medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
On Friday, October 17, 2008, at 9:08 am, John Briggs wrote:
> John Dillon wrote:
> > On Friday, October 17, 2008, at 2:59 am, Henk wrote:
> >>
> >> When they write: "After a military education the Gascon nobleman B.
> >> ... etc", do they mean he was raised in a typical nobleman's way,
> >> learning to ride and fight? It's just that it looks a bit funny: St
> Cyr
> >> did not exist yet in those days.
> >
> > I wrote that (although I was influenced by similar matter in
> > Bertrand's entry in the _Bibliotheca Sanctorum_). The Vita, which is
> > written for an ecclesiastical audience, says that he had a military
> > upbringing (_Cum vero Beatus Bertrandus attigisset juvenilis robur
> > ætatis, militaribus armis est decoratus_), enumerates sins into which
> > soldiering in the world (_temporalis militia_) is likely to lead one,
> > says that B. avoided these, and finishes the thought with a lengthy
> > utterance in which B. is said to have emulated instead all the
> > virtues of St. Martin. Additionally, B. has sometimes been said to
> > have been educated ecclesiastically from his youth, either at
> > Escale-Dieu or at Chaise-Dieu (neither of which had been founded when
> > B. was a youth). Saying that he was educated militarily is a way of
> > implicitly denying that.
>
> But such a bald denial is implausible. I think the real implication is
> that
> he came from a noble family where military training was normal. If
> that
> needed to be emphased, perhaps it wasn't really true :-)
I don't see what's so implausible about denying that B. was educated at institutions that didn't exist at the time in question. According to the Vita (which was written at the behest of a member of his family who had become an archbishop), he had an initial military education, not a clerical one (though a noble, he would have had the latter but not the former had he been oblated). It is of course possible that B. was not of noble birth. He wouldn't be the first bishop of the "Gregorian reform" to have his lily gilded in such fashion. But, because of the relative lateness of the Vita, it's also possible that the latter's studied opposition between _temporalis militia_ and the Church relates to concerns of the later twelfth century rather than to circumstances of the mid-eleventh.
Best again,
John Dillon
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