His Life and Literary Activity
Thomas of Cantimpré was born to a noble family in the village of Bellinghen, near Brussels, in the year 1200 or 1201. The village was situated on the border between Flemish- and French-speaking communities under the jurisdiction of the dukes of the Brabant and within the diocese of Cambrai. The bilingualism of the area around the place of Thomas’s birth helps explain the ease with which he would later travel in his role as itinerant preacher and confessor in the Low Countries, speaking both his native Flemish (theutonicus) and French (lingua romana).1 He also had great facility with Latin provided by his extensive education. The entirety of his literary oeuvre is composed in that language. In the year 1206, he was sent to the French-language cathedral school at Cambrai, where he remained for eleven years, though he would later profess at the Flemish-speaking Dominican house at Louvain.2 Thomas recounts that these early efforts to form him into an acceptable candidate for the priesthood—including his education and his “orientation towards a celibate life”—occurred because his father, a Brabantine knight, made his confession to a hermit while on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The hermit told him that his sins were of such gravity that his only hope lay in devoting a son to the priesthood. This son would, in time, offer particularly efficacious prayers on his father’s behalf.3 Thomas’s priestly vocation was thus inspired by the necessity of an intercessory religious role that he would later underscore as a component of the piety of the mulieres religiosae (also called mulieres sanctae, women often without institutional affiliation who nonetheless pursued a life of contemplation, chastity, and poverty) whose vitae he wrote.
While still a student at Cambrai, “before he had reached fifteen years,” Thomas heard the Augustinian canon James of Vitry (d. 1240) preach either the Albigensian Crusade (1213) or the Crusade against the Saracens in the Holy Land (1214).4 Thomas would later depict this encounter as formative. As he relates in the Supplement to the Life of Marie d’Oignies, “I was happy just at the sound of your [James’s] name.” Ever after, he bore a “special love” for James.5
James had visited the Low Countries while still a theology student in Paris, sometime between 1203 and 1211,6 and returned to the region after completing his studies in Paris and being ordained in 1210.7 This travel would eventually make him, according to Ernest McDonnell, the person who most “accurately … [and] justly appraised and vividly described, with a European-wide perspective,” the difficulties and aspirations of the semireligious communities undergoing exponential growth in Belgium, particularly in the diocese of Liège, and he was able to suggest solutions for those problems.8 James was also a crucial figure in building networks of communication both in the region and internationally, acting as an intermediary between Cistercians and Beguines, for he maintained an epistolary relationship with Master John of Nivelles; Walter, abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Villers; and Lutgard at the Cistercian monastery of Aywières (in 1217) after he had relocated to the East.9 Finally, he importantly noted the affinities between the Franciscan piety he observed in Umbria and Tuscany and the apostolic life as expressed in the diocese of Liège.10
According to Thomas, James had been drawn to Liège by the fame of Marie of Oignies (ca. 1177–1213) and a desire to become a part of her work.11 Marie was a woman who had renounced her marriage in order to live in poverty and chastity, first at a leprosarium at Willambroux, then as a lay sister with a community of women attached to the Augustinian canons at Saint Nicholas of Oignies, south of Nivelles.12 Marie herself persuaded James to join the community of Regular Canons at Oignies. He would go on to write her very influential vita, the Life of Marie d’Oignies,13 completing it by 1215, fewer than two years after her death. It recounts not only the Beguine’s piety and the novel religiosity of the mulieres religiosae in Liège but also the intimate relationship that arose between Marie and James. James depicts Marie as his inspiration and guide in the art of preaching. The vita is primarily an account of James’s personal experience of Marie, and these encounters become the source of the stories that compose it—many of them purportedly from Marie’s own mouth—confirming James’s claim that he recorded “what I have seen and come to know, for a large part from experience.”14
Brenda Bolton notes that James was inspired by late-antique figures such as Augustine and Jerome who oversaw groups of wealthy women in the ascetic life. Imitating Jerome’s efforts to spread the heroic feats of women such as Melania (in contrast with the general perfidy of women expounded on by Jerome) through pamphlets and hagiographies, James understood his own hagiographical work as providing models—exempla—for a new kind of sanctity. He wrote about mulieres sanctae not only in the Life of Marie of Oignies but in the Historia Occidentalis, his Exempla, and Sermons for Beguines.15 What he saw in Liège among ascetic women, particularly in Marie, he believed to be as significant as the movements of late antiquity: practicing a similarly austere life, these women were possibly the “new mothers of the church.”16
Perhaps inspired by James’s vocation as an Augustinian canon, in 1217, Thomas entered the Victorine House of Notre Dame de Cantimpré just outside Cambrai. The small foundation had been established in 1177 by the charismatic John of Cantimpré (ca. 1155–ca. 1205/09), the subject of Thomas’s first hagiography. In 1222 or 1223, Thomas was ordained a priest, after which he began work on the Life of Abbot John of Cantimpré. Thomas suddenly stopped work on the vita in 1228 for reasons that remain unclear. He completed it in 1270 at the request of Anselm, the abbot of the canons of Cantimpré.17
The Life demonstrates Thomas’s early fascination with the vita apostolica and the importance of preaching and the active life in Thomas’s conception of male sanctity. It depicts the itinerant adventures of John, whom Thomas represents as a peculiarly efficacious preacher. John proclaims his message by means of his deeds as well as words, both declaring and living a life of rigorous penance (while, unlike Thomas’s female subjects, avoiding debilitating austerity), preaching compassion for the urban poor who had been “oppressed” by “usury and unjust profit-taking,” and railing against the heretics of Cambrai.18 The vita also documents John’s efforts to found the community of canons at Cantimpré and have it recognized by the abbey of Saint-Victor (a task finally accomplished in 1183). It includes biographies of the first men to gather around John as well as the women who lived at Prémy, another foundation established by John, which was located next to the male house.19 Thomas emphasizes John’s conversion of the rural nobility,20 to whom he preached against violence, greed, and usury, as well as his work with urban masses, for whom he staged elaborate performances of restitution and penance in order to inspire the crowd’s conversion. Thomas elaborately narrates these acts, attempting to re-create on the page the exemplary and persuasive power of John’s deeds. The vita includes stories of the ritual suicide of a penitent named Alard, who was a moneylender and a priest,21 and the theatrical restitution of ill-gotten gains by the nobleman John of Montmirail.22
During his years as an Augustinian canon, Thomas began to compile material for his encyclopedia, De natura rerum.23 Dividing his work into nineteen sections addressing humans, animals, plants, water, stones, metals, astronomy, astrology, and meteorology, Thomas claims the work was inspired by Augustine’s observation in De doctrina christiana that it would be helpful to scriptural exegetes to have a reference work of strange creatures, animals, stones, and “anything that has roots” mentioned in scripture in order to better understand figurative expressions used in scriptural analogies.24 Robert Sweetman argues that Thomas interpreted this call as not only a need for an aid to exegesis proper but also a means to provide scintillating materiae praedicabiles (materials for preaching), although M. Michèle Mulchahey notes that the work was also intended for use by the laity. The text was translated into German and Flemish within Thomas’s lifetime.25 According to Sweetman, Thomas intended preachers to use the De natura rerum in order to create interesting digressions so that, “wandering from the trail of Scripture, by putting aside for a time the eloquence of prophets, preachers could use the eyes of faith to evoke the witness of creatures to awaken brutish minds, using novelties to caress ears no longer moved by what they heard and what was impressed directly upon them from Scripture.”26 The De natura rerum thus provides material that veils the moral message of sermons, making them more palatable and memorable, “fool[ing] hearers into listening in spite of themselves.”27
Thomas bases his use of the nature of creatures as sources for moral teaching on an exemplarist understanding of creation. In the prologue, Thomas argues that God’s artistic activity is revealed in creation; creatures reflect the creator, and by virtue of this common divine source, the patterns of all creaturely natures provide analogies for moral human life, though, as animate beings are particularly appropriate, they are the primary focus of the work.28 The description of the nature of any thing refers not only to that created entity but also to the human microcosm.29
Thomas obtained material for preaching from the world of nature by first identifying significantiae—analogies between nonhuman and human behavior—and then drawing out the moral implications of those analogies for human beings, creating moralites, “moral judgments in the form of exhortation or … chastisement.”30 These, in turn, were used by preachers to diagnose and correct sin and, less commonly, to edify with depictions of virtue.31 For example, Thomas writes that the sea urchin, though very small, is so strong that it can stop the movement of a two-hundred-foot ship if it attaches itself to the hull. Though incredible, he writes, this is a natural fact that has been witnessed by the best authorities. He then addresses the devil, asking, “What would seem more unbelievable, that a Virgin should conceive and bear a child … or that a six-inch fish should be able to keep a ship at bay even against the wind’s forceful blasts?”32 The moral thrust of the passage is addressed to those scholars of theology whose curiosity has corrupted their faith, leading them to doubt doctrine because of its supernatural foundation and thereby become heretics who speak on behalf of the devil. In addition to chastising heretics and those with the vice of curiosity, the passage offers support to the claim of Mary’s virginity, for the incredible (but empirically verified) nature of the sea urchin is compared to incredible doctrine and authorities on the natural world compared to theological authorities.
Sometime between his ordination and becoming a Dominican in 1232 (Robert Sweetman posits 1228 or 1229), Thomas received a commission to hear confessions as the bishop’s vicar in the diocese of Cambrai.33 The authority of this office entailed the power to absolve even those sins that were considered too grave or complex for the parish clergy to address, including, Barbara Newman notes, illicit sexual offenses.34 Thomas found these confessions to be a test of his own celibacy. The difficulties he experienced led him to seek the counsel of Lutgard of Aywières (1182–1246), who had a prophetic vision confirming his vocation as a confessor and promising constant divine protection while performing his office. Thomas writes that her words enabled him to continue with the work.35
Inspired perhaps by James of Vitry’s relationship with Marie of Oignies and by his salutary encounter with Lutgard, Thomas turned his literary interests to depicting the lives of mulieres religiosae. He wrote the Supplement to the Life of Marie of Oignies from 1229 to 1232—shortly after the election of Gregory IX (Cardinal Ugolino) in 1227, a man for whom, Thomas writes,36 James once prescribed the reading of Marie’s Life as treatment for the temptation of apostasy—and the Life of Christina the Astonishing, which he began during his final years as an Augustinian canon and completed after professing as a Dominican at the priory in Louvain in 1232. Thomas claims to have written the Supplement in order to add material to James of Vitry’s Life of Marie of Oignies.37 James, Thomas writes, left out much of the miraculous material lest he “tire his readers with excess, or lest the incomprehensible greatness of her miracles become an odour of death rather than life in the hearts of unbelievers.”38 The text is a liber miraculorum, offering accounts of Marie’s miracles that James did not include in the Life of Marie of Oignies. The vita focuses on those episodes that involve James, thus becoming, in effect, a biography of James as told through his relationship with Marie. The lengthy final four chapters consist of a querela addressed to James, who at the time of the text’s writing had been long absent from Liège, which he left in order to occupy the position of archbishop of Tusculum, then of cardinal. According to Thomas, James’s move was against Marie’s wishes and a betrayal of the apostolic ideals he had professed. Marie’s Supplement thus becomes James’s antihagiography, painting a portrait of what Thomas considers his fall from grace by elaborately comparing James’s lost idealism to his current materialism and ambition. Thomas renders James’s greatness a result of his relationship with Marie in order to argue that he must, by rights, return to Oignies.39
The Life of Christina the Astonishing is Thomas’s most unconventional and experimental vita.40 Like Marie, Christina (ca. 1150–1224) was an uncloistered laywoman who developed a novel form of piety, though unlike Marie, Christina did not participate in communal life except for an attenuated attachment to the Benedictine nuns of Saint Catherine’s in her home village of Saint Truiden. As Brenda Bolton notes, Christina was “claimed by Benedictines, Cistercians, and Premonstratensians alike, but … in reality was not attached to any religious order nor to a beguine group.”41 A woman who is likely Christina appears in James’s extended prologue to the Life of Marie of Oignies, where he describes a woman who “obtained from the Lord that she would endure purgatory, living in this world in her body,” being “afflicted for a long time by the Lord, so that sometimes she rolled herself in the fire, and sometimes in the winter she remained for lengthy periods in icy water and at other times she was driven (cogebatur) to enter the tombs of the dead.”42 Thomas narrates Christina’s death at a young age from “too much contemplation” and her encounter with God at the divine throne, writing that Christina was resurrected following an agreement with God to return to the flesh and “perform there the punishment (agere poenitentiam) of an immortal soul in a mortal body without damage to it.”43 Through these sufferings, God promised that Christina would deliver many souls from the horrors of purgatory and would furthermore become a living exemplum, teaching those still alive to “turn aside from their sins.” Thomas asks, What did “Christina cry out during her entire life except to do penance (agere poenitentiam) and be ready at every hour? This she taught with many words, with tears, with lamentations and boundless cries, and with the example (exemplo) of her life.”44 Christina’s vita thus continues many of the themes of John’s Life, particularly its emphasis on preaching, teaching, living an active life among the laity, and converting others. In this case, however, the preacher is female and the primary means of her pedagogy is not language but her marvelous body and the horror it inspires in onlookers.
In 1238, Thomas was sent to Saint Jacques in Paris for two years for further study. While there, he completed work on the De natura rerum.45 Returning to Louvain in 1240, Thomas stopped at Ypres, having long desired (cupiebam) to meet Zeger (Siger) of Lille,46 a powerful presence among the Dominicans of Lille and Ypres and a friend of the Countess Johanna of Constantinople.47 At this meeting, Zeger told Thomas about his spiritual daughter, Margaret of Ypres (1216–1237), a laywoman from a bourgeois family in Ypres, and asked him to write her vita, probably having heard about Thomas’s reputation as a hagiographer. Thomas returned a draft of the work to Zeger for correction in late 1240 and completed it around 1243.48 Rather than merely communicating any great impression Margaret made on him, the text comes across as a gift of love to his fellow Dominican, an example of what Janet Halley calls a “homotextual” relation in which a male writer referred to, responded to, and projected desire for other men by writing about a woman.49 The vita is addressed to Zeger, whom he calls karissimus (most beloved) three times in the short prologue.
The relationship between Margaret and Zeger structures the text. Thomas refers to him as Margaret’s “spiritual father,” and for much of the vita, Zeger holds the position that Christ occupies in Thomas’s other Lives. Thus, we are told, while Lutgard’s conversion was effected by a beautiful Christ who appeared and offered Lutgard a heavenly marriage, it was Zeger who had actually converted Margaret. Zeger saw the young woman of eighteen in church and knew by a “divine instinct” (divino instictu) that she was a “vessel of election” (vas electionis).50 He preached to her, and she was instantly converted, taking up a life of chastity and devotion while remaining in her mother’s home.51
Aware of the suspicion that such intimacy between a friar and a young woman would inspire, Thomas has Margaret articulate anxiety about having too close a relationship and describes its divine sanction in order to head off inevitable critiques. Margaret, Thomas writes, worried that she loved Zeger too fervently. She asks Christ, whom she assures she loves above all others (te … super omnia diligo), whether she can continue the relationship, for since
Mutual love and frequent conversation between a man and a woman seem suspicious (suspecta) to our superiors, I ask you through your matchless humility that you mercifully show me, your handmaid, whether I will incur any loss of your love (amoris) by loving (dilectione) and conversing with your servant. I solemnly promise that if I find anything against your love (caritati), I will never speak to him again.52
God immediately responds by confirming Margaret’s substitution of divine for human authority, saying, “Do not fear to trust him in my stead.” Thomas emphasizes the veracity of the divine response with triple alliteration, almost daring the reader to doubt him: “Verus Deus, et vera veritas ipse est.”
Despite his desire to confirm Zeger’s vocation as spiritual director, affirm Dominican pastoral relationships with mulieres religiosae (for which the vita acts as an apology), and offer Zeger a worthy account of a woman who was so important to him, Thomas struggles to portray Margaret possessing the gravitas that he saw in Marie, Christina, and Lutgard. Margaret remains a juvencula.53 This could, in part, be attributed to her death at the age of twenty-four, which suggests that it is an accurate documentation of the life of a rebellious teen.54 Furthermore, Thomas deploys her simple, precocious devotion as a rhetorical device to shame the proud monks and nuns whom Thomas presumes will read her vita, thereby using lay piety as a corrective to the piety of the professed religious.55 The depiction of Margaret’s naïve youthfulness is slowly assimilated to a portrait of her that is marked by frailty and weakness: Thomas describes Margaret as a young woman who is sustained in her extreme asceticism through bimonthly reception of the Eucharist, thus undertaking pious practices that would typically have been accessible only to monks and nuns.56
However, the vita also represents the failure and limitations of lay piety. Margaret’s devotion often seems a product of a literalism that misunderstands the practices she has read or been told about, practices that become comical in her exaggerated enactment of them. Thomas writes that her vow of chastity made her “unable to bear the sight of men”: she goes so far as to ask her mother to remove a dishwasher, a boy “perhaps twelve years old,” from the home, for “her spirit shrank from the presence of men so much that she quivered with alarm whenever she saw one”—excluding Zeger, of course.57 Margaret’s horror of men contrasts with the attitudes of Marie, Christina, and Lutgard, who each had profound relationships with men. Margaret’s interpretation of the virtue of silence, in which she was “so praiseworthy that she surpassed … many cloistered monks and nuns,” translated awkwardly to a domestic setting, causing her mother to complain to Zeger that she hardly spoke to her family. He thus ordered her to talk to her mother and sisters after eating, “for as long as it took to recite the Seven Psalms.” Afterward, she would “slump down against the wall,” her face and hands turning red. If conversations were burdensome, she would cry or conveniently fall into a trance.58 When her mother complained that she did no work to help the household, Margaret would take up a “distaff or some such thing” to “keep the peace” and then “fall into an ecstasy.”59 One of the most prominent miracles in the Life occurs when Margaret, in a state of ecstasy but seeking to “look as if she had done something useful and constructive on a day she had devoted to prayer,” breaks a number of eggs—the family’s only food—only to have them divinely restored.60
Alongside what might seem a satirical representation of a young woman’s enthusiastic piety, Margaret’s vita contains many themes and phrasings identical to those that dominate the later Vita Lutgardis. Margaret, Thomas claims, “never relaxed the vigilance of her mind to commit any mortal sin,” even as, after Lutgard exchanged hearts with Christ, “no temptation of the flesh nor the smallest unclean thought … discompose[d Lutgard’s] mind even for a moment.”61 Likewise, both women had early experiences of divine things before they acquired spiritual understanding, experiences that Thomas describes with verbs of sensible knowledge. Thus, when reading the Psalter, Margaret fell into an ecstasy in which, although she did not know the Lord (necdum cognoverat Dominum), for he had not yet been revealed to her (nec umquam ei fuerat revelatum), she saw (vidit) Jesus, who placed a golden crown on her head in reward for her vow of chastity. The young Lutgard, “although she did not yet have direct knowledge” of the Lord (necdum cognosceret Dominum) for he had not yet been revealed to her (nec enim ei tunc in aliquo fuerat revelatus), was able to “sense interiorly, she knew not what” of the divine (sentiebat interius nescio quid divini).62 In contrast, Margaret ran immediately to Zeger for confirmation of her vision. Each woman transferred her affectus from a human suitor to the new spouse, Jesus.63 Both are called “simple dove”64 and are compared to Saint Agnes, echoing the words of her vita that she was “taken by another lover,” Christ.65 Margaret’s vita thus provided Thomas with much of the language and imagery that he would use in Lutgard’s Life, though to very different effect.
Thomas began the Life of Lutgard of Aywières, his longest and most complex hagiographical effort, sometime following Lutgard’s death in 1246 and completed it in 1248. Lutgard was born in 1182 to a noblewoman and a middle-class man in Tongeren, a Flemish town in the northern part of Liège. At approximately twelve years of age, Lutgard entered the Benedictine monastery of Saint Catherine’s in Saint Truiden—the same community with which Christina mirabilis was associated—and was eventually made prioress, a position that compelled her to seek entrance to the new Cistercian monastery of Aywières in 1216.66 On Christina’s advice, she transferred to the French-speaking Aywières rather than the Flemish Herkenrode, where she forever remained “miraculously” unable to learn French, thus preventing her from suffering the institutional honor of being made abbess of any of the newly forming Cistercian monasteries in the region.67
The vita was composed at the request of Hadewijch, abbess of the Cistercian monastery at Aywières.68 For Thomas, however, it was also clearly a labor of love, written not only in exchange for a relic of Lutgard’s finger, which the Abbess withheld until receipt of the vita, but also for the sake of what he called his amor flagrantissimus for Lutgard.69 Of all the Lives, the Vita Lutgardis is most marked by Thomas’s autobiographical presence. It also contains a “gallery of remarkable characters” whom Lutgard knew, including Christina mirabilis,70 Mary of Oignies,71 Innocent III (who visited Lutgard from purgatory, where, he said, he would “be tortured by the most atrocious punishments until the day of the Last Judgment”),72 and James of Vitry, with whom she was very close.73
Simone Roisin includes the Vita Lutgardis in her study of what she identifies as the new Cistercian genre of “mystical biography.” These hagiographies, Roisin argues, arose in the “Beguinal-Cistercian milieu” of the Low Countries in which the two currents of Cistercian and Beguinal piety—the latter, according to Roisin, formed by a mingling of European spirituality with Eastern influences (Syrian, Palestinian, and Byzantine) brought to Liège by traders—flourished to create hagiographies that attended to their subjects’ efforts to die to the world, a death cultivated by means of obedience to the Benedictine Rule, asceticism, and the search for union with God.74 These saints were remarkable for their cultivation of their interior lives; their virtutes were not thaumaturgical deeds of marvelous power but inward qualities of humility, charity, and chastity.75 According to Roisin, external deeds were subordinated to the greater interest in spiritual growth and ecstatic or rapturous union, a centering in what Roisin calls the “mysticism” that arose from a fusion of Bernadine doctrine and the ascetic practices of the mulieres religiosae.
According to Roisin, Thomas’s hagiographical corpus demonstrates an increasing turn to the interior spiritual life, culminating in the Vita Lutgardis, which she considers his most mature work, written, she argues, under the influence of Goswin of Bossut—the cantor at the Cistercian monastery of Villers who wrote the vitae of Ida of Nivelles (d. 1231), the conversus Arnulf (d. 1231), and the monk of Villers, Abundus of Huy (d. 1239)—and of Lutgard herself, whom he termed his spiritual mother. Roisin traces the arc of Thomas’s hagiographical works, arguing that the Supplement and Christina’s vita emphasize external wonders, Margaret’s vita the ascetic virtues, and Lutgard’s vita the mystical graces.76 The trajectory Roisin outlines for Thomas’s career can have a teleological cast, implying that only with Lutgard’s Life did Thomas create a spiritually mature work by virtue of his full exposure to Cistercian influence through which he learned to value interiority. Although Roisin’s analysis notes fundamental theological and thematic differences among Thomas’s vitae, it is important not to discount the narrative and theological sophistication of Thomas’s earlier works. As Thomas Grzebien argues, the “looser form” of Thomas’s vitae prior to Lutgard’s mirrors the less structured nature of the religious lives adopted by his figures who demonstrated a “less patterned way to the top of the mystical mountain.”77 The rhetorical and theological differences among Thomas’s works are important indicators of his experimental spirit and the way in which his hagiographical corpus represents an evolving response to the religious diversity and innovation he encountered during his long career.
Between 1248 and 1252, Thomas was sent to the new studium generale at Cologne for further education. There, as noted above, he sat under Albert the Great, likely at the time when Albert had taken up Aristotle’s libri naturales for commentary.78 The two men had a common interest in natural philosophy, and for a long period of time, Thomas’s De natura rerum was attributed to Albert.79 By May 1263, Thomas finished working on the massive Bonum universale de apibus—which translates approximately as “the common good as taught by bees”—and sent it to Humbert of Romans, then master general of the Dominican order, upon its completion.80 The treatise, begun after 1256, represents the fruition of his thirty years of Dominican pastoral duties.81 In the dedicatory letter, Thomas writes that he began the work in response to requests from his fellow Dominicans and that he was sending the work to Humbert following the latter’s call at General Chapter for friars to collect accounts of events in which Dominicans played an important role.82 Robert Sweetman argues that Thomas began the work as part of his duty as subprior of the Dominican house at Louvain (an office he held from 1246), which included the tasks of confessing, preaching, and watching over the friars in the priory.83
The work contains a collection of exempla organized around the extended metaphor of the life of bees, which, Thomas explains, he elaborated from a chapter of De natura rerum.84 He headlines each chapter with a statement about the natural history of the bee from the De natura rerum, which he in turn relates to a quality or duty of the clergy or laity, and illustrates it with an exemplum. Book 1 concerns the lives of prelates (twenty-five chapters), and book 2 the lives of the laity (fifty-seven chapters). Thomas’s profound interest in the events of his day is apparent in the treatise. Each chapter, he tells Humbert, provides exempla aptata et appropriata that ground the abstract lessons in “our times.”85 T. F. Crane asserts that the exempla are almost entirely derived from historical anecdotes, containing very few commonplaces, as was typical of older collections.86 Thomas gathered the exempla from his extensive work as a confessor, preacher, and exorcist and included material from his own life, his pastoral experience, and tales told to him by others. Ernest McDonnell argues that in this work, Thomas filters and makes use of literature known to Beguines, thereby reflecting their ideals—particularly those of the vita apostolica.87 Unlike one of his predecessors in the genre, the Cistercian Caesarius of Heisterbach (d. 1240), and Thomas’s contemporary and fellow Dominican, Stephen of Bourbon (d. ca. 1261),88 Thomas uses personal anecdotes as material for his exempla, including the one described above concerning his entrance into religious life. He freely departs from what Jean-Claude Schmitt identified as an important feature of thirteenth-century exempla collections, namely the depersonalization of the figures, events, and places depicted, in order that they may become universal types and circumstances.89 While Thomas writes in the dedicatory letter that he has removed the names of countries, cities, and towns to avoid confusion with individuals depicted in those places who were still alive, this is a false protestation. Thomas identifies places and persons in the treatise far more commonly than he protects their anonymity.
While Crane terms these exempla “illustrative stories,” Sweetman holds that they are a form of scientia experimentalis, “units of human experience to which one could appeal to establish the actual existence of a given principle or conclusion.” Thus, the exempla do not function as doctrinal window dressing but carry an authority parallel to quotations from the Bible or the works of Seneca, Thomas’s favorite philosopher. Furthermore, the exempla provide narratives of the human consequences and reactions—joy and horror—to virtue or vice, thus including the audience’s emotions in the work of persuasion, convincing “hearts to act in accord” with doctrinal norms.90 In this way, they are exhortative in the sense outlined by Gregory the Great, whose view—quoted in the previous chapter—is invoked by Humbert of Romans in his treatise, Liber de dono timoris: “According to Gregory, exempla move (movent) [listeners] more than mere words (verba) do and are more easily grasped (capiuntur) by the understanding and more deeply fixed (infiguntur) in the memory.”91 Ernest McDonnell credits James of Vitry as the one who first “gave currency” to the use of exempla for preaching that “scarcely existed before 1200,” thereby “making it into a device the Dominicans were to use to their advantage.”92 Indeed, James’s description of the utility of the example in the prologue to Marie’s Life, like Humbert’s many years later and Gregory’s early-medieval formulation, praises its capacity to move listeners in a way that precepts cannot.93 The purpose of hagiography, according to James, is to “strengthen the faith of the weak, to instruct the unlettered, to excite the wavering, to provoke the devout to imitation, and to confute the rebels and infidels,”94 a purpose that is realized through the use of the example.95
Other than the prologue and the final chapters describing the miracles performed by John’s relics for the Life of Abbot John, the Bonum universale de apibus was the last of Thomas’s literary efforts. He is thought to have died around 1270.96
THE ECONOMIC AND PASTORAL CONTEXT OF THOMAS’S MINISTRY
Beginning in the eleventh century, the Southern Low Countries underwent massive development and urbanization concomitant with rapid population growth. It was, in Thomas’s day, one of the most industrialized and urbanized regions of Western Europe. While Italy had the largest cities in Europe, the density of the cities in the Southern Low Countries was unrivalled, as was the proportion of the population that lived within or in close proximity to cities.97 An international merchant class (of which Lutgard’s father was part) gained prominence in economic and political life. This urban revolution began in eleventh-century Flanders, whose greatest city, Ypres, was Margaret’s home. To the east of Flanders lay the duchy of Brabant, the center of Thomas’s pastoral activities, which underwent a similarly rapid urbanization in the twelfth century.98 It included the towns of Brussels, Louvain, and Antwerp as well as Nivelles, Marie’s home, and the village of Aywières.
The political, religious, and linguistic divisions of the Southern Low Countries are notoriously complicated, resulting in a “patchwork of competing allegiances.”99 The primary political constituencies were the county of Flanders (a fief of the French king), the duchy of Brabant, and the prince-bishopric of Liège, the latter two of which owed allegiance to the German emperor. However, neither the French nor the German king had control over these “frontier lands” after the twelfth century.100 All three regions had French- and Flemish-speaking inhabitants. The dioceses did not correspond with the political divisions; the diocese of Liège, part of the archdiocese of Cologne, included the prince-bishopric of Liège and a large part of the duchy of Brabant.101
From the twelfth century, the economic power of the Southern Low Countries included the urban middle class, whose growth occurred in symbiosis with the old landed aristocracy.102 This composition is reflected in Thomas’s vitae: of its cast of characters, only Lutgard had a noble mother, although her father was a merchant, while the others were born of parents who were artisanal or bourgeois town and city dwellers.103 This urban population was remarkably literate. Beginning in the twelfth century, the merchant class challenged ecclesiastical control of educational institutions and provided secular education for boys and girls in the three R’s, with subsidies for poor children.104 As Jennifer Carpenter argues, the urban context is important for understanding the new forms of piety described in vitae like Thomas’s, for cities provided new opportunities and offered a social milieu rooted in the mobility of a newly prosperous population. “Spurred by the breathtaking vision of a newly purified church promoted by Gregorian reformers,” she writes, “the Christian world, which had formerly been suspicious of change, now began to think that innovation in religious life could be part of God’s continual changing plan for a changing world, and, further, that the church was obliged to provide for the specialized needs of the urban populations.”105
Beginning in the eleventh century and burgeoning in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, forms of piety and spiritual aspiration that had been confined within monastery walls were no longer contained by them. The laity came in larger numbers to a changed “religious consciousness” that “no longer saw the essence of Christianity fulfilled in church alone” but rather “sought to realize Christianity as a way of life, binding on every individual, a commitment more essential than one’s place in the hierarchical ordo.”106 Such a shift in consciousness is found in the northern European hagiographical record only by the thirteenth century according to André Vauchez. The potential for sanctity to be attained to by nonnoble laypersons begins to be articulated in vitae early in the century—notably first in James’s Life of Marie of Oignies—reflecting the recognition and dissemination of these ideals by clerics.107
Herbert Grundmann argues that these novel religious expectations and desires arose, in part, through the Gregorian reforms (although the economic and sociological factors outlined above are likewise crucial). While Gregory VII attempted to consolidate and sharpen the distinction between lay and clerical orders, he appealed to the laity, who were asked to judge the worthiness of individual priests to prepare and serve the sacrament. The laity thereby came to possess a kind of authority in relation to clerics, of whom they could be critical and whose fate they could influence. Thus, although the Gregorian reforms were founded on the notion that power in the ecclesiastical hierarchy should flow from God, through the papacy, and eventually to the lowliest clerics by means of apostolic succession, the neo-Donatism concomitantly expounded by Gregory VII and his supporters—arguing ex opere operantis in their attempt to give weight to the removal of simoniacal priests and those who practiced “concubinage”—was at odds with this reforming effort. As priestly worthiness came to be seen as residing in behavior rather than sacramentally bestowed by ordination alone, the questioning of particular priests became more common and raised the specter of the insufficiency of ordination. The fluid urban marketplace of ideas and high rates of literacy enabled this growing sense of authority and religious prerogative among the laity to spread.108
Following the investiture controversy of the eleventh century, Grundmann argues, two new ideals emerged as essential to Christian piety, namely, voluntary poverty and the “apostolic life,” which included itinerant preaching. These ideals would find expression in twelfth-century heretical movements like the Waldensians and among papally approved wandering preachers like Robert of Arbrissel (who was given permission to preach in 1096) in northern France and Norbert of Xanten, the former archbishop of Cologne, who was given permission to preach in 1118.109
Robert, Norbert, and other itinerant preachers were eventually required to cease their wanderings, for, despite their papal permission, they made the hierarchy nervous; the “unstable crowds” of male and female followers and the virulent criticisms of the clergy they elicited were of particular concern. Following in the tradition of the Gregorian reformers, many founded double monasteries: Robert in Fontevrault around 1100 and Norbert at Premontré Abbey at Laon in 1120, very close to what would be Thomas’s sphere of activity. However, these measures to contain what Grundmann argues is a “movement”—meaning ideals and interests held in common among those of different vocational paths—within the traditional terms of the monastic ordo did not ultimately suffice, and the innovative spirit and desire of an increasing number of the laity to live the ideals of voluntary poverty and apostolic life outside the confines of the cloister continued.
An important witness to this shift in the spiritual center of gravity is Lambert le Bègue (d. 1177), a dissident cleric in Liège who was wrongly credited with bestowing his name on the Beguines. Lambert not only railed publicly against simony and the more generalized greed of the clergy but, with reference to apostolic writings, declared that all Christians—not only priests—had a duty to exhort one another by good example. He also said that all Christians could enjoy spiritual union with Christ himself. The priest’s role in the process of spiritual advancement was one of cooperation with the laity, and his function was to enable and strengthen the inherent moral capacities of all individuals. Lambert thus translated the Book of Acts into vernacular verse for the laity and Saint Agnes’s vita for a group of virgins.110 Imprisoned for heresy, Lambert appealed to Calixtus III. Then, after escaping from prison, he fled to the papal court in Rome, where he composed an apologia. The documents from his trial reveal that there was intense lay interest in studying and discussing the scriptures, particularly Acts, as it articulated what they understood to be the apostolic ideal for the church. Furthermore, many among these groups practiced an intense Eucharistic piety.111 Lambert’s testimony illuminates a “startling lay religiosity” among men and women that straddled the border between orthodoxy and heresy, revealing contestation over the nature and limits of lay religiosity at the turn of the thirteenth century.112
Although Lambert was not the founder of Beguinages (the claim that he was arose from a late narrative that he had allowed mulieres sanctae to inhabit land around his church in Liège), he was the “apostle of a popular religious movement” in Liège that would ultimately give rise to a variety of Beguinal forms, including the organization of Beguines into curtes (meaning “courts” or “homesteads,” a term for Beguinages or the Beguinal convent) and ultimately their own parishes between 1245 and 1250 in Flanders and Brabant.113 Lambert’s message was continuous with what Grundmann, in a synthetic approach to the historiography of feminine piety in the thirteenth-century Low Countries, terms the women’s religious movement, at the heart of which were gospel ideals of voluntary poverty and, often, chastity.114 This lay pursuit of the apostolic life can be seen in the Lives of Marie of Oignies, Margaret of Ypres, and Christina the Astonishing, all laywomen who lived in chastity and renounced financial ambitions while pursuing an intense contemplative regime in a secular context. The innovative spirit of this movement is also glimpsed in the piety of those women whom James of Vitry, in the prologue to the Life of Marie of Oignies, termed mulieres sanctae. The prologue witnesses to what Brenda Bolton calls a “small, like-minded, closely knit group of people,” primarily women, in Brabant-Flanders who practiced physical mortification, poverty, and contemplation.115 The Premonstratensian canons and other orders of Regular Canons offered multiple vocational opportunities for women: some women of the order, such as those John of Cantimpré established next to the male foundation at Prémy, practiced strict claustration and resembled nuns.116 Others performed menial labor rather than choir service, while some were recluses or, like Marie of Oignies, were hospital workers with a loose association to a community of canons.117
Thomas’s hagiographical corpus not only attests to the diversity of religious vocation available to women in the Southern Low Countries but also reveals the profound relationships between women in different forms of religious life, particularly recluses, Beguines, laywomen, and Cistercians. This can be seen in the friendships between Lutgard and the itinerant Christina mirabilis and between the Beguine Marie of Oignies and the recluse Jutta of Borgloon (with whom Christina also lived for nine years). Simone Roisin’s work demonstrates the deep connections between Beguines and Cistercians in Liège. More recent research has attested to the “equally close relationship between the beguines and the Dominicans in the same area.”118 Thomas’s own career demonstrates this link, as do Lutgard’s close relationship with friar Bernard and Thomas and Margaret’s relationship with friar Zeger. Differences in vocation and gender did not restrain communication or mutual influence.
Thomas’s vocation as a Dominican bore many similarities to that of the mulieres religiosae. Indeed, the religious innovation of these women was mirrored by innovations within groups like the Dominicans. Formally authorized by Honorius III in 1216, the Dominicans followed the Augustinian Rule, practicing voluntary poverty, chastity, and (as their moniker, the Order of Preachers, suggests) preaching—itinerant preaching in particular. As a Regular Canon, Dominic of Osma was already familiar with the itinerancy and apostolic life of Norbert of Xanten, founder of the Canons Regular, and Dominic drew on these roots to create the new order, which was clerical and learned from the outset, retaining some features of monastic life even as it divested itself of the earlier monastic ideal of stabilitas.119 Dominican focus on the apostolic life arose as a way to persuade converts to the Cathar heresy in Languedoc—the early Dominicans having been impressed by the apostolic austerity of Cathar perfecti in comparison with what they saw as the bloated materialism of the church of Rome and the Cistercian missionaries sent to preach to them.120 In their swift rise to pan-European importance, the order became a way for the papacy to “bridge the gap” between the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the multitude of new religious movements and the spiritually ambitious laity. The Dominicans gave prominence to apostolic preaching and poverty within a papally approved order and served the expanding needs of the laity in their roles as preachers and confessors.121 Through their pastoral ministry, the friars created a ministry focused on urban contexts, providing “new forms of religious expression specifically for the urban sector of society,” including opportunities and practices for lay participation in devotional life, thereby enhancing the laity’s “sense of spiritual worth.”122 As the careers of Thomas and Zeger attest, an important component of this ministry involved the cura animarum of women.123
Dominican preaching against heresy was a central means by which the papacy attempted to control the lay thirst for apostolic life and religious expression. However, papal response was not confined to wrangling existing movements; the canons of Lateran IV attempted to govern the efflorescence of new practices and movements while instituting new requirements for all Christians. The canons demonstrated a concern to increase the centralization and standardization of Christian practice. Under Innocent III, the papacy thus officially extended the requirements for lay participation in the religious life even as it instituted the means to supervise and control this participation. Canon 21 required annual communication, which in turn entailed annual confession, also outlined in Canon 21.
Because the Dominicans were vital to the implementation of the canons of Lateran IV, Thomas’s pastoral vision was deeply marked by its program of quelling heresy and forming the laity into religious subjects who accorded with Lateran IV ideals. Thomas’s vitae vividly portray the “confessing subject” who is placed under surveillance by the requirement to confess to a priest but who, it is hoped, will ultimately learn self-surveillance.124 Lutgard is depicted as achieving such interior vigilance. Her confessor was not Thomas but another Dominican friar, Bernard. She was tormented, Thomas writes, by “inordinate scruples” in her attempt to reach “total perfection” while saying the hours.125 Margaret was similarly overcome with a grief that terrified her confessor, Zeger. Thinking that she had done some truly horrible deed, he discovered that she had only missed saying the canonical hours because she had been rapt in ecstasy.126 As Dyan Elliott observes, Thomas, a practiced confessor, filled his hagiographies with examples of the importance of confession and penitence in the formation of the saintly person. Lutgard and Margaret, as well as others converted by John who make full penitential gestures upon their conversion, became model advocates of submission to priestly mediation in confession, counteracting the Cathar appeal to an alternative hierarchy or the heretical claim that confession to God alone was enough. “In the course of [Thomas’s] hagiographical writings,” Elliott writes, “a new kind of saint begins to emerge—one whose sanctity not only is revealed in but even develops through her evolving relation with her confessor.… The appearance of the new confessor saint was contingent upon the new role of the confessor.”127 Margaret of Ypres, in particular, tellingly models such dependence on and adoration for the confessor.
Thomas’s creation of saintly figures that resist or appropriate heretical claims resides not only in his portrayal of subjects who perfectly enact the requirements of Lateran IV. As Elliott shows, by foregrounding the ascetic practices of his subjects—including running through brambles, fasting, experiencing raptures, falling ill—as well as their Eucharistic piety and visions of the human Christ (which Roisin attributes to Beguinal influence),128 Thomas produced constructions designed to counter Cathar antimaterialism that were essential to the “sponsored emergence” of the mulieres religiosae by clerics seeking avenues to resist heresy.129 Here again Thomas is following in the footsteps of his mentor, James, who dedicated the Life of Marie of Oignies to the Cistercian abbot and bishop of Toulouse, Fulk, who had fled his diocese because of the flourishing of the Cathars, who were arriving in the diocese of Liège in 1215 or early 1216. Fulk shared with James a belief that women’s religious communities could act as effective defenses against (because they were a compelling alternative to) the appeal of heretical groups.130 The sacramental focus of the mulieres religiosae’s piety has the further benefit of providing yet another opportunity to demonstrate the saint’s dependence on and respect for the clerical caste, undermining neo-Donatist notions.131 Although the precise paths of Cathar influence are difficult to reconstruct, the ideas probably entered the Southern Low Countries with Crusaders in 1100, turning the region into a hotbed of Cathar activity and clerical countermeasures. Following the burning of Cathars in Cologne in 1163, their persecution, Walter Simons notes, “would be vigorous and unrelenting.”132 For Elliott, the hagiographical construction of these women as sacramentally and clerically focused penitents placed Thomas at the vanguard of a later medieval tendency to represent female spirituality according to the “subtle contours of displacement or reappropriation of heretical claims.”133 Thomas’s holy women, according to this account, were constructed essentially as weapons in a battle against heresy, and the vitae were persuasive propaganda offering orthodox exemplars of the holy life as an alternative to the ideals proffered by Cathar and other heretical poverty movements. The figuration of the orthodox saint as supportive of the clergy, with a piety oriented around the sacraments, the human Christ, and ascetic practices that underscored the embodied nature of the religious life addressed various heretical currents—antimaterialism, neo-Donatism—that were often attributed to those heretical movements dominated by the urban laity.134
The important connection between an antiheretical project and the composition of vitae and exempla, and more generally the “sponsored emergence” of the mulieres sanctae in the Low Countries, has been often and strongly noted in the literature. In the mid-twentieth century, Ernest McDonnell argued that for Fulk and James, religious women in the “stamp” of Marie of Oignies constituted an “impenetrable bulwark to the multiple threats of the infidel and the heretic.” Thus, “hagiographic sources for the Beguine movement illustrate conclusively that crusade fervor and the vita apostolica were essentially two aspects of the same program.”135 Dyan Elliott, as noted above, carefully analyzes the detailed dynamics and loci of such a program. Rebecca Garber speaks of these women as “poster children” against heresy.136 What is not noticed in these approaches is the way in which these texts are not so easily absorbed into such an antiheretical project. Although Thomas (and James before him) was devoted to the cause of antiheretical preaching, his vocation and interests brought him to closely depend on figures who were sometimes accused of heresy or negative “innovation” even as Thomas and James were members of novel movements.137 Moreover, as much as James or Thomas attempted to frame the mulieres sanctae in the traditions of desert fathers and mothers, virgin martyrs, and gospel models, their vitae go far beyond the emulation of these historical precedents, for they introduce a “mystical element” alongside their depictions of intense asceticism.
Brenda Bolton identifies two aspects of this piety, namely its Christocentrism and Eucharistic devotion.138 The devotion to Christ often led to an idealization of sharing his suffering and gave rise to profound mortification. Instances of such mortification abound in the hagiographies from Liège. For example, Marie of Oignies, “inflamed by an overwhelming fire of love” and horrified by the memory of eating meat when ill, cut out a “large piece” of her flesh and buried it in the ground.139 The astonishing feats of Christina mirabilis and Margaret of Ypres’s extensive illness in which she hemorrhaged constantly—interpreted by Thomas as a purgation of sin—are further examples of this extreme bodily mortification.140 In addition to these ascetic practices, James describes novel paramystical phenomena, including lengthy ecstasies in which a woman was seemingly catatonic, unable to “feel a blow” for an entire day, or in the case of another woman, experienced twenty-five such ecstasies in a single day and, upon returning to her senses, showed her inner joy by a “bodily tic” and “jumping up and down.”141 The face of another woman was reportedly marked with the traces of tears from habitual weeping while others suffered a kind of love-sickness, lying “faint with desire” in their beds for years.142 Bernard McGinn notes that James describes the enraptured state of Marie of Oignies, which lasted for thirty-five days, using the traditional monastic vocabulary of contemplation. Such a description is a great departure from theological precedent, for older authors including Augustine, Gregory the Great, and Bernard of Clairvaux spoke of the state of ecstasy attained in contemplation as necessarily brief because of the embodied nature of the human subject undergoing such a union.143
Although, as Elliott has shown, an emphasis on the physicality of female piety was useful in countering Cathar antimaterialism, the excessiveness and novelty of these depictions complicates and undermines their function as simple propaganda or as exemplars that are easily translatable into models appropriate for a reader.144 The novelty of the spiritual practices described by Thomas and James, as well as their intimate relationships with women (which Margaret’s vita reveals to be contentious), indeed rendered their preaching effective, participating in a process that Cynthia Hahn has argued was crucial to the hagiographical project from the earliest periods of Christian history, namely the renewal and recontextualization of ancient models of sanctity for contemporary persons.145 However, it also inspired attacks against them and the women they supported. James’s attempt in 1216 to obtain papal recognition of the Beguines was in large part an attempt to protect them from charges of heresy as well as a desire to have their obedience to ecclesiastical strictures safeguarded through their incorporation into the official structure of the church.146 Half of James’s Second Sermon to Virgins is devoted to a defense of the Beguines in which he compares their detractors to dogs and spiders.147 The prologue to Marie’s Life refers to those who “deride and despise those things that they do not understand.” Such are “animal men who do not have the Spirit of God, although they are considered to be prudent among themselves. They do not want to see what they cannot understand by human reasoning.”148 Gregory IX, described in the Supplement as a devotee of Marie of Oignies, whose relic and vita cured him of the spirit of blasphemy, advised northern bishops to protect Beguines from the abuse of clerics, monks, and laymen.149 In the Vita Lutgardis, Thomas writes of one of James’s detractors, “May that vile slanderer blush for shame—he who said and wrote that people who record the fantastic visions of insignificant women should be considered profane.”150 In the early thirteenth century, these detractors are unnamed, although in the Second Sermon to Virgins, James calls them “rich men and secular prelates.”151 By the mid-thirteenth century, however, the enemies of Beguines included William of Saint Amour (d. 1272) and Rutebeuf (d. 1285), whose voices were central to the secular-Mendicant controversy at the University of Paris, although they were themselves following the work of the earlier attacker of Beguines, the Benedictine Gautier de Coincy (d. 1236).152 William and Rutebeuf tied together their critiques of the Mendicants and Beguines, representing the Beguines as hypocritical and overly friendly with friars. The “institutional novelty” of the Beguines and Mendicants could, Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski shows, “be emblematic of all kinds of innovations and revolutions.”153
Beryl Smalley has shown how the notion of novelty underwent change in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The adjective “new” was often pejoratively applied to the radical Gregorian reformers. In 1085, one opponent of the reformers wrote, “O nova lex, O dogmum novum, noviter fabricatum.”154 However, in the thirteenth-century Italian urban and Mendicant contexts, much as in the Low Countries, the novel acquired a more positive connotation. For instance, an encomium of Saint Francis ascribed to Thomas of Celano praises the saint for his novelty: “Novus ordo, nova vita / Mundo surgit inaudita.” The “unheard of” became a marker of sanctity or, more precisely, a way of describing the full contemporary realization of gospel primitivism.155 Thomas’s and James’s vitae reveal the struggle to enlist the novel in defense of the ancient faith.
In the chapters that follow, Thomas’s hagiographical corpus will be contextualized in terms of the novel and thus ambivalent status of the women’s religious movement in the mid-thirteenth century. At a time when religious life was necessarily tied to a papally approved regula, a saint such as Marie, Christina, or Margaret, who took no vow and obeyed a private rule, was a novelty in terms of how she became saintly and how she manifested her holiness to others. Moreover, Roisin has shown how Thomas’s Life of Lutgard was a new genre of hagiographical writing that described a novel kind of female monasticism. In order to demonstrate and justify the sanctity of these strange figures, a justification that necessarily implied a critique of the old ordo and monastic practice, Thomas developed rhetorical techniques to describe novel behaviors in such a way that assured the exemplary holiness of his marginal subjects even as he foregrounded its novelty to astound readers. Thus, Thomas often figured his novel saints as emblems of the early church and as a return to the days of the New Testament. This movement of return, however, also points forward to the eschaton, a time marked by the emergence of “all things new.” Language that is both apocalyptic and nostalgic pervades his texts.
Thomas’s theology, performed as it is by the depiction of the lives of contemporary women and some men, is greatly complicated by the historical situation in which he wrote. He lived at a time of tremendous experimentation and innovation, which is represented in his corpus by the diverse vocational possibilities newly available to men and women. This vocational newness is echoed in the philosophical and theological innovations of the schools. Thomas’s vitae negotiate the new social and theological terrain. Although Thomas’s vitae represent novel forms of the religious life and theological discourse, they simultaneously thematize the difficulties attendant upon such novelty. Thomas’s writings are an arena of debate, at times revealing Thomas’s own uncertainties but also showing his experimental spirit in attempting to articulate emerging conceptions of holiness and a theology of sanctity to match the demands of his time.