s p E C u L u M

A Journ al of Medie val Studie s

April 2014

Vol. 89, No. 2

published by Cambridge Univer si ty Press

for The Medie val Academ y of America Cambridge, Massachuse tts SpeculumEDITOR Sarah Spence ASSOCIATE EDITOR Jacqueline Brown COPYE D ITO RS Shirley Wernerand Ellen Wert

ASSISTANT EDITOR Paul Lindholm

ASSISTANT TO THE EDITOR Christopher Cole

BOOK REVIEW EDITORS EDITORIAL BOARD Suzanne Conklin Akbari, University of Frederick M. Biggs, University of Toronto Connecticut Claudia Bornholdt, Catholic University of Sheila Bonde, Brown University America Cynthia J. Brown, University of Steven Botterill, University of California, California, Santa Barbara Berkeley Paul M. Cobb, University of Pennsylvania Susan Boynton, Columbia University John J. Contreni, Purdue University Ross Brann, Cornell University Margot Fassler, University of Notre Dame Denise K. Filios, University of Iowa Rachel Fulton Brown, University of Gregory Hays, University of Virginia Chicago Julian Hendrix, Carthage College James Masschaele, Rutgers University Colum Hourihane, Princeton University Conrad Rudolph, University of David F. Johnson, Florida State University California, Riverside F. Donald Logan, Emmanuel College, Wendy Sease, Birmingham University Boston (Emeritus) Joseph Falaky Nagy, University of California, Los Angeles Leonora Neville, University of Wisconsin Philipp W. Rosemann, University of Dallas Carol Symes, University of Illinois William Tronzo, University of California, San Diego "' Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies {ISSN 0038-7134; EISSN 2040-8072) is published quarterly, in January, April, July, and October, by Cambridge University Press for The Medieval Academy of America. For editorial policies and submission instructions see the inside back cover. Unsolicited reviews will not be accepted. Institutional subscriptions, advertising, and rights and permissions: See the last advertising page. Membership in the Medieval Academy of America: See the outside back cover. Photocopying information for users in the U.S.: The Item-Fee Code for the publication {0038-7134/14) indicates that copying for internal or personal use beyond that permitted by Sec. 107 or 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law is authorized for users duly registeredwith the Copyright Clearance Center {CCC), provided that the appropriate remittance per article is paid directly to CCC, 222 Rosewood Dr., Danvers, MA 01923. Specific written permission must be obtained for all other copying. Printed in the U.S.A. Periodicals postage paid at NEW YORK, NEW YORK, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER-Send address changes to Speculum, The Medieval Academy of America, 17 Dunster St., Suite 202, Cambridge, MA 02138. Speculum is printed on acid-freepaper. Copyright© 2014 by The Medieval Academy of America, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Contents

ARTICLES 273 Gold Coinage and Its Use in the Post-Roman West • Rory Naismith 307 "Knowledge Will Be Manifold": Daniel 12.4 and the Idea of Intellectual Progress in the Middle Ages • J. R. Webb 358 Early-Medieval Exegesis of the Song of Songs and the Maternal Language of Clerical Authority • Hannah W. Matis 382 In Praise of the Too-Clement Emperor: The Problem of Forgiveness in the Astronomer's Vita Hludowici imperatoris • Andrew J. Romig 410 Neither Bewitched nor Beguiled: Philip Augustus's Alleged Impotence and Innocent Ill's Response • Constance M. Rousseau

REVIEWS

437 al-Qu4a'1, al-Qa41, A Treasury of Virtues: Sayings, Sermons and Teachings of 'Alt, with the One Hundred Proverbs Attributed to al-Ja�i� (Emily Selove) 438 Angela da Foligno, Liber Lelle: II libro di Angela da Foligno nel testo del codice di Assisi con versione italiana, note critiche e apparato biblico tratto dal codice di Bagnoregio (Michael Robson) 440 As-Vijvers, Anne Margreet W., Re-Making the Margin: The Master of the David Scenes and Flemish Manuscript Painting around 1500 (Lieve De Kesel) 441 Barker, Juliet, Conquest: The English Kingdom of France, 1417-1450 (Craig Taylor) 442 Baudin, Arnaud, Emblematique et pouvoir en Champagne: Les sceaux des comtes de Champagne et de leur entourage (fin XIe-debut XIVe siecle). (Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak) 444 Benfell, V. Stanley, TheBiblical Dante (Mary Watt) 446 Bianchini, Janna, The Queen's Hand: Power and Authority in the Reign of Berenguela of Castile (Nuria Silleras-Fernandez) 447 Bougard, Frarn;ois and Pierre Petitmengin, eds., La bibliotheque de l'abbaye cister­ cienne de Vauluisant: Histoire et inventaires (Diane J. Reilly) 449 Boynton, Susan, Silent Music: Medieval Song and the Construction of History in Eighteenth-Century Spain (Kenneth Kreitner) 450 Brown, Peter, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD (Michele Renee Salzman) Early-Medieval Exegesis of the Song of Songs and the Maternal Language of Clerical Authority

By Hannah W. Matis

In a profound sense Carolingian society was oriented around and shaped by the study and interpretation of the Bible. Biblical interpretation occupied the ener­ gies of the most prominent intellectuals within the Carolingian world, suggesting models for social and political, as well as theological, practice and ensuring divine favor for the Carolingian dynasty. 1 Early-medieval exegetes regarded themselves as guardians not only of the biblical text but also of the entire patristic tradition, which they used to decipher it. Like scripture, however, the patristic tradition was anything but systematic; moreover, it was not comprehensive, and it was further complicated by the vagaries of manuscript survival and the availability of texts. Even when early-medieval exegetes sincerely attempted to be faithful to the works of the Fathers, they often brought a degree of organization to bear in the interpretation of scripture that had not previously existed, and, of course, they were also entirely capable of shaping and reframing the presentation of patristic authorities for their own purposes.2 Like a collection of spolia reconfigured in a new setting, the complex process of selection and abridgment of the patristic tra­ dition, therefore, can reveal the concerns of Carolingian exegetes as they sought

1 Biblical interpretation was, in fact, the "core intellectual discipline of much of the Middle Ages": Thomas E. Burman, "Introduction," in Scripture and Pluralism: Reading the Bible in the Religiously Plural Worlds of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Thomas J. Heffernanand Thomas E. Burman, Studies in the History of Christian Traditions 123 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 2. Modern scholars have increasing respect for the ability of Carolingian exegetes not only as transmitters and shapers of the patristic tradition but also for their role within Carolingian society as a whole. See the essays in The Study of the Bible in the Carolingian Era, ed. Celia Chazelle and Burton Van Name Edwards, Medieval Church Studies 3 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003 ); Biblical Studies in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Claudio Leonardi and Giovanni Orlandi, Millennia Medievale 52 (Florence: SISMEL, 2005); and The Multiple Meaning of Scripture: The Role of Exegesis in Early-Christian and Medieval Culture, ed. Ineke van 't Spijker, Commentaria 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2009). 2 Abigail Firey, "The Letter of the Law: Carolingian Exegetes and the Old Testament," in With Reverence for the Word: Medieval Scriptural Exegesis in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe, Barry D. Walfish, and Joseph W. Goering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 204-24; J. N. Hart-Hasler, "Bede's Use of Patristic Sources: The Transfiguration," in Papers Presented at the Eleventh International Conference on Patristic Studies Held at Oxford, 1991, 5: Latin Authors (other than Augustine and His Opponents), Nachleben of the Fathers, ed. Elizabeth A. Livingstone, Studia Patristica 28 (Leuven: Peeters, 1993), 197-204; Bernice M. Kaczynski, "Bede's Commentaries on Luke and Mark and the Formation of a Patristic Canon," in Anglo-Latin and Its Heritage: Essays in Honour of A. G. Rigg on His 64th Birthday, ed. Sian Echard and Gernot R. Wieland, Publications of the Journal of Medieval Latin 4 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), 17-26; Thomas O'Loughlin, Teachers and Code-Breakers: The Latin Genesis Tradition, 430-800, Instrumenta Patristica 35 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), 2-20; Guy Lobrichon, La Bible au moyen &ge (Paris: Picard, 2003), 71-78. Sometimes this early-medieval reframing of the patristic tradition could lead to subtle shifts in doctrinal emphasis even when a central core of patristic interpretation was preserved intact, as in the ninth-century eucharistic controversy.

Speculum 89/2 (April 2014) doi:10.1017/S0038713413004557 358 The Maternal Language of Clerical Authority 359 of Songs to mold Frankish society according to biblical principles. In this process of sys­ tematization, the allegorical or figural interpretation of scripture could sometimes . Authority act as a tool, linking different chains of images to one another within scripture itself or to particular doctrines or practices within early-medieval society.3 In one particular instance, which I will explore here, the early-medieval com­ mentary tradition on the Song of Songs was able to bring together the rich imagery of the Song with traditional conceptions of the church as mother and Gregorian and shaped by the ideals of pastoral care. The challenge of puzzling out the erotic poetry of the Song occupied the ener- of Songs enabled many early-medieval exegetes, including Bede, Alcuin, Haimo of 1 world, suggesting Auxerre, and Angelomus of Luxeuil, to speculate about the nature of the church md ensuring divine and to emphasize their own position and the range of their authority within it, !garded themselves including their attitudes and duties toward the laity.4 One of the central achieve­ patristic tradition, ments of Bede, I will argue, was the systematization of a particular reading of the patristic tradition .,, Song, adopted and further simplified by the Carolingian exegetes, which depicted ensive, and it was the church and the clergy in maternal terms. One of the consequences was the I the availability of early-medieval exegetes' articulation of a vocabulary to express clerical authority :o be faithful to the through the female body, specifically the maternal female body. I suggest that .tion to bear in the the Carolingian commentary tradition on the Song can be placed in parallel with 1d, of course, they other texts within the Carolingian world: Carolingian writers, to an extent per­ ntation of patristic haps not sufficiently recognized, invoked the church's authority by describing it as a mother and, at the same time, discussed relations between members of the :1 reconfigured in a of the patristic tra - clergy and between an abbot and his monks in maternal terms. This maternal etes as they sought language had a complex range of significations. At times welcoming, maternal, and sincerely tender, in polemical contexts this language could also be employed as a tactic, as Carolingian authors resorted to a vocabulary of "soft power" to :h of the Middle Ages": encourage, or compel, obedience.5 These various types of maternal language occa­ Bible in the Religiously sionally gave added force to similar language in the commentary tradition on the ,nd Thomas E. Burman, Song and culminated with powerful effect in the works of the immensely creative Modern scholars have Paschasius Radbertus, who seemed particularly to relish the vivid imagery of the :ters and shapers of the e. See the essays in The Song of Songs read in this way. 1me Edwards, Medieval In Jesus as Mother Caroline Walker Bynum explored the use of maternal lan­ iddle Ages, ed. Claudio guage as applied to Christ and the figure of the abbot in light of developments in '.005);and The Multiple twelfth-century spirituality, particularly among the Cistercians. For Bynum, Cis­ :ulture, ed. Ineke van 't tercian authors invoked such language in connection with Christ and the office of d Testament," in With ity, and Islam, ed. Jane xford University Press, 3 G. R. Evans, The Language and Logic of the Bible: The Earlier Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cam­ 1sfiguration," in Papers bridge University Press, 1984), 101-22; Mary Carruthers, "Memory, Imagination, and the Interpre­ rd at Oxford, 1991, 5: tation of Scripture in the Middle Ages," in The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the ? Fathers, ed. Elizabeth Bible, ed. Michael Lieb, Emma Mason, and Jonathan Roberts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, : M. Kaczynski, "Bede's 2011), 214-19. mon," in Anglo-Latin 4 The works I will discuss are listed in Friedrich Stegmiiller, Repertorium biblicum medii aevi, ', ed. Sian Echard and 11 vols. (Madrid: Consejo Superior de lnvestigaciones Cientificas, Instituto Francisco Suarez, 1940- nhout: Brepols, 2001), 80), under the following numbers: the commentary of Bede, no. 1610; that of Alcuin, no. 1092; Paris, ;is Tradition, 430-800, Bibliotheque nationale de France, MS lat. 2822, known as the Vox ecclesie, and the fragment, London, La Bible au moyen age British Library, MS Harley 213, nos. 9621 and 10365, respectively; the commentary of Angelomus of ?atristic tradition could Luxeuil, no. 1339; and Paschasius Radbertus's Lamentations commentary, no. 6262. istic interpretation was 5 I have borrowed the term fromJoseph Nye, SoftPower: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs,2004), x.

358 Speculum 89/2 (April 2014) 360 The Maternal Language of Clerical Authority the abbot in part to express their "intense concern and anxiety over authority," their mixed feelings about shouldering pastoral responsibility, and "the need of Cistercian abbots for a new image of authority" to meet the challenges of the day.6 More recently, although she acknowledges the existing "tension between the ideal of withdrawal and the monks' social involvement," Martha Newman has pointed to a more positive, proactive Cistercian conception of pastoral care and service within the church. Cistercian monastic culture, in which the use of interpretation of the Song played a distinctive role, fostered connections between the monastery 7 and the wider community. · While I would not disagree that Bernard and other Cistercian writers represent a shift toward a more affective tone, which is reflected in their writings about the Song of Songs, I would suggest that the early-medieval interpretation of the Song already contained within itself the model of the mater­ nal doctor of the church, a model embracing both the ambivalence toward anq the responsibilities of pastoral care, which Bernard transformed in turn to fit his own particular purposes. 8 Though it was not the main focus of her work, Bynum herself recognized that the use of maternal language and imagery by the Cister­ cians to describe the nature of their authority and their role within the church had considerable patristic and early-medieval precedent.9 Because early-medieval exegesis of the Song of Songs has received little recent critical attention, however, its impact on the later tradition has not been broadly understood, or it has been understood only in light of later, twelfth-century developments and not within its early-medieval historical context.10

6 Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 155-58. For a recent suggestion as to how the emphasis on Bernard's commentary on the Song of Songs has led to a perhaps "unbalanced view of the nature and purpose of twelfth-century monastic spirituality" see David N. Bell, "Twelfth-Century Commentaries on the Song of Songs and the Nature of Monastic Spirituality: A Reassessment," in II Cantico dei cantici nel medioevo, ed. Rossana E. Guglielmetti, Millennio Medievale 76, Atti di Convegno 23 (Florence: SISMEL, 2008), 371-96. 7 Martha Newman, The Boundaries of Charity: Cistercian Culture and Ecclesiastical Reform, 1098- 1180 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 5, 43, 64-66. 8 For a comparative study of Paschasius's mentor, Wala of Corbie, and Bernard of Clairvaux, and of Paschasius's and Bernard's differing approaches to the Benedictine rule and its justification for political action, see Henry Mayr-Harting, "Two Abbots in Politics: Wala of Corbie and Bernard of Clairvaux," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 40 (1990): 217-37, at 229-37. 9 Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 126-28. Bynum primarily juxtaposes the patristic tradition of maternal missionary endeavors, the conquests and forced conversions of Charlemagne, and the far-reaching reforms of the church itself in the ninth century led early-medieval exegetes to emphasize a different set of elements within the patristic tradition of interpreting the Song from those that attracted the Cistercians. When Bede, for example, wrote his commentary on the Song of Songs, he did not mean its readership to be limited to monastic circles­ rather, a monastery in the Northumbrian church was often the center of clerical, as well as monastic, life and maintained intimate connections to surrounding lay society. As a consequence, the importance of pastoral care, broadly defined, looms very11 large in Bede's work and in that of the Carolingians who followed him. Likewise, the very prominence of biblical interpretation within Carolingian society, its connection to the court and to Carolingian imperial ideology, and the general adherence to the Rule of Saint Benedict imposed by Charlemagne and his successors meant that these early-medieval Song commentaries were not "house scholarship" in the way that later works became for the Cistercian writers. Instead, biblical scholarship, like doctrinal controversy, was worked out in an environment of consensus politics presided over and directed by the king; the works of Carolingian biblical scholars implicated, at least in theory, everyone in a position of spiritual responsibility, from the king filtering outward from the court through the bishops to the local clergy. 12 For all that early-medieval exegetes still frequently described the Song of Songs as an epithalamium and still referred to the Song's main characters as the Sponsus and Sponsa, they were interested in the Bride of the Song, not as a depiction of the mystical longing of the individual soul, but as a collective depiction of the forms of life within the church in which they were engaged. Except for one striking instance in Bede's Song commentary, as I will show, the texts I will discuss do not explicitly describe Jesus or God as mother in the way discussed by Bynum and previously outlined by Andre Cabassut. 13 What is

Abendlandes bis um 1200, Schriften der Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft an der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt am Main, Geisteswissenschaftliche Reihe, 1 (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1958), 64-91; Helmut Riedlinger, Die Makellosigkeit der Kirche in den lateinischen Hoheliedkom­ mentaren des Mittelalters, Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters 38/3 (Munster: Aschendorff, 1958), 71-97; and E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 92- 106. In all cases treatment of the early-medieval tradition, and the Carolingian period in particular, is necessarily brief. 11 John Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 80-84; idem, Minsters and Parish Churches: The Local Church in Transition, 950-1200 (Oxford: Oxford University Committee for Archaeology, 1988), 1-2; Christopher N. L. Brooke, Churches and Church­ men in Medieval Europe (London: Hambledon, 1999), 7-10. 12 Janet L. Nelson, "The Lord's Anointed and the People's Choice: Carolingian Royal Ritual," in The Frankish World, 750-900 (London: Hambledon, 1996), 99-131, at 115-20; Carine van Rhijn, Shepherds of the Lord: Priests and Episcopal Statutes in the Carolingian Period, Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 6 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007); Thomas F. X. Noble, "Kings, Clergy, and Dogma: The Settlement of Doctrinal Disputes in the Carolingian World," in Early Medieval Studies in Memory of Patrick Wormald, ed. Stephen Baxter et al. (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 237-52. 13 Andre Cabassut, "Une devotion medievale peu connue: La devotion a 'Jesus Notre Mere,"' Revue d'ascetique et de mystique 25 (1949): 234-45. Speculum 89/2 (April 2014) 362 The Maternal Language of Clerical Authority distinctive about the early-medieval reading of the Song of Songs, I will argue, is the consistency with which the beautiful and sensual figure of the Bride is portrayed as a maternal figure and the extent to which, in turn, within the Car­ olingian church maternal imagery bled over into descriptions of the duties of a single class of senior ecclesiastics, the doctores or teachers. While the Carolingian reform has often been portrayed as either hostile to women's spirituality or, at least, as ominously silent on the subject, the decision by Carolingian authors to take up maternal imagery to convey spiritual authority is worth noting. 14 The ideals of the reform imposed on senior ecclesiastical figures the expectation that they would exert moral authority, more or less gently, on a dizzying variety of fronts.The full complexity of the bishops' role defies easy generalization; as Anna Trumbore Jones has noted for the later Carolingian world, the bishops' "fluid and multi-faceted" power and the sheer range of their responsibilities created tensions and anxieties for the bishops themselves, in an interesting parallel to the twelfth-century situation described by Bynum and Newman.15 On the whole, that the Carolingian doctores could employ a vocabulary of soft power to describe themselves, as well as the church they governed, is suggestive of the breadth and complexity of their ideals, the reach of their ambitions, and their perennial need to reinforce consensus within a common clerical class. The use of maternal imagery likely also reflects a social reality in which a large proportion of monks and clerics had been child oblates, used to finding maternal surrogates in their superiors as well as in the wider institution in which they served. 16 To envision the church as a maternal figure was hardly new even in the early­ medieval period. In the Latin West, the image of the church as mother can be found in the writings of the apostle Paul and is scattered throughout patris­ tic authorities such as Tertullian, Cyprian, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine, with Augustine in particular frequently describing the church as a mother .17 At

14 Suzanne Fonay Wemple, Women in Frankish Society: Marriage and the Cloister, 500 to 900 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 143-48; Donald Hochstetler, A Conflict of Traditions: Women in Religion in the Early Middle Ages, 500-840 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1992), 187-99; Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, Forgetful of Their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society, 500-1100 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 4-5, 107-18. 15 Anna Trumbore Jones, Noble Lord, Good Shepherd: Episcopal Power and Piety in Aquitaine, 877-1050, Brill's Series on the Early Middle Ages 17 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 219-28. 16 Mayke de Jong, In Samuel's Image: Child Oblation in the Early Medieval West, Brill's Studies .. in Intellectual History 12 (Leiden: Brill, 1996). De Jong notes the depth of the bitterness and the sense of betrayal on display between Hrabanus Maurus and the errant Gottschalk when this normally intimate, even familial relationship went sour (77-91). 17 "Cette Eglise-Epouse est Mere.... Cette maternite chaste et feconde de l'Eglise, chere deja aux Peres, est un theme frequemrnent evoque a notre epoque": Yves Congar, L'ecclesiologie du haut moyen-age (Paris: Cerf, 1968), 80-81. "Inter carnis alimenta, benedicti martyres designati, quae uobis et domina mater ecclesia de uberibus suis et singuli fratres de opibus suis propriis in carcerem subministrant, capite aliquid et a nobis quod faciat ad spiritum quoque educandum": Tertullian, Ad martyras, ed.E. Dekkers, in CCSL 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1954), chap.1, lines 2-4."Viuit enim unicus pater noster Deus et mater ecclesia, et neque mortui sumus, qui Dea uiuimus, neque mortuos sepelimus, quia et illi uiuunt in Christo": idem, De monogamia, ed.E. Dekkers, in CCSL 2/2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1954 ), chap.7, lines 64-66. "Sic et ecclesia, Domini luce perfusa, per orbem totum radios suos porrigit, unum tamen lumen est quad ubique diffunditur nee unitas corporis separatur; ramos suos in uniuersam terram copia ubertatis extendit; profluentes largiter riuos latius spandit, unum tamen caput est et origo Speculum

89/2 (April 2014) The Maternal Language of Clerical Authority 363 the same time, scripture itself had established a precedent for describing new believers as infants not ready for solid food, only for the milk of the essen­ tials of the faith. 18 In part as a tactic against Pelagianism, Augustine had argued throughout his polemical works in defense of the needs of still-immature believers, the paruuli. In a specifically exegetical sense, the paruuli were those Christians still not capable of understanding the "spiritual," or allegorical, interpretation of scripture; ironically, such a limitation had once been Augustine's criticism of the Manichaeans in particular. More generally, paruuli was also a word for the entire class of catechumens, and Roland Teske has suggested that, for Augustine, paruuli as a term came to signify the majority of the Christian community, with their continued need for direction and divine grace.19 By extension, in the patristic period and beyond, to provide milk for the paruuli was understood to be one of the duties of the scriptural exegete. Gregory the Great envisioned contemplation and pastoral care as integral parts of a dual spiritual ideal; conventionally com­ pared to Rachel and Leah, the two wives of the patriarch Jacob, if contemplation was inherently more desirable, pastoral care was ultimately more productive.20 Understood in opposition to "barren" contemplation, therefore, pastoral care for early-medieval theologians was often depicted through the language of fertility, fecundity, and nursing, and this maternal language could sometimes be applied to those charged with its execution. A distinctive early-medieval reading of the Song of Songs would grow out of this Gregorian conception of pastoral care, encouraged by the lack of one complete, authoritative patristic commentary on the Song of Songs and the concerns of the exegetes themselves. For its early-medieval commentators, the Song was not yet the exhaustively glossed text it would become in the twelfth century and later. In the third century, Origen had pioneered the technique of reading the Song of Songs allegorically, understanding the Bridegroom as Christ and the Bride, alternately, as the Church or the individual soul. Origen's commentary in Jerome's and Rufinus's translations, however, was both fragmentary and a paraphrase of the original Greek; complete Latin commentaries on the Song of Songs, such as those of Ambrose and Apponius, and even the small collection of homilies of Gregory the

una, et una mater fecunditatis successibus copiosa: illius fetu nascimur, illius lacte nutrimur, spiritu eius animamur": Cyprian of Carthage, De ecclesiae catholicae unitate, ed. M. Bevenot, in CCSL 3 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1972), chap. 5, lines 136-42. See also Joseph C. Plumpe, Mater ecclesia: An "Inquiry into the Concept of the Church as Mother in Early Christianity (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1943 ). 181 Cor. 3.2, Heb. 5.12-13, 1 Pet. 2.2. 19 Roland Teske, "A Decisive Admonition for St. Augustine?" Augustinian Studies 19 (1988): 85- 91; idem, "Homo spiritualis in the Confessions of St. Augustine," in Augustine: From Rhetor to Theologian, ed. Joanne McWilliam (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1992), 70-71; idem, Augustine of Hippo: Philosopher, Exegete, and Theologian: A Second Collection of Essays (Milwau­ kee: Marquette University Press, 2009), 111-44. 2° For example, see Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, ed. M. Adriaen, CCSL 143 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1978), 6.37, lines 183-92; Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Hiezechihelem prophetam, ed. M. Adriaen, CCSL 142 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1971), 2.2, lines 239-59. Cf. Suzanne LaVere, "From Contemplation to Action: The Role of the Active Life in the Glossa ordinaria on the Song of Songs," Speculum 82 (2007): 54-69, at 54-55. For Bernard of Clairvaux's use of this "mixed" model see Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 125-27. Speculum 89/2 (April 2014) 364 The Maternal Language of Clerical Authority Great, were not widely circulated in the early Middle Ages. The first complete and systematic commentary on the Song of Songs of any length in the early-medieval West was that of the Venerable Bede. Bede, typically, while acknowledging that he was "following in the footsteps of the Fathers," was nevertheless quite capable of making tracks of his own for a good pedagogical cause.21 While Bede appears to have possessed a rare complete copy of Apponius's commentary on the Song of Songs, his use of it was subtle; Apponius seems to have influenced Bede's overall scheme for the commentary rather than his interpretation of particular passages. 22 Of far more direct impact on Bede was Gregory the Great's piecemeal treatment of individual images from the Song over the course of his writings, particularly in the Moralia in lob and the Homilies on Ezekiel. These would be so important to Bede, who did not, in fact, possess Gregory's homilies on the Song of Songs, that he would devote the entirety of the last book of his commentary to compiling. a small florilegium of Song-related extracts, most of which are drawn from these two works.23 Written probably around 716, Bede's Song commentary displays many of the obsessions that would come to dominate his later "reforming" exegesis: a church encompassing and incorporating a variety of peoples, staffed by a highly trained class of preaching doctores learned in scriptural interpretation and modeled after the Levitical priesthood of the Old Testament.24 Among other things, Bede's commentary pushed to the forefront the ecclesiological reading of the Song as the normative, traditional reading of the text. Bede's commentary included a summary of his interpretation in the form of a list of capitula and another list specifying which character in the Song was speaking at any particular time;25 throughout the commentary Bede employed a formidable barrage of scriptural

21 For Bede's importance see Riedlinger, Die Makellosigkeit, 71-88. 22 Mary Prentice Lillie Barrows, "Bede's Allegorical Exposition of the Canticle of Canticles: A Study in Early Medieval Allegorical Exegesis" (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1962), 97-98; Arthur Holder, "The Patristic Sources of Bede's Commentary," Studia patristica 34 (2001): 370-75; idem, "The Anti-Pelagian Character of Bede's Commentary on the Song of Songs," in Biblical Studies in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Leonardi and Orlandi, 94-9 5. 23 Bede, In Cantica canticorum libri VI, ed. D. Hurst, in CCSL 119B (Turnhout: Brepols, 1983), book 6, lines 1-23. 24 Alan Thacker, "Bede's Ideal of Reform," in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society: Studies Presented to]. M. Wallace-Hadrill, ed. Patrick Wormald, Donald Bullough, and Roger Collins (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1983), 130-53; Scott DeGregorio, '"Nostrorum socordiam temporum': The Reforming Impulse of Bede's Later Exegesis," Early Medieval Europell (2002): 107-22; idem, "Bede's In Ezram et Neemiam and the Reform of the Northumbrian Church," Speculum 79 (2004): 1-25; Eric Jay Del Giacco, "Exegesis and Sermon: A Comparison of Bede's Commentary and Homilies on Luke," Medieval Sermon Studies 50 (2006): 9-28; Gerald Bonner, "Bede: Scholar and Spiritual Teacher," in Northumbria's Golden Age, ed. Jane Hawkes and Susan Mills (Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1999), 365-70, at 365; Judith McClure, "Bede's Notes on Genesis and the Training of the Anglo­ Saxon Clergy," in The Bible in the Medieval World: Essays in Honour of Beryl Smalley, ed. Katherine Walsh and Diana Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 17-30; Roger Ray, "Who Did Bede Think He Was?" in Innovation and Tradition in the Writings of the Venerable Bede, ed. Scott DeGregorio (Morgantown: University of West Virginia Press, 2006), 11-35. 25 Bede, In Cantica, pp. 181-89. Much of this is a condensed version of Bede's particular interpre­ tation of the Song. As Mary Dove has noted, "it must be admitted that if the 'chapters' are read by themselves, in isolation from the commentary, their relationship to the text of the Song of Songs is Speculum 89/2 (April 2014) The Maternal Language of Clerical Authority 365 cross-references to bolster his interpretation. Bede's focus throughout is on the ever-advancing work of the church, maturing from the Old Testament figure of Synagoga into the full-fledged Bride of Christ and encompassing the work of the apostles down to the work of present-day doctores and praedicatores. Uniting disparate passages in one complete and systematic reading, Bede's Song commentary ensured that there would be a consistent ecclesiological interpretation of the vivid images and metaphors of the Song. If anything, Bede demystified the text: through his interpretation, followed by the numerous exegetes in the next century who tackled the Song, this voluptuous collection of poetry was transmuted into a fund of images to describe an institution and a textual community within which the increasingly vocal, self-conscious elite of the Carolingian reform could reflect on their own place. Early-medieval exegetes of the Song of Songs are especially noteworthy, I would argue, in their specific application of maternal language and imagery, including images of the female body, to a group of the male spiritual elite in particular. The commentary tradition on the Song refers to this spiritual elite as the doctores of the church, and sometimes her praedicatores, and they are not defined with much greater specificity than that. In the Ecclesiastical History Bede applies the term doctotes to monks and bishops indiscriminately, and it may well be that it was intended as a broad category to include all those responsible for some level of instruction and pastoral care. In the early-medieval commentary tradition on the Song, the central, basic distinction made by the exegetes is between the doctores and the paruuli. This is projected, as it were, onto the female body of the Bride, with the exegetes visualizing the life of the church in terms of the Bride's individual features, likened in the biblical text to a variety of fruit, flowers, or animals. For example, in the Song, the Bride's eyes are compared alternately to doves and to the fish pools of Heshbon. For Bede, the Bride's eyes represent her spiritual perception (sensus spiritalium); alternately, he suggests, "the preachers of the holy church can also be understood in the eyes of the Bride, through which she gazes on the mysteries of heavenly secrets, which the general crowd of believers does not know. "26 Like the fish pools of Heshbon, however, which are productive sources of food, Bede notes that the doctores have a responsibility to communicate what they know, "so that what they learn in secret," Bede the teacher admonishes, "they might be able to proclaim in the open, and the things that they perceive in private meditation they might supply through teaching as the plain nourishment of the holy church. "27 Similarly, for Alcuin, Haimo, and Angelomus, the eyes of the Bride represent the spiritual sense in general and, in particular, the class of people who possess it,

highly obscure": The "Glossa ordinaria" on the Song of Songs, trans. Mary Dove (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2004 ), xvii. 26 "Possunt autem in oculis sponsae etiam praedicatores intellegi sanctae ecclesiae per quos cae­ lestium archana secretorum quae generalis credentium turba nequit aspicit": Bede, In Cantica 2.4, lines 45-47. 27 "Idem sancti praedicatores qui ab alimento uerbi calla erant sponsae comparati designantur etiam in oculis ab inspectione archanorum quae in occulto discunt ipsi ut possint in aperto proloqui et per ea quae secreta meditatione perceperunt manifestum sanctae ecclesiae nutrimentum docendo ministrent": Bede, In Cantica 4. 7, lines 246-50. Speculum 89/2 (April 2014) 366 The Maternal Language of Clerical Authority who, propter simplicitatem, have a clearer understanding of heavenly realities.28 The anonymous author of the Carolingian commentary known as the Vax ecclesie notes: "The eyes, the preachers of the holy church, are so called on account of their humility and innocence. "29 Similarly, the neck of the Bride, adorned with ornaments of gold and silver and compared to a tower hung with battlements, also represented the doctores. Gregory the Great had simply compared the neck of the Bride to the activity of preaching, with the gold and silver of her jewelry representing spiritual knowledge and holy eloquence, respectively. Bede, Alcuin, Haimo, and Angelomus are faithful to this interpretation, but they are also more institutionally precise that it should be the "preachers" who embody the voice of the church.30 The tower-and-shields metaphor suggested the unified, even fortified structure of the church generally but also the role of the preachers in speaking the uerbum aedificationisto the rude$.31 For Alcuin, the effect was to make the church "everywhere impregnable," and both he and Haimo of Auxerre seem to have been particularly sensitive to the threat of heresy. Within the church, however, the neck of the Bride also signified the mediative role of the doctores, linking the head, Christ, with the remaining members of his-and her-body in a very literal and tangible sense. Bede notes that the ministry of the doctores is the conduit by which the alimenta uitae enter the body; similarly, for Haimo, the voice of the preacher to its hearers is like the throat, which, "having taken in the sustenance of the word, conveys it to nourish the body. "32 If the doctores were the tower-like neck of the Bride, the church, in that they defended her against heresy, they were also her nose, able to sniff out and to detect bad doctrine. According to Bede, following Gregory the Great, "now, on account of their most wholesome discretion, which was proved by the Fathers to be the mother of the virtues, they [the doctores] are also signifiedin her nose, because, as if, evidently, by the faculty of smell, they are qualified to discern more fully than the rest those who give off the lethal stench of depravity from those actions or

28 Alcuin , Compendium in Canticum canticorum, in Commento al Cantico dei cantici con i com­ menti anonymi Vox ecclesie, Vox antique ecclesie, ed. Rossana E. Guglielmetti, Millennia Medievale 53, Testi 13 (Florence: SISMEL, 2004), 135 and 166; Haimo of Auxerre, Commentarium in Cantica canticorum, PL 117:332C; Angelomus of Luxeuil, Enarrationes in Cantica canticorum, PL 115:584A and 615B. Jerome had used similar language to describe the church, but significantly, her likeness to "" - the pure whiteness of a dove referred not to the doctores but to the "simplicitudinem multitudinis in ea credentium": "In Sophoniam," in Commentarii in prophetas minores, ed. M. Adriaen, CCSL 76A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1970), chap. 3, line 89. 29 "Oculi eclesie sancti predicatores propter humilitatem atque innocentiam ita appellat": Vox ecclesie, in Commento al Cantico dei cantici, ed. Guglielmetti, 204. 3° Cf. Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Hiezechihelem 2.3, lines 448-53; Alcuin, Compendium, 137 and 166; Haimo, Commentarium, 320D and 343D-344A; Angelomus, Enarrationes, 579A. 31 "Per collum namque et cibos traicimus in corpus reficiendum et uerba proferimus quibus cordis nostri secreta proximis declaremus. Vnde recte in collo ecclesiae doctorum persona designatur qui et uerbo aedificationis rudes instituunt et eiusdem institutionis officio cibum salutis in commissa sibi sanctae ecclesiae membra transmittunt": Bede, In Cantica 1.1, lines 489-94. 32 "Sed et hoc quad collum in media positum capiti nectit corpus apte conuenit eis quorum ministerio coniungitur ecclesia Christo qui huic alimenta uitae ab ipso domino percepta tradiderunt": Bede, In Cantica 2.4, lines 209-12; Haimo, Commentarium, 317B and 320D.

Speculum

89/2 (April 2014) ' The Maternal Language of Clerical Authority 367 words from which the good odor of Christ emanates."33 Alcuin and Haimo both repeat the comparison of the doctores to the Bride's nose; however, for Alcuin, following Bede, it is clearly the discretion of the doctores that matters, while for Haimo and Angelomus, quoting Gregory, the particular sort of depravity the doctores should detect is, specifically, "the lethal stench of the heretical corpse. "34 When, one might well ask, does one find the general populace figured within the body of the Bride? In truth, not often, perhaps because the Song of Songs was so carefully protected as a text not intended for general consumption. One exception to this tunnel vision, however, is the closely juxtaposed comparison of the Bride's hair, like a flock of goats, with her teeth, white as sheep newly come from the washing, which further suggested to early-medieval exegetes the distinction between the multitude of believers and the class of perfectiores, the doctores.35 Because of Christ's parable of the sheep and the goats, goats' hair in .. the Song had a rather ambivalent quality to most exegetes, which they explained by saying that most believers, like an unruly head of hair, were more fragile and less disciplined, particularly when compared with the purity, hardness, and impeccable order of the doctores.36 As with the throat of the Bride, her teeth were also responsible for the patient breaking down of difficult doctrines into­ essentially-baby food, "because," according to Bede, "they prepare the bread of the word of God for her little ones, who are not able to chew it. "37 For Alcuin, Haimo, and Angelomus, this particularly meant explicating scripture. The anonymous author of the Vox ecclesie notes: "It calls the teeth of the church his preachers, who pass along those things which they take up by breaking them down into the body of Christ. " 38 It is worth pondering, in an era before processed baby food, how powerful and maternal the image of chewing a small child's food for him or her would have been, what a chord it would have struck-and have been meant to strike-in its readers, and how intimate and embodied this language would have seemed in speaking about a mandarin caste of male clergy, monks, and scriptural exegetes. Similarly, the scarlet lips of the Bride, dripping with honey and milk, represent, respectively, the eloquence of the doctores and their abilities to nourish the paruuli with simple doctrine. 39

33 "Nunc autem etiam causa saluberrimae discretionis quae a patribus mater esse uirtutum probatur designantur in naso quia nimirum quasi per olfaciendi officium ceteris amplius dinoscere sufficiunt in quibus actibus siue sermonibus bonus odor Christi flagret qui uero letiferum prauitatis exhalent fetorem": Bede, In Cantica 4.7, lines 296-300. 34 Gregory the Great, Moralia in lob 31.4, lines 6-12; Haimo, Commentarium, 344B-C; Angelomus, Enarrationes, 621 C-D. 35 Augustine famously found the image delightful, outlining for it an ecclesiological interpretation (perhaps not original to him) that Gregory and others would adopt: De doctrina Christiana, ed. J. Martin, CCSL 32 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1962), 2.6, lines 15-29. 36 Cf. Haimo, Commentarium, 315C-D. 37 "Dentes sunt ecclesiae quia panem uerbi Dei paruulis illius ad quern manducandum ipsi non sufficiunt parant": Bede, In Cantica 2.4, lines 97-99. 38 "Dentes eclesie predicatores eius Vulgate, the first set of breasts to be admired in the Song of Songs were not, in fact, those of the Bride but those of Christ the Bridegroom: ubera tua meliora vino (Song of Sol. 1.1).41 What was an early-medieval exegete to make of the image of a Christ with breasts, in a sense a female Christ? Bede, never daunted, had compiled every example he could find in which Christ used feminine language to talk about himself, such as the lament over Jerusalem, in which Christ likened himself to a mother hen longing to gather her chicks under her wings, or Paul's comparison of himself to a woman in labor. "But the Spouse himself, our Lord, that is, did not hesitate to apply to himself the figure of the female sex," Bede remarks, moving swiftly on. The milk of Christ is sweeter than the old wine of the Old Testament, Bede notes, citing both the passages from Paul's letter to the Corinthians and 1 Peter. Taking up Gregory the Great's comparison from the Moralia in Job of the breasts of the Bride to the doctores of the church, Bede had a concise formulation to open his commentary by which the doctores, the breasts of the Bride, were shown to imitate in function the breasts of Christ, nurturing immature believers. 42 As Arthur Holder has noted, Carolingian exegetes who worked with the Song lacked Bede's quiet bravado in presenting an image of a female Christ, or at least a Christ with feminine attributes; it is one of the most striking instances, in fact, where they do not faithfully follow the lead of magister Beda.43 With the image of the doctores as the breasts of the church, however, the Carolingian exegetes readily concurred, and they repeated this particular interpretation of the breasts of the Bride in their commentaries whenever the figure appears. So, what did it mean for a Carolingian priest or monk to imagine himself as a breast of the church? More than a passing comparison, the image recurs several times throughout the Song, inextricably tied by these exegetes not only to the doctores but to the person of Christ from the very opening of the text. In general, these were images meant to be pored over, meditated upon, repeatedly "chewed" . - 4° For a rich exploration in the later Middle Ages of the language of nursing and lactation, both by Christ and the Virgin Mary, and its deep connection to pastoral care, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 269-76, 282-94. 41 For a modern rendering of the passage see Paul J. Griffiths, Song of Songs (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2011), 6-7, 10. 42 "Sed nee ipse sponsus, id est dominus noster, sexus feminei figuram in se transferre refugit cum per Esaiam dicit: Numquid ego qui alias parere facio ipse non pariam, dicit dominus, si ego qui generationem ceteris tribuo sterilis era? et iterum: Quo modo si cui mater blanditur ita ego consolabor uos; et in euangelio ad ciuitatem incredulam: Quoties uolui congregare filios tuos quemadmodum gallina congregat pullos suos sub alas, et noluisti": Bede, In Cantica 1.1, lines 47-135, at lines 75-82. 43 Arthur Holder, "The Feminine Christ in Bede's Biblical Commentaries," in Bede le Venerable entre tradition et posterite, ed. Stephane Lebecq, Michel Perrin, and Olivier Szerwiniack, Collection "Histoire de l'Europe du Nord-Ouest" 34 (Villeneuve d'Ascq: CEGES, 2005), 117. Speculum 89/2 (April 2014) The Maternal Language of Clerical Authority 369 by the doctores. Like the image of the Bride's teeth, it is strikingly intimate. For Alcuin, the doctores are compared to a breast "for the sake of the consolation of the weak and the sustenance of the childish"; the doctores are to be the paedagogi paruulorum meorum.44 Milk he elsewhere compares to the eruditio paruulorum, while honey signifies the fortior doctrina perfectorum.45 Similarly, for Haimo the milk of the doctores is simplex doctrina for the simplices fide/es and the infirmi auditores, while the honey stands for the arcana et intima of scripture.46 Angelomus of Luxeuil, quoting Apponius, mentions the need for believers to be nourished on the lac triforme of the Trinity. Angelomus's Enarrationes in Cantica canticorum was an ambitious effort to provide exalted, meditative reflections on particular aspects of the Song for Louis the Pious's son Lothar and was, as a consequence, perhaps less concerned with pastoral care per se than Bede or Alcuin had been. Although Angelomus includes the traditional interpretation of . the breasts of the church as the doctores, for him the dichotomy between the inner spiritual life and active charity was equally important, and so the breasts of the church are, more broadly, those holy men who draw their teaching ex intimis to nourish exterius.47 But the same oppositions still apply: inner, deeper meaning and outward rudimenta; mature and immature Christians; contemplation and active charity; the few and the many. In all of these images, the eroticism inherent in the Song's descriptions of the Bride's neck, lips, and breasts has been ignored or cut away. But there is more than censorship at work here: not simply suppression, but substitution, an alteration of the meaning of these figures. Denuded of all sexual overtones, the power of the images lies instead in their tenderness, the promise of safety and nourishment, and the juxtaposition of the maturity of the Bride (and that of the doctores) with the dependence of the little ones, the daughters of Jerusalem or the paruuli, who surround her and are in some sense under her care. So safe, benign, and intimate do these images feel, in fact, that it is easy to forget how ambitious they actually are. To aspire to be the eyes, the nose, the lips, the teeth, the neck, and the breasts of the church is a fairly formidable program of clerical activity with an almost endless scope. Moreover, not only does it exclude the laity from the church's body from the chest up, as it were, but the easy equation of the doctores with these parts of the church's body in effect claims that the doctores are the only eyes, nose, teeth, and breasts that the church possesses. According to this network of images, the doctores become the exclusive conduit by which nourishment can both enter and exit the body, in the form of milk. In other images in the Song, the doctores' supervisory, monitory role is even more directly expressed: they are the

44 "Item in mammae nomine sancti doctores propter consolationem infirmorum et parvulorum sustentationem, quae lacte exprimitur": Alcuin, Compendium, 140. 45 "In lacte eruditio parvulorum, in melle fortior doctrina perfectorum signatur": Alcuin, Com­ pendium, 141. 46 "Lac parvulis convenit, ideoque per lac designatur simplex doctrina, qua initium credentium imbuitur; mel vero, quad de rare coeli confici creditur, coelestem et spiritualem doctrinam significat, quae perfectis et instructis convenit. Sub lingua ergo Ecclesiae mel et lac est, quia aliquando coelestia mysteria perfectis, aliquando rudibus plana et simplicia annuntiant": Haimo, Commentarium, 321C. 47 Angelomus, Enarrationes, 566D, 567C, 571A-B. Speculum 89/2 (April 2014) 370 The Maternal Language of Clerical Authority gatekeepers, the uigiles who, in the text of the Song, guide and, on one occasion, even beat the hapless and wandering Bride; likewise, they are the armed ranks of mighty men standing, swords drawn, about the lectulus-the litter or palanquin of King Solomon-and are also the keepers of the Bride's vineyard and the redolent cedar beams supporting the house of the Bride and Bridegroom. The maternal imagery of the Song of Songs emphasizes the nutritive aspects of the ministry of the doctores, but it should not be separated from the broader historical context of the Carolingian reform and the claims of an expansive, even aggressive clerical class. Alongside the reading of the Song of Songs systematized by the early-medieval exegetes, maternal language could also be used on occasion to describe power relations within the ranks of the doctores themselves. Moreover, maternal lan­ guage could be used as a tactic by Carolingian authors to accompany reform, µis­ arming potential protest and reinforcing consensus. Martin Claussen has drawn attention to Chrodegang of Metz's very deliberate description of the church as a mother in the Regula canonicorum: "Thus, the appellation mother church-mater ecclesia-is so striking here.It is used to unite the various alienated and marginal­ ized groups Chrodegang has enlisted into a new family.... The choice of words and themes is purposeful, and relates to his attempts at community creation." 48 While clerical categories remained nebulous to a certain extent in this period, the Carolingian reform saw the formation for the first time of metropolitan arch­ bishoprics and, more broadly, the elaboration and crystallization of the church's institutional structure.49 Eric Palazzo has drawn attention to the mid-ninth cen­ tury as a "turning point" in which bishops "progressively found their place in the ecclesiastical system established by the temporal power," while Steffen Patzold has noted the particular importance of the 829 Synod of Paris in helping to form a new, increasingly aggressive "Paris model" of Carolingian episcopal activity.50 In a recent study, Megan McLaughlin has argued that, beginning in the ninth cen­ tury, metropolitan bishops both clarified and strengthened their control over their suffragans and that, at the same time, these claims were expressed using maternal imagery, such that "metropolitan authority ha[d] come to be seen as related to

48 M. A. Claussen, The Reform of the Frankish Church: Chrodegang of Metz and the "Regula canonicorum" in the Eighth Century, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 4th ser., 61 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 101-2. 49 Marios Costambeys, Matthew Innes, and Simon MacLean, The Carolingian World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 85, 95-96, 121-22; Roger Reynolds, "The Organisation, Law, and Liturgy of the Western Church, 700-900," in The New Cambridge Medieval History, 2, ed. Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 587-621; Mayke de Jong, "Carolingian Monasticism: The Power of Prayer," in The New Cambridge Medieval History, 2, ed. McKitterick, 627-29; Roger Reynolds, "Clerics in the Early Middle Ages: Hierarchies and Functions," in Clerics in the Early Middle Ages: Hierarchy and Image, Collected Studies Series 669 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999), item 1, 25-31. 50 Eric Palazzo, "The Image of the Bishop in the Middle Ages," in The Bishop Reformed: Studies of Episcopal Power and Culture in the Central Middle Ages, ed. John S. Ott and Anna Trumbore Jones (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 86-91, at 87; Steffen Patzold, Episcopus: Wissen uber Bischofe im Frankenreich des spaten 8. bis fruhen 10. ]ahrhunderts, Mittelalter-Forschungen 25 (Ostfildern: Jan Thorbeke, 2008), 135-84. Speculum 89/2 (April 2014) The Maternal Language of Clerical Authority 371 maternal authority," with cathedral churches, likewise, increasingly known as the "mother church" of their diocese.51 In this vein, a bishop could express his outrage over heretical teaching in terms of the heretic's rejection of the wholesome nourishment provided by the doc­ tores, or conversely, he could encourage a wayward son to return to the church's welcoming maternal embrace. In Beatus of Liebana's anti-Adoptionist work, Ad­ versus Elipandum, written around 785, Beatus explains that, in her infancy, the early church was the paruula, or "little sister," of the Song, whose breasts had not yet grown: "She could not offer the breasts of preaching to her weak hearers.... But in this age, the Lord says, 'The maidens have loved you' (Song of Sol. 1.2). In­ deed, all the church, which were made one and catholic, are called maidens ... in age of suitable mind for spiritual fecundity." 52 Also writing to Elipandus after the Council of Frankfurt in 794, Charlemagne (or those doctores writing on his . behalf) took up ecclesiological imagery circulated in the exegesis of the Song of Songs, proffering both carrot and stick, underscoring the church's authority in maternal terms, exhorting Elipandus to return to the fold, and reminding him of the terrifyingly unified and fortified appearance of the church to her enemies: The Christian faith rejoices to extend its twofold wings, namely, of divine and fraternal charity, throughout the broad expanses of the lands, so that she might nourish with maternal devotion those whom she had borne in holy baptism. And the greatest joy of holy mother church is the uniting of her sons, so that they might be joined together as one who were redeemed by one, since that same redeemer, our lord Jesus Christ, says, "Holy Father, those you have given to me, preserve them in your name, so that they all may be one, just as we are one" (John 17.22). Wherefore, in the Song of Songs, it is said concerning the holy church: "Terrible as the well-ordered battle line of an army" (Song of Sol. 6.3 ). The collected placement of an army and the united strength of warriors usually strike fear into their enemies: thus the peaceful union of the sons of holy mother church within the walls of the catholic faith, indeed, is quite terrifying to the powers of the air and stands thoroughly impenetrable to the fiery arrows of wicked treachery, just as he who was both the truest preacher to the nations and the boldest warrior on behalf

Sex, Gender, and Episcopal Authority in an Age of Reform, 1000-1122

51 Megan McLaughlin, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 139-141. McLaughlin argues that this widespread use of maternal imagery would continue to be traditional forDark the Age rest Bodies:of the Middle Gender Ages and but Monastic would, Practicefrom 1050 in onwards,the Early beMedieval gradually West displaced by "the language of paternity." For recent studies of masculinity in Moralitythe Carolingian and Masculinity world see in Lyndathe Carolingian Coon, Empire, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); and Rachel Stone, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 4th ser., 81 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 52 "Hine enim de illa dicitur: Soror nostra paruula est et ubera non habet, quia nimirum sancta eglesia priusquam proficeret per incrementa uirtutis, infirmis quibusque auditoribus praebere non potuit ubera praedicationis. Adulta uero eclesia dicitur, quando Dei Verba copulata, repleta sancto Spiritu per praedicationis misterium in filiorum conceptione fetatur, quia quos exortando concipit conuertendo parit. De hanc eius aetate Domino dicitur: Adulescentulae dilexerunt te. Vniuersae quippe eclesiae, quae unam catholicam faciunt, adulescentulae uocantur; non iam uetustae per culpam, sed nobellae per gratiam; non senio steriles, sed aetate mentis ad spiritualem congruae fecunditatem. Tune ergo cum in diebus illis eclesia quasi quodam senio deuilitata per praedicationeAdversus Elipandum filiosparere libri non duo, ualet, reminiscitur fecunditatis antiquae, dicens illud lob uersiculum: Sicut fui in diebus adulescentiae meae, quando secreto Deus erat in tabernaculo meo": Beatus of Liebana, ed. Bengt Lofstedt, CCCM 59 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1984), 1.131, lines 3892-3907.Speculum 89/2 (April 2014) The Maternal Language of Clerical Authority of the church taught, saying, "Taking up in all things the shield of faith, with which you 372will be able to extinguish all the fiery darts of the most wicked one" (Eph. 6.16) and to escape this wicked world in unencumbered flightto heavenly things.53 Likewise writing against Elipandus, Paulinus of Aquileia details how the good pastor leads back the erring sheep "until, having· been taken up into the lap of our mother, the church, in the embrace of love, resting sweetly in the tranquil peace of faith, they might suck the lavish breasts of the goodness of God. "54 Similarly, in the Opus Caroli regis contra synodum, also called the Libri Carolini, Theodulf of Orleans excoriates the Byzantine Greeks for their supposed failure to understand scripture concerning images. Theodulf begins his masterpiece with an ornate preface juxtaposing the church as mother against the incursions of heretics and schismatics: Our mother the church, redeemed by the most precious blood of her spouse, Christ, and washed by the regeneration of the life-giving flood [of baptism], satisfied by the saving food of his body and the draft of his blood, and anointed by the oil of nectar-like chrism, and spread throughout the entire earth in peace, undergoes wars, sometimes foreign and sometimes domestic, at times is shaken by the incursions of outsiders, at times is struck by the rebellions of citizens. Sometimes, indeed, she is assaulted by the molestations of unbelievers or heretics; or, in fact, at other times she is disturbed by the rivalries of schismatics or the proud.55 In writing to Hincmar of Laon, Hincmar of Reims enjoins his rebel nephew "to come back humbly and diligently and obediently to Reims, as to a mother,

53 "Gaudet pietas Christiana divinae scilicet atque fraternae per lata terrarum spatia duplices cari­ tatis alas extendere, ut materno foveat affectuquos sacra genuerat baptismate. Et maxima est sanctae matris ecclesiae exultatio suorum adunatio filiorum, ut sint consummati in unum qui redempti sunt ab uno, dicente eodem redemptore domino nostro Iesu Christo: Pater sancte, serva eos in nomine tuo, quos dedisti mihi, ut omnes unum sint, sicut et nos unum sumus. Uncle et in cantico canticorum de sancta dicitur ecclesia: Terribilis ut castrorum acies ordinata. Constipata exercitus ordinatio et unanimis bellatorum fortitudo magno solet hostibus esse terrori: sic filiorum sanctae matris ecclesiae intra murum catholicae fidaei pacifica adunatio aereis potestatibus nimium constat terribilis et ignitis malignae perfidiae spiculis omnino inpenetrabilis extat, sicut et verissimus gentium praedicator et fortissimus ecclesiae proeliator praecepit dicens: In omnibus adsumentes scutum fidaei, in quo possitis omnia tela nequissimi ignea extinguere et hoc saeculum nequam libero ad caelestia volatu evadere": Charlemagne, Epistola ad Elipandum, ed. Albertus Werminghoff, MGH Cone. 2/1 (Hannover: Im­ pensis Bibliopolii Hahniani, 1906), 158. 54 "Optamus tamen et omni annisu mentis, immensae pietatis bani pastoris, qui animam suam posuit pro ovibus suis, et neminem vult perire, clementiam imprecamur, ut perfidiae relicto errore, ad viam veritatis quae Christus est, et ipso redeant perducente, quatenus in sinum matris Ecclesiae dilectionis suscepti amplexu, tranquilla suaviter fidei pace quiescentes, largissima sugant ubera bonitatis Dei, ac per hoc perpetuae felicitatis gaudia, gratia Dei, qui pro omnibus mortem gustavit, largiente, sine fine valeant adipisci": Paulinus of Aquileia, Libellus sacrosyllabus contra Elipandum, PL 99:164C-D. 55 "Ecclesia mater nostra, pretiosissimo sponsi Christi sanguine redempta et regeneratione salutaris gurgitis Iota et salutifero edulio corporis et haustu sanguinis satiata et nectarei liquoris unguine delibuta et per universum orbem terrarum in pace diffusa, aliquando externa, aliquando intestina perpetitur bella, aliquando exterorum concutitur incursibus, aliquando civium pulsatur tumultibus. Nonnumquam videlicet incredulorum vel hereseorum inpellitur infestationibus, nonnumquam vero scismaticorum vel arrogantium turbatur simultatibus": Opus Caroli regis contra synodum, ed. Ann Freeman, MGH Cone. 2, Suppl. 1 (Hannover: Impensis Bibliopolii Hahniani, 1998), praefatio, p. 97, lines 9-15. Speculum 89/2 (April 2014) The Maternal Language of Clerical Authority 373 to suck salubrious doctrine from her catholic breasts." 56 Hincmar of Laon can hardly have thanked his uncle for depicting him, effectively, as a paruulus. Indeed, while the use of maternal language by the doctores was, no doubt, somewhat more conciliating than the language of grim disciplinarians, it is, nonetheless, a fairly manipulative tactic to infantilize potential opposition. The sort of maternal imagery I have described also appears, as one might expect, in connection with the authority and role of the abbot, and it surely would have had powerful added resonance in an era of child oblation.The commentary on the Benedictine rule by Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel notes that an abbot should be "in one and the same person" both fatherand mother to his monks, having both the "affectionate innards (pia viscera) of a mother and also the strict discipline of a father.... And those to whom he offers the breasts of a mother to suck, he holds under the discipline of a father." 57 In the Rule of Saint Basil a chapter . on the third grade of humility, repeated twice in Benedict of Aniane's Concordia regularum, enjoins the paruulus to be "submissive to the invitation to the breasts of the fosterer (nutrici). "58 In the context of Carolingian monasticism, where a significant number of monks would have been child oblates, this language of parenting and the maternal imagery found in the commentaries on the Song of Songs would surely have struck a very deep chord, particularly if, as Mayke de Jong has suggested, an even higher proportion of the educated scholastici would have entered monasteries as young children.59 Alcuin, writing to his deeply loved and much-missed community at York, describes in near-elegiac terms their role in his spiritual and intellectual formation: "You sustained the fragile years of my childhood with maternal devotion, you supported me in the lustful time of my boyhood with dutiful patience, and reared me with the discipline of fatherly chastening to the age of full-grown manhood, and strengthened me with the learning of holy studies."- 60

56 "Cui etiam licet, inspirante divina gratia, abundans adsit doctrina, tamen pro nostri officii de­ bito, ex scrinio sanctae metropolis Rhemorum documentum dare studebimus qualiter se, coope­ rante Domino, morum probitate et doctrinae studio debeat gerere. Ipsum vero non nescium quad totius provinciae cura per sacros canones sit metropolitano commissa, ad eamdem metropolim suam, sicuti ad matrem, ut ex ejus catholicis uberibus salubrem sugat doctrinam, humiliter, ac sedulo, atque obedienter monemus recurrere": Hincmar of Reims, Epistola 52, PL 126:275D-276A. 57 "In una eademque abbatis persona et pia matris viscera et districta patris debet inesse censura, ut quos amore nutrit materno, corrigat rigore paterno, et quibus matris sugenda praebet ubera, sub patris teneat disciplina": Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel, Expositio in regulam S. Benedicti, ed. Alfred Spannagel, Corpus Consuetudinum Monasticarum 8 (Siegburg: F. Schmitt, 1974), 2.30, p. 74. 58 "Eo affectu quo esuriens paruulus nutrici obtemperat ad ubera inuitanti, uel quo affectu omnis homo suscipit ab aliquo ea quae ad uitam pertinent": Benedict of Aniane, Concordia regularum, ed. Pierre Bonnerue, CCCM 168A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), chap. 13, lines 17-21; chap. 76, lines 124-28. 59 De Jong, In Samuel's Image, 236-45. See also Daniel M. La Corte, "Abbot as Magister and Pater in the Thought of Bernard of Clairvaux and Aelred of Rievaulx," in Truth as Gift:Studies in Medieval Cistercian History in Honor of John R. Sommerfeldt, ed. Marsha L. Dutton, Daniel M. La Corte, and Paul Lockey, Cistercian Studies Series 204 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2004), 389-406, at 393. 60 "Vos fragiles infantiae meae annos materno favistis affectu; et lasciuum puericiae tempus pia sistinuistis patientia et paternae castigationis disciplinis ad perfectam viri edocuistis aetatem et Speculum 89/2 (April 2014) 374 The Maternal Language of Clerical Authority Speaking very much from within this tradition, in language very similar to that of Alcuin and Smaragdus, Paschasius Radbertus's Life of Saint Ada/hard of Corbie fuses the color and emotional power of Song imagery into his narration of the life of a man who had been both a spiritual father and mother to him. Paschasius was a foundling who was raised by the aristocratic nuns of Soissons, most notably, the abbess Theodrada, who would be succeeded by her daughter Emma. Further patronized at Corbie throughout his life by Theodrada's brothers, Adalhard and Wala, Paschasius remained fiercely loyal to the family even in politically difficult circumstances. While not as divisive a character as his formidable brother Wala, Adalhard may nevertheless have posed something of a technical challenge for his would-be hagiographer.61 Without miracles to describe, Paschasius chose instead to emphasize Adalhard's considerable abilities as a model monk and abbot: his physical beauty, his abilities to preach to and counsel his monks, his learning, his devotion to the Divine Office, and, in his life, Adalhard's imitation of the sufferings of Christ. 62 Paschasius concludes the Vita Adalhardi with the brief "Eclogue of Two Nuns," a "plaint of praise" between Adalhard and two churches, personified-surely Corbie and its daughter house, Carvey. Galathea, the elder nun, whom Adalhard, "in Christ's stead, nurtured in marriage," is described as a mother, while the younger, Philis, is her daughter. While there are no explicit references to the Song of Songs, the pairing of a mature woman and her much younger daughter, both of whom had been dependent on and were now deprived of the nurture of their male counterpart, is deeply reminiscent of the female characters from the Song of Songs. Throughout the Life of Ada/hard, Paschasius creates extremely dramatic and rhetorical fusions of images and phrases lifted from the Song of Songs, alternately depicting the saint as the Bride with regard to his own relationship with Christ and as the Bridegroom with regard to his monks, who are in turn frequently described as the "daughters of Jerusalem." Particularly striking in both respects is the prominence of maternal language and imagery used to evoke the special distinction of Adalhard's ministry, and it can be no coincidence that Paschasius returns again and again to the image of the nutritive breasts of Adalhard, who is depicted both as Corbie's spouse and as her dearest son. According to Paschasius, he was both their father and their mother, even their more-than-mother; like Elisha when Elijah was lifted to heaven, his monks are left bereft with the prophet's departure. "For we are mindful," Paschasius writes, "of the breasts with which ""_ you nursed us (lactabas ); indeed, how great was the divine word of God we enjoyed

sacrarum eruditione disciplinarum roborastis": Alcuin, ed. Ernst Diimmler, MGH Epp. 4 (Berlin: Weidmanns, 1895), epist. 42, lines 21-23. 61 David Ganz, Corbie in the Carolingian Renaissance, Beihefte der Francia 20 (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbeke, 1990), 103; Mayke de Jong, The Penitential State: Autho1'ity and Atonement in the Age of Louis the Pious, 814-840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 164-70; eadem, "Becoming Jeremiah: Paschasius Radbertus on Wala, Himself, and Others," in Ego Trouble: Au­ thors and Their Identities in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Richard Corradini et al., Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, Denkschriften 385 (Vienna: Verlag der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2010), 185-96. 62 Appleby, "Beautiful on the Cross," 43-46. Speculum 89/2 (April 2014) The Maternal Language of Clerical Authority 375 in you, ...and we were nourished by the innards (visceribus) of [your] charity."63 Corbie without Adalhard is Rachel weeping for her children,Paschasius continues, with a love even greater than that of an earthly mother: I believe, 0 dearest and most beloved, that maternal love could perish before we could cease loving you. Even if she forgets her own, we will never forget you. But while the ages remain and night divides its lot with day, the fame of your most holy life will be proclaimed. We will never be without your praise. But draw us after you, we beg, and we will run in the odor of your perfumes. For better are your breasts than wine; your fragrances, than the best perfumes. The upright ones love you. So we ask to arrive where you are grazing, where you are lying. We know that it is at midday.64 At the emotional climax of this peroration, with his own words seeming to fail him, Paschasius reaches for a pastiche of verses from the Song in which Adalhard is transformed into the Bridegroom from the Song of Songs, pursued by the Bride, ,. Corbie, and her maidens, the monks. Strikingly, in the Vita Adalhardi, while the saint leaves his household-and indeed, all who come in contact with him-in the same state of longing uncertainty as the Bride for her vanishing Bridegroom, for Paschasius it is Adalhard's capacity to nourish and to teach, his breasts that were "better than wine," that is what is most missed at Corbie. Once systematized through the commentary tradition, the body of maternal imagery developed within Song exegesis could be transferred to other female per­ sonificationswithin scripture and, as with the Song of Songs, associated with the duties of the church's doctores. Paschasius Radbertus, not himself the author of a commentary on the Song of Songs that has survived, was, however, one of two Carolingian exegetes to write on the Old Testament book of Lamentations, the other being Hrabanus Maurus.As Ann Matter has argued,their decision to tackle this hitherto-untouched and rather challenging piece of scripture may have been inspired by changes in liturgical observance; she notes,too, however, that Lamen­ tations possessed certain attributes that may have recommended it to Paschasius in particular.65 Differing from Hrabanus's rather encyclopedic approach to ex­ egesis, Paschasius appears to have chosen the book as part of a deliberate and complicated agenda of self-fashioning in which he modeled himself on the prophet Jeremiah, the traditional author of Lamentations, in part to defend his controver­ sial hero, Adalhard's brother Wala. Throughout the book, the prophet envisions

63 "Recordamur enim quibus nos lactabas uberibus, vel quanto in te Dei fruebamur oraculo, quan­ tisque ferebamur alarum remigiis, et nutriebamur charitatis visceribus": Paschasius Radbertus, Vita Adalhardi 71, PL 120:1543D-1544A. 64 "Quapropter, quaeso, attendite, viri, et videte, universi populi, matrem Corbeiam ... flentem, inquam, ac dicentem, Ablatus est magnificus meus mihi, et nullus est qui consoletur me .... Credo, mi charorum charissime, quod prius maternus amor perire possit, quam nos te non diligere; quia etsi illa suorum obliviscitur, nos tui nunquam obliti erimus. Sed dum saecula manent, et nox cum die partitur vices, fama praedicabitur de te semper sanctissimae vitae, nosque tua nunquam immunes erimus a laude. Tu autem, quaesumus, trahe nos hinc post te, curramus in odorem unguentorum tuorum; quia meliora sunt ubera tua vino, fragrantia unguentis optimis. Recti enim te diligunt: et ideo quaerimus, quousque perveniamus ubi pascis, ubi cubas; scimus namque quod in meridie": Vita Adalhardi, 1549B-1550A. 65 E. Ann Matter, "The Lamentations Commentaries of Hrabanus Maurus and Paschasius Radber­ tus," Traditio 38 (1982): 137-63, at 138-39, 161-62. Speculum 89/2 (April 2014) 376 The Maternal Language of Clerical Authority the besieged city of Jerusalem personified as a grieving woman, "Rachel weep­ ing for her children." For Paschasius, Lamentations and the Song of Songs were both superlative scriptural songs, just as these two female figures, the Jerusalem of Lamentations and the resplendent Bride of the Song of Songs, were parallel visions of the church, one hemmed in by her temporal sufferings, the other transcendent in eternal glory. As Matter noted, exegesis of the Song of Songs is pervasive throughout the commentary on Lamentations, with Paschasius noting as many verbal correspon­ dences between the two works as possible. 66 Prominent among these points of contact is the degree to which both Jerusalem and the Bride, for Paschasius, are fundamentally maternal, nurturing figures, each trying every means within her power to exhort her reluctant children down the path to salvation: When the church observes those advancing on the royal way to the fatherland, pregnant because she nurtures and begets her sons, sorrowing and weeping with many cares over the shackles of her little ones, she cries out, "Oh, all of you!" not so that she may hold them back from the road but so that she might invite them to the gifts of charity. "Attend with your mind," she says, "and consider with the vision of compassion if there is a sorrow like my sorrow" (Lam. 1.12), because, according to the law of our redeemer fromthe Gospels, a woman has sorrow when she gives birth. And this virgin spouse of Christ-the mother of all of us, because she bears and produces, nourishes and gives milk-is discouraged in sadness, and mourns in abasement, since she sees that nearly all go to destruction and the extinguishing of life; in some people, indeed, she is tried to the point of death; but giving birth, she is followed by others; other immature ones she nourishes; other hardened ones she calls back, reluctantly, to the ways of life; others, hesitant and slow to go, she awaits; others, reckless, she chastens so that they might go with her own, so that the enemy might not perhaps discover such people outside of camp: no surprise, because all of these passing through along the way bear arms with the Bride of Christ in her camps. Concerning whom, of course, in the Song of Songs [we read], "Who is it?" he asks, "who ascends through the desert, rising like the dawn, beautiful as the moon, choice as the sun, terrible as a battle line" (Song of Sol. 3.6, 6.9)?67

66 Matter, "Lamentations Commentaries," 150-51. In fact, I would argue that the Lamentations commentary and Paschasius's two lives of Adalhard and Wala should be considered as a trio of thematically related works: the Song of Songs is to Adalhard what Lamentations and the language of weeping and proclamation are to the Epitaphium Arsenii, with both men representing differing, but ultimately related and equally important, models of spiritual authority within the church. .. 67 "Quos cum inspicit ecclesia uia regia gradientes ad patriam ipsa pregnans quia nutrit filios et generat multis prepedita paruulorum curis dolens clamat ac gemens: 0 uos omnes non ut eos retardet a uia sed ut inuitet ad caritatis dona. Attendite inquit mente et uidete intuitu dilectionis si est dolor sicut dolor meus. Quia secundum sententiam redemptoris nostri ex Euangelio mulier cum parit tristitiam habet. Et haec sponsa Christi uirgo quia parit et generat nutrit et lactat omnium nostrum mater in tristitia contristatur et in humilitate luget. Quoniam uidet quod pene omnes in perditionem uadunt et exterminium uitae. In aliis quidem usque ad mortem periclitatur. Ab aliis uero pariens persequitur. Alias teneros lactat. Alias exasperatos uix ad uias uitae reuocat. Alias ire nolentes et pigros expectat. Alias precipites ut cum suis eant castigat ne forte tales hostis extra castra inueniat. Nimirum quia omnes isti transeuntes per uiam cum sponsa Christi in castris militant. De qua sane in Canticis: Quae est inquit ista quae ascendit per desertum sicut aurora consurgens pulchra ut luna electa ut sol terribilis ut castrorum acies?": Paschasius Radbertus, Expositio in Lamentationes Hiei-emiae libri quinque, ed. Beda Paulus, CCCM 85 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1988), book 1, lines 1198-1217. The image of the "via regia" became synonymous with the monastic life: see Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and Speculum 89/2 (April 2014) The Maternal Language of Clerical Authority 377 In the sermons of Bernard of Clairvaux on the Song of Songs, we encounter a passage very similar in its emphasis on the maternal work of the church, expressed in terms of flexible, adaptable, affective sympathy and encouragement:68 And you may see her unhesitatingly nourishing her little ones with the milk of these full breasts, from one the milk of consolation, from the other that of encouragement, according to the need of each. For example, if she should notice that one of those whom she begot by preaching the Good News is assailed by temptation, that he becomes emotionally disturbed, is reduced to sadness and pusillanimity and therefore no longer capable of enduring the force of temptation, will she not condole with him, caress him, weep with him, comfort him, and bring forward every possible evidence of God's love in order to raise him from his desolate state? If, on the contrary, she discovers that he is eager, active, progressive, her joy abounds, she plies him with encouraging advice, fans the fire of his zeal, imparts the ways of perseverance, and inspires him to ever higher ideals. She becomes all things to all, mirrors in herself the emotions of all and so shows • herself to be a mother to those who fail no less than to those who succeed. 69 Of the extant copies of Paschasius's Lamentations commentary, the provenance of one is Citeaux and of two others is Clairvaux, and it seems likely that Bernard was aware of, and may even have been directly inspired by, such passages in the works of Paschasius. In the course of developing70 his image of the church as mother-by interpret­ ing Jerusalem in Lamentations as the other side of the coin, as it were, of his

the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catharine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1961), 130-35. 68 Bernard recognized the constructive, motivational potential for teaching conveyed to the young believer through sympathy and compassion, expressed in maternal language, and he was adamant that no one placed in a position to offer pastoral care should lack these qualities. In his own experience, Bernard claimed that spiritual authority and doctrine conveyed through good teachers, "the church's maternal breasts," had done more for his own spiritual growth than any amount of strict censure. See Shawn M. Krahmer, "The Virile Bride of Bernard of Clairvaux," Church History 69 (2000): 304-27, at 305-6; Mark S. Burrows, "The Body of the Text and the Text of the Body: Monastic Reading and Allegorical SubNersions of Desire," in Scrolls of Love: Ruth and the Song of Songs, ed. Peter S. Hawkins and Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 244-54, at 252-53; and idem, "Hunters, Hounds, and Allegorical Readers: The Body of the Text and the Text of the Body in Bernard of Clairvaux's Sermons on the Song of Songs," Studies in Spirituality 14 (2004): 113-37, at 134-37. 69 "Videas earn mox plenis uberibus paruulis incubare lactandis, et ex uno quidem consolatoria, ex altero uero exhortatoria uberius mini�trare, prout singulis convenire uidebit. Verbi gratia, si quernforte ex his quos genuit in Evangelia, deprehenderit forti aliqua tentatione concussum, et inde turbatum et tristem pusillanimem que factum, non posse iam ferre uim tentationis, quomodo condolet, quomodo mulcet, quomodo plangit, quomodo consolatur, quot argumenta pietatis mox reperit, quibus erigat desolatum! E contra, si promptum, si alacrem, si bene proficientem cognoverit, exsultat, aggreditur salutaribus monitis, accendit amplius, instruit de quibus potest, ut perseueret, ut que in melius semper proficiatexhortatur. Omnibus se conformat, omnium in se transfert affectus,matrem se denique pro bat non minus deficientium quam proficientium": Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermon 10.2, in The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux, 2: On the Song of Songs I, trans. Kilian Walsh, Cistercian Fathers Series 4 (Spencer, MA: Cistercian Publications, 1971), 61-63, at 62; Sermones super Cantica canticorum, ed. J. Leclercq, C. H. Talbot, and H. M. Rochais, Bernardi Opera 1 (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957), lines 12-23. 70 All three are twelfth-century manuscripts: Dijon, Bibliotheque municipale, MS 68; and Troyes, Mediatheque du Grand-Troyes (olim Bibliotheque municipale), MSS 448 and 558.

Speculum 89/2 (April 2014) 378 The Maternal Language of Clerical Authority interpretation of the Bride in the Song of Songs-Paschasius could also invert the positive injunctions to maternal care outlined in the Song commentaries and depict the doctores, effectively, as unnatural, dysfunctional mothers. At Lamenta­ tions 4.3, the biblical text itself creates an ideal opportunity: "Even sea monsters offer the breast to suckle their young, but the daughter of my people is as cruel as an ostrich in the desert. The tongue of the suckling child sticks to the roof of his mouth; the children (paruuli) seek bread, and there is no one to break it for them. "71 In the Moralia in lob Gregory the Great had interpreted this passage to apply to the deceptive lure of heretical teaching, an interpretation that would be deployed against the Adoptionist Elipandus by both Beatus of Liebana and Pauli­ nus of Aquileia.72 Paschasius begins with the extract from the Moralia, but then, strikingly, he turns the image back against the Carolingian doctores themselves, using the image as a platform for a scathing critique of self-interested pastoral care. Although the passage is long, it is worth quoting in full: Furthermore, according to the allegorical senses the tongue of the suckling child sticks to the roof of his mouth in thirst without the milk of doctrine, when the care of the doctores, cruel as an ostrich without concern for their flocks, loving something else, has grown cold and the pastor has not, with the apostle, nourished the suckling children with the milk of the teachings of God. For this reason also the apostle tells his children: "I gave you milk and not solid food because you were not yet able to consume it" (1 Cor. 3.2). For there are in the church of Christ nursing children suckling the breasts of the precepts of God, and there are more mature ones who already are able to receive solid food, namely, to understand the more profound depths of the mysteries of God, if there were one who would break bread for them, namely, the more obscure holy matters of the scriptures. But when the care and concern of the pastors has been lacking, there is no one to bare the breast of teachings to the immature ones and no one to break bread for the more mature ones. Carefully considering these, the prophet laments the degenerate life of the former and bewails the death through cruelty of the latter, because many doctores, seduced by their impiety, could justly be accounted more cruel than sea

71 "GHIMEL. Sed et lamiae nudaverunt rnammam, lactaverunt catulos suos: filia populi mei crudelis quasi struthio in deserto. DALETH. Adhaesit lingua lactentis ad palatum ejus in siti; parvuli petierunt panem, et non erat qui frangeret eis": Lam. 4.3-4. 72 "Quid namque larnias, nisi haereticos appellat, humanarn quidem faciern, sed beluina per impi­ etatem corda gestantes? Qui tune mamrnamnudant, cum errorem suurnlibere praedicant. Tune catulos lactant, quia male sequaces paruulorum animas dum peruersa insinuant, ad impietaternnutriendo con- � - firrnant":Gregory the Great, Moralia in lob 19.18, lines 48-55. Beatus borrows the passage verbatim: Beatus of Liebana, Adversus Elipandum 2.15, lines 437-43. Paulinus, typically, uses much more pur­ ple prose: "Dissipa, obsecro, Iesu Christe domine deus, potentissirna tua dextera babyloniae parietem ciuitatis super refluentiurn positum glumas harenarum, in qua lamia nudata mamma uirulento ablac­ tat catulos lacte, et fac benigne in bona uoluntate tua Sion ut aedificetur [muri] Hierusalern murus firrnarnpositus supra petram, in qua milia angelorum mellifluis

73 "Porro secundum allegoricos sensus lingua lactantis ad palatum adhaeret in siti sine lacte doctrinae quando cura doctorum crudelis quasi strutio sine sollicitudine pro gregibus aliud diligens torpuerit nee cum apostolo lacte doctrinarum Dei paruulos lactantes pastor aluerit. Hine quoque apostolus suis ait paruulis: Lac uobis potum dedi non escam quia necdum poteratis sed neque adhuc potestis. Sunt enim in ecclesia Christi lactantes paruuli sugentes ubera praeceptorum Dei sunt et maiores qui iam queunt solidum capere cibum scilicet profundiora mysteriorum Dei intelligere si esset qui eis frangeret panem secretiora uidelicet sacramenta Scripturarum. Sed cum cura pastorum ac sollicitudo defuerit non est qui minoribus mammam denudet doctrinarum neque qui maioribus frangatpanem. Quos bene intuens propheta iure eorum deplorat reprobam uitam et istorum plangit crudelitatis mortem eo quad multi doctores impietate sua perlecti crudeliores iure lamiis censeantur et neglegentiores strutionibus. Quoniam et si lamiae crudeliores suis foetibus uideantur nudant tamen mammam et quodammodo lactant catulos. In quarum profecto comparatione pastores qui sua sectantur et terrena quaerunt atrociores merito planguntur ex quorum neglegentia quam sepe lingua lactantium ad palatum tabo consumpta adhaeret in siti. Nee non et strutio et si oua sua sine cura et ullius pietatis affectu ponere uidetur tamen phisici dicunt quod ea in sabulo ubi nimius solis feruor cottidie candescit ponit ubi calore solis et confotu sabuli usque ad concretionem pullorum temperanter confouentur. Quibus isti sine cura ac sollicitudine pastorali aliud meditantes recte neglegentiores deplorantur qui etiam paruulis cum petierint panem saltem frangere fugiunt": Paschasius Radbertus, Expositio in Lamentationes, book 4, lines 491-520. 74 Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800-1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 12-16. Speculum 89/2 (April 2014) 380 The Maternal Language of Clerical Authority hearing, and touch, those still nursing (lactantes) in the faith by means of these three senses might draw inwardly into themselves the first rudiments of the faith, so that with the cooperation of that which is felt externally, perfect faith might be nourished more fully in turn by the breasts of the scriptures. For those who were still bestial would not have been able entirely to grasp spiritual things first. And for this reason it was necessary that through the outward senses the tender infancy of believers might perceive the faith externally and that the entire human being, returning inwardly from fleshly sensation, might become spiritual and strive to be turned upwards toward spiritual things.75 Characteristically, Paschasius adopts a position of divine accommodation mod­ eled after the thought of Augustine and Gregory but includes his own distinctive emphasis on the evidence of the external senses as conduits, albeit rudimentary ones, of divine grace. As with the Life of Ada/hard and his Lamentations com­ mentary, Paschasius expresses the relation between scripture, the doctores, and those they taught in the language of nursing, lactation, and maternal care. Pascha­ sius clearly envisioned himself as both a recipient and a provider of the milk of scripture from the breasts of the doctores; and given the circulation of his exegesis among the Carolingian ecclesiastical elite, it is suggestive of how standard or even commonplace this maternal language would have been. As scholars are beginning to recognize, Carolingian aristocratic lay piety mir­ rored and was marked by much of the earnestness of the doctores in responsibly discharging their God-given ministerium by word and moral example.76 In paral­ lel with the rise of the advice manual and the Furstenspiegel genre, if Carolingian clergy were setting themselves up in exegesis of the Song of Songs as the breasts of the church and encouraging one another to have a maternal tenderness toward the paruuli under their care, this in turn may well have given one woman and mother-and a very well educated woman at that-certain particular ideas. At the beginning of Dhuoda's Liber manualis, she tells her son that she wishes to be his hortatrix. He had doctores, she concedes, that were useful enough, "but not of an equal condition, with a heart burning in her chest, to me, your genetrix, my firstborn son. " 77 Dhuoda was not a monk or a priest, nor could she be, but in the Liber manualis it is as if she is claiming that she could feel as passionately as one with regard to her spiritual charge. If, in the Song commentaries, maternal Song

75 " •••uolens Deus Trinitas adhuc rudibus in fide luce clarius aperire qui necdum aliud sensu quam corporea sciunt cogitare trino distincte ad cognoscendum unum refulsit specialitatis numero. "" - Quatenus uisu auditu et tactu adhuc lactantes in fide tribus istis sensibus intus in se traicerent prima fidei rudimenta. Vnde cooperante ipso qui exterius sentiebatur fides perfecta deinceps uberibus Scrip­ turarum plenius nutriretur. Non enim prius adhuc animales spiritalia potuissent ad plenum capere. Et id�o necesse fuit ut per sensum exterius tenera credentium infantia £idem perciperet et de sensu carnis introrsus rediens totus homo conuersus ad Deum inuisibilia uidendo per fidemfieret spiritalis et tenderer sublimius per £idem doctrinarum lacte nutritus ad spiritalia conuerti": Paschasius Radbertus, De fide, spe, et caritate, ed. Beda Paulus, CCCM 97 {Turnhout: Brepols, 1990), book 1, lines 1084-97. 76 See the essays collected in Lay Intellectuals in the Carolingian World, ed. Patrick Wormald and Janet L. Nelson {Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), particularly Thomas F. X. Noble, "Secular Sanctity: Forging an Ethos for the Carolingian Nobility," 8-36, at 13, 16; and Janet L. Nelson, "Dhuoda," 106-20, at 111-15. 77 "Fili, habebis doctores qui te plura et ampliora utilitatis doceant documenta, sed non aequali con­ ditione, animo ardentis in pectore, sicut ego genitrix tua, fili primogenite": Dhuoda, Liber manualis, ed. Pierre Riche, Sources Chretiennes 225B {Paris: Cerf, 1991), 1.7. Speculum 89/2 (April 2014) The Maternal Language of Clerical Authority 381 imagery was meant to describe the kind of attitude the doctores should have and the kind of advice they were to provide, here maternal feeling has been made the central, justifying reason why Dhuoda could and should air her own particular, unique views, even if expressed in different terms from those of Paschasius. Bede and the Carolingian exegetes established the Song of Songs as a narrative in which the doctores envisioned themselves as parts of the body of the Bride, and they substituted for the eroticism of the Song a vocabulary of Gregorian pastoral care described in maternal terms. The use of maternal language forms one component of a shared episcopal vision in the ninth century, worked out not only in capitularies and conciliar acta but also in the more open and speculative realm of biblical exegesis and implemented in a multitude of individual cases and circumstances. Scholars have only begun to understand the sheer complexity of the Carolingian conception of the doctores as a social and religious class. The one aspect of it that I have examined here, the use of maternal language to describe the doctores, was systematized in the commentary tradition on the Song by Bede and the Carolingians but was hardly limited to it. Moreover, Carolingian authors deployed this maternal language of clerical authority for a variety of purposes: it could be alternately or even simultaneously passionate, manipulative, aggressive, and tender; it could be used to heckle theological opposition or to move one's fellow monks to tears. Beyond the ninth century these texts continued to circulate and to exert their influence into the high Middle Ages: through the segments of Bede's Song commentary incorporated in the Glossa ordinaria, for example, or in the immensely popular Song commentary of Haimo of Auxerre, whose name was often forgotten, or through the works of Paschasius Radbertus. The Song of Songs itself would always contain the power to form textual communities and to inspire reformers and exegetes to think about the church and their role within it. To a certain extent, in their use of the Song, the Cistercians were doing what church reformers have always done, taking up traditional ideas to strike an old chord within a new historical context. Their needs were different, as well as the nature of their response to the unique challenges they faced, but the early-medieval exegetes had done much to provide the Cistercians with some of the tools they would employ.

Hannah W. Matis is a postdoctoral fel/ow at the College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556-5629 (e-mail: [email protected]). Speculum 89/2 (April 2014)