Dark Age Bodies: Gender and Monastic Practice in the Early Medieval West (The Middle Ages Series) - Hardcover

Coon, Lynda L.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812242696 ISBN 13: 9780812242690

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010

Synopsis

In Dark Age Bodies Lynda L. Coon reconstructs the gender ideology of monastic masculinity through an investigation of early medieval readings of the body. Focusing on the Carolingian era, Coon evaluates the ritual and liturgical performances of monastic bodies within the imaginative landscapes of same-sex ascetic communities in northern Europe. She demonstrates how the priestly body plays a significant role in shaping major aspects of Carolingian history, such as the revival of classicism, movements for clerical reform, and church-state relations. In the political realm, Carolingian churchmen consistently exploited monastic constructions of gender to assert the power of the monastery. Stressing the superior qualities of priestly virility, clerical elites forged a model of gender that sought to feminize lay male bodies through a variety of textual, ritual, and spatial means.

Focusing on three central themes—the body, architecture, and ritual practice—the book draws from a variety of visual and textual materials, including poetry, grammar manuals, rhetorical treatises, biblical exegesis, monastic regulations, hagiographies, illuminated manuscripts, building plans, and cloister design. Interdisciplinary in scope, Dark Age Bodies brings together scholarship in architectural history and cultural anthropology with recent works in religion, classics, and gender to present a significant reconsideration of Carolingian culture.

About this title

About the Author

Lynda L. Coon is Associate Professor of History at the University of Arkansas. She is the author of Sacred Fictions: Holy Women and Hagiography in Late Antiquity, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction
Dark Age Bodies

An image of an early medieval monk dressed in humble attire and kneeling under a vibrant red cross appears in Plate 1 of this book. The hands of the monk, graceful and eloquent, are extended in a gesture of supplication, and his tonsure signifies his world-renouncing status. Subjugated by the weight of the cross, the monk's body appears to lean on the words running left to right across the page. Within the contours of his body, bold red letters stand out and link him to the cross hovering over his head. The red letters form a separate poem within the longer series of verses moving across the manuscript in a horizontal line. That poem reads: "O Christ, in your clemency and your holiness, I beseech you to protect me, Hrabanus, on the Day of Judgment." The stanzas on the horizontal and vertical arms of the cross are identical: "O Wood, I pray to you, you who are an altar, that I may be carried up and placed on your heights." Poetry clarifies the meaning of the holy man's gesture: he is offering his body as a sacrifice at the onslaught of the apocalypse.

The folio is from an acrostic poem of the ninth century, Hrabanus Maurus's In Honor of the Holy Cross, a masterpiece that gives viewers a rare portrait of the artist. Hrabanus Maurus (ca. 780-856) was a leading figure in the intellectual and spiritual world of the Carolingian Empire. His acrostics were renowned for their visual and verbal intricacy, especially the author's unrivaled talent for hiding poems within poems to be deciphered by the learned eye. Figures, such as the cross or the kneeling monk, serve as visual cues prompting viewers to find more verses in and around images. Hrabanus's figural poem also represents the Carolingian propensity for coupling classical forms and Christian themes. In this instance, the literary styles of the Romans, Horace, Lucan, Lucretius, and Virgil, glorify the crucifixion. Hrabanus himself participates in this union of the classical and the Christian. He is both seer (vates) trained in heroic hexameter and monk, whose life is dominated by the cross. In his verse, Hrabanus calls on Christ to temper his desires, to eliminate his vices, and to replace his rebellious tongue with a pure mouth.
The depiction of Hrabanus Maurus in figure 28 of In Honor of the Holy Cross exemplifies the major theme of Dark Age Bodies: the conception of the body in the early medieval enterprise of salvation. The book's chief task is to reconstruct the gender ideology of clerical masculinity through an investigation of early medieval readings of the body. It also considers the ritual, spatial, and liturgical performances of that body within the imaginative landscapes of same-sex ascetic communities in northern Europe, with a special emphasis on the Carolingian era (ca. 751-987). Investigation of the body compels the contemporary interpreter of early medieval Christianity to confront notions of gender created through ninth-century ascetic practice, especially the use of the liturgical voice in the making of monastic masculinity. Architecture is an essential component of this study because the ascetic body was mirrored in the sacred spaces constructed by monks. Finally, the monastic body expressed the imperial ambitions of the religious leadership of the Carolingian Empire.

The ensuing discussion demonstrates how the body of a monk served as a bridge between classical Rome and an encroaching Dark Age. Ascetic intellectuals believed that one particularly potent body part, the tongue, had the power to divide humanity into two opposite camps: those possessing Latin eloquence and those condemned to barbarous prattle. Pure Latin and fluent speech were prophylactics against secular savagery and the dark allures of the devil. The major textbook of the Carolingian era, Isidore of Seville's Etymologies (ca. 636), epitomizes the idea of the "Dark Age": the barbarous peoples of the empire, who were ignorant of the purity of the Latin language, corrupted Roman civilization through grammatical errors and uncouth speech. Carolingian writers believed that the Holy Spirit itself purifies the mouths of the most potent chanters in the empire's monasteries. Monastic tongues were objects of ritual blessings, and cutting off an abbot's tongue was a way of visibly declaring his impotence. It is appropriate then that the empire's abbots were "buried beneath the choir bells, recalling how their tongues, as dedicated cymbals of the Holy Spirit in that place, had summoned others to the opus divinum."

Hagiographical texts promoted classicizing portraits of the rhetorically gifted tongues of holy men. A work by a Carolingian monastic scholar, Paschasius Radbertus's Life of Saint Adalhard, is a case in point. Adalhard is the embodiment of Ciceronian eloquence. His voice is of such an exceptional quality that it caresses the minds of his audience, making them drunk with the splendors of scripture. Christ is born through the diction of the orator Adalhard, whose discourse is always unambiguous, brief, and lucid (aperta valde, brevis ac lucida); the saint's oratorical style is akin to that receiving the highest praise from classical theorists of rhetoric (quod dictionis genus oratores summis extollunt laudibus).

The spiritual elite valued being well versed in texts on oratorical training as well as mastering the linguistic intricacies of the Latin language itself. This reflected the larger context of a ninth-century ecclesiastical reform movement aimed at clerical correctio, or educational improvement. Early medieval literary luminaries wrote expositions on Latin grammar that comfortably paired basic lessons on syntax—such as the differences among masculine, feminine, and neuter case endings—with classical and biblical examples. The ninth-century Carolingian reformer Smaragdus's treatise on Latin grammar uses the Roman comic Terence's bawdy play The Eunuch to explain how certain words can sound and be masculine (that is, eunuchus) even though their meaning suggests that they are actually "feminine." Smaragdus invokes the authority of scripture to persuade the skeptical student. The Bible, the Carolingian grammarian argues, employs the masculine ending (-us) for castrated men, and he cites the example of the Ethiopian eunuch (vir Aetiops, eunuchus) of Acts (8.27) to make the point: "hic non ait 'baptizavit eam,' sed 'eum.'" Smaragdus's willingness to gloss Roman comedies with passages from Christian scripture in the service of basic grammar lessons aimed at chaste pupils speaks to the innovative nature of Carolingian Latin instruction.

Carolingian grammarians also maintained that good Latin, perfected in monastic classrooms, offers a crucial pathway to the meditation of God. Latin as linguistic avenue to the divine derives from classical views on the mystical capacity of grammar, for the Romans connected the mastery of language with the ability to understand the "more-than-human world." In early Christian communities, ecstatic speech enabled Christ's seers to transcend the corporeal by tasting the divine through the language of the heavens. As heirs to both classical and early Christian legacies regarding charismatic speech, Carolingian scholars aimed to recover a pure, non barbarous Latin. They ranked Latin as a sacred tongue along with Hebrew and Greek. In his epistle On the Cultivation of Letters (ca. 784-85), Charlemagne worries that atrocious Latin prevents inexpert priests from channeling heavenly powers. In response to the emperor's anxiety over uncouth tongues obstructing Christian salvation, clerical reformers advocated the study of grammar, philology, rhetoric, and orthography to perfect the linguistic performance of the Christian liturgy. Thus grammatical instruction was inextricably linked with the theater of the liturgy. The liturgy itself, Hrabanus writes, is replete with "gifts of the Thunderer," and, as such, custodianship of those gifts is a highly charged activity. By the ninth century, faultless Latin had emerged as a status marker, creating a mandarin priestly guild set apart from lesser clerics and from virtually all of the laity, save the inner circles of royal courts. Mandarin Latin, which was increasingly distinct from its rustic (and eventually Romance) counterpart, provided its connoisseur eminence based on the overall use of the tongue, not just in eloquent speaking, but also in singing, eating, drinking, being silent, and laughing.
This book argues that the monastic body and its expressive tongue provide new insights into familiar themes in Carolingian history: the revival of classicism in the empire, clerical reform movements, and church-state relations. The seven chapters of the book are organized around three recurring subjects: body, building, and practice. These three topics illustrate how monastic constructions of gender center on continuities between classical and early medieval perceptions of the body, the use of the body in the celebration of the liturgy, and the location of the body in sacred space. The gender paradigms explored in this book are idiosyncratic to the all-male cloister. They are not models of gender readily transferable into other social contexts, such as the royal hunt, the monarchical court, domestic spaces of the secular aristocracy, female ascetic communities, or even the palaces of bishops. Nor do the classicizing modes of gender covered here reflect the somatic styles of all churchmen, especially those of married clerics and cathedral canons, who miss the mark of bodily inviolability prized by cloistered monks. The seven chapters of this book focus on a precise reading of gender fashioned by a scholarly circle of ascetic men, who influenced the philosophical and medical conception of bodies, female and male, consecrated and lay.

Chapter 1 of Dark Age Bodies surveys the life of Hrabanus Maurus to delineate the political, intellectual, and artistic contexts crucial to the book as a whole. Each chapter of the book touches on the life of Hrabanus, the final one focusing exclusively on a gendered reading of his signature work, In Honor of the Holy Cross. Hrabanus's life offers the non specialist an introduction to Carolingian monasticism, the educational system of the cloister, the architectural ambitions of monastic builders, and the conflicts between abbots and lay rulers. Hrabanus was an exemplary figure whose encyclopedic output is relevant to all the significant themes of his time and of this book. Dark Age Bodies is not, however, a biography of Hrabanus Maurus nor is it simply an analysis of his writings. Hrabanus remains a central character in the Carolingian ecclesiastical world, and that is precisely why he is featured here.

Chapter 2 builds on the biographical sketch of Hrabanus Maurus by considering the environment of religious reform he himself experienced firsthand as a monk of the monastery of Fulda, located in modern-day Hesse in Germany. The chapter includes an overview of the Carolingian monastic reform movement and its attempt to impose one rule and one custom (una regula, una consuetudo) throughout the empire's monasteries. Additionally, Chapter 2 examines how the Carolingian enterprise of collecting (texts, alphabets, relics, building typologies, ancient statuary, and educational theories) subordinated past ascetic styles to the hegemony of the Benedictine Rule (henceforth, the "Rule"). The chapter also explores the Carolingian commitment to classicism as evidenced both in the built environment of the monastery and in the classicizing practices of monks. As a whole, the chapter considers how body, building, and practice work together to propagandize the Carolingian mastery of history, both Christian and classical.

Chapter 3 concentrates on a text venerated by Hrabanus Maurus and taking center stage in the controversies surrounding Carolingian monastic reform: the sixth-century rule attributed to the Italian holy man Benedict of Nursia. In an unprecedented move, Chapter 3 "genders" the Rule by examining the enduring legacy of classical models of gender over the daily practices and liturgical performances of monks. The chapter maintains that the disciple of the Rule is an heir of the ancient Roman orator, whose success or failure rested on the power of his speech, his license to speak in ceremonial venues, his reputation for corporeal self-mastery, and his bodily inviolability. Gendered practices of the Rule divide monks into two groups: those who are immersed in the body and those who partake of the nature of the divine, a disembodied voice. The division between body and voice reflects the supremacy of the liturgy in the Rule and the survival of the art of classical oratory in a new setting: the early medieval monastery.

Carolingian commentators on the Rule intensify the classical foundations of monastic gender and are the subject of Chapter 4. Hrabanus Maurus once exhorted the holy men of the empire to conform to the influential definition of the successful orator by Quintilian (ca. 35-100): He ought to be "a good man, skilled in speaking." Hrabanus asserts that since classical orators had observed this characterization, it is much more important that Christian altar servants follow their example. Commentaries on the Rule written by Hrabanus's contemporaries Hildemar of Civate (d. 850) and Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel (d. 830) extend the reach of classical culture into the Carolingian monastery. The two commentators borrow from ancient medical conceptions of the body to distinguish the masculine from the feminine in the monastery, and they both express anxiety over same-sex activities between monks. In the arena of classical education, Smaragdus summons the ancient Roman lexicon of effeminacy to vilify monks who do not live up to Benedictine models of virility. Hildemar's commentary takes us directly into the monastic schoolroom, where future intellectual leaders and liturgical celebrants were trained in the arts of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. Hildemar calls on the Roman art of oratory to instruct monks in manly styles of speech, thereby creating an elite group of cantors in the monastery distinguished by their penetrating voices, which break the barrier between the heavens and the earth. By the ninth century, chant had emerged both as a marker of status in the monastery and as an audible proof of a monk's masculinity. Ultimately, Chapter 4 explains how the bodies of these masculine cantors relate symbolically to the architecture of the cloister.

Chapter 5 furthers discussion of the contribution of architecture to the making of monastic gender by scrutinizing three monuments of ninth-century spirituality: the westwork at the abbey of Corvey, the circular crypt built by the monks of Fulda, and the sacred biography of Hrabanus Maurus's mentor, Abbot Eigil, which applies bodily metaphors to sacred space. All these artifacts verify that the gendered practices of the Benedictine Rule manifest themselves in a variety of artistic forms. In the early Middle Ages, the monastic westwork served as the major entryway into the monastery; therefore, the space was decidedly open to the outside world. This fortress functioned both as a tower of song where monks chanted angelic liturgies and as a sp...

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0812242696
• ISBN 13: 9780812242690
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 416