MEMORY AND THE MIDDLE AGES Boston College Museum of Art i MEMORY AND THE MIDDLE AGES Edited by Nancy Netzer and Virginia Reinburg Boston College Museum of Art February ly- May 21, iggy Copyright © 1995 by the Boston College Museum of Art, Chestnut Hill. MA Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number 94-74254 ISBN 0-9640153-2-3 This publication is supported by Boston College and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Federal Agency, with additional contributions from the Boston College Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Neil F. Phillips. Printed by Aldus Press Designed by Anne Callahan, kor group Photographs have been provided courtesy of the following: The Bennington Museum, nos. 77, 79, 80 Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid, figs. 16, 20 C. D. Arnold Collection, Division of Drawings and Archives, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University in the City of New York, no. 91 Syndics of Cambridge University Library, fig. 12 The Cleveland Museum of Art, nos. 15, 20 Detroit Institute of Arts, no. 22 Dumbarton Oaks Collection, Washington, D. C., nos. 9, 12, 13 Dwayne Carpenter, figs. 17,19 Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, figs. 7, 8 Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, nos. 8, 27, fig. 14 The exhibition was organized by the Boston College Museum of Art with partial support from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Federal Agency and an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities. Collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California, fig. 6 Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, The Houghton Library, Harvard University, no. 34 Illuminations, nos. 23, 38 Institut Royal du Patrimoine Artistique, Brussels, fig. 3 Jewish Theological Seminary, photographer Suzanne Kaufman, nos. 39-43, 47-49 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, nos. 1, 7, 11, 16, 17, 19, 35, 52, 54a-b, 63-68, figs. 1, 10, 11, 24-27, front cover The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, nos. 37, 51a-c, 62a-b, 69, figs. 4, 21-23, 29 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, nos. 4, 5, 71, 75, 78, 83a-c, 87, fig. 32 Museum of London, fig. 13 Sharon and Neil Phillips/Phillips Family Collection, photographer Bruce White, nos. 18, 30-32, 55-61 Patrimonio Nacional, Madrid, fig. 18 New Haven Colony Historical Society, no. 74a Bibliotheque Nationale. Paris, no. 45, back cover James Harrison Dakin Collection, Louisiana Division, New Orleans Public Library, no. 84 Board ofTrustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, no. 28, figs. 2, 15 Old Sturbridge Village, photo by Henry B. Peach, nos. 70, 76 Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, no. 26 front cover Ann Reliquary of Si. Valentine Switzerland, late 1 4th century gilding on silver Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift ofj. Pierpont Morgan, 1917, acc. no. 17.190.351 Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, photographer Mark Sexton, nos. 72, 73, 81, 85, 86 Peabody Museum, Harvard University, photograph by Hillel Burger, nos. 88-90 Philadelphia Museum of Art, fig. 33 Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, no. 82, photograph by George Collins Cox, fig. 36, photograph by N.L. Stebbins, fig. 38 Smith College Museum of Art. Northampton, Massachusetts, no. 36 Trinity College Library, Cambridge University, fig. 9 Victoria and Albert Museum, London, fig. Stephen Vedder, Boston College Audio- Visual Services, nos. 24, 33, fig. 31 Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, nos. 14, 21, 53, fig. 28 Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, nos. 2, 3 Whitney Library of Design, photographer Frederick L. Hamilton, fig. 34 Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA, no. 10 back cover Frontispiece to Joshua Hebrew Bible Central Italy, early 16th century manuscript on vellum Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, Ms Hebr. 15, fol. 137v. Table of Contents Preface Nancy Netzer Introduction Virginia Reinburg and Nancy Netzer Modes of Remembering the Classical Past Nancy Netzer, Department of Fine Arts, Boston College Remembering the Saints Virginia Reinburg, Department of Flistory, Boston College Unde et Memores, Domine: Memory and the Mass of St. Gregory Patricia DeLeeuw, Department of Theology, Boston College “The Captivity of Jerusalem that is in Sepharad”: Alienation, Exile, and Memory in Sephardic Spain Dwayne Carpenter, Department of Romance Languages, Boston College Reinventing Arthurian History: Lancelot and the Vulgate Cycle Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, Department of Romance Languages, Boston College Nineteenth-Century New England’s Memory of the Middle Ages Robin Fleming, Department of Flistory, Boston College The Film “Sorceress”: A Twentieth-Century Re-creation of a Medieval Memory Pamela Berger, Department of Fine Arts, Boston College List of Objects in the Exhibition 4 5 7 17 33 43 57 77 93 100 Preface Lenders to the Exhibition ,4rf Gallery of Ontario, Toronto Ba mington Museum Bibliotheque Xationale, Paris Burns Library, Boston College Cleveland Museum of Art Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College Detroit Institute of Arts Dumbarton Oaks Collection Harvard University Art Museums Houghton Library, Harvard University Illuminations, Chicago Jewish Theological Seminary, New York Mr. and Mrs. Steven H. Levin, New York Metropolitan Museum of Art Museum of Fine Arts, Boston National Gallery of Art, Washington New Haven Colony Historical Society New Orleans Public Library Nuffler Foundation Collection Old Sturbridge Village Peabody Museum, Harvard University Sharon and Neil Phillips /Phillips Family Collection, New York The Pierpont Morgan Library Peabody Essex Museum, Salem Private Collections Smith College Museum of Art Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities Walters Art Gallery Worcester Art Museum The Boston College Museum of Art is pleased to present Memory and the Middle Ages, the first exhibition to examine the many ways in which memory played an integral part in the for- mulation of images and thought in the middle ages, as well as in the neo-medieval movements in New England during the nineteenth and twen- tieth centuries. The exhibition has been planned to coincide with the international meeting of the Medieval Academy ot America in April 1995. The successful completion of a large exhibition and catalogue like this one depends on the dedica- tion, collaboration, cooperation, and vision of many. Perhaps no more so than on the curators, Pamela Berger, Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, Dwayne Carpenter, Patricia DeLeeuw, Robin Fleming, and Virginia Reinburg, professors in various disciplines at Boston College whose schol- arship informs this exhibition and publication. Jennifer Grinnell, the Museum’s exhi- bition coordinator, was indefatigable in coordi- nating the curators’ efforts, arranging for loans and photographs, preparing the catalogue for pub- lication, and reading the texts with extraordinary care. The successful completion of this endeavor is in no small part due to her precision, intelli- gence and good humor. We are also grateful to Alston Conley, the Museum’s curator, who designed the installation with great skill and imagination. Helen Swartz, the Museum’s ad- ministrator, as always, helped this project, as did our interns, Kerry Leonard and Jennifer Scuro. Marilyn Heskett, as conservator, made many helpful suggestions concerning the display of objects, and Stephen Vedder and his staff aided with photography. The catalogue benefited greatly from the discerning eye of its co-editor Virginia Reinburg and from suggestions made by Matilda Bruckner on several of the essays. We are in- debted as well to our intuitive and skilled copy editor, Naomi Rosenberg, to our careful proof- reader, Mark Stansbury, and to our innovative designer, Anne Callahan. Special thanks are extended to the lend- ers and to the following individuals who helped to make this exhibition possible: Susan Boyd and Stephen Zwirn (Dumbarton Oaks Collection); William Wixom, Charles Little, Barbara Boehm, Stuart Pyhrr, Minora Pacheo, Christine Brennan, Deanna Cross, Marceline McKee, and Trine Vanderwall (Metropolitan Museum of Art); Gary Vikan, Jennifer Cowan, and Maria LaLima (Walters Art Gallery); William Voelkle, Roger Wieck, and Marilyn Paul-Mary (The Pierpont Morgan Library); Cornelius Vermeule, Clifford Ackley, Sue Reed, Anne Poulet, Jonathan Fairbanks, Jeanine Falino, Linda Foss, Susan Odell Walker, Rebecca Reed, Patricia Loiko, Kim Paschko, and Karen Otis (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston); Glenn Lowry, Sherry Phillips, and Martha Kelleher (Art Gallery of Ontario); Ruth Levin (Bennington Museum); Francois Avril, Michel Garel, and Andree Pouderoux (Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris); Margaret Morgan Grasselli, Alan Shestack, Andrew Robison, and Sara Sibbald (National Gallery of Art); Christopher de Hamel (Sotheby’s); Robert Bergman, Stephen Fliegel, and Andrea Bour (Cleveland Museum of Art); Susan Taylor, Lisa McDermott, and John Rossetti (Davis Museum and Cultural Center); Robert O’Neill and John Atteberry (Burns Library); Peter Barnet and Alan Darr (Detroit Institute of Arts); Paula Richter (Peabody Essex Museum); Alice Wehlihan (Federal Council on the Arts); Christian Delacampagne (Consulate of France); James Cuno, Jane Montgomery, Maijorie Cohn, Ada Bortoluzzi, Maureen Donovan, and Elizabeth Gombosi (Harvard University Art Museums); Ann Anninger, Richard Wendorf, and Margaret Smith (Houghton Library); Sandra Hindman (Illumina- tions); Mayer Rabinowitz, Jerry Schwarzbard, and Marcia Slotnick (Jewish Theological Seminary); Ben Glenn II (National Endowment for the Arts); Amy Trout andVicki Chirco (New Haven Colony Historical Society); Wayne Everard (New Orleans Public Library); Frank White and Donna Baron (Old Sturbridge Village); Viva Fisher (Peabody Museum); Suzannah Fabing, Louise Laplante, Michael Goodison, Linda Muehlig. and David Dempsey (Smith College Museum); Lorna Condon (Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities); James Welu. Joan-Elisabeth Reid, Susan Strickler, and John Reynolds (Wor- cester Art Museum); Christina Ceulemans (Institut Royal du Patrimoine); Steven H. Levin and Neil Phillips. As always, the enthusiastic support of the administration of Boston College, especially J. Donald Monan, S.J. (President), Margaret Dwyer (Vice-President), William B. Neenan, S.J. (Academic Vice-President), J. Robert Barth, S.J. (Dean), Richard Spmello (Associate Dean), Katharine Hastings (Assistant to the Academic Vice-President), William Bagley (Development), Joanne Scibilia (Associate Director of Research Administration) and the Friends ot the Boston College Museum of Art, chaired by Nancy and John Joyce, have been invaluable. Finally, without the generous support of the National En- dowment for the Arts, a Federal Agency, an indemnity provided by the Federal Council on the Arts, and donations from Neil Phillips and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Boston College, this endeavor would not have been possible. Nancy Netzer Director Introduction The idea for this exhibition was horn in discussions among members of the Medieval Forum at Boston College, a colloquium organized several years ago by professors from various fields specializing in the medieval period. Medieval studies has a distinguished history at Boston Col- lege, and its Medieval Forum builds on a tradi- tion of interdisciplinary exchange and enthusi- asm among scholars of medieval philosophy, the- ology, literature, history, and art. Our wish to enhance interdisciplinary dialogue, making use of Boston College’s rich resources in this area, led us to organize colloquia on teaching and research, guest lectures by visiting scholars, and now this exhibition in the University’s Museum ofArt. The exhibition has been scheduled to coincide with the international meeting of the Medieval Acad- emy in Boston, for which Boston College will serve as host for one day. The objects and issues explored in the exhibition provide tangible evidence for the recurrent theme of memory to be examined throughout the conference. In 1966 the distinguished Renaissance historian Frances A. Yates called memory “an immensely rich field for research, needing the collaboration of special- ists in many disciplines.” 1 We offer this exhib- ition and catalogue in the hope of advancing the discussion of memory among our colleagues in the “many disciplines.” This is the first exhibition devoted to the theme of memory and medieval culture, with special attention to the role visual images played in evoking and fixing memories. The seven con- tributors to the catalogue and curators of the exhibition have chosen topics related to medieval thought about memory as expressed in literature, history, art history, and religion. The essays are not meant as a complete treatment of the role of memory in medieval culture, nor do they exhaust the many possible methods and avenues of research to be pursued. Rather they are to be viewed as a selection of some of the key roles that memory played in shaping the visual culture of the middle ages and of the various ways in which medieval images served as repositories of memory. Despite the diversity of subjects and approaches, the contributors all discuss two as- pects of memory: collective or cultural memory, and the relationship between memory and images. Both provide particularly appropriate avenues for understanding medieval culture, for images and collective memory were questions explored in classical and Judeo-Christian thought. As the classical tradition gradually blended with the Judeo-Christian tradition, a uniquely medi- eval notion of memory emerged incorporating aspects of both. Specifically, the classical world offered a rich legacy of thought about memory. Memory interested Plato, Aristotle, and other ancient phi- losophers, and they discussed the means whereby the mind stores experiences and perceptions. Plato considered the process of learning to be recollec- tion, and for him recollection involved “the seeing of internal pictures.” 2 Although Aristotle departed somewhat from Plato’s concept of learning as recollection, he considered memory to be part of cognition. According to Aristotle, the senses inscribe experiences on the memory as a signet-ring does on sealing wax; specific memo- ries created in this way take the form of mental pictures or images. As he wrote, “memory, even the memory of objects of thought, is not without an image.” He also noted that memory is always of the past, and that only animals that perceive time can remember. 3 Although both Plato and Aristotle said more about memory and recollec- tion than we can discuss here, the classical notion that memory preserves the past by means of imagery provided a rich legacy for medieval and modern reflection about memory. Arts of memory practiced in antiquity, the middle ages, and the Renaissance were rooted in the notion that the memory stores perceptions and experiences as images. 4 The anonymous Greek author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium (c. 80 B.C.E.) constructed an elaborate memory system according to which one recalled ideas by assign- ing them to specific visual images or architectural settings. In manuals of oratory inspired by the Ad Herennium , Cicero and Quintilian advised read- ers to retrieve ideas by visiting places or recalling images to which they had systematically linked those ideas. The memory here is not only a wax tablet, but also a place, usually a treasury ( thesau- rus) or storehouse. For Augustine of Hippo, the memory was “a cloister,” “a spacious palace, a storehouse for countless images of all kinds which are conveyed to it by the senses.” 5 Augustine de- scribed movingly the past experiences memory made available: “the great treasure house of the memory” contains colors, melodies, and sensa- tions “ready at my summons.” In the Confessions, Augustine forged together the classical art of memory with memory as a form of personal and collective recollection. In memory “I meet my- self,” he wrote. 6 Memory preserved the past, either a personal past or a collective one, and made it available for present use. Classical thought left a rich legacy, especially about the role of images in preserving memory and the past. But it was Judaism and Christianity that provided a compelling logic for collective remembrance. Both Judaism and Christianity have been described as “religions of remembrance,” because both Hebrew and Chris- tian Scriptures insist that remembrance is a fundamental religious duty. Jews heed God’s message that “I formed you, you are My servant; O Israel, you will not be forgotten by Me” (Is. 44:21). For their part Christians follow Jesus Christ’s command to “do this in remembrance of 4 Me” (Luke 22:19). Both commands to remem- ber create a contract between God and the faith- ful servant. But remembrance is also a collective enterprise; religious community is rooted in memories of God’s actions toward the group. Thus both Jews and Christians created liturgies memorializing historical events of special signifi- cance to their communities.' Although local and secular concerns also shaped collective memory, the influence of Jewish and Christian thought in constructing the culture of memory should not be underestimated. Memory has recently been a topic of lively discussion among scholars in the humani- ties and social sciences. Historians and sociolo- gists have studied the process of collective memory. Historians and literary scholars have addressed the relationship between history and memory in diverse cultures. 8 Medievalists have contributed richly to the study of memory in a variety of fields: literature, philosophy, and religious studies. The seven essays in this volume are connected by common threads in the recent scholarship on memory and the middle ages. Patricia DeLeeuw, Virginia Reinburg, and Dwayne Carpenter explore collective memories bearing religious meaning. DeLeeuw shows how paint- ings, sculptures, and prints of the Mass of St. Gregory preserved the rememorative drama of the mass by transmitting stories about Christ’s Passion and St. Gregory the Great to late medieval Christians. Reinburg describes how medieval Christians remembered the saints and focused collective identity around them by honoring their earthly remains. Carpenter ex- plains how Sephardic Jews — in Spain and in exile — remembered their collective past even as “strangers” m Christian society. Matilda Bruckner addresses collective remembering in a secular con- text. She shows how stories of Lancelot were encoded in popular memory and transmitted in text, image, and decorative objects. Nancy Netzer and Robin Fleming both address appro- priation of a selectively remembered past. Netzer analyzes various methods by which medieval artists evoked memory of the classical past for various reasons. Fleming suggests why medieval history was useful to the nineteenth-century New Englanders who built and decorated their houses in neo-Romanesque and neo-Gothic style. Pamela Berger re-creates a specific medieval memory; in her essay she reflects on how as a medievalist in the twentieth century she translated a thirteenth-century peasant memory into film. The contributors are pleased to present the results of their interdisciplinary collaboration m this exhibition and catalogue. We happily acknowledge the support and encouragement we have received from our colleagues and the administration of Boston College. We offer this volume as a tribute to the Rev. J. Donald Monan, S.J., president of Boston College and scholar of Aristotle’s moral philosophy. In his commentary on Aristotle’s Dc memoria et reminiscentia , Thomas Aquinas noted that we must "dwell with solici- tude on and cleave with affection to the things we want to remember.” 9 With this volume we want to remember how generously and enthusiastically Father Monan has supported humanistic scholarship and the Museum of Art at Boston College. Virginia Reinburg Nancy Netzer Notes We are grateful to Arthur Madigan, S. J. for his assistance with this introduction. 1 Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 1966), p. 14. 2 See Richard Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory (Providence, 1972), pp. 5, 25, 35-39; Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990), p. 17. 1 Aristotle, De Memoria et Reminiscentia, in Sorabji, pp. 47-50 (see also pp. 81-83). 4 On the arts of memory see Carruthers; Yates; Jonathan Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York, 1984). 5 Augustine, Confessions, X.8 (trans. R. S. Pine- Coffin [London, 1961], pp. 215, 214). See also Carruthers, pp. 33-45. 6 Augustine, Confessions, X.8 (Pine-Coffin trans., p. 215). 7 On memory in Judaism and Christianity see Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory (New York, 1992) , pp. 68-80; and Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Se- attle, 1982). * See Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago, 1992); Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de memoirc (Paris, 1984-1992); Patrick Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover, NH, 1 993) ; James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford, 1992); the special issue of Representations (spring 1989);Susanne Kiichler and Walter Melion, eds.. Images of Memory (Washington, 1991) Janet Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories (Cambridge, 1992); Patrick J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, 1994). 9 See Carruthers, p. 173; Coleman, chap. 20, esp. pp. 444-460. Essays Note to the reader Numbered plates in this book are works in the exhibition. Additional plates are designated as “figures. ” Abbreviated references are listed in full at the end of each essay. Modes of Remembering the Classical Past Nancy Netzer no. 1 Casket Rhineland or Meuse, 12th century components (19th century assemblage) gilded silver with inset gems over wood Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917, acc. no. 17.190.404 “Memory is a glorious and admirable gift of nature by which we recall past things, we em- brace present things, and we contemplate future things through their likeness to past things.” So saying, the thirteenth-century Bolognese author, Boncompagno da Signa 1 provides a contempo- rary insight into some of the ways Christian art- ists of the middle ages may have viewed and used pagan imagery of the classical past.- In employ- ing the visual language of antiquity, the medieval artist often recalls the past while confirming present Christian convictions. Implicit then in these medieval allusions to antiquity is a com- parison between antiquity and the present. They reveal the classical past from the present. The question, therefore, is what did the medieval art- ist chose to remember, why, and how. Equally important, but too large an inquiry to entertain here, is what images of antiquity medieval artists remembered to forget, and why. During the middle ages, the memory or recollection ot Greco-Roman culture often served as a symbol ol a better time. The survival and revival ol images and styles, both figurative and ornamental, associated with the Greco-Roman world confirmed connections with the revered classical world. In the early years of Christianity, nostalgia stimulated the memory and encouraged the preservation ol antique forms. Like all nos- talgic forms, Greco-Roman imagery provided the power of associations with the past as well as an escape from the present, in this case, an escape from the collapse of Roman civilization and the difficulties of the present Christian society. As Christian civilization moved further from the pagan world and found itself on surer ground, pagan forms, whether figurative images or meth- ods of ornamentation, lost their original mean- ings and survived as lingering traditions or sim- ply as signs of high culture. ■’ Ancient mythology and its gods and heroes, as will be shown below, were marginalized, lost much of their original meanings, and were exploited for new contexts, interpretations, and decorative possibilities. In the ninth century, Carolingian emper- ors, beginning with Charlemagne, looked to clas- sical civilization as well as to the Christian world of late antiquity in their efforts to re-establish the order and stability of the Roman Empire. To this end, Carolingian artists exploited the memory embodied in antique and early Christian works of art by copying aspects of their forms and illu- sionistic style . 4 From the end of the eleventh through the first few decades of the thirteenth century, termed by some as a “renaissance ,” 5 ar- tistic examples throughout Europe reveal the re- creation of many antique forms, styles, and tech- niques . 6 In the first half of the twelfth century, Rome, in particular, revived antique and early Christian artistic forms . 7 Finally, Gothic art, after the first quarter of the thirteenth century through the fifteenth, incorporates allusions to 8 9 antiquity in individual works, often, as will be shown in the last example below, at the initiation of the patron. Mnemonic techniques employed for con- juring up comparisons between antiquity and the medieval present, which will be addressed here, differ even among contemporary objects and do not develop over the course of the middle ages. All, however, take fragments from ancient cul- ture and cast them into forms relevant to the medieval present. The limitations of an exhibi- tion preclude demonstrating the multiple roles that memory of antiquity played in medieval im- agery. Still, using nine medieval objects that I procured for this exhibition, I shall isolate three principal modes of evoking remembrance of the classical past. The task will require some gener- alization, and I cannot hope to address all of the memories embodied in each object. Rather, 1 shall propose at least one that each work might have impressed on the medieval viewer. The first, and in many respects the sim- plest, of the three modes is reuse, which occurs most often in the architectural elements of build- ings and, on a smaller scale, in the insertion of carved gems and precious stones on jewelry, reli- quaries, crosses, crosiers, book covers and other ecclesiastical objects. Whether the use of these relics, called spolia, bespeaks economic necessity, aesthetic appreciation, or even ostentation, their juxtaposition with medieval elements both re- called the past 8 and established connections between the present and the culture and tradi- tions of antiquity. It is precisely the preservation of an antique unit, a synecdochic quotation from the past, that expresses reverence for its distant culture. The single example of reuse in this exhi- bition is found on a silver casket from the Metro- politan Museum ofArt in New York (no. 1). The casket, which, in its present form, is an assemblage of the nineteenth century, contains rectangular panels with filigree scrolls and inset gems, thirteen of which are antique, 9 from a Rhenish or Mosan casket or reliquary of the twelfth century. 10 The antique gems are a seem- ingly random mixture 11 ranging in date from the fourth century B.C. to the fourth century A.D. Most are engraved in intaglio or cameos either with classical figures including Venus, Dionysus, Ajax, Mercury, and Theseus or animals including an eagle-like bird, deer, dolphin, and lion. Al- though the twelfth-century viewer of the origi- nal object probably was unable to identify them all, some of the pagan motifs on the gems 12 would have been open to Christian interpretations ( interpretatio Christiana), allowing the observer to identify them with Old and New Testament fig- ures. Venus, for example, may well have been interpreted by the medieval viewer as the Vir- gin. 13 In new settings, many ancient gems took on new meanings. To the extent that they evoked the memory of paganism, their application on this Christian object might have served as a re- minder both of their magical properties as pagan amulets 14 and of the victory of Christianity over paganism. For the most part, however, the me- dieval eye would have admired their beauty, clar- no. 2 no. 3 Corinthian Capital Rome, 350-470 marble Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Eliza Newkirk Rogers (Class of 1900) Fund, acc. no. 1949.28.1 Corinthian Capital Provence or Northern Italy, mid- 12th century limestone Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Eliza Newkirk Rogers (Class of 1900) Fund, acc. no. 1949.31.1 Modes or- Remembering the Classical Past Namy Nelzcr ity, and intricate execution. In recognizing their antiquity, the viewer would have been reminded of the unity and continuity between his world and a glorious past . 18 The second mode for remembering the classical past, replication, involves an almost lit- eral copying of antique forms. Unlike the reuse of spolit 7, re-creating required a deliberate effort and the close examination of an antique model. Often generated by historical forces like imperial patronage, replication is a traditionalistic gesture by which the artist chose to remember a specific image or type of object. It most often occurs in ornamental art on the borders of smaller objects like manuscripts and objects of ivory and metal 16 and on sculptured ornaments of buildings. Two Corinthian capitals, one a Roman example from late antiquity 17 (no. 2) and the other (no. 3) a finely carved example of the mid-twelfth cen- tury produced either in Provence or Northern Italy 18 demonstrate how accurately observed these medieval replications could be. The present Ro- man example with more simplified and less natu- ralistic acanthus, however, is later than that which must have served as the precise model for the Ro- manesque example. Indeed, the medieval capital formerly was mistaken as Roman, even though a flower emanates from the foliage, instead of the traditional rosette, and its drillwork, especially on the acanthus, appears more studied, controlled, and patterned than on Roman examples. Such medieval revivalist capitals (and simi- lar ornamental motifs, as well) usually decorate buildings of otherwise medieval design. Although, the architects remembered to forget the overall structures of antique buildings, these capitals prob- ably would have been seen by the medieval viewer as venerated ancient forms. They would have evoked the memories of nearby ancient monu- ments, especially where they were prevalent, as in Italy and Provence (for example, in Nimes, Arles, and Orange ). 19 Juxtaposing old and new forms, reminded the medieval observer, as did the reuse of spolia, of historical continuity within the present Christian context. The third, and by far most varied and com- plex, mode is reconfiguration. It either adopts antique compositions or styles and recasts them to suit Christian subjects, or the opposite, it adopts classical subjects and recasts them in medieval form and style. The best known examples are portraits of medieval authors (nos. 4 and 5), usually evan- gelists placed before their Gospels. They are prob- ably the most common type of illustration in medieval manuscripts. Adapted from the Helle- nistic tradition of using a portrait at the head of a book, the practice probably began in the earliest M ' fragment of a Sarcophagus with a Man of Letters Asia Minor, third quarter 3rd century marble Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, acc. no. 1918.18.08 no. 4 Portrait of the Evangelist Luke Byzantium, early 13th century tempera and gold on vellum Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Arthur Mason Knapp Fund, acc. no. 1919.118 no. 3 Portrait of St. Gregory Flanders, late 10th century tempera on vellum Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, William F. Warden Fund acc. no. 49.492 IO 1 1 no. 6 Hcrakles Wrestling the Nemean Lion Rome, c. 90 A.D. stone Nuffler Foundation Collection no. 7 David Slaying the Lion Constantinople, 613-629/30 A.I). silver Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift ofj. Pierpont Morgan, 1917 acc. no. 17.190.395 Gospel Books , 20 in part, at least, in order to evoke the venerated classical author, a hero ot antique intellectual culture, and, thus, to assert the au- thenticity ot the Gospels. Such a mnemonic de- vice, exploiting similarity, would have been es- pecially convincing to new and potential con- verts to Christianity. In their portraits, evangelists are usually seated. Albert Friend , 21 who categorized the por- traits and suggested their origins, discovered that eight types of seated Evangelists recur in medi- eval Byzantine manuscripts. Moreover, Friend showed that they usually incorporated architec- tural backgrounds, a bench, a desk with writing implements and a lectern, and were based on seated statues (similar to fig. 1 ) of the philoso- phers (Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, and Epicurus) and poets (Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, and Menander), which often decorated Roman the- aters . 22 The traditional meditative poses of the more venerated apostles Matthew and John most closely imitate the Hellenistic Greek author stat- ues, which never show the figure writing (writ- ing being the work of the amanuensis). On the other hand, Mark and Luke, the disciples of the apostles, are shown writing their Gospels in poses adapted from the non-writing ancient philosophers . 23 An early thirteenth-century leaf (no. 4) from a Byzantine Gospel Book, now in the Mu- seum of Fine Arts, Boston, shows a standard Byz- antine representation of Luke, in which the fig- ure, seated on a low bench with a footstool, faces a desk on the right. He has begun writing his Gospel in the codex upon his lap. Like the pagan philosophers and poets, he wears a tunic and pal- lium. Only his halo designates him as Christian. The archetype for this form of Evangelist would have had an elaborate classical architectural back- ground 24 (not the present Roman arch), render- ing the comparison to the ancient scholars more explicit. Visual recollections of classical men com- mitted to otherworldly teaching, who wielded power and influence in the ancient world, would certainly have impressed upon the viewer the authority of the Evangelist and his writings. Comparison to ancient authors was also implicit in representations of other Christian au- thors, like Pope Gregory the Great (c. 540-604). A late tenth-century Flemish leaf which once pre- ceded the beginning of book twenty-eight of Gregory’s Commentaries on the Book of Job, 20 shows Gregory in a pose similar to Luke’s. Here, though, the artist has departed somewhat from the Evan- gelist archetype and turned Gregory’s lower body to the front. Gregory pores over his manuscript Modes or- Remembering the Classicai Past Nancy Netzcr on the columnar lectern by his side; his feet rest on a stool in front of an angular niche-like struc- ture with arches in the base. The architectonics of this niche suggest a faint, simplified, and prob- ably unconscious memory of the Roman settings for Evangelist portraits in early Greek Gospel Books. 26 Although the figure of Gregory, no longer in the ancient tunic and pallium, is fur- ther removed from the classical author type, the form was clearly hallowed by tradition and not abandoned during the middle ages, in part at least because it recalled the sacred authority of the philosophers and poets of antiquity. Once again, the implied comparison between ancient and medieval emphasizes the power of historical con- tinuity. A second example of reconfiguration may be examined in the legacy of the pagan man, su- perman, and demigod Herakles, renowned for his feats of strength. Herakles could pass though the gates of Hades unscathed. This theme of res- cue and resurrection had multiple applications within Christian culture. A savior larger than life and aided by supernatural force, Herakles was a popular figure in classical thought and figurative arts. As a result, images of his twelve labors were condensed over time to standard compositions. 27 His name became synonymous with strength, labor, challenge, and duty, and his life story spawned ethical interpretation among Stoics, Cynics, and Christians. 28 Classical art frequently depicted among Ins labors the strangling of the lion ravaging the countryside around Nemea in the Peloponnesus, 217 represented in this exhibi- tion by the fragment of a Roman stone sculpture (no. 6) from about 90 A. I ). Here, Herakles leans forward, squeezing the lion’s head under his arm. 30 In some accounts, the lion could be subdued only in a wrestling match; in others, Herakles stunned the lion with his club and killed it with his sword. All agree that thereafter, Herakles wore the lion’s pelt as his cloak. Transcending the limitations of physical prowess, Herakles s feats paralleled those of David and Samson. It is not surprising that in repre- senting these two Old Testament figures, medi- eval artists often recalled the compositional for- mulas used to depict the labors of Herakles. One of a set of nine plates embossed with scenes from the life of David (no. 7) provides a case in point. Stamps date the plates to the reign of the Byzan- tine emperor Heraclius (specifically to 613-629/ 30), and their style and quality suggest manufac- ture in an imperial workshop in Constantinople. 31 The scene shows the moment before David slays the lion with the club in his raised right hand (1 Samuel 17:34-35). His left hand grasps the lion’s mane; his left knee is on the lion’s back - an ad- no. 8 Capital with Scenes from the Life of Samson Avignon, 12th century marble Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Gift of Meta and Paul J. Sachs, acc. no. 1922.132 12 13 1 10. 9 Cameo of Herakles and the Nemean Lion Sicily, 1220-1240 sardonyx Dumbarton Oaks Collection, acc. no. 62.38 no. 10 Plaque with the Virtue Fortitude Spain, early 16th century alabaster Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA acc. no. 1919.305 aptation of the pose often used to represent Herakles capturing the Cretan Bull. 32 Herakles ’s club and lionskin have become David’s weapon and flowing cloak fastened over his right shoulder. The naturalistic style of the figures and drapery, fashioned in “an effort to leap back across the centuries and recapture forms of the distant past,” 33 reinforces the visual allusions to the clas- sical hero. Scholars have convincingly shown that episodes from the life of David on the silver plates were viewed as counterparts to the career of Heraclius, the upstart emperor and youthful war- rior who overthrew the terrible Phocas. 34 Heraclius sought to equate his victory with that of the Old Testament monarch. Moreover, George of Pisidia, Heraclius s court poet, speaks of both the seventh-century Byzantine emperor Heraclius and his namesake, the pagan god Herakles, as conquering heroes. 35 Thus, Heraclius not only identifies himself with the pugnacious David, but by commissioning the artist to repre- sent David in a style and pose that visually evoke the memory of Herakles, he also bolsters and glo- rifies his image. The representation of Samson wrestling the lion ofTimnath (Judges 14:5-6) 36 on a twelfth- century capital from Avignon 37 (no. 8) conveys a similar, somewhat faded memory. Samson, his leg wrapped around the lion’s neck, rends the animal’s jaws with both hands, as was often shown in antique depictions of Herakles and the Nemean lion. Like David on the seventh-century silver plate, Samson wears a cloak fastened over his right shoulder, recalling the Heraklean pelt. Although clearly in the linear Romanesque tradition, the style also shows a wealth of detail adapted from antiquity: clinging, fluttering drapery, more natu- ralistic musculature, and freer, less forced, facial expressions. The present Samson suggests a pro- cess of transforming Herakles into the OldTesta- rnent figure that probably took place centuries earlier. Although it is unclear whether the ves- tiges of the pagan hero’s memory would have been recognizable either to artist or to viewer in the twelfth century, there is little doubt that this ele- ment, showing Samson’s triumph over the lion, would remind the viewer of Christ’s triumph over evil and his descent into limbo. A cameo in the Dumbarton Oaks collec- tion (no. 9) shows Herakles strangling the Nemean lion and standing on a dragon, 38 a more direct reference to antiquity. The cameo was produced in Sicily between about 1220 and 1240 for em- peror Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (1 194-1250). Frederick amassed a large collection of antiqui- ties including intaglios, gems, and coins, which, in turn, influenced his royal commissions. Frederick sought to project the public image of a Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus, reviver of the Roman Empire, and thus promoted and exploited emulation of the classical style in his imperial commissions. 39 The Herakles cameo is meant to represent a new antiquity, not only depicting a classical hero, but also using the visual language of the classical world. A naked and muscular Herakles squeezes the lion’s head under his arm as on the Roman sculpture (no. 6) described above. The addition of the medieval dragon be- neath the hero’s feet, however, was intended to evoke Psalm 91:13 “You will tread on the lion and the adder, the young lion and the serpent you will trample underfoot,” thereby transform- ing this pagan image into a Christian memory. Here Herakles is recalled as an example of virtue ( exemption virtutis). He is not revived or reclaimed, but rather reconfigured as a Christian hero. His triumph over the lion is evoked as a reminder of Christ’s triumph over evil and as a projection of a triumphant future for Frederick. 40 It probably also provided memories of Frederick’s past tram- pling of his enemies and of the divine kingship conferred by the gods on his adopted ancestors, the emperors of ancient Rome. 41 The last example of Heraklean re-configu- ration is found on an alabaster plaque from the early sixteenth century in the Worcester Art Museum (fig. 10). 42 It represents the virtue For- titude. Along with others depicting various vir- tues, angels, and saints, it formed part of the Osorio-Perea Tomb in the church of San Pedro at Ocana. The personification of moral concepts had its roots in the classical world, and the moral order embodied by the pagan gods was adaptable to Christian needs. 43 Fortitude is one of the four cardinal virtues that St. Ambrose adapted from Plato’s Republic to Christian thought in the fourth century. Standing on a pedestal within a shallow niche, Fortitude in the present example boldly uses both hands to tear open the jaws of an up- right lion, recalling the deeds of Herakles, Samson, and David. Surely this method of personifying Fortitude depends ultimately on a Heraklean compositional formula. A chaste young woman has been substituted for the pagan hero. Here the compositional similarity between the pagan and Christian subjects may have been exploited to remind the viewer of Herakles as an exemphtni of Christian virtue, 44 thereby emphasizing the timelessness and historical continuity of the vir- tue of Fortitude. Modes or Remembering the Classicai Past Nancy Nether tnaifnv fmu't i'?v , •‘nrrtff : vittff |»HiT c/vt:f wS? ; ttrcflv ttun-.G- a>£ c r &ipC ; ycuji aturtt' c*3r cmivp^iicc »>u a'.ir-iwr ^cc* ' Tt| 9ftMt«c -Mccoft-'3>n « ' mf .u' <■>u tM.tlMCr' »v“ r t t; -'■k ' u4r |fw»< putt fnic M'fV’K-' •Arcfrt.un j OHV vucec&wit' fitf-PCwSC uu’ttc ' j«« c#t Muwft fetr cutr ] *»t UK twCKU- pfiMt or <^{eii/c : uai* t in « tntuuoif ot ,n t, no. 11 Leaf from Valerius Maximus, Factotum el dictorum memorabilium attributed to Perrin Reniiet Paris, ca. 1390 tempera and gold on vellum Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Gwynne M. Andrews, acc. no. 31.134.8 The final example of reconfiguration recasts classical pagan scenes with medieval knights, ladies and ecclesiastical figures in four- teenth-century garb on a single leaf from a Pari- sian manuscript datable to about 1390, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (no. 1 1). 45 The text is a French translation of the Roman author Valerius Maximus’s Factorum et dictorum memorabilium, written in the first cen- tury A. D. and dedicated to the emperorTiberius. The translation was commissioned from Simon de Hesdin by Charles V of France (1364-80). Seeking to revive the memory of the political lessons chronicled in Roman texts (to affirm his rightful tenure to the throne after the Hundred Years War 46 ), Charles V commissioned, among his splendid illuminated manuscripts, numerous trans- lations of classical works. 47 The Metropolitan leaf shows the beginning of Book 1 of the Memorabilium , a compilation of anecdotes on Roman religious practices and ceremonies. Above the text is an illumination divided into four scenes. The upper left quadrant depicts a contemporary scene of Simon de Hesdin presenting his transla- tion to Charles V. The memory of the classical precedent for such a ceremony is evoked by the scene in the quadrant to the right. Here the Roman emperor Tiberius, dressed in the con- temporary garb and domed crown of a Holy Roman Emperor, leads a band of knights bear- ing a banner and shield with the double-headed eagle. The contingent approaches the enthroned author, Valerius Maximus, who wears a robe, skull- cap, and pointed shoes of the fourteenth century. 48 Medieval content infiltrates a classical scene. Moreover, the juxtaposition of the two upper quadrants equates Charles V with an ancient scholar, thereby emphasizing his scholarship, as did Charles’s biographer Christine de Pisan in her writings. 49 The two lower scenes depict episodes re- counted in the text of Book I on rites and cer- emonies. In the lower left, a priestess leads wor- ship before an image of the goddess Ceres, iden- tified by the sheaf of grain in her hand. Here again, the figures are dressed in medieval costume. Indeed, the only classical aspect is the gilded im- age of the goddess; the composition is adapted from the Christian scene of worshipers before the Virgin and Child. 50 (This is the opposite of the David and Samson representations described above, which adapt a pagan composition to bib- lical figures.) On the lower right, the Roman priest Sulpicius performs a sacrifice interrupted by an “ ornement de tete” falling from his head — another classical event remembered in medieval terms. The priest is transformed into a fourteenth- century bishop whose falling head ornament is a miter. The temple, cut away to reveal a ton- sured cleric before an altar, is rendered as a Gothic church with two ecclesiastics standing before the entrance. In these illustrations then, the artist underlines the relevance of the memories em- bodied in the classical scenes and makes them more accessible to the viewer by recasting them in medieval terms. As 1 have attempted to show above, re- membering antiquity through reuse, replication, and reconfiguration first and foremost enhanced the medieval viewer’s understanding of the present Christian culture. In modern terms, it implied a comparison between the “once upon a time” and the “here and now.” No matter how closely clas- sical canonical forms were preserved in the middle ages, as in the reuse of spolia, the visual emphases and meanings were always redirected. However different their methods, each mode indulges in the memory of the classical past and its similarity to the present. It mines the debris of the ancient visual vocabulary (remembering to forget most of it) and reshapes it, perhaps in style, perhaps in context, to suit new needs. Each mode relies on careful selectivity, be it by choosing a significant ancient fragment to reuse or replicate or by adapt- ing and recasting an ancient theme. The result is the same for each, an appeal to the viewer’s emotions, prompting a casting aside of rational response and an exploitation of the viewer’s memory. Modes op Rememberinc the Classic ai Past Nancy Neuer Notes 1 In one of his two studies on rhetoric. See Boncompago 1891, p. 255. - 1 am aware of the ambiguity of the terms “clas- sical" and “antique” as they have been used in modern scholarly literature, given that pagan civilization merged gradually into the Chris- tian. I shall use the terms here to refer to the Greco-Roman period before Constantine’s le- galization of Christianity in 313 A.D. 3 Weitzmann 1979,pp. 126-131 andWeitzmann I960. 4 For a recent discussion of the notion of a Carolingian “Renaissance” and the misper- ceptions of earlier scholarship see Nees 1991, pp. 3-17. 3 The concept was first explored in detail in Haskins 1927. See also Panofsky I960. ” For discussion and additional bibliography, see Scher 1969 and Kitzinger 1982. 7 For discussion see Kitzinger 1982 with addi- tional bibliography. 8 For examples of medieval uses of spolia and discussion of the practice see Heckscher 1937; Kitzinger 1982, p. 639; Bloch 1982; Kinney 1986; Westermann-Angerhausen 1987; Brenk 1987; and Constable 1990, pp. 55-62. For the latter reference the author is grateful to Virginia Remburg. 9 The antique gems were identified and dated by Antje Krug. A list is contained in the object file at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 10 The casket also contains repousse angels and border strips from a Mosan chdsse or reliquary of about 1160. See McLachlan-Thurlby-Little 1985, p. 83. I am grateful to Charles Little for sharing his research on this object and for sug- gesting its inclusion in the exhibition. ' 4 For a similar melange of antique gems see the reliquary Shrine of the Three Kings in Co- logne Cathedral, produced in Cologne between about 1181 and 1230 (Schnitzler 1959, pp. 36- 40, no. 29). ' - At least some church officials were familiar with classical myths in the twelfth century. See Heckscher 1937, p. 218. 43 For other examples of interpretatio Christiana of ancient gems see Survival of the Gods 1987, pp. 186-188 with additional bibliography. 14 See Survival of the Gods 1987, pp. 185-192 with additional bibliography and discussion of magical properties ascribed to stones carved with various pagan gods, including Mercury, who was thought to make the possessor wise and persuasive. 43 On spolia and the notion of historical conti- nuity see Heckscher 1937. See, for example, various Carolingian ivo- ries and manuscripts in Hubert-Porcher- Volbach 1970, pis. 75, 180, 216, 228. 1 ' According to John Herrmann, this capital probably dates to between 350 and 470. 1 am grateful for his help. See Cahn-Seidel 1979, p. 57. The precise origin of this capital remains unknown. 49 On borrowings from antiquity in England, France and Germany in the twelfth century see Sauerliinder 1 982 with additional bibliography. The invention of Evangelist portraits is too late for them to be actual likenesses. There- fore, they had to be idealized types. 21 Friend 1927 and 1929. See also Hanfmann 1980, pp. 75-79. 22 These prototypes were identified in Friend’s unpublished research seeVikan 1973, p. 47 and Metzger 1964, p. 28. 23 Friend 1927, p. 143. 24 More complete examples may be found in several Byzantine manuscripts of the tenth and eleventh centuries including Rome, Vatican Li- brary Cod. Gr. 364, fol. 131. See Friend 1927, pi. 105. 23 This is a dismembered leaf from Trier, Stadtbibliothek MS 178 (205). For descrip- tion see Swarzenski-Schilling 1929, p. 3. 26 See Friend 1927, p. 140 and Friend 1929, pp. 9-22, esp. fig. 1 1 . 27 Weitzmann 1979, pp. 126-129. 2 ^ See Survival of the Gods 1987. pp. 11-17 and Nees 1991 with additional bibliography. 29 On the Herakles theme see Galinsky 1972; on representations in classical art see Uhlenbrock 1986. 30 In this fragment Herakles is broken off above the shoulders and below the waist.and the lion is missing his body beyond the mane. The back of the fragment may have been recut for reuse as building material. For description see Vermeule 1988, p. 36, no. 23. 34 On the plates see Wander 1973, Grunsven- Eygenraanr 1 973, and Weitzmann 1979, pp. 475-483 with additional bibliography. 32 For example see a fourth-century relief from Egypt now in the Brooklyn Museum, acc. no. 61.128; Uhlenbrock 1986, no. 57. Similar compositions from antiquity also show Mithras slaying the bull; for examples see Weitzmann 1979, pp. 193-196. 33 Kitzinger 1977, p. 110. 33 For discussion see Grunsven-Eygenraam 1973 and Wander 1973 and 1975, who sug- gests that the plates were commissioned by Heraclius to commemorate his victory over the Persian general Razatis in 627. 33 Heraclius’s deeds are said to surpass those of Herakles. See Nees 1991, p. 163. 36 Often represented in the twelfth and thir- teenth centuries, this subject was interpreted as a prefiguration of Christ’s conquest of the devil. 37 The capital may have come from the clois- ter of the cathedral of Notre-Dame-des-Doms; see Scher 1969, pp. 127-132. 3 ^ For discussion see Dumbarton Oaks 1967, pp. 99-100, 110 . 340; Hausherr 1977, vol. 1, pp. 696-697; vol. 5, pp. 477-520. 39 For discussion see Kantorowicz 1928 and Meredith 1986 with additional bibliography. 3,1 1 am grateful to Matilda Bruckner for the latter suggestion. 41 For discussion see Hausherr 1977, vol. 1, pp. 696-697; vol. 5, p. 513. For other mes- sages (including negative and ambiguous ones) conveyed by representations of Herakles in the middle ages, see Nees 1991. 42 See Gillerman 1989, pp. 286-289, no. 220 with additional bibliography. 43 For discussion of the origins of representa- tions of virtues and vices in Christian art see Katzenellenbogen 1939. 44 Indeed, Herakles is often thought to per- sonify the Christian virtue of Fortitude in later medieval works like the Baptistery pulpit in Pisa by Nicola Pisano datable to about 1260. See Nees 1991, p. 65. 43 For discussion and dating of this leaf see Boehm 1984, pp. 53-63. 1 am grateful to Bar- bara Boehm for suggesting its inclusion in the exhibition. Boehm now associates the leaf with the illuminator Perrin Remiet and has identi- fied a sister leaf in a private collection. 4(> See Boehm 1984, p. 53-55 with additional bibliography. 47 On the manuscripts commissioned by Charles V see La Librarie 1968 and Lcs Fastes 1981, pp. 276-362. 4 ^ For the identification of the scenes see Boehm 1984, p. 57. 49 See Boehm 1 984, p. 55 with additional bib- liography. 3(4 For the relationship between Ceres and the Virgin see Berger 1985. 17 1 6 Abbreviations Berger 1985 Berger, Pamela. The Goddess Obscured. Boston, 1985. Bloch 1982 Bloch. Herbert. “A New Fascination with An- cient Rome," Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Cenlur)'. Cambridge, 1982, pp. 615-636. Boehm 1984 Boehm. Barbara. “Valerius Maximus in a Four- teenth-Century French Translation: An Illumi- nated Leaf," Metropolitan Museum Journal 18 (1984), pp. 53-63. Boncompagno 1891 Boncompagno. Rhetorica Novissima: Biblioteca Iuridica Mcdii Aevi. Vol. 2. Bologna, 1891. Brenk 1987 Brenk, Beat. “Spolia from Constantine to Charlemagne: Aesthetics versus Ideology,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 41 (1987), pp. 103-109. Cahn-Seidel 1979 Cahn, Walter and Seidel, Linda. Romanesque Sculpture in American Collections. Vol . I: New En- gland Museums. New York, 1979. Constable 1990 Constable, Giles. “A Living Past: The Histori- cal Environment of the Middle Ages,” Harvard Library’ Bulletin 1 (1990), pp. 49-70. Dumbarton Oaks 1967 Handbook of the Byzantine Collection, Dumbarton Oaks. Washington, 1967. Les Fastes 1981 Les Fastes du Gothique: le Siecle du Charles V. Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 1981. Friend 1927 Friend, Albert M. “The Portraits of the Evan- gelists in Greek and Latin Manuscripts,” Art Studies 5 (1927), pp. 113-147. Friend 1929 Friend, Albert M. “The Portraits of the Evan- gelists in Greek and Latin Manuscripts,” Art Studies 7 (1929), pp. 1-29. Galinsky 1972 Galinsky, G. Karl. The Herakles Theme: The Ad- aptations of the Hero in Literature from Homer to the Twentieth Century. Oxford, 1972. Gillerman 1989 Gillerman, Dorothy, ed. Gothic Sculpture in America: I. The New England Museums. New York, 1989. Grunsven-Eygenraam 1973 Grunsvcn-Eygenraam, Mariette van.“Heraclius and the David Plates,” Bulletin Antieke Beschaving 48 (1973), pp. 158-174. Hanfmann 1980 Hanfmann, George. “The Continuity of Clas- sical Art: Culture, Myth, and Faith,” Age of Spirituality: A Symposium. New York, 1980, pp. 75-93. Haskins 1927 Haskins, Charles Homer. Tltc Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. Cambridge, 1927. Hausherr 1977 Hausherr, Rainer. Die Zeit der Staufer.Yoh. 1- 5. Stuttgart, 1977. Heckscher 1937 Heckscher, William. “Relics of Pagan Antiq- uity in Mediaeval Settings ’’Journal of the Warburg Institute 1 (1937), pp. 204-220. Hubert-Porcher-Volbach 1970 Hubert, J., Porcher, J., and Volbach, W.F. The Carolingiau Renaissance. New York, 1970. Kantorowicz 1928 Kantorowicz, Ernst. Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite. Berlin, 1928. Katzenellenbogen 1939 Katzenellenbogen, Adolf. Allegories of the Vir- tues and Vices in Medieval Art. London, 1939. Kinney 1986 Kinney, Dale. “Spolia from the Baths of Caracalla in Sta. Maria in Trastevere,” Art Bul- letin 68 (1986), pp. 379-397. Kitzinger 1977 Kitzinger, Ernst. Byzantine Art in the Making. Cambridge, 1977. Kitzinger 1982 Kitzinger, Ernst. “The Arts as Aspects of a Re- naissance: Rome and Italy,” Renaissance and Re- newal in the Twelfth Century. Cambridge, 1 982, pp. 637-670. La Librairie 1968 La Librairie de Charles V. Bibhotheque Nation- ale, Paris, 1968. McLachlan-Thurlby-Little 1985 McLachlan, Elizabeth, Thurlby, Malcolm, and Little, Charles. “Romanesque Reassembled in England: A Review,” Gesta 24 (1985), pp. 77- 86 . Meredith 1986 Meredith, Jill. “The Revival of the Augustan Age in the Court Art of Emperor Frederick II,” Artistic Strategy and the Rhetoric of Power: Political Uses of Art from Antiquity to the Present. 1986, pp. 39-56. Metzger 1964 Metzger, Bruce. The Text of the New Testament. London, 1964. Nees 1991 Nees, Lawrence. A Tainted Mantle: Hercules and the Classical Tradition at the Carolingian Court. Philadelphia, 1991. Panofsky 1960 Panofsky, Erwin. Renaissances and Renascences in Western Art. New York, 1960. Sauerlander 1982 Sauerliinder, Willibald. “Architecture and the Figurative Arts: the North,” Renaissance and Re- newal in the Twelfth Century. Cambridge, 1 982, pp. 671-710. Scher 1969 Scher, Stephen. The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, 1969. Schnitzler 1959 Schnitzler, Hermann. Rheinische Schatzkammer die Romanik. Diisseldorf, 1959. Survival of the Gods 1987 Survival of the Gods: Classical Mythology in Medi- eval Art. Brown University, Providence, 1987. Swarzenski-Schilling 1929 Swarzenski, Georg and Schilling, Rosy. Die illuminierten Handschriften und Einzelminiaturen des Mittelalters und der Renaissance in Frankfurter Besitz. Frankfurt, 1929. Uhlenbrock 1986 Uhlenbrock, Jaimee Pugliese. Herakles: Passage of the Hero Through WOO Years of Classical Art. New Rochelle, 1986. Vermeule 1988 Vermeule, Cornelius C. Sculpture in Stone and Bronze in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: Addi- tions to the Collections of Greek, Etruscan, and Ro- man Art 1971-1988. Boston, 1988. Vikan 1973 Vikan, Gary, ed. Illuminated Greek Manuscripts from American Collections. Princeton, 1973. Wander 1973 Wander, Steven. “The Cyprus Plates:The Story of David and Goliath,” Metropolitan Museum Jour- nal 8 (1973), pp. 89-104. Wander 1975 Wander, Steven. “The Cyprus Plates and the Chronicle of Fredegar,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 29 (1975), pp. 345-346. Weitzmann 1960 Weitzmann, Kurt.“The Survival of Mythologi- cal Representations in Early Christian and Byz- antine Art and their Impact on Christian Ico- nography,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 14 (1960), pp. 45-68. Weitzmann 1979 Weitzmann, Kurt, ed. The Age of Spirituality: Dtte Antique and Early Christian Art, Third to Seventh Century. New York, 1979. Westermann-Angerhausen 1987 Westermann-Angerhausen, Hiltrud. “Spolie und Umfeld in Egberts Trier,” Zeitsclirift fur Kunstgcschichte 50 (1987), pp. 305-336. Remembering the Saints Virginia Reinburg fig 2 Pilgrims at the Tomb of St. Nicholas Gentile da Fabriano, c. 1370-1427 Florence, 1425 tempera on panel National Gallery of Art Samuel H. Kress Collection © 1 994 Board of Trustees acc. no.1939.1.268 Like people of every era and culture, medieval men and women remembered and hon- ored their dead. They commemorated with par- ticular affection “the very special dead,” holy people — called saints — who had dedicated their lives to God, and whom God had rewarded with a place in his heavenly kingdom. Saints were not only residents of the kingdom of heaven; they were God’s family, friends, servants, and atten- dants. In short, to employ the language of me- dieval politics and society, saints were members of Gods royal court. They did God’s work in heaven as they had while alive on earth and could intercede with God on behalf of human beings. Saints thus played a key role in the relationship between God and living women and men. Their lives provided examples of virtue, and because they were God’s friends, saints served as patrons for devotees by receiving requests (in the form of prayer and pious acts) and interceding with the God they had themselves served so faithfully. 1 Medieval Christians remembered saints with great energy. They composed stories of saints’ lives and miracles, passing them from com- munity to community, from generation to gen- eration, through story-telling, sermons, art, and books. Such tales preserved memories of the saints — often with embellishment and modifica- tion — and helped forge lasting bonds between individuals or communities and saints of local fame or influence. According to Adrevald of Fleury, a ninth-century monk, the saints’ heroic deeds “are placed in our hearts through the reci- tation of their story, so that they are restored to presence in our mind’s eye as if through some mirror.” 2 Remembering a saint, keeping him alive “in our hearts,” thus depended on telling stories of his life and miracles. And it logically followed that a samt whose local reputation sug- gested a willingness to grant protection and as- sistance was more likely to receive prayer, praise, and gifts. Sixth-century bishop Gregory of Tours explained how a saintly patron’s help encouraged a devotee to offer gifts in return: “each person cheerfully rejoices under the protection of his own patron saint and more eagerly repays the honor that is owed, when he realizes that he has been cleansed by his patron’s power from the ill- ness that he suffered.” 3 Saints’ cults flourished throughout the middle ages, in every part of Europe. The act of remembering saints — telling their stories, com- memorating their deeds, asking their help — pro- vided much of the subject matter for the visual arts, music, architecture, literature, and ritual. Often these cultural expressions not only recorded an individual saint’s life or virtues, but also cel- ebrated the relationship between a saint and a human being or social group. In particular, a community’s experience of its past — its collec- tive memory — crystallized around cults of saints, usually focused on local ownership of saints’ rel- ics. For example, the city of Venice, having ac- quired St. Mark’s relics in 828, commemorated his patronage yearly by solemnly carrying his rel- ics through the city’s neighborhoods in a grand procession, and afterward celebrated the history and character of Venice itself with parades, the- atre, and feasts. Gentile da Fabriano’s Pilgrims at the Tomb of St. Nicholas (1425) (fig. 2) reminded viewers of St. Nicholas’s benevolence. The paint- ing, a predella panel from an altarpiece commis- sioned for the Florentine church of San Nicolo sopr’Arno, depicts pilgrims venerating the saint’s tomb. 4 Although St. Nicholas was not buried in San Nicolo sopr’Arno, parishioners undoubtedly addressed prayers especially fervently to their church’s patron saint. Local history was con- structed through art and ritual, as these examples show, and moreover connected to wider currents of Christian history — whether St. Nicholas’s gifts to a Florentine parish, or St. Mark’s posthumous emigration from Palestine to Venice. In both cases a saint’s cult provided the vehicle for remember- ing history and negotiating local identity. Like saints’ cults, collective identities did not remain fixed. Venice’s festivities differed in ritual detail from year to year, local preachers and viewers in- terpreted Gentile da Fabriano’s painting anew from time to time; a community’s sense of its past and its present evolved accordingly. The Venetian feast of St. Mark and Gen- tile da Fabriano’s painting exemplify what Pierre Nora has called “the places” or sites of memory ( les lieux de memoire ): events, objects, symbols, discourses, or spaces where memories converge, conflict, and define relationships between past, present, and future. 5 In short, they are the cru- cible in which identities are formed and trans- formed. In this essay I take up two aspects of memory in medieval culture that have not gener- ally been considered in tandem: collective memory and the arts of memory. 6 First, I ex- plore the way medieval Christians memorialized the saints and their deeds in the visual arts, and ask what such artistic expressions can tell us about how the saints were known in specific communi- ties. But I will also consider the activity of remembering and ask how collective memory converged and focused on objects — specifically, bodily remains of saints (relics), and the artifacts created to honor and interpret those remains. Medieval Christians remembered the saints and centered their history and collective sentiments on them through seeing, touching, even tasting relics, reliquaries, pilgrim souvenirs, and images. 1 hope to suggest here that the meaning of medi- eval art for its owners and viewers was rooted in 19 iS fig- 3 Relic of llie Skull of Pope St. Zacharias 17th or 18th century green velvet wrapper with silk embroidery Kermt, Kerk van Onze-Lieve- Vrouw-Onbevlekte-Ontvangenis Institut Royal du Patrimoine, Brussels fig- 4 Burial of St. Edmund Life and Miracles of St. Edmund, King and Martyr Bury St. Edmunds Abbey, c. 1130 manuscript on vellum The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MS. M. 736, fol. 18 the senses and in interior experiences stimulated through the senses. 7 By discussing ways medi- eval Christians remembered the saints, I will sug- gest links between collective memory and an “art” of memory centered on objects. Christians knew the saints through sto- ries circulating in oral and written form, but they also knew their saints more intimately through physical remains saints left on earth. Indeed, from late antiquity through the late middle ages, much of the cult of saints focused on the location, pos- session, and veneration of relics. 8 For twenti- eth-century people, the attention lavished on saints’ relics is surely one of the more foreign and puzzling aspects of medieval Christian prac- tice, and even scholars of medieval history on occasion express a patronizing attitude toward relic cults. But what did medieval men and women see when they looked at the skulls, bits ot bone, and piles of dust that had once been the bodies of “God’s friends”? (For an example of a relic see fig. 3.) Implicitly acknowledging a disjuncture between (earthly) appearance and (spiritual) reality, Adrevald of Fleury cautioned that saints were venerated not “because of their outward appearances, but because we know them [to be] beautiful on account of their merits.” 9 Saints had glorified God with their lives, and their bodies thus shared the glorification of Jesus’s body after his resurrection from death. Accord- ing to twelfth-century monk Guibert of Nogent, “the bodies of the elect ought to conform to the glory of the body of Christ, so that the vileness that is contracted by accident or natural decay is amended to the pattern of the Son of God as transfigured on the Mount.” 10 Guibert’s near contemporary, abbot Peter the Venerable, ex- pressed a similar understanding when he re- minded his monks that Jesus had promised his servants bodily resurrection “and the glorifica- tion of human substance totally.” Therefore, Pe- ter declared, “we ought to reverence with due honor the body of this blessed martyr about to be resurrected, as it will be clothed in immortal glory, although we see it as dead.” 11 Bodies the saints left behind — however imperfect, fragmen- tary, or decomposed — reflected the spiritual per- fection they had attained, and to the living faithful they were beautiful, worthy of the highest ad- miration. Relics of St. Martin of Tours were called “that most precious gem.” St. Benedict’s remains were described as “a treasure dearer to God than gold or silver and all gems.” 12 The rich Latin vocabulary that medieval Christians used for relics suggests the many lay- ers of meaning they attached to them. Although reliquiae referred to “relics,” the word also retained its earlier sense of “inheritance.” Relics were also pignora, literally “pledges.” 13 Mcmoria could mean tomb, sanctuary, or relic. 14 Reliquiae, pignora, and memoria signify at the same time a material object, and that object’s association with the pres- ence or memory of a person. Indeed, for medi- eval Christians the departed saints were present in their relics, and their patronage and friendship could therefore be sought at their tombs. An early inscription on the tomb of St. Martin of Tours read: “Here lies Martin the bishop, of holy memory, whose soul is in the hand of God; but he is fully here, present and made plain in miracles of every kind.” 15 Stories of miracles performed by St. Martin at his tomb inTours, and other saints in their resting places — told and retold, collected, written down in miracle collections — proved the saints’ presence and encouraged pilgrims suffer- ing from illness, disability, and misfortune to seek help at their shrines. 16 As Gregory of Tours com- mented about a healing miracle he recorded, “I must contribute to people’s memory this distin- guished miracle for the glory of the one who per- formed it.” 17 At tombs, and wherever relics were enshrined, the faithful could meet their saintly patrons. Thus time and space condensed around relics. Because saints dwelled with God but re- mained on earth in their memoriae, relics bridged heaven and earth. Their pigtwra stayed behind, a pledge of the future resurrection of all human- kind. At the resting places of saints, the past, present, and future collapsed into a dense web of promises, beliefs, hopes, and prayers. 18 Early Christians had gathered at saints’ tombs for prayer and ritual, literally praying on top of the bones of martyrs. As they constructed churches for their religious gatherings, it became customary to bury bodies of saints inside altars or under a church sanctuary. 19 For example, an illustration from a twelfth-century manuscript Life of St. Edmund (fig. 4) depicts the martyred nmth- century English king being laid in a sarcophagus beneath the church’s floor. 20 In a stained glass panel from Canterbury cathedral (fig. 5), pilgrims kneel before the altar containing relics of St. Tho- mas Becket. The eucharistic liturgy (mass) was enacted on altars that were also saints’ tombs, a practice that endures in Catholic, Anglican, and Orthodox traditions. 21 Parishes and monastic communities literally lived on, and in the presence of, their patron saints. But during the middle ages, the bodies of few saints were buried intact at a known tomb or altar. Since at least the fourth century, Christians had divided up the precious remains of martyrs, missionaries, bishops, and other holy people. Relics — and the saintly patronage they carried with them — were in great demand for altars in the churches, shrines, monasteries, and cathedrals built as new regions of Europe were converted to Christianity. 22 A veritable market evolved to fur- Remembering the Saints I / irginia Rvinhiu ^ M 5 Pilgrims at St. Thomas Bechet’s Tomh Canterbury Cathedral last quarter of ! 2th century stained glass Photo courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London nish new altars and religious institutions with the relics they needed; saints’ bones became com- modities that could be bought, sold, traded, in- herited, given as gifts, and stolen. '' While it would be easy to condemn the circulation of relics as greedy and cynical, we should also remember that medieval monks, priests, and kings longed for relics because of the saintly patronage relics pledged, as well as the social prestige they brought. In the Christian cultures of Europe and the British Isles, relics had a variety of religious and secular uses. Because relics promised the presence of a saint and were therefore believed to possess sacred power, it seemed sensible to transact all manner of business in their presence. Relics were not only employed for formal prayer and liturgy. They were used for healing and for what we today would call judicial and political business (trials, oaths, fund-raising, and what some historians have rather crudely called “monastic propaganda”). 24 The expanded functions of relics required that they not merely rest intact in tombs or churches, but that they be mobile. This in turn required portable receptacles, and modern mu- seum collections display the enormous variety of reliquaries crafted in different regions of medi- eval Europe. 25 Not all relics were enclosed in reliquaries. Some were evidently displayed as bodies or bones that viewers could see or possi- bly touch directly, as we can see from the skull of St. Zacharias the pope (fig. 3), wrapped in a red silk covering embroidered with “Anna,” probably the name of a beguine in the Flemish beguinage that owned the relic. 26 But Sister Anna’s relic of St. Zacharias’s nearly naked skull was unusual. From the early middle ages on, most relics were enclosed in reliquaries that obstructed a view of the bones themselves. The earliest form of reli- quary was probably the chasse or miniature sar- cophagus, and numerous surviving examples tes- tify to the form’s enduring popularity (nos. 14, 15, 16). The chasse resembles the reliquary shaped like a church or shrine, in function as well as in appearance (figs. 2, 7, 8). After all, churches were also saints’ tombs — indeed, because they en- shrined the bones of patron saints, churches were themselves reliquaries. 27 The chasse reminded pilgrims that they knelt and prayed ad memoriam sancli (literally, “at the tomb of the saint” or “at the relics of the saint,” but recall that memoria also means “memory”). 28 Other common forms of reliquaries are reliquary-crosses, which contained fragments of the true cross; amulets, pendants, or phylacteries, probably fashioned for relic fragments owned by individuals or families; and body part fig- 6 Pilgrims Visiting the Tomb of St.Hcdwig Life of St. Hedwig of Silesia Court Atelier of Duke Ludwig I of Liegnitz and Brieg, 1353 pen and ink and tempera colors on vellum J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California MS. 83.MN.126, fol. 87v 15 min i fimiwrfjilts t daudi mfiraiK fopnlite ibte IjAlungis adnifes ioVuilc cuianr erBaa _ . mrntqiaterTnsrtad’qnck cunnir I o 21 M 9 Feast of Relics of Salisbury Cathedral Sarwu Missal England, c. 1 380- 1 400 manuscript on vellum Trinity College, Cambridge MS. B.II.3, fol. 218v reliquaries, the remarkable arms, heads, and feet that catch the eye of modern museum visitors. Medieval art offers evidence about how Christians venerated saints’ relics housed inside reliquaries. A stained glass panel from Canter- bury cathedral (tig. 5) shows pilgrims praying at St. Thomas Becket’s tomb. In this case (as we know from literary accounts) the tomb is depicted quite accurately. 29 In Gentile da Fabriano’s Pil- grims at the Tomb of St. Nicholas (fig. 2) pilgrims approach, kneel before, and even touch a large marble sarcophagus containing St. Nicholas’s rel- ics. In an illumination from a fourteenth-century German Life of St. Hedwig (fig. 6) pilgrims — rich and poor, disabled and able-bodied — crowd around the saint’s tomb, here an open bier elabo- rately decorated with delicate Gothic tracery. 30 And two illuminations from a fourteenth-century pontifical from Metz (figs. 7, 8) depict the rite of translating a saint’s relics from one location to an- other. 31 In the first, lay people and clerics vener- ate an elaborate gold shrine reliquary sheltered under a tent. In the second, they carry the same shrine on a litter into the cathedral, where it will be installed near the main altar. A historiated ini- tial from an English missal (c. 1380-1400) (fig. 9) portrays a priest standing at an altar covered with small reliquaries — among them a head and a hand. 32 Because this image accompanies the text for the mass on the feast day of relics owned by Salisbury cathedral, it may represent reliquaries in that cathedral’s treasury. We know from paintings such as these, as well as surviving reliquaries and literary evidence, that reliquaries varied widely in size, material, and decoration. At this point we might pause over material and decoration, and not merely to note the wealth of ecclesiastical institutions, or justifi- ably to admire the skill and imagination of medi- eval artists. Both materials and decoration served the memoria of the saints. The metals, gems, stone, wood, and glass from which the material culture of medieval Christianity was fashioned were meant to honor God and his saints, and to reflect the beauty of the celestial kingdom. Here the image of “the heavenly city of Jerusalem” was never far from medieval notions of how religious objects should look. 33 The narrator-visionary of the book of Revelation described God’s kingdom as built of gold, gems, and crystal: “The wall was built of diamond, and the city of pure gold, like polished glass. The foundations of the city wall were faced with all kinds of precious stone: the first with diamond, the second lapis lazuli, the third tur- quoise, the fourth crystal.... The twelve gates were twelve pearls, ... and the main street of the city was pure gold....” [Rev. 21:18-22] As medieval commentators instructed, Christians should con- struct their churches and religious objects of the most precious materials. Among these objects, above all, were reliquaries. Was it not reasonable, asked Theofrid of Echternach, that the mortal mftfucanonc crrlcfir. p.nihr an 1 twin erriia conftmmr. ttfrrdnf ultqiiir in loco luneftts atm Ctrl (ft a fub inno.flanttH itn utgtltr prcram uoc nut . fit pupiranto ft aO Dtiuiut offrnft m bi Oittor (dir. Otrar qismipa imuo j in q picpirar fr ianr ofonnn fme 6its lobifflt. oxftnr. O.’mms. oiano. nun cdcflium ituc ft aims h dntnir pb'u tpts rrliqwas iiifnirrnnt tono.T rrlduOik rii mtatK (trimnbiiJis ftlniuinanb; tt acnftft aDnriiapfallaft pel uigur fanm frinatifioiiifc urfftr • ■ * • • • • • « • jom fanmfiour plrinn tmdiatnrnos totninre (knits m pier aifWnr. 4 M 7 M 8 Reliquary Venerated by Lay People Metz Pontifical Metz, c. 1302-1316 manuscript on vellum Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge MS. 298, fol. 1 Reliquary Carried in Procession Metz Pontifical Metz, c. 1302-1316 manuscript on vellum Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge MS. 298, fol. 5v Rr.MLMUElUNC. THE Sain is Pirginia Rcinbwg 110. JJ Reliquary Pendant of St. Sergius Constantinople, 11th century gold Dumbarton Oaks Collection acc. no. 53.19 remains of the saint now “vested in the raiment of immortality and crowned in glory” should merit the costliest of tabernacles, and that those who reign as kings in heaven should be glori- ously housed on earth? 34 Stunning gold reliquar- ies encrusted with jewels— like an exquisite sixth- century Byzantine pendant containing relics of St. Zacharias (no. 12) — remind us, as they did medieval Christians, that saints’ bones themselves were precious gems. 35 Artistic skill also reminded the faithful about the saints. Words and images carved, etched, enameled, and painted onto reliquaries identified and interpreted the bones inside. As Guibert of Nogent described a twelfth-century reliquary containing bits of the Virgin Mary’s clothing, “verses on it in gold told of the wonders within.” 36 More recently, Daniel Arasse has pointed out that a religious image is an aide-memoire — that is, it “makes the absent present,” and “makes the faithful see what they know but could forget.” 37 Images thus supported memory, primarily by re-presenting a person, a story, a truth. Reli- quaries decorated with images not only protected saints’ relics but also framed them for viewers in a more subtle way. They were sometimes deco- rated with portraits of the saints whose bones they enclosed — for example, a gold reliquary-pendant of St. Sergius from eleventh-century Constan- tinople (no. 13). 38 The reliquary identifies the saint by name and was probably designed to be worn around the neck. Owners of personal reli- quaries like this claimed in a most intimate way (and advertised?) the patronage of the saint whose bones they wore. 1 )etailed iconography could present me- dieval viewers with a specific story about the saint whose remains rested in the reliquary. For ex- ample, the iconography of the Billoin chasse (no. 14), a splendid Limoges chasse from the mid thir- teenth century, presents the patron saint of the Auvergne as Jesus’s right hand man. 39 One side of the chasse is decorated with scenes from the life of Christ; the other shows the resurrected Christ, surrounded by ten disciples, the Virgin Mary, and St. Martial. Martial, a third-century missionary and bishop of Limoges, was believed responsible for converting the Auvergne to Chris- tianity; Gregory of Tours writes of miracles performed around St. Martial’s tomb shortly after his death. According to Gregory and the gospels. Martial was not a contemporary of Jesus. But on this chasse, he stands in the coveted spot of the beloved disciple, very much the way he was represented in lives of St. Martial written by monks of the eleventh-century monastery that owned his relics. The Billom chasse explained to viewers that a local holy man stood beside Jesus in his heavenly kingdom. What better argument for the wisdom of prayer to St. Martial, or tor no. 12 Reliquary Pendant of St. Zacharias Constantinople, 6th century gold Dumbarton Oaks Collection acc. no. 57.53 the importance of the Auvergne in the kingdom of heaven? For modern viewers, reliquaries such as the Billom chasse offer precious information about a saint’s cult. On occasion we are lucky enough to have multiple reliquaries of one saint. Because so many reliquaries of St. Thomas Becket survive in European and North American museum col- lections, and because so much literary evidence also survives, the cult of Becket’s relics is one of the best documented in medieval Europe. 40 Becket reliquaries provide a good example of the visual presentation of different stories of a saint’s life and death. Thomas Becket (1 120-1 170), born into a family of French origin, was named arch- bishop of Canterbury after a brilliant career in church and secular government. Unfortunately for Becket, his quarrels with King Henry II over relations between church and crown continued after he became archbishop. Becket was twice forced into exile to France and eventually assassi- nated by two noblemen widely believed to be the king’s supporters. Thomas Becket had both enemies and al- lies during his life and for a few decades after his death. And yet, probably because of his shocking murder, he quickly acquired a reputation for sanc- tity. Within days of his death his remains — his body, his spilled blood, his clothing and personal possessions, the murder weapon — became the center of a cult, and Becket himself was proclaimed a saint by his supporters. (He was canonized by the pope in 1 173.) His relics were divided, sought by allies and pilgrims, given as gifts, and enshrined in reliquaries, churches, and chapels named after him. Stories of his posthumous miracles circu- lated and were compiled for posterity in books and stained glass. 41 Reliquaries created to house hundreds of Becket’s reputed relics aided the construction of his saintly reputation, especially in England and France, where he was most popular. For this rea- son reliquaries are valuable evidence about how the cult of St. Thomas Becket was practiced in different places. Because of his Norman heritage and his ties to France, Becket was a favorite of French pilgrims; the enamel workshops of Limoges produced large numbers of reliquaries of Thomas Becket, most of them intended for French or English use. The single surviving panel (no. 15) of a Limoges reliquary of St. Thomas Becket shows how a reliquary could frame relics no. 14 Billow Chasse Limoges, c. 1240-1260 enamel and gilding on copper over wood Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, acc. no. 44.247 Rimkmm.rinc; ti ii Saints I 'iiyitiia Remburg no. 15 Plaque from a Reliquary Chasse: The Crucifixion and Martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket Attributed to Master G. Alpais and workshop Limoges, c. 1220-1225 enamel and gilding on copper Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H.Wade Fund acc. no. 51.449 no. 16 Reliquary Chasse of St. Thomas Becket Canterbury, c. 1200-1207 gilding on copper Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 1980 acc. no. 1980.417 for medieval viewers. 42 The right side of the panel shows two knights murdering the archbishop in his cathedral; the small hand in the upper right corner represents God welcoming Becket’s soul into heaven. The left side of the panel depicts Jesus’s crucifixion. The hand ol God, and the juxtaposition of Becket’s assassination with Jesus’s crucifixion, strongly suggest that Becket died a martyr. Produced within decades of his death, this reliquary essentially argues — even testifies — that Becket died a martyr. A reliquary intended for English use (no. 16) presents Becket differently. A large and beau- tifully designed copper-gilt chasse of about 1200 from Christ Church monastery in Canterbury makes the case for Thomas Becket’s sainthood, at the same time identifying him with the local history of Canterbury. 43 The reliquary is engraved with medallion busts showing early English saints, holy kings, and archbishops of Canterbury, and includes St. Thomas Becket in what is essentially a materialized litany of Canterbury saints. The monks of Christ Church had guarded Becket’s relics from the day after the murder until 1220, when the relics were translated to what was in- tended to be a permanent place in the renovated cathedral. William Wixom has argued convinc- ingly that the chasse was created by Christ Church to protect and honor relics of the saints depicted in the medallions, including Becket. The reli- quary makes visible Christ Church’s history: as art object, it protects and interprets centuries of saintly intercession. Large enough to be seen from a distance, the chasse with its gilded finish must have glowed in the dim candlelight of a medieval cathedral. The sturdily built chasse (or “strong box” according to Wixom) has hinges at the rear and may have hung by a chain over the altar in the cathedral’s Trinity Chapel. Or the monks might have taken it on journeys as a portable reli- quary — in both portraits and bodies, they car- ried with them the memoriae of their patrons. The Limoges and Canterbury chasses were intended to aid public veneration of St. Thomas Becket’s relics. But Becket’s relics were so scat- tered that we also find a reliquary made for a gift to an individual: a small gold pendant-reliquary (no. 17) made for Reginald Fitzjocelin, bishop of Bath, for presentation to Queen Margaret of Sicily (d. 1 1 83). 44 The relics were displayed on one side of the pendant, protected by a crystal, and identified by an inscription as the blood of St. Thomas Becket and his bloodied vestments. On the other side of the pendant is an engraving of the bishop presenting his gift to Queen Mar- garet. Becket’s blood and clothing were among the most prized (and available) of his relics, and many stories testified to their miracle-working powers. For example, in 1171 a priest from Lon- don claimed to have been cured of paralysis by drinking water tinged with a drop of Becket’s blood. Pilgrims of all walks of life, especially the sick, were eager to obtain “sanctified water” ( aqua sanctificata ) that had touched a relic or reliquary of Thomas Becket and thus acquired the sacred power of the saint himself. 45 This reliquary made St. Thomas Becket’s relics Queen Margaret’s pri- vate possession. Like the Byzantine pendant- no. 19 -4 Ann Reliquary of St. Valentine Switzerland, late 14th century gilding on silver Metropolitan Museum of Art Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan acc. no. 17.190.351 A - ToHIOIV^ISTVD ^ ' no. 17 Reliquar)’ Pendant of St. Thomas Becket England, c. 1174-1176 gold Metropolitan Museum of Art Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1963 acc. no. 63.160 no. 18 Relief of St.John the Baptist’s Head Nottingham, 15th century alabaster with polychrome Neil and Sharon Phillips/ Phillips Family Collection Kememberin<; the Saints Viiginiu Reinburg fig ■ 10 Case for a Fool Reliquary of Si. Margaret France, 14th century tooled leather Metropolitan Museum of' Art The Cloisters Collection acc. no. 47.101.65 no. 21 Pilgrim’s Ampulla Syria-Palestine, 6th century terracotta Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore acc. no. 48.2521 reliquaries of St. Sergius and St. Zacharias (nos. 12, 13), it promised its owner the patronage of the saint whose relics site wore like jewelry, close to her heart like a lovers memento. The pendant also reminded Queen Margaret of her relation- ship — whether friend, relative, patron, or sup- porter — with the bishop of Bath, who had given the gift. Medieval reliquaries sometimes replicated the perfected shape of the fragment within, ren- dering the saint’s body or clothing “visible” to pilgrims, and making the holy person present. Most dramatic of these are reliquaries shaped like hands, fingers, arms, heads, feet, toes, or ribs. Although a modern viewer might assume that such reliquaries housed remains of the relevant body part, evidence suggests that like other reliquaries, they often contained a mixture of relics — sometimes from different saints. 46 Reli- quaries shaped like limbs are quite striking, as we can see from the leather case for a fourteenth- century French foot reliquary (fig. 10) decorated with scenes from the life of St. Margaret. 47 Head reliquaries “made the absent present” in a par- ticularly vivid manner. Relics of saints’ skulls were sometimes presented with minimal artistic intervention, as in the relics of pope St. Zacharias (fig. 3) and St. John the Baptist. 48 (For a medi- eval sculpted representation of the latter see no. 18.) But most head reliquaries were jeweled metal portrait busts that held relics inside an inner com- partment. A late fourteenth-century Italian reliquary-bust of St. Juliana (fig. 11), although fashioned of copper, presents the early Christian martyr in a remarkably naturalistic manner: her face is painted with tempera, her hair is gilded, and her facial features are depicted with charm and vitality. 49 The Convent of St. Giuliana in Perugia commissioned this splendid reliquary to honor remains of their patron saint’s skull. The bust of St. Juliana must have rested on an altar in the chapel, where the sisters of her convent could visualize their patron among them during mass and prayers. Head reliquaries like this meld reli- quary, relic, and image. 50 For medieval Chris- tians — indeed, for modern museum visitors — they personalize and animate the relics they house. They are the “face” of the relic. Arm reliquaries had a somewhat different function. A typical example is the late fourteenth- century gilded silver reliquary from the cathedral of Basel (no. 19) containing relics of St. Valen- tine. 51 This is a life-sized forearm; the hand wears a bishop’s ring, and the fingers are extended in a gesture of blessing. According to late medieval inventories of the Basel cathedral’s treasury, this reliquary was displayed on the main altar on im- portant feasts. It was lined up alongside reliquary heads, arms, crosses, and chasses — just like Salisbury cathedral displayed its relics, as shown in a painting from a missal of around 1400 (fig. 9). 52 Arm reliquaries fulfilled special ritual functions: in medieval European cultures, gestures made with the arm, hand, and fingers formed part of an entire gestural language used in religious and secular affairs. The shape of arm reliquaries varied front open-handed gestures probably sig- nifying an oath, to gestures of blessing as in the St. Valentine reliquary. Arm reliquaries — which generally contained relics of a sainted bishop, but could hold multiple relics of different saints — were employed in religious rites such as bles- sings, processions, and public prayer on feasts and at times of special need. Gauzlin, an eleventh- century abbot of Fleury, purchased a relic of Jesus’s sudarium that he had placed inside a jew- eled, gold arm reliquary. He established an an- nual procession during which the arm would be raised in blessing over crowds of the faithful, who would then return home “strengthened by a bene- diction made with the relics.” 53 On an almost comical note, Guibert of Nogent described sev- eral incidents involving the arm reliquary of St. Arnoul and the villagers of Clermont. It leaped out of a fire into which a scoffer had thrown it; it cured a sick man by tenderly massaging his face and limbs; it wrested itself out of the grasp of thieves plundering the church treasury. 54 Differ- ent as they are, the stories told by Gauzlin and Guibert point out how arm reliquaries embod- ied a saint’s living presence in a particularly effec- tive way. They rendered gesture material. They made visible — and embodied — the blessing of saint and bishop. Bits of the true cross and objects associ- ated with Jesus’s death were generally enshrined in cross-shaped reliquaries. After his resurrection, Jesus returned to heaven body and soul, leaving no bodily remains behind as memoriae for his fol- lowers. 55 Objects associated with his crucifixion and death became all the more precious to those who remembered him. Most dear of all was the cross on which he died — the cross soaked with his blood and tears, and alive with his presence. Medieval Christians believed that St. Helen, mother of the Roman emperor Constantine, had discovered in Palestine the cross on which Jesus had been crucified (c. 300). Pieces of the true cross had been venerated as relics in both Europe and the Christian Near East since late antique times. 56 Christians obtained relics of the true cross on pilgrimage, but also through gifts, purchase, and diplomacy. Gregory of Tours wrote that the Frankish queen St. Radegund (d. 587), through various diplomatic maneuvers, managed to ac- quire relics of the true cross for her Convent of the Holy Cross in Poitiers from the Byzantine imperial court in Constantinople. Healing miracles reportedly occurred in the presence of the silver reliquary that enshrined relics of the 26 27 fig 11 Reliquary Bust of St. Juliana Guglielmo Italy, c. 1376 gesso, tempera and gilding on copper Metropolitan Museum of Art The Cloisters Collection acc. no. 61.266 cross, instruments of the crucifixion, and bones of early martyrs. 5. Pieces of the true cross (and other relics) also flowed into Europe as a result of the crusades mounted to wrest Palestine from Muslim control. 38 Western greed for the riches of the Near Eastern kingdoms certainly fueled this influx of relics and reliquaries from Palestine. But in the realm of spirituality, relics of Jesus’s passion nurtured a new religious sensibility: more than ever before, western Christians longed to know the places where Jesus and his friends had walked, prayed, preached, and died. 59 New modes of prayer, devotion, and ritual appeared beginning in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, alongside many reliquaries of the true cross, some entirely new, others fashioned of older Byzantine fragments. 60 Among these new reliquaries is a small, gold, double arm reliquary-cross (no. 20) of the late twelfth century, made in Germany or Italy, but of Byzantine-inspired design. Accord- ing to Latin inscriptions, it held relics of the true cross, Jesus’s sudarium, his staff, and the sponge from which he drank as he hung on the cross. While the original owner of this object is un- known, its diminutive size and costly materials suggest that it was made for the private use of a wealthy noble, perhaps to hold precious relics obtained on crusade. 61 Relics were fragments of bone, cloth, or wood, but in them medieval Christians saw the whole saint. Through relics they knew the truth of human devotion and suffering, and of divine redemption. Relics and tombs fashioned to hold them were sites of memory because they reminded devotees of the saint, of their relationship to the saint, and especially of God’s enduring presence in the world. In relics and reliquaries collective sentiment was objectified, made visible and cor- poreal. 62 The collective sentiments attached to relics, reliquaries, and pilgrim souvenirs revolved around relationships among human devotees, their saintly intercessors, and God. These relationships were negotiated and celebrated in hagiography, liturgy, and art. They formed the idiom in which medieval Christians spoke about identity and com- munity life — whether within family, village, city, monastery, or kingdom. St. Juliana, St. Thomas Becket, St. Martial, and St. Zacharias each had a biography, both in life and after death, which in- cluded stories about specific individuals and com- munities they knew and favored. Relics and reliquaries created places where medieval Chris- tians constructed identity and history. For both individuals and groups, working out relationships with saints happened most in- tensely at shrines. Desire to know the places where holy people lived, where their bones rested, nur- tured a rich culture of pilgrimage. For pilgrims, ardor to know the saints engaged all the senses. In the monastic church at Echternach, witnesses saw “a wonderful light,” heard heavenly choirs, smelled “a ravishing fragrance and most sweet odor” around the tomb of St. Willibrord. 63 After a long and eventful journey to the shrine of St. Maximinus at Micy, following days of lying pros- trate in prayer on the floor of the monastery’s church, a lame eleventh-century pilgrim named Henry not only saw the saint he sought, but was cured when St. Maximinus struck him with his abbatial staff. 64 Gregory of Tours reported that Roman pilgrims drank rain water that collected in the paving stones where Saints Peter and Paul had preached. 63 Pilgrims eager to touch their saints stretched their hands toward reliquaries. They wept over them, rubbed souvenir cloths over them, scratched chips from them, drank water draining off them (figs. 2, 6). When custodians permitted it, pilgrims even crawled inside the no. 20 Double-Arm Reliquar y Cross Germany or Italy late 12th century gold Cleveland Museum of Art Purchase from the J. H.Wade Fund acc. no. 83.208 no. 22 Pilgrim's Ampulla Syria-Palestine, 6th century tin-lead Detroit Institute of Arts City of Detroit Purchase acc. no. 26. 1 54 fig- 1 3 Pilgrim Badge: Head of St. Thomas Bechet England, second half of 14th century tin-lead Museum of London acc. no. 80.65/9 outer shell of the saints tomb and slept there, as recorded in an illustrated manuscript Life of St. Edward the Confessor (fig. 12). 6,1 Whether pilgrims pressed against relic, tomb, or reliquary, the saint’s potent touch was available wherever his bones rested. 67 Pilgrims could even possess contact with the saint by acquiring souvenirs at the shrine. The most treasured mementos of pilgrimage were relics: not only bones of saints and splinters of the true cross, but also objects charged with holiness through physical contact with relics. Among these perhaps the most precious for modern viewers are souvenirs inexpensive enough for even the hum- blest medieval pilgrims to buy: ampullae, small containers which were mass-produced from ham- mered molds and designed to hold oil or earth from the holy places of Palestine. Numerous lit- erary sources report that pilgrims purchased am- pullae, and filled them with earth surrounding shrines, or oil drained from lamps burning around tombs. Pilgrims sometimes filled the flasks with oil, then touched them to relics or reliquaries to allow both oil and flask to “soak up” the sanctity believed to be communicable through physical contact. 68 An oval bottle made of terracotta (no. 21), from sixth-century Palestine, is typical of the less expensive ampullae. 69 It bears a charming image of a saint wedged into his tomb, inside a shrine, and it is punctured with holes allowing it to be worn hanging from a belt or around a neck. A tin-lead flask (no. 22) has the more complex im- agery typical of metal ampullae — on one side the crucifixion, on the other, the three Marys visiting Jesus’s empty tomb on Easter morning. 70 An in- scription on the first side reads “oil from the tree of life of the holy places.” The iconography inter- laces biblical events with motifs evoking the me- dieval pilgrim’s vision of the Holy Land. The crucifixion is symbolized by a small cross, above which Jesus’s face appears; beside the cross are the two thieves crucified with Jesus. But kneel- ing at the foot of Jesus’s cross, just below the thieves, are two tiny pilgrims dressed in sixth- century clothing. The image of the three Marys similarly includes a sixth-century detail: the ro- tunda of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, com- plete with the grilled window protecting Jesus’s tomb. Close reading of these images reveals the spiritual significance behind what might at first seem anachronistic. By showing sixth-century pilgrims present at Jesus’s crucifixion and the sixth-century chapel built over Jesus’s tomb, the artist of this ampulla represents a visualization of the pilgrim’s experience. By seeing and touch- ing the memoriae (holy sites) of Palestine, medi- eval pilgrims entered Jesus’s world and attained the blessings attached to knowing it. For pil- grims the blessing was tangible and consumable: for the Greek word eulogia signifies both the ges- ture or words of blessing and the pilgrim’s souve- nir of oil collected at the shrine. 71 Both image and relic commemorate the pilgrimage. Later medieval pilgrims who visited local shrines also bought ampullae filled with blessed water or oil. 72 More often they brought back a badge to sew on their cloak or hat. A good ex- ample is a small tin-lead badge of St. Thomas Becket’s head (fig. 13), dating from the late four- teenth century. 73 Wearable souvenirs like badges not only reminded the pilgrim of her experience, but likely also signified membership in a confra- ternity dedicated to St. Thomas Becket — a kind of club organized by veterans of the Canterbury pilgrimage. In the late middle ages, returned pil- -9 no. 24 Reliquary Cross Bavaria, 19th century wood and ivory Private Collection grims sometimes sewed or glued badges inside their prayers books. Pilgrims also purchased im- ages which they tacked on a wall back home, or glued into a prayer book. A charming watercolor of St. Agnes (no. 23) from fifteenth- century Tirol resembles the type of small image available as pilgrim souvenirs. 4 An alabaster sculp- ture from fifteenth-century Nottingham (no. 18) might also be a memento of pilgrimage, since it represents the relic ot St.John the Baptist’s head as it would have appeared to visitors at the cathedral of Amiens. ' 1 Like today’s vacation sou- venirs, pilgrim ampullae, badges, and images reminded returnees of past experiences. They dif- fer from Mickey Mouse refrigerator magnets from Disney World, however, because they were be- lieved to convey the living presence of a holy per- son or object. This was a culture in which memory was an active practice, truly an “art.” Wearing, seeing, and handling objects helped pilgrims to construct memory. Souvenirs objectified the pilgrim’s experiential knowledge of saints and sa- cred sites. The art of remembering the saints flour- ished around bones and tombs because for medi- eval women and men the whole resided in each of its parts. St. Thomas Becket was fully present in each drop of blood he left behind; a decorated chasse reliquary embodied Canterbury’s history. Medieval arts of memory that threaded together material objects and collective memories con- structed the identity of the objects, and of the individuals and communities who looked at and used them. Memories of saints and their relics endure to this day in modern Catholic practice, as we know, for example, from the display of a nineteenth-century Bavarian reliquary-cross (no. 24) in the home of a family now living in New- ton, Massachusetts. But today most people regu- larly see reliquaries only in museums. For late twentieth-century museum visitors, reliquaries and pilgrim souvenirs are themselves relics, relics of past religious and cultural practices. There is a poignancy to gazing at dislocated fragments of other lives. What we can know about what me- dieval objects meant depends on the haphazard survival of both objects and medieval writers’ re- flections about them. But our construction of the past also depends on who we are, which is why history is written and rewritten. Thus the identity ot museum objects is unstable. To a wealthy collector like early twentieth-century banker J.P. Morgan, medieval objects were reminders of “the splendor of past ages,” of a more confident era of western civilization. 7h The richest collections of medieval objects owe their existence to the passion for medieval art and ar- chitecture ot men like Morgan, Henry Walters, and John D. Rockefeller. Their benevolence created the museum as a public institution. Walk- ing through the medieval galleries of these muse- ums today, labels remind us of those collectors of nearly a century ago, even as they offer identi- ties for reliquaries. Seeing reliquaries today is a different experience than it was in the seventh, thirteenth, or early twentieth centuries. And yet they remain memoriae. They remind us ot the saints, of the medieval men and women who com- memorated the saints, and ot American collec- tor- industrialists who scoured Europe searching for fragments of the medieval civilization they so admired. 78 fig- 12 no. 23 Veneration of St. Edward’s Shrine Life of St. Edward the Confessor Westminster, c. 1255-1260 manuscript on vellum Cambridge University Library MS. Ee.3.59, fol. 29v St. Agnes Tirol, c. 1450 watercolor on paper Illuminations, Chicago Remembering thi Sainis yirginia Reinbinx Notes ' On medieval cults of saints see Brown 1981; Brown 1982; Herrmann-Mascard 1975; Head 1990; Farmer 1991 ; Noble-Head 1995, pp. xiii- xliii. - Quoted in Head 1990, p. 103. 3 Gregory of Tours in Van Dam 1993, p. 285. 4 See Vatican 1982, pp. 140-141. 3 Davis-Starn 1989, p. 3; Nora 1989. See also Nora 1984-1992. ** For sociological studies of collective memory see Halbwachs 1992 (and introduction by Coser, who points out shortcomings of Halbwachs’s theories from a historical point of view, pp. 1 - 34). For historical studies see Nora 1984-1992; Fentress-Wickham 1992; Representations 1989. For historical and anthropological studies of collective memory as expressed in art, see Kiichler-Melion 1991. On the arts or tech- niques of memory see Yates 1966, Roy- Zumthor 1986, Carruthers 1990. 7 On uses of sense experience in medieval re- ligion see Bynum 1991; Constable 1990, for suggestive comments about the ways the senses mediated ideas about the past; and on relation- ships between the visual arts and sense experi- ence.Vikan 1982 and 1984, Arasse 1981. On the amuletic qualities of objects, and ways they can act as vehicles for personal development and identity formation, see Tambiah 1984, esp. chaps. 14-18, 22. H On relics, their meaning and use, see the dif- fering approaches of Geary 1990 (esp. pp. 3- 27, 32-35); Brown 1982; Head 1990 (esp. pp. 10-19). 9 Quoted in Head 1990, p. 103. 1() Guibert of Nogent 1984, p. 39, citing Phil. 3:21. 1 1 Quoted in Bynum 1991, p. 265. Quoted in Farmer 1991, p. 33, and Head 1990, p. 11. ^ 3 Guibert ofNogent’s book on relics was called De pignoribus sanctorum. On the vocabulary ap- plied to relics see Head 1990, esp. pp. 11, 94- 95, 143, 146; Brown 1981 and 1982. ' 4 Beaune 1984, p. 57; Foreville 1976, p. 351. 15 Quoted in Brown 1981, p. 4. Some of the richest collections of miracle stories are those compiled by Gregory of Tours. See Brown 1982, Van Dam 1993. On the miracles of St. Thomas Becket see Foreville 1981, pp. 445-454; and on St. Benedict see Head 1990. 17 Gregory of Tours in Van Dam 1993, p. 157. * ^ For comments about condensation of space and time see Brown 1981, esp. pp. 78, 81-82; Constable 1990, pp. 62-63; Reinburg 1989, pp. 310-311. On medieval notions of time see Patricia De Leeuw’s essay in this catalogue. 19 Gauthier 1986, p. 13-14, 23, 43. 79 Pierpont Morgan Library MS. M. 736, fol. 18v. Life of St. Edmund, Bury St. Edmunds Abbey, c. 1 130. On the manuscript see Gauthier 1986, pp. 84-85; Hahn 1991. Hubert 1974, Gauthier 1986, pp. 9-15. On this process see Gauthier 1986, pp. 9- 15; Brown 1981; Noble-Head 1995, pp. xiii- xliii. 73 On relics as commodities see the pioneering work of Patrick Geary (1986, 1990). See also Hunt 1981. On gift giving see Brown 1982; Brown 1981, pp. 88-97; Carolus-Barre 1965; Si gal 1976. 74 On monastic propaganda seeTopfer 1992. For uses of relics cited here see Foreville 1976, p. 358; Head 1990, esp. pp. 146-148, 174-177; Sigal 1976; Guibert of Nogent 1984, pp. 1 90- 197. 73 On the history of reliquaries see Gauthier 1986, Solt 1987, Braun 1940,Taralon 1966. 26 See Brussels 1994, pp. 180-181, 244-245. The skull is accompanied by a paper inscrip- tion reading“de S.Zacharia. papa.,” which dates from the seventeenth or eighteenth century. The silk wrapper reading“AN[N]A”probably dates from the same period. (This is not the same St. Zacharias of the Byzantine reliquary in no. 12; the latter was probably the father of St. John the Baptist.) 77 See Head 1990, p. 133; Brown 1981, pp. 36-37, 385; Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Con- fessors, pp. 100, 104-105. This phrase often appears in medieval ac- counts of pilgrim behavior before shrines or reliquaries (for example Foreville 1976,pp.351- 353). 79 For descriptions of Becket s relics and their different resting places see Sedieres 1975, pp. 195-209; Hearn 1994. 30 J. Paul Getty Museum MS. 83.MN.126, fol. 87v (also known as MS. Ludwig IX. 7). Life of St. Hedwig (Hedwig Codex), Silesia, 1353; illuminated in the court atelier of Duke Ludwig I of Liegnitz and Brieg. 31 Fitzwilliam Museum MS. 298, fols. 1 and 5v. The Metz Pontifical, written for Raynaud de Bar, bishop of Metz, 1302-1316. 37 Trinity College, Cambridge, MS. B.II.3, fol. 218v. Missal for the use of Sarum, c. 1380- 1400. 33 Dahl 1978, pp. 182-186. On folkloric be- liefs about the magical properties of particular gems and metals see also Elbern 1 989, pp. 964- 966. 34 Here 1 quote directly from Dahl 1978, p. 184. 33 Ross 1965, pp. 30-31. (This Zacharias is the father of St.John the Baptist, not pope St. Zacharias as in fig. 3.) The garnet now set in this piece is not the original jewel, although it dates from the same period. On relics of St. Zacharias see also Lesley 1939, p. 219. 36 Guibert of Nogent 1984, p. 191. 37 Arasse 1981, p. 133. 33 Ross 1965, pp. 71-72. There is a story of the migration of some of St. Sergius’s relics from Palestine to sixth-century Gaul in Gre- gory of Tours, History of the Fran Its, pp. 413— 414. On the cult of St. Sergius see also Magoulias 1968, pp. 268-269. For a similar Byzantine pendant-reliquary, also from the eleventh century, but which ended up in France probably as a result of the crusades, see Paris 1992, pp. 317-318; Cabanot 1981. 39 Gauthier 1972, p. 374. On the cult of St. Martial see Landes-Paupert 1991; Topfer 1992; Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Confessors, pp. 41-42. 49 On Becket’s cult see the enormously rich studies of Raymonde Foreville (Foreville 1976, 1981). See also Sedieres 1975. 44 On art see Caviness 1977, and Sedieres 1975, pp. 211-274. 47 The reliquary panel was dated 1220-1225 by Wixom and, more recently, 1200-1210 by Gauthier. Wixom attributed it to Master G. Alpais and his Limoges workshop. (Wixom 1967, pp. 1 16-117; Gauthier in Sedieres 1975, p. 250; Foreville 1976, p. 364.) On other Limoges reliquaries of Becket see Caudron and Gauthier in Sedieres 1975, pp. 223-253; Foreville 1976. 43 Dandridge 1992, Wixom 1992. My dis- cussion of this reliquary is derived from Wixom’s excellent study. 44 Frazer 1985/86, p. 52; Newton in Sedieres 1975, pp. 260-262; Foreville 1976, pp. 358- 360. 45 Foreville 1976, pp. 354, 352. 43 Lemaitre 1990, pp. 163-164; Duffy 1992, p. 164; Carolus-Barre 1965, p. 1 108; and the story of Gauzlin of Fleury cited below. 47 See Frazer 1 985/86, p. 49. For another late medieval foot reliquary of St. Margaret see Paris 1992, p.326. Among shoe reliquaries the most prized is St. Peter’s sandal from the cathedral of Trier. On the latter see Westermann- Angerhausen 1987. 48 On the relic of St. John the Baptist’s head, now in the cathedral of Amiens, and its cult, see Paris 1992, pp. 325-326, 477;Taralon 1966, pp. 269-270. 49 Ostoia 1 969, pp. 8 1 -82; Frazer 1 985/86, pp. 48-49. 59 On the relationship between reliquary and image see the insightful remarks of Hans Belt- ing (Belting 1990, pp. 203-221); Claire Solt’s and Ellert Dahl’s discussions of the bust reli- quary ( niaiestas ) of St. Foy of Conques (Solt 1987, Dahl 1978); and on a bust reliquary of the Virgin Mary, Reinburg 1989. 3 ' Burckhardt 1933, pp. 179-185; Braun 1940, pp. 403-404. - 1 - Braun 1940, table 263 (following p. 354), pp. 359-382. The St. Valentine reliquary ap- pears in all inventories dated 1477-1827. 33 Andrew of Fleury, Vita Gauzlini abbatis Floriacensis monasterii, ed. Robert-Henri Bautier and Gillette Labory (Paris, 1969), p. 60. (I owe this reference to Thomas Head.) (The sudarium is the cloth with which St. Veronica reputedly wiped Jesus s face on the road to Calvary.) There are similar stories of the ritual use of arm reli- quaries in Lemaitre 1990, pp. 163-164; Solt 1987, pp. 176, 179. :i4 Guibert of Nogent 1984, pp. 226-227. 33 Relics of Jesus (hair, fingernails, foreskin, clothing, burial shroud) — and of the Virgin Mary, who was also assumed bodily into heaven — were, however, said to have been dis- covered, and were venerated in the late middle ages. 36 On relics and reliquaries of the true cross see Gauthier 1986, Frolow 1965. For examples of Byzantine reliquary-crosses see Paris 1992. 37 Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, pp. 164, 530; Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Mar- tyrs, pp. 22-29; Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Confessors, pp. 105-108. 58 On the flow of relics into Europe from Byzantium and Palestine see Gauthier 1986, Paris 1992,Taralon 1966, Carolus-Barre 1965. 39 On this religious sensibility see Belting 1990. Devotional enthusiasm for Jesus’s passion and relics from the Holy Land was a continuous tradition in eastern Christianity. SeeVikan 1982 and 1984; Ousterhout 1990. 66 On the use of older fragments ( spolia ) in reli- quaries see Westermann-Angerhausen 1987; Taralon 1966, pp. 19-22; and the many ex- amples in Paris 1992 and Gauthier 1986. On spolia see also Constable 1 990. My interpretation is based on the existence of many similar relics privately obtained and owned by European kings and nobles who had been on crusade. For other examples see Paris 1992, pp. 335-337, 475, 478-479; Carolus- Barre 1965; Cabanot 1981, pp. 105-106. 6 3 Here I follow Stanley Tambiah’s insights about the ways artifacts like amulets or images “objectify charisma” and embody ideas about the past and collective (national) identity in modern Thailand. SeeTambiah 1984, esp. the theoretical discussion in chap. 14. 63 Noble-Head 1995, p. 202. 64 Head 1990, pp. 169-171; Head 1984. 6 3 Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Martyrs, p. 45. 66 Cambridge University Library, MS. Ee.3. 59, fol. 29v. Life of St. Edward the Confessor; Westminster, c. 1255-1260. On the manu- script see London 1987, pp. 216-217, 205. On the practice of pilgrims sleeping in, on, or un- der saints’ tombs see also Noble-Head 1995, pp. 99, 348; Foreville 1981, pp. 451-455; Guibert of Nogent 1984, p. 194; Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Martyrs, pp. 45-46; London 1987, pp. 207-208. For stories of pilgrims touching relics or reliquaries seeVikan 1982, pp. 5. 11, 25; Head 1990, pp. 165-167; Noble- Head 1995, pp. 351, 353; Sigal 1976, p. 88; Lemaitre 1990. 67 On the belief that reliquaries had sacred power see Elbern 1989 and Magoulias 1968. 68 See Grabar 1958; Vikan 1982, 1984; Noble-Head 1995, p. 154; Hunt 1981, pp. 176- 179. 6 9 On ampullae from this period see Grabar 1958; Vikan 1982 and 1984; Engemann 1973; Lesley 1939; and on the concept of souvenir applied to these objects, Cynthia Hahn,“Loca Sancta Souvenirs: Sealing the Pilgrim’s Expe- rience,” in Ousterhout 1990, pp. 85-96. 7 1 * Sandin 1993, pp. 48-50; Lesley 1939. 7 1 On ways pilgrims acquired blessings through art and souvenirs see Grabar 1958; Vikan 1982 and 1 984. On this use of the word memoria see Grabar 1958, pp. 46-50, 64-66. 7- The practice was especially common among pilgrims to Canterbury. See Foreville 1981, p. 454; London 1987, pp. 219-223. 73 See London 1987, p. 221 (no. 58). Like so many medieval pilgrim badges this one was found in a river (in this case, the Thames, dur- ing waterfront development in 1979-1980). For other badges ofSt.Thomas Becket see London 1987, pp. 220-222. 74 See Hindman 1992, pp. 90-91. On similar images obtained at shrines see Koster 1979, pp. 84-86, 126-129. On the related practice of touching (written) prayers to reliquaries or cult images see Remburg 1989, p. 305. Koster also discusses pilgrim badges and images sewn into prayer books. 73 On pilgrim souvenirs of the relics of St.John the Baptist see Koster 1979, pp. 98, 121. 76 After J. P. Morgan’s death the Burlington Magazine obituary commented: “His feeling for works of art was the outcome rather of a romantic and historical feeling for the splendor of past ages than a strictly aesthetic one. What he recognized in an object was primarily its importance, the part it had played in the evolu- tion of civilization.” (Quoted in Auchmcloss 1980, p. 13.) 77 Auchincloss 1980, esp. pp. ll-13;Wain- wright 1989; Netzer 1991, pp. 11-13; and Robin Fleming’s essay in this catalogue. Of the rich recent literature on collecting, displays, and museums see Thomas 1991, esp. chap. 4; Karp-Lavine 1991. See also Michael Camille’s suggestive comments about displaying medieval objects in contemporary museums (Camille 1993, pp. 372-373). 78 I would like to thank Jennifer Grinnell, Thomas Head, Nancy Netzer, Claire Reinburg, and Karine Uge for their help as I was prepar- ing this essay, and Dwayne Carpenter for his companionship in thinking about religious life. I am also grateful to Peter Brown, from whom 1 have learned so much about the lived Chris- tianity of the middle ages. 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Unde et Memores, Domine: Memory and The Mass of St. Gregory Patricia DcLecuw Medieval people knew that they lived at a particular point in the flow of time, as if they were on a raft floating for a short distance on a river which ran from its source in the creation of the world by God to its end at the end of the world . 1 The events of the Old Testament and the life, death, and resurrection of Christ occurred at earlier points in the flow of the river. The Chris- tian story taught medieval people to find mean- ing and purpose for their lives by looking back to events they recalled and forward to events they hoped for, or dreaded. Christian belief and prac- tice, in the stories of the saints as exemplars of the moral life, in devotions and indulgences, and in the ritual of the mass, provided ways to re- member and learn from the past, and to provide for the future. The great Christian philosopher of time and of memory St. Augustine brought the views of Aristotle, Cicero, and especially Plato and Plotinus, to Christianity and the middle ages . 2 Augustine always saw time in contrast to the eter- nity of God, which rendered it relatively unim- portant. In fact, of the three “times” of which we are accustomed to speak, past, present, and future, only the present exists; the past and the future must be brought to the present to have any existence for us. The legacy of Augustine to medieval notions of time was essentially ambiva- lent: time has great significance as the vehicle for human salvation, while time has reality only in the mind that measures it. For Augustine, “memory ... is the present of things past.”' The term memoria meant far more to Augustine and medieval thinkers than “memory” does to modern psychology. It is, first of all, a storehouse filled with items from our own knowledge and sensory experience. More- over, in the memories of the faithful, God has placed the knowledge of God, which prayer and the reading of Scripture can help us to recall. The images stored in memory have a reality, which, like memory itself, is not inferior to that which we can see and touch. Like Plotinus, Augustine believes that through the mind, through memory, we can reach transcendence and God. These ideas of Augustine imbued all sub- sequent Christian thinkers and had a special re- surgence in the late middle ages. Unlike the more skeptical thinkers of the via moderna, who were confident that experience could be relied on and who fostered a new interest in experimentation to achieve certainty, those who held to the via antiqua taught that what we are mindful of, what exists m memory, has a greater reality than the jumble of sense perceptions that crowd in upon us . 4 The via antiqua looked upon memory as the capacity of the soul to know and think about the ~ x 7c "i ■" ■ "A - ; j — -t b uJ }iunly llruiiir txpic ulote .Tpttas ttua rp Ortmn Irani ft jrpfron |tr nr our uta fulmlrnt quo nr g ill firm! If uiJulnr nu ■ i iv mtiin miqn- nrmirlnfu no. 27 Mass of Saint Gregory Israhel van Meckenem, c. 1450-1503 Germany, c. 1480 engraving on paper Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, William M. Prichard Fund, acc. no. M 655 fig- >4 Mass of Saint Gregor y Israhel van Meckenem, c. 1450-1503 Germany, c. 1 480 engraving on paper Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Gray Collection of Engravings Fund, acc. no. G4830 34 35 no. 26 Mass of Saint Gregory Simon Marmion, active 1449-1489 France, c. 1460-1465 oil and gold leaf on panel Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Purchase 1979 Unde et Memokes, 1 )< purpose of human existence and its salvation, us- ing not only what our human existence has taught us, but depending even more on a kind of induc- tion of God’s truth by faith. It is this memory that leads us to God. The language of art was more powerful for medieval people than the language of words and understood by them in ways we can no longer experience. 5 Religious images they saw in churches or in books reinforced the lessons they learned from priests’ sermons, and invited them to prayer. And, according to Augustine, as we have seen, prayer recalls the image of God. For those who could meditate on one of the most popular images of the late middle ages, the Mass of St. Gregory, and recall what it taught about the meaning of the mass, the real presence of Christ on the altar, and the hope of salvation that Christ’s death ensured for them, the truth found in memory took on reality. According to a story invented and popu- larized in the late middle ages, as Pope Gregory the Great (c. 540-604) elevated the host at the consecration of mass one day, Christ the Man of Sorrows appeared on the altar surrounded by the instruments of his passion. Called the Mass of St. Gregory , this story captivated late medieval artists who portrayed the miracle in every medium. 6 Many of the painters and printmakers who rep- M « Mass of Saint Gregory Paris, c. 1490 woodcut and watercolor on paper National Gallery of Art, Rosenwald Collection, © 1994 Board of Trustees, acc. no. 1943.3.611 >mini;: Memory and The Mass of St. Gregory Patricia DeLeemv resented this legend inscribed their work with an explanation of an indulgence said to have been granted by a Pope Clement to those who prayed before a representation of the miracle (nos. 26 and 27, fig. 14), but the image did not require papal approbation and promotion to become popular. The Mass of St. Gregory was so often portrayed because in a single artistic image, it captures a wealth of medieval ideas about the cen- tral celebration of the Christian faith. It shows a pope, the highest of priests, and not just any pope, but the one among all others most known to succeeding centuries for his attention to pastoral care and the liturgy, saying mass. All in the church await the moment in the mass that is transformed, the moment that God is there on the altar. And in the image, God does not hide in the bread and wine, but is revealed in Christ. In the earliest versions of this story, as, for example, the one preserved in the Legemia aurea of the thirteenth century, Christ appeared as a finger at the time of the communion. 7 By the fifteenth century, however, when devotion to the human, suffering Jesus was at its height, and when the story was first portrayed in art, 8 Jesus the Man of Sorrows was present and vis- ible, his suffering and death recalled at the time of the consecration. Although this development of the legend is perfectly congruent with the no. 28 Mass of Saint Gregory Albrecht Dtirer, 1471-1528 Germany, 1511 woodcut on paper National Gallery of Art, Rosenwald Collection, © 1994 Board of Trustees, acc. no. 1943.3673 6 37 no. 29 Censer N. Italy or Alps, 1 2th - early 13 th century latten Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, H.E. Bolles Fund, acc. no. 67.292 no. 30 Chalice Northern Europe, mid- 14th century gilding on silver Sharon and Neil Phillips/ Phillips Family Collection changing foci of late medieval piety, its sources still generate debate. In some late medieval ver- sions, the location of the miracle is specified: Gregory was saying mass at the church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme when Christ appeared. 0 A Byzantine mosaic icon of Christ the Man of Sorrows in Santa Croce was believed to have been commissioned by Gregory himself to commemo- rate the miracle, but recent scholarship dates the icon to the thirteenth or early fourteenth cen- tury, and its acquisition by the Carthusians at Santa Croce to the late fourteenth century. Represen- tations of the Man of Sorrows had long been popu- lar in the West, but the Carthusians’ acquisition ot the Byzantine icon coincides with the first appearance of the Mass of St. Gregory in northern European art. 10 It is possible that the Carthusians actively promoted the story to increase the num- ber of pilgrims who visited their church while in Rome. Whatever its sources, the image of the Mass of St. Gregory would have made its lesson very clear: the effect ot the mass is to transform time. In the miracle story, for those attending that particular mass said by Pope Gregory in the church of Santa Croce, the present became a past time, the time when Christ suffered and died. But, in this transformation, as portrayed by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century artists, the faithful were not taken to Jerusalem. Rather, an event that had occurred in Jerusalem centuries earlier came from the past to them, into their church, onto their altar. Augustine’s notions of the work- ings of memory are neatly illustrated in the pic- ture of the legend. The conventions that many artists who represented the Mass of St. Gregory observed un- derline this idea of past brought into present: in the pictures, the people watching the miracle are dressed like their late medieval descendants, and the designs of the churches in which they gather and the liturgical vessels on the altar belong to the late middle ages (figs. 14 and 15, nos. 27 and 28; nos. 29, 30, 31 and 32). The faithful who meditated on this image were reminded that ev- ery mass, even those said in their parish churches, recalled the life of Christ and brought that life to them. As some of them may have been taught, and all in some way understood, the prayer the priest says immediately after changing the bread and the wine into the body and blood of Christ summarizes this belief: “ Unde et memores, Domine,” it begins, “nos servi tuifsed et plebs tua sancta, ejusdem Christi Filii tui Domini nostri tarn beatae passionis, necnon et ab inferis resurrectionis, sed et in caelos gloriosae ascensionis...;” “we are mindful, Lord, we your servants and your holy people, of the passion of our Lord Christ your Son, of his resurrection from the dead, and his glorious ascension into heaven....” The Mass of St. Gregory portrays ideas typi- cal of medieval interpretations of the mass. Since Amalarius of Metz’s influential Liber officialis from the ninth century, medieval commentaries had explained the mass as one long allegory that, in its entirety, re-creates the life, death, and resur- rection of Christ. 11 During the first part, the mass of the catechumens, the prayers from the Introit through the epistle represent OldTestament promises of the coming ot the Savior and the early life of Christ, while the gospel brings us the words of Christ in his adult ministry. The mass of the faithful, beginning with the offertory, focuses on the last week of Christ’s life, his resurrection and ascension. The Sanctus recalls the triumphant en- try into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday; during the canon, before, during, and after the consecration, the priest acts as Christ during his passion, death, and burial; the prayers and action of the priest and people from the Pater Noster through the com- munion to the Ite inissa est conclude Christ’s life on earth and send us off to do God’s will and await his coming again. In the commentaries, as in the ritual of the mass as it was experienced by medieval people, the apex of the drama comes in the middle, at the consecration. With the heightened devotion to the eucharist, beginning in the late twelfth century, came the custom of the elevation of the host and cup after the words of consecration, and the ringing of the bells by an acolyte. These ac- tions would have very dramatically interrupted the priest’s silent whispering of the canon prayers. The attention of the congregants would have been drawn to the fulfillment of the mass as they un- derstood it and the moment for which they had come: the re-creation of the death of Christ, and the real presence of his body on the altar. As they watched the priest, they remembered the events ot the passion, and this mindfulness, described in the prayer the priest whispered after the conse- cration, gave the events remembered a particular reality. The representations of the Mass of St. Gregory portray this reality: the altar at which the priest stands, and on which the body of Christ in the host and wine rests, has become the tomb in which his body rested after his death. Extended interpretations of the mass writ- ten in the late middle ages rely less on allegory and more on scholastic theology. One such com- mentary, written at the time of the immense popularity of the Mass of St. Gregory, was the Canonis Missae Expositio of Gabriel Biel. A man of the German universities, Biel trained at Heidel- berg, Erfurt, and Cologne in the first half of the fifteenth century, and taught theology atTiibingen in the latter half, where he was noted as a propo- nent of the via antiqua. He was also a member of the Brethren of the Common Life, however, and a skilled preacher. His Expositio is a work of pas- toral theology standing halfway between the uni- versity lecture hall, where the lectiones into which the Expositio is divided were delivered, and the pulpit, where, in the urban centers of the fifteenth Unde et M (mores, Domine: Memory and The Mass oe St. Gregory Patricia Dclxeuw no. 31 Chalice Flanders, 15th century gilding and enamel on silver Sharon and Neil Phillips/ Phillips Family Collection no. 32 Pyx Limoges, 13th century enamel, gilding and garnet insets on copper Sharon and Neil Phillips/ Phillips Family Collection century, eloquent and learned sermons were now rather common. The printed copy of the Expositio included in the exhibition has but one illustra- tion (no. 33), the moment of the elevation of the host. In his lecture on the prayer Unde cl memores, Biel tells his listeners that when they are mindful of the passion at the consecration of the mass, they participate in, and are “incorporated” with, the body and blood of Christ; he quotes the gospel of John 6:57, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood will remain in me and I in him.” The passion, he tells them, is called “blessed” in the prayer because only through Christ’s suffering and death do the gates of heaven, closed since the beginning of the world, open to them. 12 That promise of eventual celestial bliss, to which we have access through the salvific death of Christ, is echoed in the innovative version of the Mass oj St. Gregory by Albrecht Diirer (no. 28). Unlike most other versions, in which the artist takes great care to preserve the architectural detail that surrounds the altar, Diirer leaves open to the sky the church in which the miracle oc- curs. His placement of the ladder that was used to remove the body of Christ from the cross, one among the instruments of the passion that can be found in many versions of the Mass of St. Gregory, is also rather unusual: it rises from the altar di- rectly in front of the Pope, inviting him to par- ticipate with Christ in an imitatio Christi . 13 In the life and other writings of Gabriel Biel, we can see Augustiman theology distilled and disseminated from the pulpit of the cathedral at Mainz where, for a time, Biel was official preacher. His preaching affected not only those who heard him; sermon collections of well- known preachers like Biel were often printed to be used as models by other preachers or for the edification of individual readers. In Biel’s ser- mons and those of other noted preachers of the day throughout Europe, the meaning of the mass as a reenactment of the life of Christ and the sig- nificance of the words of the consecration in bringing that life to us are frequent themes. 14 In sermons about the mass and the eucharist, which often return to the old allegorical interpretations of the priest’s actions, his vestments and the litur- gical vessels, illuminating their dramatic qualities, the mass becomes a passion play. In defense of the doctrines of transubstantiation and the real presence, now increasingly under attack, Catho- lic preachers were especially eloquent in their emphasis on the mass as a continuation of Christ’s actual sacrifice on the cross. As one might ex- pect, sermons preached during Holy Week, es- pecially Maundy Thursday, focused on the iden- tity between the body of Christ that suffered on the cross and the body of Christ present on the altar. This idea is illustrated most clearly in those versions of the Mass of St. Gregory in which blood from the side of the suffering Jesus actually spurts into the chalice on the altar in front of the priest, as in the illustration of the legend (no. 34) in the early sixteenth-century lectionary of the epistles of the monastery of Guadalupe. 15 The feast of Corpus Christi, like the story of the Mass of St. Gregory, both resulted from and furthered late medieval eucharistic devotion. Established in France in the thirteenth century, becoming universal in the fourteenth century, the special feast was inspired by popular devotion to the real presence of the suffering Jesus in the eucharist. 16 The Corpus Christi liturgies, a mass, an office, and hymns, emphasize the connection between the transubstantiated bread and wine, and the suffering and death of Christ that gives us life. By the early fourteenth century, the typical celebration of the feast included a procession of clergy and laity singing the hymns and carrying and displaying the eucharist. The addition of Corpus Christi prayers and readings into missals, lectionaries, antiphonaries, and breviaries pro- vided illuminators with a new subject, for which they chose from among familiar images: the Last Supper, Christ as a priest, a procession, the el- evation of the host at the mass, and the Mass of St. Gregory. In Italy, in the late fifteenth century, Maestro dei Lattanzio Riccardiano illuminated the antiphons for the feast of Corpus Christi with an illustration of a priest elevating the host in an initial capital (no. 35). The illuminator of the sixteenth-century lectionary of the epistles of the monastery of Guadalupe in Spain placed an image of the Mass of St. Gregory at the readings for Corpus Christi. The picture includes a monstrance, used to carry and display the host in Corpus Christi processions, among the liturgical vessels on the altar (no. 34). The image of the Mass of St. Gregory was a popular locus for devotion in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries because it represented and reinforced widespread ideas about the mass and the eucharist, and reflected popular notions of the way memory could disrupt time. The story was portrayed in a variety of media in small ren- derings that might have been owned by lay people. A review of some ot these renderings not only indicates the popularity of the legend, the devo- tions it evoked, and the beliefs that it reinforced, but also demonstrates how works of art of the later middle ages had begun to be available to ordinary people. The fifteenth-century French artist Simon Marnnon portrayed the Mass of St. Gregory in a panel painting (no. 26), whose relatively small size may be an indication that it was not intended for display in a public church. 17 Marmion’s patrons included members of the nobility of several coun- tries; perhaps one of them had commissioned it for private devotion. Marnnon places the Pope in a small chapel, identified in the inscription as the Pantheon, where Christ shows himself to him with only an acolyte looking on. One can imag- ine the panel hanging in the chapel of a castle, reminding the noble residents of the meaning of the masses said there, and offering them the ben- efit of the indulgence that Marmion describes in his inscription. Early in the sixteenth century in the Neth- erlands an artisan rendered the story of Christ’s appearance at Pope Gregorys mass in a rosary bead (no. 36). 18 The bead joins the Mass of St. Gregory in its top scene with the Virgin of the Rosary in the bottom, a fitting juxtaposition in light of the frequent use of rosaries by medieval congregants at mass. Reciting the prayers of the rosary engaged them in activity while the priest, his back to them, was busy with his whispered Latin prayers on the altar. 19 Both halves of the bead bear inscriptions inside and out; those that accompany the Mass of St. Gregory are texts from the gospel of John (3:16, Sic dens dilexit mundunr, 15:13, Maiorem hac caritatem nemo habet), which underscore the salvific purpose of the death of Christ. Many lay people of the late middle ages were wealthy enough to own their own devo- tional books, which might have included repre- sentations of the Mass of St. Gregory. Books of Hours were the book most abundant, from the late thirteenth century in manuscript and then from the late fifteenth century in printed edi- tions. 20 Their appearance coincided with the spread of devotions typical of the period and aris- ing from the new focus on the humanity ofjesus; the centerpiece of the typical Book of Hours is the Hours of the Virgin, a series of readings and prayers dedicated to Mary, the mother of Jesus, to be recited at the canonical hours of the mo- nastic office. While the majority of Books of Hours were simple and mass-produced, those composed for the nobility or very prosperous citi- zens of towns were lavishly decorated. Most often the illustrator of a Book of Hours is anony- mous, although there are clues in the work to the artist’s background. The illuminator who painted the Mass of St. Gregory in this English Book of Hours (no. 37) was probably French, while the artist who painted the extravagant bor- ders was English. 21 In very rare instances we know the names of the illuminators of particularly beau- tiful books. Jean Colombe, for example, is best known as having worked on one of the most fa- mous of the extant Books of Hours, the Tres Riches Heines, for the Duke of Berry in the late fifteenth century. Colombe worked on other Books of Hours commissioned by his many wealthy pa- trons, one of which included a Mass of St. Gre- gory (no. 38) , 22 Some of the most famous surviving rep- resentations of the Mass of St. Gregory are prints. From the mid-fifteenth century when paper be- came plentiful and printing presses were estab- no. 33 Elevation of Host Canonis Missae Expositio Gabriel Biel, c. 1410-1495 Lyon, 1528 printed on paper Burns Library, Boston College, 16F B43, fol. lv no. 34 Mass of Saint Gregory Lectionary of the Epistles Spain, Guadalupe, October 6, 1 506 manuscript on vellum Houghton Library, Harvard University, Gift of Philip Hofer, Class of’21,fMSTyp 199 Unde et Memores, Doming: Memory andTiii Mass oh Sr. Gregory Patricia DeLeiiiw no. 3 6 Rosary Bead with Mass of Saint Gregory South Netherlands, c. 1500-1510 boxwood Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Mass., acc. no. 1991:23 no. 38 Mass of Saint Gregory Jean Colombe, c. 1435-1498 Bourges, c. 1485 gold and tempera on vellum Illuminations, Chicago 40 41 lished in cities throughout Europe, even people of modest circumstances might own a book or a picture. The first printed pictures were wood- cuts; like the earliest printed books, most had re- ligious themes and their style was determined by artistic conventions established in other media. 23 The figures in a late fifteenth-century Parisian woodcut of the Mass of St. Gregory (fig. 1 5) wear the flowing robes of the late Gothic, and the anonymous artist includes the architectural detail that earlier illustrations had made traditional. Huge printings of some early woodcuts were sold by peddlers or at pilgrimage centers; they could be tacked or fixed to a wall with wax, or carried about. Woodcuts, which could be printed with the page, were first used to illustrate books in the 1490s. Albrecht Diirer, one of the greatest of early printmakers, made many woodcuts for books, and, later in his life, in series to be printed and bound with or without text. His Mass of St. Gregory (no. 28) belongs to one of these series, and as we have seen, a mark of its greatness is its break with convention. 24 Engraved prints of the Mass of St. Gregory survive in greater numbers, though they were more expensive and not so readily made. They are usually signed or attributable to a particular artist, among them one of the most prolific of the engravers of the late fifteenth century, Israhel Van Meckenem. 23 The detail of the Van Meckenem print included in this exhibition (no. 27), from the arches of the apse behind the altar of the German Gothic hall church to the crowd of German burghers and clergy looking on. brings the story of Pope Gregorys miracle and the pres- ence of Christ in his passion to the time of the viewer, which, after all, is the lesson of the Mass of St. Gregory. 26 The doctrine of the real presence and the interpretation of the mass as a reenactment of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross neither disappeared with the middle ages nor diminished in signifi- cance over time, of course, but continued in Catholic theology. The abundant representations of the Mass of St. Gregory, however, attests to the particular impact of these doctrines in the late middle ages. Those who viewed the image dur- ing the few centuries of its popularity' understood that mindfulness, the special act of remembering that they were asked to perform during mass, brought a present reality to the event remem- bered, the salvitic death of Christ. no. 35 Mass Leaf from an Antiphonary Maestro dei Lattanzio Riccardiano Florence, 1450-1500 tempera and gold leaf on parchment Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Louis L. Lorillard, 1896, acc. no. 96.32.8 Unde et Memorbs, Dominu: Memory and Tim-. Mass op Sr. Gem. dry /ferritin DeLeaiw Notes no. 37 Mass of Saint Gregory Hours of the Virgin England, c. 1440 manuscript on vellum The Pierpont Morgan Library, MS Glazier 9, fol. 67r 1 Whitrow 1988, pp. 80-82. 2 On Augustine and time, see especially Jordan 1972; Quinn 1969. 3 On Augustine and memory, see Coleman 1992, pp. 80-1 11; Carruthers 1990, p. 199; Mourant 1980; Gilson I960, p.299 n. 110. 4 Coleman 1992, pp. 465-499 and 538-547. 3 An old idea given new and eloquent life in Constable 1990. I am indebted to my colleague Professor Virginia Reinburg for bringing this essay to my attention. See also Miles 1985, pp. 5-9. 6 The Mass of St. Gregory was “endlessly repro- duced” in the late middle ages; see Duffy 1992, p. 239; Reinburg 1992, pp. 535-537 and 542. On the variety of representations of the legend in the late middle ages, see especially Westfehling 1982; Reau 1958, pp. 614-616; Schiller 1972, vol. 2, pp. 226-228; Endres 1917. 2 Jacobus deVoragine The Golden Legend, vol. 1, pp. 179-180. The story appears first in the bi- ography of Gregory written at the monastery of Whitby in the eighth century; see Gasquet 1904, pp. 24-26, where the finger is described as “sanguilenti.” s Westfehling 1982, p. 16. This location is occasionally confused with other Roman churches; see below, no. 26, where the painter Simon Marnrion locates the miracle in the Pantheon. 10 Bertelli 1967, pp. 46-52. 1 ’ In an essay on “The Mass as Sacred Drama” in Hardison 1965, pp. 35-79, O. B. Hardison connects the Mass of St. Gregory with medieval mass commentaries, especially that ofAmalarius ofMetz;see also Schnusenberg 1988;Jungmann 1950, vol. 1, pp. 87-118; De Lubac 1949, pp. 301-312. 1 - Biel Canonis Missae Expositio, Lectio LI V, vol. 2, pp. 336-338. 13 On the iconography ofDiirer’s 1511 wood- cut of the Mass of St. Gregory, see Strauss 1980, p. 160. ' 4 Massa 1966, esp. pp. 80-95;Taylor 1992, pp. 135-137; Blench 1964; Spencer 1993; O’Malley 1979, p. 167. 15 Wieck 1983, p. 50. 16 Rubin 1991, pp. 164-287. ' 2 * * * * * * * 10 Unlike Marmion’s more famous, and larger, Saint Bertin altarpiece; see Thomas Kren’s re- view of Marmion’s biography in his Introduc- tion to Kren 1992, p. 21; on the painting, see Ainsworth 1992, pp. 248-249. Blumka II 1990; Romanelli 1992. 1 9 A practice recommended by some late me- dieval proponents of the rosary; see William 1953, p. 48 and Klinkhamnrer 1972, pp. 86- 90. 20 Wieck 1988, p. 27. 21 Plummer 1959, pp. 23-24. 22 Les Enluminures, p. 66. 23 Griffiths 1980, pp. 16-18; Mayor 1971. 24 Hutchison 1990, pp. 106-107 23 Mayor 1971, lllus. 138-140; see also Field 1985. Van Meckenem’s representations of the Mass of St. Gregory are described in Lehrs 1934, vol. 9, nos. 345-354, pp. 282-290. His engrav- ing of the Man of Sorrows attests to the connec- tion between the Santa Croce mosaic and the Mass of St. Gregory ; see Bertelli 1967, p. 40 and Schiller 1972, vol. 2, pp. 199-200. 26 Lehrs 1934, no. 353, pp. 288-289. 4 - 43 Abbreviations Ainsworth 1992 Ainsworth, Maryan W. “New Observations on the Working Technique in Simon Marmion’s Panel Paintings,” Margaret of York, Simon Marmion, amt the I Isions ofTondal. Malibu, 1992, pp. 243-255. Bertelli 1967 Bertelli, Carlo. “The Image of Pity in Santa Croce in Gerusalemme,” Essays in the History of Art Presented to RudolfWittkower. London, 1967, pp. 40-56. Biel Canonis Missae Expositio Gabrielis Biel Canonis Missae Expositio. ed. Heiko A. Oberman and William J. Courtenay. 5 vols. Wiesbaden, 1963-1976. Blench 1964 Blench. J.W. Preaching in England in the Late Fif- teenth and Sixteenth Centuries. New York, 1964. Blumka II 1990 Blumka, Anthony, ed. Medieval Masterworks, 1200-1500. New York, 1990. Carruthers 1990 Carruthers, MaryJ. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge, 1 990. Coleman 1992 Coleman, Janet. Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past. Cam- bridge, 1992. Constable 1990 Constable, Giles. “A Living Past: The Histori- cal Environment of the Middle Ages,” Harvard Library Bulletin, n.s.l (1990) pp. 49-70. Duffy 1992 Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars. Tradi- tional Religion in England, 1400-1580. New Haven, 1992. De Lubac 1949 De Lubac, Henri. Corpus mysticum: L’eucharistie et I'eglise au moyen age. Paris, 1949. Endres 1917 Endres, J.A. “Die Darstellung der Greg- oriusmesse im Mittelalter,” Zeitschrift fur christliche Kunst 30 (1917), pp. 146-160. Les Enluminures Hindman, Sandra, ed. Les Enluminures: Enluminures, Velins, Dessins du XII 1 ' au X VI l c siecle. Paris, 1992. Field 1985 Field, Richard S., Louise S. Richards, and Alan Shestack, eds. A Census of Fifteenth-Century Prints in Public Collections of the United States and Canada. New Haven, 1985. Gasquet 1904 Gasquet, F.A. A Life of Pope St. Gregory the Great, Written by a Monk of the Monastery of Whitby. Westminster, 1904. Gilson 1960 Gilson, Etienne. The Christian Philosophy of St. Augustine, trans. L. Lynch. New York, 1960. Griffiths 1980 Griffiths, Antony. Prints and Printmaking: An Introduction to the History and Techniques. Lon- don, 1980. Hardison 1965 Hardison, O.B. Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages. Baltimore, 1965. Hutchison 1990 Hutchison, Jane Campbell. Albrecht Diirer: A Biography. Princeton, 1990. Jacobus de Voragine The Golden Legend Voragine, Jacobus de. The Golden Legend, trans. William Granger Ryan. 2 vols. Princeton, 1993. Jordan 1972 Jordan, Robert. “Time and Contingency in St. Augustine,” Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R.A. Markus. Modern Studies in Philosophy, 13. New York, 1972, pp. 255-279. Jungmann 1950 Jungmann, S.J., Joseph. The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development, trans. Francis A. Brunner, C.SS.R. 2 vols. New York, 1950. Klinkhammer 1972 Klinkhammer, S.J., Karl Joseph. Adolf von Essen und seine Werke. Frankfurt a.M., 1972. Rren 1992 Kren, Thomas, ed. Margaret of York, Simon Marmion, and the Visions ofTondal. Malibu, 1992. Lehrs 1934 Lehrs, Max. Geschichte und kritischer Katalog des deutschen, niederlcindischen und franzdsischen Kupferstichs im XV. Jahrhundert. 9 vols. Vienna, 1908-1934. Massa 1966 Massa, Willi, SVD. Die Eucharistic Predigt am Vorabend der Reformation , Veroffentlichungen des Missionspnesterseminars St. Augustin, Siegburg Nr. 15. Steyl, 1966. Mayor 1971 Mayor, A. Hyatt. Prints and People: A Social His- tory of Printed Pictures. New York, 1971. Miles 1985 Miles, Margaret. Image as Insight: Visual Under- standing in Western Christianity and Secular Cul- ture. Boston, 1985. Mourant 1980 Mourant.John A. St. Augustine on Memory . The St. Augustine Lecture, 1979. Villanova, 1980. O’Malley 1979 O’Malley, John W., S.J. Praise and Blame in Re- naissance Rome: Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Sacred Orators of the Papal Court, c. 1450- 1521. Durham, 1979. Plummer 1959 Plummer, John, ed. Manuscripts from the William S. Glazier Collection. New York, 1959. Quinn 1969 Quinn, John M.“The Concept of Time in St. Augustine,” Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, 4. Washington, D.C., 1969, pp. 75-127. Reau 1958 Reau, Louis, lconographie de Part chretien. Paris, 1958. Reinburg 1992 Reinburg, Virginia. “Liturgy and the Laity in Late Medieval and Reformation France,” Six- teenth Century Journal 23 (1992), pp. 526-547. Romanelli 1992 Romanelli, Susan Jean. South Netherlandish Box- wood Devotional Sculpture, 1475-1530. unpubl. diss. Columbia University. Rubin 1991 Rubin, Miri. Corpus Christi:The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture. Cambridge, 1991. Schiller 1972 Schiller, Gertrud. Iconography of Christian Art. trans. Janet Seligman. 2 vols. Greenwich, 1972. Schnusenberg 1988 Schnusenberg, Christine C. The Relationship between the Church and the Theater Exemplified by Selected Writings of the Church Fathers and by Li- turgical Texts until Amalarius of Metz (775-852 A.D.). Lanham, 1988. Spencer 1993 Spencer, H. Leith. English Preaching in the Due Middle Ages. Oxford, 1993. Strauss 1980 Strauss.Walter L., ed. The Woodcuts and Woodblocks of Albrecht Diirer. New York, 1980. Taylor 1992 Taylor, Larissa. Soldiers of Christ: Preaching in Late Medieval and Reformation France. Oxford, 1992. Westfehling 1982 Westfehling, Uwe, ed. Die Messe Gregors des Grossen: Vision, Kunst, Realitdt. Katalog und Fiihrer zu einer Ausstellung im SchniUgen-Museum der Stadt Koln. Cologne, 1982. Wieck 1983 Wieck, Roger S. Late Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts, 1350-1525, in the Houghton Library. Cambridge, 1983. Wieck 1988 Wieck, Roger S., ed. Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life. New York, 1 988. William 1953 William, Franz Michel. The Rosary: Its History and Meaning, trans. Edwin Kaiser, C.PP.S. New York, 1953. Whitrow 1988 Whitrow, G.J. Time in History. Oxford, 1988. “The Captivity of Jerusalem That Is In Sepharad”: Alienation, Exile, and Memory in Sephardic Spain Dwayne E. Carpenter “It’s just what I should have expected,” said Mr. Hawley, mounting his horse. “Any cursed alien blood, Jew, Corsican, or Gypsy.” George Eliot, Middlemarch 1 There is a poignant scene at the conclusion of Sholem Aleichem’s late-nineteenth century classic, Tevye der Milkhiger, in which the Russian authorities exile the inhabitants of humble Anatevka. In the 1960s musical adaptation, Fid- dler on the Roof, as the camera pauses to probe the villagers’ forlorn faces, anonymous voices intone the plaintive melody “Soon I’ll be a stranger in a strange new place, searching for an old familiar face.” And moving backward in time from the somber strangers of czarist Russia to the patri- arch of wanderers, we encounter the Bible’s first mention of “stranger.” 2 Abram, soon to be known as Abraham, receives from God the dual promise of countless descendants and a land for them to possess [Gen. 15:5-7], Words of dire portent follow this proclamation, however, as God solemnly declares: “Know well that your offspring shall be strangers in a land not theirs, and they shall be enslaved and oppressed four hundred years” [Gen. 15: 13]. 3 According to rabbinic tra- dition, this presage ofjewish alienation began with the very next generation, that is, with the birth of Isaac. 4 Thus it is that from the inception of Jewish history the promise of existence has been inextricably linked to the portent of exile. Exile is in turn joined to the problem of the stranger, for it is often the calamity of exile that heralds the calumny of difference. Once again the biblical narrative provides eloquent testimony. Immediately after the thunderous theophany at Sinai, the children of Israel listened as Moses set forth a catalogue of precepts (Hebrew mishpatim ) to be observed by the fractious multitudes, only recently freed from Egyptian bondage. Within this legislative agenda, we find the following stat- ute: “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” [Ex. 22:20], an injunction later and more elabo- rately formulated in Leviticus 19:33-34: “When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I the Lord am your God.” 5 I n rm't tfanVi’Ti »» So ntn ?> wn Jij»iiip£sr] -n- Q a yen D^Tnxrninirm no. 39 Haggadah Leaf Iberian peninsula or Constantinople, c. 1515 printed on paper Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, MIC 5637 HO. 40 Abudarliani Fez, 1516 printed on paper Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, RB 1729:3, fols. 98v-99r rcrnrufr'flP ur* Tip ?' 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' 13 d x Px rxPPproi PrrrrxPd ; ,' , r*hTPr H yfic» pPpsI H yf rrryr *v» rrv y*f riTjytfrrr'bpnfrfjtnpri rrcfrfrvx]^ 1 ^ P3TPrcr'ip;»r*T* PmPrarsi -r '* oi* r?P P7rtn el xvf frrr Jp cro P 3 ? rr ft\ -* 7-53 rrpr fra Pr^r 1 pjp .-*m r; p*I r^c Pwppt tj.tc rP wypj^irrp .v Pf'p Pfcun'prBa’primyP V^ftPi r- r *p r ^ yf t?rrr ptttPp*^ K nlrr?-!*: rTOrftHvT>'*^p rrPPPrtnS"N, f j>.-i]p rPrJ-rc^W mp r^p5t*P rrc r«* ^ — plr»-'Pr-P-p , c^ TYrPP.*9~^ Sc 1I9P rm rpoJ/r ccr nyt i-w **^ PrPrn ■ tt o>n^ e-nrr ^Ph** t irlrr r*s> *n ***•> . •< » r ^ •*)* v>tid hs M>>n (tilth Via ■ ivt ip pea yop ty-Sn+WHf''* *’«"* "»**" "WVpW fpj it Am* (v w ona vvyroti ro*r • wwmw (rivst> vtooxi+w ^ pj'iO a •bw* ajt ^ *'rv, strain vp w* paid) it&ywwww ou'l"5 \i hP/V 11 Tpalrc^lsaMin * - >9307>u)\)«>u W parWnld' ■ipvnwnr Vt\pt jyA • Sol ywtojtto' ti •yiu tAii'Tif'*' 1 .vi • • * '• 'Mut i-mw. ’S' i Jeiuisai em That Is In Si piiakad": Ai ienation, Exiii , and Memory in Si phakdu Spain Dwayne I Carpenter no. 43 Mi-Kamokha Judah Halevi Mantua, 1557 printed on paper Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, 1TB 107:11 Less than 50 years after the promulgation of the Sentencia-Estatuto, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabel of Castile presented the Jews of their realms with an agonizing choice: conversion or expul- sion. Under pain of death and confiscation of their belongings, tens of thousands of Jews — the total number defies precision — departed their an- cestral homeland, seeking refuge in Portugal, North Africa, and the Balkans. The Portuguese haven proved illusory when, in 1496, King Manuel ordered the Jews of his kingdom to con- vert or be expelled. The final episode in the his- tory of medieval Iberian Jewry occurred in 1498, as Navarrese Jews, likewise threatened with ex- pulsion, “turned from God, the Lord of Israel.” 25 This complex amalgam of popular anti- Semitism, theological anti-Judaism, and wide- spread conversions should not blind us to the ex- traordinary tenacity of Sephardic Jewry to pur- sue its intellectual interests and maintain its spiri- tual heritage. Whether under Muslim or Chris- tian sovereignty, Sephardic Jews vigorously culti- vated fertile fields of belles lettres, philosophy, and science without neglecting their study of liturgi- cal poetry, halakhah, and Bible. Thus, even in the twilight of Iberian Jewish life, both Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed and Judah Halevi’s Kuzari found their Castilian voice, 26 and exquisite Bibles were begun in Spain and Portugal. Among the foremost examples of late medieval Bible pro- duction is Bibliotheque Nationale (Paris), He- brew MS 15 (no. 45), written and partially deco- rated in Portugal and completed in Italy after the Expulsion. 27 Note, as well, the Hebrew Bible begun in Spain in 1492 (no. 41). Although the appearance of these works on the eve of the Ex- pulsion may strike us as ironic, Sephardic Jewry could not know that they formed an epitaph to some 1,500 years of Iberian residence. The aforementioned appreciation of the lengthy sojourn of Jews in the Iberian peninsula enables us now to examine specific aspects of the Jew as stranger in Christian society. Clearly, the essential defining quality of a stranger is his or her difference. But what happens if the domi- nant culture finds itself unable to detect that dif- ference? Such appears to be the concern that prompted canon 68 of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215): no. 45 Bible Lisbon, c. 1 496 and central Italy, c. 1504 manuscript on vellum Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, MS Hebr. 15, fol,137v. hTTrHK-rcr-QOT ,-rrr -qp rnTOfnci’Pnit o nes ptrv’prpit ■jiy -',or L| itm paijo it? imTwrSt'Tir nen i T*®- Too 49 48 fig 1 8 Cantigas de Santa Maria Spain, 13th century manuscript on vellum Monasterio de El Escorial, MS T.I.l, fol. 7v Whereas in certain provinces of the Church the difference in their clothes sets the Jews and Saracens apart from the Christians, in certain other lands there has arisen such confusion that no differences are noticeable. Thus it sometimes hap- pens that by mistake Christians have intercourse with Jewish or Saracen women, and Jews or Saracens with Chris- tian women. Therefore, lest these people, under the cover of an error, find an excuse for the grave sin of such inter- course, we decree that these people (Jews and Saracens) of either sex, and in all Christian lands, and at all times, shall easily be distinguishable from the rest of the population by the quality ot their clothes; especially since such legislation is imposed upon them also by Moses. 28 It is hardly surprising that the Church should express grave fear of sexual intermingling, for it is in this arena that deep-seated concerns with protection, purity, and power arise. Chris- tians understood the sexual joining of Christian and Jew to be an unholy alliance of the true with the false, the faithful with the faithless. By par- ticipating in this union, the Christian partakes of — and even enjoys — the alien nature of the Jew. Thus, at the same time that the Christian seeks to denigrate the Jew, he envelops him in an erotic aura, untouchable yet desirable, the forbidden fruit of the unknown. The aim of distinguishing marks is to expose the disguised, to reveal that it is not merely the obvious differences that render the stranger dangerous; on the contrary, it is his ap- parent sameness that requires he be differentiated. The Jew’s outward similarity to Christians is a cloak that conceals his otherness, and therefore he must be identified by a sign if Christians are to remain secure (fig. 17). And if the Jew and Eros are linked, can the Devil be far behind? In Christian tradition, Lucifer is the alien angel of light, the arch-stranger who seeks to establish his spurious kingdom on earth. To achieve his end, the Devil has recourse to an army of faithful fiends, some by nature de- monic, others allied with him in common pur- pose. Of these devilish cohorts, none appears more frequently in theological treatise and popular tale than the Jew. 29 Perhaps the most widely circulated ac- counts of the Devil-Jew partnership appear in the legends of Theophilus, the precursor of Faust. Thirteenth-century Spanish literature preserves the tradition in a number of works, including Gonzalo de Berceo’s Milagros de Nuestra Sefiora [Miracles of Our Lady] and Alfonso X, the Learned’s, Cantigas de Santa Maria [Songs in Praise of Holy Mary] (fig. 18). 30 In his version of the story, Berceo reacts with horror at the naive en- thusiasm with which the common folk embrace the devilish schemes of the crafty Jew: In that same bishopric where Theophilus resided, There lived a Jew in the Jewish quarter. He was learned in every evil deed and treachery, For with the ancient host [i.e. the dead] he had his confraternity'. The wicked scoundrel was full of evil; fig- '1 Jewish Badge Tarragona Cathedral, c. 1330 wall painting "Tm. Captivity <>i Jerusalem 'I'iiat Is In Skpharau”: Alienation, Exile, and Memory in Sephardic Spain Dmiyue I Carpntier Jig- >9 Host Desecration Jaime Serra, d. before 1395 Catalonia, 14th century altarpiece Museo do Barcelona He knew both enchantments and many spells, And devised magic circles and other schemes; Beelzebub guided him in all his deeds. He was well schooled in giving evil counsel; The false traitor killed many souls. Since the Jew was the vassal of a most wicked lord. Whatever the Devil commanded, he did with even greater skill. People thought that the Jew was guided by his intellect; They did not realize that Satan advised hint in all he did. When by chance the Jew was successful in some deed. The foolish rabble nearly worshipped him. The devil granted the Jew high standing; All came to him for advice. They did whatever he counseled them to do, For he was an adept deceiver. Everyone, young and old, considered him a prophet; All ran to him like pigs to acorns. They brought the sick to him on stretchers, And everyone said: “We will do whatever you command.” 31 In this straightforward, homely narrative, the Riojan poet incorporates several elements of the medieval Christian portrayal of the Jew: he resides apart from Christians and consorts with the damned; his mentor is the Devil himself; he devotes his intellect to evil schemes, including murder; and he is a skilled magician. 32 Christians justified their antipathy toward Jews on many grounds, but none was more seri- ous or produced more misery than the charge of deicide. According to the Church, the Jews’ ob- durate rejection of the true faith and treacherous murder of its founder warranted its judgment of the Jews as the enemy of God and man. This conviction prompted crusaders en route to battle the Muslim infidel to interrupt their journey and instead wreak havoc on the “Christ-killers” in their midst. 33 Christians accused Jews not only of deicide but also of recalling the act by crucifying waxen images of Jesus and by desecrating the host. Widespread accounts of sanguineous crucifixes coincided with and reinforced the popular belief that Jesus existed in images, just as He was present in the wine and wafer of the Eucharist. 34 It was commonly held that Jews, having obtained a wafer from an obliging Christian, would seek to re-create the Passion by grinding it in a mortar, or by trampling, boiling, or stabbing the Corpus Domini (fig. 19). Blood would then flow from the host and the Jews participating in the sacri- lege would be either converted or massacred, depending on the authors didactic aim. 35 .SO si H T S T O R I A VERDADERA , Y LASTIMOSA DEL NINO DE TRIDENTO, Y EL NINO DE LA GUARDIA, CON EL JOVEN BERNERO, SACADA DEL DOCTOR JUAN MATHIAS Tyberino , y el Hisxorudor Bzovio , con otros muchos. SU AUTOR DOiY M4NUEL JOSEF M ARTIN, rcsidetuccti esta Corte. Coo I -is licrncia* occtfsarias. En Madrid : En la Imprcnta dc D. Manuel Martin , calle dc la Cruz , donde sc hallara esta y otras diferentes. Ano de 1772. no. 46 Ritual Murder Charges Against Jews Madrid, 1772 printed on paper Private Collection Especially perverse examples of memory include the oft-linked ritual murder charges and blood libel, in which Jews were accused of kill- ing a Christian child as part of a Passover blood rite. From its beginnings in the infamous case of William of Norwich (1 141), the English lad re- putedly crucified by Jews in a grotesque parody of the crucifixion, the ritual murder indictment spread quickly to other parts of Europe. In Spain, the charge appears in its most virulent form in the late fifteenth-century Nino de la Guardia af- fair. In this version, as shown here in this eigh- teenth-century pamphlet (no. 46 ), converses not only crucified a child but also plotted the over- throw of Christendom by means of sorcery. 36 The foregoing has indicated how other- ness can be a condition imposed by Christians on Jews in an effort to create or accentuate dif- ferences between the two groups. In the middle ages, these differences were understood to be qualitatively significant, thus ensuring a moral hierarchy in which Jews remained in an inferior position. In particular, Christian “memory” of the Jews’ responsibility for the death of Jesus erected an insurmountable barrier to meaningful Jewish-Christian dialogue. Related accusations of Jewish blasphemy, blood libel, and ritual mur- der further underscored for Christians the Jews’ obsession with parodic memory of Christians and their dogmas. As a consequence, Jews residing in Christian lands were considered moral strangers whose tenuous existence rested upon theological waivers and economic importance. At this point, it is well to recall Jacob Katz’s observation that Jewish-Christian relations were at all times reciprocal. 37 Did Christians, then, serve a defining function for Jews? An even more important question may be: Were there occa- sions when Jews preferred to be strangers? Given the unhappy history of the Jewish-Christian en- counter, this is in some ways a delicate question to pose, but one that may nonetheless shed light on the issue of Jewish alienation, exile, and memory. Societies rarely consider differences to be neutral, and when two societies manifest mutu- ally incompatible premises and practices, differ- ences become wedges — and buffers. Minority groups often view their survival as dependent upon maintaining, rather than mitigating, their differences with the dominant society. For them, isolation is indeed insulation. Such is surely the case with medieval Span- ish Jewry, whose dealings with the larger society were often circumscribed. Rabbinical authori- ties, like their Christian counterparts, sought to limit Jewish-Christian contacts for a variety of reasons, ranging from general suspicion of Gentile customs [minhagei ha-goyim] to fear of conversion to concern with sexual immorality. 38 One way in which Jews endeavored to protect themselves from outside influences was to reside with their coreligionists in a separate part of town. Although the institutionalized ghetto later formed part of organized anti- Semitism, during the Reconquest, at least, “Jewish quarters were often but by-products of the new rulers’ conscious policy in resettling their deserted lands.” 39 In any case, Jews required centralized residence for a number of communal structures, including synagogues, schools, benevo- lent and burial societies, cemeteries, tribunals, ritual baths, certain trades, and markets. 40 Secu- lar Christian authorities recognized the unique character of these institutions and generally allowed Jews a large measure of self-governance. Jewish-Christian convivencia sometimes resulted in clashes between the two groups, with consequences for Jews ranging from personal assaults to the destruction of entire communities. It is important to realize, however, that these conflicts were not unilateral. Just as Christians had developed a distorted picture of Jews and Judaism, so Jews sometimes depicted Christians and Christianity in unflattering terms. Since the battleground between the two rivals was often theological, this hostile portrayal frequently ap- peared in polemics against Christianity. Whereas in public Jews were constrained to be circum- spect, in their own Hebrew writings, such as the Toledot Yeshu, a pseudo-biography ofjesus, or the Nizzahon Vetus [ Old Book of Polemic], they blatantly disparaged key tenets of the Christian faith. 41 In the same vein, the late fifteenth- century Tratado del Alborayque [ Treatise on the Alborayque] (fig. 20) contains a bilingual (translit- erated Hebrew and Spanish) compendium of curses against Christianity allegedly uttered by Jews and converses. It is clear from the preceding that alien- ation adopts many forms, though perhaps none is more wrenching than territorial exile that is intimately bound to spiritual longings. For Jews, the abiding presence of Zion engendered a sense of impermanence that obliged them to remain spiritual strangers no matter how comfortable they may have felt within their immediate boundaries. The siddur (prayer book) (no. 47) and tnahzor (festival prayer book) (no. 48) likewise constitute repositories of the sorrows of exile and storehouses of hope for the reestablishment of Jewish sover- eignty. This latter yearning acquires particular poignancy in medieval Hebrew poetry, since “Christians and Muslims saw the Jews’ loss of sovereignty as proof that God had passed over them and their version of the truth.” 42 But Jews knew that one day their exile would end and, strangers no more, they would once again wor- ship — and reign — in Jerusalem. fig 20 “The Captivity of Jerusalem That Is In Sepharad”: Ai.ienation, Exile, and Memory in Sepiiakdk Spain Dwayne I Carpenter Tratado del Alborayqne Spain (possibly Seville), 16th century printed on paper Biblioteca Nat ional de Madrid, MS 17567, fols. llv-12r Dcloo inlfelea paoica fupoo que l?aii vciiidomil cl(ala.clamoi oc maloiaon. oiflf Oc. 1gopi3pab.oi3t>:queb;an#o. (L lapgleu quoioerefimocrafui. pgleliaocmaloa: apna la odbripa oioa ca fa oc piofanoa. ‘^.'•ioo pafTan pc ' Tacinictcnoaoiyf |alpar»agopm . oaraqlapn. 2 : oecriftianoa anio.’ oc perron . 21 • enlafepuui ’ 110 me |'unte oioa con cllor. ([Jitter quano*' ’0 rcfciben cn Pi finagoga 01301. maU caojanoo 1 "i repnaoo’ 6l 1 foberuia ama lo foa raoioacnnueiiiv ’''aeantenueftroaojoa. C2iloe bu uco cC.ccrloe q fon con noaon oa O1301 me# 1 umaoi n- alcipi.nunca fc falucn. C©uaootano’ 'is campanas Doe.rlpcrobem beepfeu d? bar fil.quo . anta loa con vara oc fierro . gllaeco# fae fob.'coicpaa fe pucoc oarrefponfion pojlep que tooaa dlaa fe cumplen p copliri fobje elloa. Mysticism and messianism served as the vehicles for these spiritual and political longings . 43 Although the sages of the Talmud had early on derived the mystical union between God and His people from the Song of Songs, it was medieval Hebrew poets in Al-Andalus who explored the relationship most intimately. The liturgical poetry of the golden age extols in vivid, some- times erotic, imagery the covenant between God and Israel. These shimmering pieces move at least as much by their language as by their message, as can be seen in the following poem on redemp- tion by Solomon ibn Gabirol: Come to me at dawn, love, Carry me away; For in my heart I’m thirsting To see my folk today. For you, love, mats of gold Within my halls I’ll spread. I’ll set my table for you, I’ll serve you my own bread. A drink from my own vineyards I’ll pour to fill your cup — Heartily you’ll drink, love, Heartily you’ll sup. I’ll take my pleasure with you As once I had such joy With Jesse’s son, my people’s prince, That Bethlehem boy . 44 Poetry of dialogue and redemption is linked thematically to poetry of exile, for it is exile — physical and spiritual — that estranges Israel from God. Even more, Israel alone is ultimately responsible for its exilic condition. The cry “because of our sins” resounds in Jewish Scripture and echoes in medieval poetry. Yet, while many poets lamented in verse the exilic state, only Judah Halevi sought out the object of his songs. The following poem movingly depicts the poet’s journey from the land of exile to the Promised Land: My heart is in the East And I am at the edge of the West. Then how can I taste what I eat, How can I enjoy it? How can I fulfill my vows and pledges While Zion is in the domain of Edom, And I am in the bonds of Arabia? It would be easy for me to leave behind All the good things of Spain; It would be glorious to see The dust of the ruined shrine . 45 In the course of our search for the Jewish stranger, we have discovered that he inhabits both a geographical area and a psychological space. The memory of the singular event of “matan-Torah,” the giving of the Torah, embued medieval Jewry with a sense of uniqueness and permanence in the face of supremely mutable circumstances. This no. 4$ M.i/u:cr t Festival Prayer Beak) Venice, 1581-1583 printed on paper Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, MIC 5705 no. 49 Bible Ferrara, 1553 printed on paper Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, RB 1803:23 , . p floiohS ’toys vi oru ' 3 o'xn*v nu in nn on lnya 3W3i itwnnVn'inm i 7 saia'J min t2Dh in'tnoi in 7 notoi ' uov uTk i j'YJenoi 1090I f|0i2 ji^n !j K -V£i wjSet nmi « row ton' HfT031 Kchyi nan iroip unpno Tun 1 ri'piia navi rvnoSo ~p'*'oi rwnjro rvnoma n'Dy pnoi n'rrtfo 3 i? pro Wran vw no 73i ptwiai ro , ° v31 P*fy*7 -p3DN3in'CC> Nil' - jON TIDMl TV Dolin' Tiffin' ranun •‘]i3n>!S''D7y'oW t^unpin’oiD 77 nm Tirin' nSyrriN®^ ttrrvtf isnaia 73 oc< 7 'y 7 T 0 ips lioNi t®7y3 P'dk n ttfiorai tovuen i inu; i ®3 7 ? :piy n^an SOI® ^rq qnjnn ti* «i nran ’ns© * w*js ©vox '178 wr»t>» n>Q S’”? 5 * ?, .tciuni nap 7 i"an 1 e^ 3 p}n'f?Wp^. 7b i >J * »o . *nn*V> turn's uoo nn7i Dicin' i300K>wn7iD*pvrn coup ppn ni'.i7i cnovn >n c'io7on D'conS i3W oo iml mxipooipn p Diiy7no'’p td 77 nrorno 'no unpnjn nrDpnp>7ya dw iw'ipn\yji ■ nipu-nni O'ToSnn tx> no7 o7mDi«n 'o> io7io dm nTiy 1 ? tnpn nvm Dunmnso rnrKo®£H*rtnDD7iy 7yi py po D’P'iyn cy opin opwioma Dion oTny tod KD3i D7iy, vpy o voo oxi -ronyinmo® noioSi noioi ion D2B1 DiO' 13'IN’DTI 13133 i*U1y D''n3 IDTI W3H313 D'O'yJaDft'nuci oto» 3iD3 foi d>J3) •'nyio’3 intnKi nyiauK wjtk o'nai crinnua -|7i2DTi -po'.UToo 1131 •'|7lD'DT'D17i1 D"nnUC!l O'O' “JIM inai • 11331 nprxD"n KkO' iDni npn: qui n3ni • iy7 maty lrpni ii 33 i iciyi jn 1313 O' 130 7t'-5*TO’ 73 Dy pk .10033 ni^l7 D 7 iv nnoo .1313 py *oi paw » «nai sot; \*-mopx> iD3i uw mo'ci pew D'c-tn 7y 1M1 i certitude proved to be indispensable, since, as the history of Iberian Jewry amply demonstrates, territorial residence is at best uncertain and ulti- mately impermanent. The Expulsion, above all, definitively halted the uneven continuity of overt Jewish life in the peninsula, obliging those who had arrived as exiles to depart as exiles. Yet, the calamities that befell Spanish Jewry did not efface essential features of Jewish life. It would be an error to conclude that catastrophe perforce extinguishes creativity. Moshe Idel argues, in fact, that new trends in post-Expulsion kabbalah, philosophy, and halakhah were “basi- cally not the result of despair, but of a sustained effort by the Sephardi Jews to rebuild their reli- gious and social life in new centres.” 46 At the same time, those conversos and their descendants who remained in the peninsula were responsible for an extraordinary outpouring of secular litera- ture. One of the most notable examples is Fernando de Rojas (c. 1475-1541), whose Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (more commonly known as Celestina) had appeared in over 100 Spanish editions by 1634. 47 In addition to these creative impulses, the sixteenth century witnessed a resurgence of Jewish historiography — e.g., Solomon ibn Verga’s Shebet Yehuda [ The Scepter of Judah] and Samuel Usque’s Consola^am as tribulafoens de Israel [A Consolation for the Tribula- tions of Israel ] — partly an effort to comprehend rather than simply remember the recent crisis. 48 Sephardic Jewry’s survival and adapt- ability are perhaps most evident in its rapid expansion to Italy, North Africa, and the Otto- man Empire. 49 Once again strangers, these Jews tenaciously maintained their religious traditions and customs, sometimes thus irritating their more established coreligionists. Intellectual links with the Iberian peninsula also persisted, as evidenced by works begun in Spain or Portugal but com- pleted in the diaspora (nos. 39, 4 1 , 45). 50 Equally noteworthy is the rise of »umn?o-operated printing houses in western Europe, such as the one in Ferrara which published the magnificent Biblia de Ferrara (no. 49) in 1553. 31 Later, in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, sometimes known as the New Jerusalem, Jews composed a dazzling array of secular and religious works in Spanish and Portuguese. 52 Thus, even in exile, Sephardic Jews recalled their homeland in reli- gious rite and literary tongue, eloquent testimony indeed to their abiding memory of Sepharad. 53 "The Captivity of Jerusalem Thai Is In Sepharah": Ai ienation, Exile, and Memory in Sephardic Spain Dwayne li. Carpenter NolCS no. 47 Siddnr f Prayer Book for Daily Use and Festivals) Spain, 15th century manuscript on vellum Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, MS 4366, fol. 42 ' Eliot. Middleinarclt, p. 658. - "The Hebrew term ger, 'stranger,' denotes a foreign-born permanent resident whose status was intermediate between the native-born citi- zen ( '°ezrah ) and the foreigner temporarily resid- ing outside his community (nokhri)” (Sarna 1991, p. 137). See also Milgrom 1990,p. 398 (Excursus 34). 3 Unless otherwise indicated, the version of the Bible (TANAKH) cited is that of the Jewish Pub- lication Society. The 400 years mentioned in this passage are difficult to reconcile with other calculations (Sarna 1989, pp. 1 16,359 n. 17;also, The Soncino Chumash, p. 73). One of the major problems in reckoning the Israelites’ servitude from the birth of Isaac is that he never suffered the fate of exile due to his sacrificial holiness (see Rashis com- mentary on Genesis 26:2). 3 Although these laws involve Israel’s treatment of the stranger, rather than Israel as stranger, they nonetheless implicitly recognize the social and legal disabilities attached to being a stranger. 6 Yerushalmi 1982b, p. 44. 7 University of Minnesota, 1994. I am grateful to the organizers, F.R.P. Akehurst and Stephanie VanD’Elden, for the opportunity to participate. Portions of the present essay were delivered on the occasion of this conference. ® Anderson 1991, p. 11. l> In the spirit of Salo W. Baron, one should avoid the temptation to conceive of Jewish history as an endless series of persecution-prompted wan- derings. To see the Jew only as a tormented wanderer, a stranger, is to distort at many times and in many places the Jew’s own sense of per- manence and relative comfort. The Twelve Prophets [Obadiah],p. 134. 1 ' Introduction to Abravanel’s commentary on the book of Kings ( Nevi°itn Rishonim), 1976, p. 442. Note, as well, Caro Baroja’s curious obser- vations on Spanish Jews and their alleged aristo- cratic propensities: “Es evidente que cierto tipo de judio ha gustado siempre de mezclarse con la aristocracia y que, de un modo concreto.el sefardi tuvo pronto un sentido aristocratico que parece no hallarse tan acusado en el asquenazi o judio de la Europa oriental. Vivir entre nobles y a lo noble es su supremo deseo” (1962, 1: 84). ' - Garcia Iglesias 1978, pp. 31-35. 13 Baron 1952-1983, 1: 169-170. The classic history of Spanish Jewry remains Baer 1961. 11 Photographs of early inscriptions are found m Garcia Iglesias 1978, plates 1-16. The text of the Council of Elvira (c. 300) appears inVives 1963, pp. 1-15 (canons 16,49,50,78). ' 3 Baron 1952-1983, 3: 33-46; and Bachrach 1977. ' 6 O’Callaghan 1975, p. 92. A contrasting view appears in Roth 1976. ' 7 Click 1992, p. 106; also, Harvey 1990. 18 The piyyut “Mi-Kamokha” deals primarily, of course, with Purim, although the conclu- sion makes extended reference to the Exodus. On the theological component of piyyutim see Petuchowski 1978. |lJ For an admirable synthesis of the period consult Reilly 1993. Papal-Jewish relations are examined in Synan 1965 and Grayzel 1966, 1989. - ' “Hos enim, qui a Christiana religione discordant, mansuetudine, benignitate, admonendo, suadendo ad unitatem fidei necesse est congregare, ne quos dulcedo praedicationis et praeventus futuri iudicis ter- ror ad credendum invitare poterat, minis et terroribus repellantur” ( Gregorii I Papae Registrant Epistolarum, XXXIV, 1:48). -- Important assessments of Christian proselytism of Jews include Cohen 1982; Maccoby 1982; Chazan 1989; Dahan 1991; and Toledo 1992, pp. 300-308. 33 The issue of crypto-Judaism has occupied the attention of numerous scholars, some of whom emphasize the close relations between Jews and conversos and argue that the latter attempted to retain, to the extent possible, their Jewish identity' and practices; others underscore the conversion and assimilation of many Span- ish Jews. For convenient, though polemical, summaries of these views, see Roth 1 989, pp. 23-25; and Abulafia 1992, pp. 3-6. The fundamental study on limpieza de sangre remains Sicroff 1 960. 35 Useful introductions to the complicated sub- ject of the Expulsion include Gerber 1992, pp. 115-144; Kamen 1992; Abulafia 1992; Diaz- Mas 1992; and Waddington-Williamson 1994. Primary documents are collected in Suarez Fernandez 1964. On the expulsion of Navarrese Jewry see Gampel 1989. 36 Maimonides 1989 and Halevi 1990. - Gutmann 1978, plates 39, 40; and Garel 1991, p. 1 45. Cited in Grayzel 1966, pp. 308-309. Span- ish secular authorities were rarely paragons of consistency with regard to the badge, since prac- tical considerations often prevailed over piety. Fernando ill (1217-1252), for instance, acceded to the pressure of defiant Jewish leaders who threatened to leave Castile for Muslim territo- ries if forced to wear the badge (Grayzel 1966, pp. 63, 150-151). For his part, Alfonso X, the Learned (1252-1284), ordered Jews to wear some sort of unambiguous head covering, lest certain unidentified, but easily divined, “errors and evils" occur between Christians and Jews (Carpenter 1986, pp. 36-37, 99-101). 29 The fundamental study is Trachtenberg 1983. On the racial conception of the Jew see Yerushalmi 1982a; Carmichael 1992; and Gilman 1993. Note, as well, Langmuir 1990. On the portrayal of Jews and Muslims in medieval Spanish literature see Carpenter 1992. 2 1 Berceo, Los milagros de Nuesrra Sonora, sts. 721-726. Berceo’s roster hardly exhausts the Jew’s repertoire of diabolical attributes and nefarious deeds. Many churchmen, for example, held that Antichrist, a pseudo-messiah of Jewish- Satanic pedigree, would appear prior to the coming of the true Messiah in order to deceive the Jews and battle the saints. Jews were thus allied genetically and spiritually with the enemy of Christ and his people. For an excel- lent study of this topic see Emmerson 1981, esp. pp. 79-83, 90-91. Eidelberg 1977; also Rohrbacher 1991. 44 On Christian understanding of Christ’s presence in crucifixes and images see Patricia DeLeeuw’s essay in this catalogue. Alfonso X includes in his Cantigas de Santa Maria (no. 34) the story of a Jew who steals and desecrates an image of the Virgin. The male- factor is subsequently killed by a devil. Useful treatments include Dundes 1991; Shepard 1991; and Hsia 1992. 37 ^ On Jewish-Christian convivencia see Glick 1992. 39 Baron 1952-1983, 11: 88. 99 Examples abound in Finkelstein 1972. 41 Krauss 1902; Berger 1979; Trautner- Kromann 1992; New York 1992; and Carpenter 1993. 42 Scheindlin 1991, p. 34. 42 Scheindlin 1991, pp. 33-51 . On medieval Hebrew poetry see Millas Vallicrosa 1948; Berlin 1991; Brann 1991; and Pagis 1991. 44 Schemdlm 1991, pp. 96-97. 4 ^ Carmi 1981, p. 347. Line arrangement is mine. 46 Idel 1992, p. 136. 42 See my forthcoming “A Converse Best- Seller: Celestina and Her Foreign Offspring.” 4 ® Yerushalmi 1982b, pp. 57-75; and Faur 1992, pp. 207-213. 49 A useful map of these migrations is repro- duced in Orfali 1990, p. 201. -’O Yerushalmi 1974, pp. 7-8, discusses the problematic provenance of the early sixteenth- century haggadah (no. 39). Biblia de Ferrara 1992. Also, Mordechai Glatzer, “Early Hebrew Printing,” in New York 1988, pp. 80-91; Orfali 1990; and Kaplan 1992. Oelman 1982; Kaplan 1989; and Angel 1991. The following individuals generously assisted in the preparation of this essay. I would like to extend my sincere appreciation to each of them: Virginia Reinburg; Ann Kahn, Columbia University; Evelyn M. Cohen, The Jewish Theological Seminary of America and Stern College, Yeshiva University; Sharon Liberman Mintz, Mayer Rabinowitz, Menahem Schtneizer, and Jerry Schwarzbard, all of The Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Katz 1962, p. 3. "The Captivity oe Jerusalem That Is In Sepharad": Alienation, Exile, and Memory in Sephardic: Spain Dimync / Carpenter Abbreviations Abravancl 1976 Abravanel, Isaac. New 3 mi Rishonim. Jerusalem, 1976. Abulafia 1992 Abulafia, David. 1492: The Expulsion from Spain ami Jewish Identity. Studies in Judaism, 2. Lon- don, 1992. Alfonso X, Cantigas de Santa Maria Alfonso X. Cantigas dc Santa Maria. 3 vols. Madrid, 1986-1989. Anderson 1991 Anderson, George K. The Legend of the Wander- ing Jew. Hanover, NH. 1991 . Angel 1991 Angel, Marc D. Voices in Exile: A Study in Sephardic Intellectual History. Hoboken, 1991. Bachrach 1977 Bachrach, Bernard S. Early Medieval Jewish Policy in Western Europe. Minneapolis, 1977. Baer 1961 Baer.Yitzhak. A History of the Jews in Christian Spain. Trans. Louis SchofFman. 2 vols. Phila- delphia, 1961-1966. Baron 1952-1983 Baron, Salo W. A Social and Religious History of the Jews. 2nd ed. 18 vols. Philadelphia and New York, 1952-1983. Berceo, Los milagros de Nuestra Sehora Berceo, Gonzalo de. Los milagros de Nuestra Sehora. Ed. Brian Dutton. London, 1971. Berger 1979 Berger, David. The Jewish -Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages: A Critical Edition of the “Nizzahon Vetus.” Philadelphia, 1979. Berlin 1991 Berlin, Adele. Biblical Poetry Through Medieval Jewish Eyes. Bloomington, 1991. Bible (TANAKH) 1985 The Jewish Publication Society. Bible. Phila- delphia— Jerusalem, 1985. Biblia de Ferrara 1992 Hassan, Iacob M., and Uriel Macias Kapon, eds. Biblia de Ferrara. Madrid, 1992. Brann 1991 Brann, Ross. The Compunctious Poet: Cultural Ambiguity and Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain. Baltimore, 1991. Carmi 1981 Carmi.T., ed. and trans. The Penguin Booh of Hebrew Verse. New York, 1981. Carmichael 1992 Carmichael, Joel. The Satanizing of the Jews: Origin and Development of Mystical Anti-Semitism. New York, 1992. Caro Baroja 1962 Caro Baroja, Julio. Los judtos en la Espaha moderna y contempordnea. 3 vols. Madrid, 1962. Carpenter 1986 Carpenter, Dwayne E. Alfonso X and the Jews: An Edition of and Commentary on “Siete Partidas" 7.24, "De losjudlos." Berkeley, 1986. Carpenter 1992 Carpenter, Dwayne E. “Social Perception and Literary Portrayakjews and Muslims in Medi- eval Spanish Literature,” in Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain. New York, 1992, pp. 61-81. Carpenter 1993 Carpenter, Dwayne E. Text and Concordance of the “Tratado del Alborayque": Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid MS. 17567. Madison, 1993. Chazan 1989 Chazan, Robert. Daggers of Faith: Thirteenth- Century Christian Missionizing and Jewish Re- sponse. Berkeley, 1989. Chumash (Pentateuch) 1947 The Soncino Chumash. The Soncino Books of the Bible. Ed. A. Cohen. London, 1947. Cohen 1982 Cohen, Jeremy. The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism . Ithaca, 1982. Cohen 1992 Cohen, Evelyn M. “L’Artista della Haggadah di Prato: Tradizionalista ed innovatore,” in II Codice miniato: Rapporti tra codice, testo e ftgurazione: Atti del III Congresso di Storia della Miniatura. Florence, 1992. Dahan 1991 Dahan, Gilbert. La polemique chretienne centre le judaisme an Moyen Age. Paris, 1991. Diaz-Mas 1992 Diaz-Mas, Palonta. Sephardim: The Jews from Spain. Chicago, 1992. Dundes 1991 Dundes, Alan, ed. The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore. Madison, 1991. Eidelberg 1977 Eidelberg, Shlomo, ed. The Jews and the Cru- saders: The Hebrew Chronicles of the First and Second Crusades. Madison, 1977. Eliot, Middlemarch Eliot, George. Middlemarch. Intro. Margaret Drabble. New York, 1985. Emmerson 1981 Emmerson, Richard Kenneth. Antichrist in the Middle Ages: A Study of Medieval Apocalypticism, Art, and Literature. Seattle, 1981. Faur 1992 Faur, Jose. In the Shadow of History: Jews and “Conversos" at the Dawn of Modernity. Albany, 1992. Finkelstein 1972 Finkelstein, Louis. Jewish Self-Government in the Middle Ages. Westport, CT, 1972. Gampel 1989 Ganxpel, Benjamin R. The Last Jews on Iberian Soil: Navarrese Jewry 1479/1498. Berkeley, 1989. Garcia Iglesias 1978 Garcia Iglesias, L. Los judlos en la Espaha antigua. Madrid, 1978. Garel 1991 Garel, Michel, ed. D’une main forte: Manuscrits hebreux des collections franfaises. Paris, 1991. Gerber 1992 Gerber, Jane S. The Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardic Experience. New York, 1992. Gilman 1993 Gilman, Sander L. Freud, Race, and Gender. Princeton, 1993. Glick 1992 Click, Thomas F. “Science in Medieval Spain: The Jewish Contribution in the Context of Convivencia," in Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain. New York, 1992, pp. 83-111. Grayzel 1966 Grayzel, Solomon. The Church and the Jews in the Xlllth Century. Rev. ed. vol. 1 . New York, 1966. Grayzel 1989 Grayzel, Solomon. The Church and the Jews in the Xlllth Century. Ed. Kenneth R. 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Kaplan 1989 Kaplan, Yosef. From Christianity to Judaisnr.The Story of Isaac Orohio dc Castro. Oxford. 1989. Kaplan 1992 Kaplan, Yosef. “The Formation of the Western Sephardic Diaspora." in The Sephardic Journey: 1492-1992. New York. 1992. pp. 136-155. Katz 1962 Katz. Jacob. Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Studies in Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Mod- ern Times. New York. 1 962. Krauss 1902 Krauss, Samuel. Das Leben Jesu nach Jiidischen Quellen. Berlin, 1902. Langmuir 1990 Langmuir, Gavin 1. Toward a Definition of Antisemitism. Berkeley, 1990. Maccoby 1982 Maccoby, Hyarn. Judaism on Trial: Jewish-Chris- tian Disputations in the Middle Ages. East Brunswick, NJ, 1982. Maimonides 1989 Maimonides [Moses]. Guide for the Perplexed: A 15th Century Spanish Translation by Pedro de Toledo (Ms. 10289, B.N. Madrid). Culver City, CA, 1989. Milgrom 1990 Milgronr, Jacob. The JPS Torah Commentary: Numbers. Philadelphia, 1990. Millas Vallicrosa 1948 Millas Vallicrosa, Jose M? 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Reconstructing Arthurian History: Lancelot and the Vulgate Cycle Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem ...” Psalm 137: 5 “forsan et haec dim meminisse iuvabit.” [“Perhaps some day remembering even this will be a pleasure.”] Aeneid I: 203 If the act of remembering is the quintes- sential gesture of preservation that guards and informs the identities of peoples, stories, and cultures, the psalmist reminds us that forgetting may be tied just as inextricably to the process. Indeed, the paralysis ofjorge Luis Borges’s memo- rable character “Funes el memorioso,” immobi- lized by his incapacity to forget anything, even the smallest thing, suggests that our ability to move, change, and develop depends on the sort- ing process implied by the selective constructions of memory. Keeping the past alive in the present requires an active memory that continually rein- vents key moments, stories, and symbols of the shared tradition. In the aftermath of storm’s destruction, Aeneas’s comforting words to his crew suggest just such a process of retention and transformation. Finding one’s own place in what is per- ceived to be an unbroken chain linking the present to its place(s) of origin authorizes the very changes that both recall and rework, in order to re- authenticate, the past’s monuments. Given the importance of such inventio, Mary Carruthers persuasively compares the value that modern cul- ture places on imagination to that associated with memory in the medieval context. 1 Examples abound, in the statuary of Gothic cathedrals or the “translations” of Latin works into the ver- nacular, to demonstrate that artists and writers of the European middle ages characteristically presented their classical and Biblical models in medieval dress, literally and figuratively, adapting them for their own purposes to remember and renew the past. Such adaptations entail remem- brance, to be sure, but also a kind of willful for- getting, as when the goddess Diana — removed from the Greek and Roman pantheon, then re- located among the magicians and fairies accept- able to a thirteenth-century public 2 — sets the stage for the Lady of the Lake and her rescue of baby Lancelot. A relative latecomer on the stage of Arthurian history, yet still well-known today, the figure of Lancelot reminds us that the pro- cess of remembering and forgetting that links medieval culture to its past also operates within the contemporary and evolving cultures of the medieval world. Geoffrey of Monmouth included the story of Arthur’s kingdom, its glorious flowering fol- lowed by a disastrous end, in his history of the kings of Britain ( Historic! regum Britannice, 1 1 36— 1 138). Wace translated and embellished the leg- end for a French-speaking public toward the middle of the century (c. 1155). In both rendi- tions, Mordred’s revolt and appropriation of Guenevere precipitate the fall of Arthur’s king- dom. Neither mentions Lancelot. Yet when Chretien de Troyes wrote his version of the Queen’s abduction (1177-1180), in a romance whose success reverberated for centuries there- after, the knight whose quest leads to the rescue of the queen and the liberation of Arthur’s people held prisoner by Meleagant is none other than Utmui lUjtuR • \> « cull oiuc U Cl' .nuHutr JUE l am rod \m* rnetYi L'C *V » ihc uaUUu u*nr to 1 6: i\nu vuottniw ri'auucu tiuulnmav Hec raur onftnitir nut cduir faiu .ml' *i i cotitvd <0 S Gijtz *v- '( t*et Man-' i>ilE 11 con toil ij *l«il/C* •y) • ? t'uii fig 21 fig 22 Yvaitt Riding Prose Lancelot Northeastern France, 1300-1320 manuscript on vellum The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MS 805, fol. 122v Lancelot Riding Prose Lancelot Northeastern France, 1300-1320 manuscript on vellum The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MS 805, fol. 123v no. 51a Lancelot Arriving or Galcliot’s Tomb Prose Lancelot Northeastern France, 1300-1320 manuscript on vellum The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MS 806, fol. 185r Lancelot of the Lake. Chretien’s romance offers the first piece of written evidence that testifies to a process of remembering and forgetting triggered by the name Lancelot. That process invites the public of medi- eval romance to forget Geoffrey’s version of Arthur’s reign and remember instead the tale elaborated by a cycle of prose romances written during the first part of the thirteenth century, commonly designated as the Vulgate Cycle. There Lancelot’s own story, as initiated in the Prose Lancelot (c. 1215-1225), becomes the centerpiece of Arthurian history. 3 In La Mort le roi Artn (The Death of King Arthur, c. 1225-1230), the last “branch” of the cycle added after La Queste del saint graal ( The Quest for the Holy Grail, c. 1220- 1225), Lancelot’s love for the queen leads to problems of rivalry, hatred, and vengeance among Lancelot, Arthur, and Gawam, all of which com- bine with Mordred’s revolt to bring down the Arthurian ideal. Recounted chronologically from early childhood through death, Lancelot’s biog- raphy thus constitutes the warp through which the complex and multifaceted story of Arthur’s kingdom is woven. It is the task of this essay to demonstrate how the figure of Lancelot becomes fixed in the medieval memory through a series of highly successful verbal texts and visual images. The objects gathered together to demonstrate that process show how image and text remain inter- connected: the narrative has been so powerfully encoded in cultural memory that specific images may even operate independently without losing their referentiality. Chretien’s Lancelot bursts upon the Arthurian scene paradoxically as a character al- ready well known, yet unrecognized through large portions of Le Chevalier de la Charrete ( The Knight of the Cart). Midway through the tale, when the queen reveals his identity to the participants in the story, as well as the romance public, we learn that the name “Lancelot of the Lake” suggests a knight whose stature reassures the crowd and pre- supposes his eventual, though skillfully delayed, success. If Lancelot’s repeated absorption in love meditations indicates the depth of his passion for the queen, their single night of shared joy may be the first consummation of a love whose future remains open-ended and unpredictable at the romance’s close. Chretien’s focus on an intense slice from Lancelot’s career as knight and lover simulta- neously places his story within Arthurian history 7 and removes it from the relentless teleology of Geoffrey’s and Wace’s narratives. Their ending has been at least temporarily deferred, if not con- signed to oblivion. Those familiar with the whole story may locate Chretien’s tale in the pax arthuriana already amplified in Wace’s version. 4 But given the introduction of a fascinating and irre- sistible new hero, the taste for Lancelot soon leads writers and readers into a forest of adventures that not only delay but finally rewrite the end of Arthurian history. Readers in the medieval context are pri- marily listeners, one person reading aloud for the benefit of all who gather round. In a genre that functions primarily in the setting of seigneurial courts before an audience of counts and barons, knights and ladies, romance authors use a num- ber of stylistic devices and organizational maneu- vers to deal with the oral/ aural character of their reception. In the Chevalier de la Charrete, Chretien not only bequeaths to subsequent writers the character of Lancelot, he adumbrates a new way of telling Arthurian stories that will be systemati- cally expanded in the Prose Dmcelot and subse- quent branches of the Vulgate Cycle, thereby establishing a new relationship between romance and reading public. As Chretien tells it, two knights strive to rescue Queen Guenevere. At a critical juncture, each must choose a path that will lead to a bridge connecting Arthur’s land to Meleagant’s. Gawain chooses the easier Bridge Under Water, Lancelot the formidable Sword Bridge which no one has ever crossed. The nar- rator follows Lancelot, the main focus of interest, whose incognito heightens our curiosity. Only after Lancelot has painfully but tenaciously crossed the cutting edge of the Sword Bridge, fought twice against Meleagant, and been captured through treachery, do we learn that Gawain has nearly drowned at the Bridge Under Water and must be rescued by the party vainly searching for the imprisoned Lancelot. Reconstructing Arthurian History: Lancelot and the Vulgate Cycle Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner fig- 2 3 Lancelot anti Guenevere's First Kiss Prose Lancelot Northeastern France, 1300-1320 manuscript on vellum The Pierpont Morgan Library. New York, MS 805, fol. 67 r no. 51b Lancelot Crossing the Sword Bridge Prose Lancelot Northeastern France, 1300-1320 manuscript on vellum The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MS 806, fol. 166r In this narrative segment, Chretien de- velops in embryo several of the characteristics that will become cornerstones of the prose romanc- ers’ art: (1) the use of multiple heroes who gen- erate a multiplicity ot plot lines, the thickness that eventually reconnects individual adventures to the chronology and complexity of Arthurian history, and (2) the technique of interlacing ( entrelacement ) that weaves together all the strands of the story. The alternating designs of the interlace juxtapose each hero’s adventures, intertwining them in bits and pieces as they build contrasts and similarities to measure and rank the knights’ accomplish- ments. No longer can the public conceptualize an overview of the action based on discrete episodic units, as in most twelfth-century ro- mances. In the interlaced prose romances, the reader enters a dense forest of adventures whose beginnings and endings overlap, sometimes in- terweaving their fragments across hundreds of pages and making any vertical cut a view into crisscrossing paths and incomplete actions. 5 The total picture grows slowly, incrementally, and, although the underlying impetus of the romance cycle strives for totalization, we can wonder if it is ever possible for a contemporary audience to grasp it (just as current viewers of soap operas may constantly find themselves “in the middle” without controlling either the beginning or end of ongoing stories). New narratorial formulas guide the reader through the sometimes dizzying maze of adven- tures, plots, and subplots spun out over thousands of pages: “Ci endroit dist li contes” (“Here the story says”),“En ceste partie dist li contes” (“In this part the story says”), “Or dist li contes” (“Now the story tells”). In the verbal text, these are explicit flags that signal what the narrator is about to describe (see figs. 21 and 22). They function as the narrative equivalent to a shift in gears, as the story stops telling about one charac- ter whose adventures will be held in suspense while we return to another character left earlier at a similar moment of uncompleted action:“But here the story stops speaking for a bit about [Lancelot] and returns to my lord Gawain who is searching for him. Here the story tells that since my lord Gawain began his quest for the knight who conquered the Dolorous Guard...” 6 The agency of transition here is less the voice of a narrator than the impersonal movement of the story itself whose complexities of plot and char- acters require a highly orchestrated system of steps forward, backward, and sideways to recall and advance the multiple storylines. At this point in the narrative, we have been engrossed in follow- ing Lancelot’s varied and proliferating movements since his first major victory at the Dolorous Guard and have probably lost track of Gawain and his vow to search for the unknown victor. The nar- rative formulas fix the moment of leaving Lancelot for future reference, remind us where Gawain was left and then continue the inter- rupted progress of his quest until once again the story will return to Lancelot just as we left him. Forgetting and remembering seem inex- tricably tied to this new, interlaced shape for ro- mance. The linearity of the narrative takes on a 60 6 1 no. 52 Leaf of a Writing Tablet France, 14th century ivory Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Ann Payne Blumenthal, 1938, acc. no. 38.108 spasmodic yet fluid rhythm, as different plot lines stop and start, fall behind and then catch up to each other. Such a narrative style invites us to focus on the events of the moment, caught tem- porarily between the boundary markers of those formulas, before they are swept along in the overarching chronology of the plot. The narra- tive formulas function as aide-memoire, a continual stream of small reminders that segment blocks of prose, recall and fix in our minds the actions tem- porarily frozen or released into motion. This spatialization of narrative becomes visually explicit in the twenty-five manuscripts that include illuminations. The first two volumes of the Pierpont Morgan Library’s Prose Lancelot, originally a single volume from Northern France dated to the beginning of the fourteenth cen- tury, contain 136 historiated letters and forty large rectangular miniatures, usually with multiple scenes across three columns of text. Each of those formulas of transition are locations for pictures that fill the opening letters of Or, Ci, and En, thus accentuating the rhythm of the interlace. The historiated letters help us see literally the figures about to resume their role in the action: for ex- ample, the Lady of the Lake abducting the baby Lancelot, surrounded by the water and fish of the lake that fill up the sides and bottom of the letter O (fol. 5v). Images framed in the letters tend to be highly stylized, with frequently recur- ring conventionalized signs indicating knights, castles, chapels, walled cities, and so on. Their precise meaning is clearly keyed to the given passage in which they are located: thusYvain 111 the letter C (fig. 21, fol. 122v) is represented much like Lancelot in the letter O (fig. 22, fol. 123v), a helmeted knight on horseback with shield and lance, placed on a plain gold background with no landscape details. We recognize the difference through the interaction of words and pictures . 8 In discussing the relationship between text and image in the layout of a medieval manuscript page, Michael Camille emphasizes the disruptive character of the pictorial image that leads away from the verbal text and introduces an implicit tension between two signifying codes, discursive and figural . 9 Such disruption seems particularly appropriate in a narrative that has already rejected a course of smooth progression in favor of mul- tiple interlaces continually interrupting the nar- rative flow. Indeed, the coordination of visual and verbal disruptions, brought together in the historiated letters, may actually enhance our memory of the story. In his extremely popular thirteenth-century Bestiaires d’ Amour, Richart de Fournival describes sight and hearing as the two gates that lead into memory through the media of painture (painting) and parole (speech )." 1 Mo- ments doubly represented in text and image are set more forcefully into the readers memory, as the illustrated text puts into play a multiplicity of faculties and senses. Clearly the reception of the Prose Lancelot as represented in the Morgan manu- script assumes an audience not only listening to a story read out loud and formulating pictures in the mind’s eye, but also looking at the pictures on the page to appreciate the illuminator’s visu- alization of the verbal text . 11 The time spent shar- ing the image, identifying its figures and their import, brings the eye to a full stop and length- ens the transitional pause before the readers plunge once again into the narrative flow. Given the huge proliferation of charac- ters and adventures accumulated across the vast edifice of the Prose Evicelot and the even larger Vulgate Cycle, it is not unlikely that passages not so clearly marked may be forgotten in the over- whelming press of events. Even if the memories of medieval audiences are more highly developed than their modern counterparts’, surely the prose romances’ own size and multiplicity problematizes total retention. Some events, some characters will no. 54b End Panel of Casket with Scenes from the Chastelaine de Vergi France, 14th century ivory Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917, acc. no. 17.190.180 Reconstructing Arthurian History: Lan< 11.01 and the. Vulgate Cycii Matilda 'llmaryn Umckner no. 54a Lid of Casket with Scenes from the Chastelaine de Kcijji France, 14th century ivory Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917, acc. no. 17.190.180 no. 53 Ivory Mirror Case with God of Love in Tree and Lovers England or Germany, 1340-1350 ivory Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, acc. no. 71.193 be forgotten in the mass, no doubt to highlight all the more effectively the superiority of those which stand out. And that, of course, brings Lancelot back into focus here. In her book on memory, Mary Carruthers emphasizes the "physical matrix of the whole memorative process, the affective char- acter of the memory image itself.” 12 There is surely no character throughout the entire Vulgate Cycle who can compete with the affective force generated by Lancelot. How does the Prose Lancelot build upon and develop the mystique already surrounding him in Chretien’s romance? How does the Morgan manuscript further en- hance Lancelot’s power to captivate and hold the public’s heart, the very seat of memory in the middle ages? A simple tabulation of pictures will give a quick overview of Lancelot’s role at cen- ter stage, even before we consider the verbal text: Lancelot appears in 38 out of 136 historiated letters. By contrast, we may compare this with 12 appearances for Arthur and 17 for Gawain. Lancelot’s predominance is even more striking in the large miniatures, where he appears in 29 out of 40: 15 out of 19 in vol. I (in each of the first seven); 14 out of 21 in vol. II. In many of the miniatures that contain multiple scenes, Lancelot appears more than once, as on fol. 185 (no. 5 1 a), where we see him three times: he meets first a damsel, then some monks (despite changes in color between these first two images, the hel- meted Lancelot is easily identified by his shield); finally a grieving Lancelot appears before his friend Galehot’s tomb. The focus on Lancelot, clearly visible on the figural level, reflects and substantiates his equally compelling dominance on the discur- sive level. Chronological expansion of the nar- rative, as already noted, plays an important role here. Taking up several vague allusions included in the Chanete, the prose romancer begins his story with an extensive amplification of Lancelot’s background before the adventure told in the Cart episode: at the age of two or three, Lancelot is spirited away from his mother after the death of his father. King Ban, and the capture of his land by Claudas; the Lady of the Lake thus provides Lancelot a haven of peace where her love fosters maximum development of his potential, signaled by his physical and moral beauty. Once he has reached the age of eighteen, the Lady of the Lake sends Lancelot to Arthur’s court to be knighted, and from the moment he sets eyes on the queen his development as “the best knight in the world" is ineluctably tied to his love tor her. Tikmg his cue from Chretien, the prose romancer expands the mystery of Lancelot’s identity: raised with- out knowing his name, he will learn it only by achieving his first great adventure at the Dolor- ous Guard. A complicated series of events ex- tends the suspense to include all the members of Arthur’s court, most especially the queen. 13 A brief look at the account of Lancelot’s accomplishments put together by the queen dur- ing their first private meeting may give some sense of the proliferation of adventures that have already crystallized around Lancelot to make him the most extraordinary knight in the romance. It suggests as well the care with which the ro- mancer and the characters — in their desire tor Lancelot — seek him out, recall his deeds and re- mind themselves and the public of his prowess. Paradoxically, Lancelot’s frequent use of incog- nito, even after his identity becomes public knowledge, serves the process of remembering, as if the temporary blanks and risks that ano- nymity entails provide the very key to further enhancement of his name and reputation. In- cognito provides motivation for the repetition of Lancelot’s deeds as performed and then re- ported when his identity is later revealed. In addition to amplification, such repetition plays fig- Lit! of Casket with Scenes trow the Clutstelaine tic I erf France, 14th century ivory Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917, acc. no. 17.190.177 fig- 25 Front Panel of Casket with Arthurian Scenes Paris, c. 1320-1340 ivory Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, acc. no. 1988.16, 17.190.173 an important role in impressing Lancelot on the readers’ memory. The first major instance of this technique occurs in the meeting between Lancelot and the queen that culminates in their first kiss. The queen’s extensive list of Lancelot’s deeds is too long to quote here in toto (then- dialogue extends over eight pages in Micha’s edi- tion), but the opening passage suggests the rhythm of their exchange, as both acknowledge the past and their particular understanding of it: ‘Dear Sir, why are you concealing your identity from me? Truly there is no rea- son for it. In any case, you can at least tell me if you are the knight who was victo- rious at the encounter the other day?’ ‘No, my lady,’ he said. ‘What?’ she said; ‘did you not have the black armour?’ ‘Yes, my lady.’ . . . ‘Then was it not you who wore Galehot’s armour on the final day?’ ‘Yes, my lady,’ he said, ‘that is true.’ ‘Then was it not you who was victorious at the encounter on the second day?’ ‘My lady,’ he said, ‘it was not, truly.’ Then the Queen realized that he did not wish to admit that he had been victorious there, and she esteemed him highly for it . 14 The rapid pace of questions and answers evokes in detail all the major and minor moments that have so far marked not only Lancelot’s perfor- mance as knight but also his service for love of the queen. This opening segment sets the tone of their dialogue, in which the queen plays the role of interrogator, ever probing, pressing, and even teasing Lancelot to make him reveal the connections between past events, the height of his prowess, and the depth of his passion. Her forty questions outline not only Lancelot’s spe- cific deeds at court, at the Dolorous Guard, at various assemblies, etc., but the motivation be- hind them. Lancelot answers each question truth- fully, humbly, sometimes reluctantly, but finally with an outpouring of details and explanations that give full expression to his love. The queen clearly knows, or at least suspects, the answers to her questions: what she seeks from Lancelot is a full confirmation of his past as it leads up to the present moment, an open declaration of his love, its origin and exclusive focus on the queen, its translation into acts of valor such as no other knight has accomplished. When Lancelot’s awe before the queen prevents him from making any request, despite her willingness to grant him a Reconstructing Arthurian History: Lani hoi and mi Vuicate Cy< ii VltiiildaTomaryn Bruckner gift, Galehot (who has arranged their meeting) asks that she give Lancelot her love and guaran- tee her promise with a kiss. The moment when Lancelot and the queen, shielded by Galehot, lean toward each other and kiss — with the queen once again tak- ing the initiative — is surely one of the best re- membered in the entire Prose Lancelot . It is the very moment evoked in InfernoV, when Francesca explains to Dante how she and Paolo were read- ing together in the “book of Galeotto”and were led by the lovers’ example to kiss and thus com- mit the sin of adultery that sent them to hell. While Dante’s framing of this famous scene stresses the negative results of their reading, it attests as well the affective power of that image. 15 We do not know if Francesca’s manuscript was illuminated. The verbal description in the text is sufficiently detailed to give a full picture of the lovers’ actions: Then the three of them moved close to- gether and pretended to confer. The queen saw that the knight did not dare do more, and so she took him by the chin, and kissed him for quite a long time in front of Galehot, so that the Lady of Malohaut knew that she was kissing him. 16 Such a scene was irresistible for illumina- tors: the program of miniatures that appears in illustrated manuscripts of the Prose Lancelot typi- cally includes this important narrative climax. The Morgan’s version (fig. 23) offers a particu- larly powerful and elegant visualization of the scene. The strongly horizontal frame of the min- iature is divided here, as elsewhere, into two parts, one half against a gold background, the other rose with a diapered pattern highlighted in blue. Bipartition of the picture field highlights the di- vision of the scene, the space on the left reserved for the private encounter of the lovers brought together by Galehot, the one on the right, an- other trio differently configured in which a male figure can be seen in conversation with the Lady of Malohaut and Lore of Carduel, the rhythm of their hand gestures indicating the vivacity of their exchange kept in circular motion by the direc- tions of their pointing fingers. 17 The Loomises identify the man in the sec- ond group as Galehot’s seneschal, sent to enter- tain the two ladies accompanying the Queen, while Galehot helps Lancelot and Guenevere ini- tiate their conversation. 18 While this reading is not unlikely, it is also possible to identify him as another representation of Galehot, since the same blue robe associates both Galehot on the left and the male figure on the right (minor changes in color on the undersleeves and hose are not un- like the color variations in the representation of Lancelot on fol. 185). In the Loomis reading, the two sides of the miniature occur simulta- neously; in my interpretation, the “movement” of Galehot from one side to the other follows the chronological development of the narrative dur- ing which Galehot first brings Lancelot and Guenevere together, then leaves them in truly private tete-a-tete to share the conversation dis- cussed above, and finally returns to the couple to orchestrate the exchange of their first kiss. The moment of maximum revelation bridging the past and the present through the agency of memory would thus add its power to the promise sealed in their first kiss. However we choose to interpret the coun- terpoint between the two halves, what remains most striking is the simplification of the back- ground, an artistic choice that allows the viewer to concentrate on the figures and, most particu- fig. 26 End Panel of Casket with Arthurian Scenes Paris, c. 1320-1340 ivory Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, acc. no. 17.190.173 64 6 s larly, on the lovers, whose white taces move to- ward each other and stand out against the blue of Galehot’s robe. The three figures form a wide triangle, doubled by the smaller, inner triangle of their three faces. In his discussion of the often negatively charged medieval representations of the kiss, Camille compares this triangular configura- tion to representations of the Trinity and sees it as a type of recall designed to elevate the moment into “a divine union of souls.” 19 It is worth re- membering here certain christological echoes associated with Lancelot earlier in Chretiens ro- mance, especially in relation to his crossing of the Sword Bridge. This is not to say that Lancelot is a figure for Christ according to any typological scheme; rather Christianity’s greatest hero is ap- propriated by romancers and illuminators to en- hance and magnify the value of Lancelot and his extraordinary achievements through love. The lovers’ hands and arms intertwine here in a complex overlapping pattern, as Galehot simultaneously gestures with his right hand to call our attention to the significance ot the kiss and maintains lus connection with each lover, his arm stretched out over the Queen’s back, his right foot reaching across and under Lancelot’s. The pattern of interlace that characterizes the narra- tive texture can be seen here visually in the three figures’ embrace, just as the juxtaposition of the two distinct sides of the miniature recalls the movements from one character to another as ver- bally inscribed in the formulas of transition. Little wonder then that such a moment, as it captures all that precedes and prepares much of what follows, should be printed indelibly in our memo- ries through the emotional appeal of a power- fully evocative image. The accuracy and sensitive attention to detail with which the Morgan illuminator repre- sents the verbal text can be seen in other large miniatures, notably in the visualization of Lancelot crossing the Sword Bridge. One of the most fa- mous scenes from Lancelot’s career, it passes di- rectly from Chretien’s Charrete into the prose ro- mance. 20 Images of the emotion-packed scene abound both in manuscripts and on ivory cas- kets. 21 In the Morgan Library manuscript (no. 51b), Lancelot’s painful progress across the Sword Bridge is observed by the queen and King Baudemagus (Meleagant’s father), both of whom are shown gesturing in Lancelot’s direction from the top of a tower located just beyond the center of the miniature. Baudemagus’s head and right hand extend into the left half and thus bring the figures in to witness Lancelot’s extraordinary prowess. Again the illuminator plays with the distribution of his bipartite spaces, setting up an interaction that recalls the interlacing of the nar- rative. Highlighted against the plain gold backgound and isolated far to the left of the min- iature, Lancelot’s bent-over body, framed by styl- ized trees arching toward him, stands out with particular clarity. The illumination carefully shows several important textual details: the way Lancelot has secured his shield behind his back, the blood that pours from his hands and feet (suggesting comparison with Christ’s wounds). Once across the Sword Bridge, Lancelot will fight against the two lions shown waiting. 22 As we continue to read across the minia- ture, the second scene represented occupies the remaining third of the frame and shows Lancelot at the far right being greeted by Baudemagus and his courtiers: Lancelot’s now erect pose signals his readiness for immediate battle, despite the wounds incurred during his crossing. The verbal text makes much of his efforts to conceal his iden- tity throughout the scene, though Guenevere and the king correctly guess that it is indeed Lancelot, since no one else could perform such a feat. In the miniature, however, Lancelot is shown twice with his face unconcealed, his shield readily iden- tifiable as the second in a series of three worn at the Dolorous Guard. The illuminator has thus clearly preferred to highlight Lancelot’s identity in a well known scene, relocated in the prose ro- fig- 27 Back Panel of Casket with Arthurian Scenes Paris, c. 1320-1340 ivory Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, acc. no. 17.190.173 Reconstructing Arthurian History: Lan< ilot and im Vi k.aii Cycii Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner mance to a moment in Lancelot’s career when his reputation and secret love affair with the queen have already been elaborately developed in the narrative action. Given this particular feat’s ability to char- acterize and memorialize the kind of heroism typical of Lancelot as knight and lover, it is not surprising that medieval artists repeatedly chose this scene for representation independently of the verbal text. It appears on a number of ivory cas- kets produced in Paris in the second quarter of the fourteenth century and presumably used by noble purchasers who were also consumers of romance. Although luxury items in ivory were frequently carved with courtly scenes, they just as frequently remained at the level of generic rep- resentation with no specific textual reference, as we see on the leaf of a fourteenth-century French writing tablet (no. 52), whose tour scenes depict various stages of courtship. 23 The lady first turns away from a would-be lover who aggressively places his hand on her breast (top left); in a more intimate moment (top right), the man again takes the lead as one arm goes round the lady’s shoul- ders and the other hand comes up to chuck her chin. 24 The game of chess (below left), in which the man appears to let the lady win all his pieces, leads her to accept his love (below right): he kneels before her and places his hand in hers in a typical gesture of submission that recalls the bonds of fidelity sworn between lord and vassal (the verti- cal angle of his hand also places it against the lady’s breast and recalls the earlier image, her refusal now reversed). We can observe the same gestures on a fourteenth-century (German or English) mirror case (no. 53) . 25 From the top of a tree, the God of Love presides over the scenes below: on the left, a man places his hand on the lady’s breast, while she holds a chaplet and moves willingly toward him; on the right, she places the chaplet on his head as he kneels before her with the same gestures of submission we saw on the writing tab- let leaf. These examples can begin to suggest the conventions frequently used by ivory carvers to depict courtly scenes of love but lead us to no particular love story, only the universal narrative program that underlies countless medieval poems and stories. At the opposite extreme of representation are ivory carvings that include a cycle of scenes telling a complete and specific story. For example, a fourteenth-century ivory casket from the Met- ropolitan Museum depicts the tragic story of the Chastelaine de V 'ergi, a short narrative poem from the thirteenth century (nos. 54a and 54b). 26 The conventional images of love and courting are elaborated through its particular narrative. The secret that permits the lady to accept and share the love of a knight, once revealed, is circulated from the knight’s lord (the duke), to the duke’s wife, and from the malicious duchess back to the chatelaine, who dies when she learns the knight has betrayed their secret. Discovering her body, the knight kills himself; the duke avenges both by killing his wife. Two Chastelaine dc Vergi cas- kets in the Metropolitan’s collection illustrate how carvers may exercise a range of small decisions affecting the choice, placement and embellish- ment of scenes, while the overall set of images tied to the plot remains consistent. The story begins on the lid: while one box (fig. 24) con- forms to those analyzed by Laila Gross, in which we read each of the two halves of the lid accord- ing to a Z-pattern, the other (no. 54a) lays out the eight scenes in two horizontal bands. This change in layout creates a different set of juxta- positions in the interplay of images. The hori- zontal distribution, for example, brings side by side the sixth and seventh scenes, the lovers seated together contrasting with the knight’s rejection of the duchess. The storyline then follows around the sides from the back to the front. On the right end panel (no. 54b), we can again see the indi- viduality of this version, in the way the artist has left the two scenes unsegmented, using a door- way on the left side to show the maiden bringing fig 28 Bach Panel of Casket with Arthurian Scenes France, 14th century ivory Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, acc. no. 71.264 66 67 no. 55 Arrhnr and Guenevere I l arch rhe Tournament at Camclot on Christmas Dunois Master (Jean Haincelin?) Paris, c. 1444 tempera on vellum Sharon and Neil Phillips/ Phillips Family Collection no. 56 Tournament at Camelot: Arthur’s Forces Prevailing over Baudemagus’s Dunois Master (Jean Haincelin?) Paris, c. 1444 tempera on vellum Sharon and Neil Phillips/ Phillips Family Collection no. 57 Flector Imprisoned Dunois Master 0ean Haincelin?) Paris, c. 1444 tempera on vellum Sharon and Neil Phillips/ Phillips Family Collection the knight into the private chamber. The scene of the chatelaine’s death is thus enlarged: she lies on an impressive bed with elaborate draperies, her arms crossed in death as the knight, bending over her body, kills himself with the sword. The images correspond so carefully to each of the major scenes in the story (constructed through a series of two-person dialogues) that, should you forget one, you can easily remember it by looking at the orderly progression of the carvings. Gross even suggests that someone un- familiar with the Chastelaine de Vergi could actu- ally figure it out from the detailed and ironically symmetrical visualizations of the story. 2 The re- current images of hands evoking the exchange of fidelity^ oaths, the placement of beds and sword, all reinforce the relentless linking of love and death, caused by the conflict of loyalties. Equally referential and tied to narrative are the ivory caskets that present a varied selection of scenes from specific and identifiable stories. They require, however, a greater act of recall on the part of observers, since they give only a brief evo- cation of each story in one, two, or three scenes. 2X Their referentiality, operating in a visual context separate from a written text, bears witness to the familiarity of the story and its persistence in cul- tural memory. If the story is well-known and circulating in multiple versions, we may not al- ways be able to pin down exactly which text in- spired the carvers’ visualization, even if we can clearly identify the scene. Such is the case for the Arthurian casket from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 29 The front panel (fig. 25) shows Aristotle tutoring Alexander, then falling in love with Phyllis, who rides him like a horse despite his wisdom, followed by two scenes from the Pyramus and Thisbe story. The right end shows a knight on horseback saving a damsel from a wild man and then Galahad, Lancelot’s son and the suc- cessful quester in the Queste del saint Graal, re- ceiving the keys of the Castle of Maidens. The opposite panel (tig. 26) depicts, on the right, the culminating moment in the hunt for the unicorn, captured when he lays his head on the lap of a virgin (cf. the Unicorn tapestries in the collec- tion of the Cloisters Museum). On the left, a famous scene from the Tristan and Iseut story shows the lovers’ meeting under a pine, while King Mark (hidden above in the tree) is reflected in the fountain below. The rear panel (fig. 27) is of particular in- terest here since it includes Lancelot on the Sword Bridge as the second in a series of four discrete scenes. The other three depict Gawain’s adven- tures at the Castle of Ladies, an episode found in Chretien’s last romance, Le Conte du graal). On the far left, Gawain fights a lion, whose claw we see in the third scene embedded in his shield, held up to protect him as he lies on the Bed of Marvels and thus triggers the ringing of the bells no. 51c Lancelot Fights for Baudemagus in Tournament at Camelot Prose Lancelot Northeastern France, 1300-1320 manuscript on vellum The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MS 806, fol. 239r hung on the bedcords, a rain of arrows and cross- bow bolts, and the lion’s attack. 30 With the lion’s defeat already represented on Gawain’s shield, the scene on the far right introduces a group of figures coming to congratulate Gawain on his success. Loomis suggests that the carvers execut- ing these scenes may not have known directly the stories represented, since they introduce cer- tain confusing elements into their visualization, extending the crossbow bolts and arrows across the scene in which Lancelot crosses the Sword Bridge and placing foliage in the background on the far right, even though the people should be located inside the castle. 31 On the other hand, we can recognize some positive results in the choices made by the carvers that involve both aesthetic and narrative values, and perhaps invite a slightly different reading of the scenes. From the point of view of symmetry, the foliage added on the right balances the size of the figures on the left and right scenes: once the carver chose to represent Gawain’s sword as a horizontal line ready to fall from the very top of the frame and slice off the lion’s head and feet (just as Chretien’s narra- tive specifies), he could not fill the entire space with the human figures. If he had, the secondary figures at the far right would have been larger than the upright hero on the left, thus violating a general principle of medieval representation in which the most important figures are the largest. Since no significant space is left blank in these panels, the trees conveniently fill in the top and side of the right one, as they frequently do in courtly scenes. Perhaps more appropriately, the carver of a similar ivory casket used draperies to fill the same space (fig. 28), but less felicitously the arrows in his border all slant to the left. The carver of the Metropolitan casket shows his sense of symmetry again, when our eyes follow around the box and discover that the foliage in that fourth scene leads to the trees that frame the Tristan scene represented on the connecting end panel. We have been subtly prepared for a scene of love by the three figures represented under the foliage on the back panel, since the man and woman on the left express with their bodies the same relation- ship often depicted in lovers. The model for this configuration may well have been one of the many generic courtly scenes found on mirror cases, writing tablets, etc. Here it seems to do double duty, connecting to Gawain’s adventure on the left and Tristan and Iseut’s tryst around the corner. This carver seems to be particularly adept in using recurrent motifs to invite interactive read- ing of the panels. The lion that plays such an important role in the first and third frames of the Arthurian panel echoes the one that appears in the third frame of the front panel: in the first scene from Pyramus andThisbe, we see the lion bend- ing over the garment left behind by Thisbe, while she hides in the tree above. 32 Her location ech- oes King Mark’s on the end panel, as he spies on the lovers at the fountain. The fourth frame shows Pyramus and Thisbe’s double suicide, as both are shown impaled on the same sword. The motif of the sword takes us back visually to the Arthurian scenes: the association between love and violence, suggested in the figural discourse, mirrors the links between combat and love typically associated in romance narrative. The artist’s decision to place Gawain’s sword above his head not only drama- tizes the blow about to fall on the lion, it leads our eyes directly to the next panel where it finds a mirror image in the sword upon which Lancelot seems to struggle forward, totally filling the space from left to right, as the sword does likewise from right to left. We can appreciate why the carver was tempted to extend his border of arrows (ev- ery other one of which is shaped like a sword), symmetrically moving from each side panel to- ward the center of the box and thus associating as well as highlighting the inner two scenes of the four. That is where Lancelot and Gawain appear at parallel moments in their careers, accomplish- ing extraordinary adventures reserved only for them. 33 In light of the interplay between Chretien’s and the prose romances’ versions of these stories, the interaction between Lancelot and Gawain shown on the ivory panel suggests a number of other interpretations. Lancelot’s posture on the Sword Bridge recalls the way he is represented in the Morgan miniature: back parallel to the sword, knees well above the blade. Inasmuch as this version of the prose romance also describes Lancelot fighting with two lions on the other side of the Sword Bridge, we may wonder if the fig- ure fighting the lion on the far left may not be read doubly as referring to both Gawain and Lancelot. While the scene corresponds perfectly to Chretiens description in the Conte dttgraal and is visually associated with Gawain in the third scene by the exact replication of the lion’s claw, the carver has also strongly associated the knightly figures m the first and second scenes. Both knights wear the same kind of closed helmet, the crest that appears on the first obscured by the frame in the second. Gawain s helmet is of a different type, its visor raised to reveal his face. Perhaps we are meant to associate the two scenes on the right with Gawain (hence the addition of another lion’s head in the third scene, as shown in the Walters and the British Museum caskets 34 ). The two scenes on the left would be reserved symmetri- cally for Lancelot. We might speculate further that the attention bestowed on Gawain by the rather anonymous figures on the far right is equally directed toward the appreciation of Lancelot’s feat, as their hand gestures invite us to look back across the panel. No specific verbal text requires us to choose among these readings; the visual clues suggest rather that we entertain both interpreta- tions and thereby enrich our appreciation of the carvers’ art that has managed to double the pos- sible meanings of the panel and at the same time express figuratively the same kind of interlacing no. 58 Lancelot Rescuing Cuenevere Dunois Master (Jean Haincelin?) Paris, c. 1444 tempera on vellum Sharon and Neil Phillips/ Phillips Family Collection that characterizes not only the narrative style of the prose romances but their appropriation of Chretien’s romances. Rather than confusion, we may speak then of an aesthetic of conflation that corresponds perfectly to the interplay of multiple texts represented on the ivory casket’s panels. Lancelot crossing the Sword Bridge and Gawain on the Bed of Marvels are unique im- ages, so indelibly inscribed on the medieval imagi- nation that they cannot fail to be recognized and remembered, even unaccompanied by a text. But the set of seven miniatures from a private collec- tion in New York suggest that not every scene can be lifted from its verbal context and still re- tain its specific referentiality. Part of a series of thirty-four miniatures cut from a fifteenth-cen- tury Prose Lancelot manuscript, these scenes recall the texture of the romance in its multiplicity and thickness. 35 The two tournament scenes are particu- larly good reminders that many of the adventures narrated in the prose romance are variations on highly conventional actions. 36 The repeated use of such narrative types helps the reader by pro- viding a thread of recognizability through the maze of accumulated adventures. The variations rouse the readers’ curiosity and rank heroes by their degree of success. The stock repertoire of the illuminator likewise includes many general scenes with repeated motifs that can be used in a variety of contexts, the visual equivalent of the romances’ narrative types:jousts and tournaments, banquets, encounters with hermits, conversations between knights and ladies, and so on. 3 With- tw. 59 Lancelot Slays Dragon Dunois Master (Jean Haincelin?) Paris, c. 1444 tempera on vellum Sharon and Neil Phillips/ Phillips Family Collection Reconstructing Arthurian History: Lancelot and the Vulgate Cycle Matilda Vmiiryn Bruckner out the verbal narrative, the two miniatures indi- cated might refer to any of the dozens of tourna- ments described in the Vulgate Cycle. Relating image and text, we can distinguish more specifi- cally the picture of the earlier assembly at Camelot from that of the later tournament. Long before the Cart episode, the prose romancer planted the seeds of hatred between Lancelot and Meleagant during the Christmas tournament. In the min- iature (no. 55), the action begins, as the king and queen watch. 38 The opposition of the two joust- ing knights, representing the forces of Galehot and King Arthur, is underscored by the pattern of opposing lances and horses. The knights massed on each side carry their lances in a vertical posi- tion and thus frame the central action placed in trout ot the viewers’ stand. In the second minia- ture (no. 56), we see the rout at the end of a later tournament at Camelot, once Lancelot no longer sustains those fighting on the side of Baudemagus. 39 The king and queen with their attendants once again focus on the center of the action taking place before them, although the details of their architectural setting have been considerably elaborated: the walled city fills the background, while a castle gate offers safety to defeated knights, chased by the unopposed lances of their triumphant foes. Since illuminators of the prose romances often used established pictorial cycles, not sur- prisingly the same tournament appears in the large miniature on fol. 239 of the Morgan Prose Lancelot (no. 51c). 40 What is strikingly different, how- ever, is the treatment of space. While the four- no. 6o Attack at Bridge: Lancelot in an Encounter with Four Knights Dunois Master (Jean Haincelin?) Paris, c. 1444 tempera on vellum Sharon and Neil Phillips/ Phillips Family Collection teenth-century manuscript, reflecting the style of the Amiens school, puts its figures into a standing plane, the fifteenth-century Parisian illuminator is working in what Loomis identifies as the third stage of Gothic illumination, in which the fig- ures are subordinated to the surrounding space, the miniature appearing as a pictorial projection of a whole space section. 41 In representing an earlier moment during the tournament at Gamelot, the Morgan illuminator takes advan- tage of his bipartite space to balance the contrast- ing forces within an overall design, placing a view- ing stand in each corner. A series of combats spread across the two halves. Horses and shields appear to move up and down in the picture space, highlighted by the gold and diapered rose back- grounds. That rhythm is further enhanced by raised arms holding swords poised to rain down blows. The clarity that characterizes figures and backgrounds in the Morgan manuscript contrasts with the busy fullness in the Phillips miniatures, as figures move, sit, and stand among a myriad of architectural details, including loge, buildings, castle walls, and towers. The images cut from this fifteenth-cen- tury Prose Lancelot have been isolated and pre- sumably enjoyed without respect to specific narrative location. Nevertheless, the text writ- ten on the back helps identify each one, locates the specific instance even for typical scenes that recur throughout the narrative. This is as true for Hector’s imprisonment (no. 57) as for the tour- nament scenes, since repeated cycles of impris- onment and liberation furnish much of the no. 6i Mordred before King Arthur Dunois Master (Jean Haincelin?) Paris, c. 1444 tempera on vellum Sharon and Neil Phillips/ Phillips Family Collection 7° 7i Lancelot Cured by the Split Shield Prose Lancelot Northeastern France, 1300-1320 manuscript on vellum The Pierpont Morgan Library. New York. MS 805. fol. I09r narrative momentum in the Vulgate Cycle. 42 In this particular image, Lancelot’s brother, shown in the window of an imposing walled castle, is visited by two ladies, one of whom offers to se- cure his release if he agrees to save her sister. 43 The armed knights shown in a smaller walled castle in the upper right corner remain to be iden- tified: are they knights sent to Hector’s aid or possibly Hector with his captors, now ready to begin the quest? As Camille argues in “The Book of Signs,” the medieval distrust of visual signs re- quires the written text to specify how the viewer should understand the picture, yet even where narrative and miniature are immediately juxta- posed, it may not always be clear what interpre- tation applies. 44 Three of Lancelot’s feats represented in miniatures from the Phillips collection suggest both the repeated patterns of his prowess, as well as the ceaseless renewal of his triumphs through the variations of particular episodes. 45 In no. 58, Lancelot rescues the Queen during a hunting expedition (note the dogs in the upper left and the forest surrounding her), when she is attacked by an unknown knight. Incognito and reluctantly fulfilling a vow, Bohort has already unhorsed two knights (three according to the narrative), when he is defeated by Lancelot. 46 At a cemetery out- side the walls of Corbenic (the Grail castle), Lancelot has raised the stone slab covering a tomb and now faces the fire-breathing dragon that emerges (no. 59). 47 According to the text, an inscription on the tombstone announces the birth of Galahad and relates this scene to a number of earlier ones in which tombstone inscriptions re- vealed Lancelot’s name, forecast his liberation of the queen from Meleagant and his failure in the Grail quest. No. 60 shows the attack on a bridge, when four knights challenge Lancelot. 48 He ap- pears to pause after knocking the first knight off his horse and into a river: the text informs us that Lancelot is quite amused that the knights take him to be Kay, whose arms he inadvertently donned instead of his own. Each of these scenes captures the energy of Lancelot’s physical and moral strength, whether in the tilt of his thrust- ing lance, broken through the body of an oppo- nent, or the boldly raised blade of his sword, ready to fall on the dragon’s head. These images help the reader to visualize and remember Lancelot’s courage against a large variety of opponents, the constant theme of his prowess as the best knight in the world, until the darker themes of the Grail quest limit his success. The final scene in the Phillips series (no. 61) comes from the last branch of the cycle, when Mordred announces to King Arthur that Lancelot has res- cued Guenevere and escaped with her to the Joy- ous Guard (the name given to the Dolorous Guard after Lancelot’s victory ends the enchantment). 49 In saving the queen from the stake, Lancelot has killed three of Gawain’s brothers, sowing an un- quenchable hatred for him in his former friend’s heart. That hatred contributes as much to the tragic downfall of the last battle on Salisbury Plain as do Lancelot and the queen’s adultery and Mordred’s treachery. The jealousies that attend Lancelot’s prominence and the rivalries between his clan and Gawain’s help undo the greatness of Arthur’s realm and recall elements of the Tristan story, which are constantly reinvented and trans- posed into the triangle of Lancelot, Guenevere and the king. 30 The Vulgate Cycle thus revises the end- ing for Arthur’s kingdom through a complex set of intertwined causes unanticipated by Geoffrey and Wace. In the wake of the Grail quest and the return to court of those knights who fail to com- plete it, Lancelot and Guenevere can no longer maintain the secrecy of their love, the wheel of Fortune turns and the narrative builds inexorably to the disastrous end. Exiled from Arthur’s king- dom, Lancelot makes plans to leave his shield as a substitute for himself (“que mes ecus i soit en leu de moi”): it is to be placed in a church in Camelot where it can be clearly seen “si que tuit cil qui des ore mes le verront aient en remenbrance les merveilles que ge ai fetes en ceste terre” (“so that all those who will see it from now on remember the marvels that 1 have accomplished in this coun- try”). Received with great joy, the shield is hung from a silver chain, “as richly as if it were a saint’s body.” 51 The shield is a most appropriate symbol Reconstructing Aki'HURIAN History: Lanci lot and rui.Vui.GAH Cyci i Matilda Tomary n Bruckner no. 62a Shields of Lancelot and his Cousin Bohort Les Nonis, Armcs et Blasons des Chevaliers et Compactions de la Table Ronde France, c. 1500 manuscript on vellum The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MS 16, fol. 26v-27r M.i finer .iHicii it* .jhi iiim|(ii/(iii la- tiKMiV *« ni/i •)(«« ituU linicm .jin lout CV Uv* f^iVdviitUtiu i)Mt i0:m>-^iiiiiii' jwiowk «moir illicit liiiiu i.'i ai'l'im A |i Ivinuy m* '' vf^f /■ Mol'lt u'MiMiiK *)«l*’ Oku jVt'p.H'illOll *• oiittioif moult iM'iiui »un »i 5 >iiiim \«'5Nr_*|«.H»f Glilk. tuf t i«ii lilt Tv iiuittvtirvJifr «>it mu'HiX wimiu \.VUr ^ I’iVui/ViX’ iiiv/'/iiT vVr«Vif«iini(ishit HitfiHim tun (< if fiif \m«i tli- I viip.I'Iiv i'll *Mi J\ it iVNouK 111 It Kl ifutf ii to: fvt'i'riiU mft \mt*vf / 1 U.mh .)«|ftir inn- iinttiv (< Vi/,i,(i mi/} «im*)iiiv>/iHit|i u%f ijpvf ft*- ttiM<'Xb 'WlirwR t|IU tout i)UUl|IUl m>IMIOIt(OI|foil^Olf>C iiaut fo p .lnnc rt a dvnaf IothI'i cfifi*>n iiioiidr 9c limiKt mcm» c/lait plain hit au. itvpc.,\MM. pouoit iiiioir jfrtt»m«nn>iai ft fvrtfifc ft pitrlM/kloiKt /ii'liiciwf’Vnc foi; .^fkirviulMHfctiKiit vn«rnii > M ItcfiMfr (< f*lanc vnf«i ^idt7>i( wk'(iiiqwc1i>Hfr pimu ctfunn Ti>iiit cftvit n yna 3 ioh on fiu'iiii' ft»