Download PDF | Anna Taylor - Epic Lives and Monasticism in the Middle Ages, 800-1050-Cambridge University Press (2013).
348 Pages
This is the first book to focus on Latin epic verse saints’ lives in their medieval historical contexts. Anna Lisa Taylor examines how these works promoted bonds of friendship and expressed rivalries among writers, monasteries, saints, earthly patrons, teachers, and students in Western Europe in the Central Middle Ages. Using philological, codicological, and microhistorical approaches, Professor Taylor reveals new insights that will reshape our understanding of monasticism, patronage, and education. These texts give historians an unprecedented glimpse inside the early medieval classroom, provide a nuanced view of the complicated synthesis of the Christian and Classical heritages, and show the cultural importance and varied functions of poetic composition in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. Anna Lisa Taylor is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Acknowledgments
The research for this book began as a dissertation at the University of Texas at Austin, and was supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Bibliography Society, the Medieval Academy, the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library, a Dora Bonham Award, and a Harrington Fellowship. The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, provided a publication subvention.
My research would have been impossible without access to the manuscripts. I therefore thank the librarians and archivists at the Bibliothéque nationale de France at Richelieu, the Bibliothéque municipale de Valenciennes, the Bibliothéque municipale de Rouen, the Bibliothéque municipale de Saint-Omer, the Bibliothéque municipale de Boulogne-SurMer, the Archives départementales du Nord, the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes, the Bibliothéque royale de Belgique, the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, and the Bodleian library. Particular thanks go to Jean Vilban, of the Bibliothéque Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, who was exceptionally generous with his time and expertise. Jim Kelly of the University of Massachusetts was very helpful in acquiring research materials.
Many scholars lent assistance to this project. Jean Oblin showed great kindness in guiding me through Marchiennes and Hamage and in sharing his immense local knowledge, which transformed my understanding of the relations between those houses.
I owe much gratitude to all those who provided feedback on written drafts and on presentations of the material (all errors are entirely my own). Foremost are my two incomparable dissertation advisors and patronae, Alison Frazier and Martha Newman. They shaped the project and dissected it in the best possible ways, challenging me to think differently about the material and my arguments, while also giving me the necessary confidence to proceed. I cannot possibly repay their care and concern, nor can I hope to ever be such a great mentor to my own students. The book would have been impossible without them, and their influence is present on every page.
The project benefited at its formative stages from the best dissertation committee ever, Jennifer Ebbeler, Brian Levack, and Marjorie Woods. I owe special thanks to Jennifer Heuer, who read multiple versions of every chapter and provided extensive feedback at every stage. Brian Ogilvie read chapters and helped me navigate all aspects of publication. I profited from conversations on hagiography and monasticism with Felice Lifshitz, who also allowed me to read her dissertation, and Thomas Head. Scott Bruce was extremely generous with his time, providing detailed comments on the manuscript and saving me from numerous errors. Elizabeth Brown kindly shared her unpublished work on Saint-Denis. Thomas Noble made constructive suggestions in response to my work on Hilduin. Anna Grotans and the anonymous reader for the Cambridge University Press provided numerous helpful criticisms and suggestions.
In addition, I wish to thank the other scholars and long-suffering civilians who have supported my academic life more generally. I have had a series of wonderful mentors: Suzanne Dixon, Lisa Kallet, Paula Perlman, and Sabine MacCormack, who is much missed. I have been fortunate in my colleagues including Keith Bradley, Katy Schlegel, Audrey Altstadt, Joye Bowman, Anne Broadbridge, Jenny Adams, Robert Sullivan, Jon Olsen, Jennifer Fronc, and Carlin Barton. My students at UMass were a constant source of sanity and good humor (thank you especially to the Monsters — Amy, Brittany, Chris, Elyse, Jim, Lauren, Meghan, and Nick). Amanda provided indispensable moral support and sandwiches, and forced me to write the first draft. Meli and her clan were my second family all these years. Al was the best.
Most of all I wish to thank my parents, Elizabeth and Bruce. In appreciation of their unremitting enthusiasm for and encouragement of my intellectual life, this book is dedicated to them, with much love.
Introduction: Saints, Princes, Teachers, and Students
Milo, the ninth-century poet and monk of Saint-Amand-les-Eaux, shuffles sideways into the frame of a miniature to present an unbound booklet to a larger (and therefore more powerful) seated figure, his teacher Haimin, a monk of Saint-Vaast (Figure 1)." Haimin reaches for the work with his left hand and raises his right in benediction. The front of the booklet bears the first words of Milo’s Vita Amandi, composed around 845-855.” Written in almost 2,000 lines of epic dactylic hexameter, the poem recasts the seventh-century prose life of the monastery’s founding saint into a much longer, more elaborate work.’ This full-page miniature, from the codex Valenciennes, Bibliothéque municipale, MS 502 (produced at SaintAmand between 1066 and 1107) is the visual counterpart to the letter in which Milo dedicates the Vita Amandi to Haimin.* Milo, ina stereotypical profession of humility, asks Haimin to correct his epic poem.
The full-page miniature on the folio’s verso shows Milo receiving his work back (Figure 2). In contrast to his obsequious demeanor in the previous image, Milo breezes into the room. Haimin looks up from the parchment on which he is writing (presumably his reply to Milo) to hand back the Vita Amandi. Each monk has a hand on the pamphlet, which is open toward the viewer, inviting him or her to read the Vita Amandi that follows.> Rubricated capitals that begin beneath the miniature read “the Life of Saint Amand transformed from prose speech into heroic song,” that is, epic meter.° This miniature corresponds to Haimin’s response to Milo, in which he says that after he had judged the vita to be doctrinally sound, metrically correct, and eloquent:
I showed the brothers who are with me how this whole stream should be navigated... . IT urge our brothers who do not shrink from such studies to freely take up this work and I beseech them so that they might be goaded to a similar pursuit rather than inflamed by the torches of jealousy.”
This exchange reflects the pedagogical context of epic saints’ vitae. Milo cast his epic as one of the praeexercitamina, the composition exercises undertaken by a student advanced in language arts. Haimin responded that he read the vita with others and encouraged them to emulate it.* Epic vitae were read in the monastic classroom and composed as a result of this education. The earliest manuscript of Milo’s Vita Amandi, very different from this luxury codex, is a ninth-century schoolbook.?
The other images framing Milo’s Vita Amandi in Valenciennes, BM, MS 502 indicate other contexts and functions of epic vitae. Another fullpage miniature shows a monk presenting a bound codex to a large, crowned, and seated individual (Figure 3). This man is the work’s second dedicatee, Charles the Bald, and the monk is Milo’s student Hucbald, who, after his teacher’s death in 872, sent the Vita Amandi to the emperor.*° Charles inclines his head toward Hucbald and reaches out his left hand for the Vita Amandi. His right hand is raised, holding a small scepter. The artist connects the dedications to Haimin and Charles by using almost identical composition for both scenes. The image corresponds to the acrostic poems with which Hucbald addresses the Vita Amandi to Charles, redeploying it to impress the abbey’s most important patron."' The twin dedications, to a teacher and to the emperor, point to two contexts of the epic lives, pedagogy and patronage, which were closely related in this case, because Milo had taught two of Charles’s sons at SaintAmand."* Similarly, Heiric of Saint-Germain in Auxerre had written his epic Vita Germani at the request of his student, Charles’s son Lothar, before sending it to the emperor.’?
A half-page miniature of the monk Vulfaius follows the text of Milo’s Vita Amandi (Figure 4). The nimbed figure sits at a writing desk in an elaborate architectural setting reminiscent of Carolingian evangelist portraits.** Like the depiction of Charles the Bald, the image invokes SaintAmand’s ninth-century golden age. In his right hand, Vulfaius holds a quill; in his left, a scraper. He writes on parchment, composing his versiculi (little verses) in response to Milo’s vita. His eyes rest on an open codex representing Milo’s work. His versiculi are copied in the miniature (Figure 4).
The portrait of Vulfaius, the only figure represented alone with a copy of Milo’s Vita Amandi, points to another function of epic lives, as the objects of solitary devotional reading. By showing this reader’s poetic response, the artist emphasizes the dynamic aspect of the vita; as Haimin says, an epic life could spur readers to compose their own works.'* Read intensively in the classroom, guided reading, or private meditation, they could inspire new compositions, such as Vulfaius’s verses or other epic vitae.
The four miniatures that frame Milo’s epic vita depict the work’s exchange and reception. The artist represents a book containing the epic vita four times (twice open and twice closed), its author twice, and its readers (Haimin, Charles, and Vulfaius) a total of four times. By contrast, all but one of the thirty-two miniatures accompanying the prose Vita Amandi in the same codex show the saint’s deeds. The single depiction of a book of the prose Vita Amandi is static; in Baudemund’s author portrait, the vita is nearly closed and he holds his pen aloft (Figure 5).'° In each of the images accompanying the epic vita, the work is central to the action: in three instances, it is being exchanged between men of unequal status (a student and a teacher or a monk and an emperor), and in the fourth, it is being read and inspiring new verse. Like the written materials transmitted with this copy of Milo’s Vita Amandi (Hucbald’s acrostics, the correspondence of Milo and Haimin, Vulfaius’s versiculi), the epic’s pictorial program emphasizes the poem not the saint.'7 As Rosamond McKitterick has shown, “representations of books in Carolingian book illuminations ... stress the power of the written word and by implication those who controlled and produced books.”'* By choosing to represent the epic vita, the artist signaled its importance. McKitterick has argued that elites defined themselves by their use of the written word. In this case, the epic poem — learned and difficult, requiring considerable education to read or write — was a particularly apposite way for the hypereducated elite to constitute their identity and relations.
The pictorial emphasis on the uses of Milo’s text demonstrates the importance of epic vitae for monasteries in western Francia during the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. By writing, reading, emulating, excerpting, teaching, memorizing, and exchanging these works, monks (and sometimes nuns and canons) created and perpetuated “textual communities” characterized by the use of erudite saints’ lives written in epic Latin verse.'? By depicting three generations of teachers and students (Haimin, Milo, and Hucbald), the illustrations indicate the importance of epic vitae in educating monks and creating a community of scholars. Showing Milo’s Vita Amandi as a physical object that changes hands, the pictures also point to how the exchange of these works created and cemented bonds of amicitia — friendship and patronage — with important figures outside the monastery. The manuscript itself — a lavish collection of works on Saint Amand made for the abbey and probably kept on the altar — points to another function of the epic life; it glorified the saint.*° In return for homage, poets could hope to attain the heavenly patron’s intercession in their own salvation."
None of these individual functions was unique to epic vitae — various works glorified saints, inveigled patrons, and challenged students — but the precise combination of features and purposes was distinct and significant. Of particular importance was the combination of saintly subject with epic form. During the Central Middle Ages (ca. 800-1100), a church’s patron saints, manifest in their relics, were its main source of influence and revenue.~* Texts, rituals, art, and architecture could all convey the saint’s power and narrative to patrons, adversaries, and pilgrims. The epic vita was a particular way of promoting the saint. Poetry was central to medieval grammar education, and epic was its most prestigious form. Virgil’s Aeneid — the ultimate model for the vitae — was the central school text, making epic saints’ lives the quintessential expression of the synthesis of pagan and Christian culture that underlay the Carolingian Renaissance.
By combining the virtus of their patron saints with the cachet of epic, poets imbued their works with celestial and worldly authority and combined two potent forms of spiritual and cultural capital. Accordingly, epic vitae possessed a set of meanings and social functions distinct from their prose counterparts and from other kinds of poetry. In order to show the significance of the epic vitae, I will return to the functions indicated by the images in Valenciennes, BM, MS 502, before suggesting reasons for the scholarly neglect of these sources. Finally, I discuss the sources and features of epic vitae.
THE USES OF EPIC VITAE
Epic vitae were integral to the culture of Carolingian monasteries and, from the tenth century, Ottonian and Capetian cathedral schools. These institutions educated most of the age’s leading churchmen, courtiers, and writers. Children of the lay elite as well as oblates and future clerics attended these schools. Emperors used them to house superfluous heirs. Monasteries and cathedral schools produced courtiers, reformers, diplomats, and bishops. Accordingly, the readers and writers of epic lives belonged to networks of friendship and patronage that included kings, princes, and bishops.
Epic vitae were read in the classroom. Poems, both Classical and Christian, provided the fundamental curriculum texts, and verse composition represented the apex of learning in monastic and cathedral classrooms of the Central Middle Ages.** From antiquity, epic was considered to be the most authoritative form of poetry.** The epic vita, read in the classroom, could combine the abbey’s institutional history and an edifying exemplum with many of the features that made Classical epic so useful for teaching. Further, the pleasures of poetry meant that readers would return to and remember it. Laid down in the memory at a formative age, poetry provided ideas and language for the reader to draw on later. In his letter to Macedonius, Sedulius, author of the Paschale carmen (ca. first half of the fifth century), explains his rationale for composing epic Christian verse:*°
I will not refuse, however, to briefly explain why I wished to write according to metrical rules. Rarely, best of fathers, just as your experience of reading also knows from diligent practice, has anyone shaped the gifts of divine power into song, and there are many who delight instead in the study of worldly pursuits due to its poetic decorations and the pleasures of songs. They read over whatever has rhetorical charm, but they pursue it [Scripture] more neglectfully since they do not love it at all. Any verses they have seen, however, sweetened with charm, they take up with such heartfelt enthusiasm, that by going over these things more often, they store them deep in their memory and repeat them.*
This passage abounds in terms for pleasure (deliciae, voluptates, facundia), emphasizing the allure of verse. Sacred literature, sweetened with poetic charm (blandimento mellitum), could lure those who normally rejected Scripture into reading Christian texts avidly and often.*7
Epic vitae were written in a classroom milieu. Advanced students learned and practiced verse composition and could embark on writing an epic life as a kind of “qualifying examination.”** The ability to compose poetry was a mark of education and, accordingly, moral worth.*? Because epic verse was the most revered form, its composition spoke most highly of the poet’s intellect, culture, and training.*°
The reading and writing of epic lives as part of the curriculum helped define not only individual houses but also wider “textual communities,” which shared a literary inheritance and modes of interpretation.** We will see that these communities were constituted by an education that allowed writers and readers to engage in recondite games of allusion and intertext.
As the pinnacle of studies, poetry was the elite language of amicitia.>* The exchange of poetry for patronage dated to antiquity. There are numerous examples of poets courting favor through their song.** Poetry, writes Hibernicus Exul at Charlemagne’s court, is a gift for kings, superior to the gold, gems, horses, and finery given by the world’s most important men.** It will last “as long as the stars turn in the sky.”*° In return for the gift of literature (and other services as a courtier), the writer could acquire the power and status that came from close contact with the ruler, and perhaps offices and benefices. Dudo of Saint-Quentin lays bare this exchange of literature and reward within the framework of amicitia. In the preface to his prosimetric history of the Normans (which draws on epic saints’ lives),?° he describes a conversation with his benefactor, the Norman Duke Richard I:
Two years before his death, I was with that outstanding duke, Richard, son of Count William [Longsword], as was my custom, and I wanted to return the duty of my service (meae servitutis officium) to him, because of the countless acts of generosity (beneficia), he had bestowed on me, from no merit on my part... . Ona certain day, when we were walking, he began to embrace me with the arms of most pious love and to persuade me with the sweetest words and to soften me with pleasant imprecations ... to [record] the customs and deeds of the Norman land, particularly of his own forbear Rollo, who established the laws in the kingdom.*”
Dudo describes his work as an act of caritas toward his benevolent employer. He does not present the exchange of beneficia for literature as a cynical transaction, but couches it in the language of affection.3*
Epic lives, as an ideal currency in this economy of patronage, were often dedicated to kings and bishops.*? Heiric quotes a letter in which the bishop Aunarius asks the presbyter Stephen to compose an epic vita of Germanus on account of their amicitia.*° Heiric transmits their correspondence in his letter dedicating his own epic Vita Germani to Charles the Bald.** Heiric explains that because Prince Lothar, who had requested the work, had died before its completion, he had sent the epic to Lothar’s father Charles. Heiric creates a flattering fiction in which the patron is part of the intellectual community. He depicts Charles as the pinnacle (culmen ac fastigium) of the arts, a philosopher king who single-handedly keeps learning alive and flourishing throughout his realm. The Vita Germani was a gratifying gift, implying that the recipient could appreciate its abstract and metrically diverse prefatory poems, its theology drawn from Eriugena, and its use of Greek. In the case of Charles, educated at court by Walafrid Strabo (who was author of two epic saints’ lives), this was not implausible.**
Nonetheless, the dedication reflected Charles’s cultural patronage, rather than the violent realities of his reign. Heiric locates the gift of the vita in an imaginary realm, a republic (respublica) of letters ruled over by a merciful ruler: “many are the monuments of your clemency, many the symbols of your piety.”*? In Heiric’s formulation, the palace could “deservedly be called a school” (merito vocitetur scola palatium).** Because Charles, emulating his grandfather Charlemagne’s zeal, has brought about this republic, all its literary ornaments redound to his glory.*°
The epic vita was a gift not only for the earthly benefactor, but for the heavenly patron, the saint, who is asked to intercede for the poet’s salvation. Milo presents his epic vita as a festal offering to “noster patronus” Amand and himself as the saint’s suppliant (supplex).*° Similarly, acentury and a half later, Johannes addresses Amand as “alme patrone” (nurturing patron).
Poetry was also the preeminent language of rivalry, and competitive verse took many forms.** A struggle between rival epic poets informs the context of the monk Ermenric’s mid-ninth-century letter and, I argue, competition among local abbeys prompted the production of the epic Vita Eusebiae, just as it motivated the writing of prose and epic vitae at the abbeys of Ghent (Saint-Bavo and Blandin) and those of Sithiu (SaintOmer and Saint-Bertin).*?
Epic vitae were also used for private devotional reading. Bede sent his verse vita of Cuthbert to a friend to lighten his journey.°° Alcuin explains the purposes of his prose and epic lives of Saint Willibrord (written between 785 and 797):
I arranged two little books, one going along in prose speech, which could be read publicly to the brothers in the church ... the other running along with a Pierian [metric] foot, which should be meditated on by only your learned men in their solitary little room.
The verb ruminare (to ruminate, chew over) and the location in secreto cubili show that the epic life was intended for private meditative reading.°* As we will see, epic lives, with their difficult language and dense allusion, were particularly suited to this kind of intensive study.
INVISIBLE EPIC
Despite the cultural importance of epic vitae, historians have largely ignored them. Their saintly subject matter and poetic form — the factors that made them so compelling to their writers and readers — have led to modern neglect. Positivist historians of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries defined texts about saints as “hagiography” and either dismissed them or raided them for plausible-sounding details.°> Later redactions were considered useless. During the last four decades, however, scholars have rehabilitated rewritings. As Felice Lifshitz has observed,
A critical trend has been to move away from bobbing for data to reconstructing mentalities and, consequently, to move from searching for the original version of each particular saint’s biography to studying all extant versions, each in its particular compositional context. Instead of seeing “legendary accretions” as dross to be sifted and cleared away, scholars have seen transformations ina saint’s character as crucial indicators of many different sorts of changes over time.**
Historians have explored how reinterpretations (along with rituals, art, and architecture) served writers, patrons, and institutions. Stories about saints enhanced authority, created legitimacy, increased prestige, and defended property.*> Communities rewrote these narratives to express their own identities and to shape contemporary social relations with others.°°
Despite the interest in redactions, historians have rarely considered epic lives, because they usually reproduce the basic narrative of their prose counterparts.°” Michael Lapidge observes that Bede’s early-eighth-century epic Vita Cuthberti has been largely ignored because the diction of the poem is difficult and oblique, and ... most (though not all) of the twelve additional miracles [which Bede added to the narrative] were subsequently recorded by Bede in plainer language in his prose Vita S. Cuthberti. I suspect that Charles Jones spoke for most historians when, in discussing Bede’s hagiography, he wrote that “I have disregarded the metrical life of Cuthbert and shall continue to do so. 958
Most scholarship on medieval epic lives examines them froma literary and philological perspective rather than a historical one.°? Even when historians use epic lives, they tend to ignore the form.°° The neglect reflects prejudices about the marginal nature of poetry as socially and politically unimportant and the ancient idea that poetry is composed of lies and is therefore not a historical source.°' As Lifshitz characterized earlier generations of historians “bobbing for data” in the works about saints, most scholars who have consulted epic vitae have searched only for narrative detail, as though the format and the style were irrelevant to the work’s meaning and had nothing to tell us.°*
This is incorrect. Epic vitae did not have identical meanings and functions to their prose counterparts, even when they told a similar story. As Jean-Yves Tilliette observed in his 1988 call for scholarship, poets did not rewrite prose vitae in verse simply to improve the Latin style, because they could have achieved this end more easily through prose redactions.°* Epic composition was a major undertaking, which thoroughly transformed the prose source, and which could only be performed by a highly educated individual.°* The style and the myriad nonnarrative elements — digressions, poetic allusion, and authorial asides - are not mere ornament, but are part of the text’s meaning and are integral to its social functions. As Michael Roberts explains, discussing Prudentius’s late-fourth-century martyr poems, these “narratives cannot simply be treated as just one more ... version of a saint’s legend ... form and content — poetry and the martyrs — are thoroughly interconnected.”°> When historians mine poetic works only for narrative, they overlook much of their significance.
There are several other probable causes for historians’ neglect of epic lives. As Francois Dolbeau notes, many are unedited, so their existence tends to be known only to specialists.°° Some are anonymously transmitted in single manuscripts and are difficult to locate and date. Because they are long and densely allusive with convoluted word order and arcane vocabulary, they can be challenging to read.°” Some scholars find the poetry objectionable. Epic vitae, like much medieval Latin poetry, are criticized for being a derivative and artificial combination of the Classical and the Christian.°* The “hermeneutic style” characteristic of much late antique and medieval Latin verse is alien to modern tastes.°? In discussing cathedral schools of the tenth to twelfth centuries, C. Stephen Jaeger bemoans that their main literary output was verse “in a mannerist, obscure Latin that tends to ward off careful study rather than attract it.””° He describes the epic Passio Christophori as “impenetrable.””* Baudouin de Gaiffier labels epic lives “métromanie pieuse.””~
Modern aesthetic preferences are irrelevant to works’ value as evidence. The fact that scholars often find the epic vitae bizarre, distasteful, or inexplicable indicates that we should pay attention. As Caroline Walker Bynum has pointed out, that which seems “profoundly alien to modern sensibilities” is often the most informative, and therefore, we should read puzzling medieval works seriously.”? When we find texts (or ideas or practices) that seem anomalous, yet which were clearly important to contemporaries, we have encountered a place where modern expectations do not map onto the medieval imagination. If we cannot account for such works in our broader picture of the cultural context, then we need to question that picture, rather than brushing aside the evidence. By focusing on the problematic and the neglected, we gain new perspectives.”*
Taking these sources seriously means not simply mining them for narrative, but paying attention to their form, style, and rhetoric. These are not mere embellishments to discard in the search for important information. We should read epic vitae as their contemporaries did, ruminatively with minds attuned to the poetic devices, tropes, themes, metaphors, and intertextual echoes that constitute their layers of meaning. Form is crucial. For medieval readers and writers, God was in the details.”°
As a historian, I do not undertake a primarily philological reading, but rather consider the works in their settings. Because epic vitae were such important texts, when read in their social and cultural contexts, they provide insights that other kinds of evidence do not.”° They give us a new perspective on the medieval classroom. They also reveal the versions of their histories that monks told for different audiences. Surprisingly, these works, which were destined for an exceptionally erudite readership, emphasize the miraculous and the memorable more and historicity less than the prose vitae intended for a wider public, complicating current notions of how the intended audience shaped hagiographical narrative.’” A close reading of the highly allusive texts also illuminates how thoroughly the writers melded their Christian and Classical heritages to appeal to educated religious and lay patrons. The epic vitae show that the reconciliation of the two traditions was not simply a case of putting “new wine in old bottles” as the Christian apologists would have it, but a far more thorough and thoughtful synthesis.”* Further, the exchange of epic lives around the millennium reveals the persistence of a sophisticated literary culture with its roots in the Carolingian era. The epic vitae emphasize connections with past poets, saints, and teachers.
As a nostalgic genre, expressing continuity rather than a violent break with the past, it presents a very different picture from the narratives used to support the idea of millennial crisis and transformation. Although no less ideologically loaded than the sources that show disjunction, epic’s divergent perspective reminds us that depicting continuity or rupture was an authorial choice, dependent on a text’s purpose, rather than a simple reflection of social and political realities.
“IN HEROIC SONG”: DEFINING THE EPIC LIFE
In considering how to classify epic vitae, we can turn to contemporary descriptions. Poets, readers, and scribes variously called these works vitae, passiones, gesta, and historiae, the same terms used for their prose counterparts.’? The last term is noteworthy, because saints’ lives were, in the Central Middle Ages, a kind of historia.*° As Lifshitz has shown, hagiography is a modern category not equivalent to a medieval genre.*' Prose and verse works about the lives of individual saints feature many of the same tropes, themes, and features as works modern scholars have labeled historiographical.**
Contemporaries sometimes qualify their description of an epic vita or passio by noting that it was in metric style (metricus stilus) or that it had translated (transfundere or referre) a prose work into verse.*? Milo sings the saints’ deeds (gesta) in “sweet-sounding meter” (metrum dulcisonum).°* Walafrid Strabo talks about adding “some metrical seasoning” to his prose Vita Galli and of putting the saint’s deeds in meter (facta ... metro referre).° Some writers specify that their verse is “heroic,” a synonym for epic.*°
They use other generic terms for poetry, calling the lives “verses” (versus) or “little verses” (versiculi).*” Like their Classical predecessors, they speak of verse “running,” a reference to both its perceived speed (compared to prose, which “walks”) and a pun on the “feet” that compose a line of poetry.** They often employ the terminology of song (carmen, canere, canorus) common to Classical and Christian poets.*? The Classical poet’s song had sacred connotations, stretching back to the mythological first poet Orpheus, son of Apollo.?° The writers of epic lives reflect the tradition of sacred song by using the word vates, meaning both poet and priest, to refer to themselves and their saintly subjects.?*
In their catalogue, the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina, the Bollandists apply the terms vita metrica and passio metrica to more than 600 medieval and Renaissance texts in Latin verse, including many short poems that are quite different from those examined here.?* I have not found the precise terms vita metrica or passio metrica used in the Central Middle Ages. I prefer the term “epic vita” or “epic life,” both of which reflect medieval readers’ and writers’ own understanding of the works as carmina heroica, and suggest the epic features — not only meter but also length, complexity, and Classicism — that distinguish them from other vitae and passiones.”* Iemploy “epic lives” or “epic vitae” as blanket terms that include epic passiones, because they possess similar features of format and style. An epic passio, like a vita, recounts the saint’s life, although obviously it also emphasizes his or her heroic death.
The epic saints’ lives of the Central Middle Ages share a distinctive constellation of subject matter, form, and style. Tilliette sums up their essential features:?* they are usually based on prose saints’ lives, but they are far more colorful and elaborate, enhancing the story with Classical, mythological, and historical allusions, digressions on learned subjects (such as astronomy), and long passages of direct speech.?> They most commonly feature founding patrons who were Late Roman or Merovingian missionary bishops of local or regional importance, although some tell of female founders, abbots, martyrs, universally venerated confessors, or the recently deceased.?° They emphasize emotional states and, in the case of martyrs, the saint’s suffering and death. They also accentuate the wondrous, sometimes attributing new miracles to the saint.” The epic vitae are usually cosmic in scope, placing their protagonists in the timeframe of salvation history, beginning with Christ and the apostles and looking forward to the judgment day, when the saint’s work will reveal its full value.?®
The epic lives are hundreds or even thousand of lines long and are often divided into books. They are usually written in dactylic hexameter, the standard verse of epic, although poets sometimes write in elegiac couplets, and they experiment with various meters in the prefatory poems.?? Epic vitae often feature copious ancillary matter, including prose and verse dedications, correspondence between writer and readers, and poetic invocations to the reader, God, and the saint. Individual books may also be prefaced by such poems. The prefaces are not always clearly related to the narrative and may be allegorical.
The lives are often transmitted with a prose vita of the saint, sometimes by the same author. A pair of lives could be described as a “twinned work” (opus geminatum), a work consisting of prose and verse pieces on the same topic.'°° On the model of Hraban Maur’s In laude de sancte cruce, Candid Brun, a monk of Fulda, wrote a twinned work on his late abbot: “I composed two books on the life of abbot Eigil ... I wrote one in prose, but the other in verse.” '°' Not all authors who composed both prose and verse lives of a saint saw them as closely connected, and some wrote them at different times.*°* Candid, however, certainly saw his two lives as a unit: “T asked that they be bound together in one volume so that each might support the other in telling the story.”*°?
The characteristic elaborations of the prose originals reflect Carolingian educational practices. The classroom’s influence is evident in digressions on geography, astronomy, mythology, and philosophy, which emphasize the poet’s erudition and provide teachers with topics for elaboration.*°* Francois Dolbeau observes the influence of the rhetorical exercises in which students practiced rewriting.‘°* Because epic vitae were often written by a student at the end of his or her education, the poems employ devices learned from these praeexercitamina. One of the medieval rhetorical exercises, the composition of a speech from a literary character’s point of view,'®° is reflected in the many monologues poets place in the mouths of saints, who express their charismatic power through thaumaturgic speech.*°” In Milo’s epic vita, Amand uses his words to calm, convert, rebuke, advise, and persuade.'°* He is “the victor vanquishing by the weapon of the word.”'°? Speeches in epic vitae recast the saint’s charismatic and salvific oration into the poet’s metrical words. This ventriloquism, which allowed the poet to speak with the saint’s authority, would be even clearer when a poet-teacher was reciting his own composition in a classroom.’ '°
Poets also added interjections in their own voices, including moralizing exclamations and apostrophes, which are direct addresses to absent persons or entities, such as the saint, a river, a city, or the reader.*** The poets’ interruptions allow for more metareferentiality and the foregrounding of the poetic persona. Particularly at the beginning and end of books, and in prefaces, the poets refer to their own work, sometimes likening it to the saint’s labors.
The poets also enhance descriptions, increasing the narrative’s visual and emotional impact. Poems often feature expanded ekphrastic scenes common in Classical epic (such as storms at sea).'** Both descriptions and metaphors add color. Descriptions also increase the story’s pathos and drama by emphasizing the saint’s suffering and the fury of his or her adversaries.
In accordance with broader poetic trends, epic vitae tend to become more recondite, complex, and classicizing during the ninth and tenth centuries. The poets increasingly use Classical reminiscences, sometimes in very sophisticated ways akin to the window allusions of antique epic.’ '* Writers, such as Heiric, employ lofty poetic vocabulary, using obscure Latin and even Greek words (both of which are often glossed in the manuscripts). Other features that become more pronounced are convoluted word order, and obvious Classical features, such as the appeal to the muses and Classical naming (Ceres for grain, Bacchus for wine or grapes, the “lamp of Phoebus” for the sun).''*
The epic vita can be described as a genre, as long as we understand that term to designate a flexible body of ideas about style, form, and content (“the horizon of expectations,” as Jauss calls it) with which a reader approaches a text, rather than as a set of precise rules.*** These expectations, which the reader has derived from encounters with previous texts, do not constrain the author. Rather, he or she can challenge and transform the conventions in numerous ways.''® In this way, genres evolve and mutate into others over time. As we will see, writers reformulated the epic vita, sometimes creating novel works that only partially resemble their antecedants. Accordingly, not all the texts I discuss are epic (which is to say written primarily in epic Latin verse) or vitae (dealing primarily with a saint’s life), but they all define themselves in relation to epic lives. Although epic vitae shared features of form and style, writers were free to reinterpret the tradition. So, Hilduin’s epic Passio Dionysii, composed in the 830s, contains long passages of prose, including letters attributed to the saint. A life of Gall, perhaps composed in the late ninth century by Notker I, a teacher at the saint’s eponymous abbey, comprises a dialogue between a teacher and student, written in sections of prose interspersed with different kinds verse.''” A vita written around 1000 at Metz tells of Clemens’s expulsion of snakes from the city and then provides a sermon, in which the hexameters are interspersed with rhythmical hymns.''* The epic Vita Bertini was written in leonine (rhyming) hexameters.''? Several vitae were also written in rhythmic verse.'*° Although the rhythmic Vita Eligii lacks many of the epic features noted earlier, its anonymous author clearly located it in epic verse tradition.'*’ An anonymous author, probably from eleventh-century Saint-Amand, draws on Milo’s epic Vita Amandi, as well as prose works on the saint and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, to write a vita in prose, rhythmic verse, and elegiac distichs.'** These works not only draw on the tradition of epic lives but also refer to prose vitae and locate themselves in broader Classical and Christian poetic traditions. Ermenric’s letter to Grimald (the subject of Chapters 2 and 3), which features an appendix of prose and verse sections ostensibly on Saint Gall, Abbo’s Bella Parisiaca, an account of the Viking attacks, and Dudo’s De moribus, noted previously, are all examples of sui generis works, which are informed, to greater or lesser degrees by the genre of the epic vita.
SOURCES FOR THE EPIC TRADITION
The epic vita is a form with Classical and late antique Christian roots.**? Although it is not my primary purpose to trace the genre’s formation, a brief overview of its origins gives a sense of the works that influenced epic vitae and the synthesis of diverse literary heritages.**+
Epic vitae derive their narrative structure, tropes, and some of their vocabulary from Latin prose lives. Many follow the basic arc of a saint’s life, which, in the case of a male confessor, typically covers his youth, conversion, deeds (including missionary activity, exorcisms, and healings), death, and posthumous miracles.'*> The epic lives also echo standard prose vita tropes, which suppress individualistic characterization and assimilate the saint to a type.'*° The poets adopt the standard prose vita’s humility topos, in which the author professes his or her inability and claims only to have written the work out of affection for the patron who demanded it.'*”? As early as the fifth century, citing his own unworthiness, Sulpicius Severus casts his dear patronus (“frater carissimus”) as the force behind his prose saint’s life.'** Despite these similarities, epic vitae are very different from their prose sources and counterparts. The distinctive features of epic vitae are not drawn from prose traditions, but from the antique and medieval Latin poetic heritage. Extant manuscripts, library lists, and allusions within the epic lives provide evidence of the texts available to writers.‘*? Epic vitae of the Central Middle Ages draw on three main poetic sources: Classical epic (especially Virgil); late antique biblical epic, which appropriated its form to convey a Christian message; and early verse saints’ lives, which drew in turn on biblical epic and other late antique poetry.
Because these traditions were accretive, and because poets emulated their immediate predecessors and older sources, it is not always possible to determine the models for particular aspects of the epic vitae. For example, “lush” description, '*° the use of pagan personifications, similes, and long sections of direct speech are all characteristic of both Classical and biblical epic. Similarly, the Classical poet Lucan’s taste for learned digressions on astronomy and geography, his interest in allegory and the underlying meaning of events, his episodic structure, and his frequent intervention in the text in the form of apostrophe and moralizing are all paralleled in epic vitae, but these features are also found in biblical epics.'*’ Highly visual imagery is characteristic of much pagan and Christian late antique verse, ncluding biblical epic and the works of Paulinus of Nola and Fortunatus.'**
CLASSICAL EPIC
In language, meter, structure, and style, the poets who wrote saints’ lives show themselves as the heirs to the Classical epic tradition.*** In the influential definition of the late antique grammarian Diomedes, epic is “the presentation of divine, heroic, and human matters in hexameter verse.” *>* Its heroes are closely connected with the divine sphere. Isidore (d. ca. 636), a widely read authority in the Middle Ages, explains that epic “is called heroic song because brave men’s deeds and acts are recounted. For they are called heroes,” he continues with a far-fetched etymology, “as if ethereal [aerii — literally ‘of the air’] and worthy of heaven on account of their wisdom and forbearance.” **> The hero’s elevated nature, virtue, and suffering were central to Isidore’s definition of epic. It was a small step to envision a saintly protagonist. As Jan Ziolkowski writes, “if the central figure of epics are heroes closely related to divine beings, then saints — those distinguished imitators of Christ - were candidates for leading roles in hagiographic epics.”'3° In late antiquity, epic, because it focuses “on praiseworthy actions of the individual ... becomes a form of encomiastic biography.” **” Therefore, as Roberts has observed, the saint’s life became “highly appropriate material for epic treatment.” *>*
Further, epics locate a hero’s deeds, journeys, and battles in a grand design.'*? This cosmic vision was suited to Christian subjects. As Pollman observes, Christianity’s preoccupations, God and salvation, are “epic by definition.” '*° The lofty diction appropriate to pagan heroics was equally
fitting for Christian themes.
Virgil’s Aeneid, the core text of the curriculum, was the touchstone for writers of epic vitae.’** Poets invoke Virgil as the paradigmatic pagan author, and epic based on his model remained the most prestigious literary form.*** Reflecting broader cultural shifts, tenth- and eleventh-century poets emphasize a greater diversity of Classical sources than do their predecessors, but Virgil remains central.'+* The Aeneid tells of the wanderings and travails of “pious Aeneas,” ancestor of the Roman people. Saints, particularly itinerant missionary bishops, could easily be fitted into this scheme. By making the protagonist a saint, the epic vita recasts the journey as a spiritual quest and often gives the writer’s institution a foundation story to parallel Rome.
The influence of other pagan epics, such as Lucretius’s De rerum natura, is less clear.‘** Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Pseudo-Virgilian mini-epic Culex could have provided lighter examples, leavened by humor.**> Lucan’s historical Bellum Civile (also known as the Pharsalia), written 61-65 CE, which was extremely popular from the ninth century, provided another model.'*° The impact of other Silver Age epics appears minimal.**” Except for the Aeneid, the Classical tradition had less direct influence than did the late antique Christian epic.
MYSTICA DONA: BIBLICAL EPIC
The fourth-century epic revival saw the production of pagan epics, such as Claudian’s De raptu Proserpinae, and miniature epillya.'** The late Latin tradition was transmitted to the Central Middle Ages largely via Christian poets, who, from the fourth to sixth centuries, appropriated epic for Scriptural narrative and explication.'*? The four “canonical” Bible epics — by Juvencus (ca. 330), Sedulius (first half of the fifth century), Arator (544), and, to a lesser extent, Avitus (544) — were often read in the classroom until at least the eleventh century.'°° Also influential was the late-fifth-century paraphrase of Genesis, which was the first book of Dracontius’s De laudibus Dei.">*
From the biblical poems, vitae inherited a precedent and a rationale for Christian epic. Poetry, subject to suspicion as the vessel of pagan falsehood, was acknowledged, even by Christian writers, for its “sweetness” and prestige.'>* In response to criticisms of Scripture’s unrefined Latin, Christian poets, starting with Juvencus, rewrote it as epic.'>* Borrowing Virgil’s form, meter, and language, Juvencus, in his enormously influential Gospel poem, the Evangelia (ca. 330), “created the diction of ChristianLatin Biblical verse.”">+ The memorability of epic imagery was not a distraction and “particular hindrance to salvation” (speciale impedimentum salutis), as Cassian says, but could be harnessed to benefit the reader.'>* Epic, rehabilitated with the Christian aims of “spiritual instruction, moral edification or biblical exegesis,” could be salvific for both poets and readers. '*°
In appropriating epic, biblical epicists simultaneously cast themselves within and in opposition to the Classical tradition. Rejecting the “lies of the pagan poets,” they offered an apologia for their use of the form: if the old poets could sing of worldly fictions, then Christians should sing of true things.'>” The topos of rejection allowed the poets to parade their Classical learning, showing themselves as heirs to the tradition they ostensibly denounced. In a programmatic statement, Juvencus explicitly locates himself in the tradition of Homer and “sweet Virgil” but claims that he will celebrate the salvific deeds of Christ (Christi vitalia gesta), rather than falsehoods (mendacia) about the deeds of ancient men.'** Christ has become the epic hero.
In the preface to his Paschale Carmen (first half of the fifth century), Sedulius offers a similar apologia: if the pagan poets (gentiles poetae) can “glorify their fictions” and create “monuments to crime,” then Sedulius should not keep silent about Christ’s miracles and promise of salvation.**? The topos of rejection undermined by Classical allusions, which becomes a medieval poetic commonplace, warns us against taking hostility to the pagan tradition at face value.'°°
Epic vitae inherited late Latin epic features from the biblical poems, including “generic instability,” that is, the tendency to absorb features from other genres, particularly panegyric.'°' Both biblical and saintly epic are encomiastic. The Bible poems employ other late Latin features, such as apostrophe and episodic composition. They also represent examples of the “jeweled style,” characterized by color, light, obscure vocabulary, and expression.'°* They employ varying degrees of Classical reference (from Avitus’s avoidance of Classical naming conventions to Dracontius’s liberal use of mythology).'°? Other aspects of epic vitae derived from Christian biblical epic include their length, the use of metrically distinct prefaces, and Christian invocation (replacing the appeal to the muse).'°* From late Latin, they also derive their deliberately elliptical expression and complicated syntax, which preclude a reader’s easy engagement with a text.
Perhaps most significantly, biblical epics offered different models for transforming a prose source while retaining its sensus. Juvencus’s poem is a fairly literal versification of a version of the Old Latin Bible.'°* According to Jerome, Juvencus “translated” (transferre) the Gospels into verse “almost word for word” (paene ad verbum).'°° In later biblical epic, interpretation becomes increasingly prominent. Sedulius’s Paschale carmen contains paraphrase and exegesis.'°” He “frequently departs from the narrative in order to reflect on the typological significance of New Testament events: how they were prefigured in the Old Testament, their moral, soteriological, and eschatological meaning.” '®* Sedulius has been described as the Christian Virgil, but he is more akin to Virgil and Servius combined, producing a versification that incorporates its own gloss. Later, he composed a complementary prose version, the Paschale opus, to assist and guide readers in comprehending the Paschale carmen.‘°? In doing so he provided the exemplar for the “twinned work” of prose and verse.
Like Sedulius, Avitus (ca. 450-518) was concerned with Scripture’s hidden meanings. De spiritalis historiae gestis covers events from Genesis and Exodus, but the poet includes many other biblical and historical examples to draw out events’ typological significance, that is, how they prefigured Christ and future Christian history.'7° As he says in his prologue, his books “graze over other matters [in addition to Old Testament events], where opportunity for including them was found.”'7" His structure, which intersperses descriptions of passages with long explications of the New Testament and historical events they prefigure, subordinates narrative to “typological logic.”'”* Arator surpasses Sedulius and Avitus in preferring allegorical interpretation to a paraphrase of the narrative, and exegesis all but subsumes his account.'’’ His epic is less a verse redaction than a “poetic commentary.”
So, several biblical epics offer a model for a kind of self-glossing text in which the poet’s explication forms part of the narrative.‘”° (Among the poets of epic vitae, Ermenric takes this tradition furthest, by creating a work that is, as I discuss in Chapter 2, almost entirely a gloss.) The popular first book of Dracontius’s De laudibus Dei (end of the fifth century) presented a different model for elaborating Scripture.'7° His versification of Genesis contains passages of lyrical praise, rather than exegesis.
FROM BIBLICAL EPIC TO EPIC LIFE
As these poets were rewriting Scripture as epic, others employed verse to celebrate saints. Prudentius’s Peristephanon, a late-fourth-century collection of martyr poems, was the most influential.‘7” Glossed manuscripts reveal its use in the medieval classroom.'7* His hymns, the Cathemerinon and his mini-epic Psychomachia, an allegorical battle of virtues and vices, were also widely read.*”? The Peristephanon comprises fourteen poems of different lengths and meter, each framing a passion in a description of the place and cult of the martyr. They share features with Classical epic and epic vitae such as the tendency for the protagonists to give long speeches.'*° Exhibiting the ekphrastic and emotional qualities of late Latin verse, the poems “concentrate on, and glory in, the lurid details of torture and death, and the startling operation of the supernatural.” '*' Prudentius’s contemporary, Paulinus of Nola provided other models for adapting Classical forms and meters to write about saints.'** Each year from 385-409, he composed Natalicia, which transformed the Classical birthday poem into a celebration of the day of Saint Felix’s death.'*?
Natalicia IV, V, and VI (written 398-400), which Paulinus regarded as a set, recount the saint’s life and a posthumous miracle in 1,128 lines of dactylic hexameter.'** In some respects, these Natalicia anticipate the fifthand sixth-century biblical poets. Rather than giving narrative detail, they largely consist of praise of God and the saint, addresses to the reader, digressions, and, above all, typological and moral excurses.'®> Paulinus likens the saint’s deeds to Scriptural passages and draws out the moral significance of events.'*® Like Prudentius, he combines humor and gory detail;'®” on occasion, even God and the saint are amused.'*® In addition to copious references to Scripture, especially the Psalms, Paulinus draws heavily on Classical verse.'®? Prudentius and Paulinus of Nola, unlike the biblical epic poets, localize the cosmic history of salvation in the cults of particular saints. This trend is particularly important for epic vitae, which are usually written about a saint with regional and personal significance to the poet. In the vitae, epic becomes personal.'?° The poem is an expression of devotion to the saint who is addressed as the poet’s patronus and muse. Fortunatus, especially, frames the narrative with his own experience of and relationship to the saint.*?*
Drawing on traditions of epic and poetry about saints, Paulinus of Périgueux (in the 460s) and Venantius Fortunatus (in the 570s), each wrote an epic vita of Saint Martin, bishop of Tours, based on the prose of Sulpicius Severus.'?* Each poet dedicated his vita to the current bishop of Tours (Perpetuus and Gregory, respectively), a patron invested in Martin’s cult. Paulinus addresses Perpetuus in the language of amicitia so common in later dedications.'?*
Paulinus draws on Virgil, Ovid, Juvencus, and Sedulius.'?* His Virgilian allusions assume his readers’ knowledge of the original context.’’* Fortunatus, while familiar with Virgil, Ovid, Claudian, Statius, and other Classical auctores, locates himself in an exclusively Christian
poetic lineage.
"9° At the beginning of the Vita Martini, he lists his literary
ancestors. After mentioning the writers of Scripture, he continues:
For first setting out a song in an order that was easy to grasp, Juvencus sang a majestic work of the metric art. Then the tongue of outstanding Sedulius also shone, And Orientius bound together a few things with his flowering speech, And sending these holy offerings to the pious martyrs, The prudent man Prudentius prudently offered up their acts. Paulinus, powerful in lineage, heart, faith and art, Laid out in verse master Martin’s teachings. What are called the deeds and acts of the apostles’ fate , The bard Arator plowed with his eloquent speech. . What the genealogist [Moses] once set forth in a holy order, Bishop Alcimus [Avitus] composed with his sharp intellect’?”
All these poets, except Orientius and Prudentius, wrote biblical epic.'?* Both Paulinus of Périgueux and Fortunatus draw heavily on_ this tradition.*?? In length, their vitae are closer to biblical epics than to their Classical forebears.*°° They employ direct speech and, like Sedulius (and later poets of epic vitae), often interrupt the narrative with apostrophe, making exclamations and posing rhetorical questions.*°* Both embellish their texts with poetic ornament. Paulinus amplifies his narrative with paradox and other rhetorical tropes.*°* Like much late antique poetry (and later epic vitae), Fortunatus’s Vita Martini is full of sparkling visual descriptions and ecphrases of dramatic scenes.*°? He also emphasizes emotional and affective aspects.*°* He is epigrammatic, using memorable sayings to sum up a section of the narrative.*°> In accordance with the hybrid nature of late antique epic, his epic incorporates panegyric and prayer.*°°
Despite their many similarities, Paulinus and Fortunatus augment their prose source differently. Like the biblical epic poets, Paulinus expands the prose with exegesis, explaining the significance of events and contributing moral commentary.*°” Fortunatus often gives a fairly brief paraphrase followed by his own reflections on the passage. Pollman observes that “in comparison with his predecessors ... Fortunatus avoids moralizing or exegetical meditations.”*°* He is interested instead in allegorical and metaphorical elaborations that reveal Martin’s heavenly power. This difference points to the poets’ distinct visions. Whereas Paulinus presents Martin as an apostle and focuses on his teachings, Fortunatus shows him as a celestial patron and stresses his deeds and miracles.*°? Fortunatus frames the vita in the eschatological scheme of salvation history with Christ’s descent and ascension with the souls of the saved.**° Like Sedulius’s Paschale carmen, his Vita Martini is highly episodic, privileging the message’s repetition over the story’s continuity.***
Fortunatus’s poem, which was far more influential than Paulinus’s, stands at a pivotal point in the genre’s development.*** It has been described as both “the last epic of Antiquity” and the prototype for the verse saint’s life.**? Fortunatus simultaneously looks back to epic traditions and establishes the core features of medieval epic lives.
We find the next verse lives in England, where the influence of biblical epics was particularly strong:*'* Bede’s early-eighth-century vita of Cuthbert and Alcuin’s vita of the Anglo-Saxon missionary Willibrord written toward the end of that century.*'> Bede and Alcuin, like Sedulius, wrote prose counterparts to their verse.*'°
Bede shows familiarity only with Virgil among Classical authors, but draws heavily on the three main biblical epics, especially Arator, whom he also uses in his commentary on Acts, and other Christian poets, including Prudentius and Paulinus of Nola.**7 It is unclear if he knew Fortunatus’s Vita Martini.*'® His epic Vita Cuthberti employs Arator’s exegetical methods. Short prose capitula summarize an event from his source (an anonymous prose life), omitting details, then twenty to fifty verse lines interpret its significance.**? Like Scripture, the saint’s life is part of God’s historia, the full significance of which can only be extracted by reading beneath the surface of events for moral allegorical meanings. Bede’s language forces the reader to grapple with it: “because of its allusiveness and compression it is often extremely difficult, and was clearly intended to be
so. Bede’s poem was intended as a meditation on the life and significance of Cuthbert.” **°
Alcuin (ca. 735-804) also wrote prose and verse vitae. Like his predecessors, he begins his verse vita with a personal appeal to the saint (in a metric preface), and he intervenes in the text to address the reader.**' In other ways, however, it lacks epic elements. Its syntax is straightforward and, unusually, the verse is shorter than its prose counterpart, presenting an abbreviated version of events.*** Unlike his other poems, it is largely devoid of rhetorical ornamentation and Classicism.***? One of Alcuin’s students wrote a verse vita and miracula of bishop Ninian, which Lapidge describes as “a virtual cento of lines from classroom auctores.”*** The eighth-century poets did not engage with epic traditions to the extent Fortunatus had in producing a saint’s life. Nonetheless, their works were influential in promoting the idea of the epic life and the “twinned work” in England and on the Continent in the following centuries.
These Classical and Christian antecedents formed a rich and diverse tradition, which justified the writing of Christian epic verse and offered models for the form, style, and elaboration of the original. It was not until the ninth century that poets fully utilized their literary heritage to create a corpus of epic saints’ lives.
EPIC VITAE IN THE CENTRAL MIDDLE AGES
The Central Middle Ages, from the early ninth to the eleventh centuries, was a time of great cultural transformation and innovation.*** These centuries form a coherent unit in terms of attitudes toward patron saints, the main subject of the epic vitae.**° It was also the genre’s golden age; Tilliette counts over seventy extant examples from Francia in this period.**” I conclude the current study before the beginning of the “long twelfth century,” because the dramatic educational transformations, which included a plethora of new didactic-poetic works, displaced the epic vita from its centrality. The manuscripts reflect the change. In the ninth and tenth centuries, we find epic vitae most often in teacher’s books and in /ibelli, collections of writings on a particular saint or saints. After the tenth century, they are copied less often in schoolbooks. In the twelfth century, they appear occasionally in large lectionaries, accompanying a prose life of the same saint.***
Both Bede and Alcuin influenced the flowering of epic vitae on the Continent.**? Alcuin, who left York for Charlemagne’s court, may have provided the impetus for the widespread production of epic vitae in the ninth and tenth centuries, because many of the poets were his intellectual descendants, particularly through his student Hraban Maur (ca. 780-856). The provenance of extant lives from the Central Middle Ages suggests networks of readers and writers associated with the closely linked abbeys of Fulda (where Hraban was abbot), Reichenau, and Saint-Gall (see the map in Figure 6). Writers from those abbeys included Walafrid Strabo, Candid, Ermenric, Notker I, and an anonymous writer of Saint-Gall.*3° Flanders, a site of intense literary creativity in these centuries, also produced a large number of epic lives. Writers included Milo, Johannes, and Gunter of SaintAmand and poets from Saint-Bavo in Ghent, Saint-Bertin, Saint-Omer, and houses around Liége.*** England also continued to be a source of epic lives; a number of tenth-century examples were associated with the school at York.*3*
Despite writers’ experimental approaches, and a general trend toward more hermeneutic poetry, the uses, manuscript contexts, and form of the epic vita remained fairly stable. The consistency, however, belies the social, political, and cultural transformations of those centuries. By looking at works from the ninth-century Carolingian Renaissance and others from the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, we can examine how epic vitae were written and read in different contexts. I examine texts from several points within the Central Middle Ages. My study begins at the court of Louis the Pious in the 830s, and then picks up, in Chapters 2 and 3, in the mid-ninth century, at the monastery of Saint-Gall, which was by then part of Louis the German’s kingdom. The following century and a half saw the dissolution of the Carolingian kingdoms and the rise of the Capetians in France and the Ottonians in Germany and the ascendency of local authorities, such as counts and castellans. Throughout the ninth and tenth centuries, epic vitae were sent to important patrons, but with the fragmentation of Carolingian power, the patterns of patronage changed. In Chapters 4 and 5, I look at epic vitae from Flanders, close to the border of Lotharingia, where the counts of Flanders, the French and German rulers, the bishop, the local castellan, and abbots all sought to exercise power in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. Both the political and cultural landscape had changed since the ninth century. The rise of the cathedral schools and the imperial episcopate had challenged the monasteries’ cultural centrality. Saint-Amand, once a Carolingian royal abbey, was now culturally, politically, and geographically peripheral. The epic vitae from Flanders around the millennium share many formal features with the ninth-century texts, but they operated in a very different world.
Although I bring in other epic vitae as ancillary examples, I concentrate ona small number of works because the texts are so rich, complicated, and interconnected that each warrants an in-depth study. Close readings of the vitae and responses to them reveal the creative strategies their authors used and the social functions of the works in a way a survey would not.*** By undertaking several close readings, rather than giving a broad survey or focusing on a single time or place, I can both demonstrate the range of functions and creativity of the epic lives and examine specific ways individuals used these texts. My approach allows me to consider each as a poet’s response to particular circumstances.
Epic vitae were part of broader programs of aggrandizement, selfpromotion, and education. In each case, I establish the work’s historical and cultural contexts, using codicological and sometimes archaeological evidence in addition to textual sources. I examine the vitae in different milieux, including the monastic classroom, the imperial court, a royal abbey, and a small monastery struggling for survival. I have chosen to focus on epic vitae that provide useful and diverse insights. These examples implicate a wider set of texts and illustrate aspects of their thought and culture including notions of patronage, poetry, sanctity, creativity, competition, and uses of the past.*>+ Each one illuminates a different aspect of monastic and learned culture in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries.
In Chapter 1, “Forging Sanctity: Hilduin of Saint-Denis and the Epic Passio Dionysii,” I consider the epic life of Saint Dionysius from the 830s. This work (which is unpublished) was part of a massive undertaking by Hilduin, abbot of Saint-Denis and former archchaplain, to enhance his own prestige, and that of the saint and abbey. Hilduin merged his abbey’s patron, the martyred bishop of Paris, with an earlier Greek saint of the same name, a minor Scriptural figure and, supposedly, a mystical theologian. He embroidered the saint’s passion with an unprecedented miracle in which the decapitated martyr picked up his head and, accompanied by a choir of angels, carried it to his burial site. In response to detractors who doubted his story, Hilduin produced many pieces of falsified evidence, a prose Passio Dionysii dedicated to Emperor Louis the Pious, and the epic version. These works contain competing and ambivalent notions of history, evidence, truth, and poetry. The prose life establishes a biography for the newly confected martyr, whom Hilduin casts as the emperor’s particular friend, companion, and protector. The epic adds luster to the implausible saint and unifies the narrative by employing poetic metaphors to imbue the text with the saint’s brand of mysticism and to prompt the reader to contemplative salvific modes of reading. Like other Carolingian poets, Hilduin engages in literary in-jokes and one-upmanship, but these games, far from being playful, are mechanisms of serious political rivalries. The epic life provides insight into the role of literature in these machinations and shows how poetry, self-promotion, and patronage worked at the highly factionalized court of Louis the Pious.
Chapters 2 and 3 look not at an epic vita but at the only sustained piece of writing about such a work. Around 850, the monk Ermenric sent his prospective patron a letter asserting his intention to complete an epic life of Saint Gall. Scholars have dismissed this letter as a series of rambling digressions, when in fact, properly understood, it is an excellent source for early medieval education and the role of epic vitae in the curriculum. While other sources mainly provide information about pedagogical theory, this letter takes us inside the Carolingian schoolroom to observe the teacher at work. In Chapter 2, “Glossing the Imaginary: Epic Vitae in the Classroom,” I examine how Ermenric presents himself as a teacher addressing different levels of students. His letter shows how teachers could use epic lives and how the advanced students’ rhetorical exercises could lead to the composition of such texts. The lives, often produced by students at the end of their education, were reincorporated into the curriculum that had produced them, and inspired new generations of students to emulation.
In Chapter 3, “Classical Nightmares: Christian Poets and the Pagan Past,” I examine Ermenric’s letter and his putative epic vita in their larger context. Surrounded by backbiting monks, Ermenric was part of a competitive culture of composition, in which poets vied for patronage. By writing about an epic life of Gall, Ermenric cast himself as heir to the renowned poet Walafrid Strabo, whose untimely demise had thwarted his intention to write such a work. Examining Ermenric’s nightmare of Virgil and another pagan vision, I explore the role of the Classics in Carolingian education and in the composition of epic lives. Ermenric’s demonic specter of Virgil draws on a rich tradition of disturbing Classical visions experienced by Christian monks. Despite its apparent condemnation of the pagan poet, the incident in fact reveals a nuanced approach to the Classics. Understanding the apparition and integrating the Classics were a rite of passage in becoming a writer of epic lives and a teacher for advanced students. The anti-Classics sentiment expressed in the Middle Ages was often a rhetorical trope, and Ermenric’s literary hauntings show the utility of the monks’ engagement with pagan writers. The confrontation of Classical and Christian was a creative tension that necessarily underlay the composition of epic lives - saints’ lives in a classicizing form - and monastic learning as a whole.
Chapter 4, “Bishops, Monks, and Mother Bees: An Epic Vita at the Millennium,” examines a less hostile literary contest between writers and readers of epic saints’ lives. Johannes’s life of Rictrude, written at SaintAmand and the monk Rainer’s reply reveal a flourishing literary culture in western Francia around the year tooo. With its emphasis on continuity rather than change, the vita offers a different perspective on the transformations of that era. Further, Rainer’s dense Christian and Classical allusion shows a thorough synthesis of traditions and belies the writers’ disavowal of pagan literature. Their protestations were a trope drawn from biblical epic tradition, rather than a true expression of anxiety, and these writers and readers harbored far less ambivalence to Classical learning than they professed.
Chapter 5, “Mothers and Daughters: Affiliation and Conflict in the Lives of Rictrude and Eusebia,” examines a literary contest in which a community’s very survival was at stake. The abbeys of Marchiennes and Hamage cast themselves as mother and daughter houses, symbolically represented by their warring mother and daughter patron saints, Rictrude and Eusebia. Piecing together Hamage’s neglected history from charters, archaeology, and other sources, I establish a context for the production of the epic vita of Eusebia. In the tenth and early eleventh centuries, Marchiennes threatened to annex Hamage. The residents of these houses expressed the conflict through saints’ lives that vindicated the righteousness of their respective patrons. I argue that the brothers of Hamage, bereft of other resources, used an epic life of Eusebia in which she defied her violent mother to stake a claim against their oppressive mother house.
Epic saints’ lives were tokens in the economy of advancement within a monastery and beyond its walls. Exchanged between teachers and students, monks of different houses, and poets and patrons, the epic vitae linked their authors, donors, and recipients into real and imagined networks. Poets flattered their imperial and episcopal patrons by sending them long, erudite, highly classicizing poems. They demonstrated to their teachers and colleagues that both writer and recipient were members of a dynamic literary and pedagogical culture that encompassed Classical auctores, Christian poets, and future students and emulators. As the miniatures illustrating Milo’s Vita Amandi show, the composition and exchange of an epic life was key to establishing networks of friendship and patronage.
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