Download PDF | (Natalie Zemon Davis Annual Lecture Series) William Chester Jordan - Men at the Center_ Redemptive Governance Under Louis IX-Central European Univ Pr (2012).
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Rober t of S orb on , Churchman Sorbon, today a tiny village of about two hundred souls, was very small in the thirteenth century. It is located in a region, the Ardennes, which has a rugged grandeur. The now defunct local journal, Les Ardennes françaises, devoted to the region’s history, used as its motto, “Faisons connaître et admirer le Beau Pays d’Ardenne” (“Let us proclaim and gaze with pleasure on the beautiful Ardennes countryside”). Nevertheless, it was an economically unproductive land by the robust standards of most other regions in France in the thirteenth century. In part this was because the terrain of the Ardennes was rough and unwelcoming.
Transport in and out of the hilly, boggy and heavily forested region was difficult. The too-compact soil produced hardwood trees that grew gnarled and were less desirable for lumber than those of many other regions, and such timber as woodsmen did harvest was, given the terrain, difficult to convey to major urban Chapter One 2 markets or to ports for transshipment. Moreover, at the start of the thirteenth century the Ardennes was in many respects a lawless region, as traditional historians of the state conceive law, though not perhaps as a legal anthropologist would. For every society has rules and norms even in the absence of state authority. However, neither the royal government of France nor the administrations of any of the great seigneurs who claimed rights in the area could exercise them as they wanted to in peace.1 On either side of the year 1200 the Ardennes saw German, Flemish and French armies in conflict as part of two larger struggles then being waged. The first was between England and France and ultimately led to the English loss of Normandy and many of the other continental provinces to the king of France. The other was the warfare between supporters of Otto of Brunswick, on the one hand, and Philip of Swabia and, later, Frederick of Hohenstaufen and Pope Innocent III, on the other, over claims to the imperial throne. Germans and Flemings were either by direct monetary inducement or by political or economic commitment generally drawn more to the En glish side in the first conflict but they were woefully divided in the second. In any case, for all of these contending forces, the Ardennes and neighboring regions constituted a great and enduring arena in the opening 3 two decades of the thirteenth century for bloodshed and death, for arson and pillage. On October 9, 1201, a son was born in the village of Sorbon, in the heartland of the holdings of the count of Rethel, to a peasant couple who had him baptized Robert.2
Almost nothing is known of the child’s early life, except that he manifested a singular intelligence in the local schools, to the roisterous culture of which he seems to have made reference in comments later in life.3 His parents, like so many other local parents, would have known the Ardennes of the period as a difficult place for advancement or, as we might say, for social mobility. And they would have known, like many others, that the best licit way for a peasant boy to improve his lot was to rise through the church. Robert of Sorbon4 trained for the priesthood and rose steadily. He augmented his education, it has been suggested, by a period of instruction at the College of Ret(h)el in Paris, an association of scholars and economically disadvantaged students from the Rethélois, where he had passed his childhood years.5 His studies culminated in his becoming a secular master of theology, that is, a professor, at the University of Paris.6 By about 1250 he had drawn and was drawing income, sequentially, from prebends he held as a canon of the cathedral of Notre-Dame of Cambrai and then as a canon of the cathedral of Notre-Dame 4 of Paris.7 Insofar as he was making a reputation in the capital, it was as a preacher and stern moralist denouncing gambling, the vernacular theater, bawdy songs, hypocrisy, prostitution, gossip, usury, lax attention to duty, pride in mastering theology, and generally being unchristian and thus doing the works of the Saracens.8 He was, by training, versed in the works of Aristotle which were in vogue in the Paris schools, but in his own writings he drew more on the ancient philosopher’s ethical than on his analytic and scientific works.
Only in legendary retellings of his life, as Palémon Glorieux demonstrated, is Master Robert of Sorbon made to loom as large a philosophical and theological presence in thirteenth-century Paris as Bonaventure or Thomas Aquinas.9 The modern afterlife of Robert in stories and monuments remains to be written.10 The unbending preacher with his message that popular amusements, like profane singing, was a diversion from faithful living and that the sacrament of confession should be at the center of the Christian moral experience came to the attention of King Louis IX (r. 1226–1270), himself the creator of a political regime that Jacques Le Goff has understandably called one of moral repression.11 It did not impair Robert’s chances of admission to and advancement in the royal court that the king’s favorite devotional pastime was hearing sermons and even engaging in dialogue with preach 5 ers during their sermons.12 This preacher’s message— Robert’s message—was particularly affecting. He condemned behavior, as noted, like frivolous composing and singing, which deviated from his narrow list of salutary pastimes, and he spoke of confession, a step on the way to forgiveness for such deviations, as a sacrament best practiced over a long period. One ought not to, he insisted, confess one’s sins tersely to a priest, but at great length—in long therapy sessions, as it were— which provided opportunities for meditation, spiritual medication, and recuperation.13
In a city in which the king lived almost next door to the cathedral and only a short walk from the schools, both of which were Robert’s terrain of activity, it is unsurprising that the preacher should come to Louis’s attention. Scholarly efforts to see the king’s brother Count Robert d’Artois as the preacher’s sponsor may therefore be misguided.14 True, the territorial heartland of Artois was little distant from the Ardennes, but it was not the Ardennes. His countship and the obligations of aristocratic largesse may have compelled the king’s brother to act as the protégé of a few Artésiens but hardly of men from the Ardennais. Indeed, the theory that the count of Artois’s influence was Robert of Sorbon’s conduit to the royal court may owe something to later legends that the moralistic preacher was not actually a peasant after all, but the son of nobles 6 who had presumably fallen on hard times, a man whose innate nobility merely re-emerged into the bright light of day when changed circumstances permitted it to do so.15 One is reminded of all the medieval stories, like Robert the Devil and Havelock the Dane, in which this is a prominent motif.16 Humanists even speculated that the preacher was an otherwise unacknowledged brother of King Louis IX.17 This would mean that the king’s father Louis VIII had dallied with Robert of Sorbon’s mother (wholly unattested and not even rumored in the thirteenth century). Or, the king’s mother Blanche of Castile dallied with some fellow. All Robert of Sorbon ever said about his mother (he said it in a sermon) was that she was unlettered.18 Of course, that Blanche of Castile was a well-educated woman, perhaps even the author of the words of a song in praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is no evidence against the humanists.19 An illegitimate child could have been placed with an illiterate foster parent. Nevertheless, there is no evidence or contemporary or near-contemporary rumors of this. By the year 1250 Robert of Sorbon did achieve admission to the royal court and indeed did so on his merits. He received the title clerc du roi and, probably somewhat later, chapelain royal.
These designations described a quasi-official and regular attachment to the royal court, duties at religious services attended by the 7 king, and frequent personal access to the monarch.20 Despite Robert’s obsession with confession, however, the allegation that he was Louis IX’s regular confessor cannot be substantiated. Louis was one of the few laypeople (the Hungarian king was another) who had sought and received papal permission to select their own confessors from either the regular or secular clergy, including their chaplains, but the list of the French king’s formally appointed confessors from 1248 on only includes Dominican friars.21 Thus, the assertion that Robert of Sorbon served in this role may be another part of the legends that grew up after the chaplain’s death. Nonetheless, it is generally agreed that whenever the king’s usual confessors were absent or indisposed, he would turn to other clerical members of his retinue to assume this role. On occasion, then, Robert of Sorbon probably confessed the ruler, which may be the kernel of truth behind the legend.22
The signal adventures of Louis IX’s life were his two crusades. He was absent from France in Cyprus, Egypt and the Holy Land from 1248 to 1254 and again in 1270, the year he died in the siege of Tunis. It was while the king was outre-mer in 1250 that Robert of Sorbon, who did not accompany him, first appears to have appealed for help in founding a college for poor boys who were students of theology. He would have made his appeal to Blanche of Castile, the queen-mother, 8 whom Louis had made regent for the period of his absence.23 It is interesting that Blanche, too, shared the privilege with her son and his wife, Marguerite of Provence, of selecting her own confessor. Robert did not serve this role for either of the women, however. All the confessors that can be associated with the women of the royal house were Franciscan friars.24 It may be churlish of me to suggest this, but I am of the opinion that Robert of Sorbon’s reflections on confession were much admired at court. Yet, the actual practice of long and tedious, seemingly endless, periods of confession was not to everyone’s liking or perhaps even possible for busy rulers.
The crown’s money was largely committed in 1250 to the enormous expenditures for the crusade.25 What Robert of Sorbon was seeking at this moment more than funding was the blessing of the royal court for his enterprise, a blessing, which might induce other men and women to contribute materially to his hopes and plans. In the long run, of course, he expected to get financial support not just good will from the crown, but as a courtier himself he could not have been insensible to the crush of obligations then facing the regency government. Money poured south to finance the crusade, to refill the king’s coffers after his capture and the ransom of his army and for the repair of fortifications in the Holy Land. So difficult was the situation 9 that Louis IX remarked that his treasury was nearly emptied temporarily by his obligations.26 Under the circumstances Robert of Sorbon’s plans did not really get off the ground until three years after he first approached Blanche of Castile and then only in a very modest way. Palémon Glorieux traced with painstaking care the initial steps from 1253 to 1257, which truly mark the establishment of the Sorbonne, and its transformation into a real educational institution from what may have begun rather as a hospice.27 The king’s major contributions only began around the latter year and must be regarded as part of a general pattern of increased royal philanthropy.28 For, his donations were occasioned by financial recovery from the expense of crusading, which I would estimate took at least two years from the time of the king’s return to France in 1254.
There is plenty of evidence of this time lag, such as Louis IX’s repayment of a 5,000 pound parisis (l. p.) loan to the abbot of Cluny in 1256, two years after he contracted it, which was immediately after the completion of his sea voyage back from the Holy Land.29 Endowments of money and property from Louis IX were good, but papal beneficence, even if limited to the realm of the spirit, was good too. And the two were connected. It must have been at least partly through the good offices of the king that so many popes— Alexander IV in 1259, Urban IV in 1261, and the king’s 10 personal friend Clement IV in 1268—were inclined to bless Robert’s enterprise once Louis IX’s philanthropy became known and to vest in the chaplain more or less absolute control as provisor over the new institution as long as he lived.30 Most of Robert of Sorbon’s time in the late 1250s and the 1260s was occupied with fostering the growth of the college and ancillary projects related to it— redacting the statutes, establishing a preparatory program for students who were smart but came illprepared, and assiduously improving the library by purchase and by soliciting donors.31 He did not abandon his other duties at the royal court and at NotreDame. His importance among the canons at the latter was recognized by his selection to represent the cathedral chapter after the death of Bishop Renaud Mignon de Corbeil, which is to say, he was one of the three canons who sought permission to elect a new bishop (the licentia eligendi).32 Granting permission to elect was a privilege that pertained to the crown for replacement of abbots and bishops of regalian monasteries and sees.33 On September 29, 1270, two days before his sixtyninth birthday, Robert redacted his last will and testament. A little more than one month before, on August 25, 1270, his supporter, Louis IX, had died on crusade. Upon his return from North Africa, the dead king’s 11 son, Philip III, began his rule.
The nature of the court started to change, as the younger man came to depend on a favorite, Pierre de la Broce, who acquired an unsavory reputation. And even after Pierre’s fall a few years later, the court did not resume its character as a center of austere holiness and the most extreme moral rigor. The young woman Philip III married (he had lost his first wife to disease on the crusade) and the young men, many of whom were her relatives, who occupied the new inner circle, were known for their attraction to the traditional and faddish chivalric pastimes.34 The men in particular were fonder of hunting and warmongering than of austere piety. Some of the old king’s advisers, like Mathieu of Vendôme, the abbot of SaintDenis, survived the transition, even if their influence was muted for several years. But Robert of Sorbon passed away on August 15, 1274, before the favorite met his end and a small coterie of Louis IX’s old advisers managed to regain some, if not all, the ground they had lost.35 Such, in brief, is the outline of Robert of Sorbon’s life. He was a courtier in the formal sense of the word, but this implies more than mere service at the royal court. The existence of distinctly court cultures in medieval Europe has long been recognized. I have alluded already to the fundamental differences of mood and tone between the court of Louis IX and that of 12 his son, Philip III. These differences manifested themselves not merely discursively or in terms of behavior and gesture.
They also, through patronage, have been alleged to affect the arts, as Robert Branner’s work on the court style under Louis IX long ago argued. But until recently historians have not even had a good sense of the extent and composition of Louis IX’s court. We have known about some key people, if they were famous in other ways, but no one, again until recently, has tried to map the boundaries, personnel and duties of courtiers with the kind of precision that would satisfy. With the research of the archivist Jean-François Moufflet on the hôtel du roi in the reign of Louis IX, we are heading in the right direction, but he has been the first to admit that we are still far from the goal.36 Robert of Sorbon is famous enough as the founder of his college to command the attention of scholars interested in the history of the University of Paris. He is famous enough as a preacher, moralist and defender of sacramental confession to command the attention of students of sermons, cultural representations and devotional practices. Nevertheless, little has been made of his actual work at court. Rather historians have contented themselves with repeating the few candid anecdotes about him that have come down to us from the most famous source, Jean de Joinville’s Life of Saint Louis.
Though not properly regarded as a courtier 13 himself, Jean de Joinville, the sénéchal of Champagne, knew the king from the early 1240s, and he accompanied Louis IX on his first crusade from 1248 to 1254, though not on his second in 1270, which he opposed because of the king’s weak health.37 The sénéchal was an intermittent visitor to court, however, after Louis’s first crusade and was routinely admitted to the royal circle of friends whenever he was there.38 His memoir reveals his sometimes fractious relationship with Robert of Sorbon. The preacher and the aristocrat ordinarily enjoyed each other’s conversation. Once when they were speaking sotto voce at the royal table, where, Jean de Joinville mentions, Robert often took his meals at Louis IX’s request, the king cautioned them to speak more loudly so that they would not incur the suspicions of others. On a second occasion, the sénéchal also mentions that the king “in a playful mood” (en joie) provoked a debate between Robert and himself (Jean) over whether a prud’homme or a béguin was the better sort of man. Robert had a reputation as a prud’homme, a virtuous sort of man of action, according to Jean, but the chaplain did not see that this made living the life of a béguin, that is, of a contemplative man (Jacques Monfrin translates the word into modern French as dévot) less preferred. Again, Louis IX intruded himself into the conversation to praise and offer his preference for the 14 life of a prud’homme, thereby and at one level flattering Robert of Sorbon’s prud’homie.
This flattery, it should be pointed out, was in no way compromised by the fact that the king also frankly admired and generously supported the mendicant friars and therefore implicitly various forms of the devoted life.39 On a third occasion, the royal chaplain criticized the sénéchal for upstaging the king by wearing fancier clothing than Louis. Jean retorted with a defense of his privilege to wear the aristocratic dress bestowed on him by his parents and implicitly appropriate to his lineage, irrespective of what the king wore. He in turn admonished Robert for dressing above his station and in finer cloth than the king wore at the time because the preacher was the offspring of peasants (de vilain et de vilainne). The argument got out of hand, necessitating the king’s intervention and his defense of the royal chaplain in order to counteract the humiliating reference to his base origins. But, then, out of the chaplain’s hearing Louis confessed to the sénéchal and the royal son and son-in-law, who had overheard, that he actually thought Master Robert had been wrong to criticize Jean.40
These are wonderful anecdotes, but scholars, even the best of them, have usually just cited or quoted rather than analyzed them perceptively.41 What can one learn? As to the arguments that Robert may have pre 15 sented about prud’homie and devotion, Nicole Bériou has given a brilliant if speculative reconstruction from the evidence of his sermons.42 I am more interested in what the anecdotes suggest about Robert of Sorbon’s personality. The master, the clerc du roi, the royal chaplain, the great preacher, the stern moralist was a cour tier, but he was also ashamed of his origins, if one takes the anecdotes seriously. He liked to be flattered, and the king recognized it—and flattered him. The king seemed to know instinctively that a man of Robert’s origins, no matter his repute as a scholar, preacher or defender of highly disciplined behavior, needed regular confirmation of the status he had achieved as a cour tier.43 What this suggests, in turn, is that part of Louis IX’s kingship, a part I do not believe has ever been fully appreciated, is the way he balanced personalities at court. It must have been a considerable effort when visitors, like Jean de Joinville, who could not have fully appreciated how strenuous this continuous effort was, blustered their way, even good-naturedly, into the activities of the court circle—speaking, as if in secrets, with courtiers which might inspire concern and apprehension in others.
This is the force, I take it, of Louis IX’s caution to Robert and Jean not to speak sotto voce at the crowded royal dinner table, and it is the reason the sénéchal later, realizing his mistake and the king’s craft, chose to retell it. 16 We also see by means of these anecdotes that Louis IX wanted Robert as a courtier. Hearing of his prowess as a preacher and of his moral temperament was what got the maître access to the king in the first instance, and it mirrors by the way how Louis, when he returned from crusade, became interested in the Franciscan friar Hugues of Digne, although Hugues stubbornly refused to join the royal court.44 But what explains the chaplain’s staying power? There must have been more, especially since we know he was not particularly sought after in practice as a father confessor. So, what was it or, perhaps in the plural, what were the traits or the abilities that assured Robert a continuing place at the royal court, implying the favor of Louis IX, and by doing so allowed him to exploit networks of power and patronage that gave his pet project, the Sorbonne, such an advantageous commencement and early history? No doubt there were many, but there are three that I think deserve special emphasis— the first, which I have already hinted at, may be called moral, the second philanthropic and the third governmental. Before discussing them, however, it would be wise to make the case that Master Robert actually did successfully exploit the court circle in establishing and sustaining the Sorbonne.
The evidence is very strong. The names of most of the early endowers of and donors to the Sorbonne 17 are those of men from within, indeed, sometimes from within the most intimate ranks of, the court circle.45 Such a one was Guillaume of Chartres, who endowed the Sorbonne through the conveyance of a number of Parisian properties, but who seems to have had lower class non-noble origins. At one time in his life, after joining the church, Guillaume drew income from a canonry in Saint-Quentin. In some way (perhaps through the good offices of the queen’s physician, whom I will be discussing momentarily), he came to the king’s attention and was asked to serve at court, like Robert of Sorbon, as a royal chaplain. He ultimately became a Dominican friar, but though the Dominicans were formally the Order of Friars Preachers, modern critics have not thought much of Guillaume’s surviving sermons: “Ils ne méritent aucunement d’être publiés,” one has written about them.46 It is not known what Louis IX thought of the sermons, but there is no doubt what he thought of the man. Guillaume of Chartres went on serious missions for Louis IX, accompanied him on both of the king’s crusades and served him as chaplain and, later, confessor. Indeed, he was with the king when he was captured on his first crusade and when he died on his second. A short chronicle Guillaume wrote adds to our already abundant evidence on Louis’s rule. Like Robert he exploited his contacts in the royal circle, 18 endeavoring around 1277 to get his nephew received into the royal monastery of Saint-Denis, whose abbot was Mathieu of Vendôme who had been one of Louis IX’s closest legal and political advisers. Mathieu served as co-regent when the king went on his final crusade. Guillaume of Chartres died in 1280.47
The second of this group was the physician, Robert of Douai, another man of obscure origins, who early on in his ecclesiastical career (he was in orders by 1245) became a canon of Senlis and Saint-Quentin as well. It is their mutual Saint-Quentin connection that makes me think that Robert of Douai may have been Guillaume of Chartres’s conduit to court. However that may be, Robert of Douai made a considerable reputation as a medicus and managed to obtain an appointment as a royal physician and, indeed, ultimately as Queen Marguerite’s personal physician, a fact he proudly noted in his will dated 1258. In 1254 he had sold a house to Guillaume of Chartres, one of the properties that the latter subsequently conveyed to the Sorbonne.48 Around the same time he was called upon by Pope Innocent IV to help negotiate some of the strife then affecting relations between the mendicant and secular masters at the University of Paris.49 Clearly, he had sufficient fame and significant interest in educational institutions, or in this educational institution, to have been approached for this task. The bequests in 19 Robert’s will provided a windfall for the new College of the Sorbonne when he died on the 25th of May 1258. It received 1,500 l. p., a genuinely princely sum, as well as Robert’s theology books for its nascent library. The enormous size of this bequest helps explain Robert of Douai’s unsavory reputation in some quarters, quarters outside the royal circle. Poems and songs constituted a major medium in the High Middle Ages for slurring one’s enemies or people whose behavior was allegedly repugnant. Robert of Douai appears in Henri d’Andeli’s contemporary poem known as the “Battle of the Seven Arts.”
In it he is upbraided as a money-hungry practitioner, equivalent to a surgeon.50 Again, one must ask what there was about the doctor that attracted a king who was so sensitive to avarice. Did Louis IX know of Robert of Douai’s reputation outside the royal circle? And, if he did, did he care? Would he have simply assumed that a man who served as the queen’s physician was entitled to the considerable financial benefits of the office, even if he was a little too proud and thus encouraged screeds meant to denigrate him? That Robert of Douai’s obit was celebrated at the Sorbonne, the abbey of Sainte-Geneviève, and the convent of the Mathurins (Trinitarians) of Paris does suggest, however, that no matter how greedy he appeared to certain possibly envious detractors, he was lavish in his largesse to educational and religious institutions.51 20 Two other key persons in supporting Robert of Sorbon’s enterprise in its earliest phase of existence and in sustaining succeeding popes’ blessings of the institution (they became cardinals) were Geoffroy of Bar and Guillaume of Bray. Their origins mirror Robert of Sorbon’s own and the origins of Guillaume of Chartres and Robert of Douai. Geoffroy of Bar, though he rose to be dean of the cathedral chapter of Paris, a cour tier in Louis IX’s entourage and cardinal-priest of Santa-Susanna, was born into a commoner family living in abject poverty.52
And Guillaume of Bray was from another family of ‘nobodies’; yet, he, too, found his way to a deanship at the cathedral of Notre-Dame of Laon—in the Ardennes—where he also served as officialis, typically a legal expert, and to Louis IX’s court, ending his career as cardinal-priest of San-Marco.53 All of these men would have served as examples for the impoverished students who came to the Sorbonne, examples of what hard work, determination, a great deal of learning, and supercharged piety could bring them under suitable circumstances and under a suitable master like Louis IX. Louis IX’s suitability extended to his ambivalent attitude toward social class. He was sensitive to the feelings of those who were high-born, as one can infer from one of the anecdotes Jean de Joinville related and that I have retold. The king both consoled the 21 low-born Robert of Sorbon when Jean made reference to the chaplain’s humble rustic origins and reassured his own high-born son, son-in-law and the sénéchal that they were right to display their elevated status. There is nonetheless a weirdness even in this otherwise seemingly straightforward anecdote, for in making his point separately to his aristocratic audience, the king added—quite unnecessarily—that they should array themselves nicely and appropriately so as to intensify their wives’ love of them and their dependents’ esteem for them.
This assertion or even exhortation came from a king who had a running battle with critics of his plain style of dress (“Friar Louis” they mocked him outside of his hearing) and especially with his queen, Marguerite, a woman who complained that he dressed inappropriately and below his station. This encouragement to his noble listeners to dress well was expressed, one should remember, by a king who responded to his wife’s criticism by taunting her with the bitter irony of promising that he would dress as she wished him to if she would agree to dress as he desired her to, a remark which presumably made her angry but also demonstrated the utter futility of pursuing further dialogue on the matter with her husband.54 My own view is that the king relished the feelings of generosity generated by bestowing blessings on the low-born clerics. It is true, perhaps, that his behavior 22 ran the risk of coming across to others as condescending and rather off-putting. Yet, there are also a sufficient number of indications that his own personal endurance of humiliation, self-imposed, such as flagellation or plainness of dress, or imposed by circumstances, such as his failure on his first crusade, helped soften the impression.55 “Dear children,” he once told an audience of Dominican novices in Paris slightly before he swore the formal vow to undertake another crusade, “praise our Lord and do not pine for the joys of the world. I have been king for forty years and have had more joys than all of you together, that I know. And in all my days, I did not spend one full day, that was not mingled with sorrow.”56 I noted that the kind of influence that Robert of Sorbon enjoyed emanated largely from his obvious closeness—the public knowledge of his closeness— to the king.
This closeness had many aspects, and I noted above that three of them may not be fully appreciated to the degree or depth they should be. I believe they exemplify the two men’s common moral, philanthropic, and governmental sensibilities. As to the moral sensibility, it is instantiated in their mutual distaste for profane songs. Ironically this grew out of their love of songs, but those of Christian worship. Let us remind ourselves of the extraordinary empha 23 sis laid in Christian worship on singing as a proper expression of love for God. This was rooted in scripture itself. “Sing unto the lord a new song” (Psalms 96:1 [Vulgate 95:1], and elsewhere)—indeed all the Psalms, not to mention the Song of Songs, testify to this sentiment. Profane songs struck the two men as inappropriate, and on occasion, in their bawdy form, genuinely obscene, akin to blasphemy, a topic that will be addressed in Chapter Three. Earlier it was noted that there is a thirteenth-century vernacular song whose lyrics are attributed in the thirteenth century to Louis IX’s mother Blanche of Castile. I adduced this as evidence of her education or, rather, of the reputation she had for literacy of a high order. Neither musicologists nor historians have been entirely persuaded by the attribution, despite its earliness, and I do not want to pursue the subject here. But it is germane to repeat that this vernacular song was a Marial hymn, words written to praise the Blessed Virgin. This is germane because there is another song. And it was attributed to Louis IX himself, although historians and musicologists have been equally lukewarm about accepting this also early attribution.57 I do not insist that Louis IX had anything to do with this song except that it came to be “associated” with him, as one scholar put it—put it quite weakly.58
The lyrics are more complex than those of the wholly French song 24 attributed to the king’s mother. French and Latin lines alternate in a long sixteen-verse poem.59 The alternating French lines make a clipped sort of poem themselves. The alternating Latin lyrics do so as well. The French and Latin together make a profoundly expressive poem. The Latin is comprised of formulaic phrases extracted from formal devotional poetry, hymns and the liturgy. The French draws on formulas and conventions of vernacular trouvère love poetry. Whoever put these lyrics together displayed great sophistication; it is quite an impressive accomplishment.60 Two facts: it, too, is a Marial song, like the one attributed to Blanche of Castile, and it was, again to use the weakest formulation, associated with Louis IX around his own time.61 Indeed, it was said to have been the song the king, who sang devotional songs, attempted to persuade those around him, who enjoyed and indulged profane songs, to sing in their stead.62 Although I cannot prove it, I believe there is reasonably strong evidence that to this association with Louis IX one can add Robert of Sorbon’s partial or co-authorship of the extremely sophisticated and allusive lyrics. One morning in the month of May, the poets or poet writes, the protagonist set out for a meadow intending to chant the psalms (psalmos intendens psallere), and he encountered the Virgin Mother. 25 L’autrier matin el moys de may regis eterni munere que par un matin me levay mundum proponens fugere. en un plesant pre m’en entray psalmos intendens psallere: la mere dieu ilec trouvay jam lucis orto sidere. This first stanza, I hope, gives some flavor of the poetry.
The words reveal more than may at first be apparent. To give one example: the last line of this stanza, jam lucis orto sidere, “now the star of light [the sun] having risen,” is the incipit of one of the most famous hymns in the Latin church, the hymn which was sung in the early morning of the first day of the week. It had not been chosen by our thirteenth-century poet or poets merely because the scansion and the rhyme work with the other Latin lines. They do work, but this ancient hymn has its own point that mirrors and thus makes even more emphatic the sentiments of our thirteenth-century poem, whose protagonist was intending to sing psalms (psalmos intendens psallere) in the early morning, at daybreak, at the very sunrise (jam lucis orto sidere). Moreover, in the fifth line of the ancient hymn’s first verse, the author of the original implores God, Nil lingua . . . peccet, “Let not [my] 26 tongue sin.” In other words, he asks God to prevent him from using his gift of voice, which I would gloss as singing, in vain. In the following three stanzas of the thirteenthcentury song, the poet extols the Virgin’s beauty, compares her to a rose, her clothing to the soft coverings of budding flowers and her perfect teeth favorably to crystal (comme la rose entre la gent / in gemmis grato tegmine. / plus que cristal sont blanc li dent).63 In stanza five and six her angelic character is highlighted as well as the glow of peace that emanates from her visage. Douce Dame, the classic chivalric mode of salutation, is how she is addressed, this virginal flower, who inspires good works. And then by stanza eight the tone changes to that of a sinner begging for help, for counsel and for salvation through the intervention of the gloriosa domina.
This appeal allows her to invoke her Son as well as the Holy Spirit (veni creator spiritus) as those hypostases of the godhead that will redeem the sinner. The Virgin is Mater misericordie, the mother of mercy, in effecting this divine intervention, which in turn lifts the poet to a state of heavenly bliss. And then the images of redemption cascade in line after line, stanza after stanza: a floral shower, beautiful songs, the nightingale, heavenly choruses, the salvific sign of the cross and, finally, the Virgin’s commendation of the poet, her devoted 27 slave (mon devot serf), to her Son. As the encounter ends with the Virgin ascending into heaven, the poet—but who is the poet? Let us assume for a moment that the poet speaks the words or the merged words of Louis IX (was not King David the reputed author of the psalms?) and Robert of Sorbon. The poet requests the Virgin always to keep him in her sight, to protect him from the devil’s seductions, and to bring him when he passes beyond human life to celestial paradise. Mere de dieu, vrai salut port fons pietate maxime, de celui m’envois confort salutem prestans anime. garde moi de l’anemi fort qui me temptat sepissime; paradis m’otroit a la mort rerum creator optime. amen. The final line of the thirteenth-century lyrics, rerum creator optime, is the best evidence of Robert of Sorbon’s hand at work in the song.
The line is the inci pit of the early medieval hymn that was used throughout the Middle Ages and beyond for Wednesday matins in the divine office. As one might expect, the old 28 hymn mimics the sentiments of the last stanza of the thirteenth-century poem. The protagonist desires God’s help to be vigilant in the struggle against sin. But the specific mode of behavior which the hymnist pledges in order to induce the Lord to bestow divine protection is in itself revealing in that it elegantly and precisely coheres with the moral and sacramental vision of Robert of Sorbon: Te, sancte Christe, poscimus; / ignosce tu criminibus, / ad confitendum surgimus / morasque noctis rumpimus (Holy Christ, we beg thee, / forgive our sins, / we arise [in the morning] to confess them / and we break through the interval of night). Which is to say, we confess and confess and confess— at length, all day and into the night—just as the founder of the Sorbonne had preached and written his whole life as a priest. The song that commenced in the early morning in the month of May thus ends with an allusion to the night, which threatens, but can be overcome, by persistent, continuous confession. In the same way devotional singing, I infer, was understood to be capable of overcoming the evils generated by profane singing. That this interpretation may be correct I offer as parallel evidence the famous Psalter of Saint Louis, produced for Louis IX around 1260.64 In the Psalter there is a sequence of seventyeight Old Testament illustrations.
These magnificent illustrations have excited much interest over the years. 29 It is not so much the iconography of one of the illustrations that is relevant as its allusion to the fuller text it evokes. The First Book of the Kings, chapters one and two (I Samuel 1–2), tells the story, illustrated schematically in the Psalter (fol. 67 v.), of Hannah the barren wife of Elkanah. She prayed God to give her a son and vowed him to the Lord’s service, if her prayer was granted. The prophet Eli saw her praying silently but fervently moving her lips and decided she had to be intoxicated (I Samuel 1:12). But she explained herself. When she was subsequently rewarded with a son, Samuel, the future prophet, she prayed a prayer of gratitude, which is known as the Song of Hannah (I Samuel 2:2–10). The trope, the power of devotional words (singing) over other words, is the same as can be inferred from the last stanza of the thirteenth-century song, L’autrier matin el moys de may. As Hannah puts it, “my mouth is enlarged over my enemies . . . . Do not multiply to speak lofty things, boasting; let old matters depart from your mouth” (I Samuel 2:1, 3). The sentiment, then, was expressed in another manuscript, which generations of scholars have argued reflect the very essence of Louis IX’s religious views. If L’autrier matin el moys de may is a song which served to challenge the practice of profane singing in Louis IX’s court and also so well captures the similar 30 guiding moral principles and impulses of the king and Robert of Sorbon, there is another sensibility that I called philanthropic that bound them as well. It concerns the béguines.
The whole subject of the béguines as it pertains to the French court and which is vital to an understanding of how a man like Robert, born on the margins, could effectively establish himself at the center of the realm, has been put on a new footing by the work of Professor Tanya Stabler Miller. In a data rich and richly evocative dissertation on the béguinage of Paris directed by Professor Sharon Farmer of the University of California at Santa Barbara and drawing creatively on northern French and Flemish sermon collections, Stabler Miller has overturned a plethora of received opinions.65 I have no wish to steal her thunder from her as yet unpublished book, but I do need to borrow two points from her already published articles in order to make my case about Robert of Sorbon, the first point dealing with the origin of the Paris béguinage and the second with the spiritual welfare of its inmates.66 As to the origin of the Paris béguinage, the institution was not generated from below. There were laywomen called béguines who dressed plainly and lived holy though non-professed lives in tiny communities of two, three or four individuals in thirteenth-century Paris.67 They had not presented a petition to Louis IX 31 asking for the establishment of a building complex that would house hundreds of such women together, to be organized under a head mistress.68 Indeed, many of these women in their tiny communities scattered over the city continued to live quite successfully apart from the great béguinage, which the king founded in 1264.69
This institution literally required urban redevelopment on a colossal scale and aggressive recruitment of women, perhaps as many as four hundred, to the establishment.70 Louis IX got the idea after he visited Ghent and saw a large, well-organized béguinage or so later traditions allege, or perhaps he simply heard an enthusiastic report on it.71 What makes the inspiration of the Ghent example plausible is the presence of so many men in the king’s entourage who came from the Franco-Flemish borderlands, including Robert of Sorbon himself, Robert of Douai, and Guillaume of Bray, whose service in the Ardennais see of Laon has already been noticed. Whether or not Louis saw the Ghent béguinage or had been specifically informed of it, he would have heard about similar institutions scattered about the region, though perhaps not as large as Ghent’s. One of these, one on which Louis IX bestowed alms, was Cambrai’s. It is worth recalling that Robert of Sorbon had held a canonry at the cathedral of Cambrai and, as Nicole Bériou points out, knew the béguinage there.72 32 When the king decided to introduce such an institution to Paris, he stinted not in the least in the effort or the material resources to do so. And there is not the slightest doubt that the enterprise was strongly supported by Robert of Sorbon and helped seal the alliance between him and the king. All of a sudden, thanks to Stabler Miller’s work, one prominent theme in Master Robert’s sermons, a theme which praised the laudatory nature of these women’s style of living, makes more sense.73 Moreover, the bond between king and chaplain received a fillip in that Robert’s defense of béguines flew in the teeth of the Parisian professor, Guillaume of Saint-Amour’s recent criticisms of mendicant and béguine styles of living in the 1250s.74
So harsh was his criticism, so annoying, with its apocalyptical overtones, and, finally, so obviously directed against Louis IX’s own sensibilities that the king worked hard and successfully to secure a papal condemnation of Guillaume’s works and his perpetual exile from Paris.75 Yet, this is not the end of the story. Stabler Miller, led by the example of other scholars, like Nicole Bériou, has undertaken the painstaking examination of sermons by Sorbonnistes, including Robert, and sermons directed to or commenting on béguine life in the first century of the Sorbonne’s existence.76 She and they have demonstrated that it fell significantly to the Sorbonnistes along with the Dominicans to provide, partly 33 through their sermons, for the spiritual welfare of the women in the Grand Béguinage of Paris.77 Béguines came under heightened scrutiny and received more public and official criticism, including papal, after Louis IX’s death.78 But it is indicative of the intimate association of the crown with and, in particular, the legacy of Saint Louis at both the Sorbonne and the Grand Béguinage that the latter institution escaped the censures that so many other béguinages, large and small, endured in the fourteenth century.79
I cannot commend Tanya Stabler Miller’s work enough. Besides the similar moral views on music and the similar philanthropic impulse toward the béguines shared by Louis IX and Robert of Sorbon, a third bond, as noted before, arose from what might be called a perceived similarity in the two men’s notions of governance. Men liked to claim to have influenced Louis IX in the governmental and administrative practices he instituted or they liked merely to praise the practices themselves and his choices of the men to enforce them. Jean de Joinville asserted that it was he (Jean) who cautioned the king once about receiving a gift from the abbot of Cluny who had a matter before the royal court. The sénéchal went so far as to suggest that the king listened to the abbot’s case more favorably as a result, and, Jean says, the king thought it over and had to agree that the sénéchal was right. It was 34 this revelation that induced Louis IX, again according to Jean, to issue rules limiting the gifts that councilors could accept, one provision of the great ordinances of reform that the king instituted in 1254 upon returning from his first crusade.80 Elsewhere Jean and others simply gloried in the king’s appointments of moral rigorists to important offices, even if their social profile diverged from what one might have expected of a king of the Franks, for, strange to tell, he might appoint foreigners.81
Yet, though much might be and has been surmised we know very little apart from Jean de Joinville’s possibly extravagant praise of himself as to who specifically counseled Louis in these matters. Astute the king may have been, ever alert to hear about people who might be useful, but who took part in the inner administrative councils? No serious scholar, so far as I know, has really pressed the notion that Robert of Sorbon, despite being a courtier, was in these inner administrative councils. Perhaps the royal chaplain’s general views mimicked the king’s, but what evidence is there that his influence went further or that anyone thought it did? One way to rephrase this question is to ask, whom did Louis’s subjects praise or blame for the policies he articulated and enforced? A neglected source for answering this question is a criticism of royal policies found in a contemporary song. The song is a screed aimed 35 at Louis IX’s legislation, legislation perceived by some aristocrats as undermining their power and prestige.82 This satirical song appears to have had as its author a disgruntled baron or the lyricist personates the voice of one who thought the apparatus of investigation into the administration of baronial justice which the king had set up essentially deprived him of his traditional authority: he would have preferred to remain, in the words of the song, “le maître de [son] fief.”83 And whom did he blame for this state of affairs, this assault on Sweet France, Douce France (his phrase)? 84
In truth, he did not blame the king. God forbid! The king, he believed, would have come to his senses but for the baleful influence of his clerical councilors.85 The poet laments that even Robert of Sorbon, if the identification made by Leroux de Lincy, the editor of the song, is correct, did not caution the king. Robert was too beholden to other clerics, in the poet’s words, those (li vostre, or partisans in the editor’s modern French translation) whose support he was cultivating presumably for his college—he was too beholden to them to admonish and restrain Louis IX.86 And so, the barons in the poet’s moral universe were reduced to confronting, resenting and resisting an unnatural alliance of charity (aumosne)—alms for poor boys at the Sorbonne and for holy women at the béguinage will serve—an unnatural alliance of charity, on the one 36 hand, and sin (péchié), on the other, sin implicitly being the assault on their noble privileges.87 If Robert was the object of the poet’s critique, as Leroux de Lincy argued, would he have been moved by it? Unlikely. He deliberately chose to adhere to the king’s and his own friends’ views.
In part, one supposes, this was instrumental. He wished to stay in favor at court and cultivate other courtiers in support of the Sorbonne. But everything that can be inferred from the sources also suggests a man zealous for discipline—the discipline of personal behavior and the construction and maintenance of a disciplined society. Disciplined governance and the expectation of disciplined governance from others possessing judicial and administrative authority—all in the service of the redemption of the realm—were subsets of this mentality, a mentality Robert of Sorbon shared fully with his lord and master, King Louis IX of France. In Chapters Two and Three, I hope to show that in Étienne Boileau and Simon de Nesle the king found equally fervent, some might even say fanatical devotees who willingly walked in his ways.
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