Spiritual Temporalities in Late-Medieval Europe (PDF)

Spiritual Temporalities in Late-Medieval Europe   Spiritual Temporalities in Late-Medieval Europe Edited by Michael Foster  Spiritual Temporalities in Late-Medieval Europe, Edited by Michael Foster This book first published 2010 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2010 by Michael Foster and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-2365-1, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2365-4  TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Illustrations .................................................................................... vii Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Spiritual Temporalities Michael Foster Chapter One................................................................................................. 9 Augustine at the End of History: Universal Histories and the Individual’s Place in Time John Lance Griffith Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 33 The Many Faces of Peter Lombard: Changing Perceptions of a Master in Images Made Between 1150 and 1215 Laura Cleaver Chapter Three............................................................................................ 57 Saints’ Encounters with Secular Rulers in the Welsh Saints’ Lives in the Vespasian Legendary: Miracles between Belief and Religious Politics Luciana Meinking Guimarães Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 77 Apocalyptic Time and Anti-Semitism in Thirteenth-Century England Nancy Ross Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 99 Art and Belief in Medieval Castile Tom Nickson  Table of Contents vi Chapter Six.............................................................................................. 127 Polysemy, Metatheatricality, and Affective Piety: A Study of Conceptual Blending in the York Play The Crucifixion Karen Ward Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 139 Scribal Editing in Tundale as Theological Rhetoric in the Age of Romance Michael Foster Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 165 Play Time: Picturing Seasonal Games in the Sixteenth Century Amy Orrock Contributors............................................................................................. 197 Index........................................................................................................ 199  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS CHAPTER 2 Figure 1, Peter Lombard, Troyes Bibliothèque Municipale MS 900, f.1, detail, © IRHT- Troyes Médiatheque. Figure 2, Peter Lombard, Troyes, Mediathèque MS 304, f.1, detail, © IRHT- Troyes Médiatheque. Figure 3, Peter Lombard, Reims Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 460 f.157v, detail, © Reims, Bibliothèque Municipale. Figure 4, Peter Lombard, British Library, Yates Thompson MS 17 f.42v, detail, © British Library. Figure 5, Peter Lombard, British Library, Additional MS 15603 f.2, detail, © British Library. CHAPTER 5 Figure 1, The St. Blaise chapel, Toledo cathedral. Figure 2, Arrangement of scenes in the St. Blaise chapel. Figure 3, St. Blaise chapel, west wall, detail: The Crucifixion. Figure 4, St. Blaise chapel, south wall, detail: God the Father and Christ enthroned, Christ separating the blessed and the damned. Figure 5, St. Blaise chapel, south wall, detail: The Resurrection of the Dead. Figure 6, St. Blaise chapel, south wall. The bottom register shows Peter’s martyrdom? (lost); Peter enthroned flanked by Peter and Paul baptising; the conversion of Saul. CHAPTER 8 Figure 1, January. British Library, London, Golf Book, © British Library Board, Add. 24098, fol. 18v. Figure 2, September. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, PML 572, Horae: ad usum Romanum (Rome), fol. 6v. Figure 3, September. The Bodleian Library, Oxford, Douce MS. 135, fol. 6r. Figure 4, October. Mayer van den Bergh Museum, Antwerp, Mayer van den Bergh Breviary, Codex 946, fol. 6r. Figure 5, Detail from month of March. Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp, Mayer van den Bergh Breviary, Codex 946, fol. 2v.  List of Illustrations viii Figure 6, Detail from month of March. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Workshop of the Master of James IV of Scotland, Spinola Hours, MS 83.ML.114, fol. 2v. About 1510-1520, tempera colours, gold, and ink on parchment bound between pasteboard covered with red morocco, leaf 23.2 x 16.7cm. Figure 7, Detail from month of March. British Library, London, Golf Book, © British Library Board, Add. 24098, fol. 20v. Figure 8, Figures with rattles entering a church. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Douce MS 276, Oxford, fol. 83r.  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For one day in May, 2008, I organized a conference entitled “Belief and Time in Medieval Europe” at the Institute for Medieval Research of the University of Nottingham; the spirited and insightful studies of that conference inspired the present volume. Undoubtedly, without the institute’s financial assistance and initiative, this project would not have been possible. Consideration and guidance from Rob Lutton and Judith Jesch were invaluable to me, since they were responsible for the genesis of this project; I must also thank Richard Marks and Richard Marsden for their contributions to the conference and for providing valuable feedback to the conference participants. Knowledge, wisdom, and kindness are never lacking in Thorlac Turville-Petre, to whom I shall always owe a great debt. Megan Arnott also deserves many thanks for her help. Only with her diligence and organizational skills was this project possible. Not to be forgotten are my good friends Joewon Yoon, Hikyoung Lee, and Hikyoung Moon, who supported me through the last stages of this project. Also, I am grateful for the understanding and patience of the staff at Nottingham’s Institute for Medieval Research and for additional help from Tai-Won Kim and the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Association of Korea. Conversations, discussions, and friendly exchanges with Brean Hammond, Joanna Martin, Colin Gallagher, Paul Cullen, Paul Cavill, and Karen Smyth helped me in countless ways. Of course, I am most grateful to the contributors for their patience and enthusiasm at a time when medieval studies are threatened by economic disaster.  Cur venis nobiscum? Revertere et habita cum rege, quia peregrinus es et egressus de loco tuo —II Samuel 15:19 Dilexi justitiam et odivi iniquitatem propterea morior in exilio —Pope Gregory VII  INTRODUCTION SPIRITUAL TEMPORALITIES MICHAEL FOSTER With The Waning of the Middle Ages, Johan Huizinga sparked a debate that continues to the present.1 The premise of this book is quite simple: by the end of the middle ages, a weary pessimism had become the mood of Europe, and a sense of impending doom dominated medieval life: The fifteenth century, profoundly pessimistic, a prey to continual depression, could not forgo the emphatic affirmation of the beauty of life, afforded by these splendid and solemn collective rejoicings. Books were expensive, the country was unsafe, art was rare; the individual lacked the means of distraction. All literary, musical and artistic enjoyment was more or less closely connected with festivals. (230) Huizinga’s argument assumes that moments of medieval beauty are emphatic, perhaps even hysterical, attempts to escape the overwhelming sense of misery of the period. Thus his study begins and ends with a focus on the extremes of medieval emotion and life: All things presenting themselves to the mind in violent contrasts and impressive forms, lent a tone of excitement and of passion to everyday life and tended to produce that perpetual oscillation between despair and distracted joy, between cruelty and pious tenderness which characterize life in the Middle Ages. (2) 1 Trans. Fritz Hopman (London, 1924). Originally published in Dutch in 1919, the English translation has been reprinted many times and remains an often-cited source for understanding the medieval worldview, although it has been largely criticized over the decades for its limited scope and selective evidence.  Introduction 2 This hyperemotional culture is presumed not to be the norm of Huizinga’s day, when a more moderate temperament makes the middle ages a seemingly foreign and miserable place: All this general facility of emotions, of tears and spiritual upheavals, must be borne in mind in order to conceive fully how violent and high-strung was life at that period. (6) The misery of everyday life in the middle ages has no single source, but the conveniences and security of the modern world desensitize us to the horrors of medieval reality and encourage a nostalgic view of a simpler pastoral Elysium. Huizinga challenged historical nostalgia by reminding us that the end of the middle ages was infested with hysteria. The Christian anticipation of an apocalyptic event implicitly encourages such a pessimistic worldview, and this attitude is confirmed by the large body of apocalyptic art and literature in the middle ages that encourages personal reform to prepare for God’s final judgment. By combining an anticipation for the end of days with an introspective outlook, the medieval Christian was motivated to disregard the social, economic, and political realties around him as vanities of the flesh which would soon be irrelevant at the time of God’s ultimate reckoning. While it would be easy to dismiss all late-medieval perceptions of the flow of history to this apocalyptical anxiety, the reality of the era suggests that people went about their lives with other concerns in mind. The important collection of essays edited by John Burrow and Ian Pei demonstrates that medieval perceptions of the future were complicated and sometimes self-contradictory—indeed, much like our own.2 A mixture of prophecy, eschatology, apocalyptical anticipation, and moral investment in the future—most tangibly in Burrow’s essay on prudence as a means to gain future success in this world and the next—demonstrates a variety of attitudes to the future that often mix and are not easily divided into pragmatic, spiritual, and moralistic categories.3 In looking at a world as foreign as late-medieval Europe, it can be tempting to insist on how different their experiences of life and spirituality were from our own; this impulse makes each medieval text and work of art a clue of the minutiae of an exotic and unfamiliar world. The alterity of the 2 Medieval Futures: Attitudes to the Future in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2000). 3 “The Third Eye of Prudence”, Medieval Futures, 37-49  Spiritual Temporalities 3 middle ages is obvious to any casual reader of Chaucer, yet that same reader cannot go away from the Canterbury Tales without some sense that we share much with our medieval ancestors: we are born; we die; we ponder our relationship to society and to the universe (however we understand its topography); we struggle to assert our own presumed correct morality on a world of competing ideologies and interests; and we try to make sense of our brief time on Earth. The variety of answers to these large questions is much greater today than it was for people in the European middle ages, yet it is difficult to find philosophical, moral, or religious ideas that have been completely abandoned as medieval naiveté. The anxiety for the apocalypse is thriving today perhaps more than ever in many parts of the United States, and the religious impulse is familiar to many modern European Union countries, where Christian Democratic political parties are a major contributor to mainstream political discourse. Today, many feel confident that modern perceptions and understandings of time have become more complex, nuanced, sophisticated, and accurate. In the realms of science, this is undeniable; the second law of thermodynamics and post-Einstein concepts of space-time and exotic concepts such as the Planck time, relativity, and the Big Bang are substantially more consistent and independently verifiable theories of time than anything developed in the medieval or Christian traditions, yet they are either too large, too small, or too abstract to form part of our everyday experience. Even physicists count their time in minutes and hours. Similarly, the development of the second-hand and the mechanical clock have given us tools to divide our moments into increasingly smaller units, but our lifetimes are more often divided into the larger segments of days, months and years, and many make distinctions between them by the senses. Thus sixteenth-century men and women were guided by the seasons in their daily lives and in their organization of their lives, as Amy Orrock’s chapter demonstrates. The presence and experience of the seasons and their various festivals was a greater concern for people’s personal and social experiences of Christianity, while the philosophical and scientific puzzles of the problem of the calendar—which would only finally be resolved with the Gregorian calendar in 1582—seem to exist in the background for most medieval Christians, just as the developments of theoretical physics are an intellectual pursuit removed from everyday life for us. Contributors to this book attempt to assess religious understandings and experiences of time in the middle ages from different perspectives and disciplines, but all share an understanding of time as a personal and social experience beyond the quantifiable units of measure made problematic by  Introduction 4 moveable feasts. These essays encourage us to see both the similarities and differences between medieval and modern perceptions of time within the frameworks of Christian theology and everyday experience. Our focus is on instances of popular, non-canonical, or local shifts in the perception of time within a Christian world-view. On the larger level of human history, modern perceptions of time sometimes differ from those found in the late-medieval period, since we are influenced by Kantian and Hegelian perceptions of a progressive metanarrative. Although they differ in ultimate ends, Kant and Hegel agree that human history has a distinct and definable pattern that is leading somewhere. Modern myths of progress have become the mainstays of national identities, and the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany, the USSR, Maoist China, and North Korea implicitly defend their control of political, economic, and social structures through the rhetoric of progress to ultimate ends. The western world, although more multivocal, has had its own nationalist rhetoric of progression. As the USSR collapsed, confidence in America’s liberal economics and representative democracy lead to musings that the end of this narrative had already arrived in the form of the socio-political reality of the United States of America.4 Such rhetoric of national, economic, and political progress is absent from medieval records, yet people of the era had a sense of a grand narrative leading towards an ultimate resolution. John Lance Griffith examines the differences between modern and medieval “universal histories” with the suggestion that both provide theoretical tools to understand one’s individual significance in relation to one’s society and to the world as a whole. The important difference is that modern universal narratives connect the individual to a project of secular improvement, leading to inevitable supermen, whereas the medieval universal narrative of St. Augustine provides meaning for the individual in his relationship to the eternal, which is fixed outside of time and unchanging. Thus every life becomes symbolic and connected to the divine, instead of one part of an evolutionary chain contributing to the good of the nation-state or the social group. The interaction between experiencing the passing of time and maintaining Christian faith is what we refer to as “temporal spiritualities”; we suggest that the interaction between Christian faith and the passing of 4 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, 1993).  Spiritual Temporalities 5 time is a hermeneutic circle in which both influence each another. Thus the more time passes, the more Christian faith will change, and the more Christian faith changes, the more its believers will see time differently. The various issues studied in this book demonstrate that Christianity is a socially mediated and highly variable element of European medieval culture. Likewise, changes in Christianity will influence believers’ perceptions of their lives and time itself. This can be seen quite clearly in the controversy of medieval pessimism discussed above; the presence of and faith in apocalyptic literature suggests that believers will experience an anxiety about the end of days—in fact, such literature encourages it. One need not look far in the Revelations of John to find urges for the reader to take heed of its text soon: et dicit mihi ne signaveris verba prophetiae libri huius tempus enim prope est qui nocet noceat adhuc et qui in sordibus est sordescat adhuc et iustus iustitiam faciat adhuc et sanctus sanctificetur adhuc ecce venio cito et merces mea mecum est reddere unicuique secundum opera sua And he saith to me: Seal not the words of the prophecy of this book: for the time is at hand. He that hurteth, let him hurt still: and he that is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is just, let him be justified still: and he that is holy, let him be sanctified still. Behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to render to every man according to his works. (Revelations 22:10-12)5 It is still unclear to what extent the apocalypse was anticipated in the late middle ages; judging by the presence of Middle English poetry on the subject, it seems to have been a popular component of Christian faith, yet the abundant attempts in medieval law to control the status of assets well into the future, as Paul Brand has discussed,6 suggests the presence of a more pragmatic belief that the world would be around for a while, and thus it needed to be controlled through social conventions. Legal and philosophical debates share a practical concern for people’s relationships to posterity, and assume that a human civilization will 5 The translation is from the Douay-Rheims Bible. 6 Paul Brand, In perpetuum: The Rhetoric and Reality of Attempts to Control the future in the English Medieval Common Law, in Medieval Futures 101-113.