After much fruitful work on the institutional history of the medieval frontier, scholars interested in the interactions between the corelands of the West and its expanding high-medieval peripheries have devoted increasing attention to the ways in which observers in the Latin-Christian center perceived the edge, how they conceptualized the fringe and the peoples who occupied it.11 For a sample of the range of topics covered and approaches taken in medieval frontier studies, see the essays collected in Robert Bartlett and Angus MacKay, eds., Medieval Frontier Societies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) and, more recently, David Abulafia and Nora Berend, eds., Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). Among the many monograph treatments, see the classic studies on Spain of R.I. Burns, The Crusader Kingdom of Valencia: Reconstruction on a Thirteenth-Century Frontier, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), and Angus MacKay, Spain in the Middle Ages: From Frontier to Empire, 1000–1500 (New York: St. Martin's, 1977), as well as such excellent books of the last decade as Brendan Smith, Colonisation and Conquest in Medieval Ireland: The English in Louth, 1170–1330 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), and Nora Berend, At the Gate of Christendom: Jews, Muslims, and “Pagans” in Medieval Hungary, c. 1000–1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). The broad outlines of this historiography were established by Robert Bartlett's classic 1982 essay “The Face of the Barbarian.”22 Robert Bartlett, Gerald of Wales 1146–1223 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), recently reissued as Gerald of Wales: A Voice of the Middle Ages (Stroud: Tempus, 2006). I refer here to the reprinted version. The essay on the “Face of the Barbarian” is chapter 6 (131–46). In that piece, Bartlett asked what individuals in the Holy Roman Empire, France, and England saw when they looked out at those on the geographical margins of the Western world, most notably Iberia, Celtic Britain, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe. Bartlett's conclusion was that in gazing upon their neighbors, people in the center saw “barbarians.” Analyzing a variety of ethnographic texts from the late eleventh to the early thirteenth centuries, including works by Adam of Bremen, Otto of Freising, Helmold of Bosau, Gunther of Pairis, William of Poitiers, and (most significantly) Gerald of Wales, Bartlett demonstrated that the contours of barbarism were remarkably consistent whether the subjects were Nordic, Slav, Magyar, Welsh, or Irish.33 One might add Iberians too. The portrait summarized by Bartlett was also applied to the Basques and Navarrese in the Codex Calixtinus. See Paula Gerson et al., eds., The Pilgrim's Guide: A Critical Edition (London: Harvey Miller, 1998), 22–32. Though displaying some positive traits, such as martial prowess, hospitality, and a lack of greed, the portrait was overwhelmingly unflattering. Barbarians were economically deficient by virtue of being nomadic or transhumant, as a further result of which they also had peculiar diets based on dairy and meat rather than bread and wine. They were distinguished by their strange dress, weaponry, and family structures. Politically, barbarians were similarly wanting, an evaluation that swung from caricatures of anarchy to those of despotism. Barbarians were also treacherous, failing to keep agreements made with their neighbors. Most luridly perhaps, barbarians were sexually (or at least maritally) deviant. The discourse identified by Bartlett drew in large measure on the Greco-Roman tradition, though this heritage was available to high-medieval writers only in a fragmentary and partial manner. Herodotus, Strabo, and Tacitus are the sources most familiar to modern audiences, but a host of ancient writers turned to ethnography on occasion, including Caesar, Sallust, and Ammianus Marcellinus; collectively they provided a basic stock of analytical categories and specific stereotypes reprised by ethnographers of the “long twelfth century.”44 Bartlett (Gerald of Wales, 144) regarded the high-medieval ethnographers as reinventing the genre essentially without influence from antiquity. And indeed the texts now regarded as classics of ancient anthropology, the History of Herodotus and Tacitus's Germania, were all but unavailable to twelfth- and thirteenth-century authors; Tacitus's work, for instance, survives in a single tenth-century manuscript, though it was not wholly unknown in the Middle Ages, being used directly or indirectly by Rudolf of Fulda and Adam of Bremen (see Roland Schuhmann, “tamquam oder quamquam: Zu Tacitus, Germania, c. 4 und zur Überlieferung der Germania im Mittelalter,” Glossa 79 (2003): 205–23). As Bartlett acknowledges, however, tropes of ancient ethnography would have percolated to the Middle Ages through the work of encyclopedists such as Pliny the Elder, Solinus, and Isidore of Seville (Gerald of Wales, 148). Mommsen's second edition of Solinus's Collectanea (Berlin: Weidmann, 1895), for instance, lists well over fifty manuscripts certainly or probably from before 1200, while Lindsay's edition of Isidore's Etymologiae (Oxford: Clarendon, 1911) was based on three dozen manuscripts from the eighth through tenth centuries alone. Common influence from antiquity would help to account for the relative homogeneity of high-medieval ethnographic accounts. What is more, as in the ancient world, a notion of barbarism generated indelibly by blood and environment helped to justify colonial conquest in the High Middle Ages: the English in Wales and Ireland, for example, as well as German ambitions in Eastern Europe. Bartlett's ideas have helped stimulate a body of research on perceptions of those on the Latin periphery.55 A frequent point of departure is Bartlett's later and now canonical work, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), which examines both perceptions of difference across frontiers and (more thoroughly) the development of an institutional framework for frontier relations. One particularly fruitful direction has been a closer investigation of the role of race and the development of ethnic identities in the High Middle Ages, how these were formulated in the core and projected onto “others,” and how the latter appropriated and reformulated their own sense of self.66 See the essays in the special thematic number of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 (2001), especially Thomas Hahn, “The Difference the Middle Ages Makes: Color and Race before the Modern World” (1–38); Robert Bartlett, “Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity” (39–56); and William Chester Jordan, “Why Race?” (165–73). As these essays make clear, there was a close connection between how observers in the “corelands” of the West understood those “others” within what we now consider Europe and how they perceived those beyond the boundaries of Latin Christendom. Indeed, it is surprising and too easily overlooked that many of the ideas of race and ethnicity that were later applied to “non-Western” peoples were first formulated in the contact between Latin Christendom's corelands and its peripheries. Underappreciated in this discussion has been the role of religion in perceptions of medieval Europe's partes remotae, in no small measure because these regions were themselves at least nominally within the fold of the Latin church. Though Bartlett certainly did not ignore ecclesiastical matters in his work on Europe's internal “barbarians,” the focus on a broad set of biological, social, cultural, and economic criteria as defining medieval gentes and nationes (as Bartlett has put it elsewhere, “descent, language, law, and customs”)77 See Bartlett, “Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity,” 47. has tended to obscure religion as a primary means by which the European fringe was “estranged” in the writings of those in the center. This article will attempt to redress, within limits, the relative lack of discussion of church affairs as an aspect of how writers in the corelands perceived “peoples on the edge.” It will argue that while many of the accounts from the later eleventh to the early thirteenth century dealing with “others” on the periphery consider religion only as a reflection of a more encompassing barbarism, this ethnographic tradition was paralleled by the emergence of what we might term an “ecclesiographic” rhetoric that treated the alien fringe principally as a place of religious deficiency and interpreted the frontier specifically as “pagan space” in need of evangelization, even if those societies were already Christian. A clear example of a people designated as alien through reference to their supposed paganism can be found in discussions of Ireland. The Irish were the subject of much critical scrutiny by writers in the High Middle Ages, especially from the English side. William of Malmesbury and William of Newburgh both slandered the Irish as lazy pastoralists.88 Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 132. The classic and most complete depiction of the island's culture and society, however, comes from Gerald of Wales, whose Topographia Hiberniae might be considered the first full-blown medieval ethnography.99 Following the opinion of Bartlett (Gerald of Wales, 147). Written at the time of Henry II's conquest of Ireland and unabashedly rationalizing English overlordship, the Topographia treats the Irish as a strange race living in a peculiar land. “Orientalizing” his subject, Gerald declared that, just as the East is noteworthy for “certain wonders unique and native to it,” so too should we expect to find “their own natural marvels” in the “western peripheries.”1010 Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernie (Text of the First Recension), ed. John J. O’Meara, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 52.C.4 (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, and Co., 1949), 119. See also later in the text (134–35) where Gerald compares the prodigia occidentalia with the more familiar ones from the Orient. Nature's sport in Ireland included bizarre aspects of the physical world, which found their analog in the oddities of the human inhabitants. Employing conventions reminiscent of ancient ethnography, Gerald called attention to such things as negligent parenting, “uncouth” adornment, unchivalrous warfare, pastoral subsistence, and perverse sexuality.1111 Gerald criticized the Irish for neither swaddling nor bathing their children (Top. Hib., 162) and for their beards and distinctive black-woolen clothing, which rendered them “incultos” (Top. Hib., 162). He also noted that their military methods (including horsemanship, combat, armaments, and fortification) more closely resembled guerilla tactics (Top. Hib., 166, 173). Classically, Gerald commented furthermore that the Irish had failed to follow the usual “order of the human race”“a siluis ad agros, ab agris ad uillas ciuiumque conuictus,” preferring instead to remain a “‘race of the forest’ (gens siluestris) … , living from beasts alone and in a bestial manner,” a people still living as herders despite the fertility of their land (Top. Hib., 163). Regarding Irish sexual practices, Gerald dwells at length on their alleged fondness for bestiality, which included the lurid manner of making kings in Kennelcunill, where the prospective monarch reportedly copulated with a mare and then bathed in a soup made of its flesh, drinking the broth and sharing the meat with his people (Top. Hib., 145–47, 168). The savagery of the Irish was the result, Gerald argued, of their geographical position on the European periphery (in hiis extremitatibus). They were “removed from the normal world as though in a certain other world and so separated from moderate and pleasant peoples,” a geographical accident that only compounded the primitivism inherent in their alleged descent from the equally peripheral and similarly barbarous Basclenses (Basques).1212 On the Irish position on the fringe of the world, removed from civilization, see Gerald, Top. Hib., 163. On their descent from the Basques, see 161. Gerald here reiterates an idea that the peoples of the periphery were somehow interrelated. See, for instance, the Codex Calixtinus, printed most recently as The Pilgrim's Guide: A Critical Edition, ed. Paula Gerson et al., vol. 2 (London: Harvey Miller, 1998). The text includes a scathing account of the Basque and Navarrese peoples, which avers that the “black” Navarrese were descended from the Scots, Nubians, and “Cornish men with tails” (Cornubianos caudatos) (30). And while the Topographia denies that the people of Ireland were wicked by nature, it does claim that because “all their ways are those of barbarism, … they have become steeped in and accustomed to the barbarism in which they were born and raised, and have embraced it as if it were a second nature (alteram naturam).”1313 Gerald, Top. Hib., 163. While Gerald utilized a capacious spectrum of traits to classify the Irish as alien, the failings of the native Celtic church bulked large among the islanders’ deficiencies. Many in Ireland, Gerald claimed, had never even received baptism or proper catechism, a flaw blamed principally on the “negligence” of their clergy, who preferred monastic solitude to pastoral care.1414 Gerald, Top. Hib., 168. Notwithstanding the legacy of Patrick, the Christians of Ireland “are a very filthy race, a race most enveloped in vices.”“Very uncultivated in the rudiments of the faith,” they do not pay tithes, attend church “with owed reverence,” or refrain from incest.1515 Gerald, Top. Hib., 165–66. Meanwhile, they attach tremendous sacral power to bells and croziers associated with the saints, used in a quasi-magical way.1616 Gerald, Top. Hib., 171–72. On the Irish fondness for bells and bachalls, see Lisa M. Bitel, “Tools and Scripts for Cursing in Early and Medieval Ireland,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 51/52 (2006–07), 5–27. As Bitel shows, bells were employed in much the same manner as relics, while staves seem to have functioned on many occasions as holy weapons. In the end, however, church matters play a comparatively minor role in Gerald's ethnography. At the very least, if one accepts Gerald's assessment as a whole, even profound ecclesiastical reform would not be sufficient to eradicate Irish barbarism. Gerald's recitation of Ireland's odious religiosity reads less like a call for change in Celtic Christianity than a further justification for Ireland's subjection to Anglo-Norman lords. This is the implication of a story Gerald tells about his own visit with the archbishop of Cashel. After hearing a papal legate mock his country as a land of confessor-saints lacking to a one the “crown of martyrdom,” the prelate replied that “although our race is exceedingly barbarous, uncivilized, and crude, nevertheless it has always been their custom to show great honor and reverence to ecclesiastical men, and on no occasion to strike against the saints of God. But now a race (gens) has arrived into the realm which is both able and accustomed to make martyrs. Henceforth, Ireland will have martyrs just like other regions.”1717 Gerald, Top. Hib., 171. Gerald's perspective on Irish alterity was, however, not the only one available in the twelfth century. Another rather different notion of Ireland's deviance is contained in Bernard of Clairvaux's Vita of St. Malachy, Archbishop of Armagh, written around 1150–1152. Robert Bartlett included Bernard among those writers who treated Ireland as a barbarous land in the developing language of high-medieval ethnography.1818 Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 139. And indeed, Bernard used much of the same terminology to be found in these other accounts. The French abbot concurred that the Irish were a “barbarous people” (populo barbaro) and a “wild race” (gente fera).1919 The text has been edited by J. Leclercq and H.M. Rochais in Sancti Bernardi Opera, vol. 3 (Tractatus et opuscula) (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1963). On the Irish as barbarous and feral, see chap. 1 and 5. But Bernard's elaboration of what precisely constituted the primitivism of the Irish and his prescription for what should be done about it were quite distinct from that found in the work of Gerald of Wales. Instead of the wide range of cultural, political, economic, and social traits that Gerald would apply to differentiate his subjects from the “civilized” society of the English, we find in the abbot's account a narrower set of features relating to church matters. Thus, while Malachy was said “nowhere to have yet experienced people in such great barbarism” as the Irish, he specifically regarded his countrymen as “wanton when it comes to morals, wild in rites, impious toward the faith, barbarous in terms of laws, obstinate in the face of discipline, foul in manner of life.” They were, he concluded, “Christians in name only, but heathens in fact” (Christiani nomine, re pagani).2020 Bernard, Vita S. Mal., chap. 16. In the Vita Malachiae, therefore, the discourse of barbarism is transformed into one of paganism. Bernard's perceptions deserve further investigation here. It will surely be surprising to anyone with even a passing acquaintance with Ireland's history to hear the island referred to as a pagan country in the twelfth century. Nor was Bernard himself ill-informed. Indeed, he was well aware of the deep tradition of Irish Christianity, particularly its monastic past (which he acknowledged had been influential in the foundation of such Gallic centers as Luxeuil).2121 Bernard, Vita S. Mal., chap. 12. In referring to the Irish as pagans, therefore, Bernard did not of course mean that they were true heathens worshipping gods other than that of the Christians or worshipping Christ alongside other gods. Rather, his diagnosis of Irish savagery was quite specifically their practice of a form of Christianity that he regarded as lacking in rigor. Like Gerald, Bernard thus singled out the failure of the Irish to pay ecclesiastical taxes and the dearth of pastoral care in the country: (They) did not give tithes or first fruits, enter lawful marriage, or make confessions; none at all could be found either to seek or to give penance. Ministers of the altar were few. But what need was there of more where the laity were themselves so lazy? They would not, after all, profit much from their duties among the worthless people. In the churches could be heard neither preaching nor chanting.2222 Bernard, Vita S. Mal., chap. 16. Bernard also pointed to decadence in Irish monasticism.2323 Bernard, Vita S. Mal., chap. 13. But whereas Gerald had suggested that the primitivism of the Irish was tied to their nature, the Vita Malachiae explained the problems in Ireland historically. Bernard noted that the Viking invasions and the “diabolical ambition of certain powerful men” had destroyed the glorious past. Ever since then, he claimed, “church discipline was dissolved throughout the whole of Ireland, censure weakened, religion emptied; savage barbarism everywhere replaced Christian gentleness; a certain paganism (paganismus quidam), indeed, was introduced in the guise of Christianity.”2424 Bernard, Vita S. Mal., chap. 12–13, 19. The discipline lacking in the Irish church was specifically that of Rome. Phrasing the challenge in terms of law, Bernard praised Malachy as a hero who had successfully restored proper Christian order to Ireland. Forging close ties with the papal curia and the monks of Clairvaux, the Irish prelate “sowed the holy seed in a race which was not holy” and “gave the law of life and discipline to a people who were coarse and living without law.”“You might call him a searing flame as he consumed the thorns of crimes, … an axe or a hoe as he cast out wicked plants.” The saint “tore from the roots barbarous rites [and] planted those of the Church.”2525 Bernard, Vita S. Mal., chap. 6. Ridding Ireland of “superstitions,” this “best lawgiver” was said to have replaced “whatever he found disorderly, dishonorable, or twisted,” with “heavenly laws” (iura caelestia), “laws full of righteousness, modesty, and honor,” meaning “the apostolic sanctions and decrees of the holy fathers, especially the customs of the holy Roman church.”2626 Bernard, Vita S. Mal., chap. 7. “Barbaric laws,” Bernard reiterated elsewhere, “were taken away, Roman ones introduced. Ecclesiastical customs are accepted everywhere, contrary ones are rejected.”2727 Bernard, Vita S. Mal., chap. 17. The prior Irish duritia (“obstinacy”) gave way; their barbaries came to a halt as they accepted “reproof” (correptionem) and received disciplinam. In contrast to the Topographia, which prescribed imperial conquest as a remedy for Irish backwardness, Bernard's approach calls for transformation from within. As Diarmuid Scully has noted, Bernard interpreted Malachy as a “second Patrick” who re-enacted the conversion of Ireland, but what needs to be stressed is that the particular conversion here was one explicitly from a form of degenerate (in Bernard's perspective) Christianity labeled as pagan to the reformed “law of the Roman church.”2828 Diarmuid Scully, “Ireland and Irish in Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of Malachy: Representation and Context,” in Ireland and Europe in the Twelfth Century: Reform and Renewal, ed. Damian Bracken and Dagmar Ó Riain-Raedel (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006), 255–56. Malachy thus took pains to institute proper sacramental practice, for which reason he sought out the counsel of Bishop Malchus of Waterford, who had been trained abroad at Winchester and thus presumably knew better the “ritus universalis ecclesiae.”2929 Bernard, Vita S. Mal., chap. 8. When Malachy was handpicked to be the successor of Archbishop Celsus as metropolitan of Armagh, his candidacy was supported by Malchus and another prelate with foreign and more specifically Roman ties, Gilbert, the famous reforming bishop of Limerick and author of the treatise De statu ecclesiae, who also served as native legate of the apostolic see. Significantly, one of Malachy's first acts as archbishop was to plan a trip to Rome to fetch the pallium, the woolen band worn by metropolitan bishops as a sign of their special tie to the papacy3030 See A.S. Popek, The Rights and Obligations of Metropolitans (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1947), 71–72, 298–300. (thus far absent in Ireland), from the pope, without whose authority it seemed nothing could “safely (tute) be put into action.”3131 Bernard, Vita S. Mal., chap. 33. When in Rome, Malachy, reminiscent of another great missionary saint's visit ad limina sanctorum in the eighth century, that of Boniface, toured the holy sites of the city and met with Pope Innocent II, who asked him about conditions in Ireland, apparently an exotic place to the curia. Upon sending Malachy back, the pope demanded that he hold a “general council” of the Irish church in preparation for a formal petition for the pallium.3232 Bernard, Vita S. Mal., chap. 38. According to Bernard, the pope asked Malachy about the “mores gentis, statum ecclesiarum, et quanta in terra Deus per eum (sc. Malachy) operatus fuisset.” Indeed, it was to Malachy that Bernard attributed a revival of synodal activity in the country, the practice having been abandoned previously through “priestly neglect” (negligentia sacerdotum).3333 Bernard, Vita S. Mal., chap. 42. Having held this synod (at Inis Pádraig), Malachy died at Clairvaux while en route to Rome to present the petition and retrieve the pallium. Bernard, it should be pointed out, gives short shrift to earlier reformers in Ireland. Both Maol Muire O Doonan, bishop of Cashel, and Bishop Gilbert of Limerick had previously held councils (in 1101 and 1111, respectively) as papal agents. See John Watt, The Church in Medieval Ireland, 2nd ed. (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1998), 10–12. Naturally, Malachy's top-down Romanizing reforms were, like those of Boniface before him, not welcomed by all and were openly resisted by a populist “wandering bishop” named Nigel, whose power rested not on his link to Rome but on his possession of revered objects he allegedly stole from Armagh, including a staff adorned with gold and jewels and supposedly touched by Jesus.3434 Bernard, Vita S. Mal., chap. 22–25. It is clear that Bernard's “ecclesiographic” discourse of Irish alterity differs in many ways from that offered up by Gerald's anthropological approach, despite some common ground. Most notably, while the Topographia Hiberniae had its ultimate (if not immediate) rhetorical roots in ancient ethnography, the wellsprings of Bernard's treatment of the Irish lie rather in a tradition of missionary literature. Ireland in the Vita Malachiae was a land in need of preaching and proselytizing, a goal to be achieved largely through the agency of native elites cooperating with foreign reformers like the abbot of Clairvaux and the pope in Rome. To understand the otherwise bizarre estimation of the Irish as “pagans,” we should briefly consider some of the key texts in that evangelical tradition. Those tasked with spreading the gospel along the Latin-Christian frontier were not simply concerned with converting heathens to Christianity, but equally (or perhaps even more) with ensuring that Christian populations remained untainted by the old ways, that their Christianity stayed “correct,” a standard defined not narrowly by faith but broadly by rite and morals. The danger presented by (and to) Christians who still thought it acceptable to follow non-Christian customs was identified already in the early fifth century by Augustine in his De rudibus catechizandis. In that treatise, the bishop of Hippo warned new converts that not all Christians followed a truly salvific life. Some were “drunkards, greedy, cheaters, dice-players, adulterers, fornicators, [and] fans of public games.”3535 Augustine, De catechizandis rudibus, ed. I.B. Bauer, Corpus Christianorum, Series latina 46 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1969), chap. 7.11. While not exactly pagan, such people, on account of their actions, merely “are called Christians,” because they ignore the norms of proper conduct of the truly faithful.3636 Augustine, De catechizandis rudibus, chap. 7.11 and 25.48. In the 570s, the (Pannonian-born) Iberian bishop Martin of Braga drew on Augustine's ideas in his own catechetical treatise, De correctione rusticorum. Aiming at an audience far less bookish than Augustine's, the archbishop of Braga's attitude toward conversion was yet more concerned with practice and behavior. While Martin's world still contained pagans, a bigger threat, as J.N. Hillgarth has argued, was that rural Christianity would hew too closely to pre-Christian sensibilities, that “pagani” would evolve not into the truly faithful, but remain “Occasional Conformists.”3737 See J.N. Hillgarth, “Popular Religion in Visigothic Spain,” in Visigothic Spain: New Approaches, ed. Edward James (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 3–60. On pagans as “Occasional Conformists,” see 50. Indeed, while Spain may have had little in the way of overt or organized paganism, it abounded in what must have seemed to learned Romano-Iberian churchmen like the metropolitan of Braga to be a rank undergrowth of wayward religiosities, unlettered rural populations in whose practice might still be found traces of folk belief. In his treatise De correctione rusticorum, tapping a rigorist strain of pastoral care espoused a generation earlier by Caesarius of Arles, Martin attacked heathenism not in order to convert pagans to Christianity, but to “straighten out” the ignorant baptized who failed to grasp that their new “pact with God” implied more than the mere acceptance of basic Christian belief.3838 Martin of Br