Notes

Art and beauty and poetry. E. K. R[and], “Editor’s Preface,” Speculum 1 (1926): 3–4, at 4.

Notes to Preface

Overture

unattributed joke. The incidentals (the regional origins of the two musicians, the specific cathedrals where they played, etc.) vary in different texts, but the most common form has the particulars as retold here. The earliest versions date to the summer of 2011.

the Virgin. Our Lady of the Assumption.

The Story of a Story

In the introduction. Arthur Långfors, review of E. Lommatzsch and M. L. Wagner, eds., Del Tumbeor Nostre Dame, in Romania 48 (1922): 288–90, at 290.

reflexes of the Italian Renaissance. W. D. Robson-Scott, The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany: A Chapter in the History of Taste (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 3–17; Thomas Cocke, “The Wheel of Fortune: The Appreciation of Gothic since the Middle Ages,” in Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England, 1200–1400, ed. Jonathan Alexander and Paul Binski (London: Royal Academy of Arts, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987), 183–91.

my godmother. Mary Koenig Weigand. I use the word godmother figuratively, not literally.

reception. Reception here signifies the ways in which later periods have received and re-created a literary work. Earlier generations might have spoken instead of sources and influences. Such was their means of charting the cosmic chain of being that leads down to the latest copy from the earliest, whether we are fortunate enough or not to possess the original.

flight attendant. Bette Nash, whose likely status as the world’s oldest flight attendant, with sixty years of service, has been discussed in various media, including newspapers, magazines, television, and online resources.

Erich Segal. “Rencontre avec Erich Segal,” L’Express, March 29, 1971.

From Our Lady’s Tumbler to The Jongleur of Notre Dame

from the French. Le jongleur de Notre Dame.

writing mania. I refer to the fugue state called furor scribendi in Latin.

medievalism. In analyzing medievalism in French literature, Janine Dakyns stops at 1870: see Dakyns, The Middle Ages in French Literature 1851–1900 (London: Oxford University Press, 1973). In English historiography, the same year is also frequently a dividing line, e.g., R. C. K. Ensor, ed., England, 1870–1914, Oxford History of England, vol. 14 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936). It is presented as a decisive demarcation in David Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015).

movements in art and culture. See, for example, John Steegman, Victorian Taste: A Study of the Arts and Architecture from 1830 to 1870 (London: Nelson, 1970); Walter Edwards Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT: Published for Wellesley College by Yale University Press, 1957).

conventional scheme. Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (London: Constable, 1928), 214.

Notes to Chapter 1

back to the twelfth century. Henry Adams, Letter to Charles M. Gaskell, Paris, October 9, 1899, in LHA 5: 41–43, at 42.

The French Poem

Our Lady’s Tumbler. Del Tumbeor Nostre Dame, in the original medieval French (literally, Of the Tumbler of Our Lady).

from the Middle Ages. Pierre Kunstmann, ed. and trans., Vierge et merveille: Les miracles de Notre-Dame narratifs au Moyen Âge (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1981), 11–12.

quintessentially medieval puzzles. The most comprehensive presentation is in Paul Bretel, Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame, Traductions des classiques du Moyen Âge, vol. 64 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003), which provides a translation into modern French, a text of the Old French, and a commentary, as well as the text of Anatole France’s story. A scholarly translation into English with the original en face can be found in Everett C. Wilkie Jr., trans., “Our Lady’s Tumbler,” Allegorica: A Journal of Medieval & Renaissance Literature 4 (1979): 81–120.

stand-alone moralizing piece. Adrian P. Tudor, “Preaching, Storytelling, and the Performance of Short Pious Narratives,” in Performing Medieval Narrative, ed. Evelyn Birge Vitz et al. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), 141–53, at 141.

the friars, too. David Jones, trans., Friars’ Tales: Thirteenth-Century Exempla from the British Isles (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2011).

arts of preaching. The Latin for these manuals is artes praedicandi.

songs of heroic deeds. In French, chansons de geste.

comedies. In Latin, comoediae.

exempla. G. T. Shepherd, “The Emancipation of Story in the Twelfth Century,” in Medieval Narrative: A Symposium, ed. Hans Bekker-Nielsen et al. (Odense, Denmark: Odense University Press, 1979), 4–57.

physical. For two inspirational guides to this vast topic, see Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, Lectures on the History of Religions, New Series, vol. 13 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336, Lectures on the History of Religions, New Series, vol. 15 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).

underclothes. A light cotelle or tunic.

acrobatics. Lines 135–36: “they serve by chanting, and I will serve by tumbling.”

The sequence culminates. Lines 163–67.

vida. See The Vidas of the Troubadours, trans. Margarita Egan, Garland Library of Medieval Literature, Series B, vol. 6 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1984).

miracles about Mary. Guy Philippart, “Le récit miraculaire marial dans l’Occident medieval,” in Marie: Le culte de la Vierge dans la société médiévale, ed. Dominique Iogna-Prat et al. (Paris: Beauchesne, 1996), 563–90, at 574.

The Manuscripts

No mass-produced items of this sort exist. The closest would be manuscripts produced by the pecia system. Yet our derivative piecemeal speaks to the difference between it and machine-age manufacture.

five codices. Hermann Wächter, “Der Springer unserer lieben Frau,” Romanische Forschungen 11.1 (1901): 223–88, at 299. The five manuscripts are Chantilly, Musée Condé (formerly Bibliothèque et archives du Château), MS 475 (previously 1578), fols. 190–196; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Arsenal MS 3516, fols. 127ra–128vb; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Arsenal MS 3518, fols. 89r–93r; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS français 1807, fols. 142–146; and Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS nouvelles acquisitions françaises 4276, fols. 78v–.

a form of French. Charles Théodore Gossen, “Considérations sur le franco-picard, langue littéraire du Moyen Âge,” Les dialectes belgo-romans 13 (1956): 97–121.

langue d’oïl. The French could be translated “the language of oui.” Most often it is contrasted to langue d’oc, “the language of oc.” In both cases, the words in the native language were the common way of expressing the affirmative “yes.”

common errors. For the broader intellectual consequences of this focus on error, see Seth Lerer, Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

Arsenal library. Since 1934, the Arsenal collection has belonged to the National Library of France in Paris. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Arsenal MS 3516, fols. 127ra–128rb.

major errors. On the errors in the archetype a, see Wächter, “Der Springer unserer lieben Frau,” 226–29.

Gautier de Coinci and Anonymity

miracles of the Virgin. The standard early description of the manuscript and its contents is Henry Martin, Catalogue des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, 9 vols. (Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit, 1885–1895), 3: 395–405, at 399. The closest study of this one codex is Claudia Guggenbühl, Recherches sur la composition et la structure du ms. Arsenal 3516 (Basel, Switzerland: A. Francke, 1998), 270, on fols. 127ra–139rc. Guggenbühl’s invaluable study touches upon Our Lady’s Tumbler repeatedly, especially at pp. 122 (on the table of contents), 131, 225, 354, 371.

unequivocally but wrongly. The error has continued to be made even recently: see Christophe Ghristi and Mathias Auclair, La belle époque de Massenet (Montreuil, France: Gourcuff Gradenigo Editions, 2011), 160.

translated and read. For one prominent case, see Erhard Lommatzsch, “Anatole France und Gautier de Coincy,” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 58 (1938): 670–83, repr. in idem, Kleinere Schriften zur romanischen Philologie (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1954), 126–38.

Coinci-L’Abbaye. The place of Gautier’s birth, and the spelling of its name, have been debated: see Louis Allen, “The Birthplace of Gautier de Coincy,” Modern Philology 33 (1936): 239–42.

dedicated to Mary. As far as the association with the Mother of God is concerned, the name of Notre Dame (“Our Lady”) says it all.

slipper. Anne L. Clark, “Guardians of the Sacred: The Nuns of Soissons and the Slipper of the Virgin Mary,” Church History 76 (2007): 724–49.

Hugh Farsit. Hugo Farsitus, Libellus de miraculis beatae Mariae virginis in urbe Suessionensi, in PL 179: 1777–800. For analysis, see Gabriela Signori, Maria zwischen Kathedrale, Kloster und Welt: Hagiographische und historiographische Annäherungen an eine hochmittelalterliche Wunderpredigt (Sigmaringen, Germany: Jan Thorbecke, 1995), 125–51.

discomfort. It is known technically as burning dysesthesia.

books of verse Marian miracles. Miracles de Nostre Dame. They encompass fifty-eight narratives, of which thirty-five are in book 1, twenty-three in book 2. In addition, the miracle collection contains two sermons, eighteen songs, and five prayers. The whole amounts to a total of roughly 35,500 octosyllabic lines.

language and rhetoric. On the language and rhetoric, see Tony Hunt, Miraculous Rhymes: The Writing of Gautier de Coinci, Gallica, vol. 8 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007).

images of the Mother of God. Jean-Marie Sansterre, “La Vierge Marie et ses images chez Gautier de Coinci et Césaire de Heisterbach,” Viator (English and Multilingual Edition) 41.1 (2010): 147–78, at 150–51.

representations as characters. Anna Russakoff, “The Role of the Image in an Illustrated Manuscript of Les Miracles de Notre-Dame by Gautier de Coinci: Besançon, Bibliothèque municipale 551,” Manuscripta 47.1 (2004): 135–44, at 138.

subgenre. Philippart, “Le récit miraculaire marial,” 566–67.

extant manuscripts. Kathryn A. Duys, assisted by Kathy M. Krause and Alison Stones, “Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles de Nostre Dame: Manuscript List,” in Gautier de Coinci: Miracles, Music, and Manuscripts, ed. Kathy M. Krause and Alison Stones, Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, vol. 13 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2006), 345–66.

musical notation. Gautier de Coinci, Les chansons à la Vierge, ed. Jacques Chailley, Publications de la Société française de musicologie, First Series, vol. 15 (Paris: Heugel, 1959); Kathryn Duys, “Manuscripts that Preserve the Songs of Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles de Nostre Dame (Listed by Date and Siglum),” in Krause and Stones, Gautier de Coinci, 367–68.

Likenesses of Madonnas. See, for example, Christine Lapostolle, “Images et apparitions: Illustrations des Miracles de Nostre Dame,” Médiévales 2 (1982): 47–66; Russakoff, “Role of the Image,” 135–44; Sansterre, “La Vierge Marie et ses images”; Nancy Blake, “Images of the Virgin Mary in the Soissons Manuscript (Paris, BNF, nouv. acq. fr. 25451),” in Krause and Stones, Gautier de Coinci, 253–77; Alison Stones, “Notes on the Artistic Context of Some Gautier de Coinci Manuscripts,” “Appendix III: Illustrated Miracles de Nostre Dame Manuscripts Listed by Sigla,” and “Appendix IV,” in Krause and Stones, Gautier de Coinci, 65–98, 369–96.

genuflection. An act designated in Greek as proskunesis (also prostration or bowing).

describing himself. 1 Miracle 11, 2315–17, cited by Hunt, Miraculous Rhymes, 49: “Car troveres ne sui je mie / Fors de ma dame et de m’amie / Ne menestrex ne sui je pas.”

vielle. Also often viele, with a single l.

parchment. The parchment here is a bifolium, which in a manuscript signifies the equivalent of two sheets, side by side, that have not been cut—the equivalent of four pages in a printed book.

minstrelsy and monasticism. See Kathryn A. Duys, “Minstrel’s Mantle and Monk’s Hood: The Authorial Persona of Gautier de Coinci in His Poetry and Illuminations,” in Krause and Stones, Gautier de Coinci, 37–63.

does not suffice. For example, the wrong ascription has been made by Sheldon Christian, Our Lady’s Tumbler: A Modern Miracle Play (Portland, ME: Anthoensen Press, 1948), viii; Henri Marmier, Le bateleur de Notre-Dame (d’après Gautier de Coincy) (Paris: H. Piazza, 1951), 9–14.

has been described. Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972).

gain some sense of him. Female poets existed, but they were greatly outnumbered by male ones. Furthermore, the details of monastic life suggest strongly that the person who wrote the poem was a man.

Picardy

dialect that became modern French. See especially Bernard Cerquiglini, Une langue orpheline (Paris: Minuit, 2007).

1268. In scholarly parlance, that year represents the terminus ante quem, signifying the date before which the composition of a work must be situated.

around 1200. In fact, the year of 1200 was emblazoned confidently on the cover of the 1920 standard edition. For the most reliable and succinct details about the text and its constitution, see Erhard Lommatzsch and Max Leopold Wagner, eds., Del tumbeor Nostre Dame: Altfranzösische Marien-legende (um 1200), Romanische Texte zum Gebrauch für Vorlesungen und Übungen, vol. 1 (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1920).

thoroughgoing analysis. The study in question was produced by an American scholar of medieval French language and literature who brought out his dissertation five years later in 1925. See Louis Allen, De l’hermite et del jougleour: A Thirteenth Century “Conte Pieux.” Text, with Introduction and Notes, Including a Study of the Poem’s Relationship to “Del Tumbeor Nostre Dame” and “Del Chevalier au Barisel” (Paris: Joseph Solsone, 1925), 53 (between 1223 and 1233). See also Louis Karl, “La légende de l’Ermite et le Jongleur,” Revue des langues romanes 63 (1925): 110–41. Few of Allen’s contemporaries took note of the case that he built: for one exception, see the slightly skeptical stance of Joseph Morawski, “Mélanges de littérature pieuse, III: Les miracles de Notre-Dame en vers français,” Romania 64 (1938): 454–88, at 457. Among later scholars, one who acknowledged Allen’s reasoning was Wilkie, “Our Lady’s Tumbler,” 83. For having brought home—nearly nine decades later—its validity, much credit is due to Earl Jeffrey Richards, “La devotion mariale et la politique à deux temps: Le Tumbeor Nostre Dame et Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame d’Anatole France,” in La Vierge Marie dans la littérature française: Entre foi et littérature / Actes du colloque international Université de Bretagne-Sud, Lorient, 31 mai–1er juin 2013, ed. Jean-Louis Benoît (Lyon, France: Jacques André éditeur, 2014), 233–42, at 238. I leave aside the resemblances between Our Lady’s Tumbler and the sermons of William of Auvergne that have been posited by Richards, “La devotion marial,” 239. On William, Richards points to Pierre Boglioni, “Peuple et culture populaire chez Guillaume d’Auvergne,” in Mensch und Objekt im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit: Leben, Alltag, Kultur. Internationaler Kongress, Krems an der Donau, 27. bis 30. September 1988, ed. Gerhard Jaritz, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Sitzungsberichte: Philosophisch-Historische Klasse 568, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Realienkunde des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit, vol. 13 (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1990), 193–222.

retreat from the world. The desirability of retreat from the world is mentioned at lines 13, 16, 275–78, 510, while Ponthieu is named at 620. See Allen, De l’hermite et del jougleour, 54.

The Identity of the Poet

likely a brother himself. Maurice Léna, “Massenet (1842–1912),” Le Ménestrel, no. 4422, 83.4 (January 28, 1921): 33–34, at 33.

Could the poet. If so, he would have been a real-life antecedent for the Franciscan friar William of Baskerville in Umberto Eco’s 1980 novel and the 1986 film The Name of the Rose, or for the Welsh Benedictine detective, Brother Cadfael, in the mystery novels written between 1977 and 1994 by Ellis Peters, and in the subsequent television series starring that character. Such a man would not have been unique.

The Knight of the Barrel. The original titles are respectively Le chevalier au barisel and De l’hermite et del jougleour. Brian Levy, “L’ironie des métiers, ou le récit chiasmique: A propos du conte pieux de l’Ermite et du Jongleur,” Reinardus: Yearbook of the International Reynard Society / Annuaire de la Société internationale renardienne 5 (1992): 85–107.

pendant. Allen, De l’hermite et del jougleour, followed by Tudor, “Preaching, Storytelling,” 151.

repentance. The theme of penitence has been seen also to connect Our Lady’s Tumbler (for mutual illumination rather than because of any putative shared authorship) with another anonymous text, Robert le Diable. For a comparison, see Élisabeth Gaucher, “Le ‘jeu’ de la pénitence au XIIIe siècle: Robert le Diable et le Jongleur de Notre-Dame,” in Regards étonnés de l’expression de l’altérité à la construction de l’identité: Mélanges offerts au professeur Gaël Milin (Brest, France: Amis de Gaël Milin, 2003), 261–71.

Only tears will be weighed. Emile M. Cioran, Tears and Saints, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 6.

this tale. For the text, see Félix Lecoy, ed., Le chevalier au barisel: Conte pieux du XIIIe siècle. Édité d’après tous les manuscrits connus, Les classiques français du Moyen Âge, vol. 82 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1955). The poem has been translated into modern French, Italian, Spanish, and English. For the French, see Le chevalier au barisel: Conte pieux du XIIIe siècle, trans. Annette Brasseur, Traductions des classiques français du Moyen Âge, vol. 23 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1976); Italian, Il cavaliere e l’eremita, ed. and trans. Franco Romanelli, Biblioteca medievale, vol. 4 (Parma, Italy: Pratiche, 1987); and Spanish, Le chevalier au barisel de anonimo, ed. and trans. Miguel Ángel García Peinado and Ricardo Redoli Morales, Analecta Malacitana Anejo, vol. 46 (Malaga, Spain: University of Malaga, 2003).

Both it and the other text have been translated at least once into English, together with “The Tumbler of Our Lady,” but in a virtually inaccessible book that was printed in a run of only twenty-six copies: Wilson Lysle Frescoln (1912–1997), trans., Old French Contes Dévots (Wallingford, PA: Press of the Cheerful Snail, 1962), no page numbers.

For interpretation, see Jean-Charles Payen, “Structure et sens du Chevalier au Barisel,” Le Moyen Âge 77 (1971): 239–62, and Franco Romanelli, “Le Chevalier au Barisel: L’acculturazione dei cavalieri tra lo spazio dell’aventure e il tempo della confessione,” Medioevo romanzo 11.1 (1986): 27–54.

two additional versions. One was composed from approximately 1216 to 1218 by Jean de Blois, also known as Jean de La Chapelle. The other, Conte du Baril or “The Tale of the Barrel,” is closely related to two later reflexes. One is a Latin exemplum in the “Mirror of Laymen”: see no. 121, in Le speculum laicorum: Édition d’une collection d’exempla, composée en Angleterre à la fin du XIIIe siècle, ed. Jean-Thiébaut Welter (Paris: A. Picard, 1914), 27. The other comprises later French versions that descend directly or indirectly from Life of the Fathers: see “Del halt home qui empli le barrillet d’une lerme” [Baril], 19 [18], ed. Félix Lecoy, La Vie de Pères, 3 vols. (Paris: Société des anciens textes français: A. et J. Picard, 1987–1999), 1: 288–300. For details and analysis, see Lecoy, Le Chevalier au Barisel, XVII–XXII; Jean-Charles Payen, “Y a-t-il un repentir cistercien dans la littérature française médiévale?” Citeaux 12 (1961): 120–32, at 126–31.

held to be a Cistercian. More than eighty years ago Jean de Blois was identified by his editor as a monk of Blois. See Le conte dou barril, poème du XIIIe siècle par Jouham de la Chapele de Blois, ed. Robert Chapman Bates, Yale Romanic Studies, vol. 4 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1932). This identification was contested by Louise W. Stone, “Sur le Conte du Baril de Jean de Blois,” Romania 59 (1933): 24–40, at 25–35. Bates reaffirmed his stand in “Le Conte dou Barril par Jean de Blois et le Tournoiement d’Enfer,” Romania 62 (1936): 359–75, at 361n3.

afterlife in exempla. For references, see Elisabeth Pinto-Mathieu, La Vie des Pères: Genèse des contes religieux du XIIIe siècle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2009), 830, no. 19.

source and influence. Karl, “La légende de l’Ermite et le Jongleur,” 123: “En vitis patrum un haut livre / Qui les bons essample nous livre / Nous raconte d’un saint hermite…” (“In the Vitas patrum, a lofty book that furnishes us good exempla, we are told of a saintly hermit”).

paradise. The account related in The Hermit and the Jongleur resembles another story, that of the provost of Aquileia, composed in the mid-fifteenth century by Jean Miélot. This other narrative is attested in two medieval French forms. The one in Life of the Fathers (pp. 13724–14177) tells of an ascetic who after many years of fasting and prayer in solitude yields to the sin of pride. He prays to learn from God who is his peer in piety. It raises his hackles to be told that his equal on earth is not a recluse but rather the provost of Aquileia, whom he then resolves to see with his own eyes. Upon arriving at the Italian city, he crosses paths with this very man who is on his way out (see Fig. n.1). From him, he receives a ring to present to the official’s wife, who is to treat him exactly as she would her own husband. From this moment, the hermit is shown how the dutiful laic resists earthly temptations. At table, everyone but the provost’s spouse and the hermit is served the finest food and drink. She and he share a bed. She attempts twice to seduce him, but on each occasion insists that he plunge into an ice-cold bath. In the final accounting, the solitary realizes that to live abstemiously in the world measures up fully to an existence as a religious. He returns to his hermitage, implores forgiveness, and earns heaven for his soul when he dies.

the cycle of brotherhood. Karl, “La légende de l’Ermite et le Jongleur,” 110.

Fig. n.1 The Hermit and the Provost. Miniature, fourteenth century. Paris, Bibliothѐque nationale de France, MS français 25440, fol. 54v. Image courtesy of Bibliothѐque nationale de France, Paris. All rights reserved.

The Bas-de-Page Miniature: Of Marginal Interest

sliced out. Alison Stones, Gothic Manuscripts, 1260–1320, 2 vols. in 4 (London: Harvey Miller, 2013–2014), 2: 501–5, at 501–3 for the excised miniatures.

placement. The miniature is found in Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 3516, folio 127r (dated 1268). It has been discussed in two fine studies by Johann-Christian J. A. Klamt, Een gebaar van deemoed: De interpretatie van een middeleeuwse miniatuur (Utrecht, Netherlands: Faculteit der Letteren, Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht, 1988), and “‘Le tumbeor de NotreDame’–Gaukler in Demut,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 60 (1997): 289–307. The highest-quality color reproduction of it to date has been in Sylvie Barnay, Le ciel sur la terre: Les apparitions de la Vierge au Moyen Âge (Paris: Cerf, 1999), 54. It has also been reproduced as the frontispiece of Agata Sobczyk, Les jongleurs de Dieu: Sainte simplicité dans la littérature religieuse de la France médiévale (Łask, Poland: Oficyna Wydawnicza Leksem, 2012).

stylistic separateness. Stones, Gothic Manuscripts, 2: 503.

created in Arras. Alison Stones, “The Illustrated Chrétien Manuscripts and Their Artistic Context,” in Les manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes / The Manuscripts of Chrétien de Troyes, ed. Keith Busby et al., 2 vols., Faux titre, vols. 71–72 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), 2: 227–322, at 241.

iconographic hierarchy. For a concise overview, see Jan Svanberg, “Acrobata,” in Enciclopedia dell’arte medievale, 12 vols. (Rome: Istituto della enciclopedia italiana, 1991–2002), 1: 126–30. On the frequency of acrobatic jongleurs in French art of the twelfth century, Svanberg relied on Émile Mâle, L’art religieux du XIIe siècle en France: Étude sur les origines de l’iconographie du Moyen Âge (Paris: A. Colin, 1922), translated as Religious Art in France, the Twelfth Century: A Study of the Origins of Medieval Iconography, Bollingen Series 90.1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), and Henri Focillon, “Sculpture romane: Apôtres et jongleurs (études de mouvement),” La revue de l’art ancien et moderne 55 (1929): 13–28. In older scholarship, particular note should be taken of Arthur Watson, “Tumblers,” The Reliquary and Illustrated Archaeologist: A Quarterly Journal and Review Devoted to the Study of Early Pagan and Christian Antiquities of Great Britain, 9 (1903): 186–202. Svanberg’s own book remains the fullest presentation of information: Jan Svanberg, Gycklarmotiv i romansk konst och en tolkning av portalrelieferna pȧ Härja kyrka, Kungl. Vitterhets-, historie och antikvitets akademien: Antikvariskt arkiv, vol. 41 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1970).

nineteenth-century interpreter. Louis Petit de Julleville, Histoire de la langue et de la littérature française des origines à 1900, 8 vols. (Paris: A. Colin, 1896–1899), 1: 40.

exemplum that compares a sinner with a jongleur. Stephen of Bourbon, Tractatus de diversis materiis praedicabilibus, ed. Jacques Berlioz, 3 vols., Corpus Christanorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, vols. 124–124B (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2002–2015), 1: 335 (book 1.8, lines 692–95), 532–33 (bibliography).

freak show. The most convenient repertory remains Lilian M. C. Randall, Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts, California Studies in the History of Art, vol. 4 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), 134, 135 (jongleur, juggling). The most provocative study, in all senses of the adjective, is Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). For reviews of the scholarship, see Lucy Freeman Sandler, “The Study of Marginal Imagery: Past, Present, and Future,” Studies in Iconography 18 (1997): 1–49; Anja Grebe, “The Art of the Edge: Frames and Page-Design in Manuscripts of the Ghent-Bruges-School,” in The Metamorphosis of Marginal Images: From Antiquity to Present Time, ed. Nurith Kenaan-Kedar and Asher Ovadiah (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, The Yolanda and David Katz Faculty of the Arts, Dept. of Art History, 2001), 93–102; Laura Kendrick, “Making Sense of Marginalized Images in Manuscripts and Religious Architecture,” in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 274–94.

One common form. The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, MS 78 D 40, fol. 108r; Lausanne, Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire, MS U 964 (Biblia Porta), fol. 343v; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264, fol. 90r (ca. 1338–1344).

sculpted limestone pilaster. Dated ca. 1150–1170, from the Lyonnais in France.

mobility. In a sense I extend the contention that jongleurs in Romanesque sculpture represent movement in contrast to the rigidity surrounding them: see Walter Cahn, “Focillon’s Jongleur,” Art History 18.3 (1995): 345–62.

Metamorphoses. 1.84.

stand erect. Hans Walther, ed., Proverbia sententiaeque Latinitatis Medii Aevi: Lateinische Sprichwörter und Sentenzen des Mittelalters in alphabetischer Anordnung, 6 vols., Carmina Medii Aevi posterioris Latina, vol. 2.1–6 (Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1963–1969), nos. 22635 (3: 988), 20438a (3: 674).

monstrous races. John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought, 2nd ed. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 301 (with listings passim).

Queen of Heaven. On Mary as Queen, see Gabriel M. Roschini, “Royauté de Marie,” in Maria: Études sur la Sainte Vierge, ed. Hubert Du Manoir de Juaye, 7 vols. (Paris: Beauchesne, 1949–1964), 1: 603–18.

a figure with a nimbus. In both Jewish and Christian art from late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the injunction against idolatry meant that God was seldom depicted as a full human figure. Yet divine intervention or approval could be signified, with the compromise of only partial aniconicity, through the synecdoche of a detached right hand. In Christian theology, all miracles are the work of God, and the hand of God (manus Dei, in Latin) reminds the viewer of this silent partner in thaumaturgy.

towellike cloth. Anatole France, Abeille, Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame, Les Pains noirs, ed. R. L Græme Ritchie, illus. Henry Morin (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1928), 133.

extending the thumb. In reference to the Western tradition this gesture is known formally as “the Latin benediction” (benedictio Latina): see Betty J. Bäuml and Franz H. Bäuml, eds., A Dictionary of Worldwide Gestures, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1997), 143–45. The name for the gesticulation can be a misnomer, since nearly the same position of the fingers is conventional in Eastern Orthodoxy too (see Fig. n.2).

Fig. n.2 Christ Pantokrator, sixth century. Mosaic. Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna. Image from Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Christus_Ravenna_Mosaic.jpg

another sort. On the norms in other representations of Madonnas who become animate, see Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 233—but compare Russakoff, “Role of the Image,” 140–42, 144.

star-cross. Chr. Konstantinides, “Le sens théologique du signe ‘croix-étoile’ sur le front de la Vierge des images byzantines,” in Akten des XI. internationalen Byzantinistenkongresses, München, 1958, ed. Franz Dölger and Hans-Georg Beck (Munich, Germany: C. H. Beck, 1960), 254–66.

fresco. Ca. 1305.

similar-sounding noun in German. In English, jig; in modern French gigue, Italian and Spanish giga. The German is Geige.

green tiles. In medieval color symbolism, green was sometimes associated with the devil. See D. W. Robertson, “Why the Devil Wears Green,” Modern Language Notes 69.7 (1954): 470–72.

viol. It was known in Italian as viola (whence the modern-day violin), spelled also viuola and in numerous similar ways, and in German as Fidel (fiddle). For basic information, see Nigel Wilkins, Music in the Age of Chaucer, Chaucer Studies, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1995), 150–51.

Manesse Codex. Made in Zurich, ca. 1300–1340, also known as the “large Heidelberg Lieder Manuscript.”

Frauenlob. Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg, Codex Palatinus Germanicus 848, fol. 399r. The poet’s nickname, meaning “praise of Our Lady” or “praise of women” in German, designates Heinrich von Meißen (Eng., Henry of Meissen), born in Meißen and educated in the cathedral school there.

Virgin herself. Barbara Newman, Frauenlob’s Song of Songs: A Medieval German Poet and His Masterpiece (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006).

reproduced repeatedly. Alice Kemp-Welch, Of the Tumbler of Our Lady & Other Miracles Now Translated from the Middle French (London: Chatto & Windus, 1908), reprinted a year later in the series King’s Classics (London: Chatto & Windus, 1909). It was then published with omission of the first word, Of, from the title and without indication of translator or date (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Songs The Knickerbocker Press, [n.d.]). Later, the whole folio side was reproduced in Maurice Vloberg, La légende dorée de Notre Dame: Huit contes pieux du Moyen Âge (Paris: D.-A. Longuet, 1921), between pp. 192–93, and printed fifty years later in Henri-Paul Eydoux, Saint Louis et son temps (Paris: Larousse, 1971), 156, from which it was reprinted twice by Klamt, first in Een gebaar van deemoed, plate 1, and later in “‘Le tumbeor,” fig. 1 (p. 291). In the old reproductions, the miniature is better preserved than in the latest digitization obtained from the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal.

modern illustrations. The most recent illustrator who sought out the manuscript itself appears to have been Barbara Cooney, in preparation for her 1961 picture book, The Little Juggler. In her research, she collected photographs of Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Arsenal MS 3516, fols. 127ra–128rb. She had the lower portion of the first folio side reproduced on the back of the dustcover.

minstrel’s routine. Without reference to Our Lady’s Tumbler, see Isabelle Marchesin, “Les jongleurs dans les psautiers du haut Moyen Âge: Nouvelles hypothèses sur la symbolique de l’histrion médiéval,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 41.162 (1998): 127–39.

pair of carvings. Both are corbels carved ca. 1311–1326, in the time of Bishop Stapledon, on the vaulting shafts of the great piers that face each other in the crossing and east bay of the nave. They still carry two layers of medieval paint, which gives a sense of their original polychromy. The extremely useful cathedral website indicates that the two corbels are among “the most intricately painted sculptures in the Cathedral. The first painting had the tumbler in scarlet, and the minstrel’s fiddle off-white including the peg-box which was outlined in black; the red strings stopped short of it, the tail-piece and bow were green and the hairs of the bow black. In the repainting, the tumbler became a deep blue, with elaborate embroideries. The tumbler has particoloured shoes and stockings. His belt is gold. The minstrel has a similar loose garment (note the slit dividing the front): it is white, edged with gold, and embroidered. His fiddle has four painted cross-shaped sound holes.”

supporting projections. In the system of letters and numbers that has been conventional for more than a century to designate keystones and carvings in the cathedral, these two corbels are K and K’ respectively. The designation system dates back to E. K. Prideaux and G. R. Holt Shafto, Bosses & Corbels of Exeter Cathedral: An Illustrated Study in Decorative & Symbolic Design (Exeter, UK: Commin; London: Chatto & Windus, 1910), who discuss these corbels at 197–200 and 219–20.

translation. By P. H. Wicksteed.

allusion. A medieval wall-painting in the sacristy of the Finnish town of Hattula has been interpreted as a juggler juggling for Mary. True, the performer is attired in a small smock, as may well be the case in Our Lady’s Tumbler. The stumbling block is that the figure in the wall-painting is indeed juggling, whereas the jongleur in the medieval French poem is described as performing a dance or gymnastic routine, but not as juggling. So far as we can deduce from existing evidence, a juggler did not become part of the story until it was reworked in modern French literature, first as a poem and then as a short story in the last decade of the nineteenth century. See Helena Edgren, Mercy and Justice: Miracles of the Virgin Mary in Finnish Medieval Wall-Paintings, Suomen Muinaismuistoyhdistyksen aikakauskirja, vol. 100 (Helsinki: Suomen Muinaismuistoyhdistys, 1993), 109–15, 204–5.

New York City. Saint Thomas Parish at Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street is the fourth church to be built on the site. It was designed by the architectural firm of Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson.

church of Saint Thomas. The panel is located in the front tier of the choir stalls at the altar end of the kneeling rail on the north side: see Saint Thomas Church (New York: The Church, 1965), 34; J. Robert Wright, Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2001), 161. This woodwork was fabricated across the Atlantic by the Boston firm of Irving and Casson, after designs by none other than Bertram Goodhue.

The Genre: Long Story Short

it is to be read. Legenda or legendum est.

feast-days of given saints. Hippolyte Delehaye, The Legends of the Saints, trans. Donald Attwater (New York: Fordham University Press, 1962), 8.

pious tale. In French, conte dévot or conte pieux. For succinct definitions, see J. A. Cuddon, Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 5th ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 154; Urban T. Holmes, “Conte dévot,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Roland Greene, 4th ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 302. The poem is thus classed by Walter Morris Hart, The Short-Story, Medieval and Modern: Syllabus and Bibliography, University of California Syllabus Series, vol. 57 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1915), 6.

fabliau. For example, Léon Gautier, Les épopées françaises: Étude sur les origines et l’histoire de la littérature nationale, 2nd ed., 4 vols. (Paris: Societé génerale de librairie catholique / H. Welter, 1878–1892), 2: 222 (“fableau”); Louis Bethléem et al., Les opéras, les opéras-comiques et les opérettes (Paris: Revue des Lectures, 1926), 332–36, at 332 (“fableau”); André Lagarde and Laurent Michard, Moyen Âge: Les grands auteurs français du programme, Collection Textes et littérature, vol. 1 (Paris: Bordas, 1962), 108–10, at 108.

pious fabliau. Fabliau pieux: Otakar Novák, La littérature française des origines à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, Opera Universitatis Purkynianae Brunensis, Facultas philosophica, vol. 195 (Brno, Czech Republic: Universita J. E. Purkyne, 1974), 28.

comic. Adrian P. Tudor, “Nos rions de vostre bien: The Comic Potential of Pious Tales,” in Grant risee? The Medieval Comic Presence / La Présence comique médiévale. Essays in Memory of Brian J. Levy, ed. idem and Alan Hindley, Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, vol. 11 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2006), 131–50, at 132.

laughable. Edmond Faral, Les jongleurs en France au Moyen Âge, Bibliothèque de l’École des hautes études, 4e section, Sciences historiques et philologiques, vol. 187 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1910), 157n2.

exemplum. For definitions and overviews, see Claude Bremond and Jacques Le Goff, L’“exemplum,” Typologie des sources du Moyen Âge occidental, vol. 40 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1982); Jacques Berlioz and Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu, eds., Les exempla médiévaux: Nouvelles perspectives, Nouvelle bibliothèque du Moyen Âge, vol. 47 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1998).

expanded and dramatized. Jacques Monfrin, “L’exemplum médiéval: Du latin aux langues vulgaires,” in Berlioz and Polo de Beaulieu, Les exempla médiévaux, 243–65, at 264.

mentalities. The term mentality refers to an approach that is associated with the theory and practice of medieval French historical studies in France in the 1970s and 1980s. For a convenient introduction, see Aaron J. Gurevich, “Medieval Culture and Mentality according to the New French Historiography,” European Journal of Sociology / Archives européennes de sociologie / Europäisches Archiv für Soziologie 24.1 (1983): 167–95.

many rhetorical devices. It has even been speculated that the exemplum was a fertile source for the later novella. See Salvatore Battaglia, “Dall’esempio alla novella,” Filologia romanza 7 (1960): 21–84. Like the pious tales, exempla could be intimately related to fabliaux. See Brian J. Levy, “Le fabliau et l’exemple: Etude sur les recueils moralisants anglo-normands,” in Epopée animale, fable, fabliau: Actes du IV Colloque de la Societé Internationale renardienne, Evreux, 7–11 septembre 1981, ed. Gabriel Bianciotto and Michel Salvat (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1984), 311–21.

preamble. “In the lives of the ancient fathers, / the contents of which are good, / we are told a little exemplum. / I do not say that people have not heard / equally nice ones many times, / but this one is not so flawed / that it does not do good to tell it. / So I want to speak to you and to tell / of a minstrel, what happened to him.”

little example. The medieval French diminutive derives from Latin exemplum “exemplum, moral example, anecdote, illustration.”

Clairvaux. Brian Patrick McGuire, “The Cistercians and the Rise of the Exemplum in Early Thirteenth Century France: A Reevaluation of Paris BN MS lat. 15912,” Classica et mediaevalia: Revue danoise de philologie et d’histoire 34 (1983): 211–67, at 225–26, 230–32, 257, repr. in idem, Friendship and Faith: Cistercian Men, Women, and Their Stories, 1100–1250, Variorum Collected Studies Series, vol. 742 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2002), no. 5.

Cistercian literature. On the Cistercians and exempla, see James France, Separate but Equal: Cistercian Lay Brothers, 1120–1350, Cistercian Studies Series, vol. 246 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012), xix–xxiv, 199–230, 325–32. On Clairvaux as a center of Cistercian exemplum production, see Stefano Mula, “Geography and the Early Cistercian Exempla Collections,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 46 (2011): 27–41.

authorial sermon. Lines 293–314.

The Table of Exempla, in Alphabetical Order

Table of Exempla. Latin title, Tabula exemplorum secundum ordinem alphabeti. The full title is often given as Tabula exemplorum adaptacionum secundum ordinem alphabeti ordinata: see Jean-Thiébaut Welter, ed., La Tabula exemplorum secundum ordinem alphabeti: Recueil d’exempla compilé en France à la fin du XIIIe siècle (Paris: Occitania, 1926). For concise information, see Jean-Thiébaut Welter, L’exemplum dans la littérature religieuse et didactique du Moyen Âge (Paris: E. H. Guitard, 1927), 294–97; Isabelle Rava-Cordier, “Tabula exemplorum,” EdM, 13: 139–43. The Table of Exempla enjoyed a robust transmission of more than twenty manuscripts from its time of composition into the fifteenth century.

reference work. On such alphabetical reference-books, see H. G. Pfander, “The Mediaeval Friars and Some Alphabetical Reference-Books for Sermons,” Medium Aevum 3 (1934), 19–29.

about 1277. Definitely between 1261 and 1292, possibly specifically around 1277. This resource as it survives is considered today to be the abridged form of the older Book of Likenesses and Exempla (Latin title, Liber de similitudinibus et exemplis). See Lynn Thorndike, “Liber de Similitudinibus et Exemplis (MS. Berne 293, Fols. 1r–75v),” Speculum 32 (1957): 780–91.

151 headings. The collection has keywords from the Latin accidia (“sloth”) to Xristus (Christ). The chief source is Tractatus de diversis materiis predicabilibus, compiled in the mid-thirteenth century by the French Dominican inquisitor, Stephen of Bourbon. A concatenation of more than three thousand exempla that remained unfinished at Stephen’s death, the Tractatus was the first systematic collection of exempla, arranged according to the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

alphabetization. Lloyd W. Daly, Contributions to a History of Alphabetization in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Collection Latomus, vol. 90 (Brussels: Latomus, 1967).

tables of contents. Tables of contents were closely related to subject indexes: on the evolution of both, see Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, Preachers, Florilegia and Sermons: Studies on the Manipulus florum of Thomas of Ireland, Studies and Texts, vol. 47 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1979), 11–23.

Franciscanism. Jean-Claude Schmitt, “Recueils franciscains d’exempla et perfectionnement des techniques intellectuelles du XIIIe au XVe siècle,” Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 135 (1977): 5–21.

gestures at reenactment. Tudor, “Preaching, Storytelling,” 152.

preachers from any order. In closing, I will disclose a frustrating riddle. For this tale, the anonymous author of the Table of Exempla was claimed by its nineteenth-century editor to have drawn upon Stephen of Bourbon: see Welter, La Tabula exemplorum, xxxii (see xxix–xxx for explanation of the abbreviations). From his own tally of exempla in the manuscript at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (MS lat. 15970), Welter assigned the number 1649 to this exemplum as it appears in Stephen’s Tractatus de diversis materiis predicabilibus. But the exemplum has not been printed in the Tractatus volumes that have appeared to date in Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 124–125B (ed. Jacques Berlioz et Jean-Luc Eichenlaub [Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2002, 2006]), and Jacques Berlioz assures me that he has found nothing similar to the tale of the jongleur even in the as-yet unpublished portion of the Tractatus.

The Latin Exemplum

still unknown. Anonymous, “Chronique,” review of Hermann Wächter, Der Springer unserer lieben Frau, in Romania 29 (1900): 159.

Joy. In Latin, Gaudium. The exemplum is classified in Frederic C. Tubach, Index Exemplorum: A Handbook of Medieval Religious Tales, Folklore Fellows Communications, vol. 204 (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia / Academia scientiarum fennica, 1981), 219, no. 2780, “Jester, dancing during chants.” It is omitted from the tables in Les exempla médiévaux: Introduction à la recherche. Suivie des tables critiques de l’“Index exemplorum” de Frederic C. Tubach, ed. Jacques Berlioz and Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu (Carcassonne, France: GARAE/Hesiode, 1992), 175–80.

entertainer. In Latin, ioculator.

he did not know his letters. This observation means not merely that the erstwhile jongleur was analphabetic and hence illiterate, but also that he was ignorant of Latin and Latin texts.

as I know how. My transcription (and translation): “Quidam ioculator seculum relinquens intrauit religionem et cum uideret socios suos psallere, quia litteras ignorabat, cogitauit qualiter [Welter quomodo] posset cum aliis laudare Deum. Unde, aliis psallentibus, incepit bal[l]are [et] tripudiare et cum [Welter omits cum] inquisitus fuisse cur talia faceret, respondit: ‘Video unumquemque de suo [officio] seruire Deo, ideo de meo sicut scio uolo Deum festiuare.’” See Catalogue of Romances in the Department of Manuscripts in the British Museum, 3 vols. (London: Printed by Order of the Trustees, 1883–1910), vols. 1–2, ed. H. L. D. Ward, and vol. 3, ed. J. A. Herbert, at 3: 417, which summarizes, on the basis of London, British Library, MS Additional 18351, Liber exemplorum secundum ordinem alphabeti, chapter 49 (no. 28), “Gaudium.” The Latin is also quoted in Tabula exemplorum secundum ordinem alphabeti, no. 87, in Welter, La Tabula exemplorum, 27–28, and later in Morawski, “Mélanges de littérature pieuse. I,” 456–57.

American folklorist. Thomas Frederick Crane, “Mediaeval Story-Books,” Modern Philology 9 (1911): 225–37, at 231. On Crane’s career, see Jack Zipes, “Introduction, Thomas F. Crane: The Uncanny Career of a Folklorist,” in Thomas Frederick Crane, Italian Popular Tales (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2001), ix–xxiii.

the compilers. On miracle collecting in England during this period, see Rachel Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 4, 112–38.

minstrel manuscript. The most widespread original term was the French manuscrits de jongleurs, qualified as volumes à l’usage des jongleurs. The corresponding German is Jongleurhandschriften.

The Song of Roland. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 23, known as the Oxford Roland.

dictation. Andrew Taylor, “The Myth of the Minstrel Manuscript,” Speculum 66 (1991): 43–73.

tapped by friars. McGuire, “Cistercians and the Rise of the Exemplum.” For more recent investigations, see Victoria Smirnova et al., eds., The Art of Cistercian Persuasion in the Middle Ages and Beyond: Caesarius of Heisterbach’s “Dialogue on Miracles” and Its Reception, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions, vol. 196 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2015), 161–210.

earlier friars and Cistercians. Schmitt, “Recueils franciscains d’exempla,” 11.

The Life of the Fathers

More than any other literary genre. Michel Stanesco, “Le bruit de la source: Les contes chrétiens et la resonance d’éternité,” in Translatio litterarum ad penates / Das Mittelalter Übersetzen: Ergebnisse der Tagung von Mai 2004 an der Université de Lausanne / Traduire le Moyen Âge. Actes du colloque de l’Université de Lausanne (mai 2004), ed. Alain Corbellari and Catherine Drittenbass (Lausanne, Switzerland: Centre de traduction littéraire, 2005), 331–44, at 333.

drawn from a respected work. Vloberg, La légende dorée, 234.

both miracles and pious tales. Allen, De l’hermite et del jougleour, 11–12.

overlap substantially. Adrian P. Tudor, “Telling the Same Tale? Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles de Nostre Dame and the First Vie des Pères,” in Krause and Stones, Gautier de Coinci, 301–30, at 304–7.

Latin collection. The collection is often associated with the name Heribert Rosweyde, whose printing of it was reprinted in PL 73–74. The predictable nominative form of this title would be Vitae patrum, but it is commonly known by the Vulgar Latin form Vitas patrum, which has the same meaning, but with the first word in a different morphological state—the accusative plural of the first-declension Latin noun vita, “life,” instead of the nominative plural.

useful tales. Respectively, the Greek διηγήσεις ψυχωφελείς (often with the words in reverse order), the Latin narrationes animae utiles. For an index of these tales, see John Wortley, “A Repertoire of Byzantine ‘Beneficial Tales,’” http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~wortley/. For a concise discussion of the genre, see John Wortley, “Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell in Byzantine ‘Beneficial Tales,’” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 55 (2001): 53–69, at 53–54.

late fourth century. In the Greek History of the Monks in Egypt. The customary title is the Latin Historia monachorum in Aegypto.

chronological spectrum. A kind of midway point would be the Pratum spirituale (Spiritual Meadow) by the Byzantine monk and ascetic John Moschus, whose edifying stories include some in which the Virgin plays a decisive role, and others in which holy fools are the central figures. See Henry Chadwick, “John Moschus and His Friend Sophronius the Sophist,” Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 25 (1974): 41–74, at 65–66, 71–72.

centuries afterward. In the Greek East the genre reached its terminus in the eleventh century, in the massive dossier known as the Synagoge (Assembly) by Paul Euergetinos.

Rule of Saint Benedict. The Rule of Saint Benedict, ed. and trans. Bruce L. Venarde, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, vol. 6 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 144–45 (chap. 42.3–4).

desert fathers. Terryl N. Kinder, Cistercian Europe: Architecture of Contemplation, Cistercian Studies Series, vol. 191 (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), 135.

versions. For example, an anonymous Anglo-Norman version in verse was dedicated to the Templar Henri d’Arci. Later, Wauchier de Denain and an anonymus of Champagne wrote versions in prose.

Life of the Fathers. In French, Vie des Pères.

agglomeration. It comprehends seventy-four pious tales, for a total of more than thirty thousand octosyllabic verses. For a short introduction to the collection and the unjust disregard it has suffered, see Adrian P. Tudor, “‘The One That Got Away’: The Case of the Old French Vie des Pères,” French Studies Bulletin 16.55 (1995): 11–15.

related Latin compositions. Such as the Verba seniorum (Words of the elders).

laymen may overshadow monks. I see the poem as taking a stand more robustly in favor of the laity than Jean Charles Payen considers typical for miracles and exempla: see his Le motif du repentir dans la littérature française medieval, Publications romanes et françaises, vol. 98 (Geneva: Droz, 1967), 556.

1220s or thereabouts. Another date mentioned is 1241.

lay brothers. Paul Bretel, Les ermites et les moines dans la littérature française du Moyen Âge (1150–1250), Nouvelle bibliothèque du Moyen Âge, vol. 32 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1995), 56.

reflex of the legend. The claim to have Vie des Pères as source is common to at least five thirteenth-century French poems, only one of which in fact has an established relationship with a tale in the collection: see Allen, De l’hermite et del jougleour, 11. Allen’s detailed arguments to support his view that the three poems he discusses had the same author have not been assessed over the past eighty years, so far as I can judge. On Vie des Pères, the classic study remains, much more than a century later, Edouard Schwan, “La Vie des Anciens Pères,” Romania 13 (1884): 233–63. For the most recent research (especially the forty-one tales of the first series, from around the 1220s), see Adrian P. Tudor, Tales of Vice and Virtue: The First Old French “Vie des Pères,” Faux titre, vol. 253 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005). On its authorship, see Adrian P. Tudor, “Past and Present: The Voice of an Anonymous Medieval Author,” Mediaevalia 24 (2003): 19–44.

short titles. Gaston Paris gave them their names in a note to Schwan, “La Vie des anciens pères,” 240.

the story. Lines 11884–12231, in Lecoy, La Vie des Pères, 2: 60–72. The episode is recapitulated and analyzed by Tudor, Tales of Vice and Virtue, 226–27, 229–36. Pinto-Mathieu, La Vie des Pères, 831, no. 26, notes that Stephen of Bourbon offers a distant parallel: see Albert Lecoy de la Marche, Anecdotes historiques, légendes et apologues, tirés du recueil inédit d’Étienne de Bourbon, dominicain du XIIIe siècle (Paris: Librairie Renouard, H. Loones, successeur, 1877), 448–49.

spurious source. I compiled a list of parallels before becoming aware of Tudor, Tales of Vice and Virtue, 236, who comments simply upon “an interesting analogy to be drawn with the Tumbeor Nostre Dame.”

feet up to his head. Lines 234–36.

Miserere. Verses 2743–3116. For a glossed edition of this episode, see Claudio Galderisi, Diegesis: Études sur la poétique des motifs narratifs au Moyen Âge, de la Vie des Pères aux lettres modernes (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2005), 181–94.

a miracle in Gautier de Coinci. 1 Miracle 18, “De un provoir qui toz jors chanoit Salve, la messe de Nostre Dame.” See Tudor, “Telling the Same Tale?,” 307.

Rule of Saint Benedict. Venarde, Rule of Saint Benedict, 150–51 (chap. 44.1–8).

self-depiction. Called Historia Anglorum (History of the English), produced at the Benedictine abbey of Saint Albans between 1250 and 1259 by Matthew of Paris, who was a monk there.

framed drawing. London, British Library, MS Royal 14. C. VII, fol. 6.

redemption through humility. On conversion as a theme in Vie des Pères, see Michel Zink, Poésie et conversion au Moyen Âge (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2003), 203–50.

True Story: Why the Story Succeeded

less attractive to us. A twentieth-century scholar who devoted much of his career to the study of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Latin arts of poetry came out forthrightly in hypothesizing that the best Old French poems would have been devalued if they had been put into the high-brow rhetoric that scholastic practices favored. He faulted pedants who would not leave well enough alone, and who would ruin vernacular French texts by embellishing them, dilating them, and making them static. Charles Sears Baldwin, “Cicero on Parnassus,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 42 (1927): 106–12, at 112: “These pedagogues would have recommended embellishing the eloquence of Aucassin and Nicolete at the expense of the story, dilating the Tumbeor de Notre Dame, and making the Châtelaine de Vergi static.”

sermons. Beverly Mayne Kienzle, ed., The Sermon, Typologie des sources du Moyen Âge occidental, vols. 81–83 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2000).

the application of exempla. Jean-Claude Schmitt, Prêcher d’exemples: Récits de prédicateurs du Moyen Âge (Paris: Stock, 1985).

collecting and employing exempla. Stefano Mula, “Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Cistercian Exempla Collections: Role, Diffusion, and Evolution,” History Compass 8.8 (2010): 903–12.

rivalry. Jacques Berlioz and Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu, “The Preacher Facing a Reluctant Audience according to the Testimony of Exempla,” Medieval Sermon Studies 57.1 (2013): 16–28, at 26–28.

familiar with each other’s techniques and practices. Maria Dobozy, Re-Membering the Present: The Medieval German Poet-Minstrel in Cultural Context, Disputatio, vol. 6 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2005), 120–42.

William of Malmesbury. William of Malmesbury, The Deeds of the Bishops of England (Gesta Pontificum Anglorum), trans. David Preest (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2002), 227–28; idem, De gestis pontificum Anglorum, ed. N. E. S. A. Hamilton (London: Great Britain Public Record Office, 1870), 336: “Denique commemorat Elfredus, carmen triviale, quod adhuc vulgo cantitatur, Aldelmum fecisse; aditiens causam qua probet rationabiliter tantum virum his qua videantur frivola institisse. Populum eo tempore semibarbarum, parum divinis sermonibus intentum, statim, cantatis missis, domos cursitare solitum. Ideo sanctum virum, super pontem qui rura et urbem cantinuat, abeuntibus se opposuisse obicem, quasi artem cantitandi professum. Eo plusquam semel facto, plebis favorem et concursum emeritum. Hoc commento sensim inter ludicra verbis Scripturarum insertis, cives ad sanitatem reduxisse; qui si severe et cum excommunicatione agendum putasset, profecto profecisset nichil.”

Ecclesiastic History of the English People. Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum), ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 414–21 (book 4, chap. 23 [22]). On the episode, see John D. Niles, “Bede’s Cædmon, ‘The Man Who Had No Story’ (Irish Tale-Type 2412B),” Folklore 117.2 (2006): 141–55; Joaquin Martínez Pizarro, “Poetry as Rumination: The Model for Bede’s Caedmon,” Neophilologus 89.3 (2005): 469–72.

Christian song in Old English. A nine-line Old English poem, conventionally entitled “Cædmon’s Hymn,” survives. For detailed information, see Cædmon’s Hymn: A Multimedia Study, Archive and Edition, ed. Daniel Paul O’Donnell, Series A, vol. 7 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, in association with SEENET and the Medieval Academy, 2005). It may preserve the very lines recited by the herdsman to Abbess Hilda.

a Latin letter written in 797. Epistolae Karolini aevi 2, ed. Ernst Dümmler, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Epistolae, vol. 4 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1895), 183 (no. 124): “Verba Dei legantur in sacerdotali convivio: ibi decet lectorem audiri, non citharistam, sermones patrum, non carmina gentilium. Quid Hinieldus cum Christo?” On this passage, see Donald A. Bullough, “What Has Ingeld To Do with Lindisfarne?” Anglo-Saxon England 22 (1993): 93–125, at 124 for the translation quoted here. Hinield (or Ingeld) is familiar from mentions in both the heroic epic Beowulf and another Old English poem that deals with Germanic heroes, Widsith.

Notes to Chapter 2

Now a God dances in me. Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra (Part 1:7).

discourses. This designation, one of the most ill-defined in current critical terminology, refers to the conceptual frameworks that underlie and surround social practices, customs, and institutions.

The Tumbler

Of the Tumbler of Our Lady. The titles in French are to be found in Wächter, “Der Springer unserer lieben Frau,” 223–24: “Del tumbeor nostre dame,” “C’est du tumeeur nostre dame,” “Le conte dou jugleur,” “D’un menestrer qui se rendi moynes a qui nostre dame fit grace,” and “D’un menestrel qui servoit nostre dame de son propre mestier.”

tombeur. Within the poem itself, the Old French noun tumeor is employed once to mean “dancer,” while the verb tumer “to dance,” from which it derives, is used repeatedly. The two words (with and without “b”) are tumer and tumber/tomber. Despite having distinct etymologies, they were soon conflated and became transposable. Their crossed destinies are apparent in the equivalence of tombeor in the title and tumeor in the text. They are roughly synonymous with other verbs of heterogeneous etymology in Old French to which the poet resorts in describing rhythmic or artful movement: saillir, from Latin salire “leap, spring, jump”; baler, most immediately from Late Latin ballare “to dance,” but ultimately from Greek ballein “to throw”; espringuier, from Old Frankish springen “to spring”; treper, deriving from Germanic *trippôn, related to Old English treppan “to tread, trample,” Middle Dutch trippen “to skip, hop,” and modern English “to trip.” The verb espringuier generated the noun espringeor, closely related in meaning to tombeor. On the lexicon relating to dance, see Fritz Aeppli, Die wichtigsten Ausdrücke für das Tanzen in den romanischen Sprachen, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, vol. 75 (Halle, Germany: Max Niemeyer, 1925), with specific reference to Our Lady’s Tumbler at pp. 50, 68, 70.

The medieval verb. It may be compared with the Old English tumbian, attested only twice, in both instances to describe the dance of Salomé in the New Testament episode recounted in the Gospel of Mark. See Eric Stanley, “Dance, Dancers and Dancing in Anglo-Saxon England,” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 9.2 (Autumn 1991): 18–31, at 19, 25 (on the West Saxon and Kentish Gospels), 30n17. The verb may emphasize somehow the acrobatic nature of the dance.

The relation between the Old French and the Old English forms remains murky, despite their suggestive similarity. On the French, see Walther von Wartburg, ed. Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch: Eine Darstellung des galloromanischen Sprachschatzes (Bonn, Germany: Schroeder, 1922–2003), 13.2: 403–9, 17: 384–86.

a tumbler or performer of tumbles. Émile Abry, Charles Audic, and Paul Crouzet, Histoire illustrée de la littérature française, précis méthodique (Paris: H. Didier, 1912), 33: “Un tombeur ou faiseur de tours.”

Notre Dame. The last two words are now and again hyphenated, since purists in French have sometimes designated the Virgin Mary as Notre Dame, but called churches and other institutions dedicated in her honor Notre-Dame (such as the cathedral Notre-Dame de Paris). Despite the straightforwardness of the theory, practice has often been inconsistent.

Notre Dame versus Saint Mary

universal in the Romance languages. Paule Bétérous, “Quels noms pour Marie dans les collections romanes de miracles de la Vierge au XIIIe siècle,” in La Vierge dans la tradition cistercienne: Communications présentées à la 54e session de la Société française d’études mariales, abbaye Notre-Dame d’Orval, 1998, ed. Bernard-Joseph Samain and Jean Longère (Paris: Médiaspaul, 1999), 175–92. For a paragraph on the most general context across languages, see Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976), 153–54.

her relation to Christ. The theology of Jesus’s nature and person is known as Christology.

accepted her role. See Luke 1:38.

siege of the Byzantine capital. The episode has been reinterpreted most radically by Bissera V. Pentcheva, “The Supernatural Protector of Constantinople: The Virgin and Her Icons in the Tradition of the Avar Siege,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 26.1 (2002): 1–41.

to violate the Cathedral. Maurice Landrieux, The Cathedral of Reims: The Story of a German Crime, trans. Ernest E. Williams (London: Kegan Paul Trench, Trubner, 1920), 109–10 (with change of “outrage” to “violate” twice at the end).

The Equivocal Status of Jongleurs

Not all those who wander. “All That Is Gold Does Not Glitter,” a poem in J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, vol. 1, The Fellowship of the Ring, book 1, chap. 10; book 2, chap. 2.

protean character. The best general source on the definition and classification of jongleurs remains Faral, Les jongleurs, 1–24, 66–86.

wear many hats. Faral, Les jongleurs, 1. For a later exploration of the issue, see Tito Saffioti, I giullari in Italia: Lo spettacolo, il pubblico, i testi (Milan, Italy: Xenia Edizioni, 1990), 11–19.

artists of the word. Juan Paredes Núñez, “El juglador contador de cuentos,” in La juglaresca: Actas del I Congreso Internacional sobre la juglaresca, ed. Manuel Criado de Val, Historia de la literatura hispánica desde sus fuentes, vol. 7 (Madrid: EDI-6, 1986), 115–21.

buffoons, clowns, fools, and jesters. Heather Arden, Fools’ Plays: A Study of Satire in the Sottie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 16–18.

wandering minstrels. A standard monograph on medieval jongleurs remains Faral, Les jongleurs, which touches in passing on our story (p. 157n2) and on the diversity of performing skills among jongleurs (p. 1). Another discussion of jongleurs that refers to “The Tumbler of Our Lady” can be found in G. K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1923), 77–80 (chap. 5, “Le jongleur de Dieu”).

discreditable places and activities. Decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council 16, in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. and trans. Norman P. Tanner, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 1: 243, 243*. As a decree of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 held, “Clerics should not practice callings or business of a secular nature, especially those that are dishonourable. They should not watch mimes, entertainers and actors. Let them avoid taverns altogether, unless by chance they are obliged by necessity on a journey. They should not play at games of chance or of dice, nor be present at such games.”

climb on (the) bench!. Monta in banco! The noun can be correlated with the French saltimbanque or Italian saltimbanco, from the imperative “leap on (the) bench!” (salta in banco!).

one of these compositions. The relevant snippet from the poem Fadet joglar is quoted and translated into French by Edmond Vander Straeten, La musique au Pays-Bas avant le XIXe siècle: Documents inédits et annotés, 8 vols. (Brussels: G.-A. van Trigt, 1867–1888), 4: 236–37. The standard editions of the passage are Wilhelm Keller, “Das Sirventes Fadet joglar des Guiraut von Calanso: Versuch eines kritischen Textes,” Romanische Forschungen 22 (1905): 99–238, at 144–47, and François Pirot, Recherches sur les connaissances littéraires des troubadours occitans et catalans des XIIe et XIIIe siècles: Les “sirventes—ensenhamens” de Guerau de Cabrera, Guiraut de Calanson et Bertrand de Paris, Memorias de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, vol. 14 (Barcelona: Real Academia de Buenas Letras, 1972).

etymology of jongleur. The Old Occitan (or Provençal) is joglar, Old French jogleor and joculer, modern French jongleur, Spanish juglar, Galician jogral, Italian giullare and gioculare, Old English gēogelere, jugelere, and jogler, Old High German gougalāri, Middle Dutch gokelaer. The German word Spielmann, meaning literally “game-man,” was calqued on the Latin and its derivatives in Romance languages.

The English word “joke”. Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Glare, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1: 1059.

contaminated. For the catchy assertion that “jongleur is the scion of a haplologic cross-breeding with jangler,” see Raphael Levy, “The Etymology of Franco-Italian: Çubler,” Italica 29.1 (1952): 49–52, at 49.

jangler. In medieval orthography, janglere or jangleeur. Alan Hindley et al., Old French-English Dictionary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 375 (for “jangleor”). On the presumed interference, see Oscar Bloch and Walther von Wartburg, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue française, 5th ed. (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1968), 351: “jongleur.” Joglerre is the subjective or nominative case and jogleor is the objective or oblique case in Old French. For concise information on the development of the word, see Bloch and Wartburg, Dictionnaire étymologique, 351. For a more searching examination, see Raleigh Morgan Jr., “Old French jogleor and Kindred Terms: Studies in Mediaeval Romance Lexicology,” Romance Philology 7 (1953–1954): 279–325.

verbal, musical, and physical skills. The Medieval Latin ioculator meant, both broadly and loosely, “entertainer; musician, minstrel, actor, mime, buffoon, conjurer, jester, juggler”: see Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, ed. R. E. Latham, 17 vols. (London: Published for the British Academy by Oxford University Press, 1975–2013), 1503.

sprawling Medieval Latin nomenclature. To give a modest selection, other terms were (to offer in alphabetical order a lexical smorgasbord) fabulator, goliardus, histrio, mimus, ministrellus, saltator, and scurra. In Old French, corresponding words are jogleor and menestrel (later modified into menestrier, with a suffix that aligns it advantageously with the names of other professions), in Middle High German spilman.

eventually displaced them. The comparable jacks-of-all-trades histrio, mimus, and scurra lost much ground in the medieval period to the benefit of the jongleur and minstrel.

sometimes conflated. On differentiating between jongleur and minstrel in French, see Silvère Menegaldo, Le jongleur dans la littérature narrative des XIIème et XIIIème siècles: Du personnage au masque, Nouvelle bibliothèque du Moyen Âge, vol. 74 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2005), 15–17, 219–28.

minor court official. Bretel, Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame, 114–15, 123; John Southworth, The English Medieval Minstrel (Woodbridge, UK and Wolfeboro, NH: Boydell, 1989), 3.

ministerium. Latin ministerialis, from minister (attendant or servant), Old French menestrel or menestrier, Modern French ménétrier. Bloch and Wartburg, Dictionnaire étymologique, 402, indicate that the word minstrel acquired pejorative associations in the Middle Ages as a result of having been applied to poets and musicians, that it dropped out of use before the sixteenth century, and that it was revived in the nineteenth.

minstrel. Old French menestrel.

jongleurs and trouvères. For a critical analysis of the distinction, see Giuseppe Noto, Il giullare e il trovatore nelle liriche e nelle biografie provenzali, Scrittura e scrittori, vol. 13 (Alessandria, Italy: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1998). For a description in English that was particularly influential in America of the 1950s and 1960s, see Will Durant, The Age of Faith, The Story of Civilization, vol. 4 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950), 1054–55.

language of southern France. This language is Old Occitan, persistently still called Provençal, to the frustration of those who explain that the language was not confined to the geographical extent of present-day Provence.

rightly challenged. L. M. Wright, “Misconceptions concerning the Troubadours, Trouvères and Minstrels,” Music & Letters 48 (1967): 35–39. More recently, see Joseph Harris and Karl Reichl, “Performance and Performers,” in Medieval Oral Literature, ed. Karl Reichl (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 141–202, at 180–81.

abandoned the rootless itinerancy. Eventually they became associated with music. For another perspective, see Constance Bullock-Davies, Menestrelorum multitudo: Minstrels at a Royal Feast (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1978).

poem of supplication. Declaratio, lines 168–91. See Valeria Bertolucci Pizzorusso, “La Supplica di Guiraut Riquier e la risposta di Alfonso X di Castiglia,” Studi mediolatini e volgari 14 (1966): 9–135; Joseph Linskill, Les epîtres de Guiraut Riquier, troubadour du XIIIe siècle, Association internationale d’études occitanes, vol. 1 (London: AIEO, 1985), 167–245, at 225–26, with notes on 235–37, 243. For broad context, see Miriam Cabré, Cerveri de Girona and His Poetic Traditions, Colección Támesis, Serie A, Monografías, vol. 169 (London: Tamesis, 1999), 55–59, and, in Catalan, Cerverí de Girona: Un trobador al servei de Pere el Gran, Blaquerna, vol. 7 (Barcelona: Publicacions i edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2011), 88–91.

instrumentalists, imitators, troubadours. He writes joglars, remendadors, segriers, and cazuros.

jongleurs. For jongleurs, he writes joglars.

existed at the fringes. John W. Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the Chanter and His Circle, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 1: 198–204.

characters in fiction. On such fictions, see Menegaldo, Le jongleur dans la littérature narrative.

devotion to the Virgin. For examination of the jongleur in connection with this issue, see Viviane Cunha, “O topos do jogral no acervo mariano medieval,” Revista do CESP 31.45 (January–June 2011): 167–87.

Thomas of Chobham. The toponymical element in his name is known alternately as Chabham, Cobham, and Cabham. On his life, see Joseph Goering, “Chobham, Thomas of (d. 1233x6),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), s.n.; online edition, May 2005, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/5007

vade mecum of practical theology. On the influence of his treatise, see Helen F. Rubel, “Chabham’s Penitential and Its Influence in the Thirteenth Century,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 40 (1925): 225–39.

three classes of performers. Thomas of Chobham, Summa confessorum, ed. F. Broomfield, Analecta mediaevalia Namurcensia, vol. 25 (Leuven, Belgium: Nauwelaerts, 1968), 291–92 (6.4 [Distinctio 4, “De officiis penitentium”] Questio 2a [“De histrionibus”]): “When prostitutes and performers come to confession, penance must not be given to them unless they abandon such practices altogether, because otherwise they cannot be saved… . But it is to be observed that there are three sorts of performers. For some distort and transfigure their bodies through indecent acrobatics or coarse gestures, or by laying bare their bodies indecently, or by putting on frightful costumes or masks, and all are worthy of damnation unless they abandon their trades. There are also other performers who work not at all but curiously meddle (2 Thessalonians 3:11), not having a fixed abode, but they gad about the courts of grandees and speak slander and vileness about those who are not present. Such people are worthy of damnation, because the Apostle forbids ‘with such a one to eat’ (1 Corinthians 5:11). And such people are called vagabond men-about-town, inasmuch as they are useful for nothing but devouring and slandering. There is also a third type of performers who have musical instruments to delight people, but there are two types of them. For some frequent public drinking fests and lusty gatherings to sing lusty songs there, to stir men to lust, and such people are worthy of damnation just as the others are. But there are also others who are called jongleurs who sing chansons de geste and lives of the saints and bring solace to men either in sickness or distress and do not engage in undue crudeness as do male and female acrobats and others who play in unseemly masks and cause themselves to seem as if they are apparitions through enchantments or in some other way. If however they do not engage in such conduct but sing to the accompaniment of their instruments chansons de geste and other useful topics to bring solace to men as has been said, such performers can well be tolerated, as Pope Alexander [III] said when a certain jongleur asked of him whether he could save his soul while in his profession. The pontiff asked him if he knew how to earn his living in another manner. Upon receiving a negative reply from the jongleur, he allowed him to live from his trade, so long as he abstained from all lustiness and scandalousness.”

Discussed by Faral, Les jongleurs, 67n1; Jacques Le Goff, “Métiers licites et métiers illicites dans l’occident médiéval,” in idem, Pour un autre Moyen Âge (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 89–126, at 101; Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 65. Both Thomas of Chobham and Peter the Chanter, Summa de sacramentis et animae consiliis (Summa on the Sacraments and Counsels of the Soul, from ca. 1191 or 92–1197), ed. Dugauquier, 3 (2a): 177, are examined by John W. Baldwin, “The Image of the Jongleur in Northern France around 1200,” Speculum 72 (1997): 635–63, at 644.

physical comedy or burlesque. Summa confessorum, 6.4.2a, ed. Broomfield, 291: “Quidam enim transformant et transfigurant corpora sua per turpes saltus vel per turpes gestus, vel denudando corpora turpiter, vel induendo horribiles loricas vel larvas, et omnes tales damnabiles sunt nisi reliquerint officia sua” (“Certain ones transform and transfigure their bodies through shameful jumps or gestures, or in shamefully stripping naked or donning frightful masks; and all such ones deserve damnation, if they do not abandon their practices”). Quoted in Faral, Les jongleurs, 67n1.

lustfulness and turpitude. In his criticism, Thomas followed Peter the Chanter, who is conjectured to have been his teacher. See Peter, Summa de sacramentis et animae consiliis, ed. Jean-Albert Dugauquier, 5 vols. in 3, Analecta mediaevalia namurcensia 4, 7, 11, 16, 21 (Leuven, Belgium: Nauwelaerts, 1954–1967), part 3, 2a: 177 (§ 211, lines 140–41): “Quidam enim cum ludibrio et turpitudine sui corporis acquirunt necessaria, et deformant ymaginem Dei” (“For certain ones obtain the necessities with mockery and debasement of their body, and they disfigure the image of God”).

excepts from condemnation. Summa confessorum, 6.4.2a, ed. Broomfield, 292: “Sunt autem alii qui dicuntur ioculatores qui cantant gestas principium [sic] et vitas sanctorum et faciunt solatia hominibus vel in egritudinibus suis vel in angustiis suis et non faciunt nimias turpitudines sicut faciunt saltatores et saltatrices et alii qui ludunt in imaginibus inhonestis et faciunt videri quasi quedam phantasmata per incantationes vel alio modo.” By gestas principium is presumably meant chansons de geste. Quoted in Faral, Les jongleurs, 67n1. For a study of such interdictions, see Carla Casagrande and Silvana Vecchio, “L’interdizione del giullare nel vocabolario clericale del XII e del XIII secolo,” in Il Teatro medievale, ed. Johann Drumbl (Bologna, Italy: Il Mulino, 1989), 317–68.

Romance of Flamenca. The Romance of Flamenca: A Provençal Poem of the Thirteenth Century, ed. Mario E. Porter, trans. Merton Jeome Hubert (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 58–59 (lines 612–17): “While one with mannequins contrives / Good sport, another juggles knives. / One tumbles, while another leaps / And somersaults, yet nimbly keeps / His feet. Some dive through hoops. Each man / Performs his stunt as best he can.”

we are told explicitly. Verses 25–28.

Debate poems. The standard reference remains Théodor Batiouchkof, “Le débat de l’âme et du corps,” Romania 20 (1891): 1–55, 513–78. Batiouchkof’s categorization of the genre has been disputed by Michel-André Bossy, “Medieval Debates of Body and Soul,” Comparative Literature (1976): 144–63.

Canticles of Saint Mary. Cantigas de Santa María.

Daurel and Beton. Paul Meyer, ed., Daurel et Beton: Chanson de geste provençale, Société des anciens textes français (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1880), 41 (section 32, lines 1208–10); Janet Shirley, trans., Daurel and Beton: A Twelfth-Century Adventure Story (Felinfach, UK: Llanerch, 1997), 58: “Next he took his harp and played two lays, then entertained them on the viol, and gave a display of leaping and tumbling (‘Sauta e tomba’).” Compare Arthur S. Kimmel, ed., A Critical Edition of the Old Provençal Epic Daurel et Beton, University of North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, vol. 10 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971).

instead gives him a boot camp. Meyer, Daurel et Beton, 48; trans. Shirley, section 37, lines 1419–21: “At seven years old Beton could play the viol well, also the citole, and was a fine harpist.” This discrepancy between the two passages was remarked upon by Glunnis M. Cropp, “The Disguise of ‘Jongleur,’” Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 65.1 (1986): 36–47.

thirteenth-century poem. See Kurt Lewent, “Old Provençal Saig ‘Hangman’ and Two Poems on Jongleurs by Cerveri de Girona,” Modern Language Quarterly 7 (1946): 411–44, at 421 (interpretation), 434–36 (text and translation of Sirventes, incipit “Juglar, prec vos, ans que mortz vos aucia”; here, stanza 5, lines 25–30), and 442–44 (commentary): “I am blaming you, brethren, for no other reason than that I should like you to give up that false brotherhood and praise Saint Mary; for it is she that [sic] defends and watches and guides the world and all of us, and by singing songs in her praise one could exorcise the one who, without her, would easily lead us astray.”

stabilitas loci. The phrase stabilitas loci is untapped in the Rule, but stabilitas and the corresponding adjective stabilis appear repeatedly: Venarde, Rule of Saint Benedict, 18–19 (chap. 1.11), 36–37 (chap. 4.78), 186–89 (chap. 58.9, 17), 194–95 (chap. 60.9), 196–97 (chap. 61.5).

pilgrim and pilgrimage. The Latin terms are peregrinus and peregrinatio. See Gerhart B. Ladner, “Homo Viator: Mediaeval Ideas on Alienation and Order,” Speculum 42 (1967): 233–59.

gyrovague. On gyro- and vagus, see J. Kevin Newman, “Gyrovagues in Dante and St. Benedict,” American Benedictine Review 54 (2003): 414–19.

vagrant. The Latin word is vagans.

he could epitomize instability. Paul Zumthor, La lettre et la voix de la “littérature” médiévale (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987), 72: “Au cœur d’un monde stable, le ‘jongleur’ signifie une instabilité radicale; la fragilité de son insertion dans l’ordre féodal ou urbain ne lui laisse qu’une modalité d’intégration sociale: celle qui s’opère par le jeu.” In primary texts, see Pseudo-Hugh of Fouilloy, De bestiis et aliis rebus, in PL 177, 13–56 (book 1, chap. 45), at 46B: “Hujusmodi homines vix possunt stabiles” (“People of this sort can scarcely be stable”).

He led a vagabond life. Lines 10–12.

prone to recidivism. Pseudo-Hugh of Fouilloy, De bestiis et aliis rebus, 46D: “Sed et joculatores, ante conversionem leves, cum ad conversionem veniunt, saepius usi levitate, leviter recedunt” (“Jongleurs are frivolous people before they are converted. If they are ever made to repent, they often fall back into the easy-going life they are used to”). Both this and the preceding quotation from Pseudo-Hugh are cited by Wolfgang Kemp, The Narratives of Gothic Stained Glass, trans. Caroline Dobson Saltzwedel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 138.

intermediaries. Martine Clouzot, “Un intermédiaire culturel au XIIIe siècle: Le jongleur,” Bulletin du centre d’études médiévales d’Auxerre|BUCEMA Hors-série 2 (2008), https://cem.revues.org/4312

body movements and gestures. The study of such expression is called kinesics.

the real nature of the drill. Since the Cistercians have been connected with ring dancing, it would be tempting to speculate that the sequence followed a circular pattern. See Annette Kehnel and Mirjam Mencej, “Representing Eternity: Circular Movement in the Cloister, Round Dancing, Winding-Staircases and Dancing Angels,” in Self-Representation of Medieval Religious Communities: The British Isles in Context, ed. Anne Müller and Karen Stöber, Vita regularis. Abhandlungen, vol. 40 (Berlin: Lit, 2009), 67–97.

Chauny. For discussion passim, see Georges Lecocq, Histoire du théâtre en Picardie depuis son origine jusqu’à la fin du XVIe siècle (Paris: H. Menu, 1880). The key evidence is Rabelais, Gargantua, 1.24, where the character Gargantua and his tutor “went to see the jugglers, conjurers, and sellers of quack remedies, and noted their antics, their tricks, their somersaults, and their smooth words, attending especially to those from Chauny in Picardy, for they are great babblers by nature, and fine reciters of stories on the subject of green monkeys.” Trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1955), 93.

systematic exposition. The text is Elucidarium (in English, “Elucidator”). It is so called because “it elucidates the obscurity of various things.” For the text, see Honorius Augustodunensis, Elucidarium, in PL 172, 1148CD (2.188): “[Discipulus: Habent spem joculatores? Magister:] Nullam: tota namque intentione sunt ministri Satanae, de his dicitur: deum non cognoverunt; ideo Deus sprevit eos, et Dominus subsannabit eos, quia derisores deridentur” (“None. For by their entire application they are the ministers of Satan, of whom it has been said: They knew not God; therefore God has despised them and God shall deride them”). At the close of the Master’s response, the most relevant biblical quotation is Psalms 2:4.

lecher and ribald. Willem Noomen, Le jongleur par lui-même: Choix de dits et de fabliaux, Ktemata, vol. 17 (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2003), 5–6. The definitions of the two Old French words are from Hindley et al., Old French-English Dictionary, 390 (lecheor “debauchee, glutton, rake”), 533 (ribaut “rogue, scoundrel”).

relationship of the jongleurs with the clergy. Carla Casagrande and Silvana Vecchio, “Clercs et jongleurs dans la société médiévale,” Annales: Histoires, sciences sociales 34.5 (1979): 913–28.

their standing shot up. Baldwin, “Image of the Jongleur”; Faral, Les jongleurs, 44–60; Christopher Page, The Owl and the Nightingale: Musical Life and Ideas in France (1100–1300) (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 19–33.

property and wealth. On the spectrum, see Gretchen Peters, “Urban Minstrels in Late Medieval Southern France: Opportunities, Status and Professional Relationships,” Early Music History 19 (2000): 201–35. On the marginality, see Wolfgang Hartung, Die Spielleute: Eine Randgruppe in der Gesellschaft des Mittelalters, Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte: Beihefte, vol. 72 (Wiesbaden, Germany: Franz Steiner, 1982), with coverage at p. 13 of Our Lady’s Tumbler.

professional buffoon. The last-mentioned character was attested as “clown” first in English after the Middle Ages in the mid-sixteenth century and only subsequently in French and other Western European languages.

mime of Christ. Hermann Reich, Der König mit der Dornenkrone (Leipzig, Germany: B. G. Teubner, 1905), 31 (mimus Christi).

imitation of Christ. In Latin, imitatio Christi.

itinerant sermonizers. Kunstmann, Vierge et merveille, 31, translating a passage in the coda to one of Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles.

anti-Catholic. A major flashpoint in discussion of such satire has been discussed in Tracey Sedinger, “‘And yet woll I stiell saye that I am I’: Jake Juggler, the Lord’s Supper, and Disguise,” English Literary History 74.1 (2007): 239–69; Beatrice Groves, “‘One Man at One Time May Be in Two Placys’: Jack Juggler, Proverbial Wisdom, and Eucharistic Satire,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 27 (2014): 40–57. Have no fear, fellow scholars: the quotation within the title is [sic].

the devil’s jugglers. Paul Whitfield White, Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage, and Playing in Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 126 (“the divels iugglers”).

Trance Dance

he became a dancer to God. T. S. Eliot, “The Death of Saint Narcissus,” in idem, Poems Written in Early Youth (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), 34–35 (text), 42–43 (note).

prayer books of many denominations. Here I transfer to Christianity observations made about Judaism by Lawrence A. Hoffman, Beyond the Text: A Holistic Approach to Liturgy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 71.

Theodosius banned such pagan cults. In 393.

disposed to condemn dancing. See Louis Gougaud, “Danse,” in Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie (Paris: Letouzey, 1920), 4.1: 248–58; E. Louis Backman, Religious Dances in the Christian Church and in Popular Medicine, trans. E. Classen (London: Allen & Unwin, 1952), 154–61; Yvonne Rokseth, “Danses cléricales du XIIIe siècle,” in Melanges 1945, vol. 3: Etudes historiques, Publications de la Faculté des Lettres de Strasbourg (Paris: Société d’édition Les Belles Lettres, 1947), 93–126: Gianfranco D’Aronco, Storia della danza popolare e d’arte, con particolare riferimento all’Italia (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1962), especially 113–37; J. G. Davies, Liturgical Dance: An Historical, Theological, and Practical Handbook (London: SCM Press, 1984), 19–28; Jeannine Horowitz, “Les danses cléricales dans les églises au Moyen Âge,” Le Moyen-Âge 95.2 (1989): 279–92.

texts concerned with penance. Particularly penitentials, texts that listed sins and prescribed penances for them.

extirpate dance. In general, see Alessandro Arcangeli, “Dance and Punishment,” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 10.2 (1992): 30–42. On prohibitions, see Louis Gougaud, “La danse dans les églises,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 15 (1914): 5–22, 229–45; Horowitz, “Les danses cléricales,” 279; Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books, and Local Legends, 6 vols., 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955–1958), C 51.1.5 “Tabu: Dancing in Churchyard.” With specific regard to the medieval French poem, see Jessica Van Oort, “The Minstrel Dances in Good Company: Del tumbeor nostre dame,” Dance Chronicle 34 (2011): 239–75.

even priests engage in ritual dances. Davies, Liturgical Dance, 36–57.

ecstasy. Erika Bourguignon, “Trance Dance,” in International Encyclopedia of Dance, ed. Selma Jeanne Cohen et al., 6 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 6: 184–88; Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt, 2006), 5–6.

Dionysus. Dionysus was equivalent to the Roman Bacchus. The followers of Dionysus included bacchantes and maenads.

penitential pain. France, Separate but Equal, 182–84.

with gritted teeth. Bretel, Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame, 37–38, 41, 145, emphasizes the body as a means of redemption, and as a cause of exaltation and exultation. Sobczyk, Les jongleurs de Dieu, 126–28, rejects this emphasis. Along similar lines, see also Gaucher, “Le ‘jeu’ de la pénitence,” 261–71.

flagellantism. On flagellants, see Backman, Religious Dances, 161–70.

mass hysteria. Known variously as choreomania, danseomania, or dancing mania, plague, or rage; epidemic dancing; Saint Vitus’s or Saint John’s dance; or Tarantism.

solo act of an individual. On the choreography of medieval solo dance, see Walter Salmen, “Zur Choreographie von Solotänzen in Spielen des Mittelalters,” in Mein ganzer Körper ist Gesicht: Groteske Darstellungen in der europäischen Kunst und Literatur des Mittelalters, ed. Katrin Kröll and Hugo Steger, Rombach Wissenschaft: Reihe Litterae, vol. 26 (Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany: Rombach, 1994), 343–55. On the iconography, see Gabriele Busch-Salmen, Ikonographische Studien zum Solotanz im Mittelalter, Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft, vol. 7 (Innsbruck, Austria: Musikverlag Helbling, 1982), esp. 16, on Our Lady’s Tumbler.

dances himself into oblivion. The motif of an individual who dances to death is found in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Red Shoes” (made into a strong underlying element in a 1948 film), but there the compulsion is diabolic: a woman is cursed to dance by the red shoes she dons.

aligns. The story resembles time as it operated in the Middle Ages, as an intersection of the iterative and the one-time, the diurnal round and the special, the immovable and the movable feast.

dancing mania. J. F. C. Hecker, The Dancing Mania of the Middle Ages, trans. B. G. Babington, Burt Franklin Research and Source Works Series, vol. 540 / Selected Essays in History, Economics, and Social Science, vol. 169 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), 1.

Giselle, or The Wilis. Giselle, ou Les Wilis, two acts with music by Adolphe Adam, choreography by Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot, first performed in Paris in 1841. The libretto by Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges and Théophile Gautier rested upon a legend recounted by the German poet Heinrich Heine. The Wilis are themselves drawn from Slavic tradition.

The Wilis. In Slavic and especially South Slavic mythology that is attested already in medieval sources, the vily are beautiful nymphlike spirits who have the power of flight. Associated with the mountains and waters, they overlap with the female water spirits known as rusalki, who amused themselves on land sometimes and who tickled to death or drowned their victims.

Shakers. They are known more fully as the Shaking Quakers.

sang and danced. Edward Deming Andrews, The Gift to Be Simple: Songs, Dances and Rituals of the American Shakers (New York: J. J. Augustin, 1940); Robert P. Emlen, “The Shaker Dance Prints,” Imprint: Journal of the American Historical Print Collectors Society 17.2 (Autumn 1992): 14–26.

praise dance. See Karen Clemente, “Dance as Sacred Expression,” Journal of Dance Education 8.2 (2008): 37–38; Avis Hatcher-Puzzo, “Popular to Proficient: Cultivating a Contextual Appreciation of Dance on a Rural Historically Black College Campus,” Journal of Dance Education 14.2 (2014): 67–70.

dervishes. Ahmet T. Karamustafa, God’s Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Later Middle Period, 1200–1550 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994), 20, 73, 74.

collective delusions. Hecker, Dancing Mania of the Middle Ages, 2.

Jongleurs of God

captured the theologians’ attention. Kemp, Narratives of Gothic Stained Glass, 137.

murmurs of approval. Compare Faral, Les jongleurs, 25–43, 44–60; Helen Waddell, The Wandering Scholars (London: Constable, 1927), Appendix E, “Councils relating to the ‘clericus vagus’ or ‘ioculator’”; and J. D. A. Ogilvy, “‘Mimi, scurrae, histriones’: Entertainers of the Early Middle Ages,” Speculum 38 (1963): 603–19.

God’s jesters. John Saward, Perfect Fools: Folly for Christ’s Sake in Catholic and Orthodox Spirituality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 58–79 (“God’s Jesters: The Cistercians”).

ditties and suave melodies. Apologia Berengarii Pictavensis contra Sanctum Bernardum Claraevallensem abbatem et alios qui condemnaverunt Petrum Abaelardum, in Rodney M. Thomson, “The Satirical Works of Berengar of Poitiers: An Edition with Introduction,” Mediaeval Studies 42 (1980): 89–138, at 111: “quem audiuimus a primis fere adulescentiae rudimentis cantiunculas mimicas et urbanos modulos fictitasse.”

acrobat of God. Saltator domini: see Jean Leclercq, “Le thème de la jonglerie chez S. Bernard et ses contemporains,” Revue d’histoire de la spiritualité 48 (1972): 385–400; Jean Leclercq, “Le thème de la jonglerie dans les relations entre saint Bernard, Abélard et Pierre le Vénérable,” in Pierre Abélard—Pierre le Vénérable: Les courants philosophiques, littéraires et artistiques en Occident au milieu du XIIe siècle. Abbaye de Cluny, 2 au 9 juillet 1972, ed. René Louis et al., Actes et mémoires des colloques internationaux du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, vol. 546 (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1975), 671–84; Zink, Poésie et conversion, 161–78.

letter dated around 1140. Letter 87, ad Ogerium §12, in Bernard of Clairvaux, Opera, ed. J. Leclerq et al., 8 vols. in 9 (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957–1977), 7: 224–31, at 231, lines 111–18 (= PL 182, 217): “Nam revera quid aliud saecularibus quam ludere videmur, cum, quod ipsi appetunt in hoc saeculo, nos per contrarium fugimus, et quod ipsi fugiunt, nos appetimus, more scilicet ioculatorum et saltatorum, qui, capite misso deorsum pedibusque sursum erectis, praeter humanum usum stant manibus vel incedunt, et sic in se omnium oculos defigunt. Non est hic ludus puerilis, non est de theatro, qui femineis foedisque anfractibus provocet libidinem, actus sordidos repraesentet, sed est ludus iucundus, honestus, gravis, spectabilis, qui caelestium spectatorum delectare possit aspectus” (“For in fact what else do we seem to worldly people to do than to play, when what they desire in this world, we on the contrary flee, and what they flee we strive for, like jongleurs and tumblers, who contrary to human usage stand or proceed on their hands with head downward and feet raised upward, and thus rivet upon themselves everyone’s eyes. This is not a childlike game, not from the stage, to elicit lust with shameful, womanly contortions and to represent vile activities. On the contrary, it is a joyful game, decent, serious, and admirable, which can delight the sight of heavenly onlookers”). The letter was addressed to a canon regular named Ogier of Mont Saint-Éloi (and unrelated to his fellow Cistercian Ogier of Locedio). For another translation, see Letter 90, “To Oger, a Canon Regular,” in Bruno Scott James, trans., The Letters of St Bernard of Clairvaux (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1998), 129–35, at 135. The passage has been quoted often, notably by Jean Leclercq, “‘Joculator et saltator’: Saint Bernard et l’image du jongleur dans les manuscrits,” in Translatio studii: Manuscript and Library Studies Honoring Oliver L. Kapsner, ed. J. G. Plante (Collegeville, MN: St. John’s University Press, 1973), 124–48; Meyer Schapiro, Romanesque Art (New York: George Braziller, 1977), 9; Camille, Image on the Edge, 59.

attested first in English. Earliest use at least according to the citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

hopping and dancing of tumblers. “Hoppynge & daunceynge of tumblers and herlotis, and oþer spectakils.”

sacred play. The Latin word ludus that is employed here could encompass an immense ambit. If a book can be considered a passage, the locus classicus is Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1949).

jongleurs of God and of the holy angels. Caesarius, Dialogus miraculorum, ed. Joseph Strange, 2 vols. (Cologne: J. M. Heberle, 1851), 1: 360 (distinctio 6, capitulum 8); for an English translation of which, see The Dialogue on Miracles, trans. H. Von Essen Scott and C. C. Swinton Bland, 2 vols. (London: G. Routledge, 1929), 1: 414, with the word jester(s) changed to jongleur(s): “Simplex quandoque mimo vel ioculatori comparatur. Sicut illorum [illius] verba vel opera in eius [libri eorum] ore vel manibus, qui ioculator non est, saepe displicent, et poena digna [digni] sunt apud homines; quae tamen ab eis dicta vel facta, placent: ita est de simplicibus. Ut sic dicam, ioculatores Dei sunt sanctorumque angelorum simplices. Quorum opera, si hi qui simplices non sunt, quandoque facerent, haud dubium quin Deum offenderent, qui in eis, dum per simplices fiunt, delectatur” (“The simple man is often compared to an actor or jongleur, for as their words or actions would often be displeasing in the mouth or hands of one who is not a jongleur, and would be worthy of punishment, yet when the same things are said or done by jongleurs they give pleasure; and so it is with the simple-minded. If I may put it in such a way, the simple-minded are the jongleurs of God and the holy angels. But if their deeds are sometimes done by those who are not simple-minded there is no doubt that they are displeasing to God who delights in them when they are done by the simple”).

humility, ordinariness, and inexperience. Chrysogonus Waddell, “Simplicity and Ordinariness: The Climate of Early Cistercian Hagiography,” in Simplicity and Ordinariness, ed. John R. Sommerfeldt, Studies in Medieval Cistercian History, vol. 4 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1980), 1–47, at 8–9.

minstrels of the Lord. Ioculatores domini is not documented before its use in Legenda Perusina of 1320–1312. On the expression, see Raoul S. Manselli, Francesco d’Assisi (Rome: Bulzoni, 1980), 145–53. The degree to which the phrase has become associated with Francis may be gauged from its use in titles. For example, the most famous film about the saint is undoubtedly “Francesco, giullare di Dio” (1950, known in English as “The Flowers of Saint Francis,” “Francis, God’s Fool,” and “Francis, God’s Jester”), directed by Roberto Rossellini, screenplay by Federico Fellini (1920–1993). At least two books flaunt the phrase in their titles: André Séailles, François d’Assise ou le jongleur de Dieu (Brussels: Desclée De Brouwer, 1971) and Henri Queffélec, François d’Assise: Le Jongleur de Dieu (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1982). G. K. Chesterton’s fifth chapter is entitled “Le Jongleur de Dieu” in his St. Francis of Assisi.

Brother Juniper. Fra Ginepro, in Italian. On him, see Aviad Kleinberg, Flesh Made Word: Saints’ Stories and the Western Imagination, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 225–38.

defied social norms. Described repeatedly in Fioretti di san Francesco (Little flowers of Saint Francis) and Vita di frate Ginepro (Life of Brother Juniper): see La Vita di frate Ginepro (testo latino e volgarizzamento), ed. Giorgio Petrocchi, Scelta di curiosità letterarie inedite o rare dal secolo XIII al XIX, vol. 256 (Bologna, Italy: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1960).

two classes of artists. Berceo uses the terms trovador and joglar. For his guise as joglar of Saint Dominic, see Vida de Santo Domingo de Silos (The Life of Saint Dominic of Silos), book 2, stanza 289: “Querémosvos un otro libriello començar, / e de los sus milagros algunos renunçar, / los que Dios en su vida quiso por él mostrar, / cuyos joglares somos, él nos deñe guiar” (“We want to begin another little book, / and make known to you some of his miracles, / those God willed to show through him while he lived; / may He whose minstrels we are deign to guide us”): compare book 3, 759. The translation can be found in The Collected Works of Gonzalo de Berceo in English Translation, trans. Jeannie K. Bartha et al., Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 327 (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2008), 259, 314.

sermon collections. Sermon on All Saints’ Day (incipit “Laudate Dominum in sanctis eius”), Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 13953, folio 145r: “Ioculatores, id est confessores qui Dominum et sanctos mouent ad risum et leticiam optimis uerbis et factis suis, quorum unus legit in ecclesia, alter cantat, alter romanizat, id est ‘enromiante’ id est exponendo latinum in romano laicis scilicet predicando” (“Jongleurs, these are confessors who occasion laughter and joy from God and the saints by the excellence of their words and actions. One does the reading at church, another sings, another speaks in vernacular, which is to say that what is in Latin, he sets forth in vernacular for the laity in his preaching”). Quoted and cited by Nicole Bériou, “Introduction,” in Prédication et liturgie au Moyen Âge: Études réunies, ed. idem and Franco Morenzoni, Bibliothèque d’histoire culturelle du Moyen Âge, vol. 5 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2008), 7–22, at 13n24.

Blessed John Buoni. From Romagna, he is also known as Johannes Bonus, Giovanni Bono, Giambono, Zanibono, and Zannebono. His feast day falls on October 23: see Acta Sanctorum, October, “Dies 22,” 9: 698–99. For a more approachable account, see “October,” ed. Peter Doyle, in Butler’s Lives of the Saints, ed. David Hugh Farmer and Paul Burns, 12 vols. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995–2000), 160–61. For the relevant texts and Italian translations, see Vita di Giovanni Bono, ed. Mario Mattei, Vite dei santi dell’Emilia Romagna, vol. 5 (Cesena, Italy: Il ponte vecchio, 2004).

Holy Fools

fools for Christ’s sake. Paul the Apostle, in 1 Corinthians 4:10. Compare 1:18, 23, 25.

fool of God. On the fool of God, see Saward, Perfect Fools; Thomas Lederer, “Fools and Saints: Derision and Regenerative Laughter,” Comitatus 37 (2006): 111–45.

fool for Christ. Alexander Y. Syrkin, “On the Behavior of the ‘Fool for Christ’s Sake,’” History of Religions 22 (1982): 150–71 and Youval Rotman, Insanity and Sanctity in Byzantium: The Ambiguity of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

Symeon of Emesa. Symeon flourished sometime between the middle and end of the sixth century. Emesa is the modern-day Homs, in Syria. He is known from a brief account in the sixth-century Evagrius Scholasticus and a detailed one in the seventh-century Leontios of Neapolis. For the English of the latter, see Derek Krueger, Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius’s Life and the Late Antique City, Transformation of the Classical Heritage, vol. 25 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996). Leontius was the first to use the phrase “fool for Christ.” For further information, see Vsevolod Rocheau, “Saint Siméon Salos: Ermite palestinien et prototype des ‘Fous-pour-le-Christ,’” Proche-Orient chrétien 28 (1978): 209–19.

Lausiac History. The Lausiac History was named after Lausus (or Lausos), who commissioned it. This eunuch became the imperial chamberlain at the court of Emperor Theodosius II (r. 408–450).

(un)intentional absurdism. E. Poulakou-Rebelakou et al., “Holy Fools: A Religious Phenomenon of Extreme Behaviour,” Journal of Religion and Health 53.1 (2014): 95–104. This article offers in condensed form comprehensive information on different traditions of holy fools.

Saint Francis of Assisi. The Assisi Compilation (1244–1260) 18, in Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, ed. Regis J. Armstrong et al., 3 vols. (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1999–2001), 2: 118–230, at 132–33, relates Francis’s claim at the chapter of Mats (dated often to 1221): “God has called me by the way of simplicity and showed me the way of simplicity… . He wanted me to be a new fool in the world.” Francis’s status as a fool of God has become deeply entrenched in modern biographies of him, cf. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi, 106: “It was a solid objective fact, like the stones in the road, that he had made a fool of himself. And as he stared at the word ‘fool’ written in luminous letters before him, the word itself began to shine and change”; 107–8: “When Francis came forth from his cave of vision, he was wearing the same word ‘fool’ as a feather in his cap; as a crest or even a crown. He would go on being a fool; he would become more and more of a fool; he would be the court fool of the King of Paradise.”

fools to the world. Literally, the Latin mundi moriones means “fools of the world.” Erasmus, “The Rich Beggars” (“Ptokhoplousioi”), in Opera omnia (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1969–<2017>), Ordo 1, 3 “Colloquia” (ed. L.-E. Halkin, F. Bierlaire, and R. Hoven [1972]), 389–402, at 397.

individuals whose holiness goes undetected. Lennart Rydén, “The Holy Fool,” in The Byzantine Saint: University of Birmingham, 14th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, ed. Sergei Hackel, Studies Supplement to Sobornost, vol. 5 (San Bernardino, CA: Borgo, 1983), 106–13; Derek Krueger, “Tales of Holy Fools,” in Religions of Late Antiquity in Practice, ed. Richard Valantasis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 177–86; Bernard Flusin, “Le serviteur caché ou le saint sans existence,” in Les vies des saints à Byzance: Genre littéraire ou biographie historique. Actes du IIe colloque international “Hermeneia,” Paris, 6–7–8 juin 2002, ed. Paolo Odorico and Panagiotis A. Agapitos, Dossiers byzantins, vol. 4 (Paris: Centre d’études byzantines, néo-helléniques et sud-est européennes, E.H.S.S., 2004), 59–71.

Scetis. Modern-day Wadi al-Natrun, then a monastic center, in the desert of the northwestern Nile Delta.

Mark the Fool. In Greek σαλός (transliterated salos or salós), with the accent on the final syllable.

pretends to be demented. The story, entitled De Marco salo (On […] Mark), is no. 3 in “Vie et récits de l’Abbé Daniel de Scété,” ed. Léon Clugnet, Revue de l’orient chrétien 5 (1900): 49–73, 370–91, at 60–62; no. 2 in Saint Daniel of Sketis: A Group of Hagiographic Texts, ed. and trans. Britt Dahlman, Studia Byzantina Upsaliensia, vol. 10 (Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University, 2007); trans. Krueger, “Tales of Holy Fools.” The story has been classified as no. 2255 in Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca, ed. François Halkin, 3rd ed., Subsidia Hagiographica, vol. 8a (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1957), and as no. 2099z (compare nos. 2254–55) in Novum auctarium Bibliothecae Hagiographicae Graecae, ed. idem, Subsidia Hagiographica, vol. 65 (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1984), which correspond to Wortley, “Repertoire,’” W468. Transliterated by a purist with fidelity to best practice, Scetis would be Skētis.

Another example. The story, entitled De virgine quae ebrietatem simulabat, is no. 7 in Clugnet, “Vie et récits,” 69–70. The same tale has been subsumed in Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca, no. 2101, and Wortley, “Repertoire,” W461. See also Sergei Arkad’evich Ivanov, “From ‘Secret Servants of God’ to ‘Fools for Christ’s Sake’ in Byzantine Hagiography,” in The Holy Fool in Byzantium and Russia, ed. Ingunn Lunde (Bergen, Norway: [Universitetet i Bergen, Russisk institutt], 1995), 5–17, at 10–11; idem, Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond, trans. Simon Franklin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

other tales in the genre. Ivanov, “From ‘Secret Servants of God,’” 188–89.

Maximos. [Kausokalybites (“of the burning hut”)] of Mount Athos, whose biography is recorded in four saints’ lives: see Halkin, Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca, nos. 1236z, 1237, 1237c, 1237f. Two of these are included in Holy Men of Mount Athos, ed. Richard P. H. Greenfield and Alice-Mary Talbot, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, vol. 40 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 369–439 (by Niphon), 441–567 (by Theophanes).

church of Saint Mary of Blachernae. As its name predisposes us to believe, this great church was associated with the Virgin. It was located in the northwestern section of Constantinople, in the suburb known as Blachernae.

holy fools. The key Russian term is iurodivyi.

stock characters. Ewa M. Thompson, Understanding Russia: The Holy Fool in Russian Culture (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987).

Fool. Tale 10, in Fou, dixième conte de la Vie des pères: Conte pieux du XIIIe siècle, ed. Jacques Chaurand, Publications romanes et françaises, vol. 117 (Geneva: Droz, 1971).

Gautier de Coinci wrote a miracle. Gautier de Coinci, Les miracles de Notre Dame, ed. V. Frédéric Koenig, 4 vols., Textes littéraires français, vols. 64, 95, 131, 165 (Geneve: Droz, 1955–), 3: 74–106 (book 1, miracle 37 [D. 39: “D’un escommené”]; Le miracle d’un excommunié, trans. Annette Llinarès Garnier, Traductions des classiques du Moyen Âge, vol. 92 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2013). For analysis, see Huguette Legros, “Les fous de Dieu,” in “Si a parlé par moult ruiste vertu”: Mélanges de littérature médiévale offerts à Jean Subrenat, ed. Jean Dufournet, Colloques, congress et conferences sur le Moyen Âge, vol. 1 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000), 339–53. She returns to the topic in her recent book, idem, La folie dans la littérature médiévale: Étude des représentations de la folie dans la littérature des XIIe, XIIIe et XIVe siècles (Rennes, France: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2013).

Gottfried Keller composed a poem. The original episode was recorded in the sixteenth-century family chronicle known as the Zimmern Chronicle (1519–1566).

The Fool of Count von Zimmern. Gottfried Keller, “Der Narr des Grafen von Zimmern,” in Sämtliche Werke in sieben Bänden, ed. Thomas Böning and Gerhard Kaiser, 7 vols., Bibliothek deutscher Klassiker, vol. 3 (Frankfurt, Germany: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–1996), 1: 718–19. For interpretation, see Gerhard Kaiser, “Inkarnation und Altarsakrament: Ein nichtchristliches Gedicht über die Mese und was es Christliches sagt. Zu Gottfried Kellers ‘Der Narr des Grafen von Zimmern,’” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 94 (1997): 253–62.

large lidded flagon. The cup is known as a ciborium. For the source, see Zimmerische Chronik, ed. Karl August Barack, 4 vols. (Tübingen, Germany: Litterarische Verein in Stuttgart, 1869), 2: 585 (in 1528): the fool is identified as Michele, serving Count Johannes Werner von Zimmern.

The Holy Jester Francis. Lu santo jullàre Françesco, ed. Franca Rame (Turin, Italy: Einaudi, 1999), 33–37 (Italian and dialect, in facing-page format).

immersed himself. Antonio Scuderi, “Dario Fo and Oral Tradition: Creating a Thematic Context,” Oral Tradition 15 (2000): 26–38.

holy jester. Antonio Scuderi, “Unmasking the Holy Jester Dario Fo,” Theatre Journal 55.2 (2003): 275–90.

jonglery. The Italian for jongleur is giullare, for jonglery is giullarata. The most obvious evidence would be pieces such as Dario Fo, La giullarata con Concetta Pina e Cicciu Busacca (Verona, Italy: Bertani, 1975), and Mistero buffo: Giullarata popolare (Turin, Italy: Einaudi, 2003). See Scuderi, “Unmasking.” On Fo as a medievalizer, see Louise D’Arcens, “Dario Fo’s Mistero Buffo and the Left-Modernist Reclamation of Medieval Popular Culture,” in Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture, ed. Gail Ashton and Daniel T. Kline (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 57–70; idem, Comic Medievalism: Laughing at the Middle Ages, Medievalism, vol. 4 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), 68–87.

arrogated or effaced. The framework he assumes derives from Antonio Gramsci and Mikhail Bakhtin, among others, and it posits subaltern masses of lower classes, which are oppressed by hegemonic elites.

the most successful and significant. Conrad Greenia, “The Laybrother Vocation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” Cistercian Studies 16 (1981): 38–45, at 43.

Fact or Fiction?

Truth is stranger than fiction. Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1897), chap. 15.

The City of God. De civitate Dei.

On Superstition. De superstitione.

performs daily. “A leading pantomime actor of great experience, grown old and decrepit, used to put on his act every day on the Capitol, as if the gods still took pleasure in his performance now that human beings had abandoned him.” For a translation of the passage, see Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1972), 250.

The parallel to De civitate Dei 6.10 was first drawn in Francesco Novati, “L’archimimus di Seneca ed il tombeor Nostre Dame,” Romania 25 (1896): 591, and later reexamined by G. Šamšalović, “Del tumbeor Nostre Dame,” Živa antika / Antiquité vivante 10 (1960): 320. In the retelling of the Old French by the latter, the jongleur dies at the end of performing and supplicating. A monk witnesses the death and brings the abbot, who explains that the dancer’s activity pleased God more than any other.

the show must go on. A similar impulse may explain another historical anecdote. In 211, a mime play is interrupted when the alarm is sounded of an approaching enemy. The crowd first rushes to arms and later returns to the performance, where the spectators find that in their absence the mime has continued dancing to the accompaniment of a flute player. See Sextus Pompeius Festus, De verborum significatione, ed. W. M. Lindsay, in Glossaria latina, 5 vols. (Paris: Société anonyme d’Édition “Les Belles lettres,” 1926–1931), 4: 93–506, at 419 (item 436), “Salva res <est; saltat> senex,” discussed by Paul Veyne, Le pain et le cirque: Sociologie historique d’un pluralisme politique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1976), 392, 499–500 (n58).

cases from western Christendom. The odds are good that if we wished to track down instances from other traditions, they could be found readily. For Muslim examples, see Fritz Meier, Abū Sa‘īd-i Abū l-Hayr (357–440/967–1049): Wirklichkeit und Legende, Acta Iranica, vol. 11 (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1976), 256–59.

Dancers are the athletes of God. This saying is often identified, without any source, as a quotation from Albert Einstein.

sixteenth-century friar. Known as Pascual Bailón in Spanish, often called “The Saint of the Eucharist,” he is sometimes designated simply by a diminutive of his first name, Pascualito. His feast day is May 17. For concise and reliable biographical information, see Niccolò Del Re, “Pasquale Baylón,” in Bibliotheca sanctorum, 13 vols. (Rome: Istituto Giovanni XXIII nella Pontificia Università lateranense, 1961–1970), 10: 358–63. His life story was written by his fellow Franciscan and superior, Father Juan Ximenez. See Juan Ximenez (Jiménez), Chronica del B. Fray Pasqual Baylon (Valencia, Spain: Iuan Crysostomo Gariz, 1601). The abbreviated Latin translation of the original Spanish vita by Father Ximenez can be found in Acta Sanctorum (May 4, 1866): 48–132; the episode to follow is at p. 53A, section 17. For uncritical biographies (all three of them often reprinted), see Louis-Antoine de Porrentruy, The Saint of the Eucharist: Saint Paschal Baylon, Patron of Eucharistic Associations, trans. Oswald Staniforth (London: R. & T. Washbourne, 1908); Autbert Groeteken, Paschalis Baylon: Heiligenbild aus Spaniens goldenem Jahrhundert (Cincinnati, OH: Verlag des “Sendbote,” 1912); Innocenzo Russo, Vita di s. Pasquale Baylon francescano (Naples, Italy: Federico & Ardia, 1931).

attachment to the Eucharist. This aspect is symbolized by the ostensory and the chalice.

King of the Graveyard. In Spanish, San Pascualito, also known as San Pascualito Muerte (Saint Paschal Death) and El Rey San Pascual (King Saint Paschal). As the “King of the Graveyard,” Paschal is represented as a skeleton with a crown, cape, or both.

known for dancing. Ivan Innerst, Saints for Today: Reflections on Lesser Saints (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2000), 18. On the conventional iconography, see Maria Chiara Celletti, in Bibliotheca sanctorum, 10: 363–64.

blessed the saint. “El pastor de Torrehermosa,” section 68, “La danza de los gitanos,” in San Pascual: Boletín informativo de las obras del templo 17.168 (July-August 1965). The episode is recounted in Ximenez, Chronica.

broke into a jubilant jig. The caption reads: “Then, full of joy, he sang and danced like a madman….” The voice bubble exclaims, in reference to the Eucharist with the veneration of which Paschal became celebrated: “Let all mortals eat fruit by which they will live, which is God underneath the bread.”

Baylon. The name has been construed as having in its first syllable a stem that derives from the Spanish verb bailar “to dance.” Its second syllable is the augmentative –ón, with an affective meaning—expressing a liking. See Eric O’Brien, “Omer Englebert’s The Last of the Conquistadors, Junípero Serra: A Critical Appraisal,” The Americas 13 (1956): 175–85, at 179.

Obando. In the province of Bulacan, on the island of Luzon in the Philippines.

church dedicated to him. The church is first documented in 1754 as being called Iglesia de San Pascual Baylon del Pueblo de Ovando.

Our Lady of Salambao. Our Lady of Salambao is an image of the Virgin (now in the church of San Paschal) that was reportedly found by two brothers inside their fishing net (salambao) in 1793.

the dancing saint. Both traits may be investigated by searching for Pascual Baylon and “the dancing saint.” This association seems to be endemic in the Philippines.

a second jongleur de Notre-Dame. Butler’s Lives of the Saints, ed. Herbert J. Thurston and Donald Attwater, 4 vols. (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1981), 2: 335.

Saint John Bosco. In Italian, Giovanni Melchiorre Bosco.

say the rosary and attend Mass. John Bosco, Memoirs of the Oratory of Saint Francis de Sales from 1815 to 1855: The Autobiography of Saint John Bosco, trans. Daniel Lyons, with notes and commentary by Eugenio Ceria et al. (New Rochelle, NY: Don Bosco Publications, 1989), chap. 3 (“The Young Acrobat”), 27–29, 29–31 (notes). An Italian biography by Eugenio Pilla is entitled Il piccolo giocoliere, 4th ed., Fiori di cielo, vol. 38 (Bari, Italy: Paoline, 1967).

lay brothers. The lay brothers are known as coadjutors.

dance as a spiritual medium. Ruth St. Denis, An Unfinished Life: An Autobiography (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939), 57: “But without any question I was at that time a kind of dancing ritualist. The intensities of my spiritual life had found a focus of action in exactly the same way that another earnest young person would enter the church.” She has become indelibly associated with dance as an expression of religion. For example, an account of her life story by Suzanne Shelton is entitled Divine Dancer: A Biography of Ruth St. Denis (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981); a book by Janet Lynn Roseman that studies her art is called Dance Was Her Religion: The Sacred Choreography of Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis and Martha Graham (Prescott, AZ: Hohm Press, 2004); and a documentary on her (a Mentor-St. Ives production, produced by Edmund Penney and Gertrude Marks, directed by Edmund Penney, written by Edmund Penney and Charles Curran) bears the title The Dancing Prophet (Derry, NH: Chip Taylor Communications, 1999).

founded a Society of Spiritual Arts. Jane Sherman and Christena Schlundt, “Who’s St. Denis? What Is She?,” Dance Chronicle 10.3 (1987): 305–29, at 318.

made a specialty of dances on Christian themes. Suzanne Shelton, “St. Denis, Ruth,” in Cohen et al., International Encyclopedia of Dance, 5: 490–98, at 497; Shelton, Divine Dancer, 241–43 (on a possible connection through Norman Bel Geddes with Max Reinhardt’s The Miracle); Sandra Meinzenbach, “Tanz ist eine Sprache und eine Schrift des Göttlichen”: Kunst und Leben der Ruth St. Denis, Beiträge zur Tanzkultur, vol. 8 (Wilhelmshaven, Germany: Florian Noetzel, 2013), 200–5.

The dancer was introduced. The introduction came after an organ prelude and Gospel readings.

the incarnation of femininity and creative love. St. Denis, Unfinished Life, 365: “The White Madonna is the total being of woman, passive, waiting, hidden behind the heavy veil of time. She is the being of creative love.” For interpretation, see Kimerer L. La Mothe, “Passionate Madonna: The Christian Turn of American Dancer Ruth St. Denis,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66.4 (1998): 747–69.

Madonnas were the passion of her last years. Shelton, Divine Dancer, 268. Quoted by La Mothe, “Passionate Madonna,” 748.

One Sunday in 1935. February 25, 1935.

religious dance. A rhythmic interpretation of the Psalms, it was entitled When I Meditate on Thee in the Night-Watches. Soignée in a white, black, and red outfit, she proceeded through motions that she stated symbolized “the gradual ascent of man’s soul from the moment he acknowledges his need of spiritual light to the final radiation.” See “Ruth St. Denis Dances before Church Altar” (Associated Press), The Stamford Daily 87.5, February 25, 1935.

Manhattan church. The church was Central Presbyterian, which had been constructed in Gothic revival style between 1920 and 1922 at the corner of 64th Street and Park Avenue, on the Upper East Side.

scorching controversy. Rachel K. McDowell, “Dance by Ruth St. Denis in Church Stirs Up a Presbyterian Row: Denominational Leader Presses for Disciplinary Action against Those Responsible for Her Appearance at Service in Park Avenue Chancel,” The New York Times, February 28, 1935, 21.

huffing and puffing. In “Dancing Before the Lord,” The Morning Oregonian, February 26, 1935, 8, a journalist opined against the rush to condemn: “An ingrained and lingering puritanism, not yet completely exorcised by our liberal and irreverent times, induces us to look askance on the dance as an aid to religion.”

one writer. “Dancing Before the Lord,” The Morning Oregonian, February 26, 1935, 8. On the puritanical reaction to the dance, see Shelton, Divine Dancer, 244.

Mireille Nègre. Her story can be read most fully in Mireille Nègre, with Mireille Taub, Une vie entre ciel et terre (Paris: Balland, 1990). Accounts can be found also in Jean-Roger Bourrec, Mireille Nègre, “alliance” (Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 1984); Mireille Nègre and Michel Cool, Je danserai pour toi (Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 1984); Mireille Nègre, Danser sur les étoiles (Paris: Balland, 1993).

achieved ever greater success. Eventually she danced in the corps de ballet, and ultimately she became the first dancer.

Carmelites. Known in full as the Order of the Brothers of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, this religious society owe its name to having been founded on Mount Carmel in the Holy Lands during the Crusades. Since the thirteenth century its members have been recognized within the Church as having a distinctively Marian devotion, under the Virgin’s special protection in her capacity as the Mother of God or God-Bearer. See Christopher O’Donnell, “Maria nel Carmelo,” in Dizionario carmelitano, ed. Emanuele Boaga and Luigi Borriello (Rome: Città Nuova, 2008), 539–46.

holidays associated with Mary. James Boyce, “Maria nella liturgia carmelitana,” in Boaga and Borriello, Dizionario carmelitano, 546–49.

many a long tale. My translation of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede, lines 48–49, in John Scattergood, “Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede: Lollardy and Texts,” in Lollardy and the Gentry in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Margaret Aston and Colin Richmond (Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1997), 77–94, at 87: “Thei maketh hem Maries men (so thei men tellen), / and lieth on our Ladie many a longe tale.”

striking a balletic pose. The pose in question was an arabesque, in which the dancer balances on one leg with the other unbent at the knee and extended back.

the passion for dance. Her narrative of the time is replete with pronouncements of devotion to both God and dance. Nègre, Une vie, 119: “I kept alive over a long period the secret of dance, and if I had to sign in my own hand a love letter to God, my words would be: ‘Your dancer, forever.’… God would speak to me of dance: ‘Our God is lord of the dance, he whose spirit hovers over the waters.’” Nègre’s devotion to dance as a devotional outlet calls to mind a much earlier female mystic, Mechthild of Magdeburg, who made dance a metaphor in her appeals to God, with the most striking concision in a poem that has been entitled “I Cannot Dance”: “I cannot dance, Lord, unless you lead me. / If you want me to leap with abandon, / You must intone the song. / Then I shall leap into love, / From love into knowledge, / From knowledge into enjoyment, / And from enjoyment beyond all human sensations. / There I want to remain, yet want also to circle higher still.” Mechthild of Magdeburg, Das fließende Licht der Gottheit, ed. Hans Neumann, 2 vols., Münchener Texte und Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters, vols. 100, 101 (Munich, Germany: Artemis Verlag, 1990), 1: 28–29 (book 1, section 44); The Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans. Frank Tobin, Classics of Western Spirituality, vol. 92 (New York: Paulist Press, 1998), 59.

I will dance for you, Lord. Nègre, Une vie, 84: “Je danserai pour Toi, Seigneur, tant que je dure.”

exasperated at not being able to pray for God. Nègre, Une vie, 114–15.

painful sacrifices. Nègre, Une vie, 148: “I had renounced dance, made an abstraction of my body, tolerated the worst sufferings that a dancer could know: in the name of God, I had accepted silence.”

protracted tribulations. Nègre, Une vie, 85.

Order of the Visitation. It was founded in 1610.

dedication to Him of her body as a dancer. Nègre, Une vie, 159, 179: “Dance always has a purpose; mine is to offer myself to Him.”

God was the lord of the dance. Nègre, Une vie, 167.

consecrated as a sister. Nègre, Une vie, 123 (the chapter is entitled “A virgin, consecrated to dance”), 177.

choreographed the words of the liturgy. Nègre, Une vie, 133 (cf. 147).

ballet in linguistic terms. Nègre, Une vie, 184: “Classical dance is a wonderful tool for expressing Christian spirituality, for making of one’s body a language for understanding and dialogue… . Dance is also a school of tolerance, since its language is universal and can be understood by everyone, whatever their creed or origins.”

jongleur on the façade of Notre-Dame. Nègre, Une vie, 98. It is hard to know which sculpture Nègre has in mind.

transcendence of mere art. It should come as no wonder that the cataract of publications by Nègre includes a coauthored volume on the relationship between art and life. See Mireille Nègre and Éric de Rus, L’art et la vie (Toulouse: Carmel, 2009). A recent book by her is a meditation upon the Gospels entitled Dance with Jesus. See Mireille Nègre, with Michel Cool, Danse avec Jésus: Mireille Nègre médite et illustre l’Évangile (Paris: Salvator, 2014).

I dance for God. Her convictions regarding dance are summarized simply but nicely in a French weekly for children, Fripounet 52, December 28, 1983–January 4, 1984, 28–29.

Nick Weber. Nick Weber, The Circus That Ran Away with a Jesuit Priest: Memoir of a Delible Character (Indianapolis, IN: Dog Ear Publishing, 2012).

sacred comedy. M. Conrad Hyers, The Comic Vision and the Christian Faith: A Celebration of Life and Laughter (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1981).

I Dance with God. Anna Nobili, with the assistance of Carolina Mercurio, Io ballo con Dio: La suora che prega danzando (Milan, Italy: Mondadori, 2013).

Worker-Sisters of the Holy House of Nazareth. In Italian, Suore Operaie della Santa Casa di Nazareth.

imbroglio. Nick Squires, “Lap Dancer Turned Nun Angers Pope,” The Telegraph, 26 May 2011, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/8536052/Lap-dancer-turned-nun-angers-Pope.html

If it is not true, it is well conceived. Proverbial at least since the sixteenth century, it is best put in Italian: Se non è vero, è ben trovato, and by authors as famous as Giordano Bruno, Gli eroici furori (book 2). For further information, see Michael Cole, “Se Non è Vero, è Ben Trovato,” Intellectual History Review 24.3 (2014): 429–39.

Notes to Chapter 3

He who labors as he prays. “Qui orat laborat, cor levat ad Deum cum manibus,” in pseudo-Bernard of Clairvaux, Ad sororem de modo bene vivendi.

The Order of Cîteaux

Vox clamantis in deserto. These words are drawn from the Vulgate Latin translation of the Gospel of Mark 1:1–3 and of the Gospel of John 1:22–23 in reference to John the Baptist, which in turn quotes Isaiah 40:3.

remunerated in kind. Clothing and horses were frequent tokens of largesse from wealthy patrons. Poets mention them often as coveted perquisites.

plenty of vilification. David Knowles, The Monastic Order in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), 662–78; David Neil Bell, ed. and trans., “De grisis monachis: A Goliardic Invective against the Cistercians in London, B. L., Cotton Vespasian A.XIX,” Studia monastica: Commentarium ad rem monasticam investigandam 41 (1999): 243–59. The attackers included clerics such as Gerald of Wales and Walter Map.

the founder. The founder was Abbot Robert of the Benedictine abbey of Molesmes in Burgundy, who was persuaded to undertake this innovation by two fellow monks, Alberic and Stephen Harding.

cistern. The Latin place name Cistercium is related to the noun cistellum. The English word “cistern” belongs to the same family of words.

paludal and fluvial. Kinder, Cistercian Europe, 81–88. There were obvious exceptions: we will encounter more than once a monk named Helinand of Froidmont. The place name means “cold mountain.”

Bernard loved the valleys. “Bernardus valles, colles [alternately, montes] Benedictus amabat, / Franciscus vicos [alt., “Moenia Franciscus” or “Franciscus oppida”], magnas [alt., magnus, celebres] Ignatius [Dominicus] urbes” (Bernard loved valleys, Benedict hills, Francis villages, and Ignatius the big cities). See Anselme Dimier, Stones Laid before the Lord: A History of Monastic Architecture, trans. Gilchrist Lavigne, Cistercian Studies Series, vol. 152 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1999), 51–52. The maxim merits comparison with the saying of Confucius that “The wise delight in water; the humane delight in mountains”: Analects, trans. Annping Chin (New York: Penguin, 2014), book 6.23.

desert. Exordium parvum, 3, in Chrysogonus Waddell, ed., Narrative and Legislative Texts from Early Cîteaux (Brecht, Belgium: Cîteaux commentarii cistercienses, 1999), 421 (eremum). See Benedicta Ward, “The Desert Myth: Reflections on the Desert Ideal in Early Cistercian Monasticism,” in One Yet Two: Monastic Tradition East and West. Orthodox-Cistercian Symposium, Oxford University, 28 August–1 September, 1973, ed. M. Basil Pennington, Cistercian Studies Series, vol. 29 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1976), 183–99.

alone. Mónakhos, from monos.

individualism with communitarianism. Two strands of scholarship have credited the long twelfth century with an unprecedented appreciation of individuality. One has emphasized the quality as it appears in literature, the other as it comes to the fore in religious sensibilities. The poem about the tumbler straddles both categories: in this literary work, he creates a paradoxically solo community within a monastery. It bears recalling that his individuality has nothing to do with personality in a modern sense, of which he puts on display none. On the scholarship, see Caroline Walker Bynum, “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 31 (1980), 1–17, reprinted in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 82–109.

The term abbot. The word has reached us by way of first Greek and then Latin.

Jesus and Paul. The three instances are in Mark 14:36, Romans 8:15, and Galatians 4:6.

the oldest communities. Other monasteries in this category are La Ferté, Morimond, and Pontigny.

convers. Jean Batany, “Les convers chez quelques moralistes des XIIe et XIIIe siècles,” Cîteaux: Commentarii cistercienses 20 (1969): 241–59, at 242.

eulogies on Clairvaux. William of Saint Thierry, Vita sancti Bernardi (also known as Vita prima), book 1, chap. 8, 35, in PL 185, 225–68, at 247C–248B.

convert monk. The Latin terms are monachus conversus and monachus laicus or illitteratus, respectively. See Constance H. Berman, “Distinguishing between the Humble Peasant Lay Brother and Sister, and the Converted Knight in Medieval Southern France,” in Religious and Laity in Western Europe, 1000–1400: Interaction, Negotiation, and Power, ed. Emilia Jamroziak and Janet Burton, Europa Sacra, vol. 2 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2006), 263–83.

to the monastic way of life. Ad conversionem.

metaphor. For the larger context, see Giles Constable, “The Interpretation of Mary and Martha,” in idem, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–141.

Lectio divina. Duncan Robertson, Lectio divina: The Medieval Experience of Reading, Cistercian Studies Series, vol. 238 (Trappist, KY: Cistercian Publications, 2011).

separate spaces. Dimier, Stones Laid before the Lord, 45.

a sermon. Exordium magnum Cisterciense, sive, Narratio de initio Cisterciensis Ordinis, ed. Bruno Griesser, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, vol. 138 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1994), 255–57 (4.13) (in 1961 edition, 238–39).

Cistercians and the Virgin

hyperdulia. Huper and douleia, respectively.

point person for their whole order. Gabriela Signori, “‘Totius ordinis nostri patrona et advocata’: Maria als Haus und Ordensheilige der Zisterzienser,” in Maria in der Welt: Marienverehrung im Kontext der Sozialgeschichte 10.–18. Jahrhundert, ed. Claudia Opitz et al., Clio Lucernensis, vol. 2 (Zurich: Chronos, 1993), 253–73.

service of the Virgin. Pierre-André Sigal, L’homme et le miracle dans la France médiévale, XIe–XIIe siècle (Paris: Cerf, 1985), 107–15.

Marianism. For a concise introduction, bibliography, and anthology in translation, see Luigi Gambero, Mary in the Middle Ages: The Blessed Virgin Mary in the Thought of Medieval Latin Theologians, trans. Thomas Buffer (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2005), 131–41.

Cistercian writers. Albert van Iterson, “L’ordre de Cîteaux et le Cœur de Marie,” Collectanea ordinis cisterciensium reformatorum 20 (1958): 219–312; 21 (1959): 97–120; Norbert Mussbacher, “Die Marienverehrung der Cistercienser,” in Die Cistercienser: Geschichte–Geist–Kunst, ed. Ambrosius Schneider et al. (Cologne, Germany: Wienand, 1977), 165–82.

Divine Comedy. Paradiso, 31.100–102: “E la regina del Cielo, ond’ïo ardo / tutto d’amor, ne farà ogne grazia, / però ch’i’ sono il suo fedel Bernardo” (“And the queen of Heaven, for whom I burn / All from love, will grant us every grace, / Because I am her faithful Bernard”). To Bernard, Dante also assigns the culminating prayer to the Virgin in the final canto of the same concluding canticle, Paradiso (33.1–39), in his masterpiece.

Bernard, among others. On Bernard of Clairvaux and Mary, see Jean Leclercq, “Saint Bernard et la dévotion médiévale envers Marie,” Revue d’ascétique et de mystique 30 (1954): 361–75. On Mary’s humility, see Bernard of Clairvaux, “Dominica infra octavam Assumptionis B. V. Mariae sermo,” in PL 183, 429–38, at 435A, and the German monk (and bishop of Eichstätt) Philip of Rathsamhausen, Expositio super Magnificat, ed. Andreas Bauch, Das theologisch-aszetische Schrifttum des Eichstätter Bischofs Philipp von Rathsamhausen (1306–1322) (Eichstätt, Germany: Verlag der Katholischen Kirche in Bayern, 1948), 178–250, at 214.

unvoiced grief. Donna Spivey Ellington, From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul: Understanding Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2001), 197–201.

Humility, chastity, and silence. France, Separate but Equal, 164–66, 200–207 (humility); 211–15 (silence); Edmond Mikkers, “L’idéal religieux des frères convers dans l’ordre de Citeaux aux 12e et 13e siècles,” Collectanea ordinis Cisterciensium reformatorum 24 (1962): 113–29, at 127–28 (humility).

fealty to the Virgin. See a monk of Sept-Fons, “Cîteaux et Notre Dame,” Jean-Baptiste Auniord, “Cîteaux et Notre Dame,” and Robert Thomas, “Autres Cisterciens,” in Maria: Études sur la Sainte Vierge, ed. Hubert Du Manoir de Juaye, 7 vols. (Paris: Beauchesne, 1949–1964), 2: 579–83, 583–613, 614–24; Stephan Beissel, Geschichte der Verehrung Marias in Deutschland während des Mittelalters: Ein Beitrag zur Religionswissenschaft und Kunstgeschichte (Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany: Herder, 1909), 195–213; Janet Burton and Julie Kerr, The Cistercians in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2011), 127–33; Howard Haeseler Lewis, “The Cistercian Order and the Virgin in the Twelfth Century” (AB Honors thesis, Harvard University, 1956). For an anthology of texts relating to Mary in English translation, see E. Rozanne Elder, ed. and trans., Mary Most Holy: Meditating with the Early Cistercians (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2003).

Peter Abelard. Letter 10, in Letters of Peter Abelard, beyond the Personal, trans. Jan M. Ziolkowski (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 85–98, at 94.

seals. Pierre Bony, “An Introduction to the Study of Cistercian Seals: The Virgin as Mediatrix, Then Protectrix on the Seals of Cistercian Abbeys,” in Studies in Cistercian Art and Architecture, vol. 3, ed. Meredith Parsons Lillich, Cistercian Studies, vol. 89 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1987), 201–40. The tendency was made obligatory in 1335 by a ruling of Pope Benedict XII: see Joseph-Marie Canivez, ed., Statuta capitulorum generalium ordinis Cisterciensis ab anno 1116 ad annum 1786, 8 vols., Bibliothèque de la Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, vol. 9 (Louvain, Belgium: Bureaux de la Revue, 1933–1941), 3: 411 (for 1335, 2).

every Cistercian church and cloister. On cloisters, see Exordium Cistercii et Summa Cartae caritatis (The beginning of Cîteaux and the summa of the Charter of Charity), chap. 9, “On the Dedication of the Cloister,” in Les plus anciens textes de Cîteaux: Sources, textes et notes historiques, ed. Jean de la Croix Bouton and Jean Baptiste Van Damme, Cîteaux: Commentarii cistercienses: Studia et documenta, vol. 2 (Achel, Belgium: Abbaye cistercienne, 1974), 121 (“in honore reginae coeli et terrae”). On churches, see the Cistercian statutes “of 1134” that were compiled shortly before the mid-twelfth century, in Canivez, Statuta, 1: 17 (Statuta ord. cisterciensis 1134,18 “in memoria eiusdem caeli et terrae reginae sanctae Mariae”), and Waddell, Narrative and Legislative Texts, 463 (Instituta generalis capituli 18 “Quod omnia monasteria in honore beatae Marie dedicentur”: “in memoria eiusdem caeli et terrae reginae sanctae Mariae”).

liturgies of the Cistercians. The monks lavished care upon the celebration of the four Marian holidays then in existence: the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin or Candlemas, on February 2; the Feast of the Annunciation, on March 25; the Assumption of Mary, on August 15 (and the Octave of the Assumption, on August 22); and the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, on September 8: see Goffredo Viti and Malachia Falletti, “La devozione a Maria nell’Ordine Cistercense,” Marianum: Ephemerides Mariologiae 54.1–2, no. 143 (1992): 287–348.

daily offices. On the offices, note the prescription of the Commemoratio beatae Mariae and the Horae beatae Mariae virginis: Viti and Falletti, “La devozione a Maria,” 305–9. See also Burton and Kerr, Cistercians in the Middle Ages, 127.

Hail, Holy Queen. Latin “Salve, regina”: Viti and Falletti, “La devozione a Maria,” 296, 311–14.

they explained the color. Adam of Perseigne, “102 Sermo V. in Assumptione B. Mariae,” in PL 211, 733C–744B, at 739D: “O quantus debet esse in meis candor cordium, et morum puritas, (20) qui et candore habitus et titulo nominis virginalis lilii albedinem imitantur! Albi nimirum monachi dicuntur, non modo quod albedine vestium fulgeant, sed quod candoris virginei ministri spirituales existant.”

Saint Alberic. Feast day, January 26. Acta sanctorum.

Marian Doctor. Latin Doctor Marianus or Doctor Marialis.

missionaries of Marianism. For this characterization of Bernard, see Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 121. On Doctor Marianus, see Dorothee Lauffs, “Bernhard von Clairvaux,” in Marienlexikon, ed. Remigius Bäumer and Leo Scheffczyk, 6 vols. (St. Ottilien, Germany: EOS, 1988–1994), 1: 445–50, at 445. On Doctor Marialis, see Henri Barré, “Saint Bernard, docteur marial,” Analecta Sacri Ordinis Cisterciensis 9 (1953): 92–113. For the Cistercians, see Walter Delius, Geschichte der Marienverehrung (Munich, Germany: E. Reinhardt, 1963), 157–58.

The angel Gabriel was sent. Luke 1:26, in Latin, Missus est angelus Gabriel.

On the Praises of the Virgin Mother. Latin De laudibus virginis matris.

dynamics of courtly love. Hilda C. Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion, 2 vols. (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1990), 1: 235–41.

Hail, Star of the Sea. Latin Ave, maris stella. It is actually the work of the eighth-century Ambrosius Autpertus. For the definitive study of the hymn, see Heinrich Lausberg, Der Hymnus Ave maris stella, Abhandlungen der Rheinisch-Westfälischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. 61 (Opladen, Germany: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1976).

Memorare. The title is an imperative in the learned language for “Remember!”: The Catholic Prayerbook: From Downside Abbey, ed. David Foster (Edinburgh, UK: T & T Clark, 2001), 153: “Remember, O most merciful Virgin Mary, that it has never been heard that anyone who ran to your protection, entreated your help, and sought your intercession has been abandoned. Heartened with this faith, I run to you O Virgin of Virgins, Mother, I come to you, I stand as a grieving sinner before you. Mother of the Word, do not spurn my words; but hear and hearken to me favorably. Amen.” The translation is mine.

Greetings, Bernard. Salve, Bernarde.

Mother’s Milk

nursing Madonna. Mary in this guise can be designated in Latinate terminology as the Madonna or Virgo Lactans, in Greek as panagia galaktotrophousa. This is not the place to examine the broadest implications of the motif, which has strong relevance to female spirituality. In this connection, the milk could be tied to the blood of Christ in the Eucharist as well as to the motif of the gore that comes forth when his side is lanced during the crucifixion. On the parallel between milk and blood, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 270–71.

the saint prays before a Madonna. Purportedly in the church of Saint Vorles at Châtillon-sur-Seine, involving a statue known as Notre-Dame du Château. The event was celebrated annually on January 29. See Patrick Arabeyre, “La lactation de saint Bernard à Châtillon-sur-Seine: Données et problèmes,” in Vies et légendes de saint Bernard de Clairvaux: Création, diffusion, réception (XIXe-XXe siècles). Actes des Rencontres de Dijon, 7–8 juin 1991, ed. idem et al. (Cîteaux, France: Commentarii Cistercienses “Présence Cistercienne,” 1993), 173–97.

no statue exists. Bernd Nicolai, “Die Entdeckung des Bildwerks: Frühe Marienbilder und Altarretabel unter dem Aspekt zisterziensischer Frömmigkeit,” in Studien zur Geschichte der europäischen Skulptur im 12.–13. Jahrhundert, ed. Herbert Beck and Kerstin Hengevoss-Dürkop (Frankfurt, Germany: Henrich, 1994), 29–43.

show herself as a mother. The imperative monstra te esse matrum (show yourself to be a mother) quotes verbatim a verse in Ave maris stella, the aforementioned hymn to Mary that is from the ninth century or earlier. For the text and translation, see Peter G. Walsh, with Christopher Husch, One Hundred Latin Hymns: Ambrose to Aquinas, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, vol. 18 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 200–203 (at stanza 4.1).

projecting a jet of milk. The development of the legend and its iconography have been treated together in Léon Dewez and Albert van Iterson, “La lactation de saint Bernard: Légende et iconographie,” Cîteaux in de Nederlanden 7 (1956): 165–89; Jacques Berlioz, “La lactation de saint Bernard dans un ‘exemplum’ et une miniature du Ci nous dit (début du XIVe siècle),” Cîteaux: Commentarii Cistercienses 39.3–4 (1988): 270–84; Brian Patrick McGuire, “Bernard and Mary’s Milk: A Northern Contribution,” in idem, The Difficult Saint: Bernard of Clairvaux and His Tradition, Cistercian Studies Series, vol. 126 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1991), 189–225; Cécile Dupeux, “La lactation de saint Bernard de Clairvaux: Genèse et évolution d’une image,” in L’Image et la production du sacré: Actes du colloque de Strasbourg, 20–21 janvier 1988, organisé par le Centre d’historique des religions de l’Université de Strasbourg II, Groupe “Théorie et pratique de l’image cultuelle,” ed. Françoise Dunand et al. (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1991), 165–93; idem, “Saint Bernard dans l’iconographie médiévale: L’exemple de la lactation,” in Arabeyre et al., Vies et légendes de saint Bernard de Clairvaux, 152–66; James France, “The Heritage of Saint Bernard in Medieval Arts,” in A Companion to Bernard of Clairvaux, ed. Brian Patrick McGuire (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2011), 305–46, at 329–35. For an archive of 119 images, see James France, Medieval Images of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Cistercian Studies Series, vol. 210 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2007), CD/ROM “Lactatio.”

Saint Bernard alone. For a broad overview, see Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 192–205; for a synoptic list of examples, see Dewez and Iterson, “La lactation de saint Bernard,” 168.

this legendary episode. The most important early record of the story, in which the woman is Pero and her father Cimon, appears in Valerius Maximus, Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium.

assorted miracle tales. Barnay, Le ciel sur la terre, 35.

nursing mother. Mary in the manifestation of nursing mother is often styled in Latin as mater lactans.

Mary’s Head-Coverings

sermons for Marian feasts. On Helinand’s Marian sermons, see Rubin, Mother of God, 154–57; Beverly Kienzle, “Mary Speaks against Heresy: An Unedited Sermon of Hélinand for the Purification, Paris, B.N. ms. Lat. 14591,” Sacris erudiri 32 (1991): 291–308; more generally, on the special devotion of the Cistercians to Mary, see Rubin, Mother of God, 149–57.

everlasting service to her. “Sermo II, I in Natali Domini,” in PL 212, 486–96, at 495C: “magnae huic Dominae faciunt homagium, et ejus servitutem perpetuam profitentur.” Another white monk addressed his brother as, “You, monk of the Mother of God, who have arrived in the lot of the Order of Mary.” See Ogier of Locedio (Oglerius de Tridino), Tractatus in laudibus sancte Dei genetricis, in Beati Oglerii de Tridino Abbatis Monasterii Locediensis ord. Cist. in divec. Vercell: Opera quae supersunt, ed. Giovan Battista Adriani (Turin, Italy: Augustae Taurinorum, 1873), 46: “Tu monache Matris Domini qui in sorte Ordinis Mariae venisti.” For a full translation, see Ogier of Locedio, In Praise of God’s Holy Mother: On Our Lord’s Words to His Disciples at the Last Supper, trans. D. Martin Jenni, Cistercian Fathers Series, vol. 70 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2006).

subverted by her maternal power. Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 154–59.

Our Lady of Mercy. Alternatively, Our Lady of Pity. The corresponding Latin is Mater Misericordiae; the French, Vierge de Misericorde; the German, Schutzmantelmadonna. The classic reference is Paul Perdrizet, La Vierge de Miséricorde: Étude d’un thème iconographique, Bibliothèque des Écoles françaises d’Athènes et de Rome, vol. 101 (Paris: A. Fontemoing, 1908). For recent reappraisals, see Christa Belting-Ihm, “Sub matris tutela”: Untersuchungen zur Vorgeschichte der Schutzmantelmadonna, Abhandlungen der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, Jahrgang 1976, vol. 3 (Heidelberg, Germany: Carl Winter, 1976), 131–46; Sylvie Barnay, “Une apparition pour protéger: Le manteau de la Vierge au XIIIe siècle,” Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes 8 (2001): 13–22; Sonja Reisner, “Sub tuum praesidium confugimus’: Zur Instrumentalisierung von Visionen und Wunderberichten in der dominikanischen Ordenshistoriographie am Beispiel der Schutzmantelmadonna,” Acta Antiqua 43.3 (2003): 393–405.

beneath her mantle. For the motif in general (often designated by the German Schutzmantelmaria), see Perdrizet, La Vierge de Miséricorde; Alois Thomas, “Schutzmantelmaria,” in Die Gottesmutter: Marienbild in Rheinland und in Westfalen, ed. Leonhard Küppers (Recklinghausen, Germany: Bongers, 1974), 227–42; Barnay, “Une apparition pour protéger,” 13–22. For the Byzantine backdrop, see Belting-Ihm, “Sub matris tutela.”

Constantinople. Bissera V. Pentcheva, “The Virgin of Constantinople: Power and Belief,” in Byzantine Women and Their World, ed. Ioli Kalavrezou (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums, 2003), 112–38, at 115.

white-hooded monks. James France, “Cistercians under Our Lady’s Mantle,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 37.4 (2002): 393–414.

an episode in the Dialogue on Miracles. On the origins of this tradition, see McGuire, “Cistercians and the Rise of the Exemplum,” 227–29. The first telling of it as an exemplum is in Dialogus miraculorum 7.59 (ed. Strange, 2: 79–80): see Reisner, “‘Sub tuum praesidium confugimus.’”

anonymous collection. Johannes Maior, ed., Magnum speculum exemplorum (Douay, France, 1611), an expanded version of the anonymous Speculum exemplorum that was printed first in 1481.

dries the sweat. Maior, Magnum speculum exemplorum, 285–86 (“Dives 1”).

ventilates them. Maior, Magnum speculum exemplorum, 84–85 (“Bona injuste acquisita 8”).

white towel. Une touaille blance.

medieval vernacular noun. Harri Meier, “Fortschritt und Rückschritt in der etymologischen Forschung: Als Beispiel: die Herkunft der romanischen Familie von ital. tovaglia,” in Italic and Romance Linguistic Studies in Honor of Ernst Pulgram, ed. Herbert J. Izzo, Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, Series 4, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, vol. 18 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1980), 103–11. The corresponding term in Latin was mappa. It was an ancient lexical import from Punic, a language that went extinct in late antiquity. It likewise meant “napkin” (a derivative of it) or “towel,” but eventually also denoted a cloth dropped into an arena to mark the start of games. Later it became a term for “map,” which also derives from it.

table napkin. Tovaglia and tovagliolo.

personal cleanliness. Françoise Piponnier, “Linge de maison et linge de corps au Moyen Âge: D’après les inventaires bourguignons,” Ethnologie française 16 (1986): 239–48.

Mary had an up-close-and-personal connection. See Libri de natiuitate Mariae: Pseudo-Matthaei Euangelium (Gospel according to Pseudo-Matthew), ed. Jan Gijsel, Corpus Christianorum Series Apocryphorum, vol. 9 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1997), 333 (chap. 6.1).

overspreads the head and chest. Barnay, Le ciel sur la terre, 202–5.

head cover. The French phrase is couvre chef or cuerchief.

cloth towels. Unfortunately, neither lexical development nor the premodern cultural history even in the English-speaking world receive any attention in Helen Gustafson, Hanky Panky: An Intimate History of the Handkerchief (Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 2002).

The Virgin’s textile. For the fullest information, see Annemarie Weyl Carr, “Threads of Authority: The Virgin Mary’s Veil in the Middle Ages,” in Robes and Honor: The Medieval World of Investiture, ed. Stewart Gordon (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 59–93.

made stellar. Konstantinides, “Le sens théologique”; George Galavaris, “The Stars of the Virgin: An Ekphrasis of an Ikon of the Mother of God,” Eastern Churches Review 1 (1966–1967): 364–67.

Assumption. The Assumption of the Virgin corresponds to the Dormition of the Theotokos in the Greek Orthodox Church.

transferred. Norman H. Baynes, Byzantine Studies and Other Essays, ed. R. A. Humphreys and A. D. Momigliano (London: Athlone Press, 1955): 240–48 (“The Finding of the Virgin’s Robe”).

Constantinople. John Wortley, “The Marian Relics at Constantinople,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 45 (2005): 171–87; Stephen J. Shoemaker, “The Cult of Fashion: The Earliest ‘Life of the Virgin’ and Constantinople’s Marian Relics,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 62 (2008): 53–74.

tidal wave. On Byzantine influence as a tidal wave, see Wilhelm Koehler, “Byzantine Art in the West,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 1 (Dumbarton Oaks Inaugural Lectures, November 2nd and 3rd, 1940) (1941): 62–87, at 79, 86.

chemisettes. Chemisette now refers to a distinct article of women’s clothing that was common in the late Victorian era. Similar to a dickey, it covered the lower neck and upper chest, when worn over a bodice that would otherwise have left those areas exposed.

pilgrims to Chartres. E. Jane Burns, “Saracen Silk and the Virgin’s Chemise: Cultural Crossings in Cloth,” Speculum 81 (2006): 365–97, at 366–68, 374–75, 391–95, which corresponds roughly to idem, Sea of Silk: A Textile Geography of Women’s Work in Medieval French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 156–84; Brian Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular Badges (London: Stationery Office, 1998), 225–27.

Mary’s veil. Carr, “Threads of Authority,” 59–93.

brouhaha at Chartres. Marcel Joseph Bulteau, Monographie de la cathédrale de Chartres, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Chartres, France: R. Selleret, 1887–1892), 1: 105–8.

spotless towel. For instance, it is pictured in the background of a famous painting on wood behind an altar: see Margaret B. Freeman, “The Iconography of the Merode Altarpiece,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 16 (December 1957): 130–39, at 132. More broadly, see George Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), 182.

during her pregnancy. Carr, “Threads of Authority.”

Cistercian Lay Brothers

No one can serve two masters. Matthew 6:24, Luke 16:13.

wordplay. On the wordplay, see Batany, “Les convers,” 246–48; France, Separate but Equal, 269–71.

heroic age of the Cistercians. James France, “The Cistercian Community,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Cistercian Order, ed. Mette Birkedal Bruun (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 80–86, at 85.

lay brothers. Latin fratres laici.

members of the institution. See Jacques Dubois, “The Laybrothers’ Life in the Twelfth Century,” Cistercian Studies 7 (1972): 161–213; France, Separate but Equal. The bibliography of scholarship in other languages leading up to these two is extensive, with notable resources being Othon Ducourneau, “De l’institution et des us des convers dans l’Ordre de Cîteaux (XIIe-XIIIe siècles),” in Saint Bernard et son temps, 2 vols. (Dijon, France: Association bourguignonne des sociétés savantes, 1929), 2: 139–201; Jean Leclercq, “Comment vivaient les frères convers,” in I Laici nella “Societas Christiana” dei secoli XI et XII: Atti della terza Settimana internazionale di studio, Mendola, 21–27 agosto 1965, Pubblicazioni dell’Università: Contributi Serie 3/varia 5, Miscellaea del Centro di studi medioevali, vol. 5 (Milan, Italy: Società editrice vita e pensiero, 1965), 183–261; Jean A. Lefèvre, “L’évolution des Usus conversorum de Cîteaux,” Collectanea ordinis Cisterciensium reformatorum 17.2 (1955): 66–96.

custom of silence. Chrysogonus Waddell, “The Place and Meaning of the Work of God in Twelfth-Century Cistercian Life,” Cistercian Studies 23.1 (1988): 25–44, at 33–39.

good reason. Leclercq, “Comment vivaient les frères convers,” 170.

bore such a garment. Line 137.

facial hair. For portrayals of medieval Cistercian lay brothers with their beards, see James France, The Cistercians in Medieval Art, Cistercian Studies Series, vol. 170 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1998), 122–38, figs. 77–99. On the specific nature of the facial hair, see France, Separate but Equal, 76–84.

bearded brothers. In Latin, fratres barbati.

cannot chant, read, or understand Latin. Line 155.

illiteracy. On their illiteracy, see France, Separate but Equal, 57–75.

simpleminded morons. Usus conversorum, ed. Lefèvre, “L’évolution des Usus conversorum,” 65–97, with the edition 84–97, here at 86. See Bretel, Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame, 110. On the educational level and culture of the lay brothers, see Clemens Van Dijk, “L’instruction et la culture des frères convers dans les premiers siècles de l’ordre de Cîteaux,” Collectanea Ordinis Cisterciensium Reformatorum 24 (1962): 243–58.

simplicity of lay brothers. On the simplicity of the lay brothers, see France, Separate but Equal, 3; Mikkers, “L’idéal religieux des frères convers,” 125–27; and especially Sobczyk, Les jongleurs de Dieu, who takes under consideration repeatedly the medieval poem of interest to us here.

snobbery. In the Latin, see Usus conversorum, Prologue 3, in Chrysogonus Waddell, Cistercian Lay Brothers: Twelfth-Century Usages with Related Texts, Cîteaux: Commentarii cistercienses: Studia et Documenta, vol. 10 (Brecht, Belgium: Cîteaux: Commentarii cistercienses, 2000), ed. 56, trans. 164: “Some [of our abbots] hold them [the lay brothers] in contempt because of their innate simplicity.” In the French, Us des convers, prologue: “S’il sunt simple et sans clergie, tant ont il plus besoig de no cure de no porveance.” See Bretel, Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame, 107.

the monks in his charge. Brian Patrick McGuire, “Taking Responsibility: Medieval Cistercian Abbots and Monks as Their Brother’s Keepers,” Cîteaux: Commentarii cistercienses 39.3–4 (1988): 249–68, repr. in idem, Friendship and Faith, no. 6.

convert. Bretel, Les ermites et les moines, 32–54. The category of convert is bound up with those of layman, illiterate, and more, and overlaps at times with lay brother: see Leclercq, “Comment vivaient les frères convers.”

the Latin equivalent. Bretel, Les ermites et les moines, 54–67.

second-class citizen. Del tumbeor Nostre Dame, lines 54, 65, 391.

exploited for physical labor. Berman, “Distinguishing between the Humble Cistercian Lay Brother and Sister, and the Converted Knight in Southern France,” 263–83.

fidelity to Mary. For an illustration of a lay brother kneeling before Mary in an early thirteenth-century manuscript, see France, Cistercians in Medieval Art, 137, fig. 88.

the Virgin intervened. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400–c. 1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 319.

last rites. France, Separate but Equal, 154–58. The representation of the death ritual in the medieval poem matches approximately what is documented for Benedictine monks: see Frederic S. Paxton, The Death Ritual at Cluny in the Central Middle Ages / Le rituel de la mort à Cluny au Moyen Âge central, Disciplina monastica, vol. 9 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2013). For Cistercian practices, see Megan Cassidy-Welch, Monastic Spaces and Their Meanings: Thirteenth-Century English Cistercian Monasteries, Medieval Church Studies, vol. 1 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001), 228–32.

The Great Beginning of Cîteaux. Exordium magnum Cisterciense, ed. Griesser.

One anecdote. Exordium magnum Cisterciense, ed. Griesser, 255–57 (4.13); Anthelmette Piébourg, trans., Le grand exorde de Cîteaux, ou Récit des débuts de l’Ordre cistercien, Cîteaux: Studia et documenta, vol. 7 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1997), 236–38; E. Rozanne Elder, ed., and Paul Savage and Benedicta Ward, trans., The Great Beginning of Cîteaux: A Narrative of the Beginning of the Cistercian Order; The Exordium Magnum of Conrad of Eberbach, Cistercian Fathers Series, vol. 72 (Trappist, KY: Cistercian Publications, 2012), 344–47.

Our Father. Pater noster.

Apostles’ Creed. Credo in Deum (I believe in God), etc.

Psalm 51. Usus conversorum, chap. 11. Alternately, Psalm 50, beginning Miserere mei, Deus (Have mercy on me, O God).

Our Lady’s Tumbler. See line 32.

Hail, Mary. Ave Maria.

salutation to Mary. Recorded in Luke 1:28.

stuff of higher learning. Lines 57–67.

exemplum. Caesarius of Heisterbach recounts this celebrated anecdote twice.

Dialogue on Miracles. Dialogus miraculorum.

written and oral sources. Brian Patrick McGuire, “Written Sources and Cistercian Inspiration in Caesarius of Heisterbach,” Analecta Cisterciensia 35 (1979): 227–82; and “Friends and Tales in the Cloister: Oral Sources in Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus Miraculorum,” Analecta Cisterciensia 36 (1980): 167–247, repr. in idem, Friendship and Faith, nos. 1, 2.

medieval miracle stories. The text known previously as Liber visionum et miraculorum (Book of visions and miracles) was assembled at Clairvaux between 1171 and 1179: see Olivier Legendre, ed., Le Liber visionum et miraculorum: Édition du manuscrit de Troyes (Bibl. mun. ms. 946) (thesis, École des Chartes, 2000). Its title has now been emended: see idem, ed., Collectaneum exemplorum et visionum Clarevallense e codice Trecensi 946, Exempla medii aevi, vol. 2/Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, vol. 208 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2005). For discussion, Brian Patrick McGuire, “A Lost Clairvaux Exemplum Collection Found: The ‘Liber Visionum et Miraculorum’ Compiled under Prior John of Clairvaux,” Analecta Cisterciensia 39 (1983): 26–62, repr. in idem, Friendship and Faith, no. 4.

scores of tales. There are eighty-three chapters in all.

book. Caesarius, Dialogus miraculorum, Distinctio 7, “De sancta Maria,” ed. Strange, 2: 1–80; idem, Dialogue on Miracles, trans. Scott and Bland, 1: 453–546.

sightings of Mary. Caesarius, Dialogus miraculorum, Distinctio 7, Capitula 12–13, ed. Strange, 2: 15, trans. Scott and Bland, 1: 469–70.

Conversion Therapy

portrayals of jongleurs. The first to point out this phenomenon and to cite examples was Faral, Les jongleurs, 157n2.

final years. Anselme Dimier, “Mourir à Clairvaux!” Collectanea ordinis Cisterciensium reformatorum 17 (1955): 272–85.

Lives of the Fathers. Vitae Patrum, in PL, 73: 1170.

such an entertainer. Named Gondran or Goderan, he is the supposed founder of Saint-Gilles in Septimania. See Hubert Silvestre, “Goderan, le fondateur de l’abbaye liégeoise de St-Gilles, était-il un jongleur provençal?” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 55 (1960): 122–29. Silvestre rejects the foundation for the legend, while paying attention in passing to the credence given it in the Middle Ages and later.

an abbey in Liège. See Gaston Paris, “Introduction,” in La vie de saint Gilles par Guillaume de Berneville: Poème du XIIe siècle d’aprés le manuscrit unique de Florence, ed. idem and Alphonse Bos (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1881), lxxiv.

The Monk of Montaudon. This text supplies nuggets that may be combined with other oddments of biographical information to be gleaned from the monk’s poetry. On Lo Monges de Montaudon, a vida in Old Occitan, see Egan, Vidas of the Troubadours, 69–71. The poet himself is now identified as Pèire de Vic from Auvergne, a troubadour of noble birth. On him and his poems, see Michael J. Routledge, ed. and trans., Les poésies du moine de Montaudon (Montpellier, France: Centre d’études occitanes de l’Université Paul Valéry, 1977); Jean-Lucien Gandois, Le troubadour Pierre de Vic: Moine de Montaudon, XIIe-XIIIe s. La vie, l’homme et l’œuvre, Mémoires de l’Académie des Sciences, Belles-Lettres et Arts de Clermont-Ferrand 2nd series, vol. 61 (Clermont-Ferrand, France: Académie des sciences, belles lettres et arts de Clermont-Ferrand, 2003).

what he earns. As prize for his poetry, the monk is awarded a sparrow hawk.

no relation to the Virgin. Rather, the name corresponds to the Latin Marius, a male saint.

Folquet of Marseille. On his conversion, see Nicole M. Schulman, Where Troubadours Were Bishops: The Occitania of Folc of Marseille (1150–1231) (New York: Routledge, 2001), 37–62.

Folquet’s conversion. See Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 149–50; Stephen of Bourbon, Tractatus de diversis materiis praedicabilibus, ed. Berlioz, 71.

other troubadours. Jean de la Croix Bouton, “Cîteaux,” in Robert Bossuat et al., Le Moyen Âge, ed. Geneviève Hasenohr and Michel Zink (Paris: Fayard, 1992), 300–307, at 304, on Bertran d’Alamanon, Bernart de Ventadorn, Bertran de Born, Perdigon, and Gausbert de Puycibot; M.-Jérôme du Halgouet, “Poètes oubliés,” Collectanea Ordinis Cisterciensium Reformatorum 20 (1958): 128–44, 227–42.

Guiot de Provins. Despite his conventional name, Guiot may have been from the relatively small region then known as France, which occupied only a north-central portion of what is now the country by the same name.

Bible Guiot. For more information, see Jean Batany, “Les moines blancs dans les États du Monde (XIIIe–XIVe siècles),” Cîteaux: Commentarii cistercienses 15 (1964): 5–25; idem, “Les convers,” 241–59.

Helinand of Froidmont. Jenny Lind Porter, ed. and trans., The Verses on Death of Helinand of Froidmont, Cistercian Fathers Series, vol. 61 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1999).

finished his days in an abbey. This possibility rests on a disputed interpretation of the final two lines: see Jean Renart, Le Roman de la Rose, ou, de Guillaume de Dole, ed. Félix Lecoy, trans. Jean Dufournet, Champion Classiques. Moyen Âge, vol. 24 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008), 414–15 (lines 5654–5655). Jean Renart’s text is entitled Le Roman de La Rose, but it is called by the other title to forestall confusion with the more famous Romance of the Rose by Jean de Meun and Guillaume de Lorris.

Adam of Lexington. “The Chronicle of Melrose,” in The Church Historian of England, 4.1, ed. and trans. Joseph Stevenson (London, 1854), repr. in Medieval Chronicles of Scotland: The Chronicles of Melrose and Holyrood, Llanerch facsimile (Felinfach, UK: Llanerch, 1988), 7–124, at 96.

he would take a seat. Julie Kerr, Life in the Medieval Cloister (New York: Continuum, 2009), 36n38.

monks who composed poetry. William D. Paden, “De monachis rithmos facientibus: Hélinant de Froidmont, Bertran de Born, and the Cistercian General Chapter of 1199,” Speculum 55 (1980): 669–85.

statement against versifying. Jean Leclercq, “Les divertissements poétiques d’Itier de Vassy,” Analecta Sacri Ordinis Cisterciensis 12 (1956): 296–304, at 304: “Flere decet monachum, non fabricare metrum” (“It suits a monk to weep, not to craft verse”).

The Language of Silence

schooling. Evelyn B. Vitz, “Liturgy as Education in the Middle Ages,” Medieval Education 20.16 (2005): 7–20.

system of hand signs. On this language, see Walter Jarecki, “Die Ars signorum Cisterciensium im Rahmen der metrischen Signa-Listen,” Revue Bénédictine 93 (1988): 329–99; idem, “Die zisterziensische Zeichensprache unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Loccumer Quellen,” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Niedersächsische Kirchengeschichte 88 (1990): 27–40; Scott G. Bruce, “The Origins of Cistercian Sign Language,” Cîteaux: Commentarii cistercienses 52 (2001): 193–209; idem, Silence and Sign Language in Medieval Monasticism: The Cluniac Tradition c. 900–1200, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 144–48.

monastic silence. On monastic silence, see Paul F. Gehl, “Competens silentium: Varieties of Monastic Silence in the Medieval West,” Viator 18 (1987): 125–60. For the overall Christian context, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Silence: A Christian History (New York: Viking, 2013).

crying and caterwauling, moaning and mewling. Lines 73–75. Like Bretel in his commentary, Sobczyk, Les jongleurs de Dieu, 127n19, construes the lamentation in lines 211–212 as meaning not that the tumbler’s sole form of prayer was weeping, but rather that he was moved to tears by his recognition that his sole form of prayer was dancing.

the importance of quiet. On silence, see Rule of Saint Benedict, chaps. 6, 38.5–7 (and on signs in preference to words), 42, 48.5, 52.2 (ed. and trans. Venarde, 42–43, 134–35, 144–45, 160–61, and 170–71).

signs of speaking. Latin signa loquendi.

even to lay brothers. Bruce, Silence and Sign Language, 162–65; Wim Verbaal (and is this a case of nomen omen?), “Oleum de saxo durissimo: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Poetics of Silence,” in Understanding Monastic Practices of Oral Communication, ed. Steven Vanderputten, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, vol. 21 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2011), 319–35. The silence of lay brothers is presented as virtuous by Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum, ed. Strange 2: 95, trans. Scott and Bland, 2: 18–19 (Distinctio 8, Capitulum 17). For broad background (but without consideration of Our Lady’s Tumbler), see Uwe Ruberg, Beredtes Schweigen: In lehrhafter und erzählender deutscher Literatur des Mittelalters (Munich, Germany: Fink, 1978); pages 93–118 provide information on Greco-Roman, biblical, and Christian traditions of silence.

signals were to be practiced. Gregor Müller, “Die Zeichensprache in den Klöstern,” Cistercienser Chronik 21 (1909): 243–46; Bruce, “Origins,” 203–4. The urgency of controlling signing is apparent not only in Cistercian customaries and other such texts, but also in their exempla collections. For instance, Caesarius of Heisterbach relates a tale of a monk who as punishment for overindulging in signs and speech suffered the horrors of hell, only to be revitalized so that he could admonish his brethren (Caesarius of Heisterbach, Libri VIII Miraculorum 2.32, “De converso de Dus, qui a mortuis suscitatus, que in penis viderat, declaravit”): Alfons Hilka, ed., Die Wundergeschichten des Caesarius von Heisterbach, 3 vols., Publikationen der Gesellschaft für rheinische Geschichtskunde, vol. 43 (Bonn, Germany: P. Hanstein, 1933–1937), 3: 115–16.

daily cycle of monastic offices. See Venarde, Rule of Saint Benedict, 164 (chap. 16.5, on Psalm 118/119).

acedia. First conveyed in English by the now obsolete word accidie.

characteristic of modern existence. For example, see Aldous Huxley, “Accidie,” in Essays New and Old (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1927), 47–53.

clinical depression. Siegfried Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967); Stanley W. Jackson, “Acedia the Sin and Its Relationship to Sorrow and Melancholia,” in Culture and Depression: Studies in the Anthropology and Cross-Cultural Psychiatry of Affect and Disorder, ed. Arthur Kleinman and Byron Good (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 43–62.

not being permitted to participate. I am indebted to Megan Cassidy, “Non conversi sed perversi: The Use and Marginalisation of the Cistercian Lay Brother,” in Deviance and Textual Control: New Perspectives in Medieval Studies, ed. Megan Cassidy et al., Melbourne University Conference Series 2 (Parkville, Australia: History Dept., University of Melbourne, 1997), 34–55, at 45 and 55n84. This article was revised and incorporated in Cassidy-Welch, Monastic Spaces, 191.

strictly limited. Leclercq, “Comment vivaient les frères convers,” 171n120.

A third exemplum. Cassidy, “Non conversi sed perversi,” 46 and 55n86; Cassidy-Welch, Monastic Spaces, 190–91.

way of negation. Via negativa or via negationis.

against sculptural art. Conrad Rudolph, The “Things of Greater Importance”: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia and the Medieval Attitude toward Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990).

Gym Clothes

little coat. The French words used are cotele in line 140 (diminutive of the source of English coat), chemise in line 142 (from which English chemise).

principal names. Batany, “Les moines blancs,” 17–18.

De nugis curialium. Walter Map, De nugis curialium: Courtiers’ Trifles, ed. and trans. M. R. James, rev. C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 100–103 (Distinctio 1, Capitulum 25).

the order’s policy on underclothing for lay brothers. The most comprehensive treatment of the clothing worn by lay brothers is France, Separate but Equal, 84–87. Lay brothers wore a very basic outfit of a robe with capuce, belt, socks, and footwear. Brothers who had special duties as smiths or herdsmen were authorized additional extra garments. Nothing is said about underclothing.

cloaks. A classic study is Therese Latzke, “Der Topos Mantelgedicht,” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 6 (1970): 109–31.

such items. On the clothing of jongleurs, see Noomen, Le jongleur par lui-même, 11–12.

only his undergarment. John 19:23.

pornographic. For the most extreme development of this equation, see Bill Burgwinkle and Cary Howie, Sanctity and Pornography in Medieval Culture: On the Verge (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2010).

medieval culture. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask, Bollingen Series, vol. 36 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 433–35.

difference in status. On implications of naked jongleurs in art to questions of gender relations and social status, see Elizabeth Moore Hunt, “The Naked Jongleur in the Margins: Manuscript Contexts for Social Meanings,” in The Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art, ed. Sherry C. M. Lindquist (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 85–102 and ix (list of illustrations).

medieval commentary tradition. A very useful overview of terminology and metaphors remains D. W. Robertson, Jr., “Some Medieval Literary Terminology, with Special Reference to Chrétien de Troyes,” Studies in Philology 48 (1951): 669–92, repr. in idem, Essays in Medieval Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 51–72. A thorough treatment in German is offered by Hennig Brinkmann, Mittelalterliche Hermeneutik (Tübingen, Germany: Niemeyer, 1980), 169–98.

Latin terms. Integumentum and involucrum: see Marie-Dominique Chenu, “Involucrum: Le mythe selon les théologiens médiévaux,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 22 (1955): 75–79; Winthrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century: The Literary Influence of the School of Chartres (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 36–48; Brian Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century: A Study of Bernard Silvester (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 49–62.

coordinates. Lines 225–226.

new moves. Line 217.

sweat-slicked. Lines 234–236.

Goswin of Bossut. Martha G. Newman, “Disciplining the Body, Disciplining the Will: Hypocrisy and Asceticism in Cistercian Monasticism,” in Asceticism and Its Critics: Historical Accounts and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Oliver Freiberger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 91–115, at 91–92, especially at n2. A key passage is Goswin of Bossut, Vita Arnulfi, book 1, chaps. 2–6 (10–21), in Acta sanctorum, June, vol. 7, 606–31 (Antwerp), 558–79 (Paris); in English, Goswin of Bossut, Send Me God: The Lives of Ida the Compassionate of Nivelles, Nun of La Ramée, Arnulf, Lay Brother of Villers, and Abundus, Monk of Villers, trans. Martinus Cawley, Medieval Women, vol. 6 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2003), 125–205, at 132–40.

one of the desert fathers. Gesta Sanctorum Villariensium 26, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores 25, ed. Georg Waitz (Hannover, Germany: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1880), 234, lines 43–44 (“Hic carnem suam adeo castigavit, quod qui videret eum Arsenium se vidisse putare potuit vel unum ex antiquis heremi cultoribus”), cited by Newman, “Disciplining the Body,” at 107n61.

dribbles down. Lines 400–402.

Sweat Cloth

come to life. On stories from the Middle Ages about statues of the Virgin that come to life, the locus classicus is Paull [sic] Franklin Baum, “The Young Man Betrothed to a Statue,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 34 (1919): 523–79. The motif has been explored further in its medieval context by Berthold Hinz, “Statuenliebe: Antiker Skandal und mittelalterliches Trauma,” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 22 (1989): 135–42; Camille, Gothic Idol, 220–41, 383–85 (notes).

sudarium. A sudarium, also mentioned in the Gospel of John (see below), was seen in Jerusalem about 680 by Arculf, whose report on it appears in Adomnán, De locis sanctis, 9, ed. Denis Meehan, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae, vol. 3 (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1958), 52–55.

Gospel of John. John 20:6–7.

alleged. Others are held in Compiègne and Cadouin, both in France.

hybrid form. It joins together vera and icon.

this very item. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 215–24.

one of Christ’s contemporaries. The contemporary was Ananias, also known as Hannan. See Andrea Nicolotti, From the Mandylion of Edessa to the Shroud of Turin: The Metamorphosis and Manipulation of a Legend, Art and Material Culture in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, vol. 1 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2014).

not handmade. Acheiropoeieton.

towel. The Latin is toella, cognate with French touaille.

a holy cloth. See Jannic Durand and Marie-Pierre Lafitte, eds., Le trésor de la Sainte-Chapelle (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2001), 37, 71.

identical with the mandylion. See Nicolotti, From the Mandylion, 191–93.

The Weighing of Souls

angels and demons. For orientation, see Rosa Giorgi, Angels and Demons in Art, ed. Stefano Zuffi, trans. Rosanna M. Giammanco Frongia (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005), 217–19; Laura Rodríguez Peinado, “La Psicostasis,” Revista digital de iconografía medieval 4.7 (2012): 11–20. For specifics, see Leopold Kretzenbacher, Die Seelenwaage: Zur religiösen Idee vom Jenseitsgericht auf der Schicksalswaage in Hochreligion, Bildkunst und Volksglaube, Buchreihe des Landesmuseums für Kärnten, vol. 4 (Klagenfurt, Austria: Verlag des Landesmuseums für Kärnten, 1958). For careful analysis of the Marian psychostasis, see Catherine Oakes, Ora pro nobis: The Virgin as Intercessor in Medieval Art and Devotion (London: Harvey Miller, 2008), 129–66.

a cleric of Pisa. Kati Ihnat, “Marian Miracles and Marian Liturgies in the Benedictine Tradition of Post-Conquest England,” in Contextualizing Miracles in the Christian West, 1100–1500: New Historical Approaches, ed. Matthew M. Mesley and Louise E. Wilson, Medium Aevum Monographs, vol. 32 (Oxford: The Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 2014), 63–97, at 78–79.

against conventional institutional hierarchy. David A. Flory, “The Social Uses of Religious Literature: Challenging Authority in the Thirteenth-Century Marian Miracle Tale,” Essays in Medieval Studies 13 (1996): 61–69.

The Latin-Less Lay Brother and Our Lady

tripartite schema. In Latin, the three classes are, respectively, laboratores, bellatores, and oratores. This distinctively medieval expression of the trifunctional framework familiar from various other Indo-European cultures has been traced back most notably to Adalbero of Laon, Poème au roi Robert, ed. Claude Carozzi, Les Classiques de l’histoire de France au Moyen Âge, vol. 32 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1979). In modern scholarship, the essential reference is Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

nineteenth-century book. By Maurus Wolter, the German abbot of a Benedictine monastery: see M. D. Meeuws, “Ora et Labora: Devise bénédictine?,” Collectanea Cisterciensia 54 (1992): 193–214.

one line. At line 212, the three manuscripts with “Que ne sot orer altrement” are A, D, and E; the two with “Que ne sot ovrer altrement,” B and C. See Bretel, Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame, 85 (note on text of line 212), 126.

reaches her peak. In the boundless literature on medieval Marianism, a very accessible treatment that has deservedly won the status of a classic is Warner, Alone of All Her Sex. Among more recent general studies, another book that has been paid widespread attention is Rubin, Mother of God.

long twelfth century. See John D. Cotts, Europe’s Long Twelfth Century: Order, Anxiety and Adaptation, 1095–1229 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

cosmic dance. James L. Miller, Measures of Wisdom: The Cosmic Dance in Classical and Christian Antiquity, Visio: Studies in the Relations of Art and Literature, vol. 1 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986).

Notes to Chapter 4

What Makes a Story Popular?

anything but time-bound. For example, “Some stories are so worthwhile that they belong to every age and every generation.” Vincent Arthur Yzermans, Our Lady’s Juggler (St. Paul, MN: North Central, 1974), 1.

archetypes. Philippart, “Le récit miraculaire marial,” 569.

other Western European vernaculars. For dual-language versions of medieval English miracles with facing modern English translations, see Adrienne Williams Boyarin, ed. and trans., Miracles of the Virgin (Peterborough, Ontario, Canada: Broadview, 2015). For a late but important version in English, see Peter Whiteford, ed., The Myracles of Oure Lady: Ed. from Wynkyn de Worde’s Edition (Heidelberg, Germany: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1990). For an overview of what survives in Middle English, see Thomas D. Cooke, “Tales,” in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, ed. Albert E. Hartung, 11 vols. (New Haven, CT: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1993), 9: 3177–258, 3501–51. One of the most beautiful and best known Middle English versions is Geoffrey Chaucer’s tale of the Prioress in the Canterbury Tales. Latin authors from England included Dominic of Evesham, Anselm of Bury, William of Malmesbury, the Canterbury monk known often as Nigel de Longchamps or Nigel Wireker, Roger of Ford, and John of Garland. See R. W. Southern, “The English Origins of the Miracles of the Virgin,” Medieval and Renaissance Studies 4 (1958): 176–216; A. G. Rigg, History of Anglo-Latin Literature, 1066–1422 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 35, 104, 172. The successors in the vernaculars came first in France and later in Spain, where substantial collections took shape.

The Latin digests of miracle tales tend to be labeled simply Mariale (“Marian”), a Latin neuter adjective. In titles of Latin works the masculine form is sometimes used instead, assuming the noun liber “book” as the unexpressed substantive.

feasts of Mary. The Assumption and the Purification.

pilgrimages. See Nicholas Vincent, “King Henry III and the Blessed Virgin Mary,” in The Church and Mary: Papers Read at the 2001 Summer Meeting and the 2002 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. R. N. Swanson, Studies in Church History, vol. 39 (Woodbridge, UK and Rochester, NY: Published for the Ecclesiastical History Society by the Boydell Press, 2004), 126–46, at 126.

some would favor. Most voluminous is Brian Cummings and James Simpson, eds., Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). More recent is Ronald Hutton, ed., Medieval or Early Modern: The Value of a Traditional Historic Division (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2015). Most approachable is the essayistic Jacques Le Goff, Must We Divide History into Periods?, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). An old classic that well repays reading is Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought (Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1948).

protestantized cathedrals. Ralph Adams Cram, My Life in Architecture (Boston: Little, Brown, 1936), 130. The damage experienced by English cathedrals during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the evolution in their constitution and financing as institutions are examined in two magisterial books by Stanford E. Lehmberg: The Reformation of Cathedrals: Cathedrals in English Society, 1485–1603 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), and Cathedrals under Siege: Cathedrals in English Society, 1600–1700 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).

bare ruin’d choirs. Sonnet 73.

Catholics and Protestants. Bridget Heal, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Protestant and Catholic Piety, 1500–1648 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

worship of Mary. Alain Joblin, “Les Protestants, Marie et le culte marial,” in La dévotion mariale de l’an mil à nos jours, ed. Bruno Béthouart and Alain Lottin (Arras, France: Artois Presses Université, 2005), 323–36.

supposed visionaries were executed. Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Mary and Sixteenth-Century Protestants,” in The Church and Mary: Papers Read at the 2001 Summer Meeting and the 2002 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. R. N. Swanson, Studies in Church History, vol. 39 (Woodbridge, UK and Rochester, NY: Published for the Ecclesiastical History Society by the Boydell Press, 2004), 191–217; Barnay, Le ciel sur la terre, 172–73.

knights. Nathan Edelman, Attitudes of Seventeenth-Century France toward the Middle Ages (New York: King’s Crown, 1946), 85–276, devotes close to two hundred pages to knights and other heroes, especially Charlemagne, Saint Louis, and Jeanne d’Arc, but only two (191–93) to religious subjects.

Ten Commandments. Exodus 20.

second only to that for Christ himself. Edmund Waterton, Pietas Mariana Britannica: A History of English Devotion to the Most Blessed Virgin Mary Mother of God. With a Catalogue of Shrines, Sanctuaries, Offerings, Bequests, and Other Memorials of the Piety of Our Forefathers, 2 vols. (London: St. Joseph’s Catholic Library, 1879). Waterton is particularly good on destroyed Madonnas.

Mary’s dowry. The Latin epithet used was dos Mariae.

image of the Virgin. Bishop Peter Quinel (or Quivel) of Exeter, Synodal Statutes for the Diocese of Exeter, April 16, 1287, 12, “De ecclesiarum ornamentis et eorum custodia”: see F. M. Powicke and C. R. Cheney, eds., Councils and Synods with Other Documents Relating to the English Church, 2 vols. in 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 2.2: 982–1059, at 1006 (“ymago beate virginis”).

first in 1644. The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), Madonna 2.b.

one from the early thirteenth century. From Langham Church in Essex: see Jonathan Alexander and Paul Binski, eds., Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England, 1300–1400 (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1987), 303, no. 249.

beheaded. Gary Waller, The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Literature and Popular Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 12. See also Anne Stanton, “On the Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral” (MA thesis, University of Texas, Austin, 1987).

mass cremation. Some of these lost Madonnas have been studied individually. One very close study is Stanley Smith, The Madonna of Ipswich (Ipswich, UK: East Anglian Magazine, 1980).

Walsingham. Ronald C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), 204–5.

Walsingham, England’s Nazareth

foundation legend. H. M. Gillett, Walsingham: The History of a Famous Shrine, 2nd ed. (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1950), is a helpful guide. The most recent general overview is Walsingham: Pilgrimage and History. Papers Presented at the Centenary Historical Conference, 23rd–27th March 1998 (Walsingham, UK: R. C. National Shrine, 1999). The fullest premodern account is in a ballad (op. cit., 82–85).

noblewoman and widow. Named Richeldis of Faverches.

Holy House. By the designation Holy House was meant the home of the Holy Family where Mary had been when she received the visit from God’s messenger, the angel Gabriel.

mid-twelfth century. On the dating of the shrine at Walsingham, see Mary Clayton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Saxon England, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 139–41.

Hail Mary. In Latin, Ave Maria.

milk. Sixty-nine holy places throughout Europe claimed to possess such relics, with samples of this precious liquid or of stones impregnated with it. None of these sites was more famous than the English. See Paule-Vincenette Bétérous, “A propos d’une des légendes mariales les plus répandues: Le ‘lait de la Vierge,’” Bulletin de l’Association Guillaume Budé, 4th ser., 3 (1975): 403–11, at 405. On the stone galactite, see F. de Mély, “Les reliques du lait de la Vierge et la galactite,” Revue archéologique 15 (January–June 1890): 103–16.

Song of Solomon. 1:5.

seal. See, for example, Ean Begg, The Cult of the Black Virgin, 2nd ed. (London: Arkana, 1996), 165–66.

flasks. The flasks are known technically as ampullae. For further information, see Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs, 135–48; Scilla Landale, “A Pilgrim’s Progress to Walsingham,” in Walsingham, 13–37, at 27–28.

Archbishop of Armagh. Richard Fitzralph.

failed to distinguish. G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England: A Neglected Chapter in the History of English Letters and of the English People (Cambridge: University Press, 1933), 141, at n2, citing London, British Library, Landsdowne MS 393, fols. 105v–106.

pad their own coffers. Owst, Literature and Pulpit, 141, at n3. Both passages are treated by William R. Jones, “Lollards and Images: The Defense of Religious Art in Later Medieval England,” Journal of the History of Ideas 34 (1973): 27–50, at 29.

chronicler. Henry Knighton, Chronica de eventibus Angliæ a tempore regis Edgari usque mortem regis Ricardi Secundi, in Henry Knighton’s Chronicle, 1337–1396, ed. and trans. G. H. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 292–99, at 296–97.

our dear lady of heaven. Owst, Literature and Pulpit, 145.

vain waste and idle. Reginald Pecock, The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy, ed. Churchill Babington, Rolls Series, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Green, Longman, & Roberts, 1860), 1: 194. Both this and the preceding are cited by Jones, “Lollards and Images,” 35, at nn42–43.

Erasmus. For translations of the text (one of his famous Colloquies, composed between 1523 and 1526 while he was studying in Cambridge, and published in 1526), see Erasmus, Peregrinatio religionis ergo (A pilgrimage for religion’s sake), in Pilgrimages to Saint Mary of Walsingham and Saint Thomas of Canterbury, trans. John Gough Nichols (Westminster, UK: John Bowyer Nichols and Son, 1849), 11–43; idem, Colloquies, trans. Craig R. Thompson, 2 vols., Collected Works of Erasmus, vols. 39–40 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 619–50 (translation), 650–74 (notes). For discussion, see Gary Waller, Walsingham and the English Imagination (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 65–85.

pilgrimage. Thanks to the account that he left of his expedition, we have the texts of the Latin prayer that he pronounced while kneeling at the shrine. Likewise, we can peruse the Greek ode he had inscribed on a plaque as a votive offering, despite his grave doubts that the canons on site would have the linguistic wherewithal to appreciate what he wrote. See Gillett, Walsingham, 46–48; Landale, “Pilgrim’s Progress,” 18.

Loreto. In the Marche region of Italy, not far from Ancona. The town takes its name from the clump of laurel trees into which an entire home is supposed to have been miraculously transferred from afar.

Holy House. In Italian, Santa Casa, known alternatively as the House of the Angelic Salutation.

transported. It was supposedly carried first to Tersatto in Dalmatia on March 10, 1293, later to a forest in Recanati on December 10, 1294, and, finally, to its present location in Loreto in December of 1295.

larger building. Sanctuario della Santa Casa, the Sanctuary of the Holy House.

Black Virgin. Begg, Cult of the Black Virgin, 242.

Slipper Chapel. Landale, “Pilgrim’s Progress,” 82–83.

Superstitious Practices. Landale, “Pilgrim’s Progress,” 33.

Henry III. Vincent, “King Henry III,” 133–34, mentions ten, while Landale, “Pilgrim’s Progress,” 17, writes of “about 13 visits.”

Candlemas Day. Gillett, Walsingham, 30–31.

four times. In 1487, 1489, 1498, and 1506: see J. P. Dickinson, The Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 41–42.

demise of the statue. John Phillips, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535–1660 Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), 74–75; Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims, 205.

Piers Plowman. William Langland, Piers Plowman, ed. Walter W. Skeat, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1886), 1: 148–49 (B. Passus 5.230–31; compare A. Passus 5.144–45): “But wenden to Walsyngham, and my wyf als,  / And bidde the rode of Bromholme brynge me out of dette”); trans. J. F. Goodridge (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1959), 67: “And I’ll make a pilgrimage to Walsingham, with my wife as well, and pray to the Rood of Bromholm to get me out of debt.” The Rood of Bromholm, at the Cluniac priory of Saint Andrew near Norfolk, was reputedly made from fragments of the True Cross. Pilgrims would stop at the Priory to worship it.

Marian pilgrimage. Ludwig Hüttl, Marianische Wallfahrten im süddeutschösterreichischen Raum: Analysen von der Reformations- bis zur Aufklärungsepoche (Cologne, Germany: Böhlau, 1985).

bishop of Worcester. First Catholic and then Anglican.

decreed. Sermons and Remains of Hugh Latimer, Sometime Bishop of Worcester, Martyr, 1555, ed. George Elwes Corrie, Parker Society, vol. 19 (Cambridge: University Press, 1845), 393–395 (Letter 31), at 395: “She hath been the Devil’s instrument to bring many (I fear) to eternal fire: now she herself, with her old sister of Walsingham, her younger sister of Ipswich, with their other two sisters of Doncaster and Penrice, would make a jolly muster in Smithfield; they would not be all day in burning.” Contrast text in Gillett, Walsingham, 64.

Marian revival. Sean Gill, “Marian Revivalism in Modern English Christianity: The Example of Walsingham,” in The Church and Mary: Papers Read at the 2001 Summer Meeting and the 2002 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. R. N. Swanson, Studies in Church History, vol. 3 (Woodbridge, UK and Rochester, NY: Published for the Ecclesiastical History Society by the Boydell Press, 2004), 349–57.

iconoclasm. Phillips, Reformation of Images. See Leopold Kretzenbacher, “Das verletzte Kultbild: Voraussetzungen, Zeitschichten und Aussagewandel eines abendländischen Legendentypus,” Sitzungsberichte, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, 1977, Heft 1 (Munich, Germany: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, in Kommission bei C. H. Beck, 1977).

removal in 1535. Charles Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England during the Reigns of the Tudors, from A.D. 1485 to 1559, ed. William Douglas Hamilton, 2 vols., Camden Society Publications 11, 20 (Westminster, UK: Printed for the Camden Society, 1875–1877), 1: 31.

cut away. Waller, Virgin Mary, 14.

shorn of her offspring. Phillips, Reformation of Images, 144.

Elizabeth I. Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 318; Patrick Collinson, “Pulling the Strings: Religion and Politics in the Progress of 1578,” in The Progresses, Pageants, and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I, ed. Jayne Elisabeth Archer et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 122–41, at 129–30.

Hans Holbein. Heal, Cult of the Virgin Mary, 119.

Paris. In 1528, 1545, and 1551.

Geneva. In 1532.

Valladolid. In 1600. The Valladolid image had been relabeled Nuestra Señora de la Vulnerata or Santa Maria Vulnerata (Wounded Saint Mary) after having been victimized during the English raid on Cadiz in 1596. For the information in this paragraph, see MacCulloch, “Mary and Sixteenth-Century Protestants,” 198–99.

conflicts between Catholics and Protestants. John Singleton, “The Virgin Mary and Religious Conflict in Victorian Britain,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 43.1 (1992): 16–34, at 25.

Jesuit. Wilhelm Gumppenberg, Atlas Marianus sive de imaginibus Deiparae per orbem christianum miraculosis, 1st ed., 2 vols. (Ingolstadt, Germany: Haenlin, 1657); 2nd ed., 2 vols., Atlas Marianus quo Sanctae Dei Genitricis Mariae imaginum miraculosarum origines duodecim historiarum centuriis explicantur (Munich: Johannes Jaecklin, 1672).

four-digit headcount. One noteworthy dimension of the total is the paucity of overlap with Madonnas that are touched upon anywhere in the present book.

discrete index. Idea Atlantis Mariani (Trent, Italy: Ex typog. Caroli Zanetti, 1655), 31–36 (chap. 3, index 5).

Madonnas. Joan Carroll, Miraculous Images of Our Lady: 100 Famous Catholic Portraits and Statues (Rockford, IL: Tan Books and Publishers, 1993).

Madonnas of the World Wars

street corners. Edward Muir, “The Virgin on the Street Corner: The Place of the Sacred in Italian Cities,” in Religion and Culture in the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Steven E. Ozment, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, vol. 11 (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1989), 25–40.

Henry Adams. Henry Adams, Letter to Charles F. Adams Jr., Nürnberg, July 3, 1859, in LHA 1: 49–52, at 51.

Bouchoir. The caption has the name of the municipality misprinted as Bouchois.

Divine Shepherdess. La Divine Bergère.

Notre-Dame de Brebières. Black Virgin. Begg, Cult of the Black Virgin, 167.

statue. The sculpture became the object of devotion for Saint Colette, who won exaltation from prostrating herself before the altar of Notre-Dame de Brebières, and of pilgrimage for others, as well as the basis for the foundation of a confraternity.

mortar shelling. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 131–35. On the destruction, see Alphonse Gosset, Une glorieuse mutilée: Notre-Dame de Brebières, Albert (Somme) (Paris: Blanchard, 1919), repr. as Notre-Dame de Brebières, à Albert (Inval-Boiron, France: Vague verte, 2011); Pierre Laboureyras, La destruction d’une cité picarde et d’une basilique mariale: La ville d’Albert avant et pendant la guerre, 1914–1915 (Amiens, France: Grau, 1916; repr. Paris: Le Livre d’histoire-Lotisse, 2012).

Lady of the Limp. Fussell, Great War, 44.

La Gleize. Robert M. Edsel, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History (New York: Center Street, 2009), 173–76, 214–19.

Literary Iconoclasm

letter to Thomas Cromwell. Dr. Richard Layton, in G. H. Cook, Letters to Cromwell and Others on the Suppression of the Monasteries (London: J. Baker, 1965), 38. This letter, written August 7, is found in the Cromwell Correspondence (Public Records Office), xx: “a bowke of or lades miracles well able to mache the canterberie tailles. Such a bowke of dremes as ye never saw wich I fownde in the librarie.”

lugubrious stanzas. Gillett, Walsingham, 86–87, at 87: “Weep, weep, O Walsingham, / Whose dayes are nightes, / Blessings turned to blasphemies, / Holy deedes to dispites. / Sinne is where our Ladye sate, / Heaven turned is to helle; / Sathan sitte where our Lord did swaye, / Walsingham, oh, farewell!”

a ballad. Printed in 1496 by Richard Pynson, the twenty-one verses have come to be known in recognition of him as the Pynson Ballad.

out of some of their heads. Waller, Virgin Mary, 3; Gillett, Walsingham, 65–66; Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 29. The original text reads “I cannot perceive butt the seyd Image is not yet out of sum of their heddes.”

pelted with snowballs. The National Archives, State Papers 1/157, fol. 67, in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, 21 vols. in 37 (London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1862–1932; rept. Vaduz: Kraus Reprint, 1965), 15: 28, no. 86, cited by G. W. Bernard, The Late Medieval English Church: Vitality and Vulnerability before the Break with Rome (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 147.

God and Christ. Heal, Cult of the Virgin Mary, 53–54.

most often to the Virgin. Eamon Duffy, Faith of Our Fathers: Reflections on Catholic Tradition (London: Continuum, 2004), 101 (apparently an error for 110, cited by Waller, Virgin Mary, 31).

rich spoils. Erasmus, Colloquies, trans. Thompson, 289–90. I have changed “booty” to “rich spoils.”

subtle changes. See Thomas S. Freeman, “Offending God: John Foxe and English Protestant Reactions to the Cult of the Virgin Mary,” Studies in Church History 39 (2005): 228–38, at 228–32.

bloody. In the distended bibliography, a relatively recent and thorough treatment is by Stefania Biscetti, “The Diachronic Development of Bloody: A Case Study in Historical Pragmatics,” in English Historical Linguistics 2006: Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, 3 vols., vol. 2: Lexical and Semantic Change, ed. Maurizio Gotti et al., Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, Series 4, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, vols. 295–97 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008), 53–74.

John Bale. With no specific reference to the present context, see Cathy Shrank, “John Bale and Reconfiguring the ‘Medieval’ in Reformation England,” in Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England, ed. Gordon McMullan and David Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 179–92.

presented him with a rosary. John Bale, Scriptorvm illustriu[m] maioris Brytannie, quam nunc Angliam & Scotiam uocant: Catalogus (Basel, Switzerland: apud I. Oporinum, 1557–1559), 624–25: “The Blessed Virgin entered the cell of Alanus although it was shut and, fashioning a ring out of her hair for him, betrothed herself to the friar, that she kissed him, and gave him her breasts to be fondled and milked and, finally, that she gave herself to him as familiarly as a wife customarily does to her husband.” See Freeman, “Offending God,” 233–34 (with information on other accounts of the same episode).

mediator. Mary Vincentine Gripkey, The Blessed Virgin Mary as Mediatrix in the Latin and Old French Legend Prior to the Fourteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1938).

Irish immigrant. Sheridan Gilley, “Protestant London, No-Popery and the Irish Poor, II: 1850–1860,” Recusant History 11 (1971–1972): 21–46, at 43.

Madonnas. Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 425, 772; trans. Gareth Evan Gollard (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 335, 632.

cult of Mary. Contrast Heal, Cult of the Virgin Mary, 5, 148.

great emphasis. The Council of Trent, Twenty-Fifth Session, “On the Invocation, Veneration, and Relics, of Saints, and on Sacred Images” (December 4, 1563), in The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent, ed. and trans. J. Waterworth (London: Dolman, 1848), 232–35.

shunted aside. Michael P. Carroll, Madonnas That Maim: Popular Catholicism in Italy since the Fifteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 106.

William Thomas. William Thomas, The Pilgrim: A Dialogue on the Life and Actions of King Henry the Eighth, ed. J. A. Froude (London: Parker, Son, and Bourn, 1861), 43: “[H]is Highness had found out the falsehood of these jugglers, who led the people unto this idolatry of worshipping of saints, believing of miracles, and going on pilgrimage here and there (as unto this hour you see it used here in Italy).”

Mary held an ambiguous position. Joblin, “Les protestants.”

Marian revival. Singleton, “Virgin Mary,” 28–29.

A cleavage is perceptible. Heal, Cult of the Virgin Mary, 145.

Martin Luther. On Luther’s attitudes concerning the Virgin Mary, see Peter Newman Brooks, “A Lily Ungilded? Martin Luther, the Virgin Mary and the Saints,” Journal of Religious History 13 (1984–1985): 136–49; Hans Düfel, Luthers Stellung zur Marienverehrung, Kirche und Konfession: Veröffentlichungen des Konfessionskundlichen Instituts des Evangelischen Bundes, vol. 13 (Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1968).

commented with disapproval. Düfel, Luthers Stellung, 235.

honored but not worshiped. The principle was summed up in a Latin superscription, Maria honoranda, non adoranda, which in 1619 was appended to an image of Mary as queen of heaven that was restored and put on display anew in the Lutheran city of Zittau, in southeast Saxony. Hans Carl von Haebler, Das Bild in der evangelischen Kirche (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1957), 37.

commentary. In 1520–1521 he composed a “little exposition of the Magnificat,” a Marian hymn known likewise as the Song of Mary or the Canticle of Mary. The hymn was based on Luke 1:46–55. He maintained that a person should honor Mary as she herself wished and as she expressed it in the Magnificat. See Sermon on the Mount and the Magnificat, in Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, 55 vols. (Saint Louis, MO: Concordia, 1955–1986), vol. 21; The Magnificat: Luther’s Commentary, trans. A. T. W. Steinhaeuser (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1967).

potentially idolatrous. Heal, Cult of the Virgin Mary, 82–83.

recent retelling. Helena Olofsson, Gycklarpojken (Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren, 2000); trans. Kjersti Board, The Little Jester (New York: R and S Books, 2002).

We sneer. Henry Warrum, Some Religious Weft and Warp (Indianapolis, IN: Hollenbeck, 1915), 3. The sentence is preceded by “Idolatry is the worship of idols or images either as gods, the sanctuaries of gods, or the symbols of gods, and is man’s effort to reduce the abstract to the concrete in order to establish closer communion with the unknown. Images and icons still have their place in the religions of civilization.”

Marian Apparitions

medieval narratives and images. For a beautiful treatment of both medieval texts and art, the reader can do no better than to consult Barnay, Le ciel sur la terre.

latest tally. René Laurentin and Patrick Sbalchiero, Dizionario delle “apparizioni” della vergine Maria (Rome: ART, 2010).

official policy. Finality came in 1734–1738, in a five-volume treatise written by the archbishop of Bologna, just a few years before his election as Pope Benedict XIV. See Prosper Lambertini, De servorum Dei beatificatione, et beatorum canonizatione (On the beatification and canonization of the servants of God).

fascination and perplexity. A little more than a decade ago, a book probed both sightings of the Virgin and official ecclesiastical investigations of such phenomena, including the appearance of the Virgin to six young people in 1981 in the village of Medjugorje, in what is today Bosnia and Herzegovina, and to others in Scottsdale, Arizona. See Randall Sullivan, The Miracle Detective (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2004).

Our Lady of Guadalupe. On the development of the cult down to the present day, see David A. Brading, Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe, Image and Tradition across Five Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

official accounts. The apparition, which took place at a location called the hill of Tepeyac, in Villa de Guadalupe, a northern suburb of Mexico City, was described in two accounts published in the 1640s. It became the object of official fact-checking in 1723. However, it led to formal beatification of the visionary only in 1990 and sanctification in 2002.

associated with Mary. Barnay, Le ciel sur la terre, 124–28.

black eyelashes. The phenomenon is so widespread that it has even received literary treatment: see Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (New York: Random House, 1991), 114–15 (“Anguiano Religious Articles Rosaries Statues Medals Incense Candles Talismans Perfumes Oils Herbs”).

La Morenita. The same nickname, in the form La Moreneta, is used for the Black Madonnna of Montserrat.

shepherdess. Her name was Lucia dos Santos.

millions of visitors. Carroll, Madonnas That Maim, 2. On apparitions deemed false, see Vraies et fausses apparitions dans l’Église, ed. Bernard Billet et al. (Paris: P. Lethielleux, 1973).

American historian. David Herlihy, Medieval Culture and Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 292.

Walsingham. For the modern history, see Dominic Janes and Gary Waller, eds., Walsingham in Literature and Culture from the Middle Ages to Modernity (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010); in a nutshell, John Milburn, The Mariological Lectures (London: Society of Mary, 1998), 1–6.

Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin. Singleton, “Virgin Mary,” 20.

Notes to Chapter 5

It would be interesting. Herman Oelsner, “A Story by Anatole France,” The Academy 55 (November 5, 1898): 218.

King David’s Dancing

She liked the story of David. D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 170 (chap. 6, “Anna Victrix,” of the pregnant Anna Brangwen, who dances naked before the mirror in her bedroom, out of exultation at her pregnancy). Lawrence also discussed this episode in David’s life in an essay entitled “The Crown” that he wrote at roughly the same time. See D. H. Lawrence, Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished, and Other Prose Works, ed. Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore (New York: Viking, 1968), 365–415, at 380.

figure of the jongleur. Martine Clouzot, Le jongleur: Mémoire de l’image au Moyen Âge. Figures, figurations et musicalité dans les manuscrits enluminés (1200–1330) (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2011), 219–304.

vignette before the ark. The entire passage is 2 Kings (= 2 Samuel) 6.13–23. The dancing is also mentioned at 1 Chronicles 13.8 and 15.27–29. The Douay-Rheims Bible, produced for Catholics at roughly the same time as the King James Bible, follows closely the Latin of the Vulgate Bible that Jerome had assembled more than a millennium earlier, in the fourth century. The early seventeenth-century English of the Douay-Rheims reads:

2 Kings (2 Samuel) 14. And David danced with all his might before the Lord: and David was girded with a linen ephod.

16. And when the ark of the Lord was come into the city of David, Michal the daughter of Saul, looking out through a window, saw king David leaping and dancing before the Lord: and she despised him in her heart.

20. And David returned to bless his own house, and Michal the daughter of Saul coming out to meet David, said: How glorious was the king of Israel to day, uncovering himself before the handmaids of his servant, and was naked, as if one of the buffoons should be naked.

kinetic energy. The Hebrew verb kirker denotes “whirling” or “pirouetting.”

manuscript art. For a listing, see Colum Hourihane, ed., King David in the Index of Christian Art (Princeton, NJ: Index of Christian Art, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, in association with Princeton University Press, 2002), 118–21. For analysis, see Adelheid Heimann, “A Twelfth-Century Manuscript from Winchcombe and Its Illustrations: Dublin, Trinity College, MS. 53,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 28 (1965): 86–109; Herbert Schade, “Zum Bild des tanzenden David im frühen Mittelalter,” Stimmen der Zeit 172.4 (1963): 1–16; Sandra Pietrini, “La santa danza di David e il ballo peccaminoso di Salomé: Due figure esemplari dell’imaginario biblico medievale,” Quaderni Medievali 50 (2000): 45–73; Julia Zimmermann, “‘histrio fit David…’: König Davids Tanz vor der Bundeslade,” in König David, biblische Schlüsselfigur und europäische Leitgestalt: 19. Colloquium (2000) der Schweizerischen Akademie der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften, ed. Walter Dietrich and Hubert Herkommer (Freiburg, Switzerland: Universitätsverlag, 2003), 531–61.

one representation. Dublin, Trinity College Library, MS 53, fol. 151r (accompanying Psalm 1). The manuscript is a so-called double psalter, in which the two most important Latin texts of the Psalms are presented in parallel columns. The psalter, dated 1130–1140, is thought to have come from the Benedictine monastery of Winchcombe. See Zimmermann, “‘histrio fit David,’” fig. 1.

walks about upside-down. Leclercq, “‘Joculator et saltator,’” 147, quoting Drogo of Bergues (in Flanders).

Bernard of Clairvaux. Sermones de diversis 41.6, in Bernard of Clairvaux, Opera, 6.1: 248–49; ed. Leclercq, Rochais, and Talbot, trans. Pierre-Yves Émery, Sources chrétiennes, vol. 518 (Paris: Cerf, 2007), 2: 236–71, at 252–53: “Respice David ante arcam Domini hilariter saltantem, quam sapienter superbientis feminae reprimat indignationem: Ludam, inquit, et vilior fiam ante conspectum Domini” (“Consider David dancing joyously before the Lord’s ark, and how wisely he restrains the indignation of his haughty wife”).

Dante. Purgatorio 10.64–66: “Lí precedeva al benedetto vaso, / trescando alzato, l’umile salmista, / e più e men che re era in quel caso” (“There, going before the blessed vessel, / his robe hitched up, was the humble Psalmist, / and on that occasion he was both more and less than king”).

prefiguring Mary’s entrance. For the Virgin, see Gaston Duchet-Suchaux and Michel Pastoureau, La Bible et les saints: Guide iconographique, 2nd ed. (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 120; for Christ, see Ferguson, Signs and Symbols, 64.

do we not so call the Virgin Mary?. Le Croisé: Organe belge de la croisade eucharistique 23.5 (October 1949): 77. The original quotation is “Alors le moine jongleur dansa, comme David devant l’Arche d’alliance—n’appelle-t-on pas ainsi la Vierge Marie?”

Spanish text. The book, generally agreed to have been completed in 1293, is now conventionally entitled Castigos e documentos para bien vivir ordenados del Rey Don Sancho IV (Teachings and writings for right living arranged by King Sancho IV), ed. Agapito Rey, Indiana University Publications: Humanities Series, vol. 24 (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1952). For the exemplum, see the ed. by Pascual de Gayangos, in Escritores en prosa anteriores al siglo XV, Biblioteca de autores españoles, vol. 51 (Madrid: M. Rivadeneyra, 1860), 1: 79–228, chap. 17 at 127 (“come joglar con una citole en la mano”).

jongleur of God. In Spanish, juglar de Dios.

a wise one. L’“Eructavit” antico-francese: Secondo il ms. Paris B.N. fr. 1747, ed. Walter Meliga, Scrittura e scrittori, vol. 6 (Alessandria, Italy: Edizioni dell’orso, 1992), 123 (Eructavit 235): “Joglerres soi, sages e duiz” (jongleur, wise and learned). On this passage, see Zink, Poésie et conversion, 161.

one of the buffoons. Unus de scurris. The noun that has been translated as “buffoon” here is scurra (whence the etymological root of the adjective “scurrilous”), which is glossed at least once as “jongleur.” See Die Reichenauer Glossen, 2 vols., ed. Hans-W. Klein and Andre Labhardt, Beiträge zur romanischen Philologie des Mittelalters, vol. 1 (Munich, Germany: Hueber and M. Fink, 1968–1972), 1: 97, line 1103: “Scurris: ioculator.”

dancing. Davies, Liturgical Dance.

Unto his vomit. Proverbs 26:11, 2 Peter 2:22.

invoking none other than King David. “Before the Ark of our God King David danced. / We do not read that David from grace was driven.” Alternatively, “Before the ark danced King David. / I believe that David was no pagan.” From Le Jongleur de Notre Dame (The Juggler of Notre Dame): Miracle Play in Three Acts, trans. Charles Alfred Byrne (New York: Charles E. Burden 1907), 27.

Duke Ellington. The American jazz pianist, orchestra leader, and composer Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington.

three full-evening jazz suites. It was performed originally in San Francisco on September 16, 1965, in Grace Cathedral, and recorded later from a performance in Manhattan on December 26, 1965, at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. The second Sacred Concert, which premiered at the cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York on January 19, 1968, concluded with a different piece that expressed a similar devotion, Praise God and Dance. When Ellington’s funeral was held in Saint John the Divine on May 27, 1974, excerpts from the Sacred Concerts were played: see The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 377.

his own creativity and devotion. Duke Ellington Reader, 371–72: “It has been said once that a man, who could not play the organ or any of the instruments of the symphony, accompanied his worship by juggling. He was not the world’s greatest juggler but it was the one thing he did best. And so it was accepted by God. I believe that no matter how highly skilled a drummer or saxophonist might be, that if this is the thing he does best, and he offers it sincerely from the heart in—or as the accompaniment to—his worship, he will not be unacceptable because of lack of skill or of the instrument upon which he makes his demonstration, be it pipe or tom-tom. If a man is troubled, he moans and cries when he worships. When a man feels that that which he enjoys in this life is only because of the grace of God, he rejoices, he sings, and sometimes dances (and so it was with David in spite of his wife’s prudishness).” For another pairing of David and the Jongleur a few years earlier, see Alan H. Morriss, “A Twentieth-Century Folk Mass,” Musical Times 98, no. 1378 (1957): 671–72, at 672.

David Danced before the Lord. The title is from a verse of the Bible (2 Kings 6:14), as we have seen, which describes how King David danced before the ark of the Covenant as it was brought into Jerusalem. As recorded on December 26, 1965, this piece is the nine-minute track 10.

tap master. In introducing one performance, Ellington described the dancer as “the most superleviathonic, rhythmaturgically syncopated tapsthamaticianisamist.” The performance of Dr. Bunny Briggs on this occasion “broke new ground for modern tap dancing on the concert stage”: see Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 206.

Third Sacred Concert. Duke Ellington Reader, 371. For discussion, see Thomas Lloyd, “The Revival of an Early ‘Crossover’ Masterwork: Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concerts,” Choral Journal 49.11 (May 2009): 8–26, at 9.

this particular piece. Bill Hall, “Jazz–Lewd or Ludens?,” in Creative Chords: Studies in Music, Theology and Christian Formation, ed. Jeff Astley and Timothy Hone (Leominster, Herefordshire: Gracewing, 2000), 194–209, at 203.

Protevangelium of James. The Greek noun protevangelion (“first gospel”) could be rendered almost synonymously as Protogospel.

apocryphon. The apocrypha are, as the Greek adjective for “secret” or “hidden things,” noncanonical texts that complement scripture.

sparse treatment. The presence of Mary in the Bible is concentrated in the accounts of Christ’s infancy in Matthew and Luke. The earliest of the three Synoptic Gospels, Mark, names Mary just once (Mark 6:3), Matthew mentions Mary five times, and Luke provides more evidence in his Gospel. In Matthew, Mary is silent, whereas in Luke she speaks four times. Outside the Synoptic Gospels, John brings up Mary twice. The Acts of the Apostles, the earliest text that mentions the Christian church, refers to her only a single time (Acts 1:14).

Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. For a concise introduction, see Luigi Gambero, Mary and the Fathers of the Church: The Blessed Virgin Mary in Patristic Thought (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1999), 33–42.

gaps in the canonical Bible. Mary Clayton, The Apocryphal Gospels of Mary in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

seventh chapter. Protevangelium Jacobi (Protevangelium of James), in New Testament Apocrypha, ed. Wilhelm Schneemelcher, trans. R. McL. Wilson, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Cambridge: James Clarke; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1991–1992), 1: 429 (7.3): “[T]he Lord God put grace upon the child, and she danced for joy with her feet, and the whole house of Israel loved her.” For background information, see 1: 421–25, and especially Hans-Josef Klauck, Apocryphal Gospels: An Introduction, trans. Brian McNeil (London and New York: T & T Clark, 2003), 65–72.

The fifteen steps, but not the little jig after the third step, are mentioned in William Emmet Coleman and James Boyce, eds. and trans., Officium presentationis Beate Virginis Marie in Templo / Office of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary: Which is Celebrated on the 21st Day of November. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS latin 17330, fols. 7r-14r, Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen / Musicological Studies, vol. 65/ Historiae, vol. 5 (Lions Bay, Canada: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 2001), 7, 9. The episode of the dancing has apparently not survived in either medieval or Byzantine art: see Jacqueline Lafontaine-Dosogne, “Iconographie comparée du cycle de l’Enfance de la Vierge à Byzance et en Occident, de la fin du IXe au début du XIIIe s.,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 32.128 (1989): 291–303.

lineage of David. The genealogy in Luke 3:23–38 is taken by some to be Mary’s, by others to be Joseph’s.

Presentation. The Presentation is commemorated traditionally on November 21. Such celebration began perhaps as early as 730 (but no later than 1150) in the East, where it is one of the Twelve Great Feasts of the Orthodox Church, and in the late fourteenth century (although known earlier) in the West.

fresco. By Paolo Uccello, from around 1435.

Prato. In Tuscany. An association of the painting with the episode in the Protevangelium has been rejected by José María Salcador González, “La Presentación de María en el Templo en la pintura italiana bajomedieval: Análisis de cinco casos,” Espéculo: Revista de estudios literarios 44 (March–June 2010).

The Widow’s Mites

Jesus witnesses the incident. Gospel of Mark, 12:41–44: “And Jesus sitting over against the treasury beheld how the people cast money into the treasury, and many that were rich cast in much. And there came a certain poor widow, and she cast in two mites, which make a farthing. And calling his disciples together he saith to them, Amen I say to you: this poor widow hath cast in more than all they who have cast into the treasury. For all they did cast in of their abundance; but she of her want cast in all she had, even her whole living.” The Vulgate Bible: Douay-Rheims Translation, ed. Edgar Swift and Angela M. Kinney, 6 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010–2013), 6: 259. Compare Luke 21:1–4.

novelist’s hometown. Carrickmacross, a town in County Monaghan, Ireland.

dreams for the future. Bernard Duffy, Oriel (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1918), 45: “‘Have you decided yet,’ he asked, smiling, as they left the church, ‘whether your life is to be sublime or ridiculous?’ This reference to the ambitions he had disclosed to the bishop made Oriel blush, and in his shyness he could find no answer. ‘Come now,’ said the Dean, ‘there’s nothing to be ashamed of. Why when I was your age I wanted to be an itinerant tumbler. So you see we have something in common.’” The bishop is none other than Dean James. For a reprint of the chapter with brief background information, see Bernard Duffy, “Portrait of a Parish Priest,” Clogher Record 3 (1975): 269–81.

I think I’ll be a bishop. Duffy, Oriel, 38–39.

the value of an offering. Duffy, Oriel, 64–68.

small children. W. O. E. Oesterley, The Sacred Dance: A Study in Comparative Folklore (New York: Macmillan, 1923), 23: “A little girl, not exceeding five years, was dancing before a picture of the Madonna and Child; after her dance she turned to her mother and said: ‘Do you think the Baby Jesus liked to see me dance?’ It is not quite easy to say in this case in how far the purpose was to please the ‘Baby Jesus,’ and in how far the perfectly natural and innocent purpose was to ‘show off’ before Him: probably both motives were combined. But the second is purely one of ‘showing off.’ A child of about three, a boy this time, kept on jumping as high as he could in the field; presently his father heard him say: ‘See, God, how high I can jump!’”

volume of literary history. Émile Henriot, Courrier littéraire: XIXe siècle, vol. 1: Autour de Chateaubriand (Paris: Marcel Daubin, 1948), 31: the hero in question is Captain Gervais (1779–1858), nom de guerre of Étienne Béniton.

Festival of the Crosses. In Spanish, Fiesta de las Cruces.

May Cross. Cruz de Mayo.

plays a role. On May 3.

Spanish print. An albumen print. Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida produced a painting, as well as preliminary studies, on the same theme.

researcher. J. B. Trend, “The Dance of the Seises at Seville,” Music & Letters 2 (1921): 10–28, at 28. For fuller information on the May dance, see José Manuel Fraile Gil and Eliseo Parra García, El mayo y su fiesta en tierras madrileñas, Biblioteca básica madrileña, vol. 10 (Madrid: Comunidad de Madrid, Consejería de Educación y Cultura, Centro de Estudios y Actividades Culturales, 1995).

dancing was often presented. On positive portrayal, see Van Oort, “Minstrel Dances.” On condemnations, see Arcangeli, “Dance and Punishment,” 30–42.

Stephen of Bourbon. De luxuria 461, in Lecoy de La Marche, Anecdotes historiques, 397, in Aeppli, Die wichtigsten Ausdrücke, 47n56, 77n181.

their small town. In the German region of Saxon-Anhalt.

ceasing to sing and dance. Thompson, Motif-Index, no. C 94.1.1 (compare C 51.1.5 “Tabu: Dancing in Churchyard”); Tubach, Index Exemplorum, no. 1419. The episode was investigated first in detail by Edward Schröder, “Die Tänzer von Kölbigk,” Zeitschrift für Kirchegeschichte 17 (1897): 94–164, and later exhaustively (although also very speculatively) by Ernst Erich Metzner, Zur frühesten Geschichte der europäischen Balladendichtung Der Tanz in Kölbigk: Legendarische Nachrichten, Gesellschaftlicher Hintergrund, historische Voraussetzungen, Frankfurter Beiträge zur Germanistik, vol. 14 (Frankfurt, Germany: Athenäum Verlag, 1972). Metzner’s book includes the Latin originals of the three oldest accounts, alongside ample commentary and interpretation. For the best balance between thoroughness and brevity (with extensive bibliography), see Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, “Tänzersage,” in EdM 13: 201–4.

The Little Legend of Dance. In German, “Das Tanzlegendchen.” In idem, Sämtliche Werke in acht Bänden, 8 vols. (Berlin: Aufbau, 1958–1961), 5: 409–16. See also Sämtliche Werke: Historische-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Walter Morgenthaler (Frankfurt, Germany: Stroemfeld; Zurich: Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 1996–2012), 7: 421–27. For an English translation, see Gottfried Keller, “A Legend of the Dance,” in Seven Legends, trans. Martin Wyness (London: Gowans & Gray, 1911), 98–105, and Gottfried Keller, The People of Seldwyla and Seven Legends, trans. M. D. Hottinger (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1930), 294–300.

Seven Legends. In German, Sieben Legenden.

Gregory the Great’s Dialogues. Trans. Odo John Zimmerman, The Fathers of the Church, vol. 39 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1959), 211–12 (book 4, chap. 18).

The Virgin’s Miraculous Images and Apparitions

Theotokos. Corresponding to the Latin Deipara. For brief overviews of the theology connected with this conception of Mary, see Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 55–65; Sarah Jane Boss, “The Title Theotokos,” and Richard Price, “Theotokos: The Title and Its Significance in Doctrine and Devotion,” in Mary: The Complete Resource, ed. Sarah Jane Boss (London: Continuum, 2007), 50–55 and 56–74, respectively.

City of the God-Bearer. The patriarchate acquired this status because it boasted eventually not only many precious relics of Mary but fully 117 churches and monasteries dedicated to her. See Cyril Mango, “Constantinople as Theotokoupolis,” in Mother of God: Representations of the Virgin in Byzantine Art (Milan, Italy: Skira, 2000), 17–25.

soaked up miracles. For this absorption, the ugly but serviceable neologism “Marialization” has been minted. See Philippart, “Le récit miraculaire marial,” 566.

taken into heaven. On the complex and much-debated evolution of doctrines relating to this aspect of Mary, see Henry Mayr-Harting, “The Idea of the Assumption in the West, 800–1200,” in The Church and Mary: Papers Read at the 2001 Summer Meeting and 2002 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. Robert Norman Swanson, Studies in Church History, vol. 39 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2004), 86–111.

Miracles of Our Lady in medieval French verse. Miracles de Nostre Dame.

Miracles of Our Lady in Castilian verse. Milagros de Nuestra Señora, in Collected Works of Gonzalo de Berceo, trans. Bartha et al., 13–141.

Cistercian origin. See Patricia Timmons and Robert Boenig, Gonzalo de Berceo and the Latin Miracles of the Virgin: A Translation and a Study (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 3.

Songs of Saint Mary. Cantigas de Santa Maria. For an English translation, see Kathleen Kulp-Hill, trans., Songs of Holy Mary of Alfonso X, the Wise: A Translation of the “Cantigas de Santa Maria,” Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 173 (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000).

illustration. On the images, see Jacques Le Goff, “Le Roi, la Vierge, et les images: Le manuscrit des ‘Cantigas de Santa Maria’ d’Alphonse X de Castille,” in Rituels: Mélanges offerts à Pierre-Marie Gy, o.p., ed. Paul De Clerck and Éric Palazzo (Paris: Cerf, 1990), 385–92.

living images. Alejandro García Avilés, “Imágenes ‘vivientes’: Idolatría y herejía en las ‘Cantigas’ de Alfonso X el Sabio,” Goya: Revista de arte 321 (2007): 324–42; Jean-Marie Sansterre, “L’image ‘instrumentalisée’: Icons du Christ et statues de la Vierge, de Rome à l’Espagne des Cantigas de Santa Maria,” in Hagiographie, idéologie et politique au Moyen Âge en Occident: Actes du colloque international du Centre d’études supérieures de civilisation médiévale de Poitiers, 11–14 septembre 2008, ed. Edina Bozóky, Hagiologia, vol. 8 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2012), 463–76.

performance before pilgrims. San Millan de la Cogolla.

The Jongleur of Rocamadour

other Marian exempla and miracles. An individual specimen from this genre of compilations is sometimes designated by the Latin term Mariale. This specific collection, attested in eight manuscripts, comprises 126 Marian miracles. The text was composed around 1172 by a monk in the priory of Rocamadour, in south-central France, but it refers to miracles occurring before 1166. For the Latin Miracula Sancte Marie Rupis Amatoris, book 1, miracle 34, see Edmond Albe, ed. and trans., Les Miracles de Notre-Dame de Rocamadour au douzième siècle, rev. 2nd ed. Jean Rocacher (Toulouse: Le Pérégrinateur, 1996), 142–45; Marcus Graham Bull, trans., The Miracles of Our Lady of Rocamadour: Analysis and Translation (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1999), 122–23.

writing down miracles. See Signori, Maria zwischen Kathedrale, 202–28; idem, “The Miracle Kitchen and Its Ingredients: A Methodical and Critical Approach to Marian Shrine Wonders (10th to 13th Century),” Hagiographica 3 (1996): 277–303.

shrine wonder. For the Old French, see Gautier de Coinci, Les Miracles de Nostre Dame, 4: 175–89 (2.21: “Dou cierge qui descendi au jougleour”), which supersedes the text in Reino Hakamies, Deux miracles de Gautier de Coinci, d’un vilain qui fut sauvé pour ce qu’il ne faisoit uevre le samedi et du cierge que Nostre Dame de Rochemadour envoia seur la vïele au jougleour qui vïeloit et chantoit devant s’ymage publiés d’après cinq manuscrits, Suomalaisen Tiedeakatemian toimituksia, B, vol. 113:1 (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Kirjapaino, 1958). In my recapitulation I follow the French; in the Latin the object that moves is not a taper, but instead (apparently) a piece of wax. For analysis, see Anna Drzewicka, “La vièle du cœur: Une metaphore musicale de Gautier de Coinci,” in Contez me tout: Mélanges de langue et littérature médiévales offerts à Herman Braet, ed. Catherine Bel et al., La république des lettres, vol. 28 (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2006), 175–89.

Galician-Portuguese. For the concise account, see Alfonso X the Wise, Cantigas de Santa María, ed. Walter Mettmann, 3 vols. (Madrid: Castalia, 1986–1989), 1: 75–77 (no. 8); trans. Kulp-Hill, 13–14.

Sieglar. The place name is spelled multifariously, as for example Sygelar, Sigelar, and Siegelar, in medieval and modern texts alike. It is in the diocese of Cologne.

Rocamadour. The French commune is located in a gorge above the river Alzou, a tributary of the Dordogne, in the diocese of Cahors.

Amadour. Henri Fromage, “Rocamadour: Qui est (A)madour?” Bulletin de la Société mythologie française 161 (1991): 5–14.

official in control of caring for the church. The medieval equivalent of the facilities director, he held the monastic office of sacristan.

crying for joy. As in the title of the Latin exemplum about the jongleur, the word used here is gaudium.

after the beadle had doused it. Dialogus miraculorum, book 7, chap. 46, ed. Strange, 2: 64–65; trans. Scott and Bland, 2: 528–30, at 529. On such miracles, see Jaap van Moolenbroek, Mirakels historisch: De exempels van Caesarius van Heisterbach over Nederland en Nederlanders, Middeleeuwse studies en bronnen, vol. 65 (Hilversum, Netherlands: Verloren, 1999), 113–14.

King Henry II. Emma Mason, “‘Rocamadour in Quercy above All Other Churches’: The Healing of Henry II,” Studies in Church History 19 (1982): 39–54.

Caesarius of Heisterbach. Dialogus Miraculorum, book 1, chap. 17, ed. Strange, 1: 24–25; trans. Scott and Bland, 1: 25–26.

wooden image. Jacques Juillet, Rocamadour: Symboles et histoire, 2nd ed. (Grenoble, France: Le mercure dauphinois, 2005).

Black Virgin. In French, Vierge Noire. For English-speakers, the most widely available account and census of such images is probably Begg, Cult of the Black Virgin; see especially p. 216 on Rocamadour. A Jungian, Begg promotes a theory that the phenomenon had pagan origins and that it came to the West during the Crusades, thanks to the Templars. His evidence must be verified on a case-by-case basis. The best short account is Sarah Jane Boss, “Black Madonnas,” in idem, Mary, 458–75.

The most convenient compilation and exposition of information in French is Sophie Cassagnes-Brouquet, Vierges noires (Rodez, France: Editions du Rouergue, 2000). Cassagnes-Brouquet cites repeatedly a 1550 census of Black Virgins in France, which tallied 190. She provides (on pp. 17 and 20) helpful maps to indicate the geographic distribution of such statues. A count today would be difficult, since older Black Virgins have been stolen, deliberately removed by the local ecclesiastical authorities, or spirited away for other reasons, while copies or alleged copies of now lost ones have appeared in many locations.

icon. An icon by this name survived in Russia until 1941. The panel belonged to the iconographic type known as Hodegetria, from the Greek for “she who shows the way.” It represented the Virgin Mary as she holds the infant Jesus while pointing to him as the way of salvation. Byzantine depictions of the Virgin and Child in this pose exercised a great influence upon Italian panel painting, which used the golden highlighting known technically as chrysography. See Jaroslav Folda, Byzantine Art and Italian Panel Painting: The Virgin and Child “Hodegetria” and the Art of Chrysography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Blachernitissa. It is also known as Theotokos of Blachernae, Virgin of the Sign, or Our Lady of Blachernae. A catch is that no representation of the Byzantine image from the Middle Ages that has been explicitly labeled Blachernitissa depicts Mary holding the infant Jesus. Instead, the figures show her in a praying posture that is designated technically (from the Latin participle for praying) as orans or orant. Sometimes the Virgin has a medallion of the Christ Child that is inscribed within her breast or that levitates upon it.

Byzantine coins. Vasso Penna, “The Mother of God on Coins and Lead Seals,” in Mother of God: Representations of the Virgin in Byzantine Art, ed. Maria Vassilaki (Milan, Italy: Skira, 2000), 209–17, at 211.

the Church has sometimes replaced. For a recent controversy, see Benjamin Ramm, “Which Past Should We Preserve?” The New York Times, September 2, 2017, C1, C6.

less than fifty miles from Barcelona. In Catalonia, in the northeastern region of the Iberian peninsula.

lead token. The token was called in Latin sportula, in French sportelle. Both words derive ultimately from Latin sporta, referring to the pilgrim’s scrip, pouch, or purse to which they were attached. On these objects, see Ludovic de Valon, “Iconographie des sportelles de Rocamadour,” Bulletin de la Société des études littéraires, scientifiques et artistiques du Lot 51 (1930): 1–30; Esther Cohen, “In haec signa: Pilgrim-Badge Trade in Southern France,” Journal of Medieval History 2.3 (1976): 193–214; Jean Rocacher, “Les sportelles de Rocamadour (enseignes de pèlerinage),” Bulletin de la Société des études littéraires, scientifiques et artistiques du Lot 106 (1985–1986): 269–88; Gilbert Foucaud and Régis Najac, “Sur deux sportelles de Rocamadour trouvées à Capdenac-le-Haut,” Bulletin de la Société des études littéraires, scientifiques et artistiques du Lot 125.4 (2004): 303–5. For illustrations, see Jean Rocacher, Rocamadour: Un prêtre raconte la roche mariale (Paris: Éditions de l’Atelier, 1999), 25, and especially Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs, 234–37.

On pilgrimage to Rocamadour in the twelfth century, see Jean Rocacher, “La Vierge Marie dans le pèlerinage de Rocamadour,” in Marie et le Limousin: Actes de la journée d’études organisée à Seilhac le 9 août 1991, ed. Sophie Cassagnes et al., Mémoires et documents sur le Bas-Limousin, vol. 12 (Ussel, France: Musée du pays d’Ussel; Paris: Diff. de Boccard, 1992), 53–83.

In both stories. Allen, De l’hermite et del jougleour, 51.

a version of this Rocamadour miracle tale. “D’un jongleur a cui Nostre Dame envoia son sierge,” which begins “La douce mere au creator / A l’eglise a Rochemadour… .”

anonymous poet. Chantilly: Le cabinet des livres. Manuscrits, 3 vols. (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1900–1911): 2: 56 (nos. 68–69).

The True Legend. “Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame: La véritable légende,” Comœdia 17, no. 3893, August 15, 1923, front page. The newspaper, then influential, has been defunct since World War II.

Gautier de Coinci’s version. Kemp-Welch, Of the Tumbler 127–37. A German translation, also based on the mid-nineteenth-century Poquet edition, was made by Erhard Lommatzsch, Geschichten aus dem alten Frankreich (Frankfurt, Germany: J. Knecht, 1947), 113–18, notes 216–17.

Holy Candle of Arras. Gustave Cohen, “La Sainte Vierge dans la littérature française du Moyen Âge,” in Maria: Études sur la Sainte Vierge, ed. Hubert Du Manoir de Juaye, 7 vols. (Paris: Beauchesne, 1949–1964), 2: 17–46, at 24–28.

The Holy Candle of Arras

Holy Candle. Known in French as the Sainte Chandelle.

This other wonder. The miracle was studied by Faral, Les jongleurs, 133–42; Adolphe Henri Guesnon, La Confrèrie des jongleurs d’Arras et le tombeau de l’évêque Lambert (Arras, France: Cassel, 1913); and, most recently and insightfully, Carol Symes, A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 85–92. For popular coverage, see Claude Esil, “Les jongleurs de Notre-Dame: Arras, la fête des ardents,” La France à table 110 (October 1964).

opening years of the twelfth century. Perhaps not too long before 1115, during the episcopacy of Lambert de Guînes, who served as bishop of Arras from 1093 to 1115.

half century later. The earliest and fullest written records of the miracle are found in a Latin text that was supposedly composed between 1175 and 1200, and in a French version that, at least in its present form, had to have been composed after 1237. Whatever we decide about the date of its original composition, the official prose account was recorded in a Latin charter drawn up in May of 1241. The original of the charter is no longer extant, but late fifteenth-century evidence attests to its existence. On the dating, see Symes, Common Stage, 85–86. For information on the manuscripts and editions and for presentation of the texts alongside each other, see Roger Berger, Le nécrologe de la Confrérie des jongleurs et des bourgeois d’Arras (1194–1361), Commission départementale des monuments historiques du Pas-de-Calais: Mémoires, vols. 11.2, 13,2 (Arras, France: [Commission départementale des monuments historiques du Pas-de-Calais], 1963–1970), 137–56. A briefer account is in Faral, Les jongleurs en France, 133–42. The latest terminus post quem would be when a fourteenth-century minstrel refers to the miracle: Jean de Condé, Dit des Jacobins et des Fremeneurs (Song of the Dominican and Franciscan friars), dated 1313; for which, see La messe des oiseaux et le Dit des jacobins et des fremeneurs, ed. Jacques Ribard, Textes littéraires français, vol. 170 (Geneva: Droz, 1970). For brief discussion, see Wilkins, Music in the Age of Chaucer, 143.

ergotism. The disease is known variously as le mal des ardents (the malady of the burning, or fevered) in French, ignis sacer (holy fire) in Latin, and Saint Anthony’s or Saint Martial’s fire in English. A form of ergotism caused by ergot poisoning, this affliction resulted from ingesting alkaloids produced by a fungus (in the Linnaean nomenclature, Claviceps purpurea) on grains such as rye. Long-term consumption of fungus-ridden foodstuffs, especially infested rye bread, resulted in disease, which in turn led to both convulsive and gangrenous symptoms, with the latter being associated with a burning skin condition. The ergot contained a natural hallucinogen, the psychoactive ingredient of which is lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). See Jacques Devalette et al., La peste de feu: Le miracle des Ardents et l’ergotisme en Limousin au Moyen Age, Les cahiers d’Archéa, vol. 3 (Limoges, France: Archéa, 1994).

Itier. Normand was a native of Saint-Pol-sur-Ternoise, while Itier hailed from Brabant.

Brotherhood of the Holy Candle. In French, Confrérie de la Sainte Chandelle.

confraternity of jongleurs. It was also known more fully as the Brotherhood of Jongleurs and Burghers of Arras (Confrérie des Jongleurs et des Bourgeois d’Arras) and as the Charity of Our Lady of the Fevered of Arras (Charité de Notre Dame des Ardents d’Arras). See Berger, Le nécrologe de la confrérie; L. B. Richardson, “The ‘Confrérie des jongleurs et des bourgeois’ and the ‘Puy d’Arras’ in Twelfth and Thirteenth Century Literature,” in Studies in Honor of Mario A. Pei, ed. John Fisher and Paul A. Gaeng, Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, vol. 114 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 161–71; Catherine Vincent, “Fraternité rêvée et lien social fortifié: La confrérie Notre-Dame des Ardents à Arras (début du XIIIe siècle–XVe siècle),” Revue du Nord 337 (2000), 659–79. For useful tidbits of antiquarianism (and images), see also Louis Cavrois de Saternault, Histoire du Saint-Cierge d’Arras et de la Confrérie de Notre-Dame des Ardents, 3rd ed. (Arras, France: Imprimerie de la Société du Pas-de-Calais, 1910). Such confraternities were religious associations that brought together individuals of the same social class, often of the same profession, who agreed to abide by the statutes of the group and to support its other members. In return for an entrance fee and annual dues, this organization connected its members with the church and saw to the support of the impoverished and the burial of the deceased.

One activity of the confraternity, the foundation of which is documented around 1175, was to present plays: a member was Adam de la Halle, the author and composer of the famous early French play with music, The Play of Robin and Marion (Jeu de Robin et Marion), composed in 1282 or 1283. Not much is to be made of the fact that the woman’s name Marion is a variant of the French Marie (Mary).

guilds for minstrels. Wilkins, Music in the Age of Chaucer, 126.

Our Lady of the Fevered. Domina nostra ardentium.

pulled down by a mob. For a depiction of the destruction as it took place, see Charles de Linas, La Confrérie de Notre-Dame des Ardents d’Arras (Paris: Didron, 1857), plate between pp. 56 and 57. A very different replacement in Romanesque revival style, sadly banal in contrast to the original, was completed and consecrated in 1876 (see Fig. n.3).

Fig. n.3 Consecration of the new Cathédrale d’Arras. Illustration, 1876. Published in Le Monde illustré (1876), 356.

reliquary. Linas, La Confrérie, frontispiece.

the language of Marian miracles. Philippart, “Le récit miraculaire marial,” 580.

a story’s just a story. Stephen King, 11/12/16: A Novel (New York: Pocket Books, 2011), 52.

Festival of Our Lady of the Fevered. Fête de Notre Dame des Ardents.

conflated to this day. Esil, “Les jongleurs de Notre-Dame,” 29–30.

establish group identities. Kay Brainerd Slocum, “Confrérie, Bruderschaft and Guild: The Formation of Musicians’ Fraternal Organisations in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Europe,” Early Music History 14 (1995): 257–74.

guilds. On the precise nature of the guilds, see Wilkins, Music in the Age of Chaucer, 138 (he identifies the Confrérie des Jongleurs et des Bourgois d’Arras as “probably merely a benefit society” and the Confrérie de Notre Dame des Ardents as “really a religious guild”).

segue from bodily movement. John Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants, 1: 198–204, posits that the change from bodily to musical performance was favored during the thirteenth century.

within places of worship. To take but one example, the French vernacular verse La vie de saint Thomas Becket, by Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, was recited at the tomb of the saint in the cathedral at Canterbury. See Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, A Life of Thomas Becket in Verse: La Vie de saint Thomas Becket, trans. Ian Short, Mediaeval Sources in Translation, vol. 56 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2013).

The Pious Sweat of Monks and Lay Brothers

Genius is one percent inspiration. Although attributed traditionally to Edison, the quotation has a disputed origin and wording. See https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/12/14/genius-ratio/#note-5018-8

five different versions. For further information, see Albertus Poncelet, “Miraculorum B. V. Mariae quae saec. VI–XV latine conscripta sunt index,” Analecta Bollandiana 21 (1902): 241–360, no. 576; Tubach, Index Exemplorum, 265, no. 3404: “Monks of Clairvaux harvesting” (Tubach connects the exemplum with another motif, p. 386, no. 5114: “Virgin, Blessed, collects drops of sweat. The Virgin Mary collected drops of sweat from hardworking monks and nuns”); France, Separate but Equal, 42–43; McGuire, “Lost Clairvaux Exemplum Collection Found,” 38–41.

twelfth-century brother of Clairvaux. Herbert of Clairvaux (died ca. 1198), Liber miraculorum, in PL 185: 1273–36, at 1273–75 (1.1). See Michael Casey, “Herbert of Clairvaux’s Book of Wonderful Happenings,” Cistercian Studies 25 (1990): 37–64, at 49–50 (with Engl. trans.).

Bright Valley. Likewise, Clara Vallis in Latin. The etymology is explained gracefully in passing in Wilhelm Preetorius, Der Tänzer unserer lieben Frau (Zurich: Die Waage, 1964), on the third and fourth unnumbered pages.

wiped the sweat. The same miracle story appeared earlier in Conrad of Eberbach, Exordium magnum Cisterciense, 3.13, 2nd ed. Griesser (1994), 161–64; ed. Griesser (1961), 176–77; Collectaneum exemplorum 4.16 [90]: ed. Legendre, 289 (text), 409–10 (sources); and London, British Library, MS Additional 15,723 (late twelfth century), for which, see Ward, Catalogue of Romances, 2: 629.

much later telling. This much later version is by a fifteenth-century German Dominican, Johannes Herolt (d. 1468), called Discipulus: Miracle 6, in Miracles of the Blessed Virgin Mary, ed. C. C. Swinton Bland (London: Routledge, 1928), 23. See Guy Philippart, “Les miracles mariaux de Jean Herolt (1434) et la Legenda aurea,” Le moyen français 32.1 (1993): 53–67; Philippart, “Le récit miraculaire marial,” 578.

monk of Villers. Abundus of Villers, as related by Goswin of Bossut, “Life of Abundus,” in Martinus Cawley, Send Me God (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2003), 234.

first hearing this exemplum. Caesarius heard the exemplum in 1199 as told by Gevard, abbot of Heisterbach.

dispatched a breeze to cool them. Caesarius, Dialogus miraculorum, book 1, chap. 17: ed. Strange, 1: 24–25; trans. Scott and Bland, 1: 25–26.

chock-full of exempla. On exempla in Caesarius, see Jaap van Moolenbroek, “Over exempels, wonderen en visioenen in het werk van Caesarius van Heisterbach,” Millennium: Tijdschrift voor middeleeuwse studies 12.1 (1997): 15–29.

Great Dialogue of Visions and Miracles. Dialogus magnus visionum atque miraculorum.

Eight such apparitions. Laurentin and Sbalchiero, Dizionario, 170–72.

In this poem. For the original text, see Gautier de Coinci, Miracles, ed. Koenig, 4: 412–17 (2.31: “De un moigne de Chartrose”). For discussion and translation (into modern French), see Gautier de Coinci, Cinq miracles de Notre-Dame, trans. Jean-Louis Gabriel Benoît, Traductions des classiques du Moyen Âge, vol. 78 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2007), 139–51. For appraisal of the resemblances between Gautier’s miracle and Our Lady’s Tumbler, see especially trans. Benoît, 139–40, 143; Bretel, Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame, 13–14, 18–19. This miracle was omitted from Adolfo Mussafia’s source study of Les Miracles de Nostre Dame, on the grounds that Gaston Raynaud, in “Le Miracle de Sardenai,” Romania 11 (1882): 519–37; 14 (1885): 82–93, had sourced the miracle with which it is transmitted. As poor luck would have it, Raynaud does not deal at all with the miracle of the Carthusian monk. See Adolfo Mussafia, Über die von Gautier de Coincy benützten Quellen, Denkschriften der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien, philosophisch-historische Classe, vol. 44.1 (Vienna: In Commission bei F. Tempsky, 1894), 6.

fellow monk sees Mary. Identified solely as a “virgin” or “maiden” (pucele).

Song of the Knight and the Squire. Jehan de Saint-Quentin, “Le dit du chevalier et de l’escuier,” in Dits en quatrains d’alexandrins monorimes de Jehan de Saint-Quentin, ed. Birger Munk Olsen (Paris: Société des anciens textes français, 1978), 68–76.

third form of the legend. Gautier de Coinci, Miracles, ed. Koenig, 4: 378–411 (2.30: “Miracle Nostre Dame de Sardenay”). On the worship of the icon, see Bernard Hamilton, “Our Lady of Saidnaiya: An Orthodox Shrine Revered by Muslims and Knights Templar at the Time of the Crusades,” in The Holy Land, Holy Lands, and Christian History, ed. Robert Norman Swanson, Studies in Church History, vol. 36 (Woodbridge, UK: Published for the Ecclesiastical History Society by the Boydell Press, 2000), 207–15; Benjamin Z. Kedar, “Convergences of Oriental Christian, Muslim, and Frankish Worshippers: The Case of Saydnaya,” in De Sion exibit lex et verbum domini de Hierusalem: Essays on Medieval Law, Liturgy and Literature in Honour of Amnon Linder, ed. Yitzhak Hen (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001), 59–69, and in The Crusades and the Military Orders: Expanding the Frontiers of Medieval Latin Christianity, ed. Zsolt Hunyadi and József Laszlovszky (Budapest: CEU, 2001), 89–100; Michele Bacci, “A Sacred Space for a Holy Icon: The Shrine of Our Lady of Saydnaya,” in Hierotopy: The Creation of Sacred Spaces in Byzantium and Medieval Russia, ed. Alexei Lidov (Moscow: Indrik, 2006), 373–87.

hand towel. In French, touvaille: Abbé Alexandre-Eusèbe Poquet, ed., Les miracles de la sainte Vierge, traduits et mis en vers par Gautier de Coincy (Paris: Parmantier, Didron, 1857), cols. 647–672, at 669, line 922.

The Love of Statuesque Beauty

another famous Marian miracle. Pinto-Mathieu, La Vie des Pères, 793–818; Camille, Gothic Idol, 237–39.

bed trick. See Wendy Doniger, The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

elements from these other accounts. For the broadest perspective, see Theodore Ziolkowski, Disenchanted Images: A Literary Iconology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 18–77. We will return to the Marian tales in Chapter 18.

The Venus of Ille. This is a tale that Marcel Proust said he was not allowed to read: see Bernard de Fallois, ed., Contre Sainte-Beuve (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 238.

The Holy Face of Christ and Virgin Saints

Holy Face. In Italian, Volto Santo.

Lucca. An Italian commune in Tuscany. On the origins and spread of the cult, see Diana Webb, “The Holy Face of Lucca,” Anglo-Norman Studies: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 9 (1987): 227–37. With specific reference to the tale of the jongleur and the Madonna at Lucca, see Valeria Bertolucci Pizzorusso, La Vergine e il Volto: Il miracolo del giullare (Lucca, Italy: M. Pacini Fazzi, 2009). More generally, see Chiara Frugoni, “Una proposta per il Volto Santo,” in Il Volto Santo: Storia e culto. Catalogo della mostra (Lucca, 21 ottobre–21 dicembre 1982), ed. Clara Baracchini and Maria Teresa Filieri (Lucca, Italy: Maria Pacini Fazzi, 1982), 15–48.

ankle-length tunic,. The garment is designated in Latin by the term colubium.

This is no place for the Holy Face!. Inferno 21.48: “Qui non ha luogo il Santo Volto.”

Piers Plowman. Piers Plowman 6.103.

the image was widely revered. Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs, 254–55. In the process, images of it became, and have stayed, influential in iconography. See Reiner Hausherr, “Das Imerwardkreutz und der Volto-Santo Typ,” Zeitschrift für Kunstwissenschaft 16 (1962): 129–67; idem, “Volto Santo,” in Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, ed. Engelbert Kirschbaum, 8 vols. (Freiburg, Germany: Herder, 1968–1976), 8: 471–72; Jerzy Golos, “The Crucified Female and the Poor Fiddler: The Long Life of a Legend,” RIdIM/RCMI Newsletter 11.1 (Spring 1986): 8–10; Olimpia Gołdys, “Ein mysteriöser Spielmann: Zu den kulturgeschichtlichen Aspekten der ‘Spielmanns-Ikonographie’ in den Volto-Santo-/Kümmernis-Darstellungen vom 13. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert,” Music in Art 33.1–2 (Spring–Fall 2008): 149–67.

Gospel of John. 3:1 and 19:39.

deposing Christ from the cross. Relatio Leboini 1, in Bibliotheca hagiographica Latina antiquae et mediae aetatis, ed. Société des Bollandistes, Subsidia Hagiographica, vol. 6, 2 vols. (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1898–1901), 1: 629 (no. 4236). For discussion, see Corine Schleif, “Nicodemus and Sculptors: Self-Reflexivity in Works by Adam Kraft and Tilman Riemenschneider,” The Art Bulletin 75.4 (1993): 599–626, at 608–10; Michele Camillo Ferrari, “‘Imago visibilis Christi’: Le ‘Volto Santo’ de Lucques et les images authentiques au Moyen Âge,” in La visione e lo sguardo nel Medioevo—View and Vision in the Middle Ages, SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2 vols. Micrologus: Natura, scienze e società medievali/Nature, Sciences and Medieval Societies: Rivista della Società internazionale per lo studio del medio evo latino 6 (1998): 29–42.

arrived in Lucca. To this day, the cross is situated in the same Tuscan city, in a chapel of the cathedral of San Martino. The chapel was built in 1484 to house it in the right-hand nave.

Illumination of the Holy Cross. In Italian, Luminara di Santa Croce.

takes place annually. On the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, each September 13.

miracles about the Holy Face. For edition and for dating on stylistic basis, see the still foundational work by Gustav Schnürer and Joseph M. Ritz, Sankt Kümmernis und Volto Santo: Studien und Bilder, Forschungen zur Volkskunde, vols. 13–15 (Düsseldorf, Germany: L. Schwann, 1934), 133, and, in addition, Michele C. Ferrari, “Identità e imagine del Volto Santo di Lucca,” in La Santa Croce di Lucca: Storia, tradizioni, immagini. Atti del convegno, Villa Bottini, 1–3 marzo 2001 (Lucca, Italy: Dell’Acero, 2003), 92–102, at 97.

let fall a silver slipper. In Thompson, Motif-Index, the gesture is subsumed as motif D1622.3: “Saint’s image lets golden shoe (ring) fall as sign of favor to suppliant.” This motif is closely related to D1622.2: “Image of Virgin bows to indicate favor.”

the miracle is confirmed. Schnürer and Ritz, Sankt Kümmernis, 159–78; Peter Spranger, Der Geiger von Gmünd: Justinus Kerner und die Geschichte einer Legende (Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany: Stadtarchiv, 1980; 2nd ed. 1991).

Saint Bertin. In Saint-Omer, France. Wendelin Foerster, “Le saint vou de Luques,” Romanische Forschungen 23.1 (1907): 1–55. The account is given in the prologue to a work known as La Vengeance Jhesu Christ (ca. 1430) by Eustache Marcade.

Jenois. His name probably derives from that of an early Christian martyr named Genesius.

encrusted in precious stones. Bejeweled half-shoes of silver were an uncommon adornment but are known from the wardrobe of Madonnas elsewhere, as in the English town of Ipswich (where the Madonna no longer exists) and in the Italian town of Nettuno: see Smith, Madonna of Ipswich, 23.

substantial reparation. The most complex and radical explanation has been prompted by the parallel to Cinderella in the motif of the shoe. See Jean-Claude Schmitt, “Cendrillon crucifiée: À propos du Volto Santo de Lucques,” in Miracles, prodiges et merveilles au Moyen Âge. Actes des congrès de la Société des historiens médiévistes de l’enseignement supérieur public. XXVe Congrès, Orléans, juin 1994, Série Histoire ancienne et médiévale, vol. 34 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1995), 241–69; idem, “Réalité matérielle et réalité symbolique: A propos du soulier de Christ,” in “Pictura quasi fictura”: Die Rolle des Bildes in der Erforschung von Alltag und Sachkultur des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Gerhard Jaritz, Internationales Round-Table-Gespräch Krems an der Donau, vol. 3 (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1996), 73–85.

song of heroic deeds. In French, chanson de geste.

singing an editorial. Aliscans, ed. Claude Régnier, trans. Andrée Subrenat and Jean Subrenat, Champion classiques. Moyen Âge (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2007), 328–31 (4821–31 [4759–69]): “I can well tell you and assert as true: a nobleman should not listen to a jongleur if he does not wish, by God, to give of what he has, for the jongleur does not know another way of working for his living… You can verify by the Holy Face of Lucca, which threw down to him its shoe… We ought to love jongleurs greatly: they seek out joy, and love to sing it” (my translation).

Overt incredulity. Boncompagno da Signa, Rhetorica antiqua (or Boncompagnus): no citation is provided by Gustav Schnürer, “Die Spielmannslegende,” in Die Görresgesellschaft im Jahre 1914: Jahresbericht und Abhandlungen der Herren Birkner, Büchi, Ehses, Rücker, Schnürer (Cologne, Germany: J. P. Bachem, 1914), 78–90, at 83.

stranger transmogrification. The bibliography on the tale is extensive. Key studies are Schnürer and Ritz, Sankt Kümmernis; Spranger, Der Geiger von Gmünd; Regine Schweizer-Vüllers, Die Heilige am Kreuz: Studien zum weiblichen Gottesbild im späten Mittelalter und in der Barockzeit, Deutsche Literatur von den Anfängen bis 1700, vol. 26 (Bern, Switzerland: P. Lang, 1997). For a good distillation in English of what is known and what has been hypothesized, see Ilse E. Friesen, The Female Crucifix: Images of St. Wilgefortis since the Middle Ages (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001), 35–45. In German, the standard encyclopedia entry is Peter Spranger, “Kümmernis,” in EdM, 8: 604–7.

Brothers Grimm. The Brothers Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen (repr. Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986; 1st ed. 1812–1815), 2: 293–94 (no. 66: “Die heilige Frau Kummernis”) and xxxxix (notes). In the overall count of the Grimm’s tales, this one is reckoned no. 152a (and may be compared with no. 139). In the standard system of folktale tale types, this one is now subsumed as ATU 706 D: “Kümmernis,” according to the standard classification system, ATU. The same motif also appeared in the Brothers Grimm, Deutsche Sagen, ed. Hans-Jörg Uther, 3 vols. (Munich, Germany: Diederichs, 1993), 1: 269–70 (no. 330: “Die Jungfrau mit dem Bart”). In this instance they followed Johannes Praetorius, Gazophylaci Gaudium: Das ist, Ein Ausbund von Wündschel-Ruthen, oder sehr lustreiche und ergetzliche Historien von wunderseltzamen Erfindungen der Schätze Wünschelruthe (Leipzig, Germany: Ritzsch, 1667), 152–53. See Johannes Bolte and George Polívka, Anmerkungen zu den Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm, 5 vols. (Leipzig, Germany: Dieterich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1913–1932), 3: 241.

collection of exempla from 1700. Entitled Ovum paschale novum, oder, Neugefärbte Oster-Ayr (new Easter egg or newly colored Easter eggs) das ist, Viertzig geistliche Discurs auff den H. Ostertag und Ostermontag, by the Catholic preacher and parish priest Andreas Strobl (Salzburg, Austria: M. Haan, 1694), 216–17, who drew in turn upon Benignus Kybler, Wunder-Spiegel, oder göttliche Wunderwerck auss dem Alt- und Neuen Testament zu einem beyhülfflichen Vorrath allerhand Predigen (2 vols. [Munich, Germany: In Verlegung Johan Wagners: Johann Hermanns von Geldern; gedruckt bey Sebastian Rauch, 1678–1682], 1: 505). On the sources of the exemplum in the latter, see Renate Vollmer, Die Exempel im “Wunderspiegel” des P. Benignus Kybler S.J. von 1678, ed. Wolfgang Brückner und Lenz Kriss-Rettenbeck, Veröffentlichungen zur Volkskunde und Kulturgeschichte 35 (Würzburg, Germany: Bayerische Blätter für Volkskunde, 1989), 31, no. 144.

Kummernis. This corresponds to the more common Kümmernis, with an umlaut.

sundry other names. She is known also in English as Saint Uncumber, which derives in turn from the Middle Dutch Ontkommer, signifying “freedom from care” (from the negative prefix ont- and the noun kommer). Names in other languages are: Liberata in Italian and Librada in Spanish, presumably implying something similar to the German, since both mean “freed” in Italian and Spanish. The French Débarras is similar, since it denotes “riddance.”

strong maiden. Latin, virgo fortis. For Wilgefortis, see Acta Sanctorum (July), 5: 63. For iconography and history, see Friedrich Gorissen, “Das Kreuz von Lucca und die H. Wilgifortis/Ontcommer am unteren Rhein: Ein Beitrag zur Hagiographie und Ikonographie,” Numaga 15 (1968): 122–48.

The tale is widely attested. Hans-Jörg Uther, Handbuch zu den “Kinder- und Hausmärchen” der Brüder Grimm: Entstehung, Wirkung, Interpretation, 2nd ed. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 457. See also Friesen, Female Crucifix, 9–18 (on Volto Santo), 47–62 (on Ontkommer and Uncumber), 63–80 (on Wilgefortis), 81–110 (on Kummernis). On the iconography, see Marco Paoli and Carla Simonetti, “L’iconografia del Volto Santo in codici e stampati,” in Il Volto Santo: Storia e culto. Catalogo della mostra (Lucca, 21 ottobre–21 dicembre 1982), ed. Clara Baracchini and Maria Teresa Filieri (Lucca, Italy: Maria Pacini Fazzi, 1982), 49–58.

The Image at Lucca. In German, “Die Bildnus [sic] zu Luca.” The woodcut is labeled “Sant Kümernus.” For information and reproduction, see Hans Burgkmair, Das graphische Werk: 1473–1973 (Augsburg, Germany: Städtische Kunstsammlungen, 1973), no. 38, catalogue no. 39.

folk art. Koraljka Kos, “St. Kümmernis and Her Fiddler (An Approach to Iconology of Pictorial Folk Art),” Studia Musicologica 19 (1977): 251–66.

1816 ballad. Entitled Der Geiger zu Gmünd (The fiddler of Gmünd) by the Swabian poet Andreas Justinus Kerner.

Saint Cecilia. The writer had been inspired to compose his poem by seeing a representation of Kummernis with an accompanying account of the legend.

image of Cecilia. In a chapel in Gmünd.

matching item of footwear. The ballad, still known today, enjoyed surges of popularity in the past. The German painter Hermann Knackfuss produced an engraving of this version as a book illustration that was printed in 1871, at the time of the Franco-Prussian War: Hermann Knackfuß, “Der Geiger zu Gmünd Buchillustration,” in Alte und Neue Welt: Illustrierte Katholische Monatsschrift zur Unterhaltung und Belehrung 5 (1871): 308, reproduced at p. 103 as fig. 49.

The Hermit. Der Einsiedler or Der geigende Eremit: Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen, Preussischer Kulturbesitz (Inv. Nr. A I 363), 90 × 69 cm (oil on wood): see Rolf Andree, Arnold Böcklin: Die Gemälde, 2nd ed. (Basel, Switzerland: F. Reinhardt; Munich, Germany: Hirmer, 1998), 457 (no. 384). The painting’s relevance as an analogue to the juggler tale was pointed out first in 1898 by Oelsner, “A Story by Anatole France,” 218.

The Miracle. Kurt Elbau, “Das Wunder,” Lübeckische Anzeigen 149, Morgen-Blatt, no. 393, August 6, 1899, 3. Cited by August Andrae, “Das Weiterleben alter Fablios, Lais, Legenden und anderer alter Stoffe,” Romanische Forschungen 16 (1904): 321–53, at 327.

the noun. See Wilhelm Schäfer, “Der Spielmann,” in idem, Erzählende Schriften, vol. 2: Rheinsagen (Munich, Germany: Müller, 1918), 73–74; repr. in Legenden: Alte Erzählungen in der Dichtung unserer Zeit, ed. Fritz Schloß, 29–30 (Sannerz, Germany: Gemeinschafts-Verlag, 1923), and ed. Fritz Schloß, 34–36 (with Scherenschnitt on 36) (Sannerz, Germany: Eberhard Arnold, 1925).

The Dancer of Our Lady. The German is Der Tänzer unserer lieben Frau. To take four examples from across more than four decades, this was the case with the 1921 adaptation of the tale as a play by Franz Johannes Weinrich, the 1922 translation of the Old French into German by Carl Sigmar Gutkind, a 1963 setting of the story to electronic music composed in 1963 by Konrad Boehmer for a ballet that was performed a year later, and the 1964 scissor-art version of the story by Wilhelm Preetorius.

The sixty-minute composition by Boehmer was commissioned by the Wuppertal ballet company (Wuppertaler Bühnen) during a spell when the composer was active in the West German Broadcasting Company (WDR) in Cologne. The music was recorded in the broadcaster’s electronic studio and was performed by the ballet company on January 30, 1964. The ballet was by Erich Walter and Heinrich Wendel, with soloists Inge Koch and André Doutreval. See Konrad Boehmer, Doppelschläge: Texte zur Musik, vol. 1: Texte zur Musik: 1958–1967, ed. Stefan Fricke and Christian Grün, Quellentexte zur Musik des 20./21. Jahrhunderts, vol. 12 (Saarbrücken, Germany: Pfau, 2009), 158–59.

Friedrich Hedler. Friedrich Hedler, Der Tänzer unserer lieben Frau: Ein Spiel nach altfranzösischen und altdeutschen Motiven (Munich, Germany: Buchner, 1950). The cover has a woodcut by P. J. Paffenholz, and the foreword indicates that the accompanying music (formerly available through the publisher) was by Erwin Mausz. Hedler had been an opponent of Goebbels within the Rosenberg faction of the National Socialists: see Friedrich Hedler, “Wiedergeburt der Schauspielkunst aus dem Geist der Dichtung,” Bausteine 2 (1934): 97–103. Works with the same German title that tell instead the story of Our Lady’s Tumbler have been written by Wilhelm Preetorius and Franz Johannes Weinrich, as well as the translation by Curt Sigmar Gutkind in Fraenger.

The Miracle of the Golden Shoes. Maria Dutli-Rutishauer, Das Wunder der goldenen Schuhe und andere Legenden, illus. Johannes Wohlfahrt (Rottenburg/Neckar, Germany: Pfeilerverlag, 1954).

Loving Mother of the Savior. Dutli-Rutishauer, Das Wunder der goldenen Schuhe, 65–68: Alma redemptoris mater.

Tell Me Something!. Henry Blauth and Kurt Roderbourg, Erzähl mir was! (Boston: Ginn, 1960), 126–33 (“Der Spielmann unserer lieben Frau”).

The Poor Minstrel. “Der arme Spielmann,” in Festkalendar von Frz. Graf Bocci, G. Görres und ihren Freunden, 10 (Munich: Cotta, and Vienna: Mechitaristen, 1836), 6. Cited by Schnürer, “Die Spielmannslegende,” 89–90.