MAKING A CLOISTER OF THE SOUL IN MEDIEVAL RELIGIOUS TREATISES

Abstract

The allegory of the cloister of the soul springs into currency in the middle of the twelfth century, apparently fathered by Hugh of Fouilloy,' and then developed by devotional writers until well into the fifteenth century. It serves different functions at different moments in time - commencing as a meditative enhancement of the monastic day, but moving to a point in the late Middle Ages where it acts as a kind of cover for anti-monastic comment. Fragmentary examples of this allegory are to be found in Latin, English, French, German, and Dutch. Only one detailed study of the allegory, Claustrum animae: Untersuchungen Zur Geschichte der Metapher vom Herzen als Kloster by Gerhard Bauer,2 has been carried out to date, and this concentrates upon the relation between Hugh of Fouilloy's De claustro animae and the late thirteenth-century German Her*kloster. The investigation has been conducted with great thoroughness and leaves little to add regarding the prevalence of cloister allegory in medieval Germany. However, Bauer makes no mention of versions of the allegory in French and English, and it is this omission which I wish to make good, gathering together some examples from both vernaculars and analysing them in the light of the Latin De claustro animae. A much older volume, The Figurative Castle: A Study of the Medieval Allegory of the Edifice by Roberta Cornelius,' names some of these vernacular versions in the course of a more general study of architectural allegory, but it includes them only in passing, and then at a level of straightforward description. The intention of this article is to make more analytic comments, not least on the relationship between the allegorized cloister of the mind and the literal monastic cloister at different periods. The cloister is a new structural contribution to a tradition of academic architectural allegory that has ancient roots.' Classical poetry contains many conceptual buildings intended to intensify or direct the definition of the personified abstractions who inhabit them.5 However, it is in Judaeo-Christian sacred texts and commentaries that we are faced with architectures of more obvious import for the figure under discussion. The two most significant and influential biblical architectures are the monumental forms of the temple at Jerusalem detailed in x Kings 6-7, and its predecessor, the Mosaic tabernacle, described in Exodus 25-31. The symbolic possibilities of these forms are explored to some extent by Judaic exegetes such as Josephus and Philo Judaeus, in Jewish apocryphal writings, and in the Talmud,6 and this analysis is redirected and explored in relation to Christian beliefs by St Paul and by many of the greatest Church fathers. Briefly, patristic exegesis of the temple and tabernacle tends to adduce three major symbolic referents. These buildings are perceived, first, as an emblem for the body of Christ; second, as an emblem for the moral body of the individual believer; and third, and perhaps most important, as an emblem for the corporate worshipping community - the social body of the Church.' Two of the most important patristic texts to address these themes are the long commentaries by the Venerable Bede entitled De tabernacglo and De templo,' which gather together and enlarge upon all preceding patristic comment. It is from these two commentaries that the glosses on the temple and the tabernacle in the Glossa ordinaria' are mainly compiled, and, possibly through this avenue, they operate as the principal exemplar behind twelfth-century allegorical commentaries upon the temple and tabernacle.'* The number of such commentaries indicates that there was an extraordinary degree of interest in sacred architecture as a subject for allegorical analysis during the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. At the same time, alongside the large number of allegorical expositions of Old Testament architecture, another set of treatises begin to emerge, treatises which move adventurously beyond the confines of scriptural commentary in centring upon contemporary sacred architectures. …