Reading Saints' Lives and Striving to Live as Saints

359 Pages·2014·0.99 MB·English

Reading Saints’ Lives and Striving to
Live as Saints : Reading and Rewriting
Medieval Hagiography
Author: William Casper Schenck
Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/1368
This work is posted on
Boston College

The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Department of Romance Languages and Literatures

READING SAINTS’ LIVES AND STRIVING TO LIVE AS SAINTS:
READING AND REWRITING MEDIEVAL HAGIOGRAPHY

a dissertation
by

WILLIAM CASPER SCHENCK

submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy
December 2008
© copyright by WILLIAM CASPER SCHENCK
2008
“Reading Saints’ Lives and Striving to Live as Saints:
Reading and Rewriting Medieval Hagiography”
William Casper Schenck
Dissertation Advisor: Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner

This study demonstrates the essential connection between literature and history by
examining the way selected saints’ lives were read and rewritten in Latin and Old French
from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. Building on the concept of the horizon of
expectations developed by Hans Robert Jauss, it argues against both the model of
literature as a series of timeless classics whose meaning is apparent to the intelligent
reader of any age and the tendency to reduce literature to the more or less successful
imitation of historical realities. Not only does the interpretation of a saint’s life change
over time as the text is read in different religious and cultural contexts, but the narrative
is in turn capable of influencing the way its readers understand themselves and the world
in which they live. By comparing different versions of each saint’s life, I am able to
isolate variations in form, tone, characterization, and action, and relate them to the
experiences of specific historical figures whose lives illustrate the important religious and
cultural issues of their time.
In order to do this, I examine three saints’ lives in light of the sometimes troubled
relationship between the clerical order of the church and the laity. Two Latin and two
Old French versions of the Life of Saint Alexis are read along with the life of Christina of
Markyate, an English woman who fled from her husband to become a recluse. Alexis’s
and Christina’s refusal of marriage illustrates the tension between the monastic model of
fleeing from the world to save one’s self and the pastoral ideal of working for the
salvation of others. I compare the figure of the mother in two very similar Old French
versions of the Life of Pope Saint Gregory, a story of incest, penance, and redemption, to
Ermengarde of Anjou, a countess who could never commit herself to life in a convent.
Like Ermengarde and countless other lay men and women, Gregory’s mother faces the
question of whether she can live a sufficiently holy life as a lay person or needs to enter a
convent to expiate her sins. Finally, I read Latin and Old French verse and prose versions
of the Life of Saint Mary the Egyptian in light of the similar yet opposing experiences of
Valdes of Lyon and Francis of Assisi in relation to the question of heresy and orthodoxy.
My understanding of the medieval religious historical context, particularly the
history of the laity in the Church, builds on the foundational work of Raoul Manselli,
Etienne Delaruelle, and André Vauchez, as well as more recent work by Michel
Grandjean, who compares the different visions of the laity held by Peter Damien, Anselm
of Canterbury, and Yves of Chartres. My dissertation shows that the different versions of
saints’ lives not only reflect the evolution of attitudes about human relationships,
salvation, and orthodoxy that characterize the time and place in which they were written,
but also question the practices of later readers and offer solutions to new problems in new
contexts. As my study demonstrates, ideals like the monastic identification of holiness
with asceticism shape the way people understand and direct their lives, and the source for
these ideals can often be found in literary texts like saints’ lives. These texts do not
communicate these ideals transparently. The juxtapositions, tensions, and conflicts they
depict can lead the reader to come to a more nuanced understanding or even a total
reconsideration of his or her beliefs. The study of rewriting and medieval saints’ lives
can help us better understand this interplay between narrative, ideal, and lived
experience.
Schenck i
Table of Contents

Introduction ..............................................................................................................1
Alexis, Gregory, and Mary.......................................................................................4
The Horizon of Expectations ....................................................................................7
Saints’ lives, rewriting, and history .......................................................................12
Three kinds of rewriting .........................................................................................14
Saints’ lives and the religious horizon of expectations ..........................................16
Saints’ lives and the vernacular .............................................................................21
Chapter I.................................................................................................................30
La Vie de saint Alexis and Christina of Markyate
Part 1 ......................................................................................................................30
Contemptus mundi
Saint Alexis: Personal salvation at all costs ..........................................................32
From the Man of God to Saint Alexis ....................................................................35
Saint Alexis in Latin and French ...........................................................................37
The religious horizon of expectations ....................................................................41
Novum martyrii genus: Alexis’s path to sainthood ................................................48
Vita Alexii: The Spanish and Roman Lives of Saint Alexis ....................................49
Herba: Marriage, rejection, and the first growth of holiness ................................51
Spica: The grain emerges ......................................................................................58
Plenum frumentum: living in the world in solitude ...............................................62
Christina of Markyate: flight from marriage .........................................................74
Part 2 ......................................................................................................................83
“An ices secle nen at parfait amor”
Wedding and flight .................................................................................................84
Spica .......................................................................................................................93
Plenum frumentum .................................................................................................99
Harvest .................................................................................................................107
Schenck ii
Christina and Spiritual relationships ..................................................................117
Conclusion ...........................................................................................................124
Chapter II .............................................................................................................134
La Vie du pape saint Grégoire and Ermengarde of Anjou
Can all sins be forgiven? .....................................................................................136
An apocryphal hagiographic legend and an extended exemplum .......................140
Ermengarde of Anjou, Countess of Brittany ........................................................144
Incest and consanguinity ......................................................................................148
Ermengarde and consanguinity ...........................................................................152
How do they sin? ..................................................................................................154
Sin begets sin… ....................................................................................................157
Shame and Sin ......................................................................................................161
“If you had not suffered marriage”: Ermengarde’s sin ......................................182
The Moral Life .....................................................................................................197
The Impossible Penance: Seventeen Years Chained to a Rock ...........................202
The Monastery .....................................................................................................207
Conclusion ...........................................................................................................225
Chapter III ............................................................................................................233
La Vie de sainte Marie l’Egyptienne, Valdesius of Lyon, and Francis of Assisi
Conversion: Successes and Challenges of Saints’ Lives .....................................238
How far I am from the measure of true perfection ..............................................246
To Please and to Edify – The T version ...............................................................255
Valdesius: the risks and rewards of imitating the saints .....................................265
The O Version: Prosa Oratio ...............................................................................272
The O Version: Zosimas sees a ghost ..................................................................276
The O Version: Spiritual grace and priestly office ..............................................289
Conclusion ...........................................................................................................313
Conclusion ...........................................................................................................320
Works Cited .........................................................................................................341
Schenck 1

Introduction

Vernacular hagiography is no longer the ugly stepchild of medievalism, too pious
and didactic to be considered literature and too fantastic and melodramatic to be
considered historical or spiritual writing. Too much has been written about vernacular
hagiography in its own right and as a part of broader studies of Old French literature for a
1
scholar to feel the need to defend the choice to study saints’ lives. Indeed, one of the
characteristic features of hagiography that most troubled earlier generations of literary
critics and historians is now seen as one of its most interesting. The phenomenon of
rewriting – all of the minor and major changes that constitute different versions of the
same story – was seen as an obstacle by philologists looking for the original,
linguistically-significant Urtext, cheap derivation by literary critics looking for the
creative spirit of the original author, and hopelessly opaque layers of embellishment,
fantasy, and literary common-places by serious hagiographers looking for an authentic
account of a saint’s life and miracles. Now variante and mouvance have been enshrined
as a defining feature of medieval literature, and the numerous versions of a given saint’s
life are understood as the embodiment of a legendary paradigm in different times and
2
places. Indeed, as I will argue in this dissertation, because of rewriting, saints’ lives are
doubly useful for the study of medieval literary history. Written and rewritten at the

1
In addition to countless articles, monographs on hagiography include Cazelles and Johnson, Le Vain
Siècle Guerpir; Elliot, Roads to Paradise; Robertson, The Medieval Saints Lives; Laurent, Plaire et Édifier.
Recent general studies of Old French literature that consider vernacular hagiography a vital component of
the corpus include Gaunt, Gender and Genre and Kay, Courtly Contradictions.
2
See Cerquiligni, Éloge de la variante and Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale for variante and
mouvance as well as Uitti, “The Old French Vie de Saint Alexis: Legend Paradigm and Meaning” 269-274.
Schenck 2
intersection between an enduring legendary story and the literary and religious tastes and
expectations of new writers and audiences, saints’ lives demonstrate that the relationship
between literature and history is not just a question of art imitating life, but the complex
interaction between new and old ways of understanding and giving meaning to the human
experience.

The important place of saints’ lives in Old French literary history can be traced to
one of the very first texts written in French. Tucked away in the back of manuscript 150
of the Bibliothèque Municipale of Valenciennes is a short poem of twenty-nine lines that
3
holds the honor of being the oldest extant work of literature in Romance. Dating from
the end of the ninth century, the Séquence de Sainte Eulalie gives a succinct account of
the martyrdom of a young girl named Eulalia. Though short, the poem contains all the
features of a Passio: a description of the young girl’s beauty and holiness, a pagan ruler
who wants to break her will and force her to worship his idols, the stalwart resistance of
the maiden, a first, failed attempt at execution, a beheading, and finally the ascension of
the martyr’s soul into heaven and a prayer for Eulalie to intercede for “us”, the
community in which the writer, the narrator, and the audience of the poem are drawn
together as Christians in search of salvation. All of these elements can be found in the
different Latin accounts of Eulalia’s life and death and many other stories of virgin
martyrs that came out of Christian antiquity (Berger 66-76). But here, for the first time, a

3
Berger, Les Séquences de Sainte Eulalie 45. The famous “Strasbourg Oaths” sworn by Charlemagne’s
grandsons Charles the Bald and Louis the German in 842 are older than the Séquence, and Nithard’s
account of them may very well be the first text longer than a few words in which the spoken language of
France is transcribed as something other than Latin, but they can hardly be considered a literary work. Cf.
Wright, The Romance Languages 122-126.