line, the VAA is making a clear, sharp distinction between the royal court and the spiritual life, with the latter in no way subordinate to the former.

The Vita continues: “His spirit became excited by passion, and in his heart he fostered a resolution to pursue perfect religion. And so, spurning the charms of worldly things, he disdained the ostentation of pompous powers and swiftly sought out a monastery at Grigny.”304 Again, this is a passage that is utterly typical for a Vita of a monastic saint. But in this case, it is the royal court at Burgundy that is guilty of the ostentation of conceited powers—pompa tumentium

302 “Hic dum in aula regali sedulus famulator regiae potestati adsisteret hac tota mentis integritate commissum sibi ministerium adimpleret, militiam Christi intra hospitium pectoris fideliter exercebat. Reddebat iuxta Salvatoris praeceptum, quae Dei erant Deo; regi quoque inoffense debitum servitii exhibebat.” VAA, c. 1. 303 Matthew 22:21. 304 “Nam cum, fervente spiritu, perfectae religionis intrinsecus maturasset consilium, mundanis spretis inlecebris et pompa tumentium potestatum dispecta, festinus monasterium Grenencense expetiit.” VAA, c. 1. Grigny was the site of an important confederation of monasteries across the Rhone from Vienne, founded by and closely associated with the bishop of Vienne. David Boyson, “Romano-Burgundian Society in the Age of Gundobad: Some Legal, Archaeological and Historical Evidence,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 32 (1988), 112.

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potestatum. Religious devotion, according to this Agaune monk, repels one away from secular power in disgust. Hymnemodus left his privileged position in the court of the King of Burgundy for a contemplative life at the Burgundian monastery of Grigny in a move that is framed as a flight away from corruption in search of spiritual health. Even without continuing through the rest of the text, this section alone should call into question the idea that we are witnessing an alliance between the Saint Maurice community and Burgundian royal authority.

It is possible that the text is drawing an implicit distinction between the newly orthodox

Sigismund and his Arian father Gundobad; the criticism of the royal court expressed here would possibly not be intended to apply to Sigismund.305 Indeed, the depiction of Sigismund is quite positive. But it remains true that the Vita describes a rejection of secular power as a central part of the religious life, at least for those with a monastic vocation. (It is never implied that

Sigismund, for example, had a spiritual obligation to reject secular power, and indeed the text asserts the monastic community’s claim on the exercise of that power). Such a description is unsurprising in the life of a monastic, but its presence in a text should be noted and makes it hard to imagine that its author was an agent of royal authority.

Next we have the description of Hymnemodus arriving at his destination, a monastery at

Grigny:

At that time, the abbot of the monastery was a venerable man named Caelestius. When he saw Hymnemodus, he and his whole congregation were astonished, but, because of the office given to Hymnemodus by the king, Caelestius did not dare to accept him into the cloister of the monastery. And so, when he was not able to overcome the stubbornness of the abbot with his pleas, Hymnemodus withdrew to a certain cave for a little while. There he tonsured the hair on his head, casting his every thought toward God.306

305 It is probably worth noting, however, that the author never explicitly criticizes Gundobad or his court for its Arianism specifically. 306 “Quem cum vidisset vir venerabilis abba Caelestius, qui ipsi monasterio eo tempore praeerat, cum omni congregatione adtonitus, in monasterii coenobio propter officium ei a rege traditum interim eum suscipere non

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This is even more interesting. Here we have an abbot deferring to a monarch and obstinately turning away a saint. Surely if there is a message to be drawn from this, it is that abbots should never be cowed by royal authority, and, rendering unto God what is God’s, should never allow deference to secular authority to interfere with spiritual duty.

It is also interesting to note Hymnemodus’s retreat to a cave. This of course resonates with a long early monastic tradition that emphasized a retreat into the wilderness, but I want to argue that it also needs to be read as a place in opposition to the monastery of Caelestius. The cave becomes Hymnemodus’s monastery, where he is uniquely joined to God. The wilderness—the untamed land—is the place where Hymnemodus is tonsured and attains union with God, outside the bounds of places where secular deference to kings held sway. This bespeaks a certain vision of the wilderness that draws from the tradition of Christian asceticism, a vision that imagines union to God occurring through engagement with the wilderness.307

The story concludes:

And the more threatening plots came forth from the king, so much the more keenly did Hymnemodus excel in the service of Christ. He so excelled that, when the holy abbot Caelestius went from this world to be with Christ, Hymnemodus succeeded as abbot in his place. He was not easily compelled, but God approved it, and the whole congregation agreed.308

Now we see the monastic community making the right choice. They ignore the threat from the king and allow Hymnemodus to come join them, even demanding that he be their new abbot.

Immediately the monastery begins to expand and prosper, affirming the rightness of their

audebat. Ad ubi obstinationem abbatis sanctus Hymnemodus supplicando superare non valuit, ad quandam speluncam paulisper secessit; illic detonsis capillis capitis sui, omni in Deum cogitatione adiunctus, gradibus religionis cum omni caritate et humilitatis virtute proficiebat.” VAA, c.1. 307 In addition to the hermetical wilderness-emphasizing tradition of the desert fathers, this idea of finding monastic holiness in the wilderness is also very much a feature of the Vita patrum Iurensium, on which this text is ostensibly modeled. 308 “Quantumque regis minaces insidiae procedebant, tantum ille in Christi servitio acrius excellebat, adeo ut non post multum temporis, sancto Caelestio abbate de hoc saeculo ad Christum migrante, ipse, Deo favente, ex totius congregationis consensu, fratrum supplicationibus vix coactus, abba loco eius succederet.” VAA, c. 1.

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decision. The whole scene clearly mirrors the Biblical story of the prophet Elijah, who also had to hide in a cave to avoid the wrath of an angry monarch from whom he had fled—in his case, wicked Queen Jezebel. For Elijah, as for Hymnemodus and a long tradition of cave-dwelling hermits, it was in the seclusion of the natural world that a true divine experience occurred. Elijah wept in his cave that the people of Israel had rejected the worship of their God; so we might be intended to imagine Hymnemodus weeping for the Burgundian people under their Arian king. In his cave, Elijah finally received a message from a whispering voice, telling him to go out and anoint a new king for Israel, so that the people might be returned to true religion.309

Hymnemodus, while not called upon to anoint anyone, nevertheless went on to play a role in the life of the future king Sigismund, whose desire was to convert Burgundy from Arianism.310

What follows is a description of the founding of the monastery at Agaune. Hymnemodus was among those drafted to the new monastery, and he was selected to be its first abbot. The description of the founding is consequential enough to be worth repeating in full:

Sigismund, the son of King Gundobad, was girded with the honour of a patrician at that time. When he rejected the faithlessness of Arian depravity, he began to follow the faith of Catholic dogma, and to adapt his soul most intently toward religious devotion. The bishop of the city of Geneva at that time was a man named Maximus. He was outstanding in all sanctity and purity and distinguished by his strenuous exertion in every task. The preaching of divine speech was exceedingly powerful in him, and he incited the heart of Sigismund to an act of devotion. In the place which the Theban martyrs ornamented with their precious death and the pouring out of their famous blood in happy spatters of a rosy variety, Sigismund caused that the mixed habitation of the mingled crowd should be removed. There, where the splendor of life had been acquired through an atrocity of suffering, he caused that the brightness of the inhabitants should return, so that the actions of darkness might be cast out and a day everlasting might occur. Thus it would be that these same would be his protectors, and he would possess both the kingdom and the integrity of the kingdom most securely, on the condition that his thought should not deviate from piety and the way of justice, since the saints protect those who do not wander from the ranks of the good. Yet he

309 1 Kings 19:1–18. 310 This reading, that Gundobad was allegorized as Queen Jezebel and Hymnemodus as the prophet Elijah who would go on to anoint the good king Jehu (perhaps Sigismund) for the salvation of the kingdom, is extremely speculative. It makes sense, however, that such an implication would require plausible deniability and only really be intelligible to audiences with a good knowledge of scripture.

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deserved to hold the kingdom with every abundance and prosperity, and he would have held it for a longer time if the overflowing sins of the people had not allowed the hatred of the ancient enemy to prevail.311

There is quite a bit of significant content in this passage, which seems to have received by far the most scholarly attention of any part of the text. It is quite easy to see how the initial lines contribute to the idea that the monastery at Agaune represented an alliance between royal and episcopal power. And indeed, there does seem to have been a considerable degree of cooperation between Sigismund and the council of bishops that oversaw the (re-)foundation. There does seem to be some sense that the monastery was intended as an influential bastion against Arianism, since it was founded by a recently converted king on the urging of a bishop who sought to encourage praedicatio. But, for the purposes of this study, the most relevant part is the emphasis on the role of the martyrs, their relationship to Sigismund, and their connection to the place.

First, we should note that Sigismund’s conversion is described in terms analogous to

Hymnemodus’s conversion. It is characterized by a turning away from depravity and becoming immersed in religious devotion, just as Hymnemodus turned away from the royal court and became immersed in monastic zeal. In a very significant sense, Sigismund was also rejecting the depravities of the royal court inasmuch as he was rejecting its Arian religion. Even the phrasing

311 “Cum Sigismundus, Gundebadi regis filius, iam honore patriciatus accinctus, Arrianae pravitatis abiecisset perfidiam, fidem catholici dogmatis consecutus, animum suum erga religionis studia intentissime commodabat. Eo tempore Maximus Genavensis urbis antistes omni sanctitate et puritate conspicuus cunctaque industriae strenuitate egregius, apud quem praedicatio divini sermonis vehementer pollebat, ad hanc devotionem Sigismundi praecordia incitavit, ut de loco illo, quem pretiosa morte Thebaei martyres et effusione sanguinis incliti felicibus maculis rosea verietate ornaverunt, promiscui vulgi commixta habitatio tolleretur, et illic, ubi splendor vitae per passionis atrocitatem fuerat adquisitus, nitor habitantium remearet, exclusisque actionibus tenebrarum, dies perpetuus haberetur: ita fore, ut, hisdem patrocinantibus, et regno et regni integritate tutissime potiretur, eo pacto, si cogitatio eius a pietate et iustitiae itinere minime deviaret, quia hos sancti tuentur, quos scient a bono ordine nullatenus declinare. Quod tamen cum omni habundantia et prosperitate habere promeruit et adhuc tempore longiore habuerat, si non, exundantibus populorum delictis, antiqui hostis invidia valuisset. Igitur, habito consilio, quod universitate Dei instinctu conplacuit, visum est, ut omnes mulieres de loco eodem tollerentur, et remotis familiis secularibus, Dei inibi, hoc est monachorum, familia locaretur, qui die noctuque caelestia imitantes, cantonibus divinis insisterent.” VAA, c. 3.

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is similar:

Hymnemodus:

mundanis spretis inlecebris et pompa tumentium potestatum dispecta, festinus monasterium

Grenencense expetiit312

Sigismund:

Arrianae pravitatis abiecisset perfidiam, fidem catholici dogmatis consecutus, animum suum

erga religionis studia intentissime commodabat313

Both leave something behind. For Hymnemodus, it is the mundanis inlecebris and pompa tumentium potestatum—the charms of worldly things and the ostentation of pompous powers.

For Sigismund, it was Arrianae pravitatis perfidiam, the faithlessness of Arian depravity. (Since

Hymnemodus was fleeing the court of the Arian Gundobad, maybe they were actually fleeing the same thing!) Both were urgently seeking something. Hymnemodus was seeking a monastery, monasterium, his urgency signalled by the adverb festinus. Sigismund was seeking religious devotion, religionis studia, his urgency signalled by the superlative intentissime. The founding of the monastery at Agaune represented a concrete manifestation of his new orientation. And more: like Hymnemodus’s cave, Agaune was to Sigismund a place to confirm a new religious mode of life.

I especially want to draw attention to the degree to which this passage is about the place itself.

The ground itself of the physical location is holy, ornamented as it is by the blood of the Theban

312 VAA, c. 1. 313 VAA, c. 3.

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legion.314 And the extraordinary horror of their martyrdom is precisely what fuels the rhetorical force underlining the extraordinary divinity of the site of that martyrdom: splendor vitae is placed next to passionis atrocitatas and actiones tenebrarum next to dies perpetuus. Unlike the cave of Hymnemodus, which is a spot for interface with the divine by virtue of its mimetic relationship with the story of Elijah and its association with wilderness asceticism, Agaune acquires its extraordinary status as a divine place from its association with martyrdom, the preeminent Christian ideal with mimetic ties to the crucifixion itself. It also leverages the tension between dramatically opposite concepts, atrocity and darkness next to splendour and perpetual day, in a way that recalls the coincidentia oppositorum of the Jura text.

What we see then is a holy place with a specific role in the logic of conversion, similar to

Hymnemodus’s cave. Sigismund’s coming to Agaune is not presented in the text as a political step, but rather as the completion of the process of consecration begun when he turned away from the depravity of Arianism. Where Hymnemodus was tonsured in his cave, Sigismund was committed to righteous kingship, with the assurance that the martyrs would guard his kingdom so long as he maintained his piety.315

In a sense, this story also parallels stories of anointing given to the kings of the Old

Testament.316 Sigismund is effectively establishing an agreement with the martyrs of Agaune, where they will grant him a sound kingdom so long as he remains faithful to Christian

314 “de loco illo, quem pretiosa morte Thebaei martyres et effusione sanguinis incliti felicibus maculis rosea verietate ornaverunt.” VAA, c. 3. 315 “ita fore, ut, hisdem patrocinantibus, et regno et regni integritate tutissime potiretur, eo pacto, si cogitatio eius a pietate et iustitiae itinere minime deviaret, quia hos sancti tuentur, quos scient a bono ordine nullatenus declinare.” VAA, c. 3. 316 The one that comes most immediately to mind is the pledge made between God and Solomon in 1 Kings 3, where God says to Solomon in verses 12–14 (in the Revised Standard Version): “Behold, I now do according to your word. Behold, I give you a wise and discerning mind, so that none like you has been before you and none like you shall arise after you. I give you also what you have not asked, both riches and honor, so that no other king shall compare with you, all your days. And if you will walk in my ways, keeping my statutes and my commandments, as your father David walked, then I will lengthen your days.”

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precepts.317 Rhetorically, the martyrs of Agaune are set up as the insurers of Sigismund’s royal success, with the implication that Sigismund’s royal legitimacy derives from his connection to them.

In another sense, the language of the text—particularly eo pacto—seems almost to reflect that of a legal contract being made between the king and the martyrs, with the king quite emphatically as the junior partner. The bishops, although definitely depicted as instrumental in the foundation, are excluded from this agreement, rendered almost irrelevant. The relationship is directly between the king and the martyrs, who are represented by and unified with the community of monks at Saint Maurice. What we are observing here is a specific claim being made about the political relationship between Sigismund and the martyrs of Agaune, and that claim is being made through a logic of materiality; the relationship between the martyr’s divinizing sacrifice and their spilled blood, the spilled blood and the physical ground of Agaune, becomes the basis for making the ground of the monastery coincident with the divinity of the saints, so that Sigismund’s interaction with the physical site of the monastery becomes a mediated interaction with the divine whereby, in the model of Solomon, he offers his loyalty to

Christian values in exchange for a blessing on the kingdom. What remains is to more clearly describe how the text aligns that sacred mediating ground with the monastic community of

Agaune, in a logic not unlike what we have observed in the relationship between the Jura monks and the physical landscape of the Jura hills, and thereby positions the Agaune monks themselves as the mediators between the supplicant king and the holy martyrs.

317 Sigismund seems to have become increasingly unpopular with the Nicene church during his reign, which also neatly parallels the analogy to Solomon. It sets Sigismund up as a promising king who made a good deal with God and built a fancy temple, but who later strayed from that commitment to the detriment of the whole kingdom. Dumézil, “Religion et ethnicité dans le royaume burgonde,” 85. This also neatly parallels the analogy to Solomon. It sets Sigismund up as a promising king who made a good deal with God and built a fancy temple, but who later strayed from that commitment to the detriment of the whole kingdom.

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THE UNION OF MONKS AND MARTYRS

The formation of the monastic community is described following the description of the new foundation’s establishment with its new perpetual liturgy. Monks are brought from monastic communities from all across the Burgundian kingdom. Chief among them was Hymnemodus, who was summoned to be its abbot, along with a few handpicked companions. Once the last one had arrived, the hagiographer writes, “With [Ambrosius] thus joined to the holy martyrs, a great joy of love filled all the brothers in that same congregation.”318 This language is significant because it identifies a unity between the monks of Agaune and the martyrs whose blood sanctified the place. It was not unusual for monastic communities to identify strongly with their saintly patrons and their sacred sites, but in this instance it bears note specifically because those saintly patrons and that sacred site were just rhetorically established as the divine source of

Sigismund’s legitimacy as a monarch.

This rhetoric of being joined to the martyrs does not occur in isolation. In fact, the text more broadly is quite concerned with issues of social cleaving and joining as they related to the monastic experience, and that cleaving and joining almost always has an explicitly physical dimension. When the priest Probus commits to joining Hymnemodus at Agaune, two abbots objected. “They delayed him from going for the sake of love, lest they be torn away from the sight of him.”319 The bishop of Gratianopolis felt similarly, “since [Probus] would be absent from him in body.”320 That bishop indeed felt so strongly that he made the journey to the basilica at Agaune to plead with Probus, who did not relent in his decision. The second abbot of the three founders, Ambrosius, was similarly opposed in his desire to leave his home for Agaune by the

318 “Sic iunctus sanctis martiribus, mira caritatis gaudia cunctis in congregatione eadem fratribus cumulavit”. VAA, c. 7. 319 “ne de eius aspectu devellerentur, amoris causa eum in veniendo dissimulabant.” VAA, c. 5. 320 “quod corpore ei absentaretur.” VAA, c. 5.

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bishop of Lyon. His ultimate decision to leave is described in terms that make explicit reference to cutting away bonds.321 When that same abbot’s life is later summarized, the text is careful to note that he pursued a monastic career against the wishes of his relatives.322 And the third abbot as well was dissuaded from entering the monastic life by parents concerned about his inability to sustain the rigours of asceticism.323

The recurring theme is quite clear, and perhaps not surprising for a monastic text. It clearly has a normative role in addressing monks or would-be monks whose families might oppose their vocation or even attempt to extract them from a monastery after conversion. The text models in no uncertain terms that, even when these objections originate from a place of love and concern, the obligation of the monk or would-be monk is to spurn them. The more unusual aspect is perhaps that this moral is also applied against bishops who might dissuade monastics from relocating.

The exact message here is at first a little vague. It was, after all, a council of bishops who presumably organized the relocation of the abbots and monks in question. The text certainly makes clear that the decision to refound the monastery was made by Sigismund and the decision to summon Hymnemodus as its leader was made by the council of bishops.324 How, then, is a confused monk supposed to know when to submit to a bishop’s will concerning his movements and when to ignore it? The simple answer might be to only submit to bishops who are guided by the Holy Spirit, as the council for the foundation Agaune is recorded to have been.325 But failing a convenient means for the average monk to detect which episcopal commands are inspired and

321 “omnibus morarum retibus amputatis.” VAA, c. 7. 322 “propinquis nolentibus” VAA, c. 8. 323 “parentes autem dissimulabant eum” VAA, c. 9. 324 VAA, c. 3. 325 VAA, c. 3.

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which are not, I want to suggest that a more nuanced answer can be arrived at from considering the parallel theme of monastic joining or unity.

Just as Agaune monks are repeatedly depicted as severing themselves from places and people in order to fulfill their calling, so they are emphatically depicted as being bound to their new locations and communities. To create the new community at Agaune, women and secular families are first removed, keeping with the text’s insistence on separation from the world. What replaces them is the family of God, the monks; the language of the text explicitly contrasts the two—remotis familiis secularibus, Dei inibi, hoc est monachorum, familia locaretur.326 Just as secular families are to be spurned, monastic families are to be held united.327 This principle is affirmed in a passage concerning the third abbot, Achivus, who first enters the narrative as a monk serving under Hymnemodus at the monastery of Grigny. When Hymnemodus is called to go rule the monastery at Agaune, he attempts to leave Achivus behind to rule the Grigny monastery in his place. But Achivus refuses, in language that echoes that of the scriptural Ruth refusing to abandon her mother-in-law Naomi when Naomi was returning to Israel from the land of the Philistines.328 “But Achivus was thirsty for labour, since Agaune was now under a rule, so he responded to his abbot that unless death should separate them, he would never depart from his service.”329 Achivus’s decision to go to Agaune has nothing to do with any command from any bishop, inspired by God or otherwise. In fact, here the bishop plays the role of Achivus’s secular family that must be abandoned. His decision derives explicitly from his devotion to his fellow

326 VAA, c. 3. 327 This perfect unity of the monastic community as a single unit echoes what we observed in the VPJ’s treatment of the same topic. 328 “But Ruth said, ‘Entreat me not to leave you or to return from following you; for where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God; where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the Lord do so to me and more also if even death parts me from you.’” Ruth 1:16–17, RSV. 329 “Qui sitiens opus, quod nunc Acauno regitur, hoc abbati suo respondit, nisi transitus separaret, numquam se de eius obsequio discessurum, quod sanctus Hymnemodus gratissimum habuit.” VAA, c. 4.

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monastic and abbot, Hymnemodus, and his unwillingness to be physically separated from

Hymnemodus. This is absolutely not a text with an emphasis on obedience to bishops, but rather one with an emphasis of the loyalty, love, and union of the monks to one another and, implicitly, the martyrs.

This emphasis on physical union, which parallels the unwillingness of the above bishops and families to endure physical separation, is repeated elsewhere. When the company asks Probus to join them, it is “so that they might be joined together equally in corporeal presence just as in spirit, ceaselessly giving thanks and praise to God.”330 Here physical proximity is elided with spiritual unity, a rhetorical move that renders more intelligible the description of Ambrosius’s arrival at Agaune as a joining with the martyrs—iunctus sanctis martiribus. His physical presence filled the brothers of the congregation with a “great joy of love.”331 Indeed, caritas seems to be the mechanism by which this physical and spiritual unity is achieved; one of

Ambrosius’s great virtues is later listed as “a profuse affection for brotherly love.”332

It seems, then, that this text establishes the guiding force for monastic conduct as not episcopal or royal will, which are depicted as unreliable at best, but monastic and fraternal caritas, which both creates and derives from physical proximity qua spiritual union. This logic of proximity and unity is explicitly extended to the martyrs of the Theban legion, who are present via their spilled blood in the pass of Agaune. The martyrs are included in the monastic community, and the brothers are unified with them by virtue of their physical presence at the location of the legion’s martyrdom. In addition to being quite interesting for the way that we understand this monastic community’s understanding of itself, it also, in conjunction with the

330 “ut sicut animo ita et praesentia corporali coniuncti pariter, Deo indesinenter gratias et laudes referrent.” VAA, c. 5. 331 “mira caritatis gaudia” VAA, c. 7. 332 “profusaque fraternae caritatis dilectio” VAA, c. 8.

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rest of the text, amounts to a fairly clear political statement. The legitimacy of the king and the stability of the kingdom derived from a pact between the king and the martyrs, who are essentially rendered as spiritual members of the monastic community. The monastery’s abbots especially exist in a spiritual union of caritas with those martyrs, and other monks must prioritize fraternal affection with their abbots and brothers over any episcopal or royal instruction. The council of bishops and Sigismund’s episcopal allies—far from being overlords—are thus reduced to convenient vehicles for the Holy Spirit. Sigismund himself is reduced to a spiritual client of the monastery. Almost every other instance of a king or bishop appearing in the Vita is in the role of a secular opponent of the monastic vocation trying to exert inappropriate control over a monk or abbot.

In this subtle way, this text from Agaune is trying to set up the monastery of Saint Maurice as the moral arbiter of Burgundy, the spiritual authority to which the king must be accountable. If so, this would certainly be a strong basis for rivalry with the episcopacy. Such rivalries between monastic communities and bishops were extremely common during this period, so we should not necessaryly be surprised to find one here, but that finding does not mesh well with some scholars’ notions of Agaune’s early years as ones of exceptional, dedicated subordination to king and bishop.333

It should not then be concluded that this Vita takes the side of the bishops in an early, obedient phase of a monastery that later turned fiercely independent. Rather, the text makes an argument for the spiritual pre-eminence of the monastic community at Agaune, a pre-eminence derived from its unity with a physical space made sacred by the blood of the martyrs. Whatever

Sigismund’s intentions in his new foundation, and whatever its relationship was with the

333 For a discussion of Agaune’s troubled relationship with its bishops, see: Theurillat, L’Abbaye de Saint-Maurice d’Agaune: des origines à la réforme canoniale: 515–830, 122–26.

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religious communities who inhabited the space previously, Saint Maurice of Agaune, even in its early days, like so many other monastic communities of this period, was not going to willingly submit to any other authority, and it certainly did not see itself as an instrument of royal or episcopal power imposing a foreign set of religious practices. Rather, they were profoundly local, drawing their communal identity and divine authority from their connection with the sacred ground of Agaune itself.

DIES PERPETUUS: AGAUNE AND JURA

I will conclude by discussing the relationship between the Jura text and the VAA.334 For both the

VPJ and the VAA, the unity of the monastic community is a major focus. There is an obvious level on which encouraging unity for a monastic community makes sense, but the injunctions in these texts take on a more metaphysical tone. The Jura text stresses that no monk there owned anything except for his own name. They held everything in common, since, “content with nudity they burned with the unanimity of faith.”335 When they went abroad and performed miracles, they hid their identities and quickly stole away, so that “they taught that their admirers ought to seek the font and origin of grace.”336 And the two founding abbots, Romanus and Lupicinus, together best exemplified this unity: “I say that all were one, since all were of one. Therefore if one of the fathers of government perceived his brother, that is his co-abbot, by the dispensation of the Holy Spirit to shine and enjoy some part of grace, with hands and eyes raised to heaven he

334 For the only really significant discussion of the relationship between the monasteries of Jura and Agaune, including a discussion of the possibility that the Vita sent to Agaune from Jura contained a monastic rule that might have subsequently been adopted there, and the possibility that a troop of Jura monks went to Agaune as part of the founding of the new monastery there by Sigismund, see François Masai, “La ‘Vita patrum Jurensium’ et les débuts du monachisme à Saint-Maurice d’Agaune,” Festschrift Bernhard Bishoff (Stuttgart: A.Hiersemann, 1971), 43–69. 335 “nuditate contenti caritatis ac fidei unanimitate feruebant.” VPJ, c. 113. 336 “edocebant fontem atque exordium gratiarum debere expetere admirantes.” VPJ, c. 113.

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immediately poured out tears of joy to Christ, just as if he himself had done the thing.”337 This line of thinking is entirely consistent with the normal early medieval commentary on saints, that they are all animated by the same spirit and thus all act in the same way. Interestingly here it also seems to extend to the monks themselves, making them a sort of group of junior saints, their individual identities negated. In addition to the theological implications of that negation or blurring of individual identity for monasticism, it is easy also to notice some context-specific reasons. For the Agaune text, uniting the saints with the living community and with the dead martyrs confers upon the community the authority of the saints and, more importantly for

Agaune, of the martyrs. For the Jura text, emphasizing the continuity of the community in this way also maximises the normative force of the text’s instructions on self-discipline and regular living, so that its lessons seem to apply not only to the characters in the story but also to the Jura monks in the audience, no matter how temporally distant they might be from the saints or even the text’s compiler. In that sense these are both remarkably future-oriented documents, intended to sustain a continuity of identity between the community of past and present, including but not limited to the saints described in the narrative.

Perhaps we should read the oneness of identity shared by the monastic community as the natural consequence of minds disciplined away from the bounded and toward the boundless, each united by their apprehension of the infinite unity of God. It is, I suspect, this metaphysical orientation toward atemporality that enables the conceptual gymnastics required to conceive of a seamless unity between the past and the present—between the retreat of the Egyptian ascetics into the desert and the daily life of the Jura monks, and between the daily life of the Agaune

337 “omnes, inquam, unum erant, quia unius omnes erant. Si quis igitur patrum gubernaculi fratrem, id est coabbatem utique suum, dispensatione sancti Spiritus quacumque gratiarum parte feruere ac perfrui praesensisset, eleuatis ad caelum oculis manibusque, tamquam si ipse id gereret, gaudii lacrimas alacer profundebat ad Christum.” VPJ, c. 111.

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monks with their perpetual prayer and the gruesome historical event that was the slaughter of the

Theban legion at that same site.

Since the monastic oneness seems to imply a spiritual transcendence of the world that will pass away, and thence of temporal boundedness in general, the living presence of dead saints in a monastic community itself takes on an atemporal character, with significant consequences for the status of the Vitae themselves. In a community that imagined the founding saints as a perpetual presence participating in the community, the regular recitation of the stories surrounding the saints’ lives asserts the continued intersection of the saints’ imitable example and faith- provoking wonders with the present day of the monastic community. Thus the regular reading of the lives of the founding abbots was a way, like the perpetual chant at Agaune, to hold the monastery in the timeless day of God, joined through mimesis and affect with a patron saint whose death, in a very real sense, represented no serious terminus to his existence.338

Indeed, with this borne in mind, it is possible to see several points in the Jura text where the goal seems to be the collapsing of the temporal distinction between the time of the abbot’s life and the time of the text’s reading. For example, describing the spot where Romanus decided to found the monastery of Condadisco, the hagiographer writes: “Flowing with ice-cold water, a refreshing stream emerged from the cover of that tree, from which even today, brought all the way to the monastery through wooden pipes, refreshing waters are furnished for a certain pledge of heredity to his heirs.”339 Little details like this, sprinkled throughout the text, use a known topographical feature of the monastery’s location to establish a tangible link between the present

338 This perhaps flags the existence of what Barbara Rosenwein would call an “emotional community” shared between the monasteries of Jura and Agaune. Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, New York, and London: Cornell University Press, 2007). 339 VPJ, c. 7: “Extra cuius arboris orbem fons inriguus gelidissima fluenta praestabat, ex quo etiam hodie terebratis lignis ulterius in monasterium educti latices pro quodam hereditatis pignore pignoribus ministrantur inrigui.”

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moment and the past. Just as the spring which Romanus found still flows in the same way today, the implication might be, so also do the deeds of Romanus still endure.

It is this particular relationship between saint, community, and place that I think most typifies these two sixth-century monastic texts. The monks inhabit the place and emulate the saints, and the saints persist within both the community and the place by virtue of that emulation and the constant reading of Vitae that use the permanency of the place to build a time-collapsing connection between the monastic communities and the lives of their fathers. In the case of the

Jura text in particular, this is facilitated by a particular vision of monastic discipline’s role in developing identity into an undifferentiated collective participating spiritually in an immaterial and atemporal stance oriented perpetually toward God.

In this and other ways, however, the VAA is a very different text from the VPJ. In terms of presenting a monastic guide for a proper relationship with the sensory experience of the material world, it is much less sophisticated and subtle. Indeed, its interests are far less cosmological and far more political, and it leverages the technology of medieval exegesis primarily to make coded political points, as when it applies Biblical narrative structures that implicitly place Gundobad in the position of the evil king Ahab or Sigismund in the position of the promising but ultimately disappointing king Solomon.340 However, similarities to the material logics of the VPJ exist in this text and play a central role in how it asserts the social and political identity of Agaune’s monastic community. Whether these similarities are directly influenced by the VPJ or just a result of the two texts emerging from the same milieu is difficult to determine, though I tend to lean in favour of the latter.

340 VAA, c. 1 and 3 respectively.

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The VAA does not reproduce the consistent and mystical conception of anagogical divinization of material world through the coincidentia oppositorum that we find in the VPJ, but traces of the same mode of thinking appear throughout. The VAA very much enjoys placing two opposite concepts side by side for rhetorical effect, presumably because the dramatic contrast would provoke a more vivid engagement between reader and text. For example, when

Hymnemodus heals a sick son, “his parents received joy in place of their tears.”341 The text also employs the device of having an extreme version of one thing produce an extreme version of its opposite, a dynamic which we observed to some extent in the VPJ and which we will see more in future chapters. For example, early in Hymnemodus’s monastic career we are told: “the more threatening plots came forth from the king, so much the more keenly did Hymnemodus excel in the service of Christ.”342 The most dramatic example of this dynamic, however, and the place where it most approaches the model of the VPJ, is during the description of the monastery’s ground during the foundation of Sigismund.

The text says: “There, where the splendor of life had been acquired through an atrocity of suffering, [Sigismund] caused that the brightness of the inhabitants should return, so that the actions of darkness might be cast out and a day everlasting might occur.”343 First we see a bad thing, passionis atrocitatem, in its superlative badness generating its opposite, splendor vitae.

This is a characterization of the logic of martyrdom that we will see elsewhere, where bodily, material pain and suffering, especially to the point of death, becomes the means of accessing a

341 “parentes eius pro lacrimis gaudia receperunt.” VAA, c.2. This is a reference to Isaiah 61:3, “to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit” RSV and Psalm 30:11 “Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing” RSV. 342 “Quantumque regis minaces insidiae procedebant, tantum ille in Christi servitio acrius excellebat” VAA, c. 1. 343 “illic, ubi splendor vitae per passionis atrocitatem fuerat adquisitus, nitor habitantium remearet, exclusisque actionibus tenebrarum, dies perpetuus haberetur” VAA, c. 3.

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spiritual state which is just as glorious and divine as the bodily state is base and miserable.344

Through the martyrdom of the Theban Legion, the actionibus tenebrarum, the site achieves dies perpetuus.

Dies perpetuus here evokes a divine transcendent state comparable to what we saw in the

VPJ, where the distinctions of time are replaced by timelessness, history and change are transcended, and the decay and impermanence of the material world are replaced by the infinite boundlessness of God’s eternal moment. If the VPJ imagines that state as being achieved through the enactment of a living paradox, the simultaneous presence of two contradictory things as coincidentia oppositorum, the VAA imagines this state as existing with reference to its own opposite, the material, embodied experience of suffering, misery, and death, accessible through the invocation of this opposite. To the extent that the VAA presents a model of monastic life, this is it, very different from the quietus “middle way” of the VPJ. The text describes entering a monastery as “submitting your body for punishment” and “practicing abstinences.”345 From these passages we can detect the sense, more vividly present in other texts, that the Agaune model of approaching holiness was to endure great bodily suffering in the hopes of achieving equivalent spiritual reward—ultimately the martyr’s model of sanctity—and not the careful cultivation of spiritual indifference toward the material world that characterized the VPJ. With this distinction noted, however, it remains that both texts are presenting a logic whereby a divine quality becomes associated a material location, the site of the monastery.

Like the VPJ, the VAA makes an argument for the physical site of the monastery at Agaune as a sort of axis mundi, a place where heaven and earth intersect. Indeed, even the introductory

344 You might say that this is part of the affective power of the crucifixion narrative itself, where the contrast between the infinite majesty of God and the infinite smallness and ugliness of the crucifixion is what generates the affective resonance of the moment.. 345 “aptabis corpus ad poenam” VAA, c. 9; “subsistendi regula” VAA, c. 7.

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letter of the VPJ, addressed to Agaune, makes a case for connecting the physical location of the monastery to its spiritual status when it says “Your ‘Acaunus’, in the ancient gallic expression, is recognized to be a rock, as much primordially from nature as now also because of the Church, through the truthful prefiguration of Peter.”346 The VAA similarly focuses its narrative of divinization on the physical ground of Agaune. The dies perpetuus of Agaune is the product of the physical suffering that occurred there, and that production is presented in material terms: it is

“the place which the Theban martyrs ornamented with their precious death and the pouring out of their famous blood in happy spatters of a rosy variety.”347 Here the sharp contrast between concepts even attributes to the relationship between nouns and adjectives, as in pretiosa morte— there is a sort of automatic counter-intuitive quality to the idea of any death being precious—and felicibus maculis—in very few contexts would blood spatters be described as happy. The unlikely character of what is being described here automatically supplies the impression that something otherworldly is at play, something outside the normal day-to-day logic of how things work and what goes with what. Somewhat like the VPJ’s coincidentia oppositorum, it uses paradox to open the way to impossibility, and impossibility to open the way to infinitude, so that the materiality and the material history of the blood-spattered ground of Agaune becomes characterized by the infinitude of the divine, dies perpetuus.

The centrality of this concept of dies perpetuus to the Agaune community’s conception of itself might be linked to their distinctive practice of perpetual prayer, the idea that the psalms were being constantly sung at the monastery regardless of day or night. The final words of this central chapter on the founding of the monastery reinforce this point: “And it was decided that

346 “Acaunus uester Gallico priscoque sermone tam primitus per naturam quam nunc quoque per ecclesiam, ueridica praefiguratione Petri, petra esse dinoscitur” VPJ, c. 3. 347 “de loco illo, quem pretiosa morte Thebaei martyres et effusione sanguinis incliti felicibus maculis rosea verietate ornaverunt” VAA, c. 3.

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the family of God should be located in that place—that is to say the family of monks, who imitate the heavens both day and night by persevering with divine chants.”348 This allows the monks themselves, through their monastic practice, to represent and embody the dies perpetuus as a feature of their communal life, underscoring their connection to the divine state achieved at that location by the death of the martyrs. If the martyrs are living in a perpetual day by virtue of their sanctification through violent death, the monks of Agaune, joined to the martyrs in the same location, are also living in a divine perpetual day by virtue of their perpetual singing of divine song.

The VAA concludes by locating this concept in the physical bodies of the monks of Agaune. It describes the death of Achivus: “And while he was strong in his mind, he was also ruddy in his face, continuing in that soundness of body and mind until his death. Even then, a rosy blush coloured his face, since no pallid death could bring a pale ugliness to his features.”349 This creates an equivalence or analogy between his physical state and his spiritual state, then asserts that his visible physical vivacity continued after his death, with the implication that his spiritual vivacity likewise continued. His spiritual and physical health are physically revealed in the redness of his features and contrasted to the paleness and ugliness of death. The evocation of a pale death allows the redness of his cheeks, otherwise meaningless, to assume the signification of life, perhaps echoing in some sense the rosiness of the blood of the martyrs in the earlier passage,350 and the presence of that redness in his body after death becomes a visible symbol of his eternal spiritual life. As a result, the infinite divine life of his spirit comes to inflect and

348 “remotis familiis secularibus, Dei inibi, hoc est monachorum, familia locaretur, qui die noctu caelestia imitantes, cantionibus divinis insisterent.” VAA, c. 3. 349 “Et cum fuisset mente robustus, vultu quoque rubicundus iugiter permanebat, cuius integritatem et mentis et corporis permanens, eo defuncto, in facie eius rubor roseus adsignavit, cum nulla exsanguis mors vultui eius pallidam intulerit foeditatem.” VAA, c. 9. 350 The adjective used for both is roseus/rosea. Also note the implication of blood in the use of the word exsanguis to characterize death.

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characterize material qualities of his body, and the impossible paradox of a rosy-cheeked corpse becomes yet another means of conceptualizing divine materiality as separate from mundane materiality by virtue of its negation of the traditional laws and boundaries that characterize the material world. The union between the monks and the martyrs is therefore confirmed; both groups stand together in the perpetual day, whether dead or alive, their cheeks rosy with blood, a clear logic of divine materiality securing their own conception of themselves, their home, their eternally singing way of life, and their defiant relationship to the interfering authorities of kings and bishops.

CHAPTER FOUR

AMATOR OF AUXERRE

Describing the life of the fifth-century Amator, bishop of Auxerre, the sixth-century Vita

Amatoris displays a very specific and consistent conceptual approach to understanding the sensory experience of the material world.351 In particular, it is concerned with two things: carnality, an over-preoccupation with sensory and material desire and pleasure; and divinity, the tangible, sensory presence of the boundless divine manifesting in a way that is both ethereal, as a vision or dream, and profoundly material. Both of these themes play out over and over in the text, intersecting directly with issues of social class and political relations. The material wealth of

Auxerre’s rich aristocrats, as well as the sexual congress in which they engage to secure lines of inheritance, even within the context of marriage, is sharply problematized as a worldly entanglement obstructing a true conversion to Christianity. The relinquishment of this material pleasure and its associated worldly status, however, is specifically characterized by divine sensory experiences, more than in any other text thus far. The Vita Amatoris is explicit in its

351 (BHL 0356) Stephanus Africanus, Amator, Episcopus Autissiodorensis in Gallia, in Acta Sanctorum, ed. Godefridus Henschenius and Daniel Papebrochius, Maii I (Antwerp: Michael Cnobarus, 1680); Stephanus Africanus, Vita sancti Amatoris, in Bibliothèque historique de l’Yonne ou collection de légendes, chroniques, et documents divers, ed. Louis Maximilien Duru, vol. 1, 2 vols. (Auxerre and Paris: La Société des Sciences Historiques et Naturelles de L’Yonne, 1850), 135–58.

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sensory program, often specifying exact sense organs, including eyes, ears, and nostrils, as the sites of a divine experience, so that the sensory pleasure of forsaken material indulgence is replaced by sensory pleasure of a supernal and divine character. This relinquishing of worldly wealth occurs in the context of a specific political relationship between the episcopate of Auxerre and the city’s wealthy inhabitants, modelling a dynamic whereby those inhabitants only legitimately achieve true Christian status—as well as its associated spiritual pleasures—when they place their wealth at the disposal of the bishop and the local church.

This dynamic is not completely unlike what we have observed in previous texts. The Vita patrum Iurensium, for example, articulated a dynamic of spiritual peace and satisfaction deriving from a stance of monastic indifference toward the material world. However, the pleasure of the

Jura monks is quite explicitly a spiritual experience, something that occurs within as a result of ignoring bodily sensation. For the Vita Amatoris, on the other hand, the spiritual pleasure that replaces carnality is itself a bodily experience occurring within the purview of the five senses.

Despite this sharp focus on the bodily senses, the text uses various cues to flag spiritual pleasure as nonetheless otherworldly, dreamlike, and asserting itself into the material world from a place outside the laws and constraints of that world. In other words, the spiritual sense experiences of the Vita Amatoris are incarnations, fleshly manifestations of divine truth, following in the model of the incarnation of Christ in a human body. They conceive of a world in which the divine is actively, tangibly present, available to all Christians who have adopted the proper stance toward the pleasures of carnality and, perhaps more pointedly, placed their material possessions in a proper subservient relationship to the Church and its local episcopacy.

In this chapter, I will first contextualize the Vita Amatoris within the historiography of

Auxerre and its period—the Vita itself has relatively little written about it. I will then conduct

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close readings of several passages from the text, paying careful attention to the specific language used, to illustrate exactly how its specific program for an approach to materiality functions.

Where appropriate, I will compare the Vita Amatoris to the other texts I have examined. I will also place the metaphysical paradigms drawn out by the text in conversation with the specific social and political issues associated with the context in which the text is functioning: the sixth- century city of Auxerre and its episcopate. And finally, I will conclude with a discussion of how this metaphysical program intersects with a discernable political agenda concerning the relationship between Auxerre’s bishops, its nominally but inadequately Christian aristocrats, and the city of Auxerre itself as a holy nexus.

The Vita Amatoris and its Modern Treatment

Of all the texts discussed in this thesis, the Vita Amatoris is perhaps the most under-studied. No doubt this is at least partially because it was not included, for whatever reason, in Krusch’s

Monumenta Germaniae Historica. It survives to us only in seven manuscripts, of which the two earliest are from the ninth century.352 It has been edited only twice: once by the Bollandists for the Acta Sanctorum series, and most recently in the mid-nineteenth century by the French priest

Louis-Maximilien Duru.353 Its most recent (and perhaps only) modern study was undertaken by

Wolfert van Egmond in his 2006 monograph on pre-Carolingian hagiography from Auxerre.354

Our ability to place the Vita Amatoris chronologically derives from two letters: one from

Bishop Aunacharius of Auxerre to a priest named Stephanus Africanus commissioning a verse

352 For a list of the manuscripts, see: Wolfert S. van Egmond, Conversing With the Saints: Communication in Pre- Carolingian Hagiography from Auxerre (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 80–81. 353 (BHL 0356) Stephanus Africanus, Amator, Episcopus Autissiodorensis in Gallia, in Acta Sanctorum, ed. Godefridus Henschenius and Daniel Papebrochius, Maii I (Antwerp: Michael Cnobarus, 1680); Stephanus Africanus, Vita sancti Amatoris, in Bibliothèque historique de l’Yonne ou collection de légendes, chroniques, et documents divers, ed. Louis Maximilien Duru, vol. 1, 2 vols. (Auxerre and Paris: La Société des Sciences Historiques et Naturelles de L’Yonne, 1850), 135–58. 354 van Egmond, Conversing.

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Vita of Germanus and a prose Vita of Amator, and another from Stephanus agreeing to undertake the work.355 On this basis, we date the Vita Amatoris to the episcopate of Aunacharius in the second half of the sixth century, although there is no surviving verse Vita of Germanus and it is unclear whether one was ever completed. Aunacharius is a relatively well-known figure from the documents associated with Auxerre during this period.356 In addition to commissioning the Vita

Amatoris, we have records of him attending various councils and a diocesan synod, and he was involved in an anecdote narrated by Gregory of Tours.357

To place Aunacharius’s episcopacy, I follow van Egmond in following the dates produced by

Louis Duchesne, who came up with a very precise (and enigmatic, though not problematically so for our purposes) calculation of the periods of office of the bishops of Auxerre. Duchesne claims that Aunacharius was in office from 31 July 561 to 25 September 605. Other historians suggest a narrower period would be more appropriate, but, as van Egmond notes, as a means to date texts associated with Aunacharius, Duchesne’s numbers are fine.358 That means our text, the Vita

Amatoris, probably dates from the second half of the sixth century. The episcopacy of Amator himself can be roughly placed in the first two decades of the fifth century.

The famous seventeenth-century French historian Louis Sébastien Tillemont believed that the

Vita Amatoris might even be a product of the fifth century. He accurately notes that the letters exchanged between Stephanus and Aunacharius are not attached directly to the text of this Vita

Amatoris in any manuscript, so the assumption that this Vita is the same as the prose Vita of

Amator mentioned in the letters cannot be made with perfect certainty. Tillemont was inclined to

355 In MGH Epistolae 3, W. Gundlach ed. (Berlin, 1892), nos. 7–8, pp. 446–448. 356 van Egmond, Conversing, 69. 357 “Synodus dioecesana Autissiodorensis, 561–605,” in Concilia Galliae, A. 511– A. 695, CCSL 148a, ed. C. de Clerque (Turnhout, 1963), 211–217, 237–250. Gregory of Tours, Libri historiarum, IX, c. 41. 358 van Egmond, Conversing, 70–71; Louis Duchesne, “A propos du martyrologe hiéronymien,” Analecta Bollandiana 17 (1898), 436.

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believe that the text was closer to being contemporary with Amator himself, because it exhibited a familiarity with societal issues specific to that period. He does concede, however, that the text also shows some evidence of time having distorted the stories as well; he notes in particular that

Amator was supposed to come from some wealthy family, but when he wanted to build a church, he needed to ask for the home of another. Tillemont reads this as an instance of a hagiographer having elevated a family that was merely ‘bourgeois’ to one that was immensely wealthy.359

Tillemont’s points are worth noting; it is completely true that we do not know for certain that this text is the one referred to in the episcopal letters. However, his own reflections reveal the difficulty of trying to date the text based on how much detail the writer appears to have known about the period. In my opinion, there is no way to obtain a secure footing with arguments of that nature, and the letters remain the only tangible point of reference we have for guessing a date for this text, despite the qualifications that must necessarily be made about the certainty of that connection.360

Even assuming that Stephanus wrote this Vita around a century and a half after Amator’s death circa 420, I think we can still see in it something of the way the community at Auxerre remembered and memorialized the stories associated with Amator, perhaps even to a tradition of episcopal hagiologizing of which the surviving Vitae are only a small aspect. We know that

Amator’s memory retained a concrete presence in the city by way of the cathedral in which he

359 Louis-Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire ecclesiastique des six premiers siècles: justifiez par les citations des auteurs originaux, avec une chronologie et des notes pour éclaircir les difficultez des faits et de la chronologie, vol. 15 (Paris: Charles Robustel, 1711), 835. 360 And indeed, even if Tillemont were correct, locating the date a century earlier does little to alter the argument of this chapter, except to assume that local memories of Amator’s life would have exerted an even stronger influence on that details of the text.

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was commemorated.361 There is no reason not to believe that his episcopacy was also remembered through the circulation of local stories about his life.

The point of this line of argument is not to attribute accurate historicity to the events described by the Vita, but rather to make the case that the stories in the Vita might be read as existing with reference to a broader body of locally circulating stories. Considered in this light, this Vita can be read not just as the product of a single author working within the context of a literary tradition, but as a text that had direct reference to the specific cultural milieu of Auxerre at the time of its composition.

This popular relevance is also implied by the way Aunacharius framed his commission for a prose Vita of Amator. He explained his request for two different styles of Vita by saying that some things are pleasing to certain people, and other things are pleasing to certain others, so that by writing in both prose and poetry the Vitae might reach as many people as possible.

Aunacharius specifies that this difference of taste is present both in the aristocracy—the universa nobilitas—but also in the common people—the inane vulgus.362 This strongly suggests that these texts, and probably the prose one in particular, were commissioned with the entire population in mind, both aristocratic and common; they can therefore be read as part of the broader story- telling discourse taking place in the milieu of Auxerre.363

361 “La mémoire d’Amâtre (388–418), dans l’espace de la cité au IXe siècle, est liée à la cathédrale.” Michel Sot, “Autorité du Passé Lointain, autorité du passé proche dans l’historiographie épiscopale (VIIIe–XIe Siècle) les cas de Metz, Auxerre et Reims,” in Autorité du Passé dans le Sociétes Médiévales, ed. Jean-Marie Sansterre, Collection de L’École Française de Rome 333 (Bruxelles, Brussel, Roma: École Française de Rome, 2004), 149. The Vita itself confirms this, saying: “Hæc est hactenus Ecclesia a Christianis populis confrequentata” (“This is the Church still to this day frequented by the Christian population”) Stephanus Africanus, VA, 3.21. 362 Gundlach, no. 7 p. 446. 363 van Egmond comes to a similar conclusion, saying “This is underscored by the great attention the Vita Amatoris gives to the laity” van Egmond, Conversing, 78.

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AUXERRE, ITS BISHOPS, AND ITS TEXTS

Auxerre during the early Merovingian period is an interesting place for a few reasons. In particular, it is remarkable for the unusual political power of its bishops, who soon came to take on the civic powers and roles normally associated with a city’s counts—a particularity of the city that was eventually reversed during the Carolingian era.364 So perhaps more than even might be true for an average Merovingian city, the bishop was a community-defining figure.

No doubt as a result of this uniquely prominent episcopate, Auxerre is also remarkable for having a fairly large trove of hagiographical documents associated with it, in particular with its bishops.365 We also possess the Gesta pontificum Autissiodorensium, the first example of the gesta episcoporum genre that would become popular in later centuries.366 This text, composed sometime between 872 and 875, surveys the careers of the city’s bishops starting with Pelerin in the early fourth century, with several later additions from the tenth century onward. In addition to being quite historically interesting in its own right, it has become an invaluable tool for contextualizing and dating other documents associated with Auxerre, giving our knowledge of the city a density that we might not otherwise possess.367

Without question, the most famous text associated with Auxerre during the early Middle Ages was the Vita Germani of Constantius of Lyon, composed sometime in the late fifth century.368

364 Yves Sassier, “Les Carolingiens et Auxerre,” in L’école carolingienne d’Auxerre de Murethach à Remi, 830– 908, ed. Dominique Iogna-Prat, Colette Jeudy, and Guy Lobrichon (Paris: Beauchesne, 1991), 22–27. 365 Van Egmond says, “for the hagiography written in Auxerre in this period, the great authority of the bishop means that every hagiographical text can be seen as episcopal to some extent.” van Egmond, Conversing, 69. 366 Michel Sot, Guy Lobrichon, and Monique Goullet, eds., Gesta pontificum Autissiodorensium, in Les Gestes Des Évêques d’Auxerre, trans. Pierre Bonnerue, et al., Les Classiques de l’Histoire de France Au Moyen Âge 42 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2002). 367 Jean-Charles Picard, “Auxerre,” in Province ecclésiastique de Sens, ed. Nancy Gauthier and Jean-Charles Picard, Topographie chrétienne des cités de la Gaule des origines au milieu du VIIIe siècle, VIII (Paris: De Boccard, 1992), 47–65. 368 Although it was not written in Auxerre or for an audience at Auxerre, van Egmond assesses its influence by saying “it is no exaggeration to say that the Vita Germani was the defining text for the hagiography of Auxerre.” van Egmond, Conversing, 26; Constantius of Lyon, Vita Germani, in Vie de saint Germain d’Auxerre, trans. René Borius, Sources chrétiennes 112 (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1965).

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Germanus himself was bishop of Auxerre from the time of Amator’s death around 420 until, as near as we can tell, sometime in the 430s or 440s. Together with the Vita Severini of Eugippius and the Vita Martini of Sulpicius Severus, his Vita was one of the very first pieces of medieval hagiography, formative in the genre, and became a definitive text for the early cult of the saints.369 Moreover, in addition of course to the life of Martin of Tours, it seems to have been quite an important text in establishing episcopal tombs as pilgrimage destinations.370

It seems quite likely that the Vita Amatoris was written in an attempt to echo the success of the Vita Germani. Amator was the bishop who preceded Germanus; although he does not appear in the Vita Germani, Germanus is mentioned in the Vita Amatoris.371 In this way the Vita

Amatoris served as a sort of prequel to its more famous cousin, trying to replicate its success, and—not unlike certain other prequels, at least to judge by its apparent obscurity—failing to do so.

We can also observe traces of another potential reason for the composition of the Vita

Amatoris. During the late sixth century, the time of the text’s composition, Germanus’s basilica on the north side of the city was a successful and famous pilgrimage site. Aunacharius was making an effort at the time to raise the prestige of the local episcopacy, reflected by his commissioning of Stephanus to compose the two Vitae of Amator and Germanus, and also

369 “Germanus was not Martin; and their biographies do not conceal their differences. But they spoke the same language. Constantius wrote for his bishop and disseminated what he wrote at the request of another bishop. His rhetorical training did not prevent him from writing simply and vividly for a new public avid for hagiography.” J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 6. 370 Elżbieta Dabrowska, “Les tombes de saints évêques en Gaule en tant que lieux de pèlerinage,” in Akten des 12. Internationalen Kongresses für Christliche Archäologie. Bonn, 22–28 September 1991, vol. 2, 2 vols. (Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1995), 663–66. 371 This is not an isolated cameo. Andrew Gillett writes: “Germanus appears as a character in several Vitae of fifth- and sixth-century bishops and ascetics, most famously Genovefa of Paris and Patrick, but also Lupus of Troyes, Hilary of Arles, Amator of Auxerre, and Severus of Vienne.” (Gillett has read the Vita Amatoris but does not appear to have much to say about it.) Andrew Gillett, Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West, 411– 533, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought: Fourth Series 55 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 136.

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connected to raising the prestige of Amator’s basilica, on the southwest side of the city, to the level of the Germanus basilica.372 In that light, the commissioning of the Vita Amatoris can be seen as part of a larger attempt by Bishop Aunacharius to raise Amator’s profile to complement that of Germanus.373

We know, indeed it is almost a truism by this point, that early Gallic bishops emerged predominantly from the old Roman senatorial aristocracy once associated with the old imperial systems of administration.374 Germanus himself is a perfect example of this trend. The opening passages of his Vita describe an almost stereotypical career for a Gallo-Roman noble: born into an aristocratic family, given a liberal education, and sent to Rome to study law and practice in the courts. He went on to earn the title of Dux and assume rule over more than one province, we are told, before at the demand of “all the clergy, the whole nobility, the townsfolk and the countryfolk” he was made bishop of the city of Auxerre.375 In his introduction to his translation of the Vita Germani, Frederick Hoare quite rightly draws our attention to the fact that:

Germanus was promoted from the laity directly to the episcopate. It is reasonable to suppose some period of training and then ordination to the priesthood before his episcopal consecration. Though not usual, this did happen with some frequency in late antiquity as communities sought spiritual leaders who could replace the patronage and protection

372 “In the sixth century there seem to have been attempts to raise the status of the church to a more or less equal level with that of Saint-Germain, whereby Auxerre would be protected on two sides by a group of holy bishops.” van Egmond, Conversing, 68–69; Jean-Charles Picard, “Espace urbain et sépultures épiscopales à Auxerre,” Revue d’histoire de l’église de France, no. 62 (1976), 205–22. 373 Jean-Charles Picard gives a thorough review of the medieval buildings of Auxerre and the evidence for their various dates, including a discussion of Aunacharius’s role in the construction of a basilica for Amator. Picard, “Auxerre,” 60–61. 374 S. T. Loseby, “Gregory’s Cities: Urban Functions in Sixth-Century Gaul,” in Franks and Alamanni in the Merovingian Period: An Ethnographic Perspective, ed. Ian Wood (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998); Jill Harries, “Church and State in the Notitia Galliarum,” Journal of Roman Studies, no. 68 (1978), 25–43; Jill Harries, “Christianity and the City in Late Roman Gaul,” in The City in Late Antiquity, ed. John Rich (London: Routledge, 1996), 77–98; Nancy Gauthier, “From the Ancient City to the Medieval Town: Continuity and Change in the Early Middle Ages,” in The World of Gregory of Tours, ed. Kathleen Mitchell and Ian Wood (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 47–66. 375 Constantius of Lyon, Vita Germani, 2.

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formerly provided by lay leaders. Note well that it was personal connections and public distinction that first recommended Germanus as bishop, not sanctity.376

Amator’s trajectory is not quite the same. He also came from an aristocratic family, but he pursued an ecclesiastical career as a deacon from the start, being slowly promoted through the ranks and eventually, with the “happy rebellion of the people”—perhaps meant to echo

Germanus’s ascension—he succeeds as bishop on the death of his predecessor.377 Whether this account represents an accurate historical memory of Amator’s career or just the text’s general sense of what the career of a bishop at that time might have been, it reveals an ongoing association between the episcopacy and the old aristocratic leadership of the city.

Attempts to raise the prestige of the episcopacy were not merely religious or spiritual exercises. In Auxerre, as in other places, the office of bishop was increasingly one that exercised very concrete political power. This trend underscores one of the major themes of this thesis, that

Christian concepts and institutions were providing the conceptual framework for systems of political authority and social organization, and that hagiography from the period is therefore politically and socially implicated. For a Vita to deploy complex metaphysical and theological arguments to raise the spiritual authority of the local bishop, to underscore the spiritual profundity of that episcopacy’s relationship to a particular community like Auxerre, and to make points about the importance of local Christians submitting to the bishop—these are all deeply political moves advancing a particular view of correct power relations and social structure using the discourse of Christian cosmology.

376 Frederick R. Hoare, “The Life of Germanus of Auxerre,” in Soldiers of Christ: Saints and Saints’ Lives from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Thomas Noble and Thomas Head (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 79. 377 “Tunc exorta est felix seditio populorum, concordi voce clamantium, Pastorem basilicæ Amatorem succedere” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 3.15.

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THE SMELL OF HEAVEN IN OUR NOSTRILS

The Vita Amatoris, like many of our other texts, sets up a distinction between the material and the divine, then deploys a logic of incarnation, manifestation, or immanence to identify moments where the material and divine intersect, often with specific and local socio-political inflections.

The Vita Amatoris uses at least two main devices to indicate when one of these moments of material/divine intersection is occurring. First, it draws upon the conception that the divine world is timeless and eternal, so that divine manifestations can be detected by the ways in which they distort or ignore the temporal structures of the mundane world. Second, divine manifestations can take on a sort of dream-like quality, questionably real, visible to some people and not to others, asserting their materiality in some ways while defying it in others.

These characteristics operate at the level of the bodily senses, and they engage heavily with the concept of pleasure. The Vita Amatoris presents a version of sensual pleasure that is distinctly fallen: it comes from beautiful gems, clothing, and sex; it is associated with reproduction and family obligations, especially marriage and inheritance; it is therefore inflected as pagan, connected with the religious traditions of generations before the conversion to

Christianity. There is another sort of pleasure in the text, however—a pleasure that comes from the renunciation of the first kind. And this second, divine pleasure is not just a spiritual pleasure but a bodily one, occurring at the level of the senses, and characterized by the qualities of untimeliness and liminality. This pattern is established very early in the text with the events surrounding Amator’s family and his marriage to a woman by the name of Martha.

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In the sixth century, Amator’s tomb very clearly indicated he had been buried beside his wife, a troublesome fact for a culture in which clerical marriage had become increasingly taboo.378

Stephanus’s attempt to reconcile this dilemma consists of an unlikely story about Amator being forced to marry against his wishes, never consummating his marriage, and instead pursuing a purely chaste religious life with the equally chaste Martha as his technical but not actual wife.

Both this problem and its solution were not unique to Amator. Dyan Elliot writes at length about how early hagiographers deployed the concept of “spiritual marriage” to explain the remembered fact of a saint’s marriage in the context of the growing early Christian emphasis on celibacy for clerics and monks. She explains that:

…as clerical asceticism came to dominate the hagiographical discourse of the early Middle Ages, the number of lay saints declined—especially married ones. The hagiographer is at pains to explain why someone of peculiar sanctity would be married in the first place, and compulsion plays a central role in this context. Likewise, the vitae would invariably have it that the revelation of a secret desire to remain chaste occurs in the bedroom on the night of the wedding—a situation that was both dramatic and titillating.379

The Vita Amatoris conforms more or less exactly to this pattern, which Elliot locates in numerous texts both earlier and later. In particular it seems to echo the equivalent scene in the

Passio of Cecilia, a popular martyr story—more on this soon.380 This move is not particularly remarkable, but the ways in which the text leverages a specific logic of materiality to make its points are revealing.

378 Stephanus writes: “Bajulabant igitur corpus ipsius, ut eum juxta tumulum reverentissimæ memoriæ Marthæ deponerent.” (“Therefore they carried his corpse so that they might lay it to rest by the side of the tomb to the most blessed memory of Martha.”) Stephanus Africanus, VA, 5.32. 379 Moreover, she says “The problem of clerical wives seemed particularly critical in the newly converted Frankish kingdom, probably because the local church was not overly nice about gaining the consent of the wife to her husband’s ordination.” Dyan Elliot, Spiritual Marriage Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 65–66, 87; See also: Suzanne Fonay Wemple, Women in Frankish Society: Marriage and the Cloister, 500 to 900 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 133–36. 380 The text of the Passio can be found in: Bonino Mombrizio, Sanctuarium seu Vitae sanctorum (Paris, 1910), 1:332–341.

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For our purposes, the first significant section in the text occurs quite early on, in the description of Amator’s education. His aristocratic parents made sure that he was trained in the antique style, covering letters, poetics, rhetoric, law, and philosophy.381 In other words, in the traditional educational style of a Gallo-Roman aristocrat.382 But the local bishop, Valerianus, recognized a greater potential in Amator, seeing in him “good nature”, “prudence”, and

“comprehension.”383 Significantly, the bishop also identified within young Amator “simplicity and clarity of judgement.”384

It means something specific when the hagiographer tells us that Amator possessed the positive quality of simplicity, that the bishop identified him as a vessel and a purest temple (templum purissimum),385 and that he received the urging of the Holy Scriptures into the depths of his heart.386 It is not just that Amator preferred Christian teaching to his classical education. The implication is, rather, that Amator was a vessel for a sort of knowledge that itself had a divine nature and origin—knowledge which could not be taught like the vanae superstitiones— “vain superstitions”387—of classical education, but rather could only be acquired from heaven through correct interior disposition. From the beginning of this Vita, therefore, Amator is presented as a

381 “Hunc igitur tenere diligentes, & cum summa solicitudinis diligentia educantes, litteris non solum communibus verum etiam liberalibus tradiderunt. […] ut poeticarum adinventionum schemata, oratorum enthymemata, jurisperitorum nodos atque aenigmata Philosophorum quoque syllogisticas quaestiones facili disputatione penitus enarraret.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.1. 382 This need not be read as just a trope. It also aligns with what we know of the relationship between the Late Antique Gallic aristocracy and classical literacy. Ralph Mathisen writes: “Aristocratic status became increasingly dependent on the sense of unity and elitism that came from the appreciation of classical literary culture that aristocrats shared with each other. In an earlier age, literary activities had been the means by which a new man like Ausonius could become a member of the aristocracy, but in fifth-century Gaul they provided a way for someone born an aristocrat to remain one.” Ralph Mathisen, “The Letters of Ruricius of Limoges and the Passage from Roman to Frankish Gaul,” in Society and Culture in Late Antique Gaul: Revisiting the Sources, ed. Danuta Shanzer and Ralph Mathisen (Burlington USA: Ashgate, 2001), 102. 383 “Igitur sæpissime antefatum juvenem percunctatus non solum bonum naturæ, verum etiam tantæ capacitatis prudentiæque solertiam” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.2. 384 “prudentiæ claritas atque simplicitas.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.2. 385 “vas est prædestinatum electionis, & templum purissimum majestatis,” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.2. 386 “Qui ita primordia sanctarum suasionum ejus fertili corde suscepit,” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.2. 387 “ut Dei præceptis religionique Catholicæ magis suæ mentis intentionem, quam vanis superstitionibus, applicaret.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.2.

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vessel for something supernatural, something deriving its origin from a supernal source and contrasted with the mundanities of his aristocratic upbringing. This dichotomy between the supernal and the mundane is pivotal to the logic of the Vita Amatoris, as is the image of the supernal intersecting into the life of Amator. This idea, as Peter Brown would grandly put it, of

“the joining of heaven and earth” in the bodies of the saint is typical as a feature of early hagiography.388 As we will soon see, the intersection between divinity and the person of Amator has consequences not just for his soul as an intangible self, but necessarily also for his material body and its sensory experiences.

Amator’s aristocratic parents arranged a marriage between him and Martha, the daughter of another noble family, ostensibly to ensure the continuation of their line, but also “so that through his marriage they might bend to secular affairs a mind that was given to God.”389 Though not explicitly stated, it seems likely that this means his parents were trying to separate Amator from

God by means of carnal lust. What follows is an extended and elaborate description of an aristocratic wedding, with special focus on its material components. The colours and ornamentation of every element are described; the space is “most splendid”, things are

“embellished”, while others “glitter with gold”.390 There is a list of gems, including agates, jasper, and onyx.391 When the bride emerges, she too is described in material detail, from her sleeves to her hair to her gem-studded belt. This description is flagged sociologically both at its beginning, where the wedding is described as having been arranged “after the custom of all noble

388 Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, 1. 389 “ut per ejus conjunctionem mentem Deo deditam ad secularia declinarent.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.3. 390 “splendidissima spatia [...] exornantur [...] auro plumata nitet.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.3. 391 “Stat in foribus non segnis achates: jaspis lumen obumbrat: onyx prostratus calcatur, cunctarumque divitiarum illic copia reponitur, quibus natura speciatim nomen imposuit.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.3.

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families”,392 and at its conclusion, where the bride is dressed “just as had been the rite and custom of the most elegant Romans.”393

The Vita aligns this ostentatious wedding with the classical education first forced on Amator and with traditional Roman culture more generally. This culture is imposed on him by his parents in opposition to his heavenly interior orientation. It is characterised by external material ornamentation and complexity rather than purity and simplicity. The listing of materials to condemn them as anti-spiritual echoes, for example, moments in the Passio Caeciliae, where the connection between materiality and Roman paganism is more explicit. Cecilia rebukes her brother for worshipping idols by saying: “I am amazed that you do not perceive that these false images—whether they be plaster, copper, wood and stone, or any sort of metal—cannot be

Gods.”394 In the Vita Amatoris, the rich Roman materiality of the ceremony culminates in the materiality of the bride, inevitably becoming inflected with sexuality as the narrative approaches the marital bed.

And it is indeed the events of the marital bed that immediately follow, referred to unsubtly in the text as the copulationis tempus—”time of sexual union.”395 As in the wedding scene, the bed itself is described as heavily ornamented, covered in “wonderful painting.”396 But as soon as their parents withdraw, Amator begins to speak, and he is described as a “man full of God,”397 a formulation recalling the earlier description of him as a vessel and temple for divine teaching. He

392 “de more cunctorum nobilium familiæ.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.3. 393 “sicut ritus ac mos elegantissimorum fuerat Romanorum.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.3. 394 “Miror ut non intelligas figuras fictiles: gypseas: ereas: ligneas atque lapideas: uel cuiuscumque metali deos esse non posse” Passio Ceciliae, 334. Cecilia later gives a similar rebuke to the Roman prefect who was trying to interrogate her, mocking him for thinking that rocks could be gods, and inviting him to touch the statues with his hands if his eyes could not tell what they were: “Cum quod omnes lapides uidemus esse et saxum inutile: hoc tu deum esse testaris. Do: si iubes: consilium: Mitte manum tuam et tangendo disce hoc saxum esse: si uidendo non nosti. Nefas est enim: ut totus populus de te risum habeat.” Passio Ceciliae, 340–41. 395 Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.4. 396 “strata fulcris mira pictura variatis ornantur.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.4. 397 “vir Deo plenus,” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.4.

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and Martha agree together not to consummate their marriage, but to devote themselves to God, and they spend the night discussing divine things, so that they are called in the text “lovers of sacred scriptures, not wedlock.”398

What happens next is a miracle particularly relevant to a discussion of materiality. While they are lying in bed talking about Christian teaching, Amator and Martha smell something unusual.

The text assures us that it was not a “vulgar smell” but one “conveyed by the mediator of secret light.”399 Martha is astonished, since the smell is sweet like flowers, while they are in the middle of winter.400 But Amator tells her that the smell doesn’t come

…from the boundaries of temporal meadows, but from the vernal fields of the eternal Church. Therefore it is right for us to maintain the inviolate integrity of our bodies and minds in all ways, by which divine majesty displays itself in odours, and the lover of chastity appears through the sweetness of his creation.401

This passage is fascinating and worth close examination. It invokes the trope of saints’ bodies emitting a sweet smell after their death as a signal of their victory over the curse of Adam, with the implication that sweet-smelling bodies have been transfigured to their prelapsarian Edenic state.402 In this case, the smell signals that Amator and Martha’s decision to preserve the purity

398 “sacrarum Scripturarum […] conjugii amatores” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.4. Note the pun on “Amator.” 399 “non vulgaris, sed secreti luminis a Mediatore delatus.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.5. 400 “Cujus virgo repentinam admirata suavitatem, consociatum sibi juvenem talibus percunctatur sermonibus: Narra obsecro, juvenis, cujus tanta suavitas sit odoris. Nonne omnium florum suavitatem hiems procellosi rigoris adussit?” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.5. 401 “non temporalium pratorum metis concluditur, sed æternæ Ecclesiæ campis vernantibus propagatur. Propterea oportet nos corporum nostrorum mentiumque inviolatam integritatem modis omnibus custodire, quibus se divina Majestas in odoribus præbet, & castitatis amator per suæ creaturæ suavitatem apparet.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.5. 402 Peter Brown identifies the link between celibacy and the prelapsarian body. Discussing the early Encratite movement, he says “Young men and women could decide to remain virgins: by passing through puberty without intercourse, they could overcome the sexual temptations to which Adam and Eve had finally succumbed.” Discussing Late Antique discourses of redemption from the fall via celibacy, he says “The pudor aureus of Mary spoke of the resilience of a human body from which the disorder introduced into it by Adam’s fall had been expunged. Virgins of the church bore bodies analogous to that of Mary: unshaken by intercourse and childbirth.” Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 96, 467; Discussing the way the bodily sacrifice of the martyrs could overcome the fallen state of their material bodies, Caroline Walker Bynum similarly says “Indeed the torn and twisted bodies of the martyrs might—at the very moment of execution—begin to shine with the splendid impassibility of the

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and divine orientation of their bodies and minds has resulted in a change in the status of their physical bodies as if they had just vanquished death—they now have bodily, sensory access to the divine.

In addition to evoking traditions about the sweet-smelling bodies of the saints, this new quasi- divinisation of the couple’s bodies functions with respect, I argue, to two important ideas: time and pleasure. The first thing that Martha notes about the smell is its untimeliness. She identifies its sweetness as impossible because of the winter season, and demands to know how such goodness could come forth “into the boundaries of a foreign time.”403 Amator’s answer is that the smell is “not confined by the boundaries of temporal meadows.”404 In other words, it is a smell that is exempt from the normal, seasonal laws of the material world. In that sense, it is exterior to everything subject to the worldly processes of time and exterior, therefore, to the whole of the mundane world.

Dealing with much later material, Carolyn Dinshaw discusses interruptions of normal, regulated time as being mechanisms of subversion and destabilisation in medieval texts.405 She might well have been characterizing this moment in the Vita Amatoris when she wrote of

…the schematic multiple temporalities of the liturgical calendar and scriptural history, on the one hand, and the individual experiences of mundane time and changeless eternity, on the other; the straight time of patriarchal reproduction; the extraordinary experience of contact between two disparate temporalities.406

In regarding constructions of ordered, regulated time as a world-constituting normativity, we are able to consider disruptions of that order as an attempt to reach beyond the bounds of the mundane and quotidian, and, indeed, to evade and perhaps even to challenge established social

Transfiguration.” Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 59. 403 “in alieni temporis metas prosilivit.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.5. 404 “non temporalium pratorum metis concluditur.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.5. 405 Dinshaw, How Soon?, 40–72. 406 Dinshaw, 54.

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structures like the ones that forced Amator and Martha into marriage. In encountering a smell thus untimely, Martha and Amator are having a physical, sensory interaction with a sort of divine reality beyond anything they could encounter in the course of normal embodied living.

Timeliness and untimeliness here become the distinction between mundane and divine, between normal and miraculous.

This passage appears to draw heavily on an equivalent scene from the Passio of Cecilia.

When Cecilia and her husband Valerian make their vows of chastity, an angel presents them with floral crowns. He explicitly says that these crowns are from paradise as a sign—de paradiso dei eas [coronas] attuli ad uos: et hoc uobis signum erit—that their flowers will never wilt, and their sweet smell will never diminish—numquam minuunt sui suauitatem odoris. Later, Valerian’s brother Tiburce arrives and is able to smell the flowers but not to see them.407 Already in this text we see the material status of the angelic crowns being rendered ambiguous, visible to some but only present to others as a smell. The Vita Amatoris takes this even further.

The similarities between the two texts make a direct connection seem very likely. Both use the Latin phrase suavitas odoris to describe the sweetness of the smell. The Passio associates the arrival of the flower crowns with the purity of the martyrs’ hearts and bodies; the angel tells them, istas coronas immaculato corde et mundo corpore custodite.408 Similarly, in the Vita

Amator tells Martha that the flowery smell is a sign that they should guard the integrity of their bodies and minds—propterea oportet nos corporum nostrorum mentium inviolatam integritatem modis omnibus custodire.409 Both Martha and Tiburce remark on the unseasonalness of the

407 Passio Sanctae Ceciliae Virginis et Martyris, in Sanctuarium seu Vitae sanctorum I, ed. Bonino Mombrizio (Paris, 1910), 333–334. 408 Passio Ceciliae, 334. 409 Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.5.

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smell. Martha says, Nonne omnium florum suavitatem hiems procellosi rigoris adussit?410 and

Tiburce says hberem nec sic poterant tantae mihi suauitatis odoramenta in fundere.411 The Vita takes the Passio’s very literal language of signification—hoc uobis signum erit412—and renders a similar idea with more flair—se divina Majestas in odoribus præbet.413 And this is not the only change.

Most significantly, the Amator hagiographer has deliberately removed the device of actual material crowns from the main encounter, leaving only the smell.414 That crowns were being thought of seems clear; Amator tells Martha “Your purity of mind and body has earned for you the simple crown of modesty.”415 Only later in the night, after they have both fallen asleep, is

Amator awakened again by the appearance of an angel carrying a double wreath in his hands.416

No mention is made of the wreaths having a smell or of the angel doing anything particular with them. This change has a few different consequences. First, it downplays the imagery of martyrdom associated with celestial crowns, which is probably appropriate given that Amator and Martha, unlike Cecilia and Valerian, were not martyrs.417 Secondly, it makes the connection between the saints and the divine more immediate and unmediated in the moment. They are not smelling a smell from a crown made of flowers brought to them from paradise by an angel.

Rather, the smell of paradise is immediately in their nostrils—in naribus.418 Their connection to

410 Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.5. 411 Passio Ceciliae, 334. 412 Passio Ceciliae, 334. 413 Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.5. 414 Elliot says that the floral crowns appear in both the Amator and Cecilia texts, not mentioning the differences. Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock, 69. 415 “Illa [mentis corporisque puritas] sibi tantum simplicem pudoris coronam promeruit.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.5. 416 “aspicit haud procul a se Angelum consistentem, duplex sertum gestantem in manibus” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.6. 417 For the connection between the crowns and martyrdom, see: Elliot, Spiritual Marriage Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock, 69. 418 Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.5.

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the divine is sensory and material, but the divine object is even more liminal than the crowns that only holy people are able to see—it possesses the ambiguous materiality of a smell, present but invisible, detectable but impossible to touch.

The subject of smell in the early Christian world has received a great deal of scholarly attention. Studying the writings of Ephrem the Syrian, Susan Ashbrook Harvey describes an approach to the senses that is consistent with what we are observing in the Vita Amatoris. She describes the idea of “the revelatory world,” which viewed the material world as potentially containing divine revelations, and she writes that for Ephrem,

…sanctification specifically included the capacity to reflect and encounter the divine within the physical world. Through baptism, the believer entered into the renewed condition of the created order, acquiring ‘new senses’ by which to experience it. The sanctified human body could then receive knowledge of God through its own sensory experiences, could know something of God through its own physicality.419

Harvey identifies the sense of smell in particular as being a regular locus of human/divine encounter in early Christianity, contextualizing her argument by talking about the role of smell in pre-Christian Roman religion and in Judaism, and exploring the role of smell in the Eucharist.

The only difference here, in my reading of the Vita at least, is that the divine sensory experience being described is specifically not a normal part of the created order, and it is that queerness, that wondrousness, that underscores its divine nature. Not only does it derive from an act that defies the natural rhythms of time, since Amator and Martha have decided to reject the cycles of sexual reproduction and traditional family-based generational transition, but the divine experience itself is also untimely, the smell of flowers in winter.

The other element that must be considered as an engine driving the evocativeness of this moment is pleasure. The divine smell is characterised by its supernal pleasantness. As a smell

419 Harvey, Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination, 59.

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literally “in our nostrils”, its pleasantness is a bodily experience occurring in the physical nose, not just some abstract internal or spiritual event.420 And this experience of bodily pleasure can be considered in relation to the experience of bodily pleasure that was its cost: the pleasure of sexual intimacy. This evokes perhaps the notion of productive expenditure, where value arises from deliberate loss or negation. One classic example cited by Georges Bataille is of a diamond necklace; a cheap imitation necklace of identical material qualities will never be as precious as an actual diamond necklace, since the value of the necklace derives from the expenditure involved in its acquisition.421 This notion is central to standard conceptions of Christianity, where a move toward holiness arises from and often seems to require renunciation and sacrifice, from the self-denial of the desert fathers to the suffering of the martyrs to the crucifixion of

Christ himself.

So if we accept this notion of loss and expenditure as constituting value, perhaps in general, but certainly in relation to early Christian religiosity, we can see this loss as a driving mechanism of Amator and Martha’s pleasure. By foregoing and renouncing the desired object of their bodily lust—sexual pleasure—they are depicted by the hagiographer as accessing an even more pleasurable bodily experience, a superlative olfactory encounter with time-defying divinity.

Sexual renunciation here is indeed a denial of pleasure, but in that very denial inhabits an even greater, more sublime physical pleasure.

For Amator and Martha, the spiritual rewards of their physical abnegation are immediate and explicitly corporeal. They smell the smell of the eternal fields, in other words the sweetness of the beatific moment, in the physical immediacy of their quotidian experience. This is like a less

420 “odor, qui est in naribus nostris” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.5. 421 This discussion derives heavily from Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, Ed. Allan Stoekl, Trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, Donald M. Leslie Jr. (University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 116–129.

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sophisticated version of the sweet little apples of the Jura monasteries, where monks who cultivate indifference to material pleasure experience sweetness because their internal orientation is directed toward the spiritual sweetness of the divine. Amator and Martha’s sweet smell is not a serene monastic sweetness that obliviates the particularities of material sensation. It is itself a particularity of material sensation, a tangible miracle in medio eorum.422 This difference between the Vita Amatoris and the Vita patrum Iurensium is subtle but, I believe, still important to note, because it underscores the diversity and creativity animating expositions of these ideas during this period.

GAZING DREAMILY AT THE MOUTH OF AN ANGEL

The reality-distorting effect that accompanies a saint is perhaps the principal clue that for certain early hagiographers a saint was more than, as sometimes has been contended, a particularly pious person whose life should be emulated but who is otherwise no different than any other human.

Rather, it is specifically through extraordinary piety that a saint transcends the boundedness of material humanity. Giselle de Nie says that miracles are “power patterns directly inherent in and determining all of happening reality.”423 By the same logic, a saint whose life more or less perfectly enacts divine principles becomes a point of intersection between the divine and material worlds, embodying—literally embodying—a consubstantial mysterium not unrelated to the theology of Christ’s incarnation or the real presence of Christ’s body and blood in the

Eucharist.

This principle is continuously at work in the Vita Amatoris. Not only does the decision of

Amator and Martha to remain chaste immediately provoke a divine distortion of the laws of

422 Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.5. 423 Giselle de Nie, Word, Image, and Experience: Dynamics of Miracle and Self-Perception in Sixth-Century Gaul (Padstow: Ashgate, 2003), x.

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nature by proffering the sweet smell of flowers in the middle of winter, but a later incident reveals a world in which the boundaries of the real and unreal are blurred into non-existence.

After falling asleep on the night of his wedding to Martha, Amator woke up in the dead of night and saw an angel standing near him holding a double garland.424 The angel spoke, commissioning him to undertake the munus—conceivably intended with the layered meaning of gift, duty, and office—conferred on him by God.425 The Vita then tells us: “The sleepless youth heard these words (has voces) proceeding from the mouth of the angel (ex ore Angeli), and he saw (speculabatur) with his eyes (suis obtutibus) the mouth of the one speaking (ora eloquentis): but he thought those things to have happened as if in a dream which had been truly spoken (vere dicta).”426 The story continues, but these lines deserve some attention.

As Caroline Dinshaw has explored in her book How Soon is Now? the medieval duality between the mundane and the spiritual worlds can also be conceived of as a duality between normal and queer—between everything that is known, ordered, and predictable and everything that is unexpected, strange, and wondrous. It is in this way that miracles themselves function; they are wonders in the sense that they deny the logic and order of the known world.427 They represent intrusions into this world from elsewhere, from a place unbounded by the limitations of material existence. Dinshaw often discusses this in terms of time, contrasting the ordered, quasi- mechanical system of monastic hours with what she calls queer time, where a monk can, for example, wander in the forest for an afternoon and return to find that years have passed.428 We have already seen this sort of device at work in the Vita Amatoris; the miracle of the

424 Here we see an echo of the double crowns from the Passio of Cecilia. 425 Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.5. 426 “Has voces ex ore Angeli prolatas pervigil juvenis audiebat, & suis speculabatur ora eloquentis obtutibus: sed illa quasi per somnium geri, quae vere dicta fuerant, existimabat.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.5. 427 Dinshaw, 43. 428 Dinshaw, 44–54.

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unexpectedly sweet smell is characterized by its untimeliness, elaborated by Martha when she exclaims that the sweet smell of flowers should not be present during the winter. In a similar way, this story with the angel is establishing a duality between a ‘real’ material experience, defined by the bodily senses, and a dream.

The distinction between a true material sense experience and a dream here is quite explicit.

The language of the text specifies the acts of hearing and seeing. It deliberately invokes as points of reference the voice of the angel, the angel’s mouth (twice), and Amator’s gaze. These things pertaining to material sense experience are presented as proofs of the angel’s material reality, set in contrast to Amator’s belief that the experience was a dream. But the question arises: what is the point of introducing the element of doubt to the story? Why does it make sense in the Vita’s logic for Amator to experience ambiguity about whether or not the angel’s appearance was a dream? As usual when dealing with hagiography, the answer to these questions comes in layers.

First, the story seems to evoke the Old Testament story of the prophet Samuel, who as a youth received a nocturnal message from God which he at first confused for the voice of the priest Eli sleeping in the next room.429 The hagiographic evocation of imagery from the Old Testament is completely standard, of course: it serves primarily to accommodate the audience’s sense of the shape of holy narrative and reinforces the position of a particular Vita within the context of

Christian history. But there are many other Biblical incidents of angels speaking to humans without any confusion or dream elements, perhaps most famously the annunciation to Mary by the angel Gabriel.430 Therefore we might conclude that Amator’s confusion might be drawn from scriptural precedent, but it was not dictated or required by scriptural precedent; it is not necessary for Amator to be confused in order to make the story match scriptural antecedents of nocturnal

429 1 Samuel 3. 430 Luke 1:26–38.

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visitations by angels. So the invocation of dreaming here cannot simply be reduced to the presence of a trope. As a trope it was optional, and the factors that went into the decision to employ this trope can be the subject of consideration.

So the question extends into the territory of the status of dreams and visions vis-à-vis the material world for early medieval thinkers, an enormous and heavily nuanced topic that perplexed generations of theologians throughout the Middle Ages. For guidance with respect to the Merovingian period in particular, I cannot but lean heavily on the work conducted by Isabel

Moreira in her book Dreams, Visions, and Spiritual Authority in Merovingian Gaul. Moreira tells us that:

…conveying the inner spiritual life of the saint was probably the hagiographer’s most challenging task. The solution was to record external manifestations of the inner life: tears and groans, solitary prayer, heroic feats of contemplation and mortification of the body with fasts, vigils, and physical discomforts. In similar ways visionary accounts offered an expressible external dimension to the saint’s special relationship with God.431

This insight is, I think, key to understanding the weight of the angelic visitation in the narrative.

We are not just being told, in the common-sense way one might read such a scene in a modern movie, that Amator was surprised to see an angel and did not believe his eyes. Rather, the invocation of the possibility that Amator was dreaming fulfills a specific function with respect to the text’s interaction with its audience.432 The evocation of the potential dream-status of the angelic visitation lends the occurrence a spiritual rather than simply material character, associating it with the inner world of Amator’s holy experience, with his dreams and contemplations, as well as with the more corporeal facts of his life. The invocation of the

431 Moreira, Dreams, Visions, and Spiritual Authority in Merovingian Gaul, 182. 432 In his study of the hagiography of Auxerre, using another example from the life of Amator, van Egmond writes, “Not only are all the lives of saints divine messages in themselves; like the Vita Germani, the other hagiographical texts also describe how some mortals received divine messages directed towards themselves. And just as in the Vita Germani, these messages are usually delivered through a ‘buffer.’ The most useful buffer is a dream, which if the recipient has done something wrong, is preceded by an illness.” van Egmond, Conversing, 153.

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possibility that Amator was dreaming also foregrounds a central element in the experience or narration of any wonder: doubt and disbelief. These ideas are related.

Someone hearing the story of a nocturnal visitation to a saint by an angel might reasonably ask the question, “but did that really happen?” I do not believe that we should do medieval audiences the disservice of assuming that their minds were not as capable of asking that question as ours are.433 Indeed, the very affective force of any wonder story derives from the fact that something happened which would not normally happen, which defied expectations, and therefore implicitly conflicts with a normal idea of ‘reality.’ Amator’s assumption that the angelic visitation was a dream might reasonably reflect or even pre-empt the audience’s suspicion that the visitation was a dream. It encompasses and accommodates that possibility into the story itself. But in doing so, it does not undermine the importance or authority of the experience, because a dream visitation to a saint by an angel has its own role—to expound for the audience using the symbolism of visions, as Moreira pointed out, the character of the saint’s inner spiritual experience, to express the saint’s spiritual relationship to God using a vision as a sort of parable that should be appreciated chiefly for its spiritual and not literal content.

Had the hagiographer merely told us that an angel visited Amator in the flesh one night, it would perhaps not have carried the weight of a true intersection between the material and spiritual worlds. By invoking the possibility that it was a dream, however, the Vita can implicitly frame the event as a spiritual event and an externalization of Amator’s inner spiritual experience, as well as accommodating and answering an audience’s potential doubt about the veracity of the visitation.

433 For a very good discussion of these issues, see: Steven Justice, “Did the Middle Ages Believe in Their Miracles?,” Representations 103, no. 1 (2008), 1–29.

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The story ends with a revelation that addresses the ambiguity of the angel’s appearance. Near where Amator was sleeping there were two servant women (pedissequae) who observed what had happened, were rendered prostrate by the terrible vision (terribili visione), and thereafter devoted themselves to God as nuns.434 The fact that the serving women witnessed the angelic visitation somewhat resolves the question about whether it was simply a conventional dream.435

Their presence as witnesses implies that the visitation had a reality outside of Amator’s sleeping dreams.

However, I do not think we should read the witnessing of the event by the women as completely obliviating the ambiguous status of the angel’s appearance. After all, the words used to describe what they witnessed—the terribili visione—do not imply a mundane physical presence. The angel’s appearance is therefore described also as a vision, preserving the dreamlike quality of Amator’s experience. The angel is a sort of apparition, neither imaginary nor strictly of this world. It is present in the material world, occurring at the level of the bodily senses: it has a voice that can be heard with the ears and a face that can be seen with the eyes.

But nonetheless it remains a sort of dream vision, a spiritual experience.

Therefore I think it is reasonable to identify within this anecdote and within the anecdote of the heavenly smell a common thread that is distinct from—though not unrelated to—the attitude toward corporeality and spirituality which we have observed in the other Vitae thus far. For the

Vita Amatoris, spiritual experiences are not merely interior events. They play out in the material world in a way that acts upon the senses and explicitly upon the physical organs of sense

434 Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.5. 435 Van Egmond mentions this story as a lone example of a divine message occurring without the mediation of a dream. While on one level this is true, he does not carefully investigate the fact that the text teases the possibility that the angelic visitation was a dream. Wolfert S. van Egmond, Conversing With the Saints: Communication in Pre- Carolingian Hagiography from Auxerre (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 154.

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perception: the eyes, nose, ears, etc. But in doing so these spiritual manifestations do not lose their otherworldly quality. They are flagged as queer and wondrous, either because of their defiance of natural law or because of the overtly dream-like quality of their manifestation.

JEWELS THAT OUTSHINE THE SUN

This constellation of ideas is illustrated and put to direct political work in a later incident from the Vita, occurring in Auxerre after Amator had been made a deacon. A noblewoman named

Palladia, recently converted to Christianity, came to Auxerre on business. It happened to be

Easter, and so she went to the church to receive the Eucharist. But she went over-adorned. The

Vita describes her in terms reminiscent of Amator’s wedding, saying “as a neophyte, she proceeded to the holy church covered with splendid ornaments: and the foresaid Palladia so shone with a diverse splendour of gems that she obscured the brightness of the sun and hid the light of day with precious ornaments.”436 From the wedding scene, we—the audience—should now be prepped to understand such ornamentation as intrinsically opposed to true spiritual communion with God, aligned with the secular vanity of the pagan aristocracy and with the allures of corporeal lust.

The Eucharist is being administered by Amator, who is described as “extending the most sacred chalice into eternal life for the people” in terms similar to those surrounding the pleasant smell of his marital bed.437 Both represent a material object, a smell and a chalice, that might be bodily imbibed in order to forge a connection with the transcendent. Although familiar to the point of banality, the reference to “eternal life” also represents a material subversion or

436 “Ut neophyta, ad sanctam Ecclesiam lampificis ornamentis obsita processit: ita enim diverso splendore gemmarum praefata Palladia perlucebat, ut nitorem solis obnubilaret, & lucem diei pretiosis ornamentis absconderet.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 2.8. 437 “qui sacratissimum Calicem in vitam aeternam populis porrigebat.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 2.8.

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transcendence of normal temporality, as does the understood relationship between the wine of the Eucharist and the blood of Christ. In the structure of this anecdote, drinking from the chalice represents a sensory experience of supernal divinity equivalent to the divinely pleasant smell. So when Palladia, adorned in her splendid garments and gems, approaches to receive the Eucharist,

Amator of course denies her, saying: “You will not taste of this chalice of the blood of our Lord

Jesus Christ, unless you cast off the burden of ornament from yourself.”438 He then performs a miracle, revealing to the whole assembled crowd that Palladia was guilty of a sexual crime, saying “You have practiced a crime of pollution this night.”439 Palladia is outraged and humiliated to be thus exposed before all, and she storms out of the church.

We should not at this point be surprised to see excessive ornamentation aligned with the sinfulness of sexuality, after the descriptions of Martha’s jewelled wedding dress and ornate bridal bed. But there are a few differences here. Martha seems to have been an unwilling participant in her own wedding and its associated sexual implications; she was essentially a weapon being used by Amator’s parents in an attempt to distract him from God. Palladia, however, is neither unwilling nor weaponised. Unlike Martha, she is an agent in her own ostentation, and there is no indication that her ostentation is aimed to seduce or distract anyone— least of all Amator—away from divine things. Her crime is not explicitly named as vanity, and indeed it seems to be something else: indulgence in carnal materiality, almost a sort of gluttony or lust. Unlike Amator, who fixed his mind on God and shunned the ornamentation associated with rhetoric, nobility, gems, and sexuality, Palladia embraces them and thus cannot access the supernal pleasure—the Eucharist—that comes from their denial. And this ornamentation is so

438 “De hoc calice sanguinis Domini Jesu Christi non gustabis, nisi a te onus ornamenti projeceris.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 2.8. 439 “scelus enim hac nocte pollutionis exercuisti.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 2.8.

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aligned with sexuality that the two things here are practically elided: Palladia’s sexual misconduct is not sharply distinguished from her inappropriate ostentation. Rather, they are practically the same thing—exercises of inappropriate relations with the material world.

Palladia returns to her husband and describes the events in terms that give us something we do not often see in this sort of Vita: an articulation of an alternate perspective. We should read

Palladia’s opinion about her own attire as representative of the sort of argument that this Vita is specifically trying to rebuke. She says:

So that I might be pleasing in your sight, and so that I might appear as usual more polished than everyone else going to the celebration, I gladly was dressed in whatever was the best outfit that I had. I also tastefully adorned and arranged myself with golden ornaments and necklaces of gems.440

The text is communicating a few things here. First, it puts some of the blame onto the husband.

We were told earlier that he remained pagan when Palladia converted, so his non-Christian presence in her life is partially responsible for her misconduct. Second, Palladia is identified as hubristic, wanting to adorn herself in order to be superior to her fellow Christians—implying in addition to moral and theological concerns that there is a social, perhaps even quasi-class, element to the Vita’s dislike for expensive ostentation. The final consideration looks like what we might recognize almost as a modern acknowledgement of cultural difference. The Vita realizes that Palladia thinks she adorned herself decenter even though according to the text’s own moral logic she was behaving badly. This suggestion of an acknowledgement of cultural difference is particularly interesting given the extreme diversity of perspective seen even between different hagiographical texts of the same period. The hagiographers themselves were not so myopic as to miss this. They realized that others, even other Christians—for Palladia was

440 “Ego enim, ut tuis conspectibus complacerem, & solito cultior cunctis festivitatem frequentantibus apparerem, quidquid vestimenti superbissimi habui induta sum libens, ac etiam aureis ornamentis, lapillorumve monilibus memet decenter exornavi atque curavi.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 2.9.

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nominally a Christian herself—had differing views on materiality. The ending of this anecdote and some other anecdotes that follow represent a direct counter-argument to those differing views.

The conclusion of this story played out on the bodies of the offending parties. Palladia’s pagan husband, enraged at his wife’s poor treatment, began to plot against the saint. As a result, they were both struck down. He was given over to an evil spirit, and she to a “deadly illness which dissolved the structure of her limbs.”441 The hagiographer then explains that this happened

“since omnipotent God wished through them to make visible his power in the often-mentioned

Amator and to display how much Amator was a most dear and faithful servant to himself.“442

The logic here is almost explicitly that which I discussed above in the angelic vision, wherein spiritual qualities are made tangible through miraculous material manifestation. This of course reflects what we might think of as an exegetical approach to reality, namely that literal events are to be examined primarily for their spiritual significance; here, we are being told that God causes events to happen in order to reveal spiritual truths. In this instance the fundamental integrity of

Palladia’s body is lost. Her bodily crimes of carnality and over-adornment have an unwholesome spiritual dimension that miraculously manifests in an unwholesomeness of flesh, so that her spiritual pollutions impact not just her inner spiritual life or afterlife, but her actual embodied experience and existence.

At last, the couple go before the saint and beg him to lift their affliction. They promise: “we offer whatever we have into the hands of your sanctity, for whatever purposes you wish to ask; only restore us to our original health by your prayers that are pleasing to God, and grant us

441 “illico ille doli machinator nequissimo arripitur spiritu; illa vero lethifero morbo, qui membrorum compagem dissolvisset.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 2.9. 442 “quoniam Deus omnipotens per eos voluit in saepedicto Amatore suam demonstrare virtutem, & ostendere quantum fuerit ei carissimus & fidelissimus famulis.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 2.10.

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solidity of body and spirit.”443 Amator calls the local priest, who baptizes the husband into the

Christian faith. Amator warns the two never again to give in to their desires on a holy day, then anoints their bodies with oil. The evil spirit leaves the man, and the sickness of contagion leaves

Palladia.

The subtle but persistent connection between material riches and sexual sin is once more reinforced here. When the penitent couple renounce their material wealth, then they are considered worthy to be healed, and the saint gives them a rebuke—not for ostentation, but for sexual misconduct. Here again these two issues are oddly elided. Overtly they seem like separate sins, but in the logic of this story they seem to coexist as the same sin. And indeed in their essence they can perhaps be thought of as the same moral error, namely that of inappropriate attachment to the material world. Just as most early monks interpreted Christian teaching as demanding that they renounce both wealth and sex, the Vita Amatoris seems to be associating material vanity with unregulated lust.

This of course echoes the ideas at play in the story of Amator’s own wedding, of which the sinful character—not because weddings were inherently sinful, presumably, but because a saint called to chastity was being forced to marry against his will by his parents for material reasons— was underscored by the descriptions of the bride’s fine garments and jewels. In that case, when

Amator and Martha refused to consummate their marriage, their rejection of material sense pleasure became itself a source of supernal sense pleasure, the sweet smell of heaven. In this story of Palladia and her husband, however, their embracing of materiality—in the form of both jewels and inappropriate sex—results in sense and bodily displeasure; the healthy integrity of

443 “En, quaecumque habemus tuae sanctitatis palmis offerimus, in quibuscumque volueris usus praerogare; tantum pristinae nos tuis Deo placitis precibus sanitati restitue, & robur corporis animaeque concede.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 2.11.

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their bodies is lost, and they are rendered miserable. Both of these stories share the same lesson, namely that orientation away from material pleasure will bring true pleasure, and orientation toward material pleasure will bring true displeasure. And this resultant pleasure and displeasure is not merely spiritual but itself material, tangible, and active upon the physical senses.

Despite the fact that this is an episcopal Vita, this theme shares similarities with what we have observed in the monastic Vita patrum Iurensium, though they were probably written almost a hundred years apart. Both emphasize the importance of not pursuing sense pleasure, although the

Vita patrum Iurensium is fairly nuanced in its discussion of the exact attitude of monastic indifference that should be cultivated toward physical sensation. This similarity might not be surprising; after all, the idea of spurning material things is a commonplace in early Christianity, if not in Christianity more broadly. However, this idea that there might be a specific experience of pleasure in reward for turning away from the material world—the sweet little apples of Jura, and perhaps the sweet smell of Amator’s marital bed—is more interesting. It implies an ethic of material self-denial advertised not just to monks, for laypersons like Palladia and her husband had taken no monastic vows, but to all Christians, and it offered specific, tangible, here-and-now experiences of reward and punishment to animate that ethic.

ROMAN-ISH ARISTOCRATS AND THEIR WEALTH IN THE VITA AMATORIS

The Vita Amatoris quite specifically identifies a ‘problem’ category of people living in the city of Auxerre. They are old aristocrats, embedded in old Roman, pre-Christian culture. 444 They

444 Raymond Van Dam describes such a demographic when he writes: “It is easy to take this transformation for granted, because not only has the ‘Christianization’ of Gallic society long been a favorite topic of research, the ‘aristocratization’ of the Gallic church during the fifth century has also been well explored. In fact, however, the implications of the previous chapters ought to make us hesitate. First, the discussion of heresy has suggested the inability of Christian communities easily to absorb such people as, in particular, men educated in the classical heritage—as many local aristocrats would have been. Second, the discussion of local authority has suggested that in

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cultivate a classical education, maintain ancient names, and conduct their weddings according to old Roman traditions (sicut ritus ac mos elegantissimorum Romanorum).445 They place concerns of wealth and property over their spiritual duty. Often, in Amator’s day, they were implicitly or explicitly pagan. The religion of Amator’s parents is unspecified, but he is described as having privileged Christianity over vanis superstitionibus.446 Palladia had recently converted to

Christianity from culturis daemoniorum, but her husband remained in pristinis erroribus.447 This group of worldly aristocrats seems to compose the primary antagonists of the Vita Amatoris, although, critically, the group’s boundaries are porous. Its members are capable of redeeming themselves by converting to Christianity and—for Palladia’s conversion was insufficient without this step—taming their relationship with worldly wealth and status.448

It is unclear how exactly we should take the description of this problem group. Are we to conclude that in the late sixth century, at the time of the text’s composition, there were still some pagan aristocrats in Auxerre whose anti-Christian activities needed to be rhetorically countered by making them the villains in one of the city’s episcopal Vitae? Or is this how a writer in the late sixth century imagined things were like in Amator’s time, the early fifth century? In truth, we can be fairly certain that there were no real pagans lingering around Auxerre at the time of the Vita’s composition.

any case these aristocrats did not need the sanction of Christianity to maintain their local prominence; as we have seen, they had been quite successful in performing outside, alongside, or inside even the central administration to their own advantage. The rise of Christianity to its dominating position in early medieval Gallic society therefore involves at least two simultaneous and interacting processes: first, the accommodation of Christian attitudes to secular ideology, and second, a disruption in the conventional exercise of local authority and a consequent redefinition of the options available to local aristocrats.” Van Dam, Leadership and Community, 116. 445 Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.3. 446 “Dei sibi omnipotentis prece auxilium impetrans, aggreditur juvene & salutaribus monitis adhortatur, ut Dei præceptis religionique Catholicæ magis suæ mentis intentionem, quam vanis superstitionibus, applicaret” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 1.2. 447 Stephanus Africanus, VA, 2.8. 448 In addition to the examples of Amator’s parents and Palladia and her husband, this pattern is also followed in this text by Germanus and Ruptilius, both of whom will soon be discussed.

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Indeed, our knowledge of the conversion timeline in Auxerre is sparse, but we know enough to make some observations. A little north of the main centres of early Gallic Christianity,

Auxerre was built along the important road connecting Lyon, Autun, Sens, and Paris.449 The region of Lyon was one of the only places in Gaul where we can confirm a Christian presence already by the second century, and the inscription of Pectorius at Autun from the late second or early third century is almost our only evidence for Gallo-Roman Christianity in that period.450

The bishops of Autun and Lyon were both present at the 314 Council of Arles, as were the bishops of the more northern cities of Rheims, Rouen, Cologne, and Trier.451 Auxerre is not mentioned, but it is easily in the geographical orbit of these cities with established Christian presences. Perhaps its absence can be explained by the fact that Auxerre’s prominence was itself rather new during the life of Amator, only elevated to the rank of civitas in 346 as part of

Diocletian’s reforms.452 Its first appearance as a Christian presence is the signature of its earliest attested bishop, Valerianus, on the council of Cologne in 346.453 This trajectory is more or less consistent with the claim of the Vita Amatoris that Amator established the city’s first cathedral before his death around 418 and that the city’s Gallo-Roman population during his lifetime featured both a growing Christian presence as well as lingering pagan remnants.

Nonetheless, it is frankly quite difficult to be concrete about the timeline of the conversion of the Gallo-Romans and Franks, not to mention the other originally non-Christian groups present in Gaul. Sixth-century Gaul was startlingly diverse, littered with enclaves of cultural and

449 Picard, “Auxerre,” 51. 450 Hen, Culture and Religion in Merovingian Gaul, A.D. 481–751, 7; For the inscription, see: J.L. Goff and R. Rémond, Histoire de la France religieuse: Des dieux de la Gaule à la papauté d’Avignon (des origines au XIVe siècle), L’Univers historique (Seuil, 1988), 67. 451 Concilia Galliae, in CCSL 148, ed. C. Munier (Turnhout, 1963). 452 Picard, “Auxerre,” 52. 453 Con. Gall., 27.

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religious communities ranging from Sarmatians and Huns to Goths, Romans, and Celts.454 By the time of the text’s composition, Auxerre’s Gallo-Roman population was probably entirely converted to Christianity. The Franks seem to have converted later than the Gallo-Romans, and it is not exactly clear how many Franks might have lived in Auxerre in the late sixth century to be the targets of such admonitions anyway.455 Moreover, as Yitzhak Hen has persuasively argued,

Christian authors decrying pagan practices in their writings were more plausibly engaging in a sort of traditional rhetorical posturing than reacting to actual pagans in their midst.456 Who converted from what and to what and when exactly they did it during this period seems quite difficult to know.457 However, from what we do know, it does seem unlikely that wealthy pagan aristocrats were still present in Auxerre in the late sixth century in sufficient numbers to constitute a real problem for the Church there.

I think it is reasonable to conclude that the vilification of pagan aristocrats reflects a sixth- century conception—and not an entirely inaccurate one—of a fifth-century situation. Indeed, the text itself demonstrates this sort of historical awareness when it mentions “the Christians were

454 Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church, 17. 455 Describing the process of Frankish conversion, which seems to have occurred much later than that of the Gallo- Romans, Halsall explains his version of what I take to be more or less the consensus view on this subject: “To acquire the support of a Merovingian king one would have to be Christian. Therefore we can assume that all those families in the rural areas of the region of Metz who wanted to gain royal patronage [...] would rapidly have adopted Christianity. We can, therefore, envisage that, even if there had been no Christianization in the Roman period and even with the settlement of a large number of pagan Franks, in the fluid social structures of the sixth century in northern Gaul, at least nominal Christianity could quickly have quite deeply penetrated local society.” Halsall, Cemetries and Society in Merovingian Gaul: Selected Studies in History and Archaeology, 1992–2009, 273. 456 “It seems that these references are simply means of precautions without any solid basis in reality. They are too incidental, too general, too repetitive and too small in number to imply that a real problem of pagan survivals and superstitious practices preoccupied the Christian authorities.” Hen, Culture and Religion in Merovingian Gaul, A.D. 481–751, 177. 457 Volker Bierbrauer tries to trace the process of conversion in Frankish territories by looking at the spread of cross jewellery. He says: “Among the Franks, manifestations of personal Christian belief are found on a significant scale only from the middle of the seventh century onward. [...] The use of these cross-shaped brooches on female dress, reflecting their use in north Italy, is no doubt connected with a late Roman Christianity which still survived in this area in the fifth and sixth centuries.” This evidence is interesting, but it is hard to know just exactly what the contemporary relationship was between conversions and jewellery trends, not to mention how one might figure out whether a person was wearing a cross because of Roman culture or Frankish culture. Bierbrauer, “The Cross Goes North: From Late Antiquity to Merovingian Times South and North of the Alps,” 437.

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new at the time, converting away from idols to God.”458 However, representation of this problem category of people in the text can also be read as a means of contemporary social commentary from the sixth century.

This point is fairly central to our understanding of the social politics of the Vita Amatoris.

Yes, the aristocrats of sixth-century Auxerre were probably all Christianized. But they probably also retained much of the classical heritage and education of previous generations, and that might explain why the Vita so explicitly identifies that style of education with a specifically pagan aristocracy, underscoring the point about the church’s difficulty in absorbing that particular demographic. And the aristocrats of the Vita Amatoris do indeed show every sign of managing their wealth and power without any great obeisance to clerical injunctions; Palladia and her husband ignore the rules about sexual conduct, and almost all of them put the management of their properties and treasures above any submission to Christian virtue. If the life trajectory of

Amator—and indeed Germanus for that matter—demonstrates the alternate options available to aristocrats, in other words, joining the episcopate and taking up a quasi-aristocratic career in the church, then this text also represents a critique of some of those aristocrats, the ones who had chosen not to do so.

The text itself gives us a sense of the power relationship between local bishops and aristocrats, especially those who held high secular offices. Toward the end, we are introduced to the character of Germanus—the brash and highly placed young nobleman who would eventually become Amator’s famous successor as bishop. Although he is nominally a Christian, the text tells us that he was less interested in religion than in the “activities of the young.”459 In this case,

458 “adhuc novitas erat Christianorum, ab idolis ad Deum convertentium.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 3.18. 459 “cui mos erat tirunculorum potius industriis indulgere, quam Christianae religioni operam dare.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 4.24.

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that refers to hunting. Germanus had taken up the habit of decapitating the heads of his hunting conquests and hanging them from the branches of a large tree in the middle of the city. Amator did not approve, because the practice seemed to him to be inappropriate for a Christian and indeed more appropriate for a pagan. The text tells us that Amator harangued Germanus on this topic—Vir autem Domini iterum atque iterum eum hortabatur—but that Germanus essentially ignored the bishop.

Amator eventually gets his way by uprooting and destroying the tree when Germanus is out of town, but Germanus, hearing of this, is wrathful and raises the countrymen against him, forcing him to flee the city for a short time.460 This may in fact be telling us something about the demographics of early Gallic Christianity. If the agrestes that Germanus raises while out of town on an estate—Palladia and her husband also seemed to reside in a suburban estate—are to be taken as rural rather than urban folk, and if he raises them specifically in opposition to the conventus Christianorum—the assembly of the Christians—that might defend Amator in the city, then maybe we are being told something about the differing religious affiliations of those who lived in the cities versus the countryside.461 We see here, if only through the lens of

Stephanus’s impressions of a slightly distant time, an opposition between a Christianizing urban class and a culturally pagan rural class. If that is the implication of this passage, it is probably not coincidental that Amator’s next series of miracles, performed while in exile from Auxerre, are concerned with the Christianization of agrestes and rusticulae. In any event, at the very least we are being told about a nominally Christian aristocrat whose trophy-displaying practices were at

460 Stephanus Africanus, VA, 4.24. 461 “ne ei aliquo modo quorumdan Christianorum conventus furenti resisteret; turbam secum agrestem coaduans civitati improvisus advenit.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 4.24.

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odds with what the episcopacy thought appropriate, and the relative incapacity of the episcopacy to do much about it beyond public denunciation.

To illustrate that the Vita Amatoris is interested in influencing the behaviour of its audience, I will briefly digress with a single example. When Palladia approached Amator to receive the

Eucharist, she knew—presumably—that she had sinned by having sex during the period of

Easter celebrations, something that was prohibited throughout most of the Middle Ages. Amator divinely knew about Palladia’s misdeed and announced it to the whole congregation, humiliating her. I do not doubt that this story would stick in the mind of any person at Auxerre who had likewise violated the sexual prohibition and was approaching a deacon at the Cathedral to receive the Eucharist. The threat of supernatural detection, exposure, and humiliation could have had a powerful deterrent effect, and indeed it seems likely to me that inspiring such a response was one of the goals of the story. From this, if not indeed from almost all of the text’s anecdotes, I think it is more than reasonable to consider the text as exhibiting a social or even pastoral consciousness vis-à-vis its audience.

That being assumed, we should also read the treatment of Palladia’s gems as a sort of pastoral admonishment to the Vita’s lay audience. While they probably were not pagan, it is perfectly believable that sixth-century Auxerre possessed a cohort of wealthy aristocrats who prided themselves on their old names—indeed, the families of Amator and Germanus are both positively described as old and noble—and practiced styles and customs, perhaps even some wedding customs, that were survivals from the Roman past. Syncretism is the norm rather than the exception in societies recently converted to a new religion, and there is every reason to

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believe that pre-Christian fashions and practices survived long after Gaul’s conversion.462 It is also perfectly reasonable to assume that these families were still educating their children in the traditional Roman style. We do not know exactly when or how the Roman schools in Gaul ceased to exist, but the ability of wealthy aristocrats to hire private tutors to maintain that educational tradition certainly persisted all throughout the Merovingian period. Ralph Mathisen has, for example, identified instances of classically educated bishops well into the seventh century.463 These families would almost certainly have also been concerned with lines of inheritance, as Amator’s family was, and it seems reasonably likely that they adorned themselves in expensive jewels as Palladia did. 464

My implication here of course is that the Vita Amatoris is indirectly admonishing the rich lay citizens of Auxerre not just that they should obey the rules around sexual congress during holy periods, but also that they should incorporate a quasi-monastic attitude toward material treasure, at least when it came to their interactions with the Church. Ostentatious jewels, the text is implying, are sinful. Even if you think they are appropriate, as Palladia did, you are deluded.

Ostentation is associated with pride and vainglory—the rich inappropriately lording it over their less wealthy fellow Christians. But it is also associated with something perhaps even more sinister: with the quasi-sexual sin of overindulgence in materiality, with a sort of lasciviousness

462 Thomas Charles-Edwards uses the letters of Gregory the Great to Queen Brunhild to demonstrate that concerns about syncretic practices among the population persisted at least into the late sixth century. Thomas M. Charles- Edwards, “Perceptions of Pagan and Christian: From Patrick to Gregory the Great,” in The Introduction of Christianity into the Early Medieval Insular World. Converting the Isles, I, ed. Roy Flechner and Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, vol. 19, Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), 274–75. Bernadette Filotas, Pagan Survivals, Superstitions and Popular Cultures in Early Medieval Pastoral Literature (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2005), 38–39. 463 Ralph Mathisen, “Desiderius of Cahors: Last of the Romans,” in Gallien in Spätantike und Frühmittelalter: Kulturgeschichte einer Region, ed. S. Diefenbach and G. M. Müller, Millennium-Studien 43 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012), 455–69. 464 Completely absent from this text is any sign or discussion of the dramatic social, economic, and political decline that Mathisen attributes to the Gallic aristocracy of the fifth century. Mathisen, Roman Aristocrats in Barbarian Gaul: Strategies for Survival in an Age of Transition, 17–37.

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that blocks access to the spiritual world, most concretely represented by being denied access to the salvific taste of the Eucharist.

But the indirect admonition extends even further than just “be modest.” In a later anecdote that mirrors the Palladia incident, Amator decides that the church at Auxerre is too small. He goes to the home of another recently converted nobleman, Ruptilius, and instructs him to donate part of his home to be made into a new church. Ruptilius resists, declaring that because the home had been passed down to him from his parents and was more splendid than any other home, he could not bear to part with it.465 Amator invokes God to intercede. Ruptilius is struck down and thrown into a dream—”some sort of force of sleep came upon him”—where, again, he hears a voice—again sleep and dreams are flagged as a sort of liminal space between the real world and the material world. The voice of the Lord tells him that his body will be afflicted with tortures unless he submits to Amator. 466 So of course Ruptilius leaps from the dream, runs to Amator, and offers to the saint not just his house but all of his money as well.

Here Ruptilius’s sin matches that of Palladia. The text almost explicitly flags that similar concepts are being invoked. Both are introduced with their aristocratic pedigree: Palladia equals her husband who was excellentissimo germine progenitus, born from a most excellent line, and

Ruptilius is nobilissimus civis Autissiodorensis civitatis, a most noble citizen of the city of

Auxerre.467 Palladia defends her jewels by saying that wearing them is her custom and that it is her duty to be beautiful for her husband,468 and Ruptilius insists he cannot turn over the house in

465 Stephanus Africanus, VA, 3.18–19. 466 “Sed cum, inter tormenta corporea, somni oppressio quaedam surrepsisset; audit salutaria Domini minantis eloquia, dicentia sibi, Nisi protinus famuli mei Amatoris monitis acquiescas, deterioribus te faciam affligi tormentis.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 3.19. 467 “excellentissimo germine progenitus. Cui uxor erat, nomine Palladia, moribus ac genere viro æquiparans” and “nobilissimus quidam, nomine Ruptilius, civis Autissiodorensis civitatis”. Stephanus Africanus, VA, 2.8, 3.18. 468 “Ego enim, ut tuis conspectibus complacerem, & solito cultior cunctis festivitatem frequentantibus apparerem, quidquid vestimenti superbissimi habui induta sum libens, ac etiam aureis ornamentis, lapillorumve monilibus memet decenter exornavi atque curavi”. VA, 2.9.

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which he was raised and which he inherited from his parents to have its splendour diminished by handing it over to another.469 Indeed, splendor is used in both cases: Palladia shines with a manifold splendour of gems—diverso splendore gemmarum—and Ruptilius asserts that his house excels before all others with the splendour of its highest nobility—maximæ generositatis splendore cunctis præpollens.470 This is a splendor that they regard as normal, as appropriate, as implicated in their familial relationships and in their overall status in the community of Amator.

But the community is converting to something new, Christianity, and the Vita Amatoris is clear that that conversion requires these aristocrats to change their ways and submit to a new social order.

There is a strong invocation of the importance of inherited property, very similar to the concerns expressed by Amator’s parents when they tried to prevent him from pursuing an ecclesiastical career because he was the only heir to their property. In both cases—all three, counting Palladia—it is not just possessing wealth or glorying in it that is blameworthy. The wealth is problematic not just in its materiality but also in its connection to its pre-Christian past.

Amator’s inheritance from his Roman parents, Palladia’s jewels from her pagan husband, and

Ruptilius’s house from his pagan parents are all treasures associated with a pagan past, connections to a heritage that Christians are being called upon to sever.

With this dynamic identified, it seems clear that the Vita Amatoris is launching an attack against the very concept of inherited and hoarded wealth. To convert to Christianity, even for a layperson, according to this text, is necessarily to cease finding glory in material splendour and

469 “denegavit se posse hoc opus adimplere, propterea quod illustrium parentum suorum auctoritate ei fuerat legitime in hereditatem dimissa. [at repulsam passus] Et his dictis, Sacerdotis suavissima verba decassans, respondit: Absit ut hæc domus, quæ parentes & me ab infantia enutrivit, & maximæ generositatis splendore cunctis præpollens apparuit, alterius in se dominium suscipiat, & pristinæ dignitatis [Col. 0056C] honorem amittat.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 3.18. 470 Stephanus Africanus, VA, 2.8, 3.18.

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to place that ancestral wealth in subordination to the episcopacy, including wealth inherited or about to be inherited from family. Converting to Christianity involves being willing to break a material chain linking together the generations, rupturing one’s self from the past. This quite specifically aligns with the point about temporality derived from the discussion of the untimeliness of the sublime smell experienced by Martha and Amator in their wedding bed.

Normal patterns of time and history—the turning of the seasons for the smell, and the passing down of inheritances in this case—are associated with the fallen material world from which a

Christian should turn. Indeed, Martha and Amator’s refusal to engage in copulation is exactly that sort of rupture from the normal processes of generational inheritance, since the explicit reason for their forced marriage is to provide heirs for Amator’s family’s wealth.471

Relinquishing their commitment to their inherited wealth for these citizens means placing that wealth at the disposal of the Church when necessary. For the Vita’s wealthy audience then, the message is quite clear: you are not truly Christian if you withhold your wealth from the Church.

Pride in your old noble family is the same as pride in the wealth passed down through the generations of that family, and both need to be surrendered. The rhetoric of the hagiographer, probably shared by other members of the Auxerre Church, must have been fruitful. Indeed, Ian

Wood uses Auxerre as an example of a place where donations from the wealthy were visible. He cites Heiric of Auxerre’s ninth-century description of the church at Auxerre being adorned with gifts of plates inscribed with their donors’ names.472

471 This aligns with Dinshaw’s work as well. She writes: “Dedicated to continuing a ‘line,’ in the first of my medieval examples patriarchal reproduction is revealed as resolutely linear in not only the genealogical but also, and therefore, the temporal domain; if, as I have suggested in my introduction, queerness is experienced, at least in part, in and as time, patriarchal reproduction is too.” Dinshaw, How Soon?, 44. 472 Indeed, Ian Wood uses Auxerre as an example of a place where donations from the wealthy were visible. He cites Heiric of Auxerre’s ninth-century description of the church at Auxerre being adorned with gifts of plates inscribed with their donors’ names. Ian Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450–751 (London and New York: Longman, 1994), 220; Hericus of Auxerre, de miraculis s. Germani, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina 124, (1852), 1207–72.

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As the Gallic episcopacy ascended to become a dominant political force, especially in urban settings, this sort of message had special resonance. This message utilizes a compelling metaphysical logic to motivate wealthy citizens to surrender part of their wealth to the episcopacy and to abandon ostentation for the sake of their immortal souls. We do not need to see this message as a cynical fundraising scheme on the part of the church in order to recognize that this text has a political valence that tends toward a concentration of ostentation of wealth and power in the hands of a particular faction. Indeed, we should probably attribute complete sincerity to the worldview reflected in these anecdotes, a belief that wealthy lay citizens surrendering their connections to the material world by surrendering their wealth to the church is directly edifying both to the citizens and to the church.

CONCLUSION: THE SAINT AND THE CITY

It does not take a subtle eye to see the importance of the city of Auxerre in the Vita Amatoris.

The opening line of the final section is: “Oh truly worthy and outstanding city which was placed before the whole world in its bounties.”473 The hagiographer even waxes poetic, producing a heavily alliterated line to describe the way in which Auxerre’s two saints protect the city on both sides: Amator Australibus sanitatum semina subministrat, Germanus Occidentalibus sospitatis largitur auxilium—Amator provides the seeds of health from the south, and Germanus offers the help of well-being from the west. Auxerre is then compared to Rome, protected by its two saints just as Rome is protected by Peter and Paul.474

473 “O vere digna ac praecalara civitas quae suis est foecunditatibus mundo praelata!” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 5.33. 474 “Non imparem te Romuleae asseram civitati.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 5.33.

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We have now seen this sort of rhetorical move several times, making it perhaps the most persistent trope in these texts. Just as the hills of Jura are compared to the Egyptian desert and the city of Poitiers is compared to Jerusalem, so here is Auxerre being compared to Rome by virtue of its holy protectors. This comparison has the effect of situating Auxerre, which had nothing to do with any scriptural event, into the broader narrative of Christian history by aligning its geography with that of one of Christianity’s most famous cities. It also no doubt has the effect of promoting cults of pilgrimage to the tombs of Amator and Germanus—probably Germanus’s tomb was already doing just fine—thus bolstering the wealth and prestige of the bishops of

Auxerre. But the text’s metaphysical program is also here invoked.

In its concluding sentences, the Vita Amatoris urges its reader to visit the sacred tombs,

“where manifold patterns of health are most vividly revealed: the appearance of which it is impossible for words to describe, since it is easier to describe by name the waves of the immeasurable sea or the sands of the shore than with a mortal tongue to recount the accomplished miracles of Amator and Germanus.”475 This is not simply a mundane assertion that

Amator and Germanus have done too many miracles to list. It is also a comparison of the miraculous quality of their tombs, their formae and speciatim, figures and kind, to boundless infinity, a divine reality impossible to adequately describe in words. This aligns directly with how the Vita elsewhere describes the intervention of divinity into the material world, as both tangible and yet otherworldly, not adhering to the normal laws of quotidian experience.

As we have seen over and over, the Vita Amatoris presumes a duality between the material world in which we live and the spiritual world in which God dwells. And the major difference it

475 “ubi multifariae sanitatum formae evidentius declarantur: quarum impossibile est vocabula speciatim retexere, uia facilius est immensi maris fluctus vel littoris arenas nominatim deprehendere, quam mirabilium profectus Amatoris Germanive mortali lingua percurrere.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 5.33.

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imagines between those two worlds is between the bounded patterns and limits of the material world and the ineffable limitlessness of the spiritual world. As a result, when something divine manifests in the material world, it can be identified as divine primarily by the way it defies the limits of normal existence. Just as the sweet smell of the heavenly fields defied the normal patterns of the seasons and Amator’s angelic visitor was ambiguously both a dream and a materially sensible presence, so is the city of Auxerre characterized by miracles that are at once, we must assume the text means us to believe, real events, but also impossible to describe because their relationship to the infinity of the sea and its shores removes them from the capacities of a mortal tongue.

In other words, this concluding passage mobilizes the logic of the miraculous that the text has established in the preceding chapters and applies it directly to the city of Auxerre, now focused on the tombs of the two saintly bishops, but so encompassing the city as to render it equivalent to

Rome. Indeed, the bishop and the city are connected throughout the text. In words that are probably meant to be read more broadly, Amator’s servants beseech him to save the city from a fire by saying: “In you lies every last salvation of this city: the oncoming catastrophes rush to take up you as the firmest obstacle to themselves.”476 And of course, just as this holiness is anchored on the tombs of two holy bishops, and just as this episcopal Vita was commissioned by a bishop of Auxerre, so the implication is that the city’s holy power and authority resides specifically in its bishops. In this the reference to Rome seems unlikely to have been accidental,

476 “In te omnis hujus civitatis inclinata salus recumbit: te sibi illapsae ruinae firmissimum obicem ascire contendunt.” Stephanus Africanus, VA, 3.23.

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since it is hard to imagine another city in the early Christian world more dominated by its local bishop.477

So the Vita Amatoris situates the city of Auxerre, with explicit reference to its physical eastern and western boundaries, in direct relationship with the transcendent and ineffable divine.

And this situating is accomplished quite specifically by the physical bodies of the bishops

Amator and Germanus, enacting the text’s logic of the divine intersecting into the world via direct and tangible materiality. By thus focusing Auxerre’s miraculous and divine associations specifically on the bodies of its bishops, the text is necessarily centring and advancing the importance of the city’s bishop as a meeting point, perhaps even a mediator, between the city and the divine. As we have seen from this text, people in Auxerre who run afoul of divine will can expect real, tangible, and deeply unpleasant bodily experiences as a result. Not only is the bishop often the vehicle through which the divine will is expressed, but it is often only by appeasing the bishop that these suffering citizens can achieve relief from their afflictions. The sort of norms and social relationships that this text is attempting to reinforce or assert by representing this dynamic should be self-evident by this point; Auxerre is a city full of divine power, the bishop is the focal point of that divine power, citizens who defy the bishop risk running afoul of that power, and citizens who are afflicted in their bodies because of divine displeasure can achieve relief by submitting themselves and their property to the will of the bishop. The person and the authority of the bishop in this way are directly linked to the physical health of the citizens of

Auxerre.

477 Indeed, we know that Aunacharius, the bishop who commissioned this Vita, was oriented toward Rome. Michel Sot writes, “Il est in correspondance avec le pape Pélage dont une lettre est publiée, exprimant l’étroite unité de l’Église d’Auxerre avec celle de Rome.” Sot, “Autorité,” 150.

CHAPTER FIVE

GENOVEFA OF PARIS

In his 1993 book Memoirs of the Blind, Jacques Derrida wrote:

At the very moment they veil sight, tears would unveil what is proper to the eye. And what they cause to surge up out of forgetfulness, there, where the gaze or look looks after it, keeps it in reserve, would be nothing less than aletheia, the truth of the eyes, whose ultimate destination they would thereby reveal: to have imploration rather than vision in sight, to address prayer, love, joy, or sadness rather than a look or gaze.478

This insight—that there is a deep and significant power in weeping eyes—was well understood in the Middle Ages. The blending of the eyes’ power of vision with a deep interior affective intensity produced a combination that evoked a primal liminality, a fusion of body and spirit in the eyes, which in turn could not but evoke the fundamental fusion of Christian thought: the fusion of divinity with the material world through the logic of incarnation. In this way, weeping eyes could become not just manifestations of the weeper’s pious interiority, but of the divine itself, incarnational and sacred—aletheia. Holy weeping, the gratia lacrymarum, became associated with holy women in particular during the Middle Ages. One early example of this

478 Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 126.

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phenomenon can be found in the sixth-century Vita Genovefae. Genovefa, according to the account, exercised significant influence in Paris during the later half of the fifth century. Her

Vita’s depiction of weeping drew upon both Christian and classical traditions, merging the humoral logic of watery, fluid female bodies with the Christian theology of primordial living waters, and the sanctified waters of baptism. Genovefa wept in her holiness, and in her holy weeping she saw heaven and performed miracles. Slipping in between the still-evolving categories of bishop and holy woman and civic leader, she used her tears to carve out a distinct role for herself, a holy woman whose connection to God entitled her to claim a leadership role in her civitas and beyond.

The previous chapters have already demonstrated the variety and innovation that characterized the hagiographic milieu of Gaul.479 Although we have observed, and should not be surprised by, elements of consistency between texts, in each of them we saw the same elements being modified and adapted to fit the social and political needs of the community for which the text was produced. Each of these Vitae is deeply engaged with describing the status of the material world vis-a-vis the divine, but the ways in which they do so vary greatly depending on the specifics of context.

Our first two chapters dealt with the monastic communities of Jura and Agaune, but, as we have seen exemplified in the case of Amator, many saints from this period were not monastic at all. While the fifth and sixth centuries in Gaul did see a certain percentage of the population retreating into monasticism,480 the vast majority of society weathered these tumultuous centuries

479 Provisionally: Graus Frantisek, Volk, Herrscher Und Heiliger Im Reich Der Merowinger. Studien Zur Hagiographie Des Merowingerzeit (Prague: Nakladatelství Československé akademie věd, 1965); Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul; Kreiner, Social Life; Marc Van Uytfanghe, “L’hagiographie et son public à l’époque mérovingienne,” Studia Patristica, no. 16 (1985), 54–62. 480 The most famous instance of this is of course the island monastery of Lérins. Marilyn Dunn summarizes our sense of how it formed when she writes, “The political upheavals which took place in Gaul and the Roman world in

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in their homes in the Roman civitates. For these communities, urban and lay rather than monastic, issues of materiality were less centred around the project of disciplined living that was the concern of monks and nuns, and more entangled with the political and social concerns of the civitas. In the Vita of Amator, this ultimately became a negotiation about whether the physical treasure of leading families should be at the service of their own self-aggrandizement and cross- generational inheritance practices or at the service of the bishop as the leader of the Christian community in the city, and about using the logic of dangerous materiality to leverage those same families into abandoning cultural practices identified by the episcopacy as pagan holdovers. This sort of project draws upon a different set of references than do the monastic Vitae, and it constructs distinct albeit related implicit logical structures to support its rhetorical goals.

For the purposes of exploring the flexibility and diversity of thinking on materiality in hagiography, few texts are more revealing than the Vita Genovefae. Genovefa lived during the fifth century and her Life was written a few decades after her death, sometime in the early sixth century. The text depicts a strange situation, difficult to properly understand, where a woman named Genovefa appears to fill a unique leading role in the civitas of Paris. My argument in this chapter is that the Vita represents a retrospective attempt to justify and explain Genovefa’s very unique role in the city, establishing her as a legitimate holy patron for Paris. It depicts her following the paradigms of traditional Roman municipal office-holders, the culturally recognized holy pattern of a chaste virgo, and—highly relevant at this particular time—the model of a holy bishop like Martin or Germanus. The final result becomes a depiction of Genovefa as operating

the mid-420s, when some of Lérins’ most important figures joined the community suggest that part of the attractions of the religious life lay in the fact that it was a refuge from political perils.” Dunn, The Emergence of Monasticism: From the Desert Fathers to the Early Middle Ages, 82. See also the studies contained in: Y. Codou and M. Lauwers, eds., Lérins, une île sainte de l’Antiquité au Moyen Âge, Collection d’études médiévales de Nice 9 (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2009).

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in a fashion strikingly similar to a bishop of Paris.481 The exact political circumstances of Paris during Genovefa’s lifetime are difficult to reconstruct, though I will spend some time looking at the question, and we will probably never know exactly how or why she was able to achieve such stature in the civitas, nor what her actual relationship might have been to the people, assuming they existed, who actually occupied the Parisian offices of episcopus or comes civitatis. But what we can see in this text is how a hagiographic story-telling tradition constructed justification for her unusual exercise of authority: it did so using the logic of hierophany, the divine manifest in the material.

The Vita Genovefae implicitly builds an argument for the direct connection of Genovefa’s spirit with the divine source, and of the miraculous consequences of that connection for the status and power of her physical body. The sacred materiality of Genovefa’s body rests upon a specific logic of divine immanence throughout the text. In particular, the Vita leverages Christian ideas about water and the potential inherent in water to be divinized—I will specifically discuss ideas of holy water and the living waters of baptism—in order to establish Genovefa’s body as uniquely sanctified by her spirit’s association with the divine through a depiction of her as a weeping famula Dei and sponsa Christi, with her tears combining notions of vision, affect, hierophany, and a distinct Greco-Roman humoral tradition of the female body as associated with water.

481 Here I follow in the footsteps of scholars like Lisa Bitel, who writes: “Genovefa’s whole life was a comment on the proper roles of gender, politics, and Christian history, and specifically on the relative unimportance of Paris’s early medieval bishops.” Lisa M. Bitel, Landscape with Two Saints: How Genovefa of Paris and Brigit of Kildare Built Christianity in Barbarian Europe (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 52.

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THE TEXT’S AUTHENTICITY AS A HISTORICAL DOCUMENT

Like many of the Vitae from this period, the authenticity of the Vita Genovefae was once a matter of some considerable debate. The publication of a new edition by Charles Kohler in 1881 began a significant scholarly conflict between German and Francophone scholars on the subject.482 Kohler identified four different manuscript recensions of the text and put forward the opinion that the first, his Recension A, was the oldest, dating from roughly 520. This ignited a firestorm of debate between German scholars,483 represented most critically by Bruno Krusch, and French scholars led by no lesser figures than Louis Duchesne.484 Krusch proposed a different ordering of the manuscripts, identifying another recension as older than Kohler’s. Although he believed this to represent the oldest version of the text, which he designated as his Recension A, he nonetheless placed it as a forgery of the Carolingian era.485 The fight became so vitriolic that

Duchesne eventually disengaged and ceased publishing on the topic, leaving German academia to accept the 1916 pronouncement of Bruno Krusch.486 With the recusal of Duchesne, the French position was set by Godefroid Kurth around the same time largely in agreement with the

482 Charles Kohler, Étude critique sur le texte de la vie latine de Sainte-Geneviève de Paris (Paris: Vieweg, 1881). 483 Although not reflecting Krusch’s philological positions, the German project of discrediting the French Catholic tradition was reflected by Carl Albrecht Bernoulli when he wrote in 1900 that the Vita Genovefae was a fable adapted from a pagan tradition about some sort of local water spirit—part of the now-discredited German project to find a pre-Christian “Germanic” cultural heritage in the texts of the early Middle Ages, with the addition of a nineteenth-century protestant rationalist’s desire to see the superstitions of the medieval Catholic tradition as being a distorting cover for something more socially legible. Carl Albrecht Bernoulli, Die Heiligen der Merowinger (Fübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1900), 190–96. 484 Louis Duchesne, “La vie de sainte Geneviève est-elle authentique?” Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes, no. 54 (1893), 209–24. 485 Bruno Krusch, “Das Alter der Vita Genovefae,” Neues Archiv, no. 19 (1894), 444–59; Bruno Krusch, “Die Neueste Wendung Im Genovefa-Streit,” Neues Archiv, no. 40 (1916), 131–81 and 265–327. 486 Heinzelmann and Poulin offer these examples, among others: Graus, Volk, Herrscher und Heiliger, 192; Wilhelm Wattenbach, Wilhelm Levison, and Rudolf Buchner, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter Deutsche Kaiserzeit, vol. 1 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1957), 123; Erich Zöllner and Ludwig Schmidt, Geschichte der Franken bis zur Mitte des sechsten Jahrhunderts (München: C.H. Beck, 1970), 52, n. 2; Karl Heinrich Krüger and Karl-Heinz Krüger, Königsgrabkirchen der Franken, Angelsachsen und Langobarden bis zur Mitte des 8. Jahrhunderts: ein historischer Katalog (München: W. Fink, 1971), 43; Heinzelmann and Poulin, Les vies anciennes, 4.

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pronouncements of Krusch, and the bitterness of the conflict meant that the question was mostly abandoned.487

This issue was re-opened and essentially settled in 1986 by Martin Heinzelmann and

Joseph-Claude Poulin, who forged a compromise position that has more or less been accepted by subsequent scholars.488 They agree that Krusch’s Recension A was in fact older than Kohler’s preferred text, but they do not accept Krusch’s assumption of a Carolingian forgery. Both

Heinzelmann and Poulin make extremely detailed refutations of Krusch’s claims, and

Heinzelmann in particular in his section presents an analysis of the ways that national antagonisms between France and Germany in the early twentieth century resulted in the dispute becoming more vitriolic and the actors more intransigent than was otherwise warranted.489

Even accepting that Krusch was right to recognize Recension A as the oldest, there is some confusion now about which critical edition is best to use.490 Jo Ann McNamara and her co- translators opted not to use the edition that Krusch prepared for the MGH, saying: “We have implicitly followed [Heinzelmann and Poulin’s] arguments that the life is authentic, written as claimed by an anonymous monk about 520, in our decision to use the AS edition, which appears to lack many of the inaccuracies that so offended Krusch.”491 This seems to me a very strange

487 Godefroid Kurth, Etude critique sur la vie de sainte Geneviève (Louvain: Bureaux de la Revue, 1919); “Ces tergiversations mises à part, l’impression globale d’une supériorité des positions du Monumentiste est d’autant plus vive que son adversaire le plus important par sa renommée, Louis Duchesne, se retira de bonne heure de la controverse; le coriace Belge Kurth a dû céder sur le plan de la critique externe malgré certaines réserves, et même si il a pu ébranler en partie l’argumentation de la critique interne de Krusch.” Heinzelmann and Poulin, Les vies anciennes, 5. 488 Heinzelmann and Poulin, Les vies anciennes. 489 The escalation of bitterness and intensity in this debate paralleled the build-up toward WWI. Heinzelmann and Poulin, Les vies anciennes, 5–6. 490 To his credit, in opposition to many of his contemporaries who believed that Recension B was the oldest, Krusch was also an early defender of Recension A as the first of the five, although he did not believe it came from the fifth century. In 1894, he wrote: “Ich glaubte nun, aus der Sprache, aus dem Vergleich mit den Quellen und aus der Darstellungsweise bewiesen zu haben, dass A die ursprüngliche Form und die Recension B, welche Kohler zu Grunde gelegt hatte, nur eine spätere Ueberarbeitung ist.” Krusch, “Das Alter der Vita Genovefae,” 444. 491 VG, 1.

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decision. The Acta Sanctorum edition was published in 1643, based on only a handful of manuscripts following what we now designate as Recension B. That edition was updated and republished by Kohler in 1881 in a much more thorough and reliable form, so it is very hard to see the justification for relying on the older AS version. Moreover, both Heinzelmann and Poulin were very clear that Recension B, the basis for the AS as well as Kohler’s edition, is a later text than Recension A, which is ultimately best presented in Krusch’s MGH edition. For that reason, in this chapter I will be relying on Krusch’s edition for my analysis. However, I have also extensively cross-checked the text against Kohler’s edition. Although there are many differences of grammar and vocabulary, the actual content of the text is not much different—Recension B seems to have been largely an attempt to update and clarify the Latin of Recension A492—so even if Kohler were to be right that his version is older than Krusch’s, my arguments in this chapter would be largely unaffected. I have consulted the English translation of McNamara et al. for my readings, but because of these issues I cannot rely on it, and therefore all translations here are my own, from the MGH Latin.

The criteria for dating Genovefa’s life and the composition of the Vita were laid out by

Charles Kohler, and no one has been able to produce better ones. The text indicates that

Germanus and Lupus, his companion, passed through her town when she was young, an event we can date to 429.493 We are told in the Vita that Genovefa lived to be over eighty.494 Kohler reasonably guesses that Genovefa was between seven and twelve at the time of the visit, and between eighty-one and eighty-five at the time of her death, placing the date of her death between 498 and 507. Picking an average, he then suggests the date 419 for her birth, making her

492 Heinzelmann and Poulin, Les vies anciennes, 62. 493 VG, 2. 494 VG, 15, 56.

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ten for the visit of Germanus in 429, and eighty-three for a death in 502. Our hagiographer tells us that she or he wrote the Vita eighteen years after the death of Genovefa,495 leaving us with a date of approximately 520 for its composition.496

AUTHORSHIP OF THE TEXT

Since at least Heinzelmann and Poulin, most scholars looking at the Vita Genovefae have taken the view that its author was some sort of monk or cleric sent from the city of Tours to the Church of the Holy Apostles in Paris.497 This view of the text’s authorship is based on two main arguments: first, the implication in the text that it was written after the death of Clovis but while his queen, Clothilde, was still living.498 The text speaks positively of both Clovis and his father

Childeric, Clovis is known to have based himself in Paris in the last phase of his life, and Clovis and Clothilde together are known to have cultivated the support of the Nicene Gallo-Roman population through building projects like the Church of the Holy Apostles in Paris, where both

Clovis and Genovefa are said to have been buried. Therefore, the argument runs, the Vita is likely to have been commissioned by Clothilde as a part of this project, and, after the death of

Clovis, Clothilde is known to have lived out the remainder of her life in Tours. The second argument is that, through the Vita Genovefae’s many references to the writings of Sulpicius

Severus on the life and miracles of Saint Martin, the text’s author must have been a partisan of

Martin’s cult based out of the cult’s centre in Tours.499

495 VG, 53. 496 Kohler, Étude critique, LII–LIV. 497 Heinzelmann points out that that the hagiographer does not appear to have any personal knowledge of Genovefa. Heinzelmann and Poulin, Les vies anciennes, 52; “Notre biographe a donc écrit par ordre de la reine, vraisemblablement en qualité de cler des Sts-Apôtres, dont il a pu être abbé ou chaplain.” Heinzelmann and Poulin, 53. 498 Heinzelmann and Poulin, Les vies anciennes, 36, 53. 499 Heinzelmann and Poulin, 54–57.

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Although Heinzelmann and Poulin in particular do demonstrate many correspondences in vocabulary and content with the work of Sulpicius Severus,500 I wonder if this second argument is not somewhat overstated. Martin was probably the most famous and popular saint in Gaul.

References to his Vita are ubiquitous in the hagiography of the period, and copies of it must have existed in any number of Gallic centres outside Tours. We might expect any hagiographer seeking to establish a saint as the particular patron of a Gallic city at this time to look to the writings of Sulpicius Severus on Martin for a model. Moreover, Martin is far from being the only saintly model important in the Vita Genovefae. Germanus of Auxerre undoubtedly plays a more central role in the narrative, and his Vita by Constantius of Lyon provides the model for several of Genovefa’s miracles. Anianus of Orleans is referenced multiple times, the martyr Saint Denis receives a great deal of attention, and the text is clearly drawing inspiration for its miracle stories from a range of other sources beyond. The mention and use of Martin in the Vita Genovefae, extensive though it may be, does not strike me as probative of a connection to Tours.

The argument for a connection to Clothilde is more substantive. It rests almost entirely, however, on a single paragraph at the end of the Vita.501 This paragraph says, essentially, that

Clovis liked Genovefa very much, that he began the construction of a church for her sake, that he and she were both interred in that church, and that its construction was later completed by

Clothilde. It then offers a brief peroration on the equality and unity of the persons of the Trinity, commonly read as a deliberate refutation of the Arian position.502

Such a paragraph is certainly consistent with the theory that the Vita was commissioned by

Clothilde as part of an extended royal project of cultivating good relations with the Nicene

500 Heinzelmann and Poulin, 132. 501 Heinzelmann and Poulin, 52–53. 502 VG, 56.

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Gallo-Roman population. However, it founders somewhat when held against the null hypothesis.

Should we imagine that the Vita were written by someone with no particular connection to

Clothilde, we would still expect to see mention of the church where Genovefa was buried, as well as her friendship with the famous royal couple who built that church. If the construction of the Church of the Holy Apostles in Paris was certainly part of a royal public relations campaign, that does not by itself automatically tell us that this anonymous Vita was part of the same campaign. And a concluding digression in honour of the Trinity is hardly surprising to find in any hagiographic text.

This argument may have assumed some of its force from confusion about the name of the church. By the Carolingian period, it was clearly being called the Church of Saint Genovefa.503 A certain reading of the Vita Genovefae might imply that Clovis had founded the church in dedication to her. However, Gregory of Tours clearly identified it as the Church of the Holy

Apostles,504 and the Vita Genovefae does not actually say that the church was dedicated to her. In fact, it would have been almost completely unprecedented to dedicate a new church in honour of a recently dead woman, no matter how much veneration she was accorded in the community. It was a rare enough honour even for a bishop. If Clovis and Clothilde had indeed founded a church dedicated to Genovefa, then it would certainly be reasonable to see the appearance of a Vita

Genovefae around the same time as part of a larger project of advancing the cult of Genovefa.

However, they did no such thing. They founded a church dedicated to the holy apostles, a perfectly normal dedication for a church, in which Genovefa, a famously pious leading citizen of the same city, also happened to be buried. It seems to me that that does very little to advance the case for a royal impetus behind the Vita Genovefae.

503 Kohler, Étude critique, XCI. 504 Gregory of Tours, II.1.

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Moreover, if the Vita Genovefae were a product of a royal public relations campaign, then it would appear to advance that campaign only in the single paragraph I have mentioned. Nowhere else in the text is there any material with any particular perceptible relevance to a royal interest.

Indeed, the Vita’s composer, whoever he or she was, seems to have been advancing a largely unrelated set of goals.

Judging by the sheer preponderance of time devoted to the topic, the Vita’s primary goal seems to have been the utterly conventional one of arguing for Genovefa’s sanctity by recounting her various miracles and articulating the nature of her connection to the divine, a topic to which much of the remainder of this chapter will be devoted. It also makes the case for Genovefa as a holy protector of Paris, able to miraculously guard the city against famine and invading armies, in the role of many other such saints who provide ongoing divine protection for their communities. It advances the prestige of the nearby basilica of Saint Denis by associating the materials of its construction with a series of miracles, and it makes the case for Genovefa’s tomb as an ongoing site of healing miracles for pilgrims.

Taken together, these projects overwhelmingly reflect a text preoccupied with advancing the status of Paris,505 not just the urbs, the central town, but also the wider administrative region of the civitas. It may very well be that Clothilde had something to do with commissioning the Vita

Genovefae—the notion is certainly plausible—but in my view there is simply not sufficient evidence to support the conclusion that the Vita is governed by a pro-royal ethos, still less so a

Tours-oriented one. If we can say anything about the motivations for the Vita Genovefae’s composition, it must be that the text was written with an orientation toward the Parisian civitas,

505 Kohler similarly views enhancing the prestige of Paris as a major goal of the text. Kohler, Étude critique, LXVIII.

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toward its places, its interests, its history, and its people. It is from the perspective of that orientation that our hagiographer set out to recount the life of the city’s particular saint.

SANCTITY AND MATERIALITY IN THE VIRGIN OF PARIS

Genovefa’s Vita tells us that she was born in Nanterre, a suburb of Paris, to parents named

Severus and Gerontia.506 Early in her life, the bishop Germanus, passing through on his famous first mission to Britain, stopped in Nanterre and prophetically identified Genovefa as a holy child. Before leaving, he secured from her a promise to remain a virgin and commit herself to

Christ. Overcoming the objections of her mother, she was later consecrated by a local bishop.507

Upon the death of her parents, Genovefa moved to Paris. There, she lived some sort of ascetic life, occasionally accompanied by an entourage of other virgins,508 and she advanced the

506 Allen Jones thinks we can say something about Genovefa’s family based on looking at everyone else we know who was named “Severus” and therefore might be her father or a relative. I am more sceptical. Allen E. Jones, “The Family of Geneviève of Paris: Prosopographical Considerations,” Medieval Prosopography 24 (2003), 73–80; Indeed, many scholars have wondered about the oddity of a saint with a Germanic name being born to parents with such conspicuously Roman names. dom Jacques Dubois and Laure Beaumont-Maillet, Sainte Geneviève de Paris: la vie, la culte, l’art (Paris: Beauchesne, 1982), 19; Heinzelmann and Poulin, Les vies anciennes, 83–84; Duchesne, “La vie de sainte Geneviève est-elle authentique?” 221; Krusch polemically asserted that she was a Gallo-Roman born to germanophile parents. Krusch, “Die Neueste Wendung Im Genovefa-Streit,” 29; Heinzelmann compares the different elements of Genovefa’s name to other names from the region, fairly convincingly demonstrating that the name reflects a Frankish milieu. Heinzelmann and Poulin, Les vies anciennes, 26–28. Beyond that, speculating about what these names might mean seems to me a good way to go insane. 507 The phrase used is ad consecrandum with no further explanation. VG 6. Suzanne Fonay Wemple suggests that the consecration of women as deaconesses might have grown quite popular in Gaul before a backlash began in 441 CE, so maybe that is what was happening here. Wemple, Women in Frankish Society: Marriage and the Cloister, 500 to 900, 138; For a discussion of the identity of the bishop who consecrated young Genovefa, see: Heinzelmann and Poulin, Les vies anciennes, 88–89. 508 eg VG 22. Although we are never given enough information to say for sure, it may be that this was an example of the contemporary Gallic phenomenon that saw Gallic aristocrats turning their homes into quasi-monastic retreats for themselves and assortments of their friends. John Percival, “Villas and Monasteries in Late Roman Gaul,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 1, no. 48 (1997), 1–21; Marilyn Dunn, The Emergence of Monasticism: From the Desert Fathers to the Early Middle Ages (Oxford and Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 90; To me it seems likely that she led an example of what Lindsay Rudge refers to as “small groups of women living dedicated lives outside of formal foundations. Lindsay Rudge, “Dedicated Women and Dedicated Spaces: Caesarius of Arles and the Foundation of St John,” in Western Monasticism Ante Litteram: The Spaces of Monastic Observance in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Hendrick Dey and Elizabeth Fentress, Disciplina Monastica 7 (Brepols, 2011), 102–103; Since the first female monastic institution in Gaul was not founded by Caesarius of Arles until after her death, she could not even easily have become a nun. Constance B. Bouchard, “Reconstructing Sanctity and Refiguring Saints in Early Medieval Gaul,” in Studies on Medieval Empathies, ed. Karl F. Morrison and Rudolph M. Bell, Disputatio 25 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 99.

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city’s interests in a wide variety of ways, including through occasional interactions with Clovis’s father Childeric.509 Throughout the Vita she performed various miracles, many of which will be discussed in detail later. After her death, according to the Vita, she was buried alongside Clovis in a basilica commissioned by him. 510

Throughout, the Vita presents an image of a material world that is present and sensible, and a spiritual world that is distant, desirable, and yet occasionally intersecting into the realm of the material—this is the Auerbachian pattern we are now used to.511 Certain characters are able to see spiritual things—Germanus, for example, “saw in the spirit” (intuitur in spiritu).512 Living people are said to live “in this world”—in hoc saeculo viventibus.513 Appeals to the other world often take the form of appeals to heights: when priests see Genovefa’s prophecy fulfilled, they

“turn their faces to the upper air with eyes fixed for joy on heaven,”514 Genovefa’s mother extends her hand toward heaven in search of healing—extendens manus ad celum cum fide et veneratione515—and Genovefa herself sometimes performs her miracles by praying with her hands extended toward heaven—in caelum manibus expansis.516 Conversely, spiritual things

509 VG 26. The historicity of her encounter with Childeric is questionable. Its main goal in the text seems to have been to demonstrate Genovefa’s significant political influence. Gönna Hartmann-Petersen, Genovefa von Paris — Person, Verehrung und Rezeption einer Heiligen des Frankenreiches: Eine paradigmatische Studie zur Heiligenverehrung im Frühmittelalter, ed. Hartmut Rosenau and Hartmut von Bendemann, Kieler Theologische Reihe 4 (Hamburg: LIT Verlag, 2007), 64. 510 Clovis and Clothilde were both buried in this basilica alongside Genovefa. This co-burial is possibly connected to the Vita’s composition. Heinzelmann suggests of the original text: “elle fut rédigée vers 520 pour donner à son héroïne l’image publicitaire d’une sainte titulaire puissante, appropriée à son rôle depatronne du mausolée de Clovis.” Martin Heinzelmann, Manuscrits hagiographiques et travail des hagiographes: études réunies et présentées par Martin Heinzelmann. (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1992), 10. 511 We can recall Auerbach’s description of the Biblical encounter between Abraham and God: “The two speakers are not on the same level: if we conceive of Abraham in the foreground, where it might be possible to picture him as prostrate or kneeling or bowing with outspread arms or gazing upward, God is not there too: Abraham’s words are gestures are directed toward the depths of the picture or upward, but in any case the undetermined, dark place from which the voice comes to him is not in the foreground.” Auerbach, Mimesis, 9. 512 VG, 3. 513 VG, 10. 514 “porrectis ad ethera vultos oculisque in caelo prae gaudio fixis” VG, 19. 515 VG, 7. 516 VG, 39, 51.

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sometimes seem to enter the world through unknown depths, in particular through the roots of trees that reach down into the earth. A furnace to make bricks for the construction of a basilica is miraculously provided from the midst of a tree upturned by the wind—in silva arborem radicetus a vento evulsam517—and a dangerous section of the Seine was made safe when

Genovefa had her sailors chop down a nearby tree and drive out two strange monsters that came up with its roots—Protinus duo monstra feruntur vario colore ab eodem loco egressa sunt.518

The idea of a world beyond the known, above it or below it, from which things could rise or descend, is thus entrenched in this text.

The Vita Genovefae has fairly regular devices for demonstrating how some element of the material world might come to be infused with divine grace. Probably the most common involves the sign of the cross; I have counted fifteen separate instances of Genovefa making the sign of the cross in performing a miracle.519 Often this just takes the form of an ablative accompanying the action, such as signo crucis or signaculo crucis. Other times the sign is made with reference to an object, however, such as when she blesses a vessel—signum crucis super vas poculi fecit— making the sign of the cross over the vessel of drink,520 or when she cures a man of fever by signing him—sancta Genovefa vero signans eum.521 This act of signing, this small ritual performance, is something that occurs in the sensory world but that is by its nature referring to or enacting the divine. It is a means by which the divine might enter into the world, a useful paradigm to keep in mind when considering the text’s more complex hierophanies.

517 VG, 19. 518 VG, 35. 519 VG, 7, 21, 24, twice to expel demons in 30, 34, 35, 36, 36, 37, 41, 43, 45, 48, and 49. 520 VG, 21. 521 VG, 43.

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For this text in particular, divine power seems to dwell not just in the heavens or deep beneath the roots of trees, but also in water. One of the most common citations for early medieval Christian views of water is Tertullian’s treatise on baptism. He wrote:

The spirit who from the beginning hovered over the waters will remain over the waters as the instigator. For a holy thing indeed was carried upon a holy thing, or rather because of that which was carried above it, that which carried borrowed its sanctity. This is because any material placed beneath another must necessarily take on the quality of that which hangs above. This is especially true for corporeal matter, which takes on spiritual quality that easily penetrates and inheres through the subtlety of its substance. Thus the nature of the waters, having been sanctified by the holy, itself took on the ability to sanctify.522

I include the full quotation despite its length because of its aptness not just for our discussion of water but also for the relationship between Genovefa’s body and the divine, which seems to be following exactly the same principles that Tertullian expresses here for the relationship between the spirit of God and the waters over which it hovered at the beginning of time.523

Genovefa often uses water in her miracles. 524 In one example, she is brought a sick child to cure, and we are told that “Genovefa ordered water to be brought to her, and, receiving it, she invoked the name of the Lord, performed the sign of the cross, and gave it to the sick little boy to drink.”525 Here as elsewhere, the inclusion of water stands out. There is no reason why Genovefa

522 “spiritum qui ab initio super aquas vectabatur, super aquas instinctorem moraturum. sanctum autem utique super sanctum ferebatur aut ab eo quod super ferebatur, id quod ferebat sanctitatem mutuabatur quoniam subiecta quaeque materia eius quae desuper imminet qualitatem rapiat necesse est, maxime corporalis spiritalem et penetrare et insidere facilem per substantiae suae subtilitatem. ita de sancto sanctificata natura aquarum et ipsa sanctificare concepit.” Tertullian, de baptismo IV.1, in Tertullien, Traité du Baptême, ed. R. P. Refoulé SC 35 (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2002), 69. 523 A useful discussion of early Christian approaches to baptism and baptismal water, including extensive discussion of Tertullian’s views on the subject can be found in: Robin M. Jensen, Living Water: Images, Symbols, and Settings of Early Christian Baptism, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae: Texts and Studies of Early Christian Life and Language 105 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011). 524 Moshe Sluhovsky describes how Genovefa became associated with water and water miracles in the later medieval and early modern periods, but he does not make a strong connection to late antiquity beyond noting the prevalence of water miracles in this first text. He also includes a vague discussion of the importance of water deities or goddesses or something to the pre-Christian inhabitants of the area, which resonates with some of the theories of nineteenth-century scholars like Bernoulli. However, none of the citations for this look wildly convincing. If there is something to this connection, someone other than me is going to have to pursue it. Moshe Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris: Rituals of Devotion in Early Modern France (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 30–46. 525 “Mox Genovefa aquam sibi exhibere iussit. Quam ut accepit, invocato nomen Domini, et ut vixillo crucis signata, puerolo infirmo potandam dedit.” VG, 38.

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could not have cured the boy with a touch or by making the sign of the cross over him, but instead she specifically requests water, infuses it with healing power by making the sign of the cross over it, and then gives it to the boy to drink. This suggests that, of all the things Genovefa might have asked to be brought, water was what seemed best to her hagiographer as a vehicle for holy power, aligning with Tertullian’s assertion that water could absorb holy power from a holy thing positioned over it—in this case, Genovefa’s utterance of the name of the Lord and performance of the sign of the cross. Moreover, in this instance, since the water could be drunk, it could interact with the body in a more fundamental way than a mere touch; the holiness carried on the water enters into the body as the water itself enters the body in the act of drinking.

In fact, the resonances between Tertullian’s thinking and the Vita Genovefae extend even further. Still discussing the subject of water, Tertullian tells us that: “Without any sacrament, do not unclean spirits sit on waters trying to imitate that hovering of the divine spirit in the beginning?”526 We have already seen that evil spirits, the strange beasts beneath the tree, were exercising their power over the Seine before Genovefa destroyed their tree and exorcised them.527 Another example of demons associating with liquid occurs toward the end of the Vita:

Genovefa accosts a man carrying a vessel of liquid to be sold. We are told that “when she saw an enemy of the human race sitting on the mouth of the vessel from a distance, Genovefa menaced forward and blew on it. Immediately part of the mouth of the vessel broke off and fell away.”528

Whether or not Genovefa’s hagiographer read Tertullian directly—certainly that is not impossible—it does seem as if similar ideas about the relationship between water and

526 “sine ullo sacramento immundi spiritus aquis incubant adfectantes illam in primordio divini spiritus gestationem?” Tertullian, IV.1. 527 VG, 35. 528 “Porro Genovefa conspicata generis humani adversarium in ampulle ore sedentem, comminans insufflauit in eum, statimque pars de ore ipsius ampulle fregit ac cecidit.” VG 48.

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metaphysics are at play, and water—and sometimes other liquids—are being conceived of as a medium particularly conducive to receive spiritual power. This goes far to explain the role of water in Genovefa’s Vita.

I want to connect this idea of water’s special sanctity in the Vita Genovefae to the text’s depiction of Genovefa herself. In my reading, Genovefa’s body is presented as a vessel and source of water, constantly flowing out from her in the form of sanctified tears that serve as a visible, tangible manifestation of the holiness of her incorporeal spirit. To make this case, I will first discuss the ways in which the text locates Genovefa’s body as a site of divine immanence, then transition from there to a discussion of her weeping and its significance.

GENOVEFA’S SANCTIFIED BODY

The primary locus of divine materiality in this Vita is the body of Genovefa herself, and it is established as such through rituals of consecration early in the text.529 The most important such ritual, far more important than her later formal consecration,530 revolves around Genovefa’s early interactions with Germanus, which follow the pattern of a marriage. This implicit ritual of consecration, I argue, replicates the operation of the sign of the cross elsewhere in the text. Just as performing the sign of the cross over a vessel of pure water infuses it with divine power, so does performing this ritual of consecration over Genovefa’s body suggest its infusion with similar power, especially as it culminates in Genovefa receiving a coin inscribed with a cross to wear around her neck.

Germanus formally asks young Genovefa if she would like to be a bride of Christ, keeping her body untouched and intact for him, and the text even goes so far as to pun in sanctimonio for

529 For a key influential work in anthropology on the subject of purity and defilement, see: Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). 530 VG, 8.

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the traditional in matrimonio.531 Genovefa consents, and the two immediately enter a church together, Germanus perpetually maintaining his hand upon Genovefa’s head. The language used is obviously meant to convey more than just physical entry into a physical church: they “enter into the church, celebrating the spiritual course, Nones and Vespers,”532 and we are of course meant to see this as Genovefa entering into a spiritual course that will define the rest of her life.

They eat a feast and sing songs, and then, as dawn is rising, Germanus draws Genovefa aside into his cell with her father.

Securing her promise to remain a virgin, he plucks a coin inscribed with a cross from the ground. He presents it to her and says, “keep this, pierced, always hanging around your neck in memory of me; and never permit your neck or your fingers to be ornamented with the adornment of any metal, either gold or silver or any sort of pearl. For if even the small decoration of this world overpowers your mind, then you will also lack eternal and celestial ornaments.”533 On one level, this is an exchange about Genovefa’s marital status. The prohibition against wearing any other jewellery is also de facto a prohibition against taking a wedding ring, and the implication that the necklace bound her to Germanus almost seems to connect her to him in place of a husband. He tells her to wear it pro memoria mei, language that evokes the Eucharistic in meam commemorationem,534 thus positioning Germanus as a mediator, in persona Christi, between

531 McNamara et al also notice this parallel, although they are following the AS version that substitutes in castimonio for in matrimonio. Jo Ann McNamara, John E. Halborg, and E. Gordon Whatley, Sainted Women of the Dark Ages (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 20. “Queso [...] si vis in sanctimonio consecrata Christo immaculatum et intactum corpus tuum, quemadmodum sponsa eius, servare” VG, 5. 532 “Pervenientes ergo ad ecclesiam, cursum spiritualem, nona atque duodecima caelebrantes, semper sanctus Germanus manum suam super caput eius tenuit.” VG, 5. 533 “Hunc transforatum pro memoria mei et collo suspensum semper habeto; nullius metalli neque auri neque argenti seu quolibet margaritarum ornamento collum saltim digitos tuos honerare paciaris. Nam si seculi huius vel exiguus decor tuam superaverit mentem, etiam aeterna et celestia ornamenta carebis.” VG, 6. The inclusion of pearls on this list is hard to explain, but probably it is meant to echo 1 Timothy 2:9, which in the NRSV says: “women should dress themselves modestly and decently in suitable clothing, not with their hair braided, or with gold, pearls, or expensive clothes.” 534 1 Corinthians 11:24.

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Genovefa and Christ. In its function as a sort of spiritual wedding ring, the pierced coin manifests her exclusive commitment to Christ. But the logic of this passage can be explored even further.

Germanus’s speech of course echoes familiar themes we have seen in other Vitae. The association of over-adornment, especially female over-adornment, with sexuality was a recurring theme in the Vita Amatoris. That Saint Germanus would confirm his intuition of Genovefa’s exceptional chastity by encouraging her to shun jewellery and ornaments makes perfect sense in this context; the pleasure and sensuality—here an emphasis is placed on the materials, gold, silver, and pearls—of precious objects is a temptation to carnality, improper investment in the pleasures of the material world, in the same way that sexuality is. Abstinence from one reasonably coincides with abstinence from the other. Thus we see the assertion that worldly riches translate into spiritual poverty and vice-versa. Genovefa’s physical lack of adornment is to be read, thus, as proof of spiritual adornment; the absence of jewellery becomes an invocation of its divine presence.

And yet Genovefa is wearing jewellery. She was given a cross-inscribed coin to wear as a token around her neck, which somehow symbolized her decision to wear no jewellery. It is as if this simple makeshift necklace is a more assertive rejection of expensive ornaments than no jewellery at all would have been. It makes her ornamentation more absent than absent, a sort of negative presence, in its severe simplicity. And the presence of the mark of the cross on the coin is consistent with a broader habit in this Vita, that of creating a significant intersection between heaven and earth by means of a sign.535

535 Similarly, and perhaps implying a conenction between the texts, after her death Macrina was found to be wearing, underneath her clothes of extreme simplicity, an iron cross and a ring, marked with the sign of the cross, that contained a small fragment of the true cross. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Saint Macrina, 64–65.

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Just before the section where Genovefa is presented with her coin, immediately after professing her desire to dedicate her body to Christ, Germanus tells her: “Have faith, daughter, act manfully, and occupy yourself with manifesting in deeds what you believe in your heart and profess with your mouth. For God will give you virtue and strength for your adornment.”536 The implication is not just that Genovefa should manifest in deeds what she believes in her heart— echoing the sort of spirit/body dualism that we see elsewhere in the text—but also that, in doing so, Genovefa will receive spiritual adornment.537 It is in the context of this promise as well that we should see her subsequent acquisition of the necklace. As an object bearing the sign of the cross (and having no real distinguishing features other than its ostentatious simplicity), it would seem then that the function of this necklace is to be a visible symbol of the spiritual qualities

Genovefa was promised to receive from Christ as her adornment. In the logic of the text, therefore, it is almost not a material object: it has achieved another status—a visible manifestation, symbol, or even incarnation of an invisible spiritual presence. 538

In the context of the quasi-marital ritual of consecration, then, the pierced coin manifests the permanence of the consecration ceremony just as a wedding ring manifests the presence of a marriage ceremony, and both ceremonies involve a change in the status of the body. Where a bride becomes one flesh with her husband, Genovefa, as a sponsa Christi, becomes one flesh with the divine; through chastity her body is set aside for the divine, involved with the divine, always on some level united with the divine regardless of where she might be.539

536 “Confide filia, viriliter age, et quod corde credis et ore profiteris, operibus adimplere satage. Dabit enim Dominus virtutem et fortitudinem decori tuo.” VG 3. 537 This injunction is also Biblical. 1 Peter 3:3–4 instructs women: “Whose adorning let it not be the outward plaiting of the hair, or the wearing of gold, or the putting on of apparel: But the hidden man of the heart in the incorruptibility of a quiet and a meek spirit, which is rich in the sight of God.” 538 Compare the discussion of ambiguously divine and material objects in: Miller, “Subtle Embodiments,” 49–51. 539 This chastity extends beyond merely refraining from sexual intercourse. Genovefa completely abstained from alcohol and any form of jewellery or adornment. Bitel points out that “her regimen, which also had liturgical

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Although conceptually familiar, it is worth considering what exactly that idea entails.

Consecration is a ritual act of setting aside. Churches are consecrated, and the Eucharist is consecrated. In other words, a place or a thing is designated as having a specific relationship with the divine, set apart from the mundane. Indeed, consecration is also about purity, for it is always susceptible to defilement. A consecrated thing, by virtue of being pure and removed from the taint of the mundane, maintains its relationship with divinity by a sort of sympathetic identity. To the degree that it resembles the divine in its purity, it maintains a connection to that divine—as if by analogy—that imparts something of the nature of divinity to the consecrated place or object.540

This conception of consecration, while not really breaking new ground in our understanding of the logic of Christian celibacy, is important to explore in the context of the larger goals of this thesis. It is in large part through the activation of this logic in the body and life of Genovefa that divinity is seen to intersect with the material world. While this is not unique to her—indeed, most of the Vitae I have explored make a point of emphasizing the chastity of their saints—it does seem to be uniquely emphasized. Among the fathers of Agaune, although Hymnemodus’s conversion away from the secular world was underscored, the monks’ connection to divinity seems to be a feature of their connection to the physical site of the martyrdom of the Theban legion. For the Jura monks, connections to divinity seem to be about achieving a correct mental perspective on the inputs of the physical senses—not an altogether unrelated concept—and

connotations, had revealed her sanctity to those who could neither understand nor imitate it.” Her asceticism was part of her performance of saintly identity and authority. Bitel, 58. 540 For some of the foundational work in anthropology and religious studies on the concept of purity and transgression, see: Michael Taussig, “Transgression,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 349–64; Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966); Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share (New York: Zone, 1988); Roger Callois, L’Homme et le sacré (Paris: Gallimard, 1950); Peter Stallybrass and Gillen F. J., The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).

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positioning themselves as Gallic echoes of the desert fathers. But here with Genovefa, the locus of her divine affiliation seems to be explicitly in the consecration of her body through chastity.

Peter Brown highlights that such renunciation was not just about exercising control over a body. It was, rather, about foreshadowing the divine nature that the body of a Christian would assume following the resurrection, when all the vulgar physical needs of sexuality and intercourse would be transcended. Early medieval Christians who cultivated chastity were, therefore, preparing their bodies for that great transformation. He writes of the desert fathers,

“the gift of true chastity of heart revealed, in the very slowness with which it came, the immensity of the abundance of peace that might yet descend upon the human body.”541 In this way, then, Genovefa’s chastity conveys upon her body a divinized, atemporal shadow of the glory of the final resurrection.

The divine status of Genovefa’s body is thereafter expressed repeatedly throughout the text.

When Genovefa’s mother strikes her, the physical blow instead hits the mother as a spiritual blow: ut filiae alapam dedit, statim luminum percussa est orbitatem. We are explicitly told that this was so that divinity might manifest through Genovefa.542 Here, the physical blow from the mother against Genovefa’s body is converted into a divine blow from heaven against the mother’s sight.

In numerous cases the mere touch of her hand is enough to provoke a miracle. (Maybe this should colour how we read the text’s emphasis on Germanus keeping his hand atop Genovefa’s head during their quasi-wedding, as if he were thereby conveying some grace upon her). When she takes an extinguished candle into her hand, it immediately lights—quem cum in manu accepisset, continuo inluminatus est. The otherworldly nature of the candle’s flame is then

541 Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, 442. 542 “nutu divine magestatis ad manifestandam gratiam Genovefae.” VG, 7.

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confirmed when it is utterly consumed by fire upon Genovefa reaching her destination.543 She throws open a locked gate with a touch—porta civitatis inter manus eius sine clave reseravit.544

She cures illness with her touch—quam ut manibus Genovefa contrectavit, confestim sanitatem consecuta est.545 And, perhaps most dramatically, a host of terrified demons reports that they saw divine flames leaping from the tips of her fingers to burn them—fatebantur in ora cruciatus sui, quod digiti manuum Genuvefa siggillatim velut cerei divinitus caelesti igne flagrarent.546 The theme throughout is consistent: Genovefa’s body is infused with sanctity, and that divine power can be transferred to other material things by means of a touch, usually to miraculous effect.

AFFECT, VISION, AND HOLY WEEPING

In a striking passage from the Vita, we are told:

Whenever she looked to the caelum she wept. And since she had a pure heart, just as Luke the Evangelist said about the most blessed Stephen, so also she was believed to have seen the heavens open and our Lord Jesus Christ standing at the right hand of God. For the promise of the Lord is not empty which says: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”547

It is worth remarking on the strangeness of this moment. Jo Ann McNamara and her co- translators have tried to render this passage more sensible by suggesting “whenever she contemplated heaven,”548 and indeed caelum does have the double sense of ‘sky’ and ‘heaven,’ but I would assert that caelum conspexit clearly implies “she looked at the sky.” We are being

543 VG, 22. 544 VG, 26. 545 VG, 29. 546 VG, 46. 547 “Quociens caelum conspexit, tociens lacrimata est. Et cum esset mundo corde, quemadmodum Lucas euangelista discripsit de beatissimo Stephano, ita et haec credebatur caelos apertos videre et dominum nostrum Iesum Christum stantem ad dexteram Dei, quoniam irritum non est promissum Domini, quo ait: Beati mundo corde, quoniam ipsi Deum videbunt.” VG, 16. 548 McNamara, Halborg, and Whatley, Sainted Women of the Dark Ages, 24.

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told about a physical sense act relating to a physically sensible thing: the sky. And yet the secondary, spiritual meaning of ‘heaven’ remains present in the word caelum.

The valence of this act of looking becomes somewhat clearer in the context of the story of

Stephen’s martyrdom that the passage is explicitly referencing:

But he [Stephen], being full of the Holy Ghost, looking up steadfastly to heaven, saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God. And he said: Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God. And they crying out with a loud voice, stopped their ears, and with one accord ran violently upon him.549

In Genovefa’s case, she is looking at the sky and having a massive emotional reaction upon doing so. She is lacrimata—overcome with tears. This is a strange thing, possibly even a wondrous thing, loaded up with inexplicable affect. But the mystery is resolved in the next sentences: we are told that she, like the martyr Stephen, was able to see the heavens open and have a vision of eternity. Through gazing at the physical sky she was able to see the spiritual heaven, and it provoked in her spirit such an intense affective reaction that her body manifested the physical sign of tears; this is the formula behind Genovefa’s weeping and its connection to her spiritual sight.

Genovefa possesses a special spiritual sight which we have seen elsewhere in the Vita. Just as demons were able to see the celestial fire burning in her hands and Germanus was able to see in the spirit—intuitur in spiritu550—so Genovefa is able to perceive a sublime vision of heaven where other people might see only sky. This passage connects it to her pure heart, her mundo corde, which evokes the language of her consecration to inviolate purity before Germanus, when he asks if she would be willing to “keep her body pure and untouched, as one consecrated to

549 Acts 7:56 in The Vulgate Bible: Douay-Rheims Translation, ed. Edgar Swift, and Angela M. Kinney (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2010). 550 VG, 3.

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Christ.”551 This purity gives her the ability to see the divine in the mundane, to see the heavens open, and doing so produces a response of incredible affect within her.

Elsewhere we are reminded of Genovefa that:

By the revelation of the spirit, that homeland had been once shown to her in which those who provide for the poor will seek their treasure, and for that reason it was normal for her to weep without ceasing, knowing herself to wander [peregrinari] placed in the flesh and exiled from God.552

This formulation of both the distance and relationship between the ‘seen’ and the ‘unseen’—the material and the spiritual—is here framed in terms of immense sorrowful affect. Genovefa has laid up her treasures in heaven as instructed by scripture, but this results in her deeply feeling a separation or alienation from those treasures. Indeed, the verb that is used—peregrinari—has that sense of alienation at its core. It is her apprehension of divinity through a mingling of mundane sight and spiritual sight that produces this emotional reaction in her, and the sacred intensity of that interior, emotional reaction manifests materially at the site of her sensory perception—her eyes—in the form of tears.

Genovefa’s involuntary tears then are proof of the intensity and reality of her relationship to the divine, bearing witness to an interior and spiritual dynamic that otherwise others could never perceive.553 And it is no accident that the text then explicitly connects that experience to her purity—her status as a consecrated virgin is central to her claim to sanctity, as we have seen. She looks with her physical senses on the physical sky, and thereby, like Stephen the martyr, enacts a

551 “consecrata Christo inmaculatum et intactum corpus tuum…servare.” VG, 5. 552 “Erat illi spes non de his quae videntur, sed quae non videntur. Noverat enim verum esse dictum prophete, quonium qui pauperibus errogat Deo venerat. Cui etiam patria illa, in qua veneratores egentium requirunt thesaurum suum, olim per reuelationem Spiritus fuerat ostensa. Et idcirco sine intermissione flere consueverat, quonium quidem sciebat, se in corpore posita peregrinari a Domino.” VG, 40. 553 On the virtue of tears as a more or less involuntary proof of interior feeling, Jerome Neu writes: “Some bodily states are nonvoluntary, and so while less suitable for the deliberate expression of feeling, they may nonetheless effectively manifest feelings. Indeed, that a certain state cannot be readily called up at will may help it to serve to mark sincerity of feeling.” Jerome Neu, “A Tear Is an Intellectual Thing,” Representations 19 (1987), 47–48.

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spiritual experience where she spiritually perceives eternity and has a deep spiritual reaction to that which is revealed through the physical sign of tears.554 This demonstrates a fundamentally important, ambiguous entanglement—what Patricia Cox Miller might call an oscillation555—here between physical acts and spiritual experiences, played out on Genovefa’s body in a way that is central to how this text makes meaning. This conflation of the embodied and the transcendent is at the core of my argument in this chapter.

The issue of embodied affect leads us inevitably to the question of Genovefa’s weeping, which is ubiquitous in her Vita. Her weeping is not only a visible sign of her interior emotional experiences, but it also, by being located at the eyes, becomes entangled with sight and vision— we have just examined an example where Genovefa’s spiritual vision produces tears from her eyes. Moreover, it also activates the ideas that we have already identified at work in this text around water and watery substances’ particular qualities as conveyors of spiritual presence and power.556 This connection between eyes, water, and weeping is extremely prevalent in the Vita and deserves exploration.

The idea of holy weeping that emerges from deep grief associated with alienation from heaven is not unique to this text.557 In John Cassian’s Conferences, the character of Isaac includes the following in his lists of types of grief:

554 Reflecting on the evanescent nature of a tear in the context of thing/object theory, Helen M. Hickey offers an observation that is useful to keep in mind here as well: “Although a tear has a particular claim to being read as a product of emotion, or at least as a potent signifier for it, it does not have a strong claim to being a ‘thing.’” Helen M. Hickey, “Capturing Christ’s Tears: La Sainte Larme in Medieval and Early Modern France,” ed. Sally Holloway, Stephanie Dowmnes, and Sarah Randles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 58. 555 Miller, “Subtle Embodiments,” 49–51. 556 Bitel notices this feature of the text but does not expand upon it beyond saying “Genovefa was particularly good with waters, which were not only familiar sites of healing but also were explicitly symbolic of rebirth and purification in Christian art and literature.” Bitel, 68. 557 For a fuller survey of all types of grief and crying in the Christian and Late Antique tradition, see: Piroska Nagy, Le don des larmes au Moyen âge: un instrument spirituel en quête d’institution (Ve–XIIIe siècle) (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000), 41–170.

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It arises in another way from the contemplation of eternal goods and the desire for that future glory, for the sake of which, too, abundant fountains of tears erupt out of irrepressible joy and overwhelming happiness. All the while our soul is thirsting for the strong and living God, saying, ‘When shall I come and appear before the face of God? My tears have been my bread by day and by night.’ Daily, with mourning and lamentation, it declares: ‘Woe is me that my sojourning has been prolonged.’558

This is exactly the sort of grief that Genovefa is described as experiencing. Elsewhere Cassian wrote of overwhelming tears, “I think that nothing is more sublime than this condition.”559 We can, therefore, see Genovefa’s grief as reflecting a politics of embodied desire. Her weeping is here rendered legible with reference to an emotional template of deep grief and desire for an always-unobtainable spiritual object: the thing which cannot be seen, the unreachable home. And the desire for that home, desire so strong that it results in constant agonies of tears, is purgative, salvific, and an agent of grace. Genovefa’s weeping eyes are evidence of her desire. The constancy of their weeping speaks to the permanent unobtainability of that desire. And the deep spiritual purification associated with such deeply felt grief becomes testimony to the profound sanctity of her soul.

There is considerable scholarship around the symbolism of weeping in medieval thought, much of it founded on Piroska Nagy’s book, Le don des larmes au Moyen Âge.560 Nagy identifies

Genovefa within a group of roughly contemporary Lives from the early sixth century in which crying was a feature, where she mainly identifies crying as a proof of sincerity at a moment of conversion. Though Nagy does not explore this text in any depth, Genovefa’s crying extends far beyond that.561 Scholarship on medieval weeping has been advanced by a more recent anthology from Routledge on Crying in the Middle Ages: The Tears of History. In its introduction, Elina

558 John Cassian, Conlationes 9.29, in John Cassian, The Conferences, trans. Boniface Ramsey (Mahwah, NJ: Newman Press, 1997), 347. 559 Cassian, 9.28. 560 Nagy, Le don des larmes; Elina Gertsman, Crying in the Middle Ages: The Tears of History (New York: Routledge, 2012). 561 Nagy, Le don des larmes, 159.

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Gertsman discusses the link between Galenic theory of women’s bodies as wet, referencing in particular Nancy Siraisi’s work on medieval medicine.562 In her contribution to the volume,

Kimberley-Joy Knight writes of women saints in particular:

In the eyes of holy women and of their hagiographers, tears were a defining trait of sanctity, to be treated with special reverence and desired with great longing. [...] gratia lacrymarum, characterized by Lot-Borodine and Nagy as a charism, was one of the highest degrees of perfection when the soul had reached an ecstatic union with God, momentarily tasting the joy of the heavens. This charism was miraculous, a physical imprint of God’s presence akin to the stigmata.563

Whether Genovefa’s tears represent ecstasy or sorrow can often be difficult to distinguish, considering that sometimes she is depicted as mourning her alienation from heaven and at other times her weeping seems to have a more ecstatic valence. The distinction between the two is, I suspect, not necessarily a meaningful one for this text. As Jerome Neu summarizes in his review of the psychoanalytic perspective on tears of joy and tears of sorrow: “joy/sorrow is a dimension of experience; and confronted with either extreme along the dimension we are confronted with both. They are in a sense equivalent.”564 This idea, developed more or less to explain why the physiological reactions to extreme joy and extreme sorrow can look so similar, while Nau declines to universalize it to all experiences of weeping, does seem to me to encapsulate the way

Genovefa’s ecstatic crying appears to mingle both ecstasy and grief, a sense of alienation and the apprehension of home.565 It is in this broader context then that Genovefa’s constant weeping should be read, as a sign of sanctity and bodily site of divine manifestation occurring very specifically upon and from the eyes, the seat of vision.

562 Elina Gertsman, “Introduction: ‘Going They Went and Wept’ Tears in Medieval Discourse,” in Crying in the Middle Ages, xi–xviii; Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 563 Kimberly-Joy Knight, “Si puose calcina a’ propi occhi: The Importance of the Gift of Tears for Thirteenth- Century Religious Women and their Hagiographers,” in Crying in the Middle Ages: The Tears of History, ed. Elina Gertsman (New York: Routledge, 2012), 139. 564 Neu, “A Tear Is an Intellectual Thing,” 54. 565 Neu, 54.

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Thus closely linked to the act of weeping, sight and vision are a recurring theme in the Vita.

Blindness is the most common affliction healed by Genovefa, and it is also the punishment most commonly visited on those who transgress against her.566 Her first miracle occurs when her mother strikes her and is struck blind in turn, as we have discussed, and her second is the cure of her mother’s blindness.567 Later a woman who steals a pair of Genovefa’s shoes is struck with blindness and then, upon repenting, is cured by Genovefa’s touch and the sign of the cross.568 A woman moved by curiosity tries to peek at Genovefa in her cell and is similarly blinded and then healed with the sign of the cross. She heals a man and a girl who were blinded for working on

Sunday,569 and she uses holy oil to cure a little boy (puerolos) named Merovech who was not only blind but also deaf, mute, and lame.570

In most of these healings, the language used pertains to the light of the eyes. Her mother loses and then regains her luminum orbitatem and lumen,571 the second woman loses her oculorum lumen,572 as does the third, who is healed when Genovefa ‘illuminates’ her eyes— inluminavit.573 The same verb is used in the Vita for the cure of the man and the girl, whose punishment was phrased ultio divina damnavit in lumine.574 This is consistent with the contemporary Euclidean theory of vision, which appears in late antique and early medieval

566 This has interesting resonances with the miracles that Hickey describes as being associated with the relic of the tears of Christ in the later Middle Ages: “The lacrima Christi, a bodily trace of Jesus’ earthly presence, might be expected to concentrate on the emotions of loss that were generated when Christ surveyed Lazarus’ empty tomb. But instead it became renowned for its ability to cure ophthalmological disorders, especially blindness.” Hickey, “Capturing Christ’s Tears: La Sainte Larme in Medieval and Early Modern France,” 63. 567 VG, 7. 568 VG, 24. 569 VG, 37. 570 VG, 49. 571 VG, 7. 572 VG, 24. 573 VG, 34. 574 VG, 37.

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sources from Macrobius to Augustine to Isidore, among many others. Mark Smith summarises it thus:

The visual act starts with the emission of luminous flux from the center of the eye along straight lines within a cone of radiation. Originating in the brain’s innate spirit and passing to the eye through hollow optic nerves, this luminous flux meets with external light to put us into visual contact with external objects.575

This is the lumen that is gained and lost in these miracles of blindness, an ethereal light that crosses between the outside world and the interior self through the gateway of the eyes.576 This, then, is the model for sight with which we are working, already something numinous and ethereal.577 But Genovefa’s divine sight, the spiritual gaze which she maintains perpetually fixed upon heaven, also manifests on her eyes, and it does so in a specifically material way that, as water, has a special capacity to convey the divine power generated from her spiritual gaze.

When the citizens of Paris first doubt Genovefa’s holiness, Germanus leads them to her cell and reveals that she has turned the ground to mud with her tears.578 Out of all the possible options, it is thus her tears which are presented as the definitive proof of her holiness. This reinforces all that we have said thus far about the role of tears in the construction and manifesting of Genovefa’s sanctity. Presumably this is convincing proof because, in general, tears are involuntary and thus evidence of sincere affect, and, moreover, she was crying in an isolated, solitary place, not as a performance before a crowd. It accords with Neu’s insight about tears, that:

575 A. Mark Smith, From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 234. 576 That the eyes as a gateway are being considered in this text is underscored in VG 47, where an exorcised demon attempts and is forbidden to exit through the eyes of the possessed. This mirrors a scene in the Life of Martin, except that in that case the demon attempts to exit through the mouth. The Genovefa hagiographer copied the miracle otherwise directly, but thought it was important to change the exit from the mouth to the eyes. Suplicius Severus, Vita Martini, 17. 577 It is maybe in this context that we should see Genovefa’s three consecutive miracles that involve lighting a candle to provide illumination for distressed followers. VG, 22–23. 578 VG, 11.

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Emotional tears, unlike mechanically induced or reflex tears, are mediated by thought. This is not to say they are the product of conscious deliberation and calculation, but it is to say that they depend on how we perceive the world, on how we think of it, rather than on how the world simply, in fact, is. They express our nature as well as the nature of the world.579

Tears, entangled as they are with both eyes and interior emotions, show something about the relationship between the inner self of the weeper and the object of their perceptions; they express a relationship, making that relationship and all of its emotional intensity real and tangible and undeniable. It is for this reason that Genovefa’s tears serve as proof for the masses of her true sincerity and the reality of her relationship to the divine.

This appears to be an echo of a similar revelation from the Life of Macrina by Gregory of

Nyssa, which has at least one other possible parallel with the Vita Genovefae. Marcina is also found to have turned the ground to mud with her tears, and to have made a remedy for her mother from the mud.580 (No other emphasis appears to be placed on Macrina’s tears in that text.) But the more productive analogy is found in the Gospel of John, where Jesus cures a blind man by spitting into the ground to create mud and then placing that mud upon the blind man’s eyes.581 Mud is not mentioned elsewhere in the Vita Genovefae, but this idea of liquid from a holy body being used to transfer divine power to another body is very much at work, and the fact that the specific healing here was the cure of blindness, Genovefa’s favourite, should invite us to explore further.

Indeed, the pattern is easy to find: it appears in the healing of Genovefa’s mother’s blindness. The mother asks for water to be brought, giving Genovefa a ladle, and Genovefa goes to a well and weeps as she fills the little vessel. The text next says: deinde, ut distitit flere, impleto vasculo, detulit aquam matri sue—and then, as she ceased to weep, with the little vessel

579 Neu, “A Tear Is an Intellectual Thing,” 35. 580 Life of Macrina, 67. 581 John 9:6.

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being full, she brought the water to her mother.”582 The Latin here is curiously vague, almost coy, about the source of the water. We are not told explicitly that the little vessel was filled from the well. Rather, the filling of the vessel is marked next to Genovefa finishing her weeping. On the other hand, if the hagiographer had wished to say that Genovefa filled the vessel with her tears, it would have been easy enough to do so. While the implication that Genovefa’s tears filled the vessel is deliberate, I think, the hagiographer is maintaining this ambiguity because it will prove useful as a model for a later miracle. (I am not thoroughly convinced of this, but I can think of no other explanation).

When she returns to her mother’s side, Genovefa makes the sign of the cross and applies the water to her eyes—de qua [aqua] fumentans sibi oculos.583 (I am here taking fumentans as related to the word fomentum/fomenti, a healing poultice.) This, Genovefa applying a mixture made from water that in some sense came from her own eyes in order to cure blindness, echoes the Biblical story of Jesus similarly applying a mud mixture made from his spit to heal the eyes of a blind man.

The process does not immediately cure her mother’s blindness and needs to be repeated before the healing is completely effected—paululum cernere cepit. Cumque hoc bis terque fecisset, lumen amissum pristinumque recepit.584 This seems to evoke another scriptural account of Jesus healing a blind man, this one from the gospel of Mark:

And he took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the village; and when he had spit on his eyes and laid his hands upon him, he asked him, “Do you see anything?” And he looked up and said, “I see men; but they look like trees, walking.” Then again he laid his hands upon his eyes; and he looked intently and was restored, and saw everything clearly.585

582 VG, 7. 583 VG, 7. 584 VG, 7. 585 Mark 8:23–25, RSV.

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Here again, in this account which mirrors the Vita’s description of blindness that needs to be cured by multiple applications of water to the eyes, we see the miracle performed by means of spit, effluvia. To me, this only further reinforces the implication that we are meant to see the water being applied to the mother’s eyes as having been produced from Genovefa’s tears.

Moreover, this ambiguous filling of vessels with tears is repeated in the text. During the construction of the basilica for St Denis, Genovefa learns that the workers have nothing to drink.

She goes and begins to pray over the empty vessel:

She knelt on the ground pouring forth tears until she sensed that she had obtained that for which she prayed. With her prayer completed, she made the sign of the cross over the vessel of drink. Wonderful to say—immediately the vessel was filled to the top with drink.586

Here the implication is not as strong that her tears literally fill the vessel, but the echoes of the previous miracle still invite a connection between the water flowing from her eyes and the liquid filling the vessel. The difference with this liquid is that it is meant for drinking, unlike the water used to cure her mother’s blindness. It is liquid meant to be ingested, brought into the body. To the extent that this liquid is wondrously connected to Genovefa’s tears, it shares in their divine associations.

And indeed, in a miracle that we have already explored, this dynamic is expanded still further when Genovefa calls for water, blesses it with the sign of the cross, and gives it to a sick boy to drink in order to heal him.587 Though she does not explicitly weep here, the principle of water acquiring divine power through Genovefa and transmitting that power to another person is

586 “Et illa genibus in terra fixis, lacrimas fundens, ubi sensit se obtenuisse, que praecabatur, surgens, oratione completa, signum crucis super vas poculi fecit. Mirabile dictum! Statim cupa usque ad summum poculo impleta est” VG, 21. 587 VG, 38.

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reinforced. Genovefa uses water much as we might expect to see holy oil being used. Indeed, holy oil is used very similarly to effect cures in this text.588

It is in this way, then, that one of the valences of Genovefa’s weeping begins to emerge. The text is functionally crafting an argument that Genovefa, by virtue of her sanctification, her spiritual sight, and her deep inner affective experiences, is able to spontaneously produce divine liquid equivalent to holy oil in its efficacy. Using her tears as the model for this production of liquid, the text allows for that production to be ambiguously identified as possibly the tears themselves or sanctified by being mingled with the tears, as liquid that miraculously appears in response to the simultaneous production of tears from her eyes, or even as liquid that she renders holy without the explicit use of tears. This will end up being an important basis for her claims to spiritual authority when, as we shall soon see, the Vita follows this model to claim for her the ability to produce holy oil that normally would be the exclusive prerogative of a bishop.

HISTORICIZING THE VITA GENOVEFAE

It is impossible to reliably reconstruct the historical Genovefa’s political projects through analysis of the Vita Genovefae.589 As discussed many times before, hagiography is not a journalistic genre. We are seeing the events of Genovefa’s life through the eyes of the Vita’s composer, who in turn is seeing those events through the hagiologizing collage of stories circulating popularly in the ensuing years, as well as in conformance with her or his own political and theological commitments. It may very well be that Genovefa herself deliberately modeled her life according to hagiographic forms to buttress her own claims to authority. It may

588 VG, 46 and 49. 589 For Heinzelmann’s relatively positive assessment of the historical usefulness of the text, see: Heinzelmann and Poulin, Les vies anciennes, 79.

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be that those models were imposed later, either in popular story-telling or in the Vita’s composition. It is completely impossible to tell. So how do we justify talking about Genovefa as a historical figure?

The answer requires some nuance. First, it is important to acknowledge that historians are always dealing with stories about events, not events themselves; indeed, events are transformed into stories by observers and participants even as they occur, as people render their own experiences legible to themselves. In that sense, there is no ontologically separate ‘historical reality’ to discover beneath the stories; just, at best, the first or oldest narrative, or even some sort of modern composite narrative reconstructed from multiple sources. Since we only have one narrative for the life of Genovefa and no reliable way to distinguish which elements were added when, reconstructing some separate, more historical narrative of her life is a fool’s errand. What

I propose to do instead, therefore, is to treat the narrative that we have as one that carried plausibility and to which was attributed some degree of validity or reliability, even if on other terms than those of a modern historian, by the community that produced it, the community in which stories of Genovefa’s life were circulating not long after her death.

In that sense, then, we can treat the Vita’s Genovefa, acknowledging her to be a literary construct, as a historical figure. As a literary construct, we can assume the Vita’s account constitutes a plausible account of events for the community associated with Genovefa’s memory.

We can see at least one place where the Vita is explicitly drawing upon oral accounts, and maybe another where the Vita’s composer seems to express skepticism over what she or he has been told, and we can probably be safe in assuming that that composer would not produce an account that would be rejected by those who had known Genovefa and who preserved stories of her life in Paris.

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That, then, informs how we can use this text to discuss Genovefa: not as a historical figure existing prior to the Vita, but as a historical figure existing within the Vita. When we analyze

Genovefa’s political projects, we are not analyzing what she actually did; we are analyzing what her community remembered her as doing, or at least a plausible version of that remembering.

This means we can look at her activity not just as within the bounds of what was considered plausible or likely at the time of the Vita’s composition, but as a version of what was accepted to have happened. Thus when we reconstruct how Genovefa established her personal authority in

Paris, we are reconstructing both what was considered at the time to be a plausible way whereby someone might establish such authority and also, to some extent, what local memory believed to have happened; historical reconstructions can rarely do more than that in the best of cases.

The Vita Genovefae certainly does depict Genovefa as occupying a position of significant authority or influence within the civitas of Paris, though it never attributes any specific office or title to her. Indeed, the text remains remarkably silent concerning the formal governance of the city during her lifetime, mentioning neither a comes or similar secular official nor, more strikingly, a bishop. Neither is the text exactly clear on the question of the larger regional state or ruler under whose jurisdiction the civitas fell before it was encompassed into the dominion of the

Franks, possibly as early as Childeric but certainly by the time of Clovis. This silence leaves

Genovefa as the only person in the narrative who stands as any sort of leadership figure for the civitas.

Given the situation in the other cities in Italy and Gaul and the predominant hagiographic model for urban saints, it is almost beyond question that the Vita presents Genovefa operating in the hagiographical model of a bishop for Paris and the surrounding region, with that model heavily adapted to account for the unavoidable facts that she was not a bishop and that she was a

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woman.590 The result is the sort of ad hoc leadership category of famula Dei, with her influence justified and supported by the specific embodied model of hierophany and power I have described above. One of the reasons that such a model could be considered plausible by an audience that held in their own memory Genovefa’s career and the recent history of Paris, I want to suggest, is that that model aligned with their memories of that period in the region’s political history as one of unusual ambiguity and flux.

We know very little for certain about the political circumstances of Paris during Genovefa’s lifetime. 591 The city had been important in the fourth century, occasionally serving as the residence of the Western Emperors. But by the fifth century, circumstances were sufficiently chaotic that we do not have a good impression of its status. We might presume that it had some sort of secular administrator, perhaps a comes civitatis, as well as a bishop, but we have no confirmation of the existence of either during Genovefa’s lifetime, to say nothing of any details about their careers. Genovefa’s period in Paris would hypothetically overlap with the so-called

Kingdom of Soissons, which began when Aegidius, the magister militum of Gaul, refused to recognize the new emperor Severus after the assassination of Majorian in 461. According to

Gregory of Tours, Aegidius was succeeded by his son Syagrius, who ruled from 463 until his defeat at the hands of the Frankish King Clovis in 486.592 This political entity was based out of the city of Soissons and, following the boundaries traditionally attributed to it by historians,

590 Heinzelmann points out that there were no good models for female saints in Gaul at the time, though there was an older tradition of female martyrs. Along with Radegund and Clothilde, however, Genovefa stands at the beginning of a long and abundant tradition of later female saints. Heinzelmann and Poulin, 60; Etienne Delaruelle, “Sainte Radegonde, son type de sainteté et la chrétienté de son temps,” in Études Mérovingiennes. Actes Des Journées de Poitiers, 1er–3 Mai, 1952, ed. A. Paris and J. Picard, 1953, 65. 591 “There is an almost complete gap in our knowledge of events in North Gaul between the time of Aegidius’ death in AD 465 and that of his son in c. AD 486.” “Penny MacGeorge, Late Roman Warlords (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 114. 592 Gregory of Tours, decem libri historiarum II.27.

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would have encompassed the city of Paris for much of Genovefa’s career. 593 We do not know, for example, what a hypothetical comes or bishop of Paris might think of Aegidius’s legitimacy after his disavowal of the Western Emperor, nor what the region’s later conquest by Clovis would mean for such a comes or bishop. Would Clovis have replaced a comes loyal to Syagrius with one of his own? Would the comes simply have sworn allegiance to the new ruler? We do not know with any certainty.

Moreover, there is some question about what sort of power Aegidius and Syagrius exercised and where; Edward James has made the case that the entire concept of a ‘Kingdom of Soissons’ is a modern invention based on a vastly overstated profile given to Syagrius by Gregory of Tours in order to make Clovis’s victory over him seem more impressive, speculating that Syagrius may have been nothing more than the count of Soissons, some sort of subordinate to Childeric.594 We are very far from knowing even to what degree this ‘kingdom’ existed, to say nothing of its internal administration. Writing in 2002, Penny MacGeorge conducted a thorough evaluation of

James’ claims by a review of the evidence for the Kingdom of Soissons and concluded “James’s view of the kingdom of Soissons as a modern construct is, as a negative argument, difficult to disprove, and the existence of a ‘Roman’ kingdom in North Gaul in the late fifth century under

Aegidius and Syagrius can no longer be taken for granted.”595

It is note-worthy, additionally, that neither Aegidius nor Syagrius receive any mention in the

Vita Genovefae. There are a few possible ways to interpret this silence. Maybe it demonstrates that neither of those men exercised any real dominion over Paris, and the civitas in fact was, as the Vita seems to depict, more or less autonomous during the period when control over the larger

593 MacGeorge summarizes the evidence we have for the careers of Aegidius and Syagrius. MacGeorge, Late Roman Warlords, 78–81. 594 Edward James, The Franks (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 70–79. 595 MacGeorge, Late Roman Warlords, 159.

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region was in flux. Or maybe these figures were still politically controversial at the time of the

Vita’s composition, so the compiler judiciously restricted herself or himself to praising the

Frankish kings Childeric and Clovis without mentioning their predecessors.

All things considered, to me it seems like the most credible stance is James’ suggestion that:

The situation revealed in the Life of St Genovieve is not unlike that revealed for the Western Danube provinces at exactly the same period, in Eugippius’s Life of St Severinus: a patchwork of surviving Roman authorities in the towns, with little military power behind them, and a countryside dominated by the barbarians.596

I also follow MacGeorge, however, in her conclusion that there is not sufficient evidence to support the notion that the area was controlled by Childeric with Aegidius and/or Syagrius as his local subordinates. I accept her characterization, echoing James, that “in the third quarter of the fifth century northern Gaul was neither already part of a Frankish kingdom nor one Gallo-Roman kingdom, but a complex and shifting patchwork.”597

As an example of one such local leader, James draws attention to the figure of Arbogast, comes of the city of Trier around the same time. Arbogast received a prose letter from Sidonius

Apollinaris praising him for his romanitas in a region where Roman law had ceased to hold.598

James interprets the letter as suggesting that Arbogast, despite his Frankish ancestry, was a

Roman official, but that he held sway essentially on his own authority, “on the basis of his family’s local wealth and influence. It is not impossible that he survived as a Roman ruler with the help of barbarian, Frankish, troops.”599 Discussing the same letter, MacGeorge adds, “the sources for this period are so inadequate that it is quite feasible that there were other similar warlords and regional leaders of whom we are not aware.”600

596 James, The Franks, 75. Also: “If Syagrius, rex Romanorum, did not rule the Romans of northern Gaul, who did? It is doubtful if, in the period 465 to 481, there would have been any clear answer to that question.” James, 66. 597 MacGeorge, Late Roman Warlords, 163. 598 Sidonius Apollinaris, Ep. IV xvii 1–2. 599 James, The Franks, 73. 600 MacGeorge, Late Roman Warlords, 75.

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Keeping in mind the previously stated reservations about the historicity of the Vita

Genovefae’s account, we can still detect a relationship between that account and this picture painted by James and MacGeorge. The Vita does depict Paris, at least until the time of Clovis, as having an unclear political situation, with Genovefa operating as a kind of ad hoc regional leader. The only other famous regional leader who appears at all is Childeric.601

At one point, to avoid having Genovefa free some prisoners that he meant to execute, we are told that Childeric left the city and ordered its gates closed and locked so that she could not interfere. Why he was in the city or what it meant that he could order the gates closed is not stated, but of course his attempt to forestall the saint did not succeed. Without a key, with only a touch of her hand against the door, she throws the gate open and saves the captives by persuading the king.602 The relationship between saint and king is here quite clear, not unusual for such a Vita: the king may exercise some secular authority over affairs, but the divine power embodied in a saint constitutes an absolute veto over that power. Childeric may command the gates of the city, but the divine power in Genovefa’s hands is an unconditional countermand.

Indeed, we see another strange expression of a relationship between the city and the Franks later on in the Vita, when we are told that Paris was besieged by the Franks for ten years, causing a famine in the city.603 Again, we have no context for this. No other source mentions such a siege, nor even really gives any context for guessing why Childeric, if it was Childeric, would spend ten years besieging Paris. I tend to agree with the assessment offered by James when he says that this passage “may mean no more than that [Childeric’s] troops dominated the

601 Based on little more than this and her hypothetically Frankish name, Heinzelmann speculates that Genovefa might have been some sort of local Frankish affiliate in Paris who achieved prominence because of her connections with Childeric and, later, Clovis. Heinzelmann and Poulin, Les vies anciennes, 91. 602 VG, 26. 603 VG, 35.

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countryside around Paris, or produced a state of insecurity which forced Genevieve to organize famine relief, just as so many others (mostly bishops) did in Christ’s name in the fifth century.”604 It is Genovefa who alleviates this crisis by setting out to collect the grain tax of the annona owed to the urbs of Paris by the surrounding regions.605 Just as when her prayers and guidance earlier spared the city from being attacked by Attila the Hun, here we see her saving the city by countering the threat of the armies outside the walls.

GENOVEFA’S QUASI-EPISCOPAL ROLE

My claim, then, is that the Vita Genovefae describes Genovefa as a patron who represented and advanced the interests of the city of Paris in a time when more formal authority structures were probably in particular flux. Further, my claim is that the particular paradigm used by the Vita as the model for Genovefa’s role vis-à-vis Paris is adapted from the model of a saintly bishop. 606

She was of course not a bishop, nor could she fill exactly the role of a bishop, but in a very specific way, leveraging the logic of embodied sanctity I have discussed at length above,

Genovefa is depicted as occupying a similar social and political space to the men who, in similar contexts, patroned their cities as holy bishops.607

Indeed, the Vita Genovefae is very deferential to bishops and the idea of the episcopacy, making the absence of a bishop of Paris all the more striking. Germanus and Lupus are described

604 James, The Franks, 66. 605 “Genovefa…ad conparandam annonam proficisceretur.” VG, 35. 606 John Kitchen makes a similar argument that, in the writings of Fortunatus, Radegund appears to be functioning in the role of a bishop. This perhaps suggests that our assumptions that the Christian leaders of Merovingian communities were strictly male need to be re-visited. Kitchen, Saints’ Lives and the Rhetoric of Gender: Male and Female in Merovingian Hagiography, 122–23. 607 “Le sexe de Geneviève, réputé faible à l’epoche, a aussi pu contribuer à un choix de qualification moins ‘féminine’ et, en même temps, plus ouverte pour an autre projet de l’ingénieux hagiographe. Ce project, aussi littéraire que politique, devait faire de la vierge des Sts-Apôtres non seulement l’émule des saints les plus puissants connus à l’époque, mais aussi une véritable partenaire et égale pour les episcopi sancti du royaume franc!” Heinzelmann and Poulin, Les vies anciennes, 68–69.

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glowingly as sanctis ac venerabilibus viris Germanum et Lupum pontifices.608 Germanus is always mentioned with the title sanctus. Genovefa receives her consecration from a bishop in her hometown, sancto Vilico episcopo.609 The saints Martin and Anianus are praised as bishops— summi antistes.610 When Genovefa sets out to build a basilica, it is to honour Saint Denis, first bishop of the civitas of Paris—sanctus Dionisius primus episcopus civitatis Pariseorum.611 And the hagiographer, when justifying Genovefa’s decision to begin drinking a little wine at the end of her life, insists that she did so only “at the urging of the bishops, whom it is sacrilege to contradict, and fearing the word of the Lord that says: ‘he who hears you hears me, and he who spurns you spurns me.’”612 This is simply not a text that rejects or downplays the authority of bishops, so that cannot be used as the explanation for the absence of a bishop of Paris.

I have discussed in previous chapters how the episcopacy functioned in Gaul in the fifth and sixth centuries. As the political centralization and military muscle of the Roman Empire withdrew, the Gallo-Roman population was more or less left to its own devices. The general upheaval was characterized by the regular presence of armies on the move, from the Visigoths to the Huns and others, especially, starting in the fifth century, the Franks. For the Romanized population centres, these immediate threats coincided with a disappearance of the Roman Empire as the backing and justifying force behind their administrative organization, leading to a significant authority vacuum. Stepping into that vacuum we see, perhaps unsurprisingly, the same local aristocratic families which, until recently, had populated the magistracies of the

608 VG, 2. 609 VG, 8. 610 VG, 14. 611 VG, 17. 612 “suadentibus episcopis, quibus contradici sacrilegium est, metuensque illud Domini dictum quo ait: Qui vos audit, me audit, et qui vos spernit, me spernit” VG, 15.

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municipal and imperial administration.613 Leading members of these families often took on formal or de facto leadership of their civitates.614 And it seems that, in the absence of the authority of imperial office, they substituted the religious authority of the episcopal office.615

Based on the shifts we observe around this time, it appears that in many places the office of bishop became the focus of local authority, as the ecclesiastical institutions of the comparatively new Christian religion possessed a growing currency in Gallic society.616

Many of these bishops also took on the personae of saints, leveraging the assumption of supernatural power and perception into a solidification of their dominance over their communities. In Genovefa, we see a woman essentially following this same pattern, with some opposition and without the formal title of bishop, insofar as she emerges from an aristocratic background to take control of Paris with her authority buttressed by a reputation for supernatural power.617

613 In fact, this process had been ongoing across the Roman world for centuries. Peter Brown writes: “Within a decade of the death of Origen, men accustomed to public life and skilled in the exercise of power emerged as Christian bishops in all the major cities of the Roman world.” Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, 192. 614 Heinzelmann makes a forceful case for his belief that Genovefa must have been the heir to a senatorial family with noble prerogatives in Paris, writing: “Le rôle politique que nous découverons en Geneviève d’après le texte de sa biographe ne s’explique pourtant, ni par le seul prestige d’une bonne origine, ni par une autorité exclusivement morale: son action vis-à-vis de la haute société de Paris, en 451 et après, suggère vivement, aussi inhabituel que cela puisse paraître à première vue, que la vierge sacrée occupait une position-chef dans le cadre de l’administration de Paris. Son implication étonnante dans les affaires publiques de la ville, sur laquelle nous reviendrons, et son activité incessante en faveur du peuple de Paris, en dehors d’une action thaumaturgique survenue seulement très tarduvement dans sa carrière, restent en effect incompréhensibles sans un lien instutionnel avec les pourvoirs publics traditionnels de la cité dont elle a pu être la patronne.” Heinzelmann and Poulin, Les vies anciennes, 91–92. Also: 81–83. 615 Prinz, “Heiligenkult und Adelsherrschaft im Spiegel merowingischer Hagiographie”; Bosl, “Der ‘Adelsheilige’: Idealtypus und Wirklichkeit, Gesellschaft und Kultur im merowingischen Bayern des 7. und 8. Jahrhunderts.” 616 Loseby, “Gregory’s Cities: Urban Functions in Sixth-Century Gaul”; Harries, “Church and State in the Notitia Galliarum”; Harries, “Christianity and the City in Late Roman Gaul”; Gauthier, “From the Ancient City to the Medieval Town: Continuity and Change in the Early Middle Ages.” 617 Bitel develops this argument at some length, explaining how Genovefa led processions, gave orders to the priests of the city, held vigils in churches, and ceremonially travelled through the episcopacy of Paris just like a bishop would. In fact, Bitel goes one step further, implying that Genovefa’s lack of technical episcopal office was in fact an asset to her: “Genovefa operated from an episcopal city yet without the restraints of episcopal office, deriving her political authority from her multiple identities as charismatic holy woman, surrogate bishop, urban dweller, and expert on Paris’s past.” Bitel, Landscape, 62–65.

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Hartmann-Petersen makes the interesting point that Genovefa’s Vita, unlike those of many of her contemporaries, avoids directly claiming the status of ‘saint’ for Genovefa, using the adjective sancta only twice (Hartmann-Petersen seizes the opportunity to designate Genovefa as an “unheilige Heilige”). Rather, the Vita has a shrewd way of making its claim for her sanctity, essentially letting her wonders and miracles speak for themselves.618 Much as Genovefa, no matter what her ancestry or de facto role in the city’s politics, could never claim the title of bishop because of her sex, there may have been some reluctance to accept her into the ranks of recognized local saintly authority figures like Martin and Germanus.619 This hagiographer might have felt the need to earn the audience’s acceptance of Genovefa’s sanctity by making the case with accounts of her miracles and interventions before claiming the title of sancta and risking being thought presumptuous for doing so. It is in this light that I read much of the work this text is doing to establish Genovefa’s credentials: she could not easily occupy the masculine roles that existed for what she was trying to do, namely run a city as a wonder-working friend of God, and so a new category had to be made. In Genovefa’s case, that category seems to have been the weeping famula Dei.620

I have already written at some length about the extent to which Genovefa’s saintly power, in this Vita, resides in her predisposition toward excessive crying. This may seem to be at odds with the idea that her performance of sanctity was functioning to buttress her political authority. And yet we must keep in mind that excessive crying in this context does not connote weakness,

618 Hartmann-Petersen, Genovefa von Paris, 78–83. 619 Heinzelmann suggests that Genovefa’s hagiographer was concerned with “la présentation d’une sainte capable d’égaler le prestige de ses concurrents masculins potentiels.” Heinzelmann and Poulin, Les vies anciennes, 61. 620 Constance Bouchard suggests that Genovefa’s resistance to categorization was also part of her performance of holiness, in that unpredictability and surprising behaviour were consistent with the saintly role she was trying to occupy. Constance B. Bouchard, “Reconstructing Sanctity and Refiguring Saints in Early Medieval Gaul,” in Studies on Medieval Empathies, ed. Karl F. Morrison and Rudolph M. Bell, Disputatio 25 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 100.

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vulnerability, or hysteria. Genovefa is exhibiting an early example of the gratia lacrymarum, the gift of tears, and her weeping signals her deep spiritual connection to the divine. The divine in this case is a concept that is so loaded with affect that intimate contact with it necessarily produces a profound physical response—weeping—and so Genovefa’s tears that accompany her miracles serve not to show her as weak but rather to indicate to her audience that they are in the presence of a person who is communing directly with the divine. This is quite different from the performances of saintly authority we have seen in other Vitae, but nonetheless it is a performance of saintly authority.

As already mentioned, other scholars have noted that Genovefa’s role in the city, according to this text, seems to mirror that of a bishop.621 I would go one step further and assert that the

Vita Genovefae is explicitly asking us to see Genovefa as the equivalent of a bishop of Paris.

This first becomes clear in the text’s discussion of how Genovefa saved the city from the Huns.

We are told how the greatest bishops Martin and Anianus—summi antistites Martinus et

Anianus—saved their cities in similar circumstances by averting battles.622 Then we are asked

“Why would it not be right for Genovefa to be honoured, who likewise drove off the same army with her prayers before it could destroy Paris?”623 This is an explicit appeal to equivalence. The

621 Patrick Geary writes of Genovefa: “Her role was closer to that of the de facto bishop of Paris, and yet as a woman there was no possibility of her assuming such a post. Nor did it matter: episcopal office didn’t count for much on the edges of an empire. What counted was the ability of leaders to demonstrate their divine authority, then to turn this authority into action in their negotiations with the rising barbarian powers waning Roman communities of their day. Miracle working figures, who held no religious office, claimed no imperial authority, and adhered to no doctrinal faction, were best suited to this role.” Patrick Geary, “The Discourse of Herrschaft and the Practice of Herrschaft in the Fifth Century,” Medieval Worlds: Comparative and Interdisciplinary Studies, no. 1 (2015), 5–15. Bitel develops this argument at some length, explaining how Genovefa led processions, gave orders to the priests of the city, held vigils in churches, and ceremonially travelled through the episcopacy of Paris just like a bishop would. In fact, Bitel goes one step further, implying that Genovefa’s lack of technical episcopal office was in fact an asset to her: “Genovefa operated from an episcopal city yet without the restraints of episcopal office, deriving her political authority from her multiple identities as charismatic holy woman, surrogate bishop, urban dweller, and expert on Paris’s past.” Bitel, Landscape, 62–65. 622 VG, 14. 623 “Porro Genuvefa nonne dignum est honorari, quae idem orationibus suis predictum exercitum ne Parisius circumdaret, procul abegit.” VG, 14.

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structure of the proposition is this: Martin the bishop saved his city of Worms; Anianus the bishop saved his city of Orleans. If Genovefa saved her city of Paris in the same way, is she not worthy to be held in the same honour?

Heinzelmann also makes a convincing case that the Vita represents Genovefa as entering various cities and towns in a formal adventus or accensus, called an occursus in this text, such as might be accorded to a bishop or high imperial official.624 The model is set by Germanus and

Lupus’s arrival in Nanterre: “On their way toward the church, they were met by a crowd of common people seeking blessing. The crowd processed (occurrerint), and it was of both sexes, men and women, and little children.”625 Similarly, when Germanus entered Paris: “When Saint

Germanus came to Paris, the whole population came out from the city to meet him (in occursionem).”626 Heinzelmann glosses this by saying:

il s’agit d’une situation classique qui constitue l’accueil solennel et dans les règles d’un évêque. [...] Les dignitaires ecclésiastiques furent accueillis à une certaine distance de l’église [...] l’évêque fut accompagné ensuite jusqu’à son << entrée joyeuse >> [...] S’il est primordial pour le succès d’un tel événement qu’une grande partie de la population y participe.627

Heinzelmann suggests that, later, when a man in Meldes approaches Genovefa for a miracle with the verb occurrit, a similar entry is implied.628 When she later goes to Troyes, “a multitude of the population met her (occurrit ei).”629 When she enters the town of Arcis, a tribune approaches her with the verb occurrit,630 and Heinzelmann reads his presence as the head of the town

624 For a broader discussion on these ceremonial processions, see: Martin Heinzelmann, Translationsberichte Und Andere Quellen Des Reliquienkultes, Typologie Des Sources Du Moyen Age Occidental, Fasc. 33 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1979), 66–77. 625 “quibus con vulgi multitudo aut procul ab ecclesia, benedictionem expetentes in obviam venissent, et catervatim utriusque sexus virorum et mulierum ac parvolorum occurrerint.” VG, 3. 626 “adveniente sancto Germano Parisius [...] universus populus in occursionem eius egressus ab urbe est.” VG, 11. 627 Heinzelmann and Poulin, Les vies anciennes, 46–47. 628 VG, 33. 629 “occurrit ei multitudo populi.” VG, 37. 630 VG, 36.

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participating in an official welcome.631 Most strikingly, when she arrives in Laon we are told

“When Genovefa came near to that town, a great part of the population convened to meet her (in occursionem).”632 All of this seems to strongly suggest the imagery of a bishop, especially given the direct parallel to the model of Germanus.633

Despite these strong resonances of episcopal status, Genovefa’s exercise of ecclesiastical authority is presented as a delicate matter. Her particular mode of exercising authority is well- expressed in the sequence where she decides to build a basilica in honour of Saint Denis. We are told of her immense affective relationship with the site of his martyrdom: she cherishes it “with great veneration and love.”634 She describes the location as a metuendum locum—a place to be feared—expressing the intensity of divine power there in terms of an affective response to the site.635 All of these elements constitute the legitimizing logic of her desire to have the basilica built. She experiences a strong internal, affective reaction to the physical location by virtue of its divinization, and that reaction is what makes it appropriate for her to initiate the construction project.

We are told that it was customary for the priests of the city to assemble in her house, and on one of these occasions she asked them to raise funds for the construction of the basilica, invoking the sanctity of the site. They protested that they were too poor for the undertaking, and she responded with a prophecy that revealed furnaces they could use to make bricks.636 This sequence has multiple layers, and we will review them each in turn.

631 Heinzelmann and Poulin, Les vies anciennes, 47. 632 “Adveniente Genuvefa aut procul ab ipso oppido, maxima pars populi in occursionem convenit.” VG, 25. 633 Though Heinzelmann later speculates that such ceremony might reflect some high imperial position that she held in the administration of Paris. Heinzelmann and Poulin, Les vies anciennes, 81. 634 “Quanta veneratione et amore dilexit Catulacensem vicum, in quo sanctus Dionisius et passus est et sepultus.” VG, 17. 635 VG, 18. 636 VG, 18–19.

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First, it is interesting to look at the depiction of Genovefa’s relationship to the priests of the city. She does not approach them; they come to her. Moreover, through the use of the word solito we are told that it was their custom to come to her.637 And yet when she wishes for them to do something, she does not command them as we might expect a bishop to do. Rather, she assumes a supplicant posture, speaking to them reverentially: “Venerable fathers and elders to me in

Christ, I beseech you…”638 Her relationship to them is not one of command but of entreaty, and the force of her entreaty comes not from any office she holds but from the affective, otherworldly force of the site she seeks to honour: the metuendum locum.

The priests object, not protesting the validity of the project or her right to ask it, but rather invoking their own poverty. Her response is to prophesy—vaticinans—framed in language that presents the moment as a divine eruption into the room. She is suddenly full of the Holy Spirit—

Spiritu sancta repleta—with a face shining and a mind shining more brightly still—claro vultu, mente preclariore—and through her words manifesting a pronouncement—manifestum dedit eloquuim. This becomes a command the priests are unable to resist.639

This scene gives us an explicit anatomy of Genovefa’s version of authority. Her inner self is shining, full of the Holy Spirit, connected to a higher place. That in turn manifests visibly on her face, making her physicality into a hierophany: her shining face is a manifestation of the immaterial divine into the material world. It also manifests in her words, prophetic, which are presumed to flow from her connection to the same divine source: a source which cannot be denied and whose injunctions structure reality. This makes Genovefa’s body, her physical presence, into a locus similar to the metuendum locum of Denis’ martyrdom: it is a place of

637 “Cui cum solito presbiteri occurrissent” VG, 18. For a discussion of every example where Genovefa seems to instruct the clergy of Paris, see: Heinzelmann and Poulin, Les vies anciennes, 69. 638 “Venerabiles in Christo sancti patres et seniores mei, obsecro vos” VG, 18. 639 VG, 18.

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intersection between the material and divine, a place characterized by overwhelming affect and irresistible meaning. Maybe the priests could resist the force of the martyrdom site which drives

Genovefa, but they could not resist her standing incarnate before them, full of the Holy Spirit.

And indeed, when the priests set out from Genovefa’s house and, finding news of the miraculous furnaces, see the consummation of Genovefa’s prophecy, the epiphany directs their gazes toward the sky and thus heaven in language that mirrors that used earlier to describe her similar gaze: porrectis ad ethera vultos oculisque in caelo prae gaudio fixis.640 The revelation of the miracle is met with affect, with deep emotion: gaudio, and a recognition that Genovefa was a special recipient of divine grace. They thanked God “who thought it worthy to confer so much grace on his handmaiden Genovefa.”641 And when they brought back the news to her,

Genovefa’s affective reaction was even more extreme. “Immediately she filled her lap with flowing tears of joy” and spent the night on the ground in prayer thanking God with tears.642

This, then, shows us the text’s model for how Genovefa exercised authority in Paris.

Whatever we might say about it in terms of historical accuracy, it demonstrates a clear conception of how such authority could work. By some pre-existing situation of local social status, its exact dimensions routinely occluded in the text, the priests of the city attend upon

Genovefa. But whatever that situation might be, it is through a logic of divine incarnation that she governs their actions. She does not rely on personal authority—indeed she speaks to the priests as though she were beneath them—but on the authority first of the holy, compelling site of the martyrdom of Saint Denis and then, when that proved insufficient, on the authority of her own embodied connection to the sacred, manifest in the shining of her face, the miracle of her

640 VG, 19. 641 “qui tantam graciam famulae suae Genuvefe dignatus est conferre” VG, 19. 642 “illa extemplo pre gaudio sinum lacrimis implevit obortis” VG, 19.

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prophetic words, and the effusion of sacred weeping that was the sign of her deeply felt, deeply experienced relationship to the divine.

The final miracle of the Vita tacitly makes the same claim, this time framed not as a question but an assertion based on the surest foundation of truth: a miracle. Genovefa needed some holy oil, the vessel was empty, and there was no bishop to produce more.643 Genovefa threw herself on the ground and wept and prayed until, miraculously, the vessel filled itself. In this way, by means of a miracle from God so that she might never be accused of blasphemously usurping a bishop’s prerogatives, the text sets up Genovefa’s relationship to the episcopacy of

Paris. When it says that the bishop was absent—pontifex, qui oleum ei benediceret, deerat—that claim might as well stand for the whole text, not just this one moment with the oil. We do not have enough historical information to interpret this absence: maybe the bishop is missing from the text to highlight Genovefa’s key role; maybe there was no bishop in Paris at this particular historical time, or maybe the bishop was indisposed for some reason. Whatever the case, in this text as in this scene, the bishop of Paris is not present to fulfil his role, and so Genovefa, while emphatically not a bishop and not claiming that role for herself, nevertheless was, as a leading citizen and a holy servant of God, filling the vacuum with an authority of her own, based on the immanence of the divine in the materiality of her touch, her eyes, and, most of all, her tears.

643 “Nam pontifex, qui oleum ei benediceret, deerat.” VG, 52.

CONCLUSION

BUILDING A NEW GAUL IN THE IMMANENCE OF GOD

I began this study with a reading of the tripartite Vita patrum Iurensium, which narrates the lives of three founding abbots of a group of monasteries in the Jura hills beginning in the 430s. This

Vita was the most aggressively monastic of those I have chosen. Certainly one of its most pronounced features was a carefully elaborated guide for how its audience should regard their relationship with the material world. Trying to carve out a ‘middle way’ between wanton indulgence and severe asceticism, the text instructs monks to cultivate an indifference to their physical experience of the world, instead focusing their attention and concentration on the divine. This strategy, the text asserts, will create an experience of life that is unconditionally sweet, regardless of the specific pleasant or unpleasant particularities of a given moment. This perspective is a sort of living anagogy, the exegetical mode that seeks to locate the eternal in the particular, and itself represents a fascinating new approach to materiality.

The Jura model was self-consciously a foreign import, part of the Cassian-inspired Gallic movement of emulating the monastic communities and lifestyles of contemporary Egypt and

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Syria, and this involved a re-imagining of the Gallic countryside itself. The Jura text presents the retreat of the monastery’s founder into the forest as parallel to the retreat of an Egyptian hermit into the desert, leaning heavily on the generic concept of ‘wilderness’ to establish an identity between the two. The relative fecundity of the Jura hills also posed a problem, since the monastery’s access to an abundance of food did not quite permit the putative hardships of desert life, which may be part of the reason why the text admonishes the monks to cultivate indifference to physical pleasure rather than to seek God in harsh asceticism. The rhetoric of collapsing the difference between the Jura hills and the Egyptian desert is significant, though, in that it involved re-inventing the physical spaces of Gaul to lend them the spiritual authority of the Christian tradition. Without such moves, Gaul, which had no place in Christian mythology to compare with locales like Jerusalem or Rome or Egypt, would have had great difficulty leveraging Christian ideas of immanent divinity into the Gallic context.

Indeed, once the founding saints are identified with the holiness of the desert fathers, the logic of collapsed distance allows for further iterations. The text dwells in several places on the specific landscape of the monasteries’ surroundings, drawing direct connections between features that contemporary monks might observe in their daily life and the deeds of the holy founders. The effect of using specific physical objects to collapse temporal distance in this way mirrors the collapsed geographic distance between Jura and Egypt, allowing the monks to imagine themselves as inhabiting a sanctified landscape coincident with the Vita of their holy founder as well as with the famous legends of the desert fathers. This claim to sacred legitimacy and authority for their monasteries also had direct consequences for the political situation of the

Jura monks. The Vita features regular appearances by overreaching bishops who sought to assert improper authority over the monasteries only to be rebuffed by the righteous efforts of the saintly

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founders. The rhetorical positioning of the Jura monks as Gallic equivalents of wilderness- dwelling Egyptian ascetics, connected through their landscape and their regular mode of life to the divine source, served as a powerful basis to assert their autonomy from the oversight of ambitious local bishops who, while not quite framed as ambassadors of the world from which true monastics must retreat, certainly carried something of that inflection.

The Vita patrum Iurensium was addressed to the brothers of the monastery of Agaune, an institution founded in 515 AD in a famous pass through the Alps near Geneva, and shortly afterward, perhaps inspired by the Jura model, around 525 CE the monks of Agaune produced their own tripartite Vita narrating the lives of their three founding abbots. There the structural similarities end, however. The text is much shorter, comprising of mainly a summary of the life of the first founder, Hymnemodus, with short paragraphs appended to the end with comments on the lives of his two successors. The Agaune Vita, despite also being produced by a monastery, has almost no interest in a discussion of monastic values. Its focus is almost entirely political.

From its inception, the Monastery of St. Maurice at Agaune was deeply entangled with regional politics. It was founded as the result of cooperation between Sigismund, heir to the throne of Burgundy, and the local Burgundian bishops, and its mandate seems to have been conceived in emulation of the Acoemetae monks of Constantinople. Sigismund’s exact motives are difficult to reconstruct, but building on scholars like Albrecht Diem and Barbara Rosenwein I think it is reasonable to speculate that the monastery was intended to play a part in shifting

Burgundy’s religious affiliation away from his father’s Arianism and toward an orthodoxy that might entrench stronger relations with the eastern emperor, as well as lending the Burgundian crown the shine and sanctity of an associated royal monastery.

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Between the time of the monastery’s founding and the Vita’s composition, however,

Sigismund was killed in battle and the kingdom of Burgundy fell to the Franks, and the self- image that emerges from the text is not one that is consistent with subservience to royal power.

The pass at Agaune was the legendary site of the martyrdom of the Theban Legion under their commander Maurice, and it is this connection that the Vita leverages to establish the monastery’s identity and authority. The ground of the pass is characterized as soaked with the blood of the martyrs in a way that identifies the monastery’s physical location with the physical bodies of these saints, infused with the horror and sanctity of their holy deaths. In a key passage, monks arriving to the new foundation are said to have been “joined with the holy martyrs,” implying that the monastic community of Agaune included not just its living members but also the dead saints of whom the very ground underfoot was a holy relic.

And the Vita had a very different vision of the monastery’s role in Sigismund’s career as well. According to its text, Sigismund’s participation in the founding consisted of him coming to the monastery to make a Solomon-like vow to the martyrs that while he remained a good king they would vouchsafe the security of his kingdom. Notwithstanding Sigismund’s ultimate fate, this is a reversal of the accepted logic of the monastery’s relationship to the monarch. Rather than being subordinate to the king, the Vita abbaum Agaunensium asserts that Sigismund’s royal power and position were gifts of the martyrs and therefore the monastery of Agaune. This reversal is achieved through a logic of materiality focused on the physical location of the monastery and the role of that location as a bridge between the present monastic community and the historical martyrs, employing similar if not more direct logic to that seen in the otherwise quite different Jura text.

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My penultimate chapter transitions to a purely urban figure, the fourth-century bishop

Amator of Auxerre. Amator was the immediate predecessor of the much more famous Germanus of Auxerre, and his life was commissioned by the sixth-century bishop Aunarius presumably to enhance the prestige of the city’s powerful episcopacy even further and to provide a sort of prequel text to the popular Vita Germani. Although, unlike the other Vitae in this thesis, the composition of this text is a few generations removed from the events it describes, it interacts with communal identity in some by-now familiar ways. The basilica founded by Amator was present in the city, as was his tomb, both locations maintaining a connection of the city’s public spaces and daily life with the story of Amator, and some features of the text appear to reflect communal memory. The origin and historicity of such details are impossible to confirm, but for our purposes it is enough to understand that the memory of Amator was alive in the community in some fashion and that his Vita reflects an interaction between that communal memory and a specific set of social and political goals. For the Vita Amatoris more than any of these other texts, those goals can be seen to reflect the projects of a specific constituency within its community, the episcopacy of Auxerre.

The Vita Amatoris is preoccupied with time and materiality. The primary expression of this preoccupation is a recurring engagement with the idea of inherited wealth; generational transfers necessarily involve sexual intercourse and therefore carnality, and the material treasures that the rich of Auxerre cherish and preserve as an inheritance for their children become tainted with that carnality, especially to the degree that their beauty implicated sensuality. The text is full of examples of the wealthy receiving divine punishment for flaunting or hoarding their possessions, punishment that is only lifted when that wealth is placed at the disposal of the timeless eternal

God. In concrete terms, that means at the disposal of the bishop.

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This thinking about time also encompasses concern about the pagan past and the unwillingness of some of Auxerre’s aristocracy to relinquish habits and traditions that enact pagan forms in the Christian city of Auxerre. The text presents opulent aristocratic weddings that, in addition to being loaded up with questionable jewels and treasures, followed old pre-

Christian forms, and the young men of the city decorating trees and getting up to antics that had pagan roots--the sort of syncretism that almost certainly existed. It is not necessarily surprising that an episcopal text would attempt to influence wealthy citizens to get rid of customs that were conspicuously pagan holdovers. The interesting element for our purposes is the way that the logic of materiality is mobilized for this project, and the way that logic reflects the broader trend in these texts of using arguments grounded in questions of materiality to achieve its goals.

Materiality, sensuality, and their connection to time were not only construed negatively in the Vita Amatoris however. When Amator decides to eschew sexual intercourse, he is rewarded with an ineffably sweet fragrance that, notably, is marked as untimely because it resembled the smell of flowers, but the time of year was winter. This is one of several moments in the text where a divine presence appears in a way that is sensuous but ambiguously material, hovering— as smell does in the early medieval imagination—on the boundary between material and spiritual presence. And the untimeliness of the divine presence, which violates the natural order of the seasons, is thereby flagged as both wondrous and transcendent, reflecting a divine existence outside of time that contrasts against the time-entrenched considerations of family reproduction and inheritance.

Ultimately, this conception of the timeless nature of divine incarnation is leveraged to define the city of Auxerre itself, when the tombs of the bishops Amator and Romanus are described as boundlessly sacralizing the city, just as Peter and Paul sanctify the city of Rome.

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My fifth and final chapter discusses what is probably the strangest of the Vitae I examine in this thesis, the Vita Genovefae. Genovefa was an influential and well-connected holy woman in fifth-century Paris, occupying a prominent role in the city’s leadership for much of her life. Her life was written by an anonymous cleric, probably in Tours, probably in the entourage of Queen

Clothilde, who together with her recently deceased husband Clovis had made Paris the capital of the Merovingian kingdom, and had patronized the construction of a new basilica where

Genovefe had been buried. The text appears to narrate Genovefe’s attempt to use a holy reputation to buttress her attempts to govern the city roughly in the model of a bishop, providing an implicit rationale for her female possession of spiritual authority through the invention of an innovative corporeal logic of sanctity.

Similar to some of the other Vitae examined in this thesis, this text works to set up a special category for material objects with a sort of liminal status between materiality and divinity.

Through processes of sanctification or consecration, these objects—which carry all the inflections of the contemporary cult of relics—lose the valences of fallen materiality while acquiring those of divine manifestations, such as a simple necklace given by Germanus that

Genovefe wears to symbolize her commitment to wear no ornaments.

This logic is then mobilized to characterize Genovefe’s body, drawing upon classical humoral conceptions of the female body as uniquely associated with porousness and fluidity.

Genovefe weeps constantly, performing many of her miracles either while weeping or by weeping. This weeping is explicitly associated with her saintly apprehension of heaven, the sense of which overwhelms her with such internal intensity of affect that tears pour forth from her eyes. These tears, products or extensions of Genovefe’s body, thus become material signs or incarnations of a spiritual reality, the direct, intense connection of Genovefe with the divine

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source. The text engages the Christian tradition of holy water and the waters of baptism exemplified in the writings of Tertullian, leaning on the idea of water as a privileged vehicle for holiness, and thus implying that Genovefe’s watery body similarly possesses a privileged form of sanctity.

This unique claim to personal sanctity, buttressed by classical ideas about gendered bodies and by Christian conceptions of holy water, becomes the basis for Genovefe’s claim to spiritual authority, uniting with whatever secular social capital her family connections might have afforded her—the text is vague about this—to validate the legitimacy of her direct exercise of authority in Paris.

It is difficult to know how much of the content of the Vita Genovefae reflects the actual historical nature of Genoveve’s career in Paris versus the literary innovations and political inclinations of her hagiographer. This is, however, an instance where it is useful to remember the principle of assuming a degree of collective authorship for these texts, since the circulated memories of the people of Paris (perhaps even including the person who composed the written text) would have formed a sort of oral first draft of the Vita from which only a certain amount of deviation would have been possible. While it is conceivable that Clothilde, if indeed she did provide some impetus for the creation of this text, might have seen some benefit to her own political projects from advancing the case for Genoveve’s sanctity, it seems difficult to imagine why she would be interested in justifying Genoveve’s exercise of political authority in Paris if that were not based in some sort of contemporary shared sense of what Genoveve’s life had been. Either way, whether what we read reflects Genovefe’s project or Clothilde’s or someone else’s, it is clear enough that this text was participating, like each of the others, in the use of

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innovative arguments about the divine potential of materiality to advance a specific and recognisable set of social and political goals.

In addition to the generically observable features of hagiography, all of these texts can be read as responding to the question, “where can we find a point of transcendent meaning on which to hang our views of ourselves?” with the answer, “the point where the divine manifests as the material, where the unreachable sublimity of eternity becomes something you can touch, see, hear, or smell.” The particulars of the answers provided by these texts are vastly flexible, responding to the particulars of time, place, and politics in the communities for whom they emerge. All of them, however, share this same fundamental engagement with the promise of divine immanence and incarnation, an engagement that implies a popular enchantment with these notions spanning at least a century if not much more.

Merovingian Gaul in the sixth century was not a society recovering from the collapse of a thousand-year-old empire, nor was it the first embryo of a sharply new medieval paradigm. But it was, like most of the centuries before and after it, a society facing significant shifts and reconfigurations that called for a renewal of basic shared assumptions underpinning contemporary power arrangements and social patterns. For the sixth century, this thesis has hopefully demonstrated, the means and medium of that renewal was the paradigm of divine materiality.

APPENDIX I

THE LIFE OF THE ABBOTS OF AGAUNE644

ca. 523-526 AD645

When it comes to the guiding recollection of the holy conduct of blessed men, the story deservedly kept alive always comes down to the following generations. Nevertheless, in order that it might not seem to stray from the path of certainty over a long passage of time and by confused fantasies, it is necessary for the truth to be set down in writing. Thus those burning with the fire of faith and the love of sanctity who desire to satisfy their hearts with study can thirstily drink not the empty air of misty vapour, but the true water. Therefore, by the labour of my toiling pen, I committed the life of the holy646 abbots Hymnemodus, Ambrosius, and Achivus to be put

644 For the text of this translation I rely on the Latin edition in: Vita Abbatum Acaunensium absque epitaphiis, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SRM 7 (Hanover: Hahn, 1920), 322–36. 645 For dating the text, I rely on: Jean-Marie Theurillat, L’Abbaye de Saint-Maurice d’Agaune, des Origines à la Réforme Canoniale, 515–830, 42. 646 I am translating each instance of sanctus as “holy” instead of the more formal title “saint.” In this text, it is applied to nearly every abbot, priest, and bishop that is mentioned (the only exception is one instance where Ambrosius is called beatus), and I do not believe the implication is that all of these figures were considered saints in the later, more formal sense of the word. That sense should probably be attributed to occurrences of Sanctus Hymnemodus, Sanctus Ambrosius, and Sanctus Achivus in this text, but since the Latin terminology does not make that distinction, I am rendering even these as “holy” for the sake of consistency. Peter Brown’s model of the late antique holy man is probably more applicable to these figures than is a later medieval model of sainthood.

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down on this page. And I do not fear to transcribe with uncultivated speech their wonder- working faith, which they always exerted in the fear of God and with amazing results, since whatever unclear speech obscures concerning their praises will be clarified in a narration illuminated by the glittering merits of their deeds.

1. And so holy Hymnemodus,647 mild and gentle of manner though a barbarian by birth, became so purified from all ferocity by the blessing of the divine that beneath secular apparel he carried the yoke of Christ with the gentle freedom of temperance. While he stood in the hall of the king as an attentive servant to royal power, he fulfilled the office commissioned to him with perfect integrity of mind, meanwhile training a soldier of Christ within the lodging of his heart.648 Following the instruction of the saviour, he rendered to God those things that were

God’s;649 and he also peacefully performed his debt of service to the king. His spirit became excited by passion, and in his heart he fostered a resolution to pursue perfect religion. And so, spurning the charms of worldly things, he disdained the ostentation of pompous powers and swiftly sought out a monastery at Grigny.

At that time, the abbot of the monastery was a venerable man named Caelestius. When he saw

Hymnemodus, he and his whole congregation were astonished, but, because of the office given to Hymnemodus by the king, Caelestius did not dare to accept him into the cloister of the monastery. And so, when he was not able to overcome the stubbornness of the abbot with his pleas, Hymnemodus withdrew to a certain cave for a little while. There he tonsured the hair on his head, casting his every thought toward God. He returned to the monastery that he had sought

647 Bruno Krusch believed this name to have been made up via a conflation of the name Imemund or Ememund with the Greek ὕμνος, inventing a founding abbot whose name reflected his role in establishing a liturgy of perpetual chant. Krusch, 171–172. Theurillat happily corrects him: “Malheureusement pour B. Krusch, qui croyait tenir là un argument apodictique, son ingénieuse conjecture sèst trouvée démentie par la découverte d’un fragment de l’épitaphe d’Hymnémode qui contient précisément la premiére syllabe du mot litigieux.” Theurillat, 38. 648 Ephesians 3:16–17 649 Mark 12:17.

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and was thus taken in and added to the holy congregation, where he undertook the religious path with all charity and the virtue of humility. And the more threatening plots came forth from the king, so much the more keenly did Hymnemodus excel in the service of Christ.

He so excelled that, when the holy abbot Caelestius went from this world to be with Christ,

Hymnemodus succeeded as abbot in his place. He was not easily compelled, but God approved it, and the whole congregation agreed. Beloved by God and men, he fulfilled that office for a long time with unfaltering exertion. The result was that he added to the monks both in their number and in their successes.

2. But I have undertaken mainly to describe those things which the grace of the Holy Spirit did through him. When a certain youth of high rank was threatened by the nearness of death, the youth’s parents asked Hymnemodus to visit him. Hymnemodus refused for a very long time, but finally he was moved by their tears and went immediately to the sick youth. When he arrived, he performed a prayer, picked up some holy oil, and administered it to the youth. Immediately the youth received his health and his parents received joy in place of their tears.650

And it would not be appropriate to pass over what he did in the presence of holy Achivus of

Lyon. A family matriarch651 by the name of Syagria652 asked Hymnemodus that he bless her household, which included a mute girl. She brought the girl before the holy man; he refused for a very long time, because of the presumption of such an act, but finally she prevailed with her tearful begging. Moved by the faith of the pleading woman, he invoked the name of God. He took some holy oil and placed his fingers into the girl’s mouth. Immediately she began to speak.

650 Psalm 30:11. 651 matrisfamilias; presumably a female equivalent of the more famous Roman paterfamilias. It is unclear why the word would not be materfamilias, although Krusch does indicate that there was some variation in the manuscripts. 652 Syagria might be a descendent of the fifth-century rex romanorum, Syagrius, whose family is thought to survive at least until the eighth century, when another Syagria made a donation of land to Novalesa Abbey. Lucien Musset, The Germanic Invasions: The Making of Europe 400–600 AD (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1965), 127.

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This was done through his servant by the Lord Jesus Christ, who alone with the Father and Holy

Spirit performs great wonders, and who is wonderfully visible in his saints.

But I will now turn the tip of my pen toward the founding of the monastery at Agaune which I have previously mentioned.653

3. Sigismund, the son of King Gundobad, was girded654 with the honour of a patrician at that time. When he rejected the faithlessness of Arian depravity, he began to follow the faith of

Catholic dogma, and to adapt his soul most intently toward religious devotion. The bishop of the city of Geneva at that time was a man named Maximus.655 He was outstanding in all sanctity and purity and distinguished by his strenuous exertion in every task. The preaching of divine speech was exceedingly powerful in him, and he incited the heart of Sigismund to an act of devotion.656

In the place which the Theban martyrs ornamented with their precious death and the pouring out of their famous blood in happy spatters of a rosy variety, Sigismund caused that the mixed habitation of the mingled crowd should be removed. There, where the splendor of life had been

653 This is in fact the first mention of Agaune in this text. It could be that institutionem praedicti Acaunensis monasterii in this case is referring to the title of the work, or maybe more loosely to the fact that the author has listed the names of its three founding abbots in the prologue. On the other hand, this might be a sign of some later intervention into or abbreviation of the original text. 654 accinctus. This may be a reference to a specific Byzantine belt or garment used to denote the rank of patrician. 655 Krusch complains that the text makes no mention of Avitus of Vienne, who was a famous advisor of Sigismund and is known from other sources to have participated in the founding of the monastery at Agaune. Additionally, Avitus was the metropolitan bishop, and so his intervention would have been necessary to provide the monastery with the exemptions that were standard for such institutions. Krusch, 325. Theurillat responds with the point that, whatever Sigismund’s relationship was with Avitus, Geneva was one of the royal capitals of the kingdom, and thus as its bishop we might expect Maximus to have exactly as close a connection to Sigismund as is here depicted. Theuriallat also brusquely remarks that it is pointless to critique this sort of document for not mentioning every minute detail of the foundation. Theurillat, 41. 656 There has been a certain amount of debate concerning what exactly this “act of devotion” was. Bruno Krusch believed that this text stripped credit for the foundation of the monastery away from Sigismund and attributed it to the bishops, in contradiction to other sources concerning this foundation. Krusch, 324. Theurillat responds by making the point that, if the text does not explicitly attribute the building of the new structures to Sigismund, neither does it make that attribution to anyone else, and there is no reason to assume this “act of devotion” does not represent exactly that endowment—in fact it is not clear exactly what else it might be supposed to represent. Theurillat, 40.

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acquired through an atrocity of suffering, he caused that the brightness of the inhabitants should return, so that the actions of darkness might be cast out and a day everlasting might occur.

Thus it would be that these same martyrs would be his protectors, and he would possess both the kingdom and the integrity of the kingdom most securely, on the condition that his thought should not deviate from piety and the way of justice, since the saints protect those who do not wander from the ranks of the good. (He deserved to hold the kingdom with every abundance and prosperity, and he would have held it for a longer time, if the overflowing sins of the people had not allowed the hatred of the ancient enemy to prevail.)

Therefore a council was held. Inspired by God, it seemed fitting to the whole assembly that all women should be removed from that place, and likewise secular families should be removed.

And it was decided that the family of God should be located in that place – that is to say the family of monks, who imitate the heavens both day and night by persevering with divine chants.657

4. When these things were discussed, therefore, the man most worthy by their choice to assume the highest rule658 of abbots in this plan was Hymnemodus. Although he did not wish to leave his monastery because of the danger facing the congregation that had been commissioned to him, he did not stand in the way. He promised that he would take up so unusual a task only on the condition that he should be joined by the abbot Ambrosius of Insula Barbara,659 a man similar to him in sanctity.

657 The liturgical practice of perpetual chant at Agaune has received a certain amount of scholarly attention in recent years. The best study is in: Barbara Rosenwein, “Perennial Prayer at Agaune,” Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts, ed. Rosenwein and Farmer, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 41–42. 658 monarchia. Krusch believed that this word would not be used in the sixth century to designate the authority of an abbot. Krusch, 324–325. Theurillat helpfully provides a number of other contemporary sources where the word was used in exactly that sense. Theurillat, 41. 659 Now Île Barbe in the Saône River near Lyon, as Krusch points out in his edition.

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And so he began that most holy journey. He bestowed governance of the cell of the monastery and congregation at Grigny upon holy Achivus, who never ceased from service or from his contemplations. (I will describe Achivus’s acts below, as the word of God gives me utterance).

But Achivus was thirsty for labour, since Agaune was now under a rule, so he responded to his abbot that unless death should separate them, he would never depart from his service.660 Holy

Hymnemodus received this most gratefully.

5. Commending themselves to the prayers of the congregation, they bid farewell and set off with a number of other brothers from the same monastery. Holy Probus was a priest whom they had loved for some time previously, and his honesty and sanctity of habits made him equal to them by his proven mind. They asked Probus to come with them for this great work, with God’s help, so that they might be joined together equally in corporeal presence just as in spirit, ceaselessly giving thanks and praise to God. And he received their offered blessing with the greatest rejoicing.

The abbots Ursolus and Iustus were incomparable men who held Probus equal with themselves. Along with many others, they delayed him from going for the sake of love, lest they be torn away from the sight of him. Holy Victorius, bishop of the city of Grenoble, considered him without pleasure, since he would be absent from him in body. Victorius covered him with coaxing speeches, and, rushing to meet him at the basilica of the saints,661 he begged with many prayers in the presence of the brothers that Probus must visit the brothers and the church which had brought him up. But Probus, with unshaken stability of heart, did not waver from his firm plan.

660 This echoes the famous speech of Ruth to Naomi in Ruth 1:16–18. 661 Presumably basilica sanctorum refers to the shrine of the martyrs at Agaune.

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6. Meanwhile the abbot Hymnemodus, whom I have said much about, was going to the basilica of the saints along with his companions of whom I have just made mention above, the priests Achivus and Probus. They were lingering at a certain place beneath the open air and a supremely peaceful sky, when suddenly the heaviest rain began to pour down, and they could not find a place of refuge where they might be covered. Then the man mentioned above called upon his companions to pray together with him to the Lord. And when they prayed, immediately the rains were withdrawn and the clear sky was restored with gentle breezes.

7. Meanwhile a message was sent to Lyon to the blessed abbot Ambrosius, asking that the prayer of the king and the guarantee made to Holy Hymnemodus662 should be fulfilled. When the city of Lyon heard about this, it was greatly upset that so great and excellent a servant should depart from that place. A grave dread overcame the bishop of the city, holy Viventiolus, and the brothers whom that abbot seemed to rule. But Ambrosius was full of God. When he heard that the outstanding men Hymnemodus and Achivus had preceded him to the basilica of the saints with holy Probus, he cut away all the nets of delays and quickly went to that basilica of the saints with other abbots, the holy men Arcadius and Drabist, and a great company. With Ambrosius thus joined to the holy martyrs, a great joy of love filled all the brothers in that same congregation.

Meanwhile, the rule of singing the psalms and practicing abstinences was given to holy

Hymnemodus by the assembly of bishops who had come to that place for the founding of the monastery, and not long afterward he passed from the light of this world to Christ. The narration will now appropriately say something concerning his thoughts, for he cherished and admonished with paternal piety those who were kindled by any spark of religion. This included not just those

662 In section 4 above, Hymnemodus agreed to go to Agaune only if accompanied by Ambrosius.

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whom he had with him, but also those whom he might have come upon by chance. He did this so that those who walked with the highest security might profit, saying: “We see some people proceeding with no regulation, who also labour to hinder those running well. It is more appropriate for that sort of person to be avoided than to be followed.”

8. Therefore when holy Hymnemodus had passed away, holy Ambrosius was set up as abbot in his place by divine dispensation and the election of the congregation.

From a young age, it was not unknown to the community how he performed the deeds of a senior monk in a secret sense while he fulfilled the clerical office. Indeed, he was induced by a desire for the monastic life; he contemplated and considered the vanity of the world; and he hurried to a monastery against the will of his relatives. He so joined the obedience of his soul to divine precepts that both the abbot and the whole congregation were left stunned by the miracle.

For he so excelled in love and continual servitude that everyone chose him as the father almost when the previous abbot was still alive.

When the abbot finally died, Ambrosius succeeded as abbot of Insula Barbara in his place by the will of God and the predetermined election of the congregation. And since the grace of prophecy was present in him, there was also both bountiful kindness for making assignments with all foresight as well as strict constancy for abstinence. He also had a profuse affection for brotherly love and a dutiful discernment of discipline. He attributed every good thing of his life to divine generosity, at the monastery but also in the kingdom and the country. And it ought to be an example to everyone how he held a harmonious affection with holy Achivus and Probus.

He was constantly reminding the monks, among other things, that someone who wanted to be a monk should shun every ambition and follow humility, love, and obedience, among other virtues. He said: “We ought to strive in our duties and be as vigilant over the mind as the body.

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We must shun hatred, we must put forth advantages before everyone, and we ought to give help to one another’s devotion. We should do these things so that grace might always abound among the brothers of the fellowship, and so that no one should ever be removed from holy office by fear of danger,” but instead he preached to patiently suffer all things, whether adverse or prosperous, and through it all to hold on to the goodness of love. What more is there to say? The regular instruction of that wise man raised up the perfect fear of God in the hearts of the monks.

9. And when Ambrosius passed on to Christ, holy Achivus was chosen by merit for the role of leading the monastery. I am hindered in commemorating his most holy life by pious tears, but I will try to set it forth as well as I am able through my loving groans.663

In his youth he pursued military service with his father Heraclius in the territory of Grenoble.

After a short time he became afraid of the allurement of this world and sought a monastery at

Grigny. His parents were delaying him, because they felt he would not be able to endure the severity of a monastery. But he did not receive that delay into the ears of his heart. They said to him, “If you want to do this, you will be submitting your body for punishment.” (The devout man later endured this with great patience).

He thus dedicated his soul to God so that he might prepare his secret little dwelling place for the Holy Spirit. The result was that through outstanding adherence to discipline he secured the ornaments of diverse spiritual graces, for the fear of the Lord pierced through his mind and flesh.

Among other good things, he gained a memory of such capacity that he learned almost all ecclesiastical books by heart, and he proved an eminent interpreter of those scriptures by his divinely inspired disposition.

663 This passage is essentially the primary basis for dating the text as having been written by a relative contemporary of Achivus, supported by the author’s apparent knowledge about Achivus’s family background and facial complexion.

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Loving God and loving all people, he was in turn loved by all people. In his kindness he was exceedingly lavish toward all, but toward himself he was frugal in fasting. Thus he bound the love of all men toward God. While he curbed sins by his preaching, he took pity on the grieving and piously rejoiced for those rejoicing in Christ. No one ever saw anything angry in his deeds or harsh in his face. He was a stranger to sins himself, but being pale he blushed with shame for the sins of others. On account of this purity, he demanded from God anything needed by anyone who might be suffering, conducting himself as if they all deserved to receive exactly as much as the servant of God.

And while he was strong in his mind, he was also ruddy in his face, continuing in that soundness of body and mind until his death. Even then, a rosy blush coloured his face, since no pallid death could bring a pale ugliness to his features.

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