I
recently signed a contract with the Oxford University Press to compile a little
book to be called A Cabinet of Medieval
Curiosities--one of a number of such “cabinets” already published or in the
course of preparation. I’ll be
grateful for any curiosities suggested by my readers. The medieval genre of sacred biography (i.e., saints’ lives)
is a rich acre, and I have begun rummaging around in the two classic English
language collections of the Lives of the
Saints by Alban Butler and by Sabine Baring-Gould. I am in search of a certain Celtic holy
man whose name I have forgotten.
Beheaded by his pagan tormentors beside a watercourse, he showed his
contempt for the whole proceedings by then swimming across the stream with his head in his teeth.
Miracles,
often extravagant and preferably in profusion, were a requirement of medieval
saints’ lives. Indeed the practice
developed of separating them off in a special sub-volume called Miracula so as to allow the straight
biography to flow more smoothly.
Modern biographers might find a useful hint here. Most of the ones I’ve read recently
could be improved by segregating about a third of their materials in a
subsidiary volume of Sexualia.
Of
course if you are looking for real curiosities, the periods of the alleged
Renaissance or of the Enlightenment are the places to do it. Hagiography comprised a significant
portion of the ecclesiastical literature of the Middle Ages. It is not to be supposed that the new
scholarly spirit enabled by the printing press would neglect it entirely, and
it soon attracted the same energetic and exacting philology that had produced
numerous impressive editions of classical texts and Erasmus’s groundbreaking
edition of the Greek New Testament.
The great scholarly experts in saints’ lives were a group of Jesuits in
the Low Countries who had taken scholarly hagiography as their special
vocation. They continue to this
very day and are generally called the Bollandists after one of the prominent
early scholars, John Bolland (1596-1665), though the chief protagonist of the
episode I am about to relate was Daniel Papebroch (1628-1714).
The amazing fruit of the
Bollandists’ labors is called the Acta
Sanctorum, the vast scholarly library of saints’ lives searched out from
the monastic and secular libraries of Europe, a collection indispensable for
the scholar of medieval history, literature, and folk lore. The monastic historian David Knowles,
in his endlessly engaging and informative lectures on Great Historical Enterprises, reports an episode of seventeenth-century
ecclesiastical warfare concerning the Acta
that, though deadly serious to its contemporary combatants, must strike most
modern readers as whimsical.
Some volumes of the Acta Sanctorum: Heavy Scholarship
Few works would seem less likely
candidates for ecclesiastical censure than the Bollandists’ huge volumes of
erudite piety. Their dangers are perhaps
real enough—it might prove fatal to attempt to read one in bed. Avoirdupois, however, is not primarily
a spiritual peril. Yet for two decades of the seventeenth
century several recently published volumes of the Acta lay beneath the condemnation of the Spanish Inquisition, and
the Bollandists’ whole enterprise languished while Daniel Papebroch conducted
tedious and dubious battle for his brothers’ vindication in ecclesiastical courts
in Rome and elsewhere.
Papebroch’s crime was to have cast
doubt, in the editorial apparatus to the life of Saint Albert of Jerusalem
(Alberto Avogardo, 1149-1214, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem beginning in
1204) upon the origin myth of the Carmelite Order. The Carmelites, often called the White Friars, were one of
the four new orders of mendicant friars to win papal approval—along with the
Franciscans, the Dominicans, and the Augustinians—in the early thirteenth
century. The actual date of papal authorization
was 1224, but the Patriarch of Jerusalem had some years earlier
confirmed their rule within his jurisdiction. But the White Friars themselves claimed that the Order had
been in continuous existence on Mount Carmel since the time of the prophets
Elijah and Elisha, who were in fact the
first Carmelites. It is
probable that for many of the early friars the idea of the historical connection
with Elijah was as authoritative as the words of the rule itself. The idea that a Christian religious
order should antedate Christ by a millennium or so seemed to present no problem
for the Carmelites.
The Medieval Carmelite Family with Their Protectrice, the Blessed Virgin
Certainly the legendary origin of
Carmel was already widespread in the general religious culture of the late
Middle Ages, where it was by no means always swallowed whole. Chaucer refers to the myth—with obviously satiric intent—in
the “Summoner’s Tale”.* But in
Spain, where the Order was very strong—Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross
were two famous sixteen-century Spanish Carmelites—and where the inquisitorial
spirit was alive and kicking, one doubted it at one’s peril. If you think your Division of Motor
Vehicles is a malign and intractable bureaucracy, you are doubtless right. Now imagine such an entity with the
power to burn you at the stake and you have something of the tenor of dealing
with a consistory court in the Archdiocese of Toledo.
That’s what poor Father Papebroch
was up against. This sort of thing
shouldn’t happen even to a Jesuit!
As Knowles suggests, such a curious episode in the history of
scholarship would deserve a more thorough study than a blog entry. It’s a little hard to imagine, though,
a scholarly journal sufficiently specialized to be interested.
*"But syn Elye was, or Elise [Elijah…Elisha]
Han freres been -- that fynde I of record
– " ("Summoner's Tale," 2116-17)
