Vindictive virgins: animate images and theories of art in some thirteenth-century miracle stories

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This paper was presented, in an earlier form, on a panel dedicated to animate images chaired by Dr. Jacqueline Jung at the 40th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May, 2005. I thank Dr. Jung, the other panelists, and audience members for their useful input. Dr. Vibeke Olsen generously gave of her time in reading and commenting on a draft of the paper. Also deserving of thanks is Courtney Hill, Undergraduate Research Fellow at Utah State University, who provided assistance in the early stages of research. I received generous institutional support for this project from the Art Department, the Women and Gender Research Institute, and the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Utah State University. Notes 1 – Notably, Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 2 – This point is raised (in relation to post-Iconoclastic art theory in Byzantium) by Charles Barber, ‘From Image into Art: Art after Byzantine Iconoclasm,’ Gesta, 34/1 (1995), 5–10. 3 – The Gregorian dictum that ‘pictures are the books of the illiterate’ became one of the most widely propagated and intentionally misconstrued apologetics for the image in the medieval west, as Celia Chazelle demonstrated in her article, ‘Pictures, Books, and the Illiterate: Pope Gregory I's Letters to Serenus of Marseilles,’ Word & Image, 6 (1990), 138–53. Lawrence Duggan (‘Was Art Really the “Book of the Illiterate”?’ Word & Image, 5 (1989), 227–51) also explored the disingenuousness with which medieval authors employed this trope. Conrad Rudolph noted that Bernard's view of the role of art in the instruction of illiterates was absolutely orthodox in this respect, and that he viewed this as the purview of the secular clergy (Things of Greater Importance: Bernard of Clairvaux's Apologia and the Medieval Attitude Toward Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 50–4, 194–5). Jeffrey Hamburger observed that ‘Women have historically been regarded as one of the primary, even formative audiences for devotional art, so it comes as a surprise that devotional imagery has never been adequately analyzed in terms of gender,’ a shortfall his own work has done much to address (‘Introduction: Texts Versus Images: Female Spirituality from an Art Historian's Perspective,’ in The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 15). 4 – Miracle collections abounded between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, and were often tied to a specific shrine, though in the case of Mary, a more geographically decentralized literature of miracles emerged over the last decades of the twelfth century, as discussed by Benedicta Ward in Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record, and Event, 1000–1215, revised edition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 132–3, in passim; in the course of the thirteenth century, these collections became more generalized with a view to use as exempla in sermons. A cogent discussion of this shift and of its causes is found in Marcus Bull, The Miracles of Our Lady of Rocamadour: Analysis and Translation (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1999), 8–10. 5 – On the relationship between the Mendicant orders and the development of the exemplum collections intended for the use of preachers, see David D'Avray, The Preaching of the Friars: Sermons Diffused from Paris Before 1300 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 90–131. 6 – Caesarius of Heisterbach, Caesarii Heisterbacensis monachi ordinis Cisterciensis Dialogus miraculorum [Textum ad quatuor codicum manuscriptorum editionisque principis fidem accurate recognovit Josephus Strange] 2 volumes (Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg Press, 1966; reprint of Cologne, Bonn, Brussels: S.M. Heberle, 1851); English edition, The Dialogue on Miracles by Caesarius of Heisterbach, trans. H. von E. Scott and C. C. Swinton Bland, with an introduction by G. G. Coulton (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1929); Gautier de Coinci, Les Miracles de Nostre Dame, 2 volumes, ed. V. Frederic Koenig (Geneva: Droz, 1955–1966); no English translation exists; Gonzalo de Berceo, Milagros de Nuestra Señora, 3rd edition, ed. Vicente Beltrán (Barcelona: Planeta, 1990); English edition, Miracles of Our Lady, ed. and trans. Richard Terry Mount and Annette Grant Cash (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1997); Jacobi a Voragine, Legenda aurea 2nd edition, ed. Giovanni Paolo Maggioni (Firenze: Tavarnuzze, 1988); English version The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, ed. and trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Alfonso X, o Sábio, Cantigas de Santa Maria, 4 volumes, ed. Walter Mettmann (Madrid: Coimbra, 1959–1972); English edition, Songs of Holy Mary of Alfonso X: A Translation of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, ed. and trans. Kathleen Kulp-Hill, with an introduction by Connie Scarborough (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000). 7 – The study of the miracle literature constitutes a discipline of its own, with an extensive critical apparatus. Albert Poncelet, ‘Index miraculorum B.V. Mariae quae saec. VI–XV latine conscripta sunt,’ Analecta Bollandiana, 21 (1902), 242–360, lists incipits of miracles of the Virgin found in many of the major Latin collections from the twelfth through fifteenth centuries. Tubach's Index Exemplorum catalogs known narrative types used in medieval collections of exempla (didactic stories) for preachers and is used as an indexing tool to cross-reference miracles found in multiple collections. A recent project sponsored by the British Academy and hosted by Oxford University focuses on the Cantigas de Santa Maria, but, according to its organizers, ‘will eventually contain all Latin and vernacular miracle collections associated with the CSM miracle stories, as well as cycles of miracles associated with particular shrines’ (The Oxford Cantigas de Santa Maria Database, URL http://csm.mml.ox.ac.uk/index.php?p=collections_list, accessed 10 July 2008). Numerous critical studies on the Marian miracle tradition exist, ranging from monographs on single authors, such as Gautier de Coinci, to textual studies of individual miracles, to thematic investigations of parts of or the entire corpus: for a bibliography, see Anne McCormick, ‘Imaging sex: The body and gender in Virgin Mary miracle tales of thirteenth century Spain and France,’ doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley (1996), 208–31. 8 – The literature on the rise of Marian devotion is vast, but a critical source is Hilda Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion, vol. I (London: Sheed and Ward, 1985), 210–64. Also see Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven: Yale, 1988), 125–6, in passim. For development of Marian imagery in the visual and literary arts, see Penny Schine Gold, The Lady and the Virgin: Image, Attitude, and Experience in Twelfth-Century France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). More recently, Margot Fassler has provided a long view of the emergence of Marian devotion as part of the liturgy, and as a stimulus for visual responses: ‘Mary's Nativity, Fulbert of Chartres, and the Stirps Jesse: Liturgical Innovation Around 1000 and its Afterlife,’ Speculum 75 (2000), 389–434. Rachel Fulton's contribution, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), provides important reassessment of the development of Marian devotion in terms of Mary's salvific and empathetic rather than exemplary and maternal role. 9 – Fulton, 204–43. 10 – Carolyn Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1982), 137. 11 – On the dating and authorship of this antiphon, see Jose Maria Canal, Salve Regina Misericordiae. Historia y leyendas en torno a esta antifona (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1963). 12 – Both examples occur in numerous compilations of miracles and exempla. See Frederic Tubach, Index Exemplorum: A Handbook of Medieval Religious Tales (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1969), index numbers 536 (appears in 18 distinct texts), 3572 (22 texts), respectively. 13 – Caesarius of Heisterbach, The Dialogue on Miracles, vol. I, 525–6. This is Poncelet no. 755. The Latin is found in the Dialogus miraculorum, vol. I, distinctio VII, capitulum XLIV, 62–3. 14 – This visual argument is spelled out most explicitly in the south tympanum of the west façade at Chartres, where the body of Christ in the Nativity scene in the lowest register, in the Presentation in the Temple in the middle register, and on the lap of the Virgin in the upper register underscores the Incarnation and the role of Mary's body as a vessel or seat for the Incarnate Word. See Adolf Katzenellenbogen, The Sculptural Programs of Chartres Cathedral (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1959), 8–12. 15 – Ilene Forsyth, The Throne of Wisdom: Wood Sculptures of the Madonna in Romanesque France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 31–60. 16 – Forsyth, 144, 185 (fig. 143). 17 – Forsyth, 131. 18 – For example, when Lancelot, in Le Chevalier de la Charrette (ca. 1170), finds an ivory comb with some hairs from the head of Guinevere, they are described as light and filled with light ‘si clers et si luisanz’ v. 1415). Chrétien de Troyes, Romans, ed. Charles Mela (Paris: Libraire Générale Française, 1994), 540. When Le Comte de la Marche (ca. 1250) praises the beauty of his beloved in a lyric that begins ‘You are like rubies and other precious stones,’ he speaks of the freshness and high color of her complexion. ‘Je me merveille/de la color tant fresche et tant vermeille’ (v. 13–14, Tout autresi comme li rubiz), Anthologie de la poésie lyrique française des XIIe et XIIIe siècles, ed. Jean Dufournet (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 244. 19 – Respectively: Metropolitan Museum 16.32.194 and Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe 1893.199. The Hamburg Madonna is illustrated in Images in Ivory: Precious Objects of the Gothic Age, ed. Peter Barnett (Detroit: Detroit Institute for the Arts, 1997), cat. 1, 116–7. 20 – Conrad Rudolph, The ‘Things of Greater Importance,’ 50–4, 63–9, 110–24. 21 – See note 3, above. 22 – Bernard of Clairvaux, Homilies in Praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary, trans. Marie-Bernard Saöd (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1993), Homily II.2, 16. The translation is based on the authoritative Latin edition by Jean Leclerq and H. Rochais: Sancti Bernardi Opera, IV (Rome: Editiones cistercienses, 1966), 13–58. 23 – For the relationship between chansons courtoise and chansons mariales, see Pierre Bec, La Lyrique Française au Moyen Age: contribution à une typologie des genres poétiques médioevaux, I: etudes (Centre d’études supérieures de civilisation médiévale de l'Université de Poitiers, 6) (Paris: A. et J. Picard, 1977) 143. 24 – ‘Rose fresche et clere … nete et pure et sainne,’ Gautier de Coinci, Les Miracles de Nostre Dame, ed. V. Frederic Koenig, vol. 1 (Geneva: Droz, 1966), I Chanson V.III.73, 78, 35, my translation. 25 – Most recently, Daniel E. O'Sullivan, ‘Marian devotion in medieval French literature: In and beyond the world of lyric,’ dissertation, Boston College, 2000. 26 – G.R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1933), 18. 27 – The anthropologist J.L. Austin first theorized speech as active (rather than simply reflective or descriptive), and following this model, Liza Bakewell has developed a theory of images as acts (rather than simply representations) which seems a fertile characterization in light of the apparent agency of images in the context of medieval Christianity. See, Liza Bakewell, ‘Image acts,’ American Anthropologist, 100.1 (March, 1998), 22. 28 – This is Poncelet number 168, Tubach number 5152. Alfonso X of Castile and Leon, Cantigas de Santa Maria, ed. Jesús Montoya (Madrid: Cátedra, 1988), no. 38. Translation: Songs of Holy Mary of Alfonso X, The Wise: A Translation of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, trans. Kathleen Kulp-Hill (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000), 51. 29 – The Cantigas date to the second half of the thirteenth century, but contain many episodes that are attested in earlier literature. 30 – Alfonso X of Castile and Leon, Songs of Holy Mary, 51–2. 31 – For anti-Semitism and the representation of Jews in the CSM, see Dwayne Carpenter, ‘Social Perception and Literary Portrayal: Jews and Muslims in Medieval Spanish Literature,’ in Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain, ed. V. B. Mann, et al. (New York: Brazillier/The Jewish Museum, 1992), 61–87. The same author identifies Jewish disparagement of the Virgin as one of the major themes in the CSM narratives that deal with Jewish characters: see, ‘The portrayal of the Jew in Alfonso the learned's Cantigas de Santa Maria,’ in In Iberia and beyond: Hispanic Jews between cultures, ed. Bernard D. Cooperman (Newark/London: Associated University Presses, 1998), 15–42, esp. 16. Further bibliography on the anti-Semitic arguments of the CSM is discussed by Eva Frojmovic, ‘Messianic Politics in Re-Christianized Spain: Images of the Sanctuary in Hebrew Bible Manuscripts,’ in Imagining the Self, Imagining the Other: Visual Representation and Jewish-Christian Dynamics in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, ed. E. Frojmovic (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 120–1, note 66. 32 – Ovid, Metamorphoses, books 1–5, ed. William Anderson (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), book 3, lines 155–253, 91–4. On Ovid's currency among educated readers in the later Middle Ages, see Jeremy Dimmick, ‘Ovid in the Middle Ages: Authority and Poetry,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 264–87. 33 – The Virgin's breasts — and indeed breasts more generally — were a subject of much devotional rumination. See, for example, Margaret R. Miles, ‘The Virgin's One Bare Breast: Female Nudity and Religious Meaning in Tuscan Early Renaissance Culture,’ in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge, MA, and London: 1985 and 1986), 193–208; Carolyn Walker Bynum ‘Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother,’ in Jesus as Mother: Studies in Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: 1982), 110–69). 34 – Belting, 432. 35 – Summa Theologia I 5, 4 ad. 1 36 – Even Roger Bacon's Perspectiva concludes with a rationale for the optical theory's utility to contemplation of the divine, as Dallas Denery II discusses in Seeing and Being Seen in the Later Medieval World: Optics, Theology and Religious Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 6. Suzannah Biernoff writes, ‘Sight, as it was defined by Bacon and his contemporaries, offered a means of communion that exceeds Belting's model of “communication’ or ‘dialogue.” The visual relationship — more than any other sensory interaction — allowed for bodily participation in the divine.’ (Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 134.) 37 – Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, trans. Hugh Bredin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), 71. 38 – The Virgin's gaze as a transgressive example of active female viewing is addressed by Sarah Stanbury, ‘The Virgin's Gaze: Spectacle and Transgression in Middle English Lyrics of the Passion,’ PMLA, 106, no. 5 (1991), 1083–93. 39 – Poncelet number 804; English version, Dialogue on the Miracles, 500–1; Latin, Dialogus Miraculorum, book VII, capitulum 33, 41–2. 40 – Caesarius, Dialogue on Miracles, 501; for the Latin, Dialogus Miraculorum, 42. 41 – The notion of the gaze as a violent instrument has been most fully theorized and explored in the context of feminist film studies, building on discussions of violence and rhetoric by Levinas, Lacan, and Derrida. The classic essay is Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ Screen 16.3 (1975), 6–18, reprinted in Feminism and Film Theory, ed. Constance Penley (New York: Routledge, 1988), 57–68. Mulvey, however, never uses this specific phrase. For a concise summary of arguments pertaining to idea of ‘the violence of the gaze,’ see C. Nadia Serematkis, ‘Intersection: Benjamin, Bloch, Braudel, beyond,’ in The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity, ed. C. Nadia Serematkis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 57. 42 – Sarah Stanbury, ‘The Virgin's Gaze,’ 1091. 43 – Caesarius, Dialogus miraculorum, book VII, capitulum XLV, 64–5. A similar tale is found in the Cantigas, no. 76, and was also included in Jacobus of Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, vol. 2, trans. W.G. Ryan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 155. 44 – The miracle of the knight spared humiliation has several variations, cataloged by Poncelet at nos. 727, 1087, 1443; the miracle of the Virgin of Chincolla is found only in the CSM, where it is miracle no.185 (Oxford CSM Database, http://csm.mml.ox.ac.uk/index.php?p=poemdata_view&rec=185, accessed 15 July 2008). 45 – The Theophilus miracle is Poncelet no. 74/75. ‘Douce Dame … de doucheur fontaine et ruissiaus,’ Adam de la Halle, ‘Gloröeuse Vierge Marie’ line 19–20. Anthologie de la poésie lyrique française des XIIe et XIIIe siècle, ed. Jean Dufournet (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 292. 46 – Michael Cothren, ‘The Iconography of Theophilus Windows in the First Half of the Thirteenth Century,’ Speculum, 59.2 (1994), 310–1, Appendices A and B. 47 – The restriction of subjectivity by the language of the courtly love is widely discussed in literary criticism. For an excellent and critical overview of the scholarship and bibliography, see E. Jane Burns, ‘Courtly Love: Who Needs it? Recent Feminist Work in the Medieval French Tradition,’ Signs, 27 (2001), 23–57. Naomi Wolf's characterization of later-medieval love poetry as silencing women ‘by taking them beautifully apart,’ also relates to the scopic delights of both the courtly lyric and the visual representation of the Virgin (The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women (London: Vintage, 1991), 59). 48 – New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, M. 729 fol. 232v. The miniature is widely reproduced, most recently in color on the cover of Roger Wieck, Painted Prayers: The Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art (New York: George Braziller, 1999). A full-page reproduction is also available in L'art au temps des rois maudits: Philippe le Bel et ses fils, 1285–1328: Paris, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, 17 mars-29 juin 1998 (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1998), cat. no. 202, 299. 49 – Paris, Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, ms. 6329, fol. 1v. The miniature is reproduced in L'art au temps des rois maudits, cat. no. 205, 304.