J. Goff - Time, Work & Culture in The Middle Ages
J. Goff - Time, Work & Culture in The Middle Ages
J. Goff - Time, Work & Culture in The Middle Ages
Le GoEE, Jacques.
Time, work & culture in the Middle Ages.
Preface
v
How Did the Medieval University Conceive of Itself 122
Index 368
vi
PREFACE
vii
PREFACE
viii
Preface
I was soon drawn to the Middle Ages for a more profound reason,
which did not discourage my continued interest in both earlier and
later periods. I belong to a generation of historians marked by the
problematic of the long period (longue durte). This is due to the
threefold influence of a Marxism both modernized and rooted in its
original sources, of Fernand BraudeI,Z and of ethnology. Among the
disciplines which, in French, are so awkwardly referred to as sciences
humaines (why not simply call them social sciences?), ethnology is the
one with which history has established (despite certain misunder-
standings and obstinacies on both sides) the most natural and fruit-
ful dialogue. For my generation, Marcel Mauss belatedly became the
leaven that Durkheim had been fifty years earlier (and even then,
belatedly) for the best historians of the period between the First and
Second World Wars. 3 In an essay which is but a first step along a path
of reflection and research I hope to explore further, 4 I have tried to set
down the relations which existed between history and ethnology in
the past and which are in the process of being reestablished today. I
am a follower of those scholars and reasearchers who prefer an an-
thropology applicable to all cultures, now that an older ethnology,
too intimately connected with the era and dominion of European
colonialism, has run its course. Consequently, I would rather speak
of historical anthropology than of ethnohistory. I must point out,
however, that although certain historians have been attracted by
ethnology because it advances the notion of difference, ethnologists
have, in the meantime, been turning toward a unified conception of
human societies and even toward the concept of "man," which his-
tory, now as in the past, neglects. This interchange of positions is
both interesting and worrisome. If the historian were to allow the
temptations of historical anthropology-Le., of a history other than
that of the white ruling classes, a history which moves more slowly
and deeply than the history of event!r--to lead him to the discovery of
a supposedly universal and static history, then I would advise him to
pick up his marbles now and go home. For the moment, however, I
2. Femand Braude!, "Histoire et sciences sociales: la longue duree," Anna/es E.S.C.,
1958, pp. 725--53; reprinted in ECTits sur l'histoire (Paris, 1%9), pp. 41~3.
3. For example, Marcel Mauss's important article "Les techniques du corps," Journal
de Psychologie 32 (1936), reprinted in Sociologie et Anthropologie (Paris, 1950; 5th ed.,
1973), pp. 363--86, seems long to have been without influence. In a somewhat different
spirit, historians and anthropologists have recently studied Langages et images du corps
in a special issue of Ethnologie fran~aise 6, nos. 314 (1976). This piece by Marcel Mauss is
the basis for the seminar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in which
Jean-Claude Schmitt and I have been studying, since 1975, systems of gestures in the
medieval West.
4. Reprinted in Melanges en I'honneur de Fernand Braudel, vol. 2: Methodologie de
/'histoire et des sciences hl/maines (Toulouse, 1972), pp. 233--43, and in the present
volume, pp. 225-36.
ix
PREFACE
think that a history which concentrates on the long period is far from
played out. The field of folklore, moreover, while too cut off from
history, offers the historian of European societies who is eager to
make use of anthropology a treasure trove of documents, methods,
and monographs which he would do well to examine before turning
to extra-European anthropology. Unjustly scorned as the "poor
man's anthropology," folklore is nevertheless an important source
for historical anthropology of our so-called "historical" societies to
tap. The long period relevant to our history-for us both as pro-
fessionals and as men living in the flux of history-seems to me to be
the long stretch of the Middle Ages beginning in the second or third
century and perishing slowly under the blows of the Industrial
Revolution-Revolutions-from the nineteenth century to the pres-
ent day. The history of this period is the history of pre-industrial
society. Prior to these extended Middle Ages, we face a different kind
of history; subsequent to them, we confront history--contemporary
history-which is yet to be written, whose methods have yet to be
invented. For me, this lengthy medieval period is the opposite of the
hiatus it was taken to be by the Renaissance humanists and, but for
rare exceptions, by the men of the Enlightenment. It was the moment
when modem society was created out of a civilization whose tradi-
tional peasant fonns were moribund but which continued to live by
virtue of what it had created which was to become the essential
substance of our social and mental structures. Its creations include
the city, the nation, the state, the university, the mill and the ma-
chine, the hour and the watch, the book, the fork, underclothing, the
individual, the conscience, and finally, revolution. It was a period
which, for Western societies, at least, was neither a trough in the
wave nor a bridge between the neolithic era and the industrial and
political revolutions of the last two centuries, but was, rather, a time
of great creative growth, punctuated by crises, and differentiated
according to the region, social category, or sector of activity in its
evolutionary chronology and processes.
We need waste no time indulging in the silly pastime of sub-
stituting a new legend of a gilded Middle Ages for the legend of the
Dark Ages favored in centuries past. This is not what we mean by
"another Middle Ages."s Our new view must be a total one, which
the historian will construct with the aid of archeological, artistic, and
5. I have elsewhere stated why I, as one who aspires to be the historian of another
Middle Ages, a Middle Ages of the depths, as it were, would not subscribe to either
the traditional myth of a dark age or the myth of a gilded age which some people today
would like to substitute for it. Jacques Le Goff, La Civilisation de /'Occident mtdieval
(Paris: Arthaud, 1965), Introduction, pp. 13-24. ["Another Middle Ages" refers to the
French title of the present work, Pour un autre Moyen Age.-Trans.)
x
Preface
juridical sources in addition to the kinds of documents which tradi-
tionally were the sole sources allowed to "pure" medievalists. It
bears repeating that the Middle Ages I have in mind are a long
period, which should be regarded as having the structure of a system
that begins to function, in all important respects, in the late Roman
Empire and continues in operation until the Industrial Revolution of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I have in mind a Middle
Ages of the depths, which can be studied with the aid of ethnological
methods giving access to its daily habits,6 beliefs, behavior, and
mentalities. It is through study of this period that we are best able to
understand our roots in, as well as our breaks with, the past; our
troubled modernity; and our need to understand change, the
stock-in-trade of history, both as a science and as we experience it. It
is the time of our grandparents, as it were, at such a distance from us
that we can observe our collective memory taking shape. I believe
that mastery of the past such as only the professional historian is
capable of achieving is as essential to contemporary man as the mas-
tery over matter offered by the physicist, or the mastery of the pro-
cesses of life offered by the biologist. I would be the last to wish to
pluck the Middle Ages out of the continuous stream of historical time
in which they are immersed. They must be understood in tenns of
the long period, which does not, however, imply a belief in any sort
of evolutionism. Yet I believe it is true, nonetheless, that the Middle
Ages are the primordial past in which our collective identity, the
quarry of that anguished search in which contemporary societies are
engaged, acquired certain of its essential characteristics.
Guided by Charles-Edmond Perrin, a rigorous and liberal teacher
and a great figure in a university which scarcely exists any longer, I
had started out to write a rather traditional history of ideas. Even at
that early stage, however, these ideas interested me only as they
were embodied in institutions and men and as they functioned
within societies. Among the creations of the Middle Ages were uni-
versities and academics. It seemed to me that the novelty of a fonn of
social and intellectual advancement based on a technique previously
unknown in Western societies, the examination, had not been
adequately recognized at that time. The exam had won a modest
6. I borrow this expression from Emile Souvestre, who writes, in the introduction to
his collection Le Foyer breton (1844), as a precursor of ethnohistory: "If history is the
complete revelation of a people's existence, how can it be written without knowledge
of what is most characteristic of that existence? You show me the people in their
official life; but who will tell me of their home life? After I become acquainted with
their public acts, which are always the work of a small number of meJ;l, where can I
learn the daily habits, the predilections, the fantasies which belong to all? Don't you
see that these indices of a nation's innermost life are to be found primarily in the
popular traditions?" (new ed., [Verviers: Marabout, 1975], p. 10).
xi
PREFACE
place for itself, alongside the drawing of lots (which, within rather
narrow limits, had been used by the Greek democracies) and quality
of birth. I soon realized that academics issuing from the urban
movement raised problems comparable to, those of their con-
temporaries, the merchants. In the eyes of traditionalists, both sold
goods which belonged exclusively to God-knowledge (science) in
the one case, time in the other. "Word vendors" was a revealing
epithet. Thus Saint Bernard flagellated the new intellectuals, whom
he exhorted to attend the only school worthy of a monk, the cloister
school. For twelfth- and thirteenth-century clerics, the academic, like
the merchant, could please God and win his salvation only with
difficulty. Confessor's manuals began to multiply in the wake of the
Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, a major date in medieval history, for
by making auricular confession at least once a year mandatory for
everyone the council opened up a new path for every Christian-the
examination of the conscience. 7 When I studied these manuals, a
source then little exploited, I noticed that the academic, like the mer-
chant, was justified by reference to the labor he accomplished. The
novelty of the academics thus ultimately appeared to lie in their role as
intellectual workers. My attention was therefore drawn to two notions
whose ideological avatars I attempted to trace through the concrete so-
cial conditions in which they developed. These notions were labor
and time. Under these two heads I maintain two open files, from which
some of the articles collected here are drawn. I am still persuaded that
attitudes toward work and time are essential aspects of social struc-
ture and function, and that the study of such attitudes offers a useful
tool for the historian who wishes to examine the societies in which
they develop.
To simplify a complex affair, let me say merely that I observed an
evolution from the penitential labor of the Bible and the early Middle
Ages toward a rehabilitation of labor, which in the end became a
means of salvation. This advance-which was brought about and
justified by monastic laborers belonging to the new orders of the
twelfth century, urban workers in the cities of the era, and in-
tellectual workers in the universities--led, in dialectical fashion, to
other new developments: from the thirteenth century on, the gap
between manual labor, held in greater contempt than ever, and in-
tellectuallabor (the merchant's as well as the academics) grew more
pronounced, and the new valuation of labor, by subjecting the
worker to a still greater degree of exploitation, led to his increased
alienation.
As for time, I investigated in particular the question of who became
7. The importance of this date did not escape the notice of Michel Foucault. Cf.
Histoire de la sexualite, vol. 1: La VolonU de savoir (Paris, 1976), p. 78.
xii
Preface
master of the new forms it took in changing Western medieval soci-
ety (and how they achieved this mastery). I believe that control of
time and power over time are essential components in the function-
ing of societies. 8 I was not the first-Yves Renouard, among others,
had written some brilliant pages on time as conceived by Italian
businessmen-to take an interest in what, for the sake of abbrevia-
tion, might be called bourgeois time. I tried to relate to the theological
and intellectual movement the new forms of appropriation of time
made manifest by clocks, by the division of the day into twenty-four
hours, and, before long, in its individualized form, by the watch. At
the heart of the "crisis" of the fourteenth century, I again encoun-
tered these tWo factors, labor and time, in intimate relationship.
Labor time turned out to have been a major stake in the important
struggle of men and social groups over units of measure-the subject
of a great work by Witold Kula. 9
I continued in the meantime to be interested in what I was sub-
sequently inclined to call the history of culture rather than of ideas. I
had been attending Maurice Lombard's lectures at the Sixth Section
of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. He is one of the greatest
historians I have known, and meeting him was the major scientific
and intellectual encounter of my professional life. I am indebted to
Maurice Lombard on several counts. Not only did he introduce me
to, and inspire my taste for, civilization's vast reaches (and hence the
idea not to separate space and time, to treat the broad vistas and the
long period together), but he also taught me that the Western
medievalist must constantly keep one eye peeled toward the East, the
purveyor of trade goods, myths, and dreams (even if the persistent
necessity of specialization made it prudent to keep to one's own
territory). He further insisted that history must be total history, in
which material civilization and culture must interpenetrate one
another within a socioeconomic analysis. I sensed the crudeness and
inadequacy of a vulgar-Marxist problematic of infrastructure and
superstructure. Although I acknowledged the importance of theory
in the social sciences and in history, in particular (the historian, out
of disdain for theory, is all too often the unconscious tool of implicit
and simplistic theories), I did not embark on a theoretical quest for
which I feel I have no gift, and I fear getting myself involved in what
8. Georges Dumezil, a great awakener of ideas, whose work is increasingly being
drawn upon by medievalists, has written: "Repository of events, site of endwjng
forces and actions, locale of mystical occurrences, the time-frame (temps-cadre) takes
on a special interest for anyone--god, hero, or chief-who would triumph, reign, or
be a founder: whatever he may be, he must try to appropriate time for the same reason
that he appropriates space." ("Temps et Mythes," Recherches Philosophiques 5,
1935-36).
9. W. Kula, Miary i ludzie (Measures and Men) (Warsaw, 1970).
xiii
PREFACE
xiv
Preface
requiring both rigor and imagination. Such new methods of schol-
arship would include a critical apparatus suited to a new idea of the
document, the concept of the monument-document. 11 The new
methods will lay the foundations of a new chronological science
which no longer rests on a linear conception of time. One aim of this
new science will be to determine the scientific conditions under
which comparative study would be legitimate, so that two objects or
time periods could not be compared without critical justification.
Let me conclude with a line of Rimbaud's, not, as so many in-
tellectuals do, and as so many medieval intellectuals did before them,
in order to contrast manual with intellectual labor, but rather to join
the two together in the context of the solidarity of all workers: "La
main a plume vaut la main a charrue" ("The hand that holds the pen
is worth as much as the hand that guides the plow").
NOTE
xv
PREFACE
xvi
I
TIME AND LABOR
THE SEVERAL MIDDLE AGES
OF JULES MICHELET
3
TIME AND LABOR
4
The Several Middle Ages of Jules Michelet
le-Duc's erudite architecture. For Michelet, however, erudition was
merely part of an initial phase of preparation. History began after-
ward, with the writing. Erudition was thus no longer a mere scaf-
folding, which the artist, the historian, had to remove when the work
was completed. It was a consequence of the imperfect state of science
and of the need for popularization. The time would come when
erudition would cease to be the visible prop of historical science and
would be incorporated into the historical work itself, where the
reader trained to work with this inner knowledge would recognize it.
Michelet expresses this conception with an image from cathedral
construction in his 1861 Preface: "The supporting documents, shores
and buttresses of the historical edifice, may disappear to the extent
that the education of the public keeps pace with the progress of
criticism and science." To develop in and around himself an instinct
for history as infallible as the instinct of the animals he was to study
at the end of his life was Michelet's grand design as a historian.
Would any present-day medievalist find it easy to give up the
ostentation of footnotes, annexes, and appendixes? Let us imagine a
debate-which might go a long way toward clarifying the social pro-
cesses by which history is produced-between two arguments that
initially seem equally convincing. The first argument continues
Michelet's attitude on an ideological and political plane by rejecting
the use of an erudition whose consequence, if not its aim, is to
perpetuate the domination of a sacrosanct caste of authorities. Pro-
ponents of the second argument might also claim Michelet as a
forebear. They assert that there can be no science without verifiable
proof and that the golden age of a history without erudite documen-
tation is still merely a utopian dream. It would be pointless to carry
this imaginary debate too far. The facts are there. A present-day
medievalist can only shrink back or hesitate upon confronting
Michelet's conception of erudition. The Middle Ages are still the
concern of clerics. The time has not yet come, it seems, for the
medievalist to renounce the liturgy of erudite epiphany and drop his
Latin. Even if one takes the point of view that Michelet as
medievalist was, on this important point, more prophetic than out-
moded, it must still be conceded that his Middle Ages are not those
of today's medieval science.
Even relative to Michelet himself, his Middle Ages seem out-
moded. Whether we read him as a man of his own time, the seething
nineteenth century, or from the point of view of our own convulsive
era, Michelet seems quite remote from the Middle Ages he is writing
about. This impression is only strengthened if we do as he asked and
decipher his historical work as though it were an autobiography-
"the biography of history written like the biography of a man, of
5
TIME AND LABOR
6
The Several Middle Ages of Jules Michelet
history of the past in the light of the present. Michelet's "historical"
relation to the Middle Ages changes according to his relation to con-
temporary history. This unfolds between two important milestones
in Michelet's evolution, 1830 and 1871, which frame the historian's
adult life (he was born in 1798 and died in 1874). Between the July
Revolution and the twilight of France's defeat by Prussia, the strug-
gle against clericalism, the disappointments that followed the abor-
tive revolution of 1848, disgust with the business orientation of the
Second Empire, the disillusionment born of the materialism and in-
justice of nascent industrial society all changed Michelet's image of
the Middle Ages.
From 1833 to 1844, the period during which the six volumes of the
Histoire de France devoted to the Middle Ages were published,
Michelet's Middle Ages have a positive cast. They deteriorate slowly
between 1845 and 1855, keeping pace with the appearance of each
new edition, into an inverted and negative Middle Ages. Finally, the
curtain is lowered in the Preface to volumes 7 and 8 of the Histoire de
France (1855), devoted to the Renaissance and Reformation. After the
great interlude provided by the Histoire de la Revolution, a new Middle
Ages emerges, which I call the Middle Ages of 1862, the year La
Sorciere appeared. These Middle Ages are dominated by the witch; a
strange dialectical movement has brought a Satanic Middle Ages
forth from the depths of despair. Being Satanic, these Middle Ages
are Luciferian, that is, bearing light and hope. It may, futhermore, be
possible to include a fourth Middle Ages. In antithesis to the con-
temporary world of the "great Industrial Revolution" to which the
little-known last part of the Histoire de France is devoted, Michelet
here rediscovers the fascination of a lost childhood. It is no more
possible to return to this collective childhood than it is to return,
from the threshold of a death which always haunted him, to the
warm haven of the womb.
THE GOOD MIDDLE AGES OF 1833--44
As Robert Casanova has established in painstaking detail, the por-
tion of Michelet's Histoire de France which concerns the Middle Ages
went through three editions with variants: the first edition (called
A), six volumes of which appeared between 1833 and 1844 (the first
and second in 1833, the third in 1837, the fourth in 1840, the fifth in
1841, and the sixth in 1844); the Hachette edition of 1852 (B); and the
definitive edition of 1861 (C). In the meantime, partial reissues ap-
peared, for volumes 1 and 2 in 1835 and volume 3 in 1845 (A'L and for
certain parts of volumes 5 and 6 in 1853, 1856, and 1860 (Jeanne d'Arc
from volume 5, and Louis Xl et Charles Ie Temeraire from volume 6,
published in Hachette's "Chemin de Fer" series). Edition A' of the
7
TIME AND LABOR
first three volumes is not very different from edition A. The major
change occurs between A-A' and B, especially for volumes 1 and 2,
while volumes 5 and 6 of B reproduce those of A. C merely reinforces,
roughly speaking, the tendencies present in B, though it is true that
this reinforcement is considerable.
Between 1833 and 1844 Michelet was captivated by the chann of
the Middle Ages, which, even in its misfortunes and horrors, he saw
in a positive light. What then constituted the primary attraction of
the Middle Ages was that this was an era of which he could render a
total history of the sort he was subsequently to glorify in the 1869
Preface. The Middle Ages lent themselves to such total history be-
cause they were amenable to the sort of historical writing of which
Michelet dreamed, at once more material and more spiritual than
other history, and because there was available in archives and
monuments, in texts of parchment and stone, a documentation
adequate to nourish the historian's imagination so that he could
make a total resuscitation of the era.
From the material Middle Ages he drew a number of "physical and
physiological" factors, such as the "soil," the "climate," the "diet."
One could think of medieval France as a physical object because this
was the era when French nationhood made its appearance along with
the French language; but it was also the time when provincial France
was brought into being by feudal parcelization (for Michelet, feudal
France and provincial France were the same thing). This provincial
France was "shaped by its physical and natural division." From this
he took the brilliant idea of placing the Tableau de la France, that
marvelous descriptive meditation on French geography, not at the
beginning of the Histoire de France in the banal guise of a table of
"physical factors" which had somehow conditioned history for all
time, but around the year 1000, when history was to make of this
Eurasian peninsula both a political unity, the kingdom of Hugh
Capet, and a mosaic of territorial principalities. France was newborn.
With the infant still in its cradle, Michelet could predict the fate of the
various provinces and bestow upon each its due portion.
We encounter the history of climate, food, and physiology. All
these factors are in evidence in the calamities of the year 1000: "The
order of the seasons seemed to have been reversed, the elements
appeared to obey new laws. A terrible plague devastated Aquitaine;
the flesh of its victims seemed as though eaten away by fire, falling
away from their bones, rotting."
These Middle Ages are built out of matter, out of products that are
exchanged, out of physical and mental disorders. All this is evoked
anew in the 1869 Preface: "The important thing is the way England
and Flanders were married by wool and cloth, the way England
8
The Several Middle Ages of Jules Michelet
drank Flanders in, became impregnated with her, and lured away the
weavers forced out by the brutality of the House of Burgundy by
paying whatever price was necessary." He continues: "The black
plague, Saint Vitus' dance, flagellants, and those carnivals of despair,
the witches' sabbaths, drove the people, abandoned and leaderless,
to act for themselves ... The disease reached its full paroxysm in
Charles VI's raging madness." Yet these Middle Ages were also spir-
itual, and first of all in the sense Michelet then gave the term: this
was the period during which "the great progressive inward move-
ment of the national soul" was accomplished.
In two churches in the heart of Charles VI's Paris, Michelet even
managed to find the incarnation of the two poles, materiality and
spirituality, between which he believed the new history must oscil-
late: "Saint-Jacques-de-Ia-Boucherie was the parish of butchers and
Lombards, of money and meat. Fittingly surrounded by skinners,
tanners, and houses of ill fame, this rich, dirty parish extended from
the rue Trousse- Vache to the Quai des Peaux ou Pelletier ... In con-
trast to the materiality of Saint-Jacques, the spirituality of Saint-Jean
loomed just a few steps away. Two tragic events had transformed this
chapel into a great church at the center of an enormous parish: the
miracle of the Rue des Billettes, where 'God was boiled by a Jew: and
the destruction of the Temple, which extended the parish of Saint-
Jean over the vast and silent quarter."
These Middle Ages also abound in specimens on which the histo-
rian can exercise his erudition and imagination, exercises in which,
the "document as voice," in Roland Barthes's phrase, can make itself
heard: "Entering the centuries rich in authentic records and docu-
ments, history reaches its majority." The "murmurs" in the Archives
begin to make themselves heard, and royal edicts live and speak, as
does even mute stone. Where it had been material and inert, the
historian makes it spiritualized and alive. The hymn to living stone
is the central portion of the famous passage on "passion as artistic
principle in the Middle Ages." "Ancient art, worshiper of matter,
was characterized by the material support of the temple, the col-
umn ... Modem art, child of the soul and spirit, has as its principle
not form but the face and the eye, not the column but the arch, not
solidity but the void." He goes on: "Stone is animated and spiri-
tualized by the artist's severe but ardent hand. The artist brings forth
the life within."
"1 have defined history as Resurrection. 1£ ever this was so, it has to
be in the fourth volume (Charles VI)" (Michelet's emphasis). The
same medieval archives which enable the historian to bring the dead
back to life also made it possible for Michelet to bring back those who
touched him most, the little people, the weak and the unimportant
9
TIME AND LABOR
who were even more dead than the rest and whose recall to life made
Michelet the great resuscitator that he was. "History! Reckon with
us! Your creditors summon you! We have chosen death in exchange
for a line from you." Michelet was now able to "plunge into the
populace. While Olivier de la Marche and Chastellain lolled about
the Toison d'Or over their meals, I took soundings in the cellars in
which Flanders fermented, those masses of brave and mystical work-
ers."
For Michelet, the Middle Ages of 1833 were the era of marvelous
apparitions. These jump from the documents before his very eyes,
wide with amazement. The first ghost to awaken was the Barbarian,
who was childhood, youth, nature, life. No one has surpassed
Michelet in expressing the romantic myth of the noble Barbarian:
"The word pleases me ... I accept it, Barbarians. It means full of a
new sap, alive and rejuvenating ... We Barbarians have a natural
advantage; if the upper classes have culture, we have a good deal
more of life's warmth." Other marvelous children were to pass
through his Middle Ages at a later date, such as the one hailed in the
1869 Preface: "Saint Francis, a child who knew not what he was
saying, and so only said it better." And of course there is Joan of Arc:
"It was a divine spectacle when the child, alone and abandoned on
the scaffold in the midst of the flames, maintained her own inner
Church against the priest-king and the murderous so-called Church,
and, uttering the words 'My voices!' took wing." The whole of the
Middle Ages was, in a sense, a child: "Melancholy child, ripped from
the very entrails of Christianity, born in tears, grown up in prayer
and reverie and in heartrending anguish, dead without achieving
anything; but it has left behind so poignant a memory that all the
joys and all the grandeurs of the modern age are not enough to
console us." It was around the year 1000 that the well beloved woman
France, the physical, biological France, rose from the earth, the
forests, the rivers, and seacoasts: "When the wind had dissipated
that worthless and featureless mist with which the German Empire
had covered and beclouded everything, the country appeared." And
the famous sentence, "France is a person." It is sometimes forgotten
that this was followed by: "The only way to make myself clearer is to
reproduce the language of an ingenious physiology." This did not
escape Roland Barthes's notice: "The tableau de la France, ... which is
ordinarily treated as the ancestor of our geographies, is in fact the
report of a chemical experiment: the enumeration of the provinces it
contains is less a description than a methodological tabulation of the
materials and substances necessary to synthesize, in an altogether
chemical manner, the French generality."
Once France has come into being, her people can come to her side.
10
The Several Middle Ages of Jules Michelet
Their first rising results in the Crusades. This gives Michelet a
ready-made opportunity to set the common man's generosity, spon-
taneity, and spirit off against the calculation and equivocation of the
great: "The people set out at once, without waiting for anything,
leaving the princes to deliberate, arm themselves, count their
number; men of meager faith! The plain people worried about none
of this: they were sure of a miracle." It should be noted that, in this
case, Michelet's Middle Ages, which seemed such a far cry from the
"scientific" Middle Ages of twentieth-century medievalists, actually
foreshadow what today's most innovative historians are uncovering
bit by bit, with improved documentary support for their con-
tentions. To verify this assertion, one has only to look at that great
book which, along with three or four others, ushered in the history of
collective mentalities: La Chretiente et ['idee de croisade, by Paul
Alphandery and Alphonse Dupront (1954). In this book it is shown
that there were, in fact, two contrasting kinds of crusades, the
crusade of the knights and the crusade of the people. One chapter is
even entitled La croisade populaire. Pope Urban II had preached to the
wealthy at Clermont. But it was the poor who departed-or, at least,
departed first. "The nobles took the time to sell off their possessions,
and the first troop, a numerous throng, was made up of peasants and
relatively impoverished nobles. But another difference, a much more
fundamental difference in mental outlook was soon to separate the
poor from the lords. The latter set out to use the leisure time afforded
them by the Truce of God against the infidel; for them, it was a
question of a limited expedition, a sort of tempus militiae. By contrast,
among the people there was an idea of remaining in the Holy Land .
. . . The poor, who had everything to gain in the adventure, were the
really spiritual Crusaders for the accomplishment of prophecies."
And if Michelet had known of the recent research into the children's
crusade of 1212, think what he could have written. In another chapter
(Les croisades d'enfants), Alphandery and Dupront showed that,
through the term "children," "the deep, inner meaning of the very
idea of crusade is revealed with an intensity in which the miraculous
gleams," and Pierre Toubert later proved that this term denoted the
poor and humble, such as the Shepherds of 1251 ("the poorest in-
habitants of the countryside, the shepherds especially ... ," wrote
Michelet). Here, childhood and the common people are inextricably
intertwined, as Michelet would have liked.
Michelet was most deeply taken by the second appearance of the
people in the Middle Ages. He was more a reader of chronicles and
archives than of literary texts. He seems not to have known of the
monstrous, bestial villains in the literature from around the year
1200, such as Aucassin et Nicolette, or Ivain by Chretien de Troyes.
11
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12
The Several Middle Ages of Jules Michelet
she was either people or nation, however, Joan was first of all
woman. "There is yet something else we must see in her and that is
the Passion of the Virgin, the martyr of purity ... France's savior had
to be a woman. France was herself a woman ... " Another of
Michelet's obsessions found sustenance here. Nevertheless, Joan
marks the end of the Middle Ages. Meanwhile, another marvelous
apparition had occurred: the nation, the fatherland. This represents
the grandeur of the fourteenth century, and for Michelet, the four-
teenth was the great century of the Middle Ages, the one he deemed
worthy of a separate publication. In the Pr~face to volume 3 in 1837,
he spoke of his amazement at this century, which saw the achieve-
ment of France. The child became a woman, passing from physical to
moral personhood; she at last became herself: "France's national era
is the fourteenth century. The Estates General, the Parlement, all our
great institutions either began or achieved stable form at this time.
The bourgeois makes his appearance in Marcel's revolution, the
peasant in the Jacquerie, and France herself in the war with the
English. The saying 'a good Frenchman' dates from the fourteenth
century. Until then, France was less France than Christendom."
Besides the cherished personages of the child-Barbarian, the
woman-France, the nation, and the people, two other forces came
into view which called for Michelet's enthusiasm: religion and life.
As Jean-Louis Comuz has skillfully shown, Michelet at this time held
that Christianity was a positive force in history. In an admirable
piece which remained unknown for a century until discovered re-
cently by Paul Viallaneix, and entitled by him L' Herozsme de l' esprit,
Michelet explains: "Why have I devoted such care to the treatment of
this period, which all our effort is tending to wipe from the face of
the earth? Must I say it? One of the principal reasons is that surpris-
ing state of abandonment in which the friends of the Middle Ages
have left it. Its partisans display an incredible inability to make
either visible or attractive a history which they profess to love so
much ... Who knows what Christianity was?" For Michelet in this
period, Christianity was subversion of the hierarchy, a means of
advancement for the humble: the last shall be first. It was a place
where freedom was fermenting, although already, in a material
sense, it was partly powerless. It was primarily the champion of the
most oppressed and unfortunate, the slaves. Even if it was un-
successful in its desire, it wanted to free the slave. In Gaul in the late
third century, the oppressed rebelled. "All the serfs in Gaul then took
up arms under the name Bagaudes ... It would not be surprising if
this claim of the natural rights of man was in part inspired by the
Christian doctrine of equality."
At a time when, by his own admission, he was more a "writer and
13
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14
The Several Middle Ages of Jules Michelet
It was "the long festival of the Middle Ages"; the Middle Ages were a
festival. This was a foreshadowing of the role-today clarified by
sociology and ethnology-played by the festival in a society and civili-
zation of the type that existed in the Middle Ages.
In the great 1833 piece, La Passion comme principe d'art au Moyen
Age, Michelet at last reaches the deepest, most visceral reasons for his
fascination with the Middle Ages. He sees the period as a return to
the origins, to the maternal womb. Claude Mettra (L' Arc, no. 52) has
given an inspired commentary on a February 1845 text in which
Michelet, having completed his history of medieval France, com-
pares himself to the "fertile womb," the "mother," "the pregnant
woman who does everything with an eye to her eventual fruit." The
obsession with the Womb, with its image and its realm, is fed on the
Middle Ages, out of which we were born, from which we have
emerged. "The old world must pass away, the traces of the Middle
Ages must completely disappear, and we must watch the dying of all
that we loved, all that suckled us as infants, that was mother and
father to us and sang so tenderly to us in our cradles." This sentence
is even more topical today in 1974. Traditional civilization, created
during the Middle Ages, struck with an initial blow by the Industrial
Revolution in Michelet's time, is now disappearing forever in the
wake of a series of transfonnations which have rocked and buried
"the world we have lost" (Peter Laslett).
THE DARK MIDDLE AGES OF 1855
The good Middle Ages of 1833 deteriorated rapidly. Between 1835
and 1845, in new editions of the first three volumes, Michelet began
to take his distance from the Middle Ages. The tum in his thought is
clear in the edition of 1852. The break was finally consummated in
1855 in the prefaces and introductions to volumes 7 and 8 of the
Histoire de France. The Renaissance and the Refonnation had rel-
egated the Middle Ages to the shadows. "The bizarre, monstrous,
amazingly artificial state which was that of the Middle Ages ... "
The break came with Luther. More than the now shadow-
shrouded apparitions of the Middle Ages, Luther was the real
epiphany: "Here I stand!" "It was most salutary for me to live with this
great-hearted man who said no to the Middle Ages."
Somewhat embarrassed by having loved the Middle Ages too
much, Michelet sought to take his distance from the period-from
his own Middle Ages. "This beginning to my history pleased the
public more than myself." He tried to make corrections without re-
pudiating what he had written. He claimed that he had revealed the
Middle Ages. He had believed what the Middle Ages wanted him to
believe and had not seen the reality, which was somber. "Our candor
15
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will not permit us to erase what is written ... What we wrote then is
true as the ideal which the Middle Ages set themselves. What we
give here is the reality, as it stands accused by its own testimony."
It was, of course, the perverse seductiveness of art, during that
time when, as he said of himself, he was more an artist and a writer
than a historian, which had inspired in him his unpardonable in-
dulgence for this era: "Then (in 1833), when enthusiasm for the art
of the Middle Ages made me less severe toward its system in gen-
eral ... " Now even this art was to be disparaged. It was "Gothic
disorder," visible in the clownishness of romantic neo-Gothic art.
Three guilty individuals were named. Chateaubriand: "M. de
Chateaubriand early on chanced a very grotesque imitation ... "
Victor Hugo: "In 1830, Victor Hugo took it up again with the vigor
of genius, and gave it wing, taking off, however, from the fantastic,
strange, and monstrous, or, in other words, the adventitious ... "
Finally, Michelet arraigned himself: "In 1833, ... I tried to give the
vital law of this vegetation ... My blind enthusiasm can be explained
in a word: we were divining, and we suffered from the fever of
divination ... " Even where the Middle Ages seem to be great, the
period itself failed to recognize it. It did not recognize Joan of Arc: "It
saw Joan of Arc come and said: 'What is this girl?'" Would the
fourteenth century continue in its exalted status? It might, but only
after "the denigration of the thirteenth century": "The darkest, most
sinister date in all history is for me the year 1200, the '93 of the
Church." The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were carried away in
a Dance of Death, the spectacle of a Middle Ages which would not be
done with dying: "It ended in the fourteenth century, when a layman
set his hands upon the three worlds, enclosed them in his Comedy,
humanized them, transfigured them, and closed the entire realm off
from view." Subsequently, Michelet could only be amazed at "his
naivete, his benevolent ingenuousness in remaking the Middle
Ages," as he put it, "century by century". Once adored, now ig-
nominiously burned, the period became "my enemy, the Middle
Ages (1, son of the Revolution, revolutionary to the bottom of my
heart) ... "
As subsequent editions appeared, Michelet retouched, corrected,
and darkened his portrait of the good Middle Ages of 1833. What do
we learn from his repentances? The specialists in Michelet will tell us
what caused this estrangement from his earlier self, this quasi-
reversal of his previous position. He himself presents it as stemming
from the revelation of his encounter with the Renaissance and the
Reformation. Mter discovering Luther, Michelet had to cast the
Middle Ages into the shadows, as his hero had done before him. It is
fair to assume, however, that Michelet's evolution with respect to the
16
The Several Middle Ages of Jules Michelet
Church and Christianity played an important part in this turnabout.
It is important to keep his simultaneous interpretation of past and
contemporary history constantly in mind. Michelet's anticlericalism
grew more confirmed throughout the July monarchy. This under-
mined what had been the central inspiration of his earlier version of
the Middle Ages.
Michelet pointed out that he had had the advantage of approach-
ing Christianity without the prejudice of a religious training which
would either have filled him with uncontrolled admiration or forced
him to a rebellious act of intemperate and unexamined rejection. It
was rather the "deceivers" of his own time who revealed to him the
harm done by their ancestors: "My perfect solitude and isolation in
the midst of the men of the time, so hard to believe and yet so true,
prevented me from sensing sufficiently how much these ghosts of the
past were still to be feared in the deceivers who claim to be their
natural heirs."
From correction to correction and variant to variant, one can make
out the critical points around which Michelet's revised view of the
Middle Ages crystallized. In the first volume, whatever had glorified
or excused the Church and the Christian religion was eliminated or
toned down. Western monasticism had been praised to the detri-
ment of "Asiatic cenobites." Michelet suppressed this favorable
comparison: "Freedom was destroyed in the East in the quietude of
mysticism; in the West, it was disciplined. For the sake of redemp-
tion, it submitted to the rule, the law, obedience, and labor." What
may have been excessive in the Barbarians had been civilized by
Christianity, whose poetic force had been stressed in the early ver-
sions. "To civilize and tame this raging barbarism was not too much
to ask of the religious and poetic strength of Christianity. The Roman
world sensed instinctively that it would soon need the religion's
ample bosom for its refuge." This passage, too, disappeared. The
conversion of the Franks had been hailed as a recognition of this
poetic power of Christianity, contrasted with rationalism, which was
said to be unsuited to the impulsiveness of childhood. Letting stand
that "they (the Franks) alone received Christianity through the Latin
Church," Michelet then deleted the conclusion: "that is to say, in its
complete form, in its high poetry. Rationalism may follow after
civilization, but it only desiccates barbarism, dries up its sap, drains
away its power." Christianity had been presented as the refuge of all
social classes. This was changed by the elimination of the following
sentence: "The small and the great met in Jesus Christ." The younger
Michelet had been full of understanding and indulgence for the
Church's complacent participation in the spirit of the age, its com-
promises of conscience with power and wealth: "It had to be so. As
17
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18
The Several Middle Ages of Jules Michelet
culture had been vilified and Occitanian literature characterized as a
"sterile perfume, an ephemeral flower which had grown on rock and
faded away of its own accord." Far from representing progress, the
Albigensians had been exemplars of backwardness, of the same fam-
ily as those Eastern mystics whom Western Christiantiy had been
quite right to reject; they were no better than their persecutors: "It is
still believed that during the Middle Ages only heretics were perse-
cuted. This is an error. Both sides believed that violence was a
legitimate means to conduct one's neighbor to the true faith ... The
martyrs of the Middle Ages were rarely as meek as those of the first
centuries, who knew nothing but how to die." Everything that tar-
nished the reputation of the Albigensians was now deleted.
The reader will have gathered by now that the Middle Ages had
come to inspire horror in Michelet. Subsequently, he came to regard
them as a sort of anti-nature. Instead of stimulating those marvelous
apparitions that had so astonished him, the period would hereafter
inspire only what Roland Barthes has called "malefic themes." The
Middle Ages thus entered that "bizarre, monstrous, amazingly artifi-
cial state" of the 1855 Preface: "Proscribed nature was succeeded by
anti-nature, from which the monster was spontaneously born, with
two faces, one of false knowledge, the other of perverse ignorance."
These Middle Ages condemned all that Michelet regarded as
spontaneous, good, fruitful, generous-childhood, the family, the
school: "The Middle Ages are as impotent for the family and educa-
tion as for science." As it was anti-nature, so, too, was the period
counter-family and counter-education. The era never witnessed what
might have been "the very touching and beautiful festival of the
Middle Ages, condemned by the Church, the festival of simplicity
and simple people," which never came to pass because religion for-
bade it.
From the medieval Pandora's box, three miasmas now escaped,
which Roland Barthes has categorized under the headings of the dry,
the empty and swollen, and the ambiguous. The dry included the arid-
ity of the scholastics: "Everything comes to an end in the twelfth cen-
tury; the book is closed; that bountiful efflorescence, seemingly
inexhaustible, suddenly dried up." Scholasticism "ended in the
thinking machine." Nothing remained but imitation and repetition ad
nauseam; "the Middle Ages became a civilization of copyists"
(Barthes). After a brief moment of life, Gothic art declined, and stone
once again became inert; the Middle Ages returned to the mineral
state. Worse still, as personified by their most symbolic and venera-
ble king, Saint Louis, the Middle Ages did not know how to weep,
could not shed a tear. The "gift of tears" was denied them. This
causes the historian to repent of his earlier interpretation and issue a
new judgment: "I traversed ten centuries of the Middle Ages,
19
TIME AND LABOR
From the depths of despair, a new light appears, the light of Satan
and the witch. A new Middle Ages emerges, which I have been
calling the Middle Ages of 1862, the year Michelet, between January
and October, wrote La Sorciere. These Middle Ages are positive.
They are once again a healthy era but, by virtue of a strange detour,
constitute a surprising reversal. Indeed, the Middle Ages are saved
by what the period had itself condemned, silenced, and martyred.
These inverted Middle Ages ("the great revolution of the witches, the
most important step inverse to the spirit of the Middle Ages") may
not have flowed from Michelet's pen until 1862, but he believed they
had always been in his mind. Whether as revelation or reconstruc-
tion, he believed he had recognized them as early as his first essays
in history. In L'Hero'isme de l'esprit he traced his conception of the
antagonistic pair, Middle Ages-Satan, back to the Introduction a
l'histoire universelle of 1831: "My critical beginnings and indepen-
dence of mind are marked in the Introduction a['histoire universelle, in
which I charge the Middle Ages with having prosecuted under the
name of Satan the idea of freedom, which the modem age at last calls
by its right name." He points to the virtues of Satan and his creature,
the witch. They are beneficent virtues. They introduced freedom and
fecundity into the very heart of the Middle Ages. Satan is the
20
The Several Middle Ages of Jules MicheIet
"peculiar name of the still young idea of freedom, at first militant,
negative, and creative, and later ever more productive." The witch is
"hot and fertile reality."
Surprisingly, Michelet thought the witch productive primarily be-
cause she gave birth to modem science. While the clergy and the
school men were mired in the world of imitation, bloatedness, steril-
ity, and anti-nature, the witch was rediscovering nature, the body,
mind, medicine, and the natural sciences: "Look again at the Middle
Ages," Michelet wrote in La Femme (1859), "a closed era if ever there
was one. It was Woman, alias Witch, who kept alive the great current
of beneficial natural science."
The Middle Ages of 1862 finally and fully satisfy not only
Michelet's existential obsessions but also his historical theories. In
these Middle Ages the body finds its place, for better or for worse.
These are the times of disease and epidemic, of love, of going back to
life. Jeanne Favret has seen and expressed it well: "To speak of Satan
was perhaps a way to speak of a discomfort located' elsewhere' than
in the conscience or in society, and, in particular, in the body.
Michelet had a presentiment of this---a good deal more strongly than
his successors, whether historians, ethnographers, or folklorists---
when he asserted that the witch's three functions were concerned
with the body: 'to heal, to bring love, and to bring back the dead'"
(Critique, April 1971). The witches' great revolution, in fact, "is what
might be called the rehabilitation of the stomach and digestive func-
tions. They belatedly taught that there was nothing impure and
nothing unclean. From then on the study of matter was unlimited and
unfettered. Medicine was possible." The witch's master, Satan, was,
of course, the "Prince of the world." Paul Viallaneix has rightly said
of Michelet that "Satan became the Prometheus of his old age." The
exceptional, revelatory character of the fourteenth century is again
evident. Instead of announcing the coming of the nation, the people,
and Jacques, however, it is a century which reveals Satan, the
witches' sabbath, and the plague: "this happened only in the four-
teenth century ... "
In the morbid trilogy of the last three centuries of the Middle Ages,
the fourteenth marks the apogee of the physical despair which, to-
gether with spiritual despair, gave rise to the witch: "Three terrible
blows in three centuries. In the first came the shocking metamor-
phosis of the body's exterior, in the form of skin diseases and lep-
rosy. In the second, the internal ailment, strange stimulation of the
nerves, epileptic dances. Then everything quieted down, but the
blood was changing, the ulcer was paving the way for syphilis, the
scourge of the fifteenth century." And he goes on: "The fourteenth
century went from one to another of three scourges--epileptic fits,
21
TIME AND LABOR
plague, and ulcerations." This was the great divide, the historical
nexus in which Michelet saw his conception of history embodied,
material and spiritual together, physical and social body joined in a
single movement, a common impulse. "The record of a trial in
Toulouse in 1353 in which the dance of the sabbath is mentioned for
the first time put my finger on the precise date. What could be more
natural? The black plague had scourged the earth and 'killed a third
of the world.' The pope was debased. Defeated lords taken prisoner
extracted their ransoms from the serf, taking the shirt from his back.
The epidemic of epilepsy was getting under way with the war of the
serfs, the Jacquerie ... People were so crazed that they danced."
Bewitched by the spectacle of Satanism, the fourteenth century's
most modem accomplishment, Michelet detached Satanized Chris-
tendom from its historical and geographic roots. He no longer re-
garded it as a continuation of Antiquity. The witch was neither "the
aged Magician nor the Celtic or Germanic Seer." The bacchanalia,
"small rural orgies," were not "the black masses of the fourteenth
century, solemn challenges to Jesus." When Michelet comes to the
Luciferian dawn, moreover, he seems to believe he is no longer in
the Middle Ages. As the great epidemics are about to be loosed, he
turns back toward the slack morbidity of earlier centuries and
identifies them with the Middle Ages: "The diseases of the Middle
Ages were ... less specific: primarily hunger, languor, and poor
blood."
We note a similar detachment from other worlds, including the
Arab, and the East in general. The witches' sabbath is an invention
of the Christian West: "Saracen superstitions originating in Spain or
in the Orient had only a secondary influence, along with the old
Roman cult of Hecate or Dianon. The great cry of fury which is the
real meaning of the Sabbath reveals something of quite another
order."
Concerning despair and the West, Michelet proposes what we,
with our jargon, would call a new periodization: before and after the
plague. Of course, present-day medievalists would characterize dif-
ferently the two periods of history defined by this catastrophic event.
Before the plague, the world was not a place of barrenness and stag-
nation; it was something more in the nature of a universe in move-
ment, where man leaped forward with an expansion of the area
under cultivation, a proliferation of cities, an explosion of monu-
ments, an effervescence of ideas during the Middle Ages' remarkable
growth phase. After the plague, a long period of depressed equilib-
rium begins: the population is smaller, conquests are fewer, and the
spirit is less bold, if the expansion outside of Europe is neglected. Yet
even if one prefers to change the signs from positive to negative, the
22
The Several Middle Ages of Jules Michelet
definitive break in the middle of the fourteenth century does in-
creasingly seem to be established as the line of demarcation separat-
ing a world still rooted in its ancient origins, bound to the Eurasian
and even African continents, from a universe which by way of up-
heavals had begun to progress toward a modernity that began in the
age of the witch, illuminated by the bonfires of a great physical and
moral crisis.
RETURN TO A MIDDLE AGES OF CHILDHOOD
The view of the Middle Ages that Michelet seems to have achieved in
1862 was the bottom of the abyss, the ultimate "depth of moral suf-
fering" that was reached "around the time of Saint Louis and Philip
the Fair." Yet, when we think of Michelet in his old age-the
Michelet that Paul Viallaneix has shown to be less a declining old
man dominated by his second wife and his senile obsessions than a
man delving ever more deeply into the philosophy of love, harmony,
and unity which had always occupied his mind-may we not suspect
that this ultimate Michelet was ready to "salvage" the Middle Ages?
In his 1869 Preface, which shows no tenderness toward the Middle
Ages, Michelet nevertheless recalls an anecdote from the time sub-
sequent to the July revolution, which shows him as a man ready to
defend the Middle Ages against certain of its detractors, the Saint-
Simonians, whom he detested even more vigorously: "Quinet and I,
at a solemn meeting to which we had been invited, looked with
admiration upon this bankers' religion, in which we saw a peculiar
return of what was supposed to have been abolished. We saw a
clergy and a pope ... The old religion they were supposed to be
fighting had been restored in all its worst forms; neither confession
nor supervision of consciences nor any of the rest was lacking. The
Capuchins had come back as bankers, industrialists ... They wanted
the Middle Ages abolished immediately, because they were stealing
it blind. I thought this was quite something. Upon my return, in an
unthinking impulse of generosity, I wrote a few warm words for this
terminal case whose final agony was being disturbed by these
thieves.// In' fact, Michelet was increasingly turning away from the
world he saw developing before his eyes. In the victory of the revo-
lution of industry, "new queen of the world," he came more and
more to see a tidal wave of materialism which, rather than merging
with the spirit, demolished it and "subjugated human energy."
When the present edition of the (Euvres completes [to volume 4, of
which this essay is an introduction.-Trans.J reaches the Histoire du
XIX" siecie (1870-73), the reader will be in a better position to ap-
preciate how far Michelet-although he tried to remain, as in the
epilogue to La Sorciere, a man of the dawn, of progress, of hope,
23
TIME AND LABOR
24
The Several Middle Ages of Jules Michelet
medievalist's, deepest needs. His lesson in method also serves as an
antidote to certain fashions and as a precursor and guide, not in
yesterday's pathways, but for today and tomorrow.
The Middle Ages which retnain for us to "invent," that is, to dis-
cover, after him and in his manner, are a total Middle Ages based on
all available documents, on law and on art, on charters and on
poems, on the soil and on libraries. We must make full use of the
combined arsenal of the human sciences-which Michelet lacked,
but which his method called for-in trying to overcome the still
troublesome specialization of medievalists (in areas such as law, art,
literature, and even what is called plain history, all too plain). We
must resuscitate not phantoms but men of flesh and spirit. And we
must not refuse what the sociologist, the ethnologist, the economist,
the political scientist, and the semiologist can add to our mental and
scientific equipment. Let Michelet speak for himself, that he may
urge us to restore to the Middle Ages their "flesh and blood, costume
and ornament ... adorning them with the beauty they had" and even
"with the beauty they had not but acquired with time and perspec-
tive." In this romantic fonnulation we may glimpse that new dimen-
sion of history, the history of history, or the art of placing one's
subject in historiographic perspective.
History today is, and must be, concerned to an ever greater degree
with figures, calculation, and measurement. The Middle Ages are
relatively refractory to quantitative attack. For a long while the
period was ignorant of calculation and regarded number as merely a
symbol or a taboo. It is fortunate that statistics, curves, and graphs
are growing more numerous in the works of medievalists and that
the monster computer, like the Leviathan of Gothic tympana, is suc-
ceeding in its search for an adequate diet made up of a Middle Ages
reduced to punched cards and programs; unlike the other Leviathan,
this one will make restitution for what it consumes by providing
medievalists with more solid foundations for a truer picture of the
Middle Ages. Still, the medievalist should be aware that when the
computer has done its work, he will still have only a corpse on his
hands. A "resuscitator" will always be needed. The medievalist will
still need the qualities of a Michelet, who pointed out that the quan-
titative was not everything and that, necessary as figures might be,
quantitative accounting still falls short of history. While it is fine to
apply the latest scientific refinements to the study of the past,
medievalists should know how to dismantle the quantitative scaf-
folding in order to get at the Middle Ages "as they were in them-
selves," approximate and crude, afraid to offend God by too much
computation, imputing to Cain the diabolical invention of weights
and measures.
The history of an era is never limited to the documentation on
TIME AND LABOR
26
The Several Middle Ages of Jules Michelet
ease with the Middle Ages and can help us to uncover, if not the
social reality, at least the contemporary image of that reality.
Michelet goes farther, however, in taking the measure of the popular,
approaching the world of popular culture, of the Other, to which
modem ethnologists have taught us to be attentive even in so-called
"historical" societies. As he put it: "The Middle Ages, with their
scribes, all ecclesiastics, were not interested in admitting what deep,
silent changes were taking place in the popular mind." From the
perspective of our "hot" societies, what era is better suited than the
Middle Ages to instruct us as to the nature of the varied dialogue
carried on by high and popular culture !Jver ten centuries, consisting
of pressures and repressions, borrowings and rejections, and full of
confrontations between saints and dragons, Jesus and Merlin, Joan of
Arc and Melusina? If Keith Thomas is right, medieval Christianity's
great triumph was the partial but successful integration of the popu-
lar faith with that of the clergy. When the symbiosis broke down,
witches and the Inquisition were the result. As mass phenomena,
these came later than the fourteenth century, as Michelet had
thought. But the documented hypothesis is substantially the same.
It is not merely his famous declaration of failure that makes
Michelet a man and scholar of the present day: "I was born among
the people, the people were in my heart ... But their language was
inaccessible to me. I could not give them voice." According to
Barthes, this confession makes Michelet "the first among modem
authors only capable of singing an impossible lyric." But it also
warns us that discourse on the people is not necessarily the discourse
of the people. Thus we are invited to begin a patient search, taking
our inspiration from the ethnologists' study of the Other, for a
method which will enable us to give voice to the silences and the
silent people of history. Michelet was the first historian of these
silences. His failure was prophetic and illuminating.
In approaching these silences, Michelet discovered a marginal, pe-
ripheral, eccentric Middle Ages which can and should still inspire
the present-day medievalist. ;'The Middle Ages always confronted
the very high with the very low," he exclaimed. He went on to
confront-and to explain coherently, even if we don't accept his
explanations-God and Satan, the witch and the saint, the rib vault
and the leper. Like Michel de Certeau, who used the theory of de-
viations [theorie des ecarts] to penetrate to the heart of a society by
looking at what it excluded, Michelet found himself at the center of
the Middle Ages. We say this while bearing in mind that, for him,
the situation was inverted in 1862, when what was lowest turned out
to be more fruitful than what was highest. An inverted view is, after
all, a fruitful way of approaching an age which invented the wheel of
27
TIME AND LABOR
7A
MERCHANT'S TIME AND CHURCH'S TIME IN
THE MIDDLE AGES
The merchant in the Middle Ages was not held in contempt as com-
monly as he is said to have been, particularly in the wake of certain
remarks of Henri Pirenne, who placed too much confidence on this
point in theoretical texts. 1 Nevertheless, while the Church very early
gave protection and encouragement to the merchant, it long allowed
serious suspicions to persist as to the legitimacy of essential aspects
of his activity. Some of these aspects enter profoundly into the world
view of medieval man. Or rather, in order not to yield to the myth of
an abstract collective individual, one should say that these factors
entered profoundly into the world view of those men in the West
between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries who were in possession
of sufficient cultural and mental equipment to reflect on professional
problems and their social, moral, and religious consequences.
Among the principal criticisms leveled against the merchants was
the charge that their profit implied a mortgage on time, which was
supposed to belong to God alone. For example, we have the follow-
ing remarks of a lector-general of the Franciscan order in the four-
teenth century concerning a disputed question: "Question: is a mer-
chant entitled, in a given type of business transaction, to demand a
greater payment from one who cannot settle his account immediately
than from one who can? The answer argued for is no, because in
doing so he would be selling time and would be committing usury by
selling what does not belong to him."2
Before isolating the conception of time hidden behind this argu-
ment, we should point out the problem's importance. The whole of
economic life at the dawn of commercial capitalism is here called into
question. To reject the notion of earnings on time and to identify the
practice with the basic vice of usury is not merely to attack the prin-
ciple of interest but to destroy the very possibility of credit. For the
29
TIME AND LABOR
30
Merchant's Time and Church's Time in the Middle Ages
and did not bring about an "irruption of eternity into time, which
would thus have been vanquished."5 For the early Christians, eter-
nity was not opposed to time, nor was it-as it was, for example, for
Plato-lithe absence of time." Their eternity was merely the exten-
sion of time to infinity, lithe infinite succession of eons," to use a
term from the New Testament, these being both "precisely delimited
expanses of time" and unlimited and incalculable durations. 6 We
will return to this notion of time when it becomes necessary to op-
pose it to the tradition inherited from Hellenism. For our present
purposes we need only say that, from this point of view, there is a
quantitative rather than a qualitative difference between time and
eternity.
As compared with Judaic thought, the New Testament introduces,
or, rather, makes explicit, one new condition. The appearance of
Christ, the fulfillment of the promise, the Incarnation give time a
historic dimension or, better still, a center. Subsequently, "the whole
history of the past, from the Creation until Christ, as told in the Old
Testament, becomes part of the history of salvation."7
This is an ambiguous development, however. For Christians as for
Jews, time had an end, a telos. In this respect, the Incarnation was a
crucial event. liThe future is no longer, as it is for Judaism, the telos
giving a sense to the whole of history."s Eschatology takes its place
in a new perspective, becoming, in a sense, secondary. It, too, be-
longs to the past, since Christ has somehow abolished it by bringing
certainty of salvation. The problem becomes one of how to achieve
what Christ has begun once and for all. The Second Coming was not
merely prefigured on the day of Pentecost; it has already begun,
although its completion depends on the cooperation of the Church,
clergy and laymen, apostles, saints, and sinners. The "Church's mis-
sionary duty and the preaching of the Gospel give meaning to the
time between the Resurrection and the Second Coming."9 Christ
brought the certainty of eventual salvation with him, but collective
and individual history must still accomplish it for all, as well as for
each individual. Hence the Christian must Simultaneously renounce
the world, which is only his transitory resting place, and opt for the
world, accept it, and transform it, since it is the workplace of the
present history of salvation. In this connection, Oscar Cullmann
gives a very convincing interpretation of a difficult passage in Saint
Paul (1 Cor. 7:30 ff.).10
We should point out, before we encounter the problem of time in a
concrete medieval context, that this problem was to arise as one of
the essential aspects of the notion of time during the crucial period in
the eleventh and twelfth centuries that also witnessed a rebirth of
eschatological heresies in certain social groups, including merchants.
31
TIME AND LABOR
32
Merchant's Time and Church's Time in the Middle Ages
33
TIME AND LABOR
II
34
Merchant's Time and Church's Time in the Middle Ages
35
TIME AND LABOR
36
Merchant's Time and Church's Time in the Middle Ages
will. Subsequently, perspective, even if it was only a new schemati-
zation which did not reflect a "natural" view but rather corre-
sponded to what could be seen by a hypothetical abstract eye, was a
visual statement of the results of a scientific experiment and ex-
pressed a practical knowledge of space, in which men and objects are
reached in successive, quantitatively measurable steps by methods
within the reach of human capacities. In a similar way, the painter
confined his picture or fresco to the temporal unity of an isolated
moment and focused on the instantaneous (which, ultimately, pho-
tography would take for its domain), while time, one might say
narrative time, was to be found restored in mural cycles. It was in
this very area, in fact, that Florentine painting, under the patronage
of the merchant aristocracy, displayed its most startling progress.
The portrait was triumphant; it was no longer the abstract image of a
personage represented by symbols or signs materializing the place
and rank assigned him by God, but rather the rendering of an indi-
vidual captured in time, in a concrete spatial and temporal setting.
Art's new function and goal, in fact, was not to capture the eternal
essence but rather to immortalize this ephemeral being of the indi-
vidual in a particular space and time. Thus at a relatively late date,
we can still observe a large number of trials, hesitations, and com-
promises, as well as such delectable fantasies as Paolo Uccello's Mira-
cle of the Host at Urbino, where the original treatment of space in the
predella also gives the painter the opportunity to dissect the narra-
tive time of the tale into separate episodes, while preserving both the
continuity of the story and the unity of the episodes. 34
Although the merchant's time was measurable, and even
mechanized, it was nevertheless also discontinuous, punctuated by
halts and periods of inactivity, subject to quickenings and slowings
of its pace. These were frequently connected with technical back-
wardness and the inertia of natural factors: rain and drought, calm
and stormy weather had great influence on prices. Debts came in-
exorably to term, and yet time was pliable, and it was in this pliabil-
ity that profit and loss resided. This was where the merchant's intel-
ligence, skill, experience, and cunning counted.
III
What about the Church's time? For the Christian merchant, this was
essentially a second horizon of his existence. The time in which he
worked professionally was not the time in which he lived religiously.
Where salvation was concerned, he was content to accept the
Church's teaching and directives. Contact between these two hori-
zons was merely exterior. From his profits, the merchant withheld
God's portion, which went toward good works. Existing in a time
37
TIME AND LABOR
which bore him toward God, he was aware that eternity, too, was
susceptible to halts, stumblings, and quickenings of its pace. There
was a time of sin and a time of grace. There was a time of death to the
world before the resurrection. Occasionally, he would hasten it by
making a final retreat into a monastery. More frequently, he would
accumulate restitutions, good works, and pious gifts against the hour
of the frightening passage into the hereafter. 3s
Natural time, professional time, and supernatural time were,
therefore, both essentially distinct and, at particular points, con-
tingently similar. The Flood became a subject for reasoned specula-
tion, while ill-gotten gains opened the gates of heaven. It is impor-
tant to eliminate the suspicion that the psychology of the medieval
merchant was hypocritical. In different ways, the ends pursued in
the distinct spheres of profit and salvation were equally legitimate
for him. It was this very distinctness which made it possible to pray
to God for success in business. Thus in the sixteenth and later cen-
turies, the Protestant merchant brought up on the Bible and particu-
larly attentive to the lessons of the Old Testament would readily
continue to confuse, albeit in a world where it had become custom-
ary to distinguish them, the designs of Providence with his own
prosperity and fortune. 36
In some incisive pages, Maurice Halbwachs has asserted that there
were as many collective notions of time in a society as there were
separate groups, and has denied that a unifying time could be im-
posed on all groups simultaneously.l7 He reduces the individual no-
tion of time to no more than the internalized point of contact of the
several collective notions. It is to be hoped that an exhaustive in-
vestigation will someday be made with the intention of showing in a
particular historical society the interaction between objective struc-
tures and mental frameworks, between collective adventures and in-
dividual destinies, and between the various times within Time. This
would help to shed light on the very substance of history, and to
replace man, the historian's quarry, in the complex fabric of his
existence. 38 Here, we must settle for sketching the behavior of the
medieval merchant within this multifarious interplay.
The merchant was accustomed to acting in the context "of dura-
tions, so to speak, piled one on top of the other."39 Neither ration-
alization of his behavior and thought nor introspective analysis had
yet habituated him to the hannonization of his various activities or
to the feeling, or the wish, of wholeness. It was actually the Church
that opened the way to a unification of conscience through the devel-
opment of the confession. The Church also contributed to the coher-
ence of behavior by elaborating a body of canon law and a
theologico-moral theory of usury.
38
Merchant's Time and Church's Time in the Middle Ages
39
TIME AND LABOR
41
TIME AND LABOR
new views concerning time and space. It is fairly well known that
kinematics, through the study of uniformly accelerated motion, was
transformed by this critique. 50 This should be enough to arouse the
suspicion that time as well as motion was understood in a new way.
Earlier, complementary research in science and philosophy among
the Arabs had taken a new approach to the key notions of dis-
continuity inherited from the atomists of antiquity, which led to a
new view of time. 51
Perhaps the connection is closer than has been thought, and cer-
tainly closer than the parties involved believed, between the lectures
given by the masters of Oxford and Paris and the enterprises of the
merchants of Genoa, Venice, and Lubeck in the waning Middle
Ages. Their joint efforts may have been responsible for fracturing
time and for freeing the time of the merchants from biblical time,
which the Church was not capable of maintaining in its fundamen-
tally ambivalent form.
42
LABOR TIME IN THE "CRISIS" OF THE
FOURTEENTH CENTURY: FROM MEDIEVAL
TIME TO MODERN TIME
43
TIME AND LABOR
44
Labor Time in the "Crisis" of the Fourteenth Century
clerical time rung by the church bells, took his pause. 9 In this con-
nection, one can imagine a more likely form of pressure for a change
in the hour of None, which led to an important subdivision of labor
time: the half-day. This was to become established, moreover, dur-
ing the fourteenth century. 10
From the end of the thirteenth century, this system of labor time
found itself under challenge and entered upon a crisis: an emphasis
on night work and, most important, harshness in the definition,
measurement, and use of the working day, as well as social conflicts
over the duration of work-such was the form taken by the general
crisis of the fourteenth century in this particular domain. Here as
elsewhere, general progress went hand in hand with serious dif-
ficulties of adaptation. 11 Labor time was transformed along with
most other social conditions; it was made more precise and efficient,
but the change was not a painless one.
Curiously, it was at first the workers themselves who asked that
the working day be lengthened. In fact, this was a way of increasing
wages, what we would today call a demand for overtime.
An ordinance from Arras of January 1315 illustrates this case quite
well. The fullers' assistants had demanded longer working days and
higher wages, and their demands were satisfied by a commission
composed of delegates of the masters of the cloth trade and repre-
sentatives of the assistants. 12
In this case, of course, a technical reason was given for the de-
mand, namely, the increase in the weight and size of the fabrics.
Still, it is legitimate to assume that it was the first expedient adopted
by the workers to mitigate the effects of the wage crisis, which was
no doubt connected with the increase in prices and the deterioration
of real wages due to the first monetary mutations. Thus we see Philip
the Fair authorizing night work and his ordinance subsequently
invoked and reaffirmed by Gilles Haquin, provost of Paris, on
19 January 1322.13
Before long, however, a contrary sort of demand arose. In response
to the crisis, employers sought to regulate the working day more
closely and to combat workers' cheating in this area. It was at this
time that the proliferation of work bells noted by Bilfinger oc-
curred. 14 It may perhaps be useful to point out a few examples of
these Werkglocken.
In Ghent, in 1324, the abbot of Saint-Pierre authorized the fullers
"to install a bell in the workhouse newly founded by them near the
HOipoorte, in the parish of Saint John."ls
At Amiens, on 24 April 1335, Philip VI granted the request of the
mayor and aldermen "that they might be permitted to issue an ordi-
nance concerning the time when the workers of the said city and its
45
TIME AND LABOR
suburbs should go each morning to work, when they should eat and
when return to work after eating; and also, in the evening, when
they should quit work for the day; and that by the issuance of said
ordinance, they might ring a bell which has been installed in the
Belfry of the said city, which differs from the other bells."16
At the end of this same year of 1335, the bailiff of Amiens satisfied
the aldermen's desire that "the sound of a new bell" should serve as
the new means of regulating the "three crafts of the cloth trade"-as
then existed in Douai, Saint-Orner, Montreuil, and Abbeville, as a
study has shown-given that the old ordinances concerning working
hours were "corrupt."t7
In Aire-sur-Ia-Lys, on 15 August 1335, Jean de Picquigny, gover-
nor of the county of Artois, granted to the "mayor, aldermen, and
community of the city" the right to construct a belfry with a special
bell because of the "cloth trade and other trades which require sev-
eral workers each day to go and come to work at certain hours."18
Our investigation has by no means been exhaustive, but it is suffi-
cient to indicate that the problem of the duration of the working day
was especially acute in the textile sector, where the crisis was most
noticeable and where wages played a considerable part in production
costs and employers' profits. Thus the vulnerability of this advanced
sector of the medieval economy to the crisisl'l made it the prime area
for progress in the organization of labor.
This is made clear in the Aire text, which explains that the new bell
is necessary "because the said city is governed by the cloth trade."
We also have negative evidence: where doth does not occupy a
dominant position, we do not observe the appearance of the
Werkglocke. Fagniez has rightly noted this fact in the case of Paris. 20
Thus, at least in the cloth manufacturing cities, the town was bur-
dened with a new time, the time of the cloth makers. This time
indicated the dominance of a social category. It was the time of the
new masters. 2l It was a time which belonged to a group hard hit by
the crisis but in a period of progress for society as a whole.
The new time soon became a stake in bitter social conflicts. Worker
uprisings were subsequently aimed at silencing the Werkglocke.
In Ghent on 6 December 1349, the aldermen issued a proclamation
ordering the weavers to return to the city within a week, but there-
after allowed them to start and stop work at the hours of their
choosing. 22
At Therouanne on 16 March 1367, the dean and chapter had to
promise the "workers, fullers, and other mechanics" to silence
"forever the workers' bell in order that no scandal or conflict be born
in city and church as a result of the ringing of a bell of this type."21
In view of these revolts, the doth-manufacturing bourgeoisie took
46
Labor Time in the "Crisis" of the Fourteenth Century
more or less draconian measures to protect the work bell. Fines were
tried first. In Ghent between 1358 and 1362, shearers not obeying the
injunctions of the Werkglocken were fined. 24 In Commines in 1361,
"every weaver who appears after the sounding of the morning bell
will pay a fine of five Parisian solz." Another set of penalties makes
clear the stake represented by the bell. If the workers seized the bell
in order to use it as a signal of revolt, they incurred the heaviest
fines: sixty Parisian pounds for anyone who should ring the bell for
a popular assembly and for anyone who should come armed (with
baston, the people's weapon, and armeures); and the death penalty for
anyone who should ring the bell to call for revolt against the king, the
aldermen, or the officer in charge of the belPs
It is clear that in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries,
the duration of the working day rather than the salary itself was the
stake in the workers' struggles.
From a celebrated set of documents, we learn about the struggles of
a particularly combative category of workers,26 the vineyard day
laborers. This was a time when vineyards were found in urban and
suburban settings. The documents tell us how these workers waged
the battle against their noble, ecclesiastic, and bourgeois employers
for a reduction of the working day, a battle which led to a trial before
the Parlement of Paris. 27
Archival documents 28 show us that real conflicts did in fact take
place, predictable with the aid of the ordinance of the provost of
Paris of 12 May 1395: "Whereas ... several men of crafts such as
weavers of linen or cotton, fullers, washers, masons, carpenters, and
several other kinds of workers in Paris have wanted and do want to
start and stop work at certain hours while they are being paid by the
day as though they were on the job the whole day long," the provost
reminds them that "the working day is fixed from the hour of sunrise
until the hour of sunset, with meals to be taken at reasonable
times."29
Documents from Auxerre and Sens, moreover, even when we
allow for the fact that they concern a special category, enable us to
understand the workers' goals in the struggle for mastery of their
own labor time: at bottom, no doubt, was the desire for protection
against the tyranny of employers in this respect, but there was also
the more specific need that leisure time 30 be set aside along with
working hours; and, in addition to regulation wage labor, they
wanted time allotted for personal work or for a second job. 31
It should be noted, however, that the influence of the agitation
related to labor time in bringing about a general metamorphosis of
social time was limited by certain further considerations.
In the first place, the question was a more general one of urban
47
TIME AND LABOR
time, which served needs broader than those concerning the organi-
zation of labor. Economic needs were no doubt of great importance
among urban concerns; a market bell appears here, a mill bell there,
and so forth.32 Defense of the city was of prime concern: witness the
curfew (ignitegium) and watch bells. In the 1355 Aire text it is stated
that the clocquier [bell tower] built by order of the aldermen, in which
they asked that the work bell be placed, had been built in the first
place "so the gate of said city could be raised at the stroke of day-
break and at vespers and to warn of any danger or difficulty which
might arise as a result of evildoing or otherwise."
There were also the campana bannalis, campana communitatis, and
bancloche, which were used to call the bourgeois to the defense or
administration of their city, and sometimes the oath bell (Durlach's
Eidglocke) or council bell (Ratsglocke).33
What was clearly new, however, in the contribution of the work
bell or the city bell used for purposes of work was that instead of a
time linked to events, which made itself felt only episodically and
sporadically, there arose a regular, normal time. Rather than the un-
certain clerical hours of the church bells, there were the certain hours
spoken of by the bourgeois of Aire. Time was no longer associated
with cataclysms or festivals but rather with daily life, a sort of
~ chronological net in which urban life was caught.
In a century when quantitative elements were timidly making their
way into administrative and mental structures,34 the requirement
that a better measure of labor be found was an important factor in the
secularization process, of which the end of the monopoly of church
bells in the measurement of time is an important index. Once again,
however, in spite of the importance of the change, we should be
careful not to make too bald a distinction between secular and reli-
gious time. At times, the two sorts of bells coexisted without con-
frontation or hostility. In York, for instance, between 1352 and 1370,
at the work site of the cathedral itself, a work bell was installed,
relieving the church bells of this function. 3s Nor should it be forgot-
ten that, even in this sphere, the Church took initiatives. Monks,
especially, as we shall see subsequently, were masters in the use of
schedules. Cities, in imposing fines on councillors or aldermen who
were late in answering the call of the city bell, were merely imitating
the monastic communities' punishment of the tardy monk. The se-
vere Columban punished tardiness at prayer with the singing of fifty
psalms or with fifty lashes. The more indulgent Saint Benedict was
content to have the guilty monk stand in the corner.36
Rung by ropes, that is, by hand, the work bell was no technical
innovation. Decisive progress toward "certain hours" clearly came
only with the invention and spread of mechanical clocks and the
48
Labor Time in the "Crisis" of the Fourteenth Century
49
TIME AND LABOR
50
Labor Time in the "Crisis" of the Fourteenth Century
of Pisa, who died in 1342. He devoted two chapters of his Disciplina
degli Spirituali to the "waste of time" and to the duty to "save and
take account of time:'49 Beginning with traditional considerations of
idleness and using a merchant's vocabulary (wasted time was for him
the lost talent of the GospelSO-time was already money), he devel-
oped a whole spirituality of the calculated use of time. The idler who
wastes his time and does not measure it was like an animal and not
worthy of being considered a man: "egli si pone in tale stato che e
piu vile che quello delle bestie." In this way, a humanism based on a
nice computation of time was born.
The man representative of the new time was, indeed, the humanist,
specifically the Italian humanist of the first generation of around
1400, himself a merchant or close to business circles. He introduced
his business organization into everyday life and regulated his con-
duct according to a schedule, a significant secularization of the
monastic manner of regulating the use of time. Yves Lefevre has
found one of these schedules, so characteristic of the behavior and
mentality of the good Christian bourgeois humanist, at the end of a
manuscript of the Elucidarium altered at the beginning of the fifteenth
century.S1 Only the morning was reserved for work-"and all this
must be done in the morning." The bourgeois businessman, by con-
trast with the common laborator, worked only half a day. "After
eating" came the time of rest ("rest one hour"---one new hour!),
diversion, and visiting, the leisure time and social life of men of
substance.
Thus the first virtue of the humanist is a sense of time and its
proper use. Gianozzi Manetti's·biographer, for instance, extols his
sensitivity to time. 52
A more precisely measured time, the time of the hour and the
clock, became one of man's primary tools: a Florentine humanist in
the second half of the fourteenth century thought every study should
have a clock in it.S3
"Time is a gift of God and therefore cannot be sold." The taboo of
time with which the Middle Ages had confronted the merchant was
lifted at the dawn of the Renaissance. The time which used to belong /
to God alone was thereafter the property of man. The famous text of
Leon Battista Alberti is worth rereading:
GIANOZZO: There are three things which man may say properly
belong to him: his fortune, his body-
LIONARDO: And what might the third be?
GIANOZZO: Ah! a very precious thing indeed! Even these hands
and these eyes are not so much my own.
LIONARDO: Incredible! What is it?
GIANOZZO: Time, my dear Lionardo, time, my children. 54
51
TIME AND LABOR
52
A NOTE ON TRIPARTITE SOCIETY,
MONARCHICAL IDEOLOGY, AND
ECONOMIC RENEWAL IN NINTH- TO
TWELFTH-CENTURY CHRISTENDOM
53
TIME AND LABOR
54
Tripartite Society, Monarchical Ideology, and Economic Renewal
than would identical terminology the ideological convergence of
these three passages and Alfred the Great's text. Even more than the
earlier texts, that of Gallus Anonymus was closely connected with
monarchical propaganda. The entourage of Boleslav the Wry-
mouthed that inspired the chronicler had in fact wanted the work to
be a eulogy of the Polish state under Boleslav the Bold (992-1025) and
a propaganda instrument for the restoration of the power and dignity
of the monarchy in Poland. 10
Whether or not their efforts were crowned with success, these
three texts show that, from the end of the ninth until the beginning
of the twelfth century, throughout Latin Christendom, the tripartite
schema can be related to the efforts of certain secular and ecclesiasti-
cal circles to lay the ideological foundations for the consolidation of
national monarchies.
To understand how this theme could have served as a monarchical
and national ideal, we must first make explicit what social and
mental realities corresponded to the three orders of the schema-
especially to the third order, which, in my view, is the one that gives
the whole model its most original and significant aspect.
There are no great difficulties in characterizing the first two orders,
although it is not without interest to take note of certain special
features in the definition of each, or in the nature of their relations
with the king as implied by the schema.
The clerical order was characterized by prayer. This was perhaps
indicative of a certain primacy accorded to the monastic ideal or,
rather, to a certain form of monasticism;l1 but it was especially re-
lated to the essential nature of clerical power, which came from its
specialized capacity to obtain divine aid by means of its professional
activity, prayer. As king of the oratores, the monarch in a sense
shared the ecclesiastical and religious nature of the clergy, as well as
their privilege. 12 He maintained, moreover, an ambivalent re-
lationship with the clerical order, being both protector and protected
with regard to the Church, a relationship worked out by the Carolin-
gian clergy in the ninth century. 13
The military order, too, was perhaps a little more complex than is
at first apparent. No doubt it was less unified and coherent in reality
than was the clerical order. The term milites, which, from the twelfth
century on, became the usual designation of the military order
within the tripartite schema, no doubt came to correspond to the
emerging class of knights within the lay aristocracy, but it brought
more confusion than clarity into the relations between the social
reality and the ideological themes that claimed to express it. In any
case, the appearance, between the ninth and twelfth centuries, of
bellatores in the tripartite schema corresponded to the formation of a
55
TIME AND LABOR
56
Tripartite Society, Monarchical Ideology, and Economic Renewal
ricultural workers who were the principal artisans and beneficiaries
of economic progress, an elite, a group of peasant improvers, or, as
nicely defined in a tenth-century text, "those, the best, who are
laboratores."21
The third order of the tripartite schema, then, consisted of an eco-
nomic elite which was in the front rank of the agricultural expansion
of Christendom between the ninth and twelfth centuries. Giving
expression to a consecrated, sublimated image of society, this
schema did not include all social categories but only those worthy of
representing fundamental social values, which were religious, mili-
tary, and, for the first time in medieval Christendom, economic.
Even in the area of labor, medieval society remained, culturally and
ideologically, an aristocratic society.
The king of the laboratores was the head and guarantor of the
economic order and material prosperity. This was largely because he
maintained the peace indispensable to economic progress. 22 The
ideological purpose of the tripartite schema was to express the har-
mony, interdependence, and solidarity of classes and orders. The
three orders constituted the social structure of the state, which would
collapse if the eqUilibrium among the three groups, each of which
stood in need of the two others, were not respected. The equilibrium
could only be guaranteed by a chief, an arbiter. This arbiter was, of
course, the king. The monarchy only became more necessary when
economic function made its appearance as an ideological value. This
marked the end of the duality of pope and emperor, which corre-
sponded more to the distinction between clerics and laymen than to
the difficult and unrealizable distinction between the spiritual and
the temporal.
The kings were to become the real lieutenants of God on Earth. The
gods of the ancient mythologies were combined in triads which
grouped together the three fundamental functions. 23 In a society
which had become monotheistic, the monarch concentrated in his
person all three functions 24 and expressed the unity of a trinitarian
national society.
Medieval kingship was thus the beneficiary of the tripartite
schema, but there was also a danger that it would fall victim to it if
the irrepressible class struggle should tum all three orders against the
arbiter-king. This is the meaning of the nightmare of King Henry I of
England, who dreamed in 1130 that first the laboratores, then the
bellatores, and finally the oratores attacked him, the first with their
tools, the second with their weapons, and the third with the
emblems of their office. 25 After that, the laboratores appeared no
longer as a collaborating elite but rather as a hostile mass, a danger-
ous class.
57
LICIT AND ILLICIT TRADES IN THE
MEDIEVAL WEST
Every society has its social hierarchy, which is revealing of its struc-
tures and mentality. It is not my intention here to outline the
sociological schema of medieval Christendom and the metamorph-
oses it underwent. l In one way or another, the trades found their
place in it, a broad or a narrow place according to the era. My inten-
tion is to study the hierarchy of trades in the medieval West. Noble
and ignoble, licit and illicit trades-such categories overlay economic
and social realities and, to an even greater degree, mentalities. In the
present essay I am particularly interested in the latter, with the
understanding, of course, that the relations between concrete situa-
tions and mental images not be neglected. Mentality is what changes
most slowly in societies and civilizations; yet it is imperative that
mentality follow and adapt to infrastructural transformations in spite
of resistances, delays, and different temporal rhythms of develop-
ment. The portrait we present, therefore, will not be a static one but
rather a portrait of an evolution, of which we will try to identify the
stimuli, agents, and modalities. What was held in contempt in the
year 1000 will occupy a proud position at the dawn of the Renais-
sance. We shall here attempt to follow the wheel of Fortune as it
determines the movement of the status of the medieval trades.
Certain of these trades, such as usury and prostitution, were un-
reservedly condemned, while others incurred condemnation only in
certain cases. 2 This depended on the circumstances (for example, all
"servile occupations," oropera servilia, were banned on Sundays), on
the motives (commercial trade was proscribed when conducted with
an eye to profit-lucri causa-but authorized when for the purpose of
serving one's neighbor or the common good), and, above all, on the
sort of person involved, which generally meant that certain activities
were forbidden to clerics. 3 It is clear, however, that even in these
58
Licit and Illicit Trades in the Medieval West
latter cases the trades thus prohibited from time to time were in fact
held in contempt, whether because they had been placed on the
black list due to their having been traditional objects of contempt or,
on the other hand, because, proscribed for reasons long since for-
gotten, their presence on the list in itself aroused such contempt.
When a profession was forbidden to a cleric in a religious and "cleri-
cal" society like that of the medieval West, this was clearly no rec-
ommendation; the profession so marked earned an opprobrium
which reflected on its lay practitioners. This was felt by surgeons and
notaries, among others.
No doubt there were both practical and juridical distinctions be-
tween forbidden trades, or negotia illicita, and occupations which
were merely dishonorable or ignoble, inhonesta mercimonia, artes in-
decorae, vilia officia. 4 Both classes, however, were included in the
category of contemptible professions in which we are interested here
as a component of mentality. It is significant, moreover, that if we
were to give an exhaustive list of these professions, it would be
necessary to include virtually all medieval professions, S for they vary
according to the document, region, or era, and sometimes grow in-
ordinately in number. It will suffice to cite those which occur most
frequently: innkeepers, butchers, jongleurs, mountebanks, magi-
cians, alchemists, doctors, surgeons, soldiers,6 pimps, prostitutes,
notaries, merchants,7 among the first ranks. But also fullers, weavers,
saddlers, dyers, pastry makers, cobblers;8 gardeners, painters,
fishermen, barbers;9 bailiffs, game wardens, customs officers, ex-
change brokers, tailors, perfumers, tripe sellers, millers, etc.,tO fig-
ured on the index. l l
Behind such prohibitions, we find survivals of primitive
mentalities enduring in the medieval mind: the old taboos of primi-
tive societies.
In the first place, there is the blood taboo. Primarily affecting
butchers and executioners, it also bore on surgeons and barbers, and
apothecaries who engaged in the practice of bleeding-all of whom
were more harshly treated than physicians; in addition, soldiers
were affected. The sanguinary medieval West seems to have oscil-
lated between relish and horror of the blood it spilled.
Next comes the taboo of impurity, of the unclean, which struck
fullers, dyers, and cooks. Textile workers, the "blue thumbs" of the
fourteenth-century riots, were held in contempt. At the beginning of
the thirteenth century, John of Garland shows them exposed to the
hostility of their peers, especially women, who found them re-
pugnant. 12 Cooks and laundrymen, too, were regarded as con-
temptible, as we find naIvely expressed around the year 1000 by the
bishop Adalbero of Laon, who, in praising clerics exempt from
59
TIME AND LABOR
60
Licit and Illicit TTades in the Medieval West
prostitution,17 which must have been at least partly true, in view of
the miserable wages they received. Avarice, or greed, was in a sense
the professional sin of both merchants and men of the law-lawyers,
notaries, judges. The condemnation of gluttony naturally led to the
condemnation of cooks. Pride and avarice no doubt added to the
condemnation of soldiers already established on grounds of their
blood spilling. Albertus Magnus enumerated the three principal
dangers of the military profession as follows: "murder of the in-
nocents," "the lure of greater gains," and "the vain display of
strength." Even sloth could be used to justify the presence on the
index of the beggar's profession, or, more precisely, the able-bodied
beggar who "does not want to work out of sloth."18
In a more profound sense, trades which were opposed to certain of
Christianity's most important tendencies or dogmas were con-
demned. Lucrative professions were attacked in the name of con-
temptus mundi, the contempt for this world which every Christian
ought to exhibit. Jurists, too, were condemned, the Church stressing
the opposition between legitimate canon law and pernicious civil
law. 19 More generally, Christianity tended to condemn all forms of
negotium, all secular activity; on the other hand, it encouraged a
certain otium, an idleness which displayed confidence in Providence.
Men were children of God and hence participated in his divinity.
The body was a living temple, and whatever soiled it was sinful.
Thus the trades related to lust, or supposed to be, were especially
stigmatized.
The brotherhood of man-of Christians, at least-was the basis for
the condemnation of usurers, who ignored Christ's precept: "Lend,
hoping for nothing again-nihil inde sperantes" (Luke 6:35). ,_
On an even more profound level, man's work was supposed to be j/
in the image of God's.20 God's work, of course, was Creation. Any
profession, therefore, which did not create was bad or inferior. It was
imperative to create, as the peasant, for example, created the harvest,
or, at least, to transform raw material, like the artisan, into an object.
If there was no creation, then there should be transformation (mu-
taTe), modification (emendare), or improvement (meliorare).21 The
merchant, who created nothing, was thus condemned. This was an
essential mental structure of Christian society, sustained by a theol-
ogy and morality developed during a precapitalist regime. Medieval
ideology was materialistic in the strict sense. Only production of
matter had value. The abstract value defined by capitalist economy
eluded its grasp, disgusted it, and was condemned by it.
The portrait we have sketched thus far is valid particularly for the
early Middle Ages. Essentially rural during this period, Western so-
ciety held in contempt any activity not directly linked to the land,
61
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62
Licit and Illicit Trades in the Medieval West
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64
Licit and Illicit Trades in the Medieval West
cians, whose aim was to charm their listeners. The first two
categories were condemned; in the third, another distinction was
made between those who frequented public balls and revels and
encouraged wild abandon and those who sang gests and lives of
saints and brought consolation to the sad and troubled. Only the
latter group engaged in legitimate activity, but this approval was an
open door through which jongleurs of all kinds were to make a place
for themselves in the continually expanding world of allowable
professions.
We can see how the newcomers were integrated into "proper',
society, not in a merely theoretical but in a practical sense. One way
was by means of anecdotes, taken as exemplum, which we find in
stereotypical form in sermons and edifying works. Thus the story is
told of the jongleur who questions Pope Alexander III as to the possi-
bility of his being saved. The pontiff asks if he knows any other trade
and, the response being negative, assures him that he need not live
in fear because of his trade, provided he avoids doubtful and
obscene behavior.27
The case of the merchant is the best known and the most highly c-
charged with consequences. Decried for so long, his trade became
the object of an increasing number of excuses, justifications, and
even expressions of respect. Having become classics in scholastic
exposes, certain of these are well known. They are related to the risks
taken by the merchants: damages actually sustained (damnum
emergens), tying up of cash in long-term undertakings (lucrum ces-
sans), hazards of trade (periculum sortis). The uncertainties of com-
mercial activity (ratio incertitudinis) justified the merchant's profit,
even the interest he obtained from the money involved in certain
transactions and thus, to an ever greater extent, "usury," hitherto
damned.
Above all, the merchant was justified by his labor and by his
service to the common good, his social utility. Theologians, canon
lawyers, and poets were all in agreement. 28
In his manual of confession from the early thirteenth century,
Thomas of Chobham wrote: "There would be great poverty in many
countries if merchants did not bring what abounds in one place to
another where these same things are lacking. They can therefore
justly receive the price of their labor."
Saint Thomas Aquinas: "If a person engages in trade with an eye
to the public utility and wants things necessary to existence not to
lack in the country, then money, rather than being the end of the
activity, is only claimed as remuneration for labor."
And at the beginning of the fourteenth century, Gilles Ie Muisit,
canon of Tournai, in his Dit des Marchands:
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66
Licit and Illicit Trades in the Medieval West
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68
Licit and Illicit Trades in the Medieval West
such that the old aristocracy quickly adopted some aspects of the
newcomers' way of life. To work or engage in trade was not an
occupation unworthy of a noble Italian. The aristocracy there had
been urbanized quite early. Bishop Otto of Freising accompanied his
nephew, the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, into Italy in the middle
of the twelfth century and was astonished to observe that artisans
and merchants there enjoyed considerable respect. 32 What must have
been the reaction of this thoroughly feudal personage upon seeing
Italian lords lower themselves to plebeian occupations? We can
imagine his indignation when we read the words of that free spirit,
Michel de Montaigne, who was likewise surprised by the Italian
business nobility.33 Elsewhere, in France particularly, the nobility's
hostility to labor had hardened and become institutionalized in the
social and mental phenomenon known as derogation. 34 Louis XI
could do nothing about it. Two sorts of contempt subsequently con-
fronted one another, that of the aristocrats for the toilers, and that of
the workers for the idle.
If the world of labor was ever unified in opposition to the world of
prayer and war, it was a unity which did not last long. There was
unification against the old ruling classes, with the lower strata of
artisans infiltrating the citadel of social respect through the breach
opened by the upper strata of urban society, and the wealthy
bourgeois using the weight and strength of the working masses
against Church and nobility. But these social categories were soon
differentiated on both spiritual and material levels. A split occurred,
separating the upper stratum of urban society, which, for the sake of
convenience, we shall call the bourgeoisie, from the lower strata: on
one side were large merchants, exchange agents, and the wealthy; on
the other, small artisans, journeymen, and the poor. In Italy, in Flor-
ence, for instance, the contrast was established even within the in-
stitutions; "major arts" were opposed to "minor arts," whose prac-
titioners were excluded from municipal functions.
A new frontier of contempt arose right in the midst of the new
classes and even within professions. Discrimination was aided by
the extreme fragmentation of trades. In Paris in 1292 there were 130
regulated trades: IB in foodstuffs, 22 in metalworking, 22 in textiles
and leather, 36 in clothing, etc. This fragmentation was horizontal to
a degree but vertical to an even greater degree. Weavers were placed
near the bottom of the scale in textiles, but above fullers and dyers;
cobblers below bootmakers, surgeons and barber-apothecaries
below medical doctors, who became increasingly bookish and were
willing to leave practice, which was contemptible, to base practi-
tioners.
The Florentine Giovanni Villani, a typical representative of the
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70
LABOR, TECHNIQUES, AND CRAFTSMEN IN
THE VALUE SYSTEMS OF THE EARLY MIDDLE
AGES (FIFTH TO TENTH CENTURIES)
PRELIMINARY REMARKS
This essay is merely the outline of a projected study, "Les images du travail au Moyen
Age." A bibliography may be found below, pp. 303--6.
71
TIME AND LABOR
systems within its own, or allowed them to subsist, none was con-
sciously elaborated and systematically exposed outside the
framework of Christian doctrine. Such value systems must be largely
implicit, reconstructed by the historian. The particular value which
is the subject of this essay, moreover, as well as the men who em-
bodied it, namely, labor and laborers, did not interest the masters
and producers of culture. Labor was not a "value," nor was there
even a word to designate it. If the history of mentalities is still a
history that stammers, the history of the silences, lacunae, and gaps
of the past, which will be an essential part of tomorrow's history, is
mute.
2. Justification of the Research.
It is already a significant feature of a mentality that the documents
from the early Middle Ages are silent as to labor and laborers. Since
there were men during this period who worked, in the sense in
which the word is commonly understood today, they, and those of
their contemporaries who did not "work," necessarily had attitudes
toward labor, techniques, and craftsmen which implied value judg-
ments. It is therefore legitimate to try to uncover their traces with the
aid of the documents we possess, even if we must, so to speak,
"induce labor" if we hope to deliver the expected knowledge. It
would be an abdication of the historian's responsibilities if he were
to allow a fetishistic respect for his subject to lead to a submersion in
the mentality of the era he was studying, such that he refused to
apply to it other concepts than those current at the time. It is as
legitimate to attempt to compare our own estimate of the value of
labor with that of Charlemagne and his contemporaries as it is to
apply to the economy of the Carolingian era the Fisher formula, of
which it was ignorant.
3. Analytical Eclecticism and the Method of Successive Soundings
A variety of approaches have been used (philology, analysis of liter-
ary and legal texts, archeological and iconographic documents, etc.),
not only because of the necessity to make use of whatever materials
happen to be available but also because a multifaceted attack has
proved fruitful in the area of mentalities. Mentalities are, after all,
related to the whole range of historical data but may be better re-
vealed by one type of document rather than another, depending on
the region and period. This sort of history must therefore be done by
means of a series of successive soundings. This technique offers the
additional advantages of providing a periodization and of drawing
attention to the areas in which the phenomena under study take the
form of problems.
72
Labor, Techniques, and Craftsmen
Between the fifth and eighth centuries, for example, attitudes to-
ward labor are best understood through examination of monastic
rules and the hagiographic literature, for the only area in which labor
was at that time a psychological and theoretical problem was the
ecclesiastical and properly monastic sphere, where the question was
whether a monk could, or should, work with his hands. Between the
eighth and tenth centuries, priority must certainly be given to legal,
literary, and iconographic texts, for it was in the context of the
cultural ferment which has been called the Carolingian renaissance
that labor made a certain advance. Beginning in the eleventh century,
the terminus ad quem of this sketch, attitudes toward labor were
supported by a more or less conscious ideology which was best
expressed in genuine value systems, such as the ideology of the tripar-
tite society composed of oratores, bellatores, and laboratores; icono-
raphic series (the labors of the months or illustrated technical ency-
clopedias); scientific classifications (artes liberales and artes
mechanicae); and concrete systems of social hierarchy based on
socioprofessional status more than juridico-sacred ordo.
If such a method makes it possible to observe modifications in
mentalities and attitudes, it is also useful for disclosing continuities,
for determining the respective portions of tradition and innovation
and their interrelations. Individually and collectively, men are in the
first place determined by their heritages and by the attitudes they
adopt toward them. This is even more true of mentalities, since
mentalities, as we have said, are what changes most slowly in his-
tory. Research into heritages is all the more imperative in the present
case because the men of the early Middle Ages, and first of all the
intellectuals whom we know from the works of the period, felt the
need to invoke the support of the auctoritates of the past. In every
area, they exerted themselves not in developing or creating, but in
saving and preserving.
I THE AMBIGUITY OF THE LEGACIES
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74
Labor, Techniques, and Craftsmen
between the technical level and the appraisal of labor" G.-P. Ver-
nant). The scope and limitations of the Prometheus myth were an
index of this. There is also the ambiguity of the Stoic ponos, "which
applies to all activities requiring a painful effort, not only to tasks
productive of socially useful values" G.-P. Vernant). And there was
also the ambiguous position of the Greek philosophers with regard
to "machinism" (A. Koyre).
Another element was the equivocation between ars and artes, in-
dicating on the one hand technical skill and on the other creative
genius. There was the pair manus-ingenium (medieval avatars of the
symbolism of the hand: symbol of command or of labor? How can we
know the mental reactions of the unlearned to the sight of the hand of
God, which appeared with increasing. frequency in iconography?)
And there was oscillation between negotium and otium (from which
derived the problems of otium monasticum and the definition in the
twelfth century of an otium negotiosum for monks).
Under the late Empire, there was an ambivalence in the estimation
of the value of labor, due to a mixture of an artisanal mentality, a
corporative yoke, and the existence of forced labor. Vergil's energeti-
cism was more closely related to rural life than it was artisanal.
Early medieval man faced the problem of understanding certain
distichs of the Disticha Catonis, which very early became a reading
primer (for example, L 39: Above all, save what you have earned by
your labor I When labor is considered baneful, deadly poverty grows
apace).
There was an ambiguity in the inherited vocabulary: labor with its
psychological and moral overtones (pessimistic connotations of pain,
fatigue, toil ... ), opus oriented more toward the result of labor than
the laborer .. .
Above all, there was the weight of the association of labor with
slavery. This gave rise to the notion of opus servile and the antithesis
of labor and freedom. During the various medieval "renaissances,"
from Charlemagne to the Renaissance, and including both the legal
revival connected with the renaissance of Roman law and the Aris-
totelian fashion which culminated in Thomism, the mere use of the
ancient vocabulary (e.g., opera servilia) encouraged a contempt for
labor which was frequently in contradiction with the social evolu-
tion.
b) Barbarian Legacies
A rough distinction may be made between poorly Romanized old
traditions (Italic, Iberic, Celtic) and the traditions of the invaders,
mainly Germanic.
In the first case, what was likely to have become established after
the removal of the Roman veneer were traditions of artisanal tech-
75
TIME AND LABOR
77
TIME AND LABOR
78
Labor, Techniques, and Craftsmen
ironsmiths (Jabri terrari;) to fifty, with only the goldsmiths reaching a
higher level (150 sous for the auritices and 100 sous for the argentarii).
d) The silence of the artistic and archeological materials. The dif-
ficulties of interpreting such sources for the purposes of the history
of mentalities should not be forgotten. Works of art and archeological
monuments are a different sort of repository; their connections with
general history and even with ideological history are delicate to de-
fine and interpret. Moreover, during the period in question, figura-
tive art had almost entirely disappeared, along with epigraphical
inscriptions; and interpretation of the archeological material, in par-
ticular of funerary furnishings, for use by the history of mentalities is
a particularly delicate task; what relations existed between beliefs
and funerary rites on the one hand, and the system of socioprofes-
sional values on the other? Joachim Werner has observed, for exam-
ple, that while objects from everyday life, such as craftsmen's tools
and products, are quite rare in tombs in the eastern part of the
Merovingian realm, this may be due as much to their not preserving
well as to the possibility that they were not among the funerary gifts.
Furthermore, the same archeologist notes that there are no weapons
in the tombs of the Goths, who were no less warlike than the
Alemanni, the Franks, the Bavarians, the Thuringians, the Lom-
bards, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Scandinavians, whose funerary
furnishings generally included weapons. On the other hand, the
presence of tools in the funerary furnishings of the tombs of
goldsmiths, the only craftsmen honored during the era, precludes
ignoring the evidence contained in tombs as to labor's place in the
value systems of early medieval societies.
e) Finally, it is clear that the absence of labor and laborers from the
cultural products of the early Middle Ages is only one instance of the
consequences of the era's taste for abstract symbolism in art and
literature, already a fundamental feature of the tardo antico. It seems
probable, however, that the ideological and social insignificance of
workers during this period contributed greatly to the success of this
aesthetic tendency.
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80
Labor, Techniques, and Craftsmen
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82
Labor, Techniques, and Craftsmen
in barbarian legislation. Variations of the Wergeld according to the
finger severed refer implicitly to the free man's role as warrior (the
value of the finger depends on its function in wielding arms),
whereas with craftsmen and slaves the implicit reference is to labor
(the tool here replaced the weapon and was, on a lower level, its
equivalent) .
IV THE CAROLINGIAN RENAISSANCE OF LABOR
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lematica strutturale dei contratti agrari nella esperienza giuridica dell' alto
Medioevo italiano. XIII Settimana di Spoleto, 1%5.
b) Regulation of Labor
Regulations applicable to labor are found in secular as well as
ecclesiastical documents. These indicate a certain renewal of activity
in the crafts, especially in the domanial setting. Greater attention was
paid to problems raised by work.
In the first case, the primary sources are the capitularies (particu-
larly the capitularies de villis). Two concerns of the capitularies are
worthy of notice: (1) the regulation of the Sunday rest, now more
explicit than before, which is not only a sign of the primacy of reli-
gious taboos but also an indication of the desire to organize labor's
breathing cycles (while at the same time codifying the opera
servilia)--cf. the studies by W. Rordorf and J. Imbert; (2) the con-
demnation of the idle and of able-bodied beggars, taken over from
the Justinian code and prefiguring certain opinions of the thirteenth
century (Guillaume de Saint-Amour, Jean de Meung) and, especially
of the end of the Middle Ages and the Reformation (capitulary of 806
to the missi at Nimegue).
In the second case, we witness the disappearance of the problem of
monks' labor. First, this is no longer the primary ground of the con-
troversy over labor. Second, but for a few exceptions, labor is no
longer a problem for the monastic world: the triumph of Benoit
d' Aniane's reformed Benedietinism reduced manual labor to a sym-
bolic practice in the face of the encroachments of the opus Dei. Along
with records of monastic customary law, which enable us to follow
the evolution of regulation (Corpus consuetudinum monasticarum ... ),
abbey statutes, like Adalhard's famous statutes for Corbie in the
ninth century, show the progress of craft activity and regulation on
monastic estates, as well as the fact that the monks were falling back
on particular tasks considered more honorable and less fatiguing
(baking, gardening, brewing, etc.), while an increasing manual labor
force of serfs and wage earners was taking over the heavier labor.
c) Literary and Artistic Evidence
Iconographers, particularly A. Riegl, followed by J. c. Webster, have
shown that around 800 there was a discernible break in the iconog-
raphy of the seasons and months. A new series, called the "labors of
the months," which was to enjoy a singular fortune in the Middle
Ages, made its appearance. H. Stem has shed some light on this
turning point by making the ideological content of the break be-
tween the antique calendar and the Carolingian and medieval
84
Labor, Techniques, and Craftsmen
iconography of the months explicit and by comparing the icono-
graphic miniatures with contemporary poetic texts.
From the antique calendar, which generally represented genre
scenes with several characters of a passive, allegorical, and religious
kind, we shift to the representation of a single character actively
engaged in a single labor of some sort, generally agricultural, with
the scene being treated in a realistic manner (miniatures from two
Salzburg manuscripts of the first third of the ninth century and from
a manuscript of the Martyrology of Wand albert of Prom from the end
of the ninth century). To throw into greater relief the realistic theme
of the labors of the months, it should be noted, as Stem has ob-
served, that the Byzantine world continues the antique iconography.
Thus we have a prime example of a cultural turning point associated
with an economic and social turning point. We also find the new
ideology of labor in certain contemporary poetic works treating the
theme of the labors of the months, particularly in the poem De
duodecim mensium nominibus, signis, aerisque qualitatibus (848) by
Wandalbert of Prom, which has been studied by K. T. von Inama-
Sternegg for the information it yielded concerning progress in rural
techniques observed by the poet (additional spring plowing in
February-March). The testimony of Eginhard, according to whom
Charlemagne gave new names to the months related to rural activity,
joins these documents in bringing to light a Carolingian ideology of
labor, which supported the economic and governmental effort.
d) Scientific and Intellectual Advances of Labor and Technique
Carolingian ideology had highlighted agricultural labor, which it
held to be the basis of everything else. For the first time since anti-
quity, however, the crafts were accorded scientific status by the
Carolingian renaissance.
Technical treatises from antiquity (Vegetius) were more common,
and, even more important, the first technical treatises of the Middle
Ages appeared (d. the work of B. Bischoff).
For the first time in cultural history, moreover, the notion and the
expression artes mechanicae appeared, in the commentary by Johan-
nes Scotus Erigena (c. 859) on the De nuptiis philologiae et mercurii by
Martianus Capella. Technical and artisanal activities attained an
equal footing with the artes liberales ("The liberal arts derive naturally
from the intelligence. The mechanical arts, however, are not natu-
rally innate but are derived from man's reflection. Cf. the work of
P. Sternagel).
The new iconography of labor joins the new literature treating of
technical concerns in 1023 in a manuscript from Monte Cassino in
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TIME AND LABOR
86
PEASANTS AND THE RURAL WORLD IN THE
LITERATURE OF THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES
(FIFTI-I AND SIXTH CENTURIES)
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TIME AND LABOR
of Braga4 from the end; again from the late sixth century, the one
contemporary chronicle, Gregory of Tours's Historia Francorum; some
specimens of hagiography of the first rank, with Gregory of Tours
represented once again by his Miracula, the Liber de gloria con-
fessorum, and Vitae patrum,S and Gregory the Great's Dialogues, par-
ticularly the second book devoted to Saint Benedict;6 and, finally,
representing poetry, Fortunatus. 7
2. My purpose is not to describe peasants as they appear in the
literature of the fifth and sixth centuries. If it were, this essay would
have to be very brief, for reasons which will appear shortly. Instead, I
would like to use my chosen subject to pose the problem of the
relation of literature to society. This relation is not a simple one. The
image of society that appears in literature (or iconography, some-
times in kindred forms, sometimes in different ones, as literature
and the figurative arts frequently have their own thematic specific-
ity) is related in a complex way to the global society from which it
stems, to the ruling classes that dominate it, to the specific groups
that sharpen the literary image, and to the writers who actually pro-
duce it. For the sake of simplicity, and in order not to linger too long
over theoretical generalities, we may say that this image is at once an
expression, a reflection, and a sublimation or camouflage of the real
society. If it is permissible to define literature, with a certain rhetori-
cal flourish, as a mirror of society, it is nevertheless a more or less
distorting mirror depending on the conscious or unconscious desires
of the collective soul which is examining itself-depending, more
particularly, on the interests, prejudices, sensibilities, and neuroses
of the social groups responsible for making the mirror and holding it
up to society, or at least to that part of society capable of seeing, that
is, of reading. Fortunately, the mirror is also tendered to us as mem-
bers of a posterity better equipped to observe and interpret the
interplay of illusions. To the historian of societies and civilizations,
literature offers imagos rather than images and thus forces him to
attempt to become the psychoanalyst of the collective past.8 Some-
times the mirror of literature proves to be an unsilvered one from
which the image has vanished or has been conjured away by the
mirror cutter. This is the case with peasantry and the rural world in
the literature of the early Middle Ages.
3. In a sense, my subject does not exist. It is scarcely doing vio-
lence to reality to admit that there is no peasantry or rural world in
the literature of the fifth and sixth centuries, so that my thesis must
first attempt to explain this absence.
It is an absence which, frankly, is surprising and paradoxical. All
the papers we have heard this week demonstrate that the most basic
88
Peasants and the Rural World in Literature
fact of the history of the early medieval West was the ruralization of
the economy and society. Land became the primary source of sub-
sistence, wealth, and power. The prime movers in this basic devel-
opment do not appear in the literature of the time. What is still more
surprising is that they depart from literature after having played, if
not the leading roles, then at least important parts in Greek and Latin
literary works. This holds true not only for the mass of peasants. The
dominus, too, whether an ecclesiastic or layman, who has become
basically a landowner from the fifth century on, practically never
appears as such in the literature of the era. The first pOint of this
essay will be to attempt to explain this disappearance of rural society
and, more particularly, of peasant society, from the literature of the
fifth and sixth centuries. I will then try to rediscover, under his
various guises, the peasant who disappeared from early medieval
literature.
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TIME AND LABOR
without any human intervention. It was not merely that rural images
have become purely symbolic and stereotyped (the bishop, for in-
stance, takes over the metaphor of the pastor gregis). So common in
the Bible, and still frequent in Caesarius of Arles, such images became
sparse in literature during the course of the sixth century. What
caused the peasant and the rural world to disappear from literature at
the threshold of the Middle Ages?
Most likely, the economic, social, and mental underpinnings of
the agricultural laborer's important role in the literature of the pre-
ceding period had crumbled.
1. The ideology of the early Middle Ages was not favorable to
labor, particularly not the humble form of labor involved in provid-
ing ordinary subsistence, a description applicable to most human
labor at this hour of dawn from which medieval society was emerg-
ing slowly and with difficulty. Poverty itself no doubt led to the
attribution of a certain value to the improvements produced by
labor,14 but a threefold legacy from the past weighed unfavorably on
mental attitudes toward labor: a Greco-Roman legacy shaped by a
class which lived on slave labor and prided itself on its otium; a
barbarian legacy originating with warrior groups used to deriving a
considerable portion of their resources from war booty and, in any
case, to favoring a militaristic way of life; and, of greater conse-
quence in this Christianized society, a Judeo-Christian legacy which
emphasized the primacy of the contemplative life 15 and considered it a
sin and a sign of lack of confidence in God not to await Providence
for the satisfaction of material needs. This reached such a point that
Caesarius of Arles 16 had to refute the objection of those who recalled
the necessity for man to provide for his own nourishment, clothing,
and lodging and invoked Pauline texts, particularly the phrase from
2 Thessalonians which, from the eleventh century on, was to serve as
basic reference for proponents of a revaluation of labor: "If any
would not work, neither should he eat."
It is true that Saint Benedict, in the Rule that bears his name, does
require the practice of manual labor, but this is a form of penitence
and obedience to the law of expiation imposed on man as a result of
original sin.
2. While free peasants and small landowners did survive in vari-
ous places, perhaps more extensively than is generally acknowl-
edged,17 their economic and social influence had become virtually
negligible. The social and juridical condition of the peasant was that
of the servi, mancipia, and coloni, whose condemnation by society·
and ideology was well described by Salvianus on the threshold of the
Middle Ages. It is true that, for Salvianus, just as the barbarian's sin
is more excusable than the Christian's, the employer's or master's
90
Peasants and the Rural World in Literature
mistake is judged more severely than that of the colonus or servus. 18
But he recognizes the slaves' collective guilt ("It is quite certain that
slaves are bad and detestable") and makes no exceptions in the guilt
of this class, while, in the higher classes, he does admit exceptions. 19
He has already accepted and begun propounding that un-
differentiated image of a class of peasants of hideous visage which
was eventually to be taken up by the medieval West.
3. Nevertheless, the disappearance of the peasant from early
medieval literature was not due simply to the characteristics of his
social class. A general regression of realism, particularly social and
human realism, in literature and art affected the peasant. One has
only to think of the virtually complete disappearance of figurative art
and especially of the human figure in art.
Realism is not "natural" or primary, nor is it the product of a virgin
vision, but rather it is the result of a visual, mental, and cultural
conquest. Primitive art-and the early Middle Ages were marked by
the invasion of a variety of primitivisms-is abstract. The Church
replaced pagan realism with a universe of symbols and signs. It
denied man's importance in favor of God and the hereafter, and
established new patterns for the representation of society. In some
cases, this took the form of an elementary dualism: clerics and
laymen, or the powerful and the humble (and this latter distinction is
indeed fraught with a social content, to which we shall return). These
were religious schemata in the full sense, which de structured the
traditional images of society organized according to social functions
and remodeled them along the lines of vocations subordinated to
religious needs. Consider, for example, the case of the city of Rome,
an urban society, of course, but one from which the economic and
professional categories had been evacuated. Pope Gregory arrayed
the Roman population, then decimated by an epidemic of the black
plague, in seven expiatory and propitiatory processions: secular
clergy, male regular clergy, cloistered nuns, children, lay males,
widows, married women. 20 In other instances, the society might be
assimilated or reduced to groups of sins: Cassianus' eight deadly
sins, Gregory the Great's seven, or the twelve abuses of the Pseudo-
Cypriot in the middle of the seventh century.21 At the risk of anti-
cipating what follows, we should point out that in this last list we
find our peasants, in the guise of the poor, represented by a major
sin: the desire to rise above their humble place, a social ambition
which would become the great sin in a society congealed in orders.
This general nonfigurative tendency affected the peasant above all.
As with Salvianus, the servi as a whole were an anonymous crowd of
sinners which admitted no exceptions, no individuals susceptible of
salvation. The author of a recent study of the Merovingian warrior
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TIME AND LABOR
was able to write that only clerics and warriors could be understood
as human types by the Merovingians. 22 Whether free or not, the
peasant of the early Middle Ages was held in deep contempt. The
servus could not receive holy orders,23 but even the free peasant, if
only because of his lack of culture, had little opportunity to enter the
Church, including the still lax and somewhat anarchic monastic
order, where the recruitment of peasants seems to have been mini-
mal. 24 Frantisek Graus, in his admirable book on Merovingian soci-
ety,2S points out that we must wait until the thirteenth century for
the Church to canonize a peasant. Before that time, there are no
peasant saints.
92
Peasants and the Rural World in Literature
superstitions denounced in the De correctione rusticorum persist to
this day in peasant societies in the northwestern part of the Iberian
peninsula. 30
Thus, our manner of proceeding raises the whole problem of
folklore and hence of peasant culture in the literature of the early
Middle Ages. What we have here, rather than a sort of involuntary
revenge of the peasant against the cleric, appears to be a case of
simple appropriation for evangelical purposes of folkloric elements
removed from their peasant cultural context. 31
Beyond this, however, we encounter the problem of the ruraliza-
tion of the West in the early Middle Ages. During this period there
was a resurgence of what we shall call primitive or pre-Roman tech-
niques, social structures, and mentalities. Underlying traditional
peasant structures emerged and displayed great resistance to
change. 32
When he reappears in literature, the early medieval peasant is a
barely human monster, and subsequent literary production was to
continue to present him in this guise to youths and knights lost in
the forest, where the peasant-lumberjack was in his own dark and
wild element. They were great, ugly, huge-headed beasts with wide
eyes fixed in an animal stare as they appeared to Aucassin or
Lancelot. 33
Thus, even after he had become a Christian, the peasant was a
sinner of the first order. We need hardly to point to the servus, who
personified man's servitude to sin,34 serous peccati. All rustici were
sinners par excellence; they were vicious by birth and nature.
Caesarius of Arles did not usually put personalities in his sermons
and gave his sinners neither individuality nor social specificity, but
he made an exception for three specially selected categories: clerics,
whose sins were most serious because of their status, but it was only
a minority of unworthy clerics who were involved; merchants, who
constituted a very limited group in southern Gaul at the beginning of
the sixth century; and, finally, the peasants, who were predestined to
certain sins and vices.
The rustici, for instance, were preeminent lechers and drunk-
ards. 3s And this was not all. A mentality was forming at this time
according to which the venereal diseases were the sign and sanction
of sin. Peasants, more than others subject to undernourishment,
poor hygiene, and physical defects thus exhibited their fundamen-
tally flawed nature. Leprosy in a child was a sign of lewdness in the
parents, and, according to Caesarius, lepers were mainly peasants,
because peasants procreated in lust. 36
2. The peasant was also the pauper and, more frequently, one of a
crowd of paupers less and less differentiated. It is at times difficult to
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TIME AND LABOR
distinguish the city poor from the country poor in the pauperes of the
texts. 37 This is the case with Gregory of Tours, in whose writings
Gaul still appears to be highly urbanized; yet virtually no distinction
is ever made between urban and rural populations. A sign? Although
he was observing the peasant society before his own eyes in writing
the De correctione rusticorum, Martin of Braga may have had, besides
the sermons of Caesarius of Aries, another model in the De catechizan-
dis rudibus by Saint Augustine. 38 Saint Augustine, however, distin-
guished between categories of the faithful to be indoctrinated: "the
few or the many, the learned or the ignorant, the city-dwellers or the
peasants." Of course, one later encounters urbanus and rusticus in the
figurative sense of civilized and ignorant which they respectively
came to take on, but the distinction, and the reference to the opposi-
tion of city and country, which are still clear in Augustine, are no
longer apparent in Martin of Braga.
There are, however, unambiguous texts which make it possible to
identify the pauper with the peasant. It should be noted that, of the
four peasants who, to our knowledge, are the only ones to appear in a
concrete form in the literature of the very early Middle Ages, none
has a name. In each case, the hero of the story is actually a saint, the
peasant being merely an anonymous object in the hagiographic tale.
On the other hand, although they are characterized simply as
"poor," the poverty of these peasants seems relative. In one case it is
stressed that the unfortunate fellow has no animals to help him,
whereas the other three possess oxen. Apart from the use of the term
pauper, the social condition or, in any case, the juridical condition is
not made explicit in any of the four cases.
The first three of these texts are from Gregory of Tours.
In the first of these, an itinerant priest asks a peasant of Limagne to
provide him hospitality for the night, "ad hospitiolium cuiusdam
pauperis Limanici mansionem expetit." The peasant rises before
dawn to go cut wood in the forest, and, following the habit of the
peasants, which establishes the identity pauper = rusticus, he asks
his wife for bread for his breakfast. He asks the priest to bless the
bread and to make several hosts from it which he might carry with
him to enable him to resist the assaults of the deviL who tries to
throw him into the water when he crosses a bridge with his cart and
oxen. 3Cj
In the second text, a poor man, who has lost the oxen who worked
with him ("quos ad exercendam culturam habebat"), dreams that
Saint Genesius shows him the place on the forest trail where he will'
find his oxen, which he will then use to transport an enormous mar-
ble slab miraculously to the site of the saint's sepulcher, which will
become a place of miracles. 40
The third text again shows us a peasant characterized as poor,
94
Peasants and the Rural World in Literature
whose total possessions consist of two oxen ("erat enim quidam
pauper habens duos boves ad exercendam culturam suam, nec ei erat
alia possessio"). A thief steals them, and he recovers his possessions
by going in pilgrimage to the tomb of Saint Felix. 41
The finest text, the fourth, is actually a Carolingian recasting of a
Merovingian hagiography. It shows us an ordinary man, a poor
peasant without oxen whom Saint Sigiran meets while the peasant is
pulling a wagonload of manure by himself ("accidit ... ut quendam
homunculum es ruricolis unum videlicet piau strum fimo honustum
sine cuiuspiam animalis auxilio cum vi nimia trahentem con-
spiceret"). The saint, moved by pity, speaks to the peasant: "Oh,
unfortunate pauper, you have no oxen to help you." He harnesses
himself to the wagon alongside the peasant and, when the labor is
done, gives him three pieces of gold to buy an ox. This is a text
abounding in information of an economic order, even if such in-
formation is difficult to organize and interpret, and one which offers
the most concrete and human of the rare peasant figures in early
medieval literature. 42
The pauper who figures in these texts as an object of solicitude for
the saints of Merovingian hagiography, the brother of Gregory the
Great's peasant who takes refuge with Saint Benedict from a Goth
who wants to torture him into revealing the hiding place of his for-
tune,43 was in reality regarded by the upper strata of society as an
object and a danger.
In the first place, he serves merely to set off the qualities of the
wealthy man or saint in these tales. His only reason for existing is to
furnish them an instrument or opportunity for salvation. In a society
in which spiritual salvation was the essential aim, and in which the
dominant classes conferred priority upon themselves in this respect,
the pauper made it possible for the rich man or saint who gave him
alms to save his own soul. Reified by the charity of his betters, the
peasant was a Gegenstand in the full sense of the German word, an
object, who would only later and with difficulty achieve the dignity
of a social status, a Stand. 44 Caesarius of Arles gave a good definition
of the peasant, who existed only in relation to the rich: "God has
allowed the poor into this world so that every man might have the
means to redeem his sins."45
The peasant was also a danger. In the early Middle Ages the peas-
ant class was the dangerous class. As early as the end of antiquity,
this was illustrated by the Circumcellions and the Bagaudes. 46 We
encounter these half savage peasants in the life of Saint Wandrille,
abbot of Fontenelle: "Upon coming into a place in the midst of very
wicked peasants, who did not fear God and revered no man, a con-
flict arose."47
Most important, it was in the peasant masses that the pseudo-
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TIME AND LJ\BOR
96
Peasants and the Rural World in Literature
say: "Go on, peasant. Your occupation is to graze the sheep, mine is
to become civilized through the study of literature. My ministry thus
ennobles me, while your service makes you base."
97
II
101
LABOR AND VALUE SYSTEMS
102
Academic Expenses at Padua in the Fifteenth Century
examination for the alternates; previously, all this had gone to the
bishop.24
Elsewhere, sanctions to be imposed on students in default in set-
tling their accounts are set out. On 18 November 1441, measures
were decreed against students who had been content merely to pay a
deposit (brevia). 25
This urgent desire for profit helps to explain the progressive di-
minution of the number of students exempt from payment of the
dues. The Church's traditional protection had assured poor students
a place in the universities. Then, too, particularly in the thirteenth
century, the movement of the population toward the cities had filled
the faculties with crowds of young people with no resources, who
were noteworthy as a cause of the ferment in the faculty of arts. 26
With the subsequent demographic ebb, the number of such students
decreased, and the masters took advantage of the opportunity to
encourage the decline by eliminating exemptions from dues as far as
they were able; between 1405 and 1409, a modification in the statutes
reduced their number to two for the whole of the school of law, one
in canon law and one in civil law. 27 Thereafter, the principle was
reduced to virtually symbolic form. The time of the poor at Padua
was over. Democratic recruitment was permanently ended. Yet
another regulation of 25 February 1428 would require the two re-
maining "privileged" students to submit to an extra preadmission
examination and to supply conclusive proof of their poverty.28
Simultaneously, however, an inverse process was opening the
doors of the university free of charge to a whole category of youth:
the children of academics.
In 1394, an initial decision granted free entry into the college of
jurists to any new doctor belonging to the male lineage of a doctor,
even if one of the intervening descendants was not himself a doc-
tor.29 On 17 August 1409 it was specified that the son of a living or
deceased doctor had to be examined free of charge, and sanctions
were declared against anyone contravening this decision. 30
Besides an academic ancestry, another condition was required of
these new doctors: Paduan citizenship. A statute of 13 January 1418
even specified that this condition was an absolute necessity and
limited the scope of earlier decrees; an exception was made in favor
of a famous teacher commonly regarded as Paduan by adoption. 31 A
statute of 11 November 1440 excluded alien doctors from the exam-
ining jury and denied them the right to receive the ducat paid to the
twelve regular and alternate examiners.32
These texts enable us to describe the three convergent evolutionary
processes affecting the University of Padua in the late fourteenth and
103
LABOR AND VALUE SYSTEMS
first half of the fifteenth centuries. The main tendencies were the
elimination of poor students; the fonnation of a caste of academic
families; and nationalization, or a tendency to restrict recruit-
ment-at least as far as masters were concerned-to the local
population. In just two centuries, higher education had come a long
way since the days when the nascent universities were welcoming
students of every social origin from all over Europe, and the most
famous schools were attracting students who came to acquire the
right to teach anywhere (Le., in any university).
Still, the student who recorded on a cover leaf of his law book the
expenditures that had to be made-and no doubt that he himself had
to make-at Padua in order to be examined was a student who came
from the other end of Italy.
Folios 7-8, 9-41 verso, 42 verso -447 of the Codex Vaticanus latinus
11503 were written by the same hand that signed the last folio (447):
"scripsit Matthaeus de Grandis Siracusanus," dated 1427.
We are familiar with this Sicilian. On 24 September 1424 he at-
tended the ceremonies conferring a doctorate in theology on Fra
Giovanni de Borometis. 33 We know that in 1426 he received a schol-
arship from the municipality of Syracuse to enable him to continue
his studies at Padua.J4 When he returned to Sicily, he was first arch-
deacon of Syracuse and then elected vicar general, sede vacante, in
1443. 35 In 1462 we meet him again as a member of the college of
doctors of the University of Catania, and subsequently, until 1466, he
was vicar general of the bishop of Catania and vice-chancellor of the
university.36
His was an exemplary career. Lacking in their own university,37
young Sicilians of the early quattrocento eager to obtain a reasonably
rigorous education and titles went to seek them on the continent. At
which university, Bologna or Padua? The question as to which of the
two was preferred is controversiaP8 It is probable, however, that
with the decline of Bologna and the concurrent beginning of Padua's
most eminent phase,3'! the latter would have attracted a greater share
of the young islanders.
Like many of his compatriots, Matthew of Grandis enjoyed a
scholarship to Padua provided by his native city.40 The city, how-
ever, exercised a certain control over the students it subsidized41 and
the uses to which they put the money allotted to them. Do we owe
our manuscript text to this control, in view of which our student may
have been keeping a statement of expenses in order to render his
accounts to the municipality of Syracuse? In any case, Syracuse's
reason for helping to defray young Matthew of Grandis's educational
expenses was to reap the eventual profit from what he had learned.
Like most of the other scholarship holders, therefore, we find him
104
Academic Expenses at Padua in the Fifteenth Century
returning to Sicily once he has his doctorate to take up various posts
in the ecclesiastical administration of the island. The final phase of
his career comes in 1444 when Alfonso the Magnanimous and Pope
Eugenius IV approve the foundation of a university at Catania. Mat-
thew was one of the Padua graduates who quite naturally assumed
the leadership roles in the new institution. 42
At Padua, Matthew de Grandis was no more than a scholarship
student representing his nation. Unfortunately we have no way of
learning any further details about his social origin, but his career is
one of a well-defined type: destined to playa role in the administra-
tion of the Church, he was a student of the most traditional sort. For
him, surely, the problem of providing for his needs at Padua was
solved. Why, then, did he record his expenses? We have suggested
that he had to account to his sponsors. Wouldn't it have been suffi-
cient to have referred to the university statutes? In fact, he does note
at the bottom of his statement that what he has just tabulated is in
confonnity with these statutes. But which statutes was he referring
to? The fees and gifts in kind or in money which he indicates are not
always equivalent to the amounts prescribed in the statutes of 1382,
and another list of expenditures on examinations at Padua, probably
dating from the middle of the fifteenth century, provides us with still
different data. 43 Was there a modification of the statutes during the
first half of the fifteenth century? Examination of the previously cited
manuscript in the archives of the University of Padua discloses
among the additions to the 1382 statutes a particularly interesting
text dated 12 May 1400. 44
This decree, indeed, established a genuine sliding scale for univer-
sity dues. Such automatic modification of the amounts paid by stu-
dents to their masters at a time of monetary deterioration stands in
strange contrast with the fixed amounts of scholarships granted
during the same period to the Sicilian students at Padua, for exam-
ple. Here, what we began to observe above becomes more evident,
namely, that an academic oligarchy was fonning, an oligarchy which
sought increasingly to profit from its educational activities. Its av-
idity in the pursuit of profit derived both from a desire to strengthen
its prestige relative to the students and from a concern to acquire
insulation from economic fluctuations. In short, its motives were
pride and self-interest. 4S
On the subject of economic instability, the text of 12 May 1400 in
which variations in exchange rates are explicitly mentioned is an
invaluable piece of evidence. It makes Matthew de Grandis's list of
expenditures all the more valuable, for it, and others like it which
may yet be discovered, give us the means to evaluate variations in
the value of money, changes in prices, and economic tendencies in
105
LABOR AND VALUE SYSTEMS
106
TRADES AND PROFESSIONS AS
REPRESENTED IN MEDIEVAL CONFESSORS'
MANUALS
107
LABOR AND VALUE SYSTEMS
108
Trades and Professions as Represented in Confessors' Manuals
longer Rome, the city that obsessed the ancient imagination, but
rather Jerusalem, and not merely the real, earthly Jerusalem, which
was invested with all the signs of the prestige of the celestial
Jerusalem for which it stood, but Jerusalem as a concrete symbol for
all cities, for the essential city ...
Such relations between the religious universe and the material
world remain external. On a more profound level, that of spirituality,
it should be noted that nothing could become an object of conscious
reflection in the Middle Ages except by way of religion. It would
almost be possible to define a medieval mentality by its inability to
express itself apart from religious references. As Lucien Febvre has
brilliantly demonstrated, this remains the case as late as the sixteenth
century. Craft guilds represented themselves to the world by taking
the tools of their trade and making them the attributes of a saint,
integrated in a hagiographic legend, in works they commissioned.
This was quite natural, since the members of such guilds fonned
their conceptions of their work through the mediation of religion.
Consciousness of an individual or collective situation, including a
professional situation, is a fonn of participation; in the Middle Ages
this could only have been participation in a religious universe-more
precisely, the universe offered or imposed by the Church. But the
problem is precisely here: wasn't the Church's universe one that
excluded the trades?
First, it should be noted that in the medieval West, at least until the
fifteenth century, a revolt against the Church and its mental and
spiritual universe almost always took on a somewhat hyperreligious
character-a fonn of mystical religiosity, one of whose principal
characteristics was to exclude material, and consequently pro-
fessional, life from integration into the religious universe. Almost all
such revolts expressed themselves as heresies, usually of Man-
ichaean, dualist character. Material life was classified as a part of the
universe of evil. Labor, as perfonned, and consequently conceived,
by the heretics, served the Church-supported established order and
was therefore condemned as a fonn of servitude to, or even complic-
ity with, a reviled state of affairs. It seems to me certain that medieval
heresies had a social basis and, still more, a social origin, although
the composition and social structure of heretical movements is com-
plex. Certain social groups rushed headlong into heresy because of
discontentment with their social and economic situation-for exam-
ple, nobles envious of ecclesiastical property; merchants irked that
they did not occupy a place in the social hierarchy commensurate
with their economic strength; and workers, whether serfs or wage
laborers in the countryside or weavers and fullers in the city, who
109
LABOR AND VALUE SYSTEMS
rose against a system to which the Church seemed to give its sup-
port. But on the level of consciousness, all forms of labor were ir-
revocably condemned. Among the Cathari, for example, labor was
tolerated for those believers who continued to lead a worldly exis-
tence tainted with evil, but it was forbidden to the perfecti, or the
pure. It is likely that the inability of medieval heresies between the
eleventh and fourteenth centuries to define a spiritual and ethical
system appropriate to labor was an important cause of their failure.
Conversely, a reason for the present success of the various forms of
socialism, primarily of Marxism, might be that they did succeed in
defining such a system. 6
By contrast, the medieval Church was able to fashion ideological
structures suited to the spiritual needs arising out of professional
activity. It is this fact that makes it legitimate to approach questions
of professional consciousness through the orthodox penitential liter-
ature of the Middle Ages.
For the Church to have succeeded as it did, it of course had to
evolve. From its inception, Christianity did offer a spiritual approach
to labor, a veritable theology of work. 7 Its bases are to be found in the
Bible, notably in Paul's writings (2 Thess. 3:10: "If any would not
work, neither should he eat"), as well as in the works of the Fathers,
particularly the Greek Fathers such Saint Basil and Saint John
Chrysostomos. Between the fourth and twelfth centuries, however,
this aspect of Christianity remained merely a latent and undeveloped
possibility, perhaps overwhelmed by other aspects. The economic
and social condition of the early Middle Ages found its expression in
the well-known tripartite schema of society, which was a resurgence
of a concept common to ali Indo-European societies, as Georges
Dumezil, among others, has shown. 8 This schema, which divides
society into the three classes of oratores, bellatores, and laboratores, is
a hierarchical one. If the oratores-the clerics-ultimately came to
accept the bellatores at their side in a position of eminence, both these
groups were in accord in regarding the inferior order of workers,
laboratores, with the utmost contempt. Labor was thus discredited by
association with the baseness of the class that monopolized toil. The
Church explained the serf's lowly condition as that of society's
scapegoat, invoking man's servitude to sin. Labor's disgrace was the
result of original sin, on which the text provides all the necessary
commentary. In this connection, there should be no mistaking the
position of Saint Benedict and Benedictine spirituality with regard to
labor.9 The Benedictine Rule imposes labor on monks in two forms,
manual and intellectual, and both are penitences, in confonnity with
the ideology of the time. In the Benedictine mind during the early
Middle Ages, both labor's spirituality, which was merely a pen-
110
Trades and Professions as Represented in Confessors' Manuals
itential instrument, and its theology, according to which labor was a
consequence of original sin, had only negative value, as it were. to
Scarcely more positive was the accompanying conception of labor as
a remedy for idleness, which stood in the way of the temptations of
the devil.
If the Church had persisted in this attitude, professional con-
sciousness would no doubt have been quite different from what it
Was. The Church's opposition to this consciousness came not only in
the form of a perceptual screen but also in the shape of a physical
obstacle. There were two principal ways in which the Church man-
ifested its hostility.
First, it was directed at the guilds. Hostility to the guilds was not
merely reserved for the occasions when they spearheaded the fight
against the temporal power of the lord-bishops of cities in the name
of urban, primarily economic freedom. As an enemy of monopoly
and supporter of the justum pretium, or free-market price, 11 the
Church was in a more profound sense opposed to the fundamental
aim of the guilds, which was to eliminate competition in the urban
marketplaceY The Church was suspicious of the guild as such,
moreover, because it recognized as legitimate only those groups
which it held to derive from the divine wil~ and human nature; it
regarded the tripartite schema as being at once natural and super-
natural, and it accepted classifications based on proper religious or
ecclesiastical criteria, such as Christian-non-Christian, clerical-lay,
etc. Organization of the trades was accepted only to the extent that it
also had the character of religious organization: the brotherhoods
(confreries). This meant that professional consciousness was formed
under very special conditions, involving a sort of dialectic between
the corporative spirit and the confratemal spirit which it is important
to take into account, despite the great difficulty of doing so as long as
our understanding of the history of the brotherhoods remains poor. 13
Second, the Church's hostility to trade was reflected in its suspi-
cion toward many professional activities. The whole gamut of illicit
trades was implicated in this suspicion; their history is particularly
illuminating. 14 How often the Middle Ages must have witnessed the
inner drama of men anxiously wondering whether they were really
hastening toward damnation because they were engaging in a trade
suspect in the eyes of the Church. The merchant comes naturally to
mind. Such dramas must ultimately have played a leading role in the
formation of professional consciousness. In the end, the Church had
to capitulate to the pressures exerted by the trades. Only then could
the seed of a positive theology of labor contained in Christian doc-
trine at last germinate, which ultimately led to a conquest of spiritual
dignity by groups that had first risen to material power.
111
LABOR AND VALUE SYSTEMS
The world of religion is thus an ideal area for adding to our knowl-
edge of mental representations of the technological and professional
domain in the medieval West, provided that the historian does not
lose sight of the situation of the latter domain within the encom-
passing religious world. There is a triple aspect to this situation;
explicitly, the former is contained in the latter in (1) a state of trans-
formation, (2) a state of expression, and (3) a state of pressure.
In this connection, we shall use confessors' manuals to help answer
the following question: how did the Church change the tripartite
schema into one that was more flexible and open to the diversified
working world of trades and professions, and what new mental rep-
resentations resulted from this change?
Confessors' manuals are valuable as evidence in dealing with pro-
fessional consciousness because they reflect the pressure brought to
bear on the Church by men engaged in given types of work. Con-
versely, they were one of the principal tools in the formation of
professional consciousness in medieval men from the thirteenth
century on.
The doctrine embodied in such manuals was not merely dispensed
in the confessional. They had a more direct and lasting influence on
men who obtained and read them for themselves. In contrast with
today's practice, these manuals were not restricted to confessors but
were available to penitents as well. Significantly, the first confessors'
manuals to be translated into vulgar tongues ad usum laicorum were
those which devoted the greatest amount of space to the problems of
professional conscience, such as the Summa of John of Freiburg
translated into German by the Dominican Berthold Hunlen as early
as the end of the thirteenth century. Evidently they were acquired
principally by merchants who had the money and education to pur-
chase and read them, and whose professional activities raised the
thorniest questions of conscience. 1s After the end of the fifteenth
century, printing further extended, at least for a while, the influence
of the most important of these manuals.
It is worthwhile pausing to give some additional details concern-
ing the kind of evidence these manuals offer as to the ideological
pressure exerted by various profes.sional milieus.
The origins of the evolving professional consciousness which cul-
minated in the confessors' manuals can be traced back to the twelfth
century, 16 where a threefold evolutionary process may be observed:
(1) a subjectivization of the spiritual life, accessible primarily
through the development of the confession; (2) the emergence of a
spirituality and theology of labor; (3) the transformation of the
tripartite schema of society into models better adapted to the in-
creasing differentiation of social and economic structures, due to the
increasing division of labor.
112
Trades and Professions as Represented in Confessors' Manuals
1. The barbarized world of which the early medieval Church was a
part was an extrovert world, oriented toward exterior tasks and mate-
rial ends or rewards, such as conquest, food, power, and salvation in
the hereafter. It was a world we may call primitive, defined by at-
titudes, conduct, and gestures. Men could be judged only according
to their acts, not according to their feelings. This may be seen in
barbarian law as well as in any of the codes of the early Middle Ages.
The Wergeld, for example, does consider men as well as their acts,
according not to their intentions but rather to their objective situa-
tion, using a very rudimentary classification (free and nonfree,
membership in such and such a national community). This was also
the practice of the Church, whose only access to souls was through
bodily gestures. Its codes were the penitentials, tables of spiritual
penalties, which were more concerned with the sin than with the
sinner. 17 At best, two classes of sinners were singled out, clerics and
laymen, sanctions against clerics being heavier than those against
laymen. The sins themselves existed not because of the sinner but
rather because of a vice that was independent of him, to which he fell
prey when it entered him as an alien being, a materialization of the
devil. Throughout the early Middle Ages, spiritual life was conceived
as a combat modeled on Prudentius' Psychomachia. According to the
most widespread codification, the vices in question were the deadly
sins. IS Should one succumb to the enemies pride, gluttony, avarice,
lust, sloth, envy, or vainglory, one was required to pay, and the
amount of the penalty was almost automatically specified by the
penitentials. In a world ruled by external forces of good and evil, it is
not surprising that judgment should be left to chance, characterized
as Providence: the ordeal was the fonn of God's judgment. 19 There
was no room for individuals in this world, unless they were truly
extraordinary beings such as saints or heroes, the fonner excelling
among the oratores, the latter among the bellatores. In fact, there were
only two literary genres in the early medieval West, the gests and
hagiography. Other individuals existed only through participation
in the being of the hero or saint: the biographer who wrote or the
minstrel who sang his praise, the ironsmith who forged his sword,
the goldsmith who fashioned the outward signs of his wealth and
power. During this era family names did not exist, and the anony-
mous masses derived their meager portion of individuality from the
first name of their patron saint, which conferred on whoever bore it a
little of the exalted being of the spiritual father.
In the twelfth century a considerable change came about. The his-
tory of the confession and penitence has been written. 20 The role
played by such great minds as Saint Anselm and Abelard in this
development is known. Yet they only gave expression and polish to
what was a broad trend. Roman law, particularly through its influence
113
LABOR AND VALUE SYSTEMS
114
Trades and Professions as Represented in Confessors' Manuals
and strong resistance to change appeared. Still, the founding of new
orders makes clear that something had changed, that a mutation had
occurred in the Benedictine spirit, for why else would such new rules
be necessary? It is, of course, possible to point to a Rupert of Deutz,
who was irritated by the vogue for manual labor, or to a Peter the
Venerable somewhat stunned by the attacks of Saint Bernard, both of
whom point out that, according to Saint Benedict, manual labor,
advisable but not obligatory, was merely a means and not an end of
spiritual life. But there is abundant evidence from every quarter that
the spiritual attitude toward labor was undergoing a crucial devel-
opment through practice. A genuine debate was begun around Pre-
montre over the issue of peasant monks, and, with the Umiliati, the
question of worker-monks arose soon thereafter. 21 Meanwhile,
theoretical consideration of the value of labor was in a state of agita-
tion, exemplified by the Liber de diversis ordinibus. 22 The concept of~
penitential labor was supplanted by the idea of labor as a positive
means to salvation. 23 Behind the growing importance of this new
monastic world, it is impossible not to notice the pressure being
exerted by new professional categories, such as merchants,
craftsmen, and workers, concerned with finding religiOUS justifica-
tion for their activity and vocation, anxious to assert their dignity
and obtain assurance of their salvation, not in spite of, but rather
because of, their profession. Once again, the image of such aspira-
tions as projected in hagiography is instructive. With the beginning
of the thirteenth century, the working saint was losing ground, giv-
ing way to the saintly worker.24
This new spiritual attitude towards labor tended, naturally, to
strike deep roots with a theology of labor. For the outlines of this
theology, we must look to the commentaries on Genesis, which at-
tempted to demonstrate that labor had its positive roots in God be-
cause (1) the Creator's work (here, the development of the theme of
the summus artifer or summus opifer should be traced) was genuine
labor-sublime labor, to be sure, a creation, but one which entailed
the usual painful consequences, as seen in the fact that the creation
was a labor from which God had to rest on the seventh day. God was
the first worker. (2) Man, Adam, had been given a certain labor as his
vocation before the Fall, a labor which was to be understood as a
kind of maintenance, since God had placed him in the Garden "to
dress it and to keep it" (Genesis 2:15). Thus before penitential labor,
which was a consequence of sin and the Fall, there had been joyful
labor, blessed by God, and earthly labor had kept about it something
of the quality of the paradisiacal labor from before the fall.
3. It is hardly surprising that, in such a conjuncture, the tripartite
schema of society should no longer correspond well to social and
115
LABOR AND VALUE SYSTEMS
116
Trades and Professions as Represented in Confessors' Manuals
different cities (note, in passing, the urban reference). Ten such arts
were listed: the seven traditional ones, to which Honorius added
physics, mechanics, and economics. His was a universe of doing and
making as well as knowing.27
As the new world was conceptualized, a role of great importance
was played by the idea of the common good. It became the touchstone
of the utility and legitimacy of every profession.
It should be noted that along with the collapse of the tripartite
schema came the end of the traditional framework of the seven liberal
arts and the division. between the mechanical and the liberal arts.
While Otto of Freising had been surprised to find that in Italy
"even the craftsmen of the mechanical arts" were held in high
esteem, Hugh of Saint-Victor in the Didascalicon put the mechanical
arts alongside the liberal arts in a new classification of the sciences,
which we later encounter in Robert Grosseteste and Saint Thomas
Aquinas in the thirteenth century.28
By the beginning of the thirteenth century the spiritual guides had
been affected by the evolution of public opinion, in whose consid-
eration the virtuous hero had been supplanted by the skillful techni-
cian. The Guiot Bible declared that henceforth knights had to give
precedence to crossbowmen, miners, stonecutters, and engineers.
The evolution of military technique compromised the proiessional
supremacy of the feudal knight. The developments were comprehen-
sive. Guiot de Provins exaggerates, anticipates, but he does reveal
one tendency of public opinion.
Thus, on the threshold of the thirteenth century, the ideological
conditions and mental structures needed for the consecration of the
various professions were present. In the accomplishment of this con-
secration, the transformation of penitential practices as guided by
the confessors' manuals played a leading role.
We have been observing a threefold evolutionary process: the
evolution of confession, of the conception of labor, and of the schema
of social structure. At this point, two developments of major im-
portance made it possible for this evolutionary process to produce its
full effect.
The first of these was canon 21 of the Fourth Lateran Council of
1215, which made annual confession obligatory for all Christians, in
other words, for virtually all people in the Western world. Thereafter,
confessors were regularly besieged with questions, many of which
were embarrassing because (1) many confessors were inadequately
informed and knew nothing of recent developments in canon law,
particularly since the Decretum of Gratian; and (2) most of them had
been trained in a traditional spirit and atmosphere and were incap-
able of resolving (and at times even of comprehending) the problems
117
LABOR AND VALUE SYSTEMS
110
Trades and Professions as Represented in Confessors' Manuals
confessors' manuals. Another scheme of classification tended to
supplant it, however, one which considered categories of sinners
rather than sins, such sinners being grouped by profession: clerical
sins, academic sins, judges' sins, peasants' sins, mechanics' sins, etc.
In both confession and preaching (and the thirteenth century was a
great one for preaching, with the mendicant and particularly the
Dominican friars, known as the Preachers), we thus have a new
genre, the teaching of religion ad status. Alan of Lille in the Summa de
arte praedicatoria, Humbert of Romans in the second book of the De
eruditione praedicatorium, and James of Vitry, among others, have left
sermones ad status. The new penitential texts lay stress on questions
to be put secundum offici a. 30
The twenty-first canon of the Fourth Lateran Council specifies
"that the priest be capable of discernment and prudence, so that he
may pour wine and oil on the wounds of the victim in the manner of
a competent physician, after conducting a careful inquiry into the
circumstances surrounding the sinner as well as the sin."
The Summa Astesana of ca. 1317 is still more explicit (lib. V, cap.
XVII, "Questions to ask during confession"): "Sins typical of men of
the penitent's station must be inquired about. A knight must not be
questioned about the sins of a monk, or vice versa. .. To gain a
better understanding of whom you must question about what, ob-
serve that princes are to be questioned about justice, knights about
plunder, merchants, officials, craftsmen, and workers about perjury,
fraud, lying, theft, etc .... bourgeois and city dwellers generally
about usury and chattel mortgage, peasants about covetousness and
theft, especially in regard to the tithe, etc."
This principle of confession according to professionally
categorized sins was dearly the inspiration for the plan of a manual
in widespread use at the end of the thirteenth century, the handbook
"for less educated and less competent confessors" taken by John of
Freiburg from his Summa confessorum and commonly entitled Con-
fessionale. The first section of this handbook, devoted to sins found
generally in all sinners, is followed by a second section which treats
the sins of the various socioprofessional categories: (1) bishops and
other prelates; (2) clerics and holders of benefices; (3) curates and
their vicars and confessors; (4) friars and monks; (5) judges; (6) attor-
neys and solicitors; (7) physicians; (8) professors and academics; (9)
princes and other nobles; (10) married laymen; (11) merchants and
bourgeois; (\2) craftsmen and workers; (13) peasants and farmers;
(14) manuallaborers.31
All the professional categories are treated by this catalogue, which
has here been reduced to its table of contents, although a detailed
commentary could be developed. This was possible because the
number of illicit and proscribed trades had been reduced to the point
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LABOR AND VALUE SYSTEMS
120
Trades and Professions as Represented in Confessors' Manuals
fined to making loans of limited scope, to the second rank. Sub-
sequently, the problem of Christian usury had to be faced. Interest,
without which precapitalist monetary economy could not develop,
involved an activity previously damned, in scholastic terms: the sale
of time. In precise symmetry with the problem of trade in knowl-
edge, a problem of trade in time arose and was opposed by the same
tradition and slogan: "Time is a gift from God and therefore cannot
be sold." Once again, though coupled, to be sure, with certain pre-
cautions and a restrictive casuistry, the answer found in the con-
fessors' manuals was favorable to the new practices. 36
3. In both cases, the same justification was offered, Significantly
changing the interpretation of the Gospel text. Where Matthew had
said "the workman is worthy of his meat" (Matthew 10:10), exegetes
now said the workman was worthy of his wages, evidence of transi-
tion from a natural to a money economy. The important point was
that for a salary to be merited, labor had to be performed. Labor was
still an ambiguous concept, marked by the essentially medieval
confusion between trouble, fatigue, and the performance of an eco-
nomic task in the modern sense. Labor was toil.
The necessary and sufficient condition for legitimization of a trade
and for payment of a wage was the requirement of labor.
Here again, the intellectual and the merchant found similar justifi-
cation for their new socioprofessional status. If the magister or the
merchant were to receive a legitimate wage without fear of damna-
tion, the remuneration or benefice (the late Middle Ages maintained
no clear distinction between the two) had to be compensation for
their toil. It was necessary and sufficient that they work. The con-
fessors' manuals were confirmed by the guild statutes: a wage or
benefice was legitimate when it was accepted pro labore. 37 Labor
became the standard reference value.
This outline ~hould be complemented with a history of the post-
fourteenth-century avatars of labor value in Western society. In spite
of its absolution by the Middle Ages, labor remained a fragile value,
threatened and arraigned continually by social and economic evolu-
tion. Before as well as after the Industrial Revolution, social classes
which had risen owing to labor hastened to deny their working
roots. Labor has really never ceased to be a sort of mark of servility.
As early as the thirteenth century, a new social cleavage came into
being. Although idleness had no future as a social and ethical value,
labor was arraigned at its most basic level, that of manual labor. "I do
not work with my hands," proclaimed the poor man Rutebeuf. John
of Freiburg's Confessionale reserved the lowest position for the simple
workers, laboratores. Hardly had feudal values been vanquished
when workers divided against themselves. History was not over.
121
HOW DID THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY
CONCEIVE OF ITSELF?
122
How Did the Medieval University Conceive of Itself?
spiritual problems from which the moments in time studied here
have been isolated. 1 Where, for instance, would the great debates of
the thirteenth century have led us? Then, too, our impression is a
hasty one particularly because we have resigned ourselves to do no
more than shed a little light on certain aspects of the larger theoretical
problem, which is still somewhat undefined.
In the question of how consciousness is formed, we face one of the
central-and most difficult-problems of history. The investigation
should be designed to proceed along several convergent paths. The
central areas of observation, and even experimentation, have to be
defined, and tools and methods chosen. Finally (perhaps?) we need
to adopt a basic criterion for identifying the essential phenomenon,
the decisive moment at which the infrastructures are perceived,
in which the group recognizes and ~ffirms itself and comes into
being for a second time through a conscious awareness of its own
originality.
Its very difficulties, then, make this an excellent theme, of
heightened interest by reason of its connection with the theme of the
1960 Mediavistentagung, vocation, which it extends and develops.
In this essay, we have chosen one of several possible avenues of
approach, adopting the point of view of the intellectual formulation
of the university's role relative to other groups and classes of the
society. In looking particularly for difference and, at times, opposi-
tion, we shall attempt to locate some of the key stages in the forma-
tion by academics of a consciousness of their status and its changing
fortunes within medieval Western society.
123
LABOR AND VALUE SYSTEMS
124
How Did the Medieval University Conceive of Itself?
Besides differentiating itself from the monastic world, this new
social group of scholars more generally asserted that to live in any
way other than by its special profession and its own type of labor was
impossible and repellent: "At that time, an intolerable poverty forced
me more than ever in the direction of a school, since I was incapable
of working the land and ashamed to beg. Returning, therefore, to the
only trade I knew, I was forced to tum away from manual labor in
order to make use of my tongue."IS This is an important passage, the
refusal of manual labor and beggary foreshadowing the great con-
flicts and choices of the thirteenth century: "I do not work with my
hands," Rutebeuf would say.
For the "new students and scholars," the object of the quest was
thus pecunia et laus: 16 a wage, in one fonn or another,17 and glory.
Here we touch on two further elements of the group's consciousness,
its economic base and its professional morality.
This morality was in the first place a morale, a state of mind. Still
enmeshed in the moral conceptions of the day and the traditional list
of sins,I8 Abelard made no secret of the fact that the new group's
dignityl9 could easily be turned into glory-dedecus, gloria 2°-and
ultimately, pride, that superbia "which came to me particularly from
science and letters."21 The sin was merely a distortion of the pro-
fessional consciousness. By way of an Aristotelian theoretical treat-
ment, it would become, particularly in Sigerian circles in the thir-
teenth century, the magnanimity of the philosopher.
This last tenn, moreover, is indicative of the height of Abelard's
awareness of the specificity of the new group to which he belonged.
For a new group or type, consecration came in the fonn of a label.
The tenn philosopher also conveys the limitations, in several
senses of the word, of the medieval academic. It was the name by
which he preferred to be known-in itself worthy of a detailed
analysis which we must beg indulgence for not attempting here. We
shall confin~ ourselves to calling attention to the reference to the
ancients, to pagans or gentiles, and to the intellectual and metaphysi-
cal implications of the word. Along with the assertion of the primacy
of philosophy, the primacy of reason over authority was also being
proclaimed. In the word philosopher, Abelardian attitudes are
crystallized-"Outraged, I answered that it was not my habit to pro-
ceed by routine but rather by intelligence", 22 expressing opposition
to the old dialectic and the old philosophy. 23
Even when all due precautions are taken not to endow twelfth-
century vocabulary with an anachronistic sense and scope, we are
obliged to recognize the innovative, bold, and far-reaching character
of what has taken place here. When we look at Sigerian circles, we
will again find that the idea of the "philosopher" has made progress;
when it becomes appropriate, we will point out the word's overtones
125
LABOR AND VALUE SYSTEMS
126
How Did the Medieval University Conceive of Itself?
cleric than to lose himself in the study of belles-lettres, to sit with
book in hand. "35
Above all, he is conscious that the cleric must choose between
intellectual and manual labor, although his solution, as usual, is one
of moderate compromise. The passage in which he treats this prob-
lem is of special importance. 36 In the great debate over manual labor
which raged in the monastic world in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, he in effect adopted the attitude of the old monasticism.
Despite the concessions that had been made to manual labor, a fash-
ionable slogan in the twelfth century, this was in fact a hostile at-
titude, but in a clearly different perspective from that of a Rupert of
Deutz or a Peter the Venerable, who were mainly concerned with
defending the post-Benedictine and Cluniac tradition of a monastic
life devoted to the opus Dei, as opposed to the new monasticism. We
wiII see this modern perspective become established in the thir-
teenth century with the mendicants. The scholarly cleric's conscious-
ness of specialization sharply limited the part of manual labor in his
existence. Less trenchant, as always, than Abelard, Philip of Har-
vengt nevertheless agrees with him in this case that manual labor is
no longer the business (negotium) of the cleric us scolaris.
Finally, even in working out in his own fashion a reconciliation
and a sort of hierarchical relationship between the monastery and the
school, the cloister and the study, Philip of Harvengt carefully dis-
tinguished one from the other in yet another passage of far-reaching
consequence: "For clerics, the monastic cloister must be given pri-
mary importance ... Second place, however, should be given to at-
tending schools, love of which should lead the enlightened cleric to
reject secular things, so as not to embark insufficiently laden on the
cloister-vessel, in order not to be shipwrecked but rather to be in a
position to catch hold of the nearby bark or raft."37
Thus the antagonism between Saint Bernard and Philip of Har-
vengt went far deeper than the miscellany which brought them into
conflict. 38 The soldier-monk who came to Paris to try to entice the
students away, who held that the monastery was the only schola
Christi, who hurled anathema at Paris-Babylon,l9 was opposed to the
enlightened abbot who, besides trying to reconcile cloister and
school, recognized the usefulness, the necessity, and the specificity
of the latter and hailed the holy city of science-"merito dici possit
civitas Iitterarum"4o-Paris-Jerusalem.
The serious conflict between the mendicants and the secular clergy in
the thirteenth century reveals just how sharply conscious of their
existence as a body the Parisian academics had become. 41 Although
the debate was camouflaged with a cover of doctrinal questions, and
127
LABOR AND VALUE SYSTEMS
128
How Did the Medieval University Conceive of Itself?
then acquire what they need in the way of bodily necessities, such as
parchment for making books, leather for making shoes, etc. Could
they, moreover, receive gold and silver and metals with which they
might fashion coins and other precious things, with which they
might buy what they need? Some hold that no raw material may be
received as property, but labor may be lent to others who possess the
raw material only in order to obtain what is necessary for the lender.
This is because possession of the raw material received with an eye
to selling it constitutes possession of property. Others say that dis-
tinctions must be made among various raw materials. There are in
point of fact some raw materials which have no value, all value
stemming from the labor involved, such as, for example, curtains and
matting made from cane or similar material; such a raw material is
not part of anyone's fortune, and those holding this view say that
brothers may receive such raw material."
The argument is a traditional one in the monastic world, placing
the accent on the ars, or labor, and the craft. Once the material book
had been accepted, there was then a still stronger reason for accept-
ing its contents and the intellectual labor that it inevitably supported.
Saint Bonaventura, in the Epistola de tribus quaestionibus, was not
satisfied merely to legitimate the use of books and the pursuit of
learning. At the cost, at times, of surprising contradictions with the
letter of the Testament of Saint Francis itself, he limits the obligation
concerning active labor as much as possible, with the evident inten-
tion of safeguarding all the necessary time and attention for in-
tellectual work. 43
Similarly, both the essential activity of begging and intellectual
labor were absolved of the objection to manual labor. This was the
culmination of an important debate in which the earlier texts of
Abelard and Philip of Harvengt figured. Saint Thomas Aquinas, in
the face of attacks by William of Saint-Amour and his allies and
disciples, brought the controversy to a striking conclusion in his
Contra impugnantes. 44
With Saint Thomas, the necessity of specialization for the in-
tellectual worker was asserted in a plain and straightforward manner.
The academic had his trade. The job of working with one's hands
was to be left to others-it, too, had spiritual value---but the in-
tellectual worker was not to waste time in what was not his affair. In
this way, the division of labor was legitimated on the theoretical
plane and became the basis of academic specificity.
130
How Did the Medieval University Conceive of Itself?
philosopher the abortive ancestor of the sixteenth century
philosopher-that religious skeptic who would be the ideal of a
Charron, for example--or of the eighteenth-century philosophe. As
individual types and as a professional and intellectual group, the viri
philosophici of the MS Paris BN Lat. 14698 are effectively precursors of
the philosophes of the AufkHirung.
The philosophers were, of course, opposed in the first place to the
theologians (and this was also the rivalry of the "artist," the pure
academic, with the theologian);57 they were distinguished as well
from the homines profundi-pseudo-Iearned obscurantists attacked in
proposition 91 of 1277: "The philosopher's reason, when it demon-
strates that the motion of the heavens is eternal, is not guilty of
sophistry; it is surprising that some homines profundi do not see
this. "58
The philosophers were, of course, confident of their reason, or,
rather, of their intellectual virtues, which raised their estate above
others, but they were also aware that their dignity perhaps lay in
limiting themselves to certain demonstrable truths, and that their
vocation was to be satisfied to explain and not to preach. In "the
famous dialectical duel" between Saint Thomas Aquinas and Siger of
Brabant of which Father Gauthier speaks, 59 do we not perceive an
awareness on Siger's part of that scholarly neutrality that is so difficult
to achieve even today?
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LABOR AND VALUE SYSTEMS
and he ranks above all false healers the "masters in medicine who
have devoted all their time to the study of the books of those who
discovered and set forth medicine."
But what was the truth that the university taught? What light did it
spread, as the "beautiful, bright sun of France and all Christen-
dom,62 the beautiful, bright illumination of every holy Church and of
Christianity?"63
There were three ways of life: (a) the corporeal, carnal, personal life;
(b) the civil, political, or universal life; (c) the life of grace, divine or
spiritual. Of these three ways, however, "the first is ephemeral, the
second durable, the third etemal."64 The university, of course,
ministered to all three, in other words, to everything: corporeal life
was instructed by the faculty of medicine, political life by the facul-
ties of arts and decrees, and divine life by the faculty of theology. In
virtue of the hierarchy between the levels, however, a special value
was conferred on the second and third.
The intellectual role of the university, therefore, gave way to its
political and spiritual role. The political role, moreover, was defined
so as to be subordinated to basically spiritual ends. The university
"is conducive to freedom and independence for the people of France
and to the restoration, not of the material temple, but of the spiritual
and mystical temple which is the entire Holy Church. "65
The aim was, in fact, order and peace. Beyond the momentary goals
of national reconciliation of the faction-ridden French people and the
overall reconciliation of Christendom with the end of the Great
Schism, however, a more fundamental objective is evident, the pres-
ervation of the existing order. Gerson put it quite well to the
graduates in civillaw. 66 When he came, with a certain hesitancy, to
mention tyrants, his purpose, in the final analysis, was to con-
gratulate them for enforcing respect for property and order.67
The academics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries consciously
took their vocation to be that of discoverers, but their successors in
the fifteenth were satisfied to be conservatives. This accounts for a
persistent denigration of the intellectual and material aspects of the
academic profession, a far cry from the earlier notion of magnanim-
ity. Curiously, Gerson, when he appeared before the future jurists,
reduced the contribution of their discipline to the common good to a
purely negative utility, which existed only as a consequence of sin;
law and justice were only inevitable effects of evil: "In a primitive
state of nature, the Lord would have no need of jurists or canon
lawyers, just as He will have no need of them in the state of nature
glorified. "68 In conclusion, he adds that theology is superior to law.
The brief text in which he states his desire to resign his office of
132
How Did the Medieval University Conceive of Itself?
chancellor69 is at first sight a mere formality. But Gerson was sincere.
He held all the technical aspects of the academic profession in con-
tempt. He would rather be saying mass, praying, or meditating than
be doing administrative work.
Finally, he gave the students of the college of Navarre a singular
charter for conservatism. His praise of the "beaten path"70 is sur-
prising, even after one has become well versed in the writings of this
grandiloquent and mediocre conservative. Rereading his praise of
the physicians, we notice that his respect for them is merited only by
their bookish knowledge of the ancients. 0 Hippocrates! 0 Galen!
What was the university in his eyes? It had become a part of the
pageant of divine right, a daughter of the King and particularly of
Adam, come from the Earthly Paradise by way of the Hebrews,
Abraham's Egypt, Athens, and Rome. The translaho studii was
transformed into a law of succession by the grace of God. The craft
guild became a prince of the blood. 71
This accounts for the arrogance with which he treated those
boorish voices which had been brash enough to point out that the
university had a professional function: "And if someone says: What
does it [the university] want to get involved or mixed up in? To look
at books and study them is not very well advised, what good is
knowledge without action?"72
The Gersonian academic, then, had become aware of a new voca-
tion, on the whole political, but in a broader sense national and
international. The professional consciousness of the medieval
academic was changing, on the threshold of the modem world, into a
moral consciousness. What was the place of the academic in the
nation and in universal society? What values was he to assert, pro-
mote, and defend?
The product of a profound upheaval, had this new consciousness
fully penetrated the minds of academics of the period?
We can say, in any case, that by repudiating his professional con-
sciousness, the Gersonian academic deprived himself of the means to
exercise these new prerogatives. The university was reduced to a
mere caste. No doubt it was still open to new arrivals; Gerson insists
on the fact that the university of Paris, as a result of its recruitment
policies, was open to all classes and effectively represented the whole
society. It was nevertheless a caste by virtue of its mentality and
function. The corporation of book users had changed into a group of
repetitious theologians bent on setting themselves up as mental and
moral policemen, as book burners. They went so far as to bum Joan
of Arc-in spite of Gerson.
Apart from a few commendable efforts, they left it to the
133
LABOR AND VALUE SYSTEMS
134
THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE PUBLIC
AUTHORITIES IN THE MIDDLE AGES AND
TIlE RENAISSANCE
I GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS
135
LABOR AND VALUE SYSTEMS
136
The Universities and the Public Authorities
137
LABOR AND VALUE SYSTEMS
1.lR
The Universities and the Public Authorities
We have therefore chosen an approach determined by the charac-
teristics and functions of the universities. We will not try to disguise
the fact that this approach leads us to make rather abstract analytic
distinctions. Nevertheless, it seemed to us the best way to shed light
on the essential point, the nature and role of the academic world in
relation to the larger society of which it was a part, whether urban,
seigneurial, or national.
c) We have particularly endeavored to explicate these relations
through tensions and conflicts, which are particularly revealing of the
nature of the social groups and institutions in which they occur. We
do continue to bear in mind, however, that the relations between
universities and public authorities were not characterized solely by
antagonism, nor can they be reduced to a series of crises and strug-
gles. Instead, both partners mutually supported and sustained each
other, and their relations were marked by reciprocal services and
mutual respect which often triumphed over fundamental and cir-
cumstantial divergences.
1. Universities as Corporations
a) As corporations or guilds, medieval universities sought to obtain a
scholastic monopoly, primarily in the form of a monopoly on the
granting of degrees, as a result of which they came into conflict,
particularly in their early history, with ecclesiastical authority but
not with the public powers.
b) They subsequently sought legal autonomy, which they ob-
tained relatively easily from the public authorities. The latter gener-
ally followed the tradition inaugurated by Frederick Barbarossa in
1158 in the case of Bologna (authentic Habita, "source of all academic
freedoms"). In Paris, for example, the university's legal autonomy
was recognized by Philip Augustus as early as 1200, before it was
recognized by the papacy (which happened either in 1215 or possibly
as late as 1231).
c) To the extent that the university, like any other corporation,
aimed at controlling the scholastic trade, the public authorities could
only regard it as advantageous that there should be such an organi-
zation of the professional order fitted into the general public order.
d) With this view of things, the public authorities saw no dis-
advantage in granting special privileges to the academic corporation
as they did to other corporations. These included exemption from
watch duty and military service, which accorded, moreover, with the
"clerical" character of academics.
e) Just as municipal, seigneurial, or royal officials supervised other
139
LABOR AND VALUE SYSTEMS
140
The Universities and the Public Authorities
2. Universities as Centers of Professional Training
a) Academics were motivated either by a straightforward desire for
knowledge, or by an interest in pursuing a career which would bring
them honor or money, or by all of these at once. Nothing in this
implied necessary conflict with the public authorities, but rather the
opposite. In fact, the time of the founding and growth of the uni-
versities was a period of growth, specialization, and increasing
technical requirements in public offices. The faculties of medicine
were just one instance of a response to the increased efforts of the
authorities in the field of public health and sanitation following on
the growth of cities. After the Black Plague, the battle against
epidemic came to be considered an essential part of the role and
obligation of the public authorities. The academics' search for career
opportunities was met by an increased demand on the part of the
public powers.
b) The highly theoretical and bookish character of professional
training in the academy did not prevent it from responding to the
needs of the public authorities. The degree of specialization required
by public offices was in fact quite limited: the ability to read and
write, knowledge of Latin, and familiarity with legal principles or the
capacity to argue from certain texts were essential, along with some
elementary accounting principles and some still more rudimentary
economics (see De moneta by Nicole Oresme). Furthennore, a taste
for political theory on the part of princes and sovereigns, and even a
taste for "scientific" government, i.e., government inspired by
scholastic principles (d. the role of Aristotelianism at the court of
Charles V of France, and at the Polish court, and the role of Aris-
totelianism and Platonism or an amalgam of the two in the govern-
ment of the Italian oligarchies and seigneuries), coincided with the
intellectual tendencies of the academics.
c) Apart from the utilitarian aspect of academic work, its dis-
interested aspect was far from displeasing to the public authorities
and indeed seemed an essential part of their glory. Thus a consider-
able place was allowed intellectual prestige alongside the other fonns
of prestige which were vital to regimes half-utilitarian and half-
magical in character (see section 5 below).
d) The fact that the careers pursued by academics were still for the
most part ecclesiastical was also not regarded unfavorably by the
public authorities. In the first place this was because a large propor-
tion of public servants were still ecclesiastics: ecclesiastic and civil
officials were often indistinguishable. Second, the authorities were
also Christian, and religion and men of the cloth seemed useful and
necessary in themselves. Furthennore, it was rare that what was
useful to the Church was not in some way useful to the state: for
example, preachers or theologians trained by the universities to fight
141
LABOR AND VALUE SYSTEMS
142
The Universities and the Public Authorities
143
LABOR AND VALUE SYSTEMS
144
The Universities and the Public Authorities
145
LABOR AND VALUE SYSTEMS
political role; even the University of Prague was not called upon after
the decree of Kutna Hora to play an official political role in the Bohe-
mian kingdom; and so forth.
f) In conflicts with the public powers, universities used the pres-
tige element in conjunction with their most effective pressure tactic
and major weapon, the threat or the actuality of a strike or a secession.
This accounts for the bitterness surrounding the efforts of young
universities to win recognition of this right with the help of the
papacy, which was readily granted because the pope's interests were
in general not directly at stake.
6. Universities as Social Milieu
Ultimately, the basis of the relations between medieval universities
and the public authorities should be sought in the fact that the
medieval universities were a new kind of social milieu: a medieval
intelligentsia. The characteristics of this milieu, however, remain to
be determined by detailed studies.
a) Recruitment took place in every social category, but it is of great
importance to determine, as far as the documentation will allow,
what percentage of each university's membership in a given period
of its history was drawn from the various social categories, and what
careers were pursued by the members as a function of their social
origins. It is equally important to find out how the various categories
within the academic community were structured: poor and non-
poor, masters and students, members of the various faculties, etc.
Only then will it be possible to make a comparative study of the
social structure of the academic community with that of the sur-
rounding society, which will enable us to understand their relations
in sociological terms.
b) The academic milieu was a temporary social group; except for a
small minority, academics eventually left the university. A series of
statistical studies of the careers pursued by graduates is needed:
How many actually took degrees, !;tow many remained in the univer-
sity, what became of those who left? Only then will it be possible to
evaluate the return on capital invested by the public authorities in
financial, legal, and moral aid to the universities.
c) It was also an international milieu; here again, we must know
how the nationalities were distributed initially (upon recruitment)
and ultimately (in the various careers of the graduates) in order to
clarify the relations between the universities and political organs.
d) Finally, we should like to be able to evaluate the cohesiveness
and homogeneity of this medieval intelligentsia and define its
essential characteristics, in order to determine what it contributed to
political institutions: competence, prestige, opposition? Was the
academic "estate," which offered most of its members a means to a
146
The Universities and the Public Authorities
147
LABOR AND VALUE SYSTEMS
148
The Universities and the Public Authorities
the universities changed their role and social character. Rather than
crucibles in which a new intelligentsia was produced, they became
centers of social education, which trained the future members of the
group that formed the administrative and social backbone of the
modem state and, before long, of absolute monarchy. Although it is
not easy to determine what was cause and what effect of the chang-
ing role of the university, the social origin of the academic class, or,
in any case, of the student body, seems to have changed considerably
during the Renaissance ("seems," because although the documenta-
tion for the Renaissance is much richer than for the Middle Ages,
detailed studies are lacking to an even greater degree for the later
period, so great is the historian's fascination with periods marked by
beginnings. The proportion of academics of bourgeois and particu-
larly of noble origin greatly increased, which again shows the in-
volvement of the universities with the ruling social groups of the age of
monarchy.
i) Thus the Renaissance witnessed a domestication of the uni-
versities by the public authorities, which significantly reduced the
number of potential causes of conflict. Subsequent disputes were
limited to minor issues relating particularly to questions of material
interest and corporate prerogative on the local level and to religious
problems and matters of intellectual administration on the national
level.
CONCLUSION
149
III
153
HIGH CULTURE AND POPULAR CULTURE
154
Clerical Culture and Folklore Traditions
traction and bureaucratic expansion brought about the rise of those
urban classes in which Christianity was already strong. Their rise led
to the Christian breakthrough. When Christianity's triumph took
shape, however, the classes that had carried it forward were declin-
ing. Christianity survived the collapse of the fragile superstructures
of the Late Empire, but only by separating itself from the classes
that had assured its success, which were destined to disappear with
the movement of history. Their social role was taken over by the
aristocracy, and then by the peasant masses, which gave roots to
Christianity, but at the price of a good deal of distortion, particularly
noticeable in the cultural area. Christianity was caught between a
clergy increasingly colonized by an aristocracy formed on Greco-
Roman paideia 10 and a mainly rural lay population, which was ren-
dered increasingly vulnerable to the advance of a renascent primitive
culture by the decline of official paganism. Established by moribund
urban social categories, would the Christian religion succeed in de-
fining itself within a common culture through a subtle interplay of
internal acculturations?11
155
HIGH CULTURE AND POPULAR CULTURE
156
Clerical Culture and Folklore Traditions
attitudes toward miracles, cults of relics, use of phylacteries, etc.).
b) Such acceptance was a practical and tactical necessity for
evangelical purposes. Evangelization demanded that the clerics make
some effort to adapt culturally: language (sermo rusticus), use of oral
forms (sermons, chants), certain kinds of ceremony (liturgical cul-
ture, procession&--the Rogation days18 and processions instituted by
Gregory the Great),19 and satisfaction of "client" requests (miracles
"to order").
Ecclesiastical culture frequently had to take its place within the
framework of folkloric culture: the location of churches and chapels,
pagan functions bequeathed to Christian saints, etc.
The essential point, however, is that folkloric culture was refused
by ecclesiastical culture:
a) By destruction. The many destructions of temples and idols were
mirrored in literature by a proscription of distinctively folkloric
themes, of which there is no more than a scanty harvest even in
hagiographic literature, which a priori one would expect to enjoy a
special position in this respect. The yield is even smaller if folkloric
themes from the Bible are eliminated (it is important in this connec-
tion to distinguish between the Old Testament tradition, rich in
folkloric motifs, and the New Testament tradition, in which they are
rare). Furthermore, we must be careful to identify the various
chronological layers in hagiographic tales due to a series of revisions.
Certain writers (such as P. Sa.intyves, En marge de la Ugende doree, or
H. Gunther, Psychologie de la legende) have not gone far enough in
distinguishing these strata and have therefore tended to trace certain
elements of folklore back to the very early Middle Ages, when in fact
they were introduced in Carolingian times or during the great wave
of folklore of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which crests in
Jacobus da Varagine's Golden Legend.
b) By obliteration. The superimposition of Christian themes, prac-
tices, monuments, and characters on pagan predecessors was not a
"continuation" but an abolition. Clerical culture covered over, hid,
and blotted out folkloric culture.
c) By adulteration. This was probably the most important tactic in
the battle against folkloric culture: the themes of folklore radically
changed their meaning in their new Christian form (consider the
dragon, e.g., in Fortunatus' Vita Marcelli; 20 or the phantoms in Con-
stantius of Lyons's Vita Germani, in comparison with the Greco-
Roman model in Pliny the Younger and the theme from folklore of
the unburied dead).21 Even the essential nature of a theme might be
altered (e.g., saints became mere auxiliaries in miracle-working, as
only God could perform miracles).22
The real cultural gap was between the fundamental ambiguity and
157
HIGH CULTURE AND POPULAR CULTURE
lSi!
ECCLESIASTICAL CULTURE AND FOLKLORE
IN THE MIDDLE AGES: SAINT MARCELLUS
OF PARIS AND THE DRAGON
159
HIGH CULTURE AND POPULAR CULTURE
bishop can wash his hands. The water turns to wine and swells in
volume to the point where the bishop is able to give communion to
all present; the author of the miracle is made a deacon. In the third
miracle, which does not represent a qualitative advance ("miraculum
secundum ordine non honore," Vita VII), Marcellus is surrounded by
a sacerdotal scent. As part of his liturgical duties, he once again offers
water to his bishop, and this time it begins to give off a fragrance like
holy chrism, as a result of which Marcellus becomes a priest. No
doubt because the bishop has shown some unwillingness to rec-
ognize Marcellus' miracles, he himself has to be the beneficiary of
the next one in order to put an end to his hostility and hesitancy.
Having fallen mute, he regains the power of speech through his
priest's miraculous powers. The priest is at last judged worthy-in
spite of his obscure birth-to succeed as bishop (Vita VIII). As
bishop, Marcellus accomplishes the great deeds the era demanded of
its ecclesiastical chiefs, who had become protectors of their flocks in
virtually every area: he goes on to bring about a twofold miraculous
liberation by causing the chains to fall from a prisoner, liberating
him physically, and by delivering the bound man, who is possessed
as well, from sin, thus liberating him spiritually (Vita IX).
Finally we come to the crowning achievement of Saint Marcellus'
career-worldly and spiritual, social and religious, ecclesiastic and
miraculous in one (Vita X): "We come to that triumphant miracle
(mystery) which, though it is the last in time, is the first in value." A
monster-a serpent-dragon-that has been terrorizing the populace
in the environs of Paris is driven away by the holy bishop, who, in a
dramatic confrontation with the beast before the eyes of his people,
subjects it to his supernatural powers and causes it to disappear.
The hagiography tells us that this last great deed has survived in
the collective memory. And in a collection of miracles made slightly
after Fortunatus' account and about a century and a half after the
death of Marcellus, Gregory of Tours reports this one miracle of a
saint to whom he pays no further attention. 4
The cult of Saint Marcellus would seem, then, to have had a prom-
ising future in store. Yet from the outset this cult was limited to a
local area. One obstacle to its spread was the veneration of other
saints of the same name, among them the saintly Pope Marcellus
(probably martyred under Maxentius in 309) and Saint Marcellus of
Chalon, whose cult competed with that of Marcellus of Paris in the
Parisian region itself. 5
As a Parisian saint, Marcellus appeared to be successful. Although
the history of his cult--even apart from its traditional dragon, the
object of this study-is full of obscurities and legeltds, we know that
the site of his last miracle was the location of his tomb and of a
160
Ecclesiastical Culture and Folklore
suburban church dedicated to him. According to tradition, this was
"the first church" of Paris; even today, it gives its name to one of the
most active districts in the history of Paris, in both the economic and
the political sense: the faubourg Saint-Marcel. 6 At a date not easy to
determine between the tenth and twelfth centuries, his relics were
transported, perhaps in connection with an epidemic of Saint An-
thony's fire, to the cathedral of Notre-Dame,7 where they sub-
sequently played a leading role in Parisian worship. Together with
the relics of Saint Genevieve, with which they were always exhibited
in tandem, they remained until the Revolution the most popular of
Paris's protectors. Even the important relics for which Saint Louis
built the Sainte-Chapelle were unable to supplant them in the senti-
ments of pious Parisians. 8 Along with Saint Genevieve and Saint
Denis, Marcellus became a patron saint of Paris; he was consequently
attributed a legendary house, naturally located on the Be de la Cite. 9
As late as the seventeenth century, Le Nain de Tillemont could ad-
mire Saint Marcellus' historical success: "Neither the great length of
time," he wrote, "nor the fame of his successors has been able to
prevent the (Parisian) Church's reverence for him from surpassing its
reverence for all others, and it considers him its first patron and
protector after Saint Denis."lo
It was not long thereafter, however, before Marcellus returned to
virtually total obscurity. His cult began to wane in the eighteenth
century, and after the Revolution he fell victim to the progressive
purification of the religion, which in Paris saw a decline of local
piety; after many centuries, Saint Marcellus was finally eclipsed by
Saint Denis and Saint Genevieve. His dragon, as we shall see, was
one of the first victims of his disgrace, and since the nineteenth
century it has rarely been cited among the dragons of hagiography
and folklore whose fortunes it long shared.
In that case, what is the point of bringing it back to life in this
scholarly essay? Quite simply, it is a case which, though apparently
quite banal if judged by a quick glance at Fortunatus' text and its
medieval posterity, turns out on closer examination to be complex,
instructive, and perhaps exemplary.
At first sight, there is nothing very original about the two forms in
which Saint Marcellus' dragon appears in medieval history. In its
sixth-century literary form in Fortunatus' text, it seems to be no more
than one of those dragons which served as attributes for a good many
saints, particularly evangelical bishop-saints, symbolizing the devil
and paganism. Mter a certain date, probably not before the twelfth
century and in any case between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries,
it becomes merely one of the processional dragons paraded almost
everywhere in the liturgy of the Rogation days.
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HIGH CULTURE AND POPULAR CULTURE
162
Ecclesiastical Culture and Folklore
tale of combat a bravura piece which must have delighted the
Ravenna-trained author, as well as readers still nostalgic for circus
games and antique triumphs and quite willing to substitute a Chris-
tian arena. From this Christian gladiatorial combat, we shall single
out only the type of relationship it defined between saint and
monster.
Finally, we should point out in passing the comparison Fortunatus
makes between Pope Sylvester's taming of a dragon in Rome t3 and
the Parisian episode he is recounting. A historian of nationalist sen-
timent might see the comparison as one of the earliest medieval
expressions of a Christian Gallic patriotism. We are interested in this
analogy only insofar as it shows that the author was to some extent
aware that the story he was telling was typical of a genre and not an
isolated case.
Before analyzing the episode in terms of the question that interests
us--viz., what does the dragon signify in this text?-we should take
care to rule out one hypothesis which, if true, would make our study
useless: the historical reality of the episode in the narrative. If the
dragon of which Saint Marcellus rid the Parisians really existed, this
essay is pointless. By dragon, of course, we mean a serpent, a real
animal, but one of such extraordinary size that, in the imagination of
the native populace and of posterity, it has the character of a monster
which only a person endowed with supernatural powers could sub-
due, by miraculous means.
We know that such a hypothesis has been put forward to cover all
cases of this sort; and in Paris itself, Saint Marcellus' dragon was
concretely interpreted, by the clergy anyway, in this manner. In-
deed, on the eve of the Revolution, a stuffed animal-a giant serpent,
crocodile, or lizard-was suspended from the vaults of Saint Marcel-
lus' Church in the Paris faubourg of the same name,14 having been
donated, perhaps, by a traveler originally from the parish and evi-
dently intended to embody Saint Marcellus' dragon in a realistic and
scientific fashion. It should be noted that the clergy of the Ancien
Regime favored such scientistic interpretation, which was to be con-
tinued by the rationalist mythologists and folklorists of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such explanations were applied
to Saint Marcellus' dragon, among others, by Eusebe Salverte. An
article by Salverte, originally entitled "Legendes du Moyen Age---
serpents monstrueux," 15 and revised under the title "Des dragons et
des serpents monstrueux qui figurent dans un grand nombre de
recits fabuleux ou historiques," 16 was incorporated in his work Des
sciences occultes ou Essai sur la magie, les prodiges et les miracles. The
third edition, in 1856, bore an Introduction by Emile Littre, the mere
mention of whose name is enough to disclose the positivist spirit of
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HIGH CULTURE AND POPULAR CULTURE
the work.17 Louis Dumont, among others,18 has refuted this scien-
tistic, pseudo-scientific theory, which he calls naturalistic and is ap-
plicable only to a very limited number of legendary occurrences. 19
Monstrous animals, particularly dragons, are real legendary
phenomena. It is impossible to explain them scientifically in the
framework of a purely positivist scientism. Phenomena of civiliza-
tion are involved, which history can attempt to explain only with the
aid of folklore, ethnography, and the history of religion. Such beasts
are facts ascribable to a collective mentality,2° which does not mean
that they stand outside time and history. Their actuality, however,
lies in the depths of the psyche; the pace of their chronological devel-
opment is not identical with the pace of traditional history.
The first thing one notices in Fortunatus' text is a total absence of
symbolic interpretation by the author. The saint's victory over the
dragon is material, psychological, and social in nature, not religious.
It is a triumph that comforts the terrorized populace ("perterriti
homines," "hinc comfortatus populus"). The dragon-slaying bishop
here appears in his worldly role as chief of an urban community
rather than in his spiritual role as pastor. He is the bulwark of the
nation (propugnaculum patriae), vanquisher of the public enemy
(inimicus publicus). Mention is made of his religious character only in
order to bring in a theme dear to Christian hagiography since the late
fourth century: with public institutions in disarray, the vir sanctus is
able to mitigate their deficiencies with his spiritual weapons, private
rather than public but placed at the disposal of the civil community.
The arma privata serve to protect the cives; the insignificant bishop's
crook turns out to be a potent weapon, owing to the material trans-
formation brought about by the saint's miraculous power-"In his
light staff the weight of miraculous power was displayed"; Marcel-
lus' frail fingers became as solid as chains: "cuius molles digiti fuer-
unt catenae serpentis."
Thus it is in his civic rather than in his religious role that Marcellus
is shown triumphing over the dragon. As for the beast, its nature is
as vague as the episcopus Marcellus' is precise. Three times it is re-
ferred to as bestia, which evokes the combat of the bestiarius, the
gladiator; once it is called belua, alluding to the extraordinary size
and ferocity of the monster; four times the term used is serpens and
once coluber, its poetic equivalent; it is called draco on only three
occasions. By contrast, certain of the monster's physical peculiarities
are emphasized: its bulk ("serpens immanissimus," "ingentem be-
luam," "vasta mole"); and the three parts of its body, the sinuous
curves ("sinuosis anfractibus") connecting two clearly individu-
alized extremities, head and tail, at first held erect and threatening,
later lowered in defeat ("cauda flagellante," "capite supplici,"
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"blandiente cauda"). One particular point on the body is stressed by
the narrator: the nape of the neck is the point at which the beast will
be miraculously subdued. The saintly tamer, having struck the
beast's head three times with his staff, subdues it by putting his stole
around the nape ("missa in ceIVice serpentis orario"). These are cru-
cial details, because they establish the symbolism of the creature, the
heraldic stylization of its body, and at the same time a ceremonial
and ritual of subjection. We shall return to this point. 21
There is one further sentence in the story that forces us to go
beyond the symbolism of the beast and its taming in search of a
meaning hidden behind a piece of descriptive detail: "Thus, it came
to pass that in this spiritual circus, with the people as spectators, he
single-handedly fought the dragon." The spectacle described is
merely the double of another, truer spectacle. We must now leave the
material circus and place ourselves in its spiritual counterpart.
Between the time of Marcellus' death and the writing of his Vita by
Fortunatus, what possible meanings could this arena and combat
have had? We shall neglect for the moment the problem of whether
there was a change of interpretation from the mid-fifth to the late
sixth century, and, similarly, in passing from oral legend to literary
biography.
Since Venantius Fortunatus' work belongs to a well-defined liter-
ary genre of the era, hagiography,22 it is important that we first
investigate what significance combat with dragons had in Christian
and particularly hagiographic literature at the end of the sixth cen-
tury. Then we may proceed to consider how this hagiographic cliche
could have been applied to a story Fortunatus was supposed to have
heard at the time of his inquiries in Paris.
Since the Bible is the prime source of all Christian literature, it is
there that we should first look for dragons or serpents likely to be
taken for dragons.2J There are a good many in the Old Testament.
Three of them stand out: the serpent-tempter of Genesis (3);24 and
Behemoth and Leviathan, more harshly treated by Isaiah (27:1), who
identifies them as serpents, than in Job (40-41), where no animal
name is given them. 25 More individualized dragons are found
thrashing about in the psalms. 26 Finally, although the Gospels ne-
glect the dragon, the Book of Revelation gives it a decisive lift. This
text was to provide the medieval imagination with the most extraor-
dinary arsenal of symbols,27 and it was here that the dragon was
given the interpretation which would hold sway over medieval
Christendom. This dragon is the serpent of Genesis, man's old
enemy, the devil, Satan: "the great dragon ... that old serpent, called
the Devil, and Satan" (12:9). It was destined to become the dragon of
ecclesiastical literature. It would relegate the other dragons, whose
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existence the Book of Revelation does not deny, to the shadows and
become the great dragon, the dragon par excellence, leader of the rest
and incarnation of all the world's evil: Satan. •
Had the Book of Revelation's version of the dragon become the
usual one among Christian authors by the end of the sixth century?28
We shall inquire of two authorities: Saint Augustine and, though he
follows Fortunatus by about half a century, Isidore of Seville, the first
encyclopedist of the Middle Ages. We hope the reader will allow us
to extend this rapid survey as far as Bede, the last of the "founders"
of the Middle Ages, to use E. K. Rand's tenn, because the cultural
. 'world of the clerics did not change before the middle of the 'eighth
century. Saint Augustine paid little attention to the dragon. As an
exegete, he was obliged only to explain the word's meaning as it
occurred in the Bible. It is primarily in his Commentary on the Psalms
(Enarratio in Psalmos) that he treats the dragon. He was aware of its
identification with Satan and used it to explain Ps. 91:13, "the young
lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet," and Ps. 104:26,
"There is that leviathan whom thou hast made to play therein."
Augustine saw "our ancient enemy" in the dragon. 29 The interpreta-
tion of the dragons in Psalm 148 proved more embarrassing. In this
text, the Psalmist exhorts all creation to sing the Lord's praise and
invites the dragons to join the choir: "Praise the Lord from the
earth 30 ye dragons and all deeps" (148:7). Aware of the contradiction
in haVing God praised by creatures whose evil and rebellious nature
is known from other passages, Augustine overcame the difficulty by
explaining that here the Psalmist is referring to. dragons only as the
largest living creatures on Earth ("majora non sunt super terram").
Filled with admiration for the powers of a God capable of creating
such immense beings, it is man himself who associates dragons with
the hymn that the world, by its mere existence, offers the Lord. 31 The
dragon thus figures here in a basically realistic, scientific, fonn: it is
the largest animal.
The early medieval commentators on the Book of Revelation were
led quite naturally to identify the dragon with the devil. For example,
Cassiodorus,32 Primasius, bishop of Hadrumetum (d. 586),33 and
Bede all identify the devil with the serpent of Genesis as well as with
the dragon of the Book of RevelationY
Isidore of Seville, however, treats the dragon in an essentially sci-
entific rather than symbolic manner. He is "the largest of all the
animals": "the dragon is the largest of the serpents and land ani-
mals."3s Two important details of its behavior are noted: it is an
animal at home both underground and in the air, which likes to leave
its hiding places in caves to fly through the air; and its strength lies
not in its mouth and teeth but in its tail. 36 Two scientific problems of
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the dragon concern Isidore. First, what distinguishes the dragon
from similar animals, primarily the serpent? The answer seems clear.
Using mainly Vergil, Isidore establishes the difference between an-
guis, serpens, and draco: anguis lives in the sea, the serpent on earth,
the dragon in the air.37 This brings him to the second problem: what
is the dragon's habitat? He cannot ignore the variety of elements in
which the dragon lives and moves about, in particular its con-
nections with water, which do not appear in either of the two defini-
tions above. This leads him to identify a special type of dragon: the
sea dragon, draco marinus. 38
On the other hand, the dragon carries no moral or religious sym-
bolism in Isidore. In a passage from the Sententiae (III, v, 28; PL
LXXXIII, 665) he lists the animal fonns taken on by the devil when he
embodies one of the deadly sins: animal, not further specified, when
he takes the fonn of lust (luxuria), serpent (serpens) when he changes
into greed or malice (cupiditas ac nocendi malitia), or bird (avis)
when he is pride (superbiae ruina). The dragon is not among these
fonns. Nevertheless, Isidore, the compleat scholar, was aware of
other aspects of the dragon which we do not think very useful for
understanding Fortunatus' text yet are invaluable additions to the
dossier on the dragon we are assembling here. He knows of three
other dragons: the guardian dragon that watches over the golden
apples in the garden of the Hesperides;3Q the banner-dragon of mili-
tary emblems, used by the Greeks and Romans, as Isidore recalls,
claiming that its origin dates from the ceremony commemorating
Apollo's victory over the serpent Python;40 and the ring-shaped dra-
gon which, because it is biting its own tail, can represent the year-
round or circular time, the time of eternal recurrence, which Isidore
says was invented by old civilizations, specifically Egypt.41
Finally, Isidore knows of a battle between a bishop and a dragon.
He cites the case of Donatus, bishop of Epirus at the time of the
emperors Arcadus and Honorius. Donatus was said to have killed an
enonnous dragon whose breath made the air stink, and whose
weight caused a great deal of trouble for the eight teams of oxen
which dragged the body to the pyre where it was burned. 42 Isidore
does not interpret this great deed symbolically.
It is very difficult to compile a chronological catalogue of the battles
waged by saints, and more particularly by bishops, against dra-
gons. Existing works are both imprecise and untrustworthy.43 The
historian of traditional civilization who wishes to take such deeds
into account has to make his way uneasily between the positivists,
who neglect this sort of phenomenon or subject it to inadequate
methods, and the parahistorians, who, out of contempt, naivete,
myopic erudition, and muddle-headed curiosity, forget chronology
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that the progress of these Far Eastern dragons along the routes of the
steppes brought them to the West during the Merovingian era. De-
veloping an idea of Forrer,59 Edouard Salin has analyzed Merovin-
gian art forms to show the arrival in the West of the Asiatic dragon.
He has laid stress on two important characteristics of its symbolism:
polyvalence and ambiguity. "The Merovingian dragon takes diverse
forms; its symbolism is no less diverse; very likely it represented
equally diverse beliefs, just as it reproduced quite different di-
vinities."60 He continues: "Usually solar i!l character when they are
akin to the griffin and chthonic when they derive from the serpent,
the representations of the variously benevolent or malevolent dra-
gons ultimately appear to be the legacy of beliefs almost as old as the
world, from the Orient through Eurasia to the West."61
In this complex of traditions and beliefs we should attempt to
isolate the part due to indigenous traditions, separating it from the
Greco-Roman legacy and the Asiatico-Barbarian contribution. H we
take the Celtic world as a whole, certain areas were swarming with
dragons;62 in Ireland, for instance, saints had to devote themselves
especially to combating them. 63 Gallic beliefs and symbols, however,
do not seem to have been rich in dragons, although the chthonic
serpent was accepted as an attribute of gods and goddesses64 and
was killed by the Gallic Hercules, Smertrios, the "Provider."65
Underlying all these traditions, do we not find the quasi-universal
serpent-dragon common to all primitive beliefs and myths? Was not
the Merovingian dragon above all a monster of folklore 66 which had
resurfaced during an interregnum between two beliefs, when pagan
culture was fading before the Christian cultural system had really
taken root?67 It may indeed have been the Christian, ecclesiastical
interpretation of Saint Marcellus' dragon that Fortunatus was
sketching, but did not this creature have a different significance in
the oral tradition from which he drew? Should we not try to find out
what this significance was by looking into the depths of a renascent
folklore, laden with bits of earlier cultures that had been turned into
folklore and brought up to date under the impact of new historical
conditions? Underlying the legend reported by Fortunatus is the
image of a miracle worker who has tamed an awesome power. This
power is related to nature. There is ambiguity in the tale between a
chthonic animal (serpent) and a more or less aquatic one (dragon),
inasmuch as the saint orders it to disappear either into the desert or
into the sea. Of course, given the Parisian geographic setting, the
"sea" was no doubt taken from a hagiographic model copied by
Fortunatus with no serious effort at adaptation. Still, should we not
explain this borrowing by the fact that it was relatively appropriate
in a similar context, indeed an aquatic one, which G. Elliott Smith
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locale and lose himself in one of these wastes.72 May we not look
upon this text as evidence of an early example of medieval construc-
tion, after a hesitant clearing of land and installation of rudimentary
drainage, under the aegis of a bishop-entrepreneur who was also a
spiritual pastor and political leader?73 It is also the creation of an
early medieval community, instituted by the preparation of urban
and suburban sites to be inhabited by a body of citizen-faithful
(cives) near a road of some importance. 74
This is not the only text in which Fortunatus narrates the story of a
saint who performs a miracle that rids a region of monsters and turns
it to productive use. .
In the life of Saint Hilary, 75 Fortunatus tells how the saint comes to
pass close by the Isle of Gallinaria, opposite Albenga on the Ligurian
coast, and is warned by coastal dwellers that it is impossible to settle
on the island because of the enormous serpents infesting it ("in-
gentia serpentium volumina sine numero pervagari"). Like Marcel-
lus, Hillary goes forth bravely to do battle with the wild beasts ("vir
dei sentiens sibi de bestiali pugna venire victoriam"). The serpents
flee at the sight of him, and he uses his bishop's crook as a marker to
divide the island into two parts: one that the serpents are forbidden
to enter, the other where they may remain free. More clearly than in
the case of Saint Marcellus, we have here a dangerous monster, sym-
bol of hostile nature, being contained and tamed rather than annihi-
lated. 76 Here, too, the serpents are told that if they do not wish to
respect the division established by the saint, they always have the
sea, which in this case really is at hand.
As in the life of Saint Marcellus, the author's discussion turns the
interpretation toward a diabolical symbolism. Fortunatus points out
that Christ, the second Adam, is greatly superior to the first, because
rather than obey the serpent he has servants, like the saint, capable
of giving it orders. 77 Once again the allusion is not further explained.
By contrast, the conclusion is purely materialist and incontestably
makes Hilary a "civilizing hero": "He increased the territory avail-
able to man, for on the animal's land man came to settle."
Even if our hypothesis concerning the symbolism and significance
of Saint Marcellus' battle with the dragon is rejected, it is nonetheless
true that ecclesiastical writers in sixth-century Gaul did not succeed
in completely masking a symbolism quite different from the Chris-
tian when they attempted to Christianize the legends of the dragon-
slaying saints by identifying the vanquished serpent or dragon with
the devil. Besides the contributions of various pre-Christian cul-
tures, this complex symbolism seems to reveal a traditional fund of
folklore. It appears in relation to a system ·of mental responses and
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Six centuries later, Saint Marcellus and his dragon reappear. At the
end of the twelfth century, a sculpture clearly inspired by Fortunatus'
text and depicting the scene we have just analyzed was in evidence at
the cathedral of Notre-Dame. We have good reason to believe, fur-
thermore, that from this time forward Saint Marcellus and his dragon
figured in the Rogation Day processions which took place in the
vicinity of Notre-Dame. What had become of our heroes-and what
was the dragon's new meaning?
It will be useful first to sketch out the major developments in
dragon symbolism between the sixth and twelfth centuries.
In one of the principal works bequeathed to the Romanesque faith
by the early Middle Ages, the Moralia in Job by Gregory the Great, the
Old Testament's Leviathan is identified with Satan. 78 In the ninth
century Rabanus Maurus gave Christian encyclopedism its polished
form. We know that he drew heavily on Isidore of Seville. The dif-
ferences between them are only more significant as a result. The
abbot of Fulda treats the dragon in his chapter on serpents. 79 The
first portion is scientific: the dragon is the largest of all the serpents,
indeed of all the beasts. It frequently emerges from its cave to fly
through the air. It has a crest on its head and breathes and darts its
tongue from its tiny mouth. Its strength lies not in its teeth but in its
tail. It is untrue that its poison is to be feared. The article quickly
moves on to another level-mystical significance. 8o Here, the inter-
pretation is clear: the dragon is the devil or his ministers or the
wicked persecutors of the Church. Scripture is cited in support of
this interpretaiton: the Psalms, Job, the Revelation of Saint John. The
occurrence of both singular and plural forms in these texts leads to
the explanation that the dragon may signify evil spirits as well as the
devil: "a dragon" is Satan, "the dragons" are his henchmen.
In Romanesque iconography, it is this diabolical dragon, dedi-
cated to evil, that holds sway.81 The naturalistic current stemming
from Isidore and reinforced by the increasing influence of the
Physiologus 82 on the bestiaries allowed the sculptor or miniaturist
some freedom in depicting the crest, scales, and tail. The dragon
nevertheless continued to serve as a malefic symbol and came to
merge with the tradition of Satan-Leviathan which started with Greg-
ory the Great and became established in the best-known commen-
taries on the Book of Job, such as Odo of Cluny'S or Bruno of Asti's.
Ultimately, it was Honorius Augustodunensis who synthesized the
mystico-allegorical current and the pseudo-scientific current. 83 Even
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where it was not the seven-headed dragon of Revelations,84 the
Romanesque dragon was evil.
There were two reasons for the dragon's success in Romanesque
art, which may be identified with the twin roots of all such art,
aesthetics and symbolism. Making use of the legacy of Irish art and
the art of the steppes, Romanesque forms took advantage of the
dragon's flexible body. It was the perfect theme for a Romanesque
artist bent on satisfying the canon laid down by Henri Focillon: "the
law of the greatest number of contacts with the frame." 8S Further-
more, since evil was omnipresent in the Romanesque world, dragons
abound on every page of manuscript, every block of sculpted stone,86
every piece of forged metal.
The Romanesque, however, was the world of psychomachy, the
battle of virtue and vice, good and evil, righteousness and wicked-
ness. Individuals and classes rose up as champions of God against
Satan and his accomplices, the dragons. In Carolingian times, the
supreme dragon fighter, Saint Michael, had attacked the beast in a
new Christian mythology of salvation;87 now the knights came to
join the clergy in fighting the monster. Beginning in the eleventh
century, Saint George, who arrived from the Orient before the
Crusades to lend a hand, ideologically speaking, to the military aris-
tocracy in its social ascent, won an unending series of victories over
one dragon after another, in the name of all knights. More than once,
though, a real but anonymous knight, armored from head to toe,
would attack the monster, sometimes even dismounting to fight it on
foot, like the knight who is finishing his battle in stone, at the Musee
de Gadagne in Lyons. 88 Among these fearless warriors, bishops oc-
cupy a distinguished place, just as in the heroic period of evangeli-
zation, but now openly symbolic. It is a rare bishop's crook that does
not hold captive in its curved head a defeated dragon, offering its
twisted body to the goldsmith's triumphant skill and the prelate's
symbolic power.
The advance of funerary art in the Romanesque and Gothic periods
offered the vanquished dragon a new career. It was allowed to sleep
at the feet of its vanquishers, whose victory was thus immortalized
in stone. Bishops like Hugh of Fouilloy at Chartres89 and even lay
lords like Haymo, count of CorbeiL <)0 thus used the dragon as a
symbolic cushion. Apart from the diabolical symbolism here, may
we not read this as another instance of the symbolic victory of the
civilizing hero, the cathedral builder or land clearer, organizer of the
feudal order?
Dragons were not always so docile in the Romanesque world. They
forced their way into the dreams of heroes, haunting their nights
with terrifying apparitions. The frightened Charlemagne of the
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are from the thirteenth century. In all probability, the pier belongs to
the "archaic" period. 102
Regardless of such details, the Saint Marcellus of the Saint Anne
portal clearly fits into the program of the facade. 10J In this sculpted
triptych, the central panel is dedicated to Christ and represents
man's destiny, progressing toward the Last Judgment by way of the
struggle between vice and virtue and the mediation of the New Tes-
tament, embodied by the apostles. The two flanking panels are dedi-
cated to the Virgin Mary. On the left, however, the crowned Virgin
plays the role of patroness of the liturgical cycle. It is the triumph of
Maria Ecclesia, gathering together the occupations of the months,
and, according to Adolph Katzenellenbogen's formulation, a series of
characters drawn from throughout ecclesiastical history. Thus we
find Saint Michael laying the dragon low, along with important per-
sonages in the history of the Church and traditional Parisian piety:
Constantine with a figure that is probably Saint Sylvester; Saint
Stephen, protomartyr and patron of the First Parisian cathedral;
and Saint Denis and Saint Genevieve.
The Saint Anne portal contains a more chronological and narrative
history, placed under the patronage of the Virgin Mother enthroned
together with the holy infant. On the lintel the Virgin's life is told,
from the story of her parents Anne and Joachim to the final episode of
the birth: the visit of the three magi. On the archways and piers are
biblical characters: kings and queens, prophets, the elders of the
Book of Revelation (4:4), up to the consolidation of the Church with
Saint Peter and Saint Paul; this is a portal of precursors. But this is
also where the cathedral's individuality appears. On the tympanum
are its founders, Bishop Maurice of Sully on the left, King Louis VII
on the right. Finally, on the pier, we find Saint Marcellus, the Pari-
sian patron who, in the fullest sense, belongs to the cathedral, since
his relics are preserved within. Thus Marcellus, more than Saint
Denis or Saint Genevieve, represents the Parisian church at Notre-
Dame, the Parisian episcopal see, and the Parisian Christian com-
munity. Head of his flock, the bishop whose character was drawn
and justified in Fortunatus' Vita here achieves the natural culmina-
tion of his triumph and local significance.
It is clear that at the behest of his commissioners the sculptor who
carved Saint Marcellus on the Saint Anne portal has followed For-
tunatus' text. The lower part of the group, in fact, contains a repre-
sentation of the sarcophagus containing the body of the adulterous
woman, with the dragon escaping from it. 104 The battle between
saint and monster is reduced to the moment of triumph. No doubt
technical requirements outweighed iconographic significance: the
lines of the lintel made it necessary to have a vertical scene in which
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the only possibility was for the saint to dominate the dragon, rather
than a horizontal battle in which the taming of the beast could have
taken a less bloody form more in line with Fortunatus' text. Still, the
textual fidelity that transforms the monster's flight into its execution,
with the bishop's crook plunged into the animal's throat, thus killing
it, expresses the clerical interpretation of the dragon as symbol of
evil. In laying out the sculptor'S program, the canons of Notre-Dame
adapted Fortunatus' text to the evolution of the symbolism of the
dragon; the pier of the portal was the ideal setting for this meaning-
ful aesthetic.
The same iconography is used in the scene from Saint Marcellus'
life depicting the bishop's triumph over the dragon-a scene that
appears in the archway of the canon's portal (also known as the "red
portal," from the color of its doors). The saint is seen sinking his
crook into the monster's throat. This sculpture dates from around
1270.
The sculptures of Notre-Dame are consistent with the dragon sym-
bolism of Gothic orthodoxy. Undoubtedly this symbolism was
somewhat weakened by the Gothic stress on the anecdotal and
moralizing aspects of the scene rather than on its theological im-
plications. As in the episodes involving dragon-slaying saints and
bishops in Vincent of Beauvais and in Jacobus da Varagine's Golden
Legend, the dragon was the symbol more of sin than of evil. 105 Still,
its intrinsically evil character is confirmed. In the Gothic age, the
various dragons of the Old Testament and Revelation converge to-
wards a materialization of hell. This was symbolized by the dragon's
throat in the innumerable hells of Last Judgments. 106
Probably around the same time, a quite different dragon-also
associated with Saint Marcellus-haunted the vicinity of Notre-
Dame. During the Rogation Day processions, a great wicker dragon
was paraded about, to the great delight of the Parisians, who threw
fruits and cakes into its gaping jaws. This was certainly Saint Mar-
cellus' dragon, yet quite different from the dragon the clergy had had
depicted on the Saint Anne portal and the red portal, and different
from the one described by Fortunatus as well. This was one of many
well-documented processional dragons which we know were used in
the Rogations. 107 It is worth pausing to name a few of the best
known: in western France, the Grande Gueule of Poi tiers, the
crocodile dragon of Niort, the Gargouille of Rouen; in F1anders-
Hainault, the dragons of Douai and Mons; in Champagne, the dra-
gon called Chair-Salee of Troyes, the dragon of Provins, and the
Kraulla or Grand Bailla of Reims; in Lorraine, the dragons of Tou],
Verdun, and particularly Metz, with its famous Grawly or Graouilly,
which did not escape the notice of that great consumer of folklore and
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lover of giants, Rabelais. 10Ij The South was no less rich in dragons,
although excepting the crocodile of Nimes, the only one of these
which is still well known is the Tarasque of Tarascon. This, however,
provides us with an exemplary case, both because tradition-
continued, or rather revived in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries---makes a concrete study possible, and because this study
has been carried out in a magisterial book by Louis Dumont. 109 A
more minute inventory would reveal dragons in nearly every city (or
celebrated site)-at Sainte-Baume, Aries, Marseilles, Aix, Gragui-
gnan, Cavaillon, the fountain of Vaucluse, Avignon, and on the Isle of
Lerins. 110
These dragons had two sources. Some came from hagiographic
legends and were connected with saints, frequently bishops (or ab-
bots), often dating from the early Middle Ages. Such was the case
with Graouilly of Metz, taken from the legend of the bishop Saint
Clement; with the Provins dragon, from Saint Quiriatus; the Mar-
seilles dragon, attributed to Saint Victor; and the Graguignan dragon,
attributed to Saint Annentarius. And, of course, there is our dragon
and Saint MarceIlus in Paris. But many of these processional dragons
owed their existence solely to the Rogation processions in which they
had an official place, as we shall see shortly. It seems that the most
famous of these dragons were those traditionally connected with the
legend of a local saint, whereby they could be introduced into the
Rogation processions under the saint's patronage and with a pro-
nounced individuality, sometimes emphasized by a proper name or
nickname. This was clearly the case with Saint MarceIJus' dragon,
although it seems not to have achieved celebrity.
There can be no doubt, moreover, that these processional dragons
were integrated into folkloric rituals. Either for themselves or for the
benefit of the organizers or actors of the procession (curates, sacris-
tans, members of the procession), they attracted offerings in kind
which were propitiatory rites connected with ceremonies intended,
from earliest antiquity, to win the favor of the fertility deities. 111
Young Roman girls used to go in springtime to leave cakes in the
grottoes inhabited by the serpents (dragons) of Juno of Lanuvium, an
agrarian goddess, in the hope that she would provide a good har-
vest. 112 Plato set such offerings of fruits and cakes in the context of
perpetual fertility of the golden age (Laws VI, 782 c-e).
The problem is to make the chronology of the appearance of these
processional dragons precise, as an aid to understanding their sig-
nificance for the medieval men and women who were actors or spec-
tators at these processions.
As an initial hypothesis, one might guess that beliefs and rites
connected with dragons exhibit a continuity from antiquity and even
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unrelated to the cycle of Lent and the carnival, and that their origin
"was more literary and semischolarly than popular." On the other
hand, he believes that monstrous dragons appeared earlier in pro-
cessions, and that the ensuing vogue of gigantism subsequently
came to apply to other animals and, still later, to human figures. He
points to such dragons in Antwerp in 1394, Cierre in 1417, Alost in
1418, Fumes in 1429, Audenarde in 1433, Malines in 1436. The dates
in this chronology can be pushed back somewhat. As early as 1361,
the ledgers of Saint Aime of Douai record that year's expenditures
"for making a new tail of bright red cendal (a silk fabric) for the dra-
gon carried in the procession." 118 The source for these processional
dragons was clearly the Rogation processions. But when did these
first incorporate dragons?
To our knowledge, Flanders offers no individualized dragon be-
fore the Douai dragon of 1361. Is it possible to use our knowledge of
the Parisian dragon of Saint Marcellus to make this chronology more
precise and to extend it farther back in time?
Louis Reau states: "In the Rogation processions, the clergy of
Notre-Dame had a great wicker dragon carried about in commem-
oration of the miracle it symbolized, and fruits and cakes were
thrown into its gaping jaws by the populace."ll<J He does not specify
the era he is speaking of, and it is clear that he has reproduced
without reference a passage from Alfred de Nore's Coutumes, mythes,
et traditions des Provinces de France (Paris, 1846), or from this author's
model, the early nineteenth-century historian of Paris, J. A.
Dulaure. 120
We have been unable to discover in any medieval record or chroni-
cle or in any ancient or modem history of Paris any reference to a
processional dragon of Saint Marcellus. This dragon's existence was
asserted only when it was about to disappear in the eighteenth cen-
tury. J. A. Dulaure, and de Nore after him, claimed that the pro-
cessional dragon of Saint Marcellus fell into disuse around 1730.
Nevertheless, in the second edition (1733) of his Histoire et recherches
des antiquites de la ville de Paris (2, 620), Henry Sauval, clearly an
enthusiast of the Enlightenment, states with undisguised contempt
that "every year in the processions staged by Notre-Dame and her
four daughters for the Rogation Days, we continue to see a large
dragon behave as stupidly as that great devil," i.e., the devil that
fough t wi th Sain t Michael as the dragon had done wi th Sain t Marce Hus.
Must we give up the possibility of setting a date to the appearance
of the processional dragon of Saint Marcellus and resign ourselves to
calling it, with Dulaure, "a custom from earliest antiquity," without,
however, adding the hypothesis which we have already found too
bold: "which could well date from pagan times?" A note to the sec-
181
HIGH CULTURE AND POPULAR CULTURE
ond edition of Dulaure's Histoire de Paris shows that the only source
which can support the assertion of the ancient existence of the Pari-
sian processional dragon is a well-known text of a general character.
"All the churches in Gaul in the thirteenth century," Dulaure
writes, 121 "had their dragon. Durand, in his Rational, speaks of them
as being in general use. These dragons, in his view, signified the
devil." In fact, Guillaume Durand, in his Rationale divinorum of-
ficiorum from the late thirteenth century ,122 merely copies a text of
the Parisian liturgist Jean Beleth from around 1180,123 and James of
Vitry had dealt with the Rogation Day processions in a sermon at the
beginning of the thirteenth century. 124 We learn from these texts that
in certain places proces<;ions were held over a period of three days at
the time of Rogations and that a dragon figured in them. On the first
two days, the dragon took the head of the procession, preceding
cross and banners, with its long tail erect and inflated-"cum cauda
longa erecta et inflata." On the third day, it followed at the rear, its
tail deflated and lowered-"cauda vacua aeque depressa." The dra-
gon represents the devil ("draco iste significat diabolum"), and the
three days signify the three eras of history-ante legem, sub lege, and
tempore gratiae. During the first two eras the devil reigned and, full of
pride, deceived mankind. Christ had won over the devil, however,
and, as told in the Apocalypse, the dragon had fallen from heaven-
"draco de caelo cadens"-and henceforth could do no more than try
humbly to tempt man.
The symbolism is clear. Louis Dumont, who was familiar with
these texts, has given an admirable explanation of the tail symbolism
in connection with the ritual of the Tarasque. 125 We believe we have
shown that this symbolism is very ancient, rooted in the pseudo-
scientific symbolism of antiquity and folklore. 126 We have also
pointed out that it occurs in Fortunatus' text too.
Are we then using this detail, important as it is, as a basis for
reiterating the hypothetical continuity of the dragon of folklore?
Louis Dumont has made an authoritative analysis of the most an-
cient of the texts in which the Tarasque appears-the Life of Saint
Martha, allegedly written by Marcella, Martha's serving girl, com-
posed between 1187 and 1212, and utilized by Gervase of Tilbury,
Vincent of Beauvais, and Jacobus da Varagine. 127 Dumont demon-
strates that, despite the bookish influence of the bestiaries, the mon-
ster described in this text presupposes the existence of a "ritual ef-
figy." 128 Similarly, his iconographic inquiry leads him to believe that
the ritual Tarasque appeared at the tum of the thirteenth century, no
doubt as the culmination of a long prehistory .129
We are inclined to believe that the history of Saint Marcellus' pro-
cessional dragon must have been virtually the same. We have been
182
Ecclesiastical Culture and Folklore
no more successful than was Louis Dumont in the case of the Taras-
que in establishing an "iconographic index" 130 for Saint Marcellus'
dragon, and we are less fortunate than he in having no image of the
processional dragon. We have only the ecclesiastical dragon of
Notre-Dame to work with. Dragon iconography does, however,
seem to have acquired some ritual effigies in the early thirteenth
century; like the Tarasque, these can only have been inspired by real
models. We believe we have an example of one in an early thir-
teenth-century fountain top from northern France, now in the
Dahlem Museum in Berlin. I do not think the devil astride a dragon
was created either by the genius of traditional Romanesque forms or
by the pure imagination of a gifted artist. It seems to me to be a
processional mask, related to carnival masks.131
What is the significance of this new type of dragon, directly in-
spired by folklore? Is Jean Beleth's text, together with the example of
the Tarasque and possible iconographic analogies, sufficient to con-
firm the hypothesis that Saint Marcellus' processional dragon was
probably introduced in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century?
At the conclusion of his study, in a review of the major charac-
teristics of the Tarasque rite analyzed in the course of his "ethno-
graphic snapshot," Louis Dumont states that "the sociological factor is
fundamental: the Tarasque is above all the eponymous animal, the
palladium of the community."132 The latter phrase is strikingly re-
miniscent of an expression in Fortunatus' text concerning Saint Mar-
cellus' victory over the dragon: "propugnaculum patriae." Is it pos-
sible that what in the fifth and sixth centuries may have symbolized
the constitution of the Chirstian community and the organization of
the urban and suburban terrain for human use had taken on, locally
and generally, a new meaning, but one of similar import, by the end
of the twelfth century? This was the time, at the end of Louis VII's
reign and during that of Philip Augustus, when Paris became the
capital and grew in size within the limits of its new walls, and when
its flourishing and concerted urban functions brought Parisians to a
new local self-awareness and stimulated a search for a new civic
emblem. In the fourteenth century, of course, Etienne Marcel and a
whole group of wealthy bourgeois behind him would impose a
political emblem on Paris which was borrowed from the great mer-
chants: the Seine ship, the half blue and half red hood. But was not
Saint Marcellus' dragon an earlier version of a Parisian emblem?
Simultaneous with the clergy's use of Marcellus as a visible and
immortal patron of the city in the Saint Anne portal, were not the
people introducing a different kind of dragon into the Rogations,
drawn from different sources, but a creature in which local patriotic
feeling crystallized?
183
HIGH CULTURE AND POPULAR CULTURE
184
Ecclesiastical Culture and Folklore
It should be noted that, for the clerics, the emblem was the bishop
in his role as dragon killer, while for the people it seems to have been
the dragon itself, as its relations with the prelate follow its changing
fortunes. Furthermore, while the ecclesiastical dragon is unequivo-
cally designated a symbol of evil, which must be suppressed, the
popular dragon is the object of more mixed feelings: the people first
try to cajole it with offerings to satisfy its demands; later, they
ridicule its defeat, but without wishing for its death. Of course, the
processional dragon was integrated in a Christian ceremony, and the
liturgists had given the orthodox theological interpretation of its be-
havior, as well as that of the spectators, in the course of the pro-
cessional triduum. By the same token, we cannot rule out the
hypothesis that the processional dragon had a learned, ecclesiastical
origin, which popular tradition may have distorted. Arnold van
Gennep has spoken of "folklorized liturgical festivals," and numer-
ous instances are known of the degradation of saints of erudite origin
into cult folklore. 136 Nevertheless, even if there was a mutual con-
tamination of the clerical idea and the popular belief-popular in that
period being virtually equivalent to lay-we are still faced with the
difference and even the opposition between two mentalities and two
sensibilities. On the one hand we have clerical culture, sufficiently
secure to claim the triumph of good over evil and to impose clear
distinctions. On the other, we have the traditional culture of folklore.
Faced with forces not yet stripped of their ambiguity, this traditional
culture is prudent to the point of preferring primitive, yet also
equivocal and shrewd approaches, which are intended, through
flattery and gifts, to render the natural forces symbolized by the
dragon not only inoffensive but even beneficial.
From the sixth to the thirteenth centuries, we have seen a striking
evolution. In Fortunatus, the Christian Manichaean interpretation is
not yet fully formulated, but its outlines are clear enough to repress
the ambiguities of popular interpretations. In the heart of the Middle
Ages, the ecclesiastical interpretation has achieved its definitive ex-
pression, but it has to coexist with a neutral folkloric interpretation
that has powerfully reasserted itself.
We believe it likely that this resurgence dates from the twelfth
century and expresses the growth of a lay popular culture, rushing
into the breach opened during the eleventh and twelfth centuries by
a lay aristocratic culture 137 thoroughly imbued with the one available
culture system distinct from the clergy's, namely, the tradition of
folklore. If this is the case, the Parisian example is then a perfected
model: the clerical dragon in stone and the folkloric dragon in wicker
are contemporaries. One revolves around the other as if defying it,
185
HIGH CULTURE AND POPULAR CULTURE
186
Ecclesiastical Culture and Folklore
text in which to set the phenomena of sensibility and mentality
studied here. We hope that we have not made too weighty the ludic
but ambiguous grace of this devilishness: the dragon of Saint Mar-
cellus of Paris.
187
HIGH CULTURE AND POPULAR CULTURE
most holy man, who, with the power of his frail crook, showed where the
strength lay, and whose delicate fingers were the serpent's chains! So private
anns vanquished a public enemy and a single victim aroused the applause of
a general victory. If the saints' merits are compared according to their
exploits, Gaul must admire Marcellus as Rome does Sylvester, and the
fonner's exploit is the greater, since, where the latter could only set his seal
on the dragon's mouth, the fonner made him disappear.
Venantius Fortunatus, Vita Sancti Marcel/i, cap. X, (MGH, Scriptores
Rerum Merovingicarum, IV/2, ed. B. Krusch (1885 2 ), pp. 53-54
188
THE MEDIEVAL WEST
AND THE INDIAN OCEAN:
AN ONEIRIC HORIZON
The medieval West knew nothing of the real Indian Ocean. As late as
the mid-fifteenth century, the Catalonian mappemonde in the Bib-
lioteca Estense in Modena shows utter ignorance of the Indian
Ocean. 1 On the planisphere of Fra Mauro of Murano (1460), the east
coast of the Persian Gulf "no longer has the form of land."2 Despite
his use of Marco Polo, Martin Behaim's globe of 1492 shows no
knowledge of India. South Africa, Madagascar, and Zanzibar are
depicted on it in extravagant and fantastic form. We must await the
first Portuguese discoveries before geographical~r, rather,
coastal-knowledge of the Indian Ocean begins to take shape. The
most important date is 1488, the year of Diaz's return to Lisbon.
There is still a good deal of fantasy in Doctor Hamy's Carta
navigatoria auctor incerti (1501-2), but its map of eastern Africa is very
good. The portolano-mappemonde of Caneiro Januensis (1503) is
much more precise. 3 On the whole, knowledge of the Indian Ocean
begins with Africa-and the Portuguese-in contrast with medieval
dreams, which turned primarily toward Persia, India, and the
islands.
Nevertheless, there had been some progress in the fifteenth cen-
tury.4 This was due primarily to the rediscovery of Ptolemy, who,
unlike the ignorant Roman geographers who were the main source
for medieval cartographers, knew the Indian Ocean fairly well.
Ptolemy's rediscovery dates from 1406 but bore fruit only with the
introduction of printing. The earliest printed editions I have been
able to locate in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris are from Vicenza
(1475), Rome (1478 and 1490), Bologna (1482), and Ulm (1482 and
1486). The work was not always put immediately to good use, how-
ever, as Martin Behaim's globe indicates, although he did in fact use
the Vim editions.
189
HIGH CULTURE AND POPULAR CULTURE
190
The Medieval West and the Indian Ocean
191
HIGH CULTURE AND POPULAR CULTURE
192
The Medieval West and the Indian Ocean
193
HIGH CULTURE AND POPULAR CULTURE
one chapter De India, not counting the Indian references in the chap-
ters Paradisus, De Monstris, and De Bestiis. 29 James of Vitry drew on
these sources for his Historia Orientalis, which shows that Christian
scholars of the Holy Land continued to rely on the Western
storehouse of knowledge, in this case the Epistola Alexandri, rather
than use written or oral Eastern sources. 30 All the thirteenth-century
encyclopedists used Indian myth: Walter of Metz, in his Imago
Mundi, which was translated into English, French, and Italian until
the end of the Middle Ages;31 Gervase of Tilbury, who borrowed
heavily from the Letter from Fermes to Hadrian 32 for his Otia Im-
perialia, written around 1211 for Otto IV; Bartholomew the En-
glishman, who relied on Solinus, whose De proprietatibus rerum
would enjoy success until the beginning of the seventeenth cen-
tury;33 Thomas of Cantimpre, whose De natura rerum was translated
into Flemish at the end of the thirteenth century by Jacob Maerlant
and into German in the mid-fourteenth century by Conrad von
Megenberg;34 Brunetto Latini, in his Treasury, from which Dante
may have taken his references to India;3s Vincent of Beauvais, who
treats the subject on three occasions, once in the Speculum naturale
and twice in the Speculum historiale. 36 The late Middle Ages would
perpetuate and supplement the Indian myth. In his imaginary trip
around the world, Mandeville introduced a new "Indienfahrer,"
Ogier the Dane, whose exploits rival Alexander's.37 The Gesta
Romanorum, a collection of fables and moralizing stories used as a
source by preachers, extended Indian fantasy to those who listened
to sermons,38 and Pierre d' Ailly, in his Imago Mundi of 1410, assem-
bles in one chapter all that is known about the Mirabilia Indiae. 39
The success of this literature was increased by the illustrations in
many of the manuscripts, which sometimes spilled over into
sculpture, as shown by numerous works of art, of which the most
famous and impressive is the tympanum at Vezelay.40 This is not the
place for a digression into an iconography that would take me far
from my subject and competence, but it will be useful to make a few
remarks about these images. First, their abundance shows how much
the marvels of India inspired Western imagination; the sculptors and
miniaturists, better than their written sources, depicted the whole
range of fantasy and dream which the Middle Ages lavished on these
marvels. An imaginary world, it was to be a favorite theme for the
exuberant medieval imagination.
Iconographic studies are also useful for showing the complexity of
the various artistic and literary traditions that combined in a myriad
of ways to produce the Indian inspiration of the medieval Western
mind, an effect that went far beyond the few major influences and
central lines. 41 Perhaps it would be revealing to single out, from
194
The Medieval West and the Indian Ocean
195
HIGH CULTURE AND POPULAR CULTURE
196
The Medieval West and the Indian Ocean
populated by fantastic men and animals, a world full of monsters of
both kinds. As Honorius Augustodunensis put it, "There are mon-
sters there, some of which belong to the human species, others to the
several animal species."52 These dream creatures enabled the west-
ern imagination to free itself from the mediocrity of the fauna actu-
ally to be found in its own world and to discover the inexhaustible
creativity of Nature and God. There were men whose feet were turned
around; dog-headed men who barked, lived well beyond the normal
life span, and whose skin turned black in old age rather than white;
monopodes who shaded themselves with their raised foot; cyclops;
headless men with eyes on their shoulders and two holes in their
chest for nose and mouth; men who lived on the scent of a single kind
of fruit and died if they could not smell it. 53 It was a surrealistic anthro-
pology, comparable to something from Max Ernst. Besides these mon-
strous men, fantastic beasts pullulated. Some were constructed of
bits and pieces, like the bestia leucocroca, which had the body of an
ass, the hindquarters of a deer, the breast and thighs of a lion, the
hooves of a horse, a large forked hom, a broad mouth which went
from ear to ear and emitted an almost human voice; others had
human faces, like the mantichora, with three rows of teeth, a lion's
body, scorpion's tail, blue eyes, a blood-red cast, a whistling voice
like a serpent's, faster on the ground than a bird in flight, and an-
thropophagous to boot. 54 A poor and limited world formed for itself
an extravagant combinatoric dream of disquieting juxtapositions and
concatenations. The irony was that these monsters often served as
screens between man and the riches he glimpsed, dreamed of, and
desired: the dragons of India guarded treasures of gold and silver and
kept men from coming near.
The dream expanded to a vision of a world where a different kind
of life was lived, where taboos were eliminated or exchanged for
others. The weirdness of this world produced an impression of liber-
ation and freedom. The strict morality imposed by the Church was
contrasted with the discomfiting attractiveness of a world of bizarre
tastes, which practiced coprophagy and cannibalism;55 of bodily in-
nocence, where man, freed of the modesty of clothing, rediscovered
nudism 56 and sexual freedom; and where, once rid of restrictive
monogamy and family barriers, he could give himself over to
polygamy, incest, and eroticism. 57
Going farther still, medieval man dreamed of the unknown and the
infinite, of cosmic fear. The Indian Ocean became the mare infinitum,
the entry to the world of storms, to Dante's terra senza gente. Here,
however, Western imagination ran up against the limits of what was
ultimately a closed world, its dreams going around in circles within
it. On the one hand it encountered the walls that confined, for the
197
HIGH CULTURE AND POPULAR CULTURE
time being, the Antichrist and the damned races of the earth, Gog
and Magog; it came upon its own apocalyptic destruction. On the
other hand, it discovered a mirror image of itself, an upside-down
world; it was turned back in on itself by the anti-world of which it
dreamed, the oneiric and mythic archetype of the antipodes. 58
There remained no choice but to be satisfied with tranquil, virtu-
ous, reassuring dreams. Thus we have the Catholic dream of the
Indian Ocean. Its tempests could not prevent the apostles from carry-
ing the gospel to the Orient. Saint Matthew was supposed to have
converted meridional India, Saint Bartholomew upper India, and
Saint Thomas, especially, lower India, where medieval Christians
pursued one more mirage in searching for his tomb. A lost Christian
was said to be awaiting his Western brothers on the shores of the
Indian Ocean. This dream gave rise to Prester John, who was to be
given a semblance of reality by the discovery of the Nestorian com-
munities. From Gregory of Tours to William of Malmesbury, Henry
of Moringen, and Caesarius of Heisterbach, apostolic India would
haunt Christian imaginations. It was Far Western Christendom that
made one of the earliest attempts to open friendly relations with Far
Eastern Christendom: in 883, King Alfred of England sent Bishop
Sigelmus on a voyage toward Christian India. 59 The shores of the
Indian Ocean were the favorite object of missionary dreams. Even
the more realistic Marco Polo carefully noted down which peoples
were pagan, Moslem, Buddhist, or Nestorian, as so much useful
information for the great undertaking.
This Christian dream had a still more prestigious goal: to find the
way into the Earthly Paradise. For it was indeed on the borders of
India that medieval Christendom thought this Eden was located.
From it flowed the four rivers of paradise which Christians identified
with the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Ganges (under the name Pison),
and the Nile (under the name Gihon). Most medieval cartographers,
beginning with the monk Beatus on his famous map from the second
half of the eighth century, carefully noted the location of Paradise on
India's borders. 60
Here, too, however, a more pagan dream frequently supplanted
the Christian one. The Earthly Paradise of India then took the form of
a primitive world enjoying its Golden Age, the dream of a happy and
innocent humanity prior to original sin and Christianity. Perhaps the
most curious aspect of the Indian myth in the medieval West was that
of a world of noble savages. From the Commonitorium palladii in the
late fourth century to Roger Bacon's Opus majus and Petrarch's De
vita solitaria, the theme of the virtuous peoples of the Indian Ocean
underwent continual development. The Alexander cycle dwells in-
198
The Medieval West and the Indian Ocean
dulgently on "virtuous Ethiopians" and "pious Brahmins." Although
their piety might bear some resemblance to a certain Christian evan-
gelism, it was distinguished by the absence of all reference to origi-
nal sin and by the rejection of all social and ecclesiastical organiza-
tion. Thus the Indian dream culminated in a humanism hostile to all
civilization and to all religion other than natural religion. 61
We have reached the end of our rapid excursion through the
oneiric universe projected by medieval Western man onto the world
of the Indian Ocean. Ultimately, this sea was conceived as an anti-
Mediterranean, a place contrasted with the familiar world of civili-
zation and rationalization. At this point we may ask ourselves
whether the contradictions we have noted in the Indian dream are
merely those inherent in any oneiric universe. To return to a distinc-
tion suggested above, I would be tempted to see two opposing sys-
tems of thought, two opposing mentalities and sensibilities, fre-
quently found, moreover, in combination. On the one hand we have
a tendency toward the domestication and exorcism of marvels, which
were brought within reach of the Western mind by being associated
with a familiar universe. This tendency Christianity reinforced
through the influence of its allegorical explanations. Tailored for in-
structional use, the India thus moralized might still inspire desire or
fear, but it was primarily sad and saddening. The lovely substances
are now mere allegorical baubles, and the poor monsters, created for
edification, as well as the unfortunate race of wicked men with large
lower lips who rank just above the monsters in the scheme of things,
all seem to repeat the verse in Psalm 140 that they personify: "malitia
labiorum eorum obruat eos."62 Tristes tropiques ...
On the other hand, we have not left the ambiguous world of mar-
vels which captivate and frighten at the same time. The psychic
complexes of primitive mentalities have been transferred onto the
plane of geography and civilization. 63 Barbarism both attracts and
repels. India is the world of men with an incomprehensible lan-
guage, men denied articulate and intelligent speech, and even the
possibility of utterance. This is the meaning of the "mouthless" In-
dians which some have foolishly sought to identify with one or
another Himalayan tribe. 64 During the Middle Ages, moreover, the
West and India held each other in contempt. Since the time of Greek
antiquity, monoculism had been the symbol of barbarousness in the
West, and for medieval Christians India was populated with Cy-
clops. We can imagine the surprise of the fifteenth-century traveler
Niccolo de Conti when he heard Indians say they were quite superior
to Westerners because those men from the West had only one eye,
unlike themselves, two-eyed and hence wise. 65 When Westerners
199
HIGH CULTURE AND POPULAR CULTURE
dreamed of motley Indians, half men and half beasts, were they not
merely projecting their own complexes onto these fascinating and
disquieting monsters? Homodubii ... 66
NOTE
The Celtic world was another oneiric horizon for the medieval West.
Clerical culture colored it strongly, however, with Eastern influences.
Indian myths invaded the Arthurian legend. Cf. Arthurian Literature
in the Middle Ages, edited by R. S. Loomis (Oxford, 1959), pp. 68-69,
13~31.
I have not treated the problem of possible Indian influences on the
fabliaux, which was raised by Gaston Paris on 9 December 1874 in
his inaugural lecture at the College de France, "Oriental tales in
French literature of the Middle Ages" (in La Poesie du Moyen Age, 2e
serie [Paris, 1895]), based on the works of the great nineteenth-
century Gennan orientalists (particularly T. Benfey, Pantschatantra:
Fun! Bucher indischer Fabeln, Miirchen und Erziihlungen aus dem
Sanskrit abersetzt [Leipzig, 1859]). On this debate, cf. Per Nykrog, Les
Fabliaux (Copenhagen, 1957).
200
DREAMS IN THE CULTURE AND
COLLECTIVE PSYCHOLOGY OF
THE MEDIEVAL WEST
201
HIGH CULTURE AND POPULAR CULTURE
202
Dreams in Culture and Collective Psychology
we may evaluate from this point of view the extent to which a com-
parison between medieval society (or societies) and so-called
"primitive" societies might be valid and infonnativeY
First of all, our research called attention to the fact that it was
characteristic of medieval culture and mentality to elaborate what it
had inherited from the past. From the oneiric science of Greco-Latin
antiquity, medieval clerics selected mainly those texts open to
an interpretation compatible with Christianity and relatively
accessible-at the cost of distortions and misinterpretations, usually
unconscious--to less sophisticated minds. In Macrobius, the great
master of medieval oneiric science, Pythagoreanism and Stoicism,
through Cicero, join neo-Platonic influences already mixed in Ar-
temidorus' eclectic crucible. 22 A Vergilian text 23 offers the notion of
true and false visions,24 important for crude medieval Man-
ichaeanism. This withering of the oneiric diversity and richness of
antiquity was augmented by the mistrust of the dream deriving from
the biblical legacy: prudence in the Old Testament,25 silence in the
New. 26 Oneiromantic practices derived from pagan tradition (Celtic,
Gennanic, etc.)27 further increased hesitancy with regard to dreams
and even caused them to be shunned quite routinely in the early
Middle Ages. Already questionable in Saint Jerome and Saint Au-
gustine,28 the dream had swung over to the side of the devil for
Gregory the Great and, with nuances, for Isidore of Seville ...
Nevertheless, a sort of typecast "good" dream remained, inspired by
God through the new agency of angels and particularly of saints. The
dream came to be associated with hagiography. It served to authenti-
cate the important milestones of Martin's progress towards saint-
hood. As we learn from Gregory of Tours, the old practices of in-
cubation were reclaimed on behalf of the sanctuaries of saints (Saint
Martin of Tours, Saint Julian of Brioude).29 In general, however,
dreams were relegated to the hell of things dubious, and the ordinary
Christian had carefully to refrain from placing his faith in them. Only
a new elite of the dream measured up to the task of interpretation:
the saints. Whether their dreams came from God (Saint Martin) or
from Satan (Saint Anthony-and, in this case, resistance to visions
and oneiric heroism became one of the battles of sainthood, which
could no longer be conquered by martyrdom), saints replaced the
ancient elites of the dream: kings (Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar) and
chieftains or heroes (Scipio, Aeneas).
The twelfth century may be considered the age of the reconquest of
the dream by medieval culture and mentality. To put it briefly and
crudely, the devil gave way before God, and there was a notable
expansion of the domain of the "neutral" dream, or somnium, more
203
HIGH CULTURE AND POPULAR CULTURE
204
MELUSINA: MOTHER AND PIONEER
'A slightly different text may be found in the standard English translation by L.
Scott (Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics,
1958), pp. 103--4.-Trans.
205
HIGH CULTURE AND POPULAR CULTURE
ship that was taking her to the king of France, whom she was sup-
posed to marry. Henno falls in love with the beautiful stranger, mar-
ries her, and gives her handsome offspring (pulcherrimam prolem).
But Henno's mother notices that the young woman, who feigns
piety, avoids the beginning and the end of mass and does not par-
ticipate in the sprinkling of holy water or communion. Curious, she
cuts a hole in the wall of her daughter-in-law's bedroom and sur-
prises her in the midst of bathing in the form of a dragon (draco),
after which she resumes her human form, but not before cutting a
new cloak into tiny pieces with her teeth. Informed by his mother,
Henno, helped by a priest, sprinkles holy water on his wife, who,
accompanied by her maid, jumps across the roof and disappears into
thin air, emitting a terrible scream. In Walter Map's time, many
offspring (multa progenies) of Henno and his wife are still alive.
The creature is not named, and the historical era is not specified;
but "large-toothed Henno" may perhaps be identical with the Henno
(without epithet) who appears in another passage of De nugis
curialium (chapter 15 of the fourth part) among half-legendary, half-
historical characters and events which can be assigned to the mid-
ninth century.
Some critics have compared the story of JJlarge-toothed Henno"
with that of the JJLady of Esperver Castle" recounted in the Otia
Imperialia (part 3, chapter 57), written between 1209 and 1214 by
another old protege of Henry II of England, who subsequently
moved to the service of the kings of Sicily and then to Emperor Otto
IV of Brunswick. He was Otto's marshal for the kingdom of ArIes
when the Otia Imperialia was written. 2 Esperver Castle is located in
this kingdom, in the diocese of Valence (Dr6me department of
France). The lady of Esperver also came late to mass and could not
participate in the sacrament of the host. One day, her husband and
his servants having forcibly restrained her in the church, she took
flight upon hearing the words of the communion ceremony, de-
stroying part of the chapel and disappearing forever. A ruined tower
adjacent to the chapel remained in Gervase's day as a memento of the
event, which also is assigned no date. 3
While there is an evident similarity between this story and the
story of large-toothed Henno's wife, in that, although the lady of
Esperver is not identified as a dragon, she is nevertheless a diabolical
spirit driven away by Christian rites (holy water, consecrated host),
Gervase of Tilbury's text is quite poor in comparison with Walter
Map's. On the other hand, few have thought of comparing the story
of large-toothed Henno with another recounted by Gervase of Til-
bury, the story of Raymond (or Roger) of Chateau-Rousset. 4
Not far from Aix-en-Provence, the lord of the castle of Rousset, in
206
Melusina: Mother and Pioneer
207
HIGH CULTURE AND POPULAR CULTURE
208
Melusina: Mother and Pioneer
209
HIGH CULTURE AND POPULAR CULTURE
What are the "sources" for our texts? Couldrette mentions two Latin
books found "in the tower of Mabregon" and translated into French,
and another work supposed to have been procured for him by the
"Count of Salz and of Berry" (the Count of Salisbury is also cited as
an infonnant by Jean d' Arras). Whether this is the truth or a ruse of
the author, whose real source was Jean d' Arras's romance or an ear-
lier text, it remains true that the bookseller Couldrette was familiar
with Melusina through his reading in erudite literature.
Jean d' Arras also mentions books as sources, "the true chronicles"
procured for him both by the Duke of Berry and the Count of Salis-
bury and "several books which have been found." He cites Gervase
of Tilbury (Gervaise) by name. 11 He adds, however, that he has been
able to supplement the true chronicles with what he has "heard our
elders tell and recount" and with what he has "heard has been seen
in the vicinity of Poitou and elsewhere." Hence he has used oral
traditions transmitted through aged persons: the value of Jean d' Ar-
ras for our study lies here. Despite the author's literary talents, his
attention to oral culture prevents him from subjecting tradition to too
great a distortion, and, consequently, he notes and includes elements
which had been misunderstood or neglected by the clerics of the late
twelfth century and rediscovers the previously effaced meaning of
the marvelous. 12 The Melusina of Jean d' Arras is fair game for the
folklorist, although, forty years ago, Louis Stouff could do no better
than decipher it clumsily, though usefully, using the methods of
traditional literary history.
Jean d' Arras was receptive to folklore in another, indirect way: by
his use of the traditional material already collected and partially inte-
grated into high culture by the clerics of the year 1200.
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Melusina: Mother and Pioneer
We cannot say much about Helinand of Froimont on the basis of
Vincent of Beauvais's brief summary. We do know, though, that the
Cistercian was interested in the marvelous of a more or less folkloric
sort. He was part of a small group of clerics who, again around the
year 1200, took pleasure in the mirabilia that concerned Naples and
Vergil the magician. 13 Even if it is true, as has been suggested,14 that
he is alluding not to Langres but to the vicinity of Linges, which
could be Saintonge, hence, roughly speaking, the region of Lu-
signan, this is still evidence of the presence of Melusina (even before
she was Melusina) in the West, as in Normandy and Provence,
around the year 1200.
Walter Map drew abundantly on the libraries to which he had
access. Alongside the Church Fathers and Latin classics, however,
are numerous tales taken from oral tradition. The editor of the De
nugis curialium speaks of "the unidentified romances and sagas from
which many of his longer stories are supposed to be derived." 15 Map
often refers to the fabulae from which his information was taken.
While he gives no source for the story of large-toothed Henno, for
Edric the Savage he refers to the Welsh, "Wallenses," whom he calls
elsewhere "compatriote nostri Walenses." This is evidence for the
importance of oral, if not popular, tradition. 16
With Gervase of Tilbury, matters are clearer. Apart from his
bookish baggage, the Englishman, in the course of a career which
took him from England to Bologna and Naples to Arles, gathered a
full harvest of oral traditions. At the beginning of the chapter in
which he relates the story of Raymond of Chateau-Rousset, he cites
his source: "The common people tell it."17
No matter how contaminated she may have been, then, by the
readings of the writers who gave her voice, chances are good that we
shall find the medieval Melusina-who, as we shall see, has relatives
(or even ancestors) in ancient societie&--by looking in the direction
of folklore. Melusina-and, more particularly, the Melusina of our
text&--ean easily be located in the reference works on folklore and the
folktale. IS
Arnold van Gennep devoted seventeen entries to Melusina in the
bibliography of his Manuel de folklore fran~ais contemporain; 19 but,
although he cites Jean d' Arras, he explicitly stops at the threshold of
the Middle Ages.
Stith Thompson, in his Motif-Index of Folklore, classifies Melusina
under several headings. First, from the angle of taboo (C.30, Tabu:
"offending supernatural relative," and more specifically, C.31.1.2,
Tabu: "looking at supernatural wife on certain occasion"). Then, con-
cerning animals, and particular men- (or women-) serpents (B.29.1,
Lamia: "Face of woman, body of serpent," with reference to F.S62.1,
Serpent damsel, B.29.2, Echidna: "Half-woman, half-serpent," and
211
HlGH CULTURE AND POPULAR CULTURE
B29.2.1: "Serpent with human head"), and men- (or women-) fish
(B812: "Mennaid marries man"). Then, in the chapter on marvelous
creatures (Marvels, F.302.2: "Man marries fairy and takes her to his
home"). Finally, among witches (G. Ogres [Witches], G.245. "Witch
transfonns herself into snake when she bathes"). If we bring actual
medieval conditions into these categories, we encounter the follow-
ing problems:
1. What is the importance of the transgressing of the taboo? It is
essential because it is the crux of the story, and, in the Christian
atmosphere of the medieval tale, a further question arises: is not the
husband's failure to keep his promise less culpable because of his
wife's "diabolic" character? The era's "culture" alters the tenns of the
problem.
2. In "pagan" religions, a god may perfectly well assume the fonn
of an animal, and union between a mortal and a supernatural animal
may be glorious. But for Christianity, which holds that man is the
unique, incarnate image of God, is not union between a man and a
half-beast automatically considered degrading? The question arises
in connection with Nebuchadnezzar and the werewolves in Gervase
of Tilbury (Otia Imperialia III, 120).
3. As regards "marvelous" women, how can white magic be dis-
tinguished from black, and fairies from witches? Does Christianity
offer Melusina hope of salvation or consign her to inevitable damna-
tion?
In their classification of the Types of the Folktale, 20 Antti Aarne and
Stith Thompson do not finally settle the question of Melusina but
place her among types T400-459 = "Supernatural or enchanted Hus-
band (Wife) or other relatives," more particularly among numbers
400-424 (wife) and, better still, T411: The King and the Lamia (the
snake-wife), which brings up the problem of the vocabulary and
frame of reference used by the work's authors: while Lamia explicitly
refers to the Bible, to Greco-Latin writers of antiquity, to Saint
Jerome, and to our medieval authors (Gervase of Tilbury, particularly
Otia Imperialia III, 85), the reference given for the tale is Indian!
Melusina has a still smaller place in the catalogue of Paul Delarue
and Marie-Louis Teneze. T.411 is not illustrated in this work by any
examples; on the other hand, T449 offers the case of "the man who
has married a woman-vampire," and T425 goes into great detail re-
garding the "search for a husband who has disappeared," whiCh
includes the story of Melusina with sexes reversed (31, the daughter
who marries a serpent).
It is therefore legitimate to raise some of the basic problems in-
volved in studying folklore in connection with the medieval versions
of Melusina, particularly the problem of folktales and, still more pre-
cisely, of marvelous tales. 21
212
Melusina: Mother and Pioneer
In the first place, are we really dealing with a tale? Is it not rather a
matter of a legend, in the sense of the German word Sage? German
uses two words, Sage and Legende, where French uses one, legende
[and English legend, although saga, apart from its specialized sense,
may also be used to mean "a historical legend" (O.E.D.).-Transl.] In
German, Legende is reserved in literary typology for the religious
legend, in the sense of the medieval Latin legenda, equivalent to Vita
(alicujus sancti). 22 The difference between tale and legend was care-
fully noted by the brothers Grimm, authors, as everyone knows, of a
famous collection of Miirchen and a no less important collection of
Deutsche Sagen: "the tale is more poetic, the legend more historical." Is it
not true that the medieval stories of Melusina correspond exactly to
their definition: "The legend, whose colors are less iridescent, is also
peculiar in that it establishes a connection with something con-
sciously familiar, such as a place or a genuine name from history."B
Instead of regarding the tale and the legend as two parallel genres,
as the Grimms did, it may be that the legend should often be consid-
ered a possible avatar of the tale, though not necessarily so. When a
tale falls into the sphere of the upper social strata and high cultural
circles and passes into a new spatial and temporal setting with a
more definite geographic location (a certain province, city, castle, or
forest) and a quicker tempo, when it is snapped up by the more
hurried history of "hot" social classes and societies, it becomes
legend.
This is exactly what seems to have happened with our story. In the
late twelfth century, the tale of the man married to a woman serpent
was common in a number of regions: Normandy, Provence, and the
vicinity of Langres or Saintonge. Under certain conditions, as to
which we shall offer certain hypotheses below, men such as large-
toothed Henno, Raimondin of Chateau-Rousset, the nobleman spo-
ken of by Helinand of Froimont, or their descendants, rather, tried to
take possession of the tale and make it their legend. The Lusignans
were successful at this. When, how, why? It is difficult to know.
Aficionados-many of them and often quite ingenious---of the dis-
appointing little historicist game of pin-the-tail on the myth have
tried to discover which Lusignan was Jean d' Arras's Raimondin and
which countess of Lusignan was Melusina. The only probable link
with a real historical character in the affair is in connection with
"Geoffroy with the large tooth," sixth son of Melusina. In the four-
teenth century, at least, he seems to have been identified with Geof-
froy de Lusignan, Viscount of Chatellerault, who, though he did not
bum either the abbey or the monks, did lay waste the domain of the
abbey of Maillezais (and had to go the following year to Rome to
obtain the pope's pardon). His motto was supposed to have ben non
est Deus ("there is no God"), and he died childless before 1250. This
213
HIGH CULTURE AND POPULAR CULTURE
214
Melusina: Mother and Pioneer
1456, and his translation was printed around 1477 (in Strasbourg?),
and in 1491 at Heidelberg. Another translation appeared in Augs-
burg in 1474.27 A German version was translated into Polish in
1569 by Siennik. The success of this translation is evident in the
many Melusinas to be found in both high and folk art and in the
seventeenth-century folklore of Poland and the Ukraine. 28
If we tum now not to the posterity of the medieval Melusinas but
rather toward precursors and counterparts in other cultures, the
whole vast field of myth opens up to us. The comparative study
begun by Felix Liebrecht,29 editor of the anthology of folklore from
the Otia Imperialia of Gervase of Tilbury, yielded three first-rate
studies at the end of the last century: Der Ursprung der Melusinensage:
Eine ethnologische Untersuchung, by J. K9hler (1895), most suggestive
of the three and most "modem" in its problematics; Marie Nowack's
dissertation, Die Melusinensage: Ihr mythischer Hintergrund, ihre Ver-
wandschaft mit anderen Sagenkreisen und ihre Stellung in der deutschen
Literatur (1886), oriented toward the study of German literary works;
and, finally, Jean Karlowicz's article, La belle Melusine et la reine
Vanda (1877), focused on Slavic Melusinas.
In these studies, the Melusina legend is compared with: (1) the
Greek myths of Eros and Psyche and Zeus and Semele, and the
Roman legend of Numa and Egeria, from European antiquity;
(2) with several myths from ancient India, that of Urvashti being the
oldest Aryan version; (3) with a whole series of myths and legends
from a variety of cultures, from the Celts to the Amerindians.
Kohler defined the characteristic feature of all these myths as fol-
lows: "A being of another kind marries a man and, after leading an
ordinary human life for a time, disappears when a certain even oc-
curs." The variable is the type of event that causes the dis-
appearance. This event is usually a revelation of the nature of the
magical being. The principal type in this category, according to
Kohler, is the "Melusina type," in which the magical being dis-
appears when its earthly partner has seen it in its original form.
This analysis has the great merit of having started mythology
down the path of structural analysis, but it gives a poor account of
the real structure of the legend (or Illyth). The framework of the tale
(or legend) is neither a major theme nor a motif but rather its struc-
ture, what von Sydow calls composition, Max Luthi form (Gestalt), and
Vladimir Propp morphology. 30
If we had the competence and the desire, we could undoubtedly
give a structural analysis of the various versions of the Melusina
legend according to Propp's schemas. For instance:31
1. A member of the family leaves the house (Propp): the hero goes
hunting.
215
HIGH CULTURE AND POPULAR CULTURE
216
Melusina: Mother and Pioneer
The tale, especially the marvelous tale of which Melusina is in-
contestably an example, is centered on a hero.33 Who is the hero of
Melusina? The fairy's husband, no doubt. According to the logic of
the tale, reinforced by contemporary ideology in the sight of which
she is a devil (Christian symbolism of serpent and dragon), Melusina
should be wicked; Walter Map qualifies her as pestilentia, and Jean
d' Arras calls her "most false serpent" (in the words of the enraged
Raimondin). And yet, by the end of the tale, she appears to be the
victim of her husband's betrayal. She becomes a pretender to the
place of the hero. Marc Soriano discovered in La Fontaine a wolf that
is a pitiful victim, alongside the detestable aggressor wolf; by the
same token, Melusina arouses pity as victim-serpent. The affecting
representation of this pseudo-heroine is given a psychological di-
mension by the final touch which has her come invisible and wailing
by night to the side of her young children. What accounts for this
tenderness toward a demonic woman?
One of the characteristics of the marvelous tale is the happy end-
ing. Melusina turns out sadly. No doubt this story was near to being a
legend, and the marvelous tale had begun to evolve toward the
heroic poem, with its often tragic tone. Why was there this trend
toward a genre which implied the failure or death of the hero?
Finally, there is the "psychologization" of the tale (Raimondin's
inner states play an important role at several places in the narrative:
passion, curiosity, rage, sadness, or despair; and we have just
pointed out the development of Melusina's character in this sense),
along with a tendency toward coherent rationalization of the narra-
tive, in which we can undoubtedly see the standard (but not obliga-
tory) development from myth to tale or epic and then to the romance
in the ordinary sense (a literary genre) or in Dumezil's sense (an
evolutionary form and phase).34
Turning now to problems of interpretation, we should first ob-
serve that medieval authors explained very clearly what Melusina
represented for them. All of them took her for a demonic succubus, a
fairy identified with a fallen angel. She was half-human, half-beast;
when she mated with a mortal, exceptional children were pro-
duced, physically fortunate (beautiful daughters, strong sons) but
blemished or unhappy.35 Some also explain why these marriages
took place. Condemned for an error to suffer eternally in the body of
a serpent, the serpent-woman seeks to wed a man, her only chance to
escape eternal misery and regain the right to a natural death and to
the subsequent enjoyment of a happy life.
This Christian dress is not surprising if one recalls that the whole
cultural life of the Middle Ages was bound up with Christianity. By
the late twelfth century, moreover, Christianity had begun to elabo-
217
HIGH CULTURE AND POPULAR CULTURE
218
MeIusina: Mother and Pioneer
her feet, and forests are transformed into fields. One region, Forez
(perhaps in Brittany), is indebted to her for its transition from nature
to cultivation.
In Jean d' Arras, however, anoH.er creative activity has taken the
fore: construction. As much as she is a pioneer, Melusina is even
more a builder. In the course of her many travels, she leaves behind
fortified castles and cities, often built with her own hands as the
head of a work crew.
No matter how wary one may be of historicism, it would require a
real will to let the truth slip through one's fingers to refuse to see the
connection between Melusina's historical aspect and an economic
conjuncture: land clearing and construction. Melusina is the fairy of
medieval economic growth.
There is, however, yet another area in which Melusina's fertility is
even more astonishing-demography. What Melusina gives
Raymond is, above all, children. Even when there are not ten of
them, as in Jean d' Arras, they are the survivors after the fairy-mother
has disappeared and the father has been plunged into ruin. Edric
"left his inheritance to his son." After Henno and his pestilentia, "many
of their descendants are still alive today." Raymond of Chateau -Rousset
has kept from his adventure and misfortune a daughter "whose de-
scendants are among us."
Melusina disappears when she has accomplished her essential
function as mother and nurse. Driven from the light of day, she
remains a parent by night.
Who could resist bringing in at this point the feudal family and
lineage, the basic cell of feudal society? Melusina is the womb that
gave birth to a noble line.
This structuralism (and comparative history) not only helps us to
do away witbt the fallacious historicism of an "event-ridden" history
of tales and legends (which sought the explanation and, worse still,
the origin of a tale or legend in a historical event or character). It also
makes it possible, if we pay attention not only to form but also to
changing content, to comprehend the historical function of both, in
relation not to an event but rather to social and ideological structures
themselves.
At this point, we cannot evade two major problems.
One of them we shall merely name: totemism. Kohler has devel-
oped this theme at length in connection with Melusina. Are we not
obliged to restate the problem of totemism by this woman-beast who
is the origin and emblem of a bloodline?36
The second problem relates to the connections between literature
and society. Who produced these tales or legends, and why?
Were they produced by the writers who left us the erudite versions
219
HIGH CULTURE AND POPULAR CULTURE
on which this study is based? Yes and no. Three sorts of constraints
were imposed on those writers, by their patrons, by the (folk?)
sources from which they drew their material, and by the literary
forms they chose, all of which considerably limited their freedom of
initiative. We do sense, in Walter Map, for instance, his attraction to
the marvelous; in Gervase of Tilbury his desire to make a scientific
work by integrating the mirabilia into reality and knowledge; and in
Jean d' Arras the formal aesthetic pleasure of dealing with a pleasant
subject. We see, nevertheless, that they were basically allowing
others to express themselves through their work. Who were these
others?
We are struck by the fact that all the heroes belong to the same high
social class. Why should this surprise us? Are we not aware that the
king's son is the principal hero of the folktale? But this is just the
point: we are not dealing here with the king's son. We are looking
instead at the world of the small to middling aristocracy, the knights
or milites, sometimes deSignated as nobles. Henno, Edric, the lord of
Espervier, Raymond of Chateau-Rousset, Raimondin de Lusignan
are all milites. Indeed they are ambitious milites, eager to push back
the boundaries of their little seigneuries. The fairy is the instrument of
their ambition. Melusina brings the knightly class land, castles,
cities, progeny. She is the symbolic and magical incarnation of their
social ambition.
The knights who have turned this storehouse of marvelous litera-
ture to their own use are not, however, its makers. Here we en-
counter Erich Kohler's ideas37 on the small and middle aristocracy. In
the twelfth century this group was the instigator of a culture of its
own, which soon came to be couched in the vulgar tongue. The
knights' cultural arsenal was supplemented by a whole world of folk
marvels. This consisted of the treasures of folklore which the knights
heard from their peasants (to whom they were still close in the
twelfth century) or which they had their writers listen to once they
had taken their distance, together with an admixture of folklorized
ancient myths, recently "popularized" clerical stories, and tales
thought up by peasant storytellers. We should add that this class felt
a certain distance from, and perhaps even a hostility toward the
Church, if not Christianity itself. It refused to accept the Church's
cultural models, preferring fairies to saints, entering into compacts
with hell, toying with a suspect totemism. 38 This temptation should
not be exaggerated. Melusina's husbands managed to reconcile their
profession of Christian faith with a sometimes rather offhand prac-
tice of it. Marc Bloch has shown that in actuality their class took some
liberties with the Christian doctrine of marriage and the family.
We will content ourselves with these hypotheses, which to a cer-
220
Melusina: Mother and Pioneer
tain extent bring us onto common ground with the ideas of Jan de
Vries concerning folktales. More generally, we are pleased to have
attempted to apply Georges Dumezil's simple, yet profound, remark:
"Myths cannot be understood in isolation from the lives of the men
who tell them. Although they are eventually called to a proper liter-
ary career, they are not gratuitous dramatic or lyrical inventions un-
related to social or political organization, to ritual, law, or custom;
their role is rather to justify all of this, to express in images the great
ideas that organize and sustain this system."39 Should we be satis-
fied with this much?
That "the fairy tale is linked to a definite cultural period," as Jan de
Vries would have it, and that, in the West, particularly in France, this
period should have been the second half of the twelfth century, does
not appear to me sufficient to account for the extent of the influence
of a legend like Melusina.
The tale is a whole. If it is legitimate to isolate its central motif-the
idea of prosperity gained and lost in certain conditions-in order to
point out a social class's appeal to a mother-goddess, then the
"moral" of the tale must be sought in its conclusion above all.
It has been noted that Melusina comes to an unfortunate end.
Jan de Vries, referring to the "aristocratic circles which elaborated"
(elaborated-I don't think so; monopolized, yes, but the elaboration
was the work of specialists, both among the people and the clerics,
tellers of folktales and erudite writer-storytellers) the epic and the
fairy tale, remarks: "Behind the apparent optimism may lurk the
feeling that failure is inevitable."40
It is beyond the scope of this essay to determine how and why the
search for prosperity, particularly family prosperity, ended in partial
or total failure. We simply observe the fact. Compare this with what
has been said about the pessimism-at the end of a literary
evolution--()f the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novel. For
many novelists of this period, the subject was the rise and crisis of a
family. In different social settings, with various intellectual and ar-
tistic resources, and in a variety of ideological climates, from the
Rougon-Macquarts to the Buddenbrooks, a family flourishes and
disintegrates.
So it was with the Melusinian lineage. Yet just as Roger Martin du
Gard, at the end of Les Thibault, leaves a child as a tiny hope,
Melusina's medieval storytellers stopped the fairy in mid-flight on
her way to hell-the soul's journey, which for Propp was ultimately
the unique theme of the tale 41-long enough to take from her the
small children through whom everything continues; or, if not every-
thing, then the essential thing, which is continuity itself. Adhuc
extat progenies. 42
221
HIGH CULTURE AND POPULAR CULTURE
POSTSCRIPT
222
IV
TOWARD A HISTORICAL
ANTHROPOLOGY
THE HISTORIAN AND THE ORDINARY MAN
225
TOWARD A HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
226
The Historian and the Ordinary Man
he had lived in England, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and Pro-
vence.
The Middle Ages also furnished all that was necessary to prepare
the way for a "noble savage": a millenarianism that awaited a return
to a golden age; the conviction that historical progress, if it exists,
takes place by way of rebirths, or reversions to a primitive state of
innocence. But medieval man lacked a content to give to this myth.
Some looked to the East and, with the help of a belief in Prester John,
thought up an anthropological model, the "pious brahmin." Yet
Marco Polo was not taken seriously. Others baptized "savage man"
and changed Merlin into a hermit. The discovery of America sud-
denly provided Europe with "noble savages."
The Renaissance continues both lines, both attitudes. On the one
hand, "official" history is tied to political progress and to the for-
tunes of princes and cities, the princely bureaucracy and urban
bourgeoisie being the two rising forces with an interest in discover-
ing the justification of their promotion in history. On the other hand,
the curiosity of scholars extended to explorations in the ethnographic
area. In literature, for example, Rabelais's genius and erudition are
displayed in an imaginary ethnography-but one which is often not
far removed from its peasant bases. As George Huppert wrote,
"There are certainly other eras, less fortunate in this respect than
antiquity, whose history has not yet been written. The Turks or the
Americans, who lack a literary tradition of their own, would certainly
present a modem Herodotus with an opportunity."
Herodotus was expected, Livy came. Etienne Pasquier, in his
Recherches, took on the role of ethnographer of the past and provided
science with" origins."
This coexistence of historian and ethnographer was not to last. The
rationalism of the classical age and subsequently of the Enlighten-
ment reserved history for peoples caught up by progress. "In the
sense that Gibbon or Mommsen were historians, there was no such
thing as an historian before the eighteenth century." From this point
of view, R. G. Collingwood is right.
II
After a divorce lasting more than two centuries, historians and
ethnologists are showing signs of converging once again. The new
history, having taken on a sociological guise, is tending to become
ethnological. What, then, does the ethnological outlook reveal to the
historian in his own domain?
First, ethnology modifies history'S chronological perspectives. It
leads to a radical abandonment of the singular event, and thus re-
alizes the ideal of a history without events. Or, rather, it proposes a
history made up of repeated or expected events, such as festivals on
727
TOWARD A HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
228
The Historian and the Ordinary Man
the present day. Are liturgy and festival, present in all societies, par-
ticularly connected with archaic societies? Evans-Pritchard seems to
think so: "An anthropological training, including field work, would
be especially valuable in the investigation of earlier periods of his-
tory in which institutions and modes of thought resemble in many
respects those of the simpler peoples we study." But was medieval
Western man (Evans-Pritchard stops at the Carolingian era) archaic?
And are we not archaic, in our world of sects, horoscopes, flying
saucers, and racing lotteries? Do the terms "liturgical society" or
"ludic society" accurately express the nature of medieval society?
As distinct from the historian of societies in flux and of urban
dwellers influenced by changing modes, the ethnologist will choose
for his object conservative rural societies (which are not so con-
servative as is sometimes said, as Marc Bloch has reminded us), the
connective tissue of history. Thus, owing to the ethnological outlook,
there has been a ruralization of history. The reader will allow the
medievalist to look once again to his own specialty. After the urban
and bourgeois Middle Ages imposed by nineteenth-century histo-
rians from Augustin Thierry to Henri Pirenne, we have what seems
to us the truer rural Middle Ages of Marc Bloch, Michael Postan,
Leopold Genicot, and Georges Duby.
Through this shift in interest toward the life of ordinary men,
historical ethnology leads naturally to the study of mentalities, con-
sidered as "that which changes least" in historical evolution. Even at
the heart of industrial societies, archaism becomes evident as soon as
collective psychology and behavior are examined. Mental time being
"out of joint" with other historical time scales, the historian is com-
pelled to become an ethnologist. But the mental world he seeks to
grasp is not 10st in the night of time. Mental systems are historically
datable, even if they do carry a heavy freight of debris from archeo-
civilizations, dear to Andre Varagnac.
III
Ethnology also leads the historian to place in relief certain social
structures which are more or less effaced in "historical" societies,
and to complicate his picture of social dynamics and the class
struggle.
Notions such as class, group, category, and stratum should be
reconsidered by introducing into the model of social structure and
interaction certain concepts and realities which, though fundamen-
tal, have been relegated by post-Marxist sociology to the margins of
social theory:
a) Family and kinship structures, for example, whose introduction
into the historian's problematics may lead to a new periodization of
European history based on the evolution of family structures. By
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230
•
The Historian and the Ordinary Man
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• 232
The Historian and the Ordinary Man
scientia nihil est," said the learned French architects; "Scientia
sine arte nihil est," replied the Lombard masons, no less learned,
but in another system of knowledge. This interest, in any case,
has begun to stimulate a history of building materials and raw
materials, not necessarily noble or precious, such as salt and wood.
2) The emergence of the body in history. Michelet had already laid
claim to this theme in his 1869 Preface to the History of France. He
there deplored history's lack of interest in foods, and in innumerable
physical and physiological circumstances. His wish is beginning to be
fulfilled. This is largely the case, at least, for the history of food,
thanks to the impetus provided by journals and centers such as
Annales-Economies, Societes, Civilisations (Fernand Braudel, co-
director); Zeitschrift fiir Agrageschichte und Agrasoziologie, around
Wilhelm Abel at Gottingen; and the Afdeling Agrarische Geschiednis,
conducted by Slicher van Bath at the Landbouwehogeschool in
Wageningen.
Biological history is getting underway. A special issue of Annales
E.S.C. set out the prospects. The great book by a biologist turned
historian, Fran.;ois Jacob's La Logique du vivant, a history of heredity,
shows that the encounter between biology and history may be ap-
proached from either side.
To move nearer the domain of ethnology proper, it is to be hoped
that historians will follow the path laid out by Marcel Mauss in his
famous article on the techniques of the body, historical knowledge of
which should be of decisive importance in the characterization of
societies and civilizations.
3) Dwellings and clothing should provide the historian-
ethnologist with the opportunity for an interesting dialogue between
stability and change. The problems of taste and fashion, essential in
dealing with these subjects, can be treated only through inter-
disciplinary collaboration among students of aesthetics, semi-
ologists, historians of art, historians, and ethnologists. Here
again, work such as that of Fran.;ois Piponnier and Jacques Heers
illustrates the desire on the part of historians to root their research in
the proven fertile soil of economic and social history.
4) Finally, there is the immense problem for which historians and
sociologists should join forces to study a phenomenon of capital im-
portance for both, tradition. Particularly illuminating among recent
work in this area is that of Jean-Michel Guilcher, an ethnologist
specializing in popular dance.
VI
I will not insist on the fact that the ethnological outlook offers the
historian a new sort of documentation, different from that to which
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showing that there are no societies without history and that the idea
of static societies is an illusion, is it prudent for the historian to give
himself over to an ethnology that stands outside time? To put it in
Levi-Straussian terms, if there are no hot and cold societies but,
rather, as is obvious, societies more or less hot or more or less cold, is
it legitimate to treat hot societies like cold ones? And what about
"tepid" societies?
While ethnology helps the historian rid himself of illusions of a
linear, homogeneous, and continuous progress, problems of evolu-
tionism remain. In relation to history, is the neighboring discipline
of prehistory, which is also devoted to societies without writing,
really a prehistory, or a different history?
If the historian takes a view of the world too close to that of ethnol-
ogy, how can he explain growth, an essential phenomenon in the
societies he studies, a modern, economic, insidious form of progress,
which must be demythified (as, for example, Pierre Vilar has done in
unmasking the ideological presuppositions in Rostow's takeoff) but
which is also a reality to be explained?
Are there not, moreover, several ethnologies that should be distin-
guished from one another, among which the European will be of a
different kind from that of more or less preserved areas such as the
Amerindian, African, or Oceanic?
A specialist in change (by saying transformation, the historian
places himself on potentially common ground with the ethnologist,
providing he does not revert to the notion of diachronic), the histo-
rian should beware of becoming insensitive to change. His problem
is not so much to seek a transition from the primitive to the historical
or to reduce the historical to the primitive as to explain the coexis-
tence and interaction within the same society of phenomena and
groups not located within a single time or a single evolutionary scale.
It is a problem of levels and of temporal displacements. As for the
way in which the historian might teach the ethnologist how to
recognize-and respect-the other, this is a lesson that should not,
unfortunately, be overestimated, for, beyond the often regrettable
polemics, ethnology today shows us that the negation or destruction
of the other is not the privilege of a human science .
• 236
THE SYMBOLIC RITUAL OF VASSALAGE
Appendixes to this essay and a bibliography may be found below, pp. 354--57, 367.
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TOWARD A HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
238
The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage
Another symbolic interpretation of the ritual of entry into vassal-
age dating from the late thirteenth century may be found in one of
those rare texts that give symbolic explanations of certain points in
the rites of vassalage, the Speculum juris of Guillaume Durand (1271,
recast in 1287): "because he who does homage, on his knees, places
his hands between the hands of the lord and does him homage; he
promises on his honor, and the lord, in a reciprocal sign of faith,
gives him a kiss," and, further: "immediately afterward, as a sign of
reciprocal and perpetual love, the kiss of peace is given."s
What interests me here, however, more than identifying symbols
in the current sense of the term, i.e., as concretizations of an abstrac-
tion, "close to emblematic analogy," is rather the possibility of a
symbolic ritual in the whole complex of acts by which vassalage was
constituted. In this regard, the traces of a conscious conception of
this ritual are still more tenuous. Lambert of Ardres, for instance,
does write, in his Historia comituem guinensium at the very end of the
twelfth century, that "The Flemish did homage to Count Thierry
according to the rite,"6 but can we take the term "rite" in the strong
sense, as expressing awareness of an actual rite of homage, or is it
merely a worn-out and devalued word, devoid of its initial semantic
charge?
If I may temporarily leave aside the problem of the silence of
medieval documents with respect to an explicit symbolic interpreta-
tion of the rites of vassalage, I would like to offer the hypothesis that
such rites were indeed a symbolic ritual and that an ethnological type
of approach might be able to shed some light on important aspects of
the institution of vassalage.
Not that I am unaware of the risks of applying such methods to the
study of vassalage in the medieval West. A society which has tradi-
tionally been the object of study by historians does not easily lay
itself open to methods used by ethnologists to study other societies.
In attempting this approach, I shall try to preserve the meaning of
such differences---of a certain basic difference.
I DESCRIPTION
One is struck at once by the fact that the rites of vassalage involve
three preeminently symbolic categories: speech, gesture, and ob-
jects.
Lord and vassal make certain speeches, perform certain gestures,
and give or receive certain objects which, to quote Augustine's defi-
nition of the signum-symbol, "in addition to the impression they
make on our senses, impart something further to our knowledge."
Let us review briefly the three stages of entry into vassalage which
were distinguished by men of the Middle Ages and, after them, by
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TOWARD A HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
240
The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage
was written down and preserved. It would also depend on the exac-
titude of the documents and might require a consideration of re-
gional differences and chronological changes.
The speech is symbolic, however, in that it is already the sign of a
relationship between lord and vassal that goes beyond the words
exchanged.
There is an analogous case, although it raises the problem of vas-
salage between kings to which we shall return. In this instance,
according to Ermold the Black, Harold the Dane was even more ex-
plicit when he became the vassal of Louis the Pious in 826.
"Receive me, Caesar," he said, "with my kingdom, which is sub-
ject to you. Of my own free will, I place myself at your service."')
There is a similarity with baptism, during which the new Chris-
tian answers God, who has questioned him through the baptizing
priest, either speaking himself or through his godfather: "Do you
want to become a Christian?-I do." By the same token, the vassal
enters into a total, but definite, engagement to his lord at this first
stage.
A second act completes the initial phase of entry into vassalage.
This is the immixtio manuum: the vassal places his joined hands be-
tween the hands of his lord, which close over them. Galbert of Bruges
is quite precise on this point: "then he (placed) his clasped hands in
those of the count, who grasped them."
The oldest documents on rites of vassalage mention this rite of the
hands.
In the first half of the seventh century, formula 43 of Marculf states,
concerning the antrustion of the king: "He was seen to swear in our
hand fidelity (in manu nostra trustem et fidelitatem)." 10
In 757, according to the Annales regni Francorum, Tassilo, Duke of
Bavaria, comes "recommending himself in vassalage by the hands"
to King Pepin. 11
In the previously cited poem by Ermold the Black, Harold the Dane
makes the same gesture to Louis the Pious in 826: "Shortly there-
after, with hands joined, he delivered himself voluntarily to the king."
At this point, a comment is in order. Here we are certain that there
was a reciprocity of gestures. The vassal's gesture was not enough by
itself. The lord's had to respond to it. 12
Furthennore, we are here touching on one of the great chapters in
m~dieval and universal symbolism. This symbolism was polysemic,
expressing instruction, defense, judgment, but especially, as in this
case, protection, or rather the encounter between power and submis-
sion. The gesture revived a shopworn image of Roman legal ter-
minology by restoring to manus its full scope as one of the expres-
sions of potestas, and, in particular, one of the important attributes of
the paterfamilias. 13 But we must not get ahead of ourselves.
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242
The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage
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TOW ARD A HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
relics of the saints. And he promised fealty to King Pepin and to his
aforementioned sons, the lords Charles and Carloman, as by law a
vassal must do."22
At this stage of the ritual of vassalage, the vassal has become the
"man of mouth and hands" of the lord. In 1110, for example, Bernard
Atton N, Viscount of Carcassonne, swore homage and faith in return
for a number of fiefs to Leon, abbot of Notre-Dame-de-Ia-Crasse in
the following terms: "In the name of each and every man, I do hom-
age and faith by my hands and mouth to thee, my lord Leon, abbot,
and to thy successors."23
We see the same frequently-used expression, "man of mouth and
hands," in still more explicit form in the carta donationis of 1109 of
Dona Urraca, in which Alfonso the Battler uses it in addressing his
wife: "Let all the vassals (homines) who today hold this fief (honor)
from you, or will hold it in the future, swear fealty to you and become
your vassals (men) of mouth and hands."24
This expression is manifestly important because it shows the
essential place occupied by the symbolism of the body in the cultural
and mental system of the Middle Ages. The body not only reveals the
soul but is the symbolic site where man's fate--in all its forms-is
fulfilled. Even in the hereafter, at least until the Last Judgment, it is
in corporeal form that the soul meets its fate, for better or worse, or
for purgation.
Finally, the ritual of entry into vassalage concludes with the in-
vestiture of the fief, which is accomplished by the lord's delivery of a
symbolic object to his vassal.
"Then," says Calbert of Bruges, "with the wand which he held in
his hand, the count gave investiture to all."
What we have here is, in my view, a relatively minor aspect of the
symbolism of the ritual of vassalage, the involvement of symbolic
objects rather than speech or gesture. Nevertheless, our approach to
the question, which is not without interest, is facilitated by the fact
that Du Cange has treated it in the admirable article Investitura in his
glossary.25
This article is admirable in three respects. First, because it collects
a range of texts which comprise a veritable corpus of objects and
symbolic gestures used in the course of investiture: ninety-nine vari-
etiesp6
Second, because it begins with a veritable essay on the symbolism
of medieval investiture.
Finally, because it proposes a tentative typology for symbolic ob-
jects used in investiture in the Middle Ages. Du Cange points out
that investitures were not only made orally or with the aid of a simple
document or charter set per symbo/a quaedam. These symbolic objects
had to serve two purposes: to mark the transfer of possession of a
244
The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage
thing (dominium rei) from one person to another, and to confonn to a
consecrated custom so as to be perceived by all as an act having legal
force.
Du Cange then classifies the various symbolic objects culled from
documents of investiture according to two successive typologies.
In the first schema, he distinguishes objects having some relation
with the thing transmitted, for example, the branch, the clod of
earth, or sod, which signifies investiture of a piece of land. Next, he
singles out those which indicate transmission of power, potestas,
essentially in the fonn of a stick, festuca. Then come objects sym-
bolizing, beyond the transmission of power, the right to do violence
to the property (ius evertendi, disjiciendi, succidendi metendi, right
to uproot, throw out, cut down, or divide): these are primarily knives
and swords. Two additional categories of symbolic objects of in-
vestiture are related to customs, tradition, and history. Some are
connected with ancient traditions, like the ring or standard. Others
became symbolic during the Middle Ages, apart from any ancient
tradition. These were taken in particular from the realm of weaponry,
such as helmets, bows, and arrows, or from daily use, like horns,
cups, etc.
In his second typology, Du Cange gives a special place, before
listing all other objects in alphabetical order, to three sorts of objects
which he says occur most frequently in investitures: (1) objects con-
nected with the earth, and, more particularly, cespes or guazo (clods
or turf); (2) the various staffs of command: particularly baculum,
fustes (scepter, twig); (3) objects connected with the ius evertendi
(right to uproot), particularly cultellus (knife).
I have no intention of launching into a thorough study of the
ninety-eight symbolic objects inventoried by Du Cange (see Appen-
dix I [AD nor of undertaking to criticize his work in detail-it is, I
repeat, remarkable.
I shall merely make three comments.
The first is that, to my mind, another typology would be prefer-
able, which would take account of (il) references of an ethnohistorical
kind; (b) the frequency of occurrence in the documents.
As a first approximation, subject to revision, I would distinguish:
1. Socioeconomic symbols-in which the preeminence of what is
related to the earth is apparent, with an apparent preference for the
natural, uncultivated earth.
For example: per herbam et terram, per festucam, per lignum, per
ramum, per virgam vel virgulam, etc. (by grass and earth, by the stick,
by the wood, by the branch, by the twig or shoot), with occasional
borrowings from fishery (per pisces, by the fish) or the money econ-
omy (per denarios, by deniers).
2. Sociocultural symbols (I am taking culture here in the an-
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TOWARD A HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
246
The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage
247
TOW ARD A HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
II SYSTEM
It must be stressed that the whole body of symbolic rites and gestures
of vassalage constitutes not merely a ceremonial or ritual but a sys-
tem; that is, it functions only if all the essential elements are present
and is significant and effective only by virtue of each one of those
elements, whose meaning indi~dually can be made clear only by
248
The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage
reference to the whole. Homage, fealty, and investiture are necessar-
ily interdependent and constitute a symbolic ritual that remains intact
not so much because of the force and, in this case, the almost sacred
character of tradition as because of the internal coherence of the
system. It seems, moreover, that contemporaries perceived it in this
way.
The sequence of acts and gestures, from homage to fealty to in-
vestiture, was not merely temporal. It also had the character of a
logical, necessary unfolding. One may even wonder whether de-
scriptions of the rites of vassalage were as succinct as they are be-
cause of a more or less conscious desire to indicate without un-
necessary digression that the essential rite in all its necessary phases
had indeed been performed. Quite frequently all three ritual actions
are expressed in a single sentence covering homage and fealty. To
use the previously cited examples:
a) When William Long Sword became a vassal of Charles the Sim-
ple in 927, "he placed himself between the hands of the king to be his
man of war and pledged his faith and confirmed it with an oath."31
b) According to Thietmar of Merseburg, when Henry II arrived at
the eastern border of Germany in 1002, "all who had served the previ-
ous emperor crossed their hands with the king's and confirmed with
oaths that they would help him faithfully."32
The way the symbolic gestures are connected together in time and
in the internal necessity of the system is frequently underscored by
coordinating conjunctions (et, ac, que).
When the narrative is broken down into several episodes and
phases, the brevity of the interval between successive episodes is
frequently stressed.
a) In Ermold the Black's story of the Danish king Harold's becom-
ing a vassal of Louis the Pious and his investiture in 826:
Soon thereafter, hands joined, he delivered himself of his
own free will to the king ...
And Caesar himseU received his hands in his own hon-
orable hands ...
Soon Caesar, following the old tustom of the Franks,
gave him a horse and weapons ...
Meanwhile Caesar made offering to Harold who was
thereafter his faithful servant. 33
b) In the story of the entry of Notker, elected abbot of Saint Gall,
into the vassalage of Otto I in 971: " 'Finally you will be mine,' said
the emperor, and after having received him by the hands, he kissed
him. And soon, a gospel book having been brought in, the abbot
swore fealty."34
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The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage
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The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage
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254
The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage
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256
The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage
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The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage
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The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage
what, in our view, are the two most important observations which
can be made by way of provisional conclusion to this study of the
symbolic system of vassalage.
First, I should make it clear that I am not claiming that this system
is copied from a kinship system or that the relationship between lord
and vassal must be as one between father and adoptive son or be-
tween friend (in the medieval sense) and friend. I mean that the
system's symbolism, as it appears in the ritual of entry into or exit
from vassalage, was perceived (more or less consciously-I shall re-
turn to this important point) as a symbolism related to the domain of
family symbolism, and structured· as such. In my view, a society
possesses only a few basic symbolic systems, to which all other sys-
tems refer. In the case of the symbolic gestures of vassalage, this
referent was the system of gestures associated with kinship sym-
bolism.
Second, the symbolic system of vassalage did not embrace all
members of the society. Just as kinship symbolism excludes (what is
left outside the family model) more than it integrates, the symbolic
gestures of vassalage not only exhibited this exclusion but were also
responsible for bringing it about, among their other functions.
The society of kinsmen created by the symbolic ritual of vassalage
was masculine and even virile, as well as aristocratic. In other words,
women and commoners were excluded. A masculine society: if we
return to the case cited by Chlmon involving the homage done by a
minor child to his lord, the bishop-elect of Carpentras, in 1322 64 , we
observe that although the child requires the assistance of his gover-
ness in doing his homage (the lord takes in his hands the hands of
both child and governess), it is the child alone who gives (or re-
ceives) the osculum, the governess being excluded ("remisso ejusdem
dominae tutricis osculo"). I have already stated my skepticism as to
the interpretation offered by the author of the charter, who invokes
decency ("propter honestatem"). To me, the real reason for the exclu-
sion of women seems to lie in the social hierarchy with which the
hierarchy implicit in the symbolic system of vassalage was con-
fronted. Homage was the phase of inequality. Woman was allowed
to participate in this part of the ritual. The faith, on the other hand,
as symbolized by its component kiss, was the phase of equality be-
tween the partners. As a minor from a social and religious point of
view, the woman could not receive it. In reality, of course, greater
latitude was probably shown at times, but primarily on a more ele-
vated level, where great ladies or, in particular, women in possession
of royal authority were involved, such as Dona Urraca, with regard to
whom Alfonso the Battler used the expression "your men of mouth
and hands."6s
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262
The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage
Chascun vilain, chascun porchier;
Mais estre doit courtois et frans
Celui duquel homage prens. 68
(For your sake from this day I From my person I shall tum
away I Any man low-born or uncouth I Who would do me hom-
age or kiss my mouth. I No man who is base I May have leave to
touch my face. I Neither swineherd nor villein I Will tomorrow
my presence gain. I He to whose homage I agree I Must be one
both courtly and free.)
There can be no doubt that in certain regions, at least, commoners
and even serfs acquired fiefs and did servile homage, an interesting
phenomenon which requires further study. But the enfeoffed com-
moner would never be a real vassal. The symbolic kiss, the osculum,
was refused to him as it was to women.
Clearly, we should find some part of the system wherever servile
homage existed. But neither the commoner nor, for even stronger
reasons, the serf entered fully into the symbolic system. It is there-
fore impossible to draw any conclusion from Charles-Edmond Per-
rin's interesting remark that in Lorraine in the early twelfth century,
the granting of a peasant holding to a tenant was expressed in legal
documents by the word investire. 69
The exclusions thus support our interpretation of the symbolic
gestures associated with vassalage as expressive of a relationship
which, through a reciprocal commitment sanctioned by the fief,
makes the lord and vassal equals by virtue of the oath and a hierar-
chized couple by virtue of the homage.
III RESTORING THE SPATIO-TEMPORAL PERSPECTIVE
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264
The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage
the Latin s-tates in the East. Does the symbolic ritual of vassalage in
these cases reveal the same "pure fonn" of feudalism that some
others have been pleased to find in them? This could prove quite
illuminating for the definition of the symbolic "system," although I
remain somewhat skeptical as to the reality of the concept of "im-
ported feudalism." In the first place, my doubts arise from the arbi-
trariness of saying of a historical institution that it was "pure" in one
instance and not in another. Furthennore, I do not believe that in-
stitutional or cultural borrowings are successful, or even that they are
actual historical occurrences. To take root, a foreign model must find
the ground already prepared and must adapt to new conditions. In
this as in other respects, I find the notion of "purity," which accom-
panies that of "importation," to be ant~scientific, and in the present
instance, antihistorical.
On the other hand, I do believe that our understanding of a given
historical phenomenon could profit from the study of regions where
there was acculturation (such as those cited above) or which were
boundary zones on the fringes of medieval Christendom and
feudalism. These areas are too often forgotten by medievalists. More
than the zones of contact with the major competitors or adversaries
(Byzantium and Islam), which were mainly areas of conflict and re-
jection of alien fonns, the areas of contact with "paganism"-Ireland,
Scotland, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Slavic countries--deserve to be
studied on a variety of grounds and according to a different chronol-
ogy.
B. Chronological Perspectives
In spite of the gaps, the hazards of record keeping and preservation,
and the lack of interest that we have noted on the part of medieval
clerics in the ritual of vassalage, such documents as we do have allow
us to ascribe dates to the evidence.
One point seems certain. The system, in all essential respects, was
in place at the end of the eighth century, and this must have been the
time of its fonnation. The silence of earlier texts accords with what
we know of early medieval society, which was not yet, in the strict
sense, "feudal."
Two further remarks are called for, however.
First, most of the evidence concerns relations between personages
of very high rank, frequently of royal rank.
The Formulae Marculfi (first half of the seventh century) concern the
antrustion of the king. The "first known example of the oaths of
vassalage" involves King Pepin and Tassilo, Duke of Bavaria (757).
The text of 787 in which we witness the commitment of the vassal by
means of a symbolic object, "a stick with a human figure carved at its
265
TOWARD A HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
head" (cum baculo in cujus capite similitudo hominis erat scultum), con-
cerns Tassilo III, Duke of Bavaria, and Charlemagne. And one of the
earliest texts to describe the whole ritual-homage, oath, and in-
vestiture, with gestures, words, and symbolic objects--that of Er-
mold the Black (826), features the Danish King Harold and Emperor
Louis the Pious. 74
Of course, the writers were particularly interested in ceremonies
involving "stars," which seemed more worthy of record; still, the
text relating Tassilo's submission to Pepin, for example, stresses that
this act was no different from what vassals performed for their lords:
"As by law a vassal must do, with a loyal spirit and steadfast devo-
tion, as a vassal must have toward his lords"7s-w hich proves that
vassalage was widespread in the Frankish aristocracy and that a
ritual of vassalage existed.
The selectivity of the documents, however, shows that the impor-
tant part of the ritual of vassalage at this time was the homage, a sign
of recognition of the lord's superiority and of submission to it. There
is nothing surprising about this if one bears in mind that what prob-
ably assured the success of the insti tution of vassalage was the use
made of it by the Carolingian dynasty with the intention of creating
its own network of loyal supporters.
The second observation is of a similar nature. Even if, as I have
stated, the system was complete as early as the end of the eighth
century, investiture was clearly the weakest and least distinctive
feature of the rite. This accords well with what is known of the origin
of the fief, which would later become the perfected fonn of the bene-
fit or honor that the vassal received from the lord in exchange for his
homage, oath of fealty, and service.
Apparently the connection had not yet been made (assuming that
this was the way things happened-a permissi ble interpretation of
the origin of the symbolic system of entry into vassalage) between a
ritual that created a personal bond, and another (the ritual of af-
fatomie, for instance), using the festuca for a symbol, that was
primarily intended to transmit an inheritance, a piece of property,
through a personal bond or adoption viewed more as a means of
transferring the property than as the end in itself of the institution
and ritual.
Nevertheless, there is one point, of the first importance in my
view, on which the system was not completed before perhaps the
end of the tenth century. This was the osculum, or kiss, which sealed
the oath and faith. The text in the Saint Gall collection which de-
scribes how Notker, abbot-elect of that monastery, became a vassal
of Otto I in 971 ("Finally, he kissed him. And soon, a gospel book
was brought, and the abbot swore fealty") is given by one of the
266
The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage
267
TOWARD A HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
268
The Symbolic Ritual of Vt:ssalage
269
TOW ARD A HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
one accepts the ethnographic method, since this assumes that a sym-
bolic system can be fully effective without explicit awareness. 80
IV PROBLEMS
270
The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage
271
TOWARD A HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
272
The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage
ceremony than from the ceremony itself and consists of infonnation
which transcends the system of gestures-words-objects implicit in
the analysis of the historians.
A more comprehensive ethnographic interpretation of this type is
what I shall attempt. What follows is only an outline, since a more
intensive collection and interpretation of data than I was able to
undertake would be required to carry the study farther.
This analysis will treat the place of the ceremony, the persons
present, the respective positions of the participants, and the memori-
zation of the ritual.
a) Entry into vassalage did not take place in just any location, but
in a symbolic space, a ritual territory. In a classic study, Jean-
Fran~ois Lemarignier has shown the role of borders as sites for vas-
salage rituals: this was known as "homage on the march."86 In the
text by Thietmar of Merseburg cited above, it was on the occasion of
a trip made by the emperor Henry II to the eastern borders of Ger-
many that acts of homage were done to him.
More generally, we frequently find indications that the partici-
pants in vassalage rituals traveled to the site. Sometimes it is the lord
who comes to receive the vassal's homage; sometimes it is the vassal
who appears before the lord to undertake symbolic acts. In the text of
the Annales regni Francorum, for example, in connection with the
event of 757, we read: "The king Pepin held court at Compiegne with
the Franks. There came Tassi/o, Duke of Bavaria, who commended
himself in vassalage by his hands." Similarly, in Galbert of Bruges's
text, the new Count of Flanders, William Clito, Duke of Nonnandy,
comes to Flanders to receive the homage of his new vassals; the latter
come into his presence, however, in Bruges, where they do homage.
It is significant, I think, that the historian Robert Boutruche begins
the extract from this text which appears in the documentary section
of his book with the beginning of the ceremony of vassalage proper,
neglecting the previous phase of traveling, which, to us, appears to
be a part of the complete ritual. 87
Although the lord himself often goes to a particular place for the
ritual, the significant journey, from a symbolic point of view, is
made by the vassal, who always goes and presents himself to the
lord. Such travel has a dual function: it situates the ritual in a sym-
bolic location, and it begins defining the nature of the bond which is
to be established between lord and vassal by emphasizing that it is
the latter, the inferior, who is showing deference to the lord by
coming to him. 88
In the vast majority of cases, the symbolic space in which the ritual
of vassalage is accomplished is either a church or the great hall of the
castle (or one of the castles) of the lord.
If it is a church, the symbolic function of the site is that of being
273
TOWARD A HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
274
The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage
The spectators did not, I think, playa merely passive role as wit-
nesses but had a more active function as well. Along with the lord,
they received the vassal into the masculine and aristocratic society
which was "feudal" in the full sense of the word. They were witness-
es and guarantors of the mutual commitment of lord and vassal. If
the function of the site is to reinforce the hierarchical and in-
egalitarian aspect of the system of vassalage, then it seems to me that
the role of the spectators, by contrast, is to reaffirm the reciprocity of
the system.
c) It is also important to take account of the respective positions of
the participants during the ceremony. Unfortunately, detailed in-
formation on this point is sparse in the documents.
Was the lord seated? On what kind of seat? Was he on a raised
platform of some sort?
Was the vassal standing or on his knees?
Did the respective positions of the two participants change during
the ceremony?
Do we have the same symbolic significations here that we found in
the ritual of vassalage: hierarchy, equality, reciprocity?,~5
Did the positions of the participants refer to the symbolic complex
associated with kinship? Although our previous consideration of the
two factors of site and spectators may not have confirmed our
hypothesis, what we found was certainly compatible with it: church
and aula were spaces in which marriages took place, and the spec-
tators may have been the same as those who assisted at family cere-
monies, but these data are too general and vague to allow us to argue
one way or the other.
d) Finally, we must consider elements of the ritual which were
intended to insure its perpetuation and memorization.
The witnesses were one of these elements---along with such writ-
ten documents as were sometimes drawn up, of course, but these
represent only a particular case of a broad range of techniques of
memorization; writing long had no precedence over other forms.
Another element was the conservation of the symbolic object.
It should be noted first that the object was not always within reach.
In this case, Chenon has observed, the osculum, curiously enough,
could replace the delivery of the object. 96 The texts which show this
substitution deserve closer study.
Was the object kept? Who kept it? Where? At the present stage of
research, I can only put forward several hypotheses: the object was
usually kept; if it was one of the two participants who held it, it was
generally the lord; but most frequently the object was kept on neutral
and sacred ground, in a church, for instance, even if the ritual did not
take place there. 97 On rare occasions, apparently, the object was di-
275
TOWARD A HISTORlCAL ANTHROPOLOGY
vided, one part kept by the lord and the other part by the vassal. 98
Borrowing a distinction traditionally made by Germanic feu-
dalists, F. L. Ganshof stated that when the symbol was one of
action, it was either kept by the lord (scepter, rod, gold ring, glove)
or broken if of little value (e.g., a knife). When the symbol was an
object, the vassal kept it. 99
I am skeptical of this distinction. In the first place, the difference
between Handlungsymbol and Gegenstandsymbol is not very clear to
me. Second, the list includes objects which seem to be parts of the
monarchical ritual (scepter, rod, gold ring) rather than the ritual of
vassalage. The texts, in any case, need to be reexamined one by one.
Finally, I do not think the answers are quite so clearly delineated.
It should not be forgotten, however, that the instruments for per-
petuation and memorization of the symbolic ceremony are part of the
ritual.
C. References in Other Societies
I will take my examples primarily from non-European societies, par-
ticularly African, because I find that they offer the most suitable
material for comparison aimed at demonstrating the novelty of the
Western medieval system, both because of the types of socioeco-
nomic and cultural structure and because of the type of approach
employed by Africanists.
I am not going to discuss the parallel-well known to
medievalists--between the medieval West's feudal system of vassal-
age and Japanese institutions before the Meiji restoration. This par-
ticular parallel is useful and enlightening, but the invaluable and
detailed works of F. Jotion des Longrais in particular lead, I think, to
recognition of important differences between the two systems. Our
analysis of the Western system through the medium of the symbolic
ritual supports the idea that vassalage and fief were indissolubly
linked. Whether the fief was the crowning touch or the foundation of
the system, only investiture, as its constituent symbolic gestures
make dear, achieved the element of reciprocity essential to the sys-
tem. No such linkage of vassalage and fief existed in the Japanese
system, however. 100
The subject deserves extensive study. Here, I will confine myself to
giving a few references lOI and to stating two or three ideas.
Japan has been the object of so much discussion in comparative
work for two reasons. First, Japanese "feudalism" appeared at ap-
proximately the same time as our Western variety. Second, the com-
monly held opinion that Japan had remained "feudal" until 1867
made it easy to find records of its "survival" in the modem period,
much richer in documentation. Since there was no question of one
276
The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage
"feudalism" having influenced the other, chronological consid-
erations were relatively unimportant.
But why not look to China? The institutions that have been called
"feudal" there were established very much earlier than in the
medieval West, since the specialists regard the Chou dynasty (c.
1122-256 B.C.) as the "classical" period of Chinese feudalism.
Henri Maspero prudently chose to ignore a work on which several
sinologists had based work on Chinese "feudalism": Li-chi's
Memoirs Concerning Rites, a collection of Confucian ritualistic pam-
phlets written between the end of the fourth and the beginning of the
first century B.C. He found it difficult to decide whether this book
was a description of reality or a work of the imaginationY)2 On the
other hand, he was quite interested, with good reason, in an in-
scription from the eighth century B.C. describing the "investiture"
of a high royal officer: "In the morning, the king went to the temple
of king Mou and took his place. .. The officer K' 0 came in through
the door and took his place in the middle of the court, facing north.
The king shouted: 'Chief of the Yin family, prepare the tablet pre-
scribing the duties of the officer K'o.' The king spoke thus: 'K'o,
formerly I had mandated that you should execute and relay my or-
ders. Now I increase and exalt (?) your duties ... I give you a piece of
land at Ye ... ' K'o honored the king by prostrating himself."103
I will neglect the problem of what institution we are dealing with
here and the fact that, rather than vassalage and enfeoffment, it
seems to involve something similar to the fief of function, possibly
comparable with the Russian tchin. It should be noted that the
Chinese, more sensitive than Westerners to the symbolic signifi-
cance of the ceremonial, carefully describe the time that the ritual
takes place (morning), the symbolic site (the temple of king Mou),
the situation of the two main actors (the king takes his place, the
officer K'o takes his place in the middle of the court, facing north), as
well as the fact that both actors have to travel to the ceremony. Fur-
thermore, though the king may have gone to the temple, there is
greater stress on the movement of the officer, which is described in
detail, including the fact that he enters the symbolic and sacred space
through the door. There is at least one spectator, a sort of scribe or
notary, the chief of the Yin family, who prepares the tablet. Words
are involved in the ceremony, but only the king appears authorized
to speak in order to pronounce the ritual formulas. On the other
hand, the recipient of the honor salutes the king by prostrating him-
self, which eVidently represents an act of respect for a superior, but I
do not know whether it is addressed to the king or to the "lord" who
has entrusted to him the office and the land, nor whether it merely
expresses gratitude or is homage in the sense of "vassalage."
277
TOWARD A HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
278
The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage
Here, it does look as though the significance of the rite was
primarily territorial, without, of course, overlooking the fact that the
fief was territory, a piece of land. The Chinese institution thus cal1s
attention to the symbolism of border&-which we have encountered
before---and, more particularly, to the material embodiment and
symbolism of boundary markers, which played a well-known role in
the Roman world. This has not yet been adequately studied in the
case of the medieval West. lOS
The Chinese case, then, is an interesting one, inviting a closer
analysis of the ritual, an analysis that would take account of
"sites-movements of the principal&-reciprocal value of gestures,
words, and object&-function of the onlookers." Nevertheless, for
reasons previously indicated, it is by turning toward Africa, as we
shal1 now do, that we may hope to glean the finest fruits of compara-
tive study.
I am going to draw from two comprehensive works, Jacques
Maquet's Pouvoir et societe en Afrique (Paris, 1970) and the col1ection
of articles assembled by M. Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, African
Political Systems (London, 1940), as well as a number of articles. 109
As a good many African specialists have pointed out, the in-
stitutions studied in these works concern in general the region of the
Great Lakes and, more broadly, central and eastern black Africa. I
will not consider the question of whether this has more to do with
the novel features of these societies (and the kinship of their struc-
tures) Or with the fact that, for one reason or another, students of
Africa have focused their attention on this region.
Except for Maquet's work and works used by him, and J. J. Taw-
ney's article on a feudal custom among the Waha, all the studies are
concerned with "royal" ceremonial. This is not the place to discuss
whether the term "king" should apply to the persons of rank consid-
ered by these studies. It is true, nevertheless, that there are clear and
profound differences between the ceremonials represented in these
works and the ritual of vassalage. Hardly anything other than the
transmission of certain symbolic objects can be said to be similar in
the two cases. In the African ceremonies, however, the objects in
question are emblems of power and the forces involved are clearly
political, which is not the case with entry into vassalage. There is a
crowd representing the populace, along with a few high-ranking
individuals with special roles, such as members of the royal family,
priests, and dignitaries, but there is only one hero, the "king." The
function of the rites is to assure continuity and to perpetuate or foster
fertility and prosperity. More generally, as Meyer Fortes points
out-borrowing an expression from Marcel Mauss's celebrated Essai
sur Ie don (1925), in a remark that is also valid for royal rituals in the
279
TOWARD A HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
280
The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage
a congregation."114 Here, of course, this requirement derives from
the fact that a total institution is involved. I wonder, though, if a
detailed examination of the ritual of vassalage would not show that
the role of spectators went beyond that of mere witnesses, and that
the ceremony's symbolism needs to be expanded beyond its two
principal characters, the lord and the vassal.
Still, the comparative data collected in African societies are limited
and disappointing, to judge from my information, at least. Perhaps
this particular trail is more or less a dead end. But I think the confu-
sion thus far between royal rites and rites of vassalage has blocked
the comparative path. The fault often lies with historians, who have
started anthropologists down the wrong paths. 115
I am afraid, however, that the tendency of African specialists to
tum toward political anthropology, while it has the merit of reacting
against the excesses of a timeless and static anthropology, opens
them to the risk of getting bogged down in the misleading explana-
tions implicit in certain recent problematics involving the concept of
power; as a result, they neglect the study of the fundamental social
and economic phenomena, the kinship structures to which they
refer, and the singular symbolic systems connected with them. 116
Still, when African specialists have studied institutions and rites
related to those of medieval Western feudalism, both differences and
similarities have appeared.
Going beyond the analyses of the ubuhake in Ruanda, which I have
already used, Jacques Maquet makes the interesting observation that
"an essential aspect of the relation of dependence is that protector
and dependent choose each other because of their individual qual-
ities ... With the exception of the marriage tie, the other networks all
subject each actor to the tutelage of all the other actors ... It some-
times happens, moreover, that a dependency relation becomes
hereditary ... Even in that case, a vestige of choice remains: both
heirs must reaffirm the continuance of the bond which united their
predecessors. This initial choice bestows an individual quality on the
ensuing relationship, which stimulates confidence and even
friendship. "117
I will not enlarge upon the references to the matrimonial tie and
friendship, which, though interesting, are more metaphoric than
scientific. Instead, I will concentrate on the reciprocity of desire
which has been noted in vassalage. In addition to the words expres-
sing this choice or desire (d., in Galbert of Bruges, "the count de-
manded [of the future vassal] if he wished without reserve to become
his man, and the latter answered: 'I wish it.' "), one needs to in-
vestigate whether this voluntary aspect of reciprocal personal choice
is reflected in the ritual.
281
TOWARD A HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
282
The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage
The oath, an essential part of fealty, was usually taken on a reli-
gious object, even one particularly sacred, such as the Bible or relics.
As can be seen in the list taken from Du Cange's article Investitura,
the symbolic object of investiture was sometimes an ecclesiastical or
religious object (staff and ring, chalice, bishop's crook, candelabra,
keys to the church, abbatial cross, prioral hat, communion-an act
could replace the object, just as the osculum could, cakes of incense,
missal, monastery rule, psalm book, etc.). It is true that Du Cange
has relied heavily on investitures involving clerics, in many cases
ecclesiastical investitures, and, as I have pointed out, their con-
nections to rites of vassalage in the proper sense are still question-
able. Even in the ecclesiastical case, however, although the partici-
pants in the ceremony were laymen, the symbolic object was kept in
a church.
On the other hand, even if clerics were parties to the contract and
involved in the sanctioning ceremony, the symbolic objett could
perfectly well be profane. I will cite one case which offers certain
interesting details. Frederic lotion des Longrais has devoted an excel-
lent study to the charters of the priory of Hatfield Regis, in Essex, a
dependency of the celebrated Benedictine abbey Saint-Melaine of
Rennes, in Brittany.l2l In 1135, a Chamberlain of England, Aubrey
de Vere, enfeoffed to this priory two parts of the tithes from the
domain of Reginald Son of Peter at Ugley. He did so using a broken
knife as a symbol, and the knife, with a black hom handle 8.2 centi-
meters long and a broken blade 3.1 centimeters long, attached by a
braid of harp strings to the left side of the document registering the
act, which had a hole pierced through it, was still preserved in the li-
brary of Trinity College, Cambridge, when lotion des Longrais wrote
his study (and is no doubt still there today). The document is tradition-
ally known, moreover, as the "deed with the black hafted knife." In
it we find mentioned an invaluable detail. The transfer as fief of these
tithes by Aubrey de Vere to the monks of Hatfield Regis was done
"for the soul of his predecessors and successors."122 Thus it is pos-
sible for the religious character of a contract of vassalage to reside in
the lord's intentions.
There is nothing surprising in all this. Since medieval Western
society was Christian, and medieval Christianity was rich in rites
and symbols, we should expect to find the mark of the dominant
ideology on the ritual of one of its fundamental institutions, the
occasion of a public ceremony.
Here we find several important functions of the medieval Church:
its tendency to monopolize sacred spaces (churches), its efforts to
supply the only absolute guarantees for oaths sworn on the Bible and
relics (strengthening the role of Scripture and the cult of the saints),
283
TOWARD A HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
284
The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage
offered to a monastery by its parents is shown at the altar, its hand
wrapped in the altar cloth, and adds that the gesture "is equivalent to
a homage between the hands of God." This equivalence is very
dangerous! The rite of oblation of the child is much earlier than the
institution of vassalage, which it has nothing to do with. What we
ought to see in the Farfa document is an example of the old custom of
commendatio manibus or in manus, which, as Dom Leclercq himself
says, had come "to be employed in any sort of patronage or re-
lationship of protection."
By way of contrast it should be noted that in what Dom Leclercq
acknowledges to be the oldest text to mention the immixtio manuum,
the Marculf formula of the seventh century, 124 when the king de-
scribes the new antrustion as "coming here in our palace, with his
weapon, and having sworn, in sight of all, in our hand, fidelity," he is
referring not to the commendatio manibus but rather to an oath sworn
"between the hands of the king."
In the ritual of vassalage, by contrast with what takes place in
dubbing, Christianity merely provides the setting and acces-
sories-important as they may be-but neither substance nor
symbolism. The ritual of vassalage is essentially profane rather than
pagan, for though the system did borrow certain elements from
pre-Christian practices, these again, in my view, were only isolated
details, objects, or gestures. 125
Two additional questions will suffice to conclude our rapid survey
of this final problem.
We have seen in the examples cited that in black Africa and to an
even greater degree in China, the religious, sacred character of the
ritual is more marked than in Europe. Is this due to the fact that in
most cases these were royal rites or rites in which the king took part?
This was also the case in the medieval West. Or is it true that these
civilizations and societies are or were more highly sacralized than
was the medieval West?
Finally, we know that one of the indications of the religious
character of dubbing was the fact that it usually took place-in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries in any case--on the occasion of an
important Christian festival, Pentecost. Here we plainly see the con-
tinuity with paganism, for which this date was of great importance
in the rituals marking the beginning of the warm season, and it is
undoubtedly important to note what pains the medieval Christian
Church took to obliterate all traces of pagan origin in the dubbing
ceremony. This was unnecessary in the ritual of vassalage. Moreover,
it was practically impossible for ceremonies of entry into vassalage
and investiture to take place at a fixed date, assuming that there may
have been precedents or calendar references. The travels of the lords,
285
TOWARD A HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
the date of the death of lord or vassal occasioning renewal of the con-
tract and rites, the vagaries of the "politics of vassalage" in the feudal
class all justify the fact that such dates as we possess for vassalage and
investiture ceremonies vary considerably. Are there no favored dates?
As we try to interpret its symbolism, it would be useful to ascertain
that the ritual of vassalage is not concealing any calendar reference.
CONCLUSION: FAITHFUL SERVANTS, HENCE VASSALS
286
The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage
287
NOTES, BIBLIOGRAPHIES,
AND APPENDIXES
The documentation for each essay-whether in the fonn of notes, selected bibliog-
raphies, appendixes, or a combination of these elements-will be found grouped
together under the respective essay titles.
ABBREVIATIONS
289
NOTES TO PAGES 29--32
(1160--1229), Summa aurea, OI, 21, f" 225v: "The usurer acts in contravention to univer-
sal natural law , because he sells time, which is the common possession of all creatures.
Augustine says that every creature is obliged to give of itseU; the sun is obliged to give
of itself in order to shine; in the same way, the earth is obliged to give a\l that it can
produce, as is the water. But nothing gives of itseU in a way more in conformity with
nature than time; like it or not, every thing has time. Since, therefore, the usurer sells
what necessarily belongs to all creatures, he injures all creatures in general, even
stones. Thus even if men remain silent in the face of usurers, the stones would cry out
if they could; and this is one reason why the Church prosecutes usury. This is why it
was especially against the usurers that God said: 'When I take back possession of time,
when time is in my hands so that no usurer can sell it, then I will judge in accord with
justice.''' Cited by John T. Noonan, Jr., The Scholastic Analysis of Usury (1957), pp.
43-44. He points out that Guillaume d' Auxerre was the first to use this argument,
which was repeated by Innocent IV (Apparatus super libros decretalium, V, 39, 48; V, 19,
6). At the end of the thirteenth century, the author of the Tabula e::cemplorum (ed. J. T.
Welter (1926], p. 139) argues: "Since usurers sell nothing other than the hope of
money, that is, time, they are selling the day and the night. But the day is the time of
light and the night the time of rest; therefore, they are selling eternal light and rest."
Cf. also Duns Scotus, In IV libros sententiarum (Op. Oxon) IV, 15, 2, 17.
3. Invaluable data are found in Giovanni di Antonio da Uzzano, La pratica della
mercatura, ed. G. F. Pagnini Della Ventura, vol. 4 of Della decima ... (1766), and in EI
libro di mereatantie e usanze de' paesi, ed. F. Borlandi (1936). For example, we find: "In
Genoa, silver is dear in September, January, and April because of the sailing of the
ships ... in Rome or wherever the pope is located, the price of silver depends on the
number of vacant benefices and on the pope's travels, which causes the price of silver
to rise wherever he is ... in Valence, it is dear in July and August because of the wheat
and rice ... , in Montpellier, there are three fairs which cause the price of silver there to
be very high." Cited by Jacques Le Goff, Marchands et banquiers du Moyen Age (1956),
p. 30. For speculation on the rate of circulation of information, cf. P. Sardella, Nouvelles
et speculations ii Venise au debut du XVI' siec/e (1949).
4. Cf. G. Post, K. Giocarinis, R. Kay, "The medieval heritage of a Humanistic Ideal:
'Scientia donum Dei est, unde vendi non potest:" Traditio 2 (1955), 19fr.234; and
Jacques Le Goff, Les intellectuels au moyen age (1957), pp. 104 ff.
5. Oscar Cull mann, Temps et histoire dans Ie christianisme primitif (1947), p. 35.
Gerhard Delling, Das Zeitverstiindnis des Neuen Testaments (1940), cited in Cullmann, p.
35, note 2.
6. Cullmann, p. 32.
7. Ibid., p. 93.
8. Ibid., p. 98.
9. Ibid., p. 111.
10. Ibid., p. 152.
11. On millenarianism, see Ray C. Petry, Christian Eschatology and Social Thought: A
Historical Essay on the Social Implications of Some Selected Aspects in Christian Escha-
tology to A.D. 1500 (1956), which is entirely theoretical. It is still possible to consult E.
Waldstein, Die eschatologische Ideengruppe: Antichrist, Weitsabbat, Weltende und
Weltgeschichte (1896), and even Tommaso Malvenda, De Antichristo (Rome, 1604; 3d
ed., 1647). Gordon Leff has opposed the historian's problems ("In search of the Mil-
lennium," in Past and Present [1958), pp. 89-95) to the abstract work of Norman Cohn,
The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957). There are divergent views on the relations be-
tween medieval heresies and social classes. The social aspects are minimized by Father
Harino da Milano, "Le eresie popolari del secolo XI nell' Europa occidentale," Studi
greg. raccolti da C. B. Borina 2 (1947), 43-101 and A. Borst, Die Katharer (1953). In the
290
Notes to Pages 32-34
opposite direction there are: G. Volpe, Movimenti re/igiosi e sette ereticali nella societa
medievale italiana (1922), and the Marxist interpretations of N. Sidorova, "The popular
heretical movements in France in the eleventh and twelfth centuries" (in Russian) in
Srednie Veka (The Middle Ages, 1953), and E. Werner, Die gesellschaftlichen Grundlagen
der K/osteTTeform im 11. Jahrhundert (1955). A survey by R. Morghen is to be found in
Medivo Cristiano (1951), pp. 212 ff., and in the Relazioni of the tenth International
Congress of Historical Sciences (Rome, 1955), vol. 3, pp. 333ff. There is a suggestive
essay by Chrales P. Bru, "Sociologie du catharisme occitan," in Spiritualitt de l'hiresie:
Ie Catharisme, ed. R. Nelli (1953).
12. Georges Poulet, Etudes sur Ie temps humain (1949).
13. Marc Bloch, in Annales d'histoire economique et socia/e, 1936, p. 582.
14. Henri I. Marrou, L' Ambivalence du temps de l'histoire chez saint Augustin (1950).
On time in Saint Augustine, see, in the collection Augustinus Magister, Congres inter-
national augustinien, Paris, 21-24 September 1954, 3 vols. (1955), the following arti-
cles: J. Chaiz-Ruy, "La Cite de Dieu et la structure du temps chez saint Augustin," pp.
923-31; R. Gillet, O.S.B., "Temps et exemplarisme chez saint Augustin," pp. 933-41; J.
Hubaux, "Saint Augustin et la crise cyclique," pp. 943-50.
15. E. Bernheim, Mittelalterliche Zeitanschauung in ihrem Einfluss aUf Politik und
Geschichtsschreibung (1918); H. X. Arquilliere, L' Augustinisme politique (1934).
16. Cf. P. Rousset, "La conception de I'histoire a I'epoque feodale," in Melanges
Halphen, pp. 623-33: "The notion of duration and of precision did not exist for men of
the feudal era" (p. 629); "the taste for the past and the need to mark off epochs was
accompanied by a desire to ignore time" (p. 630); "the same sentiment flared up at the
origin of the Crusades; the knights wanted to eliminate time and space and to attack
Christ's executioners" (p. 631). The author echoes Marc Bloch, who uncovered in the
feudal era "a broad indifference to time" (La Societe feodale 1, p. 119 [Bloch's work has
been translated as Feudal Society, Chicago and London, 1961.-Trans.]). On Otto of
Freising, d. H. M. Klinkenberg, "Der Sinn der Chronik altos von Freising," in Aus
Mitte/alter und Neuzeit: Gerhard Kullen zum 70. Geburtstag dargebracht (1957), pp. 63-76.
17. M.-D. Chenu, "Conscience de I'histoire et theologie," Archives d'Histoire doc-
trina/e et litteraire du Moyen Age, 1954, pp. 107-33; reprinted in La Thtologie au XlI'
siee/e (1957), pp. 62-89. See also Etienne Gilson, L'Esprit de la philosophie medievale, 2d
ed. (1948), chap. 19, "Le Moyen Age et I'histoire," pp. 365-82. On two "historians" of
the twelfth century, d. R. Daly, "Peter Comestor, Master of Histories," Speculum,
1957, pp. 62-72; and H. Wolter, Ordericus Vita/is: Ein Beitrag zur Kluniazensischen
Geschichtsschreibung (1955).
18. M.-D. Chenu, Archives, pp. 210-20, "VAncien Testament dans la theologie
medievale." B. Smalley's work The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages is fundamental.
The symbolic aspect of Christian thought in the twelfth century has been treated by
M. M. Davy in Essai sur la Sybolique romane (1955), which stresses only the most tradi-
tional aspect of twelfth-century theology.
19. M.-D. Chenu, La Theologie au XW site/e, pp. 66--67.
20. Ibid., p. 76.
21. Cf. Etienne Gilson, Les Idees et les lettres, pp. 183 ff., and P. Renucci, L' Aventure
de l'humanisme europeen au Moyen Age, pp. 138 ff. The Franco-Italian translatio studii.
22. M.-D. Chenu, La Theologie au XlI' sit!e/e, pp. 79-80.
23. Ibid., p. 86.
24. Cf. H. Liebeschutz, Medieval Humanism in the Life and Writings of John of Salis-
bury (1950).
25. For a general view of the medieval merchant, see Y. Renouard, Les Hommes
d'affaires italiens du Moyen Age (1949); A. Sapori, Le Marchand ita lien au Moyen Age
(1952); Jacques Le Goff, Marchands et banquiers du Moyen Age (1956).
291
NOTES TO PAGES 3~39
26. On monetary problems in the Middle Ages, see Marc Bloch, Esquisse d' une his-
toire monetaire de I'Europe (posthumous, 1954); C. M. Cipolla, Money, Prices, and Citlili-
zation in the Mediterranean World, 5th to 16th Centuries (1956); T. Zerbi, Moneta effetiva e
moneta di conto nelle fonti contabili di storia economica (1955); R. S. Lopez, Settecento anni
fa: II ritomo all'oro nell'Occidente duecentesco (1955).
27. Cf. J. Meuvret, "Manuels et traites a l'usage des negociants aux premieres
epoques de l'age moderne," Etudes d'Histoire modeme et contemporaine 5 (1953).
28. Cf. Raymond de Roover, L'Evolution de la lettre de change (1953).
29. Cf. R. H. Bautier, "Les foires de Champagne: Recherches sur une evolution
historique," RecueiIs de la SocieU Jean Bodin: La Foire (1953), pp. 97-147.
30. Published by J. Rouyer, Aper~u historique sur deux cloches du beffroi d' Aire: La
banc/oque et Ie vigneron (P.J.I.), pp. 253-54; G. Espinas and H. Pirenne, Recueil de
documents relatifs il l'histoire de l'industrie drapi~re en Flandre 1(1906), 5-6.
31. Georges Friedmann, "Frederic Winslow Taylor: l'optimisme d'un ingenieur,"
Annales d'Histoire economique et sociale, 1935, pp. 584-602.
32. On the measurement of time and clocks, there are interesting ideas to be found,
but often requiring further study with more precise data, in Lewis Mumford, Technics
and Citlilization (1934), pp. 22 ff.; an excellent sketch is found in Renouard, pp. 1~92.
It should be pointed out, in any case, that decisive progress in this area was to come
only after the beginning of the sixteenth century. A. P. Usher nevertheless is
exaggerating in the opposite direction when he states: "The history of clocks prior to
the 16th century is largely a record of essentially empirical achievements," in A History
of Mechanical Inventions, 2d ed. (1954), p. 304. Cf. A. C. Crombie, Augustine to Galileo:
The History of Science, A.D. 400-1650, 2d ed. (1957), pp. 15(}-.51, 183, 186-87. From a
vast literature, we will single out F. A. B. Ward, Time Measurement (1937), for its
documentation, and the popularization of F. Le Lionnais, Le Temps, for pleasure of
reading. The quote from Jean de Garlande is taken from his Dictonarius, Geraud ed., p.
590.
It is well known that psychologists have stressed that the child acquires his spatial
and temporal notions concomitantly. See Jean Piaget, Le Developpement de la notion de
temps chez l'enfant (1946), pp. 181-203; P. Fraisse, Psychologie du temps (1957), pp.
277-99; P. Malrieu, "Aspects sociaux de la construction du temps chez l'enfant,"
Journal de Psychologie, 1956, pp. 315-32.
33. Pierre Francastel, Peinture et Societe: Naissance et destruction d'un espace plastique;
De la Renaissance au Cubisme (1951).
34. On the relations between theatrical representations and UcceUo's painting, cf. P.
Francastel, "Un mystere parisien illusrre par Uccello: Le miracle de l'hostie d'Urbino,"
Revue archeologique, 1952, pp. 180-91.
35. For examples, see especially J. Lestocquoy, Les Villes de Flandre et d'Italie sous Ie
governement des patriciens (XIe-xve s.) (1952), pp. 204 ff.: "Les patriciens et l'Evangile."
36. We are aware of the fact that recent detailed studies are leading to considerable
modification and correction of the classic theses of Max Weber, Die protestantische
Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (1920), and of R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of
Capitalism (1926).
37. Maurice Halbwachs, "La memoire collective et Ie temps," Cahiers internationaux
de sociologie, 1947, pp. 3-3l.
38. Robert Mandrou has pointed out (Annales, 1960, p. 172) what the requirements
of the historian are and has recalled some old suggestions of Marc Bloch, in connection
with recent works of philosophers relatively unconcerned with concrete history.
39. Poulet, p. vi, echoing Duns Scotus, Questiones quod/ibetales, q. 12.
40. Besides general works on the history of philosophy and the sciences, the reader
may consult, on the role of the Arabs, A. Mieli, Panorama general de historia de la
ciencia, vol. 2, EI mundo islamico y el occidente medieval cristiano (1946); and F. Van
292
Notes to Pages 39-44
293
NOTES TO PAGES 44--47
etymology of John of Garland (above, p. 36).
7. Gunnar Mickwitz, "Die Kartellfunktionen der Ziinfte und ihre Bedeutung bei
der Entstehung des Zunftwesens," Societas Scientiarum Fennica: Commentationes
Humanorum Litterarum 8, no. 3 (1936), 88-90.
8. The English word noon reflects this.
9. Cf. Casalini, in Studi Storici O.S.M., 1960.
10. Cf. D. Knoop and G. P. Jones, The Mediaval Mason (1949), p. 117.
11. I do not believe that there was an absolute depression in the fourteenth century.
Cf. E. A. Kosminsky, "Peut-on considerer Ie XIV' et Ie XV' siecle comme I'epoque de la
decadence de I'economie europeenne?" Studi in onore di Armando Sapori I (1957).
12. G. Espinas and H. Pirenne, Recueil de documents relatifs a [,histoire de ['industrie
drapiere en Flandre 1 (1906), 200.
13. R. de Lespinasse, Les Metiers et corporations de Paris (1886), part 1, p. 1.
14. Bilfinger, pp. 163-64.
15. Espinas and Pirenne 2, 411-12.
16. A. Thierry, Recueil des monuments in edits de thistoire du tiers etat (1850), pp.
456--57.
17. Espinas and Pirenne 2, 230-33.
18. Ibid. 1, 6.
19. I am thinking here only of the role of the textile industry in the progress made in
certain specialized techniques of medieval economic organization. In my view, certain
historians go too far in making textiles the motor of medieval economic growth. The
takeoff of the medieval economy occurred in two basic, rather than advanced; sectors:
land and construction.
20. G. Fagniez, Etudes sur ['industrie et la classe industrielle Ii Paris au XIII' et au XIV'
siec1e (1877), p, 84.
21. On measures and social history, cf. the exemplary article by Witold Kula, "La
metrologie historique et la lulte des classes: l'exemple de la Pologne au XVIII" siecie,"
Studi in onore di Amintore Fanfani (1962), vol. 5.
22. Espinas and Pirenne 2, 471.
23. Ibid. 3, 395.
24. Ibid. 2, 596.
25. Ordonnances des Rois de France . .. 4, 209.
26. On the revolutionary role of this group, cf. esp. Ernest Labrousse, La Crise de
[' economie fran(aise ala fin de [' Ancien Regime et au debut de la Revolution 1 (1943), 592 ff.
27. Cf. E. Maugis, "La journee de 8 heures et les vignerons de Sens et d' Auxerre
devant Ie Parlement en 13~1393," Revue historique 145 (1924); I. M. Delafosse, "Notes
d'histoire sociale: Les vignerons d' Auxerrois (XIV -XV" siecie)," ·Annales de Bourgogne,
1948.
28. Cf. the references to acts of the parlements cited by B. Geremek, Le salariat dans
/' artisanat parisien aUI Xm"-xv' siecles: Etude sur Ie marche de la main-d' C1!Uvre au
Moyen-Age (Paris, 1968).
29. Lespinasse, p. 52.
30. The decree of the Parlement of Paris for Auxerre of 26 July 1393 states: " ... suum
opus relinquentes, quidam eorum ad proprias vineas excollendas, alii vero ad taber-
nas ac ludos palme vel alibi accedunt, residuis horis diei ad laborem magis propiciis et
habilioribus omnino (or ottiose) pervagando" (cited by Maugis, p. 217).
31. In addition to the preceding text, d. this passage from the ordinance of Charles
V1 for Sens, in July 1383: they "abandon their work and leave between midday and
None or thereabout, a particularly long while before the sun has set, and go to work on
their vines or at other jobs, and there they labor and do as much or more work than
they did the whole day for those who paid them their daily wages; and what is more,
by working by the day, they take care of and spare themselves, without doing their
294
Notes to Pages 48-49
duty, so that they may be stronger and less exhausted for work in the places they go
after quitting their jobs" (ibid., p. 210).
32. Bilfinger, pp. 163-64. The names of the bells must not, however, be interpreted
in too narrowly economic a sense. Thus J. Rouyer, in his study Aper,u historique sur
deu:r cloches du beffroi d' Aire: La bancloque et Ie vigneron, suggests that the second of
these two names must indicate a reference to a hypothetical grape culture in the Aire
region. But actually this was merely the bell which replaced the crintr de vin, whose
shout sometimes marked the end of the working day: it was thus for the fullers in Paris
in the thirteenth century, who "quit work on the night of Ascension when the crier
brought wine" and, on the eve of certain festivals, "as soon as the first crieur de vin
comes" (Le Livre des Metiers d'Etienne Boileau, ed. R. de Lespinasse and F. Bonnardot,
pp. 108--9).
33. With all its symbolic consequences, the destruction or banishment of the com-
munal bell could be punishment for a rebellious city, as the razing of a house or
destruction of a fortified castle could be for an individual or nobleman. This is what
Philippe d' Alsace is said to have done as early as 1179 at Hesdin: "Comes Flandrensis
Philippus Sancti Quintini et de Parana castra graviter afflixit, eorumque cives ob-
sidione, et persequutione diu multumque humiliavit: Hesdiniensibus reipublicae dig-
nita tern abstulit; campanam communiae apud Ariam transmisit, et quosdam pro
interfectione cujusdam de turri praecipitari jussit" (Chronicon Andrensis Monasterii apud
0' Achery, Spicilegium II, 817).
34. With fiscal advances came the premises of a statistical mentality in the four-
teenth century. Giovanni Villani has, of course, been singled out in this regard.
35. Cf. L. F. Salzman, Building in England down to 1540 (1952), pp. 61-62.
36. Sancti Benedicti Regula Monachorum, ed. Dom Philibert Schmitz (1946), chap. 43,
"De his qui ad opus Del vel ad mensam tarde occurunt," pp. 64--66.
37. There seem to be two major zones: northern and central Italy and a region which
H. Ammann defines as the area of the Tuchindustrie Nordwesteuropas (d. Hansische
Geschichtsbliitter 72 [1954]).
38. There is, of course, an enormous bibliography on the introduction of the clock.
Cf. A. P. Usher, A History of Mechanical Inventions, 2d ed. (1954). On the famous clock
of the Bourges cathedral, see the particularly interesting work of E. PouIle, Un con-
strucleur d'instruments astronomiques au XV' siecle: Jean Fusoris (1963).
39. CE. R. Mandrou, Introduction Ii la France Modeme (1961), pp. 95-98.
40. Time would be unified, of course, only in the nineteenth century with the
industrial revolution, the transportation revolution (schedules and timetables on the
railroads imposed a unified hour), and the establishment of time zones. There fol-
lowed rapidly the age of the minute and then of the second, the age of chronometers.
One of the first literary indications of the unified time was Jules Verne's Around the
World in Eighty Days (1873).
41. Cf. J. Vielliard, "Horloges et horlogers catalans a la fin du Moyen Age," Bulletin
hispllnique LXIII (1961). In connection with these repairs, the author points out the
existence of specialist clockmakers, which shows that already the clock was in use
over a fairly wide area.
42. Cf. the legends surrounding the constructors of clocks, who were fabulous per-
sonages sometimes suspected of having made a pact with the devil. This was the
degree to which their knowledge appeared mysterious. Cf., e.g., the legend of the
clockmaker of Prague.
43. On the beginnings of a calculating mentality and practice, see the suggestive
article of U. Tucci, "AIle origini dello spirito capitalistico a Venezia: La previsione
economica," Studi in onore di Amintore Fanfani 3 (1962).
44. From the end of the fourteenth century on, the clock is nearly always present in
miniatures representing princes in their palaces, particularly the dukes of Burgundy.
295
NOTES TO PAGES 50-53
1. This, of course, is the point of view put forward by Georges Dumezil in many
works. Cf. H. Fugier, "Quarante ans de recherche sur ndeologie indo-europeene: La
methode de M. Georges Dumezil," Revue d'histoire el de philosophie Teligieuses, 1%5,
pp. 358-74. P. Boyance, "Les origines de la religion romaine: Theories et recherches
recentes," L'Information li/ttraire 7 (1955), 100-107, "doubts that the tripartite schema
was present in the mind of the Latins, since they never describe it explicitly." In the
ninth to eleventh centuries, we do find explicit expressions of the schema and clear
and precise formulations (see later in this chapter). We get the impression, further-
more, of two different types of mental structure juxtaposed, rather than an impression
of confused thought evolving into clear thought. Should we speak of two types of
coherent and parallel thought, "primitive" OT "savage" On the one hand, "historical"
on the other?
2. This was recently asserted by Vasilji I. Abaev, "Le cheval de Troie. Paralleles
caucasiens," Annales E.S.C., 1963, pp. 1041-70. D. Trestik has rightly called attention
to the importance of the passage in Genesis (9:18-27) in the treatment of the theme of
the tripartite society in medieval literature (Ceskoslovensky ~a50pis Historicky, 1964. p.
296
Notes to Pages 53-54
453). Noah's curse on his son Ham in favor of his brother Shem and Iapheth
("Maledictus Chanaan, servus servo rum erit fratribus suis';), was used by medieval
authors to define the relations between the two superior orders and the third, sub-
ordinate order. The exploitation of this text seems to have come relatively late, how-
ever, and will not be treated here.
3. King Alfred's Old-English Version of Boethius' "De Consolatione Philosophiae," ed.
W. J. Sedgefield (Oxford, 1899--1900). Alfred's text says ,that the king must have
"gebedmen & fyrdmen & weorcmen," "men for prayer, men for war, and men for
work." Cf. the suggestive article by Jean Batany, "Des 'Trois Fonctions' aux 'Trois
Etats'?" in Annales E.S.C., 1%3, pp. 933-38; and F. Graus, Ceskoslovensky tasopis
Historicky, 1959, pp. 205--31.
4. On Alfred, besides the fundamental work of F. M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England
(Oxford, 1945), and B. A. Lees's book with the significant title Alfred the Great: The
Truthteller, Maker of England (New York, 1919), the reader may consult the more recent
studies of Eleanor Duckett, Alfred the Great: The King and His England (1957), and P. I·
Helm, Alfred the Great: A Re-assessmenl (1963).
5. A convincing case for this dating has been made by I.-F. Lemarignier in Le
gouvemment royal aux premiers temps capttirns (987-1108) (Paris, 1965), p. 79, n. 53. The
text with a (French) translation may be found in G. A. Huckel, Les Poeml's satiriques
d' Adalbtron, Bibliotheque de la Faculte des Lettres de l'Universite de Paris, 13 (1901). A
French translation also appears in E. Pognon, L'An Mille (Paris, 1947).
6. Here is the text: "Sed his posthabitis, primo de virorum ordine, id est de laicis,
dicendum est, quo alii sunt agricolae, alii agonistae: et agricolae quidem insudant
agriculturae et diversis artibus in opere rustico, unde sustentatur totius Ecclesiae
multitudo; agonistae vero, contenti stipendiis militiae, non se collidunt in utero mat-
ris suae, verum onmi sagacitate expugnant adversarios sanctae Dei Ecclesiae. Sequitur
c1ericorum ordo." (PL 139, 464). On Abbo, see P. E. Schramm, Der Konig von Frank-
reich: Das Wesen der Monarchie vom 9. zum 16. Jahrhundert, 2d ed. (Dannstadt, 1960),
vo\. 1; and the posthumous edition, with updated notes, of the old thesis of the Ecole
des Chartes by A. Vidier, L'Historiographie a Saint-Bl'noit-sur-Loire et les Miracles de
saint Benoit (Paris, 1%5).
On the Abbo text, for an anthropological point of view, see the enlightening re-
marks of Claude Levi-Strauss in Anthropologie structurale (Paris, 1958), translated by C.
Jacobson and B. G. Schoepf as Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1%3),
chap. 8, "Do Dual Organizations Exist?" which explains the third circle of concentric
village organization as that of land clearing, the conquest of the soil, the field of labor.
7. Abbo was defending monastic privileges against Bishop Arnoul of Orleans. By
contrast, Adalbero, in a violent attack on Cluny, was deploring the hold that monks
had on the government of the kingdom.
8. On the role of Fleury (Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire) in the formation of the monarchical
ideal in France for the benefit of the Capetians (along with Saint-Denis, which would
take over the role for itself, quite effectively, beginning in the twe'lth century), see, in
addition to Vidier, L'Historiographie, R. H. Bautier's introduction to Helgaud of Fleury,
Vie de Robert Ie Pieux (Epitoma Vitae Regis Roberti Pii) (Paris, 1%5). The publication of
the Fleury texts, announced by R. H. Baulier, under the aegis of the lnstitut de Re-
cherche et d'Histoire des Textes du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
should make possible more detailed studies of this subject. Cf. also the important
article of J.-F. Lemarignier, Autour de III royauti fran(aise du IX' au XIII' siecle, Bib-
Iiotheque de l'Ecole des Chartes, 113 (1956), 5--36.
9. Monumenta Poloniae Historica, n.s. II, ed. K. Maleczynski (Krakow, 1952), 8. In his
remarkable works (Podslawy gospodarcZf !ormowania sie pllnstw slowianskich [War-
saw, 1953); "Economic Problems of the Early Feudal Polish State," Acta Poloniae His-
297
NOTES TO PAGES 55-56
to rica 3 (1960), 7-32; and "Dynastia Piastow we wczesnym sredniowieczu," in Poczalki
Paristwa Polskiego, ed. K. Tymieniecki, 1 (Poznan, 1962]), H. Lowmianski has stressed
this classification and given its socioeconomic significance. "Gallus's definition, m;-
lites be/licos;, rustici aboriosi, contains a reflection, unintentional as regards the chroni-
cler, of the objective fact of division of the community into consumers and producers"
(p.ll).
10. Cf. K. Maleczyriski's introduction to the edition cited in the preceding note; M.
Plezia, Kronika Galla na tIe historiografi; XH wieku (Krakow, 1947); J. Adamus, 0 mon-
archii Gal/owe; (Warsaw, 1952); T. Grudzinski, "Ze studiow nad kronika Galla," in
Zapiski Historyczne (1957); J. Bardach, Historia paristwa i prawa Polski (Warsaw, 1965) 1,
125--27. B. Kiirbis6wna, "Wid najstarszego dZiejopisarstwa polskiego z paristwem",
in Poczatki Paristwa Polskiego (Poznan, 1962), vol. 2, and J. Karwasiriska, Paristwo
polskie w przekazach hagiograficznych, ibid., pp. 233--44. D. Borawska's hypotheses
(Przeglad Historyczny, 1964) on the Venetian sources of the chronicle of Gallus
Anonymus, if verified, do not seem to be such as to require modification of our
interpretation.
11. It would be pushing the interpretation rather far to say that Adalbero adopted
the term oratores out of a desire to remind his Ciuniac adversaries that their exclusive
duty was to the opus Dei, in view of his accusation that they were too much involved in
the affairs of the day.
12. We have no intention here of going into the problem of the thaumaturgic king or
the saint-king (see, on this subject, the articles by R. Folz, "Zur Frage der heiligen
Konige: Heiligkeit und Nachleben in der Geschichte des burgundischen Konigtums,"
14 (1958], and "Tradition hagiographique et culte de saint Dagobert, roi des Francs,"
in Le Moyen Age, jubilee vol., 1963, pp. 17-35, and the article in Annales E.S.C., 1966,
by K. Gorski on the saint-king in northern and eastern medieval Europe). On monar-
chical ideology in the Middle Ages, the basic work is the collection, Das Konigtum:
Seine geistigen und rechtlichen Grundlagen, Vortrage und Forschungen, ed. T. Mayer, 3,
1956. On the ecclesiastical character of kingship according to Abbo of FleuIY, in the
tradition of the Council of Paris of 829 and the De institutione regia of Jonas of Orleans,
see Lemarignier, pp. 25--27.
13. Cf. preceding note. On the unification of the clerical order and the place of the
monks in that order in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, in relation to the economic
development, see the interesting remarks of G. Constable, Monastic Tithes (1964), pp.
147 fi.
14. On this new nobility, d. esp. the surveys of Leopold Genicot ("La noblesse au
Moyen Age dans l'ancienne Francie" in Annales E.S.C., 1961, and "La noblesse au
Moyen Age dans I'ancienne Francie: Continuite, rupture ou evolution?" Comparative
Studies in SOCiety and History, 1962); G. Duby ("Une enque!e a poursuivre: La noblesse
dans la France medievale," Revue historique, 1961); and o. Forst de Battaglia ("La
noblesse europeenne au Moyen Age," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 1962).
A colloquium on the theme "Royalty and Nobility in the Tenth and Eleventh Cen-
turies," organized by the German Historical Institute of Paris, was held in April 1966
at Bamberg.
15. There is scarcely anything to note other than the interesting articles by M.
David, "Les laboratores jusqu'au renouveau economique des XIe_XII" siecles," in
Etudes d'historie du droit prive offertes it Pierre Petot (1959), pp. 107-19, and "Les 'Iab-
oratores' du renouveau economique, du XIIc a la fin du XIVe siecle," Revue historique de
droit franl;ais et etranger, 1959, pp. 174-95, 295--325.
16. The situation was perhaps different in Italy, at least in Northern Italy, because of
the survival of ancient traditions and the precocity of the urban rev·ival. It would be
especially useful in this regard to investigate Ratherius of Verona.
17. Cf., e.g., G. Duby, La Societe aux Xl' et Kif' siecles dans la region maconnaise
298
Notes to Pages 56-57
(Paris, 1953), although, for him, this evolution was not completed in the Maconnais
until the early twelfth century (pp. 245-61), while the origin of the uniformity of the
peasant class in the ecclesiastical literature of the early eleventh century is said to stem
from the ignorance and contempt of the writers, such as Raoul Glaber (p. 130-31).
18. This is the case with Adalbero of Laon, who uses it to come to the defense of the
serfs, with the obvious ulterior motive of denigrating the monks, who are masters of
great numbers of serfs, in particular, the Cluniacs.
19. The clearest text is that of a canon from a Norwegian national synod of 1164,
"Monarchi vel clerici communem vitam professi de laboribus et propriis nutrimentis
suis episcopis vel quibuslibet personis decimas reddere minime compellentur,"
which in the British Museum MS Harley 3405 appears with a gloss above the word
"Iaboribus": "id est novalibus." This text is cited by J. F. Niermeyer, "En marge du
nouveau Ducange," in Le Moyen Age (1957), where the reader may find some well-
chosen examples, with fine commentaries, of labor in the sense of "results of agricul-
tural labor or, rather, of recently cleared land." The author rightly points out that in
Carolingian capitularies labor designates the "fruit of any acquisitive activity as op-
posed to inherited patrimony" (e.g., in the Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae, probably
from 785: "ut omnes decimam partem substantiae et laboris suis ecc1esiis et sacer-
dotibus donent," of which Hauch has given a good interpretation in Kirchengeschichte
Deutschlands 2 [1912), 398, by translating substantia by Gnmdbesitz and labor by alles
Erwerb) and laborare, "to acquire by clearing land" (e.g., 'villas quas ipsi laboraverunt'
in the Capitulary of 812 for the Spaniards, which may have been at the bottom of a
whole series of similar usages in the poblaci6n charters of the Reconquista). We find
the same vocabulary in a series of records of gifts to the Abbey of Fulda (8th-10th c.).
The reader may also find it profitable to consult G. Keel, Laborare und Operari: Verwen-
dungs- und Bedeutungsgeschichte zweier Verben fur 'arbeiten' im Lateinischen und Gallo-
romanischen (Saint Gall, n.d. [1942]). On the novalia and the meaning of labor, see
also Constable, Monastic Tithes, pp. 236, 258, 280, 296-97.
20. For all this, see Georges Duby's basic work, L'Economie rurale et la vie des cam-
pagnes dans I'Occident medieval (Paris, 1962), translated by C. Postan as Rural Economy
and Country Life in the Medieval West (Columbia, S.c., 1968). On the progress of
agriculture during the Carolingian age and its repercussions in the institutional and
cultural area, see the fine article by H. Stem, "Poesies et representations carolingi-
ennes et byzantines des mois," Revue archeologique, 1955.
21. This definition is found in a 926 act in the cartulary of Saint-Vincent de Macon,
ed. C. Ragut (Macon, 1864), SOL It was noticed by A. Deleage, La Vie rurale en Bour-
gogne jusq'au dt!but du Xl' siecle (Macon, 1942) 1, 249 n. 2; Duby, La Societe, p. 130, n. 1;
and David, Etudes d'histoire, p. 108. This term has, of course, persisted in old French
(laboureur) to denote a well-off peasant, owning work animals and tools, as distinct
from manouvrier or brassier with only his own hands and arms for work. On the uses of
laboureur in this sense at the end of the Middle Ages, d. esp. R. Boutruche, La Crise
d'une societe: Seigneurs et paysans du Bordelais pendant la guerre de Cent Ans (Strasbourg,
1947; new ed. Paris, 1963), passim, esp. pp. 95-96. This distinction and meaning are
already found in the cartulary of Saint-Vincent de Macon, 476, in a text from the period
1031-60: "ilIi ... qui cum bobus laborant et pauperiores vern qui manibus laborant vel
cum fossoribus suis vivant," also cited by Duby, La Societe, p. 130 n. 1. On the whole
problem of the laboratores, I hope the reader will allow me merely to open a question
here, which I shall take later in a more detailed and searching manner.
22. Cf. B. T6pfer, Yolk und Kirche zur Zeit der Gottesfriedenbewegung in Frankreich
(1951); Recueils de la Societe Jean Bodin, XIV; La Paix (1962); and G. Duby's study, I
laici e la pace di Dio, in the setting of the III Settimana Intemazionale di Studi Medioev-
ali (Passo della Mendola, 1965) on "I Laici nella Societa reliosa dei secoli XI e XII"
(Milan, 1968). Traditionally, royalty assured prosperity by means of arms. Cf. Georges
299
NOTES TO PAGE 57
Dumezil, "Remarques sur les armes des dieux de troisieme fonction chez divers
peuples indo-europeens," SMSR 28 (1957). The Carolingian stage is again important
here. We detect its echo in the popular lamentations on the death of Robert the Pious
(1031) recorded by his biographer-hagiographer Helgaud: "In cujus morte, heu! pro
dolor! ingeminatis vocibus adclamatum est: 'Rotberto imperante et regente, securi
viximus neminem timuimus'" (R. H. Bautier, [see n. 8 above] p. 136). In the eleventh
century, however, royal protection was not hailed for bringing a sacralized and some-
how metaphysical prosperity but rather for specific institutions which required work-
ers, works, beasts of burden, and tools under royal guidance. It is not at all surprising
that representatives of this economic elite should appear in the king's own entourage
(d. J .-F. Lemarignier, in Le Gouvernement royal. p. 135: Philippe I "welcomed into his
entourage not only bourgeois ... but particularly, and with increasing frequency, cer-
tain quite obscure characters who defy identification and appear only once: clerics or
monks; or else laymen: farmers of some importance, so that their presence matters,
and particularly village mayors."
23. Cf. Georges Dumezil's Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus, and, on certain aspects of the
third function in Greek antiquity, the remarkable study by Jean-Pierre Vernant,
"Promethee et la fonction technique," Journal de psychologie, 1952, pp. 419-29 (re-
published in My the et penslie chez les Grecs, [Paris, 1965], pp. 185-95). Among the
Scythians, for example, it is known that there was a triad of objects corresponding to
the three functions: the cup, the axe, the plow and harness. It is tempting to compare
this symbolism with the medieval legends which, among the Slavs, connect the plow
with the founding heroes of the dynasties of the Piasts in Poland and the przemyslides
in Bohemia. It is also interesting to see the economic function appear in the monarchi-
cal hagiographical propaganda in France in our time. The most remarkable text is
found in the Vita Dagoberti in which the king, at the behest of the peasants, tosses the
seeds with his own hand, from whichfrugum abundantia is born (MGH, SRM 2,515). F.
Graus, Volk, Herrscher und Heiliger im Reich der Merowinger (Prague, 1965), p. 403,
dates this text from the end of the tenth century at the earliest, and Folz, whose
interesting commentary may be read in Le Moyen Age, p. 27, from the last third of the
eleventh century (ibid. p. 29). This dating corroborates our thesis. On this legendary
aspect of kingship, one should not forget James Frazer's classic, The Golden Bough, I,
The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings (London, 1911), and his Lectures on the Early
History of Kingship (London, 1905). U we lay stress on these aspects, which belong to
the domain of ideology on which this study is focused, we are not forgetting that it is
important, as it was in actuality in the past, to relate them to economic context of the
phenomena considered. For example, it should not be forgotten that the monastery of
Fleury was located at the southern end of the Paris-Orleans road, where the Capetians
in the eleventh and twelfth centuries had increased the amount of cleared land and the
number of new centers of habitation, and which Marc Bloch has called the" axis of the
monarchy" (Les Caracteres originaux de "histoire rurale fran,aise [Paris, 1952]. p. 16 and
plate 2).
24. The Carolingian imprint is again strong here. Heinrich Fichtenau (in Das
karolingische Imperium) rightly points to these words of a Carolingian poet: "One alone
reigns in heaven, he who hurls the thunderbolts. It is natural that one alone should
reign after him on earth, one alone who should be an example for all men." In spite of
the essentiaUy liturgical character of the monarchical ideology in the Carolingian era, it
is perhaps possible to observe a form of the third function in the epithet Summus
agricola bestowed upon the emperor by the Libri Carolini.
25. The nightmare, reported by the chronicler John of Worcester, was iUustrated by
very explicit miniatures in the Oxford MS., Corpus Christi CoUege, 157, ff. 382-a3. A
reproduction may be found in Jacques Le Goff, La Civilisation de /'Occident mtdilival
(Paris, 1964), pp. 117-18.
300
Notes to Pages 58--60
LICIT AND ILLICIT TRADES IN THE MEDIEVAL WEST
1. This is what we will attempt to do in a work now in preparation: Les images du
travail dans /'Occident medieval.
2. The systematic elaboration of these cases starting with the Decretum of Gratian,
hence from the middle of the twelfth century, represents an important stage in the
history of the contemptible professions, to which we shall return below.
3. On activities forbidden to clerics, see Naz, Dictionnaire de Droit Canonique 3
(1942), article on "clerc," § xiv-xvii, cols. 853-61; and M. Beny, "Les professions dans
Ie Decret de Gratien" (thesis, Faculte de Droit de Paris, 1956).
4. The expression inhonesta mercimonia is from the statutes of the synod of Arras (c.
1275), which was used for the title of the article of J. Lestocquoy, "Inhonesta mer-
cimonia," Melanges Halphen, 1951, pp. 411-15. Artes indecorae is found in Naz (see
note 3 above). Vilia officia is also found in the statutes of Arras. The statutes of the
synod of Liege, from the same period, speak of negotia turpia et officia inhonesta.
5. This derived from the passage in Saint Paul forbidding all secular professions to
clerics: "Nemo militans Deo implicat se negotiis soecularibus" (2 Tim. 2:4), among
other things.
6. The presence of soldiers on this list may be surprising: was not medieval Western
society as "military" as it was "clerical"? We shall have more to say about medieval
antimilitarism below.
7. On merchants, d. Jacques Le Goff, Marchands et banquiers du Moyen Age (Paris,
1956).
8. Along with executioners, these professions figure in the statutes of the synod of
Arras from around 1275 (d. Dom Gosse, Histoire d'Arrouaise [1783)), and E. Fournier in
Semaine religieuse d' Arras (1910), pp. 1149-53.
9. These figure secondarily in the statutes of the diocese of Tournai of 1361 (d. E. de
Moreau, Histoire de /,Eglise en Belgique 3 [1945], 588) which forbids clerics from exer-
cising the trades of innkeeper, butcher, mountebank, weaver.
10. These are found in the statutes of the synod of Liege from the second half of the
thirteenth century (d. Moreau, ibid., p. 343, and J. Lejeune, Liege et son pays, p. 277)
which also mentions jongleurs, innkeepers, executioners, pimps, usurers, crossbow-
men, champions, coiners(?), cooks, cup-bearers, and fishermen.
11. A list of servile works forbidden on Sundays may be found in the Admonitio
generalis, published by Charlemagne in 789 (art. 81, ap. Boretius, Capitul. 1, p. 61).
It should be noted that these interdictions were valid only for Christians. From this
point of view, the Jewish usurer had long been accepted in medieval western society.
Popes and cardinals, in particular, had often turned to JeWish physicians. In this
respect, the history of the professions, of course, offers a special chapter in the history
of medieval anti-semitism. See B. Blumenkranz, luifs et Chretiens dans Ie monde occi-
dental, 430-1096 (1%0), and L. Poliakov, Histoire de I'antisemitisme, 2 vols. (195~1).
12. Cited by De Poerck, La Draperie medievale en Flandre et en Artois (1951) 1, 316-17.
13. Adalbero of Laon, Poem to King Robert in E. Pognon, L' An Mille (1947), p. 225.
14. Aquinas, Sententia libTi politico rum 1, lectio 9.
15. Primitive mentalities are not exempt from contradictions. One of the most
noteworthy of these was the one which made coiners powerful and respected men in
the early Middle Ages. Cf. R. Lopez, "An Aristocracy of Money in the Early Middle
Ages," SpeCUlum, 1953. A thirteenth-century manuscript (Ottob. lat. 518) lists five
professions "which are difficult to engage in without sinning." In addition to the
military profession, the four others are essentially related to the handling of money:
accounting (cura rei familiaTis), commerce (mercatio), the trade of the attorney (pro-
curatio), and that of the administrator (administratio).
16. Plutarch recalls Plato's contempt for the mechanical arts (Markel/os, XIV, ~).
Cicero expresses his, particularly in the De Oficiis, 1142. Among the texts of the Fathers
301
NOTES TO PAGES 61-69
of the Latin Church, who intervene between the antique mentality and the medieval
mentality, Saint Augustine's De opere monachorum XIII, PL 40, 559--60, should be
noted.
17. According to John of Garland, cited by De Poerck.
18. Albertus Magnus' opinion regarding the militia and the condemnation of
ablebodied beggars is found in several confessors' manuals, esp. the Summa of John of
Freiburg.
19. The interdiction placed on the regular clergy by Pope Alexander III (council of
Turin, 19 May 1163), forbidding them to leave their convents "ad physicam legesve
mundanas legendas" is in Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima col/ectio 21,
1179. The constitution "Super speculam" of Honorius III, which forbade the Univer-
sity of Paris to teach civil law, may be found ibid. 22, 373.
20. This important point of Christian theology (usually implicit) [elating to work has
recently been stressed by L. Daloz, Le travail selon saint Jean Chrysostome (1959).
21. This appears clearly in several confessors' manuals, notably in Thomas of
Chobham, who cites Aristotle on this point.
22. Cf. G. Le Bras, Article on "Usure," in Dictionnairf de !Mologie catholiqul', fase.
144-45 (1948), and John T. Noonan, Jr., Thf Scholastic Analysis of Usury (1957).
23. Cf. E. Schonbach, "Studien zur Geschichte des altdeutschen Predigt." Sitzungen
und Berichte dl'r philologisch-historischen Klasse der kaiSl'rlichfn Akademie der Wiss-
enschaften 154 (1907), 44.
24. This phrase from an unpublished confessors' manual (OUob. lat. 518) may be
found, for example, in the Summa of John of Freiburg.
25. CE. G. Post et al., Tradilio, 1955.
26. This problem was treated superlicially in the classic works by Jubinal. Jongleurs
el troulleres, and by Faral. Lrs Jongleurs I'n Francl' au Moyen Age. From the standpoint of
the rehabilitation of the jongleur, the theme of the Jongleur of Notre Dame and the
surnames taken by Saint Francis of Assisi and the Franciscans, "jongleur of Christ"
and "jongleurs of God," should be recalled (cE. P. Asupicius Van Corstanje, "Francis-
cus de Christusspeler," in Sainl-Franciscus 58 [1956]). It should be noted, furthermore,
that, although the condemnation of the jongleur-contortionist was similar in certain
respects to Saint Bernard's condemnation of certain tendencies of Romanesque
sculpture, it nevertheless passed from Romanesque into Gothic art (especially in the
windows).
27. This anecdote is found in the Summa of Thomas of Chobham.
28. Cf. Le Goff, Marchands el banquiers. pp. 77-81.
29. For example, in the thirtelmth century, Robert Kildwarby, taking his inspiration
from Gundissalinus and AI-Farabi, made a distinction between a trivium and a quad-
rivium of mechanical arts, imitating the liberal arts. The first included agriculture,
food, and medicine; the second, construction, weaponry, architecture, and commerce
(De orlu sille dillisione scienliarum). This comparison between the liberal and mechan-
ical arts had earlier appeared, in the twelfth century, in the Didascalicon (book 2, chaps.
20-23) of Hugh of Saint-Victor, and had certain analogies in antiquity.
30. John of Salisbury, Polycraticus, book 6, chap. 20.
31. "De animae exsilio et patria," PL CLXXII, 1241 ff. On all aspects of this important
turning point in the history of ideas and mentalities, see M.-D. Chenu, La Theologie au
XIr siec/e (1957).
32. "Ut etiam ad comprimendos vicinos materia non careant, inferioris conditionis
iuvenes vel quoslibet contemptibilium etiam mechanicarum artium opifices, quos
ceterae gentes ab honestioribus et liberioribus studiis tam quam pestem propellunt,
militiae cingulum vel dignitatum grad us assumere non dedignantur" (Gesta Friderici I
Imperatoris, Scriptores rerum germanicarum II [1912), 13, p. 116).
33. See Montaigne, Journal du voyage en Italie.
302
Notes to Pages 69-70
34. Cf. La Rigne de Villeneuve, Essai sur les theories de la derogeance de la noblesse,
and the works of G. Zeller, in Annal!'s E.S.C., 1946, and Cahi!'TS internationaux de
sociologie, 1959.
35. "Di questa sconfitta (Courtrai, 1302) abassO moIto'I'honore, 10 stato, e la fama
dell' antica nobiIta e prodeua de Franceschi, essendo il fiore della cavalleria del mondo
sconfitta e abassata da'lore fedeli, e dalJa piu vile gente, che fosse aJ mondo, tesseran-
doli, e folloni, e d'altre viii arti e mestieri, e non mai usi di guerra che per dispetto, e
loro viltade, da tutte Ie nalioni del mondo erano chiamati conigli pieni di burro"
(Muratori, Scriptores rerum italicarum Xlii, 388);" ... alli artefjci minuti di Brugia, come
sono tesserandoli, e folloni di drappi. beccai, calzolari" (ibid., 382). "AlIa fine si levo
in Guanto uno di vile nazione e mestiere, che facea e vendea il melichino, cioe cer-
vogia falta con mele, ch'havea nome Giacopo Dertivello" (ibid., 816).
36. Cf. E. Perroy, "Les Chambon, bouchers de Montbrison" (circa 122(}"1314), An-
nales du Midi 67 (1955).
37. This idea was most recently expressed in the Introduction to H. Luthy's La
Banque protestante en France, 2 vols. (Paris, 19541).
LA80R, TECHNIQUES, AND CIlAPTSMEN IN THE VALUE SYSTEMS OF THE EARLY MIDDLE
AGES
Selected Bibliography
A. Sapori, "II pensiero suI Iavo ro attraverso ai secoli," Rivista del diritto commerciale e
del dirilto generale delle obbligazioni, 1946, 267-89, 367-79, 467-80.
A. Tilgher, Homo Faber. Stona dl'l concetto di lavoro nella civi/ta occidentale, 3d ed.
(Rome, 1944).
L. Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York, 1934).
A. Aymard, "Hierarchie du travail et autan:hie individuelle dans la Grece archalque,"
Revu!' d' Histoir!' de la Philo sophie et d'Histoir!' genera Ie de la civilisation, 1943, 124-46.
Id., "L'idee de travail dans la Grece archaique," Journal de Psycho logie, 1948,29-45.
V. Tranquilli, "n concetto di lavoro in Aristotele," La Rivista trimestrale 1 (1962), 27-f12.
J. P. Vemant, "Le Travail et la Pensee technique," in My the et Pensee chez It'S Grecs
(Paris, 1965), 183-248.
J. M. Andre, L'Otium dans la vie morale et intellectuelle romaine des origines il I'epoque
augusteenne (Paris, 1966).
B. Bilinski, "Elogio della mane e la concezione ciceroniana della societa," in Atti dell 0
congresso internazionale di studi ciceroniani (Rome, 1961).
N. Charbonnet "La condition des ouvriers dans les ateliers imperiaux aux i~ et ~
sie'C\es," in Aspects de I'Empire romain (Paris, P.U.F., 1964),61-93.
S. Mazzarino, "Aspetti sociaJi del quarto secolo," in Ricerche di sloria tardo romana
(Rome, 1951).
L. Robert, "Noms de metier dans des documents byzantins," in Milanges A. Orlandos
(Athens, 1964), 1, 324-47.
E. Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (New York, 1956).
W. Bienert, Die Arbeit nach der uhre der Bibel (Stuttgart, 1954).
A. T. Geoghegan, The Attitude towards Labor in Early Christianity and Ancient Culture
(Washington, 1945).
F. Gryglewicz, "La valeur morale du travail manuel dans la terminologie grecque de la
Bible," Biblica 37, (1956),314-37.
H. Holzapfel, Die sittliche Wertung der kiirperlichen Arbeit im christlichen Altertum
(Wiirzburg, 1941).
E. B. Allo, Le Travail d'apres saint Paul (Paris, 1914).
L. Daloz, Le Travail selon saint Jean Chrysostoml' (Paris, 1959).
J. Danielou, Les Symboles chretiens primitifs (Paris, 1961).
303
NOTES TO PAGES 71--86
304
Notes to Pages 71-86
R. S. Lopez, "Still another Renaissance?" American Histon'cal Review 57 (1951-52),1 ff.
Miniature sacre e profane dell' anno 1023 i/lustranti /' encic/opedia medioevale di Rabano
Mauro, ed. A. M. Amelli (Montecassino, 18%).
C. Stephenson, "In Praise of Mediaeval Tinkers," Joumal of Economic History 8 (1948),
26-42.
M. David, "Les Laboratores jusqu'au renouveau economique des xI"-XII" siecles," in
Etudes d'Histoire du Droit prive offertes a P. Petot (Paris, 1959), 107-20.
C. Violante, La Societa milanese nel/'Eta precomunale (Bari, 1953).
305
NOTES TO PAGES 71-88
PEASANTS AND THE RURAL WORLD IN TIlE LITERATURE OF THE EARLY MlDDLE AGES
1. E. K. Rand, The Founders of the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1928).
2. MGH, AA I; and M. Pellegrino, Salviano di Marsiglia, studio critico, 2 vols. (Rome,
1939--40).
3. Caesarius, Sermones, ed. G. Morin, in CaeSllrii opera omnia 1 (1937; 2d ed. 1953).
Corpus Chrislianorum, Series Latina CIlI.
4. Opera omnia, ed. C. W. Barlow, Papers and Monographs of the American
Academy in Rome 12 (1950).
5. MGH, SRM 1-2.
6. Dialogi, ed. U. Moricca, Fonti per la Storia d'llalia 57 (1924).
7. "Carmina," in MGH, AA 4-l.
8. Cf. A. Dupont, "Problemes et methodes d'une histoire de la psychologie collec-
tive," Annales, E.S.C., 1961; and A. Besan~on, "Histoire et psychanalyse," ibid., 1964.
306
Notes to Pages 89-93
307
NOTES TO PAGES 93--97
Falk, Etude socia Ie sur les chansons de geste (1899); S. L. Galpin, "Cortois and vilain"
(diss., New Haven, 1905). Cf. the expression of the "humanist" poet from around 1100
cited by Curtius, p. 142 n. 1: "Rustici, qui pecudes possunt appellari."
34. Cf. the interesting remarks of K. J. Hollyman, p. 72: "the opposition dominus-
serous is fundamental in Latin \JOcabulary, and the religious uses are based on it; they
do not alter, but rather enrich it by adding yet another special application."
35. Caesarius, senno 44, p. 199, and senno 47, p. 215.
36. "Denique quicumque (filii) leprosi sunt, non de sapientibus hominibus, qui et
in aliis diebus et in festivitatibus castitatem custodiunt, sed maxime de rusticis, qui se
continere non sapiunt, nasci solent," senno 44, p. 199.
37. On the meaning of pauper in the early Middle Ages, see K. Bos!, Potens und
Pllup.er: Festschrift fur Otto Bruner (1963), pp. 60-80 (reproduced in Friihfonnen der
Gesellschaft im mittelalterlichen Europa, 1964), and Graus, pp. 136--37.
38. Migne, PL 40, 310-47.
39. Gregory of Tours, Liber in gloria confessorum, MGH, SRM 1-2, 766.
40. Ibid., p. 533.
41. Ibid., p. 558.
42. MGH, SRM III, 623.
43. Dialogi II, 31.
44. J. Hoffner, Bauer und Kirche im deutschen Mittelalter (Paderbom, 1939).
45. Senno 25, p. 107. On the indifference of Merovingian hagiography to social
conditions, see F. Graus, "Die Gewalt bei den Anfangen des Feudalismus und die
'Gefangenbefreiungen' der merowingischen Hagiographie," Jahrbuch flir Wirtschafts-
geschichte 1 (1961).
46. On the Bagaudes, d. Salvianus, in Pelegrino ed.
47. MGH, SRM V, 15.
48. J. N. Biraben and J. Le Goff. "La peste dans Ie Haut Moyen Age." Annales E.S.C.,
1969, pp. 1484-1508.
49. This folkloric detail may be compared with the episode of the heretical peasant
Leutard in Champagne in the early eleventh century, according to Raoul Glaber,
Historiae II, 11.
50. Historia Francorum X, 25. Cf. another pseudoprophet, Desiderius, ibid. IX, 6-7.
51. Cf. Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity,
translated by Ralph Mannheim (London, 1965). C. Mohrmann, "Latin vulgaire, latin
des chretiens, latin medieva!''' Revue des Etudes Latines, 1952, and Settimane di studio
del Centro italiano di studi suI/' alto medioevo 9 (Spoleto, 1%1).
52. Isidore of Seville, Differentiae, PL 83, 59: "inter rusticitatem et rusticationem.
Rusticitas morum est, rusticatio operis."
53. Vitae patrum IX, I, MGH, SRM 1-2, 702. Cf. Sidonius Apollinaris' contempt for
the rustici: Epistolae, 1,6.
54. Hollyman, pp. 72-78. The author observes, ibid., p. 145: "In the literary vocab-
ulary, no virtue was deSignated by a peasant name." On the relations between social
classes and language in the Middle Ages, d. G. Gougenheim, "Langue populaire et
langue savante en ancien fran~ais" in Melanges 1945, V: Etudes linguistiques, Publica-
tions de la Faculte des Lettres de Strasbourg, f. 108 (1947). Hollyman has also observed
that "the use of the terminology of the rural classes for the pejorative vocabulary is not
particular to old French." (p. 169). Cf. L. R. Palmer, An Introduction to Modem Linguis-
tics (1936), p. 102. F. Martini's work Das Bauemtum im deutschen Schrifttum von den
Anfiingen bis zum 16. Jahrhundert (1944), does not go farther back than the eleventh
century.
308
Notes to Pages 101-106
Ihesus Christus.
Expense que Hunt in privato examine in studio paduano
in primis
pro XII doctoribus collegii due. XII.
Item pro rectore studii due. II.
Item pro vicario domini episeopi due. I.
Item pro priore eollegii due. I.
Item pro eaneellario domini episeopi due. Ill.
Item pro tribus promo tori bus duc. III.
Item pro utraque universitate libr. VII.
Item pro collegio doctorum libr. I.
Item pro bidello generali libr. I.
Item pro notario collegii libr. I.
Item pro notario universitatis libr. I.
Item pro bidellis specialibus libr. III.
Item pro campania et disco Iibr. I.
Item pro bancalibus solid. XII.
Item pro quinque libris confeccionum Iibr. III et solid. x.
Item pro octo fjalis et triginta ciatis solid. XlIII.
Item pro quinque fialis malvaxie Iibr. II et solid. XII.
Item pro quatuor fialis vini montani solid. XVI.
Item pro pifaris et tubis due. I.
Expense que Hunt in conventu publico seu in doctoratu
in primis
pro quolibet promo tore brachia XlIII de panno, vel due. XII.
Item pro bidello generali brachia VIII de panno et duc. I.
Item pro quolibet bidello speciali promotorum suorum brachia
VIII panni.
Item pro XII doctoribus collegii duc. VI.
Item pro priore collegii duc.1/2
Item pro collegio doctorum Iibr. I.
Item pro notario collegii libr. I.
Item pro bancalibus Iibr. I.
Item pro quinque paribus cirotecarum cum serico libr. XII et 112.
Item pro quinque duodenis cirotecarum caprieti Iibr. xxv.
Item pro septem duodenis cirotecarum mutonis Iibr. XVII.
Item pro sex anulis auri Iibr. XII.
Item pro septem biretis libr. V et solid. v.
Item [pro) bancis cathedra et campana libr. II et solid. XVI.
Item [pro) priviJegio duc. I.
[Item pro] una carta, cera et serico solid. XIII.
[Item pro tu]bis et pifaris duc. I et 112.
He sunt expense taxate per statu tum studii paduani tam in examine quam in
conventu ibidem faciendis.
309
NOTES TO PAGES 101-106
Appendix II: Expenses Made for Furnishings of the College of Jurists at Padua in 1454
(pI. II) (Archives of the University of Padua, Statuti del collegio dei legisti, 1382)
In Christi nomine.
Racio expense facte per me Franciscum de Alvarotis priorem almi collegii doctorum
utriusque iuris padue pro banchis VI altis de novo factis pro sessione doctorum et pro
reparacione VI banchorum antiquorum et cathedre magistralis de anno 1454 de mense
Julii.
Primo die mercurei x Julii pro !ignis octo de teullis emptis
in aqua in racione I. 2 s. 16 pro quo!ibet Iigno capit . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. I. 32 s. 8
Item pro Iignis octo de remis emptis in aqua in racione s. 4 pro Iigno
capit ......................................................... . I. 9 s. 12
Item pro trabibus sex magnis emptis in aqua in racione I. 1 pro
quolibet trabe ................................................. . I. 6 s. 0
Item pro conductura a porta Sancti Johannis per aquam et pro
extrahendo de aqua ........................................... . I. 3
Item pro uno carizio a sancta croce s. 16, et pro fachinis qui
exoneraverunt bancas de mea careta super qua feci conduci ban cas ad
ecdesiam I. 1, et pro conductura carete pro aliquibus vicibus I. 1, capit I. 2 s. 16
Item die mercurei ultimo Julii pro 36 cidellis cum suis cavill is et pro
factura earum in racione s. 2 pro qualibet cidella cum sua cavilla capit I. 35. 12
Item pro Iigno de nogaria pro cidelisSJ et pro disgrossando cidellas
et pro ligno cavillarum I. 3 s. 12 cap it ........................... . I. 7 s. 4
Item pro medio Iinteamine veteri ad incollandum fixuras cathedre
magistra!is .................................................... . I. 2
Item pro tribus magistris qui laboraverunt diebus 10 pro 1. 1 pro
quolibet in die et ulterius feci sibi expensas ..................... . I. 30
Item pro davis 1400 adn (?) in raciones s. 9 pro cento capit I. 5 s. 9 et
pro davis 500 a mezano in racione s. 18 pro cento I. 4 s. 10 in s. . .. I. 9 s. 10
Item pro pictura cathedre pro duobus die bus qui bus laboraverunt
duo pittores et pro incollatura telle super fixuris cathedre et pro col-
oribus duc. 1 capit ............................................ . I. 6
Summa ..... . I. 1095. 5
De qua summa et expensa I. 109 s. 5 secundum statuta et consuetudines observatas
mediatas tangit collegio [nJostro iuristarum et alterius medietatis unus quartus tangit
collegio artistarum et medicorum, alius quartus collegio theologorum qua teologi (sic)
non utuntur, et sic extractis I. 6 pro pictura catedre tangit collegio theologorum I. 25 s.
16 et collegio medicorum pro suo quarto I. 27 s. 5 d. 8, et legistis pro medietate I. 56 s.
4.
Infra scripta est expensa facta per me Franciscum de Alvarotis priorem antedictum
almi collegii Padue pro banchis xv pro sessione scolarium sumptibus propriis quas
dono predicto collegio.
Primo pro piaguis XVI grossis a torculo emptis ab apoteca in
racione s. 22 pro quolibet capit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. I. 17 s. 12
Item pro tavolis squadratis VII et piaguis v acceptis ab apoteca M.
Felipi pro s. 12 pro qualibet pro gantellis bancharum . . . . . . . . . . . . .. I. 7 s. 4
Item pro davis 300 a mezano pro s. 18 pro cento et pro davis 500
adena (?) pro s. 9 pro cento capit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. I. 4 s. 19
Item pro manufactura trium magistrorum duobus diebus . . . . . . .. I. 6
Item pro duo bus scrinis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. I. Os. 10
Summa. . . . .. 1. 36 s. 5
Expensa facta pro bancha, alta tabula tripedibus altis et scabello sub pedibus pro
310
Notes to Pages 101-106
sessione doctorandorum et promotorum quam similiter dono predicto collegio ego
Franciscus de Alvarotis supradictus.
Primo pro piaguis duobus grossis a torculo acceptis ab apoteca pro
s. 24 pro quolibet .............................................. I. 2 s. 8
Item pro galtellis piaguum 1. Item pro tabula piaguum 1. . . . . . . .. I. 1
Item pro piaguis tribus pro scabello sub pedibus ............... I. 1 s. 10
Item pro una asci a pro pedibus tripedium . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. I. 0 s. 12
Item pro clavis adeno (?) et amezano et duplonis .... . . . . . . . . . . .. I. 0 s. 10
Item pro ligno tripedium et manufactura predictorum . . . . . . . . . .. I. 2
Summa ...... I. 8
Supradicta expensa bancarum et cetera capit I. 44
quam dono collegio.
Notes
1. This very ancient custom represented a considerable expense. In the thirteenth
century, the English kings sent presents of game or wine to certain young doctors for
this banquet. For example, we have the following letter of Henry 111 in 1256: "Man-
datum est custodi foreste regis de Wiechewode quod in cadem foresta faciat habere
Henrico de Wengh', juniori, studenti Oxonie, 1111°' damos contra festum magistri
Henrici de Sandwic', qui in proximo incipiet in theologia apud Oxoniam ... de dono
nostro (Calendar of Close Rolls, Henry III, 1254-1256, p. 308). More than a mark of
honor, this was a veritable subsidy which made a place for high personages or official
bodies in the politics of university patronage. Besides the banquet, some were bent on
showing their munificence by such diversions as tournaments, balls, etc. In Spain,
some universities went so far as to ask new masters to stage a bullfight (ef. Rashdall,
The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, ed. Powicke-Emden [1936]1, 230). What is
the meaning of these customs? One might think of the sumptuary obligations of the
Greek and Roman magistracies; although there is no historical continuity, one might
measure the social rise of "professors" from antiquity to the Middle Ages. Even more
striking is the comparison with the potaciones or carousing sessions of the first guilds
and corporations. In both cases, although there need not have been conscious imita-
tion, the essential rite is the same, a communion by means of which a social body
became aware of its fundamental solidarity. On the links between potus and" gift" as a
ritual manifestation in Germanic groups, ef. the observations of Marcel Mauss in his
article: "Gift, Gift," Melanges Adler, 1924, p. 246. In any case, a sociohistorical study of
the "university estate" wiD have to take account of these anthropological data.
2. The transition from a moral obligation to a statutary obligation relative to these
gifts took place as early as the inception of academic regulation. At Oxford, for exam-
ple, between 1250 and 1260, we find a new master wealthy enough to take on the fees
of certain of his less well-off colleagues: "Omnibus autem istis etiam quibusdam
artistis in omnibus tam in robis quam aliis honorifice predictus magister R. exibuit
necessaria" (N. R. Ker and W. A. Pantin, "Letters of a Scettish Student at Paris and
Oxford c. 1250," in Formularies which bear on the history of Oxford 2 [1940]). Sometime
prior to 1350, the fees were fixed at the equivalent of the communa of a beginner
(Statuta antiqua Universitatis Oxoniensis, ed. Strickland Gibson (1931), p. 58). In Paris,
in spite of the 1213 prohibition, renewed in 1215 and 1231, against requiring
"pecuniam ... nec aliquam aliam rem loco pecunie aliquo modo pro Iicentia danda"
(Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, ed. Denifle and Chalelain, 1 [1889J, 75, 79, 138),
the artists' statutes of the English nation of 1252 indicate that the examinatores are to
make the candidates pay in advance: "pecuniam ad opus Universitatis et nacionis"
(ibid. 1, 229).
3. The description of this manuscript may be found in a volume of the catalogue
311
NOTES TO PAGBS 101-102
prepared by the Abbot J. Ruschaert, Scriptor at the Vatican Library, who called it to
our attention, and whom I would like to take this opportunity to thank in the warmest
possible tenns. The title is Prosdocimi de Comitibus Patauini et Barth%maci de Zabarellis
lectura in /ibn II decrttalium titulos xx-xxx. The first of these courses is found on f".
9-41 v" and 42 v"-428 v", and the second on 418 v"-442. po 1-8 contain the table of
contests and various texts, including ours in f" 7. As we shall see, the author of the
manuscript and its date of composition are given on f" 447.
4. A description for the case of Bologna may be found in Rashdall1, 224-28. Padua
was similar.
5. The description of this ceremony may be found in the notarized deeds executed at
Bologna in the fourteenth century and published in volume 4 of the Chartularium Studi;
Bononiensis, ed. L. Frati (1919), esp. p. 81.
6. A study of these coffers, and of the use of funds deposited in them (originating
from taxes, fines, and gifts), as well as their possible role in assisting or financing
masters and students, has yet to be made. It is important for understanding the
medieval university. Some pieces of documentation exist, at least at Oxford and Cam-
bridge (cf. Rashdall 3, 35-36; Statuta antiqua passim, see index under Chests; O. F.
Jacob, "English university clerks in the later Middle Ages: the problem of mainte-
nance," Bulletin of the John Ry/ands Library 29, no. 2 [1946], 21-24).
7. Our text alludes to the maintenance costs of the benches for the assistants (pro
bancalibus, pro ban cis), of the chair of which the new doctor symbolically took posses-
sion (pro cathedra), of the bell that was rung (pro campana), the desk where the notary
sat (pro disco), as well as to the payments for paper for the diploma received by the
novice, wax for the seal affixed to it (pro carta, cera et scrico), and, finally, musicians
who played trumpets and fifes during the ceremony (pro tubis et pifaris).
8. The bishop, who granteq the licentia docendi, closely watched the university (d.
Rashdall 2, 15). His vicar and chancellor received money from the university at the
time of the examination. The ecclesiastical authorities are not mentioned in connection
with the conuentus, however, which was a basically corporate ceremony.
9. The notaries and beadles cited in our text were important personages in the
academic world, and shared in its privileges. In Paris, in 1259, the masters in arts
complained that the sums disbursed to them caused a deficit in the academic budget
(Chartularium Uniuersitatis Pansiensis 1, 376-77).
10. Cf. Gaines Post, "Masters' Salaries and Student-Fees in Mediaeval Un-
iversities," Speculum 7 (1932), 181-98. This interesting article caUs for completion,
broadening, and deepening. We indicate below some of the directions we believe this
research ought to take.
11. Cf., e.g., Cicero, De officiis r. 42. See L. Grasberger's interesting remarks in
Erzifhung und Unterricht im klassischen Altertum (1875) 2, 176-80; and those of H. I.
Marrou, Histoire de I'iducation dans /'antiquiU, 2d ed. (1950), p. 362.
12. When Saint Augustine quit his profession, he said: "Renuntiavi ... ut scholas-
tids suis Mediolanenses venditorem verborum a1ium providerent"(Confessiones IX, v,
13). We have the familiar sentence of Saint Bernard: "Et sunt item qui scire volunt ut
scientiam suam vend ant, verbi causa pro pecunia, pro honoribus; et turpis quaestus
est" (Sarno 36 in Canticum, n. 3). But Saint Augustine was thinking of pagan verbiage
and Saint Bernard was open neither to the material conditions nor to the intellectual
methods of urban instruction, as indicated by his attitude toward Abelard. Yet Hon-
orius Augustodunensis, who was attentive to the problems of the work, also wrote:
'Talis igitur quaerendus est, qui doceat: qui neque causa laudis, nec spe temporalis
emolumenti, sed solo amore sapien tie doceat (Migne, PL 177, 99).
13. Post (see n. 10 above) did not make systematic use of the canonical texts and
penitentials which shed light on the debate over new conditions of instruction begin-
ning in the thirteenth century, as well as on the solutions arrived at. Nearly all the
312
Notes to Page 102
confessors' summaries from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries ask the question:
"Utrum magister possit colleetam imponere vel eXigere?'"The two objeetions are that it
is a duty of the estate and a spiritual good, whence the risk of simony: "symoniam
committeret quia venderet obsequium spirituale quod ex officio suo tenetur facere"
(Summa Pisane/[a, ms. Padova Bibliotheca Universitaria, 608, u. v" magister); the same
text is in an anonymous Summa (Codex Vatican us Ottoboniani latini 758 c. yO magister:
this is Henricius de Segusio's (Hostiensis) classic fonnulation. From the end of the
thirteenth century, the problem arose only in connection with exemptions, as the
invaluable Confessionale of John of Freiburg proves. Here the question has become: "si
exegit colleetam seu salarium ab hiis a quibus I'\on debuit ut a pauperibus et ceteris
prohibitis." For the rest, salary was allowed as payment, not for the master's knowl-
edge, but for his labor: "potest accipere colleetam pro laboribus suis (Oftob. lat. 758).
This was the solution indicated by Saint Thomas of Aquinas and Raymond of Pen-
nafort for lawyers and physicians. Here, we touch on an important point: the recogni-
tion of the liberal profession, the intellectual worker. The masters refer to it constantly;
for example, our doctors of Padua in 1382: "Irracionabile credimus laborantem sui
laboris honorific:enciam non habere. Ideo statuimus quod doctor qui scolari presentato
de mandata prioris sennonem pro collegia feeerit responsalem \ibras tres con-
fectionum et fialas quatuor vini aut unum ducatum a scolare pro sui laboris honore
percipiat" (Statuti del Collegio dei Legisti, ed. A. Gloria, Atti del reale Istituto Veneto, s.
VI, VII-I [hereafter cited as Gloria], 393).
14. Even as they asked for the salary of laborers, the masters themselves laid claim to
the homage due to their prestige. A manuscript cited by Charles Homer Haskins,
Studies in Mediaeval Culture (Oxford, 1929), p. 55, says: "Nee magistri ad utilitatem
audiunt, legunt, nee disputant, sec ut vocentur Rabbi." See Johan Huizinga's inter-
esting remarks in The Waning of the Middle Ages on "the tendency to give to the title of
doctor the same rights as to that of knight." A semantic study of the word magister (at
one pole a leader of work, a foreman [contremaure in French], such as the magister
officinae, or shop foreman; at the other, a dignitary in a social hierarchy, a "chief" with
mysterious power) would help to show how the medieval academic "estate" was
caught between two conflicting scales of social values, one ancient and "feudal," the
other "modem."
15. Cf. n. 13 above.
16. The first important lay initiative in the area of university instruction was the
foundation of the University of Naples by Frederick II in 1224 (ef. Charles Homer
Haskins, Studies in the His/ory of Mediaeval Science, 2d ed., p. 250).
17. A study of the social origin of the students, the intelleetual equipment of the
academics, the efforts (how successful?) of certain (how many?) to escape the
ecclesiastical estate for more lucrative secular careers would make it possible, in at
least one area, to make the somewhat theoretical views of G. de Lagarde more preeise;
ct. La Naissance de l'esprit la/que au dt!clin du Moyen Age 1 (Saint-Paul-Trois-Chateaux,
1934).
18. Here, again, most of the work remains to be done. On the novelty of the coexis-
tence at Oxford in the thirteenth century of a community of "producers" (the
"bourgeois" and a community of "consumers" (the academics) of almost equal size, d.
A. B. Emden, An Oxford Hall in MediaevIII Times, pp. 7-8; and H. E. Salter, Munimenta
Civitatis Oxonic, pp. xv-xvi.
19. Here is the text, found in A. Gloria, Statuti del Comune di Padova dal secolo XII
al/'anno 1285, and Denifle, Die Entstehung der Universitiiten des Mittelalters 1, 805:
"Tractatores studii possint constituere saJarium doctoribus legum usque ad summam
tricentarum Iibrarum et non ultra, magistris deeretorum et deeretalium librarum
ducentarum et non ultra. Et dieti tractatores possint providere de utilitate communi
super dictis salariis."
313
NOTES TO PAGES 102-103
20. Unfortunately, we were unable to consult G. Luzzatto, "n costo della vita a Ven-
ezia nel Trecento," in Atenco Veneto (1934).
21. A. Gloria, Atti del Teale Istituto Veneto, s. VI, vol. vn, p. 1.
22. We would like to take this opportunity to thank the Rector of the university and
his assistant, the archivist, who were kind enough to assist us in our work.
23. Gloria, Atli del Teale Istituto Veneto, p. 395.
24. Statuti del collegio dei legisti 1382, Archives of the University of Padua (hereafter
cited as Statuti), fD 31 v": "Quoniam multociens evenit quod in examinibus privatis
pauci doctores ultra doctores numerarios intervenerunt, ut examina plurium doctorum
concurso venerentur statuimus et ordinamus quod collectio que fieri consuevit in
examine completo convertatur ad pecunias inter supernumerarios presentes qui tamen
non fuerint promotores equaliter dividendas, iuribus tamen familie reverendisimi
domini episcopi reservatis."
25. Statuti, f' 29.
26. A sociological study of the faculty of arts in the thirteenth century would no
doubt add a good deal to our understanding of the doctrinal battles of this era (d., e.g.,
part of Rutebeuf's poetic work). We regret not yet having been able to acquaint
ourselves with the recent work of A. L. Gabriel.
27. In the preceding period, the masters must have been more generous, because
the text reproves the "nimia liberalitas collegarum nostrorum." It is also alleged that
the desire is to avoid fraud by students falsely claiming poverty: "importunitas
scolari urn falso paupertatem allegantium."
28. In Gloria, Atti del Teale Istituto Veneto, p. 361.
29. The text is directed at any "doctor canonici vel civilis paduanus originatus civis
ac padue doctoratus qui doctoris de collegio nostro sit vel fuerit filius sive nepos ex
filio etiam non doctore vel sit pronepos vel ulterior descendens per Iineam mas-
culinam" (Statuti, f' 15 v").
30. "Lege civili sancitum esse cognoscentes ut juris doctorum filii pre ceteris in
honoribus ex peritia juris consequendis honorentur, ordinamus ut natus doctoris
nostri collegii ex legittimo matrimonio sive genitore diem functo sive in humanis
agente etiam si desierit esse de nostro collegio liberaliter in examine privato et publico
per doctores nostri collegii promoveatur. Ita quod nec a suis promotoribus nec ab
aliquo doctore collegii possit occasione dictorum examinum vel alterius eorum com-
pelli ad solvendum stipendium ad quod ex hujusmodi causa secundum formam nos-
trorum statutorum promovendi noscuntur obligatio Et ne contingat aliquos ex doc-
toribus in talibus examinibus deesse volumus ut contra eos qui cessante justa im-
pedimento defuerint procedatur secundum formam alterius statuti quod incipit"
(Statuti, fF" 18 v"-19 r").
31. "Quum omnis labor optat premium" (and not salarium, as the masters of the
preceding eras had requested) "et prima caritas incipit a se ipso et ne nimia liberalitas
in vitium prodigalitatis a jure reprobatum convertatur statuiumus et statuendo de-
cernimus, addimus et delaramus quod statutum situm sub rubrica quod filii doctorum
nostri collegii in examine privato et publico gratis promoveantur quod incipit "priore
domino Petro de Zachis" intelligatur et locum habeat in filiis dumtaxat doctorum
nostri collegii qui fuerint aut sint cives origine propria aut paterna aut saltern origine
propria vel paterna civitatis Padue vel districtus. Nec tamen declaratio non intellegatur
nec habeat locum in domino Hendrico de Alano qui per collegium nostrum habitus est
et omnino habetur pro originali cive" (Statuti, f' 20 v").
32. "Cum orte sint a1ique dubitationes super certis emolumentis ex hoc sacratissimo
collegio percipiendis ut omnes tollantur dubietates et scandala per consequens
evitentur et ut omnis dilectio et caritas fraternalis inter collegas remaneat semper
ferventissima, statuimus quod nullus doctor forensis legens in hoc felici studio qui de
314
Notes to Pages 104-105
cetero intrabit hoc yenerandum collegium possit habere emolumentum ducati qui
datur duodecim numerariis vel supernumerariis a1iquo numerariorum deficiente, non
obstante aliquo statuto vel consuetudine in contrarium loquente" (Statuti, f' 28).
33. C. Zonta and G. Brotto, Acta graduum academicorum gymnasii Patavini, 612. These
biographical details are taken from F. Marietta, Archivio Storico per la Sicilia (1936-37),
p.178.
34. M. Catalano-Tirrito, "L'istruzione pubblica in Sicilia nel Rinascimento," in Ar-
chivio storico per la Sicilia orientale 7, 430, no. 66.
35. Pirro, Sicilia Sacra 1, 632.
36. Catalano, Stona dell'universitil di Catania, p. 33.
37. Cf. V. Casagrandi, "Scuole superiori private di jus civile in Sicilia avanti la
fondazione dello Studium generale di Catania," in Rassegna Universitaria Catanese
(Catania, 1903) V, fasc. I-II, pp. 46-53; L. Genuardi, "I guiuristi siciliani dei secoli XIV
e XV anteriormenti a!l'apertura dello studio di Catania," in Studi storici e giuridici
dedicati ed offerti a Federico Ciccaglione (1909); Catalano-Tirrito, p. 418.
38. In favor of Bologna, Sabbadini, p. 8. In favor of Padua, N. Rodolico, "Siciliani
nello studio di Bologna nel medio evo," Archivio storico Siciliano XX (1895), and Mar-
Ietta, p. 150.
39. Cf. Rashdall 2, 19-20.
40. On these scholarships, d. Catalano-Tirrito, pp. 427-37, where a list of 113 Sici-
lian scholarship recipients between 1328 and 1529 may be found.
41. After the student received his doctorate, he was generally asked either to defend
the rights and privileges of his fatherland or to assume a public office in it. Cf.
Catalano-Tirrito, p. 428.
42. Although, according to the official bull, the new university was organized "ad
instar Studii Bononiensis," MarIetta (p. 151) observes, "10 studio catanese iniatti, nei
primi anni della la sua esistenza, bien pUCl considerarsi una sezione staccata di quel\o
padovano."
43. It may be found at the beginning of our manuscript from the University of Padua
Archives and appears in Gloria, p. 358, n. 1.
44. "Sacratissimis constitucionibus canonicis ac legalibus cautum esse cognoscentes
ut variato cursu monete condicio ejus quod est debitum non propter ea varietur de-
cernimus ut solidi triginta duo qui quondam statuti furerunt et sic hactenus persoluti
pro singulo duodecim doetorum antiquorum nostri collegii qui publico conventui sive
in canonibus sive in legibus adessent intelligantur esse et sint prout etiam venetorum
boni auri et justi ponderis sic quoque deinceps tantum monete que ducati medietatem
constituat secundum cursum qui tempore solucionis esse reperietur sine ulla de-
tractione persolvatur (Statuti, f' 16 v").
45. This academic evolution may be fitted into the economic and social current of
western Europe in the fourteenth century. Faced with rising prices, the response was
stubbornness and wage controls on the part of administrative authorities and em-
ployers, who admitted no connection between the cost of living and remunerations,
leading to the establishment of a sliding scale (d. G. Espinas, La Vie urbaine de Douai
au Moyen Age 2, 947 ff; G. Des Marez, L'Organisation du travail iI Bruxelles au XV'siecIe,
pp. 252 ff; H. Van Werveke, Annales de la Socil!M d'l!mulation de Bruges 73 (1931),1-15;
H. Laurent Annales d'histoire &onomique et sociale 5 (1933), 159). On the other hand,
there were frequently successful efforts on the part of beneficiaries of rents, rates, and
dividends to adjust their value to the cost of living, either by valuations in kind or by
conversion of payments evaluated in money of account into real terms (d. Van Wer-
veke, who observes this tendency in Flanders, particularly beginning in 1389-90, and
Laurent). Thus the academics are seen to join the social groups living on feudal,
seigneuri.u-:,r capitalist-incomes. It is important to follow this evolution beyond
315
NOTES TO PAGES 106-110
the economic and social sphere, into the intellectual and ideological area. The Renais-
sance humanist comes into being in a totally different milieu from that of the medieval
academic.
46. Cf. Carlo Cipolla, Studi di storia della moneta, I: I movimenti dei cambi in Italia dal
serolo XIII al XV, Publications of the University of Pavia, 29 (1948). The author thinks,
in particular, that he can show that 1395 marks the beginning of a phase of monetary
crisis.
47. Cf. Perini, Monete di Verona (pp. 29-30), who asserts that Padua's abandonment
of the Veronese monetary system coincided with the Venetian conquest. In certain
sectors, at least, the change came earlier.
48. Cf. Rashdall 2, 21.
49. In Gloria, pp. 397 and 399.
50. Statuti, f" 32.
51. Cf. the invaluable indications collected by F. F05sati, "Lavori e lavoratori a
Milano nel 1438," Archivio storico lombardo, s. VI, a. LV, fase. m-N (1928), 225-58,
496-525.
52. We have been unable to find the term designating a type of nail, ignorance of
which prevented our reading a word in our manuscript: adn, aden· (?).
53. Pro cidelis (sic): between the lines.
316
Notes to Pages 111-121
10. Here, there is no question about the important role played-from the
beginning-by Benedictines in the areas both of manual labor and of intellectual
labor. In practice, somewhat contrary to Saint Benedict's idea, they were exemplary. It
is well known, of course, that after the seventeenth century, people spoke of "working
like a Benedictine."
11. Cf. J. W. Baldwin, The Mediaeval Theories of the Just Price (1959).
12. Cf. G. Mickwitz, Die Kartellfunktionen der Zlinfte und ihre Bedeutung llei der Ent-
stehung des Zunftwesens (1936).
13. As G. Le Bras has admirably pointed out.
14. Cf. "Licit and Dlicit Trades in the Medieval West," above.
15. On the presence of confesson' manuals in the libraries of merchants, d. esp. P.
Wolff, Commerces et marchands de Toulouse (c. 1350-<:. 1450) (1954).
16. On the spiritual climate of the twelfth century, cf. Father Chenu's illuminating
book La Theologie au douzi~me site/e (1957).
17. a. G. Le Bras, art. "Penitentiels," in Dictionnaire de theologie catholique; C.
Vogel, l.a Discipline penitentie/le en Gaule (1952).
18. Cf. M. W. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins (1952).
19. a. J. W. Baldwin, "The intellectual preparation for the canon of 1215 against
ordeal," Speculum 36 (1961).
20. Cf. P. Anciaux, La Theologie du sacrement de penitence au XII' si~cle (1949).
21. For Premontre, cE. P. Petit, La SpiritualiU des Premontres (1950).
22. On the importance of the evidence of the Liber de diversis ordinibus, d. M.-D.
Chenu, La Theologie au douzieme si~cle, pp. 227 ff. It should be noted that the missing
book 4 was to have been entirely devoted to the problems of manual labor.
23. CE. G. Lefranc, Du travail maudit au travail souverain? Rencontres intemationales
de Geneve (1959).
24. Among other significant instances from the fint yean of the twelfth century, the
canonization of Saint Homebon, merchant of Cremona, connected with the Umiliati.
25. Polycraticus VI, c. 20.
26. Cf. M.-D. Chenu, La Theologie au dou%i~me siee/e, p. 239.
27. De animae exsilio et palria, in PL 172, 1241. A sonorous echo of his century in its
traditionalism as well as its innovations, Honorius expressed some ancient views on
professional categories in the Elucidarium.
28. On the "dissolution du regime des sept arts:' d. G. Pare, A. Brunet, and P.
Tremblay, La Renaissance du XlI" si~cle: Les Ecoles et l'Enseignement (1933), pp. 97 ff.
29. On the origins of the confesson' manuals, see the works of P. Michaud-Quantin.
30. On the diffusion of a whole literature de officiis, see G. B. Fowler, "Engelbert of
Admont's Tractalus de officiis et abusionibus eorum," in Essays in Medieval Life and
Thought Presented in Honor of A. P. Evans (1955).
31. We cite from the Ms. Padova, Bibl, Antoniana, scaff. XVII cod. 367. This te:d,
according to two manuscripts of the B.N. Paris, was used by B. Comte for an un-
published thesis defended before the Faculty of Letters of Paris in 1953.
32. On the treatment of these excluded categories, see M. Foucault, L'Histoire de la
folie ilrage c/assique (1961).
33. Ct. Jacques I.e Goff, Marchands et banquiers du Moyen Age, 2d ed. (1962).
34. Cf. Jacques Le Goff, Les Intellectuels au Moyen Age (1957).
35. Cf. G. Post, K. Giocarinis, R. Kay, "The medieval heritage of a Humanistic Ideal:
Scientia donum Dei est, unde vendi non potest," Traditio, 1955.
36. Cf. "Merchants' Time and Church's Time in the Middle Ages," above.
37. To take one example from many texts, the Summa pisanella (cited from Ms BN
Paris Res. D 1193, f.L) answers the question "utrum negotiando Iiceat a1iquid carius
vend ere quam emptum sit," following Saint Thomas, II a 11 e q. LXXVD: "lucrum
317
NOTES TO PAGES 122-125
expetat non quasi finem sed quasi stipendium sui laboris et sic potest quis carius
vend ere quam emit."
318
Notes to Pages 125-128
social background-by G. Post, K. Giocarinis, and R. Kay, "The Medieval Heritage of
a Humanistic Ideal," Traditio 2 (1955).
18. In connection with work on the confessional manuals, we propose to study the
metamorphosis of psychological and spiritual life which is revealed, in particular, by
the substitution of a social morality (of estates) for an individual morality (that of the
deadly sins).
19. Monfrin ed., pp. 78, 533-35.
20. Ibid., pp. 75, 428, 431.
21. Ibid., pp. 71, 266-67.
22. Ibid., pp. 69, 20S-10.
23. Ibid., pp. 82-83, 690--701, underscored a contrario pp. 84, 757-59.
24. Although we are quite far from belittling the necessity of situating the term in its
underlying terrain, the inconsequence of Ernst Robert Curtius's remarks is disap-
pointing: European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. R. Trask (New York,
1953), chap. 11, "Poetry and Philosophy," pp. 214-27.
25. On Philip of Harvengt, cE. Dom U. Berliere, in Revue Benedictine, 1892; and A.
Erens, in Dictionnaire de theologie catholique 12-1, 1407-11.
26. Ep. XVlll ad Richerom, in PL 203, 158.
27. De lnstitutione clericorom 10, xxxv, in PL 203, 710.
28. Ibid., 706.
29. Ibid., 31.
30. Ibid., 33.
31. Ep. XVlll ad Richerum, in PL 203, 701. "Sicut autem isti a labore discendi nociva
revocantur prosperi tate, sic multi, ut aiunt, praepediuntur paupertate. Videntes enim
sibi non ad votum suppetere pecuniariae subsidia facultatis, imparati sufferre
aliquantulae molestias paupertatis, malunt apud suos indocti remanere quam discendi
gratia apud exteros indigere."
33. "non tam audiri appetens quam audire," PL 203, 157.
34. Ibid., 31.
35. Ibid., 159.
36. De institutione Clericorom, in PL 203, 706. "Possunt enim (c1erici) et curas
eccIesiasticas Iicenter obtinere, et labori manuum aliquoties indulgere, si tamen ad
haec eos non vitium levitatis iIIexerit, sed vel charitas vel necessitas quasi violenter
impulerit. Apostolus quippe et sollicitudinem gerebat EccIesiarum, quia eum charitas
perurgebat, et laborabat manibus quando necessitas incumbebat. Denique cum
Timotheum instrueret, non ab eo laborem relegavit penitus, sed eum potius ordinavit,
ut osenderet non esse alienum a c1erico aliquoties laborare, si tamen id loco suo
noverit collacare. Debet enim studium praeponere scripturarum, et ei diligentius in-
haerere, laborem vero manuum, non delectabiliter sed tolerabiliter sustinere, ut ad
iIIud eum praecipue alliciat delectatio spiritalis, ad hunc quasi invitum compellat
necessitas temporalis."
37. PL 203, 159.
38. P. Delhaye: "Saint Bernard de C1airvaux et Philippe de Harvengt," Bulletin de la
Societe historique et archeologique de Langres 12 (1953).
39. De conversione ad clericos sermo, in PL 182, 834-56.
40. Ep. ad Heroaldum, in PL 203, 31.
41. There is a vast literature on this conflict. The most important works are cited in
the survey, in a traditional spirit, of D. Douie, "The Conflict between the Seculars and
the Mendicants at the University of Paris in the 13th Century," in Aquinas Society of
London, Aquinas Paper no. 23 (1954).
42. Exposition quatuor magistrorom super regulam Iratrum minorum (1241-42), ed. L.
Oliger (1950).
319
NOTES TO PAGES 12~132
43. K. Esser, "Zu der Epistola de tribus questionibus des hl. Bonaventura," Franzis-
kanische Studien 17 (1940),149-59, has shown that Sain~ Bonaventura took the majority
of his commentary from the Joachimite Hugh of Digne (Expositio Regulae published in
Firmamenta trium ordinum beatissimi patris nostri Francisci [Paris, 1512], pars IV). On
Saint Francis's attitude toward manual labor, Bonaventura goes further than Hugues
de Digne, giving one detail which is found nowhere else in the thirteenth century
Franciscan literature: "Ipse autem (Franciscus) de labore manuum parvam vim
faciebat nisi propter otium declinandum, quia, cum ipse ruerit Regulae observator
perfectissimus, non credo quod unquam lucratus fuerit de labore manuum duodecim
denarios vel eorum valorem" (Ioc. cit. 153). Cf. contra Testamentum: "Et ego manibus
meis laborabam, et volo laborare. Et omnes alii fratres firmiter volo, quod laborent de
laboritio, quod pertiriet ad honestatem" (H. Boehmer, "Analekten zur Geschichte des
Franciscus von Assisi," Sammlung ausgewiihlter Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichtlicher
Quellensschriften 4 [1930], 37).
44. Contra impugnantes Dei cultum et religionem, I, IV ad 9: "Quando enim aliquis
per laborem manuum non retrahitur ab aliquo utiliori opere, melius est manibus
laborare, ut exinde possit sibi sufficere, et aliis ministrare ... Quando autem per
laborem manuum aliquis ab utiliori opere impeditur, tunc melius est a labore man-
uum abstinere ... sicut patel per exemplum Apostoli, qui ab opere cessabat, quando
praedicanci opportunitatem habebat. Facilius autem impedirentur modemi praedi-
catores a praedicatione per laborem manuum quam Apostoli, qui ex inspiratione
scientiam praedicandi habebant; cum oporteat praedicatores modemi temporis ex con-
tinuo studio ad praedicandos paratos esse."
45. Ed. F. Stegmuller, "Neugefundene Quaestionen, Recherches de th~ologie ancienne
et m~dievale 3 (1931), 172-77.
46. Boethius of Dacia, De Summo Bono sive de vita philosophie, ed. Grabmann, in
Archives d'histoire doctrinale et litttiraire du moyen-dge 6 (1931), 297-307.
47. R.-A. Gauthier, Magnanimitt!: ('Ideal de la grandeur dans la philosophie paienne et
dans la theologie chretienne (1951).
48. See especially the text cited by R-A. Gauthier, p. 468, n. 2, and attributed by
him to Jacques de Douai: "Sicut tamen alias dixi, status philosophi perfectior est statu
principis ... "
49. Stegmuller, p. 172.
SO. Ibid., p. 175.
51. H. Denifle and A. E. Chatelain, Charlularium Universitatis Parisien sis 1, 545.
52. Ibid., p. 549.
53. Ibid., p. 551.
54. Ibid., p. 552.
55. Ibid., p. 555.
56. Gauthier, p. 469, note.
57. Cf. proposition 153 of 1277: "Quod nichil plus scitur propter scire theologiam."
Denifle and Chatelain 1, 552.
58. Ibid., p. 548.
59. R.-A. Gauthier, "Trois commentaires 'averrolstes' sur I'Ethique a Nicomaque,"
Archives d'histoire doctrinale et litttiraire du moyen-age 16 (1948), 224--29.
60. On Gerson, the importance of the work of Msgr. Combes and the article by
Msgr. Glorieux, "La vie et les <Euvres de Gerson," ibid. 25/26 (19~51), 149-92, is
known. Louis Mourin, Jean Gerson, predicateur frant;ais (1952), is useful. I was unable
to consult G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes, Jean Gerson, zijn kerkpolitek en ecclesiologie
(1963).
61. Vivat Rex (1951 ed.) f' II I" and 45 V'.
62. Ibid., f' 2 I".
63. Ibid., f' 3 I".
64. Ibid., f' 7 V'.
320
Notes to Pages 132-149
65. Ibid., C" 4 v".
66. "Recommendatio Iicentiandorum in Decretis," in Gerson, Opera (Paris, 1606) 2,
828-38. "Dominus ita vobis opus habet ... et hoc ad regimen suae familiae grand is
quietum et tranquiUum ... Ea enim demum vera pax erit, ea gubematio idonea ea
servitus placens Domino, si manet unicuique debitus ordo. Ordo autem quid aliud est
nisi parium dispariumque rerum sua unicuique tribuens collatio. Hunc ordinem do-
cere habetis" (ibid., p. 829).
67. "On parle d'aucuns pais gouvemez par tyrans, qui travaiUent en plumant leurs
subiects: mais Ie demeurant est seur et bien garde, tellement qu'il n'est homme qui
osast ravir un seul poussin, ou geline sur la hart." ("Some people speak of countries
ruled by tyrants, who pluck their subjects bare for an occupation: but what is left over
is safe and secure, for there is not a soul who would so much as filch a chick or a
roosting hen.") Vivat Rex, C" 33 v".
68. "Recommendatio," Opera 2,832.
69. "De onere et difficultate officii cancellariatus et causis cur eo se abdicare voluerit
Gersonius." Opera (1606) 2, 825-28.
70. "Sequamur tritum iter commodius plane et ab errorum scandalorumque dis-
crimine remotius" (ut, posthabitis recentioribus, antiquiores legant), Opera (1606) 1,
558.
71. The University of Paris is characterized as "daughter of the King" in Vivat Rex,
fC"s 2 t', 4 v", etc.
72. Vivat Rex, C" 9 t'.
THE UNIVERSrrlHs AND THE PUBLIC AUTHOarrlES IN THE MIDDLE AGES AND THE
RENAISSANCE
Selected Bibliography
I General studies
H. Grundmann, "Vom Ursprung der Universitat im Mittelalter," Berichte liber die
Verhandl. der Siichs. Akad. der Wiss. zu Leipzig. Phil. hist. Kl., 103-2, 1957.
P. Kibre, "Scholarly Privileges in the Middle Ages. The Rights, Privileges, and Im-
munities, of Scholars and Universities at Bologna, Padua, Paris and Oxford,
Mediaeval Acad. of America, pub!, no. 72 (London, 1961).
A. Kluge, Die Universitatsselbstverwaltung. lhre geschichtliche und gegenwll"rtige Rechts-
form (Frankfurt am Mam, 1958).
R. Meister, "Beitrage zur Griindungsgeschichte der mittelalterlichen Universitaten,"
Anz. der phil. hist. Kl. der 6sterr. Akad. der Wiss., 1957.
H. Rashdall, Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, new ed. by F. M. Powicke and
A. B. Emden, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1936).
S. Stelling-Michaud, "L'histoire des universites au Moyen Age et it la Renaissance au
cours des vingt-cinq demieres annees," Xl" Congr~s international des Sciences his-
toriques, Stockholm, 1960; Rapports, t. I.
II Works published before 1960
V. Beltran de Heredia, "Los origines de la Universidad de Salamanca," La Cienca
tomista 81 (1954).
F. Benary, ZurGeschichte der Stadt und der Universitiit Erfurt am Ausgang des Mittelalters
(Gotha, 1919).
F. von Bezold, "Die iiltesten deutschen Universitaten in ihrem Verhiiltnis zum Staat,"
Historische Zeitschrift 80 (1898) (repr. in Aus Mittelalter und Renaissance, 1918).
E. Bonjour, "Zur Griindungsgeschichte der Universitat Basel," Basler Zeitschrift fur
Geschichte und Altertumskunde 54 (1955) (repr. in Die Schweiz und Europa, Basle,
1958).
G. Cencetti, "Sulle origini dello Studio di Bologna," Rivista Storica ltaliana, VI-5 (1940).
321
NOTES TO PAGES 135-149
G. Cencetti, "11 foro degli scolari negli Studi medievali italiani," Atti e Memorie della R.
Deputaz. di Storia Patria per I'Emilia e la Romagna V (1939-40).
M. M. Davy, "La situation juridique de I'universite de Paris au XIIl" siecle," Revue
d'Histoire de l't.glise de France 17 (1931).
G. Ennini, "11 concetto di studium generale," Archivio giuridico, ser. 5,7 (1942).
L. Van der Essen, "Les nations estudiantines a I'Universite de Louvain," Bulletin de la
Commission royale d'Histoire 88 (1924).
F. Eulenburg, "Die Frequenz der deutschen Universitaten von ihrer Griindung bis zur
Gegenwart," Abh. der phil. hist. KI. der Siichs. Gesell. der Wiss., 24-2 (1904).
A. L. Gabriel, "La protection des etudiants a I'Univer.;ite de Paris au XIIl" siecle,"
Revue de I'UniversiU d'Ottawa, 1950.
A. Gaudenzi, "La costituzione di Federico II che interdice 10 Studio Bolognese," Ar-
chivio Storico Italiano, ser. 5, XLII (1908).
R.-A. Gauthier, MagnanimiU, L'Ideal de la grandeur dans la philosophie paienne et dans la
theologie chretienne (1951).
H. Grundmann, "Sacerdotium-Regnum-Studium. Zur Wertung der Wissenschaft
im 13. Jahrhundert," Archiv fUr Kulturgeschichte 34 (1951).
H. Grundmann, "Freiheit als religioses, politisches und per.;onliches Postulat im
Mittelalter," Historische Zeitschrift 183 (1957).
K. Hampe, "Zur Griindungsgeschichte der Univer.;itat Neapel," Sitz. Ber. Heidelberg,
phil. hist. KI., 1923, 10 (1924).
H. Heimpel, Hochschule. Wissenschaft, Wirtschaft, in Kapitulation vor der Geschichte?
(1956).
E. F. Jacob, "English Univer.;ity Clerks in the Later Middle Ages: The Problem of
Maintenance," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 29 (1945-46).
G. Kaufmann, "Die Univer.;itatsprivilegien der Kaiser," in Deutsche Zeitschrift fUr
Geschichtswissenschaft 1 (1889).
H. Keussen, "Die Stadt Koin als Patronin ihrer Hochschule," Westdeutsche Zeitschrift
9 (1890).
P. Kibre, "The Nations in the Mediaeval Univer.;ities," Mediaeval Acad. of America,
pub!, nO 49 (1948).
S. Kuttner, Papst Honorius III und das Studium des Zivilrechts. Festschrift far Martin Wolff
(1952).
M. MeyhOfer, "Die kaiserlichen Stiftsprivilegien rur Universitaten," Archiv far Urkun-
denforschung 4 (1912).
A. Nitschke, "Die Reden des Logotheten Bartholomaus von Capua," Quellen und
Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken 35 (1955).
A. Palmieri, "Lo studio bolognese nella politic a del secolo XII," R. Deputaz. di storia
patria per Ie provo di Romagna, ser. 4, XIII (1932).
J. Paquet, "Salaires et prebendes des professeur.; de I'universite de Louvain au xv"
siec1e," Studia, Universitatis "Lovanium" 2 (1958).
F. Pegues, "Royal Support of Students in the XlIIth Century," Speculum 31 (1956).
G. Post, "Masters's Salaries and Student-Fees in the Mediaeval Universities,"
Speculum 7 (1932).
G. Post, "Parisian Masters as a Corporation (1200-1246)," Speculum 9 (1934).
G. Rossi, "Universitates scolarium e Commune. Sec. XII-XIV," Studi e Memorie St. Univ.
Bol.; NS I (1956).
L. Simeoni, "Bologna e la politica di Enrico V," Atti e Memorie della Deputaz. di storia
patria per I'Emilia e la Romagna 2 (1936-37).
- - - . "Un nuovo documento su Imerio," ibid. 4 (1938-39).
- - - . "La lotta dell'investiture a Bologna e la sua azione suUa citta e sullo studio,"
Memorie della R. Accad. delle sc. delnst. di Bologna, c/o mor. ser. IV, 3 (1941).
L. Sighinolfi, "Gli statuti del Comune di Bologna e i privilegi degli scolari forestieri,"
322
Notes to Pages 135-149
See also the studies on the financing of various German universities cited by S.
Stelling-Michaud in his Stockholm report, p. 137, n. 185.
III Works published after 1%0 (including some which, published shortly before
1960, could not be used by S. Stelling-Michaud in his report to the Stockholm
conference) but before 1965 (when this study was presented to the Vienna conference)
H. R. Abe, "Die soziale Gliederung der Erfurter Studentenschaft im Mittelalter. 1392-
1521," I, Beitriige zur Geschichte der Universitiit Erfurt vm (1961).
Actes du Colloque de la Commission intemationale d' Histoire des UniversiMs ill'occasion du
jubilt! de I'UniversiM Jagellonne, 1364-1964 (Krakow, May 1964): "La conception des
universites a l'epoque de la Renaissance."
Actes du Congr~s sur l'ancienne universitt! d'Orit!ans, 6-7 May 1961 (Orleans, 1962).
"Aus der Geschichte der Universitat Heidelberg und ihrer Fakultaten hrsg. v. G.
Ninz," Ruperto-Carola (1961) XIII, Sonderband (Heidelberg, 1%1).
G. Baumgartel, "Die Gutachter und Urteilstatigkeit der Erlanger Juristenfakultat in
dem ersten Jahrhundert ihres Bestehens," Erlanger Forschungen, ser. A, XIV (Er-
langen, 1962).
A. Blaschka, "Von Prag bis Leipzig. Zum Wandel des Stadtelobs," Wissenschaftliche
Zeitschrift der Universitiit Halle. Gesellschafts-Sprachwiss. ser. 7, 1959.
A. C. Chibnall, Richard de Badew and the University of Cambridge (Cambridge, 1963).
F. Claeys Bouuaert, "A propos de l'intervention de l'Universite de Louvain dans la
publication des decrets du Concile de Trente," Revue d'Histoire ecc/esiastique LV
(1960).
M. H. Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition. 1558-1662 (Oxford, 1959).
M. H. Curtis, "The Alienated Intellectuals of Early Stuart England," Past and Present,
no. 23 (1962).
Das 500-jiihrige Jubiliium der Universitiit Greifswald 1956, ed. G. Erdmann et al.
(Greifswald, 1%1).
J. Dauvillier, "La notion de chaire professorale dans les universites depuis Ie Moyen
Age jusqu'a nos jours," Annales de la Facultt! de Droit de Toulouse, 1959.
J. Dauvillier, "Origine et histoire des costumes universitaires fran~ais," ibid. 1958.
"Dekret Kutnohorsky a jeho misto v dejinach" (The decretum of Kutna Hora and its
place in history), Acta Universitatis Carolinae. Philosophica et Historica 2 (Prague,
1959).
Dzieje Uniwersytetu Jagiellonskiego w latach 1364-1764 (History of the University of
Jagel\ona, 1364-1764) ed. K. Lepszy (Krakow, 1964).
323
NOTES TO PAGES 135--154
324
Notes to Pages 154-156
6. Dialog; I, 27.
7. "The counts and saiones sent on missions to the Roman officials had to know a
few Latin phrases, of the sort that eventually any officer or even soldier comes to know
in an occupied country" (P. Riche [bibliography, no. 37], p. 101). "There is no doubt
that Barbarian aristocrats were very quickly Romanized. Bllt it is clear that this was
only a minority and that the mass of the Barbarians kept their own customs" (ibid., p.
102).
8. This was different from what happened at the beginnings of Roman culture. In
that case, the rural basis continued to impregnate a culture which was in the process of
urbanization and constant expansion (d., e.g., W. E. Heitiand, Agricola [Cambridge,
1921]; and the remarks of J. Marouzeau on Latin, "the language of peasants," in
Lexique de terminologie linguistique, 2d ed. [1943]). Here, the peasant, eliminated from
the cultural universe and kept apart from it (see Jacques Le Goff, "Peasants and the
Rural World in the Literature of the Early Middle Ages," this volume, p. 87)
threatened the culture in such a way as to oblige the clerics to act in the opposite
direction, from the top down, to lessen their risks.
9. Jones, n. 6.
10. Cf. Marrou's classic work (bibliography, no. 30) and, for the Greek basis of
Greco-Roman culture: W. Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture 1-3 (Oxford,
1936-45).
11. On the problematics of acculturation, see the survey of A. Dupront, "De I'accul-
turation," in Comite international des sciences historiques, XII" Congres international des
sciences historiques (Vienna, 1965). Rapports, 1, Grands themes (1965), pp. 7-36.
Translated into Italian, with additions, in, L'acculturazione: Per un nuovo rapporto tra
ricerca storica e scienze umane (Turin, 1966). The problems of internal acculturation
stemming from the coexistence of distinct levels and cultural complexes within a single
ethnic area are a particularly important aspect of acculturation.
12. For example, the major portion of the ethnographic knowledge bequeathed by
Greco-Latin culture to the medieval West was to come from Solinus' mediocre compi-
lation in the third century (ed. Mommsen, 2d ed. [Berlin, 1895]).
13. Cf. W. H. Stahl, "To a Better Understanding of Martianus Capella," Speculum 40
(1965).
14. It was from Macrobius that the clerics of the Middle Ages took, for example, the
typology of dreams--so important in a civilization in which the oneiric universe
occupied such a large place; d. L. Deubner, De Incubatione (Giessen, 1899).
15. The Vita Samsonis has been subjected to a severe critique by its editor, R. Fawtier
(Paris, 1912). Even if the additions and emendations in the text which has come down
to us are noteworthy, however, the historians of Irish monasticism tend to regard the
"liberal" culture of the Irish abbeys (Saint Iltud and Saint Cadoc are in the same boat
as Saint Samson) as a reality and not a Carolingian fiction (d. Riche, p. 357; and O.
Loyer [bibliography, no. 26], pp. 49-51).
16. Although archaeology has revealed a warrior culture (see E. Salin [bibliog-
raphy]), the military aristocracy of the early Middle Ages remained distant from writ-
ten culture, awaiting its rise in the Carolingian and pre-Carolingian era (d. n. 25
below), at which time, moreover, it was caught up in clerical culture before finally
breaking through in the Romanesque era with the gests (cf. J.-P. Bodmer [bibliog-
raphy, no. 6]).
17. By folkloric culture, I particularly mean the deep stratum of traditional culture (or
civilization) (in the sense of A. Varagnac [bibliography, no. 48]) which underlies every
historical SOCiety and crops up or is close to cropping up in the chaotic period between
antiquity and the Middle Ages. What makes identification and analysis of this cultural
stratum particularly delicate is that it is riddled with historical contributions disparate
in age and kind. Here, it will scarcely be possible to distinguish this deep-lying
325
NOTES TO PAGE 157
stratum from the level of Greco-Roman "high" culture which colored it so strongly.
These, if you will, were the two paganisms of the era: one of traditional beliefs
endUring over the very long period; the other of the official Greco-Roman religion,
more susceptible of development. Christian authors of late antiquity and the early
Middle Ages fail to distinguish them properly and seem, moreover (as shown, e.g., by
an analysis of the De correctione rusticorum by Martin of Braga; d. L. Chaves and S.
McKenna [bibliography, nos. 13 and 27] and text in C. Wr Barlow, "Martin de Braga,"
Opera omnia (1950)), more concerned with fighting official paganism than the old
superstitions, which they find difficult to tell apart. To a certain extent, their attitude
encouraged the emergence of these ancestral beliefs more or less purged of their
Roman veneer and not yet Christianized. Even Saint Augustine does not always make
the distinction, although he still carefully distinguishes urbanitas from rusticitas as to
the social aspects of mentalities, beliefs, and behaviors (d., e.g., his discriminating
attitude in this respect concerning funerary practices in the De cura pro mortuis
gerenda, PL XL--CSEL 41-Bibliotheque augustinienne 2; and more generally the De
catechizandis rudibus, PL XL, Bibliotheque augustinienne 1, 1). Thus the celebrated
passage from De civitate Dei XV, 23, on the Silva nos et Faunos quos vulgo incubos vocant,
the birth certificate of the demonic incubi of the Middle Ages, as Ernest Jones saw
clearly in his pioneering essay on the psychoanalysis of medieval collective obses-
sions, in On the Nightmare, 2d. ed. (London, 1949), p. 83.
In practice, I consider as folkloric elements the themes from Merovingian literature
which relate to a motif in Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-literature, 6 vols.
(Copenhagen, 195~58).
On the historicity of folklore, d. a brilliant article which, despite its title, is quite
general in scope, by G. Cocchiara, "Paganitas: Sopravivenze folkloriche del
paganesimo siciliano," Atti del 1° congresso intemazionale di studi sulla Sicilia antica,
Studi pubblicati dall']stituto di storia antica dell'Universita di Palenno, 1~11
(1964-65),401-16.
18. It is known that the Rogation days date from the fifth or sixth century. According
to tradition, they were instituted by Saint Mamertus, bishop of Vienne (d. 474), in a
context of calamities and rapidly spread across Christendom, as Saint Avitus (d. 518)
testifies in Homilia de rogationibus (PL 59, 289-94). It is not certain that they were
intentionally and directly substituted for the antique Ambarvalia: d. article "Roga-
tions" in Dictionnaire d'archeologie chretienne et de Iiturgie XIV-2 (1948), cols. 2459-61,
H. Leclercq). On the other hand, it is certain that they included folkloric elements. But
it is difficult to know whether these elements colored the liturgy of the Rogations
immediately, as early as the era we are considering, or whether they were introduced
or, in any event, developed at a later date. Concerning, for example, the processional
dragons, our evidence dates only from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries where
theoretical texts are concerned (the liturgists Jean Beleth and Guillaume Durand) and
from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries for concrete individual mentions. ] have
studied the problem of these processional dragons from the Merovingian era on in an
essay entitled "Ecclesiastical Culture and Folklore in the Middle Ages" (this volume,
p. 159). On the folkloric characteristics of the Rogations, d. the admirable pages of
Arnold van Gennep with the significant title "Fetes liturgiques folklorisees," Manuel
de folklore fran,ais contemporain 114-2 (1949), 1637 ff.
19. Their origin is urban and their nature basically liturgical, as is shown by the
letter of institution sent by the pope to the Romans after his elevation to the pontificate
at the time of the epidemic of Black Plague in 590-a leiter which Gregory of Tours
included in the Historia Francorum because a deacon from Tours, then in Rome to
acquire relics, had brought it back to him (Historia Francorum X, 1). But their inclusion
in the liturgical calendar as liturgiae majores alongSide the liturgiae minores of the
Rogations no doubt laid them open to a popular degradation.
326
Notes to Pages 157-158
20. The dragon of folklore--symbol of ambivalent natural forces which can tum
either to our advantage or to our detriment (d. E. Salin (bibliography, no. 45) 4,
207-8)-existed throughout the Middle Ages, alongside the Christian dragon, the
latter being identified with the devil and signifying evil exclusively. In the late sixth
century, when Fortunatus wrote the Vita Marcelli (d. Bruno Krusch, MGH, Scn'ptores
rerum merovingiarum IV-2, 49-54), the theme of the victorious saint who defeats the
dragon remains midway between the two conceptions, in the lineage of the antique
interpretation, which, having granted the heros a victory over the dragon, hesitated
between domesticating and killing the monster. On the folkloric aspects of this theme,
d. Stith Thompson, Motif A 531: "Culture hero (demigod) overcomes monsters." I
have tried to treat this problem in the article cited in n. 8 above; "L'ambivalence des
animaux reves" has been pointed out by Jean Gyory, Cahiers de civilisation medievale
1964, p. 2(0). For a psychoanalytic interpretation of this ambivalence, d. Jones, p. 85.
21. Constantius of Lyons, Vie de saint Germain d' Auxerre, ed. R. Borius (Paris, 1965),
pp. 138-43; Pliny the Younger, Letters VII, 27.
22. It is important to make a distinction here. The thesis of P. Saintyves, which is
stated in the suggestive title of his book with a "modernist" imprint, Les Saints succes-
seurs des dieux (bibliography), which appeared in 1907, is false insofar as the antique
ancestors of the saints were not gods but demigods and heros and insofar as the
Church wanted to make the saints not the successors but the replacements of the
heroes, situated in another system of values. On the other hand, G. Cocchiara's thesis,
which asserts that the Church triumphed in this area, takes no account of the fact that
the vast majority of Christians in the Middle Ages and later behaved in the same way
toward saints as their ancestors had toward heroes, demigods, and even gods. Contrary
to what Cocchiara thinks, the frequent rough treatment, common in medieval com-
munities, of a saint (or his statue) guilty of not having answered the prayers of his
faithful is attributable to a persistent "primitive" mentality and not to some sort of
affectionate mutation of piety. What remains is that the distinction between the role of
God and that of the saints (pure intercessors) in miracles offers a safety valve to
individual and coUective psychology which safeguards to a certain extent the devotion
to God.
23. It is no doubt simplifying the mental and intellectual role of Christianity to insist
on its contribution to the progress of rationalization in these areas. In the medium run
of the history of collective mentalities, it seems to have more to do with a mystical,
"oriental" reaction against a certain Greco-Roman "rationalism" to which, moreover,
the critical sensibility prepared the way for Judeo-Christianity, and medieval Chris-
tians were aware of a certain continuity in bringing Vergil and Seneca to the verge of
Christianity. StiD, in the area of mental and intellectual structures, I believe that
Christianity represented a new phase of rational thought-as Pierre Duhem main-
tained in connection with science, where, according to him, by desanctifying nature,
Christianity had enabled scientific thought to achieve crucial progress. In this respect,
the opposition of folklore to Christianity (more basic, I think, than amalgams and
symbioses) represents the resistance of the irrational, or rather of another mental
system, another logiC, that of "la pensee sauvage."
24. Constantius of Lyons, pp. 142-43. Sheltered by villagers, Saint Germain gives in
to their pleas and restores the voice to mute cocks by giving them blessed bread. The
biographer clearly does not understand the importance and significance of this mira-
cle, which he excuses himself for mentioning. "Ita virtus diuina etiam in rebus
minimis maxima praeeminebat." These res minimal!, often spoken of in early medieval
hagiographies, are miracles of a folkloric type which entered clerical literature by the
back door. In the case cited here, we see a combination of several folkloric themes
embodied in the miracle of the village sorcerer who repairs the magical order of
nature. Cf. Stith Thompson, Motif A 2426, "Nature and meaning of animal cries" (esp.
327
NOTBS TO PAGE 158
A 2426.2.18, "Origin and meaning of cock's cry"); A 2489, "Animal periodic habits
(esp. A 2489.1, "Why cock wakes man in morning"; A 2489.1.1, "Why cock crows to
greet sunrise"); D 1793, "Magic results from eating or drinking"; D 2146, "Magic
control of day and night"; J 2272.1, "Chanticleer believes that his crowing makes the
sun rise."
25. The clerical aristocratic culture flourished in the Carolingian era with the
stranglehold of the Church over secular values and, reciprocally, of the lay aristocracy
over religious values. If, in the era which concerns us here, the fifth and sixth cen-
turies, the aristocracy colonized the Church socially, it did so only by abandoning its
lay culture, not as technical equipment, but as a system of values. Among others, the
example of Cesarius of Aries is significant (Vita Caesarii I, S-9, ed. G. Morin, in S.
Caesarii opera omnia 2 [1937]). Weakened by his ascetic practices at Lerins, Caesarius
was sent to Aries to an aristocratic family which puts him in charge of "quidam
Pomerius nomine, scientia rhetor, AIer genere, quem ibi singularem et clarum gram-
maticae artis doctrina reddebat ... ut saecularis scientiae disciplinis monasterialis in
eo simplicitas poliretur." Author of the De vita contemplativa, which would enjoy a
great vogue in the Middle Ages, Pomerius, moreover, was a Christian who had noth-
ing of the "rationalist" about him. But once he had acquired the intellectual technique,
Cesarius turned away from this profane science, as suggested to him by a dream in
which he saw a dragon devour his shoulder, supported on a book on which he had
fallen asleep. At the other extreme of our period (seventh and eighth centuries), we see
the aristocratic ideal (we will not here enter into the arguments about the existence of a
"nobility" in this period) invade hagiographic literature to the point of imposing on it
an aristocratic type of saint; d. F. Graus (bibliography, no. 22); and F. Prinz (bibliog-
raphy, no. 36), esp. pp. 489,501-7, "Die Selbstheiligung des frankischen Adels in der
Hagiographie, 8; Heiligenvita-Adel-Eigenkloster, 9; Ein neues hagiographisches Leit-
bild"; and the works cited ibid., pp. 493--94, nn. 126 and 127, to which we should add
K. Bosl, "Der' AdelsheiIige: Idealtypus und Wirklichkeit, Gesellschaft und Kultur in
Merowingerzeiten: Bayern des 7 und 8. Jahrhunderts," in Speculum historiale: Ge-
schichte im Spiegel von Gedichtsschreibung und Gedichtsdeutung, ed. C. Bauer (1965), pp.
167-87.
26. AIter the fashion of Erich Kohler, I interpret the renascence of profane literature
in the eleventh and twelfth centuries as the product of the small and medium aristoc-
racy of the milites, who desired to create for themselves a culture relatively in-
dependent of the clerical culture with which the Carolingian lay proceres had put up
quite well (d. E. E. Kohler, Trobadorlyrik und hOfischer Roman [Berlin, 1962]; id., "Ob-
servations historiques et sociologiques sur la poesie des troubadours," Cahiers de
civilisation mldievale, 1964, pp. 27-51). I also believe, with D. D. R. Ower, "The secular
inspiration of the 'Chanson de Roland'" (Speculum 37 [1962]), that the mentality and
morality of the original Roland were completely secular, "feudal." And I think that this
new feudal, lay culture borrowed extensively from the underlying folkloric culture
because the latter was the only substitute culture that the lords could establish
alongside-if not in opposition to--derical culture. Marc Bloch, moreover, had sensed
the importance of the deep folkloric character of the gests ("The plot of the Chanson de
Roland has more to do with folklore than history-hatred between stepson and step-
father, envy, betrayal." La Socim feodale 1, 148. Cf. ibid., p. 133). Of course, clerical
culture would easily and quickly conclude a compromise with this seigneurial culture,
a Christianization of a lay and folkloric base. Between Geoffrey of Monmouth, for
example, and Robert of Boron, there is barely time to observe a wild Merlin, a non-
Christian prophet, a madman alien to Catholic reason, a wild man fleeing the Chris-
tian world, offspring of a Myrdclin in whom the semi-aristocratic culture of the Celtic
bards had put some of the traits of the village sorcerer. In contrast with the Merovin-
gian era, however, the Gothic-Romanesque age was unable to entirely repress this
328
Notes to Pages 153-158
folkloric culture. It had to compromise and allow folklore to become implanted prior to
the new growth of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The eminently folkloric theme
laden with aspirations coming from the collective depths, that of Never-Never Land,
appeared in thirteenth-century literature before making a decisive breakthrough in
the sixteenth century (d. Cocchiara, 11 paese di Cuccagna, 1954). In this respect, the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries were indeed the first stage of the Renaissance.
Selected Bibliography
1. J.-F. Alonso, La cura pastoral en la Espana romanovisigoda (Rome, 1955).
2. E. Auerbach, Literatursprache und Publikum in der lateinischen Spiitantike und im
Mittelalter (Berne, 1958).
3. H. G. Beck, The Pastoral Care of Souls in South-East France during the Sixth Century
(Rome, 1950).
4. C. A. Bernoulli, Die Heiligen der Merowinger (Tiibingen, 1900).
5. H. Beumann, Gregor von Tours und der "sermo rusticus." Spiegel der Geschichte,
Festgabe Max Braubach (Munster, 1%4), pp. 69-98.
6. J.-P. Bodmer, Der Krieger der Merowingerzeit und seine Welt (1957).
7. R. Boese, Superstitiones Arelatenses e Caesario collectae (Marburg, 1909).
8. I. Bonini, "Lo stile nei sermoni di Caesario di Aries," Aevum, 1%2.
9. M. Bonnet, Le Latin de Grlgoire de Tours (Paris, 1890).
10. R. Borius, Constance de Lyon: Vie de saint Germain d' Auxe"e (Paris, 1965).
11. W. Boudriot, Die altgermanische Religion in der amtlichen kirchlichen Literatur vom 5.
bis 11. Jahrhundert (Bonn, 1928).
12. S. Cavallin, Literarhistorische und textkritische Studien zur "Vita S. Caesari Arelaten-
sis," (Lund, 1934).
13. L. Chaves, "Costumes e tradicoes vigentes no seculo VI e na actuaJidade," Bracara
Augusta VIII (1957).
14. P. Courcelle, Les Lettres grecques en Occident de Macrobe Ii Cassiodore (Paris, 1943).
15. Id., Histoire litUraire des grandes invasions germaniques (Paris, 1948).
16. E.-R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask
(New York, 1953).
17. H. Delehaye, Les Ltlgendes hagiographiques (Brussels, 1905).
18. Id., "Sanctus." Essai sur Ie culte des saints dans l' Antiquite (Brussels, 1954).
19. A. Dufourcq, La Christianisation des foules. Etude sur la fin du paganisme populaire et
sur les origines du culte des saints, 4th ed. (Paris, 1907).
20. Etudes mlrovingiennes, Actes des journees de Poitiers, 1-3 mai 1952 (Paris, 1953).
21. J. Fontaine, Isidore de Slville et la culture classique dans l'Espagne wisigothique (Paris,
1959).
22. F. Graus, Volk, Herrscher und Heiliger im Reich der Merowinger, (Prague, 1%5).
23. H. Grundmann, "Utteratus-illiteratus. Der Wandlung einer Bildungsnonn vom
Altertum zum MittelaJter," Archiv fUr Kulturgeschicnte 40 (1958).
24. C. G. Loomis, White Magic. An Introduction to the Folklore of Christian Legends
(Cambridge, Mass., 1948) ..
25. F. Lot, "A quelle epoque a-t-on cesse de parler latin?" Archivum Latinitatis Medii
Aevi, Bulletin Du Cange, 1931.
26. O. Loyer, Les Chr/tientes celtiques (Paris, 1965).
27. S. McKenna, Paganism and Pagan survivals in Spain up to the Fall of the Visigothic
Kingdom (Washington, 1938).
28. A. Marignan, Etudes sur la civilisation mlrovingienne. 1. La SocilU mirovingienne. 11.
Le Culte des saints sous les Merovingiens (Paris, 1899).
29. H.-I. Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, 2" ed., (Paris, 1937) and
Retractatio (1959).
30. Id., Histoire de l'education dans I'Antiquite, 5" ed. (Paris, 1960).
329
NOTES TO PAGES 159-160
31. Id., Nouvelle Histoire de l'Eglise.I. Des origines iJ Gr~goire Ie Grand (avec J. Danielou)
(Paris, 1963).
32. L. Musset, us Invasions. I. Les Vagues germaniques (Paris, 1%5). 11. u Second Assaut
contre I' Europe chrt!Henne (Paris, 1%6).
33. Dag Norberg, "A queUe epoque a-t-on cesse de parler latin en Gaule7" Annales,
E.S.C., 1966.
34. G. Penco, "La composizione sociale delle communita monastiche nei primi se-
coli," Studia Monastica rv (1962).
35. H. Pirenne, "De l'etat de I'instruction des laics a I'epoque merovingienne," Revue
beige de Philologie et d'Histoire, 1934.
36. F. Prinz, Fruhes Monchtum im Frankenreich. Kultur und Gesellschaft in Gallien, den
Rheinlanden und Bayern am Beispiel der monastischen Entwicklung, IV bis VIII
Jahrhundert (Munich-Vienna, 1%5).
37. P. Riche, Education et Culture dans I'Occident barbare (Paris, 1%2).
38. M. Roblin, "Paganisme et rusticite," Annales, E.S.C., 1953.
39. Id., "Le rolte de saint Martin dans la region de Senlis," Journal des Savants, 1%5.
40. J.-L. Romero, Sociedad y cultura en la temprana Edad Media (Montevideo, 1959).
41. Saint Germain d' Auxerre et son temps (Auxerre, 1960).
42. "Saint Martin et son temps. Memorial du XVI" Centenaire des debuts du
monachisme en Gaule," Studia Anselmiana XLVI (Rome, 1%1).
43. P. Saintyves, us Saints successeurs des dieux (Paris, 1907).
44. Id., En marge de la Ugende Dor~e. Songes, miracles et survivances. Essai sur la forma-
tion de quelques themes hagiographiques (Paris, 1930).
45. E. Salin, La Civilisation m~rovingienne d' apres les st!pu/tures, les textes et Ie laboratoire
(Paris, 4 vols., 1949-59).
46. SetH mane di studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull'alto Medioevo (1954 sqq.), esp. IX.
/l passaggio dell' AnHchita al Medioevo in Occidente (1%2).
47. The Conflict between Paganism and ChrisHanity in the IVth century, ed. A. Momi-
gliano (Oxford, 1%3).
48. A. Varagnac, Civilisation traditionnelle et genres de vie (paris, 1948).
49. G. Vogel, La Discipline pt!nitentielle en Gaule des origines Ii la fin du XlI" siec/e (Paris,
1952).
50. Id., Introduction aux sources de I'histoire du culte chrt!tien au Moyen Age (Spoleto,
1%5).
51. J. Zeilinger, Augustin und die Volksfr6mmigkeit. Blicke in den frUhchristlichen Alltag
(Munich, 1933).
330
Notes to Pages 160-163
331
NOTES TO PAGES 163-165
Stude e Testi, 38 (Rome, 1924), pp. 155-247; reprinted in Aus rheinischer und frankischer
Friihzeit (Dusseldorf, 1948), pp. 39G-465; and G. de Tervarent, Les Enigmes de rart du
Moyen Age, 2d series, Art flam and (Paris, 1941), 6, "Le pape au dragon," pp. 49--50.
14. On these exotic creatures in churches, d. Perdrizet, under "Marce!," and Male,
pp. 325-26. '(No document, to my knowledge, permits the assertion that medieval
churches were "veritable museums of natural history"-this phenomenon seems to
me to have come later.) Miilecites J. Berger de Xivrey, Traditions Uratologiques (1836),
p. 484. But the griffin's claw suspended in the vault of the Sainte-Chappelle is not
found in Bartholomew the Englishman nor in the translation made by Jean de Cor-
bichon for Charles V. This was an addition to the manuscript transcribed by Berger de
Xivrey, written in 1512.
15. "Lettre adressee a M. Alexandre Lenoir au sujet de son Memoire sur Ie dragon de
Metz appele Graouilli," from Magasin encyclopedi4ue i (1812).
16. In Revue encyclop~dique 30, nos. 88 and 89 (1826).
17. Paris, 1829; Paris, 1842 2 , preceded by the speech of Fran\;ois Arago at the tomb of
Eusebe Salverte, 30 October 1839; Paris, 18563 , with an introduction by Emile Littel!.
18. L. Dumont, La Tarasque: Essai de description d'un fait local d'un point de vue
ethnographique (Paris, 1951), pp. 213 ff.
19. This may have been the case with the crocodile of Nimes, which was said to
have been brought from Egypt by Roman legionnaires. But this explanation, from L. J.
B. Feraud, Superstitions et suroivances ~tudi~es au point de vue de leur origine et de leurs
transformations (Paris, 1896), is subject to caution; for the author was a rationalist, a
descendant of Salverte.
20. On "depth psychology," d. the exploratory propositions of A. Dupront, "Prob-
lemes et methodes d'une histoire de la psychologie collective," Annales, E.S.C., 1961.
On the historicity of folklore, d. G. Cocchiara, "Paganitas: Sopravivenze folkloriche
del paganesimo siciliano," Alii dell ·congresso internazionale di studi sulla Sicilia antiea,
Studi pubblicati dall'lstituto di storia antica dell'Universita di Palermo, 10-11
(1964-65), 401-16.
21. The importance of these physical details has been shown particularly well by
Dumont (in the rite, pp. 51-63; in the legend, pp. 155-63; in the interpretation, pp.
207-8).
22. The best work on Merovingian hagiography is that of F. Graus (cf. n. 1 above),
where an ample bibliography may be found.
23. Cf. F. Spadafora, Dizionario Biblieo (Rome, 1955), under "Dragone."
24. On the "two Geneses" and the "two serpents" which may be traced through
certain contradictions or discrepancies in the biblical text, cf. James G. Frazer, Folk-lo"re
in the Old Testament, abridged ed. (Lo"ndon, 1923), pp. 15 ff.
25. Among the characteristic signs which make it comparable with the dragon of
Saint Marcellus, note the following: (1) the habitat in moist places ("in locis humen-
tibus," Job 40:16; in the twelfth century, on a miniature from the Hor/us delieiarum of
Herrad of Landsberg, wavy marks indicate that the dragon is in the ocean; d. M. M.
Davy, Essai sur la symbo/ique romane [Paris, 1955], p. 167). (2) The tail (Behemoth:
"stringit caudam suam quasi cedrum," Job 40:12). (3) The neck (and more generally,
the head of Leviathan: "in collo ejus morabitur fortitudo," Job 41:13). On dragons, and
especially Daniel's dragon, in the biblical Apocrypha, Graus, p. 231, and Merkelbach,
col. 247.
26. E.g., Ps. 73:13; 90:13; 148:7.
27. Rev. 12:3. On the medieval commentaries on the Apocalypse, see the incompar-
able repertoire of F. Stegmuller, Repertorium biblieum medii atvi. M. R. Sanfacon, pro-
fessor at the Universite Laval in Quebec, and Msgr. G. Vezin are preparing works on
the iconography of the Apocalypse. The dragons of the Apocalypse had many uses,
mora!, aesthetic, and political.
332
Notes to Pages 166-167
28. There is little to be gleaned in the article "dragon" (H. Leclercq) in the Dic-
tionnaire d'archtologie chrttienne et de liturgie IV/2 (1921), cols. 1537-40, which is
derivative of older works which were valuable in their time but useful for following the
progress of the historiography of the question. According to Dom Jerome Lauret, e.g.,
in Sylva allegoriarum totius sacrae Scripturae (Venice, 1575), "for the Fathers of the
Church, the dragon was a species of serpent of large dimensions, living in the water,
pestilential and horrible; dragons usually signify Satan and his companions; Lucifer is
called great dragon." In Marangoni's work Delle cose gentilesche e profane trasportate ad
usa e ad ornamento delle chiese (Rome, 1744), the link was established between pagan
and Christian dragons on the one hand, and archaeological and iconographic texts and
documents on the other. The early methods of the history of religion and anthropology
may be found in A. Longperier, "Sur les dragons de I'antiquite, leur veritable forme,
et sur les animaux fabuleux des legendes," Comptes rendus de la 20 session du Congres
international d'anthropologie et d'archeologie prehistorique, 1867, pp. 285-86, and in M.
Meyer, "Ueber die Verwandtschaft heidnischer und christlicher Drachenttidter," Ver-
handlungen der XL Versammlung deutscher Philologie (Leipzig, 1890), pp. 336 ff. This
article has the additional merit of calling attention to the text of Gregory the Great
(Dialogi II, c. XXV): "De monacho qui, ingrato eo de monasterio discedends, draconem
contra se in itinere invenit" which shows the ancient usage of the dragon in the
Benedictine disciplinary symbolism and the political use of dragon symbolism in the
Carolingian era, beginning with a text from the Vita of Saint Eucherius (MGH, Script.
Rer. Mer. VII, 51), in the context of the ecclesiastical campaign to discredit Charles
Martel, despoiler of churches: in 858, Louis the German heard the opinion of the
bishops of the provinces of Reims and Rouen that his great-great-grandfather Charles
Martel was surely damned because Saint Eucherius of Orleans saw him one day right
in the middle of hell, and a dragon had escaped from his tomb-a theme bearing a
striking relationship with the dragon of the Vita S. Marcelli (cf. A. de Bastard, "Rap-
port sur une crosse du)(fl" siecle," Bulletin du ComiU de la langue, de thistoire et des aris
de la France (1860) 4, 450 and 683 n. 206).
29. Saint Augustine, Enarratio in Psalmos 103:27, PL 36137, 1381-83.
30. This is a terrestrial dragon.
31. Saint Augustine, Enarratio in Psalmos 103:9, PL 36137, 1943.
32. Cassiodorus, Complexiones in Apocalypsim, PL 70, 1411; and Expositiones in Psal-
terium, ibid., 531, (commentary on Ps. 73:13).
33. Primasius, Commentarium in Apocalypsim, PL LXVIII, 873-75.
34. Bede, Hexameron, PL 91, 53. Commentarii in Pentateuchum, PL 210-11; Explanatio
Apocalypsis, PL 93, 166-67.
35. Isidore, Etymologiae, XII, iv, 4, PL 82, 442.
36. "Qui saepe a speluncis abstractus fertur in aerem, concitaturque propter eum
aer ... Vim autem non'in dentibus, sed in caude habet, et verbere potius quam ri(tu
nocet" (ibid.).
37. Isidore, Differentiae I, 9, (PL 83, 16): "in mari angues, in terra serpentes, in
templo dracones." Isidore in fact reproduces Servius' commentary on VergiI, Aenead 2,
204.
38. Isidore, Etymologiae XII, iv, 42, PL 82, 455.
39. "In quarum hortis fingunt fabulae draconem pervigilem aurea mala servantem"
(Etym. XIV, vi, 10, PL 82, 14).
40. "Draconum signa ab Apolline morte Pythonis serpentis inchoata sunt. Dehinc a
Graecis et Romanis in bello gestari coeperunt" (Etym. XVIII, iii, 3, PL 82,643).
41. "Annus quasi annulus ... Sic enim et apud Aegyptis indicabatur ante inventas
litteras, picto dracone caudam suam mordente, quia in se recurrit" (Etym. V, xxxvi, 2,
PL 82, 222). On the "rolled up" dragon in the art of the Steppes and Merovingian art,
cf. E. Salin, La Civilisation mtrovingienne d' apres les stpu/tures, les textes et Ie laboratoire 4
333
NOTES TO PAGES 167-169
(Paris, 1959), 241-44, in which the author, following J. Grimm, gives the rather im-
probable and in any case derivative interpretation of the dragon as guardian of a
treasure. O. Mircea Eliade, Le My the de L'Eterne! Retour: Arch~type et r~pttition (Paris,
1949). Translated by William R. Trask as The Myth of the Eternal Return (Princeton,
1954).
42. "Per idem tempus Donatus, Epiri episcopus, virtutibus insignis est habitus. Qui
draconem ingentem, expuens in ore ejus peremit, quem octo juga boum ad locum
incendii vix trahere potuerunt, ne aerem putredo ejus corrumperet" (Chroniscon 107,
PL 83, 1051). In a different, more diabolical context, we find a dragon in the Vita of
Saint Caesarius of Aries (ed. G. Morin [Maredsous, 1942]2, 299-300); after Caesarius
has left the monastery of Lerins for reasons of health, and has gone to Aries to devote
himself to profane science, he falls asleep one night over his book and sees a dragon
devouring his arm.
43. Cf. the works cited by the Dictionnaire d' Archiologie and mentioned in n. 28. It is
unfortunate that the work of C. G. Loomis, White Magic: An Introduction to the folklore
of Christian Legend (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), is difficult to use because of its confusion
and laek of chronological distinctions. Father Delehaye, whose works on hagiography
remain fundamental in spite of their frequently outmoded problematics, did not ap-
proach this theme systematically. According to Graus, p. 231, n. 203, a general study of
the theme of the dragon and of the combat with it has recently been undertaken by V.
Schirmunski (d. Vergleichende Epenforschung (I, Deutsche Akademie der Wis-
senschaften zu Berlin, Veroffentlichungen des Instituts fur Deutsche Volskunde, 24
(Berlin, 1961), pp. 23 ff, which I have been unable to consult).
44. PG 26, 849. On the influence of the Life of Saint Anthony by Athanasius on
Western hagiography in the early Middle Ages, d. S. Cavallin, Literarhistorische und
textkritische Studien zur Vita S. Caesarii Arelatensis (Lund. 1934).
45. This is the case studied by W. Levison, cited n. 13.
46. Cf. A. Graf, Roma nella memoria e nell'immaginazione del medio evo (Turin, 1923),
pp. 177 and 442.
47. Cf. C. Cahier, CaracUristiques des saints dans l'art populaire (1867), p. 316, and
Tervarent (see n. 13 above), p. 50. It is curious that Sylvester and Marcellus were both
granted another miracle of the same type and similar to that of the fight with the
dragon: they were said to have tamed a wild escaped bull (d. for Sylvester, The Golden
Legend, and for Marcellus, J. A. Dulaure, Histoire physique, civile, et morale de Paris
(18375 ) 1, 200 ff). Is this mere coincidence, a common memory of the stTUggle against
the cult of Mithra, or a broader symbolism linked to the archaic symbolism of the. bull?
48. Cf. R. M. Grant, Miracle and Natural Law in Graeco-Roman and Early Christian
thought (Amsterdam, 1952), and R. Bloch, Les Prodiges dans I' AntiquiU classique (Paris,
1963).
49. Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum X, 1.
50. Cf. E. Kuster, "Die Schlange in der griechischen Kunst und Religion," Re/i-
giongeschicht/iche Versuche und Vorarbeiten 13, no. 2 (1913).
51. Cf. L. Deubner, De incubatione (Giessen, 1899); M. Hamilton, Incubation for the
cure of Disease in pagan temples and Christian Churches (London, 1906); P. Saintyves, En
marge de la lfgende dor~e: Songes, miracles, et survivances (Paris, 1930), pp. 27-33.
52. Suetonius, Divi Augusti Vita 94.
53. K. Herquet, "Der Kern der rhodischen Drachensage," Wochenblatt des Johan-
niterordens Bailey (Brandenburg) to, (1869), 151 ff.; R. Herzog, Kos, Ergebnisse der
deutschen Ausgrabungen und Forschungen, 1 Asklepieion (Berlin, 1952).
54. For psychoanalytic interpretations of incubation, d. in the orthodox Freudian
tradition, Ernest Jones, On the Nightmare (1949 2), pp. 92-97 (and on the medieval
incubi, ibid., passim); by a disciple of Jung, c. A. Meier, Antike Inkubation und moderne
Psychotherapie, 5tudien aus dem C. G. Jung-Institut, 1 (Zurich, 1949). For the
334
Notes to Pages 169-171
335
NOTES TO PAGES 171-174
348-55. These motives appear under reference B.11; but the dragon and similar motifs
may also be found under other references, such as A.531, 0.418.1.2 (Transfonnation:
snake to dragon), H.1174.
67. Cf. Jacques Le Goff, "Clerical Culture and Folklore Traditions in Merovingian
Civilization," reprinted above.
68. It cannot, however, be ruled out that Fortunatus may have been influenced by
the assimilation which could have been made, according to R. Merkelbach (Re-
al/exicon, col. 240), between the martyr and the fight with the dragon. We could then
be faced with one of those attempts by early medieval hagiographers to keep the
mythology of martyrology for the benefit of saints who were no longer martyrs. This
interpretation, which as far as we know has never been proposed, seems to us compli-
cated and risky.
69. Cf. G. Penco, "II simbolismo animalesco nella letteratura monastica," Studia
monastica, 1964, pp. 7-38; and "L'amicizia con gli animali," Vita monastica 17 (1963),
3-10. The dragon, considered a real animal, took part in that mysticism of interior
creation for which W. von den Steinen has marvelously explained the role of the
symbolic animal: "Altchristliche-mittelalterliche Tiersymbolik," Symbolum 4 (1964).
70. M. L. Concasty has demonstrated the importance of the floods of the Bievre
(Positions, 1937, p. 28).
71. M. Roblin, Le terroir, p. 114.
72. Cf. the Tarasque between forest and river ("a nemore in flumine"), L. Dumont,
pp.156-57.
73. On the economic role of the saints and bishops of the early Middle Ages, there
are numerous indications in hagiography. One of the earliest examples, in the signifi-
cant context of the valley of the middle Danube in the fifth century, may be found in
the Vita S. Severini of Eugippius (MGH, Auct. ant. 1 [1877), 1-30).
Was dynastic propaganda Fortunatus' intention? This has been held in connection
with the life of Saint Radegonde. Cf. D. Laporte, "Le royaume de Paris, dans I'ceuvre
hagiographique de Fortunat," in Etudes merovingiennes (Paris, 1953), pp. 169 ff.
74. Concerning the legendary dragon and the establishment of Krakow, at the foot
of the Wavel hills and on the banks of the Vistula, d. art. "Krak" in Siownik Folkloru
Poskiego (Dictionary of Polish Folklore), ed. J. Krzyzanowski (Warsaw, 1965), pp.
185-86.
75. Vita s. Hilarii, MGH, Script. Rer. Mer., IV/2, p. 5.
76. The dragon of the Apocalypse, moreover, sustains a similar fate: "et misit eum
in abyssum, et clausit, et signavit super ilium, ut non seducat amplius gentes" (XX, 3).
77. "Apparet quantum est melio Adam secundus antiquo. Ille serpenti paruit, iste
servos habet, qui possunt serpentibus imperare. me per bestiam de sede paradysi
proiectus est, iste de suis cubilibus serpentem exclusit."
78. PL 76, 680.
79. Rabanus Maurus, De universo VIII, 3; PL 3, 229-30.
80. "Mystice draco aut diabolum significat aut ministros ejus vel etiam persecutores
Ecclesiae, homines nefandos, cujus mysterium in pluribus lods Scripturae invenitur"
(ibid., 230). On this exegetical method, d. H. de Lubac, Exegese medievale, les quatre
sens de l'Ecriture (Paris, 1959-64).
81. Little on the dragon is to be found in the still basic work by E. Male, L' Art
religieux. The work of F. d'Ayzac, "lconographie du dragon," Revue de l'art chretien 8
(1864), 75--95, 169-94, 333-61 (d. on the tail of the dragon pp. 183-89) has aged. L.
Reau, Iconographie de l'art chretien 1 (Paris, 1955). "Le symbolisme animal: dragon,"
pp. 115--16, is hasty and confused. V. H. Debidour, Le Bestiaire sculpte en France (Paris,
1961), passim (d. Index, dragon), is hasty but contains some judicious observations
and fine illustrations.
82. There is moreover no dragon in the Latin Physiologus from the fourth or fifth
336
Notes to Pages 174-176
century, whose influence would be great in the late Middle Ages, particularly from the
thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Cf. Physiologus latinus, ed. F. Cannoody (1939), p.
97.
83. Cf. Male, pp. 384--85. Odo of Cluny, PL 133, 489. Bruno of Asti, PL 164, 685.
Honorius Augustodunensis, Speculum Ecc/esiae, PL 172, 937. It is interesting to note
that there is no dragon in Honorius' encyclopedia, the Imago Mundi.
84. On the iconography of the dragon in the book of Revelation, see Reau, 1conog-
raphie 312 (1957), 708-12.
85. Cf. Debidour, pp. 129-33. On the Cistercian environment and the game of
Romanesque fonns in the initials of manuscripts, d. O. Pacht, "The pre-Carolingian
roots of early romanesque art," in Studies in Western Art, 1, Romanesque and Gothic Art,
Acts of the Tenth International Congress of the History of Art (Princeton, 1963), p. 71
and pI. XIX, 6.
86. On the dragons depicted on baptismal fonts (symbolism of water and the aquatic
dragon), d. J. T. Perry, "Dragons and monsters beneath baptismal fonts," Reliquary, s.
3, U (1905), 189-95; G. Le Blanc Smith, "Some Dragonesque Fonns on, and beneath,
Fonts," ibid. 13 (1907), 217-27.
87. Cf. C. Heitz, Recherches sur les rapports entre architecture et liturgie Ii /'epoque
carolingienne (Paris, 1963).
88. mus. in Debidour, p. 347. From the vast bibliography on Saint George and the
dragon, a theme far from having given up all its secrets, see Aufhauser, "Das
Drachenwunder des hI. Georg," in Byzantinisches Archiv. 5 (1911), 52...fJ9.
89. Cf. Debidour, illus. p. 98.
90. Cf. plate from the catalogue of the exposition Cathedrales (Paris: Musee du
Louvre, 1962). Note that the personage in question was the founder of a feudal
dynasty, and a pioneer land clearer.
91. Cf. R. Mentz, Die Triiume in den altfranziisischen Karls- und Artusepen (Marburg,
1888); K. Heisig, "Die Geschichtsmetaphysik des Rolandliedes und ihre Vor-
geschichte," Zeitsc:hri{t {u'r romanische Philologie 55 (1935), 1417. K. J. Steinmeyer, Un-
tersuchungen zur allegorischen Bedeutung der Triiume im alt{ranzosischen Rolandlied (1963)
(and a review of it by J. Gyory in Cahiers de civilisation medievale, 1964, pp. 197-200).
92. "Ambivalence des animaux reves" O. Gyory, p. 200). Cf. J. Gyory, "Le cosmos,
un songe," in Annales Universitatis Budapestinensis, Sectio philologica 4 (1963), 87-110.
93. On the dragon in medieval dreams, from a psychoanalytical point of view, d. E.
Jones, On the Nightmare, pp. 170,306.
94. Cf. DACL. For the representations of dragons on currency, d. R. Merkelbach,
Reallexicon, pp. 243-45.
95. Cf. F. Stenton, The Bayeux Tapestry (London, 1957).
96. In connection with the banner-dragon, one may be surprised to read in G.
Gougenheim, us Mots franrais dans l'histoire et dans la vie 2 (Paris, 1966), 141-42: "No
indication makes it possible to detennine exactly what this dragon was nor what
relationship it had with the fantastic animal denoted dragon (from the Latin draco). It is
a pure product of the imagination to suppose that an image of this fantastic animal was
painted or embroidered on the banner." A simple glance at the tapestry of Bayeux (d.
note 95 above) refutes these assertions.
97. Cf. J. S. P. Tatlock, "Geoffrey and King Arthur in Nonnannicus Draco," Modern
Philology 31 (1933-34), 1-18, 113-25.
98. Cf. A. H. Krappe, "The fighting snakes in the Hi~toria Britonum of Nennius,"
Revue celtique 43 (1926). A miniature from a late thirteenth-century manuscript (Paris,
BN, Ms. fro 95) shows Merlin carrying the standard-dragon in a battle. This miniature
is reproduced in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, ed. R. S. Loomis (Oxford,
1959), pI. 7, p. 320. Cf. R. Bromwich, Trioedd Ynys Prydein: The Welsh Triads (1961), pp.
93-95.
337
NOTES TO PAGES 176-180
99. In connection with the Robert of Boron's Merlin: "The two dragons lying under
the foundations of the tower that Vertigier wants to build are never precisely de-
scribed, and their combat does not arouse horror or anguish. Above all, they have
ceased to be monsters from another age, escaped from some bestiary of another world,
with an ambiguous meaning that could be pondered endlessly. Through the voice of
Merlin, Robert puts an end to all the equivocations and explains the symbol, which
loses its poetic value." "L' Art du recit dans Ie Merlin de Robert de Boron, Ie Didot
Perceval et Ie Parlevaus," Romance Philology 17 (1963--64), 579-80.
100. Cf. F. L. Utley, "Arthurian Romance and International Folklore Method," Ro-
mance Philology 17 (1963-64), in which the author indicates that Alan Loxtennan and
Miriam Kovitz are studying the relations between Type 300 (dragon-slayer) and Type
303 (the two brothers) with the story of Tristan.
101. Cf. M. Aubert's classic monograph La Cathidrale Notre Dame de Paris, notice
historique et arch~ologique (1909, new ed. 1945), and for the illustrations, P. du Colom-
bier, Notre-Dame de Paris (Paris, 1966).
102. Cf. Aubert, p. 117-18. The statue of Saint MarceUus currently in place is a copy
from the nineteenth century. The deteriorated original belongs to the Cluny Museum
and is presently kept in the north tower of the cathedral. I would like to take this
opportunity to thank Mr. F. Salet, curator of the Cluny, for the infonnation he was
kind enough to provide. On the history of the sculptures in the Saint Anne portal, d.
Cathidrales (n. 90 above), p. 31.
103. Cf. W. Sauerliinder, "Die kunstgeschichtliche SteUung der Westportale von
Notre-Dame in Paris," Marburger /ahrbuch fur Kunstwissenschaft 17 (1959). A. Kat-
zeneUenbogen, Sculptural Programs of Chartres Cathedral: Christ-Mary-Ecclesia (Balti-
more, 1959), and "Iconographic Novelties and Transfonnations in the Sculpture of
French Church Fa~ades, ca. 1160-1190," in Studies in Western Art, pp. 108-18.
104. Curiously caUed the "vampire of the cemetery" by Emile Mile (p. 315).
105. MlIe, who clearly saw the role of the dragon in the Golden Legend, was mistaken
in making a clerical initiative responsible for the origin of the theme ("originaUy, the
story of the dragon was a pious metaphor thought up by the clerics," p. 291, n. 3).
106. MlIe, pp. 384-86.
107. On, the processional dragons in France, d. A. van Gennep, Manuel de Folklore
Fran,ais contemporain 3 (Paris, 1937), 423-24 (with bibliography). An abridged list,
with references, of processional dragons and saints who tame or vanquish dragons in
France may be found in R. Devigne, Le Ugendaire des provinces fran,aises Ii travers noire
folklore (Paris, 1950), p. 152.
108. Quart Uvre, chap. 59.
109. Cf. n. 18 above.
110. Cf. L. J. B. Berenger-Feraud, Traditions et reminiscences populaires de la Provence
(Paris, 1886). E. H. Duprat, "Histoire des legendes saintes de Provence," M~moires de
I'Institut historique de Provence 17-20 (1940-46).
111. Cf. A. van Gennep, Manuel 1-412 (1949), 1644-45. In Troyes, "the dragon was
carried triumphantly, decorated with flowers, ribbons and pompons; it seemed to be
leading the crowd, which threw biscuits into its gaping jaws." (c. Lalore, "Le
dragon-vulgairement dit Chair-Salee--de saint Loup eveque de Troyes. Etude
iconographique," Annuaire administratif, statistique et commercial du d~partement de
rAube 51 [1877), 150). In Metz "in times past, the image of Graouilli, carried in the
Rogation festivals in the city, would stop in front of the doors of bakers and pastry
makers, who would throw breads and cakes into its mouth" (R. de Westphalen, Petit
Dictionnaire des traditions populaires messines [Metz, 1934), col. 318).
112. Cf. J. Maehiy, Die Schlange im My thus und Cultus der classischen Volker [Basel,
1867], p. 13.
113. J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (London, 1915). Balder the Beautiful, vol. 2, pp.
338
Notes to Pages 1BO-182
339
NOTES TO PAGES 182-186
Leviathan alongside the symbolic Synagogue (Blumenkranz, fig. 121, p. 107).
126. Once again we have an ancient feature repeated uncomprehendingly by
liturgy: that of the "backward-looking monster" (cf. Salin, 4, 209-22). On the third
day, Guillaume Durand notes that the dragon went "quasi retro aspiciens."
127. Text of the Pseudo-Marcella and references in Dumont, p. 150. Pseudo-Marcella
in Mombritus, Sanctuarium seu vitae sanctorum ... , new ed. (1910) 2, 128-29. Vincent
of Beauvais, Speculum Historiae 10,99. Jacobus da Varagine, Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse
(1846), pp. 444-45.
128. Dumont, p. 161.
129. Ibid., p. 226.
130. Ibid., p. 199.
131. On carnival masks, d. O. Karl, "Uber Tiermasken," in Worter und Sachen 5
(1913); Deutsche Fastnachtspeile aus dem 15ten Jahrhundert, ed. A. von Keller (Tiibingen,
1853-58); A. Spamer, Deutsche Fastnachtsbriiuche (jena, 1936).
132. Dumont, p. 227.
133. M. Battard, Beffrois, Hailes, H6tels de ville dans Ie nord de la France et la Belgique
(Arras, 1948), p. 36. On the dragons which are guardians of treasures, d. H. R. Ellis,
"The Hill of the Dragon: Anglo-Saxon Burial Mounds in Literature and Archaeology,"
Folklore 61, 169-85.
134. Cf. F. Wild, Drachen im Beowulf und andere Drachen mit einem Anhang: Drachen-
feldzeichen, Drachenwappen und St. Georg., Osterreichische Akad. der Wiss. Phil.-hist.
K1. Sitzungsber, 238, 5 Abh. (Vienna, 1%2).
135. Westphalen, Petit Dictionnaire, col. 317. The text of Rupert of Deutz cited in n.
123 gives this text a certain theoretical basis, however. Should one see a historical
relationship between Saint Clement of Metz and his GraouiUy on the one hand, and
Saint Marcellus of Paris and his dragon on the other? According to tradition, the
suburban church of Saint-Marcel was constructed on the site of a chapel originally
dedicated to Saint Clement. In "Les eglises suburbaines" (see n. 6 above), it is stated
that the cult of Saint Clement appeared in Saint-Marcel only in the twelfth century,
i.e., during the period which we believe to be critical for the processional dragons (a
seal of Saint-Marcel affixed to an act of 1202 bears the images of Saint Clement and
Saint Marcellus). But it could be Saint Clement, pope, rather than Saint Clement of
Metz.
136. A. van Gennep, Manuel I-IV/2, pp. 1624 fl., "Fetes Jiturgiques folklorisees (et
specialement les Rogations)." On "folklorization" of the cult of the saints, d. M.
Zender, Riiume und Schichten mittelalterlicher Heiligenverehrung in ihrer Bedeutung fiir
die Volkskunde: Die Heiligen des mittleren Maaslandes und des Rheinlandes in Kult-
geschichte und Kultverbreitung (Dusseldorf, 1959).
137. Cf. Erich Kohler, Trobadorlyrik und hofischer Roman (Berlin, 1962). And from the
same author, "Observations historiques et sociologiques sur la poesie des
troubadours," Cahiers de civilisation mt!dit!vale, 1%4, pp. 27-51.
138. Lalore, Le Dragon (vulgairement dit Chair-Salt!e), p. 150. The almost hundred-
year-old study by Abbot Lalore testifies to an exceptional perspicacity and open-
mindedness. Having noted the medieval liturgical sources, the images of dragons on
money and banners, the author saw that there were two dragons in one, the one tamed
by Saint Lupus and the one carried in the procession. He looked for Chinese ancestors
for the guardian dragons and found a good citation from a Chinese source showing
that the dragon was the image of benevolent spirits and protectors of man for the
Chinese, an emblem of superior intelligence: "I do not know how the dragon is carried
through the winds and clouds and raised as high as the sky. I have seen Lao-Tse, and
he resembles the dragon." (Windischmann, Mt!moires concernant les Chinois, p. 394).
139. Conversely, Mackenson, as shown by Dumont, p. 221, was incapable (Hand-
worterbuch, art. "Drachen") of recognizing the specificity of popular practices reduced
340
Notes to Pages 186-190
to substitutes for legends of scholarly origin.
140. Varagnac, p. 105.
141. Dumont, pp. 219-20.
341
NOTES TO PAGES 190--193
cognitum cum reIigionum atque impiorum diversitas tum barbaries immensa red-
did it. Veteres tamen navigatum et Oceano qui extremas amplectitur terns a suis
littoribus nomina indiderunt ... Straboni multi consentiunt. Ptolemeus plurimum
adversatur qui omne iIlud mare quod Indicum appeUatur cum suis sinibus Arabico,
Persico, Gangetico et qui proprio vocabulo magni nomen habet undique terra ron-
dudi arbitratus est."
6. O. Kammerer, pp. 353-54, and F. von Wieser, Die Weltkarle des Antonin de Virga.
7. Kammerer, pp. 354 ff.
8. ]urgis Baltrusaitis, Reveils et prodiges: Le Gothique fantaslique (Paris, 1960), p. 250.
9. Cf. R. Hennig, Terrae Incognitae, 2d ed., 4 vols. (Leyden, 1944-56); A. P. Newton,
Travel and Travellers of the Middle Ages (London, 1926); M. MoUat, "Le Moyen Age," in
Histoire universelle des explorations, ed. L. H. Parias, vol. 1 (Paris, 1955); J. P. Roux, Les
Explorateurs au Moyen Age (Paris, 1961); R. S. Lopez, "Nuove Iud sugli Italiani in
Estremo Oriente prima di Colombo," in Studi Colombian; 3 (Genoa, 1952), and "L'ex-
treme frontiere du commerce de l'Europe medievale," Le Moyen Age 69 (1963).
10. Cf. Wittkower, p. 195, n. 1, which mentions the medieval statues of New Col-
lege, Oxford, in which the students' reading of the mirabilia mundi is discussed. Cf.
also Roux, pp. 138 fE, in a chapter improperly entitled "Des yeux ouverts sur I'in-
connu."
11. Cf. L. Olschki, L'Asia di Marco Polo (Florence, 1957). On the Venetians' distrust
of the Indian Ocean boats, cE. p. 17, and on the change of the character of Marco Polo's
narrative, pp. 31-32.
12. Conceming the amazing resemblance between the fabulous India of the manu-
scripts of Kazwin (in particular, the Cod. Arab. 464 of Munich from 1280), d.
Wittkower, p. 175. On what Westem scholars borrowed from Arab works that were
more astrological and magical than scientific, cf. R. Lemay, "Dans l'Espagne du XU·
siec1e: les traductions de I'arabe au latin," Annales, E.S.C., 1963, pp. 639--65.
13. Strabo, II, 1, 9.
14. Aulus-Gellius, Nodes Atticae IX, 4.
15. Cf. E. L. Stevenson, Geography of Claudius Ptolemy (New York, 1932).
16. On the text of Saint Augustine, De civitate Dei XVI, 8: "An ex propagine Adam
vel filiorum Noe quaedam genera hominum monstrosa prodiderint," cE. Wittkower,
pp. 167~. Albertus Magnus (De animalibus XXVI, 21) states, in connection with the
gOld-seeking ants of India, "sed hoc non satis est probatum per experimentum."
17. Pliny states (Historia naturalis VII, ii, 21) "praecipue India Aethiopumque tractus
miraculis scatent."
18. The Col/ectanea rerum memorabi/ium of Solinus were published by Mommsen
(2d ed. Berlin, 1895).
19. Martianus Capella's geography may be found in the sixth book of De nuptiis
Philologiae et Mercurii, devoted to geometry.
20. Published by H. Omont, "Lettre ;} l'Empereur Adrian sur les melVeilles de
l' Asie," in Bibliothtque de rEeolt des Charles 24 (1913), 507 fl, based on the Ms. Paris
B.N. Nouv. aeq. lat. 1065, ff'". 92 v"-95, from the ninth century.
21. The first two treatises, Mirabilia and Epistola Premonis regis ad Traianum Im-
peralorem, have been published by M. R. James, Marvels of the East: A Full Reproduc-
tion of the Three Known Copies (Oxford, 1929). The third, De monstris et belluis, was
published by M. Haupt in Opuscula 2 (1876), 221 ff.
22. These texts have been published by F. Pfister, Kleine Texte zum Alexanderroman,
Sammlung vulgar-Iateinischer Texte, 4 (1910). W. W. Boer has put out a new critical
edition of the Epistola Alexandri ad Aristotelem (The Hague, 1953).
23. AU sources concerning Prester John have been collected by F. Zarncke in
Abhandlungen der phil.-hist. Klasse d. kgl. sachs. Gesell. d. Wiss. 7 and 8 (1876--79). Cf.
Henning, no. 13, III, chap. 115; L. Thomdike, A History of Magic and Experimental
342
Notes to Pages 193-194
Science (London, 1923) 2, 236 ff. c.-V. Langlois, La Vie en France au Moyen Age Ill, La
connaissance de la nature et du monde (Paris, 1927), pp. 44-70. L. Olschki sees in the
Letter of Prester John a text concerning a political utopia. "Der Brief des Presbyters
Johannes," Historische Zeitschrift 144 (1931), 1-14, and Storia letteraria delle scoperte
geografiche (1937), pp. 194 ff. I have been unable to consult Slessarev Vsevolod, Priester
John (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1959).
24. From the abundant literature on the medieval Alexander, I single out three
recent, fundamental books: A. Abel, Le Roman d' Alexandre, I~gendaire m~di~val (Brus-
sels, 1955); G. Cary, The Medieval Alexander (Cambridge, 1956), and D. J. A. Ross,
Alexander historiatus: A Guide to Medieval Illustrated Alexander Literature, Warburg In-
stitute Surveys, 1 (London, 1963).
25. J. W. McCrindle, Ancient India as Described by Ktesias the Knidian (Westminster,
1882).
26. E. A. 5chwanbeck, Megasthenis Indica (Bonn, 1846).
27. Isidore of Seville, Etymalogiae, ed. W. M. Lindsay (London, 1911), chaps. 11,12,
14, 16, 17. Cf. J. Fontaine, Isidore de Seville et la cullure classique dans I'Espagne
wisigothique, 2 vols. (Paris, 1959).
28. Rabanus Maurus, De universa or De rerum naluris, 8, 12,4,17,19. Migne PL 111.
Amelli, Miniature sacre e profane dell' anno 1023 i/lustranti I' Encic/opedia medioevale di
Rabano Mauro (Montecassino, 1896). A. Goldschmidt, "Friihmittelalterliche illustrierte
Enzyklopadien," Vortrage der Bibliothek Warburg, 1923-24. Lynn White Jr., "Technol-
ogy and Invention in the Middle Ages" Speculum 15 (1940).
29. Migne, PL 172, I, 11-13.
30. Historia Orientalis, chaps. 86--92.
31. Cf. Wittkower, p. 169, n. 5.
32. Cf. James, n. 25, pp. 41 ff.
33. Cf. Wittkower, p. 170, n. 1. The Indian marvels are discussed in the De pro-
prietatibus rerum in chaps. 12, 15, 16-18.
34. Cf. Wittkower, p. 170, nn. 8 and 9.
35. Cf. ibid., n. 2. On Dante, d. De Gubernatis, "Dante e I'India," Giornale della
Societa Asiatica Italian a 3 (1889).
36. The Indian passages may be found in book 31, chaps. 124-31 (in particular,
following solinus and Isidore), in the Speculum naturale; and, in the Speculum his-
toriale, a chapter "De India et ejus mirabilibus" (1, 64) and a long passage (4, 53-60),
"De mirabilibus quae vidit Alexander in India," taken from the Epistola Alexandri ad
Aristotelem.
37. Cf. A. Bovenschen, Die Quelle fiir die Reisebeschreibung des Johann van Mandeville
(Berlin, 1888). Mandevil/es Reise in mitlelniederdeutscher Ubersetzungen, ed. 5. Mar-
tinsson (Lund, 1918). In John of Mandeville, we hear the echo of the adventures of
sinbad the Sailor, partly drawn from the same sources (esp. Pliny and solinus). On the
theme of the explorers of the Indian Ocean in medieval Moslem literature, d. the
edition by Eusebe Renaudot, Anciennes relations des Indes et de la Chine de deux voy-
ageurs mahom~tans (Paris, 1718), and C. R. Beazley, The Dawn 01 Modem Geography
(London, 1897) 1, 235-38, 438-50.
38. Cf. Grasse, Gesta Romanorum (Leipzig, 1905), and H. Oesteriey, Gestll
Romanorum (Berlin, 1872), pp. 574 ff. On the Indian exempla in medieval moral Iitera-
ture, cf. J. Klapper, Exempla, Sammlung mi ttellateinischer Texte, 2 (Heidelberg, 1911).
39. Pierre d'AiIly, Imago Mundi, ed. E. Buron (Paris, 1930), "De mirabilibus Indiae,"
pp. 264 ff.
40. On the iconography of the mirabilia, besides Wittkower's article, see two admir-
able works by J Baltrusaitis, Le Moyen Age fantastique: AntiquiUs et exotismes dans ['art
gothique (Paris, 1955), and Reveils et prodiges: Le Moyen Age fantastique (Paris, 1960). It
is still possible to read E. Male, L' Art religieux du XlI" siee/e en France, 6th ed. (Paris,
343
NOTES TO PAGES 194--197
1953): "La geographie du XU" siecle. La tradition antique. Les fables de Ctesias, de
MegasthEme, de Pline, de Solin sur les monstres. La colonne de Souvigny, tableau des
merveilles du monde. Le tympan de Vezelay et les differents peuples du monde
evangelises par les apotres," p. 321 ff. On the tympanum at Vezelay, see A. Katzenel-
lenbogen, "The Central Tympanum at Vezelay," Art Bulletin, 1944, and F. Salet, La
Madeleine de vezelay (Melun, 1948).
41. On the iconographic and stylistic filiations in the miniatures of the mirabilia
Indiae of the early Middle Ages, especially the Byzantine influences, d. Wittkower, pp.
172-74.
42. Cf. ibid., p. 117.
43. Cf. the texts cited by Wittkower, p. 168, nn. 2 and 4. "Portenta esse ait Varro
quae contra naturam nata videntur; sed non sunt contra naturam, quia divina volun-
tate fiunt." (Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae Xl, iii, 1), and "Portentum ergo fit non
contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura. Portenta autem, et ostenta, monstra,
atque prodigia, ideo nuncupantur, quod portendere, atque ostendere, mo'strare, atque
praedicere aliqua futura videntur" (ibid., 2). A folio from the Cod. 411 of Bruges is
reproduced in Wittkower, fig. 44", p. 178.
44. See esp. the works of J. Baltrusaitis, cited n. 40,
45. On the three lndias, d. e.g., Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, ed. F. Liebrecht
(Hannover, 1856) 1, p. 911, and R Yule, Cathay and the Way Thither (London, 1914) 2,
pp. 27 fE, and J. K. Wright, The Geographical Lore ... , pp. 307 ft
46. Cf. Wittkower, p. 197, and Jean de Plan Carpin, Histoire des Mongols, ed. J.
Becquet and L. Hambis (Paris, 1%5), n. 57, pp. 153-54.
47. Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis ecc/esiae, book 4 passim, esp. chaps. 12,
15, 19, 25 (MGH, 55 7, and B. Schmeidler, MGH, 55, R. G. ed 2, 1917). Adam trans-
plants the monstrous races of India to Scandinavia. Cf. K. Miller, Mappae mundi 4,18.
48. Marco Polo, La Description du Monde (with the reproduction of miniatures from
Ms. fro 2810, Paris, BN entitled Le Livre des Merveilles), ed. L. Hambis (Paris, 1955), p.
292.
49. Rabanus Maueus, De universo, Migne PL 111, chap. 5, "De insulis": "Insulae
dictae, quod in sale sint, id est in mari positae, quae in plurimis lods sacrae Scripturae
aut ecclesias Christi significant aut specialiter quoslibet sanctos viros, qui truduntur
fluctibus persecutionum, sed non destruuntur, quia a Deo proteguntur."
SO. Marco Polo, p. 276.
51. Ibid., p. 253. Here is how the isles of gold and silver appear in Pierre d' Ailly's
Imago Mundi (chap. 41, "De aliis insulis Oceani famosis"): "Crise et Argire insule in
Indico Oceano site sunt adeo fecunde copia metallorum ut plerique eas auream super-
fidem et argenteam habere dixerunt unde et vocabulum sortite sunt."
52. De Imagine Mundi, Migne, PL 172, chaps. 11-13, cols. 123-25. The sentence cited
is the beginning of chap. 12.
53. "Ut sunt ii qui aversas habent plantas, et octonos simul sedecim in pedibus
digitos, et alii, qui habent canina capita, et ungues aduncos, qui bus est vestis pellis
pecudum, et vox latratus canum. Ibi etiam quaedam matres semel pariunt, canosque
partus edunt, qui in senectude nigrescunt, et longa nostrae aetatis tempora excedunt.
Sunt aliae, quae quinquennes pariunt: sed partus octavum annum non excedunt. Ibi
sunt et monoculi, et Arimaspi et Cyclopes. Sunt et Scinopodae qUi uno tantum fulti
pede auram cursu vincunt, et in terram positi umbram sibi planta pedis erecti fadunt.
Sunt alii absque capite, quibus sunt oculi in humeris, pro naso et ore duo foramina in
pectore, setas habent ut bestiae. Sunt alii juxta fontem Gangis fluvii, qui solo odore
cujusdam pomi vivunt, qui si longius eunt, pomum secum ferunt; moriuntur enim si
pravum odorem trahunt" (ibid., chap. 12).
54. Let alone giant serpents that could swim the Indian Ocean, we are told that
"lbi est bestia ceucocroca, cujus corpus asini, clunes cervi, pectus et crura leonis,
344
Notes to Pages 197-199
pedes equi, in gens comu bisulcum, vastus oris hiatus usque ad aures. In loco dentium
os solidum, vox pene hominis ... Ibi quoque Mantichora bestia, facie homo, triplex in
dentibus ordo, corpore leo, cauda scorpio, oculis glauca, colore sanguinea, vox sibilus
serpentum, fugiens discrimina volat, velecior cursu quam avis volatu, humanas carnes
habens in usu .... " (ibid., chap. 13).
55. "On this island are the most marvelous and most wicked people in the world.
They eat raw flesh and all manner of filth and are guilty of the worst cruelties. For there
father eats son and son father, the husband eats his wife and the wife her husband"
(Les voyages en Asie au XIV' siec/e du bienheureux frere Odoric de Pordenone, religieux de
saint Fran~ois. Recueil de voyages et de documents pour servir it l'histoire de la geographie
depuis Ie Xlll' jusqu' ala fin du XVI' siec/e 10, ed. Henri Cordier [paris, 1891], chap. 19, p.
237, "De \'isle de Dondiin").
56. "On this island (Necuveran, i.e., Nicobar), they have neither king nor lord but
are like wild animals. And I tell you that they go completely naked, both men and
women, and cover themselves with nothing at all. They have camal relations like dogs
in the street, wherever they may be, completely shamelessly, and respect no one; the
father does not respect his daughter, nor the son his mother, and everyone does as he
pleases and is able. They are a lawless people." Marco Polo, p. 248). This theme is
combined with that of innocence, the golden age, and the "pious" brahmins, which I
shall speak of below. E.g., "We go naked," say the ciugni, a special category of
brahmins of Malabar, "because we want nothing from this world, because we came
into this world without clothing and naked; and if we are not ashamed to show our
member, it is because we commit no sin with it" (ibid. p. 269).
57. "It is the honest truth that this king has five hundred wives, and I mean brides,
because, I teU you, as soon as he sees a beautiful lady or maid, he wants her for himself
and takes her for his wife. And in this kingdom, there are some very beautiful women.
And what is more, they make themselves up beautifully on their faces and their whole
bodies" (ibid., p. 254). And further, e.g., "These little virgins, as long as they stay
little virgins, have such firm flesh that you cannot squeeze it or pinch it anywhere. For
a small coin, they'll let a man pinch them as much as he wants. " On account of this
firmness, their breasts do not hang down at all, but stand straight out in front. There
are plenty of girls like that throughout the kingdom" (ibid., p. 261).
58. On Gog and Magog, d. A. R. Annderson, Alexander's Gate, and Magog and the
Inclosed Nations (Cambridge, Mass., 1932). On the antipodes, d. G. Boffito, "La
leggenda degli antipodi" in Miscellanea di Studi storici in onore di Arturo Graf (Bergamo,
1903), pp. 583-601, and J. Baltrusaitis, Cosmographie chretienne dans l'art du Moyen Age
(Paris, 1939).
59. E. Tisserant, Eastern Christianity in India (London, 1957); U. Monneret de Villard,
"Le leggende orientali sui Magi evangelistici," Studi e Testi 163 (1952); J. Dahlmann,
Die Thomaslegende (Freiburg-in-Brisgau, 19U); L. W. Brown, The Indian Christians of
St. Thomas (Cambridge, 1956). The passage from Gregory of Tours may be found in the
Liber in gloria martyrum 31-32 (MGH, SRM, 1). On the pilgrimage of Heinrich von
Moringen to India around 1200, d. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum,
dist. VIII, cap. LIX, and R. Henning, Terrae Incognitae (Leyden, 1936-39) 2, 380 ff. On
the embassy of Sigelmus, d. William of Malmesbury, De gestis regum anglorum libri
quinque, coil. Rerum britannicarum medii aevi scriptores, 90, ed. W. Stubbs, 1 (lon-
don, 1887), 130, and Henning, 2, 204-7.
60. On the Earthly Paradise, d. L. I. Ringbom's basic work Paradisus Terrestris: Myt,
Bild och Verklighet (with a summary in English and abundant illustrations).
61. Cf. R. Bemheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A study in Art, Sentiment, and
Demonology (Cambridge, Mass., 1952). The brahmins were the inspiration of an abun-
dant literature, both in the Middle Ages (since the De moribus Brachmanorum by
Pseudo-Ambrosius: in Migne PL 17) and in modem histOriography. Cf. H. Becker, Die
345
NOTES TO PAGE 199
346
Notes to Pages 200-202
66. "Homodubii qui usque ad umbilicum hominis speciem habent, reliquo corpore
onagro similes, cruribus ut aves ... " (legend on a manuscript of the Mirabilia lndiae,
London, British Museum, Tiberius B V, f" 82 1/', from around the year 1000; d. R.
Wittkower, loc. cit., p. 173, n. 1).
347
NOTES TO PAGES 202-203
9. Saint Jerome, Ep., 22, 30 (ad Eustochium), ed. Hilberg, CSEL 54 (1910), 189-91,
and Labourt, coil. "Bude," vol. 1 (1949),144--46. .
10. Sulpicius Severus, Life of Saint Martin, 3, 3--5, 5, 3, 7, 6, ep. 2, 1--6, and d. Index,
under "Reves," in the edition with a remarkable commentary by Jacques Fontaine, 3
vols. Sources chrtiennes, nos. 133--134--135 (Paris, 1967~9).
11. Gregory of Tours, De miraculis sancti Juliani, c.IX: De Fedamia paralytica. Gregory
of Tours, De virtutibus sancti Martini, c. LVI: De muliere quae contractis in palma digitis
venit. It should be noted that the dream of Herman of Valencia cited below (end of
twelfth century) is, in a degenerate fonn, a dream of incubation. One of Jung's dis-
ciples has studied incubation from a psychoanalytic standpoint. C. A. Meier, Antike
Inkubation und modern Psychotherapie (1949). He has also contributed uLe reve et !'in-
cubation dans I'ancienne Grere" to the previously cited work, Le Rive et les soci~Us
humaines, pp. 290--304.
12. John of Salisbury, Polycraticus II, 1~16, ed. Webb (1909), pp. 88-96: "De
speciebus somniorum, et causis, figuris et significationibus et Generalia quaedam de
significationibus, tam somniorum, quam aliorum figuralium."
13. Hildegardis Causae et Curae, ed. P. Kaiser (Leipzig, 1903): De Somniis, pp. 82-3,
De nocturna oppressione et De somniis, pp. 142-43.
14. Liber De Spiritu et Anima (Pseudo-Augustin us), c. XXV PL 40, 798). The reliance of
PSl'udo-Augustinus on Macrobius has been shown by L Deubner, De incubatione
(1900).
15. Ci commence la senefiance de songes, ed. Walter Suchier: "Altfranzosische Traum-
bucher," Zeitschrift fiir franzosische Sprache und Literatur 67 (1957), 154-56. Cf. Lynn
Thordike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science 2 (London, 1923), chap. 50,
"Ancient and Medieval Dream-Books," pp. 290--302.
16. It should be noted that Latin has no word for nightmare (Macrobius has no Latin
equivalent for the Greek ephialtes, which he lumps with popular beliefs). This does
appear in the vulgar languages during the Middle Ages. Cf. the fine historical
psychoanalytic study by Ernest Jones, On the Nightmare, 2d ed. (1949).
17. The Chronicle of John af Worcester, pp. 41-42.
18. The Roman de Sapience by Hennan of Valenciennes, unpublished portion of Ms.
B. N. fro 20039, lines 399--466. lowe this text to the kindness of J. R. Smeets of the
University of Leyden.
19. M. Mauss, ULes techniques du corps," Journal de Psychologie, 1935, pp. 271-93,
reprinted in Sociologie et Anthropolagie (Paris, 1950).
20. Cf. the special number "Histoire biologique et societe" of Annates E.S.C., no. 6,
November-December 1969.
21. Cf. esp. the contributions of G. Devereux, "Reves pathogenes dans les societes
non occidentales," in Le Rive et les soci~tes humaines, pp. 189--204; D. Eggan, "Le reve
chez les Indiens hopis," ibid., pp. 213--56; A. Irving Hallowell. "Le role des reves dans
la culture ojibwa," ibid., pp. 257~1. Geza Roheim, himself the author of
"Psychoanalysis of Primitive Cultural Types," in International Journal of Psycho-
Analysis 13 (1932), 1-224, has severely criticized the work qi J. S. Lincoln, The Dream in
Primitive Cultures (London, 1935). In the very suggestive coUection mentioned pre-
Viously, Le Rive et les socitUs humaines, G. von Grunebaum has given an interesting
definition of the characteristics of civilizations that he calls "medieval" or "pre-
modern" (pp. 8--9), thus helping to situate them in relation to "primitive" civiliza-
tions. The prestige associated with comparative study, which is necessary and en-
lightening, should not obscure the importance of the differences.
22. On Artemidoros. C. Blum, Studies in the Dream-Book of Arlemidorus (1936), and
from a psychoanalytic point of view, W. Kurth's invaluable study "Oas Traumbuch
des Artemidoros im Lichte der Freudschen Traumlehre," Psyche, 4 Jg, 10 H (1951),
488-512.
348
Notes to Page 203
23. We are referring to the famous passage (Aeneid VI, 893-98) dealing with the two
gates of sleep, one of which, the hom gate, lets true shades ~ass, while the other, the
ivory gate, lets false visions by:
Sunt geminae somni portae: quarum altera fertur
cornea, qua veris facilis datur existus umbris,
altera candenti perfecta nitens elephanto,
sed falsa ad caelum mittunt insomnia manes.
His tibi tum natum Anchises unaque Sibyllam
prosequitur dictis portaque emi,ttit eburna.
These gates have obviously lent their name to the last book of G. Roheim, The Cates of
the Dream (1953). Concerning this passage, the scholarly exegesis of E. L. Highbarger,
The Gates of Dreams: An Archaeological Examination of Aeneid VI, 893-899, The Johns
Hopkins University Studies in Archaeology, no. 30 (1940), expends a good deal of
ingenuity and learning in the vain search for a geographical localization of the Vergil-
ian oneiric universe. See also H. R. Steiner, Der Traum in der Aeneis, Diss. (Berne,
1952). On the meaning of insomnia in this text, see R. J. Getty, "Insomnia in the
Lexica," American Journal of Philology 54 (1933), 1-28.
24. The Middle Ages made no clear distinction between dream and vision. The
essential division was between sleep and wakefulness. Everything seen by a sleeping
person belongs to the sphere of the dream. As so often happens, the researcher lacks a
serious semantic study in this case. Cf. however the interesting and perceptive article
by F. Schalk, "Somnium und verwandte Warter im Romanischen," published in
Exempla romanischer Wortgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main, 1%6), pp. 29~37. To be of
real use, the philological inquiry must be carried on in all the languages of medieval
Christendom. One dreams of a work dealing with medieval societies comparable to
the magisterial book by E. Benveniste, Lt Vocabulaire des institutions indo-europ~tnnes,
2 vols. (Paris, 1969), which, moreover, is invaluable to the medievalist.
25. A typology and list of dreams from the Old Testament in E. L. Ehrlich, Dtr Traum
im Alten Testament (1953). N. Vaschide and H. Pieron, "La valeur du reve prophetique
dans la conception biblique," Revue des traditions populaires 16 (1901), 345--60, think
that the Old Testament's reticence with regard to dreams comes particularly from the
hostility between the Jewish prophets and the Chaldean soothsayers. CE. A. Caquot,
"Les songes et leur interpretation selon Canan et Israel," in Les Songts et leur inter-
pretation, pp. 99-124.
26. A (brief) list of the dreams in the New Testament in A. Wikenhauer, "Die
Traumgeschichte des Neuen Testaments in religionsgeschichtlicher Sieht:: in Pisci-
culi: Studien zur Religion und kultur des Altertums, Festschrift Franz Joseph Dolger
(Munster, 1939), pp. 320-33. The five dreams' of the Gospels (all in Matthew concern
the childhood of Christ and Saint Joseph) and the four in the Acts oE the Apostles (all
concern Saint Paul) refer to an oriental and a Hellenic model, respectively.
27. Cf. e.g., E. Ettlinger, "Precognitive Dreams in Celtic Legend and Folklore,"
Transactions of the Folk-Lore Society 59 (1948), 43. On divination, d. the excellent
collection of studies, La Divination, ed. A. Caquot and M. Lebovici, 2 vols. (Paris,
1968), from which the medieval West is, alas! absent.
28. On dreams in Saint Augustine, I am indebted to the kindness of J. Fontaine for
having been able to consult the excellent study by Martine Dulaey, uLe Reve dans la
vie et la pensee de saint Augustin" (D.E.S. mimeographed, Paris, 1967), which makes
use of F. X. Newman, "Somnium: Medieval Theories of Dreaming and the Form of
Vision Poetry" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1963), which I have not yet been
able to look at.
29. Cf. P. Saintyves, En marge de la Legende Dor~e (1930): incubation in western
Christian churches in the Middle Ages, and more particularly in the sanctuaries of the
349
NOTES TO PAGES 204-208
Virgin. See also article on Incubation by H. Leclercq in Dictionnaire d' archt!ologil.'
chrt!tienne et de liturgie VII-I (1926), coll. 511-17.
30. A1bertus Magnus, De somno et vigilia (Opera V [Lyons, 1651], 64-1(9). Arnaud de
Villeneuve, "Expositiones visionum, quae Hunt in somnis, ad utilitatem medicorum
non modicam" (Opera omnia [Basel, 1585], pp. 623-40). Lynn Thorndike, A History of
Magic and Experimental Science (New York, 1934) 3, 300-302, attributes this treatise to a
certain master Guillaume d'Aragon on the basis of Ms. Paris B.N. lat. 7486.
31. Garde la moie mort n'i soit pas oubliee,
De latin en romanz soit toute transpose.
(Roman de Sapience, Ms. Paris, B.N. fro 20039, lines 457-58.)
32. John of Salisbury, Policraticus II, 15-16. One may wish to compare this with the
narrower, more scholastic conception, still rather similar, of the Ms. Bamberg Q VI 30,
from the first half of the tweUth century, cited by M. Grabmann, Geschichte der
scholastischen Methode (1911; repro 1957) 2, 39, according to which the dream is one of
the three ways for the soul to know occulta Dei.
350
Note~ to Pages 208-211
8. "In Lingonensi provincia quidam nobilis in sylvarum abditis reperit mulierem
speciosam preciosis vestibus amictam, quam adamavit et duxit. IlIa plurimum balneis
delectabatur in quibus visa est aliquando a quadam puella in serpentis se specie
volutare. Incusata viro et deprehensa in baineo, numquam deinceps in comparitura
disparuit et adhuc durat ejus projenies" (Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale II,
127, cited by L. Hoffrichter, p. 67).
9. A previously unnoticed comparison confirms the links among these stories, it
seems to me. Edric's son AInold, who wants to regain his health, is told to make a
pilgrimage to Rome to ask for a cure from the apostles Peter and Paul. Angry, he
answers that he will go first to Hereford to plead with Saint Ethelbert, king and
martyr, of whom he is a "parishoner." (De nugis curialium, ed. M. W. James, p. 77).
10. Along with Melusina and in the same category, Walter Map, Gervase of Tilbury,
and Jean d' Arras mention other fairies {demonic succubi) that are not serpents. Chris-
tianity had caused an upheaval in the typology. Although we point this out, we will
confine ourselves to the "restricted" question. Cf. the fairy of Argouges noted by E. Le
Roy Ladurie in his bibliographic note. The reader will have noticed other episodic
echoes and transfers. "Large-toothed Henno" and "Geoffroy with the large tooth," the
castle of Espervier in Dauphine and that of Epervier in Annenia, etc.
11. Jean d' Arras must have known the Otia Imperia/ia through the fourteenth-
century translation made by Jehan du Vignay, who was also the translator of the
Speculum naturale of Vincent of Beauvais. These "sources" were available to Jean
d' Arras in the library of Jean de Beny. A. Duchesne has devoted a thesis of the Ecole
des Chartes (1971) to medieval French translations of the Otia lmperialia.
12. The study of popular culture or phenomena, or of works impregnated with
popular culture, brings the historian into contact with a disconcerting "historical
time." Slow rhythms, flashbacks, losses, and resurgences are not easily reconciled
with the unilinear time in which he is at most accustomed to detecting "accelerations"
or "retardations." This is yet another reason to rejoice that the broadening of the
historical horizon to include folklore will result in calling this inadequate notion of
time into question.
13. On Neapolitan and Vergilian mirabilia, see D. Comparetti, Vergilio nel Medio Evo,
2d ed. (1896), in English trans\. repub\. in 1966. J. W. Spargo, Virgil/he Necromancer
(Cambridge, Mass., 1934).
14. Cf. note 7 above.
15. M. R. James, Preface to the edition of De nugis curialium of Walter Map, p. xxii.
16. It should be noted that the existence of a nonwritten high culture (bards con-
nected with "aristocratic" circles?) complicates the problem of Celtic and Germanic
cultures, etc. The distinction between oral tradition and popular tradition is a matter
of elementary prudence.
17. Otia Imperialia, ed. Liebrecht, p. 4.
18. It should be recalled that an important French review of folklore, established by
Henri Gaidoz and Eugene Rolland, which brought out eleven volumes irregularly
distributed over the period 1877 to 1912, was named Mtlusine (a collection of mythol-
ogy, popular literature, traditions, and customs).
19. Arnold van Gennep, Manuel de folklore franrais conlemporain 4 (1938), 651-52.
Van Gennep places the following "header" above the entries: "The origins of this
quite typical folkloric theme are not known; Jehan d' Arras surely drew on popular
material; despite its Iiterarization, the theme has remained popular in certain regions,
as may be seen in the monograph by Leo Desaivre, to which I am adding folkloric
supplements classified in chronological order, without taking the works of
medievalists into account, which would be beyond the limitations imposed on this
Manual."
351
NOTES TO PAGES 212-217
20. Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and
Bibliography, 2d revision, FFC no. 184 (Helsinki, 1964). Faced with this monument,
one is torn between admiration and gratitude on the one hand, and doubts as to the
principles of classification on the other. Marie-Louise Teneze, with the authority and
courtesy which are hers, has expressed her reservations concerning that other monu-
ment, the Motif-Index of Folk-Literature by Stith Thompson, 6 vols. (Copenhagen,
1955-58) (M.-L. Teneze, "Introduction a I'etude de la Iitterature orale: Le conte,"
Annales, E.S.C., 1969, p. 1116, and "Du conte merveilleux comme genre," in Approches
de nos traditions orales, ed. G. P. Maisonneuve and Larose, [Paris, 1970], p. 40). We
believe that these reservations may be extended to Types of the Folktale.
21. In particular, we refer the reader to the remarkable study by M.-L. Teneze cited
in the preceding note.
22. From the abundant literature concerning the problem of the genres of "popular"
literature, we single out H. Bausinger, Fonnen der "Volkpoesie" (Berlin, 1968), particu-
larly vol. 3: (1) Erziihlfonnen; (2) Miirchen; (3) Sage; (4) Legende, pp. 154 ff. German
authors refer to the Melusinensage.
23. J. and W. Grimm, Die deutschen Sagen, Preface to vol. 1 (Darmstadt, 1956), p. 7,
cited by Bausinger, p. 170.
24. Cf. Hoffrichter, p .. 68.
25. K. Heisig, "Uber den Ursprung der Melusinensage," Fabula 3 (1959), 170-81. P.
178: "Aix Iiegt etwa 30 km nordlich von Marseille; man wird daher kaum fehlgeben,
wenn man annimmt, dass Kaufleute aus Marseille die alteste Fassung des Marchens
aus Zypern in ihre Heimat mitgebracht haben werden!".
26. Almost all the studies treat the etymology of Melusina. See particularly Henri
Godin, "Melusine et la philologie," in Revue du Bas-Poitou, and P. Martin-Civat, Le
Tres Simple Secret de Mt!lusine (Poitiers, 1969).
27. Cf. Hoffrichter and Desaivre, pp. 257 ff.
28. Slownik Folkloro Polskiego, ed. J. Krzyzanowski, under heading "Meluzyna," pp.
226--27.
29. Zeitschrift fUr vergleichende Sprachforschung, ed. Kuhn, 18 (1869).
30. Cf. Teneze, "Du conte merveilleux comme genre," pp. 12-13, 16--17.
31. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, Eng. trans. (Indiana University Re-
search Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics), pp. 24-26.
32. Concerning all of this, in addition to the work of Claude Levi-Strauss (particu-
larly the series Mythologiques) and the collective work under the direction of E. F.
Leach cited in the bibliography, see Communications, special number, "L' Analyse
structurale du recit," no. 8 (1966), and Teneze, esp. " ... vers la structure 'Iogique' du
genre" (pp. 20 ff.).
33. On the hero, d. esp. Teneze, p. 15, n. 7.
34. On this evolution, Jan de Vries, Betrachtungen zum Miirchen besonders in seinem
Verhiiltnis zu Heldensage und Mythos, FFC no. 154 (Helsinki, 1954). Cf. "Les contes
populaires," Diogene, no. 22 (1958), 3-19. One could cite almost the whole of George
Duml!zil's work in this respect. We will single out the most recent work, Du my the au
roman: La saga de Hadingus et autres essais (Paris, 1970).
35. "Audivimus demones incubos et succubos, et concubitus eorum periculosos;
heredes autem eorum aut sobolem felici fine beatam in antiquis historiis aut raro aut
nunquam legimus, ut A1noldi qui totam hereditatem suam Christo pro sanitate sua
retribuit, et in eius obsequiis residuum vite peregrinus expendit" (Walter Map, con-
clusion of the story of Edric the Savage, De nugis curialium XI, 12, ed. James, p. 771).
The same explanation is found in Gervase of Tilbury (Otia Imperialia I, 15, before the
story of Raymond of Chateau-Rousset), which compares the case of serpent-women
with that of werewolves. Similarly Jean d' Arras, who refers to Gervase of Tilbury. Jean
d'Arras's originality was to stress the identification of these demonic succubi with
352
Notes to Pages 218-221
fairies (the importance in his work and mind of popular sources), and, moreover, his
indication of the three taboos: "They made (their husbands) swear in some cases that
they would never look at them naked, in othen; that on Saturdays they would never
inquire what had become of them, in othen; that if they had children, the husbands
would never look at them in their beds" (ed. Stouff, p. 4). He adds a good explanation
of the mechanism of prosperity associated with the pact: "And as long as they kept
their word, they enjoyed great happiness and prosperity. And as soon as they faltered,
they lost these things.and all their happiness fell away little by little." Earlier, Geoffrey
of Monmouth, in the Hi,S:J'o.ria Regum Britanniae, had spoken of love between humans
and demons (incubi and.~ix:cubi) in connection with the birth of Merlin (here the pair
is reversed: mortal + dem6nic incubus).
36. In a youthful work, in connection with Urvashti, Georges Dumezil treated
Melusinian themes by mentioning the totemic hypotheses of Frazer and, more par-
ticularly, by reference to J. Kohler's study and Slavic, especially Polish, works: "The
nymph Urvashti is the head of a clan widespread in folklore: that of supernatural
women who marry a mortal under a certain condition and disappear forever on the
day the pact is violated, sometimes leaving the unfortunate spouse the consolation of a
son, the fin;t of a heroic line. In Europe, this theme from folklore is quite widespread,
and the romances of Melusina have given it both literary consecration and new vi-
tality: it flourishes from the lemuziny to the banks of the Vistula. But the Negroes and
Redskins tell similar stories, and Sir James G. Frazer has advanced the hypothesis that
these tales are the remains of a totemic mythology; indeed, among the Ojibways and
on the Gold Coast, the form of these tales is closely linked to the organization of the
society into totemic clans, and even in our European folklore, the half-human, half-
animal nature of the heroine (if not the hero) has pen;isted. .. For our purposes,
however, so obscure and remote an origin is unimportant; what matten; to us, on the
other hand, is the traits by which the story of the Pururavas and Urvashti is distin-
guished from the typical Melusinian tale" (Le Probleme des Centaures [Paris, 1929], pp.
143-44).
37. Stated esp. in "Observations historiques et sociologiques sur la poesie des
troubadours," Cahier5 de Civilisation mUievale 7 (1964), reprinted in Esprit und ar-
kadische Freiheit: Aufsiitze aus der Welt der Romania (Frankfurt, 1966).
38. Cf. Claude Levi-Strauss's comment: "Totem ism is firstly the projection outside
our own universe, as though by a kind of exorcism, of mental attitudes incompatible
with the exigency of a discontinuity between man and nature which Christian thought
has held to be essential" (Totemism, Eng. trans. [Beacon Press, 1963], p. 3). On the
anti-humanism which vigorously opposed Romanesque and Gothic Christian
humanism (continuity between man and the animal and vegetable kingdoms), d. the
iconographic information and stylistic analyses of Jurgis Baltrusaitis, Le Moyen Age
fantastique (Paris, 1955), and Reveils et Prodiges: Le gothique fantastique (Paris, 1960).
The touchstone, the great challenge to the idea of man made ad imaginem Dei, was the
werewolf. Cf. Montague Summers, The Werewolf (London, 1933). Also disconcerting
were the cases of the ape and the wild man. G. H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London, 1952), and Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in
the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment and Demonology (Cambridge, Mass., 1952). F.
Tinland, L' Homme sauvage (Paris, 1968).
39. Georges Dumezil, My the et Epopee 1 (Paris, 1968), 10.
40. Jan de Vries, Les Contes populaires, p. 13; cE. Teneze on the Wunschdichtung,
compensatory literature according to Max Luthi, "Ou conte merveilleux," pp. 2~29.
41. Since the old, classic study by Alfred Maury, Les Fees du Moyen Age (Paris, 1843;
new ed. 1896), medieval fairies have not greatly interested historians and appear in the
works of folklorists only in connection with particular points. Cf. however, C. S.
Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature
353
NOTES TO PAGES 221-287
(Cambridge, 1964), chap. 6, "The Longaevi," pp. 122-38. Lewis had noted, particu-
larly in Walter Map, the reference to the souls of the dead; but his whole book seems to
us vitiated by his conception of the Middle Ages as a "bookish" era (el. esp. p. 11),
which we believe false because blinkered by the traditionalist view of medieval
studies and by the use of the myth of the "man of the Middle Ages" (e.g., p. 10:
"Medieval man was not a dreamer nor a wanderer; he was an organiser, a codifier, a
builder of systems, etc." filii mortwe, says Walter Map of the children of a pseudo-
Melusina mentioned just before Henno's fairy (De nugis curialium IV, 8, ed. James, p.
174). J. Kohler had observed: "Es ist der Sagenstoff, der sich urn die Orpheussage
schlingt," p. 31. For his part, A. Maury pointed out that Melusina in Jean d' Arras
"emits mournful cries each time death claims a Lusignan."
42. I would like particularly to thank Mr. Claude Gaignebet, who obtained for me
the issues of the Bulletin de /a Societe de Mythologie fran,aise in which the articles
concerning Melusina appeared, and Mr. Jean-Michel Guilcher, who called my atten-
tion to the miniatures in the Ms. Fr. 12575 of the B.N. (the oldest manuscript of
Couldrette's Roman de Milusine, from the fifteenth century).
354
Notes to Pages 237-287
355
NOTES TO PACES 237-287
87) Per pollicem
88) Per psalterium
89) Per ramum filgerii (fern)
90) Per regulam
91) Per sceptrum
92) Per scyphum (cup)
93) Per spatae capulum (hilt?)
94) Per tellurem
95) Per textum evangelii
%) Cum veru (sharpened stake, pointed iron hafted at the end of a long stick)
97) Per vexillum
98) Per virgam vel virgulam
to which manu and per manum should be added, making 100 in all.
N.B.-I have already offered a critique of the typology which underlies this remark-
able and suggestive list, but I would like to mention a couple of additional points. For
reasons connected both with the nature of his sources and with his conception of
medieval society, Du Cange took many of his examples from ecclesiastical in-
vestitures. In spite of the clear and significant contaminations, it is our opinion that
these should be distinguished from the rites of vassalage as such, just as royal rites of
coronation are. Similarly, it seems to me that he is too fascinated by the baculus and
symbols of command. Although Von Amira does not make this distinction either, his
justly celebrated article makes clear that the symbolism of the stick is found also in
quite different societies and rites. Here, ethnohistorical analysis makes it possible to
distinguish what learned studies in history and law have been too prone to confuse.
Set in a broad comparative context, the novelty of Western medieval vassalage is
brought out even more clearly.
Appendix 1(8): Symbolic objects in contracts, according to M. Thevenin, Textes relati,s
aux institutions . .. m~rovjngiennes et co.rolingiennes (1887), pp. 263-64.
Juridical symbols used in contracts, legal procedure, etc.
1) Andelangum (gauntlet). 42, 76, 117, 124
2) AnaticuIa. ~Axadoria. 124
3) Arbusta. 98
4) Atramentarium. 50, 52, 136
5) Baculum. 135
6) Brachium in collum, et per comam capitis. 38
7) Claves. 37
8) Cibum et potum. 84
9) Cultellus. 50, 52, 105, 136, 143
10) Corrigia ad collum. ll~ordas ad collum. 155
11) Denarius. Penny and denarius, 42. Quatuor denarii super caput. 151, 155, 157, 161,
162,171
12) Finger: incurvatis digitis, 148, 159
13) Ensis. 48
14) Festuca. 16 (see page 18, note 2, 29, 42, 52,73,103,105,107,108,124,136,143,148.
Jactare et calcare (the straw), 137, 141
15) Fuste buxea. 116
16) Herba. 29, 30,100 ter (et cespitem), 124
17) Sod.-See also Wasonem
18) LaunegiId. 48. Camisia 6. Facetergis (handkerchief). 61
19) Ligamen serici. 170
20) Medella. 70
21) Osculum. 177
356
Notes to Pages 237-238
22) Ostium. 30, 124
23) Ramum arboris. 52, 136, 143
24) Radicem. 121
25) Secmento. 170
26) Terra. 29, 30, 98, 124. Clod of earth, 79
27) Vinea. 98. Vineas facie bat et ad radicem fodicabat et operas facie bat per potes-
tatem, 121
28) Virgula. 173
29)VVantonem.48, 52,136,143
30) VVasonem terrae. 52, 105, 136, 143
31) VVadium. Settlement of pledges. See Security by pledges.
Appendix I(C): Schema of feudo-vassal symbolism
osculum exfestucatio
abandonment breaking off of homage and fealty
(and divestiture?)
per festucam
Notes
1. VValter Ullmann, The Carolingian Renaissance and the Idea of Kingship, The Birkbeck
Lectures 1968-69 (London, 1%9).
2. I would like to thank Gerard Genette for having been kind enough to send me the
French translation of the interesting article by Johan Chydenius, "La theorie du sym-
bolisme medieval" (published in English in Societas scientiarum fenmica, 1960) before
its appearance in Pol!tique, no. 23 (1975), 322--41.
It would be possible to complete this study by reference to anyone of several
indices, particularly that of Migne'sPatrologiae latina, which is incomplete and in need
of checking, but here, as so often, fertile in leads. In particular, one might consult the
second volume of the index, cols. 123-274, for references to the article De allegoriis
under the heading De Scripturis, which has, among other things, definitions of
al/egoria ("eum aliud dicitur et aliud significatur," according to Saint Jerome), figura
seu typus ("antiphrasis cum per contrarium verba dicuntur," according to Saint Au-
gustine, who gives, among other examples, "transgressio Adae 'typus justitiae Sal-
vatoris et baptisma typus mortis Christi," with indications of a semantic field includ-
ing praefigurare, praesignare, designare, interpretari, exprimere, etc.), parabolae
("similitudines rerum quae comparantur rebus de quibus agitur," according to
357
NOTES TO PAGES 23S-242
Rufinus), etc. In ibid., cols. 919-28, in connection with symbolum, Migne can do no
more than reflect the poverty of the use of the word in medieval Latin. Apart from its
meaning in Greek (with the equivalent in classic Latin, indicatio and collatio), the only
meaning indicated is regula fidei. To this absence of symbolum from medieval Latin
with its Greek and modem senses, it is possible to find exceptiops which confirm the
rule, among the rare Latin theologians with a smattering of Greek, e.g. John Scotus
Erigena.
3. Cited by Du Cange, Glossarium ad scrip/ores mediae e/ infimae latini/as (1733 ed.) 3,
col. 1533, art. Investitura. We should emphasize that Du Cange takes investitura in the
broad seQse, including not only ecclesiastical "investitures" but also a variety of do-
nations which give rise to symbolic rituals.
4. Emile Chenon, "Le role juridique de l'osculum dans I'ancien droit fran~ais,"
Memoires de la Societe des Antiquaires de France, ser. 8, vol,. 6 (1919-23), 133, no. 2, citing
the cartulary of Obazirte from Rene Fage, La Propriete rurale en Bas-Limousin pendant Ie
Moyen Age (Paris, 1917), p. 260.
5. Guillaume Durand, Speculum juris II, lib. IV, 3, sec. 2, no. 8, cited by Chenon, p.
139, no. 2.
6. Lambert d' Ardres, Historia comitum Ghisnensium in MGH, Scrip/ores 16, 596.
7. F. 1. Ganshof, Qu'est-ce que la feodalitf? Translated as Feudalism (see bibliogra-
phy, p. 367 below, sec. B).
8. Galbert de Bruges, Histoire du meurtre de Charles Ie Bon, ed. H. Pirenne (Paris,
1891), p. 89. This work has been translated by J. B. Ross as Murder of Charles the Good
(New York, 1967). The English edition of Ganshof, Feudalism, contains a translation of
the relevant portions of Galbert's account (p. 71) along with the Latin. A slightly
different translation of the account of the homage may be found in Murder of Charles
the Good, pp. 206-7.
9. Ermold the Black, In honorem Hludowicii, Classiques de l'histoire de France, ed.
and transl. E. Faral (1932), lines 2484-85, in Boutruche, p. 366.
10. Formulae Marculfi I, 18, in MGH, Formulae Merowingici et Karolini aevi, ed.
Zeumer, part 1 (1882), p. 55, with (French) translation in Boutruche, pp. 364-35.
11. Annales Regni Francorum, ed. F. Kurze (1895), p. 14, in MGH, Scriptores Rerum
Germanicorum in usum scholarum 6, cited and translated (into French) in Boutruche, p.
365.
12. It would be useful to have as complete and as exact as possible an inventory of
the expressions used. On the basis of the examples given by Ganshof, Feudalism, pp.
73-78. I think it is possible for our purposes, i.e., to understand the reciprocity of the
gesture, to make an initial classification which would distinguish the expressions
which stress the vassal's initiative ("manus alicui dare," "in manus alicuius venire,"
"regis manibus sese militeturum committit" concerning William Long Sword, Second
Count of Normandy, who became vassal of Charles the Simple in 927) from those
which give precedence to the lord's acceptance ("aliquem per manus accipere") and
those which primarily express the juxtaposition Qf the two gestures and the mutual
commitments ("omnes qui priori imperatori servierant ... regi manus compli-
cant ... ") according to Thietmar of Merseburg in connection with homages done to
Henry II on the eastern borders of Germany in 1002, or else the expression "alicuius
manibus iunctis fore feodalem hominum" from an English charter of the time of
William the Conqueror, studied by D. C. Douglas, "A Charter of Enfeoffment under
William the Conqueror," English Historical Review 42 (1927), 427.
13. In addition to the work of P. Oudiac and J. de Malafosse (see bibliography, p.
367, sec. B), for ancient Roman law I have used primarily the great work by Edoardo
Volterra, Istituzioni di dirilto pritlato romano (Rome, 1961).
14. C. Sanchez Albornoz, En toma a los origenes del feudalismo (Mendoza, 1942).
15. H. Grassotti, Las Instituciones feudo-vassal4ticas en Leon y Castilla, 2 vals.
358
Notes to Pages 242-244
(Spoleto, 1969), esp. vol. 1, EI vassalaje, chap. 2, "Besamanos," pp. 141~2.
16. To judge from the examples given by Hilda Grassotti, it may be that a certain
royal model, probably of oriental origin reinforced by Moslem practices, played a
special role in Spain. More than the problem of oriental and Moslem influences, what
we find interesting in this hypothesis is the problem of the relation between rites of
vassalage and royal rites, on which we shall have more to say later. H. Grassotti points
out the many examples of hand kissing in the Poema del Cid, noted by Menendez Pidal,
for example: "Por estos vos besa las manos,. commo vassalo a senor," but also "Be-
samos vos las manos commo a Rey y a senor." In Moslem Spain what is stressed
(again, reciprocity of the gesture) is the signal favor being accorded by the Caliph
when he gives his hand to be kissed. When Jean de Gorze, ambassador of Otto I, is
received by 'Abd-al-Rahman III in 956, the latter gives his hand to be kissed "quasi
numen quoddam null is aut raris accessibile." Similarly, when Ordono IV is received
by al-Hakam II at Medina-al-Zabra, of which Claudio Sanchez Albornoz has given a
very realist account following al-Maqquari, probably using medieval sources.
17. Cf. note 3 above.
18. Livre de jostice et de plet XII, 22, sec. 1, ed. Rapetti (Paris, 1850), p. 254, cited by
Chenon, p. 138.
19. In a 1322 charter, Hugh, bishop-elect of Carpentras, receives the homage of a
minor child and his governess. He takes the hands of both the child and its governess
between his for the homage and faith, but he gives the osculum only to the child,
"remisso ejusdem dominae tutricis osculo propter honestatem." Cited by Du Cange,
Glossarium, art. Osculum, and Chenon, pp. 145-46, and p. 146, n. 1.
20. Chenon, p. 149.
21. Casus 5. Galli, c. 16, ed. von AIx, MGH, 55 2, 141, in Boutruche, p. 367.
22. Cf. note 11 above.
23. Teulet, Layettes du Tresor des chartes 1, no. 39, cited in Chenon, p. 141, n. 1.
24. Ramos y Loscertales, "La sucesion del Rey Alfonso VI," in Anuario de Historia del
Derecho espanol13, 67~9, cited in Grassotti, p. 169.
25. Du Cange, Glossarium 3, art. lnvestitura, cols. 1520-38. I am unstinting in my
praise for this remarkable article, a fine example of the erudition of the era in which it
was written. At the same time, of course, it is open to criticism. As I pOinted out
above, in note 3, one particular difficulty is that investitura is taken in too broad a
sense. But even if there are many symbolic objects used in ecclesiastical "investitures"
or just plain gifts, I have used Du Cange's references because, for this part of the feudal
ceremonial of vassalage, the ritual and its symbolism seem identical to me.
26. This list may be found in Appendix I A above. Of course, regardless of the extent
of Du Cange's erudition, his list should be completed by as broad as possible a
collection of data, which should be analyzed statistically, though the result would be
only approximate and subject to caveat.
For example, Benjamin Guerard, in his introduction to the Cartulaire de /'abbaye de
5aint-nre de Chartres I, (Paris, 1840), has briefly studied (pp. ccxxiv-<:cxxvi) "symbols
of investiture." We find the knife, the stick, the incense spoon, the virga or virgula (or
the ramusculus). Generally, the wood of the virga or ramusculus is specified (e.g.,
virgula de husso: small sprig of hollYi savinae ramusculo, sprig of juniper). In the article
cited below (see bibliography, sec. C), Von Amira accords a great importance from an
ethnohistorical point of view to the wood of the symbolic stick. We also find the
gesture of breakage to which we shall return in note 28 (e.g. "quam virgam ... in
testimonium fregit"). The symbols of investiture as such are juxtaposed with symbols
of gift and witness.
I will enlarge below on what I think is interesting about another list, in appendix
I(B) above, of juridical symbols from the Merovingian and Carolingian eras, gathered
by M. Thevenin in his edition of texts (see bibliography, sec. A).
359
NOTES TO PAGES 245-253
27. Of course, this remark takes none of the value away from the problem of the
influence of Roman jUridical models on medieval law (I wiu discuss this below in
connection with the festuca, with special reference to the previously cited book by
Volterra, cEo note 13). Furthermore, it is in no way applicable to the remarkable work of
P. Ourliac and J. de Malafosse, Droit romain et Ancien Droit, vol. 1, Les obligations
(Paris, 1957), one of the rare books to treat the early medieval origins of the festucatio
with learning and intelligence.
28. The French literature on the subject is very brief. One may cite A. Laforet, "Le
baton (Ie baton, signe d'autorite, la crosse episcopale et abbatiale. Le baton cantoral, Ie
sceptre et la main de justice)," in Memoires de r Academie des Sciences Belles-Lettres et
Arts de Marseille 21 (1872-74),207 if, and 22 (1874-76), 193 ff. For Ernst von Moeller, the
breaking of the stick was the most important in a class of ceremonials concerned more
with officers, judges and outlaws than with vassals. He gives a Simplistic interpreta-
tion: the breaking is the symbol of the rupture of a bond. On the contrary, it was the
reunion of two pieces which first had to be broken from a single whole that created the
bond between two persons, if we follow the line of the etymology of the Greek term.
Von Amira has given a pertinent critique of Von Moeller's interpretation, which Marc
Bloch has renewed. Because the point is important for the subject of ethnohistorical
method, it bears repeating that the scope of comparative study must be broadened,
though not so far as to introduce confusion. Bloch puts it excellently: "The breaking of
the stick ... resembles the breaking of the straw, considered as a rite of renunciation of
homage, in no more than an external and fortuitous manner" ("Les formes," p. 209).
29. See bibliography, sec. C. From the comparative point of view, which I will make
explicit below, I regret having been unable to consult the work of M. Gluckman,
Rituals of Rebellion in South East Africa (Manchester, 1954).
30. Chenon, pp. 130-32. Chenon also notes that the osculum can replace the symbolic
object in the ritual, which might be worthy of further study (ibid., pp. 132-34).
31. Cf. note 12 above.
32. Ibid.
33. Cf. note 9 above.
34. Cf. note 21 above.
35. Cf. note 8 above.
36. J. Maquet, Pouvoir et Societe en Afrique (Paris, 1970), chap. 8, "Dependre de son
seigneur," pp. 191-215.
37. Ibid., p. 192.
38. Ibid., p. 193.
39. Cf. note 8 above.
40. Chenon, p. 149.
41. Cf. note 5 above.
42. Cf. C. Gaignebet, Le Carnaval (Paris, 1974), chap. 7, "La circulation des souffles,"
pp.117-3O.
43. Information received in the seminar of R. Guideri and Cl. Karnoouh, whom I
would like to thank for having been good enough to discuss this research.
44. There is unfortunately little to be gleaned from N. J. Perella's The Kiss sacred and
profane: An Interpretive History of Kiss Symbolism and Related Religious Erotic Themes
(U!1.iversity of California Press, 1969), which, in spite of its good intentions, has not
profited from ethnographic literature and turns out to be just another book on courtly
love.
45. Cf. note 8 above.
46. Cf. note 11 above.
47. Cf. note 9 above.
48. Maquet, p. 197. The author points out, pp. 200-202, that institutions similar to
360
Notes to Pages 253-258
the ubuhake may be found in the region of the African Great Lakes, e.g. in Ankole.
Burundi, and the chiefdoms of the Buha.
49. M. Bloch. La Societe leodale, critical ed. (Paris, 1968). p. 320. English translation:
Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Manyon (Chicago and London" 1961), p. 228.
50. Maquet, p. 196.
51. Cf. note 28 above.
52. Cf. the work by Volterra cited in note 13 above, esp. pp. 205-7.
53. E. Chenon, "Recherches historiques sur quelques rites nuptiaux," Nouvelle Revue
historique de droit Iran~ais et etranger, 1912.
54. G. article Baiser in Dom Cabrol. Dictionnaire d' archeologie chretienne et de liturgie
II11 (1910). Tertullian's text may be found in De velamine virginum. PL 1, cols. 904-5.
55. Volterra, p. 206.
It should be noted that the aim of the other form of oath in Roman private law, the
sacramentum in personam, was to acquire the manus iniectio. In my view, however, no
parallelism or continuity of significance should be looked for between the lestuca and
the manus of Roman law and those of the ritual of vassalage. Societies normally make a
distinction between law pertaining to persons and law pertaining to things; with
Volterra, we reiterate that manus in Roman imperial law no longer has any but an
abstract sense, and it is the symbolism more than the symbol that matters. Only
concrete historical study can make it possible--<lften with much difficulty, it is
tru~to distinguish the part played by continuity from that played by change. The
case of the lestuca requires attention, because the word and the object are not "obvi-
ous."
56. P. Ourliac and J. de Malafosse (see bibliography, sec. B), pp. 372-73. I would like
to thank Mr. Alain Guerreau, who called my attention to these texts and attempted the
difficult job of translating them.
In their remarkable study, Ourliac and Malafosse make several important observa-
tions which have points in common with some of the ideas stated in this lecture.
a) On medieval symbolism (pp. 5~59): "The striking feature of Salk law was the
symbolism characteristic of all primitive law. A good is transferred by transmission of
the lestuca or wadium (security), which was apparently an object of little value (d. Du
Cange, art. Wadia); and anything could become a symbol: a clod of grass, a vine stem,
a branch, a knife, silk knots, locks of hair; appropriate sign language and words are
added; sometimes the object was attached to the act: an act of 777 (Neues Archiv 32,
169) still has the branch used in the transfer attached to the parchment. The clerics
would tend to replace the profane objects with certain cult accessories: the missal, but
also the ring and the staff."
b) On the polysemy of symbols (d. below). Thus the lestuca should not be taken out
of context but in an institutional and symbolic complex which we think comparable to
the feudal ritual of vassalage (p. 59): "Such symbols were well suited to contracts
which involved the transfer of the good, sale or division; but the lestuca was used in
many other contracts: as power of attorney (Marcull I, 21, 27-29); promise to appear
before a tribunal, bail. Other symbols would appear, such as the joining of the hands
in homage or the gift of the ring in marriage. The preparation (and delivery) of a
charter was soon to appear only as one of these symbols. One may think that in the
South of France, the influence of Germanic symbols was more limited; there, earnest
money was given to mark the conclusion of an agreement. This is still practiced for the
marriage contract. In any case, the flourishing of symbols is characteristic of the
progress of the law and marks the pace of its advance."
c) On the symbolic complex-gestures, objects, words (p. 59): "Symbolism is allied
with formalism: gestures and speech are regulated by custom. The acts generally
mention that the witness 'see and understand'; contracts were frequently concluded
361
NOTES TO PAGES 258-264
before the mallus and, in the Carolingian era, on the occasion of the pleadings of the
missi."
d) Finally, the idea of "counter-prestation" or "symbolic counter-gift," which is
found in attatomie in connection with the role of the festuca, and the practice of
reciprocity (p. 69): "A prestation always presupposed a counter-prestation; a gift was
not valid without a symbolic counter-gift, which gave it the appearance of an ex-
change. In this connection, one may single out a Lombard institution, the launegild:
the donor gave the object to the donee, a ring, for example, the word's very etymology
attesting to its character of being compensation for services rendered. The symbol of
the festuca or wadium might be explicable in the same way: it would represent the
counterpart of what was furnished by the creditor."
57. Pactus Legis Salicae, ed. K. A. Eckhardt in MGH, Legum Sectio I, 411 (Hanover,
1962).
58. See bibliography, sec. C.
59. Du Cange, Glo5sarium 3, cols. 412-13.
60. Bloch, "Les fonnes," p. 197.
61. Bloch, moreover, finds troubling a text from the Coutumes du Beauvaisis by Beau-
manoir (from the end of the thirteenth century, it is true, and seminonnative in
character), and he tries to limit its significance. Ibid., p. 197, n. 4.
62. This is Georges Duby's outlook in his course at the College de France. The study
of family structures and kinship relations occupies an important place in the recent
important theses of P. Toubert, Les Structures du Latium medieval: Le Latium meridional
et la Sabine du IX' a la fin du XIV' si~c/e, 2 vols. (Rome, 1973), and P. Bonnassie, La
Catalogne du milieu du X' ala fin du XI'siee/e, 2 vols. (Toulouse, 1975-76).
63. Bloch, La Societe feodale, pp. 18:l-86; Eng. trans., p. 124.
64. Cf. note 19 above.
65. Cf. note 24 above. Boutruche, without giving references, unfortunately, notes
that where a woman was concerned, "a kiss on the right hand" sufficed (Boutruche 2,
154-58).
66. Cf. the works of Erich Kohler on the protest aspect of courtly love, esp. "Les
troubadours et la jalOUSie," in Melanges Jean Frappier (Geneva, 1970) 1, 543-99.
67. G. Duby, La Societe aux XI' et XW si~cles dans la region mdconnaise, new ed.
(Paris, 1971), p. 116, n. 35.
68. Cited by Chimon, p. 144, from the edition of the Roman de La Rose by Francisque
Michel, p. 63.
69. C.-E. Perrin, Recherches sur La seigneurie rurale en Lorraine d' apres les plus anciens
censiers, IX'-Xl1' s. (Paris, 1935), pp. 437-38.
70. Cf. note 20 above.
71. Robert Boutruche has clearly seen the significance of the kiss: "Significant ges-
ture! It was a sign of peace, friendship, and 'mutual fidelity.' It brought the 'man of
mouth and hands' closer to his superior" (2, 154). He adds "The kiss was not indis-
pensable, however. 'Classic' in France and the lands of the Nonnan conquest after the
year 1000, and later in the Latin states of the East, it made little headway in the
kingdom of Italy. It was rare in Gennany before the thirteenth century, probably
because there was a more marked social distance between lord and vassal and a greater
concern for hierarchy." I have no desire to replace the rigidity and abstraction of
certain theories of scholars, jurists rather than historians, with an overly "systematic"
ethnographic model. Boutruche has rightly emphasized the diversity connected with
different historical traditions in different locales. Nevertheless, it seems to me that
rather than being a question of influences, the progress of the osculum in medieval
Gennany reflects the fonn taken by the system in a space in which the social and
political structures (connected with the imperial system) had hitherto retarded its
implantation.
72. MGH, Capitularia regum francorum I, 104, (p. 215) C.3.
362
Notes to Pages 264-274
73. G. Fasoli, Intraduzione allo studio del Feudalismo Italiano (Bologna, 1959), p. 121.
74. Texts cited and translated (into French) by Boutruche, pp. 364--66.
75. Annales regni Francorum, ed. Kurze, p. 14, cited in Boutruche, p. 365.
76. Casus 5. Galli, c. 16, ed. von Arx in MGH, S5 2, 141, cited and translated by
Boutruche, p. 367.
77. Cf. esp. G. Duby, ['An Mil (Paris, 1%7).
78. With the inspiration of the brilliant works of Georges Dumezil, I have touched
on the problem of tripartite society in the Middle Ages in "A Note on Tripartite
Society, Monarchical Ideology, and Economic Renewal in Ninth- to Twelfth-Century
Christendom," this volume, pp. 53-57. G. Duby has given a more probing treatment
of these problems in a course at the College de France and is preparing a work on the
subject.
79. Bloch, "les Formes," p. 421.
SO. Without embarking on an analysis of the problem, I have carefully researched
and indicated in this essay such ev,idence as is available of perception of the symbolic
system of vassalage by men of the Middle Ages, at least by the clerics who described it,
because I regard a society's consciousness of itself, or lack of it, as very important.
81. Chenon, pp. 130 ff. "In the second place, the osculum was used for renouncing
contested rights; it was then a symbol of abandonment (guerpitio)."
82. Chenon has fallen, I think, into the error of looking for a single symbolic mean-
ing in a given symbol instead of respecting the polysemy of the symbol when he
writes: "Regardless of the form of the rite and the meaning of the symbol, whether
confirmation, abandonment, transfer of goods, it is possible to reduce it to a single
idea: the idea that the situation created by the contract which is followed by the
osculum will be respected. .. This is the idea that emerges from the words osculum
pacis et fidei which are encountered so frequently in the charters." ("l'osculum en
matiere de fian~ailles: Recherches historiques sur quelques rites nuptiaux," extract
from the Nouvelle Revue historique de Droit fTan,ais et ilranger, Paris, 1912, p. 136).
83. Du Cange, art. lnvestitura, col. 1520.
84. Thevenin, pp. 263-64.
85. Elze, Simboli e simbologia, Settimane di Studio del Centro italiano di studi
sull'alto medioevo XXIII (Spoleto, 1976).
86. J.-F. lemarignier, Recherches sur I'hommage en maTche et les frontieres flo dales
(lille, 1945).
87. Boutruche, p. 368. Galbert writes: "Non. aprilis, feria tertia Aqua sapientiae, in
crepusculo noctis, rex simul cum noviter electo consule Willelmo, Flandriarum mar-
chione, Bruggas in subburbium nostrum venit ... Octavo idus aprilis, feria quarta,
convenerunt rex et comes cum suis et nostris militibus, civibus et Flandrensibus
multis in agrum consuetum in quo scrinia et reliquiae sanctorum collatae sunt ... Ac
deinceps per totum reliquum dies tempus hominia fecerunt consuli ilIi qui feodati
fuerant prius a Karolo comite piisimo ... " (ed. Pirenne, pp. 86-89). The ceremony
took place in agra consueto in order to respect custom, to accommodate the crowd, and,
as was peculiar to Flanders, to involve the burgesses. The relics were brought to
sanctify the site.
88. It should be noted that the vassal also had to make a journey when he came out
of vassalage. In Galbert of Bruges's account of the exfestucatio of Ivan of A1ost, studied
by Marc Bloch, the notary of Bruges observes: "Illi milites ... sese et pluTes alias trans-
miserunt consuli Willeimo in lpra, et exfestucaverunt fidem et hominia."
89. For example, the charter of 1123 cited above, note 3, conserved in the cartulary of
Saint-Nicolas d' Angers. "De hoc dono revistivit Quirmarhocus et duo filii ejus
Gradelonem monachum S. Nicolai cum uno libro in ecc!es;a 5. Petri super a/tuTe 5.
Petri." In a charter of Robert, Duke of Burgundy, from 1043: "Hune oblationis char-
tam, quam ego ipse legali concessione per festucam, per cultellum, per wantonem, per
wasonemsuper altare, posui, ... " (Du Cange, art. InveslituTa, col. 1525).
363
NOTES TO PAGES 274-277
90. E.g. "Hanc concessionem fecit Dominus Bertrandus in aula sua, et pro intersigno
confinnationis hujus eleemosynae, tradidit quendam baculum, quem manu tenebat,
Annando priori Aureae Vallis" (Charter of Bertrand de Moncontour, cited by Du
Cange, art. Investituta, col. 1525). In 1143, the gift of several small manors by the
Viscountess of Turenne to the monastery of Obazine took place in the great hall of the
castle of Turenne "Hoc donum factus fuit in aula Turenensi" (Ch~non, "L'osculum en
matiere de fian~ailles," p. 133, n. 2).
91. For example, in a charter of Mannoutier (Du Cange, art. Investitura, col. 1530):
"Quod donum ... posuit super altare dominicum per octo denarios, in praesenlia mul-
torum." Sometimes the spectators are explicitly acknowledged in their function as
witnesses and guarantors of the collective memory: e.g., in this charter from the
monastery of Mannoutier cited by Du Cange, col. 1536: "Testes habuimus legitimos,
qui omni lege probare fuerunt parati, quod Hildegardis ad opus emerit, et per pisces
ex ejus piscaria investituram de derit in vito sua monachis Majoris Monasterii."
92. C. Walter, L'Iconographie des conciles dans la tradition byzantine (Paris, 1970).
93. In a charter of Mannoutier, it is the abbot of the monastery who is named as the
principal (and sufficient) witness: "Quod am fuste, qui apud nos nomine ejus in-
scriptus servatur in testimonium, praesente Abbate Alberto, fecit guerpitionem" (Du
Cange, art. Investitura, col. 1521).
94. Maquet, p. 195.
95. The records give hardly any indication other than the genuflection of the vassal
in the phase of homage: e.g., in an act of Rabastens of 18 January 1244 cited by
Ch~non, "L'osculum en matiere de fian~ailles," p. 142, n. 3: "et inde vobis homagium
facio, flexis genuis . .. ," which is the only detail given by Guillaume Durand in
Speculum juris, part 21, N, 3, 2, n. 8: "Nam is qui facit homagium, stans flexis
genuis . .. " Stans appears to indicate that the lord is seated, as one might expect.
96. Ch~non, "L'osculum en matiere de fian~ailles," pp. 132-33. "Finally, a more
curious and also rarer phenomenon, the osculum could also serve in making a transfer
of goods; in this case, it replaced the symbolic object which was not at hand." Was this
really the case?
97. Du Cange gives several examples of conservation of the symbolic objects of
investiture, e.g., in connection with a gift "Facto inde dono per zonam argenteam, ab
altari in annano S. Petri repositam ... " (art. Investilura, col. 1521). He cites Wendelin
in his Glossary: "Hujusmodi cespites cum sua festuca multis in Eclessiis servantur
hactemus, visunturque Nivellae et alibi." He says that he himself has seen in the
archives of Saint-Denis, thanks to Mabillon, several charters with symbolic objects (d.
below, note 122): "complures chartas, in quarum imis (limb is intextae erant festucae,
vel certe pusilla ligni fragmenta" (ibid., col. 1522).
98. Du Cange, in regard to the broken festuca, recalls the Roman stipulatio and cites
Isidore of Seville (Origines m): "Veteres enim quando sibi aliquid promittebant,
stipulam tenentes frangebant, quam iterum jungentes sponsiones suas agnoscebant"
(Glossarium, art. Fesluca, col. 411). I am not sure that the breaking of the straw (or
knife) was intended to provide two pieces, one for each principal to keep.
99. Ganshof, Feudalism, pp. 106--69.
100. F. Joiion des Longrais, L'Est et rOuest: Institutions du Japan et de rOccident
comparees (six studies in juridical sociology) (Tokyo, 1958). Other works in Western
languages treating Japanese "feudalism" may be found in Boutruche 1, 463-64.
Both Marc Bloch and Robert Boutruche, in particular, placed too great and too
exclusive an emphasis on the Japanese case, I think, in their comparative efforts.
101. I wish to thank Marc Auge for furnishing useful references to works of African
specialists.
102. H. Maspero, uLe regime feodal dans la Chine antique," in Recueils de la Socine
Jean Bodin, vol. 1, Les liens de vassaliU et les immunites (1935, 1936, 2d ed., Brussels,
364
Notes to Pages 277-280
1958), pp. 89-127. The collection of Li-chi is treated on page 9l.
103. Ibid., pp. 94-95. [I have rendered French officier de bouche-a dignitary in
charge of transmitting imperial orders-simply as "officer."-Trans.]
104. D. Bodde, "Feudalism in China," in Feudalism in History, ed. R. Coulbom
(Princeton, 1956), pp. 49-92. The author cites a work in Chinese by Ch'i Ssu-ho,
"Investiture ceremony of the Chou period," in Yenching, Journal of Chinese Studies, no.
32 Oune, 1947), pp. 197-226, which I was clearly unable to consult.
105. Bodde, p. 56.
106. Ibid., p. 61.
107. Ibid., p. 51.
108. CE. the interesting note presented by T. Wasowicz to the "settimana" where
this paper was first read (Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi suD' alto
Medievo, XXIII).
109. Beattie O.H.M.), "Rituals of Nyoro Kingship," in Africa-fournal de /'Institut
international africain 29, no. 2 (1959), 134-45; E. M. Chilver, "Feudalism in the Inter-
lacustrine Kingdoms," in East African Chiefs, ed. A. Richards (London, 1960); M.
Fortes, "Of Installation Ceremonies," in Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological In-
stitute of Great Britain and Ireland for 1967 (1968), pp. 5-20; F. Lukyn Williams, "The
Inauguration of the Omugabe of Ankole to Office," Uganda Journal 4 (1937),300-312;
K. Oberg, "Le Royaume des Ankole d'Ouganda," in African Political Systems, ed.
Fortes and Evans-Pritchard; A. P. Richards, "Social Mechanisms for the Transfer of
Political Rights in Some African Tribes," Journal of the Royal Anthropological In-
stitute . .. , 1960, pp. 175-90; R. A. Snoxall, "The Coronation Ritual and Customs of
Buganda," Uganda Journal 4 (1937), 277~8; J. J. Tawney, "Ugabire: A Feudal Custom
amongst the Waha," Tanganyika Notes and Records, no. 17 (1944), pp. 6-9. K. W., "The
Procedure in Accession to the Throne of a Nominated King in the Kingdom of
Bynyoro-Kitara," Uganda Journal 4 (1937), 289-99.
Since my concern was not feudalism, I did not use the justly classic book of J. F.
Nadel, A Black Byzantium (London, 1942); nor the early works of J. Maquet, Systemes
des relations sociales dans Ie Ruanda ancien (Tervuren, 1954), and a hypothesis for the
study of African feudalisms in Cahiers d'Etudes africaines 2 (1961), 292-314; nor the
works of J. Lombard on a society "of feudal type," the Banba of North Dahomey; nor
the contribution of I. I. Potekhin, "On Feudalism of the Ashani," to the Fifteenth
International Congress of Orientalists, Moscow, 1%0. I share the view expressed in
the fine article by Jack Goody, "Feudalism in Africa?" Journal of African History, 1%3,
pp. 1-18, particularly where he writes: (1) "I could see no great profit (and possibly
some loss) in treating the presence of C1ientship or fiefs as constituting a feudality ...
There seems even less to be gained from the view which sees African societies as
feudalities on the basis of political or economic criteria." (2) "To suggest that there
appears little to be gained by thinking of African societies in tenns of the concept of
"Feudalism" implies neither a rejection of comparative work that European
medievalists can make to the study of African institutions. .. While the reverse is
perhaps even more true (emphasis mine--J. Le G.), AIricanists certainly have some-
thing to learn from the studies of medj.eval historians." Still, though I agree that it is
best 10 speak in comparative terms not of "feudalism" but of particular institutions
analyzed with comparative methods. it seems to me that as far as my subject here is
concerned, viz., the symbolic ritual of'the feudal system of vassalage, the points of
comparison with African material are rare, since most of the rituals studied by Af-
ricanists are royal. Nevertheless, I would again like to underscore, along with Jack
Goody, that if one thinks a priori that "institutions defy comparison because of their
uniqueness" (ibid. p. 2), then one is condemning research in the human sciences,
including history, to a Singular impoverishment.
110. Fortes, "Of installation ceremonies," p. 7.
365
NOTES TO PAGES 280-286
366
Notes to Pages 286-287
127. I am thinking in particular of Marc Auge and Maurice Godelier in France. CE.,
e.g., C. Levi-Strauss, M. Auge, and M. Godelier, "Anthropologie, Histoire,
Ideologie," L'Homme 90, nos. 3-4 Guly-December, 1975) 177-88.
Selected Bibliography
A. Documents
Du Cange, Charles du Fresne, Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis (1678), Articles
Festuca et Investitura.
Thevenin, M., Textes relatifs aux institutions . .. merovingiennes et carolingiennes (1887),
esp. list of symbols, pp. 26J....64. Lex Salica, XLVI; Lex Ripuaria, XLVIII; d. Rotharii,
157, 158, 170, 172; d. Liutprandi, 65.
B. General studies of vassalage
Boutruche, R., Seignellrie et {eodalite, 2 vols. (Paris, 1968, 1970).
Fasoli, G., Introduzione allo studio del feudalesimo italiano in Storia medievale e moderna
(Bologna, 1959).
Ganshof, F. L., Qu'est-ce que la feodalitt!? 3d ed. (Brussels, 1957). Translated by Grier-
sen as Feudalism (New York, 1964).
Grassotti, M., Las instituciones feudo-vasalltiticas en Le6n y Castilla, vol. 1 Cap. Seg.
Entrada en Vasallaje, pp. 107 sqq.
Mor, G., L'eta feudale, II (Milan, 1952).
Oudiac, P. et De Malafosse, J., Droit romain et Ancien Droit, I, Les Obligations (Paris,
1957).
Mitteis, H., Lehnrecht und Staatsgewalt (Weimar, 1933).
C. Specialized studies
Amira, K. von, "Der Stab in der gennanischen Rechtsyrnbolik," Abhandlungen der Kg.
Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philologische und historische Klasse, 35
(Munich,1909).
Bloch, M., "Les fonnes de la rupture de l'hommage dans l'ancien droit feodal,"
Nouvelle Revue historique de droit fran,ais et etranger, 1912. Reprinted in Melanges
historiques I (Paris, 1%3), 189-209.
Chenon, E., "Recherches historiques sur quelques rites nuptiaux," Nouvelle Revue
historique de droit franrais et ~tranger, 1912.
- - - , "Le role juridique de I'Osculum dans I'ancien droit frant;:ais," Mtmoires de la
Societe des Antiquaires de France, 8 ser. 6 (1919-23).
Moeller, E. von, "Die Rechtssitte des Stabsbrechens," Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung
flir Rechtsgeschichte, G.A. XXI (1900).
D. Comparative studies
1. Feudalism in history
Coulbom, R., ed. Feudalism in History (Princeton, 1956), esp. D. Bodde, "Feudalism in
China," pp. 49-92.
2. African feudalism
Fortes, M., "Of installation ceremonies," in Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological
Institute . .. , 1%7 (1968), 5-20.
---and Evans-Pritchard, E. E., eds. Syst~mes politiques africa ins, French trans., Paris,
1964.
Maquet, J., Pouvoir et societe en Afrique (Paris, 1970).
- - - , Systemes des relations sociales dans Ie Ruanda ancien (Tervuren, 1954).
- - - , "Une hypothese pour l'etude des feodalites africaines," Cahiers d'Etudes af-
ricaines II (1961), 292-314.
367
INDEX
368
Index
Apollo, 167, 169 166
Arabs: and Indian Ocean, 190, 191; and Augustinism, political, 33, 286
Spanish vassalage, 264; science and Augustus, as child of god, 169
philosophy of, 42 Aulus Gellius, 191
Archeology, 79, 156, 162, 233; of Auriol, Pierre, 50
Merovingian tombs, 231 Ausbert (bishop of Rouen), 81
Architects, versus masons, 232-33 Authentica habita, 139,145
Aristocracy, 55, 298 n. 14, 325 n. 16; at- Autrecourt, Nicholas d', 41
titude to Christianity of, 220; culture Auxerre, Council of, 180
of, in twelfth century, 220, 284; vassal- AVerroism, 129, 145
age in Frankish, 266. See also Knights Avitus (saint), 180
Aristotelianism, 39; and pagan aristo-
craticism in ethics, 130; in France and Bacchanalia, 22
Poland, 141; "integral," 129; mag- Bacon, Roger, 198
nanimity in, 125, 130; notion of com- Bagaudes, 13, 95, 156
mon good in, 64; and status of Balandier, Georges, 235
academics, 145 Baitrusaitis, Jurgis, 170, 190
Aristotle, 36, 40, 41; apocryphal letter Barbarians, 32, 75-79; and HeIlenes, 225;
from Alexander to, 193; and Charles V, languages of, 154; Michelet on, 10, 17;
50; Nichomachean Ethics, 130 and tools, 82; as prelates, 155; Romani-
Armentarius (saint), 179 zation of, 154; Salvian on value of, 226;
Arnaud de Villeneuve, 204 serpent worship by, 180. See also Law
ArquiUiere, Monseigneur, 32 Barthes, Roland, viii, 9-11, 27; on
Ars, 75,232-33; monastic use of notion Michelet's modernism, 6
of, 129. See also Artes Bartholomew (author of Summa
Art, 175; dragon in Merovingian, 171; Pisanella),118
dragon in Romanesque, 175,335 n. 57; Bartholomew (saint), 198
peasants in, 97; primitive, 91. See also Bartholomew the Englishman (Bar-
Gothic art; Iconography tholomaeus Anglicus), 194
Artaxerxes Mnemon, 193 Basil (saint), 110
Artemidorus, 203 Battard, M., 184
Artes: major and minor in Florence, 69; Bayeux tapestry, 176
in Milan, 232-33 Beatus, 198
Artes liberales, 85, 116, 155; Martianus Bede the Venerable, 166
Capella and, 192 Behaim, Martin, 189, 190
Artes mechanicae, 85,116; Plato's con- Beleth, Jean, 182, 183
tempt for, 301 n. 16 Bellatores. See Tripartite schema
Artes moriendi, 41 Bells, 43, 48. See also Measurement;
Arthurian literature, 200. See also Time; Work bells
Folldore Benedict (saint), 48, 88, 95; on labor, 80,
Artisans. See Craftsmen 81, 90, 110, 115; miracles by, 82
Aryon, chest of, 81 Beresford, Maurice, 234
Asceticism, 61, 78. See also Monasticism Bergson, Henri, 40
Asclepius of Epidaurus, 169 Bernard (saint), 114-15, 124; curses
Athanasius (saint), 168 money and merchants, 60; Michelet
Aucassin et Nicolette, 11, 93 on, 18; and new intellectuals, xii; on
Augustine (saint), 32, 286, 289-90 n. 2; sale of knowledge, 30; on time, 50. See
anthropology of, 192, 195; on dragons, also Abelard, Peter; Philip of Harvengt
166; on dreams, 203; on sacramentum Bernard Atton IV, 244
signum, 23S-39; social classifications Bernheim, 32
in, 94. Works: De catechizandis rudibus, Berthold of Regensburg, 62
94; De civitate Dei, 33, 238; De doctrina Bible (Guiot), 117
christiania, 238; Enarratio in Psalmos, Bilfinger, Gustav, 43, 44, 45
369
INDEX
370
Index
Dante, 43; literature on, 295 n. 38; tensions in, 162. See also Art; Folklore;
symbolic importance of, 52; technical Iconography; Ideology; Mentality
improvements in, 4H9; Werkglocken, Curtius, E. R., 89
45,47
Cluniac order, 127. See also Monasticism Dance, history of, 233
Coal mining, 108 Dante, 43, 197; cites Vergil, 226; Indian
Cohn, Norman, 232 references in, 194
Coinage, 35, 176; counterfeiting and, 82; De agricultura (Cato), 89
fear of, 60 De catechizandis rudibus (Augustine), 94
Col/ectanea rerum memoTabilium (Solinus), De civitate Dei (Augustine), 33, 238
192 De consolationt phi/osophiae (Boethius),
Collingwood, R. G., 227 54,86
Coloni,9O De correctione rusticOTUm (Martin of
Columban (saint), 48, 80 ,:Iraga), 87, 94,156
Columella, 89 Decretum of Gratian, 60, 62, 117
Complant, 83 De doctrina Christiana (Augustine), 238
Concordat of Worms, 272 De eruditione praedicatorium (Humbert of
Confession, 112-14, 117,119 Romans),119
Confessors' manuals, xii, 39, 107-21 De guhernlllione Dei (Salvi anus), 87
Confreries, 111 De institutioni! cieri corum (philip of Har-
Conrad of Heisau, 89 vengt),122
Conrad von Mengenberg, 194 Delarue, Paul, 212
Consolations of Philosophy, 54, 86 Delaruelle, Etienne, 80
Constantine, 33; conversion of, 154, 168 Delling, Gerhard, 30
Constantius of Lyon, 156-58 Demography, 103, 114, 143
Contemptus mundi, 61 De moneta (Oresme), 141
Contracts, 83,255 De natura rerum (Thomas of Cantimpre),
Contra lmpugnantes (Aquinas), 129 194
Comuz, Jean-Louis, 13 Denis (saint), 161, 177
Corporations, 135-40. See also Guilds De nuph·is phi/%giae et Mercurii (Mar-
Cosmographia (Pius 10, 190 tianus CapeUa), 85, 155
Couldrette (author of Melusina tale), 208 Dependency, 251
Courtly love, 230 De proprielatibu5 rerum (Solinus), 194
Craftsmen, 303; association of, with hero De re TUstica (Yarro), 89
and saint, 113; and charisma, 231; Derogation, 69
confessions of, 119; and dragons, 175; De sacramenlis (Hugh of Saint-Victor, 238
justification of activity of, 115; Saint Descartes, Rene, 40
Marcellus and, 159; sacred character De summa bono (Boethius of Dacia), 130
and prestige of, 62, 81 De universo (Rabanus Maurus), 193
Credit, 29, 118, U0-21. See also Usury De vita solitaria (petrarch), 198
Crisis, economic, 102 DeVotio modema, SO, 131
Crusades, 11, 114; Jerusalem and, 26; Diachronic analysis, 225, 235-36
Michelet on, 18 Dia/ogus miraculorum (Caesarius of
Ctesias of Cnidus, 193 Heisterbach), 247
Cullmann, Oscar, 30, 31, 39 Diaries, 35
Cults: of Mary, 230, 262; of relics of Diaz, Bartholomeu, 189
saints, 157 Didascalicon (Hugh of Saint-Victor), 33,
Culture: dreams and, 201-4; ecclesiasti- 116
cal, 156, 158; in 5th~th centuries, 155; Diet, 8,81
high and popular, 27,153-222 passim Dindymus, 193
(esp. 185, 216, 234); and law, 264; rise Dionysius (saint). See Denis.
of secular, 185; sodal bases of, 154; Disdplina degli Spiritua/i (Calva), 50-51
371
INDEX
372
Index
Evangelization: in Asia, 191; of coun- cation of, 157-58; and bible, 157; and
tryside, 92; cultural requirements of, clerical culture, 1.56-57; defined, 325 n.
157; dragons in, 169; of Lithuania, 142; 17; degradation of saints in, 185;
in Roman Empire, 154 functions of, 186; in Arthurian litera-
Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 229, 279 ture, 200; Motif-Index of, 211; phan-
Examinations, dues for, 102 toms in, 157; psychologization of, 217;
Exfestucatio, 246-48,259 ritual and, 179
Expositio in canticum cantorum (Cas- Food. See Diet
siodorus),92 Fortes, Meyer, 229, 280
Fortunatus, Venantius, 88, 15~ pas-
Fabliaux, 200 sim; commission from Saint Germain
Faculties, 135-41. See also Academics; to, 159; on Saint Hilary, 173; on pa-
Universities gani, 92; peasants in, 89; Ravenna
Faith (part of vassalage ritual):243, training of, 163; use of hagiographic
252-53; of oath on altar, 274, 283-84. models by, 171; Vita Marcelli, 157,
See also Osculum; Vassalage 187-88.
Familia Christi, 63,67 Francastel, Pierre, 36
Familia diaboli, 63 France, emerges as nation, 13
Family: adoption ritual and, 256; af- Francis (saint), 10, 172
fatomie and, 257; ceremonies con- Franciscan order: internal quarrels in,
nected with, 275; factions in, 230; in 128; knowledge of society of, in thir-
feudal society. 219,220,271,284; his- teenth century, 118; question of pov-
tory of, 228, 22~30; and investiture, erty and, 128; views on usury of, 29.
286--87; literary representations of, See also Mendicant orders; Monasticism
221; Michelet on, 19. See also Salic law Franciscus of Alvarotis, 106
Faria (abbey), 284 Frazer, J. G., 180
Fasoli, Gina, 264 Frederick Barbarossa, 33, 69, 137, 139
Faubourg Saint-Marcel (district of Paris), Frederick II (emperor), 137
161~, 172 Freud, Sigmund, 201, 347 n. 4
Favret, Jeanne, 21 Friardus (saint), 80
Fealty. See Faith Friedmann, Georges, 36
Febvre, Lucien, 6, 109 Friendship, in Middle Ages, 260, 281
Felix (saint), 95 Functions: of folklore traditions, 186; as
Fermes, letter to Hadrian of, 192, 194 key to interpretation of folktale, 218; of
Ferramenta (iron parts of tools), 82. See gods in mythology, 57; social organiza-
also Tools tion in terms of, 91; in relation to
Festivals, 14; dubbing and, 285; structure/superstructure schema, 286;
folklorized liturgical, 185; in historiog- of universities, 139. See also
raphy, 228; time and, 48 Tripartite schema
Festuca, 245-46,257-59, 266, 270 Furet, Fran~ois, 232
Feudalism, 264-65; novelty of, 286; in
Africa, 250, 253, 2741, 365 n. 109; in Gaius, Institutes, 257
China, 277-78; in Japan, 276-77, 364 n. Galbert of Burges, 2~2 passim
100. See also Vassalage Gallus Anonymus, 54
Fidelity. See Faith Ganshof, F. L., 240, 276
Fief, 240; origin of, 266; potestas not Gaul, 13, 171
transferred with, 256; compared with Gelasius, 33
African ubuhake, 253; in China, 278; in Genevieve (saint), 161, 177
Russia, 277. See also Investiture Genicot, Leopold, 229
Fleury (Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire), 54 Gentilis, 92
Florence (Italy), 37, 43 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 176
Foeillon, Henri, 175 Geography. See Cartography
Folklore, 14, 93; ambiguity and equivo- George (saint), 175
373
INDEX
374
Index
Historia Naturalia (Pliny the Elder), 192 Nativity theme, 97; Romanesque, 174,
Historia orientales Games of Vitry), 194 194; of Vezelay tympanum, 194. See
Histories (Herodotus), 225 also Dragons
History: in Renaissance and Enlighten- Ideology: Christian, 60, 283; of knightly
ment, 227; as biography, 5-6; biology class and Saint George, 175; and labor,
and, 233; of climate, food, physiology, 73,86, 90; materialism of medieval, 61;
8; danger.; of historicism in, 219; dan- {onnation of modem, 30; of monarchy,
gers of substituting ethnology for, 54-57 passim; professional, 110; and
234-36; Herodotus as father of, 225; the university, 148; of vassalage,
Roman literature on, 226; social pro- 238-39,283
cesses of production of, 5; and sociol- lltud,l56
ogy, 26; age classes in, 230; clothing Imago Mundi (d' AiIIy), 190, 194
and dwellings in, 233; festivals and Imago Mundi (attributed to Honorius
liturgy in, 228; quantitative methods Augustodunensis),193
in, 25; uses of dream interpretation in, Imago Mundi (Walter of Mea), 194
202-3; of popular dance, 233; of taste Immixtio manuum. See Homage
and fashion, 233 Impetus, 50
Hochberg, Margrave of, 214 Incubation, 169; revival of, 203
Holy Roman Empire. See Empire, Holy India, 191-95; conversion of, 198
Roman Indian Ocean, 189-200 passim; as anti-
Homage, 240-42, 250-53; by commoners, Mediterranean, 199; and Arabs, 190,
263; immixitio manuum in, 241, 242, 191; Catholic dream of, 198; closed to
250,255,284; initiative in, 240,252; Christians, 190; as fantasy, 195; isles
relative importance of, 266; Spanish in, 196; medieval ignorance oi, 189;
hand kiss and, 242, 264 opening of, 190; sources for western
Hominium. See Homage ideas of, 191-93
Homo faber, 40, 108 Indica (Ctesias of Cnidas), 193
Honorius III, bull of, 136 Inflation, 35
Honorius Augustodunensis, 67; and Inquisition, 27
dragon symbolism, 174; Imago Mundi, Installation ceremonies, 2B<H!1
193; on India, 193-94, 197; on mon- Institutes (Gaius), 257
sters, 197; vision of society in, 116-17 Intentions: analysis oi, in ethics, 39, 114;
Horae canonicae. See Time of lord in vassalage ritual, 283; use of,
Horus, 170 to effect tolerance of certain trades,
Hugh of Fouilloy (bishop of Chartres), 63-M
175 Investiture: in Africa, 280; of common-
Hugh of Saint-Victor, 33, 114,238; ers, 263; delivery of symbolic object
classification of sciences in, 116; and, 244; divine rite of, 271; of fief,
Hugo, Victor, 16 240,244; hand in, 256; as seal of vas-
Humanism, 41; at Chartres, 114; and in- salage contract, 253, 266; symbolism
dian mythology, 199; medieval, 97; of, 286-87; types of objects used in,
medieval anti-, 195; Siger of Brabant 244-47,283,354-56. See also Festuca;
as precursor of, 130; and universities, Vassalage
134, 148; and time, 50 Investiture Conflict, 272
Humbert of Romans, 119 Ironsmiths. See Craftsmen
Hunlen, Berthold, 112 Isidore of Seville, 33, 169; on dragon,
Huppert, George, 227 1~7; on dreams, 202-3; Etymologiae,
Huygens, Christian, 49 92, 193; on Indian miracles, 193, 195;
on pagani, 92; on rural life, %; in-
Iconography, 73,234; of the Fall of Man, fluence on Rabanus Maueus of, 174;
77; of the hand of God, 75; and litera- Sententiae, 167; on standard· dragons,
ture, 88; material life and, 108; of 175; and Visigothic culture, 156
375
INDEX
Islam, 114, 265. See also Arabs 12; and universities, 133, 137, 142, 143,
Ius ever/endi, 245 145; as vassal of God, 271
Ivain (Chretien de Troyes), 11 Kingship: African, 279-81; as ben-
Ivan of A1ost, 248, 260 eficiary of tripartite schema, 57;
emblems of, 231; and feudalism, 231,
Jacob, Francois, 233 271; relation to priesthood of, 237-38;
Jacobus da Varagine, 157, 178, 182 transition from sacred to saintly, 232
JageUon, Ladislas, 142 Kinship, 260-61, 280-82. See also Family
Jakobson, Roman, 235 Knights: Abelard and, 124; and
James of Douai, 130 academics, 313 n. 14; clergy and, 284;
James of Vitry, 119, 144, 182, 194 confessions of, 119; culture of, 220, 328
Januensis, Caneiro, 189 n. 26; ideology of, and Saint George,
Japan, 276-71, 364 n. 100 175; self-consciousness of, 267; status
Jeammaire, Henri, 230 of, 117; term milites and, 55. See also
Jean d' Arras, 208 Aristocracy; Dubbing
Jean (duke of Beny), 208 Knowledge: analogy with time, 30; Fran-
Jerome (saint), 154,201-3; 172, 212 ciscan attitude to, U8; justification of,
Jerusalem, 26, 109, 127 128; sale of, 29-42 passim, 64, 120
Jesters. See Jongleurs Kohler, Eric, 220, 230
Jews, 120. See also Antisemitism; Koyre, Alexandre, 75
Judaism Kula, Witold, xiii
Joachimism, 32. See also Heresy Kutna Hora, 146
Joan of Arc, 10, 16; as representative of
people, 12-13, 230; role of academics Labor: attitudes toward, 73, 114; bibliog-
in buming of, 133 raphy on, 303; and bishops, 80; in
John Chrysostomos (saint), 110 Carolingian era, 83; and Church
John of Damascus, 39 Fathers, 110; cleric's choice between
John of Freiburg, 112, 11S-21 intellectual and manual, 127; contempt
John of Garland, 36, 59 for manual, 70; debate over manual,
John of Monte Corvino, 191 127; and heresy, 109; as justification
John of Salisbury, 34, 67, 116, 202, 204 for remuneration, 64; monastic orders
John of Worcester, 202 and, 80--81, 114, 127; in New Testa-
Jonas of Bobbio, 80 ment, 74, 90, 110, 121; in Old Testa-
Jones, A. H. M., 154 ment, 76, 115; and opus, 75; as pen-
Jongleurs, 59, 60, 302 n. 26; banned from ance, 110; positive theology of, 111,
Christian society, 62; three categories 112; religious organization of, 111; in
of,64--65 scriptoria, 81. See "Iso Workers
Jotion des Longrais, Frederic, 276, 283 Laboratores, 56-57,68,121. See also
Journal,44 Tripartite schema
Judaism: legacy to medieval mentality Labors of the months. See Iconography
of, 60, 74, 76, 90 Lambert of Ardres, 239
Julian (saint), 203 Lamia, 212
Julius Pomerius, 78 Lance/at (Chretien de Troyes), 11, 93, 284
Juno of Lanuvium, 179 Land tenure, 83
Justum pretium, 111; and academics, 142 Laon (cathedral of), 54. See also Adalbero
of Laon
Karlowicz, Jean, 215 Lateran Council, Fourth (UlS), xii, 117,
Katzenellenbogen, Adolph, 171 119
King: antrustion of, 241, 265; charisma Latin, as medium of CUlture, 107; versus
of, 231; gifts to doctors of, 311 n. 1; in vulgar tongues, 204
relation to tripartite schema, 57; Latini, Brunetto: as source of Dante's
thaumaturgic powers of, 231, 298 n. references to India, 194; Treasury, 194
376
Index
Law: abandonment of civil, by clergy, dicant masters, 142; as transitional
63; Burgundian, 78; and culture, 264; figure in history of kingship, 231-32
written and unwritten, 243; faculties Louis Xl, 69
of, 136; Lombard, 258; vassalage and Louis·the Pious (emperor), 241, 249, 253,
Frankish, 268--{j9. See also Canon law; 266
Roman law; Salic law Love, courtly, 230, 262
Laws (Plato), 179 Lucri causa, 58, 63
Lefevre, Yves, 51 Lug (the Gallic Mercury), 76
Lef£. Gordon, 41 Lupicinus (saint), 80
Legends, 213 Lusignan family, 208-22 passim
Lemarignier, Fran,ois, 273 Luther, Martin, 15, 16
Le Muisit, Gilles (canon of Tournai), 65
Le Nain de Tillemont, 161 Machinery and machinism, 75, 80, 82.
Leprosy. See Disease See also Clocks; Mills; Tools
Lerins,80 Macrobius, 155, 202-3
Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, 205 n., 216, Maerlant, Jacob (Flemish translator of
228 Thomas of Cantimpre), 194
Letters of exchange, 35 Magisters (masters): Paduan, 102; re-
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 216, 232, 235,236 muneration of, 120, 121, 140; in urban
Liberal arts. See Aries liberales schools, 64, 120, 123. See also
Liber de diversis ordinibus, 115 Academics
Liber de glon'a confessorum (Gregory of Magnanimity, 125, 130
Tours),88 Magog, 198, 345 n. 58
Liber de monslruosis hominibus (Thomas of Maillezais (monastery), 209, 213
Cantimpre), 195 Malabar, 196
Libido, feudal, 201 Malafosse, J. de, 257
Licentia docendi, 101, 140 Mamertus (saint), 180
Li-Chi, Memoirs Concerning Rites, 277 Mancipia, 90
Liebrecht, Felix, 215 Mandeville, John, 194
Linguistics, 153, 235 Manetti, Gianozzi, 51
Literacy, 107 Manuel Comnenus, 193
Literature: evolution of genres of, 217; in Manus: and immiritio manuum, 255; in
relation to society, 88,219; in late Roman law, 241, 256
Roman Empire, 226; and representa- Manuscripts, as consumer good, 143
tion of dreams, 201. See also Culture; Map, Walter, 205-20 passim
Folklore Mappemonde, 189-90
Littre, Emile, 163 Maquet, Jacques, 250-54 passim; 272-79
Livy,227 passim; 281
Lombard, Maurice, xiii Marcel, Etienne, 183
Lombard law, 258 Marcella (alleged author of Life of Saint
London,34,228 Martha), 182
Long period. See Longue duree Marcellus (saint, of Chalon), 160
Longue duree, 228; of familial existence, Marcellus (saint, of Paris), 159-88 pas-
284; and French historiography, ix. See sim; cult of, 160-61; life of, 157,
also Braudel, Femand 187-88; miracles by, 159-60
Lopez, R. S., 82 Marcellus (saint, of Rome), 160
Lord, 238; or dominus in literary sources, Marco Polo. See Polo, Marco
89; relation to vassal, 259; significance Marculf, formulas of, 241, 265, 285
of aula of, 274. See also Vassalage Mare clausum, 190
Lot, Ferdinand, 153 Marie «duchess of Bar), 214
Louis IX (Saint Louis), 19, 23; builds Marriage, 220; and vassalage, 275, 28I.
Sainte Chapelle, 161; supports men- See also Family
377
INDEX
378
Index
of, 7-8; and Edgar Quinet, 14, 23; on Nations (groups within university), 136,
rationalism, 17; on Refonnation and 142, 147
Renaissance, 15, 16; and Saint- Navarre (college of), 133
Simonians, 23; and Satan, 21,22; on Nebuchadnezzar, 203, 212
school and scholasticism, 9-20; view Negotia illicita, 58-70 passim, 120; con-
of fourteenth century of, 13; on temptus mundi and, 61
witches, 20-21, 230 Negotia scholaria, 126
-Works: L'Etudiant, 14;La Femme, 21, 24; Negotium. 61, 75
L'Hho'isme de ['esprit, 20; Histoire de Neo-Platonism, 203. See also Platonism
France, 3,4,7,15,23; Introduction il Nestorian Christianity, 198
['histoire universeIle, 20; La Passion New Testament, 121, 203. See also Dra-
comme principe d'art au Moyen Age, 15, gons, in Bible; Paul
18; La Sorciere, 20,23 Niccoli) de Conti, 199
Mickwitz,. Gunnar, 44 Nicene creed, 238
Milan Cathedral, 232-33 Nicetius (saint), 80
Milites. See Knights Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 193
MiUenarianism, 32, %, 227, 232, 290 n. Nietzsche, Friedrich, 39
11 None, 43; change in time of, 44
Mills, 80, 108. See also Machines and Norberg, Dag, 153
machinism NOTe, Alfred de, 181
Miracles, 157-59, 316 n. 5 Notaries, 59
Miracula (Gregory of Tours), 88 Notker (abbot of Saint Gall), 243, 249,
Mirecourt, Jean de, 41 266
Mirrors of princes, 34 Notre-Dame (cathedral), 174, 176-78;
Missionary work, 39. See also Evangeli- dragons and, 174
zation Novalia 56
Moeller, Ernst von, 246, 247, 256 Nowack, Marie, 215
Mommsen, Theodor, 227
Monasticism: Abelard and, 124; Ben- Obazine (monastery), 238
edictine, 114; and confession, 119; in Ockham, William (0£),50
Ireland, 156; and labor, 73, 80-81, 110, Ockhamists, 41
114, 115, 317 n. 10; "new," 124; and Odilo of Cluny, 262
otium, 75; and time, 48; in debates Odo of Cluny, 174
over manual labor, 127; living con- Ogier the Dane (imaginary traveler to
ditions and, 118. See also Benedict, India),194
Rule of; Dominican order; Franciscan Old Testament, 115, 203. See also Dra-
order; Prflnlonstratensians gons, in Bible
Money: changers, 35, 60; disturbances in, Opera servilia: notion of, 78; Sunday ban
35; rates of exchange of, 105; time and, on,58,62,68
35. See also Coinage Opus Dei, SO, 120, 127
Montaigne, Michel de, 49,69 Opus maiU5 (Bacon), 198
Monte Cassino, 85, 193 Oratores. See Tripartite schema
Montfort, Simon de, 145 Ordericus Vitalis, 34
Montmorillon (cartulary of), 243 Orders (monastic. See Monasticism
Morphology of the Folktale (Vladimir Orders (of society), 53-57 passim;
Propp),205 studium, regnum, sacerdotium, 144;
Musicians. See Jongleurs conflicts among, 145, 149. See 11150
Mysticism: and revolts against Church, Laboratores; Tripartite schema
109; and spirituality, 114; and time, Oresme, Nicole, 41, 141
41,50 Osculatio manuum, 242, 264
Osculum, 238, 243, 252-56 passim, 266-
Nationalism, 34, 163 67 pasSim, 275. See also Homage;
Nationalization, of universities, 104,148 Investiture; Vassalage
379
INDEX
380
Index
381
INDEX
Siennik (translator of Melusina tale), 215 of David, 238; difficulties in history of,
Sigelmus, 198 269; distinction between Handlung-
Siger of Brabant, 122-34 passim; and symbol and Gegenstandsymbol, 276;
academics, 128; on magnanimity of Georges Duby on, 262; guilds and, 68;
philosopher, 125, 145; Quaestiones of hand, 75; and historical time, 33; of
morales, 129-30 Indian isles, 196, 198; introduced by
Sigiran (saint), 95 Church, 91; in Italy, 264; of Jerusalem,
Signum, 238 109, 226; of Martha and Mary, 76, 78,
Sin: classifications of, 118-19; in theol- 108, 114; of Mary Magdalene, 78;
ogy of labor, 111 medieval interpretation of, 237-38; of
Smertrios, 170 Notre-Dame Cathedral, 176-77;
Smith, G. Elliot, 170, 171 polysemic, 241,269,284,361 n. 56; in
Social mobility, 114 primitive Christianity, 77; in primitive
Socrates, 204 law, 361 n. 56; of Rachel and Leah, 77,
Socraticism, Christian, 114 78, 108; of Rome, 226; significance of,
Solinus, Gaius Julius, 192, 194 286; sociocultural and socioeconomic,
Songe du Verger, 204 245; socioprofessional, 246; use of ob-
Spain, 242,250,264 jects for, 244-46. See also Dragons;
Speculum his/oriale (Vincent of Beauvais), Emblems; Festuca; Vassalage
194 Symbolum, 238
Speculum naturale (Vincent of Beauvais), Syphilis, 21
194, 207
Spengler, Oswald, 34 Taboos: on blood, 59; on money, 60, 120;
Spirituality, 109, 132 psychological, 191; survivals of, 70; in
Statuta Ecclesiae Antiqua, 80 folktales, 212
Staufenberg, Peter von, 222 Tacitus, 28, 76, 225-26
Stephen (saint), 177 Tarasque (dragon), 179, 180, 182-83, 228
Stoicism, 203 Tassilo (duke of Bavaria), 241, 243, 251,
Stouff, Louis, 210 253, 265, 266, 273
Strabo, 191 Tassilo III, 266
Structuralism, 215-16, 219 Tauler, Johannes, 41
Students, 103-4. See also Academics; Tawney, J. J., 282
Universities Taylorism, 36
Studium, 144, 145, 149 Tchin, 277
studium genera Ie, 135 Techne, 74-75
Subjectivization, 64, 112, 114 Tenenti, Alberto, 41
Suetonius, 169 Teneze, Marie-Louise, 212, 222
Sulpicius Severus, 92, 154, 168, 202 Teratology, 193, 195
Summa Astesana, 118-19 Terce, 43
Summa Confessorum Gohn of Freiburg), Tertullian, 256
119, 121 Textile trade, 35, 45, 46-47, 59, 64
Summa de arte praedicatoria (Alan of Theodulf: Eclogue, 89
Lille), 119 Thierry, Augustin, 229
Summa molindina, 118 Thietmar of Merseburg, 249, 273
Summa Pisanella, 118 Thomas, Keith, 27
Surgeons, 59, 69 Thomas Aquinas' (saint): Contra im-
Suso, Horologium Sapientiae, 50 pugnantes, 129; classification of sci-
Sylvester (saint), 163, 168, 177 ences in, 116; debate with Siger of
Symbolism: of body, 244, 246; of bor- Brabant of, 131; definition of time by,
ders, 279; of Caliban, 97; castles as, 39-40, 50; on remuneration for labor,
267; clocks as, 49, 52; clothing as, 246; 65
of cyclops, 199; dance of death as, 116; Thomas of Cantimpre, 194-95
382
Index
Thomas of Chobham, 66--67 See also Academic Expenses; Academ-
Thompson, Stith, 211-12 ics; Magisters
Thuring of Renggeltingen, 214 -Institutions discussed: Bologna, 102,
Time: ecclesiasticalJsecular division of. 137, 139; Cambridge, 136, 140; Co-
43, 48; Church notion of. 30--31, 37-39; logne, 140; Heidelberg, 147; Krakow,
collective notions of, 38; cyclic, 39; 142, 147; Leipzig, 147; Louvain( 140,
defined by Saint Thomas, 39--40; and 147; Oxford, 42, 104, 105, 140, 142,
festivals, 48; Hellenistic tradition and, 144, 145; Padua, 101~ passim, 148;
31,39; Heraclitus and, 39; in history, Paris, 42, 122-47 passim; Prague, 137,
229; horae canonicae, 44; Judaic notions 142, 146; Toulouse, 142; Tiibingen,
of, 30, 31; measurement of. 35; and 147; Wittenberg, 147
millenarianism, 32; and monasticism, Urban growth: as represented in art,
48; and money, 35;"mystidsm and, 43; 108; impact on schools of. 120
Ockhamists on, 41; and painting, 36; Urvashti. 215, 216, 353 n. 36
Saint Paul on, 31; Plato on, 31; pro- Usury, 29, 289-90 n. 2; attacks on, 60;
fessional. 38; and Renaissance, 49; sale canon law and, 38; changes in pen-
of. 29-42 passim; scholastic concept of, alties for, 40; condemnation of, 58, 61;
50; Scotists on, 41; supernatural, 38; in Decretum of Gratian, 62; Jews and,
Terce and None and, 43; transforma- 301 n. 11; justification of. 65, 121
tion of labor-, 45; units of. 44, 49. See
also Clocks; Work bells Vagi (vagabonds), 63, 144
Tools, 79, 82, 108, 147 Van Gennep, Arnold, 180,185,211
Totemism, 219, 353 n. 38 Varagnac, Andre, 186, 229
Toubert, Pierre, 11 Varro: De re rustica, 89
Toulouse, 142 Vassalage: and African institutions, 250,
Toynbee, Arnold, 34 253,271-73; Carolingian use of. 266;
Tradition, 233. See also Folklore clergy and, 265, 284; components of
Trajan, 192 ritual of. 240-41; conflict of hierarchy
Translationes, 34 in, 261; and dubbing, 285; exit from,
Translatio studii, 133 246-48,259; and Frankish law, 268-69;
Treasury (Brunetto Latini), 194 Frankish ritual and, 258; giftlcounter-
Tripartite schema, 53-57, 68, 73, 86, gift and, 252-53; and Japanese in-
110--12,267; in dream of Henry I, 201; stitutions, 276-77; kinship referent of,
inadequacy of. 115-16 260; "man of mouth and hands" in,
Truce of God, 11 244, 256, 261; multiple, 137; political
Tubal-Cain, 76 referent of. 255, 271; reci prod ty of de-
sire in, 281; Roman contract compared
Uccello, Paolo, 37 with, 255, 271; and royal rites, 271;
Umiliati. 115 Russian forms of, 253, 277; in Spain,
Universities: autonomy of. 147; Church 242, 250, 264; symbolic unity of, 260;
and, 138; disciplines taught in, 135; as symbolism of hand in, 255, 256,
"eldest daughter of king," 133, 145; 284-85; travel and, 273. See also Faith;
fiscal organization of, 135; inter- Feudalism; Homage; Investiture
nationalism of. 146; monastic property Venice, 106
and, 147; and monopoly, 139; Vere, Aubrey de, 283
nationalization of, 104; origins of, 64, Vergil (magician), 211
137,147; political activities of. 145-46; Vergil (poet), 33; and Dante, 226; on
political relations of. 137; prestige of, dragons and serpents, 167; energeti-
144-46; and public authorities, 135-49 cism in, 75; peasants in, 89; as pre-
passim; self-conception of. 122-34 cursor of Christianity, 204; on visions,
passim; statutes of, 102-3; strikes in, 203
146; teaching in, 141; typology of, 138. Vernant, J.-P., 75
383
INDEX
384