Medieval Mont-Saint-Michel Through the Perception of Pilgrims

Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of Art History Sabina ROSENBERGOVÁ THE MOUNTAIN AND THE MAN BENEATH: Medieval Mont-Saint-Michel through the Perception of Pilgrims Master Thesis Thesis Supervisor: Ivan FOLETTI 2017 I hereby declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the sources mentioned in the bibliographical list. ............................................................ Sabina Rosenbergová iii iv Acknowledgements This space is dedicated to those who helped the author in her endeavour. Therefore, I would like to express my gratitude to them. First of all, I owe a deep debt of gratitude to all the people who participated in the project Migrating Art Historians and were inspiring to me along the way. Of these, I am most grateful to Ivan Foletti, who supervised this thesis and proved himself again to be an excellent supervisor, overflowing with ideas and encouragement. This thesis blossomed from the project The Pilgrimage to Mont Saint- Michel in the Post-Romantic Era and during the Middle Ages supported by the Grant Agency at Masaryk University in the year 2017, and the Centre for Early Medieval Studies located at the same institution. I gratefully acknowledge the funding received, which made this thesis possible. I also greatly benefited from the libraries at the University in Poitiers, where the majority of this thesis was compiled. Therefore, my gratitude goes to those who contributed to the pleasant and intellectually stimulating environment of those places. On a more personal note, I would like to thank my friends and colleagues in Brno, Poitiers and elsewhere, especially Pavla Tichá. Last, but not the least, my family has been supportive as always and I am deeply thankful for that. And finally, very sincere gratitude goes to Petr Vronský. v vi Contents INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................... 9 CHAPTER I. IN DAYS OF BISHOP AUTBERT: THE FOUNDATION LEGEND ................................................ 13 CHAPTER II. NEW COMMUNITY, NEW NEEDS ...................................................................................... 17 CHAPTER III. VARIOUS AUDIENCES ..................................................................................................... 27 CHAPTER IV. TO SEE THE ARCHANGEL MICHAEL................................................................................ 33 CHAPTER V. SACRED TERRAIN ........................................................................................................... 39 CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................................................... 49 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................................................. 53 ILLUSTRATIONS .................................................................................................................................. 61 vii 8 Introduction The thesis presented here concentrates on Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy. Its focus is on pilgrims and their perception of the place in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Mont Tombe, the name of the hill where the church dedicated to the Archangel was erected, used to be a shrine, frequently visited by pilgrims throughout the Middle Ages. Nonetheless, studying Mont-Saint- Michel is a tough proposition for a scholar interested in the monument’s medieval period. It is due to several reasons, rooted in the events of the modern period. One of them is the serious damage to the edifices caused by wars, looting and finished by the French Revolution. It is certainly true that Mont-Saint-Michel had already lost its prominent function as a religious and pilgrimage centre at the end of the eighteenth century – the revolution, however, gave the last blow to religious life at Mont. These circumstances were subsequently intertwined with the laicisation of the Mont. After the Revolution, the Mont became a prison. Due to the effort of the French Romantics, including Victor Hugo, the prison was abolished in 1863 and Mont-Saint-Michel was added to the list of national monuments in 1874. The desolate state of the new monument led to a number of restoration works. Tourism at Mont-Saint-Michel started to develop in this period. Now, it has attracted enormous numbers of visitors. The current Mont-Saint-Michel is mostly a place of consumerist tourism and it is admired as a place of national identity and perceived as a medieval monument, though it is more a Romantic vision of the medieval past.1 All the same, the monastic community was restored at Mont-Saint-Michel in 2001 and therefore the Mountain reacquired this lost component. At the same time, pilgrimage to Mont-Saint-Michel is undergoing its revival. Today, tourists, monks, believers, and pilgrims mingle together in the area of the Mountain. The current, like the medieval, Mont-Saint-Michel had different functions and its area served several types of people. The necessities of the monastic community were different from the necessities of pilgrims arriving at the Mont – they, however, shared the same space. Even though this thesis focuses on the pilgrims, the medieval monastic community and their devotional life, full of specific demands, must not be absent. The loss of the majority of (not only) medieval furnishing, documents and other objects, and the blurred identity of the Mont, stand between the historian and his or her matter of research. This lays an uneasy duty on the scholar, to explore his or her own relationship to the current Mont- Saint-Michel – to the place, which is so appealing and so present in our culture that always makes 1 On this notion see article by FOLETTI – ROSENBERGOVA, Holy Site (forthcoming). 9 the scholar take a personal stand. The goal of the scholar ought not to be to get rid of this conditon, which probably cannot be done, but to be aware of its limitations. The second more objective limit is the absence of the majority of the medieval Mont-Saint- Michel. Due to this fact, art historians interested in any different subject than architecture and manuscript illumination are sentenced to delve into conserved written sources and to extract an image of what medieval Mont-Saint-Michel could be from them. In this case, the art historian could hardly begin with objects. Methodology used in this thesis reflects this absence of objects. Because of those limits a large part of my thesis comes from written evidences, mainly legends. The number of preserved Mont-Saint-Michel hagiographical works is not insignificant and could reveal much to art historians as well. In this thesis, I focus on the perception of pilgrims – unfortunately we do not have any profound pilgrimage description of Mont-Saint-Michel and we have mainly sources produced in the environment of the monastic communities. In other words, we are informed about pilgrims and their perception mainly via official sources, which are most likely a reflection of the ideal vision of pilgrimage devotion. Nevertheless, the comparison between different time layers of those narrative sources results in the notion that the pilgrimage praxis is reflected in the sources. Alongside patrons’ intentions and artistic skills, the spectator created the object he or she was looking at. Furthermore, the viewer continued to reconstruct the meaning of the object long after the creators had passed away. The spectator, in this case a pilgrim, participated to a large extent in the development and transformation of the cultural aspects of sites that became pilgrimage centres. I understand pilgrimage as a multi-sensorial experience, involving the whole body with its senses. None of this can be overlooked. And last but not least, the architecture and its placement in the landscape, together with the phenomenological approach, should not be omitted. Specifically, in the five chapters of this thesis, my aim will be to reflect on the perception pilgrims had of Mont-Saint-Michel as a holy place, visited by people to venerate the church of the Archangel. The first chapter opens the debate with an introduction of the ninth-century foundation legend of Mont-Saint-Michel, which, throughout the period studied, served as an important text for the Benedictine monks, who inhabited Mont-Saint-Michel in the tenth century. The foundation legend is essential for the arguments in Chapter II, in which the eleventh-century construction of the Romanesque church and the hagiography is discussed. It will be argued that the motifs of the legend were appropriated by the Benedictines and incorporated into the architecture and cult practices – the position of Bishop Autbert, the legendary founder, will be examined in particular. Regarding the hagiographical sources, I will argue that the legends, normally perceived as the official rhetoric of the monastic community, contain the pilgrimage experience as well. The chapter concludes that, despite the assumptions, the relics of the Archangel Michael are rarely mentioned in the hagiography, and pilgrim’s devotion was not concentrated around them. Chapter III examines, therefore, the presence of pilgrims at Mont- Saint-Michel and also the pilgrimage to other Michaeline sanctuaries in Western Europe. It will be shown that pilgrims had certain ideas about the appearance of Michael’s churches, even before 10 they arrived to the very place – thus they sought a specific kind of experience. The pilgrimage perception

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