I am indebted to the careful readings and suggestions of Philippe Buc, Thomas Kaiser, Maureen Miller, Amy Remensnyder, and Bruce Smoller.
1. Heinrich von Hervordia, Liber de rebus memorabilioribus sive chronicon Henrici de Hervordia, ed. August Potthast (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1859), 268–69: “Tricesimo primo anno Lodewici in conversione Pauli [January 25] et circa fuit terremotus in Carinthya tota et Cornicula, sevus in tantum, quod quilibet de vita desperavit. . . . Hec ex littera conventus Frisacensis ad priorem provincialem Theutonie. Item in eadem dicitur, quod hoc anno ignis de celo cadens terram Turchorum ad 16 dietas consumpsit. Item hoc anno pluit aliquot diebus bufones et serpentes. De quibus multi homines perierunt. Item hiis temporibus pestilentia jam invaluit in multis partibus mundi.” Portions of Heinrich’s descriptions of the plague are translated in Rosemary Horrox, The Black Death, Manchester Medieval Sources Series (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 127–30, 150–53.
2. Annales Austriae, continuatio novimontensis, ed. D. Wilhelmus Wattenbach, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptorum 9 (Hanover: Hahn, 1851), 674 (version in column 1, Codex episcopalis):
In die conversionis beati Pauli universalis terremotus hora vesparum emersit, sed in aliquibus locis vehementior ac crudelior, quemadmodum in Villaco [Villach, in Carinthia] evidentius est ostensum. . . . Item eodem anno infinita disturbia in diversis regionibus apparuerunt, quemadmodum principaliter orta fuit seva pestilentia ultra in partibus orientalibus, et per diversos effectus immanissime omnes ibidem interficiebat, ex maligna impressione superiorum causa efficiente. Nam sicut ex relatione veridica didicimus, homines et iumenta in illis temporibus quemadmodum erant in labore et loco qualicunque constituti, per validam aeris corruptionem in lapides transmutati sunt.
There is an English translation in Horrox, Black Death, 59–61, but she translates the version from the Codex novimontensis, p. 674, col. 2. The only significant differences here are that the Codex novimontensis has “in partibus transmarinis” for “in partibus orientalibus” and “ita in lapides transmutabantur” for “in lapides transmutati sunt.”
3. Continuatio novimontensis, 674, col. 1:
Insuper in partibus ubi cinciber nascitur, letalis pluvia roravit, mixta cum serpentibus pestiferis et vermibus diversis, cunctosque super quos inundavit, penitus extinxit. Non longe etiam ab illa regione accidit, quod terribilis ignis de celo fulminavit, et cuncta que erant in superficie terre consumpsit; lapides vero virtute illius ignis ita ardebant, ac si naturaliter in arida ligna fuissent transmutati; fumus etiam inde procedens fuit valde contagiosus, ita ut mercatores ipsum a longe intuentes continuo inficerentur, nonnulli etiam ex eis ibidem finierunt vitam. Qui autem fortuitu evaserunt, pestilentiam quam arripuerant, secum deportaverunt; et cuncta loca ad que cum mercimoniis applicuerunt, quemadmodum in Greciam, Italiam, Romam, infecerunt, et vicinas regiones per quas transierunt.
4. Breve Chronicon clerici anonymi ex MS Bibliotheca Regiae Bruxellis, in J.-J.de Smet, ed., Recueil des chroniques de Flandre/Corpus chronicorum flandriae (Brussels:Hayez, 1856), 3: 14:
Eodem anno [1347], in mense septembri, incepit quaedam et maxima mortalitas et pestilentia, ut vidi in transcripto literarum cantoris et canonici Sancti Donatiani [namely, Louis Heyligen] contineri, qui eo tempore in curia Romana cum cardinali domino suo consistebat, quas literas sociis suis Brugis pro novis et trementibus transmiserat: videlicet quod circa Yndiam majorem in orientalibus partibus in quadam provincia terribilia quedam et tempestates inaudite totam illam provinciam tribus diebus oppressam tenuerunt. Primo quidem die ranas pluit, serpentes, lacertos, scorpiones et multa hujus generis venenatorum animalium; secundo vero die audita sunt tonitrua, et ceciderunt fulgura et choruscationes mixte cum grandinibus mire magnitudinis super terram, que occiderunt quasi omnes homines, a majori usque ad minimum; tercio die descendit ignis fetido fumo de celo, qui totum residuum hominum et animalium consumpsit, et omnes civitates et castra illarum partium combussit. Ex quibus tempestatibus tota illa provincia est infecta, et conjecturatur quod ex infectione illa, per fetidum flatum venti ex parte plage meridionalis venientis, totum litus maris et omnes vicine terre infecte sunt, et semper de die in diem plus inficiuntur, et jam venit circa partes marinas, voluntate Dei, per hunc modum, ut quidam suspicantur.
This letter also is translated in Horrox, 41–45, who identifies its author.
5. There has been surprisingly little written about the apocalyptic interpretation of the plague. Many modern authors note that people living in the fourteenth century viewed the plague as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but do not add much beyond that observation. For example, Robert S. Gottfried notes that “The Black Death was an ideal spur to millenarianism, and several natural disasters that occurred in 1348, including a number of earthquakes, seemed to provide physical evidence of the demise of the world.” The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe (New York: Free Press, 1983), 72. He devotes less than one paragraph to millennial movements and beliefs attendant on the plague, however. Plague figures not at all in Marjorie Reeves’s magisterial The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969; rep. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993). Robert E. Lerner’s work poses one significant exception to this rule. In an article devoted specifically to the plague’s impact on European eschatology, Lerner argues that plague did little to change ideas about the apocalypse (as, say, the rise of papal monarchy had done), but rather fourteenth-century Europeans readily fit the plague into preexisting apocalyptic scenarios. Lerner discusses several ways in which apocalyptic prophecies were retooled to provide an explanation of plague in his “The Black Death and Western European Eschatological Mentalities,” American Historical Review 86 (1981): 533–52; see also his The Powers of Prophecy: The Cedar of Lebanon Vision from the Mongol Onslaught to the Dawn of the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 114–22. See also Faye Marie Getz, “Black Death and the Silver Lining: Meaning, Continuity, and Revolutionary Change in Histories of Medieval Plague,” Journal of the History of Biology 24 (1991): 265–89, esp. 267–74. Getz offers a brief analysis of the apocalyptic slant of several plague chronicles.
6. For a discussion of geography as conquest and possession, specifically within a medieval context, see Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles, eds., Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), especially Sylvia Tomasch, “Introduction: Medieval Geographical Desire,”1–12.
7. The text appears in Robert Hoeniger, Der schwarze Tod in Deutschland: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des vierzehnten Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Eugen Grosser, 1882; rep. Wiesbaden: Martin Sändig, 1973), 155: “Coniunctiones enim et alie causa predicte partes istas [the south and the east] plus quam nostras respexerunt. Ista tamen cum indiciis [iudiciis?] astrologorum secundum dictum ptolemei inter necessarium et possibile sunt reponenda amplius quia uise fuerunt exalationes et inflammationes quam plurime, velut draco et sydera volantia.” (Hereafter cited as Opinion of the Paris Medical Faculty.) There is an English translation in Horrox, Black Death, 158–63.
8. See Sylvia Tomasch, “Medieval Geographical Desire.”
9. There is an enormous body of literature on the marvels of the east. See, e.g., John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988); Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, Fines Terrae: Die Enden der Erde und der vierte Kontinent auf mittelalterlichen Weltkarten, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Schriften, 36 (Hanover: Hahn, 1992); and Iain Higgins, Writing East: The Fourteenth-Century “Travels” of Sir John Mandeville (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). By the thirteenth century the marvels of the east were being naturalized in the writings of authors like Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon, who attributed the diversity of species and races in the east to the different influence of the stars on differing regions of the earth. See Katharine Park, “The Meanings of Natural Diversity: Marco Polo on the ‘Division’ of the World,” in Edith Sylla and Michael McVaugh, eds., Texts and Contexts in Ancient and Medieval Science: Studies on the Occasion of John E. Murdoch’s Seventieth Birthday (Leiden: Brill, 1997), esp. 140–43. Since I completed this chapter, there has also appeared Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998).
10. For a discussion outside the mappaemundi of the far from universal medieval notion of Jerusalem as the world’s center, see Iain Macleod Higgins, “Defining the Earth’s Center in a Medieval ‘Multi-Text’: Jerusalem in The Book of John Mandeville,” in Tomasch and Gilles, eds., Text and Territory, 29–53. On the mappaemundi, see David Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” in J. B. Harley and David Woodward, eds., The History of Cartography, vol. 1, Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 286–370.
11. M. C. Seymour, ed., Mandeville’s Travels (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 83.
12. See Seymour, Mandeville’s Travels, ch. 13, 80–81. Adso Dervensis, De Ortu et tempore Antichristi necnon et tractatus qui ab eo dependunt, ed. D. Verhelst, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis 45 (Turnholt: Brepols, 1976), 24. An English translation appears in John Wright, trans., The Play of Antichrist (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1967), 100–110. On medieval Antichrist lore in general see Richard Kenneth Emmerson, Antichrist in the Middle Ages: A Study of Medieval Apocalypticism, Art, and Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981); and Bernard McGinn, Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil (San Francisco: Harper, 1994).
13. Quoting from Robert Lerner’s composite edition of the prophecy as re-dated for 1347, ed. in Lerner, Powers of Prophecy, 226–31. Lerner’s book remains the fundamental study of this prophecy.
14. On the expectation of this universal conversion and its relationship to geography, see Jacques Chocheyras, “Fin des terres et fin des temps d’Hésychius (Ve siècle) à Béatus (VIIIe siècle),” in Werner Verbeke, Daniel Verhelst, and Andries Welkenhuysen, eds., The Use and Abuse of Eschatology in the Middle Ages, Mediaevalia Lovaniensia, series 1, 15 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1988), 72–81; and Pauline Moffitt Watts, “Prophecy and Discovery: On the Spiritual Origins of Christopher Columbus’s ‘Enterprise of the Indies,’ ” American Historical Review 90 (1985): 73–102.
15. “Tunc passagium erit commune ab omnibus fidelibus ultra aquas congregatas ad terram sanctam, et vincentur. Et civitas Ierusalem glorificabitur, et sepulcrum Domini ab omnibus honorabitur” (ed. in Lerner, Powers of Prophecy, 230). There were some apocalyptic expectations centering on Rome as well, reflected, for example, in the belief in a final angelic pope and a papal Antichrist. See Bernard McGinn, “Angel Pope and Papal Antichrist,” Church History 47 (1978): 155–73.
16. Hugh of St. Victor, De area Noe morali, 4:9, in J.-P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae cursus completus: series latina (Paris: Garnier Fratres, 1854), 176, col. 677:
Ordo autem loci, et ordo temporis fere per omnia secundum rerum gestarum seriem concurrere videntur, et ita per divinam providentiam videtur esse dispositum, ut quae in principio temporum gerebantur in Oriente, quasi in principio mundi gererentur, ac deinde ad finem profluente tempore usque ad Occidentem rerum summa descenderet, ut ex ipso agnoscamus appropinquare finem saeculi, quia rerum cursus jam attigit finem mundi.
The Cedar of Lebanon vision is an example of a prophecy that was retooled to place the fall of Acre within an apocalyptic scenario. See Lerner, Powers of Prophecy, 622–83.
17. See Iain Higgins, “Imagining Christendom from Jerusalem to Paradise: Asia in Mandeville’s Travels,” in Scott D. Westrem, ed., Discovering New Worlds: Essays on Medieval Exploration and Imagination (New York: Garland, 1991), 91–114.
18. Henry Knighton, Chronicon Henrici Knighton vel Cnitthon Monachi Leycestrensis, ed. Joseph Rawson Lumby, 2 vols., Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores, Rolls Series (hereafter Rolls Series) 92 (London: HMSO, 1895), 2: 58–59:
Isto anno et anno sequenti [1348–49] erat generalis mortalitas hominum in universo mundo. Et primo incepit in India, deinde in Tharsis, deinde ad Saracenos, postremo ad Christianos et Judaeos. . . . Rex Tharsis videns tam subitam et inauditam stragem suorum, iter arripuit cum multitudine copiosa nobilium versus Avinoniam ad papam disponens se Christianum fieri et baptizari a papa, credens vindictam dei populum suum enervasse propter eorum malam incredulitatem. Igitur cum fecisset viginti dietas itinerando audivit quod lues mortaliter invaluit inter Christianos sicut inter alias nationes, verso calle ultra non progreditur in illo itinere, sed repatriare festinavit.
Thus for Knighton the potential convert is the king of Tharsis, the second place the plague strikes. For the Meaux abbey chronicler, it is the “Saracens” in whom the plague begins and who send messengers to Christendom to initiate their conversion to Christianity. Chronica Monasterii de Melsa, a fundatione usque ad annum 1396, auctore Thoma de Burton, abbate: accedit continuatio ad annum 1406 a monacho quodam ipsius domus, ed. Edward A. Bond, 3 vols., Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores (Rolls Series), 43 (London: Longmans, 1868), 3:40:
De ipsa autem pestilentia fertur, quod primo in Saracenismo nimium ingruebat. Unde Sarraceni residui adhuc superstites, sperantes vindictam Dei in eos propter fidem Christi non assumptam exarsisse, in Christum credere disponebant. Sed, primo missis nuntiis in Christianismum ad indagandum si dicta pestilentia ibidem sicut et inter ipsos inolevit, et ipsis regressis et pestilentiam generalem in Christianismo sicut et in Saracenismo renuntiantibus, in Christum credere iterum contemnebant.
(The story is repeated on p. 68.) There are translated excerpts from both chronicles in Horrox, Black Death, 75–80 (Henry Knighton) and 67–70 (Meaux).
19. Roger Bacon, The “Opus Majus” of Roger Bacon, ed. John Henry Bridges,2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), 1: 303:
Quando igitur hae nationes inclusae in locis certis mundi exibunt in desolationem regionem et obviabunt Antichristo, multum deberent Christiani et maxime ecclesia Romana considerare situm locorum, ut posset percipere hujusmodi gentium feritatem et per eos percipere tempus Antichristi, et originem; nam debent obedire ei: ergo si illi ex una parte mundi veniant, ipse ex contraria procedet.
20. See Andrew Runni Anderson, Alexander’s Gate, Gog and Magog, and the Inclosed Nations (Cambridge, Mass.: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1932); Vincent DiMarco, “The Amazons and the End of the World,” in Westrem, ed., Discovering New Worlds, 69–90; Scott D. Westrem, “Against Gog and Magog,” in Tomasch and Gilles, eds., Text and Territory, 54–75 and Andrew Colin Gow, The Red Jews: Antisemitism in an Apocalyptic Age, 1200–1600, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 55 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), 37–53, 65–89.
21. Westrem, “Against Gog and Magog,” 57, 60–65; Anderson, Alexander’s Gate, 3–7, 87–104; von den Brincken, Fines Terrae, 26, 61–62, 70, 93, 115, 118–19; and Andrew Gow, “Gog and Magog on Mappaemundi and Early Printed World Maps: Orientalizing Ethnography in the Apocalyptic Tradition,” Journal of Early Modern History 2 (1998): 61–88.
22. This is particularly so given the rather loose connotations of “the East.” As Mary Campbell has aptly put it, “‘The East’ is a concept separable from any particular geographic area. It is essentially Elsewhere.” Campbell, Witness and the Other World, 48.
23. Pseudo-Methodius, Revelationes, ed. in Ernst Sackur, Sibyllinische Texte und Forschungen: Pseudomethodius, Adso und die Tiburtinische Sibylle (Halle: Niemeyer, 1898), 91–92: “Tunc reserabuntur portae aquilonis et egredientur virtutes gentium illarum, quas conclusit intus Alexander . . . Gentes namque, que exient ab aquilone, comedent carnes hominum et bibent sanguinem bestiarum sicut aqua et commedent inmu[n]das serpentes et scorpiones et omnem sordissimum et abominabilem genus bestiarum et reptilia, que repunt super terra.”
24. Seymour, ed., Mandeville’s Travels, ch. 29, p. 193.
25. Roger Bacon, Opus majus, 1: 303: “O terra, mater draconum, nutrix scorpionum, fovea serpentum, lacus daemonum, facilius fuerat in te infernum esse quam tales gentes parturire. Vae terrae fructiferae et mellifluae, quando ingruent tot serpentes et bestiae in eam.”
26. Westrem, “Against Gog and Magog,” 68–70.
27. Westrem, “Against Gog and Magog,” 69; see Seymour, ed., Mandeville’s Travels, ch. 29, p. 193.
28. But many of the chroniclers cited in this paper—e.g., Heinrich of Herford—reject the notion of the Jews’ guilt (Heinrich von Hervordia, Liber de rebus memorabilioribus, 280). Heinrich says the Jews were killed on account of their money, like the Templars. According to the confessions extracted from Jews in Chillon, the conspiracy had been directed from afar, by Jews in Toledo. Urkunden und Akten der Stadt Strassburg: Urkundenbuch der Stadt Strassburg (Strasbourg: K. J. Triibner, 1896), 5: 167–74; the confessions have been translated in Horrox, Black Death, 211–19. See also Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 33–68. Ginzburg notes the parallels to the imagined leper conspiracy in 1321 that also linked up both external and internal enemies.
29. Horrox, Black Death, 73, translating from Historia Roffensis, in British Library, Cottonian MS, Faustina B V, fols. 96v–101. There are excerpts from this chronicle printed in Henry Wharton, Anglia sacra, sive collectio historiarum, partim antiquitus, partim recenter scriptarum, de archiepiscopis et episcopis Angliae (London: Richard Chiswel, 1691), part 1, 356–77. There the chronicle’s author is identified as William Dene. Wharton omits the sections dealing with the plague, however.
30. Heinrich von Hervordia, Liber de rebus memorabilioribus, 269; Chronica Monasterii de Melsa, 35, 69.
31. It is perhaps not insignificant that Roger Bacon had proclaimed that the gates enclosing Gog and Magog “cannot be broken apart by . . . anything other than a mighty earthquake.” Roger Bacon, Opus majus, 1: 304 (“nec igne nec ferro nec aqua nec aliqua re dissolvi potest, nisi solo terrae motu violento”).
32. See, e.g., R. W. Southern, “Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing: 3. History as Prophecy,” Royal Historical Association Transactions 5th ser. 22 (1972): 159–80, esp. 170–73.
33. To be sure, many commentators read Revelation as presenting allegorically the whole course of the Church’s history, so that, for example, in Nicolas of Lyra’s commentary, all of the events described in the first sixteen books of Revelation have already been fulfilled (including all the earthquakes mentioned in Revelation, which Nicolas reads metaphorically anyway). See Philip D. W. Krey, trans., Nicholas of Lyra’s Apocalypse Commentary (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), 214–16.
34. Gregory of Tours (Gregorius Episcopus Turonensis), Libri historiarum X, ed. Bruno Krusch and Wilhelm Levison, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum, 1.1 (Hanover: Hahn, 1951), IX.5, p. 416: “Et multa alia signa apparuerunt, quae aut regis obitum adnunciare solent aut regiones excidium.” See also V.33 (storms, a light traversing the sky, and an earthquake all precede the outbreak of an epidemic in V.34) ; VI. 14 (fire and lights in sky and a rain of blood precede an epidemic of boils and tumors in the groin); IX.5–6 (a rain of snakes, flashes of lights, strange vessels bearing strange writing, floods, and odd growths all precede the appearance of a false Christ, Desiderius, whom Gregory specifically links to the false Christs of end times in Matthew 24:24). Gregory links the portents, plagues, and false prophets all together at the beginning of X.25 with apocalyptic quotations from Matt. 24: 7 (“And there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes”) and Mark 13: 22 (“For false Christs and false prophets shall rise”).
35. Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, ed. Henry Richards Luard, 7 vols., Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores (Rolls Series) 57 (London: Longmans, 1872–83), 5: 191–98:
Notandum autem est, et non leviter attendendum, quod in nulla illarum quinquagenarum, scilicet viginti quatuor, sicut in ista ultima quinquagena, scilicet quae jam praeteriit, videlicet vicesima quinta, tot mirabilia et insolitae novitates evenerunt, ut in ultima. Et sunt quidam et multi historiarum scriptores et diligentes inspectores, qui dicunt, quod nec in omnibus aliis quinquagenis visa sunt tot prodigia et novitates admirandae, sicut in hac jam terminata. Et his tamen majora cum formidine expectantur. (191)
And at the chronicle’s original end (he later changed his mind and continued the work up until his death in 1259), Matthew notes additionally, “It is thought to be not without significance that in this last year all the elements suffered unusual and improper degradation.” (“Creditur quoque non vacare a significatione, quod omnia hoc ultimo anno elementa insolitum et irregulare passa sunt detrimentum” 5: 197). This reference to the four elements may be apocalyptic, too. In at least one enumeration of signs before Judgment Day, the author notes that “The natures will change/of each element, report that is most wondrous.” The tenth-century Irish poem Saltair na Rann, strophe CLIX, as translated in William W. Heist, The Fifteen Signs Before Doomsday (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1952), 12.
36. Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, 4:603: “quia, ut credebatur, significativus et insolitus in his partibus occidentalibus, necnon et innaturalis, cum soliditas Angliae cavernis terrestribus et profundis traconibus ac concavitatibus, in quibus secundum philosophos solet terraemotus generari, careat; nec inde ratio poterat indigari. Erat igitur, secundum minas Evangelii, [prope] finem mundi senescentis descriptus quasi per loca.”
37. Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, 5: 192–93: “Una noctium visae sunt stellae infinitae cadere de caelo, ita quod simul et semel decem vel duodecim, hae in Oriente, hae in Occidente, Austro, et Aquilone, et in medio firmamenti, volitare viderentur, quae si essent verae stellae, nec una in caelo remansisset, nec potest inde in libro metheororum ratio reperiri manifesta, sed ut Christi comminatio mortalibus immineret, Erunt signa in sole, etc.” (Luke 21: 25).
38. This is parallel to the scholastic redefinition of miracles as something contra or praeter naturam. In his commentary on book II of Lombard’s Sentences, Thomas Aquinas classified miracles as contra, supra, or praeter naturam. S. Thomae Aquinatis Opera Omnia, vol. 1, In Quattor Libros Sententiarum, ed. Roberto Busa (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1980), bk. 2, dist. 18, ques. 1, art. 3: “[Miracula] autem quandoque sunt supra naturam, quandoque praeter naturam, quandoque contra naturam.” See also Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record, and Event, 1000–1215 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982, 1987), 3–9; Laura Smoller, “Defining the Boundaries of the Natural in the Fifteenth Century: The Inquest into the Miracles of St. Vincent Ferrer (d. 1419),” Viator 28 (1997): 333–59; and Lorraine Daston, “Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991): 93–124, which surveys definitions of the marvelous and the miraculous from Augustine through Francis Bacon. The eclipse at the crucifixion similarly was explained as not a natural event. See Laura Smoller, History, Prophecy, and the Stars: The Christian Astrology of Pierre d’Ailly, 1350–1420 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 46, 160, n. 13. On the medieval “disenchantment of the world,” see M.-D. Chenu, “Nature and Man: The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century,” in Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 11–18 (Chenu calls it a “desacralizing” of nature); Tullio Gregory, “La nouvelle idée de nature et de savoir scientifique au XIIe siècle,” in John E. Murdoch and Edith D. Sylla, The Cultural Context of Medieval Learning, Boston Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 26 (Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel, 1975), 193–218; and Daston and Park, Wonders’, esp. 109–133. Later fourteenth-century authors extended this type of discussion, so that an author like Nicole Oresme could assert that all mirabilia can be explained by natural causes (even if these causes could not always be knowable by humans). Bert Hansen, Nicole Oresme and the Marvels of Nature: The De causis mirabilium (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1985), esp. 70–76.
39. The term “bleeding edge” refers to a technology that is so new—and therefore requires such a powerful system to use—that a company will actually lose customers by employing such technology in its web site. The term implies going too far too fast.
40. See the discussion of judicial astrology in part 4 of the Opus maius, in Roger Bacon, Opus majus, 1: 251–69. It has recently been argued that Bacon’s condemnation by the Franciscan order in 1277 was because of the excessive claims he made for astrology’s ability to predict religious change. See Paul Sidelko, “The Condemnation of Roger Bacon,” Journal of Medieval History 22 (1996): 69–81. There is no contemporary evidence indicating what in Bacon’s work was deemed offensive, however; Sidelko argues simply on the basis of Bacon’s assertions about the stars’ effects on religion.
41. Bacon, Opus majus, 1:269: “Scio quod si ecclesia vellet revolvere textum sacrum et prophetias sacras, atque prophetias Sibyllae, et Merlini et Aquilae, et Sestonis, Joachim et multorum aliorum, insuper historias et libros philosophorum, atque juberet considerari vias astronomiae, inveniretur sufficiens suspicio vel magis certitudo de tempore Antichristi.”
42. See Smoller, History, Prophecy, and the Stars, 33, 152–53; S. J. Tester, A History of Western Astrology (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1987), 177; and Philippe Contamine, “Les prédictions annuelles astrologiques à la fin du Moyen Age: genre littéraire et témoin de leur temps,” in Histoire sociale, sensibilités collectives et mentalités: mélanges Robert Mandrou (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985), 192 (listing twenty-seven condemned propositions dealing with astrology).
43. Arnau de Vilanova, De tempore adventus Antichristi, ed. Heinrich Finke, Aus den Tagen Bonifaz VIII: Funde und Forschungen, Vorreformationsgeschichtliche Forschungen 2 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1902), p. cxxxiv: “suam potentiam et sapientiam Deus non alligavit naturalibus causis. Set sicut in productione mundi fuit supernaturaliter operatus, sic et in consummatione huius seculi supernaturaliter operabitur.”
44. John of Paris, Tractatus de Antichristo, ed. in Sara Beth Peters Clark, “The Tractatus de Antichristo of John of Paris: A Critical Edition, Translation, and Commentary,” Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1981, 46–47, 59–62; John dismisses astrology’s claims to offer any certainty about the time of Antichrist’s arrival. See also Laura Smoller, “The Alfonsine Tables and the End of the World: Astrology and Apocalyptic Calculation in the Later Middle Ages,” in Alberto Ferreiro, ed., The Devil, Heresy and Witchcraft in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey B. Russell (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998), 211–39.
45. Henry of Harclay, Utrum astrologi vel quicumque calculatores possint probare secundum adventum Christi, in Franz Pelster, ed., “Die Questio Heinrichs von Harclay über die zweite Ankunft Christi und die Erwartung des baldigen Weltendes zu Anfang des XIV Jahrhunderts,” Archivio Italiano per la Storia della Pietá 1 (1951): 82.
46. Ibid., 82: “Ad argumentum principale, cum arguitur: in diebus ultimis post tribulacionem sol contenebrabitur etc., dicendum quod tale signum erit miraculosum ante finem mundi, non naturalis eclipsis.”
47. The astrologer was John of Aschenden (Joannis Eschuid). See Smoller, “Alfonsine Tables,” 220–21, and the references therein.
48. John Clynn, Annales hiberniae, in Richard Butler, ed., The Annals of Ireland by Friar John Clyn, of the Convent of Friars Minor, Kilkenny, and Thady Dowling, Chancellor of Leighlin, Together with the Annals of Ross (Dublin: Irish Archaeological Society, 1849), 36: “De ista pestilencia facta est visio mirabilis (ut dicebatur) anno precedenti scilicet 1347, in claustro Cisterciensium Tripolis, sub hac forma; quidam monachus celebravit missam coram abbate suo, uno ministro presente, et inter ablucionem et communionem misse apparuit quedam manus scribens super corporale in quo predictus monachus confecerat. ‘Cedrus alta Libani succendetur.’ ” Clynn’s entry describing the plague has been translated in Horrox, Black Death, 82–84.
49. John Clynn, Annales hiberniae, 36: “Non est auditum a principio seculi tot homines pestilencia, fame aut quacunque infirmitate tanto tempore mortuos in orbe; nam terre motus, qui per miliaria multa se extendebat, civitates, villas, et castra subvertebat absorbuit et subversit; pestis ista villas, civitates, castra et oppida homine habitatore omnino privavit, ut vix esset qui in eis habitaret.”
50. Ibid., 28–29.
Item, die Martis, scilicet xv. Kal: Decembris, fuit maxima inundancia aque, qualis a xlta. annis ante non est visa; que pontes, molendina et edificia funditus evertit et asportavit; solum altare magnum et gradus altaris de tota abbacia Fratrum Minorum Kilkennie, aqua non attigit nec cooperuit. Hic annus fuit tempestuosus nimis et nocivus hominibus et animalibus; quia a festo Omnium Sanctorum usque Pascha, ut plurimum fuit pluvia, nix, aut gelu . . . Hoc anno boves et vacce moriebantur, et oves precipue, fere sunt desctructe . . . Item, in hoc anno in quadragesima, salices in Anglia rosas protulerunt, que ad diversas terras pro spectaculo sunt advecte.
Then Clynn lists a number of battles, duels, and murders, none of which is clearly said to be foreshadowed by these portents. Perhaps he simply enumerated these signs in the hopes that their meanings would become clear later.
51. Clynn, Annales hiberniae, 36: “Tunc passagium erit commune ab omnibus fidelibus ultra aquas congregatas ad Terram Sanctam.” The consolatory power of such prophecies is a major theme of Lerner’s in Powers of Prophecy and “Black Death and Eschatological Mentalities.”
52. John of Winterthur, Die Chronik Johanns von Winterthur, ed. C. Brun and Friedrich Baethgen, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum germanicarum, nova series 3, pp. 275–76:
Item eodem anno [1348] in fine Ianuarii in conversione sancti Pauli factus est terre motus magnus, qui in Longobardia multas turres deiecit, menia scidit vinaque in doliis turbulenta fecit. Villach quoque civitatem Karinthie subvertit. . . . Anno Domini MCCCXLVIII. tempore hyemali vel circa principium veris in partibus ultramarinis exorta est mortalitas seu pestilencia tam grandis, quod infinitam et inestimabilem multitudinem infidelium absorbuit et absummpsit. . . . Predicta, scilicet terre motus et pestilencia, precurrencia mala sunt extreme voraginis et tempestatis secundum verbum salvatoris in ewangelio dicentis: “Erunt terre motus per loca et pestilencia et fames” et cetera.
John of Winterthur’s chronicle ends in the year 1348; it is likely that he died in the plague.
53. Historia Roffensis, as translated in Horrox, Black Death, 73. The chronicle does note that the plague began in the east: “A great mortality of men began in India and, raging through the whole of infidel Syria and Egypt, and also through Greece, Italy, Provence and France, arrived in England, where the same mortality destroyed more than a third of the men, women and children” (Horrox, Black Death, 70).
54. Heinrich von Hervordia, Liber de rebus memorabilioribus, 268:
Sed et inter ecclesiasticos, seculares et religiosos eo tempore dissentiones, rebelliones, conspirationes, conjurationes et conventiones ubilibet et vallidissime sunt exorte, sicut predixerat apostolus II. Thim. 3. et 2. Cor. 12. Sed et alie tumultuationes, puerorum contra senes, ignobilium contra nobiles, in civitatibus, monasteriis et congregationibus plurimis seditiones et generales et particulares plurime temporibus hiis exstiterunt. Heresis etiam symoniaca tantum invaluit in clero et tam exuberanter inundavit, ut quilibet quanticumque status, maximus, mediocris et parvus, et qualiscumque, scilicet secularis vel religiosus, et quomodolibet etiam manifeste emeret et venderet spirituale quodcumque, nec verecundaretur, nec a quoquam corriperetur vel reprehendetur. . . . Prebendas etiam et personatus et dignitates ecclesiasticas alias omnes, ecclesias parrochyales, cappellas, vicarias et altaria pro pecunia, pro mulieribus et quandoque pro concubinis commutabant, in ludo taxillorum exponebant, perdebant et acquirebant. Tunc tumultuationes et decertationes pro regnis, principatibus, archiepiscopatibus, episcopatibus, prebendis et aliis hujusmodi plurimi plurimas habuerunt.
55. Ibid., 280: “Eodem anno gens sine capite, sui multitudine et adventus sui subitatione mirabilis universis, ex omnibus subito Theutonie partibus exsurgunt.”
56. The prophecy reads, in part: “The high Cedar of Lebanon will be felled, and Tripoli will soon be destroyed and Acre captured. . . . Within fifteen years there will be one God and one faith. The other god will vanish. The sons of Israel will be liberated from captivity. A certain people (gens) who are called without a head will come.” Translation quoted from Lerner, Powers of Prophecy, 74 (the version that began to circulate shortly after the fall of Acre in 1291).
57. Heinrich von Hervordia, Liber de rebus memorabilioribus, 277: “Gens sine capite flagellariorum adventum Anticristi prenuntiavit.” The sense is that the flagellants were a sign of the approach of Antichrist, not that they themselves verbally proclaimed Antichrist’s advent. Heinrich does not describe them as preaching about the apocalypse.
58. Ibid.: “Principium autem regni Karoli istius multum videtur memorabile propter monstra et portenta et singularia plurima, que tunc apparuerunt.”
59. That is, in Robert Lerner’s felicitous phrase, the “uncertainty principle” of Acts 1: 7: “It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power.” See Lerner, “Refreshment of the Saints: The Time After Antichrist as a Station for Earthly Progress in Medieval Thought,” Traditio 32 (1976): 97–144 (p. 103).
60. Heinrich von Hervordia, Liber de rebus memorabilioribus, 289: “Et nota, quod annus iste Karoli regis, scilicet octavus, fuit annus ab origine mundi 5317., ab egressu Noe de archa 3661., a nativitate Abrahe 3369., a principio regni David 2427., ab exterminio regni Judeorum jam facto et principio etatis quinte 1944., ab incarnatione filii Dei 1355., . . .”
61. Richard Landes, “Lest the Millennium Be Fulfilled: Apocalyptic Expectations and the Pattern of Western Chronography, 100–800 C.E.,” in The Use and Abuse of Eschatolojjy, ed. Werner Verbeke, Daniel Verhelst, and Andries Welkenhuysen, 137–211. Such speculations could focus on the world’s 6500th or 7000th year as well as on its completion of six millennia. See Smoller, History, Prophecy, and the Stars, 88.
62. Heinrich von Hervordia, Liber de rebus memorabilioribus, 289: “Residuum tempus etatis istius sexte soli Deo notum est. Non enim est hominis, nosse tempora vel momenta, que pater posuit in sua potestate.”
63. Ibid., 290. Heinrich cites Augustine, De civitate dei, 22: 30: “Etas autem septima, que animarum quiescentium est et ab ascensione Domini, janua quietis aperta, initium habuit, usque in presens una cum etate sexta decurrit, sed et deinceps usque in finem mundi simul cum ista protenditur.”
64. Breve Chronicon clerici anonymi, 14: “et ceciderunt fulgura et choruscationes mixte cum grandinibus mire magnitudinis super terram, que occiderunt quasi omnes hominis, a majori usque ad minimum.”
65. Ibid., 22–23: “Eodem anno [1349], IIIo nonas junii, cum magna pluvia, choruscatione et tonitruo, Brugis et in territoriis ejus grando ad quantitatem ovorum cecidit, cum diversis faciebus, formis, oculis et caudis, que multis stupori fuit.”
66. See Suzanne Lewis, Reading Images: Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Apocalypse (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), esp. 186–87.
67. See Lewis, Reading Images, 164.
68. The Neuberg chronicle for the year 1342 also reports that the four elements were confused (there was also an earthquake that year), Continuatio novimontensis, 672. The confusion of the four elements is also an apocalyptic sign. See note 35 above.
69. This was not really a triple conjunction, but a series of conjunctions of Mars and Jupiter (March 1), Mars and Saturn (March 4), and Jupiter and Saturn (March 21). See Bernard R. Goldstein and David Pingree, Levi ben Gerson’s Prognostication for the Conjunction of 1345, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 80, pt. 6 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1990), 52.
70. Opinion of the Paris Medical Faculty, part 1, chap. 1, pp. 153–54.
71. Ibid., part 1, chap. 2, pp. 154–55.
72. Ibid., part 1, chap. 3, p. 155: “Idcirco si futura hyems fuerit pluuiosa multum et minus debito frigida epydimiam circa finem hyemis ut in tempore veris tememus futuram.”
73. Ibid.:
quia non diximus futuram pestilentiam fore valde periculosam, nolumus intelligere quod sit adeo periculosa sicut in partibus meredionalibus [sic] vel orientalibus. coniunctiones enim et alie causa predicte partes istas plus quam nostras respexerunt. ista tamen cum indiciis [iudiciis?] astrologorum secundum dictum ptolomei inter necessarium et possible sunt reponenda amplius quia uise fuerunt exalationes et inflammationes quam plurime, veluti draco et sydera volantia.
(It is not entirely clear from the syntax here whether the doctors mean that these signs appeared only in the south and east or happened closer to home as well.) Horrox translates draco as comet, but the physicians must have in mind not a cometa, but rather the specific form of “fire in the sky” known as Assub, as described in Albertus Magnus’s De meteoris, which can take the appearance of a flying dragon. Albertus Magnus, De meteoris, 1.4.8, in August Borgnet, ed., B. Alberti Magni Ratisbonensis episcopi, ordinis praedicatorum, opera omnia, 37 vols. (Paris: Vives, 1890), 4: 514: “Quando autem materia est inaequaliter subtilis et simul elevata, anterior pars quae prius frigido tangitur, expellitur, quam sequitur alia grossior: et ideo apparet in modum trabis: trabs autem ista cum expellitur si obviat ei frigus, incurvatur, et apparet ad modum draconis flexuosi: et hoc est quidem quod quidam dicunt se vidisse dracones volantes per aerem.” (See Horrox, Black Death, 162; she interprets the “comet” as a mysterious star seen over Paris in August 1348 and reported by Jean de Venette.)
74. Opinion of the Paris Medical Faculty, part 1, chap. 3, p. 155:
color eciam celi yctericius et aer subruens propter fumos adustos fequentius solito apparuit. fulgura etiam et choruscationis incense multe et frequentes, tonitrua et venti adeo impetuosi et validi ut puluerem multum terreum commouerent a partibus meridionalibus venientes, qui omnibus aliis deteriores existunt cito putrefactionis corpora magis disponentes, presertim terre motus fortes et multitudo piscium bestialium et aliorum mortuorum in litore maris, nec non in pluribus partibus arbores puluere cooperte. quidam et vidisse se fatentur ranarum et reptilium multitudinem que ex putrefactione generantur; que omnia magnam in aere et terra putrefactionem precedere videntur.
75. Ibid., p. 156: “nimirum igitur si epydimiam venire futuris temporibus timeamus.”
76. See, e.g., Albertus Magnus, De causis proprietatum elementorum, 1.2.13, in Paul Hossfeld, ed., Alberti Magni ordinis fratrum praedicatorum, episcopi, opera omnia (Münster: Aschendorff, 1980), vol. 5, part 2, p. 86: “Similiter autem et in generatione animalium similium in corpore, sicut sunt serpentes et vermes et pisces; videmus enim quosdam lacus novos fieri, in quibus generantur per se et pisces et vermium multa genera. Et hoc ostendunt animalia nata ex putrefactione, quae generans univocum nullum omnino habent.”
77. Martha R. Baldwin, “Toads and Plague: Amulet Therapy in Seventeenth-Century Medicine,” Bulletin for the History of Medicine 67 (1993): 227–47. The toad amulet was attributed to Paracelsus.
78. Many of these signs also appear in lists of the fifteen signs before Doomsday. See the various versions in Heist, Fifteen Signs, 24–29.
79. Utrum mortalitas, que fuit hijs annis, fit ab ultione divina propter iniquitates hominum vel a cursu quodam naturali. The treatise appears in Erfurt, Amploniana, MS
Quart-Cod. 230, fol. 146v–148v. I am relying on the edition in Karl Sudhoff, “Pest-schriften aus den ersten 150 Jahren nach der Epidemie des ‘schwarzen Todes’ 1348, XI. Ausarbeitungen über die Pest vor Mitte des 15. Jahrhunderts entstanden im niederen Deutschland,” Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin 11 (1918–19): 44–51.
80. This objection is not entirely astrologically correct because astrologers frequently attributed effects to conjunctions long after the fact and particularly argued that the slowest-moving planets, Jupiter and Saturn, had the longest-lasting effects. See Smoller, History, Prophecy, and the Stars, 20, 74.
81. Utrum mortalitas fit ab ultione divina, 47: “Qua propter quarta opinio, quam probabiliorem alijs credo, sit ista in sensu conditionis et locacionis Ypocratis videlicet, quod si ex naturali cursu facta est mortalitas sepedicta, tunc eius tam per se et inmediata est exalacio terrestris corrupta et venenosa, que aerea in diuersis mundi partibus infecit, et inspirata hominibus ipsos suuffocauit subita quadam extinctione.”
82. Ibid., 48:
aer vaporosus et plenus fumo terrestri diu clausus et incarceratus in aliquo mansorio terre adeo corrumpitur, ut venenum efficatiuum humane nature efficiatur et precipue in cauernis et ventribus terre, ubi per nouum et recentem aerem aduentari non poterit illud propter experientijs quam plurimis, sumptis a puteis longo tempore desertis et superius obstructis per plurimos annos. Nam quando tales putei aperiuntur et purgari debent, accidit nonnumquam, quod primus qui ingreditur suffocatur et quandoque mutuo sibi succedentes. Et vulgares tantum ignorantes basiliscum putant intus latitare.
(The basilisk is a mythical reptile whose very look was said to kill.)
83. Ibid.: “Certum fundamentum est, quod motus terre causatur ab exalatione terre suo fumo clauso in visceribus terre, qui quando pulsat cum impetu ad latera terre et ex illis non patet, terram quassat et mouet illam, ut patet ex philosophia naturali.”
84. Ibid.:
Tunc [?] dico, quod maximus vapor et aer corruptus, qui egressus est in terre motu purgandi, videlicet que accidit anno dominj M°ccc° 47 [1347] S. pauli et similiter aer corruptus in clausorijs terre, que preterea [?] in alijs motibus et eleuacionibus terre egressus est, aerem super terram infecit, et homines in diuersis mundi partibus interfecit. . . . Mortalitas quantum ad partes Almanie primo incepit, in Carinthea post terre motum in eo loco.
Other authors give various dates for this earthquake on the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul: Heinrich of Herford puts it in 1345 (Heinrich von Hervordia, Liber de rebus memorabilioribus, 268); the Neuberg chronicle puts it in 1348 (Continuatio novimontensis, 674); John of Winterthur places it in 1348 (John of Winterthur, Die Chronik, 275).
85. Utrum mortalitas fit ab ultione divina, 49: “Octaua ratio est, ut recitant Auicenna et Albertus, quod in aliquibus terre motibus homines in lapides transsubstanciati sunt et precipue in lapides salis propter fortem virtutem mineralem in vaporibus terrestribus existentem; igitur possibile est quod a uaporibus aliter dispositis in terra infectos homines communiter moriuntur.”
86. Continuatio novimontensis, 674.
87. Aristotle, Meteorologica, ed. and trans. H. D. P. Lee (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), 2.7–2.8, pp. 198–223.
88. Albertus Magnus, De meteoris, 3.2.6, 3.2.9, 3.2.12. The explanation of the darkened sky and of pestilence comes in 3.2.12 (ed. Borgnet, 4:629):
Scias etiam, quod frequenter pestilentia praecipue omnem sequitur terraemotum: vapor enim inclusus et privatus sic luce et aere libero grosso est habens quasi veneni naturam, et ideo animalia interficit, praecipue quae terrae quasi semper proximum os tenent, sicut oves: quia antequam totus erumpat vapor, per plures dies semper aliquid ejus paulatim per poros terrae evadit, et laedit animalia pastum in loco terraemotus accipientia, et continue os juxta terram habentia.
See note 121.
89. Tractatus Petrus de Eliaco episcopi Cameracensis super libros Metheororum (Strasbourg: Johann Prüs, 1504), fol. XIII:
Sciendum quod vapores calidi et sicci pro magna parte includuntur infra terram . . . Istos autem vapores vocat Aristoteles spiritus propter eorum agitationem siue subtilitatem: qui quidem spiritus mouentur sum magno impetu infra terram et quando non potuerint habere liberum egressum exeuntes propter partes terrae circumstantes reuerberantur ad locum terrae: ex qua reverberatione agitatur terra siue mouetur motu tremulo.
90. Ibid., fol. XIIIIv.
91. Ibid.:
Quandoque in terremotu (maxime quando mouent motu pulsus et non tremoris) elevantur vapores et lapides de terra per modum ebulitionis sicut corpora grauia ebulentia in caldarijs. Causa est: quia vapor infra terram inclusus successiue exiens de terra per unam partem eleuat lapides de terra: et de illis lapidibus sic descendentibus alios elevat per eos exeuntes de eodem et sic continui leuando lapides primus lapis videtur facere quandam ebulitionem.
92. Ibid., fol. XIIIv: “Huius terrae motus similitudo (secundum Aristotelem) in corporibus animalium habent. Videmus enim animalia moueri motu tremulo in paralisi: et in huiusmodi infirmitatibus.” Tetanus and spasms are both motions of the wind, according to Aristotle, Meteorology, 2.8.
93. Tractatus Petrus de Eliaco, fol. XIII v.:
Unde secondum Aristotelem huiusmodi tremor fit a quibusdam spiritibus supra-callefactis per naturam discurrentibus infra corpus animalium: et reuertuntur ad diuersas partes intrinsecas. Ex qua reuersione sequitur motus tremulus totius corporis. Aliquando fit etiam in hominibus post effusionem vrinae: quando per vias naturales vrinales subingrediuntur quidam spiritus, id est, vapores subtiles qui postea discurrunt per partes alias intrinsecas et faciunt tremorem totius corporis quousque per poros corporis exeunt.
94. Ibid., fol. XIIIIv–XV:
Item mouetur terra motu supradicto et huiusmodi terremotus saliendo sicut in febribus febres tertianae vel quartanae animalium: cum cessant febres iterum per alios dies reueniunt vt in quarto die: vel citra: vel quandoque post. Cuius causa est: quoniam prima cessatione febris non sufficienter fuit expulsa, sed derelinquebatur pars in corpore: quae non fuit sufficiens ad continuandum motum febrilem. sed huiusmodi multiplicatur a ratione male regiminis: iterum mouet corpus et facit paralisim.
95. Albertus Magnus’s De meteoris also provides natural explanations for others of the portents that mark the outbreak of the Black Death, such as fire falling from the sky (1.1.4 and 1.1.5) and rains of stones (3.3.20).
96. Heinrich von Hervordia, Liber de rebus memorabilioribus, 277: “Principium autem regni Karoli istius multum videtur memorabile propter monstra et portenta et singularia plurima, que tunc apparuerunt.”
97. Ibid., 268, 277, 280.
98. Ibid., 258:
Vicesimo tertio anno Lodewici pluvia sanguinis fuit in Erphordia Thuringie colore rubicundissimo. . . . Item hoc anno in Confluentia, ubi Mosella Renum influit, puella novem annorum a coco patris sui gravidatur et filium pulchrum peperit. Quod monstruosum est, sicut et illud, quod factum fuit in Sosato eodem anno. Ibi siquidem puella nascitur mamillis tumentibus, pilos et sub ascellis et in inguine habens, et fluxum menstruorum patiens, sicut esset 18 annorum. Cui per omnia simile ponit Albertus secundo phisicorum, tractatu tertio, cap. 3, dicens: Temporibus meis presentata fuit puella, que nata fuit dependentibus uberibus, cum pilis inguinis et ascellarum, et fatebatur mater ejus, quod etiam patiebatur resolutionem menstruorum. Quod absque dubio accidit propter fortitudinem caloris formantis et maturantis. Hec Albertus.
Quoting Albertus Magnus, Physica, 2.3.3, as in Paul Hossfeld, ed., Alberti Magni ordinis fratrum praedicatorum, episcopi, opera omnia (Münster: Aschendorff, 1987), vol. 4, part 1, p. 137.
99. Heinrich von Hervordia, Liber de rebus memorabilioribus, 258: “Cujus guttas in albo lineo panno receptas ego ipse vidi.” Daston and Park remark that reports of prodigies are frequently accompanied by careful verification and location. Wonders,52–57.
100. Heinrich von Hervordia, Liber de rebus memorabilioribus, 268–70.
101. Ibid., 270: “Item hoc anno [1346] in Sosato opido Westphalie natus est agnus cum duobus capitibus. Quorum caput inferius fuit sicut agni, superius autem sicut avis. Quod videtur et portentum fuisse et virtuti stellarum attribuendum.” (Note that this prodigy occurs in the same town in which the sexually mature baby girl was born in 1337, according to Heinrich.) There is a two-headed human “monster” whose birth serves as a portent of plague in the chronicle of Matteo Villani, Croniea di Matteo Villani, ed. Gherardi Dragomanni, 2 vols. (Florence: Coen, 1846), 1: 14, and another in the chronicle of the monastery of Meaux, Chronica Monasterii de Melsa, 69–70: “Et paulo quidem ante haec tempora [earthquake and plague of 1348–49], erat quoddam monstrum humanum in Anglia, ab umbilico et sursum divisum, masculus scilicet et foemina, et in inferiori parte connexum. . . . Solebant namque dulcissime simul cantare” Albertus Magnus says that such “monsters” are born (as are twins) when the mother takes excessive delight in the sexual act (Physica, 2.3.3, p. 137):
Sunt enim quaedam mulieres et quaedem animalium, quae multum in coitu delectantur, et in delectatione illa movetur matrix, cum sperma infunditur nervis sensibilibus eius, et in motu illo dividitur sperma. Cum ergo divisio tota perficitur, tunc fiunt gemini, si coalescit semen in fetum. Si autem divisio non perficitur, sed sperma quasi ramificatur, tunc fiunt bicorporea animalia subtus vel supra vel etiam in medio secundum modum, per quem dividitur sperma.
102. Heinrich von Hervordia, Liber de rebus memorabilioribus, 270 (following Albertus Magnus, Physica, 2.3.3, p. 138):
Porce quandoque pariunt porcellos cum capitibus humanis et hujusmodi. Quod ex seminum commixtione fieri non potest, quia semina valde diversa in specie se invicem corrumpunt, et nichil generatur ex eis. Sed potius fit hoc per constellationem moventem semen ad illam formam extra qualitatem suam; sicut est illud, quod dicit Ptolomeus in quadripartito, quod, in quadam parte arietis existentibus luminaribus et quibusdam planetis aliis, non potest fieri generatio humana.
See Igor Gorevich, O kentavrah i rusalkah: raznovidnosti i granitsy (Of Centaurs and Mermaids: Boundaries and Species), vol. 3 of his O kritike antropologii zhivotnikh (Toward a Critique of Animal Anthropology) (Kishinev: Kabul, 1987).
103. Heinrich von Hervordia, Liber de rebus memorabilioribus (following Albertus Magnus, De meteoris, 2.1.21, p. 536):
Quia pluvia fit de vapore multum habente de terrestri, ideo, cum suavis est, aliquando cum pluvia generantur multa animalia aquatica, sicut ranunculi et pisces parvuli et vermes. Cujus causa est, quia calidum, quod est in nube, cum evaporare incipit, trahit secum humidum subtile, quod in si habet aliquid de subtili terreo bene commixto; et ideo est viscosum. Cum autem viscosum ducitur ad aerem, incipit durescere et in pellem constare. In qua continue pulsans calidum, efficit spiritum. Cui additur anima sensibilis virtute stellarum Et tunc fit animal. Fiunt autem hec ut plurimum aquatica, quia in tale pluvia vincit aqua.
104. Ibid, (following Albertus Magnus, De meteoris, 3.3.20, p. 663): “Corpora autem perfectorum animalium raro formantur in nube, licet hoc semel dicat Avicenna contigisse, quod corpus vituli de nube cecidit. Et hoc ipse maxime attribuit virtuti stellarum in tempore illo formam vituli imprimentium.”
105. Ibid., 277: “Gens sine capite flagellariorum adventum Antichristi prenuntiavit.”
106. Ibid., 281: “Vidi, cum se flagellarent, aliquando ferramenta dicta carni taliter infigi, quod uno tractu quandoque, quandoque duobus, non extrahebantur. . . . Cor lapideum esset, quod talia sine lacrimis posset aspicere.”
107. Ibid., 282–84: “Ex tractatu de flagellariis hiis, quem edidit Gerhardus de Cosvelde, rector scolarium in civitate Monasteriensi Westphalie, cum secta ista cursum suum cepisset et potissime vigeret et non cito desitura putaretur.” Because this passage is little known to modern scholars, it seems worth describing at length here. In his edition of Heinrich’s chronicle, August Potthast was not able to identify either Gerhardus or his treatise (p. xx), nor was it known to Richard Kieckhefer (personal communication). Horrox mentions but does not translate this astrological section in her excerpts from Heinrich’s chronicle (Horrox, Black Death, 150).
108. Heinrich von Hervordia, Liber de rebus memorabilioribus, 283: “Et sol fuit dominus anni in eadem significatione. Et aries erat domus tertia, cadens ab angulo medie noctis, qui appellatur domus terre. Et in eodem signo erat Saturnus combustus radio solis. Huic signo jungebatur pisces in eadem domo tertia, que erat cadens. In quo erat Mars et Mercurius, similiter cadentes cum piscibus.” And 284: “Domus 3. cadens ab angulo noctis 6. gradu arietis. In hac domo sunt omnes significatores hujus secte, pro qua est questio facta, scil. Sol, Pisces, Mars, Merc., Saturnus.” A horoscope divides the heavens into twelve artificial divisions called mundane houses (or places or sometimes simply houses); each of the twelve mundane houses was said to have significance for some different aspect of life. There is something wrong here, however, either in Heinrich’s copying or in Gerhardus’s calculations. In Heinrich’s quotation of Gerhardus at least, the planets of Mars and Mercury are in the sign of Pisces, which would have to fall within the second house in his horoscope and not the third if the third house indeed begins with Aries 6°.
109. Ibid.: “Est ergo calculatio talis: Sol in ariete, que fuit domus tertie, multiplicat religionem et sectam. Nam domus tertia est fidei et religionis et mutationis, ut patet in Alkabitio, doctrina prima: de naturis domorum et earum significationibus.” Alchabitius and most authors more commonly make the ninth mundane house the signifier of religion, but Gerhardus’s interpretation is possible according to Alchabitius. See Alchabitius (al-Kabisi, al-Qabisi), Alchabitius cum commento: noviter impresso (Venice: Melchior Sessa, 1506), fol. 7: “Tertia domus est fratrum et sororum et propinquorum ac dilectorum fidei atque religionis mandatorum ac legatorum mutationum atque itinerum minorum et significat esse vite ante mortem.”
110. Heinrich von Hervordia, Liber de rebus memorabilioribus, 283: “Et incipit hec religio ab oriente, quia aries est signum orientale, ut patet ibidem. Et respicit precipue Alemanniam, ut dicit glosator super Alkabitium in doctrina predicta. Quare hec secta precipue vigebat in Alemannia.” See Alchabitius, Alchabitius cum commento, fol. 2v: “Aries ergo Leo et Sagittarius faciunt triplicitatem primam: quia unumquodque istorum signorum est igneum masculinum diurnum calidum scilicet et siccum colericum. sapore amarum est quoque et hec triplicitas orientalis. Cuius domini sunt in die sol et in nocte Jupiter et eorum particeps in die ac nocte est Saturnus.” The assigning of various regions to various signs was not at all standard; there were many variations.
111. Heinrich von Hervordia, Liber de rebus memorabilioribus, 283: “ Verumtamen, quia Mars conjunctus Mercurio, testatur super percussiones acuum et sanguinis effusionem, ut patet ibidem, doctrina secunda: de naturis planetarum cap. de Marte. Et Mercurius e converso testatur super percussiones flagellorum, ibidem cap. de Mercurio.” Cf. Alchabitius, fol. 10: “Mars masculinus nocturnus malus . . . et natura eius colorica amari saporis et ex magisteriis omne magisterium igneum et quod fit per ferrum et ignem: sicut est percussio gladiorum cum martellis. Cumque ei complectitur Saturnus significat percussionem ferri . . . Si mercurius percussionem acuum,” and fol. IIV: “Si [Mercurio complectitur] Mars significat . . . numerum percussionum flagellorum atque clavarum.”
112. Heinrich von Hervordia, Liber de rebus memorabilioribus, 283: “Et quia isti [Mars et Mercurius] erant in domo Jovis simul in predicto tempore in eadem domo tertia, cadente cum sole, induxerunt hominibus hujus secte penitentias per flagellationes acuum, et non sine ypocrisi, ut patet ibidem” (in addition to the mundane houses, each planet is assigned a particular sign that is its domus or domicile or mansion, in which it has particular strength). Cf. Alchabitius cum commento, fol. IIV: “Et significat ex sectis culturam unitatis et horum similia: et hoc secreto cum hypocrisia et simulatione.”
113. Heinrich von Hervordia, Liber de rebus memorabilioribus, 283: “Et quia aries respicit caput, ut omnes concedunt, in quo fuit Saturnus cum sole, supponunt peregrini hujus secte pilleum griseum ante oculos, facientem Saturninum aspectum.”
114. Ibid.: “Item hec secta horrendum facit casum ad terram. Cujus causa sine dubio est, quia sol et Saturnus et alii ejus significatores in predicto tempore ceciderunt ab angulo terre.” The 3d, 6th, 9th, and 12th houses are considered “cadents”; the 2d, 5th, 8th, and 11th, succedents; while the 1st, 4th, 7th, and 10th mundane houses are the angles or cardines. Thus the sun and Saturn, in the third mundane house, are “cadent.”
115. Ibid.: “Sed diceretur: que est causa nuditatis eorum? Dico, quod combustus Saturnus et ejus vilitas, quia sic adhuc est in domo sui casus. Sed Venus existens in domo Saturni addidit verendis, tybiis et cruribus ipsorum albam vestem. Nam testatur super vestes muliebres et pudibunda.” Each planet has a particular degree of the zodiac in which it has an access of power, its exaltation; the opposite sign marks a low degree of influence, the planet’s fall or dejection (casus).
116. Ibid.: “Dicunt ipsi, tabulam lapideam sectam hanc continentem per angelum de celo venisse. Quod teste Deo fingunt et mentiuntur. Sed causa fictionis et dicti eorum est Saturnus cadens, qui testatur super res graves, ut sunt lapides, et super oracula et super apparitores rerum secretarum.” On the so-called Heavenly Letter, see Lerner, “Black Death and Eschatological Mentalities,” 537; Richard Kieckhefer, “Radical Tendencies in the Flagellant Movement of the Mid-Fourteenth Century,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 4 (1974): 165–66; and (with caution) Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961, 1970), 129–34.
117. Heinrich von Hervordia, Liber de rebus memorabilioribus, 283:
Notandum etiam, quod scorpio, signum dolositatis et mendacii, in dicto tempore fuit in medio celi. Quapropter infinita mendacia sectam hanc precedunt et secuntur; immo major laus et gloria hujus secte est in mendaciis. Nam medium celi est domus Jovis et glorie et sublimationis, ut ibidem doctrina secunda: de naturis domorum. Hec tamen mendacia vulgus appellat miracula propter fidem Jovis. Item hec secta nullum habet fundamentum stabile, quia omnia signa rerum eam testantia sunt instabilia propter scorpionem.
See Alchabitius, Alchabitius cum commento, fol. lOr, on Jupiter: “et [Jupiter] significat fidem et appetitum in bonis.” On the long tradition of beliefs about Scorpio’s baleful influence, see Luigi Aurigemma, Le signe zodiacal du Scorpion dans les traditions occidentales de l’Antiquité gréco-latine à la Renaissance (Paris: La Haye, 1976). There are errors in the horoscope as printed in Potthast’s edition (or as Heinrich copied it or Gerhardus erected it). There is no indication of which sign begins the 10th house, but it must be Scorpio, given the reference in the text and the order of signs. That makes the horoscope in error as to the ascendant, which is given as Scorpio 14°, but which must be Capricorn 14°.
118. Heinrich von Hervordia, Liber de rebus memorabilioribus, 283–84: “Alia causa brevitatis pretermitto, sed dico, quod estimatione mea secta hec pure naturalis est, et quod agitantur quadam specie furie, que vocatur mania. Et possibilie est, quod in aliqua parte mundi fiat persecutio cleri ab hac secta. Et secta non diu durabit, sed cito et cum confusione et infamia finem habebit.” (emphasis added)
119. Within a paragraph, however, Heinrich returns to the subject of the plague, which he describes through a lengthy quotation from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (VIII, 523 seq.), in which the poet tells of a plague sent as punishment by Juno, which is lifted only after prayers and vows are made to Jupiter. If he means to imply similarly a divine origin for the Black Death, he does not spell this out for his readers. Heinrich von Hervordia, Liber de rebus memorabilioribus, 284–85.
120. Ibid., 285–86:
Quarto anno Karoli [1351] in opido Hamelen supra Mindam in metis Westphalie et Saxonie pestis quedam singularis oboritur. Siquidem fovea fodiebatur, purgabatur et eruderabatur in area civis cujusdam ibidem. Fossor existens in imo, subito, nescitur a quo tactus, corruit et exspiravit. Alius descendit ad extrahendum primum jam frigidum, et ipse quoque mox extinctus est. . . . Tertius cautius agere volens, fune forti cingitur circa corpus, per quem de fovea, cum opus esset, extraheretur. Ad medium fovee descendens pervenit, totoque corpore stupidus esse cepit et rigere. Signum dat. Semivivus extrahitur, aliquamdiu sic permanens. . . . Quartus descendens in foveam similiter ut primi duo periclitatur. Quidam opinabatur, in aliqua cavernula fovee serpentem basiliscum habitare, qui visu et anhelitu suo, quidquid sibi propinquat, divitur vitiare; aliis putantibus, terram in fovea qualitatem aliquam venenosam contraxisse, quia prius et tempore multo latrina fuerit in eodem loco. Quid autem esset in veritate, penitus a nullo sciebatur. . . . Demum consilio casu transeuntis extranei decoctio in modum sorbitii ex aqua et farina silignis in quantitate tanta, quod fovea repleri posset, paratur, et de ipsa fortissime bulliente fovea totaliter ad summum usque velocius infunditur et impletur. . . . Quo facto et per decoctionem illam vel interfecto basilisco vel fovea a venenosa qualitate purgata et recentificata, Hamelenses peste dicta liberantur.
121. Albertus Magnus, De meteoris, 3.2.12, p. 629:
Ego autem vidi in Paduana civitate Lombardiae, quod puteus ab antiquo tempore clausus inventus fuit, qui cum aperiretur, et quidam intraret ad purgandum puteum, mortuus fuit ex vapore cavernae illius, et similiter mortuus est secundus: et tertius voluit scire quare duo moras agerent, inclinatus ad puteum adeo debilitatus est, quod spatio duorum dierum vix rediit ad seipsum: cum autem exspirasset vapor putrefactus in puteo, factus est bonus et potabilis.
122. See note 82 above. This is not the only parallel between the two texts; both mention the Carinthia earthquake, for example.
123. John Clynn, Annales Hiberniae, 37: “ne scriptura cum scriptore pereat, et opus simul cum operario deficiat, dimitto pergamenam pro opere continuando, si forte in futuro homo superstes remaneat, an aliquis de genere Ade hanc pestilenciam possit evadere et opus continuare inceptum.”
124. Opinion of the Paris Medical Faculty, 156: “Amplius pretermittere nolumus quod epidemia aliquando a divina uoluntate procedit, in quo casu non est aliud consilium nisi quod ad ipsum humiliter recurratur, medicos tamen non deserendo.”
125. Utrum mortalitas fit ab ultione divina, 51: “Deus non solum retrahere posset afflictionem supernaturaliter inflictam, sed etiam cursum nature in suis accidentibus retardandis.” The question is posed in either/or terms: “Utrum mortalitas, que fuit hijs annis, fit ab ultione divina propter iniquitates hominum vel a cursu quodam naturali” (44).
126. Continuatio novimontensis, 674, col. 1: “Item eodem anno infinita disturbia in diversis regionibus apparuerunt, quemadmodum principaliter orta fuit seva pestilentia ultra in partibus orientalibus . . . ex maligna impressione superiorum causa efficiente.”
127. See Smoller, History, Prophecy, and the Stars, esp. chaps. 2 and 6.
128. His prognostication appears in Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, MS 3893, fol. 65–99 (the sole Latin manuscript). There is an early printed edition: Pronosticum, sive tractatus qui intitulatur de veritate astronomie, a principio mundi usque in ejus finem (Antwerp: T. Martens, before 1503). There is also a French version, existing in two manuscripts: Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS lat. 7335, fol. 115ra–131ra; Paris, Bibliothèque Ste. Geneviève, MS 2521, fol. 37–57v. There is a brief mention of Jean in the late fifteenth-century compilation of Simon de Phares, in Jean-Patrice Boudet, ed., Le recueil des plus celebres astrologues de Simon de Phares (Paris: Champion, 1997), 563–64. See also Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1923–58), 4:146–47; Jean-Patrice Boudet, Lire dans le ciel: la bibliothèque de Simon de Phares, astrologue du XVe siècle (Brussels: Centre d’Etude des Manuscrits, 1994), 80–83; and Smoller, “The Alfonsine Tables,” 224–31.
129. For a more detailed description of medieval conjunction theory, see Smoller, History, Prophecy, and the Stars, 20–22, 70–71, 73–74; John D. North, Chaucer’s Universe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 370–74; and John D. North, “Astrology and the Fortunes of Churches,” Centaurus 24 (1980): 181–211.
130. Bibliothèque Mazarine, MS 3893, fol. 94v: “Videtur ergo probabile cum naturali lumine per presentem triplicitatem aquatica antichristum et per futuram igneam diluvium per ignem naturaliter exspectandum.” See Smoller, “Alfonsine Tables,” 226–28.
131. E.g., the work of Pierre Turrell (published in 1531), described in Smoller, “Alfonsine Tables,” 231–36; see also Denis Crouzet, Les guerriers de Dieu: la violence au temps des troubles de religion, vers 1525–vers 1610, 2 vols. (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1990), 1: 103–53; and Paola Zambelli, ed., “Astrologi hallucinate”: Stars and the End of the World in Luther’s Time (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1986).
132. Watts, “Prophecy and Discovery,” esp. 96. (But it must be noted that Columbus, like John of Paris, based his prediction on a calculation of the world’s age and the belief that the world would endure only 7000 years.)
I gratefully acknowledge the generous help and encouragement of my teacher Caroline Walker Bynum and that of my classmates in the Eschatology seminar at Columbia University. I thank Nicole Randolph Rice for reading portions of this article before its publication.
1. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super cantica canticorum 26.3.5, in Sancti Bernardi opera, ed. Jean Leclercq, C. H. Talbot, and H. M. Rochais, 8 vols. in 9 (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957–77), 1: 173 (hereafter SC in SBO); trans. Kilian Walsh and Irene Edmonds in Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs, Cistercian Fathers Series, 4 vols. (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1971–80), 2: 63 (hereafter Song). Abbreviations for the works of Bernard of Clairvaux in Latin are taken from “Commonly Used Abbreviations,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly (Vina, Calif.: Abbey of Our Lady of New Clairvaux, 1994).
2. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones in festivitate Omnium Sanctorum 1–5, in SBO 5: 327–70 (hereafter OS in SBO); trans. a priest of Mount Melleray [Ailbe Luddy], Sermons for the Feast of All Saints in St. Bernard’s Sermons for the Seasons and Principal Festivals of the Year, 3 vols. (Dublin: Brown and Nolan, 1921–25), 3: 330–96 (hereafter All Saints, in Sermons for the Seasons).
3. SC 26.3.5 in SBO 1: 173; trans. in Song, 2: 63.
4. I have not addressed this question directly here, but I believe that further investigation would show that the boundary between self and other is, for Bernard, lodged most fundamentally in memory and body.
5. OS 2.2 in OSB 5: 344. Bernard is thinking here of 1 Cor. 9: 26–27. Unless otherwise indicated, the translations are mine.
6. Bernard of Clairvaux, Officium de sancto Victore, in SBO 3: 501; trans. Robert Walton, The Office of St. Victor in The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux, Cistercian Fathers Series 1 (Spencer, Mass.: Cistercian Publications, 1970), 169.
7. OS 5.2 in SBO 5: 362; trans. in All Saints, in Sermons for the Seasons 3: 384.
8. In the twelfth century, as today, one of the Gospel readings for the Feast of All Saints was the Sermon on the Mount, and the bulk of Bernard’s first sermon is a commentary on the Beatitudes, which he refers to as the “ladder on which the whole band [of saints] whom we honor today have climbed to glory”; OS 2.1 in SBO 5: 343.
9. Bernard McGinn, The Growth of Mysticism, vol. 2 of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1994), 212. The language of repose has a long history in monastic literature; see Jean Leclercq, Etudes sur la vocabulaire monastique du moyen áge, Studia Anselmiana Philosophica Theologica 48 (Rome: Herder, 1961), 67, 102–3; idem, Otia monastica: études sur le vocabulaire de la contemplation au moyen age (Rome: Herder, 1963), 13–26, 119–21; Michael Casey, Athirst for God: Spiritual Desire in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1988), 229–30. In Bernard’s own works, see, for example, SC 4.3.4 in OSB 1: 20; trans. in Song, 1: 23; Liber de gradibus humilitatis et superbiae 7.21, in OSB 3: 33–34 (hereafter Hum in OSB); trans. G. R. Evans in Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Steps of Humility and Pride, in Selected Works, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 117–18; for sleep as vital, watchful slumber, ecstasy, and embrace with Christ, see SC 52.2.3–3.6 in OSB 2: 91–93; trans. in Song, 3: 51–54. On the paradox of “waking sleep” and on the significance of otium in Bernard’s writings and in writings of other medieval monastic authors, see Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catherine Misrahi, 3rd ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), 67; idem, Vocabulaire de la contemplation, 27–41, for the word’s ancient, biblical, and patristic use.
10. OS 2.5 in OSB 5: 346; trans. in All Saints, in Sermons for the Season, 3: 359. Restlessness sometimes has a positive connotation, as, for example, when Bernard writes of the bride soul who “cannot rest. . . unless he [Christ] kisses me with the kiss of his mouth”; SC 9.2.2 in OSB 1: 43; trans. in Song, 1: 54. In this case, restlessness is desire and will be consummated in the “ecstatic repose” of the “kiss of his [Christ’s] mouth”; SC 4.3.4 in OSB 1: 20; trans. in Song, 1: 23. Furthermore, Leclercq points out that “to desire Heaven is to want God and to love Him with a love that the monks sometimes call impatient. The greater the desire becomes, the more the soul rests in God”; Leclercq, Love of Learning, 68. Thus it is only while seeking that the soul can rest.
11. The tension between rest and labor is evident throughout Bernard’s works. See, for example, SC 26.4.6 in OSB 1: 173–75. See also Sermo in festivitate sancti Martini episcopi 17, in OSB 5: 411–12.
12. OS 2.6 in OSB 5: 347. For some, there are moments of rest on this side: the person who, having eaten the food of good works and having drunk the beverage of prayer, falls asleep in the midst of prayer and dreams of God; SC 18.3.5–6 in OSB 1: 106–8.
13. OS 2.5 in OSB 5: 378.
14. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones in dedicatione ecclesiae 2.4, in OSB 5: 378 (hereafter Ded in OSB).
15. OS 3.2 in OSB 5: 350.
16. Bernard of Clairvaux, Liber de diligendo Deo 11.30, in OSB 3: 144–45 (hereafter Dil in OSB; trans. in On Loving God, in G. R. Evans, Selected Works, 197.
17. On the bed and bedroom, see Dil 3.8 in OSB 3: 125; Dil 3.10 in OSB 3: 126; SC 23.1.2 in OSB 1: 139; SC 23.2.3 in OSB 1: 140; SC 23.6.16 in OSB 1: 149–50; SC 84.1.3 in OSB 2: 304. On the bed as the location of encounter with God, see McGinn, Growth, 188–89. It is not surprising that the bed is also an image of the monastery; see SC 46.1.2. in OSB 2: 56–57.
18. SC 23.6.16 in OSB 1: 149–50; Hum 7.21 in OSB 3: 32–33. See also McGinn, Growth, 190.
19. In sermon twenty-three on the Song of Songs, Bernard suggests further the discreteness of each soul’s union with God when he writes: “I feel that the King has not one bedroom only, but several. For he has more than one queen; his concubines are many, his maids beyond counting [Song 6: 7]. And each has her own secret rendezvous with the Bridegroom and says: ‘My secret to myself, my secret to myself’ [Isa. 24: 16]. All do not experience the delight of the Bridegroom’s visit in the same room”; SC 23.4.9 in OSB 1: 144–45; trans. in Song, 2: 33–34. Bernard’s emphasis on the separateness of each soul’s encounter with God from every other soul’s encounter with God, his imagery of separate beds and separate bedrooms, raises interesting questions about privacy in the Middle Ages: the separate bedrooms in heaven contrast with the sleeping arrangements at Clairvaux, where, with the exception of the abbot, all monks slept in a single dormitory; Elphège Vacandard, Vie de saint Bernard, abbé de Clairvaux (Paris: J. Gabalda, 1894; rep. 1927), 70–71.
20. OS 5.4 in OSB 5: 364. The saints do seem to be aware of the damned; it is not clear if this awareness comes before or only after the resurrection; OS 3.3 in OSB 5: 351–52.
21. OS 1.3 in OSB 5: 329.
22. We find little concern for the communal aspect of eating when Bernard uses this image in a sermon for St. Victor. The conscience of St. Victor, resting from his conflicts, is seated at a table with Christ, the angels, apostles, and prophets. Bernard even names some of Victor’s dining companions, it is true—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—but such identification simply underscores the saint’s august company, rather than suggesting interaction among that company. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones in natali sancti Victoris 2, in OSB 6.1: 33–34 (hereafter Vict in OSB).
23. Thus, for example, no clear picture of the saints as particular, specific people emerges in these sermons, and neither emulation of individual saints nor their intercession is the connection between heaven and earth. If we want to know about the relationship between the living and the dead, we have to look elsewhere: indeed, it is in large part the monks’ participation in the heavenly feast that joins heaven and earth. When, in the opening passages of his first sermon, Bernard labors to excite his monastic readers’ (or listeners’) desire for heaven (and not, it is worthwhile noting, their desire for the saints per se), he uses images of spiritual feasting and alludes also to the actual eating practices in the monastic community. Bernard describes himself and his monks as “beggars . . . lying before the door of a very rich king”; OS 1.2 in OSB 5: 328. Like hungry Lazarus, who pleaded with the rich man for scraps from his table, Bernard’s monks, and Bernard himself, long to be sustained by the crumbs that fall from the table of the holy souls. God himself (not the saints) gives this food directly to Bernard, and it is through Bernard’s sermon that his monks eat of these longed-for crumbs of Christ, tasting heaven by eating with their ears the words of Bernard’s sermons. (That Bernard should talk about eating Christ’s words and actions through hearing is not surprising. It is, after all, the flesh of the Incarnate Word that is eaten in communion.) By eating this food, the monk participates in the glory of the saints.
24. For eating as the occasion of union with others and on the eucharistic overtones of feasting in general in the Middle Ages, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 3–5; on the changing perceptions of fast and eucharist from late antiquity through the high Middle Ages, see ibid., 33–69. Miri Rubin analyzes the ways in which members of dominant as well as nondominant groups in the Middle Ages used the eucharist to circumvent local loyalties in an effort to achieve unity among those with widely differing social and political allegiances, as well as to buttress dominant ideology and to challenge it; Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. 347–49.
25. SC 71.2.5 in OSB 2: 217; trans. in Song, 4: 51–52.
26. SC 71.4.10 in OSB 2: 221.
27. SC 71.3.8 in OSB 2: 220. See McGinn, Growth, 213–15.
28. Dil 15.39 in OSB 3: 153; trans. in On Loving God, in Selected Works, 205.
29. Dil 10.28 in OSB 3: 143. For biblical and baptismal sources of water symbolism in medieval writings, see James C. Franklin, Mystical Transformations: The Imagery of Liquids in the Work of Mechthild von Magdeburg (Rutherford, N.J.: Associated University Press, 1978), 64–72.
30. “Pristina propriaque exutum forma”; Dil 10.28 in OSB 3: 143.
31. Dil 10.27–28 in OSB 3: 142–43.
32. Etienne Gilson, The Mystical Theology of Bernard of Clairvaux, trans. A. H. C. Downes (London: Sheed & Ward, 1940), 122.
33. Dil 10.28 in OSB 3: 143. Colin Morris argues (citing Dil 10.28 in OSB 3: 134) that, whereas Bernard spoke in On Loving God (written between 1125 and 1141 and perhaps in 1128) about deification as a loss of self in God, he spoke about déification as the fulfillment of self in his sermons On the Song of Songs, which he began in 1135 (see SC 71.4.10 in OSB 2: 221); Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200 (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 154–55. Gilson, sensitive to charges of pantheism leveled against Bernard, is at pains to emphasize Bernard’s insistence, throughout his writings, on the permanent distinction between God’s substance and the substance of each soul; Gilson, Mystical Theology, 122–32.
34. See Gilson, Mystical Theology, 26–28, 128–29 and Morris, Discovery, 152–57. Bynum discusses this idea in the context of twelfth-century thought as a whole; Caroline Walker Bynum, “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?” in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), esp. 87–88.
35. SC 82.3.5 in OSB 2: 295. See also Dil 11.32 in OSB 3: 146.
36. Gilson discusses this in Mystical Theology, esp. 28, 54. McGinn points out that, whereas Bernard argues in On Grace and Free Choice that the soul’s likeness to God has not been lost through sin, he argues in his sermons on the Song of Songs that this likeness has been partly concealed; McGinn, Growth, 168–71.
37. Ded 1.7 in OSB 5: 374–75.
38. Ibid. Bernard believes that no created spirit can communicate with another created spirit without the use of bodily senses—God alone can act directly on the mind (OS 5.2.8–3.8 in OSB 1: 24–25), and neither human being nor angel can penetrate the secret intentions of another (Sermones in Psalmum “Qui habitat” 15.3.3–6, in OSB 4: 478). On Bernard’s acceptance of the Augustinian principle of the “inviolability of spirits,” see Adele Fiske, “St. Bernard and Friendship,” parts 1 and 2, Citeaux: commentarii Cistercienses 11 (1960): 5–25, 85–103 (quote at 6). This epistemology would militate against the notion of the union of souls’ wills in heaven (and raise the question of how, before the resurrection, the bodiless souls of saints communicate with one another). But a different epistemology reigns in Bernard’s heaven, if we take Ded 1.7 to mean that the thoughts of each are accessible to each without going through the medium of sense perception. And see Ded 2.4 in OSB 5: 378. The relation between the self—as image of God—and others is particularly intriguing in the light of the fact that the imago Dei is the same for all people. I have not been able to locate any text that addresses this question directly. For the twelfth-century understanding of “the self” and for the soul as image of God, see Bynum, “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?” 85–88, Morris, Discovery, 64–95, and Robert Javelet, Image et ressemblance au douzième siècle, de Saint Anselme a Alain de Lille, 2 vols. (Paris: Editions Letouzey et Ané, 1967), esp. 1: 187–98. See M.-D. Chenu for a new sense of self in the twelfth century; M.-D. Chenu, “Nature and Man: The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century,” in Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 23–37.
39. On the twelfth century’s emphasis on the boundaries between people, see Bynum, “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?” 85–86.
40. SC 26 in OSB 1.
41. SC 26.6.9 in OSB 1: 177; trans. in Song, 2: 69.
42. SC 26.2.4 in OSB 1: 172; trans. in Song, 2: 61.
43. Ibid.
44. SC 26.2.4 in OSB 1: 172; trans. in Song, 2: 62.
45. Bernard of Clairvaux, Preface, The Life of Saint Malachy, in The Life and Death of Saint Malachy the Irishman, trans. Robert T. Meyer, Cistercian Fathers Series 10 (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1978), 13.
46. The Life of Saint Malachy, 93.
47. Sermo in obitu domni Humberti 1, in OSB 5: 440, (hereafter Humb in OSB); trans. in Sermon for the Feast of Blessed Humbert, in Sermons for the Seasons, 1: 61.
48. Jean Leclercq, “La joie de mourir selon saint Bernard de Clairvaux,” in Dies Illa: Death in the Middle Ages, ed. Jane H. M. Taylor (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1984), 200–201.
49. Humb 6 in OSB 5: 445–46; trans. in Blessed Humbert, in Sermons for the Seasons 3: 68–69.
50. In these five sermons, Bernard expresses little interest in the complexity of the inner (or outer) life of the saints (on earth or in heaven), and he does not detail the diversity of the lives lived by the saints, of which we are given little if any sense at all: the saints remain, throughout, an anonymous, undifferentiated group. On the question of grouping, see “The Orders of Society,” in Giles Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought: An Interpretation of Mary and Martha, The Ideal of the Imitation of Christ, The Orders of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
51. SC 26.3.5 in OSB 1: 173; trans. in Song, 2: 63. It is important to note that I have not located traces of this preoccupation in other writings by Bernard. If we consider Bernard’s own preference for withdrawing in union with the Word, it is not surprising that he should be fearful of being forgotten by Gerard. In sermon eighty-five on the Song of Songs, Bernard writes that in spiritual marriage the soul may give birth in two ways. On the one hand, she may give birth to others, in consideration of the joys of her neighbor; on the other hand, the soul may give birth to spiritual insight. It is this latter bringing to birth that Bernard relishes: “A mother is happy in her child; a bride is even happier in her bridegroom’s embrace. The children are dear, they are the pledge of his love, but his kisses give her greater pleasure”; OS 85.4.13 in OBS 2: 316; trans. in Song, 4: 209. No wonder Bernard is worried. Fracheboud and Bynum have drawn attention to the conflict Bernard felt over the competing claims of service and solitude, over preaching and prayer; M. André Fracheboud, “Je suis la chimère de mon siècle: le problème action-contemplation au coeur de saint Bernard,” Collectanea Cisterciensium Reformatorum 16 (1954); Bynum, “The Cistercian Conception of Community,” in Jesus as Mother, 71.
52. SC 26.2.4 in OSB 1: 172; trans. in Song, 2:61.
53. SC 26.3.5 in OSB 1: 173; trans. in Song, 2: 63. Bernard writes similarly about the love that Humbert, now in heaven, houses for those on earth; Humb 7 in OSB 5: 446–47.
54. Vict 3 in OSB 6.1: 33—35.
55. Bernard of Clairvaux, De consideratione ad Eugenium papam 5.7.26 in OSB 3: 488. It is interesting that (in at least some instances) it is Bernard’s need to be remembered by the dead that prompts him to discuss the question of memory in heaven, indicating that the concern for the continuity of relationships established on earth is an impetus for his discussion of memory. See his sermon on St. Victor (Vict in OSB 6.1: 29–37), whom Bernard did not know, and his sermon on Gerard (SC 26 in OSB 1: 169–81).
56. The depth and ardor of Bernard’s attachments triggered conflicting emotions in him. In sermon fourteen on the Song of Songs, he recounts the near despair by which he was several times overcome “in the beginning of his conversion,” when he was unable to find and love the God whom he sought and when he could discover no friend who might loosen “the chilling winter that bound” his “inward senses (sensus internos)”; SC 14.4.6 in OSB 1: 79. But he also remembers that at a sudden and chance utterance, “or even at the sight of a spiritual and excellent man, and occasionally at the memory alone of someone dead or absent, the wind blew and the waters flowed [Ps. 147: 18],” and Bernard’s tears fell almost day and night; ibid. Bernard acknowledges that he was disappointed not to have come to this experience of God without the mediation of fellow human beings and writes of the shame he feels at having been “moved more by the memory of a human being than by God”; ibid. As Fiske has remarked, a “friend can communicate to him [Bernard] what he cannot get for himself directly from God, even from the humanity of Christ”; “St. Bernard and Friendship,” 13. Bernard has been singled out as a pivotal example of a twelfth-century person who placed an enormous value on friendship and cultivated friendships with energy and passion. On the importance of the twelfth century for the history of friendship, see Morris, Discovery, 96–107. For the role Bernard played in the subsequent identification of the twelfth century as “the age of friendship,” see Brian Patrick McGuire, Friendship & Community: The Monastic Experience c.350–c.1250, Cistercian Studies Series 95 (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1988), 231–95. For the influence of Cicero’s ideas about friendship on Bernard—and on the twelfth century as a whole—see Gilson, Mystical Theology, 8–13. Fiske shows the enormous importance of friendship to Bernard, considers the friendships Bernard had with William of St. Thierry and Peter the Venerable, and discusses the way in which Bernard’s reflections on friendship figure into his theological reflections; Fiske, “St. Bernard and Friendship.”
57. Hum 4.14 in OSB 3: 27; trans. in Steps of Humility, in Selected Works, 112–13.
58. Fiske has argued that Bernard held two different positions regarding love of others. First, Bernard expressed the belief that authentic love is grounded in a true perception of the person whom one loves. Second, Bernard considered authentic love to be without proportion to the merit of the person loved; Fiske, “St. Bernard and Friendship,” 21–23. Fiske’s insight is important for my topic. To pursue it might very well shed further light on Bernard’s understanding of whom and how we love in heaven.
59. OS 5.6 in OSB 5: 365.
60. Dil 10.28 in OSB 3: 143.
61. This “leveling” of all human beings may take place while we are alive, but with a different outcome; it creates a sort of solidarity among sinners. While we are alive, the ecstasy that the soul enjoys when she is carried away from herself and adheres to God ushers in the compassionate realization that all human beings are weak, wretched, and powerless. This realization causes the soul to cry out: “Every man is a liar”; Hum 4.16 in OSB 3: 28.
62. SC 26.3.6 in OSB 1: 173; trans. in Song, 2: 64.
63. SC 82.2.2–3.8 in OSB 2: 293–98. On the soul made in the image of God and the soul’s likeness to God, see Javelet, Image et ressemblance, 1: 187–98.
64. OS 2.7 in OSB 5: 347–48.
65. OS 3.3 in OSB 5: 351.
66. OS 3 in OSB 5: 349–53. With their bodies back, the saints’ love might spill outward into new sorts of relationships with others; after all, the return of their bodies to them frees them to love God fully for the first time. Moreover, there might be a connection between the establishment of the whole person and the nature of relationship with others. In addition, Fiske has drawn attention to Bernard’s zest for the corporeal presence of his friends. Bernard expressed his preference for the corporeal presence of his friends, regarding it as “far more desirable than the spiritual bond alone”; Fiske, “St. Bernard and Friendship,” 87–88. Finally, if embodiment more completely establishes the identity of each saint, might these new selves usher in a new kind of community?
67. The Life of Saint Malachy, 93.
68. SC 26.8.12 in OSB 1: 179; Humb 1 in OSB 5: 441.
69. OS 3.1 in OSB 5: 349–50. Simon Tugwell discusses Bernard’s insistence on complete reward going only to complete people—not to bodiless souls; Simon Tugwell, Human Immortality and the Redemption of Death (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1990), 133.
70. Bynum has remarked on the rarity in the late Middle Ages of considerations of “the social implications of resurrection,” and she has pointed to the lack of a communal dimension in the medieval discussions of the resurrection; Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 249, 287.
71. OS 5.6 in OSB 5: 365.
72. Dil 11.30 in OSB 3: 144; trans. in On Loving God, in Selected Works, 197.
73. OS 1 in OSB 5: 350; OS 3.4 in OSB 5: 352; trans. in All Saints, in Sermons for the Seasons, 365, 369.
74. See Bynum, “Conception of Community,” in Jesus as Mother, esp. 69–75, 80–81.
75. It is not clear whether there is a causal relationship between loving God fully because desire for the body has been quieted and seeing God as he is. Bernard wants to insist that souls are at rest before the resurrection and that souls cannot be fully at rest—because not fully satisfied—until they get their bodies back. He does, nevertheless, seem to believe that bodies do add something, in addition to the cessation of distraction, to the soul’s ability to experience in heaven; Dil 11.30 in OSB 3: 144–45. See Leclercq, Vocabulaire de la contemplation, 126 and Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 163–66.
76. Bernard’s thought was at the center of the controversy that erupted over the beatific vision in the 1330s. For that controversy, see Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, esp. 283–85. Tugwell discusses the controversy and points to the significance of Bernard’s thought in it; Tugwell, Human Immortality, 130–55.
77. See M.-D. Chenu, “Monks, Canons, and Laymen in Search of the Apostolic Life,” in Nature, Man, and Society, 202–38; Bynum “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?”; and, largely in response to Bynum’s essay, Colin Morris, “Individualism in Twelfth-Century Religion: Some Further Reflections,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 3, 2 (April 1980): esp. 204–5.
Versions of this paper were given at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in January 1997 and a colloquium connected with the Paris exhibition L’art au temps des rois maudits in June 1998. I am grateful to many colleagues, both at these conferences and in correspondence, for their comments and suggestions.
1. Cambrai, Bibl. Mun., ms. 87 fols. 16v, 17v. Auguste Molinier, Catalogue général des manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques de France 17 (1891), 21–22. See National Gallery of Canada, Art and the Courts: France and England from 1259 to 1328 (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1972), no. 18 (by M. Montpetit); Paris, Musée National du Moyen Age—Thermes de Cluny, and Cologne, Schnütgen-Museum der Städt Köln, Un trésor gothique: la châsse de Nivelles (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1996), no. 51 (by A. von Euw); Andreas Bräm, Das Andachtsbuch der Marie de Gavre, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, ms. nouv. acq. fr. 16251. Buchmalerei in der Diözese Cambrai im letzen Viertel des 13. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden: Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 1997), 177–80; and Paris, Galleries Nationales du Grand Palais, L’art au temps des rois maudits: Philippe le Bel et ses fils 1285–1328 (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1998), no. 210 (by François Avril).
2. In addition to the Hours of the Virgin, Office of the Dead, Canticles, and Creed, the manuscript contains a number of texts in French, including the Hours of the Cross, a short version of the story of Christ, and prayers in prose or verse to Mary and the guardian angel. See Jean Sonet, Répertoire d’incipit des prières en ancien français (Geneva: Droz, 1956), nos. 321, 330, 587, 588, 1100, 1278, 1599. On Sonet nos. 321, 330, 587, 1100, 1599, see Keith Val Sinclair, Prières en ancien français (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1978), and on nos. 588, 1278, R635, R1305, see Pierre Rézeau, Répertoire d’incipit des prières françaises à la fin du Moyen Age: addenda et corrigenda aux répertoires de Sonet et Sinclair (Geneva: Droz, 1986). See also Rézeau, Les Prières aux saints en français à la fin du moyen âge (Geneva: Droz, 1982–83), 515–18.
3. Molinier identified the arms as those of Mahaut d’Artois, wife first of Robert I d’Artois and then of Guy de Châtillon, count of St. Paul; because of his attribution, the manuscript is sometimes referred to as the Hours of Mahaut d’Artois. All subsequent writers, however, have followed Sydney C. Cockerell’s suggestion in the catalogue of the Burlington Fine Arts Club Exhibition of Illuminated Manuscripts (London, 1908), no. 141 that the arms are those of Isabeau de Rumigny. Bräm, Das Andachtsbuch der Marie de Gavre, 178, citing Michel Pastoureau, seems to adhere to the earlier identification.
4. Avril, L’art au temps des rois maudits, 310.
5. Ibid.
6. Christ’s nimbus is orange rather than gold, like the others in the miniature.
7. Beside the figure wearing a papal tiara are two men wearing bishop’s mitres, and nearby is a priest with a chalice and the eucharist as well as a king in a plain blue robe. Only some of the figures in the rest of this all-male group are tonsured.
8. The men include St. John with his cup and possibly St. Paul with the sword; the others are presumably other apostles, martyrs, and confessors. Among the group of virgins and female martyrs are Margaret standing behind or in a small dragon, Ursula holding an arrow, and Katherine, who puts a sword in the mouth of the crowned Maxentius, as she does in illuminations accompanying the litany in the closely related Ruskin Hours, now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, ms. 83. ML. 99; see Anton von Euw and Joachim Plotzek, Die Handschriften der Sammlung Ludwig (Cologne: Schniitgen-Museum, 1982), 2: 74–83, Fig. 39.
9. The armored figure wears a decorated helmet and carries a lance and shield. His shield and the horse coverings are decorated with his arms, which appear to be argent a cross gueles, the arms of St. George.
10. Florence, Bibl. Laurenziana ms. Plut. XII.17; C. M. Kauffmann, Romanesque Manuscripts, 1066–1190, Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles 3 (London: Harvey Miller, 1975), no. 19. For later manuscripts of the City of God, which follow another tradition, see Alexandre de Laborde, Les manuscrits à peintures de la Cité de Dieu de Saint Augustin (Paris: E. Rahir, 1909).
11. See Gertrude Schiller, Ikonographie der christlichen Kunst, vol. 4. 1 (Götersloh: Gerd Mohr, 1976), 101. Marie-Louise Thérel, Le triomphe de la Vierge-Eglise: sources historiques, littéraires et iconographiques (Paris: CNRS, 1984), 180, notes that while the text would suggest that this figure is the Church in the midst of the elect, she connects the flowering scepter and its dove with Isaiah 11: 1–2 and thus sees here an allusion to the Mother of God.
12. Augustine, De civitate Dei, bk. 20, chap. 9, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 43 (Turnholt: Brepols, 1955), 716.
13. Herrad of Hohenbourg, Hortus Deliciarum, ed. Rosalie B. Green et al., Studies of the Warburg Institute 36 (London, Warburg Institute, 1979), no. 302. The text identifies the figure as “Ecclesiam qui dicitur Virgo Mater.” See also Herrad of Landsberg, Hortus Deliciarum, commentary and notes by A. Straub and G. Keller, ed. and trans. Aristide D. Caratzas (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Caratzas Bros., 1977), 205, pl. 59.
14. The diverse ranks we see here and in the Cambrai manuscript clearly reflect larger social structures, such as Peter Dinzelbacher has shown for textual descriptions of the next world. See his “Reflexionen irdischer Sozialstrukturen in mittelalterlichen Jenseitsschilderungen,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 61, 1 (1979): 16–34; and “Klassen und Hierarchien im Jenseits,” in Soziale Ordnungen im Selbstsverstandnis des Mittelalters, Miscellanea Medievalia 12, (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1979), 20–40.
15. Hortus Deliciarum, 204 (“per obedientiam in suis ordinibus cottidie laborant et adventum sponsi, id est Christi, fideliter negociantes exspectant”).
16. Munich, Bay. Staatsbibliothek, clm. 835; Nigel J. Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts, vol. 1, 1190–1250, Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles 4 (London: Harvey Miller, 1982), no. 23 (attributed to Oxford).
17. They hold scrolls inscribed “Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus,” “Gloria in excelsis deo,” and the like; there is also a nonliturgical hymn, the Laus deo. See Reinhold Hammerstein, Die Musik der Engel: Untersuchungen zur Musikanschauung Bern: Francke, 1962), 221.
18. For Haimo, Expositio in Apocalypsim, PL 117 cols. 1169 A–D, 1170 B–C; for Richard, In Apocalypsim Libri Septem, PL 196 cols. 847C–848C. Also see Richard (PL 196 col. 759D–760C) and Rupert of Deutz (Commentarium in Apocalypsim, PL 169 col. 939A), who interpret the twenty-four elders of Revelation 19: 4 as the prelates and judges of the Church. The distinction in gender among the groups of saints in these miniatures may also be a function of the spousal imagery: see Berengaudus, Expositio in Apocalypsim, PL 17 (mistakenly attributed to Ambrose), col. 1010A, who discusses the marriage of Christ and the Church in terms of the joining of male and female into one flesh, as in Genesis 2.
19. Lionel J. Friedman, Text and Iconography of Joinville’s Credo (Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of America, 1958), 48; and I. P. Mokretsova and V. L. Romanova, Les manuscrits enluminés français du XIIIe siècle dans les collections soviétiques, 1270–1300 (Moscow: Isskusstvo, 1984), 194–231.
20. For the relation to contemporary apocalypse illustration, see Suzanne Lewis, Reading Images: Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Apocalypse (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 176.
21. In the Munich Psalter the facing page represents the Last Judgment (fol. 30) and is followed by the related Torments of Hell (fol. 30v). The reading of this Credo page is unusual because the text of the eleventh article of faith (Carnis resurrectionem) and the Last Judgment are at the bottom of the page and the text of the twelfth article (Vitam eternam. Amen) and banquet scene are above. Because the previous texts and miniatures all read normally, from above to below, it is likely that the artist reversed the order so that the subjects illustrated would follow that of Revelation.
22. Thérel, Le triomphe de la Vierge-Église, 174–82 and passim.
23. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, acq. 1970.324.7a–b. See Peter Barnet, ed., Images in Ivory: Precious Objects of the Gothic Age (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), no. 9 (by C. Little); and Christian Heck, L’échelle céleste dans l’art du moyen âge: une image de la quête du ciel (Paris: Flammarion, 1997), 141.
24. Raymond Koechlin, Les ivoires gothiques français (Paris, A. Piccard, 1924), nos. 234, 348, 524.
25. See my “Narrative Structure and Content in Some Gothic Ivories of the Life of Christ,” in Barnet, ed., Images in Ivory, 95–114.
26. Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 309.
27. The theological issues have been recently surveyed and discussed in detail in Christian Trottmann, La vision béatifique des disputes scolastiques à sa définition par Benoît XII, Bibliothèque des Ecoles Françaises d’Athènes et de Rome 289 (Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 1995). I have found especially useful the shorter discussions in Nikolaus Wicki, Die Lehre von der himmlischen Seligkeit in der mittelalterlichen Scholastik von Petrus Lombardus bis Thomas von Aquin, Studia Friburgensia n. f. 9 (Freiburg: Universitätsverlag, 1954); Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), esp. ch. 7; and Jeffrey Burton Russell, A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 122–46.
28. For example, Albertus Magnus, in Tract IV, Questo 1, Art. 9 sec. 3, distinguishes the visio dei in patria from lesser visions in via; see De Resurrectione, in Opera omnia (Cologne: Bernhard Geyer, 1958), 26: 330–31. For his discussion of “across the Jordan” as a metaphor for the interim of the blessed, see ibid., p. 270. For a similar discussion of the sinus Abrahae, see Alexander of Hales, Glossa in quattuor libros sententiarum Petri Lombradi, Bibliotheca Franciscana Scholastici Medii Aevi (Florence: Quaracchi, 1952), Liber IV, Distinctio I, 19. In contrast, Bonaventura, one of the strongest exponents of the beatific vision, leaves no doubt that souls are in heaven and of the “curia coelestis”; see Dist. XXI, part. I, art. III, quaest. II, in Saint Cardinal Bonaventura, Opera omnia, ed. A. C. Peltier (Paris: L. Vives, 1864), 6: 101–2. Elsewhere (Dist. XLV, quest. II, p. 512) he refers to this heavenly place of quietude and waiting as Gloria and likens it to the bosom of Abraham.
29. See Wicki, Die Lehre, esp. 209–12. For Mary as the ladder on which angels and, for that matter, the son of God and we ourselves ascend and descend, see Albertus Magnus, Biblia Mariana, in Opera omnia, ed. Augustus and Aemitius Borgent (Paris: L. Vives, 1890), 37: 369, on Genesis 23: 12–13 (“Vidit Jacob in somnis scalam, id est, Mariam. Per eam enim descendit Filius Dei ad nos, et nos per ad eam eum. . . . Ipsa etiam est porta regni, et nostrae ingressionis in regnum . . .”).
30. Wicki, Die Lehre, and Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 8, 235–47, and passim. See also Eileen C. Sweeny, “Individuation and the Body in Aquinas,” in Individuum und Individualität im Mittelalter, ed. Jan Aertsen and Andreas Speer, Miscellanea Medievalia 24 (Berlin: de Gruyter 1996), 178–96.
31. PL 212 cols. 1059–60 (“Campus iste floridus locus est animarum sanctarum, quae in bonus operibus exierunt de corpore, et regnum Dei exspectant cum magna laetitia et exultatione.”
32. See Giles Constable, “The Vision of Gunthelm and Other Visions Attributed to Peter the Venerable,” Revue Benedictine 56 (1956): 92–114, at p. 107. For the exempla of Stephen of Bourbon (c. 1260) describing visions in which Mary is the guide, see A. Lecoy de la Marche, ed., Anecdotes historiques, légendes et apologues tirées du receuil inédit d’Étienne de Bourbon, dominicain du XIIIe siècle (Paris: Libraire Renouard, 1877), nos. 115 (p. 99) and 125 (p. 107). Caesarius of Heisterbach (c. 1220) has numerous exempla in which Mary shows the living a vision of the coelesti patria, usually in which she presides, often in the company of saints; see Dialogus Miraculorum, ed. Josephus Strange (Cologne, 1858; rep. 1966), 2: 280–81, 351–53, 357–58, 360–61. For a similar situation seventy years later, see Anne-Marie Polo de Beaulieu, ed., La scala coeli de Jean Gobi (Paris: CNRS, 1991), no. 659, no. 445.
33. Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, Its Origins and Character (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), 1: 212–13.
34. For the former, see the All Saints window in the cathedral at Cologne, c. 1315, where the whole grouping is surmounted by Christ blessing Mary, both of whom are crowned, and there is a hierarchy of both saints and angels, in Herbert Rode, Die mittelalterlichen Glasmalereien des Kølner Domes, Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, Deutschland IV, 1 (Berlin: Deutsches Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 1974), 65–68. For the latter, a striking example is the All Saints illumination from a Laudario, c. 1340 possibly made for the Company of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington; see Medieval and Renaissance Miniatures from the National Gallery of Art, ed. Gary Vikan (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1975), 29–32, no. 8.
35. In the Ascension, Christ and Mary are enthroned together in a mandorla raised by angels, with Christ to Mary’s right, possibly a reference to the bride and bridegroom of Canticum Canticorum, 2.6, 8.3; see I. Hueck, “Cimabue und das Bild-programm der Oberkirche von S. Francesco in Assisi,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institut in Florenz 25 (1981): 279–324, esp. 301–5. These themes are also stressed by J. Poeschke, Die Kirche San Francesco in Assisi und ihre Wandmalereien (Munich: Hirmer, 1985), 24, 73.
36. For example, the Clarisse Master’s painting in Siena in James H. Stubblebine, Guida da Siena (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964), 67–69, fig. 34; the panel in Santa Maria Novella reproduced in Richard Offner, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting (New York: College of Fine Arts, New York University, 1930), sec. III, vol. 2, pt. 1, 58–59, pl. XXV; or the painting attributed to Giovanni del Biondo in New Haven, reproduced in Lotte Brand Philip, The Ghent Altarpiece and the Art of Jan van Eyck (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), fig. 78. For Christ crowning Mary from her right, see the unusual drawing of the group in the gable of the Siena Baptistry in H. Keller, “Die Bauplastik des Sieneser Doms,” Kunstgeschichtliches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana 1 (1937): 139–222, fig. 128. Such images are rarer in northern Europe; see, however, examples such as the Bonmont Psalter and others cited in Philippe Verdier, Le couronnement de la Vierge: les origines et les premiers développements d’un thème iconographique (Montreal: Institut d’Etudes Médiévales, 1980), 146–49.
37. See Francis Lee Pitts, Nardo di Cione and the Strozzi Chapel Frescoes: Iconographic Problems in Mid-Trecento Florence, Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1982, esp. 265–71.
38. Ibid., 256–61.
39. Ibid., 219–45, especially for the way the blessed and angels are ordered according to distinct physical and psychological qualities. The author sees the frescoesin part as a response to the continuing controversies surrounding Aquinas’s teachings and recent canonization (141–56). The painting is usually referred to as the Paradisio; for the parallel to Dante’s poem, canto XXXII, see Hans Belting, “Das Bild als Text:Wandmalerei und Literatur in Zeitalter Dantes,” in Belting and Dieter Blume, Male-rei und Stadtkultur in der Dantezeit (Munich: Hirmer, 1989), 23–64, esp. 52–53. For a discussion of Dante’s poem in relation to the visio dei, see Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 298–305. Citing the angels sounding trumpets in the lower corners of the dark area below the enthroned Virgin and Christ, Bynum (306 n. 102, pl. 25) interprets the blessed as already resurrected and thus as “ ‘real’ and paintable.” However, Pitts, Nardo di Cione, 244–45, links the two trumpets to the two tambourines in the upper corners of this area and shows that both were used heraldically at the time and are part of an elaborate setting of musical instruments. Bynum’s connection between what is resurrected and what is paintable raises the interesting question of whether it is possible, in a visual context in which the soul must always express itself in body, to distinguish between the resurrected and the unresurrected. Some distinctions are possible, I believe, such as between different levels of reality or of representation, as discussed below.
40. In this it naturally relates to other Marian themes, such as the Virgin enclosing the elect under her mantle. Like the subjects discussed here, the theme is found widely in devotional literature, especially in France in the mid-thirteenth century, and is especially widespread in Italy in the early fourteenth century; for this tradition, see Vera Sussman, “Maria mit Schutzmantel,” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 5 (1929): 285–351.
41. Un trésor gothique, no. 13, 300–303.
42. Bruno Boerner, “Interprétation du programme iconographique de la châsse de sainte Gertrude à Nivelles,” in Un trésor gothique, 225–33.
43. In illumination too the new dispensation is shown by placing Sponsa or Ecclesia in structures with recognizably modern architectural details; see Reiner Haussherr, “Templum Salomonis und Ecclesia Christi: Zu einem Bildvergleich der Bible Moralisée,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 31 (1968): 101–21; and Véronique Germanier, “L’Ecclesia comme Sponsa Christi dans les Bibles Moralisées de la première moitié du XIIIème siècle,” Arte Cristiana 84, 775 (1996): 243–52. At this time stained glass programs in architectural choirs increasingly assert ecclesiastical presence; see Peter Kurmann and Brigitte Kurmann-Schwarz, “Französische Bischôfe als Auftraggeber und Stifter von Glasmalereien: Das Kunstwerk als Geschichtsquelie,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 60 (1997): 429–50, who refer to the programs as creating an “église archiépiscopale” (440).
44. Cambrai, Bibl Mun., ms. 154; see Un trésor gothique, no. 53.
45. Philippe Verdier, “Les staurothèques mosanes et leur iconographie du Jugement Dernier,” Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 16 (1973): 199–213.
46. It is unlikely that someone just wanted to include these subjects because several are already represented in the initials in the Hours of the Virgin.
47. Examples include the initials in the Bury Bible and Lothian Bible; see Kauffmann, Romanesque Manuscripts, no. 56, p. 89 and Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts, no. 32, p. 79.
48. The frame dimensions are approximately 17 x 10 cm.
49. The cycle of the Hours of the Cross shows the presumed patron in a series of temptations. For a detailed discussion, one looks forward to Adelaide Bennett, “A Woman’s Power of Prayer Versus the Devil in a Book of Hours of ca. 1300,” in Image and Belief: Studies in Celebration of the Eightieth Anniversary of the Index of Christian Art, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).
50. Published in Rezeau, Le prières aux saints, no. 217, pp. 515–18. The final verses (lines 55–60) read: “Et quant m’arme ert del cors sevree, / faites que soit representee / devant la parmanaule joie, / la ou sans fin avec Diu soie, / ou jou le voie fache a fache. / Pryés ent Dieu et il le fache.”
51. For a depiction of the visio dei of slightly later date, see Lucy Freeman Sandler, “Face to Face with God: A Pictorial Image of the Beatific Vision,” in England in the Fourteenth Century, Proceedings of the 1985 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. W. M. Ormrod (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1986), 224–35. For devotional works, see Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland circa 1300 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), ch. 4. An interesting analogy to the introductory role of the Cambrai miniature is the illumination of Christ, Mary, and the saints in heaven which, along with the facing page of the Four Evangelists, introduce the Gospel Lessons (which precede the Hours in the Virgin) in a Flemish Horae of c. 1440, Morgan Library, M. 357; see Roger S. Wieck, Painted Prayers: The Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art (New York: George Braziller in association with the Pierpont Morgan Library, 1997), 49.
52. Philip, Ghent Altarpiece, chap. 1.
53. See Elisabeth Dhanens, “De Wijze Waarop het Lam Godsaltaar was opgesteld,” Gentse Bijdragen tot de Kunstgeschiedenis en de Oudheidkunde 22 (1969–72): 19–90, who proposes that the various panels were arranged into a large cabinetlike structure. The analogy to a reliquary—in this case it would be a box reliquary—is still apt, all the more so because the central panels in her reconstruction enclose a tabernacle.
54. Philip, Ghent Altarpiece, 55–61. Various authors have argued for the influence of specific theological works, especially Rupert of Deutz; see the summaries in H. Silvester, “Le retable de l’Agneau mystique et Rupert de Deutz,” Revue Bénédictine 88 (1978): 274–86; Elisabeth Dhanens, Van Eyck: The Ghent Altarpiece (New York: Viking Press, 1973). For Berengaudus, see Derk Visser, Apocalypse as Utopian Expectation (800–1500) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), 152–64.
55. See Carol J. Purtle, The Marian Paintings of Jan van Eyck (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), 17–39, esp. 35–38. The author also interprets the Annunciation on the exterior in terms of its spousal imagery and argues that the altarpiece was originally seen as a pairing of the Annunciation and Coronation of the Virgin, subjects linked in several contemporary works.
56. They may, however, have known similar works, as Jan and possibly Hubert may have worked as illuminators. Some of the altarpieces of their contemporary Robert Campin seem to have been influenced by the same True Cross triptychs discussed above. For Jan, see Anne van Buren, Das Turin-Mailander Stundenbuch (Lucerne: Faksimile Verlag, 1996), 303–6, 313–19; for Campin, see Barbara Lane, “‘Depositio et Elevatio’: The Symbolism of the Seilern Triptych,” Art Bulletin 57 (1975): 21–30.
57. Trottmann, La vision béatifique, 357–60, 370–72, and passim.
1. Important recent work on Dante and apocalypse includes Guglielmo Gorni, “Spirito profetico duecentesco e Dante,” Letture classensi (1984): 49–68; Dennis Costa, Irenic Apocalypse: Some Uses of Apocalyptic in Dante, Petrarch and Rabelais (Saratoga, Calif.: Anma Libri, 1981); Ronald Herzman, “Dante and Apocalypse” in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard K. Emmerson and Bernard McGinn (Ithaca, NY.: Cornell University Press, 1992); the chapter on “The Commedia: Apocalypse, Church, and Dante’s Conversion” in Emmerson and Herzman’s The Apocalyptic Imagination in Medieval Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); and Rebecca S. Beal, “Bonaventure, Dante, and the Apocalyptic Woman Clothed with the Sun,” Dante Studies 114 (1996): 209–28. On Langland, see Morton W. Bloomfield, Piers Plowman as a Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1962); Mary Carruthers, “Time, Apocalypse, and the Plot of Piers Plowman” in Acts of Interpretation: The Text and Its Contexts, 700–1600, ed. Mary Carruthers and Elizabeth D. Kirk (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1982); Robert Adams, “Some Versions of Apocalypse: Learned and Popular Eschatology in Piers Plowman” in The Popular Literature of Medieval England, ed. Thomas J. Heffernan (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985); and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Richard Emmerson’s “ ‘Or Yernen to Rede Redels?’ Piers Plowman and Prophecy,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 7 (1993): 27–76, provides a comprehensive clarification of the critical confusion surrounding prophecy, apocalypse, and millennial expectation in Langland’s poem and medieval culture more generally.
2. This definition and its derivation are more fully explained in the introduction to my “Fictions of Judgment: The Apocalyptic T in the Fourteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1996), in which I address the problem of apocalypse qua genre through the work of J. J. Collins in “Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre,” Semeia 14 (1979); Bernard McGinn in Apocalyptic Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), Lois Parkinson Zamora in Writing the Apocalypse (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), Frank Kermode in The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), Victor Turner in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974), and Dennis Costa in Irenic Apocalypse. While apocalypse as a literary genre may not have existed in the fourteenth century, as Emmerson argues in “The Apocalypse in Medieval Culture” (The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, pp. 295–300), the Commedia itself provides a generic template for the fiction of judgment, in light of which it is possible to consider Langland’s negotiations with his own text.
3. Relevant comparisons of Dante and Langland can be found in Mary Carruthers, The Search for St. Truth: A Study of Meaning in Piers Plowman (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973); Anne Middleton, “Narration and the Invention of Experience: Episodic Form in Piers Plowman” in The Wisdom of Poetry: Essays in Early English Literature in Honor of Morton W. Bloomfield, ed. Larry D. Benson and Siegfried Wenzel (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1982); and Pietro Cali, Allegory and Vision in Dante and Langland (Cork: Cork University Press, 1971).
4. Citations and quoted translations from the Commedia are from Charles Singleton’s edition and translation, Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy’, trans. and comm. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970–75), with my bracketed emendations.
5. On post-Commedia representations of the otherworld as based on Dante’s, see, e.g., Eugene Paul Nassar, “The Iconography of Hell: From the Baptistery Mosaic to the Michelangelo Fresco,” Dante Studies III (1993): 53–105. See also Alison Morgan, Dante and the Medieval Other World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
6. Robert Hollander has pointed out one moment when this claim is made explicit in “Dante’s Book of the Dead: A Note on Inferno XXIX, 57,” Studi Danteschi 54 (1981). The lines in question refer to the tenth bolgia of the Inferno, in which the falsifiers are punished:
. . . là ‘ve la ministra
de l’alto Sire infallibil giustizia
punisce i falsador che qui registra. (Inf.29: 55–57)
. . . where the ministress of the High Lord, infallible
Justice, punishes the falsifiers whom she registers here.
The claim that God’s own justice (the same justice that punishes) registers itself, infallible, here in Dante’s fiction makes it analogous, as Hollander notes, to the libri of life and death mentioned in the Apocalypse, the Book of Daniel, and the Dies Irae. See also Jesse Gellrich, “Dante’s Liber Occultorum and the Structure of Allegory” in The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985).
7. See Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992) for a brilliant analysis of the narrative sleights of hand with which Dante achieves this effect and of how critics have for centuries allowed themselves to be fooled.
8. While Dante makes it clear (because only a few seats in the celestial rose remain to be filled) that the end of time, though imminent, has not yet arrived, he also says that he sees the blessed as they will appear at the end of time. See Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), esp. chapter 7, for the controversies surrounding the beatific vision and its precise eschatological significance (was it granted to the blessed at death or only at the end of time?) around the time of Dante’s writing.
9. As Bloomfield points out: “the dream was a favorite [medieval] literary device because it bespoke a revelation, a higher form of truth. . . . A dream was or could be a vision, and the poet in reporting visions was only fulfilling his traditional role as seer” (11). Morning dreams were particularly endowed with truth in the Macrobian tradition on which the Middle Ages based their oneirology. However, Jacqueline T. Miller amply demonstrates the limitations of authority in the dream convention with the chapter “Dream Visions of Auctorite,” in her Poetic License: Authority and Authorship in Medieval and Renaissance Contexts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
10. I will quote from the better-known B-text unless otherwise specified, using The Vision of Piers Plowman, ed. A.V.C. Schmidt (London: Everyman’s, 1978) and J. F. Goodridge’s prose translation in Piers the Ploughman (London: Penguin, 1959), with my bracketed emendations.
11. As Mary Carruthers has argued in The Search for St. Truth, Piers Plowman is basically “an epistemological poem, a poem about the problem of knowing truly,” which is in large part, for Langland, a problem of language (see esp. 4–11).
12. In “Narration and the Invention of Experience” Middleton argues for the sense of inconclusiveness and indeterminacy present throughout Piers in the many “episodes” that move the poem forward without exactly giving it a plot, “units whose arrangement seems somehow reiterative rather than progressive” (92). These episodes each comprise “disputes” between competing authorities that inevitably remain unresolved: “While the purpose of this procedure may be, like that of scholastic disputation, to draw explicit discrepancies to the surface so as to show in what sense they may all point to the same truth, its narrative effect is quite different” (97–98)—it results rather in a sense of truth’s fragmentation and multiplicity.
13. Carruthers asserts, regarding the poem’s open ending, that “From the point of view of literary plot, Christian history refers both its beginning and end to an all-causative, all-significant middle [i.e., Christ]. Because of this, both beginning and end lose importance in relation to the midpoint. . . . Piers Plowman mirrors this distinctively Christian economy of time in its own plot. It neither has a decisive beginning nor builds toward a climactic ending. . . . From Langland’s viewpoint . . . to tie up everything into a consonant whole as the classical canons of art would dictate would be to confirm the fictiveness of such an imposed design” (“Time, Apocalypse,” 185–87). Interestingly, however, this view of the eschatological and epistemological limitations of Christian “plot” does not take into account the apocalyptic text’s stance with respect to its own textuality, in which closure is traditionally definitive. While “the cry of St. John which ends Revelation exactly captures the eschatological expectation of ending, and is echoed in Conscience’s cry after Grace at the end of Piers Plowman” (186), John’s authorial ending, in which those who alter the text are cursed (Apoc. 22: 18–19) has no parallel in Piers.
14. Pietro Cali delineates other aspects of this allegorical parallel, Allegory and Vision, 109ff.
15. See Robert Hollander, “Dante and His Commentators” in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 226–36, who asserts that “this poet behaves in such a way as to indicate that he is evidently in frequent search of a glossator” (227), and Barolini, who suggests the ways in which the poet then constrains the critics’ exegesis, in Undivine, esp. 3–20.
16. See Robert Kaske, “The Seven Statūs ecclesiae in Purgatorio XXXII–XXXIII,” in Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio: Studies in the Italian Trecento in Honor of Charles S. Singleton, ed. Aldo Bernardo and Anthony Pellegrini (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983).
17. See “Fictions of Judgment,” chap. 1, for my argument that the major prophecies in the Commedia (the Veltro and the 515) are actually metatextual prophecies of the Commedia itself in its apocalyptic role.
18. For my discussion of the end of Piers Plowman, I will use the C-text, which I believe represents the most fully formed “fiction of judgment” among the versions of the poem (Piers Plowman, ed. Derek Pearsall [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978], with my own translations of any differences from B). See “Fictions of Judgment” for an interpretation of the “apocalyptic” evolution of the three versions, and Theodore L. Steinberg’s similar conclusions in Piers Plowman and Prophecy: An Approach to the C-Text (New York: Garland, 1991). See also the new verse translation of C by George Economou (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). On Book, see Robert E. Kaske’s “The Speech of ‘Book’ in Piers Plowman” Anglia 77 (1959): 117–44, in which a “Janus-like pattern of allusion” (124) is detected in Book’s speech, where past and future are mirrored in the Word of the New Law (126).
19. My literal translation attempts to retain the ambiguities others have elided, particularly regarding the “Iewene ioye.” Goodridge offers “and dash to pieces all the triumph of the Jews” (224), while Economou has “And all the joy of the Jews dissolve and despise” (189), and Pearsall glosses “they” (1. 267) as the Jews, adding “The conversion of the Jews to the New Law . . . was a traditional part of millennial prophecy” (331 n.267). More suggestively, Kaske interprets the grammatical difficulties of this passage by glossing the first line as “I, Book, will be burned, but Jesus (will) rise to life” (“Speech,” 134–38), and reads the results in light of the tradition of the Evangelium aeternum in the writings of Joachim of Fiore, who conceived of this testament for the third age “not as a written document, but as the spiritual meaning or understanding of both Old and New Testaments. . . . According to Joachim, the intellectus spiritualis of the Evangelium aeternum will consume the letter of the Old and New Testaments like the fire which consumed the sacrifice of Elias” (139).
20. On the dangers of vernacular revelation in late-medieval England, see, e.g., Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) and Nicholas Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409,” Speculum 70, 4 (October 1995): 822–64.
21. These lines are an addition in the C-text that suggests Langland’s heightened apocalyptic awareness in the final version of his poem, for the knowledge of good and evil is apocalyptic knowledge, rightly reserved only to God (my translation).
22. This triple vision suggests the “theology of history” of Joachim of Fiore, the influence of which on this part of the poem is considered by Kaske, who sees that “Langland seems to be clothing the Resurrection at least partly in the imagery of the third status mundi” (“Speech,” 140). The role of Joachim in Piers Plowman is seen also by Bloomfield, Kerby-Fulton, and Robert Frank in Piers Plowman and the Scheme of Salvation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957), and is considered briefly by Lawrence Clopper in “Songes of Rechelesnesse”: Langland and the Franciscans (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), chapter 7. See Emmerson, “Piers Plowman and Prophecy” for an overview of Joachimist interpretations of the poem, and Emmerson’s rejection of them (41–49). In “Fictions of Judgment,” I suggest a role for Joachim’s thought in both Dante and Langland, but argue that both poets appropriate elements of a Joachite “episteme” to their own visions, without their poems being subsumed by them.
23. Pearsall, 340 n.471.
24. Mary Carruthers, in The Search for St. Truth also argues for the epistemological turning point represented by this moment. On the figure of Antichrist in Piers Plowman, see Richard Emmerson, Antichrist in the Middle Ages, 193–203, and “Piers Plowman and Prophecy,” 44–49, where he argues for a traditional reading of Langland’s Antichrist as the Antichrist of the last days, rather than the more allegorical or polemical figure seen in Joachite and Lollard texts.
25. See, e.g., Leonard W. Cowie, The Black Death and the I’easants’ Revolt (London: Wayland, 1972), which uses chronicles and other contemporary sources to explain the sociopolitical and religious ramifications of the plague, and their connections to the Rebellion of 1381, to which Langland’s poem is also linked, as Steven Justice describes in Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
26. “The Black Death and Western European Eschatological Mentalities” in The Black Death: The Impact of the Fourteenth-Century Plague, ed. Daniel Williman (Bing-hamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1982), 77–95.
27. Robert Lerner uses these words to define chiliasm in “Medieval Prophecy and Religious Dissent,” Past and Present 72 (1976): 3–24, 19.
28. See “Fictions of Judgment,” chapter 2.
29. David Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 72.
30. Relevant work includes Nicholas Havely, “Poverty in Purgatory: From Commercium to Commedia,” Dante Studies 114 (1996): 229–43; Charles T. Davis, “Poverty and Eschatology in the Commedia,” Yearbook of Italian Studies 4 (1980): 59–86; Warren Lewis, Peter John Olivi, Prophet of the Year 2000: Ecclesiology and Eschatology in the Lectura super apocalipsim (Ph.D. diss., Tübingen University, 1972); Bruno Nardi, “Dante Profeta,” in Dante e la cultura medievale (1941; rpt. Bari: Laterza, 1949), 336–416 and “Il punto sull’ epistola a Cangrande” in Lectura Dantis Scaligera (Florence: Le Monnier, 1960); and Raoul Manselli, “Spirituali,” Enciclopedia Dantesca (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970–78). I have addressed this influence in “Fuggire and Coartare: Dante and the Hermeneutics of the Spiritual Franciscan Controversies,” presented at the Dante Society session of the International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo, Mich.: 1996), as well as in “Fictions of Judgment,” where I juxtapose the Commedia to the confession of Na Prous Boneta, a lay follower of the Spiritual Franciscans condemned as a heretic and apparently burned, with many others, for apocalyptic claims similar in many respects to Dante’s.