Las Cantigas De Santa Maria: Thirteenth-Century Popular Culture

LAS CANTIGAS DE SANTA MARIA: THIRTEENTH-CENTURY POPULAR CULTURE AND ACTS OF SUBVERSION Jerry Coats Dissertation Prepared for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS August 2016 APPROVED: Laura Stern, Major Professor Marilyn Morris, Committee Member Elizabeth Hayes Turner, Committee Member Robert Upchurch, Committee Member and Chair of the Department of English David Holdeman, Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences Victor Prybutok, Vice Provost of the Toulouse Graduate School Coats, Jerry B. “Las Cantigas de Santa Maria”: Thirteenth-century Popular Culture and Acts of Subversion. Doctor of Philosophy (History-European History), August 2016, 273 pp., bibliography, 267 titles. Across medieval Europe, the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela in Spain traced a lattice web of popular culture. From the lowest peasant to the greatest king and churchmen, the devout walked pathways that created an economy and contributed to a social and political climate of change. Central to this impulse of piety and wanderlust was the veneration of the Virgin Mary. She was, however, not the iconic Mother of the New Testament whose character, actions, and very name are nearly absent from that first-century compilation of texts. As characterized in the words of popular songs and tales, the mariales, she was a robust saint who performed acts of healing that exceeded those miracles of Jesus described in the Bible. Unafraid and authoritative, she confronted demons and provided judgement that reached beyond the understanding and mercy of medieval codes of law. Holding out the promise of protection from physical and spiritual harm, she attracted denizens of admirers who included poets, minstrels, and troubadours like Nigel of Canterbury, John of Garland, Gonzalo de Berceo, and Gautier de Coinci. They popularized her cult across Europe; pilgrims sang their songs and celebrated the new attributes of Mary. This dissertation uses the greatest collection of these songs, Las Cantigas de Santa Maria compiled in the thirteenth century under the direction of Alfonso X, King of Castile and Leon, to construct the history of a lay piety movement deeply rooted in medieval popular culture. Making the transition from institutionalized, doctrinal saint to popular heroine, Mary becomes a subversive conduit through which culture moved from Latin poetry to vernacular verse and from the monasteries of scholasticism to the popular pathway of Wycliffite reform. Copyright 2016 by Jerry B. Coats ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Chapters 1. INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................1 1.1 Topic Introduction and Chapter Sequence .........................................................1 1.2 The Nature of Sources .......................................................................................9 2. THE VIRGIN MARY AND HER STORIES ....................................................................17 2.1 Chapter Introduction ........................................................................................17 2.2 Mary in the New Testament .............................................................................20 2.3 Mary in the Patristic Period .............................................................................29 2.4 Mary and Poplar Culture in the Middle Ages ..................................................56 2.5 Collections of Marian Tales .............................................................................66 2.6 Conclusion .......................................................................................................75 3. MARY AS PHYSICIAN: HEALING THE SICK AND HEALING THE SINFUL IN MARIAN TALES ..............................................................78 3.1 Chapter Introduction ........................................................................................78 3.2 Traditions of Healing in the Bible ..................................................................82 3.3 Healing in the Marian Tales .............................................................................92 4. THE VIRGIN AND THE DEVIL: MARY AS DEMONSLAYER IN MEDIEVAL CULTURE .............................................................134 4.1 Chapter Introduction ......................................................................................134 4.2 Demons in the First Christian Millennium ....................................................138 4.3 Demons, Mary, and the Cantigas ...................................................................149 4.4 Conclusion .....................................................................................................181 iii 5. MARY AS MEDIATRIX: THE LAW, PILGRIMAGE, AND MARIAN TALES ............................................................................................................183 5.1 Chapter Introduction ......................................................................................183 5.2 Jesus, Mary, and the Law in Early Christian Literature ................................184 5.3 Alfonso X, the Law, and the Great Pilgrim Trail ..........................................191 5.4 The Cantigas and Mary’s Primacy in the Law ...............................................217 5.5 Conclusion .....................................................................................................230 6. CONCLUSION: MARIAN ASCENDENCY AND AN AGE OF ANXIETY ..............234 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...........................................................................................................255 iv CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION And her months were fulfilled, and in the ninth month Anna brought forth. And she said to the midwife: What have I brought forth? And she said: A girl. And said Anna: My soul has been magnified this day. And she laid her down. And the days having been fulfilled, Anna was purified, and gave the breast to the child, and called her name Mary. Protoevangelium of James Ch. 5 1.1 Topic Introduction and Chapter Sequence Near the conclusion of The Paradisio, Dante offers a description of the Virgin Mary through the eyes of his guide, Bernard of Clairvaux: Look now upon the face [Mary’s] that is most like The face of Christ, for only through its brightness Can you prepare your vision to see Him. (XXXII, 83-85)1 This tercet illuminates two elements of Mary’s countenance. First, she is indeed, “most like the face of Christ” in as much as they are mother and son. Second, Mary’s role as intercessor had evolved to such preeminence in Dante’s mind that Christ was simply inaccessible without the help of the Mother. Mary stands as the temporal conduit through which believers might access the heavenly Son. Nor is this assessment of Mary’s value unusual for the Western world of 1300. Dante was not alone in creating parallelisms between Son and Mother. Even until the end of that century no less a firebrand than John Wycliffe, “Morning Star of the Reformation,” clung to Mary’s intercessory role: “It seems to me impossible that we should obtain the reward of Heaven without the help of Mary. There is no sex or age, no rank or position, of anyone in the whole 1 Dante Alighieri, Charles H. Sisson, and David H. Higgins, The Divine Comedy (United Kingdom: Oxford Paperbacks, 1993), 493. 1 human race, which has no need to call for the help of the Holy Virgin.”2 Despite the apparent surety of the Englishman’s statement concerning the primacy of Mary’s role in bringing Christians to God, this view would not universally hold throughout Christianity during the Reformation and beyond. The age of Dante may well represent the height of Mary’s hold on popular religious imagination. The fact that Mary became infused into the popular imagination of the Middle Ages is unquestioned; from the many churches dedicated to her to the works of art and literature that feature this most holy of saints, medieval men and women reveled in Marian veneration. However, works of art and literature tend to represent only the high culture valuation of the Mother of God. This dissertation focuses on the many roles that Mary assumed in popular culture. I construct a history for late thirteenth-century based on texts that otherwise might appear to be divergent in structure, topic, intent, and application. Theoretically, I rely on suggestions supplied by Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt in Practicing New Historicism. The authors lay claim to “the notion of culture as text” in which any work—“text and images”—might provide a cohesive analysis of culture.3 What is particularly important here is their assertion that “in the analysis of the larger cultural field . there are links between high cultural texts.”4 Unfortunately, exploring the world of pop culture frequently places the medieval historian on tenuous ground. In his introduction to a reader titled Medieval Popular Religion, 1000-1500, John Shinners admits that the first question that arises concerning popular religion is “’What isn’t it?’ since religion suffused every aspect of medieval life.” Shinners goes on to explain, “but popular religion typically suggests something else. Too often it has implied 2Gotthard Victor Lechler and Perter Lorimer, John Wycliffe and His English Precursors (United States: Palala Press, 2015), 299. 3 Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 9. 4 Gallagher and Greenblatt, New Historicism, 10. 2 some quaint grab-bag of superstition, magic, and pious hooey clouding the

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