Download PDF | [Medieval Church Studies, 12] Kathryn M. Rudy, Barbara Baert (eds.) - Weaving, Veiling, and Dressing_ Textiles and Their Metaphors in the Late Middle Ages, Brepols, 2007.
388 Pages
INTRODUCTION
The curtain opens. It reveals a scene that is itself a revelation: St John the Evangelist transcribing the Book of Revelation while seated on a promontory of the Island of Patmos (Figure i).1 *The image appears in the Hours of Philip of Cleves, painted around 1485.1 Among the multiple layers of meaning is the act of opening a book and discovering what is inside, in this case, the illuminated, decorated, and inscribed page. A second layer involves an angel pulling back a curtain. A third is that the saint is experiencing a divine revelation. The objects of the revelation — seven candlesticks — appear in the cloudy sky in the form of a gauzy haze that functions as a kind of thought balloon. These layers pull us even deeper into the fictive space of the page, but we are at once tossed back to the shore of Patmos and to the surface of the vellum by the text, which does not present the Book of Revelation at all, but rather the beginning of the other Biblical text attributed to John: his Gospel. ‘In the beginning’, it proclaims, ‘the Word was spun into Flesh’. The Word was made manifest and revealed to humankind, as if a curtain had been opened onto salvation. It is this thread that the essays in this volume trace.
Textiles formed a strand of Christian history even before the infancy of Christ. The Virgin spun and wove purple cloth when she was a child in the temple. Consequently, spinning and cloth-making are associated with virginity, although there is a paradox as these activities are likened to virginity’s very opposite: the production of a life line.3 A German panel from around 1400, for example, depicts the Virgin spinning a thread that passes over the homunculusJesus visible through her dress. Spinning and flesh making are allied visually: the thread passes directly over (through?) her womb as she spins it. She metaphorically clothes Jesus while he is still in-vitro (Plate i).4 In a mid-fifteenthcentury miniature prefacing a prayer called the Obsecro te, the Virgin appears sitting on a piece of furniture that is at once a loom and a throne, as she weaves cloth across her womb: cloth comes into being as it passes over her belly, while the Christ child, a toddler, reaches up to sit on this enchanted lap, and angels help to wind wool, showing that the process is divinely inspired (Figure 2).5 In another scene from Christ’s infancy, the Virgin, equipped with multiple knitting needles, knits the seamless garment for her son.s The resulting clothing is miraculous (especially to those who do not knit). This garment wraps around both the infancy and the Passion stories, and engenders a number of recurring metaphors invoking themes of unity and protection. We can trace this and other threads through the infancy and Passion, and also through the vitae and martyrdoms of the saints. The thread is pervasive and multivalent, wrapping around sacred history and tying it to the domestic and familiar. Textiles often mediate between the secular and the divine, between the down-to-earth and the otherworldly. Threads, cloths, and vestments mark, absorb, and transmit holy status.
One of the ways to understand the specific charge surrounding textiles and articles of clothing is to look at exempla, moralizing and entertaining stories that circulated in large quantities from the twelfth century on.7 These often describe textiles in the context of miracle-working sculptures of the Virgin. In these stories, the Virgin’s image talks, eats, and pleads with her son on behalf of desperate votaries. Of the several hundred medieval miracle legends, a large portion of them mention cloth or clothing, such as a nun’s habit, a sculptor’s greatcoat, or the Virgin’s mantle. These objects mediate between the natural and supernatural worlds. The readership (or aural audience) of exempla counted both lay and religious. And at least in some circles, exempla were considered appropriate gifts: in 1448 Johannes van Leyerdam, a Canon Regular at the Monastery of Marienkamp in Ezinge (a province of Groningen), neatly copied some ascetic treatises and a large selection of exempla, then sent the book as a gift to his friend Alardus Symonis in Amsterdam.8 That such a book constituted an appropriate gift suggests that the transmission of exempla was wrapped in some pleasure. The stories also circulated orally, and were subsequently compiled into several collections, including, most famously, the Dialogo Miraculorum written by the Cistercian monk Caesarius of Heisterbach (c. 1180-c. 1240).9 Caesarius was to the miracle story what Jacobus de Voragine {c. 1229—98) was to the saint’s Life. Caesarius, like Jacobus, peregrinated throughout western Europe, lodged in monasteries, and interrogated the monks dwelling there about miracles they had heard. Consequently, monks loom large as the recipients of grace in Caesarius’s tales. Middle Dutch miracle stories, which often contain a higher proportion of stories from the Low Countries, were copied with cumulative additions through the late Middle Ages.
They circulated in the fifteenth century, especially among convents, but they also entered lay reception because sermonists peppered their sermons with miracle tales. For that reason, miracle legends have been called one of the first mass media. In this essay, I examine several of these stories in order to tease out the particular charge of clothing and textiles. From the vast catalogue of Middle Dutch miracle stories, I have selected some that shed light on the prohibitions, promises, and powers woven around dress. The legends illuminate the reception of the Virgin as the premier weaver, miraculous clothier, blessed knitter, and seamstress in late medieval northern Europe. Miracle stories first circulated orally and were only later written down, but they returned to an oral format, since sermonists relied on miracle stories to infuse their sermons with testimonials to the power of prayer and to the power of faith in the Virgin. This is a two-ply essay. It is in one sense a miracle play in three acts, each one featuring an aspect of the role of textiles in Middle Dutch miracle stories and images from the Low Countries, specifically their role in mediating between the natural and supernatural worlds. Secondly, these acts unfold to reveal the themes at play in the remainder of this volume.
Act I: Investiture A pontifical, one of the various liturgical books produced in the Middle Ages, contains the ceremonies performed by a bishop. It provides both the stage directions and the ritual words to be uttered when a bishop sanctifies a new church or altar, graduates a group of young monks, blesses an image of the Virgin, confirms vows for nuns or monks, or indoctrinates new priests, to name but a few examples. Ceremonial clothing, which bestows upon its wearer status or authority, often plays a role in these initiations.10
In a series of historiated initials within the pontifical he illuminated in around 1440, the Master of Catherine of Cleves depicts several of these ceremonies, beginning with the celebrant ritually washing his hands before mass and prior to donning the ceremonial outer garments and mitre (Figure 3)." He appears in those garments as he presides over ceremonies in the remainder of the initials. Throughout the codex, the illuminator reiterates the multifold role of dress in both historiated initials and in marginal illuminations. Not only does the bishop wear garments appropriate to his office in order to perform the rituals, but some of the rituals themselves involve blessing the garments before they, in turn, can function in subsequent ceremonies. One historiated initial, for example, shows the bishop and an acolyte blessing a dalmatic and a chasuble (Figure 4).
The acolyte sprinkles holy water with an aspergillum, while the bishop, clutching an evangeliary — the book on which oaths are sworn — blesses a chasuble with two outstretched fingers. The gilt letter O has become a vestiary; the liturgical garments hang on the walls of the letter that initiates the words to be said for their own benediction. The textile theme continues in the bas-de-page, where two virgins sit behind looms, weaving a great swathe of cloth of gold that stretches across the width of two columns of text. They labour behind gossamer warp threads, filling them in with opaque weft, which will increasingly hide them from view. They work behind a cloth of honour in its inchoate stages, while they themselves are framed by fluttering swathes of acanthus. As a pair, each under a column of ritual Latin, they mediate between text and textile; the sanctity of Catholic ritual is to be found at the intersection of these two terms, as the pontifical would have it. As Margaret Goehring asserts in her contribution below, such textiles, often represented around miniatures or borders, connote richness and opulence. This was true in the Burgundian Netherlands, as well as in the northeastern Netherlands, where the Master of Catherine of Cleves, who was particularly mindful of the textures, colours, and patterns of represented fabric, was active. In the Utrecht Pontifical, the artist is constructing weavers who are themselves constructing a textile in the bottom margin.
The bishop wears his full regalia in a later initial to mark the ceremony of ordaining a group of deacons (Figure 5). The various articles of clothing appear suspended in the margins of the manuscript. A dalmatic hangs from an acanthus hook near the top of the folio, while arms wearing liturgical sleeves extend from behind the screen of text/textile to proffer a stole and an evangeliary. The screen of text has therefore provided all the objects necessary for the completion of the ritual, and the illuminated letter at the centre of the folio provides the altar, the consecrated bishop, the soon-to-be deacons, and the Holy Spirit, crystallized in the form of a nose-diving dove. As the Master of Catherine of Cleves reiterates throughout the folios of the Utrecht Pontifical, many of the ceremonies of the medieval church were centred upon textiles, clothing, and altar cloths.
The higher the rank an officiate achieves in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, the more vestments he acquires, so that the clothing of a pope subsumes all the orders beneath. Analogously, in the Utrecht Pontifical, the long section providing instructions for clothing begins with the lowest rank and proceeds up the pallium, which, as Barbara Baert discusses in her article in this volume, is made from white wool, is rooted in the symbolism of female chastity, and transforms its wearer into the shepherd of the Christian flock (Figure 6). The miniaturist dangles the pallium, carefully inscribed with six crosses, in the margin of the relevant section. The terminology of taking on a religious profession reflects the centrality of the clothing in the ceremonies described in the pontifical. Investiture means to ‘take the cloth’ or to ‘don the habit or vestment’.
The analogous terminology also operates in Dutch, as we see in a late fifteenth-century copy of instructions for some unidentified nuns of St Clare to profess their vows: according to the rubric, ‘This is the way the sisters of the Order of St Clare take their habits, which is taken from the Minderbrothers’ general statues’.11 The habit becomes not just what the nun adopts when she takes the vow, but synonymous with the vow itself. It is not surprising, then, when the habit adopts part of the personality of the nun herself. Clothing takes on the identity of its wearer, or vice versa, in a spiralling series of reciprocal relationships. An event from the investiture of Katharina van Naaldwijk on 6 September 1412 illustrates the connotative charges of worldly clothing in contradistinction to the habit. Shortly after 1400, Johannes Brinckerinck founded the convent of Diepenveen to accommodate the rich women and widows who were excluded by statute from the Meester-Gertshuis in Deventer. Brinckerinck, questioning whether Katharina van Naaldwijk, who was particularly wealthy, possessed the fortitude to live according to strict piety and labour, demanded that she tread upon her richly fur-lined mantle, which was spread over the steps of the altar as she received her new clothes and recited her vows.12 3 To don the vestments of holy orders was to hang up — or even more decisively, to trample — the clothing of a secular life.
To be stripped of rank is to be stripped of clothing, and to wear clothing poorly, in a haphazard way or in a way that reveals what it should conceal, confers scandalous disgrace. Martha Bayless, in her essay below, analyses the moral charge behind the revelation of the lower body, which can be seen through the poorly draped clothes of fools, sinners, swindlers, executioners, and other marginalized folk. Furthermore, this theme runs through several saints’ Lives, notably those of St Catherine of Siena and St Martin of Tours, as Philine Helas discusses in her essay: saints confer their sanctity through the self-abasing ritual of shedding or refusing clothes. In a telling miracle story about a nun who decides to quit the convent in pursuit of a sexual affair, the protagonist clearly becomes identified with her habit.14 Before her escape, she must take off her habit, thereby stripping herself of her vow. As she is about to exit the convent, she leaves her habit draped on an image of the Virgin.
When her affair turns sour and she returns to the convent, she finds that the Virgin, while wearing the habit which had been draped on her image, has been ‘covering’ for the prodigal nun by performing her duties. Far from being chastised, the nun returns to find that she has become the model nun. The nun’s habit, which mediates between the nun and the Virgin, seems to animate the image. Liturgical clothing, blessed and imbued with meaning, continues to be a protagonist in many other miracle stories. The ultimate stripping of rank appears in an image depicting Thomas Becket of Canterbury, the English bishop who was martyred at the altar. On an intentionally damaged manuscript leaf, textiles mediate between Thomas and his authority. Many manuscripts were damaged during the iconoclasm of the sixteenth century, and English manuscript owners often scratched out or mutilated references to popes and indulgences. In the so-called Hours of Catherine of Aragon, written in Flanders around 1460 for the Use of Sarum (and therefore made for export to England)1’ and illuminated by Willem Vrelant, a full-page miniature depicts the martyrdom of Thomas of Canterbury (Figure 7).16
Soldiers have stormed into the church where the bishop is performing mass at an altar, and they prepare to behead him. But his life is not all that was to be negated: someone has scraped the paint from the image in order to erase the soldiers’ swords, or in one case, to erase the hand that is wielding a sword, as if to deny the fact that Thomas was martyred at all. The one object most effectively expunged, however, is the bishop’s mitre, which had been resting on the altar until someone scraped it away, as if to take away Thomas’s authority, connoted by the hat. Finally, as if to make one final negating gesture to deny the saint his martyrdom, and the image as a whole, an iconoclast has taken a pen filled with dark brown ink and inscribed a violent and expunging X through the entire image. It is difficult to tell whether the same hand performed these various acts of iconoclasm, since the connoisseur usually evaluates the hand of creation, not the one of erasure. What is clear, however, is that the manuscript leaf bears witness to layers of negation. It is noteworthy in this context that the iconoclast(s) also cut out the folio originally facing the image, which would have contained a prayer (suffrage) to St Thomas. Did this iconoclast hesitate to remove a precious page with an illumination by Willem Vrelant, or did this person think that Thomas could live with greater ignominy in his dismantled state — taunted with his mitre erased — in perpetuity? While the iconoclasts destroyed Thomas’s clothing and authority, clothing also played an important role in the construction of his authority. The story of Thomas’s investiture appears within collections of Marian legends and reveals aspects of Mary’s relationship to clothing.
According to legend, the saint interacted with Mary more than once through the medium of textiles: In his younger days, Thomas of Canterbury lived a chaste life, for he had vowed chastity to Our Lady Mary. Among his companions, he was like a lily among thorns. Once he heard his companions brag about the lovely love-tokens their girlfriends had given them. At last, Thomas told the others in jest: ‘None of your love-tokens is worthy of praise. I have a girlfriend who surpasses all your girlfriends, who has given me a love-token without equal’. He meant this in a spiritual way, but they all took it in a worldly sense. They began to urge him to show them the love-token and they kept bothering him about it. When he could no longer stand it, he went to the church to the statue of Our Lady, fell on his knees, and prayed for mercy for his wrongdoing by having spoken so presumptuously of her to his companions. As Thomas was thus lying in prayer, the pure Virgin Mary appeared and comforted him and said: ‘Do not be afraid, you have boasted rightly to your companions of your girlfriend’s great nobility and dignity, for she indeed surpasses all mankind’. She then gave him a beautiful love-token, a small box. Having received this, he came to himself after his prayer and went home. His companions came round and urged him to show his girlfriend’s love-token. In the end, they took the little box he had received from Our Lady Mary from him. When they opened the box, they saw a little piece of red purple.
They drew it out, and an astonishing chasuble and another beautifully adorned mass vestment followed it. When word of this miracle reached the Bishop of Canterbury, he sent for Thomas and asked him how he had come by the box. Thomas told him the truth, about how Mary, Mother of God, had given it to him. When the Bishop heard from Thomas, who was poor at the time, how much Mary loved him, he bestowed upon him as much of his own property and income as he would need every year to learn and study. He put the desire into Thomas’s heart to become bishop after him, and he ordered it as well, so that it indeed happened after his death. This is how Thomas became bishop, and he governed the bishopric [well]. He lived very piously and very devoutly and fervently served Mary, Mother of God, all his life.'7 The ‘red purple’ (purper) does not only refer to colour, but also to a particular kind of cloth, pellen, derived from the Latin pallium, used for garments for important clergymen. The legend positions Thomas as a braggart who taunts his friends and then subsequently repents by prostrating himself before an image of the Virgin. Merciful as always, the Virgin does not chastise her lover, but rather approves of his boasting and rewards him for it with a gift. His vision of her seems to have occurred in a trance-like state, from which he emerges to find himself holding an extraordinary gift: a box full of fine silk. His relationship with his ‘girlfriend’, the Virgin Mary, is mediated through clothing: she bestows upon him a set of luxurious vestments.
This gift both confirms the solidity of his vision and confirms the Virgin’s approval of his future office as bishop, since she is, in effect, providing him a purple bishop’s cloak. The story provides a miniature Bildungsroman-, the wise-cracking young monk has an intimate experience with his girlfriend and emerges as a fully cloaked man. The legend continues with a second chapter in the life of Thomas of Canterbury, in which textiles again play a key role:17 8 19 Later he [Thomas of Canterbury] was expelled from England and his diocese because he would not consent to breaches of the Holy Church’s rights.'5 He spent some time in a monastery under the Order of St Bernard in France. As one can read about him, he used to wear a hairshirt instead of a linen one. Everybody assumed that a religious woman, a recluse [in England], used to make and wash these for him. But because he had suddenly and unexpectedly been expelled from England and had not packed enough of that kind of clothing, eventually his shirt needed mending. Because he did not know anyone in whom he could confide his problem, he once secretly went and sat in the monastery sewing and mending his shirt, but it caused him much grief that he could not do this task properly.
Then the glorious Virgin Mary, who helps those who serve her, appeared to the bishop and comforted him. Greeting him, she said, ‘Do not fear’. Sitting next to him, she took the garment from the bishop’s hand and sewed it with her own blessed hands. When the task was completed, she vanished from the bishop’s sight. He thanked her with great devotion and fervour, and in his amazement, he pondered the loveliness and sweetness of the glorious Virgin Mary. Once again, the Virgin has appeared to save Thomas from his humiliating distress, thereby showing her satisfaction with his set of choices, specifically to wear the penitential shirt. What is telling here is the gendered nature of sewing: Thomas is so embarrassed to use a needle and thread that he must do so in hiding. To make matters worse, he experiences frustration stemming from his inability to sew. Clearly, he had not received training in sewing as a young monk, but the Virgin, heavenly handmaiden, learned to sew as a child.
According to the Golden Legend, Mary’s parents sent her to the temple when she was three, and she spent the next eleven years praying and doing needlework. In this miracle, which is also a fantasy and a vision, she has become Thomas’s silent seamstress, arriving in time to darn his tattered garment. Mary is not the only woman who becomes enmeshed with textiles, and the gendered nature of textiles runs as a thread through many of the essays in this volume, including those by Barbara Baert (most clearly in her treatment of the pallium and its miraculous origins, which were tied up with the legend of St Agnes’ youthful and virginal martyrdom), and by Philine Helas, who, by analysing three miracle legends, teases out the complex gendered nature of clothing the poor as an act of mercy.
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