Un problème de cultures ou de culture ? La statue-reliquaire et les joca de sainte Foy de Conques dans le Liber miraculorum de Bernard d'Angers

Abstract

The Liber miraculorum of Sainte Foy of Conques, written by Bernard of Angers between ca. 1013 and ca. 1020, allows the historian to observe the intricate relationship between elite and popular traditions, traditions which belonged to one culture. The Liber is structured by Bernard's "conversion" : it relates how Bernard accepted elements of Sainte Foy's cult and miracles which, as a member of the learned northern clerical elite, he had initially viewed as suspiciously popular in nature. The statue reliquary (majestas) of Sainte Foy, which he first found shocking and which modem historians have interpreted as a sign of a renascence of "popular, pagan" attitudes in this era, was representative of a genre not yet common north of the Loire. In the south, the elite — abbots, bishops and secular nobles — vied with one another to be the patrons of these reliquaries ; the statues could incarnate the prestige and power which these groups or individuals had or sought to obtain. In addition, these elites seem to have shared with the non-elite a belief that such reliquaries embodied the saints whose relies they enshrined. An analysis of the miracles in the Liber which seem to be peculiar to Sainte Foy when compared with those of other patron saints of this era — joca or practical jokes, the restoration of eyes which had been plucked out, and the resurrection of animals — reveals more of a divergence between elite and non-elite attitudes. In these miracles, especially in the joca, a lay conception of the miraculous emerges. These unusual miracles accord with Sainte Foy's identity as a female child. Indeed, due to the combination of her age and her sex, Sainte Foy herself was as anomalous for this period as were her miracles ; very few French patron saints of this era were female and/or children. Bernard labelled these miracles with the term novitas and betrayed his anxiety that they would be diffîcult for his audience to believe. But nonetheless, this learned hagiographer wrote down these miracles tinged with lay conceptions, and accepted them as valid signs of God's power working through the saint. In the Liber and in these aspects of the cult of Sainte Foy, the historian fînds a convergence of elite and popular traditions, rather than a clash between two ineradicably different "cultures".