Entrances and Exits: Performing the Psalms in Goscelin's "Liber confortatorius"

Abstract

In about 1080 the young English nun Eva decided to step up her religious com mitment and become a recluse. Apparently without discussing her move with any one, she secretly left her convent, the prestigious royal abbey of Wilton, and crossed to Angers, where she joined what appears to have been an established community of anchoresses attached to a church there. Her former teacher and mentor, the monk, hagiographer, and musician Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, learned of her departure after some delay. His Liber confortatorius, datable to about 1082/ 83, is by far the most personal and most original text in his considerable oeuvre, expressing deep personal grief about Eva's departure.1 It is a book of spiritual advice, in the tradition of Jerome and Ambrose, or more recent masters like John of Fecamp and Anselm, and anticipating later and more familiar anchoritic texts like Aelred of Rievaulx's De institutione inclusarum and the Ancrene Wisse. It is an anthology of texts and excerpts that Goscelin and Eva both valued. It is a guide to meditation. It is also a personal letter, a lament, a consolation, and self consolation. One of the exciting things about the Liber confortatorius, apart from its per sonal engagement and its sometimes disconcerting glimpses of more than just spiritual attachment, is precisely its early date. Goscelin tends to anticipate ideas and practices that are familiar to us from the later Middle Ages, and it is often surprising to find them in the 1080s. And, as is often the case with letters of spiritual counsel, one has the impression of watching someone's private theology unfold-not so much original thought as a personal mix of reflections and de votions. Some religious practices that later in the Middle Ages gelled into standard usage or hardened into prescriptive rules are offered as personal habits, an exchange of ideas, suggestions, shoptalk along the lines of I do it like or here is something you might want to try. For instance, the Little Office of the Virgin, not exactly referred to in this text but certainly implied, had evidently been around in personal, voluntary, or local usage some two centuries before it became near-universal monastic practice in the twelfth century and a centerpiece of lay devotion with the development of the book of hours.2 Goscelin's comments on