Dear members of MEMHS, I’ve attached a chapter of my dissertation for our discussion on March 23. I am considering either revising the chapter for a book manuscript or dividing it up into several articles. Given my current career trajectory at the Sheridan Center, I am unsure which of these publication formats makes the most sense for me professionally, so I invite feedback on the paper’s potential in either of these formats (along with any other feedback you may wish to provide). I look forward to discussing the paper, and the project as a whole, with you all next Tuesday. Sincerely, Charlie Carroll CHAPTER 4 TO KNOW THE ORDINANCES OF THE HEAVENS: PREACHING MANLINESS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS When Guillaume d’Auvergne, bishop of Paris, began his sermon on the Vigil of All Saints in 1230, his words likely echoed around an empty nave. Looking up from the pulpit, he would have glanced out at a much-depleted audience, an audience likely comprised largely of students and clergy.1 This was more than a year and a half since a drunken brawl between a band of students and an innkeeper over the price of wine led to an immediate strike of students and masters, thereby endangering both the establishment of the University and the economy of the city of Paris. The dispute, which had begun in the faubourg of Saint-Marcel on Shrove Tuesday in 1229, had quickly escalated from pulling hair and striking blows to, on the following day, an all-out street riot with students armed with wooden clubs.2 The bishop, along with the prior of Saint-Marcel and 1 The sermon is included in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS nouv. acq. lat. 338 – a collection comprised entirely of sermons preached by clergy associated with the University of Paris. The majority of these sermons are addressed explicitly to students and masters. At the time of this sermon, Guillaume would have been bishop for about a year, having been a master at Paris since 1220, and would likely have still held a teaching role at the University. 2 Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, vol. 3 (London: Longman, 1876), 166–67. 1 the papal legate, urged the queen and regent of France, Blanche of Castile, to immediately suppress the riot. Upon the queen’s orders, the prévôt and his mercenary bodyguards (ruptarii) moved in to suppress the uprising, killing several students in the process. In response, the masters suspended their lectures and filed complaints with the bishop and the papal legate. By Easter Monday the masters had grown weary of their complaints falling upon deaf ears, and within a month a great number of them left Paris. Some crossed the Channel to join the emerging universities at Oxford and Cambridge, others joined scholars at Toulouse, Orléans, Reims, or Angers. They would not return in earnest until 1231.3 With the distractions of controversy then swirling around the Latin Quarter, and indeed around the bishop himself, the message of his sermon must have been particularly affecting: one must direct one’s intentions toward God, lest he throw the heavens into disorder.4 He took his lesson from Job: “Do you know the ordinances of the heavens? Can you establish their rule on the earth?”5 The bishop describes the appointed order of the heavenly court, in its sublime and spiritual splendor: seraphim, cherubim, thrones (throni), dominions (dominationes), rulers (principatus), authorities (potestates), virtues (virtutes), archangels (archangeli), and angels (angeli).6 He describes the etymology of each angelic choir in due course: the seraphim are “the burning ones,” meaning they are aflame with zeal and ardent love of God; the cherubim are “the wise ones,” and so on. 3 A comprehensive summary of these events can be found in Rashdall, Universities, 1:335. 4 Paris, BnF, MS n.a.l. 338, fol. 32v. 5 Job 38:33. 6 The virtutes and potestates are traditionally directly beneath the dominationes and above the principatus, but he changes the order here. The traditional order is based on Pseudo-Dionysius’ De coelesti hierarchia, who based the hierarchy primarily upon Ephesians 1:21 and Colossians 1:16. The bishop also first lists the angeli and then the archangeli, but then describes them in the traditional hierarchical order later in the sermon. It is possible that when delivering the sermon he listed the choirs in their traditional order, but the person transcribing the sermon recorded them in the improper order. 2 The choirs have their negative counterpart: the antiseraphim burn with anger or hatred, the cherubim make fools out of intellect, and so on. Likewise, an earthly order has its appointed hierarchy and its reverse—here the bishop injects a piercing social critique: there are now young sons in place of patriarchs, doctors in the place of prophets, immodest women in the place of virgins. Like Alain de Lille several decades prior, Bishop Guillaume was concerned with the ability of wrongful knowledge to throw the universe into disorder. But Guillaume concludes that in order to not throw the heavens into disorder, one must direct one’s intentions toward God; this is not an invective against an institution or even a kind of learning, as in Alain’s De planctu Naturae, but rather a cautionary message to individual students. In calling for students to direct their intentions toward God, the bishop likely meant two things. First, that students should pursue their studies not for professional advancement or monetary gain, but only in service to God and God’s church. Second, that they should focus on their studies rather than on the distractions of the earthly world around them—meaning both the decadent diversions of the city and the distracting squabbles surrounding the strike of 1229. As I shall demonstrate below, the masters of the universitas magistrorum et scholarium Parisiensis saw their nascent institution as uniquely suited to take up the challenge of directing their students’ attention toward God so as to keep the Christian world from falling into disorder. As the university emerged as a corporate entity in the final decades of the twelfth century, and as church councils emphasized a heavier focus on the cura animarum (particularly in the Third and Fourth Lateran Councils of 1179 and 1215, respectively), 3 the souls of individual students became a greater concern of their masters.7 In addition to the papal and conciliar directives for a broader emphasis on the cura animarum throughout the Latin church, the University of Paris, which had gradually developed corporate structures governing the behavior of masters and students from the time of Peter Abelard onward, now shifted responsibility for transgressions from university institutions onto the individuals which constituted them.8 This concern for individual students is borne out explicitly in the cardinal legate Robert de Courçon’s rules for the University in 1215: “Each master shall have jurisdiction over his scholar.” 9 In this chapter I argue that, in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council’s emphasis on the importance of preaching, Parisian masters grounded their claims for the authority of the University in their belief, borne out in their sermons, that they could transform students into a specific kind of man capable of performing the reforming and pastoral missions of the Church.10 While university masters used their sermons to critique student misbehavior, they simultaneously elevated the sanctity of university studies in an attempt to not only exhort their audience to improve their moral constitution, but also demonstrate the sacred value of their scholarship. Returning to the idea that public speaking in most premodern European contexts was a restricted, masculine privilege accorded only to men of specific status, I first argue here that preaching was not only a 7 This is linked Ian Wei’s argument that behavioral responsibility shifted from the schools to individual students with the incorporation of the university and its behavioral statute; see his Intellectual Culture, 100. 8 Ibid., 87–169. 9 Chartularium 1:79: “Quilibet magister forum sui scolaris habeat.” In 1289, masters were required by statute to record the names of their students. (Chartularium, 2:35-36) On the process of corporate recognition by royal law, see: Ibid., 87–124; Ferruolo, Origins, 279–315; Alan Bernstein, “Magisterium and License: Corporate Autonomy against Papal Authority in the Medieval University of Paris,” Viator 9 (January 1978): 291–308; Rashdall, Universities, 1:300–311. 10 Throughout this chapter and those which follow I use “University” in the upper case to indicate the University of Paris, and “university” in the lower case to represent the loose commonality of similar institutions of higher education throughout Europe. 4 masculine practice but was also integral to the academic training and spiritual formation intended for young men at the University, as well as to the missions of church reform. Then, using sermons written by masters at Paris from about 1230 to 1274, I argue that the young men who matriculated into the University were seen by their masters and by ecclesiastical supporters of the University for their potential for moral training. I then suggest that university education was seen by masters as a transformative event in the moral and spiritual formation of these young students. Lastly, I describe the unique qualities of student piety as conceived of by university masters, particularly students’ spiritual martyrdom and the relationship between intellectual study and the Last Judgment. These sermons demonstrate that, in contrast