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MEDIEVAL-RELIGION  November 2009

MEDIEVAL-RELIGION November 2009

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Subject:

Re: Fwd: TMR 09.11.17 Jordan, A Tale of Two Monasteries (Bedos-Rezak)

From:

GarceauM <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

medieval-religion - Scholarly discussions of medieval religious culture <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 12:56:08 -0500

Content-Type:

text/plain

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medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

As is WC Jordan.


On 11/16/09 12:54 PM, "Christopher Crockett" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
> 
> Brigitte Bedos-Rezak is always worth reading.
> 
> c
> 
> ------ Original Message ------
> Received: Mon, 16 Nov 2009 10:31:14 AM EST
> From: The Medieval Review <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: TMR 09.11.17 Jordan, A Tale of Two Monasteries (Bedos-Rezak)
> 
> Jordan, William Chester. <i>A Tale of Two Monasteries. Westminster and
> Saint-Denis in the Thirteenth Century</i>. Princeton, 2009. Pp. 245.
> $35.00. ISBN 978-0-691-13901-2.
> 
>    Reviewed by Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak
>         New York University
>         [log in to unmask]
> 
> In this beautifully narrated and richly informative study of the Benedictine
> abbeys of Saint-Denis and of Westminster in the thirteenth century, William
> Jordan measures the vital signs of two kingdoms, France and England. The
> significance of the abbeys went well beyond the symbolic; they embodied royal
> mythology as well as being constitutive of the living royal fabric. It was
> their precincts that royal bodies, relics of national saints, emblems of
> states, and manuscripts of national histories permeated, by their very
> presence, with an aura of monarchical sacrality. It was within the walls of
> these abbeys that key rites of the royal life cycle were discharged, even as
> the abbeys' powerful abbots weighed in crucially on the governance of their
> respective kingdoms.
> 
> Arguably, Westminster's thirteenth-century position as the showcase of
> monarchy seems superior to that of Saint-Denis. The English abbey was the
> monopolist of coronation and keeper of the regalia; it housed the relics of
> the canonized king, Edward the Confessor; it memorialized the incarnation in
> possessing bread from the Last Supper and a vial of
> Christ's blood; and it became the sole royal mausoleum after the loss of
> continental lands to French rulers deprived English kings of their eternal
> rest in their traditional necropolises at St Etienne of Caen, Our Lady of
> Rouen, and Fontevrault.  What Westminster accomplished single-handedly
> required the participation of three institutions in France. Saint-Denis had
> long enjoyed the position of French royal
> necropolis, indeed the English king Henry III (1216-1272) may have followed
> the Saint-Denis model when he promoted Westminster's role in dynastic burial.
> Saint-Denis also held royal emblems, such as the military banner known as the
> Oriflamme, and the regalia used in the coronation ceremony; but the coronation
> itself was held in Reims cathedral. With respect to Christology, King Louis IX
> (1226-1270)'s
> acquisition of a precious relic of the Passion, the Crown of Thorns, inspired
> him to erect a reliquary in the shape of an elaborate edifice, the Sainte
> Chapelle.
> 
> There was, however, one area in which Saint-Denis took clear precedence over
> Westminster, and that was in royal historiography. The thirteenth-century
> Dionysian abbot, Mathieu de Vendôme (ca. 1222-1286), oversaw the compilation
> of the <i>Grandes Chroniques de France</i> entrusting the work to a talented
> writer, the monk Primat, and to gifted illustrators. Here again, there is some
> evidence that
> Mathieu's counterpart at Westminster, Abbot Richard de Ware (d. 1283) may have
> wished to emulate Saint-Denis' command of royal historiography when, perhaps
> at his instruction, the chronicle compilation known as the <i>Flores
> historiarum</i> was imported from the abbey of Saint Albans, the English
> center for the production of royal historiography, and lightly edited at
> Westminster. The competition in grandeur between the two abbeys thus centered
> on their respective abilities to represent and to promote the greatness of
> their kings, who would in turn find it in their own interest to maintain the
> abbeys' splendor. Here again, in such monastic combinations of the actual, the
> factual, and the emblematic, Westminster held the trump card: it boasted the
> body of a saint king.
> 
> Indeed, the efforts deployed by Richard de Ware and Henry III to make
> Westminster the most holy royal site in England centered on their creation of
> a shrine for Saint Edward, King and Confessor. Despite political upheavals and
> financial burdens, the holy royal body was translated to its new splendid
> repository on 13 October 1269. As Jordan points out, Richard's and Henry's
> efforts to renovate Westminster and imbue it with sanctity enhanced their own
> rulership.
> 
> In Saint-Denis, Abbot Mathieu also substantially refurbished his abbey's
> monumental architecture, giving it the rayonnant appearance it carries to this
> day. He also paid special attention to tombs, but at first with a focus that
> differed from the English endeavor. Underlying Mathieu's and his patron King
> Louis IX's project was the desire to create a lapidary history, by a
> re-arrangement of royal tombs, that
> would blot out the blemish of Capetian usurpation and imply continuity with
> the ancient Frankish rulers. Thus, the goal was to articulate royal
> authenticity, an objective that was achieved with the re-organization of royal
> burials in 1267. Yet, the year selected to celebrate the end of the building
> campaign, 1281, lagged well behind the completion of the funeral installation
> and of most of the church itself. Jordan suggests most convincingly that Abbot
> Mathieu timed
> this celebration with the moment when the canonization hearings for Louis IX
> were about to start at Saint-Denis itself. In other words, building on the
> evidence magisterially presented by Jordan, one may suggest that Abbot Mathieu
> was readying his abbey to become, as Westminster already was, the repository
> of a holy king. Since Louis IX's canonization was delayed until 1297, Mathieu
> had to content himself with the translation of the national saint, Denis, to
> his new, marvelously crafted, reliquary. Competition between the two royal
> abbeys may have thus inflected French royal ideology, now eager to inscribe
> royal lineage with sanctity as well as authenticity.  Mathieu
> de Vendôme was assiduous in recording the miracles performed at Louis' tomb,
> and gave testimony when Pope Martin IV finally sent commissioners to
> investigate the king's life and miracles.
> 
> The competition between the abbeys of Saint-Denis and of Westminster was
> predicated upon a shared understanding that they were in fact comparable. Both
> enjoyed royal protection and patronage; both saw their abbots' careers
> culminating in government service; both were exempt from episcopal control and
> were under unmediated papal jurisdiction; both were immensely wealthy.  Such
> status was not without its challenges. The two monasteries had to please two
> masters,
> the papacy and the king, upon whom they depended for safeguard against
> encroachment upon their power and wealth, particularly by bishops. Faced with
> threats to their institutional rights and assets, the abbots reinforced
> documentary practices and consolidated archival organization so as to muster
> appropriate proof against their adversaries. As a result, Saint-Denis and
> Westminster rank among the
> best documented institutions in medieval Europe.
> 
> In modern historiography, the comparable status enjoyed by each abbey in its
> respective polity has been so taken for granted that, despite such inviting
> parallels between the two institutions, no historian has previously undertaken
> their comparison. The originality of Jordan's comparative approach, however,
> further resides in his ability to
> derive from the joint analysis of these two Benedictine institutions a novel
> understanding of national identity and of the ways their respective identities
> informed the fates of France and of England during the thirteenth century. For
> if the abbots' pursuit of similar structural goals entailed a superficial
> similarity in the fulfillment of their office, their strategies and
> achievements occurred and interacted within very different political cultures.
> Of these and
> their various manifestations, Jordan gives an illuminating account while
> surveying the relevant historiography, to which he himself is no small
> contributor, with full command and a critical eye.
> 
> In France, Louis IX was confronted with a geographic polity of which many
> parts had recently been conquered. Crusading ideals inspired his dream of
> expansion. After his first crusading effort failed in 1250, Louis IX focused
> on the kingdom, attempting to make France a holy and unified land. By means of
> thorough administrative reforms, Louis
> imposed a new moral order within. Order was also brokered externally as Louis
> promoted peace among Christian powers, in particular between himself and King
> Henry III of England with the treaty of Paris (1259). With royal reform and
> peace, France grew immensely prosperous. Mathieu de Vendôme was in fact very
> much part of the reforming and standardizing activities of the national
> polity. His horizons were French; he reformed his abbey along the lines of the
> royally inspired administrative model and his architectural renovations
> conformed to the formulae of French style. His service to the Crown was
> rendered on
> French soil, which he hardly, if ever, left. King, abbot, and abbey were
> hospitable to the world, in particular their English neighbors King Henry III
> and Abbot Richard de Ware, but the world had to come to France and to
> Saint-Denis to seek solutions and be restored to order and to peace.
> 
> Henry III presided over a kingdom that had recently experienced severe
> continental losses. His dream was of territorial expansion, toward Sicily for
> instance, which he ultimately lost to Charles d'Anjou. Henry had his eye on
> international opportunities, and diplomacy played a major role in his
> politics. Abbot Richard de Ware was often sent
> abroad on royal missions, particularly relishing his stays in Italy where he
> developed a taste for its artistic creations. Thus, the abbey of Westminster
> came to be fitted with a splendid pavement inspired by Cosmati work, and St
> Edward with an Italianate shrine. For his own seal Abbot Richard adopted a
> foreign, French, style. While a certain
> level of cosmopolitanism prevailed in England, the royal and abbatial
> international outlook, coupled with the financial costs and long absences all
> these entailed, contributed to baronial unrest and monastic laxity. Internal
> reforms emerged in a context of rebellion and, tensely negotiated, were
> begrudgingly accepted. The setting of continuous financial distress in which
> Henry III and Richard de Ware
> operated makes their achievement in the transformation of Westminster all the
> more remarkable. At Westminster, England demonstrated its ability to match the
> standard of the France of Louis IX.
> 
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