The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity. Volume 1: The Middle Ages The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Ziolkowski, Jan M. The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity. Volume 1: The Middle Ages. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2018. Published Version https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/697 Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:40880853 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity VOLUME 1: THE MIDDLE AGES JAN M. ZIOLKOWSKI THE JUGGLER OF NOTRE DAME VOLUME 1 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity Vol. 1: The Middle Ages Jan M. Ziolkowski https://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2018 Jan M. Ziolkowski The text of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text and to make commercial use of the text providing attribution is made to the author(s), but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work. Attribution should include the following information: Jan M. Ziolkowski, The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity. Volume. 1: The Middle Ages. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2018, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0132 Copyright and permissions for the reuse of many of the images included in this publication differ from the above. Copyright and permissions information for images is provided separately in the List of Illustrations. Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://www.openbookpublishers. com/product/697#resources ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-433-6 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-434-3 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-435-0 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-436-7 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-437-4 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0132 Cover image: The jongleur before the Virgin and Child. Miniature, thirteenth century. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Arsenal 3516, fol. 127r. Image courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. All rights reserved. Cover design: Anna Gatti. All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative), PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) and Forest Stewardship Council(r)(FSC(r) certified. Printed in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers (Cambridge, UK) Contents Note to the Reader 3 Preface 5 Overture 5 The Story of a Story 6 From Our Lady’s Tumbler to The Jongleur of Notre Dame 9 1. The Medieval Beginnings of Our Lady’s Tumbler 17 The French Poem 17 The Manuscripts 22 Gautier de Coinci and Anonymity 25 Picardy 33 The Identity of the Poet 34 The Bas-de-Page Miniature: Of Marginal Interest 38 The Genre: Long Story Short 54 The Table of Exempla, in Alphabetical Order 57 The Latin Exemplum 59 The Life of the Fathers 63 True Story: Why the Story Succeeded 69 2. Dancing for God 73 The Tumbler 73 Notre Dame versus Saint Mary 75 The Equivocal Status of Jongleurs 79 Trance Dance 90 Jongleurs of God 96 Holy Fools 99 Fact or Fiction? 102 3. Cistercian Monks and Lay Brothers 117 The Order of Cîteaux 117 Cistercians and the Virgin 125 Mother’s Milk 131 Mary’s Head-Coverings 133 Cistercian Lay Brothers 140 Conversion Therapy 146 The Language of Silence 149 Gym Clothes 153 Sweat Cloth 158 The Weighing of Souls 162 The Latin-Less Lay Brother and Our Lady 166 4. Reformation Endings: A Temporary Vanishing Act 171 What Makes a Story Popular? 171 Walsingham, England’s Nazareth 177 Madonnas of the World Wars 186 Literary Iconoclasm 192 Marian Apparitions 196 5. A Troupe of Sources and Analogues 203 King David’s Dancing 204 The Widow’s Mites 210 The Virgin’s Miraculous Images and Apparitions 216 The Jongleur of Rocamadour 218 The Holy Candle of Arras 225 The Pious Sweat of Monks and Lay Brothers 232 The Love of Statuesque Beauty 235 The Holy Face of Christ and Virgin Saints 237 Notes 247 Notes to Preface 247 Notes to Chapter 1 249 Notes to Chapter 2 267 Notes to Chapter 3 288 Notes to Chapter 4 305 Notes to Chapter 5 315 Bibliography 335 Abbreviations 335 Referenced Works 335 List of Illustrations 377 Index 387 To Michel Zink Art and beauty and poetry are a portion of our mediaeval heritage. Our contribution to the knowledge of those times must be scholarly, first of all, but scholarship must be arrayed, as far as possible, in a pleasing form. —E. K. Rand Mary Garden as Jean the juggler in Jules Massenet’s Le jongleur de Notre Dame. Photograph by Aimé Dupont, 1909. Note to the Reader This volume is the first of a half dozen. Together, the six form The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity. The book as a whole probes one medieval story, its reception in culture from the Franco-Prussian War until today, and the placement of that reception within medieval revivalism as a larger cultural phenomenon. The study has been designed to proceed largely in chronological order, but the progression across the centuries and decades is relieved by thematic chapters that deal with topics not restricted to any single time period. This installment, entitled “The Middle Ages,” deals with the story in its medieval forms, with the nature of chief character as a dancer and lay brother, with the circumstances relating to the Reformation and Counter-Reformation that explain the disappearance of the narrative in the early modern period, and with possible sources and analogues, from the Bible on through saints’ lives. The second in the series, called “Medieval Meets Medievalism,” examines the reemergence of the narrative after its edition in 1873, its translation into English, and its recasting as a short story by Anatole France. Later volumes trace the story of the story down to the present day. The chapters are followed by endnotes. Rather than being numbered, these notes are keyed to words and phrases in the text that are presented in a different color. After the endnotes come the bibliography and illustration credits. In each volume-by- volume index, the names of most people have lifespans, regnal dates, or at least death dates. Significant topics and concepts are also indexed. One comment on the title of the story is in order. In proper French, Notre-Dame has a hyphen when the phrase refers to a building, institution, or place. Notre Dame, without the mark, refers to the woman, the mother of Jesus. In my own prose, the title is given in the form Le jongleur de Notre Dame, but the last two words will be found hyphenated in quotations and bibliographic citations if the original is so punctuated. All translations are mine, unless otherwise specified. Preface Overture If no one can walk backward into the future, can anyone walk forward into the past? Over the last half decade, an unattributed joke in French has made the rounds of the highways and byways on the internet. In it, two musicians, one Corsican and the other Breton, chat together in a club for violinists. Both instrumentalists pride themselves on their talents. The performer from the Mediterranean island brags, “Last week I played a concerto in the cathedral of Ajaccio, in front of six thousand spectators. You won’t believe me, but I acquitted myself so well on my instrument that I moved the statue of the Holy Virgin to bawl her eyes out.” The entertainer from Brittany shakes his head and replies, “As for me, yesterday I played at the cathedral of Brest before an audience of more than ten thousand people. You won’t believe me, but at one point I saw Jesus detach himself from the cross and come to me. I stopped playing. In the dead silence, he said to me, ‘My son, I hope you know the music well.’ Surprised, I responded, ‘Lord, I know the score. Why do you say that to me?’ He answered, ‘Because last week at the cathedral of Ajaccio, a pompous little Corsican played so badly that he caused my mother to wail.’” Jests of this sort may circulate hither and yon for a while, then die out for a bit, only to return from the jocular grave to joyous rebirth and regrowth. Yet few ever prove themselves ready for the big time. Achieving broad visibility and long durability nowadays requires the narrative to be infiltrated somehow into a mass-media blockbuster of one kind or another, such as a chart-topping film or novel. Otherwise the tale will not make much headway when the tempo of life is frenetic and airtime is packed. For all the tenuousness of its current existence, the French joke makes a suggestive point of departure for the book before you.